by Neal Asher
"Can you fly a shuttle injured like that?" she abruptly enquired.
Of course he could; he nodded.
"We'll head straight out to the terraforming plant and start searching. When you get to the shuttle, you bring it straight out there." As she turned away an area map arrived in his aug, almost like a dismissal. It gave the coordinates of the old terraforming plant some fifty miles away.
"I've told Sadist to come in above us now, since if Thrace is here I rather doubt he's now unaware of our presence. It should arrive in about an hour and begin scanning the plant. But we'll get out there and start searching." She gazed about at them. "Let's move." She led the way out and Gorman, Travis and Crean followed. Only Crean looked back, her expression unreadable.
"Cold bastards, those Polity agents," said Adsel.
Cormac glanced across at her, then scanned round for his pulse-gun. He found it lying under a table by the foot of one of Tarren's men, who was unconscious—snoring in fact.
"What are you going to do with them?" he asked.
"Those identified as murderers become fertilizer, just like him." Adsel gestured towards the hooper. "The rest get to leave if there's a ship left, if not they work for their keep."
Cormac stared for a moment more at the hooper, who now seemed to be sagging closer to the floor. He felt a stab of sadness. Here was a crime he could do nothing about, a crime that might well have been committed before he was born. Returning his attention to Adsel, he reckoned the people here would probably do all right. Presumably they now possessed weapons, if Spencer's comment about a weapons cache was anything to go by, and the will to use them. It struck him as unlikely there would be any more Tarrens coming here, since people like that, though quite prepared to kill, did not like risking their lives unless there was profit to be made and no other options available. It did occur to him, however, that in this Adsel, they might end up with a completely home-grown despot.
"I'll be able to get to the shuttle myself," he said as, with difficulty, he holstered his pulse-gun.
"I imagine so," said Adsel, "but I wouldn't want any of my people mistaking you for one of Tarren's men—it's been getting quite nasty out there."
The moment he and Adsel reached the courtyard, Cormac saw what she meant. The water in the interlinked ponds was now red, and a shoal of the troutlike fish had gathered underneath a floating corpse clad in a grey envirosuit, whether to feed or just out of curiosity was difficult to tell. Out in the garden were two more corpses—both also Tarren's men. One of them had obviously been shot numerous times through the back with a pulse-rifle, the other was hanging from a palm tree, optic cable wound around his neck and secured over one of the sawn-back scales on the trunk. His hands were tied behind his back and his face black, tongue protruding. He had died there. Trying to be coldly analytical, Cormac realised that someone must have held onto his feet while he strangled, to stop him from supporting his own weight on the lower tree scales.
"Lot of bitterness here," he observed.
Adsel just glanced at him blankly, then dismissively looked away again.
In the airlock she put on a breather mask pulled from within her bright clothing, and they headed out towards the spaceport. Three ships were rising from the ground and another, still on the ground, was smoking, muted fires visible inside through blast holes in its hull, sustained by internal air supply and doubtless soon to be extinguished by the oxygen-free outer atmosphere. Numerous locals were scattered here and there, and numerous corpses lay sprawled on the ground, many wearing the same kind of bright clothing as Adsel. When they finally reached the shuttle, all under the watchful gaze of a crowd of locals gathered about the nissen huts, Adsel stepped back.
"It's easy to be judgmental when you come from the civilized Polity," she said, her voice distorted through her mask. "There's no ECS to protect us here, no wise AIs to govern us."
Cormac did not know what to say, and so nodded in agreement before climbing inside the shuttle. Only later, as he applied to his biceps a nano-activated wound-dressing from the shuttle's first aid kit, did he remember that all survivors within the Graveyard had been offered relocation to other worlds within the Polity. That Adsel and her fellows had stayed here meant they must have refused that offer and were living with the consequences.
