by Neal Asher
"Get yourselves strapped in," Olkennon instructed—the same instruction other unit leaders were also giving.
Before he pulled himself down in his seat Cormac noticed a man and a woman taking the seats nearest the end of the spine aisle where it led into the cockpit. They did not wear uniforms, just comfortable clothing that included a mismatched combination of fatigues, denim, enviroboots and chameleoncloth capes. Peering at the equipment strapped before their seats he saw two stretched multipurpose sniper rifles. Maybe these two were just specialists, but the way they had been talking to the lifter's pilot and the deference with which he seemed to respond to them made Cormac suspect they were ECS agents.
Killers, he thought.
"Is there something about the instruction 'Get strapped in' that confuses you, Cormac?" Olkennon enquired.
He hurriedly pulled himself down and drew the straps across his body. Once secure, he glanced at Carl who was sitting right next to him. "Be nice to know what we're dropping into."
Carl grimaced. "Cormac, we're little more than trainees. It'll be guard duty and urban policing. Anything heavy goes down and the Sparkind will be on it like a Zunniboot on a bug. We get to experience a new environment, do some scutwork and earn a few points towards our final assessment."
Carl evidently wanted a fight, and knew it would be some years before those in charge would let him anywhere near one. Cormac wondered what it was that he himself wanted. He'd joined ECS because he felt a responsibility towards the society that had raised him, but also because it seemed like a good way to travel to places usually off the map. So many other careers would have resulted in him being planet-bound and travelling only when he could afford to, and then to the usual tourist traps. What was the old joke? Join the army, see interesting new places, meet interesting new people, and kill them. He hoped that wouldn't be necessary, but he was prepared to do his duty.
Am I naïve? he wondered, then shrugged. Of course he was, compared to some of the people here who, despite their appearance, were in some cases five times his age.
The lifter shunted forwards in the queue, and viewing screens along the bulkheads before them powered up. Cormac considered the wing shape of the lifter. The vessel was capable of AG descent but had been built in such a shape to enable glide re-entry and landing should anything go wrong with the grav-motors. Only ECS still built these things, the landing craft constructed by other Polity organizations coming in all shapes and sizes. He supposed that those other craft were less likely to go wrong, since there was less chance that anyone would be shooting at them.
Finally he felt the lifter stabilize on maglev fields, then abruptly surge forwards. The screens ahead of him showed the bay walls receding before the lifter fell into flecked blackness. Internal lights dimmed automatically as the craft tugged sideways and brought the planet into view. This seemed to be the signal for everyone to settle and prepare for the hour-long flight to the landing field. Seat lights came on here and there; palm-tops, lap-tops and even the occasional paper book were opened; some passengers sat back with their eyes closed, seeking entertainment or instruction from the augmentations affixed like iron kidney beans behind their ears and surgically linked directly into their brains. Cormac opened the top of his pack and took out his own palm-top, quickly calling up the sites that had provided him with information about the planet below. Glancing aside he noticed that Carl had what might be described as the breach section of a pulse-rifle on his lap, plugged via an optic cable into a palm-top. Yallow, sitting next to him, was leaning back, eyes closed and fingers tapping against her chair arm. Perhaps she was listening to music through her aug, or watching a musical, or even taking part in one. Olkennon was reading a paper book—The Art of War by Sun Tzu. She could have uploaded a recording of the book straight to her crystal mind, so Cormac guessed this was all for show.
Hagren had been an idyllic place to live. Its cities had been very open-plan, but most of the planetary wealth was generated by concerns growing GM crops used in the manufacture of esoteric drugs and biotech construction units, or raising vat-grown meat and other comestibles. These concerns were scattered like farms and ranches over the four main interlinked continents. The spirit here had been a pioneering independent one and this consequently resulted in a lot of problems when ECS ordered the evacuation. It had gone slowly—only two million shifted offworld by the time the Prador arrived. At first Cormac couldn't understand what had gone wrong, then studying news items of the time he realised someone had been sowing some quite strange memes. The Polity, apparently, was not to be trusted and the Prador were not as bad as portrayed, they were in fact being used as an excuse for the evacuation so that ECS could get a firmer grip on this world. Cormac sat back. It all started to make sense to him now—the requirement for so many troops here.
"Separatists," he said.
"Outstanding," said Olkennon, without looking up from her book.
From orbit the impact site was teardrop shaped with a wrinkled area just beyond the blunt end, and beyond that a curiously even and radial pattern spreading to the coastal cities. It seemed a geographic oddity, a curious formation until you were there, and saw what it meant.
The heavy lifter deposited them on a flat expanse of plasticrete that extended into misty distance out of which autogun towers loomed. Other lifters were coming down, smaller transports like flying train-carriages were picking up troops and supplies, gravcars and floating platforms zipped here and there. A massive snake of troops clad in body armour was winding its way into the mists. But they were not to join it.
Holding her fingers to her ear as if listening to something, when in reality the radio signal was directly entering her artificial brain, Olkennon said, "There'll be a transport along for us shortly. Fifty of us are on special assignment out in the sticks."
