The Line of Polity

by Neal Asher

  Stanton looked across at the two men making their way towards him. Whatever could be said about their charm or otherwise, Stanton knew that these two men were consummate professionals. As he understood it, Dreyden, having climbed so high, was beginning to realize just how far he could fall, and was becoming a bit twitchy about the possibility of Polity intervention here, and starting to clamp down on the arms trade. These two men maintained the fragile balance despite Drey-den’s often idiotic meddling: they allowed enough arms to be passed on to the Separatists to prevent Elysium becoming a target, but kept the quantity supplied low enough to keep ECS from doing anything drastic against them.

  ‘Good to see you,’ he said to Lons, who as always stayed a few paces back from Alvor and acted the silent heavy – a position that led people to make the misguided assumption that he was secondary to Alvor and less intelligent. Stanton, however, knew that they had equal standing below Dreyden, and, if anything, Lons was the sharper of the two. Lons nodded, and Stanton turned to Alvor who always did the talking.

  ‘Alvor,’ he said.

  ‘Good to see you, John Stanton. And as always it is a pleasure to see you, Captain Jarvellis,’ said Alvor, grinning his chrome grin.

  ‘I can’t say the pleasure’s mutual,’ said Jarvellis. ‘But I think you are already aware of that.’

  Stanton knew that these two had a history, but what lay between them was not hate, just a kind of lazy bickering. Had it been hate, he would have wanted to know why, and then would probably have to kill Alvor.

  ‘Do you have my cargo ready?’ said Jarvellis.

  ‘Of course. The main package can be loaded right now.’ Alvor looked pointedly at the briefcase Stanton carried. ‘And the two extra items you ordered are with Dreyden, who would like to extend his hospitality.’

  Stanton considered suggesting Jarvellis should stay with the ship, when he saw her expression, but knew she would refuse.

  ‘Then we accept,’ said Stanton.

  Alvor grinned again, and rested his forefinger against his aug in a somewhat effeminate gesture. ‘And so your main cargo is on its way. Will we require locking codes?’ he said.

  ‘Lyric will handle it,’ said Jarvellis.

  The two men turned to keep pace, as the four advanced across the bay.

  ‘Oh yes, you have an AI on this ship,’ said Alvor. ‘Do you trust it?’

  ‘More than I’d ever trust you,’ replied Jarvellis.

  ‘That’s nice,’ said Alvor as they moved on out of the bay.

  ‘I am dying.’

  Cormac was alone in his cabin when Dragon told him that. He was lying on his bed transmitting through the submind. No doubt Tomalon would be listening in, but there was not much Cormac could do about that, nor wanted to.

  ‘Is there no way we can help you?’

  Silence.

  ‘There is a very good xenobiologist on this ship and the bioscience facilities are the best.’ Cormac thought his offer faintly ridiculous. Got any wound dressing that’s a quarter of a kilometre wide? And how about ten thousand gallons of unibiotic?

  ‘Why would you want to help me?’

  ‘Why not?’

  ‘You avoided the contract killers.’

  Ah.

  ‘It was you then, not your fellow I killed at Samarkand – or the other two?’

  ‘They are far from here.’

  ‘Did you organize things through the Masadans?’

  Silence.

  ‘How long until you die?’

  ‘I will have vengeance first.’

  ‘What are you waiting for, then?’

  ‘Take me there.’

  Cormac chewed that one over. ‘You’ve lost the ability for trans-stellar flight.’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘Why should I help you kill people?’

  Silence.

  ‘What would you do if we transported you to Masada?’

  ‘Destroy until destroyed.’

  ‘And how much damage could you do?’

  ‘Enough.’

  ‘I couldn’t be a party to such indiscriminate destruction.’

  ‘Vengeance!’

  ‘You’re repeating yourself, but your impulse could serve my purposes.’

  Silence.

  ‘We could transport you there. In return, I would want you to only attack orbital facilities. This we can enforce. You are aware of the capabilities of this dreadnought?’

