Polity 4 - The Technician (17 page)

Janice
had hoped to find explanations to dispel her fear; all she found was something
more frightening. However, she would not let fear govern her. Though Human, she
was the interfaced captain of a Polity dreadnought, and her years in this
position had refined her intellect, ground away the animalistic responses,
hardened her mind into something strictly governed by logic. Yes, this alien
object would seem powerful and frightening to a lesser being, but all she
needed was more data, more input, so as to come up with a suitable response to
it. She would not let herself down, she would not let Cheops down.

What do you think? she drily enquired of her partnered
artificial intelligence.

I think we should run like hell, Cheops replied.

As ordered, Halloran had delivered the cylinder and accompanying
instructions. He continued to watch until Shree Enkara’s mud buggy was out of
sight then abruptly turned. Gleet had served his purpose and was nearly dead
from blood loss, his aug link erratic and questions arising in him that
Halloran had managed to suppress in the small network he and the twins formed.
Melet, though he had thought she would still be useful when they got back
offworld, was straining against his control – her dying brother tearing at
those parts of her original mind that remained.

Perhaps
he could suppress Melet’s nascent rebellion after Gleet finally died, but that
was too great a risk to take. He couldn’t afford to have her escape enslavement
as they entered Polity-controlled areas. She might give him away, and if the
Polity got hold of her and managed to unearth what was concealed in her mind,
the whole operation was dead. He reached inside his coat and drew his thin-gun,
hesitated for a second, then abruptly thrust it back into its holster. No,
better to wait until after they met his other contact here – the one who named
herself Agent Azure. Apparently it was through her that the Jain technology had
been obtained, and smuggled off Masada just after the quarantine ended.

Halloran
walked over to Gleet, prodded him with the toe of his muddy shoe. All aug
contact with him blanked at that moment as if that final prod dispelled the
last of his life. He noticed that without instruction Melet had turned to watch
him, so hardened his control of her.

‘Bury
him,’ he instructed out loud to reinforce his nonverbal instruction.

She just
stood there shuddering for a moment, until he really pressed her, then she
lurched into motion and walked over to the twin-disc and unlatched a toolbox
positioned between the two fans. She took out a monofilament cutter, then
turned. Halloran walked away from Gleet’s corpse, now aware that Melet might be
a physical danger to him. She walked over, activated the vibro on the monofilament,
then cut into the ground, soon heaving out a chunk of heavy sod and tossing it
aside.

‘It is
not the Dracocorp network that dehumanizes,’ said a voice. ‘It is the choice of
those who rise to ascendancy within it.’

‘Who is
that?’ Halloran asked, looking round.

‘The
female, Melet, is slipping from your control.’

A
hissing sound ensued and something sped from the flute grasses. Halloran
thought for a moment it was one of those flying prawnlike things here, but
realized it wasn’t when it thumped straight into Melet’s chest. A glassy tube
protruded, with two testicular sacs on the end of it. These things started
pumping, eagerly, obscenely. Melet started choking, grabbed hold of the thing
and fought to pull it out. She fell, at last pulling the thing free, and hit
the ground on her back. The thing landed at Halloran’s feet, still pumping a
bile-like fluid from the hollow point ahead of barbs in which chunks of flesh
were caught. Halloran’s link with her turned grey, shot through with screaming
shadows shimmering like heat-haze, then abruptly blinked out.

‘Gleet,’
she said on her final exhale.

‘The
Humans would call it a mercy killing,’ said the voice. ‘We don’t tend to
believe in mercy.’

A figure
hurtled from the flute grasses, humanoid, but something wrong about it, about
the way it ran. It seemed to be clad in chameleoncloth, for it was difficult to
see. It slammed into Halloran before he even managed to reach inside his coat.
Next thing he knew he was up on his toes with a rough scaly hand closed around
his face.

‘This is
necessary,’ said the draconic visage gazing at him.

