Gridlinked

9

They trudged along, head down into a wind that blew ice crystals like steel pellets against them. It was not possible to hurry, much as they wanted to get back to the shuttle before the weather worsened. Mika slipped on the glassy ice and Thorn hauled her to her feet. As she made to move on, Thorn held onto her and inspected her coldsuit. A simple fall and one little tear could mean the loss of a limb or even death. Flesh froze quickly at these temperatures.

After that they regained the shuttle without further mishap. Jane headed for the cabin while the outer door closed on the rattle of ice crystals. AG engaged and then a thruster fired. A faint roaring penetrated the hull as the shuttle turned against the wind. Cormac wondered just how much of a hammering this place would give the equipment they had brought. Of course, he would have to ask.

It took ten minutes before the outer layers of their suits had been heated enough to be touched without the danger of coldburn. When they removed their masks their breath billowed in the frigid air. The heaters had not yet succeeded in raising the temperature above zero Celsius. Cormac inspected the chill lens of ceramal containing the fleck of material that was the submind, then slipped it in the pouch on his suit's utility belt. He looked at Mika, who was frowning, probably at herself, and then he turned his attention to Gant and Thorn, who had now removed their gloves and were checking over their weapons.

'Don't be too ready to shoot,' he told them.

'We're always ready to shoot, old chap, but never eager,' drawled Thorn. Then he nodded to the holster on Cormac's sleeve. 'Nice little piece that. May I see it?'

Cormac looked at the holster for a moment, then, coming to a decision, he unstrapped it and passed it across. Thorn touched a finger to the frigid control panel. There was a quiet snick and a small red light blinked on, then off. Thorn removed the five-point star of chrome steel and inspected it admiringly if somewhat gingerly.

'Chainglass blades as well. This is a custom job. A Tenkian?'

He handed the weapon to Gant.

'Yes, a Tenkian,' said Cormac.

'What's the cut diameter with the auxiliary blades fully extended?' asked Gant.

'Twenty-five centimetres,' Cormac told him.

'Fuck! You ever used it at that?'

'Once.'

'Must have taken him apart.'

'No, there's never any need for full extension against a human opponent, it was against a Thrake.' Cormac paused, groping for another conversational gambit. 'Big bastard, looks like a woodlouse, but about the size of an elephant.'

Gant nodded and continued his inspection of the weapon.

'Male bonding,' said Chaline to Mika in a stage whisper, and shook her head. Mika lost her frown and smiled before starting some work on a notescreen. Gant took the holster from Thorn and put the shuriken away.

'Not only a Tenkian, but one with a juiced-up processor as well,' he said. He passed it back to Cormac. 'A weapon like that is not cheap.' He took out a cigarette and lit it.

Cormac strapped the holster back on his arm. He appreciated the irony of his situation. It was quite possible to talk to a person, without an AI in the background to give him information on that person. It was quite possible to learn a great deal about that person too, things that an AI might not be able to tell you. What had he learnt? He'd learnt that both these soldiers wore their personal guises over a harsh professionalism: Thorn with his phoney English accent borrowed from another age, Gant with his smoking and his gruff manner. Here, he realized, were two men who had been dehumanized, and were now reclaiming that humanity. Another of Blegg's little touches. Cormac snorted to himself and thought about his last conversation with Angelina before he killed her. How had he managed to get so out of touch? In retrospect he realized he was lucky to be alive.

'Five minutes and we should be there. It's a hydroponics facility on the edge of the blast-zone. A bit hot, but the suits should handle it if there's no fallout from these storms,' said Jane.

'What about you?' asked Cormac.

'I'll have to stay here, otherwise I'll need to spend the next week being detoxified.'

Gridlirtked

It was a nice way to describe it. Cormac knew that she would probably have needed a body replacement.

'Is there any more information on the heat source?'

'Not very much. Hubris has picked up two heat sources of about human mass. They might be survivors.'

And if they are not? Cormac wondered.

Chaline said, 'If they are survivors, they will be very sick, being that close to the blast-site. Let's hope they're not too sick to tell us what happened to the runcible. If they even know.'

Cormac turned from her and watched Mika put her notescreen aside, then open a case on her lap. From this she removed an instrument like a flattened torch. Its wider end was inset with a small touch-panel and screen. He recognized it from one time he went on a mission to a planet that had seceded from the Polity, and where immediately the diree continents had gone to war. It was a hand diagnosticer. It covered a whole range of cases, up to just how many lumps of radioactive metal were lodged in your patient, or what poisons were in his blood, and what viral agents might be eating his face away. Perhaps now she would get a chance to use an instrument like this. Before, he had doubted the possibility.

