Polity 4 - The Technician (37 page)

‘So when
do they stop looking?’

‘After
that last hit Penny Royal told me the hormone had spread over an area of twenty
square kilometres and mentioned something called catastrophic cascade.’

‘Oh
yeah?’

Grant
seemed perfectly calm, thought Jem, perfectly at rest in this madness, and so,
it seemed, did Jem himself. Where is my guilt? he
wondered. Where is my pain? The answer to those
questions seemed astounding in its simplicity: the organism he was could not
afford them whilst fighting for its own survival. Guilt and other emotional
sufferings were an indulgence, a luxury only afforded to those with the
resources to waste on them.

‘The
death hormone from one gabbleduck is, depending on wind direction and air
quality, enough to summon hooders from the surrounding fifty square kilometres
of flute grasses,’ the soldier explained. ‘Unless we get a north wind to blow
this out over the south coast, there could be enough hormone in the air to send
hooders crazy from east to west across the entire continent down here.’

‘Let’s
hope they follow the wind into the sea,’ said Shree.

Grant
gazed at her steadily. ‘I’m told that’s a possibility, which is why every
vehicle in Greenport is being used to transport the population there to the
east, including the cargo ships, and which is why no vehicles are available
from there to help us here.’

‘I
thought he was important.’ She stabbed a finger at Jem.

‘He is,
but we’re safe now.’

‘Penny
Royal tell you this?’ She nodded towards where a tower of shadow knives was
sliding to put itself between them and the line of a hooder crossing below the
horizon like a black monorail train. Convenient that the huge number of hooders
in the area had crushed down most of the flute grasses, for now they could see
them coming.

‘No, I
got that from Amistad,’ said Grant. ‘Penny Royal ain’t saying much now.’

‘It’s
been damaged, hasn’t it?’

A slight
whine in her voice caught Jem’s attention and he looked at her curiously.
Ostensibly she seemed to be showing fear of her own demise, yet it came with an
underlying frustration. Gazing at her flat Human features, the tense pose of
her body and the way her hand never strayed far from the butt of her thin-gun,
he understood that fear of death was not her greatest concern, but fear of inappropriate death. Returning his attention to the shell
whorls he traced one with his finger, further hints of meaning now apparent
under a Braillelike sensation. ‘Of course Penny Royal has been damaged,’ he
said.

They
both turned to look at him, but when he offered no further explanation,
returned to their conversation.

‘Amistad
is getting us out of here,’ said Grant. ‘Transport should arrive for us in
about an hour.’

‘Shit,
where’s it coming from? Zealos?’

Jem removed
his finger from the shell, looked over towards where the corpse of the hooder
Penny Royal had killed lay just visible between them and the remains of the way
station. It had been that first creature that damaged the AI, immediately
demoting it from the legions of Hell to reality; a reality excised of the
supernatural, but nonetheless strange and frightening. Penny Royal had
underestimated that first attacker, taken the full brunt of its attack like a
hand raised to stop a falling blade. Jem had seen parts of the AI smashed away
before it resorted to more conventional weaponry to blow off the creature’s
head. With the other two hooders that came close the AI used different
techniques, presenting a hard surface to divert their course, actinic light,
other radiations and an output of complex hormones to blind and confuse. Of
course, the soldier and the killer, Shree, only averted their gaze from the
light; they did not have the other radiations screaming in their heads nor
taste and smell the contradictory messages of those hormones in the air, as did
Jem. So blind and dull these Humans.

‘Most
vehicles to the north of us are being used to evacuate areas up there,’ Grant
explained. ‘But these are here for the survivors.’

He
pointed towards the horizon where three black shapes became visible, catching
sunlight on their sides from the rising sun. Watching these things approach Jem
recognized old Theocracy troop transporters.

‘They’ll
get torn apart,’ said Shree.

‘I think
not,’ said Grant.

Shree
gazed at him, her expression all suspicion. ‘I see . . . so we should board
them.’ She turned as something crashed in the way station and the cowl of
another hooder rose out of it. ‘Seems pretty fucking dangerous round here.’

