Polity 2 - Hilldiggers (8 page)

“My basic interpretation of that is that we're fucked?” I suggested. He slumped back into his couch, miserable and staring at me accusingly. I turned my attention to the ceiling. Doubtless the chute resided behind that rectangular panel, itself secured in place with about fifty Y-head bolts. The guys who packed the chute probably used some sort of electric driver to screw those bolts home, but I doubted there would be one handy in here. I took out the knife Yishna had given me and inspected the blade. It was certainly sharp but might also be brittle, so to try using it to undo the bolts would be a mistake, and anyway I didn't have the time. Reaching up I pressed the blade flush against one side of a bolt head, then pressed, hard. The entire head sheared off and pinged around inside the pod. My companion looked up, his mouth falling open.

“How did you...do that?”

“It's just a knack,” I replied.

I began working my way round all of the bolt heads, sending them pinging and clattering all about me. As I got to the last two, the drive shut off and we were in freefall. I hauled myself up, clamping my legs around the control pillar, and managed to shatter the knife blade while trying to break away the last bolt heads. Two bolts, damn. I closed a forefinger and thumb around one of them and tried turning it, but I must have turned it the wrong way for the head sheared off. Good enough. I did the same with the remaining bolt. Next, fingers digging in at the panel edge. Jammed in place. I punched a dent in the ceiling right beside it, opening a gap, shoved my fingers in and heaved. The panel tore away from protruding bolt shafts. Peering inside I saw coils of wire packed in what looked like cellophane wrapping, all attached to heavy crossmembers, while above these parachute fabric hung like a padded ceiling. Grabbing one of the cross-members I pulled myself up until the crown of my head rested against the covered wires. The exterior of the pod curved down away from me so, forcing up parachute fabric, I pushed my arm down that curve and groped around a bit, eventually closing my hand around a smooth cylinder.

“How many explosive bolts?” I asked.

“Six,” he replied.

This could be rather dangerous. I didn't know how stable the explosive was in the bolts, and if I got this wrong I could get my hand blown off. But then, hitting the earth at a few hundred miles an hour wouldn't do me many favours either. Exploring with my fingers I found that the base of the cylinder terminated in a flat plate welded to the hull, so that was the fixed part. Feeling above this I found a shaft, extending from the cylinder to attach to the nose cone above. I got hold of that, and pulled until it snapped. No explosion. Diametrically opposite this bolt I found another similar, and snapped that off too. Then another bolt, at sixty degrees from a line drawn between the first two, then a fourth opposite that. This one blew just as I snapped the shaft.

“Aaargh! Fuck!”

A sudden roar ensued as one side of the nose cone lifted. Abruptly the pod began tumbling. My friend below, who foolishly had not strapped himself in, yelled in panic as he was flung from his couch. He would have to look after himself however—I needed to get this done quickly, for impact with the ground could be imminent. Pulling out my arm, I inspected the length of steel now punched through my palm and out the back of my hand. No blood of course, for we older hoopers tended not to have much of that stuff circulating in our veins. I extracted the shaft and discarded it, then paused for a moment, overcome by nausea, for while the Spatterjay viral form sealed and began to quickly heal the wound, the other viral form took the opportunity to attack its opposite. But, again, no slippage—no big advantage gained by the killer virus. I reached for another of the explosive bolts.

As the fifth bolt snapped, the cone lifted even further, exposing leaden sky and blasting in the stink of hot metal. The sixth and final bolt obviously could not take the full strain. A loud bang ensued, and a gust of wind threatened to suck me out as the parachute pack disappeared, sideways. The pod jerked hard, wire uncoiled, and cellophane wrapping snowed upward. Another even stronger lurch dropped me down inside the pod beside my companion, who then crawled up onto another couch and hung desperately onto the safety straps. I felt a momentary elation, but that soon disappeared as I saw the tangled mess of parachute squirming above.

“Should slow us a little,” I said—ever the soul of optimism.

“We're going to die!”

“Get yourself strapped in,” I snapped.

But he just clung on. I reached over to lift him up properly into the couch.

Too late.

We hit.

