The Line of Polity

17

Nodding to herself the woman read on, "First into the mountains came Brother Stenophalis and high and low he searched for this enemy of the faithful, and at last found him in the Valley of Shadows and Whispers."

The picture displayed the Brother as some huge godlike incarnation astride the valley in his gleaming armour — a rail-gun of unlikely proportions clasped in his gauntlets, its ribbed power cable attaching to a lumpish power pack on his belt. Below him in the valley was something shadowy and insectile, and just looking at this made the hairs stand up on the back of the woman's neck.

She read: "Standing over the valley with the sun gleaming on his polished armour, he demanded of the monster, 'Come forth and face me! "

Abruptly the woman realized what was giving her the creeps: the picture had taken on depth — a 3-D effect. She pressed her finger against the page and it felt cold.

"The Hooded One came forth, and Stenophalis smote it with good iron, until the valley rang and echoed with the sound of their conflict, and avalanches of rock thundered from the heights."

The Hooded One coming forth was horrible: it was a hood of chitin containing shadow and just a hint of eyes. Brother Stenophalis turned and his rail-gun spat lines of black that just dissolved into this shadow.

"But iron availed him nought against this monster, and in the end it dragged him down into the Valley of Shadows and Whispers, and his armour parted like butter under the knife of the Hooded One."

The woman stared at the scene displayed, and decided she had been right to check out this story before letting her son… experience it.

Hierarch Epthirieth Loman Dorth stood in his favoured viewing room in the Tower of Faith and considered what he had wrought. The Council, in their terror of him, had voted him more and ever more powers, and had thus all but destroyed their own effectiveness in office. But this was how it had always been: when Amoloran had become Hierarch, the Council had done the same thing and, over the forty years of his rule, they had their powers restored by simple delegation because, in the end, no one man could effectively control the entire Theocracy. Knowing this, Loman smiled to think of those bureaucrats who had attempted to load him with endless detail in order to expedite this natural process. Even now he could see what remained of them floating beyond the arc of the Up Mirror. What none of them seemed to realize was that, with the higher channels now available to him, now controlled by him, the option to take the place Behemoth had prepared for itself was now also available to him.

The Hierarch closed his eyes and felt the vast potential of the Gift spread through three cylinder worlds, and down to his forces on the planet surface. Poor Aberil, even with all his abilities and training he had never wondered how the likes of Brom had managed to gain such stature so rapidly on their home worlds. He had not grasped that the Gift was as hierarchical as the organizations it was generally employed by, like the Theocracy itself, and just as he, Loman, had clawed his way to power in the physical world, so had ascendancy in the world of the Gift swung over to him once his usurpation was recognized. The moment Amoloran had died, there had been that first flush of additional power as command channels opened to him — excepting those occupied by the Septarchy Friars. And now, with the Friars gone, he could truly feel the growth of his mental dominion; now he no longer had to give orders at all, as the world ordered itself to his will. Just his very expectation of something had people scrambling to provide that something, often not knowing why. However, he realized that this was only the beginning — there were even greater levels of control he could reach, there was greater ascendancy to be gained. He was coming to understand that the ultimate level — the plateau — was the entire Theocracy acting as one beast, with one mind that was his own.

Throughout the realm of the Gift, Loman extended his power, and the feedback to him was gratifying and sometimes disconcerting. From the surface of the planet he felt a distortion, the essence and the sense of Behemoth undissipated: something there, but something not easily definable nor grasped. From deep space he knew rather than sensed, distantly, other conglomerations of Dracocorp augs, and out there he did sense, between him and them, another distortion, something odd, twisted. Here in the tower, it amused him to feel the fear of those who served him closely. It amused him to look through their eyes and see how, to them, he had gained weight and wore small scales upon his skin, yet to himself he had changed not at all. What a strange world he had wrought, and with what senses now could he view it all — the senses of all his subjects.

"Ah, you are at the apex, Hierarch Epthirieth Loman Dorth."

The words wormed into his consciousness, almost as if forming from the random sounds of so much that he was himself hearing and hearing by proxy. With part of himself that seemed nothing to do with human senses, he felt something unfolding from quantum vacuum, oozing out like guts pressured out through a small hole in someone's torso, or perhaps like crystals growing in cooling magma — something vast, and more powerful than anything should have the God-given right to be. Even Behemoth was a pale monster indeed by comparison.

