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  The Line of Polity

  ( Agent Cormac - 2 )

  Neal Asher

  Come visit a world where you cannot draw breath… should its horrifying wildlife allow you.

  Outlink station Miranda has been destroyed by a nanomycelium, and the very nature of this sabotage suggests that the alien bioconstruct Dragon — a creature as untrustworthy as it is gigantic — is somehow involved. Sent out on a titanic Polity dreadnought, the Occam Razor, agent Cormac must investigate the disaster, and also resolve the question of Masada, a world about to be subsumed as the Line of Polity is drawn across it. But the rogue biophysicist Skellor has not yet been captured, and he now controls something so potent that Polity AIs will hunt him down forever to prevent him using it.

  Meanwhile on Masada, the long-term rebellion can never rise above-ground, as the slave population is subjugated by orbital laser arrays controlled by the Theocracy in their cylinder worlds, and by the fact that they cannot safely leave their labour compounds. For the wilderness of Masada lacks breathable air…and out there roam monstrous predators called hooders and siluroynes, not to mention the weird and terrible gabbleducks.

  The Line of Polity

  (Agent Cormac book 2)

  Neal Asher

  For Dawn, Samantha and Rebecca, Lorna and Jack, and all ensuing generations of readers

  Acknowledgements

  My thanks as always to Caroline for encouragement and support even when subjected to my readings, or tirades, about obdurate plotlines; Peter Lavery for his judicious pencil and lavish patronage; Stefanie Bierwerth for all her efficient help; Steve Rawlings, Richard Ogle and James Hollywell for those stunning covers; Jason Cooper and Chantal Noel for infiltrating my books into Germany and America; and to all the other staff at Pan Macmillan for their hard work.

  Further thanks to all those people grafting in research establishments and laboratories across the world: people who will in years to come be putting wheelchair manufacturers out of business, restoring sight and creating artificial limbs — when not finding ways to grow new ones — finding cures for cancers and other ills, and generally bringing closer a future only small aspects of which the likes of myself attempt to imagine.

  Prologue

  Eldene felt weak and light-headed for the second time that morning and wondered if her scole was preparing to drop a litter of leaves. Running her thumb down the stick-seam of her shirt, she opened the garment to inspect this constant companion of hers that oxygenated her blood in exchange for a share of it. The scole clung to her chest, between and below her breasts, like a great flat aphid coloured in shades of dark brown and purple; however, it was a relatively small creature, as she was still a young woman. Observing a reddish flushing in the crevices between its many segments, as it rippled against her body, confirmed for her that it was drawing blood, and such frequent feeding in the course of one day indeed meant it was preparing to litter. She closed her shirt and gazed across the square-banked ponds to where shift foreman Ulat was speaking to Proctor Volus — the latter easily identifiable by his white uniform — and decided now was not the time to ask for a lighter work assignment. Gritting her teeth, she hoisted up her cone basket and moved on.

  The squerms remained somnolent under the aubergine predawn skies, but that would change as soon as she started casting in the dried pig-meat flakes that were their favoured food. As she walked, Eldene observed her fellow workers scattered between the ponds that chequered the land to a horizon above which the gas giant Calypse ascended ahead of the sun. These ponds reflected the red, gold and opalescent green of the giant, and her fellows were sooty silhouettes against this reflection, weighed down by their huge cone baskets as they tramped along the banked-up paths for the morning feeding. Every now and again one of those ponds lost its reflectivity as squerrns fed voraciously, disturbing the turgid and slimy water. Eldene supposed the scene might be considered a beautiful one, but well understood that beauty was something you required energy to appreciate.

  After propping her pole-grab and net against a nearby flood-post, Eldene lowered her basket to the ground, took up the scoop from the dried flakes it contained, and gazed down into the water. The squerms in this pond were each over a metre long and the thickness of her arm. Their brassy segmented shells gave the impression of something manufactured — perhaps items of jewellery for some giant — rather than of living creatures. The tail of each squerm tapered into a long ovipositor that Eldene knew, from experience, was capable of penetrating both flesh and bone. The head of each creature was a slightly thicker hand's-length segment that extruded a bouquet of glassy hooks to pull in food to be ground up by whirling discs deep in the creature's throat. Those hooks were not so lethal as the ovipositors, but they could still strip the skin off a worker's hand for a moment's inattention.

  She tossed some meat-flakes upon the pond, and the water foamed as the squerms writhed and fed, their bodies gleaming in the lurid morning, feeding hooks flashing in and out of their mouths. A second scoop caused further frenetic activity, till some of the squerms were surging half their body-length out of the water. The third and final scoop quietened this activity a little.

