by Neal Asher
‘On the other side of the island, on the beach. He’s not moving and all I’m getting is “objective achieved” and some weird images. He won’t move.’
‘Perhaps we should just turn around and leave him here?’
Arian lowered his hand from his platinum aug and stared at her. ‘I think it may be the second link to his control module from my aug. We need a direct optic link to get the bandwidth, and some military programming. Someone like Sylac could do the job.’
Angelina could hear the doubt in his voice. Personally she had no wish to see herself, or her brother, under Sylac’s knives, since the surgery he performed might not render the intended result. The surgeon was a law unto himself and considered the human body a testing ground, or even a playground. Nor did she want either of them to be more closely connected to the scrambled insane mind of the Golem, no matter how much more control they might thus obtain. And the idea of putting that kind of power into the hands of one of their employees would be sheer madness. Already she was beginning to see that Mr Crane was like a black-market pulse-gun from one of the less reputable dealers on Huma—it might work, but was just as likely to blow up in your face. When she saw the mound, she felt her thoughts confirmed.
‘Why the fuck did he do that?’ asked Arian.
Counting heads, they found the knotted mound of corpses consisted of maybe eight people—it was difficult to be sure. Stepping closer to see if she recognized any of the faces, Angelina felt her foot sink, and abruptly stepped back. Her boot pulled out with a slurp, and she saw that the blood had turned the ground into a quagmire. She had killed, she had seen horrible death, and been hard and unaffected by it. But this made her gorge rise. One of their men stepped off to one side, leant against a rock, and spewed briefly before turning back.
‘Up to his house?’ he asked, after wiping vomit from his lips.
‘Yes… to his house,’ Arian replied. Abruptly he reached up and initiated the comunit button on his collar. ‘Falen, Balsh—don’t go round to the other side of the island. Just get back to the boat.’ He tilted his head as he listened to their reply, then said. ‘You needn’t bother—I don’t think there’s anyone left alive here.’
In the moonlight the corpses on the hillside were macabre sculptures: clawed hands frozen while groping for mercy, jags of white bone pointing to the sky, and an eyeless head propped on a rock, gazing into infinity. More of the same occupied Alston’s fortified home, but what struck Angelina more than anything was the lack of pulse-gun burns on the walls. The slaughter here had been quick and absolute. She was also surprised at just how intact Alston himself was, sitting behind his desk there with something gleaming in his mouth.
‘No one else must get their hands on him,’ said Arian, staring at the corpse.
Angelina realized her brother was referring to the Golem.
‘We’ll just hide him away somewhere secure, just… keep him ready.’
So, Arian was beginning to see straight.
‘It’s not like we’ll need him for every operation.’
Angelina kept her mouth closed and her face expressionless.
‘We can handle most problems ourselves.’
‘Where do we put him?’ Angelina asked him.
‘Where such things should always be kept,’ Arian told her. ‘In a cellar.’
‘Yes, of course.’
Angelina would have preferred that place to be the caldera of a volcano.
— retroact ends -
10
The evolutionary forces detailed long ago by Darwin, and only elaborated on ever since, are universal, and required for life. The other requirements were thought to be matter and energy, though doubt has now been cast on the former. All life, therefore, lives by rules already discussed ad nauseam by others. Suffice to say that there are doves and hawks in every ecosystem. And some of the hawks are monstrous. Looking into the natural history of our own planet it can be seen that we ascended during a particularly peaceful time, and that most of the monsters were in our past. We missed the dinosaurs by sixty million years. Close call—they were bad enough. However, even Tyrannosaurus rex would have had problems with some of the alien creatures we have since discovered: the fauna of Masada with its hooders, heroynes, siluroynes, and the positively weird gabbleduck. How would dinosaurs have fared there? What about the thrake—a grade-three sentience but still armoured like a tank? What about the horrifying leeches of that far out-Polity planet Spatterjay? What else is out there—what have we yet to find?
