Polity 4 - The Technician (48 page)

‘So what
do you want?’ Grant snapped.

‘Surely
that’s obvious.’

‘Not to
me.’

‘You
bring us Tombs. You bring Tombs out to the East Quadrant fence. If you don’t,
we kill her – it’s quite simple.’

‘How the
hell do you think you can get away with this?’

‘First
because that thing guarding him at Greenport is now in pieces outside the
Tagreb, second because the war drone Amistad just went offworld, third because
the police from either Zealos or Greenport won’t get here in time, even if they
hurry, which they won’t. Oh, and by the way, we’ve got sensors scattered all
over the area, so if we see any dracomen coming out this way, no deal.’

‘Even if
you get away with this now,’ said Grant, ‘you’ll be hunted down later.’

‘Maybe,
but that’s not your concern,’ Ripple-John replied. ‘You’ve got one hour to
bring Tombs here, after which time I take Jerval Sanders outside and gut her –
that clear enough for you?’

Jem had
only been half listening up until that moment, but at the mention of that name
his attention focused utterly and completely on the screen.

‘I just
can’t do that,’ said Grant, frustrated, angry.

‘As I
now know, you’ve known Sanders for a long time, Leif Grant. Do you think Tombs
is worth her life?’

‘I can’t
make value judgements like that.’

Ripple-John
shrugged. ‘Maybe I’ll take a lesson from Tombs himself and cut off her face
first.’

It
seemed like everything around Jem had just opened out, like a pit, threatening
to pull him down. Surely he had misheard?

‘I’ll
need to see that she’s alive,’ said Grant.

‘Easy
enough,’ replied Ripple-John. He reached out to grab something and the view
swung round and down. It next showed the interior of an ATV, someone rapidly
stepping aside to reveal a woman lying on the floor, her ankles taped together
and her wrists bound behind her back. The one who had moved out of the way now
stepped back in, reached down and took hold of a handful of her hair, jerked
her head up so she faced the camera.

The
Weaver snapped away within Jem’s mind. He stepped closer to the screen. She had
been beaten, clearly, just as it was clear that this was definitely Jerval
Sanders.

‘You’ve
got one hour.’ Ripple-John came back into view. ‘One hour,’ he repeated, then
his picture blinked out.

I didn’t kill her, Jem thought. Guilt, undermined in his
mind, collapsed like city blocks built on mud, but there seemed no joy in it,
just an empty confusion. That same guilt, suddenly finding no reason for
itself, began to thrash around in search of some reason for being.

Because of me she is like this, because
of me she might be murdered.

Succinct
and precise, yet some mental juggernaut seemed to be hurtling up behind it. Jem
took another step closer, knew exactly what to do.

‘You
take me out there,’ he said. ‘And we do the exchange.’

Grant
turned towards him. ‘I was told to guard you – you’re important, to this world,
to the Polity and maybe to the whole Human race.’

Jem
shook his head. ‘No, you are wrong. What is inside my head is just a
recording.’ He knew it was a lie, but now he was in control, completely in
control.

‘Nevertheless.’

‘You
take me out there or I go by myself.’

‘I can’t
allow you to do that.’

‘I’m a
free citizen to the Polity and it is my choice.’ Jem turned and looked directly
at Blue, who had been standing quietly in the background. ‘He cannot stop me.’

The
dracowoman gave a curt twitch of her head, but Jem read all the subtleties
there. She would not interfere because she knew what Jem had become; this was
between Grant and him. When Jem turned back Grant was rising from his seat, his
disc gun levelled.

‘So you
would kill me to stop me going and getting myself killed?’ Jem asked.

Grant
lowered his aim to Jem’s leg.

Did
Sanders matter? Within the enormous reaches of time Jem had experienced, even
second-hand, she was nothing, a fleeting moment quickly passed, but then, in
that same vastness his own Human life seemed so little. Should he just let it
go, accede completely to the changes that other self had caused in him? No,
because even with the Weaver granted perspective he knew that he wasn’t the
Weaver, could never be the Weaver. There wasn’t room enough in this narrow
Human skull to be everything that entity was – always sacrifices would have to
be made. He was Human, and must live in a Human world with Human references,
Human emotion, all Jem, though a much changed version of that man.

‘It
involved meticulous planning along with some doubtless long-understood and well
tested methods,’ said Jem.