'Coming up on the facility now.' The shuttle dipped and slowed, thrusters firing in reverse, and through swirls of snow they caught glimpses of three long buildings like half-submerged pipes.

'They are in the middle one. Hubris says there is a power source of some kind there, but it is not being used for heating. They must be in coldsuits. Certainly the heat levels would indicate so.'

The shuttle finally came to a halt in midair, then, using the AG and blue stabs of retro flame, Jane piloted it in as close to the building as she could. It came down into a hissing storm, the beating of ice crystals a constant drone on its hull. Even as it landed, it slid sideways a couple of metres before AG was completely disengaged and its full weight rested on the ground.

'I can't land on the other side, so you'll have to walk the length of the building. Take care, the weather is even worse here,' Jane said.

Cormac grimaced at Thorn, who grinned back before pulling on his facemask. Golem could be patronizing at times. When they had all pulled on their masks and gloves, Gant hit the door control and stepped back. The wind was howling outside and, even when the door was only open a crack, hard crystal ice hissed in and powdered every surface.

'Should we rope up?' asked Chaline.

'No need,' Thorn replied. 'Only a few metres to go, and this wind's not going to pick you up.'

Chaline inspected him for a long moment before reluctantiy leading the way out. Cormac did not need to see her expression to know that she was doubtful. He had his own reservations about their safety. But he also knew that Thorn and Gant would not agree to go roped into a potentially hostile situation. They wanted to be able to move.

Underfoot was cold-cracked plascrete skinned with ice like a layer of badly scratched perspex. This water-ice had been considerably abraded by the wind-driven crystals, and as a consequence it was not slippery. The door was only a few metres away across this surface; even so, it seemed kilometres distant as they struggled to stay upright against the blast of the wind.

'This door is jammed as well,' said Chaline, when they reached the building.

Gant and Thorn both tried it, but it did not move. Gant waved Thorn back and drew his hand weapon. Cormac noted it was standard issue JMC 54: a military version of the thin-gun he had used on Cheyne III, a pistol that fired field-accelerated pulses of ionized aluminium dust, but an effective weapon for all that.

There was an arc-light flash and the buckled and smoking door went crashing down a central aisle between rows of frozen plants. They got in out of the wind.

'Messier than Jane, but just as effective,' said Cormac.

Gant chuckled and advanced ahead of them, with Thorn at his side. He did not put his weapon away. Thorn drew his.

'Have you got a fix on us, Jane?' asked Chaline.

'Yes, I have you,' came Jane's reply.

'How far to the heat sources?'

'Approximately five hundred metres, and they have not moved. Have you found anything interesting yet?'

'Nothing so far.'

They came across the first corpse twenty metres beyond the door - or, rather, half a corpse. It lay on the floor, its lower half missing, and the top half so badly burnt it was impossible to tell if it was male or female. White teeth showed in stark contrast to the blackly incinerated face.

'Jesu!'

That was from Chaline. Gant and Thorn had seen this sort of thing before. Mika knelt down next to the body and inspected it closely. She pushed at burnt lips to get a better view of the teeth, and the lips crumbled away. There was a gagging sound from Chaline. Mika held her diagnosticer against the belly, where the flesh had not been burnt and was like marble.

'Female, heavily radioactive. I'd say she was flash-burnt in the explosion.'

'Quick, then,' said Gant.

'Not necessarily… that's strange…'

Cormac stepped forward and looked down. 'Tell me,' he said.

'It looks like her lower half was cut away after she was burnt. I suppose that could have happened…'

Mika glanced up then around. There was no damage evident to the building where they were, or anywhere nearby. Cormac knelt down and inspected the corpse. He looked over to Mika.

'See there.' She pointed to the severed organs and muscle. 'That was done with a shear of some kind, after she was frozen. See? No fluids.'

Gant stooped down, next to the two of them. 'Now why would someone do that?' he asked.

Cormac knew damned well that the question was rhetorical. He stood. 'We'll find out soon,' he said. 'No need to second-guess.'

They advanced and found another corpse in a similar condition. Then they found a stack of five corpses, which looked like a sculpture made in hell. None of these corpses was burnt. Mika inspected them closely, though with some difficulty as they were frozen together.

'Hypothermia. Most of these froze to death.' She pointed at the corpse of a man right in the middle of the heap. His skin was dark blue and he was impossibly thin. 'That one is an Outlinker. He must have been in a low-G area when AG cut out. His neck is broken.'