Then it
closed its other arm around his body and turned his head like someone undoing a
jam jar. Halloran felt it snap, felt everything wrenched, then gagged into
blackness.

Before the rebellion the population of Godhead had numbered over ten
thousand, consisting of a large contingent of the upper echelons of the
Theocracy and a substantial force of proctors to protect them and watch over
the thousands of enslaved workers. There hadn’t been many mid-level citizens
here, which was part of the reason why the population was now less than two
thousand. Grant, climbing out of his ATV where he had parked it on a hard
standing by the harbour, gazed across at other reasons why there were so few
people here.

The long
and heavily laden cargo ship coming into dock was controlled by a submind of
the planetary AI, Ergatis. That sub-mind also controlled the conveyor buckets
that steadily unloaded its cargo either into parked lorries or the massive
complex of storage bays, whilst a second harbour submind controlled most of the
other machinery ashore: the big loaders, the autohandlers and the maintenance
robots. People did work here, but out of choice not necessity. Some were aboard
the cargo ships, some drove harbour machinery or the trucks transporting the
guano up the continental highway to the northern crop ponds and fields. Others
just lived here, enjoying the sea air now they could breathe it.

Grant
remembered how it used to be here. The ships were commanded by members of the
Brotherhood, had crews of over a hundred, consisting of enslaved workers, some
citizen personnel and proctor disciplinary units. They also transported a
steady stream of workers out to the islands, to replace those dying in the
guano pits from horrible skin and lung diseases usually contracted after just
three or four years of work.

The
trucks that ran the guano up north were worker transporters on the way back,
bringing in needed replacements for those expiring both on the islands and
here, where much the same routine had prevailed. Inefficient machinery was used
in the loading and unloading of the guano and there were frequent spillages
that the workers had to clear up with shovels and barrows and brooms, thus
exposing themselves to the highly alkaline stuff. Very primitive.

In
Godhead it had been very easy to distinguish the workers from those overseeing
them, for all the proctors, Theocracy bigwigs and citizens wore protective
clothing as well as breather masks. This ease of identification was probably
why so few of them survived the rebellion.

After
Dragon destroyed the laser arrays, those working under cover here received
notification of that, and an instruction to delay their rebellion until ground
units from the Underground were in place. Guano-based homemade explosives and
hidden weapons were distributed, and preparations began, but so bitter were the
workers they didn’t want to wait. Using loading machinery as armour they
attacked both the ecclesiastical central town and the proctors’ station.
Fighting was fierce, and though better armed, Theocracy soldiers found
themselves up against people who had little to lose. Just over three thousand
workers died to inflict casualties of about five hundred on the Theocracy. The
surviving hundred or so of proctors and upper echelon ecclesiasts were stripped
naked, though allowed to retain their breathing gear, thrown into a guano
storage bay then buried alive in the stuff. Whether they died when their air
ran out, or were killed by the stuff eating into their skins, was a moot point.

Pacing
out the edge of the harbour, Grant watched the ship slow to a halt beside the
long unloading jetty, then be drawn in by magnetic docking gear to lock in
place with a resounding clang. Immediately its conveyor arms extended like
opening limbs and dipped down to open-top trucks. The stuff that spewed from
the throats of the conveyor tubes was like talc. Despite special cowlings and
an array of filtration devices mounted along the jetty, a haze arose from it,
and after only a couple of minutes Grant felt a slight tingling on the skin of
his exposed hands. He quickly turned around and headed up towards the main
town.

When
Underground forces arrived here the main battle was over and, but for the
worker huts, most of this place had been turned into a smoking ruin, the
workers having run riot destroying the place that had been killing them. After
the vengeance killings, both workers and the rebel forces took the road north,
abandoning Godhead. A year and a half later, whilst Masada remained under
quarantine, northern crops began to suffer from lack of guano, and military
governor Lellan Stanton ordered the port reopened. A large group, consisting of
surviving workers and technicians from Zealos, came south and, assisted by
Polity drops of equipment, put this place back together again. The largest
share of the inhabitants now consisted of those who had once been enslaved
here, and many of them were Tidy Squad supporters, so it definitely was not a
safe place for a lunatic proctor who thought the Theocracy still existed.

