Hilldiggers (polity)

by Neal Asher

  "Fleet have destroyed two Defence Platforms," said the Chief, gazing out across the empty sands. "The plan of attack seems quite simple, though what their final aim is I don't know. However, I do know that Harald will need to neutralise the Corisanthe stations, no matter what else he's after."

  "There's over a quarter of a million people aboard those stations," Orduval noted.

  "Maybe more…"

  Having originally noted Reyshank's queue and the scar on his face, Orduval suggested, "You were in Fleet?"

  "I trained during the last years of the War, and went down to Brumal during the occupation." He turned his face into view, pointing to the scar on it. "I got this from a quofarl before I managed to blow its head off. But I feel no loyalty to Fleet now, and no agreement with what they're doing. What about you, then? The Admiral is your brother, after all."

  "How did you know that?"

  "Harald Strone and Orduval Strone? I had my suspicions, and Duras confirmed them for me."

  "You spoke to Duras?"

  "Oh yes, he chose me to pick you up, when we still only knew you as Uskaron, because he and I knew each other from our service days. He became very interested indeed in you when we later learned your real name."

  Out over the desert, Orduval saw a constellation of lights that seemed to make no sense to him. Other stars weren't visible there, and those lights seemed too constant to be the result of explosions. After a moment he realised they were just below the horizon. Buildings maybe? But there was nothing out there, and anyway these lights seemed to be on the move.

  "Here comes Parliament," explained Reyshank.

  "What?"

  "It's of Combine manufacture." He smiled wryly at Orduval. "GDS has three of them: mobile incident stations in the event of planetary disaster. It seemed safest to take Parliament aboard this one, so at least the chance of us losing the rest of the planetary government has been reduced."

  The lights were now revealed as windows in some enormous floating structure: like a tall city building turned on its side and floating a few thousand feet above the dunes.

  "They brought this out here for me?" Orduval asked.

  "It would be nice to think so," replied Reyshank, "but no. We're only a few hundred miles from the landing site."

  "What landing site?"

  "For the Brumallian ship that's arriving here with the Consul Assessor and your two sisters aboard."

  Orduval swore, but then he smiled.

  Harald

  He opened his eyes to the aseptic look of scoured aluminium in Ironfist's medbay, the taste of copper in his mouth and the astringency of antiseptic in his nostrils. With his head throbbing unremittingly, he tried to remember which particular operation this was, which surgical enhancement he had just undergone. Only after a moment did he remember that all those he had planned had been carried out many months ago.

  "Try to take it easy," said Jeon, leaning over him.

  Harald tried to sit upright but felt incredibly weak. He kept his face empty of expression, not wanting her to see the panic he felt, for he did not recall why he was in this place. Turning his head so as not to meet her eyes, he gazed steadily across at an instrument trolley, observed the bloody wadding and soiled instruments.

  Noting the direction of his gaze, Jeon said, "I did the best I could after you told them all to get out." Harald could remember nothing about that. She stepped over to the trolley and picked up a steel dish in which lay a lump of grey metal with shallow flanges spiralling round it. "You were lucky really. This is an explosive slug but it failed to detonate. It lifted a piece of your skull and lodged next to your brain. Had it gone off there wouldn't be anything left of you above the neck."

  Someone had tried to kill him—that much was clear, if all the details were not. He felt a sudden surge of rage, which he immediately fought, disliking such lack of control.

  "You do understand me, don't you?" she asked.

  "I unnerstan yo per…" He stopped talking, horrified that his mouth was mangling the words, like on the first and last time he had got drunk on going to his first ever party aboard Ironfist. He could feel one side of his mouth twisted down and wondered if he looked like someone who had suffered a stroke.

  "What—is—happening?" he articulated carefully.

  "Franorl took command in your absence and pulled the fleet back. All ships are holding station, safely out of range of beam weapons. We're maintaining a bombardment and we're still taking hits from Combine's rail-guns, but we can sustain that."

