by Neal Asher
‘No way – that region you mention extends into Polity space and a large collection of things of the same mass as the thing here, no matter how widely dispersed, would have been picked up.’ She hesitated for a second. ‘Have they been detected? Did the big-fuck AIs know all about this thing before it appeared?’
‘No, they did not.’ He smiled, a twist of the mouth only, nothing reaching eyes containing a scaly metallic glitter. ‘Their assessment of it is much the same as your own: this object sits at the centre of a sensor net, those sensors occupying U-space interfaces.’ He stopped there. Janice was sure he had been about to add more. ‘What do you think its purpose is?’ he finally asked.
‘Some kind of alien defence system, maybe left over by one of the dead races?’ she suggested.
‘Employing what manner of weaponry?’
She shrugged, sending a ripple down her optics to her sarcophagus. ‘Could be anything. It can suck up and remodel matter in just about any form as far as I can see, and it can—’ She stopped dead, making a sudden intuitive leap. ‘You’ve found one of the sensors haven’t you?’
He bowed his head in acknowledgement. ‘It is being studied, passively, as we speak.’
‘What can you tell me about it?’
‘It scans, across the EM band, all material objects within its vicinity. However, passive analysis of its scanning format reveals that it is tuned to recognize precise bio-electrical patterns.’
‘Searching for some long-dead aggressor?’
‘Perhaps – it certainly shows no great interest in Polity activity within its scanning area.’
‘What else?’
‘It draws energy from the realspace U-space interface.’
‘Then it’s also an anchor.’
He blinked, paused for internal calculations.
‘Yes, it seems so.’
She gestured to the screen wall. ‘Probably an efficient way of drawing this thing to its location should it find that old aggressor, or perhaps so it can more easily send something. With an anchor the thing out there could penetrate some levels of U-space disruption.’
Again that slight bow of the head.
‘So we have some possible answers,’ she said, ‘but not the main one we want.’
‘Which is?’
‘Why the hell has it surfaced here, and now?’
‘Which is precisely the question I was going to ask you.’
‘It found something – it’s preparing to act.’ She studied him intently but could read little from his expression. ‘Where is this sensor you found?’
‘In the Graveyard.’
‘So maybe the Prador?’
‘No – they’ve been in the region for centuries.’
‘Then what?’
‘We don’t know.’
Why do I get the feeling, interjected Cheops, that shit and fan are moving into conjunction, and that we might be in the way?
Probably because they are and we are, she replied.
‘I have to question why the Polity isn’t taking this thing a little more seriously,’ she said to the haiman. ‘Is that a question you can answer?’
I think our answer is just arriving, said Cheops.
Janice felt the disruption through her connection with the ship AI, like something dragging at her skin, or a wrongness, a distortion seen through some extra eye she had not possessed until then. The dreadnought that surfaced into the real was instantly recognizable: a thing like a giant bracket fungus made of steel, snapped from some titanic world-tree. They called it Scold – an understated light-hearted label for something very dangerous. It seemed the Polity had decided to take that thing out there very seriously indeed.
Jem opened his eyes to a bright comfortable place, and a feeling of utter disjointed confusion. He remembered the agony, and so much more: the demon falling upon him like a wave of writhing sharp-edged blackness, snatching away his knife then sliding the bloody mess from his other hand, inserting wormish tentacles into the ruin where his face had been. The demon took away the agony in gradual stages, knitting ruination back together in a way that exactly mirrored what had been done to him two decades ago, that mirror opening his mind to clear slaughterhouse memories of the Technician, that time preceding it and much that came after. He remembered seeming to float in the demon’s swirl of darkness, up the Polity ship’s ramp, through internal spaces more like city parks than any ship he had known, finally to this place, this garden.
But though memories now lay clear in his mind, he felt utterly disconnected from a reality seemingly wholly distorted. Gazing at the two nearby he recognized them from outside the ship, yet some deeper part of him could not quite integrate them. They were such an odd shape: small, simply jointed limbs, flat-faced and just two eyes – almost like something put together by a child.
