The Technician

  Later, the gabbleduck came, carefully closed its claws about them as the force-fields released, lowered them to the ground and led the way out into devastation.

  An arrow of intense light shot up from the planet, and, still struggling to regain control of his body after scrubbing the last of Eight’s viral attack, Amistad only knew of the mechanism’s grav-weapon response to that arrow, the Technician, as the wave hit him. It compressed and stretched his internal components as it passed, metal and crystal fracturing, optics disrupted and superconductors shorting out, delicate highly-protected components trashed in an instant. Disoriented and still fighting to regain control of his internal workings as he tumbled through vacuum, Amistad saw the Technician shudder to a halt, then lurch into progress again. No longer travelling like a missile, the biomech writhed through vacuum as if its legs were finding purchase on the nothingness and, by the minimal readings Amistad could obtain from a few remaining sensors, that was precisely what the creature was doing.

  Like a white-hot centipede a hundred metres long it clambered relentlessly towards the mechanism, yet, though the Technician was massive and certainly dangerous, the inequalities of scale made it seem to be something that could be stomped on by its opponent. The mechanism reacted. The whole massive device swung incrementally, its throat now entirely centred on the approaching Technician. Another gravity wave slammed out, paused the Technician for just a second, then seemed to allow it to surge forward once past.

  Further damage, the legs all down one side disconnected, some crystal storage cracked, optics distorted and thus distorting information flows. Amistad took it, calculating what systems he could save, and concentrated on them. In orbit over Masada a brief intense detonation at the head of a column of purple fire – the geostat weapon, which Ergatis had just used against a disruptor, detonating halfway through its next firing cycle, fusion plasma escaping the doughnut Tesla bottle and punching out into vacuum, proton beam unfocused, dissipating on the way down, just licking the disruptor sliding in over the east coast. Amistad also noted blooms of steam arising in the southern ocean, all in a long line not very far from where Eight’s armoured prison resided. Volcanic action there, a subduction zone forced into activity by the mechanism’s gravity weapon. Any more of that and a tsunami or two might be included in Masada’s present woes.

  But the mechanism must have decided otherwise. Three disruptors appeared in the Technician’s path and a hemispherical hardfield slammed the war machine to a halt, it coiling to slam down on the field, a centipede dropped on a plate. After a moment it straightened out again and nosed against the barrier, moving like an eel making no headway in a current.

  ‘You lied.’

  Where had that come from? U-space signal, highly disrupted and taking whole seconds to put back together again. It could have been from Ergatis, but it wasn’t, and it didn’t take a supermind to figure out its source.

  ‘On one small point,’ Amistad replied, and waited interminable seconds. But Penny Royal did not reply, so the drone tried, ‘Where are you?’

  ‘Take a guess.’

  ‘Under the sea?’

  Again Penny Royal did not reply.

  Amistad remained focused on the Technician and the mechanism – he could do nothing about Penny Royal now, and wouldn’t be capable of doing anything about the black AI for some time hence, if at all, if anything sentient remained alive here.

  Induction.

  The war machine must have fed something back through the force-field between it and its prey. One of the disruptors abruptly tumbled away as if slapped aside like a skittle, and the hardfield shimmered, weakened. The remaining two turned towards each other. Amistad guessed they were running direct line-of-sight diagnostics. The hardfield stabilized. Here, Amis-tad realized, was warfare gone beyond just bombs, energy weapons and simple force-fields – the kind of fight he had already witnessed down on the surface between Penny Royal and the Technician.

  U-space.

  Amistad detected a weird U-space signature as the Technician’s cowl faded to translucence, and pushed straight through the hardfield. That translucence passed along its body at the point of intersection with the hardfield as it continued to worm through. Amistad wasn’t quite sure he believed his own sensors: the damned war machine had just tunnelled – a theoretical possibility but with energy-density requirements that should outscale the Technician’s physical body.

