Hilldiggers

by Neal Asher

  As abruptly as it came, his anger receded. He could easily have waited a little longer – those had been totally unnecessary deaths. Just like those of the crew aboard Stormfollower . . .

  ‘Platform Four has somehow managed to tilt itself to enable the deployment of its main weapons,’ Franorl warned him, his image taking over one of Harald’s screens, and his words banishing that brief moment of introspection.

  ‘Something like that was not unexpected,’ replied Harald. ‘Anyway, our tactics against this platform would only work once.’

  ‘So you are going to use . . . the weapon?’ enquired Franorl.

  Harald felt his suspicions confirmed by Franorl’s reserve. From what he could recollect and from what he had scanned in his own records, Franorl was less averse to causing mayhem than Harald himself, yet now this sudden reluctance? He gazed at the Captain and, while giving his orders, carefully gauged the man’s reactions.

  ‘Firing Control, bring main weapon capacitance up to full,’ Harald ordered. Then on general com he announced, ‘Shipwide alert, condition Aleph. This is Admiral Harald speaking. Prepare for gravity wave recoil. You know the drill since you have performed it many times. But this time it is for real.’

  As he came off general com, one of the officers in charge of internal ship’s logistics immediately came on instead. ‘All back-up reactors to standby mode. Suit for possible breach and run airlock integrity tests. Seal and crash-foam damaged areas. All rail transport and internal lifts will be locking down in twenty-four minutes from now. Engineering, prepare for main engine shutdown . . .’ and so it continued.

  Franorl bowed in acquiescence, and his image winked out.

  Firing the main weapon of a hilldigger, its gravity disruptor, was no simple task. Hugely destructive, it was also excessively dangerous for the one wielding it. There were other likely consequences as well. Once Fleet resorted to such weapons, it could well mean that Combine would deploy them too. Franorl’s recent reaction was probably indicative of how the other supposedly loyal Captains also felt. Harald now called up access to numerous programs on his screen. He had prepared the means for seizing control of those hilldiggers whose Captains seemed likely to rebel, and as necessary he had already done so. What his remaining ‘loyal’ Captains did not know was that he possessed similar access to the controls of their ships too.

  McCrooger

  While keeping their weapons trained on her, they injected Yishna with a sedative, using some type of gunlike syringe. Watching her carefully, I wondered if at the door the Worm had divined her intentions, and had slowed her down just enough. The sedative knocked her out within seconds, whereupon a female medic sealed her shoulder wound with a large gummy dressing, before she was loaded onto a floating gurney and towed away. The medic then moved on to Orduval, gazed frowning at the huge hole in his back, then gestured over one of his companions.

  ‘The morgue,’ she said, as she next propelled herself over to me.

  Without much ado Orduval went into a body bag, the basic design of which had not changed in a thousand years. The medic took rather more time over me since, as far as I knew, I had no catastrophic wounds. After a visual inspection – just turning me round in mid-air – she took out a hand-held scanner to check me over.

  ‘Quite strange-looking . . . almost deformed,’ commented one of the armed security personnel.

  ‘Actually, we are the deformed ones,’ replied the medic. ‘Apparently this is what our ancestors looked like.’ She peered at the readout from her scanner, grimaced and shook her head. ‘Though I’m guessing our ancestors weren’t composed like him internally. He’s got a Brumallian mutualite in there, and that’s the least strange thing about him.’

  Yeah, I certainly knew about the mutualite. Shutting down my heart and lungs had introduced a deathly quiet the last time I tried it. This time the reduction in the noise level allowed me to hear the glubbing and squelching of the beast inside me. I could also feel it moving, which was not a particularly pleasant sensation.

  ‘But he’s dead?’ suggested the man.

  ‘Well if he isn’t, he’s doing a very fine impersonation of a corpse,’ she quipped.

  ‘The morgue?’

  ‘No, he goes up to Bio-containment. There’s a casket there with his name on it.’

