Hilldiggers

by Neal Asher

  ‘Your drone’s melding with this ship’s AI caused that. I’ll be able to get round it so long as neither AI chooses to interfere.’

  ‘They won’t,’ I said, with more certainty than I felt.

  Orduval and Yishna – after a rather silly tug-of-war, followed by Rhodane’s intervention – managed to take the chest away from Flog and Slog and convey it over to the hatch. They climbed inside with it, and I followed. The two of them took the main seats, while I strapped myself into one of the two fold-down passenger seats right behind them. A scraping and rattling ensued and beyond the front screen I observed the vine-like growths that held the vessel in place parting and sliding away. Within the shuttle the temperature, already higher than in the Brumallian ship, began to rise. My two companions shed their jackets, but I was wearing little I could remove. I soon began sweating and wondered if I could stand yet another temperature change, since down there on the planet I’d come close to fainting, and once back on the Brumallian ship again had begun shivering and even noticed my hands turning a nice shade of frosty white.

  ‘The bay is now clear,’ came Rhodane’s voice, from the console immediately in front of Yishna, whereupon she and Orduval strapped themselves in. After a moment there came a roaring, and I could see bits of organic detritus blowing past the screen. Then the craft tilted and was soon tumbling out into vacuum. Thrusters corrected attitude; a steady increase in acceleration pushed me back against the bulkhead. Were we all just being used as puppets, seemingly unable to comprehend our minimal chances of success? IF21 shifted violently inside me. I coughed, spat blood, and held on tight.

  Some time later Yishna said, ‘Here comes our escort.’ I glimpsed the flare of steering thrusters, their light bursting over the screen, followed by some kind of globular craft swinging past, then descending out of sight. Shortly afterwards the immense station Corisanthe Main ascended into view and grew ever larger. Now I had seen ships in the Polity that were larger than that station, but this thing hung in my perception with a mass that seemed to extend beyond the skin of reality. I knew that, like the mass of a planet distorting spacetime about it to extend its influence well beyond, this huge station sat at the heart of those perceptual distortions that influenced the minds of all Sudorians. Eventually we flew past one of the Ozark Cylinders, and I felt a shiver of apprehension while gazing at that featureless tube.

  ‘We’ll have to move fast once we’re in,’ said Yishna. ‘I’ll lead the way up to Centre Cross. The automatics should register the presence of three of us here aboard, as required, but after that there’ll still be more security to get through.’

  ‘You are sure you can do this?’ asked Orduval, turning to inspect her closely.

  She returned his gaze, her expression bland, her emotions rigidly under control. ‘There are only two people in the Sudorian system who could penetrate that security.’

  Ah, you yourself – and Harald.

  ‘That’s not what I asked,’ said Orduval.

  ‘I can do it,’ Yishna replied, her expression now twisted into an amalgam of pain and anger. ‘I’ve been a puppet all my life, and today that ends.’ She returned her attention to the screen.

  We slid into a narrow bay, where I could see machined parts moving like the internal components of some engine, and hear automatic clamping systems crashing all around us. The sickening lurch of artificial gravity dragged me down, and it felt as if something might be tearing loose below my breastbone. Something else clonked to one side and I heard the explosive roar of air entering an evacuated space – an airlock had attached. I unstrapped and moved back into the small rear cargo space, where the evidence chest lay secured beside some other large object underneath a concealing tarpaulin. Where one corner of this covering had been pushed aside I observed whorled metal studded with crystalline dots like sensor heads, and guessed this was the same object Yishna had so nearly detonated aboard the Brumallian ship.

  Stepping out behind me Yishna and Orduval picked up the chest, while I opened the craft’s hatch and heaved myself out into a segmented airlock tube that expanded in girth to meet a door larger than the hatch I’d just departed. The controls were simple enough – I’d seen the same on the Fleet ship that originally brought me into this system. I opened it and stepped through.

  ‘Welcome, Consul Assessor,’ said the individual standing before me.

  I gave him a short bow and said, ‘Thank you for allowing me to come.’

