by Neal Asher
"A day should cover it."
A linkage request arrived in Cormac's aug, identified by the figures on the palm-top screen, and he paid with a thought.
"The one at the end of the row." The boy pointed, then returned to his tinkering. As Cormac walked over to the car he wondered if the boy was really one of those odd adults who liked to retain the appearance of a child. He felt not, for positioned on the wall of the portable office, a sticky screen displayed images from the war, some of them being of Jebel U-cap Krong, but of course that was not conclusive.
The chainglass bubble automatically rose as he approached, so he stepped inside the vehicle, immediately taking hold of the simple joystick to lift the car from the roof even as the bubble closed back down again. A flock of gull-things scattered above him, spattering the vehicle with white excrement, which quickly slid from its frictionless surfaces. City traffic-control immediately took over and the car swept to one side and then up, joining a widely spaced row of similar vehicles punctuating the sky. Tapping the console screen turned it on, and in a moment Cormac called up a map of the area, and a further search scaled the map down to show him "Vogol's Stone" some two hundred miles away at the tip of the Olston Peninsular. The moment he selected it as his destination, traffic-control turned his vehicle out of his present sky lane, then into another, the car accelerating. Within a few minutes the city was receding behind him and the screen alerting him to the fact that he could now take control of the car, if he wished. He so wished.
Below, mountains of grey stone speared above valleys filled with plants like pine trees, though with foliage both dark green and steely blue, and some areas Cormac recognised as being infested with skarch. Gradually, it seemed the grey stone was being sucked down into the trees, which were soon changing to autumn colours of deciduous growth. The mountains became hills, interspersed with the occasional lake along the shores of which the local «gulls» skated their bodies across the mud in search of their favourite delicacy: a thing that looked like a cross between a slug and a cockroach. Next, Cormac began to notice occasional barren areas, some of them fenced off, all of them looking as if they had been ploughed. Spotting a plume of vapour from some machine working one such area he brought his car down low to take a look. It was a huge cylinder running on numerous sets of treads, conveyors of scoops lifting soil up into its mouth, blackened and smoking soil excreting from its anus. The thing was a massive soil sterilizer, there to kill potential Prador bugs or nanomachines. Cormac flew on.
Soon the barren areas melded and were only occasionally scattered with copses of trees. He saw great lines of sterilizing machines stretching to the horizon, other devices like mobile oil rigs trundling across the wasteland at a snail's pace, occasional ruined cities or towns, buildings melted and crumbling. Then, in the distance he saw the sea, and swinging out that way he was soon flying above a long rocky coastline against which waves broke to cast up plumes of water through crevices, and above which spume floated like confetti in the low gravity. His console screen pinged, scaled up the map and he saw Vogol's Stone lay only ten miles away. He was reaching the tip of the peninsular now, with sea both to his right and left. A series of sharp peaks rose ahead, marching down into the sea. His map gave him direction arrows, then pinged at him again once he arrived above his destination.
The stone had to be the single canted monolith jutting from a plateau cut into the side of one of the peaks, for there, right beside it, rested a familiar steely shape: a scorpion memory.
The weapons exhibition occupied the centre of the city where permanent buildings had yet to be raised. A three-dimensional mazelike structure, nearly two miles wide, had been assembled from portable, but massive tubes of plasmel strengthened with girders of light bubble metal. Escheresque stairways interlaced all this, also drop-shafts and enclosed walkways. The entrance Cormac approached was a wide arch without human attendants but, the whole exhibition being computer-monitored, the doors would automatically close once an optimum number of visitors had entered, then reopen when the number dropped again. The long tubular foyer lying beyond was crowded but not unpleasantly so. Here, numerous exhibits stood in chainglass cases, on pedestals or hung from the plain white walls. Entering, he immediately received a query to his aug, allowed it, and studied the provided menu of options. There were numerous historical tours he could take, both general and specific: he could get an overview of weapons history or he could track the specific historical development of particular weapons. He could focus on a chosen era, for example just taking the tour of medieval weaponry, and enjoying ersatz battles between armoured knights. He could select particular battles and inspect every recorded detail, observe how the weapons of the time were deployed, to what effect, hear expert analysis, study tactics and logistics. It seemed there was something here for every variety of war and disaster junky.
