Polity 4 - The Technician (59 page)

Exhausted,
Grant gazed at the gabbleduck. It was the same one Tombs had lured into the
Atheter AI building, but it looked very different now. It moved with greater
certainty, gazed with great intensity at something on the distant horizon,
seemed more here. Tombs himself now walked into view
too, his attention fixed on the creature.

‘I’m
looking at the Weaver, ain’t I?’ Grant said, now the pain had started to fade.

‘You
certainly are,’ said Sanders, pressing something against his leg to spread
blessed numbness.

He
glanced down as she next pressed an extractor-pack wound dressing in place, and
watched it deform over his leg, melding around and into the wound. This would
help him heal in the same way as the usual Polity wound dressings, infusing
antibiotics, antivirals and further painkillers, but would also extract the
metals from a pulse-gun shot. Next she set to work on his shoulder, pulling his
jacket aside to cut through the underlying fabric.

‘So how
did that happen?’ Grant asked.

‘You
guessed the first bit,’ said Sanders, ‘surely you can guess the rest.’

‘Tombs
loaded the Weaver to it, but how?’

‘A
physical connection.’ Sanders shuddered.

Tombs
now turned to face them.

‘Did you
kill her?’ he asked abruptly.

How to
explain that? He was about to simply say ‘yes’ but he cared about what Sanders
thought of him, and realized that Tombs’s opinion of him counted too.

‘Yes, I
killed her, but not in the circumstances you might think.’ As he went on to
explain about the heroyne, Penny Royal, the Technician and Shree’s end, Sanders
finished dressing his wounds and then injected a cocktail of drugs that spread
like cold fire through his body.

‘You did
the best thing,’ she said, carefully replacing the injector in the first-aid
kit and closing it.

As he
now easily found the energy to sit upright, Grant glanced at her in surprise.
He had expected her to berate him, tell him he should have called her so she
could tend to Shree.

‘Best
thing?’ he repeated. He pressed a hand against the soft ground, now feeling
sure he would be able to stand.

‘I could
have saved her life, but for what?’ Sanders shook her head, took up the kit,
stood up and stepped back. ‘She was Tidy Squad. If we are to believe what she
said, she was the leader of the Tidy Squad. That means that on top of trying to
release Jain technology here and murder us, she has killed before, probably
many times.’

‘Where’s
the medical ethics that inclined you to save proctors?’ Grant asked, studying
her expression. She seemed harder to him now, more callous, yet this new
attitude was a product of peacetime, not war.

‘Still
there. I just hold to Polity law. Proctors like Tombs had an amnesty and a
chance to redeem themselves. She killed long after the war was over and the
enemy defeated.’ Sanders looked at him directly. ‘The minimum I would have
saved her for would have been mind-wipe.’

After a
brief silence, Tombs said, ‘Redeem themselves – that sounds almost religious.’

‘Doesn’t
it just,’ Sanders replied.

Grant
pushed against the ground, got into a squat and slowly stood upright. His left
arm still hung weak at his side, but his leg no longer felt so tight, so swollen,
and could easily bear his weight. Fantastic technology – and he was in a
position to know, remembering how long it had taken him to be able to stand
after having grapewood splinters from a bomb blast removed from his calf two
years before the rebellion. He now turned to study Tombs more closely. The
man’s face was a mess. The soldier at first thought it might have been caused
by shrapnel from the recent blasts, but the puncture wounds were all the same
size and too evenly spaced.

‘What
happened to you?’

‘He
cleared his mind and became whole,’ replied an utterly alien voice.

Grant
looked up into the gaze of the gabbleduck. It raised its claw and beckoned with
one talon. ‘Follow me.’ Grant felt no inclination to disobey it.

The
creature led them around a nearby mound and then on a convoluted path through
the devastation to halt by yet another mound, where Sanders’s gravan lay on its
side half-buried. She must have retrieved her medical kit from here, Grant
realized, but how had she known she would need it?

The
gabbleduck now began digging away the debris covering the vehicle, its claws
perfect for the task as it used them like great dung forks.

‘Our way
home?’ he asked.

‘Yes,’
Tombs replied, ‘though no part of this world can be called home for us any
more.’

