by Neal Asher
Ah, LS-45, now.
One of the Separatists there had stepped outside, perhaps hearing something. He turned, horror writ clear in his features. Through six red eyes Tomalon saw this, then transferred his attention to the pinhead camera set high in the corridor. He watched as one of the drones hurtled forwards and slammed straight through the man, exploding away most of his torso and spinning the remainder against the wall where it smeared blood and intestines before collapsing. The two other drones turned into the hold to be greeted by screams and yells. Then the stuttering of a pulse-rifle hitting one of the drones before it slammed into the possessor of the weapon in white-hot fragments. The woman next to that man staggering away, groping at where a stray fragment of metal had torn away half her face. The other one, pushed back against the wall by the second drone — it not penetrating because it had not room to build up sufficient speed — screaming as it crushed his chest, blood spraying from his lips. The drone backing off to let him drop, turning to the woman who is now down and crawling, coming down on her head like a stamping iron boot…
LS-26 again. The robot connects its key-plug, turns it, inserts it further, turns it three more revolutions, retracts it and trundles back on its hull-grip treads. Initiated now, the hatch motor draws power and begins to lift from its seals. The five other Separatists have now reached the inner door to the hold and one of them fires at the lock with a pulse-gun. This does no more than fuse the mechanism and reduce the possibility of them getting the door open. Tomalon observes this, just as he observes the white mist of vapour-laden air blasting from the opening outer hatch and ice crystals condensing on the hull-repair robot. Inside the hold, he observes the four scrabbling at the inner door as the outer hatch reaches its slide point and slams aside. Suddenly a miniature hurricane drains the hold. The woman who slams against the hatch-hole does not have time to scream before the huge pressure differential snaps her spine and folds her in half — ejecting her into space. The man who hits directly behind her is jammed in place — the differential no longer enough to break him up sufficiently to push him through. Air continues to escape past him. Through the robot, Tomalon watches him — his arm and head through the hatch, eyes bulging and vapour jetting from his mouth, veins breaking and reddening his face like a drunkard's. Soon all the air is gone and he falls back inside to join his fellows, who are on the floor gasping at nothing, and dying.
The surveillance drones have nearly reached the other five who have now stepped back from the inner door — no doubt having received some last communication from their fellows inside. Tomalon turns the drones and sends them in search of the other escaped prisoners. He considers that the evacuation of further air will be no great loss, for the Occam Razor is now less five hundred souls who would need to breathe. All around these five Separatists, he closes doors and seals and hatches, then he opens the inner door to hold LS-26. This is a show he wants to see again. He watches the five try to run, fighting the hurricane that wants to snatch them away. He sees one hurtling down the corridor and slamming into the doorjamb of LS-26 before being dragged through, yet knows in his heart that this is not enough vengeance; there will never be enough.
"Hello, Captain."
The voice is close and he feels breath on his face. He slides aside the two nictitating screens that cover his eyes and behind his eyes he stands down the extra optic-nerve linkages. All views external to the bridge pod fade and he gazes at the face before him.
"Hello, Skellor."
The hand that touches his face is hot and feverish, then suddenly scalding. He feels linkages blinking out, subprograms collapsing or being isolated. He feels the invasion. Pain in his right arm. He looks down and sees Skellor's other hand on the engine-control vambrace, then that being levered up and tearing from Tomalon's flesh, trailing strands like tar. Engine control gone. Dropping out of U-space. In horror he watches Skellor finally pull it away from him, skeining optic cable behind, then pressing the vambrace into place on his own arm. Security protocols come online, grope for the invasive presence — become that presence.
Tomalon. Tomalon. Tomalon. Like a child mimicking the galloping of a horse, but, behind this, Occam is screaming.
Access codes!
He tries to dump them, but the system-backup protocols will not allow them to go unless he orders it again. Too late. System backup slides into black isolation. Tearing. The second vambrace has gone, and now Skellor has his fingers under the Captain's heart plate, his grasp coming near to life-support; and on Tomalon's head the primary connections to Occam are loosening.
Someone is screaming, Tomalon realizes it is himself.
Perhaps this is enough?
Tomalon accesses a system long unused in the Polity, and Occam gladly consents.
It was fun, Occam says.
Goodbye, Tomalon replies.
The unused system comes online like a guillotine slamming down: hard-wired and not easily amenable to subversion; it was built in when humans ran the Polity and AIs were not to be completely trusted. Occam dies, its mind fragmenting under a huge power surge, crystal layers ablating away, perfect logic and stacked memory becoming a searing explosion of static. Throughout the ship, surveillance drones drop from the air, their minds bleeding away and single power-surges scrambling the silicon matrices in which those minds were contained. The hull-repair robot outside LS-26 closes the hatch, shearing in half a corpse still caught in it, before locking down against the hull itself and dying. Other drones either freeze or lock into a repetition of their most recent task. One of these, which is welding a hull member, continues the task long after it has run out of welding wire; and another, deep in the ship, continues polishing an area of floor it will wear its way through some time hence. Control panels shut down for a moment, then come back on in isolated function. And finally, twenty-eight skinless Golem bow their heads as one, dots of white heat appearing on polished ceramal skulls as internal components fuse and burn away. A further twenty-two stand up as one, and step out of their bracing frames.