  The hardfield began flickering, emitting Hawking radiation, and an arc-light glare where it intersected with the Technician’s body, but the war machine continued writhing on through. The hardfield went out, the two disruptors folding out of existence, no doubt back within the body of the mechanism. Then another massive U-space disruption tried to tear at reality. The mechanism stretched fifty thousand kilometres at a tangent to Masada, relocating itself as it had in its battle with Scold and Cheops, its elongated form lying only a few hundred kilometres from Amistad so it seemed he was at touching distance from some immense space-borne train. The mechanism snapped back into shape at the terminus of that stretch, but it seemed the move had failed, for the Technician had moved with it, persistent as a mamba, still writhing closer.

  Antimatter blasts next, interspersed with straight fission weapons, partially obscuring both the Technician and mechanism behind a spreading cloud of nuclear fire. But between explosions the war machine moved relentlessly closer. It was tunnelling again, just dipping itself into U-space to avoid the worst of the shockwaves and heat, glowing like something out of a blacksmith’s forge as it surfaced.

  Then it arrived, nosing straight into that mass of dodecahedrons at the mechanism’s core, seeming to tunnel straight inside them. The mechanism shifted again, its stretch line straight down into Masada, gone. U-space shift through a gravity well; a fish trying to shake off a leech. Then back again, two million kilometres out, spinning as if smacked by the hand of some playful god. Another stretch, straight back to its original position. Within it the dodecahedral structures had parted, were rearranging themselves. Some massive detonation ensued inside, arclight glaring out through its structure, another gravity wave followed, cracking further crystal inside Amistad, shuddering Masada so that a row of red eyes stitched down from the pole, a fault line opened.

  The mechanism then hung in vacuum for long minutes, seemingly dead, the shapes within it still. Finally they shifted again, like a giant clearing its throat. They spat out the Technician, twisted, broken into three pieces.

  Stomped on.

  20

  Black Hats

  When a bitter war has been fought long and hard, and at last ends, many of the combatants use their energies to rebuild their lives. They delight in the day-to-day normalities of living because, for so long, they weren’t normal. Tired and sickened by it, they give up that detestation of the enemy that was necessary to enable them to fight, and kill, or at least suppress it sufficiently so they can just live. However, some cannot live without their war and are unable to give up their hate. They are matured by conflict and cannot define themselves other than by what they fought. They consider themselves the polar opposite to their enemy, the antithesis of their enemy. They are the white hats whilst the enemy are the black hats. Their problem is that they cannot visualize a world without hats – and fail to see that the ugly processes of war ironed out those distinctions. And worse still, even when there are no black hats left, they seek others they deem suitable for that attire, because in the end it is not the enemy that matters, but the hate.

  – From HOW IT IS by Gordon

  As he finally pushed his head out into the open, Grant swore to himself, but with a kind of maniacal glee – something to counter the pain. Oh yes, he was an anachronism because he hadn’t gone in for radical physical redesign so he could breathe the air of Masada, but being such had saved his life. He’d seen the Technician streak into the sky and slam through that disruptor, punched at the sky in glee on seeing the disruptor broken and falling to earth. But he hadn’t fores
een the ground bucking like a faulty aerofan and the subsequent wave of mud and flute-grass debris. It buried him, and only because he wore breather gear did he survive. One of the adapted would have suffocated.

  He began to drag himself into the open, the little self-justifying victory of having survived passing, and the pain returning, and hard. The wounds in his shoulder and leg were just raw agony, and tears began to fill his eyes. Because of that he didn’t see the claw as he dragged himself out. It closed round his chest, plucked him yelling from the ground and held him up for inspection. His luck had just run out: he’d survived Shree, the heroyne and the Technician, and now it seemed he was to become the plaything of a gabbleduck.

  ‘Put him down!’ said someone, annoyed.

  It took him a second to recognise the voice. He tried to tell Sanders to run, to get out of there, but his mouth was dry, he couldn’t find the breath. You just didn’t tell off a gabbleduck like it was a naughty child. That could get you chewed up, or not, depending on how the creature felt at the time. However, the gabbleduck lowered him carefully to the ground, and stepped back. In a moment Sanders knelt beside him, triggered an auto-injector against his leg and then his shoulder, straight through his clothing, then used a micro-shear to slice through the cloth of his trousers, a first-aid kit open beside her.

