Africa Zero

by Neal Asher

  the army of god and the sauraman

  I was twenty metres up in the branches of a prairie elm—a splicing of elm, redwood, and stinging nettle—and so intent on collecting the microscopic seeds of the orchid that I didn’t notice the men until they were below me. As soon as I heard the voices I looked down and instantly became curious: I did not recognise the uniform, though it had parallels in the far distant past, and as far as I knew no-one on Earth had been taking slaves for at least a hundred years.

  There were four men dressed in black, with skirted helmets of mirror metal on their heads, and rapid-fire projectile weapons in their hands. They were guarding a neck-yoked and manacled party of about twenty ragged men and women. These people were loaded down with equipment that I focused in on and identified as a variety of fuel-driven cutting implements. I watched them pass under the tree then after securing my sampling pack to a branch, I scrambled to the ground and followed.

  The buzz of the chain saws located the group for me when for a short time I lost sight of them, and if that had not been enough the fall of a hundred-foot elm would have been. I sneaked in close and watched them from a ridge tangled with lianas and infested with poisonous spiders the size of apples. The creatures were tenacious, but after testing their fangs on my skin a few times they soon lost interest.

  The slaves, now freed from their yokes but still manacled, were stripping the branches from the elm and cutting away the top shattered section. The guards had seated themselves at a vantage and were smoking something which, by the giggles, I figured was not tobacco. I settled down to watch, only mildly annoyed at the destruction of this fine tree. The loss of one or two of them would be no problem, but if these people went into wholesale lumber-jacking I knew I would have to do something. The tree orchid had only just managed to get a foothold here.

  In the hour that followed they cut the tree into thirty-foot sections then split it into rough planks as thick as a man’s body. When these were stacked, one of the slaves approached the guardsmen. Something was said, perhaps about the work being completed, and one of the guardsmen rose and followed the slave back to the tree. When he got there he walked to one of the slaves who was lying on the ground, stood over him, and began shouting. This second slave slowly dragged himself upright and as he did so I noticed the other guardsmen had risen and were approaching also. When I turned my attention back to the first guard I saw him strike the slave in the belly with his weapon. I don’t know what came over me then. I should not have interfered. I rose from my bed of spiders and began walking down the slope. The guards saw me immediately, and grouped together to watch me approach. Their stance was hesitant at first, then after something was said, casually arrogant.

  “Good morning,” I said.

  A guard, with burnt-black skin and a ginger goatee, grinned with wide white teeth and turned to one of his companions. This one was a short bow-legged bushman.

  “The Lord Provides,” he said.

  The bushman looked at me warily then pointed his weapon at me. I did not consider this a civil greeting and considered killing him, but my curiosity was roused, and dead men don’t answer questions.

  “There’s no need for that,” I said mildly.

  “You are correct,” said ginger beard. “You have come here unarmed to offer your services to the Drowned God. Why should we threaten you?” As he said this his companions moved forwards and ranged themselves about me. I kept a wary eye on the bushman as he moved close in to my left.

  “Drowned god?” I wondered.

  “You are unenlightened,” said ginger beard. “Enlighten him, Chakra.”

  The rifle butt struck me in the base of the spine and bounced. Chakra swore as I turned towards him. He hurriedly stepped back. I snatched his rifle from his hands before he could get too far and snapped it in half, then I turned back to ginger beard. He now had his weapon pointed at me, as did the rest of them. Some new religious cult, I surmised. There seemed little more worth learning. I regretted the impulse that had brought me to this confrontation, and I was annoyed by the predictable behaviour of these men.

  “Who are you?” asked ginger beard.

  “I am sometimes referred to as the Collector. Now, I merely came down here to ask who you are and how many of these trees you intend to take down.”

  “We will take as many as the Bishop requires.”

  I noticed that the bushman’s face had taken on an unhealthy pallor, as had the face of the one white-skinned guard. They, I assumed, were the only two that knew of me.

  “Sir,” said the whitey. “It would be best not to take this any further.”

  “Yes, you are perhaps right,” said ginger beard, and put three rapid-fire shots into my chest.

  I staggered back and swore. Now I was really annoyed. There had been no need for that. As I regained my balance I saw the bushman sprinting away just as fast as he could and whitey backing away nervously. I stepped forward as ginger beard fired again, took his rifle off him and swung it in a short arc ending at his companion’s head. With a crunch that one’s head deformed and he dropped to the ground. Before ginger beard could react, I took hold of the front of his uniform, lifted him off the ground, and looked round at whitey. He turned and ran.

  “Now,” I said. “I would like some answers. What is this wood for? And where is it to be taken?”

  He made some gagging sounds so I lowered him to the ground so he could reply.

  “The wood... is for the Cathedral to the Greater God. It goes south... south into Cuberland.”

  “I see, now, your uniform. I do not recognise it.”

  “We are soldiers in the Army of God,” he replied, as if this was meant to impress me.

  “How many trees do you intend to cut down in this region?”

  “The cathedral is a great work!”

  “How many trees?”

  “I don’t know.”

  “How large is this army of god?”

