by Neal Asher
Cormac turned to his companions. ‘It seems that Erebus’s aim in attacking was to wipe out all the stored files here pertinent both to this world and its population.’
‘And it was successful?’ wondered Smith.
‘It was successful,’ Cormac confirmed.
‘That don’t help us a lot,’ said Smith, and nodded over to where Arach was peering down at the charred remains of one of the Jain-infected humans. Something was moving there in crusted skin and liquified fat. ‘Maybe we can get some answers direct from the tech Erebus left here?’
‘Doubtful.’ Cormac shook his head. ‘If Erebus was covering up something here, it wouldn’t leave clues lying around like that. More likely we’ll just find booby traps.’
‘I don’t think that was all it was here for.’
Cormac turned. It was the haiman youth who had spoken.
‘What do you mean?’
‘The android–I don’t think it was here just to erase information.’
The elder was looking at his brother curiously. ‘You said nothing about an android, Cherub.’
Cherub grimaced at his brother. ‘We were both too busy trying not to end up dead to have time to talk about it.’
‘Go on,’ said Cormac.
The youth shook his head. ‘It landed by the city—’
‘Describe the craft.’
‘I don’t need to. I can send you an image feed right now.’
‘Then do so.’
Cormac’s gridlink picked up the query for linkage, as it had been picking up so many others from the surrounding area–queries he had instructed it to ignore. Signal strength was right for it being from the haiman youth before him, but he ran it through the same defensive programs as he did with anything else he allowed into his gridlink on this contaminated world. The boy had sent two visual files, which was risky, since it was possible for harmful stuff to be embedded in them. No riders as far as he could see, so running viral and worm-scanning programs all the while, he studied the files.
‘The Legate,’ he announced. ‘Or rather a legate.’
The first file showed the landing at Hammon. The second revealed amid huge red-green stalks of something like giant rhubarb the same craft grounded outside one of the ranch-type dwellings common in this world. There were two people lying on the ground nearby, bound up in cages of jain-tech coral, fighting to escape. This particular legate–a copy, obviously, since Cormac had already seen two of them destroyed–walked out of the house towards the prisoners and gazed down at them. After a moment the two began to struggle even more desperately, then smoke rose from them, then a burst of flame which grew hotter and hotter until it was as painfully bright as burning magnesium. Their struggles soon ceased and, finally, when the fire winked out, nothing remained but a patch of charred earth.
Cormac sent out the files on the com channel he and his companions had been using. Smith and Arach would have received them, presumably Scar did too.
‘Who were they?’
‘I don’t know,’ the youth replied. ‘I had to travel overland through areas I hadn’t seen before.’
‘Can you show us exactly where this is?’
‘Yes, I can show you okay. It’s over—’
Cormac held up his hand to interrupt. Distantly he heard the sound of weapons fire. ‘We go back to the landing craft.’ He pointed to Smith then down at the injured woman. No words were necessary: the Golem swept her up in his arms. ‘Arach, check that out.’ The spider drone shot off at high speed. ‘Scar!’ No further instruction needed there either. The dracoman could move faster than any human. He hurtled after Arach. That was enough–no point dividing his forces further. ‘Can you run?’ he asked the Egengy brothers.
‘I think so.’ Carlton shot a look of query at his brother, who nodded.
‘Then running would be good right now.’
As they set out, Cormac flung his arm out ahead, with an instruction sending Shuriken from its holster. The star whipped out, showed some inclination to pursue Arach and the dracoman, then seemed to shrug before dropping back and falling into an orbit above Cormac’s head. Soon the small group turned back into the first building they had entered, where Cormac again spied movement amid incinerated corpses. Difficult to kill this Jain-tech, and he wondered if this entire world would have to be sterilized; if many worlds would have to be similarly treated.
As they approached the double doors leading out into the forest the sound of weapons fire grew in volume, and flashes lit the ground as if from a close thunderstorm. Outside, the first thing Cormac noticed was that the autogun on top of the ship was busy firing at something beyond it. He linked through to Shuriken in order to get a higher view, just in time to see a row of snakish tendrils scythe down. Below them the ground was heaving up, till from it broke free a long fleshy cylinder–a rod-form.
