The Line of Polity

16

Certain now that the boy was deeply asleep, the woman tiptoed away to her seat in front of the screen and reopened the book. She did not like to act the censor, but this picture book was definitely now out of the realm of Disney and into that of some psychotic relative of the brothers Grimm, and she suspected that some of the later stories had a greater potential for bloody distortion. The one she chose now was entitled 'Four Brothers in the Valley' and the initial picture was far from ominous, displaying as it did the four good Brothers themselves making ready for their journey.

"Yeah, right," said the woman, wondering if there might be a hint of AI to this book. She reached out and touched the top of the text column, and the Brothers moved now — talking to each other and laughing. The woman cleared her throat — slightly embarrassed to be speaking to herself — and began to read.

"Four good Brothers set out upon a journey to find and bring finally to justice the Hooded One. Brother Stenophalis wore armour of aluminium and carried a thrower of iron. Brother Pegrum wore armour of brass and carried a sword of light. Brother Egris wore armour of iron and carried the caster of thunderbolts. And Brother Nebbish wore his armour of faith and carried in his right hand the Word of God and His Prophet."

The woman paused as the book clad each of the brothers in the required garb, and set them on their way. It all seemed like a happy scene from some wonderful tale in which right and justice would triumph. She tried fast-forwarding the text but it just wouldn't move.

"I see," she said, then read on.

Three of them came over in the first pass, and turned the entire area occupied by the rebel tents into a brief morass of fire and flying dirt. Lellan guessed that this was just a probing attack, however. The pulse-cannon, on the one remaining tank, spat up from its place of concealment close beside the embankment. One of the fighters — a wedge-shaped, one-man craft with swing wings, and enough weapons pods to give it the appearance of a tern with a very bad fungal infection — flared briefly and then became a line of white-hot fragments tumbling across the sky. Another of the fighters bucked as if an invisible hand had slapped its back end, then overcorrected and nosed straight into the ground — the following explosion sleeting mud even as far as where she and her brother were dug into the embankment.

"I'd get out of there, Carl. They'll have you spotted now," said Lellan.

Stanton lowered the intensifier and glanced round at his sister, as he listened in on the man's reply.

"It'll be the carrier they hit next," Carl replied. "We'll take a second shot at them, then leave the pulse-cannon on automatic."

Stanton nodded to her his agreement with Carl — the Theocracy fighters would take out preselected targets to begin with, before raining down the real shitstorm.

In the second pass came five of the fighters, low this time — then turning away from the swarm of missiles released. The carrier leapt out of its pond on the first scattering of explosions, and came apart on the next. Only small fragments reached the ground, as was the similar fate of another of the fighters.

"Now we get our heads down," advised Lellan.

The fighters came in low again, flying directly along the embankment this time, high-powered rail-cannons opening up to create a long swarm of explosions that wiped out every weapon the rebels had mounted there. Still more fighters came hurtling in low over the flute grass, into the face of pulse-cannon fire from Carl's tank. A row of explosions stepped through the grasses towards the tank, and on the final explosion it ceased to fire. Lellan hoped the pulse-cannon had been on automatic — hoped that Carl was still alive.

"Polas, speak to me," she said.

"Main body is coming in right now with the big bastards behind — three of them," came the reply.

"Remember, everybody." Lellan addressed her troops scattered through the flute grass. "When I give the order, you cease firing and let our friends deal with the bombers."

A full wave of attack aircraft came in only shortly after she spoke, and their numbers darkened the sky.

"Kill them," she hissed.

All through the long grasses, troops cast aside the flak blankets they had been lying under, shouldered their hand-helds, and began firing. Soon there was more light in the sky than the predawn sun had managed, and a constant rain of wreckage. Stanton led the way out of their foxhole, brought his hand-held to his shoulder, and just held its trigger down. There were enough targets for each of his five missiles to find one. Amid the grasses there came explosion after explosion, as cluster shells dropped, and even though a counter in the corner of her visor was ticking up just how many of her people were dying, she knew it could be a whole lot worse. On the big bombers following, there would be daisy-cutters — wide-area antipersonnel weapons — and probably enough of them to kill off most of her little army.

"Ram and Rom, are you ready?" she asked.

"We were created ready," came the ironic reply.

Gazing at the chaos filling the sky, the wreckage and burning fighters falling to earth, Lellan decided that now was the time.

"Cease firing and go for cover," she ordered her troops, knowing that the only cover they had out there was under the Kevlar-filled blankets. She continued, "Drones, the sky is now yours."

The two cylindrical war drones burst from where they had buried themselves in the soft ground far to the right flank of Lellan's army. Immediately they performed a strange ballet around each other as they hurtled up into the sky. Then suddenly lines of violet fire began spewing from one end of each drone, so that they seemed tumbling torches. Unseen through this, their missiles speared out with horrifying accuracy, and all across the sky the fighters were disintegrating. Lellan observed some fighters turning to attack the two rising cylinders, but they were nowhere near as manoeuvrable as the drones, which simply slid aside and obliterated their assailants as they went past. It wasn't all one-sided though; the two drones were jerked about by the occasional hits they suffered, then one of them lost its APW in a brief flare. But they continued to rise, their course coming to intersect perfectly that of the first bomber. The lumbering giant did not stand a chance, and the explosion that cut the sky was twinned by the flare of sunrise, which heralded the sudden attack of the Theocracy infantry.

