The Line of Polity

by Neal Asher

  The woman leant back with her hand over her mouth for a moment – already she was beginning to recognize the change of tone. When the boy glanced round at her impatiently, she continued:

  ‘Grandma, what big motion sensors you’ve got.’

  ‘All the better to follow you wherever you go.’

  ‘Grandma, what a lot of eyes you’ve got.’

  ‘All the better to see you my little morsel.’

  ‘Grandma, what big teeth you’ve got.’

  ‘The very same I used to chew up your friend with the axe.’

  ‘Oh, please don’t eat me. I’m a God-loving child!’

  The woman glanced at the child on her knee, who was staring at the picture of the thing in the bed in wide-eyed fascination.

  ‘I’m beginning to see a pattern here,’ said the woman.

  ‘“Underground” is misleading in a number of ways,’ Fethan explained as they trudged on out of the stand of flute grass onto drier ground cloaked with mosses, wild rhubarb and black plantains. ‘It makes you think of a singular secret resistance organization, when in fact it’s the aim of most people there merely to survive – not to overthrow the Theocracy. You could also be misled into thinking the word has nothing to do with “ground” and “under” when in reality it has everything to do with those words.’ Fethan stabbed a finger downwards. ‘Below us there’s about ten metres of loose and highly organic soil – the creation of millions of years of tricone burrowing and feeding. Below that is a layer of chalk over fifty metres thick – created by tricone shells sinking through the soil and slowly conglomerating and compressing.’ Fethan stopped and pointed towards some current movement in the damp ground that was shaking the big purplish leaves of the rhubarb and causing disc molluscs to drop from their undersides like scatterings of silver coins. The ground humped up, and briefly the spiked end of a tricone broke the surface before retracting. ‘Industrious little soil makers those. The inhabitants here could make a fortune exporting tricones – and the concomitant ecology – to Polity-run terraforming projects. Of course that’ll never happen with the Theocracy in control.’

  ‘You were saying about the Underground,’ Eldene reminded him – part machine or not, Fethan did tend to ramble.

  ‘Oh yeah.’ Fethan looked about himself, then led the way to where the ground rose beyond yet more flute grass. ‘Underneath the chalk you’ve got layers of limestone – which is probably the result of the tricone’s distant ancestors – with occlusions of basalt and obsidian and other volcanic rocks. You know the geology of this place is fascinating.’

  ‘The Underground,’ Eldene reminded.

  ‘Yeah, well, the water flow of this landmass is also fascinating. As it soaks down, it wears the limestone away, making caverns and underground rivers, till eventually reaching the deeps where it’s heated by geothermal energy and pushed out again in hot springs, about fifteen hundred kilometres from here. There are cave systems down there that are thousands of kilometres long, some as big as space habitats – room for cities if you wanted ’em. That’s the Underground, and that’s where, over the last couple of centuries, your people went when they fled the Theocracy.’

  Through this second stand of flute grass they moved onto higher ground clad in blister mosses and the occasional tricone shell blued by algae. Eldene considered asking what basalt and obsidian were, and how big exactly was a space habitat, but her scole was now shivering against her body, she herself was beginning to pant, and the air tasted like iron in her mouth. They reached a bank, which they climbed, and looked around. To their right a mechanical digger stood tilted into the ground, its windows broken and its entire surface orange with rust. Ahead of them stretched row upon row of low twisted black trees with yellow leaves and a peppering of nodular green fruit, growing out of ground thick with vegetation so green it made Eldene’s eyes ache.

  ‘Grape trees,’ said Fethan.

  Eldene already knew about grape trees: those strange plants producing the fist-sized fruits that were turned into wine for the Theocracy. She’d seen pictures of them on the labels of stubby bottles, and once tasted some of the wine stolen by a friend back at the city orphanage. She instead pointed down at the surrounding green vegetation and gasped, ‘What’s that?’

  ‘Grass,’ Fethan replied.

  Eldene glanced back at the flute grass, then eyed the old man with suspicion.

  Fethan indicated the flute grass. ‘That’s a native plant so named because of a few similarities to this’ – he pointed now at the verdancy below the trees – ‘which is the real thing. It’s one of the plants brought by the fanatics who first came here to set up their colony two hundred years ago. It’s real grass from Earth.’

