Polity 4 - The Technician (58 page)

‘It’s
here,’ said Tombs, and started trying to get up.

Sanders
resisted him for a moment, pressing her hand against his chest, but he seemed
utterly determined and brushed it aside, so she helped him as best she could,
though her own body was bruised and battered.

A strong
wind seemed to be blowing through the flute grasses, rushing, impatient, then
the Technician surged into view, circumventing the building then circling round
it, its hood catching up with its own tail to form a ring. The ring tightened,
the Technician travelling steadily faster and faster, and the hood finally
closed over the tail.

‘What
now?’ asked Sanders, having to raise her voice over the noise.

‘Now it
receives its orders!’ Tombs replied.

Sanders
gazed down at the gabbleduck, at the Atheter named the Weaver. It was squatting
again, arms folded across its chest like some self-satisfied Buddha. It showed
no sign of giving any orders, but how was she to judge?

Tombs
reached out to a pillar, took the weight off his legs for a moment then sat
down. Sanders sat beside him.

‘This
could be dangerous!’ he shouted, not seeming to care.

‘I’ll
stay here!’ she replied.

The
rushing wind sound grew to the roar of a gale, and then steadily transformed
into something more intense. The air movement it generated blasted across
before them, swirled around them and seemed to be creating a vacuum in the
building behind, constantly trying to drag them in. In a minute Sanders
realized the creature had started to glow, and felt the heat of that on her
face. No doubt now that the Technician was moving faster than any hooder had
ever moved – whirling like a machine component rather than something living.
Sanders wanted to ask Tombs about this, but now it wasn’t possible to speak.

Another
sound then, more a feeling; the deep resonant toll of a bell. Sanders looked up
straight into the throat of one of the mechanism’s disruptors, poised over them
like a capture cup ready to slam down. Glowing an intense eye-aching white, the
Technician now spun about the building a couple of metres off the ground.
Suddenly it tilted, and only as it did so did Sanders see the Weaver raise one
claw and gesture. The Technician tilted further, a burning wheel against the
sky, its lower rim skidding on the ground and spraying smoking debris. The air
seemed to thicken and Sanders suddenly felt a panic, unable to remember why she
was here, the noisy chaos around her becoming meaningless, confusing, frightening.

Then the
wheel broke and the Technician speared into the sky. It hit the disruptor like
an arrow going through an apple, but with the sound of mountains falling.
Sanders averted her eyes from the sudden raw glare. From horizon to horizon,
the flash leached the landscape of colour, rendered it only in white and shades
of sepia. The domed roof above slammed down, then back up and flipped away. A
pillar to their right tilted out, then snapped off to tumble end over end into
the distance. Only upon seeing this did she realize that she was now pressed
down on her back, and that the same force-fields that had prevented Shree from
killing her and Grant were now preventing them both from being tossed about
like leaves in a hurricane.

A second
detonation turned the sky into a pink backdrop etched with streaks of yellow
lightning. Pressure waves rolled out from the impact site above, across the sky
and down to the ground. The whole landscape jumped, smoked and steamed, shifted
sideways. Something massive thundered down to the left, and the ground surged
up and forwards into a wave that wrenched the building up until the floor stood
near-vertical for the seconds it took to pass underneath it. Another
cataclysmic impact surged a wave in from the side, and at once the building
turned right over. Sanders found herself still pinned in place by force-fields,
facing down towards the ground, one side of the building swamped, the open side
revealing in a devastated landscape fires which, because of its lack of oxygen,
shouldn’t be burning.

Later,
the gabbleduck came, carefully closed its claws about them as the force-fields
released, lowered them to the ground and led the way out into devastation.

