The Line of Polity (62 page)

"Please ... no ..." he pleaded.

But the creature had no pity — nothing in its mien or expression that was in any way
Terran
and Molat now knew he had been mistaken about its apparent amusement earlier. Caught in teeth like blue hatchets, Molat saw a torn and bloody pair of uniform trousers. The three-fingered claws, big as garden rakes on doubled forearms, closed around his torso and up-ended him. Over his shrill screams Molat heard a rail-gun opening up and emptying its magazine, but by then the siluroyne had eaten his legs and was crunching into his pelvis.

"If I ever possessed any inclination to religion, I think I'd find it now," said Gant, shading his eyes from the bright sunlight as he stared up into the sky.

"Ignore it, then," said Cormac. "We have to focus on our goal, and just that." But even he did not feel any great ease in that assertion. What Skellor had done to the appearance of the
Occam Razor
was a blatant demonstration of his power, and that he managed to hold it so easily in low orbit yet further evidence. The
Occam
was poised there like a giant overseer directing some huge chess game on the ground below, ready in a moment to sweep board, pieces, everything away. Cormac tried to focus his attention on the game, and specifically on one of those pieces whose abilities he now did not really know for sure.

All that distinguished Scar from the rest of the dracomen was his weapons harness, his loose fatigues, and the facial scar that had given him his name. Cormac remembered Mika explaining how the dracoman could easily have erased that scar, but had retained it for some reason of pride, and now perhaps for some means of identification. Standing upon the burnt-out carcass of a lander, Cormac studied the dracoman a moment longer before returning his attention to the wilderness stretching before them. Now, with the budding of the grasses, the formerly green landscape was tinged with washes of red, white, yellow and metallic gold. But these flowering grasses were now shaking with some approaching movement.

"Okay, what have we got out there?" he asked. He had a good idea — just wanted confirmation.

"Soldiers," replied Scar, before Gant could.

Gant glanced at the dracomen. "Looks like the whole Theocracy army is heading our way." He looked from side to side. "We won't be able to move fast enough to get round them."

"We go through them," said Scar abruptly.

Cormac gazed down at the thousands of dracomen gathered around the landers or in the surrounding flute grass. Every one of them was indistinguishable from Scar when he had first encountered him, and many of them seemed to have similar appetites. They had found charred corpses lying amongst the incinerated landers and had obviously decided not to let the meat go to waste. The carnivorous scene appeared hugely primitive but for other dracomen checking over, with smooth expertise, the weapons they had also found. Cormac feared Mika was allowing her fascination with these creatures to outweigh her caution as she walked amongst them, scanning and sometimes even daring to take samples from them. But then perhaps she had less fear of injury now, with the alien mechanisms operating inside her body.

"Convenient that you arrived when you did," he said to Scar.

The dracoman grunted as he surveyed his fellows, then something seemed to claw at him from the inside, and he hissed before turning to Cormac again.

"You will let me live," said the dracoman, echoing Dragon's words, and Cormac wondered if it was truly the dracoman speaking.

"Polity law." Cormac gestured to the gathered dracomen. "It was a single entity that was guilty of crimes against the Polity, but I see no such single entity here."

And so it was. Before eagerly gathering up her instruments, Mika had observed to him, "
Here's that missing fifty per cent of Dragon. Now we know what it meant about both dying and living.
"

Cormac continued speaking to Scar. "But what ECS decides to do is irrelevant at present, and genocide may yet be committed." He gestured up at the
Occam Razor
before scrambling down the lander to the ground. Scar and Gant quickly followed him, and the three moved over to join Thorn and Fethan, who were listening in on radio exchanges through Thorn's partially dismantled coms helmet.

"What have you got?" Cormac asked.

"Radio only," said Thorn. "Lellan's sending her army back underground. Some of her commanders are protesting, but they're doing what they're told. It would seem Lellan sees no purpose in keeping them up on the surface. From something I heard, they probably haven't enough supplies to stay up any longer. What about you?"

It was Gant who replied. "The whole Theocracy army is heading this way, and too rapidly for us to get around it."

