by Neal Asher
Stepping outside, he scanned around. Visibility was just over twenty feet and cinders were still dropping from the sky this close to the hypocentre. He wondered what Sadist hoped for him to achieve here, and what he hoped to achieve himself. He knew Golem could move very fast and that maybe, given time, Travis and Crean might have been able to get Gorman and Spencer clear. But they had not been given time. It seemed likely that they had all simply been vaporized.
"It is becoming clearer," said the ship AI. "I am sending direction finding to your aug. Key to envirosuit reactive visor."
He hadn't even thought of that. As an information package arrived from Sadist he searched for the channel to the suit he was wearing, found it and initiated visor projection. Immediately the dosimeter appeared down in the corner of the visor; shortly after that he opened the package from Sadist and ran it too. Now a locator arrow appeared in the lower half of the visor with his present coordinates on some planetary grid, in red numerals, to one side, and coordinates of some other location aligned underneath them in green numerals. The arrow presently pointed to his left, he turned until it was pointing straight ahead, which put the shuttle right in from of him, so he walked round the craft, aligned the arrow again, and headed off. Already the dosimeter had shifted to a pale yellowish green and checking one of its attached functions he realised his time here was limited to an hour and ten minutes.
"So what is it you've found?" he asked.
"A regular energy signature, but beyond that I have no idea."
Cormac again checked the given coordinates against his own and worked out that he had half a mile to travel. Maybe, out there, either Spencer or one of his unit was lying injured. He broke into a jog, then accelerated, going just as fast as he could over the churned ground through this poor visibility. Within a couple of minutes a hundred-yard length of a huge pipe loomed out of the murk to his right, five yards wide and flattened by its impact with the ground, almost like some massive sea creature washed ashore and decaying. Then lay chunks of twisted building superstructure, deposited on the ground like sections cut out of a steel forest. He had to slow here because, as well as the ground being uneven, the ends of I-beams and jagged edges of metal protruded from it. His own set of coordinates gradually drew closer to the others, then eventually the arrow blinked out.
"Within five yards of your present location," Sadist informed him.
Cormac halted and scanned around, disappointed, since there was no immediate evidence of any of his companions here. He spotted a short length of aluminium extrusion, tugged it from the earth, then stabbed it down upright where he had been standing; then walking out in a spiral from this, he closely inspected the ground. Now paying greater attention to what lay about his feet, he noted all sorts of items scattered amidst the earth. There were numerous small fragments of greenish brown matter. He stooped and picked one of these up and crumbled it between his fingers, guessing it to be a piece of dried up algae from one of the silos. There were also numerous hard chunks of something and it was only when he picked one of these up and cleaned the soot off that he realised these were spatters of molten metal that had hardened. But still no sign of what he was looking for.
"What was this signal?" he asked again.
After a brief delay, Sadist replied, "Merely a regular energy signature—possibly from a power supply of some kind."
Then he saw something he at first took to be a red object on the ground which, only as he drew closer, resolved as a patch of red light cast by an LED. He stooped down to inspect it more closely and saw that the small light was inset in some sort of metal object. He dug underneath it with one hand and levered it up, and as the object came free he instantly recognised the breach section of a pulse-rifle. He grabbed it and pulled it free. The barrel was missing as was most of the buttstock; the barrel stock, which was in fact the power supply, was still partially attached. He instantly dropped the weapon and stepped back.
"A pulse-rifle," he said.
About the rifle the ground was smoking, and he realised he had just had a close call, for the power supply was discharging into the ground.
"Nothing else?" asked Sadist.
"Perhaps I should dig?" Cormac wondered.
"No," replied the AI. "There's as much chance of anyone being down below there as anywhere else within a hundred miles. I will however deep scan that area when the ionization has cleared. Move on to the next coordinates."
These coordinates appeared on his visor and he saw that the next location was a mile away. His dosimeter had now edged into a yellow-orange on its way across the spectrum to the red. He was about to set out when there came a crack from the ground, the pulse-rifle jerked, sparks momentarily spreading about it, then these drained away and the LED went out. For a moment he considered it an ominous sign, then felt a tight sadness in his chest, because really the time for omens was past. However, he set out, again running as fast as he could. Abruptly, there came a drumming sound and he felt something pattering against his envirosuit. Halting, he saw great globular drops of black tarlike rain. This struck him as odd, since there was not a great deal of water on this world. Some sort of atmospheric reaction caused by the heat of the blast. No matter, he set out again.
More wreckage, and acres and acres of churned earth. His dosimeter was into the orange when he reached a great mountain of wreckage, which he realised was an entire building, uprooted to its foundations and dumped on its roof. Was the power source in this? He followed the arrow until it disappeared, and found himself still twenty yards from the nearest wall, though amidst a strewn wreckage of chainglass pipes and large chunks of ceramic he recognised as vats he had seen in the building his unit had entered through.
"Within five yards of your present location," Sadist again informed him.
