The Book of Koli (Rampart Trilogy #1) - M. R. Carey Page 0,31

a drone was coming was that it told you. It would drop down from out of the sky, fast as a stone, but stop dead ten or twenty feet above the ground. And it would speak a word. “Disperse.” Then you knowed you just had got a few seconds to dive under cover and hope it didn’t follow you or fire on you, for if it did you would most likely be dead.

If the drones didn’t give their warning, they would of killed most every time. The warning, which was always the same, give us a chance to raise the alarum. Ramparts would come running then from wherever they was and whatever they was doing, carrying their name-tech with them.

They all knowed their places and their parts. Rampart Arrow would stand in the middle, with Fire on one side and Knife on the other. She would let fly with a bolt. She didn’t need to aim, for that was not how the bolt gun worked, but she did point the gun at the drone for a second or two so it knowed what its target was. Then she pulled the trigger and off went the bolt.

Sometimes it hit the drone on the first pass, and that was a great good fortune. Most often, though, the drone would see the bolt coming and swing away, nearly too fast to see. Then there would be a kind of a skirmishing and snaking around in the sky, with the bolt chasing the drone and the drone flying every which way so as not to be hit, and once that was happening both Rampart Fire and Rampart Knife come into the picture. Rampart Fire would cut loose with the firethrower, making a kind of roof of fire over the village, or at least the part where the drone was. The fire was to keep it from coming down low and attacking.

If it did come down through the fire and didn’t melt or fall apart, then it would be close enough for Rampart Knife to have at least a chance of hitting it. The last chance, so to speak, for if he missed then that day would be someone’s funeral day. But most often the sheet of flame kept the drone high up in the sky until the bolt done its work. One or two drones come down on us every year in the times I’m speaking of, and there was only two times in all them years that they killed anyone.

But then, there had never been a time when three drones attacked us at once.

Some things come on you too fast for you to understand them when they’re happening. And when you try to understand them afterwards you put them together any way you can, but you get it wrong. In your mind there’s a moment here and a moment there, but no sensing what went with what. That’s how it was for me right then.

There was a drone standing in the air in front of me, close enough for me to touch. It had already spoke, so I ought to be running, except there wasn’t nowhere I could run to. Nothing was close by except Ursala’s tent, and that wouldn’t offer no help at all when the drone struck.

I heard the handclap sound of the bolt gun being fired, and another sound that was like a hammer hitting a nail – the quick little taps you give when the nail is almost all the way in and you want to seat it solid without bruising the wood. The sky turned orange-yellow-white, sheets of fire rolling out like flags far away over us.

Our drone tilted in the air a little, then steadied itself. The tiny little cylinder that was its stinger flicked from Ursala to me and back again, and there was some sounds from inside it like someone was humming in there while they worked.

Ursala hadn’t moved until then, but now she did. She bent down slowly and picked up a stick from the fire, one that was burning good. Then she took up a rock in her other hand. She had builded up a circle of biggish stones around her firepit, and it was one of them she grabbed a hold of now. It must of been hot to the touch but she didn’t flinch or make a sound.

She walked right towards the drone.

I give a yell like I was warning her. Like she was sleep-walking or something and I had got