The Line of Polity

by Neal Asher

  ‘Where are the rest of you?’ Cormac immediately demanded, surprised to note that the two were still fighting against the adamantine grip of the Golem – surely they knew they had no chance to escape, so why did they continue to fight?

  ‘About,’ said the man, through gritted teeth.

  Cormac studied the two of them for a moment. ‘Where’s Skellor?’ he asked, but the pair just glared at him with a kind of grim desperation, and still they struggled to escape.

  ‘You know, you can either live or die,’ Cormac warned them, coldly studying their response.

  ‘We’re dead already,’ the man replied, then went rigid, his eyes rolling up inside his head. Cormac saw that he had bitten right through his bottom lip, and observed the blood running out of his ear as his head slumped to one side. Reaching out he tilted the man’s head to more closely observe the Dracocorp aug: the thing appeared deflated – like the desiccated corpse of some strange mollusc. He turned to the woman and saw that she was staring at him with a slightly contemptuous twist to her mouth.

  ‘You survived then,’ she said. ‘But that’s something I can soon enough change.’

  ‘What do you mean?’ asked Cormac.

  The woman continued, ‘I told you, on Callorum, that you were over the Line, but being arrogant ECS you just had to push too far. Well, you’ve pushed me to this, and you’ll pay for it.’

  ‘Skellor?’ Cormac asked.

  ‘Oh yes, I control every one of these prisoners and I’ll soon control this ship. It’ll be interesting to see what the Polity can do about a subverted AI dreadnought nicely filled with a technology that’s about a million years ahead of its own . . . I’ll be seeing you, Ian Cormac.’

  With that, the woman convulsed in the same way as the man, and died.

  Skellor smiled a triumphant smile to himself as he stood before this newest door. It was with some relish that he contemplated getting his hands on that ECS bastard and doing something really drastic: maybe rewiring his nervous system so that everything he felt caused him pain, and rewiring his head so he could never faint or die of shock. But that was for the future, when he had complete control of this ship. Right now, he must get complete control. He turned to the door and placed his hand against the palm lock.

  He now found that he did not require a sample of the specific DNA for those doors that were DNA-locked, as he had discovered that the locking codes only keyed to a thousand or so specific and short base sequences. Having discovered the positioning of these sequences in the polynucleotide chains enabled him to create a skeleton key in his right hand – actually altering the genetic structure in the skin of that hand to suit. Of course, this did not work without him sending filaments into the locking system to subvert security routines and listen, like a safebreaker, while he changed over to specific sequences to suit the lock. The door he now stood before opened after a few seconds, and he strode through, quickly followed by Aphran and Danny.

  ‘My God,’ said Aphran, her dull tone belying the words.

  This entire room was a storehouse of Golem. Skellor surveyed the racks of skinless androids for a moment before moving on – these were not for him, not yet.

  With Cento and Gant at his back, Cormac stepped into Medical and studied the scene. Mika now stood over Apis, who was slumped in a chair. Scar stood to one side, watching the boy intently – perhaps now learning more about human grief than he had ever known before. When the boy looked up, Cormac met his gaze for a moment then turned away. He could offer him no comfort: the boy’s mother was dead – murdered by Skellor almost by default, while the man had been killing five hundred other people aboard this ship.

  Cormac switched his gaze to the ceiling. ‘Tomalon, are you listening in?’ he asked.

  ‘I hear you,’ replied the familiar grating voice that was an amalgam of both Tomalon and Occam.

  ‘Okay, I want you to use all the subminds and stored personalities at your disposal to initiate those of the ship’s Golem you consider safe. How quickly can you do that, and how many can you provide us with?’

  ‘I can have all the Golem with you in one hour – they have not been subverted. From the subminds and personalities I have, I can run as many copies as required.’

  Cormac glanced at the two Sparkind Golem. ‘Do you still have copies of Aiden and Cento?’

  ‘I do.’