The shuttle subscreen briefly showed a view of a grounded gravcar, then swung back to the ruin. The terraforming plant was not much to look at, comprised mainly of big silos like the ones just a few hundred yards from Cormac beside the spaceport. There were also numerous low buildings and networks of big pipes, many of which speared away across the ground beyond view, piles of twisted wreckage, and spills of green and rusty brown across the white ground. He assumed this was one of those places that manufactured masses of GM algae tailored to survive in this environment and spread through the ground, slowly multiplying and chewing up oxides to add oxygen to the atmosphere, hence those white and brown spills. Perhaps, if no other plants were built, the stuff already here would spread out and eventually finish the job in a few tens of thousands of years, though more likely the growth spread would not possess enough momentum and eventually die.
Now the view swung from side to side as Crean glanced first at Travis to her left, then at Gorman and Spencer to her right and just ahead of her.
"Spencer wants you to bring the shuttle here and land it beside the gravcar," said Crean, her voice issuing from the screen.
Maybe Crean was the only one prepared to talk to him, or maybe he was just being paranoid. Spencer and Gorman would certainly be a bit disappointed with him but not overly censorious, surely. He had risked their lives by allowing himself to go into combat when he was not functioning at a hundred per cent, but being new to the Sparkind, only recently promoted from the status of grunt, surely some leeway would be allowed? Cormac would have given anything to have heard their conversations since they departed for the terraforming plant. Or perhaps he was being both paranoid and egotistical to even think they had been talking about him.
"Okay," he replied. "I'm on my way."
"How are you now?" she enquired solicitously.
For a moment he did not want to have this conversation, since he did not want any of the others to overhear, then he damned himself for his stupidity, because Crean was quite capable of talking to him without using her audible-voice generator.
"I am well enough," he said cautiously.
"Don't sweat it," she replied. "Nobody expects perfection from you at once, and certainly not Spencer. She walked us into a situation which, because she had not completely assessed it, could have gone a lot worse than it did."
"Meaning?"
"Meaning she didn't know about the hooper, and she should have."
"I see."
Knowing that did make him feel a little better, but not much. Perhaps he was just being too hard on himself? His arm now properly dressed and the drugs in the dressing numbing both that and his nagging headache, he reached out and quickly initiated the shuttle's start-up routine, then gripped the joystick and pulled it up.
"Sadist, how are you doing?" he asked, as the craft's AG motors lifted it shakily from the ground. He boosted it higher with a couple of spurts from the steering thrusters, and watched the ground rapidly drop away.
"I will be above you in thirty minutes," the ship AI replied.
Cormac was about to ask if Sadist could send a program to realign the grids in the shuttle's ion drive, since there was no longer any need for the craft to appear to be a Graveyard relic owned by dodgy inhabitants of the area, when he started to pick up military com in his aug.
"Over there," said Gorman.
Crean's view swung across to focus on a gravcar grounded by one of the low buildings. A chameleoncloth tarpaulin had been slung across it, but obviously the wind had picked up one corner and dislodged it. Crean now began scoping out the surrounding area with magnification, focus and in spectrums not available to unaugmented humans. There seemed to be no weapons emplacement
s within view, but in infrared she detected a heat source within the nearest silo adjacent to where the car was parked.
"Two-by-two cover," said Spencer, breaking into a trot towards the gravcar. "Pulse-rifles down to electro-stun. We want Thrace alive if he's in there."
Crean and Travis reached the grounded gravcar well ahead of Gorman and Spencer. Meanwhile, Cormac urged the shuttle out over the spaceport, checked his position on a terrain screen called up in a frame in one corner of the subscreen, then set the shuttle grav-planing towards the terraforming plant.
Now he asked, "Sadist, can you do anything about the ion drive in this shuttle from up there?"
"I have sent an alignment program," the ship AI replied. "It will take two minutes to take effect."
He could turn on the drive immediately and have the shuttle speeding to his destination, but running such drives dirty never did them much good. They also tended to be noisy, and he guessed that Spencer would not want him creating a racket while she and the others were creeping about down there. He decided to wait.
Crean studied the chalky ground about the gravcar, a visual program clearly outlining footprints for her. There were numerous patterns, so obviously Carl had been tramping about this area for some time, but most of them led to a single door in the nearby building. In a second Crean and Travis were over by the door.
