‘It’s here?’ said Tinsch, his hand finally dropping away from his suicide bomb.
‘Been playing with you all along.’ The grey-haired man gestured to the woman sprawled beside her console. ‘It was turning off your hardfields from the inside, while its other half provided the fireworks display. But I’ve stopped the game, and just hope that’s enough – that it’ll let you walk away from here.’
The gut-shot one was dying, Jem realized, his face deathly pale and blue under the eyes, his black clothing soaked with blood, the demon script stained red and a pool spreading all about him. An artery torn open. Where had Jem seen such a wound? Why did he know?
Grey-hair tilted his head for a moment. ‘Seems you get to live.’
The knife wielder suddenly accelerated backwards and slammed into the far wall of the street. He shrieked, the knife in his shoulder sinking deeper, the handle disappearing inside him. Oddly no blood leaked from the wound, and then he was just hanging there, pinned by the shoulder, his feet kicking half a metre above the paving.
Tinsch next, his arm coming up against his own volition – he seemed to be fighting it, his hand moving round in a smooth arc whilst his body writhed and kicked. His hand slapped against the side of his skull, then dropped away. Now having acquired a second aug on the opposite side of his skull to the first, he abruptly went down on his knees.
‘No . . . please,’ he said, then after a moment started crying.
The demons haunt their own, Jem realized. Hell offered no relief, no better treatment for its allies. He swung his gaze to the woman. She was sitting up, her console in her lap, eyes closed as if in meditation. Jem could not see her hands, for her wrists ended against the sides of the console, seemed to be connected to it.
The wounded man now. He stood upright in that pool of blood, and the pool seemed to be growing smaller, whilst colour returned to a face locked in a rictus of terror. As the last of the blood disappeared something seemed to happen down by his feet and he abruptly dropped, sinking up to his ankles in a paving slab. He looked down, terror transforming to a knowing horror, tried to move and went over on his back, his knees in the air.
‘Nooo!’ Tinsch wailed. ‘Please, I’m sorry . . .’
‘You get to live,’ said Grey-hair. ‘To live.’
He turned to look at Jem, features utterly clear now behind a practically invisible visor: a hard face, dull green eyes, a scar across the back of his cheek leading to where part of his earlobe had been severed. Utter and complete recognition now. Here stood the soldier. Jem got to his feet and ran without a further thought. The constant background mutter turned to a growling, like some engine starting up. Horrific painful memories clamoured in the vaults of his mind and he abruptly realized the truth.
It was all lies.
Everything he had seen had been twisted out of shape, for wasn’t the one trying to destroy his faith the Prince of Lies? From the moment Sanders affixed this demonic prosthesis over his skull, it had been feeding him its bile, its fiction, its madness routed straight out of Hell. It had overlaid his world with false visions of the aftermath of a successful rebellion and Polity intervention here.
He had to remove it.
The Tagreb sat amidst the flute grasses like an iron lily opened on the surface of a weed-choked pond. Here it served as a base from which its AI and its staff could make a taxonomic and genetic assay of the fauna and flora of Masada, create a database, then from that make the planetary almanac. After this was done, the base was supposed to remain as a permanent fixture for the use of the planetary residents, as specialized researchers completed their work and moved on to the next world, the next Tagreb landing. However, the specialists here were becoming a bit of a permanent fixture, the life of Masada having the fascination of a monorail crash.
Chanter approached the place from underneath, studying with interest the seismic images presented on his screen. He could see the various pipes terminating in extraction heads the Tagreb had injected into the ground to suck up water for internal supply, for the fusion reactor and to crack for oxygen. These, Chanter understood, were often pulled back up when too many tricones gathered, only to be injected elsewhere. There were also sensor heads down there, and the flat, scan-proof interfaces of hardfields, between which extended cattle prods to keep tricones at bay.
