The Line of Polity (8 page)

Hesitantly at first, several Outlinkers stepped forward, to be directed through the doors. More soldiers waited beyond. Apis turned to hurry back to his mother, but she was already standing at his shoulder. They gazed at each other but they did not speak. Later, when the five returned, dirty, tired, and with the radiation tags on their belts into amber, they exchanged that gaze again. All their lives they'd had information access. They now knew the score: they were in the hands of barbarians.

"I am Deacon Chaisu of the warship
General Patten,
" the face on the screen informed them later on. "It is unfortunate that a member of your group was killed today — may she rest in the arms of our Lord — but it must be understood that you are indebted for your lives to the people and planet of Masada and to the God of the Faithful. A small portion of this debt can be cancelled by your work upon this ship, and finally in the yards on Flint..." The Deacon went on and on about the wonderful things they could do, and the projects in which they might become involved. He then told them they were the defenders of humanity.

"Perhaps you are unaware of what caused the destruction of Outlink station
Miranda
... Some of you may know the story of the system of Aster Colora, some of you may know of the more recent events on the way-station world of Samarkand. On the latter world, thousands of people were killed by the transgalactic servant of Satan that names itself Dragon. It used a nanomycelium to destroy the buffers of an interstellar runcible so that a man arrived on Samarkand as photonic matter. His arrival was the cause of a fusion explosion that killed many. Many more died in the aftermath, for Samarkand was a cold world heated by energy build-ups from the runcible. The rest of the population froze to death. Know now that the nanomycelium used to destroy
Miranda
was the same one — that Dragon destroyed your home. You must work now to ..."

So it went on and, each time they thought it had finished with a 'God defend the faithful', Deacon Chaisu would start up again.

"Propaganda officer," said someone nearby.

"They're religious," observed Apis's mother.

"So?" asked the speaker.

"They believe their own propaganda. It's where the word originates," she replied knowledgeably.

Apis asked, "What is going on?"

"There is an old word for what we are to become," said the man nearby.

"What is that?" asked Apis.

"Slaves," his mother told him.

The sprawns were the blue of tool steel and over ten centimetres long. Their wings made it necessary for nets to be stretched across their ponds at all times, to prevent them flying off to die in an environment hostile to them. As Eldene understood it, they were another expensive delicacy destined both for the tables of the Theocracy and for them to trade in exchange for luxury goods from other worlds.

"They say these are an adaptation from an Earth creature," Fethan said as he and Eldene laboured at digging a sluice ditch leading to one of the ponds.

"I might like to believe your stories about the Underground, but I don't believe the ones about Earth, old man," Eldene replied.

"Why not?" Fethan sounded hurt, as he shovelled out another clump of black mud.

Eldene watched the nest of green nematodes the old man had uprooted, as they writhed and burrowed back into darkness. "The great mythical empire where everyone is free and everyone has their portion of plenty. I know the difference between what's possible and what's wishful thinking. If this Earth even exists, it's far from here and not doing anything to help us. And as for this Human Polity run by godlike AIs..." She snorted and shovelled more mud.

"But it's true," Fethan protested.

"Oh yes, then why aren't there Polity ships amongst the traders?"

"How do you know there are not?" Fethan asked.

"Well, if some of them are Polity, they seem glad enough to buy refined squerm and sprawn essence," Eldene spat, thinking of the buyers the Vicar of Cyprian Compound sometimes brought out on tour, who did not seem overly bothered by the penitential lot of the pond worker.

Fethan said, "Most of 'em are scum of the Line."

"Yes, and I'm a gabbleduck's mother," said Eldene. And there the conversation ended, as it was drowned out by the racket of Volus's aerofan landing nearby. Now silent, the two of them dug their way closer and closer to the heavy iron sluice gate across which they must fit nets before draining the pond. Before they reached the gate, a shriek had them peering over the edge of the ditch.

"That's where Cathol and Dent are digging!" shouted Fethan.

