Polity 4 - The Technician (46 page)

Cherry-picking
information as it slid into the Masadan system, camouflaged electronically from
the Theocracy’s primitive sensors, Dragon noted that the Theocrats were aware
of the original source of their augmentations and, possessing minds twisted by
religion, had created a mythology about them. This it seemed enabled them to
accept something which, up to this time, did not fit doctrine.

They had
named Dragon Behemoth and distorted that label to their purpose. Behemoth, it
seemed, was an angel only half-fallen, a renegade and a rogue, but not entirely
evil. The augs were a gift from this entity, a powerful tool of seraphic origin
that could lead them to damnation if they weren’t sufficiently strong and did
not adhere sufficiently to the tenets of their faith. Dragon loved this thing
about Humans: how they lied even to themselves for their own advantage. Then
something else, coming in through the sensor cloud it had distributed ahead of
it, riveted its attention.

Masada.

They’d
named their world after the Jewish fortress zealots suicided in rather than be
captured by the Romans who had it under siege, yet they had not made it their
own fortress, rather keeping their powerbase offworld, in the cylinder worlds
presently under construction, and in their growing fleet. Did their reluctance
stem from some sense of what this world had been; that they would have been
building down there on the rotten foundations of an even older fortress?

As the
sensor bees settled through the atmosphere they relayed enough data for Dragon
to see the vague shape of it all. As they either hit the ground and began
sucking up and analysing genetic material or sank into the ground for deeper
scans, that shape hardened into visibility. The tricones for this, the hooders
for that, the Atheter themselves now just animals but with a potential that had
to have been held in check in some other . . .

There.

A brief
glimpse of some alien eye peeking out from underspace to check all was well,
the patterns of that continuum indicating an evident link back to something
with the power to act, with the power to ensure its masters remained animals.
Dragon of course perfectly understood the despair, driven by Jain technology,
which could lead to such racial suicide. Had it not seen something similar in
the kind that had sent it to the Humans in the first place? Wasn’t that kind of
madness why it had gone rogue?

So very
very interesting, and with all sorts of ramifications. Certainly, even with
Dracocorp augs and Separatist technological assistance the Theocracy could
never survive the Polity steamroller. And the status of this world, once the
Polity saw it, absolutely ensured that the Theocracy would be crushed.

But the
Polity, whilst it crushed up and absorbed stray Human civilizations as it
perpetually extended its border, moved too slowly and too cautiously. Its AIs
did not yet understand what danger they were in. Yes, Dragon’s own games and
manipulations kept them alert, but not sufficiently so, for they had a big
tendency towards complacency. They needed to see
Masada, they needed to understand what had happened to the Atheter and they
needed to do both very soon, because the ever-growing span of the Polity was
fertile ground for a Jain node, and that lethal technology would sprout once
again.

Time to
hurry things along.

‘Hierarch
Amoloran!’ Dragon boomed through the aug network whilst, inside itself, it
tapped off some of a lethal metal-eating mycelium from a hidden cache, and
sealed it in a small container.

The
Hierarch’s reply was instant and somewhat worrying in its perspicacity. ‘You
are the creature called Behemoth. Are you here in the Braemar system?’

‘I am
everywhere and nowhere,’ Dragon replied. ‘But here is something you will need
to bring your dreams to fruition.’ Dragon sent coordinates of a point in orbit
over Calypse, simultaneously ejecting the small vessel from inside its body and
setting it on a course to that point.

‘Another
gift?’ Amoloran enquired.

Rather
than reply, Dragon sent a data packet containing instructions for how the
mycelium should be used.

‘We
understand the nature of your gifts, Behemoth: sufficiently attractive for us
to want them, but dangerous to everything we hold dear.’

‘That is
the nature of power.’

‘Yes,
power.’ Amoloran issued instructions, but they went too fast for Dragon to
ghost a copy and study them. ‘Whilst I accept your new gift, Behemoth, I reject
the snare of your old one.’

