Polity 2 - Hilldiggers (39 page)

“Someone must be moving it right now,” she told Dalepan.

“Well, I figured—what the hell is that?”

Just as he spoke, an infernal light glared in through upper ports in the roof of Centre Cross Chamber.

“Attention all personnel!” Director Gneiss's face appeared on one of her touch-screens, his voice issuing from the screen speaker and also over the public address system. “Our telescope arrays have been monitoring Fleet manoeuvres between here and Carmel, and twenty-five minutes ago Fleet hilldiggers fired approximately a thousand inert relativistic projectiles at Combine stations. Expected time of impact is thirty-eight minutes from now. This is an act of war and in response we are neutralising all Fleet satellites in orbit that could pose a danger to us militarily or be used for intelligence gathering. It is fortunate Fleet evacuated those satellites first. All personnel are to don suit helmets and check suit integrity before moving to their stations.” Gneiss paused for a moment, and Yishna thought he looked almost bored. “Okay, most of you know what to do now—those of you who don't, check with your superiors. Further updates and announcements will be made on Media Channel One. That's all.”

Yishna immediately began searching for exterior views of activity from Main and from other stations. While she did this a rumbling noise dragged her attention up to where armoured shutters were closing across all the Centre Cross ports.

It's really happening. My brother ...

On her screens she soon observed ships launching from Corisanthe stations II and III. They were big, well armed, but nothing like the scale of the hilldiggers. Defence buoys were also going up: robotic spheres containing a honeycomb of hard ceramocarbide steel whose sum purpose was to detect incoming projectiles and put themselves in their way, the honeycomb being specially designed to break those projectiles apart. Once all these had departed, the energy screens would also go up, and rail-guns and beam weapons would be made ready. Soon a lot of fast-moving metal would be flying about out there.

Yishna dragged her spacesuit helmet a little closer as she continued to flick through these various scenes, then paused the display at something she could not identify: Corisanthe II was rail-gun-launching a stream of large pill-shaped objects through a window that remained in its growing defences. These objects were now speeding away from Sudoria, out towards interplanetary space. She considered asking someone about them, but instead decided to track the information down herself. Keying into current launches from Corisanthe II, she immediately hit a security block, but one she possessed the clearance to get round. A little further work pulled up a schematic of one of the unfamiliar objects on her screen. It seemed they contained new concealment technology that had not been made available to Fleet, and this was wrapped around an old plutonium-based technology. They were atomic stealth mines—all of them in the megaton range—and so a rather unpleasant surprise awaiting Fleet.

Then the schematic abruptly disappeared as Dalepan appeared before her. “About that cable?”

Prosaic interruption, but on such mundane details might their lives depend.

McCrooger

The food, drink, and gentle exercise seemed to be doing the trick, and I now felt some optimism while striding around the circular corridor. Big mistake: an abrupt change of course threw me stumbling towards a wall, and I put out a hand to steady myself. As my palm hit its slick surface my forearm bones snapped with a gristly crunch, and a spike of bone stabbed out through the muscle. Turning I shouldered into the wall, and, gripping my wrist, stared at the injury with disbelief. It just didn't seem to make any sense. I then reached out to a nearby pillar, tried to grab hold and couldn't, so held one hand in place with the other as I tried to pull the bones straight so they would heal in the correct position. The broken end of the bone disappeared back into muscle with a glutinous sucking sound, and agony washed up my arm, bringing with it a tide of blackness.

After an unknown time, consciousness returned to me. I found myself lying on the floor, my face in something sticky. Blood? Blood all around me in a spreading pool. My arm was bleeding copiously and I knew that even for a normal human this degree of bleeding wasn't right. It seemed, along with ridiculously brittle bones, I had also developed some form of haemophilia.

