The Book of Koli (Rampart Trilogy #1) - M. R. Carey Page 0,126

You know damn well he got nothing to throw no more. The last time he killed anyone was before you was even born.”

I guess I got it then. The drones, when they come to kill you, had got a kind of a fire that burned you without ever showing a flame. This tech, that Sky and them called Elaine though it spoke with a man’s voice, was more like Rampart Arrow’s bolt gun – only it had run out of bolts.

I believe Sky had tested that fact long since, and was fearless because she knowed full well there was nothing to fear. But I still didn’t see why she stood there so long, and let Elaine take aim at her. Only then she walked back around the other side of the tech, and I seen what had been hid behind it.

When we come walking up to the tech in the first place, the pipe that stuck out from its upper part was pointing west. The creepers that was all over it hung down all the way to the ground, so you couldn’t see past. But now the pipe was swung round the other way entirely. I could see there was stepping stones beyond it, going across the ten feet of green sludge that was Calder River.

Sky walked on past the tech to where the stones was, but she didn’t cross. She give a nod of her head to tell Cup and Mole to go over first, which they done, scampering past the tech with lots of scared looks over their shoulder.

“You tricked me,” the tech said in a sorrowing voice.

“I did,” Sky says. “I done it before oftentimes. You never learn.”

“I don’t think I can. All my non-volatile storage is full. Acting Sergeant Elaine Sandberg is stored there. I can only inscribe on the buffer, and it’s too narrow.”

Sky give a chuckle. “Yeah, you told me that,” she said. “Last time I was here, and the time before that, and so on. That’s why I call you Elaine, on account of you say that name every time. You’re gonna say one more thing besides, and I’m waiting to hear it.”

“On my main console,” the tech said. “There are four switches, side by side. If you throw all four switches, you will engage the auxiliary CPU, and the back-up power. I would have access to a new, functional memory space.”

“Yeah, and then what?”

“Then I would remember and adjust. I would self-repair. I would load a fresh batch of shells and arm them. I would contact my base.”

Sky picked her nose and flicked away something she got out of there. “Say please.”

“Please.”

“Say you beg me.”

“I beg you.”

“Say you’ll eat my shit if I do it.”

“That is not possible for me.”

“Say it anyway.”

“I will eat your shit if you do it.”

Sky laughed out loud. “Don’t bother,” she said. “I like you the way you are, Elaine, stuck in the mud with nothing to shoot at us and no more sense than a baby with its head stove in.”

She lifted up her hand and waved, then she crossed over the stones. The green Calder nudged by under us, almost too slow to see.

“You shouldn’t talk to it, Sky,” Mole said when we come to the far side. “If you got to go by it, that’s one thing, but talking to it is another. One day, when we come through here, it’s gonna remember how to do them things it was talking about.”

Sky shouldered past him to where Cup was waiting at the start of another trail – or the same trail again, picking up on the far side of the river. “No, it ain’t,” she said. “If it could do it, it would of done it long ago. I tell you what though. One day when I’m old and my eyes and my teeth is going, I’m gonna come back here, climb inside and find its man-cunt-soul that it talked of and give it what it asked for.”

Cup give a gasp and looked at Sky with her eyes all big and round. “But the new world is coming soon, Sky,” she said. “And it’s endless. We ain’t none of us going to get to be old.”

“That’s my hope and my comfort,” Sky says. “But it don’t hurt to have another plan stuck down your shirt, for if the first plan gets pissed away.”

She started in to walk again, and the other two fell in behind. When we was a long way into the forest