Polity 4 - The Technician (53 page)

‘Yeah,
harmless,’ she spat.

‘I
assure you it is,’ Tombs stated, gazing at the gabbleduck as it cautiously
stepped between pillars and then into the building. ‘It’s been prepared, and
its only motivation is to get to this location, and wait.’

‘Prepared?’
Shree glanced at him.

Tombs
studied her carefully. ‘This can only matter to you if you decide not to do
what you intend. You are procrastinating, Shree. Is it not time you brought
this all to an end? Is it not time for you to express your hatred of a world
that fails to live by your rules?’

‘You
think you understand me? You?’

‘I think
he does,’ said Grant. The soldier folded his arms, suddenly seemed more at
ease, which worried Shree.

Tombs
glanced at the soldier. ‘She defines herself by a belief in the purity of her
hatred. During the rebellion she believed that hatred was of the Theocracy,
afterwards she maintained and nurtured it in the Tidy Squad, and has now turned
it on the Polity.’

‘Childish
psychology,’ said Shree. ‘I am the Tidy Squad and
this has nothing to do with hatred but everything to do with justice and
freedom. I don’t hate your Theocracy and I don’t hate the Polity – this is just
a fight that must be fought.’ Why the hell was she debating this? Was she
procrastinating?

Tombs
turned back to her. ‘You misunderstand me. I said you believe you hate both of
those. In reality you just hate yourself, and that’s why you want to die.’

It was
as if he had just sucker-punched her. For a moment she felt small and utterly
lost, but then anger swamped in and drowned that. He was taunting her and now
the time had come to bring him back to reality. She lowered her aim, didn’t
want him to die at once, just to suffer. A burn-cauterized hole in his gut
would do it.

Through
clenched teeth she said, ‘I think I’ve had just about enough of you, Tombs.’

She
pulled the trigger. The thin-gun gave just a little kick as it fired its charge
of ionized aluminium dust. The impact flashed before Tombs, something like a
two-metre-tall sheet of glass briefly blinking into existence in front him. As
the fire dispersed he just stood there, gazing at her. This was why he could
taunt her. She fired twice more and both shots impacted on the same hardfield.
She swung her aim across and fired at Sanders. A hardfield stopped those shots
too.

‘Self-protection,’
said Grant. ‘The Polity AIs gave their alien brother the means to defend
itself.’

Shree
abruptly holstered her gun, then held up the cylinder, poised her finger over
the end.

‘You’ve
left me no choice,’ she said.

‘There’s
always a choice,’ said Tombs. ‘Just put that on the ground and go – over the
next few hours the AIs will be too busy to try finding you.’

‘No,’
said Shree, suddenly feeling very calm. She pressed her finger down, then
pulled it away. Certainly, the geostat weapon was not directed down here now,
but once the Jain technology started spreading here the Polity AIs would soon
react. Feeling a huge burden coming off her shoulders, Shree waited for the
end.

Nothing
happened.

A void
growing in her torso, Shree reached out and pressed her finger down again, and
still the cylinder remained inert.

‘I told
you Blue ensured you got that item to me,’ said Tombs. ‘Bearing that in mind,
you don’t think Blue would have allowed you a way to open it, do you?’

Shree
felt suddenly very stupid, but then saw a way clear. She stooped and put the
cylinder on the ground, held it in place with her foot, drew her gun and fired
at the thing. Fire flared across the floor, over her boot and up her leg. She
yelled and stepped back, trousers smouldering and then going out.

‘Nano-chromed,
case-hardened ceramal, seems to me,’ said Grant. ‘You’d need a proton weapon to
get through it.’

Every
option was being closed down, but she was damned if she was going to let them
win. She stooped and swept the cylinder up in her hand, groaned as it burned
her skin, threw herself towards the nearby pillars. Briefly something caught
her shoulder – hardfield, trying to stop her, then she was out on the walkway,
coming to her feet, running.

