by Hank Davis
“Then why bother bringing me here at all?” the thing asked. “Just kill me. You’re going to anyway.”
Sarana’s clawed nails clicked against the concrete arms. “The forms must be obeyed.”
“The forms…” the hybrid echoed, venom on her tongue. Sarana noted the way the face did not move as it spoke, the voice issuing instead from speakers near where the beast’s ribs ought to be, beneath flanges in the gray chassis.
Unmoved by this realization, the praetor said, “There are questions regarding the nature of your depravity whose answers will impact the severity of your sentencing, not least of which being the disposition of your companion.” Here she raised a finger and indicated the apparently human child clinging to the hybrid’s dog-legged thigh.
“My daughter, you mean?”
Sarana thought that if the giant could have stepped forward or pushed the child behind her that she might have done. A derisive laugh almost escaped her. Almost. The beast thought the child needed protecting from the Chantry? That was almost too rich.
“Your…daughter,” Sarana echoed the words. She’d been briefed on the unnatural association between the once-human thing before her and the child, but to be faced with the reality of the situation beneath the cold light of the courtroom lamps was something else entirely. The thing that called itself Leocadia looked more like a freight lifter than a human being. Sarana imagined the hybrid carrying its child in a tank on its back and shuddered. Fixing her eyes on the girl, she asked. “Inas, was it?”
The girl turned away, clutching at the machine’s leg to hide her face.
“Is she human?” asked one of the jurors.
At the sound of the questioner’s voice, the chimera swiveled its turret of a head so that the plastinated human face regarded the juror. “Human?” it sneered. “Human? It’s you priests I’m not so sure about.”
From the praetor’s seat, Sarana could see the blood drain from the juror’s ashen face. She shared a portion of the man’s horror. The creature’s head had rotated on its neck far more than was natural. With a glance to the guards and the cathars who held the restraints in check, she reasserted command of the chamber. “You have been found guilty of Abomination under the Writ of Mother Earth’s Holy Chantry and Her Inquisition. Of profaning your given flesh with machines, of consorting with machine intelligences, of permitting those same intelligences to possess your body and mutilate your soul. These are deadly sins and disgraces in the eyes of She who made us…” While she spoke, Praetor Sarana settled back against the throne, her high, Egyptian-styled miter just touching the backrest. “But the Mother is not without mercy. Repent. Renounce your sinful ways. Cleanse yourself of these machines.”
“And what?” the beast spat. “You’ll let me go?”
The praetor shut her eyes, the better not to look upon that ghastly, once-human face. There were some crimes—some sins—which no mortal judge could expiate. For such sinners, there was only death. Only Mother Earth’s mercy. Her justice. Some affronts were beyond mortal forgiveness, beyond the powers of men to make right.
“You will be permitted to die clean,” the praetor answered. “Clean and free of this taint you have brought upon your body and your soul. Renounce your machines.”
“Commit suicide?” the creature asked. “If you’re going to kill me, kill me. I won’t do your work for you.”
“There is the matter of your immortal soul to consider,” Sarana said.
“My soul!” the chimera echoed. “You’re one to talk, lady.”
“And there is the matter of your child—if she is your child—to consider,” the praetor said, angling up her chin. “Cooperate, and it will be easier for her.”
A horrid sound, low like the grinding of stones issued from the creature below the dais. The thing that once had been woman snarled, strained against her chains. The cathars scrambled, guards training lances on the thing’s shoulders. An instant later, the chimera tore itself apart. The turret head with its human face fell forward, bringing a huge chunk of its torso along with it. Sarana saw the scuttling of limbs—arms or legs she could not tell. Too many. The thing took half an instant arranging itself on the floor, but for the woman in the chair time seemed to slow as she beheld the horror of it. Snakelike, spiderlike and fashioned all of steel it was, a human face on the end of a braided metal spine seven feet long and big around as a man’s arm, with six legs, each razor-edged and graceful as a blade and tipped with splayed, three-clawed feet.
