by Neal Asher
"If you try to get up, you die," he said, coldly.
The two of them stared up at Shuriken, and showed no inclination to move from where they lay. Meanwhile Cormac scanned around to pick up Skellor's trace just beyond the silo. He ran to the edge of the silo and peered past one of the pipes running down the side of it. A plascrete wall cut across in front of him. Inset in this was a wide observation window, and what appeared to be another airlock. Judging by the equipment he could see through the window, the room beyond was a laboratory, so the lock was probably a clean-lock. Checking to either side as he passed the silo, Cormac slammed into the plascrete wall before peering round through the window again. The room was bright and aseptic. Esoteric equipment cluttered workbenches. Cormac identified a nanoscope, a huge surgical robot, cryostasis vessels, and a surgical table holding what appeared to be the corpse of a calloraptor. Cormac slapped a contact charge against the window and stepped away. The charge blew, and its metal disc went clattering across the floor. The glass remained intact until the decoder molecule began unravelling the tough chain molecules of the glass. After a minute the entire window collapsed into powder, and Cormac leapt through.
"Skellor!"
Cormac hesitated before moving beyond the corpse, as now he saw that he had been mistaken in thinking it a calloraptor. He had never seen anything quite like it: greyish veins seemed raised up from the inside, and had a slightly metallic hue; the face was also distorted — much more flattened than a calloraptor's and of a simian appearance — and the forearms were bigger, the claws more like hands. It had also, obviously, been able to walk more upright, and in its ocular hollows gleamed a line of pinhead eyes. He recognized that there was much of calloraptor in this corpse and also something of human being, and surmised that this creature must be the result of some experiment of Skellor's. He moved on and scanned his surroundings further.
There.
Skellor stepped out from behind the insectile chrome nightmare of the surgical robot. The hologram Cormac had studied earlier had not shown a particularly distinguished-looking individual: he was short, muscular, with brown hair and brown eyes. Fanatical as Skellor was about his work, he had apparently never bothered with cosmetic alteration, nor any form of augmentation. The latter situation, Cormac now saw, had changed: a crystalline aug curved from the man's right temple, down behind his right ear, and terminated in three crystalline rods that entered the base of his neck. Recognizing just what this device was, Cormac felt inclined to put numerous holes in him right there and then. He restrained himself.
"Cormac, Earth Central Security. I've come to get you out," he said, going for the less confrontational option.
Skellor snorted a laugh, then shook his head. "You're outside your jurisdiction here," he said.
"You're a Polity citizen and you were kidnapped. That puts anywhere you are found inside Polity jurisdiction," Cormac replied.
"Wrong, citizen, I am here of my own free will, and you are over the Line. But I don't suppose that'll make any difference to your actions. The arrogance of ECS has always been unassailable — hence their insistence on hindering my work."
"If I recall the file correctly, the hindrance was regarding your choice of experimental subjects, not of the work itself. The Polity does not prevent research into anything so long as it doesn't impinge upon another individual's rights."
Skellor gestured to a nearby bench, upon which rested a completely sealed chainglass cylinder supported in a ceramal framework that seemed excessive for the task. Inside the cylinder lay a scattering of pinkish coralline objects.
"Perhaps you should ask your superiors about research into items such as those," Skellor said, "should you survive."
As Skellor turned away, something slammed into Cormac's back and bore him to the floor. Cormac shifted as he went down and fired three shots from under his armpit into the assailant behind him. The only response was a grating hiss — then he was hurtling through the air to crash down onto the equipment lying on one of the benches. The creature from the surgical table. After rolling from the bench, Cormac put three shots into the sharp double keel of its chest. The creature opened its three-cornered mouth and hissed again, as something pinkish welled up to fill the holes the shots had made — and it just kept advancing. This time Cormac shot it in the head, putting out some of those pinhead eyes, which paused it for all of a second or two before it caught hold of the bench, and hurled it to one side. Just then, there came a low sucking boom, and a wind suddenly dragged across the laboratory, towing pieces of cellophane and paper. Dome breach — a large one this time. Cormac leapt over the next bench, turned and concentrated his fire on one of the creature's leg joints. Four shots should have blown away enough of its knees to sever its lower leg, yet the limb clung on as rapidly expanding strands of the pinkish substance filled the gaping wounds.
