Neal Asher - The Technician

THE TECHNICIAN

TOR

Three Years before the Rebellion (Solstan 2434)

The sculpture had been mounted on a rock which, though far from the Northern Mountains of the continent, Chanter knew to be the tip of a mountain itself submerged in the underlying tricone-generated soil of the planet Masada. After studying the screen display for a moment longer, he turned to the other displays arrayed before him and did some checking. His mud-marine had risen to the surface pushing up the rhizome mat as a shield above it, so should be all but invisible to the cameras peering down from the Theocracy laser arrays. However, he ensured that the chameleonware shield was functioning too and now extended to the rock, so would cover his departure from his vehicle. It was only by such attention to detail that he had remained undiscovered under the eyes of the Theocracy for so many decades.

He spun his seat round then heaved his bulky amphidapt body from it, traipsing across to the door to one side, his big webbed feet making a wet slapping against the floor. Beside the door he unclipped his root shear from its rack and turned it on. The thing looked like a dental-floss stick, the handle extending to a bow-shaped section across which a monofilament stretched, now vibrating at high frequency.

The door opened with a thump, extruding in towards him then sliding aside into its cleaner compartment. Inevitably, mud and chunks of flute-grass rhizome spilled in towards him. Amidst this mess a nest of green nematodes also tumbled in and began to wetly writhe apart, so Chanter took the time to grab up a sample bag and scoop the worms inside. Waste not want not he had not had his body adapted to this environment to no purpose, and here was lunch.

The rhizome mat overhung the exit like a pergola collapsing under an excessive weight of vines, but the work of a moment with the root shear dropped it all back down into the black mud below. Chanter next returned the shear to its rack before stepping out. He paused for a moment to breathe deeply, gill slits opening to increase his air intake and thus winnow out the small amount of oxygen in the air. He held his right webbed hand up before his face, peering at the sculpture through the translucent skin between forefinger and mid-finger, but the infrared image gave him no more data than his mudmarines sensors had already obtained. The next web across gave him ultraviolet and evidence of some puzzling trace radioactives, but that was all.

Chanter sighed and now trudged through mud then across the flattened layer of flute grass to the rock and gazed up at the sculpture. The structure of carved bones had been joined together with plaited sinew threaded through drilled holes, or small mortise-and-tenon joints carved with a precision normally only available to machines. One of the grazers of this world had been disassembled, its poisonous fats meticulously extracted from its still-living body and discarded, in fact, stacked neatly in a pyramidal Chinese puzzle to one side, glistening in the light of the sun, whilst the rest, excluding sinew and bone, had been consumed. The predator had then taken the hard remains and made this.

As always Chanter felt a species of awe upon seeing such expressions of the artistic temperament, yet though the sculpture had been fashioned with such precision, such symmetry and such definite purpose, he still had no idea what it represented. The thing before him looked like something living, but bore little resemblance to its original form. To his recollection, it also did not look like anything else on this world, nor on any of the other worlds he had visited. The skull had been shortened, the grinding plates removed, cut into spikes along one side then reinserted sideways to give the skull pointy teeth. The thing sat upright, like the statue of some Human god, which was perhaps why Theocracy proctors destroyed these things if they got to them before Chanter.

The rib bones had been closed together vertically and added to at the bottom to form a cone-like structure. The rear legs extended up from behind and had been substantially altered; the long bones sliced thin, lengthways, and splayed out almost like a peacocks feathers. Forelimbs formed a single hoop looping round from the top of the cone to its bottom a perfect circle.

Chanter whistled, and Mick came trundling out of the mudmarine, long-toed feet extending almost like paddles from the sides of the low, flat louse-like robot to keep its weight supported on the delicate rhizome mat. It headed straight over to the sculpture, stalked eyes hingeing from under its front end to inspect the thing for a moment, then arms folding up from each side of its flat body to reach out with long-fingered hands to probe into the bonework and ensure the thing would remain undamaged when shifted to Micks flat-ribbed back. Soon afterwards Mick had safely installed the sculpture inside the mudmarine.

Sighing yet again, Chanter realized he was no nearer to understanding the work of this artist. This sculpture would join the rest of his unfathomable collection in his underground base. Of course, he shouldnt be surprised, even after fifty years, at his lack of comprehension. This was no ordinary artist. The Technician, as some had begun to call it, was a very strange and lethal beast indeed.

The Rebellion from Underneath (Solstan 2437)

Damnation! Chanter exclaimed.

Hauling himself up by the console from the tilted floor of his mudmarine, he plumped himself back in his chair. Once ensconced, he pulled across safety straps he only used when negotiating particularly moist strata of mud the stuff that possessed currents and was also navigated by tricones the size of gravcars.

On his screen he called up a seismic map created by the various infrasound emitters hed planted about Masada, but what it showed just didnt quite make sense. At first hed thought the shockwave slamming into his conveyance came from a test firing of the Theocracys new weapon that massive coilgun theyd named Ragnorak and intended to use to punch missiles right down through the mountains into the rebels cave systems but no, they could not have moved it into position so soon and the readings here were just not right for that. The seismic map showed that something big had come down just fifty kilometres away from his present position below the surface, but that it hadnt come down hard enough to be a direct fall from orbit.

He wanted more data something was going on and he needed to know what it was, and to collect that data he must surface and take a look. He engaged the vehicles conveyor drive and it began to worm its way forwards, then up as he pulled the control column up. Occasionally there came a bump as the mudmarine shoved tricones aside, but they were of little danger to him, since though their grinding tongues could turn the toughest metal to powder, or sludge, out here he tried not to stay in one spot long enough for them to converge, and when halting did become necessary, he had the means to repel them.

Within an hour he was near the surface, the marine travelling faster in the less dense soil. He slowed almost to a halt below the rhizome mat, taking the precaution of engaging chameleonware before surfacing, then eased the vehicle up. Once it was stable, he first extruded a camera up through the mat to take a look around. No Humans in the vicinity, no technology, and he was a good distance from any Theocracy arachniculture. However, an unseasonal storm was blowing out there, the grasses waving about vigorously and the air filled with broken stems the aftermath of the same shockwave he had felt below. Also the light seemed odd. It was night out there and, though the nights here were never that dark, it seemed oddly bright. Maybe a distant fire fed by some oxygen supply? Perhaps a spaceship had come down that certainly matched the seismic profile, but pointing the camera in the direction of the impact revealed no fire. Finally he tilted the camera upwards, and gasped in surprise.