The Guns of the Wisdom

© 1997 Stephen Hunt (UK)

Sample Chapters: Part 1

Glass shattered as Horatio plunged through the window. Behind him, Chanisse was screaming at Baron Magellan, begging her father to call off his scree-cats.

Awkward, Horatio thought. More than that, damned inconvenient. And tonight of all nights.

 "Bard!" Magellan yelled. "Horatio Bard, you little scummer. I told you before about coming out here, I told you and I warned you, and now I'm going to run you through a pharm processor; I'm going to scatter your ashes across my fields you lanky scrap of piss."

 Horatio believed him. "Baron, do you eat with that mouth?"

 He launched himself off the porch towards the ground below.

 There was a hiss as the scree-cats cleared the window ­ two of them ­ more lizard than acinonyx jubatus, the cheetah that had been the base for their genetic shaping. Hitting the path outside the Baron's mansion, the hunting pair flicked armour shields up over their skulls and hurdled the ornamental flint wall.

Then they stopped, their eyes searching for a filter that would enable them to see in the dying half-light. Horatio wondered why they bothered. He was five times the size of the wild forest cleaners which raided their farm land for tasty morsels, and if the cats couldn't follow his trail then they deserved to be put out to grass by the Baron.

 Sighing, Horatio buried himself in the Baron's swaying plain of meatabix, lamb-plant nodules bursting as he forced his way through the neat pattern of vegetation. There was still a couple of boxy processors in the distance, and seeing the damage he was doing to their crops, they turned their periscope-like eye stalks towards him and crooned out an alarm.

 Behind Horatio a flood of groats scrambled from the mansion, clutching pitchforks and the odd jelly-gun and chattering as they ran after him, the green creatures only reaching as high as the knees of the Baron's human retainers. If they had been summoned by the processors then they were reacting uncommonly fast, if they had heard the Baron's curses then they were due a beating for their sloth.

 First the scree-cats. Horatio might have been responding to the irresistible song of his hormones, but his mind had stayed in command long enough to realise he might be meeting the Baron's nasty little pets this night.

Pulling out a vial tucked behind his trouser sash, Horatio seeded a line of white powder behind him. It was a one-generation cyanobacteria which acted on the lining of the cats' lung-sacs, limiting the oxygenation process and causing a reaction that resembled a severe asthmatic attack. He had obtained if from a feral evergreen which hadn't much cared for scree-cats sharpening their wicked claws on its bark ­ a sentiment Horatio felt strong sympathy for.

 Pouncing through Horatio's trail, the hunters jerked over in a fit of sneezing coughs, rolling across lamb-plants and thrashing about in a haze of brown meat-corn while their claws triggered and retracted.

Out on the plain the processors howled even louder when they saw the destruction the cats were causing to the harvest they were meant to be protecting; the processors becoming so worked up their bony tractor-treads chewed the ground in outrage, spinning soil and stubble into the cool evening air.

One vented a burst of hot gas through its spine horns, and Horatio prayed that whoever had originally shaped it had included a basic behavioural inhibitor in its mind ­ something about not spinning their blade arms across innocent ramblers, for instance.

 

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