by Neal Asher
John was out there somewhere, but to try and communicate with him would be madness – locating both him and herself for this Skellor. And then there was this ship of theirs and all it contained . . .
‘Lyric, what must we do to stay safe?’ she asked, more for confirmation than because she did not already know.
‘Move,’ replied the AI. ‘The Skellor will have realized that was only a secondary emitter in the mountain peak, and we do not know how much information he obtained from there.’
AIs were just so cold: never unable to answer any question posed. Jarvellis thought of Polas in the nursery in Pillartown One, laughing as he pushed around toy tanks for a blond-haired child. She tried to scrub the image and to concentrate on the instrumentation before her.
‘We have to assume that Skellor now has full use of all the scanning instrumentation possessed by that dreadnought. In Polity terms it is an old ship, but it’s still way beyond anything the Theocracy owns . . . or rather owned,’ she said.
‘The Skellor may have more than even that,’ commented the AI.
‘Why do you keep calling him “the Skellor”?’
‘Because it is not human, it is not AI – and because I want to,’ it replied.
John had deliberately programmed Lyric II’s AI for a certain cussedness, but sometimes Jarvellis wondered why they couldn’t just have one as nice, polite and helpful as those she encountered on other ships.
‘Very well,’ she went on, ‘he may even have more . . . in fact he must have, to have been able to subvert a Polity dreadnought.’ Jarvellis could feel herself clenching up inside. There it was again: indecision stemming from the fear of making the wrong choice – too much to lose.
‘Dammit!’ She slammed her hands down on the console. ‘We just assume a level of technology equivalent to that of the dreadnought. Now . . . this means the chameleonware field should cover us for anything, barring a real close scrutiny, but it will not cover us if we use AG.’
‘Agreed,’ said the AI.
Jarvellis stared at the screen, showing her the lake and riverine valley beyond: the looming faces of stone and tangled vegetation, which had changed from the dull beige seen upon their arrival here to dark green and red, lurid purple and light-sucking black. ‘So we need to use ion drive and gas thrusters to get out of this trap.’
‘You will then leave an ionic trail,’ cautioned the AI.
Jarvellis nodded. ‘But a diffuse one, as I’ll only be using the ion engine for lift, and especially diffuse because the blast will be directed down into the river, which will soak most of it up. Would it be better to stay here?’
‘On the basis of a Polity technology level, no,’ replied the AI.
‘And if “the Skellor” has a higher tech?’
‘No again.’
‘Then we move,’ said Jarvellis.
‘What about when you want to move away from the river?’ the AI asked, probably annoyed about her little victory.
‘There’s a hundred kilometres of it before it finally winds out onto the plain. I think we’ll worry about that pass when we come to it.’
The AI had nothing more to add, so Jarvellis reached out, her fingers skittering across the controls with practised ease. She noted that the AI had, on its own initiative, filled the water tanks with water it had purified from the nearby source, so there was now no shortage of fuel for the tokamac running around the centre of the ship, nor for the ion function of the engines themselves, which now started up with a low thrumming. Outside she saw steam and debris blasting from underneath Lyric II, shells and stones splashing into the adjacent pond, and the insectile creatures diving from their rocks, perhaps confused by this sudden shower that appeared to them out of thin air. Taking a firm grip on the joystick Jarvellis gently raised and tilted it, observing on the subscreens the ship’s feet retracting and folding away. Without AG, the ship handled like it was wading through glue, but she was more than capable of flying it. She considered telling its other human occupant to strap in for safety, then rejected the idea. She was confident she would not crash this ship; and the only disaster that could befall it would be discovery by Skellor, in which case Lyric II and all its occupants would survive only fractionally longer than the mountaintop containing Lellan’s operations room.
Aberil realized it was going to burn his mind like fuse wire in a lightning strike; just as it had burnt the thousands in Faith, just as it had burnt his brother Loman, and just as it was burning the minds of the Theocracy army upon the planet and making each individual soldier into a dronelike extension of itself. Then something caused the ‘burn’ to pull back from all those within the tented area.
‘Outlinker . . . too crude . . .’
After these three words something, which until then had seemed as monstrously impersonal in its slaughter as a pyroclastic flow, became personal and focused. Aberil found a force of will operating more directly, on him, and he could not resist. It jerked him to his feet and pulled his hooked fingers away from their tearing at his aug. Eyes open now, he both saw and felt Speelan, Molat and the others gathering in closer as if this was necessary to bring them into the focus of the now possessing mind.
‘The Outlinker boy . . . where is the Outlinker boy?’
All of them turned to survey their surroundings, bewilderment and rage roaring up in a darkness somewhere behind perception, like the oncoming wall of a tsunami. Aberil felt the others overwhelmed by the force – folding in on themselves – but for him the cold hard ideals that had so long ago crystallized his mind served as a bulwark, and he did not allow himself to go.
‘I will find him for you.’
Suddenly he became the full focus of that attention, and he sensed amusement spreading through the wave like red cracks.
‘What a horribly neat mind you have, Aberil Dorth. It’s like a Chinese puzzle: all interlocked blocks and distorted shapes.’