  He was wearing a spacesuit, though with the helmet off and fixed to his belt. So were the two guards standing behind him, but with disc carbines slung in front of them. The primitive utile area we were in smelt of machine oil and hot electronics, and seemed to be used generally as a store for boxes of spare parts – some of them with the lids hinged back to reveal their foamite-wrapped contents. The area was missing a wall on one side and it was possible to see into part of the station’s structure, and from there emerged a constant whining and thumping of hydraulics, the metronomic booming of weapons fire, a cacophony of voices, and the familiar grumbling of engines and generators. I scanned up, looking for cameras, but spotted none. I had to wait on Yishna, for she would decide where exactly we must make our first move. I privately wondered if she could manage even that.

  ‘Dalepan,’ Yishna acknowledged the man.

  ‘Yishna,’ he responded, then to us all, ‘I hope you will understand that, under present circumstances, there are certain security procedures I must strictly adhere to?’

  ‘Why, is there a problem?’ Yishna quipped.

  ‘Consul Assessor, please excuse this.’ Dalepan waved one of the guards forward.

  I extended my arms sideways. ‘I have a weapon here.’ I nodded down. ‘No security breach was intended – it was a gift from Chairman Duras.’

  The guard halted for a moment, and eyed me, then turned back to Dalepan for guidance. Dalepan nodded once and the guard came forward to search me, relieving me of the weapon I had mentioned. Next he searched Yishna and Orduval, but found nothing at all on them.

  ‘Now the chest,’ said Dalepan.

  Yishna frowned, then after a moment’s hesitation she squatted down beside our ostensible reason for being here. ‘You’ll understand that this chest contains sensitive information.’

  Here, then.

  From her control baton she sent the code to the lock, while one guard stood watchfully over her. As the lid popped she immediately reached inside. It was smoothly done. The stun-bead shotgun she pulled out had a wide matt-black barrel, and it made a sound like a hammer hitting a lead sheet. The first guard flew up off his feet and hit the rear airlock door. Standing up, she fired twice more, flinging down the other guard, and then Dalepan. She gazed at him for a long moment as impact anaesthetic beads rattled and rolled about the floor, then she shook herself as if the sight had momentarily hypnotized her.

  ‘Okay.’ She stooped and removed from the chest a small knapsack that she slung over one shoulder, then shoved the shotgun back into the chest and closed the lid. ‘Let’s get moving.’

  Orduval went over to check the three downed men.

  ‘They’re fine,’ he said. ‘In the asylum I saw some of the more violent patients being knocked unconscious by these. They’ll be out for an hour or so, and if they’re lucky they won’t suffer concussion.’

  Yishna dragged the first guard away from blocking the door, opened it and stepped through. I retrieved my automatic – put it down to a sentimental attachment – and followed her, with Orduval at my heel. We moved on along a wide corridor, encountered a group of personnel moving a lev-pad loaded with munitions, passed open doors through which we could see other staff working on some kind of generator.

  ‘Where are your suits?’ someone shouted after us.

  ‘We’ve only just got here,’ Yishna replied, turning.

  ‘Yishna Strone,’ said another, then peered at me curiously. ‘Would you like me to fetch you some suits?’

  ‘No need,’ replied Yishna, hurrying on
.

  We entered another of those curious revolving lifts the Sudorians seemed so fond of and, copying Yishna, I strapped myself down in one of the four seats of the buggy. When we were all in place, it ascended at what to me felt to be about two gravities. I was slick with sweat once the buggy halted and, even though our arrival point was nil gee, I experienced problems propelling myself after the other two.

  Centre Cross was impressive, pretty similar to the interior construction of one of our larger Polity ships. I could see people at work in large cabin-like structures poised at the end of multiple jointed cranes. Cables snaked everywhere and equipment was scattered all about. Yishna pointed out one of four caged shafts leading up from the lift nexus to one of the four quadrants of the station, where presumably lay the entrance to one of the cylinders.

  ‘Let me go first.’ Orduval led the way into this caged tube.

  Yishna eyed me. ‘Can you manage this?’

  ‘I’d best go ahead of you.’