‘We’re
safe,’ Grant repeated. ‘And we’ve got other transport.’

Jem
watched the transporters drawing closer, three fifty-metre-long bricks of
bubble metal kept in the sky by aerofan, thruster nacelles protruding at the
back should their usual lumbering pace not be enough to get them out of
trouble. No gravmotors, no sleek, fast and efficient Polity technology – they
had probably been requisitioned from a museum. No way, on their own, could they
survive both landing and take-off in an area swarming with hooders like this.
Jem transferred his gaze to the sky directly above. Though Calypse still
occupied the eastern sky and though the sun lay close to rising, some stars
were still visible, one of them steady and metallic, and which hadn’t been up
there twenty years ago.

‘Dragon
destroyed the laser arrays,’ said Shree, a hint of bitterness in her voice. ‘It
destroyed the Theocracy’s main power for oppression. How free are we now,
Grant?’

The
soldier shrugged. ‘A gun ain’t evil – only the fuck pulling the trigger is
that.’

‘Far too
trite and easy,’ she replied.

Grant
shrugged again, gave her an estimating look as she turned away from him to
watch the transporters start a circling descent. Jem watched for a moment too,
then abruptly switched his attention to Penny Royal, now rolling across the
landscape like a lost cloud full of steel crows as it moved to position itself
between them and the hooder departing the way station. He felt that sensation
again – the one he had felt arising when the AI had turned away the third
attacking hooder – that feeling of denial and an upswell in his mind that
deposited penny mollusc shell patterns across internal vision, encoded for
external inspection.

The
first old troop transporter came down near the wreckage the hooders had made of
the departing ground vehicles, and a surprising number of people fled their
hideaways, some running, some limping, others being carried. The hooder from
the way station turned towards this scene and accelerated. A roar of aerofans
above and a second transporter descended nearby, coming down by the chunk of
apartment building. Refugees fled that like parasites departing an old mattress
doused with insecticide, soon reaching a rapidly lowered ramp and clambering
inside. Jem watched these for a moment. Distantly another hooder had been drawn
in, but it wouldn’t get there in time. The way station hooder was a different
matter so, with a feeling of regret, Jem returned his attention to it.

The
strike ruptured air molecules all the way down, a violet fire seeming the
refined essence of the aubergine sky, concentrated and hurled down. It lasted
for only an eyeblink, but left a black after-image like a column of shadow. A
sphere of fire expanded ten metres back from the hooder’s cowl, bright red at
first then swiftly guttering with little oxygen to maintain it. The blast
peeled up rhizome and black mud, whilst the fore-section of the hooder tumbled
away like a discarded spoon. The rest of its body bucked up and peeled back,
came down again writhing – a beheaded snake.

‘How
different are Polity satellite weapons from the Theocracy’s?’ Shree asked.

‘A
damned sight more powerful, for one thing,’ the soldier replied, then he tilted
his head for a moment, listening. ‘Amis-tad tells me we need to head west – the
hooders were starting to move off but this is pulling ’em back.’

‘This
doesn’t make any sense,’ said Shree angrily. She pointed towards the
transporter down by the ruined chunk of building. ‘A couple of minutes and we
can be away from here.’

‘No
one’s stopping you,’ said Grant. He turned to Jem. ‘You coming?’

Jem
considered the question very carefully. If their remaining in this area was to
result in further strikes, he would have objected – why destroy more of those
fine creatures just so three Humans could get to a particular designated
transport? So wasteful. He concentrated on Penny Royal. The AI had begun to
close in on them, meanwhile becoming less and less visible. It had been
repairing itself, its latest repairs evidently to its chameleon-ware shield, so
it seemed likely it would be able to hide them, and that no further satellite
strikes would be necessary.

‘Yes,’
he replied. ‘I am coming.’

