Hilldiggers

by Neal Asher

  Eventually the rival sides came to an agreement. Two and a half thousand colonists took their share of supplies and descended in the landing craft to Brumal. Subsequently the same craft were then supposed to return on automatic to the ship so the other faction could then descend to Sudoria. But the craft were sabotaged on the ground, leaving the prospective Sudoria residents stuck up in space. Eventually they took the only option remaining open to them, and did with the Procul Harum what it was emphatically not designed to do: they landed it. The landing on Sudoria was rough, and surviving thereafter was to be rougher still. They physically adapted to their new environment as best they could. They raised their embryos and began building, but during those harsh times lost U-space tech and much else. It took four and a half centuries for them to get back up into space. And they took their long-term bitterness towards the Brumallians with them.

  On Brumal, another living planet like Sudoria, conditions were unexpectedly even more harsh. Orbital surveys, though picking up much life and activity, had failed to detect the acidity of the environment, or, the pioneers having arrived during a calm period, the subsequent out-gassing of chlorine trapped in rocky layers of the crust. The residents first resorted to a basic amphidaption to this watery world, but as conditions changed they were forced to use the adaptation technology again and again. The humans there became exceedingly strange, but their environment toughened them and their almost hive-like social structure and chemically linked mentalities enabled them to quickly rise. They were still at a preindustrial stage when some Copernicus amongst them first noticed the satellites the Sudorians were putting up. Twenty years later, radio communications were established between the two worlds. Many mis-understandings followed, and public reaction on Sudoria to the first image of a Brumallian was not too brilliant. By the time the first Sudorian ship swung around Brumal there were satellites up in orbit to observe it. Sudorian historians would later insist that one of these satellites fired a missile that destroyed the innocent vessel – though the writer known as Uskaron had rather changed that view of late. A space arms race ensued, then, inevitably, war.

  It lasted a hundred years. And the hilldiggers finished it.

  2

  The lack of intervening oceans on Sudoria allowed our civilization to spread without fragmenting. There were still, however, attempts at forming independent states. The first was initiated by certain Sudorians espousing the ideology of the Blue Orchids – an ideology passed on over five generations by the surviving remnants of that party as it grew into a large secret organization. They attempted to set up a bordered enclave on the coast of the Brak sea to the East of the Komarl but, having learnt the lessons of history, our political predecessors felt they could not allow this. The Sudorian army of the time was immediately dispatched to the area, with instructions to break up the enclave and forcibly relocate the Orchids. There was resistance and there was fighting, but nowhere near the scale of that seen back within the Sol system. We had yet to learn how to get really bloody.

  – Uskaron

  McCrooger

  Crawling mind-numbing terror had turned my mouth dry and my guts rigid as stone. The sky ahead looked like a cataract eye, with the horizon folded up around it. Baroque old buildings rose to my right and left, leaning into each other like plotting courtiers. Having seen both visual effects before, I realized I was standing in a town within a cylinder world, but was too frightened to wonder how I’d come to be there. Heading towards the milky eye of the end-cap I found myself slipping and stumbling on some uneven hollow-sounding surface and, peering down, unreasonably knew that the street was cobbled with skulls, which had been laid over a compacted hogging of human bones. Ahead of me a figure stepped from a darkened alley and began to drift away up the street. I hurried to catch up, but just could not seem to move fast enough. Then I was abruptly right up behind the same figure and reaching out to grasp one shoulder. My father turned with his familiar bored ‘What now?’ expression. I glanced away for a moment, trying to remember what important news I had to give him. I should have kept my gaze fixed upon him instead, for he seized the opportunity to transform; rising up above the buildings to cast me into shadow, growing convoluted and complex, a tangled living spire of—

  Very little transition brought me to wakefulness, but I lay there paralysed with irrational terror, my eyes still tightly closed. Something had accompanied me out of that nightmare into reality and now stood poised above my sleeping mattress.