  She waved me on distractedly while opening her knapsack and checking its contents. Inside I knew there was some computer hardware, a selection of cables and the Sudorian equivalent of a limpet mine. As I began pulling myself up after Orduval, I found it increasingly difficult to breathe, as if I was pulling myself through a hundred-per-cent-humidity jungle. Luckily, once moving, I needed to make only a few corrections to my course. I decided then I would slow myself very carefully near the end, since my brittle bones might not withstand an abrupt impact.

  ‘Faster!’ Yishna suddenly shouted from behind me.

  Orduval accelerated, but then came a vicious smacking and clattering sound from ahead of him, pieces of metal spanging off the cage tube, sparks scattering through the air and fizzing out like welding spatters. He grabbed a nearby bar and jerked himself to a halt. I clipped him in passing and myself entered the impact zone, somehow passing through it unscathed. The firing ceased and Orduval then Yishna quickly propelled themselves after me. Glancing up I saw armed figures in spacesuits descending towards us. We had reached the airlock door leading into the cylinder, where Yishna first input a code using her baton, then abruptly used some other tool to lever up the panel over the electrical locking mechanism.

  ‘Move back from the door!’ bellowed an amplified voice.

  From her knapsack Yishna removed a box and a coil of cable, plugged one end of the cable into the box and the other end into something behind the panel. After a moment she cursed, then scrabbled in her knapsack for something else. A fusillade of disc-gun missiles crackled against the bulkhead to our right and left, scarring metal and hitting us with splinters that hurt like the grit flung from a shattered grindstone.

  ‘This is your last warning!’ the voice bellowed again. ‘Move back from the door!’

  ‘I’ve got it!’ said Yishna, in triumph.

  As the door began opening, it seemed the marksmen could hold off no longer. The racket was horrible, vicious. Sparks and coils of metal zinged through the air all around us. I saw Yishna spin to one side, clutching her shoulder. Orduval jerked forward as if someone had just placed ice against his back. I felt a violent tugging at my clothing. Glancing down I saw a great splash of blood across my middle, spatters of blood elsewhere, some of them spreading.

  ‘Oh,’ said Orduval, sounding both surprised and somehow disappointed. He made a glutinous coughing sound. Then, turning slowly, he released his hold and drifted, head bowing and breath exhaling in a long sigh. There was a hole in his back nearly the size of someone’s head, and blood pumping from severed arteries was beading in the air.

  ‘Orduval!’ Yishna’s cry was anguished.

  I guess the cage cut down on the number of projectiles that got through, but not enough. In one brief moment Uskaron had become just a legend that would live on here. I felt sickened and unutterably sad. Yishna’s grief echoed all around me, as the suited figures descended around us. The door was fully open now, but I knew that other security precautions lay within, and that without her expertise I would be going no further. I didn’t even know how much of the blood spattered on me was my own, but in any case I shut down my heart and lungs and allowed myself to go limp. I lapsed immediately into the apparent death that only Rhodane knew to be illusory, I don’t know why.

  Harald

  Ironfist shuddered under multiple impacts delivered by the weapons on Platform Three, but its shields were still holding well and those impacts grew less intense as, with a roar reaching a crescendo, the great vessel entered upper atmosphere. On one of his screens Harald observed some detonations in the mid-section of Desert Wind, which then slewed aside from a growing debris cloud. He waited for a few minutes, to watch the same ship straighten up. Then, checking a tactical feed, he swung his view to one side to see a Combine assault vessel bucking under the multiple impacts of coil-gun missiles, before spinning down out of sight, burning as it went.

  ‘Franorl, status?’ he barked.

  The other Captain did not answer immediately so Harald pulled up a view of Desert Wind’s Bridge.

  Franorl looked harried as he stood, arms akimbo, over one of his crew.

  ‘The fire suppressant isn’t working,’ said the subordinate. ‘And I can’t shut down the line.’

  ‘Then close the section down and vent it.’

  ‘But, Captain, we’re in atmosphere.’

  ‘Very thin atmosphere,’ Franorl observed.

