by Neal Asher
Her mental capacities and knowledge had certainly increased as a result of that battle with the Librarian, with the knock-on effect being that she had radically altered her plans to rebuild the weapons platform and was now calling in those attack pods to make some serious additions to them. However, just like her doubts about her physical form, her identity felt precarious. Her plan to seize knowledge directly from the Librarian’s mind had not worked out as she had intended. It had been the battle Jain always fought when up against each other, mind to mind: mental rape and amalgamation—the victor coming out of it dominant but absorbing a large portion of the loser.
She wasn’t herself.
Pheromones, heavy with data, filtered back from the tree to her anosmic receptors. She observed the structure of her plans falling together but then felt the urge to actually look upon the work rather than use other senses. Perhaps this was a hangover from her assimilation of the AI previously in charge of this platform. Pragus may have been an AI but it had also been the product and evolution of humans, with a preference for gathering data in the same way they did. She microwave-linked into the Polity tech all around her, spreading her awareness throughout the platform. First, she focused on the latest attack pod, now within a repair bay glittering with moving robotics. Suspended in a framework, its outer shells had been pulled back to reveal all its internal workings, which the robots were dismantling.
The pod was quite simple—much like a Polity attack ship but with no room for a crew. At one end it possessed a compact fusion drive, ahead of that lay its U-space drive for jumping through that continuum. And next was its fusion reactor and laminar power storage. To the fore were its weapons: a particle cannon, a railgun and two coilgun missile launchers. Behind these was positioned its magazine. Lasers were scattered along its length on one side. On the other were the nodules of its defensive hardfield projectors—positioned so it could easily eject them should overload threaten. It was well integrated, as all Polity technology is, but not totally unified and was incapable of rearranging itself, adapting. In essence, it was a tool for one job only and the Client intended to change that.
The library, as well as being an information treasure trove, had been a technological one too. The material riches she had looted from that moon, she had only just begun to examine in detail. It was all Jain technology, but not the universally destructive pseudo-life the Polity and the Kingdom so feared. What she had found predated that. Some of it did possess such organic traits, but ones she could program. She turned her attention to the organic machine she had grown from this tech in one of the platform’s numerous, disposable laboratory units.
The unit itself was a chain-glass sphere twenty feet across, with a single entrance which could be sealed to prevent even atoms escaping. Inside, canisters supplied materials, via numerous pipes, that ranged from gel-suspended metal powders to carbon fullerenes. Outside it, a fusion reactor—a coin-shaped piece of technology eight feet across and three thick—provided power through superconducting cables. Everything was there to nourish the object at the centre of the sphere. The Client had watched its growth and felt she understood it perfectly now. This technology was not autonomous in any way that could be a danger to her. In fact, even if it was, the chain-glass sphere wouldn’t be a barrier to it. All it would need to do is decode the glass, apply the correct electromagnetic frequency and turn the sphere to dust.
The object itself resembled an octopus with far too many limbs spread around it, turned woody with petrification, and some small detonation having opened up its insides. Slight movement was visible, but slow and meticulous, as from one sphincter it extruded an object that looked like a large clam. The surface of this was marked, as though someone had carved the runes of an obscure mathematical language into it. The single robot inside the sphere—a bodiless spider-form, chrome-bright and multi-jointed—eased in to snatch up the clam-like object. The Client sent an instruction and the sealed hemisphere hatch popped open.
The robot, following its simple program, climbed out through the hatch, carrying the clam. It clambered along the framework which held numerous other laboratory spheres, until it reached a newly made tunnel in one wall. Through this it entered the maintenance bay containing the stripped-down attack pod, whose inner workings the bay robots were now busy reassembling. They had removed the hardfield generators and replaced them with one of a radically different design. This now backed onto the U-space engine, with the grav-engine ahead of it. The weapons array to the fore had also been enlarged and would spill out of the pod’s original shell once reassembly was complete. The spiderbot ducked through the swiftly moving arms and other tools of its brethren, and placed the clam into a recess. This had been created specially for it in the upper face of the new hardfield generator. The thing sank into place, making its connections and drawing power.