  ‘Run copies from them: they’re Sparkind so they’ll probably be more useful in this situation than technicians or researchers.’

  ‘Understood.’

  ‘What about Skellor: any sign of him?’

  ‘None.’

  ‘The escaped prisoners?’

  ‘I have located fifteen of them, and have that matter under control.’

  Cormac now turned his attention to those gathered in the room with him.

  It was like a raw bloody wound in his side, where part of his flesh had been excised, but neither that, not the damage to Occam, nor the excision and destruction of a whole internal system, caused him the greatest pain. That was caused by guilt. They had been his responsibility. Five hundred human beings had given themselves over to his care and his infallibility, and now they were all dead. Tomalon had screamed and raged earlier, but the cold machinery of the bridge pod sucked away his cries, and they were as ineffectual as the dead themselves. Grief was not the answer: vengeance was. While, with one facet of himself and Occam combined, he watched Cormac’s briefing, he hunted with the rest of himself.

  The four he’d located hiding in hold LS-45 had not moved, and shortly the high-speed surveillance drones would reach them. Tomalon considered also sending the hull-repair robot from LS-33, but a diagnostic probe revealed that it had discharged its laminar batteries. Looking through the same robot’s two normal and two tracking eyes, he saw through the clearing smoke that the two Separatists were most definitely dead: teeth broken and internal organs shattered, skin blistered where it was not charred. He’d known that, during the long game of hide-and-seek, the two would at some point make the mistake of trying to get past the slow-moving robot, not realizing that though the robot was slow, the wire-feed to its seam-welder was not. It had electrocuted them both when they made that mistake.

  The drones were nearly there now. Another thirty seconds would see the four Separatists in LS-45 dealt with. Though shaped like arrowheads, the drones had no sharp edges, but that was of no consequence when they could accelerate to Mach II within only a few tens of metres.

  With tears running from his whitened eyes Tomalon now turned his attention to the nine escaped prisoners he had located in LS-26. Four of them were in an outer hold space that possessed an external hatch. They’d panicked when he’d shut them in, but they carried nothing with them they could use to cut through the ceramal door. Their five fellows were coming to their aid with all speed – obviously summoned via the Dracocorp augs they all wore – but it seemed unlikely they would get there before the second hull-repair robot, which was trundling round the hull, reached the hatch. With a kind of horrible glee, Tomalon felt the Occam part of himself calculating vectors from the four – trying to work out which of them would first be sucked out of the fifteen-centimetre-square hatch.

  Ah, LS-45, now.

  One of the Separatists there had stepped outside, perhaps hearing something. He turned, horror writ clear in his features. Through six red eyes Tomalon saw this, then transferred his attention to the pinhead camera set high in the corridor. He watched as one of the drones hurtled forwards and slammed straight through the man, exploding away most of his torso and spinning the remainder against the wall where it smeared blood and intestines before collapsing. The two other drones turned into the hold to be greeted by screams and yells. Then the stuttering of a pulse-rifle hitting one of the drones before it slammed into the possessor of the weapon in white-hot fragments. The woman next to that man staggering away, groping at where a stray fragment of metal had torn away half her face. The other one, pushed back against the wall by the second drone – it n
ot penetrating because it had not room to build up sufficient speed – screaming as it crushed his chest, blood spraying from his lips. The drone backing off to let him drop, turning to the woman who is now down and crawling, coming down on her head like a stamping iron boot . . .