  This is ridiculous, I thought, and forced my eyes open while expecting to see nothing. Something dark and shadowy slid away, muttering, into the walls. I reached out and hit the light panel set in the wall at the head of the fold-out mattress and forced myself to sit upright. The cabin seemed slightly distorted around me, requiring of me some unknowable mental effort to return it to normality. Eventually I stood up and went to get myself a drink. This had to be an effect of Inigis’s scanning, I told myself again, uncomfortably aware that this weirdness had started in the drop-sphere, before I even met Inigis.

  The next night I visited that cylinder world town again, and fled from my father’s doppelgänger. I felt his disappointment in me, and by the third night the nightmare seemed just a desultory attempt to attract my attention, and faded thereafter to feelings of anxiety and moments of panic in the night, though sometimes, while awake, I would catch sight of some figure out of the corner of my eye, turn towards it and find it had disappeared.

  I spent most of my time aboard the ship accessing the palm screen and learning how to use the control baton Yishna had given me, reading omnivorously, my mind sponging up as much information as it could process. I reread Uskaron’s book all through, then one day left it in the ship’s refectory, from where it quickly disappeared – which told me something about attitudes aboard, though I’m not sure what. I ate regularly with Yishna and Duras, and quizzed them as intently as they quizzed me.

  On my fourth day aboard, one of Captain Inigis’s lieutenants turned up: a thin pointy-nosed man with a ginger queue and a perpetual frown etching his features. Behind him entered a young woman loaded down with a bulky mass of fabric.

  ‘How may I help you?’ I asked.

  The woman placed her load down on the floor and, utterly ignored by the lieutenant, turned to go.

  ‘Thank you,’ I said, smiling at her from where I still sat cross-legged on my mattress, though I wasn’t yet sure what for. She appeared startled by that, then smiled tentatively before ducking through the curtain. The lieutenant just turned his head away from this exchange as if embarrassed to be witnessing it. I knew the Fleet was patriarchal, but his behaviour struck me as plain rude.

  ‘I don’t know your name,’ I said.

  ‘I am First Lieutenant Drappler,’ he stated, then gestured to the stack of fabric. ‘We had to have this made for you. It is a shipboard survival suit – should we suffer a hull breach.’

  ‘Oh, very good.’ Like I would trust a survival suit received from one of Inigis’s men. I would have preferred them to return my spacesuit, which was checked out by a forensic AI before I donned it. He stood there looking uncomfortable. ‘Is there anything else?’ I asked.

  ‘I am to show you this ship’s safety procedures.’

  I held my hands out to each side and rose to my feet. ‘Please do so.’

  Drappler removed a baton from his pocket and pointed it to a row of four squares set high in one wall of my cabin. ‘The alarm tone is this.’ He pressed a button and a klaxon started wailing. It didn’t matter how long they had been away from ‘normal’ human society, stuff like that didn’t change – a loud repetitive noise imparting the meaning ‘Panic now.’ He shut down the alarm and now the squares lit up. One was yellow with a black band across it, the other three were green. ‘This is emergency level one, which indicates you must stay in your cabin. It usually means there might be some shipboard problem, but no hull breach.’ Now two of each kind of light. ‘Level two: this means hull breach. You must remain in or re
turn to your cabin, and don your survival suit. Bulkhead doors will be closing off the affected area.’

  ‘And if you’re caught in that area?’ I asked.

  ‘This.’ Only one green light left now. ‘Now you must proceed to an escape-pod and enter it quickly. The emergency is level three. If it rises to level four, the pod will be ejected.’ Now all four lights displayed that black-banded yellow. ‘If you see this while in your cabin, you must try to find a pod that has not already been ejected from the ship.’ He turned towards the curtain. ‘Now the escape-pods.’

  ‘Presumably this is prior to the ship being ejected from existence?’ I asked quickly, wanting to delay his departure. A moment ago I had spotted someone lurking beyond the curtain, and I didn’t want him to pull it aside only to reveal that there was no one there.

  ‘Just so,’ he replied, turning back to me. ‘Shall we proceed?’

