by Neal Asher
Five thousand hours of secret holocording, filming, and depositions – in fact recordings in every medium available to humanity. Those same hours, which he viewed in less than one hour realtime, told him a lot about his destination, but it took him a while to understand the purpose of the transmission. Subsequent communications from someone called Lellan, and transmissions of realtime events on the surface of the planet, brought home to him what it was all about. As did the meticulously recorded ballot of the indigenous population, which clearly made their wishes known. The five thousand hours detailed atrocities and the unjust rule of a Theocracy. This was a cry for help directed towards the Polity. These people wanted Polity intervention.
Annoyingly, the signal might already have got through to the Polity – but no more. His reply to it and his offer to act as a signal-boosting station had been immediately accepted, and someone called Polas was grateful in the belief that the signal was now being relayed into the heart worlds of the Polity. This would all give Skellor time to get a lot closer, where he could more easily employ the signal-blocking technology of this ship. Chuckling to himself – inside, for his face no longer had the ability to show expression – Skellor gave his instructions, and smooth as a snake the Occam Razor slid into underspace. They would certainly get intervention on this world called Masada – but he didn’t think they would like it.
16
Certain now that the boy was deeply asleep, the woman tiptoed away to her seat in front of the screen and reopened the book. She did not like to act the censor, but this picture book was definitely now out of the realm of Disney and into that of some psychotic relative of the brothers Grimm, and she suspected that some of the later stories had a greater potential for bloody distortion. The one she chose now was entitled ‘Four Brothers in the Valley’ and the initial picture was far from ominous, displaying as it did the four good Brothers themselves making ready for their journey.
‘Yeah, right,’ said the woman, wondering if there might be a hint of AI to this book. She reached out and touched the top of the text column, and the Brothers moved now – talking to each other and laughing. The woman cleared her throat – slightly embarrassed to be speaking to herself – and began to read.
‘Four good Brothers set out upon a journey to find and bring finally to justice the Hooded One. Brother Stenophalis wore armour of aluminium and carried a thrower of iron. Brother Pegrum wore armour of brass and carried a sword of light. Brother Egris wore armour of iron and carried the caster of thunderbolts. And Brother Nebbish wore his armour of faith and carried in his right hand the Word of God and His Prophet.’
The woman paused as the book clad each of the brothers in the required garb, and set them on their way. It all seemed like a happy scene from some wonderful tale in which right and justice would triumph. She tried fast-forwarding the text but it just wouldn’t move.
‘I see,’ she said, then read on.
Three of them came over in the first pass, and turned the entire area occupied by the rebel tents into a brief morass of fire and flying dirt. Lellan guessed that this was just a probing attack, however. The pulse-cannon, on the one remaining tank, spat up from its place of concealment close beside the embankment. One of the fighters – a wedge-shaped, one-man craft with swing wings, and enough weapons pods to give it the appearance of a tern with a very bad fungal infection – flared briefly and then became a line of white-hot fragments tumbling across the sky. Another of the fighters bucked as if an invisible hand had slapped its back end, then overcorrected and nosed straight into the ground – the following explosion sleeting mud even as far as where she and her brother were dug into the embankment.
‘I’d get out of there, Carl. They’ll have you spotted now,’ said Lellan.
Stanton lowered the intensifier and glanced round at his sister, as he listened in on the man’s reply.
‘It’ll be the carrier they hit next,’ Carl replied. ‘We’ll take a second shot at them, then leave the pulse-cannon on automatic.’
Stanton nodded to her his agreement with Carl – the Theocracy fighters would take out preselected targets to begin with, before raining down the real shitstorm.
In the second pass came five of the fighters, low this time – then turning away from the swarm of missiles released. The carrier leapt out of its pond on the first scattering of explosions, and came apart on the next. Only small fragments reached the ground, as was the similar fate of another of the fighters.
‘Now we get our heads down,’ advised Lellan.