  LS-26 again. The robot connects its key-plug, turns it, inserts it further, turns it three more revolutions, retracts it and trundles back on its hull-grip treads. Initiated now, the hatch motor draws power and begins to lift from its seals. The five other Separatists have now reached the inner door to the hold and one of them fires at the lock with a pulse-gun. This does no more than fuse the mechanism and reduce the possibility of them getting the door open. Tomalon observes this, just as he observes the white mist of vapour-laden air blasting from the opening outer hatch and ice crystals condensing on the hull-repair robot. Inside the hold, he observes the four scrabbling at the inner door as the outer hatch reaches its slide point and slams aside. Suddenly a miniature hurricane drains the hold. The woman who slams against the hatch-hole does not have time to scream before the huge pressure differential snaps her spine and folds her in half – ejecting her into space. The man who hits directly behind her is jammed in place – the differential no longer enough to break him up sufficiently to push him through. Air continues to escape past him. Through the robot, Tomalon watches him – his arm and head through the hatch, eyes bulging and vapour jetting from his mouth, veins breaking and reddening his face like a drunkard’s. Soon all the air is gone and he falls back inside to join his fellows, who are on the floor gasping at nothing, and dying.

  The surveillance drones have nearly reached the other five who have now stepped back from the inner door – no doubt having received some last communication from their fellows inside. Tomalon turns the drones and sends them in search of the other escaped prisoners. He considers that the evacuation of further air will be no great loss, for the Occam Razor is now less five hundred souls who would need to breathe. All around these five Separatists, he closes doors and seals and hatches, then he opens the inner door to hold LS-26. This is a show he wants to see again. He watches the five try to run, fighting the hurricane that wants to snatch them away. He sees one hurtling down the corridor and slamming into the doorjamb of LS-26 before being dragged through, yet knows in his heart that this is not enough vengeance; there will never be enough.

  ‘Hello, Captain.’

  The voice is close and he feels breath on his face. He slides aside the two nictitating screens that cover his eyes and behind his eyes he stands down the extra optic-nerve linkages. All views external to the bridge pod fade and he gazes at the face before him.

  ‘Hello, Skellor.’

  The hand that touches his face is hot and feverish, then suddenly scalding. He feels linkages blinking out, subprograms collapsing or being isolated. He feels the invasion. Pain in his right arm. He looks down and sees Skellor’s other hand on the engine-control vambrace, then that being levered up and tearing from To malon’s flesh, trailing strands like tar. Engine control gone. Dropping out of U-space. In horror he watches Skellor finally pull it away from him, skeining optic cable behind, then pressing the vambrace into place on his own arm. Security protocols come online, grope for the invasive presence – become that presence.

  Tomalon. Tomalon. Tomalon. Like a child mimicking the galloping of a horse, but, behind this, Occam is screaming.

  Access codes!

  He tries to dump them, but the system-backup protocols will not allow them to go unless he orders it again. Too late. System backup slides into black isolation. Tearing. The second vambrace has gone, and now Skellor has his fingers under the Captain’s heart plate, his grasp coming near to life-support; and on To malon’s head the primary connections to Occam are loosening.

  Someone is screaming, Tomalon realizes it is himself.

  Perhaps this is enough?

  Tomalon accesses a system long unused in the Polity, and Occam gladly consents.

  It was fun, Occam says.

  Goodbye, Tomalon replies.

  The unused system comes online like a guillotine slamming down: hard-wired and not easily amenable to subversion; it was built in when humans ran the Polity and AIs were not to be completely trusted. Occam dies, its mind fragmenting under a huge power surge, crystal layers ablating away, perfect logic and stacked memory becoming a searing explosion of static. Throughout the ship, surveillance drones drop from the air, their minds bleeding away and single power-surges scrambling the silicon matrices in which those minds were contained. The hull-repair robot outside LS-26 closes the hatch, shearing in half a corpse still caught in it, before locking down against the hull itself and dying. Other drones either freeze or lock into a repetition of their most recent task. One of these, which is welding a hull member, continues the task long after it has run out of welding wire; and another, deep in the ship, continues polishing an area of floor it will wear its way through some time hence. Control panels shut down for a moment, then come back on in isolated function. And finally, twenty-eight skinless Golem bow their heads as one, dots of white heat appearing on polished ceramal skulls as internal components fuse and burn away. A further twenty-two stand up as one, and step out of their bracing frames.