The
ecclesiastical section, with the proctors’ station looming at the edge, had
been built on a fat foamstone coin with a life, estimated when it was laid, of
two hundred years. The new town had been built on the ruins of all that. Like
all such towns or compound rafts on the tricone-infested soil of Masada, a
steady hum almost below perception filled the air as the tricones below
steadily ground away at the stone. Stepping onto a slabbed street, Grant paused
to listen for a moment, before heading over to a covered walkway, recollecting
that they no longer called this place Godhead. Officially it had been renamed
Greenport, and the residents stuck to that. Those still embittered and vowing
never to return here unofficially named it Shit Harbour.

Pausing
at the walkway door, Grant unholstered his sidearm and checked its action. The
proctors’ disc gun possessed an electrical trigger and a magazine containing
seven discs, each with five rounds. Grant extracted the cylindrical magazine
and inspected it for a moment before slotting it back into place. The weapon
could fire single shots, five-shot bursts, or empty the entire magazine in five
seconds. There were many better weapons available, but Grant had become
attached to this one. It was the one that nearly killed him when he himself ran
out of ammo, before he managed a throw that put the ceramic stiletto now
holstered in his boot through the owner’s eye. He holstered the weapon and
pushed through the door into the walkway, a slight breeze slipping past him
because of the pressure differential. And as the shimmer-shield of his Polity
breather mask automatically shut down, he turned right to head directly to his
destination.

Time to
deliver a warning.

Amistad found Chanter amusing: one of those borderline cases whose
low-order autism balanced out his sociopathy, so that rather than being
antisocial he was asocial. The man had chosen not to have his head rewired,
rather had gone in for heavy physical adaptation to enable his monastic, highly
introvert pursuits. On one world he’d been a piscine, limbless, sensorium
boosted so he could study the colony patterns of some odd oceanic life-form
like a slime mould on speed. On another world he’d returned to full Human to
study the paintings of an artist in vogue at the time, until he became
something of a nuisance and needed to be warned off. Then, upon learning about
the Technician here on Masada, and knowing there would be no danger of him
being classified as a stalker, he went in for heavy amphidaption, converted all
his funds into that mudmarine and some other equipment, and had come here to
study the creature.

Six
years ago, upon being informed of Chanter’s presence here and the nature of his
interest, Amistad had thought him an unnecessary complication and considered
having him removed. However, since the rebellion the man had done no more than
follow the Technician about like some eager puppy, only abandoning that pursuit
to return to his underground base or to chase rumours of sculptures or
sculpture fragments found on the surface. He seemed harmless, and another
element to Amistad’s calculations prevented him from sending the man away:
deleting complications to try and find simplistic patterns, simplistic
solutions to puzzles, was a Human approach. It was why they’d ended up with religions
like the one here, and why throughout their history they’d been hampered in
their advancement by superstition, crippled value judgements and a tendency to
accept facile explanations. Amistad’s own research had shown him that retained
complications often helped permanently resolve a puzzle, or could provide
outfield components to that puzzle. And four years ago Chanter had done so in
spades.

His
discovery of that ancient sculpture had revealed that the Technician was a
living artefact, a creature that definitely dated halfway back to the time when
the Atheter rubbed out their own minds and ground their civilization to grit.
But it went further than that, further than Chanter had seen. Hooders, though
long-lived, did not have the physical and genetic ruggedness to survive for
such an appalling length of time. That a mutation capable of doing so had
arisen a million years ago was about as likely as a flipped coin turning up
heads a thousand times in succession. Amistad precisely recollected his brief exchange
with Penny Royal at the time:

‘Give me
your thoughts,’ he had asked.