—RETROACT 5—

Rhodane—in childhood

The little girl, Rhodane, sitting on the peak of the sand dune while tying back her long blonde hair, studied the massive gun emplacement, its linear accelerators canted to the sky, like ruined city blocks, from the armoured dome. Five years ago she remembered sitting in this very spot with her fingers in her ears while watching the coil guns send missiles screaming into the sky, and then turning to red streaks high up as air friction heated them. The experience had been exciting, and kept the blackness at bay. The soldiers were now gone, and in their place a big salvage concern had brought in its cranes and treaded machines to take the place apart. A fence now surrounded the gun emplacement itself to keep out the souvenir hunters, and the old barracks buildings nearby had been repainted in the happy colours of a temporary asylum to house the increasing numbers of those suffering mental illness—a fallout from the War, some claimed, while others dismissed it as the result of a society going soft. The place interested her much less now, she realised.

Lowering her attention to a skirl which remained unaware of her silent presence as it rotated its way up towards her, Rhodane returned to her contemplations. The long-legged white beetle would pause every few seconds to run sand through its sieves, spraying out streams of grit on either side of its head, then it would continue its advance while drawing its barbels through the sand in search of its microscopic prey. Rhodane considered what she knew about this creature. She visualised its anatomical structure complete in her mind: its downward-facing blue eyes and sensory tendrils, its ribbed abdomen and sand-scoop wings, the structure of its various internal organs, single lung and single-chambered heart, and the complex spiral gut. In her mind she also now visualised the creature's genome and began relating genes to physical characteristics. She knew this creature in ways that no other human mind on the planet could encompass. She knew many other creatures in the same way, understanding so much more than most other planetary biologists, yet the authorities had taken away her gene sequencers, splicers and construction equipment like they were dangerous toys in the hands of an infant.

Rhodane knew from an early age that she and her three siblings were very different from other Sudorians. All of them could speed-read by the time they were three, read through grandmother Utrain's book collection within a few months, then squabbled over the books and disks their grandmother brought from the local library each week. By the time they reached the age of four, the squabbling decreased as their interests diverged. Rhodane loved biology, Yishna's interests lay towards the physical sciences, Harald focused completely upon Fleet, and Orduval studied history and politics. But their intellects were so broad and inclusive that their areas of interest blurred over into each other's, and so there was still some squabbling. When it came time for them, at this age, to begin their compulsory schooling, Utrain applied for a special dispensation, taking the four of them along to the Ministry of Education so they could demonstrate that already they were beyond anything that First School could teach them—they were even well beyond their contemporaries in physical training, already attending combat classes for those much older than them. Second School, also compulsory, though with the main subjects chosen by the pupils themselves and paid for by their parents or guardians, the four attended only briefly before another special dispensation was made, and they moved on to pursue their own goals with a single-minded purpose possessed by few adults.

Yes, they were different, Rhodane knew, but were her siblings different in the same way as herself? Did they feel in their minds that inner hollow, like a hunger that could never be satisfied? Was the acquisition of knowledge to them like an addiction to the opiate extracts derived from strug, the pink rock fern? Did they feel that hollow expanding, and in danger of encompassing their minds in a dank black depression, if they were not constantly in the process of learning something new to feed its hunger every day? Did they fear that adulthood would find them drugged into placid stupidity inside one of those colourfully painted institutions like the one standing just over there?

The skirl drew close to Rhodane's right sandal, so she peered down at it and said, “Hello, little fellow, how does the sand taste today?”

The skirl froze, so she tapped her fingers against her upper leg, knowing the creature would pick up the vibration through its highly sensitive feet. The skirl raised the central visual section of its head, its two blue eyes revealed at first slitted, then opening wide. It spread its pearly wing cases as it turned, flicked out its sand-scoop wings and they blurred into motion. Emitting the sound after which it was named, it skated off down the dune, spraying Rhodane with sand as it went and causing her to close her nictitating membranes in reflex. Rhodane leapt to her feet and ran after it—trying in her own small way to understand why other children found this game so fascinating. After fifty yards she could feel sweat growing slick on her body. After a hundred yards the creature disappeared from sight.

