Polity 4 - The Technician (5 page)

–
From QUINCE GUIDE compiled by Humans

Masadan Wilderness (Solstan 2438 – Rebellion Aftermath)

The aerofan motored fast across the flute grasses, raising a
multicoloured storm of petals, and Grant realized that flowering would soon be
over as the grasses dropped the rest of their petals whilst growing their seed
nodules. The fan was a proctor’s machine: single big fan underneath the
pulpit-like upper section, all gyro-stabilized and fashioned of light bubble
metals, a railgun bolted to the safety rail and a single control column, like a
lectern, before which the driver stood. But this driver was no proctor, since
in the patriarchal Theocracy few females achieved any rank at all. Grant felt
something tightening up inside him when he saw her blond hair streaming about
her face as she brought the aerofan towards the clearing where he had parked
his ATV. Then, when he got a closer look at her vehicle, he felt a brief stab
of anger. It seemed Jerval Sanders had made her decision – though she’d come
directly from Central Command in Zealos, the aerofan’s code number and design
showed it came from the southern isles and, since Central had ordered that an
effort should be made to keep these vehicles in their designated areas, it was
probably due to be returned there.

The
vehicle descended, now blowing about itself fragments of the dry old flute
grass trampled into the rhizome layer. As it finally settled and its engine
began to wind down it also blew out spatters of mud. The rhizome layer here,
having taken the traffic of many feet and numerous vehicles, was starting to
become unstable. There were even tricones visible on the surface – their three
cones connected like Pan Pipes and bearing some resemblance to discarded
munitions also scattered nearby. Soon this area would have to be left alone to
enable it to recover, and by then there would be no data left to gather.

Sanders
opened the gate in the safety rail and stepped down. She wore spring growth
fatigues coloured green and purple, heavy boots and a sleeveless insulated top.
Her face was clearly visible and he realized she must now be wearing one of
those Polity breather devices that contained oxygen about the face under a
near-invisible shimmer-shield – one of the most visible benefits from the
Polity supply drops – he meant to get hold of one soon.

‘Grant,’
she said, striding over. She looked sad and serious.

He
waited until she reached him before speaking. He nodded towards the aerofan.
‘From Heretic’s Isle?’

She
dipped her head in grave agreement.

‘So
you’re gonna take that job at the sanatorium?’

‘Yes,’
she replied, then hurried on with, ‘but that doesn’t mean things have to end
between us.’

Their
love affair had been good but brief whilst the rebels finally accepted that
they had won, and different for him since his previous relationships had always
been with fierce Amazonian rebels – soldiers like himself – but now came the
aftermath. Grant did not expect to be in one place for long as their de facto
leader Lellan Stanton sent him hither and yon, whilst Sanders would be south of
the continent on that remote island. And really, he hadn’t expected someone
like her to put up with someone like him for so long.

‘No I
guess not,’ he lied. Damn, even their meeting here had been wangled as semi-official.
She needed to know the full story behind her most important patient at the
sanatorium; wanted to hear it from his lips. The fact that he hadn’t already
told her, and she hadn’t asked, maybe indicated that neither of them had taken
their relationship seriously. Love in the ruins, need and celebration, that was
all. He abruptly felt uncomfortable, groped for something else to say.

‘I hear
Lellan Stanton wanted you there?’

‘Yes,’
she grimaced, ‘I was appointed to the position by the military governor of
Masada herself. I said I wasn’t sure I wanted it. She told me she didn’t want
her job but we don’t get to pick and chose.’

‘Yeah, I
know – heard we’re not getting any AI governor here any time soon.’

‘The
quarantine stands,’ she stated. ‘We’ll continue to get Polity supply drops, but
that’s all until they consider it safe for them to land.’

He
nodded, not sure what to say now.

‘Let’s
take a look at the spot, shall we?’ she said.

He
gestured off to one side of his ATV and led the way, glancing over to an area
of charred ground. That was where four corpses had been piled – four proctors
he’d railgunned down before chasing after Jeremiah Tombs. They had only been
recently collected, and the ground underneath them sterilized. Even after many
months they had still been whole – the environment wasn’t conducive to human
decay. She glanced over that way too.

