The Technician

  How long he sat there he did not know. It was only when the slow counting down of the timer on his wristwatch impinged upon him that he managed to force himself back to his feet. Four days left of his prosthetic’s oxygen supply – somewhere along the line he had lost a day, but he couldn’t figure out if that had been while at sea or while here on the shore. He took up his bag, managed to slip its handles over his shoulders to make it a backpack, and set out, small nodules of stone hard through the soles of his sanatorium slippers. At first walking was difficult, his legs feeling weak and rubbery and his breathing harsh. He started to get hot too, but after a few hundred metres found himself settling into a steady rolling gait. After a little while he glanced back, noting that the boat was now out of sight, then he began to study his surroundings more closely.

  The shore here, like all the shores of the continent but for the one against the northern mountains, consisted of stretches of compacted mud or shingle. The shores were in a perpetual state of flux, having no rock to anchor them. Tricone-generated soil was perpetually washed away or redeposited, and often the steady scouring processes of the sea washed out all but the largest items the tricones left after their constant grinding processes, that being this shingle with no stone larger than a ridiculously precise three millimetres across, each drift topped with lighter pebbles of foamstone scraped from the undersides of numerous structural rafts inland. Also, flute grasses fought to reclaim land, whilst the sea fought to take it back. A frequent sight at sea, Jem knew, were floating islands of dying flute grass, which had been snatched away by late summer storms.

  Other things now began to impinge upon him, almost as if he was waking up from nightmare to bright day. He saw a drift of snow-white tricone shells like the back of some beast preparing to dive into the mud below, each shell no larger than three fingers. These were those killed in the mud here by the high concentration of salts their kind had generated by grinding up the land and which were subsequently washed into the sea. Remembering some Theocracy-approved biology, he knew that some time in the past there had been tricones in the ocean, but they could no longer survive there. He saw red nematodes writhing through a bank of hard mud like slow veins, a crowd of mudslappers skittering towards the waves at his approach, then he ducked down upon seeing a small heroyne striding across the mudflat now extending to his right. Only when he passed what looked like an oddly sculpted boulder of lava until he realized it was a segment of a dead hooder did some of the brightness go out of his day. And the other sound from the flute grasses to his left took the rest of it.

  ‘Yissock blaggerslog,’ said a voice quite distinctly, whilst some huge shape shifted there.

  With utter cold dread he realized that a gabbleduck was keeping pace with him.

  The muttering was back, that thing stirring, somewhere. At first it seemed it might be coming from the gabbleduck, but somehow, deep inside, he knew it wasn’t the original source. The creature was a relay, its presence somehow amplifying that . . . sense of something else.

  There seemed no point in running, because the only predators here that a Human on foot could outpace were the ambush ones like mud snakes. A gabbleduck, with its odd loping and rippling gait, would be able to bring him down within a few tens of metres, so if it wanted him dead, he was dead. But even there, he suddenly found room for optimism. A heroyne big enough to consider him viable prey would have been on him in an instant, gulped him down whole to suffocate and burn in its acidic stomach. A siluroyne would have shown no hesitation either and would have grabbed him and eaten him alive, even though his flesh would have later sickened it enough to throw up his remains. But gabbleducks were odd contrary creatures whose actions often defied the conventional behaviour of predator with prey.

  Gabbleducks sometimes pursued their prey with outrageous stubbornness – Jem distinctly recollected a story of a proctor, high up in his aerofan, being followed by one all the way back to Agatha Compound. The thing managed to get through all the compound’s defences, though badly wounded, then ignored the man and trashed his vehicle, before expiring on its way out. Both compound and surrounding crop ponds then had to be abandoned when the scent of dead gabbleduck brought in a swarm of hooders, and the mess they left took months to clear up.

  Gabbleducks sometimes caught Human prey and just chewed them up, spitting out the remains. They did other odd things too, like drowning their victim in mud, then carrying the corpse back to some settlement. But they also sometimes chased those on the ground but then did nothing, and on other occasions just ignored Humans completely. And there were even stories of people being lost out in the flute grasses and then guided back home by the creatures.

