Matter by Iain M. Banks
They split up in twos. Djan Seriy and Holse checked the Archipontine’s carriages and the rest of the headquarters compound, but found only more dead bodies, and none they recognised.
Then Hippinse called from the hospital train.
“I’m sorry! The fellow I shot. Tell him I’m sorry, won’t you, somebody, please? I’m most terribly sorry.”
“Son, it was me you shot, and – look – I’m fine. I just fell over in surprise, that’s all. Calm, now.” Holse lifted the young man’s head and tried to get him sitting upright against the wall. His hair was falling out too. Holse had to wedge him in a corner eventually to stop him falling over.
“I shot you, sir?”
“You did, lad,” Holse told him. “Lucky for me I’m wearing armour better than stride-thick iron. What’s your name, son?”
“Neguste Puibive, sir, at your service. I’m so sorry I shot you.”
“Choubris Holse. No damage done nor offence taken.”
“They wanted whatever drugs we had, sir. Thinking they would save them or at least ease their pain. I gave away all I could but then when they were all gone they’d not believe me, sir. They wouldn’t leave us alone. I was trying to protect the young sir, sir.”
“What young sir would that be then, young Neguste?” Holse asked, frowning at the little barb just flexed from the longest finger on his right hand.
“Oramen, sir. The Prince Regent.”
Hippinse had just entered the compartment. He stared down at Holse. “I heard,” he said. “I’ll tell them.”
Holse pressed the barb into the young man’s mottled, bruised-looking flesh. He cleared his throat. “Is the prince here, lad?”
“Through there, sir,” Neguste Puibive said, attempting to nod at the door through to the next compartment. He started to cry thin, bloody tears.
Ferbin cried too, sweeping back the mask section of the suit so that he could let the tears fall. Oramen had been cleaned up carefully; however, his face looked to have been badly beaten. Ferbin touched his gloved hand to his brother’s reddened, staring eyes, trying to get the eyelids to close, failing. Djan Seriy was at the other side of the narrow bed, her hand cupped under the base of their brother’s head, cradling his upper neck.
She gave out a long breath. She too swept her mask back and away. She bowed her head, then let Oramen’s head very gently back down, allowing it to rest on the pillow again. She slid her hand out.
She looked at Ferbin, shook her head.
“No,” she said. “We are too late, brother.” She sniffed, smoothed some of Oramen’s hair across his head, trying not to pull any of it out as she did so. “Days too late.”
The glove of her suit flowed back from her flesh like black liquid, leaving the tips then the whole of her fingers then her hand to the wrist naked. She gently touched Oramen’s bruised, broken cheek, then his mottled forehead. She tried to close his eyes too. One of his eyelids detached and slid over his blood-flecked eye like a piece of boiled fruit skin.
“Fuck fuck fuck,” Djan Seriy said softly.
“Anaplian!” Hippinse shouted urgently from the compartment where he and Holse were trying to comfort Neguste Puibive.
“He asked for Earl Droffo, but they’d killed him, sirs. Tyl Loesp’s men, when they came on the air-beasts. They’d already killed him. Him with only one good arm, trying to reload.”
“But what afterwards?” Hippinse insisted, shaking the injured man. “What was it he said, what did you say? Repeat that! Repeat it!”
Djan Seriy and Holse both reached out to touch Hippinse.
“Steady,” Djan Seriy told the avatoid. “What’s wrong?” Holse didn’t understand. What was making Hippinse so upset? It wasn’t his brother lying dead through there. The man wasn’t even a real human. These weren’t his people; he had no people.
“Repeat it!” Hippinse wailed, shaking Puibive again. Djan Seriy took hold of Hippinse’s nearest hand to stop him jolting the dying youth.
“All the rest left, sirs, those that could, on the trains, when we all started to fall ill the second time,” Neguste Puibive said, his eyes rolling around in their sockets, eyelids flickering. “Sorry to . . . We all took a terrible gastric fever after the big explosion but then we were all right but then—”
“In the name of your WorldGod,” Hippinse pleaded, “what did Oramen say?”
