by Neal Asher
– From QUINCE GUIDE compiled by Humans
Masadan Wilderness (Solstan 2438 – Rebellion Aftermath)
The aerofan motored fast across the flute grasses, raising a multicoloured storm of petals, and Grant realized that flowering would soon be over as the grasses dropped the rest of their petals whilst growing their seed nodules. The fan was a proctor’s machine: single big fan underneath the pulpit-like upper section, all gyro-stabilized and fashioned of light bubble metals, a railgun bolted to the safety rail and a single control column, like a lectern, before which the driver stood. But this driver was no proctor, since in the patriarchal Theocracy few females achieved any rank at all. Grant felt something tightening up inside him when he saw her blond hair streaming about her face as she brought the aerofan towards the clearing where he had parked his ATV. Then, when he got a closer look at her vehicle, he felt a brief stab of anger. It seemed Jerval Sanders had made her decision – though she’d come directly from Central Command in Zealos, the aerofan’s code number and design showed it came from the southern isles and, since Central had ordered that an effort should be made to keep these vehicles in their designated areas, it was probably due to be returned there.
The vehicle descended, now blowing about itself fragments of the dry old flute grass trampled into the rhizome layer. As it finally settled and its engine began to wind down it also blew out spatters of mud. The rhizome layer here, having taken the traffic of many feet and numerous vehicles, was starting to become unstable. There were even tricones visible on the surface – their three cones connected like Pan Pipes and bearing some resemblance to discarded munitions also scattered nearby. Soon this area would have to be left alone to enable it to recover, and by then there would be no data left to gather.
Sanders opened the gate in the safety rail and stepped down. She wore spring growth fatigues coloured green and purple, heavy boots and a sleeveless insulated top. Her face was clearly visible and he realized she must now be wearing one of those Polity breather devices that contained oxygen about the face under a near-invisible shimmer-shield – one of the most visible benefits from the Polity supply drops – he meant to get hold of one soon.
‘Grant,’ she said, striding over. She looked sad and serious.
He waited until she reached him before speaking. He nodded towards the aerofan. ‘From Heretic’s Isle?’
She dipped her head in grave agreement.
‘So you’re gonna take that job at the sanatorium?’
‘Yes,’ she replied, then hurried on with, ‘but that doesn’t mean things have to end between us.’
Their love affair had been good but brief whilst the rebels finally accepted that they had won, and different for him since his previous relationships had always been with fierce Amazonian rebels – soldiers like himself – but now came the aftermath. Grant did not expect to be in one place for long as their de facto leader Lellan Stanton sent him hither and yon, whilst Sanders would be south of the continent on that remote island. And really, he hadn’t expected someone like her to put up with someone like him for so long.
‘No I guess not,’ he lied. Damn, even their meeting here had been wangled as semi-official. She needed to know the full story behind her most important patient at the sanatorium; wanted to hear it from his lips. The fact that he hadn’t already told her, and she hadn’t asked, maybe indicated that neither of them had taken their relationship seriously. Love in the ruins, need and celebration, that was all. He abruptly felt uncomfortable, groped for something else to say.
‘I hear Lellan Stanton wanted you there?’
‘Yes,’ she grimaced, ‘I was appointed to the position by the military governor of Masada herself. I said I wasn’t sure I wanted it. She told me she didn’t want her job but we don’t get to pick and chose.’
‘Yeah, I know – heard we’re not getting any AI governor here any time soon.’
‘The quarantine stands,’ she stated. ‘We’ll continue to get Polity supply drops, but that’s all until they consider it safe for them to land.’
He nodded, not sure what to say now.
‘Let’s take a look at the spot, shall we?’ she said.
He gestured off to one side of his ATV and led the way, glancing over to an area of charred ground. That was where four corpses had been piled – four proctors he’d railgunned down before chasing after Jeremiah Tombs. They had only been recently collected, and the ground underneath them sterilized. Even after many months they had still been whole – the environment wasn’t conducive to human decay. She glanced over that way too.
‘They’re in cold storage,’ she said. ‘All those Skellor touched are being so collected.’
‘You were over at Central,’ he said. ‘Why the quarantine?’
She sighed and shook her head. ‘It’s complicated.’
‘I’ve heard some, but not all of it,’ he said. ‘They’re being a bit close-mouthed.’
‘You know that our Hierarch’s predecessor seemed to believe that the inevitable’ – the word came out laced with bitter sarcasm – ‘fall of the Polity was long overdue and decided to accelerate the process. He dealt with an alien emissary called Dragon’ – she glanced at him – ‘who here was known to the Brotherhood as Behemoth.’
‘The thing that flattened the base on Flint and trashed the laser arrays, yeah, I get that.’
‘Yes. Dragon gave Amoloran the Gift . . . those Dracocorp augs, but it also gave him metal-destroying mycelium it had used once before against a Polity runcible installation. Amoloran used that mycelium against a Polity Outlink station, and Dragon got blamed. Trying to exact vengeance it attacked a Theocracy ship but was injured by the engine flame, then came here for some payback.’
‘But why did it crash itself?’
