‘They must have put up an infrared detector. We were a bit too close,’ he said.
More explosions to their right, followed by the distinctive vicious cracking of rail-gun fire. Gant slowed to a halt and held up his hand. Mika swore aloud after stumbling into his back, then fell silent when he glared at her. He made a downward gesture and they quickly squatted low.
‘They’re not firing at us,’ he said. ‘There’s something else out there.’
They listened as the firing drew further to the right of them, and something moved through the vegetation with a sound like a leaking compressor.
‘What the hell is that?’ wondered Cormac aloud.
‘Big bastard of a hooder,’ said a voice none of them recognized.
Cormac observed with surprise the old man who stepped into view. He was short, gnarled, had a large ginger beard and a distinct lack of teeth, but most importantly he had managed to get this close to them without being detected by the hearing of a Golem Twenty-seven. Gant himself was gaping in amazement at the oldster, and Cormac grinned to himself – it was well for one such as Gant to be reminded he was not omnipotent.
Casually, Cormac pointed the thin-gun he had drawn at the old man’s chest. ‘And you are?’ he asked.
The stranger surveyed the four of them in turn, studying with great curiosity the exoskeleton that Apis wore, before returning his attention to Cormac.
‘You came down in the lander – from Dragon,’ he observed.
‘You didn’t answer my question,’ said Cormac, tilting his head to pick up further sounds of rail-gun fire, and the racket of seven or eight grenades going off one after another.
The old man grinned, and spoke over the noise. ‘You didn’t ask the right one. What you meant to ask was, which side am I on?’
‘And?’ Cormac asked.
The old man lowered his voice to a whisper. ‘Yours, Agent. Now shall we get the hell out of here? I just led a nightmare over to visit our Theocracy friends, and I don’t want to be leading it back again.’
Cormac considered for all of half a second, then reholstered his weapon before gesturing to the old man to lead on. He received looks from both Gant and Mika that suggested they were on the edge of questioning his judgement, when suddenly there was a huge crash from far behind them, followed by continuous rail-gun fire and grenade explosion after explosion. Looking back, they saw wreckage fountaining up through the arc lights, then hurtling through the night above them went the engine of one of the landers.
‘Fucking hell,’ Gant suggested.
The lights suddenly went out, but the firing and explosions did not quickly cease – nor did the screams. Something reared up into the night, and there came a sound as of a hundred glass scythes sharpening themselves against each other. Cormac saw something glittering, as of red light reflected from spilt mercury – etched against a background of something wide and black.
‘Yeah, hell’s about right,’ said the old man, quickly leading them away.
‘That was a hooder,’ said Mika – again a statement.
‘Observant, ain’t she?’ said the stranger.
A hundred metres further along, where the tall grasses petered out into purplish darknesses of deep rhubarb, Gant caught hold of the old man’s arm and halted him.
‘Who’s that ahead of us?’ the Golem asked calmly.
‘He’s all right, he’s just waiting for me,’ explained the other.
Gant was having none of that – he’d been caught out once that night, and it was enough. He ducked into the dank vegetation, to approach whoever was ahead of them. Behind, there now came only sporadic gunfire, the occasional explosion, but the screaming remained almost constant.
‘What the hell is it doing back there?’ Cormac asked.
‘That’s mostly terror you can hear. The screams from the ones it catches would get more muffled.’
The three of them stared at him with morbid curiosity.
He shrugged. ‘They normally eat grazers that have toxic structures layered in their skin, bones and flesh, so of necessity they eat slowly and meticulously. I’m told it takes them a while, so a human victim will die some time after being stripped down to the bone.’
‘Muffled?’ asked Apis, clearly fascinated.
The old man brought a cupped hand down on the palm of his other hand. ‘By its hood – that’s what it traps you under.’
It didn’t require the superb senses Gant possessed for him to realize there was something decidedly odd about that old man. Even so, Gant reckoned on the stranger not meaning them any immediate harm, else why had he revealed himself? Also, whatever the old man was, it involved some high-level Polity tech – little to do with the hostile Theocracy here. Probably the man who was lurking just on the other side of this small, perfectly circular, mossy clearing offered no immediate harm either. But Gant had heard something, felt something . . .
Was instinct, intuition – or any other of those intangibles humans believed in – recordable? For Gant this was not some rhetorical question to stimulate interesting debate – it was a question that lay at the core of everything he was. If these intangibles did truly exist, then perhaps others like ego, self, soul . . . In the end Gant had to wonder if he was really Gant, and to find the answer to that he needs must pursue things neither solid nor easily defined.
The unseen man was good, very good for a human: he was so still that all Gant could detect was the very slow and easy cyclic breathing, and the even beat of his heart – its rate attesting that though the man knew Gant was present nearby, he wasn’t allowing himself to get over-excited about it. Before the others could catch up, Gant stepped out into the clearing.
‘You can come out now. I know where you are,’ he said.
