The Technician

by Neal Asher

  Next the building bucked underneath them. Ground shock from that fallen chunk of the object. Grant readied himself for more of that as, trailing fire, the rest of the thing abruptly dropped out of the sky. With an eardrum-tearing shriek the attack ship hammered in, decelerating at a seemingly impossible rate to a halt above the site. In the smoke and steam its energy weapons were perfectly visible; proton beams and lasers, even a maser etching out its existence so it seemed a glass column reached down. Then something else stabbed down, a single missile, and the attack ship accelerated away again. When he saw Tombs stepping over to one of the building’s pillars, crouching down behind it and catching an arm round it, Grant braced himself for the worst.

  First the building bucked again, rising up on a ten-metre wave through the soft ground, but that was only from the fall of the object. Then the sky ignited, all the pillars around thrown into black and purple silhouette. The shock wave hit, and no preparation was enough for it. Grant lost his grip on Sanders, found himself hurtling through the air. He clipped a pillar, thumped down into soft mud, the debris-laden air soon darker above him than any Masadan night. Then the wind blast reversed, and the building became a grinning mouth of pillar teeth trying to suck him inside it again. The roar actually seemed composed of all the debris: a solid substance in the air. This just went on and on eternally. He anchored himself, driving heels and hands into soft ground. But next it all paused, as if reaching some physical limit, other sounds impinging; the patter of falling mud, the landscape around him groaning. Gradually, it began to wane, fall of debris became a light black snow, and Grant just lay there gazing into a darkness that cleared to a smoky fog, at the last swept abruptly away by an icy breeze.

  ‘Are you okay?’

  He wasn’t sure how long he’d lain in comparative silence before hearing the words. He looked around to see Sanders standing beside him, surprised he hadn’t been deafened.

  ‘I think so.’ At last he felt able to stand up, which he did. ‘Glad to see you are.’

  She shrugged. ‘It slid me against one of the pillars and pinned me there.’

  ‘Tombs?’

  She nodded towards the building. ‘He seems indestructible.’

  They walked across a thick layer like the outflow from a compost shredder, and stepped back into the building. The gabbleduck still squatted here in the same position as before, seeming oblivious to the crap that had fallen all over it, even in its eyes. Tombs stood between two pillars, gazing out at the steadily rising mushroom cloud.

  ‘Straightforward fission bomb,’ he said without turning. ‘Probably the dirty burn has a more disruptive quality itself.’

  Grant moved up beside him, shuddered – it seemed explosions of that shape had branded themselves in the Human consciousness. Then he lowered his gaze, seeing Shree Enkara, fifty metres beyond the end of a walkway, pulling herself up from the ground, glancing back at them then abruptly heading for a nearby stand of flute grass. He moved to go after her, but Tombs caught his shoulder.

  ‘There’s no need,’ he said.

  ‘But she’s got that Jain tech—’

  ‘The Technician is out there – she won’t get far.’

  Grant thought about that for only a moment. Shree deserved to die for what she had done, but not like that. No one deserved to die like that.

  ‘No,’ he said, ‘I’ll bring it back for you, and I’ll bring her back.’

  He stepped through and down, and set out after her.

  Acceleration, instant, unfelt by her Human body but sensed in more ways than a Human body could sense. Masada dropped behind, whilst space debris impacted on the adamantine slopes of Cheops’s sides and its drive glowed like a small sun. Ahead, Calypse slowly grew, but magnification rendered in clear detail the object poised over its onyx face.

  It seemed a cornucopia woven from strips of metal. Only the metal weighed ten times more than lead, was harder than diamond, tougher than ceramal, and each of those strips measured fifty metres across. Inside that horn of plenty the mass of dodecahedrons Janice Golden had first seen in constant motion about each other had conglomerated in one unmoving lump. Mass sensors indicated that this thing would still balance the scales with the planet Mars, and already tidal effects were visible down on the surface of Calypse. The gas giant’s moon system had disrupted too – and no one would know the result of that until later, when they started clearing up the mess.

  ‘Why is no interception on the way here?’ Janice asked. ‘We knew its intentions were hostile. Why are we only now being allowed to take the gloves off?’