The fighters came in low again, flying directly along the embankment this time, high-powered rail-cannons opening up to create a long swarm of explosions that wiped out every weapon the rebels had mounted there. Still more fighters came hurtling in low over the flute grass, into the face of pulse-cannon fire from Carl’s tank. A row of explosions stepped through the grasses towards the tank, and on the final explosion it ceased to fire. Lellan hoped the pulse-cannon had been on automatic – hoped that Carl was still alive.
‘Polas, speak to me,’ she said.
‘Main body is coming in right now with the big bastards behind – three of them,’ came the reply.
‘Remember, everybody.’ Lellan addressed her troops scattered through the flute grass. ‘When I give the order, you cease firing and let our friends deal with the bombers.’
A full wave of attack aircraft came in only shortly after she spoke, and their numbers darkened the sky.
‘Kill them,’ she hissed.
All through the long grasses, troops cast aside the flak blankets they had been lying under, shouldered their hand-helds, and began firing. Soon there was more light in the sky than the predawn sun had managed, and a constant rain of wreckage. Stanton led the way out of their foxhole, brought his hand-held to his shoulder, and just held its trigger down. There were enough targets for each of his five missiles to find one. Amid the grasses there came explosion after explosion, as cluster shells dropped, and even though a counter in the corner of her visor was ticking up just how many of her people were dying, she knew it could be a whole lot worse. On the big bombers following, there would be daisy-cutters – wide-area antipersonnel weapons – and probably enough of them to kill off most of her little army.
‘Ram and Rom, are you ready?’ she asked.
‘We were created ready,’ came the ironic reply.
Gazing at the chaos filling the sky, the wreckage and burning fighters falling to earth, Lellan decided that now was the time.
‘Cease firing and go for cover,’ she ordered her troops, knowing that the only cover they had out there was under the Kevlar-filled blankets. She continued, ‘Drones, the sky is now yours.’
The two cylindrical war drones burst from where they had buried themselves in the soft ground far to the right flank of Lellan’s army. Immediately they performed a strange ballet around each other as they hurtled up into the sky. Then suddenly lines of violet fire began spewing from one end of each drone, so that they seemed tumbling torches. Unseen through this, their missiles speared out with horrifying accuracy, and all across the sky the fighters were disintegrating. Lellan observed some fighters turning to attack the two rising cylinders, but they were nowhere near as manoeuvrable as the drones, which simply slid aside and obliterated their assailants as they went past. It wasn’t all one-sided though; the two drones were jerked about by the occasional hits they suffered, then one of them lost its APW in a brief flare. But they continued to rise, their course coming to intersect perfectly that of the first bomber. The lumbering giant did not stand a chance, and the explosion that cut the sky was twinned by the flare of sunrise, which heralded the sudden attack of the Theocracy infantry.
Suddenly their ATV was full of people, and Eldene felt angry at her space being invaded – then suddenly confused about why she felt thus.
‘Slow and easy,’ Thorn advised her. ‘Take us round the other side of the crater.’
‘Did it work?’ she asked, almost too shy to look round a
t the intruders as she spun up the vehicle’s turbine.
‘Spectacularly,’ said Thorn, but she could tell he was angry about something. She watched him as he turned to the four newcomers. ‘Let me introduce some old comrades,’ he said to her. ‘Ian, Mika, and my old friend Gant – who is dead.’
Eldene was busy wondering about the yellow-faced boy in the big suit, before Thorn’s final words impacted. She did not react, however, merely turned her attention back to the screen and set the vehicle in motion. That she felt confused again came as no surprise to her – she’d been in a state of confusion right from the moment she had seen Fethan ram his hand into Proctor Volus. As Thorn returned to the back of the ATV, the strange boy moved up beside her and studied the controls she was operating. She gave him a tentative smile and he returned it tiredly, as he took hold of one of the support handles fixed above the screen. She could sense he felt more comfortable here.
‘Dead or not, he looks mighty well to me,’ commented Fethan in reply to Thorn’s brief acerbic introduction.
With the vehicle getting up speed, they all either grabbed handholds or quickly folded down seats, as the inclination took them.