'Yeah, but who stacked them here, and why?' wondered Gant.

Cormac wished he could give the soldier a dirty look.

They continued along, until Jane contacted them.

'One of the heat sources is moving, coming your way.'

Gant spoke up quickly. 'This isn't scientific any more. What do you recommend, Agent?'

'Get off this central aisle. We'll hide for a while and see what we might see,' said Cormac. There was no objection from Chaline; since they'd found that first corpse she had been very quiet.

They cut down a side path to a secondary aisle and crouched there behind troughs of frozen hydroponics fluid containing tomato plants, which would shatter at a touch. Both Gant and Thorn held their weapons ready. Cormac moved his hand close to his shuriken.

'Close to you now, about a hundred metres,' Jane told them.

They waited in tense silence.

'Fifty metres.'

'OK,' said Cormac. 'Radio silence until I say otherwise.' He wished he had thought of that earlier. If whoever was coming had a radio he knew where they were.

The figure that clumped down the main aisle appeared to be a human heavily wrapped in whatever materials it could find. Unless there was a coldsuit of some kind underneath all that material, Cormac realized it was not human. The material itself was some kind of plastic mesh: probably the only stuff the figure could find that had not become frangible with cold. Ordinary cloth would shatter at these temperatures. He continued to watch for any signs that they had been spotted, but the figure plodded on slowly, facing straight ahead. As it passed the cross-aisle in which they hid, Cormac's suspicion was confirmed. The figure's knees were higher up than a human's and bent in the opposite direction. It walked like a bird.

Where…?

Once past them, it soon reached the pile of corpses. With a crackle of breaking flesh, it hoisted one of the corpses onto its shoulder as if it was made of thin balsa, then turned and began to trudge back again.

'It has no radio, then,' said Cormac.

'What the hell was that?' asked Gant. A genuine question this time.

Cormac tried to track down an aberrant memory. Where had he seen a creature that walked like that? 'I don't know, but it's a sure bet it had something to do with the runcible breakdown. We'll follow it. Try not to make too much noise. It might not have a radio, but it's probably got ears.'

They moved after the creature once it was twenty metres ahead of them.

'A description would be nice,' said Jane.

Mika replied, 'Manlike, but with lower inverted knee-joints.'

'What are they doing with the bodies?' asked Chaline.

Cormac glanced in her direction. She had not figured it out, and he was not about to start spouting theories just yet. He wondered what it was like to have that kind of naivety.

They followed the creature to an area where any troughs had been pushed back against the walls. There it dropped the corpse to the ground. Chaline gagged when an arm flew off and its fingers shattered like porcelain. The creature squatted down and picked up a device with the appearance of a builder's trowel. A high-pitched whining came over their comunits as it used the device to cut the arm into sections.

'Oh my God,' said Chaline, and was ignored.

'Appears to be some kind of electric shear,' said Thorn, then he pointed to the row of black cubes to which the shear was wired. 'Homemade cells. God knows what they're made of.'

'And that is a microwave oven, if I'm not mistaken,' said Cormac, indicating a cylindrical canister on the floor.

The creature opened the canister and dropped the sections of human arm inside.

'They're… they're cooking…' Chaline could not goon.

'More like softening, at these temperatures,' said Thorn. He did not seem the slightest bit bothered by what he was seeing. 'Human flesh is about the only form of protein and fat around, here on the perimeter. Most supplies were probably destroyed and whatever was left they probably used up long ago.'

Cormac surveyed the plants all around them. Thorn looked as well.

'Not wordi them diawing vegetable matter either. That would be a waste of energy. Just not wordi the effort with all this flesh about/ the agent said.

'Yeah,' said Gant, 'but what kind of creature can survive on radioactive human flesh?'

Cormac had a horrible suspicion he might know.

'Oh God.'

Cormac glanced at Chaline with irritation. But she was not viewing the scene before them, but was looking behind her. Cormac turned fractionally before Gant did. Behind them stood a second creature, as if it had been there for some time, watching them. Gant raised his gun, but Cormac had his shuriken to hand before him. It flashed through the air with its chainglass blades retracted. There was a crack. Gant swore as his gun clattered on the floor. Cormac laid a restraining hand on Thorn as the shuriken hovered in the air above him. Thorn lowered his gun. Cormac hit the recall on its holster and it shot home, glad to be out of the cold.

'No violence,' he said, then put some lightness in his voice. 'They're only eating dead people, not killing live ones.'

They all slowly stood up. Cormac glanced behind and saw diat the other creature had seen them too, and was also standing. 'Right, we'll head back for the shuttie. They'll eidier follow us or they won't; we cannot compel them. But if they do come, we'll allow them aboard.'