“It was his last understandable word, I think, sirs,” Puibive told them woozily, “though they’re not real, are they? Just monsters from long ago.”
Oh shit, no, Anaplian thought.
“What are, lad?” Holse asked, pushing Hippinse’s other hand away.
“That word, sir. That was the word he kept saying, eventually, when he could speak again for a short while, when they brought him back from the chamber where the Sarcophagus was. Once he knew Earl Droffo was dead. Iln, he kept saying. I couldn’t work it out at first, but he said it a lot, even if it got softer and fainter each time he said it. Iln, he said; Iln, Iln, Iln.”
Hippinse stared at nothing.
“The Iln,” Holse’s suit whispered to him. “Aero-spiniform, gas-giant mid-level ancients originally from the Zunzil Ligature; assumed contemporary sophisticated equivtech level, Involved between point eight-three and point seven-eight billion years ago, multi-decieon non-extant, believed extinct, non-Sublimed, no claimed descendancy; now principally remembered for the destruction of approximately two thousand three hundred Shellworlds.”
To Djan Seriy Anaplian it was as though the world beneath her feet dropped away and the stars and the vacuum fell in around her.
Anaplian stood. “Leave him,” she said, snapping her mask back into place and striding out of the compartment. Hippinse rose and followed.
It’s the second-hand word of one dying man transmitted by another, the avatoid sent to the SC agent. Could be false.
Anaplian shook her head. Something spent geological ages in a buried city, wasted several hundred thousand people as it left just for the hell of it and then disappeared, she replied. Let’s assume the worst of the fucker.
Whatever it was, it may not have been the source of the—
“Can’t I stay—” Holse began.
“Yes you can but I’ll need your suit,” Anaplian told him from down the corridor. “It can function as an extra drone.” Her voice changed as Holse’s suit decided her voice was growing too faint and switched to comms. “Same applies to my brother,” she told him.
“Can we not mourn even a moment?” Ferbin’s voice cut in.
“No,” Anaplian said.
Outside, in the cold desert air, Turminder Xuss swept down to join Anaplian and Hippinse as they stepped from the carriage. “Oct,” it told them. “A few still left in the rearmost ship, a klick back under the ice upstream. All dying. Ship systems blown by EMP. Recordings corrupted but they had live feed and saw a black ovoid emerge from a grey cube housed centrally in a prominent chamber beneath the city’s central building. It was joined by three smaller ovoids which emerged from objects the Sarl and Oct co-operated in bringing to the central one. Last thing they saw sounds like a concentric containment enaction; strong vibrations and photon-tunnelling immediately before containment drop and fireball release confirmatory.”
“Thank you,” Anaplian told the machine. She glanced at Hippinse. “Convinced?”
Hippinse nodded, eyes wide, face pale. “Convinced.”
“Ferbin, Holse,” Anaplian said, calling the two men still inside the carriage. “We have to go now. There is an Iln or some weapon left by the Iln loose. It will be at or on its way to the Core of Sursamen. The first thing it will do is kill the WorldGod. Then it will attempt to destroy the world itself. Do you understand? Your suits must come with us, whether you are inside them or not. There would be no dishonour in—”
“We are on our way,” Ferbin said. His voice sounded hollow.
“Coming, ma’am,” Holse confirmed. “There, lad, you just rest easy there, that’s it,” they heard him mutter
The four suits and the tiny shape of the accompanying machine lifted from the wispily smoking remains of the Hyeng-zhar Settlement and curved up and out, heading for the nearest open Tower, seven thousand kilometres distant. Turminder Xuss powered ahead and up, vanishing from sight almost immediately. Ferbin assumed they were flying in the same diamond formation as before, though the suits were camouflaged again so it was impossible to tell. At least this time they were allowed to communicate without having to touch.
“But this thing must be ancient, ma’am, mustn’t it?” Holse protested. “It’s been under there for an eternity; everybody knows the Iln vanished millions of years ago. Whatever this thing is it can’t be that dangerous, not to more modern powers like the Optimae, the Culture and so on. Can it?”
