Neal Asher: The Line of Polity

"Understood," replied Tomalon.

"Is the shuttle in position?" Cormac asked.

"In position, yes. It can be with you in five minutes."

"Well, you'll have to wait until we lose that 'ware. There's no telling what else they have in there. Even these autolaser towers are pretty sophisticated, and they're only for the local wildlife. Also, I want Skellor secured before things get… frantic."

"I do know what I'm doing," growled Tomalon.

Cormac supposed he must: you didn't get to be the Captain of a ship like the Occam Razor without having some grasp of combat realities. He glanced at his two companions.

"Ready?"

Both Gant and Scar gave him affirmative nods.

"Well, let's get in there then," Cormac said.

Scar raised his multigun and aimed at the tower. He did not fire, but merely held the laser sight on-target and transmitted the required information from his gun up to the ship.

"Acquired," Tomalon told them.

"Hit it," said Cormac.

As painful seconds dragged out, Cormac hunkered down, realizing because of the delay that Tomalon must have fired a kinetic missile rather than one of the Occam's beam weapons. He was proved right when fire stabbed down through the tower and it lifted up on a blast. The air-rending sound of the explosion rolled out to them as the tower came apart on the expanding surface of a ball of fire — and disappeared. Globules of molten metal pattered on the ground fifty metres ahead of them, and a dust cloud rolled past them as they rose and ran towards the encampment.

Gant and Scar immediately outdistanced Cormac, as they sped towards the strange object in the centre of the encampment. Now, people were coming out of one of the barracks buildings. Two explosions followed — grenades tossed by Gant — and a man was running and screaming, with most of his suit ripped away. Someone else was turning and pointing a weapon. Observing the shock-absorbing side cylinders and the cable leading down to a belt-mounted power supply, Cormac realized they were using rail-guns here too, though of primitive design. He fired once and that same someone went over on his back, with vapour jetting from his head. Then Cormac was at the wall of the dome. Not far away he could hear the stuttering fire of Separatist weapons, and the sonic cracking of Gant's and Scar's weapons in reply. Over com he could hear Scar growling with enjoyment. To his right: three people running towards him. Something was punching a line of cavities from the plascrete wall of the dome. He drew Shuriken and hurled it. The throwing star shot away, with its chainglass blades opening out in bloody welcome — through one attacker then another, both of them keeling over, a limb hitting the ground here, blood jetting and vaporizing; then, on its return, the third man losing his head before even knowing his companions were dead. From its holster Cormac sent new instructions: a program he had keyed in earlier. Shuriken swooped away from its three dead victims, then hit the wall of the dome with a circular-saw scream. While it was providing this distraction, Cormac used a smart key on the airlock. As he entered, it was to the welcoming light of the explosion that toppled the 'ware device from its supporting scaffold. And Gant's "All yours, Tomalon," coming over com.

A moment's pause as the lock cycled. When the inner door opened Cormac went through, keeping low, and dived to one side, rolled and came up in a crouch, with his thin-gun aimed and ready. To his right, two men and a woman were struggling into environment suits, to the sound of Shuriken's cutting.

"On the floor!"

One of the men started groping for something at his belt, before toppling over with a hole burned in through the bridge of his nose and out through the back of his head. The woman's eyes flicked towards something on Cormac's left. Turn. Someone on a gantry positioned round a silo, aiming a rifle at him. Four shots slammed the marksman back against the silo, then he followed the rifle to the ground.

"I said on the floor!"

The remaining man and the woman obeyed, and Cormac hit the recall on his shuriken holster. The screaming noise stopped and suddenly Shuriken was hovering above him. From behind it came a thin whistling of pressure differential, through the slot it had cut. Checking a readout at the lower edge of his vision, Cormac saw that the atmospheric pressure here was higher than that outside, so there would be no danger just yet of cyanide poisoning for anyone going unsuited in this dome. He keyed another program from the holster menu, and Shuriken advanced to hang threateningly over the prostrate man and woman.

"If you try to get up, you die," he said, coldly.

The two of them stared up at Shuriken, and showed no inclination to move from where they lay. Meanwhile Cormac scanned around to pick up Skellor's trace just beyond the silo. He ran to the edge of the silo and peered past one of the pipes running down the side of it. A plascrete wall cut across in front of him. Inset in this was a wide observation window, and what appeared to be another airlock. Judging by the equipment he could see through the window, the room beyond was a laboratory, so the lock was probably a clean-lock. Checking to either side as he passed the silo, Cormac slammed into the plascrete wall before peering round through the window again. The room was bright and aseptic. Esoteric equipment cluttered workbenches. Cormac identified a nanoscope, a huge surgical robot, cryostasis vessels, and a surgical table holding what appeared to be the corpse of a calloraptor. Cormac slapped a contact charge against the window and stepped away. The charge blew, and its metal disc went clattering across the floor. The glass remained intact until the decoder molecule began unravelling the tough chain molecules of the glass. After a minute the entire window collapsed into powder, and Cormac leapt through.

"Skellor!"

Cormac hesitated before moving beyond the corpse, as now he saw that he had been mistaken in thinking it a calloraptor. He had never seen anything quite like it: greyish veins seemed raised up from the inside, and had a slightly metallic hue; the face was also distorted — much more flattened than a calloraptor's and of a simian appearance — and the forearms were bigger, the claws more like hands. It had also, obviously, been able to walk more upright, and in its ocular hollows gleamed a line of pinhead eyes. He recognized that there was much of calloraptor in this corpse and also something of human being, and surmised that this creature must be the result of some experiment of Skellor's. He moved on and scanned his surroundings further.

There.

Skellor stepped out from behind the insectile chrome nightmare of the surgical robot. The hologram Cormac had studied earlier had not shown a particularly distinguished-looking individual: he was short, muscular, with brown hair and brown eyes. Fanatical as Skellor was about his work, he had apparently never bothered with cosmetic alteration, nor any form of augmentation. The latter situation, Cormac now saw, had changed: a crystalline aug curved from the man's right temple, down behind his right ear, and terminated in three crystalline rods that entered the base of his neck. Recognizing just what this device was, Cormac felt inclined to put numerous holes in him right there and then. He restrained himself.

"Cormac, Earth Central Security. I've come to get you out," he said, going for the less confrontational option.

Skellor snorted a laugh, then shook his head. "You're outside your jurisdiction here," he said.

"You're a Polity citizen and you were kidnapped. That puts anywhere you are found inside Polity jurisdiction," Cormac replied.

"Wrong, citizen, I am here of my own free will, and you are over the Line. But I don't suppose that'll make any difference to your actions. The arrogance of ECS has always been unassailable — hence their insistence on hindering my work."