Polity 4 - The Technician (15 page)

‘Yes, I get
that.’

‘More
Polity control, more restrictions.’ Still that flat tone, yet he was talking
about something Separatists had been fighting for for years. He continued, ‘The
greatest dangers to you are the Atheter AI and what might be inside Tombs’s
head.’

‘Which
is why he needs to die.’

‘You
need to think bigger.’

‘Go on.’

‘We
calculate that the AIs presently watching over Tombs will guide him to certain
locations. They will confront him with the realities he has avoided through his
madness. It seems likely that one of these confrontations will involve the
Atheter AI.’

‘And?’

‘You
need to get close to him; you need to be with him when he reaches the AI. The
Atheter AI is perhaps the larger danger and needs to be eliminated.’

‘No one
can get close,’ Shree replied. ‘The barrier around it is loaded with
force-fields and sensors. You need permission from the planetary governor, the
AI Ergatis, to get there, and I’m damned if I want that thing inspecting me so
closely. Anyway, as I understand it, no one has been granted that permission
for years.’

‘We
calculate that Tombs will be permitted to approach it.’

‘Right,
so all I have to do is get close to Tombs, stay with him when he goes to the
AI, meanwhile smuggling a bomb in under my blouse?’

‘Circumstances
are now in your favour. You can use your cover as an Earthnet reporter to get
close to Tombs.’

‘Yeah,
they’ll choose me over all the other reporters who’ll want to be in on this.’

‘Circumstances
are now in your favour.’ The repetition gave Shree more of the creeps than the
sight of that heroyne. Was it the Dracocorp augs that had seemingly dehumanized
these people? She glanced at Halloran’s two attendants. They hadn’t moved since
she and he had started talking, and their expressions were blank.

‘What
circumstances?’

‘We
understand that a Human will be recruited to shepherd Tombs. That Human is the
erstwhile rebel commander, Leif Grant. You know him, he knows you. This is your
entry point.’

Shree
grimaced. Halloran said ‘Human’ like he wasn’t a member of that species.

‘Possible,’
she agreed, wondering if Halloran knew her history with Grant. ‘But that still
leaves the problem of how I “eliminate” a fifty-metre disc of memory crystal
with a building sitting on top of it.’ She paused for a moment. ‘You can
guarantee that getting any form of chemical explosive past the barrier will be
impossible and a CTD containment flask would be detected at once.’

Halloran
held up his hand and clicked his fingers. The attendant on his left, the man,
stepped forward and just stood there dumb for a moment. Halloran clicked his
fingers again, in irritation, and the blond-haired man abruptly opened his coat
and then his shirt to expose a bare pale chest and saggy stomach. He then
turned over his right hand and stared at it for a moment, before twisting his
fingers in some odd fashion. A knife shot out of his sleeve, delivering the
handle straight into his hand. He flipped it up, turned it, then stabbed it
back in just below his breastbone.

‘My
God!’ Shree exclaimed, then was suddenly annoyed with herself for using those
words.

The man
slit down, almost with the indifference of someone unzipping a carryall. Blood
gouted and spattered down his trousers. He reached inside himself, grabbed
something and pulled it out with a horrible sucking sound, then held it up. The
slit in his stomach bulged intestines.

Halloran
turned and gazed at him, perhaps conveying some silent communication through
his Dracocorp aug. The man removed a thick pad of cloth from his pocket and
cleaned off the squat glassy cylinder he was holding, before handing it over.
Halloran nodded. The man turned, pushing his intestines back inside, walked
with a slight stagger over to the twin-disc then abruptly sat down next it and
leant his back against it. He was going to die, Shree realized. He was just
going to die.

‘Was
that entirely necessary?’

‘It was
the safest way of smuggling this’ – Halloran held up the cylinder – ‘to this
world. It possesses electronic camouflage to screen it from scanning, but not
to conceal it from a physical search of our luggage.’

‘CTD?’
Shree enquired. ‘I thought it almost impossible to hide an antimatter
containment flask.’

‘So the
Polity would have us believe, but no, it is not a CTD.’

The
blond man had bowed over now. His trousers were soaked with blood, as was the
ground all around him.

