by Neal Asher
"As the sun rose over the compound. Brother Serendipity said unto his companions, 'You shall come with me to share in this glorious day! "
Now the three creatures moved in around the Brother, almost concealing him with walls of flesh, bone, claws and teeth.
" 'Here, from my trial in the wilderness, I come to claim my birthright. I shall smite the morlocks in their dank caverns and I shall rise up over my brothers and rule from the sky! said the Brother. 'That would be a good place to rule from. said the heroyne, sharpening his beak on the side of the boundary stone, 'This boy could go far' added the siluroyne, sharpening his claws on the other side of the stone. 'Shame' concluded the gabbleduck, whose teeth and claws were always sharp."
The boy didn't get it for a moment, until he saw the picture of the creatures pulling apart the Brother like a piece of naan bread. He then grinned with delight and pointed at the picture.
"Gabbleducked," he asserted, not without a degree of craftiness in his expression.
The woman looked at him warningly, then finished the story.
"And thus our story ends with the moral: You can have your cake and give it away, but never turn your back on a gabbleduck."
The night sky was bright with shooting stars that burned long courses through the oxygen-bereft air. Occasionally, distantly, some larger piece of wreckage would make it to the ground, and there then would be a flash and a boom as of gunfire on a distant battleground.
"Dragon is nothing if not thorough when it decides to destroy something," commented Mika.
"It always works on a huge scale," said Cormac, taking a sip from the tea Gant had made out of a packet he'd found amongst their supplies. Cormac and Mika were sitting on their packs whilst watching this display; Apis stood a little apart from them, his head tilted to the sky; and Gant and the dracoman were out 'taking a little recce', as Gant put it.
Cormac nodded to the Outlinker boy. "You notice how all his hatreds are directed towards the Theocracy here and against Skellor on the Occam, He hasn't had a bad word to say about Dragon, yet the creature destroyed the General Patten and killed many of his kin."
"I had not noticed that," agreed Mika, studying the boy.
"It's an attitude prevalent throughout the Polity — since Samarkand, and probably before, Dragon has been viewed as more a force of nature than a being in its own right. It's too huge and unfathomable for most people to see it otherwise. You might just as well hate a hurricane or a volcano."
"I think I understand that: even with scientific objectivity, one cannot help but feel awe. It is godlike in its power and size, and its rather Delphic communications only make it seem more so. There is also its immortality: you once destroyed one Dragon sphere, yet Dragon still lives," Mika replied.
Apis turned towards them now, and walked back over. As he seated himself on his own pack, Cormac thought that behind his visor the boy looked rather unwell.
"How are you doing?" he asked.
"Gravity," confessed Apis. "This exo damps out most of the effects, but I can still feel it pulling on me. I'm tired, even though I'm not working."
That was not actually what Cormac had been asking about, but he let it ride. "We are all tired," he said. "I'd like to stop for sleep, but…" He gestured at his oxygen bottle.
"Oh," said Mika, glancing at Cormac. "I thought, being an agent, you would have been… adjusted."
Cormac considered that: many people, especially in Earth Central Security, had the function of their bodies adjusted so sleep was, at worst, necessary only for a few hours, and then not every night. When he had been gridlinked, he himself had been such a person. After losing his link, he had then deliberately sacrificed the rest of his augmentations. Blegg, his boss in ECS, had been right about the dehumanizing effects of gridlinking, but had not gone far enough: for in Cormac's opinion all augmentations dehumanized. And, furthermore, Cormac found that with human weaknesses he operated more efficiently. This was actually psychological, and he knew that it too could be adjusted, but he felt that in the end people had to draw the line and decide for themselves just how much they wanted to remain themselves. Because of his previous experience of gridlinking, Cormac did not want to fool with his own mind, so he drew his line long before many others drew theirs.
"No," he said. "I'm not adjusted — and I'm tired."
Mika reached into one of the pockets of the pack she was sitting on and pulled out a reel of drug patches, each one on the same paper backing strip no more than a centimetre wide. Catching the reel Cormac tore off one section, removed the patch, discarded its backing strip, and reached inside his shirt to press it against his torso. Then, holding up the reel, he nodded his head to indicate Apis.
"No," said Mika.
"Why not?" Apis asked.
"Your system is not used to the constant drag of gravity, especially your heart, so using stimulants might be suicidal. Anyway, you probably will not need any sleep. The nanites building up your musculature and adding density to your bones will also be clearing out toxins."
"But I feel tired," Apis protested.
"Psychological," replied Mika, tapping her head with her forefinger.
As the stimulant scoured away the fuzzy coating that seemed to have been thickening over everything for the last few hours, Cormac was glad to have it confirmed that it had, after all, been a good idea to lug along Mika's equipment. He himself had refused to use a nanite booster treatment so that he could handle the higher gravity on Callorum, a treatment that would have required him spending forty hours in a tank. Luckily for Apis, Mika had an interesting device with which she could manufacture nano-machines to her own specifications — a device Cormac was not sure was entirely legal within the Polity — and those specifications, he had since learnt, owed much to her study of the hybrid Skellor had created. The Outlinker himself now had a few varieties of those machines beavering away inside him, building muscle, bone, and all those other structures required for a body to handle gravity. Of course, Mika had to make only one mistake and they might end up having to pour Apis out of his exo-skeleton. However, the alternative was that the point eight gee on this planet would kill him over time. Thus far the only detrimental result of this treatment was that the boy was forever hungry. Cormac watched him as he fingered the touch-pad on his neck ring, to draw his visor down into his chin rest so he could begin stuffing another meal bar into his mouth.