  After negotiating the slope, they entered the orchard of grape trees. Feeling weak and drained, Eldene stumbled to one side and slumped with her back against one of the trees. It was time – she could not go on like this any more. With reluctance, she hinged up the mask of Volus’s breather and took a deep breath. The surge of oxygen left her suddenly light-headed, and in a somewhat distracted state she stared down as Fethan squatted before her and pulled open her shirt. For a moment she thought to slap his hand away, as she had with some of the younger male workers who had become a bit too curious about the tightening of her shirt above her scole, but he was an old man – and a machine – and he was helping her.

  Her scole was now almost white, and had pushed away from her chest on its eight chitinous legs. Its head was still attached to her: pincers still hooked in and feeding tubules still imbedded in her flesh, but there was now some leakage of blood, and a white pus crusting under her breasts. Below the creature was a neat row of ‘leaves’ – a litter of five baby scoles born to leech blood. Back at the worksheds these would have been carefully removed and transported to the piggeries in the north, where they would be fattened up on pig’s blood before being returned to be attached to a new worker.

  ‘About done with, your scole,’ commented Fethan. ‘Combination of leafing and Volus hitting it with that stinger of his.’ While she stared in perplexity, he tugged off each of the leaves and tossed them to one side. ‘Fucking things,’ he muttered, then removed his own false scole and opened it up. From within this he removed a small flat pack, which he also opened to expose a sewing kit, and Eldene wondered what the hell he needed that for. She stared at the old man in puzzlement.

  ‘Best we get it done now,’ said Fethan. ‘Dying ones sometimes don’t detach cleanly, and if they leave bits of ’emselves in you that can cause problems.’ With that he reached down and took hold of Eldene’s scole. Eldene yelled at the horrible ripping sensation, then yelled again when the pain hit her. Through eyes blurred by tears she saw Fethan standing with the scole gripped tightly before him, its legs kicking in the air, its pincers opening and closing, and its three feeding tubules waving like bloody fingers. Then, cast aside, it landed in the grass on its back. Eldene felt a sudden frisson of fear at seeing the thing detached and moving on its own like that. She then stared down in horror at the raw wound welling blood from her chest and, as well as pain, felt embarrassment at her own nakedness – not for exposure of her breasts, but of the area below where the scole had been attached. For more than half her life this thing had lived on her torso and now she felt incomplete without it. After Fethan threaded a needle and stooped to sew together the ragged edges of the wound left by the scole, she turned her head away from such intimate work and wished she could faint from the pain.

  ‘You know,’ he said as he worked, ‘scoles are the same old biotech as the squerms and sprawns – brought in by the Theocracy when it first established itself here.’

  ‘Really,’ said Eldene through gritted teeth.

  ‘Yeah. No one uses big ugly symbionts any more, and these things cut your lifespan by half.’

  Eldene turned and stared at him.

  ‘You didn’t know that, did you?’ he said.

  ‘I did not.’

  ‘It never occurred to you
to wonder why proctors and priesthood put up with the inconvenience of breather gear.’

  ‘I thought . . . something to do with status . . .’

  ‘You thought wrong.’

  Through the shuttle screen, Cormac gazed out at Elysium and saw neither green fields nor any of the blessed. The station was a morass of linked habitats clustered around the kilometre-long monofilament cables and struts that supported the main catchment mirrors of a sun-smelter facility. Here it was that the more free-wheeling entrepreneurial types towed in asteroids for smelting, bought refined metals, ran factories, and generally made large amounts of money – or not – in a grey area where the Line of Polity had simply juddered to a halt and dissolved before the onslaught of the wishes of this place’s inhabitants. There was a runcible installed, the reason they had stopped here, but as far as the Polity was concerned this was a place you came to at your own risk. There weren’t many complaints made: those who might have wanted to did not usually get much of a chance, being given a brief tour of the inside of one of the smelters.

  ‘There’s many feel this place should be broken up,’ said Cento.