‘Suicide and rebirth: it killed itself and, incidentally, turned most of its substance into an alien race here on Masada.’ She shrugged. ‘Interesting times.’
‘That’s the reason for the quarantine?’
‘Oddly enough, no.’ Grant saw amusement flash across her expression. ‘It seems we weren’t deep enough into a shit storm at that point – Skellor, the guy in that Polity dreadnought, brought that. Dragon, and some Polity citizens it had brought along for the ride, was being pursued by him – he’d got his hands on something called Jain technology, and used that to hijack the dreadnought. Seems this technology comes from an alien race that’s been extinct for a mere five million years. It’s very dangerous stuff and, before his departure and eventual demise, Skellor left it scattered all over our world. That’s the reason for the quarantine.’
It took a quarter-hour to walk to the spot where the hooder had taken Tombs apart but left him alive. All the remaining shreds of the man had been collected and stored in sample bottles, but blood still stained the flattened grass, turned blue-black by the lack of oxygen in the air. The place also swarmed with penny molluscs, the Euclidean shapes and patterns on their shells giving the impression that some piece of ancient electronics had been shattered here. Sanders squatted down and gazed at the blood.
‘There ain’t much to see,’ Grant said.
‘Where were you standing?’
He pointed into the still standing flute grasses over to one side. These long stalks were bound together in an almost impenetrable mass by their side shoots, which would later break away to leave holes into the hollow stems, holes that later in the year created haunting melodies whenever the wind blew, and were the reason for the name of the plant.
She turned to gaze at him. ‘So you saw everything?’
‘Yes.’
‘You’ve no uncertainty about that?’
Grant nodded as he once again described events here. Tombs had run screaming, clawing at his aug, fighting whatever it was that was trying to capture his mind. The other four had gone under in a moment. Grant had hesitated when he got them in his sights, having no idea what was happening. They staggered about like people who had just been nerve-gassed, and two of them fell
. Then the two standing grew still, and the two on the ground stood up. Their faces were imbecilic – one seemed to have suffered a stroke, for one side of his face had sagged – but still they all stooped to take up the weapons they had dropped. That’s when Grant opened fire, rail-gun bullets smacking through their bodies to jerk them about in a bloody ballet until they dropped. Then he set out after Tombs.
Grant pointed to a peninsula of flute grass they were just walking round.
‘I ran round here following Tombs’s trail and near fell over the fucker before I got what I was seeing. The Technician, here.’ He gestured to one side at trampled flute grasses. ‘I thought that was my lot – I was going to die.’
The sight had just slammed him to a halt. The Technician was the size of the largest of hooders, over a hundred metres from head to tail. It had lain coiled across here like the spine of some long-dead giant, only with legs stabbed down from between the vertebrae into the rhizome layer, and this spine terminating in an armoured spoon-shaped head which at that moment had cupped something against the ground, something screaming in raw agony. Then that head had risen, up to ten metres in the air, clear in execution light. In the underside he had seen its close-work eyes – two columns of them gleaming an odd yellow with some strange internal light. And, all about those eyes, the clicking, whickering glassy movement of its feeding scythes and drills. That’s when he had jammed the barrel of his own rail-gun underneath his chin and begun backing off.
‘You’re sure it was the Technician?’
‘These are the questions you were instructed to ask?’ he grated.
‘They are – we have to be sure.’
‘I’m sure – ’less you know of any other albino hooders out here?’
‘Okay.’
Nobody got that close to a hooder and lived, and that thing that had been writhing on the ground below it, that thing that had once been a Human being, looked as if it would not live for much longer. Grant had felt it would be attended to after the hooder slammed its spoon head down on him, at which point he meant to blow his own brains out – he refused to be subject to its protracted and agonizing feeding process. But the Technician merely watched him for a time that seemed to extend towards infinity, before dipping down and once again covering Tombs. Grant should have run then, but having been a soldier for so long he had accepted his role as a walking dead man – that soldier’s trait that enabled him to function in the midst of flesh-tearing metal. His survival instinct was there, but its power over him had waned, and a terrible fascination had held him rooted to the spot.
‘We know they’re just animals,’ said Sanders. ‘Complicated animals with some mysteries about them remaining unsolved, but animals nonetheless.’
‘So why the . . . intense Polity interest?’ he asked. ‘We’ve been scraping up samples and making recordings of hooders for them for decades, and then there’s that . . . face . . .’
Sanders nodded. ‘Yes, the prosthetic was unexpected.’
It was. Upon hearing about events here, in this clearing, some distant AI had dispatched one of the fastest Polity spaceships here ahead of the intervention fleet. Upon its arrival, that ship had dropped a supplies capsule. Included among them was a new face for Jeremiah Tombs – a thing Sanders herself had fitted.
‘You are utterly sure about what you saw?’ she asked.
Grant concealed his flare of anger, knowing she must ask the question. Still his deposition was in doubt, especially that part about what he saw after the Technician rose from Tombs for the second time, when he saw Tombs lying there with his breather mask back in place. The hooder had studied Grant with an intensity beyond that of predator watching potential prey, almost as if trying to ascertain if he understood that Tombs must live, then abruptly it swung away.
