by Neal Asher
Soon Jarvellis switched the view on the main screen to encompass the planet’s surface. Under cloud like swirled sugar, the main inhabited continent soon became visible amid seas of a dark purplish blue. This continent was roughly rectangular, with its four corners stretched out so it bore some resemblance to the sail on an old galleon. Mountain chains spread from one of the corners, as if this was the point where a cannon-ball had holed the sail and it had subsequently been roughly stitched together – the material rucked up in the process. Huge areas extending beyond these mountains were dark greenish blue, whilst other wide areas were khaki or Sahara beige.
‘Desert?’ Thorn pointed at the last of these.
‘No desert here,’ Stanton replied. ‘What you’re seeing there is old flute grass – where it’s not yet been flattened by spring storms or the new is yet to come through like it has elsewhere.’
‘It’s all flute grass?’
‘Not all. There’s other kinds of native vegetation, and of course there’s the agricultural areas – mostly crop fields and ponds – but when you’re in the wild it seems like nothing but flute grass. It’s said that there were once trees here.’
Thorn remembered something from one of Lyric’s little lectures. ‘The tricones?’ he suggested. ‘They disturb the soil so much that nothing large can root, but flute grass survives because it sprouts from rhizomes that sit on the surface.’
‘You have done your homework,’ quipped Jarvellis.
‘Trees are grown,’ said Stanton. ‘But to grow them requires a major excavation, lined with plascrete then refilled with soil. Even then, the tricones manage to grind their way through. They go through plascrete at a rate of about a centimetre every five solstan years.’
‘Surely there are better ways?’
‘There are: use Polity composites, use genetic splicings from flute grass, build hydroponics facilities, float platforms on the sea. But the Theocracy is not prepared to inject the level of financial resources required for change. If there are shortages of any of the crops they require, they simply attribute blame and innocent people are punished.’
‘Very short-sighted of them.’
‘They don’t care. Aren’t they all going to Heaven?’ Stanton spat.
The screen now contained the whole of the continent – the edges of its surrounding world hidden from sight. Jarvellis checked her instrumentation and made some adjustments. The roar of the ion engines, which had been growing increasingly muted for some time, now cut out.
‘We’re fully on AG now,’ she explained.
For a short time they found themselves flying through cloud. On one of the subscreens giving a view of the ship itself, Thorn noticed that ice was building up on all its surfaces, then breaking away in thin flat flakes. They emerged from this cloud above the mountains: guts of stone pushed up through the plains and rucked together in tight folds and twisted pinnacles, scree slopes and slanted boulder-fields, the white scars of rivers slashing through dark valleys, and waterfalls cutting down from the heights. Jarvellis now folded her viewing visor across and firmly gripped the complex joystick before her. Obviously flying her ship was a great source of pleasure for her, as the AI could have done the job just as well, if not better. Soon they were hurtling along a riverine valley, grey faces of stone looming over them on either side, as if inspecting this impertinent intrusion into their realm.
‘You got the beacon?’ Stanton asked.
‘I traced that an hour back,’ she replied. ‘Though no one’s talking to us yet.’
Lyric II slowed to negotiate a curve in the valley, then descended further. Thorn could see vegetation blown flat by the wind of their passage, and papery fragments clouding the air behind. At the end of the valley was a small lake surrounded on all sides by precipitous slopes. Jarvellis brought the ship down onto its stony shore, next to a cliff formed by the collapse of one of the mountainous slopes, on an area between boulders that had once formed part of that slope. Thorn heard hydraulics operating as Lyric II lowered its feet. Along the bottom of the main screen, six subscreens appeared showing a view of each of the ship’s six feet with its spread of four toes. Five of the feet came down flat on the shore, but one of them descended on a small boulder, and Thorn was amused to see the obstructed foot close on it and shove it to one side as if in irritation, before planting itself down firmly – it seemed the AI did still control some things.
Manoeuvring thrusters cut out and various motors and generators wound down throughout the craft. He heard the tick of cooling metal, the occasional loud clunk or hissing crunch as its weight settled. Jarvellis operated a ball control to slide from view to view around the ship, giving the effect of a single camera panning slowly round 360 degrees to survey their surroundings. For a moment she paused at a view showing one of the partially submerged boulders, where something large and insectile squatted, its mantis head tilted towards them while its mandibles fed something wriggling into its mouth, as if without the insectile creature’s consent or apparent notice.
‘Harmless,’ said Stanton, ‘unless you feel inclined to go swimming.’
After a moment, the creature raised its snaky body from the stone on rows of centipedal legs, and dived into the water in one smooth motion. Jarvellis snorted and continued on round, until she came back to the original view.
‘You’d have thought they would have been here to meet us,’ she said.
‘We gave them a window of two months,’ Stanton replied. ‘They couldn’t wait out in the open for that length of time without attracting unwanted notice – and I don’t just mean from the Theocracy.’
‘Gabbleducks, heroynes and hooders?’ suggested Thorn.
