Dent was still gasping for breath as the Proctor glanced unconcernedly down at him, then returned his attention to Ulat.
Ulat gestured down at Dent. ‘He punctured this pond membrane with his pole-grab, Proctor, and did not bother to report it.’ He pointed to the pond. ‘Now you see the result.’
‘You were required to increase the production of squerms, Ulat. This does not look like any increase to me. The Vicar will not be happy,’ said Volus.
‘What can I do?’ Ulat whined.
Now Dent slowly began to breathe more easily, as his scole recovered from the blow it had received.
‘You can begin by keeping your workers in order. Those of the Hierarchy are not best pleased by the shortfall of trade essence, so their displeasure is focused on the Deacon, the Deacon’s displeasure is focused on his vicars, and theirs on us proctors. We have been instructed to take measures. So must I take measures now, or will you get this mess cleaned up!’
Ulat whirled on his workers. ‘You four, get in there and clear out those deaders!’ He kicked Dent until the man stood up, then gave him a shove towards the pond. Eldene caught Dent’s arm before he stumbled into it, and got a brief nod of gratitude before he stooped to retrieve his net and pole-grab.
‘Work the edge for a moment,’ Eldene whispered to him, before leaving her own pole and net on the bank and following Fethan into the turbid water. Dent moved off along one side and began using his pole to pull out all those deaders he could reach.
It was back-breaking and dangerous work. Twice Eldene felt the brush of feeding hooks close to her face, as she and Fethan stooped to lift the tricone from the water and carry it to the bank, before returning with their nets to scoop up the swiftly decaying segments of squerm. Cathol, fourth member of their group, swore quietly, and Eldene noticed that he had not been so swift and had lost a piece of his cheek to one of the creatures. The man continued working, though, blood soaking into the collar of his coverall and dripping into the water. After a short time, Volus departed in his aerofan, leaving Ulat nervously patrolling the bank. Hours later, when the team had cleared the pond of deaders, and were mounding them on the bank for collection, the Proctor returned.
‘Come here, all of you!’ Volus bellowed.
The four workers gathered before him, with Ulat standing at their backs.
‘You have done well, brothers, in your labour for the Church of Masada,’ said the Proctor, strolling along their line. ‘But it is a shame that it has even been necessary for you to labour like this.’ He came to stand before Dent, and gestured Ulat to come and stand beside him.
Ulat pulled his mask down. ‘Yes, Proctor?’
‘What do you think is a sufficient punishment for his infringement?’ Volus asked.
Ulat took another deep breath from his mask before replying. ‘I think a few days in a cage should do the trick. We don’t want to ruin him completely.’
Eldene glanced aside nervously. It was coming now. Volus was bound to suggest a more vicious punishment. Quite likely Dent would soon be dead, and Eldene could see the man knew that: he looked terrified.
Volus nodded slowly. ‘I see . . . So, that being his punishment, what do you think yours should be, Ulat? Your own crime has been theft from the Church . . . hasn’t it?’
Eldene could not help but feel a species of joy at the sudden panic in Ulat’s expression.
‘I have done nothing, Proctor, I assure you!’
‘No, of course not,’ said Volus, but now his hand snapped out, and he struck Ulat across his legs with the stinger. Ulat shrieked and went down, and Volus immediately stooped over him. Eldene watched in amazement as the Proctor tore away the foreman’s breather gear and stepped back.
‘Now, brothers,’ continued Volus. ‘A new work party will be taking over here from tomorrow. So tomorrow morning you four must report to the ponds on South-side, to join the sprawn harvest. Return to your barracks when you have finished here.’
As the Proctor returned to his aerofan, Ulat crawled after him, his breathing heavy at first, then gasping and choking as he tried to summon the breath to beg for the return of his mask. It was a horrible and rare justice, Eldene felt, watching Ulat die, while the Proctor took his aerofan into the air. They loaded Ulat into a basket along with the other deaders – asphyxiated blue under the lurid sky.
