Hilldiggers

by Neal Asher

  As she reached the end of the tunnel Yishna began to feel the effects of gravity. A door opened ahead of her, and she spied a Fleet marine peering towards her down the sight of a disc carbine. He kept her on target as she approached, then finally withdrew to let her pass through. Yishna stepped out into a semi-circular steel lobby before a bank of lifts. Three marines awaited her there, along with one Fleet officer – a grey-haired woman with razor eyes.

  ‘Yishna Strone,’ said the old woman.

  ‘Yes, that would be me,’ Yishna replied, tired and irritable. ‘And you are?’

  ‘Com-res Jeon.’

  Com-res? Harald had sent a research officer to collect her?

  ‘I am afraid it will be necessary for you to be thoroughly searched,’ Jeon added.

  ‘Really? I’ve been searched once before by Fleet personnel and I cannot say I enjoyed the experience. Will this search also include an exploration of my more intimate cavities, followed by a beating?’

  The older woman looked genuinely insulted at this. ‘Fleet personnel would never—’

  ‘Spare me the platitudes.’ Yishna began trying to remove her spacesuit, and when, because of her damaged shoulder, it became evident she was having difficulties, one of the marines stepped forward to assist. He was young and good-looking, so she gave him a special smile and watched him blush. Once down to her usual clothing, she quickly retrieved her baton from the spacesuit’s belt cache, then turned to Jeon. ‘Do I need to take off any more?’

  ‘That will be enough,’ the woman replied. She nodded to the same young marine, who did a quick touch search of Yishna, then stepped back.

  ‘Now can I see my brother?’ Yishna asked.

  Two marines remained behind to guard the access to her shuttle – why, she had no idea, since the small craft would have been intensively scanned on its way in, and they would have discovered there was no one else aboard. Accompanying Jeon and the young marine, she entered a lift that shortly deposited them on a platform right beside one of the hilldigger’s internal trains. As they entered the vehicle Yishna gazed about at the vast internal space and the massive machinery surrounding her. She briefly speculated on the psychological effect on Fleet personnel of being enclosed in so massive a war machine. Then she dismissed such idle speculation. She was tired, her shoulder hurt, and she urgently needed to acquaint her brother with some unpalatable truths.

  A short, high-acceleration train ride brought them to another platform, then another lift, then more corridors. Hard metal all around and the taste of steel in her mouth. As she entered through the rear doors of Ironfist’s Bridge the marine remained behind in the lift while, without a word, Jeon walked away from her and sat down before a console. Two waiting security personnel eyed her carefully, then one of them stepped forward.

  ‘I’ve already been searched,’ she said tiredly.

  The man, a scar-faced individual with two fingers missing from his right hand, ignored her comment and searched her anyway, and with notably more robustness than the young marine. He extracted the baton from her pocket, studied the personal device for a moment, then ran a small hand scanner over it.

  ‘If I was going to hit him, I’d use my fist, not that bloody thing,’ she said.

  He grinned and tossed the baton back to her, then led the way across the Bridge, his companion falling in neatly behind her. Shortly they reached the stairs leading up into the Admiral’s Haven, whereupon the scar-faced guard waved her ahead. As she climbed, she felt a sudden nervousness at meeting Harald again. But once she reached the top of the stairs, shock displaced that feeling.

  For a moment she thought a ghost had appeared to haunt her, for Harald looked as cadaverous as Orduval had done during his later years in the asylum. Yet this was certainly Harald: the hard uncompromising expression, the long blonde hair tied back, that blank re-engineered eye. She noted the sealed wound on his head, but there was no way of knowing how serious that injury had been.

  ‘Come in, sister.’ Harald gestured to a low chair directly facing the sofa he had risen from.

  Rather than sit as instructed, Yishna walked over to the narrow window giving her a view across the hill-digger’s exterior. She felt no connection with him, none of that sliding into a strange fugue state that usually happened between the Strone siblings when they met after being apart for a while. Was that because the Worm had now gone, or was it a side-effect of his head injury?

