Iron Gods

by Andrew Bannister

  It was time to break open the Archive. And it might now be time to hurry.

  It wondered if it should drop a hint to the humans, but for their own reasons, not entirely unconnected with its own although they didn’t know it, they were already heading in the right direction. It took the path of least resistance and left them to it.

  Meanwhile it ramped up its senses to what an earlier craft might have called battle stations, carrying out a full outward-and inward-facing audit of its own status every few nano-seconds. For good measure it extended the audit into the recent past, because you never knew.

  What it found made it blink again.

  It had been monitoring its own outgoing comms, obviously, and even more so anything incoming, but it had missed the tiny, intermittent signal that arose sporadically from somewhere within itself – somewhere which, now it checked, always coincided with one of the humans – the same one.

  Someone, somewhere, was keeping tabs on them. Well, well. Even more reason to hurry. But not to panic, it reassured itself. Not yet.

  Hive, Mind Stack Unit

  VESS WOKE UP with the sensation of being somewhere unexpected. Physically, he was where he should have been – on a grubby couch in the Mind Stack unit. Mentally, he felt as if he was somewhere quite new. Or maybe that he was where he had always been, but had only just noticed it.

  He cautiously played back the latter half of his conversation in the Stack, and then nodded to himself. That would explain it.

  Both views were right, in a way.

  He didn’t have long to think before the old world intruded. Or rather, almost failed to. The warder who disconnected him from the couch did it brusquely, not meeting his eye even when that meant elaborate avoidance, and sent him back to the Village with nothing more than a grunt and a shove. In the Village, eyes slid away from his. His Stack time had lasted through the night; when he queued for breakfast, spaces opened in front and behind him. The server turned his face away as he slopped out his helping. It was as if he didn’t exist.

  And then he realized how close he was to the truth and almost laughed out loud.

  Dead, he thought. I’m supposed to be dead. But then how is it that everyone seems to know that?

  Then he realized it wasn’t everyone. Dimollss was watching him with a half-smile.

  ‘Hello,’ she said.

  ‘Hello.’ Doubt assailed him. What did she know, and what should he say?

  She saved him the trouble. Leaning towards him, she spoke quietly. ‘You survived in there. Well done. You must be very clever. Now if you’re even cleverer you’ll survive out here.’

  She turned her back on him and walked away, allowing the crowd to heal behind her. He lost sight of her in seconds but the image of her expression stayed with him. It had been – he struggled for the word – fierce, yes, but something else as well.

  Two other things. That was it. Hopeful, and desperate. Perhaps a touch of something else, too.

  Pride?

  He was still reflecting on that when he felt a quick thrumming at the base of his spine – not painful, not even really uncomfortable, but certainly enough to attract his attention. He waited, standing as still as the crowd allowed, and counted silently. At five the thrumming came again, and again at ten – one of the pre-arranged signals they had dinned into him at the briefing. Put simply it meant you will be contacted. Leave the when and the how to us.

  In other words, someone – probably the Hive Management – wanted to talk. It wasn’t surprising.

  He breathed out and let himself be jostled along gently. After a minute he realized he was part of a small group who were slowly parting from the main mass. He tried to count the group but the numbers seemed to keep changing as people joined and left. He didn’t recognize any of them.

  They were approaching the confluence of the walkways from three Villages. As the flows of people merged Vess found himself moving off to the right, and suddenly he and a half-dozen others were off the main route and walking up a ramp to an exit he hadn’t noticed until they were almost through it. His companions tightened round him like bodyguards. They didn’t meet his eye, and after a single glance around he didn’t look again. His gaze didn’t seem welcome.

  They walked along a short plain corridor just wide enough to fit three abreast. It ended at a blank door set deep into a heavy-looking surround. Vess raised his eyebrows; it was the sort of door that defined the beginning of the boundary between inside the Hive and outside. The lead guard stepped forward and placed his palm flat against the middle of the door. It split along invisible seams into irregular shards which curled round each other in eye-watering patterns before collapsing into an angular mass and floating out of the way. Beyond it was a small plain chamber.