"Right, point taken," muttered Cormac, slapping the recall on his shuriken holster. Shuriken arrived as Cormac was backed up against the wall of the dome, emptying the last of his thin-gun's charge. It took the creature's head off on the first pass, hesitated when it just remained standing, then — with two hatcheting thumps — cut its torso in half at chest level, then curved back through to take away its legs.
As Shuriken hovered and bobbed, whirring with irritation above the dismembered body, Cormac advanced for a closer look. There was no blood, just pink strands creeping across the floor between body parts, before freezing and fading to a bone white. He prodded at one of these strands with the toe of his boot, and it curled up briefly before shattering into glassy fragments.
"Gant, where are you?"
"Heading your way," came the immediate reply. "The shuttle's down and the unit's clearing up the stragglers."
"There's two inside the dome here. I had Shuriken guarding them, but then I ran into a little trouble."
"Gotcha."
Cormac hit recall again, and held up his arm. Shuriken returned reluctantly to its holster, retracting its chainglass blades at the last moment before snicking itself away. Cormac stepped over his recently demised enemy and trotted over to where he had last seen Skellor. Beyond the surgical robot there was a hole in the wall of the dome, out of which gyred all the loose rubbish sucked from the laboratory. Cormac stepped through it and saw the shuttle — a U-shaped lander twenty metres long — resting at the edge of the encampment to the side where the autolaser tower had stood. A pulse-gun was firing intermittently from one of the shuttle's turrets, bringing down calloraptors that were coming in to see what all the excitement was about. Cormac walked on until the frame in his intensifier closed to a line, and then he peered at the ground. Lying in the dust was the small black button of a memplant — Skellor's implant, the one from which issued the tracer signal. Cormac could only suppose it had been removed some time earlier, and only now — because Skellor had realized what danger it represented — had it been discarded. He picked the object up, then surveyed his surroundings. It seemed to be all over. The Sparkind were herding prisoners out into the open — those of them that had hotsuits — and Cormac could hear no more shooting.
"What happened in there?" Gant asked, coming up behind him.
Cormac glanced round at him — and at Scar, who was following closely behind.
"It would seem that friend Skellor is going to be more of a problem than we thought."
"How so?"
"Well, from what I can gather, he is interfaced with a quartz-matrix AI," said Cormac.
"Shit, that's bad," said Gant.
"Is it?" said Cormac, slipping the memplant into one of his belt pouches. "Would it be as bad as him having got his sticky little fingers on Jain technology too?"
"Double shit," muttered Gant.
The silence of space should have made the destruction seem unreal, but the picture of the station — without atmosphere to spoil the clarity — brought reality home. With kin and clan, Apis Coolant hung in the air before the great screen and watched his world tearing itself apart. As he watc
hed, he picked up snippets of the conversation from the rainbow crowd gathered around him, and they seemed a suitable commentary.
"… nanomycelium…"
"… too much time. The counteragent too late…"
One individual, with emerald skin and pure black eyes, pressed her thin fingers to the chrome aug she wore.
"Miranda just resorbed the subminds. The servers are getting cranky," she said.
"Confirmed… Miranda just transported out," said another.
"Where do we go now?" someone whispered.
The Outlink station Miranda seemed to be sparkling, but close-up views showed that each glint was either an explosion or where a misaligned gravity field collapsed part of the hull. The stalk of the station was twisting as well, and gaps were appearing in the structure. Debris orbited it in ring-shaped clouds, and beyond this the other ships that had helped take off the last of the survivors were poised like silver vultures.
"Ten minutes to fusion engage," a voice told them.
The clans ignored this and continued to watch the dramatic destruction of their home. For a moment, the screen blanked out. As it came back on, they saw a star-glare going out. Part of the station had disappeared.
