by Neal Asher
‘No reservations?’ Jack asked her, coldly dispassionate.
‘None at all,’ she replied, trying to believe that completely.
Machines first, just like those she had destroyed as a child, but now she was working with more effective tools. Freyda taught her all about explosives: which ones to use in what situations and how to maximize their destructive effect. Aphran learnt impatiently — she wanted to do something soon about the injustice done to her two sisters. Obviously it was all the fault of the AIs. Why wasn’t that s-con cable adequately shielded? Why no safety nets in that ventilation space? Why didn’t these godlike AIs look after people? At the age of seventeen she killed her first monitor. He had fancied her, so was not sufficiently on his guard. She shot him once through the throat, again through the back of the head as he lay gagging for life. Then she spewed up her guts nearby. The organization got her out of there—she’d left just too much of her DNA as evidence at the scene. On another world she graduated to mass murder with a bomb planted in a runcible facility, but it failed to take out the AI there. The only AI she ever managed to actually… kill, was a free Golem, and that at close range with a missile launcher, while its back was turned. But though the AIs were the main enemy, the most hated of all were those who willingly served them: ECS and its agents—no agony could be too much for them to suffer. How utterly and completely did the Separatist organization brainwash her, and how downright stupid of her to allow it.
Skellor—the brilliant biophysicist who was promising to change their fortunes—brought ECS down on them like an avalanche. Subverting an ECS dreadnought by using Jain technology, he then made Aphran and some of her fellows his crew in the most horrific way possible: subsumed in Jain tech, becoming mere adjuncts to him, suffering and yet not dying. Then he killed her, burned her in a never-ending fire, the only escape being for her mind to flee inside the Jain structure. Next came Jack, who uploaded her from there to a partitioned segment of his own crystal. She combined with him, embracing him for the sake of her own survival, and there found clarity with which she began to see everything thereafter. For open to her were the massive historical files that Jack contained, giving sharp contrast to the peace and plenty enjoyed across the majority of the human Polity. She saw how the AIs allowed the human race the freedom to enjoy luxurious eternity, or even to destroy themselves personally, but not the freedom to destroy each other. She came to recognize her past life as the stubborn intransigence of a spoilt child. But most importantly she saw Jack. And that alone was enough.
‘I wondered why you were not prepared to die for the cause, but you did not answer me,’ she enquired over com.
Freyda shook her head, then sat down with her legs crossed, her back resting against the wall.
‘Only when I see you, will I believe it’s really you,’ she replied.
Aphran chose an image matching her appearance when held captive aboard the Occam Razor, and projected it into the room.
Freyda frowned and waved a dismissive hand. ‘Projection. I suppose whatever is talking to me now was constructed out of information reamed from Aphran’s mind before they killed her.’
‘Skellor killed me. You remember Skellor, don’t you? He actually burned me to death.’
Again the dismissive hand gesture.
Aphran allowed her form to change into that now more commonly seen by those aboard the NEJ. This elicited more of a reaction, Freyda’s eyes growing wide. She stared for a long moment before shaking her head.
‘I am a memcording—that’s all of me remaining,’ Aphran told her. ‘Is this what you would like to be? You have information that may be vital and you are surrounded by people who are very much lacking in patience. They’ll use an aug to interface with your mind, make a copy of all it contains, then that recording will be taken apart by this ship’s AI. You personally will then be of no use. This cell can easily be opened to vacuum.’
‘You’re no Aphran I know. You would have died rather than serve them.’
‘But I did die.’
Freyda grimaced and stared down at the floor.
Aphran went on, ‘This is an Aphran with her eyes opened wide. Your cause is hopeless, pointless and destructive. But then I think you came to realize that even before you recruited me. Once you genuinely believed all that humans-to-rule-humanity crap, but in the end you just enjoyed your own sense of importance… and killing people of course.’
‘If I do talk, what do I get in return?’
‘Whatever we can give you, but within reason.’
