by Neal Asher
"Grass," Fethan replied.
Eldene glanced back at the flute grass, then eyed the old man with suspicion.
Fethan indicated the flute grass. "That's a native plant so named because of a few similarities to this" — he pointed now at the verdancy below the trees — "which is the real thing. It's one of the plants brought by the fanatics who first came here to set up their colony two hundred years ago. It's real grass from Earth."
After negotiating the slope, they entered the orchard of grape trees. Feeling weak and drained, Eldene stumbled to one side and slumped with her back against one of the trees. It was time — she could not go on like this any more. With reluctance, she hinged up the mask of Volus's breather and took a deep breath. The surge of oxygen left her suddenly light-headed, and in a somewhat distracted state she stared down as Fethan squatted before her and pulled open her shirt. For a moment she thought to slap his hand away, as she had with some of the younger male workers who had become a bit too curious about the tightening of her shirt above her scole, but he was an. old man — and a machine — and he was helping her.
Her scole was now almost white, and had pushed away from her chest on its eight chitinous legs. Its head was still attached to her: pincers still hooked in and feeding tubules still imbedded in her flesh, but there was now some leakage of blood, and a white pus crusting under her breasts. Below the creature was a neat row of 'leaves' — a litter of five baby scoles born to leech blood. Back at the worksheds these would have been carefully removed and transported to the piggeries in the north, where they would be fattened up on pig's blood before being returned to be attached to a new worker.
"About done with, your scole," commented Fethan. "Combination of leafing and Volus hitting it with that stinger of his." While she stared in perplexity, he tugged off each of the leaves and tossed them to one side. "Fucking things," he muttered, then removed his own false scole and opened it up. From within this he removed a small flat pack, which he also opened to expose a sewing kit, and Eldene wondered what the hell he needed that for. She stared at the old man in puzzlement.
"Best we get it done now," said Fethan. "Dying ones sometimes don't detach cleanly, and if they leave bits of 'emselves in you that can cause problems." With that he reached down and took hold of Eldene's scole. Eldene yelled at the horrible ripping sensation, then yelled again when the pain hit her. Through eyes blurred by tears she saw Fethan standing with the scole gripped tightly before him, its legs kicking in the air, its pincers opening and closing, and its three feeding tubules waving like bloody fingers. Then, cast aside, it landed in the grass on its back. Eldene felt a sudden frisson of fear at seeing the thing detached and moving on its own like that. She then stared down in horror at the raw wound welling blood from her chest and, as well as pain, felt embarrassment at her own nakedness — not for exposure of her breasts, but of the area below where the scole had been attached. For more than half her life this thing had lived on her torso and now she felt incomplete without it. After Fethan threaded a needle and stooped to sew together the ragged edges of the wound left by the scole, she turned her head away from such intimate work and wished she could faint from the pain.
"You know," he said as he worked, "scoles are the same old biotech as the squerms and sprawns — brought in by the Theocracy when it first established itself here."
"Really," said Eldene through gritted teeth.
"Yeah. No one uses big ugly symbionts any more, and these things cut your lifespan by half."
Eldene turned and stared at him.
"You didn't know that, did you?" he said.
"I did not."
"It never occurred to you to wonder why proctors and priesthood put up with the inconvenience of breather gear."
"I thought… something to do with status…"
"You thought wrong."
Through the shuttle screen, Cormac gazed out at Elysium and saw neither green fields nor any of the blessed. The station was a morass of linked habitats clustered around the kilometre-long monofilament cables and struts that supported the main catchment mirrors of a sun-smelter facility. Here it was that the more free-wheeling entrepreneurial types towed in asteroids for smelting, bought refined metals, ran factories, and generally made large amounts of money — or not — in a grey area where the line of Polity had simply juddered to a halt and dissolved before the onslaught of the wishes of this place's inhabitants. There was a runcible installed, the reason they had stopped here, but as far as the Polity was concerned this was a place you came to at your own risk. There weren't many complaints made: those who might have wanted to did not usually get much of a chance, being given a brief tour of the inside of one of the smelters.
"There's many feel this place should be broken up," said Cento.
Cormac turned to the Golem, who was piloting the shuttle, and once again was struck by his perfection. This it was that told him he must be dealing with a copy of Cento for, since the events on Viridian, the original Cento had retained the brass arm that he had torn from the killing machine, Mr Crane, and this Cento possessed no such arm. Aiden appeared no different from how he had looked the last time Cormac had seen him, but the other Golem was yet another copy.
"There are places like this all across the Polity," said Cormac, "and those who object to them don't have to visit them."
"I like this place," said Gant from behind.
Cormac glanced round at him and Aiden. "You would," he said. "Wasn't it to here you and Thorn used to come for your holidays — a bit of relaxing non-lethal violence and enough high-tox cips to dissolve this shuttle?"
"Good days," Gant reminisced.