  I glanced up at the four black and yellow lights again. ‘Do you have wasps on Sudoria?’ I used the English word as there seemed no obvious alternative in their language.

  ‘What . . . what are wasps?’

  ‘Never mind, it’s not important.’ I let him lead me out.

  The pod procedure was simple enough. Once the emergency hit level three, the pod doors, which were scattered throughout the ship, automatically unlocked. Drappler took me through the manual procedure should there be any problems with that. I tried not to break anything. A short access tunnel led through into the pod itself – its own door remaining open until level four was reached, at which point ship systems closed the doors on any occupied pods and ejected them, or else you did both those operations manually.

  ‘How much air?’ I asked.

  ‘This is a five-man pod,’ Drappler said inside the cramped space. Great. ‘If five men occupy it, enough for twenty days. The pod’s distress call should get someone to it within that time. The pod will also point itself towards the nearest Fleet beacon, and use three-quarters of its fuel in a concentrated burst. If you are near either Sudoria or Brumal, it will send itself there and effect reentry using first its engine then a polymer parachute.’

  I thought all his estimates and suppositions overly optimistic. Right out here the nearest Fleet ships would be some weeks away, as were the nearest habitable worlds. Back up in the ship’s corridor I shook his hand. ‘Earth custom,’ I told him after his initial startlement. ‘I want to thank you. I feel so much safer now.’

  His nostrils flared as he muttered something along the lines of, ‘Think nothing of it,’ then headed quickly away wiping his hand on his foamite suit. When I returned to my cabin I found Yishna waiting inside, seated on my mattress. Maybe she’d been the one lurking outside earlier – rather than that other dark illusory figure.

  ‘They are so solicitous of my safety now, it’s heartening,’ I told her.

  She gave me a louche smile. ‘That could be due to the charges ranging from rank incompetence to attempted murder that Duras filed against Captain Inigis.’

  ‘Ah, I see. Is there anything I can help you with?’

  Without more ado she said, ‘Tell me, if the Polity were to intercede here, what would be their policy on imprisoned sentients?’

  It was such a simple question, but I sensed an underlying tension. For a moment the room distorted around me again, shadows appeared displaced and it seemed some other individual was listening intently. I wondered then if these effects were more to do with the war between the two viral forms occupying my body than with Inigis’s rough scanning of me earlier.

  ‘That depends. In the case of corrupt totalitarian regimes a full amnesty to prisoners is granted, though those guilty of capital crimes would be checked for socio-or psychopathic tendencies. Your regime is not such, so cases would be reviewed under Polity law and those found innocent of any crime would be released. But intercession is unlikely.’

  She was studying me very closely, her gaze intense as if trying to penetrate behind my eyes. In that moment it occurred to me that she had not said imprisoned ‘people’ or ‘citizens’ but ‘sentients’. That put a whole new gloss on the reason behind her question, and I shivered. I think she noted that reaction. Glancing aside, she stood up, then faced me again, her gaze no longer so unnerving.

  ‘I will perhaps ask you this again when you visit Corisanthe Main.’

  ‘Interesting place,’ I said, gesturing to her gift of the palm screen with attached control baton. ‘I would be most interested in seeing this Worm.’ I paused for a moment, because this was critical. ‘I am sure Polity scientists would be interested in anything you might be prepared to share with them concerning it, just as they would perfectly understand if you decided not to share anything at all.’ It was the diplomatic thing to say, yet I was still having trouble getting my head around the idea of Polity AIs taking a none-of-our-business attitude to a seriously weird piece of alien technology.

  ‘Information is best shared,’ she said noncommittally. Now she gazed at me with a look I can only describe as prurient, and for the first time in many years I actually felt nervous in the presence of a woman.

  ‘Was there anything else?’ I asked.

  She stood up from the mattress and ran her hands down from her neck to her thighs. ‘No, I think that’s it.’ The atmosphere almost crackled. She stepped up to me and took hold of the fabric of my shirt, running it through long-nailed fingers. ‘Oh,’ she said briefly, abruptly turning and heading for the curtain. She shot one final coquettish look at me then departed.

