Legion by Charles L. Grant

Author:Charles L. Grant [Grant, Charles L.]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: science fiction
Publisher: Crossroad Press
Published: 2017-05-20T00:00:00+00:00

XI

A moment.

The foliage melded, forestsounds converged, a second drawn through the eye of a timepiece that extended it into a century of a single framed scream. The first note of thunder, the first cry of a beast. A falling leaf froze, a gnat froze, the air congealed and the Alpha would have seen a set piece, a toy, several tiny figures trapped in a clear glass bubble.

And it shattered.

Mathew forgot his rage as though it hadn’t been and plunged back into the clearing after Will. Kalen, who had heard the shouting and the responses, grabbed for Dix’s arm and yanked him close.

“What are you talking about, old man?” he demanded, his eyes narrow in a puzzled glare. “I saw that thing before they took it apart. It wasn’t any android, it was a Rogue.”

“Same thing,” Will said, undisturbed, carefully prying the big man’s fingers lock from his arm. He looked around when Mathew joined them, to Vivian who had started to approach them with the boy but changed her mind when she saw the cloud on Kalen’s face. Instead, she lowered her pack quickly to the ground and knelt beside it, Garlen hovering eagerly at her shoulder. But her gaze did not leave Mathew’s face until he indicated with a nod that he would fill her in later if she didn’t overhear.

“Come on, Will,” he said, turning his attention back. “You’re not making any sense at all. I was there on the road when it came. It was—”

“Like me,” Will said. “Couldn’t have broken a twig.” Kalen slumped to the ground, looking at Mathew with evident disbelief, altering it to shock, shifting finally into a slow shaking of his head as Mathew’s earlier suspicions finally became his. “Well, I’ll be held for a Plagueborn bastard,” he said. “Why didn’t they tell us?”

“Thought they had,” Will said. “Zelloche made his notes. Took them to the Longhouse day before we left. Two days. Something like that.”

The way of it assaulted Mathew for no more than a few embattled seconds; the answer would come in time, and for the time being he had something more to worry about—the tampering with the androids’ biomechanisms was far more terrifying than the conspiracy he had stumbled upon. That Rogue, then … that android must have been one from a Quilly village; and if one had been exposed, then there had to be others, others whose basic programming had been circumvented or somehow altered to produce … drones, soldiers … he refused to allow his imagination to continue through the dark. The point was, it was being done, and by someone who had no right in any sense of the word to do it.

And when he spoke of it to Vivian later, as the sun ducked down behind the mountains and drew in the cold, he wondered aloud how Quilly had managed it.

“It isn’t easy, is it,” she said. “To do something like that, I mean. It isn’t easy.”

“No,” he answered bleakly. “Not at all. Even if

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