The Line of Polity ac-2

by Neal Asher

  "Oh yeah," Gant interrupted, chuckling inside.

  A taste he could replay was the one in his mouth when he had taken his first ever breath with this artificial body. The air tasted sweet, though he did not require it then, nor did he now. And he'd thought somewhat on what lay ahead — a future that death had not denied him. Now, still gazing at the horizon, he breathed air that would have killed the man he had once been.

  Cormac clicked his intensifier into place on the goggles of his hotsuit and then, from the tracer clipped on his utility belt, uploaded the signal code to the image intensifier's CPU. As he increased the magnification by several orders of magnitude, chameleon lenses whirred and shifted as they compensated for the involuntary movements of his head, and in his visual field a frame was thrown up, centred on the shimmering horizon. Nothing came into view other than tilted slabs of rock that were harsh white in the scalding sunlight, plasoderms rooted like giant metallic birds' claws in the arid soil between, and the occasional flickering movement from the abundant lethal fauna. It was, Cormac felt, the calloraptors that made this place such a hell, not the temperature that remained constantly above fifty degrees Celsius, not the desiccating air laden with cyanide compounds, nor the gravity of two gees. The calloraptors were what could tear your suit and expose you to the killing conditions; they were the creatures that would chew you down to the bone even while your flesh poisoned them. All things considered, he was glad of the pair that accompanied him, though he wondered what Earth Central had thought was the benefit in partnering these two.

  "Nothing yet," said the first of those individuals.

  Cormac unclipped the intensifier and returned it to his belt. Of course, Gant had no need of an intensifier, as he had one built-in. Cormac glanced at this Golem with its human mind uploaded from the dead soldier: Gant did not wear the mask or the hood of his suit, and it was this that revealed his unhumanity as he casually surveyed their surroundings, his multigun resting across his shoulder. Had he himself done the same, Cormac wondered what would kill him first: asphyxiation or desiccation. He studied the individual with whom Gant had been partnered. This one's unhumanity was mostly concealed by his hotsuit, until he moved legs that were hinged the wrong way — birdlike. But then the dracoman was, by a convoluted route, descended from the same ancient species as birds.

  "No sign," Cormac agreed. "I thought they'd have towers up. You'd think they'd have autoguns for our friends here." He gestured to their right where a raptor had leapt onto a rock slab and was inspecting them with its bright orange eye-pits. He inspected it in turn. The creature could, with a stretch of the imagination, have been a relative of Gant's partner. Its name was an amalgam of the name of this planet, 'Callorum', and of the dinosauroid raptors that had once roamed ancient Earth. It stood a metre and a half high, on two legs, but closer study revealed forelimbs branched at the elbow into two forearms, which each in turn terminated in three bladed fingers. Its mouth, below the disconcerting eye-pits, opened into three independent jaws lined with back-curved slicing teeth, and its utterly smooth skin was a dark purplish red.

  "Mine," said Scar, the dracoman.

  Gant, who had lowered his multigun, gave a deprecatory smile and waved him on. With his strange reverse-kneed gait the dracoman advanced on the creature, his own multigun held at his hip. Cormac wondered why Scar found it necessary to be so confrontational. The raptor made an easy enough target where it was, so there was no real need to provoke it.

  As Scar reached the edge of the slab they were presently upon, the calloraptor opened its mouth and no doubt emitted the subsonic groan that was the challenge of its kind. When it attacked, it came in with a kangaroo-bouncing from slab to slab. The triple thud of Scar's multigun came as the creature was in midair between two slabs. It shuddered at the terminus of a broken blue line, then hit the next slab on its back, its head missing and its internal fluids streaming into the thirsty air. Then it rolled down to come to rest at the base of a plasoderm.

  "Are we all having fun?" Cormac asked.

  Gant, grinning, glanced round at him, then wiped away the grin and shouldered his multigun. Scar swung his toadlike head from side to side, searching for something else to shoot, before giving a grunt and returning to join them.

  "We'll get on now, shall we?" said Cormac, and led the way onto the next slab.

