The Technician

by Neal Asher

  ‘Going for the facial reconstruction record?’ she asked, relieved he still lived.

  ‘It’s my face now,’ he said obscurely.

  Sanders looked up at the gabbleduck now, and it returned her gaze. Its eyes gleamed and it seemed tauter somehow. It raised one claw, studied it while flexing the talons, then did something that shouldn’t have been possible for a creature with a hard ducklike bill. The gabbleduck grinned.

  No, Sanders realized, the Atheter grinned.

  ‘We go in,’ said Janice and Cheops simultaneously, neither a question nor an order, but a statement of fact from both of them.

  They had spent so long on that area of the Polity Line where they were the most dangerous thing anyone was likely to encounter, and the reality of the ultimate extent of their remit had been a vague thing, something acknowledged but unlikely. Their job was to defend the Polity, and here was something it certainly needed defending against. Together, they were a warship, and in the face of a dangerous enemy they were the line that must not be crossed.

  The ship’s engines ramped up their power, every weapons system not already online, coming online. Masers cut through the intervening gap from them to the mechanism, selected spectrum lasers probed for weaknesses. Missile carousels turned and loaded continent cracking rounds into the rail-gun magazines. EM bands swelled with every form of viral warfare the Cheops contained.

  Janice sometimes wondered just how much her interfacing with Cheops suppressed her Human self. Without that connection would she be prepared to throw herself into battle like this? Without their close mutualistic link would she be prepared to do her duty, up to and including dying for it? As lasers just reflected away and the point temperature of the masers just dispersed in the massive object ahead, she began preparing for the ultimate: ramming, and simultaneous detonation of all internal reactors.

  ‘Viral warfare feed?’ both she and Cheops enquired.

  ‘Some, but it seems it was ready for this,’ they both replied.

  Ten thousand kilometres, eight thousand. Janice felt an utter calm suffuse her. Yes, she was prepared to do this.

  ‘Firing.’

  Angry wasps departing their hive, CTDs railed out, speed cut because massive acceleration could lead to containment breach. They sped towards their target; five-ton steel sharks. Something flashed out. Gravity weapon. The Cheops bucked as if slamming through a wall of stone half a mile thick. It’s superstructure buckled and twisted, walls ruptured and atmosphere spewed out through hundred-metre splits in the hull. The U-space engines ruptured, sprayed out pseudo-matter and half-real components like alien rainbows. The fusion drives burned dirty for half a second as their magnetic bottles failed, ate out the face of the pyramid that contained them, guttered out.

  Forty-eight missiles detonated; a massive multiple blast spreading atomic fire across thirty thousand cubic kilometres of vacuum. A wall of fire slammed into Cheops, ablating away hull, burning through inside to melt and slag so much that very few systems remained available. However, some sensors were still available as Cheops spun a new face towards Calypse. Janice felt a moment’s joy seeing five remaining missiles still on course. Then the mechanism stretched, became a line reaching up past her, in towards Masada, snapped out of existence here and reappeared a million kilometres behind. The missiles continued on down into the face of Calypse. They didn’t detonate; their target was gone.

  We will follow you down, Janice thought, but Cheops negated that. The gravity wave and subsequent blast had shoved them off course. They would slingshot around Calypse, that was all.

  She wasn’t going to die, not just then, but having prepared for it she felt a deep gnawing disappointment and almost unconsciously reached towards the ship’s self-destruct. Cheops relieved her of control like an adult taking a sharp knife out of a child’s hand.

  ‘We did what we could,’ the AI told her. Janice lay in her sarcophagus, wanted to cry, but found she couldn’t.

  Amistad detached optic links and leapt out into vacuum. Frustration passed in a microsecond to leave cool calculation. He had to accept that the geostat weapon was about as much use to him as a machine gun against an approaching battle tank.

  ‘You might be able to use this,’ he said, surrendering control of the weapon to the planetary AI.

  ‘Thanks,’ Ergatis replied, once again swinging the weapon round towards the planet where, even now, a further five of those bell-shaped disruptors were materializing.

  ‘Penny Royal, what’s your position?’ Amistad enquired.

  ‘Passing through barrier,’ the black AI replied.

  Here, in this planetary system, they did not have the resources to physically defeat the mechanism. They were in serious trouble, there was absolutely no doubt about that. The mechanism had rolled over Scold and Cheops with consummate ease, and now it was here.

  Amistad experienced a weird moment of bewilderment. Earth Central had seen the data provided by Cheops and by the haiman Drode and yet had seriously underestimated what they were up against. Then again, Amistad had seen the same data and considered a warship like Scold more than adequate. So much for the omniscience of AIs. He shook himself internally, switched more to memory and experience rather than reliance on new processing power, and rediscovered cynicism. Frankly, as a veteran of the Prador–Human war, Amistad knew that mistakes like this weren’t that uncommon. And he now began to try and find some new solution. Perhaps it could be provided by what resided in that armoured sphere anchored to a plate of ancient coral underneath the southern ocean?

  ‘Do you have anything for me?’ Amistad asked Penny Royal.

