by Neal Asher
The shuttle was now vibrating, and soon punched through the underbelly of the overcast. Below stretched a chequerboard of fields scattered with occasional buildings like game pieces–a landscape that much reminded Cormac of the English countryside seen from a gravcar. There were rivers down there too, but their regular pattern demonstrated artificial antecedents. He glanced down at the terrain map appearing on one of his lower sub-screens, then at the cross on the main chainglass screen before him, and decided he didn’t like the inaccuracy of this so queried the shuttle’s computer through his gridlink. Some delay passed before he had the information about their route lodged in his mind like a memory. The delay irritated him but was a necessary consequence of the surrounding ether being filled with Erebus’s subversion programs. Approaching such matters incautiously might easily result in him coming under control of one of those things down on the ground, and it making him fly this shuttle into a mountain.
‘King tells me one of the four survivors is down,’ said Smith abruptly. ‘Probably dead now and being drafted by the opposition.’
‘Damn.’ Cormac wished he could go faster. In his gridlink he accessed the plan King had sent while they were still aboard. In what was often termed a ‘third eye’ he studied the layout of their destination: a building complex located underneath a tree canopy. King was having difficulty identifying targets there. By means of heat signatures and observing their patterns of movement, the attack ship AI had ascertained that there was fight going on in the complex and that four–now three–individuals might be under attack from Jain-subverted humans. Unfortunately, though King should be able to hit a target a foot wide from orbit, the heat signatures of the good guys and bad guys were difficult to distinguish from each other. It also might not be that easy to tell the difference up close. Though Cormac had already worked out a plan of attack and imparted it to the others, and they, professionals that they were, had absorbed and understood it, there was still a chance this could turn messy.
The fields terminated right up against a forest of huge gnarled trees. Accessing information about this world, loaded to his gridlink but not yet loaded to his mind, Cormac learnt that these also constituted a crop–their seed pods producing an interlaced mass of biocontrol modules. Apparently the wood itself could also be wired up as an organic processor, but there was some dispute about felling the trees because of an ongoing investigation into the possibility that they might be sentient. For a moment, as he gazed at the forest, the trees seemed to multiply to infinity, and yet it was as if he knew the position of every one of them. He also glimpsed the buildings presently hidden from normal view.
‘Dammit!’
‘Problem?’ asked Smith.
Cormac concentrated and brought his immediate surroundings back into focus. He really didn’t need the distraction of that other perception now.
‘No,’ he said. ‘Just a little impatient.’
Smith gave him a blank look–no doubt registering Cormac’s momentary departure from usual behaviour. Though they had already seen combat together, Cormac was coming to the conclusion that he didn’t entirely trust this Golem. It seemed an old distrust of AI was stirring inside him, though it was odd how this didn’t apply to war drones. Maybe that was because the likes of Arach didn’t pretend to be something they weren’t.
Drawing closer to the trees, Cormac saw that his first idea about dropping through the canopy might not be feasible, for it was too dense. However, the trees were wide enough apart…He spun the shuttle, coming in backwards while using the main engine to decelerate. Crop debris and cinders blew past. Once the vessel was down to below a hundred miles an hour and mainly using antigravity to stay in the air, he spun it back round again and used tertiary thrusters to bring the speed down still further, then nosed into the forest between two massive trunks pocked with dark holes and as twisted as ancient olive trees. Checking coordinates he saw that the first of the concealed buildings was a mile ahead, and very shortly it came into sight–confirming the veracity of his earlier weird glimpse. Something flashed in the forest: weapons fire, maybe explosives.
Cormac brought the shuttle in to land, fast, retaining attack plans in his mind and adjusting them incrementally to the movement of the heat signatures inside that building complex. Three of them were labelled ‘Human?’ but were surrounded by others that possessed no label at all. The whole picture kept blurring and changing. That, Cormac realized, was also part of King’s problem: the shooting was creating its own heat signatures, and it also seemed likely there were fires breaking out in there.
