Chương 25: Build the Predator

The hold kept its one good lamp over the reclaim bench, and under it I'd laid four dead things. A line-fresh coupling, a ranging core, a relay still warm with the patient nothing it had hummed inside its node, and the focusing array I'd torn off the drowned unit two nights back. Three of them were never going in me. I'd carried them this far because down here you don't walk past a part you might learn to want.

"You want them," Errata said.

"Which isn't the same as wanting them in. The coupling is a doorstop with ambitions. The relay is mine, and I'd thank you not to wear my relatives. Take the array. Put the rest back in the dark before they flatter you into a drawer."

"The ranging core reads at thirty-three." Low, for a banked part. Capable.

"It reads low because somebody built it to go in clean, and you are not a clean install. You're a negotiation. Down." Sefa was across the bench with the coupling already in her hand, turning it under the lamp, Tam's habit in her fingers.

"This one's bent." She set it aside without being asked.

"Whole back face. You'd feel it every shot."

"The child has a better eye than half the depot," Errata said, "and no notion whose side she just took." I picked up the array. It was a flat ugly collar of vanes around a throat, built to bolt behind a maintenance unit's arm and take the loose shove those things used for shifting rubble and pinch it to a line. On anything sanctioned it would have sat behind a discharge that already ran clean. Mine didn't.

The core I'd carried since the second night threw its kinetic shove like a cheap thing throws everything: in a fistful, on a beat and a half, the cycle-gap and the grip that never shut clean scattering it wide. Feed a scatter into a throat built for a line and the throat goes first. Then, as a rule, the arm it's wired to.

"You see the problem," Errata said.

"I see the problem."

"Say it, so I know you're not about to improvise."

"The array wants one beat. The core gives it three."

"And the part that makes three into one." She waited. She had decided I'd teach myself this or not have it. The phase-regulator. The coherence I'd seated into my own arm a week back, the thing that took a build made out of arguments and made it stop arguing. It could fold the core's scatter into one clean pulse before the array ever saw it. Discharge through the regulator first, into the array second, and the fistful became a point. Nobody had built these three to speak to each other.

Nobody had built any of me to speak to each other; that had never been the question. The question was only whether I could read what each part couldn't run without, and route the rest of myself around giving it to them.

"Yes," Errata said, reading the answer off whatever I do instead of saying things.

"Thirty-eight percent it tears loose and you wear a focusing throat out through your own wrist. But consider the other sixty-two. A point where you've always had a shove. A thing that goes in, not through. You've spent four months hitting what you weren't allowed to scratch. Would you not like, once, to put a hole exactly where you looked." [Installation risk: 38%. Host rejection probable.]"Thirty-eight," I said.

"Thirty-eight," she agreed, and didn't round it down for me, which from Errata is a hand on the shoulder. The tale has been illicitly lifted; should you spot it on Amazon, report the violation. Sefa had stopped sorting. She didn't ask what I was about to do; she'd watched me open my own arm before and filed it under things that happen, like weather, except she'd never once called it weather.

"Lamp or wall," she said.

"Lamp. Then the hatch."

"I'm not going to the hatch." She'd already set the lamp where I'd need it, which ended the discussion.

"Then the lamp." I opened the seam at my forearm where the core and the regulator sat crowded against each other, and I read the path like a room I meant to walk out of. Where the pulse would rise, where it had to go, the quarter-second the regulator needed to fold the scatter before it would hand the array a beat to focus. I didn't force the array to fit. It would never fit. I fed it the one thing it couldn't run without, a clean beat, and rerouted everything else in me to leave that beat alone.

It fought going in. They all fight. This one fought like it had counted the others already crowded in there and resented the company. [INSTALL: Discharge-focusing array. Host architecture non-standard. Integrating — unstable.] I put the first one through the bench's dead leg, a foot of bulkhead stock the reclaim crew kept for exactly this, soft with a hundred old test-strikes. The old shove would have knocked it off the trestle and rung the whole nook like a struck pipe. This went in.

A finger of force no wider than the throat had promised, and it bored clean through a foot of stock and left the edges bright and the trestle standing and the nook silent. The silence was the loud part. It billed me on the way out. The regulator took the timing, not borrowed it, took it; the beat the shot left on was the part's to pick now, not mine, and my hand moved on the part's count a half-second before the rest of me agreed.

The grip that never shut clean took the recoil of a point instead of a spread and ran the cost up my wrist and didn't stop at the wrist. I'd traded reach I could aim myself for reach that aimed truer than I did. I'd known I would. That was the whole of the transaction, and I'd signed it before I read the line at the bottom, the same as I'd signed all of them. Underneath, the meter did its arithmetic. [Anomaly profile: 33/100. Correction notice issued.] Thirty-three.

Two for the new shape, no kill in it, just me, louder by the exact size of a thing built to put holes where it looks. Two corridors of dark between me and the number I didn't want to be standing on when it came, and I'd just spent toward it on purpose, because what they were drawing up to find me wasn't going to arrive the size of the things I'd practiced on. Sefa was looking at the hole in the stock. Then at me.

Then at my hand, still half-open over the bench, the fingers come to rest a beat after the rest of me and not all the way back yet.

"That was faster than you," she said. Flat, a route's grade.

"You didn't aim it. It aimed. You let it." She wasn't afraid of the hole. She was a little afraid of the hand.

"Is that how it's meant to go?"

"That's how it goes now." I put the hand under the bench, out of the lamp. She looked at the hole a breath longer, then reached past me for the broom.

"Tam'll want the stock back," she said.

"Even with a hole in it."

"Four," Errata said, once she'd gone quiet over the array's empty cradle. She was counting the loadout, proud of it and refusing to be: the core, the vent I'd put back, the regulator, and now the throat that made all three of them mean one thing.

"Four parts, not one off the same shelf, and not a Veyr clamp left anywhere in you to knock. I looked, going past. Twice. Whatever you are now, it isn't a junk drawer wearing a person." A beat, the proud thing leaking through the flat where it always does.

"This one we keep." I kept it. That was the trade I'd stopped pretending to weigh: I kept every part, and every part kept a little more of the say in what my hands did next. The thing on the bench was finished, or near it; the last of the finishing would be done by whatever came down the corridor to test it. I was not finished. Two Strata up, a thing was being drawn to the same plan I'd just run on myself: built out of better builds, made to do one thing all the way. We would be very alike by the end.

I put the lamp out so I'd stop being able to see the hole.