In that same moment, Sarana reflected that her cathars had failed her, had failed to detect this smaller body housed within the larger shell. That was the trouble with these demoniacs. No two Extrasolarians were alike: each a puzzle box of danger and mechanical horror. The cathars had sworn they’d defanged the creature, removed all its built-in weapons, but this body had gone undetected, had appeared little more than an endoskeleton contained within the larger shell that hung open and lifeless in chains before the judge’s seat.
Sarana knew she was going to die, her and possibly several of the jurors before the cathars and the guards could stop it. Even still, Sarana wondered what the creature thought it could accomplish. Even if it killed her—killed everyone in the room—there was yet the entire bastille and temple complex beyond the doors of the court. Thousands of clergy and armed guards.
It could not get far.
All this passed through Sarana’s mind in the space of a lightning strike, in the time it took for the chimera to find its clawed feet and launch itself at the judge’s throne like a panther from the branches of some tree in the jungles of mankind’s mythic youth.
It crashed against an invisible barrier mere inches from the foot of the dais and fell in a tangle on the floor.
The praetor gasped. She had forgotten about the prudence barrier. In all her years of judgment, in all her hundreds of hearings…she had never needed it before that day. Unlike the standard Royse body-shields, whose limited power supplies meant they could guard against only high velocity projectiles, the prudence shield was powered by geothermal sinks that drew energy direct from the planet’s core. Though it was invisible as air, the prudence barrier was solid as stone, as impenetrable to artifice as it was to brute force.
A curious thrill pulsed through the praetor’s body, and she sat forward, the better to watch. The thing called Leocadia righted itself, six limbs clicking as it reared up, body like some six-limbed stick figure of a man. The still-human face contorted, hissing with fury, it drove its spike-like arms into the barrier curtain. Fractal shimmers sparkled and died where it struck, claws bouncing back scarce two feet from the face of the judge.
Mastering her fear and her instinct to flinch away, Sarana sat forward. She could no more pass through the membrane than the beast could, and so was at no risk of endangering herself. The cold lighting of a stunner bolt splashed against the shield. Leocadia’s head rotated a full one hundred eighty degrees. The snakelike spine and shoulder joints flexed oddly as three of the arms rolled over in their sockets. The guards advanced, lances raised. One man leaped bravely forward—what he was thinking Leocadia never knew—and thrust his zircon bayonet towards the demoniac’s face. Leocadia caught the ceramic blade in its pincers and snapped it clean in two. The poor fellow never stood a chance. Two more metal arms lanced out, skewering him at the neck and in the soft place beneath one shoulder. He died instantly, red blood gushing across the gray concrete at the foot of the brutal dais.
Another of the Chantry guardsmen opened fire, and his lance’s beam sliced across one of the chimera’s legs at the joint. The limb smoked and the metal monster staggered, but another of the arms shot out, razored edge slicing through the man’s red tunic and the black underlayment beneath. Iron claws seized the fellow’s lance and pulled it from its owner’s hands. Another shot caught the creature in its shoulder, but it swung its stolen lance around and clubbed its attacker in the head with its haft. The man reeled and hit the floor with a groan. The daimon fired its stolen lance
. One guard’s head exploded with the heat, and he fell like a toppled tower.
Black-robed cathars drew back—they were no soldiers. The knot of torturer-technicians retreated towards the door, one of them shouting at the sergeant-at-arms to summon more guards. The demoniac advanced on them, lance raised. It fired, and men died. The cathars had no armor. No shields. They never stood a chance.
“Summon the guards!” Sarana shouted from the safety of her seat. The sergeant-at-arms—an older man, bald as all legionnaires are bald—nearly tripped in his scramble to pull the chain that would sound the bell in the guard room down the hall. Its deep chiming filtered through the heavy concrete and steel of the court’s walls, urgent and melancholy at once. The jurors—safe themselves behind a similar prudence barrier—nevertheless scrambled to leave the chamber by the side door. There were only three guards.
