Polity 1 - Prador Moon (13 page)

But it seemed the humans and the AIs were beginning to register the change in tactics and were pulling their own forces back on the surface. Analysing this retreat, Immanence narrowed down the position of the runcible to the north of one of the main continents. He targeted the centre of that spread of jungle. Some Prador forces still remained within the zone, but the loss would not be unacceptable. He launched a single antimatter missile, maximum acceleration all the way down. It cut an orange streak of fire through atmosphere, as it burnt away its ablation shield, and hammered into the ground. A mountain rose then flew apart in a growing sphere of annihilating fire. A fire storm spread, instantly, across thousands of square kilometres of jungle, and the ensuing Shockwave peeled up the topsoil from bedrock. From orbit he observed a massive disk-shaped cloud spread above the detonation site. Beyond, the devastation spread almost like a pyroclastic flow. Within minutes a million square kilometres of jungle turned into something like the surface of a world closely orbiting a sun. No sign, thereafter, of any U-space interference. The runcible was gone.

The evacuation was all but complete on the fourth day, though heavy losses were inflicted by Polity war drones, which carried the fight all the way up into orbit—the drones attacking until depleting all their weaponry, then slamming themselves as hard and fast as possible into any vulnerable Prador ship. At this point Immanence contacted Shree to say, “Now.”

Antimatter missiles rained down on the planet, each one, at a minimum, causing devastation the same as that caused by the one Immanence had used to destroy the runcible. Within hours it became impossible to see the continents from orbit, for the atmosphere filled with smoke, steam and debris. Tsunamis slammed around the world washing thousands of kilometres inshore. A fault line reactivated three hundred kilometres inshore of one continent, and dropped everything behind it five metres into the ocean. Some inactive volcanoes exploded violently into action, one active volcano went out. Immanence supposed that, after a winter lasting a century or so, the jungle might return. It would take millions of years before this place evolved large life forms again. All but maybe a few of the large, alien life forms down there were dead.

“Satisfactory,” said Immanence. “Now, Shree, with a little stopover to remove a Polity transfer station—a small matter, no more than a nibbling louse—you will accompany me to a system the humans name Trajeen, where we will seize from them a runcible that is not planet-based.”

“Do we have need of such things?” Shree asked.

“Some of the technology may come in useful, but if not, what matter? Another human world there awaits our attention.”

* * * * *

“What's with Jadris?” said the new copilot. “He can't just do that at the last moment—the AI wants those buffers in position and ready for fitting straight after the test.”

“Too much green brandy?” Conlan suggested.

The woman looked at him with slight puzzlement and Conlan rather suspected his mimicking of Heilberg's voice might be wrong. “What did you hear?” he asked.

She shrugged. “He auged in to opt out of this flight, saying he was sick, then he took his aug offline, so he must be unwell to not be taking calls. But it's not like him to be so irresponsible.”

Conlan studied her as she moved off ahead of him. She was an attractive woman with a bald skull, fine coffee skin and an evident athleticism that did not detract from her femininity. But then Polity cosmetic surgery made it possible for anyone to be attractive. Maybe she had been born an ugly troglodyte with warts, bad breath and suppurating acne.

At the security gate into the flight bay, she stepped ahead of him to press her hand against the palm reader, then walked through. He glanced up, noting the drone hanging Damoclean overhead, and placed Heilberg's hand against the reader. Nothing happened, no alarms and no sudden activity from the drone, and he walked through trying not to show any reaction.

“Green brandy you say?” she asked him.

Conlan scanned the four ships presently resting in the huge bay and felt a brief moment of panic. All four of them were grabships stripped of their claws, and all three held runcible buffer sections dogged under their forward cockpits. He had no idea which one was Heilberg's. Fortunately the copilot moved on ahead of him. He wished she would stop talking. He didn't know her name or what her association with Heilberg might be. They could have been lovers, they might have shared in-jokes and all that sad paraphernalia born of friendships.

Rather than head for any of the ships she turned to the right, and only when he called up schematics of this area in his aug did he realise she was heading for the changing room.

Idiot!

It would have looked hugely suspicious if he'd climbed aboard without donning a spacesuit first. Though these ships were very rugged, safety procedures on what was effectively a construction site required crew to wear spacesuits.