‘Earthnet,’ said one of them. ‘You’re working for Earthnet?’
The words possessed a strange clarity and in a second he realized why. The muttering was gone, that constant sound, as of a discussion being conducted one room away, had disappeared. The man’s voice also brought him into focus for Jem: Leif Grant, commander of the eastern forces of the rebellion, the first Human face he had seen this side of the Technician’s punishment and that flow of Euclidean shapes. He hadn’t remembered the man at the time, but now recollected that Grant had been on the Theocracy hit list for some time. The woman he didn’t recognize. Perhaps she was one of the crew of this Polity spaceship – certainly she looked far too Human to be one of the passengers.
‘I’d perfectly understand if you told me to go away right now, Leif,’ she said. ‘But since I was allowed to send a recording of what happened out there, the story just became huge and, really, someone has to report it. If I provide that story, Earthnet will be able to farm out portions of it to some of the other Net News services, and that way you won’t be bothered by other reporters.’
Grant gazed at her steadily. ‘Reporters ain’t no bother unless they’re allowed to be. I just don’t get why it let you through.’
He gestured off to one side at something black and sharp-edged in this colourful paradise. Jem concentrated his attention on this thing, but wasn’t quite sure what to make of the form the demon had taken now. It had reduced itself to a flattened ovoid, hard angles, glinting protrusions, gutlike metallic and glassy folds – almost like a metal brain with crystals of obsidian in the process of breaking out from inside it. Yet, this strange thing seemed almost more logical than the two Humans. Movement off to the side of it swung his attention that way.
Jem gazed in puzzlement at the sight that met his eyes, simply failing to understand it, feeling a niggling terror of the thing. Then, abruptly, he realized what he was seeing. Datura, a datura tree – he’d seen them in his Bishop’s garden. But it wasn’t movement of the long trumpet-like pink blossoms that attracted his attention, but the zipping flight of the electric-blue humming bird feeding on their nectar. Utterly fascinated he watched it proceed from bloom to bloom, as if seeing something for the first time he knew he had seen before.
‘Hasn’t it told you?’
The two were at one of a scattering of tables in the enclosed garden, close to Jem and sitting higher, a bottle and two glasses on the tabletop between them. He lay on some sort of lounger. This place in fact rather resembled a Bishop’s garden with its collection of exotic plants and comfortable furniture, though he couldn’t see any walls and the ceiling looked like a blue sky with a yellowish sun burning in it – a sky some deep part of him recognized, though he had never gazed upon one like it.
‘As you can see, Penny Royal’s shut down,’ said Grant. ‘It don’t like to be aboard this ship – don’t want the mind here takin’ a close look.’
The woman now turned towards Jem, who quickly closed his eyes and pretended to still be asleep, which was an easy pretence when lying in such ridiculously luxurious comfort.
‘So what the hell happened back there?’ she asked.
Hell indeed,
thought Jem. He had tried to cut off his own face. Yes, his own face – the prosthetic had been removed long ago and, using Polity technology, Sanders had regrown his own flesh.
Jem’s stomach tightened with deep gnawing guilt, and suddenly he no longer felt comfortable, no longer felt either disconnected or confused. He clearly saw Sanders lying in a pool of her own blood. He had cut the throat of the woman who had looked after him for so long, and her being on the side of the enemy did nothing to assuage his guilt. Even his madness seemed no excuse and the suffering he had self-inflicted no recompense. So intense was the feeling he felt the heaviness of tears behind his face, his repaired face. But to cry seemed like self-indulgence, self-pity and childish denial of his responsibility. He tried to step back from it; to be more analytical and rediscover that earlier disconnect, but it just wouldn’t come.
‘Call it . . . catharsis,’ said Grant.
‘You’ve got to be kidding.’
‘What do you know about him?’
