by Neal Asher
'That's it: I saw you and I told Jill. She was. setting us up to watch you so she could call for instructions and back-up.'
'You think I believe that?'
'It's true, why not? Oh, come on! I'm telling you the truth!'
The man's next scream lasted a long time as Pelter drew the blunt nose of the inducer up his inner thigh and touched it to his genitals. When the inducer was withdrawn he was hunched forwards and sobbing. Stanton pulled his pulse-gun from his coat and pointed it at the man's head. Pelter pushed the gun aside.
'I haven't finished yet,' he said.
Stanton turned and looked out through the gap in the rusting cargo shell at the light of the just-risen sun. Three hours they had been in here. He studied Svent and Dusache. Dusache supposedly didn't like this sort of thing, yet he seemed as avid as Svent and Pelter. Corlackis had, some time ago, suggested someone should keep watch and had gone to do so himself. Stanton looked back at Pelter.
'You've had all you can out of him. He's got nothing else to say.'
'I won't know that, John, until I've tortured him to death,' Pelter replied.
Stanton saw that the man had heard, and saw the look of terror in his face.
'He'll only start making it up if you carry on,' he said.
Pelter just stared at Stanton for a long moment. 'All right,' he eventually said, 'I'll kill him.' As he said this he held up the nerve-inducer and clicked the switch. He gave a dead smile, then stooped down and pressed the inducer against the man's stomach. He was still screaming by the time Stanton had walked out to join Corlackis.
'He's not giving him time to answer questions,' Corlackis said.
'He doesn't want answers. He's just killing him with the nerve-inducer.'
'That's just a bit sick,' said Corlackis.
Stanton moved away. He thought of Corlackis describing his homicidal brother as 'not so bad', and he thought of what Pelter was doing, and he wondered if just maybe he was getting a little sick himself.
15
Nanomachines: Very small machines constructed molecule by molecule for a specific purpose. Usually these are self-replicating and not liable to any form of mutation. Usually they can only work in specific environments. They are not the solve-all people once thought they were to be, because vast amounts of processing power is required for the design of even the simplest. At least, this is what we are told. One does wonder if this is a science being kept under very firm control, because of its endless possibilities. Such wonders as nanomycelia and nanofactories have long been discussed. It is doubtful that they as yet exist.
From Quince Guide, compiled by humans
The shuttle bucked as it hit turbulence and a hail of black crystals hissed across the screen. Cormac was not too worried, but it was disconcerting to be sitting in a hemisphere of chainglass at the front of a nacelle. The flying wing was without a central body and this positioning seemed to imply indirect control of the craft, rather as if it was being shepherded. Moreover, there was an awful lot of empty space below Cormac's feet.
'One hundred and fifty kilometre winds, up here,' Jane observed.
'Should be no problem with dispersal then,' said Cormac and peered out at the gleaming noses of the pods distributed along the wing. Each was merely an aerodynamic cover and heating unit for the spray heads inside.
'There could be. We have to seed the counteragent where it will be distributed following the weather patterns since the blast, and we cannot be certain what they have been like since then.'
'Hubris estimated a dispersal across about ninety per cent of Samarkand.'
'Yes, a lot of material would have been thrown into the upper atmosphere, and the weather then, during the initial cooling of the planet, would have been a lot worse than it is now. There would have been winds of up to four hundred kilometres an hour. Some of the mycelium has probably been carried right round the planet.'
'I see… but the counteragent will get to it?'
Jane nodded. 'In time. And this area will be saturated.'
'Will that be enough?'
'With safety measures implemented, and ceramal left out of the equation. It's mostly been replaced with chainglass now anyway.'
Cormac looked down between his feet again and thought about what was down there. He felt a momentary surge of anger, and repressed it. No matter what had been said about his humanity, emotion did get in the way of efficiency.
'Coming up on first release point,' said Jane.
She punched out a sequence on the console. On a screen showing a rear view of the shuttle, Cormac saw a contrail snake out from one of the pods as the warm counteragent hit the frigid air. Another screen showed it further back, being chopped into sections and dispersed by the vicious winds. Jane released the joystick and sat back.
'The automatics will take us in a circle fifty kilometres wide.'
Cormac glanced at the air-speed indicator; 950 kilometres per hour. Ten minutes, then. 'You'll save the scatter bomb for last, I take it?'
'Yes, four pods up here, then we go in low and drop it. An arbitrary decision, really. It makes no difference in what order we do it,' said Jane.
Cormac got out of his seat and headed off into the wing of the shuttle, searching for something to eat or drink. He could have stayed on Hubris, as his presence here was not required, but he was fed up with waiting for something to happen or something to be found by the ship's scanners. Chaline and her technicians were well enough employed preparing their runcible to be taken down, and he had not had much opportunity to talk to her - or any wish either, to be honest. She was just the kind of involvement he did not need right now, or was he kidding himself? Mika was becoming increasingly involved in her study of the dracomen, and had already induced the four Sparkind and a few of the crew to assist her. The rest of the crew were involved in replacing mycelium-damaged components and superstructure. Hubris, of course, was involved in just about every aspect of all these activities, while simultaneously scanning the planet. Cormac had felt like a spare wheel, so grabbed the first opportunity offered to get out of the ship. He needed action, not introspection.
