The Line of Polity ac-2

by Neal Asher

  "They care so much about their people in the city?" Carl inquired sarcastically.

  "They care about the spaceport, I think," Lellan replied.

  "What losses there?"

  "We lost five tanks to some big launchers Clotus had set up."

  "Now?" asked Carl, as he drove the tank up beside a stand of new flute grass and noted, on the radar traces transferred from Uris's console, that other tanks from other attack points were now converging on his own.

  "Most of the launchers are down, apparently, but there are still snipers with rail-guns stuck in the old bastions — like scole leaves, as Polas puts it," Lellan replied.

  Carl succinctly relayed this information to his crew.

  "Still seems too easy," remarked Beckle, pushing his targeting visor away from his face and glancing tiredly towards Carl.

  "It is," said Carl, his face without expression. "All bets changed once the arrays went down." He now stared down at the screen to which Uris was relaying all command signals. "If it makes you feel any better, Polas is keeping me updated on the situation up above: the fleet is now on its way, with forces embarked from Charily, so it seems likely we'll have a whole rush of Theocracy troops up our arses any day now."

  Into the short silence that followed this announcement Uris interjected, "Then we need to take the spaceport as soon as possible."

  "Yes," agreed Carl. "If they can bring down their mu-class ships, then they'll be able to offload heavy armour. Without the port they'll have to use the landers and infantry, and they'll have to come down on the plains, as there aren't enough clear areas around here to land on."

  "It'll get bloody," said Paul.

  Thinking of the carnage they had so recently wrought, Carl said, "What do you mean, get?"

  The sun sank close beside Calypse, bouncing light off the gas giant in a brief flood that turned the landscape golden. Within half an hour this odd light was fading, and now the clouds along the horizon, behind which both planet and sun were sinking, had the appearance of stretched marshmallows in pastel shades of green, blue, and red against a rusty orange sky.

  "It's because of the dust and smoke," said Cormac. "Pollution makes for the best sunsets."

  Apis only half heard what the agent was saying, as pain and anger sat inside him hand in glove, clenched in a fist around his insides — or perhaps the physical pain he felt was due to the constant drag of gravity, of being confined here in this dark well. After all, the words 'My mother is dead' seemed to have no real meaning at all, along with phrases like Miranda has been destroyed… I am the only survivor from the supposed rescue ship, which was in turn destroyed by Dragon… I killed twenty-three of my fellow survivors because they would have killed me… the AI dreadnought that then rescued me has been hijacked by a Separatist madman wielding the technology of a five-million-year-dead race — the same technology that is now keeping me alive in gravity that would otherwise kill me.

  "How are you doing?" Mika suddenly asked him.

  Apis glanced at her. By what he had learnt from Cormac and Gant, the ability to ask questions was something she had only recently acquired, and he could see that just asking a question was an end in itself for her. It was not as if she required any specific answer — the nanomycelium growing in the tissues of his body, which it was currently rebuilding, monitored him at a level far beyond that even of an autodoc; and, as far as he understood, transmitted reports to this suit's CPU which in turn conveyed the information to Mika's laptop.

  "I'm alive," replied Apis.

  Mika's expression showed some confusion for a moment, then she turned away to observe the other members of their party as they trudged through flute grass that had been grazed down to ankle height. It occurred to him that though Mika was learning to ask questions, she had yet to discover what to do with the answers — it seemed that whole new landscapes of conversation were opening up for her, and that she was still agoraphobic in that respect.

  He decided to ask a question himself, more to ease her discomfort than because he wanted answers. At an intellectual level he knew that he should have answers and knowledge of all that was occurring, but on an emotional level he just did not care.

  "What makes this Jain nanotechnology you are using better than the Polity version?" he asked her.

  Mika turned back to him with her expression relaxing into the comfortable superiority of the didact. "Besides their basic nanomachine units being as far in advance of our own as the AGC is to a horse and cart, it is the structural nanotechnology that is so… useful. The technology employs nanomycelia, which enables a powerful support structure for the machines at the business end, and almost instant communication between machines. Essentially it is the linking together of disparate machines: it is the organization. A useful analogy would be in the building of a city. With our technology, it would be as if you had sent in a thousand stonemasons each with blueprints and the tools to do the job. The masons would do the job, but get in each other's way, repeat tasks, and make outright mistakes because of the ensuing chaos. Jain nanotechnology is more hierarchical: every unit knows its place, its job, and all inefficiencies are therefore wiped out."

  "Jain technology is social, then," he said.

  Mika appraised him wonderingly. "Yes, you're right. You're absolutely right."

  Apis went on, "Perhaps a better view of your masons, in Jain terms, would be them standing on each other's shoulders, passing up tools and stone to build the castle."

  "Yes, that is indeed a simplification of the mycelial structures now being built inside you." She glanced at her laptop. "Within two solstan days you will no longer require that suit. Using Polity tech, a similar result could only be obtained in about a month — and you would have spent most of that same month in a tank, along with the nanites, monitored by AI."

  "Jain tech is self-monitoring then?"

  "Yes, it is," Mika replied, slightly puzzled.

  "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 li
stened 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.