The Line of Polity

by Neal Asher

  ‘Does it have inbuilt AI then?’

  Mika had no further reply, and Apis noted her expression of worried fascination. That she had not foreseen the possibilities was perhaps some facet of her inability to ask questions. That none of them had understood what Dragon had meant when saying of the Jain, ‘It is not they any more . . . it is not a race,’ he put down to the fact that they had all been under quite a lot of pressure recently, and that they did not have the Jain growing inside them, like he did.

  Skellor gazed down upon the sulphurous moonlet with a vastness of comprehension that was almost godlike, but still with the pettiness of human drives – anger, hate, power-lust – and felt a hint of disappointment when the first missile punched down through its surface. There seemed to be no satisfaction in destroying the inanimate, no satisfaction in destroying something that could not appreciate its own doom, nor feel pain or terror. The second, third and fourth missiles then punched into the moonlet, evenly spaced around its equator, timed to impact to its spin, so they struck all four quarters. The explosions that followed collapsed thousands of square kilometres of surface and raised vast clouds of dust in shades of yellow and chocolate brown that were dragged round in orbital streamers to obscure from the normal human eye much of what followed. Skellor’s breadth of vision encompassed nearly every emitted radiation, though, and he enjoyed a grandstand view of the destruction he had wrought.

  Each collapsed area was flooded through rapidly opening fumaroles and soon became a lake of molten rock. From these lakes, huge crevasses opened in the surface and spread, separating mountain ranges and swallowing them, turning frozen plains of sulphur into boiling seas, and finally joining in a network that spread across the entire surface. At this point the fifth missile struck and tore the moonlet apart: here an asteroid fifty kilometres long trailing streamers of molten rock, its cold face what had once been a range of mountains; there a vast sheet of sulphurous fire separating out into smaller spheres cooling into something like black glass; an incandescent cloud of gas spreading, turning, already moving – dragging back into the shape of an accretion disc.

  Skellor observed all this with the eye of a physicist, before sending out the Occam’s grabships in search of suitable chunks of debris. Like wolves cutting through herds of great brown buffalo they sped, selecting the calf-sized chunks to clamp onto and drag back. Whilst this was happening Skellor inwardly focused his attention.

  He was all-encompassing, but all his systems did not yet operate to perfection – there was much he still needed to do, and soon he would have the material for the job of extending and expanding the Jain architecture of the ship. Through this architecture he would gain absolute control of all the ship’s distant systems, and perhaps enough control to be able to still the intimate mutterings of what remained of the minds of his command crew, or rather have sufficient control that such things were no bother to him. Suddenly overcome with curiosity about the functioning of minds from which he was quickly becoming alienated, he studied their . . . output.

  Danny’s mind revealed only a low instinctual mutter related to sex and the urge to procreate – something that always functioned most strongly when extinction was close. The man controlling the U-space engines – Skellor did not know his name as that had been something erased as irrelevant – was listening to music as if on a looped tape. Linking through to a library on the Occam, which he had only recently subsumed, he identified the tune as a Mozart clarinet concerto – not the usual easy listening indulged in by a Separatist fighter out of Cheyne III. The mutter from Aphran’s mind was something of a duologue – a parody of the madwoman speaking to herself.

  ‘There’s a limit, there’s always a limit. Go beyond this point and the technology you acquire from the enemy shafts you, and you become the enemy.’

  ‘But it wasn’t acquired from the enemy, it was acquired from wonderful Skellor whom I love who acquired it from the artefacts of a dead race.’

  ‘Don’t matter, there’s still a limit: rail-guns are okay, but anything that starts to think for itself is dodgy. AI is the limit. Jain stuff is AI – almost alive. No, no further.’

  ‘What about Mr Crane? He thought for himself, and he nearly creamed that bastard Cormac.’

  ‘Unstable and dangerous. How many of our own did he kill?’

  Skellor’s curiosity was further piqued, and he immediately raided Aphran’s mind for all information concerning this Mr Crane. In half a second he had all she knew. Encased in Jain architecture, he snorted derisively. ‘A brass metalskin Golem – a simple machine like that,’ he said aloud.

