Polity 4 - The Technician (13 page)

Heading
out of the foyer she stepped into the covered street. This area of the city had
been one of the wealthier suburbs, generally occupied by those in the higher
echelons of the Theocracy. It wasn’t a place where you had to pay to breathe
the air in a walkway, or where oxygen debt could lead to enslavement, scole
implantation, and eventual demise labouring in squerm ponds. Now, however,
things had changed. There were none of those white uniforms with text of the
Satagents running from underarm to ankle, and the only bearded fool in long
robes was the corner preacher, who hadn’t been in the Brotherhood at all but
was a city resident who delighted in lampooning religion and getting into
arguments with the believers here, who still formed the larger part of the
population.

Within a
few minutes she had wended her way to the steel stairs leading up to Mulen’s
apartment building, climbed these and walked out into the glassed-over area
before the doors and there halted. She gazed about herself with interest for a
moment, then reached out to thumb the comscreen beside the door. A dour-looking
security guard peered out at her.

‘I have
a delivery from Soola’s for Mr Glaffren,’ she said.

‘I don’t
know you.’

‘I’m
new, but not without training.’

‘Let me
see it, then,’ the guard replied.

Resting
one hand on her tilted hip she replied, ‘You are seeing it.’

The
guard’s face receded a little way as he obviously sat back in his seat. ‘I
think you can do better than that.’

Having
watched this place for some time, Shree knew precisely what the man required.
She ran a finger down the stick seam of her dress and opened it for him,
cupping her breasts for a moment and squeezing her nipples, then sliding a hand
to her pubis to gently play with herself.

‘Come
see me afterwards,’ he said huskily, and the doors unlocked.

Closing
up her dress she entered the foyer and headed for the stairs. The whores who
regularly came here from Soola’s conducted their main business with Mulen, but
then had a little number on the side with the security guard. Apparently the
man did not like to go where Mulen had already been, and was conscientious – he
kept on watching his camera screens all throughout the ensuing blowjob.

Three
flights up, Shree reached the door into Glaffren Shipping and tapped the com
screen beside it.

‘Delivery
for Mr Glaffren.’

His new
face peered out at her for a long moment, then the door unlocked. ‘Remove your
clothing in the lower office then come up,’ he said.

The
office contained two desks with old computer terminals mounted on them, a
collection of squerm essence cylinders in one corner and a scattering of empty
wine bottles on one desk. Litter lay scattered across a floor that looked none
too clean. Mulen had been letting himself go, just as she intended to let him
go. She shed her dress and draped it across the cleanest surface she could see,
then climbed the spiral stair to his apartment.

‘Mr
Glaffren?’ she said, scanning the kitchen diner she found herself in.

‘Through
here.’

He
awaited her in his bedroom, flopped back naked on his bed, the half-empty
bottle of wine he had been swigging from clutched in his left hand, his penis
in his right. Shree wrinkled her nose at the smell of sour sweat and alcohol,
then stepped over to the window overlooking Zealos and the covered street two
hundred metres below. As she had surmised, the window was one that simply
locked down on a seal, and generally outside atmosphere was kept out by a
pressure differential. She reached up and began undoing the catches.

‘What in
Smythe’s name do you think you’re doing?’

He was
up off the bed and coming unsteadily towards her by the time she undid the last
catch. She turned, smiling cheekily as he drew close. He hesitated, and in that
pause the heel of her hand came up hard into his nose, crushing it and
depositing him on his backside on the floor.

‘Whah!’
he managed nasally.

‘I’m
here to bring you to account for the fifteen pond workers you personally
executed, Proctor Mulen,’ she said. ‘I am a member of the Tidy Squad and it is
not our policy to accept the Polity Intervention amnesty.’