Freyda snorted contemptuously then said, ‘I would rather like to stay alive.’’
‘Is that within reason?’ Aphran shrugged. ‘Hard or soft—your choice. From here you’ll be transported back to Earth, which will require about fifteen runcible transfers. There you’ll face a judicial AI and be sentenced for your crimes. This does, however, mean you’ll live a little longer.’
The fifteen transfers were the key, for Freyda would still believe there might be a way out of this for her. Aphran only felt sad when registering the furtiveness in the woman’s expression.
‘I want to be allowed certain freedoms during that time,’ she said. ‘I don’t want to be put into coldsleep.’
‘Granted.’
Again that look of furtiveness. ‘I’ll need time to think about this… in a better location than this. I am not an animal to be caged.’
Aphran allowed herself to begin to fade. ‘You have no time.’
‘Okay,’ said Freyda quickly. ‘Okay… what do you want to know?’
‘How many of you were there, down there?’
‘I’m not entirely sure—’
‘How many?’
‘Seventeen… fourteen now.’
‘Their location?’
Freyda eventually volunteered a grid reference deep in the forests.
‘There is something there,’ Jack informed Aphran. ‘It’s shielded, but not sufficiently so.’
‘Now,’ said Aphran, ‘what brought you here?’ She gritted her non-existent teeth through the ensuing political diatribe, and kept asking the same questions until Freyda provided the true answer.
‘High level ECS agents to kill—that’s always attractive.’
‘How did you know they would be here?’
While she waited for the answer, Aphran listened in on coms traffic both within the ship and way below, as the shuttle down on the surface, containing Thorn, Scar and fifty dracomen, launched on a heading to the coordinates just revealed.
‘I was told.’ Freyda abruptly stood and eyed Aphran up and down. ‘Is that how you appear now, the princess, the lady in white… one of the good guys?’
‘It is how I like to appear.’
‘Perhaps you’ve forgotten Coloron, then. Thellant N’komo still runs things there, and it’s him you need to talk to. Where he got his information from I don’t know, but it was him that sent us here.’
Aphran allowed her image to fade totally, then, as an afterthought, sent the signal that paralysed Freyda. The Separatist woman dropped like a pole. Aphran observed as the door now opened and the telefactor entered, carrying the aug they would use to record Freyda’s mind and check the veracity of her story.
‘Do we ship her back to Earth?’
‘No,’ Jack replied.
‘Kill her?’
‘No.’
‘What then?’
‘Sentence was passed on Freyda long ago, should she ever be caught. Death or erasure to be carried out as soon as feasible after her capture. After I have taken a recording of her mind, checked her story, and gleaned from it all knowledge that might be useful to ECS, I will wipe the recording and then wipe her mind. We will put her body into coldsleep, as there are still plenty of minds in the Soulbank who would be grateful for the physical vessel.’
And that being how the Polity dealt with its criminals, Aphran felt die then any hope she harboured for a future.
* * * *
The scene now surroundin
g Thorn vaguely reminded him of his time as a soldier. Inside the shuttle the ten dracomen squatted in pairs in their saddle seats, their weapons braced across their chests. But these were soldiers of a different stripe. When they first landed on the planet, Thorn asked Scar why they discarded their impact suits. The dracoman leader had replied that they did not wish to be encumbered. Thorn then suggested they clad themselves in chameleon-cloth fatigues. Scar demonstrated how their own skin was much better at the job. So now, but for harnesses on which to carry high-tech weapons and other equipment, they were naked: green scaled all over except for their fronts which were yellow from throat to groin. With their forked tongues tasting the air, sharp white teeth occasionally exposed, they seemed like extras in a barbaric scene out of some VR fantasy.
In the cockpit Thorn faced forwards as Scar brought the shuttle down low so that now, through the ceiling-to-floor front screen, they could see the forest hurtling along underneath them.
‘How long?’ he asked.
‘Sixteen minutes.’