  Cormac turned to the Golem, who was piloting the shuttle, and once again was struck by his perfection. This it was that told him he must be dealing with a copy of Cento for, since the events on Viridian, the original Cento had retained the brass arm that he had torn from the killing machine, Mr Crane, and this Cento possessed no such arm. Aiden appeared no different from how he had looked the last time Cormac had seen him, but the other Golem was yet another copy.

  ‘There are places like this all across the Polity,’ said Cormac, ‘and those who object to them don’t have to visit them.’

  ‘I like this place,’ said Gant from behind.

  Cormac glanced round at him and Aiden. ‘You would,’ he said. ‘Wasn’t it to here you and Thorn used to come for your holidays – a bit of relaxing non-lethal violence and enough high-tox cips to dissolve this shuttle?’

  ‘Good days,’ Gant reminisced.

  Cormac snorted and returned his attention to the screen, as Cento brought the shuttle in towards a conglomeration of habitats below the cylindrical tower of a giant refinery. Looking beyond this, he saw an ancient grabship clasping in its huge ceramal claw the single mountain protruding from the asteroid it was hauling in. As he understood it, the asteroid would be brought to one of the many furnace satellites, and then the sunlight from the mirrors would be focused upon it. While it heated, the automated systems on the satellite would draw off materials when they attained their particular melting or volatile temperatures. Nothing would be wasted: this place produced just about everything on the elementary table, and even the asteroidal ash that remained – such as it was – they used to make soil for the habitats. Thereafter, rough ingots and tanks were transported from the furnace satellites to the refineries and factories, there to be turned into bubble-metals, alloys and pure crystal for electronic applications, composites and complex compounds: every substance used by the material technologies of the Polity.

  Soon, amongst the habitats, they noticed a structure like a giant octagonal coin around which clustered deep-space and insystem ships. There Cormac saw many of the multi-spherical varieties – ships consisting of any number of conjoined spheres – also ones with the sleek lines of cuttlefish, and those like baroque sculptures, still others that were replicas of vehicles out of human history: aeroplanes, early rockets and shuttles, and even one ship that had the appearance of an ancient sailing vessel.

  ‘You get some types here,’ Gant observed.

  Cento navigated the shuttle through this swarm and finally brought it to an open bay in the side of the structure. Cormac glanced back through the rear screen and saw that the Occam Razor was still easily visible. The reason given here by the docking control for the dreadnought not being allowed in was that it was just too large to be joining this crowd – supposedly just one accidental burst from one of its manoeuvring thrusters could crisp any number of these ships. He doubted this was the true reason and, to be honest, it irked him that some autocrat here could order a Polity battleship to stand off.

  As the shuttle drifted slowly into the bay, through the shimmer-shield, Cento made a sound of annoyance.

  ‘Problem?’ Cormac asked.

  ‘Not really,’ muttered the Golem, ‘but I have just been informed of what we are being charged for the use of this bay.’

  ‘Probably ten times the going rate,’ said Gant. ‘We’re a type that ain’t all that welcome here.’

  There were people coming towards them from every direction as they headed for the ramp leading down to the catamaran, but in the darkness there was no way to easily distinguish friend from foe, or rather, for all those foes to realize that Thorn and Stanton were not friendly. This did not last though, for somewhere on the barge an auxiliary generator or pile cut in. A searchlight beam lit the area around Brom’s cabin, and began to traverse the deck. It found them as they were running down the ramp to Stanton’s vessel.

  ‘The mooring cables,’ Stanton instructed almost conversationally, as there rose an outcry from the barge.

  Thorn grabbed the nearest cable and unhooked it from its bollard, while Stanton did the same with the other one. Stanton was leaping aboard as Thorn unhooked the final cable. Someone on the barge then decided it was no longer time for just shouting, and something smashed the cable from his hand, while the ramp behind him erupted into jagged twists of metal. He leapt from the ramp onto one of the catamaran’s outriders and found himself clinging to a stanchion supporting the suspended cabin as tractor drives engaged in both outriders, and the vessel began to pull away. Thorn ran along the outrider to the steps leading up it into the cabin, but slipped when projectiles slammed holes through the surface next to his feet, and only managed to prevent himself falling into the water by catching hold of the safety rail guarding the steps. With his legs still trailing in the water, he glanced back at the quickly receding barge and saw one of the gun turrets swinging in their direction, before disappearing in an actinic explosion. From the ramp, most of Brom’s people started opening up with hand weapons, while a small group of them set up a tripod-mounted missile launcher. Thorn assessed his chances of reaching the cabin at just a little above zero, and his chances of remaining alive, either there or here, as little different. Then a coughing sound from the rear of the cabin, and something cylindrical and black sped back towards the ramp. The explosion that followed sliced the ramp in half and threw those of Brom’s people who were still intact into the water.

