The Line of Polity

15

"The monster was as greedy to fill itself as were Sober and Judge, and so, to save her husband from its jaws, Judge stole food from the compound when there was no sinning Brother to be found there."

The picture explicated this with an animation showing Judge tramping a mountain path with a great sack of food slung over one shoulder. As she walked, she dipped a hand into the sack and crammed food into her great jowly face. The woman, just to be sure, closed the book to have a look at the cover, shrugged, then continued:

"On the seventieth day Judge could find no more sinning Brothers in the compound and no more food in the warehouses, so, with much sorrow, chose to lead Brother Evanescent to the bridge."

Brother Evanescent was obviously about half a second away from acquiring a halo and, considering all that had gone before, the woman clearly guessed what was going to happen to him.

"The monster rose up before Brother Evanescent, but he was not afraid. 'I am armoured with my Faith, the Word of God is my whip, and His Grace is my Spear! he cried and, casting aside his white robe, the good Brother revealed golden armour that glowed in the sun. In his right hand he bore a long golden spear and in his left hand he bore a whip as hot as molten iron."

The woman and the boy observed with some perplexity that the picture was precisely in concurrence with the text,

"And so for one day and one night Brother Evanescent battled the monster from under the bridge," continued the woman. "Ah, now I see."

The Brother kept attempting to spear the siluroyne whilst, with a bored expression, the creature leant an elbow on the parapet and knocked the point of his spear aside with one claw. In the background Sober and Judge were stacking wood.

"With Faith you cannot come to harm."

When the two workers gave the signal, the siluroyne picked up Evanescent, and plucked away his whip and his spear as if taking away dangerous toys from a child.

"With God's word you will chastise your enemies."

As if preparing a kebab the monster threaded the spear through the back of the Brother's armour, and used the whip to bind his arms and legs in place.

"With God's Grace your enemies will be brought down."

The purpose of the two Y-shaped sticks on either side of the woodpile now became apparent. Once ignited, the wood burned as it never ever burned on Masada.

"With all three, the world will fall at your feet!"

The woman and the boy watched as Brother Evanescent was sufficiently broiled, with implausible speed, then Sober, Judge, and the siluroyne opened up the hot parcel of his armour to enjoy a merry feast.

Loman cupped a blue rose, brought it close to his nose, and closed his eyes as the subtle perfume drew him back to his childhood. The pain of thorns penetrating the flesh of his palm was also a reminder, for at one time he had been destined to join the Septarchy and had briefly experienced their bloody discipline. Opening his eyes he surveyed the ordered beauty that stretched far away from him, and blurred into rainbow hues riding up round the inner arc of Hope.

The gardens of the Septarchy were beautiful indeed, which was something Loman always found surprising, considering the gardeners themselves could have little appreciation of the colours; but then perhaps, with the Gift, they saw them through the eyes of others? He turned now to the First Friar and studied the man: he was emaciated, almost as if he suffered some wasting illness; his dark robes, tied close to his thin frame with twists of rope made from human hair, were worn thin and losing their dye through too-frequent washing, but of course the First Friar would not know this, since sewn in the place of his eyes were the ancient memory crystals that once contained the truths of the first colonists.

"They say you construct your gardens by scent alone, and that there is a whole landscape of olfactory meaning that those of us with eyes cannot appreciate," said Loman.

"The power of myth must never be underestimated," replied the Friar.

Loman stared beyond the cropped lawns and intricate stone gardens towards the great colonnaded sprawl of the main Septarchy halls. In their white uniforms the platoons of soldiers, marching in to take up positions around the beautiful white buildings, seemed in perfect consonance. The First Friar and the two young acolytes — with their sewn-up eye-sockets — could not see this, but would know soon enough. Loman glanced around at his bodyguard scattered between the borders and neat shrubberies, then at Tholis — who was Claus's replacement and a man thoroughly aware of the precariousness of his position.

"Subtle," he said, returning his attention to the Friar. "But in the end plain power is what must not be underestimated."

"That is something I never do," said the First Friar, at last beginning to sound worried.

"Why then do you persist in occupying the upper channels with your prayers and your chants?" Loman asked.

"They are offered to the glory of God," said the Friar.

"They were intended to keep Behemoth from taking hold of our minds, and now Behemoth is dead they are no longer needed."

"How can you — the Hierarch — say that prayer is no longer needed?"

Loman sighed and, shaking his head, held out his hand towards Tholis. The man did not need the brief instruction Loman sent him via aug. He drew his pistol and placed it into Loman's still-bleeding hand.

The First Friar now tilted his head. "Why have soldiers entered the Septarchy halls?" He turned towards Loman, and the Hierarch could feel the questioning probes coming through so many channels of his aug, his Gift, He replied with a simple statement:

"One whole quarter of Hope used for your damned Septarchy halls and damned useless gardens."