"Who? Who?"

On Charity, Loman looked through the eyes of technicians and saw something they had hoped very much never to see. On the Witchfire he felt the horror of Captain Ithos as, trapped against atmosphere, he observed missiles hammering down on him from deepest space. One after the other he felt the brief sad protest of lives snuffed out in seconds, as hugely powerful induction weapons and full-spectrum lasers scoured away small ships of every kind between the cylinder worlds, almost like a blowtorch singeing away pin feathers from three plucked birds. Briefly he heard the babbling panic of the crew in the lone bomber with its cargo of atomic weapons. Briefly he glimpsed on a screen in the Gabriel the trace of radioactive vapour which that craft became in high orbit over Masada, and felt the keening grief of Captain Granch.

"I am Skellor and you see me in total, Hierarch Epthirieth Loman Dorth. Now, release your hold or I must free your hand."

Loman saw the sheer appalling size of the Occam Razor, and watched it pulverize the entire technical infrastructure of the system in mere seconds. The small ships of the fleet were burning, cargo carriers and small transports burning when not already become glowing debris. He felt the sudden groundswell of prayer from the Gabriel, the Witchfire and Ducking Stool, just before the missiles struck and the burning shells of these ships rolled around the planet, breaking up and contributing their substance to the growing scrapyard orbiting Masada. Then the afterglow of another titanic explosion bled across his vision, and he saw Ragnorak in harsh and brittle detail tumbling end over end down into the gaseous sea that was Calypse. Through the eyes of screaming men he saw girders and huge frameworks twisting against vast storms of colour. Then the image blinked out upon a fading wail and, alone again, he felt something reaching out from that terrible ship: something that wanted to get inside his head, something that wanted to seize from him the reins of power, absolute power.

"You cannot have it."

That seemed the limp and ineffectual protest of a child caught playing with something it had been disallowed, but Loman reached out, tightened his grip, and resisted.

"I have work to do."

Hanging on with all the sweaty grip of his mind, and the will that had allowed him to climb so high, Loman wondered at this huge emphasis on this entity's work.

"This is mine! You have no right!"

Glinting sunlight from its golden hull, and sucking away sunlight with grey Jain architecture, the Occam Razor slid closer, dominated the face of Calypse, and turned silver and ebony towers on its hull down towards the cylinder worlds of the Theocracy. In vacuum, the titanic flash of lased light was invisible, but it became visible as the first coherent wave slammed from the Down Mirror of Faith, only microseconds before that mirror disintegrated. The full horror washing through him in hot sickness, Loman leaned out and stared down into the eye of the cylinder world as the wall of fire ascended. He started screaming, as for each passing second he felt tens of thousands of his citizens incinerated; and at the last moment, when the firestorm obliterated Amoloran's Tower and the Up Mirror, he felt all contact and all power plucked from his grasp, and thought that truly cruel, before brief incandescent agony snuffed his life.

Rolling through space: Faith was an empty container, burnt out on the inside.

The side of the big lander opened down into the tented area, in which men were now erecting dividing walls. Speelan led them round stacks of packing cases, then held up his hand to halt them by the ramp leading up into the lander itself. From the room beyond, which was obviously some sort of control centre, walked a man with a blank face and ball-bearing eyes, below flat black hair. He seemed surrounded by a kind of dead atmosphere as he descended the ramp. Perhaps that was the smell of death, Apis thought, then dismissed the idea as being far too romantic.

"My name is Aberil Dorth, Deacon and First Commander of the Theocratic forces of Masada." He gestured to the first man. "You have met my lieutenant, Speelan. And your names are?"

Apis considered keeping his mouth shut, but then wondered what point there was in that — doing so he realized would only bring about the expected violence earlier.

"I am Apis Coolant, M-tech number forty-seven of Outlink Station Miranda," he said, quietly pleased with his fulsome title.

Aberil Dorth stared at him for a moment, then turned to Eldene.

"I'm Eldene," she said simply.

Aberil abruptly stepped towards her, reached out and with one finger parted the stick-strip of her shirt to expose her small breasts and the dressing underneath them.

"Pond worker," he observed.

Eldene did not reply, she just closed her shirt once he removed his hand, and waited.

