by Neal Asher
‘Don’t slow down!’ Cormac bellowed, when he realized Lellan had started to do so. She gestured forward, just as pulse-rifles filled the cavern with a blizzard of blue stars.
20
‘Now we’re getting to it,’ said the woman as she observed Brother Nebbish with his robe of sackcloth, his expression of pious disapproval, the slight aura around his head, and a book clutched in his right hand.
‘At last into the valley came Brother Nebbish, and when he saw how Stenophalis, Pegrum and Egris had failed, he was undaunted.’
Nebbish was staring bug-eyed at the mess strewn across the valley floor as he walked into the place. The remains of the other three were huge in comparison to him, and he did not stand astride the valley.
‘Warded by his faith and armed with the Word of God, Brother Nebbish demanded of the Hooded One, “Come forth and face me!”’
The woman choked on her laughter when in the picture the good Brother dropped his book, hauled his robes up over his knobbly knees, and took off down the valley like an Olympic sprinter.
‘Standing always in the light of God, Brother Nebbish smote the monster with the iron of God’s law, and the monster was bowed.’
Nebbish had fallen flat on his face at this point, as the shadowy creature rose up to follow him. His face thick with ash, Nebbish looked back at it as he scrambled to his feet, and with his mouth hanging open in what had to be a perpetual scream, he sprinted on.
‘Standing always in the light of God, Brother Nebbish smote the monster with the radiance of God’s justice, and the monster was blinded.’
Nebbish could certainly shift, but he just didn’t have quite so many legs as the thing that was coming after him.
‘Standing always in the light of God, Brother Nebbish finally smote the monster with the thunder of God’s truth, and the monster was cast down.’
The woman had never before seen a realistic depiction of a man being peeled like a potato. She was also intrigued to watch the movement of muscle and sinew, as the skinless Brother Nebbish ran screaming on a conveyor belt of chitin, towards the deep shadow containing a glitter of horrid eyes.
‘And what moral does this story have?’ she wondered.
‘Hooders have more fun?’ the book suggested.
She dropped the book as if it had tried to bite her.
Stanton eased the aerofan down on a rocky outcrop and the machine made a crunching sound as it crushed the countless molluscs colonizing the surface. As the machine’s fans wound down to stillness, he held out his hand to Apis, who handed over the binoculars he had been gazing through.
‘Primitive, but effective enough in this light,’ the boy commented.
Stanton thought at first he was referring to the great mass of creatures ahead, then realized Apis meant the binoculars – being an Outlinker he had probably only come across such technology in a museum. Stanton then found himself amused, realizing the boy had only spoken thus to highlight the fact, to the girl, that he came from the superior Polity.
‘You do tend to find that with some technologies,’ said Stanton, bringing the lenses up to his eyes. ‘They reach the limit of their development. I wouldn’t call these a satisfactory limit though. I could do with autotracking lenses, shake compensators, and image enhancement.’ He paused to study the view ahead, continuing, ‘Then again, I doubt those would tell me anything different.’ He lowered the binoculars. ‘I haven’t the faintest idea what those creatures are, but even in half-light they look like killers to me. We’ll have to go round them to try for the ship.’
Thorn kept his head well down and tried not to think beyond surviving the next few minutes. The pulse-cannon was only a few metres ahead of him. It was firing away at full power, its shots passing only a metre above his head, yet still the creatures were somehow getting past it – to fly straight into the fusillade coming up from the rebel soldiers who he saw were now retreating towards the armoured doors. To his left his aerofan lay on its side draped in pieces of smoking calloraptor remnants – the same unpleasant fallout that was presently snowing down on himself. The soldier Carl was tangled in the wreckage of the crashed fan. He was wasted, as not even these creatures could have survived what had happened to him. Further back, the war drones were down and out of it, their energy sources drained beyond any possibility of self-recharge. Somehow knowing this, the calloraptors had quickly lost interest in them and were going after more mobile prey.
