by Neal Asher
‘What are you going to do?’ Fethan asked.
Thorn did not reply. He placed the mind on a rock, brought the butt of his weapon hard down on it. Then, perhaps remembering Mr Crane, he ground the fragments to dust and scattered it.
‘We’ll leave the rest for the clear-up crews,’ said Thorn. ‘They’ll be all over this place soon. Let’s head back to the city.’
Yes, thought Fethan, realizing he would not himself be leaving any time soon. Tanaquil would be needing some help during the time to come.
* * * *
The sun was setting in a greenish explosion, and occasional stars beginning to brave the firmament. His armour stripped off and hanging, along with his other belongings, on temporary pegs epoxied to the side of Bonehead’s carapace, Anderson Endrik trudged towards a new horizon. His legs were aching from this unaccustomed exercise, but he would get used to it—it wasn’t as if he was old or anything. He had just gone a few rounds with one of the fiercest creatures on this planet. However, he was averse to stopping again, no matter how entitled he was to rest. It was difficult pretending not to notice how, each time he did stop, the sand hog extruded its sensory head to observe him and tapped a little tattoo on the ground with the tip of one crawler limb.
The devastation of broken rock on the draconic plateau was far behind, which was annoying as it now took him a little while to spot a suitable rock on which to sit. When he did see one, he sank down with a sigh — his back towards Bonehead—then used a cloth to mop the sweat from his bald pate.
It was a shame about Tergal leaving. Once over his criminal tendencies, the boy had shown promise. But Tergal had claimed he still had issues to resolve with his stepfather and mother. This was good as it meant the boy was back on track, and Anderson was not going to stand in his way even though he felt the youth’s departure was only partially about that. Tergal had lost his sense of fun while the droon had hunted them, and then lost heart when it had killed Stone. Anderson guessed that, travelling by blimp, Tergal and the others would be halfway back to Golgoth by now. Had Anderson chosen to accompany them, he himself could have been perhaps a quarter of the way back towards Bravence. He had not so chosen.
After taking a sip from his water bottle, Anderson asked of his travelling companion, ‘How far, again?’
Seated on her rucksack, Arden glanced across at him. ‘Five thousand kilometres.’
‘And then you’ll take this ship up, and go to this Polity?’
‘Certainly, unless I encounter somewhere more interesting before I reach it.’ Arden shrugged.
‘Room for a sand hog on this ship?’
‘I’m sure we can manage something—that’s if Bonehead wants to come.’
‘Well, he can decide when we get there, and that’ll be a while yet.’ Anderson stared up at the sky and saw that it was not only ribbons of cloud and the odd star that occupied it now.
‘And you?’ Arden asked.
Anderson heaved himself to his feet, pointed above his head. ‘Oh, I’ve already decided. My world just got a lot larger.’
* * * *
Tanaquil carefully read the lengthy report from Stollar. A great deal of advanced technology had become available to them from the landing craft: computing power, components they were yet unable to manufacture and systems they could directly copy rather than reconstruct from ancient schematics. Five craft were quite probably still operational, though it would take them some time to learn how to operate them, and perhaps one more could be constructed from the other damaged ones. But in the end, to what purpose now? Ogygian was gone, a dream had been destroyed…
Jeelan is dead.
Tanaquil rested his face in his palms. Now, maybe, that dream was no longer needed. Two citizens from this Human Polity were out there somewhere in the Sand Towers, and that Polity now knew about this world. Stollar was quite enthusiastic about this, but Tanaquil could find no enthusiasm inside himself, no room for hope. Perhaps that was because he resented Stollar, who had miraculously survived a fall similar to the one that had killed Jeelan. He took his hands away from his face before reaching out, turning on his desk lamp, then opening another report. His eyes remained dry.
Gyrol had organized a guard for those burying the dead because sleer activity had meanwhile increased tenfold. A great deal of wreckage had been cleared from the spot where a lander had crashed into the lower city, and those that required shelter had been housed in warehouses in the industrial district. Medical teams were working night and day to disinfect and sew shut the head wounds nearly every citizen bore. They would recover, regroup, and then… and then.
The Human Polity?
Tanaquil shook his head as if to dispel shadows. Everything was black: depression constricted his mind and sapped his strength, his will. The excitement that was now displacing shock in the likes of Stollar and Gyrol seemed utterly inaccessible to him. He would just do his job, keep going. There wasn’t anything else. Then a knock at his door broke his reverie.
