The Technician

by Neal Asher

  ‘They’re still looking for dying gabbleducks,’ said Grant. ‘And anything that moves they’ll come down on.’

  ‘So when do they stop looking?’

  ‘After that last hit Penny Royal told me the hormone had spread over an area of twenty square kilometres and mentioned something called catastrophic cascade.’

  ‘Oh yeah?’

  Grant seemed perfectly calm, thought Jem, perfectly at rest in this madness, and so, it seemed, did Jem himself. Where is my guilt? he wondered. Where is my pain? The answer to those questions seemed astounding in its simplicity: the organism he was could not afford them whilst fighting for its own survival. Guilt and other emotional sufferings were an indulgence, a luxury only afforded to those with the resources to waste on them.

  ‘The death hormone from one gabbleduck is, depending on wind direction and air quality, enough to summon hooders from the surrounding fifty square kilometres of flute grasses,’ the soldier explained. ‘Unless we get a north wind to blow this out over the south coast, there could be enough hormone in the air to send hooders crazy from east to west across the entire continent down here.’

  ‘Let’s hope they follow the wind into the sea,’ said Shree.

  Grant gazed at her steadily. ‘I’m told that’s a possibility, which is why every vehicle in Greenport is being used to transport the population there to the east, including the cargo ships, and which is why no vehicles are available from there to help us here.’

  ‘I thought he was important.’ She stabbed a finger at Jem.

  ‘He is, but we’re safe now.’

  ‘Penny Royal tell you this?’ She nodded towards where a tower of shadow knives was sliding to put itself between them and the line of a hooder crossing below the horizon like a black monorail train. Convenient that the huge number of hooders in the area had crushed down most of the flute grasses, for now they could see them coming.

  ‘No, I got that from Amistad,’ said Grant. ‘Penny Royal ain’t saying much now.’

  ‘It’s been damaged, hasn’t it?’

  A slight whine in her voice caught Jem’s attention and he looked at her curiously. Ostensibly she seemed to be showing fear of her own demise, yet it came with an underlying frustration. Gazing at her flat Human features, the tense pose of her body and the way her hand never strayed far from the butt of her thin-gun, he understood that fear of death was not her greatest concern, but fear of inappropriate death. Returning his attention to the shell whorls he traced one with his finger, further hints of meaning now apparent under a Braillelike sensation. ‘Of course Penny Royal has been damaged,’ he said.

  They both turned to look at him, but when he offered no further explanation, returned to their conversation.

  ‘Amistad is getting us out of here,’ said Grant. ‘Transport should arrive for us in about an hour.’

  ‘Shit, where’s it coming from? Zealos?’

  Jem removed his finger from the shell, looked over towards where the corpse of the hooder Penny Royal had killed lay just visible between them and the remains of the way station. It had been that first creature that damaged the AI, immediately demoting it from the legions of Hell to reality; a reality excised of the supernatural, but nonetheless strange and frightening. Penny Royal had underestimated that first attacker, taken the full brunt of its attack like a hand raised to stop a falling blade. Jem had seen parts of the AI smashed away before it resorted to more conventional weaponry to blow off the creature’s head. With the other two hooders that came close the AI used different techniques, presenting a hard surface to divert their course, actinic light, other radiations and an output of complex hormones to blind and confuse. Of course, the soldier and the killer, Shree, only averted their gaze from the light; they did not have the other radiations screaming in their heads nor taste and smell the contradictory messages of those hormones in the air, as did Jem. So blind and dull these Humans.

  ‘Most vehicles to the north of us are being used to evacuate areas up there,’ Grant explained. ‘But these are here for the survivors.’

  He pointed towards the horizon where three black shapes became visible, catching sunlight on their sides from the rising sun. Watching these things approach Jem recognized old Theocracy troop transporters.

  ‘They’ll get torn apart,’ said Shree.

  ‘I think not,’ said Grant.

  Shree gazed at him, her expression all suspicion. ‘I see . . . so we should board them.’ She turned as something crashed in the way station and the cowl of another hooder rose out of it. ‘Seems pretty fucking dangerous round here.’

  ‘We’re safe,’ Grant repeated. ‘And we’ve got other transport.’