‘Utterly sure,’ he snapped.
‘So what happened afterwards?’
After watching the hooder shifting its massive bulk off and away through the tangled grasses, he had walked over to Tombs, who just lay on his side in his own blood, the portion of his body between knees and throat stripped down to muscle, one arm reduced to bone and that mask grotesquely fixed over his stripped skull. All about him penny molluscs were scattered, though how they had got there so fast, Grant couldn’t imagine. He had thought the proctor was dead, but then realized an odd sawing sound was coming from the man, for he was breathing still. It also seemed as if he was studying the molluscs with his one remaining eye.
‘So you carried him back to the ambulance?’ Sanders asked.
‘He was the only other living witness,’ said Grant, and shrugged.
Sanders fixed him in her gaze for a moment, then turning away said, ‘Yeah – I understand.’ After a pause she added, ‘It seems enough for the Polity that he survived an attack by the Technician.’
Yeah, that part of Grant’s deposition about the breather mask wasn’t on general release – too many of those who heard it believed Grant had made it up after putting the mask back himself.
They began walking back to their vehicles, an uncomfortable silence rising between them. Finally, at the point of departure, she said, ‘I’ll see you soon.’
‘Yeah, sure,’ he replied, wondering how many months or years might pass before then.
The Graveyard (Solstan 2448)
‘So why is my experience required?’ asked the massive iron scorpion. ‘Though there’ve been some interesting developments on Masada, there’s not been much action there recently. What is there for me?’
‘Don’t be obtuse, Amistad,’ replied the head. ‘You have a special interest and your present project is relevant too.’
The polished chrome head apparently floated in the darkness above, but really resided only in Amistad’s mind, it being just a representation of the AI the drone was addressing, just as this AI would no doubt be gazing at a big iron scorpion in some temporary virtuality. The head was the standard factory-setting icon used by artificial intelligences yet to choose their own form, yet to choose whether they wanted to live, what body they wanted to live in, and what purpose they might serve, if any. Yet Amistad knew that this intelligence had been around for some time, first as the mind of a Polity dreadnought, and now as the mind running the massive Jerusalem spaceship and research station. However, Jerusalem had not chosen its own pursuits, rather they had chosen it.
There were three named ancient and dead alien races: the Csorians, the Jain and the Atheter. The Csorians were the special interest of an AI called Geronamid – a part-time hobby it pursued while holding the position of sector AI, mainly because most Csorian artefacts were to be found in the sector of the Polity it controlled. No single AI had yet to devote itself to things Atheter – to become the leading expert on the subject of that extinct race – but Jerusalem was the leading mind on all things Jain. During the Polity’s long-ago war with the vicious arthropod Prador, a war in which Amistad had fought too, Jerusalem had found a small item of Jain technology and used it against the enemy to devastating effect. Only then did the artificial intelligences across the Polity realize just how dangerous this technology might be, and Jerusalem got ‘volunteered’ to look into it. Now, that same technology, having come close to bringing down the Polity, lay outside it, contained in a star’s accretion disc. That’s where Jerusalem was now, studying Jain technology and, with a strange collection of helpers, ensuring it remained contained.
‘What special interest?’ Amistad swung his attention to the technological detritus surrounding him, focusing for a moment on a mess of spines and tentacles where it looked as if something huge had stomped on the giant bastard offspring of a black-spined sea urchin and an octopus.
‘I know precisely where you are,’ said Jerusalem.
‘Oh yeah?’
The request for direct com had routed to Amistad from some nearby runcible, and the drone had allowed it only after ensuring no tracing routines were attached. Unless Jerusalem was using some programming technique Amistad was unaware of, which wasn’t u
nfeasible, the big AI should not know the drone’s location.
‘I know the location of the last runcible you used,’ said Jerusalem, ‘and, being aware of your interests, I surmise that you are presently in the Graveyard. Next, calculating travel times, it is simplicity itself to nail down that you are presently in the cave where the black artificial intelligence known as Penny Royal met its end. You are probably quite close to that creature’s remains right now.’
‘Lucky guess,’ said Amistad. ‘So tell me: what do you think my special interest is?’
‘When we of the Polity were at war with the Prador, speed of manufacture was the way to win. Independent war drones were made then and, because they were so hastily manufactured, some went into battle with minds that weren’t quite stable. Some found equilibrium; some went insane and had to be destroyed, if they could be found. Some found their own ending – like that black AI just a short distance from you.’
‘Get to the point,’ Amistad said.
‘During the war you went insane, Amistad, though it was a useful insanity of greater danger to the enemy than us. After the war, when we were clearing up the mess, you recovered what might loosely be described as sanity. Since then your special interest has been in minds that have been, not to put too fine a point on it, bent out of shape.’
‘I’ll grant you that.’
‘We want you to study such minds on Masada. There is one Human mind – that of a man who was once a member of the religious police there.’
An information package arrived and Amistad opened and studied it. Jeremiah Tombs was certainly an interesting individual, and what had led to his imbalance even more interesting still.