  The guards ahead of him stepped back round Vess, and one of them shoved him forward.

  ‘Airlock,’ he said simply. ‘Palm the next door.’

  Vess turned in surprise. ‘Only me?’

  ‘Only you. The lock cycles just enough air for one.’ The man grinned. ‘I hope it’s expecting you. If not, it’ll cycle just enough air for no one.’

  He stepped backwards through the entrance. Before Vess could respond, the lump that had been the door flitted past him, blurringly untangled itself and fitted itself back into the door-frame with a soft fluttering noise.

  An alarm chimed and the light in the chamber changed from the mock blue-white daylight that was standard through the Hive to an abrasive purple.

  ‘Ten seconds to cleanse cycle. Present identification to abort.’

  The light was disorientating. Vess shook his head and took the two paces to the further door.

  ‘Five seconds to cleanse cycle. Present identification to abort.’

  He placed his palm flat against the middle of the door, as the guard had done. Just in case, he took a deep breath and held it.

  ‘Cleanse aborted.’

  The light brightened, although it still kept the purple tint. The door did the same fragmenting trick as the other one and Vess let the breath out again. The space beyond the door was gloomy; he took a step forward and then another. Something brushed against his shoulder, and then several somethings, and the air smelled dank and fungal. He was in some sort of – forest? Jungle? – and then he froze at the sound of a voice.

  ‘Hevalansa Vess.’

  It was a voice he knew – an oddly sibilant purr. He shivered.

  Vut seemed to notice. The voice sounded amused. ‘We know your discomfort with our kind. Would it be easier for you if we showed ourselves, or remained out of sight?’

  It had been bad enough when it was just crawling over a lectern in the Lay Palace but in here, in what was presumably its natural environment, the idea that it was lurking out there somewhere just beyond vision made Vess’s nerves scream. He gritted his teeth. ‘Show yourself. Yourselves. But warn me where to look. Don’t just …’ he tailed off, trying to think of a diplomatic way of ending the sentence.

  Vut did it for him. ‘Appear? Creep up? Drop out of a tree? We won’t do that. It would be a pity to frighten you to death after all you’ve been through. And a waste. Take two paces forward; you’ll find a log suitable for humans to sit on.’

  Vess obeyed, brushing aside creepers. In the dim light it was easier to feel the log than to see it. It was soft with what he hoped was moss. He sat.

  ‘Well done. Are you ready?’

  He didn’t need to ask, ready for what. He nodded, assuming the creatures could see him even if he couldn’t see it. Or them.

  ‘Good. Look straight ahead.’

  He peered into the distance. There was a fuzzy irregular line hanging in front of him. It was hard to tell quite how far away. It glowed a bluish green that was unsettling against the violet-black background. The colour reminded Vess of chemicals. As it brightened he saw that it was a line of dots. Vut was hanging on a vine.

  It was bad, but not bad enough to be unbearable. He was relieved it wasn’t a pseudo face.

&nbs
p; Vut spoke. ‘Are you comfortable? For a given value of comfortable?’

  He nodded.

  ‘Good. Now, questions. You ought to be dead. Why aren’t you?’

  Vess realized that there was no point in trying to suppress his pounding heart. Vut could obviously sense it and anyway, why wouldn’t he be frightened?

  He shrugged a little. ‘What do you mean?’

  The line twitched, like a wagged tail. ‘Even knowing only what we know, we would have killed you, but you are the only implant out of many who has come out of a Mind Stack alive. We are entitled to ask why, and what it is that we do not know.’

  Vess shrugged again. ‘I did nothing unusual.’

  ‘And yet you are an unusual person.’

  ‘Yes, you said. So, if none of your implants survived, was sending me in tantamount to execution?’

  ‘Evidently not, because here you still are.’ The line was swinging like a pendulum. ‘We would still like to know why.’

  ‘I’m sure.’