‘Then
what is it?’

‘The one
thing that will utterly ensure the destruction of the Atheter AI.’ Halloran
held the cylinder out to her and, with some reluctance, she took it. ‘There is
a simple DNA fingerprint console on the end, you will notice.’ Shree observed a
small glassy circle, almost like an old-style camera lens. ‘You press your
finger against it once and it records your fingerprint and DNA. Do so now.’
Shree did as she was told, heard a little chime issue from the cylinder.

‘Now
what?’ she asked.

‘Only
you can open it now,’ Halloran continued. ‘The next time you touch the reader
and press, hard, the cylinder opens.’

‘And
then what happens?’

‘You
unleash Hell.’ It was the nearest he had come to saying something emotive.

‘Then I
don’t want to be in the vicinity when that happens.’

‘You can
throw the cylinder and run but, having used this weapon, you will be hunted by
the Polity.’

‘Nothing
new to me.’

‘You
misunderstand. The most powerful Polity minds will be seeking you and, should
they catch you, their forensic AIs will take apart your mind. A better choice
for you would be to stay with the cylinder when you open it.’

‘What
does it contain?’ she asked, feeling that excitement again, that response to a
challenge.

‘Active
Jain technology.’

That
dumbfounded Shree for a moment, then she managed, ‘It will destroy the Atheter
AI?’

‘No.’

‘What do
you mean “no”?’

‘It will
do what it always does. It will begin to hijack technology or even any life it
comes into contact with.’

‘With
what result?’

‘The
Polity satellite network will detect it within minutes and the AIs will react
within seconds. They consider the Atheter AI a potential danger, but an Atheter
AI being infested with Jain tech they will consider a system-wide lethal
threat. The AI and probably a great deal else within the barrier will be vaporized.
You will have to run very fast.’

Shree
weighed the cylinder in her hand, nodded an acknowledgement and turned away.
Would she run? She didn’t know, but she did know that she would deliver this
item to the designated place.

Jem stepped out of the boat and took a couple of paces away before
turning to study it. Though damaged, it still appeared serviceable and, with
some effort, he should be able to drag it back down off the shingle strand and
relaunch it. But he didn’t want to go back into the sea. He didn’t want to risk
the sealuroynes again. Didn’t want to see the patterns in their eyes. Yet even
here on the land, he didn’t feel in the slightest bit safe. There were
dangerous animals here, he knew, and now, almost as if it had woken the moment
he contacted solid land, something, somewhere, was muttering like a giant
stirring in uneasy slumber. He concentrated on it, realizing it was distant
from him, somewhere far inland. Then abruptly it seemed to retreat, and he felt
fear, though whether his own or from that other source he could not tell. Once
it faded it seemed that it had been the only thing holding him in place, and he
impelled himself into motion, and stepped back to the boat.

After
searching through the lockers he unloaded a collection of supplies then packed
them into a bag that he emptied of some sort of inflatable. Checking the map
screen again he saw that if he crossed the peninsula to Godhead the journey
would only be twenty kilometres, but that meant crossing flute-grass prairie
occupied by the kind of horrors he had always tried to see only from his
aerofan, nervous even when fifty metres up in the sky. Also, the mapping
computer of the boat could not be detached and there were no portable direction
finders amidst the rest of the equipment. He could very well end up lost, then
dead.

Better,
he felt, to stick to the shore and take the sixty- or seventy-kilometre route
round to the port town. He didn’t know what dangers might lurk in that margin
between flute grasses and sea, but at least across the open stretches of
shingle or compacted mud he would be able to see them coming. They wouldn’t
surface like a mud snake through the rhizome mat and chomp him down, nor creep
up on him concealed by chameleon skin and only at the last moment reveal an
improbable mouthful of teeth, nor come down on him like . . .

Jem
abruptly found himself sitting with his back to the boat, shivering, his gaze
fixed on the flowering flute grasses a few hundred metres inland from him, cold
horror wrapped around his guts.

‘With perfect timing it cut his aug off
just as it was being taken over – cut it off while taking off his face.’

