Polity 4 - The Technician (55 page)

‘It’s
rather disappointing really,’ Scold noted.

What did
they expect? Janice wondered. The sheer scale of this thing might be
impressive, but was dwarfed by some engineering projects within the Polity.
Yes, it was all alien technology, but technology based on the same science the
Polity used. There was nothing new here.

‘Should
we just disable it and retain it for study?’ she asked.

‘No,
let’s not become too arrogant and too complacent,’ Scold scolded. ‘I’m
targeting one U-jump and firing.’

In the
Polity those not in the know had always thought that travel through U-space was
a complicated affair that could only be managed by an artificial intelligence.
The myth lasted even throughout the Prador–Human war when the enemy arthropods
were using their own surgically altered children to fly U-jump missiles on
suicide missions. Now the Polity was experimenting with similar devices guided
by sub-AI minds. And now Scold sent one such device
after its prey.

It left Scold under its own power, a spike of gleaming metal
standing on a one-burn fusion drive. Two thousand kilometres out, it rippled,
then twisted into U-space like a trout diving after having snatched its mayfly.
The instant effect of its impact was immense, but in entirely the wrong place: Scold bucked, opened up like a clam and vomited fire. Its
AI didn’t even have time to deeply analyse how the mechanism had turned the
missile back on it, had time only to send one word.

‘Tricky,’
it said, and died.

Sanders studied him, still trying to find inside herself some emotional
response to a Jeremiah Tombs no longer confined to a wheelchair, drawing penny
mollusc patterns and muttering Satagents to himself; to a Jeremiah standing
whole and sane . . . maybe more than sane. Perhaps the beating she’d received
from Ripple-John and the certainty that she was going to die had numbed her, or
perhaps seeing Jeremiah like this dispelled all those nursy maternal instincts.

‘Jerval
Sanders,’ said Tombs, turning to her the moment Grant disappeared out of sight
amidst the flute grasses.

‘Jeremiah,’
she replied cautiously. ‘I was going to ask you why you were prepared to give
your life for me, but now I see that wasn’t the case. How did you escape
Ripple-John? How is it you’re alive?’

Shut up Jerval, you’re babbling . . .

‘I knew
I wasn’t going to die.’

‘Religious
certainty?’

‘Via the
intelligence here.’ He stamped his foot against the ceramal grating. ‘I called
in some gabbleducks, which changed the odds, but I didn’t know I would be able
to do that. What I did know was this: the Technician was within range, and it
would not let me die. And then there’s this.’

He
moved, suddenly, abruptly crossed the three or four metres between them so fast
it seemed some godlike power had edited the movement out of reality. Now he
stood right next to her, reached out and pressed the palm of his hand against
her face. It felt like hot metal.

‘I
understand so much now.’ He smiled a boyish smile and at last she felt
something stirring in her. She reached up, closed her hand over his and
squeezed it, then lowered her hand. He took his away. Now much closer to him
she could see that his eyes were bloodshot and broken blood vessels webbed his
face. Had the recent blasts caused that?

‘Tell me
what you understand.’

‘What
the Technician did, all of what it did to me.’ He
shook his head, grimaced. ‘Did you ever think to closely examine the full
extent of the damage?’

‘Of
course I did,’ she replied. ‘I repaired it . . . most of it.’

‘Certain
muscle groups excised, certain nerve pathways, all of which you regrew. What
you didn’t realize, as you regrew them on my body from my own tissue, was that
you weren’t following the original blueprint. There were deep changes, but
mostly so that my body could perform as required.’ He paused, looked distant
for a moment. ‘Only now do I realize that if Grant hadn’t picked me up and you
hadn’t repaired the damage I wouldn’t have died, but I wonder if I would have
still been Human.’ He snapped his fingers, and just ten metres away the
gabbleduck swung its head round and peered at him. ‘Speed and strength I at
last understand. Ripple-John wasn’t going to kill me; the only question was
whether he would survive me.’

‘So
you’re Superman now?’

‘No,
just a better vessel to contain what I hold within my skull, and a better
mechanism to transfer it.’

‘Is
there anything left of who you were?’

