by Neal Asher
The slaves stood their ground as I approached. They started to back up when I drew my QC laser. I stepped in and grabbed the nearest one by his yoke.
“Keep still, idiot. I’m freeing you,” I said as he struggled.
He did as I said and I inspected the locking mechanism of the yoke. A short burst from the laser cut through a forged bar and the yoke fell open.
“Thank you, master,” said the man.
“I’m not a master,” I said, handing him the laser. “Free your fellows. There’s weapons out there you can use if you wish. Or you can get out of here. Don’t put on their helmets.”
He looked puzzled and it was convenient that a God soldier chose that moment for a suicidal attack. He ran into the compound yelling and firing his Optek. He hit about three slaves and was coming at me before one of the autoguns tracked and fired. One shot, cleanly through his helmet. He went down like a brick.
“Leave their helmets alone,” I said, pointing at the soldier’s helmet. Blood was pulsing out of the entry hole. The exit hole was a torn mess out of which brains and skull fragments had flowered. I returned to my tank.
It was a long night. By dawn the fighting was over and the looting and celebrations begun. Many of those celebrations involved doing unspeakable things to the captives. I guess cruelty is catching. Some of the slaves found a store of stakes, and soldiers were soon decorating every street corner, either on stakes or dangling over fires. As I sat in my tank in the ruins of the small cathedral, awaiting Gurt’s arrival, I saw one of the Clergy dragged screaming out of a building. They stripped him and hung him upside down, split him open and slowly pulled his intestines out. His wife and his two children they were kinder to. They only raped her a couple of times in front of the children before beating the three of them to death with the butts of their Opteks.
Gurt arrived with an escort of ten freed slaves to keep others from taking his captive. Other slaves followed, yelling and threatening. One woman ran at the black-clad figure with a carving knife in her hand. Gurt casually took the knife out of her hand and shoved her back into her fellows. I climbed out of my tank and walked to meet them. When I got there, Gurt had the bound captive brought forward and thrown at my feet. It was all very dramatic.
“Bishop,” he said.
“Give him to us!” yelled someone in the crowd, and that yell was taken up by others. No one had used an Optek against one of their fellows yet, but it looked likely to happen. There was much jostling and people began to push forwards. I did my little trick with my face and the jostling at the front of the crowd stopped.
“He is mine!” I shouted, and some bastard shot me.
The bullets of course had no effect other than to put holes in my outer covering and ricochet away. When I stood there looking at them with my ceramal face, unaffected by the round I had taken in my chest, the crowd got a little quieter. Someone said, “Oh shit.” I put my face back on, reached down and hauled the Bishop to his feet. He’d been badly beaten and seemed not to know what was going on. I looked at Gurt.
“You coming?” I asked.
He nodded. I tucked my captive under my arm, leapt up onto the tread of my tank and went inside. He followed. When I later asked him what had happened to the two women I discovered that they had fled on discovering his eating habits.
* * *
The Bishop was a diminutive little man of about sixty years. His face was brown and wrinkled and he only had a few scraps of white hair on his head. At some time in his past he had lost an eye and the socket was filled with a glass eye of the wrong colour. During the journey back to my cave he remained sullenly silent, his gaze fixed firmly on the floor. When we arrived and after I shut down the tank, I turned to him.
“What’s your name?” I asked him.
He looked up at me with his good eye wide open.
“I am Dextroth the one true vicar of Christos the one true God,” he said, perhaps expecting me to be impressed.
“Where did you get your weapons, Dextroth?”
“The one true Drowned God provides,” he said.
In retrospect I wished Gurt had grabbed one of the Upper Clergy rather than this individual. I doubted I’d get much sense out of him.
“Who were the Drowned God’s agents in this case then?” I asked.
“This information is the privilege only of the one true God’s Vicar and his Clergy,” he said. It seemed to me that he was incapable of saying any sentence without injecting a ‘one true’ into it.
“Skin him?” Gurt suggested.
I thought not. I’d seen his type before amongst the Sheta-protestanti. It wouldn’t have surprised me had he been a member of that group at some time in his past.
“No, bring him,” I said.
We exited the tank and I led the way to a stair from the cave. This took us up to a steel door which would only open for me. Beyond the door was one of the laboratories I used for research, repairs, all sorts of things. I had Gurt tie Dextroth to a chair then I checked through storage compartments until I found what I wanted. It took about an hour to get through the bullshit, but the scopolamine derivatives did the trick. I got the name I wanted and this caused me some amusement. By way of the river-cave door we went to the wing. I let Gurt have his way with the old man there and we left what remained of him with the rest of the cockroaches.
Once back at the complex I immediately checked to see which of the shuttles was ready to go into orbit. A huge flying-wing heavy lifter was due to leave in one hour. I hurried to find Susan and soon learned that she was up on the main JMCC station. With Gurt I went up to her office, and while Gurt fed himself I had a conversation with Molly.
“How does my JMCC stock stand at present?” I asked.
