Redemption Ark

‘Open your mouth.’

The evil little blade — which was still large enough to nip off a finger — hovered an inch from her nose. She felt the pressure increase. The machine’s humming intensified, becoming a low orgasmic throb.

‘Open your mouth. This is your last warning.’

She opened her mouth, but it was as much to groan in pain as to give the proxy what it wanted. Metal blurred, much to quick for her to see. There was a moment of coldness in her mouth, and the feeling of metal brushing her tongue for an instant.

Then the machine withdrew the blade. The limb articulated, tucking the blade into a separate aperture in the proxy’s compact central chassis. Something hummed and clicked within: a rapid sequencer, no doubt, tallying her DNA against the Convention’s records. She heard the rising whine of a centrifuge. The proxy still had her head in a vicelike grip.

‘Let her go,’ Xavier said. ‘You’ve got what you want. Now let her go.’

The proxy released Antoinette. She gasped for breath, wiping tears from her face. Then the machine turned towards Xavier.

‘Interfering in the activities of an official or officially designated mechanism of the Ferrisville Convention is a category-one…’

It did not bother to complete the sentence. Contemptuously, it flicked the taser arm across Xavier so that the sparking electrodes skimmed his chest. Xavier made a barking noise and convulsed. Then he was very still, his eyes open and his mouth agape.

‘Xavier…’ Antoinette gasped.

‘It’s killed him,’ Clock said. He started unfastening his restraint webbing. ‘We must do something.’

Antoinette snapped, ‘What the fuck do you care? You brought this about.’

‘Difficult as it may be to believe, I do care.’ Then he was up from his seat, grappling for the nearest anchorage point. The machine gyred to face him. Clock stood his ground, the only one of them who had not flinched when the proxy had arrived. ‘Let me through. I want to examine him.’

The machine lurched towards Clock. Perhaps it expected him to feint out of the way at the last moment, or huddle protectively. But Clock did not move at all. He did not even blink. The proxy halted, humming and clicking furiously. Evidently it did not know quite what to make of him.

‘Get back,’ it ordered.

‘Let me through, or you will have committed murder. I know there is a human brain driving you, and that you understand the concept of execution as well as I do.’

The machine brought the taser up again.

‘It won’t do any good,’ Clock said.

It pressed the taser against him, just below his collarbone. The sparking bar of current dancing between the poles like a trapped eel ate into the fabric of his clothes. But Clock remained unparalysed. There was no trace of pain on his face.

‘It won’t work on me,’ he said. ‘I am a Conjoiner. My nervous system is not fully human.’

The taser was beginning to chew into his skin. Antoinette smelt what she knew without ever having smelt it before to be burning flesh.

Clock was trembling, his skin even more pale and waxy than it had been before. ‘It won’t…’ His voice sounded strained. The machine pulled back the taser, revealing a scorched-black trench half an inch deep. Clock was still trying to complete the sentence he had started.

The machine knocked him sideways with the blunt circular muzzle of its Gatling gun. Bone cracked; Clock crashed against the wall and was immediately still. He looked dead, but then again there had never been a time when he had looked particularly alive. The stink of his burned skin still filled the cabin. It was not something Antoinette was going to forget in a hurry.

She looked at Xavier again. Clock had been on his way to do something for him. He had been ‘dead’ for perhaps half a minute already. Unlike Clock, unlike any spider, Xavier did not have an ensemble of fancy machines in his head to arrest the processes of brain damage that accompanied loss of circulation. He did not have much more than another minute…

‘Mr Pink…’ she pleaded.

The pig said, ‘Sorry, but it isn’t my problem. I’m dead anyway.’

Her head still hurt. The bones were bruised, she was sure of it. The proxy had nearly shattered her skull. Well, they were dead anyway. Mr Pink was right. So what did it matter if she got hurt some more? She couldn’t let Xavier stay like that, without doing something.

She was out of her seat.

‘Stop,’ the proxy said. ‘You are interfering with a crime scene. Interference with a designated crime scene is a category…’

She carried on moving anyway, springing from handhold to handhold until she was next to Xavier. The machine advanced on her — she heard the crackle of the taser intensify. Xavier had been dead for a minute. He was not breathing. She felt his wrist, trying to locate a pulse. Was that the right way to do it, she wondered frantically? Or was it the side of the neck…