by Neal Asher
Gant smelt burning and just knew there was something wrong. He wondered if this knowledge could be put down to instinct, then he wondered if such an abstraction could have survived the copying process that had resulted in his present self.
"Aiden? Cento?" he said into his wristcom, while drawing his pulse-gun. Then he damned his own stupidity — he was in a security area so radio signals could not penetrate the shielding incorporated in the walls. All communications from here had to be via direct line wires or optic cables. Moving to one of the coms set in the wall itself, he spoke the same words. His voice should have activated the device and his words caused it to relay them to the required recipient, but there was no response. He tried the touch-pads and found them dead.
Of course, his next action should have been to get the hell out of there, then return with a shitload of backup. But Gant was Sparkind and a Golem android now, and utterly confident that there was little he could not squash on his own. He ran to the door and flung himself through it, rolled, and came up into a crouch to spot potential targets. No movement. The guy sitting at the console looked wasted, and the other…
Gant suddenly had one of those moments of revelation that in others often necessitate a change of underwear. Golem, He tried to communicate with it on the same level as Cento and Aiden did with himself — direct radio transmission, mind to mind — but got nil response. Someone had killed this Golem. The head was a blackened ruin, which did not necessarily mean much as the mind was contained in an armoured case in the chest. But the lack of movement or communication did signify. Swinging round, Gant quickly moved back to the door and headed for SA1. He was only a few paces down the corridor when the blast from a riot gun lifted him into the air and deposited him on his back.
"The ship you were on, the General Patten, was completely destroyed by Dragon," explained Cormac.
Apis stood in a gravity of one gee. The exoskeletal suit that the Golem, Aiden, had earlier found in the Occam's stores, bulked him out so he now looked to have the musculature to withstand this gravity. The thick grey material covered him from his feet to under his chin, where it flared to cup his head. There was also a coms helmet that went with the suit, but they told him he would have no need of it, just as he would be unlikely to need the hood that folded up from the back, or the visor that could rise to meet it from the chin rest, or the weapon-system connection ports. For this was a suit specifically manufactured for military use.
"Yes, I knew that," he said, staring straight back at Cormac.
"Did you know many of those aboard?" Cormac asked, sitting. Apis moved carefully to another chair and sat down. He would be all politeness, but he wondered what this grim man wanted from him. The Cormac of The Dragon in the Flower — the book detailing the events preceding Dragon's supposed suicide on the planet Aster Colora — did not strike him as the kind to waste time on socializing, especially with a teenage Outlinker. They were now heading into a potential war zone, with a titanic dying alien clinging to the outside of the ship. Surely there were more important things that required his visitor's attention?
"My probable father, Peerswarf, also others I'd known in the tech section for a few months, my teachers…"
"Friends?"
"They were all in the communal areas. I was in the tech section," said Apis bluntly.
Cormac looked around the room. "Why one gee?" he asked.
That isn't it, thought Apis.
"I want to get used to using this suit. I don't want to be helpless again. If soldiers…"
Apis suddenly lost track of what he was saying. It was fear, he realized. With this exoskeleton on, he could fight back.
"You weren't exactly helpless. A brain beats physical strength every time."
You're watching me, thought Apis, gauging my reactions.
Cormac said, "Now, I don't want to aggravate your grief, but there are details I need from you. I want you to tell me the entire story."
Ah…
"From when?" Apis asked.
"From a relevant point."
Apis stared at him for a long moment. "I discovered the mycelium," he said, and was gratified to see a flash of reaction in Cormac's face.
"Then start from there."
Apis did so, frequently being stopped for questions about various points, some of which struck him as utterly irrelevant. Why did Cormac want to know precisely where the mycelium was found, and at exactly what time? Why did he need to know all the technical parameters of its growth through Miranda? Why did he push so hard to learn the wording of Masadan prayer?
When Cormac finally left, Apis felt tired and frustrated, but as he headed for his zero-gee hammock, replaying the conversation in his head, he realized that the agent had missed very little, that it had been a very thorough interrogation.