— From How It Is by Gordon
The kiln smell, then the sound of a steam pump, told Anderson what lay ahead before he even saw the minerallier encampment, and rounding a butte beside which some spillage had cut an oily-looking channel, around which grew stunted sulerbanes, he and Tergal soon came in sight of industry.
‘You can see why they’re here,’ said Tergal. Anderson looked at him questioningly, and Tergal pointed up at the butte. ‘White and blue sand in separate layers.’
Anderson glanced up to where layers of pink and orange sand separated the white from the blue.
Tergal explained, ‘You find the two layers close together and they’ve normally reacted with each other. Then the trace elements turn to salts, and rain washes them out. The sands are worthless then.’
Anderson nodded, not wanting to disappoint the boy by explaining that he already knew all this.
By the channel a sand hog as old as Bonehead was lying in the sunshine, harnessed to a huge cart laden with coke. Next to this was parked a large powered vehicle with caterpillar treads, and two trailers attached behind—one flatbed and one container. Beyond the stream, the mineralliers had erected a scaffold up the side of the butte, so that they could get to the layers of sand which they lowered in separate buckets on a steam-driven chain. A short distance back from the butte, bonded-sand kilns and houses had been built, but even so Anderson knew this to be a temporary encampment—the mineralliers would stay only until the seams were worked out, though that could take them months or years. Between the houses they had erected a wooden frame on which sleer carapaces were drying—no doubt to be used as additional fuel. Workers were busy in the excavation in the butte, mining the sands or, down below, harrowing it to the kilns where others spread it on ceramic plates to fuse it into sheets. No one noticed their approach until a little girl spotted them, and went yelling into the encampment.
‘What would we do without them?’ Anderson asked, eyeing the solar triptych lying open on Bonehead’s back—its three cells charging up the batteries of the charge generator they had used during the night.
‘Mineralliers?’ Tergal asked.
‘No, solar cells. There are other ways of generating electricity, but none so easy and convenient as this.’ He gestured to a stack of boxes by one of the sandstone houses.
Beside this, a big black-haired woman was cutting sheets of opaque-white and translucent-blue glass, before polishing them. Next to her, a small monkey of a man was attaching small braided copper wires, painting something on one kind of glass, then sealing pieces of each kind together with sheets of glistening film he removed from a bucket beside him. Each complete photovoltaic cell he wrapped and carefully packed away. It was to the woman that the girl ran. The woman ceased working and walked out to meet Anderson and Tergal at the edge of the encampment.
‘A slow response, and I hardly expected a Rondure Knight to be sent,’ she said, looking Anderson up and down.
‘I think you’re mistaking me for someone else,’ said Anderson, unstrapping himself from his saddle as Bonehead went down on its crawler limbs.
‘You’re a weapons man?’
‘I am that,’ he replied, stepping down onto the sand.
The woman nodded. ‘We sent into Golgoth for a weapons man five days ago and he has yet to appear.’ She gazed about in irritation, eyed Tergal for a moment, then returned her attention to Anderson. ‘Are you taking commissions?’
Anderson shrugged. ‘Whenever availa
ble—a man has to eat.’
‘Then I have one for you for which I can pay in pfennigs, or new phocells if you’d prefer. Our man from Golgoth can suck on a sleer’s arse for all I care now.’
Tergal snorted, choked off his laughter. The woman stared at him estimatingly.
‘Your apprentice?’ she asked Anderson.
‘Of a kind,’ replied Anderson. ‘Tell me about this commission.’
Again the woman looked around. ‘It comes at night, and we’ve not minded when it only knocked a few things over as it searched our camp for food. But it’s getting bolder. Six nights ago it attacked one of our hogs and put a hole in its carapace.’ She gestured to a hog compound over the other side of the encampment in which more of the huge creatures rested like a scattering of laval domes in the sunshine. One of them, perhaps younger and more curious than its fellows, had its sensory head out from under its shell and high up in the air with its eye-palps extruded wide apart to observe proceedings. ‘Then five nights ago it tried to grind its way into one of our houses.’