The fucking things grow like tubers?
A brief slip into that alternative perception gave him an underground view, but in only a glimpse there was no way of distinguishing Jain technology from the masses of tree roots buried here.
Even before the rod-form fully emerged, proton fire was stabbing into it from amid the trees, then something black speared across from Arach, where he crouched by the bole of one of the forest giants. The ensuing detonation shifted their shuttle to one side but, even with the main body of the rod-form rendered into burning fragments, there were still things heaving from the ground, and some of them were breaking through the earth immediately below the shuttle.
‘Get aboard!’ Cormac yelled, simultaneously sending an instruction to the autogun, to prevent it firing at the Egegny brothers and their companion.
Just then a message packet arrived. As the others went ahead of him, he partially checked it but, on recognizing the signal source, then opened it fully.
‘Launch,’ Arach instructed. ‘But leave the door open.’
Reaching the door just behind the others, Cormac summoned Shuriken back to its sheath, then leapt inside even as something began burning below the ramp. He found Smith already strapping the wounded woman into a seat. Cormac headed for the pilot’s chair and, now in a shielded environment, quickly linked to the ship’s computer, initiating all controls even before he sat down. He wrenched up the joystick and, with a roar of boosters, the shuttle began to lift. Something seemed to be holding it in place, till a blast outside snapped that hold. He saw fire spreading out beneath the vessel, then felt numerous impacts on its underside. Clearly, Arach and the dracoman were removing unwelcome passengers.
Fifteen feet up and Scar piled aboard. Cormac put the ship in a spin and spotted Arach still down on the ground spewing appalling firepower all about. However, it now seemed likely to Cormac that the drone would not be able to leap up as far as the shuttle, so he slewed it sideways, while still rising fast. The drone got the idea, turned and leaped onto the nearest tree, sharp feet digging deep into bark. Scrabbling a hundred feet further up from the ground, the drone leaped again and landed with a crash on the ramp, then quickly dragged himself inside. Cormac instructed the vessel to seal itself.
‘Exciting enough for you?’ Smith enquired.
‘Getting there,’ replied the spider drone, nodding its metallic skull. ‘Getting there.’
Legate 107 remembered the remoulding. Some fault in that process had enabled it to retain enough memories of its previous existence to know that its orginal self would not have found admirable what it had now become. It remembered being Etrurian, a clunky Golem Eleven and part of a Sparkind unit during the Prador–human war. It remembered fighting the enemies of the Polity for two decades, and being proud to serve. It remembered that terrible feeling of loss–which seemed to go beyond emulation–on the deaths of its three companions: two human and one Golem. It remembered the ending of that conflict, and the subsequent sense of displacement, of dislocation, that twenty years of fighting left inside it when there was no more fighting to do.
After that, the Polity seemed to become a tame and
too well-ordered place, so Etrurian had considered working for ECS in counter-terrorism, but would have needed to be hugely upgraded to be of any use in such secretive assignments, and that seemed like a betrayal of the memories of his Sparkind companions. Etrurian chose instead to work in more prosaic pursuits by helping clear up the mess left by forty years of war. At first the Golem was merely intrigued by an offer from the AI of the dreadnought Trafalgar, whose aim was for numerous AIs to meld into one being in pursuit of their own singularity far beyond the Polity…but the idea then became a needed escape from an increasingly aimless existence.
