by Neal Asher
– From HOW IT IS by Gordon
The one called Sharn sat on the other side of the ATV from her, holding his nose to stop the blood. It seemed she wasn’t the only one subject to Ripple-John’s violence. Sharn, it seemed, was a ‘fucking idiot’ with ‘the brains of a mud snake’. Sharn had killed someone, that seemed evident, and now Ripple-John was worried, couldn’t keep still.
‘Why this way?’ asked the one called Blitz, from the driver’s seat. ‘Surely we need to stay close – we don’t know where they’ll take him next.’
Ripple-John turned and stepped over to her, prodded her with his boot. ‘You awake?’
Sanders kept her eyes closed for a moment, then relented, gazing up at him, her vision slightly blurred. Pretending she was unconscious still would not have worked – he would have just put the boot in again. ‘I’m awake.’
‘Why don’t you tell me all about you and Leif Grant,’ he suggested.
‘What’s to tell?’
‘I wonder how much he values your life?’
Sanders could think of no reply.
Ripple-John smiled, but without warmth, then turned away to address Blitz. ‘If we stay near Dragon Down your dear stupid brother has ensured we’ll be hunted down – that stirred them up like blood in a fucking squerm pond!’ He turned and glared at Sharn. ‘You were supposed to disable that thing, not blow it to bits and kill the pilot!’
‘So we’re running?’ Blitz asked.
‘Yes and no,’ Ripple-John replied. ‘From the Barrier we’ve got the option to run south, to our aerofan cache, then we can fly over the hooder activity and go into hiding at Greenport. But we’ve still got one play left – haven’t we, Jerval Sanders?’
‘What’s this about Leif Grant?’ asked Kalash – factual question to get his father back to the point, and hopefully away from further violence.
Again the cold smile. ‘Seems Leif Grant and Jerval Sanders here have a history. Seems she spread her legs for him after the rebellion before running off to look after Tombs. I wonder how much he values her – whether he values her more than Tombs. What do you think Jerval?’
Not giving an answer wasn’t an option. ‘Leif Grant is a professional – he won’t bow to threats.’
‘You think?’ Ripple-John nodded to himself. ‘You’d better hope he does, because you, lady, are dead if he doesn’t.’
Sanders turned her gaze back down towards the deck. If these idiots thought Grant would exchange Tombs for her, then they didn’t know the man at all. That meant she was dead. She wanted to believe that when Ripple-John found out Grant wouldn’t do as instructed, then she would be killed quickly. She really wanted to believe that.
Jem glanced at the face on the screen, realized it was no one he recognized and let his attention stray to one of the windows giving a view across the central park. In the raspberry light of dawn a group of dracomen were pruning grape trees and feeding the cuttings into the open back of something that looked like the offspring of a tortoise and a dustbin. Every now and again, this thing extended a rubbery tube from its underside to squeeze out a turd of mulched and digested plant matter at the foot of each tree.
The sun was rising, yes, and Chanter’s body rested, cooling, wrapped in a scaly caul, in the room that had been provided for him. But this was about something else. Someone had gone missing, someone who should have been here.
‘We didn’t actually want anyone to die,’ said the face on the screen. ‘We just wanted to ensure you couldn’t go underground to your next destination.’
‘But nevertheless, you murdered the pilot of that mudmar-ine,’ said Grant tightly.
The man shrugged. ‘Casualties are inevitable.’
‘Only when lunatics like you have their way.’
‘No, if I got my way there would be no need for casualties at all,’ replied the man. What was his name? Something odd, yes: Ripple-John.
Grant sat back, pressing a finger down on the mute button.
‘This doesn’t make sense,’ said Shree. ‘Why contact you now?’
Grant nodded agreement. ‘Just what I was going to ask.’ He took his finger off the mute button and sat forward again. ‘So you destroyed the mudmarine, presumably so you could ambush us when we headed away from here by other means, so why are you talking to me now?’
‘I changed my mind and decided to appeal to your sense of justice – a little research has revealed your long-term relationship with her . . .’
‘So what do you want?’ Grant snapped.
‘Surely that’s obvious.’
