by Neal Asher
Upon completion, the mechanism packed away its disruptors and next sent out all its probes as it turned hunter, tracking down those minds that had avoided the initial holocaust at its location on the Atheter Homeworld. It also began to move itself away so as to be able to more easily bring its power to bear. Whenever a probe found a living, thinking Atheter, the mechanism took a disruptor out of storage and dispatched it to that location, to erase the mind found there, and shatter the technology the Atheter had surrounded itself with. These Atheter had either fled or not been part of the return home, and most of them, existing in situations that required technical expertise to sustain, did not survive losing both their minds and their artificial environments.
This hunt took it a realtime period of fifty thousand years, towards the end of which span it seemed the mechanism’s task was nearing completion and the moment approaching for it to destroy itself, breaking the last link between the gabbleducks and the Atheter civilization. However, those long years and its numerous battles had taken their toll. Necessarily it had needed to repair itself, many times, and its programming had degraded throughout the process. When the time came for it to die it found the parameters of completion of its mission too vague to act upon. Instead it settled itself in U-space adjacent to its realspace position at the limits of the Atheter realm, its touch light on its probes, which now encompassed thousands of light years, and watched.
Proof that its task remained incomplete came to its attention a million years into its vigil when a rogue war machine of its masters tried to load a static recorded Atheter mind to one of the animals. The war machine was a formidable physical being. It possessed defences against the kind of direct attack the mechanism had been intending to launch, and wielded weapons at the peak of Atheter technology.
The mechanism considered the necessity of relocating to the actual scene to bring the full force of all its pattern disruptors to bear, considered how dangerous that would be to itself. It frantically sought some way of fulfilling its programming without a direct confrontation and, because that programming had degraded, found it.
Through its probe, it found a situation it could manipulate to a satisfactory conclusion. The war machine was vulnerable at that moment, rather like some predator in the process of giving birth. The attack was brief, specific, involved no apocalyptic weapons. The result was a war machine with a scrambled mind, and the failure of its attempt to resurrect one of its masters. A better result would have been the complete obliteration of the war machine, but the mechanism just settled back like a senile cat watching an injured snake.
The next situation that impelled the mechanism to fulfil its function occurred a million years later, the circumstances surrounding the event, and its location, utterly unexpected. It found one of the animals located away from its Homeworld and in the process of having an Atheter mind-recording loaded to it. Data from the probe that found this was murky, and the mechanism mistook the occurrence for some automated process, some Atheter machine, missed by the hunters, at last firing up. It first tried to halt this process by working through the probe only, deeming only minimal interference necessary. Something rebuffed this attempt, violently, the mechanism assailed by killer programs suddenly loading to it from the probe. The mechanism fought to destroy them, meanwhile waking and dispatching one of its pattern disruptors. Through the disruptor its power ramped up, as did its ability to see through the murk. It found a powerful alien intelligence there; an artificial intelligence calling itself Penny Royal. They fought, their battleground the disruptor itself, and their own mental strongholds. It managed to fulfil its programming and prevent the loading of an Atheter mind to a gabbleduck. But the fight had taken a further toll and it did not completely destroy its enemy, and retreated, its physical structure damaged and its programming further disrupted, to again settle back, watching, and not quite understanding why.
It couldn’t be a coincidence that they had contacted her now. Jeremiah Tombs was on the move – apparently he’d stolen a boat and was currently en route to the mainland – and the Polity AIs were watching him closely. As she drove her mud buggy hard through the wilderness north of Greenport, Shree felt an excitement twisting her stomach she hadn’t experienced since . . . since the rebellion. She felt sure her offworld Separatist contact had seen an angle here, some way of striking a blow for freedom.
Her buggy collapsed the flute grasses before it, occasionally disturbing creatures from hiding: mud snakes shoved the tips of their horse-skull snouts out of the ground, and sprawns that had escaped during the rebellion, and now thrived out here, would go flitting up to fill the air with the mica-like glitter of their dragonfly wings. At one point a heroyne rose up from its woven nest of grass and stalked away stilt-legged. She shuddered at the sight of the big birdlike monstrosity. Certainly there were more dangerous creatures on this world, but none that gave her the creeps like a heroyne. She had seen one of these creatures gobble down whole one of her comrades, then stride away with the man still struggling as he slid down its long throat. What a death – drowning in stomach acid. However, there was nothing in the vicinity that could be a danger to her whilst she remained inside the bubble cabin of her vehicle. No hooders or big gabbleducks – she got that direct from one of the Polity satellites.
When she finally motored her buggy out into a muddy channel, she brought it to a halt and checked her map screen. Yes, this was the place she had been aiming for – just a kilometre along this channel and she would be at the coordinates. As she turned her vehicle she wondered if her contact, Halloran, would be here. It would be nice to at last put a face to the voice – communications had been necessarily limited in bandwidth to prevent Polity interception, so no image data had been used.