“You are still the primary shareholder with fifty-eight percent of the stock,” the AI replied.
“Okay, but I gave Jethro Susan powers to act on my behalf. What have been her main moves over the last few months?”
“Jethro Susan has increased JMCC mining interests in the asteroidal belt.”
“And that’s mainly Enmark territory, isn’t it?” I said.
The AI emulation of my long-dead friend confirmed this for me.
“If I died, Jethro Susan would receive most of my stock and immediately assume cardinal status. What would happen if she died as well?”
“The stock would go on the open market and Fearson would assume the directorship.”
“How does Fearson stand on the increased mining activities?”
“He is against them. His preference is for further development of JMCC banking and stockbroking.”
“So if he assumed the directorship the mining development would be scrapped.”
“This is most likely.”
I thought about that. It was the Enmarks who had supplied weapons to the Army of God. They probably intended to shove JMCC out to the belt by killing off myself and Susan, thus promoting this Fearson to the Directorship. This did not prove that Fearson was necessarily guilty of anything, though I suspected he probably was. All that remained for me to figure out was what purpose the Enmarks had for Gurt’s kind. If, indeed, it was the Enmarks who had created the sauramen. I was beginning to have my doubts. Did the Enmarks plan all-out war? It was time to nip things in the bud.
“Molly, I want you to direct link me to the Enmark AI,” I said.
It took a minute or so, then a completely different voice spoke to me. This was the gruff and irritated voice of a man.
“Enmark AI online,” he said. “What is the purpose of this communication?”
“Hello, David, it is the Collector here. Look under file code ABG413,” I said.
Most of the major Family AIs are downloaded mind recordings of important humans who died long ago. Molly Canard I had put in charge of JMCC a thousand years ago. It had been her idea to have a memplant installed. When she died at the ripe old age of two-hundred-and-five I’d downloaded her memcording into the JMCC system. Her psychological status had made it i
mpossible for her to be like me. She would have self-destructed after only a few years. In the JMCC system it was possible to change her program and remove those self-destructive aspects of her character. David Enmark had been a different case altogether.
Eight centuries ago David had been one of JMCC’s best mining engineers, but far too fiercely independent to fit in well. I’d liked him-— his attitude had been much like mine. When he tried to form a breakaway cooperative, rather than shoot him down in flames I financed him and let him get on with it. The solar system is big. There’s room for everyone ... or there was then. He formed his little company shortly after Molly was downloaded into the JMCC system. Immortality attracted him and he decided to get himself a memplant. He built his mining cooperative into a huge corporation over the next century and when he died during a risky mercury-mining expedition—he’d always liked to keep his hand in—he was downloaded into the Enmark system. Because of my initial financing of his operation I retained a large proportion of Enmark stock. The details of this were kept in archive file ABG413 and I had never until now used the power that controlling interest gave me.
“You bastard,” said David Enmark.
“Yes,” I said, “and a bastard with cardinal status. Who’s Director there now?”
“Callum Manx Enmark. He’s distantly related and a canny bugger,” David replied.
“I take it that he’s taken exception to JMCC interests in the belt?”
“Yes.”
“He had the Army of God supplied with weapons and the instruction to kill me?”
“Yes.”
“What about Jethro Susan?”
“That’s Alex Fearson’s job.”
“I see. What can you tell me about the project in Madagascar?”
“The sauramen are a recent discovery. It is posited that they are the private project of JMCC or the Jupiter Bank,” he said reluctantly. The Jupiter Bank—a Corporation but not a corporate Family. The people and AIs that ran it usually kept in the background making pots of money out of other people’s disputes and deals.
“Go on,” I said. He didn’t want to answer me, but he was the Enmark AI and I had the controlling interest, so he was incapable of not answering.
“Callum believes the sauramen are the fodder for someone else’s private army. An army formed as a counter to his steadily growing Army of God. His God soldiers he plans to use as storm troopers to take the other Family stations. He has training stations and an assault craft manufactory in the belt.”
The reply was terse but it provided me with much of the information I required.
“Very well. I now assume the Directorship of the Enmark Corporation. Tell this Callum to stand down and await my arrival. Also give the order that all operations in the belt are to cease immediately,” I said.
“Issuing order now. You are—”
David’s voice was cut off with a buzz of static.
“Molly, what happened?”
“There was an explosion aboard the Enmark station. Their system is now offline.”
“Shit... Put me in contact with Jethro Susan.”
“She has been monitoring.”
“Susan?”
“I heard you,” replied my wife, and there was a flickering in the middle of the room. Her projected hologram appeared hovering a few centimetres above the floor.
“You’ll deal with Fearson?” I asked her.
Rather than reply she reached forward and adjusted the feed from her holocamera. The hologram expanded across the carpet to show a hovering corpse with its neck twisted out of place. Jank stood over this corpse, his wig and cosmetic work mussed to expose the scales on his head and face.
“Fearson?” I asked.
She nodded in reply.
“And I see Jank appears rather familiar,” I ‘said.
