by Neal Asher
What do you think? she drily enquired of her partnered artificial intelligence.
I think we should run like hell, Cheops replied.
As ordered, Halloran had delivered the cylinder and accompanying instructions. He continued to watch until Shree Enkara’s mud buggy was out of sight then abruptly turned. Gleet had served his purpose and was nearly dead from blood loss, his aug link erratic and questions arising in him that Halloran had managed to suppress in the small network he and the twins formed. Melet, though he had thought she would still be useful when they got back offworld, was straining against his control – her dying brother tearing at those parts of her original mind that remained.
Perhaps he could suppress Melet’s nascent rebellion after Gleet finally died, but that was too great a risk to take. He couldn’t afford to have her escape enslavement as they entered Polity-controlled areas. She might give him away, and if the Polity got hold of her and managed to unearth what was concealed in her mind, the whole operation was dead. He reached inside his coat and drew his thin-gun, hesitated for a second, then abruptly thrust it back into its holster. No, better to wait until after they met his other contact here – the one who named herself Agent Azure. Apparently it was through her that the Jain technology had been obtained, and smuggled off Masada just after the quarantine ended.
Halloran walked over to Gleet, prodded him with the toe of his muddy shoe. All aug contact with him blanked at that moment as if that final prod dispelled the last of his life. He noticed that without instruction Melet had turned to watch him, so hardened his control of her.
‘Bury him,’ he instructed out loud to reinforce his nonverbal instruction.
She just stood there shuddering for a moment, until he really pressed her, then she lurched into motion and walked over to the twin-disc and unlatched a toolbox positioned between the two fans. She took out a monofilament cutter, then turned. Halloran walked away from Gleet’s corpse, now aware that Melet might be a physical danger to him. She walked over, activated the vibro on the monofilament, then cut into the ground, soon heaving out a chunk of heavy sod and tossing it aside.
‘It is not the Dracocorp network that dehumanizes,’ said a voice. ‘It is the choice of those who rise to ascendancy within it.’
‘Who is that?’ Halloran asked, looking round.
‘The female, Melet, is slipping from your control.’
A hissing sound ensued and something sped from the flute grasses. Halloran thought for a moment it was one of those flying prawnlike things here, but realized it wasn’t when it thumped straight into Melet’s chest. A glassy tube protruded, with two testicular sacs on the end of it. These things started pumping, eagerly, obscenely. Melet started choking, grabbed hold of the thing and fought to pull it out. She fell, at last pulling the thing free, and hit the ground on her back. The thing landed at Halloran’s feet, still pumping a bile-like fluid from the hollow point ahead of barbs in which chunks of flesh were caught. Halloran’s link with her turned grey, shot through with screaming shadows shimmering like heat-haze, then abruptly blinked out.
‘Gleet,’ she said on her final exhale.
‘The Humans would call it a mercy killing,’ said the voice. ‘We don’t tend to believe in mercy.’
A figure hurtled from the flute grasses, humanoid, but something wrong about it, about the way it ran. It seemed to be clad in chameleoncloth, for it was difficult to see. It slammed into Halloran before he even managed to reach inside his coat. Next thing he knew he was up on his toes with a rough scaly hand closed around his face.
‘This is necessary,’ said the draconic visage gazing at him.
Then it closed its other arm around his body and turned his head like someone undoing a jam jar. Halloran felt it snap, felt everything wrenched, then gagged into blackness.
Before the rebellion the population of Godhead had numbered over ten thousand, consisting of a large contingent of the upper echelons of the Theocracy and a substantial force of proctors to protect them and watch over the thousands of enslaved workers. There hadn’t been many mid-level citizens here, which was part of the reason why the population was now less than two thousand. Grant, climbing out of his ATV where he had parked it on a hard standing by the harbour, gazed across at other reasons why there were so few people here.
The long and heavily laden cargo ship coming into dock was controlled by a submind of the planetary AI, Ergatis. That sub-mind also controlled the conveyor buckets that steadily unloaded its cargo either into parked lorries or the massive complex of storage bays, whilst a second harbour submind controlled most of the other machinery ashore: the big loaders, the autohandlers and the maintenance robots. People did work here, but out of choice not necessity. Some were aboard the cargo ships, some drove harbour machinery or the trucks transporting the guano up the continental highway to the northern crop ponds and fields. Others just lived here, enjoying the sea air now they could breathe it.
Grant remembered how it used to be here. The ships were commanded by members of the Brotherhood, had crews of over a hundred, consisting of enslaved workers, some citizen personnel and proctor disciplinary units. They also transported a steady stream of workers out to the islands, to replace those dying in the guano pits from horrible skin and lung diseases usually contracted after just three or four years of work.
The trucks that ran the guano up north were worker transporters on the way back, bringing in needed replacements for those expiring both on the islands and here, where much the same routine had prevailed. Inefficient machinery was used in the loading and unloading of the guano and there were frequent spillages that the workers had to clear up with shovels and barrows and brooms, thus exposing themselves to the highly alkaline stuff. Very primitive.
