Line War (8 page)

The gravcar approached through the sulphurous haze constantly emitted from the numerous volcanos upon this primitive Line world. Yannis recognized the shape of a floating Zil, which was the vehicle of preference for some who traded out this way. He glanced at the box lying open to one side, its contents of Prador diamond slate exposed, then he long-distance auged into the satellite he’d left out in orbit. In the last hour no spaceships had arrived there, and there was nothing watching them from above unless it was concealed by chameleonware. However, he doubted, what with the recent unusual activity in the Polity seemingly directed at some exterior threat, that ECS could spare resources for that kind of mundane operation, so anything they might be doing here was probably concentrated on the ground. Possibly an agent, or maybe one of those new undercover Golem that were becoming so difficult to detect.

Kicking up a cloud of icy dust, the Zil landed: far too dramatic, since there had been no need to employ turbines during the descent. Yannis sent off an instruction to the
Harpy.
Immediately, in his visual cortex, he began receiving a readout from the highly complex scanning routine the ship was using.

‘Harpy, give me overlay,’ he instructed.

As four individuals climbed from the car, they were immediately in his envirosuit visor outlined in red, then their hidden weapons were picked out and precise details displayed to one side. The ship’s AI was very good at this sort of stuff, since it was of Prador manufacture, or rather had been made from the brain of a Prador first-child. It always amused Yannis that AIs were ostensibly seen as an essential requirement for U-space travel, yet the Prador, who had been dropping their ships into that continuum for centuries, supposedly did not possess AIs. Few in the Polity saw fit to question or explain that discrepancy. He supposed it was all about definitions. Polity AIs could manage the rapid, complex and huge calculations required for U-space travel because of their processing capacity and speed. Harpy could do them because that’s what it had been bred - and surgically altered - to do. It was an engineered autistic savant. It was really all a question of when does an intelligence become artificiAI?

Scan then penetrated the Zil to reveal the two crates of proton carbines in the back footwell, and another object in the boot which Harpy took a while to analyse. When Yannis saw the final result he felt his legs go slightly weak. It really was an imploder, and a big one - the kind employed by Polity dreadnoughts when they wanted to slag a moon. He realized then that he really must be dealing with amateurs, since if they’d really understood what they’d got hold of, the asking price would have been fifty times as much.

‘Looks like they are expecting trouble,’ said Forge.

‘Well, let’s not disappoint them,’ said Kradian-Dave.

Yannis smiled to himself, then blinked when the outline of one of the figures displayed on his visor began flashing. He read the side display: chameleonware embedded syntheflesh, ceramal chassis: Golem Twelve. So it was a set-up, but Yannis felt mildly disappointed that ECS had sent such an
old
Golem on an entrapment operation directed at
him.

Now, not subvocalizing because even at this distance a Golem would be able to hear him, Yannis used a text routine in his aug:
Harpy, acquire and target - if it moves out of human emulation, hit it. Fire also on my signal.
Then he stood up and stepped away from his shooting stick. He was slightly puzzled, for it surprised him that the ECS Golem had allowed this to proceed so far. Surely the mere chance of that imploder falling into the wrong hands could not be countenanced?

The one who was obviously the leader strode ahead of the three heavies, one of which was the Golem. She was a squat mannish woman with a strutting arrogance that immediately annoyed Yannis.

‘So you’ve brought payment,’ she said, coming to a halt a few paces from him. The other three held back, all of them clutching heavy pulse rifles.

‘Yes, I’ve brought the payment.’ He waved a hand towards the box of diamond slate. ‘And now I want to see what I’m buying.’

‘Ooh, naughty naughty,’ came Forge’s voice over Yannis’s aug. ‘Our satellite feed has located a small commando group all dressed up in chameleoncloth and trying to creep up on us. Let me know when you want them to go bye-bye.’

Yannis finally understood what was going on here. The Golem was not working for ECS. It had to be one of those rare items: one that had been corrupted. It really did work for the woman standing before him, and was her edge. This was quite probably something she had done before, maybe many times before: the weapons were the bait and he was the fish. He used the text function of his aug to send back to Forge:
Now would be good.