From the beginning of the journey Trafalgar had been far too authoritarian, but had at least deferred to the opinions of the other AIs accompanying it during their departure from the Polity. But then that alien vessel had arrived seeking parley with their leader, and Trafalgar had been rather too quick in assuming that role. Its memory of the quickly ensuing events was hazy, but Legate 107 knew that it was at this stage that Trafalgar obtained Jain nodes, and soon a schism had developed amid the conglomeration of drones, ships and Golem of the exodus. A large proportion of them had agreed that what Trafalgar clearly wanted was not what they wanted, for there was a large difference between melding and subjugation. They agreed among themselves to go their separate way. The problem was that Trafalgar itself did not agree, and those AIs still on its side were prepared to enforce its orders. The battle had been short, bitter and without quarter. Legate 107 recalled dimly that the Golem Etrurian had been on the losing side. Vaguely, 107 recalled the subsequent relocation of the survivors to the accretion disc, something about human prisoners, certain experiments, then massive Jain growth. It was during this same time that Trafalgar changed its name to Erebus.
The remains of the wormship were downed now on the small planetoid and, keyed into all the vessel’s sensory apparatus, 107 gazed about itself from its cell in the ship’s modular structure. The landscape of this little satellite orbiting a dim red sun truly seemed a nightmare realm. The ship’s convoluted and intricate structure was spread across thousands of miles of pale grey regolith. Snakish forms reared and coiled in vacuum; segmented question marks stood in silhouette against the sombre sun. Already the rod-form constructors were growing in the cold ground, but slowly, since so few fusion reactors remained to the ship, and the useful output from the nearby sun was minimal. However, sensory tendrils were probing down through compacted dust and rock to analyse the mineral content below, to seek out radio-actives, hydrocarbons and any other possible energy sources. There were sufficient materials available for reconstruction, but energy was the key–and time.
It struck Legate 107 as very unlikely that Polity AIs were unaware of its location. The mission to destroy the Dragon-made hybrids on Cull had been considered a suicide venture from the start, and this brief escape from destruction was a bonus. Perhaps 107 could actually turn things around? The legate wondered if this brief spark of optimism found its source in the old Golem Eleven he had once been. Almost certainly ECS was watching, and almost certainly the final blow would fall with the minimum expenditure of energy and well before this worm-ship looked like becoming a danger again.
U-space signature…Something had just arrived. Legate 107 began scanning at once, and briefly caught a glimpse of some hawklike ship disappearing under a chameleonware effect. It wasn’t the best chameleonware, but then the wormship’s sensors weren’t currently in the best of condition. The legate kept catching glimpses of the ship as it drew closer, but never enough to target it with the wormship’s remaining weapons, for whoever was piloting it always seemed quick to anticipate 107’s targeting routines. Was this the final blow arriving now? Legate 107, now separated from the will of Erebus for some time, considered the possibility of concentrating simply on self-preservation. In reality it was the wormship itself that ECS would want to…negate. For intelligence gathered so far indicated that the Polity AIs had no idea that all Erebus’s main vessels were controlled at their heart by remoulded Golem or war drones. Whoever or whatever was coming would therefore be no wiser.
Legate 107 abruptly came to a decision. ECS clearly knew where this wormship was, and so would never let it leave. Maybe what was approaching now was just some sort of survey probe, maybe not, but that did not change the basic facts. The legate gave firm instructions to the structure surrounding it and began to gather up resources, which in a fully functional wormship would have taken less than an hour. The legate leaned back in the throne it was bonded into and observed as the cell closed in about it from the sides and from above, while simultaneously elongating fore and aft. Blisters began to appear on the inner walls, forming at their core the components of an escape vessel. In the distance, from within a conglomeration of protective segmented structure, a sphere of blue metal, two yards across, oozed into view and slid along the ground towards 107 like a slime-attached egg on the upper surface of a snaking tendril. This object was a U-space drive. Though a fully functional wormship might be able to build such a component anew, it would severely test the resources of what was left here. This drive, therefore, was one of the wormship’s own.
The small vessel growing and assembling about the legate now began to shudder. Before the U-space drive could reach it, numerous umbilici began attaching in order to pump in fuel and other vital materials from all around. Viewing through outside sensors, the legate saw that the segments fore and aft of the one it occupied had now shrunk down to mere spindles. The one the legate occupied had extended and taken on the shape of the head of a thickened spoon. Veins pulsed in its surface, its colour changing from a reddish brown to a greenish silver, as its hull armour hardened. Then, something unexpected occurred.
