by Neal Asher
Now, his senses enhanced by a range of spectral scanners growing throughout his body, he could see a little more of the war drone. To many of his new senses it was still utterly black because that armour blocked most EMR, but, gaining some data from neutrinos zipping through his immediate environment from the far sun, he could see what looked like a warm blush inside as it sucked up and stored power in laminar capacitor batteries, steadily accumulating enough to kick start its scattered network of fusion nodes. As he watched, power flashed out from that blush, highlighting a network like veins. Its eyes glimmered and if shifted, and then it spoke.
‘You are,’ it said, in a language only found on this world in the oldest writings and spoken only occasionally by a few academics in the Divinity College. It then slumped. It simply did not have sufficient power yet. But Rune felt this brief activation to be a good sign, because forming words likely meant its mind was still intact. He turned away and headed back to his apartment.
In the morning the Bishop arrived with numerous soldiers, a retinue of ecclesiasts, the two from the Divinity College and with Eller at his side. They arrived just after the workers, which was good, because Rune had no idea how to keep them employed. He stayed back with those workers, noting their nervousness, since it was never a good idea to be around the higher ups. At some point he supposed Eller would summon him over; for now he just watched.
They milled around the drone, seemingly reluctant to get too close, then one brave soul abruptly stepped forwards and rested a hand on it. Eller shouted a warning, then seemed embarrassed when nothing happened. Had the drone just been a normal lump of metal sitting there, on the slightly damp floor, that individual would have now been stuck in place frying nicely. But the thing processed the power input efficiently. No one was likely to get an electric shock unless they touched one of the clamps. Rune considered walking over and making that warning, but Eller got there before him, urging caution, and the people backed off. Rune, of course, could hear every word spoken. He could even hear the beat of their hearts and the rush of blood through their veins.
‘Rune!’ Eller finally called.
He walked over and, as he should, went straight to the Bishop and down on one knee before him to receive a bored touch to the forehead. The Bishop’s eyes widened, boredom dispelled, and he retracted his hand and stood back. Rune stood up meekly, his head bowed, but he noticed some of those who had gathered closer now backed off too – sensing, as did the Bishop, at levels below the conventional that what stood before them was not quite human, at least in their terms.
‘So it was your idea to attach the power cables?’ said the Bishop, shrugging himself and trying to regain dignity. Of course he sensed something, but the likes of such men were masters at making mental adjustments to put others below them.
‘I did indeed, your reverence,’ Rune replied, his gaze straying to the drone, and other senses abruptly going to high alert. Changes were taking place in it and power distributing. New systems within the thing were coming online.
‘What do you hope to discover by doing this?’ the Bishop asked.
‘I hoped to reveal active systems within the drone and thereby learn more about it than would be garnered by merely measuring it.’
The Bishop frowned. ‘According to my –’ he began, but then his words just trailed off as it seemed the air around them thickened and began fizzing with energy. Rune detected a rise in radiations one of their new detectors would have registered, were they not large immobile machines sitting in the divinity college. Collating scan data he observed, in a multi-spectrum view, singular glares igniting at various points in the drone’s body. Almost at once the radiation spill began to fade, as the fusion nodes settled to a steady efficient burn. Then, in eerie silence but for the crunch of its feet against the floor, the drone rose higher and walked forwards.
Yelling and chaos immediately ensued as some just ran, others backed off, and guards grabbed the Bishop to pull him to safety. The drone kicked one of the jacks in passing, sending this item, weighing at least two tons, crashing across the floor. It turned, flipping its tail and snapping the cable there, the thing sizzling and sparking across the floor, just as Eller reached the welder and turned it off. The drone flipped its tail again and the clamp there came off in a flat trajectory smashing a hole through one wall. It turned, scuttling round, feet gouging holes in the concrete. Facing the retreating people with Rune ahead of them, it pointed one claw – the one with what Rune knew to be a Gatling cannon fixed down the side. It held that claw there for a moment, but then reached across and stripped the power clamp off its other claw.
‘We will talk,’ it said in that language ancient here.
Rune dipped his head in acknowledgement.
Everything now seemed to tighten, as if the world were taking a breath. The drone rose from the floor and Rune felt the wash of its grav engines, then it shot up towards the roof and smashed through, and in the oily yellow glare of dirty-burning thrusters, disappeared from sight. Rune just stood there smiling as chunks of roofing material fell all about him.
‘Arrest that man!’ the Bishop shrieked.
A rifle butt smacked against his head and he shifted it in consonance with that, as if the blow had actually moved his head, and staggered as if the blow had affected him. In that moment he decided not to ape unconsciousness because the moment they tried to pick him up they would know something was very wrong. Further blows ensued and he staggered some more, yelped and protested, then finally they cuffed his hands behind his back, and shoved him into motion.
Outside the warehouse the Bishop and others were climbing into big luxurious cars. The guards dragged him over to a van, threw him down on the floor, and sat on the seats along the sides. He listened to them talking about the drone in awed tones, then one of them poked him with a rifle barrel.