  ‘I am aware.’

  ‘Specifically, then: geostationary over the populated area of Masada are laser arrays. Destroy them – only them. Is it agreed?’

  ‘Agreed.’

  Cormac cut communication.

  ‘You trust this creature?’ asked Tomalon.

  Cormac kept his annoyance from his voice. ‘No. But if it attacks anything other than the laser arrays, we can destroy it and be lauded as saviours.’

  ‘And after it has destroyed the arrays?’

  ‘Likewise. The crew of that Masadan ship, I have very little concern about, but I’ll not soon forget those Outlinkers that died out there.’ Skellor gazed from one to the other of the two individuals he had killed: one Golem and one human. As he subsumed the experience of their lives – their knowledge and understanding, and anything else that might be of relevance to him – he could not help but make comparisons. The heart of the Golem’s mind, once he had discarded layers of emulation programs, was all logic and clarity and thoroughly documented storage of life-experience and knowledge. The heart of this Card-aff’s mind, however, was something that snarled and had to be immediately erased – life-experience and acquired knowledge sitting in layers over this primal animal. As – in the quartz-matrix AI that was an extension to his own mind – he sorted all that he had acquired, he began to feel disappointment. Increasingly he found himself discarding irrelevancies until very little was left. All that remained were a few experiences, all that these two knew about the Occam Razor, and memories of places to which he had never been. So much dross stored by both Golem and human mind alike.

  Moving to the nearest console, Skellor pressed one grey hand down on it and let the filaments flow down into its workings. Soon he found what he was searching for and the console came back online. He gazed at the screen showing the thirty Separatist prisoners. They were conferencing through their augs: probably trying now to decide what best to do for the cause. Skellor berated himself for the surge of contempt he felt – they had been useful to him, and would be useful again. With a thought he initiated the program that downloaded the information virus he had been working on into the Jain substructure that interpenetrated his body and was also an extension of himself. The Dracocorp augs had been a very useful tool for the Separatists and now for himself they would become a useful tool. Having an organic basis made them so much more accessible.

  Moving out of the control area Skellor marched down the corridor just as the lights came back on. Soon reaching the armoured door into SA1, he punched in the code he had stripped from Cardaff’s mind, before pressing his hand against the palm-lock. Now the DNA he had stripped from the man’s body enabled him to cause enough of a delay in which to shoot in filaments and subvert the lock’s security program. The lock thunked and the door slid open.

  ‘Skellor,’ gasped Aphran, groping for where she usually kept her QC laser. She didn’t trust him – none of them did after he had moved back from the development of chameleonware for them to his own work.

  ‘Glad to see me?’ Skellor smiled.

  Aphran was a number of paces away from him, but a boy called Danny stood close enough. Skellor recalled all their names since his change. Nothing he had viewed or known previously was now inaccessible to him. Being direct-linked into the quartz-matrix AI had given him perfect recall as well as huge processing capabilities. Being extended by the Jain substructure enabled him to use those capabilities to devastating effect in the real world. He reached out and caught hold of Danny’s shoulder. The boy froze – at first in fear, then because Skellor reached inside
him and blocked the relevant nerves.

  ‘Now,’ Skellor said. ‘You’ll be glad to know that you are going to help me to take over this ship.’ Taking his hand from Danny’s shoulder, he transferred it to the Dracocorp aug behind the boy’s ear, and cupped the device in his hand. It felt cold to him, but then very little didn’t now.

  ‘Take over an ECS dreadnought?’ Aphran sneered.

  Skellor nodded as the filaments flowed into the aug and sought out the right connections. Once he found them and connected, he loaded the virus. The boy grunted as if he had been punched. Aphran, her face pale with fear, slapped her hand against her own aug, but the virus was transmitting now and she could do nothing. Skellor folded his arms and watched as she lost her balance and went over. All around the others started to fall over as well. The convulsions hit shortly after, and many of them now were showing the whites of their eyes. Three of them started screaming, which confirmed for him his calculation of a seven to thirteen per cent loss. Stepping further into the Security Area he watched those three die, then waited for the others to recover.