‘He was a proctor who survived an attack by the Technician, which was why you saved his life. What happened to him drove him off the other side of weird and he’s spent the last twenty years believing the Theocracy still exists. It also seems likely that Polity mindtechs have been let nowhere near him because, just maybe, the Technician did something to his mind.’
‘You’ve got it about right,’ said Grant.
‘Do I have your permission to send this to Earthnet?’
‘You’re recording now?’
‘I’m always recording – got a link straight to my visual cortex perpetually downloading into terabyte storage.’
‘You need permission?’
‘Not really – everything is vetted by the news service AIs.’
‘In what way?’
‘For distortion of the truth by reporting methods, reporter narrative and subsequent cutting and pasting. I’m just asking you personally.’
‘Then you can send, but only if it’s vetted by Amistad first.’
‘Amistad?’
‘Ask Ergatis.’
Jem opened one eye slightly to see her tilting her head, her expression slightly unfocused. He realized she must be communicating through her aug, just as that communication ceased and she returned her attention to the soldier.
‘I’m informed that Amistad is unconcerned about what I send to Earthnet, but that whether I can accompany you and continue reporting is up to you,’ she said.
He tapped a finger against a comunit in his ear. ‘That’s what I’ve been told too.’
‘And your answer?’
‘How important is this to you, Shree?’
She slid one of the glasses across the surface of the table as if moving a piece in some board game. ‘You know how it is – you dedicate your life to the rebellion, to fighting the Theocracy, and when the fight is won that leaves a great hole inside you. Some of us can never recover from that – the likes of the Overlanders and the Tidy Squad are an extreme example in the way they cling to the past.’ She moved her glass again, checkmate. ‘As a sometime Earthnet correspondent over the last twenty years I’ve found a way to fill that hole, but there have been so many strictures on what I can report and so much I’ve looked into that Earthnet simply dumped that it’s been difficult.’ She looked up at him. ‘This, really, is my big break.’
‘Okay, I understand,’ he replied. ‘But I want a say in what you report. It can’t be realtime – you’ll send at the end of each day when I get the power of veto on what you send.’
‘That’s standard when reporting like this. Your power of veto begins with you being able to just walk away from me,’ she said, then smiled, reached out to take hold of his chin and planted a kiss on his lips.
The two were revisiting some previous relationship, Jem realized. Remembering Sanders’s attempts to manipulate him – her sometimes crude efforts to get a reaction out of him – Jem felt he knew the reality here. The man was a Human male being twisted by the wiles of a female, deliberately ignoring her equivocation because his own instinctive imperatives had some other goal in mind. For a moment Jem complimented himself: obviously his Theocracy training, and his faith, made him more able to see through such subterfuge. Then doubt trammelled that away, because he had no memory of ever thinking so analytically before. Abruptly uncomfortable with the workings of his own mind, he sat upright and let the outside world back in.
‘So you’re back with us,’ said Grant.
Jem stared at the two of them for a long moment and quailed inside. They had no welcome in their expressions, they weren’t glad he had recovered his mind for his own sake, but because it served a purpose of their own. That made him sad and, though he tried to ignore the feeling, he wanted their acceptance of him.
‘I am back and I am remembering,’ he replied, his voice catching.
And he was. He remembered being on an inspection of sprawn canals when Behemoth arrived to destroy Flint, then the satellite lasers, before crashing to the ground. He and his fellows broke out the heavy weapons because at that point the possibility of the rebels attacking overland became a certainty. After that the Septarchy Friars were silenced and the Hierarch became impossible to disobey. However, no matter how forceful his orders to crush the rebellion, Jem and his fellows had been unable to resist the force that attacked Triada Compound – Commander Grant’s force – and beat a steady retreat through the flute grasses. Then came that other thing in a subverted Polity dreadnought, the destruction of Ragnorak, the concerted scream over the aug network as thousands died when the newcomer gutted cylinder world Faith with fire, and next the worm in his skull, trying to flee it and running straight into an albino hooder, darkness and agony descending . . .
‘But how much do you remember?’ asked Grant.
