“Hah! I know you know you’ve lost when you break out the big words. Action Governor! Let us proceed.”

The Yoruba say, “If you’re gonna eat a frog, eat one that has eggs,” which means, if you’re going to do something unpleasant, you might as well go large. He hates it when she calls him Action Governor.

The Decisive AI contacts him and soon it is time to countdown.

Once more into the Brink.

Chapter Seven

Ragtime: Fin, Shell, Fin

Fin and Salvo make good time. They have, between them, arranged seventeen bodies on the floor, side-by-side. They use Node M, which is roomier than other spaces on the Ragtime and designed for medical procedures. Blood everywhere. Fin is acclimatising to the gore, able to accept the feel of dead human flesh, but he expects nightmares. He has seen bodies before in his line of work, but this is far more than he has ever seen at one time. He knows from study that there are such things as mass murder and war, but Bloodroot has experienced neither. A part of him that he resents revels in this, catalogues the data relentlessly, sifts through Shell’s account looking for flaws and considers the entire affair valuable experience. That part of Fin is like Salvo and his kin.

Fin looks up as the door slides open. It closes. Opens. Closes.

Opens.

A small bot, barely six inches tall, crawls through the door, smearing blood, scuttling towards Fin, and clamps on to his boot with a hook. Fin stares at it and flicks his leg, but to no avail. He drops the head he is holding with a wet thunk! and kicks out, but the bot holds on. Salvo continues his own work.

“Hey, what the… Salvo, get this off me,” says Fin.

Before Salvo can react, the door opens again, and a larger bot launches into the sick bay, springing and latching on to Fin’s right hand with six punctures. Minor pain. He finds it heavy and struggles to hold his arm up. The bot fires a tentacle at the wall, anchors it, and pulls Fin towards the spot.

Salvo moves to help, but a wall-mounted medbot seizes the Artificial’s arm and clamps him against a different wall.

“This is wrong,” says Salvo.

“No shit,” says Fin.

The medbot injects the Artificial with something, but there is no effect.

Bots stream in the open door now, splitting between Fin and Salvo, each latching on to a different part of the body or a different bot. The detached part of Fin admires how the bots take turns in a strict algorithm deciding on first human, then Artificial. Is this how those passengers died? Was the carnage logical? He finds it difficult to stand under the weight.