Landing directly on top of the Separatist encampment would remove any element of surprise, since the shuttle’s arrival would be detected long before. This highway for the massive agrobots was the nearest place to the encampment for a shuttle to find a plausible reason for landing. Aelvor had somehow caused the agrobot to break down at this point, so anyone listening and watching would think their shuttle contained a maintenance crew. It was a good plan since, on foot, dracomen could cover the intervening terrain very quickly. Thorn, being very fit and physically strong, and possessing reserves at their maximum, could also have covered the forty miles of forest easily enough, but in his case it was a question of how fast. He remembered once running with Scar through the foothills of the Masadan mountains, hunting a hooder on which they intended to plant transponders so that the monstrous predator’s location would always be known. Their pace then had been an even jog, and Thorn had thought it time they picked it up a little.
‘Can you go any faster than this?’ he had asked the dracoman on that occasion.
Scar fixed him with that big-eyed gaze, ‘Can you?’ Thorn accelerated until he was running full-pelt along the stony trail. He glanced at Scar and saw that the dracoman’s pace seemed almost unchanged, yet still he kept up.
After a moment Thorn said, ‘Show me, then.’
One moment Scar was loping along beside him, the next moment he took off like an ostrich, kicking up wet shale as he accelerated. Thorn watched him go, tracked him moving further along the path, then turning left up the slope until soon out of sight. After about five minutes he heard something approaching to his rear, and glanced back to see the dracoman speeding up behind him. Scar again settled to that jogging pace beside him.
‘In miles per hour?’ Thorn had asked.
‘Ninety to a hundred… on level ground,’ Scar replied.
‘Okay, maybe we’ll stick to my pace for now.’
It was a chastening memory.
Thorn now returned to the shuttle, donned his VR headgear, and began selecting views to observe. Soon the dracomen moved from tangled growth to clearer ground below the trees. They picked up their pace and became more visible, as their skin failed to compensate fast enough to the changing surroundings. Then, again almost as one, they returned to their natural coloration.
‘Scar,’ he said over com, ‘let me know when you’re about to attack. I’ll then launch and head over towards you. That might provide further distraction.’
Scar’s reply was merely a grunt, whereupon Thorn decided to shut up, sit back, and enjoy the show. A half-hour more of forest scenes resulted in him impatiently removing the headgear to go in search of a tab-pull coffee from the shuttle’s supplies. Returning to his seat and replacing the helmet, the first thing he heard was Scar’s voice: ‘We attack.’
Thorn spilt his coffee, swore, then quickly called up the feed from Scar’s camcom: pulse-rifles firing through the trees, shots stitching across a thick trunk, momentary glimpse of an autogun bolted to another trunk, an explosion, a tree falling. Two figures, human, a blurred shape between, and the double thump of stun discharge, two figures falling wrapped in small lightnings. Tents: chameleon cloth. Stun fire. A turbine winding up to speed somewhere. Thorn flicked through views, caught a glimpse of an AG scooter slamming into a tree. Another view: a man firing his weapon at the dracoman through whose camcom Thorn watched, muzzle-flash, flame and smoke then foliage and sky, then the dracoman was abruptly back upright again as the man turned away. A stun discharge threw the man down on his face. Then back to Scar, walking now.
‘We are done.’
Thorn sat very still, checked the time display in the corner of his visor, then shivered involuntarily. So much for his idea of launching the shuttle as a distraction. Abruptly the entire range of frames before his eyes then froze.
‘Scar cannot hear us,’ said Jack. ‘Observe this.’
Without Thorn doing anything, his VR gear selected a frame and the scene it displayed went into fast reverse, froze, then played forwards. He watched a man swinging his pulse-rifle round and begin firing. The shots slammed into a dracoman’s chest, juddering it to a halt then flinging it back. The man swung away to aim elsewhere. From a prone position the dracoman flipped forward and upright, fired on the man and brought him down, then it ran on. Half its chest was missing, the resultant cavity smouldering.
‘I’m glad they’re on our side,’ whispered Thorn.
‘If they really are,’ replied Jack.
Thorn’s view returned to encompass all the separate frames again. As the AI withdrew, he selected Scar’s frame in time to observe the dracoman brandishing a ceramo-carbide knife. Scar was busy removing leaf mould from around what looked like a small antipersonnel mine.
‘How many dead?’ Thorn asked.
‘Three humans: one received four stun charges, one broke his neck falling from an AG scooter, and one was accidentally shot by a comrade of his.’
‘What about your own people?’
‘No deaths.’
‘I’m sure I saw one of them hit.’
‘Three with minor injuries.’
‘Very well, I’ll come and pick you up.’ Thorn swung the shuttle joystick across on its hinged arm, so it lay before him. As he engaged the gravmotors and warmed up the turbines, he thought: And these fuckers are breeding…
6
Let me summarize some theories concerning the Atheter: they moved on to a higher plain of existence after reaching the apex of material technology, either that or they reached their own singularity and disappeared in a puff of logic having solved their theory of everything; they are still here with us keeping a benevolent eye on younger civilizations, but shifted slightly into another dimension so we cannot now see their vast glittering cities; their technology destroyed them (either their own AIs — if they built them—reached singularity and wiped them out, or they created some unstoppable nano-plague that did the job); or, my personal favourite, having done it all and understanding the emptiness of existence, they deleted their entire civilization, their entire knowledge base, even from their own minds, and started again, as humans. However, despite much speculation and some quite lunatic theorizing, very little is known about the Atheter. There is in fact still much debate about whether they were in fact a race distinct from those other ancient races named, the Jain and Csorians. And argument still abounds concerning what artefacts are attributable to which race, or civilization. But let us be clear on this: actual physical artefacts dating from each period are few. Most of the theorizing is based on such obscure sciences as xenogeneic archaeology, metallo-crustal dispersion and—this one really is obscure—Fifth Gen. Boolean analysis of U-space transitional echoes. It’s all piss and wind really, we’ll probably never know.
— From ‘How it Is’ by Gordon
Thellant turned to gaze at a screen wall. The scene it displayed was taken from cameras high above his present location, and its clarity so good he appeared to be looking through a chainglass window at a pastoral view of patchwork fields, rivers and copses, with only occasional incongruous towers sprouting like vulgar metal plants amid this apparently rural idyll. It was deceptive. Some human, transported to those fields from a past time, would not know that below him lay an arcology housing a billion humans. Fifteen miles straight ahead, a cliff dropped two miles sheer down to the coast, beyond which sea-life breeding pens chequered the shallow ocean extending to the horizon and beyond. That cliff formed one arcology edge. Another edge lay 200 miles behind the present view.