Hilldiggers (polity)

by Neal Asher

  His eye-socket throbbed as if in response to this thought and, folding aside his eye-screen, he ground the heel of his hand into his eye. It seemed this discomfort was the price he must pay, since to remain alert he must continue with the stimulants, and they tended to negate part of the analgesic's effect. Nevertheless, he took another of the pills and, while it dissolved in his mouth, returned his attention to the screens.

  While it was always possible that this was some new weapon, Fleet intelligence had long ago identified Corisanthe III as the final assembly point for Orbital Combine's newly constructed space liners. So it now seemed rather likely that one of these passenger vessels was being brought into the fray. What they hoped to achieve with a civilian-format vessel, he had no idea, since it would possess no more than anti-meteor defences and certainly could be no match for a hilldigger.

  Just then, Ironfist juddered in the shock wave of a nearby nuclear detonation, and this returned Harald's attention to his ship's present surroundings. At this moment, both hilldiggers were using defensive fire only, and that was mainly directed against Combine assault craft, since the platform itself could not bring much weaponry to bear on them. Though he felt no affinity with such emotions at that moment, it was both sad and amusing that these giant Defence Platforms were so vulnerable to attack from their underside. He recollected that the reason for this was that Parliament did not like the idea of Combine being able to point massive weapons down towards Sudoria, so political wrangling had resulted in certain alterations to the original plans. However, Harald could not allow himself to feel too complacent about that, since Combine had already deployed weapons sufficient to destroy Fleet bases down there.

  "Engines to one-sixteenth," he instructed. "Franorl, go to a sixteenth at 200 miles' separation. No changes to current plan." The other Captain gave a sloppy salute over his side arm, while keeping his attention focused on his tactical screens.

  Desert Wind now quickly pulled away from Ironfist, Ahead, and above them, the Defence Platform hung in a purple-blue firmament in which the stars were just visible. Unlike the other versions of these platforms, like the ones he had already destroyed, this one was not disc-shaped, but a flat square pierced through with a central spindle, its armaments spread over the upper surface and the docking facilities on the surface below. Four ships were currently docked there, two of them obviously some kind of assault craft, the other two being large inter-station shuttles regularly used to transport both personnel and cargo. Even as he watched, one of the latter began to depart. Maybe they were evacuating; Harald decided to let the shuttle go.

  "Firing Control, prepare loads for Silos One to Four, then fire on positional confirmation," said Harald, irked that he still felt the need to speak when already his orders had been given. Checking through the ship's control systems, he found the missiles already loaded and prepped to fire once Ironfist reached a predetermined location. In reality, his presence here on the Bridge was superfluous, or at least until something did not go quite to plan.

  Desert Wind passed far below the platform, detonations from intercepted missiles lighting the air above the ship and spreading a laminated haze, the occasional Combine assault craft blazing and going out like a meteor.

  Then Ironfist reached its firing point and Harald felt the ship shudder.

  Balanced on blades of flame, the four missiles launched and wrote smoky curves in the sky as they accelerated up towards the platform. Outside views then became intermittent and hazy, as beam weapons fired down from the platform at the approaching missiles also impacted on the ship's shields and filled surrounding atmosphere with ionisation. However, there was enough reception for him to see the four missiles throw out a red glow and begin fragmenting, then turn painfully bright and just burn away, their four smoke trails expanding and abruptly petering out.

  "Do you have them located, Franorl?" Harald enquired once com came back online.

  "I'm sending you the coordinates now," replied the other Captain.

  Harald sat back, clamping down on the urge to take yet another painkiller, for now he most definitely must remain alert.

  The first four missiles had actually been duds, but those on the Defence Platform weren't to know that. They most certainly would have employed every weapon they had available, believing that if just one missile got through they were dead. Franorl, with his uninterrupted view, had now located the exact positions of those weapons aboard the platform.

  "Let's take out those firing positions and send them the real thing now," said Harald.