Aberil turned back to Apis, then pointed to something lying in a heap beside the ramp, which it took a moment for Apis to recognize as the exoskeleton he had been wearing previously.

"That suit," said the Deacon with obviously more than passing interest. "How does one remove the limiters?"

Here it comes, thought Apis: the first question he could not answer. "I don't know," he said, then seeing an opportunity to turn things away from himself, he tipped his head towards Speelan. "He killed the woman who did know."

Aberil glanced at Speelan, then abruptly reached out and closed his hand around Eldene's throat. "You are an Outlinker," he said to Apis. "You manage to stand down here which, as I understand it, is quite exceptional, but I don't want to risk killing you just yet." Eldene was now choking, fighting for breath. She tried kicking him, but he easily avoided her attempts. Apis started to move forwards, but one of the guards caught him by the hair and struck him lightly across the back of his legs with a gun barrel, so that Apis went down on one knee.

Aberil went on, "So, every time you either refuse to answer, or give me an answer that displeases me, I will do something unpleasant to your companion here. Is that understood?"

"Understood," said Apis, tears in his eyes.

Aberil gave Eldene a shake. "The correct reply from you, Outlinker, is 'Yes, your reverence. »

"Yes, your reverence," said Apis.

Aberil released Eldene and she too slumped to her knees. Another man walked down the ramp — this one wearing a less obviously military uniform — and stood observing things from a wary distance. Aberil turned to him. "Ah, Molat, hand me your stinger."

"There's no need for this," said Apis, as the man unhooked a white baton from his belt and passed it across to Aberil.

Aberil glanced at him. "What there is need for or otherwise, I will decide. Now, my first question: how did you get here?"

"I was rescued from the station Miranda as it started to come apart, by a ship called the General Patten," Apis replied.

Aberil stared at him for a long drawn-out moment, then abruptly turned and drew the stinger across Eldene's stomach. She gasped, then clamped down on her pain, obviously determined not to scream.

"It's the truth!" Apis yelled.

"Truth," Aberil sneered, "is the General Patten was obliterated, and everyone aboard was killed. You arrived here with Polity spies and saboteurs." He slapped the stinger against Eldene's face and, even though determined not to, she screamed. "You came here to undermine the true faith and spread rumours and lies!" As Aberil pulled back the stinger to inflict it on Eldene once again, Apis found a strength in his legs that surprised him. He launched himself from the ground, driving himself headfirst into the commander, had the satisfaction of feeling air whoof out of him, and seeing him fold up, stagger back, then go down on one knee. Then the guards were dragging Apis away, and Aberil was standing up again, holding the stinger ready, his expression vicious.

"Oh, I tire of questions," he sneered.

Then suddenly it seemed as if the whole atmosphere inside the tent shuddered, and every one of the Theocracy soldiers jerked as if just dealt a blow. Apis watched Aberil's expression slide from viciousness to bewilderment and shock. Suddenly men were howling and dropping to the ground. Aberil bent face-forwards, his hands pressed to either side of his head. Molat was on his knees, his hands clasped as if in prayer, while Speelan was in a foetal curl with his arms over his head. Apis gaped about himself and wondered what madness had descended on them. He glanced across at Eldene, whose expression mirrored his own shock, but who reacted much faster: she stood up and, moving as fast as the hobble allowed her, went over to an open toolbox that was being used by those erecting the partitions. In a moment she had found a pair of wire-cutters to quickly release herself from her bonds, before returning to free Apis too.

"What's happening?" Apis wondered, as he discarded the severed plastic from his wrists and ankles.

"Oxygen and masks," said Eldene curtly.

Apis surveyed his surroundings. The others were all clawing at the biotech augs they wore, and the tent was filling up with a smell like seared pork. She was right: now was not the time to ask questions but to act.

Sastol grated his teeth as he watched the rebels being seemingly sucked away by the evening shadows. This squad with which they had been playing a lethal game of hide-and-seek all day was made up of only three men, formerly four, yet they had taken out seven of his own men — including Braden, who had burnt up in his own oxygen supply. Sastol wanted to go after them exclusively, but orders were orders and they must continue their slow advance beside the swamp basin, allowing the rebels to flee back and entrench themselves in their damned mountains.

"Okay, hold it here. Seems they're all pulling back now."

