Strata

hit the ground asleep.
    Kin entered the hall with the stunner turned to minimum power maximum beam, swinging it like a scythe. A fighter staggered towards her with a raised sword and began to dream on his feet, sending her sprawling as fifteen stone of norseman cannoned into her. For a moment she suffocated in a reek of stale sweat and badly-tanned hides, then managed to roll away. The stunner was gone, dropped in the collision. She was in time to see a teetering giant pick it up curiously and look down the barrel. In the middle of the tumult, a look of perfect peace passed over his face. He fell like a tree.
    Another man rushed at Kin. She kicked out and upwards, and was rewarded with seeing his eyes cross before he rolled over, screaming and clutching his groin.
    There wasn’t a fight going on, it was a brawl. Most of the men were simply hacking blindly at everything.
    She managed to get to her feet, almost slippingon the curiously muddy floor. Through a gap in the figures she saw Marco dodging like a demon in the torchlight, a sword in all four hands. The dumbwaiter hummed behind him, a sticky, sweet smell in the air.
    There was a bellow from the door and Eirick hobbled in, his face contorted with rage. He was flailing about with his crutch.
    Then the roof fell in. One of the fighters backed into Kin, and she felled him with a backhanded chop as dawn-pale light flooded the hall. Part of the nearest wall bowed inward and crumbled away. There was a brief glimpse of a wide, white-haired foot.
    Silver appeared at the roof hole, black against the gold sky. There was silence, broken only by the whimpers of the wounded and a background trickle.
    Silver roared again. There was a brief moment of pandemonium as those who could rushed for the doorway.
    Kin looked down. She was standing ankle deep in a sticky, frothy puddle.
    She looked at the dumbwaiter. A yellow-brown waterfall was spilling out of the food hatch, filling a deepening puddle. Marco looked at her, trying to focus. Then he sighed contentedly, and fell backwards.
    Resignedly, knowing what to expect, Kin held her cupped hand under the stream and tasted it. It was sweet and potent, a super-beer. Here andthere in the pool, darker stains were spreading from the wounded and dying.
    Kin stopped the flow and set the machine to producing an antidote. When it delivered a bowl of foul blue liquid she dragged the kung up by his comb, tipped the bowl into his mouth in one motion, and let him fall back into the mire.
    After Silver dropped through the ruined roof she and Kin toured the hall. The ’waiter was instructed to produce the various seal-and-heal ointments in its repertoire, and after some thought Kin dialled for limb-replacement stimulants. Usually such sophisticated medicine was frowned on for its cultural shock effects, but hell, the disc was one big cultural shock. With some of the wounded she plastered the stuff on like mud, and hoped.
    After a while Marco groaned and sat up. He looked at them hazily. Kin ignored him.
    ‘Leiv’s men told them about the ’waiter producing alcohol,’ he said thickly. ‘Then when I gave them a demonstration they began acting irrationally and demanding more. And then they started fighting.’
    ‘A fucking Valhalla machine,’ muttered Kin, and turned back to her work.
    There was a hoarse chuckle from the darkness under the room, and a black feather floated down.
    They left at noon. The colony gathered to see them off.
    Many of the men had new white scars. Some displayed tiny limbs already growing from healed stumps. But several had died in the hall; the Valhalla machine had been too efficient.
    Eirick made a long speech in Latin and produced rare furs and two white hunting birds as farewell gifts.
    ‘Say we can’t accept,’ said Kin. ‘Say anything. We can’t afford to carry the weight. Say we can’t go and repair the sun if we carry too much weight. It’s almost true.’
    Eirick listened to Silver’s careful reply, and nodded graciously.
    ‘I’d like to give him something, though,’ said Kin.
    ‘Why?’ snapped Marco.
    ‘Because she’s still afraid the Company might be behind the disc, and she wants to apologize. Isn’t that right?’ said Silver. Kin ignored her.
    ‘Ask him for some timber,’ she said. ‘Scraps. And grass or hay. Old bones. Anything that was living. What I have in mind’ll mean the ’waiter will want feeding.’
    They set the dumbwaiter up as a timber mill. After the first metre of