by Neal Asher
Eller fought as they dragged him in and hooked his cuff chain through an iron wall staple back and to the left of the interrogator. He hung there looking at Rune, terrified and in pain from the beatings, but also angry.
‘Now,’ said the interrogator. ‘You will immediately and succinctly answer each question I ask. For every wrong answer you provide, Efton here,’ he gestured to the guard who had supposedly broken Rune’s legs and arms, ‘will cut off one of your fingers.’ The guard grinned at Rune as he took down a set of bolt croppers from the wall display. ‘When we run out of fingers, he will cut off your toes, then your penis, your balls, your nose and ears.’
Rune just stared back at the man. Obviously this interrogator and the four guards in this room had done this kind of thing before, perhaps many times. He felt no sympathy for them. In fact, in that part of his being some of his kind would see as primitive, he quite relished the prospect of what must now ensue.
‘Now, I will ask again: How long has Hand Eller been working for the Groogers?’
‘Oh, just a couple of years,’ Rune replied.
The interrogator showed a flash of annoyance at that. ‘Who recruited him?’
‘I did.’
‘You’re lying!’
‘What lie would you prefer me to tell?’
The interrogator nodded. Efton stepped forwards, pulled up Rune’s left forefinger and got the jaws of the bolt cropper around it. He looked straight into Rune’s face then proceeded to close the croppers. His expression of cruel satisfaction changed to puzzlement as the handles simply would not close together – the sharp jaws denting Rune’s skin down to the bone and stopping. He opened them again and pulled them away, tried them in the air and they closed easily.
‘What are you doing Efton?’ asked the interrogator.
‘They jammed – seem okay now.’
He tried again to cut off Rune’s finger and again the croppers just would not go through. Rune sighed.
‘Oh well,’ he said. ‘Play time is over.’
Rune snapped the straps securing his left arm, slid his finger out of the cropper, raised it and stabbed it straight into Efton’s eye, deep inside and hooked it to hold him there. He snapped the straps holding his right arm as he pulled Efton’s head down to the left chair arm, then delivered a punch that crushed his skull and bent the metal underneath. The man dropped away bonelessly as Rune stood, snapping further straps as he kicked clear of the chair. A baton flew at his head. He caught it, snatched it from the assailant’s grip, snapped it in half and drove one half into the man’s mouth so hard that splintered wood stabbed from the base of his skull in a spray of blood. The second half he swung back, leaving it imbedded in another guard’s chest. The last guard now came in swinging his baton. Rune took that blow on the head, grabbed the front of the man’s uniform and threw him at the wall, where he hit hard enough to leave a corona of blood before peeling away and dropping to the floor. This took just a matter of seconds, and the interrogator was still in his chair, gaping in shock.
Rune walked over and leaned on the desk, hands on the edge. He then just pushed the desk to the wall. The interrogator tried to stand and got high enough to trap his hips between the wall and the desk. His pelvis crunched and he screamed, but Rune supposed that wasn’t an unusual sound down here. He kept pushing, bones splintering, the gap growing narrower and narrower, flesh parting and blood, urine and shit spurting out. The desk was just an inch from the wall when it broke, the upper surface bowing up and shattering. Rune stood back as the man collapsed, almost separated from his legs. He tried to crawl and Rune stamped on his head. He was no torturer. He then returned to the guard gasping and bubbling with half a baton stuck in his chest, and backhanded him, shattering his skull and relieving him of his misery.
‘Well that’s messy,’ he said, looking at the blood up the walls, on the floor, spattered on the ceiling and all over him. He felt a twinge of annoyance. He really should have killed them all bloodlessly. Now as he got out of here his state would draw notice.
‘What… the fuck are you?’ said Eller from where he hung from the staple.
Rune stepped over to him and Eller flinched away. He reached up and snapped the chain between cuffs. Eller dropped to his knees staring up at him and Rune stepped back. The man was waiting to die, but when he realised that wasn’t going to happen, his mind kicked into gear. Rising unsteadily to his feet he walked over to one of the corpses, searched pockets and came up with a key to take off the cuffs.
‘What now?’ Eller asked.
Rune reviewed exterior events in his mind. The drone had risen from the ocean trench but was still under the sea. He doubted it was collecting materials there, just ruminating and probably sulking. He then surveyed inland. Back from Foreton rose hills and then some of the highest mountains on the continent. It seemed an appropriate place.
‘I’m going to the mountains,’ he explained. ‘You may do what you will, though I suggest that you do not stay here.’
Eller looked around at the corpses. ‘I’m coming with you.’
‘Why?’ Rune studied him.
‘Because I want explanations. Because you know too much and you just did things no normal man could do.’ He grimaced. ‘And because I now have nowhere else to go.’
‘Okay.’ Rune nodded. ‘Let’s go.’
‘Wait,’ said Eller, then went over to the corpse of the interrogator, searched through his pockets and came up with a heavy cylindrical key. ‘Now we can go.’
Rune walked over to pull open the door and lead the way out of the cellar to the stairs. They climbed in electric light then stepped out into corridors now lit by gas lamps. Locating himself, Rune turned to head for the most direct route out of the College and towards the mountains. Eller caught his arm.