Over his aug he could feel their disapproval at the order, but only Donch felt any inclination to voice it:

"It would seem like an opportunity not to be missed."

Speaking out loud, now that the rebels were quite obviously not trenching in to a new position or turning round to attack, Sastol said, "An opportunity for what?"

"Filling their backs with iron slugs, I think," said Sodar, who had moved in to crouch at his right side, dropping the heavy rail-gun — which had somehow survived the destruction of the car — on the ground before him.

"It was a direct order from Aberil Dorth. Do you want to take it up with him?" Sastol asked.

"That would not be so wise," admitted Donch, moving in close on Sastol's left. "How long do we have to hold these positions?"

"For as long as necessary — probably throughout the night." He did not look at either of his comrades, but he guessed their feelings on the matter. The previous night had been bad enough for them, what with Dominon killed by a mud snake, and that siluroyne which had charged them just before dawn, but the worst of it was the screaming during the night, the result, they had discovered, of an entire squad being taken out by a hooder. They knew about hooders — who could not know about such creatures of gruesome myth and horrifying reality?

"We'll dig in here as best we can, and wait it out," he announced.

"Seems crazy to let them get to terrain they know, and where they can easily find cover," persisted Donch.

"Do you doubt the First Commander's capabilities?" Sastol asked, staring at him directly.

"Not to his face I don't. I want to keep my extremities intact."

Sastol grinned at this and turned to Sodar. "What do you think—" he began, but then spoke no more, because of the sheer powerful horror of what he now knew to be happening.

"Oh my God, what is that?"

Donch's was the clearest voice of them all, over the huge rush of screaming communication that filled all channels. Sastol slapped his hand against his aug and screamed too, adding his voice to the thousands doing the same all along the Theocracy front.

"Faith… it was Faith… Gone!"

But even that was not the worst. Where once Behemoth had worked his twisted wiles, before being pushed away by the chanting and praying of the Septarchy Friars, something else loomed — and it wanted him, it wanted them all. It was reaching… Sastol tried to find something to hang on to, as his aug squirmed against his head and something utterly putrid overran his senses of smell and taste. Trying to mould solidity out of the indescribable, he saw himself standing with his men — and that something reaching out for him like a huge multibodied mud snake. But how could he fight it when there were no weapons to fire, and no physical body to fire them at? Then Donch showed him the way. Yelling angrily, the man reached up and tore away his aug, hurling it to the ground, stamping it into the ground. Sastol reached up for his own, levered his fingers behind it and pulled down. The pain, in the end, was nothing compared with the relief of blessed silence.

Seconds passed — or perhaps minutes, or hours. Sastol gazed around at his men, and those men of the neighbouring squad. Most of them were now on the ground, groaning, writhing… though some were ominously still. Others, who like Donch and himself had torn away their augs, were still standing and mobile.

"What the hell was that?" Sastol shuddered, unable to accept that he had seen one of the cylinder worlds gutted by fire, and then felt some monster trying to take control of his mind.

"Fucking Satan," Donch replied.

Sastol nodded; perhaps that was the only answer he would be getting down here. He stepped out into the open and looked around. Some of the prostrate members of the other squads were now standing again. The rattle of gunfire had him down in squat as he observed the captain of the next squad stumbling out into the open as well, with one of his men following. The second man suddenly raised his weapon and blew the captain to the ground in a bloody mess of pieces of flesh loosely connected by skin and ligament.

"What?" Sastol turned to his own men, saw Donch's horrified expression turn to one of pleading, then saw him spin away in a wheel of blood. Sodar. It was Sodar who had fired — the man standing upright with mechanical efficiency, but his face twisted as if he had suffered a stroke and the aug on the side of his head now seemingly fused to it, looking ashen grey as if burnt. Sastol observed that same ashen tint on many heads turning with the same dead eyes and wasted expressions. Without hesitation he stepped back into the clearing his squad had made earlier, snatched up his weapon and pack — and ran.

Polas read through and understood every piece of information with which his instruments presented him. Through the probe he watched Faith die, and the source of that death coming insystem, before the probe whited out. Then his instrumentation went insane in a way he immediately recognized as viral takeover.

"Lellan, I'm getting a viral takeover of com. Shut it down immediately!"