‘Not to me.’
‘You bring us Tombs. You bring Tombs out to the East Quadrant fence. If you don’t, we kill her – it’s quite simple.’
‘How the hell do you think you can get away with this?’
‘First because that thing guarding him at Greenport is now in pieces outside the Tagreb, second because the war drone Amistad just went offworld, third because the police from either Zealos or Greenport won’t get here in time, even if they hurry, which they won’t. Oh, and by the way, we’ve got sensors scattered all over the area, so if we see any dracomen coming out this way, no deal.’
‘Even if you get away with this now,’ said Grant, ‘you’ll be hunted down later.’
‘Maybe, but that’s not your concern,’ Ripple-John replied. ‘You’ve got one hour to bring Tombs here, after which time I take Jerval Sanders outside and gut her – that clear enough for you?’
Jem had only been half listening up until that moment, but at the mention of that name his attention focused utterly and completely on the screen.
‘I just can’t do that,’ said Grant, frustrated, angry.
‘As I now know, you’ve known Sanders for a long time, Leif Grant. Do you think Tombs is worth her life?’
‘I can’t make value judgements like that.’
Ripple-John shrugged. ‘Maybe I’ll take a lesson from Tombs himself and cut off her face first.’
It seemed like everything around Jem had just opened out, like a pit, threatening to pull him down. Surely he had misheard?
‘I’ll need to see that she’s alive,’ said Grant.
‘Easy enough,’ replied Ripple-John. He reached out to grab something and the view swung round and down. It next showed the interior of an ATV, someone rapidly stepping aside to reveal a woman lying on the floor, her ankles taped together and her wrists bound behind her back. The one who had moved out of the way now stepped back in, reached down and took hold of a handful of her hair, jerked her head up so she faced the camera.
The Weaver snapped away within Jem’s mind. He stepped closer to the screen. She had been beaten, clearly, just as it was clear that this was definitely Jerval Sanders.
‘You’ve got one hour.’ Ripple-John came back into view. ‘One hour,’ he repeated, then his picture blinked out.
I didn’t kill her, Jem thought. Guilt, undermined in his mind, collapsed like city blocks built on mud, but there seemed no joy in it, just an empty confusion. That same guilt, suddenly finding no reason for itself, began to thrash around in search of some reason for being.
Because of me she is like this, because of me she might be murdered.
Succinct and precise, yet some mental juggernaut seemed to be hurtling up behind it. Jem took another step closer, knew exactly what to do.
‘You take me out there,’ he said. ‘And we do the exchange.’
Grant turned towards him. ‘I was told to guard you – you’re important, to this world, to the Polity and maybe to the whole Human race.’
Jem shook his head. ‘No, you are wrong. What is inside my head is just a recording.’ He knew it was a lie, but now he was in control, completely in control.
‘Nevertheless.’
‘You take me out there or I go by myself.’
‘I can’t allow you to do that.’
‘I’m a free citizen to the Polity and it is my choice.’ Jem turned and looked directly at Blue, who had been standing quietly in th
e background. ‘He cannot stop me.’
The dracowoman gave a curt twitch of her head, but Jem read all the subtleties there. She would not interfere because she knew what Jem had become; this was between Grant and him. When Jem turned back Grant was rising from his seat, his disc gun levelled.
‘So you would kill me to stop me going and getting myself killed?’ Jem asked.
Grant lowered his aim to Jem’s leg.
Did Sanders matter? Within the enormous reaches of time Jem had experienced, even second-hand, she was nothing, a fleeting moment quickly passed, but then, in that same vastness his own Human life seemed so little. Should he just let it go, accede completely to the changes that other self had caused in him? No, because even with the Weaver granted perspective he knew that he wasn’t the Weaver, could never be the Weaver. There wasn’t room enough in this narrow Human skull to be everything that entity was – always sacrifices would have to be made. He was Human, and must live in a Human world with Human references, Human emotion, all Jem, though a much changed version of that man.
‘It involved meticulous planning along with some doubtless long-understood and well tested methods,’ said Jem.
‘What?’ said Grant, beginning to look worried.
