Hilldiggers

by Neal Asher

  Yishna shook her head as if dispelling idiocy. ‘I can record bleed-over now – not telepathic inductance after all, but some inductance phenomena related to underspace.’ She was now fidgeting, as if bored with this conversation.

  ‘Which the Polity would know all about, of course. It is a shame that David McCrooger is now dead, for he could perhaps have helped you in many ways.’

  ‘Yes, a shame.’

  Harald continued, ‘However, I rather suspect that David McCrooger is not the Polity’s only envoy here within our system, and for my purposes I would rather there were none here at all.’

  ‘Your purposes?’

  ‘Yishna, much as it’s pleasant to chat to you, perhaps we can take this up later?’

  ‘What are your purposes, Harald?’

  ‘I am not at liberty to discuss Fleet matters with someone so high up in Orbital Combine, sister.’

  ‘Would that I could believe “your purposes” concern only Fleet.’ Yishna put aside her cup and stood. ‘We should discuss this further.’

  ‘Yes, perhaps later.’

  Yishna glanced at his coms helmet and glove, then turned and departed.

  Harald sat for a long moment with the polished wheels of his mind turning. Some input in the recent conversation had changed his attitude to McCrooger, but that did not alter his overall plan, and his feeling that the Consul Assessor was best out of the way, permanently. He stood and went to retrieve his helmet and glove, donning them almost with relief. Opening a com channel he waited. After a moment a woman’s face peered at him from his eye-screen – cropped grey hair and bitter mouth, and a thin face deeply grooved with lines and a permanent look of disapproval. He rather suspected her sour mien was due to years of fighting her way up through a patriarchal organization.

  ‘Jeon,’ he acknowledged. ‘Update?’

  She glanced at something to one side then said, ‘I am still analysing the data. The trace separated on the surface – one part of it remaining inland, and the other travelling fast over land and sea to the escape-pod, then back again.’

  ‘So there is either one conjoined object or two separate objects that have remained together until now?’

  She nodded. ‘So it would seem. It also strikes me as likely that, whatever it is, it rescued the Consul Assessor.’

  Harald sat back. ‘I will ask Special Operations on Brumal to . . . solve that problem. They will enjoy the challenge. But that is irrelevant for my purposes right now. If the Polity is interventionist, it seems this unknown object is the greatest danger to us. You have detected nothing else?’

  ‘Nothing so far, but that’s not to say there’s nothing more here. It was pure luck that we picked up on this thing – luck and the application of some recent research results from Corisanthe Main.’

  ‘I must work on the assumption that there is only this one . . . maybe two.’ Harald grimaced – he did not like making assumptions. ‘You’re still tracking?’

  ‘The trace is sitting five hundred miles above the Recon York, holding station there.’

  ‘Very well, Jeon. I want you to prepare a five-megaton warhead – fully shielded and EM hardened – for simple contact detonation, and allowing coded detonation from here.’ Jeon frowned her puzzlement, and he explained, ‘There will be a retaliatory strike made against the Brumallians for their attack on Inigis’s ship. We will then see if the Polity is prepared to intervene, and perhaps we can remove their ability to do so.’

  ‘I see.’

  ‘Let me know when you’re ready. The missile is to go into Silo Fourteen.’

  Harald cut their communication and opened another channel. After a moment, a man gazed out at him.

  ‘Captain Franorl, you will shortly be receiving instructions, through the usual channels, to replace Dravenik on Corisanthe Watch,’ said Harald.

  ‘To whom do I owe this honour?’

  ‘To me, as always.’

  ‘I see.’

  ‘As per the agreement between Orbital Combine and Fleet, Combine observers will be sent over to your ship while you are on station watching Corisanthe Main. You are to know where they are at all times, because at a certain time they will attempt to sabotage the Desert Wind.’

  ‘If we’ve evidence of this, why can’t I just throw them in the brig?’

  ‘You misapprehend me. They will all be killed while making this sabotage attempt, and therefore no evidence will be required. Suspecting attack from Combine, you will then move your ship out of range of Corisanthe Main’s armament.’

  Franorl smiled. ‘At last.’

