The Mammoth Book of Best New Science Fiction 22nd Annual Collection (41 page)

The boy’s mother’s eyes flew open in horror. She looked out of the window, which showed sand billowing down a dusty street.

She stood still a moment, as though paralysed. Then she grabbed his arm.

“Come with me.”

They walked out to the edge of the village. The village was small. It was not a long walk. Out there at the very edge of the sun farms, beyond a hectare or so of jet-black solar collectors, the wrecked battle machines of the Barbarians sat rusting in the sand.

What are Barbarians?
the boy had asked his teacher once in class. And the answer had been quick and pat. Why, people from outside the Commonwealth, of course.
Any
people from outside the Commonwealth.

The machines sat at what the boy knew to have been the extreme limit of the Guardian’s target acquisition range, sixty years ago.

Of the old man, there was no sign.

“Stupid old fool,” said mother, and pulled the boy off down the village streets again. She seemed to know where she was going. Only two streets, two rows of gleaming aluminium-steel habitats, and the old man came into view. Standing in the square at the Guardian’s habitat-sized feet, he was arguing with a pair of Consultancy men, armoured troopers holding guns that could track the electrical emissions of a man’s heartbeat in the dark and shoot him dead through steel. He was carrying a sword.

“But I always do my exercises in the square at this time,” the old man was saying, which was a lie.

“You are carrying a weapon, grandfather,” said one of the Consultants gently, “which I am forced to regard as a potential threat, despite your advanced years.”

The old man looked from hand to hand, then finally held up the sword as if he had only just realized it was there. “This? Why, but this is only an old sword-shaped piece of aluminium. It cannot even be made to take an edge.”

“All the same,” said the Consultant persuasively, “out of deference to the tense situation in which we find ourselves, it would be safer if —”

“HOI!”

The shout broke the polite silence in the town square. Five heads turned towards it. As the sun heaved its head over the southern horizon, a figure staggered into town out of the desert. It waved its arms.

“HOI! It’s me, Khan! Khan, the man you’re looking for! Catch me if you can!”

Guns rose instantaneously to shoulders. Khan dived for cover. How useful that cover was was debatable, as a line of projectile explosions stitched its way across the wall of the nearest habitat like a finger tearing through tinfoil. When the guns had finished tracking across the building, the building was two buildings, one balanced precariously on top of the other, radiator coolant gushing from the walls and electrical connections sparking. Hopefully no one was sitting headless at breakfast within it. The Consultancy men were already spreading out round the habitat, hoping to outflank their target if he had somehow survived the first attack. The boy’s mother looked on, appalled.

Some caprice, however, drew the boy’s attention upward.

The old man was on the inside leg of the metal colossus, on the access ladder, moving with dinosaurian slowness towards the Guardian’s bumward access hatch.

The boy’s jaw dropped.

Meanwhile, the men who were guarding the Guardian seemed on the point of following Khan and finishing him, until one of them remembered his orders, waved his comrade back to the square, pulled a communicator from one of his ammunition pouches, opened it, spoke into it, and flipped it shut again. Someone Else, he told his comrade, Could Do The Running. Up above, the old man was still moving, but with the speed of evolution, at the speed glass flowed down windowpanes, at the speed boys grew up doorposts. He had not even reached the knee. Surely, before the old fool reached the top of his climb, somebody in the village underneath had to notice? And what did he think he’d accomplish, if he once got up the ladder?

The two Consultants reassumed their positions underneath the Guardian’s treads. They stood on the square of concrete, reaching all the way down through the regolith to the bedrock, that had been put there solely as a foundation for the vehicle to stand on. They faced outwards, willing to bleed good red blood to stop anyone who tried to get past them. One of them even remarked on the old man’s sword discarded in the sand, saying that they Must Have Frit The Old Coot Away. Meanwhile, by pretending to scratch his eye against the dust, the boy was able to see, far above, the old coot pulling an battered slab of black plastic from his tunic and sliding it into what the boy knew, from the climb he had been dared to do a year ago, to be a recess in the circular ass-end access hatch about the same size as the slab. The hatch was also spraypainted with the letters AUGMENTED INFANTRY UNIT MK 73 (1 OFF), and only members of the privileged club of boys who had taken the dare and made the climb knew it.