An arrow of intense light shot up from the planet, and, still struggling
to regain control of his body after scrubbing the last of Eight’s viral attack,
Amistad only knew of the mechanism’s grav-weapon response to that arrow, the
Technician, as the wave hit him. It compressed and stretched his internal
components as it passed, metal and crystal fracturing, optics disrupted and
superconductors shorting out, delicate highly-protected components trashed in
an instant. Disoriented and still fighting to regain control of his internal
workings as he tumbled through vacuum, Amistad saw the Technician shudder to a
halt, then lurch into progress again. No longer travelling like a missile, the
biomech writhed through vacuum as if its legs were finding purchase on the
nothingness and, by the minimal readings Amistad could obtain from a few
remaining sensors, that was precisely what the creature was doing.

Like a
white-hot centipede a hundred metres long it clambered relentlessly towards the
mechanism, yet, though the Technician was massive and certainly dangerous, the
inequalities of scale made it seem to be something that could be stomped on by
its opponent. The mechanism reacted. The whole massive device swung
incrementally, its throat now entirely centred on the approaching Technician.
Another gravity wave slammed out, paused the Technician for just a second, then
seemed to allow it to surge forward once past.

Further
damage, the legs all down one side disconnected, some crystal storage cracked,
optics distorted and thus distorting information flows. Amistad took it,
calculating what systems he could save, and concentrated on them. In orbit over
Masada a brief intense detonation at the head of a column of purple fire – the
geostat weapon, which Ergatis had just used against a disruptor, detonating
halfway through its next firing cycle, fusion plasma escaping the doughnut
Tesla bottle and punching out into vacuum, proton beam unfocused, dissipating
on the way down, just licking the disruptor sliding in over the east coast.
Amistad also noted blooms of steam arising in the southern ocean, all in a long
line not very far from where Eight’s armoured prison resided. Volcanic action
there, a subduction zone forced into activity by the mechanism’s gravity
weapon. Any more of that and a tsunami or two might be included in Masada’s
present woes.

But the
mechanism must have decided otherwise. Three disruptors appeared in the
Technician’s path and a hemispherical hardfield slammed the war machine to a
halt, it coiling to slam down on the field, a centipede dropped on a plate.
After a moment it straightened out again and nosed against the barrier, moving
like an eel making no headway in a current.

‘You lied.’

Where
had that come from? U-space signal, highly disrupted and taking whole seconds
to put back together again. It could have been from Ergatis, but it wasn’t, and
it didn’t take a supermind to figure out its source.

‘On one
small point,’ Amistad replied, and waited interminable seconds. But Penny Royal
did not reply, so the drone tried, ‘Where are you?’

‘Take a guess.’

‘Under
the sea?’

Again
Penny Royal did not reply.

Amistad
remained focused on the Technician and the mechanism – he could do nothing
about Penny Royal now, and wouldn’t be capable of doing anything about the
black AI for some time hence, if at all, if anything sentient remained alive here.

Induction.

The war
machine must have fed something back through the force-field between it and its
prey. One of the disruptors abruptly tumbled away as if slapped aside like a
skittle, and the hardfield shimmered, weakened. The remaining two turned towards
each other. Amistad guessed they were running direct line-of-sight diagnostics.
The hardfield stabilized. Here, Amis-tad realized, was warfare gone beyond just
bombs, energy weapons and simple force-fields – the kind of fight he had
already witnessed down on the surface between Penny Royal and the Technician.

U-space.

Amistad
detected a weird U-space signature as the Technician’s cowl faded to
translucence, and pushed straight through the hardfield. That translucence
passed along its body at the point of intersection with the hardfield as it
continued to worm through. Amistad wasn’t quite sure he believed his own
sensors: the damned war machine had just tunnelled –
a theoretical possibility but with energy-density requirements that should
outscale the Technician’s physical body.

The
hardfield began flickering, emitting Hawking radiation, and an arc-light glare
where it intersected with the Technician’s body, but the war machine continued
writhing on through. The hardfield went out, the two disruptors folding out of
existence, no doubt back within the body of the mechanism. Then another massive
U-space disruption tried to tear at reality. The mechanism stretched fifty
thousand kilometres at a tangent to Masada, relocating itself as it had in its
battle with Scold and Cheops,
its elongated form lying only a few hundred kilometres from Amistad so it
seemed he was at touching distance from some immense space-borne train. The
mechanism snapped back into shape at the terminus of that stretch, but it
seemed the move had failed, for the Technician had moved with it, persistent as
a mamba, still writhing closer.

