The Line of Polity (40 page)

Before Lellan could ask anything more, Polas interjected, "I'm getting a picture now." The man was operating a small toggle control, and each of the screens showed views over the curve of Masada, then space, and the face of Calypse. "There," he said, pointing at one of the screens.

Dragon loomed clear on the horizon, and Polas pushed his control forwards to take the probe closer. As it slowly drew in, the picture kept juddering, and when asked about this Polas replied, "Automatic avoidance — it's dodging debris." On two occasions thereafter they saw drifting clumps of titanic wreckage, fires glowing inside them, gases spewing away.

Closer to Dragon, and a flash of light blanked the screen. It then came back on to show a spreading ball of fire and debris — and one less laser array.

"I don't care," said Lellan. "We've lived under those for too long."

"God in Heaven," said Polas. He was operating other controls, calling up views all around as the probe accelerated towards Dragon. Radar images came up, spectral displays — he seemed to be trying every instrument the probe possessed.

He turned to Lellan. "EL-24 and 26 next," he said.

"How much of a hole has it made for us?" she asked.

Polas removed his hands from the controls — perhaps because they were shaking so much.

"Talk to me, Polas," said Lellan.

He turned to her, with a stunned expression, then stared back at the screen when it blanked yet again. "That was EL-26. One more to go, and that's it."

Lellan still hadn't quite grasped what he was telling her. Her expression showed irritation, confusion, then slowly dawning realization.

Polas nodded.

"It's destroyed..." He blinked at the screen as it flickered off then back on again. "It's destroyed all forty-six arrays. There's nothing but wreckage up there now."

12

"In the predawn light Brother Serendipity stood at the bounds of Agatha Compound and turned to address his three companions. 'You have served me well these three days, and should know that in that service you have served God and his Prophet: For the great day of his wrath is come; and who shall be able to stand?' "

The woman made a slight whimpering sound as she suppressed a laugh. The Brother stood to one side of the tall boundary stone, with his arms spread wide and a beatific expression on his face. The three creatures looked at each other with expressions that were completely unreadable. The gabbleduck then lifted what could loosely be described as a hand up to the side of its head and, with what could equally loosely be described as a finger, scribed circles in the air.

"As the sun rose over the compound. Brother Serendipity said unto his companions, 'You shall come with me to share in this glorious day!' "

Now the three creatures moved in around the Brother, almost concealing him with walls of flesh, bone, claws and teeth.

" 'Here, from my trial in the wilderness, I come to claim my birthright. I shall smite the morlocks in their dank caverns and I shall rise up over my brothers and rule from the sky!' said the Brother. 'That would be a good place to rule from.' said the heroyne, sharpening his beak on the side of the boundary stone, 'This boy could go far' added the siluroyne, sharpening his claws on the other side of the stone. 'Shame' concluded the gabbleduck, whose teeth and claws were always sharp."

The boy didn't get it for a moment, until he saw the picture of the creatures pulling apart the Brother like a piece of naan bread. He then grinned with delight and pointed at the picture.

"Gabbleducked," he asserted, not without a degree of craftiness in his expression.

The woman looked at him warningly, then finished the story.

"And thus our story ends with the moral: You can have your cake and give it away, but never turn your back on a gabbleduck."

The night sky was bright with shooting stars that burned long courses through the oxygen-bereft air. Occasionally, distantly, some larger piece of wreckage would make it to the ground, and there then would be a flash and a boom as of gunfire on a distant battleground.

"Dragon is nothing if not thorough when it decides to destroy something," commented Mika.

"It always works on a huge scale," said Cormac, taking a sip from the tea Gant had made out of a packet he'd found amongst their supplies. Cormac and Mika were sitting on their packs whilst watching this display; Apis stood a little apart from them, his head tilted to the sky; and Gant and the dracoman were out 'taking a little recce', as Gant put it.

Cormac nodded to the Outlinker boy. "You notice how all his hatreds are directed towards the Theocracy here and against Skellor on the
Occam,
He hasn't had a bad word to say about Dragon, yet the creature destroyed the
General Patten
and killed many of his kin."