The Client could not help but feel building excitement as she watched, even though the details of the process were clear in her mind. As the spiderbot headed back to the lab unit to await the next clam, a robot arm swung in. It was carrying a multicore feeding tube to supply a specific collection of molten metals, carbon and silicon dust. Its nozzle came down and sealed on the clam, then, as soon as it received the instruction to do so, began pumping at the point of contact.
Glowing veins of material immediately shot out from all around the clam, like molten metal in the channels of a mould, spreading over the grav-motor, penetrating it and making connections. Some of these began to lose their glow as they cooled to an iridescent hue. Others thickened, sprouting nodes, and from these nodes more veins webbed out around the pod. One thick vein created another node when it reached the U-space engine, and from this even more veins spread to encompass and connect to that device. Veins also took hold throughout the internal structure of the attack pod, the whole mass linked together. It looked like a lump of tech dropped into a jungle and strangled by lianas. When growth finally halted, the feeding tube detached and withdrew. Other robotic arms shifted the two outer shells of the pod back into place and secured them. With the gleaming veins, the lack of exterior hardfield generators and a bulky weapons array protruding like a high-tech prolapse, the pod did not look so neat any more. It was more organic.
Robotic arms retracted, and the pod engaged a drive that was an amalgam of its grav- and U-space engines. Pushing on the very fabric of space, it slid out of the platform’s maintenance bay and smoothly into vacuum. The Client watched it go for just a moment before summoning the next pod in. She struggled to make this task her sole focus, but the body dysmorphia remained and those alien parts of her mind she’d recently acquired shifted uneasily inside her.
TOBIAS
The shuttle was kidney-shaped and much the same colour as that organ. It was small, just a single compartment for the pilot over a grav-motor, and steering thrusters all round it. Tobias supposed it didn’t need to be all that big. The pilot wasn’t really human and didn’t require life support. She also had no need for all the bulky paraphernalia of steering and navigation, since she just had to plug the shuttle’s system into her body and was otherwise essentially omniscient.
But not sufficiently omniscient. He smiled to himself, feeling strong, ready.
After watching, from the balcony, Orlandine’s shuttle shrink to a speck in the bright morning sky, Tobias turned his attention to the grav- cars and buses settling on the parking platforms of the runcible facility.
It pleased him to see the Polity interlopers departing. It also pleased him that cowardly Jaskorans—those whose loyalty to the home world was questionable—were departing too. Fewer people made things easier. Next he glanced over to the horizon, at the accretion disc, which was beginning to sink out of sight. Specks of light had appeared, flaring and going out. What he was seeing had happened a year or so ago, so was probably the last Jain-tech excursion from the disc—the one the alien entity Dragon had apparently stirred up. But a lot had happened out there since then. Tobias’s sources informed him that a res
urrected Jain mechanism, a soldier, had attacked the defence sphere. But Orlandine had destroyed the thing using a black hole she managed to transport to the disc. And this hole was now eating it up.
Tobias felt a momentary doubt, and fear. Some of the things she could do were terrifying. But then he shrugged, took another bite from his egg roll and his confidence returned. Whatever. No doubt further events, related to the black hole, had compelled her to abandon her token attempt to be human and sent her on her way. That meant it was also time for him to be on his way. He went back inside the apartment, chewing.
Tobias started to feel excited as he finished breakfast and quickly pulled on his clothing. That Orlandine was so powerful and smart yet had no idea about him meant he was an operator. He was dealing big time! Heading for the door, he replayed last night’s sex in his mind. It was good. He really enjoyed fucking her and easily forgot that she was a by-blow of human and AI. Of course, that she was his sworn enemy gave it all an added frisson. He shivered with pleasure as he exited the apartment and headed over to the dropshaft, his feelings only briefly dulled at the sight of the security drones’ winking red lights in the ceiling.