  ‘Actually, no,’ came the reply from Scold, ‘we did not know for sure.’

  Currently travelling on a parallel course, a thousand kilometres away, the modern dreadnought loomed huge in her sensors, and Janice felt like a puppy running beside a full-grown wolf.

  ‘So we had to wait until it started killing people? I’m betting that wouldn’t have happened if this had been a Prador dreadnought.’

  ‘Perhaps because we have nothing more to learn from the Prador,’ the other ship AI replied.

  Yes, that seemed highly likely. The order to attack had been delayed whilst further information was gathered. That information was more important to the rulers of the Polity than a few civilian lives. How hugely things changed throughout history, and how greatly they remained the same.

  ‘A more apposite question should be: why out here? Why not right over Masada?’ Scold wondered.

  ‘Probably so it can suck up matter like it did before.’ Fully interfaced now and lying in her sarcophagus, Janice couldn’t tell if it was herself or the Cheops AI that replied. More likely an amalgam of the two had spoken the words.

  ‘It could also be targeting Flint,’ Scold noted.

  The Braemar moon Flint currently lay on the other side of Calypse, but in less than twenty hours would lie directly over the mechanism. That wasn’t really a concern. This should all be over long before then, one way or another. With a thought, Janice opened ports over her four big rail-guns, gazed through ship eyes into their hardened bunkers and watched conveyor magazines loading one-ton missiles of mono-dense iron wrapped in a layer of case-hardened ceramal. As the guns began firing their roar echoed through vast open spaces within Cheops as if from a horde of monsters.

  ‘No finesse, then,’ suggested Scold.

  ‘Just a probe to test things before we start to finesse the attack.’ Janice noted that Scold had begun firing too, though it seemed to be lacing its inert missiles with a nice selection of atomic and chemical explosives. ‘We have to test it, see how it reacts, see if the weaknesses are where we expect them to be.’ Janice paused. ‘We also need to ensure your U-jump missiles will hit home – no point wasting them.’

  ‘No, really?’ said Scold.

  Janice didn’t bother going on, she’d long realized that when an AI started getting sarcastic it was time to stop talking.

  Travelling at a large proportion of light speed, the two clouds of missiles sped out, the gap between them narrowing as they closed on their target, till they melded into one cloud. Abruptly, something materialized before this cloud – one of the objects they had already seen down on the planet. Janice ensured that every scrap of data from this encounter was being relayed back to Amistad, and to the ships defending Masada.

  The thing flared, briefly, emitting an EM pulse of massive intensity. The missiles to the fore of the cloud vaporized, but after that there seemed something wrong with the instrument readings, for the whole cloud seemed off course. Then, as her entire ship groaned around her, Janice realized, with a sudden sinking in her gut, what she had just seen.

  ‘Fuck. Gravity weapon.’

  Her sensors had registered the passing of a line of distortion throughout her ship. The gravity wave had hit even before the EM blast reached the missiles, in fact that blast might have been only a side effect of it. Damage diagnostics began to catch up. The internal structure had weakened by 10 per cent, there were reactor breaches
and systems crashes but luckily, since this was a weapon the Polity had also been developing and had thus also prepared a defence against, both her ship and Scold now used reactive antimatter containment. Twenty years ago they would both have been toast.

  The cloud of missiles, though diverted, had not been diverted enough, but the mechanism was ready for that. The U-space signature from it seemed as disruptive as a USER, and the thing didn’t entirely submerge in that continuum. Even to her most precise sensors the mechanism seemed to stretch into an object five hundred kilometres long, then snap back into shape, five hundred kilometres from where it had been.

  Inert missiles hurtled straight down into Calypse, pocking its face with hundreds of thermal blasts each spreading to the size of North America then fading to blood red. However, just a few of the missiles Scold had fired, which possessed their own guidance systems, diverted enough to come down on the mechanism. Two of them hit. Silent detonations in space, small suns igniting; explosions that would have gutted a ship like Cheops.

  ‘Minimal damage,’ Scold noted as the fires faded. Just shallow craters in that basketwork of super-dense strips, some shrapnel of that same matter hurtling away. ‘Intersecting X-ray lasers . . . now – microwave on pattern D412.’

