by Neal Asher
‘Fucking things,’ said Beckle and, drawing his cut-down rifle, put two shots through the creature. Smoking, it pushed itself up on its legs, as if trying to retract its head, then it sagged with red oxygenated blood pouring out of it.
‘It probably finished her off,’ observed Carl, for a moment staring beyond her with the thought that her blood had sprayed a very long way – before realizing that what he was seeing was red gallish nodules breaking out on the grass stalks, and recognizing how utterly irrelevant human drama was to the indefatigable grind of the seasonal engine. Then, peering out of the crater in the opposite direction, he ducked as a burst of fire sprayed them with fragments of the same budding growth.
‘They’ll put a grenade in here any moment now,’ warned Beckle.
‘We keep running, and hold at the mountains,’ said Carl, relaying the orders he had just received.
‘I agree with the running bit,’ muttered Beckle.
‘Lellan?’ Uris asked – he had lost his helmet earlier and did not have Carl’s coms access.
‘Yes,’ Carl replied.
‘Great, she’s got a plan,’ said Beckle as they piled over the edge of the crater and ran for the next scrap of cover.
In such horror and chaos Carl felt it necessary to believe that someone, somewhere, knew what they were doing. To think otherwise would be to give in to despair.
When consciousness eventually returned it did so with disorientating abruptness. One moment Apis felt he was waking again from the cold-coffin in the lander, then as memory caught up he assumed he was waking on the floor of the ATV. Both scenarios turned out to be incorrect as he lifted his head and looked around. He was in a lander, sure, but not the one in which he had arrived upon this planet. This particular one had its cockpit sealed off with a heavy door, some sort of fibrous matting on the floor, and cold blue lights set in the ceiling. With a grunt of effort, Apis sat up and heaved himself to a position with his back resting against the cold wall. Eldene, sitting with her arms wrapped around her shins and her chin resting on her knees, observed him silently for a moment before saying, ‘You haven’t noticed, have you?’
Apis wondered if she was referring to the bloody dressing on her head. He reached up, with an arm that seemed wrapped in lead, and felt the back of his own head – where it had slammed against the wall of the ATV after the Theocracy soldier had . . . pushed him. He lowered his arm and stared at it, then lowered his hand to his chest and probed it with the fingers of his other hand.
‘I warned them that to remove it would kill you,’ Eldene added.
They’d shot him, but the exoskeleton had prevented the bullet penetrating, which would not now be the case for he no longer wore it. He continued probing his chest, his stomach, his biceps, his thighs. His body felt utterly wrong to him; instead of feeling just bone and gristle under his skin he found a layer of flesh, the shapes of muscles clinging to his bones like parasitic growths – in fact, utterly unaccustomed bulk. Whenever he moved, these muscles moved with him – it did not seem quite real to him that the muscles were doing the moving, and were actually part of him.
‘Why aren’t you dead?’ Eldene asked.
Apis considered the complicated – and to his mind incredibly dangerous – procedures involved in standing up, and rejected them for the moment.
‘The mycelium working inside me – it’s rebuilt me as a normal-gravity human. Mika said that the exo was taking less and less of the strain, but I wasn’t sure what she meant by that.’
Mika?
‘Where is Mika?’ he asked, not sure he wanted to hear the answer.
‘Dead,’ said Eldene flatly. ‘They shot her, then just threw her outside like a sack of deaders.’
Apis stared at Eldene, but somehow just could not find the energy to feel sorry. He’d lost his own people, he’d lost his mother, and Mika he had not even known for very long. He just did not have the grief to spare for her.
‘Where are we now?’ Apis asked, wanting to know more than just their location.
‘On the way here, I saw hundreds of landing craft, and a great tent-like building erected between some of them. We’re in one of those craft by the edge of the tent. We’re prisoners of the Theocracy.’
‘What will they do with us?’ he persisted.
Eldene stared at him for a long moment, then shrugged. ‘Probably torture us to death. There aren’t any jails down here.’
