The Line of Polity (25 page)

Dreyden spun the card with his finger. "Etched sapphires... interesting." He looked up at Stanton. "Are they scan-enabled?"

Stanton nodded. "Each is a unit representing a hundred thousand New Carth shillings — the price we agreed, yes?"

Dreyden sat back, pulling yet another cigarette from the dispenser and lighting it with his fancy ring. He drew deep and waved one hand airily through the smoke. "Oh, it's agreed."

Opposite them the two war drones, obviously instructed through Dreyden's aug, began to rise back towards the shimmer-shield door in the roof of the biodome — since through there lay no doubt the most direct route to the bay containing
Lyric II
.

"I'll take it on trust that they are genuine," Dreyden added.

Stanton kept a smile on his face, knowing that also through his aug, Dreyden could control the orientation of every mirror out there. He was aware that any who had crossed this man and thought to then escape by ship were now so much drifting ash. Apparently a ship the size of
Lyric II
would last for slightly less time than a fly in a blast furnace if even a single one of the mirrors was directed at it.

There was something horrible about the way Skellor moved, as if something chitinous was heaving along under his skin, but with movements not quite in consonance with his own. Studying him, Aphran wondered at the strange outgrowth that extended up the side of his neck and cupped his chin, at the grey veins that ran across his face and the backs of his hands. What the hell was all that about? And why was there blood flowing in his crystal matrix AI? She could only assume that he had now put it fully online, and that somehow he must have used that weird shit he had been playing with on his off-time from doing work for the group, to prevent it from killing him. Had she been able to, Aphran would have opened up on him with the pulse-rifle she had picked up in the Security Area but, judging by the burnt-out Golem she had seen in there, such action would not have availed her much. Anyway, she was unable to act against him: her aug felt like the body of some vicious insect with its sharp legs clawed inside her brain, and she
knew
that all his orders must be obeyed — the consequences of disobedience would be agony and death.

Glancing aside, she studied Danny, and to a certain extent considered herself lucky. Her own aug, though somehow subverted and now being used to control her, was at least the same Dracocorp item that had been provided by the Masadans. The boy's aug, where Skellor had touched it, now sprouted the same greyish material that inhabited Skellor's body, and roots of it were spreading across the boy's neck and his head. Now, whenever she looked into Danny's face, all she got in return was the expression of an imbecile, but one who obeyed Skellor without hesitation.

Finally finding the courage to speak, Aphran asked, "What about the others?"

"They'll cause sufficient disruption. My 'ware field wouldn't extend to cover you all," Skellor replied.

Aphran glanced about herself — she had not even been aware that they were covered. She glanced to Skellor's belt and saw that he was now not wearing the generator he had spent so much time on. What was he talking about?

"Ah, here," he said, halting and turning to face a door. He reached out and pressed his hand against the touch-panel, and for a moment Aphran expected klaxons to start blaring. Then she chided herself for being obtuse — if he could break into a Polity Security Area, then closed doors were obviously no problem to him.

The door slid aside and as Skellor pulled his hand away from the panel, Aphran saw that it was as if he had just pressed it down in some tar — long strands stretched and attenuated, then snapped back into his palm. Useful ability maybe, but she was not sure it was one
she
wanted to own.

"Cold store," she said, stepping into the room beyond and surveying the rows of cold-coffins either side of a single aisle.

"There are only fifty people here," said Skellor, "but the system that watches this room is the same system that watches all the other sleep rooms on this ship, so I can access it here." So saying he headed down the aisle to a space in one row of coffins, finding an instrument wall. Here he slapped his hand against a touch-console. This time the task for him appeared much more difficult as, after a few seconds, he closed his eyes and bowed his head. Aphran watched the blood pulsing faster in his aug, and noted how the greyish veins on his face seemed to be moving: sliding under his skin like lizard tails.

A series of sucking thumps sent her into a crouch with her pulse-rifle held at the ready, then she realized that the noise came from cold-coffins hinging open — all of them. Inside each was exposed the naked body of a man or a woman, their concave impressions mirrored in the lids.