  Ironfist seemed to heave under the recoil of multiple launches, coupled with the increased vibration from generators taking load. Coil-accelerated projectiles began impacting on the platform, not as effectively as those that could be fired from Ironfist's main coil-cannon, but hard enough to rattle any shields that could be deployed or otherwise tear off chunks of armour or punch holes through the platform. The two assault ships that had been nested below the platform—raptor-bodied and with short elbowed-back wings—abruptly dropped, fusion engines igniting, and accelerated away. Harald did not for a moment suppose they were running. As expected, their courses began to curve round to bring them back towards Ironfist. They did in fact reach the hilldigger, for Harald heard fragments of them impacting on the hull.

  Beam weapons turned metal glowing, sometimes molten. Fired upon from both the widely spaced hilldiggers, the platform ultimately could not sustain the attack. Finally, its defence collapsed, and the attackers could rake the platform's underbelly without hindrance.

  "Firing Control, prepare loads for Silos Five to Eight, and fire at your convenience," Harald ordered. Meanwhile, on one of his larger screens, he called up a closer view of the Defence Platform. Hearing the low sound of these latest missiles launching, he glanced to a side screen and watched them accelerating up from Ironfist. Halfway to the platform he observed one of them impact against a shield and spew glowing debris in every direction. It did not detonate, however, as the missiles were set for positional detonation, since the premature explosion of one missile might throw all the others off course. As he watched, the last interstation shuttle dropped away, accelerating hard. He rather suspected the last of the platform crew was aboard it, and had most recently been operating the platform weapons via remote consoles. The three missiles passed close by the departing shuttle and punched right into the platform's underside. A heartbeat, and then the platform seemed to expand as if the very fabric of space was being stretched. Next came a brief glimpse of its structure parting over an expanding ball of fire, then all was consumed by an inferno that grew painfully bright, before filters cut out the glare.

  The shuttle by now lay well clear of the fireball, but even so it could not outrun the shock wave. Abruptly it jerked sideways, then began to fall, rolling along its axis with fragments tearing away from it. It fell for five miles, attitude jets firing to try and straighten its course. Yet, even though they achieved this, it now seemed they were all it possessed to keep it in the air. Harald watched a deliberate hard change of course, and was unsurprised to note the vessel being set to collide with Ironfist. As it hammered down towards the hilldigger, it spat out a sequence of spheres—one-man re-entry pods.

  "Firing Control, is someone going to do something about that shuttle?" he enquired tightly.

  "Yes, Admiral, I was waiting until the pods were clear," came the harried and somewhat off-hand reply.

  "Well, whoever put it on a collision course with this ship should have thought of that!" he shouted. "Destroy it now!"

  "Yes, Admiral! At once, Admiral!"

  Harald seethed as he watched a short-range interceptor missile streak up and pierce the shuttle's belly. Thermal load: the shuttle flew apart in another fireball, most of it vaporised or turned molten. Beyond it the pattern of re-entry pods disrupted. The technology of such pods was tough, so Harald reckoned that most of them would be able to deploy their parachutes. Their contents were not so rugged, however, and he estimated that abo
ut half of the parachutes would be dangling corpses to the ground.

  As abruptly as it came, his anger receded. He could easily have waited a little longer—those had been totally unnecessary deaths. Just like those of the crew aboard Stormfollower…

  "Platform Four has somehow managed to tilt itself to enable the deployment of its main weapons," Franorl warned him, his image taking over one of Harald's screens, and his words banishing that brief moment of introspection.

  "Something like that was not unexpected," replied Harald. "Anyway, our tactics against this platform would only work once."

  "So you are going to use…the weapon?" enquired Franorl.

  Harald felt his suspicions confirmed by Franorl's reserve. From what he could recollect and from what he had scanned in his own records, Franorl was less averse to causing mayhem than Harald himself, yet now this sudden reluctance? He gazed at the Captain and, while giving his orders, carefully gauged the man's reactions.

  "Firing Control, bring main weapon capacitance up to full," Harald ordered. Then on general com he announced, "Shipwide alert, condition Aleph. This is Admiral Harald speaking. Prepare for gravity wave recoil. You know the drill since you have performed it many times. But this time it is for real."