‘What?’
said Grant, beginning to look worried.

‘First I
had to be driven out of my insane denial of current reality; a madness that had
locked down my mind and incidentally locked down what the Technician put
there.’ Grant seemed to shrink in Jem’s perception as if he was looking through
some dark tunnelling lens. He continued: ‘This was achieved by a series of
painful confrontations with that reality and manipulation of my inculcated
tendency towards guilt. And in the final act Amistad and Penny Royal expected
my encounter here, with Jerval Sanders, to finish the process.’

Jem
didn’t recollect stepping forward. All he knew was that now he just stood a
pace away from Grant, close enough to see the sweat beading on the man’s face.

‘They
are very powerful intelligences, and they got it mostly right on the basis of
the information they had. They thought that by now the strong medicine of guilt
would be a hindrance and by removing it they would allow more of the Weaver to
surface in my mind. But arrogantly they did not factor into their calculations
what the Weaver wants, or the changes within me and what I, Jeremiah Tombs, now
want.’

He could
feel it now, tightening up within his mind, loosening its hold, a distinct
massive consciousness poised like a thunderstorm, ready to explode into full
being, but not within him, never within him. This separation, which neither
Penny Royal nor Amistad could have predicted, allowed Jem some power over his
own destiny. Now, turning in on itself as it prepared for the next stage of its
existence, the Weaver knew Jem’s actions might threaten that next stage, but
also had confidence in the vessel that contained it.

He
reached down and closed his hand over Grant’s disc gun, and just took it out of
the man’s hand, inspected it for a moment and noted that the safety switch was
still on. Grant needed to be able to protest but, in his heart, he valued
Sanders more than Jem.

‘I
want,’ said Jem, ‘Sanders to be free.’

‘I’ll
take you out there,’ said Grant.

‘Yes, I
know,’ Jem replied.

The geostat cannon was of a thoroughly simple design: a doughnut tokomac
two hundred metres wide supplying energy to a proton accelerator mounted above
it, the beam focused and further accelerated through the doughnut hole by the
magnetic field used to contain the fusion plasma within the tokomac. Around its
rim micrometric attitude jets and curved-field gravmotors adjusted its position
with sufficient precision to direct the beam to any single square metre on the
continent below. Such was the precision of its positioning system that when
Amistad landed on the doughnut, changing its position by only millimetres, the
attitude jets briefly fired up to correct.

‘How
long?’ Amistad asked, the communication directed to the surface below.

‘Two
hours minimum, three hours max,’ Penny Royal replied.

Obviously
the damage the Technician inflicted had been major for it to take the black AI
so long to recover from it. But, even without Penny Royal on guard, Tombs would
be safe. Yes, the Tidy Squad had again tried to take him out, and Chanter was a
casualty, dead, permanently dead, since the man had no memplant and his
injuries were such that little could be extracted from his mashed brain.
However, with Tombs inside the dracoman town the chances of another
assassination attempt succeeding were minimal. The dracomen would protect him
and, beside Penny Royal, no better bodyguards could be found on Masada.

‘Well he
stays in Dragon Down until you get there – he and Sanders can get nicely
re-acquainted,’ said Amistad. ‘Then you take him on to the Atheter AI – we
might not get anything more from him there, but maybe he’ll elicit a response
from it.’

‘No,’
Penny Royal replied.

‘What do
you mean “no”?’

‘Jerval
Sanders is no longer present within Dragon Down,’ the black AI replied. ‘Data
routing.’

The
information from Dragon Down arrived immediately. Sanders’s belongings were
still in her room, but the trunk she had brought them in had gone missing, as
was she. Next a file arrived of the exchange between Leif Grant and an
Overlander called Ripple-John, a man tentatively identified as a member of the
Tidy Squad.

‘This
will have to wait until you are there,’ said Amistad.

‘Too
late,’ Penny Royal replied.

Amistad
began grabbing further data and did not at all like what he found. Grant, the
woman Shree and Tombs had taken Sanders’s gravan and were acceding to
Ripple-John’s demand. Why had Grant done that? Probably because of his past
relationship with Sanders – he would see her as worth more than a reformed
proctor.

‘Does
Tombs know Sanders is still alive?’

‘I do
not know.’