Aberil was not sure what was meant there. All he was sure of was his recognition of power – terrible and godlike. He could feel it studying him, and knew that his life depended utterly on what he said next.
‘There is service or death – I can see that. Give me the tools and I will serve.’
Threat receded and Aberil now felt some degree of normality return. Around him stood his men: four guards, Speelan and Molat – tired and pale, but not burnt out. He could feel the strength of his linkage through to them, and the ascendance of his aug over theirs.
‘These tools are yours.’
The presence now mostly folded itself away, leaving only the lightest touch upon him. There were no further threats, because there was no need of them. Aberil knew the consequence of failure, but he also knew that even success would probably bring the same consequence.
‘Jerrick here is a trained tracker,’ said Speelan, clapping his hand on the shoulder of one of the guards.
Aberil nodded and surveyed the other soldiers in the tent. Those that were not obviously dead seemed utterly brain-burned – their augs turned grey against their skulls.
‘Then we’ll use Jerrick,’ said Aberil, clapping his hands together. ‘Let’s move!’
Aberil led the way across the large tent, pointing out supplies that should be collected, and pulling breather gear for himself from a rack by the airlock. Out in the falling night he paused and sent to Speelan:
‘Where’s the ATV?’
Puzzled, Speelan replied out loud, ‘Over to the right there, but surely we’ll need to work on the ground.’
Aberil turned to the rest of them. ‘You,’ he selected one of the guards, ‘get in that ATV and take it straight back into the flute grasses.’
‘For how far?’ asked the man.
‘You keep driving until ordered to do otherwise,’ snapped Aberil, reinforcing the order through the new power he derived from his aug. The man turned woodenly and headed for the ATV, climbed inside, and soon they heard the turbine winding up to speed.
‘The rest of you come with me.’
&
nbsp; When they were what Aberil considered was a sufficient distance from the command tent and the landers, he sent the heavily reinforced order for them to tear off their augs, before he reached up and tore off his own.
Snarling, Skellor let run a subprogram he had paused only minutes earlier. One of the towers on the surface of the Occam began punching lased light down at the surface of the planet, obliterating lander after lander, then Aberil’s command tent, and the ATV the First Commander was clearly escaping in. Under high magnification, from orbit, a glowing line briefly cut through the wilderness as plastics and metals burnt in the intense heat, with what little oxygen there was available, before snuffing out. Then Skellor shut the program down and swore at his own stupidity.
Dragon had come down in that area, as was evident from the crater, and the Outlinker boy was also in the area – which meant it likely that Cormac was there too. Skellor felt the rage cycling inside himself. In itself the destruction and death he had just delivered did not matter, because in the end he must utterly expunge the system here of human life and burn every scrap of recording technology to dust, so that no evidence of his existence could ever leave this place. But in this case he had deprived himself of what eyes he had possessed in that area – those Theocracy soldiers in and around the landers who had not torn away their augs – and in that blast could have killed Cormac as well. Seething, he blanked the attack program he’d already downloaded to the whole subverted Theocracy army, then turned them around and set them marching back towards the landers.
‘Why don’t you just burn it all?’
For the first time in a while Skellor opened his human eyes and looked across the control room to Aphran – tangled in a tree of Jain architecture that had lifted her out of her seat while he had tormented her. It surprised him that she still had enough mind left to pose such a question, as she had become so fragmented it had been necessary for him to disconnect her from any form of control.
‘Because I want him. He is the arrogance of the Polity and ECS, and I want him exactly where you are now. I want him to see how wrong he is, to know how foolish it was to frustrate me.’
Even though she could no longer act as a submind, he had not yet wholly disconnected her from himself. He could feel her fighting not to speak, not to let what she was thinking flow into communication. And as she fought he felt her separate into two Aphrans: the one who repeated endlessly, ‘I love you I love you I love you,’ and the one that now opened the mouth of the naked and ripped human body twisted between ligneous trunks, and spoke in a rusty gulping voice.
‘Direct-linked to a crystal matrix AI . . . able to calculate U-space co-ordinates . . . able to control nano-technology bare-brained . . . retarded child . . . idiot savant . . .’
With crystalline scum breaking away from his lips, Skellor opened his mouth and attempted to speak too. When nothing happened he looked at himself internally and realized how much of his human body he had neglected, and with a thought he started repairs. Soon his mouth moistened and he could more easily move his tongue and lips. However, vocal speech only became possible when he started breathing again.
‘Why . . . do you say that? You know what I can do to you.’
‘I love you I love you I love you . . .’
‘It is true . . . you have the power to destroy and to build on a vast scale, yet your priority is merely to capture one ECS agent so you can say to him, “Look at me now, aren’t I clever, don’t you wish you’d been nicer to me?” . . . It’s pathetic.’
Skellor twisted the Jain tree tighter around her, and she hissed in agony transmitted directly down her nerves.
‘Please please please please . . .’
‘Your need to grow is so strong, Skellor, because you are actually so small. You need to control minds so absolutely, because minds uncontrolled are free to see you as you really are.’
