The Line of Polity ac-2

by Neal Asher

  The Outlinker boy, Apis, was utterly exhausted and sank to his knees on the muddy ground, but Eldene did not allow him to stay there. She grabbed his arm and began hauling him to his feet.

  "We have to keep going. If they catch us, they'll kill us. And they won't do it quickly!"

  He stared at her, probably too tired to know what he thought of that possibility. At first she had not understood what was the matter with him, until he'd gasped earlier, "How do you people live with this? How do you manage to spend all your lives in gravity?" Without his exoskeleton he was directly feeling the full effects of a force he had never before experienced.

  As she finally wrestled him to his feet, he managed to formulate a response. "Do you think any of them are still alive back there, then?"

  "I hope not," Eldene replied, fingering the pistol she had snatched from Speelan as they escaped. She moved in close and hooked an arm around his waist to help him along. Together they staggered on through a dark wilderness of flute grasses and churned mud; hot breezes blowing in behind them, where a hot-metal glow illuminated clouds of smoke and steam so that they appeared like a range of orange mountains — a range from behind which the upper edge of Calypse was rising as a harbinger of morning.

  "Where should we head now?" Apis asked.

  Eldene scanned around them and did not know what to reply. Their situation seemed hopeless: they had limited oxygen, were miles from anyone who could be considered friendly, and even heading back to their erstwhile captors was now out of the question. Where could they go? Back towards the crater, in the hope of running into their comrades, or towards the fighting in the hope of coming across some of the rebels? These were the questions she was beginning to ponder, when she heard the sound of voices from behind them.

  "Keep moving," she hissed at Apis as he showed signs of sagging to the ground again. He too now heard the voices and then an order suddenly barked, followed by silence.

  "Theocracy?" he whispered.

  Eldene felt the skin on the back of her neck creeping — she had recognized the source of that order. She nodded to Apis as they struggled on.

  It seemed the voice must have carried for some distance, for thereafter they heard nothing more until the lightening sky became distinct from the horizon of towering grasses around them. When they next heard something — the sound of someone falling over and cursing until ordered to silence again — it became evident that someone was indeed behind them, and now, in the better light, rapidly drawing closer.

  "They're trailing us," whispered Eldene, at first suspecting herself of paranoia, then coming to believe her fears absolutely. How else could it be that this party, led by the one called Aberil, was still so close to them, hours after the godlike obliteration of the landers? "We have to move faster." She looked up into the Outlinker's face, and knew that it wasn't the quality of the light that now gave his yellow skin a greyish tinge, though she did wonder what was producing the appearance of worms writhing underneath that skin. He returned her gaze, his expression apologetic, before something seemed to take hold of him from the inside and shake him violently. He jerked upright and away from her — his eyes gone wide in shock and his skin turning almost orange as it suffused with blood. Then his legs folded and he went down. Eldene tried to heave him upright, but he was no longer the construct of sugar sticks and paper he had described himself as once being — but now heavy with muscle and bone.

  "You go on," he gasped, his breathing raw. "I'll tell them you got killed back there." He nodded towards the now fading fire-glow.

  Eldene did not like to point out that if someone was experienced enough to track them this far throughout the night, that person would surely be experienced enough to recognize that there were two of them.

  "I'm staying with you," she muttered, giving herself the appearance of expertise as she pulled out and checked the magazine of the pistol before slapping it back into place. Glancing around, she saw that moving further along or backwards on this spit of rhubarb-cloaked land would afford them no better cover than at present. She gestured to the tangled flute grass beside them. "We'll go in there."

  "You should go on," Apis insisted.

  Eldene shoved the pistol back in the belt of her camouflage trousers, and reached down to help him to cover. Seeing her determined expression, he made no further attempt to send her away. It was obvious to Eldene, though, that he did not really want to be left alone. But then, she was staying with him for the very same reason.

