Polity 4 - The Technician (14 page)

At first
he thought he was seeing a bare rock sticking up from the waves, but when he
detected movement he realized that yes, a rock was sticking up over there, but
it was covered with sealuroynes. Knocking off the autopilot, which obviously
wasn’t taking into account the local fauna, he swung his boat away from the
colony hoping to bypass it before being seen. However, having only just woken
he hadn’t seen the danger soon enough, and the heaving movement there
culminated in a wave of the creatures diving into the sea with a concerted
splash.

‘Zelda
Smythe, guard me now,’ he muttered, and grabbed up the harpoon from by his
feet.

He
didn’t know for sure whether sealuroynes were dangerous. But they possessed a
similar name to the predatory siluroyne, and now they appeared to be in pursuit
of him he didn’t want to wait to find out. He turned the motor throttle right
round to its stop and the outboard roared, throwing spume out behind and
lifting the bow clear of the water. But even this did not seem likely to be
fast enough, for the creatures behind were accelerating, playfully hurling
themselves up out of the water as they came.

For long
minutes he stayed ahead of them, then they were into his wake, their bodies
churning the sea like oiled rubber, then leaping out beside his boat, then
ahead of it. Seeing one of them leap airborne close to the boat, he shuddered.
The things looked like shroud-wrapped corpses, bones more than a mere hint
through translucent obsidian skin, underlying arms enwrapping torsos but
terminating in odd fan-shaped fins which at the tail opened and closed like the
petals of a rose, long stretched bird heads and teardrop eyes containing
turning wheels of linked familiar shapes.

Jem found
himself choking on terror. He couldn’t look at those eyes. They gazed straight
into the darkness in his mind and seemed to be the key to unravelling it. In
the rush and splash of their movement all about him, he heard the underlying
sharpening of scythes, and it was as if the surrounding creatures were all
merging into one menacing whole, rearing up out of the sea into a nightmare
hood. Another sound now, and Jem realized it was issuing from him, a chesty
keening that seemed to be using up all his air. He dragged his gaze away, the
confusing image of the thing they were making spreading before the boat, sharp
edges and grey-scaled hide.

Then the
boat slammed into it, hurling him forwards. Jem smacked his head on one of the
lockers, but though his head covering transmitted pain, no blessed
unconsciousness arrived. He curled in the bottom of the boat, crying. When he
finally surfaced it was to observe a sea filled with nothing more threatening
than waves, and to see his map screen indicating that he had hit the western
side of the peninsula he had been trying to navigate around.

Heroyne
(an introduction)

As indicated by its name, this creature
does bear some resemblance to the heron of Earth, this emphasized by a
similarity of environments – of mud flats covered with the reedlike ‘flute
grasses’. However, there are no flying creatures on that world that have not
been introduced by Humans, and to call an alien organism a bird is to descend
into fundamental error. Heroynes look like birds, hatch from eggs and make
nests, but there the resemblance ends. The eggs are not hatched in the nests,
but carried about on the back of the prime male (image one) of the species,
whose body resembles a thick bucket seat, its long curved neck extending from
what would have been the backrest. Below this neck, to the creature’s fore, are
two sets of arms terminating in spadelike scoops, whose sum purpose is to load
the eggs onto its back. The prime male also possesses a long beak just like the
secondary male and the female (images two and three respectively), but it is
serrated, and no one knows why. The female builds a night nest – a thick pad of
interwoven flute-grass stems. After being fertilized by the primary and
secondary males it lays eggs in this nest after three months’ gestation, then
abandons them, whereupon the primary male collects them up and carries them
around until they hatch. Heroyne chicks must then get away from the male as
fast as they can whilst the male goes into a brief fugue, after which it will
eat them. One thing is known for certain about these creatures: more study is
required, because much of their behaviour doesn’t seem to have a logical
evolutionary basis.

However . . .