Eldene glanced round and was surprised to see the old man nimbly leap out of the ditch and head in the direction of the sound. Upon tiredly following the old man, she saw Volus standing over by the sluice that the other two had been digging, with Dent sprawled at his feet. The rattling of sprawn wings filled the air, the strange creatures having escaped through the sluice and uncovered ditch. Eldene quickly followed Fethan who seemed, surprisingly, intent on finding out what was going on. Soon they arrived at the side of the ditch, only to see Cathol trapped underwater beneath the collapsed sluice gate, sprawns swarming in the water all around him.

"He's ... going to ... kill... us," Dent managed to gasp from where he lay at the Proctor's feet.

"Get back to work, brothers," said Volus, turning round from his cold studying of Cathol.

The worker, Cathol, looked dead to Eldene, but it seemed unlikely that the collapsing gate would have killed him or his scole, and his scole would have prevented him from drowning. She could only think, then, about what Fethan had told her the night before, and assume this to be murder. With no idea what she intended, she took a step forward. Volus whipped his stinger across, hitting her arm and then her scole, and she went down with a yell, the entire side of her body feeling as if dipped in acid, and her scole jerking against her. Crawling along the ground, she saw Volus draw his gun, point down, and casually shoot Dent dead. The man slammed face-down, his head opened, and its contents spattered across the black loam. Gasping, and beginning to black out from both pain and oxygen starvation, Eldene stared at Fethan and willed him to run.

Fethan stared straight back at her. "You know," murmured the old man, "there's only so much undercover work I can stand." Then he walked towards the Proctor, jerking but not falling as two shots slammed into his chest, then halted, and speared his hand straight through the man's body.

Twenty of the Outlinkers had their radiation tags into amber when, with a terrifying wrenching feeling of dislocation, the
General Patten
dropped out of U-space. Over the intercom, the speechifying continued, but they had all, after the first repetition, learned to ignore it. The twenty told of the primitive conditions, the lack of automatics, the weaponry openly carried, the radiation leaking into the engine hold. On the face of it, their situation seemed quite clear, yet some aspects Apis found confusing.

"They called AI 'idiot silicon' — like Separatists would — yet they are auged," he said to his mother.

Peerswarf, who had come over to share food and conversation with them, smiled and nodded at Apis, then said, "Looks like biotech to me, so, as such, it's definitely not silicon. Anyway, they 'do not allow it to govern their lives' which is not to say that they will not govern it."

How plausible all that sounded, yet Apis picked up on the worried look flashed between Peerswarf and Apis's mother, and he knew that plausibility did not make truth. He listened to further discussion of the augs these people wore — how there was absolutely no connection to be made with those the clans wore — but in the end sleep became more important to him than eliciting whatever truth there might be, and he turned towards his hammock. He was just resting his hand on the edge of it, ready to pull himself in when a surge of gee threw him to the floor, then slid him against a wall. There was a crash, followed by pressure on his chest.

"Fast manoeuvring," someone gasped. "An AI would have compensated."

A siren started wailing and red lights strobed in the ceiling above the bay's inner doors. Another crash. The ship shuddered.

"Oh no," someone said, quite simply; there was terror and fatalism in the voice. Apis looked round and realized it was his mother who had spoken. She was staring at the ceiling. He looked up also, and immediately saw how the metal was twisting across its entire length.

"What do we do?" he asked her.

Another crash ... the ship slewing sideways... people's belongings flying through the air. His mother tilted her head to listen to the distant sounds of distorting and shattering metal, screaming, explosions.

"Something's tearing this ship apart," she said, more puzzled now than fearful. "It must be in gee ... a black hole? They can't have got too close to a planet. Even they could not be so incompetent."

The ceiling then split, and something surged through: a tentacle as thick as a man's body, and terminating in a flat cobra head with a single blue eye where a mouth might have been.

"Dragon," said his mother. "
Run!
" But where was there to run to? Apis saw it happen, along with many others: the buckling and splitting of the ceiling had pulled open the back doors of the bay. Beside his mother, Apis was one of the first to reach those doors.

"Soldiers," he said, after sticking his head through the gap, and seeing uniformed men half running and half dragging themselves down the corridor by the evenly spaced handrails. Turning to his mother he said, "They don't have grav-plates out there."