  ‘Yeah, and how much closer did you get with Jain tech and a fucking delta-class dreadnought?’ said one of the two Aphrans.

  The other one tried to drown this with, ‘I love you I love you I love you Skellor!’

  This didn’t stop him finding the best way of hurting . . . both of her, and this was more satisfying to him than destroying a moonlet.

  14

  ‘And thus it was in the fiftieth year of colonization that the siluroyne came to dwell underneath the Bridge of Psalms and sorely troubled the low people of the compounds, and in the fiftieth day of the fiftieth year there came to that bridge the two pond workers, Sober and his wife Judge.’

  The picture the book displayed was of a mountainously fat couple made even more grotesque by the huge green and red scoles that seemed almost moulded into their bare chests. They wore only breeches and open shirts and were both so bristly and ugly that it was difficult to distinguish male from female.

  ‘Greedy peasants,’ commented the woman.

  The boy looked up at her and waited.

  ‘You’ll never see a fat pond worker,’ she explained to him.

  The boy continued staring at her until she continued with the story.

  ‘As the two workers crossed the bridge, the siluroyne climbed out before them and said, “Give me my toll of flesh blood and bone.” Terrified, the two could not say a word as the monster bore down upon them. Then Judge, more quickwitted than her husband, said, “Let us live, and we shall bring you more flesh blood and bone than you can shake a stick at!” Craftily the monster said, “One of you will bring it to me whilst I hold the other here.” Judge went and brought first the Brother whose sin was gluttony . . .’

  In the picture the siluroyne held Sober in one of its multiple hands, whilst with the other it ate, one after the other, the sinning Brothers that Judge led to the bridge. Glancing at her son, the woman was glad he did not seem to notice when she missed reading out some of the sins committed by the Brothers – he was so busy watching those Brothers being crunched down and the gut of the siluroyne expanding.

  Dawn crept in unnoticed, covered by the flashing of pulse-cannons and detonation after incandescent detonation. Slowly, the ancient walls and bastions surrounding the city became distinct from a purplish sky – gradually revealed in all their repro-medieval glory. In the past these huge limestone and plascrete defences had served the purpose of keeping the somewhat hostile wildlife out of the small inhabited area within. The growth in the population and the spread of crop fields into the wilderness had driven said wildlife back, and for a hundred years the walls had served only to prevent the city itself from spilling out across the land like some kind of poisonous technological froth. Now they once again served a truly medieval purpose, as this morning the enemy was at the gates.

  Carl noted the position of the rail-gun in the north tower, as it opened up on one of the remaining tanks, which sped down the causeway between two squerm ponds. The racket of iron slugs impacting armour was horrendous and pieces fell away from the tank as it turned and motored down into one of the ponds, taking itself to cover. Carl hoped, for the sake of the occupants of that tank, that no slugs had penetrated. If the tank had been holed, and those holes were big enough, the occupants wouldn’t even have time to either drown or suffocate before the squerms got them.

  The transformer hum, followed by a strobe light, signified that
the pulse-cannon had cooled down enough for Beckle to fire it once again.

  ‘Got the bastard,’ he said.

  ‘Are you sure about that this time?’ Carl asked, observing the water slopping against the lower edge of their own tank’s display screen, and the squerms in that same water scraping their way across the vehicle’s surface, perhaps sensing that there was something soft to chew on inside the big tin can in their pond.

  ‘Sure enough,’ Beckle replied. ‘It was the same one as before, I reckon they just wheeled it across from the other side.’

  Carl looked up at this latest burning cavity cut into the limestone, and opined that they would be wheeling nothing nowhere now.

  ‘Let’s get out of this hole then,’ he said, and thrust the steering column forwards and up. The tank’s motor droned in response, while squerms and water slewed away from the screen. Immediately there came the rattling clanging of small-arms fire impacting on their armour, and Beckle replied by cutting chunks out of the city wall with his pulse-cannon. On the displays, and by glancing to either side, Carl saw that all the tanks were now advancing.