Cormac snorted and returned his attention to the screen, as Cento brought the shuttle in towards a conglomeration of habitats below the cylindrical tower of a giant refinery. Looking beyond this, he saw an ancient grabship clasping in its huge ceramal claw the single mountain protruding from the asteroid it was hauling in. As he understood it, the asteroid would be brought to one of the many furnace satellites, and then the sunlight from the mirrors would be focused upon it. While it heated, the automated systems on the satellite would draw off materials when they attained their particular melting or volatile temperatures. Nothing would be wasted: this place produced just about everything on the elementary table, and even the asteroidal ash that remained — such as it was — they used to make soil for the habitats. Thereafter, rough ingots and tanks were transported from the furnace satellites to the refineries and factories, there to be turned into bubble-metals, alloys and pure crystal for electronic applications, composites and complex compounds: every substance used by the material technologies of the Polity.
Soon, amongst the habitats, they noticed a structure like a giant octagonal coin around which clustered deep-space and insystem ships. There Cormac saw many of the multi-spherical varieties — ships consisting of any number of conjoined spheres — also ones with the sleek lines of cuttlefish, and those like baroque sculptures, still others that were replicas of vehicles out of human history: aeroplanes, early rockets and shuttles, and even one ship that had the appearance of an ancient sailing vessel.
"You get some types here," Gant observed.
Cento navigated the shuttle through this swarm and finally brought it to an open bay in the side of the structure. Cormac glanced back through the rear screen and saw that the Occam Razor was still easily visible. The reason given here by the docking control for the dreadnought not being allowed in was that it was just too large to be joining this crowd — supposedly just one accidental burst from one of its manoeuvring thrusters could crisp any number of these ships. He doubted this was the true reason and, to be honest, it irked him that some autocrat here could order a Polity battleship to stand off.
As the shuttle drifted slowly into the bay, through the shimmer-shield, Cento made a sound of annoyance.
"Problem?" Cormac asked.
"Not really," muttered the Golem, "but I have just been informed of what we are being cha
rged for the use of this bay."
"Probably ten times the going rate," said Gant. "We're a type that ain't all that welcome here."
There were people coming towards them from every direction as they headed for the ramp leading down to the catamaran, but in the darkness there was no way to easily distinguish friend from foe, or rather, for all those foes to realize that Thorn and Stanton were not friendly. This did not last though, for somewhere on the barge an auxiliary generator or pile cut in. A searchlight beam lit the area around Brom's cabin, and began to traverse the deck. It found them as they were running down the ramp to Stanton's vessel.
"The mooring cables," Stanton instructed almost conversationally, as there rose an outcry from the barge.
Thorn grabbed the nearest cable and unhooked it from its bollard, while Stanton did the same with the other one. Stanton was leaping aboard as Thorn unhooked the final cable. Someone on the barge then decided it was no longer time for just shouting, and something smashed the cable from his hand, while the ramp behind him erupted into jagged twists of metal. He leapt from the ramp onto one of the catamaran's outriders and found himself clinging to a stanchion supporting the suspended cabin as tractor drives engaged in both outriders, and the vessel began to pull away. Thorn ran along the outrider to the steps leading up it into the cabin, but slipped when projectiles slammed holes through the surface next to his feet, and only managed to prevent himself falling into the water by catching hold of the safety rail guarding the steps. With his legs still trailing in the water, he glanced back at the quickly receding barge and saw one of the gun turrets swinging in their direction, before disappearing in an actinic explosion. From the ramp, most of Brom's people started opening up with hand weapons, while a small group of them set up a tripod-mounted missile launcher. Thorn assessed his chances of reaching the cabin at just a little above zero, and his chances of remaining alive, either there or here, as little different. Then a coughing sound from the rear of the cabin, and something cylindrical and black sped back towards the ramp. The explosion that followed sliced the ramp in half and threw those of Brom's people who were still intact into the water.
"Are you coming up here or not?" Stanton shouted.
Thorn finally hauled himself from the water and scrambled up the steps.
The catamaran's cabin was of a standard utile design: cylindrical, with a rear hold and a forward cockpit containing three control chairs. Thorn entered the hold and headed quickly for the cockpit, little comforted to be under cover when he noticed the many bullet holes punched through the walls.
While with his right hand guiding the vessel out to sea using a joystick that had probably, in a previous life, belonged to some kind of nil-AG aircraft, Stanton glanced at Thorn and nodded to the chair next to him. As Thorn strapped himself in, the mercenary swung across the targeting visor he had himself just used to take out the ramp, then kicked across the floor-mounted firing control he had been operating with his left hand. Thorn saw that the hinged beam the control column extended from, as well as the jointed arm supporting the visor, allowed them to be operated from any seat.
"Bit primitive," Stanton explained. "It was connected into this boat's harpoon, but I've replaced that with a weapons carousel. You've got twelve heat-seekers, three chaff, and three antimunition packages back there. Use them wisely."
Thorn pulled the column into position and swung the visor across his face, feeling its skin-stick surfaces adhering to him. Now he had a view straight back to the barge but, thumbing the swing control on the joystick he now gripped, that view swung in increments of ninety degrees, as the launcher on the rear of the catamaran swung round. Tilting his head back, he saw nothing but sky for a moment, before thumbing the launcher round again so the barge was back in the screen.
"We've got AGCs launching," he told Stanton.
"Most'll be running," the mercenary told him bluntly.
"Three are running in this direction."