  They fired simultaneously; a complex pattern of energy attack tangling along the length of the mechanism, generating hot spots where recent sensor data indicated complex systems, microwave beams tracking what seemed to be com-lines, possibly optic. Explosions within the massive machine, visible through its basketwork interior, tracked progress. An irised gravity field began to generate to its fore as it began to turn towards Calypse, but then something massive blew near the front end, molten matter bled out into space, and the field winked out. The whole mechanism shuddered, began responding with multispectrum lasers whose energy load was easily absorbed and distributed by the superconductive layers in the armour of the two massive ships.

  ‘It’s rather disappointing really,’ Scold noted.

  What did they expect? Janice wondered. The sheer scale of this thing might be impressive, but was dwarfed by some engineering projects within the Polity. Yes, it was all alien technology, but technology based on the same science the Polity used. There was nothing new here.

  ‘Should we just disable it and retain it for study?’ she asked.

  ‘No, let’s not become too arrogant and too complacent,’ Scold scolded. ‘I’m targeting one U-jump and firing.’

  In the Polity those not in the know had always thought that travel through U-space was a complicated affair that could only be managed by an artificial intelligence. The myth lasted even throughout the Prador–Human war when the enemy arthropods were using their own surgically altered children to fly U-jump missiles on suicide missions. Now the Polity was experimenting with similar devices guided by sub-AI minds. And now Scold sent one such device after its prey.

  It left Scold under its own power, a spike of gleaming metal standing on a one-burn fusion drive. Two thousand kilometres out, it rippled, then twisted into U-space like a trout diving after having snatched its mayfly. The instant effect of its impact was immense, but in entirely the wrong place: Scold bucked, opened up like a clam and vomited fire. Its AI didn’t even have time to deeply analyse how the mechanism had turned the missile back on it, had time only to send one word.

  ‘Tricky,’ it said, and died.

  Sanders studied him, still trying to find inside herself some emotional response to a Jeremiah Tombs no longer confined to a wheelchair, drawing penny mollusc patterns and muttering Satagents to himself; to a Jeremiah standing whole and sane . . . maybe more than sane. Perhaps the beating she’d received from Ripple-John and the certainty that she was going to die had numbed her, or perhaps seeing Jeremiah like this dispelled all those nursy maternal instincts.

  ‘Jerval Sanders,’ said Tombs, turning to her the moment Grant disappeared out of sight amidst the flute grasses.

  ‘Jeremiah,’ she replied cautiously. ‘I was going to ask you why you were prepared to give your life for me, but now I see that wasn’t the case. How did you escape Ripple-John? How is it you’re alive?’

  Shut up Jerval, you’re babbling . . .

  ‘I knew I wasn’t going to die.’

  ‘Religious certainty?’

  ‘Via the intelligence here.’ He stamped his foot against the ceramal grating. ‘I called in some gabbleducks, which changed the odds, but I didn’t know I would be able to do that. What I did know was this: the Technician was within range, and it would not let me die. And then there’s this.’

  He moved, suddenly, abruptly crossed the three or four metres between them so fast it seemed some godlike power had edited the movement out of reality. Now he stood right next to her, reached out and pressed the palm of his hand against her face. It felt like hot metal.

  ‘I understand so much now.’ He smiled a boyish smile and at last she felt something stirring in her. She reached up, closed her hand over his and squeezed it, then lowered her hand. He took his away. Now much closer to him she could see that his eyes were bloodshot and broken blood vessels webbed his face. Had the recent blasts caused that?

  ‘Tell me what you understand.’

  ‘What the Technician did, all of what it did to me.’ He shook his head, grimaced. ‘Did you ever think to closely examine the full extent of the damage?’

  ‘Of course I did,’ she replied. ‘I repaired it . . . most of it.’

  ‘Certain muscle groups excised, certain nerve pathways, all of which you regrew. What you didn’t realize, as you regrew them on my body from my own tissue, was that you weren’t following the original blueprint. There were deep changes, but mostly so that my body could perform as required.’ He paused, looked distant for a moment. ‘Only now do I realize that if Grant hadn’t picked me up and you hadn’t repaired the damage I wouldn’t have died, but I wonder if I would have still been Human.’ He snapped his fingers, and just ten metres away the gabbleduck swung its head round and peered at him. ‘Speed and strength I at last understand. Ripple-John wasn’t going to kill me; the only question was whether he would survive me.’

