Neal Asher - The Line of Polity

"Watch out!" Fethan yelled.

Apis ducked, and the creature went straight over him, and knocked Eldene to the ground. Apis leapt forward, and slammed himself into the raptor just as it was trying to drag Eldene upwards. He brought it down and, pinning it underneath himself, he emptied his rifle into the monster's chest. Fire flared underneath him, and claws closed on his leg. He felt himself being jerked up, but with his head towards the ground, and with horror saw the one he had just eviscerated with fire flapping to its feet, with fibrous pink chyme welling up in the burn holes on its midsection, then going for Eldene a second time. Hauling himself up, Apis swung his weapon with all the force he could muster, smashing one of his own assailant's wing joints, and both he and it crashed to the ground. His rifle gone now, he was defenceless as the raptor loomed over him, its triple mouth opening to tear off his face.

"Fuck you!"

His fist smacked hard into its double-keeled chest, and it coughed. He thought of Miranda, and hit it again in exactly the same place. As something gave under his fist, he assumed it was his own bones breaking. Amazingly the raptor continued coughing. He struck it again, now thinking of all those who had died on the General Patten . Then for his mother, he followed that blow with one up and under the monster's ugly head, then another… then another. It suddenly seemed to go soft on him. He felt its neck snap, saw its flesh tearing — that pinkish chyme welling up to make repairs.

"And double fuck you!" he yelled, remembering one of Gant's favoured curses. His next blow tore the creature's head from its body.

Apis did not allow himself time to feel appalled at what he had just done, he turned and immediately went for the one attacking Eldene. By then the dracomen had realized where the rebels were heading and had closed in. During the confused and vicious fight that followed, all the rebels were soon undercover, and dracomen manned the doors, joyfully countering any intruding raptors.

"Skellor programmed 'em to attack and kill, but not much beyond that," observed Fethan. "They're at a disadvantage when they land." He then turned to inspect Apis thoughtfully. "Take it you finally got over your fear of falling."

Apis fought to recover his breath, still not quite believing what he was now capable of doing, even though he had worked it all out. That was the Jain nano-mycelium working inside him — likely the very same stuff that effected such rapid repairs to those raptor creatures. Even though the same tech worked inside, he had beaten the creature simply because its strength was related to its density, so the raptor could not be as strong as himself since it needed to be light enough to fly. After a moment Apis stood upright and noticed Eldene was watching him with something approaching awe. He turned back to Fethan. "If they keep having to land in order to attack, the dracomen will eventually get them all," he suggested.

"Only thing to stop them fighting themselves to death would be a bit of Skellor's reprogramming," said Fethan with satisfaction.

"There's nothing to stop him doing that remotely," Apis stated.

"I doubt he can do it from underspace," replied Fethan with a grin.

"He's gone? Skellor's gone?"

"That's the word, boy. That's the word," Fethan replied.

Apis could only believe it as he watched raptor after raptor land outside and enter the building, only to be torn apart by the waiting dracomen, and as what had been a desperate fight in the open devolved into a slaughter — an extermination.

Lyric II spun out of underspace, exciting a photonic trail, before its fusion engines ignited to decelerate it down into the system. Being identified as one of the numerous large cargo ships that usually arrived at and departed from the sprawling structures coming into view, its AI was soon queried by a local AI, its presence noted and directions given, then it was all but forgotten. Aboard the ship, Cormac sipped hot coffee and tried to shake off the last dregs of cold-sleep that seemed to clog his head with wet tissue-paper. So much would depend on what happened in the next few minutes that, in his present debilitated state, he was finding it difficult to accept it all as real. Eyeing Stanton and Jarvellis, he saw that they were having no such problems accepting reality: she appeared white and ill, while her partner wore an expression of grim determination.

"He may not be prepared to take any more risks with us." Stanton at last voiced what they were all thinking. "If he fires on us as soon as he surfaces, that's it — all over."

"But he won't," said Cormac with a confidence he did not feel. "He'll want to gloat, if only for a few minutes, and while he does that we'll be sending our message on ahead. I would even bet he'll open communications with us in the hope of getting some response out of me."

"And our response to that?" said Jarvellis.

"I will talk to him," said Cormac. "Every second we gain…"

"In that respect," said the captain of Lyric II , "it's time to start counting."

The Occam Razor slid out of underspace a thousand kilometres behind them, so that it seemed a tangled, dead thing, wrapped around something glorious and precious, was folding out of blackness there. Observing the great ship, Cormac was struck this once by how strangely beautiful it was. Perhaps this was because it would be the last time he ever saw it.

Through the myriad senses at his disposal, Skellor observed Lyric II like a fleck of matter against the sprawling backdrop. He studied the cylinder worlds like displaced towers, and the fragile chains of habitats, the huge manufactories and refineries, and the swarms of ships. Here was another place open to subversion, to takeover — throughout it he could feel the presence of Dracocorp augs, in loosely aligned communities each held together by the creeping dominion of one of their members. His arrival at Masada, and what he had found there developing under the Hierarch, had made him understand the subtle route Dragon had used to dominate humans — a route Skellor had very unsubtly ripped wide apart. But that was all something he must return to later, for here he was much too close to the Polity, and already could feel the U-space probing of a runcible AI. No, the one ship ahead of him he would take, and that would be all and enough. He opened the bay from which he had earlier ejected the raptor-piloted lander, and accelerated down onto Lyric II . As he descended, he spread himself out through Jain structure, substructure, architecture in a kind of rapturous stretching as of some creature extending great wings and claws.

This is it, Agent. I have you now.

Horrible laughter then echoed within him — and it wasn't his own.

You are dead, he told the source of that laughter.

You made me, replied the ephemeral voice of Aphran. He tried to find it, encompass it, smear it out of existence, but he was chasing mere shadows through the vastness of himself.

You haven't seen it yet, have you?

I haven't seen what? he asked, hoping this time that when she spoke again he would be able to nail down exactly where she lurked.

The light, Skellor. The light.

Standing in the sharp blue shadows of his favourite cyanid, Dreyden drew hard on his cigarette, its glowing tip reflecting off his chromed aug, then blew out a cloud of smoke over the exposed yellow convolutions inside one of the plant's opened pods. The convolutions all immediately zipped themselves up like a swarm of worms passing over the surface of this alien flower, then after a time unclenched again.

It was only here that Dreyden truly felt he could relax. Or perhaps he was kidding himself that relaxation was even possible for him: he had been described as being 'taut as monofilament' from his childhood — full of crazy hopes and numbing fears which he felt were the driving forces of his success. He knew that sometimes his fears strayed into the irrational, and it was good that he did know this, for Lons and Alvor would never tell him: Lons because Dreyden's sanity or otherwise was not a matter of interest to him; and Alvor because he was always looking for an angle, for a way to manipulate his boss, to scrabble another couple of rungs up the ladder.