The impact was surprisingly small for the extinction of a human life. There was a dull thud, and the child hurled through the air, arms and legs limp, her head hanging loose on her neck, hair flying. A veil of blood fountained from her open mouth.
The body landed a good twenty yards in front of the powerful war wag, which made no visible effort to stop. It clattered on, its huge wheels crushing the helpless little body, pulping it into the pavement.
Jak closed his ruby eyes, great tears coursing down his ivory cheeks.
The wag carried on without even attempting to deviate or brake, vanishing around the next corner and rumbling off into the distance, the smell of its exhaust overlaying the bitter tang of fresh-spilled blood.
The woman hadn’t moved, staring at the crumpled corpse, her face in shadow.
Lifting her head, she revealed the smooth complexion and almond eyes of the little geisha, Issie, her rosebud mouth pursed in distress. “So sorry,” she lisped. “To save the child would have been difficult.”
Jak couldn’t stop crying.
MILDRED LAY ON A TABLE of polished glass, naked, in a room of glittering chrome walls and ceiling and floor.
Her breath was slow and steady, pluming out into the freezing air around her. Her body was covered in a sheen of ice crystals, fragile and delicate.
A range of gleaming surgical instruments hung limply from the ceiling, the concealed lighting bouncing off the steel. There were various probes, drills, strange whirling blades and spring-loaded devices that looked as if they were designed to stretch the intimate orifices of the body.
Mildred couldn’t move.
She wasn’t dead.
Was she?
There wasn’t a shred of feeling in any part of her body, no sensation of life.
But she could see her own breath.
There was a faint tinkling sound, and some of the remote-controlled equipment above her began to move in a way that seemed sinister and threatening to her.
A long probe, the size and shape of a pencil, lowered itself over her face, hovering as if it were trying to select a target, going toward her right eye.
Mildred struggled to close her eyes, to protect them from the steel, but nothing happened.
The probe delicately tapped on the surface of the eye, and she heard a faint clicking sound like metal on glass. The knowledge that the surface of her eye was frozen solid was somehow more terrifying than anything else, and she wanted to vomit.
But that was closed off from her, as well.
Another of the surgical devices was moving toward her, aiming itself at the junction of her spread thighs.
There was a whirring noise, and it began to revolve very quickly, the sharp teeth on its end spinning with a vibration like a tiny chain saw.
As Mildred felt the machine enter her, with a sudden warmth over her thighs, she fought to scream in revulsion and in protest at the gross invasion of her helpless body.
But there was no sound from her.
The blackness that swam up over her mind was a great mercy to her.
J.B. STROLLED through a dense forest of pine trees, with a bright, dazzling sun that broke through like golden spears into the occasional clearing, filling the still air with the scent of balsam.
The path wound its way gently into a steep hollow, the close-packed trees making it hard to see more than a few yards ahead.
The air was oppressively warm, and he hadn’t seen any wildlife. Nothing scurried across the trail. No bird soared in the gaps in between the upper branches.
As J.B. reached the bottom of the track, he found himself in a clearing, surrounded on all sides by a dense hedge of thorns. He pushed through the undergrowth, glancing behind him as the brush sprang back to close the opening, sealing him in.
At the center of the clearing was an irregular block of stone, roughly rectangular.
The Armorer pushed back his fedora, blinking in the dusty light. He took off his glasses to polish them on his sleeve, then peered at the boulder, realizing that it was some kind of altar.