In Godhead it had been very easy to distinguish the workers from those overseeing them, for all the proctors, Theocracy bigwigs and citizens wore protective clothing as well as breather masks. This ease of identification was probably why so few of them survived the rebellion.
After Dragon destroyed the laser arrays, those working under cover here received notification of that, and an instruction to delay their rebellion until ground units from the Underground were in place. Guano-based homemade explosives and hidden weapons were distributed, and preparations began, but so bitter were the workers they didn’t want to wait. Using loading machinery as armour they attacked both the ecclesiastical central town and the proctors’ station. Fighting was fierce, and though better armed, Theocracy soldiers found themselves up against people who had little to lose. Just over three thousand workers died to inflict casualties of about five hundred on the Theocracy. The surviving hundred or so of proctors and upper echelon ecclesiasts were stripped naked, though allowed to retain their breathing gear, thrown into a guano storage bay then buried alive in the stuff. Whether they died when their air ran out, or were killed by the stuff eating into their skins, was a moot point.
Pacing out the edge of the harbour, Grant watched the ship slow to a halt beside the long unloading jetty, then be drawn in by magnetic docking gear to lock in place with a resounding clang. Immediately its conveyor arms extended like opening limbs and dipped down to open-top trucks. The stuff that spewed from the throats of the conveyor tubes was like talc. Despite special cowlings and an array of filtration devices mounted along the jetty, a haze arose from it, and after only a couple of minutes Grant felt a slight tingling on the skin of his exposed hands. He quickly turned around and headed up towards the main town.
When Underground forces arrived here the main battle was over and, but for the worker huts, most of this place had been turned into a smoking ruin, the workers having run riot destroying the place that had been killing them. After the vengeance killings, both workers and the rebel forces took the road north, abandoning Godhead. A year and a half later, whilst Masada remained under quarantine, northern crops began to suffer from lack of guano, and military governor Lellan Stanton ordered the port reopened. A large group, consisting of
surviving workers and technicians from Zealos, came south and, assisted by Polity drops of equipment, put this place back together again. The largest share of the inhabitants now consisted of those who had once been enslaved here, and many of them were Tidy Squad supporters, so it definitely was not a safe place for a lunatic proctor who thought the Theocracy still existed.
The ecclesiastical section, with the proctors’ station looming at the edge, had been built on a fat foamstone coin with a life, estimated when it was laid, of two hundred years. The new town had been built on the ruins of all that. Like all such towns or compound rafts on the tricone-infested soil of Masada, a steady hum almost below perception filled the air as the tricones below steadily ground away at the stone. Stepping onto a slabbed street, Grant paused to listen for a moment, before heading over to a covered walkway, recollecting that they no longer called this place Godhead. Officially it had been renamed Greenport, and the residents stuck to that. Those still embittered and vowing never to return here unofficially named it Shit Harbour.
Pausing at the walkway door, Grant unholstered his sidearm and checked its action. The proctors’ disc gun possessed an electrical trigger and a magazine containing seven discs, each with five rounds. Grant extracted the cylindrical magazine and inspected it for a moment before slotting it back into place. The weapon could fire single shots, five-shot bursts, or empty the entire magazine in five seconds. There were many better weapons available, but Grant had become attached to this one. It was the one that nearly killed him when he himself ran out of ammo, before he managed a throw that put the ceramic stiletto now holstered in his boot through the owner’s eye. He holstered the weapon and pushed through the door into the walkway, a slight breeze slipping past him because of the pressure differential. And as the shimmer-shield of his Polity breather mask automatically shut down, he turned right to head directly to his destination.
Time to deliver a warning.
Amistad found Chanter amusing: one of those borderline cases whose low-order autism balanced out his sociopathy, so that rather than being antisocial he was asocial. The man had chosen not to have his head rewired, rather had gone in for heavy physical adaptation to enable his monastic, highly introvert pursuits. On one world he’d been a piscine, limbless, sensorium boosted so he could study the colony patterns of some odd oceanic life-form like a slime mould on speed. On another world he’d returned to full Human to study the paintings of an artist in vogue at the time, until he became something of a nuisance and needed to be warned off. Then, upon learning about the Technician here on Masada, and knowing there would be no danger of him being classified as a stalker, he went in for heavy amphidaption, converted all his funds into that mudmarine and some other equipment, and had come here to study the creature.
Six years ago, upon being informed of Chanter’s presence here and the nature of his interest, Amistad had thought him an unnecessary complication and considered having him removed. However, since the rebellion the man had done no more than follow the Technician about like some eager puppy, only abandoning that pursuit to return to his underground base or to chase rumours of sculptures or sculpture fragments found on the surface. He seemed harmless, and another element to Amistad’s calculations prevented him from sending the man away: deleting complications to try and find simplistic patterns, simplistic solutions to puzzles, was a Human approach. It was why they’d ended up with religions like the one here, and why throughout their history they’d been hampered in their advancement by superstition, crippled value judgements and a tendency to accept facile explanations. Amistad’s own research had shown him that retained complications often helped permanently resolve a puzzle, or could provide outfield components to that puzzle. And four years ago Chanter had done so in spades.