  ‘Let’s take down that gate,’ ordered Carl, speaking into his comlink. Missiles flashed from right and left, and the ancient grapewood gates disappeared in a cloud of fiery splinters, then the gate towers were soon collapsing into dusty piles of rubble. Carl drove his tank up onto one of these piles and, as the dust cleared, looked down into the city. Before them lay the sealed complexes and towers, the underground tunnels and roofed parks and greenhouses that made up the place – a place that people simply called ‘the city’ and sometimes forgot had once been called ‘Valour’, but then it was easy to forget a name like that in a place where one false step could mean death and where people could get into debt for merely breathing.

  ‘I wish we could just go straight in,’ said Beckle.

  ‘We’d kill thousands,’ warned Targon, again acting as their collective conscience. ‘It cannot be done like that.’ Carl observed the Theocracy soldiers dodging between the buildings, then swung the viewpoint to behind them. Over the chequerboard of ponds the infantry were now coming in on their grav-sleds, fans kicking up spray behind, and leaving agitated movement in the squerm ponds. He listened to his comlink, then glanced across at Uris who was receiving the same instructions via text and logistic diagram, before reversing his tank down off the pile of rubble.

  ‘I could have hit a few,’ said Beckle. ‘I’m not that inaccurate.’

  ‘Too much collateral damage,’ said Carl. ‘Anyway, Lellan’s coming out with a couple of carriers, and we’re gonna join the attack on the spaceport now.’

  Spinning the tank full circle on its treads, he applied full power to send it away and around the city – away from aberrant missile-launchers, be they hand-held or tripod-mounted. He did not mention to his crew that they were one of only three remaining tanks now joining the attack on the spaceport. He didn’t think that would be helpful or encouraging.

  Listening in to Lellan’s battle channels, Stanton raised the Proctor’s set of binoculars and observed the first explosions as a heavy pulse-cannon opened up on the spaceport cranes. The response was immediate: armoured vehicles roaring across the huge foamed plascrete slabs to meet the attack; Theocracy carriers rising into the air, surrounded by swarms of aerofans; fire and missiles and explosions and, most importantly, all over there. Lowering the binoculars Stanton glanced down at the man from whom he had taken them. The man was young, inexperienced, had been arrogant in his new position of power, and Stanton had taken less pleasure in snapping his neck than he had in doing the same to the Separatist, Lutz. All the same, Aberil Dorth had been just like this young man all those years back, and look at what he had since become.

  Stanton reached down and hauled the man up to the rail of the aerofan, then tipped him over so he fell with a splat onto the damp ground between wide spreads of native rhubarb leaves – his naked skin flecked over with spatters of black mud. Had the man been smaller or thinner, Stanton would have needed to find another proctor of sufficient girth, as the uniform had been his main requirement, though he was happy to have acquired an aerofan to get him into the spaceport more quickly. The man should have been less careless in pursuit of what he must have considered a worker gone astray. Things might have turned out differently – strange, the workings of serendipity.

  There were no queries as Stanton took the aerofan in over the fences and rail-gun towers on this side of the port, nor when he brought it down by a large bedstead shuttle that was undergoing maintenance – though not one of the maintenance crew was now in sight. Picking up his rucksack Stanton stepped out of the aerofan and moved out across the acres of plascrete, viewing his surroundings with something approaching nostalgia.

  Most Polity worlds had outgrown ports like this, what with the spread of the runcible network and the advent of efficient AG technology. This port, built two centuries ago to support the landing of ships without AG, was still in use as such – a vast platform of foamed plascrete slabs that floated on the muddy plain to support the huge ships when they came down, along with the tangled infrastructure of rolling support towers and cranes, refuelling tankers and cars, a whole world of what on many worlds was called ‘heavy tech’. Like so much on this world, this port was an anachronism. The traders coming to buy the squerm essence produced by the refineries in the city did not actually need the infrastructure, but were confined to the port to prevent smuggling and other infractions of Theocracy law. That confinement had not prevented Stanton himself from stowing away as a child, and thus escaping this world. He noted that, like the rats that they were, all the traders were gone now.

