by Neal Asher
‘I don’t fucking think so!’ someone shouted suddenly.
A pulse-gun fired and a figure spun out from behind a pillar and landed in the pool. Then came the detonation, blowing the same figure up out of the water in tatters, drenching the chainglass ceiling and all surroundings. Thorn quickly moved in—only one opponent left here. He spotted Scar running in from the other side of the pool, levelled his weapon. The ceiling abruptly transformed into a white shower of debonded chainglass as the remaining telefactor dropped through. A black gloved hand speared out from behind the pillar, suspending on one finger a gas-system pulse-gun by its trigger guard.
‘Okay, you’ve got me!’
The gun clattered to the floor and a woman with cropped brown hair stepped out from behind the pillar, her arms held out from her sides, gloved hands wide open. Thorn considered stunning her anyway, but the shattered body in the pool told him all he needed to know. Aphran’s voice, issuing from the telefactor, confirmed this:
‘Freyda, I take it you are not quite prepared to die for the cause?’
5
The Sparkind are an elite ECS military force, given a name derived from the Spartans (citizens of an ancient Greek city who were noted for their military prowess, austerity and discipline), though they cannot trace their ancestry back so far. Sparkind are rather the direct descendants of the Special Forces that came into being during the Earth-bound wars towards the end of the second millennium: the Special Boat Service, the Special Mr Service, Navy SEALS and the like. Candidates for the Sparkind must first serve five years in conventional military or police service. Their ensuing training program, both in reality and virtuality, is not designed to weed out the physically unable, because with today’s boosting and augmentation technologies, anyone can be physically able. But a certain strength of mind is sought: will, a toughness of spirit and a degree of wisdom. A Sparkind has to know what he, she or it is fighting for, has to be able to make life and death decisions, and has to be trusted with weapons capable of annihilating entire cities. Operating in four-person units, usually consisting of two Golem and two humans, they have been involved in some of the most violent and dangerous actions the Polity has ever faced. But the Sparkind, though an elite fighting force, are usually never the first in. Which brings me to the ECS agent, or Polity Agent…
— From her lecture ‘Modern Warfare’ by EBS Heinlein
The latest eruption dumped a layer of ash an inch thick, pocked with large spatters of cooling magma. Blegg stepped down off one of the ceramal beams glued in a gridwork across the Atheter artefact, stooped, and brushed away more ash. The cutting machines inevitably left swirls of stone stuck all over the surface since they had been programmed to hold back from actually digging into the object itself. However, some stone flaked away by itself to reveal translucent green crystal underneath. Blegg considered what all this meant.
This green substance was some form of memcrystal similar to that used in the Polity today. The most basic form of memcrystal — the sort that did not use crystal-interstice quantum processing, or etched-atom processing as it was sometimes called—could still store huge amounts of information. Just a piece of such a memcrystal the size of the last joint of a man’s thumb could model the function of and store the memories of a human mind over a period of twenty-five years—though those who possessed memplants would upload more often than that just to keep their Soulbank copy up to date, thereby freeing up space in the crystal implanted inside their heads. If only of that kind, what could a single mass of crystal this size potentially contain? The mind of a god? The stock market transactions of an entire galactic civilization? Alien porn tapes and family albums? Atheter blogs?
With information technologies it was accepted that crap naturally expands to fill the space available—that recording media and the media it recorded always somehow outpaced memory storage. The whole new science of information archaeology was based on that truism. But this object was alien, so everything it contained would be new, unfamiliar and worthy of lengthy study. Even information that would be considered dross in human storage would inevitably reveal things never before known about the constructors of this huge item.
Blegg stood up and looked around. The recent eruption streaked smoke across the lemon firmament, and a river of magma thrashed past some way to his left. He turned, remounted the beam and headed back towards his shuttle, which rested like a large grey slug on a rubble mound at the giant crystal’s edge. As he reached the beam end, a shadow fell across him. He glanced up to see the tug arriving: a manta-shaped behemoth.