‘They are . . . insane,’ began Apis. But Eldene’s attention had slid over to the light beside the airlock, as it faded down from red, through orange, to yellow. Apis felt a rush of adrenalin and used it to push himself to his feet. Every movement, it seemed to him, was fraught with peril; he felt his weight as a hugely unstable load, and wondered what bones might snap in trying to support it; he felt his muscles sliding under his skin, and expected agony as they tore free from their anchor points; the clicking of his joints and the buzzing pins-and-needles in his feet terrified him, but somehow, without mishap, he stood.
The soldier who stepped through was the very same one who had burst into the ATV and shot him. Naked as he was, Apis felt incredibly vulnerable when the man negligently levelled the same weapon at his chest.
‘You’re standing, I see, which means that you’ – he looked at Eldene – ‘are a liar.’
Apis immediately felt affronted, was about to argue her case, but she caught his eye as she stood up too, and gave him a slight shake of her head. Only as she did that did he truly begin to understand their situation, and only then did something very adult and very callous – probably born in that moment when he had opened the airlock on twenty-three of these people, and nurtured by all that had subsequently ensued – rear its head inside him and look around. He kept his mouth closed and wondered how much he could depend on his body in this gravity; and also wondered if he would get an opportunity to use it.
Receiving no verbal reaction to his words, and perhaps expecting none, the man threw something compressed in his left hand at Apis, then stood aside to allow another guard to enter the cell. Apis caught the balled-up material, let it fall open, and saw that he had been given a set of overalls.
‘Put them on,’ ordered the soldier.
Apis pulled on the overalls, his every measured movement carried through with the utmost care. As he finished, struggling to do up the primitive buttons down the front of the garment, he felt exhausted. When the soldier waved them both towards the door, where more guards waited with plastic ties for their wrists and hobbles for their legs, Apis felt their chances of escape fading.
Now, with the advance of the Masadan month, Calypse was being overtaken by the sun in their erratic race across mackerel skies, and had half its vast bulk sinking into misty oblivion behind the horizon as the sun set off to one side, throwing it into brown and lead silhouette. For a brief time the gas giant seemed fused to the body of the planet itself, and with its slow descent any watcher might expect the earth to tremble with this shift.
‘What happened?’ Fethan asked, looking intently at Thorn.
‘We could as well ask what happened to you,’ said Cormac, studying the old cyborg’s ripped clothing, and ripped skin, and noting the exposed hard white ceramals and carbon materials of his internal workings.
Thorn said, ‘The other two were in the ATV when it was taken by Theocracy soldiers. We are following them now.’ Then, gesturing to Mika, ‘We’ve got a trace on the boy’s exoskeleton.’
Fethan nodded, for a moment observed the blood on Mika’s clothing, shot Cormac an inquiring look, then turned his attention to Gant. ‘Can you move fast, Golem?’ he asked.
There was too much intensity in his question for Gant to ridicule it, and he merely nodded an affirmative. Cormac glanced from Fethan to Gant, then back again.
‘Trouble?’ he asked.
Fethan grimaced. ‘We’ve got a hooder only two hundred metres off in that direction.’ He gestured beyond tall shadowed stands of flute grass, then stabbed a finger at Gant. ‘Me and hi
m are gonna have to be live bait to lead it away.’ He turned to Thorn, Cormac and Mika. ‘You three have to keep going – as fast as you dare. Stay out of the flute grass as much as you can, and keep an eye up for heroynes.’ He stabbed a finger to the darkening sky.
‘We could just kill it,’ suggested Gant, holding up his APW.
‘Nah, you couldn’t,’ said Fethan, eyeing the weapon. ‘That’d only piss it off.’
Knowing that the gun Gant held was capable of destroying other Golem and blowing holes through steel walls, Cormac wondered if Fethan knew what he was talking about. Before he could comment on this the cyborg went on.
‘That’s one big fucker out there,’ he said. ‘You might manage to blow enough segments to kill it, but more likely you’d just burn it a bit, before it ripped you apart . . . Look, we gotta go.’