  While two others opened up a body bag for me, I observed, just past them, another suited figure clamping something that looked like a portable heater, with attached gas bottle, to nearby cagework. I couldn’t figure out what this thing was for until it made some stuttering gobbling sounds, as it sucked down free-floating droplets of blood and and stray gobbets of flesh. Clearing the air, no less. Then the body bag closed out any further view of my surroundings.

  ‘How come there’s already a casket for him?’ asked someone.

  ‘That was all worked out before he even arrived,’ replied the medic. ‘The intention was to keep a bio-containment casket on standby close to him at all times.’

  ‘Seems rather ghoulish.’

  ‘No, just good sense. No one wanted him to die, but if he did, we didn’t want to lose vital information. And his body is vital information.’

  Such a comforting thought, but at least it dispelled the slight worry I had that corpses might normally be expelled straight into vacuum.

  I guess they subsequently dragged me along through the cagework tube, since the bars would account for the jolts I kept receiving. They then sat me in one of the seats of the lift buggy, which began to ascend at half its previous acceleration. Next I was carried out into a grav section, loaded onto a gurney with squeaky wheels – a strangely primitive mode of transporting a body when you had access to anti-gravity, and perhaps indicative of how they had yet to fully understand the science behind that technology. Numerous crashings and bumpings later, I heard something like a vacuum-sealed door opening, then my gurney came to a halt.

  ‘Do you want him in there?’ someone asked.

  ‘No, out of the bag and on the slab,’ the medic replied.

  ‘Are you going to . . . you know?’ said the first speaker, suffixing his question with a slurping sound. I got a horrible vision of the gesture that had accompanied that sound: one representing the double-handed scooping of offal. Was she now preparing to do an autopsy? I hoped her heart was in good order, since it would need to be sound when I finally sat up and told her to put her scalpels away.

  The body bag parted right above me, giving me a view of a white ceiling with pairs of light bars inset – one bar producing white light and the other bacteria-killing ultraviolet. Cold air fingered my face and I felt my eyes starting to water in response. The medic woman leant over to peer down at me, and I very nearly shifted my eyes to look into hers. Until then there had been no twitches or ticks to give me away, but now I felt as if I was rising from a pool, and floating poised just at the surface. I sorely wanted to start my body running again. Perhaps some survival impetus was taking over, for maybe being too long in this state would render me unable to recover from it.

  ‘No, I’ll not start cutting him up just yet,’ said the woman. ‘Director Gneiss wants to take a look at him first.’

  ‘Hardly surprising that,’ said the other, ‘Gneiss taking an interest in alien corpses.’

  Laughter ensued and I listened to footsteps retreating, followed by the thump of a heavy door closing. For a moment I considered allowing my heart to beat normally and allowing my lungs to inhale. However, if this was a bio-containment area there might be sensors operating. I decided to bide my time and considered the fortuitousness of Director Gneiss coming to see me here, and meanwhile puzzled out how best to take advantage of the situation.

  We had failed to cause the containment breach that would have instigated the ejection protocol. Alone I would never be able to gain admittance to any of the Ozark Cylinders, and I doubted that Yishna, having just seen her brother die and herself taken a hit in the shoulder, would be of any help right now, even if I could track her down aboard this huge
station. Should I give it all up? No. What other routes could I try? I could try to convince Director Gneiss that the Worm was ultimately responsible for the present conflict, and ejecting it to awaiting destruction would bring an end to that conflict. Despite the fact that I was dead, my face twisted in a sneer, for I wasn’t entirely sure I believed my own reasoning. The offspring of Elsever Strone had believed, because they could feel the Worm inside their heads. I’m certain that Duras only partially believed, and that his reasoning, in allowing us to come up here on this half-baked mission, was that if the Polity Consul Assessor did something outrageous, that would raise the bargaining position of Sudoria when it came to future negotiations with the Polity. There was also the chance that I might be right, of course – a secondary consideration. From everything I understood about the man, Director Gneiss would believe absolutely nothing unless it was backed up by cold empirical fact. It was an admirable trait, but one I could do without him possessing now.