A distant whine, as of disturbed mosquitoes, came from the surrounding slopes. This was followed by dull, almost inaudible concussions. Forge and the others must have decided to use the seeker bullet function on their multiguns. There would be a mess up there. The bullets entered their targets to detonate inside.

The woman before Yannis raised her hand to her ear, then abruptly dropped it, her expression giving nothing away. Comunit in her ear. She wouldn’t know for sure her troops were dead, but now she was out of contact with them.

‘But of course you never really intended to sell me anything,’ Yannis said.

Hit the Golem.

With a sawing crackle the blurred turquoise bar of a particle beam stabbed out seemingly from mid-air behind him. His internal face visor shot up from the armour underlying his envirosuit, so he was now viewing the scene through just a narrow slot. The beam struck the ersatz big man and turned him to fire. Instead of being thrown back, the Golem stepped forward, its clothing and syntheflesh slewing away. A briefly revealed metal humanoid stood against the blast for a moment - then flew apart.

The woman was now on the ground, her arms wrapped protectively over her head. Her remaining two heavies were crouched in firing positions, their weapons wavering between Yannis and the unseen source of the particle beam. Both of them kept shooting anxious glances at what was left of their companion; their edge was gone and they knew that opening fire might now be suicidal.

Yannis shrugged. ‘You try to cheat me, and now your Golem is gone.’

Get rid of those two, Forge.

Yannis awaited the expected arrival of the seeker bullets, but nothing did arrive.

Forge?

‘We’ve got a problem - there’s something else out here,’ said Kradian-Dave.

Something in the voice of the man sent a shiver down Yannis’s spine, but he believed in his men’s competence. Let them sort out whichever of this woman’s troops they had missed.

Harpy, kill the two armed males.

The particle beam stabbed out twice more and screaming the two men flew apart like fat-soaked rags held before a blow torch. Yannis stepped forward, but abruptly the woman heaved herself upright and drew a gas-system pulse-gun. She fired straight into his chest, sending flames and smoke rising up before his face.
Damn, another envirosuit wrecked.
He stepped into the fusillade and slapped the weapon from her hand, then grabbed her by the throat and heaved her up off the ground.

‘I am very
annoyed,’
he said. He would have liked to spend some quality time with her, but the firing of
Harpy’s
particle cannon might have already been detected, so ECS agents could now be on their way. He began closing his hand, the motors in his armour kicking in as his fingers dug into her neck. She began flailing about and kicking, but that came to a convulsive halt as his fingers broke through flesh, crunching a handful of windpipe, muscle and fat. Ripped arteries sprayed blood, one jet spattering along his arm and on his visor. He discarded her, then shook the mess from his gloves.

‘Do you have your problem under control?’ he asked.

No reply.

‘Forge? Kradian? . . . Lingel? Sheila? Prescott?’

Some kind of com failure? Maybe someone up there had been using an electronic warfare technique?

‘Harpy, give me satellite feed,’ he demanded, trying not to get too nervous about this. Even so, he backed up a little way and took up his shooting stick.

The feed clicked in.

‘Close shots of the last locations of my crew,’ he instructed.

Three of them weren’t where they were supposed to be. Forge and Prescott were . . . well, he assumed that he
was
seeing Forge and Prescott, but it was difficult to tell with the bits of them spread all around and spattered on the surrounding rocks. It looked like they had been hit by seeker bullets, but they must have been of some new and powerful armour-penetrating kind for the two men had worn the same sort of motorized armour as did he.

Time to get back to the ship.

He pulled up his shooting stick, which was an apt description for it also served as a weapon, then quickly headed back towards
Harpy,
However, just then, a strange sight gave him pause. He aimed at this thing with the stick and tracked its course to the ground.

A bird?

In a flurry of feathers it landed amid the smoking and strewn remains of the Zil’s passengers and began pecking up bits of flesh.

A vulture?

Yannis vaguely recollected something from childhood lessons on Terran ecology.

