by Neal Asher
‘So what do you think of the Separatist cause?’
‘Anachronisms, throwbacks. AIs are just larger and more efficient versions of ourselves. Those people are fighting for a past that never existed – and they’ll lose.’
‘Why did you run arms for them, then?’
‘Money,’ she replied succinctly, bringing their conversation down to earth.
On the second day, Thorn tried to learn some more about the Theocracy: its aims, its teachings, its structure, and what its members actually believed in. It seemed for them there was a god whose rules for the existence of his children were little different from those posited by the Islamic or Christian religions. And, as was the case with those old religions, the higher up you were in the hierarchy, the more freedom you enjoyed to interpret those rules. In the end, brute force maintained the whole thing, and those who lived in the cylinder worlds spent most of their time utterly wrapped up in power struggles. It would seem they had other methods of population control to ‘keep the whole thing exclusive’, as Stanton had opined, and were often crueller to the losers in this continual struggle than they were to the surface dwellers of Masada. Given the courage and the opportunity, such losers often took the option of suicide, as the alternatives were far from pleasant. They consisted of a device similar to an autodoc but which could be programmed to inflict things the Inquisition never thought of; the aptly named ‘steamer’ in one of the world’s rendering plants; and a veritable cornucopia of viral and bacterial agents.
‘Do you believe in this god?’ he asked Stanton.
‘No,’ came the flat reply. ‘But if he does exist, I’d like to give him a CTD suppository.’
Their exchange of greetings had been brief, and the other three seemed intent on staying at the cave mouth. Eldene crouched alone by the fire, which issued from blocks of some brownish organic matter. It was nevertheless welcome. Slowly the chill began to leave her, and before she knew it she had dozed off then woken again. After a time Lellan entered the cave, crouched beside Eldene, and poked at the embers with a length of flute grass.
‘Did he get the ajectant?’ the rebel woman asked.
Eldene peered at her. ‘What’s that?’
Lellan looked up. ‘Did he get a sample of the pills you must take to prevent your scoles from dying?’
Eldene nodded.
Lellan went on, ‘Then let’s hope he gets back in one piece. But then, if anyone could survive a hooder attack it would be him. I haven’t yet witnessed anything he can’t survive.’
‘He told me he’s part machine and part human.’
Lellan grimaced. ‘Yeah, you could say that, though I’d challenge him to point out which part is human.’
‘You don’t believe him?’ Eldene asked.
‘It doesn’t matter. I’m glad to have him on my side.’ Lellan stood up and, from amongst the packs, found another rifle like the one she was carrying, and handed it to Eldene. ‘In there’ – Lellan pointed to another of the packs – ‘you’ll find spare oxygen and food, if you need them. I suspect we’ll be facing a long night here.’
‘You suspect wrong,’ said a voice out of the darkness.
‘Fethan!’ said Eldene, shooting up.
The old man walked into the middle of the cave followed by the other two. They were called Beckle and Carl – the latter being the one who had run alongside her.
Fethan glanced around. ‘Very cosy.’
‘So what happened out there?’ Lellan asked.
‘Don’t think I smelt right, so it stopped chasing me. I tracked it for a while, but it seemed intent on going after a herd of grazers up at the other end of the valley.’ He shook his head and grinned. ‘That was some experience. I’ve always wanted to actually see one of them.’
Everyone in the cave stared at him as if he was quite mad.
‘You get to my age,’ he explained, ‘and you come to relish experiences like that. It’s what makes life worth living.’
‘It’s also the kind of thing that can make life shorter,’ opined Beckle.
Fethan shrugged, then winked at Eldene.
‘We all been introduced?’ he asked.
‘Yeah,’ said Lellan. ‘But we can save the getting-to-know-you routine until we’ve got some decent stone overhead. Let’s move out now. I don’t fancy hanging around here in case our friend comes back, having worked up an appetite chasing grazers. That is not an experience I’d relish.’
Quickly the three began gathering their equipment and hoisting bulky packs onto their backs. After passing his own pack to Eldene, Fethan took up one of the bulky ones as well. Carl, who was now the one without a pack, exchanged his heavy rifle for an even more lethal ugly-looking weapon.