  What was she talking about? And what was Admiral Carnasus up to?

  "Admiral, what are your orders? Do we continue with this? I can give you something now to keep you on your feet, but I don't know how long it will last."

  Admiral?

  "We—must not—withdraw." The words seemed to come out of him automatically, even though he had no clear idea what she was talking about. Summoning some core of will, he took command of his body and sat upright. Dizziness assailed him, and in the fug that billowed through his mind he recalled feeling the warm grip of a small Combine handgun, and saw the slugs from it smashing into Admiral Carnasus's skull. Sudden grief clutched at his throat, and tears began to run down his cheeks. He reached up to wipe them away, then tried to put that memory into context. He had killed the Admiral and, from what Jeon had just told him, he realised his plans to move against Combine must be well advanced.

  But only vague details punctuated by the odd disconnected sharper scene floated up into his consciousness. He recollected the fleet being gathered around Carmel, but did not know if that was something recent or went back to a time when Carnasus was in command. He also recollected giving the order to fire on a Brumallian city. Something else of importance had happened then, but he could not recollect it. He slotted these events into his initial plan, which he remembered clearly, and found that they fitted in well. However, he needed to know if anything had not gone to plan, he needed to know what had happened to him, and most importantly he needed to feel some genuine commitment to what he had been doing, for it seemed strangely lacking at that moment.

  "My…memory of recent events is unclear," he said. That was a victory of will for he hardly slurred the words at all.

  "That's totally understandable," Jeon replied. "I've injected drugs into you to limit the concussion and some powerful anti-inflammatories, but the trauma to your brain…"

  He tried something he thought might be safe. "Was my assailant captured?"

  "Your guards killed him. He was a subaltern from Engineering," Jeon supplied. "He probably bought into that offer made by Parliament. There will probably be many others like him in Fleet, so perhaps you were right to send all the surgeons away and insist on being treated by only me."

  What offer from Parliament?

  Even though possessing no knowledge of what Jeon referred to, Harald thought it through and concluded: Parliament must have rejected Fleet's claim on the Defence Platforms and sided instead with Orbital Combine. Knowing Harald to be the main instigator of the present crisis, they must have offered some sort of reward or even just amnesty to anyone in Fleet who managed to bring him down. Parliament's offer would be recorded. He looked around the room, vainly trying to locate his com helmet.

  "My helmet?" he demanded.

  "You weren't wearing it."

  Harald nodded, then wished he hadn't. He reached up and felt the hard line of surgical glue and the stiff blood-crusted hair above. The skin there felt dead to him, probably because of the anaesthetic Jeon had used. He carefully swung his legs to the side of the surgical table and just sat there motionless knowing he wasn't ready to stand yet.

  "Earlier you said…you can give me something?"

  "I've some Vrastim and Tenoxalate," Jeon replied, picking up a small box plastered over with old-style storage labels. "Obviously, you are aware of the risks?"

  Of the drugs suggested one was a battlefield stimulant and the other a cocktail of enzymes, endorphins, vasoconstrictors and
sugar accelerants. The Tenoxalate cut down on pain and could force continued usage out of the most damaged tissues, but could also result in dangerous formations of scar tissue prone to turn gangrenous, and also in extreme weariness. The Vrastim served to counter the last effect, so combined the two drugs could even put someone with multiple gunshot wounds back on their feet. Staying on these drugs for too long would result in dependency, followed shortly afterwards by organ failure. Even coming off them before they got their hooks into you would result in shock, then the probable requirement of further surgery to remove dead tissue, after which recovery would be long and slow.

  Harald gazed at Jeon, it suddenly occurring to him that she could give him any drugs she might choose, and he wouldn't know the difference until they were in his veins. Could he really trust her?

  Then the illogic of his paranoia struck him. She had just cemented his skull back together. Why would she now bother to do that?

  "Okay, give them to me," he told her.