  Exhausted, Grant gazed at the gabbleduck. It was the same one Tombs had lured into the Atheter AI building, but it looked very different now. It moved with greater certainty, gazed with great intensity at something on the distant horizon, seemed more here. Tombs himself now walked into view too, his attention fixed on the creature.

  ‘I’m looking at the Weaver, ain’t I?’ Grant said, now the pain had started to fade.

  ‘You certainly are,’ said Sanders, pressing something against his leg to spread blessed numbness.

  He glanced down as she next pressed an extractor-pack wound dressing in place, and watched it deform over his leg, melding around and into the wound. This would help him heal in the same way as the usual Polity wound dressings, infusing antibiotics, antivirals and further painkillers, but would also extract the metals from a pulse-gun shot. Next she set to work on his shoulder, pulling his jacket aside to cut through the underlying fabric.

  ‘So how did that happen?’ Grant asked.

  ‘You guessed the first bit,’ said Sanders, ‘surely you can guess the rest.’

  ‘Tombs loaded the Weaver to it, but how?’

  ‘A physical connection.’ Sanders shuddered.

  Tombs now turned to face them.

  ‘Did you kill her?’ he asked abruptly.

  How to explain that? He was about to simply say ‘yes’ but he cared about what Sanders thought of him, and realized that Tombs’s opinion of him counted too.

  ‘Yes, I killed her, but not in the circumstances you might think.’ As he went on to explain about the heroyne, Penny Royal, the Technician and Shree’s end, Sanders finished dressing his wounds and then injected a cocktail of drugs that spread like cold fire through his body.

  ‘You did the best thing,’ she said, carefully replacing the injector in the first-aid kit and closing it.

  As he now easily found the energy to sit upright, Grant glanced at her in surprise. He had expected her to berate him, tell him he should have called her so she could tend to Shree.

  ‘Best thing?’ he repeated. He pressed a hand against the soft ground, now feeling sure he would be able to stand.

  ‘I could have saved her life, but for what?’ Sanders shook her head, took up the kit, stood up and stepped back. ‘She was Tidy Squad. If we are to believe what she said, she was the leader of the Tidy Squad. That means that on top of trying to release Jain technology here and murder us, she has killed before, probably many times.’

  ‘Where’s the medical ethics that inclined you to save proctors?’ Grant asked, studying her expression. She seemed harder to him now, more callous, yet this new attitude was a product of peacetime, not war.

  ‘Still there. I just hold to Polity law. Proctors like Tombs had an amnesty and a chance to redeem themselves. She killed long after the war was over and the enemy defeated.’ Sanders looked at him directly. ‘The minimum I would have saved her for would have been mind-wipe.’

  After a brief silence, Tombs said, ‘Redeem themselves – that sounds almost religious.’

  ‘Doesn’t it just,’ Sanders replied.

  Grant pushed against the ground, got into a squat and slowly stood upright. His left arm still hung weak at his side, but his leg no longer felt so tight, so swollen, and could easily bear his weight. Fantastic technology – and he was in a position to know, remembering how long it had taken him to be able to stand after having grapewood splinters from a bomb blast removed from his calf two years before the rebellion. He now turned to study Tombs more closely. The man’s face was a mess. The soldier at first thought it might have been caused by shrapnel from the recent blasts, but the puncture wounds were all the same size and too evenly spaced.

  ‘What happened to you?’

  ‘He cleared his mind and became whole,’ replied an utterly alien voice.

  Grant looked up into the gaze of the gabbleduck. It raised its claw and beckoned with one talon. ‘Follow me.’ Grant felt no inclination to disobey it.

  The creature led them around a nearby mound and then on a convoluted path through the devastation to halt by yet another mound, where Sanders’s gravan lay on its side half-buried. She must have retrieved her medical kit from here, Grant realized, but how had she known she would need it?

