Gridlinked

  ‘Mennecken!’ yelled Corlackis from behind Stanton.

  Mennecken froze, staring at Stanton with open hate, then he became calm. He turned and wiped his dagger on the catadapt’s clothing, then sheathed it, keeping his back to Stanton and Corlackis all the while. When he did turn, his expression was casual.

  ‘I thought I told you to stay at the car,’ said Stanton, glancing aside at Corlackis.

  Corlackis held up his own comunit. ‘I could see he wasn’t far. Thought I might help.’

  Stanton nodded and holstered his pulse-gun. ‘Mennecken, bring her to the car,’ he said, then turned away. Corlackis fell in beside him as they returned to the AGC.

  ‘He’s becoming a liability,’ Stanton said.

  ‘He’s not so bad,’ Corlackis replied.

  Stanton had to wonder just what precisely this mercenary’s definition of ‘bad’ was. On reaching the AGC he waited in the pouring rain. He could have helped Mennecken to carry the corpse back, but felt no inclination in that direction. It was Mennecken’s fault she was so far from the car anyway. He was just about to speak into his comunit when he saw a drunken trio swaying down the street towards him.

  ‘Wild party,’ said Corlackis.

  From a distance it seemed as if the three of them were drunk. Closer inspection revealed that the one in the middle did not have his feet on the ground and any movement was imparted by the two on either side, those two being Svent and Dusache. Stanton reached inside the car and popped the boot.

  ‘I thought you were going to wait,’ he said as the two mercenaries drew close.

  Svent nodded at their burden. The man had a trail of dark blood from one nostril and his head had more movement at the neck than was natural.

  ‘Sonny here started to get anxious when we walked in. I walked over and gave him a friendly hug. Few people in there, and I got fed up with his lack of conversation.’

  Stanton motioned to the boot of the car and looked around. Apart from a few revellers that had gone into the metrotel, there was no one about. It was a perfect night for murder. Svent’s victim went into the boot too, shortly followed by the catadapt Mennecken dragged out of the alley.

  ‘Phew! You stink, Mennecken,’ said Svent as they all crammed into the car. He pointed to the unconscious ECS men on the back seat. ‘Who’s this?’

  ‘Pelter wants a chat,’ said Corlackis.

  There was general laughter Stanton felt no inclination to join in with. He flung the AGC round and headed out for the wasteland.

  * * *

  Pelter pocketed his comunit and stopped. He stared blankly into the rain-curtained night. How would the Golem react? That it had overheard that conversation he had no doubt. He peered around at the rain dripping from the acacias, then at a nearby wrecked AGC and, further back in a tangle of growth, the corroding cargo section of a small carrier. It would have worked out what had happened and perhaps now be considering how it might rescue its companions. It wasn’t to know about their little rehearsed conversation. He reached up and touched the scaled aug on the side of his head and from it, through the command module, he gave Mr. Crane his instructions. So clear and precise was this aug, it almost made him see the world in a different light. Crane held out the briefcase for him and he took it. Crane then stepped to one side. Pelter watched through the android’s night vision. Shortly, as expected, the Golem broke cover and walked towards him.

  ‘What are your intentions, Pelter?’ it asked.

  So very much like a very beautiful woman, Pelter thought. It was almost a shame.

  ‘I intend to kill a man,’ he replied.

  The Golem woman stopped and tilted her head to one side. She seemed puzzled. It annoyed Pelter that even in these circumstances she still went through the charade of human body language and reaction.

  ‘I do not understand,’ she reluctantly admitted. ‘You have my three companions.’

  ‘Yes, I do.’

  ‘What are your intentions toward them?’

  ‘You should, really, worry about my intentions towards you.’

  ‘I should?’ She tilted her head and shot a look of contempt at Mr. Crane.

  ‘You should. I lured you out here so my men could deal with your companions without interference. I also lured you out here because I knew that even though Mr. Crane here will have no problem scrapping you, it will be a noisy affair.’

  Again the look of contempt. ‘I am a Golem Twenty. That creature is a metal-skin. He is something manufactured Out-Polity from Cybercorp leftovers and sold for far too much to the likes of yourself.’

