The Cyber Chronicles Book III - The Core (4 page)

She glanced at
the corpse with a shudder, and Sabre disentangled himself and took
her hand, leading her back towards the cart.

She looked up
at him. "Shouldn't we bury him?"

"What's the
point? It would take ages to dig a grave in this ground; it's
mostly rock. And what difference does it make whether the worms eat
him, or the vultures?"

She shuddered
again. "It seems wrong."

"Do you think
he'd have buried you? Some cultures leave their dead for the
vultures on purpose; they believe the birds carry the spirit to the
next world."

Tassin looked
up at the eagle, which rode the thermals above them. "He was a good
ally."

"Yeah. She,
actually. The males are smaller."

"I knew you
would find me. How did you do it?"

"One of the
cyber's less useful functions, being able to see through rock.
Although it can't detect life signs through it, it can map it for a
limited distance."

They
approached the tree to which the donkeys were tethered, and Sabre
stared at it in amazement. The tree had been denuded, save for some
withered leaves at the top, which the donkeys could not reach.
After they had finished the leaves, they had stripped the bark, and
the tree looked as if it had been the main course for a swarm of
locusts. The culprits stamped and swished at flies, looking
bored.

Tassin burst
out laughing, her eyes shimmering with tears.

He grinned.
"Makes you want to laugh and cry, doesn't it?" She nodded, wiping
her eyes, and he addressed the donkeys sternly. "I can't leave you
two alone for five minutes!"

She doubled
over with mirth, clutching her stomach.

He shook his
head at the tree. "That poor thing will never be the same
again."

"Stop it,
Sabre!" she said. "You'll make me bust a gut!"

Sabre
chuckled, glad she had this opportunity to vent the pent-up
emotions accumulated over months of adversity. The colour had
returned to her cheeks and her eyes sparkled once more. He untied
the donkeys and helped her, still giggling, into the cart.

Chapter Two

Sabre made
camp early that night. Tassin drooped with weariness after her
ordeal in the caves, favouring her abused arm. When Sabre sat
beside the fire roasting a wild chicken, the Queen opposite, she
smiled at him.

"I hope that's
the end of our troubles. I doubt Torrian sent anyone else after
us."

"Yeah."

She poked a
twig into the fire and held it up, watching the flames devour it.
"We've been through a lot together." She paused, looking pensive.
"Am I just a friend to you, Sabre?"

He regarded
her, wondering at her strange choice of topic. "Yes, a good
friend."

"Is that all?"
Her brows rose.

He smiled.
"What do you want?"

She met his
gaze, her eyes challenging. "More than that."

"More
what?"

"More than
friendship."

"You'll have
to be a bit more specific."

She looked
away. "I thought... maybe you felt something for me."

"Again, you'll
have to -"

"Don't play
dumb; you know what I mean."

"I'm not sure
I do, actually."

Tassin frowned
at the fire. "I thought perhaps that you... might... like me more
than just a friend."

"Ah. And you'd
like that?"

"Yes."

"With a dirty
commoner?" His smile widened. "You surprise me, My Queen. I'm only
riffraff."

She raised her
chin as the barb hit home. "I may do as I wish, and if I wish to
flout the laws, I shall."

Sabre experienced a poignant stab of warmth in the centre of
his chest, then the mocking voice shouted its derision from that
dark corner of his mind.
Cyborg!
He shook his head, regretting his sarcasm in the
face of her determined honesty.

"When we get
back to Arlin, I'll be free only until the spacer returns for me.
There's no way I can evade him. He'll track me down. There can
never be anything more than friendship between us, Tassin. You'll
only end up being hurt."

A pregnant
silence fell, and he looked up to find her staring at him as if
this possibility had never occurred to her before.

"That can be
changed! What if -"

"No." He shook
his head. "No 'what ifs'. Forget it, there's nothing you or I can
do about it."

"But -"

"No 'buts',
either." He smiled wryly, masking his despair with false humour as
he stared into the fire. "Your future is a blank page, waiting for
you to write it, but mine's already written."

Her brows drew
together. "How can you be so defeatist? There must be some way
of..."