He stood and watched as cables rappelled down from it, lowering spiderish grabs. These grabs hit the surface then scuttled along to grip large U-shaped lugs welded to the beams, then the cables drew taut. The entire artefact began vibrating—the gravmotors underneath it starting up. He stepped from it at that point, scrambling up the rubble slope to his shuttle’s airlock. Inside he waited as a blast of frigid air brought the exterior of his hotsuit down to a manageable temperature, then opened his shimmer-shield visor as he entered the shuttle’s interior. He dropped into the pilot’s seat and studied the scene outside. The artefact was rising now, but the impression given was of his own vessel sinking. Feeling the shuttle readjust its landing gear on the rubble below it, he engaged AG and lifted it a few yards into the poisonous air. Soon the artefact became a black line cutting from right to left. Fumaroles ejecting sulphurous gas clouded the view underside for a while, but that soon cleared to reveal the gravmotors attached beneath it. Keeping his shuttle positioned to one side, Blegg followed the huge object up into the sky. Other observers joined him—grabships from the station, telefactors, and floating holocams recording every instant of this ascent.
As the artefact rose through the acidic atmosphere it left a trail of ash and then, as the air pressure began to drop, volatiles complemented this trail with poisonous vapours. Five hours later, when the artefact lay only a mile away from the Hourne, all the ash and volatiles were gone. The tug released its grabs, wound in its cables and drew away. Now the grabships moved in to delicately clamp their claws onto the crystal rim. Very slowly and very carefully, they eased the artefact through a gap in the Hourne’s skin, and into a large enclosed space where shock-absorbing jacks closed in on its surface. Even as Blegg brought his shuttle back round the giant ship, he observed suited figures and telefactors shifting plates of hull metal to weld into place and seal the entry gap.
When Blegg returned inside to stand at a viewing blister overlooking the artefact, the beams used to brace it were being removed and beetlebots were busy scouring the crystal surface of the last layers of accreted stone. Around the internal chamber’s perimeter, multiheaded optic interfaces were waiting on telescopic rams ready to be pushed into position. Back in the ship itself, haiman, human and Golem scientists, and the Hourne’s AI, were awaiting that crucial moment of connection with something of an alien race believed long dead.
— retroact 3 -
Despite this place having been pounded into rubble, some remnants of the Reich here still fought on. The jeep lay sideways in the dust, its engine screaming and one rear wheel spinning madly, the driver’s headless corpse now draped over a nearby pile of rubble. A long spatter of blood linked vehicle to body. Herman—as he now called himself—walked a little closer to see if he could locate the head.
Ah, there…
It lay in the middle of the track bulldozed through the ruins, directly below the lethal wire strung across. As Herman moved closer he observed four German boys clambering down the pile of rubble to loot the headless corpse. They managed to get away with some chocolate, condoms, a wallet and an automatic pistol.
‘There’s another one coming!’ shouted a fair-haired boy, and they all scrabbled from view.
Herman wondered if they themselves had set the wire, and if this ploy had really proved worth the effort. It never occurred to him to question how he could understand their language, any more than he questioned his ability to t
raverse the non-region of U-space around the planet. Nor his intrinsic understanding of the events unfolding upon that planet. He was only a boy, yet he knew about that million-degree eye that had opened over Hiroshima. He was a boy yet he understood what had happened in that forest-bound camp where now the perimeter wires and posts lay bulldozed into heaps and the long sheds burned to ash, and where still a stinking miasma rose from the mass graves.
Another jeep arrived. This time with an upright steel bar bolted to the vehicle, which snapped the wire just as the right front wheel rode over the previous visitor’s dusty detached head. The jeep turned and slid sideways to a stop, as the two passengers jumped out cocking M2 carbines. Herman stepped away, half a mile this time, to reappear just outside a courthouse. A little later an American gave him chocolate, peering with a puzzled expression at his asiatic features. Over the ensuing weeks Herman tried copying such expressions, concentrating on manipulating the muscles in his face. Only after the judges arrived did he realize, after seeing his reflection in a shard of mirror, how unreasonably successful he had been. Thereafter he unwrapped the filthy bandage he had bound around over the top of his head and running underneath his chin.