  Even though his clothing effectively kept out the searing heat, Cormac felt hot and tired. Despite the exoskeletal help he was getting from his hotsuit — it was set to multiply his strength sufficiently to compensate for the doubled gravity — he was really feeling his weight. The other two, of course, made this particular mission seem like a jaunt in holiday sunshine.

  "You never explained why Central paired you with chummy here," Cormac said, before leaping a gap from which a somnolent raptor observed him for a moment, before returning to sleep. Its bulbous stomach attested the fact that it had recently eaten one of the root-suckers. It would now, if the survey probe's information was correct, be digesting its meal for a solstan month.

  Gant followed him across the gap, then said, "Even though Scar is now considered a free citizen of the Polity, he's not entirely trusted. We work together, and I watch him."

  They both glanced back as Scar hesitated at the same gap, his muzzle directed towards the sleeping raptor. When this provoked no action, the dracoman followed on.

  "Should we trust you, Scar?" Cormac asked.

  Scar growled but offered no other reply — as talkative as ever.

  Cormac felt that whether or not to trust the dracoman was a tough call, as he was the creation of a transgalactic being calling itself 'Dragon' — a being as untrustworthy as it was immense. Dragon had first proclaimed itself as an emissary of an alien race, but had then caused wholesale destruction and slaughter on a world called Samarkand, in its anxiousness to kill one of the aliens searching for it. It was during a mission to that world, led by Cormac, that Gant had died, so perhaps Earth Central's choosing him to keep an eye on Scar was not such a bad idea after all.

  It took the rest of the Callorum afternoon for them to cross the slab-field and come at last to an easily traversable saltpan. Here plasoderms had spread like a marching army of avant-garde sculptures and amongst them could be seen the occasional timorous root-sucker. These were utterly strange creatures: three-legged — a truncated tail forming the rear one of the three — and almost lacking in anything that could be called a body at the juncture of these three legs, merely having an eyeless oval head from which extended a long curved snout terminating in a ring of black tentacles. The creatures were harmless, subsisting as they did on sap tapped from the roots of the plasoderms.

  Cormac again studied the dracoman as they moved on across the weird and arid landscape. Scar now purportedly had self-determination, and was no longer controlled by Dragon, for Cormac's mission had resulted in that entity's destruction…

  Partial destruction, Cormac reminded himself. When the human race had first found Dragon on the planet Aster Colora, it had consisted of four conjoined and living spheres, each a kilometre in diameter, with pseudopods like giant snakes rooted in the two-kilometre perimeter all around it. There it had apparently destroyed itself, at the termination of its supposed mission to deliver a warning to the human race. And that had seemed the end of it until one of those spheres turned up at Samarkand. During that same encounter they had learnt that out there somewhere were the three remaining spheres. That they had indeed been parts of an emissary had turned out to be true. But now they were rogue biological constructs — like three round dots below three huge question marks. And a similar question mark hung over Scar himself.

  The sun, which was so bright that one glance at it left the reactive glass in a hotsuit's goggles black for some time afterwards, ate into a chain of globular mountains eviscerated from the white crust of the planet, then blinked out. The blue twilight was an immediate thing: there was no gradual change. In this light, the grazers headed for the shadows, and the raptor
s followed after them to play the nightly lethal game of hide-and-seek.

  "I see a tower," said Gant.

  Cormac clipped his intensifier into place, and at the centre of the signal frame he spotted the squat tripod with its swing-ring-mounted autolaser. Even as he watched, the two rings shifted to bring the gun to bear on something near to it, and there was a brief ruby flash.

  "Okay," said Cormac, lowering the intensifier, "nothing fancy. We'll find out what their perimeter is, and spot that tower for the Occam, Once it's down we go in. You two find their 'ware generator and take it out. I'll go after Skellor."

  "If he's still alive," said Gant.

  "Will Occam see?" asked Scar, his muzzle pushed forward as he peered into the twilight. Cormac wondered if the dracoman could even see the tower. It was possible: the dracomen had certainly been made with combat in mind.

  "That we won't know until we try it," Cormac said.

