The Technician

by Neal Asher

  ‘I thought it was a bomb.’ He glanced at the weapon she held – a thin-gun, and not the kind of thing you would expect an Earthnet reporter to be carrying – then swung his attention to the door to Tombs’s apartment, which remained closed. After a second he returned to his own room to grab up his comunit and turn it on.

  ‘Penny Royal?’ he asked, whilst inserting the receiver into his ear.

  ‘Get out,’ the AI replied, just as some other unknown impact shuddered the floor. ‘Leave ATV – too large a target.’

  ‘What’s happening?’

  ‘Hooders.’

  ‘Surely it’s safer here?’

  ‘Gabbleduck death hormone,’ the AI replied. ‘Am searching for source. You remain, you die.’

  ‘Hooders,’ Grant said to Shree, who was hovering in his doorway. ‘Someone’s released gabbleduck death hormone in here and if we stay we’re dead.’

  ‘If we go outside we’ll probably die too,’ she said, oddly fatalistic.

  ‘Get your stuff,’ he instructed, himself pulling on the rest of his clothing.

  She stared at him for a moment longer, then turned away. He dressed fast and efficiently, ensuring his Polity-tech breather gear was in place at his neck before then checking the action of his disc gun and holstering it. The weapon would be no use against hooders, but if one of them got to him at least it would provide a get-out clause. Next he slung his pack over one shoulder and left his room. Tombs’s door was still closed and he hammered on it. ‘Tombs! We go now!’

  The door slid open and Tombs stood there clad in heavy walking boots, black trousers tucked into the tops of them, a green denim jacket open to reveal the silvery padding of a temperature-controlled undersuit. He also had a backpack slung from one shoulder, and had even made use of other facilities in his room, his jet-black hair now cropped down to his skull.

  ‘They’ve come,’ he said.

  How did he know?

  ‘Who’s come?’ Grant asked.

  ‘The morticians,’ Tombs replied.

  The man wasn’t even looking at Grant, but staring slightly off to one side, almost as if gazing through the very walls of the way station. His hand strayed up to his chest and fingered a penny mollusc shell now depending from a string about his neck.

  ‘Hooders,’ said Grant.

  Tombs abruptly focused on him.

  ‘Oblivion,’ he replied, just as Shree stepped out of her room and strode over.

  ‘Not if Penny Royal or I have anything to say about it,’ Grant replied. ‘We run. We’ll use one of the emergency exits— ’

  ‘West side,’ Penny Royal whispered in his ear.

  ‘—on the west side of the station, get as far from here as we can.’

  ‘Canister located, shut down,’ said Penny Royal, ‘but hormone level at twenty gabbleduck deaths – many hooders.’

  Grant glanced at Shree and continued, ‘Hooders go crazy when they’re looking for a dead gabbleduck. They’ll attack this way station and probably ignore us.’

  Probably.

  ‘Come on.’ Grant reached out to grab Tombs’s shoulder and found his hand closing on iron, then his wrist closed in a similar grip. The erstwhile proctor pulled him close, then put a hand against his chest and shoved. Grant slammed into the other side of the corridor, the wind knocked out of him. As he slumped down the wall he saw Tombs, his expression blank, turn and take a pace towards Shree. She stepped back, sudden fear there, drew her thin-gun and pointed it at the man.

  ‘Oblivion,’ said Tombs, taking another pace and backing Shree up against the wall, the barrel of her weapon only a metre from his face.

  ‘No,’ Grant managed.

  Tombs abruptly looked puzzled. He gazed at the gun then took a pace back, before turning to look at Grant.

  ‘I am sorry,’ he said. ‘I am frightened.’

  Grant struggled upright. ‘Put it away Shree – we go now.’

  Shree hesitated, a brief yearning fleeing across her features, then holstered her weapon. Grant stepped forwards and caught Tombs’s shoulder again, felt only Human resistance before Tombs turned and set off in the direction Grant propelled him.

  ‘Let’s pick it up.’ Grant broke into a jog, towards the end of the corridor, Tombs and Shree keeping pace.