Now he could feel the spreading noise as people in the area nearby, so accustomed to bloody pogroms, reacted with panic. The Friars themselves were not panicking, accustomed as they were to being above such pogroms. No one had been killed yet, as the soldiers herding the Friars out of the halls and into their gardens were showing greater restraint than they normally showed with other citizens. This, Loman knew, was not out of any respect, but through fear of the power these Friars had enjoyed under previous Hierarchs. It was time, he decided, for someone to die and, so deciding, pointed the pistol just to the First Friar's right and fired four times. Both acolytes dropped: one of them dead before he hit the ground, the other coughing up blood from shattered lungs until Loman fired again, opening a closed eye-socket and blowing out a froth of brains across the close-cropped grass.

"No! You cannot do this!"

Loman carefully clicked the pistol's safety switch across then tossed it back to Tholis who caught and holstered it in one swift movement. The Hierarch was pleased with this new commander of his guard, for the man so quickly anticipated his orders that it almost seemed unnecessary to give them. Already two of the guard were closing in to take hold of the First Friar, even as Loman unhooked from his belt the sculping tool he had taken from Amoloran. The Friar did not have eyes, but he screamed as if he did when Loman cut and gouged the two memory crystals from his head, then continued screaming as the neurotoxin worked its way through the exposed raw flesh of his eye-sockets.

"Release him, now."

With the two bloody crystals in his right hand, Loman stepped back while the First Friar fell face-down and in his agony seemed to be trying to bite the ground. Glancing down to the Septarchy halls, Loman saw his soldiers now needing to use more brutality to get the blind friars out into the open. He sent instructions to Tholis:

"Finish it on their lawns and throw their bodies into the flower borders."

Aloud, Tholis asked, "What are your orders, Hierarch?"

Loman turned and gazed steadily at him, then after a moment relented: it was understandable that the man wanted to hear a direct order witnessed by others.

"I want you to kill all of these Septarchy parasites on their wonderful lawns, and I want you to throw their bodies onto the borders, so that the flowers are fertilized by their blood. Is that clear enough for you?"

"It is clear, Hierarch," Tholis replied.

They first came in high over the inhabited lands: ion thrusters filling the sky with actinic white stars in rectilinear display, on wave after wave of bulky landing craft. Below each wave the flickering of orange lights ignited the sky beyond the edge of the crater, and soon the sound of a distant storm came grumbling down onto them.

"They're bombing something," observed Gant.

"Yes," said Cormac, "let's get our gear together and get out of here."

Out of sight the craft must have turned, because soon the first waves were coming in over their heads — now heading towards the inhabited area of the planet — and Cormac supposed it was too much to hope that the Theocracy would not come to inspect this site where the creature that had destroyed their arrays had come down. As the last line of craft rumbled over, one of them peeled away and descended on the eastern side of the crater.

"Mika, move it!" he shouted, as the Life-Coven woman once again turned on the inspection light she had secured to her temple with a skin-stick pad, and delayed to study some bizarre gory object and cut samples from it. She hurried to catch up, as he stood waiting with his boot resting on the bottom of the slab.

"We could hide here," she suggested half-heartedly, indicating the macabre architecture she had been studying, which now — in the semi-dark which was all of a night this place managed — seemed to be turning into an organo-Gothic monastery. It was a protest really — she just didn't want to leave this place of such reverential interest to her.

Trotting up behind her Gant said, "Not too clever an idea — only one way out, and they'll certainly be coming down here."

"There's so much more to learn — I've hardly scraped the surface," said Mika, looking back regretfully as she stepped onto the slab to follow Apis.

"I promise that when this is all over we'll let you come back here and dig it all up," said Cormac.

"A lot of digging," said Mika. "There is, by my calculation, only fifty per cent of Dragon visible here in this crater."

Cormac caught her arm. "What do you mean?"

She gestured to the slopes on either side. "The rest of it must be buried deeper under here, or it vaporized on impact," she said.

"Remember, a lot was already sheared away from the creature," he reminded her.

She shook off his arm and moved on up the sloping stone. "I have, of course, taken all that into account," she said haughtily.

"Oh damn," said Cormac, surveying the scene in the crater with infinite suspicion, before turning to Gant. "Where's Scar?"

Gant glanced up the slope to Apis and Mika, then quickly scanned all around. Abruptly his expression became puzzled, and he lifted his fingers to touch the side of his head. "He's not responding to his comlink," he announced.

And so it begins, thought Cormac, then instructed, "Go with the others and get them under cover. I'll catch up with you."

Gant looked set to protest, but Cormac didn't give him a chance, quickly turning away and heading back the way they had come. A glance behind showed Gant hesitate, then turn to bound easily up the slab after Mika and Apis.