–
From THE MASADAN PLANETARY Almanac

The Atheter had constructed the mechanism with meticulous precision, and
deeply graven their purpose into its structure. It must erase the active higher
thought processes, the sentience and intelligence of the Atheter themselves – a
wipeout process affecting not only the content of those minds, but their
physical structure too. Upon first initiating, it had spread its pattern
disruptors all around the Homeworld to carry out its function on a massive
scale, and sometimes, when it was done, too little survived of the animal mind
to keep the target alive. However, many did survive the process and, as had
been planned, the Atheter returned to the level of animals: gabbleducks. This
done, the mechanism followed through with its secondary function: matter
disruption to shatter remaining Atheter technology, to render it down small
enough for the tricones and the depredations of time.

Upon
completion, the mechanism packed away its disruptors and next sent out all its
probes as it turned hunter, tracking down those minds that had avoided the
initial holocaust at its location on the Atheter Homeworld. It also began to
move itself away so as to be able to more easily bring its power to bear.
Whenever a probe found a living, thinking Atheter, the mechanism took a
disruptor out of storage and dispatched it to that location, to erase the mind
found there, and shatter the technology the Atheter had surrounded itself with.
These Atheter had either fled or not been part of the return home, and most of
them, existing in situations that required technical expertise to sustain, did
not survive losing both their minds and their artificial environments.

This
hunt took it a realtime period of fifty thousand years, towards the end of
which span it seemed the mechanism’s task was nearing completion and the moment
approaching for it to destroy itself, breaking the last link between the
gabbleducks and the Atheter civilization. However, those long years and its
numerous battles had taken their toll. Necessarily it had needed to repair
itself, many times, and its programming had degraded throughout the process.
When the time came for it to die it found the parameters of completion of its
mission too vague to act upon. Instead it settled itself in U-space adjacent to
its realspace position at the limits of the Atheter realm, its touch light on
its probes, which now encompassed thousands of light years, and watched.

Proof
that its task remained incomplete came to its attention a million years into
its vigil when a rogue war machine of its masters tried to load a static recorded
Atheter mind to one of the animals. The war machine was a formidable physical
being. It possessed defences against the kind of direct attack the mechanism
had been intending to launch, and wielded weapons at the peak of Atheter
technology.

The
mechanism considered the necessity of relocating to the actual scene to bring
the full force of all its pattern disruptors to bear, considered how dangerous
that would be to itself. It frantically sought some way of fulfilling its
programming without a direct confrontation and, because that programming had
degraded, found it.

Through
its probe, it found a situation it could manipulate to a satisfactory
conclusion. The war machine was vulnerable at that moment, rather like some
predator in the process of giving birth. The attack was brief, specific,
involved no apocalyptic weapons. The result was a war machine with a scrambled
mind, and the failure of its attempt to resurrect one of its masters. A better
result would have been the complete obliteration of the war machine, but the
mechanism just settled back like a senile cat watching an injured snake.

The next
situation that impelled the mechanism to fulfil its function occurred a million
years later, the circumstances surrounding the event, and its location, utterly
unexpected. It found one of the animals located away from its Homeworld and in
the process of having an Atheter mind-recording loaded to it. Data from the
probe that found this was murky, and the mechanism mistook the occurrence for
some automated process, some Atheter machine, missed by the hunters, at last
firing up. It first tried to halt this process by working through the probe
only, deeming only minimal interference necessary. Something rebuffed this
attempt, violently, the mechanism assailed by killer programs suddenly loading
to it from the probe. The mechanism fought to destroy them, meanwhile waking
and dispatching one of its pattern disruptors. Through the disruptor its power
ramped up, as did its ability to see through the murk. It found a powerful
alien intelligence there; an artificial intelligence calling itself Penny
Royal. They fought, their battleground the disruptor itself, and their own
mental strongholds. It managed to fulfil its programming and prevent the
loading of an Atheter mind to a gabbleduck. But the fight had taken a further
toll and it did not completely destroy its enemy, and retreated, its physical
structure damaged and its programming further disrupted, to again settle back,
watching, and not quite understanding why.