Thorn nodded. It had been difficult, but he managed to force himself to delegate this mission to Scar—just giving the dracoman the simple instruction:
‘Try to kill as few of them as possible—we’re here for information, not extermination.’
‘How many prisoners do you want?’
‘I leave that up to you, Scar.’
Scar banked the shuttle slightly, and took it lower, forest now speeding under its left-hand side. Opening his pack Thorn removed a plastic box and popped it open. As Scar straightened the craft again, Thorn took out one of the small camcom discs and passed it over to the dracoman, who inspected it for a moment before slapping it on the side of his head. Closing the box, Thorn tossed it to the next dracoman behind him. He did not need to say anything more as dracomen were very far from stupid. The first took out a disc, pressed it to its temple, then passed the box on. Now Thorn operated the lever to bring his seat closer to the mission control console. He lifted the VR headgear from its recess and placed it over his head—the visor covering his face and phones enclosing his ears. Immediately frames began accumulating across his range of vision as each dracoman pressed a camcom into place. Using the ball control in his chair arm he selected frame one in the sequence. It expanded to fill his vision and the sounds within the shuttle changed slightly. He now seemed to be looking through Scar’s eyes, and hearing what the dracoman heard. Clicking back, he saw all the frames now present, and a diagnostic readout showed the system to be working at optimum. Thorn removed the headgear and placed it back in its recess.
The view remained largely unchanged for ten minutes more, then Scar brought the shuttle down lower still so it sped along a straight lane between looming walls of trees. Below, three tracks, each five yards wide and spaced forty yards apart, had been crushed through a dense tangle of bluish bracken, parsleys and brambles. Soon they came in sight of the massive machine responsible: the beetle-shaped agrobot was two hundred yards long and a hundred wide, and mounted on three sets of three huge cage-ball wheels, which enabled so massive a machine to manoeuvre with remarkable accuracy. But it was going nowhere at the moment, since two of the cage balls had collapsed. Scar swung the shuttle in a wide circle around this behemoth, checking the ground below with infrared and carbon dioxide emission scanners. But nothing showed up, and Thorn wondered if Aelvor had yet started introducing large animals—or if he ever would. Perhaps he did not like what creatures like deer might do to his newly planted saplings.
After this survey, the dracoman finally brought the shuttle down directly behind the mechanical colossus. Even before the shuttle landed, its side-ramp doors began to open. Dracomen started disembarking the moment a wide enough gap opened; leaping fifteen feet down into the vegetation as if the drop was nothing to them. As soon as the shuttle settled, Scar unstrapped himself and stood up from his saddlelike seat. Thorn stood also and followed him out into the bracken. Here the dracomen only became visible when they moved—their scales transforming in both colour and texture to match their surroundings. Dressed in simple green fatigues, Thorn himself was the only one clearly visible.
Then, as if showing sympathy to him, all the dracomen simultaneously returned to their natural colour.
‘Remember,’ said Thorn, ‘we want to take some of them alive.’ Scar wrinkled his lips away from sharp ivory in a manner not exactly reassuring, then made a spearing gesture with his hand, and they set out. With their high-stepping birdlike gait the dracomen easily picked their way through the thick-growing brambles and bracken, then slowly they began to fade as they once again began to camouflage themselves. Thorn stood and watched them go, and really wanted to follow, but realized that would be pointless.
Landing directly on top of the Separatist encampment would remove any element of surprise, since the shuttle’s arrival would be detected long before. This highway for the massive agrobots was the nearest place to the encampment for a shuttle to find a plausible reason for landing. Aelvor had somehow caused the agrobot to break down at this point, so anyone listening and watching would think their shuttle contained a maintenance crew. It was a good plan since, on foot, dracomen could cover the intervening terrain very quickly. Thorn, being very fit and physically strong, and possessing reserves at their maximum, could also have covered the forty miles of forest easily enough, but in his case it was a question of how fast. He remembered once running with Scar through the foothills of the Masadan mountains, hunting a hooder on which they intended to plant transponders so that the monstrous predator’s location would always be known. Their pace then had been an even jog, and Thorn had thought it time they picked it up a little.