Suddenly their ATV was full of people, and Eldene felt angry at her space being invaded — then suddenly confused about why she felt thus.

"Slow and easy," Thorn advised her. "Take us round the other side of the crater."

"Did it work?" she asked, almost too shy to look round at the intruders as she spun up the vehicle's turbine.

"Spectacularly," said Thorn, but she could tell he was angry about something. She watched him as he turned to the four newcomers. "Let me introduce some old comrades," he said to her. "Ian, Mika, and my old friend Gant — who is dead."

Eldene was busy wondering about the yellow-faced boy in the big suit, before Thorn's final words impacted. She did not react, however, merely turned her attention back to the screen and set the vehicle in motion. That she felt confused again came as no surprise to her — she'd been in a state of confusion right from the moment she had seen Fethan ram his hand into Proctor Volus. As Thorn returned to the back of the ATV, the strange boy moved up beside her and studied the controls she was operating. She gave him a tentative smile and he returned it tiredly, as he took hold of one of the support handles fixed above the screen. She could sense he felt more comfortable here.

"Dead or not, he looks mighty well to me," commented Fethan in reply to Thorn's brief acerbic introduction.

With the vehicle getting up speed, they all either grabbed handholds or quickly folded down seats, as the inclination took them.

"You angry because you forgot about my memplant?" asked Gant.

Thorn grimaced. "I don't know myself why I'm angry." Still showing some irritation, he sat down by the weapons console and swung the targeting visor across his face, probably to hide his expression.

"Angry or otherwise, I need you getting me up to speed concerning what's going on here," said the one called Cormac, and Eldene felt her spine crawl at the sound of his voice. She glanced round at him and took in eyes as unforgiving as lead shot, but then he smiled at her and suddenly the coldness was gone. All she could do was turn away and concentrate once again on her driving.

"Oh, I can tell you all that, Agent," said Fethan.

"Please do," said Cormac. "Beginning with why you keep on calling me 'Agent'."

"Last I heard you was an agent — didn't think you'd retired," said Fethan.

"You know me?"

"Know of you, who don't? You're Ian Cormac — not what I'd call a secret agent."

"I've never been considered that," Cormac replied. "I'm a… facilitator, and it is sometimes useful that I'm recognized. Polity secret agents wear a different face every day and often they are Golem… or something else." He eyed Fethan.

"The name's Fethan," said the old cyborg. "I'm a facilitator too."

"Well, facilitate away and tell me what the hell's going on down here."

As Eldene manoeuvred the ATV around the edge of the crater and into a clear bright day, Fethan tersely detailed all that had occurred over the last few days.

"So nice to encounter old friends," muttered Cormac, when Fethan told him about John Stanton — though Eldene could hear no pleasure in his voice. Finally, some time after Eldene had stopped the ATV and powered it down, Cormac observed, "So it seems Lellan is caught. She cannot stay hidden in the cave systems because of the approach of this Ragnorak device; she cannot destroy all the Theocracy forces on the surface because that would result in a nuclear strike being used against her; she cannot lose against said forces because there would be no taking of prisoners; and in the end all she can do is drag the battle out and hope for Polity intervention here."

"But that's on its way, apparently," said Thorn. He gestured to a coms helmet lying on the floor at the rear of the ATV. "Polas earlier sent out a message of encouragement to the troops, informing them that Lellan's U-space plea for help has been picked up and relayed by an ECS dreadnought — and that same ship is now on its way here."

Cormac went very still for a moment, then asked calmly, "And the name of this dreadnought? Was a name ever given?"

"Yes, a line Patrol ship, name of the Occam Razor," Thorn replied.

The euphemistic description might be tactical withdrawal, but it was called defeat in any other language, and no less than Lellan had expected. Hit and withdraw, hit and withdraw — all the way back to the mountains, where she knew she could extend the conflict almost indefinitely. To stand, out here against a force three times their number would be plain suicide. Perhaps it would have been a different matter with a few more of those war drones, or if the two she did possess had not depleted their power supplies to the point where they could just about keep up with her army's retreat, and manage an occasional counter-attack whenever Dorth's forces pushed to break the line. In the end, she desperately needed Polity intervention, because without it they would do nothing but lose.

I've destroyed us, I've completely destroyed us…

"Tell me again, what did he say?" asked her brother.

"He said that the Occam Razor is now in the hands of Separatists who are unlikely to pass on our shout for help." She remembered that cold voice speaking in her ear, then the confirmation from Fethan and the man Thorn.

"No, what exactly did he call it?" Stanton asked.