Cormac quietly initiated Shuriken as he moved into the shadows of the Dragon corpse. Many years ago he had been present when the entirety of this creature had apparently suicided. He'd foolishly believed it then, so to say he was suspicious now would have been an understatement.

"Scar?"

The dracoman was crouched by a charnel hillock of black bone and broken flesh. At first Cormac thought Scar was staring at him, until he moved aside and realized the dracoman was gazing directly at the slope Gant had just climbed. Cormac moved to his side and squatted down next to him, peering in the same direction.

"What do you see?" he asked.

Scar hissed, exposing his teeth — bright white in the moonlight — then turned and just looked at Cormac.

"We have to get out of here," Cormac said.

"I stay," said the dracoman finally.

Cormac shook his head. "You're not stupid, Scar. Theocracy troops will be down here soon to investigate this place. They may find you here, and if they find you they'll certainly kill you."

Scar seemingly did not consider this worthy of a reply, and Cormac understood that perfectly. The dracoman used only such words as were necessary and never bothered formulating replies to the patently obvious. Cormac reached out to touch the dracoman's shoulder, but Scar's hand snapped up and caught Cormac's wrist — that hand was hot, febrile.

"What is happening, Scar?"

"I stay… it is soon." Scar released his wrist, then returned his attention to the slope.

Cormac stood up: he had no time to spare, and he knew he would be wasting time trying to get anything further out of the dracoman. He stepped over and picked up the denuded pack of oxygen bottles Scar had discarded.

"Take care," he said, turning to go. The dracoman bared his teeth in what might have been a grin.

The stars were now easing into visibility between ragged strips of cloud — cloud that also parted coyly to reveal the distant baroque and glassy sculpture of a nebula. Glancing at this, Cormac realized it was the same one as filled the sky of Callorum, only there he had seen it from the opposite side. As he scrambled down the sloping debris into the flute grass outside the crater, one of the moons sped across the face of the nebula like a searchlight flung by a catapult — its tumbling light occasionally stabbing through cloud gaps. Gant still waited for him at the edge of the flute grass, then led the way into a dense area where the stalks gathered in a protective wall all around.

"Scar's not coming," Cormac told him.

Gant nodded. "I knew one day it would happen. He's not human, and he's always seemed to me to be marking time — waiting for something."

"I'll let you explain that to Mika, then," said Cormac.

Gant grimaced.

Without an oxidizing atmosphere, the laser worked at almost twenty per cent above expected efficiency, and it took the team only a few hours to knock down a wide enough area of flute grass. Such a clearance was not entirely sufficient to the task at hand, which was why a second team went in — once the laser was shut down — to spread a powder of copper sulphate to poison all the plant roots in that same area. Had they laid the inflatable flooring direct onto still-living rhizomes, new growths of flute grass would have punched up through the tough plastic within a matter of hours. After observing all the outside activity for a while longer, Aberil turned his attention from the infrared screen to his own gathered staff.

"The loss of the Lee and the Portentous is an object lesson to us all: we must never underestimate the rebels, and we must show not the slightest hesitation, nor mercy, as we prosecute their destruction," he said.

Returning his attention to the screen he observed the troops, now disembarked from the landers, gathering into squads and preparing to move out. They had little in the way of armour or transport — the largest items being balloon-tyred cars on which could be mounted launchers and larger rail-guns, but which were mainly for the moving of supplies — but that was intentional. Though there was always comfort in having armoured vehicles to use, in this kind of war they never lasted very long. Lellan had employed her tanks for a swift assault, their main target being the rail-gun towers of the compounds, but now those tanks were all but obsolete, just as were large airborne carriers. When a single man could easily carry a high-penetration missile-launcher with intelligent tracking, large vehicles soon became more vulnerable than single individuals. In fact, Lellan had quite dramatically proven this point at the spaceport.

He considered what had happened there: obviously she had sacrificed a carrier, and ordered the apparent disarray of her forces thereafter, to fool them into thinking they had killed her. An elaborate trap and an effective one: in one stroke she had wiped out a quarter of the force sent against her. That she had destroyed the heavy armour aboard those ships was irrelevant as such, because Aberil suspected she could easily have taken the spaceport before, rendering such armoured vehicles — perhaps the only ones that could have lasted long enough under hand-held attack and put a dent in her forces — completely useless. No matter, right now he had with him thirty thousand well-armed and thoroughly vicious infantry skirmishers, whereas Lellan's forces numbered perhaps one-third of that even including those she had recruited from the crop fields. And she would pay — he had seen to that.