‘Can you go any faster than this?’ he had asked the dracoman on that occasion.
Scar fixed him with that big-eyed gaze, ‘Can you?’ Thorn accelerated until he was running full-pelt along the stony trail. He glanced at Scar and saw that the dracoman’s pace seemed almost unchanged, yet still he kept up.
After a moment Thorn said, ‘Show me, then.’
One moment Scar was loping along beside him, the next moment he took off like an ostrich, kicking up wet shale as he accelerated. Thorn watched him go, tracked him moving further along the path, then turning left up the slope until soon out of sight. After about five minutes he heard something approaching to his rear, and glanced back to see the dracoman speeding up behind him. Scar again settled to that jogging pace beside him.
‘In miles per hour?’ Thorn had asked.
‘Ninety to a hundred… on level ground,’ Scar replied.
‘Okay, maybe we’ll stick to my pace for now.’
It was a chastening memory.
Thorn now returned to the shuttle, donned his VR headgear, and began selecting views to observe. Soon the dracomen moved from tangled growth to clearer ground below the trees. They picked up their pace and became more visible, as their skin failed to compensate fast enough to the changing surroundings. Then, again almost as one, they returned to their natural coloration.
‘Scar,’ he said over com, ‘let me know when you’re about to attack. I’ll then launch and head over towards you. That might provide further distraction.’
Scar’s reply was merely a grunt, whereupon Thorn decided to shut up, sit back, and enjoy the show. A half-hour more of forest scenes resulted in him impatiently removing the headgear to go in search of a tab-pull coffee from the shuttle’s supplies. Returning to his seat and replacing the helmet, the first thing he heard was Scar’s voice: ‘We attack.’
Thorn spilt his coffee, swore, then quickly called up the feed from Scar’s camcom: pulse-rifles firing through the trees, shots stitching across a thick trunk, momentary glimpse of an autogun bolted to another trunk, an explosion, a tree falling. Two figures, human, a blurred shape between, and the double thump of stun discharge, two figures falling wrapped in small lightnings. Tents: chameleon cloth. Stun fire. A turbine winding up to speed somewhere. Thorn flicked through views, caught a glimpse of an AG scoot
er slamming into a tree. Another view: a man firing his weapon at the dracoman through whose camcom Thorn watched, muzzle-flash, flame and smoke then foliage and sky, then the dracoman was abruptly back upright again as the man turned away. A stun discharge threw the man down on his face. Then back to Scar, walking now.
‘We are done.’
Thorn sat very still, checked the time display in the corner of his visor, then shivered involuntarily. So much for his idea of launching the shuttle as a distraction. Abruptly the entire range of frames before his eyes then froze.
‘Scar cannot hear us,’ said Jack. ‘Observe this.’
Without Thorn doing anything, his VR gear selected a frame and the scene it displayed went into fast reverse, froze, then played forwards. He watched a man swinging his pulse-rifle round and begin firing. The shots slammed into a dracoman’s chest, juddering it to a halt then flinging it back. The man swung away to aim elsewhere. From a prone position the dracoman flipped forward and upright, fired on the man and brought him down, then it ran on. Half its chest was missing, the resultant cavity smouldering.
‘I’m glad they’re on our side,’ whispered Thorn.
‘If they really are,’ replied Jack.
Thorn’s view returned to encompass all the separate frames again. As the AI withdrew, he selected Scar’s frame in time to observe the dracoman brandishing a ceramo-carbide knife. Scar was busy removing leaf mould from around what looked like a small antipersonnel mine.
‘How many dead?’ Thorn asked.
‘Three humans: one received four stun charges, one broke his neck falling from an AG scooter, and one was accidentally shot by a comrade of his.’
‘What about your own people?’
‘No deaths.’
‘I’m sure I saw one of them hit.’
‘Three with minor injuries.’