by Neal Asher
Finally Aberil jerked himself alert, as if coming out of a trance, and suddenly was once again aware of just how bad he felt. His face seemed just a swollen ball of pain, his broken teeth aching abominably, and an overall swelling beginning to close his eyes. As if that was not enough, he felt sure some of his ribs were broken, and he was beginning to suspect that the bloody froth he’d been spitting out was not coming from the ruin of his face but from one of his lungs.
Damn you, Stanton!
He had known for far too long that he should either have left that family alone or exterminated every last one of them. Drunk on the extent of the powers granted to him as a young proctor, he had committed crimes that had led to the creation of Lellan Stanton the rebel and her brother John the mercenary killer.
Moving now with painful slowness Aberil headed back towards the landing craft, occasional fumaroles of smoke or steam rising into the sky locating them for him. Not for one moment did he consider the possibility of his own death, for he was so sure of God’s purpose for him. Yes, he worked hard to preserve his own life, as he had just done with this siluroyne, for not to do so would display a punishable arrogance – but it was all part of how he was being continually moulded by the deity. Even the beating he had just received at Stanton’s hands had been part of this same process. No, Aberil would not die – he had far too much yet to do.
There . . . something moving.
As far as he could remember from what he had been taught as a child, siluroynes were extremely territorial, so this definitely would not be another of them. Hearing the sound again, he tried to discount the realization that whatever was making the noise was obviously a lot bigger than the siluroyne. The sound he next heard – a whickering of rapid sharp motion – shot him through with an almost supernatural dread.
The Lord is my shepherd . . .
Much louder now – the hissing passage of a long hard body writhing through flute grass and over compacted mud. Aberil picked up his pace, wheezing now and with flecks of red spattering the inside of his mask. He’d heard that sound before: who of the higher Theocracy had not watched holocordings of rebel prisoners pinned out like bait near their mountains? But this was ridiculous surely: hooders did not venture this far out onto the plain.
As the sound grew louder, Aberil looked aside in time to see a huge segmented body hurtling past him like a speeding train. It was heading in the opposite direction, but he listened hard and could hear it curving round. He ran. He could get to the landing craft . . . find something there . . . there would be help. Behind . . . it was behind him. He glimpsed nightmare there, and fired a burst of slugs at it. He turned and ran on, his chest constricting so that he couldn’t get his breath. He stumbled down on his knees, pain daggering into his side, his vision blurred.
As a shadow drew across him, he emptied the entire magazine at it, then groped for the spare. He realized that to preserve himself from the agony to come, he should use that precious magazine on himself, but he couldn’t really believe what was happening to him. Instead he emptied the last rounds into a looming darkness, and that seemed to have no effect at all. Scrubbing at his face to clear his vision, he looked up into a circular pit of darkness that contained row upon row of mandibles glittering like surgical steel and glass, amid a constellation of red glowing eyes.
‘No,’ he managed to protest before the hooder slammed down on him.
Tented in its chitin, his screams became both muffled and echoey – as the creature commenced, with surgical precision, to feed.
Cormac held up his hand, and Shuriken came back to its holster without reluctance – perhaps sated by its excess of killing. Once it snicked back into place he turned towards movement registered behind, as two soldiers rose out of cover and began to level their rail-guns at him. A snap shot with his thin-gun knocked one over backwards with a hole through his forehead. Gant slammed into the second, knocking him two metres through the air before the man hit the ground, following fast to stab down with one hand, then stood up and shook blood from his fingers. Horrible, utterly horrible, though Cormac was not sure if what he was killing could actually be classified as fully alive.
Mostly, though, it was not Cormac and his companions who were accomplishing the wet work. The dracomen moved at frightening speed right into the rail-gun fire where iron slugs ripped through many of them, but these creatures were of extremely rugged construction and withstood more hits than any human could possibly sustain. Cormac even saw one of them fighting on with both of its arms blown away. It had still managed to bite out the throats of three Theocracy soldiers before gunfire from elsewhere finally cut it in half.