"No booby-traps or sensors evident," sent Travis, obviously having used his Golem senses to scan through the wall.
The moment she arrived, Spencer twisted the door handle and she and Gorman entered. Crean and Travis followed them in, pulse rifles up against their shoulders as they scanned the gloomy interior. From Crean's perspective, Cormac observed twisted and collapsed pipework, and big ceramic vats, some cracked or shattered. He observed frames picking out various points within that area and understood she was making threat assessments. Meanwhile, Gorman and Spencer reached double swing-doors through the further wall, one of the doors hanging by only one hinge. Now they covered the area behind them as Travis and Crean sped over.
"Your ion drive is now at optimum function," Sadist abruptly informed him.
Had only two minutes passed? It seemed like hours. Cormac held off engaging the drive as he gazed at the screen. Crean and Travis went through the doors, Gorman and Spencer coming through behind them to cover the area they now hastily crossed. Here lay a long, low room walled with chainglass through which ran many transparent pipes; some sort of control area with numerous consoles were attached along those same walls. The area terminated against the curve of a silo, where a hole had recently been cut through. Using her infrared vision, Crean detected heat beyond, inside. Travis dived through the hole ahead of her, while she turned to cover the other two as they approached. Then she dived through, rolled and came upright in the cathedral space inside.
"No one here," said Travis, out loud, as Gorman and Spencer now entered.
"The heat source?" Spencer snapped.
Travis gestured to a large crate with some fleshy-looking substance seemingly growing over it like a fungus. Crean, focused on this, detecting the heat signature inside the crate. They all walked over to inspect it. Cormac felt both disappointed and glad as he engaged the ion drive to accelerate towards their location. He certainly wanted Carl apprehended, but he wanted to be there when it happened.
"Shit!" Spencer exclaimed.
Cormac returned his attention to the screen, and saw that Crean was now gazing down at the face of Marcus Spengler. The stuff strewn over the crate was syntheflesh: Carl's syntheflesh disguise. Then the face spoke.
"Ah, you're here at last," it said. "Say bye bye cruel world."
The face winked.
"Run," said Spencer, and chaotic images ensued—too fast for Cormac to follow.
Then a light ignited on the horizon, and he looked up. A fireball expanded, so bright it seemed to eat into the Earth. He just stared, utterly understanding what had happened, yet still unable to accept it. When he looked back at the screen, it was blank.
The crash of the explosion arrived shortly after its glare, and it sounded as if the world was being smashed in half. The shockwave struck just as Cormac slammed the shuttle into an emergency landing, lifting the vessel off the ground, pointing nose down. It automatically fired stabilizing thrusters and Cormac felt a strange wave run through his body as the grav-motors tried to realign too. Immediately the surrounding air filled with white dust, blotting everything from view. He concentrated on bringing the craft level and landing it properly, but it still came down hard, and as its systems wound down into silence, he listened to the patter of some sort of hail against the hull.
"Gorman?… Crean?… Travis?… Spencer?"
No response over his aug, just static. The electromagnetic pulse from the blast might well have screwed up his aug… might have screwed up their augs…
Feeling numb, he unstrapped himself and headed for the side door of the shuttle, stood before it for a long moment, then went off to search the craft's lockers for some goggles, which he found—they were Gorman's. Opening the door he stepped out, then immediately stepped back inside when falling cinders burned his bare arms. After a further search he found an envirosuit which, with painful slowness, he began to don. When he finally closed it up he just sat exhausted, not quite sure how to proceed. Then came a query for linkage through his aug, and he realised, recognising the source, that the device had lost all its previous settings. He approved the query and a com channel established.
"Are you alive?" Sadist enquired.
It seemed a stupid question but then, for all the ship AI knew, it was opening a communications channel with a still-functional augmentation attached to a corpse.
"I'm alive," Cormac replied.
"Are you injured?"
"Got a pulse shot through the arm."