  Jem watched the transporters drawing closer, three fifty-metre-long bricks of bubble metal kept in the sky by aerofan, thruster nacelles protruding at the back should their usual lumbering pace not be enough to get them out of trouble. No gravmotors, no sleek, fast and efficient Polity technology – they had probably been requisitioned from a museum. No way, on their own, could they survive both landing and take-off in an area swarming with hooders like this. Jem transferred his gaze to the sky directly above. Though Calypse still occupied the eastern sky and though the sun lay close to rising, some stars were still visible, one of them steady and metallic, and which hadn’t been up there twenty years ago.

  ‘Dragon destroyed the laser arrays,’ said Shree, a hint of bitterness in her voice. ‘It destroyed the Theocracy’s main power for oppression. How free are we now, Grant?’

  The soldier shrugged. ‘A gun ain’t evil – only the fuck pulling the trigger is that.’

  ‘Far too trite and easy,’ she replied.

  Grant shrugged again, gave her an estimating look as she turned away from him to watch the transporters start a circling descent. Jem watched for a moment too, then abruptly switched his attention to Penny Royal, now rolling across the landscape like a lost cloud full of steel crows as it moved to position itself between them and the hooder departing the way station. He felt that sensation again – the one he had felt arising when the AI had turned away the third attacking hooder – that feeling of denial and an upswell in his mind that deposited penny mollusc shell patterns across internal vision, encoded for external inspection.

  The first old troop transporter came down near the wreckage the hooders had made of the departing ground vehicles, and a surprising number of people fled their hideaways, some running, some limping, others being carried. The hooder from the way station turned towards this scene and accelerated. A roar of aerofans above and a second transporter descended nearby, coming down by the chunk of apartment building. Refugees fled that like parasites departing an old mattress doused with insecticide, soon reaching a rapidly lowered ramp and clambering inside. Jem watched these for a moment. Distantly another hooder had been drawn in, but it wouldn’t get there in time. The way station hooder was a different matter so, with a feeling of regret, Jem returned his attention to it.

  The strike ruptured air molecules all the way down, a violet fire seeming the refined essence of the aubergine sky, concentrated and hurled down. It lasted for only an eyeblink, but left a black after-image like a column of shadow. A sphere of fire expanded ten metres back from the hooder’s cowl, bright red at first then swiftly guttering with little oxygen to maintain it. The blast peeled up rhizome and black mud, whilst the fore-section of the hooder tumbled away like a discarded spoon. The rest of its body bucked up and peeled back, came down again writhing – a beheaded snake.

  ‘How different are Polity satellite weapons from the Theocracy’s?’ Shree asked.

  ‘A damned sight more powerful, for one thing,’ the soldier replied, then he tilted his head for a moment, listening. ‘Amis-tad tells me we need to head west – the hooders were starting to move off but this is pulling ’em back.’

  ‘This doesn’t make any sense,’ said Shree angrily. She pointed towards the transporter down by the ruined chunk of building. ‘A couple of minutes and we can be away from he
re.’

  ‘No one’s stopping you,’ said Grant. He turned to Jem. ‘You coming?’

  Jem considered the question very carefully. If their remaining in this area was to result in further strikes, he would have objected – why destroy more of those fine creatures just so three Humans could get to a particular designated transport? So wasteful. He concentrated on Penny Royal. The AI had begun to close in on them, meanwhile becoming less and less visible. It had been repairing itself, its latest repairs evidently to its chameleon-ware shield, so it seemed likely it would be able to hide them, and that no further satellite strikes would be necessary.

  ‘Yes,’ he replied. ‘I am coming.’

  The third lander had descended right beside the way station to disgorge a crew of humanoids who were carrying heavy-looking hand tools and darted into the ruination faster than any Human should be able to move. Golem, Jem realized, able to hear the beat of a heart, able to sense signs of recoverable life even after the heart had stopped beating, able to trace down the beacons of memchips. Strong too, enough power to rip away twisted wreckage trapping survivors, enough to rapidly dig away rubble with those tools they carried. Not demons.

  It occurred to him to wonder how he could see so far and in such detail with just binocular vision, then he realized he was just manipulating the visual data more efficiently, dispensing with the models Humans used to save on mental processing, and seeing everything.

