‘And his armour parted like butter under the knife of the Hooded One.’
The woman paused again. ‘Gross,’ she murmured.
The flash from the screen left shadows fleeing across his vision and, even though he was some distance from the explosion itself, Stanton’s ears were still ringing. From the holocam he’d dropped on top of Dorth’s command tent, he was now unsurprisingly getting no response, but he had seen enough.
All communications shut down, only seconds before all those guards he had seen around the landers dropped to the ground, so he was getting nothing from Lellan, Polas or even Jarvellis on what had been going on, but then he didn’t need to. Through the holocam he’d watched that bastard Dorth walking out into the grasses with five others, and then those five tearing away their Dracocorp augs only seconds before the hit. It didn’t really take much figuring to work out what had happened: some sort of subversion weapon operating through aug software, communications knocked out, high-powered laser hits obviously from outside of the atmosphere . . . so the one Cormac had warned them about had arrived and started throwing his weight around. But Stanton was not going to allow that to distract him. Barring the near-miss on Brom’s barge on Cheyne III, this was the nearest he had got to Aberil Dorth in decades, and he was not now going to take his eye off the ball. The only problem was that he needed to cross about five kilometres of wilderness to get on Dorth’s trail.
At present the aerofan was useless – its laminar batteries so drained they had not even an erg to spare to run the LCD displays on its console – so Stanton stepped over the side rail and dropped to the ground. He tried not to allow himself to think too deeply about the kind of creatures he had been seeing in quantity during his circuitous journey here, nor to wonder what the hell was stirring them up, but there seemed something odd about the atmosphere of the wilderness – something that felt, incongruously, both alien and familiar, and threatening too. He shook his head and swore. He’d been around too long and in too many shitty situations to get the jitters like this.
Checking the direction-indicator setting of his wristcom, he was annoyed to see it had been completely scrambled by the same viral attack that had knocked out communications. No matter, the line of incinerated landers stretched from horizon to horizon and, so long as he did not go too wildly off course, he would run into that line soon enough, and once there all he needed to do was find one undamaged laminar battery. Stomping straight into flute grasses, he drew his heavy pulse-gun and a laser torch.
‘I am the meanest son of a bitch in the valley,’ he intoned, and tried to believe it when his words seemed to stir something huge in the darkness right behind the spot where he had brought down the aerofan. He went into a squat, and peered back in that direction but, with afterimages still plaguing his vision, all he could see was flute grass and the aerofan. Then there was the rearing of a huge shadow, and something nudged the aerofan aside as it slid past . . . and just kept on sliding.
I’m dead.
He knew exactly what it was: the other monstrous predators here walked only on two or four feet, not on a hundred paddle legs. And other predators he could handle mostly, but not this one. Stanton reversed his pulse-gun up underneath his chin, as the hissing roar moved up beside him and a head like a gigantic limpet shell reared up into the darkness – the shadowed hollow of it filled with the whickering of small sharp movement. Stanton prepared himself: if it came down over him he would pull the trigger – there was simply no other option. Unbelievably the thing slid on past, its segmented body forming a wall of armour beside him that he could have reached out and touched. Then it was gone.
With care Stanton withdrew the weapon from under his chin, releasing it into his other hand. He then straightened out the crackling tension from his fingers. The heat from the laser strike, he reasoned, must have confused it – as it was in the direction of that it was now going. To his knowledge, no one had ever got so close to a hooder and survived. This, he supposed, was another example of what Jarvellis called ‘Stanton luck’. He hoped it would hold out, since he must now follow the hooder in towards the fires.
Inside the bridge pod, Skellor checked, with his human eyes, that all that remained of his command crew was ash and smoke. In the end, he realized, only those things that were utterly of his own creation could be trusted. His eyes now opaquing, he turned his attention outward once again.
The Theocracy army would reach the landers soon enough, but meanwhile there were other matters requiring his attention. Through huge magnification he gazed down on the northern ranges of the single continent.
Hitting the rebel communications centre had been a mistake, for there they had possessed only a secondary emitter, not the actual U-space transmitter, and now his chances of tracing it had become so much less. It was somewhere there in the mountains, but had since ceased transmission, though there was still a ghost of signature for him to work with. Because of this he was able to extend the fractal calculations that fined down its location in realspace as a function of its location in underspace. But even for him this was not easy, as such maths was normally the province of runcible AIs – specifically constructed for the purpose. What he really needed was some eyes on the ground – or at least close to it. The Theocracy army was out of the question, for if he turned them back towards the mountains, the rebels, still scuttling for their caves, would probably turn to counterattack and thus hinder any search. The Theocracy soldiers were rough tools now anyway – the cerebral burn he had used leaving them as little more than automatons – and most importantly, though he could control them, they were, like Aphran, not his own creation and therefore not to be trusted. Skellor had something else in mind.