Something glittered like a rack of unsheathed blades in the Guardian’s normally dull and pitted skin; the old man skimmed his fingers over the glitter rapidly, and the boy saw blood ooze out of his fingers onto the hatch cover momentarily, before the surface drank it like a vampire.

The key was tuned to the operator’s genetic code. The vehicle had to have a part of him to know who he was.

The hatch slid into the structure, silently. The old man began to slip into the hole it had opened. But for all the wondrous silence of the mechanism, the old man was by now unable to prevent the boy’s mother from standing with her head in the air gawping like a new-hatched chick waiting to be fed worms. And as she gawped, the guards gawped with her.

Luckily for the old man, the guards also took a couple of moments to do helpless baby chick impersonations before remembering they had weapons and were supposed to use them. The hatch had slid shut before they could get their guns to their shoulders, take aim and fire. They were not used to firing their weapons in that position, and the recoil, coming from an unaccustomed direction, blew them about on the spot like unattended pneumatic drills. The boy saw stars twinkle on the Guardian’s hide. He was not sure whether they had inflicted any damage or not; the detonations left a mass of after-images on his retinas.

The two men could not have inflicted too much damage, however, as they thought better of continuing to shoot, and instead stood back and contemplated the crotch of the colossus.

For one long minute, nothing happened. The lead Consultant spoke quietly but urgently into his communicator, saying that he Wasn’t Quite Sure Whether Or Not The Shit Indicator Had Just Risen to Nostril Deep.

Then the dust under the left tread of the Guardian moaned like a man being put to the press. The boy looked up to see the great pipe legs of the Augmented Infantry Unit buckling and twisting, as if the wind were blowing it off its base. But Guardians weighed so much they smashed themselves if they fell over, the boy knew; and despite the fact that the dry season wind howled down from the mountains here like a katabatic banshee, it had never stirred the Guardian as much as a millimetre from its post.

The Guardian was moving
under its own power.

Huge alloy arms the weight of bridge spans swung over the boy’s head. Knee joints that could have acted as railway turntables flexed arthritically in the legs. And at that point, the boy knew exactly who was at the controls of the Guardian.

The whole colossal thousand-tonne weapon was doing the old man’s morning exercises. Moving gently at first, swinging its arms and legs under their own weight, cautiously bending and unbending its ancient joints. Some of those joints screamed with the pressure of the merest movement. The boy suddenly, oddly, appreciated what the old man meant when he talked of rheumatism, arthritis and sciatica.

The old man’s exercises were good for a man with rheumatic joints who needed them oiling in the morning. But they were just as good for a village-sized automaton that had not moved for sixty standard years.

The men sent to guard the Guardian were backing away. From somewhere in the village on the other side of the buildings, meanwhile, someone else decided to fire at the machine. A pretty coloured show of lights sprayed out of the ground and cascaded off the metal mountain’s armour. Habitats that the cascade hit on the way back down became colanders full of flying swarf. The Guardian carried on its warm-up regardless.

Eight times for the leg-stretching exercise – eight times for the arm-swinging – eight times for the two-handed push up above the head –

The boy began to back away, and pulling at his mother’s robe. He knew what was coming next.

Men ran out of the buildings with light anti-armour weapons. Many of the weapons were recoilless, and some argument ensued about whether they should really be pointed up into the sky or not. Some of them were loosed off at point blank range at the Guardian’s treads, leaving big black stains of burnt hydrocarbon. But a Guardian’s feet were among its most heavily armoured parts. Every old person in town would tell you that. They were heavily armoured because they were used to crush infantry.

The Guardian lowered its massive head to stare at the situation on the ground. The operator, the boy knew, was actually in the main chassis, and the head was only used to affix target acquisition systems and armament. That small movement of the head was in itself enough to make the Consultants back away and run.