‘Keep moving!’ Cormac shouted. ‘And keep together.’
Mika proved the most wayward – she kept wanting to stay with wounded dracomen, though whether to tend to them or to see what tissue samples she might obtain, Cormac could not judge. Gant and Thorn stayed on either side of him, whilst Fethan had gone running off with the dracomen and getting himself as bloody as they. Scar had come back occasionally to check if they were still alive.
‘Where the hell are your people?’ Cormac asked him the next time he returned.
Showing his teeth, Scar gestured in either direction along the Theocracy lines and gave a shrug. Obviously just punching a gap through those lines had not been enough for them – now they had achieved that objective it was time for them to play. Cormac could hear plenty of gunfire, but no screams from dying soldiers – but maybe those brain-burnt individuals did not feel pain.
The whining of an electric engine sounded to the right . . .
Cormac soon had Shuriken up a couple of metres in front of him, his fingers poised over the lethal device’s attack menu on its holster.
‘Time to ride!’ Fethan bellowed, driving in with a balloon-tyred ground car he had just stolen – the blood on the driver’s seat was fresh. All but Gant, the fastest mover anyway, boarded the vehicle as Fethan turned it towards mountains now looming in the purple haze of distance below the sinking gas giant.
‘Check that out,’ Cormac instructed Thorn, gesturing at a pedestal-mounted grenade-launcher fixed to the back of the vehicle. Thorn pushed his way past Mika who was sitting on the metal floor with her back against the side. Seeing her pull out her laptop, Cormac commented, ‘Hell or high water won’t stop your research on Dragon or dracomen.’
She glanced up at him. ‘There’s always so much more to learn about them.’
‘And what more have you learnt today?’ he asked.
‘A lot gets revealed about a body’s structure when it is torn open,’ she said. ‘Scar is asexual, but his kin out there are not.’
‘I wonder if that would make Scar happy or sad,’ he said.
‘I think you miss the point. Sex has more purpose than social bonding or physical gratification.’
‘Well, make the point clearer to me then,’ said Cormac, irritated.
‘The point is that we are no longer dealing with just organic constructs. We are dealing with self-determining beings who can breed – a race.’
‘Well, that’s nice,’ said Cormac distractedly. Then, ‘Can’t this thing go any faster, Fethan?’
‘I’m doing my bloody best,’ the cyborg replied.
Crouching down to retain his balance as the machine accelerated, now jouncing all over the place, Cormac continued to Mika, ‘Personally, I don’t see the difference between a group of organic constructs and any naturally derived race, but I will be interested to know how the Earth Central AI sees it.’
‘You will let me live,’ stated Mika, echoing both Scar and Dragon.
‘Still can’t ask even the important ones?’ he asked her. ‘I didn’t promise anything, and what I promise is irrelevant – I wouldn’t be the one to pull the trigger.’
Mika was about to make some bitter comeback when Thorn’s sudden frantic activity distracted her. They both turned as he slammed a cartridge of grenades into the launcher and swung the device round, then up.
Just then two shadows slid over above them.
The Occam Razor caught the last of the setting sun, and hung half-gilded in the sky long into the evening. Observing the massive thing through her binoculars, Lellan could not help but shudder. With the riotous fighting below it, this object seemed to represent some demon presiding over one of the numerous circles of Hell described in Theocracy dogma. She lowered her binoculars to observe men looking little better than walking corpses fighting those hellish lizard creatures. The dead on both sides strewed the churned ground and flattened vegetation, and now that most rail-guns were empty, the combat was hand-to-hand, or rather hand against claw and teeth.
‘If you recalled our army, who would you instruct them to fight?’ asked Carl, as he turned the aerofan back towards the compound embankment.
Lellan looked round at the Theocracy soldier, Sastol, who was the only other occupant of the aerofan. ‘Who is the enemy now?’ she asked him.