  ‘What have you done?’ Aphran asked him as she recovered enough to pull herself to her knees. One of her eyes was bloodshot, the other entirely red. Blood was also seeping from her right ear.

  ‘Just ensuring that you do as you’re told,’ he said. ‘Now, stand up.’

  The remaining twenty-seven stood as one, then stared at each other in confusion. Aphran was noticeably grimacing.

  ‘Fight it,’ warned Skellor, ‘and it will cause you increasing pain until it kills you. Now, come with me.’ They followed.

  After collecting a meal and a small bottle of wine from his room’s dispenser, Cormac sat down to enjoy them while the room’s screen displayed an image of Dragon before him. First pouring out a glass of wine, he then peeled back the meal’s wrapper and stared for a moment at what might laughingly be described as a roast dinner, then took up a fork and started stabbing at the odd item of food.

  Gant’s suggestion that they should put a missile into the creature was perfectly understandable, but how perfect a situation they could manufacture instead by having Dragon attack the Masadan laser arrays. Now having accessed the files transmitted by ECS, Cormac had more of a grasp of what was going on there. There was a special neatness about using Dragon, because of the Theocracy’s claim that they were building the launcher to protect themselves from this creature. Cormac was not entirely sure what agreements had been broken, but he very much suspected the Masadans of being terrified of Polity subsumption, and of gaining what allies they could – those including both Separatist groups and Dragon. With their arrays being attacked, the Occam Razor would of course have to go and assist the Masadans – after a suitable delay – and then . . . Then perhaps ECS could learn, very loudly, of the oppression of Masada’s surface populace and their wish to become part of the Polity.

  ‘Show me the Masadan solar system,’ he said.

  The screen changed to show him precisely what he had requested: Masada itself orbiting within the so-called green belt which supposedly made it habitable for humans. Not very much further out from it orbited a gas giant named Calypse that must loom large in its sky. Numerous moons surrounded both planet and giant in complex intersecting orbits. All these bodies were numbered, but he doubted very much if the Masadans used such numbers; for them no doubt the moons had names out of some religious work.

  ‘Give me the Masadan names for those moons,’ he therefore instructed.

  The submind he was dealing with was prompt in its reply, though it gave no verbal response. Down the side of the same display, it now showed him each of the numbers with a name and a brief description. Cormac snorted with surprise as he read through it.

  Around Masada itself orbited two moons, Thom and Lok, both indistinguishable from each other in their irregularity of shape and complex orbits. The last of these were sent into different sequences on each close pass of Calypse’s moons, of which four were named:

  Amok was small and irregular; the severed testicles of some titan spiralling round the gas giant Calypse. Dante was the largest moon, and the one closest to the giant. It was a sulphurous hell with volcanic activity continually encouraged by the wrenching tides of the giant and its close passes of Masada. Torch was a ball of ice with a slight cometary tail when it was at perihelion; this was due to the flaring of complex ices lighting a tail of ice crystals when tidal forces heated the moon. At aphelion the moon cooled enough for the ices to stop flaring. This was a common phenomenon in comets, but not often seen in moons. Flint was cratered, near geologically dead, and furthest out from Calypse, but was hence the giant’s moon that passed closest to Masada on the sunward side of its orbit. It was the kind of moon on which the Polity normally established runcible facilities, but here instead was the base for a shipyard – frameworks and buildings stretching out into space from its surface.

  This entire system of moons was named – so the screen notes informed Cormac – by their discoverer, one Braemar Padesh. Cormac felt the man must have used some strange random search in their naming process. He was already ruminating on whatever preparations were now being made on Flint, and how costly they might prove in human life, when his door chime sounded. Immediately, in the corner of the screen he was gazing at, a view into the corridor outside flicked up.

  ‘Enter,’ he said, and the door opened behind him.

  ‘There’s something you should know,’ said Mika, walking quickly into the room and perching herself on the edge of his sofa.

