Polity 4 - The Technician (57 page)

Grant
stayed utterly frozen, still as he could be. The heroyne straightened its neck
against the sky, opened its mouth and tossed her up, screaming, caught her and
did it again, her screams muffled when her head entered its gullet, then it
gobbled her down whole. In utter horror Grant watched her slide into the
creature’s neck. It convulsively swallowed, shoving her deeper, but she was
still struggling. The heroyne raised its head again, shrieked again, then
raised one of its webbed feet off the ground and like someone troubled with
reflux rubbed at the lump in its neck.

Grant
turned his head slightly to locate his gun. The heroyne swung towards him and
he froze, and fought an old urge to pray. The heroyne took one slow and short
pace in his direction, halted, tilted its head as if listening. Long painful
moments passed, during which Grant saw the still struggling lump that was Shree
traverse the last length of neck down into the creature’s stomach. Next it
abruptly straightened, lifted a foot off the ground and began grooming its
head, scraping one toe down the edge of its beak. When it finally realized
there was nothing to clean off, it lowered that leg, tucked it underneath
itself and just stood there on the other leg. Its head nodded, slowly started
to droop. It looked like the damned thing intended to take a nap.

Go away! Go away!

Something
snapped the creature’s head back up. Had it actually heard him thinking?

‘Jain technology,’ a voice ghosted in his comunit.

A
tentacle whickered through the air, wrapped around the heroyne’s neck for a moment
then retracted. The creature’s head, and a yard of neck, toppled like a scythed
weed, thudded to the ground, the beak opening and closing spasmodically. Orange
liquid squirted from the stub of its neck protruding from its body, and it
began to lash back and forth. Its raised leg went down and it started
high-stepping in a tight circle. The tentacle lashed out again, cracking this
time. It sliced down at an angle through the back of the creature’s body,
separating its main body from the saddle of bone and muscle above its legs.
Body and remaining neck thumped to the ground, the neck still writhing. The
legs, and the muscle above them, squatted and frog-leapt into the air, came
down ten metres away, staggered on for a little while then came to a swaying
stop. They didn’t fall, just stood there.

‘Distributed neural tissue,’ said that voice in Grant’s
ear.

‘Get her
out!’ Grant shouted. ‘Get her out of there!’

Penny
Royal passed over him like a cloud of black knives and descended on the
heroyne’s body, which rose into the air, a cage of lines drawing across it. The
outside fell into segments like an orange, revealing a multicoloured mass of
internal organs. These abruptly spread to the limit of their connections to
each other. One big maggot-like sac split, spilling Shree onto the ground, then
Penny Royal tossed the rest over by the still-standing legs.

By now
Grant had retrieved his gun. He began crawling over. Penny Royal had yet to
finish. It opened Shree’s coat and extracted the cylinder, then entirely shed
its chameleonware as it enwrapped that in one tentacle.

‘Jain technology,’ it repeated.

The
black AI rose up off the ground, supported on a pillar of tentacles, its upper
part divided into three masses of spines, each mass aligned and each pointing in
one direction only. As Grant reached Shree, a shadow fell across and he looked
up – he preferred not to look at Shree anyway.

‘Great,
just perfect,’ he said.

The
black AI’s spines were pointing at the source of that shadow, risen up out of
the flute grasses like a titanic cobra made of bone. The Technician had finally
arrived and Grant lay between it and Penny Royal, between it and the cylinder.

‘Eight?’
said Penny Royal out loud.

The
Technician slid closer, the movement of its massive body now clearly audible.
The air seemed to be charging up with something. Grant closed his eyes,
expecting to die any second now and just hoping it would be quick. But nothing
happened. Finally he opened his eyes again, now to see Penny Royal extruding a
tentacle with the cylinder attached to the end of it as if by glue. The
Technician tilted its hood up like an animal ready to receive some treat,
extended complex glassy manipulators, accepted the cylinder and transferred it
inside itself. Then it turned, and in one massive wrench that shook the ground,
it was gone.

The
moment stretched taut, then Grant broke it. ‘Can you do anything for her?’

