Neal Asher - The Line of Polity

The old cyborg, Fethan, had been flung much further along the cavern. By running like a madman, he had made it to the rebel line — only losing the skin off his back to one tenacious creature that would not let go until blasted to fragments. Thorn considered fleeing too, but the fractured bone sticking out of his shin told him he would not be running anywhere; just as the piece of fan blade imbedded in his forearm told him he would not be playing the violin for a while. That he had managed to retain his APW he considered a miracle, and he wondered for how many minutes it would extend his life, should he finally make some move.

Just back from the wreckage of the aerofan was a door he had seen one of the creatures tear open, perhaps hoping this would provide another route into the rebel stronghold. When the creature emerged from it shortly after, Thorn guessed some sort of maintenance room lay beyond the door. Perhaps a place for tools, even spares for the pulse-cannons. Maybe if he could just…

Suddenly the nearest pulse-cannon ceased firing, and immediately the creatures were swarming past it overhead. He turned back to see them landing by the armoured door, and tearing at it in mindless anger. Others turned their attention to Lellan's abandoned aerofan, ripping the grounded machine to pieces. But his simple turning motion betrayed him, and three of them dropped from the flock to come hissing towards him like gulls after a discarded fish. With his left hand he swung round his APW, and managed to incinerate two of them before the third was upon him. He smashed away with his weapon and tried to bring the barrel to bear. But the creature had closed its claws into his clothing and the flesh of his stomach, its wings wide open to steady it as its pink star of a mouth stabbed towards his face. Flinching back, he saw silver hands close round each shoulder of the creature's wings. With a new screaming, it tore apart before him, its double chest parting down its central channel. Then a figure stepped through, grabbed Thorn by his collar, and dragged him at speed to the maintenance room. There Thorn pulled himself up on one leg, and stared across at what was still recognizably Gant, as the Golem drop-kicked a pursuing calloraptor back amongst its fellows, then fired a shot that sent the lot of them tumbling backwards.

Through gritted teeth Thorn said, "Seems we've been in caves like this before, old man."

Gant glanced at him. "Tell me you've got a memplant," he said.

" 'Fraid not," Thorn replied.

"Best you survive then." The Golem then hauled closed the steel door, and braced his back against it.

In one bay Skellor found a shuttle that was not so interpenetrated with Jain substructures as to be almost unrecoverable. Those stems and branches that had penetrated its hull, he quickly withdrew, initiating the necessary repairs on their way out. Whilst transporting its egg from Medical through the strange organic spaces of the ship, he accelerated the growth of this one chosen from a new batch of calloraptors. Upon getting it to the bay, he paused only to retard its wing growth and then make swift surgical alterations so that when he stripped the egg case away the raptor tumbled out possessing only long bony arms ending in optic interface plugs. Skellor then wrapped the new creature in a Jain pseudopod, inserted it into the pilot's chair of the shuttle, tore away the manual controls, and connected it directly into the craft's main systems. Now he was ready: he had his way of bringing Cormac to the Occam . Skellor then opened the bay doors and ejected the craft and its raptor pilot into space — another of his experimental creatures wrenched painfully into the world.

Looking through the eyes of his other creatures on the surface, Skellor now felt a grinding boredom at the inevitability of it all. He had destroyed every spacecraft evident on the surface of the planet, and though there might be something hidden in the caverns, it could not get off the ground without detection. So really Cormac, as much as his two companions trapped in that store room, had nowhere to run. The agent might choose to take his own life rather than be captured, but Skellor's anxiety about that was leavened, for he knew he could rebuild and revive anyone who had been dead for up to ten hours. Skellor's greatest fear was that Cormac might select a form of suicide that could utterly destroy his brain — as Captain Tomalon had done — for not even Skellor could recreate something for which he possessed no pattern.

Though the remaining pulse-cannon was still destroying his creatures in great numbers, he knew it could kill no more than an eighth of their number before they finally broke through. Of the remaining raptors maybe half would be killed inside the cavern itself before the human population was slaughtered and Cormac finally taken. Their losses didn't matter very much, because Skellor did not intend to retrieve his raptors. Once Cormac was safely aboard the shuttle that was even now going into descent, Skellor could break this planet like he had broken the moonlet from which he had obtained materials for growth.

Cormac glanced at the empty Shuriken holster on his wrist and swore. It seemed to him that he suffered nothing but loss all the way down the line, and he was damned if he was going to lose any more. Gazing around the huge cavern in which he stood, anger and suppressed grief prevented him from feeling impressed. All he saw was another trap — and that was not where he wanted to be. Lellan was over conferring with her men, setting up heavy weapons for the moment the raptors broke through the door — as they most certainly would, any time now. She had said she would be back soon, but minutes dragged slow and leaden. Did she not realize how unimportant all the little battles down here really were? Abruptly, Cormac came to a decision. After a conversation held with Lellan, before they had come here to the mountains, he had learned that he needed exit cavern seventeen, which lay to the right of something called the Watergate. He gazed along the river's length winding past the pillartowns and the ponds, the crop fields and storage bunkers. It had to be there: one of those tunnel entrances beside where the river entered the huge cavern. There must be the Watergate.

Cormac walked away past a big antique rail-gun now being bolted to the stone floor, past soldiers setting up a barricade — something pretty futile considering their attackers could fly. He headed on down an alley leading between two large warehouses, to an open space where various military vehicles had been abandoned. As he walked along, he found it a relief to be breathing again without a mask over his face. Reaching the empty vehicles, he climbed into something that resembled the bastard offspring of a jeep and a golfer's cart, engaged the simple electric drive, and headed away. Someone shouted after him, but he ignored that. He would have readily shot anyone who attempted to stop him.

Now on the move again, he did have a little time to spare for his surroundings. Just as Blegg had informed him: the Underworld was bigger than the surface colonization, and from what he could see was well organized. Whether it was better in this respect than what he had briefly seen above he could not judge, as all he had seen up there was ruined by war, and the one city he had only glimpsed. Studying the fields and ponds down here he saw that the inhabitants had taken the same agricultural route as the Theocracy, and as so many other planetary populations: the usual cereal and vegetable crops, but also protein harvested from species of fast-growing crustaceans and chilopods that were not the product of natural evolution, but genetically spliced for this very purpose hundreds of years in the past. He wondered how the Theocracy, farming the same unnatural creatures, could square that with their rigid beliefs, but then recalled how religions had a long history of 'squaring things' so their senior echelons could live comfortably whilst the lower ones did the labour and suffering.