"I know about that," said the AI, sounding irritated. "I wanted to know if you sustained further injuries as a result of the CTD blast."
On some level he had known that's what the explosion had been, but never really admitted it consciously. Carl had left a nice little booby-trap for anyone who came hunting him, with the final touch of that syntheflesh head winking at the victims.
"They're gone," he said abruptly, but the words did not seem to make any sense.
"At present I can detect no signals either from Travis and Crean or from the augmentations belonging to Gorman and Agent Spencer," said Sadist didactically. "However, it is quite possible that the EM pulse knocked out all their com hardware—you will have to go and look."
Cormac jerked himself to his feet and headed outside, where he found that the cinders had stopped falling and the dust had cleared enough for him to see about ten feet ahead.
"I am now within scanning range," Sadist informed him. "I cannot as yet penetrate the ionization around the site, but I can see you, Cormac. Might I enquire why you are outside the shuttle."
Cormac just stood gaping into the dust, his brain seemingly running on neutral. Why had he stepped outside, what purpose was served by him walking the twenty-odd miles to the terraforming plant?
"Bit of a glitch," he said, and returned to the shuttle.
"Are you sure you are uninjured?" Sadist enquired.
"I think it's what might be described as shock."
"Then take an antishock med," said the AI.
Standing inside the shuttle, Cormac gazed across at the first aid kit, then abruptly turned and smashed his left fist into the wall. "Fuckit!… Fuckit! Fuckit!" Then he forced himself into motion, taking the pilot's chair and re-engaging the shuttle's systems. He glanced at the blank subscreen and abruptly reached out to key the controls that expanded the location map to cover it, then jerked the shuttle into the air. He did not want to take antishock meds; it seemed like a betrayal.
Fifty feet up the dust thinned, and a hundred feet up he was above the worst of it in his present location, but ahead a mushroom cloud stood high in the sky. Turning on the ion drive he thrust the joystick forwards, not
bothering to check the location map since his destination was clear. Within a few minutes debris were pattering against the shuttle and occasionally there would be a loud clang as something big impacted. Nearing the stem of the cloud he spun the shuttle around and used the ion drive to decelerate, then descended into boiling whiteness. This was no good—he needed a clearer view. Setting the craft to hover he checked the control panel before him for a moment, then damned himself for not thinking clearly.
He aug-linked to the shuttle's system, mentally sorted through the menus available, noting numerous diagnostic warnings from the EM damage to the craft's systems, and eventually found what he wanted. Shortly a radar map of the terrain below began to build on the screen—slowly, because of the ionic interference—but it soon became evident that there was no terraforming plant anymore, just a large crater with occasional chunks of silo and pipework scattered about it. Using the radar image for guidance, which was also updating slowly, he cautiously descended towards the largest mass of wreckage. Again setting the shuttle to hover, he waited until the picture on the subscreen was again complete, selected a clear area to one side of the wreckage and descended cautiously to the ground, using a high-powered radar pulse to give him the distance to measure his altitude. Still the shuttle settled with a crash.
"Can you hear me?" he enquired, via the aug channel to Sadist.
For a moment there was no clear reply, just occasional bursts of static, then abruptly Sadist spoke. "I can hear you, just." The AI's voice was clear to Cormac so he guessed it must be using a narrow-beam transmission aimed precisely at his location, while using all sorts of clean-up programs to sort out what Cormac was transmitting. He unstrapped himself and headed for the door, knowing that, though there would be a lot of radiation outside, his envirosuit would protect him from much of it as would his own internal suite of nanites and the anti-mutagenic tweaks to his own immune system. However, he called up the main menu in his aug, then sorted through numerous submenus until he obtained what he required. Once this facility of the aug initiated, a simple dosimeter appeared in his third eye, presently reading in the green. Anyway, even if he received what once would have been considered a lethal dose, the medical facilities aboard Sadist would certainly be able to deal with it—dealing with the effects of radiation was something ECS Medical had become quite expert in during the years of the Prador war.