  It took me a moment to put my thoughts back into order. I realized I’d just been played, and that this last part of our encounter was the one I was supposed to remember. She was, I realized, not only dangerous physically – this evident from the way she had dealt with the guard in the hold upon my arrival aboard this ship – but clever and manipulative.

  – RETROACT 3 –

  Yishna – to Corisanthe Main

  ‘I knew your mother, you know,’ he said.

  At twelve years old Yishna had managed to pass herself off as eighteen. Now, purportedly a twenty-year-old, everything she was working towards hung in the balance. Her documentation had been approved, her promotion confirmed, and her luggage was already aboard the interstation shuttle here on Corisanthe III, ready for the journey to Corisanthe Main. Now this: I knew your mother.

  ‘Really,’ said Yishna, no clever get-out clauses occurring to her. She should have taken this eventuality into consideration. Her all-consuming aim to study the Worm aboard Corisanthe Main was, despite the size of that station and its population being in the tens of thousands, sure to put her in the way of some who had once known Elsever Strone.

  ‘Please, take a seat.’ With a short pecking gesture with his forefinger and thumb pressed together, Oberon Gneiss, Director of Corisanthe Main, indicated the seats on the other side of the alcove. Once she did as he asked, he elbowed the wall control to slide out a table surface between them, then picked up a matt-black case and dumped it before him. As he studied her, she noticed how his yellow eyes, with their irises deeply delineated, almost spoked, somehow gave him an almost insentient look.

  ‘A very clever and a very complex woman was Elsever Strone. She too earned her position on Corisanthe Main when quite young.’ He cocked his head at her queryingly. ‘But not as young as you, it would seem.’

  ‘Elsever Strone?’ Yishna pouted thoughtfully. ‘I’ve heard the name, but I don’t see the connection. My name is Deela Freeleng – perhaps you have mistaken me for someone else?’ She smiled at him brightly.

  He shook his head, more of a twitch really, as if to discourage an irritating insect. ‘All three of your siblings have been caught advancing themselves through the Sudorian education system faster than seemed possible. But upon review and retesting it was discovered that though they had altered their ages in their records, they had not cheated in respect of their qualifications. Your brother Harald was caught at the age of twelve, a year after Orduval and Rhodane. You have evaded detection
because as well as your age in your record, you changed your name too.’

  Yishna sat still and quiet. She could have continued arguing that she was Deela Freeleng, but knew that a few simple tests would find her out. Her combat training would not help in this situation – she and her siblings had excelled at this regimen that had remained obligatory ever since its introduction during the War and it had helped them in many a tight corner. She wondered if using sex might get her out of this, having employed it ruthlessly since puberty, but now felt it somehow wrong to resort to that to attain her final goal. However, that was not the whole of it: there was something distinctly odd about Director Gneiss which made her suspect he would not be easy to manipulate. She could not read him as easily as she did others, which suggested he was either incredibly complex or that his motivations were not something she had encountered before.

  ‘Have you been told how your mother died?’ Gneiss asked.

  ‘An accident aboard Corisanthe Main. She went outside without filing her plan and somehow put herself in the way of a com laser.’

  ‘Yes – her fault.’ Gneiss opened the case and took out a touch screen, switched it on and called something up, before sliding it across to her. ‘Perhaps you would like to read the real report of the “accident”.’

  The document was long, but it took Yishna only moments to speed-read and absorb it.

  ‘Suicide?’ she queried. ‘Why?’

  Gneiss shrugged, slid the screen back towards him, and called up something else. ‘As you can see by that report all of your mother’s actions are well detailed, and the conclusion reached is that she was suffering fast-onset post-natal depression. No one really knows, though.’ He paused, elbows on the table and fingers interlaced before his mouth, then continued as if reciting from a script. ‘I can provide you with any of the evidence in that report. You can even speak to some of those who were involved and who still work on Corisanthe Main. I warn you, though, that you’ll come to the same conclusions as the investigators, because in the end nobody could ever know what was going on inside your mother’s head.’