The man’s heartbeat suddenly ratcheted up very high. Gant could only presume this meant he himself was about to be attacked. As he leapt forwards directly towards the half-seen figure, a hand shoved him aside and he ducked the folding stock of a pulse-rifle. Turning fast on the boggy ground he caught hold of the weapon, withheld an instinctive strike at the other’s momentarily exposed neck, and consequently got the heel of a hand smashing into his nose. But the fight had a foregone conclusion: Gant lived in a Golem Twenty-seven chassis so however brave or skilled was his opponent, it was like matching a lion against a battle tank. Ignoring the blows that rapidly slammed into him, Gant picked the man up and threw him out into the clearing. He was instantly up, and a dagger clanged off Gant’s head and went whickering into the flute grass. Light from the tumbling moon then suddenly ignited the tableau.
‘What the hell are you doing here?’ Gant asked. ‘You know, you never possessed much finesse, even when you were alive,’ Thorn told him.
The carrier lay where she had brought it down, almost entirely filling a squerm pond. From underneath the vehicle the writhing and scraping of segmented bodies rose and fell in flurries of skittering hissing, as if the creatures were pursuing a long-running argument down there in the darkness. Standing upon the ramp that descended from her carrier to the muddy ground, Lellan surveyed the horizon through her image intensifier, and wondered just how long the pounding would continue before the ground attack began. The presence of the laser arrays had negated for both sides any need to accumulate both armour and air power on the planet’s surface – on her side because it would provide too easy a target and be too easily destroyed, and on theirs because the arrays had provided ample firepower. The same rules however did not apply to the Theocracy army on Charity because, as she understood it, its purpose was armed insertion on Polity worlds in that mythical time when the godless Polity supposedly collapsed. Stanton’s activities had managed to prevent the enemy getting any armoured vehicles down, but some kind of air force had been dropped from one of their capital ships and was heading this way.
Lowering her intensifier, she surveyed those of her forces ranged here behind the embankment. They had a window of some two hours before the fleet of attack ships came in over th
e Theocracy lines, and were using that time to best advantage.
The commissary was up and running, with huge aluminium pots – that had come from she knew not where – now boiling over a number of those wonderful Polity heaters, and squerms were being dunked, then their cooked and separated segments handed out. She liked the fact that her troops were stuffing themselves with great hunks of meat considered a delicacy up on the cylinder worlds, where it was served only on small sesame seed biscuits; and something more than that on other worlds where it was sold as a bottled food essence. She liked the fact that here and now, so many workers recently freed were for the first time eating the product of their own killing labour.
Beyond this commissary area, the troops had erected many tents, in or around which they were either sleeping or preparing their weapons. Rail-guns had been mounted all the way across the embankment, but only those guns that could not be fitted on some kind of vehicle, because static targets made short-lived targets. The two remaining tanks were still workable, and Lellan was now debating with herself about whether or not they could be used, since they moved slowly and again made easy targets. Perhaps it would be best to leave that decision to each tank’s own commander.
In the end her hopes for the coming attack rested mainly with Polity technology. Against an airforce and thirty thousand aug-linked, fresh, highly trained – and also trained in higher gravity – Theocracy troops she could only field a scattered force of ten thousand tired fighters, a few hover-aerofans, and her grounded carrier. Never expecting to be able to come out onto the surface in full force, to fight, the Underworld had never really geared to that eventuality, so, though there was no lack of weapons, they did have a shortage of breather equipment, ration packs, and quite simple things like warm clothing. Lellan cursed the fact that the ten thousand she now had on the surface was one fifth of the number she could have fielded had she possessed the equipment. And she hoped that these two newest additions that were coming had been worth their weight in the breather equipment Lyric II could have carried.
Polity technology levelled the playing field a bit by giving her troops communications of an equivalent sophistication to the Dracocorp aug, and weapons either equivalent or better. The pulse-rifle was more sophisticated technologically, but the Theocracy rail-gun performed the same function with an efficiency that was little different: that function being to put holes in people. Her first hope rested with the ‘hand-helds’ that John had brought them in his last smuggling run. These light missile-launchers would be a boon in the coming air attack. With their magazines of five armour-piercing missiles that could run on intelligent targeting, Lellan knew her forces would be able to take down quite a few attack craft – but that wasn’t enough. With so little cover for her troops and the impossibility of digging foxholes in the boggy ground, she wanted the air attack over quickly, as she was well aware of the devastation that daisy-cutter and multiple-warhead munitions could wreak, let alone a tactical nuke. She needed more of an edge, and the two who should have arrived here only a little while ago would hopefully provide her with that edge.
‘Polas, where the hell are they?’ she asked into her helmet comlink.
From the concealed control room in the mountains Polas replied, ‘It took longer than I thought to upload to them.’
‘Is there a problem with them?’ she asked.
‘Not with them, just with our gear. They each received the five-thousand-hour package we sent through the U-space transmitter, and all recent data. They would have sucked it up in seconds, but it was our system here that screwed. It was glitching because we just went realtime on our broadcast to the Polity, and we were also sending the increased ballot figures.’
‘Someone’s replied?’ Lellan asked, her previous queries going out of her mind.
‘Yes, it’s an AI dreadnought and it’s boosting our signal into the runcible system for us.’ Polas could not keep the delight out of his voice. ‘Also, in preparation for orders from Earth Central Security, it’s on its way here – ETA one hundred solstan hours.’