The air was breathable but left an acidic taste in the mouth and it smelt of burning hair. Cormac breathed through his mouth and took frequent sips from the water spigot of his envirosuit to wash the taste from his palate. Peering intently through the mist, he tried to discern his surroundings. Over in one direction he was sure he could see trees and in another direction he was sure lay the sea, either that or the expanse of plasticrete extended to the horizon.
Some of the troops who had come down with them peeled off in disciplined groups to join the departing column. Some Sparkind moved off with them, while others were picked up by a small open-topped transport. The two Cormac guessed were ECS agents, opened a crate that had been deposited, amongst many, from the lifter's belly hold. Eventually they dragged out a grav-scooter, unfolded it and prepared it for use, then mounted one behind the other and shot off into the sky. Cormac wondered who they were off to assassinate.
Finally two train-carriage transports landed for them and they boarded. Their journey took an hour, and gazing down through one window Cormac saw that they were approaching the impact site they had spied earlier. After the transports departed leaving fifty of them on the peak of a spoil hill, Cormac gazed around. Through slowly clearing mist he could see the edge of that radial pattern and now knew it consisted of skarch trees, millions of acres of them, all flattened and pointing in the direction of the blast wave. The spoil hill they stood upon had been thrown up by the impact, and was one of a whole range of them. Below this range, the scalloped inner slope of the crater delved down to something massive, brassy coloured, and still smoking.
"I have given your unit leaders the positions for each unit and the area to be covered by each," said someone.
Cormac turned to see some grizzled veteran standing balanced on a couple of packs. He glanced at Carl who rolled his eyes—it had been a dictum in the regulars that so long as your commander never felt the urge to make speeches, your chances of survival were higher. However, more closely studying the one addressing them, he realised that individual was Golem. In reality, he realised, all the new human recruits here were being nurse-maided.
"I cannot over-stress the importance of what
we are doing here. There are those who would like to gain access to what lies below us, and having gained access might obtain weapons whose destructive power we have seen the effect of in orbit and on the surface of this world. Now I'm not going to ramble on—I'm not one for speeches. Your unit leaders will take you to your areas of responsibility." The Golem grinned and stepped down.
"What did I tell you?" said Carl. "Guard duty."
"Yeah, but we're guarding something pretty important," said Yallow.
They'd been given a screen display aboard the troop transport—almost a documentary. It had taken a swarm of Polity attack ships and drones to drive the Prador dreadnought down into atmosphere. The linear accelerator that had finally done for its engines had been sited down the length of a deep mineshaft in the ground. That mineshaft had become a crater itself shortly afterwards. The dreadnought, suddenly gaining the aerodynamics of a million-ton brick, had dropped, attempted AG planing, then ploughed into the ground below where Cormac stood.
"Comunits on," said Olkennon. "Let's go."
"This is to give us an authentic taste of soldiering," commented Carl, as he gazed out through his monocular into the darkness.
Cormac squelched his feet in the mud in the bottom of their foxhole and surmised, from his reading, that an authentic experience should include leaky boots. Carl's cynicism could be wearing at times. He raised his own monocular and peered from his side of the foxhole. The infrared image he saw showed him leggy things with bodies about the size of a human head crawling about on the slopes below. They'd been given no warnings about anything dangerous… then again, maybe that was part of the learning process, maybe they had been supposed to find this out for themselves.
"Are you seeing these beasties?" he asked.
"Scavengers," Carl replied. "Called cludder beetles. They'll eat anything organic."
"I thought the inland ecology was Terran."
"Imports—the eggs probably came in on the bottom of someone's boot."
That accounted for Carl knowing about these things, for to Cormac's knowledge he certainly hadn't done any research on this place.
They kept watching into the long hours of the night. The stars here had a reddish tint and there were no recognisable constellations. About three hours into their watch a group of four asteroids tumbled up over the horizon, flashing reflected sunlight then falling into shadow as their course took them overhead. When he began to feel weary, Cormac took out a packet of stimulant patches and pressed one against his wrist. In moments his bleariness cleared and he abruptly realised one of the cludders was only a few yards downslope from him. He pointed his monocular at it and brought it into focus.
"Fancy a swap round?" he suggested to Carl.
"I'm fine where I am," his companion replied.
The cludder looked horribly like a human skull without eye-sockets and with eight arthropod legs sprouting from where its jawbone should have been. He could hear it making sucking slobbering sounds as it drew a skarch twig into some unseen mouth.
"About these cludders—" Cormac began.
A flashing, like someone striking an arc with a welding rod, lit up their surrounding, and this was immediately followed by the stuttering of pulse-rifles, then the clatter of some automatic projectile weapon. Cormac turned and located the source as lying behind a mound to his right, possibly down in the crater itself. His comunit earplug chirped, and obviously addressing both himself and Carl, Olkennon said, "Have you had a nice sleep there, boys?"
Since Carl outranked Cormac by a couple of points, it was his prerogative to reply. "We have not been asleep, Commander."
"Then perhaps your monoculars have malfunctioned or maybe even your eyes?"