  Jem hoped that his case would be one of the last.

  As he walked, he caught glimpses of the creature’s hide through the grasses: greyish-green with odd purplish swirls. The grasses stood three metres high and he also caught the odd glimpse of its back, which meant it had to be a huge example of its kind. Diverting his course outwards, he walked as near to the sea and as far from the flute grasses as he could get without sinking into sticky mud. However, sweat chilled on his back when ahead he saw an area where the mud had been churned and torn up, and his only way through was a firm strip only three or four metres wide between that and the grasses.

  As he drew closer to the churned-up area it seemed to him that the creature was moving about with more eagerness, as if something prevented it coming out into the open, but that it knew he would soon draw close enough to grab. He studied the ground ahead more intently in the hope of seeing a way through, and it was only then that he saw the area was not the result of some storm or land slippage, but seemingly of battle.

  What he had at first taken to be a chunk of torn-up rhizome mat came abruptly into focus and made clear everything beyond it. A tank lay there, its rear end sunk in the mud, its turret half torn off and the blackened barrel of some kind of gun pointing up towards the sky. Other wreckage lay scattered in the area, all spattered with the mud that initially disguised it from him. He saw Satagent script etched into a chunk of armour and only after studying other debris around it did he realize he was seeing the remains of a Theocracy lander.

  ‘The Hierarch’s brother, Aberil Dorth, brought the troops down from Hope to attack us,’ said Sanders. ‘He might even have succeeded in flattening us, if it weren’t for the fact that our rebellion was just a side show in a bigger and more lethal drama.’

  Jem looked round to see Sanders wading ashore, naked again. He averted his eyes for a moment, but then could not help glancing at her once more, but she was gone. Her spectre had been sent to taunt him, straight from Hell.

  ‘The Devil came,’ he muttered to himself, not sure where the words came from, but an image clear in his mind of Proctor Shaunus turning towards him, expression dull, one eye reddened with blood, his augmentation, their Gift from Behemoth, turned into something scraped from an ash pit. Terror accompanied the vision, old remembered terror of something trying to take control of him, and his need to flee. He felt his legs starting to give away, a blankness spreading in his mind, but he fought it, straightened up and struggled to breathe evenly air that should have killed him.

  ‘Lies,’ he said.

  He was like one of the prophets out in the wilderness being taunted by demons, haunted by visions, going through a trial to arrive at the eventual truth. However, when he again raised his gaze to the wreckage strewn before him, he could not deny it. This was no vision, no illusion, nor could it be something that had been staged just for him. A real battle had occurred here and he must accept and integrate the fact of it. Now, abruptly, he did sink to his knees, but to begin reciting the Satagents, to try and drown out that constant background mutter and more importantly to find some inspiration in their truth, some guidance. But the Satagents gave him no comfort and even as he started on the second Satagent, the words felt empty. He stood up, paced forward. He would find the truth in Godhead. Revelation would come, it had to.

 
Keeping out near the shore, a feeling of unreality, emphasized by that odd muttering, distancing him from the frightening reality of the gabbleduck over to his left. He walked closer. There was definitely a hole in his mind. He did not remember how the rebels got hold of him so perhaps just a small amount of truth lay in the things Sanders had told him because, in the end, all the best lies were laced with truth. Now closer, he noted something else. The wreckage looked old; there were growths of moss on some of it, and webs of fungal mycelia.

  Twenty years . . .

  He shook his head, trying to see all this clearer, and then he saw the machine.

  It was working out in the middle of the devastation, foamed-metal treads supporting it on the soft mud, its cylinder body covered in dirt, mantis arms excavating the ground before it and churned mud mounded up behind. Then he saw the next machine – ovoid body on spider legs, the thing probing the ground with a proboscis almost like the beak of a heroyne. Then another – this one scooping soil with one flat arm into some kind of sieve and shaking it through, advancing its metal body with a caterpillar humping motion. These, he realized, were what had made this area impassable, not the battle that had been fought here. He had never seen anything like them, could not integrate them into his reality. Abruptly he headed inwards, towards that narrow strand between the area they occupied and the flute grasses, his fear of the gabbleduck lost in the sheer incomprehensibility of this scene.