Just inside the entrance Cormac cast an eye over a huge pedestal-mounted rail-gun, obviously of Prador manufacture, then turned and halted to gaze for a long while at a large oil painting. It depicted the battle between the Polity dreadnought My Mary Rose and a large Prador dreadnought, with distances shortened to fit both vessels within the frame. This was the first one-on-one encounter between such vessels in which the Polity ship was actually victorious, and as a child Cormac used to run a video recording of this as a screen saver on his p-top. Further along he regarded a display case containing a single Prador claw. Keying to the constant signal from the case, he uploaded information, discovering the claw was recovered in the vicinity of the battle depicted in the painting. Doubtless the rail-gun on the other side of the foyer had been recovered from the same location.
Entering a juncture of six of the tubular units beyond the foyer, he now needed to make a decision. Here the exhibitors had obviously chosen World War I as their kicking off point. Digitally remastered films from the time could be run on various screens or loaded to aug. The centre display was of the first ever tanks to be used in war: slow-moving iron monsters likely to kill their own occupants merely with the fumes from their engines. In one area, obviously surrounded by a sound-suppression field, visitors were availing themselves of the opportunity to fire replicas of the weapons used at the time: Enfield rifles, heavy revolvers, Maxim machineguns, and the targets available ranged from static silhouette boards to moving manikins that actually bled and screamed. Numerous VR booths offered similar experiences and more besides. It all depended on how much you were prepared to pay, for this whole exhibition was privately owned. Heading down from here would take Cormac directly into wars prior to the first to be numbered. Ahead lay the development of the tank, but only the kind that ran on treads, to his right the propeller-driven airplane, and to his left the machinegun, but only so far as that weapon used solid projectiles. Would such things interest Carl Thrace? Certainly, but nowhere near as much as what lay above, far above. Cormac headed for the nearest stair.
Stepping from the gravcar Cormac expected to feel some disappointment upon once again seeing this drone up close, or rather, up close when he himself was not on the point of death. The distant sight of the drone still roused in him all sorts of complicated feelings, along with the excitement he had felt as a child. It also seemed unchanged: still a big iron scorpion with peridot eyes and weapons ports below its mouth. But Cormac had changed, had experienced an array of situations and emotions, was bigger in every way, so perhaps the drone would look small, not quite so substantial as childhood memory told him.
Drawing closer to where Amistad squatted in the shadow of Vogol's Stone, Cormac realised that childhood or otherwise, edited or not, his memories where not lying to him. If anything, from an adult perspective, the scorpion drone was even more fearsome, for he now knew that there were numerous reasons to fear it. He knew that its armour was tough ceramal it would take a particle cannon to penetrate, that it contained enough weapons to tear a city apart, and that if any individual pissed it off sufficiently, it would probably use its claws to tear that one apart, slowly,
for since this machine was a product of the later years of the war, when the aim was to produce fighting grunts just as fast as possible, it was not necessarily stable or moral. Its weapons were supplied with power by laminar storage and fusion reactor, both of which the drone could detonate at will, and during the war its kind often did if they were somewhere the explosion could do huge damage to the enemy, or if they were in danger of being captured. To say that the entity before him was dangerous was an understatement, for Amistad was a purpose-built killing machine with «bastard» being an essential part of its job description.
The drone rose up onto its numerous legs, the fat hooked sting in its tail looping above threateningly, and a single weapons port opening briefly. It raised one long lethal claw and gestured to the stone above.
"He was a Prador first-child, you know."
That sonorous voice sent a shiver down Cormac's spine. He gazed up at the stone and considered accessing information about it, but such ready knowledge was a conversation-killer. "So what was this Vogol's story?"
