Lockdown Tales

by Neal Asher

  ‘Right, we’ll work back from this. If it is like a crab claw as you suppose, Snerl, there may be more behind it.’

  They set to with greater eagerness now. Snerl fetched a pick to work on the softer stone, his growing muscles bulging, while Rune and Gibbon worked with their chisels. By midday they had revealed the claw entire, its fat joint with a cylindrical object attached down the side with a ring of holes in one end, a section of thick limb behind it with vein-like protrusions running down it, and then the next joint. Such was their eagerness for this work that Snerl pointed out it was lunch time an hour later than usual.

  They sat eating sandwiches and drinking soup, gazing in fascination at what they had revealed.

  ‘I think you two need to set to work there.’ Rune pointed at a lava bulge a little further along. ‘If this is some sort of facsimile of a creature, the positioning indicates that you might find another claw there.’

  ‘You don’t want us working on this?’ Gibbon pointed at the revealed claw.

  Rune shook his head. ‘We’re getting in each other’s way. Don’t worry. If I’m wrong I’ll let you take over from me. It seems unlikely you’ll damage anything.’ Already Snerl had pick-axed the thing and not even left a scratch.

  Two hours later Snerl shouted victory and Gibbon laughed in delight. They had revealed the other claw. Snerl and Gibbon subsequently revealed more of the limb they had found, with all its odd attachments and protrusions, while Rune chiselled down to the base attachment point of his limb – the whole thing now standing clear of the rock.

  ‘Okay, we’re done for today,’ said Rune, and it was with unusual reluctance that his two apprentices quit their work. As they returned to the village Rune knew that Snerl would, after eating a large meal, be straight round to the Rector’s apartments. And tonight the Rector would be calling Foreton. His intervention here was reaching its end at last, his thumb firmly on the scales of the war.

  On the second day, Rune began to reveal the clustered sensory arrays of the head and the macerating equipment below. The nightmarish thing had two glassy red eyes set within all this, over each of which he could spread his whole hand. When he did this, feeling the cool surface against his palm, and then pulled it away, he was sure he saw a glimmer of something in the eye. He felt this must be imagination, though he did know the revealed armour would already be sucking up further energy from the sunlight. This of course was only in complement to the energy it had been harvesting from temperature changes in the rock and those parts of the EMR spectrum that penetrated it.

  He chiselled with a little more care here because, though the materials were all incredibly hard and tough, the thing was powered down and none of its molecular binding fields in operation. Not that he really knew that, of course.

  ‘So what do you reckon it is?’ asked Gibbon when they stopped for lunch.

  ‘I think it must be some kind of robot,’ Rune replied. ‘The Divinity College has much information on them. They were used in building and suchlike.’

  ‘It was alive?’ she asked.

  ‘No, not in the sense that you or I are for it possessed no soul – it was merely a powered mechanism just a little more complicated than a piston engine.’

  ‘I heard that they could think,’ interjected Snerl, when he finally finished inhaling his sandwich.

  ‘Yes, things like that have been said, but they are contrary to theological thought,’ Rune reprimanded him, while laughing inside. Both here and out on the islands they believed in a god and a fall. The Polity was a strange combination of the Garden of Eden and the Tower of Babel. Humankind had been ejected for the usual. Now they must live good religious lives to return to their garden, while disagreements on precisely how those lives should be lived had led to the war. All of this was a very old story.

  Meanwhile both sides sought to find fragments of that lost Polity from which to learn about their sin; the fact that much of what they found also turned out to be very useful in their growing technological bases was a bonus. Fragments of materials they found turned out to be so hard and tough they worked as almost wear-proof cutting tools for the metal they were now smelting. Chainglass got used in fine optics. Some materials, when attached up to a generator in the correct way, stored ridiculous amounts of energy. The shattered crystals they found, though certainly showing vastly complex structure at the microscopic level, which was as deep as they could reach, seemed to have no purpose at all. This was both amusing and sad, since those fragments were pieces of the minds that had built the Polity.

