Polity 4 - The Technician (42 page)

‘So who
was it?’

‘Ripple-John,
of course.’

Shree
snorted annoyance. This was why Katarin thought Ripple-John had killed Thracer.
‘So where did he get hold of death hormone?’

‘Separatists,
we think,’ replied Katarin. ‘He has offworld contacts – we know that.’

Shree
absorbed this, felt the waters muddying around her. The Separatists were not as
well organized nor did they have the clarity of purpose she had supposed. She
felt another of those deep stabs of doubt that seemed to be plaguing her
lately.

‘Where
is Ripple-John now?’

‘Last
contact was from Bradacken, but nothing since and no information from other
assets in the area.’

‘Thank
you.’ Shree thought for a moment, wondered if there was anything else useful she
might obtain during this communication. There wasn’t, so she shut it down, and
felt suddenly alone as the link disrupted.

Tricones of doubt chew on the raft of
certainty.

It was a
Theocracy saying, but seemed no less apposite for that. Shree finished washing
and stepped out of the shower, dried herself with the towel provided then
retrieved her clothing from the sanitary unit – all clean, dry and neatly
folded. She dressed and tried to concentrate on those tricone doubts.

Thracer’s
comments about the improvement in living conditions here since the Polity took
over were one source of doubt, as was the feeling of self-disgust she
experienced after killing him. That Leif Grant, a man she respected still,
would agree with Thracer and was now working, even against his own people, for
the Polity, had its effect too. But the attitudes of both these men were
something she had encountered before on many occasions. Both men were strong in
their own way, but did not possess sufficient strength of will or character to see
how they were willingly donning their chains. It was, she realized, Tombs
himself who affected her most and cut a hole through her armour to give those
doubts access.

Jeremiah
Tombs terrified her.

Actually
seeing in the flesh someone she had known about, seen vids and pictures of and
read stories about over twenty years, had its effect. To many, herself
included, Jeremiah Tombs had achieved almost legendary status; he was a kind of
celebrity. She had tried to dismiss that, hoping to find a madman just a few
degrees crazier than the foaming-at-the-mouth doctrinaires given free rein
under the Theocracy. She had understood that the Polity AIs would not have
treated the man as they had without reason, but hoped he was being used as a
shill, that supposed information hidden within him would give them
justification for imposing the harsher controls of Alien Occupancy Policy on
Masada. She had expected the whole set-up to be aimed at such justifications,
that it was all about horse-trading, the lies and obfuscation of Human
political manipulation. But what she found was Jeremiah Tombs cutting off his
own face.

The kind
of madness that drove a man to do something like that to himself was an order
of magnitude beyond the ravings of the doctrinaires. Afterwards, she’d seen and
heard some of that religious crap issuing from Tombs, but even as it seemed to
just fade away, wondered if she had only seen and heard what she had been
wishing for. Now, after their return from that jaunt to the cylinder worlds,
Tombs had moved on, was becoming something she didn’t understand and, because
she didn’t understand it, because it didn’t match her preconceptions, found it
difficult to hate. Him going out there and patting the Technician like some pet
dog was the real turning point. She had to accept that the religious policeman
had the mind of an Atheter sitting in his brain, that though some of the
original Tombs resided there, something utterly alien seemed to be swamping it.
But did that change anything?

Shree
sat down on one of the softly padded chairs in her room and sighed to herself,
gazing down at the pack slung on the wide single bed, aware at the core of her
being of what squirmed inside a shielded cylinder within that pack. Really,
what Tombs was did change things, but not in any way to change her course of
action, only to make it more imperative. The man definitely was the source of
information that could lead to AOP here. If the AIs accepted that he contained
an Atheter then there was their indigene, there was their alien. She realized,
finally, that she had hoped for some evidence, some information that would
enable her to choose a different course, but only found confirmation. Tombs had
done nothing, revealed nothing to make the AIs decide he was a waste of time.

When the
Polity AIs let him run it seemed evident they had aimed to deliver a series of
shocks to him to free up the stuff the Technician put inside his head. Grant
was introduced into the equation as one of those shocks, being the soldier who
had rescued Tombs. The cylinder worlds were another. Those, it seemed, had been
enough to open Tombs’s eyes and get him to start thinking for himself just as
the AIs wanted, hence the man’s own wish to come here. The next shock, the next
revelation Shree had been betting on, should be an encounter with the Atheter
AI, because that thing related to everything Tombs was about. However, now he
was opening up, changing, was there any guarantee his next destination would be
the Atheter AI?

Shree
walked over to her bed, opened her pack and took out the cylinder, weighing it
in her hand. Tombs had to die and, as others had to be aware, killing him was
not the problem, the assassin surviving afterwards was. Shree would ensure that
Tombs died but, now everything about him had been confirmed, she must use him
to get to another target: the Atheter AI. Opening this cylinder she would kill
both the AI and Tombs, removing the threat of AOP from Masada that both of them
represented. The contents of this cylinder would kill all in the vicinity, so
she too would die, but with a real purpose,
something she only now admitted to herself she had been searching for since the
end of the rebellion.

She put
the cylinder away again, shrugged the pack onto her shoulder and went to find
Grant.

With a deep sense of urgency the mechanism completed a new U-space jump,
then with a deep sense of frustration tried to rebalance its U-space engine.
Limiting its jumps to ten light years to prevent the engine getting out of
control, upon each surfacing it was forced to repeat the routine. The murky
data it had been obtaining from the Homeworld was now clear: the bioelectrical
readings seemed a bit odd because the now functional Atheter mind existed
inside one of the alien organisms occupying the Atheter realm; one of these
Humans.