2
With the boy on her lap, leaning back against her breast, the woman continued, ‘And then there was the brother who built his house from grape sticks, and who sat safe while the heroyne ate his friend and clacked its beak in satisfaction. So proud he was of what he had built . . . and don’t we know all about pride?’
In all seriousness the little boy said, ‘Big trouble.’
The woman bit her lip trying to keep a straight face, then sat upright. ‘Yes, “big trouble”,’ she concurred.
In the picture book propped on the console before her, the long-legged bird creature was frozen at the point where it pinched the previous brother’s head in the end of its beak. As she clouted the book, the picture continued running through its animation. The creature tilted its head back and swallowed the man whole . . . then the picture clicked back to where it was gripping his head again, and had clearly gone into a loop.
‘Bugger,’ the woman muttered, clouting the book a second time. Now the animation resumed as it should, and proceeded to the house of sticks.
The woman went on, ‘That very night the heroyne came to stand over his house of sticks. And what did it do?’
Together, woman and child said, ‘It huffed and it puffed, and it puffed and it huffed, and it blew his house down.’
‘And what did the brother say when his house was gone?’ the woman asked, checking her watch.
‘Don’t eat me!’ was the boy’s immediate reply.
‘And I’m sure you’re eager to tell me what happened.’
‘It gobbled him all up!’
‘You can’t run, girl. None of us can run.’ Those had been Fethan’s early words to her, shortly after she had crossed the short space from the hover bus that had transported her and five others from the city orphanage to this farming co-operative. Fethan had gone on to explain that euphemism to her: ‘You co-operate on the farm or they kill you.’
It seemed Fethan was an old hand. Some time in his youth he had got on the wrong side of some member of the Theocracy, but not far enough on the wrong side to end up dead – only as a virtual slave.
‘Why?’ she had asked him. ‘Why all this?’
‘Just the way it is, girl. The Theocracy have all the cream, and if we so much as think of licking it, we get trod on well and good.’
‘It’s not fair,’ she had said. ‘My parents were executed, but I’ve done nothing wrong.’
‘Right and wrong don’t come into it. It’s a shit situation and y’gotta make the best of it.’ Later it would be platitudes like this one that would precede Fethan’s oblique references to the Underground. ‘You gotta find an entrance in the mountains first, and no way we’ll ever get there with these fellas hanging on us.’ Fethan slapped at the scole nestling on his chest. ‘You don’t take your pills regular and your body’ll reject the bugger. You don’t get in the air at night to build up the surplus it feeds to you in the day, it’ll die on you and you’ll suffocate.’
Remembering such past conversations, Eldene finished her meal of nut-potatoes and bread, then went into the chapel adjoining the canteen to say her evening prayers, under the gaze of the Theocracy cameras, before heading for the bunkhouse. Most of the other workers were already asleep, not having had the extra tasks allotted to herself and her three companions, but there were still one or two muted conversations in progress. Seated on her own bunk, as she tiredly removed her boots, Eldene considered her bleak future – if it could even be called a future. Most workers did not last as long as Fethan, since accident, exhaustion, or proctors killed them before they got to enjoy grey hair for long. Escape was not an option, as without their scoles they
would suffocate outside in minutes, and the Theocracy rigidly controlled distribution of the anti-rejection pills. Only stowing away on a trader’s ship, or rescue by the fabled Underground, offered any chance of getting away, and all that Eldene knew of the latter seemed rumour and myth. There was one other option for her – the same one many female workers chose upon entering puberty. Eldene hoped she would never be so desperate as to take that route, then wondered if she would be given a choice.
‘You ever work the sprawn ponds?’ Fethan asked her from the bunk above.
‘You know I haven’t,’ Eldene replied.
‘Yeah . . . right, of course.’
Eldene felt a sinking in her belly. Fethan was getting forgetful, slow, old. With horrible certainty she knew that sometime soon she would see the old man die, and would probably have to drag his corpse back for processing into fertilizer – which was the best in the way of a send-off any of them could expect.
‘What’s it like there?’ she asked.