Stanton shook his head. ‘Not so many heroynes or gabbleducks in these mountains. Siluroynes and hooders cause the most problems, and in the latter case any weapon heavy enough to deal with the problem might attract the notice of the Theocracy.’
‘Hard to kill?’ Thorn’s curiosity was piqued.
‘Never seen one myself, but I’m told that nothing less than an APW or missile launcher will do the job. Their chitin is something like a carbon composite, and they’re mainly made up of that substance and fibrous muscle as dense as antique wood. Small arms just make a lot of holes that do nothing to slow them down, and the heat from lasers quickly disperses through their chitin. Also, for something so large, they move very fast.’
‘How large and how fast?’ Thorn asked.
‘I’m told that a hooder once grabbed a proctor, plus his aerofan, from a hundred metres up in the air. As to how fast they move – faster than a man can run, and they hunt grazers that move at a similar rate to the grazers on Earth.’
‘Like gazelle?’
Stanton glanced at him. ‘If that’s a grazer on Earth, then yes.’
‘This is all very interesting,’ said Jarvellis, ‘but what do we do now?’
Standing up, Stanton replied, ‘I’m for stretching my legs outside. Anyone coming?’ He looked from Thorn to Jarvellis. ‘Lyric can listen for any signals coming in from them.’
As he headed away through the entrance tunnel, Jarvellis turned to Thorn. ‘You know, every time I land here it confirms for me that the Theocracy has the right idea.’
‘Living safe in their cylinder worlds?’
‘Safe anywhere you’re not likely to get eaten,’ she replied.
Aphran and Danny entered the bridge pod first, soon followed by five other Separatists who looked both tired and frightened. Skellor observed them as they halted just inside the doors and showed no inclination to come further in, and through their augs he sensed the gritty taste of their fear and their confusion at what they were seeing.
Nodding to the command-crew chairs he said, ‘Take your places.’
With their eyes widening in horror, they stared at the chairs with the growths poised underneath them like grasping claws. Through most of them, he sensed continued fear and confusion, but from Aphran he felt sudden panic at her partial understanding of wha
t he wanted. He reinforced the order with something like a mental slap that jerked them all into motion. Inevitably it was Danny who responded first, and was soon in the seat nearest to Skellor.
‘You don’t need to do this,’ said Aphran tightly, fighting all the way but unable to stop herself from sitting down.
Skellor did not bother to reply. Whether or not he actually needed to do what he was doing was irrelevant – he was doing what he wanted to do, and because he could. With the seven now seated, he started the Jain structure growing again, observing it climbing around the backs of each chair, fingering over the arms, and fumbling at the clothing of the seven Separatists. At the first penetration of his skin, the man on the end groaned in pain, then his groan was cut off as the filaments penetrated his spine and rapidly made connections as they sped up to his brain. Skellor then shunted over programs to run the man and programs for him to run. Where the man’s own experience or memory or skill conflicted with what was now required of him, it was erased – chalk wiped from black slate. Drooling in his chair, the Separatist took control of the almost irrelevant systems of life-support.
Aphran, Skellor noted, was making weak whimpering sounds as an extension of the structure slid over her shoulder and rose up by the side of her face and hung poised there like a cobra. She showed the whites of her eyes as she tried to peer round at it, but was unable to turn her head. She yelled once when it struck, and thereafter lost herself as she unwillingly gained control of the weapons systems of the Occam Razor. But she did not control them as a human being – she controlled them as a submind of Skellor, an extension, a useful tool that possessed as little self-determination as a trigger. Aphran did not drool; she just slumped in her seat and her face lost any vividness of expression it had once possessed.
The others followed, one after the other, and as he delegated control of systems, Skellor freed up much processing power within himself in which to more fully view and understand his conquest. The Occam Razor was a formidable ship, but it was not yet entirely his. Such had been the destructiveness of the burn Tomalon had initiated, there were huge sections of the vessel that Skellor could not yet even see, let alone control. He realized now that he needed a breathing space in which to grow the Jain structure throughout the whole ship, and he understood that here was not the best place to initiate that chore. Using another member of his crew as a sophisticated search-engine – an informational bloodhound – soon revealed to him a simple recording of a conversation that gave him all the information he required. He smiled nastily to himself: so Dragon was going there, outside the Polity, to a world that was utterly primitive by comparison – a place where it would be easy to still the wagging of tongues. With a half-nod to that member of his crew who controlled the U-space engines, he had the Occam taken under, and away. Then, when – through the Jain substructure – he experienced underspace utterly unshielded, he screamed. And one second after, his command crew mimicked him exactly.
12
As she read she could see it would soon be time for the boy to go to bed, for his expression was becoming increasingly glazed. Checking ahead she saw that there wasn’t all that much more to read and realized that the boy would soon be taking a greater interest.