"Fuck you!" Skellor rages, his hand closing on Tomalon's throat.
9
The image of the room and all its contents, excepting the creatures, faded away, to then be replaced with an image of a bedroom with three beds, and Brother Malcolm, hugely asleep. The woman glanced at her son, perhaps considering showing him this, herself certainly understanding where the story was now going. The boy was busy playing with his macabre toys and probably wouldn't notice if she stopped reading. However, she wanted to carry on because she was enjoying the story herself.
" 'Who's been sleeping in my bed? asked Daddy Duck, upon finding the sheets of his bed rumpled and crumpled," she said — over-egging the self-parody.
Her son glanced up at her and frowned. She continued in a more normal tone, " 'Who's been sleeping in my bed? asked Mummy Duck, finding her sheets all rumpled and crumpled too. 'Mffuful coffle foofle, said Baby Duck."
The woman stared at the picture of the smallest of the three gabbleducks — that is to say one that was only about three metres tall — as it ground its jaws from side to side, two feet clad in filthy red and white striped bedsocks sticking out the side of its bill, and blood running in rivulets down its breast. The boy would like this picture, but was too intent on his toy, which had now pulled its victim out from underneath the carpet and was using it in the same way as Brother Malcolm had been used. As, on the final gulp, the two feet disappeared, she finished the text of the story:
" 'Don't speak with your mouth full, said Mummy and Daddy Duck together."
In the morning, they pushed through the flute grass for only an hour before coming to a crushed-down clearing in which something had obviously pounced on and devoured a grazer. Old grass and new, the latter being now even in these wetter areas up to waist-high, was spattered with a treacly substance that Fethan told her was grazer blood. Also scattered all around were regurgitated piles of white bone flakes and chewed skin, and stinking worms of excrement — whether this l
ast was from the grazer or the thing that had eaten it was debatable. The most eye-catching item left was the grazer's skull, which sat at the precise centre of the clearing as if carefully placed there. This object was as large as a man's torso, and possessed a jaw set with three rows of flat grinding teeth that worked against a flat bony plate. There were four eye-sockets on either side of the long skull — one still holding an eye that was the colour of iron and contained a double black pupil.
Eldene noticed movement amid the treacly blood and dark flesh still clinging to white bone, and on closer inspection saw this was due to small black crustaceans similar in shape to sprawns — but without the wings — that had come to feed. Stepping back, she realized that the entire clearing was swarming with these creatures. Wordlessly she hurried after Fethan, who now took the track that led from the clearing towards the mountains.
By mid-morning they were on high ground yet again, and the going became much easier. As they drew closer to the mountains, the landscape and vegetation began to change drastically. Lizard tails grew in big clumps encircling some kind of huge flower or fruit with the appearance of a mound of raw liver; stubby flute grasses grew in hollows, but the rest of the ground was covered by blister mosses ranging from blue to green, with the occasional red pod-spike rearing up to a metre in the air; plants like giant thistles encroached., as neatly ranked as marching armies, clad in finger-length thorns and bearing furred heads of deepest purple over bodies of pale green; rocky outcroppings became commonplace and a wider variety of molluscs clung to them. And the ground sloped ever upwards.
"I've never seen this, any of this before, not even in a book," Eldene commented, after she had stopped to inspect some of the rock-clinging molluscs gathered on a large flat stone. Their shells were seemingly enamelled in Euclidian patterns of black and yellow, as if someone had spilt a jewellery box there.
"How many books have you actually seen?" Fethan asked her. Eldene began to count them up, but before she could answer Fethan continued, "If you can even count them, then you haven't seen enough. The Theocracy doesn't allow many anyway, and the only ones you will have seen will be copies of the few brought here by the first settlers, or else the subversive versions smuggled in by the Polity. I'm surprised you've seen any at all."
"They had some at the orphanage," Eldene said.
"Then they are probably a well-kept secret which, if revealed, would get someone into a lot of trouble," Fethan replied. Then, as if this had only just occurred to him: "Were these paper books?"
Eldene stared at him in confusion. "Paper books? They were memory fabric, just like any other book."
Fethan shook his head. "Damn, I'm getting old."
Soon they were high enough to look back across the sweep of grasslands, and the settlement areas beyond. Through the mist of distance, Eldene could just make out the city and, still further, something glinting in the sunlight as it rose from the spaceport. She gazed up at the stations silhouetted against the face of Calypse, and supposed that what she had witnessed was either a trader's ship taking essence of squerm to some faraway port, or a Theocracy transport taking the same luxury protein, in its unrefined form, to the tables of the Theocracy. Much, she knew, was grown up there, in crop cylinders, but the religious hierarchy that ruled their lives had a special taste for such products resulting from the killing labour of the surface dwellers.
"I've often wondered what kind of lives they lead up there," Eldene said.
"Oh, they do very nicely. They wear the trappings of theism and they violently debate the tenets of their faith, but meanwhile they live like primitive kings." Fethan turned to her. "Do you believe in this god your Theocracy has you worship?"