'What are they, Cormac?' asked Chaline.

Now she had asked, Cormac wanted to answer her -but he had to be sure. If they were what he diought they were, then that meant there would be an awful lot more questions - like, where now was a certain extragalactic creature? A creature with a body consisting of four kilometre-wide spheres of flesh joined in a row, and how had it survived an antimatter explosion? But that was another story, one he suspected he would have to be telling soon enough.

'I cannot be sure of what they are. We'll see back at the shuttle, if they come along.'

The five of them moved back down the aisle. Gant retrieved his gun and holstered it. As they neared the second creature, it moved aside to allow them past. Once they were past, it turned to watch them. Its fellow joined it. Cormac gestured for them to follow. They immediately did so.

'How dangerous are diey?' asked Gant.

'They haven't attacked, diat's all I can say. Whatever their reason for being here, they are survivors. We came here to rescue any survivors…'

They soon reached the open door to the facility, and began fighting their way dirough a worsening blizzard to the shuttle.

'Quickly,' said Jane. 'Some fallout.'

Cormac glanced back and saw the two creatures hesitating at the door. Perhaps they were at their limit there. Perhaps it was too cold out here for them. He again gestured for them to follow, and pointed over at the shuttle. They followed again. The storm made no difference to their plodding gait. In a moment all five were beside the shuttie and Jane opened the door and helped them inside. Cormac waited with her at the door for the two creatures to arrive. They climbed inside also. The door closed. The creatures stood there waiting.

As the temperature rose, the shuttle filled with carbon-dioxide vapour that slowly cleared. Soon the floor around the creatures was peppered with water-ice splinters that had flaked from their plastimesh clothing. When the temperature reached 250 Kelvin, minus twenty-three Celsius, Cormac removed his mask and gloves. The creatures copied him, the plastic mesh that covered them breaking like wet blotting paper at this higher temperature.

'No coldsuit underneath. Must have antifreeze for blood,' observed Thorn.

Everyone else was silent as the creatures revealed themselves, and finally stood naked before them. Cormac nodded to himself, all his recent suspicions confirmed, and new ones taking their place. Had Blegg known? The old bastard had said Cormac was just right for this mission.

These creatures looked like men, only their skin was green, fading to yellow around their stomachs, inside their legs and under their chins, and it was tegulated with fingernail-sized scales. They were hairless, and their eyes were about three times the size of a man's. They had no ears, only holes set in the requisite positions. The shape of their heads was toadlike, with muzzles rather man human noses and mouths. Their hands were three-fingered and bearing claws. Tentatively, Mika stepped closer and scanned them with her diagnosticer. After that she studied her readings for a long time before saying anything.

'I can't get a proper reading from them. We'll need the lab on the Hubris.'

'Doesn't surprise me,' said Cormac. 'And it wouldn't surprise me if you get some strange readings there, too. You see, I don't think they are really alive.'

Mika looked at him and waited.

Cormac glanced at Jane, who was keeping a wary eye on their two visitors, then turned to Mika, his tone acid. 'You asked what they are. Well, a very long time ago a palaeontologist by the name of Dale Russell followed up on a little thought-experiment of his. He was wondering what dinosaurs might have evolved into, had not mammals displaced them. For his basic model he took a dinosaur called stenonychosaurus, and from that he developed what he called a dinosauroid. These are something like his model.'

'But they are not dinosauroids,' Mika stated.

'Oh no,' said Cormac, 'I think these were made as a taunt, or a lesson, or for some other unfathomable reason. I've only ever seen one before now, and I assumed it was unique. I christened it dracoman.' Cormac rubbed a hand across his eyes. Suddenly he felt very tired. 'You see, these were made by an extragalactic dragon that might or might not have died a quarter of a century ago.'

They were staring at him in disbelief as he turned to them. All except Mika - she nodded sagely.

'Aster Colora,' she said. 'The Monitor. The contra-terrene explosion. I was five then, but I've never forgotten the story. They turned it into a holodrama: "The Dragon in the Flower". And there was a book called Dragon's Message.'

Cormac sighed with relief. Someone knew the story, then. He turned back to the two strange creatures. "They'll need to be decontaminated somehow. It would be a good idea to keep them in isolation. We should get back now. You should be able to get the whole Dragon story from Hubris.'

At that moment one of the dracomen gave a shiver, and its slotted pupils focused on Cormac. Then it grinned at him with lots of pointy white teeth. There was a raw bloody smell on its breath.