"Of what?" His
smile faded and he raised his eyes to meet hers. "Changing his
mind? Buying me from him? Fighting him? No, there's no way. I
know."

"How do you
know? He's my friend. He'll do as I ask."

"No." Sabre
lowered his gaze to the flames once more. "You don't understand. He
can't leave me here; I'm a cyber. He's already bent the law by
loaning me to you; to leave me here would be criminal. Cybers are
dangerous. Their use is monitored, and their status constantly
checked. Few cybers have ever disappeared, and they were destroyed,
their locators deactivated. If he reports me destroyed and someone
picks up my locator, he'll be punished severely, and he won't risk
that. If he reports me lost, they'll track me down. Just forget it,
okay?"

Tassin frowned
at the fire, looking daunted, but still rebellious. Her declaration
amazed him. Why would she want more with him? He was not even sure
what 'more than just a friend' meant, but he was certain it was
forbidden. He was not entirely human. The taunting voice in his
head was right. He was only a cyborg, scarred inside and out, and
incapable of most of what she craved, as far as he knew. Of course,
he would never find out. He could never hope to be that human.

Tassin simply
had no idea of the depths of his strangeness, and he had no
intention of telling her about the terabytes of programming in his
brain, some of which he occasionally glimpsed, like Sanskrit on a
cave wall. It was hard to decipher, especially since he avoided
looking at it. The reminder of what he truly was only depressed
him. He wanted the pretence of humanity, as much as he was able,
for as long as he could. Sabre inspected the chicken and found it
cooked, so he tore it in two and handed half to her.

The next day,
they journeyed out of the diseased area. By the afternoon the
scanners detected no more radioactive spots, and the land looked
healthier. A hot wind blew from the desert, and Tassin fanned
herself on the cart. The evenings brought some relief, when the
temperature dropped to a pleasant coolness.

Sabre trudged
ahead of the donkeys, certain his brains were boiling, when he
sensed the cyber's warning. The scanners showed five humans just
within their range, and his suspicions surfaced again. What kind of
people would live in this arid land, surrounded by radiation, so
close to the desert? The five points of light approached from
ahead, and he stopped the donkeys and turned to Tassin.

"There are
people coming."

"Oh, good! I
hope they're from a nice town. I could do with a rest, and a
bath."

He shot her a
glum glance. "I hope so too."

Looking
deflated, she squinted ahead while the donkeys helped themselves to
any greenery within reach. Five men trotted into view, and Sabre
stared at them in shock. He had expected deformities, but not this
bad. Tassin made a gagging sound and clapped a hand over her
mouth.

The strangers
slowed to a walk and approached warily, as if expecting hostility.
They carried crude spears with a broad, leaf-shaped heads. Thick
black or brown hair covered their exposed areas, and they wore
rough, ill-fitting homespun clothes. One had a hunched back and
only half a face, one side a smooth expanse of skin. Another
gripped his spear with hands webbed to the last finger joint, his
forearms shorter than normal. A third hobbled on a bent leg, his
withered left arm hanging at his side and an extra eye staring
blindly from the side of his head. The other two sported lesser
deformities, which made them merely ugly, rather than grotesque.
One of these stepped forward.

"Who are
you?"

Sabre faced
him. "Travellers."

"Why do you
come to the great city of Gramman?"

"We aren't.
We're going into the desert."

The man's
frown wrinkled the solid ridge of black hair above his eyes. "What
do you want in the desert?"

"To cross
it."

"That's
impossible. No one can cross the Dead Sector, it's forbidden."

Sabre shook
his head, not taking his eyes from the leader's pugnacious, twisted
face. "We came from there, and now we return."

"You didn't
pass this way before."

"No, we took
another route to the east."

The leader
pondered this for several moments before reaching a decision.
"You'll be welcome in the city."

"Thank you,
but we'll go into the desert."

The other men
muttered and shuffled their feet, hefting their spears. The leader
raised a hand to silence them. "I've said that you'll be welcome in
the city. Do you scorn our hospitality?"

"No, we just
have no use for it. We're in a hurry."