  You’re frightened, thought Grant. Not half so much as me.

  The west-side emergency exit lay on the side of the station directly opposite their rooms. The quickest way to it was down, outside, across the parking area then through the apartment block over there. A crowd milled in reception, and through its glass doors he could see vehicles pulling out of the parking area and queuing up at the main exit from this place. The people here must have been warned about the danger of staying put, but obviously hadn’t been warned about the danger of taking large noticeable vehicles outside. Had Penny Royal delivered a warning, or had someone else? Had it been decided by some horribly cold mind that those departing vehicles would act as decoys whilst the one they considered important, Jeremiah Tombs, made his escape?

  They made their way to the glass doors, following others out, just as something like thunder rumbled above. Grant looked up to see an image similar to one recorded in the past here – a hooder up there on the glass dome – only it wasn’t on its way across, it had paused, its legs trying to scrape purchase and a blur under its hood where it was scratching the glass to opacity. It rose up, a jointed tower, gleaming red navigation lights at its top, then it came down like a giant fist.

  With the impact, the floor of the way station seemed to drop half a metre. Grant staggered, saw others falling over, noted Tombs squatting and retaining his balance, head tilted upwards and eyes closed as if he was enjoying some sun. The whole dome bowed inwards and with a sound like mountains clashing, shattered and rained down, the hooder flowing down with it like black oil. It hit the parking area hood first and the rest of it thundered down in a rain of armoured glass like quartz boulders. Its hood came up again, crowned with wreckage, and it shook itself. A mangled ATV, perhaps Grant’s vehicle, smashed into the buildings to their right, just as Grant grabbed Tombs’s shoulder and pulled him on.

  ‘We go round!’ Grant shouted into the din of demolition and screaming. Shree moved ahead of him even as he spoke. They ran round along the aisle between buildings and gardens, partially shielded from falling wreckage by the spread of grape-tree branches. They passed the fallen ATV and Grant saw that it actually was his vehicle. Some people were here, staring stunned at the scene, others with more purpose were running, and one group of three were down on their knees, praying.

  Even as they reached the other side of the way station, a second hooder flowed in from above. The first now speared into the apartment block and swung across, cutting through the buildings like a finger drawn through soft cake. The second hooder, a smaller version, slammed its hood down on something, then up again, spewing abattoir wreckage across the foamstone. It looked like more than one person. Seemed the hooders here weren’t slow-feeding, just obliterating.

  Grant kicked open a door ahead, followed emergency exit signs to where people clad in armoured work clothes were already cramming through a door into a narrow tunnel through the surrounding reinforced concrete. It seemed the work crew here had a better idea of how they might survive this.

  ‘Why would anyone do that?’ The woman ahead had been injured – blood all down her leg, leaning for support on a co-worker Grant at first thought was an adapted Human, until he recognized the birdlike legs and knew it to be a dracoman.

  The dracoman did not reply, but one of the others did. ‘Probably some Smythian.’

  How wrong you are, thought Grant. This had Tidy Squad written all over it. After attempting a straight hit the Squad had upscaled to something more careless of casualties to get to Tombs. And how appropriate those murderers must have thought it to set hooders on one who had once survived an attack by such a creature – a tidy resolution to the existence of Jeremiah Tombs that took no account of other conseq
uences.

  A door stood open ahead through which the road crew were spilling out into Masadan night, pastel-lit by the cabochon face of Calypse on the horizon. Grant pushed out, slid down a concrete slope turned slick by crushed rhizome, regained his balance on compacted flute grass and looked round for Tombs and Shree. Over to his left, crouching, Shree with her thin-gun in her right hand and a handful of Tombs’s jacket in her left.

  ‘Penny Royal?’ Grant asked.