Stanton sipped his drink very carefully, as he did not have Dreyden's tolerance of scotch with lumps of hallucinogenic cips ice in it. Already the man's collection of tropical plants had taken on a slight halo of glowing blue, and there seemed suspect movement just at the edges of his vision.
"The more I look at those things, the more I sympathize with the Separatist cause," said Dreyden as he lit up yet another cigarette. Stanton studied the man: with his feet up on the balcony rail of his apartment in the geodesic dome, which also housed his plant collection, the man was trying to impress with his relaxed urbanity. But Stanton was not impressed. Dreyden was actually gaunt with worry, and eaten away by drugs and the constant medical treatments that kept them from killing him. Though he had reached the top here in Elysium, it seemed he was having trouble maintaining his foothold there. Stanton turned from him and looked up at what elicited the man's sympathies.
Outside the dome, the two war drones hovered where they had finished their brief demonstration — all their targets now so much metallic vapour. Dreyden pressed the two yellowed fingers clamping his cigarette against the expensive aug he wore, as if he really needed to concentrate to operate it. One of the segments of the dome slid aside onto vacuum, but trailing the nacreous meniscus of a shimmer-shield behind it to fill the gap. With small jets of thruster flame, the drones manoeuvred towards this gap and one after the other oozed into the dome to then drop down and hover over the cyanids and plasoderms.
"Separatism will eventually lose unless it is prepared to accept and use AI," said Jarvellis. "There's always been a bit of an arms race, but now the Polity is winning."
"Yes," said Dreyden, "the Polity is winning."
Stanton glanced at him and recognized a look in his face that he had only seen previously in Arian Pelter's, from the moment just after agent Ian Cormac had nearly killed him, right up to the point when Cormac actually did kill him. He glanced at Jarvellis sitting in a lounger on the other side of Dreyden and knew her expression: she had opined that this man was, as she put it, 'out with the fairies' for some time before Stanton himself had seen it. He had been as slow seeing the same in Pelter as well.
"It depends what you mean by 'winning'," he replied. "It's suppressing any rebellion against it, and expanding, but there's an awful lot of space out there that isn't Polity-controlled."
"All very well if you want to keep on moving," said Dreyden, drawing heavily on his cigarette before flicking the glowing butt over the balcony. "Now, on to money."
Smiling easily, as if unaware of the man's sudden abruptness, Stanton placed his briefcase on the table between them. Opening the case, he removed a card holding ten cut blue gems, each the size of someone's eye, and each containing square flaws which on close inspection would reveal intricate patterns as of an old integrated circuit. Closing the case, he dropped the strip of gems on the lid for Dreyden's inspection.
Dreyden spun the card with his finger. "Etched sapphires… interesting." He looked up at Stanton. "Are they scan-enabled?"
Stanton nodded. "Each is a unit representing a hundred thousand New Carth shillings — the price we agreed, yes?"
Dreyden sat back, pulling yet another cigarette from
the dispenser and lighting it with his fancy ring. He drew deep and waved one hand airily through the smoke. "Oh, it's agreed."
Opposite them the two war drones, obviously instructed through Dreyden's aug, began to rise back towards the shimmer-shield door in the roof of the biodome — since through there lay no doubt the most direct route to the bay containing Lyric II.
"I'll take it on trust that they are genuine," Dreyden added.
Stanton kept a smile on his face, knowing that also through his aug, Dreyden could control the orientation of every mirror out there. He was aware that any who had crossed this man and thought to then escape by ship were now so much drifting ash. Apparently a ship the size of Lyric II would last for slightly less time than a fly in a blast furnace if even a single one of the mirrors was directed at it.
There was something horrible about the way Skellor moved, as if something chitinous was heaving along under his skin, but with movements not quite in consonance with his own. Studying him, Aphran wondered at the strange outgrowth that extended up the side of his neck and cupped his chin, at the grey veins that ran across his face and the backs of his hands. What the hell was all that about? And why was there blood flowing in his crystal matrix AI? She could only assume that he had now put it fully online, and that somehow he must have used that weird shit he had been playing with on his off-time from doing work for the group, to prevent it from killing him. Had she been able to, Aphran would have opened up on him with the pulse-rifle she had picked up in the Security Area but, judging by the burnt-out Golem she had seen in there, such action would not have availed her much. Anyway, she was unable to act against him: her aug felt like the body of some vicious insect with its sharp legs clawed inside her brain, and she knew that all his orders must be obeyed — the consequences of disobedience would be agony and death.