‘So what happened there?’ the man asked.
Rune coughed and wheezed like someone injured, then replied, ‘I have no idea.’
‘I’ll bet you’ll be having all sorts of ideas later,’ said another. This inevitably was a source of amusement for which Rune needed no explanations.
After a short drive the guards quickly dragged him out on a road beside bubble grass lawns with buildings rearing all around. Some were old and Gothic in appearance, while others were new boringly blocky structures. He noted the gun installation at the centre of one of the lawns, gun turrets up on the roofs. Some spectators stood nearby clad in long leather coats and thin-brimmed black hats. If recognition of his surroundings had not been enough, their presence would have been. He needed neither since he now had utterly perfect knowledge of his location. They had brought him to the Divinity College.
They took him into one of the older buildings, along corridors with polished stone floors and through thick old doors of apple wood, down steep stairs into gloom, soon dispelled by big fizzing electric lights. In this cellar stood a row of cages along one wall, with doors in the wall opposite. Here in the College they corrected and reinforced religious thought, but also interrogated enemy prisoners. They tried to throw him into a cage and much puzzlement ensued when he didn’t stumble and fall satisfactorily. Afterwards he allowed them to beat him to the floor with rifle butts and give him a kicking for good measure. Then they departed.
Rune sat up and crossed his legs as the lights went out. He searched the darkness around him, seeing with perfect clarity. In the cage at the far end lay a dead woman – he had heard her breathing turn ragged when the lights came on, then stutter to a halt while the guards were kicking him. In infrared he could see her body cooling. He knew his position perfectly on a map of Foreton, this continent and this world in his mind. With his enhanced senses he could probe beyond this cellar, seeing the people above, in the lecture halls and class rooms or strolling in cool sunshine. He could build a schematic of the College’s electrics, water and gas supply and see the line of workers carrying shells up to the roof. But this was not enough, fo
r beyond a certain point his vision faded as the data became more difficult to collate. And he wanted to know where someone was. He turned his vision inward. Now had come the time to push to connect to the whole of himself.
Growing tougher and tougher his body now etched in and grew circuitry on the surface of his bones, while laminating new meta-materials inside them. His blood, packed with nanites running in a lubricant, no longer resembled blood at all. It was moving much more slowly now and no longer shifting about oxygen, which his body required less and less. Dense and fibrous muscles were switching over to electrical activation, while organs had begun serving new purposes or were being completely displaced. Half of his liver and three quarters of his lungs were gone and in their place laminar power storage and other devices steadily grew, along with the expansion in complexity and utility of his gut. He wryly observed those places where fusion nodes had begun to grow, and how much of what he could see here resembled what the war drone already had. Quantum storage crystals were blooming throughout and tough nanoptics and superconducting nano-fibres were connecting the whole. Once that network completed, his organic brain would become surplus to requirements. But right now, what he really wanted was firm connection to and activation of the U-space transceiver in his chest.
He concentrated resources around it, drove the growth of superconductor to connect there and to a portion of the laminar storage that had become useable. Annoyingly the processes were using up his resources and he needed to eat more of a variety of materials, but of course none were available here. Instead he scavenged elsewhere in his body – reversing some processes to get what he required where he required it. As the optics connected to quantum storage his capacity for data processing – for thought – shifted to them and increased, so he began breaking down the fats and proteins of his brain for their energy and materials. Finally the superconductors supplied power, while the optics already in place could feed data to his now distributed mind, and he activated the transceiver.
Connection.
That majority of himself sitting in U-space adjacent to this world both absorbed him and returned to him. If he so wished, he had the option to simply dissolve into it and abandon this body. But that was not his purpose here. He fined the connection down and limited it to the demands his self here on the planet required, and that was the sensors of his whole self: omniscient vision.
He could now look upon the whole world, and in as much detail as he required. He studied the Islands, noting some islands turned over to be airstrips entirely, the dwellings on land and spreading into the sea, the ships that were floating towns, the factory and processing vessels. He focused on the missile barges, assault craft and warships and allowed a brief smile. Options would be available to the one making the decision, but he suspected he knew what its choice would be. At the mainland he studied the villages, towns and cities, the airfields there, though not so many as the Islands, and the industrial complexes supplying defensive guns but whose greatest output went to the sea forts lying all along the coasts facing the islands. Little had changed. The war ground on, depleting both populations and their resources, while they continued pulling more resources out of the ground here and out of the sea over there. And people grew up and joined in with the killing. But war also drove innovation and as Rune had already surmised that innovation would result in it ending in utter disaster for all.
He now looked elsewhere for particular energies not produced by this civilization. At first he could detect nothing and suspected that the drone, as was often the nature of such machines, had grown paranoid and hidden itself too well. But then a brief intense flash of radiation deep in a sea trench reflected off a surface, whereas elsewhere it just passed through. He focused his instruments there, bringing scanning heads out of U-space in that location and gathering data.
