Gideon the Ninth

There was nothing objectionable to this role, which was why Gideon was automatically suspicious of it. But she said, “As you wish, my lamentable queen,” and ducked out the Imaging door. Her adept followed close behind her, rummaging in her pockets. She brought out a whole knuckle, which was telling. Harrow threw it down and, with an awful grinding sound, it sprang into a burly skeleton: she flicked her wrist at it impatiently and it lumbered toward Response, standing, waiting. Then Harrow ducked back inside Imaging.

This is dumb, thought Gideon. The Imaging door wheezed shut, presumably as Harrow placed her hand upon the pedestal, and the Response door ground open: the skeleton stepped forward, bone feet crunching on a carpet of other bones. As it stepped through, the door plunged shut behind it, and the little light next to Occupied turned red.

Whatever happened next happened pretty goddamn fast. The lights in Response flared as the vents started choking out cloudy puffs, obscuring the far wall: she pressed herself so close to the glass that her breath made it misty and wet. There was no sound from within, and there should have been (it must have all been soundproofed) which simply made it all the more absurd when something enormous and misshapen came raging out of the fog.

It was a bone construct, she could tell that much. Grey tendons strapped a dozen weirdly malformed humeri to horribly abbreviated forearms. The rib cage was banded straps of thick, knobbly bone, spurred all around with sharp points, the skull—was it a skull?—a huge knobble of brainpan. Two great green lights foamed within the darkness there, like eyes. It had way too many legs and a spine like a load-bearing pillar, and it had to crouch forward on two of its heavyset arms, fledged all over with tibial spines. The exterior arms were thrust back high, and she could see now that they did not have hands: just long slender blades, each formed from a sharpened radius, held at the ready like a scorpion’s tail. It rampaged forward; Harrow’s skeleton patiently waited; the construct fell on it like a hot meal, and it disintegrated under the second blow.

The construct turned its awful head toward the window, fixed its burning green gaze on Gideon, and got very still. It lumbered toward her, gaining speed, when the red light for Occupied turned green: there was a low and doleful parp from some klaxon, and then the construct dissolved. It became soup, not bones, and it moved as though sucked into some small grating toward the centre of the room. It was totally gone, along with all the fog, when Imaging sprang open and Harrow found her cavalier with her jaw dropped open.

It took a few moments of explanation. Harrow cross-questioned the measurements and looked disgusted with all her answers. Before Gideon had finished, Harrow was pacing back and forth, robes swishing around her ankles like black foam.

“Why can’t I see it?” she raged. “Is it testing the skeleton’s autonomy, or is it testing my control? How much multidexterity does it want?”

“Put me in there,” said Gideon.

That brought Harrow up short, and her eyebrows shot to the top of her hairline. She fretted at the veil around her neck, and she said slowly: “Why?”

Gideon knew at this point that some really intelligent answer was the way to go; something that would have impressed the Reverend Daughter with her mechanical insight and cunning. A necromantic answer, with some shadowy magical interpretation of what she had just seen. But her brain had only seen the one thing, and her palms were damp with the sweat that came when you were both scared and dying of anticipation. So she said, “The arms kind of looked like swords. I want to fight it.”

“You want to fight it.”

“Yep.”

“Because it looked … a little like swords.”

“Yop.”

Harrow massaged her temples with one hand and said, “I’m not yet so desperate for a new cavalier that I’m willing to recycle you. No. I’ll send in three this time, and you’re to tell me how it handles that—exactly how it responds; I’m not yet convinced that this isn’t testing my multidexterity…”

The next time she sent a skeleton in, it was clutching a crinkly bundle of phalanges in each bony fist. Gideon watched dutifully as the light turned green, and as Harrow sightlessly raised two identical skeletons next to her first. They were models of their kind: beautifully made, built to spec, animated and responsive. Harrow’s skeletons looked almost like First House servants now. When the construct flailed out of the mist, they moved with admirable poise and fluency, and got demolished in three moves. The last skeleton ran around in a sad little sprint before the monstrous construct raised one bladed arm and shattered it from sacrum to shoulder.