  Time passed, though I don’t know how much. I wondered if the human body clock was some kind of biological mechanism that counted the beats of the heart, and therefore in me had ceased to work properly because it had nothing to count, for my sense of time passing now seemed quite hazy. Eventually I heard the thump of the vacuum-sealed door opening.

  ‘You may return to your duties,’ said an implacably stern voice.

  The door closed and I thought I was alone again, until I heard a sigh followed by the slow approach of footsteps.

  Cold empirical fact?

  I sat bolt upright, my hand snaking under my foamite top, then emerging to offer Gneiss a cold empirical fact in the form of the handgun Duras had given me. I didn’t suppose anyone would get in trouble over my having retained it, since checking to see if a corpse is still armed might be considered rather anal.

  ‘You are now going to apply one of your Emergency Ozark Protocols,’ I informed the Director.

  He gazed at me with his weird eyes, then smiled a disconcertingly crazy smile.

  Harald

  He ran the display a couple of times, and felt a deep disquiet. The Brumallian ship must be the same one he had sent Captain Lambrack to destroy. Harald had received brief reports of contact and weapons fire, but nothing subsequently from Lambrack, who had disobeyed the order to destroy the launch site on Brumal and continued out into the system. Lambrack must have missed this ship, or more likely simply allowed it to go past unharmed. Somehow it then managed to reach the surface of Sudoria, where some Fleet spies reported Chairman Duras going aboard with security personnel, then departing a few hours later. Whereupon this ship launched from the planet’s surface, and approached Corisanthe Main, where an interstation shuttle left it to dock with the station itself. The ship had since disappeared, and Harald could only suppose it now lay within one of the blind spots of Fleet coverage. Why was it here and, most importantly, would it have any effect on his plans?

  Harald shut off the display and sat back for a moment. The appearance of this Brumallian ship should not have any effect on his original plans, since what happened next was all about firepower. He decided to dismiss the intruder from his consideration, and returned his attention to their present situation.

  Because the technology was so risky to use, Fleet did not run many tests of its gravity disruptors. The last such test Harald remembered was when he had been a mere apprentice in the Engine Galleries. But, then, maybe there had been other tests the memory of which the bullet had scoured from his mind.

  Readying the gravity disruptor for firing also created all sorts of strange effects throughout the ship. Infrasound and ultrasound spikes directly affected mood, so mock tests were conducted, producing similar sounds, and crew were instructed to practise interacting with each other without any emotional input. What these mock tests could not duplicate, however, was the sounds the ship made as huge forces began to distort the very fabric of space around it, and as the gravitic effects of that distortion began to twist and stretch the ship itself like a piece of bread dough.

  Numerous alarms began sounding, until an officer managed to shut them down, thereafter tracking the breaches and breaks on an electronic flow chart, and delivering instructions on what to do about them to the maintenance crews via his com helmet. Internal lights dimmed and in some places went out completely to be replaced by low-energy emergency lighting.

  ‘Begin your run to the cover point,’ Harald instructed Franorl, then watched Desert Wind accelerating away, its belly thruster stabbing down into atmosphere as the great ship laboured back up into vacuum.

  Defence Platform Four now lay just a few hundred miles ahead and above them and, rising over the curve of Sudoria, Corisanthe Main became just visible beyond it, picked out by the sun which now lay behind Ironfist itself. Some thousands of miles over to Harald’s left, still in planetary twilight, lay Corisanthe II, and when he turned a camera in that direction he could see flashes, as of an approaching thunderstorm, from the battle being fought between that station and the hilldiggers Harvester and Musket.

  ‘I will be reaching cover point in thirty minutes,’ Franorl informed him, by voice only. ‘The troops are ready for station insertion.’