  There was a short silence. Then Vut stopped moving, a sudden perfect return to the vertical halfway through a swing. ‘Perhaps it would help our relationship if we told you that there is more than one view among the Board.’

  ‘I’m not sure we have a relationship.’

  ‘We dare say. We make your flesh crawl. Nonetheless. We will not ask you the same question a fourth time. Nor will we kill you, which, you should know, is now the view of the rest of the Board.’

  Against all reason Vess found himself grinning. ‘Are you travelling alone, Board Member Vut?’

  ‘Hardly. There are thirty-one of us in the gestalt.’ The line wagged again and Vess realized with a start that the creatures were actually laughing. Then it was still. ‘There is something honest about your distaste for us. We will trust you, hater of insects, up to a point. The fact of your survival in the Stack means that you must be a more accomplished liar than any of those who went before you and died, because either you lied successfully to them, or you are now lying to us. We could kill you now; that would be the safe option – but taking the safe option has brought the Inside to its present state, and that makes more safety seem unpalatable. Therefore we will take a risk. Answer a question, if you will – how do you feel about the Chairman?’

  ‘Or-Shls?’

  ‘Indeed. He was still the Chairman, when last advised.’

  Vess shook his head. ‘Neutral.’

  ‘Really?’ Another wag. ‘Given what you are going through on his orders, you are in remarkable control of your feelings. Now, you will go back into the Hive. You will continue whatever exploration you have begun. And you will be watched, more closely than you can imagine. And now, with apologies, you will be moderately injured.’

  ‘What?’ Vess half rose.

  ‘Something decorative rather than serious. We can’t reinsert you into the Hive by the same route we used to extract you. You need a cover story to persuade your new friends that you are still friends.’

  ‘What new friends?’

  ‘The ones who, for whatever reason, didn’t kill you in the Mind Stack, obviously. Please don’t waste time on denials. They will need to be convinced that you have incurred displeasure.’ Vut paused. ‘If it makes you feel any better at all, the decoration will be carried out by humans, not by us.’

  He had heard nothing to suggest anyone else was there, but suddenly there were hands seizing him from behind. Then, for a while, there was pain, and then there was nothing.

  Vess woke to more pain. At first he flinched and tried to raise his arms to fend off the next blow, but his arms wouldn’t move properly. The blow didn’t fall. Instead someone said, ‘Hi,’ and he opened his eyes. Dimollss was looking down at him.

  ‘Don’t move,’ she said. ‘They did a good job on you. You must have pissed someone off properly.’

  He tried to nod, but even that didn’t work. ‘I suppose,’ he said. ‘How long have I been here?’

  ‘About six hours. You were found.’ Her eyes darkened. ‘You were pretty messed up. One broken arm, one dislocated shoulder, three broken ribs. Your face, well. And some odd wounds. Did someone have a sword?’

  Vess frowned, and then stopped frowning very quickly as the muscles in his face howled at him. ‘I don’t remember.’

  ‘Hm. Did they ask you things?’

  ‘Why I didn’t die in the Mind Stack.’

  ‘What did you tell them?’

  ‘Nothing.’

  ‘Did they know …’ but then she looked up from his face towards something behind him. Her expression flickered and the question lay unfinished.

  Not something, Vess thought. Someone. There’s someone standing behind me. Someone who guessed Dimollss was going to ask if they knew about communication in the Stack, and stopped her.

  He grinned up at Dimollss, ignoring the ache. ‘No they didn’t, and no they still don’t.’

  He thought he heard the faint sound of a held breath being released very carefully, somewhere behind him.

  ‘You can trust me,’ he said. And suddenly realized that, just for once, he meant it, and with the realization came fear.

  For once, here was someone he really didn’t want to let down. When it came to it, he hoped he’d at least have a choice.

