Neal Asher - Line War

Cormac turned to his companions. ‘It seems that Erebus’s aim in attacking was to wipe out all the stored files here pertinent both to this world and its population.’

‘And it was successful?’ wondered Smith.

‘It was successful,’ Cormac confirmed.

‘That don’t help us a lot,’ said Smith, and nodded over to where Arach was peering down at the charred remains of one of the Jain-infected humans. Something was moving there in crusted skin and liquefied fat. ‘Maybe we can get some answers direct from the tech Erebus left here?’

‘Doubtful.’ Cormac shook his head. ‘If Erebus was covering up something here, it wouldn’t leave clues lying around like that. More likely we’ll just find booby traps.’

‘I don’t think that was all it was here for.’

Cormac turned. It was the haiman youth who had spoken.

‘What do you mean?’

‘The android — I don’t think it was here just to erase information.’

The elder was looking at his brother curiously. ‘You said nothing about an android, Cherub.’

Cherub grimaced at his brother. ‘We were both too busy trying not to end up dead to have time to talk about it.’

‘Go on,’ said Cormac.

The youth shook his head. ‘It landed by the city—’

‘Describe the craft.’

‘I don’t need to. I can send you an image feed right now.’

‘Then do so.’

Cormac’s gridlink picked up the query for linkage, as it had been picking up so many others from the surrounding area — queries he had instructed it to ignore. Signal strength was right for it being from the haiman youth before him, but he ran it through the same defensive programs as he did with anything else he allowed into his gridlink on this contaminated world. The boy had sent two visual files, which was risky, since it was possible for harmful stuff to be embedded in them. No riders as far as he could see, so running viral and worm-scanning programs all the while, he studied the files.

‘The Legate,’ he announced. ‘Or rather a legate.’

The first file showed the landing at Hammon. The second revealed amid huge red-green stalks of something like giant rhubarb the same craft grounded outside one of the ranch-type dwellings common in this world. There were two people lying on the ground nearby, bound up in cages of jain-tech coral, fighting to escape. This particular legate — a copy, obviously, since Cormac had already seen two of them destroyed — walked out of the house towards the prisoners and gazed down at them. After a moment the two began to struggle even more desperately, then smoke rose from them, then a burst of flame which grew hotter and hotter until it was as painfully bright as burning magnesium. Their struggles soon ceased and, finally, when the fire winked out, nothing remained but a patch of charred earth.

Cormac sent out the files on the com channel he and his companions had been using. Smith and Arach would have received them, presumably Scar did too.

‘Who were they?’

‘I don’t know,’ the youth replied. ‘I had to travel overland through areas I hadn’t seen before.’

‘Can you show us exactly where this is?’

‘Yes, I can show you okay. It’s over—’

Cormac held up his hand to interrupt. Distantly he heard the sound of weapons fire. ‘We go back to the landing craft.’ He pointed to Smith then down at the injured woman. No words were necessary: the Golem swept her up in his arms. ‘Arach, check that out.’ The spider drone shot off at high speed. ‘Scar!’ No further instruction needed there either. The dracoman could move faster than any human. He hurtled after Arach. That was enough — no point dividing his forces further. ‘Can you run?’ he asked the Egengy brothers.

‘I think so.’ Carlton shot a look of query at his brother, who nodded.

‘Then running would be good right now.’

As they set out, Cormac flung his arm out ahead, with an instruction sending Shuriken from its holster. The star whipped out, showed some inclination to pursue Arach and the dracoman, then seemed to shrug before dropping back and falling into an orbit above Cormac’s head. Soon the small group turned back into the first building they had entered, where Cormac again spied movement amid incinerated corpses. Difficult to kill this Jain-tech, and he wondered if this entire world would have to be sterilized; if many worlds would have to be similarly treated.

As they approached the double doors leading out into the forest the sound of weapons fire grew in volume, and flashes lit the ground as if from a close thunderstorm. Outside, the first thing Cormac noticed was that the autogun on top of the ship was busy firing at something beyond it. He linked through to Shuriken in order to get a higher view, just in time to see a row of snakish tendrils scythe down. Below them the ground was heaving up, till from it broke free a long fleshy cylinder — a rod-form.

The fucking things grow like tubers?

A brief slip into that alternative perception gave him an underground view, but in only a glimpse there was no way of distinguishing Jain technology from the masses of tree roots buried here.

Even before the rod-form fully emerged, proton fire was stabbing into it from amid the trees, then something black speared across from Arach, where he crouched by the bole of one of the forest giants. The ensuing detonation shifted their shuttle to one side but, even with the main body of the rod-form rendered into burning fragments, there were still things heaving from the ground, and some of them were breaking through the earth immediately below the shuttle.

‘Get aboard!’ Cormac yelled, simultaneously sending an instruction to the autogun, to prevent it firing at the Egengy brothers and their companion.

Just then a message packet arrived. As the others went ahead of him, he partially checked it but, on recognizing the signal source, then opened it fully.

‘Launch,’ Arach instructed. ‘But leave the door open.’

Reaching the door just behind the others, Cormac summoned Shuriken back to its sheath, then leapt inside even as something began burning below the ramp. He found Smith already strapping the wounded woman into a seat. Cormac headed for the pilot’s chair and, now in a shielded environment, quickly linked to the ship’s computer, initiating all controls even before he sat down. He wrenched up the joystick and, with a roar of boosters, the shuttle began to lift. Something seemed to be holding it in place, till a blast outside snapped that hold. He saw fire spreading out beneath the vessel, then felt numerous impacts on its underside. Clearly, Arach and the dracoman were removing unwelcome passengers.

Fifteen feet up and Scar piled aboard. Cormac put the ship in a spin and spotted Arach still down on the ground spewing appalling firepower all about. However, it now seemed likely to Cormac that the drone would not be able to leap up as far as the shuttle, so he slewed it sideways, while still rising fast. The drone got the idea, turned and leaped onto the nearest tree, sharp feet digging deep into bark. Scrabbling a hundred feet further up from the ground, the drone leaped again and landed with a crash on the ramp, then quickly dragged himself inside. Cormac instructed the vessel to seal itself.

‘Exciting enough for you?’ Smith enquired.

‘Getting there,’ replied the spider drone, nodding its metallic skull. ‘Getting there.’

Legate 107 remembered the remoulding. Some fault in that process had enabled it to retain enough memories of its previous existence to know that its original self would not have found admirable what it had now become. It remembered being Etrurian, a clunky Golem Eleven and part of a Sparkind unit during the Prador-human war. It remembered fighting the enemies of the Polity for two decades, and being proud to serve. It remembered that terrible feeling of loss — which seemed to go beyond emulation — on the deaths of its three companions: two human and one Golem. It remembered the ending of that conflict, and the subsequent sense of displacement, of dislocation, that twenty years of fighting left inside it when there was no more fighting to do.