All of the shuttles inside the Occam, from the smallest twelve-seaters to the huge delta-wing heavy lifters, were already bound up and pierced by the growth of Jain substructure, and in some cases with the larger architecture. Luckily he did not require an actual landing on the planet – just insertion into its atmosphere – and those grabships he had returned to their holds after the growth would be adequate to that task. Through the internal vision of the Jain structure which, like an infinity of fibre optics, could provide him with views anywhere it existed in the ship, he watched the continued growth of the calloraptor-hybrid eggs in their polyhedral framework, before deciding what changes should be made. The alterations to muscle and bone structures took an infinitesimal fraction of a second for him to calculate, but for longer than that he was annoyed that practical considerations had him dispensing with a large proportion of the weight and hence the strength of those structures. Briefly he considered the installation of some form of AG, but found the idea aesthetically displeasing. As soon as he finally reached a decision on what he must do, he did it: Jain filaments darkening the albumen of the eggs as they tore and rebuilt and polished to perfection.
Beyond the Medical section, by using the old mechanisms of the ship, Skellor shifted a corridor so there was a direct connection between that area and the bay containing the grabships. As the eggs turned metallic white on completion of the processes operating inside them, they were drawn in towards the main trunk of Jain architecture passing through that section, and microscopic cilia in their billions conveyed them into the newly constructed corridor, further down which Skellor now grew another spur of architecture to convey them to the bay. Here he glued them into a three-dimensional honeycomb that expanded the grabs of three ships so that in the end it seemed they held boulders of metallic conglomerate. When the doors of the bay finally opened, and the ships blasted out into space, Skellor felt great satisfaction with his creation, and even more so as he began to program sharp little minds. In all, this particular act had taken him five and a half solstan hours – about twice the time it would take him to denude the planet’s surface of human life by using the conventional weapons of this ship. But that was not something he wanted to do just yet – not while he was having such fun.
Through her light-intensifying binoculars,
Lellan surveyed the lower slopes and still saw no more sign of the Theocracy army. There seemed no rhyme or reason to anything the enemy had been doing all night. Earlier they had kept attacking erratically: squads charging from cover in what seemed a co-ordinated attack, then that charge losing impetus once out in the open, where her own troops could use the Theocracy troops for target practice. It had been mad, horrible, and seemed to make no sense at all, yet it had produced an effect simply by attrition, because the Theocracy forces outnumbered hers by three to one. Now, though, the foe were just turning around and walking away. Lowering her binoculars, she turned her attention to the technician, who had Lellan’s coms helmet lying in pieces on a nearby mollusc-crusted rock.
‘Any luck?’ Lellan asked. ‘Because I could really do with talking to my field commanders sometime soon.’
The woman glanced up. ‘You can use it for direct radio communication right now, if you want. All the computer functions are scrambled and the only way to clear that would be a wipe followed by a direct software download from—’
‘From the operations room,’ finished Lellan. ‘From Polas.’
The woman ducked down and, with quick expertise, reassembled the components of the helmet, then passed it up to Lellan before turning to pack away her tools.
‘Okay, who can hear me?’ asked Lellan into the comlink as soon as she donned the helmet, then winced at the barrage of sound as everyone tried to reply together. ‘Okay, okay! I’ll list each of you in your numerical order and you can reply in turn, then you can shut it unless I speak to you individually.’ Twelve out of fifteen field commanders answered as she said their names. Lellan nodded to herself, then went on. ‘I have here with me a Theocracy soldier just taken prisoner – as no doubt have some of you. I want you to listen to this, then to what I have to say after.’
Turning to the prisoner on either side of whom stood Carl and Uris, she asked, ‘Your name?’
‘Squad Leader Sastol,’ said the man. He looked bewildered, as if not even sure about the truth of that statement.
‘Shall we pretend, Sastol, that I’ve had you beaten and tortured, and am now threatening to take away your air supply?’ she continued. The man Sastol jerked his head up from contemplation of his feet and stared at her in confusion. Lellan went on, ‘What’s happening down there? Your entire army was attacking us previously without any co-ordination. We’ve captured hundreds like you who have ripped off their augs, but those still with augs would seemingly rather die than be captured. And now your entire army has turned around.’
‘Something destroyed Faith,’ Sastol replied, perhaps deciding he preferred this method of pretend torture.
‘Something destroyed my faith a long time ago,’ said Lellan. ‘Are you trying to tell me you’ve lost yours?’
Sastol stared at her directly. ‘Something destroyed Faith – the cylinder world.’
Lellan absorbed that, then asked, ‘And the army?’
‘He who destroyed Faith also tried to capture my mind through the Gift. I tore my aug away. Others did not.’
Carl said, ‘So whose side is this Skellor on?’
‘His very own, I think.’ Lellan paused, then said, ‘Did you all get that? By the numbers, give me the confirmation – or otherwise – such as you can.’ Seven of her commanders confirmed that they were getting the same story from their own prisoners. Two others assumed the whole thing a ruse, and did not believe that one of the cylinder worlds had been destroyed.
‘As your commander I’m very interested to have your opinions. Now I will tell you how I see things.’ Lellan paused, obviously uncomfortable with what she must now say. ‘We came up from below and we attacked not because we thought we could hold the surface, but simply because we thought we could increase the ballot and create enough noise to attract the attention of the Polity – so that our cry for help would be heard and could be responded to. We had to do this because staying underground, and staying silent, would have resulted in the Theocracy destroying us down there. Are you all in agreement with that?’