  The first of the Theocracy soldiers emerged into view, shortly followed by the officer, Speelan. Watching the guard inspect the path she and Apis had flattened through the purple vegetation, Eldene suppressed any hope that this group might head on past them. Their trail was too obvious, what with succulent stems and leaves crushed and oozing sap like blue paint. She also realized that, for survival's sake, she must act first. She raised the pistol and aimed it, but Apis caught her wrist.

  "Wait… wait a moment," he said firmly.

  She stared at him and saw that he no longer looked so weak and ill. Now there was something gaunt and fierce about him.

  He went on, "It knows about threats to its survival, and I bet that was something that Mika did not program in. Before, it just had me operating at the lowest energy level, while it continued rebuilding me. But now it knows."

  "What the hell are you talking about?" she hissed.

  "When you shoot at them, they'll run for cover. When they go for cover, we must run on and wait for them again."

  "You are up to running?"

  "With the mycelium… I can."

  Now Aberil himself and the Proctor Molat had come into view. Eldene studied Apis for a moment longer, then turned away and raised her pistol again. It was morally wrong to kill, according to tenets of the Satagents and Zelda Smythe, yet when had that ever stopped members of the Theocracy from doing so? With cold calculation Eldene chose the leading soldier, for he was obviously the tracker, and emptied one full disc of five rounds into his torso.

  With a horrible grunting sound the man staggered back, the front of his jacket sprouting its insulating fibres, a haze of red exploding out behind him and hinge-ing down his mask as it simultaneously exploded from his mouth. His expression turned bewildered as he tried to retain balance on legs no longer under his control. Finally he collapsed beneath the rhubarb leaves.

  Eldene just stared, too stunned, for a moment, to take aim at the others diving for cover. Just pressing her finger down on the electric trigger had achieved this. Shaken, she aimed at the spot where she had seen Aberil drop and scrabble towards a thicket of flute grass, and fired off another disc. To the right, someone stood and brought a weapon to bear. She fired a further disc of five rounds in that direction.

  "Come on! Come on!"

  She did not know how long Apis had been pulling at her arm. Slugs were now slapping with vicious force into the vegetation all around. Eldene allowed him to lead her for a moment, then freed herself when she realized she was hindering his progress. Something flicked the epaulette on her shoulder, and something else nipped her earlobe. Ahead of her she saw the back of Apis's overalls slapped, and he went over, rolled, came to his feet snarling for a moment before humanity reasserted itself and he pushed on. There was blood on his clothing for he had certainly been hit, but it must have been a ricochet — a slug with its force spent in the flute grass — and soon, sometime soon, he would replace the oxygen mask that had been torn from his face.

  They came out into another open spit between the grasses, this one with black plantains spearing up through the purple rhubarb leaves, their own foliage insipid white and sprouting wormish secondary roots in the shade below. Looking around, Eldene was bewildered by surrounding light and by clouds of colour. The flute grasses here were peppered and hazed with red, yellow, white and gold, and just looking at them made her eyes hurt. Abruptly she realized that it was only the sunrise illuminating an area where the grasses were budding at last — something she had only ev
er before seen at a distance. Catching her breath, she glanced again at Apis.

  "Your mask," she said.

  Apis stared at her for a moment. Then, realizing what she was saying, he removed a new mask from a pocket in his oxygen-bottle container, tore the remains of the old one from its clip hinges in the collar extension below his chin, and clipped the new one into place.

  "How?" Eldene asked.

  Apis looked confused for a moment, then explained, "I'm an Outlinker — we can live in vacuum for a time, so this is no problem." He waved a hand at their surroundings, but she could see he did not believe that explanation himself. She reached towards his back and he allowed her to part the rip in his overall. She saw there only what looked like an arrow-shaped scar.

  "It's the mycelium," he said.

  So he had been hit. As Eldene stepped past him to lead the way to the next tangled stand of flute grass, dotted with white buds, she tried to focus on the realities of people trying to kill them, not the unreality of someone who should have died.

