by Neal Asher
She opened the door to her apartment and stepped inside. Tobias was here—she’d received notification both from him and from the war drone in the lobby. He wasn’t in the living room and, glancing towards the bedroom, she wondered about more human time, if it might clear her thinking. She then felt a rush of irritation with him. Did he think that her sum purpose in having him here was sexual relief, that she needed that? She would send him away. It was time for her to make some serious decisions about her consciousness and to abandon her shadowy existential angst.
She walked over to the balcony doors to gaze out at the storm. Larger hailstones were breaking on the balcony. Increasing her focus, she mapped the convoluted laminations of the ice in the broken ones; layers upon layers, like her. Damnit! Was she now looking for answers in chunks of ice? Was magical thinking her resort?
“You’re here.”
She turned and made a conscious decision not to suppress the wholly human instinct to take out her anger on the nearest available victim.
“Evidently,” she said. “Your eyes might be merely human but apparently they still work.” She then saw that he looked tired and under some strain, and immediately regretted her choice.
He tipped his head for a moment, acknowledging something, then looked up. “I still wasn’t sure, while I waited here, whether I could do it. But thank you for reminding me of what you are.”
“Do what?” she asked.
“This.” He raised his hand.
Danger registered and she reached out mentally for her defences. In the walls of the apartment a hardfield projector warmed up and a particle beam weapon targeted its only other occupant besides herself. Then something else hit, and in vital microseconds her distributed mind started falling apart.
A satellite exploded, utterly destroyed, pieces of it spreading in a glittering cloud in vacuum. This excised a chunk from her mind and broke her main connection to the ghost drives of the weapons platforms at the accretion disc. Automatically she groped for another route to contact, but that immediately failed as a com laser running updates to her orbiting microsats began turning these into hot clouds of vapour.
Danger...
The communication came through U-space and she glimpsed the interior of Magus’s chamber aboard the weapons platform above. A man stood there, a weird twisted grin on his face as he turned and seemed to look directly at her. Instinctively she fought for some link to the platform, bouncing from com relay to relay since she could not link to the Ghost Drive Facility. The Al’s chamber whited out, but dying feeds showed a massive detonation in the platform, blasting a hole in it and hurling yard-thick chunks of composite out into vacuum.
And she was too late.
The shot struck her in the middle of her torso, hurling her back through shattered glass doors. She hit the balcony rail and dropped, tilted her head down and gaped in disbelief. She reached in with her hand to touch the injury and it went right through the hole, as wide as her head, her fingers brushing her spine as they exited her back. Dying feeds were all around her, flashes in the night across the city, others up in space as further links and stores of her being blew apart. Through city cams she saw Golem technicians in a data store fighting something—silvery snake-like drones with axolotl heads—and she knew what had done this to her. Elsewhere, similar scenes were playing out. It seemed units of the Clade were everywhere, destroying and killing. She groped for whatever she could—at least she could kill Tobias—but found no connection. Something else was happening.
Microfactories scattered through her body around the huge wound in her torso were spewing nano-machines. These were broadcasting growing interference and informational warfare. Viruses were propagating in her Polity AI component and something was happening to her Jain tech too. The nano-machines were keying in and it was unravelling. She pushed herself up, automatics failing inside her, Jain tech struggling to weave closed the hole through her torso. Emotionally she could not believe what was happening to her, but her pure logic told her the truth: she was dying. Gasping, she looked out into the night as some titanic blast turned it to day. As it faded, she saw a great cloud of fire rising from the city.
“That’s the runcibles gone.”
She looked around at Tobias standing amidst the broken glass, rain soaking his clothes. He was pointing the weapon at her again. His hand shook as he looked at her torso. She glanced down. The hole was filled with the writhing of Jain tech and newly generated skin drawing across. But it was cosmetic—the worst damage was from that load of nano- and micro-machines spread about the wound.
“Why?” she managed, trying to delay him, knowing she could not survive another shot like that.
His face twisted up with hate, but also guilt and pain. “At first because we must be free of the Als, and of you. Now I just need to survive.”
She saw the tension in his body, the intent as he aimed at her head. She could fling herself at him but calculated that, though she could kill him, she would still take another shot. She tensed, gripping the balcony rail, and hurled herself over.
Something which could so effectively unravel Jain tech must have that same technology as its source. A high level of understanding of its workings had been required, and that went beyond Orlandine’s own. The weapon Tobias had used against her had been specifically created, almost certainly by the Wheel, to kill every element of her. But as Orlandine fell through the storm, her mind worked at its ever-accelerated pace, seeking solutions.
Though boundaries were blurred, she comprised three components. The Jain tech protected her human body both from itself and her Polity AI component. Now the Jain tech was coming apart, while malware steadily whittled away the programming in her AI crystal. It would need to be scrubbed and a copy loaded from one of her backups. There was time to think as she fell with the hailstones, because her mind moved AI fast, but actions took longer. Her human body and brain were warded still. She would hit the pavement at one hundred and forty miles an hour in Jaskor’s gravity. She had four seconds . . .