"Primitive," she replied as other Outlinkers pushed up behind them. They all turned and looked up, as another pseudopod squirmed through the split in the ceiling. The ship shook once again; emergency lights began flashing in the corridor. Apis checked the corridor once more and saw the last of the soldiers disappearing around a bend in it. Again the ship lurched, sending people floating — observed by the blue eyes of Dragon — towards the broken ceiling.

"We can go through!" Apis yelled, and hauled himself into the corridor.

"No, not yet!" his mother yelled too late.

Apis was halfway to the bend when the others began to follow. His mother reached him ahead of the crowd. Most of them did not reach him. To one side, something distorted and broke, and fire spewed through — flame hanging in the air like layers of fog, with no gravity to give it shape. Apis heard screaming, saw shapes...

"Come on." His mother grabbed his shoulder and pulled him onwards. With others, they reached a side shaft that ran through the ship. Uniformed people were floating and propelling themselves up it, aiming for an access way above.

"They'll be heading for craft to escape in," she said. They flung themselves up the shaft, and followed the crowd. No one took any notice of them. Terror had become a taste in the air. Vacuum could claim them all at any moment. The access way opened in another corridor leading to an airlock. Apis and his mother followed the uniformed personnel through it. Three others also in uniform followed them, before a sucking explosion and the sudden slamming of the airlock. One got halfway through, but he did not stop the lock from closing.

The hull of the landing craft clanged as the clamps let go, and all was free-floating chaos as it dropped away from the mother ship. Orders were bellowed and soldiers pulled themselves down into seats and strapped themselves in. Apis and his mother did the same, and only now that the craft was moving away from the ship did they get some strange looks. Glancing back he took in the soldiers there, the mixture of uniforms — in some cases the lack of a uniform, in other cases uniforms soaked with blood. Forward, some sort of commander floated between the passenger area and the cockpit, surveying the cabin. Behind him the pilot and navigator sat at the controls, the curved chainglass screen before them displaying pinpricks of stars and the occasional hurtling pieces of wreckage. Apis stretched himself up to try to get a view of the camera-fed screens below this — those that showed other views. He glimpsed fire, and the hardly recognizable shape of the ship that had ostensibly come to rescue them from
Miranda,
a chaotic tangle of pseudopods, and the dark-scaled moon that was Dragon. When the commander's gaze fixed on him and his mother, he pulled himself back down in his seat.

"Secure those two," said the man, pointing. Heads turned in their direction and soldiers came towards them with plastic ties to bind their hands and feet.

"This is not necessary," said Apis's mother. "We can cause you no harm. We have not the strength—"

A soldier struck her across the face to silence her. It was a blow any normal-gee human could have taken with ease, but it knocked her unconscious. The soldier stared at her in surprise, then turned to his commanding officer, who merely nodded for him to continue. Apis held out his hands to be tied, and looked worriedly at his mother. It was only when he was certain she was breathing that he took any further notice of his surroundings. She needed medical attention, that was all he could think. He had to find a way to get it.

The dark-otter facility sat on the edge of the papyrus-choked bay, before a backdrop of rounded mountains that resembled crouching animals. These slopes were predominantly mottled with heathers, bracken, and other Terran plants that filled the few niches not already occupied by native species. With a few exceptions adapted to a sea full of copper salts, the water beyond the papyrus swarmed with all the strange creatures found on Cheyne III when it had been colonized centuries before. The flatlands that curved back from the bay, on either side of the mountains, grew only papyrus and other native species that could tolerate the poisonous soil.

The killer set up his tripod on a raft of stone protruding from the side of one of the mountains. Bushes lush with cloudberries surrounded him and, up behind him, thick bracken hissed in a constant wind blowing down from the higher slopes.

Sure that the tripod was firmly set and unlikely to rock, the killer — whose name was ostensibly Stiles — stooped down to his case and began to lovingly assemble the weapon it contained. It looked like a hunting rifle, yet the barrel was a metre long and as narrow as a pencil, and the stock and main body were inset with digital displays and touch controls. Stiles mounted the weapon on the tripod and peered through the X10000 image intensifies before locking the small motion dampers in place. He then scanned the facility.