Some time after the Tagreb established itself on the surface, its AI decided that mobility might be a good idea here, so constructed bubble-metal treads for it to run on. Beneath the defensive perimeter fence lay a four-metre-wide foamstone raft, below which tricones gathered like barnacles. Four huge spokes attached the whole engirdling raft to the Tagreb itself and so propelled it along with the base. The research Tagreb seemed a living organism, perpetually shifting its underparts to prevent them being bitten, slowly shifting itself across the surface. A starfish maybe, or a sea urchin – that last being something Chanter did not want to think about too much as this particular creature’s mind finally got in contact.
‘I wondered when you would be paying us a visit here.’ The Tagreb AI, Rodol, spoke from his communicator. ‘Leonardo Da Vinci invented machines, explored the structure of the Human body and other structures besides, and he painted and drew with great skill. But he was from a time when the false division between art and science had yet to be firmly established.’
AIs talked to each other, Chanter knew. They talked to each other a lot.
‘Why do you claim the division is false?’ he asked, at a loss for any other words.
‘Art is just another way to describe and classify reality – its mystical aspects merely a function of ignorance.’
‘Yeah, whatever,’ said Chanter, already finding himself disliking this particular intelligence. ‘I’m here to see Jonas Clyde and Shardelle Garadon.’
‘Shardelle is unavailable, since she is presently working with the haiman Kroval Liepsig on Earth studying the deliberate disconnection from coherence and derision factor of the gabble. Jonas Clyde, however, is here but presently deliberately disconnected from coherence himself. I’ll check if he is prepared to see you.’
‘Where do I go?’ Chanter asked.
‘Surface your mudmarine beside ATV Ramp Three – it is behind my direction of travel so your vessel should remain within the perimeter fence for four days,’ Rodol replied, a schematic of the Tagreb appearing on Chanter’s screen with Ramp Three indicated. ‘If your stay is going to be longer, then link your system to me and I’ll keep your vessel beside the ramp continuously.’ Now a linking icon appeared.
Chanter did not want to link up because he did not expect to be here for long, and to do so would also breach his security; however, if Rodol wanted to take control of his mudmarine, there wasn’t really much he could do about it. He reached out and touched the icon, giving his permission, then motored directly to the ramp he had been directed to.
Once again stepping out onto the surface of this world, Chanter studied his surroundings. The ramp extended from an all-terrain vehicle garage, but one ATV stood out here too, its big fat wheels turning with incremental slowness as it kept pace with the Tagreb. The base itself sprawled across the ceramal petals it had folded down when it landed, after having first been ejected from the research spaceship the Beagle Infinity. Now cluttered with numerous additional buildings – storehouses for organic samples, additional laboratories and accommodation areas – it looked less like the single complete and sparse structure it had been. Here lay a small circular town, perpetually on the move. He climbed the ramp, walked in past two ATVs, one of which gleamed like new, the other being washed free of mud by a hose-trailing robot like an upright iron cricket on wheels. A third ATV lay beyond these two. It looked like someone had fed it between the rollers of a massive mangle.
‘The ostensible reason for her departure,’ said the voice of Rodol, issuing from nearby.
‘What? Who?’
‘Shardelle Garadon felt there was still more to learn about the gabble by direct study. She wanted t
o find another old gabbleduck who was close to death, since she believed that in that state part of its real underlying mind might show through,’ Rodol explained. ‘She found her creature and kept track of it, whereupon it abruptly changed course and headed at great speed up into the Northern Mountains, to a place called the Plate – a circular plateau – where it turned back to her ATV and sat on it. You see the result.’
‘So nearly dying destroyed her spirit of scientific inquiry?’ Chanter asked, unable to keep the sarcastic tone out of his voice.
‘No, she thought the gabbleduck’s actions, in leading her to where its attack on her ATV would have more effect than just pushing it down into the mud – an indication of hidden intelligence revealing itself,’ said Rodol. ‘The real reason for her departure was so she could work closely with Kroval – she gave her near-death experience as an excuse to disconnect completely from communication and so avoid the massive amounts of incoming data from the sudden proliferation of would-be gabble experts springing up all over the Polity.’