With the shuttle now settling, blowing up clouds of red and gold leaves and what looked like the husks of giant chestnuts, Cormac hit his belt release and stood. Already the side door was opening and Scar heading towards it. The dracoman did not reach it first, of course, for Arach took the ceiling route above him and dropped with a crash on the ramp just as it hit the ground. Then Arach was out amid the swirling leaves, two hatches opening in the top of his abdomen and two Gatling-style cannons folding up into view. Exiting the shuttle last, Cormac strode down the ramp then whirled round, simultaneously sending an instruction through his gridlink. The autogun on the top of the shuttle spun and targeted him for a moment, which was worrying, then settled into a search pattern. That meant it would recognize them when they returned, but anyone else approaching would receive a few warning shots, before being cut in half by pulse-fire.
‘Okay, head out, you two,’ he said, as he turned back to them.
Arach and Scar immediately departed for the loading entrance situated on the forest road. He and Smith meanwhile headed over to where a set of double doors stood open, the ground before them well churned up, and some kind of heavy autohandler standing idle to one side.
Assessing distances, Cormac said, ‘We’ve got two off to the left, about thirty yards in. The others are starting to reposition–they know we’re here.’
Smith lovingly adjusted the settings on his proton carbine. Cormac pulled up his sleeve, called up a list of programs in his gridlink before sending one to Shuriken, then pulled the star from its holster and tossed it out ahead of him. For a moment the weapon seemed dead in the air, then it steadied and whirled up to speed, extending and retracting its chainglass blades in anticipation. Then, as if deciding to behave itself, it pulled back and hung in the air, humming a couple or yards above his shoulder.
‘They’re approaching the door now,’ Cormac noted.
Smith brought the stock of his weapon up to his shoulder and froze to a motionlessness that simply was not human. Cormac folded his arms and just watched as a ragged figure stumbled into view. It was a woman, badly burned, pink blobs where her eyes should have been. She brandished a large spanner and, without hesitation, started forward with plain intent. Cormac considered giving her a warning but knew that though this had once been a human being it wasn’t now. Out of curiosity he allowed his perception of the real to slip, and again his surroundings took on that odd transparency. He now saw inside her body: her internal organs where exactly they should be, but now all entangled with ropes of Jain technology. She looked packed with snakes.
He glanced at Smith. ‘Take her down.’
The Golem fired one long burst, cutting from head to groin, and blasted the woman back through the door in two burning halves. One chunk of her impacted the next figure coming out. He merely shrugged the burning mess aside and came on. More difficult to judge this time, since he looked quite normal on the outside. But inside, again, he was full of snakes.
‘Halt right where you are!’ Cormac ordered, then glanced questioningly at the Golem, who opened fire on the man, spreading his burning fragments to light up the interior of the building beyond. That Cormac had instinctively concealed his new ability from Smith showed his growing distrust of AI. Perhaps this reluctance was due to his frustration at the Polity’s insufficiently aggressive response to the threat of Erebus, as much as his feeling that the AIs had some unknown agenda.
‘
Definitely infected,’ affirmed Smith, tapping a finger against the side of his head. ‘No human would have temperature and density readings like that.’ Cormac filed that fact away for future reference. There was no time now, but it was possible for him to run a program sensitizing his eyes to infrared, and adding a small ultrasound scanner to his equipment might also be a good idea. He could then pretend he was using current Polity technology to see those snakes too.
‘Okay, let’s step it up now–and switch over to com.’ That was a bit of a misnomer, for none of them really used the standard military comunit. He himself could transmit and receive through his gridlink, Smith and Arach contained equipment for that purpose too, as did Scar, though the dracoman’s way of sending and receiving signals had a biological basis.