  There were creatures out here, three of them. Grazers? Something like that but lower to the ground with odd protrusions from their backs. Then Grant realized he was seeing mounts of some kind, single dracoman mahouts astride thick scaled necks, the road crew scrambling up the flanks of the mounts to cling onto cargo frames. Even as he saw this, one of the mounts turned and disappeared into vegetation, its departure strangely musical as it disturbed old flute-grass stems. Another sound then – the music of demons as a high-speed train arrived at Hell’s way station. The hooder just appeared out of darkness like such a train spearing from a tunnel, flicking one of the dracoman mounts onto its back and going over it like a blunt saw over liver, then rising up into the night.

  The thing reared up and up, in silhouette against Calypse, some monstrous cobra, but one fashioned of slick, hard black components moving with oiled smoothness against each other. But as it surged forwards and down, the hollow machine movement in its cowl became visible, then its columns of red eyes, as if some power breaker had been switched on inside it at that moment. Almost certainly its targets were the other dracoman mounts nearby, but it would come down across where Grant, Shree, Tombs and other refugees crouched.

  I’m dead, was all Grant could think, frozen to the spot.

  Then the hooder slammed to a halt against some invisible wall, which became visible at that moment: Penny Royal, ten metres up, a curved face with inward-pointing spikes, tentacles wound into a trunk rooting down into the ground and bowing under the impact. The hooder itself arched with the strain, a terrible hissing shrieking cutting the night, then came a sound as of a tank going over a glass greenhouse. Lightning flashed, a single static electricity gunshot discharge. Debris began to rain down as the two opponents swayed back and forth, and Grant was horrified to see a single black spine spear down into the soft ground beside him. Then an explosion between the two, blinding bright, and more debris, flute grass flattened as if under some giant aerofan, dracoman mounts and their Human cargo fleeing under it. The ground came out from underneath Grant and when another explosion ensued, then another, he put his hands over his head and fought the urge to pray.

  ‘Keep moving west,’ whispered Penny Royal.

  Grant peered out, saw the hooder, headless, writhing as it fell, Penny Royal bowed over – some carnivorous plant suffering terminal indigestion.

  ‘Wesst,’ hissed the AI, a strange reverberating echo behind its instruction.

  Up on his feet, Grant ran to the other two, pulled up Shree, Tombs following. He couldn’t hear what they said, ears ringing, and perhaps they couldn’t hear his instructions. But they followed him out into the wilderness, fleeing a writhing destruction as hooders tore the station apart.

  12

  After the Quiet War, when art was no longer supported by state funds or by those more interested in iconoclasm, the grotesqueries of the previous centuries died a deserved death. People were no longer satisfied or impressed by political messages in an age when politicians and ideologues had become objects of ridicule. Higher general intelligence and broader knowledge of the world, of the solar system, also enabled them to at last see through the obfuscations and justifications of lazy but glib pretenders to art. Something of a renaissance occurred when art returned at last to its natural state of being beautiful objects or elegant design that people are prepared to pay for. Thousands of artists, who previously would not have considered producing objects of beauty, now started producing. Legions of art critics whose greatest skill was analysis of non-existent meaning discovered an urgent need to retrain. And the time had returned at last when a gorgeous painting taking weeks of skill to produce might garner more praise than a frozen pig’s penis in a glass of vodka.

  – From a speech by Jobsworth

  Chanter slammed shut the door of the room provided for him, pack slung over one shoulder containing both his special food and a copy of his research notes – the latter because he didn’t trust Rodol to consider them as important as he did, and so keep them safe. He felt a confused amalgam of excitement and anger, and he didn’t know if he was angry at himself for doubting beliefs that in the past had been firm, or angry at believing such stuff in the first place.

  The Technician is on the move.

  It had been so easy to wrap himself up in his esoteric pursuits and deep analysis of the wealth of data that had become available. He had convinced himself he was forging a lot closer to understanding the Technician’s art, but now it was on the move again and new data was flooding in from the observation tower, new hypotheses were arising that threw his speculations into further doubt.

  It’s a war machine.