  ‘Out.’ Harald cut that connection and quickly made a new one. After a short delay a different male face gazed at him from the screen. ‘Captain Dravenik, you will shortly be replaced on Corisanthe Watch by Captain Franorl on Desert Wind.’

  ‘This is from the Admiral?’ Dravenik asked suspiciously.

  ‘It is. You will also be receiving orders to position yourself just out from Planetary Defence Platform One. It seems we may be having a little bit of a problem with Combine.’

  ‘The nature of this problem?’

  ‘It would appear there may be some connection between the Brumallian missile strike on Inigis’s vessel and certain factions operating in Orbital Combine. We have yet to obtain clear proof of this, however.’

  ‘Combine and Brumallians collaborating?’ said the Captain disbelievingly.

  ‘Unlikely, I agree,’ said Harald. ‘It seems more likely to me that these factions in Combine deliberately tried to implicate the Brumallians so we would be distracted.’

  ‘Why would Combine want to take down the ship transporting the Consul Assessor?’

  ‘Factions within Combine, Dravenik.’

  ‘This is all very well,’ said Dravenik, ‘but I’d get all that through the usual channels. Why are you contacting me privately like this?’

  ‘I have a favour to ask of you.’

  ‘Oh really.’

  ‘Attempting to keep the peace, the Admiral will order you to hold station there, but to keep your weapons systems offline. I am not entirely sure if he understands the seriousness of the situation. I am not entirely sure if I do either, so I want you to keep your weapons systems online.’

  ‘Provocative.’

  ‘Yes, but not sufficiently so to cause an incident, unless an incident is what Combine wants. Should such circumstances arise I would rather you were ready.’

  Dravenik paused for a moment, before replying, ‘I’ll consider your request.’ His image blinked out.

  Harald sat back. Dravenik, whose dislike of Harald never wavered, would now assume Harald was trying to undermine his position as the senior candidate to replace Carnasus. The Admiral would never order him to take his weapons systems offline, though that was standard peacetime practice, but would leave that decision to Dravenik. The Captain, however, would most certainly keep those weapons offline now simply because Harald asked him not to. Dravenik would still be able to respond to an attack, but only belatedly. Fleet needed substantial motivation to turn on Orbital Combine, and Dravenik would soon be providing it.

  – RETROACT 11 –

  Orduval – in the Desert

  The moment Orduval woke he felt reduced – honed down to a smaller point in existence. With his body comfortable and warm, he dared not move for fear of stirring pain. Gradually he became aware that his head rested gently on padded fabric, and daring to turn it he eventually focused his blurred vision on a large water chiller standing beside him – precisely the sort found inside municipal buildings. Then, inspecting his close surroundings, he realized his head was resting on the pillow of an inflatable mattress and that he was lying naked in a sleeping bag. Still he dared not move excessively, knowing that, no matter what drugs his rescuer had pumped inside him, the compound fracture of his leg was going to hurt.

  ‘You’re safe now, Orduval,’ said a voice nearby.

  Immediately analysing that voice, he found it scared him badly. He detected a dearth of
humanity behind it, like something heard from a voice synthesizer. Slowly now, he drew one hand up out of the sleeping bag and inspected it. It was bruised but hurt surprisingly little. His rescuer had relocated his fingers, so perhaps had also set his leg?

  As he slowly pulled himself upright, more of the interior of the cave became visible to him. On a canvas sheet laid on the ground nearby rested an assortment of packaged foods, a solar-power store and cooker, some medical supplies and a stack of clothing. With his vision clearing properly, it seemed to Orduval as if all these objects became more real to him, more substantial than anything he had ever seen before. With a sudden panic he recognized the clothing as some of his own he had left behind in the hospital.

  He looked round for the speaker. ‘Where are you?’

  ‘Outside the cave at the moment – well, mostly. Why don’t you get dressed and come and join me?’

  Orduval paused a long moment, then ran a finger down the stick-seam of the sleeping bag and peeled it open. He then inspected himself more fully.

  His bony frame felt tender, bruised, but he could see no open cuts or grazes. When last he saw it, bits of shattered bone protruded from his leg, but now the dark skin was pristine, without even a scar. He swung both legs to the side and cautiously stood up. He still ached, all over, even the crown of his head. With care he stepped over to the water chiller, found a cup hanging on the side, and filled and drained it three times, before turning to his clothing.