  ‘Atheter AI interacting with Tombs, but it has shut down access to all sensors in the area. Technician inside the barrier. Unusual wildlife activity. Nothing else.’

  ‘I will be going dark for a while, do not be concerned.’

  ‘Why?’

  ‘Informational warfare up here,’ Amistad lied.

  He shut down all connections with Penny Royal, shut down other communication channels from himself to other intelligences, even physically disconnecting some of them. All he left himself was his U-space transmitter, and allowed only one channel to open in that when he sent a heavily encrypted signal.

  Activation and contact, and Amistad flowed into Eight’s realm, the door firmly closed behind. The virtuality had changed. Amistad now seemed to be standing in a snow-swept landscape, white and clean and, with its lack of the imagery of torment, utterly unlike anything Eight had provided before.

  ‘I like what you’ve done with the place,’ the drone said.

  A gust of wind cleared powdery snow to reveal Eight’s reply: Humans up to their necks in ice, trying to scream but only gusting snowflakes from their mouths. These streams of flakes began melding into one single stream which began circling the drone – a visual representation of the expected attack.

  ‘I’ve no time for this,’ said Amistad. ‘I want everything you have on the mechanism. I will take it now.’

  The swirling storm stuttered and broke apart in the air, went into reverse to coagulate into a single thick column of snow that entered the mouth of just one of the victims below. Amistad concentrated on this one, watched its head bloat grotesquely and the ice about it begin cracking. A fist smashed upwards, then reached over, sausage fingers splaying, and a giant of a man with the physique of a sumo wrestler and blue skin webbed with purple veins began to clamber out. Icicles extended from this giant’s eyes as he finally reached the surface and began to stalk towards Amistad.

  The drone prepared isolated storage within himself, put all his internal defences on full alert and turned the new upgraded power of his mind towards bolstering those defences and making them more reactive. Perhaps now he could handle anything Eight might throw at him.

  The figure walked right up close, its head level with Amis-tad’s own, and the icicles extended further until they finally touched the drone’s own eyes. Here a representation of the upload channels, waiting for per
mission to connect. If Amistad allowed this now there was a chance that something might escape from here; that all his work with Penny Royal might be undone. But this eighth state of consciousness seemed to know some way to defeat the mechanism, and for that Amistad had to take the risk. He allowed contact.

  An icy storm of information flowed in, filling up three secure storage crystals. Amistad allowed it to continue whilst important facts could be gleaned from it, fully aware that much of it formed a viral attack. In the first few microseconds the drone learnt about the battle between Penny Royal and the mechanism, but he needed more data about the thing itself, how it functioned, what weaknesses it possessed.

  There were few. It soon became evident that the mechanism contained warfare technology far in advance of much in the Polity and, through its underspace links, almost limitless resources. Then, at the last, Amistad saw it: the off button.

  Swinging out one claw, Amistad smashed the humanoid away to send it tumbling across the ice. On an informational level he closed all access, let nothing more in. However, already he felt like he had swallowed a dose of poison. He backed away in a direction Eight could not see, departed, once again slamming the door closed behind him.

  Floating free in space, Amistad fought the viral attack propagating from his secure storage. He now possessed vital information about how the mechanism could be stopped, but to communicate that information to any other entity right now would be a kiss from a diseased mouth. Internally, he directed an ultrasound beam weapon, smashing one of the three storage crystals. A mistake, because a fraction of a second before everything in that crystal broke down, along with its structure, the breaking process itself first cracked the crystal’s security. Programs like armoured bacteria in turn laden with all sorts of nasty viruses spread through the drone, dumping their loads to shut off all the internal ultrasound cleaners and then going on to work on other internal defences. Before they could go too far, Amistad managed to physically eject a second crystal through a skin port, and hit it with a laser, turning it to a micalike glitter in vacuum.

  The third crystal became more of a problem as a virus took away his ability to eject internal components. Within just a few seconds the programs from Eight had control of nearly a quarter of his systems and were getting mighty close to breaking through to his core mind. As he fought against this, he now noted something odd, some kind of networked program forming. Trying to understand the shape of this, and the intention, Amistad did not see it until too late. Data aligned, seized internal physical components and did their work, rerouting one optic and making a connection with it between the remaining crystal and the drone’s U-space transmitter.

  The crystal emptied, transmitting all its contents which, almost certainly, would find their way to Penny Royal. No need now to eject or destroy the crystal, but the internal battle was by no means over. The viral attack began to mutate and Amistad knew at once that he would not be contacting the outside world for some time yet. Annoying, that. He now understood that others knew about the mechanism’s off-button and were doing something about it, but he couldn’t warn them that a previous ally might shortly turn into a dangerous AI psychopath. And the final irony was that with his processing power, his intelligence, back down to what it had been before, he had the answers he had been seeking.