Glancing aside, she studied Danny, and to a certain extent considered herself lucky. Her own aug, though somehow subverted and now being used to control her, was at least the same Dracocorp item that had been provided by the Masadans. The boy's aug, where Skellor had touched it, now sprouted the same greyish material that inhabited Skellor's body, and roots of it were spreading across the boy's neck and his head. Now, whenever she looked into Danny's face, all she got in return was the expression of an imbecile, but one who obeyed Skellor without hesitation.
Finally finding the courage to speak, Aphran asked, "What about the others?"
"They'll cause sufficient disruption. My 'ware field wouldn't extend to cover you all," Skellor replied.
Aphran glanced about herself — she had not even been aware that they were covered. She glanced to Skellor's belt and saw that he was now not wearing the generator he had spent so much time on. What was he talking about?
"Ah, here," he said, halting and turning to face a door. He reached out and pressed his hand against the touch-panel, and for a moment Aphran expected klaxons to start blaring. Then she chided herself for being obtuse — if he could break into a Polity Security Area, then closed doors were obviously no problem to him.
The door slid aside and as Skellor pulled his hand away from the panel, Aphran saw that it was as if he had just pressed it down in some tar — long strands stretched and attenuated, then snapped back into his palm. Useful ability maybe, but she was not sure it was one she wanted to own.
"Cold store," she said, stepping into the room beyond and surveying the rows of cold-coffins either side of a single aisle.
"There are only fifty people here," said Skellor, "but the system that watches this room is the same system that watches all the other sleep rooms on this ship, so I can access it here." So saying he headed down the aisle to a space in one row of coffins, finding an instrument wall. Here he slapped his hand against a touch-console. This time the task for him appeared much more difficult as, after a few seconds, he closed his eyes and bowed his head. Aphran watched the blood pulsing faster in his aug, and noted how the greyish veins on his face seemed to be moving: sliding under his skin like lizard tails.
A series of sucking thumps sent her into a crouch with her pulse-rifle held at the ready, then she realized that the noise came from cold-coffins hinging open — all of them. Inside each was exposed the naked body of a man or a woman, their concave impressions mirrored in the lids.
Opening his eyes and glancing round, Skellor said flatly, "Damn."
"What happened?" Aphran asked, standing again. She noted that Danny had moved not at all.
"Vascular control," Skellor explained. "I was trying to get the system to pump them dry, then return their blood before they'd reached thaw-up, which would have killed them all rather neatly. Unfortunately, I overlooked a subroutine that isolates the coffins, which in turn then revive their occupants. But don't worry, this was only a test run, so it's only happening in here."
"They're waking up?" Aphran asked.
Skellor surveyed the room as if that had not occurred to him. "Oh, yes," he said. "You've got about six minutes yet, so you'd best hurry and kill them all."
Aphran stared at him in horror, and immediately felt the claw inside her head closing when she made no move to obey. Suddenly she found herself walking towards the head of a row. It was not as if she was being forced, for it was her doing the walking; it was rather as if at the wholly animal level she had made the choice to stay alive, for by obeying was the only way she could.
"You take that other row," she instructed Danny, the words tasting foul to her.
Upon reaching the cold-coffin at the end of her own row, she placed the snout of the pulse-rifle against the temple of its occupant, and pulled the trigger. The man's head lifted to the side, blooming open like a flower on the blue flash of energy. However, as he settled back, what ran out of the ugly wound was not blood but the complex antifreeze that had been pumped into his body whilst his blood had been pumped out. The next coffin occupant was a woman, and seeing a tattoo on her arm that branded her as Earth Central Security, gave Aphran no comfort. This was bloody work. She was a soldier in the Separatist cause, not a murderer. Her tenth victim leaked blood, and her fifteenth sprayed it across the metal floor. Her last one of twenty-five opened his eyes and sat upright before she shot him twice in the chest, knocking him out of his coffin. Perhaps she should not have been so tardy; Danny had killed all his lot long before.