  ‘Okay, let’s get in a good afternoon’s work before sundown,’ said Rune when they had finished their meal.

  They revealed the first legs and further curious devices attached either side of the thing’s head. Rune gazed at these and the feed tubes leading into the body behind and, even though he was what he was, felt a shiver run down his spine. Finally, when they returned to the village, the Bishop’s Hand and some of his police were waiting, as expected.

  The Bishop’s Hand stood by Rune’s house with the Rector, the Sexton and four ecclesiastical police. Rune glanced over at Snerl and saw him duck his head guiltily, confirming what he had expected. The Hand stepped forwards, touched a curled finger to his chin then pointed the flat of his hand to Rune – a gesture meaning glad to meet you and I have something to say. It was so unexpectedly polite it took a moment for Rune to give the correct response.

  ‘I am Bishop’s Hand Eller, and you are Rune the relict digger.’

  Eller was a slim individual without so much of a back ridge, his skin more yellow than green and his lip tendrils short and all but useless for testing his food. He was, in fact, closer in appearance to Rune than the four bulky soldiers he had brought with him. All were dressed in black uniforms – Eller having more in the way of silver decoration and less in the way of padding and armour plates. In such things Rune felt history tended to repeat itself.

  ‘I am that,’ Rune replied.

  ‘You have found something in the mountains, yet the Rector has no report on it yet,’ said Ellor, gesturing to the Rector who was now frowning at the two of them.

  ‘I still haven’t dug it free, your Reverence,’ Rune replied. ‘I was going to submit a report when I’ve revealed it all.’

  Eller nodded. ‘Okay, no problem. We’ve taken rooms in the village and you will take us out to your find in the morning. Is that suitable?’

  Rune felt a degree of wariness kick in. The man was being far too reasonable, which meant intelligence.

  ‘Fine by me,’ he replied.

  Eller turned to the Rector. ‘Thank you for your assistance, Rector. I’ll deal with things from here. I’m sure you have important work to be getting on with.’ He eyed the Sexton, Snerl and Gibbon. ‘I’m sure you all have places to go and things to do.’

  The Rector looked set to explode, but his gaze strayed to the four ecclesiastical police and he deflated. ‘Then a good evening to you,’ he said, and turned away, the others scuttling after him.

  Eller turned back to Rune. ‘You will, meanwhile, join me for a meal and a drink in your local hostelry. Do you need to get cleaned up first?’

  ‘No sir – I’m hungry now.’

  He was dusty and sweaty from work, but with the depredations of war, standards of cleanliness were much lower than they had once been. He dumped his wheelbarrow by the house and followed Eller and his men down into the village, entering the local tavern where old male Cheevers were downing shot glasses of plum brandy and eating toasted bread biscuits spread with nut paste. Eller waved his men to a large table in one corner then headed over to another smaller table in the tavern. Rune felt the beady eyes watching him, Eller and his men. Entertainment was severely lacking in Meeps and everything would be noted, and gossiped about at length tomorrow.

  ‘The Rector doesn’t like you much,’ said Eller. ‘I suspect that has something to do with your appearance.’ He gestured over Ma Dourt from the kitchen door.
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br />   ‘Since I am not pure Cheever I am apparently too stupid to be a relict digger,’ Rune replied. He knew that pretending to be stupid here would not be a good idea.

  Ma Dourt came over and they ordered food and drink. She lingered at the table hoping to hear something until one of the four policemen called her over. She lingered there too.

  ‘Your appearance is that of an extreme throwback,’ said Eller. ‘People in the Polity looked like you in their primary form, though they had the ability to make extreme changes to their bodies.’

  ‘Yes, apparently – from what I’ve read in the Divinity College Library.’

  ‘You spent four years there,’ said Eller. ‘And qualified with high honours as a relict hunter. It quite surprised me how few people there remember you, considering your appearance.’