The drone was doing precisely what he had been doing back in the warehouse when it first spoke to him. It was gathering up resources. In its case this wasn’t to initiate new growth, but to replace materials and energy that had been depleted and pack it into the dense technology of its body. The flash had brought down an undersea cliff, exposing deposits of pitchblende. This puzzled him for just a second, in his earth-borne mind, but his whole mind supplied the answer. It did not need uranium to supply its power since it ran on fusion. However, the dense radioactive metal served as a good precursor for making the hyper-dense beads of its material ammunition. It had also, Rune noted, been grazing on metallic nodule deposits on the bottom there. These no doubt supplied the correct particulate for its particle weapon. He considered contacting it right then, but felt such a conversation would be too distant, too inhuman. He had after all come here as much for the interaction as to do some good. He would wait until it came to him. He withdrew scanning heads into U-space, leaving just one in place to warn him should the drone’s activity change in any major way.
Time passed.
Outside, the sun rose on a new day but there was no sign of it down in the cellar for any without the senses Rune possessed. Two guards came, stopped to peer in at him, then went down to the cage at the end to drag out the body and carry it away. The corpse would go into the town composter without ceremony – all part of the cycle here. A little later the lights came on again and he could hear someone struggling, blows being delivered. A new prisoner really did not want to end up down here and should have begun his fight a lot earlier than this. The guards dragged the man down the stairs. A last effort from him had one of the guards crashing down the stairs and hitting his head, sprawling on the floor unconscious. The remainder beat their prisoner into unconsciousness too and dragged him the rest of the way down, then along to the cage right next to Rune’s. They threw him inside and then kicked him while he lay on the floor, but being unconscious he wasn’t so entertaining, so they left.
Rune listened to the man’s breathing and the beat of his heart. Looked through his body at its functions and saw that though the man had received a beating no bones had been broken. Inspecting his skull, he saw no bleeds beyond those from a light concussion. He turned his attention elsewhere, watched the world, watched the drone, considered and then dismissed old options. Finally the man regained consciousness. He moved against the floor, swore, vomited and then finally heaved into a sitting position.
‘I’m sorry you ended up here,’ said Rune.
‘Who is that?’
‘It’s Rune, Eller – the relict digger.’
They came in the late afternoon: four guards with batons and the interrogator with his clipboard and sheets of paper no doubt detailing the questions he must ask. They opened Rune’s cell first.
‘Get up,’ said the interrogator. ‘If you resist it will be bad for you.’
At this Eller laughed bitterly and the interrogator frowned at him.
Rune stood and walked out of the cell, whereupon the guards grabbed him and struggled to drag him across to the door in the opposite wall. Again they were puzzled about their difficulty in moving him until he moved with them, allowing them to get him to the chair bolted to the floor. They took off his cuffs and then sat him down in it, pulling across leather straps to secure him there. Ahead of the chair stood a desk and the interrogator took out a cloth to prissily wipe the chair behind that before sitting down. Rune studied the implements on the walls – obviously there to scare the life out of a prisoner and no doubt to be used when required. He hoped they did not use them because the moment they did they would know he was no longer… normal. That would mean the necessity to act, when he had wanted to keep a low profile. But then, in retrospect, he realised it did not matter either way.
‘You are Rune the relict digger, a graduate of the Divinity College,’ said the interrogator.
‘I am indeed,’ Rune replied.
‘Then perhaps you can explain to me how it is that though your name appears in the records, no one remembers you? Perhaps you can also explain how in your submission papers to the College, you have recommendation p
apers from people who have no knowledge of you?’
Rune shrugged. ‘I don’t understand the problems with the paperwork. I do understand that because of my appearance I was avoided here and that is why people do not remember me.’
The interrogator stared at him then inclined his head slightly. A guard stepped forwards and brought his baton down hard on Rune’s leg. He yelled, just for form’s sake, and twisted up his expression in pain.
‘How long have you been working for the Groogers?’
This was interesting. Obviously they had decided he was a spy. He chose to run with this and see where it went.
‘I don’t work for them,’ he protested.
He kept the protests up through the beatings that would have shattered bones in the arms and legs of a normal man, then finally conceded that he had been recruited by the Groogers at the age of eighteen. Next, gasping in pain every time a guard probed his apparently broken bones with a baton, he spent the next hour whining out his story of recruitment, secret organisations in the mountains, spying in Foreton and reporting the positions of factories via a radio concealed in his house in Meeps. He then moved on to the instructions he had received concerning the drone – how he needed to infiltrate here and ensure they fed it power. He wove a tale then of the Groogers finding a drone some years before and how by connecting it up to a power source the Groogers had activated it, whereupon it had sunk a research barge. He took his cues from the interrogator – measuring his heart rate, micro changes of expression, shifts in neurochemicals, pupil dilation – but it could not last.
‘How long has Hand Eller been working for the Groogers?’ the man asked.
‘I didn’t know he was.’
The interrogator raised a finger. ‘Bring in Eller. I think it will be instructive for him to watch this.’