"What was that?"
"It's where the runcible was," said someone knowledgeably. "Probably antimatter."
Others felt inclined to argue.
"No, foolish — not antimatter. Collapse of spoon."
"Rubbish. That was flare-off from the buffers. The energy had to go sometime."
An involved argument followed that Apis ignored. What would happen now that his home was gone? Another station? He did not know. All he did know was that he felt a deep anger at what had happened. A nanomycelium had been used, so there must have been forethought. Someone had deliberately destroyed his home. The room jerked and people looked around in confusion, before returning their attention to the screen and continuing their arguments. Talk was a shield against the reality of what had happened.
"Fusion drive engaging in ten seconds. Entering underspace in twenty-two minutes," the voice told them, but was ignored by all but Apis and the woman next him. She seemed confused and kept touching her aug as if probing a sore.
"Don't seem to be receiving anything on this ship," she said.
Apis agreed: there was something strange about this situation — the voice had sounded too mechanical to be the voice of an AI. It sounded more like the voice of a bored human. Peculiar job for a human to have. There was also a slight jerk as the drive engaged, as if something might be functioning a microsecond out — something that should not be.
The picture transmitted by the remotes at the Outlink station remained as good as ever. Apis could see that it had now twisted in half, and that the two halves were starting to revolve in the same direction, like the needles of a dial. They had completed three revolutions, and were upright on the screen and parallel to each other, when the ship entered underspace. The picture then blinked out. When Apis glanced around, he saw that he was one of only a few who remained, everybody else having gone to their allotted hammocks.
"Leave your basket here, but bring your pole-grab and net," said Ulat, standing beside the pond with three other pond workers. Eldene glanced at him, then carefully made her way to the edge of the pond, towing her net full of broken deaders behind her. The squerms in this pond were only small ones — less than the length of her arm and only the thickness of her thumb — but you never dared take your eye off them for long. Even ones this size could writhe up the side of a wader to tear holes in a worker's body.
Reaching the bank she climbed out of the water and emptied her net. As Ulat and the others began to move away, she took up her pole-grab then hurried to catch up, falling in beside Fethan. The man was an old hand who had been working the ponds for more than half his life, hence the huge bulge apparent on his chest — over which his ginger beard spread — where his scole lay feeding under his shirt.
"What's happening?" Eldene hissed.
Fethan glanced at her with bloodshot eyes, then twisted his face in a parody of a grin, exposing his lack of front teeth — apparently lost when he had taken a beating from one of the town proctors. "Tricone. Musta been a faulty membrane. Broke through into one of Dent's ponds and drowned — poisoned half the squerms."
Eldene felt fear clenching her gut: that meant half a pondful of deaders to remove. "What size?" she asked.
"Full-grown squerms," Fethan replied, then lowered his voice. "Now'd be a good time to go under. Guarantee one of us'll get scraped today."
Eldene considered that. Fethan had teased her remorselessly about 'the Underground' — occasionally saying something to pique her curiosity, then dismissing it all as rumour and myth. Eldene thought it likely that it was all myth. She had so far seen no sign of a resistance movement, but plenty of signs of something to resist. She glanced up at the satellites and stations of the Theocracy glinting in the now lavender sky, or across the face of the gas giant, all reflecting the light of the sun that would shortly break from behind the horizon. Then she gazed out across the ponds, to where Proctor Volus was rapidly approaching in his aerofan with its side-mounted rail-gun. What chance did any resistance movement stand with satellite lasers poised overhead, and the Theocracy's religious police below constantly watching the planet-bound population?
It was evident they had reached the pond in question when Ulat halted and stood gazing at the water, with arms akimbo. Dent stood at the foreman's side, wringing his hands, his balding head bowed. That a tricone had broken through the membrane separating the pond's water from the deep planetary soil was not due to any fault on his part. In fact it was more likely due to skimming on Ulat's part — trying to make a membrane last for three seasons, rather than the usual two, and pocketing the consequent saving. But, as Eldene well knew, blame always devolved on the workers, no matter how innocent.
