Neal Asher - The Gabble

The third man tried to run.

Message from Jennifer Tarjen: Polity monitors coming in through the runcible and two gamma-class dreadnoughts in orbit. Geronamid has ordered immediate intervention on Banjer!

This has to be because of your transmission!

Like hell, thought Salind. Geronamid had intended intervention here from the start.

Salind’s transmission was just part of the justification.

What’s Geronamid doing now?

Message: Geronamid cannot be traced at present.

Garp caught the third man by his collar, dragged him back and broke his neck. He was going to do them all. He just wasn’t going to stop. . Then there came a turquoise flash that left afterimages on Salind’s retina. He saw Garp fly back, his clothing and skin burning. He hit the ground hard then immediately sat up. Deleen Soper walked in from outside, three men in armoralls walking in behind her.

‘It was obvious you’d been uploaded to a Golem,’ she said. ‘And typically arrogant of you to consider yourself invulnerable.’ She held up her weapon and went on. ‘This is Polity hardware.

It will stop a Golem, as you’ve just found out.’

Garp began to chuckle, then to laugh.

‘It amuses you that you are finally going to die?’ she asked.

From where he was hiding behind a row of frames Salind shakily raised the rail-gun. He had to do something; had to commit. He couldn’t just observe.

‘I’ve already done that. It’s not something that scares me,’ Garp replied.

‘It’s a shame you can’t be put on a frame,’ said Soper.

‘Nothing you can do but destroy me. You can’t even use me for some idiot assassination attempt this time. You might have got your hands on a fancy gun, but no way you’ve got the tech to access Golem hardware.’

Soper leant the weapon across her shoulder and gazed down at Garp. ‘No point in that now. The fact that I could get an assassin through all the Council’s defences brought most of them back into line. I also gained the unexpected bonus of making Mr straight and true officer Garp kill an innocent Polity citizen.’

Salind could feel sweat running down his back. This was it: he could delay no longer.

Message: Salind, put the gun down before you shoot your own foot off.

Who the hell?

Just then he felt Argus go offline, but it wasn’t him that had made it do so.

Garp now began to rise.

‘Stay on the fucking ground!’

‘Polity hardware,’ said Garp, continuing to stand. ‘Had you the opportunity I know that you would have some strong words for your supplier.’

Soper aimed her weapon at him and pulled the trigger, again and again. Nothing happened. Salind could see first confusion then terror growing in her expression. Her three accompanying thugs were backing off, ready to run. He tried the record facility in Argus — that didn’t work either. On his feet now, Garp held his hands apart before him.

‘Don’t worry about me, Deleen. I’m not going to kill you.’ For a moment she found hope, then Garp gestured to the doorway behind, which now filled with a huge shape. ‘He’s going to do that.’

Soper and her three thugs turned. Salind stepped out to see more clearly as Geronamid, still in the form of an allosaur, stepped delicately into the building.

For a moment, stillness, then Soper laughed with relief and tossed her weapon on the floor. ‘You can’t do that. You’re an AI. It’s against all Polity law.’

‘Whatever gave you that idea?’ asked Geronamid, pacing forward.

‘You can’t interfere in places where that law doesn’t apply, and if it ever does apply here there’ll be a general amnesty.’

‘Who said anything about law?’ Geronamid asked. ‘But since you mention it, amnesty doesn’t apply in cases of intervention.’

‘What?’

Geronamid stepped in closer. Salind thought Soper must smell the last meal on the allosaur’s breath. What happened next was nightmarish. Geronamid’s head snapped to one side and one of Soper’s men fell over. His head was gone. Geronamid spat the head at Soper’s feet.

‘I think I would like you to run now.’

Soper stared at the head for one interminable moment, then turned and fled, her men following fast. Salind understood now why Argus was totally offline. The AI had remotely shut it down: no recordings, no transmission. He watched the allosaur take off after the three and disbelievingly watched what happened in the shadowy interior of the building. No one would believe this: Polity AIs were just so measured and moral.

Breathing ash out of his burnt mouth, Garp stepped up beside Salind. ‘Even AIs can get pissed off when a friend gets killed.’

‘I guess so,’ Salind replied, remembering the acrobat.

Soper’s scream, the last one, seemed more protracted than that of her two fellows, probably because Geronamid took his time about eating her.

So lay they garmented in torpid light,

Under the pall of a transparent night,

Like solemn apparitions lull’d sublime,

To everlasting rest, — and with them

Time Slept, as he sleeps upon the silent face

Of a dark dial in a sunless place.

— Hood

To say it is cold is to seriously understate the matter. The inside of the shuttle is at minus fifty centigrade because of what Jap calls ‘material tolerances’.

‘These coldsuits we’re wearing — take ‘em above zero and they’ll fuck up next time you use ‘em outside,’ he told me.

‘Yeah,’ I said. ‘Two centuries ago I’d have believed you, but things have moved on since then.’

‘Economics ain’t,’ was his reply.

I am careful not to respond to his sarcasm.

The landing is without mishap, but I am surprised when the side of the shuttle opens straight down onto the surface of the planet Orbus.

‘No point maintaining an entrance tunnel,’ says Jap over the com.

I don’t mind. It is for moments like this that I travel, and it is moments like this that fund my travel. I walk out with CO snow crunching underfoot and the clarity of starlit sky above that 2

you normally only get in interstellar space. I gaze across land like arctic tundra with its frozen lakes and hoared boulders. In the frozen lakes trapped faerie lights flicker rainbow colours.

‘What’s that?’ I ask.

‘Water ice. Below one-fifty it turns to complex ice and when it heats up and changes back it fluoresces. Talk to Duren if you want the chemistry of it.’

I don’t need to. I remember reading that this is what comets do. It had taken a little while for people to figure that the light of comets was not all reflected sunlight — that comets emit light before they should.

‘What’s heating it up?’ I ask, turning to gaze at the distant green orb of the dying sun.

‘The shuttle, our landing. There’s nothing else here to do it,’ he replies.

We walk the hundred or so metres to the base and go in through a coldlock. In the lock we remove our coldsuits and hang them up. Jap points to the white imprint of a hand on the grey surface of the inner door.

‘Keep your undersuit and gloves on until we’re inside,’ he tells me. I stare at the imprint in puzzlement. Is it some kind of safety sign? Jap obviously notes my confusion. He explains.

‘Fella took his gloves off before going through the door,’ he says.

The imprint is the skin of that fella’s hand, and some of the flesh too. Later I speak to Linser, the base commander, and ask why they take such risks here. We stand in his room gazing out of a panoramic window across the frozen wastes.

‘Thermostable and thermo-inert materials are expensive, Mr Gregory. A thermoceramic cutting head for a rock-bore costs the best part of fifty thousand New Carth shillings and has to be shipped in. Doped water-ice cutting heads can be made here. Coldsuits that can function from plus thirty to minus two hundred cost fifty times as much as the ones we use. That’s a big saving for a small inconvenience,’ he says.