“Cowards…” Sarana muttered, and watched as the demoniac leaped upon another of her guardsmen and pinned him to the ground with three of its bladed limbs. Blood flowed freely from wounds at wrist and elbow as the machine-creature lowered its serpentine bulk atop its victim like the body of some vampire. It twisted, fixing humanish eyes on Sarana as it drew a fourth arm smoothly across the throat of the downed man.
Slice.
The guardsman twitched, but with his arms pinned at the elbow there was nothing he could do. Sarana thought she could see Death’s gray shadow rush over him as the blood ran out. But the demoniac woman had made a mistake.
Lance fire scraped across its back, braided metal glowing where the high-energy beams heated it to a fevered scarlet. The demoniac lurched behind the hulk of its abandoned, larger body and returned fire, but the guards had gotten shields up and circled round. The sergeant at arms still pulled on the chain, bell tolling for aid in the halls outside. Sarana heard—or thought she heard—the hammer of booted feet and rattle of armor without.
“Freedom!” the creature screamed, and swung its lance down at the nearest guardsman. The white zircon bayonet flashed in the stark light and clubbed the man in the shoulder with such force the fellow went to his knees. Leocadia whirled the lance in a circle to strike the man in the neck. A little shape darted out from the shadow of the giant’s abandoned husk—running for the doors and the bodies of the dead cathars.
The child. Inas.
Too slow.
The whirling lance caught Inas on the flank. Sarana heard a cry and watched as the little girl went skidding across the floor, tumbling until she struck the prudence barrier at the base of the jury stands.
The child lay very still.
For an instant, nothing moved in the courtroom. Nothing save the slow spread of blood on the floor from the wreck of dead men and the frantic scramble of the sergeant at the bell.
“No!” Leocadia exclaimed. “No no no no no!” The demoniac scrambled across the floor towards its child’s prone form, six feet scraping against the stone. It coiled round the child’s form, razor edges smoothing away as it traced a line of the girl’s face with one tripodlike hand. “Inas, are you all right?”
Sarana stood. She did not think the girl was bleeding—it looked like the energy-lance had just clipped her flank. Nevertheless, the force of that blow had surely been sufficient to shatter bones, and the praetor was certain the girl had at least one broken rib. She felt a twinge of pity for the child, who had not asked for so unnatural a mother, nor so dangerous a one.
The child made no sound. Was she unconscious?
The doors to the court chose that very moment to burst open, jerking Sarana’s attention from the pair on the floor. Three dozen men in the white armor and red tunics of the common Sollan Imperial legionnaire streamed in, lances raised and ready. Sarana saw the red points of targeting lasers track across the prudence barrier and take aim at the serpent-spider thing huddled around its still-human young.
“Hold your fire!” Sarana shouted, raising both arms. With her loose sleeves, she cast a cruciform shadow on the floor beneath the dais. The bell had stopped ringing, and the old sergeant stood ready behind the new. “You’ll hit the child!”
The men did not fire, but kept their lances trained on the metal monster.
The praetor descended from the dais and advanced until she almost pressed her nose against the prudence barrier. In a voice tense but flat of all feeling, Sarana asked, “Is she alive?”
The demoniac was slow to answer her. In the silence, the men advanced, and the creature shouted, “Don’t come closer!” It clutched the child to itself, weapon raised. “She’s still alive!”
“No thanks to you,” the praetor said, cold and distantly. “Put down the lance and step away, and we may be able to save her.”
“Save her?” Leocadia almost choked. “You lot?” Metal arms flinched, tightening about the child. “No closer, I said!”
“If she is human,” Sarana replied. “She has nothing to fear. Prove there is still some humanity in you and stand down. Let us save her. From you.”
The once-human monster snarled. “From me! She would not be here were it not for you!”
“No,” the praetor said, and pressed a hand against the prudence barrier. It felt smooth and unyielding as glass. “She would not be here were it not for you. You did this. It is because of you that you are here, and it is because of you that your child suffers. Your violence.”
“Me!” the thing repeated. A hollow laugh escaped it. Arms still tightened.