Eldene nearly gave the automatic: "I believe in the one true God whose prophet is Zelda Smythe. I believe in the Creation and the truth of Human Ascendance. I believe…" The entire list usually took fifteen minutes to recite, and Eldene remembered how on only one or two occasions had she been made to go right the way through it. Anyway, a proctor usually demanded such recitations as a prelude to some punishment, and would usually find a mistake within the first twenty lines as an excuse to inflict a beating. For the first time Eldene actually stopped to consider her own belief. All it had ever been to her was the memorizing of religious texts, morning and evening prayers recited below the Theocracy cameras, beatings for infringements she did not understand: all a framework that tied her to the grinding toil and misery of her life.
"Yes, I do," she replied, because she could think of no other answer.
"Of course you do — it's been ground into you since you were born. But do you then believe in the god-given right of the Theocracy to rule your life?"
After a pause Eldene replied, "No, I do not. There has to be something better."
"Yeah, there is," said Fethan, turning to continue climbing the slope.
"Do you believe?" Eldene asked, following him.
"I believe only in those things that can be proven empirically. There has never been any proof that a god exists, and if such proof was found why the hell should we worship him? Organized religions are just elaborate con-tricks. Take the Christian religion from which yours is an offshoot: 'Obey me throughout your life, give me the product of your labour, and you will go to Paradise when you die. Disobey me and you will go to Hell and burn forever. Of course I cannot prove that this is what will actually happen — you just have to have faith. That was a good one, and it worked well enough in a society that still believed the Earth was flat."
"But… what happened here?"
"An isolated group of fanatics, with sophisticated psychological programming techniques… This place would never have survived in the Polity, and it is breaking down even now as the Polity gets closer and information filters through."
"But the universe… how do you explain it? When did it begin? What existed before it? Where does it end, and what lies beyond it?"
Fethan glanced at her. "Questions that might similarly be asked about this god of yours?"
Eldene considered that. Of course: what was before God and what lies beyond God?
Fethan continued, "The greatest admission a human can make is that perhaps he does not have the intelligence, the vision, the grasp to fully understand the universe, and that perhaps no human ever will. To put it all down to some omnipotent deity is a cop-out. Factor in fairy tales of an afterlife and it becomes a comforting cop-out."
Eldene had always been clever — it had been her ability to memorize and understand things that had enabled her to avoid many of the punishments her fellow workers had received, except when that punishment came from a proctor or orphanage administrator who had taken exception to her very cleverness. Now she sank into deep contemplation of the issues raised. Fethan had quite bluntly just stated things that she had never before heard stated. Surface dwellers hated the Theocracy and the yoke they laboured under with vehemence, but belief in God or the necessity of worship never came into question. With discomfort she realized that since their escape she had not prayed once, nor thought about God, and that discomfort increased when it struck her she had never felt happier. She was deep in thought when Fethan gripped her arm.
"Believe what you want, girl," said the old man, "but don't let it master your life. Do you think that if there is a god who created the universe he would be the petty vindictive god of your Theocracy? They're just people like you or me. Life's precious and short, girl. Just enjoy it."
Eldene looked around at the weird plants, the molluscs clinging to the rocks. She thought about the heroyne and gabbleduck she had seen in the night. Halting, she pointed at a hemispherical shell patterned with beautiful green, yellow, and white geometric shapes.
"Life," she said, "it's so complex — someone must have made it?"
"Ah, Creationism," said Fethan. "Let me tell you about evolution and a blind watchmaker…"
Eldene listened and grew angry. It seemed that everything Fethan said was empirically true, yet that all that had been beate
n into her was also true — if you had faith. She grew angry because at her core she did have faith, and she was coming to realize just how that crippled her, and she envied Fethan's freedom of thought.
For a moment the grav in Medical went off, then it came back on and climbed to what felt to Cormac about one and a half gees, before dropping back down to about half a gee.
"What the hell?" he asked of the air. "Tomalon?"
He looked around at the others and saw that both Aiden and Cento had collapsed, and were showing no sign of getting up. Stepping over to Aiden, he looked down and saw that something had charred the syntheflesh of the Golem's forehead, burning and blistering it away to expose heat-tarnished metal. Gant quickly joined him in a crouch and helped him turn Cento over onto his back — the same was found there.
Gant gazed at him in bewilderment. "They just went out. I felt them go out."
"Tomalon!" Cormac bellowed.
In answer, Tomalon's hologram appeared in the middle of the room, cut in half by a surgical table, faint images of complex systems etching the air all around it. "This is recorded, so attempt no communication," said the Captain's voice.
Cormac buttoned down the question he had been about to ask.
The Captain went on, "Skellor is subverting the Occam Razor with Jain technology. It is an old ship and, in the event of attempted AI takeover, has the system facility for complete AI burn, which I initiated. This burn has not been wholly successful and he now has control of twenty-two ship's Golem, as well as life-support and the U-space engines."
Tomalon's mouth opened as if he was screaming, but no sound could be heard. His eyes suddenly became blackened pits and a complex grid-work of black lines traversed his holographic body from head to foot. "You must escape. You must escape," came his grating whisper. Then, "Occam… Occam… Occam…"