  Rune shrugged. ‘Perhaps that is because those who look as different as me are excluded from social circles. People tend more to remember the beautiful.’

  It was all utter nonsense, since Rune had never actually been in the Divinity College, but he knew that Eller would have some fellow feeling here. The man was himself at variance from the norm and had doubtless been socially excluded. Quite possibly the same exclusion had been the driver of his ambition to take him to the position of Bishop’s Hand, while it seemed likely his appearance would not allow him to climb any higher.

  Instead of agreeing, Eller simply said, ‘So tell me about what you have found,’ just as Ma Dourt arrived with a carafe of brandy, two shot glasses and plate of paste biscuits. She hung around the table again till Eller politely enquired about who was cooking their food, then she moved off resentfully. Rune detailed what they had revealed from the rock, confining his description to that and any observations another relict digger might make, and not speculating too much on the find.

  ‘It could well be a drone, maybe even a war drone,’ Eller stated. ‘General robots of the time only resembled living creatures because of utility of purpose, and those objects attached to the claws might well be weapons.’

  Rune nodded, pretending some surprise, then realising he had done the wrong thing as Eller watched him. Eller knew that Rune knew.

  ‘I did not want to speculate too much on what it was,’ he said. ‘I find things and knowledge is required for that, but it is for those higher in the Church to judge precisely what I have found. Perhaps it will be useful… for the war?’

  It wasn’t enough, for as their food arrived, Eller said, ‘There is something not quite right about you, Rune. But I will find it out.’

  When Rune woke up in the morning he felt as if he had been in a mental battle. Throughout the meal Eller had probed him and he found himself increasingly struggling to make the responses that fitted his present persona. The man kept dropping information bombs on him that were at the cutting edge of Cheever relict research, eased into heretical territory on some subjects and continually pushed for details of Rune’s past. The man was very intelligent for what he was, and Rune did not want him to divine Rune’s ultimate purpose here, which seemed all too possible. It was time to upgrade.

  Rune washed and dressed, then went to stand in front of his mirror and gaze at himself. Almost certainly Eller had sent messages last night and investigators were on the case called Rune. He could intervene on the wider scale and shut that down, but his intention here had been to move events with a light a touch as possible. Such intervention could reveal a larger actor here to Eller, lead to paranoia and actions and responses that might stray into the unpredictable. The most sensible thing to do now would be to disappear, but Rune simply did not want to do that. This wasn’t in the end about the best way to do something to save the most lives, since that would be utterly totalitarian seizing of power here and shutting down their war. Nor was it about subtle intervention that allowed a civilisation to go its own way, learn from its own mistakes. In the end it was about Rune and the way he wanted to do things, his interaction and his choices. And he wanted to stay and greet an old friend.

  While staring into the mirror, he looked internally with other senses at the switches and sliders of his mind and this body he wore. He would become more useful, take on a persona more likely to stay with developments, and for this he clicked over the switches giving him access to greater mental resources. As his mind heated up and more of his whole being became accessible to him, this had immediate visible effects. His stance straightened, his eyes looked brighter and intelligence showed in the subtle shifting of muscles in his face. But further physical changes were required, since he was moving into dangerous territory in which he needed this body to be more able to survive and act quickly. He allowed the neurochemical changes in his mind and began to make demands on his body. The long inactive nansuite kicked into motion, biological processes changed, growth in many areas ramped up as his bones began toughening and his muscles layering in stronger more reactive materials. His heart rate increased to move blood increasingly laden with new factors about more quickly – a temporary measure until his heart grew to capacity. Further alveoli budded in his lungs. His skin thickened and began to acquire new dermal layers.

  Rune turned away from the mirror, making a mental effort to suppress interior changes from showing too much externally. He then went to his fridge and cupboards to feed his sudden ravenous hunger and thirst. By the time he heard the vehicle he had eaten the equivalent of four standard meals here, and been to the toilet twice. Gulping from a large bottle of sugary mandarin juice he headed out onto his terrace and looked over to the track up into the mountains.