Within the changing area others were stripping off clothing before open lockers, hanging the clothing inside and then donning their suits. Relief again when he saw that each locker bore a name stencilled on the door. He walked up to Heilberg's and pressed his hand against the reader beside it. Nothing happened. Conlan just stood there swallowing dryly.

“Is that bloody thing still playing up?” asked the copilot.

“So it would seem,” he replied, not knowing what to do next. She provided the answer for him by reaching over and thumping the wall beside the plate as she passed. The door popped open. Conlan felt a great gratitude towards—he checked the name on the locker she came to a halt before—Anna Vasco.

Conlan stripped off his clothing and donned the spacesuit, surreptitiously making adjustments so it fitted him properly. He glanced aside at Anna, and seeing her utterly naked, tanned and sleek as she pulled out her suit, felt a surge of excitement. She glanced at him, noting his attention, and, rather deliberately he felt, dropped her suit then bent over, with her naked behind towards him, to pick it up. Of course, he knew, by the standards of general humanity, that between his ears lay a twisted ugly mess. He was a psychopath, and he knew that his heterosexual wiring had fused with other parts of his psyche. Hence the prospect of killing a sexually attractive woman excited him in an entirely different way from how he felt about Jadris and Heilberg. Unfortunately, he could not pander to the part of himself requiring the act to be protracted. The woman must die quickly. Such a shame.

Suitably attired, and with their bowl helmets tucked under their arms, they headed out towards the ships. Again Conlan let Anna take the lead, and thus discovered that Heilberg's ship lay second from the left. They boarded, stooping through the cramped body of the vessel, which was racked out and packed with the kinds of hand tools Conlan often employed for purposes other than those intended. He smiled at a row of electric screwdrivers and remembered how it once took him many hours and many hundreds of self-tapping screws to kill one man, and the subsequent long-running joke in the Organization that if you crossed Conlan you were screwed.

In the bulbous chainglass cockpit Anna took the copilot's seat while Conlan strapped himself in where Heilberg once sat. Of course Anna's presence was for the same reasons as the spacesuits—a precautionary measure—and having little to do, she chattered. Conlan kept his replies monosyllabic so as not to offer any encouragement while they waited for their slot. Soon the two ships ahead of Heilberg's moved through the ship lock at the end of the bay, and his turn came. The maglev in the bay automatically drew the ship into the lock, the entry doors sealing behind. High-speed pumps screamed up to full function, their sound gradually receding as they removed from the lock the medium for carrying sound. The outer doors opened with a puff of residual atmosphere, and maglev, and the station's spin, threw the grabship out into vacuum. Showing confident professionalism, Conlan started the vessel's fusion engine—pointed away from the station—and made the required corrections to bring it on course for the cargo runcible.

“Is there something wrong with your hand?” Anna asked.

Difficult to hide, and her question would have been the first of many. One more task, then, for Heilberg's hand. He straightened it and chopped back hard, smashing Anna's nasal bones up into her head. She snorted a spray of blood all over the cockpit screen as she choked into silence. Conlan inspected the hand. The force of the blow had torn it from the interface clamps and it now stuck out at an odd angle from his forearm. He removed it, and replaced it with his own artificial one—glad of the return of feeling and sensitivity, for he would need all his faculties for what he intended. But before he set about preparing for that task,he unstrapped Anna from her seat and dragged her into the back. He found her presence distracting.

Which they ate with a runcible spoon—

He managed to ignore it at first, the people patting him on the back or grasping his hand and saying, “It's great to meet you,” or “Thank you for what you're doing,” or simply staring. But now as he sat sipping a glass of the local brew—something called greenwine—at one of the bars in the arcade leading to the main runcible complex, he began to become a little irritated. “Christ! You think they'd be used to seeing soldiers by now.”

Urbanus, who sipped a glass of cranberry vodka just to be sociable and because a fuel cell in his body could utilize it to power him, emulated an amused smile and gazed up at the glass ceiling of the arcade. “Are you going to tell him, Lindy, or shall I?”

“I think we should let him find out for himself, don't you?” Lindy replied. She glanced back into the bar itself where numerous customers had gathered since their arrival, and kept peering out at them. Then she bit her lip and nodded to a screen display affixed amidst ivy on the outer wall of the bar.