Again he approached this as before, this time picking up a length of chainglass pipe to jab into the ground as the start point of his search, but he did not have far to go. Nearby a sheet of muddy chainglass jutted up from the earth, and just seen through it, something was moving against the underside. He stepped over, thinking for a moment he was seeing one of the insects of this world, then realised it was a black skeletal hand. He paused for a moment, not sure he wanted to see more, then felt a sudden disgust at this reaction and forced himself forwards. As he stepped round the sheet a head turned towards him, severely blackened and burnt, but with shiny metal showing through where some of the crisped synthetic skin had fallen away.
Cormac grabbed the edge of the sheet and with some difficulty, possessing only one working arm, tried to pull it away. He could not tell if it was Travis or Crean who lay there. The Golem reached up and pressed its hand against the sheet, which began to shift, and abruptly Cormac was able to pull it clear. The Golem lay with its legs and lower half of its torso buried in the ground. Cormac grabbed the arm, but the Golem failed to clasp its hand around his forearm, and otherwise seemed to be making no further effort to get free. Perhaps its power supply was down, for surely it could pull itself free.
"I see," said Sadist abruptly. "She is refusing to acknowledge my signal—allow me to speak through your envirosuit."
She?
Cormac wasn't quite sure how to go about that until through his aug he accessed the suit menu and initiated "external speaker" whereupon the ship AI immediately spoke.
"Crean," said Sadist, "Cormac has now received about half of the allowable dose of radiation searching for you, and now you have been found. However you choose to proceed henceforth, your recent experiences must be recorded—this you cannot avoid." Then, after a pause, "Get up."
Crean lurched to sit upright and it was only then that he realised one of her arms was missing. She turned, her torso revolving further round than a human torso could have, stabbed her only hand deep into the earth and levering from this point, dragged her legs free. She looked grotesque twisted round like this, but abruptly twisted back and then stood. Cormac studied her, seeing that very little of her syntheflesh remained and
she looked like a charred mummy. He wondered if, without Sadist naming her, would he have known this was Crean? Did Golem females possess female ceramal skeletons, would he have known her as female by the shape of her pelvis? Too late now to know for sure for in his mind he had imposed the shape of Crean over this burned wreck.
"What about the others?" he asked.
Her head swivelled towards him for a moment. "Dead," she said, her voice perfect, which more than anything seemed to bring home her unhumanity. Humans needed lips and tongues to form their words; she now possessed neither. He took that in, some weasel part of himself trying to find some way around it. He stamped on that inclination, hard. Whatever he thought of Golem, or artificial intelligences, in this situation Crean would not have said the others were dead without being utterly sure. Cormac felt that, had she been human, this would have accounted for her apathy earlier. He felt a moment of confusion: Why should she emulate shock and grief?
"Return with Cormac to the shuttle, and then to me," Sadist instructed.
New coordinates appeared. Cormac turned, until the arrow was pointing directly ahead, and set out. There was no need to run now, and suddenly he felt so exhausted a slow walk seemed almost too much.
13
As Cormac stepped outside the school he scanned around eagerly for a sight of the war drone—the one they had seen in Montana and which now seemed to be here—but there was no sign of it.
"Bye bye, Cormac!"
He glanced round and saw Culu standing with her father.
He waved. "Bye, Culu!"
Her father was a bulky bald-headed man in baggy pyjama-like clothing that disguised the physical cybernetic additions to his torso, but which could not disguise his twinned augs, shiny chrome additions on either side of his head. Cormac's mother, on one of the few occasions she met Cormac outside the school, said Culu's father was a «traditionalist» because he felt the necessity to pick Culu up every day, and it had taken Cormac some time to figure out what she meant. Only stumbling across a historical text about twenty-first-century paedo-hysteria did he understand the old tradition of always picking up one's daughter at the school gates. His mother also said something about minority-group paranoia also being traditionalist—a comment he still did not quite understand.
The only other individual being picked up at the gates by his parents was Meecher, but Cormac suspected that had something to do with Meecher's behaviour today. He watched as Meecher's mother smacked him hard across the back of the head then pointed to their hydrocar. Meecher climbed in and sat down, while his father and mother stood outside discussing him. Cormac watched them until they climbed into the car and headed off. He waited a little longer, dawdled for a while because he did not much enjoy sharing public transport with his fellow pupils, which was apparently a trait that worried the school authorities.
Eventually he began heading down the pavement in the direction many of the other pupils had gone—towards the nearest bus stop. Still scanning his surroundings for some sight of the war drone, he noticed the presence of numerous gravcars parked here and there in the area, most of which seemed to be occupied by one or two individuals. This was odd, since usually such vehicles occupied the roofports of the residences here, or if from outside the area, they parked on public roofports. Then a shadow loomed above and he glanced up expecting to see yet another car coming in to land, only to see a scorpion, black against the bright sky.