  19

  When the Polity seizes control of a new world, it usually does so because it has been asked to by 80 per cent of the population – a majority that would have been the envy of past Human democracies. However, that majority is only attained over an open-ended voting period usually culminating when things are so bad on the world concerned that the population feel that anything would be better – usually in the middle of catastrophe, often natural but more often man-made. Polity intervention forces normally turn up when some bitter war has obliterated infrastructure and is turning genocidal. The moment the AIs take over, they institute the amnesty. They want a clean slate, a new beginning, are not interested in what went before or in war crimes trials, since at the point of intervention where to attribute blame has become murky indeed. However, many historians have questioned the very loose enforcement of Polity law in the years directly after intervention, and noted how the worst of those who would have been defined as war criminals in some previous age tend to end up in a body bag, despite the protection the amnesty is supposed to afford them.

  – From a speech by Jobsworth

  As he entered the stand of flute grasses Grant realized his mistake and threw himself abruptly to one side. A series of shots tracked across where he had been standing, grasses briefly flaring and smoking stems falling. Lying on the ground he winced, pressing a hand against his ribs, the pain concentrating his attention, reminding of the old days. He drew his disc gun, checked its action, but didn’t return fire. He waited, gave it a good minute, then smiled to himself when he heard grasses rustling ahead and over to his left. Shree seemed impatient to get away. In the old days she would have waited a lot longer.

  Grant slowly rose up into a crouch, then began making his way forward as quietly as possible, carefully pushing stems aside and ensuring they didn’t noisily spring back once he was past. This slow and laborious process had prolonged his survival in the past during numerous encounters with Theocracy soldiers and proctors. However, when he heard the flat cracking of a thin-gun some distance ahead he knew it was time to move fast rather than quietly.

  He began pushing hard, head low, forearms brushing the grasses aside. Spilling out into a channel between stands he checked to his right and saw footprints then, seeing a heroyne step out only thirty metres further up the channel, gunshot wounds evident on its armchair-shaped body, he leapt the channel and forged ahead. He knew that Shree had always loathed the things, but against all logic and sense she must have fired on this one. Her recent failure must have seriously knocked her out of whack to allow her to do something so stupid.

  If a heroyne got over-excited it would certainly eat a Human being, but its senses weren’t those of a siluroyne or gabbleduck, since it detected its usual prey of mud snakes by feeling their subterranean movement through its feet – it was possible to avoid a heroyne’s attention by just keeping very still. However, just as with those other predators, if you pissed off a heroyne it could become viciously persistent, kicking over every bit of grass in the area in its search for you. But then perhaps he misjudged Shree, perhaps the creature was already over-excited by the events here and she had inadvertently stumbled straight into it.

  ‘Hey, Shree!’ Grant called. ‘Why’re you upsetting the local wildlife?’

  ‘You keep coming after me, Grant, and you’re dead.’ Shree replied. ‘You’re slow and you’ve forgotten how to do this.’

  Some of the flute grasses ahead had been flattened, the rest were islands of tangled broken stems. Working his way through one of these he began to notice heaped drifts of stems and occasional chunks of torn-up rhizome. She was heading towards where that thing had been knocked out of the sky and, if she kept going, would end up in an area where the grasses had been either completely flattened or scoured away. That would put her in the open. All he had to do was ensure he stayed behind her, which shouldn’t be too difficult since she was leaving a perfectly visible trail. Abruptly realizing how very visible that trail was, he halted at the edge of a clearing where flute grasses had been flattened in a spiral, probably by a small whirlwind, and squatted down.

  What would he have done in her situation? Of course, she was right, he had been slow. She would have looped back towards her own trail, and lain in wait for him. He moved off to his right because, of course, the area ahead was perfect ambush territory. Slowly circumventing the clearing, ten metres into the grasses, he tried to find her trail. Fifty-fifty chance – she could have looped round to the other side. He paused, decided to take a risk.

  ‘I’m trying to save your life, Shree!’ he called. ‘Either I retrieve that cylinder from you or the Technician does it – your choice.’

&nb
sp; ‘Generous of you,’ she said from close by.

  Grant threw himself for cover, heard the crack of her thin-gun, then felt an impact against his thigh. He hit the ground wrong, pain jabbing from his ribs, rolled and snap-shot behind him. He came up, dragging his leg, tried to locate her. He did so by her gun’s flash, the second shot slamming into his shoulder and spinning him.

  ‘Toss your gun away or my next shot will be through your head,’ she said, much closer now.

  He peered behind him. She stood five metres back, weapon held steady with both hands. He did not doubt she meant what she was saying. He tossed his gun and turned, pain lancing through his shoulder, his right leg feeling like dead weight.

  ‘So you’ve got me, Shree, but that don’t change your situation at all.’ He heaved himself up into a sitting position. ‘You’ve got days of walking to get anywhere you can get hold of faster transport, and the Technician is out here, ready for you.’

  ‘So you say,’ was all she could manage, but she looked scared.

  ‘Give it up, Shree,’ he said. ‘Give me the cylinder and you can run – I won’t come after you.’ He gestured down at his leg, which was really starting to hurt now. ‘I can’t come after you.’

  She took one hand away from her weapon, reached inside her coat, took out the cylinder and held it up. ‘This? How about if I just toss it out here somewhere?’

  ‘Tombs seemed pretty confident. I’d say the Technician’s got some way of detecting it, which again is why I say just give it to me and run. You saw that thing in the sky. Do you think this is only about—’