‘Show me that,’ Anderson said.
The woman gestured for him to follow her, and led the way into the encampment. Tergal also dismounted, and led his hog by hooking his goad under the edge of its carapace skirt. Anderson stared pointedly at Bonehead until, with a long sigh, it heaved up onto its crawler limbs and followed as well. Glancing about as he walked in, he saw that this encampment must have been here—or was intended to be here—for some time, for the spill-channel issued from a standing hand pump. Therefore the mineralliers had drilled a borehole, and that was not something done for a short-term operation. Soon other workers were coming over to see what was going on. The monkey-like man walked beside Tergal, talking animatedly to him, but Anderson could not hear what their conversation concerned. By the time he reached the sandstone house, quite a crowd had gathered. He inspected the gouges in the soft stone, confirming what he had already guessed. Smiling, he glanced at Tergal before turning to the woman.
‘Do you know what did this?’ he asked.
‘We’d earlier hoped it was a second-stager, but what with the attack on a sand hog and now this…’ She shrugged.
‘Third,’ he said, and gestured to the deep puncture holes in the bonded sand. ‘That’s where it held on with its pincers while it worked on the wall with its carapace saws. Something must have distracted it, else it would have gone right through.’
‘Third!’ someone snorted. ‘He’s trying to bump the price up, Chandle.’
Anderson turned away and began to walk back to Bonehead.
‘Wait!’ the woman Chandle shouted. ‘And you, Dornick, shut your mouth.’
Anderson turned. ‘Thirty phocells—they’ll be useful for trade as I’m heading up onto the Plains.’
‘Bloody extortion!’
Anderson rounded on the man Dornick: a squat, bearded individual with cropped mouth tendrils and the underhand thumb-spurs that inevitably led his type into some technical trade. ‘Would you prefer to hunt it yourself?’
‘At that price—probably.’
‘Dornick,’ Chandle warned.
‘That’s days of work, that is. Days and days.’
Anderson noted that Chandle, though giving a warning, seemed disinclined to interfere and was waiting for his reply. He noted that some of these people carried metallier weapons, and perhaps that was making them overconfident. Really, he didn’t need this as, though he might manage to trade off a few phocells to nomads on the Plains, he had no real need for them. And as for money—he had accumulated plenty of that. But a sense of duty asserted itself. He glanced at the little girl standing beside Chandle. A third-stager would take only seconds to mince her into easily ingestible portions.
‘Days, you say.’ He turned and walked back to the wall of the house. ‘Dornick, I see you have a measuring wire on your belt. May I borrow it?’ Anderson held out his hand.
The man looked rebellious but, after a warning glare from Chandle, handed over the wire. Anderson unspooled it above his head, measuring the height of the damage to the wall.
‘There was no reason here for the creature to climb, so I would bet it chewed on this dwelling while keeping its forelimbs on the ground. So, when you find marks like this, there’s an easy calculation to apply.’ He wound the wire back into its spool. ‘The body length of a third-stager is nominally two and a half times the height of its mouthparts from the ground. These marks are over two metres high.’ Anderson observed how some faces had taken on a sickly hue. Dornick was mouthing the figures. ‘Five metres,’ Anderson told the man. ‘A third-stager of that length weighs five times a big man. And, incidentally, can run twice as fast.’
‘So you say,’ muttered Dornick.
Anderson handed back his wire. ‘I’ll bring you the body, and if it is less than five metres long I’ll waive my fee.’
‘You have a deal, Rondure Knight,’ said Chandle, stepping forward before Dornick could say any more.
* * * *
The ECS doctors had erected a chainglass partition to prevent any air-transmission of infection, and it was an infection possible for even Fethan, with his flash-frozen bio-gridded brain and body of plastic and metal, to contract. Not that there had been any sign of the dying remains of the Jain mycelium—inside the outlinker — spreading through the air, but no one was taking any chances.
‘The girl will be next?’ he asked, scratching at his ginger beard.