Chanter snorted as he stepped through the door at the back of the garage, pressure differential impinging, the oxygenated air almost aseptic. He now stood in a room racked with various survival suits and lined with glass-fronted cases containing discrete Polity breather gear. One of the suits, until then utterly still, stirred into motion and he realized it was occupied. The individual inside glanced at him with reptilian eyes, a glint of frost slowly clearing from the visor below them. An adapt like himself, wearing a suit to keep her cool on a world too hot for her. She headed through the door into the garage. He turned and eyed the two doors exiting from this place.
‘Where do I go?’ he asked.
‘Jonas has taken some aldetox, and when he has also finished his triple espresso he will see you in the museum,’ Rodol replied. ‘Take the door to your right and follow the directions now entered in your palmtop.’
Through the door, palmtop out and direction arrow clear, Chanter stomped down corridors clean and white, feeling a childish satisfaction that he was still leaving muddy footprints behind him. By the time he reached the museum his webbed feet were dry and his skin felt decidedly papery, but the sight that met him when he stepped through double sliding doors dismissed the discomfort from his mind.
The dead hooder extended along the length of a hundred-metre wall – the spinal column of a giant. Of course he had seen all this before, but it was the spoonlike hood, turned so its underside faced out, that drew his attention. He’d seen hooder remains, and he’d seen anatomical schematics, flatscreen and holographic, but to actually stand beside something like this and gaze at what was the last thing some people had seen before the darkness closed over them and the agony began, held a horrifying fascination.
Down either side of a ridge that ran on the underside of the hood were rows of eyes like glassy beads. At both ends of the ridge jointed limbs were folded, these terminating in curved spatulas, small spikes extending from their bases along their inner faces. To either side of the ridge lay rows of glassy tubes, some flat, some turned in and some folded out, these last showing telescopic sections, all toothed. Next out were rows of glassy scythes, some shedding their inner faces to expose sharper material, much in the way a cat sheds its claws. Outside these lay tangled organics like the insides of some animal, looking soft at first then hardening down into the rim of the hood. Here and there protruded black tentacles, some terminating in pincers, others in things that looked oddly like paint brushes.
Chanter stepped closer, eyed a column-mounted scan scope – a device that could scan any of the EM spectrum, and at any focus from nanoscopic upwards – then abruptly stepped back when the eyes lit with a red inner glow and all that surgical cutlery began to move like the workings of an ancient mechanical printer running a diagnostic.
‘The red glow isn’t the real thing,’ said a voice behind him.
He turned to see Jonas Clyde standing there. The man wore slippers, knee-length trousers and sleeveless shirt, and he clutched a coffee beaker in his right hand. His blond hair was cropped, eyes electric green and skin bearing a tan that didn’t come from Masada. Though he looked athletic, there was a distinct unsteadiness to him now – the aldetox had yet to purge from his body the effects of whatever he had been drinking.
‘I’m hoping none of this is real.’ Chanter gestured to movement within the hood.
‘All synthetic muscle and electro-nerves,’ Clyde explained. ‘This exhibit was sprawn-infested and long into decay when it was discovered.’
‘So what causes the glow?’ asked Chanter. ‘What makes their eyes glow when they’re alive?’
‘The same luminescent amoebae you find on some of this world’s beaches. It’s not mutualistic, symbiotic or parasitic really – just a foible of the designers.’
‘The gabbleducks,’ said Chanter. ‘The Atheter.’
Clyde nodded like someone whose head might not be firmly attached. ‘Glad you’re here, Chanter – I’ve been wanting to talk to you for some time.’
‘And I you.’
‘Though not for so long.’
‘No.’
They stood staring at each other, and to Chanter it felt almost as if he had finally come face to face with some old enemy. He could find no real reason for the feeling, it just existed.
‘So what’s brought you here?’
‘I’ve read your studies, your reports and your précis for the almanac, but I’m here to find out what else you’ve learnt. You’ve said nothing about the Technician, yet one would think that creature would hold as much fascination for you as it does for me.’