He could
not put the words into context, could not remember where or when they had been
spoken. Certainly he recognized Sanders’s voice but could not see much beyond
that, just some shadowy figure she had been addressing. And even though he knew
it had been something that was staged for him, to reinforce their fiction about
this mythical hooder the Technician, the terror he felt was undeniable.

How long
he sat there he did not know. It was only when the slow counting down of the
timer on his wristwatch impinged upon him that he managed to force himself back
to his feet. Four days left of his prosthetic’s oxygen supply – somewhere along
the line he had lost a day, but he couldn’t figure out if that had been while
at sea or while here on the shore. He took up his bag, managed to slip its
handles over his shoulders to make it a backpack, and set out, small nodules of
stone hard through the soles of his sanatorium slippers. At first walking was
difficult, his legs feeling weak and rubbery and his breathing harsh. He
started to get hot too, but after a few hundred metres found himself settling
into a steady rolling gait. After a little while he glanced back, noting that
the boat was now out of sight, then he began to study his surroundings more
closely.

The
shore here, like all the shores of the continent but for the one against the
northern mountains, consisted of stretches of compacted mud or shingle. The
shores were in a perpetual state of flux, having no rock to anchor them.
Tricone-generated soil was perpetually washed away or redeposited, and often
the steady scouring processes of the sea washed out all but the largest items the
tricones left after their constant grinding processes, that being this shingle
with no stone larger than a ridiculously precise three millimetres across, each
drift topped with lighter pebbles of foamstone scraped from the undersides of
numerous structural rafts inland. Also, flute grasses fought to reclaim land,
whilst the sea fought to take it back. A frequent sight at sea, Jem knew, were
floating islands of dying flute grass, which had been snatched away by late
summer storms.

Other
things now began to impinge upon him, almost as if he was waking up from
nightmare to bright day. He saw a drift of snow-white tricone shells like the
back of some beast preparing to dive into the mud below, each shell no larger
than three fingers. These were those killed in the mud here by the high
concentration of salts their kind had generated by grinding up the land and
which were subsequently washed into the sea. Remembering some
Theocracy-approved biology, he knew that some time in the past there had been
tricones in the ocean, but they could no longer survive there. He saw red
nematodes writhing through a bank of hard mud like slow veins, a crowd of
mudslappers skittering towards the waves at his approach, then he ducked down
upon seeing a small heroyne striding across the mudflat now extending to his
right. Only when he passed what looked like an oddly sculpted boulder of lava
until he realized it was a segment of a dead hooder did some of the brightness
go out of his day. And the other sound from the flute grasses to his left took
the rest of it.

‘Yissock
blaggerslog,’ said a voice quite distinctly, whilst some huge shape shifted
there.

With
utter cold dread he realized that a gabbleduck was keeping pace with him.

The muttering was back, that thing stirring, somewhere. At first it
seemed it might be coming from the gabbleduck, but somehow, deep inside, he
knew it wasn’t the original source. The creature was a relay, its presence
somehow amplifying that . . . sense of something else.

There
seemed no point in running, because the only predators here that a Human on
foot could outpace were the ambush ones like mud snakes. A gabbleduck, with its
odd loping and rippling gait, would be able to bring him down within a few tens
of metres, so if it wanted him dead, he was dead. But even there, he suddenly
found room for optimism. A heroyne big enough to consider him viable prey would
have been on him in an instant, gulped him down whole to suffocate and burn in
its acidic stomach. A siluroyne would have shown no hesitation either and would
have grabbed him and eaten him alive, even though his flesh would have later
sickened it enough to throw up his remains. But gabbleducks were odd contrary
creatures whose actions often defied the conventional behaviour of predator
with prey.

Gabbleducks
sometimes pursued their prey with outrageous stubbornness – Jem distinctly
recollected a story of a proctor, high up in his aerofan, being followed by one
all the way back to Agatha Compound. The thing managed to get through all the
compound’s defences, though badly wounded, then ignored the man and trashed his
vehicle, before expiring on its way out. Both compound and surrounding crop
ponds then had to be abandoned when the scent of dead gabbleduck brought in a
swarm of hooders, and the mess they left took months to clear up.