‘’Tain’t as bad as the squerms. Hard work, but they ain’t vicious.’ Fethan swung his spindly legs over the side of his bunk and dropped down to sit on Eldene’s bunk, beside her. ‘Only trouble is that you gotta wonder why Volus had us moved.’
Eldene stared at him. ‘What do you mean?’
‘Well, Ulat was skimming, but you don’t get to do that without some help from higher up. Reckon Ulat was paying off Volus, and Volus decided it was time for the arrangement to end once he received his Gift. We’re trouble for him now ’cause we might have seen things we oughtn’t.’
‘But he could have easily killed us out there . . . claimed we tried to escape,’ said Eldene.
‘Nah, he’s smarter than that. He can easily blame any shortfall on Ulat, but if us four got done as well, things might start to look a bit too suspicious to the Vicar.’
‘So he’s just moving us conveniently out of the way.’
‘Yeah, let’s hope so,’ muttered the old man.
The calloraptors had taken to feeding on their seared brethren, so did not get as far as the guard perimeter set up by the new autogun. Cormac observed the insectile machine as it patrolled its allotted area, swivelling its chromed barrels hopefully, and he swore yet again. He raised his gaze to the incandescent sky, where the iron wing of a heavy-lifter was silhouetted on its way down, and he wondered what the hell Tomalon was playing at. Then he marched over to the shuttle that was now powering up.
‘Still no sign of Skellor, and we’ve got probes out as far as twenty kilometres in every direction,’ said Gant, over Cormac’s comlink.
‘What about the stratospheric probes?’ Cormac asked.
‘No sign of a ship, and they’ve covered most other possibilities. They’ve been surveying from the moment we arrived,’ Gant replied.
‘Could be under another chameleonware shield.’
‘Yes, there is that.’
Cormac looked around for Gant, and spotted him over by one of the barracks buildings, where a team was stripping out and crating everything, including those damned coralline fragments. He considered going over and joining the Golem, then rejected the idea. He had to find out what all this was about, why Tomalon was being so difficult. Then he would find out what the hell Skellor had been up to.
Jain . . . Cormac tasted the word as he walked to the shuttle. The name had been that of a member of an ancient Hindu sect believing the material world eternal, and seemed suitable for a race with a seemingly numinous technology. It was also suitably ironic considering the race no longer existed. The first fragmentary coralline artefacts had been discovered before Cormac’s birth and had immediately been a sensation, for though alien life was common in the Polity, sentient alien life was rare. Interest had waned when the fragments were dated at over five million years old, then resurged when further examination revealed some of them to be the product of advanced nano- and even pico-technology. That discovery had consequently impelled huge advances in Polity technology. Ever since, the hunt had been on for similar remains, but the sum total of fragments found weighed less than ten kilos. Of the Jain themselves, little more was known than that they had occupied many worlds, had actually rearranged solar systems to suit their requirements, and were now gone. No one knew what a Jain looked like. It was speculated that like humans they had adapted themselves to their worlds when the reverse could not be done. And knowing of what those aliens had been capable, AIs and humans alike expressed the sentiment that perhaps it was a good thing that they were no longer around.
‘Tomalon, can’t you transmit the message down here to me?’ Cormac asked, suddenly feeling frustrated.
‘No,’ replied the Captain of the Occam Razor. ‘It is for your eyes only and it cannot be retransmitted. You have to come here to read it.’
‘You say there’s no information as to why we have to pull out so fast?’
‘None, unfortunately.’
‘What about Occam, has it got anything to say?’ Cormac asked, as he reached the lock of the shuttle. The lock irised open and he stepped inside. He was removing his breathing gear and goggles when the Captain’s reply came through the shuttle’s comlink – the craft’s hull otherwise being impervious to radio transmissions.
‘Occam says that Earth Central is aware of the importance of capturing Skellor.’
‘That’s it?’
‘That’s it,’ Tomalon confirmed.