Bombing from landing craft was not an easy option, as they were not really equipped for the task. They had accomplished this by connecting magnetic mines to the undersides of the craft — mines they could disconnect by radio, and detonate by the same means. Only one craft had been lost, when some fool sent the wrong signal first, but overall Aberil's main aim had been achieved: Lellan could not retreat directly back down into her caverns, now he had destroyed all her breakout tunnels.

"Over this night we'll move our soldiers into position, and in the morning we go in on their left flank," he said. "Nothing elaborate: we just hit them hard and drive them back from the spaceport towards the mountains."

"The mountains are easily defended," noted Torthic, the logistics officer.

Aberil studied his fingernails. "And utterly useless to us. We cannot establish crop ponds or colonies there, and they are riddled with caves where traitors can hide."

"Your meaning?" Torthic asked, taking the prompt Aberil sent him over a private aug channel.

Aberil shrugged. "The Witchfire is aptly named. I should think a scattering of ten- and twenty-megatonne devices should take the backbone out of Lellan's army once she considers it safely ensconced in the mountains."

In bright moonlight, they moved out in squads of twenty into the flute grass. Each squad had its own commander with an open aug link to Aberil's logistics staff, its own car carrying either a heavy rail-gun or a mortar, plus supplies. Each soldier was armed with a rail-gun capable of firing anything from single shots to eight hundred a minute, and carried enough of the small iron slugs to maintain ten minutes at that latter rate of fire; a short-stock grenade-launcher; and curve-bladed commando knives for more intimate work.

They had trained all their lives for this kind of action and were ready and willing for it. They eagerly looked forward to their first encounter with the rebels, who at present were ten kilometres away from them. As squad commander Sastol led his men in a brief prayer, he felt his stomach tight with excitement and his head buzzing with the sometimes contradictory instructions that filtered down from First Commander Aberil. Finishing the prayer with a silent 'Amen' over his Gift, he found that nevertheless the central order was unchanged. Advance and destroy the rebellion — in the end it was simplistic.

"We march behind the car for the present. The moment any part of the line hits resistance, we spread out and link up with adjacent squads," said Sastol. Then focusing on his lieutenant, Braden, he went on, "You and two others of your choice get to ride on the car. I want you on the heavy gun at all times as I think that when it starts, it'll start fast."

"Don't you want to ride?" asked Braden, with a touch of irony.

"Not now. I need to loosen up for…" Sastol paused as the order for them to move out came through his aug. He held up his hand for a moment, then raised it above his head, made a circular motion then pointed with two fingers into the flute grass. Hand-signalling — an anachronism from days before the Theocracy had received the Gift from Behemoth — was something many military commanders obdurately continued to practise. The precise technology of aug communication not being entirely understood, these men liked to be prepared for the eventuality of its failure in a battle.

As one, the army of the Theocracy moved into the flute grass, each squad cutting a swathe separated from its neighbours by a hundred metres of vegetation on either side. Sastol watched Braden ensconce himself behind the heavy rail-gun, observed Donch and Sodar clamber up behind him, Donch taking up the simple detachable drive handle to set the car in motion. As the rest of their squad moved in behind the car in a loose double column, Sastol moved in behind them. In truth, he preferred walking because he was so charged with adrenalin that it would be almost painful for him to sit still — experiencing action at last after a lifetime of training for it.

Only action came rather sooner than he expected. A hissing crunching sound to the right snapped Sastol's attention in that direction, whence he saw a sharp-edged yellow hook the size of a man's arm cleaving through the ground towards his men. It was such an odd sight that it took him some time to recognize it for what it was.

"Mud snake!" he bellowed, just as the sliced mat of rhizomes parted and the creature heaved its giant caterpillar body into view, clacking its huge beak with appended slicing hook, and emitting horrible coughing barks. Rail-gun fire slammed into it from both sides, and it was beginning to disintegrate even as it surged forwards. Turning its blind head sideways at the last moment, it clashed its beak shut on Dominon and bore him to the ground. Continued fire separated front end from back and leaking blood like molasses, its rear end sank back into the ground. Immediately the squad fell upon the front end with knives and rail-guns, levering the monster's ragged beak open.

"I'm okay, no need to panic."

Finally, by cutting corded muscle at the base of its beak, they were able to wrench the top half of it back — which unfortunately released human arteries that had been pinched shut.

"Really, I'm okay," Dominon reiterated out loud, then, "Oh."

He died before one of the roving med-squads could reach them, but Sastol thought that perhaps for the best, as Dominon — as athletic and libidinous as the rest of them — would not have wanted to continue living in only the top half of his body.

"Gods protect us all," intoned the medic as he bagged and tagged Dominon to be picked up later.

"Not the first?" asked Sastol.

