Hilldiggers

by Neal Asher

  The extent of time allowed for this examination was set at four hours. After only one hour, Harald turned off his console and removed his baton, then walked over to the same engineer sitting in the monitoring booth with three other invigilators.

  ‘You realize that by pulling your baton authorization now you’ll have to go through the exam again from the beginning?’ the man warned.

  ‘Yes, I understand that. May I have my identity plaque back now?’

  The man smiled sympathetically. ‘Fusion Mechanics can be difficult. I suggest you take one of the applied mathematics courses to begin—’

  ‘Chinzer,’ interrupted a female tacom officer sitting beside him, ‘before you make too much of an idiot of yourself.’ She pointed to one screen on the montage of them before her.

  The engineer stared at the information she indicated. ‘Well, fuck me.’ He looked up at Harald with sudden respect, picked up the ID plaque from the table before him, and handed it over. ‘Congratulations, Engineering Candidate Harald Strone.’

  ‘Thank you,’ said Harald politely, pocketing his plaque. It was a gratifying response, but he would rather have gone unnoticed. With head ducked, he headed for the exit, and, as he stepped out from the examination room, he realized such circumspection had come too late. The three Fleet security personnel standing outside were obviously waiting specially for him.

  ‘Harald Strone.’ The officer in command eyed him almost with bewilderment. ‘First, my congratulations on passing yet another Alpha Grade examination – but you must have realized such a level of achievement would not go unnoticed.’

  ‘But I took some with only Gamma Grades too,’ Harald protested quietly.

  ‘Yes, you did.’ The officer looked towards the others. ‘Twelve of them.’

  One of the others swore in disbelief.

  ‘And as startling as that is in itself,’ the officer continued, ‘what we would really like to know is how a twelve-year-old managed to alter his ID to give him an age of eighteen years.’

  ‘I know computers,’ muttered Harald. He took out his ID plaque and baton, plugged the plaque into one baton port, and quickly entered the code that would update the plaque, and simultaneously correct the errors he had introduced. Then he held both items out to the Fleet officer.

  Puzzled, the officer used Harald’s baton to start running up on the plaque’s small screen all the information it contained. ‘Applied Mathematics and Computer Science,’ he said. Now he was staring at Harald with something more than bemusement.

  ‘I suppose I’m in trouble,’ Harald suggested.

  The man handed back both plaque and baton, then checked the timepiece on his sleeve. ‘No, Harald Strone. In five hours you will be in a hilldigger.’

  Harald’s expression showed delight, but the machine that was his mind – its oiled and beautifully polished components sliding into position with perfect precision – just ticked off another box and stepped him up another rung.

  – Retroact 2 Ends –

  McCrooger

  I felt edgy, and unable to relax. It seemed I could hear the murmur of voices out in the ship’s corridors, yet when I ducked my head through the curtain covering the cabin door to look, I encountered either silence or other sounds bearing no relation to that previous murmur. Within my cabin, shadows seemed to flicker out of synch with whatever was casting them, and occasionally I would catch movement at the corner of my eye as if something had just scuttled out of sight. Clad in loose trousers, a shirt and some kind of embroidered garment that draped over me tabard-like and laced up from under my arms down to my waist, I inspected my cabin more closely – perhaps to assure myself that nothing was hiding there.

  It was a small neat cell, similar to those found in the oceanic ships of my homeworld. A mattress rolled out from an alcove set at floor level into the wall, but there were no blankets available – who needed them in this temperature? A spigot operated by a snake-shaped lever shot water into a three-quarter-globe basin, and the toilet was an interesting horn-shaped affair that folded out from the wall and which you applied to the necessary part of you with a sucking thwock. When you had finished your business, it then made some very alarming sounds similar to those of a carpet cleaner, as it sprayed and then sucked away water. No towels – moisture on any part of the body being a pleasure as it quickly evaporated. I was inspecting my face in a circular mirror, running fingers through the short grey fuzz on my scalp – hair that never grew any longer and rarely fell out – and trying to figure out the purpose of the various devices slotted into the wall below the mirror, when there came a repetitive clink-clink-clink from outside the curtain door.