  His seat was comfortable and the gravity worked perfectly, which was probably why the shuttle didn’t smell. Or rather it didn’t smell of anything unpleasant. The on-board fragrance was subtle, and shifted through the journey from maritime-floral to desert herbs. But then the kind of high-net-worth clients who hired entire Hollowed race squads expected them to be treated carefully. Far more carefully than ordinary Hivers.

  Vess had heard of Hollowed racers but he had never seen one, either at a race or close up, until now. Without being rude, he was trying not to look. It was better to look at the view in the forward screens.

  Folklore said that Bantrass was one of the last planets to be completed during the original Construction Phase. It had originally had a cool temperate maritime climate with lots of agreeable craggy-coasted islands surrounded by restless seas. Then, eighteen millennia ago, it had been bought by an eccentric shipping magnate who liked privacy. Unfortunately for Bantrass, he also liked deserts. To howls of protest from every ecologist in the Spin, and ignoring the advice of even his own planetary engineers, he had simply towed Bantrass ten per cent closer to its sun.

  The resulting diurnal turmoil and catastrophic climate change wiped out ninety-nine per cent of all the original species, boiled away the oceans in a single century and left every last mountain and hill planed flat by the insane winds that had taken another century to die down. In the end, the magnate’s ambition wasn’t achieved to a habitable standard until more than five centuries after his death, and even then habitable was a matter of opinion. Most people thought that served him right.

  It was a good environment for Hollowed racers though: hot, dry and flat. What was left of their metabolisms worked best at high temperature.

  Metabolism was putting it a bit strongly. Vess shuddered.

  The shuttle dropped through the faintest wisp of high cloud, banked sharply and sank on to its pad with a well-damped curtsey. The doors popped and the shuttle began to empty. Vess waited next to his assigned racer until the ramp was clear and then followed the creature down it, keeping his eye on the odd-looking bulbous thing that floated along behind it at the end of a short, complicated umbilical. He didn’t know what gender it had originally been – like lots of other bits, that went missing when they were hollowed out. As a description, ‘creature’ was good enough. Like all the rest it consisted of about forty kilos of superbly muscled remnant human, and under normal conditions it would have lasted less than ten minutes without its floating companion that was heating, cooling, energy processing, blood cleaning and immune systems in one high-value, high-risk package.

  It was a perfect example of following a train of thought through to a logical conclusion and then holding your nose and just doing i
t. If the only thing you have to do is run very fast for a short distance, what do you need? Muscles, joints, bones, coordination, just enough stored energy, some oxygen. Everything else is just wasted when you’re running.

  Hollowed racers were called what they were called because of what happened to their body cavities. They were empty. Everything from the bottom of the lungs down – liver, kidneys, pancreas, appendix, small and large intestine, genitals, some of the ribs – was all removed. During races they were all just dead weight, and between races they could easily be replaced by mechanical systems. Hence the life support which the racers were plugged into for every moment of their lives except for the honed flashing seconds of a race.

  Being Hollowed was not a desired life choice. For that reason, it was never optional. Criminals and dissidents were Hollowed, and so were the hopelessly in debt, the substance-addicted, a few with favourable learning disabilities and, obviously, Hivers. It was a natural fit with the Hive business model because a competitive racer could earn a lifetime’s average income per race. Not for themselves, of course.

  The racers weren’t speaking. Not because they couldn’t – vocal cords were kept, for good communication during training. Vess supposed they simply didn’t have anything that needed saying. He followed them down the ramp. It was near the end of Bantrass’s artificially shortened day and the sun was low. Half the length of the ramp was in the shadow of the shuttle, but the air was still hot and thick-feeling. Then he walked out of the shadow and the glare hit the back of his head like a cosh. And then there was something else and he stopped and listened, feeling his stomach moving uneasily.

  Bantrass had a background noise. It was only just above the limit of perception, but once Vess had noticed it he knew he would always be able to hear it – a tiny swelling susurration like a billion shiny dark little wings.

  The one per cent of Bantrass’s species that had survived the desertification had been insects, and they had survived it very well. Vess had been trying not to dwell on it. He shuddered again.