Was she really dead if this body died? She had backups around the accretion disc, others scattered throughout the Polity and even some in the Kingdom. All possessed U-space transceivers and had been updating on all that she was, until the Clade destroyed everything here. Logically, Orlandine would exist no matter what happened to this body . . . but logic could not circumvent this Orlandine being splattered on the pavement. She had to act.
In half a second, with the processing she still had available, she put together a message package and, through the U-space tech in her body, flung it into that continuum. It was a message in a bottle that Dragon might receive, if it was alive and ever came out of that disruption around the Cyberat system. She considered, briefly, sending further messages to Earth Central and Oberon, but immediately rejected the idea. Oddly, Dragon, whom she had so mistrusted before, was the one she trusted most now.
Next she built the program her parts needed to run. She created a line of division inside herself, separating the disintegrating Jain tech from the rest. Splits developed all over her body and most of the uninfected Jain techs oozed tendrils, spreading out and caging her body. It also issued growths, like fungi, of impact foam, and a haze of other tendrils branched out and dragged moisture from the air, snaring hailstones. Within the space abandoned by the bulk of her Jain tech, her compressed and dehydrated organs expanded, filled with tendrils making repairs. Some function still remained in the infected tech. Her blood loosened from the consistency of peanut butter and flowed. Though she had used her stomach, that had been her limit before, and now her large intestine expanded, sending a pang of animal hunger through her. The complexities of her liver fired up and her kidneys began to work. Muscles shivered. She heaved and shuddered as dying tech retreated into her stomach and intestines, drawing the nano- and micro-machines with it. It would work. Those machines could not harm her human body.
A thing, like a great epiphyte, slammed into the pavement. In that instant Orland
ine wiped her AI crystal—an utterly clean diamond residing in the base of her skull. The epiphyte bounced in the rain and hail. It then began to coagulate to one point and, as a worm consisting of braided tendrils, quickly squirmed away from her—fleeing the infection. On her hands and knees, the naked woman lurched forwards and vomited a great gout of black and grey in which things squirmed and died. She looked up the street as the wall of the apartment building exploded outwards. A huge stag beetle war drone tumbled out, battling something that writhed and glittered and cut. She felt a surge of terror. The night was alight with danger and she knew she had to be safe, and find somewhere to run. Glancing behind, she saw something moving, consisting of the same squirming life she had vomited. Fear was still her only response as she scuttled over to a barred storm grating and heaved it up, dropped inside, and was taken by the flood.
But she knew little else.
THE CLIENT
The attack pods hung in a cold shoal, in patient readiness around the weapons platform. They were the best the Client could make them, while the platform smoked metal vapour, shifted and deformed as the technology she had unleashed made radical alterations. The process was halfway to conclusion when she detected the U-signature generating a few million miles away. She immediately activated concealing chameleonware in the pods, but it was a more difficult option in the platform. She could not hide it completely, just its energy output, while starting a feedback routine in response to any scanning. This would show only a wrecked hulk. Logically, because her primary aims lay far away from here at the accretion disc, the best thing for her to do now was just U-jump away, while obscuring her U-signature. But deep inside her arose an acquisitive curiosity—a need to grasp at any and all sources of data. She knew this feeling, this strange urge, must be due to her incorporation of the Librarian, yet she stayed. Little in the Graveyard could harm her now and perhaps this encounter would enable her to learn more about what she had become? Perhaps it would help quell the confusion she was feeling . . . While in another level of her being she was aware that her impulse to stay was driven by the painful frustration she knew she would feel if she fled.
The ancient hauler that appeared, judging by its additional weapons nacelles and the open mouth of a deconstruction bay at one end, had been adapted to other purposes. As she scanned the thing, she felt some satisfaction in data received, but no reduction in her amorphous need. And something else—something cycling inside her and growing stronger . . .
The ship was a salvager vessel, patrolling the Graveyard in search of wartime vessels and other debris of value. If it was the usual kind of salvage vessel here, it would be a craft that also reclaimed ships not in need of salvaging. She waited as it drew closer, aware that the concealment she was using would not deter its crew. Here was a hulk probably loaded with treasures. In fact, her present concealment was not the best option if she wanted to deter them. If she turned off her chameleonware, they would probably take one look at the massively armed platform and attack pods, turn right round and leave as fast as possible. Instead, they were flying directly towards a trap.
Why? Why maintain a trap?
The thought of turning the ‘ware off again caused an agonizing surge of anxiety. Instead she waited and waited, baffled by the intensity of her focus on the approaching vessel. Baffled by that thing cycling just below her consciousness.
Finally, the vessel went into a decelerating burn on fusion for twenty minutes, then stabilized on steering thrusters a few miles out from the platform. But that did not seem enough for her. It remained tantalizingly out of reach and she felt like stretching out into vacuum and grasping the thing. She wanted to call to it, shout to it, and that feeling was related to what was building inside her, yet sat contrary to her efforts at concealment. Heavy active scanning from the vessel then ensued, which she found easy to defeat, letting them see only what she wanted them to. But why did she want them to know about inactive but undamaged weapons, reactors, hardfield generators and other such useful paraphernalia?