‘I might
ask the same about you. How much of the Jerval Sanders of ten years ago do you
retain, now?’

‘I think
you know what I mean.’

‘All the
memories are there, Jerval, and more. I’m Tombs but I’ve been changed by the
world, just as we all are.’ He shrugged. ‘Admittedly the world has been more
radical in its redesign of me.’

The
gabbleduck leaned forward, placing its claws on the floor, then casually
plodded over. Sanders backed up, ready to run no matter what she had been told.

‘You
finally returned my face to me, though I didn’t realize it at the time,’ Tombs
said.

‘Then
you cut it off again.’

‘Yes –
Amistad and Penny Royal were manipulating me, but didn’t know that they had no
say in the final outcome.’

‘Which
is?’

‘You returned
my face to me, regrew the nerves, muscle, everything, but never ventured any
deeper than the duramater of my brain.’ He reached up and touched his face.
Sanders saw something writhe under his fingertips, under the skin.

‘As I
was instructed,’ she said.

‘I was
scanned, scanned deeply?’

‘Yes.’

‘What
was found?’

She
stared at him, saw that his face looked grey, almost metallic, blotchy. The
shadows here? ‘We found signs of surgical intervention, signs of the kind of
connections a cerebral aug makes all throughout your brain.’ Sanders turned
towards the gabbleduck as it halted and squatted nearby. ‘Remaining fibres
even, both from your Dracocorp aug and, we believe, from the Technician itself.
I wanted to remove them but was told that they seemed to be still connected,
rewiring your brain.’

‘That’s
true, but if you’d removed them they would only have grown back.’ He paused,
turned to gaze at the gabbleduck. ‘And once I drew the final pattern from a
penny mollusc shell, completing the Atheter alphabet, finishing the countdown,
they began to grow again. Now they are ready.’

His face
seemed to be moving as he stepped away from her, right over to the gabbleduck.
She saw a trickle of blood run down from inside his ear. He shivered, groaned,
and stepped even closer to the creature, its bill just a metre above his head.
It bowed, hunched down and in, its bill pressing against his chest and its eyes
only centimetres from his. Sanders stepped to one side to get a better view,
horror and intellectual curiosity warring for predominance inside her.

‘Now,’
said Tombs.

A white
worm, narrow as a bootlace, sprouted from his cheek and writhed across to the
gabbleduck. Its tip groped across the creature’s skull, found a purple scar
just above one eye, straightened, opening that scar to reveal a bloodless slit,
and its end writhed inside. Another broke from Tombs’s forehead, blood pulsing
out at its base, then another from beside his mouth. He shrieked, his hands
clamping round the creature’s claws, but it wasn’t clear whether he was trying
to pull himself away or hold himself there. Even more of the things broke from
his face and his shrieking continued until finally muffled by a great skein of
these things extending from bloody ruin to the creature’s skull. Tombs writhed,
took his hands away, but now the gabbleduck closed its claws around his chest.

Sanders
sank to her knees, curiosity gone, only horror remaining. Tombs was struggling
now, stretching that skein taut. The things started breaking, pieces of them
dropping away, writhing down the chest of the gabbleduck. Some disconnected
from Tombs’s face to leave bloody holes, others detached from the gabbleduck’s
skull, small Venus flytrap heads flapping weakly. Then a convulsion. The
gabbleduck tossed Tombs away. He hit a pillar, high, then dropped leadenly to
the ground and lay utterly still.

Still
eyeing the gabbleduck, which like a man shaving his skull now scythed away the
last of those worms with one claw, Sanders stood and walked over to Tombs. She
knelt beside him, turned him over so his head rested in her lap. He looked like
he’d been shot in the face with a multi-pellet gun. Blood still leaked from the
holes in his forehead but those in his lower face seemed to have closed. She
carefully pulled out two remaining pieces of worm – they were like spaghetti
now, lifeless – and tossed them away. After a moment, he opened his eyes.

‘Going
for the facial reconstruction record?’ she asked, relieved he still lived.

‘It’s my
face now,’ he said obscurely.

Sanders
looked up at the gabbleduck now, and it returned her gaze. Its eyes gleamed and
it seemed tauter somehow. It raised one claw, studied it while flexing the
talons, then did something that shouldn’t have been possible for a creature
with a hard ducklike bill. The gabbleduck grinned.