"He called it a subverted AI dreadnought, and our signal to the Polity has been updated to include that news."

"That should bring them running," said her brother.

Lellan gritted her teeth and, feigning tiredness, rubbed at her eyes to smear away the tears that were gathering there. Jarvellis had yet to contact Stanton and give him the wonderful news that the moment they had started sending the updated signal, something had begun blocking it.

"I need to wear it to prevent the gravity here killing me," explained Apis.

"Why? How would it kill you?" Eldene asked him, glad of those long talks with Fethan which had given her some understanding of 'gravity' and how it was absent in space.

Mika, seated on a rolled-up sleeping bag opposite them, intervened, "His people… they adapted to living in space. Amongst other things, his bones would never have supported him in this gravity since, as he was then, he would have collapsed and died almost immediately."

Apis, who had been showing little inclination to sit down and continued to prowl around inside the ATV, snapped his attention towards Mika. "You say 'would' and 'was'? How different am I now?"

Mika inspected the laptop, via which she monitored the Outlinker's body through his exoskeleton. "You are improving, though I would not yet advise the removal of your suit. It is possible that you would survive it, and that the nanomycelium reconfiguring your body would be thereby stimulated to work harder, but such a move is still not recommended."

Leaning back in the driver's chair, Eldene studied the boy further. She had no idea what Mika was talking about, but it added to the mystery. This boy had previously lived on a giant space station and now had to wear the strange bulky suit to support his weight in Masada's gravity. Eldene could not conceive of anyone more unlike herself.

"Tell me about Miranda," she asked him suddenly.

Apis froze in mid-stride, and Eldene noted how Mika was now studying him analytically. Obviously there was a great deal more to learn here, more than she had overheard in previous conversations before the others had left the ATV — Fethan to check where the hooder had gone, and the other three to find out about this 'dracoman'.

Apis turned to her and replied doggedly, "What's to tell? Miranda was an Outlink station that was the home for millions of people, and now it is just so much floating wreckage."

Before he could turn away Eldene persisted, "But how was it destroyed?"

"A nanomycelium," said Apis, perhaps hoping her lack of knowledge might silence her.

"You have fungi here." Mika made it a statement, in her accustomed fashion. Then, with a flash of self-annoyance, "Do you have fungi here?"

"Orepores," Eldene replied, not quite sure of what relevance that was.

"Describe them," said Mika.

"Round things." Eldene's hands shaped something spherical in the air. "Up in the north, they feed them to the pigs."

"What you are seeing in these orepores is the fruit of a plant — the plant itself is a spread of thin fibres, some of which are too small to be seen. These fibres are called mycelia — that's the plural of mycelium."

"A fungus destroyed a place with millions of people in it?" Eldene asked, disbelievingly. Then she pointed at Apis. "And he's got one inside him?"

"It's a little more complicated than that," replied Mika, glancing towards the door of the ATV as the warning light came on beside it, then hinging her mask back into place.

Eldene raised her mask too, and noted how Apis did not even have to — apparently devices in his clothing detected any drop in the oxygen content of the air and raised his visor when necessary.

"That was quick," said Mika, standing up and turning towards the door. Eldene had been aware that the woman was very annoyed earlier, when ordered by Cormac to stay with the ATV — so they did not later have a struggle again to drag her away from the remnants of Dragon. She wondered if they had found this dracoman they had been talking about. What she did not expect was for the door to slam back, and to hear a thud like a cleaver chopping into a cabbage.

For a moment she could not fathom what was going on. Mika suddenly bent over, something smacking into the wall above and behind her. Only when blood welled through the torn fabric of Mika's suit did it become evident that someone standing outside had put a shot through her. With a bubbling groan Mika collapsed to her knees. She turned to say something, but only blood came out of her mouth.

The Theocracy soldier who now stepped through the door seized Mika by the shoulder and hurled her outside behind him, even as he turned and fired at the Outlinker. Apis grunted as the single shot slammed him back against the wall. It was only as he began sliding down it, his eyes turning up in his head to show only the white, that Eldene thought to reach for her weapon. In a second the soldier had knocked it away, shoving the snout of his weapon up under her chin. Eldene froze, recognizing the gun — it was the very same type as the one Fethan had given her when they first left the crop lands and she knew exactly what it was capable of.

"What about this one?" asked a voice from outside.

"Leave her. She'll be dead in a minute, if she's not already," said Eldene's captor.

A second soldier, then a third, entered the ATV, and after a few minutes a fourth one closed the door behind him. The one threatening Eldene drew away his weapon as he raised his visor. It was strange, thought Eldene bizarrely, how little you could tell from someone's appearance; for she had frequently encountered plump, cheerful-looking proctors who were always ready with quips and funny anecdotes whilst they were lashing the skin off a worker's back. This man, though, with his hawkish face and twisted mouth, looked just plain evil and obviously relished the fact.

He gestured towards Apis with his weapon. "Check him out. He may still be alive."

"Should have gone for a head-shot, Speelan," said one of the newcomers.