‘You still got the ajectant?’ Lellan asked when they were nearly ready to go.
Fethan pretended to search his pockets in panic before finding the tube of pills and tossing it to her. She studied them for a moment then carefully buttoned them into her top pocket.
‘A more important question to ask is, “Have the manufactories arrived yet?”’ he said.
‘Not yet,’ Lellan replied. ‘But they’re on their way – along with some arms, more ballots, and a U-space transmitter.’
‘A lot,’ said Fethan, puzzled.
‘There, old man: you don’t know everything. We’ve got a ship coming in soon, with enough maybe for us to tilt the balance down here.’
‘How the hell will you get something that big past the arrays?’ Fethan asked.
Lellan turned to Eldene and grinned at her. ‘Wouldn’t he like to know?’
Eldene smiled back uncertainly – she just did not know her own position here. These people behaved as if she was one of them, yet they discussed things that were beyond her. She realized she had a great deal to learn.
They all headed to the cave mouth, Lellan and her two comrades moving some sort of apparently opaque visors across their eyes. Fethan took the lead out into the night, followed by Lellan and Beckle. Before waving her ahead, Carl passed Eldene a pair of glasses of a similar material to the visor he himself wore. She at least understood enough to know that these must provide night vision, but she let out a sound of startlement when she discovered just how effectively – it was as if day had descended instantly. Carl moved in behind her, his head moving from side to side with almost robotic vigilance – his heavy gun hanging from a strap over his shoulder.
It gave her a weird sense of dislocation, this sudden daylight, and walking out into it while realizing that if she raised these glasses she wore it would be night again was weirder still. Trudging along with her new companions, Eldene wondered just how much her life was about to change. She felt trepidation at this, but also a growing excitement at the feeling that she might be taking part in major events. With a sense of irony she realized that just about anything might appear ‘major’ to someone who had spent a dull five seasons managing squerm ponds. However, a grinding weariness – with which she was all too familiar – soon extinguished excitement. One of the few benefits of her previous employment had been that you got to go to bed at night.
As the trek went on and on, Eldene found herself slipping into a state of fugue. Even seeing three grazers – of the type she had seen earlier – close by on a slope, worming their snouts between the rocks, did not arouse in her any curiosity this time, and later, when something flew overhead making a strange whickering, she didn’t even look up at it.
‘Watch your footing,’ warned Carl from behind her, and she gazed down at her boots as if they were somehow disconnected from her. Nevertheless, the boots trudged on, without any intercession from her brain.
How long this continued she had no idea, until Beckle glanced back towards her, his visor raised, and informed her, ‘Calypse is up.’
Eldene removed her night glasses and blinked in the twilight of early morning. Placing the glasses in her pocket, she felt herself coming out of her stupor, as if they had disconnected her from reality. The gas giant had breached
the horizon and, in this stage of the cycle, the sun would not be far behind it.
‘Not much further,’ said Carl in a more affable tone, slapping her on the shoulder as he moved past her.
‘Well, that’ll be one to tell the kiddies,’ said Beckle.
From all of them there now seemed a relaxing of tension. When Fethan slipped back to walk at her side, Eldene asked him, ‘The hooder?’
‘From what I gather they only hunt in the full dark. Best stay alert, though – they might be wrong about that,’ Fethan replied. ‘Be a bit of a bastard to get hit when we’re this close.’
‘Close to what?’ she asked.
‘The real Underworld,’ he replied.
Soon they were walking along under a rocky overhang that resembled a breaking wave. The further along this they proceeded, the further it overhung them, until soon it closed over completely on their right and they were entering a perfectly circular tunnel. Seeing the others push their visors back into place, Eldene took out her night glasses and put them back on. Here the effect of them was even stranger, for the inside of a cave was not a place one ever expected to be as bright as day. She found it weird that it could be so light in here without any apparent source of illumination.
The cave curved off to the left then began to drop. Before the floor became too steep to negotiate easily it became stepped. Staring down at these steps, Eldene realized that they were not natural, and had obviously been specially cut.