Abruptly
the chanting and prayer of the Septarchy Friars occupied over 50 per cent of
the aug channels. This abruptly cut down the whole utility of the network,
limiting the extent of communication, limiting the amount of data that could be
transferred from person to person. It also made it a certainty, whilst it
continued, that no one would reach ascendancy over the network and that there
would be no one Dragon could ultimately control. Amoloran had seen the danger,
perhaps not understanding the initial ascendancy of one individual, but
certainly understanding that through the whole network Dragon might be able to
grab hold of their minds.

‘Damn
you Amoloran!’ Dragon cried, allowing its voice to fade,
while its amusement grew. Amoloran would do precisely as predicted. He and all
his fellow idiots believed that ultimately the Theocracy would bring down the
Polity. Wasn’t faith stronger than machines? He was ambitious that this should
happen under his own rule and had been pushing hard to that end. Dragon had
given him a potent weapon against the Polity and he would certainly use it, and
soon. This would sufficiently piss off the Polity AIs and they would come and
stamp on him. Then they would find out about what had happened here on Masada
two million years ago.

Now
considering what it had set in motion, Dragon understood something else: the
necessity of its own death. The mycelium had been used many years ago on a
planet called Samarkand, with over thirty thousand deaths resulting, and the
Dragon sphere that had delivered it there had paid the price of extinction.
After Amoloran used the nano-mycelium again, the Polity AIs would soon identify
its source as Dragon itself. Inevitably they would hunt down this particular
aspect, this sphere of Dragon entire, and given the chance, would kill it too.
Dragon did not want to flee, wanted to remain here to be part of and influence
events, therefore it decided to pursue a course it had been considering for some
time: to die, and live.

More
data, coming in from the sensors, hidden by those who had not wanted to die, in
the genetic code of the life, in patterned atmospheric gases and hot machines
perpetually renewing themselves deep in the magma, etched into the shells of
molluscs, roiling in a hooder’s eye, trapped in the hearts of artificial gems.
And then something else, a huge anomaly, a creature, no, a biomechanism like
Dragon itself, ancient, from the time of the Atheter suicide. It seemed likely
to be here as a result of another Atheter’s attempt at survival but was complex
enough to be worthy of closer study, for the readings nearby sensors provided
were very strange.

Dragon
immediately selected a more powerful and invasive sensor from a store within
itself and spat it towards the world. The long egg-shaped biomechanism speared
through the intervening distance over a period of days. Meanwhile Dragon noted
a Theocracy ship arriving at the location of its new gift to them, picking it
up and transporting it to one of the cylinder worlds.

The
sensor hit atmosphere, burned its way down, shedding dispensable outer layers,
thumped into the surface to blow a steaming crater half a kilometre across,
then in the soft ground underneath began to reformat itself. Finally, during
one Masadan night, it rose to the surface and emerged; a grotesque octopoid
with a bloated tic body five metres long. Its own senses already focused, it
skated out of the already refilling crater. Then cut a channel through the
surrounding flute grasses directly to its target.

The
massive albino hooder was departing the messy site of a recent meal, the
remains of its repast refashioned over long hours into something unknowable
even as it sank into the area of boggy ground it had been made upon. Dragon’s
monstrous sensor slid up to the hooder and flung itself upon it, wrapping
tentacles around it and injecting mechanisms between the segments of its body.
At once Dragon began to realize that the war machine had been hugely disrupted,
not enough to kill it, but enough to render it down to the level of those
animals of its own kind, only its colour and the curious way it played with its
dinner remaining to distinguish it to the casual viewer. However, it was no
walkover. It responded fast and viciously, both on the nanoscopic and
macroscopic levels, repelling internal invasion with its still effective
internal defences, its immune system, and turning its tool-packed hood on
Dragon’s sensor. Within seconds it had torn the sensor apart, and began hitting
the remains with patterned energy fields to tear them apart at the molecular
level. But, by the time the sensor had been turned to slurry spattering the
surrounding grasses, Dragon had all the information it needed.