The old cyborg, Fethan, had been flung much further along the cavern. By running like a madman, he had made it to the rebel line – only losing the skin off his back to one tenacious creature that would not let go until blasted to fragments. Thorn considered fleeing too, but the fractured bone sticking out of his shin told him he would not be running anywhere; just as the piece of fan blade imbedded in his forearm told him he would not be playing the violin for a while. That he had managed to retain his APW he considered a miracle, and he wondered for how many minutes it would extend his life, should he finally make some move.
Just back from the wreckage of the aerofan was a door he had seen one of the creatures tear open, perhaps hoping this would provide another route into the rebel stronghold. When the creature emerged from it shortly after, Thorn guessed some sort of maintenance room lay beyond the door. Perhaps a place for tools, even spares for the pulse-cannons. Maybe if he could just . . .
Suddenly the nearest pulse-cannon ceased firing, and immediately the creatures were swarming past it overhead. He turned back to see them landing by the armoured door, and tearing at it in mindless anger. Others turned their attention to Lellan’s abandoned aerofan, ripping the grounded machine to pieces. But his simple turning motion betrayed him, and three of them dropped from the flock to come hissing towards him like gulls after a discarded fish. With his left hand he swung round his APW, and managed to incinerate two of them before the third was upon him. He smashed away with his weapon and tried to bring the barrel to bear. But the creature had closed its claws into his clothing and the flesh of his stomach, its wings wide open to steady it as its pink star of a mouth stabbed towards his face. Flinching back, he saw silver hands close round each shoulder of the creature’s wings. With a new screaming, it tore apart before him, its double chest parting down its central channel. Then a figure stepped through, grabbed Thorn by his collar, and dragged him at speed to the maintenance room. There Thorn pulled himself up on one leg, and stared across at what was still recognizably Gant, as the Golem drop-kicked a pursuing calloraptor back amongst its fellows, then fired a shot that sent the lot of them tumbling backwards.
Through gritted teeth Thorn said, ‘Seems we’ve been in caves like this before, old man.’
Gant glanced at him. ‘Tell me you’ve got a mem-plant,’ he said.
‘’Fraid not,’ Thorn replied.
‘Best you survive then.’ The Golem then hauled closed the steel door, and braced his back against it.
In one bay Skellor found a shuttle that was not so interpenetrated with Jain substructures as to be almost unrecoverable. Those stems and branches that had penetrated its hull, he quickly withdrew, initiating the necessary repairs on their way out. Whilst transporting its egg from Medical through the strange organic spaces of the ship, he accelerated the growth of this one chosen from a new batch of calloraptors. Upon getting it to the bay, he paused only to retard its wing growth and then make swift surgical alterations so that when he stripped the egg case away the raptor tumbled out possessing only long bony arms ending in optic interface plugs. Skellor then wrapped the new creature in a Jain pseudopod, inserted it into the pilot’s chair of the shuttle, tore away the manual controls, and connected it directly into the craft’s main systems. Now he was ready: he had his way of bringing Cormac to the Occam. Skellor then opened the bay doors and ejected the craft and its raptor pilot into space – another of his experimental creatures wrenched painfully into the world.
Looking through the eyes of his other creatures on the surface, Skellor now felt a
grinding boredom at the inevitability of it all. He had destroyed every spacecraft evident on the surface of the planet, and though there might be something hidden in the caverns, it could not get off the ground without detection. So really Cormac, as much as his two companions trapped in that store room, had nowhere to run. The agent might choose to take his own life rather than be captured, but Skellor’s anxiety about that was leavened, for he knew he could rebuild and revive anyone who had been dead for up to ten hours. Skellor’s greatest fear was that Cormac might select a form of suicide that could utterly destroy his brain – as Captain Tomalon had done – for not even Skellor could recreate something for which he possessed no pattern.