He stepped into the shaft, and the irised gravity field floated him down to ground level. His awareness of the weapons in the shaft’s walls had his nerves jangling. Striding into the lobby, he nodded a greeting to a couple of other residents as they headed towards the shaft. They looked normal enough, but he knew they were Golem androids, quite capable of ripping an ordinary human to shreds. A more visible sign of the security here squatted at the back of the lobby. The thing was ten feet long—a giant stag beetle rendered in chrome and grey metal. It was rather beaten-up in appearance but still sporting Gatling cannons on its antlers and other lethal hardware about its body. This was one of Orlandine’s war drones—a survivor of the prador/human war, centuries old and battle hardened. At present, it was squatting by a table, on the other side of which sat a woman, who may or may not have been Golem. They were playing 3D mah-jong.
Orlandine’s security was tight and she was surrounded by some very dangerous . . . people. The haiman herself was dangerous and highly capable. Of course, Tobias had his occasional doubts about what he and his organization were about to attempt. But every time he dismissed them. David had had similar misgivings when he went up against Goliath.
Coming out onto the pavement slabs, which were fashioned from slices of petrified tree, he breathed clean air and felt buoyant. He flagged a ground taxi—a replica of some ancient Earth car—and climbed inside.
“Where to?” asked the driver—a woman he immediately recognized as a Jaskoran, like himself.
“1270 Genstraza,” he replied, then hit the privacy option on the console before him.
A glass screen slid up—one way. He took out his fone, shot payment over to the cab and sat back as it pulled away. After a moment of watching the passing city scenery, he asked, “We’re clear?”
“We are clear,” replied a humming creepy voice.
No matter how far away it was, the thing always managed to speak to him as if it was breathing into his ear. He had no idea how: it wasn’t nearby. But he knew it was always aware, and somehow present, whenever Orlandine departed, and once he was free from the heavy security of her apartment building.
“I’m not sure that this constant checking is necessary,” he opined.
“There is always a chance that she will grow suspicious of you,” it replied, “and she could leave a watcher on you, which could be as small as a mote of dust.”
“Yeah, okay.” He didn’t want to think about that too much, so opened up his fone and began making calls, arrangements. He had things to do, a lot to do, because the time was coming
ORLANDINE
From a distance, the Ghost Drive Facility looked like a standard Polity city erected in Jaskor’s Canine Mountains. However, only one road led to the valley it occupied and, as Orlandine mentally steered her shuttle closer, she could see its formidable defences. Here lay the root of her power because the facility connected to all her weapons platforms. From here she could control them completely, reprogram them and alter their directives.
A high, armour-clad foamstone wall surrounded it, punctuated with sentinel towers. Atop these squatted sub-AI security drones, like huge brass robber crabs, whose forelimbs were loaded with weaponry. These angled towards her, but turned away again as she responded correctly to the protean codes the facility tested her with. She slowed and gently drifted over the wall and the strip of stony ground beyond. She had sunk mines here, although she didn’t think anything capable of getting past the drones would be on foot. This was why the drones could fly, and why she had loaded this place with hardfield generators, BIC and quantum cascade lasers, particle beams . . . in fact substantially more weaponry than her weapons platforms.
The facility itself consisted of a cluster of hexagonal-section skyscrapers—the tallest a mile high and others just a few hundred feet. They grew at the same rate that she added weapons platforms to the defence sphere. Arguably some parts of the towers could now be discarded, since she had lost numerous platforms during the encounter with the Jain soldier. But discarding information that might prove valuable was neither an AI nor a haiman trait. She drifted over them, then dropped her shuttle through a glassy canyon towards a central hexagonal space. As she landed and detached the data feed from a socket in the side of her torso, she considered why she had come here.