  I jumped in surprise, but luckily controlled the violence of my reaction enough not to break anything.

  ‘Come in,’ I called, and turned.

  Yishna entered first, then Duras, lowering the stick he had obviously used to tap against the door frame. I noticed how the gold cane grip seemed to be moulded in the form of a beetle of some kind. Yishna studied my spartan accommodation with the same amusement she had shown on first bringing me here. Duras merely grimaced, displaying yellow teeth, then abruptly turned around and headed back through the curtain. Yishna turned as well, with some hand-flip gesture which I presumed meant ‘Follow us.’ They led me out into a tilted box-section corridor like something out of an Escher nightmare, where it was necessary for me to stoop while walking, and conducted me to another much larger cabin. This contained a table laden with food and drink, surrounded by four strapwork chairs. These last items I eyed dubiously.

  ‘Consul Assessor David McCrooger, welcome to the Sudorian Democratic Union.’ Duras turned towards me, holding out a wooden box.

  I accepted it. ‘Thank you for the gift. I regret that I was unable to bring you anything in exchange, but perhaps, should technology proscriptions ever be raised, I can one day return the favour.’ I placed the box down on a side table, twisted the simple latch and flipped it open. Inside rested a handgun and a knife. I took out the knife first, pulled it from its ornate sheath and inspected the blade. It was similar in shape to a Gurkha knife, though with a blade fashioned from some translucent ceramic. I didn’t need to touch it to know the edge could probably shave iron. I carefully replaced it in its sheath, then picked up the handgun. The grip, fashioned of carved bone inlaid with gold and what looked like flat polished emeralds, lay slick in my hand. As I pulled it from the holster I expected to find myself holding some kind of ancient muzzle-loader. It was certainly a gun relying on chemical propellant, but even so was a finely manufactured automatic weapon. Peering into the box I noticed a row of ammunition clips underlying the gun compartment. There was something strange about the cartridge visible in the top of each clip. I levered out one clip and inspected it. The cartridge was of some ordinary metal like brass, but the bullet itself was sharp and fashioned of some hard black material.

  ‘These gifts are purely ceremonial,’ Duras explained, ‘but we would feel insulted if you did not wear them at all times.’ He then reached up to undo some catches around the back of his skullcap, before removing it.

  So, they felt the need to provide me with the means of defending myself, since it struck me as unlikely that any ceremonial weapons would require armour-piercing bullets. I grinned at him, then abruptly felt a surge of sadness upon noting his cropped white hair and the visible shape of his skull beneath the loose skin of his face. I’d been forgetting that people still actually died of old age here. Their medical science, though advanced, lay some centuries behind that of the Polity, and there were the harsh environmental factors to take into account. Duras was probably at most a hundred years old – a mere junior by the standards of my own world and not really very old by Polity standards. I wondered if I felt sad because death had become for me a very personal preoccupation.

  ‘Orbital Combine also welcomes you to the Sudorian system,’ announced Yishna, though the gifts from that political and economic force occupying the many satellite stations orbiti
ng Sudoria were of a rather different nature. In one hand she proffered a palm screen incorporating audio, recording facilities, local netlink and terabyte processing and storage, and also a control baton which plugged into a slot along the bottom of the screen. Both these items had their equivalents in the Polity, but the control baton’s construction was rather unique. It was a rod about four inches long and one inch thick, with twist controls and small buttons spaced along it, and a laser emitter at one end which could serve as torch, pointer, measuring and spectroscopic-analysis device. In all other respects this combined unit served as a multiple-function com device: phone, computer access, remote key, bank card – and much else besides. In her other hand Yishna held an old-fashioned paper book I’d already read: a history of the War by someone called Uskaron. I held it up to inspect its plain cover, maybe the safest choice considering its explosive contents.