  ‘How are you, Harald?’ she asked, then winced at such a commonplace.

  ‘I’ve been better,’ he replied drily. ‘I see we both bear our war wounds, so how did you receive yours?’

  ‘I was shot by Combine security officers while trying to break into that Ozark Cylinder.’

  ‘Then we both have the distinction of having been shot at by our own side. But now is not the time for civilities; those are only for the civilized, I’m told. You have something to say to me?’

  Gazing out across the hilldigger, Yishna felt a sudden panic. Out there lay the three Corisanthe stations, containing hundreds of thousands of Sudorians. All Harald needed to do was pick up his control glove and send some codes, and all of them would be gone. She took a shaky breath.

  ‘The Worm,’ she began, ‘started affecting the Sudorian people from the moment we captured it, then some little while after that, it began to manipulate them.’ She turned towards him. ‘Indirect evidence of this is the distorted society to be found on Corisanthe Main, and the levels of mental illness on Sudoria itself. Bleed-over was direct evidence of its reach extending beyond the supposed containment canisters. I have my suspicions that Director Gneiss is himself evidence of that same reach.’

  ‘Really,’ he said.

  ‘Really,’ she replied. ‘You know that Sudorian mental-illness rates are ridiculously high. And the Shadowman? If we had been thinking straight we would soon have recognized that for what it was. It was simply the Worm trying to present a human face, perhaps the more easily to twist us to its will.’

  ‘But I have never seen a Shadowman in my life.’

  ‘No, because the Worm’s communication with us is so much more direct, for we too are direct evidence of its reach.’

  ‘And at some point you’ll explain your obscure assertions.’

  ‘Our mother,’ she continued doggedly, ‘had her womb standard-monitored for conception. She conceived us during a fumarole breach on Corisanthe Main.’ She turned towards him. ‘Now that you are the Admiral you have access to all Fleet’s secrets, so you will know precisely what is meant by a fumarole breach?’

  Harald nodded carefully. ‘I do know.’

  ‘Then add to that the knowledge that she conceived us actually within the Ozark Cylinder where the breach occurred.’

  ‘Really?’

  ‘Yes, really. And after giving birth to us she didn’t die in an accident. Combine covered up the true details. She stepped out of an airlock without wearing a spacesuit, and then detonated a home-made explosive strapped against her body. They never managed to recover even bits of her.’

  Harald did not look as shocked as she had hoped – just slightly puzzled.

  ‘And the relevance of this?’ he suggested.

  ‘Who was our father?’ she countered.

  ‘Does it matter?’

  ‘It matters because I don’t think our real father was human at all.’

  Harald smiled in that superior manner of his and crossed his arms. She noticed he wasn’t now wearing his control glove, and momentarily speculated on the possibility of killing him hand to hand. But no, Harald had always beaten her and he always would. He was the best of the four of them – the most perfect example of what they were all meant to be.

  ‘I feel I should point out the absolute requirement for sperm in such matters,’ he said.

  I’m not going to get through to him. He’s playing with me.

  ‘Maybe there was sperm involved, but something alien had much more of an influence on our conception, and on our subsequent development,
than any merely human father.’

  ‘Evidently,’ said Harald.

  Yishna was momentarily stunned. There was no sarcasm in his voice; he wasn’t ridiculing her. He just seemed to be agreeing with an established fact.

  Evidently.

  He continued, ‘I’ve thought more about this since our last conversation. I’ve thought about it a lot. The connections I’ve worked out take that fact beyond mere coincidence. You’ve now confirmed some of them for me, and given me others to ponder. It strikes me as highly likely that the Worm was sentient and that, after healing sufficiently to break away from its prison, it instead chose to remain there and toy with us – to wreak vengeance upon us.’ He paused for a moment, unfolded his arms and began reaching for something at his belt, then abruptly snapped his hand away in irritation. ‘In fact we’ve been manipulated by it.’

  ‘Precisely,’ said Yishna, feeling a loosening in her chest.