  They were struggling up a slope thick with slimy vegetation, when the grasses ahead of them shuddered under a fusillade, spraying a snowstorm of buds. Eldene turned back and fired past Apis. She saw someone staggering aside, yelling, and two other figures diving for cover. Then… then only an electrical clicking from the pistol she was holding. What had Fethan instructed? "Double-press and hold down empties the entire magazine." She nevertheless pointed the weapon at Aberil as he slowly stood up, bloodied power pack tucked under one arm, its cable looped in front of him, and the rail-gun he had taken from the dead soldier pointed negligently at their legs. The electrical clicking continued for a moment, then ceased as some mechanism in the pistol cancelled it.

  Aberil tilted his head and grinned at her. "Empty, I think, little rebel." Then he moved in close, jabbed the barrel of his weapon into Apis's stomach, keeling him over, then swept it across to knock the pistol from Eldene's hand. Clutching at bruised fingers, she held her ground and glared at him. With obvious contempt he turned his back on her. Looking past him she could see Speelan sprawled on the ground, cursing, until Proctor Molat emerged from cover and went over to help the wounded man put a dressing on his leg and also slap on an analgesic patch. Aberil turned back to face her.

  "This Outlinker, I think, has knowledge which may be of use to me. You have killed one of my men and injured another." He shrugged. "I would like to have time to punish you properly, but time is not something I have…" Aberil paused as the sudden roar of an aerofan drowned his words. He glanced up as the machine appeared overhead and began to settle down towards them. "Then again," Aberil shouted, "it seems I will have time to deal with you properly."

  Eldene stared at the commander then up at the descending machine. If she ran now, the other proctor would get her with the aerofan's side-mounted rail-gun, but that was perhaps better than suffering the ministrations of this lunatic. And run she was just about to do, as the aerofan dropped to hover just over their heads. Then the proctor inside it flung himself over the rail, and descended on Aberil like a flesh-and-bone hammer. Aberil dropped his rail-gun and power pack and, before Eldene could think to reach for it herself, Apis had snatched up the weapon and pointed it at Molat and Speelan, who simply had no time to reach for their own weapons. The two of them froze where they were, and could only passively observe what followed.

  "Good Deacon Aberil Dorth," said John Stanton, hauling the man to his feet then driving his own forehead straight into the bridge of Aberil's nose. Eldene winced at the horrible crunching sound, then at the horrible butchering impact of each blow that followed. The Deacon tried to fight back, but he might just as well have been striking a mobile boulder, and in return he received blows from hands seemingly made of granite. Eventually, Aberil was down on his knees, groping for another mask as he spat teeth and blood. Eldene expected Stanton to finish the man, to kill him, such had been the palpable hate issuing from him. Instead he eventually pushed the Deacon onto his side with his boot, then turned to her and Apis.

  "No more time for self-indulgence," he said, nodding towards the aerofan that had drifted down only a few metres away from them. "Climb in and we'll get out of here."

  "What about these two?" Apis asked.

  Stanton glanced at Molat and Speelan, then swung his attention back to Aberil as the man finally got his mask into place and managed to rise to his knees. "We just leave all of them here," he said. "They'll not be going far." He stabbed a thumb over his shoulder. "I have friends coming soon who'll see to that."

  Choking on blood, Aberil said, "Got… no stomach for it…Stanton?"

  Stanton grinned at him. "Just leaving that for someone who can do a better job."

  Eldene did not understand what he meant until she, he, and Apis were high in the aerofan and heading away. When Stanton pointed out the things in the vegetation below, she knew precisely the ending of Aberil Dorth's fairy tale.

  Her neck and shoulders aching with tension, Jarvellis studied with suspicion the flat expanse of rock wedged amid foothills. This was the first likely-looking landing spot she had spotted while traversing fifty kilometres of river, then five kilometres of its tributary. For a while she'd felt panic growing in her as she manoeuvred the ship between precipitous slopes or sheer walls of stone. For a time she even felt she had taken a wrong turning somewhere, somehow.

  "This is the one?" she asked.