Grant
tilted his head in acknowledgement of that, then turned to another mound and
began to climb it – the drugs Sanders had used not only dispelling the pain but
filling him with a restless energy. In a moment he reached the top and from
there surveyed the devastation. The building housing the Atheter AI lay upside
down, and tilted like a ship photographed on a storm-tossed sea. All around,
the mud, soil and rhizome had been mounded into waves, all of them ringing a
source that still belched smoke and steam into the air – where the disruptor
the Technician destroyed had come down. Then, with the horizon line visible,
Grant felt his stomach sink upon seeing another of those bell-shaped devices
hanging in the sky above the horizon. He quickly scrambled back down the mound
to his companions.

‘The
Technician failed,’ he said. ‘Those things are still in the sky.’

With a
whoomph the gravan crashed upright.

‘Too
early to judge,’ Tombs replied.

‘So what
now?’ Grant asked.

‘Now we
leave – we don’t belong here any more.’

As Amistad ran internal diagnostics and tried to repair some of the
massive damage he had suffered, his senses began to range out, his compass to
expand, and some abilities returned. Like small animals nosing from cover after
some massive storm, com lines began to open up again. Amistad first obtained an
overview of the situation down on Masada. Three disruptors hung in the sky over
the main continent, whilst a fourth was poised far out over the ocean for no
obvious reason. Amistad speculated that perhaps there had been something
significant out there about two million years ago. Two attack ships were
functional – one resupplying from the orbiting dreadnought whilst the other
held station between the disruptor nearest to Zealos and the city itself.

‘Why the
pause?’ the drone asked.

‘Ah,
you’re back,’ replied Ergatis. ‘Simple answer: destroying those things results
in significant damage elsewhere, so whilst they are doing nothing I ordered the
attack ships to hold back.’

‘Reasonable
enough,’ Amistad replied, wondering if his opinion would be different if he
hadn’t recently lost a great mass of his own mental processing.

‘So what
happened up there?’ Ergatis asked.

Amistad
magnified the image of the three chunks of the Technician floating through
vacuum. They hadn’t completely separated, held loosely together by strands of
some fibrous matter. The thing certainly seemed to be dead, since the only EM
reading issuing from it lay in the infrared, and that steadily declining as it
cooled. Next the drone took a long hard look at the mechanism. There the
activity had increased. The thing was glowing from inside and rapidly swapping
about those odd internal components, EM output filling and disrupting numerous
com bands. It looked rather like it was trying to grind up something
indigestible.

‘The
Technician is finished,’ the drone stated. ‘The mechanism is still
functioning.’

‘Then
we’re screwed,’ Ergatis suggested.

There
was something else too, but Amistad was having problems tracking down the
memory. The Technician was controlled by the Weaver and had been sent against
this threat to the Weaver’s existence, but it had failed, hadn’t it?

Amistad
abruptly stabilized relative to Masada, a gravmotor at last beginning to
function how it should. Fusion drive was down for the moment, but simple
steering thrusters were still available. He fired up some of these to begin a
long slow acceleration back towards the planet, and in that moment remembered,
and at once sent a message to Ergatis.

‘You’re
kidding!’ the planetary AI replied.

‘No I’m
not,’ said Amistad, with some relief at last igniting its fusion drive.

Within
minutes the drone entered atmosphere, and hurtled down to a location in the
southern ocean, just hoping that by the time he reached his destination there
would be a planet to land on. It just depended on how it was done, in the end.

The mechanism, now becoming acquainted with emotion, understood that it
had just experienced fear – fear of extinction. Two million years ago it had
eradicated all the remaining Atheter war machines down on the surface of the
planet, but that had been a demolition job, for they had been powered down and
unable to resist. A million years ago it had scrambled the workings of the
Technician, at a distance, using techniques that did not involve direct
confrontation. But this had been different.

Machines
like the Technician had been the pinnacle of war technology and had
subsequently been used to obliterate both those Atheter and their own machines
that had resisted the enforced return to the Homeworld. And just now such a
machine had come close to killing the mechanism. It had resisted every warfare
technique at the mechanism’s disposal, managing to actually penetrate right
down the core. Only there had the mechanism contrived to bring to bear the full
force of its field technology to tear the thing apart and eject it, and even
now it continued to search out fragments of the shattered device and eject
them. Everything about the Technician was dangerous: nanotech spreading from
its physical parts, computer warfare programs downloading from the smallest
fragments, modulated fields spreading infection . . .