Jain
Technology – A Brief Overview

It now seems evident that this technology
was made during some vicious and eons-long civil war between Jain factions. And
it also seems evident that it evolved into something more destructive than the
faction that made it wanted it to be. It’s why there are no Jain, no Atheter,
and quite probably why there are no Csorians either. It’s a whole technology as
a booby trap, but one so large that when it goes off it can take out a
civilization. It’s a poisoned chalice, Sauron’s ring of power and Pandora’s
box, though in the last case the box contains no hope. Once initiated it grants
its host the power to seize control of just about any other technology, and to
also seize control of other life-forms. Neither Humans nor artificial
intelligences are immune to it. It gives its host the power to increase his own
intelligence too, and using it, one man could quite easily seize control of a
planet, even a solar system. And inherent in its methods is the simple fact
that the man will not even consider doing otherwise. Then it takes, it absorbs
the pattern of its host, and formats itself to more effectively hijack more of
the same kind. It effectively breeds with its host, though it is a one-sided
affair. Next it will go to seed, just like an annual plant – switching over to
a new program it will produce Jain nodes within its structure and disperse
them, and the next intelligent life-form to pick up one of these nodes starts
off the whole process again. If it is not stopped, the final result is nothing
but a spreading cloud of Jain nodes, each waiting for its next host and its
next technical civilization to prey upon. And just one node is enough to wipe
out an entire race.

–
From QUINCE GUIDE compiled by Humans

The population of Zealos had reduced substantially, as had the
populations of the two other northern cities and some of the smaller Human
habitats. No one had abandoned the erstwhile rebel cities in their underground
caverns, in fact many had fled there. Their safety was illusory. Many of those
caverns dated back to the time of the Atheter. It being confirmed that not all
the Atheter had agreed to racial suicide, some would certainly have hidden
there, and it seemed evident they hadn’t survived.

‘How
long now?’ the planetary AI enquired.

‘It’ll
be here within two hours, by current estimates – it’s powering up for its last
jump of eight light years.’

Ergatis
retained a loose contact with Amistad and reviewed the war drone’s plans,
trying to figure out where to fit the geostat weapon into them. It didn’t seem
to fit, just demonstrated that Amistad had not shaken off its lifelong
inclinations. Through its numerous eyes scattered across the surface of the
planet, the AI now checked out other arrangements.

The red
attack ship, labelled Corpuscle but generally only
using its nickname, had landed on the Plate in the Northern Mountains – that
place where a gabbleduck had crushed Shardelle Garadon’s ATV. The vessel was
down on two rear weapons nacelles of a conventional ovoid shape, and one
forward spherical nacelle from which extended a weapon like a stack of ancient
machine guns wrapped in a ton of radiator fins and from which a magazine feed
curved back into the body of the ship.

‘Blood,’
Ergatis sent. ‘I thought that weapon was only vacuum spec.’

‘Yeah,’
Blood replied.

‘Perhaps
you could explain why you have it deployed?’

‘The
percentage of oxygen here cuts down on burn ablation within expected target
range. The five-stage neutronium pellets will survive for eight kilometres,
thereafter converting to plasma for the next kilometre.’

Ergatis
asked no more. Though the megagun fired at a rate of a million rounds per
minute at near-c its destructive power was outweighed by many of this and the
other attack ships’ weapons. Blood, however, had obviously seen an advantage in
having a weapon that effectively changed what it was after eight kilometres. It
could be that an opponent, preparing a defence for projectiles might be caught
out when those projectiles turned into short-lived spears of plasma.

Next
Ergatis took a look at the attack ship down only fifty kilometres away from the
Atheter AI in the south. This one was resting at forty-five degrees in a hollow
it had burnt in the ground, steam still rising all around it and the mud now a
hardened shell below.

‘Anoxia,’
Ergatis named the ship, but got no further.

A
wordless communication from the dreadnought above just gave coordinates, a
time-frame of seconds, and some characteristics of the U-space signature it had
detected.

‘Gotta
go,’ said Anoxia, even as its fusion drive ignited underneath it like a bomb
and flung it into the sky, the ground behind it exploding outwards to leave a
smoking crater a kilometre across. Tracking those same coordinates, Ergatis
tried to see what it could, detecting a disturbance directly above Zealos, and
another a short distance away from the Atheter AI, in fact over the known
location of the Technician.

