by Neal Asher
The cop looked at his weapon in bewilderment, then he holstered it.
‘Inspector Garp,’ he said.
With Argus now set to record only, Salind observed, ‘So that’s how you looked.’
The uniformed police had been in disarray, and let them leave without protest, though Salind wondered what they could have done to stop them with their ex-boss, firmly uploaded to a Golem chassis, there to facilitate matters.
‘Yeah,’ said Garp, ‘ten years ago. Geronamid managed to piece together enough information to have this made.’ Garp touched his face and chest.
They sat in Garp’s car, Geoff in the back holding a medpatch to his head and groaning sporadically.
‘When I looked like this I was the big man who was a royal pain to the Tronad. Callus was my partner until Soper bought him off. I think he slipped praist into my tea.’
‘He won’t be doing that again,’ said Salind.
Garp gave him a slightly indifferent glance. Salind wondered if he was fully aware of the capabilities of the body he now occupied. He’d checked on Callus and the two others while Garp spoke to the uniformed officers. Callus and the one behind the car were dead. The third thug was not far from it.
They dropped Geoff at the Tarjen offices.
‘I’m gonna keep my head down now. Soper is not going to sit on her hands after this. She’ll want us all nailed to banoaks,’ Geoff said, and with that disappeared inside.
‘What now?’ Salind asked. Without thinking he took out his pill container and clicked out a pill. Garp’s hand clamped on his wrist and the pill fell to the floor. Salind fought the grip, suddenly unreasonably angry.
‘What the hell do you think you’re doing?’ Garp asked.
Salind stared at him. He felt the hairs on the back of his neck rising. He was sure someone was scratching on the glass behind him.
‘I … they’re to stop me …’
‘I know what they are. How long have you been a user?’
‘Soper dosed me when I interviewed her. Didn’t you see that on the net?’
‘So a few days. She used pure derivative?’
‘I don’t know.’
‘Nightmares during the day?’
‘Yes.’
‘I thought so. You’re on fifteen strength. You’re already at the level of a seven-year addict. You’re losing it already.’
‘I’ll get a detoxicant treatment when this is over.’
‘Be sure you do or I’ll off you myself.’
Garp released his hand. Salind picked up the pill from the floor and quickly swallowed it. The feeling, like a looming wave of black chaos ready to fall on him, slowly receded. Not taking the next needed dose was unthinkable, as briefly he had seen how thin was the veneer over reality for him. Garp started the car and pulled away.
The ceramal mesh fence stood three metres high, carried a killing current and sported beam-break alarms set along the top. Beyond it, banoaks stretched up the hill in neat rows. Between the rows the ground seemed in constant motion, and in the distance a disc-shaped vacuum harvester, towing a collection tanker, worked its way down.
‘They must have to empty those tankers quite often,’ said Salind.
‘Not as often as you might think. That’s a Massey Vacpress. It sucks up the treels, presses out the juice and shoots the pressings into the tanker – almost pure treelskin.’
As it drew closer Salind observed the waste juice pouring from pipes in the side of the harvester. The machine left the ground behind it completely clear of treels, but there were plenty yet to be sucked up. This had to be the first run of the morning. A driver sat in a bucket seat on the main harvester disc steering it with two levers. He wore blue armoralls and a sphere helmet.
‘Why that gear?’ he asked.
‘The helmet’s to prevent narcosis from the vapour, and it’s their uniform.’
‘Whose?’
‘Soper’s people.’
Salind nodded and wondered what the hell they were going to do now. No way were they going to get through that fence without setting off a mass of alarms, even if they managed not to fry themselves.
‘Boring job,’ he said, nodding at the driver. ‘That’ll be one to go with the Polity running things. They’ll stick a submind in the harvester and that’ll be that.’
‘Okay, let’s go,’ said Garp.