‘D’
fuck!’ He reached round and smashed the wine bottle he still held on the corner
of a cupboard, then surged to his feet, fast. Shree was glad about that; he was
fat, heavy, smelly – she hadn’t wanted to pick him up. He came at her with confidence
inspired by her naked, petite and vulnerable-looking female body. Intercepting
his arm as he thrust at her with the bottle, she snapped his elbow, turned him
and slammed his head against the window, once, twice. As he staggered back she
heaved the window off its seals and propelled it aside on its hinge. When he
came at her again the throw was simple and neat, and all she’d need to wash was
her hands and the hip she rolled him over. He didn’t even touch the window
frame, though he did touch the roof of the covered street, and hard.

Ten
minutes later, Shree had retrieved her pack, having given the guard the kind of
blow he had neither expected nor wanted, before going on to trash the image
files of the surveillance system. She was a number of streets away when an icon
appeared to the far right of her visual field informing her of a call through
her aug. With a slight mental effort she’d always found difficult to describe
to those who had never tried these devices, she accepted the call, and halted to
lean against a nearby wall.

‘It’s
done?’ enquired the man whose face seemed to appear in midair before her.

‘Certainly.’
Shree studied him.

Thracer
was a tough TS unit commander, the maple-leaf scar on his shaven head
indication of his route to the Squad from the Overlanders. Perhaps it was time
to tell him about how things were changing, to let him in?

How did
the Tidy Squad survive whilst being hunted down by AIs and dangerous ECS
agents? It did seem that the AIs secretly agreed with the Squad’s work, but she
reckoned they were reluctant to close down units like Thracer’s until through
the likes of him they’d found and caught the Squad Leader – that person whose
identity few knew.

‘Then
get your wilderness gear together – you’ll be needing it.’

‘Found
another one out there?’

‘No, but
it seems target Alpha has left Heretic’s Isle and they’re letting him run.’

‘Dangerous
– we know there’s AI interest.’

‘Even
so, I have a standing instruction to pass this on to you.’

‘Send me
the details,’ she said.

Jeremiah
Tombs possessed an iconic status here on Masada, and the Tidy Squad wanted him
swept away most of all. But as Shree well knew there was so much more to it
than one ex-proctor. The AI interest in Tombs related to the entire status of
the planet Masada and getting close to him might lead to a chance to remove
even bigger threats to this world. Certainly this would be a very risky kill,
very likely a suicidal one, but it was one Shree had always wanted and, as
Squad Leader, it had been easy enough to secure it for herself.

As the shore continued to recede, Jem tried to shake from his mind the
image of Sanders lying in a pool of blood, and concentrate on the present. He
began to examine the controls available to him through the console set just
below the rudder arm. Eventually he noted that wrapped around the rudder pivot
were small hydraulic motors, connected by an optic into the same console, and
surmising that the boat possessed some kind of autopilot, soon found and
engaged it, keeping his course due north.

While
the boat sailed on, he sat back, flinched at that same bloody image, and again
tried to turn his thoughts to other things, but memory seemed a perilous place.
His inspection tour of sprawn canals lay clear in his mind, but he struggled,
his eyes watering again and an unknowable dread coming to sit on his chest,
when he tried to get beyond the point when he landed his aerofan inside Triada
Compound. Something unusual had been happening, because he recollected his
fellow proctors being stirred up like a mid-pond filled with meat flakes.
Something about the rebels? He reached up and touched his head where his Gift had once been attached. It was as if, with its
removal, a large portion of memory connected to it had been excised too. There
had been fear over the aug channels, he was sure of that, terror even.

Behemoth . . .

The
name, and some attached meaning, seemed to sit in his skull like a weight
bristling with barbed hooks. Behemoth had given them the Gift,
but knowledge of that creature’s nature remained confined to the upper
echelons. He tried to shake the memory free and realized he was sweating, and
yet cold at the same time. Then he saw an image, a brief flash with visual file
bar coding running down the side of it, someone in the shipyard of Flint glimpsing
some immense shape on a screen, just before a wall of fire fell down on him.
Next came screaming, channels snuffing out, a whole portion of the aug network
disappearing . . .

Jem
found himself coiled in the bottom of the boat in darkness, but painful recall
remained with him. Flint had been snuffed out, hadn’t it? That much he
retained: one small fragment dragged out of a darkness guarded by something
terrifying. And now he just did not have the will to venture there again. He
kept himself in the present, found with extreme disgust that he had shit
himself.