“Help,” I managed, but it only came out in a whisper. Again, “Help.” No one around. I knew there was no way of getting to my feet, since I felt like a wet rag, but if no one turned up soon it seemed likely I would bleed to death. Summoning every fragment of will I could muster, I managed to roll over onto my back. I groped down my chest with one hand and closed it over my pendant, which was now just a shapeless lump. Bringing it up near my lips I managed one hoarse, “Tigger,” before even the energy to speak deserted me.

Normal perception began to break apart then. Nightmare creatures slid out to shake their twisted limbs at me, gape with slobbering mouths and slink away again. A dark figure loomed, studying me analytically, and I could hear the sound of footsteps on a hollow bony floor...which slowly changed to a sharp awareness of my own breathing and heartbeat and, somehow, of the autonomous system that kept them going. I felt incredibly weary and it seemed that there, in that deeper knowledge of my own function, lay my answer. I knew instantly that I could, through an act of will, simply stop everything. I guessed this to be something like the perception which must be experienced by those who delivered their famous last words and then promptly died; they knew they could let go their hold on life at any time, and so chose the appropriate moment.

While carrying the original Spatterjay virus, I hadn't really been human and so could not have died like a human. But I didn't know what carrying IF21 inside me meant. The fact that I leaked blood was so unusual for me in itself, but could I actually bleed to death? Would I die if my heart stopped or if I stopped breathing? I don't know whether it was these thoughts that initiated it, but suddenly I found myself at a point of utter stillness, deep in a personal silence. I had just allowed my heart and lungs to grow still, and blood no longer pumped from my arm—yet I remained functional, presumably due to the transference of oxygen and nutrients through the viral fibres of IF21 to where they were needed, as would have been the case with the original virus. With the shutting down of those two crucial organs also went all those involuntary twitches that are the signs of life. Perhaps other autonomous functions had also closed down. Lying there in that silence, I realised my body might not die, yet that I myself could. To complete my death I only needed to shut down my brain, which I now felt I knew how to do. However, I was an Old Captain and 'the long habit of living' was a difficult one to break, so I just lay there not dying.

Next, voices impinged upon my silence, and I saw people staring down at me. I realised they believed me to be dead and so were taking no action. By restarting my heart and lungs, I initiated all sorts of activity around me. Soon Flog was carrying me, cradled like an infant, a silver tiger pacing at his side. A tourniquet of woven hide wound above my elbow seemed to have lessened the renewed blood flow, but not stopped it. Or maybe there just wasn't that much of it left inside me. Something had changed, too: my breathing and the beating of my heart no longer seemed entirely autonomous. It was as if by consciously interfering with the living process I had now taken over responsibility for it, so must keep a small hard kernel of willpower constantly focused on the task of making those organs work. To allow myself to die now seemed rather less an act of will, more a case of ceasing that act.

“He's dying,” Tigger confirmed for me to Rhodane as I lay on my organic bed inside the spin section. A Brumallian I did not recognise attached a drip, while another placed metal clamps around shattered bone in my numb open arm. “He'll not last more than another month,” Tigger added.

“What is doing this to him?”

“I told you about the two viruses inside him, and how one of them needed to be sacrificed—the only one we could kill—to ensure his survival. Well, it now looks like the one left behind is killing him anyway.”

“How so?”

I never heard the rest for I blacked out. Later I woke in a panic, thinking that by slipping from consciousness I might also release the reins I held to my heart and lungs. However, that hard lump of willpower was too stubborn to renege on its duties because of mere unconsciousness.

“How is it killing me?” I asked.

Even before opening my eyes I knew only Tigger occupied the room with me.

“IF21 does work like the original Spatterjay virus—transferring nutrients and oxygen around your body and occasionally carrying nerve impulses. Unlike the original, this one isn't replacing muscle and bone with something stronger, but with something weaker. The nerve impulses it carries aren't always the ones you want either, and it's also destroying some parts of your body to feed its own growth.”

“It's destroying my autonomous nervous system,” I suggested, opening my eyes.

Tigger squatted beside my bed, peering down at me with mild but implacable amber eyes. He paused for a long moment before replying. “You're aware of that?”