One of the Consultants, thinking smarter than his colleagues, grabbed hold of the boy’s mother, shouting at the sky and pointing a pistol shakily at her head. He might as well have threatened a mountain.

The Guardian turned its head to look directly at him.

The boy screamed to his mother to drop down.

The Guardian’s hand came down like the Red Sea on an Egyptian. Or, the boy pondered, like a sword upon a melon. Unlike a human hand, it had three fingers, which might be more properly described as claws. Exactly the same disposition of fingers a man might have, in fact, if a man held his middle finger and forefinger, and his little and ring finger, together, and spread the two groups of fingers apart. A roof of steel slammed down from heaven. The boy felt warm blood spray over his back.

Then the sunlight returned to the sand, though the sand was now red rather than brown, and the gunman’s headless body toppled to the ground in front of him. The man had not simply been decapitated. His head no longer existed. It had been squashed flat.

Beside him, his mother, still alive, was trembling. Looking at the front of her skirts, the boy realized suddenly that she had wet herself.

One of the Guardian’s massive treads rose from the ground and whined over his head. For some reason the sole of its left foot was stencilled LEFT LEG, and that on its right foot was labelled RIGHT LEG. Arms fire both small and large whined and caromed off its carapace; the Guardian ignored it. It was moving out of the village, eastward, in the direction of the mining company army camped beyond the outskirts. Soon it was out of shooting range, but the boy could still hear guns going off around him. Single shot firearms! The villagers had brought out their antique home defence weapons and were using them on their oppressors. The boy swelled with pride.

Despite the fact that she had clearly wet herself, the boy’s mother hauled herself to her feet, and remarked:

“The old fool! What does he think he’s doing? At his age!”

The boy hopped up onto a ladder fixed to the main water tower. The Guardian was striding eastward like a force of nature, silhouetted by things exploding against it. The boy saw it pick a thing up from the ground, and hurl it like a discus. The thing was a light armoured vehicle. He saw men tumble from it as it flew.

The mining company men were now flocking round a larger vehicle that was evidently their Big Gun. Most probably it had been brought in specially to deal with the possibility that the villagers might be able to revive their Guardian. It appeared to be a form of missile launcher, and the missile it fired looked frighteningly large. The turret on the top of the vehicle was being rotated round to bear on the approaching threat, and men were clearing from the danger space behind it.

The Guardian had stopped. Its hand was held before it, the elbow crooked, extended out towards the launcher. If had it been human, the boy would have described the posture it had now moved into as a defensive stance.

The boy blinked.

No. Surely not –

The missile blazed from its mounting, and then became invisible; and the Guardian’s arm blurred with it.

Then the missile was tumbling away into the sky, its gyros trying frantically to put it back on course, wobbling unsteadily overhead; and the Guardian was standing in exactly the same position as before. A streak of rocket exhaust had licked up its arm and blackened its fingers.

The Guardian had brushed aside the missile in mid-air, so softly as not to detonate its fuse.

Men in the mining company launcher were standing staring motionless, as if their own operators had left them via their back entrances. The boy, however, suspected that other substances were currently leaving them by that exit; and as soon as the Guardian cranked into a forward stride again, the men began to run. By the time the Guardian eventually arrived at the launcher and methodically and thoroughly destroyed it, the boy was quite certain there were no human beings inside it. To the east of the village, he heard the terrific impact of the anti-armour missile eventually reaching its maximum range and aborting.

Then there was nothing on the face of the desert but running men, and smoking metal, and the gigantic figure of the Guardian standing casting a long, long shadow in the dawn.

The old man climbed down slowly, with painstaking exactness, just as he did in all things. He was breathing quite heavily by the time he swung off the last rung and into a crowd of cheering children.

“I knew Khan would not let us down,” said Mother Tho.

“Khan Senior is a terrible fruit farmer,” observed Father Magnusson, “but a Guardian operator without equal.”

“His oranges are scabby-skinned and dry inside,” agreed Mother Dingiswayo.