  Jeon opened the box and removed twinned glass vials, one containing a clear fluid and the other something peaty. She clipped them to the access port in a tube trailing from Harald's arm to a nearby pressurised saline feed—pressurised because gravity feeds weren't used in ships where gravity could fail. Harald watched the twin vials slowly emptying, felt a sudden fizzing in his limbs, and a lightness of breathing resulting from an adrenal surge. Suddenly he felt a great urge to get out into the ship's corridors and run. Instead he carefully pushed himself off the surgical table and stood up.

  Jeon picked up a sealed injector pack and placed it beside the labelled box, then turned her attention to the two emptying vials. Once they were drained she took a sterile swab and, pulling the tube from his arm, pressed the swab into place. "Hold that," she instructed.

  Harald obliged, feeling thoroughly alert now, but still there were holes in his memory, fuzzy and disconnected incidents he could not put into context, occasional oddities like the phrase 'Polity Consul Assessor'—itself a collection of words that seemed to make no sense at all. Jeon now handed over both the box and the injector pack.

  "The two drugs must always be injected together, but use no more than one dose every two hours. I know you'll be strongly tempted to use them more frequently as the initial effect begins to wear off, but be warned that cutting gangrene out of someone's head is a rather different matter to removing it from elsewhere in the body."

  "I am not so stupid," Harald protested.

  "No, you're not," Jeon admitted, "but you'll still overuse the drugs. People like you, and me, always do." Now she picked up a tube of capsules. "These are painkillers which you dissolve under your tongue. Use them sparingly."

  Harald pocketed the drugs then, shaking at first but slowly getting it under control, he walked over to the door. Pausing there, he gazed down at himself. Despite some sponging down of his foamite suit, there were still bloodstains at his shoulder and all down one side as far as his knee. Though tempted to change into a new uniform, he decided that keeping this suit on would remind people of what had happened. He opened the door and stepped through with Jeon behind him. Four guards outside immediately came to attention. Noting that two of them also wore blood-splashed uniforms, he wondered if it was his own blood or that of his would-be assassin.

  "We'll head for the Bridge," he decided, because that seemed the most likely location of his missing com helmet—and because, at that moment, he did not know in which direction it lay.

  The guards turned smartly to face down the corridor, two setting out ahead of them, with the other two falling in beside himself and Jeon. After a couple of turnings they finally arrived at a bank of elevators. There Harald felt himself tensing up as he warily watched two technicians depart one of the lifts. He had no direct memory of it, but strongly sensed he had been shot in a place like this. One of the guards confirmed this for him by training his disc carbine on the departing technicians, while the other three carefully watched the surrounding area. Harald now transferred his paranoia onto them, nervous of their weapons, which could be turned on him at any moment.

  Finally their own lift arrived.

  "I'll be returning to my station on the Bridge within the hour," announced Jeon. "I have to check that recent upgrade to the U-space scanner. We need to keep a watch out for that Polity artefact."

  Harald nodded to her knowingly, and she departed along the corridor. As he stepped into the lift, he tried to put together all she had said to him. The last he could remember, she had worked from her own separate research area, yet now she must have a station on the Bridge. But 'U-space scanner' and 'Polity artefact'? Obviously there was a great deal of information he needed to reintegrate.

  Having drawn smoothly to a halt, the lift unit revolved till its exit aligned with the entrance to the Bridge. Harald stepped out and surveyed, seeing many gazes turn towards him. He knew he should say something encouraging, but was terrified of revealing his ignorance. Raising a hand in greeting instead, he hurried towards the stair leading up to the Admiral's Haven. Leaving his escort below he quickly climbed it alone. Once out of everyone's view he allowed himself to slump in exhaustion. But when he spotted his com helmet and control glove, like an addict drawn to his fix, he quickly stepped over and picked them up.

