Neal Asher - Hilldiggers

"Stay exactly where you are!"

I glanced round. Captain Inigis and his men were ranged around us, every weapon trained. Duras patted me on the arm and stepped out in front of me.

"So, Captain, not only have you insulted the Polity by treating their Consul like a criminal, you have also made two attempts on his life: one by using the kind of scan on him normally confined to inspecting munitions for faults—and now like this." Duras gestured to the guard who was beginning to make tentative exploratory movements, perhaps wondering how far he could move before things began to hurt.

"I am merely ensuring the safety—"

"Do be quiet, Inigis," Yishna interrupted. "You know you've botched this, and if you push it any further there will certainly be repercussions. Probably in Parliament, but definitely in Fleet Command when I describe your incompetence to Harald. My brother and I disagree on many matters, but we have always agreed that idiots should not be allowed to thrive."

Inigis grew paler as she spoke; I suspected he had just been reminded of a rather unpleasant fact. I studied the woman. Obviously her brother Harald ranked higher in Fleet than Inigis, but knowing Fleet's attitude to any contact with the Polity, wondered if she might be bluffing. How important was her brother? Whatever, it worked for Inigis let us go. While Yishna and Duras conducted me to my cabin, apologising the while, it seemed some other menacing party accompanied us—whispering grim truths in my ear, yet forever out of sight. An after-effect of the scanning, or so I thought.

Harald —in childhood

Harald Strone knew where he wanted to be—and had always known. As he walked into Yadis Hall to take the seat at his assigned console, he received some strange looks from the Fleet personnel present and, maintaining a bored expression, removed his control baton from his belt cache.

"What are you doing here, boy?" asked the man who loomed over him.

Harald stared up at him, noted the missing ear and the scarring on one side of the face before turning his attention to the man's ranking necklace: a ship's engineer, retired from service, but looking rather young for that. Harald inspected him further and realised that though his interrogator moved easily and looked intact from a distance, both his legs and his right arm were artificial. Silently, Harald reached back into the belt cache for his identity plaque.

"Harald Strone…I see. My apologies, but—"

"Yes, I know," interrupted Harald. "I look like I should be out sand boarding and skirl catching. But, as you see, I am eighteen years old and my authorisation is in order. I am here to take Fusion Mechanics Grade Alpha."

The engineer nodded, then moved away, but he did not return Harald's identity plaque. The boy grimaced and quickly slotting his baton into the reader in the console, then began his examination by unscrolling a flimsy screen and pressing his palm against it. As, like a concert pianist, he began rattling away on the ship-clone engineering console, solving the problems thrown up on the screen, he wondered if this time he might get caught. Thus far he had managed to take Grade Alpha in Navigation, Astrophysics, Command Management, Weapons Solutions and Design and Materials Technology. Rather than risk too much exposure, he took the twelve other Fleet examinations at Grade Gamma, had avoided demonstrating the extent of his abilities in combat training, for like his siblings his control of his body was equal to that he exercised over his mind, and had thus far managed to keep his doctorates in Applied Mathematics and Computer Science off the record—mainly because of his facility in the latter discipline. Pursuing their own particular interests, his sister and brother Rhodane and Orduval did get caught and a huge furore ensued, but then they were allowed to continue, though under close supervision. No one, however, had yet caught Yishna, whose computer-science qualifications matched his own, and she was already working as a laboratory technician on the space station Corisanthe III.

The extent of time allowed for this examination was set at four hours. After only one hour, Harald turned off his console and removed his baton, then walked over to the same engineer sitting in the monitoring booth with three other invigilators.

"You realise that by pulling your baton authorisation now you'll have to go through the exam again from the beginning?" the man warned.

"Yes, I understand that. May I have my identity plaque back now?"

The man smiled sympathetically. "Fusion Mechanics can be difficult. I suggest you take one of the applied mathematics courses to begin—"

"Chinzer," interrupted a female tacom officer sitting beside him, "before you make too much of an idiot of yourself." She pointed to one screen on the montage of them before her.

The engineer stared at the information she indicated. "Well, fuck me." He looked up at Harald with sudden respect, picked up the ID plaque from the table before him, and handed it over. "Congratulations, Engineering Candidate Harald Strone."

"Thank you," said Harald politely, pocketing his plaque. It was a gratifying response, but he would rather have gone unnoticed. With head ducked, he headed for the exit, and, as he stepped out from the examination room, he realised such circumspection had come too late. The three Fleet security personnel standing outside were obviously waiting specially for him.

"Harald Strone." The officer in command eyed him almost with bewilderment. "First, my congratulations on passing yet another Alpha Grade examination—but you must have realised such a level of achievement would not go unnoticed."

"But I took some with only Gamma Grades too," Harald protested quietly.

"Yes, you did." The officer looked towards the others. "Twelve of them."

One of the others swore in disbelief.

"And as startling as that is in itself," the officer continued, "what we would really like to know is how a twelve-year-old managed to alter his ID to give him an age of eighteen years."

"I know computers," muttered Harald. He took out his ID plaque and baton, plugged the plaque into one baton port, and quickly entered the code that would update the plaque, and simultaneously correct the errors he had introduced. Then he held both items out to the Fleet officer.

Puzzled, the officer used Harald's baton to start running up on the plaque's small screen all the information it contained. "Applied Mathematics and Computer Science," he said. Now he was staring at Harald with something more than bemusement.

"I suppose I'm in trouble," Harald suggested.

The man handed back both plaque and baton, then checked the timepiece on his sleeve. "No, Harald Strone. In five hours you will be in a hilldigger."

Harald's expression showed delight, but the machine that was his mind—its oiled and beautifully polished components sliding into position with perfect precision—just ticked off another box and stepped him up another rung.

McCrooger

I felt edgy, and unable to relax. It seemed I could hear the murmur of voices out in the ship's corridors, yet when I ducked my head through the curtain covering the cabin door to look, I encountered either silence or other sounds bearing no relation to that previous murmur. Within my cabin, shadows seemed to flicker out of synch with whatever was casting them, and occasionally I would catch movement at the corner of my eye as if something had just scuttled out of sight. Clad in loose trousers, a shirt and some kind of embroidered garment that draped over me tabard-like and laced up from under my arms down to my waist, I inspected my cabin more closely—perhaps to assure myself that nothing was hiding there.