It couldn’t be a coincidence that they had contacted her now. Jeremiah
Tombs was on the move – apparently he’d stolen a boat and was currently en
route to the mainland – and the Polity AIs were watching him closely. As she
drove her mud buggy hard through the wilderness north of Greenport, Shree felt
an excitement twisting her stomach she hadn’t experienced since . . . since the
rebellion. She felt sure her offworld Separatist contact had seen an angle
here, some way of striking a blow for freedom.

Her
buggy collapsed the flute grasses before it, occasionally disturbing creatures
from hiding: mud snakes shoved the tips of their horse-skull snouts out of the
ground, and sprawns that had escaped during the rebellion, and now thrived out
here, would go flitting up to fill the air with the mica-like glitter of their
dragonfly wings. At one point a heroyne rose up from its woven nest of grass
and stalked away stilt-legged. She shuddered at the sight of the big birdlike
monstrosity. Certainly there were more dangerous creatures on this world, but
none that gave her the creeps like a heroyne. She had seen one of these
creatures gobble down whole one of her comrades, then stride away with the man
still struggling as he slid down its long throat. What a death – drowning in
stomach acid. However, there was nothing in the vicinity that could be a danger
to her whilst she remained inside the bubble cabin of her vehicle. No hooders
or big gabbleducks – she got that direct from one of the Polity satellites.

When she
finally motored her buggy out into a muddy channel, she brought it to a halt
and checked her map screen. Yes, this was the place she had been aiming for –
just a kilometre along this channel and she would be at the coordinates. As she
turned her vehicle she wondered if her contact, Halloran, would be here. It
would be nice to at last put a face to the voice – communications had been
necessarily limited in bandwidth to prevent Polity interception, so no image
data had been used.

Finally
the coordinates’ tracker zeroed. She brought the buggy to a halt again and
gazed ahead. The channel had reached its terminus here, the flute grasses once
again closing in, and beside the wall of stalks stood a twin-disc aerofan. She
shut down the engine, unstrapped herself, picked up her stubby Zatak melee gun
– it fired a load of fibre-linked glass beads on different choke settings and
was capable of taking down three or four people if they stood close enough
together – opened her bubble-cab door and stepped down.

‘Shree
Enkara.’ The voice was instantly recognizable – flat, emotionless, almost as if
the one speaking had some difficulty with spoken language: Halloran.

He
stepped out from behind the twin-disc, a squat bulky man who bore some
resemblance to Unit Leader Thracer. He wore a long heavy coat, baggy trousers
and inadequate shoes now stained with mud, and seeing that the two companions
walking out behind him were similarly attired, Shree wondered if they adhered
to some sort of Separatist dress code. The other two, a man and a woman who might
have been twins, what with their pale hair and narrow aesthetic faces, both
wore breather masks. Halloran, however, wore none. Was he adapted to the
Masadan atmosphere like herself, Shree wondered, or was he adapted to all sorts
of different environments? She just didn’t know.

‘Halloran,’
she said. ‘Good to meet you at last.’

‘Yes,
good,’ he said, without any emphasis.

The next
thing she noticed was that all three wore scaly organic augs clinging to the
sides of their heads like adolescent scoles. She didn’t like that. Though she
had been aware that Separatists used Dracocorp augs, they were too much of a
reminder of others who had worn the same: those in the Theocracy Brotherhood,
her enemy.

‘So
what’s the urgency?’ she asked. ‘I take it you know that I’ve got an important
hit coming up?’

‘Yes,
Jeremiah Tombs.’

‘That’s
what this is about, isn’t it?’

‘Yes.’

Shree
felt a surge of frustration. She felt like stepping over to slap him across the
face to elicit some sort of Human reaction.

‘Perhaps
you can elaborate?’

‘The
AOP,’ he replied.

‘Yes,
I’m aware of the Alien Occupancy Policy.’

‘Then
you are aware that this place could end up being classified as an alien
Homeworld, with the result that you would have little or no say about your
future here.’