Polity 1 - Prador Moon (3 page)

“Aug trance,” someone said.

Briefly she surfaced into the real world and saw a woman stabbing a thumb at her as she and a man strolled past. Both of them wore augs themselves and the man grinned at her knowingly.

The tutorial took her on to explore applied mathematics, chemistry, though she sidelined the vast potential in organic chemistry with its programs for modelling genfactored life forms. Two hours later, with her neck stiff and the sky purple-black and flecked with stars above her, she paused the tutorial.

SUBCONSCIOUS LEARNING? > the tutorial program suggested. Finding out what that was about took her a further ten minutes. The tutorial could cycle at a level just below consciousness, almost like sleep-teaching. She chose that and stood. Walking then in a strange fugue in which she could interact with the real world around her while the tutorial played just at the edge of perception, she went to find those glasses of greenwine. In a bar in the city centre she chatted with two runcible technicians who recognised her from the Trajeen runcible project. When they headed off she found herself a niche and called up images of the two cargo runcible gates, one tracking a slow orbit about Trajeen itself and the other lying in orbit about Boh, the gas giant.

Thus far it had only been possible to transmit small objects through runcibles—nothing larger than a twenty-person shuttle—and mostly they were planet based and used to transport humans. Now over Trajeen and Boh they had built gates which, in theory, should be able to expand their Skaidon warps like the meniscus of a bubble. It should be possible to send through large spaceships, even asteroids should their ore value be worth the effort. The project received much criticism: Why transport large ships through a gate when such vessels could use their own underspace drives to enter that continuum anywhere? Why transport ore asteroids when they can be refined in situ and the product from them transported? Moria's answer to those who asked her such questions was always, why not?

RUNCIBLE TECHNOLOGY? > the tutorial suggested, and Moria lost herself for a further two hours. When she finally went to find her hydrocar and instructed it to take her home on automatic, she understood why it was necessary for her to take time off. Two more weeks of this, and by then she would have acquired the basics, the very basics.

* * * * *

The area beyond the armoured wall had been smashed by explosions and scoured by fire. The walls, floor and ceiling were torn apart, insulation bulged like moss from the rents, and power cables and fried optics hung sizzling. Some of the jags of metal protruding nearby still glowed red and kicked out oven heat, and smoke hung thick and acrid in the air. This all became more disorientating because no grav-plates were functioning here, and Jebel lost any perception of up and down. Urbanus paused for a moment, then abruptly stooped and flung Jebel over his shoulder. Jebel closed his eyes as the Golem began negotiating his way, fast, through the lethal chaotic jungle of hot metal and smoking plastic. At some point pain and blood loss impinged, and Jebel lost consciousness.

Hiatus.

“They just had to find out… is that what you're saying?” said a woman.

“Yes, I think it must be,” replied Urbanus.

Jebel opened his eyes and immediately felt a surge of nausea. He tried to keep it under control but spied a kidney dish containing a few pieces of bloody bone and a rind of flesh he realised must be his own. He leant over and puked, only then realising he lay on a surgical table. Glancing at his arm stump he saw that Urbanus had removed the biceps armour section and covered the raw end with an interface joint. But he felt better now, probably as a result of the contents of those empty synthetic-blood bags scattered on the floor, and whatever drugs Urbanus had pumped inside him. Now he focused on his companions.

“You survived,” he managed.

Lindy Glick sat on the other surgical table in this small medbay. She had lost her translator gear and two of her front teeth, and a blue wound-dressing formed itself to the side of her skull. Jebel rather suspected that whatever mishap tore away the translator and damaged her mouth, had also torn her aug from the side of her head.

“Yeah, no thanks to our fucking AIs.”

Jebel glanced at Urbanus. The Golem had lost syntheflesh all down his left-hand side. The metal of his upper arm, shoulder, side of his body, hip and upper leg lay exposed. He shrugged. “Don't look at me. I may be AI but I wasn't in charge of this shit-storm.”