Often this place had been a bolthole for her when human timebecame a little too tedious. This, she admitted to herself, was one of those occasions. But some recent data had made her suspicious and given her an added reason for coming. She stepped out of the shuttle and sighed in the clean mountain air, then headed across to one tower standing half a mile tall. As she walked, she engaged with the facility across the electromagnetic spectrum, unlocking the way ahead of her. A black glass wall began to shift and flow, opening a hole that steadily grew large enough to admit her when she reached it. Inside, she followed a passage to a central dropshaft, which wafted her up the moment she stepped into it. She ascended past brightly lit glassy crystalline rooms glinting with technology. Finally, as the irised gravity field halted her at a quarter of a mile up, she stepped into one.
The room she entered was triangular, but only partially divided from the other five of the hexagon. This hexagon contained a ghost drive and all its support paraphernalia: the U-space and multi-spectrum transceiver that maintained contact with a weapons platform across all possible eventualities. This was accompanied by an iron-burner that could trash it in microseconds if need be. The backup and protective hardware had heavy security to prevent informational penetration, including induction warfare and any other known style of access. There were also automated antipersonnel weapons and hardfields that could completely enclose the drive—layers and layers of security. But perhaps, not enough.
The ghost drive itself was a cyst of compact hardware containing a disk similar in appearance to an ancient gramophone record, but fashioned of laminated sapphire and carbon. It used nano-lasers to record weapons platform data indelibly. Orlandine moved over to stand beside the drive and issued further instructions mentally as she reached up to touch the device on her collarbone. Her shipsuit retracted into it, leaving her naked. The tongue of her sensory cowl rose up behind her head and opened out. Then the sides of her torso unzipped bloodlessly—pink flesh peeling back from rows of data sockets. Self-propelling data leads rose from the surrounding hardware, like iron mealworms, and speared in, slotting into these sockets. A moment later, another thicker lead, with a bayonet like a heron beak, stabbed into the power socket in her back. Her eyes went blind white, gridded for a moment, then opened metallic, kaleidoscope irises. And she was in—making her inspection.
This ghost drive no longer needed its transceiver since the connection had been broken—the platform AI at the other end was almost certainly extinct. It had connected to the AI Pragus of Weapons Platform Mu—a
platform now far away and under the control of the entity called the Client. Fully connected into the system around her, Orlandine looked for small clues or minimal traces. She found what had only been the hint of an anomaly at a distance, usually to be ignored, and realized she would not have known the truth without coming here. Something had penetrated the deep security and swiped a copy of the drive.
“I wondered if you would spot this,” said a voice, and she knew at once who it was.
“I thought the agreement was that I had carte blanche here, with Polity and Kingdom backup as I required it. I was to supply all the data and detail you demanded,” she said, tracing the source of the contact to a U-space transceiver just outside the main facility.
“Do you think Oberon doesn’t have his watchers here too?” asked Earth Central, the AI ruler of the Polity.
It was a game really. She knew that EC had its spies here, just as she knew Oberon, the king of the prador, did too. Occasionally, she had found and destroyed them. As she searched further and traced this transceiver to one of her own sentinel drones, she received a request to the transceiver in her body. With a sigh, she opened the connection and, after briefly checking security, fell into a virtuality to communicate with EC there.
It was a new backdrop this time. She stood in vacuum, under the hard glare of stars, on a plane of metal and composite. This was part of the destroyed runcible gate she had used to move the Harding black hole into the accretion disc. Earth Central appeared as a crystalline skull floating above it. As always, the AI’s choice of scene and actors had meaning.
“Do you think I didn’t know?” EC asked.
She shrugged. She had worried the AI would object to her special project. Building and operating runcibles strong enough to gate through that black hole to the disc had been a dangerous undertaking. And it had been her understanding EC did not like runcibles anywhere near the accretion disc, since they could instantly transfer Jain tech to the heart of the Polity. She had felt sure EC would send warships to destroy them. But, considering EC had now supplied the exodus runcibles to evacuate citizens from Jaskor, it seemed she’d been wrong. Unless, of course, EC was lying and it hadn’t known about her project before, which was always a strong possibility.