Whether that got through or not he had no idea, for all the equipment shut off together for a couple of seconds, before clicking back on. Then, over to his right, he saw that the holojector tank had dumped its usual program, and no longer displayed the complicated dance of the Braemar moons and other worlds and worldlets that made up the Masadan system. Instead a wasted face appeared, seemingly wearing a helmet of grey wood and blood-infused crystal.

"I will not hamper your communications," spoke a decidedly creepy voice from Dale's console. "Just as I will not hamper your inclination to kill each other. I have only one wish, and that is for you to give me Ian Cormac. Do that and I go away."

"What is this, Polas?" said Lellan from her hide in the foothills.

Polas quickly replied, "The Occam Razor just arrived. Are you getting the picture I'm seeing over your helmet screen?"

"I am."

"Skellor, I think."

A slow handclap issued from Dale's console — she had now pushed her chair well back from the machine, as if it might bite her — and the image of Skellor, in the tank of the holojector, grinned nastily.

"Ah, I see I have been expected — which means you know where Cormac is. Let me have him and I will let you all live."

Whilst watching Skellor speak, it took a moment for Polas to realize that an old stripfilm printer across the other side of the room was operating. Moving out from behind his console, he walked across to it and observed the printout.

"I would hand this Cormac over to you," Lellan told Skellor, "but even though we have been in communication, I have no idea where he is."

The message coming through the printer read:

"Sophisticated viral subversion programs all over — attempted trace of U-space transmission — closing down all links and now maintaining a watching brief — Jarv."

Knowing that the printer possessed its own small memory, Polas reached down and pulled its optic cable, before reversing the stripfilm and wiping it. Returning to his console he was uncomfortably aware of the wall-mounted security camera following his progress.

"That is a real shame," said Skellor with the sincerity of a crocodile. "That means I'll just have to kill some of your people, and keep killing them until you find Cormac for me."

"Lellan, you have to get to the caves," advised Polas. "That ship is more powerful than the arrays ever were."

"I don't think that's our main problem," Lellan replied. "We've got Theocracy soldiers attacking right now, but there's something very wrong with them." She went on to say something more, but her voice became heavily distorted, and all comlinkage then blinked out.

… viral subversion programs…

Polas turned to look at the head in the holojector as it stared out with seemingly blind eyes. There were no Theocracy soldiers here for Skellor to subvert — but there were people to kill.

"All of you, get out," he said to the personnel in the operations room.

Dale looked up at him, her expression puzzled. Perhaps it was better that way, for when white fire blasted in through the panoramic window, no one but Polas realized what was happening. And he knew it only for the half-second it took for the fire to reach him, and vaporize him along with the rest of the mountain peak.

Jarvellis lifted her hands away from the instrumentation of Lyric II as if it had suddenly become infectious — which, in limited electro-optical ways, it could well have been.

"Lyric… are you all right?" she asked, frightened that she might not believe the answer.

"No worms got through," replied Lyric II's AI. "The Skellor based its attack program on information gleaned from the cylinder world it burnt out. In my terms it was pretty crude, but only crude in the way that dropping an atomic bomb on your enemy is cruder than creeping up behind him with a knife."

"Your metaphors leave something to be desired," Jarvellis replied, glancing over her own shoulder. "Remember your language."

At least the ship's AI was still hers, but things were far from all right. For the first time in a very long time Jarvellis felt frightened and indecisive. She knew that this was not wholly because of what the AI had referred to as 'the Skellor' — it was because for the very first time in ages she had so much to lose.

John was out there somewhere, but to try and communicate with him would be madness — locating both him and herself for this Skellor. And then there was this ship of theirs and all it contained…

"Lyric, what must we do to stay safe?" she asked, more for confirmation than because she did not already know.

"Move," replied the AI. "The Skellor will have realized that was only a secondary emitter in the mountain peak, and we do not know how much information he obtained from there."

AIs were just so cold: never unable to answer any question posed. Jarvellis thought of Polas in the nursery in Pillartown One, laughing as he pushed around toy tanks for a blond-haired child. She tried to scrub the image and to concentrate on the instrumentation before her.

"We have to assume that Skellor now has full use of all the scanning instrumentation possessed by that dreadnought. In Polity terms it is an old ship, but it's still way beyond anything the Theocracy owns… or rather owned," she said.