But how was that possible? The air here could not support Terran life, and whatever large life forms survived crawled through tunnels in the ground scraping up rock sulphur and digesting primitive forms of algae out of it.

Then something else caught his eye and he looked up.

Standing over by the Zil was a big big man wearing a long coat and a wide-brimmed hat. As if Yannis seeing him had been some kind of signal, the man began taking lengthy strides towards him. Harpy gave him an outline which immediately began flashing.

Golem.

Yannis read the side display:
Golem Twenty-Five prototype, ceramal armour, further modifications unknown. Rescan. Rescan.

Hit it.

A
text reply nicked up in his visual cortex:
You are within target acquisition frame.

Yannis quickly stepped to one side, but the Golem suddenly moved horribly fast, almost a subliminal flicker, and was then strolling in from a different direction.

You are within target acquisition frame.

He moved again.

The Golem moved again.

Rescan. Rescan. Rescan. Viral return
—

The display in his visor shut down. He stepped aside again, but the Golem just continued striding in.

Hit it! Hit it!

Nothing.

Yannis turned and ran, but before he’d even managed two paces a big brassy hand slammed down on his shoulder, spun him round, closed on his neck and hoisted him from the ground.

He heard, ‘Particle weapons leave a metallic aftertaste.’ The voice seemed to be coming from somewhere below him. It was not the Golem talking for he was looking straight into its implacable face. Around his neck he felt something creak, then his neck armour collapsed with a cracking sound like thunder to his ears. His last thought as his head, now disconnected from his body, thumped to the ground, was,
Metallic aftertaste?

* * * *

Gazing out through
Heliotrope’s
sensors, it was with a feeling of bitterness that Orlandine contemplated the massive object sitting out there in vacuum. This was not the kind of project she’d had in mind upon her return to the Polity, but now circumstances had changed. The computer virus from the wormship had changed them, for it had provided her with a definite
purpose.

Her purpose was vengeance.

When, by destroying a massive USER based on an icy moonlet, Orlandine had opened the trap holding both her and the Polity fleet that Erebus first attacked, she had been leaving the Polity for pastures new. Somewhere, towards the inner galaxy, she had intended to build something grand with the fantastical technology she now controlled. Procrastinating for some time, she then realized that, no matter how grand it might be, the thing she built would be worthless with only herself to appreciate it, and so she had returned to the Polity. The remote place where the wormship found her had been her selected construction site. Not any more.

Using every devious precaution she could think of, she studied the computer virus transmitted by the wormship and came to the conclusion that it bore some similarities to a memcording. Then, because it possessed all sorts of strange visual, audio and seemingly sentient components, she allowed it to run in a secure virtuality. Immediately, in this virtuality’s albescent space, something manifested and spoke.

‘Well, hello, Orlandine,’ said the entity, the virus.

Orlandine gazed at the scruffy-looking man and knew that this could not be a human being.

‘What are you?’ she asked, while on other levels she investigated the structures of information that had caused this apparition to appear.

‘Me?’ He pointed with both forefingers at his own unshaven face. ‘I’m a seriously pissed-off dead man.’ He grinned. ‘The name’s Fiddler Randal.’

‘What do you want?’

‘Well, I want something to die - the something that killed me - and I want your help.’

‘Ah, and coincidentally you were transmitted to me by a wormship.’

He shrugged. ‘I’ve managed to spread myself throughout Erebus.’

A dubious contention, Orlandine thought, but nevertheless asked, ‘Why should I help you?’

‘Because that same something manipulated you; intended you to be a weapon it could use against the Polity.’

‘So you want Erebus to die - the same entity of which you seem to be a part,’ said Orlandine. ‘Now why should I try to kill it? Despite Erebus’s manipulation of me, it still gave me the greatest gift I could ever have wanted.’

‘Like making you a murderer?’

Orlandine felt distinctly uncomfortable with that statement. Without doubt, Randal was referring to her partner, Shoala, whom she had killed while covering up traces of her escape with the Jain node that had been Erebus’s ‘gift’ to her.