  ‘So you’re Superman now?’

  ‘No, just a better vessel to contain what I hold within my skull, and a better mechanism to transfer it.’

  ‘Is there anything left of who you were?’

  ‘I might ask the same about you. How much of the Jerval Sanders of ten years ago do you retain, now?’

  ‘I think you know what I mean.’

  ‘All the memories are there, Jerval, and more. I’m Tombs but I’ve been changed by the world, just as we all are.’ He shrugged. ‘Admittedly the world has been more radical in its redesign of me.’

  The gabbleduck leaned forward, placing its claws on the floor, then casually plodded over. Sanders backed up, ready to run no matter what she had been told.

  ‘You finally returned my face to me, though I didn’t realize it at the time,’ Tombs said.

  ‘Then you cut it off again.’

  ‘Yes – Amistad and Penny Royal were manipulating me, but didn’t know that they had no say in the final outcome.’

  ‘Which is?’

  ‘You returned my face to me, regrew the nerves, muscle, everything, but never ventured any deeper than the duramater of my brain.’ He reached up and touched his face. Sanders saw something writhe under his fingertips, under the skin.

  ‘As I was instructed,’ she said.

  ‘I was scanned, scanned deeply?’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘What was found?’

  She stared at him, saw that his face looked grey, almost metallic, blotchy. The shadows here? ‘We found signs of surgical intervention, signs of the kind of connections a cerebral aug makes all throughout your brain.’ Sanders turned towards the gabbleduck as it halted and squatted nearby. ‘Remaining fibres even, both from your Dracocorp aug and, we believe, from the Technician itself. I wanted to remove them but was told that they seemed to be still connected,
rewiring your brain.’

  ‘That’s true, but if you’d removed them they would only have grown back.’ He paused, turned to gaze at the gabbleduck. ‘And once I drew the final pattern from a penny mollusc shell, completing the Atheter alphabet, finishing the countdown, they began to grow again. Now they are ready.’

  His face seemed to be moving as he stepped away from her, right over to the gabbleduck. She saw a trickle of blood run down from inside his ear. He shivered, groaned, and stepped even closer to the creature, its bill just a metre above his head. It bowed, hunched down and in, its bill pressing against his chest and its eyes only centimetres from his. Sanders stepped to one side to get a better view, horror and intellectual curiosity warring for predominance inside her.

  ‘Now,’ said Tombs.

  A white worm, narrow as a bootlace, sprouted from his cheek and writhed across to the gabbleduck. Its tip groped across the creature’s skull, found a purple scar just above one eye, straightened, opening that scar to reveal a bloodless slit, and its end writhed inside. Another broke from Tombs’s forehead, blood pulsing out at its base, then another from beside his mouth. He shrieked, his hands clamping round the creature’s claws, but it wasn’t clear whether he was trying to pull himself away or hold himself there. Even more of the things broke from his face and his shrieking continued until finally muffled by a great skein of these things extending from bloody ruin to the creature’s skull. Tombs writhed, took his hands away, but now the gabbleduck closed its claws around his chest.

  Sanders sank to her knees, curiosity gone, only horror remaining. Tombs was struggling now, stretching that skein taut. The things started breaking, pieces of them dropping away, writhing down the chest of the gabbleduck. Some disconnected from Tombs’s face to leave bloody holes, others detached from the gabbleduck’s skull, small Venus flytrap heads flapping weakly. Then a convulsion. The gabbleduck tossed Tombs away. He hit a pillar, high, then dropped leadenly to the ground and lay utterly still.

  Still eyeing the gabbleduck, which like a man shaving his skull now scythed away the last of those worms with one claw, Sanders stood and walked over to Tombs. She knelt beside him, turned him over so his head rested in her lap. He looked like he’d been shot in the face with a multi-pellet gun. Blood still leaked from the holes in his forehead but those in his lower face seemed to have closed. She carefully pulled out two remaining pieces of worm – they were like spaghetti now, lifeless – and tossed them away. After a moment, he opened his eyes.