The leader's
over-large jaw jutted further. "You'll come to the city. Our
priests will want to speak to you."

So there it
was, Sabre thought. Not a friendly invitation, but a stipulation,
just as he had suspected. "And if we refuse?"

The man
smiled, revealing yellow teeth that grew at odd angles, the canines
over-long. "There's only one of you and five of us."

Sabre
considered the situation. He had no wish to kill or injure them,
and it seemed likely that he would have to in order to pass them.
Since he and Tassin had apparently strayed into an inhabited area,
avoiding further confrontations might mean a long detour. The
mutants did not appear to be a real danger, since they had made no
attempt to attack. They seemed too simple to harbour any covert
plans, and, if the priests of this tribe wished to ask a few
questions, it was just a delay. Perhaps Tassin would even get her
bath. These people surely had no motive to harm them.

He shrugged.
"Very well. We'll come and speak to your priests, then continue on
our way."

The mutant
nodded. "A wise choice."

Sabre glanced
at Tassin as the men turned and trotted away, catching the look of
disgust and trepidation in her eyes before she hid it behind a
bland smile.

Several
kilometres further on, they came within sight of a pre-war city,
not the town Sabre had expected. The city had been bombed, but not
with nuclear weapons, and according to the scanners the radiation
was within tolerable levels; enough to cause deformed children to
be born, but not enough to kill. The ruined city sprawled across
the hills, betraying traces of its former charms, but far beyond
the glory of its youth. It had been rebuilt crudely in places, old
walls patched with new, rough-hewn stone, the craters that dotted
the concrete streets filled with sand.

Twisted
skeletons of once proud towers remained, their glass looted. Modern
materials had been used in odd ways to rebuild. Pieces of plastic
helped to cover roofs, and weirdly-shaped windows had been made
from sheets of shatter-proof glass. A few derelict streetlamps
leant drunkenly beside the cratered streets. Warrens of huts and
shanties jostled within the walls of ruined buildings, their upper
floors now rubble used to weigh down the odd roofing materials
employed. The overall effect was ragtag and dilapidated, a patched
and broken corpse of a city.

The empty-eyed
people who shambled along the streets were as slovenly as their
city, dressed in coarsely-woven clothes that looked like sackcloth.
They all had some sort of deformity; eyes blinded by cataracts or
missing, faces disfigured by warped bones, limbs twisted and spines
crippled. The most horrendous were those who appeared to have lost
part of their humanity and now possessed fur or scales, walked on
horny stumps or had claws instead of hands. Many bore the scars of
brutal doctoring to remove growths or deformities, but the most
pitiful were the crippled children who played handicapped games
amongst rusted metal and crumbling walls. Tassin stared at them
with wide eyes, a hand over her mouth, and it sickened Sabre to see
these people still suffering for the mistakes of their
forebears.

Their captors
led them to a squat, bunker-like building with chunks blown out of
its thick concrete walls. Sabre helped Tassin down, and the
mutants' leader gestured to the polished steel doors. They entered
a luridly lighted room that appeared to be a temple. Oily torches
lined the walls, thickening the air with smoke, and a brazier
filled with glowing coals stood before an altar that had once been
nothing more than a rather ornate dining table. Atop it, a
candelabrum held pots of oil with wicks set in them, and a chunk of
black glass stood in front of it. Sabre stopped, his blood
chilling. The mutants halted and looked at him, hefting their
cumbersome spears.

"Let the girl
stay outside," Sabre said.

The mutant
leader frowned, a fearsome expression on his low-browed face.
"Why?"

Sabre pointed
at the glass. "That's dangerous. It could kill her."

"So, you're
not like us."

Sabre turned
as a deep female voice spoke behind him. A tall, thin woman moved
out of the shadows, pushing back the hood of a coarse white robe.
Her mutated features made her resemble a vulture, for she was as
bald as one, and lacked any form of facial hair. A thin, hooked
nose jutted between bulbous green eyes, tiny ears hugged her skull,
and a receding chin added to the vulpine look. She approached him,
as tall as he, and the hairy men bowed, backing away. Dismissing
them with a wave, she turned to Sabre while they headed for the
door.