Though the remaining pulse-cannon was still destroying his creatures in great numbers, he knew it could kill no more than an eighth of their number before they finally broke through. Of the remaining raptors maybe half would be killed inside the cavern itself before the human population was slaughtered and Cormac finally taken. Their losses didn’t matter very much, because Skellor did not intend to retrieve his raptors. Once Cormac was safely aboard the shuttle that was even now going into descent, Skellor could break this planet like he had broken the moonlet from which he had obtained materials for growth.
Cormac glanced at the empty Shuriken holster on his wrist and swore. It seemed to him that he suffered nothing but loss all the way down the line, and he was damned if he was going to lose any more. Gazing around the huge cavern in which he stood, anger and suppressed grief prevented him from feeling impressed. All he saw was another trap – and that was not where he wanted to be. Lellan was over conferring with her men, setting up heavy weapons for the moment the raptors broke through the door – as they most certainly would, any time now. She had said she would be back soon, but minutes dragged slow and leaden. Did she not realize how unimportant all the little battles down here really were? Abruptly, Cormac came to a decision. After a conversation held with Lellan, before they had come here to the mountains, he had learned that he needed exit cavern seventeen, which lay to the right of something called the watergate. He gazed along the river’s length winding past the pillartowns and the ponds, the crop fields and storage bunkers. It had to be there: one of those tunnel entrances beside where the river entered the huge cavern. There must be the watergate.
Cormac walked away past a big antique rail-gun now being bolted to the stone floor, past soldiers setting up a barricade – something pretty futile considering their attackers could fly. He headed on down an alley leading between two large warehouses, to an open space where various military vehicles had been abandoned. As he walked along, he found it a relief to be breathing again without a mask over his face. Reaching the empty vehicles, he climbed into something that resembled the bastard offspring of a jeep and a golfer’s cart, engaged the simple electric drive, and headed away. Someone shouted after him, but he ignored that. He would have readily shot anyone who attempted to stop him.
Now on the move again, he did have a little time to spare for his surroundings. Just as Blegg had informed him: the Underworld was bigger than the surface colonization, and from what he could see was well organized. Whether it was better in this respect than what he had briefly seen above he could not judge, as all he had seen up there was ruined by war, and the one city he had only glimpsed. Studying the fields and ponds down here he saw that the inhabitants had taken the same agricultural route as the Theocracy, and as so many other planetary populations: the usual cereal and vegetable crops, but also protein harvested from species of fast-growing crustaceans and chilopods that were not the product of natural evolution, but genetically spliced for this very purpose hundreds of years in the past. He wondered how the Theocracy, farming the same unnatural creatures, could square that with their rigid beliefs, but then recalled how religions had a long history of ‘squaring things’ so their senior echelons could live comfortably whilst the lower ones did the labour and suffering.
The stone track he drove along sat well above the ponds and fields stepping down in tiers towards the central river. He noticed the marks of cutting tools on stone and realized that every field and every pond had been excised out of rock. Looking round at the immensity of the cavern, with its gridded ceiling and pillar-towns, he wondered just how much had been excavated and how much was natural. But, then, over a couple of centuries it would have been possible to shift a lot of stone.
Eventually the track curved directly past the plascrete banks of the river, near where a couple of waterwheels, maybe fifty metres in diameter, were constantly churned round by the current. Cormac wondered if the river itself was the only source of energy here – generating the power to supply heating and lighting, while the plants growing under those lights provided the oxygen. Or if there was somewhere a hidden fusion plant or geothermal energy tap? He reckoned there must be something like those, for this place was not just some agrarian idyll. There had to be industries here for the building of the pillartowns and the manufacture of tools and weapons. This underground world was definitely not low-tech.
Beyond the waterwheels, lock gates reached halfway up the height of the cave mouth from which the river issued. Hinged on either side to the walls of the cavern, these were driven by huge hydraulic rams, and were presently open. Cormac could not discern the purpose of these gates until he drew closer and saw that, just back from the cave mouth, another tunnel led off to one side, opening just above the surface of the water. Closing the lock gates would force the water level to rise and be diverted into this alternative tunnel. Perhaps this was to provide further hydro-electric energy from a hidden generator, or maybe just a flood-prevention measure.