The man looked at him, his face expressionless behind his tinted visor as he sent the statistics across via a private channel. Mud snakes had already killed eight and injured seventeen sufficiently for them to be out of the fight. A siluroyne, disturbed at the eastern end of the line, had taken out an entire squad of twenty. Three were lost to a heroyne before the creature had been brought down. It had apparently swallowed them whole.

"It's not even night yet," Sastol said gloomily.

"They're certainly all stirred up," said the medic, "but let's hope the enemy will be facing the same problem."

A wide area of flute grass had been flattened around the enemy lander, and that area was now lit by arc lights as troops began pulling equipment out into the open.

"Laser," observed Gant, holding up the ends of some of the laid-over grass for inspection. Discarding them he pointed to a heavy device mounted on a flat tray, with one driving wheel behind. "Only for levelling an area of the grass — not really manoeuvrable enough to be used as a weapon."

"Like they need another weapon?" said Cormac, eyeing the rail-guns and grenade-launchers most of the men carried.

"True," said Gant.

How bloody must warfare become when most fighters carried weapons that could turn a human being into steak tartare in a second — and where there was nothing but flat swampy ground and nothing to hide behind? It seemed to him that the fighting Gant had earlier referred to must have been bloody indeed. He glanced aside at the Golem, then back towards the spot where Apis and Mika were concealed. The four of them possessed APWs, so could wreak havoc in this clearing, but it seemed unlikely that they would live long enough to board one of the landers and lift it off. Even Gant with his Golem Twenty-seven chassis would eventually be destroyed by enough rail-gun hits. He caught the trooper's eye and nodded back the way they had come. They crawled back into deep shadow beyond the range of the lights before standing up and returning to join Apis and Mika.

"What do you suggest. Agent?" Gant asked.

"I suggest we find somewhere to bed down for the night, and reassess things in the morning. Maybe they'll send an investigation party down into the crater, and an opportunity may present when there's a few less of them about the lander."

"Scar's still in the crater," said Mika, falling back on her usual technique of not asking the question she really wanted to ask.

"Yes, well spotted," retorted Cormac and, ignoring her pique, turned back to Gant. "Maybe we could get ourselves one or two of their uniforms — reach one of the landers that way?"

Hesitantly Apis asked, "Where would you then take the lander? Hundreds came down between here and where you want to go, and if you steal one, that will soon be broadcast."

Cormac glanced at him and nodded. "I know that. I'm just thinking about our immediate future." He rattled a forefinger against his oxygen bottle. "Anyway, we could fly out and round, and put down in the mountains."

"If not shot down first," said Apis.

Cormac grimaced. "We've gone from an AI dreadnought to creeping around in the undergrowth, so I wouldn't be surprised."

"And there I was thinking you an optimist," said Gant.

"You still haven't—" began Mika, but just then grenades went off to their right.

"Lead!" Cormac shouted to Gant, then he, Mika and Apis hurried after the Golem as he moved swiftly into the flute grass.

"How did they…?" Apis did not manage to finish the question, but Cormac answered it anyway.

"They must have put up an infrared detector. We were a bit too close," he said.

More explosions to their right, followed by the distinctive vicious cracking of rail-gun fire. Gant slowed to a halt and held up his hand. Mika swore aloud after stumbling into his back, then fell silent when he glared at her. He made a downward gesture and they quickly squatted low.

"They're not firing at us," he said. "There's something else out there."

They listened as the firing drew further to the right of them, and something moved through the vegetation with a sound like a leaking compressor.

"What the hell is that?" wondered Cormac aloud.

"Big bastard of a hooder," said a voice none of them recognized.

Cormac observed with surprise the old man who stepped into view. He was short, gnarled, had a large ginger beard and a distinct lack of teeth, but most importantly he had managed to get this close to them without being detected by the hearing of a Golem Twenty-seven. Gant himself was gaping in amazement at the oldster, and Cormac grinned to himself — it was well for one such as Gant to be reminded he was not omnipotent.

Casually, Cormac pointed the thin-gun he had drawn at the old man's chest. "And you are?" he asked.

The stranger surveyed the four of them in turn, studying with great curiosity the exoskeleton that Apis wore, before returning his attention to Cormac.

"You came down in the lander — from Dragon," he observed.

"You didn't answer my question," said Cormac, tilting his head to pick up further sounds of rail-gun fire, and the racket of seven or eight grenades going off one after another.

The old man grinned, and spoke over the noise. "You didn't ask the right one. What you meant to ask was, which side am I on?"

"And?" Cormac asked.

The old man lowered his voice to a whisper. "Yours, Agent. Now shall we get the hell out of here? I just led a nightmare over to visit our Theocracy friends, and I don't want to be leading it back again."