As it
travelled the mechanism prepared itself by bringing all its back-up resources
online, even the processing power of all the once
somnolent pattern disruptors it contained. It understood now, in a way its
creators had not made it to understand, that those same creators had not
prepared it for eventualities like this. They had chosen oblivion, but a nuance
of oblivion with an ancient cultural basis. They had wanted to live in some
long-ago innocent state that in reality had never existed. However, it now
seemed to the mechanism that this state, this nuance of oblivion, could not be
maintained. The solution was all too obvious: all nuances must be cut away to
reveal oblivion in its purest form.

Only
total annihilation could work. The mechanism had erased the minds of its
masters as instructed but, like Jain nodes, they were persistent. There had
been the one the war machine had resurrected, the one the black AI had
resurrected, so it only seemed logical that there might be others still. The only
way now for the mechanism to properly fulfil its original programming was to
remove the vessels to which those minds could be transferred. The Homeworld had
to go, but that would only be the beginning.

The
alien civilization that had now spread across the Atheter realm, and also
occupied the Homeworld, was a great danger. The black AI was a product of that
civilization, this was now evident, and that these aliens could also be
instrumental in future Atheter resurrection attempts seemed inevitable. Present
circumstances also demonstrated that it was possible to awaken an Atheter mind
inside a Human being. The only way to ensure complete erasure of every trace of
the Atheter would be to work outwards, as it had two million years ago, burning
to ash anything with the potential to contain an Atheter, annihilating all
informational or physical storage in which they might exist.

Yes, the
Homeworld would have to go, but the aliens would have to go next. It seemed
only logical to the mechanism, now its graven instructions were becoming much
less specific, in fact quite blurred, that the next stage in the existence of
Humans, and the machines they made, should be precisely the same as that of the
Atheter.

‘You’ll deal with it,’ Earth Central had said, but Masada had not been
abandoned by that entity – the world was far too important and the events
taking place on its surface more important still. In Amistad’s calculation,
Earth Central would rather any number of other worlds in the Polity faced
obliteration than this one.

Launching
from the observation tower’s platform, he gravplaned out across the wilderness
then, finding adequate clearance, ignited the small fusion drive in his tail
and headed straight up.

‘So what
kind of defences do we have?’ the drone enquired of the planetary governor
here, Ergatis. The question was merely a politeness, since Amistad now had the weight to just take that information directly from
Ergatis’s mind.

‘Four
gamma-class attack ships, two medium-range dreadnoughts and the geostat cannon,’
the AI replied, supplying details of these items.

One of
the dreadnoughts and two of the attack ships were out at the Braemar moon
Flint, the attack ships undergoing a refit at the space dock there and the
dreadnought on guard duty over the runcible installation on the surface. The
second dreadnought sat in orbit about Masada, called in from patrol in the
unlikely event that it might be needed to back up the geostat cannon – the one
positioned directly above the main continent where it could keep both the
Atheter AI and the main dracoman towns in it sights. A precautionary measure,
with firepower in excess of what the Theocracy laser network had been able to
deliver, considered essential when dealing with aliens whose motivations were
as yet unclear. But it was the two remaining attack ships that drew Amistad’s
attention.

‘This
anomaly they’re investigating . . .’ Amistad began.

‘Two
detonations under the chromosphere of the sun,’ Ergatis supplied, also opening
all that data for Amistad’s inspection. ‘Both were preceded by U-space
signatures and whatever the objects were that surfaced there have been all but
obliterated. The attack ships, however, have dropped probes to check for
instabilities.’

It could
have been some kind of attack using U-space technology to cause instabilities
in the sun’s surface. This kind of attack had been conducted to devastating
effect during the Prador war – deliberately causing a solar flare to sear the
surface of a nearby world. However, studying the data available, Amistad didn’t
think that the case here. Those instabilities were usually quite plain, and had
they been detected, everyone capable of doing so would be running. This time
without any politeness, Amistad went through Ergatis to seize the data stream
from those solar probes. Chromatic analysis revealed super-dense metals still
in the process of dissolving – the kind of metals Amistad had already seen,
just recently. The drone apprised Ergatis of this.

‘The
approaching mechanism sent them,’ Ergatis decided.

‘But
not, I would suggest, recently,’ said Amistad.

‘The
hypothetical sensors,’ suggested the AI.

By now
the curve of the world had become visible all around Amistad and the main
continent clearly visible in a deep purple sea below. Old habits dying hard,
the drone began running close diagnostics on his weapons, even as he did so
recognizing the futility of him trying to use such small firepower against what
was approaching.

‘Not
hypothetical,’ he said. ‘This is certainly the device that screwed Penny Royal
in the Graveyard and screwed the Technician a million years ago. That it
possesses some method of detecting active Atheter minds is a certainty.’

‘I have
some further data on this,’ Ergatis announced, immediately relaying data
packets to Amistad.

Studying
these, the drone contemplated events that had been occurring very close to the
moonlet in which he had found Penny Royal. Since the Atheter device had
interfered with the black AI at that location, a small research vessel had been
sent. It had been some millions of kilometres out when Amistad had collected up
Penny Royal’s remains and transported them away. Its purpose had been to map
and analyse U-space tremors for evidence relating to that device – its position
consonant with U-space/realspace drift. Four years after Amistad abandoned the
small private cargo ship he had hired, then used the runcible network to get to
Masada, the research vessel had picked up on something sitting at the interface
between the two continua.

Amistad
was unsurprised to only learn about this now. The readings could have been from
any number of the imperfections sitting in that position: a black hole ghost,
the disruption left by a faulty U-space drive, or one of the infinitely
multiplying afterimages left when such a drive everted itself. However, just
recently, the source of the anomaly became clear when it relocated to the
nearby sun to obliterate itself. Another object made of super-dense metals – a
necessity of construction when making physical probes to sit at such a
location. Here then was the sensor that had picked up on Penny Royal’s
activities, here was another of the device’s eyes.