'Unknown. A ghost reading. There's maybe… ah, there it is… a catch under the quick. You'd need something small to trigger it/
She adjusted her bionic finger settings and slid out a very thin metal probe, thin like…
… a tooth pick.
'Back! Back now!' I yelled.
It was too late. Tutrone had undone the catch. The false nail sprang back and something flew out of the cavity in the finger tip. A silver worm, like a thread of necklace chain, flashed through the air.
Where did it go?'
'I don't know, I said, pushing Tutrone and Aemos behind me. 'Did you see it?' I asked Fischig.
'Over there/ he said, pulling a short-nosed gloss-black autopistol out from his robes.
I reached for my own gun, then remembered I'd given it back to Vibben.
I snatched up a bone knife from the trolley.
The worm slithered back into the light. It was a metre long and several centimetres thick now. What foul sorcery had caused that expansion, I did not want to know. It was made of segmented metal, and the head was an eyeless cone split by a hissing mouth full of razor teeth.
Tutrone cried out as it flew at lis. I pushed her down and the thing whipped across over us, hitting a corpse on a nearby plinth. There was a dreadful sucking, gnawing sound and the worm disappeared into the corpse's torso through a jagged hole.
The corpse vibrated and ruptured, filling the air with a foul mist of vapour. The worm swished up out of it and disappeared across the floor. By then, Fischig had opened fire and blasted the shattered corpse off its plinth. The worm was long since gone.
'Touch-activated mechanism/ Aemos was murmuring to himself, 'very discrete, probably of Xenos manufacture, a guard weapon, with some mass-altering system that expands it on contact with air and/or release, hunting by sound…'
'So shut up!' I told him. I bundled him and Tutrone against the far wall. Fischig and I moved in parallel courses down through the plinth rows, weapons ready.
It reappeared. By the time I saw it, it was almost on me, thrashing forward through the air on its metallic tail. In a split second, I reflected that this was how Eyclone had wanted me to die. This was what he had intended to unleash against me on the landing platform at Processional Two-Twelve.
Rage made me deny him. I stabbed out and my extended blade jabbed directly between the gaping teeth and down the gullet. The impact knocked me back. I found I had the whole, heavy, two-metre thing thrashing on the end of my knife like a lash.
Shots banged past me. Fischig was trying to hit it.