  Definitely from the hospital, for he recognized the tabard his grandmother Utrain bought him years ago, also the hospital-issue undergarments and his loose trousers and cotton shirt. His desert boots resting beside these garments were the same ones he wore in getting out here, yet he distinctly remembered the right one having been split. Picking it up he tried to find a mend, but it was as invisible as the repairs made to his body. Glancing round, he then observed his old clothing piled over by the wall, bloody, ripped and filthy. He dressed in the new.

  Upon first waking he had supposed some desert Samaritan had rescued him, but factoring in the renewed state of his body, those intact boots and a fuzzy recollection of something significant before he had lost consciousness, he knew this situation to be abnormal. Once dressed, he rummaged through the food supply until he found several bars of compressed fruit and jerky, two of which he gobbled swiftly, taking his time over a third. Despite the bruising, he decided he had not felt so good in a long time, and it was then he realized that his body must be clear of the anti-convulsives. He decided to just enjoy the moment – until the next fit struck him – and stepped outside the cave.

  The midday sun had heated the surrounding rocks to oven temperature – warm enough to fry meat and boil water. An arid breeze blew and dust misted the horizon. Orduval studied the object at the edge of the small clearing before the cave, and recognized the basic shape of one of the big cats of Earth, though which genus he could not guess. It was fashioned of silver metal and utterly still, so logically had to be some kind of statue placed here by his rescuer, and his earlier vision just another hallucination. This logic shattered as the statue turned, jointless as mercury, and regarded him with amber feline eyes.

  ‘I projected a pretty picture that finally lured the searchers to find and save the kid who fell through into an abandoned skirl nest,’ it announced suddenly. ‘No problems there, and the only minus point being the mother getting infected with religion – she thought the images had been sent by the Shadowman. No one saw me, either, when I holed a water tank to put out a fire in a burning building in Transit, or when I pushed a foundering shrimp boat ashore on Brumal.’

  Orduval suppressed his abrupt fear and odd feeling of dislocated loss. This . . . thing just did not fit into his perception of reality. However, here it was, so his perception of reality must be wrong.

  ‘Was that building you mentioned the Sunlight Tower?’ he ventured. ‘They said it was lucky the water all poured down the correct lift shaft, and that it was surprising so small a quantity put out the fire.’

  The cat shrugged. ‘I squirted in fire-retardant gas as well, and it broke down into base gases before the investigators got to work. Anyway, those are three examples of how I occupy my time here, within this system, whenever I’ve got the time to spare, of course. But you, Orduval—’

  ‘What are you?’

  ‘Me – I’m Tigger.’

  Orduval tasted the name, ran it through the processor that was his brain, checking the ancient languages he knew. ‘Like . . . tiger. You’re a tiger?’

  ‘Not exactly,’ Tigger replied.

  ‘Well, you appear to be made of metal.’

  ‘Yup, cell-form and pliant,’ said the tiger proudly.

  ‘You still haven’t answered my question. I want to know –’ Orduval froze, blankness occupying his mind, though he retained an awareness of time. Minutes passed, but he felt disconnected enough from them to not become too concerned ‘– what you are.’ His body ached and slowly his muscles unlocked. The scene had changed. Tigger was now right in front of him.

  ‘Yes,’ said Tigger, ‘there’ll be no more falling off mountains for you, which is, I have to say, a pretty unhealthy occupation – nor anti-convulsives either. I placed a block to stop the clonus, so the fits will eventually fade. I’ve got to admit I can’t yet figure out what’s causing them.’

  Orduval felt his legs grow weak and shaky, and he slowly sank down until he was sitting in the dust. ‘What are you?’

  ‘You’re a bright spark, Orduval, just like your brother and your sisters. Let me ask you this: do you think that after you lot left it, Earth just ceased to be?’

  No more anti-convulsives.

  Orduval clamped down on his feelings and tried to understand more clearly what he had just been told. Really, he should have fathomed this being’s source once it gave him its name. ‘You are a technological product of the human race . . . from Earth.’

  ‘Close enough.’

  Orduval narrowed his eyes, stared at the cat, and made an abrupt reassessment. ‘You’re a product of a product.’

