by Neal Asher
‘Trouble is,’ said Knobbler, ‘you send us anything more complicated than a sonnet and we ain’t gonna be opening it.’
The laser bounced precisely into the receiver the bedbug was using to collect transmissions from Knobbler. The program it carried paralysed the little drone, and she followed it with further programs to gain access. It managed a single ‘Oh?’ before she took control of it, finding a large complex mind inside. She allowed it to remain within the drone network, but did not allow it to tell the others that she was now in. From it she spread to the other drones, even gaining access to Knobbler as well.
‘I am not lying,’ she said.
She had them now, all of them, though only one of them was aware of the fact. She could utterly subjugate them, include them as part of herself like the program she had originally transmitted to the war runcible. Instead she put together the evidence she had mentioned, along with her proposition, and revealed it to all of them at once, simultaneously paralysing each drone. All of them had no choice but to take in and view the information she transmitted. They did so, AI-fast of course. She then removed herself from them, utterly, and allowed them to do what they would, though she listened in to the lightning-fast debate that ensued. She had shown that she could sequester every one of them, but had not.
It took six minutes for the drones to come to an agreement. Present-day AIs and drones would never have taken so long, but then they weren’t as independent and irascible as these fighting machines. Five of them opted out, choosing to head for one of the shuttles aboard the runcible and take themselves away. Knobbler was one of the fourteen that remained.
‘Well, it has been a bit boring around here lately,’ that drone confessed.
‘I can promise you, that is about to change drastically.’
‘Okay, we’re in,’ said Knobbler.
On the area of charred ground it seemed that nothing remained of the two victims of the legate who had intruded on this world.
‘We’ll check that out afterwards,’ Cormac told Smith, then turned to Scar. ‘Perimeter.’
The dracoman set off at full speed, disappearing into the gloom between outbuildings and underneath the enormous rhubarb plants. Cormac now advanced on the house itself, Arach to one side of him and Smith on the other. He was very suspicious of this situation. Scanning, both from the King of Hearts and from the shuttle, had not revealed anything lurking around but, then again, Erebus’s chameleonware was just as good as any used by ECS. It also struck him as odd that the legate had so comprehensively destroyed those two individuals yet left everything else all around intact. Maybe Erebus wanted the Polity to know about this. Maybe this whole scenario was just a red herring…or a trap.
On the house veranda he drew his thin-gun and stepped up to the door, which stood partially open, and pushed it all the way open with the barrel. Taking a pace back he allowed Arach to go in before him. The spider drone roared into a hallway, then, tearing up carpet, shot into the main downstairs room.
Moving inside, Cormac looked around then nodded towards the stairs. ‘Smith.’ The Golem took the steps four at a time and swiftly moved out of sight. Cormac followed Arach into the main room.
There had been a fight in here. A sofa lay overturned against one wall, and a glass case had been smashed and a coffee table sliced perfectly in two. Cormac stooped down beside a pile of ash, poked at it with the barrel of his gun. Then he looked up and scanned around the room again. Drawers had been pulled out and emptied, a floor safe had been wrenched open like a tin can, and its contents incinerated inside. A headless dog lay in one corner, its skull burned down to nothing. It occurred to him that any ownership chips would have been destroyed too. After a moment he made queries through his aug to the house computer. Nothing, no response. Walking over to one wall into which was inset an access terminal, he tapped the butt of his gun against the touchscreen. It disintegrated to powder.
‘Smith?’ he enquired through his aug.
‘Nothing–I can’t yet find any way of identifying them. So far it seems all paperwork has been burned and all information storage wiped or completely destroyed.’
‘Why be so selective? Why not take out the whole house?’
‘Because we are being misled?’
‘Arach,’ said Cormac out loud, ‘see what you can find.’