"He was the leader of a Prador battalion: near on a thousand second-children, war drones, armour, portable p-cannons. We smashed them, but he and a few of his kin survived and climbed to the top of the stone with hard-field generators and two p-cannons. He held us off for two whole hours. He's still up there now." Amistad flicked its antennae to one side. "Follow me."
The drone led the way out from the shadow of the stone around towards its canted back, where a stairway had been cut into the rock. This last was a recent addition, Cormac noted, because it actually cut through the burn marks and heat-glazing caused by the battle here. The drone's sharp feet scraped the rock sending flakes of stone tumbling down behind. Within a few minutes they reached a slightly tilted plateau, and there stood Vogol. The first-child was much larger than those of its kind Cormac had encountered aboard the Prador ship on Hagren, its shell lay nearly ten feet across and its colouration was a bright combination of yellow and purple. It stood perfectly still, a big rail-gun affixed to one claw, an ammunition belt and cables trailing to a power supply and heavy ammo box affixed to its underside. As he drew closer Cormac saw that a thick glaze covered the creature, and rods supported it, penetrating into the rock below. Vogol had been stuffed and mounted.
"I got to him first," Amistad informed him. "Just after your father managed to down their systems with a computer virus and put a shot through one of their power supplies. Vogol never gave up; even spitting stomach acid at me after I tore off all his limbs." The drone was chinking a claw against the stone below it as it gazed at the Prador. "Happy times."
"Tell me about my father," said Cormac.
After a long pause the drone reared up and spread both claws expansively. "I met him here on this world. He was a combat veteran and specialist in attack viruses, whose usefulness in creating such viruses was coming to an end because of his frustration with being kept out of the fighting. Just like you he was then transferred in as a replacement in a Sparkind unit." Amistad dropped down onto all legs and turned to face Cormac, not that there was anything in that face Cormac could read. "I first met him in the Cavander mountains where his unit, amongst others, and amongst independent drones like myself, was hunting Prador saboteurs. Being allowed to fight once again, he was taking more risks than he should and using Jebel U-cap Krong's methods: wearing chameleoncloth fatigues and sneaking up on Prador with gecko mines to take them out. The AI on the ground did not like this, but knew it had to give him some leeway."
It was good to hear this and Cormac was glad he had come, but he knew there was much more to be told. "This was during the Hessick Campaign?"
"No, a solstan month before."
"When did you meet him next?"
"You understand what the Hessick Campaign was?"
"The Prador occupied this peninsular, where they had numerous cities under siege. I'm not entirely clear why they wanted to fight a ground war here—why they didn't just bombard from orbit." Cormac shrugged. "It was a big and complicated war."
"Our understanding of the situation then," said the drone, "was that we were certain to lose this world, because if we won the ground war the Prador dreadnoughts would then move in to obliterate everything. But we were fighting a delaying action in order to keep the runcibles online, and ships coming in, wherever possible, to evacuate as many of the people here as we could." The drone brought one claw to clonk its tip against the stone, as if making a point. "Only as we began the campaign to drive the Prador from the peninsular so we could evacuate the besieged cities, did we find out the true aim of the Prador."
"Presumably to establish a foothold, but also to retain this world as a living environment," said Cormac.
"So we thought, but we could see no tactical advantage to them." The drone shook itself. "You of course know that this was the time when the traitor Jay Hoop was operating out of the world now named after him: Spatterjay. He was processing tens of thousands of human prisoners, ferried there by the Prador. He was infecting them with the Spatterjay virus in order to make them tough enough to withstand the installation of Prador thrall technology. It is estimated that before his operation was shut down, he processed over ten million human beings, but the likely figure is much, much higher."
Cormac nodded, a nasty taste in his mouth. He had already seen a product of that "processing," the hooper on Shaparon, the "human blank" as they were sometimes called: an abnormally tough human with most of his brain ripped out and replaced with thrall technology.
