Use of Weapons by Iain M. Banks Read Free Book Online Page B

hair-thin stems of the flowers it had
picked, then threading the stems through each other, creating a little chain.
    Sma
watched the machine, its unseen fields manipulating the little blossoms as
dexterously as any lace-maker flicking a pattern into existence.
    It
was not always so refined.
    Once,
maybe twenty years ago, far away on another planet in another part of the
galaxy altogether, on the floor of a dry sea forever scoured by howling winds,
beneath the mesa that had been islands on the dust that had been silt, she had
lodged in a small frontier town at the limit of the railways' reach,
preparatory to hiring mounts to venture into the deep desert and search out the
new child messiah.
    At
dusk, the riders came into the square, to take her from the inn; they'd heard
her strangely coloured skin alone would fetch a handsome price.
    The
inn-keeper made the mistake of trying to reason with the men, and was pinned to
his own door with a sword; his daughters wept over him before they were dragged
away.
    Sma
turned, sickened, from the window, heard boots thunder on the rickety stairs.
Skaffen-Amtiskaw was near the door. It looked, unhurried at her. Screams came
from the square outside and from elsewhere inside the inn. Somebody battered at
the door of her room, loosing dust and shaking the floor. Sma was wide eyed,
bereft of stratagems.
    She
stared at the drone. 'Do something,' she gulped.
    'My
pleasure,' murmured Skaffen-Amtiskaw.
    The
door burst open, slamming against the mud wall. Sma flinched. The two black-cloaked
men filled the doorway. She could smell them. One strode in towards her, sword
out, rope in the other hand, not noticing the drone at one side.
    'Excuse
me,' said Skaffen-Amtiskaw.
    The
man glanced at the machine, without breaking stride.
    Then
he wasn't there any more, and dust filled the room, and Sma's ears were
ringing, and pieces of mud and paper were falling from the ceiling and
fluttering through the air, and there was a large hole straight through the
wall into the next room, across from where Skaffen-Amtiskaw - seemingly defying
the law concerning action/reaction - hovered in exactly the same place as
before. A woman shrieked hysterically in the room through the hole, where what
was left of the man was embedded in the wall above her bed, his blood
spattered copiously over ceiling, floor, walls, bed and her.
    The
second man whirled into the room, discharging a long gun point-blank at the
drone; the bullet became a flat coin of metal a centimetre in front of the
machine's snout, and clunked to the floor. The man unsheathed and swung his
sword in one flashing movement, scything at the drone through the dust and
smoke. The blade broke cleanly on a bump of red-coloured field just above the
machine's casing, then the man was lifted off his feet.
    Sma
was crouched down in one corner, dust in her mouth and hands at her ears,
listening to herself scream.
    The
man thrashed wildly in the centre of the room for a second, then he was a blur
through the air above her, there was another colossal pulse of sound, and a
ragged aperture appeared in the wall over her head, beside the window looking
out to the square. The floorboards jumped and dust choked her. 'Stop!' she
screamed. The wall above the hole cracked and the ceiling creaked and bowed
down, releasing lumps of mud and straw. Dust clogged her mouth and nose and she
struggled to her feet, almost throwing herself out of the window in her
desperate attempt to find air. 'Stop,' she croaked, coughing dust.
    The
drone floated smoothly to her side, wafting dust away from Sma's face with a
field-plane, and supporting the sagging ceiling with a slender column. Both
field components were shaded deep red, the colour of drone pleasure. 'There,
there,' Skaffen-Amtiskaw said to her, patting her back, Sma choked and
spluttered from the window and stared horrified at the square below.
    The
body of the second man lay like a sodden red sack under a cloud of dust in the
midst of the