‘You angry because you forgot about my memplant?’ asked Gant.
Thorn grimaced. ‘I don’t know myself why I’m angry.’ Still showing some irritation, he sat down by the weapons console and swung the targeting visor across his face, probably to hide his expression.
‘Angry or otherwise, I need you getting me up to speed concerning what’s going on here,’ said the one called Cormac, and Eldene felt her spine crawl at the sound of his voice. She glanced round at him and took in eyes as unforgiving as lead shot, but then he smiled at her and suddenly the coldness was gone. All she could do was turn away and concentrate once again on her driving.
‘Oh, I can tell you all that, Agent,’ said Fethan.
‘Please do,’ said Cormac. ‘Beginning with why you keep on calling me “Agent”.’
‘Last I heard you was an agent – didn’t think you’d retired,’ said Fethan.
‘You know me?’
‘Know of you, who don’t? You’re Ian Cormac – not what I’d call a secret agent.’
‘I’ve never been considered that,’ Cormac replied. ‘I’m a . . . facilitator, and it is sometimes useful that I’m recognized. Polity secret agents wear a different face every day and often they are Golem . . . or something else.’ He eyed Fethan.
‘The name’s Fethan,’ said the old cyborg. ‘I’m a facilitator too.’
‘Well, facilitate away and tell me what the hell’s going on down here.’
As Eldene manoeuvred the ATV around the edge of the crater and into a clear bright day, Fethan tersely detailed all that had occurred over the last few days.
‘So nice to encounter old friends,’ muttered Cormac, when Fethan told him about John Stanton – though Eldene could hear no pleasure in his voice. Finally, some time after Eldene had stopped the ATV and powered it down, Cormac observed, ‘So it seems Lellan is caught. She cannot stay hidden in the cave systems because of the approach of this Ragnorak device; she cannot destroy all the Theocracy forces on the surface because that would result in a nuclear strike being used against her; she cannot lose against said forces because there would be no taking of prisoners; and in the end all she can do is drag the battle out and hope for Polity intervention here.’
‘But that’s on its way, apparently,’ said Thorn. He gestured to a coms helmet lying on the floor at the rear of the ATV. ‘Polas earlier sent out a message of encouragement to the troops, informing them that Lellan’s U-space plea for help has been picked up and relayed by an ECS dreadnought – and that same ship is now on its way here.’
Cormac went very still for a moment, then asked calmly, ‘And the name of this dreadnought? Was a name ever given?’
‘Yes, a Line Patrol ship, name of the Occam Razor,’ Thorn replied.
The euphemistic description might be tactical withdrawal, but it was called defeat in any other language, and no less than Lellan had expected. Hit and withdraw, hit and withdraw – all the way back to the mountains, where she knew she could extend the conflict almost indefinitely. To stand, out here against a force three times their number would be plain suicide. Perhaps it would have been a different matter with a few more of those war drones, or if the two she did possess had not depleted their power supplies to the point where they could just about keep up with her army’s retreat, and manage an occasional counter-attack whenever Dorth’s forces pushed to break the line. In the end, she desperately needed Polity intervention, because without it they would do nothing but lose.
I’ve destroyed us, I’ve completely destroyed us . . .
‘Tell me again, what did he say?’ asked her brother.
‘He said that the Occam Razor is now in the hands of Separatists who are unlikely to pass on our shout for help.’ She remembered that cold voice speaking in her ear, then the confirmation from Fethan and the man Thorn.
‘No, what exactly did he call it?’ Stanton asked.
‘He called it a subverted AI dreadnought, and our signal to the Polity has been updated to include that news.’
‘That should bring them running,’ said her brother.
Lellan gritted her teeth and, feigning tiredness, rubbed at her eyes to smear away the tears that were gathering there. Jarvellis had yet to contact Stanton and give him the wonderful news that the moment they had started sending the updated signal, something had begun blocking it.
‘I need to wear it to prevent the gravity here killing me,’ explained Apis.
