Polity 2 - Hilldiggers (17 page)

She stared out to where the quofarl had now surfaced and began swimming back towards us from about twenty feet out. She glanced down at the other quofarl on the boat, whose mandibles were hanging wide apart, then turned to study me cautiously.

“Follow me,” she instructed abruptly.

The grobbleworm seller occupied the first stall of a market running alongside a canal that tunnelled off from the marina. Even as we approached, a fisherman brought his catch to the stall—a basket full of the same armoured worms making a racket like snakes writhing in a barrel of stones. Their pincers extruded through the basket mesh, sharp tail fins stabbed out like knives. The stallholder extended one mandible, directing him to a stack of similar baskets ranged to one side, then turned her attention towards us, or rather to me. She stared, mandibles hanging wide in what I now recognised as an expression of surprise or shock.

“Give me your attention,” Rhodane said in Brumallian, though the subtext she signed went something like, “Consensus Speaker business—stop staring at the weird human.” She continued out loud with, “I want ten worms—six of them overcooked.”

Once the stallholder got over her surprise she pulled on gauntlets and began the dodgy task of pulling arm-thick worms from a nearby basket and threading them onto long steel skewers, before plunging them into a pot of boiling water.

“Why overcooked?” I asked.

“It weakens the acid content, which is more acceptable to me, and I presume would be more acceptable to you?”

“You presume right.”

Six skewered worms squirmed and thrashed in the boiling water. The stallholder paused for a while before dropping in the remaining four, long enough only for them to stop thrashing about. I felt a surge of nostalgia for Spatterjay, where similar monsters met a similar end in similar pots. By this time the quofarl I had thrown into the water had turned up. I expected some display of anger or resentment, but he showed none I could identify.

“Grobbleworms—” he rubbed his meaty hands together.

“—good,” his companion completed.

Meaty hands continued, “You weren't joking—”

“—about being hungry,” the companion supplied.

Rhodane took the four minimally cooked worms from the stallholder and handed them to the two quofarl, who, holding the skewers in their right hands whilst pulling off shell with mandibles and left hand, began stuffing the gristly meat into their mouths. Observing them, I realised one did not really need mandibles, since these worms looked no more difficult to eat than say a lobster or a prill. When at last the six overcooked worms were ready, Rhodane took two for herself and handed the remaining four to me. I placed three of the loaded skewers down on the stall and impatiently started on the other, pulling the worm apart and stuffing chunks into my mouth and sometimes chewing up shell as well as flesh. It took the skin off the inside of my mouth, burned like jalapeño chillies and caused such an eructatious racket in my stomach that those passers-by who stopped to gaze at me hung around to listen to the symphony until Rhodane shooed them away. But my body's need took over, quickly regrowing damaged skin in my mouth and adjusting itself to this acidic nutriment. By the time I sucked the last piece of meat from the last piece of shell, the worms tasted like chilli-flavoured frog-whelk to me, and I was hooked.

“Less chance of you turning dangerous now?” Rhodane asked, eyeing the remnants of shell and the discarded skewers about my feet.

I glanced longingly at the pot, but the worms had taken the edge off my hunger so I decided not to push my luck. “That will sustain me for a little while,” I conceded.

She handed a small black rod to the stallholder, who pressed it into some kind of reader before handing it back. Some transaction had obviously just taken place. I knew nothing about their economic system here, but supposed they must use some form of currency since few human societies ever have managed to survive without it. We moved on, stared at all the while. As I walked, feeling a little calmer and more able to assess my situation, I considered what I had seen back at the stall. The Brumallians didn't really need mandibles to handle their food, so were they a result of inefficient recombinant techniques, or had some bastard in their past saddled these people with mandibles to make some obscure ideological point? Again, one of those things I would probably never find out.