  Some survivors did leave the way station under their own power, but with the place having been the focus of the attack, not so many as out here. Jem stood up, feeling a momentary joy when he saw the woman from reception limping out towards the transport, and the Human emotion flipped over biological switches in his skull, and his clarity of vision degraded. Was that really her? How could he be sure that distant, ragged and mud-covered figure was her? He turned and followed as Grant led off, Penny Royal sliding in ahead of them, now a grey veil, a mere distortion in the air.

  ‘You’ll need to hurry if you want to get to that transport before it takes off,’ the soldier called over his shoulder.

  Jem glanced round as Shree swore under her breath then, after a pause, stomped after them. Another switch clicked over in his skull. Her act was good but Jem could see right through it. He wondered if the soldier could too. Did Grant see her pretence of reluctance to accompany them as an attempt to restore trust and repair the damage she had done by earlier revealing her true feelings? Did he understand that now her fear of an inappropriate death had been removed she was trying to restore her simple reporter persona by displaying fear of death alone?

  ‘Penny Royal is extending chameleonware to cover us,’ said Grant. ‘But be ready to move fast – if we end up in the path of a hooder it not seeing us ain’t any protection.’

  ‘So Penny Royal’s talking again?’ asked Shree, moving up beside him.

  Grant gazed at her blankly for a moment. ‘Yeah, it’s talking.’ The man did not want her with them anymore, this lay evident in the minutiae of his expression.

  Jem turned away, also realizing something else: some crucial encounter was imminent. Immutable facts confirmed this. The increased activity here would not summon in more hooders, for focused on the death hormone they were hard-wired to respond to, they would go where it was more concentrated, and the breeze against Jem’s cheek told him that was to the west, precisely where they were heading. Those Euclidean shapes up in the forefront of his mind like a shield, he trudged after the other two, idly wondering why his feet kept sinking into the soft ground, then remembering this was because his legs terminated in small Human feet.

  ‘There is no doubt that it will have an impact,’ Amistad had informed him. ‘Penny Royal agrees that circumstances are fortuitous and should be taken advantage of – we were going to confront him with it anyway.’

  It certainly was having an impact, but whether Tombs felt that impact any more than Grant himself, the soldier could not say.

  Even at this distance from the way station, much surrounding vegetation had been flattened, only occasional islands of flute grass still standing, along with a nearby copse of lizard tails sprouting from an islet of dried-out rhizome protruding from the surface. Hooders were visible whichever way he looked. But now he wasn’t looking at any normal hooder. The Technician appeared as a movement on the horizon to their right, little to distinguish it from the other hooders they had seen. However, as it moved closer the dawn sunlight reflected off its white back, glistened on carapace like polished ivory. The thing was bigger even than the first hooder to attack the way station. It had probably reached some physical limitation to the species of which it seemed only marginally a member. Its cowl was also longer and flatter, more sleek, more dangerous-looking.

  Grant halted and swung towards it, a disturbance in the air twenty metres out swinging round with him and moving away as Penny Royal planted itself between them and the creature.

  ‘You’re sure it can’t see us?’ he asked out loud.

  ‘Increasingly less so,’ Penny Royal whispered in his ear.

  ‘What is this, Grant?’ asked Shree, sounding worried.

  Tombs offered her an explanation. ‘What it is is self-evident. My nemesis comes.’

  Grant turned towards them. ‘Amistad is aboard the mobile observation tower that was set to watch over this creature, which was somnolent until the death hormone reached it three hours ago.’

  ‘So it’s just like the other hooders?’ said Shree.

  Grant focused on Tombs. ‘Is it just like the others?’

  For a few seconds the man just continued gazing at the distant but rapidly approaching creature as if he hadn’t heard, then swung his attention to Grant, with eyes wide and a slightly crazy smirk twisting his mouth. ‘Of course it is not just like the others. Golem are similar to Humans, those augmented creatures called haimen are similar to Humans, but never can they be described as “just like” Humans. The differences here’ – Tombs stabbed a finger towards the Technician – ‘are of a similar nature.’

  ‘What did it do to you, Tombs?’ Grant asked.