‘Why? How would it kill you?’ Eldene asked him, glad of those long talks with Fethan which had given her some understanding of ‘gravity’ and how it was absent in space.
Mika, seated on a rolled-up sleeping bag opposite them, intervened, ‘His people . . . they adapted to living in space. Amongst other things, his bones would never have supported him in this gravity since, as he was then, he would have collapsed and died almost immediately.’
Apis, who had been showing little inclination to sit down and continued to prowl around inside the ATV, snapped his attention towards Mika. ‘You say “would” and “was”? How different am I now?’
Mika inspected the laptop, via which she monitored the Outlinker’s body through his exoskeleton. ‘You are improving, though I would not yet advise the removal of your suit. It is possible that you would survive it, and that the nanomycelium reconfiguring your body would be thereby stimulated to work harder, but such a move is still not recommended.’
Leaning back in the driver’s chair, Eldene studied the boy further. She had no idea what Mika was talking about, but it added to the mystery. This boy had previously lived on a giant space station and now had to wear the strange bulky suit to support his weight in Masada’s gravity. Eldene could not conceive of anyone more unlike herself.
‘Tell me about Miranda,’ she asked him suddenly.
Apis froze in mid-stride, and Eldene noted how Mika was now studying him analytically. Obviously there was a great deal more to learn here, more than she had overheard in previous conversations before the others had left the ATV – Fethan to check where the hooder had gone, and the other three to find out about this ‘dracoman’.
Apis turned to her and replied doggedly, ‘What’s to tell? Miranda was an Outlink station that was the home for millions of people, and now it is just so much floating wreckage.’
Before he could turn away Eldene persisted, ‘But how was it destroyed?’
‘A nanomycelium,’ said Apis, perhaps hoping her lack of knowledge might silence her.
‘You have fungi here.’ Mika made it a statement, in her accustomed fashion. Then, with a flash of self-annoyance, ‘Do you have fungi here?’
‘Orepores,’ Eldene replied, not quite sure of what relevance that was.
‘Describe them,’ said Mika.
‘Round things.’ Eldene’s hands shaped something spherical in the air. ‘Up
in the north, they feed them to the pigs.’
‘What you are seeing in these orepores is the fruit of a plant – the plant itself is a spread of thin fibres, some of which are too small to be seen. These fibres are called mycelia – that’s the plural of mycelium.’
‘A fungus destroyed a place with millions of people in it?’ Eldene asked, disbelievingly. Then she pointed at Apis. ‘And he’s got one inside him?’
‘It’s a little more complicated than that,’ replied Mika, glancing towards the door of the ATV as the warning light came on beside it, then hingeing her mask back into place.
Eldene raised her mask too, and noted how Apis did not even have to – apparently devices in his clothing detected any drop in the oxygen content of the air and raised his visor when necessary.
‘That was quick,’ said Mika, standing up and turning towards the door. Eldene had been aware that the woman was very annoyed earlier, when ordered by Cormac to stay with the ATV – so they did not later have a struggle again to drag her away from the remnants of Dragon. She wondered if they had found this dracoman they had been talking about. What she did not expect was for the door to slam back, and to hear a thud like a cleaver chopping into a cabbage.
For a moment she could not fathom what was going on. Mika suddenly bent over, something smacking into the wall above and behind her. Only when blood welled through the torn fabric of Mika’s suit did it become evident that someone standing outside had put a shot through her. With a bubbling groan Mika collapsed to her knees. She turned to say something, but only blood came out of her mouth.
The Theocracy soldier who now stepped through the door seized Mika by the shoulder and hurled her outside behind him, even as he turned and fired at the Outlinker. Apis grunted as the single shot slammed him back against the wall. It was only as he began sliding down it, his eyes turning up in his head to show only the white, that Eldene thought to reach for her weapon. In a second the soldier had knocked it away, shoving the snout of his weapon up under her chin. Eldene froze, recognizing the gun – it was the very same type as the one Fethan had given her when they first left the crop lands and she knew exactly what it was capable of.