"The Skellor may have more than even that," commented the AI.

"Why do you keep calling him 'the Skellor'?"

"Because it is not human, it is not AI — and because I want to," it replied.

John had deliberately programmed Lyric II's AI for a certain cussedness, but sometimes Jarvellis wondered why they couldn't just have one as nice, polite and helpful as those she encountered on other ships.

"Very well," she went on, "he may even have more… in fact he must have, to have been able to subvert a Polity dreadnought." Jarvellis could feel herself clenching up inside. There it was again: indecision stemming from the fear of making the wrong choice — too much to lose.

"Dammit!" She slammed her hands down on the console. "We just assume a level of technology equivalent to that of the dreadnought. Now… this means the chameleonware field should cover us for anything, barring a real close scrutiny, but it will not cover us if we use AG."

"Agreed," said the AI.

Jarvellis stared at the screen, showing her the lake and riverine valley beyond: the looming faces of stone and tangled vegetation, which had changed from the dull beige seen upon their arrival here to dark green and red, lurid purple and light-sucking black. "So we need to use ion drive and gas thrusters to get out of this trap."

"You will then leave an ionic trail," cautioned the AI.

Jarvellis nodded. "But a diffuse one, as I'll only be using the ion engine for lift, and especially diffuse because the blast will be directed down into the river, which will soak most of it up. Would it be better to stay here?"

"On the basis of a Polity technology level, no," replied the AI.

" And if 'the Skellor' has a higher tech?"

"No again."

"Then we move," said Jarvellis.

"What about when you want to move away from the river?" the AI asked, probably annoyed about her little victory.

"There's a hundred kilometres of it before it finally winds out onto the plain. I think we'll worry about that pass when we come to it."

The AI had nothing more to add, so Jarvellis reached out, her fingers skittering across the controls with practised ease. She noted that the AI had, on its own initiative, filled the water tanks with water it had purified from the nearby source, so there was now no shortage of fuel for the tokamac running around the centre of the ship, nor for the ion function of the engines themselves, which now started up with a low thrumming. Outside she saw steam and debris blasting from underneath Lyric II, shells and stones splashing into the adjacent pond, and the insectile creatures diving from their rocks, perhaps confused by this sudden shower that appeared to them out of thin air. Taking a firm grip on the joystick Jarvellis gently raised and tilted it, observing on the subscreens the ship's feet retracting and folding away. Without AG, the ship handled like it was wading through glue, but she was more than capable of flying it. She considered telling its other human occupant to strap in for safety, then rejected the idea. She was confident she would not crash this ship; and the only disaster that could befall it would be discovery by Skellor, in which case Lyric II and all its occupants would survive only fractionally longer than the mountaintop containing Lellan's operations room.

Aberil realized it was going to burn his mind like fuse wire in a lightning strike; just as it had burnt the thousands in Faith, just as it had burnt his brother Loman, and just as it was burning the minds of the Theocracy army upon the planet and making each individual soldier into a dronelike extension of itself. Then something caused the 'burn' to pull back from all those within the tented area.

"Outlinker… too crude…"

After these three words something, which until then had seemed as monstrously impersonal in its slaughter as a pyroclastic flow, became personal and focused. Aberil found a force of will operating more directly, on him, and he could not resist. It jerked him to his feet and pulled his hooked fingers away from their tearing at his aug. Eyes open now, he both saw and felt Speelan, Molat and the others gathering in closer as if this was necessary to bring them into the focus of the now possessing mind.

"The Outlinker boy… where is the Outlinker boy?"

All of them turned to survey their surroundings, bewilderment and rage roaring up in a darkness somewhere behind perception, like the oncoming wall of a tsunami. Aberil felt the others overwhelmed by the force — folding in on themselves — but for him the cold hard ideals that had so long ago crystallized his mind served as a bulwark, and he did not allow himself to go.

"I will find him for you,"

Suddenly he became the full focus of that attention, and he sensed amusement spreading through the wave like red cracks.

"What a horribly neat mind you have, Aberil Dorth. It's like a Chinese puzzle: all interlocked blocks and distorted shapes."

Aberil was not sure what was meant there. All he was sure of was his recognition of power — terrible and godlike. He could feel it studying him, and knew that his life depended utterly on what he said next.