  The gabbleduck now began digging away the debris covering the vehicle, its claws perfect for the task as it used them like great dung forks.

  ‘Our way home?’ he asked.

  ‘Yes,’ Tombs replied, ‘though no part of this world can be called home for us any more.’

  Grant tilted his head in acknowledgement of that, then turned to another mound and began to climb it – the drugs Sanders had used not only dispelling the pain but filling him with a restless energy. In a moment he reached the top and from there surveyed the devastation. The building housing the Atheter AI lay upside down, and tilted like a ship photographed on a storm-tossed sea. All around, the mud, soil and rhizome had been mounded into waves, all of them ringing a source that still belched smoke and steam into the air – where the disruptor the Technician destroyed had come down. Then, with the horizon line visible, Grant felt his stomach sink upon seeing another of those bell-shaped devices hanging in the sky above the horizon. He quickly scrambled back down the mound to his companions.

  ‘The Technician failed,’ he said. ‘Those things are still in the sky.’

  With a whoomph the gravan crashed upright.

  ‘Too early to judge,’ Tombs replied.

  ‘So what now?’ Grant asked.

  ‘Now we leave – we don’t belong here any more.’

  As Amistad ran internal diagnostics and tried to repair some of the massive damage he had suffered, his senses began to range out, his compass to expand, and some abilities returned. Like small animals nosing from cover after some massive storm, com lines began to open up again. Amistad first obtained an overview of the situation down on Masada. Three disruptors hung in the sky over the main continent, whilst a fourth was poised far out over the ocean for no obvious reason. Amistad speculated that perhaps there had been something significant out there about two million years ago. Two attack ships were functional – one resupplying from the orbiting dreadnought whilst the other held station between the disruptor nearest to Zealos and the city itself.

  ‘Why the pause?’ the drone asked.

  ‘Ah, you’re back,’ replied Ergatis. ‘Simple answer: destroying those things results in significant damage elsewhere, so whilst they are doing nothing I ordered the attack ships to hold back.’

  ‘Reasonable enough,’ Amistad replied, wondering if his opinion would be different if he hadn’t recently lost a great mass of his own mental processing.

  ‘So
what happened up there?’ Ergatis asked.

  Amistad magnified the image of the three chunks of the Technician floating through vacuum. They hadn’t completely separated, held loosely together by strands of some fibrous matter. The thing certainly seemed to be dead, since the only EM reading issuing from it lay in the infrared, and that steadily declining as it cooled. Next the drone took a long hard look at the mechanism. There the activity had increased. The thing was glowing from inside and rapidly swapping about those odd internal components, EM output filling and disrupting numerous com bands. It looked rather like it was trying to grind up something indigestible.

  ‘The Technician is finished,’ the drone stated. ‘The mechanism is still functioning.’

  ‘Then we’re screwed,’ Ergatis suggested.

  There was something else too, but Amistad was having problems tracking down the memory. The Technician was controlled by the Weaver and had been sent against this threat to the Weaver’s existence, but it had failed, hadn’t it?

  Amistad abruptly stabilized relative to Masada, a gravmotor at last beginning to function how it should. Fusion drive was down for the moment, but simple steering thrusters were still available. He fired up some of these to begin a long slow acceleration back towards the planet, and in that moment remembered, and at once sent a message to Ergatis.

  ‘You’re kidding!’ the planetary AI replied.

  ‘No I’m not,’ said Amistad, with some relief at last igniting its fusion drive.

  Within minutes the drone entered atmosphere, and hurtled down to a location in the southern ocean, just hoping that by the time he reached his destination there would be a planet to land on. It just depended on how it was done, in the end.

  The mechanism, now becoming acquainted with emotion, understood that it had just experienced fear – fear of extinction. Two million years ago it had eradicated all the remaining Atheter war machines down on the surface of the planet, but that had been a demolition job, for they had been powered down and unable to resist. A million years ago it had scrambled the workings of the Technician, at a distance, using techniques that did not involve direct confrontation. But this had been different.