  ‘Are you coming up here or not?’ Stanton shouted.

  Thorn finally hauled himself from the water and scrambled up the steps.

  The catamaran’s cabin was of a standard utile design: cylindrical, with a rear hold and a forward cockpit containing three control chairs. Thorn entered the hold and headed quickly for the cockpit, little comforted to be under cover when he noticed the many bullet holes punched through the walls.

  While with his right hand guiding the vessel out to sea using a joystick that had probably, in a previous life, belonged to some kind of nil-AG aircraft, Stanton glanced at Thorn and nodded to the chair next to him. As Thorn strapped himself in, the mercenary swung across the targeting visor he had himself just used to take out the ramp, then kicked across the floor-mounted firing control he had been operating with his left hand. Thorn saw that the hinged beam the control column extended from, as well as the jointed arm supporting the visor, allowed them to be operated from any seat.

  ‘Bit primitive,’ Stanton explained. ‘It was connected into this boat’s harpoon, but I’ve replaced that with a weapons carousel. You’ve got twelve heat-seekers, three chaff, and three antimunition packages back there. Use them wisely.’

  Thorn pulled the column into position and swung the visor across his face, feeling its skin-stick surfaces adhering to him. Now he had a view straight back to the barge but, thumbing the swing control on the joystick he now gripped, that view swu
ng in increments of ninety degrees, as the launcher on the rear of the catamaran swung round. Tilting his head back, he saw nothing but sky for a moment, before thumbing the launcher round again so the barge was back in the screen.

  ‘We’ve got AGCs launching,’ he told Stanton.

  ‘Most’ll be running,’ the mercenary told him bluntly.

  ‘Three are running in this direction.’

  ‘That’s why I said “most”,’ Stanton replied.

  Finding the cursor control under his little finger, Thorn called up the mask’s menu and scrolled down through it. The selection buttons Stanton had added – heat, chaff and anti-m – were red and of an entirely different font from the rest of the menu. He was about to choose one of these when a familiar voice spoke. ‘That you in there, trooper Thorn?’ He quickly made a different menu choice and called up, in the corner of the screen, a mini-display that showed him Ternan’s face. Zeroing the targeting box on one of the approaching AGCs, he then selected heat, fired off a missile, and had the pleasure of seeing her frantically slapping at controls while the three vehicles broke away. However, anti-munitions took out the missile before it reached its target.

  ‘How long, Jarv?’ asked Stanton, speaking into his wristcom.

  ‘Seven minutes,’ replied a woman’s voice.

  ‘Why so slow?’ he asked.

  ‘Thousand-kilometre restricted zone. Came on just as you got to the barge – probably something to do with your friend there,’ she replied.

  ‘Any Polity activity?’

  ‘You bet. When they shot down that military transport, we got a swarm of craft taking off from Gordonstone. As soon as the ’ware generator went offline, two insystem attack boats launched from Cereb. They’re about three minutes behind me.’

  ‘Great,’ murmured Stanton.

  Thorn absorbed this, but kept his attention mostly focused on the pursuing AGCs. There were seven of them now, and there was no way this catamaran, even with its tractor drive flat out, could outrun them. Observing seven white dots then speeding from the AGCs towards him – quickly highlighted in flashing red boxes on the screen – he selected and fired chaff, shortly followed by antimunitions. Three missiles exploded in the cloud of glittering dust that the remaining four successfully punched through. The antimunitions package flew apart into its hundred component seeker explosives, two of which were detonated by two of the missiles, but the remaining two hammered on in.