  He did not seem inclined to reply to this question so I reached out with my other hand and snapped his wrist. After he’d stopped yelling, he became a little more co-operative.

  “We are... five thousand.”

  “And presumably there is a priesthood as well?”

  “Yes ... I do not know how many... Please! I don’t know.”

  That seemed about as much as I needed to know so I then checked through his pockets until I found a set of rough-cast keys. These I tossed to the slave who had not yet dared to rise from the ground. He grinned at me viciously, selected a key, then unlocked his manacles. As soon as he had done this he tossed the keys to another of the slaves and rushed to pick up one of the weapons.

  “What are you doing? They are the property of the Drowned God!”

  I considered killing him then and there, but after looking round at the gathering slaves I realised that here were people more eager for the job. I threw him down in the dirt and wandered over to have a look in the packs the guards had left at their vantage.

  The first two packs I opened contained nothing but food and spare ammunition. The third pack I opened contained a much thumbed book written in Urtak Swahili. From this I discovered the doctrine of the Drowned God and found it little different from all the forms of fundamentalism I had encountered down the years. The whole mess was a weird distortion of Christianity. Their god was called Jesu Christos. There was no trinity. Their main icon was the chair he was drowned in by John Batiste. He died for our sins apparently. I thought him a bit premature. As I speed-read this book I kept an eye on the slaves and saw that out of one of the planks they had made a pole with a suspicious-looking spike carved on the end. This they had set in the ground and were meticulously sanding and removing the tip of the point from. Ginger beard was lying on the ground tied to a plank and weeping. I opened the last pack to see what else I could find.

  The last pack contained all sorts of strange paperwork. There was a list of punishments for crimes ranging from heresy to petty theft. The cult of the Drowned God
was very big on severe punishment. It looked to me as if ginger beard was about to get number twenty-four on the list: the punishment for assaulting a soldier of the army of God. I watched them as they greased the end of the spike with lubricant removed from the cutting implements. As they started to strip off ginger beard’s clothes I wandered over and methodically smashed the saws. These at least would not be used to cut down any more trees. The chief slave approached me when I had finished.

  “Collector, we thank you,” he said with a bow.

  “Think nothing of it,” I said as ginger beard was carried screaming to the spike with ropes tied to his ankles. “Why did you blunt it?” I asked.

  “A sharp spike will penetrate vital organs and he would die too quickly. This way it will take him days.”

  “I see,” I said as I went to collect my specimen pack. Behind me the screams reached a crescendo then became interspersed with agonised groans. I felt nothing.

  * * *

  My next encounter with those who styled themselves The Army of God was not long after my first and not wholly unexpected. I had remained in and about the forest of elms to await developments. I had no doubt that a report of my actions would reach the Clergy, though not necessarily from the escaped soldiers—such men might not consider it politic to be the bringers of such bad news, it might be unhealthy for them.

  This time it was no guard detail leading slaves that came to the forest but a disciplined military unit of twenty-five men and women.

  I watched their cautious approach from deep in the forest, hidden in the shade of dark-green cycads. I considered coming out to face them but numbering their weapons I decided against this. Hits from such weapons would be unlikely to kill me, but the bullets could entirely strip my outer covering and I would then have a long trek to one of the complexes to get another. It was fear of inconvenience rather than fear of death that caused me to stay hidden.

  After removing their comrade from his stake—I believe he had finally died sometime the night before their arrival—the unit methodically searched the area. This they did for three days before setting up permanent camp on the edge of the forest. I watched as radio messages were passed, then watched again as on the morning of the third day another guard detail came into the area with a couple of hundred slaves. Many of the slaves carried nice gleaming chain saws with ceramal teeth and compact power-dyn engines. I reckoned these had come from one of the corporate families and felt a hint of unease. What, I wondered, had been bartered in exchange for these tools? Most Earth-bound organisations had no currency to interest those hugely wealthy satellite-based families. It was perplexing, and whereas I had been about to intervene and ask about the cutting of trees, I held back. This was fortunate. Over the next two days I came to notice that though most of the soldiers carried rapid-fire Opteks, there were others amongst them who carried weapons I at first could not identify. I was wondering if perhaps some group, separate from the families, had reinvented the QC laser, when my wonderings were answered.

  Though worn to the bone by their treatment there was still spirit in some of the slaves. I recognised some of them by tribal marking and physical irregularities. There were proud people here only awaiting their chance. It was in the night that some of them took that chance.

  Being very much a spectator in all things, I had flicked my vision over to infrared, and secured myself in the top of an elm to watch for the night. The moon, with its face ordered and cut like an integrated circuit, was full, but more often than not clouds obscured its light. I suppose it had not occurred to the guards that it wasn’t a good idea to provide the slaves with tools that could cut through their forged ironchains as easily as they cut the wood of the trees. A chain saw started in the middle of the night and of a sudden there was chaos down below. Slaves were bolting into the forest and guards were running back and forth and shouting. Then there was a stuttering purple flash and I saw a man momentarily silhouetted before he disintegrated. Abruptly I felt quite vulnerable up in my tree. Someone had provided these people with weapons that could kill me. I was less than amused as I descended from the tree and crept into the shadows, and more than a little confused: like the chainsaws, such weapons had to come from one of the corporate families. Perhaps one of them had some sort of agenda beyond sacred profit.