  ‘So precisely what relevance does this have to our situation now?’ Harald asked.

  Her sense of relief was short-lived. ‘Don’t you see yet? This whole conflict was caused by the Worm!’

  ‘I do not see that. Yes, I see the Worm’s manipulation of us, but that was just an aggravating factor. This conflict has really been about Combine scrabbling for power, and thus weakening the effectiveness of Fleet at a time – with this Polity now barging its way in – when we need to remain strong.’

  She had failed. He was obstinately holding to his beliefs, no matter their source.

  ‘You don’t really believe that,’ she protested. ‘I think you’re just afraid of what will happen to you if you stop now.’

  Anger twisted his face – that last shot that had gone home. He turned away, then lowered his gaze. She saw he was now looking at his control glove, which rested on a table nearby.

  ‘To face this new threat from outside, the Sudorian people need to be united under a single force,’ he said.

  ‘The Polity is not a threat to us, Harald.’ Her hands down at her sides, she walked over towards him. ‘I’ve spoken with their Consul Assessor, and I know that for sure. Do you doubt my judgement?’

  He glanced at her. ‘Did you know that their machines are already lurking here among us?’

  And so he slid into his paranoia. What a mess must have been churning around in his mind while ensconced up here in this disconnected Haven. Maybe he had felt the Worm’s departure. Or maybe it did not matter either way. It was so difficult to abandon faith for hard reality. He stepped nearer to the table, stooping to reach for the glove.

  Yishna took a long step forward, then brought her foot up in a hard arc, the toe of her boot directed towards his face. He dropped into a squat, as if only ducking, but his leg swept out just above floor level at her other foot. She managed to avoid it, but retreated slightly off balance, bringing her one usable arm up defensively, anticipating his attack. He snapped himself upright, one fist shooting out. He wasn’t close enough to hit her, yet something slammed into her guts, sending her staggering backwards. Suddenly she could no longer breathe and her legs felt weak. There came a cracking sound as something hit her leg, and it gave way. Collapsed on the floor, she gazed in bewilderment at her knee: broken open, bone and blood. She peered down at the blood soaking into her clothing from a wound low down on the right of her belly.

  ‘Did you really think you could bring me down?’ Harald enquired.

  She looked up into the barrel of the small Combine handgun he held – the one she had seen in his cabin what seemed an age ago.

  He continued, ‘Jeon will patch you up – I don’t want to lose a sister as well as a brother.’ He slid the handgun back into his belt, then stepped over and picked up the control glove.

  ‘You . . . don’t want me to die. Yet you are prepared to kill . . . all those people?’

  ‘It’s necessary,’ he said, ‘and anyway I don’t know them.’

  ‘Then I’m sorry.’

  ‘You’re sorry?’

  ‘Yes . . . for the crew of this ship.’

  Yishna held up her control baton, turned one of the twist rings round by one click, then pressed the transmit button.

  ‘What have you done?’ he bellowed.

  Yishna closed her eyes, as the floor slammed up at her and everything turned to fire.

  McCrooger

  I felt the sudden acceleration, which meant my inner ear was still functional at least, but it took me another second to understand what was happening. Tigger had reacted to the electromagnetic pulse with a speed that only artificial intelligences are capable of, so we were already beginning to move away just as that eye into Hell opened in the mid-section of Ironfist. A blast front sped either way along the length of the hilldigger, and fire illuminated it from the inside, as if it were an iron bar fresh from the forge, then began exploding from ports, bays and breaks developing in the structure. The megaton range explosion of that mine in the cargo area of Yishna’s shuttle swamped all in a fireball. As the first blastfront hit us, it tumbled our Brumallian ship through vacuum, knocking out all the sensors.

  I was grateful for the blindness.

  Epilogue

  McCrooger

  The planetoid hung in the bloody glare of a red giant, the ring around it far too even and too close to the surface to be mistaken for any natural formation.

  ‘I’m astounded,’ admitted Rhodane, gesturing about at the Polity vessel we were aboard.