  ‘That is?’ he asked, after washing down another mouthful of food with a sip of wine.

  ‘There has been some kind of communication between Scar and Dragon.’

  ‘Specifically?’

  ‘Just before the sphere was detected Scar showed . . . signs of distress, collapsed, then went into convulsions.’

  ‘Communication?’

  ‘It seems the most likely explanation. I would conjecture some kind of link.’

  ‘Why that conjecture?’

  ‘Because dracomen are tough and as far as I can tell there is very little that can cause them distress; because Dragon is here and it has happened now,’ she replied.

  He studied her for a long moment and wondered if she had bothered to ask Scar what had happened to him.

  ‘Where is Scar right now?’ he asked.

  ‘With the Golem – Gant.’ Cormac noted she had no problem describing Gant as such. ‘They’ve got to put your prisoners into cold-sleep. Apparently there are communication problems.’

  Cormac raised an eyebrow, then turned towards his screen. ‘AI, can you establish a communications link for me with the dracoman, Scar?’

  ‘Drone present,’ grated the voice of the submind of Occam’s he had been using. Immediately the view on the screen changed to show internal structures of the ship swinging past, and finally it drew to a halt on Scar walking along a gangway beside Gant.

  ‘Scar, does Dragon speak to you?’ Cormac asked.

  Still moving, Scar lifted his head and gazed at the drone that had to be hovering only a couple of metres in front of him, blinked, showed his teeth, but said nothing. Cormac snorted in annoyance: just like his creator – keeping his cards close to his chest.

  ‘Scar, I want you to return here now. You’ll join me in the bridge pod when Tomalon is ready, understood?’

  Scar gave a sharp nod and halted. Cormac’s last view was of Gant slapping the dracoman once on the shoulder, as Scar turned to head back.

  ‘You hope to learn something,’ Mika stated, clearly uncomfortable with this near-question.

  ‘I like to keep potential dangers close, where I can watch them, and if necessary, deal with them quickly,’ Cormac replied, spearing a carrot.

  Cormac, Scar and Tomalon stood in the retracted bridge pod and watched as ten grabships approached Dragon. Every now and again Cormac glanced at the dracoman. Only when he was turning back to see the first of the grabships positioning itself against the su
rface of Dragon did he see some sign of what Mika had reported. Scar flinched – then flinched again as the second ship took position. He bared his teeth as the third moved in.

  ‘You can feel it,’ Cormac said.

  Scar nodded.

  ‘What do you feel?’

  ‘Pain.’

  ‘As do we all. I thought you could blank it out.’

  Silence.

  ‘It’s not just the pain, is it?’

  ‘It tries to control me.’

  ‘Will it succeed?’

  ‘No. But I will.’

  Succeed at what?

  Cormac was about to voice this question when a change in Scar’s expression alerted him to something happening on the screen. He instantly looked up. All the grabships were now in position, most of them out of sight from their point of view, and scalpels of fire were probing the night. Dragon was being pushed towards the Occam Razor.

  ‘How will you secure it to the ship?’ he asked Tomalon.

  ‘It will secure itself with its pseudopods.’

  ‘Any problems?’

  ‘None that are insurmountable. A portion of its body will remain outside U-field, but it informs me that it intends to position itself so as that portion will be part of the radioactive area. That portion will then be left here – cut away.’

  How to perform surgery with a U-space field generator.

  Dragon grew large in the screen. On other screens were views from the various grabships. Cormac saw forests of pseudopodia reaching towards monolithic devices on the dreadnought’s hull. He saw the Occam Razor growing larger, and was able to compare the size of the creature with the size of the ship. A Dragon sphere had twice almost destroyed the Hubris, the ship on which he had travelled to Samarkand. But this sphere came like a supplicant to an iron god.

  ‘Are all the scanners operating?’ he asked Tomalon.

  ‘They are all operating. The slightest sign of attempted entry, or the slightest sign of nano-attack, and we will know.’