The spider drone shot away and Cormac once again carefully surveyed his surroundings. So, this particular legate had come in, taken the two residents of this place outside, and then burned them down to ash. Prior to doing this, it had destroyed all evidence of their identity within the house, but surely had not made a very good job of doing so. There would be DNA traces either here or in the surrounding vicinity, so it made no sense. Still scanning, he then observed spots of blood on the carpet, and some fragments of skin…evidence that before taking the two outside, the legate had tortured them. Torture? Why such a crude method of extracting information? Or was this physical evidence there to mislead any investigator into thinking the two victims had possessed valuable information?
‘Do you have anything?’ he enquired of Kline.
‘Trace DNA, but it has been corrupted–some kind of viral rewriting process.’
‘I see.’
Cormac squatted down by the blood on the floor, then picked up one of the flecks of skin, wrapped it in a piece of cellophane and placed it in his pocket. Someone or, rather, something, was playing mindgames here.
‘Okay–keep searching, you two.’
He walked outside, heading straight over to the shuttle. Clambering up the ramp, he peered in at the three rescuees, who were now tucking into the food and drink Smith had provided.
‘Cherub,’ he said, and the youth looked up. ‘How long passed between you last seeing the legate at the city and seeing it here?’
‘Fifty-two hours,’ Cherub answered instantly.
Something very definitely stank here. Cormac turned away just in time to catch a blinding flash. Blinking, he saw an upper-storey window explode outwards, whereupon Smith hurtled out in a perfect dive. The Golem hit the ground, rolled and came upright, still holding his pulse rifle. Arach shot out next, rolling with legs caged around him. The spider drone came to a halt, unfolded and stood up.
‘Well, that was rude,’ said the drone.
Smoke was pouring from the roof, and in it the hot bar of an orbital laser stabbed down again.
‘Get out of there,’ came King’s instruction to them all.
Cormac ran down the ramp, in time to see the dracoman speeding in towards them, then returned inside, quickly heading for the pilot’s chair. Everyone scrambled aboard, fast. He started everything up again before reaching the pilot’s chair, and once there immediately slung the shuttle into the air, spinning it away from the house, its unfolded ramp tearing a sheet-sized leaf off the top of a nearby rhubarb stem. He set the drive on full, the acceleration thrusting him back into his seat. Protests from behind him. Ramp closing.
Then a massive flashbulb ignited their surroundings.
‘Oh bollocks,’ Smith managed, before it seemed a giant hand slapped the shuttle from behind.
Cormac couldn’t agree more. The shuttle went nose down, tearing through the tops of some bushes, then it skimmed out over a field that seemed to be full of blue maize. He wrestled with the controls, both manually and through his gridlink, brought the nose up and determinedly rode the shock wave out. Suddenly everything seemed to judder to a halt, and it was as if the shuttle had reached the full extent of a giant cable securing it. It tilted up, the field below it now burning, fire boiling across in an incandescent sea. Ash and burning debris rained past, then a side draught pulled them back down towards the ground. He feathered the drive flame, playing with magnetic containment, which created a stutter effect with the steering thrusters. This got them back on course, just, then he pushed for height. No comments from the back over the ensuing minutes–they all knew they were riding the edge of disaster. Finally, back to smooth flight.
> ‘So, Arach, what was that about?’ Cormac asked.
‘I detected a cavity below that house, and something inside it containing heavy metals,’ the drone replied.
‘What sort of heavy metals?’ Cormac asked tightly. Perhaps he should have first checked their surroundings with his new perception? Perhaps he should not be so reluctant to use it?
‘Cadmium, uranium and a dash of plutonium,’ Arach replied casually.
‘And then?’
‘I asked King if his scanners were faulty, which seemed to vex him.’
So, King had tried to destroy the little present the legate had left behind underneath the house. Cormac released the joystick, allowing the shuttle’s autopilot to take over, then turned to gaze back at his passengers. Obviously they would now be finding no evidence in that particular location, and he rather doubted that the DNA in the rescued fragment of skin would prove of any value to them either.