‘What if proctors ever found this place?’ she asked Fethan. ‘They could march straight in.’
‘Pin-head cameras,’ Fethan explained, gesturing to the curving walls. ‘If they did find this place and tried to go down lower they’d find themselves at the hot end of a pulse-cannon.’
Before they had descended much further, Lellan held up her hand and the party came to a halt while she unreeled a thin optic cable from her coms helmet and plugged it into a hidden socket in the wall. She then stood frowning with her hand up against the speaking side of her helmet.
‘It here yet?’ Carl asked.
She detached the cable, then shook her head. ‘Nothing yet. The dishes are out to track Ragnorak, but they’ve picked up nothing else.’
‘Ragnorak?’ Eldene whispered to Fethan.
‘A weapon powerful enough to destroy what you’re just about to see,’ he replied.
After a time they came down to a level tunnel lit by wall panels, where they all removed their visual aids. Eldene was already thinking how grim an existence it must be to live constantly under the earth in tunnels like this one, when the tunnel itself opened out into a circular chamber. At the centre of this gaped the mouth of a wide shaft, and poised over this stood a steel framework containing a cable mechanism, electric motor, and lift cage. Lellan led the way over, throwing the locks on the cage’s wire door with a remote control she took from her pocket. Inside, Eldene noted a more visible camera that moved on its little stem up in the corner of the cage to inspect each of them in turn. Without any of them touching another control, the lift jerked and began to descend, the motor droning.
Against the sides of the shaft clung square light panels like crystals of some exotic mineral, and at one point an encircling ring of what could be mistaken for nothing other than heavy weapons. The deeper down they went, the whiter the calcite glittered in runnels down the walls; and, as the shaft curved, this calcite formed stalactites and stalagmites, so it seemed they were flying between the teeth of some underground monster. Finally reaching the bottom of the shaft, they exited the lift into another tunnel, curving round towards a huge armoured door with another smaller door inset in it.
‘A lot of lights,’ Eldene observed, gazing at the numerous light panels set on faces of stone, their glow reflecting in rainbow hues from the crystalline surfaces of a forest of calcite above.
‘Geothermal and hydroelectric energy,’ said Carl – answering a question she had not asked. ‘No shortage of that down here.’
Eldene noticed then that he had removed his mask and was breathing easily. Feeling gauche, she hinged her mask down and breathed clear air. It was cold and tasted of iron, but sweet.
Lellan pointed her remote control at the smaller, centre door and it opened with a tearing sound as they approached. Inside was a space the same size as the lift cage, with yet another door at the opposite end. Eldene recognized this was an airlock, but wondered at its purpose when they had walked into breathable air before reaching it. She looked questioningly towards Fethan, but it was Carl who answered that question too:
‘The main cavern haemorrhages air all the time, but we can produce it faster than we lose it. This lock is about a century old – from a time when we didn’t have much oxygen to spare,’ he said.
Main cavern? Eldene wondered.
As the inner door opened, Eldene thought for one moment that they had returned to the surface – so bright was the vision before her. Following the others through, she looked about herself in wonder.
The cavern was so huge and so well lit that its lofty ceiling had the appearance of lowering cloud rather than stone. Across it ran webworks of metal, and in places it was supported by huge many-windowed buildings, formed like a collection of bulging discs of distinctly varied sizes stacked haphazardly one upon the other until reaching the ceiling. Running down the centre of this cavern, with arched bridges spanning it, was a foaming torrent, whose source was a dark hollow in one wall, warded at its sides by two slowly turning water-wheels. Alongside this river, Eldene recognized the same pattern of square ponds used on the surface to grow food crustaceans, and their presence helped give a further indication of the sheer scale of this place. Beyond the ponds lay fields in varying shades of green and gold, or the black of recently turned earth. On the floor of this cavern were not many low-rise buildings – it seemed space was at a premium, hence the design of the pillar-townships. However, as they advanced further into this underground idyll, Eldene did spot some recently erected prefabs around which many people busied themselves at many tasks. They too all wore uniforms the colour of old flute grass – like Lellan and her two comrades – and their labour seemed mainly to concern maintenance and preparation of weapons.