"That's why I said 'most'," Stanton replied.
Finding the cursor control under his little finger, Thorn called up the mask's menu and scrolled down through it. The selection buttons Stanton had added — heat, chaff and anti-m — were red and of an entirely different font from the rest of the menu. He was about to choose one of these when a familiar voice spoke. "That you in there, trooper Thorn?" He quickly made a different menu choice and called up, in the corner of the screen, a mini-display that showed him Ternan's face. Zeroing the targeting box on one of the approaching AGCs, he then selected heat, fired off a missile, and had the pleasure of seeing her frantically slapping at controls while the three vehicles broke away. However, anti-munitions took out the missile before it reached its target.
"How long, Jarv?" asked Stanton, speaking into his wristcom.
"Seven minutes," replied a woman's voice.
"Why so slow?" he asked.
"Thousand-kilometre restricted zone. Came on just as you got to the barge — probably something to do with your friend there," she replied.
"Any Polity activity?"
"You bet. When they shot down that military transport, we got a swarm of craft taking off from Gordonstone. As soon as the 'ware generator went offline, two insystem attack boats launched from Cereb. They're about three minutes behind me."
"Great," murmured Stanton.
Thorn absorbed this, but kept his attention mostly focused on the pursuing AGCs. There were seven of them now, and there was no way this catamaran, even with its tractor drive flat out, could outrun them. Observing seven white dots then speeding from the AGCs towards him — quickly highlighted in flashing red boxes on the screen — he selected and fired chaff, shortly followed by antimunitions. Three missiles exploded in the cloud of glittering dust that the remaining four successfully punched through. The antimunitions package flew apart into its hundred component seeker explosives, two of which were detonated by two of the missiles, but the remaining two hammered on in.
"We're not gonna survive seven minutes," Thorn observed, firing one of the last two antimunitions packages.
The explosions were close, shock waves veering the boat in its course and shrapnel clattering against the cabin. Thorn pulled the visor aside in time to see a missile tumbling end over end into the sea beside them, and detonating just under the waves.
"Seven AGCs, and it looks like all of them have launchers." Thorn slapped the targeting visor back into place.
"Jarv," explained Stanton, "we're going to bail out. Thorn, empty that carousel. We're going."
Thorn took the cursor to each missile selection, rattling the firing button on each, then removed the visor and reached for his seat straps. Stanton was already through the door into the hold by the time he had his straps undone. Soon the two of them were moving back to the entry hatch. Thorn glanced to the rear of the hold, where the carousel was clicking round, and heard the missiles launching one after the other. Following Stanton down, he squinted through spray driven up by the outriders chopping through the wave tops. The two men jumped at the same time. Travelling at the same speed as the catamaran, Thorn hit the sea and bounced — the water feeling about as welcoming as concrete. Next, he was into it headfirst, whiteness all around him and copper salts bitter in his mouth. At his first breath on coming to the surface, he saw the catamaran already fifty metres away — missiles still launching from the rear of its cabin. The missile that then hit it, he did not see.
The central cabin just disappeared, like a balloon being burst by an orange explosion. Caught in the blast, one outrider went straight up into the air, then dropped like a dolphin having reached the summit of its leap, and disappeared. The remaining outrider, its tractor drive still functioning, motored on, towing a tangle of smoking wreckage.
"Perfect timing," said John Stanton from behind him.
Thorn sculled round to the mercenary and grinned at him, before looking beyond to where the pursuing AGCs were now coming into sight. Soon the seven vehicles were hovering over the still motoring wreckage of
the catamaran. From one of them another missile stabbed down and destroyed even this. Then the attackers nosed out across the area.
"Shit," said Thorn. "You reckon they know we got out?"
"Perhaps," said Stanton.
Thorn shot him a look of annoyance, then began hyperventilating, ready to dive under the waves. Stanton seemed amused by this. Thorn was just about to submerge when a double sonic boom shook the sky, and there came a roar as of a giant steel beast. A blast of hot wind hazed the area with sea spray and a shadow blotted out the sky. The AGCs turned and fled, like crows driven away from a road kill, and Thorn gazed up at the trispherical ship as it descended, cables dropping from an underside hatch.
Stepping from the shuttle, Cormac looked around the bay and wondered at why it was so empty. Such a huge area had plenty of space for other shuttles, of which, judging by the number of ships outside, there needed to be many, yet there was none here but their own. He had begun to get an intimation of something not quite right when out of one of the row of drop-shafts to the rear of the bay emerged the welcoming party.
The two men were suited in grey businesswear and wore black intensifier eye-bands and executive polished-chrome augs. They preceded soldiers uniformed in light combat armour, with helmets which extended down one side of their heads — containing military coms and augs no doubt — and carrying pulse-rifles. But all these seemed inconsequential compared with what came up out of the shaft behind them, passed to either side of the group, and swung round in front. Here were two large polished cylinders floating vertically, with weapons mounted at each end. They were heavy-armour AI drones — very new and very dangerous. Even the Occam Razor did not have anything like this aboard. Cormac glanced back and noticed that the bay's armoured doors were drawing closed. He initiated Shuriken as the three Golem accompanying him moved out to either side of him.