‘They’re
in cold storage,’ she said. ‘All those Skellor touched are being so collected.’

‘You
were over at Central,’ he said. ‘Why the quarantine?’

She
sighed and shook her head. ‘It’s complicated.’

‘I’ve
heard some, but not all of it,’ he said. ‘They’re being a bit close-mouthed.’

‘You
know that our Hierarch’s predecessor seemed to believe that the inevitable’ – the word came out laced with bitter sarcasm
– ‘fall of the Polity was long overdue and decided to accelerate the process.
He dealt with an alien emissary called Dragon’ – she glanced at him – ‘who here
was known to the Brotherhood as Behemoth.’

‘The
thing that flattened the base on Flint and trashed the laser arrays, yeah, I
get that.’

‘Yes.
Dragon gave Amoloran the Gift . . . those Dracocorp
augs, but it also gave him metal-destroying mycelium it had used once before
against a Polity runcible installation. Amoloran used that mycelium against a
Polity Outlink station, and Dragon got blamed. Trying to exact vengeance it
attacked a Theocracy ship but was injured by the engine flame, then came here
for some payback.’

‘But why
did it crash itself?’

‘Suicide
and rebirth: it killed itself and, incidentally, turned most of its substance
into an alien race here on Masada.’ She shrugged. ‘Interesting times.’

‘That’s
the reason for the quarantine?’

‘Oddly
enough, no.’ Grant saw amusement flash across her expression. ‘It seems we
weren’t deep enough into a shit storm at that point – Skellor, the guy in that
Polity dreadnought, brought that. Dragon, and some Polity citizens it had
brought along for the ride, was being pursued by him – he’d got his hands on
something called Jain technology, and used that to hijack the dreadnought.
Seems this technology comes from an alien race that’s been extinct for a mere
five million years. It’s very dangerous stuff and, before his departure and
eventual demise, Skellor left it scattered all over our world. That’s the
reason for the quarantine.’

It took
a quarter-hour to walk to the spot where the hooder had taken Tombs apart but
left him alive. All the remaining shreds of the man had been collected and
stored in sample bottles, but blood still stained the flattened grass, turned
blue-black by the lack of oxygen in the air. The place also swarmed with penny
molluscs, the Euclidean shapes and patterns on their shells giving the
impression that some piece of ancient electronics had been shattered here.
Sanders squatted down and gazed at the blood.

‘There
ain’t much to see,’ Grant said.

‘Where
were you standing?’

He
pointed into the still standing flute grasses over to one side. These long
stalks were bound together in an almost impenetrable mass by their side shoots,
which would later break away to leave holes into the hollow stems, holes that
later in the year created haunting melodies whenever the wind blew, and were
the reason for the name of the plant.

She
turned to gaze at him. ‘So you saw everything?’

‘Yes.’

‘You’ve
no uncertainty about that?’

Grant
nodded as he once again described events here. Tombs had run screaming, clawing
at his aug, fighting whatever it was that was trying to capture his mind. The
other four had gone under in a moment. Grant had hesitated when he got them in
his sights, having no idea what was happening. They staggered about like people
who had just been nerve-gassed, and two of them fell. Then the two standing
grew still, and the two on the ground stood up. Their faces were imbecilic –
one seemed to have suffered a stroke, for one side of his face had sagged – but
still they all stooped to take up the weapons they had dropped. That’s when
Grant opened fire, rail-gun bullets smacking through their bodies to jerk them
about in a bloody ballet until they dropped. Then he set out after Tombs.

Grant
pointed to a peninsula of flute grass they were just walking round.

‘I ran
round here following Tombs’s trail and near fell over the fucker before I got
what I was seeing. The Technician, here.’ He gestured to one side at trampled
flute grasses. ‘I thought that was my lot – I was going to die.’