"If I'd known there'd be such a celebration of our arrival, I'd have put on my dress uniform," said Gant, striding out of the darkness with Scar at his side.
"I don't think the Theocracy have anything to celebrate at present, and I think they'll find this particular firework display rather costly," said Cormac.
Gant came to a halt with his APW cradled across his chest and nodded at the sky behind them. "You seen that?"
Cormac glanced round but could see nothing else of note, but then the flute grass stood in a tangle two metres tall there, so blocked out most of the starlit sky. He stood up, Mika and Apis also, and they all quickly saw to what Gant referred.
"I think this was what I missed on Samarkand, wasn't it?" said the Golem.
Cormac glanced at him, trying to read something in his expression. Yes, on Samarkand… Gant had never got to see this. He'd been ripped apart, underground, less than an hour before Dragon had appeared in the sky — as it had done here.
The latest 'moon' of Masada was a small reddish-grey penny in the dark sky, nowhere near as impressive as the descending giant Calypse, or the moon Amok that was following it down — that was until you tried to grasp the fact that this was a living creature.
"What, now, do you think?" said Gant.
"Indeed," Cormac replied.
Apis looked at the two of them, his expression showing stubborn anger. "You never tell me anything," he protested.
Cormac was pleased at such a reaction — it was better than the kind of dead efficiency the lad had heretofore displayed.
He explained, "Dragon has probably de
stroyed every laser array up there, but we think it unlikely it's now just going to meekly sail away into the sunset. That creature is a very large imponderable… so to speak."
"Perhaps it's going to die… like it said," Apis suggested.
"Or live," Gant added.
"Or do both," said Mika. They all turned to look at her, and she went on, "Well, it didn't seem able to make up its mind as to exactly what it was going to do."
"Quite," said Cormac, and was about to go on when suddenly Scar snarled, his eyes fixed on the sky. They all turned back to observe Dragon.
"It's moving," said Gant.
Cormac could not tell for sure, but then he did not have Gant's eyes. He glanced at Scar. "What's happening, Scar — or do I mean Cadmus? What's Dragon going to do next?"
"Dragon is coming," announced Scar.
They gazed back up at it and could now see clearly that it was moving. Dropping lower and lower, it grew larger and larger, clouds of vapour boiling around it, then flashes of orange fire, so that soon it looked like the open circular mouth of a furnace. Distantly, at first, there came to them a steady thunderous grumbling that grew in volume. Cormac gazed around, wondering where they could run for safety, but there was nowhere — if this gigantic sphere was coming down on where they stood then they had no chance at all of getting away. Once again, he resumed the view he had taken aboard the landing craft: if Dragon wanted to kill them, then there was little in these circumstances that they could do about it.
Lower now in the heavens it revealed the vast storm of fire behind it — a wake that continued to boil out in a wide V to cover half the sky.
"It'll come down about fifty kilometres away," said Gant. As a Golem, he possessed the ability to range the creature and work out its angle of descent and its relative velocity.
In the clouds behind and over the surface of the leviathan, forks of lightning flickered, and occasional gunshot discharges hit the ground. The grumbling had become a roar and the ground began to vibrate in sympathy.
"Suicide?" Cormac wondered.
"It's not coming down completely freefall — must be using AG," Gant replied.
At the last it almost seemed to dip, to slam down in the distance, and the fiery cloud of its wake rolled on, blasting up dark clouds and weird vortices of flame.
"On the ground," ordered Cormac.
They flung themselves down with their heads sheltered behind their packs — being the only barrier between themselves and what was coming. The ground shuddered and rocked, and it seemed the whole vast plain dropped a few metres before rising back into position. The roaring increased in volume, then the hurricane was upon them. The flute grass flattened before the blast, and for a short time the air above was filled with long stems and papery fragments, these skirling a hideous dirge as they hurtled past. Then came earth, smoke, and a further rippling of the ground. As this blast-wave passed, it tried to suck them into its wake. After a few minutes, it died and broke into random eddies and the occasional mini-tornado that played strange music with still unbroken stems of grass. In time, they were able to stand up and view the devastation of the flattened plain — and the distant funeral pyre. Scar, tilting his head to the sky, let out a long and mournful howl. Cormac wondered if this was for Dragon… or for something Dragon had done.
Soldiers were revving up the engines of the few machines that would be of use on the surface, and checking weapons that seemed in pristine condition. Thorn had slept, despite the cacophony that seemed only to grow since the destruction of the arrays. Then, upon waking to discover Stanton and Jarvellis gone with soldiers to unload Lyric II, he made his way to Lellan's control room where, after the guards finally let him through, he found further frenetic activity.