Cormac considered for all of half a second, then reholstered his weapon before gesturing to the old man to lead on. He received looks from both Gant and Mika that suggested they were on the edge of questioning his judgement, when suddenly there was a huge crash from far behind them, followed by continuous rail-gun fire and grenade explosion after explosion. Looking back, they saw wreckage fountaining up through the arc lights, then hurtling through the night above them went the engine of one of the landers.

"Fucking hell," Gant suggested.

The lights suddenly went out, but the firing and explosions did not quickly cease — nor did the screams. Something reared up into the night, and there came a sound as of a hundred glass scythes sharpening themselves against each other. Cormac saw something glittering, as of red light reflected from spilt mercury — etched against a background of something wide and black.

"Yeah, hell's about right," said the old man, quickly leading them away.

"That was a hooder," said Mika — again a statement.

"Observant, ain't she?" said the stranger.

A hundred metres further along, where the tall grasses petered out into purplish darknesses of deep rhubarb, Gant caught hold of the old man's arm and halted him.

"Who's that ahead of us?" the Golem asked calmly.

"He's all right, he's just waiting for me," explained the other.

Gant was having none of that — he'd been caught out once that night, and it was enough. He ducked into the dank vegetation, to approach whoever was ahead of them. Behind, there now came only sporadic gunfire, the occasional explosion, but the screaming remained almost constant.

"What the hell is it doing back there?" Cormac asked.

"That's mostly terror you can hear. The screams from the ones it catches would get more muffled."

The three of them stared at him with morbid curiosity.

He shrugged. "They normally eat grazers that have toxic structures layered in their skin, bones and flesh, so of necessity they eat slowly and meticulously. I'm told it takes them a while, so a human victim will die some time after being stripped down to the bone."

"Muffled?" asked Apis, clearly fascinated.

The old man brought a cupped hand down on the palm of his other hand. "By its hood — that's what it traps you under."

It didn't require the superb senses Gant possessed for him to realize there was something decidedly odd about that old man. Even so, Gant reckoned on the stranger not meaning them any immediate harm, else why had he revealed himself? Also, whatever the old man was, it involved some high-level Polity tech — little to do with the hostile Theocracy here. Probably the man who was lurking just on the other side of this small, perfectly circular, mossy clearing offered no immediate harm either. But Gant had heard something, felt something…

Was instinct, intuition — or any other of those intangibles humans believed in — recordable? For Gant this was not some rhetorical question to stimulate interesting debate — it was a question that lay at the core of everything he was. If these intangibles did truly exist, then perhaps others like ego, self, soul… In the end Gant had to wonder if he was really Gant, and to find the answer to that he needs must pursue things neither solid nor easily denned.

The unseen man was good, very good for a human: he was so still that all Gant could detect was the very slow and easy cyclic breathing, and the even beat of his heart — its rate attesting that though the man knew Gant was present nearby, he wasn't allowing himself to get over-excited about it. Before the others could catch up, Gant stepped out into the clearing.

"You can come out now. I know where you are," he said.

The man's heartbeat suddenly ratcheted up very high. Gant could only presume this meant he himself was about to be attacked. As he leapt forwards directly towards the half-seen figure, a hand shoved him aside and he ducked the folding stock of a pulse-rifle. Turning fast on the boggy ground he caught hold of the weapon, withheld an instinctive strike at the other's momentarily exposed neck, and consequently got the heel of a hand smashing into his nose. But the fight had a foregone conclusion: Gant lived in a Golem Twenty-seven chassis so however brave or skilled was his opponent, it was like matching a lion against a battle tank. Ignoring the blows that rapidly slammed into him, Gant picked the man up and threw him out into the clearing. He was instantly up, and a dagger clanged off Gant's head and went whickering into the flute grass. Light from the tumbling moon then suddenly ignited the tableau.

"What the hell are you doing here?" Gant asked. "You know, you never possessed much finesse, even when you were alive," Thorn told him.

The carrier lay where she had brought it down, almost entirely filling a squerm pond. From underneath the vehicle the writhing and scraping of segmented bodies rose and fell in flurries of skittering hissing, as if the creatures were pursuing a long-running argument down there in the darkness. Standing upon the ramp that descended from her carrier to the muddy ground, Lellan surveyed the horizon through her image intensifier, and wondered just how long the pounding would continue before the ground attack began. The presence of the laser arrays had negated for both sides any need to accumulate both armour and air power on the planet's surface — on her side because it would provide too easy a target and be too easily destroyed, and on theirs because the arrays had provided ample firepower. The same rules however did not apply to the Theocracy army on Charity because, as she understood it, its purpose was armed insertion on Polity worlds in that mythical time when the godless Polity supposedly collapsed. Stanton's activities had managed to prevent the enemy getting any armoured vehicles down, but some kind of air force had been dropped from one of their capital ships and was heading this way.