More
data, routed through Penny Royal from an organic source in Dragon Down, the
image strangely distorted. Something more had happened after the exchange with
Ripple-John. The dynamic had suddenly changed: Tombs had become more dominant.

‘Get to
them as soon as you can,’ said Amistad. ‘Do what you can.’

Next
Amistad opened a communication channel with Dragon Down.

‘Blue,’
said Amistad, the dracowoman appearing to his internal vision ensconced in her
quarters, the view again distorted through some sort of organic camera. ‘Why
did you let them go?’

‘It was
not for me to decide either way.’

‘Really
. . .’

‘Yes,
really,’ Blue replied. ‘It may come as a surprise to you, Amistad, but we take
the Polity ideas about personal responsibility and freedom quite seriously.’

Did
Amistad believe that? There had been input from the dracomen right from when
Amistad arrived here, mainly through dracowoman Blue. It had seemed like she
was keeping her finger on the pulse simply because major events on this world
were of interest to the dracomen, Masada being the birthplace of their race.
She had made suggestions about ongoing events, her last few being agreement
with the idea that the Earthnet reporter Shree Enkara should accompany Tombs,
and the suggestion that he should be brought, along with Chanter, to Dragon
Down. But now, having earlier seen the recording she had shown Chanter, Amistad
knew that dracoman involvement went all the way back, and that Dragon’s
manipulation of events hadn’t finished with its self-immolation and rebirth.

‘They
could get themselves killed and, more importantly, Tombs could end up dead
too,’ Amistad noted.

Blue
shrugged. ‘I seriously doubt that.’

‘What
aren’t you telling me, Blue?’

‘Surely
that is evident?’

‘How
so?’

‘I’m
obviously not telling you what I’m not telling you.’ Blue shut down the
communication.

Amistad
opened up the processing power of his mind and applied it to every small piece
of information, every hint, and very soon started to come up with some answers.
Dragon had cured the Technician, but it seemed certain it had also influenced
that war machine’s subsequent actions. The Technician had downloaded the Weaver
consciousness to Tombs. Both he and it had effectively been somnolent for
twenty years, and were now active. It appeared that Amistad’s own interference
had resulted in this weaver becoming active inside Tombs, but was that true?
Amistad had only started pushing after Tombs went on the move himself . . . In
the end it seemed that the big question was what had been Dragon’s intent in
luring the mechanism here now, for it had to be Dragon who had started this.

Tempted
to head back down to the surface to settle this, Amistad impatiently rattled
his feet against the tokomac, causing the attitude jets to fire once again. But
really, if Blue seriously doubted Tombs was in danger that was very likely
true.

‘Ergatis,’
Amistad enquired. ‘I want data on anything Dragon-related and nefarious over
the last twenty years.’

‘This
may take a while,’ Ergatis replied.

It did
take a while; whole seconds for the AI to compile the data in one file and send
it. Amistad tailored search engines to run through it, some of those engines
possessing intelligence nearly equivalent to that of an unaugmented Human
being. Much about the visit of the second Dragon sphere here they dismissed,
but a lot still remained. Amistad went through that remainder himself, finally
concentrating on one incident.

There
had been assassinations here certainly conducted by dracomen, but brief
analysis scrubbed them of any connection to events that concerned Amistad.
Separatists who had tried to force dracomen to their cause had ended up in the
paths of hooders. A unit of eight Separatists that detonated a bomb in Zealos
and tried to make it appear that dracomen were involved were found in a squerm
pond, or rather bits of them were. But there was something a little odd about
this latest killing.

The
story of what happened to those in the squerm pond had been extracted by
forensic AI from a couple of Dracocorp augs. Those who had ended up in the
paths of hooders were identified by remaining DNA and usually further evidence
found of what they had been up to from their belongings – usually in some hotel
room. It seemed their killers had ensured that evidence would come to light.
These three corpses, however, were an oddity. They were found by pure chance: a
Tagreb researcher had been ground-scanning and taking soil samples when he
discovered them under a layer of rhizome. An engineered bacterium had been
sprayed over them to eat away their bodies as quickly as possible – a few days
later and there would have been nothing left. Forensic examination of their
remains revealed that they had worn Dracocorp augs and that one of them,
indicated by the remains of a particular poison, had been killed by dracomen,
so it seemed possible they were Separatists. However their augs were gone – had
been torn away – and no further evidence had been conveniently left to be
discovered.