Finally the coordinates’ tracker zeroed. She brought the buggy to a halt again and gazed ahead. The channel had reached its terminus here, the flute grasses once again closing in, and beside the wall of stalks stood a twin-disc aerofan. She shut down the engine, unstrapped herself, picked up her stubby Zatak melee gun – it fired a load of fibre-linked glass beads on different choke settings and was capable of taking down three or four people if they stood close enough together – opened her bubble-cab door and stepped down.
‘Shree Enkara.’ The voice was instantly recognizable – flat, emotionless, almost as if the one speaking had some difficulty with spoken language: Halloran.
He stepped out from behind the twin-disc, a squat bulky man who bore some resemblance to Unit Leader Thracer. He wore a long heavy coat, baggy trousers and inadequate shoes now stained with mud, and seeing that the two companions walking out behind him were similarly attired, Shree wondered if they adhered to some sort of Separatist dress code. The other two, a man and a woman who might have been twins, what with their pale hair and narrow aesthetic faces, both wore breather masks. Halloran, however, wore none. Was he adapted to the Masadan atmosphere like herself, Shree wondered, or was he adapted to all sorts of different environments? She just didn’t know.
‘Halloran,’ she said. ‘Good to meet you at last.’
‘Yes, good,’ he said, without any emphasis.
The next thing she noticed was that all three wore scaly organic augs clinging to the sides of their heads like adolescent scoles. She didn’t like that. Though she had been aware that Separatists used Dracocorp augs, they were too much of a reminder of others who had worn the same: those in the Theocracy Brotherhood, her enemy.
‘So what’s the urgency?’ she asked. ‘I take it you know that I’ve got an important hit coming up?’
‘Yes, Jeremiah Tombs.’
‘That’s what this is about, isn’t it?’
‘Yes.’
Shree felt a surge of frustration. She felt like stepping over to slap him across the face to elicit some sort of Human reaction.
‘Perhaps you can elaborate?’
‘The AOP,’ he replied.
‘Yes, I’m aware of the Alien Occupancy Policy.’
‘Then you are
aware that this place could end up being classified as an alien Homeworld, with the result that you would have little or no say about your future here.’
‘Yes, I get that.’
‘More Polity control, more restrictions.’ Still that flat tone, yet he was talking about something Separatists had been fighting for for years. He continued, ‘The greatest dangers to you are the Atheter AI and what might be inside Tombs’s head.’
‘Which is why he needs to die.’
‘You need to think bigger.’
‘Go on.’
‘We calculate that the AIs presently watching over Tombs will guide him to certain locations. They will confront him with the realities he has avoided through his madness. It seems likely that one of these confrontations will involve the Atheter AI.’
‘And?’
‘You need to get close to him; you need to be with him when he reaches the AI. The Atheter AI is perhaps the larger danger and needs to be eliminated.’
‘No one can get close,’ Shree replied. ‘The barrier around it is loaded with force-fields and sensors. You need permission from the planetary governor, the AI Ergatis, to get there, and I’m damned if I want that thing inspecting me so closely. Anyway, as I understand it, no one has been granted that permission for years.’
‘We calculate that Tombs will be permitted to approach it.’
‘Right, so all I have to do is get close to Tombs, stay with him when he goes to the AI, meanwhile smuggling a bomb in under my blouse?’
‘Circumstances are now in your favour. You can use your cover as an Earthnet reporter to get close to Tombs.’
‘Yeah, they’ll choose me over all the other reporters who’ll want to be in on this.’
‘Circumstances are now in your favour.’ The repetition gave Shree more of the creeps than the sight of that heroyne. Was it the Dracocorp augs that had seemingly dehumanized these people? She glanced at Halloran’s two attendants. They hadn’t moved since she and he had started talking, and their expressions were blank.
‘What circumstances?’
‘We understand that a Human will be recruited to shepherd Tombs. That Human is the erstwhile rebel commander, Leif Grant. You know him, he knows you. This is your entry point.’
Shree grimaced. Halloran said ‘Human’ like he wasn’t a member of that species.
‘Possible,’ she agreed, wondering if Halloran knew her history with Grant. ‘But that still leaves the problem of how I “eliminate” a fifty-metre disc of memory crystal with a building sitting on top of it.’ She paused for a moment. ‘You can guarantee that getting any form of chemical explosive past the barrier will be impossible and a CTD containment flask would be detected at once.’
Halloran held up his hand and clicked his fingers. The attendant on his left, the man, stepped forward and just stood there dumb for a moment. Halloran clicked his fingers again, in irritation, and the blond-haired man abruptly opened his coat and then his shirt to expose a bare pale chest and saggy stomach. He then turned over his right hand and stared at it for a moment, before twisting his fingers in some odd fashion. A knife shot out of his sleeve, delivering the handle straight into his hand. He flipped it up, turned it, then stabbed it back in just below his breastbone.
‘My God!’ Shree exclaimed, then was suddenly annoyed with herself for using those words.
The man slit down, almost with the indifference of someone unzipping a carryall. Blood gouted and spattered down his trousers. He reached inside himself, grabbed something and pulled it out with a horrible sucking sound, then held it up. The slit in his stomach bulged intestines.