Gant glanced at Cormac for confirmation. When Cormac nodded, Gant followed the old cyborg out into the falling twilight. Turning back to the others, Cormac said, ‘Let’s keep moving.’ Then, noticing how Thorn was staring after the two rapidly departing figures he said, ‘They’re machines, Thorn. You’d never be able to move as fast, so you’d soon get exhausted.’
‘Machines,’ Thorn repeated, then, ‘you know, he never told me he’d had a memplant. He lay spread in pieces on the floor of that cavern on Samarkand, and I didn’t know . . . A recovery team must have come along later.’
Cormac reached out and slapped his arm. ‘Come on.’
Thorn shook himself and did as bid.
They travelled, where possible, down plantained and mossy channels, or across areas where the grass had been grazed down to its roots; and, where that was not possible, they progressed cautiously and with weapons to hand through areas of thick flute grass. All the time they were aware of the drama being enacted elsewhere by Fethan and Gant. Distantly they heard rushing sounds, as of a maglev train or a sudden burst of wind through dry foliage. At one point the reddish arc-welder flash of Gant’s APW ignited the twilight, and Cormac had to wonder if the Golem had disobeyed instructions or perhaps used it just as a distraction.
‘What did he mean blow enough segments to kill it?’ asked Cormac as they rested briefly.
Mika was busy checking her laptop to once again locate where they should be going – roughly adapted software using the increase or decrease in signal strength from Apis’s exoskeleton as its direction finder. ‘I only read a little about hooders, and then only out of morbid curiosity, rather than because I expected to ever encounter one,’ she said, hooking her screen back on her belt and turning to look at Cormac. ‘As I understand it they have some of the physical attributes of earthworms, with their brain not just contained in the head but spread down the length of their bodies. It would be difficult to kill a creature like that hitting it in only one place.’
‘What else can you tell me about them?’ asked Cormac, firmly believing that once horror had been named and described, it ceased to be quite as horrifying.
‘I can tell you a little,’ said Thorn.
Cormac nodded for him to continue.
Thorn went on, ‘Stanton told me that nothing less than an APW or missile-launcher could kill them. Apparently their shells are something like a carbon composite, and they’re mainly made up of that and fibrous muscle. Both disperse the heat from lasers, and small arms just make a lot of holes. Apparently one of them once grabbed a proctor and his aerofan, which was a hundred metres up in the air.’
Cormac lowered his mask and took a sip from his water bottle – his mouth now feeling a little dry. ‘How fast?’ he pressed.
‘Stanton claims they can move as fast as Terran predators. I checked that with the Lyric II AI. They can move even faster of course, at about a hundred kph, over this sort of terrain.’
‘Great,’ said Cormac, his previous theory about describing horror now in pieces around his feet. ‘Shall we keep moving?’
17
Nodding to herself the woman read on, ‘First into the mountains came Brother Stenophalis and high and low he searched for this enemy of the faithful, and at last found him in the Valley of Shadows and Whispers.’
The picture displayed the Brother as some huge godlike incarnation astride the valley in his gleaming armour – a rail-gun of unlikely proportions clasped in his gauntlets, its ribbed power cable attaching to a lumpish power pack on his belt. Below him in the valley was something shadowy and insectile, and just looking at this made the hairs stand up on the back of the woman’s neck.
She read: ‘Standing over the valley with the sun gleaming on his polished armour, he demanded of the monster, “Come forth and face me!”’
Abruptly the woman realized what was giving her the creeps: the picture had taken on depth – a 3-D effect. She pressed her finger against the page and it felt cold.
‘The Hooded One came forth, and Stenophalis smote it with good iron, until the valley rang and echoed with the sound of their conflict, and avalanches of rock thundered from the heights.’
The Hooded One coming forth was horrible: it was a hood of chitin containing shadow and just a hint of eyes. Brother Stenophalis turned and his rail-gun spat lines of black that just dissolved into this shadow.