  ‘What did it do?’ Tombs now tilted his head to one side, gazing at the great white hooder as if studying the activity of a beloved pet. ‘The nature of the beast is to feed and so it did, cutting me as all hooders cut their prey so as not to release poisons contained in the black fats. So fine was its surgery it cut without allowing me to bleed, just as Penny Royal cuts. With deep respect it lovingly peeled away skin, fat and muscle and consumed them.’ He turned back towards Grant and the soldier stepped back, couldn’t see anything Human in the man’s expression. ‘But there is more to the nature of this beast – something retained almost like instinct after the mechanism stamped on its consciousness and rewired its mind like a child using a penknife to adjust a computer.’

  ‘Mechanism?’

  ‘Penny Royal knows.’

  ‘And what more is there to the Technician’s nature?’

  ‘Its weaver did not choose oblivion, soldier. So many did not, which is why the tricones grind so fine.’ Tombs kicked at the matted rhizome they stood upon.

  ‘I don’t get it,’ said Grant, though some he did. The mechanism must be that Atheter machine that tore Penny Royal apart, but what was this weaver and that stuff about the tricones?

  ‘What is the Technician’s distinguishing nature?’ Tombs asked rhetorically. ‘Grief, soldier; a grief inconsolable for a million years and an anger that must have been great enough to enable it to rebuild the wreckage of its mind.’ Tombs reached up and traced some shape in the air with his forefinger, but he looked bemused. ‘That can be the only explanation for how it recovered from the mechanism.’

  ‘Run!’ a new voice boomed through the air. ‘Run and hide!’

  This was Penny Royal, speaking out loud for the first time.

  ‘It’s heading directly towards us,’ Grant said. ‘We need to get out of its path.’

  ‘But it can’t see us,’ Shree protested.

&nbs
p; ‘Of course not,’ Grant replied. ‘Just coincidence.’

  His hope not to be contradicted was immediately destroyed when Penny Royal informed them, ‘On the contrary.’

  ‘What do you fucking mean?’ asked Shree.

  Grant surveyed their surroundings. They could conceal themselves in that stand of lizard tails, but that was the best they could do. There was no point just continuing to run. If Penny Royal could not stop this creature then it would surely catch them.

  ‘The proctor confirms its nature,’ Penny Royal stated. ‘The war machine is fully functional and can see us.’

  ‘Come on.’ Grant reached out to grab Tombs’s shoulder, only to find that steely resistance there again. Tombs peered down at Grant’s hand, but did not react so violently this time, just brushed it away.

  ‘It is not necessary,’ the man said.

  Shree was already running, her thin-gun clutched in her hand.

  ‘You might like to stop a while under that cowl again, Tombs, but I’ve no intention of letting that thing near me.’

  Tombs blinked, looked vaguely confused for a moment, and then whatever had laced steel through his body seemed to drain out of him. The man looked over towards the approaching Technician, huge now, beginning to rear above the air disturbance that was Penny Royal, now shedding its chameleonware.

  ‘Yes,’ he said, turning, stumbling at first, then breaking into a steady lope after Shree.

  Grant followed, pulling his own disc gun out of its holster. He wondered if he would be capable of turning the weapon on himself should the big white hooder get to him, or would he, like so many, still hope to survive even as the sharp darkness closed over him? His legs felt slightly weak, wobbly, as he ran on an adrenalin surge, never seeming to go fast enough. Even as he stepped up onto the islet of dry rhizome and pushed aside clattering lizard tails, there came from behind a sound like a monorail running full-tilt into a mountain of glass.

  Grant threw himself down beside the other two and peered out. Penny Royal was now fully visible, a big black sea urchin, perfectly spherical, but with tentacles curving out from between lower spines to spear into the rhizome mat below. Twenty metres out from the AI the curved interface of a hardfield cut the air, and the Technician was skating along this, its armoured underside and knife-like legs visible, its cowl screeching along leaving a trail of odd pinkish flames. Even as it slid towards the side of the hardfield, Grant could see the effect of whatever it was doing. Penny Royal sank halfway into the ground, the rhizome mat all around it steaming, then bubbling to release hot gouts of smoke.