Under one of the bench seats that lined the front edge of the wing Cormac found a ration box. From it he removed a foil package that the label identified as 'egg mayonnaise sandwiches'. He glanced at the lid of the box, where a logo identified it as ECS property. Was this the Sparkind's secret? He grinned and also removed a self-heating coffee from the box before replacing the lid. He pulled the tab on the coffee and, while it heated, he studied the globular tanks distributed along the wing, and the mesh of pipes running into the floor. Full of counteragent. He remembered the image Mika had shown him on the screen of her nanoscope. The thing had claws, damn it, and a mouth. He had asked why its skin was so… knobbly. He once again considered her reply, before returning to Jane: 'Those are atoms,' Mika had told him.
'How long should this take us?' Cormac asked Jane, after swallowing a mouthful of egg mayonnaise washed down with scalding coffee.
'Four hours.' Jane turned to inspect him. 'You are easier now about not being gridlinked?'
'A lot. It seems to me that I'd been living a vicarious life: all my involvement with the external world had become secondary. Blegg was right about the twenty-year limit. I should have been taken off the grid ten years ago.'
'I am surprised that was not done. Obviously your usefulness to Earth Central outweighed their concern for your mental health.'
'It didn't take me long to recover.'
'There are fifty-eight people on the Hubris.'
He looked at her in surprise. She went on.
'Four of them are the Sparkind; twenty-two of them are crew; the rest are technicians. That you did not know this is not surprising. After being gridlinked you find there are a lot of questions you forget how to ask. Had you had any normal social interaction, this fact would have become evident.'
'So you're saying I'm not recovered yet.' He found he was having trouble keeping a smug grin off his fa
ce.
'Your efficiency does not seem overly impaired…'
He thought back to his conversation with Blegg, and realized what Jane was inferring: it was his humanity that was impaired. She was wrong, he felt - or was she? His avoidance of Chaline might be an aspect of that impairment. It might also be a perfectly human wish to avoid emotional involvement. The point was debatable.
'Should I spend more time in the recreation area? It would be wasted time now that everyone is busy'
'Your course of action is for you to decide. I merely make observations.'
Patronizing doll. He smiled to himself. Now that had been human enough.
The conversation moved on to Dragon and its motivations, while the shuttle moved on to each of the four seeding areas. Jane seemed to have stored all the Dragon/human dialogues. As they spoke, he wondered about that time back on Aster Colora: he had only been gridlinked for five years then, though an agent for many more. How different was he now? Could it be that Jane was confusing his own natural reserve with the aftereffects of being linked for too long? Again he smiled to himself. First contempt for the android, and now doubts about its abilities. He was becoming more human by the second. Soon he would be treating her like any other person, which would be just what she wanted.
When the contrail from the pods had bled away, Jane twisted down on the joystick and the shuttle spiralled down into the lower atmosphere. They dropped through a thick bank of yellow cloud, where flat ice crystals the size of thumbnails hissed against the screen. They came out of this and swooped low over a desolate landscape that could have been described as tundra had it possessed but a little vegetation. The only suitable description to Cormac's mind was 'arctic desert'. Here the ground had a pattern of tidal sands and icy sculptures like frozen waves poised over narrow gullies. In the rear-view screen Cormac saw that their passage was creating a blast cloud of powdery CO2 ice. Ahead was a huge mountain with the shape of a giant sandstone butte surrounded by snow-heaped slopes. As they drew close, Jane slowed the shuttle to less than the speed of sound so they could bank round the mountain's icy flanks.
'It was originally M65, but over a twenty-year period seven people died trying to climb it. It is now called Mount Prometheus. Prometheus was chained by Zeus to a mountain, where every day an eagle came to feed on his liver, and where every night his liver was renewed.'
'Charming. Has anyone ever reached the summit?'
'A woman called Enoida Deacon once climbed it with nothing but a coldsuit and oxygen pack. No one else has climbed it. She settled at the runcible town.'
So was now dead, he thought.
They swooped on past the mountain then across the ice-pan of New Sea below an off-white sky completely clear of cloud. Once they were beyond sight of the shore, it was as if they were flying between two curved but featureless cotton sheets. Jane upped the speed of the shuttle past the sound barrier, and soon twists of sooty cloud smeared the horizon. Minutes later they streaked over the farthest shore: a row of cliffs like the edge of a crust yet to be stripped away from the purity below, arctic desert again, but this time scattered with obvious flat areas that were frozen water. In the distance, Cormac saw a heat-sink station. It might have been the one they had been inside, but there were many on that shore, so it was difficult to tell. Soon they came upon the first scattering of buildings, most of them undamaged. Ahead was the dark ring of the blast-site.
'Strap yourself in,' said Jane.
Cormac pulled his harness across and clipped it into place. You did not get such comforts as internal gravity in anything other than passenger shuttles. This wing was military, so you didn't get shockfields either. ECS did not believe in pampering its employees. Jane yanked back on the joystick and the shuttle turned straight up into the sky. Cormac was thrust back into his seat, but the pressure soon eased off as Jane levelled the shuttle out and slowed. Soon they came to a halt above the blast-site, AG operating at full.