‘But iron availed him nought against this monster, and in the end it dragged him down into the Valley of Shadows and Whispers, and his armour parted like butter under the knife of the Hooded One.’
The woman stared at the scene displayed, and decided she had been right to check out this story before letting her son . . . experience it.
Hierarch Epthirieth Loman Dorth stood in his favoured viewing room in the Tower of Faith and considered what he had wrought. The Council, in their terror of him, had voted him more and ever more powers, and had thus all but destroyed their own effectiveness in office. But this was how it had always been: when Amoloran had become Hierarch, the Council had done the same thing and, over the forty years of his rule, they had their powers restored by simple delegation because, in the end, no one man could effectively control the entire Theocracy. Knowing this, Loman smiled to think of those bureaucrats who had attempted to load him with endless detail in order to expedite this natural process. Even now he could see what remained of them floating beyond the arc of the Up Mirror. What none of them seemed to realize was that, with the higher channels now available to him, now controlled by him, the option to take the place Behemoth had prepared for itself was now also available to him.
The Hierarch closed his eyes and felt the vast potential of the Gift spread through three cylinder worlds, and down to his forces on the planet surface. Poor Aberil, even with all his abilities and training he had never wondered how the likes of Brom had managed to gain such stature so rapidly on their home worlds. He had not grasped that the Gift was as hierarchical as the organizations it was generally employed by, like the Theocracy itself, and just as he, Loman, had clawed his way to power in the physical world, so had ascendancy in the world of the Gift swung over to him once his usurpation was recognized. The moment Amoloran had died, there had been that first flush of additional power as command channels opened to him – excepting those occupied by the Septarchy Friars. And now, with the Friars gone, he could truly feel the growth of his mental dominion; now he no longer had to give orders at all, as the world ordered itself to his will. Just his very expectation of something had people scrambling to provide that something, often not knowing why. However, he realized that this was only the beginning – there were even greater levels of control he could reach, there was greater ascendancy to be gained. He was coming to understand that the ultimate level – the plateau – was the entire Theocracy acting as one beast, with one mind that was his own.
Throughout the realm of the Gift, Loman extended his power, and the feedback to him was gratifying and sometimes disconcerting. From the surface of the planet he felt a distortion, the essence and the sense of Behemoth undissipated: something there, but something not easily definable nor grasped. From deep space he knew rather than sensed, di
stantly, other conglomerations of Dracocorp augs, and out there he did sense, between him and them, another distortion, something odd, twisted. Here in the tower, it amused him to feel the fear of those who served him closely. It amused him to look through their eyes and see how, to them, he had gained weight and wore small scales upon his skin, yet to himself he had changed not at all. What a strange world he had wrought, and with what senses now could he view it all – the senses of all his subjects.
‘Ah, you are at the apex, Hierarch Epthirieth Loman Dorth.’
The words wormed into his consciousness, almost as if forming from the random sounds of so much that he was himself hearing and hearing by proxy. With part of himself that seemed nothing to do with human senses, he felt something unfolding from quantum vacuum, oozing out like guts pressured out through a small hole in someone’s torso, or perhaps like crystals growing in cooling magma – something vast, and more powerful than anything should have the God-given right to be. Even Behemoth was a pale monster indeed by comparison.
‘Who? Who?’
On Charity, Loman looked through the eyes of technicians and saw something they had hoped very much never to see. On the Witchfire he felt the horror of Captain Ithos as, trapped against atmosphere, he observed missiles hammering down on him from deepest space. One after the other he felt the brief sad protest of lives snuffed out in seconds, as hugely powerful induction weapons and full-spectrum lasers scoured away small ships of every kind between the cylinder worlds, almost like a blowtorch singeing away pin feathers from three plucked birds. Briefly he heard the babbling panic of the crew in the lone bomber with its cargo of atomic weapons. Briefly he glimpsed on a screen in the Gabriel the trace of radioactive vapour which that craft became in high orbit over Masada, and felt the keening grief of Captain Granch.