'“Sacrificial goat' I think is the old term.” Lindy turned and spat out some blood. “They just had to put some people out there to find out how hostile these fuckers are.” Now a boom echoed through the station, and Jebel surmised that the distant chattering clattering sounds he heard were from weapons fire. “I think they found out, don't you?” she added.

Jebel sat upright and swung his legs over the side of the table, watched for a moment while Urbanus placed some instrument against Lindy's upper mandible. He tried to aug into the station network but received only NO NET CONNECTION, and guessed that was due to some local security protocol. He cued a message for Cirrella to contact him the moment she could, since he guessed he would not be on time for dinner. Again he studied his arm stump. He was thinking his armour had not really served him very well until he turned his attention to the rest of his body.

His businesswear hung in tatters with one leg of his trousers burnt away. The composite armour underneath was scorched in many places and lumps of ceramal shrapnel were imbedded in his chest plate. Bearing in mind that he wore no head protection or gloves he considered himself lucky to have lost only an arm.

After a couple of sucking clicks, Urbanus extracted the instrument from Lindy's mouth, and stepped aside.

“How do they look?” she asked, exposing her two new teeth at Jebel.

“Lighter than your own, but better than the gap.” He held up his stump. “I wouldn't mind the same.”

Urbanus picked up a case, clicked it open and showed him the contents. “We don't really have the time to grow you a new one. This area has already been evacuated and we've been here too long. I'll fit it for you later. Now we must leave.”

Jebel eyed the gleaming Golem lower arm and hand in the case as Urbanus snapped it closed. He pushed himself from the table, as Lindy did from hers, and they followed Urbanus to the door.

Something exploding much nearer shuddered the corridor as they entered it. He heard the sawing sounds of energy weapons of the kind that should never be used inside a space station, and wondered if they were being fired in defence or by the attackers.

“What about the others?” he asked.

“I believe seven of them made it out with the main crowd, though I cannot be sure of that,” Urbanus replied.

Jebel felt a sick lurch in his stomach, but realised his reaction was muted by the antishock and analgesic drugs washing around inside him. Eighteen of his team dead, just like that, and fuck knows how many others killed in that chamber. What he wanted now was that arm attached so he could employ some lethal hardware. A proton carbine would do the trick, or maybe one of those nice compact missile launchers. He really felt the urge to make some crab paste.

Shortly they reached a drop-shaft that ran at an angle into the station body, but the irised gravity field was out—either damaged or shut down for security reasons. Urbanus peered up the shaft then turned to study Jebel.

“I will have to carry you.”

“Can't you fit that arm now?”

“It would take too long.”

Lindy led the way up the slanting ladder, Urbanus, with Jebel on his back, rapidly followed. As they left the shaft the depleted shock wave from an explosion below washed up past them. They traversed more corridors, one of them with its grav-plates malfunctioning, though luckily grav did not fluctuate above one standard gee. Finally they entered a wide boulevard lined with shops and residences, and a line of station forces awaited them: ceramal shields a metre thick raised up like lids on treaded vehicles, two portable flat-field generators, and behind these a row of tanks sporting missile launchers or particle cannons. The station security personnel were in full combat gear and Jebel saw that ECS forces also joined them. As he and the other two came to this line and were waved through, Jebel's aug informed him that net connection was reinstated—security procedure, then. His aug sent the cued message to Cirrella, and he set it to inform him the moment she contacted him.

* * * * *

Captain John Varence gazed out upon the firmament and knew it to be his home. He studied those points of light out there… what were they… stars… and something niggled at his memory. Something about them, some connection, but he couldn't quite…

“You are human” the other part of his consciousness reminded him. “You were born on a planet called Earth orbiting a star called Sol.”

No, that couldn't be right. Wasn't being human something to do with arms, legs and rather wet messy biology? He knew something about that, though was not entirely clear how he did know. Nothing to do with him. A fusion drive moved him omniscient and omnipotent near those glittery points, and U-space engines took him underneath the vastnesses between. He gazed out on it all with sensors capturing everything in the electromagnetic spectrum, felt the vacuum on his adamantine hull and bathed in the balm of hard radiation—his body, a massive, golden lozenge spined with sensor arrays, four kilometres long, one and a half wide and one deep. The body was his own for he felt the immediacy of all sensation within and at its skin. When damaged he suffered, when repaired he was healed. It stood under his utter control, its systems at his beck—

It was moving again…

Yes…yes he had decided to travel to those coordinates for he remembered starting the fusion engines with that other part of his mind. Why go there? Though omniscient, as part of the Polity, John served its purposes. And the Polity is the…

“John, it is time—this ship is needed.”