Lellan was dumbfounded. It was working, it was actually working . . . but still there was much work to do if they were to survive this.
‘Have you now finished with the uploading?’
‘Yeah, and our two new friends are on their way with just one diversion, to ferry your brother to you as he’s not that far out,’ Polas replied.
‘Then my brother is in for some harsh words here for delaying them. The Theocracy line is only ten kilometres away from us,’ said Lellan, not yet managing to put as much bile into her words as was her custom.
‘It was not your brother’s idea,’ interrupted a voice that was unfamiliar to her.
‘Polas? Polas, who is this?’
Polas replied, ‘That was CED Forty-two. It was its idea to fetch your brother.’
‘I thought they were supposed to obey orders,’ said Lellan.
‘We do obey orders,’ came back doubled voices. Then one went on, ‘We have been monitoring the situation. No attack possible from Theocracy forces during our approach time . . . We approach now.’
Three dots resolved in the sky. One of them was an aerofan, on which rode John Stanton. On either side of him, flying sideways on, with weapons and detection devices scanning all around, came the cylinders of the two heavy-armour AI drones he had brought from Elysium. Observing these objects Lellan well understood now what John meant when he explained that Polity AIs loved their euphemisms: CED stood for Controlled Elimination Device.
During their descent, the drones swung into upright positions on either side of the aerofan, so that when Stanton finally stepped from it, the appearance given was of a man stepping between two pillars – only these pillars advanced with him as he approached Lellan.
‘Not a good uniform to wear around here,’ she said to him when he was close enough for her to see he was dressed as a proctor.
‘I’ll change in a minute,’ he replied, nodding towards her carrier. ‘But first let me introduce to you CEDs Forty-two and Forty-three.’
Lellan felt a bit uncomfortable being required to address two armed and armoured cylinders that showed no characteristics of life, but then she was not so well travelled as her brother.
‘I don’t like that,’ she said. Then, when her brother gazed at her questioningly, ‘Forty-two and Forty-three. If these are AI, and accepted as being alive, then they should have names.’ She stepped forwards. ‘Which is which?’
The drones had now settled to the ground on either side of Stanton. He glanced at each of them, then shrugged. ‘I don’t rightly know.’
Lellan studied the one to her right, trying to find some feature on it to focus on in place of a face. Eventually she focused on a collection of lenses and antennae clustered below the panpipes missile-launcher on its end-cap. ‘You will henceforth be known as Romulus,’ she said, then turning to the other drone, ‘And you will be known as . . .’ she hesitated, a twist to her mouth, ‘Ramus.’
‘Very funny,’ muttered Stanton.
Ignoring him, Lellan said, ‘Welcome, Ram and Rom,’ wondering if she should be welcoming what looked to be the future of warfare.
Disgusted at his own excess – at his uncontrolled feeding and growth – Skellor concentrated on organizing his resources and properly preparing himself. The underspace package the ship’s automatic systems had intercepted whilst he had been growing, and to which he had given his dissembling reply, he metaphorically put to one side. Thereafter he refined his internal structures and created storage like giant fat cells for excess materials; he burnt out waste and honed down systems to their optimum efficiency. It was while he was collating and cataloguing all useful sources of information inside the ship, to incorporate them into himself, that he found Mika’s database and inspected it with fascination. Gazing through Jain structure, he then recognized the corpse of his calloraptor/human hybrid and immediately knew what to do with some of the excess he now contained – and plunged Jain filaments into
the hybrid corpse.
Incorporating human DNA had been a mistake brought about by lack of imagination and resources, but now, utilizing the complex calloraptor trihelix, he knew he could make something much more useful. Isolating what he required was the work of a moment, as were the subsequent processes of meiosis and recombination. Almost with a shrug he tore out the walls of Medical, and expanded the space there to take a huge polyhedral framework of Jain structural members. To the junctures of polyhedra he pumped raw materials and, in their passage through nanotubes and nanofactories, they knitted into complex organic molecules. Small pearls sprouted and grew as they were pumped full of the required nutrients. Then, at the last, Skellor opened nanotubes into microtubes to transfer the already well-developed zygotes he had grown into the awaiting eggs. Raptly watching the growth of this army of his creatures, he found himself more reluctant to disengage from the process than he had been before. With slow grinding force of will he forced his awareness out from the warm internals of the ship and himself, out to his interface with the harshness of space. Here he observed the system and what he had done.
The planet itself could have been the twin of Neptune, and now would bear a closer resemblance as the debris from the shattered moonlet spread as it followed the moonlet’s original orbit. Coldly, Skellor calculated that this debris would form a complete ring in one hundred and twenty years solstan – the five largest surviving chunks of the moonlet acting as its shepherds. But what did any of that matter? With that same grinding strength of will he forced himself into a higher awareness of the present, and realized it was time for him to stop playing with the power he now possessed, and to use it. Employing the conventional ion manoeuvring thrusters, he drew the Occam Razor away from the debris and closer into the sun itself. For a time he felt as one great beast wallowing in the harsh radiation, then he forced his attention back to the underspace package he had earlier put aside. Once again he felt something like dry laughter echoing inside himself – knowing where this communication was from.