Nearly
all gone now, nearly all . . .

There.

The
mechanism found something alien stuck like a caddis-fly larva case to one of
its internal units. This wasn’t part of the Technician – analysis revealed
metals and field containment similar to those used by the aliens here. It
didn’t seem to be dangerous, so why was it here? Closer study revealed that the
end of the glassy cylinder lay open, the field generators within shut down, and
whatever they had contained was gone. A metallic smear spread from the open end
across the surface it was stuck to. The super-dense metal there possessed a
strangely uniform crystalline structure and, even as the Mechanism directed
sensors to study this more closely, the metal fractured into even hexagonal
chunks that swirled away.

The
enormous dodecahedral unit, two kilometres across at its widest point and one
of hundreds within the mechanism’s horn-shaped body, shuddered as it tumbled,
went out of pattern and bounced off its nearest neighbour. A signal generated
from it, routed though its U-space transmitters and down to the planet. There,
a disruptor abruptly began to rise into the sky as its holding position
adjusted. This made no sense. The mechanism tried to isolate the unit, managed
to shut down all EM and U-space transmission and reception around the thing,
but could not halt its physical movement.

They
were going out of pattern – it had to be one of the worms or viruses sent by
Penny Royal all those years ago . . . no, no they were gone. Something else was
attacking, subverting. The mechanism used a complex field grab to seize hold of
one of the floating fragments of metal, meanwhile diverting its other units
away from the infected one. Using a deep-scan nanoscope it focused on the
structures in the dense metal, recognizable structures, but still room for
doubt.

Fear
again.

The
mechanism immediately wanted to eject the unit and destroy it. It also wanted
to send a destruct signal to the disruptors that had also been affected by it,
but there was no way round the deep hard-wired programming now coming online.
Unable to stop itself, the mechanism summoned the disruptors back, back through
U-space and thumping down in its core, pitiful diseased children called back to
be free of their misery. It felt them there, felt patterns generating from
them. The painful reality was that there was nothing threatening about those
patterns. Yet.

Like
with Penny Royal . . .

Still it
could eject its infected parts, still it could destroy them.

Another
unit fell, briefly touched by the rogue. The mechanism gazed inside, trying
with all its will to deny what it was seeing. Matter and energy were being
reordered inside and such now was the mass of data accumulating about that
process, it could no longer be denied. It tried, but its orders crippled it.

Here
then was Jain technology – the one thing the mechanism could never allow within
itself, the thing it had been built to free its masters from, by destroying
them, their own self-destructive fear of it the utter basis of the mechanism’s
programming. The mechanism fought the inevitability of the oblivion, fought its
hard wiring, but so deeply ingrained were the orders that they rooted to the core
of its being. They took over, carrying through the inevitability of the
Atheter’s self-destructive fear. Suddenly this Jain tech felt like infection,
filthy life occupying pristine technology, and there was only one way to be
free of it, one way to be clean.

Its mind
in the grip of the same madness that killed a race, the mechanism reached for
the succour of cleansing fire, stretched half in and half out of the real, out
and down, millions of kilometres drawn thread-thin, finally snapping fully into
the real in a place where matter itself burned, and immolated itself in
Masada’s sun.

Amistad hit the ocean hard, speared down in a tube of superheated steam
that slammed shut after half a kilometre, then angled his claws and body to
curve his course upwards. Most of the drone’s components remained undamaged by
the sudden cooling, designed for even harsher conditions, but those already
damaged by the mechanism’s gravity-wave weapon failed, some shattering. Even
so, the reduction in temperature accelerated internal repairs: information
processing speeded up, some nano-machines forced into somnolence by the heat
woke and set to work; microbots, their joints seized by thermal expansion,
stretched like arthritic fleas and returned to the job in hand. Then, with one further
fusion blast creating a high-pressure steam bubble behind, the drone shot to
the surface.