The chorus of ‘ayes’ was all she needed to continue with, ‘Now, we have above us an AI dreadnought, which I am told has been subverted by someone who worked for the Separatists. The Separatists on Cheyne III were supplied with arms by the Theocracy, yet, that same individual has come here and destroyed a cylinder world, and is now demanding that we . . . What is it, Pholan?’
The commander who had interrupted her gave a terse explanation, and when he had finished she went on, ‘Oh, not only a cylinder world, it seems – all of the Theocracy landers as well. As I was saying, this individual is now demanding that we hand over Ian Cormac. As I see it, Polas was right. The army must get under cover. You have to take your fighters back down into caves.’
Lellan waited for the dying down of a storm of protest. Even in war, to be on the surface offered a kind of freedom none of them had experienced for a long time. When that protest turned to argument between various commanders, she lost her patience.
‘Enough!’ Argument died to muttering, then silence, and she continued, ‘Wake up and smell what you’re shovelling. You know we cannot win a war on the surface. We have never been able to win a war on the surface. In the end we must have Polity intervention here to escape further oppression. And that we will get it is a foregone conclusion.’
There came a brief flurry of further argument before they realized what she had just said. Into the silence that came after, she threw, ‘A subverted AI Polity dreadnought has destroyed a cylinder world, and has been striking at the surface. Anyone would be mad to think Earth Central Security will not come here now. What credibility they were preserving by non-intervention here is completely gone. Separatists across humanspace will claim that dreadnought was not really subverted. ECS will come here to investigate and to offer aid – and the whole furore the Polity has been striving to avoid is now inevitable. Now they have nothing to lose by coming here, but they do have a world to gain – one that has been iconic to Separatists for a long time.’
Argument continued, but Lellan was determined. ‘You have my orders. Obey them or not.’ Then she shut off her comlink.
‘We retreat and hide, then?’ asked Beckle, inspecting the rail-gun he had taken from Sastol.
Lellan shrugged. ‘If we stay up here, this Skellor could fry us from orbit any time he likes. That he has not done so yet tells me that he’s in such a strong position that we’re almost irrelevant to him. Either that or he likes playing games.’
‘You didn’t answer his question,’ said Carl, who had sat Sastol on the ground with his hands on his head.
‘No, I didn’t,’ said Lellan.
‘What are you going to do?’ Carl asked.
Lellan grinned. ‘Well, I’ve been the rebel leader for long enough, and now I don’t think there’s much more I can do for the rebellion. I intend to head out there’ – she pointed into the night – ‘to get hold of this Ian Cormac, and the others, and find out what the hell is happening.’
‘We’ll be coming with you,’ said Beckle, closely inspecting the sight of the rail-gun.
‘I didn’t doubt it for a moment,’ she replied.
‘We will also be coming,’ said two voices simultaneously.
The prisoner, Sastol, stared with bewilderment at the two cylinders, which he had assumed merely contained supplies. They emitted a deep humming and ignited all over with glinting lights and displays, as they rose off the ground and turned themselves upright.
The Outlinker boy, Apis, was utterly exhausted and sank to his knees on the muddy ground, but Eldene did not allow him to stay there. She grabbed his arm and began hauling him to his feet.
‘We have to keep going. If they catch us, they’ll kill us. And they won’t do it quickly!’
He stared at her, probably too tired to know what he thought of that possibility. At first she had not understood what was the matter with him, until he’d gasped earlier, ‘How do you people live with this? How do you manage to
spend all your lives in gravity?’ Without his exoskeleton he was directly feeling the full effects of a force he had never before experienced.
As she finally wrestled him to his feet, he managed to formulate a response. ‘Do you think any of them are still alive back there, then?’
‘I hope not,’ Eldene replied, fingering the pistol she had snatched from Speelan as they escaped. She moved in close and hooked an arm around his waist to help him along. Together they staggered on through a dark wilderness of flute grasses and churned mud; hot breezes blowing in behind them, where a hot-metal glow illuminated clouds of smoke and steam so that they appeared like a range of orange mountains – a range from behind which the upper edge of Calypse was rising as a harbinger of morning.
‘Where should we head now?’ Apis asked.
Eldene scanned around them and did not know what to reply. Their situation seemed hopeless: they had limited oxygen, were miles from anyone who could be considered friendly, and even heading back to their erstwhile captors was now out of the question. Where could they go? Back towards the crater, in the hope of running into their comrades, or towards the fighting in the hope of coming across some of the rebels? These were the questions she was beginning to ponder, when she heard the sound of voices from behind them.
‘Keep moving,’ she hissed at Apis as he showed signs of sagging to the ground again. He too now heard the voices and then an order suddenly barked, followed by silence.
‘Theocracy?’ he whispered.
Eldene felt the skin on the back of her neck creeping – she had recognized the source of that order. She nodded to Apis as they struggled on.
It seemed the voice must have carried for some distance, for thereafter they heard nothing more until the lightening sky became distinct from the horizon of towering grasses around them. When they next heard something – the sound of someone falling over and cursing until ordered to silence again – it became evident that someone was indeed behind them, and now, in the better light, rapidly drawing closer.