‘Who is it?’ he asked.
‘Stollar and Gyrol,’ replied Stollar, some tension clear in his voice.
‘Come in.’
The two men entered, Stollar resting heavily on a cane, Gyrol still in his kilnsman gear and lugging one of the small telescopes and a tripod from Stollar’s tower.
Stollar looked around the dark room, focused on the shutters pulled across the windows and the closed balcony doors. He glanced meaningfully at Gyrol as he pointed at these.
‘What is it? I’ve got a lot to do,’ said Tanaquil.
‘You haven’t seen—no, obviously not. Perhaps we should step out onto your balcony,’ Stollar replied.
Tanaquil didn’t want them here, he wanted to be alone with his thoughts, but something in both of their expressions pulled him to his feet. Stollar moved over to the balcony doors, unlatched and pulled them open. Perhaps some new collapse in the lower city? Tanaquil dared not think otherwise. He stepped out into the dark after the old man, Gyrol following close behind and stepping to one side to set up the telescope. Tanaquil surveyed his city, seeing only the fires being fed by those horrible grey lice-things.
‘Look up, Chief Metallier,’ said Stollar.
Tanaquil did as instructed—a telescope was hardly required. Bright leviathans filled the sky, immense ships that would have dwarfed Ogygian. One vast ship, almost like a steel moon, hung clearly in view. Smaller ships were jetting in between. Other ships, smaller still but seeming large because they loomed so close, were coming down. Tanaquil gaped, felt the blackness around him dispersing under the impact of this vision, something breaking in his chest. He bowed his head and felt it coming, felt Stollar’s hand momentarily on his shoulder before he and Gyrol returned inside to give him space. He moved forwards and rested his hands on the rail as grief heaved out of him. He did not know how long this lasted. One of the ships, a thing consisting of four spheres mounted at the end of star arms, drifted over the city, its correction jet flames stabbing out. Tanaquil reached up and touched the tears pouring down his face, then wiped them away. The pain was still there—he doubted it would ever go away completely. He returned inside to where Stollar and Gyrol waited.
‘Our world is going to change drastically,’ he said, ‘but we will not allow that change to swamp us, to erase what we have done or what we are. We have work to do, so let’s begin.’
* * * *
It was virtuality, illusion, for no projector could get close, and what point would there be in projecting holograms to that place anyway? But there was a point to this; Jack felt there was a point. Perhaps he was too much of an aesthete. Perhaps there was too much conceit in this, and just maybe Dragon owned that same conceit as much as himself and Aphran.
Whatever, Jack and the erstwhile Separatist walked on the surface of the brown dwarf. Dragon, who had rescued them just before they departed the Cull system but seemed reluctant to give them up to Jerusalem or any of the other Polity AIs patrolling this still-enclosed sector of space, seemed not
to be present at all—granting them this illusory space and a definite moment of satisfaction.
‘He makes a pretty pattern,’ said Aphran, eyeing the silvery spirals and ellipses inlaid in the super-dense surface.
‘He does that. And it is a pattern that is changing.’
‘What?’ Aphran looked up.
Jack pointed. ‘Those ellipses are compressed Jain nodes. They won’t change, apparently, unless removed from this environment. They require a host and a motivating will. The rest is him still trying to survive, still trying to return himself to order.’
‘He’s alive? He thinks?’
‘In a sense, and slowly.’
‘Will he get away from here?’
Jack allowed himself a hangman’s smile. ‘Not in the lifetime of this universe.’
* * * *
A golden egg clasped in one brass hand, Mr Crane walked the dusty plateaux, shady canyons and ragged mountain chains of Cull. Like a knight who slew a dragon, he slid from cold reality into bar yarn, and very quickly into legend. Those who saw that tall striding figure, wearing a wide-brimmed hat and with the bottom of his long ragged coat flapping about his lace-up boots, often agreed that a flying creature accompanied him—one much like some seen in the spaceport being built just outside Golgoth. Perhaps they thought this extra touch added veracity to their assertion that they had actually seen Mr Crane. Others pretended to believe these witnesses with the same patronizing kindness with which they believed those who claimed to have seen the Inconstant Sea.
What they had seen was real, sort of, in a sense…
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