Penny
Royal directed one clump of spines down towards Shree, then flipped up two
stalked eyes, red as hell, as if to make a closer inspection. The orange bile
covering her from head to foot had rotted her clothes and burnt away much of
her skin. One of her eyes was gone, the other lidless in its socket. The lips
on one side of her mouth were gone too, exposing ridiculously white teeth, and
the flesh had been scoured from one of her hands. Hideous damage, but a
bubbling wheezing issued from her mouth. She still lived and Grant knew that
this damage was not beyond Penny Royal.

‘No,’
the AI said.

‘What do
you mean “no”?’

‘It is
just.’

The thing
folded its eyes back inside and began to turn away.

‘Wait!
Where are you going!’

‘Eight,’
it replied, and flowed away like darkness.

Grant
returned his attention to Shree, and in horror realized she had turned her head
towards him, gazing at him with her remaining eye.

‘Do . .
. it,’ she managed.

He could
lie there pretending he didn’t know what she meant, allowing her to suffer for
longer. He could kid himself that he wouldn’t hand her over to the Polity, and
that mind-wipe or some other execution of a death sentence would not then
ensue. He did none of these.

Grant
put the barrel of his disc gun against her temple, fired twice.

A ball of fire rose from the point of impact, throwing into silhouette
the new disruptor to appear over Zealos. The thing hardly moved – solid in the
sky as if nailed to the fabric of the universe – but in the city below the
shock wave picked up ATVs, aerofans and gravcars and tumbled them along the
streets like polystyrene models.

The red
attack ship, Corpuscle, threw itself into a hard
turn, then dipped low to the ground as some sort of surface extended from the
disruptor – a three-dimensional ripple spreading from the fabric the thing had
been nailed to. Where the lower edge of this shaved the city, it peeled up
roofs and knocked over buildings. But this was no hardfield, Ergatis realized,
everything falling from the point of contact seemed shredded. An aerofan rising
into its path fragmented: in one twisting wrench it separated into all its
individual components, and they fell. Nuts and bolts, cowlings, armature
windings, spindles, computer chips and seat padding, all mixed with other
components: bones, bleeding organs, soggy sheets of fat and lumps of muscle.

No
connection with Amistad, Scold had been obliterated,
and Cheops knocked out of the fight, and now the
mechanism was visible in the Masadan sky. Also, the disruptor above was one of
five presently materializing, messing up coms so badly that Ergatis couldn’t
even pull the trigger on the geostat weapon Amistad had returned to it. Things
did not look so good.

The
planetary AI watched the attack ship flying low between buildings – its passing
flipped over further cars and blew out glass windows in the street behind it.
It ducked right underneath the field the disruptor had emitted, leaped an old
church, peeling up tiles as it went, then stood on its tail and hurtled up
towards the device, its megagun firing. The disruptor spewed fire, even shifted
slightly from the impact, then cracked like an egg full of magma, its two halves
beginning to fall. Again there would be the problem of all that weight coming
down on the city raft. The attack ship would need to . . .

Positioning
itself for that underside shot, Blood must have known the likely result. It
tried to turn using gravmotors, side-blast fusion and by detonating one of its
own weapons nacelles. Not enough. It hit one half of the disruptor and bounced
off, its entire body bent at the middle so it looked almost like a boomerang.
Completely out of control it tumbled in an arc over the city and came down in
the Market District, cut a burning swathe before coming to rest, almost
indistinguishable from the ruination it had created.

The two
halves of the disruptor slammed down, both on one half of the cracked city
raft. They didn’t break it further, nor did they cause it to start tilting;
instead that half of the city just began to sink at a rate of half a metre a
minute.

No way
of moving those immensely heavy objects now. Through all available com systems
in that half of the city, Ergatis ordered evacuation to the other half. Would
that save lives? Perhaps, but maybe only for a short while. Another disruptor
had begun to slide in this direction. It had materialized in the sky fifty
kilometres away, and all data feed from the small town under its shadow had
blanked. But now, with the disruptor here destroyed, data began coming in.
Fires were visible in the town, massive damage, building collapses, and people
staggering and crawling through the wreckage, just one look at their dumb imbecilic
faces enough to tell nothing intelligent remained behind them. That could
happen here in Zealos, soon, unless . . .