The
third lander had descended right beside the way station to disgorge a crew of
humanoids who were carrying heavy-looking hand tools and darted into the
ruination faster than any Human should be able to move. Golem, Jem realized,
able to hear the beat of a heart, able to sense signs of recoverable life even
after the heart had stopped beating, able to trace down the beacons of
memchips. Strong too, enough power to rip away twisted wreckage trapping
survivors, enough to rapidly dig away rubble with those tools they carried. Not
demons.

It
occurred to him to wonder how he could see so far and in such detail with just
binocular vision, then he realized he was just manipulating the visual data
more efficiently, dispensing with the models Humans used to save on mental
processing, and seeing everything.

Some
survivors did leave the way station under their own power, but with the place
having been the focus of the attack, not so many as out here. Jem stood up,
feeling a momentary joy when he saw the woman from reception limping out
towards the transport, and the Human emotion flipped over biological switches
in his skull, and his clarity of vision degraded. Was that really her? How
could he be sure that distant, ragged and mud-covered figure was her? He turned
and followed as Grant led off, Penny Royal sliding in ahead of them, now a grey
veil, a mere distortion in the air.

‘You’ll
need to hurry if you want to get to that transport before it takes off,’ the
soldier called over his shoulder.

Jem
glanced round as Shree swore under her breath then, after a pause, stomped
after them. Another switch clicked over in his skull. Her act was good but Jem
could see right through it. He wondered if the soldier could too. Did Grant see
her pretence of reluctance to accompany them as an attempt to restore trust and
repair the damage she had done by earlier revealing her true feelings? Did he
understand that now her fear of an inappropriate death had been removed she was
trying to restore her simple reporter persona by displaying fear of death
alone?

‘Penny
Royal is extending chameleonware to cover us,’ said Grant. ‘But be ready to
move fast – if we end up in the path of a hooder it not seeing us ain’t any
protection.’

‘So
Penny Royal’s talking again?’ asked Shree, moving up beside him.

Grant
gazed at her blankly for a moment. ‘Yeah, it’s talking.’ The man did not want
her with them anymore, this lay evident in the minutiae of his expression.

Jem turned
away, also realizing something else: some crucial encounter was imminent.
Immutable facts confirmed this. The increased activity here would not summon in
more hooders, for focused on the death hormone they were hard-wired to respond
to, they would go where it was more concentrated, and the breeze against Jem’s
cheek told him that was to the west, precisely where they were heading. Those
Euclidean shapes up in the forefront of his mind like a shield, he trudged
after the other two, idly wondering why his feet kept sinking into the soft
ground, then remembering this was because his legs terminated in small Human
feet.

‘There is no doubt that it will have an impact,’ Amistad had informed
him. ‘Penny Royal agrees that circumstances are fortuitous and should be taken
advantage of – we were going to confront him with it anyway.’

It
certainly was having an impact, but whether Tombs felt that impact any more
than Grant himself, the soldier could not say.

Even at
this distance from the way station, much surrounding vegetation had been
flattened, only occasional islands of flute grass still standing, along with a
nearby copse of lizard tails sprouting from an islet of dried-out rhizome
protruding from the surface. Hooders were visible whichever way he looked. But
now he wasn’t looking at any normal hooder. The Technician appeared as a
movement on the horizon to their right, little to distinguish it from the other
hooders they had seen. However, as it moved closer the dawn sunlight reflected
off its white back, glistened on carapace like polished ivory. The thing was
bigger even than the first hooder to attack the way station. It had probably
reached some physical limitation to the species of which it seemed only
marginally a member. Its cowl was also longer and flatter, more sleek, more
dangerous-looking.

Grant
halted and swung towards it, a disturbance in the air twenty metres out
swinging round with him and moving away as Penny Royal planted itself between
them and the creature.

‘You’re
sure it can’t see us?’ he asked out loud.

‘Increasingly less so,’ Penny Royal whispered in his ear.

‘What is
this, Grant?’ asked Shree, sounding worried.

Tombs
offered her an explanation. ‘What it is is self-evident. My nemesis comes.’

Grant
turned towards them. ‘Amistad is aboard the mobile observation tower that was
set to watch over this creature, which was somnolent until the death hormone
reached it three hours ago.’