‘This way.’
Rune nodded. Of course – the key Eller had taken. As they moved through the corridors a group of divinity students came towards them, accompanied by their lecturer. As the two approached they moved quickly to the side to let them past, goggling at them all the while. Perhaps seeing people coming up bloody from that cellar wasn’t usual, but not so unusual as to cause alarm. Rune felt a sneer twist his lips. He did not like this place and all it represented, and considered acting on that. But then he shook himself and dismissed the idea. He had aimed to be just the catalyst here. The ensuing reaction he had no intention of controlling.
Soon they exited the main door out into the central area of the college. The troop truck parked over on the far side had presumably brought the four guards below. Directly opposite the door, under a gas street light, sat a large well-polished sedan. Leaning against it was the driver, drinking from a lidded cup, sandwiches open on the bonnet next to him.
‘We’re taking the car,’ said Eller, walking up to the man.
‘Where’s Amb –’ the driver began, then the breath went out of him as Eller chopped him across the throat, then thumped him hard in the torso, before shoving him stumbling to fall on the bubble grass.
They climbed into the car and Eller started it – a big engine grumbling into life – and took off in a spray of gravel. He turned on the lights as they headed out through the College gates, where he negotiated streets obviously familiar to him. Checking his internal map Rune saw that the man seemed to know where he was going so desisted from giving directions. They finally reached a clear road heading out of Foreton; moths and bats flitted through the headlamp beams, and Eller relaxed back from the wheel, for until then he had been hunched over it.
‘Now tell me how you managed to do what you did back there,’ the man said.
Rune considered ignoring him, or maybe weaving a fabrication as he had with the interrogator, but he saw no reason why he should. Why not tell the truth? Few would believe Eller if he survived what was to come and told his story, and even if some did, that didn’t really matter. He pondered on where to start and, since they would be driving for a few hours, decided to s
tart with a historical error here.
‘The Polity did not fall, you know – not in the sense you people think of it.’
‘What?’ Eller shot a look at him that seemed like panic.
‘There was a war against monsters. They were called prador and, being vicious, xenophobic, amoral crustaceans the size of this car, “monsters” is a suitable description for them. The war lasted many decades during which worlds were destroyed and stars detonated. Billions on both sides died, and then, because of usurpation in the prador kingdom, an uneasy truce ensued.’
‘How do you know this?’
‘I’ve picked up a few things over the last few thousand years,’ Rune replied.
‘I don’t believe you.’
Rune shrugged and continued, ‘But like I said, after that war there was no immediate fall. Integration and radical changes fractured the Polity society, along with a vast diaspora.’
‘I don’t understand.’
‘There are so many things you don’t know, for example, humans did not really rule the Polity but artificial intelligences did.’
Eller looked around at him again. ‘Artificial intelligences?’
‘Machines that could think, and could think a lot better than humans. From their rise, way back during the Quiet War in the Solar System, they could have easily abandoned humanity and gone their own way, or they could have exterminated it. They hung around instead always trying to push humanity to catch up with them – rather like the young trying to teach ageing relatives modern things.’
‘And did they catch up?’ Eller looked at him pointedly. Rune enjoyed the man’s perspicacity, nodded and smiled.
‘It started with the mental enhancements – machine additions to the human mind to improve communication and function – but these were mental prosthetics, if you like, to begin with. It was difficult to combine human mind and AI as they were then. The first was organic and slow while the second was crystalline and fast. An early human tried it once and did some brilliant things in the brief time it took his mind to burn out while connected to AI. But things changed as hard material technology blended with organic technology. For many years there were the haimans who were a buffered combination of human and AI, and you had people loading to crystal and AIs loading to organic minds. New substrates arose on which intelligence could be written. Change was a gradual thing. And after some thousands of years no one could distinguish between AIs and humans.’
‘You became gods…’ said Eller.
Rune looked at the man – that perspicacity now surprising him. Rune had expected lengthy diversions and explanations. Or perhaps Eller simply did not grasp it or believe it, and thought Rune a lunatic to be calmed.
‘As you would see it, yes,’ he said. ‘Control over their existence and great swathes of material technology fell into the grasp of individuals. This was essentially your “fall” because individuals being so able there was little need for the organisation called society, little need for its infrastructure, for the means of maintaining populations, for factories, piped water or power. Also a diaspora had commenced. Individuals being so immensely powerful, and little needing the company of each other, drifted away like seeds on a breeze. Those that needed company often retreated into virtual worlds written into the cores of neutron stars. Trillions of humans just evaporated from the Polity.’
‘Humans?’
‘As such. It has always been accepted that the AIs were post-humans. The individuals that came next, whether arising from AI or human, could be described as post-post humans, but humans nevertheless.’
‘And you claim to be one of these creatures?’
‘I went away for a long time – there was, after all, a galaxy to explore and, at some point when I was ready, other galaxies. But my explorations have brought me full circle to the ancient ruins of the Polity, and here I find primitive human populations arising from the landings of ancient colony ships, engendered by birthing machines on some worlds, woken from underground storage on others, or growing from just a few who did not choose to be what I am. Here on this world your population arises from a crash-landed colony ship whose machinery took a millennium to self-repair before waking your ancestors.’
