Drawing closer to the ship, Skellor saw two people clad in reflective hotsuits heading down towards the plain of ash. It amused him that there were four people here searching for Jain artefacts. They would be very surprised, and very chagrined, when living Jain technology found them. Skellor pondered that irony.
Though that was not his purpose here, he needed information about what he carried inside him—the Jain technology that was mutating in a way somehow hidden from him—and that information was not something he could acquire from the Polity. However, one brief exchange between Cormac and Dragon—absorbed as part of his memory from recordings inside the Occam Razor—had told him where to obtain such information. Dragon knew about Jain technology, and somewhere — probably on the perimeter of human space—two Dragon spheres still lurked. But how to find them? As he and Crane began to climb the slope, Skellor reviewed what he thus far knew about Dragon.
The creature in its initial form of four conjoined spheres had been a probe, a data-gatherer sent by the Makers—a race of energy-based life forms located out in one of the Magellanic clouds. But it malfunctioned and started interacting with humanity, setting itself up as some sort of demigod on the planet Aster Colora. Upon delivering some obscure judgement, it had then apparently destroyed itself. But, as far as Skellor could work out, it had actually separated itself into four entities to surround and attack the Maker ship sent to retrieve or destroy it. The drastic events at Samarkand had then proceeded from there: one sphere destroyed by Cormac in the process. Events at Masada had since accounted for another sphere. From both farragos, Skellor could see that these entities liked to meddle in human affairs. Dragon now even had its own corporation operating in the Polity, and its own networks of humans coming under its control via the Dracocorp biotech augs. How these networks connected back to their controlling Dragon spheres was the only firm lead he had and, with this small piece of business out of the way, would be the one for him to pursue. But now… now it was time to look inside the survey vessel.
There was no special code to operate the outside door, just a simple inset handle easy to operate for someone in a hotsuit. Skellor had already observed the carrier shell in orbit above, and with an earlier probe he had discovered that neither the shell nor this survey vessel it had transported here were run by AI; therefore such a simple door mechanism confirmed for him that both shell and vessel were old and privately owned. He pulled the handle up and, as the door swung open, he waved Crane ahead of him. The Golem almost had to crouch to fit himself inside the airlock. Skellor followed, pushing up close to Crane and pulling the outer door closed. In a minute, the lock had filled with cooled air and the safeties preventing him opening the inner door cut out. Crane was the first to duck inside.
‘What have you forgotten now?’ asked someone, from further inside the ship.
Crane stood with his head bowed so as not to bang it against the ceiling. Skellor looked around. Here was the initial decontamination and rough-cleaning area, and there were no artefacts in the isolation tank. But, then, this four-man research team had not been here very long—Skellor had followed them out only a day after their departure. This team, he had learnt, consisted of three humans and one Golem. A woman, easily identifiable as not being the Golem, ducked through into the cabin, and froze.
‘Who the fuck are you?’ she managed.
‘Have you found anything yet?’
‘Fuck off!’
‘Unforgivable rudeness,’ said Skellor, placing his hand against the control panel for the airlock. From the Jain substructure inside him, he sent filaments searching, connecting and overriding the safety system. He pointed to the open airlock. ‘Mr Crane, put her in there.’
The woman had time only to let out a yelp and duck back a little way before Crane’s hand closed on her shoulder. She struggled and began screaming, and just then one of the men ducked through from the other direction, holding level a small gas-system pulse-gun.
‘Tell that thing to put her down,’ he demanded.
Skellor just turned and walked towards the man. Three shots slammed into his chest, opening smoking holes and flinging pieces of his Jain carapace across the deck. Reaching the man, he slapped the weapon away, grabbed him by the jacket, and almost negligently tossed him towards Crane, who caught hold of him in his other big hand.
‘Well, our friend must be one of the other two, so let’s go back outside,’ said Skellor.
The woman carried on screaming and fighting; the man tried reasoning, but he too soon started to scream once the outer lock was open. Skellor was surprised at the tenacity with which a person could hang on to life. Even with smoke pouring from their clothing, their skin melting and slewing away and contrails of flame whipping up and about their bodies, the two still tried to fight their way past Crane and back into the ship, which was filling with the same searing acidic air anyway.
‘Hey ho,’ said Skellor, as the two finally died and the heat began to blacken and contort them into ebony foetuses. ‘Let’s go find the others.’
‘“Mission objective achieved” is all I’m getting,’ said Angelina, her fingers pressed against the bean-shaped aug behind her right ear.
‘What about visual? Aural?’ John Stanton asked.
‘Nothing.’ Angelina shook her head. ‘It won’t tell me anything more. It’s almost as if it’s shut down. We know where it will be anyway, so no problem there.’ Now turning to face Semper and Stanton, she said, ‘I’ll want you first to check that Stalek and that idiot Falco are both dead.’ And with that she waved the two men ahead of her.
Stanton closed his mouth on any further comments and tried to restrain his cynicism about this whole little outing. He drew his heavy pulse-gun from its insulated holster in his hotsuit. From his belt he detached a small adhesive mine and held it in his left hand. He was just as unenamoured with the idea of using a subverted Golem as were many others in the Pelters’ organization. Facing forwards, he and Semper now advanced.
Stalek had built his house on the equatorial belt of Huma, so it necessarily possessed a ceramic shell and thick, heavily insulated walls. At present that insulation only served the purpose of maintaining a comfortable internal temperature against the constant fifty degrees outside, since the resinous incendiary briar that constituted most of the surrounding jungle had yet to achieve ripeness. In the distance, Stanton noted a column of smoke from where one patch of briar had reached that point in its growth where the sparks from its exploding seedpods ignited it. It was early, though. Later in the season, this entire continent would become an inferno: the briars burning down to provide plenteous ash in which the seeds could lie ready to germinate in the ensuing sooty rainstorms.
Semper studied the door’s palm lock, then let out a bark of laughter. He took a crowbar from his belt, jammed it under the lock, and levered the plate and attached console from the wall.
‘Is that a good idea?’ Stanton asked.
‘It’s a dummy,’ Semper explained. ‘Understandable really: he has to be able to get in and out wearing a hotsuit, so he can’t use something that operates by his palm print and DNA coding. Merely a simple input code.’
Taking a small console from his belt he unwound two optic cables terminating in interface clamps, which he now closed on two optic cables trailing from the back of the lock and into the wall. Then he simply waited while the device he still held did the job of safe-breaker for him. The seals on the circular door eventually whoomphed, and it hinged outwards to reveal an airlock and an inner door. Semper stared inside for a long moment, before turning to Stanton.