The Line of Polity

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The Line of Polity
Author	Neal Asher
Cover artist	Steve Rawlings
Country	United Kingdom
Language	English
Series	Ian Cormac
Genre(s)	Science fiction novel
Publisher	Macmillan UK
Publication date	2003
Media type	Print (Hardback & Paperback)
Pages	560 pp
ISBN	ISBN 0-333-90365-X
Preceded by	Gridlinked
Followed by	Brass Man

The Line of Polity is a 2003 science fiction novel by Neal Asher. It is the second novel in the Gridlinked sequence. In this novel, Earth Central Security (ECS) agent Ian Cormac is placed at the center of a civil war on the planet Masada, where an elite Theocracy lives in cylindric habitats in orbit and violently rules over commoners enslaved to laborious agriculture jobs on the planet's surface. To complicate matters, someone has attacked a low-grav Outlinker habitat with a nanomycelium which bears a striking resemblance to that used by Dragon on Samarkand in the previous novel Gridlinked. To top things off, a brilliant Separatist biophysicist has apparently reactivated an extremely ancient relic of technology created by the Jain, an alien species that dropped out of the universe millions of years ago, and commanded forms of technology that the brightest AI minds of the Polity have difficulty comprehending.

[edit] Technology

AI: machine intelligence responsible for planetary management
runcible: an interstellar teleporter, comparable to the Ramsbotham Jump in Robert A. Heinlein's Tunnel in the Sky
contra-terrene device or CTD: an anti-matter bomb
AGC: antigravity carrier anti-gravity vehicle
Antiphoton Weapon: A proton beam weapon (APW).
Aug: A brain augmentation device, allowing gridlink-like access to local networks.
Proton Gun
Pulse-gun
Golem: sophisticated androids, named in numbered series
Sparkind: elite human(oid) soldiers
Chainglass armor and cutting blades: "A glass formed of silicon chain molecules. Depending on heat treatments and various doping techniques, this glass has a range of properties covering just about every material that has preceded it. Chainglass blades can be as hard as diamond and maintain an edge sharper than that of freshly sheared flint, whilst having a tensile strength somewhere above that of chrome steel. Chainglass also lacks the brittleness of its namesake. The substance was the invention of Algin Tenkian, and it made him filthy rich." -Gridlinked: Asher, pg. 142.