  Upon reaching the narrow pass, Jem broke into a slow jog, determined to put this behind him, to get somewhere he could straighten out his mind, but as he rounded a jut of flute grass it seemed as if someone, or something, was determined to stick things in his way. Ahead, across his path, a wide silvery sheet lay pegged to the ground, glassy objects neatly arrayed across it. Coming to the edge of this he peered at one of the objects, and realized he was seeing a coffin. Inside lay the corpse of a Theocracy soldier, black-stained by mud, wrinkled and partially preserved in an environment that did not provide the means for Human decay. Every coffin here, and there were hundreds, contained a similar black atomy.

  ‘Sapple clogger,’ said the gabbleduck knowingly.

  Jem turned to stare at the mountainous pyramidal creature squatting less than ten metres away from him. It seemed like some rotund jolly Buddha relaxing prior to some enormous feast, the food laid out before it in glass coffins.

  Jem ran, hurdling coffins, a sound issuing from deep in his chest that might have been a scream, and might have been laughter.

  6

  Squerm Essence

  The biggest export from Masada was and still is squerm essence. Squerms, which are a genetic splicing of tubeworm, sea louse and lobster, are capable of surviving in low-oxygen-content water. They take five years to grow from egg to the aggressive and hard to handle adult form. The whole process is fraught with problems, since just one dead squerm decaying in a rearing pond will poison the water and kill all its fellows. Upon reaching adulthood they are caught and placed in presses, the essence crushed out of them and immediately bottled. Whilst sealed in the bottle it undergoes an odd and highly complex fermentation and maturing process resulting in long-chain protein molecules. Only very small amounts of squerm essence are used in cooking and work as a flavour enhancer for sea foods and some other dishes. The flavour is one that Epicureans claim cannot be reproduced chemically and, despite numerous comparison trials in which said Epicureans could not tell the difference, the more expensive essence shipped from worlds like Masada remains a favourite. But then, this inability to accept that the cheaper version of a food or drink is absolutely no different from the expensive version, has a long and well documented history.

  – From QUINCE GUIDE compiled by Humans

  The mechanism stirred uneasily in a state that would have been called slumber had it been a wholly conscious being. Its probes, strewn along the interface between realspace and its own domain in underspace, were registering input with a direct relationship to its function, but because of its confused state of mind, this input only served to raise it to a higher level of inner alertness and did not impel it to act.

  Time passed in realspace, marked by those probes, which in turn confirmed the veracity of the new input. The mechanism became aware that certain patterns were in evidence and they possessed a spacial relationship with the two problems it had encountered before: the war machine and the black artificial intelligence, both of which had tried to resurrect the Atheter by loading ancient mind recordings of those creatures into the brains of their animal descendants. The mechanism woke, increasing its capacity as it did so, but still it could not act, for it had yet to detect clearly active Atheter thought processes.

  However, preconditions for its main function evident, and something quite odd and difficult to nail down about them, enabled it to bring online back-up programming previously unused, and new processes woke in the mechanism’s disrupted consciousness. It began to model reality in ways it had never done before, began to extrapolate, began to use a mental function now available that in another being might be called imagination. New data also became available, and the mechanism understood, beyond automatic function, the ‘why’ of its existence.

  Jain technology destroyed civilizations and, having taken up its poisoned chalice, the Atheter had proceeded to the precursor to that destruction of internecine war that had lasted for tens of thousands of years. In the end they decided to free themselves of this technology by removing its target. That target being civilization, it became necessary to remove the uttermost basic building blocks of that: the minds that build it.