'Bomb away,' she said, after punching out a sequence on the console.
He watched the screen that showed the view below. He saw the silver sphere fall away, to be quickly dimin- ished by distance. Seconds later there was a flash which left a momentary black spot on the screen, then around that there was a ring of eight flashes as the cluster bombs carried the counteragent across the site. After a short time a cloud of icy dust rose up and obscured the ground. Had the body of the intrepid Enoida Deacon been destroyed then or before? He doubted it would have mattered to her.
Jane turned the shuttle on its tail and they streaked into the sky.
As the shuttle drifted through the shimmer-shield into the Hubris, Cormac noticed that a large area of the shuttle bay's deck had been replaced. A couple of crew-members were working on something behind the far wall, near the drop-shaft, but otherwise it looked as if most of the damage had been repaired. The shuttle itself had been attended to before they went out, and at least ten technicians and numerous robots had been waiting for them to move the vehicle, so they could get to the deck underneath it.
'Well, that's the holiday over,' he said to Jane.
'You considered that restful?' she asked him.
'Yes. I have a feeling I'll be looking back on our little trip with something approaching nostalgia in the days to come.'
He undipped his belt and stood up. He grinned to himself as he left the Golem; it was nice that she could think of no patronizing reply. Now, as he had told her, the holiday was over. Perhaps something more had been discovered here. Bowing slightly to Jane's observations, he headed for the recreation room, rather than the mis- anthropic solitude of his cabin. From there, he would talk with Hubris. As he entered the corridor leading to that room he saw Chaline, her overall wrinkled and sweat-stained yet again, walking in the opposite direction with another technician. At the end of the corridor they kissed before moving on. Cormac felt a moment of chagrin, then grinned to himself again. Perhaps her shower didn't work properly. He entered the canteen.
The only people in the room were diree technicians. They were eating a meal while checking computations on their notescreens and arguing about five-dimensional singularity mechanics. Cormac heard one of them mention N-space and another say something about Skaidon cusp time vectors. He nodded to them and headed for the food dispenser. It was not as if it was a conversation to which he might be able to contribute. The round screen of the dispenser clicked to life when he tapped a miniconsole that someone had left extended from the wall on its narrow stem.
'Do you have Cheyne white cakes,' he asked.
The words 'In Stock' appeared on the screen and a 'Waiting' sign began flashing in its lower right-hand corner.
'OK,' he said. 'I'll have Cheyne white cakes, new bread and butter, and a suitable white wine.'
The words changed to 'Acquiring', and it took only a few minutes for his meal to drop into the slot below on a sealed tray. He had been on worse ships. He sat at a table as far from the technicians as he could get - their discussion had reached the waving-plastic-knives-across-the-table stage - and flipped up the table's screen.
'Hubris, anything new?' he asked as he unsealed his tray. He examined the glass bottle of wine he freed from the tray. Made from null-G grapes; he pursed his lips in approval, and tfien pulled a glass free too.
There was a delay before he received an answer from Hubris. The screen flicked on to reveal the view seen from something moving slowly down a smooth-sided shaft.
Hubris said, 'Deep scan has revealed a black spot underneath Samarkand's surface. This shaft leads to it. It is two kilometres under the ground. I initiated a probe.'
Black spot?
Then he remembered: a black spot was something the various radiations of scan bounced back from without the usual spectroscopic information; or something from which they did not return, like a black hole.
'Did you get a bounce?' he asked.
'Total reflection. There is a lenticular object of an as yet unidentified material. It is five metres wide by two metre
s thick.'
'What materials give that kind of reflection?'
'There are one hundred and fifty-six recorded—'
'OK, don't list them.' He continued to watch the screen. Then something more occurred to him. 'Hang on, will that probe be all right down there? What about the mycelium?'
'All the ceramal in this probe's construction has been replaced by chainglass.'
Remembering what Jane had said, Cormac snorted and returned his attention to his food. The picture was uninteresting and he gave it only cursory attention. He finished his meal and poured out the last of his wine. As he sipped, Hubris spoke again.
'Further information indicates that the shaft is too narrow for the object to have passed down it in its present form.'
'How do we know it did?' asked Cormac.
'We do not, but it does seem likely.'
'Then there would be a crater. Signs from when it struck.'
'Not necessarily. Samarkand has had recent volcanic activity.'
'What exactly do you mean by recent?'
'Two hundred thousand years ago,' Hubris replied.
Cormac let that sink in. He also equated it with a claim Dragon had made about his age and wondered just what the hell he was dealing with here. He got back to the central issue.
'It might be that the shaft was cut by people on Samarkand. Perhaps they were digging this thing up,' he said.
The picture from the probe changed as it slowed and turned. What he was seeing now was frosted black glass. He doubted the crystals were from water-ice, though.
'The walls of the shaft are made of compression glass,' Hubris told him. 'This indicates the rock was melted and compressed. The usual method of tunnel digging is to either cut or vaporize the rock. Here, on a cold world with an energy surplus from the runcible, it would have been the latter method. There are no records of either being used. No records of any such excavation.'