Clyde winced, walked over to lean against the scan scope. After a moment he tossed his cup down on the floor and just watched as a beetlebot scuttled out of its alcove and snatched the cup up, polished away the spill of coffee then shot out of sight again.
‘The thing you learn, being a Tagreb researcher, is that half the time you’re looking into things that have already been studied by minds far in advance of your own.’ He turned to look at Chanter. ‘We’re not researchers, Chanter, but research tools. They withhold stuff, they sometimes give us false information or information with a particular emphasis or slant. All this is to direct their tools, us, to a particular point, to elucidate it, to expose some new angle. It’s quite depressing.’
‘But the Technician?’
‘All I knew was that it was an interesting legend among the people here,’ said Clyde. ‘Not really my territory but that of the social anthropologists. I was preparing to leave this world, having mapped both the hooder genome and its physiology, having ascertained that it’s really an organic machine, an artificial creation.’
‘But learning that the Technician is a reality kept you here?’
‘No, not really – I learnt about it a little while after I was going to leave.’ Clyde now gestured to the other side of the long room. Here stood a row of exhibit cases, but they were all empty. ‘So, Chanter, don’t you think it’s about time you allowed others to study your collection of sculptures?’
That threw Chanter. They were his sculptures – how dare this man make such a demand? Then he felt a moment of chagrin. The art of the Technician should be on display for all. How could he allow his own selfish greed to keep this work from the world?
‘I suppose,’ he said reluctantly.
‘Fair exchange,’ said Clyde. ‘You bring your collection here where, frankly, it would be much safer, and you get to use the specialist pattern- and shape-analysing programs Rodol designed, which, as we both know, is your real reason for being here.’
AIs talked to other people a lot too.
‘Very well,’ said Chanter then, after a pause, ‘but tell me what kept you here, if you didn’t know about the Technician.’
Clyde shrugged. ‘It was a toss-up between me and Shardelle. We were given a non-negotiable instruction that one of us had to remain here. Shardelle won the coin toss.’
‘Who instructed you?’
&nbs
p; ‘An arachnid associate of yours.’
‘Amistad?’
Clyde nodded.
‘Why?’
‘Apparently one Jeremiah Tombs needs to speak to us, when he’s ready.’ Clyde pushed himself away from the scan scope, the aldetox obviously having fully kicked in now. ‘Seems he’ll be ready sometime soon.’
Information, once out of safe storage, was like something Pandora might recognize. Usually, when a supposed secret escaped out into the public domain, it was because the AIs were using the time-honoured technique of aptly timing leaks. However, it seemed to Shree that the news of Jeremiah Tombs’s escape had leaked too early. What purpose could be served by alerting Overlanders, the Tidy Squad and Theocracy haters everywhere that the erstwhile proctor had become a viable target? Unless, of course, this was all about entrapment.
Tidy Squad members had been apprehended whilst attempting to kill Tombs, but then the likes of Miloh were all too obvious in their hate, and had probably been closely watched by the Polity anyway. No, the entrapment had been aimed at ex-rebels who apparently bought into the regime, were generous in their forgiveness and did not openly reveal their hate, like Tinsch, who it seemed might have been captured, and like her.
Perhaps the AIs had unearthed something about the alliances she had been making with offworld Separatists and understood Tombs’s importance in that respect. Perhaps they understood that Tombs was precisely the one they needed to draw out the Squad Leader. It seemed likely he was bait in a trap but, unfortunately, he was bait she could not ignore.
‘Uffstetten here,’ said the face appearing in her visual field – fed directly to her optic nerves from her aug.
Uffstetten, a pale, thin-faced and bald man, possessed double-pupil eyes, twinned augs and internal visual interlinks. His ears had been replaced with squat cylindrical multidrums and he was also processing direct mental feeds. She knew that his screen image must be partially adjusted, for he appeared to be talking to her only, whilst in reality he was conducting numerous conversations, reading numerous texts and studying numerous images. He was a haiman, his augmentations perfectly designed for his job as Earthnet News Editor.