"There is service or death — I can see that. Give me the tools and I will serve."

Threat receded and Aberil now felt some degree of normality return. Around him stood his men: four guards, Speelan and Molat — tired and pale, but not burnt out. He could feel the strength of his linkage through to them, and the ascendance of his aug over theirs.

"These tools are yours."

The presence now mostly folded itself away, leaving only the lightest touch upon him. There were no further threats, because there was no need of them. Aberil knew the consequence of failure, but he also knew that even success would probably bring the same consequence.

"Jerrick here is a trained tracker," said Speelan, clapping his hand on the shoulder of one of the guards.

Aberil nodded and surveyed the other soldiers in the tent. Those that were not obviously dead seemed utterly brain-burned — their augs turned grey against their skulls.

"Then we'll use Jerrick," said Aberil, clapping his hands together. "Let's move!"

Aberil led the way across the large tent, pointing out supplies that should be collected, and pulling breather gear for himself from a rack by the airlock. Out in the falling night he paused and sent to Speelan:

"Where's the ATV?"

Puzzled, Speelan replied out loud, "Over to the right there, but surely we'll need to work on the ground."

Aberil turned to the rest of them. "You," he selected one of the guards, "get in that ATV and take it straight back into the flute grasses."

"For how far?" asked the man.

"You keep driving until ordered to do otherwise," snapped Aberil, reinforcing the order through the new power he derived from his aug. The man turned woodenly and headed for the ATV, climbed inside, and soon they heard the turbine winding up to speed.

"The rest of you come with me."

When they were what Aberil considered was a sufficient distance from the command tent and the landers, he sent the heavily reinforced order for them to tear off their augs, before he reached up and tore off his own.

Snarling, Skellor let run a subprogram he had paused only minutes earlier. One of the towers on the surface of the Occam began punching lased light down at the surface of the planet, obliterating lander after lander, then Aberil's command tent, and the ATV the First Commander was clearly escaping in. Under high magnification, from orbit, a glowing line briefly cut through the wilderness as plastics and metals burnt in the intense heat, with what little oxygen there was available, before snuffing out. Then Skellor shut the program down and swore at his own stupidity.

Dragon had come down in that area, as was evident from the crater, and the Outlinker boy was also in the area — which meant it likely that Cormac was there too. Skellor felt the rage cycling inside himself. In itself the destruction and death he had just delivered did not matter, because in the end he must utterly expunge the system here of human life and burn every scrap of recording technology to dust, so that no evidence of his existence could ever leave this place. But in this case he had deprived himself of what eyes he had possessed in that area — those Theocracy soldiers in and around the landers who had not torn away their augs — and in that blast could have killed Cormac as well. Seething, he blanked the attack program he'd already downloaded to the whole subverted Theocracy army, then turned them around and set them marching back towards the landers.

"Why don't you just burn it all?"

For the first time in a while Skellor opened his human eyes and looked across the control room to Aphran — tangled in a tree of Jain architecture that had lifted her out of her seat while he had tormented her. It surprised him that she still had enough mind left to pose such a question, as she had become so fragmented it had been necessary for him to disconnect her from any form of control.

"Because I want him. He is the arrogance of the Polity and ECS, and I want him exactly where you are now. I want him to see how wrong he is, to know how foolish it was to frustrate me."

Even though she could no longer act as a submind, he had not yet wholly disconnected her from himself. He could feel her fighting not to speak, not to let what she was thinking flow into communication. And as she fought he felt her separate into two Aphrans: the one who repeated endlessly, "I love you I love you I love you," and the one that now opened the mouth of the naked and ripped human body twisted between ligneous trunks, and spoke in a rusty gulping voice.

"Direct-linked to a crystal matrix AI… able to calculate U-space co-ordinates… able to control nanotechnology bare-brained… retarded child… idiot savant…"

With crystalline scum breaking away from his lips, Skellor opened his mouth and attempted to speak too. When nothing happened he looked at himself internally and realized how much of his human body he had neglected, and with a thought he started repairs. Soon his mouth moistened and he could more easily move his tongue and lips. However, vocal speech only became possible when he started breathing again.

"Why… do you say that? You know what I can do to you."