  Pelter smiled his nasty smile. ‘You couldn’t be more wrong. Mr. Crane was a Golem Twenty-five who used to work for ECS. His moral governors were broken by full sensorium downloads from the mind of a psychopath, and then he was reprogrammed for our purposes. The metal skin you see is case-hardened ceramal, netted with superconductor, over his usual ceramal skeleton. He runs from four different micropiles and all his joint motors are somewhat more than Cybercorp standard.’

  ‘I am to believe this?’ the Golem woman asked.

  ‘Let me convince you.’

  Pelter turned to Mr. Crane to give his orders, not because it was necessary for him to give vocal orders, but because he wanted the Golem woman to hear.

  ‘Mr. Crane, tear this arrogant machine into pieces and scatter those pieces here amongst the rest of this scrap.’

  Crane kicked up a huge clod of earth as he went from stillness to terrifying speed. The Golem had time only to turn before he hit her. The sound was like a slab of iron being dropped onto a car. Her feet were driven deep into the ground. She struck at Crane with blows too fast to see: each blow a gun shot, each blow without noticeable effect. He bowed, looped his right arm under her right, his left arm round her hips, and he bent and twisted her. Clothing ripped and artificial skin split. The flashes of shorts and system diodes blowing could be seen through her parting flesh. She started to make a high keening sound, for even androids do not like to die. The sound ceased when Crane finally tore her in half and methodically began to pound those halves to fragments.

  ‘How far are you?’ Pelter asked into his comunit.

  ‘Be with you shortly,’ Stanton replied. ‘Everything OK there?’

  ‘Yes, of course,’ said Pelter, shutting off his com. He stared at Mr. Crane now and, with the huge clarity he now had through his new aug, he could almost feel the android’s longing.

  ‘No, Mr. Crane,’ he said, ‘you cannot keep her head.’

  Mr. Crane reluctantly tossed his trophy into the bushes, then turned, at Pelter’s instruction, towards the approaching AGC. Pelter turned his comunit back on.

  ‘That you, John?’

  ‘It is. Where’s the android?’

  ‘About, I think would be the best description,’ Pelter replied.

  The AGC halted and the five men got out. Stanton looked at some of the bits scattered around where Mr. Crane stood, then turned to Pelter.

  ‘What now?’

  ‘You have them all, as instructed?’ Pelter asked.

  ‘More or less,’ Stanton replied.

  ‘And by that you mean?’ Pelter asked.

  ‘We got them all, and we’ve got your live one.’

  Pelter stared at him for a long moment, then abruptly turned to Svent and Dusache. He pointed. ‘In that old carrier over there. Strip him and tie him.’

  The two dragged the still-stunned man out of the car and dragged him off towards the carrier.

  ‘Mennecken,’ Pelter said. ‘Bury the bodies and lose the car. I want nothing found while we’re here. John, Corlackis—with me.’

  Mennecken got into the driver’s seat and took the car away, while the three others moved over to the carrier. After a moment Crane jerked as if he had just woken, and he followed them. They entered the carrier through a rusting split in the thin wall. It was essentially a small room with alloy walls and a dirt floor thick with the black growths seen in the town. The two had stripped the man
by the time they arrived, and were tying his wrists and ankles. His wrists they secured to stanchion along one wall. Dusache cracked a low-luminosity chemical light and jammed it into a rusting crevice.

  ‘Now we see what he knows,’ said Pelter.

  Stanton studied the object Pelter pulled from his pocket. It was something the Separatist had acquired from that weird shit Grendel. Knowing what was about to ensue, Stanton wondered if it was entirely necessary.

  * * *

  ‘I knew you . . . from Cheyne III,’ the man said as he fought to regain his breath.

  ‘And?’ said Pelter.

  Stanton thought the Separatist was taking a bit of a risk sucking on the end of the inducer like it was a pen. You could never tell whether or not the things were on or off until you touched someone with them. Then that someone would certainly know. Mennecken would have wanted to carve the ECS agent up with a knife, but the simple fact was that an inducer hurt more, and the person you were torturing would stay alive longer because there would be no blood loss.

  ‘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 Ja
ne: ‘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 face.

  ‘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 after-effects 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.