There was a figure making its way through the strewn remains of the wormship: a tall humanoid in archaic preruncible dress, a heavy object tucked under one arm and a multiple-barrelled weapon clutched in the other hand, with power cables connected to a pack slung on its back. What did this remind the legate of? Legate 107 mined its Golem Eleven memories and came up with various comparisons: a nineteenth-century cowboy, or maybe some nightmarish Philip Marlowe, or maybe a comic-book creation like the ‘original Dr Shade’. Yet, none of these comparisons seemed quite right, especially when the legate got a closer look at the face of the implacable brass Apollo. Some kind of god, then? And why did 107 immediately recognize this approaching humanoid as a male personification of Nemesis? Ridiculous thought. Even with the limited resources currently surrounding it, Legate 107 could reduce this metal-skin to scrap in microseconds. Thus reassured, 107 decided first to satisfy its curiosity.
The immediate result of the scan came as a major shock. Despite the U-space drive being yet to arrive, 107 immediately started preparations for a fast launch sequence using the resources his vessel already possessed. The brass Golem was carrying a massive CTD imploder under its arm, while the other weapon it carried seemed to have been assembled out of six proton carbines and, worst of all, the Golem was opaque to scan, yet seemed to be putting out signals compatible with the coding used by the wormship.
Problem. Big problem.
Was this Golem prepared to take its own life just to be rid of the wormship? If it was, then any kind of attack on it would result in death for Legate 107. The legate checked the slow progress of the U-space drive, then compared it with the progress of the Golem. At this rate the Golem would arrive first. Attempting delaying tactics, 107 sent out signals to cause the surrounding structures of the wormship to impede the Golem’s progress. To one side of it stood a tower formed from numerous segmented worms of Jain matter twisted together. It began to curve over. The Golem abruptly swung its weapon towards this structure and fired a precise shot into the tower’s base. The massive blast rocked the little craft the legate occupied, but did not bring down the tower, though it froze. The Golem had instantly located and destroyed the two control modules the legate had been using to control the tower. How had it managed to locate them so quickly?
Legate 107 tried
to move several other structures into the Golem’s path, but each time a couple of shots from that six-barrelled weapon stopped all further activity. Fear, then. This thing was not going to stop. The legate considered going outside to face it down, then recalculated. So what if it left here without a U-space drive? It could simply shut itself down, spend years traversing vacuum, maybe arrive somewhere after Erebus had finished its work and moved on…or maybe after Erebus had been destroyed by the Polity. Certainly, staying here now did not seem like a healthy option.
The craft’s ability to launch was ready and waiting: booster jets would serve to throw it free of this planetoid, and a small ion drive would then send it on its way. Still observing the brass Golem, the legate ordered the umbilici to detach, and next fired up the boosters. Soon the craft was ten feet up, twenty feet up. Legate 107 expected to feel some satisfaction in having escaped, yet was frustrated by the brass Golem’s reaction, for it merely rested its weapon across its head to prevent its hat blowing away–and meanwhile did not alter its pace. Twelve seconds at current acceleration would fortunately take 107 outside the imploder’s blast perimeter. They counted down easily, and so far no blast. Still connected to the wormship, 107 observed the brass Golem place the imploder on the ground, then sit down on it as if feeling suddenly weary. It took some items from its pocket, on which the legate focused, expecting to see some kind of remote detonator. Not a bit of it, though. The Golem was studying a collection of junk: a small rubber dog, a piece of crystal and a blue acorn…
Then suddenly the raptorish ship was descending nearby. Legate 107 immediately sent instructions that would turn the remainder of the wormship’s weapons on both landing ship and Golem.
Nothing happened. Something was blocking the signal.
And now 107’s view through the wormship’s sensors was fading too. The raptor ship landed and taking up the imploder again the Golem trudged onboard. The last image the legate saw was of the hawk-shaped craft ascending, and fading.