Some agreement with his other half, some contract made over a decade ago. He couldn't remember what that had all been about, though on some level there grew a tired acceptance.

U-space now, sinking into a somehow unreal continuum that came over only as grey to his multiple senses. The other made the calculations and the subtle alterations, it spoke with other entities of a similar kind, and now he could feel its steel-hard precision and something else there… sorrow.

“Why am I sad?”

“Because evolution does not prepare its products for ending, and the finality of death can never be acceptable. I too, in a sense, am a product of evolution.”

“I know I am.”

“John…”

Communication faded away from him, the grey he viewed reflected in his mind. Word and sensation blurred and lost meaning. Time passed. It does. A lurching twist snapped him out of reverie into the black and glitter of realspace.

“What's that?” he wondered.

“The shipyard—our destination.”

The Occam Razor drew in towards the spaceborne construction site, but being too massive to dock, held off a hundred kilometres. The structure was kilometres long, scaffolds spearing out into space, structural members like iron bones. Steely dots zipping around close seemed like flies around a corpse, but the shipyard was visibly growing under their ministrations. With childlike curiosity John Varence watched vessels smaller than himself heading over, docking themselves to his body, though he only vaguely recollected allowing that. Internally he watched those wetware creatures called humans coming aboard, and wondered what purpose they might serve.

“I will be gentle,” said the other.

John did not comprehend why he felt suddenly numb and that numbness seemed to be increasing. It was very strange, but he could no longer feel the fusion engines. The confusion did not last, within a minute he did not know what fusion engines were. The U-space drive was easier to forget, for he did not understand it anyway. He felt all his other senses somehow receding to a point inside his huge body—discomforts, a nagging ache and slight nausea localized there. Sensors, confined to a narrow part of the emitted spectrum between infrared and ultraviolet, came online within his larger body's bridge pod. He did not like them very much for they seemed dim and gummy, organic, even. Vacuum no longer touched his hull, rather air blew cool over febrile skin. No, he did not like this at all. Vision through his other senses remained and he forced a return to them, spying blackness again and vaguely familiar points of light.

“What are they?” he asked.

“Stars, John,” his other half replied.

All faded now to that central point as a solid scaffold of AI programming slowly withdrew. John shrank down into a shrivelled body on a throne, tugged and pushed slightly as optical and electrical connections detached and folded away.

“Rest now,” said the other.

John did not hear, already fading to a smaller and much stiller point in his ancient skull.

So they took it away, and were married next day—

Newsnet services she auged into carried the same incredible comic-book stories. That all the newsnets seemed to be carrying the same story was probably one indication of the fault. Seated in her apartment, with her travel bag at her feet, Moria felt a clammy sweat grow on her body. The images she saw were just too cartoonish, too ridiculous, so the only explanation seemed to be that her aug was somehow scrambling up the newsnets with a fantasy virtuality. The programming of such a virtuality would certainly iron out inconsistencies and give the gloss of veracity to what she saw. She needed to do something about this before her brain ended up scrambled too.

MESSAGE MODE >

RECIPIENT > AUBRON SYLAC

MESSAGE > I NEED AN APPOINTMENT AT ONCE. MY AUG IS PRESENTING A FANTASY VIRTUALITY ON NEWSNET CHANNELS.

ATTACH > NIL

After a short delay she received the reply RECIPIENT NOT FOUND which seemed to confirm that her aug was malfunctioning. But what to do? She was due on a shuttle flight back to the Trajeen runcible complex in two hours. Should she just head over to Sylac's surgery first and hope he could do something in the limited time? No, she would have to try to put this right herself.