  Only one deader in this particular pond, Eldene was glad to see, and that one a fresh, so therefore unbroken, squerm. Stepping back, she retrieved her pole-grab to see if she could reach it from the bank, but it was too far out. She sighed, pulled on her armoured gauntlets, and waded in, treading down the mat of silkweed and algae rumpled up at the pond's edge, while the hooks and ovipositors of the squerms grated against her armoured waders. With the deader positioned in the jaws of the grab, she almost dropped the pole when a live squerm rose out of the water beside her, flashing out its glassy hooks only a metre from her face. She backhanded the creature, slapping it down into the water, before pressing the trigger of her pole to close its jaws round the deader, then she turned and trudged out of the pond, hauling it behind her. Once back on the bank, amongst the wild rhubarb and clumped flute grass, she paused to swallow bile — feeling sick with fear and the weakness caused by the constant drain on her by her scole. After dropping the dead squerm on a mossy patch next to the path, she took up her feed basket again and moved on to the next pond. She'd collect the deader on her way back, along with any others, once she'd emptied this load of meat-flakes into the twenty ponds that made up her round.

  As Eldene trudged towards the next pond, she gazed up at the satellites glittering in the sky, and tried to believe that beyond them lay wonders, and those seemingly magical worlds that had been described to her — but it was difficult to see anything beyond this orbiting metal that might just as well have formed the bars of a prison.

  The Outlink stations were poised on the surface of the sometimes expanding and sometimes contracting sphere of the Human Polity. They marked the line beyond which AI governance and Polity law no longer applied. Most of this sphere's border lay in intergalactic space, but on the edge of it facing towards the centre of the galaxy, the density of stars increased and the line was still shifting as worlds were subsumed by or seceded from the Polity. Here was a buffer zone of human occupation, beyond which lay numberless unexplored systems where people had ventured, but where hard fact blurred into strange tales and myth.

  Each station had its own character, its own shape, and its own distinctive society. Over the centuries better materials and methods of manufacture had become available — also fashions had changed. Some stations were spherical, others were ovoid, and others still were like steadily growing arrows. Station Miranda had the shape of a corn-stalk with accretions like fungus down its eight-kilometre length — additions made during its long history — and those who dwelt within it were strange to the transitory runcible culture.
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br />   Apis Coolant was one of the more exotic examples of his kind. He was so thin and lacking in muscle that gravity above one quarter of a gee would have collapsed him as if he were made of sugar sticks and tissue paper. He avoided the runcible travellers, who mostly kept to the one-gee areas — death to him — as even a friendly pat on the back from an Earth normal or near equivalent would break his spine. He did not mind this isolation: he preferred the warm electric atmosphere of the station near the scoop-field generators, just as he preferred the company of his own hairless multi-hued kind. However, the station was not small, and back near the fusion engines Apis had relatives — but he never went there to see them. They were strange.

  The Coolant clan was mainly concerned with maintenance, and the only contact necessary for them was with Miranda, the AI that ran the station and its runcible. To this AI they put their requests for equipment, chemicals for their floating gardens and crop cylinders, and for information, gossip, news… It was a fallacy, which Apis and his kind allowed to go unchallenged, that they were stupid or socially crippled. They were just perfectly happy where they were: looking at the galaxy voyeuristically and taking what they wanted from it with eclectic reserve.

  Apis's tasks were educative rather than necessary, as he was too inexperienced to have qualifications to put him in a position to challenge the station drones. Yet, at fourteen solstan years old, he was a fast learner and knew he would soon be graduating from stress data collation to direct testing and re-crystallization. But today this was not his greatest concern and, as he hauled himself between the D-section struts of Skin Heights, he contemplated his technical future with a lack of excitement that was uncharacteristic.

  Apis had just discovered sex.

  In the Coolant clan, polyandry was the rule; most of the women took three or more husbands, and there was not a great deal of civility in the taking. The women were bigger and stronger, and the selection process they used was one of attrition. First husbands were normally those with the greatest stamina, and therefore the ability to take punishment. Second and third husbands were usually the casualties of this selection process. Apis, only just into puberty, was completely new to it all and had countless bruises. He was feeling a little shell-shocked, hence his confusion and long-delayed reaction to what he now saw beyond one of the flickering shimmer-shields.

  At least a couple of minutes passed before Apis realized that what he was seeing should not be there. There was something unusual on one of the obsolete communication pylons. He pushed himself away from a strut and floated across the face of the shield to catch at another strut on the further side. He still could not quite fathom what was out there. The pylon itself contained a chaotic collection of tubes and dishes, but he was familiar with its every angle and curve — it was his business to know them. He saw that there was something caught in it that had no right to be there. Something amorphous? A product of life?

  Silently damning the fact that he was too young yet to be allowed an aug, he spoke into his wristcom. "Apis Coolant M-tech number forty-seven. Anomaly on com pylon three six eight six bee. Respond."

  "This array is disconnected and not available to ship systems," Miranda told him. "Ah yes, I have it on visual now. A sampling drone is on its way."

  "Not necessary. I will investigate," Apis told the AI, feeling an excitement he had not felt since… his last intended sleep period. He plunged his arm into the shimmer-shield and stepped through into vacuum.

  Not only did Apis look very different from the rest of humanity, he was very different. Four centuries in the past, his ancestors on the Sol-system bases had been eager users of adaptogenic drugs, and recombinant and the later nanochanger technology. Apis did not have pores; his bright yellow skin was impermeable and, if stretched enough from its filament ties to his bones, it became rigid. He had sphincters to shut his nostrils and ears, and on his eyes nictitating membranes like glass cusps. He could live without breathing for fifty minutes. He could survive vacuum.