  ‘So this is the famous book,’ I said. ‘The one Fleet wanted banned and the one that resulted in a planetwide search for its author.’

  ‘Yes, that’s the one,’ agreed Duras, but he did not look too happy about this choice of gift.

  ‘I understand he was never found . . . this Uskaron,’ I glanced at him, ‘but proof of his claims was delivered to Parliament?’

  ‘The veracity of that evidence has yet to be proven,’ said Duras tightly.

  ‘But I understand, nevertheless, that Sudorian opinion of both the Brumallians and Fleet has changed greatly in the last few years.’

  He merely nodded, so I turned to Yishna. ‘I thank Orbital Combine for these gifts. Perhaps, when the time comes, I can conduct you through the intricacies of U-space mechanics, Calabi-Yau space extension matrices, and the like.’ I winked at her, and she first looked startled, then realization dawned: maybe I wasn’t just a politician, and maybe Polity technology did not have to be something you could physically hold and inspect. Fleet could hardly place import restrictions on what I had brought here between my ears.

  ‘Please be seated.’ Duras gestured to one of the chairs. ‘I understand that none of our food is likely to be incompatible with your biochemistry?’

  ‘That’s so.’ I gingerly lowered myself into a chair and, though it creaked loudly and sagged somewhat, it seemed to be holding. The smell of the food started distracting me, but I tried to pay it no attention while we got the social niceties out of the way.

  Duras, lowering himself into another of the chairs, commented, ‘You’re not entirely what we expected.’

  Yishna seated herself too and, without any more ado, picked up a bowl with a series of rings on the underside into which she inserted her fingers, and began selecting items from the table and filling it. I decided to do the same, but found the finger holes weren’t large enough.

  ‘What did you expect?’

  After chomping down something that looked like a deep-fried cockroach, Yishna replied, ‘Fleet has been making much of the effete products of a soft civilization run by artificial intelligences. I think Inigis had started believing his own organization’s propaganda, so you came as rather a shock to him.’ She raised an eyebrow and gestured to the empty chair. ‘The Captain, incidentally, will not be joining us.’

  I couldn’t help but grin, not about the missing Captain’s shock but about those supposedly ‘effete products’. I was loyal to the Polity but did not actually consider myself a fully paid-up member. Though born and grown to adulthood on Earth, and having spent many years there on later occasions, I still considered a world called Spatterjay to be my home. But I’d met Polity Agents and Earth Central Security personnel who were, quite frankly, frightening. I knew some who could have come out of that drop-sphere naked, gone through Inigis and his soldiers like they weren’t there, and assumed total control of this ship in under an hour. Lucky for the Sudorians that the Polity chose to be more diplomatic nowadays, and therefore tended to keep its ECS attack dogs on a tight leash. They sent me instead – the warm and cuddly option.

  ‘You are rather large and, as you demonstrated, uncommonly strong,’ noted Duras, while breaking open an object like a razorfish.

  After Captain Inigis’s lieutenants had finally conducted me to my cabin, they then spent some time trying to locate some clothes that would fit me. Ever since that first leech bite, I had steadily grown in bulk and strength, and density – my body now packed tight with the viral fibres (some of which I could do without it has to be said). I stood nearly six foot six tall in bare feet, and carried the breadth and musculature of a fanatical bodybuilder, though I weighed about two and a half times as much as he would. I’d got used to it – you did, while the centuries stacked up.

  I tried one of the cockroaches and studied the other food on the table. Some of it I recognized as adapted Earth foods: a bowl of miniature lemons like sweets, fried lumps that were probably some form of potato, kebabbed combinations of small vegetables – one looking like a carrot – and blocks of meat, pastries, even canapés – though ones filled with green flies in a clear aspic – and something like jellied eels which I suspected instead to be jellied snake since there wasn’t a lot of open water on Sudoria. The cockroach tasted good, rather like glister meat in crunchy batter, and being raised on Spatterjay one tended not to be squeamish about what one ate. It was also rather nice to have it laid out prepared like this and not risk your food taking a bite out of you before you managed to cram it into the cooking pot.