Lowering her intensifies she surveyed those of her forces ranged here behind the embankment. They had a window of some two hours before the fleet of attack ships came in over the Theocracy lines, and were using that time to best advantage.

The commissary was up and running, with huge aluminium pots — that had come from she knew not where — now boiling over a number of those wonderful Polity heaters, and squerms were being dunked, then their cooked and separated segments handed out. She liked the fact that her troops were stuffing themselves with great hunks of meat considered a delicacy up on the cylinder worlds, where it was served only on small sesame seed biscuits; and something more than that on other worlds where it was sold as a bottled food essence. She liked the fact that here and now, so many workers recently freed were for the first time eating the product of their own killing labour.

Beyond this commissary area, the troops had erected many tents, in or around which they were either sleeping or preparing their weapons. Rail-guns had been mounted all the way across the embankment, but only those guns that could not be fitted on some kind of vehicle, because static targets made short-lived targets. The two remaining tanks were still workable, and Lellan was now debating with herself about whether or not they could be used, since they moved slowly and again made easy targets. Perhaps it would be best to leave that decision to each tank's own commander.

In the end her hopes for the coming attack rested mainly with Polity technology. Against an airforce and thirty thousand aug-linked, fresh, highly trained — and also trained in higher gravity — Theocracy troops she could only field a scattered force of ten thousand tired fighters, a few hover-aerofans, and her grounded carrier. Never expecting to be able to come out onto the surface in full force, to fight, the Underworld had never really geared to that eventuality, so, though there was no lack of weapons, they did have a shortage of breather equipment, ration packs, and quite simple things like warm clothing. Lellan cursed the fact that the ten thousand she now had on the surface was one fifth of the number she could have fielded had she possessed the equipment. And she hoped that these two newest additions that were coming had been worth their weight in the breather equipment Lyric II could have carried.

Polity technology levelled the playing field a bit by giving her troops communications of an equivalent sophistication to the Dracocorp aug, and weapons either equivalent or better. The pulse-rifle was more sophisticated technologically, but the Theocracy rail-gun performed the same function with an efficiency that was little different: that function being to put holes in people. Her first hope rested with the 'hand-helds' that John had brought them in his last smuggling run. These light missile-launchers would be a boon in the coming air attack. With their magazines of five armour-piercing missiles that could run on intelligent targeting, Lellan knew her forces would be able to take down quite a few attack craft — but that wasn't enough. With so little cover for her troops and the impossibility of digging foxholes in the boggy ground, she wanted the air attack over quickly, as she was well aware of the devastation that daisy-cutter and multiple-warhead munitions could wreak, let alone a tactical nuke. She needed more of an edge, and the two who should have arrived here only a little while ago would hopefully provide her with that edge.

"Polas, where the hell are they?" she asked into her helmet comlink.

From the concealed control room in the mountains Polas replied, "It took longer than I thought to upload to them."

"Is there a problem with them?" she asked.

"Not with them, just with our gear. They each received the five-thousand-hour package we sent through the U-space transmitter, and all recent data. They would have sucked it up in seconds, but it was our system here that screwed. It was glitching because we just went realtime on our broadcast to the Polity, and we were also sending the increased ballot figures."

"Someone's replied?" Lellan asked, her previous queries going out of her mind.

"Yes, it's an AI dreadnought and it's boosting our signal into the runcible system for us." Polas could not keep the delight out of his voice. "Also, in preparation for orders from Earth Central Security, it's on its way here — ETA one hundred solstan hours."

Lellan was dumbfounded. It was working, it was actually working… but still there was much work to do if they were to survive this.

"Have you now finished with the uploading?"

"Yeah, and our two new friends are on their way with just one diversion, to ferry your brother to you as he's not that far out," Polas replied.

"Then my brother is in for some harsh words here for delaying them. The Theocracy line is only ten kilometres away from us," said Lellan, not yet managing to put as much bile into her words as was her custom.

"It was not your brother's idea," interrupted a voice that was unfamiliar to her.

"Polas? Polas, who is this?"

Polas replied, "That was CED Forty-two. It was its idea to fetch your brother."

"I thought they were supposed to obey orders," said Lellan.

"We do obey orders," came back doubled voices. Then one went on, "We have been monitoring the situation. No attack possible from Theocracy forces during our approach time… We approach now."

Three dots resolved in the sky. One of them was an aerofan, on which rode John Stanton. On either side of him, flying sideways on, with weapons and detection devices scanning all around, came the cylinders of the two heavy-armour AI drones he had brought from Elysium. Observing these objects Lellan well understood now what John meant when he explained that Polity AIs loved their euphemisms: CED stood for Controlled Elimination Device.

During their descent, the drones swung into upright positions on either side of the aerofan, so that when Stanton finally stepped from it, the appearance given was of a man stepping between two pillars — only these pillars advanced with him as he approached Lellan.