On the schematic perpetually updated in his mind Cormac saw that the other two had also encountered expected opposition, for the heat map in the zone they entered now became blurred and chaotic. As he stepped past burning and sizzling remnants of what had once been human beings, he held his breath against the oily smoke and barbecue smell. Once through the doors, he used a gridlink program to ramp up light amplification, and then peered around. The interior of the building extended for a hundred yards with gantries looming up above on either side. Ranged about on the floor space were various sorting machines and conveyors, and he also noted a hopper full of fig-like objects–probably the contents of those spiky husks scattered outside. There were no warm bodies present inside this building but their own, but four were approaching its far end from the complex beyond.
‘That gantry.’ He gestured to the one on their right, wondering if he even needed to say that since they all knew the assault plan. Smith headed off to some nearby stairs, bounded up them unhumanly fast and shot ahead along the gantry. Cormac advanced at a more leisurely pace, meanwhile onlining a program he’d only recently discovered in Shuriken’s control suite–uncertain if it was original or had been added by Jerusalem when that AI had repaired the weapon. Now another image appeared in his mind: triangular and seemingly diamond-rimmed, and viewed from a perspective somewhere just above his head, for he was looking through Shuriken’s eyes. A brief programming prod sent the weapon skimming ahead of him. Simultaneously, he checked the position of the four heat signatures, and saw that Smith was now directly above them. Almost immediately came a detonation, the flash from it lighting the way ahead, followed by several brief spurts of proton fire. The four, obviously identified as being infected with Jain-tech, had been moving close together, so logically Smith had used a grenade, then finished off anything surviving with his carbine. As Shuriken skimmed over the burning corpses, from its viewpoint Cormac glimpsed a smoking limb groping up, only to be incinerated by another burst of fire from Smith.
Now Shuriken wheeled into another long building. There came a flashing, and the star dodged and weaved, pulse-gun fire tracking across a ceiling above it. Ah, these ones were armed. Shuriken shot to one side and cut straight through a grating–its view now only of the inside of an air-conditioning vent. Heat map again: Arach and Scar had separated, and the dracoman had already reached the tunnel bridge connecting this building with the one where the main action was taking place.
‘In position,’ Scar growled over com, upon reaching the target building.
Arach, too, was now positioned where Cormac wanted him. Himself reaching the burning corpses, Cormac stepped quickly round to one side when he noticed snakish movement in the carnage. Finally reaching the turning that led into the second long building, he halted. ‘Arach?’
‘Two subverted haimen. They’ve got pulse-rifles and assister frames. They’re up in the ceiling beams, just below me.’
‘Smith, do you have yours covered?’ he asked.
‘Four raggety-looking things, but they’ve enough intelligence to keep their heads down now. Our three survivors are hiding behind a big automated packing machine. One of them is wounded and the others are running low on ammunition. They’ve got only one simple shotgun and a couple of pulse-rifles between them.’
‘Scar.’
‘Covered. Two of them. One’s a haiman.’
Cormac again turned on his view through Shuriken and saw, in dim shades, the pair of feet belonging to a man inching along through the vent. Then this view turned into a red and pink explosion, and Shuriken shot out the other side of the corpse shaking splinters of bone from its chainglass blades. One enemy less now for Scar to cover. In a moment the star hit another grating, cut through and shot out of it to hover above three individuals. One of them lay flat on the ground, her right arm missing below the elbow, while another knelt beside her applying a tourniquet.
‘Ah shit,’ said the one still standing, as he raised his pulse-rifle to target Shuriken.
Cormac spoke. ‘Put it down. We’re here to rescue you.’
The man hesitated, lowered his weapon. He was a haiman, Cormac noticed. There seemed to be quite a concentration of them on this world.
‘Okay, Scar, you can burn out those vents now,’ Cormac instructed. ‘The rest of you, take them down.’
The sound of weapons fire became a constant drumming while a glare lit up the huge interior of the building. Drawing his thin-gun, Cormac turned the next corner in time to see two burning shapes slam to the floor and fly apart. He glimpsed a head sheathed in flame and pieces of a haiman assister frame scattered here and there. A steady thumping of thermal grenades then began. All along one wall fire belched from air-conditioning vents. Scar’s three targets were now incinerated in the vents they had been using to creep up on the survivors.