  At first there seemed to be something wrong with the resolution of the eye-screen, then he realised the problem was in his eye itself. This defect required him to use the entire screen for just one image at a time. He proceeded to access his private records and Fleet logs, carefully scanned and reintegrated information, then began to relearn the history of all recent manoeuvres in an attempt to bring himself back up to date. Yet when, many hours later and after another shot of the drugs Jeon had provided, he stood up and prepared to go down into the Bridge to issue orders, he felt a hollow detachment from all he had done or intended to do. It almost seemed as if, like some automaton, he was carrying through the schemes and Machiavellian plans of someone else—and someone he did not know too well.

  Yishna

  She gazed to her left and to her right, eyeing the quofarl on either side of her. She had never thought she would ever get so close to such creatures, having only ever seen them before on a screen. But now here were two of them ready, like asylum orderlies, to restrain her. Quite rightly too.

  What had made her take out her control baton? What had so angered her about Rhodane that she had been prepared to take her own life in the process of taking her sister's? Well, it seemed to be the same thing that had driven her to alter the containment breach protocols aboard Corisanthe Main, and whether that was psychosis or some exterior influence almost did not matter. Either way it was not really part of her own conscious mind.

  "Feeling better now?" asked McCrooger, who stood before her.

  "What did they give me?"

  "A powerful sedative and anti-psychotic. I'm guessing they interfere with the signal, or the program, or whatever it is."

  Signal or program? Yishna felt she should ask more about that, but felt a huge reluctance, and the opportunity went away as he held up her baton and continued, "Now, I'm guessing this signals Combine to either drop the umbrella or fire on us?"

  "Near enough," Yishna replied.

  He stared at her for a long moment. "I see…so neither of those. Something aboard your shuttle then?"

  She gave a sharp nod, both chagrined and glad of the quality of the mind before her.

  "Do you still feel the urge to…use this item?"

  "I was only taking precautions," said Yishna, then cringed at her blatant lie. The baton had been in her hand before she even knew what she was thinking, and her finger was ready poised over the button to send the mine's detonation code. Her sister, Rhodane, something about her, about some lack of connection, had caused a resentment and a twisted terror to arise within Yishna. True, she had stopped herself from actually operating the damned thing, but wondered if she could have held out much longer had not McCrooger tackled her.

  "
I shan't dignify that statement with a reply, because we have no more time to spare. Director Gneiss is demanding to speak to you, and won't cover us down to the planet's surface until he's done so. Meanwhile, every moment we stay here we are in danger."

  "Then let me speak to him," said Yishna.

  "But you might tell him this ship presents a danger."

  "I might, but it would take a lot more than any claim from me to persuade him. What I brought aboard that shuttle was my own idea. He doesn't believe the Brumallians to be a threat."

  "Very well, stand up."

  Glancing at the quofarl on either side, Yishna pushed herself to her feet. It was only then that she realised she was experiencing gravity, and wondered briefly if the Brumallians had conquered that technology. Once out in the corridor, however, when she saw the curve of the floor, she realised she must be in some part of the ship that had been spun up.

  "The drug?" she managed, as she walked between the quofarl.

  "Like Rhodane, you find it difficult to talk about what that drug is suppressing," he said.

  "I…yes."

  "The Shadowman has you by the throat, Yishna. Though her mind has been shaped by him, he has no hold on Rhodane any more. And your reaction to her, I suspect, was either due to that—the elimination of a faulty tool—or to the possibility, however remote, that the evidence we're bringing here might end this war." The door opened and he used sign language to the two quofarl, who then chattered something in Brumallian, before stepping back. They entered some kind of control room where Brumallians sat enclosed in organic technology. Rhodane stood over on the other side of a viewing pit, with something clinging to the side of her head. Immediately Yishna felt another surge of resentment towards her, and just could not fathom why. Fortunately it was weaker than before, so one she thought she could control.

  Out of the viewing pit rose the holographic image of Director Gneiss.

  "Yishna, where've you been?" he asked. On the surface he evinced suspicion, but underneath that display Yishna wondered if there was anything at all. She did not even want to try to analyse that impression, as she was currently having enough problems with her own emotions.