Chương 6: Harvest Two

We'd come down two levels toward the fork Sefa swore was unswept, and where the freight corridor pinched to a single throat, a Mark-Three came off the wall to meet us. It stood a head taller than the warden that started all this, and built worse. I read it like a bad weld on a pressure line, start to finish in the time it took to stop walking. Gray plating sitting proud of its seams. Fasteners run in fast, torqued to nothing and waved through.

A body someone got paid to assemble by the unit, not by the unit that worked. It came forward into the throat, unhurried, sure of itself the way only a thing that's never lost can be, and filled the only way across with its own bulk. Sefa pulled up hard at my shoulder.

"Mark-Three." Low and fast, no fear in it, just the cost of the thing laid out flat.

"They don't come down to the freight levels. Nothing down here's worth a Mark-Three."

"There is now." Behind it, past the throat, the corridor opened toward her fork, the only road that wasn't four levels around, and four levels around was where the careful thing was, taking the long way round after us. Forward went through the Mark-Three, or it didn't go.

"Veyr-pattern," Errata said, with the contempt she saves for bad work.

"Relief-regulator housing. They built it to a budget, and the budget won: all its coolant routed through one relief clamp, and then they cheaped out on the clamp." A pause, the connoisseur finding the flaw.

"It overheats if you make it work. So make it work."

"That's the plan," I said.

"That's the entire plan. The complication is that you have to be in the room while it happens, and the room is this one." I put Sefa behind the nearest strut and told her to stay boring. She went without arguing, a kid who knew exactly how useful she was in a corridor with a Mark-Three in it, and how useful she wasn't, and saw no reason to pretend either way. From back there she'd watch. She watched everything. It was how she'd stayed alive.

Then I went to make two tons of compliance hardware run hot in a space built for one. The Mark-Three was huge, and sure of it, and in a throat this small both of those were the same weakness. I didn't trade blows with it. I stayed a half-step inside the arc its bulk wanted and a half-step clear of where its fist came down. Made it reach, made it miss, made it reach again. Every swing it threw, it vented to cool the throw, a hiss of white off its back each time.

Every hiss ran through the one clamp that couldn't keep up.

"It's getting slower," Sefa called, flat, from the strut. She had a scavenger's eye for a machine going wrong.

"It's getting hotter," I said. Same thing, from the other end. The whistle started under its plating, thin, climbing, the note of a pressure that has run out of anywhere to go. The Mark-Three heard its own body make it. It broke off the press and tried to back into the throat, to buy a second to dump the heat the slow safe way, and I took the second off it before it closed its fist.

I crowded in, close and ugly, inside the reach of a thing that could have folded me in half, and made it throw the one swing it could not afford. The clamp went. Its own coolant came out sideways in a white shriek, the regulator seam splitting along the exact corner Veyr had cut to save a tenth of a credit, and the whole right side of the thing seized mid-swing, cooked stiff with the arm still up. I went in under the dead arm and put my blade through the chest port that looked, on this one too, like it was smiling.

This novel is published on a different platform. Support the original author by finding the official source. It went down in pieces. I stayed in one. The regulator sat in the ruin of its forearm, untouched by the failure that had killed the rest of it. The core of these is always fine; it's the clamps Veyr skimps. I got my hand around it and pulled. It came free with a wet click and a box. [HARVEST: Veyr Relief-Regulator. Incompatible with host architecture. Installation risk: 64%.]"Sixty-four," I read.

"Sixty-four for a sanctioned body that slots it blind and lets it cook them, the only body that number was ever written for, and why nobody above our tier loots these twice." The pleased thing came into her voice and got flattened, hard.

"You don't slot anything blind. You've had your hands inside this exact cheap build all night. Read the corners they cut, and for you it's forty-eight. Lower than the core that fought you to a draw at sixty-one. You're getting better at this. I'd find it more reassuring if better at this meant something kinder."

"And before I do the part where I pretend to weigh it…"

"You stopped weighing it the second you saw it in the wreck. I started the compatibility math a half-second behind your face. It seats clean above the core; the routing doesn't fight. Go on, then. You always do." I let the wrongness of being read that cleanly stand where it was, and pressed the regulator to the inside of my forearm, above the core, where the skin still hadn't forgiven the first one, and gave it me to read. This one argued less.

The core had gone in like a fight, an argument in a language of pain; the regulator went in like a tenant who'd read the lease and decided the place wasn't worth the fight. It wanted routing I could give and a clearance it had stopped expecting from a body like mine, and it took. Cold gathered at the crook of my arm, pressure, held, a breath waiting to be let out. I let a little of it out.

A thread of coolant vented clean down the line of my forearm and away, a controlled white sigh where the Mark-Three's had been a scream. The same trick that killed it, on a leash now, in me. Then the leash caught. Half a second where the vent snagged on something cheap and stuttered before it ran, a small wrong knock down in the new seam, there and gone before I'd finished feeling it.

"There it is," Errata said, and under the disgust was something you'd have to call fondness in a person.

"You hear that. That is the clamp. The same clamp. It will knock like that every time you run it, a little worse each time, until the morning it doesn't knock at all. It just fails, and the odds are excellent that something will be trying to kill you when it picks. Let me recalibrate it now. While nothing is."

"No."

"Carole."

"It works. Leave it."

"It works like everything Veyr builds works: beautifully, right up until it's the reason you're dead." A beat.

"Noted. For the record. And the record, when it finally goes, is going to be insufferable." That was care, dressed as a complaint, the only suit she owned that fit. I left it alone. Killing a Mark-Three loud and wearing its parts inside five minutes carried a price, and the System sent the invoice, prompt and itemized, the same as ever. [Anomaly profile: 10/100. Unsanctioned tech signature logged.]"Ten."

"Background, still. It doesn't lean in until twenty. But you've been loud lately, and getting louder, and the thing on the long road is going to round its last corner into a corridor gone warm with everything you just did. We shouldn't be standing in the warm part when it gets here." I flexed the arm. The core's old refusal to let my hand fully close, and now above it the regulator's patient cold. Both mine, a tool I owned and a scar I was stuck with. Two parts in, both cut out of things built to process me.

Somewhere under it was still a maintenance tech who'd spent eleven years keeping other people's machines honest, and she was turning into a shelf the dead got stored on. [LOADOUT — 2 components: Enforcer core (kinetic discharge) · Veyr relief-regulator (pressure vent). Host instability: persistent grip — clamp degrading.] Sefa had come out from behind the strut. She wasn't looking at the downed Mark-Three, which was a scavenger's whole year, a full unit, unstripped, hers for the prying. She was looking at my arm.

"You watched it die of that exact part," she said.

"Then you cut the part out and put it in you."

"It's a good part."

"It killed the last thing that carried it."

"Everything down here did." I started toward the fork. She fell in beside me, like she had since the vent, but half a step wider of the arm now, the distance you keep from a tool you've watched kick. She still wanted to know how. I could see it on her. I let her work out, on her own, what the wanting might cost.