"No, I think the good Deacon will be wanting words with these people."

"What about the other four?"

"We forget about them. I don't want to hang around here any longer." He glanced through the front screen. "Maybe that hooder will deal with them."

Eldene kept silent. To speak out, she knew from long experience, only brought unwanted attention. Transferring his gaze back inside, Speelan stared at her as if he had momentarily forgotten her presence. Almost negligently, he drew back his pistol and cracked its barrel down against her temple.

Sometimes it did not help to have the kind of mind in which blocks of logic keyed together so precisely, and life-and-death facts revealed themselves like nasty gumboils. Dragon was gone: buried under a mud slide that had raised the soil level in the pit of the crater by at least ten metres. But what the hell did that matter one way or the other, with what was coming?

"I can't and I won't believe Scar is somewhere underneath that," said Cormac, as ever revealing nothing of what he felt.

Gant disagreed. "He may be there still, but if he is you can guarantee he's not dead."

"Unlike some I could mention," said Thorn.

"I'm not dead," Gant pointed out. "How can I be? I'm a machine."

"This isn't helping," said Cormac before Thorn could formulate a reply. "Gant, why so certain he's not dead?"

Gant shrugged, turning so that the snout of his cradled APW pointed down into the slowly refilling crater. "As you know, he doesn't need to breathe oxygen. As I understand it, he is just more efficient when he is surrounded by a gaseous oxidant he can breathe in to burn his body's fuel. He can use other types of atmosphere, as we've already found out, and I know that without any atmosphere to breathe he can run on his body's fuel for days before simply going into stasis."

"And how do you know all this?" Cormac pretended interest in the answer.

"Mika. Not from her directly, but she's built up quite a database on dracomen." He nodded towards the crater. "He could be in stasis under there — or digging his way out even now."

"But do we wait to find out?" Thorn asked.

Cormac studied the two men while he considered the present situation. Maybe they should stay and wait to see if Scar would indeed dig his way out, because it seemed to Cormac that any other efforts were futile. The Theocracy would destroy the rebel army, either on the surface in straight combat, or underground — along with the rest of the population there — by kinetic missile. And it was all such a pointless drama: the squabblings of geese in a pen outside an abattoir. Cormac felt hopeless: he'd fallen so far he was not sure he could get back up again.

"Do we wait?" asked Thorn.

"To achieve what?" asked Cormac.

Perhaps this time the bitterness came through in his voice for both Thorn and Gant looked at once confused, then not a little apprehensive.

"We should return and help Lellan Stanton," said Thorn. "She's an effective commander, and committed to the Underground cause. She deserves whatever we can give her, little as that may be."

Only half-hearing what the man had said, Cormac continued to stare down into the crater. Then something clicked. "Lellan Stanton," he said, turning back to the pair of them.

"Yes?" inquired Thorn.

"You arrived here in John Stanton's ship Lyric II. But how did you get through undetected?"

"The ship had chameleonware. Pretty sophist—"

"And this ship is now up in the mountains somewhere?"

"Yes…"

Cormac turned away from the crater and set then a rapid pace back towards the ATV. Hurrying along behind, Thorn asked, "You're thinking of hitting that Ragnorak device with it, aren't you?"

Cormac let out a brief bitter laugh, abruptly halting and turning to face the other two. "Maybe I haven't painted a clear enough picture with what I already told you, or with what I passed on to Lellan. Perhaps that's because I left out one pertinent fact." He glanced at Gant. "Your partner understands, I think, but I'm not sure he's allowing himself to understand completely."

"Skellor?" said Gant, and Cormac thought the pale grimness overtaking the Golem's expression was a superb emulation of the real thing.

"Precisely, Skellor. Skellor subverted an AI dreadnought using Jain technology, and is direct-linked to a crystal matrix AI, and surviving. I told you this, and I told Lellan this, though I'm not sure just how much of it she understood."

"Enough to know he's dangerous," said Thorn.

"Dangerous," Cormac echoed leadenly.

"Tracking him down and stopping him will become an ECS priority — something like him cannot be allowed to exist," Thorn added.

"Yes," said Cormac. "And if Earth Central knew about him, it would already have ECS tracking him down and stopping him, as you put it. You see, the fact I've missed out is that only we few on this world actually know about Skellor. We few, and whoever else we may have spoken to here."

A look of horror slowly crept into Thorn's expression as he realized what Cormac was telling him. "He's coming here… he won't risk letting the news get out…"

"He killed the entire crew of the Occam Razor," reminded Gant.

Turning to continue on his way, Cormac added, "And he's coming here in control of that ship, one capable of incinerating everything on the surface of this world, so, frankly, fuck the stupid little rebellion here and its suppression. If Lellan's transmission doesn't get through, I have to get off this world and warn the Polity. And with me off and away from here, and Skellor knowing about it, maybe he won't be so inclined to hang around killing every human being in this entire system."

For a second or two Cormac stared at the clearing, and the two tracks disappearing into the flute grasses, and wondered which particular deity was crapping on him from a great height.