Antimatter
blasts next, interspersed with straight fission weapons, partially obscuring
both the Technician and mechanism behind a spreading cloud of nuclear fire. But
between explosions the war machine moved relentlessly closer. It was tunnelling
again, just dipping itself into U-space to avoid the worst of the shockwaves
and heat, glowing like something out of a blacksmith’s forge as it surfaced.

Then it
arrived, nosing straight into that mass of dodecahedrons at the mechanism’s
core, seeming to tunnel straight inside them. The mechanism shifted again, its
stretch line straight down into Masada, gone. U-space shift through a gravity
well; a fish trying to shake off a leech. Then back again, two million
kilometres out, spinning as if smacked by the hand of some playful god. Another
stretch, straight back to its original position. Within it the dodecahedral
structures had parted, were rearranging themselves. Some massive detonation
ensued inside, arclight glaring out through its structure, another gravity wave
followed, cracking further crystal inside Amistad, shuddering Masada so that a
row of red eyes stitched down from the pole, a fault line opened.

The
mechanism then hung in vacuum for long minutes, seemingly dead, the shapes
within it still. Finally they shifted again, like a giant clearing its throat.
They spat out the Technician, twisted, broken into three pieces.

Stomped
on.

Black
Hats

When a bitter war has been fought long
and hard, and at last ends, many of the combatants use their energies to
rebuild their lives. They delight in the day-to-day normalities of living
because, for so long, they weren’t normal. Tired and sickened by it, they give
up that detestation of the enemy that was necessary to enable them to fight,
and kill, or at least suppress it sufficiently so they can just live. However,
some cannot live without their war and are unable to give up their hate. They
are matured by conflict and cannot define themselves other than by what they
fought. They consider themselves the polar opposite to their enemy, the
antithesis of their enemy. They are the white hats whilst the enemy are the
black hats. Their problem is that they cannot visualize a world without hats –
and fail to see that the ugly processes of war ironed out those distinctions.
And worse still, even when there are no black hats left, they seek others they
deem suitable for that attire, because in the end it is not the enemy that matters,
but the hate.

–
From HOW IT IS by Gordon

As he finally pushed his head out into the open, Grant swore to himself,
but with a kind of maniacal glee – something to counter the pain. Oh yes, he
was an anachronism because he hadn’t gone in for radical physical redesign so
he could breathe the air of Masada, but being such had saved his life. He’d
seen the Technician streak into the sky and slam through that disruptor,
punched at the sky in glee on seeing the disruptor broken and falling to earth.
But he hadn’t foreseen the ground bucking like a faulty aerofan and the
subsequent wave of mud and flute-grass debris. It buried him, and only because
he wore breather gear did he survive. One of the adapted would have suffocated.

He began
to drag himself into the open, the little self-justifying victory of having
survived passing, and the pain returning, and hard. The wounds in his shoulder
and leg were just raw agony, and tears began to fill his eyes. Because of that
he didn’t see the claw as he dragged himself out. It closed round his chest,
plucked him yelling from the ground and held him up for inspection. His luck
had just run out: he’d survived Shree, the heroyne and the Technician, and now
it seemed he was to become the plaything of a gabbleduck.

‘Put him
down!’ said someone, annoyed.

It took
him a second to recognise the voice. He tried to tell Sanders to run, to get
out of there, but his mouth was dry, he couldn’t find the breath. You just
didn’t tell off a gabbleduck like it was a naughty child. That could get you
chewed up, or not, depending on how the creature felt at the time. However, the
gabbleduck lowered him carefully to the ground, and stepped back. In a moment
Sanders knelt beside him, triggered an auto-injector against his leg and then
his shoulder, straight through his clothing, then used a micro-shear to slice
through the cloth of his trousers, a first-aid kit open beside her.