They stepped out of the car and Garp popped the boot. From it he removed his rail-gun and walked over to the fence. The red sun breaking over the horizon cast his shadow behind him. He held the weapon out of view and waved. The driver raised a hand in return and continued down the row. Some minutes later the harvester neared the fence. Salind couldn’t figure what Garp intended. Was he going to hold up the harvester? Garp showed him. As the machine reached the point where it had to turn to go down the next row Garp raised his weapon and fired a short burst. The driver disappeared in a cloud of red.
‘Jesu! What the hell are you doing!’
Garp glanced at him. ‘Well you said he’d be redundant.’
‘You just killed him!’
‘Yeah, I did didn’t I. Come here.’
He took hold of Salind’s shoulder and walked him to one side. Salind felt himself shaking. He’d seen some horrible things, but he’d never seen someone killed in such cold blood. The harvester kept going, from where it should have turned, and crashed into the fence. Electricity shorted through its body as it tore out a hundred-metre length of fencing and dragged it into the highway. Hitting the bank on the other side of the road it ground to a halt, its vacuum still roaring. Salind saw that the driver was still sitting in the bucket seat, though only from the waist down.
‘You killed him,’ he repeated.
‘They all know what’s going on in here. You’ve seen nothing yet. Come on, we’ve got to move fast now. The guards’ll be here soon.’
Garp led him back to the car and started it up. He carefully drove it off-road and through the gap made by the harvester. Then he floored the accelerator and the turbine soon had them up to a hundred kloms up the cleared lane between the banoaks.
‘They always come at a breach from the outside. We’ll be too far in by then for them to do anything about us,’ said Garp.
‘What about getting out?’ asked Salind.
‘I shouldn’t worry unduly about that.’
In a few minutes they reached the end of the grove and Garp dumped the car in an irrigation ditch. He gave it one shove to get it there, leaving a dent in the metal.
‘You still recording?’ he asked as he checked his rail-gun.
‘Yes,’ said Salind, wondering if that was the right thing to say.
‘Good. Let’s go take a look at the factory.’ He hung the gun at his belt and turned his back to Salind. Looking over his shoulder he said, ‘Hop on.’
This being his first piggy-back ride on the back of a psychotic Golem android, Salind did not know what to expect. He swore, after they covered four or five kilometres, it would be his last. In minutes they reached rocky terrain cut through by gravel roads. Banoaks grew in wild profusion here, with a low scrub of adapted thyme and spherule grass below them. On the higher ground the banoaks were bigger and older than in the grove. Perhaps they had been growing since before humans arrived on Banjer.
How long do they live?
Oaks on the north continent have been dated at over five thousand years in age.
Garp peered at him, and he wondered if the ex-policeman could listen in on these aug conversations. Garp pointed to a ring of pots strapped round one of the nearby oaks.
‘Sap drains. You’ll see how they use the sap in a bit. Still recording?’
‘Yes,’ Salind replied, prepared to give no more than that. He dry-swallowed another praist pill before following where Garp led. Soon they came to a rise overlooking a sprawl of warehouses. Garp pointed to the four trucks parked before the largest building.
‘See, they’re unloading cropsters,’ he explained.
Salind’s vision did not exte
nd so far, for he did not have a Golem’s eyes. He could just about see some activity.
Argus, give me a visual feedback, magnification x10.
Processing.
After a moment his vision flickered and suddenly he could view the scene up close. Trussed in straitjackets and with bags over their heads, people were being led from the trucks. One of them tried to run and soon fell flat on his face. The men doing the unloading, men dressed in armoralls like those worn by the one Garp had killed, stood laughing. One of them walked over to the fallen man and proceeded to beat him with a length of wood, only desisting when one of his companions called to him. He then dragged his victim to his feet and with more blows drove him back to the rest.
Cut feedback.
Salind’s vision returned to normal.
‘What the hell is going on down there?’ he asked.
‘They’re all people who’ve done something to piss off Soper or one of her lieutenants. Or they’re other disposable members of society. It’s noticeable how few occupants our asylums and gaols have,’ replied Garp.
‘What are they going to do to them?’