  "It is," confirmed the AI. "A homing beacon has just been activated by our presence."

  After a moment Jarvellis eased the control column over and boosted the ion engines to lift the ship over mounded muddy banks and rhubarbs standing three metres tall. On side screens she glimpsed vegetation steaming and slumping under the craft's ionic blast and, strangely, tricones oozing to the surface as if urged by some suicidal imperative. Coming in over the flat stone surface, she made no complaint when the AI opened out the ship's legs and feet, unbidden. She brought it down gently, but no amount of gentleness could prevent its weight crushing thousands of little hemispherical molluscs to a slurry.

  "This is somewhat visible," said Lyric, flashing up on one screen a view of the trail of broiled vegetation leading from the river.

  "Like I give a shit," she said, stretching her neck to ease it.

  "I think that perhaps you should," said the AI. "I did not want to distract you while you were engaged in such risky flying, but now you have to know." The screen showing the vegetation now flicked over to another view that Jarvellis recognized as computer-enhanced.

  "What is this?" she asked.

  "The view of the sky above us, magnified, from two hours ago. You are seeing three grabships from the dreadnought."

  "Shit, what kind of scan did you use?"

  "Passive scan — the Skellor will not be able to trace us."

  "Good… good. Why grabships?"

  "Observe the masses of objects they are dropping," said the AI.

  Jarvellis squinted at the screen. Even computer-enhanced, the picture was not very clear. She could now make out the shapes of three grabships, but would never have recognized them as such without the AI telling her. She only saw the 'masses' to which the AI referred when they moved from line of sight to the ships, for they were blurred into that original image, and then only saw them for a few seconds as they glowed before breaking apart. She felt something tightening in her abdomen when she thought of John Stanton being out there somewhere, and not knowing about this. As far as she judged, to say this Skellor's intent would be hostile was an understatement, so anything that did not slam down on them from orbit — like the laser blast that had taken out Polas — was probably even worse.

  "Bioweapon?" she managed, her mouth dry.

  "Possibly — but a strange one. Each of the objects in the initial masses was an ovoid approximately two metres long. This in itself is not unusual, because bioweapons dropped from orbit are usually inserted in larger packages for heat-shielded re-entry and then dispersal. However, these are not dispersing. A
fter losing some sort of shielding after re-entry, the objects have remained in a loose cluster."

  "Where is it now?"

  "Directly above the mountains — and above us."

  "Can you get a picture?" Jarvellis asked, puzzled.

  "Oh yes. Now that they are settling lower, I do not need to use so much enhancement either," the AI replied with annoying smugness.

  "Well, show it to me then."

  The AI showed her, and Jarvellis could only gape at this newest insanity.

  Calypse was attached to the horizon by only the smallest arc of its disc, as if reluctant to release its hold for its journey across the sky. Its swirls and bands of colour gleamed bright only for as long as it took until the sun, rising to one side of it, could throw it into silhouette. Perhaps reflection from the surface of Masada, or some luminous quality of the giant itself, cast it meanwhile in a light that gave it true depth. More than at any other time he had seen it, Cormac felt aware that this orb was truly a vast gas giant rather than some two-dimensional disc imprinted over a large proportion of sky.

  "Where is it now?" Cormac asked them tiredly.

  Gant did not display any tiredness, and Cormac wondered if Fethan had enough that was human remaining in him to feel any weariness. It seemed not, however, for since the cyborg had returned to requisition Gant's aid in the task of leading away the hooder, the both of them had been charging back and forth at high speed all night. This was evident from their clothing — torn from their running through the abrasive grass stalks and smeared with streaks of yellow and red juice from the crop of coloured buds the grasses had suddenly produced.

  "It's moved on ahead," said Fethan. "But if that relieves you, best you know that it's not alone."

  "More hooders?" asked Thorn.

  "More of everything," said Fethan. "Seems the whole fauna of the planet is on the move. Must be the fighting attracting 'em, as I can't think what else it might be."