The drone descended fast and landed hard in the road flinging flakes of plasticrete and gritty dust. Simultaneously, surrounding gravcars accelerated, blocking the road in either direction, and the occupants began piling out. With a surge of sheer excitement Cormac realised that many of these people wore ECS uniforms and were brandishing weapons, which they rested across the roofs and bonnets of their vehicles. These weren't any kind of weapon he recognised, having long, arm-thick barrels and heavy, wide breach sections covered with cooling fins. The drone spun in place, its sharp-pointed limbs scoring the plasticrete, until it came to face Cormac, then it surged forwards to loom over him.
"I do not have much time," it stated.
Cormac just gaped.
"You need to know."
"Amistad!" came a bellow from some public-address system. Now more shadows drew across and Cormac looked up to see some huge vehicle hovering above. It looked like a floating barge, but with all sharp corners and flat surfaces, all a dull greyish green he recognised as military ceramal armour.
"Amistad! Move away from the boy!" A woman in ECS uniform had approached, her hands on her hips.
The drone turned slightly to peer at her, then quickly swung back to Cormac. "Your father—" The drone seemed highly agitated, and Cormac was reminded of his mother's archaeologist friends who visited; men and women who were not accustomed to talking to children. "Your father is gone."
"He's dead?" Cormac asked.
Further agitation from the drone. Its feet were beating a tattoo against the ground, its antennae quivering and it kept extending and snipping its claws at the air as if it could find the words there. It never got the chance.
There came a thrumming from above, a deep sonorous note, and it seemed as if something invisible but incredibly heavy and substantial slammed down from the vessel above. The drone was crushed flat on its belly, its legs spread out about it and its claws immobilized. An invisible wall of air hit Cormac in the face and shoved him straight back against the wall of the building behind. He tried to fight his way free, but the air seemed to have coagulated around him, turned into a cloying sheet.
"Is my dad dead?" he asked, but knew at once that his words reached no further than his lips.
Then came a blast, excavating a great crater in the road underneath the drone. Somehow, this gave it enough freedom to move and it dropped down into the hollow then bounced out sideways. Beams of a deep red radiation stabbed through the dusty air from those weapons resting across the gravcars, but the drone avoided them all, moving almost too fast to follow. Coiled into a ring it rolled and sprang open, landed on the face of the building opposite and leapt again, crashed against the side of the ship above and bounced off again. The bright light of a fusion drive ignited in atmosphere lit the street, and the drone hurtled away.
The ship above also accelerated away, the invisible force pinning Cormac against the wall immediately relinquishing its grip, so he slumped to the pavement, and some of the people in the street leapt into their gravcars and they too sped away. His ears ringing, Cormac gazed down at the pavement, then after a moment noticed a pair of enviroboots nearby. He looked up at the woman who had addressed the drone and she reached down and helped him to his feet.
"You mother will be here shortly," she said.
"My dad is dead," he replied.
She gazed up at the sky in the direction of the departing vessel and gravcars. "So that's what it's about," she said. "You can never be sure with them, and it's best not to take any chances." She peered down at him. "They can be so dangerous."
He tried to learn more, but everything he asked was referred to his mother, who soon arrived looking worried and angry and quickly led him to her gravcar.
"It said that Dad is dead," he told her.
"And that's all?" she enquired, handing him a bottle of fruit juice.
"It didn't get time to say much," he replied, uncapping the bottle. He took a long drink, for he was very thirsty. "I think they used a hard-field to try and capture it."
"It should not be here, and it should not interfere in things it is not equipped to understand," Hannah told him, watching him carefully.
He suddenly felt incredibly tired, and leant back in the seat.
Hannah continued, "It knows about fighting and killing, but like them all is emotionally stunted." She seemed to be speaking to him down a long, dark tunnel. "How can one like Amistad explain the truth when even I, your mother, can think of no way?"
Everything faded to black.
* * *
Feeling utter betrayal, C
ormac opened his eyes.
"She drugged me," he said, just a second prior to an invisible dagger stabbing in through his forehead. He glanced at the side table and reached out to pick up the roll of patches, his biceps still stiff under the length of shellwear enwrapping it. He took one patch only this time, since he felt that using two last time might have contributed to his nausea, and stuck it on the side of his neck. Now familiar with this process he then took up a sick bag, and tried to order the detach sequence in his aug for the optic connection. It was a struggle, but this time he managed it. After a moment he reached up and pulled the fibre optic strands free, then glanced aside as the machine wound them in.
"I am not aware of what these mem-loads contain," said Sadist. "I would require your permission to load them myself."
Cormac wasn't sure how to react to the AI's evident curiosity, however, he really wanted to talk to someone about all this. Gazing about the room he half expected to find someone standing by his bed, then felt a sick sinking sensation in his stomach. The only one who might possibly have been there was Crean, but she had confined herself to her cabin ever since they boarded. Sadist, having now scanned much of the area around the blast, had reported finding only a heat-distorted ceramal blade belonging to Spencer, the surprisingly intact brass buckle from Gorman's belt, and Travis' legs. All three of Cormac's companions had been vaporized. Crean had survived only because a chainglass wall had peeled up and slammed into her, acting like a sail on the blast front and carrying her two miles from its hypocentre. Total unlikely luck, coincidence.