‘That’s what you’re here to see. Come on.’
Using banoak copses, scattered boulders and the occasional natural gully as cover, they worked their way closer to the buildings. Salind worried about the footprints they were leaving in the spherule grass as its little glassy bubbles burst under their feet, until he looked back and saw how quickly the footprints faded. When they were within a hundred metres of the main building Garp stopped in a low gully.
‘Wait here. I’ll be back in a few minutes.’
True to his word Garp soon returned. He carried two pairs of armoralls and two helmets. The helmet with a crack in it dripped blood. Salind selected the other one.
Garp told him, ‘Just follow me and keep your mouth shut. You’re going to see some pretty horrible things in there. Don’t react. These people see it every day.’
‘Can I start transmitting now?’
Garp glanced over to where a long and expensive-looking hydrocar was parked. ‘Yeah, I reckon so. She’s only got access to the Polity networks back in the city, and by the time she finds out it’ll be too late.’
With some relief Salind turned his aug’s transmitter back on.
They pulled on the armoralls, Salind trying not to notice his were still warm. Climbing from the gully to one side of the main building, they headed towards the doors. Those unloading the cropsters did not notice them for a moment. When they did, Garp raised his hand and continued walking. A hand was raised in return, but they were otherwise ignored. Salind just kept his head down and his teeth gritted. He’d just seen the previous possessors of the armoralls lying in a drainage ditch. Passing the trucks, they entered the building. Salind tried to ignore the crying from inside one truck.
Message from Jennifer Tarjen: Great job, Salind. You’re live on Earthnet right now!
Somehow Salind couldn’t get excited about that. He wondered how the Polity citizens were reacting to what he was seeing right now. Inside the building a group of three men were strapping cropsters to frames. They had it down to a fine art: no one escaped. After the victims were in place, two women went down the rows pulling bags from heads and pushing metal devices into the cropsters’ mouths. Salind supposed those devices were to stop them biting through the tubes that were then forced down into their stomachs.
‘Sap from the banoaks,’ said Garp. ‘It takes an hour or so to reach sufficient concentration in the bloodstream.’
Salind jumped when he heard an agonized scream from deeper in the building.
‘That was a cropster whose sap levels just reached sufficient concentration,’ said Garp.
‘What the hell are they doing here?’
Garp explained, ‘It was some lunatic ancestor of Soper’s who first drank tea made from the treels that had fed on an enemy he had nailed to a banoak. He discovered that tea to be powerful indeed. He had discovered the human-specific narcotic, praist. In his subsequent gruesome experiments he also discovered that treels live longer in victims who like their tea too much, and that in those cases the yield of praist increases.’
Deeper in the building Garp abruptly halted and gestured ahead. Here an old grey-bearded man, who Salind thought resembled the park labourer he had observed before meeting Garp the reif, was doing something to one of those strapped to a frame. It took a moment for Salind to absorb this further horror. The woman on the frame was unconscious. The old man cut slits in her body and opened them with sprung clamps. Into the holes, through a wide funnel, he fed finger-length treels.
‘During the later years of the cult of Anubis Arisen it was discovered that if you fed someone on pure banoak sap to get a sufficient concentration in the bloodstream, and if the treels are inserted just so, they will attach quickly without causing too much internal damage – without hitting an artery. Allowed to grow in a sap-fed human body for as much as five days, the yield of praist is fifty times more than when it was done the old way. The victim dies eventually, as you can see.’ Garp gestured down the row of frames to where corpses hung, larger treels writhing in and out of holes in their bodies.
‘This is a nightmare,’ said Salind, and for once he wasn’t thinking about the story. He thought about what Geronamid had said: eight hundred of these places.
Garp nodded, then unhooked his rail-gun and handed it across. ‘Protect yourself.’
‘What?’