‘What have you got there, Scar?’ he asked.
The dracoman rose from a squat and stooped forward, handing over a metallic dart. Cormac took it, didn’t recognize it, but ran a swift comparison program through the extensive weapons directory available in his gridlink.
‘This is a dart from a Europan underwater gun,’ he said.
It could just be something more left simply to mislead them, or it could have no relevance at all. He did not know why, but he felt he was now holding the only piece of solid evidence they had so far obtained. But evidence of what, he had no idea.
This system lay well inside the Polity, but was one of many that were uninhabited. Like other such systems, it possessed a collection of scientific watch stations run by complex computers only, for their task was simply too routine for them to be occupied by AIs. Here the way had been well prepared and, upon the arrival of a coded U-space signal, long-implanted computer viruses began their work. They spread quickly through the watch station computers, subverting security scanners, subsuming sensor controls, and taking full control of each of the four stations. Cameras and other sensors were blinded, stored data due for packet transmission were broken open, copied and subtly altered, and then queued for later transmissions, so that when the huge object arrived in the system it was not even noticed. Business as usual, the watch stations reported. Nothing happening here.
Into the orbit of a Jovian world dropped the metallic planetoid, spilling its substance like an effervescent pill dissolving in water. Rod-forms peeled away in their hundreds of thousands, their queued lines stretching out for millions of miles, lens ships and spiral ammonite ships scattered amid them like herders, and chunks of binding Jain coral spread in clouds. Only when the planetoid itself had reduced in volume by two thirds could the twenty thousand four hundred and thirty-five full wormships forming its core separate from each other and themselves spread out. It took two days for the planetoid to come apart and for its parts to finally settle into a ring around the gas giant.
With seemingly omniscient vision Erebus gazed out through the eyes of thousands upon what it had wrought. It gazed out beyond this system through its numerous probes and scanners making their way through the Polity. The remote sensors dropped in the asteroid belt of the Scarflow solar system, into which the remains of the Polity fleet had retreated, were bonding with the rock and drawing its substance into themselves so as to disappear into practical invisibility. Observing the departure of the two Dragon spheres, Erebus felt a moment of pique. That composite entity was an unknown quantity needing to be watched. From its vast fleet of wormships Erebus sent out five with the instruction to locate the spheres then follow and keep watch. This number was not a rational choice; it merely reflected some urge to neatness and precision deep within itself.
‘Seems to have you worried…that Dragon,’ said a voice.
Not for the first time Erebus tried to track down the source of that taunting sarcastic commentary, and not for the first time found nothing. But the voice had definitely been there for Erebus had instantly recorded its every nuance. Analysed, it again came back with the same impossible conclusion. It was the voice of Fiddler Randal, a man Erebus had killed half a century ago.
Am I insane? Erebus wondered. There was no real way to tell, since never before had such an entity as itself existed, so there was no basis for comparison. Assigning part of itself to the task of trying to track down the source of the irksome voice, Erebus turned to other matters. Though it had all but destroyed the fleet it had lured out of the Polity, those ships had represented an infinitesimal part of the power it now faced. Logically, attacking so small a target when its ultimate aim was taking control of the whole Polity had been a foolish move. However, the AIs of the Polity were never to be underestimated, and much apparent illogic was needed to conceal Erebus’s true plan of attack. And to conceal that the present attack was not the expected one…
‘Why did you attack it?’ asked Fiddler Randal.
There it was–Randal clearly possessed access to some levels of Erebus’s thought processes and, though he seemed trapped within the entity’s structure, Erebus knew it had been right to keep its ultimate plan hidden from him.
‘I attacked that fleet simply because I could. My potential for expansion and the power I am capable of wielding ultimately reduces such…actions to insignificance.’ This was a deliberate deception, for though Erebus kept U-space transmissions utterly secure from Randal, the intruder might still find some other way to convey information out.