The surgeon master, Gorlen, gave him a funny look. Fethan had noted that same look from many of those members of the hospital arm of ECS. It encompassed their amazement at finding a cyborg such as himself still existing—for those of his kind who had survived the process had long since transferred themselves to more durable Golem bodies—and their overpowering urge to take him apart to see how he ticked.
‘The girl is already undergoing surgery,’ Gorlen replied. ‘One of the nodes was pressing against her heart and there was a chance of arrest.’
‘She’ll survive?’ Fethan turned towards the man.
Gorlen nodded towards where Apis Coolant lay on a bed inside the quarantine booth, almost concealed by monitoring equipment. ‘She has as good a chance as him. The nanobots sent from the Jerusalem are breaking apart every last scrap of the mycelium and, unless I’ve missed something, he’ll be out of here in a day or so.’ The surgeon now picked up an aluminium box with carry strap from a nearby table.
‘So that’s the bugger, is it?’ Fethan asked.
‘That’s it—designed by Jerusalem itself.’
The man passed the box over, and Fethan, after inspecting the ouroboros motif on the lid—Jerusalem’s mark—hung it by its strap from his shoulder. He then turned and looked outside through the window to his right.
Dry flute grasses spread for as far as he could see, beyond where Polity machinery had churned the ground to black mud veined with the green of unearthed nematodes. Against aubergine skies, he saw another big carrier setting out for the mountains, surrounded by its swarm of robot probes. Most of the calloraptor bodies had been recovered, along with the landing craft Skellor had sent down to the surface, and all were now stored in the burnt-out Theocracy cylinder world Faith—which struck Fethan as somehow ironic. The huge research vessel Jerusalem was to pick up those items, only that was not now the case. Jerusalem had decided it was needed elsewhere. Perhaps that was a good thing for the people of Masada, for even the runcible-linked communication from that AI had apparently caused the Flint runcible AI to shit bricks. It had taken a mind such as that to design the nanobots; nothing less could have managed it.
‘I guess it was too good to be true,’ said Fethan, now seeing a group of Masadans coming in from the flute grasses. All of them wore bulky breather gear.
Moving up beside him, Gorlen asked, ‘What?’
‘The mycelium—enabling people to live out there, rebuilding their bodies, keeping them alive…’
‘We know it’s possible now. A lot of benefits will come from this
technology.’
Fethan grunted, then turned to head away.
‘And you’ll be taking it to them?’ Gorlen asked.
‘So I’ve been instructed.’
‘Good luck.’
‘Let’s hope so.’
Heading for the tunnel leading to the shuttle landing-pad, Fethan abruptly turned aside and made for the airlock. Just one last time he wanted to hear the strange music from the flute grasses. Stepping outside he looked around. This place had been his home for many years while he worked here for ECS, fomenting rebellion against the ruling Theocracy, and he began to feel the wrench of departure. Turning to walk along the composite path laid down on the mud, he wondered, as ever, how true that feeling really was. His flash-frozen brain was as unchanging in content as it was in structure; and what he was, was as much crystal memory and emulation as existed in any Golem. Was he foolish to hold so stubbornly on to what little humanity remained to him? He turned and headed for the waiting shuttle. Once aboard, he tersely greeted the human monitor who was his pilot, strapped himself in, then set his internal timer and turned himself off… slept.
With seemingly no transition he then woke to a view of the moonlet Flint.
Well, why have I been woken? he asked through the wide-open channel in his internal comlink.
Runcible linked communication, the Flint AI told him.
Let’s have it then, he said.
There came a clatter of static, as of something small scrabbling out of the path of a juggernaut.
Something more is required.
Fethan paused as he felt the vastness of the mind poised beyond the link. He shivered and felt a sinking in the pit of his stomach—all emulation, but he still understood what was scaring the Flint runcible AI.
Jerusalem?
Evidently.
At this word, Fethan looked down at the box in his lap, then across at the pilot who was watching him. The ouroboros turned—swallowing its own tail endlessly — then Fethan felt a series of clicks as locks disengaged.