Skellor suddenly felt fear: she remained so coherent yet he was pumping such agony into her body she must now imagine herself being skinned with white-hot scalpels. He instantly shut down on what he was doing to her and, through the mycelial structures netting the inside of her body and her brain, he gave her an intense forensic inspection. Immediately he observed that it was that other Aphran who was experiencing the pain: the animal, the primordial reptile. Somehow she had separated out the core of her intelligence, somehow . . . suddenly he also realized that there were blank areas inside her, where Jain mycelia went but where he could not sense.
‘Not quite so much control as you thought,’ said Aphran, opening eyes dark with blood, and turning her head so she could study him.
Skellor’s reaction was like a whiplash. At the same time as the Jain architecture wound itself closed, crushing and bursting Aphran’s body, he concentrated heat through superconducting filaments and pumped pure oxygen through nanoscopic pipes. Broken and coming apart, Aphran suddenly flared magnesium-bright; and when Skellor adjusted for the loss of rods and cones in his eyes, and cleared the afterimages, he saw all that physically remained of her was black smoke congealing in the air. But he could not shake an echo of laughter through a structure that, in that instant, had become as alien to him as it had always been.
The explosion had flung him to the ground and mauled him through thick vegetation, before showering him with a foul mixture of heat-softened rhizomes and mud. Sitting up in that mess, as tendrils of fire flared weirdly through the night sky pursuing escaping oxygen, Molat changed his paper mask yet again, and did not have to look far to realize that he had been lucky.
One of the three soldiers who had been standing behind him had caught one of those flares even as he ran, so that from the back of his head down to his ankles his clothing had been burnt away and his skin charred black. The only part not burnt was that area of flesh underneath the scoured oxygen bottle and the ribbed pipe that snaked round to his mask. Whether or not this man was luckier than another soldier further back, who was a coiled ashen sculpture and quite obviously dead, Molat could not really judge. When the man groaned, and rolled partially to his side to look up at Molat – black skin opening red cracks which immediately began to ooze – the Proctor just wanted to get up and run away.
‘That was close,’ the burned man said, ‘but God has been kind.’ He reached round to grope for a fresh mask from the pack attached beside his oxygen bottle. When his fingers encountered bare metal and ash, his expression turned puzzled until, in his groping around, he managed to slough away a hand-sized crust of his own skin. Then his eyes grew wide, and he started to make a horrible keening sound.
Molat closed his eyes and turned away. He wanted to vomit, but his mouth was cast in ceramic and his stomach a ball of lead. With eyes closed he heard the familiar clatter of a rail-gun nearby, the abrupt cessation of the keening, and felt something spatter against his chest. Knowing exactly what had happened, he pushed himself upright, only glancing briefly at the corpse that now lay beside him with half its head gone, and turned to Speelan who was holding the weapon with its cable fully extended from the power pack on the one surviving soldier’s belt.
Handing the weapon back to the soldier, Speelan said, ‘Let’s get moving.’
Molat asked, ‘Get going where?’
Aberil now walked into the light cast from the still-glowing wreckage of the landers. As he looked Molat up and down, the Proctor noticed that something, perhaps a fragment of hot metal, had carved a neat coin of flesh out of Aberil’s cheekbone, leaving a bloodless wound like a third eye.
‘We need to find the Outlinker. Jerrick here’ – Aberil gestured to the surviving soldier – ‘will locate his tracks and we will hunt him down.’
‘But why?’ asked Molat.
‘Because I say so,’ growled Aberil. Then, perhaps noting Speelan’s questioning expression, he pointed a finger up into the night and added, ‘And because that creature up there wanted him for some reason, so he may prove useful to us. We are here now, and by God we are here now for a reason.’
Molat averted
his eyes from the rampant fanaticism. Personally, he would rather run off and find a hole to crawl into, but he seriously doubted Aberil would let him do that. Removing first from the front of his shirt a piece of scalp with fragments of skull still clinging inside it, he began to trudge after the other three as they moved off.
18
‘In his armour of brass, Brother Pegrum came upon the valley and saw how Stenophalis had failed, but was undaunted.’
The woman reckoned that, after seeing what had happened to Stenophalis, she herself would be daunted to the point of having to change her underwear. But of course Pegrum had not seen it happening, only the final result – which somewhat resembled a can of minced beef after being hit with a sledgehammer.
She continued with: ‘Coming astride the valley, with the sun gleaming on the polished brass of his armour, he demanded of the monster that skulked below, “Come forth and face me!”’
Brother Pegrum looked fine and strong. The woman shook her head, and read on – she suspected there might be some degree of repetition in these stories of the variously armoured brothers.
‘The Hooded One came forth, and he smote it with hard light until its scutes glowed like the sun, and below it the river boiled away.’
The red beams from the Brother’s heavy QC laser spat into the shadowed cowl, but only seemed to make the eyes glow brighter. Deep in that cowl the woman saw things glittering and moving, and wondered how true to life this picture might be.
‘But light availed him nought, and out of a great fog of steam rose the monster to drag him down into the Valley of Shadows and Whispers.’
Brother Pegrum definitely did not want to go: he was kicking and he was screaming and he was clawing at the mountainsides. The picture reminded the woman of an ancient picture she had seen, long ago, of one of the damned being dragged down into Hell.