Opening his eyes and glancing round, Skellor said flatly, "Damn."

"What happened?" Aphran asked, standing again. She noted that Danny had moved not at all.

"Vascular control," Skellor explained. "I was trying to get the system to pump them dry, then return their blood before they'd reached thaw-up, which would have killed them all rather neatly. Unfortunately, I overlooked a subroutine that isolates the coffins, which in turn then revive their occupants. But don't worry, this was only a test run, so it's only happening in here."

"They're waking up?" Aphran asked.

Skellor surveyed the room as if that had not occurred to him. "Oh, yes," he said. "You've got about six minutes yet, so you'd best hurry and kill them all."

Aphran stared at him in horror, and immediately felt the claw inside her head closing when she made no move to obey. Suddenly she found herself walking towards the head of a row. It was not as if she was being forced, for it was
her
doing the walking; it was rather as if at the wholly animal level she had made the choice to stay alive, for by obeying was the only way she could.

"You take that other row," she instructed Danny, the words tasting foul to her.

Upon reaching the cold-coffin at the end of her own row, she placed the snout of the pulse-rifle against the temple of its occupant, and pulled the trigger. The man's head lifted to the side, blooming open like a flower on the blue flash of energy. However, as he settled back, what ran out of the ugly wound was not blood but the complex antifreeze that had been pumped into his body whilst his blood had been pumped out. The next coffin occupant was a woman, and seeing a tattoo on her arm that branded her as Earth Central Security, gave Aphran no comfort. This was bloody work. She was a soldier in the Separatist cause, not a murderer. Her tenth victim leaked blood, and her fifteenth sprayed it across the metal floor. Her last one of twenty-five opened his eyes and sat upright before she shot him twice in the chest, knocking him out of his coffin. Perhaps she should not have been so tardy; Danny had killed all his lot long before.

Carrying her laptop, Mika entered the cold-sleep area and glanced around. Everything looked as it should be; anything wrong in any of the ten or more of these areas, and the Occam's AI would have registered it immediately. This particular area, though it had room for many more of them, had only eight occupied coffins. Seven contained some of the
Occam's
technicians — overspill from another area a quarter of a kilometre to port of the ship — and the eighth one held Apis Coolant's mother.

It had been Mika's intention to leave her in cold-sleep until she could be returned to an Outlinker medical facility, as the injuries she had sustained though easy enough to deal with in a normal human, in an Outlinker were not so amenable to the medical technologies at Mika's disposal. Even the boy's broken ankle had caused her some problems — normal bone welding not being sufficient to the task of repairing fragile Outlinker bone — and she'd needed to fabricate an autodoc boot to monitor the slow process of repair.

But in the end it came down to convenience. Though it would not be easy for Mika to repair this woman's fractured skull and the consequent thrombosis, it was by no means impossible. If Mika was perfectly honest with herself, the only reason she had been avoiding the chore was so she could spend more time studying the human/calloraptor hybrid Cormac had killed. However, this choice was unfair on the boy Apis as, though he might seem rather advanced for a teenager, he'd had some hideous experiences and was now amongst strangers. He needed his mother.

Plugging the optic cable of her laptop into the woman's coffin, Mika waited impatiently for the status list to come up on the screen. After a moment, she looked about herself to make sure she had not overlooked the presence of anyone, then began to speak out loud.

"Who are you?" she asked. "What is that? Why is this? How do you do that?" It was so easy for normal Polity citizens to ask direct questions, yet for Life-Coven graduates it seemed so difficult and unnatural. The ideal was that you used all the resources at your disposal to discover answers — including your own reasoning abilities — and that to have to ask a question was a kind of defeat. In cases where there were no other options available the Life-Coven taught that you should then feel free to ask, which was all very well if the concept of not asking had not been as deeply inculcated from birth as potty training. In this respect Mika was discovering just how wrong her early training had been, so was attempting to retrain herself.