His discovery of that ancient sculpture had revealed that the Technician was a living artefact, a creature that definitely dated halfway back to the time when the Atheter rubbed out their own minds and ground their civilization to grit. But it went further than that, further than Chanter had seen. Hooders, though long-lived, did not have the physical and genetic ruggedness to survive for such an appalling length of time. That a mutation capable of doing so had arisen a million years ago was about as likely as a flipped coin turning up heads a thousand times in succession. Amistad precisely recollected his brief exchange with Penny Royal at the time:
‘Give me your thoughts,’ he had asked.
‘Two million years,’ Penny Royal had replied.
The sea urchin AI, once classified as black but now, to Amistad’s mind, just a slightly darker shade of grey than himself, clacked a tentacle against the platform rail, then returned that tentacle to a process that seemed alarmingly like it was sharpening its black spines, but which Amistad knew to be an odd way of making dataport connections between its seven states of consciousness. Perhaps it too was remembering that exchange.
Amistad’s claw gripped the same platform rail, as if the drone was steadying himself against the slight sway up here at the top of this stalk as its lower section, a hundred metres below, cleaved through the rhizome mat. The observation tower was still on the move – an underlying conveyor drive much like the one in Chanter’s mudmarine driving it along. But soon it would be stationary again, for their target now lay in sight.
They had been inspecting that cave shortly after Chanter had relayed his news about the ancient sculpture, and now Amistad replayed the rest of their brief exchange in his mind, relaying it to Penny Royal so the AI would know what he was thinking about:
‘Elaborate,’ he had said.
‘It was made, and no makers here for two million years.’
‘Agreed.’
‘Surprising that this wasn’t discovered before,’ Penny Royal had opined. ‘Unless knowledge is being kept from you to prevent mental crippling.’
It was often an AI technique: provide all the information to an investigator and that individual would probably come to the same conclusions as you. Be sparing with information and that same investigator might discover something you missed.
‘Not something we should concern ourselves with.’
Penny Royal had writhed, doubtless something surfacing from one of its states of consciousness about its own past when it disagreed with AI research policy, before going on to conduct research in its own violent and sadistic manner.
‘Mind ungoverned by evolution,’ Penny Royal had stated. ‘And yet to be sized to ultimate technological purpose.’
Amistad had dipped his head in acknowledgement, and dipped it now, as the observation tower drew to a halt and spread its nacelle anchors below, concentrated on the creature lying just a couple of kilometres away.
The Technician had brought down a big grazer, a thing resembling a six-legged water buffalo with a tined lower jaw to fork up rhizomes, extended head to accommodate the numerous grinding plates used to mash them up, and big flat feet to stop it sinking into mud it exposed while feeding. The animal was so large that the big hooder could not accommodate all of it, and so was working its way along the creature section by section. The back half of the grazer had been skinned, muscle and white fat removed with surgical precision and ingested, whole unbroken guts, veins and layers of black fats flapping about grey-blue bones in a loose shreddy mess. The thing was making a sound like a flock of rooks being sucked into a combine harvester, as it continued to fight for freedom.
‘A prototype,’ said Amistad, repeating verbatim the observation he had made four years ago, ‘made before the Atheter extinguished themselves.’
The Technician was a leviathan albino centipede whose head had been squashed flat then dished underneath; perhaps, as many had remarked, it was similar to a giant Human spinal column. Though of course, those who made such comparisons were usually at as safe a distance as Amistad and Penny Royal. Using his own sensors and those within the platform, Amistad studied the creature, the machine, on numerous levels, and made comparisons. It became evident, almost at once, that it had changed furt
her.
Since the rebellion all the data the Theocracy had gathered on the Technician had been collected and collated. This and all Chanter’s data had been added to that gathered by the Polity researchers and stored in the Tagreb. Prior to the rebellion, scans of the Technician did reveal all sorts of anomalies, but within the recognizable structure of a hooder. The scanning methods used had not been sophisticated enough to reveal what those anomalies were. After the rebellion, Chanter’s intermittent scans of the creature yielded a steady decrease in information, for it seemed evident it had started undergoing major internal changes, which it was somehow shielding. Later scans by Tagreb researchers revealed complex nano-structured materials, high-density energy storage and that internal shielding. Now, even using state-of-the-art scanning routines, data had become increasingly difficult to obtain, and large portions of its body were completely opaque. Notable, Amistad felt, that this transformation had accelerated after the Technician did what it did to Tombs.
‘Perhaps the prototype,’ Penny Royal opined, flipping up its two superfluous eye-stalks so as to gaze at Amistad with eyes like glowing rubies.
‘Explain,’ since they were moving to new territory now.
‘Final hooder form given limited lifespan and ability to breed,’ Penny Royal stated. ‘They were made to fit an environmental niche even if the environment is, in essence, artificial.’
‘You still haven’t explained why you think it might be the prototype.’
‘At this technological level only one would be required,’ Penny Royal explained. ‘All the necessary data to make the current hooder form would be downloaded from it.’