"Mika!" shouted Thorn, running forwards to stoop by the bloodied form sprawled on the ground. Signalling Gant to move over to one side, Cormac pulled his thin-gun and followed Thorn out into the clearing. Glancing at Mika, he knew she had been wasted: the position of the bloodstains informed him of the entrance and exit wounds, straight through her chest on the right-hand side. Poising his gun to one side of his face, he looked down at the tracks left by the ATV. Who was responsible? That girl? Fethan? Whoever it was, he would kill them.

"Look, stop fussing. I'm all right."

Cormac registered the voice, but recognizing it just did not coincide with any kind of reality for him. He watched, dumbfounded, as Thorn helped Mika to her feet. He then stepped forward and caught her under the elbow as she appeared about to collapse.

"I'm all right. I'm all right," she insisted.

"You've been hit," protested Thorn.

Cormac tried to reassess what he was seeing: the spread of blood around one hole under Mika's right breast and a greater leakage of blood around a larger hole ripped out of the back of her jacket, the insulating layers splayed out like a thistle head: entrance and exit wounds. Thorn clutched Mika as she slumped drunkenly against him. Cormac used the barrel of his gun and one finger to gently part the ripped fabric on her back. There was plenty of blood there, but underneath it a nub of purplish-pink flesh like a deep-rooted tumour.

"Physician heal thyself," he murmured, releasing the fabric and stepping back, as he remembered the creature he had killed in Skellor's laboratory — the creature Mika had later studied so intensively.

She glanced round at him, a certain amount of calculation creeping into her woozy expression. "It was soldiers, Theocracy soldiers."

At Cormac's shoulder Gant said, "Survivors from that lander, probably."

"You well enough to walk?" Cormac asked her.

Mika nodded.

"Then we follow them — at least they're heading in the right direction."

"What about Fethan?" asked Gant.

"He'll catch up, I assume."

Later, as it became apparent that Mika no longer needed anyone's help, and while Thorn moved ahead with Gant, Cormac leaned close to her and said, "Doctor, you've been taking some of the Outlinker's medicine?"

"I have," Mika replied.

"And it's good, I think?" he said.

"Better than good," said Mika, tapping her finger against the contents indicator on her oxygen bottle. The indicator had gone from green through orange to deep dark red, which meant that the bottle was completely empty. Cormac wondered if, when she had earlier changed her bottle for a new one, she had done this just to keep up appearances, or if, like Scar, she operated more efficiently when breathing a suitably gaseous oxidant.

Even though Speelan delivered his report with a terseness and rigidity of control that was almost machinelike, Aberil could feel fear coming through the link. Whether that fear was of the hooder still out there, or of the expected wrath at Speelan's loss of a lander and twenty-four men, Aberil could not make up his mind. In fact he felt no wrath, just curiosity at what their two captives — one of them obviously an Outlinker — would have to say for themselves. The Proctor, Molat, who had been brought to him earlier in the day, had provided no information of tactical value and was beginning to bore him. Only the story about the siluroyne had been interesting because Aberil had known the Proctor was lying about something, but sufficient pressure had only revealed Molat's silly guilt over the sacrifice of an underling. Obviously Proctor Molat had reached the limit of his advancement within the Theocracy.

"Where is the rebel army now?" he asked generally.

"The other side of the swamp basin, First Commander," replied his logistics officer.

"So they're retreating towards the mountains, without us having to force them across the basin. It's too easy really."

"I don't think Captain Granch thought so, First Commander." The officer looked pale as he turned towards Aberil. "He has ordered the withdrawal of his remaining fighters."

"Granch, what do you think you are doing?"

The captain of Gabriel was quick to reply.

"My apologies. First Commander, but they must return for refuelling and arming, with the spaceport being now unavailable."

Aberil grinned across the room at Proctor Molat who, like everyone else in the command lander, was listening in.

"The one bomber we have retained is reactor-run so I do not see why it should be recalled. I am in fact adamant that it should not be."

Granch: "First Commander, it cannot get in close enough, with those Polity machines there."

Aberil: "Granch, I know perfectly well that your son is aboard that plane. It will, however, remain in high orbit until required — is that understood?"

Granch did not reply, but the logistics officer spoke up. "The bomber is returning to high orbit, sir."

Aberil turned to Molat. "You see: softness, lack of faith, nepotism. We must be harder and harsher if we are to proudly take our place in the universe before God." Then, before the Proctor could reply, Aberil turned away from him and sent over the ether, "How far away are you now, Speelan?"

"I have the command vehicle in sight, and will be with you within minutes, First Commander," came Speelan's abrupt response.

"Bring your prisoners directly to me here," Aberil instructed. "And without further damage to them."

Before Speelan could reply, another presence intruded:

"Aberil, I do hope you are not allowing your little games to distract you from your main objective."

Aberil was out of his seat in a moment. The sheer force of the Hierarch's communication almost had his head ringing, and he felt that force could not be explained just by the message being transmitted through a high channel, formerly used solely by the Septarchy Friars.