“What are you two—” Jebel turned towards the screen. “That's Grant's World… fucking Prador.”

The scene depicted a camouflaged second-child fleeing through jungle. Something familiar about that, but then Jebel had seen many fleeing Prador. He let his gaze stray away and saw that a group of people now gathered on the main concourse were looking towards the bar. When they saw he had spotted them, some of them grinned, nodded and moved off. Others stayed to point out the bar to others. Jebel was beginning to get the creepy feeling it was him they were pointing to, and it made him feel nervy.

“Excuse me, sir.”

Jebel spun round spilling some greenwine down his shirt front. His hand dropped to the thin-gun holstered on his belt. Then he lowered his gaze to a small boy standing before him—a kid in ersatz fatigues, a toy pistol on his belt and a pet lizard clinging to his shoulder.

“Hey,” said Jebel, “I'm no recruiting officer.”

The boy did not seem to know how to reply to this, so instead looked towards a woman standing a few paces back, clutching a holocamera. She held the device up questioningly. Jebel supposed the kid, who was obviously into militaria, wanted a recording of himself with some soldiers. He shrugged and waved a hand obligingly. Boy moved up beside him as the woman, probably his mother, raised the recorder.

“Can you stand by me?” the boy asked.

Feeling rather foolish, Jebel stood with his hand on the boy's shoulder.

“What's your name?” he asked.

“Alan,” the boy replied.

“So you want to be a soldier?”

“I want to be like you,” the boy replied, staring up at him wide-eyed.

Like adults throughout history Jebel then just stood there unable to think of anything else to say. Certainly the boy would not want to be like Jebel, but how to explain that to him? Finally the woman came over.

“Thank you for that.” She held up her holocamera exposing a fingerprint and gene reader plate. “Could you verify it, please? I know it's an imposition, but there are sure to be fakes.”

“Well… yeah, sure.” Jebel pressed his thumb against the plate until the device beeped.

“We'll leave you in peace now—I expect you get a lot of this.” Hand on her boy's shoulder, she moved away. The boy kept looking back at Jebel, still wide-eyed.

Jebel sat, not quite sure what to think.

“Of course,” said Urbanus, “the lizard on his shoulder is a gecko—they've become quite a fashionable pet.”

Gecko.

“Worryingly dense, our great leader,” Lindy added.

With interminable slowness, realisation surfaced in Jebel's consciousness. He understood then that, on some level, he already knew. He turned and looked at the bar's screen and observed airborne shots of a glowing crater surrounded by burning jungle.

“Recorded by the AIs, war drones,” said Jebel, then turning to Urbanus, “and you?”

The Golem nodded. “Those were my instructions. The Polity needs good news of victories right now, and there's damned few of them. It also needs heroes.”

“I'm not sure I—” Shadows abruptly fell across their table. Jebel looked up to see four floating holocams jockeying for position above him.

“Looks like the Trajeen newsnets just found out,” said Lindy.

“I won't stay here for this,” said Jebel.

“No need,” Urbanus replied, “I've just been informed that our services are required elsewhere, if you are willing.”

“Where?” Jebel asked.

Urbanus pointed up through the roof of the arcade, at an object only just visible in the sky.

* * * * *

Standing upon the bridge of one of the utility ships available to the runcible project, Moria gazed through a chainglass screen at the nearby Boh runcible hanging in silhouette before the gas giant: a small thorny object skating above banded colour and omnipotent indifference. She rubbed at the back of her neck. The tension, just bearable during the transit here, seemed to have stretched all her muscles and turned her spine into a rod. Her stomach also felt full of swirling oil and she'd not eaten for ten hours. But the excitement was gone. Moria acknowledged to herself that the war removed the gloss of discovery and adventure from it all. Everyone was distracted by the constant bad news, and only recently were people becoming frightened. Staff were also being seconded away by ECS to work in the big shipyards, and many of those remaining worried about kin either involved in the conflict or living on worlds closer to the front line. How could anyone feel excited about the runcible project now that the Prador were killing millions, taking world after world, and smashing Polity dreadnoughts like a steamroller tracking over walnuts. Moria shook her head and tried to return to the moment.