‘I do not know any more,’ he replied. ‘Perhaps they are.’ Unable to point, his wrists being secured to the rail of the aerofan, he nodded towards two heroynes striding through the flute grasses some distance away to their right. As Lellan and Carl turned to observe these creatures, one of them pecked downwards and came up with something that was recognizably a struggling soldier. Tilting its head back, it tossed the man around until it had him in the right position, then swallowed him head first.
‘Sweet Lord,’ said Sastol.
The heroyne and its companion strode on in search of further prey, whilst the struggling lump slid slowly down its long neck to its stomach. Lellan considered going after it, but what would they achieve by blowing the creature open? The Theocracy soldiers now seemed little better than automatons, and apparently did not cease fighting even when captured. From what Sastol had told her of his own experience, she surmised that the soldiers did not have much individual mind left to them, and were merely following a program, albeit a complex one. As Carl finally brought the aerofan down onto the embankment, where they found Beckle and Uris attempting to get another aerofan up and running, Lellan noticed a light flashing on the essential part of the coms helmet she had hanging on her belt. Unhooking it, she placed the speaker button in her ear and spoke into its mouthpiece.
‘Yes, what is it?’ she asked.
‘We have located agent Ian Cormac and his companions. What are your instructions?’
‘Just bring them safely to the compound, Rom,’ she replied, wondering if the drone’s voices had become distinct from each other the moment she had named them, or if they had always been that way. In appearance they had originally been indistinguishable, but even that was no longer so – the damage each had received giving them visible individuality as well. Bringing her binoculars back up to her eyes, Lellan began searching the horizon. Shortly she located the two cylindrical shapes heading directly towards the compound, and below them, intermittently visible between still-upright stands of vegetation, came a car with an interesting collection of passengers.
Fethan and Thorn, the one with a bushy orange beard and the other with a cropped black one, were easily identifiable from a distance. Lellan had no idea who the woman was, and presumed the other, silver-haired man to be the agent Cormac. The shaven-headed trooper who had, leaping aboard at speed, just joined them in the car, she presumed to be something more than human. Lowering her binoculars she turned to lean on the rail of the aerofan and peered down the slope of the embankment. ‘Any luck with that thing?’ she asked Beckle and Uris casually. The two men crouching by the tilted aerofan, at the bottom of the bank, had its control column in pieces between them.
Uris looked up. ‘Needs a new column, but we can still run it.’
‘Then get it in the air and head back to the compound,’ ordered Lellan. ‘See if you can find any spares there. Also get everyone prepared to move out. We don’t know what these creatures are likely to do when they’ve finished out here.’
The two men stood and with one heave dropped the aerofan back into its upright position. In disgust Beckle kicked the pieces of its control column to one side.
‘You will go with them,’ said Lellan, stabbing a finger at Sastol. He might have surrendered himself, and circumstances might have changed dramatically, but he was still Theocracy and she trusted him not at all. She watched as Carl unclipped the man’s wrist-ties from the rail and stepped back with weapon drawn while the captive climbed to the ground.
Climbing onto the righted aerofan, Beckle sat with his legs either side of the control column base, and his arms inside the casing. Uris waited cautiously until Sastol was aboard, then climbed on behind him, his pulse-rifle covering the prisoner’s back. The fans started with a slightly discordant drone, sending a spray of mud in every direction, as the machine rose and slid off over the chequerboard of ponds towards the compound. There, Lellan knew, Sastol would be wise to stick close to her two men, for the newly liberated pond workers had a penchant for removing the breathing apparatus of any Theocracy soldiers caught, then tossing them into one of the squerm ponds to see if they could survive even long enough to suffocate.
‘We may find out what those creatures are all about,’ said Carl.
Lellan turned back to observe the approaching car, and watched in perplexity as one of the lizard creatures ran along behind it then jumped aboard without either attacking or being attacked. It seemed there were some things she still needed to know.