  Once on the other side of the shimmer-shield, the air jetted from Apis's lungs, and when it was mostly gone, the saliva on his lips turned to resin, sealing them. His body bloated and stabilized, and, using an old handrail attached to the hull, he moved ponderously towards the pylon. Five minutes later he was below it. A few seconds after that he was studying the anomaly at close quarters.

  Between the metal struts it clung like a slime-mould, only it had the colour of green metal, and the texture — as Apis discovered when he touched it — of wood. Apis was first intrigued, then worried, when he noticed the fibres etched into some of the nearby struts. With trained precision, he took a sample of the substance with a small field-shear, then went on to press his M-tester against the strut itself. The strut snapped off. Apis returned the tester to his belt and pushed against another strut. This one also broke and a piece of it floated away. A third strut shattered — frangible as burned bone — and a receiving dish made a slow departure from the pylon. Apis pulled himself down from the pylon, some struts breaking in his hands, others holding. As he hurried back to the shimmer-shield, he felt panic — another new experience for the precocious fourteen-year-old.

  1

  With the small blond child balanced on her knee the woman managed the awkward task of one-handedly turning a page of the picture book, and ran her finger down the border between text and picture, to set the superb illustration moving — the long legs striding through the reeds, and the sharp beak snapping in silhouette against a bruised sky.

  She continued, "For the brother who had built his house out of flute grass there came misfortune indeed; that very night a heroyne came to stand over his house… and what did it do?"

  The child reached and stabbed down with one stubby finger, leaving a jammy imprint on something that bore only a passing resemblance to a wading bird. "Heroyne," he said, blue eyes wide at his own cleverness.

  "Yes, but what did it do?"

  "It huffed and it puffed, and it puffed and it huffed," said the boy.

  "And it blew his house down," the woman completed. Then, "Now, do you remember what the brother said when his house was gone?"

  The boy frowned in concentration, but after a moment grinned with delight, knowing the best bit was coming. "Don't eat me!" he said.

  "And what did the heroyne do?"

  "It gobbled him up! It gobbled him up!" the boy replied, bouncing up and down with the excitement of it all

  "Once more: tell me of your death."

  Gazing at the weird view of pink striated sky and twisted shapes, and seeing more with his new eyes than ever before, he clearly recalled the words. Because memory to him could be only as fallible as he wished it, he knew every intonation, every nuance — just as he remembered every vivid second of his own demise:

  "I was leading the way down, when it came up the shaft and hit me…"

  And thus it had gone: words spoken while his senses came online, sounds impinging, light illuminating the map of artificial veins in his eyelids, gravity holding him down on a warm but hard slab. He never heard the beat of his heart, never would again. His speech finished; he'd paused before saying, "Value judgements."

  "You are no longer in virtual mode. The reality you will now experience is really real."

  Oh, he was a joker that one. Gant remembered the feel of human bones breaking in his hands, the screams, the blood — the sheer terror of movement, past now.

  "There's a difference then," he'd asked with some sarcasm.

  "Virtual mode is fine for physical training — in it you have been made aware of your capabilities, but too long in it can affect value judgements. In virtual mode you have learnt that you can kill a human being in an eye-blink, and you have learnt how to control your new body. You learnt nothing of consequences though."

  "You think I don't already know?" he'd asked, then thinking: human being. The AI had been way ahead of him though.

  "Yes, in VR you have killed twenty people, many of them by accident, and there have been
no consequences. All the time you have been aware that these people are not real. It would have been possible to quell this awareness, but the disorientation can sometimes drive a mind into paranoid schizophrenia."

  "My mind is made of silicon," he pointed out.

  "Your brain is made of silicon. Your mind is made of memories and patterns of thought little different from how they were in your organic brain."

  "I can't hear my heart beat."

  "You chose to have the memplant, trooper Gant. Would you prefer termination?"

  "No… I guess not."

  Gant remembered opening his eyes and staring at the tiled ceiling. He'd sat upright and, out of old habit, moved his head from side to side. There was no stiffness, though, no aches or pains of any kind — not a trace of humanizing weakness. He could feel, oh yes he could feel, and it was with a clarity that was as hard and sharp as broken flint. Scanning the room, he'd flicked his vision to infrared, ultraviolet, wound his hearing to each limit of its scale, before abruptly leaping from the slab and standing beside it. He'd been naked, his body free of scars. Touching his genitals he'd found them no less sensitive than he remembered.

  "I'm not really Gant any more," he said.

  "No, you are a recording of Gant."

  "I mean, all that was Gant: the glands, the aches and pains, the body. I'm not human, so I won't act the same."

  "Does that matter?"

  "I wanted immortality."

  "You have it."

  "Gant does not."

  "There is no such thing as immortality: death is change. A human being is dying every day that it lives. The material of its body is exchanged for other materials, its thoughts change. All that lives is the DNA, and what does that matter to you? In the end it is your mind that is important. The mind you have now is closer to the mind you had when you died on Samarkand — than the mind you would have now, had you not died. The memplant crystal does not get everything, but the margin for error is smaller than the alterations to an organic brain in—"