  ‘It’s pretty nice to have a port like this,’ he said into his comlink. ‘But to be utterly dependent on it when there are alternatives is downright stupid.’

  ‘Convenient for us, though,’ Jarvellis replied to him from Lyric II.

  Stanton grunted noncommittally as he removed an innocuous cylinder the size of a coffee flask from his pack, plugged a miniconsole into the end of it, and punched in the required code. Satisfied with the response, he detached the console, and dropped the cylindrical object down into the narrow channel between the two huge slabs of plascrete. He then looked across to where something detonated, and a huge loading crane twisted with an agonized scream and went down like a falling tree, incidentally cutting a building in half in the process. Beyond this he now saw two carriers rise into view: one hovering protectively above the attacking tanks, and one ahead of them, bombarding troop positions concealed in the warehousing at the edge of the port. It was a bombardment that did not last long, for a missile stabbed up and punched through the second carrier and, trailing fire, it ploughed sideways through buildings as it came down, throwing up a wave of burning wreckage before itself. Stanton thought the Theocracy troops must feel proud of themselves – managing to hold off such a force from such a vulnerable position. He felt almost proud to wear their uniform himself as he dropped another cylinder into the gap between slabs below a huge container that he suspected, by the smell, was full of something wonderfully flammable.

  ‘One more, over nearer the centre, then I think it’s time I went away,’ he said.

  He trotted across slab after slab to reach the centre of the landing field – he felt that a casual stroll was not really suited to the occasion – and there he initiated another innocuous-looking cylinder and dropped it between slabs. Looking down he saw it plop into black mud five metres below, then slowly sink, its red LEDs swamped at the last.

  ‘That’s it, all done now,’ he said.

  ‘Tell me when you’re on your way out, and I’ll inform Lellan. She’s swearing already about plausibility,’ Jarvellis replied.

  ‘Tell her now: I can look after myself, and I don’t like the idea of her sacrificing more of her armour,’ said Stanton.

  ‘I’ll only tell her that when you’re on your way out,’ said Jarvellis stubbornly.

  Stanton swore, and broke i
nto a run for his abandoned aerofan. Half an hour later, Lellan’s forces were driven back by the resolution and fighting spirit of the Theocracy forces. Tragically, Lellan had been unable to take the most essential installation on the planet – and Theocracy commanders even believed that to be her aim.

  At first Eldene found huge satisfaction in dozering the ATV through tangled stands of flute grass now turning dark green; accelerating across areas of rhubarb, plantain, and multicoloured blister moss; carefully edging around areas where the fighting was most obvious, then bringing it back on course for the south. But she discovered that operating the simple controls was not exactly demanding and, after the initial novelty had worn off, her actions soon became almost automatic, and in a state of weary fugue she found her mind drifting back to the apartment in Pillartown One, and the conversation there between herself and Fethan:

  ‘How much of that Dragon business did you understand?’ Fethan asked, cutting straight to the core of her confusion.

  ‘Some ship attacking one of the arrays. Then there was something about a creature . . .’ She trailed off. What she remembered didn’t make any sense.

  ‘Dragon is a creature the size of a small moon,’ Fethan explained. ‘It came here and it destroyed every single laser array in orbit, before falling to earth in the south.’

  Eldene nodded, waiting for the punch line that would turn a patently ridiculous statement into some moral epigram, or the explanation that would make clear what Fethan was actually saying. He’d not elaborated.

  After a moment Eldene said, ‘You’re saying some mythical creature flew here through space and destroyed the laser arrays – that we are all now free and will live happily ever after?’

  ‘No, I’m saying that an alien creature, but well known in the Polity, and which named itself after a mythical one, came here and destroyed the laser arrays, and that now your people have a chance to fight for their freedom – a fight they still might lose.’ He held up a finger. ‘You hear that?’