—RETROACT 11—

Yishna—on Corisanthe Main

The screen showed the distinct words:

HATE... SKIRL SAND... IMPACTED... FIRE

Keleon, the OCT who had heard those words in his mind, had told her in detail the sensations and thoughts accompanying them. He had experienced the usual fantasies, some violent, some sexual. He described to her how he imagined setting at each other's throats two OCTs he knew had had him thrown out of the Cognisants—yet another sect aboard this station—then went on to describe to her how he had vividly visualised buggering her over a console in a study unit. After this Keleon had taken the opportunity to suggest that this might be something they could try—strictly in the interests of research. Yishna had subsequently dismissed him and had used her consoles for more prosaic activities.

The workings of the human brain were intricate indeed, sometimes annoyingly illogical to Yishna when compared with computers; but thus far that lump of pinkish organic matter was the only instrument sensitive enough to detect bleed-over. In her first year aboard Corisanthe Main she had worked on developing ways of recording the workings of the brain. Delving into the research of others, she mapped its function and learnt how to interpret electrical and biochemical readings as thoughts. From this she managed to create audio recordings of bleed-over and listened with growing disappointment to the disconnected and sometimes half-formed words that seemed merely the product of random selection from some lexicon. Further studies revealed that these thoughts arose out of deeper functions of the brain; the words being merely the bubbles bursting at the surface of a pool, and therefore only an indication of deeper activity. She did, however, create complex linguistic programs in order to analyse these first recordings by comparing content with source. Some interesting connections arose, but never enough to understand the purpose of bleed-over, if it even possessed one.

Keleon had become the source of more information, for he was the first to volunteer for surgery and try out the new hardware. A year ago Yishna had designed both hardware capable of surviving in the hostile environment of the human body and the surgical techniques for installing it. She often went back to his file in search of inspiration, or in the hope of seeing something new. As she studied the cladograms of synaptic activity, applied comparative programs and mapped the course of thoughts through his brain, she mused and speculated. Perhaps bleed-over, weakened almost to non-existence outside Ozark Containment, was the actual cause of all the flourishing sects aboard this station? In fact she felt sure it was the cause of most of the strangeness aboard Corisanthe Main. Telepathic inductance, the OCTs called it. She did not believe that was what it was, but for her it was no longer the issue. The Worm affected humans who got close. She also felt certain that the definitely emotional elements of bleed-over indicated the Worm was self-aware—that was the issue.

Yishna closed the file, stood up and walked to the window of the study unit, to gaze down into Centre Cross Chamber. As always, there was much work in progress: old equipment in the containment cylinders being replaced, refurbished; new designs of scanner being brought in for trial; and as ever the perpetual checking of security. After watching for a little while, she returned to her touch-screens, keyed into the networks, and began checking on published research and looking for news of new developments.

Unlike others working here Yishna frequently published her research for, unlike those others, knowledge not status was her goal, and by publishing quickly she received much useful feedback. It did not concern her that other scientists frequently took her work and ran with it, that around her a whole network of R & D had sprung up, and that some of them awaited her publications with something approaching desperation. Only recently had she learned that both Fleet and Combine scientific teams were developing her hardware—surgically implanted inside the brain—for the purpose of controlling ship and satellite systems, for the fast analysis of information, for many operations that shortened and made more efficient the link between thought and action. She had watched with interest the trials of new surgically implanted communications hardware; how Fleet tacoms—ship's communications, logistics and tactical officers—became capable of comprehending multiple visual and audio inputs, and then acting on them with computer speed.

There was some breaking news about the surgical division of certain brain functions and some further development of the synaptic connection. Though both of these were of interest and directly applicable to her own work, Yishna felt a sudden weariness and unaccustomed boredom. Idly working her touch-screen, she allowed her mind to wander. Remembering something Dalepan had said earlier, she wondered what would actually happen here if the Worm broke free? During fumarole breaches, those computers affected ended up scrambled and running some decidedly odd code, but even that—like bleed-over—seemed only to hover on the point of making sense, but never did. Dalepan had told her about a physical breach occurring near the end of the War, when the unlikely failure of three reactors simultaneously resulted in a brief power outage to Ozark Three. This in turn resulted in the similarly brief collapse of the magnetic containment field inside the canister itself, and the Worm directly touching the sidewall. He had elaborated no further.