  "Never expected them to become this sophisticated. Even our chameleonware isn't that good," said Gant.

  "That'll be Skellor, and he is still alive. His implant signal would have changed, otherwise."

  Gant nodded, then said, "I still don't understand what all the anxiety is about this guy. I'd have thought if he'd been that dangerous, Earth Central would have had him whacked long ago."

  "Skellor's a top-flight biophysicist, highly rated even by an AI like Earth Central, but his methods have always been dubious to say the least. It was rumoured he was using human subjects in some of his experiments, but insufficient evidence was found for any kind of prosecution… or whacking as you so charmingly put it. I think EC was reluctant to act against him because of the possible huge benefits deriving from his research. Now the Separatists have him it's a different matter. He was screwing around with nanotechnology and biological systems — and it doesn't take much imagination to work out what our home-grown terrorists might do with such tech."

  "Well, best we resolve the issue," said Gant, unshouldering his multigun and swiftly tapping a new program into its side console.

  "Whacking Skellor is not an option yet," Cormac told him. "We still don't know if he was kidnapped or went willingly."

  "Gotcha," said Gant, clicking the three barrels of his multigun round by one turn, before swapping magazines. He glanced at Scar. "Night work," he explained. The dracoman likewise adjusted his weapon.

  "What setting?" Cormac asked.

  "Rail," said Gant.

  Cormac nodded before moving on. Rather than firing bright pulses of ionized aluminium dust, their guns would now be firing tipped iron slugs; whether those tips were ceramal, hollow, or mercury was a matter of choice. He of course had his own preferred armament. He initiated the shuriken holster strapped on his wrist, and the weapon gave a buzz of anticipation — something he suspected was not in the user's manual. He then drew his thin-gun and wondered just how many Separatists he would kill tonight.

  It seemed that his work for Earth Central Security consisted mainly of such killing. Expanding into space the human race brought with it all the traditional troubles of old Earth, and it seemed that all who had once been labelled 'terrorist' now called themselves 'Separatists' as if that would provide their nefarious activities with some cachet. In Cormac's experience they only really wanted wealth and power — as always. This swiftly became evident on any world that seceded from the AI governance of the Polity when, usually, the inhabitants started screaming for the Polity AIs to be brought back in.

  "Gant, I want you to spot the tower for me," Cormac said, glancing at the Golem.

  Gant grimaced, peered at his own weapon, then shrugged. "Never really aligned it," he said.

  With Golem eyes, he had no need of a laser sight.

  Cormac turned to Scar. "I take it the sight on your weapon is aligned?"

  "It is," Scar grated.

  "Well, you can spot the tower for us."

  Scar gave a sharp nod in reply. Cormac felt that the mask of his suit probably disguised the dracoman's characteristic gnathic grin.

  Hot darkness swamped the blue twilight, however through his intensifier it seemed almost daylight to Cormac, but with an odd lack of shadows. In this weird gloaming, the perimeter of the autolaser tower soon became evident. Thinking of other perimeters he had known, Cormac involuntarily glanced over at the dracoman. Scar was obviously fascinated by a curving line of hollowed-by-fire corpses of calloraptors. It was fast becoming apparent to Cormac where the dracoman's interests lay.

  Beyond the tower, three geodesic domes had been erected amongst a scattering of low barrack-like buildings, and beyond these the other perimeter towers were just visible. At the centre of this encampment stood a complicated scaffold. It held something canted above the ground so it was possible to see it was a huge flattened spiral of reddish metal, wavering behind distortions like heat haze. The frame cast up by the intensifier had narrowed and centred on one of the domes. Cormac signalled a halt and pointed to the centre of the encampment.

  "That thing in the scaffold has to be your target. Skellor is in the dome on the far left," he explained, before squatting down and turning on his suit's comlink. "Tomalon, do you still have a position on us?" he asked.

  "I do," came the reply. "You're about two hundred metres in from the edge of the 'ware effect. By my scanning, all that lies beyond you is empty saltpan."