  As he came off general com, one of the officers in charge of internal ship's logistics immediately came on instead. "All back-up reactors to standby mode. Suit for possible breach and run airlock integrity tests. Seal and crash-foam damaged areas. All rail transport and internal lifts will be locking down in twenty-four minutes from now. Engineering, prepare for main engine shutdown…" and so it continued.

  Franorl bowed in acquiescence, and his image winked out.

  Firing the main weapon of a hilldigger, its gravity disruptor, was no simple task. Hugely destructive, it was also excessively dangerous for the one wielding it. There were other likely consequences as well. Once Fleet resorted to such weapons, it could well mean that Combine would deploy them too. Franorl's recent reaction was probably indicative of how the other supposedly loyal Captains also felt. Harald now called up access to numerous programs on his screen. He had prepared the means for seizing control of those hilldiggers whose Captains seemed likely to rebel, and as necessary he had already done so. What his remaining 'loyal' Captains did not know was that he possessed similar access to the controls of their ships too.

  McCrooger

  While keeping their weapons trained on her, they injected Yishna with a sedative, using some type of gun-like syringe. Watching her carefully, I wondered if at the door the Worm had divined her intentions, and had slowed her down just enough. The sedative knocked her out within seconds, whereupon a female medic sealed her shoulder wound with a large gummy dressing, before she was loaded onto a floating gurney and towed away. The medic then moved on to Orduval, gazed frowning at the huge hole in his back, then gestured over one of his companions.

  "The morgue," she said, as she next propelled herself over to me.

  Without much ado Orduval went into a body bag, the basic design of which had not changed in a thousand years. The medic took rather more time over me since, as far as I knew, I had no catastrophic wounds. After a visual inspection—just turning me round in mid-air—she took out a hand-held scanner to check me over.

  "Quite strange-looking…almost deformed," commented one of the armed security personnel.

  "Actually, we are the deformed ones," replied the medic. "Apparently this is what our ancestors looked like." She peered at the readout from her scanner, grimaced and shook her head. "Though I'm guessing our ancestors weren't composed like him internally. He's got a Brumallian mutualite in there, and that's the least strange thing about him."

  Yeah, I certainly knew about the mutualite. Shutting down my heart and lungs had introduced a deathly quiet the last time I tried it. This time the reduction in the noise level allowed me to hear the glubbing and squelching of the beast inside me. I could also feel it moving, which was not a particularly pleasant sensation.

  "But he's dead?" suggested the man.

  "Well if he isn't, he's doing a very fine impersonation of a corpse," she quipped.

  "The morgue?"

  "No, he goes up to Bio-containment. There's a casket there with his name on it."

  While two others opened up a body bag for me, I observed, just past them, another suited figure clamping something that looked like a portable heater, with attached gas bottle, to nearby cagework. I couldn't figure out what this thing was for until it made some stuttering gobbling sounds, as it sucked down free-floating droplets of blood and and stray gobbets of flesh. Clearing the air, no less. Then the body bag closed out any further view of my surroundings.

  "How come there's already a casket for him?" asked someone.

  "That was all worked out before he even arrived," replied the medic. "The intention was to keep a bio-containment casket on standby close to him at all times."

  "Seems rather ghoulish."

  "No, just good sense. No one wanted him to die, but if he did, we didn't want to lose vital information. And his body is vital information."

  Such a comforting thought, but at least it dispelled the slight worry I had that corpses might normally be expelled straight into vacuum.

  I guess they subsequently dragged me along through the cagework tube, since the bars would account for the jolts I kept receiving. They then sat me in one of the seats of the lift buggy, which began to ascend at half its previous acceleration. Next I was carried out into a grav section, loaded onto a gurney with squeaky wheels—a strangely primitive mode of transporting a body when you had access to anti-gravity, and perhaps indicative of how they had yet to fully understand the science behind that technology. Numerous crashings and bumpings later, I heard something like a vacuum-sealed door opening, then my gurney came to a halt.

  "Do you want him in there?" someone asked.

  "No, out of the bag and on the slab," the medic replied.