“It doesn’t work that way,” Anaplian said. “Would that it did.”
She fell silent as they tore upwards into the air, spreading out. Hippinse cleared his throat and said, “The type of progress you guys are used to doesn’t scale into this sort of civilisational level; societies progress until they Sublime – god-like retirement, if you will – and then others start again, finding their own way up the tech-face. But it is a tech-face, not a tech-ladder; there are a variety of routes to the top and any two civs who’ve achieved the summit might well have discovered quite different abilities en route. Ways of keeping technology viable over indefinite periods of time are known to have existed aeons ago, and just because something’s ancient doesn’t mean it’s inferior. With workable tech from this thing’s time the stats show it’s about sixty-forty it will be less capable than what we have now, but that’s a big minority.”
“I’m sorry to have to involve you in this,” Anaplian told the two Sarl men. “We are going to have to descend to the Machine level and possibly the Core of Sursamen to confront something we have very little knowledge of. It may well have highly sophisticated offensive capabilities. Our chances of survival are probably not good.”
“I do not care,” Ferbin said, sounding like he meant it. “I would gladly die to do whatever I can to kill the thing that killed our brother and threatens the WorldGod.”
They were leaving the atmosphere, the sky turning black.
“What about the ship, ma’am?” Holse asked.
“Hippinse?” Anaplian asked.
“I’m broadcasting for help,” the avatoid replied. “Oct systems, Nariscene, Morth; anything to patch us through. Nothing’s coming back from the chaos in the local dataverse. System disruption is still spreading, jamming everything. Take heading to another level to find a working system and even then it’d be somebody else’s whim.”
“I’ll signal it,” Anaplian said.
“I guess we have no choice,” Hippinse said. “This should get us some attention.”
“Arming,” Anaplian said. “Coding for Machine space rendezvous, no holds barred.”
“Total panic now mode,” Hippinse said as though he was talking to himself.
“How can you signal the ship, ma’am?” Holse asked. “I thought signals couldn’t get out of Shellworlds.”
“Oh, some signals can,” Djan Seriy said. “Look back at the gorge down from the Falls. Where we landed earlier.”
They had risen so fast and travelled so far laterally already, this was not easy. Holse still hadn’t located the gorge below the Hyeng-zhar, and hadn’t thought to ask the suit to do so for him, when a sudden flash attracted his eye. It was followed by four more in groups of two; the whole display lasted less than two seconds. Hemispherical grey clouds burst blossoming around the already dead light-points, then quickly disappeared, leaving rapidly rising grey-black towers behind.
“What was that?” Holse asked.
“Five small anti-matter explosions,” Anaplian told him. The debris stacks were already falling over the horizon as they raced away just above the outer reaches of the atmosphere. “The Liveware Problem and its remotes are monitoring the Surface at Prime level, listening for unusual vibrations. Those five explosions together won’t rattle Sursamen as much as a single Starfall but they’ll make the planet ring like a bell for a few minutes, all the way out to the Surface, which is all we need. Surface compression waves. That’s how you get a signal out of a Shellworld.”
“So the ship—” Holse began.
“Will right now be making its way towards the Core,” Anaplian said, “and not taking no for an answer.”
“Getting something,” Hippinse said. “Oh. Looks like—”
Brilliant, blinding light splashed off to Ferbin’s left, diagonally ahead. His gaze darted that way even as the images danced inside his eyes and the suit’s visor blacked out the entire view then cast an obviously false representation up showing the horizon, nearby towers and not much else. The image he was left with was that of a human figure, lit as though it was made of sun stuff.
“Anaplian?” Hippinse yelled.
“Yes,” her calm voice came back. “Laser. Strong physical hit. Optical sighting; no ranging pulse. My suit has slight ablation and I slight bruising. All mirrored up now. Suits have split us up already. Expect mo—”
Something hammered into Ferbin’s back; it was like a cutting sword blow landing on thick chain mail. The breath tried to whistle out of him but the suit was suddenly very stiff and it felt like there was nowhere for the breath to go.