  ‘Fuck you!’ Skellor rages, his hand closing on Toma-lon’s throat.

  9

  The image of the room and all its contents, excepting the creatures, faded away, to then be replaced with an image of a bedroom with three beds, and Brother Malcolm, hugely asleep. The woman glanced at her son, perhaps considering showing him this, herself certainly understanding where the story was now going. The boy was busy playing with his macabre toys and probably wouldn’t notice if she stopped reading. However, she wanted to carry on because she was enjoying the story herself.

  ‘“Who’s been sleeping in my bed?” asked Daddy Duck, upon finding the sheets of his bed rumpled and crumpled,’ she said – over-egging the self-parody.

  Her son glanced up at her and frowned. She continued in a more normal tone, ‘“Who’s been sleeping in my bed?” asked Mummy Duck, finding her sheets all rumpled and crumpled too. “Mffuful coffle foofle ,” said Baby Duck.’

  The woman stared at the picture of the smallest of the three gabbleducks – that is to say one that was only about three metres tall – as it ground its jaws from side to side, two feet clad in filthy red and white striped bedsocks sticking out the side of its bill, and blood running in rivulets down its breast. The boy would like this picture, but was too intent on his toy, which had now pulled its victim out from underneath the carpet and was using it in the same way as Brother Malcolm had been used. As, on the final gulp, the two feet disappeared, she finished the text of the story:

  ‘“Don’t speak with your mouth full,” said Mummy and Daddy Duck together.’

  In the morning, they pushed through the flute grass for only an hour before coming to a crushed-down clearing in which something had obviously pounced on and devoured a grazer. Old grass and new, the latter being now even in these wetter areas up to waist-high, was spattered with a treacly substance that Fethan told her was grazer blood. Also scattered all around were regurgitated piles of white bone flakes and chewed skin, and stinking worms of excrement – whether this last was from the grazer or the thing that had eaten it was debatable. The most eye-catching item left was the grazer’s skull, which sat at the precise centre of the clearing as if carefully placed there. This object was as large as a man’s torso, and possessed a jaw set with three rows of flat grinding teeth that worked against a flat bony plate. There were four eye-sockets on either side of the long skull – one still holding an eye that was the colour of iron and contained a double black pupil.

  Eldene noticed movement amid the treacly blood and dark flesh still clinging to white bone, and on closer inspection saw this was due to small black crustaceans similar in shape to sprawns – but without the wings – that had come to feed. Stepping back, she realized that the entire clearing was swarming with these creature
s. Wordlessly she hurried after Fethan, who now took the track that led from the clearing towards the mountains.

  By mid-morning they were on high ground yet again, and the going became much easier. As they drew closer to the mountains, the landscape and vegetation began to change drastically. Lizard tails grew in big clumps encircling some kind of huge flower or fruit with the appearance of a mound of raw liver; stubby flute grasses grew in hollows, but the rest of the ground was covered by blister mosses ranging from blue to green, with the occasional red pod-spike rearing up to a metre in the air; plants like giant thistles encroached, as neatly ranked as marching armies, clad in finger-length thorns and bearing furred heads of deepest purple over bodies of pale green; rocky outcroppings became commonplace and a wider variety of molluscs clung to them. And the ground sloped ever upwards.

  ‘I’ve never seen this, any of this before, not even in a book,’ Eldene commented, after she had stopped to inspect some of the rock-clinging molluscs gathered on a large flat stone. Their shells were seemingly enamelled in Euclidian patterns of black and yellow, as if someone had spilt a jewellery box there.

  ‘How many books have you actually seen?’ Fethan asked her. Eldene began to count them up, but before she could answer Fethan continued, ‘If you can even count them, then you haven’t seen enough. The Theocracy doesn’t allow many anyway, and the only ones you will have seen will be copies of the few brought here by the first settlers, or else the subversive versions smuggled in by the Polity. I’m surprised you’ve seen any at all.’