"This is not a distraction, Hierarch. I predict that by tomorrow's sunrise Lellan's forces will be perfectly positioned in the mountains for our nuclear cleansing. But I am very much concerned at why an Outlinker would want to be down here on the surface, let alone how he got here."

On a lower channel now, Loman spoke conversationally. "Don't spend too much time finding out, if you consider it that important, use drugs, not torture."

Aberil did not let himself object to having to forgo the pleasure of causing pain. He in fact became suddenly wary of making any response, for even on the lower channels there was something quite overwhelming about the communication from his brother.

"Your will, Hierarch."

The link closed, and Aberil swallowed and took a deep breath. In the expressions of Molat and the others, he read a hint of fear and bewilderment. They had all registered the contained power in the Hierarch, and all of them understood it not at all.

Not for the first time, Carl reached up and patted at the Polity wound dressing on the side of his face, as he stared across the swamp basin to the flute grasses on the far side. If they just opened up with their pulse-rifles they would be sure to hit some Theocracy soldiers, just as no doubt the reverse applied with the enemy and their rail-guns, but ammunition was not limitless on either side and the thick grasses had a tendency to eat up the momentum of any projectile, be it an iron slug or a pulse of ionized aluminium.

"These bastards have got thermal mesh in their body armour," said Uris, staring at the screen of a small heat detector he had managed to salvage from the tank before the vehicle got pulverized.

"Either that or you were imagining things," said Targon.

In suitable reply, a full clip of rail-gun slugs hammered into the flute grass to the right of them, with a sound like the revving of a worn diesel engine. They went face-down, flak blankets pulled over them, as the high stalks collapsed in pulpy dark green fragments. A short way off, someone started screaming, then something suddenly curtailed their noise. Another fighter broke cover and tried to dash across a channel inhabited by low plantain to seek better cover on the other side. A second rail-gun opened up, and the man just flew apart.

"Where the fuck is that coming from?" asked Carl.

Hunched up with his flak blanket over his back, Uris studied his heat detector, then abruptly gestured with his open hand. "Ten metres back from the far edge — just left of the plantain channel over there!"

"Beckle!" Carl shouted.

Beckle did not need specific instructions. He quickly set up the small mortar he had been given — as an inadequate replacement of his pulse-cannon on the tank — and fired off three rounds. Two explosions blew loam and roots into the air, but in the detritus thrown up by the third explosion Carl, as he stood up, was sure he spotted a human arm. He and Targon raised their weapons over their heads so as to clear the flute grass, and opened fire on the same area where the explosions had occurred. But then grenades started detonating to their left and the rail-gun fire became so intense that the air filled with a sleet of blasted-up mud and scraps of vegetation. Carl did not need to give any orders — his men were running again, forcing their way through thick growths of grass, stomping across already trampled spreads of moist purple leaves, staggering through muddy channels so wet that only black plantain could root there. Off to their right, others were running… falling… dying. In their own little group it was Targon who went down first. Turning to fire back behind, he looked down for his weapon and, in numb surprise, only saw his two arms ending at the elbow. He began to yell, but collapsed into the ground like a statue made of red ash, a burst of fire just eating him away.

"You bastards!"

Beckle fired the mortar and its shell slammed into a half-seen ground car on which a heavy rail-gun had been mounted. The explosion flung the vehicle out of view, and someone ran screaming to one side — his Theocracy uniform burning, then blazing white in an oxygen fire as his air bottle ruptured. The recoil of the mortar saved Beckle's life, as it sprawled him on his back below a fusillade that cut down the cover he had been fleeing towards. Carl drew his fire across, the glowing shots from his rifle acting like tracer fire as he brought it to bear on the soldier who had been shooting at Beckle, and cut him in half.

"This is not good!" bellowed Uris, dragging Beckle to his feet.

"We're outnumbered and outgunned," Beckle spat, as the three of them dived for cover in a small crater lying behind a mound of tangled roots and earth obviously hinged up from it by a recent explosion.

"Well, you know we can't win down here, so we just have to prolong it," growled Carl.

"Be nice to come close, though," said Beckle.

"Shut up, Beckle," said Uris, then grabbed Carl's shoulder and directed his comrade's attention to the other occupant of the crater. The woman sitting there was clearly an ex-pond worker, for she still had a scole attached to her body. That she was now cradling most of the contents of that body did not seem to affect the scole at all — it was still looking healthy as it drew on what remained of her blood. Keeping his head well down, Carl crawled over to her, and felt for a pulse at the side of her severely burnt neck. After a moment he shook his head and slid back to join his companions.

"Fucking things," said Beckle and, drawing his cut-down rifle, put two shots through the creature. Smoking, it pushed itself up on its legs, as if trying to retract its head, then it sagged with red oxygenated blood pouring out of it.