Yishna looked up and realised that, almost without thinking, she had dropped from accessing the networks and instead opened a port into Corisanthe Main's library. Her interest stimulated, she began to do some research.

The touch against the side of the canister had resulted in the slow spread of something like a metal-eating fungus. That was the kind of nano-technology they studied endlessly, very often understood, but simply had no way of creating for themselves. It was, many opined, something you could not build without it having been created as a part of your science. A desert nomad could understand a computer, but without the infrastructure, the tooling and much else beside, he could never build one. Such creations were the culmination of a long chain of development.

The reports she read then went on to detail how, avoiding the implementation of any of the main 'Emergency Ozark Protocols', an OCT had entered the affected cylinder and sterilised the infestation with a laser. Later, OCTs cut away this section from the canister and replaced it with new metal. They also replaced all the equipment within the surrounding cylinder and thereafter ran constant checks for nanite infestation.

Emergency Ozark Protocols...Yishna searched the library for further mention of them. She found only one: EOP Three would only be applied if we were unable to evacuate the station—

It was just that one line remaining from a partially deleted file. Further searching referred her to 'Gneiss eyes only' files stored in the system under heavy encryption, beyond the scope of the access codes in her control baton. She had encountered these files many times before and knew that any foolish tampering with them would result in station security officers dragging her off to face the Director. However, on those previous occasions she had felt insufficiently curious to know what was hidden in them. Now she was, and when it came to cracking encryption there was probably only one person better at it than herself, and he was busily climbing the ranks aboard Ironfist.

Yishna stretched her fingers, smiled to herself and went to work. It was exhilarating, and using programs she had created during her research she easily sidestepped all the traps and was soon browsing the Director's database. Private reports he had compiled concerning herself soon distracted her. It pleased her to note comments like: If it were not for the importance of her research, I would immediately recommend her for a position on the Oversight Committee. However, I am loath to turn such a mind away from research and employ it in the prosaic managerial and political aspects of running Combine.

A further distraction for her was the archived material concerning the original building of Corisanthe Main while the four segments of the Worm were held in a stripped-out cruiser hastily converted into the role of a magnetic bottle. It seemed at this time the Worm showed little activity. In a state of shock, perhaps? It only began to become active after they transported it from the cruiser to the newly completed canisters which would hold its separate segments inside the Ozark Cylinders. As if it knew where it was being taken? But eventually Yishna found what she was looking for, and then it felt as if something juddered to a halt inside her mind.

There were three of them. Protocol Three detailed 'Actions in the event of physical containment breach should there be an inability to evacuate the station'. It seemed that it was possible to eject the Ozark Cylinders entire from the station. Protocol Two detailed the 'Evacuation of the station in the event of physical containment breach and the thermal and EM sterilisation of the Ozark Cylinders'. Protocol One talked of evacuation, massive physical breach beyond the cylinders and the infestation of the station itself. Six thermo-nuclear warheads had been evenly placed throughout its structure, and their detonation would vaporise everything. It also seemed evident to Yishna that, in some cases, the protocol demanded their detonation even without evacuation of personnel.

She stared at this dry set of rules and felt a sudden overpowering anger. This cannot be allowed. The thought sat leaden and incontestable in her mind. They should not be able, out of fear, to so easily destroy all or part of the Worm. It was a trust. It belonged to all and itself. It belonged to her!

Now she began to really tear into the station's computer systems. With both hands to her touch-screens she created and modified programs, hunted down and absorbed. Inside her skull she felt a bloated heaviness, and knew she was moving into one of those almost sublime moments of mentation. She quickly located all the warheads, and discovered they could not be physically disarmed—were in fact regularly checked for readiness. The lasers and thermite explosives it would be impossible to get to, since they lay actually inside the cylinders and none could go there without accompanying OCTs. But, as always, there was another way.