‘On the third day he came into the realm of the gabble-duck, and found that many years had passed since the faithless had come to test themselves, and it had also been many years since the creature had fed, and to Brother Serendipity it seemed but a mound of skin and bone.’ The woman bit her lip, then pulled her chair round beside her son’s, so he could see the picture in the book. The gabbleduck appeared as a pyramidal monstrosity looking down on the little man. Behind the man the heroyne towered hugely, and coiled on the ground behind it rested the siluroyne, picking at its hatchet teeth with one claw. All three creatures had in their expressions something like suppressed amusement. The boy indeed started to pay more attention now.
‘“Please feed me for I have not eaten in many a year and am fading away,” spake the gabbleduck. “Why should I feed you when, strengthened by my food, you might riddle me to my doom?” asked the good Brother. “You have my promise that it will be otherwise,” the gabbleduck replied. “Swear in the name of God and in the name of his prophet Zelda Smythe,” the Brother demanded. And so swore the gabble-duck, and in recompense ate the last third of the meat cake gifted by the old woman. That night none dared approach Brother Serendipity and his three protectors as they came at last in sight of the boundary stone of Agatha Compound.’
As the cold-coffin opened, Cormac saw a pterodactyl head poised over him, as if contemplating the opening of a can of food. For a second he felt utterly vulnerable, but his previous assessment of their current situation inside the landing craft – inside Dragon – had not changed. If Dragon wanted to kill them, then there was nothing they could do about it. Ignoring the head, he pushed himself up from the coffin and to one side. Turning in midair, he also ignored the always painful return of feeling as he reached over to the adjacent locker and removed his clothing. Only when he was dressed, and with Shuriken strapped to his arm and his thin-gun in his pocket, did he turn to observe Dragon.
‘You interfered with the timings on the coffins,’ he said.
A mass of tentacles once again filled the airlock, but some of them, he now saw, snaked through the air to penetrate much of the craft’s instrumentation.
‘Your timings were wrong. We are already off Calypse and you would otherwise have slept for one solstan week more,’ Dragon replied.
Cormac rubbed his arms and, after pulling himself down to the floor with one of the many wall handles, he stamped his feet on the deck. Glancing around the inside of the craft, he thought for a moment that Apis had also thawed up, then realized that what he was seeing was the boy’s exoskeletal suit strapped upright to a handle right by his coffin. He next saw Gant sitting utterly still in the co-pilot’s chair: he too had shut himself down for the duration of the journey, but it seemed strange that he had not roused by now, for surely any unexpected sounds or movements would have woken him instantly. Cormac noticed that one of the draconic tentacles had snaked up the side of the chair and penetrated the Golem’s side.
‘Why have you woken me alone, then?’ Cormac asked.
‘The only way to win is to become.’
Ah, it was going to be one of those conversations – a kind of verbal chess in which he did not know the value of the pieces played. Cormac decided not to dignify such an opaque comment with a reply.
‘You referred to “the enemy” being aboard the Occam Razor, and I presumed that to mean the Jain. Were the Makers – your makers – once at war with them?’ he asked.
‘It is not they any more.’
‘You mean the Jain are a dead race?’
‘I mean it is not a race.’
‘Is the rumour true that you enjoy speaking a lot and saying nothing?’ Cormac asked, getting irritated.
The head turned towards the cockpit, where a mass of something with the consistency of raw liver darkened the front screen. However, one of the lower screens came on, to display a view outside Dragon. It revealed the swirled opal face of the gas giant Calypse, with two moons poised nearby. From the nearest of these moons, some sort of structure feathered out into space, small ships moving about it like beetles over a pile of twigs.
‘That’s Flint – and that structure some sort of shipyard, I would guess. Why did you come into realspace out here? Surely closer in would have been better? You could have hit the laser arrays and been out before they had a chance to respond.’
‘I am not planning to leave.’
Great.
‘That still doesn’t tell me why you’re this far out.’
‘Let them tremble at my presence. Let them see!’
Its final bellow had Cormac clapping his hands over his ears. He saw tentacles retracting; Gant jerking, then abruptly whipping his head round. Behind him, the cold-coffins began to open.
‘What the hell?’ asked Gant
.
‘I begin,’ said Dragon, quietly now, and suddenly the very air in the craft seemed taut with energy. Behind him, Cormac heard Mika groan, then Apis asking a question – but he could not distinguish the words because they became so distorted. Huge pressure built, so it felt to him as if his head must implode. Then there came an immense sound, as of two seconds broadcast from inside a hurricane, and in this vast exhalation the tension and pressure drained away. The screen became a distorting lens showing the view down a long tunnel towards the shipyard. As it settled back to a normal view, the yard disappeared inside a pillar of fire, ships tumbling out into space, some burning and some breaking apart, a crater now glowing in the face of the moon.
Then they were moving, Calypse and its moons dropping behind.
‘Vengeance is mine, saith Dragon,’ the head intoned.
The shaking of her room had been enough to bring Eldene to the surface of slumber, but not enough to hold her there. It was the constantly increasing cacophony in Pillartown One that finally dragged her back to the surface and held her there. She had been lying awake, but just too comfortable to move for quite some time, when the door opened and the lights came on.