Behind the waterwheels, but before the lock, a level bridge stretched across the river. Cormac observed that tunnels had been bored into the wall on either side of the river’s entrance. Lellan had told him earlier that exit seventeen lay to the right of the watergate, and this was soon confirmed for him when he saw the large 17 etched into the rock above one tunnel right ahead of him. Soon he plunged into it, lights coming on automatically above him. The tunnel drifted left in a slow arc and eventually emerged into the natural cave cut by the river. For a while he motored along on a narrow track beside the thundering white water, then his route cut away from the river bank and began to rise. When he began to find himself gasping for breath, he had to flip his breather mask up, realizing that it wasn’t the airlocks that retained the oxygen in the larger cavern. He guessed that it must be continually topped up, which confirmed his suspicion about there being other sources of energy, since greenery would not be able to do the job alone.
A few minutes after donning his mask, he came to an open area where a couple of vehicles were parked in front of a circular armoured door, with a smaller door set into it. Three soldiers stepped out of their vehicles, as he halted his own and got out. One, who was evidently an officer, approached him.
‘We are to offer you all assistance,’ she said, her fingers resting against her coms helmet, while she listened to instructions delivered through the device.
Cormac studied her and then the two big men with her. He was frankly tired of seeing people around him die. ‘Just confirm for me how to get to Lyric II once I reach the surface.’
‘We’ll take you there,’ the woman insisted, taking her fingers away from her helmet at last.
‘No, just give me the directions,’ he repeated.
The woman gestured behind her. ‘There’s only one route down the hill, which takes you directly to the river. You follow that downstream to the Cistern, and the ship rests on the largest beach. You won’t see it though.’
‘I know all about the chameleonware,’ Cormac replied, heading for the smaller door. Then he paused and turned back. ‘Tell Lellan . . .’ He paused, momentarily unable to go on. If he failed in his attempt, this whole planet would be denuded of human life. If he succeeded, however . . . he succeeded.
‘Tell her the Polity will come.’
The woman smiled at this, and he
did not add that they might well be coming to inspect an ashpit over a charnel house.
The calloraptors’ racket outside ceased once the pulse-cannon started up again. Gant had dragged over a heavy pedestal-mounted grinding machine, and jammed it against the warped and mutilated door of the workshop, before turning back to Thorn.
‘We’ll need to do something about that.’ The Golem pointed at Thorn’s shattered leg.
‘No, really?’ said Thorn, groping in the bag of medical supplies he had earlier retrieved from the ATV. Finding what he wanted he slapped three drug patches on his knee, and a further one on his biceps. Gant moved off to scour the workshop and small storage room attached. Shortly he returned with rolls of insulating tape, a plascrete sprayer, and varying lengths of alloy tube that was probably used for water pipe.
‘I can see what you’re thinking, and I don’t think I like it,’ murmured Thorn. Before the analgesic patch on his biceps had fully done its work, he wrenched out the aerofan fragment imbedded in his arm. That there was no instant gush of blood to denote a severed artery almost surprised him, as that was the way his luck had been going. He then caught the roll of insulating tape Gant tossed him, and wound some of it tightly around the wound. Meanwhile, Gant was studying his leg.
‘Here, take this,’ the Golem said at last, holding out the plascrete sprayer.
‘So you’re qualified in field surgery?’ said Thorn, groping for humour.
‘Who took that bullet out of your arse on Thraxum?’ Gant muttered.
‘I was trying to forget about that.’ Thorn looked away while Gant taped lengths of the alloy tube to his boot, and bound them close to the protruding fracture.
‘I’ll pull it straight,’ said Gant. ‘When I give the word, I want you to start spraying the plascrete.’