‘Smith?’ Cormac queried laconically.
‘One did get past,’ the soldier admitted. ‘But there’s now pieces of him all over the floor, with that weapon of yours hovering above them.’
‘Any of them still moving?’ Cormac queried generally.
When there came no reply, he holstered his gun and headed over to where the survivors were located. Nothing to learn here from the enemy, but maybe those three would have something to say.
The two Dragon spheres hung in space seemingly indifferent to the buzz of activity surrounding them. Ensconced in VR, Mika was apparently standing out on some invisible floor suspended over vacuum, observing the new conferencing unit being brought by two grab-ships towards the Dragon sphere that had first been able to break its Maker programming. To those seeing them for the first time, both these incarnations of Dragon were indistinguishable, being just spheres of fleshy alien technology now each extending three miles wide. They had grown by taking in asteroidal matter and processing it into something internally. Mika herself could distinguish between them because she recognized the scars on their surfaces. Of course she could, because she had been present when the two had inflicted the wounds upon each other.
The conferencing unit itself was a domed pressurized accommodation structure five hundred feet across and packed with technology for scanning, research and much else besides. The two grabships released it about a mile away from the first sphere and then quickly departed, like acolytes after leaving an offering for some tantrum-prone god. The unit turned slowly in vacuum, gradually being drawn to the intended sphere by its slight gravity. This was obviously not fast enough for, in the fleshy Dragon plain extending below it, a triangular red-glowing cavity opened and a tree of cobra-head pseudopods speared up to snag the approaching object and bring it clumping down on the sphere’s surface like a conjurer’s cup. Once it was in place, the unit followed its installation procedure: barbed spikes stabbing down from its underside to anchor it in place, various probes being thrust down into the alien flesh below it, and all its internal scanning and computer hardware instantly coming online. The pseudopod tree lifted away, hovered for a moment as if undecided about something, then suddenly withdrew back into the sphere. With a huff of vapour the triangular hole snapped shut.
Mika, satisfied that all had gone as expected, held out her hand and under her fingertips a touch console sprang into being.
She hit one control only and fell back into blackness and into a seated position. Reaching up she hit the disengage button on her VR helmet and felt the nanoplugs withdraw from her temples. She tilted the helmet back, for the moment keeping her eyes closed, undid the clips along the back of the one VR glove she wore and stripped it off, then carefully opened her eyes to the glare of her research area.
Mika pushed herself out of the VR frame, which at that moment lay in chair format because she had decided not to use all its facilities, and headed for the door.
‘I want to go across right now,’ she said.
‘Certainly,’ came Jerusalem’s immediate reply. ‘A small vessel awaits you in the usual place.’
Mika paused. ‘Usual place?’
‘Yes, where you boarded the last one to transport you across to Dragon.’
Was Jerusalem playing some game here? The last vessel she had taken across had never made it back. She had served merely as a piece of confirmatory evidence taken along by one sphere to help convince the other one that its masters the Makers–who had built Dragon and dispatched it into the Polity–were now extinct and therefore its base programming was no longer applicable. This convincing process had resulted in the two spheres becoming somewhat irked with each other, and to be a mere human being in the vicinity of million-ton alien entities getting irked had not been a healthy option. Mika had nearly died inside her little ship, would have died if the second Dragon sphere had not suddenly grabbed her and, while riffling through her memories for confirmation of everything it had just been told, put her back together like a broken toy. Though quite possibly not the same toy she had been before.
She decided that maybe this time there wasn’t any deliberate subtext to her current exchange with the AI. Nodding reassuringly to herself, she stepped out of her study area and took a familiar route through the cathedral spaces of the great ship which somehow seemed unfamiliar, though she knew it was not they that had changed.