Halloran turned and gazed at him, perhaps conveying some silent communication through his Dracocorp aug. The man removed a thick pad of cloth from his pocket and cleaned off the squat glassy cylinder he was holding, before handing it over. Halloran nodded. The man turned, pushing his intestines back inside, walked with a slight stagger over to the twin-disc then abruptly sat down next it and leant his back against it. He was going to die, Shree realized. He was just going to die.
‘Was that entirely necessary?’
‘It was the safest way of smuggling this’ – Halloran held up the cylinder – ‘to this world. It possesses electronic camouflage to screen it from scanning, but not to conceal it from a physical search of our luggage.’
‘CTD?’ Shree enquired. ‘I thought it almost impossible to hide an antimatter containment flask.’
‘So the Polity would have us believe, but no, it is not a CTD.’
The blond man had bowed over now. His trousers were soaked with blood, as was the ground all around him.
‘Then what is it?’
‘The one thing that will utterly ensure the destruction of the Atheter AI.’ Halloran held the cylinder out to her and, with some reluctance, she took it. ‘There is a simple DNA fingerprint console on the end, you will notice.’ Shree observed a small glassy circle, almost like an old-style camera lens. ‘You press your finger against it once and it records your fingerprint and DNA. Do so now.’ Shree did as she was told, heard a little chime issue from the cylinder.
‘Now what?’ she asked.
‘Only you can open it now,’ Halloran continued. ‘The next time you touch the reader and press, hard, the cylinder opens.’
‘And then what happens?’
‘You unleash Hell.’ It was the nearest he had come to saying something emotive.
‘Then I don’t want to be in the vicinity when that happens.’
‘You can throw the cylinder and run but, having used this weapon, you will be hunted by the Polity.’
‘Nothing new to me.’
‘You misunderstand. The most powerful Polity minds will be seeking you and, should they catch you, their forensic AIs will take apart your mind. A better choice for you would be to stay with the cylinder when you open it.’
‘What does it contain?’ she asked, feeling that excitement again, that response to a challenge.
‘Active Jain technology.’
That dumbfounded Shree for a moment, then she managed, ‘It will destroy the Atheter AI?’
‘No.’
‘What do you mean “no”?’
‘It will do what it always does. It will begin to hijack technology or even any life it comes into contact with.’
‘With what result?’
‘The Polity satellite network will detect it within minutes and the AIs will react within seconds. They consider the Atheter AI a potential danger, but an Atheter AI being infested with Jain tech they will consider a system-wide lethal threat. The AI and probably a great deal else within the barrier will be vaporized. You will have to run very fast.’
Shree weighed the cylinder in her hand, nodded an acknowledgement and turned away. Would she run? She didn’t know, but she did know that she would deliver this item to the designated place.
Jem stepped out of the boat and took a couple of paces away before turning to study it. Though damaged, it still appeared serviceable and, with some effort, he should be able to drag it back down off the shingle strand and relaunch it. But he didn’t want to go back into the sea. He didn’t want to risk the sealuroynes again. Didn’t want to see the patterns in their eyes. Yet even here on the land, he didn’t feel in the slightest bit safe. There were dangerous animals here, he knew, and now, almost as if it had woken the moment he contacted solid land, something, somewhere, was muttering like a giant stirring in uneasy slumber. He concentrated on it, realizing it was distant from him, somewhere far inland. Then abruptly it seemed to retreat, and he felt fear, though whether his own or from that other source he could not tell. Once it faded it seemed that it had been the only thing holding him in place, and he impelled himself into motion, and stepped back to the boat.
After searching through the lockers he unloaded a collection of supplies then packed them into a bag that he emptied of some sort of inflatable. Checking the map screen again he saw that if he crossed the peninsula to Godhead the journey would only be tw
enty kilometres, but that meant crossing flute-grass prairie occupied by the kind of horrors he had always tried to see only from his aerofan, nervous even when fifty metres up in the sky. Also, the mapping computer of the boat could not be detached and there were no portable direction finders amidst the rest of the equipment. He could very well end up lost, then dead.
Better, he felt, to stick to the shore and take the sixty- or seventy-kilometre route round to the port town. He didn’t know what dangers might lurk in that margin between flute grasses and sea, but at least across the open stretches of shingle or compacted mud he would be able to see them coming. They wouldn’t surface like a mud snake through the rhizome mat and chomp him down, nor creep up on him concealed by chameleon skin and only at the last moment reveal an improbable mouthful of teeth, nor come down on him like . . .
Jem abruptly found himself sitting with his back to the boat, shivering, his gaze fixed on the flowering flute grasses a few hundred metres inland from him, cold horror wrapped around his guts.
‘With perfect timing it cut his aug off just as it was being taken over – cut it off while taking off his face.’
He could not put the words into context, could not remember where or when they had been spoken. Certainly he recognized Sanders’s voice but could not see much beyond that, just some shadowy figure she had been addressing. And even though he knew it had been something that was staged for him, to reinforce their fiction about this mythical hooder the Technician, the terror he felt was undeniable.
