suit came tumbling down like a landslide of metal and crashed into the gate. For a terrible moment Hannah thought the impact was going to smash the gate open, but it proved to be made of tougher stuff. The fallen RAM suit lay over the hole left by the dislodged rivet, temporarily sealing the leak. However, if sealing the leak had spared the three of them from steam burns, it had done no other favours for Rudge. The dislodged suit had brought his line down with it, and now the young navvy was pinned under the knee joins of his own suit, the arch of the leg trapping him with all the weight of a two-tonne foundry-forged tree trunk.
T-face was off his line, whining and pushing hopelessly at the massive suit’s leg. Rudge was still conscious enough to see Hannah trying to climb up into his downed suit’s pilot cage.
‘Suit – won’t work,’ he coughed up at her. ‘Not this – far down the – shaft.’
‘It might,’ Hannah called down. ‘I just need enough power to lift the leg off you.’
‘You’ll as like – crush me, grub. You’re the – only one with a line left tied to – a working suit. Climb back up and – take T-face with you.’
Hannah tried not to gag. She could smell Rudge’s skin burning where it was touching the gate. ‘I’ve found the fault, you idiot. The gate’s vanes are going to open up underneath you.’
‘Good job, girl. Then there’s only one – way me and my – suit are going, and that’s straight down.’
There was a loud creaking noise from underneath them. The gate wasn’t going to hold together long enough for Hannah to get out before the flow of super-pressurized steam resumed. It looked as if Vardan Flail had got his way. He was going to buy Hannah’s silence with her death after all.
Burning. Burning, as he rolled across the hotel room’s floor. Boxiron’s body was burning, but not as fiercely as his mind. The Steamo Loa that his people knew as Radius Patternmaster was reaching into his brain and filling it, preparing to swell and crack his nanomechanical neural channels and burn out each and every memory that Boxiron possessed. Not just the almost-decrypted code hidden inside Jethro’s church painting, but everything that made Boxiron a distinct being. His inferior, man-milled body was finally going to get the mind it deserved – that of an idiot savant.
Something deep inside Boxiron struggled and writhed in reaction to the pain – a vomit-like reflex that was trying to emerge and fight the possession of the Loa. What was it? A routine that had been hidden inside him by the flash mob? The cunning mechomancers who knew that there was always a danger that one of the steamman’s gods might strike at the abomination they had created for their Jackelian criminal masters. But whatever defences the crime lords had secreted inside his body felt too far away and the weight of the Loa riding him too intense for him to connect with it—
—as he felt Jethro’s shadow falling over his body, the gear lever on his back slid squealing up to five. Top gear.
Now it was the Steamo Loa’s turn to shriek as the cobbled-together firewall the flash mob’s hirelings had inserted inside Boxiron connected with his mind. Blocks were raised on every circuit he possessed, the Loa that was trying to ride him cut into a million separate, self-aware splinters, steam leaking out of his joints. The manifestation of Radius Patternmaster tried to seethe out of Boxiron’s body, broken and mangled beyond recognition, attempting to reform…but merely dissipating in the air of the hotel room.
Boxiron pulled himself groggily to his feet, trying to avoid placing a heavy iron foot on Jethro’s toes as he swayed to and fro. Jethro was standing there before him, as was the young ursine Chalph urs Chalph.
‘That was one your people’s gods, was it not, old steamer?’
‘A Loa – I rejected him,’ said Boxiron, ‘much as you reject your gods.’
‘I am not much of a standard to aspire to,’ said Jethro.
‘You are more than they.’
A coldness flowed through Boxiron, as if every crystal board and node inside his body was hardening after being freed of the corrupting hold of the Loa. But it was not the aftershock of cleansing himself of the possession he felt. It was the cipher from the painting.
Assembling. Assembling. The last of the flash mob’s crooked processing units came back online passing him