"That's why the Prador were here," Amistad continued. "Yes, they were fighting ECS forces, but they didn't want to bombard this place and kill everyone because they wanted the people. Their snatch squads were operating all across the planet. Cities we had thought destroyed during the fighting had in fact been emptied then subsequently demolished." The drone raised that claw and brought it down hard, splintering stone. "They were not here to gain some tactical advantage in the war, but for slaves."
The stair wound up past displays of combat knives, uniforms, handguns. Suspended in the central space was a replica Stuka, then an American tank, then a selection of World War II machineguns. Opposite each of these were drop-shaft entrances to take those whose interest was more specific to the areas dealing with these items. The WWII room contained more weaponry than the one below, more logistical stuff too, though it was still possible to have fun blowing away a mannikin with a Sten gun. Divergent halls traced the development of jets during the war and for a number of years thereafter. One entire hall was devoted to atomic weapons used on Earth before Solar System colonization, and another traced the development of submarines, though with a brief diversion at the beginning into the submarine used in the American Civil War and WWI submarines. Cormac kept on climbing, heading for the Solar System corporate wars and beyond. Or course, up there, right at the top, the Prador/Human war occupied almost one third of this exhibition.
After World War II ensued smaller but no less intense conflicts: the Korean War, Vietnam, the Cold War, the numerous squabbles over fast-depleting oil supplies and the subsequent squabbles over other resources, then, until the human race established itself in the Solar System, everything was labelled a "police action" rather than a war. It was during this time that the leaden behemoths of government were bankrupting themselves and imploding and the corporations were growing in power. Effectively the governments were bought out by the corporations, asset-stripped and consigned to history, then, because they were as human run as the previous governments and just as liable to greed and stupidity, the corporations began to fight between themselves for power and resources.
The whole of history was not covered here, for that would defeat the purpose of this exhibition. There was nothing here about the diaspora of cryo- and generation-ships during the time of corporate power, nor much about the political complications—they only displayed where relevant to some conflict or the development of some new weapon. Cormac paused by an early attack ship, apparently salvaged from the
surface of Io, which was used during an assault on Virgin Jupiter by the Jethro Manx Canard Corporation—one of the survivors of those wars and a weapons development and design corporation still in existence now, though controlled by the AIs. Gazing about he saw that there were few visitors in this part of the exhibition. Perhaps those coming here who, like himself, had probably bought the bargain price week-long pass, were leaving these upper levels until later. He decided to take a side route from this point, for he remembered Carl expressing an interest in JMCC, in the weapons it developed, and in one particular designer.
A side passage took him into a hall detailing the weapons developed by JMCC. The corporation was responsible for much that was still extant now: the pulse-guns, proton weapons and particle weapons—it was left to others to find ways to defend against these destructive devices. The JMCC hall rose in steps heading, he realised, for the Prador War levels above, where the corporation expanded massively to develop the aforementioned weapons into something much more effective than initially. Before reaching that area, which he could identify far ahead by the brassy glint of Prador exotic metal armour, he turned into a side hall, quite small and narrow, whose subject was just one man: Algin Tenkian. As he stepped in Cormac downloaded a brief history of the man:
Tenkian was born two hundred years ago on Mars during something called the Jovian Separatist crisis, and as yet there was no record of his death. Originally he was trained in the areas of metallurgy and the then quite young science of force-field dynamics and, at age nineteen, on his graduation from VIT (Viking Institute of Technology), the Jovian Separatists recruited him and soon moved him to their weapons division. After four years, when the Separatists had resorted to terrorism, he became disillusioned with their methods and surrendered to Earth Security on Phobos, where he served two years of a ten-year sentence—on his release being forced to join ECS where he worked for six years. Aged thirty-two he joined JMCC, where he worked for five years after which he was recorded as leaving the JMCC complex. Three years later he turned up on Jocasta as a designer and crafter of esoteric individual weapons. Beyond that there was no further chronology.