Connection.

If
Ergatis had possessed a face it would have smiled at that moment, a tight
humourless smile. A simple digital instruction set the doughnut fusion reactor
of the geostat weapon winding up to full power, but enough energy was available
in super-capacitor storage for three full-power shots. No point using any less
than full power – those things in the Masadan sky were tough.

Perfectly
targeted, the proton beam appeared like a blue pillar in the sky, its base on
the approaching disruptor. The energy flash blanked those cams pointing at the
thing, but the last microseconds recorded a spray of something
issuing from its underside. New cams swung to bear as the beam blinked out,
leaving a black trail of quickly dispersing smoke. The disruptor itself tilted
and the ground underneath it burned with the orange flames of some sort of
chemical-isotope fire. Its progress had halted, but now it began to move again,
now in a wavering spiralling course spreading more of that fire.

Great, thought Ergatis. The thing had turned into ground
fuser with its operator dead at the controls.

Cam eyes
averted for another shot, then back again. The thing flipped over onto its
back, spewed a cloud of glowing matter into the sky, but remained intact. A
third shot, straight down its throat, and now the thing was gone, the blast
wave of a massive explosion rolling towards Zealos, chunks of super-dense shrapnel
leading it.

Ergatis
sent what warnings it could, targeted another disruptor and waited with the
patience of a machine for the geostat weapon to reach full charge.

‘The Technician freed itself of the Weaver by placing it inside me so it
could reformat itself for war,’ said Tombs, his voice hollow and his expression
lost. ‘Whether I returned to sanity or not was irrelevant – I was just a safe
storage vessel. After a countdown, using penny mollusc shells, a twenty-year
countdown.’ He glanced at Sanders, who smiled, remembering the quiet of the
asylum terrace and her stripping off to go for a swim. It seemed an age ago.

‘Why did
it need to do that?’

‘It has
been like a soldier hampered with a civilian – never able to fight without
reserve, always needing to protect the civilian.’

‘But
twenty years?’

‘Twenty
years ago the Technician would not have been ready for it, but now it is. That
is why the Weaver first rose up in my mind, so as to lure the mechanism here.
Now it has departed my mind to give the order of battle.’ He shook his head,
sad, puzzled. ‘Though I don’t think its physical presence here is necessary,
rather it wanted to be in at the kill – it is a predator after all.’

‘But
Amistad’s manipulation of you gave the Weaver freedom to do that, surely?’

Tombs
smiled without humour. ‘Amistad and Penny Royal, representing the Polity, did
precisely what was expected of them by Dragon. They kept me alive and they kept
me here. Everything else they did was irrelevant. They kept me safe until the
time was right.’ He paused, checking about himself as if for something lost.
‘And now it is gone, and I am a broken bottle.’

‘But why
download to a Human?’

Tombs
shrugged, looked tired. ‘Because Dragon wanted the mechanism physically present
here at Masada. Placing the Weaver inside a Human being ensured the mechanism
took note of the Human race, and recognized it as a danger sufficient to impel
it to come here.’

‘You are
not broken,’ said a voice. The words were perfectly enunciated, yet definitely
did not issue from a Human mouth.

‘I feel
empty,’ Jem replied.

‘Yes,
but now you can fill yourself.’

The skin
on her back crawling, Sanders looked round. The gabbleduck had moved with utter
silence and now squatted just a metre away from them. She had never been this
close to one of the creatures. It produced a smell, cinnamon apple pie, but
with an underlying hint of carrion. Its skin looked like rhinoceros hide, but
blotchy purple and green with a glint as if lightly sprayed with gold paint.
One composite forearm was closed up, the other partially open, and she could
see how its six-talon claw could divide into two claws each with three talons.
It held the two of them fixed in its emerald gaze for a short time, then turned
and went down on all fours to saunter off out of the side of the building. Why
should she be surprised that an Atheter spoke to them with such ease?
Gabbleducks had been speaking Human words ever since Humans came here to
Masada.