  The vehicle was military – an armoured car with pairs of caterpillar treads front and back – but the only weapon was a turret machinegun on the roof of the cab. Numerous items and supplies bulked under a canvas tarpaulin over the back of the thing, while at least twenty workers in drab olive overalls and carrying hand tools were following it. Behind them walked three of Eller’s police, carrying squat heavy machineguns. For a second Rune thought the twenty were prisoners, but with his mind now functioning on a higher level, he read detail he would not have seen before. The casual way they walked and talked with each other, minutiae of movement, their physical condition and finally the fact that some of them had sidearms strapped on. These were sappers out of Foreton North – builders of defences and gun installations.

  The truck stopped and Eller climbed out, looking up towards him. The man gestured peremptorily for him to come over. He raised a hand in acknowledgement and returned inside to gather up food and drink to put in his bag with his hammers and chisels. Outside he did not bother collecting up his wheelbarrow. When he saw Snerl and Gibbon hanging back looking bewildered he gestured them over as he headed for the truck.

  ‘A little assistance in your endeavour,’ said Eller, gazing at him with a slightly puzzled expression.

  Rune nodded to the back of the truck. ‘You have a compressor and air chisels?’ Before Eller could answer he continued, ‘We’ll need to do some work on the way to make a road up the side of the old lava flow. I suggest you also requisition a flatbed trailer.’

  Eller just stared at him for a long moment, then reached back into the cab of the lorry and took out a radio handset. It was very modern for it had its own aerial and power supply and did not need a wire to connect it to a larger set in the truck. Rune suspected a piece of power-storing Polity meta-material inside the thing, but wouldn’t know without a closer look. He glanced at Snerl who was about to say something, and held a finger to his lips – a gesture that had not changed in an age. He then pointed to the men behind and made a walking motion with his fingers. They got the idea and headed over to join those men, knowing that hanging around near Eller might get them sent away.

  Eller walked back alongside the truck still holding the radio. ‘Get this tarpaulin off,’ he instructed, and the men in overalls quickly got to work removing it. When it had finally been rolled back, Eller weighed the radio in one hand for a moment, then brought it up to his face.

 
; ‘Jaston, are you receiving?’

  The acknowledgement came back with a loud crackle.

  ‘I’m handing you over to our chief relict digger. He will give you a list of the things we may need.’ He next held out the radio to Rune.

  Rune took it. It seemed he had now become the ‘chief relict digger’. That was faster than he had expected, and he knew that was all down to Eller and something the man suspected about him. As he took the radio he analysed that: backwater relict digger, obviously intelligent, detail about his past lacking. Eller probably thought he was someone high up in the Church hierarchy – perhaps the bastard son of a Bishop – put into an ecclesiastical job out of harm’s way. Either that or a spy.

  Rune walked around the truck peering into the back, while Eller walked with him, hands folded behind his back. They had a large generator there, compressor, reels of hose and air chisels. Other items included hand tools of every variety, wheel barrows, scaffold boards and a large cable winch. The last two would be helpful in moving what he had been digging out of the lava, but not sufficient. He also noted tents, lights, cooking gear and food, and other things intended to set up a semi-permanent encampment. He considered whether or not to wait, then decided against it.

  ‘Jaston?’ he enquired into the radio.

  ‘Yes, I’m Jaston. Who am I speaking to?’

  ‘My name is Rune – the relict digger.’

  ‘Eller tells me you have a list?’

  ‘A provisional one to begin with,’ said Rune, while watching Eller’s expression. ‘Once the item is dug clear we’ll need a lot more things to get it out of there. One is a flatbed trailer with a rating upward of twenty tons. A tank transport may do, but it would probably be better to reinforce it. The ramps for such a trailer will be required too, also reinforced. We will also need hardened steel machine skates and rollers, a Gratlian Yard ship winch rated at thirty tons upwards and a great deal of reinforced webbing straps.’