No,
Sanders realized, the Atheter grinned.

‘We go in,’ said Janice and Cheops simultaneously, neither a question nor
an order, but a statement of fact from both of them.

They had
spent so long on that area of the Polity Line where they were the most dangerous
thing anyone was likely to encounter, and the reality of the ultimate extent of
their remit had been a vague thing, something acknowledged but unlikely. Their
job was to defend the Polity, and here was something it certainly needed
defending against. Together, they were a warship, and in the face of a
dangerous enemy they were the line that must not be crossed.

The
ship’s engines ramped up their power, every weapons system not already online,
coming online. Masers cut through the intervening gap from them to the
mechanism, selected spectrum lasers probed for weaknesses. Missile carousels
turned and loaded continent cracking rounds into the rail-gun magazines. EM
bands swelled with every form of viral warfare the Cheops
contained.

Janice
sometimes wondered just how much her interfacing with Cheops suppressed her
Human self. Without that connection would she be prepared to throw herself into
battle like this? Without their close mutualistic link would she be prepared to
do her duty, up to and including dying for it? As lasers just reflected away
and the point temperature of the masers just dispersed in the massive object
ahead, she began preparing for the ultimate: ramming, and simultaneous
detonation of all internal reactors.

‘Viral
warfare feed?’ both she and Cheops enquired.

‘Some,
but it seems it was ready for this,’ they both replied.

Ten
thousand kilometres, eight thousand. Janice felt an utter calm suffuse her.
Yes, she was prepared to do this.

‘Firing.’

Angry
wasps departing their hive, CTDs railed out, speed cut because massive
acceleration could lead to containment breach. They sped towards their target;
five-ton steel sharks. Something flashed out. Gravity weapon. The Cheops bucked as if slamming through a wall of stone half
a mile thick. It’s superstructure buckled and twisted, walls ruptured and
atmosphere spewed out through hundred-metre splits in the hull. The U-space
engines ruptured, sprayed out pseudo-matter and half-real components like alien
rainbows. The fusion drives burned dirty for half a second as their magnetic
bottles failed, ate out the face of the pyramid that contained them, guttered
out.

Forty-eight
missiles detonated; a massive multiple blast spreading atomic fire across
thirty thousand cubic kilometres of vacuum. A wall of fire slammed into Cheops, ablating away hull, burning through inside to melt
and slag so much that very few systems remained available. However, some
sensors were still available as Cheops spun a new
face towards Calypse. Janice felt a moment’s joy seeing five remaining missiles
still on course. Then the mechanism stretched, became a line reaching up past
her, in towards Masada, snapped out of existence here and reappeared a million
kilometres behind. The missiles continued on down into the face of Calypse. They
didn’t detonate; their target was gone.

We will follow you down, Janice thought, but Cheops
negated that. The gravity wave and subsequent blast had shoved them off course.
They would slingshot around Calypse, that was all.

She
wasn’t going to die, not just then, but having prepared for it she felt a deep
gnawing disappointment and almost unconsciously reached towards the ship’s
self-destruct. Cheops relieved her of control like an adult taking a sharp
knife out of a child’s hand.

‘We did
what we could,’ the AI told her. Janice lay in her sarcophagus, wanted to cry,
but found she couldn’t.

Amistad detached optic links and leapt out into vacuum. Frustration
passed in a microsecond to leave cool calculation. He had to accept that the
geostat weapon was about as much use to him as a machine gun against an
approaching battle tank.

‘You
might be able to use this,’ he said, surrendering control of the weapon to the
planetary AI.

‘Thanks,’
Ergatis replied, once again swinging the weapon round towards the planet where,
even now, a further five of those bell-shaped disruptors were materializing.

‘Penny
Royal, what’s your position?’ Amistad enquired.

‘Passing
through barrier,’ the black AI replied.

Here, in
this planetary system, they did not have the resources to physically defeat the
mechanism. They were in serious trouble, there was absolutely no doubt about
that. The mechanism had rolled over Scold and Cheops with consummate ease, and now it was here.