‘I intend to use my hands,’ said Garp, and walked over to the old man. The man looked up, grinning, for he obviously enjoyed his work. Garp reached out and pressed his hands to either side of the man’s face, then twisted. Salind could hear the bones breaking from where he stood. Now Garp turned and headed back, passing Salind without looking at him as he headed for the building’s entrance. Salind turned and followed. Reaching the first of the women, Garp chopped once and she went down. The next woman went down the same way. The first two of the three men strapping people to the frames, Garp grabbed and slammed together. They dropped soggily. The third man tried to run.
Message from Jennifer Tarjen: Polity monitors coming in through the runcible and two gamma-class dreadnoughts in orbit. Geronamid has ordered immediate intervention on Banjer! This has to be because of your transmission!
Like hell, thought Salind. Geronamid had intended intervention here from the start. Salind’s transmission was just part of the justification.
What’s Geronamid doing now?
Message: Geronamid cannot be traced at present.
Garp caught the third man by his collar, dragged him back and broke his neck. He was going to do them all. He just wasn’t going to stop … Then there came a turquoise flash that left afterimages on Salind’s retina. He saw Garp fly back, his clothing and skin burning. He hit the ground hard then immediately sat up. Deleen Soper walked in from outside, three men in armoralls walking in behind her.
‘It was obvious you’d been uploaded to a Golem,’ she said. ‘And typically arrogant of you to consider yourself invulnerable.’ She held up her weapon and went on. ‘This is Polity hardware. It will stop a Golem, as you’ve just found out.’
Garp began to chuckle, then to laugh.
‘It amuses you that you are finally going to die?’ she asked.
From where he was hiding behind a row of frames Salind shakily raised the rail-gun. He had to do something; had to commit. He couldn’t just observe.
‘I’ve already done that. It’s not something that scares me,’ Garp replied.
‘It’s a shame you can’t be put on a frame,’ said Soper.
‘Nothing you can do but destroy me. You can’t even use me for some idiot assassination attempt this time. You might have got your hands on a fancy gun, but no way you’ve got the tech to access Golem hardware.’
Soper leant the weapon across her shoulder and gazed down at Garp. ‘No point in that now. The fact that I could get an assassin through all the Council’s defences brought mos
t of them back into line. I also gained the unexpected bonus of making Mr straight and true officer Garp kill an innocent Polity citizen.’
Salind could feel sweat running down his back. This was it: he could delay no longer.
Message: Salind, put the gun down before you shoot your own foot off.
Who the hell?
Just then he felt Argus go offline, but it wasn’t him that had made it do so.
Garp now began to rise.
‘Stay on the fucking ground!’
‘Polity hardware,’ said Garp, continuing to stand. ‘Had you the opportunity I know that you would have some strong words for your supplier.’
Soper aimed her weapon at him and pulled the trigger, again and again. Nothing happened. Salind could see first confusion then terror growing in her expression. Her three accompanying thugs were backing off, ready to run. He tried the record facility in Argus – that didn’t work either. On his feet now, Garp held his hands apart before him.
‘Don’t worry about me, Deleen. I’m not going to kill you.’ For a moment she found hope, then Garp gestured to the doorway behind, which now filled with a huge shape. ‘He’s going to do that.’
Soper and her three thugs turned. Salind stepped out to see more clearly as Geronamid, still in the form of an allosaur, stepped delicately into the building.
For a moment, stillness, then Soper laughed with relief and tossed her weapon on the floor. ‘You can’t do that. You’re an AI. It’s against all Polity law.’
‘Whatever gave you that idea?’ asked Geronamid, pacing forward.
‘You can’t interfere in places where that law doesn’t apply, and if it ever does apply here there’ll be a general amnesty.’
‘Who said anything about law?’ Geronamid asked. ‘But since you mention it, amnesty doesn’t apply in cases of intervention.’
‘What?’
Geronamid stepped in closer. Salind thought Soper must smell the last meal on the allosaur’s breath. What happened next was nightmarish. Geronamid’s head snapped to one side and one of Soper’s men fell over. His head was gone. Geronamid spat the head at Soper’s feet.
‘I think I would like you to run now.’