Rhodane crouched by the hole into which the creature had disappeared and brushed sand away around it, revealing the curve of the underground nest. Calculating from the exposed curve by eye she estimated the spherical nest to be about eight feet in diameter—home then to about a hundred skirls, their own separate segments of the nest filled with their young. Skirls were a strange mix of the social and the independent. When they reached Rhodane's present age, many of the females drew together to weave a communal nest with fibres extruded from their spinnerets. This task took them many years, but once the nest was completed they emitted certain hormones into the air to attract males. Rhodane now mentally reviewed the molecular structure of that same hormone. When the males arrived, a mating frenzy ensued, the males dying in the process. The females then partitioned the nest and laid their own eggs each in their own designated areas. Thereafter began the long process of raising the young, feeding them with a protein soup refined from the skirls' own microscopic diet. Fascinating...at least for a little while.

Rhodane stood up and moved away, scanning around for something else to interest her. But she knew this whole area, and its ecology and biology, so very well now. She would therefore return home, study the new disks Utrain had obtained from the library, and thus try to stave off the hollow blackness awaiting in her mind. Utrain had promised to take them to the Ruberne Institute tomorrow, so perhaps something there would help her to feel that all her choices were not yet exhausted.

—Retroact 5 Ends—

Tigger

This endless watching since the end of the War was enough to drive a drone to distraction. Corisanthe Main had developed a strange paranoiac society, as if the Worm were some alien splinter inside the body of humanity here, and all those living aboard the station were the crusty resultant mess of humanity's immune reaction to it. This malaise also seemed to be reflected upon the planet below, with increasing proportions of its population ending up in either asylums or cultist churches. Though maybe the reverse applied, and Corisanthe Main's weird culture merely reflected what was occurring below it. Since the end of the War, the proportion of the population suffering mental illness at some point in their lives had grown to three out of four, and one in four of them ended up permanently committed to an asylum. One manifestation of such illness was the common hallucination of some dark menacing figure who had grown in popular culture into the Shadowman. Since the publication of Uskaron's book, these illnesses had been put down to 'societal guilt' and the Shadowman was described as the Sudorian conscience. It was a worrying phenomenon that Tigger had studied closely, but drawn no conclusions from.

The technologies being constantly developed aboard Corisanthe Main, and quickly applied there, made his scanning difficult, and trying to scan the Worm itself was like trying to shine a torch through a brick. Watching the human dramas played out aboard offered some entertainment, but even with the distinctly odd Director Oberon Gneiss running the station, even that began to pall. So, without asking Geronamid, since he knew what the AI's answer would be, Tigger often went to find entertainment elsewhere, and not necessarily down on Sudoria.

On the surface of Brumal the drone was deep-geoscanning some recent developments in one growing hive city when Consul Assessor David McCrooger arrived. At last things were starting to get interesting.

David McCrooger...Tigger pondered that. The newcomer having been a long-time resident of Spatterjay was interesting enough but, damn it, he was also an Old Captain! Admittedly the man had captained a sailing ship there for only a short time, but he was still on a par with legendary names like Captains Ambel, Drum and Ron, who were all now entering the second millennium of their long lives. So, what might one expect from such a character? To begin with he would be unreasonably strong and durable—such men were reputed to possess greater physical strength than Golem androids, and they could easily withstand injuries that would instantly kill other humans. He might also be incredibly knowledgeable and wise. Though that was not a given, even for someone who lived so long, many of them were, and Geronamid would never have employed anyone stupid for such a task.

Moving on, from geoscanning the living Brumallian hive city to the mountains created by the hilldiggers and those mass graves that lay underneath them, Tigger applied only half his mind to the depressing task—the other half perpetually scanning Fleet coms. His other half warned him of activity amidst those ships above, and the news that the Consul Assessor would be coming to Brumal first, so Tigger decided to hang around. After the missile launched, Tigger flew fast to its launch site, and there observed a covert Fleet military unit moving away from the missile launcher—probably one confiscated at the end of the War—about which Brumallian corpses had been neatly laid out. The covert team was well away before a laser strike from a hilldigger positioned far above. Just enough evidence would be left to fully implicate the Brumallians.