  Switching to another camera, Harald felt his gut tighten as he observed, from inside the ship, a hole ripped through the hull, glowing wreckage and two charred corpses stuck to the deck. Almost in sympathy with this horrible image, his head began to throb violently, and he automatically reached into his pocket for his painkilling capsules, taking two of them at a time now.

  Pulling his view back behind closed bulkhead doors, Harald saw crew clad in survival suits battling an oxygen fire, which was fed by a broken line and maintained by the partially molten remains of a white-hot shield generator. Metal was burning. He heard the order given to evacuate that entire section and watched them run for safety, some not making it in time through the rapidly closing bulkhead doors. Another set of doors near the impact site then opened, and the air pressure inside exploded into the meagre atmosphere outside, sucking with it both fire and remaining people. Some crew members managed to hold on, others became fuel to the flames and burned a greasy yellow as they screamed out into the gulf. The inferno diminished but, still fed by the line, did not go out until a brave engineer in a heat-resistant suit finally tracked down the line’s source and closed it manually.

  ‘Franorl, status?’ Harald demanded tightly when this was all over.

  Captain Franorl appeared on Harald’s eye-screen. ‘We took a hit, sir, but we have it under control now. Minimal casualties.’

  About thirty, by Harald’s count.

  The roar reached a climax, as if Ironfist had now entered the peak winds of some hurricane – which in essence it had. The firing upon them had become intermittent, but it seemed Combine personnel were now using steering thrusters, trying to tilt Platform Three so as to bring its big guns back on target.

  ‘Increase to one-quarter drive,’ Harald ordered. ‘We need to get—’

  Tactical alert.

  Harald tracked down the source and called up the relevant views. Resilience, poised out from Corisanthe III, had taken a major pounding. There were three definite hits upon the hilldigger which had rather neatly taken it out of action. He felt a surge of uncharacteristic panic upon seeing this so soon after the enemy’s successful strike against Franorl’s Desert Wind. Were Combine forces employing some new type of weapon? His panic slowly receded as he carefully analysed the three strikes made upon the ship, and realized how conveniently placed they were. A now familiar anger flooded in to replace the panic and he found himself up on his feet, pacing back and forth before his array of screens.

  ‘Orvram Davidson,’ he said, addressing the mutinous Captain of Resilience. ‘Perhaps you did not learn anything fro
m Tlaster Cobe?’ He would now put Davidson’s hilldigger on a course to ram Corisanthe III. Those aboard the station would then have to destroy the approaching ship or themselves be destroyed. However, even as he opened up the channels to seize control, there were further explosions aboard Resilience: fuel lines, generators, a whole network of systems. The sabotage put the steering controls of that hilldigger beyond Harald’s reach.

  Orvram Davidson now appeared on one of Harald’s large screens. ‘Oh I did learn, Admiral Harald,’ replied the Captain. ‘I think we’ve all now learned that our overall commander is quite insane, and was so even before some sensible soul managed to put a bullet in his head.’

  This reply was delivered on uncoded general address, so could be picked up by anyone, even though Harald had supposedly shut down the young Captain’s ability to broadcast. The voice coming from the screen speaker also seemed excessively loud. Harald paused in his pacing and glanced about the Bridge, noting how crew were turning to look over towards him, though hurriedly returning attention to their tasks upon catching his glance. The ache in his head still growing, despite the painkillers, Harald began tracking Resilience’s systems, trying to find out how Davidson had managed this communication. Abruptly, vividly, he remembered Cheanil, wounded aboard Defence Platform One, and then apologizing for her stupidity in getting herself shot because she could not resist grandstanding. Harald cursed himself for his idiocy in contacting Davidson to indulge in similar grandstanding, before trying to seize control. Yet he also felt a gratitude to Davidson as other memories began to surface clearly in his mind’s sea.

  ‘You know, Harald,’ continued Davidson, ‘I almost made the mistake of respecting you, and I really wish you could have been my Admiral. I would have followed you readily into battle, confident in the soundness of your tactics and knowing we had every chance of winning. But not into battle against my own kind, Harald. Never against my own kind.’