“I am.”

“Well, it isn't just that it's screwing. Add to the list your immune system, your body's ability to produce T-cells and clotting cells, and really,” Tigger shrugged, “all your major organs. By the state of your liver it looks like you've been a bit too partial to the sea-cane rum for far too long.”

“Any good news?” I quipped.

“Some. The IF21 may still not kill you.”

“Really.”

“Quite likely the hilldigger on its way out to us will do that instead.”

I can't say that I was a great fan of Tigger's morbid humour.

“Then you must do what we discussed.”

“I intend to—just preparing myself for the AI-upon-AI melding.” Tigger tapped one claw against his metal skull. “I need to be in full control—can't just give instructions.”

“Right,” I said, staring at the ceiling. Only after a moment did it impinge upon me what Tigger was saying. “You're saying this ship's computer is AI?”

“Yup, even under the two hundred and seventy-first revision of the Turing Test,” Tigger replied.

It seemed that the ship, after receiving instructions from the Consensus, carried them out in the way it saw best—in the same way that, under the impetus of consensus, Brumallians would go into battle, but it would be up to them to figure out how best to avoid getting themselves killed. It would seem that the Consensus knew how to delegate.

“I'll ask the ship,” Rhodane had told Tigger, shortly after the drone let her know his intentions.

And the ship apparently replied, “Yes, I would like to make these alterations to myself, since a hilldigger is now heading directly towards us.”

After hearing all that news, I closed my eyes again.

“There's something else I can do,” Tigger informed me.

“Hit me with it.”

“Once melded, I can create the means to stick you into hibernation. Then I could get you back to the Polity.”

“I'll think about it,” I said.

The Brumallians were an implacable and merciless enemy. They did not negotiate, did not communicate, and they gave and accepted no quarter, so this was a fight that could only end with one contender lying bleeding on the ground. In the latter stages of the War the people of Sudoria knew all this with utter certainty, which was why, when the hilldiggers arrived at Brumal, their final strike against the enemy came close to genocide. Many records were destroyed during the revolt that resulted in our present Parliament, but a sufficient number have survived to tell us the true story. The Brumallians had wanted peace, they wanted a ceasefire, they wanted an ending, but for the first twenty years of conflict they were asking for these things from the plutocrats—people who were making fortunes out of building massive warships and stations in orbit, and out of manufacturing munitions. These approaches were either dismissed or, worse, responded to with treachery. I shall include below a report that details the capture of a small Brumallian ship sent to us with negotiators aboard, and what happened to those captives when they were sent to a bioweapons research establishment. The Brumallians stopped talking after their first big warships took apart a hilldigger. Directly after this the sudden spate of representations to them from the plutocrats were ignored. This occurred only a few months before those same plutocrats were due for their appointment with a bolt gun and a Komarl rock.

—Uskaron

Tigger

Using full-spectrum scanning of the interior of the ship, Tigger studied its cellular structure of compartments linked by intestinal corridors. Within a scattering of compartments inside the spin section he noted Brumallians monitoring and tending to organic machinery with the focus of veterinary surgeons. The crew seemed almost like components in the ship's immune system—little nano-doctors attentively ensuring its health. It was all rather primitive really. Polity ships, though not the product of an organic technology, did not require ministering to with such finesse.

He had always been interested in how a society that ruled by consensus could manage to conduct a war where decisions needed to be made instantly and without consultation. He had supposed that some Brumallians had been selected as commanders and on them the Consensus had delegated authority. This he subsequently discovered to be true, but within certain limitations: to those individuals who proved the best at any task, the authority over that task had been delegated, so the weapons inventors were left to their own devices, literally, and those devices then passed on to those most capable of manufacturing them—and so on. But that had not been enough. The Brumallian Consensus wanted the war won, and the enemy rendered incapable of attacking again. Implementing this was not something that could be efficiently governed by the ebb and flow of public opinion—they realised they needed overall commanders to make hard tactical and logistical decisions. They grew them.