"The whole
subverted
Theocracy army," Cormac added.

Thorn nodded, turning his attention to the ominous shape in the sky. "Why is he doing this? Why doesn't he just incinerate this whole place?" he asked.

Gazing up too, Cormac said, "I think he wants us alive for some reason, to use or to play with, whatever. I don't see what else could possibly keep him here."

"Not so omnipotent then," said Thorn.

"No," Cormac agreed. "Still human enough to want to make his enemies suffer, and prideful enough to want to show off. Let's just hope he doesn't move beyond that stage just yet."

"Before you wax too philosophical, perhaps we should sort out what we gonna do," interjected Fethan.

Cormac glanced at the old cyborg, then turned to Scar. "Are your people ready to move?"

Scar just showed his teeth in reply.

"Then," Cormac continued, "we cut a hole through the Theocracy army, and keep going until we reach the mountains. Then you" — he glanced at Fethan — "and Thorn will take us to John Stanton's ship."

"Then what?" asked Thorn.

Almost without thinking, Cormac drew his thin-gun and checked the charge. "Let's just see if we can get that far first, shall we?"

With shaking hands Aberil changed magazines then took aim with his rail-gun. Very badly he wanted to empty this second magazine into the creature's head, but that would be more than stupid considering he only had this and one other magazine, and there were certainly other creatures lurking out here. The siluroyne no longer moved, but then with half its head ripped away that was not surprising. Molat was still moving though, which considering how little was left of the Proctor, Aberil did find surprising. Swallowing the foul taste in his mouth, Aberil walked over to Molat and watched him finally die. That didn't take long for blood was draining from him like red wine from an upended bottle.

Finally Aberil jerked himself alert, as if coming out of a trance, and suddenly was once again aware of just how bad he felt. His face seemed just a swollen ball of pain, his broken teeth aching abominably, and an overall swelling beginning to close his eyes. As if that was not enough, he felt sure some of his ribs were broken, and he was beginning to suspect that the bloody froth he'd been spitting out was not coming from the ruin of his face but from one of his lungs.

Damn you, Stanton!

He had known for far too long that he should either have left that family alone or exterminated every last one of them. Drunk on the extent of the powers granted to him as a young proctor, he had committed crimes that had led to the creation of Lellan Stanton the rebel and her brother John the mercenary killer.

Moving now with painful slowness Aberil headed back towards the landing craft, occasional fumaroles of smoke or steam rising into the sky locating them for him. Not for one moment did he consider the possibility of his own death, for he was so sure of God's purpose for him. Yes, he worked hard to preserve his own life, as he had just done with this siluroyne, for not to do so would display a punishable arrogance — but it was all part of how he was being continually moulded by the deity. Even the beating he had just received at Stanton's hands had been part of this same process. No, Aberil would not die — he had far too much yet to do.

There... something moving.

As far as he could remember from what he had been taught as a child, siluroynes were extremely territorial, so this definitely would not be another of them. Hearing the sound again, he tried to discount the realization that whatever was making the noise was obviously a lot bigger than the siluroyne. The sound he next heard — a whickering of rapid sharp motion — shot him through with an almost supernatural dread.

The Lord is my shepherd
...

Much louder now — the hissing passage of a long hard body writhing through flute grass and over compacted mud. Aberil picked up his pace, wheezing now and with flecks of red spattering the inside of his mask. He'd heard that sound before: who of the higher Theocracy had not watched holocordings of rebel prisoners pinned out like bait near their mountains? But this was ridiculous surely: hooders did not venture this far out onto the plain.

As the sound grew louder, Aberil looked aside in time to see a huge segmented body hurtling past him like a speeding train. It was heading in the opposite direction, but he listened hard and could hear it curving round. He
ran
. He could get to the landing craft ... find something there ... there would be help. Behind ... it was behind him. He glimpsed nightmare there, and fired a burst of slugs at it. He turned and ran on, his chest constricting so that he couldn't get his breath. He stumbled down on his knees, pain daggering into his side, his vision blurred.

