The engine had not simply stopped, it was dead. I had been beating like a stick on the dead body of the electrical machine for what seemed hours, and my knuckles were bleeding with the rusty engine block. It is not a mere inconvenience on one of the Scrap Wastes out here--a death sentence to a dead Rig. The sun was a bloody thumbprint dropping down below the jagged horizon, and the temperature was already dropping. Cold is one thing. Another are the things that are hunters of the cold.
My Rig, Rustbucket, was a bricolage, a toyish chassis which never competed on a real Death Circuit. Angles and bizarre proportions, the drawing of a child of a race car made alive by a mad engineer. And, which was, I suppose, just what I was. Feral Inferno Fangs or smooth Shock Dancers were carried by most racers. I possessed a gilded rustic tin can held together with an eyo and a panhandle.
There was a vibration of a low hum on the metal under my feet. Not my Rig. Something else.
Syndicate patrol.
A wild drum beat to the ever-increasing whine of their hover-cycles, my heart beat frantically against my ribs. They also had been cracking down on scavengers such as me, saying that we were stealing proprietary tech. As though the rubbish they threw out here was not rubbish. One hopeless smack with the wrench I gave the engine. Nothing. Not even a cough.
The hum became a roar. There were three cycles and their headlights flashed through the twilight like knives. No more time.
I abandoned the Rig. It was just scrap anyway. I scrambled over a ridge of broken concrete, and the sound of dismounting Syndicate grunts was ringing in my ears. "Just a scavenger rat!" one yelled. "Don't waste ammo!"
But they always did. A bolt of plasma flew past my head, fusing the concrete under the feet where I had been the moment before. I ran, and my boots puffed up alkali dust, which scalded my throat. I was not thinking of glory or Genesis Shards, I was thinking of the searing of a plasma bolt to the back. My life did not pass in front of my very eyes. Nothing but the harsh, idiotic irony of perishing about a dead machine.
That's when I saw it. A deep and fresh crater, all gleaming with an internal light. It wasn't a natural formation. Something had struck down here, hard. And at the very centre of the crater there was a fragment of crystal, something like my fist in size, beating with a soft hypnotic beat. Like a heartbeat.
A Genesis Shard.
All instincts cried forbidden. These belonged to Circuit legends, to such monsters as Zerath or Orkan Blight. To any one but a scavenger of the wastes. You were supposed to evaporate on touching one of the raw, or turn your skeleton into a pretzel, worse.
The ground was ripped up by another plasma bolt on my right. Worse was relative.
I crept down the side of the crater and my hands were tearing open on the fractured surface. The Shard was not hot, but rather warm. It felt... alive. The light grew stronger, oozing into my flesh, through my arm. No noises, no sound, no movement, came to my ears; and a weird silence filled my mind, more deafening than the din of engines. There was a moment when there was nothing. Perhaps the narratives were mere narratives.
Then the pain hit.
It was not a burning, but a disintegration. It was as though all my body was being pulled to pieces and new threads of lightning sewed all over it. I screamed, however, with no sound. The globe melted to white flame.
The grunts of the Syndicate echoed at the ridge. "Fool touched it! Scatter his atoms, boys!"
But I wasn't scattered. I was on knee, gagging, entire. The Shard was gone, absorbed. And, as of my deserted Rig, I heard a sound that put the blood in my veins.
No whinings of straining motor.
A thrum, deep, resonating, metallic. A heartbeat.
I fell up the crater, my body throbbing with alien vitality. The Syndicate grunts were no longer speaking. Their weapons were dropping and they stared.
Rustbucket was... changing. The rust appeared to peel off, not to leave the polished metal, but a darker and more biological substance. The headlights flashed on, but no longer gray-yellow bulbs, but blazing amber slits. The whole frame vibrated and I averted my gaze, and feared a momentary burst. Rather it appeared to be kneeling to the ground, waiting. It ceased to be a piecemeal. It was a one and waiting thing.