Jem swung his legs off the couch and inspected himself. He was clad in clothing with a cut the same as a proctor’s uniform, even down to the boots. However, the material wasn’t white, but a pale pearly grey, and the text running from armpit to ankle was not the usual from the Satagents, but something else from Zelda Smythe:
‘You are the vessel of divinity and perfect copy of some fragment of the mind of God’ ran down one side, whilst up the other side ran, ‘But your internal vision is imperfect.’ It ended there, the text that side terminating at his waist, the bit about the strength of faith enabling clarity of vision being missing. Jem looked up.
‘I remember all that happened to me during your damned—’ He caught himself, recognizing deliberate provocation arising in him from set patterns of thought and an anger that he groped for but couldn’t find. For a moment the two before him slid in and out of his mental compass, one moment looking utterly alien, the next becoming utterly recognizable. And, though they were recognizable as the enemy, their familiarity felt like a refuge, a haven. He began again, ‘I remember everything that happened to me during the rebellion, and some of what occurred after is returning to me.’ Jem inspected the memories of his perpetually adjusted self-delusion; how he had considered himself the subject of some faith-breaking experiment and had twisted new data to fit that delusion – the delusion that had resulted in him killing Sanders.
‘But, I’m told, “with insufficient emotional investment”,’ Grant replied, obviously uncomfortable with the words. ‘Apparently, to become sufficiently invested, you need to see the Monument.’
‘Monument?’ Jem wondered just what they considered ‘emotional investment’, for guilt hung inside him like an axe head.
‘We’re no longer on Masada, Tombs,’ the soldier said. ‘This ship’s taking a little journey just for you.’
In retrospect, Amistad felt that leaking the news that Tombs had left Heretic’s Isle had been a mistake. It had resulted in Tidy Squad killers being apprehended, as intended, but the direct mind interrogations being conducted even now had revealed nothing new about ‘Squad Command’ or the ‘Squad Leader’. And now news services were onto the story and pushing for more, especially after Shree Enka
ra’s recent broadcast. Amistad didn’t like it, but the offer Uffstetten of Earthnet had made, after making deals with other news services to farm out the story to them, seemed the best one going. Having just Shree Enkara watching and recording would be better than having Masada swamped with reporters. But still, Amistad should not have allowed the news to be leaked in the first place. This whole issue with Tombs was so much more important than netting a few Squad killers. Perhaps, after the coming upgrade, such errors of judgement would be less likely?
Poised upon the viewing platform, Amistad rattled his feet against the metal as he watched the upgrade unit descending. The octahedron lay five metres across, its eight polished plane faces revealing nothing of the incredible complexity packed inside it. It came down on internal gravmotors, tumbling silently.
Now that events were rapidly heading towards their resolution, Amistad felt an unaccustomed impatience. Perhaps this was the result of thorough mental dyspepsia and the subsequent lack of mental integration. So much information, so many facts to put together, and still no shape emerging as to what that resolution would be. Perhaps the upgrade would help, perhaps not – Amistad felt that it was the information from Tombs that would impart clarity, yet that information would not be forthcoming until after the man had been scrubbed of all his illusions. At this point the temptation to instruct Penny Royal to key directly into the man’s mind and tear from it said steadily surfacing information had become almost irresistible. However, Amistad calculated that an over 10 per cent chance remained that such contact would distort the information. Too much of a risk to take, despite the fact that within the calculated period of that percentage dropping below 2 per cent, there remained a large risk of Tombs now being assassinated.
The unit slowed to a hover over the platform, turning slowly as if inspecting its surroundings, which was highly likely because the thing possessed intelligence, though of a rather odd kind. Then it finally descended the last few metres to crunch down on the diamond-pattern metal.
There were no other observers up here today. Those presently aboard this strange pillar of a vessel had been instructed to remain below, whilst today there would be no more specialists heading out this way from the Tagreb. Amistad had decided he did not want anyone watching this particularly personal time.