  ‘Just biology,’ I explained in reply to Duras’s observation.

  ‘Then not some organic technology?’ he suggested wryly.

  ‘Certainly not.’ I stared at him across the table. ‘We have a saying where I come from – “Softly softly catchy boxy” – which very very roughly translated means the Polity is not going to come crashing in here stamping on all your traditions and tearing up your social order. The ethos now on the Line – the Polity border with . . . well, everything – is to no longer “subsume with prejudice” any populated worlds or civilizations we encounter. Too much chaos, too much death and destruction results from that, and afterwards, once that civilization has been subsumed it is no longer unique, but just another homogenous addition. So we’re playing this by your rules.’

  ‘Which suggests to me that the Polity no longer considers those new worlds it encounters as a threat needing to be controlled.’ Duras was undoubtedly sharp. ‘Back in the hold I suggested to Inigis that you possess ships capable of digging their own hills. Do you possess hilldiggers?’

  I carefully considered my reply. On the one hand I did not want to appear boastful, yet on the other I needed to play this straight with people who, after all, wanted to initiate trade and greater contact. ‘You understand that on the whole the Polity is run by artificial intelligences?’ Duras nodded. ‘Those AIs are everywhere. As far as the ships are concerned, they control them, captain them – for many AIs the ship is actually its own body.’

  ‘But how large and how powerful are those bodies?’ Duras pressed, staring at me piercingly. ‘I would not want us allying ourselves with a political entity that does not possess the will or capability to . . . perhaps have some bearing on future negotiations.’

  Was Duras looking for Polity intervention, should Fleet react badly? It appeared so, for he seemed to be trying to gauge how much help he might expect, and whether we were actually capable of helping. Here it seemed lay a large fault in our policy of not revealing too much, of not wiring up a civilization like this to too much of a culture shock.

  I shrugged. ‘Quite some time ago the Polity was involved in a war with an alien species called the Prador. Whole worlds were burned down to bedrock and billions died. That war began about two centuries after your colony ship set out from the solar system.’

  Yishna whistled past her canines.

  ‘The Polity has moved on since then. Geronamid is an AI sited, mostly, inside one large vessel. That vessel is not allowed to orbit any worlds possessing oceans or crustal instabilities.’

  They sat there looking puzzled, then the p
enny dropped.

  ‘Fuck,’ said Yishna. ‘Tides?’

  ‘Perhaps now we can turn to my itinerary?’ I suggested.

  I know that the Procul Harum set out just before the Quiet War – that time when the AIs displaced humans as the rulers of humanity and took over in the Solar System, in a conflict surprisingly without resort to massive exterminations. The ship ran on a rather dodgy U-space drive and carried 6,000 passengers in hibernation mode, plus 50,000 frozen embryos and the requisite equipment to start building a civilization. It arrived at the planet Sudoria a hundred years later, and then the passengers were revived – well, most of them, since hibernation tech-nology wasn’t that great back then.

  The system they entered consisted of one ubiquitous gas giant, five cold worlds outside of it, two of which orbited each other while spinning round the sun, and one the size of Neptune bearing a large ring system. The inner system consisted of a Mercury clone and two Earth-like planets orbiting within the green belt. The hot world they named Sudoria, and the other one Brumal. Though cold and wet, Brumal seemed more accommodating to human life; however, these people were extremely taken with the adaptogenic technologies they’d brought along with them, so many wanted to change themselves to live on the hotter alternative, Sudoria. A schism developed, mutiny and fighting aboard. This could not be allowed to continue, else none of them would manage to reach planetfall, since space being a harsh and unforgiving environment at best, it became even more so when you were trying to kill each other in it.