Forcing
himself into motion, Jem removed his pyjama trousers, cleaned them and himself
with seawater, then tossed them to the far end of the boat. By the time he was
done he realized the dawn was coming – he’d been out of it for over ten hours.
He just sat listening to the thrum of the motor and the steady lapping of the
sea against the hull, his mind shut down, nothing to see . . .

The sun,
eating a diamond chunk out of the horizon, set him in motion again. He searched
lockers set along the sides of the boat, finding a pair of overalls to go over
his pyjama jacket, cinched with the belt of a large sheath knife, and a life
jacket that he immediately donned. He also found a complex medical kit with
inset autodoc like a hibernating metal spider – certainly Polity technology –
some fishing gear, then food and drink. A gun would have been useful, but the
short, vicious-looking harpoon gun he uncovered would have to do. Thus kitted
out, he uncapped and sipped from a bottle containing cold coffee with a vaguely
salty taste, ate preserved sausage and dried fruit, and gazed into the
distance.

By his
estimation it would take him a further three days to reach the mainland, but
his hope was that before then one of the cameras up on the laser arrays would
spot him and a proctor be sent out by aerofan to investigate. But if this did
not occur, what to do?

Peering
down at the console screen, he used a small ball control to bring up a map of
the main continent. Generally there wasn’t much civilization along the south
coast, since the climate, though good, wasn’t right for crop ponds. However, on
the other side of the eastern peninsula lay the port of Godhead, where ships
docked to unload a kind of alien guano, mined on some island out that way.
Abruptly he came to a decision. He had to presume that some of what the
computer here was telling him was true, as proven by the position of the
sunrise, and so made a course correction to take him round the south-eastern
peninsula. Further investigation gave him an exact figure for the journey time
of five and a half Masadan days. Time to explore his memories, if he dared.

It took Jem four days to finally drag enough memories clear of the
darkness inside his skull to form a small but coherent collection; four days of
probing a wound and often finding the pain too much for consciousness. After
the second occasion of having to wash his clothing in the sea, he learnt that
it was best to strip off his trousers when he tried this, because each time he
lost all self-control. Sanders must have cleaned him up each time before . . .

Sanders? Before?

Yes, the
rebel doctor he killed while escaping. He saw her clear in his mind naked on a
beach, but that memory had to be false because she wore no breather mask.

Surgical alterations. Polity technology.

He shook
his head trying to clear that. He would have to sort out the truths and
fictions there later, for he did clearly remember her walking outside with him
before . . . before he cut her throat. He swallowed, the artificial lining of
his mouth dry, concentrated on memories retrieved, sitting there in his skull
like a precise interlocking collection of geometric shapes, and studied them
closely . . .

Behemoth
was an intelligent entity, a massive sphere of alien flesh able to propel
itself through vacuum like a spaceship, and wielding weapons from within its
body more potent than those of a Theocracy dreadnought. It had destroyed such a
warship, but had itself been injured in the process and, wounded and angry, it
had come to the Braemar system to exact vengeance. It had arrived screeching
for Hierarch Amoloran, who had betrayed its trust, using against the Polity a
weapon it had provided so that blame would fall squarely on the creature
itself. Upon its arrival it became clear why the Septarchy Friars occupied so
many of the aug channels with their chanting: Behemoth had provided the Gift so it could seize control of the Brotherhood and only
their racket kept it out. Not finding Amoloran, for he had been replaced by
Hierarch Loman, it had turned its weapons on the shipyards of Flint,
obliterating them, then it had . . .

Nothing.
He couldn’t get beyond that point and now he was weary, needed to sleep rather
than render himself unconscious again. Deliberately maintaining a void inside
his skull, Jem lay down in the bottom of the boat, allowing the thrum of the
motor to lull him. Sleep came and went like a black juggernaut, dragging
daylight in behind it as the only indicator that he had
slept. He sat up and stretched, then peered out across the sea.