Getting inside the courtroom was not possible at first, but he picked up so much by just listening and lurking around. In this way he learned about the film to be shown as evidence. Upon hearing instructions given to the guards about having to put out the lights, he managed to transport himself inside at precisely the right time. No one there noticed him: their eyes riveted to the screen and many of them quietly crying. He wept then for his parents, for the horror of the world, and for the lot of a humanity he no longer felt a part of. And with a wholly adult relish he sometime later transported himself to a spot nearby to watch a stiff old gentleman in a baggy uniform, climb with shaking legs some wooden stairs to have his neck snapped at the end of a rope.
— retroact ends -
After detaching her carapace from the interface sphere, Orlandine stepped out of it and headed aft, through the living quarters, through a hold space packed with equipment, and into a storage chamber for haiman tools. She needed more than one set of hands for this job, and that’s where they were available.
Within the chamber, four assister frames were racked. Ignoring them for the moment she found a lightweight spacesuit adapted to haiman requirements and donned it, then she approached the first of the frames. This contrivance hung in its rack just like a spider carcase fashioned of silvery metal. She backed into the body space designed to accommodate her carapace, felt the numerous locks and optic plugs engaging, and her own control software coming online. One arm, human in length and terminating in four fingers, came up underneath her right arm, locking soft clamps above and below her elbow and just above her wrist. Now, essentially, her right arm possessed eight fingers—four of them metal. The pseudo arm that now connected to her left arm terminated in a three-fingered clamp over a micro-manipulator and s-con and optic interface head. Pseudo limbs simultaneously clamped themselves down each leg. These terminated in large three-digited claws protruding backwards from her ankles, which were usually used to anchor a haiman in place while working in zero-G. Folding out at a point just above her midriff were two additional arms, terminating in hands each with two opposable thumbs. She extended one of these out in front of her, wiggling its metal fingers. Now she was totally haiman.
This transformation was a psychological thing, related to ego and self-image. With just her carapace engaged, though her mind became larger and more extensive—capable of processing information like an AI and able to handle multiple tasks—it only extended from the two-legged two-armed ape. The next step was opening her sensory cowl. The moment she did that, the ‘ware loaded to handle multiple sensory inputs: she could perceive radio, infrared, ultraviolet, microwave, detect complex molecules in the air… But still she remained psychologically no more than a human using tools; peering through a nightsight, binoculars, whatever. But the assister frame’s ‘ware undermined her self-image in a way that seemed integral to her being. Her metal fingers were as touch-sensitive as her organic ones. She knew their position, their relation to each other and to her own soft self; her micro-tools were sensitive to textures not far above the atomic. She became the goddess Kali and the all-seeing Watchmaker combined.
Am I insane? some part of her wondered. But it was a very small part indeed.
Initiating detach, she stepped away from the support frame, then scuttled insectlike to the airlock. Once outside she clung to the hull and looked around. With her cowl spread, her surroundings seemed as bright as day from the residual infrared emitted from the ship’s thrusters and the further fluorescing of complex ices nearby.
The cell she had entered was a hundred yards across, its six walls nearing sixty feet high. Orlandine pushed herself from the hull and dropped slowly towards the floor. Making contact with it, she began walking away from the ship with a steady floating gait. In a moment she realized that the low gravity here would prove an inconvenience. If she moved everywhere like this, it would take her forever to get anything done. Using the enhancement of her legs she leapt forwards, hitting one of the walls ten yards up but absorbing the shock through her other enhanced limbs. As she dropped down beside the wall surface she studied it contemplatively, turning to look back at the Heliotrope only as her feet connected with the floor. This chamber she would prepare first for the rapid escape of the ship, and perhaps in time she could convert it for her own comfort. She would pressurize it and insulate it, maybe move out of the ship itself. In the wall behind her she would cut a hole and construct an airlock, and the cell beyond would then become her laboratory. That would be perfect. The Jain node would sit between clamps right in the middle of it: the focus of every resource she could muster.