  I guessed Polity technology was astounding. Feeling an itch on my nose, I scratched it quickly, satisfied at dispelling this minor irritation. I too was astounded: should synthetic skin itch or was my other nose itching? I glanced past her as Slog, and one of the other Brumallian crewmen from the organic ship, entered the viewing pod to join us, then returned my attention to that glowing ring. While I watched it, I considered the update relayed to me here from the AI Geronamid.

  After the surrender of the remaining hilldiggers, Orbital Combine had mooted the idea of its taking control of them but, at the instigation of Chairman Duras, this had been quickly slapped down by Parliament. Those surviving vessels would remain under the control of the Sudorian Parliament, and apparently Combine must hand over control of its Defence Platforms too. I considered this an astute move on the Chairman’s part. For, without the Worm at its core, that amalgamation called Orbital Combine might easily come apart with the result of further conflict. Parliament needed to assert its authority, and become the only organization in full control of such hefty weapons.

  ‘What’s it doing?’ Rhodane asked.

  ‘Feeding, as far as we can gather,’ I replied. ‘It’s definitely sopping up solar energy, and there’s also some piezo-electric effect within it, generated by the tidal forces of the planetoid.’

  While political moves continued in Parliament, there was still a great deal of work to be done. On the surface of Sudoria itself there was the wreckage to clear, fires to put out, but this was balanced out by a sudden freeing of human resources as it was discovered how many mental patients were abruptly recovering. In space the two crippled hilldiggers were being moved to a safe orbit, meteor guns were kept firing perpetually to vaporize chunks of debris, and the night skies of Sudoria glittered with falling stars. A day ago Geronamid had chosen to offer Polity assistance, but Duras had politely replied that though Parliament would like a Consulate established on Sudoria, and would also like to begin trade negotiations with the Polity, no assistance or intervention would be required. I think that was precisely the answer Geronamid wanted, anyway.

  Rhodane stepped up beside me.

  ‘How are you feeling?’ I asked.

  ‘Lost,’ she replied, ‘and somehow cheated. I should be grieving now but for what the artificial intelligence here has done to my mind.’

  ‘On request, it will return you to your previous state.’ I paused, studying her. ‘Do you think that experiencing the grief would make you a better person, that the pain is somehow advantageous?’

  ‘I don’t know.
’

  ‘Neither do I, really, but I trust that the AIs do. They repair us when they can, and never stand in the way of us improving ourselves. I’ve never known them to be overanxious about our suffering if it might be of benefit to us.’

  As for Brumal, Duras allowed the parliamentary meeting, assessing the evidence the Brumallians had presented, to be broadcast. The inhabitants of that planet were innocent, they had always been innocent. This added impetus to everything Orduval had inspired with his books, and already there were those in Parliament suggesting that the Polity should establish a Consulate on Brumal too. Surely it was only fair?

  Slog and the other Brumallian crewman moved off to continue their exploration of the ship, just as Flog and the others from the organic vessel were doing while their ship sat in a repair bay. AI-controlled telefactors were busily swarming inside it and all over its hull, repairing, adjusting, and also extracting Polity technology from amongst organic Brumallian technology.

  ‘And you?’ Rhodane asked me.

  And me?

  By the time those same telefactors had extracted me from the ship, my body below the neck was unrecoverable. Above the neck my brain still functioned, but even that was wadded with IF21 fibres, and consequently suffered a disease similar to the ancient malady called Alzheimer’s. The AI here had offered me a number of choices. There was flash-freezing and bio-gridding, memcording, and the one that I chose – DTM or destructive transfer mapping. This entailed the electrochemical destruction of my brain, whereby those structures being destroyed would be simultaneously mapped into the brain of a clone created from my body. Of course, it would take time for that clone to be force-grown in an amniotic tank, but my old self wasn’t dead yet. The Golem body I stood in, with its ceramal skeleton and syntheflesh covering, was merely a radio-controlled remote, while the real me still bubbled in another tank somewhere aboard this same ship.