Cormac dropped into the seat next to the pilot, and turned to the woman herself. She was Golem, he realized almost immediately. She watched him enquiringly until he impatiently pointed upwards, before strapping himself in – this being a military craft it did not have the luxury of internal grav-plates. She cursorily scanned the instrumentation then lifted and tilted the joystick. With a deep AC hum the craft rose and turned, the screen polarizing as it partially faced towards the sun. To one side Cormac saw the heavy-lifter coming down to collect, piecemeal, the entire Separatist base. For someone the future would involve a great deal of deep forensic scanning, as they extracted every mote of available information concerning what Skellor had been up to from the material of this base. And the deepest and most rigorous scanning would certainly be concentrated on those small fragments of coralline material.
The sky turned from an inferno to that abrupt blue twilight, as the shuttle outdistanced the sun and continued to ascend. Soon stars became visible, their light punching through the glassy sculpture of a not-so-distant nebula.
‘The Occam’s coming up,’ said the pilot, pointing at a distant speck, perhaps emulating discomfort at Cormac’s silence.
Cormac felt himself relenting: it wasn’t her fault that this mission was being screwed, whether she was Golem or not.
‘You know,’ he said, ‘when I was first shuttled out to that ship, the pilot pointed it out to me then.’ She looked at him inquiringly and he went on, ‘More precisely she said, “We’ll be there soon,” and I suggested the figure of twenty minutes. When she told me forty minutes, I was quite surprised – I hadn’t realized just how big the damned thing was.’
She nodded her agreement. ‘The Occam Razor is a delta-class dreadnought.’
Cormac continued, ‘You discover, in such situations, that you still have the capacity for awe.’ He watched the speck as it grew in the screen. Later he discovered his capacity to feel awe was undiminished. The Occam Razor hung utterly still in space: a golden lozenge spined with sensor arrays and weapons, four kilometres long, and one and a half wide, and one deep. He felt a moment of disquiet when he remembered that this was not the largest of the Earth Central Security dreadnoughts. It took its place in the Greek alphabet after three other classes.
‘You have to wonder how big alpha-class dreadnoughts are,’ he said, as they passed below a sensor array the size of a cathedral.
‘That’s something we’d all like to know,’ said the woman. Cormac glanced at her in surprise: it was not often that a Golem admitted to any lack of knowledge. She went on, ‘Information on alpha and beta dr
eadnoughts is restricted. But I know that the gamma dreadnought Cable Hogue is not allowed to orbit any world with seas.’
Cormac looked at her and waited.
‘Tides,’ she explained. ‘Cable Hogue masses the same as Earth’s moon. It’s a lot bigger, though.’
‘Shit.’
‘Of course, it’s only a dreadnought. There are reputed to be others.’
‘Let me guess: planet breakers? Popular fiction has a lot to answer for.’
The Golem woman just stared at him for a moment, before manoeuvring the shuttle into an open bay. A gnat flying into a lion’s mouth. And this lion had sharp claws indeed.
Disembarking from the shuttle, Cormac gazed around at the huge cavern of the shuttle bay and at the activity therein. There were other shuttles clamped to the acres of ceramal flooring, and a maintenance team was working on one of these – a team consisting of humans, Golem, and various esoteric designs of robot. As he moved out across the floor, one of these devices – a remote drone – flew an erratic course towards him.
Once the drone was close he said to it, ‘I want you to take me to the bridge.’ For he had already experienced disorientation at the shifting of the internal structure of the ship. Occam, the ship’s AI, often rearranged that structure for supposed optimum efficiency, though Cormac suspected the intelligence had other reasons.
‘Yeah, yeah, yeah,’ said the drone impatiently, and began its wavering flight away from him. He stared at it in annoyance, and it halted ten metres away. ‘Come on then,’ it said, and a clawed arm folded out from its flat body and gestured impatiently for him to follow. He did so, remembering that warship AIs and their various subminds were reputedly cranky. It had something to do with getting a shitty deal as far as employment was concerned. A ship like the Occam Razor was effectively its controlling intelligence’s body, and was built for wholesale destruction and slaughter. Occam, the AI, spent most of its time twiddling metaphorical thumbs.