On the last of the five days, they were all together in the flight cabin as the ship hurtled towards the atmosphere of Masada. Glancing at one of the subscreens, Thorn watched the explosive bolts detaching themselves from the lump of asteroidal rock, and the arms they were fixed to folding back out of sight. A few blasts from the manoeuvring thrusters were enough to have the rock apparently rising from Lyric II, though it would be more correct to say that the rock now hurtled towards atmosphere at a speed slightly faster than that of the ship.
‘What about it outpacing you?’ Thorn asked.
‘It’s angled so it’ll explode and fragment, rather than burn up. We’ll be one of those fragments,’ said Jarvellis.
Stanton picked up with, ‘Believe me, no one watching will call attention to the dissimilarity of velocities. Up here, reporting anything to your superiors that you are unsure about gains you no credit, and the best way for the lower echelons to keep out of trouble is to keep out of notice.’
‘A fatal lack of vigilance,’ Thorn observed.
‘Yes, it’s why the Underworld now possesses a more advanced technology than the Theocracy itself. Their only disadvantage is in numbers and position.’ He called up an image on one of the side screens and gestured to it. Satellites hung stationary around the curve of the horizon, the nearest one bearing an uncanny resemblance to a huge curved machine-gun magazine. ‘What advantage the Underground does have, it must be prepared to use soon, before the Theocracy finishes building something with greater punch than that.’ He indicated the satellite.
‘And what is that?’ Thorn nodded to the displayed picture.
‘Laser array – but it’s only effective on the surface of the planet. It can’t reach into the real Underground.’
‘They’re building something that will?’
‘Near-c coil-gun. Should have enough power to penetrate right down to the caverns.’
‘And the people on the surface?’
‘It’ll kill millions, but the Theocracy doesn’t care about them – down on the surface they breed easily enough.’
‘If the ECS knew about this, then you’d get some action.’
Stanton turned to gaze at him. ‘The Polity just lost an Outlink station out here, supposedly to Dragon. The Theocracy is building things like that,’ Stanton stabbed a finger at the screen, ‘supposedly as a defence against Dragon. All nice and innocent, so if the Polity came in heavy-handed now, it’d cause big problems with its members and potential for rebellion inside its own borders. They’ll need a damned good reason to intrude here; like an open rebellion, or a cry for help.’
‘I see,’ said Thorn.
Now Lyric II was vibrating, and a couple of hundred metres ahead of it the rock was producing contrails and small pieces of it were ablating away. All around – ahead of the rock – the surface of the planet filled the screen. Thorn glanced at Jarvellis’s profile as she now manoeuvred the ship down out of the contrail and below the rock itself. She looked rapt and beatific – this was what she was all about.
‘About two minutes. Stress readings are way up,’ she said.
Thorn glanced with alarm at Stanton.
‘On the rock,’ explained the mercenary laconically. ‘We’ve got a sensor on it.’
The rock began to glow and, like a stuttering gas torch with the pressure too high, its contrail kept igniting and going out, until suddenly it ignited completely on full blast. Larger pieces began to break off from the rock, coiling away, sparkling with burning iron.
‘We’re on it!’ shouted Jarvellis, and slammed her hand down on the controls. All at once, the rock broke into four large pieces and many smaller ones, those pieces themselves rapidly parting, driven asunder by gaseous explosions. Lyric II’s ion engines roared, for a moment internal AG did not correct, and Thorn felt himself coming out of his seat. On the screen, the breaking-up rock rapidly receded, as Lyric II slowed and dropped through atmosphere behind it, underneath a trail of smoke and vapour dispersing across the sky. It occurred to Thorn that on a Polity world this scenario would never have been allowed, not so much because of the superior detectors possessed but because the AIs would have long since mapped the solar system concerned, therefore knowing in advance what asteroidal debris posed a threat, so would have been very suspicious of finding one out of place. Also, no Polity AI would have allowed a rock of that size into inhabited space.
