The Garments of Caean

They passed into the dodecahedron. Estru examined the interior with some interest. It was constructed on some complicated open-plan system. From the peripheral walls jutted a maze of metal screens, but the central space, across which Sovyans soared to and fro, was left undivided apart from being criss-crossed by slender retaining girders. Estru found the place impressive.

Now their guards were herding them through the peripheral maze until they arrived at a meshed and gridded cage. For a moment Estru heard Captain Wilce beginning to speak to him again, then he and Amara were both pushed roughly into the cage and the gate closed behind.

He became aware of a sudden deadness in his transceiver.

They were in a Faraday cage, blocking them off from all radio communication.

Up until now Estru had not really been able to think of the Sovyans as anything more than truncated, rather pathetic human beings huddling inside their protective metal encasements. When he had coined the word ‘metalloid’ it had been as a disparaging joke. But the suit-men’s swift and unhesitating actions had changed all that. Suddenly they seemed more capable and intelligent than his prejudices had formerly allowed him to admit. They had become what Amara had always said they were: a new species, wholly at harmony with their own nature.

One small detail during the journey to the dodecahedron had struck him with particular force – the way the antennae arrays surrounding the suit-men’s heads and shoulders automatically shifted and turned as they darted unerringly through the rock fields. It was such a natural movement, yet completely non-human. The Sovyans really had adopted a new form of physical existence.

Yet in a purely technical sense the suits were not even particularly sophisticated. Ziodean technicians could have produced a version half the size and twice as efficient. Still, for their purpose they were fully effective. The biological and the technical parts of the new entity functioned as a unit. Oxygen was required to be imbibed only once every thirty hours, and then only to top up the reserve tank since the suit was able to split exhaled carbon dioxide. ‘Biofood’, a thick fluid whose waste content was minimal, was taken once in ten hours. ‘Technofood’ consisted of a small amount of lubricating oil and energy for the electrical systems, which came from an isotope battery replaced every fifty days and a solar cell back-up.

For the next half-hour Estru and Amara kept themselves busy, adding notes to their running commentaries on everything they saw. The scene put Estru more and more in mind of a beehive – and the Sovyans reminded him particularly of the bullet-bees found on his home planet of Migrat.

He could not deduce the purpose of the dodecahedral building. It contained a great deal of machinery which was being evacuated through the exit as time went on, and the numbers of suit-men in it also decreased. It could, he thought, be a military centre. He reflected that the Sovyans had suffered these attacks for centuries, and presumably knew how to deal with them. The assault would no doubt be followed by a retaliatory raid on Shoji – though the suit-men, being unable to land on the enemy planet, could do little more than bombard its surface.

At length Estru and Amara ran out of remarks to put on record, and still no rescue party arrived from the Callan. They looked at one another. Estru knew that, though she tried not to show it, Amara was even more scared than he was.

‘What do you think’s happened?’ she said hesitantly.

‘I dread to think.’

‘Could the Callan …’

‘Have been captured? It’s possible. But don’t write us off too soon. We haven’t been waiting all that long. Maybe it’s taking Wilce a bit of time to extricate himself.’

‘It will be really awful if—’ she began, and then a gasp of shock caused Estru to look the way her helmet was facing.

One of the dodecahedron’s pentagonal walls was bursting inwards. Through the imploding rent, accompanied by the icy light of the rings, floated a dozen space-rafts crammed with cyborg warriors.

What followed was horrifying. Only a few Sovyans remained in the dodecahedron. The cyborgs swarmed throughout the structure, hunting them down and slaughtering them in a frenetic orgy. The suit-men were shot, burned, battered to junk with huge hammers. They fought back as best they could, occasionally blowing pale bodies to shreds with rocket-driven shells, but they were outnumbered and their situation was hopeless.

The ferocity of it all terrified the two Ziodeans, floating in their cage in frozen fascination. Then a moan of fright escaped Amara as one of the rafts drifted slowly by them only a few yards away.

The gowned figure they had encountered a week earlier stood on the raft. Leisurely the cyborg gangster abbot turned his body to look them over, his cowl thrown back, his face, with its bizarre mouth and black eyes, appearing cruel, supercilious, amused. Estru felt like a hypnotized rabbit.