* * * *
Aphran considered the facts of her life, if it could be called that. Even though she was a second generation recording of the original Aphran, a sentence of erasure hung over her because of the crimes that original one had committed. No claim of being a changed person, of having understood the error of her ways, of now being prepared to actively support the Polity, would change that. Aphran had murdered people, hundreds of people, and nothing she could now say or do would bring them back. Her sentence remained suspended only because ECS currently found her knowledge very useful, and because she had become intertwined so closely with Jack that her erasure might damage him in the process. But Jack was slowly untangling himself from her, and her usefulness to ECS was decreasing. She was a dead woman, and felt sure she would soon be a non-existent one.
Tracking Freyda as she came aboard, Aphran recognized another walking dead woman. Their captive wore a security collar which could paralyse her in a second, or blast a toxin straight into her carotids. She strode with a kind of arrogance, ahead of the bobbing telefactor, and Aphran knew Freyda probably thought she could get through this using just nerve and lies. Soon she would have to wake up to reality. Jack had appointed Aphran to the task of administering the cold shower.
‘And not a krodorman in sight,’ Aphran murmured.
‘Aelvor’s people have yet to make a search,’ Jack replied, ‘but none are listed in crew or on any passenger manifests of arrivals within the time frame.’
‘They won’t find any,’ interjected Thorn, over com from the planet below.
‘Perhaps you could explain, Thorn?’ Aphran enquired though, knowing Freyda, she knew what Thorn’s answer would be.
Freyda looked up and around, almost as if hearing part of this com exchange. Impossible of course. Perhaps she wondered why Aphran had not come to greet her the moment she boarded. When she eventually found out why, that would be the first shock.
‘There was no krodorman. That’s why you found no krodorman DNA at the scene. I’ll bet you found syntheflesh at von Hellsdorf’s place that’ll match samples in the hotel. She simply wore a krodorman suit… By the way, Aphran, what’s your history with her?’
Reluctantly
she replied, ‘She recruited me to the Separatist cause on Corolon.’
Aphran and her two sisters were each born from different fathers, but that was nothing unusual in the Corolon arcologies. She remembered the three of them playing together in the enclosed arboretums, in the shopping malls and sometimes in the rooftop fields. But best of all were the secret places of the sprawling city: the tunnels and niches, the air ducts and hollows through which spread forests of cables and pipes. It probably all started with them when the latest game became ‘break it and see how quickly the robots can fix it’. Enger obtained an electric saw with ceramo-carbide teeth, and not being the most incandescent lightstrip on the block, she found and cut into a superconducting cable. There seemed little point sending what remained to the crematorium. Aphran and Arial then blamed the robots. Arial, the eldest, was caught destroying three welding robots, and, while pursued by monitors, fell down a ventilation cavity. She survived but, after they bone-welded her skull back together she was never quite the same again: never wanted to play those same destructive games any more. Aphran believed the AIs had tampered with her brain. So when, a few years later, Freyda approached Aphran to recruit her to the Separatist cause, she knew she had at last found her place in the universe. Only in later years did she realize that after fighting for the cause for so long, a love of death and carnage had displaced Freyda’s initial idealism. Aphran now recognized the blindness of her earlier self: Freyda representing what Aphran herself had become before her physical death.
The cell Jack had prepared for their prisoner was unfurnished, deliberately claustrophobic, the lighting too bright. If Freyda wanted to sleep, or even just sit down, the cold ceramal floor would have to suffice. As the door closed behind Freyda, Aphran allowed the woman a little time to contemplate her present situation.