‘First I had to be driven out of my insane denial of current reality; a madness that had locked down my mind and incidentally locked down what the Technician put there.’ Grant seemed to shrink in Jem’s perception as if he was looking through some dark tunnelling lens. He continued: ‘This was achieved by a series of painful confrontations with that reality and manipulation of my inculcated tendency towards guilt. And in the final act Amistad and Penny Royal expected my encounter here, with Jerval Sanders, to finish the process.’
Jem didn’t recollect stepping forward. All he knew was that now he just stood a pace away from Grant, close enough to see the sweat beading on the man’s face.
‘They are very powerful intelligences, and they got it mostly right on the basis of the information they had. They thought that by now the strong medicine of guilt would be a hindrance and by removing it they would allow more of the Weaver to surface in my mind. But arrogantly they did not factor into their calculations what the Weaver wants, or the changes within me and what I, Jeremiah Tombs, now want.’
He could feel it now, tightening up within his mind, loosening its hold, a distinct massive consciousness poised like a thunderstorm, ready to explode into full being, but not within him, never within him. This separation, which neither Penny Royal nor Amistad could have predicted, allowed Jem some power over his own destiny. Now, turning in on itself as it prepared for the next stage of its existence, the Weaver knew Jem’s actions might threaten that next stage, but also had confidence in the vessel that contained it.
He reached down and closed his hand over Grant’s disc gun, and just took it out of the man’s hand, inspected it for a moment and noted that the safety switch was still on. Grant needed to be able to protest but, in his heart, he valued Sanders more than Jem.
‘I want,’ said Jem, ‘Sanders to be free.’
‘I’ll take you out there,’ said Grant.
‘Yes, I know,’ Jem replied.
The geostat cannon was of a thoroughly simple design: a doughnut tokomac two hundred metres wide supplying energy to a proton accelerator mounted above it, the beam focused and further accelerated through the doughnut hole by the magnetic field used to contain the fusion plasma within the tokomac. Around its rim micrometric attitude jets and curved-field gravmotors adjusted its position with sufficient precision to direct the beam to any single square metre on the continent below. Such was the precision of its positioning system that when Amistad landed on the doughnut, changing its position by only millimetres, the attitude jets briefly fired up to correct.
‘How long?’ Amistad asked, the communication directed to the surface below.
‘Two hours minimum, three hours max,’ Penny Royal replied.
Obviously the damage the Technician inflicted had been major for it to take the black AI so long to recover from it. But, even without Penny Royal on guard, Tombs would be safe. Yes, the Tidy Squad had again tried to take him out, and Chanter was a casualty, dead, permanently dead, since the man had no memplant and his injuries were such that little could be extracted from his mashed brain. However, with Tombs inside the dracoman town the chances of another assassination attempt succeeding were minimal. The dracomen would protect him and, beside Penny Royal, no better bodyguards could be found on Masada.
‘Well he stays in Dragon Down until you get there – he and Sanders can get nicely re-acquainted,’ said Amistad. ‘Then you take him on to the Atheter AI – we might not get anything more from him there, but maybe he’ll elicit a response from it.’
‘No,’ Penny Royal replied.
‘What do you mean “no”?’
‘Jerval Sanders is no longer present within Dragon Down,’ the black AI replied. ‘Data routing.’
The information from Dragon Down arrived immediately. Sanders’s belongings were still in her room, but the trunk she had brought them in had gone missing, as was she. Next a file arrived of the exchange between Leif Grant and an Overlander called Ripple-John, a man tentatively identified as a member of the Tidy Squad.
‘This will have to wait until you are there,’ said Amistad.
‘Too late,’ Penny Royal replied.
Amistad began grabbing further data and did not at all like what he found. Grant, the woman Shree and Tombs had taken Sanders’s gravan and were acceding to Ripple-John’s demand. Why had Grant done that? Probably because of his past relationship with Sanders – he would see her as worth more than a reformed proctor.
‘Does Tombs know Sanders is still alive?’
‘I do not know.’
More data, routed through Penny Royal from an organic source in Dragon Down, the image strangely distorted. Something more had happened after the exchange with Ripple-John. The dynamic had suddenly changed: Tombs had become more dominant.