  When Clyde told him that, Chanter had felt a deep offence, his instinctive reaction being that nothing made for the specific purpose of delivering destruction and death could have artistic sensibilities. He had argued with the man, even then realizing how infantile his reaction was but unable to stop himself. Wartime produced some of the greatest art, and only the exigencies of survival, and a lack of excess wealth and spare time for those involved, limited its quantity. Even so, when Clyde went on to inform him that the Technician might also be an evolved creature adapted, genetically altered and augmented for the purpose of battle, he had grasped at that as a man sinking into some quagmire would grasp at overhanging flute grasses.

  ‘Then there is the trauma from which the art arises,’ Chanter had said. ‘A natural creature twisted to kill, destructive technologies sewn through its body, all that it was repressed, crippled, broken.’

  ‘You’re assuming it wasn’t a killer before. You’re assuming prior sentience and enough of a mind to suffer.’ Clyde had gazed up at him from where he sat before his screen, data maps cycling spookily like bone sculptures. ‘The organism from which the Technician arose might have had no more mind than some Terran arthropod – might have been no more than something programmed by evolution to kill, eat and breed.’

  ‘The sculptures tell me otherwise,’ said Chanter. ‘How appropriate that a creature distorted for war should choose so bloody a medium for its art.’

  ‘What analytical mind the Technician had, and might still have, could all be additional, could all be the kind of add-ons you see in a haiman. Its mind could be the most artificial thing about it.’

  ‘Artificial intelligences produce art,’ Chanter responded, then realized he had just contradicted something that had been a contention of his for most of his life, from which his earlier offence had arisen. He believed that machines did not produce art. He had always felt that only evolved creatures could produce it, that AIs only copied, they did not have the soul. Then, out of that thought and all that dodgy word – soul – implied, he felt a deep confusion. Clyde just looked at Chanter pityingly, probably understanding, even from their brief association, that he had just shot himself in the foot.

  ‘You just don’t understand,’ said the amphidapt, hot anger purple-blushing his warty skin.

  ‘On the contrary,’ said Clyde. ‘I understand that your house of cards is collapsing, Chanter, and that despite everything, you have the intelligence to see it.’

  Chanter just turned and left, feeling stupid and very annoyed with himself.

  His mudmarine was just where he had left it, still keeping pace with the slow molluscan crawl of the Tagreb. He pointed his remote control at it as he stomped wetly across ground churned up by the movement of the base, and its door opened for him offering welcome retreat inside. Ensconced in his chair he pulled across and fastened his safety straps. Grabbing the control column h
e tilted it forward and down, the machinery responding with a comforting roar, soon muffled as the marine speared down into the mud. Next checking the location of the Technician’s beacon on his screen and the intervening seismic maps, he changed course ten metres below the surface and headed for a nearby undercurrent of slushy mud flowing between ancient layers of decayed rhizome.

  If the Technician didn’t change its present course he would intercept it in about two hours. Thereafter he would be able to keep pace with the creature until its next kill. He felt certain that the creature must be aware, in some way, of recent events. It had to be aware that its living artwork, Jeremiah Tombs, was on the move too and was in some way responding to this. And, maybe, even after twenty years of no product, no art, its next kill might be turned into something new, something different, something from which Chanter would be able to extract explanations, find some sort of resolution . . .

  Twilight brought no rest, just better visibility in which to observe the devastation. The way station looked like a titan had segmented it with some immense cleaver, then torn out its guts and strewn them about the surrounding landscape. The big tricone shell, almost the length of Grant’s ATV, offered welcome cover for the three of them. Others had hidden in some of the debris – Jem had seen people peeking out from the large chunk of apartment building lying canted where it had landed in the mud a hundred metres away. Still others had not been so lucky. Just a few metres away from where they crouched behind the shell lay a woman’s head, whilst a little way beyond it lay what might have been her enviroboot, the foot still inside.

  Debris both Human and machine strewed the surrounding landscape. Judging by the wreckage lying smeared across from where the way station main entrance had been, not one of the departing vehicles had escaped. As he studied the whorls in the curve of shell before him, Jem wondered if anyone at all had managed to get clear of the area, including those the dracomen had come for.

  ‘I think it fairly fucking evident that they’re missing nothing,’ said Shree.