As a shadow drew across him, he emptied the entire magazine at it, then groped for the spare. He realized that to preserve himself from the agony to come, he should use that precious magazine on himself, but he couldn't really believe what was happening to him. Instead he emptied the last rounds into a looming darkness, and that seemed to have no effect at all. Scrubbing at his face to clear his vision, he looked up into a circular pit of darkness that contained row upon row of mandibles glittering like surgical steel and glass, amid a constellation of red glowing eyes.

"No," he managed to protest before the hooder slammed down on him.

Tented in its chitin, his screams became both muffled and echoey — as the creature commenced, with surgical precision, to feed.

Cormac held up his hand, and Shuriken came back to its holster without reluctance — perhaps sated by its excess of killing. Once it snicked back into place he turned towards movement registered behind, as two soldiers rose out of cover and began to level their rail-guns at him. A snap shot with his thin-gun knocked one over backwards with a hole through his forehead. Gant slammed into the second, knocking him two metres through the air before the man hit the ground, following fast to stab down with one hand, then stood up and shook blood from his fingers. Horrible, utterly horrible, though Cormac was not sure if what he was killing could actually be classified as fully alive.

Mostly, though, it was not Cormac and his companions who were accomplishing the wet work. The dracomen moved at frightening speed right into the rail-gun fire where iron slugs ripped through many of them, but these creatures were of extremely rugged construction and withstood more hits than any human could possibly sustain. Cormac even saw one of them fighting on with both of its arms blown away. It had still managed to bite out the throats of three Theocracy soldiers before gunfire from elsewhere finally cut it in half.

"Keep moving!" Cormac shouted. "And keep together."

Mika proved the most wayward — she kept wanting to stay with wounded dracomen, though whether to tend to them or to see what tissue samples she might obtain, Cormac could not judge. Gant and Thorn stayed on either side of him, whilst Fethan had gone running off with the dracomen and getting himself as bloody as they. Scar had come back occasionally to check if they were still alive.

"Where the hell are your people?" Cormac asked him the next time he returned.

Showing his teeth, Scar gestured in either direction along the Theocracy lines and gave a shrug. Obviously just punching a gap through those lines had not been enough for them — now they had achieved that objective it was time for them to play. Cormac could hear plenty of gunfire, but no screams from dying soldiers — but maybe those brain-burnt individuals did not feel pain.

The whining of an electric engine sounded to the right...

Cormac soon had Shuriken up a couple of metres in front of him, his fingers poised over the lethal device's attack menu on its holster.

"Time to ride!" Fethan bellowed, driving in with a balloon-tyred ground car he had just stolen — the blood on the driver's seat was fresh. All but Gant, the fastest mover anyway, boarded the vehicle as Fethan turned it towards mountains now looming in the purple haze of distance below the sinking gas giant.

"Check that out," Cormac instructed Thorn, gesturing at a pedestal-mounted grenade-launcher fixed to the back of the vehicle. Thorn pushed his way past Mika who was sitting on the metal floor with her back against the side. Seeing her pull out her laptop, Cormac commented, "Hell or high water won't stop your research on Dragon or dracomen."

She glanced up at him. "There's always so much more to learn about them."

"And what more have you learnt today?" he asked.

"A lot gets revealed about a body's structure when it is torn open," she said. "Scar is asexual, but his kin out there are not."

"I wonder if that would make Scar happy or sad," he said.

"I think you miss the point. Sex has more purpose than social bonding or physical gratification."

"Well, make the point clearer to me then," said Cormac, irritated.

"The point is that we are no longer dealing with just organic constructs. We are dealing with self-determining beings who can breed — a race."

"Well, that's nice," said Cormac distractedly. Then, "Can't this thing go any faster, Fethan?"

"I'm doing my bloody best," the cyborg replied.

Crouching down to retain his balance as the machine accelerated, now jouncing all over the place, Cormac continued to Mika, "Personally, I don't see the difference between a group of organic constructs and any naturally derived race, but I will be interested to know how the Earth Central AI sees it."