“Look at yourself!” Sarana shouted. “You’ll crush her!”
“I…” the serpent’s human face flitted back and forth from Sarana to the guards and back.
“Look around you, creature.” And here the praetor spread her arms. “You killed ten of my people. I am trying to save one of yours. Ask yourself: which of us is the danger here?”
Leocadia snarled again, iron fingers wringing the haft of its stolen lance.
“You cannot win,” Sarana said, and was pleased to hear her voice so smooth and even. “And you cannot save the girl. Submit. Repent. And die human.”
How human the eyes still seemed! The shine in them, the film of tears…Whatever engineer had saved that flesh and transmuted it to plastic had done his vile work too well. It was all Sarana could do not to recoil, to hold herself fast by the energy curtain. She was Earth’s holy representative, the goddess-mother’s avatar in the living world. She could not be afraid, and so held the monster’s gaze.
Human and inhuman stared at one another.
Inhumanity blinked.
“You’ll help her?” Leocadia asked, relaxing her grip on the child. In the harsh light of the chamber, Sarana though she could see bruises flowering where the metal arms had bit the child’s flesh.
“If she is human.”
“She is, you bitch!” The serpent coiled closer about its child. “As if you’d know the difference.”
Sarana ignored the monster’s needling. There was no reasoning with the profane.
Metal hands cradled the unconscious child while other hands still held the lance, its bayonet aimed at the three dozen men shielded and clustered by the door. Doubtless some machine eye or sense stranger still kept watch on the ranks of armed men, but the human face looked up towards the judge, and expression forming there that Sarana did not expect to see from a monster like the one before her eyes.
Horror.
It was a human face again. In that moment. Leocadia’s face. Gone was the feral snarling, gone the hollow-eyed lethality of the thing that had killed her cathars and her guards. Here was only the woman. The mother. Here was only Leocadia, eyes wide with fear and shame. It was as if the woman had awoken from a dream. Her eyes darted round the room as if she had not truly seen it before—as if she had never seen it. She had the nervous energy of one who knows not where she is standing. Sarana felt pity for the woman within the machine, for she was a victim, too. Her own victim, to be sure, but a victim all the same. A victim of the changes she’d wrought on her body, of the machines she’d let into her mind. No
human mind could undergo such changes to the body without changing itself—and the woman she was or might have been was not the creature that crouched coiled before the praetor’s throne.
“Let the child go,” Sarana said. “Put her down and the weapon. Lie on the ground.”
The woman inside the machine glanced down at her child, at striped bruises on her arms where the metal appendages had dug in. “I…I don’t…”
“Mama?” the child’s eyelids fluttered. “Mama, it hurts. Breathing.”
The monster sobbed, and Leocadia clutched Inas against its central column where a breast ought to be, limbs approximating the gestures of human tenderness.
“Put her down,” the praetor said. “Let her go.” She raised a hand to the old sergeant. “Send for a med team, Arleg.” The bald officer bobbed a quick bow and vanished out the open double doors. Refocusing on the demoniac, Sarana said, “Put the weapon down, at least.”
Tears began to fall. “You’re going to kill me,” Leocadia said, and Sarana sensed it was the woman speaking, not the machine she had sacrificed herself to become.
“You’re killing her!” the praetor said.
The creature’s lance tumbled from fingers that had never known nerves. Limbs buckled, and the tight coil the beast had made loosened from around the child. It had not known its own strength. Its grip—which had it been human would have been only the desperate embrace of the concerned parent—had in its current form been a kind of vise. It had nearly crushed its own child in its arms, another victim.
Sarana sorely hoped she’d have to burn but one of them that day.
“I’m not…” the creature stammered, “I’m not a monster.” Those still-human eyes squeezed shut. Tears pressed between the lids. “My name is Leocadia. Leocadia.”
“You have been using your child as a shield since my men entered this courtroom,” the praetor said. “You slaughtered ten of my men in seconds. You would have slaughtered me.” Once more, Sarana pressed her hand to the prudence barrier.
“You’re going to kill me!” the creature said.