"It probably finished her off," observed Carl, for a moment staring beyond her with the thought that her blood had sprayed a very long way — before realizing that what he was seeing was red gallish nodules breaking out on the grass stalks, and recognizing how utterly irrelevant human drama was to the indefatigable grind of the seasonal engine. Then, peering out of the crater in the opposite direction, he ducked as a burst of fire sprayed them with fragments of the same budding growth.

"They'll put a grenade in here any moment now," warned Beckle.

"We keep running, and hold at the mountains," said Carl, relaying the orders he had just received.

"I agree with the running bit," muttered Beckle.

"Lellan?" Uris asked — he had lost his helmet earlier and did not have Carl's coms access.

"Yes," Carl replied.

"Great, she's got a plan," said Beckle as they piled over the edge of the crater and ran for the next scrap of cover.

In such horror and chaos Carl felt it necessary to believe that someone, somewhere, knew what they were doing. To think otherwise would be to give in to despair.

When consciousness eventually returned it did so with disorientating abruptness. One moment Apis felt he was waking again from the cold-coffin in the lander, then as memory caught up he assumed he was waking on the floor of the ATV. Both scenarios turned out to be incorrect as he lifted his head and looked around. He was in a lander, sure, but not the one in which he had arrived upon this planet. This particular one had its cockpit sealed off with a heavy door, some sort of fibrous matting on the floor, and cold blue lights set in the ceiling. With a grunt of effort, Apis sat up and heaved himself to a position with his back resting against the cold wall. Eldene, sitting with her arms wrapped around her shins and her chin resting on her knees, observed him silently for a moment before saying, "You haven't noticed, have you?"

Apis wondered if she was referring to the bloody dressing on her head. He reached up, with an arm that seemed wrapped in lead, and felt the back of his own head — where it had slammed against the wall of the ATV after the Theocracy soldier had… pushed him. He lowered his arm and stared at it, then lowered his hand to his chest and probed it with the fingers of his other hand.

"I warned them that to remove it would kill you," Eldene added.

They'd shot him, but the exoskeleton had prevented the bullet penetrating, which would not now be the case for he no longer wore it. He continued probing his chest, his stomach, his biceps, his thighs. His body felt utterly wrong to him; instead of feeling just bone and gristle under his skin he found a layer of flesh, the shapes of muscles clinging to his bones like parasitic growths — in fact, utterly unaccustomed bulk. Whenever he moved, these muscles moved with him — it did not seem quite real to him that the muscles were doing the moving, and were actually part of him.

"Why aren't you dead?" Eldene asked.

Apis considered the complicated — and to his mind incredibly dangerous — procedures involved in standing up, and rejected them for the moment.

"The mycelium working inside me — it's rebuilt me as a normal-gravity human. Mika said that the exo was taking less and less of the strain, but I wasn't sure what she meant by that."

Mika?

"Where is Mika?" he asked, not sure he wanted to hear the answer.

"Dead," said Eldene flatly. "They shot her, then just threw her outside like a sack of deaders."

Apis stared at Eldene, but somehow just could not find the energy to feel sorry. He'd lost his own people, he'd lost his mother, and Mika he had not even known for very long. He just did not have the grief to spare for her.

"Where are we now?" Apis asked, wanting to know more than just their location.

"On the way here, I saw hundreds of landing craft, and a great tent-like building erected between some of them. We're in one of those craft by the edge of the tent. We're prisoners of the Theocracy."

"What will they do with us?" he persisted.

Eldene stared at him for a long moment, then shrugged. "Probably torture us to death. There aren't any jails down here."

"They are… insane," began Apis. But Eldene's attention had slid over to the light beside the airlock, as it faded down from red, through orange, to yellow. Apis felt a rush of adrenalin and used it to push himself to his feet. Every movement, it seemed to him, was fraught with peril; he felt his weight as a hugely unstable load, and wondered what bones might snap in trying to support it; he felt his muscles sliding under his skin, and expected agony as they tore free from their anchor points; the clicking of his joints and the buzzing pins-and-needles in his feet terrified him, but somehow, without mishap, he stood.

The soldier who stepped through was the very same one who had burst into the ATV and shot him. Naked as he was, Apis felt incredibly vulnerable when the man negligently levelled the same weapon at his chest.

"You're standing, I see, which means that you" — he looked at Eldene — "are a liar."

Apis immediately felt affronted, was about to argue her case, but she caught his eye as she stood up too, and gave him a slight shake of her head. Only as she did that did he truly begin to understand their situation, and only then did something very adult and very callous — probably born in that moment when he had opened the airlock on twenty-three of these people, and nurtured by all that had subsequently ensued — rear its head inside him and look around. He kept his mouth closed and wondered how much he could depend on his body in this gravity; and also wondered if he would get an opportunity to use it.

Receiving no verbal reaction to his words, and perhaps expecting none, the man threw something compressed in his left hand at Apis, then stood aside to allow another guard to enter the cell. Apis caught the balled-up material, let it fall open, and saw that he had been given a set of overalls.

"Put them on," ordered the soldier.