She shrugged.
So, Jethro Susan was responsible for the sauramen.
“When did you find out about Enmark’s plans?” I asked.
“Not until now. We knew one of the Families was supplying a fanatical group on Earth and building up their numbers. It’s been going on for seventy years. We couldn’t find out who was responsible so we started the Madagascan project as a counter to it. That was fifty years ago,” she replied.
“We?” I asked.
“The Jupiter Bank.”
“I see.” I looked at Gurt, who seemed to be concentrating on his food. I wasn’t fooled. He was taking all of this in. I thought about what she and the Bank had done. It occurred to me that for an Army of God whose beliefs did not encompass such Godless things as evolution, the perfect enemies would be people whose ancestry could be directly traced to the dinosaurs. This was also the kind of irony that Susan loved.
“What about what happened to Gurt?” I asked.
“The Enmarks and other Families found out about his kind shortly after we instituted the project. We pulled out and left it. It could have caused major problems. Other Families have snatched sauramen since then to study. I would say the Enmarks started it recently with a view to recruiting.”
“A complete turnaround then,” I said.
“The sauramen and the army aren’t really the problem anymore. The Enmark station’s the big problem. If I’d have known you were a majority stockholder we could perhaps have prevented a deal of grief,” she said.
“Perhaps,” I said. I had always kept my cards close to my chest and I saw no reason to change even then. Again, I looked at Gurt, who was sitting at her desk calmly feeding chicken legs into his mouth. I couldn’t read his expression.
“I’ll deal with the station,” I said. “Molly, order that heavy lifter unloaded of its present cargo, then load a hundred and fifty skirmish guns with two hundred rounds each.” Then I turned back to Susan, who had yet to cut her hologram.
“Where did you get the DNA?” I asked.
“There’s been a working template for sauraman DNA in the system since JMCC was founded. It was one of their initial projects,” she replied.
“Ah,” I said, brilliantly. I was the founder of JMCC and I didn’t know about it. Well, I guess you can be a super-being and not know everything.
The pilot and navigator of the heavy lifter were a little dubious of my instructions.
“A water landing?” the pilot asked.
“You can handle it?” I asked in return.
“I can handle it,” he said, and returned to the controls.
Below us Madagascar was spread in all shades of green in the azure of the Indian ocean. I don’t know what it was called now, but the lake that soon came into view below us had once been called Lake Itasy. Gurt told me it was in the thick jungles around this lake that most of his people lived. While the pilot brought us down I walked back into the huge hold which extended into the thick wings of the heavy lifter. The cargo I had ordered put aboard occupied one small corner. Gurt had one of the crates open and was inspecting the weapons inside. The problem with fighting a battle on a station is that high velocity weapons will punch through the hull to the detriment of friend and foe alike. In these cases were guns that fired mercury shot. Each took a fifty round box and could fire on automatic. The mercury shot would kill a man, unless armoured, but not puncture hull metal.
“Think they’ll be able to handle them?” I asked Gurt.
“We’re not complete primitives,” he replied.
I let that go then decided to be direct.
“You heard Jethro Susan. Do you still want to kill God soldiers?”
“They killed Horl and the rest,” he said.
“That’s not what I’m getting at,” I said.
“My mother’s mother remembers the teachers. No-one believes the first comers, but now I see it is true,” he said, and it took me a moment to figure out.
“Jethro Susan and JMCC,” I said.
He nodded.
“Do you hate them?” I asked.
“How can I hate what created me?” he asked, and that, I guess, was that.
* * *
The pilot brought the lifter down on the glittering waves of the lake, adjusted AG to keep it buoyant, then with delicate touches on the thrusters had it drifting to the shore. It hit a floating mass of lilypads before the shore, but on AG he got us over them and finally up against a vine-covered slope below thick jungle. I went to the main-bay door as it opened down to make a ramp to the slope. When the door was finally down I made to step out on the ramp. Four heavy arrows thumped into my chest. I guessed the natives were unfriendly.
About forty of them came roaring out of the jungle armed with bows, wide-bladed spears, one or two Opteks, and what looked like muzzle-loaders. Their charge stuttered to a halt when they saw me still standing at the ramp, pulling the arrows out of myself and discarding them. Gurt stepped to my side then and babbled something at them that was a mishmash of Urtak-Swahili, and Old French and Portuguese. I was impressed. It seemed to me that this meant his standard Family English had been recently acquired.
A large saurawoman—I later discovered that the women were all bigger and more ornery than the men—walked to the head of the crowd and burbled back at him. It took a moment or two for my auto-translator to get up to speed. When it did, I replayed the conversation and followed it through:
“Who are you who comes with this armoured meat?” she asked.
“I am Gurt of the Ankatra. Lieutenant of Horl Lord of Ankatra,” he said.
“And I’m a lemur.”
“I am Gurt and I will prove this on your flesh if you doubt,” said Gurt.
After this friendly exchange the female looked to one of her fellows.