"You have to understand that we are just as unprepared for this as they are," said Lellan, during a brief pause when people weren't approaching her for orders, explanations, even comfort, as the military machine she had built reconfigured itself for these strange circumstances. "There's a few units of the Theocracy military on the surface, but mostly it's the proctors, and they only possess limited armament."
"The arrays," said Thorn. "What else would they have needed?"
"Exactly," said Lellan, nodding. "On the surface they only have hand weapons, aerofans, a few military carriers and armoured cars, and limited antipersonnel weapons. For more than a century they've had no need for heavy armour, missile launchers, or anything with more punch than a hand grenade. Why bother with anything else when in a minute you can summon a satellite laser strike accurate and powerful enough to take out anything bigger than an aerofan?"
Fethan, who had only then arrived, interjected, "About four of the arrays were accurate enough to target and take out single individuals, but the Theocracy never bothered — it meant using a huge amount of power, and when was there ever a single individual offering a sufficient threat to 'em?"
Thorn glanced at him, noticed the girl Eldene walking a pace behind him, the pulse-rifle hung from a strap over her shoulder, obviously an unfamiliar weight to her. To Lellan he said, "Surely that makes it all a lot easier for you?" He had already guessed the answers Lellan might give him, but wanted confirmation.
"Well," she said, "we never bothered building any armoured vehicles or any launchers that could not be carried by a man, for the same reasons — the arrays could just take them out. All our forces are kitted essentially for guerrilla warfare, and that kit is limited in quantity — we never expected to be in a position to take all our forces to the surface at once."
"Bastards woulda used the arrays at leisure," said Fethan.
"Can you take the surface with what you have?" Thorn asked.
"Yes, only to lose it again," Lellan replied. Thorn studied her queryingly. "Charity," she went on, "is just a great big training camp for the military. It's spun over to one gee, so the fifty thousand active troops there are training in gravity higher than we have down here. So there's them, and they can come down in landers at any time. With the big ships of the fleet down, they can unload launchers and tanks, and in the end, if all else fails, they can bombard us from orbit with atomics."
"Seems no-win," admitted Thorn.
"In the end it's down to Polity intervention, and we've always known that. The guy at the bottom of a well with a bag of rocks is always gonna lose to the guy at the top," said Fethan.
"It's a balancing act," said Lellan. "We want to capture the surface for long enough to get the ballot over eighty per cent, and then to ask for help from the Polity. We need to create enough disorder so that the Polity can justifiably intervene, but not so much that the Theocracy are forced to go nuclear."
"Never clear-cut, is it?" said Thorn.
"No," said Lellan, moving away with the latest group dressed in camouflage fatigues who had demanded her attention. "Always dirty, and infected."
Thorn now turned to Fethan and Eldene. "And probably deeper and dirtier than even she knows," he muttered, stepping past them to Polas, who had been listening in to their conversation whilst keeping half an eye on his consoles and screens. It seemed that most of the tasks required from him at present he was managing to automate.
"I want to see that recording again," Thorn said, resting a hand on the back of Polas's chair.
Polas glanced up from his instrumentation and eyed him dubiously. "They say you're ECS," he said. "Were you sent here to help us, or just make fruitless inquiries?"
"I wasn't sent. I ended up here by accident," Thorn replied.
Polas raised an eyebrow as he opened a box underneath the console and from it removed a computer disc, which he shoved into a slot in the console. Again, on one of the screens before him, the recent events that had occurred above played out.
"Stop it there," said Thorn, and Polas froze on the image of wreckage hurtling away from the dispersing explosion. "Can you move backwards slowly with this set-up?"
"We're not entirely primitive here," said Polas.
Flickering, the image jerked bac
k in frames: wreckage reversed back into a brightening explosion as the laser array re-formed.
"There," said Thorn. "That came out of Dragon."
Polas squinted at the screen, and adjusted the image back, and they saw for certain an object spat from Dragon just before the creature's strike on the laser array. He now moved the image back and forth until the object was at its most visible. "We should be able to close in on that and clean it up a bit," he said. He opened his box of discs and sorted through them. Finally selecting one, he held down two buttons while removing the recording and replacing with the new disc he selected. The image remained in place and a grid flicked up to cover it. Using a ball control, he adjusted the grid to centre the object in one of the grid's squares. Pressing down the control, he called up a target cursor in the corner of the screen, and then zeroed it on that square.
"Here we go," he said, pressing down the control again to select.
The image broke apart, then the one from the selected co-ordinates began to re-form in small squares across the entire screen. After a moment, a blurred and vaguely rectangular shape became evident. With the computer chuntering away, and each of the squares breaking and re-forming into smaller pixels, the image became steadily clearer.
Before it had completely re-formed Polas said, "Military lander."
"Theocracy?" Thorn asked.
Polas nodded.
Thorn studied the image as it continued to clear. "Now what was Dragon doing with that?"
Polas shrugged and, as the computer finished its work, he used the ball control to pull up a menu and save the same image.
"Any idea where it came down?" Thorn asked.