Eller’s hands were tight on the wheel as he turned off the main road onto narrower more winding roads up into the mountains.
Rune added, ‘That colony ship is remembered in your sacred texts as the ark ship, of course.’ Eller grunted, as if Rune had just punched him in the stomach. Rune continued, ‘Your ancestors were a religious group and, as with many such, infighting soon started. They wrecked the technology they had brought and dropped back into semi-primitivism out of which you people are beginning to rise.’
‘What are you doing here? Why the drone?’
‘Take a right here.’ Rune pointed.
‘There’s nothing up there,’ said Eller. ‘Just the Flat Top.’
‘I know.’
Eller turned and drove up a track that soon lost its metalling and became a gravel one. They were silent for a while, then he asked again, ‘Why are you here?’
‘Your war has stagnated,’ Rune replied. ‘Your sea forts prevent invasion by the Groogers, their sea power prevents you invading them. Neither of you have weapons powerful enough to do more than just tear at each other. It would be nice to think you would just tire of it and that the war would die a natural death. But it engenders hate with every generation and just continues.’
‘It would never end?’ Eller asked quietly.
‘That’s not the problem. You and the Groogers now have technology within your reach that could end it. The problem is that the scenario I predict will result in billions dying and your whole society dropping into a primitivism worse than that of your ancestors after their particular fall.’
The track took them up and up for miles, finally opening out on to the flat top of a mountain that looked like it had been sheared off with a blade. In fact it had been sheared off even while the colony ship, sunk out in shallow seas by the Islands, had still been slowly repairing itself. This world had been a battle ground during the prador-human war and this was why so many artefacts could be found here. The mountain top had been sheared off by a particle beam capable of cutting through the crusts of worlds.
Eller stopped the car and they climbed out. No lights up here, but the star-sprinkled sky gleamed bright, and green light from the moon turned their surroundings into black blocky shadows and shades of emerald. They walked over to where a waist-high wall had been built across the top of the drop down the side of the mountain. From here they could see the plains below, the lights of hundreds of villages, of Foreton and other towns, and factory complexes extending into misty distance. The lights of the sea forts were bright red, perhaps that colour being a warning or a threat. They stretched from out of sight on his left and studded the coast to his right for a hundred miles, ending where other mountains stepped down into the sea. Cheever was a fortress as such. The Groogers could evade the sea forts and land elsewhere on the continent, but to get to the heart of military production would require passing through mountains all around. They could not bring armour for that purpose, and fortifications in the mountains would make mincemeat of any land army.
‘Some say that if we were to concentrate on air power, the war would be winnable,’ Eller commented.
‘Grooger air power is growing at near the same rate as yours,’ Rune replied. ‘Already you are building your attack planes to bring down their gunships and they are doing the same with yours. Both sides would also get round to deploying ballistic missiles that could reach each other, but the war would continue.’
‘So what is this technology that could end the war?’ Eller asked.
Rune glanced at him, feeling brief disappointment. Was he trying to learn the ‘secret’ that could win the war for his side? He studied the man for longer on other levels, analysed his reactions and tracked the signalling in his brain. Out of the whole of
his observations he reached a single conclusion. Eller, after being sent to be tortured, felt betrayed by his own side. He considered himself an outsider now and had no loyalties beyond his personal ones.
‘On your side it would be atomic weapons.’
‘I have heard theories about these,’ said Eller. ‘That mass can be turned into vast amounts of energy.’
‘Quite – you would be able to build bombs to depopulate islands in a single blast.’
‘And the Groogers?’
‘Biological weapons. Plagues they could sow from their gunships that would have your people coughing out their lungs and depopulate most of the continent.’
‘And you will not allow either of these.’
The drone had risen from the sea now and begun looking around. He had no doubt it was absorbing and translating radio transmissions, in fact it had probably learned all the languages here within just half an hour of leaving the warehouse. He now sensed its scanning, which was on the same level as his own. It reached out to the islands and in towards the continent. It would be analysing the cultures here, assessing their technological capabilities. Because of its nature it would first be looking at the weaponry and of course it would know they were at war and who was doing what to whom. But it would be seeing and understanding a lot more than that. Rune did not in the slightest underestimate its intelligence, understanding and wisdom. The thing was, after all, older even than him and throughout its long existence had upgraded itself as desired. It had even fought in that long ago war against the prador, which he had only learned about as a child in school via the growing implants in his brain.
‘It is not a case of either or,’ he told Eller distractedly. ‘You and the Groogers will develop these weapons at around the same time. Or, the more likely scenario, you will use nuclear weapons against the Groogers and that will compel them to use biological weapons they will have developed but will otherwise be too frightened to deploy.’
The drone began cruising in towards Foreton now. Their primitive radar installations would not detect it unless it allowed them to, in which case the sirens and searchlights would come on and the guns begin firing, all to no effect. As it passed over the sea forts, Rune realised it had made itself invisible to them. It came to a halt over the city, no doubt directly above the warehouse in which it had woken. There he sensed its scanning becoming more intense. It then began shifting inwards towards the centre – to the Divinity College.