  "Are you going to…you know?" said the first speaker, suffixing his question with a slurping sound. I got a horrible vision of the gesture that had accompanied that sound: one representing the double-handed scooping of offal. Was she now preparing to do an autopsy? I hoped her heart was in good order, since it would need to be sound when I finally sat up and told her to put her scalpels away.

  The body bag parted right above me, giving me a view of a white ceiling with pairs of light bars inset—one bar producing white light and the other bacteria-killing ultraviolet. Cold air fingered my face and I felt my eyes starting to water in response. The medic woman leant over to peer down at me, and I very nearly shifted my eyes to look into hers. Until then there had been no twitches or ticks to give me away, but now I felt as if I was rising from a pool, and floating poised just at the surface. I sorely wanted to start my body running again. Perhaps some survival impetus was taking over, for maybe being too long in this state would render me unable to recover from it.

  "No, I'll not start cutting him up just yet," said the woman. "Director Gneiss wants to take a look at him first."

  "Hardly surprising that," said the other, "Gneiss taking an interest in alien corpses."

  Laughter ensued and I listened to footsteps retreating, followed by the thump of a heavy door closing. For a moment I considered allowing my heart to beat normally and allowing my lungs to inhale. However, if this was a bio-containment area there might be sensors operating. I decided to bide my time and considered the fortuitousness of Director Gneiss coming to see me here, and meanwhile puzzled out how best to take advantage of the situation.

  We had failed to cause the containment breach that would have instigated the ejection protocol. Alone I would never be able to gain admittance to any of the Ozark Cylinders, and I doubted that Yishna, having just seen her brother die and herself taken a hit in the shoulder, would be of any help right now, even if I could track her down aboard this huge station. Should I give it all up? No. What other routes could I try? I could try to convince Director Gneiss th
at the Worm was ultimately responsible for the present conflict, and ejecting it to awaiting destruction would bring an end to that conflict. Despite the fact that I was dead, my face twisted in a sneer, for I wasn't entirely sure I believed my own reasoning. The offspring of Elsever Strone had believed, because they could feel the Worm inside their heads. I'm certain that Duras only partially believed, and that his reasoning, in allowing us to come up here on this half-baked mission, was that if the Polity Consul Assessor did something outrageous, that would raise the bargaining position of Sudoria when it came to future negotiations with the Polity. There was also the chance that I might be right, of course—a secondary consideration. From everything I understood about the man, Director Gneiss would believe absolutely nothing unless it was backed up by cold empirical fact. It was an admirable trait, but one I could do without him possessing now.

  Time passed, though I don't know how much. I wondered if the human body clock was some kind of biological mechanism that counted the beats of the heart, and therefore in me had ceased to work properly because it had nothing to count, for my sense of time passing now seemed quite hazy. Eventually I heard the thump of the vacuum-sealed door opening.

  "You may return to your duties," said an implacably stern voice.

  The door closed and I thought I was alone again, until I heard a sigh followed by the slow approach of footsteps.

  Cold empirical fact?

  I sat bolt upright, my hand snaking under my foamite top, then emerging to offer Gneiss a cold empirical fact in the form of the handgun Duras had given me. I didn't suppose anyone would get in trouble over my having retained it, since checking to see if a corpse is still armed might be considered rather anal.

  "You are now going to apply one of your Emergency Ozark Protocols," I informed the Director.

  He gazed at me with his weird eyes, then smiled a disconcertingly crazy smile.

  Harald

  He ran the display a couple of times, and felt a deep disquiet. The Brumallian ship must be the same one he had sent Captain Lambrack to destroy. Harald had received brief reports of contact and weapons fire, but nothing subsequently from Lambrack, who had disobeyed the order to destroy the launch site on Brumal and continued out into the system. Lambrack must have missed this ship, or more likely simply allowed it to go past unharmed. Somehow it then managed to reach the surface of Sudoria, where some Fleet spies reported Chairman Duras going aboard with security personnel, then departing a few hours later. Whereupon this ship launched from the planet's surface, and approached Corisanthe Main, where an interstation shuttle left it to dock with the station itself. The ship had since disappeared, and Harald could only suppose it now lay within one of the blind spots of Fleet coverage. Why was it here and, most importantly, would it have any effect on his plans?