The
sight had just slammed him to a halt. The Technician was the size of the
largest of hooders, over a hundred metres from head to tail. It had lain coiled
across here like the spine of some long-dead giant, only with legs stabbed down
from between the vertebrae into the rhizome layer, and this spine terminating
in an armoured spoon-shaped head which at that moment had cupped something
against the ground, something screaming in raw agony. Then that head had risen,
up to ten metres in the air, clear in execution light. In the underside he had
seen its close-work eyes – two columns of them gleaming an odd yellow with some
strange internal light. And, all about those eyes, the clicking, whickering
glassy movement of its feeding scythes and drills. That’s when he had jammed
the barrel of his own rail-gun underneath his chin and begun backing off.

‘You’re
sure it was the Technician?’

‘These
are the questions you were instructed to ask?’ he grated.

‘They
are – we have to be sure.’

‘I’m
sure – ’less you know of any other albino hooders out here?’

‘Okay.’

Nobody
got that close to a hooder and lived, and that thing that had been writhing on
the ground below it, that thing that had once been a Human being, looked as if
it would not live for much longer. Grant had felt it would be attended to after
the hooder slammed its spoon head down on him, at which point he meant to blow
his own brains out – he refused to be subject to its protracted and agonizing
feeding process. But the Technician merely watched him for a time that seemed
to extend towards infinity, before dipping down and once again covering Tombs.
Grant should have run then, but having been a soldier for so long he had
accepted his role as a walking dead man – that soldier’s trait that enabled him
to function in the midst of flesh-tearing metal. His survival instinct was
there, but its power over him had waned, and a terrible fascination had held
him rooted to the spot.

‘We know
they’re just animals,’ said Sanders. ‘Complicated animals with some mysteries
about them remaining unsolved, but animals nonetheless.’

‘So why
the . . . intense Polity interest?’ he asked. ‘We’ve been scraping up samples
and making recordings of hooders for them for decades, and then there’s that .
. . face . . .’

Sanders
nodded. ‘Yes, the prosthetic was unexpected.’

It was.
Upon hearing about events here, in this clearing, some distant AI had
dispatched one of the fastest Polity spaceships here ahead of the intervention
fleet. Upon its arrival, that ship had dropped a supplies capsule. Included
among them was a new face for Jeremiah Tombs – a thing Sanders herself had
fitted.

‘You are
utterly sure about what you saw?’ she asked.

Grant
concealed his flare of anger, knowing she must ask the question. Still his
deposition was in doubt, especially that part about what he saw after the
Technician rose from Tombs for the second time, when he saw Tombs lying there
with his breather mask back in place. The hooder had studied Grant with an
intensity beyond that of predator watching potential prey, almost as if trying
to ascertain if he understood that Tombs must live, then abruptly it swung
away.

‘Utterly
sure,’ he snapped.

‘So what
happened afterwards?’

After
watching the hooder shifting its massive bulk off and away through the tangled
grasses, he had walked over to Tombs, who just lay on his side in his own
blood, the portion of his body between knees and throat stripped down to
muscle, one arm reduced to bone and that mask grotesquely fixed over his
stripped skull. All about him penny molluscs were scattered, though how they
had got there so fast, Grant couldn’t imagine. He had thought the proctor was
dead, but then realized an odd sawing sound was coming from the man, for he was
breathing still. It also seemed as if he was studying the molluscs with his one
remaining eye.

‘So you
carried him back to the ambulance?’ Sanders asked.

‘He was
the only other living witness,’ said Grant, and shrugged.

Sanders
fixed him in her gaze for a moment, then turning away said, ‘Yeah – I
understand.’ After a pause she added, ‘It seems enough for the Polity that he
survived an attack by the Technician.’

Yeah,
that part of Grant’s deposition about the breather mask wasn’t on general
release – too many of those who heard it believed Grant had made it up after
putting the mask back himself.

They
began walking back to their vehicles, an uncomfortable silence rising between
them. Finally, at the point of departure, she said, ‘I’ll see you soon.’

‘Yeah,
sure,’ he replied, wondering how many months or years might pass before then.

The Graveyard (Solstan 2448)

‘So why is my experience required?’ asked the massive iron scorpion.
‘Though there’ve been some interesting developments on Masada, there’s not been
much action there recently. What is there for me?’