Dragon
could see that the disruption within the war machine was such that its
self-repair mechanisms could never overcome it. Intervention would be required,
but intervention of a very special kind. The best way past its immune system
was down the white hooder’s gullet: thereafter a penetration through its
digestive system would not elicit such a swift response. Specially designed
viruses could install programming patches, microscopic phages could make
repairs in certain critical areas, those parts of the immune system that had
been turned in on themselves could be burnt out by nanoscopic thermal charges,
thereafter regrowing as they should be. Whole repair wasn’t possible but,
beyond a certain point, the war machine could fully heal.

Dragon
began fashioning, in the organic factories of its innards, something from a
blueprint close to one used by the sphere that caused the Samarkand
catastrophe. It understood that the one that penetrated the white hooder would
require outside back-up – retransmission of programming destroyed during the
internal war – so it caused a division within the egg that it both grew and
fashioned from that blueprint. In a tryout of its later plan for
self-resurrection, it sexed the twin foetal dracomen, one male and one female.
The first would be the one to enter the war machine; the second would run
back-up. Dragon brought them to term but did not hatch them out, instead
building up protective layers about the egg before spitting it towards Masada.
By the time it reached the surface those outer layers had burnt away and the egg
had grown ready to hatch, and so it did.

. . .

Blue
gazed out across the flute grasses swaying in recalcitrant breezes and issuing
mournful music, appreciating them, appreciating so much about this world with a
huge intelligence and knowledge already downloaded into her mind from her
parent. Her brother gazed in just one direction, utterly fixed on his purpose
and indifferent to his surroundings. The instant his body reached optimum, he
set out at a fast run which, for a dracoman, was very fast indeed. Organs
within her brain monitoring her brother’s function, the link between them so
strong he seemed almost part of her, she was drawn after him.

They ran
throughout one day, one night and into the next day, whereupon the male just
slammed to a halt and began preparing the vast complexity of his body for the
task ahead. The albino hooder came into view ahead of them, hunting again,
hungry again. Blue moved away, yet even as she did so the link to her brother
grew even stronger, so she carried his very shape in her mind.

Her
brother stood up, that movement enough to attract the hooder, and it attacked,
cupping him to the ground and following an instinctive feeding program. It
stripped him of his skin, his muscle, hesitant over internal structures it
hadn’t been prepared to find, but ingesting them anyway. It took him apart, and
in disjointed death agony he slid into its digestive tract, the connection
broken with his sister. Soon he began penetrating tract walls and spreading out
inside the hooder as it meticulously cleaned his bones. He followed his
program, pheromone and EM transmitters re-establishing the link to his sister,
Blue restoring those parts of him he had lost from her mental image of him. He
did his work, death agony fading to an ache as the hooder destroyed him inside
itself, a whisper of might-have-beens fading thereafter.

It was
done.

Blue
rose from where she had hidden herself as this white hooder adjusted, swung its
cowl towards her. It did not attack, its self-awareness already growing enough
to encompass a thing called gratitude. Perhaps it tilted its head in
acknowledgement to her before it brought its cowl back down on her brother’s
bones and made its tribute.

She
watched it rise again, leaving that sculpture, watched it depart. As
purposeless then as any living sentient being, she collected her brother’s
remains and went to find a hidden place to exist. Waiting, waiting for her
other brothers and sisters.

As he removed the helmet from his head, tendrils stretching and pulling
from his skull like guinea worms, Jem gazed across at the dracowoman, two
portions of his mind sliding around each other like immiscible fluids. It
seemed that the Weaver continually connected to his Human self, and that those
connections could not be sustained and so broke. Consciousness remained protean
throughout the process. Sometimes his Human past became the lesser of two
alternative histories; sometimes the Weaver became a graft upon his Human
consciousness. Even so, his Human part was being perpetually changed by this
process, and he liked it. The being he seemed to be changing into now felt
better than that poor, thoroughly indoctrinated and unintelligent Human
proctor, and perhaps the process might at last rub out the grief and the guilt
his Human mind seemed determined to cling to.