As the vehicle drew closer Lellan saw that more of the creatures were now emerging from the surrounding vegetation and running alongside the vehicle. Despite no signs of aggression towards the car’s occupants, or of Rom and Ram considering the creatures a threat, Lellan turned to Carl. ‘Take us up and out a few metres.’
Carl sharply did as requested, obviously glad to get out of reach.
‘What’s happening, Fethan?’ Lellan called out when the whole strange procession had finally reached the embankment.
‘Always the unexpected,’ the old cyborg shouted up.
As if in confirmation of that, for a second the evening grew brighter than day, then the whole plain erupted with fire and gouting explosions. With after images chasing across her retinas, Lellan saw Cormac conversing with the lizard creature in the car. The creature then turned to others of its kind gathered around the vehicle, and after a moment they melted away into the surrounding vegetation.
Then all was chaos as they fled the hellfire the Occam Razor laid down upon the land.
‘Is this it?’ asked the woman he guessed to be Lellan, removing her mask as they piled into the workers’ barracks. ‘Is this the start of it?’
Tiredly removing his own mask, Cormac considered telling her that the start of it had been when Skellor arrived in the system, but what gain would there be in that information?
‘I’d say Skellor has just realized what’s been attacking the Theocracy army out there,’ he said.
‘And what’s that?’ Lellan studied Scar with suspicion.
‘Dracomen,’ said Cormac, also glancing at the dracoman. ‘Dragon’s children, if you like.’ At this he saw her loosen her grip on the pulse-rifle she pretended to hold so casually. Because Dragon had destroyed the laser arrays, Cormac felt she must have some trust in that creature’s intentions. He did not have time to disillusion her.
‘This Skellor is attacking them? Why them specifically . . . and why now?’
Cormac thought he knew the answer to that, though he did not like it. ‘Because Dragon was one of those he came here to silence, and I think because I just got clear of the area, and because he likes destroying things.’
‘He doesn’t want to kill you too, then?’ Carl interjected, squatting next to an electric heater.
Cormac glanced at him. ‘In the same way that the Theocracy would rather capture your leader alive than kill her.’ He gestured at Lellan, who winced when she realized what he meant. Cormac turned to Scar. ‘What’s happening out there now?’
The dracoman held up a claw and
slowly closed it in a squeezing motion. ‘Many die, but we disperse and we hide.’
Cormac nodded to himself – just at the last he’d spotted some burrowing into the ground. Skellor might be blitzing the area with laser strikes, but he would need to incinerate every square metre, to some depth, in order to kill every dracoman. He tried not to become too attracted to the idea of Skellor committing such genocide, and thereby obviating a future headache for the Polity. So far the dracomen had been most helpful, and had not committed any significant crime.
‘They all listen to you,’ he said to Scar. ‘You are somehow linked to them.’ To one side, he was aware of Mika becoming more alert. ‘Is that why Dragon named you Cadmus?’
‘They are my people,’ said Scar, with almost a touch of pride in his voice.
Cormac nodded. ‘Then you must stay here with them.’ He turned to Mika. ‘You’ll continue watching them, and report?’
Mika nodded eagerly and turned to Gant. Silently he unhooked from his shoulder the pack which now contained the bulk of her instruments, and handed it across to Scar. Without any acknowledgement, the dracoman accepted the pack, its attention still firmly fixed on Cormac.
‘You will let us live?’ Scar repeated.
Cormac replied, ‘I’ll try to save those of you that manage to survive, for now. Later, we can only hope – as the decision will rest in Polity hands . . . but I’ll do all I can.’
As he headed for the airtight door, Scar turned towards Mika. ‘She not survive with us,’ he said dismissively.
Mika smiled, then began unstrapping her oxygen pack, collar mask and piping. She handed these items to the soldier Uris, before following the dracoman towards the door.