  "Scar," said Cormac, nodding to the dracoman, "is going to send his multigun code to you, then range-spot an autolaser tower. On my signal I want you to take it out."

  "Understood," replied Tomalon.

  "Is the shuttle in position?" Cormac asked.

  "In position, yes. It can be with you in five minutes."

  "Well, you'll have to wait until we lose that 'ware. There's no telling what else they have in there. Even these autolaser towers are pretty sophisticated, and they're only for the local wildlife. Also, I want Skellor secured before things get… frantic."

  "I do know what I'm doing," growled Tomalon.

  Cormac supposed he must: you didn't get to be the Captain of a ship like the Occam Razor without having some grasp of combat realities. He glanced at his two companions.

  "Ready?"

  Both Gant and Scar gave him affirmative nods.

  "Well, let's get in there then," Cormac said.

  Scar raised his multigun and aimed at the tower. He did not fire, but merely held the laser sight on-target and transmitted the required information from his gun up to the ship.

  "Acquired," Tomalon told them.

  "Hit it," said Cormac.

  As painful seconds dragged out, Cormac hunkered down, realizing because of the delay that Tomalon must have fired a kinetic missile rather than one of the Occam's beam weapons. He was proved right when fire stabbed down through the tower and it lifted up on a blast. The air-rending sound of the explosion rolled out to them as the tower came apart on the expanding surface of a ball of fire — and disappeared. Globules of molten metal pattered on the ground fifty metres ahead of them, and a dust cloud rolled past them as they rose and ran towards the encampment.

  Gant and Scar immediately outdistanced Cormac, as they sped towards the strange object in the centre of the encampment. Now, people were coming out of one of the barracks buildings. Two explosions followed — grenades tossed by Gant — and a man was running and screaming, with most of his suit ripped away. Someone else was turning and pointing a weapon. Observing the shock-absorbing side cylinders and the cable leading down to a belt-mounted power supply, Cormac realized they were using rail-guns here too, though of primitive design. He fired once and that same someone went over on his back, with vapour jetting from his head. Then Cormac was at the wall of the dome. Not far away he could hear the stuttering fire of Separatist weapons, and the sonic cracking of Gant's and Scar's weapons in reply. Over com he could hear Scar growling with enjoyment. To his right: three people running towards him. Something was punching a line of cavities from the plascrete wall of the dome. He drew Shuriken and hurled it. The thro
wing star shot away, with its chainglass blades opening out in bloody welcome — through one attacker then another, both of them keeling over, a limb hitting the ground here, blood jetting and vaporizing; then, on its return, the third man losing his head before even knowing his companions were dead. From its holster Cormac sent new instructions: a program he had keyed in earlier. Shuriken swooped away from its three dead victims, then hit the wall of the dome with a circular-saw scream. While it was providing this distraction, Cormac used a smart key on the airlock. As he entered, it was to the welcoming light of the explosion that toppled the 'ware device from its supporting scaffold. And Gant's "All yours, Tomalon," coming over com.

  A moment's pause as the lock cycled. When the inner door opened Cormac went through, keeping low, and dived to one side, rolled and came up in a crouch, with his thin-gun aimed and ready. To his right, two men and a woman were struggling into environment suits, to the sound of Shuriken's cutting.

  "On the floor!"

  One of the men started groping for something at his belt, before toppling over with a hole burned in through the bridge of his nose and out through the back of his head. The woman's eyes flicked towards something on Cormac's left. Turn. Someone on a gantry positioned round a silo, aiming a rifle at him. Four shots slammed the marksman back against the silo, then he followed the rifle to the ground.

  "I said on the floor!"

  The remaining man and the woman obeyed, and Cormac hit the recall on his shuriken holster. The screaming noise stopped and suddenly Shuriken was hovering above him. From behind it came a thin whistling of pressure differential, through the slot it had cut. Checking a readout at the lower edge of his vision, Cormac saw that the atmospheric pressure here was higher than that outside, so there would be no danger just yet of cyanide poisoning for anyone going unsuited in this dome. He keyed another program from the holster menu, and Shuriken advanced to hang threateningly over the prostrate man and woman.