"Not a good uniform to wear around here," she said to him when he was close enough for her to see he was dressed as a proctor.

"I'll change in a minute," he replied, nodding towards her carrier. "But first let me introduce to you CEDs Forty-two and Forty-three."

Lellan felt a bit uncomfortable being required to address two armed and armoured cylinders that showed no characteristics of life, but then she was not so well travelled as her brother.

"I don't like that," she said. Then, when her brother gazed at her questioningly, "Forty-two and Forty-three. If these are AI, and accepted as being alive, then they should have names." She stepped forwards. "Which is which?"

The drones had now settled to the ground on either side of Stanton. He glanced at each of them, then shrugged. "I don't rightly know."

Lellan studied the one to her right, trying to find some feature on it to focus on in place of a face. Eventually she focused on a collection of lenses and antennae clustered below the panpipes missile-launcher on its end-cap. "You will henceforth be known as Romulus," she said, then turning to the other drone, "And you will be known as…" she hesitated, a twist to her mouth, "Ramus."

"Very funny," muttered Stanton.

Ignoring him, Lellan said, "Welcome, Ram and Rom," wondering if she should be welcoming what looked to be the future of warfare.

Disgusted at his own excess — at his uncontrolled feeding and growth — Skellor concentrated on organizing his resources and properly preparing himself. The underspace package the ship's automatic systems had intercepted whilst he had been growing, and to which he had given his dissembling reply, he metaphorically put to one side. Thereafter he refined his internal structures and created storage like giant fat cells for excess materials; he burnt out waste and honed down systems to their optimum efficiency. It was while he was collating and cataloguing all useful sources of information inside the ship, to incorporate them into himself, that he found Mika's database and inspected it with fascination. Gazing through Jain structure, he then recognized the corpse of his calloraptor/human hybrid and immediately knew what to do with some of the excess he now contained — and plunged Jain filaments into the hybrid corpse.

Incorporating human DNA had been a mistake brought about by lack of imagination and resources, but now, utilizing the complex calloraptor trihelix, he knew he could make something much more useful. Isolating what he required was the work of a moment, as were the subsequent processes of meiosis and recombination. Almost with a shrug he tore out the walls of Medical, and expanded the space there to take a huge polyhedral framework of Jain structural members. To the junctures of polyhedra he pumped raw materials and, in their passage through nanotubes and nanofactories, they knitted into complex organic molecules. Small pearls sprouted and grew as they were pumped full of the required nutrients. Then, at the last, Skellor opened nanotubes into microtubes to transfer the already well-developed zygotes he had grown into the awaiting eggs. Raptly watching the growth of this army of his creatures, he found himself more reluctant to disengage from the process than he had been before. With slow grinding force of will he forced his awareness out from the warm internals of the ship and himself, out to his interface with the harshness of space. Here he observed the system and what he had done.

The planet itself could have been the twin of Neptune, and now would bear a closer resemblance as the debris from the shattered moonlet spread as it followed the moonlet's original orbit. Coldly, Skellor calculated that this debris would form a complete ring in one hundred and twenty years solstan — the five largest surviving chunks of the moonlet acting as its shepherds. But what did any of that matter? With that same grinding strength of will he forced himself into a higher awareness of the present, and realized it was time for him to stop playing with the power he now possessed, and to use it. Employing the conventional ion manoeuvring thrusters, he drew the Occam Razor away from the debris and closer into the sun itself. For a time he felt as one great beast wallowing in the harsh radiation, then he forced his attention back to the underspace package he had earlier put aside. Once again he felt something like dry laughter echoing inside himself — knowing where this communication was from.

Five thousand hours of secret holocording, filming, and depositions — in fact recordings in every medium available to humanity. Those same hours, which he viewed in less than one hour realtime, told him a lot about his destination, but it took him a while to understand the purpose of the transmission. Subsequent communications from someone called Lellan, and transmissions of realtime events on the surface of the planet, brought home to him what it was all about. As did the meticulously recorded ballot of the indigenous population, which clearly made their wishes known. The five thousand hours detailed atrocities and the unjust rule of a Theocracy. This was a cry for help directed towards the Polity. These people wanted Polity intervention.

Annoyingly, the signal might already have got through to the Polity — but no more. His reply to it and his offer to act as a signal-boosting station had been immediately accepted, and someone called Polas was grateful in the belief that the signal was now being relayed into the heart worlds of the Polity. This would all give Skellor time to get a lot closer, where he could more easily employ the signal-blocking technology of this ship. Chuckling to himself — inside, for his face no longer had the ability to show expression — Skellor gave his instructions, and smooth as a snake the Occam Razor slid into underspace. They would certainly get intervention on this world called Masada — but he didn't think they would like it.