"You checked it before it was filled?" Ulat asked, after hinging down his mask. Because he used such breather gear showed he was a citizen, rather than just a worker, but it did not raise him to the rank of a true brother. All that could impart that lofty status was the Gift, which only those of religious rank above vicar could bestow.
"I did, Ulat," replied Dent.
Ulat flipped his mask back up as he studied the pond again. In the shallow water rested a mollusc the size of a man's torso. This creature consisted of three white cones of shell closely joined, like panpipes, but with nodular fleshy heads resting deep within each shell mouth. All around it the water was discoloured, bluish, and the only squerms anywhere near it were either unmoving or breaking up into individual segments. The rest of the squerms were gathered around the edges of the pond, tangled in the mat of weeds in a hissing and flicking, vicious metallic spaghetti. As Ulat glanced round to where Volus was landing his aerofan, the mask did not conceal an alarmed but furtive expression. Eldene understood that, with the Proctor being here now, Ulat had no chance to cover up the disaster and put the loss down to the natural wastage entailed by deaders. Someone, she knew, was going to be punished.
"I think not," said Ulat, and abruptly struck Dent across the face. When the man went down, Ulat kicked him in the stomach. Then, as he coiled around this pain, Ulat stamped down on the scole attached to his chest — which soon had Dent gasping for breath as the creature ceased to oxygenate his blood.
"What has happened here, brother?" asked Volus, approaching, his voice echoey behind his tinted visor.
Eldene studied the new arrival, with his stinger resting across one shoulder and his pistol drawn from its recharging holster, and realized that the rumours were true: Volus had received the Gift from this work-compound's Vicar. She could see the large bean-shaped object attached behind his ear, scaled and reddish green, and looking alive as any scole. Now he truly was a member of the Theocracy, in his white uniform with sacred words written down the side and down one leg of it, his higher-status visored breather apparatus, and now his connection to all brothers and his a
ccess to all channels of prayer.
Dent was still gasping for breath as the Proctor glanced unconcernedly down at him, then returned his attention to Ulat.
Ulat gestured down at Dent. "He punctured this pond membrane with his pole-grab, Proctor, and did not bother to report it." He pointed to the pond. "Now you see the result."
"You were required to increase the production of squerms, Ulat. This does not look like any increase to me. The Vicar will not be happy," said Volus.
"What can I do?" Ulat whined.
Now Dent slowly began to breathe more easily, as his scole recovered from the blow it had received.
"You can begin by keeping your workers in order. Those of the Hierarchy are not best pleased by the shortfall of trade essence, so their displeasure is focused on the Deacon, the Deacon's displeasure is focused on his vicars, and theirs on us proctors. We have been instructed to take measures. So must I take measures now, or will you get this mess cleaned up!"
Ulat whirled on his workers. "You four, get in there and clear out those deaders!" He kicked Dent until the man stood up, then gave him a shove towards the pond. Eldene caught Dent's arm before he stumbled into it, and got a brief nod of gratitude before he stooped to retrieve his net and pole-grab.
"Work the edge for a moment," Eldene whispered to him, before leaving her own pole and net on the bank and following Fethan into the turbid water. Dent moved off along one side and began using his pole to pull out all those deaders he could reach.
It was back-breaking and dangerous work. Twice Eldene felt the brush of feeding hooks close to her face, as she and Fethan stooped to lift the tricone from the water and carry it to the bank, before returning with their nets to scoop up the swiftly decaying segments of squerm. Cathol, fourth member of their group, swore quietly, and Eldene noticed that he had not been so swift and had lost a piece of his cheek to one of the creatures. The man continued working, though, blood soaking into the collar of his coverall and dripping into the water. After a short time, Volus departed in his aerofan, leaving Ulat nervously patrolling the bank. Hours later, when the team had cleared the pond of deaders, and were mounding them on the bank for collection, the Proctor returned.