"Where is this item? Do you have this ability? Are you ...?" She trailed off, realizing that the status list was taking an awful long time to come up on her screen. Quickly she started the laptop's self-diagnostic program, and immediately got a response that assured her there was nothing wrong with the device. Now she sent a search engine through the console's memory space to try to find the optic connection. Briefly there came a flash of some very odd code across the screen, then the words 'Nil Return Signal'. Frowning, Mika rested the device on top of the cold-coffin and headed down the aisle to the instrument wall. Here the same strange code was scrolling across all of four different screens. She tried the touch-controls and the code disappeared, but beyond that there was no response.

Running back to the cold-coffin, Mika felt a horrible sinking sensation. Problems with cold-sleep coffins? They did not have problems — it was unheard of. Grabbing up her laptop she quickly detached it, fed its own optic cable back into it, and laid it on the cold-coffin behind her. Now she tried the touch-plate lock on the lid of the coffin: nil response. Nothing else for it but to use the manual lever — no matter how many alarms this caused to go off. She gripped the cold metal and drew it back towards her, and with a thunk the lock disengaged and the coffin lid sighed open. Gazing at the Outlinker woman, Mika immediately knew something was terribly wrong: the woman's skin had been light lavender when Mika had transferred her from the landing craft, but now it was dark. It was always the case that people in cold-sleep looked colourless, pallid, simply because the blood had been withdrawn from them and replaced by clear fluid. This woman should be bloodless and she was not. Mika placed her hands on the woman's chest. Nothing. With sudden fierce strength, she got hold of her and pulled her onto her side. Stiff with rigor mortis. Her underside was also deep purple where the blood had pooled in the lower portions of the corpse — for this was what she was now dealing with: a corpse. Mika let the woman drop back into place in her aptly named box.

"AI... Occam, this is Asselis Mika reporting a malfunction in Cold-sleep Room One." After no response from the intercom set into the control wall, she rushed out into the corridor and tried the intercom there.

"There is no malfunction in Cold-sleep Room One," one of the AI's subminds informed her.

"The Outlinker woman who we recently placed in a coffin there is dead," Mika replied, trying to keep her voice from getting shrill.

"System function return is optimal. There is no problem in Cold-sleep Room One," repeated the sub-mind in a somewhat annoyed tone. Clearly, even though only a submind, it did not like having to point out the obvious to idiots.

"I suggest you send a drone here as fast as you damned well can, because I don't think that rigor mortis and postmortem lividity are particularly healthy symptoms even for someone in cold-sleep! Also, I'm standing out in the corridor at the moment since the com in there does not work either."

"System function return for com is optimal. There is no problem with the com in Cold-sleep Room One. Asselis Mika, do you require medical assistance?"

"I want a direct link with Tomalon or Occam itself," she demanded.

"You have a problem," immediately stated the voice of Tomalon. "Occam is gearing for a full diagnostic check and I have sent Aiden and Cento to assist you."

"Good," said Mika. "I must go back in now to check the other coffins."

"If you do," said the Captain, "do not use your console, as it may be infected."

"You suspect a computer virus," Mika stated.

"Virus or worm, whatever. There are too many safety backups in the cold-sleep control system for it to be anything other than deliberate subversion of programs."

"Murder," muttered Mika, heading back into the room and instantly thinking, like so many of those who have sought to do the best for a patient and failed:
How do I tell her son?
And there was no one who could answer that question for her, dared she even to ask it.

Every com-unit howled, whether it was mounted on a wall, integrated in a wristcom, or part of the device built inside a Golem's head. Cormac exited his room and broke into a run. Halfway down the corridor he felt something lurch through his body as he passed over a fluxing grav-plate. He immediately halted and stepped over to a nearby handle affixed to the wall and gripped it for support.

"Tomalon? Occam?"

From his wristcom issued a sound that could have been interference but sounded more like a steady keening.

"Aiden? Cento?"

"Online," came the twinned reply.

"What's happening?" he asked.

"All the people in Cold-sleep Room One are dead," replied Aiden flatly.