Carrying her laptop, Mika entered the cold-sleep area and glanced around. Everything looked as it should be; anything wrong in any of the ten or more of these areas, and the Occam's AI would have registered it immediately. This particular area, though it had room for many more of them, had only eight occupied coffins. Seven contained some of the Occam's technicians — overspill from another area a quarter of a kilometre to port of the ship — and the eighth one held Apis Coolant's mother.
It had been Mika's intention to leave her in cold-sleep until she could be returned to an Outlinker medical facility, as the injuries she had sustained though easy enough to deal with in a normal human, in an Outlinker were not so amenable to the medical technologies at Mika's disposal. Even the boy's broken ankle had caused her some problems — normal bone welding not being sufficient to the task of repairing fragile Outlinker bone — and she'd needed to fabricate an autodoc boot to monitor the slow process of repair.
But in the end it came down to convenience. Though it would not be easy for Mika to repair this woman's fractured skull and the consequent thrombosis, it was by no means impossible. If Mika was perfectly honest with herself, the only reason she had been avoiding the chore was so she could spend more time studying the human/calloraptor hybrid Cormac had killed. However, this choice was unfair on the boy Apis as, though he might seem rather advanced for a teenager, he'd had some hideous experiences and was now amongst strangers. He needed his mother.
Plugging the optic cable of her laptop into the woman's coffin, Mika waited impatiently for the status list to come up on the screen. After a moment, she looked about herself to make sure she had not overlooked the presence of anyone, th
en began to speak out loud.
"Who are you?" she asked. "What is that? Why is this? How do you do that?" It was so easy for normal Polity citizens to ask direct questions, yet for Life-Coven graduates it seemed so difficult and unnatural. The ideal was that you used all the resources at your disposal to discover answers — including your own reasoning abilities — and that to have to ask a question was a kind of defeat. In cases where there were no other options available the Life-Coven taught that you should then feel free to ask, which was all very well if the concept of not asking had not been as deeply inculcated from birth as potty training. In this respect Mika was discovering just how wrong her early training had been, so was attempting to retrain herself.
"Where is this item? Do you have this ability? Are you…?" She trailed off, realizing that the status list was taking an awful long time to come up on her screen. Quickly she started the laptop's self-diagnostic program, and immediately got a response that assured her there was nothing wrong with the device. Now she sent a search engine through the console's memory space to try to find the optic connection. Briefly there came a flash of some very odd code across the screen, then the words 'Nil Return Signal'. Frowning, Mika rested the device on top of the cold-coffin and headed down the aisle to the instrument wall. Here the same strange code was scrolling across all of four different screens. She tried the touch-controls and the code disappeared, but beyond that there was no response.
Running back to the cold-coffin, Mika felt a horrible sinking sensation. Problems with cold-sleep coffins? They did not have problems — it was unheard of. Grabbing up her laptop she quickly detached it, fed its own optic cable back into it, and laid it on the cold-coffin behind her. Now she tried the touch-plate lock on the lid of the coffin: nil response. Nothing else for it but to use the manual lever — no matter how many alarms this caused to go off. She gripped the cold metal and drew it back towards her, and with a thunk the lock disengaged and the coffin lid sighed open. Gazing at the Outlinker woman, Mika immediately knew something was terribly wrong: the woman's skin had been light lavender when Mika had transferred her from the landing craft, but now it was dark. It was always the case that people in cold-sleep looked colourless, pallid, simply because the blood had been withdrawn from them and replaced by clear fluid. This woman should be bloodless and she was not. Mika placed her hands on the woman's chest. Nothing. With sudden fierce strength, she got hold of her and pulled her onto her side. Stiff with rigor mortis. Her underside was also deep purple where the blood had pooled in the lower portions of the corpse — for this was what she was now dealing with: a corpse. Mika let the woman drop back into place in her aptly named box.