"I had not noticed that," agreed Mika, studying the boy.

"It's an attitude prevalent throughout the Polity — since Samarkand, and probably before, Dragon has been viewed as more a force of nature than a being in its own right. It's too huge and unfathomable for most people to see it otherwise. You might just as well hate a hurricane or a volcano."

"I think I understand that: even with scientific objectivity, one cannot help but feel awe. It is godlike in its power and size, and its rather Delphic communications only make it seem more so. There is also its immortality: you once destroyed one Dragon sphere, yet Dragon still lives," Mika replied.

Apis turned towards them now, and walked back over. As he seated himself on his own pack, Cormac thought that behind his visor the boy looked rather unwell.

"How are you doing?" he asked.

"Gravity," confessed Apis. "This exo damps out most of the effects, but I can still feel it pulling on me. I'm tired, even though I'm not working."

That was not actually what Cormac had been asking about, but he let it ride. "We are all tired," he said. "I'd like to stop for sleep, but..." He gestured at his oxygen bottle.

"Oh," said Mika, glancing at Cormac. "I thought, being an agent, you would have been ... adjusted."

Cormac considered that: many people, especially in Earth Central Security, had the function of their bodies adjusted so sleep was, at worst, necessary only for a few hours, and then not every night. When he had been gridlinked, he himself had been such a person. After losing his link, he had then deliberately sacrificed the rest of his augmentations. Blegg, his boss in ECS, had been right about the dehumanizing effects of gridlinking, but had not gone far enough: for in Cormac's opinion
all
augmentations dehumanized. And, furthermore, Cormac found that with human weaknesses he operated more efficiently. This was actually psychological, and he knew that it too could be adjusted, but he felt that in the end people had to draw the line and decide for themselves just how much they wanted to
remain
themselves. Because of his previous experience of gridlinking, Cormac did not want to fool with his own mind, so he drew his line long before many others drew theirs.

"No," he said. "I'm not adjusted — and I'm tired."

Mika reached into one of the pockets of the pack she was sitting on and pulled out a reel of drug patches, each one on the same paper backing strip no more than a centimetre wide. Catching the reel Cormac tore off one section, removed the patch, discarded its backing strip, and reached inside his shirt to press it against his torso. Then, holding up the reel, he nodded his head to indicate Apis.

"No," said Mika.

"Why not?" Apis asked.

"Your system is not used to the constant drag of gravity, especially your heart, so using stimulants might be suicidal. Anyway, you probably will not need any sleep. The nanites building up your musculature and adding density to your bones will also be clearing out toxins."

"But I feel
tired,
" Apis protested.

"Psychological," replied Mika, tapping her head with her forefinger.

As the stimulant scoured away the fuzzy coating that seemed to have been thickening over everything for the last few hours, Cormac was glad to have it confirmed that it had, after all, been a good idea to lug along Mika's equipment. He himself had refused to use a nanite booster treatment so that he could handle the higher gravity on Callorum, a treatment that would have required him spending forty hours in a tank. Luckily for Apis, Mika had an interesting device with which she could manufacture nano-machines to her own specifications — a device Cormac was not sure was entirely legal within the Polity — and those specifications, he had since learnt, owed much to her study of the hybrid Skellor had created. The Outlinker himself now had a few varieties of those machines beavering away inside him, building muscle, bone, and all those other structures required for a body to handle gravity. Of course, Mika had to make only one mistake and they might end up having to pour Apis out of his exo-skeleton. However, the alternative was that the point eight gee on this planet would kill him over time. Thus far the only detrimental result of this treatment was that the boy was forever hungry. Cormac watched him as he fingered the touch-pad on his neck ring, to draw his visor down into his chin rest so he could begin stuffing another meal bar into his mouth.

"If I'd known there'd be such a celebration of our arrival, I'd have put on my dress uniform," said Gant, striding out of the darkness with Scar at his side.

"I don't think the Theocracy have anything to celebrate at present, and I think they'll find this particular firework display rather costly," said Cormac.

