Barrington Bayley SF Gateway Omnibus: The Soul of the Robot, The Knights of the Limits, The Fall of Chronopolis

Then he whirled around as something darted in suddenly from one side. It was the image of a man, which he saw sometimes as a three-dimensional figure and sometimes as a four-dimensional extension. The man was burly, bedecked like a stage magician in a flowing cloak and coloured hose. In place of eyes his sockets were filled with glittering, flashing jewels. He grinned wolfishly at Aton, at the same time directing a bazooka-like tube from which issued a billowing exudation.

The purple mist struck Aton like a physical force. He felt his whole body vibrate; he veered aside to avoid the attack.

The intruder lunged at him again. Hissing, the bazooka tube went into action for a second time, and Aton saw that what it actually did was to distort the substance of the strat. With alarm he felt himself being sucked into the turbulence; he worked his rudder controls frantically.

Then both the apparition and the strat fled. He stood limply in a steel-clad chamber identical to the one he had left an eternity ago, and a loud humming noise filled his ears.

Just before the grinning jewel-eyed man had pounced Aton had recognised the galleon-like battle wagon that was to receive him. As irony would have it, the ship was Commander Haight’s Lamp of Faith.

FIVE

Exhausted with fear and fatigue, Inpriss Sorce collapsed with a sigh on to a rickety couch. She pushed straggled hair out of her eyes and looked around the cheap, dismal room she had just rented.

The two weeks since she had escaped from Chronopolis had nearly driven her insane.

It was lucky she had taken the satchel containing money and bank cards from her apartment in Kell Street, otherwise she would have been completely helpless. Her one thought had been to flee as far away as possible. Everyone knew that once the Traumatic sect had chosen someone for sacrifice they would do everything possible to track the victim down and complete the rite.

Briefly it had occurred to her to go to the police with her story, but she had heard of people who had done that … only to be sacrificed by Traumatics inside the police force once they were taken into protective custody. The vision of some stone cell from which she could not escape filled her with claustrophobic panic.

No. The only answer was flight. To hide, to become too small to be noticed.

Only it was so difficult! This was already her third hiding place since quitting the eternal city, and the third time she had changed her name. The first move had been to a town barely fifty miles from Chronopolis, and for a few hours her eagerness to be safe had fooled her into thinking that she was safe. Then, coming home to her new apartment, she had spotted the two men who had tortured her, walking down the street and glancing up at the houses one by one.

And so she had had to leave, after only one day. But that had not been the end of it. She had left Amerik and gone to Affra, but they had followed. By good chance she had caught glimpses of them several times and so had been warned – in the jetliner passenger lounge and hanging around the transit and accommodation centres. And so finally, not caring about the expense, she had taken several jetliner trips in quick succession, zigzagging about the globe to shake off pursuit before retreating here to an old, out-of-the-way city in the middle of Worldmass.

Besides the two men she knew – Stryne and Velen, they had called each other – how many others she would not recognise had kept watch for her and hunted her down using all the methods that could be used to find a person? By now she had become afraid of everyone and everything.

She wondered if it was possible to live with terror indefinitely.

Idly her thoughts turned to the Church. Could a comforter help her? But churches would be dangerous places to approach. The sect could be watching. As it was, for the first time she felt some relief. Virov was well off the main routes and this tiny room, in a back street away from the main thoroughfares, had a closed-in, cupboard-like feeling. The narrow window admitted no direct sunlight at any time of the day and that, too, gave her a perverse feeling of safety, as if it was a room the world could not see.

She would get a job, would survive somehow. She would make no friends for years to come.

She opened the window and relaxed with the sound of the breeze and with Virov’s quaint, well-melded odours.

Then she heard a nervous, tuneless humming from the other side of the door.

Mmmmmmmmm …

With a fear-stricken cry she flung herself against the door, trying with her body to hold it closed. Her slight frame was far from sufficient to resist the force that pushed it open from the other side.

The feral-faced Stryne moved into the room, followed by Velen.

‘Nice to see you, Inpriss. Let’s carry on where we left off, shall we?’