Apis pulled on the overalls, his every measured movement carried through with the utmost care. As he finished, struggling to do up the primitive buttons down the front of the garment, he felt exhausted. When the soldier waved them both towards the door, where more guards waited with plastic ties for their wrists and hobbles for their legs, Apis felt their chances of escape fading.

Now, with the advance of the Masadan month, Calypse was being overtaken by the sun in their erratic race across mackerel skies, and had half its vast bulk sinking into misty oblivion behind the horizon as the sun set off to one side, throwing it into brown and lead silhouette. For a brief time the gas giant seemed fused to the body of the planet itself, and with its slow descent any watcher might expect the earth to tremble with this shift.

"What happened?" Fethan asked, looking intently at Thorn.

"We could as well ask what happened to you," said Cormac, studying the old cyborg's ripped clothing, and ripped skin, and noting the exposed hard white ceramals and carbon materials of his internal workings.

Thorn said, "The other two were in the ATV when it was taken by Theocracy soldiers. We are following them now." Then, gesturing to Mika, "We've got a trace on the boy's exoskeleton."

Fethan nodded, for a moment observed the blood on Mika's clothing, shot Cormac an inquiring look, then turned his attention to Gant. "Can you move fast, Golem?" he asked.

There was too much intensity in his question for Gant to ridicule it, and he merely nodded an affirmative. Cormac glanced from Fethan to Gant, then back again.

"Trouble?" he asked.

Fethan grimaced. "We've got a hooder only two hundred metres off in that direction." He gestured beyond tall shadowed stands of flute grass, then stabbed a finger at Gant. "Me and him are gonna have to be live bait to lead it away." He turned to Thorn, Cormac and Mika. "You three have to keep going — as fast as you dare. Stay out of the flute grass as much as you can, and keep an eye up for heroynes." He stabbed a finger to the darkening sky.

"We could just kill it," suggested Gant, holding up his APW.

"Nah, you couldn't," said Fethan, eyeing the weapon. "That'd only piss it off."

Knowing that the gun Gant held was capable of destroying other Golem and blowing holes through steel walls, Cormac wondered if Fethan knew what he was talking about. Before he could comment on this the cyborg went on.

"That's one big fucker out there," he said. "You might manage to blow enough segments to kill it, but more likely you'd just burn it a bit, before it ripped you apart… Look, we gotta go."

Gant glanced at Cormac for confirmation. When Cormac nodded, Gant followed the old cyborg out into the falling twilight. Turning back to the others, Cormac said, "Let's keep moving." Then, noticing how Thorn was staring after the two rapidly departing figures he said, "They're machines, Thorn. You'd never be able to move as fast, so you'd soon get exhausted."

"Machines," Thorn repeated, then, "you know, he never told me he'd had a memplant. He lay spread in pieces on the floor of that cavern on Samarkand, and I didn't know… A recovery team must have come along later."

Cormac reached out and slapped his arm. "Come on."

Thorn shook himself and did as bid.

They travelled, where possible, down plantained and mossy channels, or across areas where the grass had been grazed down to its roots; and, where that was not possible, they progressed cautiously and with weapons to hand through areas of thick flute grass. All the time they were aware of the drama being enacted elsewhere by Fethan and Gant. Distantly they heard rushing sounds, as of a maglev train or a sudden burst of wind through dry foliage. At one point the reddish arc-welder flash of Gant's APW ignited the twilight, and Cormac had to wonder if the Golem had disobeyed instructions or perhaps used it just as a distraction.

"What did he mean blow enough segments to kill it?" asked Cormac as they rested briefly.

Mika was busy checking her laptop to once again locate where they should be going — roughly adapted software using the increase or decrease in signal strength from Apis's exoskeleton as its direction finder. "I only read a little about hooders, and then only out of morbid curiosity, rather than because I expected to ever encounter one," she said, hooking her screen back on her belt and turning to look at Cormac. "As I understand it they have some of the physical attributes of earthworms, with their brain not just contained in the head but spread down the length of their bodies. It would be difficult to kill a creature like that hitting it in only one place."

"What else can you tell me about them?" asked Cormac, firmly believing that once horror had been named and described, it ceased to be quite as horrifying.

"I can tell you a little," said Thorn.

Cormac nodded for him to continue.

Thorn went on, "Stanton told me that nothing less than an APW or missile-launcher could kill them. Apparently their shells are something like a carbon composite, and they're mainly made up of that and fibrous muscle. Both disperse the heat from lasers, and small arms just make a lot of holes. Apparently one of them once grabbed a proctor and his aerofan, which was a hundred metres up in the air."

Cormac lowered his mask and took a sip from his water bottle — his mouth now feeling a little dry. "How fast?" he pressed.

"Stanton claims they can move as fast as Terran predators. I checked that with the Lyric II AI. They can move even faster of course, at about a hundred kph, over this sort of terrain."

"Great," said Cormac, his previous theory about describing horror now in pieces around his feet. "Shall we keep moving?"