Gant came to a halt with his APW cradled across his chest and nodded at the sky behind them. "You seen that?"

Cormac glanced round but could see nothing else of note, but then the flute grass stood in a tangle two metres tall there, so blocked out most of the starlit sky. He stood up, Mika and Apis also, and they all quickly saw to what Gant referred.

"I think this was what I missed on Samarkand, wasn't it?" said the Golem.

Cormac glanced at him, trying to read something in his expression. Yes, on Samarkand ... Gant had never got to see this. He'd been ripped apart, underground, less than an hour before Dragon had appeared in the sky — as it had done here.

The latest 'moon' of Masada was a small reddish-grey penny in the dark sky, nowhere near as impressive as the descending giant Calypse, or the moon
Amok
that was following it down — that was until you tried to grasp the fact that this was a living creature.

"What,
now
, do you think?" said Gant.

"Indeed," Cormac replied.

Apis looked at the two of them, his expression showing stubborn anger. "You never tell me anything," he protested.

Cormac was pleased at such a reaction — it was better than the kind of dead efficiency the lad had heretofore displayed.

He explained, "Dragon has probably destroyed every laser array up there, but we think it unlikely it's now just going to meekly sail away into the sunset. That creature is a very large imponderable ... so to speak."

"Perhaps it's going to die ... like it said," Apis suggested.

"Or live," Gant added.

"Or do both," said Mika. They all turned to look at her, and she went on, "Well, it didn't seem able to make up its mind as to exactly what it was going to do."

"Quite," said Cormac, and was about to go on when suddenly Scar snarled, his eyes fixed on the sky. They all turned back to observe Dragon.

"It's moving," said Gant.

Cormac could not tell for sure, but then he did not have Gant's eyes. He glanced at Scar. "What's happening, Scar — or do I mean Cadmus? What's Dragon going to do next?"

"Dragon is coming," announced Scar.

They gazed back up at it and could now see clearly that it was moving. Dropping lower and lower, it grew larger and larger, clouds of vapour boiling around it, then flashes of orange fire, so that soon it looked like the open circular mouth of a furnace. Distantly, at first, there came to them a steady thunderous grumbling that grew in volume. Cormac gazed around, wondering where they could run for safety, but there was nowhere — if this gigantic sphere was coming down on where they stood then they had no chance at all of getting away. Once again, he resumed the view he had taken aboard the landing craft: if Dragon wanted to kill them, then there was little in these circumstances that they could do about it.

Lower now in the heavens it revealed the vast storm of fire behind it — a wake that continued to boil out in a wide V to cover half the sky.

"It'll come down about fifty kilometres away," said Gant. As a Golem, he possessed the ability to range the creature and work out its angle of descent and its relative velocity.

In the clouds behind and over the surface of the leviathan, forks of lightning flickered, and occasional gunshot discharges hit the ground. The grumbling had become a roar and the ground began to vibrate in sympathy.

"Suicide?" Cormac wondered.

"It's not coming down completely freefall — must be using AG," Gant replied.

At the last it almost seemed to dip, to slam down in the distance, and the fiery cloud of its wake rolled on, blasting up dark clouds and weird vortices of flame.

"On the ground," ordered Cormac.

They flung themselves down with their heads sheltered behind their packs — being the only barrier between themselves and what was coming. The ground shuddered and rocked, and it seemed the whole vast plain dropped a few metres before rising back into position. The roaring increased in volume, then the hurricane was upon them. The flute grass flattened before the blast, and for a short time the air above was filled with long stems and papery fragments, these skirling a hideous dirge as they hurtled past. Then came earth, smoke, and a further rippling of the ground. As this blast-wave passed, it tried to suck them into its wake. After a few minutes, it died and broke into random eddies and the occasional mini-tornado that played strange music with still unbroken stems of grass. In time, they were able to stand up and view the devastation of the flattened plain — and the distant funeral pyre. Scar, tilting his head to the sky, let out a long and mournful howl. Cormac wondered if this was for Dragon ... or for something Dragon had done.