Blood
was up too, the Plate behind it glowing red and now marred with slowly cooling
ripples. As best it could, using satcams and eyes scattered across the planet,
Ergatis tracked both attack ships near the surface and the two above now
turning meteoric as they hurtled down, whilst also watching the things now
materializing.

Jeremiah
Tombs’s description had been apt. Under the bell. From top to bottom they
measured half a kilometre and with their slightly flared bases and domed tops
closely resembled the kind of bronze bells that might be found in a Buddhist
monastery. They also appeared to be hollow, or rather hollow in the way that a
tulip is hollow with the functional bit deep inside. A ground view showed what
looked like a great bundle of steel rods, which now seemed to be in the process
of extruding downwards, and beginning to glow. The colour of these devices was
odd, metallic yellows and purples in either a mathematical or decorative configuration.
They were also translucent; had not yet fully materialized into the real.

Ergatis
tried what scanners were available to it, even hijacking those on the Tagreb
mobile observation tower. Certainly these objects were powering up for
something, but so tightly woven and interconnected was the technology it was
difficult even for a planetary AI to figure out how they functioned. Then, as
the extruding rods drew level with the base of the bell above, it did function.

The air
hazed below the device, camera eyes directly underneath were immediately
disrupted by powerful, rhythmic EM interference. In the street, Humans fell to
their knees pressing their hands to their heads, screaming. A wall of pure
ceramal alongside one street began to vibrate to the same odd rhythm,
shuddered, cracked, then abruptly fell into even chunks each the size of a
hand. Chainglass thumped white and turned to dust. Ergatis tried to analyse
what weapon was being used here, briefly noted a U-space signature matching the
rhythm and directly relayed its data to Amistad.

‘Seems
like a sophisticated USER effect,’ Amistad replied. ‘Keep monitor—’

Com shut
down, and suddenly Ergatis found it difficult to connect what Amistad was
saying to immediate events. What is a USER? What am I?

Then Blood
arrived.

The
attack ship hurtled over the horizon seemingly pushing a star ahead of it as
the megagun fired. Smoky black before the attack ship, the tons of five-stage
neutronium beads it spewed ramped up through the spectrum from red to bright
white until, half a kilometre away from the device, air friction turned them to
plasma. This torch of super-hot gas played over it, but only for a second. The
next moment it bucked in the air as Blood closed the half-kilometre gap and hot
neutronium beads impacted.

I know what a USER is, Ergatis remembered. Underspace
Interference Emitter created by simply oscillating a singularity in and out of
a runcible gate to cause disruptions in U-space. This was more precise though,
surgical almost. Running internal diagnostics the planetary AI began connecting
up further broken links in its mind and realized that, had Blood not attacked
at that moment, a further few seconds would have left it with no mind left at
all.

People,
who a moment ago were on their knees clutching at their skulls, were now
staggering for cover. Metallic snow boiled down over Zealos – those metallic
beads turned molten, losing their artificial density, expanding and
crystallising as they fell. The device had begun to tip, turning its business
end up towards the attack ship just as that ship arrowed past.

‘No you
don’t,’ said Blood.

The
missile must have been released just at the last moment, its sharp curving
course a burning question mark as it used up a one-burn fuser engine. The
device lit up like a bulb, distorted, shed internal bars and molten metal like
a prolapsing robot. As the glare faded the thing became completely visible,
utterly solid, then it just dropped out of the sky.

It came
down sideways across a street, one end hitting the top of an apartment and
collapsing it like a sugar stick, the other end coming down on warehouses. It
took down everything it landed on without slowing, thundered into the ground,
crushing foamstone, sinking to half its width. The entire foamstone raft of
Zealos rocked with the impact. Stress sensors and other monitoring devices
recorded that the raft had cracked, and continued to monitor the crack growing
wider. Super-dense metals, no doubt – Ergatis estimated a weight approaching
one megatonne.

Between
eight and nine hundred people had died, some in the crushed buildings, other
scattered elsewhere in the city, from ricochets, suffocation, accidents caused
by something turning their minds momentarily to mush. Other sensors began
registering movement and Ergatis immediately knew that the death toll it had
just calculated would not be all.