shoots the pressings into the tanker — almost pure treelskin.’
As it drew closer Salind observed the waste juice pouring from pipes in the side of the harvester. The machine left the ground behind it completely clear of treels, but there were plenty yet to be sucked up. This had to be the first run of the morning. A driver sat in a bucket seat on the main harvester disc steering it with two levers. He wore blue armoralls and a sphere helmet.
‘Why that gear?’ he asked.
‘The helmet’s to prevent narcosis from the vapour, and it’s their uniform.’
‘Whose?’
‘Soper’s people.’
Salind nodded and wondered what the hell they were going to do now. No way were they going to get through that fence without setting off a mass of alarms, even if they managed not to fry themselves.
‘Boring job,’ he said, nodding at the driver. ‘That’ll be one to go with the Polity running things. They’ll stick a submind in the harvester and that’ll be that.’
‘Okay, let’s go,’ said Garp.
They stepped out of the car and Garp popped the boot. From it he removed his rail-gun and walked over to the fence. The red sun breaking over the horizon cast his shadow behind him.
He held the weapon out of view and waved. The driver raised a hand in return and continued down the row. Some minutes later the harvester neared the fence. Salind couldn’t figure what Garp intended. Was he going to hold up the harvester? Garp showed him. As the machine reached the point where it had to turn to go down the next row Garp raised his weapon and fired a short burst. The driver disappeared in a cloud of red.
‘Jesu! What the hell are you doing!’
Garp glanced at him. ‘Well you said he’d be redundant.’
‘You just killed him!’
‘Yeah, I did didn’t I. Come here.’
He took hold of Salind’s shoulder and walked him to one side. Salind felt himself shaking.
He’d seen some horrible things, but he’d never seen someone killed in such cold blood. The harvester kept going, from where it should have turned, and crashed into the fence. Electricity shorted through its body as it tore out a hundred-metre length of fencing and dragged it into the highway. Hitting the bank on the other side of the road it ground to a halt, its vacuum still roaring. Salind saw that the driver was still sitting in the bucket seat, though only from the waist down.
‘You killed him,’ he repeated.
‘They all know what’s going on in here. You’ve seen nothing yet. Come on, we’ve got to move fast now. The guards’ll be here soon.’
Garp led him back to the car and started it up. He carefully drove it off-road and through the gap made by the harvester. Then he floored the accelerator and the turbine soon had them up to a hundred kloms up the cleared lane between the banoaks.
‘They always come at a breach from the outside. We’ll be too far in by then for them to do anything about us,’ said Garp.
‘What about getting out?’ asked Salind.
‘I shouldn’t worry unduly about that.’
In a few minutes they reached the end of the grove and Garp dumped the car in an irrigation ditch. He gave it one shove to get it there, leaving a dent in the metal.
‘You still recording?’ he asked as he checked his rail-gun.
‘Yes,’ said Salind, wondering if that was the right thing to say.
‘Good. Let’s go take a look at the factory.’ He hung the gun at his belt and turned his back to Salind. Looking over his shoulder he said, ‘Hop on.’
This being his first piggy-back ride on the back of a psychotic Golem android, Salind did not know what to expect. He swore, after they covered four or five kilometres, it would be his last. In minutes they reached rocky terrain cut through by gravel roads. Banoaks grew in wild profusion here, with a low scrub of adapted thyme and spherule grass below them. On the higher ground the banoaks were bigger and older than in the grove. Perhaps they had been growing since before humans arrived on Banjer.
Garp peered at him, and he wondered if the ex-policeman could listen in on these aug conversations. Garp pointed to a ring of pots strapped round one of the nearby oaks.
‘Sap drains. You’ll see how they use the sap in a bit. Still recording?’
‘Yes,’ Salind replied, prepared to give no more than that. He dry-swallowed another praist pill before following where Garp led. Soon they came to a rise overlooking a sprawl of warehouses. Garp pointed to the four trucks parked before the largest building.
‘See, they’re unloading cropsters,’ he explained.
Salind’s vision did not extend so far, for he did not have a Golem’s eyes. He could just about see some activity.