Abruptly, she fired an induction warfare beam and began penetrating the salvager’s systems. The data this rendered caused a surge of joy. Eighteen humans were aboard, two aug-enslaved Golem and even a war drone in one hold, with an adaptation of prador thrall technology rigged into its crystal. The flash-frozen ganglion of a prador second-child ran the ship, and data stores were scattered throughout. When she saw the remains of a Polity troop transport, still being taken apart in its forward deconstruction bay and useful parts being stored, she felt a sudden,
baffling kinship with these people. She shrugged it away and sucked data, incorporating some into her mind, discarding what was neither useful nor relevant. But cautiously—she didn’t want them to know about her. Not yet.
Five of the human crew and the two Golem boarded an old atmosphere survey shuttle, which broke away from the side of the salvager like a bat leaving its roost. Via the shuttle’s internal monitoring, she could see the humans were excited by their find.
“This is the big one,” asserted a boosted woman with horn growths on her head and sheep’s eyes, as she pulled on a heavy space suit.
“We can’t be sure till we get a proper look,” replied a man with data storage tattoos on his arms, as he ran diagnostic checks on a laser carbine.
“You saw that scan data,” she replied.
“We’ll need to put out some feelers quickly—start looking for buyers,” said the painfully slim outlinker at the shuttle’s controls.
“Or maybe we’re not thinking big enough,” said the tattooed man, reaching for his own space suit. “We could online its weapons . . . site an auction here.”
“Even more,” said the outlinker excitedly. “That thing is big. It could be a site for a permanent auction, a new commerce centre, a station . . . people could live there!”
So they chattered on and the Client enjoyed their exchange as they drew closer. But she knew her pleasure was more about them coming closer. In preparation for their arrival, next to the hold they were heading for, she powered up a construction bay recently upgraded by the technology she had unleashed here. She tested its robotics, but why was not entirely clear to her. Her thinking, she found, was becoming a bit disjointed. She realized then that the segment at the top of her body’s chain was dying. This had to be the problem. Surely clarity would come once she shed it and the following fresh mind took over. But why was she making alterations in her next birth now?
The shuttle headed directly to the open hold door. Meanwhile, she was opening a course through the platform from the bay directly to her own location in her chain-glass cylinder. She could see herself doing these things but sat somehow outside of them—a dispassionate observer and consciousness divided from the frenetic activity of her own mind.
The Client prepared and fed, though for what she did not know. Even as her new wings had been sprouting, her primary form continued to die, handing over its consciousness to the next in the chain. At her terminus, the new birth expanded and changed rapidly, taking on the radical alterations she had instituted . . . hadn’t she? She gave birth and the new form, hanging from an umbilicus, sucked nutrients and grew so fast it smoked.
They knew something was wrong the moment they stepped, clad in heavy space suits and bristling with weapons, from their shuttle. All their scans had been telling them this was an old damaged hulk. Now they saw the gleaming interior of a modern Polity weapons platform hold, with the tentacular growths and veins of Jain tech spread all around it. Four humans and the two Golem stood on the grated floor. The outlinker remained in the shuttle, but no matter—the Client could accept some loss of data. She began drawing the bay door closed and opening the route to the construction bay. Webbed with Jain tendrils and eagerly flexing their limbs, two spiders shot in on their ribbed umbilici and grabbed the two Golem. A moment later, the spiders dropped them flailing into the mincing robotics of her construction bay. Cutting lasers flared and atomic shears snipped, grabs and probes stabbed in an
d the Golem came apart like insect corpses in an ant colony. The machines spirited pieces of them away, their components either routed to storage or for recycling. Probes sought interface sockets in a hungry need for data.
Further robots swarmed into the hold. Big grasping arms folded out like the limbs of giant trapdoor spiders, slamming down on the shuttle, turning it over and dragging it into the bay. Grappler robots stepped out of transport tubes in the side of the hold, lunging towards the four humans. The four opened fire, looked towards the closed hold doors, then turned and ran . . . heading in the only direction they could.
The recently acquired Golem crystal rendered data. It gave the Client history, human psychology, but no technology she did not know. She took what was useful then scrubbed the crystal and routed it off for data storage. The shuttle was mostly just useful materials and as the robots took it apart, it dissolved into the substance of the weapons platform. The outlinker who had remained aboard . . . lost data killed by the brush of a thermic cutting lance . . . routed to a furnace . . .
The main ship . . .
This was turning on steering thrusters and the Client saw that those who’d come aboard the platform had sent a distress signal. Obviously, the captain of the salvager had decided the crew sent over was dispensable and he was getting ready to run. The Client froze, physically and mentally. She reviewed what she had just done and simply did not understand it. But her need and the thing cycling below her conscious mind grew stronger and stronger. Then it broke free.
The Client shrieked across the ether—a communication through the spectrum, dense with open formulae, equations and questions, a language over five million years old. Even as this hammered into the systems of the salvager, she recognized it as the same call the Librarian had sent to her: the shriek of a Jain challenge, a call for mating and for battle— which were one and the same to them. The implicit question about the worthiness of the opponent, mate, amalgamation. She writhed on her crystal tree and understood, if briefly, how she was now completely out of control, though she managed to close off the transmission.