“Under CREW attack, dorsal, above,” the suit informed him. “No immediate threat at present power and frequencies.”
“That’s one hit each, two on me,” Anaplian said. “More have missed. I am reading a ceiling source, Nariscene tech, probably – tss! Three on me. Source probably comped.”
“Ditto,” Hippinse said. “We can probably soak. Outrange in twenty.”
“Yes, but maybe more ahead. I am sending Xuss to deal with. Practice if nothing else.”
“My pleasure,” Turminder Xuss said. “Can I use AM too?”
“Anything,” Anaplian said.
“Leave to me,” Xuss purred. “I’ll get back ahead and anticipate similar?”
“Feel free,” Anaplian said. “Kinetics would be a bigger worry; prioritise and warn.”
“Of course.”
“Regardless, shoot first.”
“You spoil me.”
“Ah!” Holse shouted a moment later. “Faith, even my old man never hit me that hard.”
“Should be this one’s last,” Xuss said. “There; straight up their collimator. Oh! Pretty.”
“Firing not admiring,” Anaplian told it.
“Oh, really,” Xuss said, somewhere between amused and annoyed. “Already on my way.”
They flew over the landscape far below for another few minutes without attracting any more hostile attention, the world seeming to turn like a great tensed drum beneath them, shining and darkening as Fixstars and Rollstars came and went and complexes of vanes and ceiling structure cast them into shadow.
Ferbin cried a little more, thinking of his brother lying dead, disfigured, assaulted in that cold, abandoned carriage. Unmourned now they had been forced to leave, unattended save for a dying servant who was himself hardly more than a child; it had not been a death or a lying-in-state fit for a prince of any age.
A cold and terrible fury grew in his guts. How fucking dare anything do that to so young a man, to his brother, to so many others? He had seen them, he had seen how they’d died. Prompted by Holse, he’d had his suit tell him the effects of high radiation doses. One hundred per cent certainty of death within four to eight days, and those days full of appalling agony. It looked like his brother had been injured before the lethal blast, though that made no difference; he might still have lived but even that chance, however good or slim, had been snatched away from him by this filthy, pitiless murderous thing.
Ferbin sniffed back the tears and the suit itself seemed to absorb whatever he could not swallow. No doubt to be re?cycled, reused and purified and brought back to him as water from the tiny spigot he could summon to his mouth whenever he wa
He had to do the same, he realised. He could not afford not to employ Oramen’s cruel, ignoble death. They might well have to surrender their lives in whatever doomed enterprise they were now embarked upon, but he would honour his young brother in the only way that could mean anything from this point on and turn Oramen’s death to a determining reinforcement of his purpose. He had meant what he said to Djan Seriy earlier. He did not want to die, but he willingly would if it helped destroy the thing that had killed his brother and meant to do the same to the WorldGod.
The WorldGod! Might he see it? Look upon it? Dear God, converse with it? Just be addressed by it? Never had he thought to witness it in any way. No one did. You knew it was there, knew it was in some sense another being, another inhabitant of the vast and bounteous galaxy, but that did not reduce its manifest divinity, its mystery, its worth of reverence.
Something flickered high above in the darkness. Three tiny trails of light seemed to converge on an implied point. One trail winked out, another curved, the third flared suddenly into a dot of light the suit’s visor briefly blocked out.
“There you go,” Xuss said. “Kinetic battery. Definitely compromised; there was a Nariscene combat engineering team crawling all over it trying to get the unit back under their control.”
“What happened to them?”
“Blown to smithereens,” the drone said matter-of-factly. “No choice; thing was powering up, already swinging towards you.”
“Great,” Anaplian muttered. “So now we’re at war with the fucking Nariscene.”
“Excuse me, ma’am, sir,” Holse said. “Do all levels have such fearsome weaponry looking down upon them?”
“Basically, yes,” Hippinse said.
“By the way, I’m down by five and a half out of eight micro-missiles,” the drone said. “That was learning overkill and I think I can deal with anything similar with two easy, one high-probability, but just to let you know.”