"I love you I love you I love you…"

"It is true… you have the power to destroy and to build on a vast scale, yet your priority is merely to capture one ECS agent so you can say to him, 'Look at me now, aren't I clever, don't you wish you'd been nicer to me? … It's pathetic."

Skellor twisted the Jain tree tighter around her, and she hissed in agony transmitted directly down her nerves.

"Please please please please…"

"Your need to grow is so strong, Skellor, because you are actually so small. You need to control minds so absolutely, because minds uncontrolled are free to see you as you really are."

Skellor suddenly felt fear: she remained so coherent yet he was pumping such agony into her body she must now imagine herself being skinned with white-hot scalpels. He instantly shut down on what he was doing to her and, through the mycelial structures netting the inside of her body and her brain, he gave her an intense forensic inspection. Immediately he observed that it was that other Aphran who was experiencing the pain: the animal, the primordial reptile. Somehow she had separated out the core of her intelligence, somehow… suddenly he also realized that there were blank areas inside her, where Jain mycelia went but where he could not sense.

"Not quite so much control as you thought," said Aphran, opening eyes dark with blood, and turning her head so she could study him.

Skellor's reaction was like a whiplash. At the same time as the Jain architecture wound itself closed, crushing and bursting Aphran's body, he concentrated heat through superconducting filaments and pumped pure oxygen through nanoscopic pipes. Broken and coming apart, Aphran suddenly flared magnesium-bright; and when Skellor adjusted for the loss of rods and cones in his eyes, and cleared the afterimages, he saw all that physically remained of her was black smoke congealing in the air. But he could not shake an echo of laughter through a structure that, in that instant, had become as alien to him as it had always been.

The explosion had flung him to the ground and mauled him through thick vegetation, before showering him with a foul mixture of heat-softened rhizomes and mud. Sitting up in that mess, as tendrils of fire flared weirdly through the night sky pursuing escaping oxygen, Molat changed his paper mask yet again, and did not have to look far to realize that he had been lucky.

One of the three soldiers who had been standing behind him had caught one of those flares even as he ran, so that from the back of his head down to his ankles his clothing had been burnt away and his skin charred black. The only part not burnt was that area of flesh underneath the scoured oxygen bottle and the ribbed pipe that snaked round to his mask. Whether or not this man was luckier than another soldier further back, who was a coiled ashen sculpture and quite obviously dead, Molat could not really judge. When the man groaned, and rolled partially to his side to look up at Molat — black skin opening red cracks which immediately began to ooze — the Proctor just wanted to get up and run away.

"That was close," the burned man said, "but God has been kind." He reached round to grope for a fresh mask from the pack attached beside his oxygen bottle. When his fingers encountered bare metal and ash, his expression turned puzzled until, in his groping around, he managed to slough away a hand-sized crust of his own skin. Then his eyes grew wide, and he started to make a horrible keening sound.

Molat closed his eyes and turned away. He wanted to vomit, but his mouth was cast in ceramic and his stomach a ball of lead. With eyes closed he heard the familiar clatter of a rail-gun nearby, the abrupt cessation of the keening, and felt something spatter against his chest. Knowing exactly what had happened, he pushed himself upright, only glancing briefly at the corpse that now lay beside him with half its head gone, and turned to Speelan who was holding the weapon with its cable fully extended from the power pack on the one surviving soldier's belt.

Handing the weapon back to the soldier, Speelan said, "Let's get moving."

Molat asked, "Get going where?"

Aberil now walked into the light cast from the still-glowing wreckage of the landers. As he looked Molat up and down, the Proctor noticed that something, perhaps a fragment of hot metal, had carved a neat coin of flesh out of Aberil's cheekbone, leaving a bloodless wound like a third eye.

"We need to find the Outlinker. Jerrick here" — Aberil gestured to the surviving soldier — "will locate his tracks and we will hunt him down."

"But why?" asked Molat.

"Because I say so," growled Aberil. Then, perhaps noting Speelan's questioning expression, he pointed a finger up into the night and added, "And because that creature up there wanted him for some reason, so he may prove useful to us. We are here now, and by God we are here now for a reason."

Molat averted his eyes from the rampant fanaticism. Personally, he would rather run off and find a hole to crawl into, but he seriously doubted Aberil would let him do that. Removing first from the front of his shirt a piece of scalp with fragments of skull still clinging inside it, he began to trudge after the other three as they moved off.