  ‘Startlingly fast.’

  ‘Does humanity still exist?’

  ‘Now you’re getting ahead of yourself. Yes, humanity, in all its wonderful and sometimes repulsive variety, still exists and has spread throughout many star systems, and will soon be coming here.’

  Orduval began to feel bolder. He stood up. ‘And do humans tell you what to do?’

  ‘Sometimes they do, though not very often. Generally, the machines rule the Polity. We’re better at it.’

  ‘Polity?’

  ‘Empire, dominion . . . call it what you will.’

  ‘Why do you bother to rule?’

  Again that tiger shrug. ‘Why not?’

  Orduval closed his eyes. He could feel himself absorbing this new data and placing it on hold, ready to apply it to the huge body of knowledge resting in his narrow skull, before making massive reassessments. He replayed the conversation thus far, then asked, ‘Why am I different? You inferred that rescuing me was a different matter from rescuing all those others.’

  ‘I was instructed not to reveal myself or to interfere here. I’ve been ignoring that order and until now got away with it. You were one of four people – you can guess who the others are – I decided to watch very closely. You would have died here, either quickly from exposure or your injuries, or later from your fits. My intervention will be discovered, though perhaps not for some time.’

  ‘You did not need to actually show yourself to me. I’m sure you could have anonymously engineered a scenario similar to the others.’

  ‘Similar, maybe. But then there were those fits . . .’

  ‘What about them?’

  ‘Well, I interfered a bit more than can be covered.’ Tigger looked to one side, exposing his teeth, then turned back to centre his gaze on Orduval again. ‘Your problem was interesting to neurologists on Sudoria, in the Orbital Combine stations and in Fleet – mainly because of the not
oriety of your three siblings. No engineered scenario would prevent those neurologists getting a bit uptight after seeing the first scan made of your brain after your return home.’

  ‘That block you put in?’

  ‘More than that.’

  ‘You’ve done something else?’

  ‘Where’s your star, Orduval?’

  Looking inward, Orduval felt his mind was closed like a fist. The white star, that point at the centre of his being, seemed now to be missing.

  Tigger continued, ‘I made surgical alterations – very small ones. I’ve stuck a device in your skull that shifts the balance of your neurochemicals closer to that possessed by your brother Harald. From this device a mycelium is growing which will finally complete the job. I designed it all myself.’

  Orduval felt an instinctive urge to protest, but immediately rejected it. He held no love for experiencing the alternative to what this entity had done to him.

  ‘So what now, you’re going to keep me prisoner?’

  ‘No, you can bugger off if you want, and we won’t meet again for some years.’

  Orduval knew he could not walk away from all this, so wondered just how well this entity knew the workings of his mind. The questions were building up inside him, like the preparatory quakes before a volcanic eruption. ‘What do you want me to do, then?’

  ‘I want them to think you dead. If you like I can give you a new identity, though I’d have to give you a new face too.’

  Orduval smiled at the metal tiger and gestured back towards the cave mouth. ‘If you can continue to provide for my more prosaic needs, Tigger, I will be happy to stay here for now.’

  The cat grinned back.

  – Retroact 11 Ends –

  7

  After the first two generations of Sudorian pioneers, the technology for tank-growing human beings was still in use, but with an increasing lack of expertise in that area and a dearth of resources it became a risky affair, with a less than fifty per cent chance of success. We needed people, though, for without a certain population density the establishing of many of the basic requirements of civilization becomes impossible. In those early years women were applauded for their contribution to society as mothers. There was no real marriage at the time, though casual partnerships were formed and, continuing with the system used for the tank grown, children were communally raised in crèches, whilst the mothers went back to work and to further pregnancy. Inevitably patriarchalism raised its ugly head and things began to change. The first such change was when the Planetary Council made abortion illegal. The second change was when the Orchid Party – highly patriarchal from the beginning – and the growing representation of the Sand Churches attempted to extend the law further to prohibit contraception. For eighty years women were incrementally and increasingly restricted by new laws and amendments to existing ones. It was only during the War, with the formation of the Woman’s League and its landmark inclusion in Parliament, that this trend was reversed. However, patriarchalism is still prevalent, mostly among the personnel of Fleet.