  Harald nodded to himself, but carefully since his headache seemed to hang like a lead weight in the jelly of his brain. Via his eye-screen he accessed cameras located on railway platforms within Desert Wind, and there observed the first of 1,500 Fleet marines disembarking from the trains and heading for the lifts to take them down to the insertion craft crammed waiting in the docking bays. The men wore armoured spacesuits, carried disc carbines, grenade launchers and portable impact shields, and they were the reason Desert Wind had only played a minor role in the present orbital firefight. Harald had wanted to keep them safe and ready for the takeover of Corisanthe Main.

  He now tried dividing his eye-screen so as to view simultaneously the docking bay and the platform, but found, despite managing to divide his perception on one occasion since his injury, that he could not manage it now, as his eye just performed like an unenhanced one. Sudorian medical science had enabled him to get up and function again after such a serious injury, but he suspected his present problem might be due to damage to the enhancements rather than to himself. In irritation he flipped the eye-screen aside and abruptly stood up. Too abruptly, for dizziness assailed him and he needed to lean over and prop himself against a chair arm. After a moment the fit passed and, on shaky legs, he crossed the Bridge to climb the stairs.

  Once safely up in the Admiral’s Haven, Harald removed his com helmet and control glove, then headed for the ensuite facilities. After using the toilet he started to splash some water on his face, then realized that he had not washed properly for some time. Twenty-five minutes remained before the other ship was in position and it seemed unlikely anything unexpected could happen within that time. Deciding to take advantage of the interval, he quickly closed down the computer units within his foamite suit then reached inside to disconnect the interface plugs from the sockets grafted along his collar bone. He then quickly stripped off the suit and undersuit, and stepped into the shower. He cleaned carefully around the collar-bone sockets, soaped himself down, scrubbed the blood from his hair and, finally feeling refreshed, stepped from the shower booth and went to find a replacement suit. Once dressed again he felt so much better that he even began thinking he could tolerate his headache enough to forgo taking further drugs for a while. With his com helmet in place and control glove back on, he headed for the stair while flipping the eye-screen back across. The image he summoned first was to be an exterior view of Defence Platform Four as seen from Ironfist. But nothing appeared. He began to run a diagnostic program to give him an audio report, then noticed from his left eye that the eye-screen was showing something after all. Puzzled, he removed the helmet, carefully keeping a finger on the automatic cutoff switch so that the helmet remained functional. Now he could see clearly that the screen was showing precisely the scene he had requested.

  Blin
d?

  Placing a hand over his left eye, he could still see everything from his right eye, including the screen image, but as he moved that screen closer, things started to get a bit strange at about a foot and a half from his face. Much of the helmet was simply no longer visible. Moving it closer, more and more of it disappeared from view, including the screen itself, and even the hand holding the helmet. The enhanced vision of his right eye was no longer registering anything that came within a certain range of it, which he recognized as both a hardware and an organic failure. This sudden knowledge jerked him to a halt, his mouth suddenly dry. Then came that uncontrolled surge of anger and he hurled the helmet away from him. Gasping, he staggered to a nearby seat where, seemingly without his conscious intervention, his hands sought out the containers on his utility belt. Two painkillers went into his mouth, after a hesitation followed by a third. He loaded syringes with the other drugs, and injected them into an arm that was now quite tender. He then sat and just stared, his mind seemingly on hold.

  ‘Admiral?’ asked a nervous-looking subaltern from the top of the stairs leading up from the Bridge. ‘I’m sorry to disturb you, sir, but Captain Franorl has reported that he is now in position.’

  Harald abruptly pushed himself to his feet. Where had the time gone? Another mental organic failure?

  He waved the subaltern away and strode over to pick up his com helmet. He removed the earpiece and microphone, discarding the helmet itself as he headed for the stair, but snatching up his control glove on the way. Down on the Bridge, he moved with apparent decisiveness over to the Admiral’s chair and sat down.

  ‘Disruptor status?’ he demanded, using the control glove to transfer his visual com helmet functions to one of the screens ranged before him.