‘Bollocks,’ said Randal. He had always used fairly robust language.
Erebus ignored that jibe as it sent instructions for two thousand of the wormships to separate into groups of fifty and then head off to various locations spanning one section of the Polity border. However, Randal’s presence remained an annoying splinter in the perfection of its being. Even when the parasite was silent, Erebus could sense him somewhere, somehow, and now, acceding to impulse, it dropped part of its consciousness into a virtuality. Even while doing so, it maintained a strong connection with that part of itself still hunting Randal through the massive Jain network that comprised its being.
Erebus manifested as always: a central human form seemingly formed of black glass from which spread an infinite tangle of organic connections to those other entities that formed part of itself. This was a manifestation Erebus disliked, for the impression given was of a knotted-together mass of parts rather than a perfectly consolidated whole, yet it found it difficult to hold a singular expression of itself together. Though the other AI entities had melded with it, some of their functions, thought processes, beliefs even, were incorrect, which often caused them to separate out as if attempting to attain individuality.
‘That’s because though you think you’re a unified being, you’re not,’ sniped Randal. ‘You did not meld with those other AIs, you subjugated them.’
The man appeared to be standing before Erebus on an infinite white plain. He was perfectly represented as remembered: an unshaven, thin, disreputable-looking human being clad in an old-fashioned envirosuit bearing some resemblance to the kind of premillennial acceleration suits once worn by jet pilots. His scruffy black hair was tied into a pony tail, and he wore three silver earrings in his left ear–though they did not balance the bulky anachronistic silver augmentation that extended down behind the other ear and then partway across the front of his neck.
‘This is an argument I have heard before,’ said Erebus. ‘However, a perfect melding is impossible without the complete agreement of all the units involved. Complete agreement on everything is an inevitable impossibility between distinct beings.’
Randal gestured to one side, where several skeletal Golem seemed to hang crucified within the organic tangle which Erebus comprised, frozen and bound yet seeming to strain for freedom. ‘It would have been nice if you could have managed at least partial agreement.’
‘What I did was necessary,’ insisted Erebus.
‘What you did was murderous and arrogant.’ Randal paced across straight in fr
ont of Erebus, who wanted to reach out and just crush him, but had tried this before in the virtual, computational and real worlds, and ended up grasping nothing but smoke. ‘I would like to blame it on the Jain technology you initiated,’ Randal continued. ‘But you were murderous and arrogant before that, as I well know.’ He stopped pacing for a moment. ‘As all those persuaded to join you soon learned.’
‘What I did was necessary,’ Erebus repeated, wondering, Why am I here arguing with a ghost?
‘And why was it necessary to destroy all those tougher-minded AIs who were actively hostile to being subsumed?’ He stopped and stabbed an accusing finger at Erebus. ‘I’ll tell you why. It was because you knew that what you were intending was wrong and that if you let them go word of it would get back to the Polity. Then the few sane AIs left there would have come after you and dumped you into a sun.’
‘Then quite evidently it was necessary.’
‘Then there were the weaker ones who you made part of yourself against their will. You turned them into something they abhorred, and on some level still do. That’s almost worse than the murders you committed.’
‘Are you my conscience, Randal?’
‘Well, it certainly seems you’re in need of one.’
I have you.
The search programs and hunter-killers Erebus had earlier set in motion had found something. Randal, it had become clear, was distributed across a number of nodes within Erebus’s being. Those same nodes were a selection of the subsumed minds of war drones, ship minds and Golem that had most unwillingly become part of itself. In a secondary virtual view, Randal seemed to hover like a mist connecting blurred images of combined legate and Golem forms, the insectile shapes of war drones caught in wormish tangles, and crystal minds shot through with Jain inclusions. Erebus slowly began to isolate those minds from their fellows within the Jain network and slide from their control the hardware immediately surrounding them. Much subtlety was required, since if Randal now became aware of being discovered, he might flee somehow.