  * * *

  Stalking away from the camp in the darkness I extended the range and depth of my hearing, as well as my sight, as a precaution. I heard him before I saw him. It was the severed metre of chain he held in his right hand that I heard clinking in the night. He was one of the slaves who had escaped. This much was obvious. One of the ‘Army of God’ would not have been slinking in the bushes like this. He was almost certainly going to attack me.

  It is a fact, unfortunate to many, that I do not hold human life in high regard. Let’s face it: evolution has provided human beings with a more than adequate facility for survival. This is why the culling of the human race had become a necessity within the history of my span; why the Great African Vampires had been engineered to feed on human beings; and why human beings had been engineered into the vampiric Pykani so they could feed on easily renewable resources like mammoth blood. The cull had saved us as a race by freeing sufficient resources to enable us to get into space and find lebensraum there. Us ... how readily I use that word: I who ceased to be human a thousand years ago.

  It is also a fact that I am called The Collector for a very good reason: I am a collector and curator of the genetic heritage of Earth. I value this diversity more than anything else, because once lost such complexity is lost forever. It can be replaced. There are technologies in existence for the creation of complex life. Without its genetic information, a buttercup can still be recreated from pictures, but it won’t be a buttercup. Picky, but that’s me I guess. It is that side of my nature that saved my attacker’s life.

  The man was naked, squat, and heavily muscled. He was light-skinned and had curious diamond-pattern markings extending up his back and over the top of his head. He swung his length of chain at me very hard and, as I later discovered, had I been truly human it would have literally taken my head off. I caught this chain and drew him towards me—he was still manacled at the other end—with the intention of breaking his neck. It was when I saw that the markings were in fact scales that I let him live. Here was something I had heard about and dismissed as the workings of fabulists. Here was a sauraman: a splicing of human DNA and DNA built from imprints on fossilised bones.

  “Desist—I’m not your enemy,” I said.

  The man continued to struggle against me even though he could not escape from the hand I had round his neck. I considered rendering him unconscious, but had no idea of the strength of his skull. It is true that, had I killed him, I would still have had access to his DNA, but I was curious. And when you have lived for as long as me, something of interest can be a life saver—ennui being the greatest killer of my kind.

  I tripped him and sat him on the ground. He kept fighting me even from there, hooking blows at me, with his left hand, that would have caved in the ribs of a normal human. As he fought me I saw that his eyes had slotted pupils that were dilated—he could see in the dark. I threw him to his back and pinned him with my knee. Releasing his throat I reached round and caught his left wrist. Still he fought, attempting to throw me off. I noted a degree of surprise in his expression when he discovered that he could not lift me. Yet he simply would not give up. I was beginning to get a little irked and considered taking the risk of knocking him unconscious when I heard the soldiers approaching through the forest behind. I tilted my head to the sound and abruptly the sauraman was still underneath me. His hearing had to be superb if he heard them as well.

  “These are the enemy,” I said.

  The sauraman just lay there and stared at nothing. Damn, I’d killed him, I thought. I was about to release him when I realised he was playing dead as do some of the snakes to which he was distantly related. I also wondered if he understood my words. Per
haps he did not. Perhaps he thought I was with the soldiers and playing possum like this, now he knew my strength, was the only way he could escape. I had to show him that I was on his side. I could kill to do this, but this would put me in danger of losing him should he run or losing him should he join in with the slaughter. I took another option.

  I listened until the soldiers were close, to be sure that even a man with less-than-average hearing would hear them. They were still a way off, but they made no effort at silence or concealment these soldiers of God. Abruptly, as if I had only just heard them, I released my holds on the sauraman and leapt up. I then fled into the forest. What happened next I should, in retrospect, have expected. Here was a man who had been caught, enslaved, and brutalised by this ‘Army of God’. Here also was a man who could see in the dark, was perhaps three times stronger than a normal man, and was, to put it bluntly, a predator. I had been a surprise to him. He had perhaps thought me some kind of forest demon. His tormentors he knew and he had them right where he wanted them.

  I had gone perhaps a hundred metres before I realised he had not fled with me. I stopped and listened and realised that he was circling back. He was good, very good. I had to have my hearing at its optimum to catch him sneaking back upon the soldiers. I crept back after him, worried for his safety. I need not have worried.

  There were five soldiers. Four of them were armed with Opteks and one carried an APW. This I discerned after climbing an elm to get above the undergrowth for a better view. They were walking through the darkness with torches, talking, and smoking cannabis cigarettes. The sauraman was lurking in the undergrowth five metres ahead of them. He had not been evading capture when I had come upon him, but lying in wait. He came at them from the side, his chain swinging in a tight vicious arc. I saw one soldier standing for a moment minus his head and another going over with the side of his head caved in. The former had been the one with the APW. A torch bounced off a tree and lay flickering on the ground. My sauraman went into the next soldier and drove his hand into his guts. There was a high pitched scream and he was discarding a handful of intestines. An Optek stuttered in the darkness, but I did not see it fired as by then I was down my tree and moving in.