  That the Atheter had done Jain technology’s job by returning themselves to the level of animals to avoid it, the mechanism did not question. Nor did its new imagination have the sheer extent to contemplate the level of despair and self-hate that led to such self-immolation. Nor did it see that as a product of the Atheter their fear and madness were integral to its own systems. Deeply ingrained in its programming lay its self-destruct. If it became infected by Jain code it must destroy itself. No other option had been provided.

  This extra programming capacity, however, did not resolve the puzzle it was sensing on the Atheter Homeworld. An Atheter mental pattern existed there, yet it seemed to exist in a grey area between function and non-function.

  There was only one way to deal with this. Remaining in underspace so far from the action, or potential action, was no longer an option. Within the mechanism, components of matter, pseudomatter and patterned energy, which hadn’t been used for nearly two millions years, powered up. They unzipped the fold that had concealed the mechanism for that time, everted it into realspace where relativity snatched it up, and the rules of existence hardened into immutability.

  Janice Golden, the interfaced captain of the Polity dreadnought Cheops, swore loudly and vehemently, scared for the first time in eighty years. In that time she had always resided deep inside her ship, which bore the shape of an Egyptian pyramid sitting over U-space nacelles like two conjoined iron cathedrals. Here she commanded weapons which, though not nearly as effective as those of newer Polity warships, could still trash a planet. She had patrolled the Line, the Polity border, as it expanded towards the inner galaxy where, thus far, nothing as nasty as the Prador had been found nor had any lethal alien technologies crawled out from under a stone to spoil her godlike insouciance. But that looked like it might have changed.

  Something had disrupted U-space in the Wizender system, and had done so with enough force to slap Cheops back out into the real just seconds after it had U-jumped. Janice at first thought a USER had been deployed here, but the readings she was getting were nothing like the disruption caused by an Underspace Interference Emitter. In fact the readings weren’t like anything either she or the Cheops AI she was interfaced with had ever seen. Something had certainly disrupted U-space, but why the massive ensuing energy flash?

  Anything? she asked, mind to mind, the question not even really a word.

  Patterned, Cheops said, the
reply ghosting over a feed of a five-dimensional shape far too regular to be anything but artificial. Cyclic point disruption into the real, here . . .

  Image feed from Cheops’s long-range receiver array gave her the location close to a green gas giant, a Jovian planet yet to acquire anything but a number. Only now it wasn’t the plain green orb it had been. A bruise much the size and shape of Jupiter’s eye storm had appeared, striations spreading out from it of storm-feeding atmosphere flows that Earth could float in. However, unlike the storm on Jupiter, this phenomenon wasn’t confined to the surface of the giant. From its centre a tail of gas extended hundreds of thousands of kilometres out into space, there terminating at . . . something.

  Not clear, she said.

  Too much interference, Cheops replied, but I will try.

  Close imaging gave her something dark and blurred at the tip of that tail of gas. Janice tracked the clear-up programme in her mind as EM emissions directly attributable to the spiral were subtracted from the data and all that remained gradually built into a clear image. The mass came through first – about that of Mars, which made it perfectly understandable that its exit from U-space had caused so much disruption. Then its shape came clear.

  Janice felt her spine crawling. The thing there looked woven, a horn of matter made from evenly woven strips of a material whose density put it just a spit away from being neutronium. It was sucking inside itself the gas from the giant below, using an irised gravity field like a million-mile-long syringe. Within the horn itself, where the gas arrived as plasma, conglomerations of dodecahedrons were swirling and reordering in bewildering complexity, and fast, so very fast.

  Janice had hoped to find explanations to dispel her fear; all she found was something more frightening. However, she would not let fear govern her. Though Human, she was the interfaced captain of a Polity dreadnought, and her years in this position had refined her intellect, ground away the animalistic responses, hardened her mind into something strictly governed by logic. Yes, this alien object would seem powerful and frightening to a lesser being, but all she needed was more data, more input, so as to come up with a suitable response to it. She would not let herself down, she would not let Cheops down.