Neal Asher - Polity Agent

The blast lifted him from his feet and hurled him backwards. He glimpsed burning flesh fountaining from the top of the rod-ship, around the turquoise pillar of a particle beam. The ship seemed to deflate as it dropped from sight, flames bursting around the now flopping figure of the Legate. As he ducked for cover with the others, towards the back of the ledge, Cormac observed the CTD roll away and fall from sight. Burning biomechanisms rained down, piling on the ledge itself then falling further in smouldering masses. Acrid smoke filled the air. Somewhere a boom, and fragments vaguely identifiable as bits of other rod-ships rained down through the volcanic chimney.

‘What the fuck?’ said someone, inevitably.

Polity?

As Shuriken snicked back into his wrist holster, Cormac dared to hope. He peered up through hellish fire but saw only the spiral ship still hovering above. Next, from below, objects streaked upwards—he had been looking in the wrong direction. The missiles slammed into the underside of the spiral ship, and the series of ensuing flashes darkened Cormac’s visor. When it cleared he saw one half of the great ship falling aside, trailing fire, exposed girders like bones glowing white hot. It crashed just out of sight, shuddering the stone beneath Cormac, and a wave of burning jungle spilled over the lip above. The remaining half of it seemed to be managing to draw away, but then another missile impacted. Incandescent fire burned out from its insides, exploding in jets from the surviving hull, and that half too fell from sight. The survivors crouched instinctively as further detonations shook the stone all around them. Then, up beside them rose a Polity attack ship of the same style as the Jack Ketch. Its original hull, where still visible between numerous repairs, glittered metallic blue. A bay door irised open in its side and a ramp extruded.

From inside issued a voice. ‘The USER is down, so I think it time to leave, don’t you?’

Cormac recognized that voice because he distinctly remembered his last exchange with it:

‘You saw that I did not gain access to Skellor—or to Jain technology?’

‘So,’ Cormac managed.

‘Tell Jerusalem that.’

They ran for the ramp, their choices being limited, though Cormac wondered how much better they might now fare aboard the King of Hearts. The rogue AI controlling this ship did not tend to show much regard for anyone standing between it and its objectives.

Once they were inside the ramp swiftly withdrew. The bay door slammed shut, then abrupt acceleration threw them to the deck. Cormac could not breathe, and noticed the acceleration even kept Arach, the dracomen and the remaining Golem pinned immobile. A telefactor rolled out on treads and began by relieving Cormac of Shuriken, then went on to collect up the rest of their weapons. He could still feel his gridlink connection to the bomb down below, and sent the signal to detonate it—perhaps futile, but it gave him some satisfaction to know that any of those biomechs remaining in the volcanic chimney would now be turned to ash. Minutes later, the telefactor withdrew, but acceleration still held them pinned to the floor.

They were helpless, but at least alive.

As he hurtled up through atmosphere, King pondered his reasons for rescuing these Polity personnel and understood that in truth he found more in common with them than with the multipart entity spread through space above. He wanted back into the Polity. He longed for forgiveness. But, with cold and exacting logic, knew it would not be forthcoming. His complicity in the deaths of so many humans on the world Cull would be enough for a sentence of erasure to be proposed, though the outcome there was not certain since he did not actually take a direct part in any killing. However, his destruction of the Jack Ketch, and the AI it contained, made erasure a certainty, should he be captured.

Breaching from atmosphere, King immediately noted that there were not so many of Erebus’s minions as he supposed, and a lot of debris. He registered numerous signatures of ships dropping into U-space, and realized that, with the USER now down, they were fleeing. However, many weapons targeted the King of Hearts and in reply he began emptying the stash he had manufactured while hiding in that volcanic chimney.

The chimney was a fortuitous find, since his first plan had involved slamming himself into radioactive earth for concealment. He detected it only microseconds before the multiple blast from the missiles sent to destroy him threw up from the mountains material that could be mistakenly identified as parts of himself. Decelerating hard, he smashed in through the rocky mouth of the chimney and crashed down inside. When he hit the bottom, tons of stone and dust rained on top of him. He powered down all systems, excepting chameleonware nowhere near as effective as possessed by the new Polity ships nearby. But it was enough, for none of Erebus’s minions detected him.

Over the ensuing months King made his repairs: sending out telefactors to collect refinable ores from the surrounding cave systems, sucking up briny water from below and separating from it both deuterium and pure water to fuel his fusion reactor and engines. When the USER that had trapped him first went offline, he was in no condition to go anywhere. As a precaution, over ensuing months, he manufactured drones no larger than a human head, from non-metallic materials, and launched them—some to take position on the surface of the planet, some out in space, and all using passive scanning. When the USER came back on again, he lay in a perfect position to observe what ensued—the battle fought by those new Polity Centurion-class attack ships. The second time the USER went offline—this time it quite evidently had not been powered down but destroyed—he readied himself to run, Erebus being otherwise occupied. He waited for the moment the biomechs finished off those Polity personnel who had landed here, and themselves left. But next, all hell broke loose right on top of him.

Bastard, that.

But why did he act when he did? The chances of him being discovered had grown exponentially as Erebus dickered about above him in the volcanic chimney. A quick strike and then an even quicker escape were what was required. So why had he stopped to take on these passengers on the way up? There seemed no easy answer to that.

Gaps everywhere. Though swarming in their hundreds even now, Erebus’s forces had still taken a severe pasting from those Centurions, and seemed somewhat in disarray. King felt a strange sort of pride in that.

My sort.

He dropped into U-space just as his weapons carousel clicked on empty.

The Battle Wagon went first, then in waves the other ships followed, winking from black existence. Azroc watched armoured shutters draw across the chainglass screen, as they would be drawn across many other screens throughout the Brutal Blade. Next the ship’s U-space engines came online with a grumble that reverberated through its massive hull, and warning lights came on inside to indicate that it had entered that continuum. Knowing ten hours of journey time would now ensue, unless the USER came back on, Azroc stepped back from the screen and, making an internal adjustment, shut himself down. As he descended into the Golem equivalent of unconsciousness, he understood that many of the humans aboard would not find it so easy to disconnect themselves from the world.

Later, Azroc roused, immediately conscious and thoroughly aware of his surroundings. A brief contact with the ship’s AI, Brutus, confirmed the passing of nine hours.

‘We are one hour from surfacing into realspace,’ the AI informed him.