When Olkennon got sarcastic, this usually meant someone had seriously fucked up.
"If you could explain, Commander," said Carl primly.
"Well, it seems a commando unit of six rebels just tried to get into the Prador dreadnought. Luckily they were running a small gravsled—probably to haul away a small warhead on—and one of our satellites picked that up on a gravity map. I'm looking at that map now and previous recordings. They came in right past you."
"Were they caught?" asked Carl.
After a long delay, Olkennon replied, "Hold your positions and stay alert. Four of them were taken down but the other two are heading back your way. If they arrive before I get there, try for leg shots or try to pin them down, but don't hesitate to kill if necessary. Out."
"How the hell did we miss them?" wondered Carl, bringing his monocular back up to his eyes.
"Some sort of chameleonware?" said Cormac, doing the same.
He scanned the nearby slopes then concentrated in the direction of the crater. As far as he understood it the only portable camouflage available for a soldier was chameleoncloth fatigues—the same cloth the outer layer of his envirosuit was made from and which turned it to the colour of the mud he was lying in. But such cloth did not conceal one from someone looking through a monocular set to infrared, which was why they had dug in—that, and the possibility of gunfire.
"Maybe they slipped past while you were studying cludder beetles," Carl suggested.
Cormac immediately felt a flush of guilt. He'd only been distracted by the creatures for a moment—nowhere near enough time for someone to get past him. Then he felt anger. Carl's accusation seemed not only unjust but spiteful. Had Carl himself fallen asleep or not been following the required scanning patterns? Was he now trying to find a way to shift the blame onto Cormac? The anger existed in him for a short time, accelerating his heartbeat as he searched for a sufficiently cutting reply. Then it seemed to hit a cut-off, and he abruptly reassessed his situation.
"Maybe they did," he said without heat.
Aren't we on the same side? he thought. Carl might want to step on people's hands in a scramble up the promotional ladder, but no matter. Cormac had joined to do a job, and do it well. He abruptly felt an utter coldness towards his companion, a detachment. It was as if the man had suddenly become a malfunctioning item of machinery he must account for in his calculations. He would watch Carl.
Following his search-grid training, Cormac continued to scan the slopes on his side of the foxhole. Carl was doing the same. A belligerent silence fell between them.
"I'm half a mile from you and will be there soon," Olkennon informed them through their comunits.
Carl, as if in response to this, abruptly stood, bringing his rifle to his shoulder while flicking up its infrared sight screen. Cormac spun, monocular still to his eyes. The rifle thrummed, spitting an actinic broken beam into the darkness. It fired again, then again.
"Got 'em," said Carl.
Olkennon had specified leg shots, or keeping the two escapees pinned down, probably because someone in ECS wanted to interrogate these people. What had Cormac seen? Two people struggling towards them, one supporting the other, obviously wounded. The light from the pulse-rifle tended to blank infrared viewing for brief periods; still, Carl's shots had all torn into upper bodies and heads.
"I fucked up, okay? I fucked up." Carl turned and gazed out the wide window of the troop transport. Other soldiers aboard gazed across enquiringly and Cormac felt this best a conversation to have at some other time.
"But that's not like you," Yallow insisted.
"End of conversation," said Carl, without looking round.
At that point Olkennon rejoined them after speaking with some grizzled sergeant seated towards the front of the transport. She gazed at them for a moment then sat, and it was difficult to tell whether she could read the unpleasant atmosphere. Cormac wondered if Golem could sense such things… probably, though by picking up pheromones and reading the tensions in facial expressions. They probably used some sort of formula.
"The barracks adjoin a temporary township by the coast adjacent to the old city," she said without any ado. "You are located in Theta bubble. Cormac, your room is 21c, Yallow, 21b and Carl, 21a. Get yourselves settled in then use the local facilitie
s—I doubt we'll have any reassignment until after the enquiry."
Carl grimaced and turned to gaze out of the window again.
"We get our own rooms?" asked Yallow.
"Certainly," said Olkennon. "There's no shortage of living space and no limitations were put on the size of the township."
Without any hint of a change in her expression of mild interest, Yallow looked across at Cormac. It had been over a month now since they'd had their own rooms and certain activities had been neglected. He felt a pleasurable anticipation seat itself in his groin.
Within a few minutes the troop transport descended and landed on an area of grated plasticrete over mud. A short walk away bonded-earth domes stood clustered as if the earth had bubbled. The domes were a uniform grey-brown, scattered with green and the occasional flashes of red, which only as the four of them were walking over did Cormac identify as some adapted form of geranium gaining a root-hold in the bonded earth. There were numerous windows inset in the lower floors of the domes, though fewer windows in the upper levels since they were mainly used for storage. Some of the domes had large hatches open in those upper areas and extending below them landing platforms for military AG cargo drays.
They departed the landing area onto a path of the same grated plasticrete leading across churned mud sprouting skarch shoots like blue asparagus.
"Not difficult to find our dome," said Yallow, pointing. The main entrance to each dome had one letter of the Greek alphabet incised above. And even as they approached these buildings, Cormac picked out the letter theta.