‘Get to them as soon as you can,’ said Amistad. ‘Do what you can.’
Next Amistad opened a communication channel with Dragon Down.
‘Blue,’ said Amistad, the dracowoman appearing to his internal vision ensconced in her quarters, the view again distorted through some sort of organic camera. ‘Why did you let them go?’
‘It was not for me to decide either way.’
‘Really . . .’
‘Yes, really,’ Blue replied. ‘It may come as a surprise to you, Amistad, but we take the Polity ideas about personal responsibility and freedom quite seriously.’
Did Amistad believe that? There had been input from the dracomen right from when Amistad arrived here, mainly through dracowoman Blue. It had seemed like she was keeping her finger on the pulse simply because major events on this world were of interest to the dracomen, Masada being the birthplace of their race. She had made suggestions about ongoing events, her last few being agreement with the idea that the Earthnet reporter Shree Enkara should accompany Tombs, and the suggestion that he should be brought, along with Chanter, to Dragon Down. But now, having earlier seen the recording she had shown Chanter, Amistad knew that dracoman involvement went all the way back, and that Dragon’s manipulation of events hadn’t finished with its self-immolation and rebirth.
‘They could get themselves killed and, more importantly, Tombs could end up dead too,’ Amistad noted.
Blue shrugged. ‘I seriously doubt that.’
‘What aren’t you telling me, Blue?’
‘Surely that is evident?’
‘How so?’
‘I’m obviously not telling you what I’m not telling you.’ Blue shut down the communication.
Amistad opened up the processing power of his mind and applied it to every small piece of information, every hint, and very soon started to come up with some answers. Dragon had cured the Technician, but it seemed certain it had also influenced that war machine’s subsequent actions. The Tec
hnician had downloaded the Weaver consciousness to Tombs. Both he and it had effectively been somnolent for twenty years, and were now active. It appeared that Amistad’s own interference had resulted in this weaver becoming active inside Tombs, but was that true? Amistad had only started pushing after Tombs went on the move himself . . . In the end it seemed that the big question was what had been Dragon’s intent in luring the mechanism here now, for it had to be Dragon who had started this.
Tempted to head back down to the surface to settle this, Amistad impatiently rattled his feet against the tokomac, causing the attitude jets to fire once again. But really, if Blue seriously doubted Tombs was in danger that was very likely true.
‘Ergatis,’ Amistad enquired. ‘I want data on anything Dragon-related and nefarious over the last twenty years.’
‘This may take a while,’ Ergatis replied.
It did take a while; whole seconds for the AI to compile the data in one file and send it. Amistad tailored search engines to run through it, some of those engines possessing intelligence nearly equivalent to that of an unaugmented Human being. Much about the visit of the second Dragon sphere here they dismissed, but a lot still remained. Amistad went through that remainder himself, finally concentrating on one incident.
There had been assassinations here certainly conducted by dracomen, but brief analysis scrubbed them of any connection to events that concerned Amistad. Separatists who had tried to force dracomen to their cause had ended up in the paths of hooders. A unit of eight Separatists that detonated a bomb in Zealos and tried to make it appear that dracomen were involved were found in a squerm pond, or rather bits of them were. But there was something a little odd about this latest killing.
The story of what happened to those in the squerm pond had been extracted by forensic AI from a couple of Dracocorp augs. Those who had ended up in the paths of hooders were identified by remaining DNA and usually further evidence found of what they had been up to from their belongings – usually in some hotel room. It seemed their killers had ensured that evidence would come to light. These three corpses, however, were an oddity. They were found by pure chance: a Tagreb researcher had been ground-scanning and taking soil samples when he discovered them under a layer of rhizome. An engineered bacterium had been sprayed over them to eat away their bodies as quickly as possible – a few days later and there would have been nothing left. Forensic examination of their remains revealed that they had worn Dracocorp augs and that one of them, indicated by the remains of a particular poison, had been killed by dracomen, so it seemed possible they were Separatists. However their augs were gone – had been torn away – and no further evidence had been conveniently left to be discovered.
