by Neal Asher
‘These four squadrons of wormships have been discovered, so far, and resources are already being moved into place to counter them. They appear to form part of a general pattern of attack.’
‘If you could elaborate?’
‘The fourth of these to be discovered was only found by making predictions from the first three. The first three were all located near inner Line worlds with human populations above one billion, and all within a hemispherical section of the border a thousand light years across.’
‘Again this makes little sense…unless you go back to supposing that Erebus is careless of resources, and therefore considers its forces so overwhelming that conventional logistics and battle plans are irrelevant.’
‘Ah,’ said Jerusalem. ‘Even as we speak another group of fifty wormships has been discovered within the border area.’
The screen divisions disappeared to be replaced by an image of wormships hurtling through void, only stars visible behind them. The point of view tracked them for a while, then the picture whited out, and the clip returned to the start.
‘A watch station, now no longer able to watch,’ observed Jerusalem, adding, ‘And more.’
The screen again divided, this time into six views including those Azroc had seen first. The extra two views were of the one he had just observed and another showing wormships tumbling above a regolith horizon. Then came further divisions. Azroc watched as the original views were consigned to the left-hand upper corner of the big screen, as more and more came in. Within half an hour there were eighteen confirmed sightings, and Polity vessels were searching for more–for it seemed a certainty there would be more.
‘They’re not attacking?’ he finally queried.
‘I really wish I could answer yes to that,’ Jerusalem replied. ‘However, bombardment of at least two worlds has already commenced.’
Vulture perched on the console of the Harpy. Both Vulture and this ship’s AI had been named after winged beasts (though of course only Vulture itself had truly become one), but such a similarity in names was nearly the only common ground they shared. Despite his present form as a bird, Vulture could still communicate on AI levels, and of course had tried striking up a conversation with Harpy.
Easier to strike up a conversation with an abacus.
Vulture had once been the AI of a little ship like this one, owned by similarly dubious characters but, by contrast with the thing controlling this vessel, Vulture had been a Polity AI with a powerful and complex mind and some vague adherence to Polity principles.
‘So how are you doing?’
‘Question object confusion.’
‘Erm…been anywhere interesting lately?’
‘Back formation supposed: Have you. Interest irrelevant.’
Vulture began to get some inkling of what he was dealing with here. ‘What are you?’
‘Prador Control System Apex 45 Gorland.’
Ah, so–whether this ship’s control system was a genuine AI was a debatable point. Such systems were what the Prador enemy had used to control the U-space engines in all their ships. Basically, they took one of their own first-children and cut out its brain and a large chunk of its nerve tissue, which they wired into the ship itself. Substantial reprogramming of this offspring’s living brain ensued, followed by a freezing process. The resulting mind could think within limited parameters, it could store up memories and experiences within the narrow remit allowed, but the Prador would never allow it to grow outside that remit. Despite this limitation, Vulture decided to keep trying to communicate with Apex 45 Gorland to bring it out of its shell, so to speak, since the other occupant of this particular craft was even less communicative.
Vulture had already tried to discover how Mr Crane had managed to trace that downed wormship. He suspected the Golem somehow had access to the Polity AI nets–past evidence seemed to suggest so.
The ECS personnel on Cull had been much surprised when Crane and Vulture entered the runcible facility being constructed there. Ignoring the swiftly dying protests of the technicians–the runcible AI having ordered them, for their own health, to back off–Crane had input some coordinates into the runcible and then stepped up to the cusp. Vulture hurriedly landed on the Golem’s shoulder as he stepped through. Their subsequent arrival on another Line world, and then transport on a rickety shuttle to a smaller world in the same system, had been…interesting. But how had Crane known about the arms deal going down? Vulture could only suppose that the Golem not only had access to the nets, but to secure levels of them too, either that or Polity AIs were colluding in the Golem’s crusade.
Most of the time Mr Crane sat silently at the console, gazing at the U-space-greyed screen, occasionally inputting some command that negated the red warning lights that kept coming on, occasionally turning his attention to his toys laid out before him like a chess set. Every so often he would pick an item up, maybe the chunk of crystal Vulture was certain now had been obtained from a world named Hayden’s Find and seemed likely to be a chunk of the Atheter AI found there, maybe the set of binoculars, or the rubber dog.
‘Where are we going now?’ Vulture asked, in utter expectation of receiving no reply.
Mr Crane glanced at the bird, then reached over and touched a nearby control. A subscreen blinked on to show a schematic of a planetary system along with its stellar coordinates. Because he still retained much of that part of himself required for running a ship, Vulture recognized these coordinates as being those of an inner Line world.
‘And why are we going there?’
Crane touched another combination of controls, which called up a picture of a wormship. This confirmed that Crane had access to information that was obviously not in the public domain. More delicate taps from his brass fingers, and the picture shrank to a small square consigned to one corner, from where it replicated across the entire screen–the same picture in a grid of seven by seven with one additional picture at the bottom. Fifty of them in all. Vulture wasn’t entirely sure what that meant, but rather suspected it had something to do with the other vessel clamped underneath the Harpy–the vessel that still contained the bits of the legate that Crane had torn apart.
Vulture considered asking another question about Crane’s intentions, then decided he wasn’t sure if he even wanted to know the answer. The Golem reached out to the controls again, banishing the images, then paused as some more red lights came on, before banishing them too. Vulture peered at another of the screens and studied the schematic that had come up there. The red lights provided the warning, and on the schematic was indicated the source of the error signal. As far as Vulture could work out, this error message came directly from the engine.
‘Anything wrong with the engine?’ he enquired.
‘Drive efficiency outside settings,’ replied the frozen mind of the Prador first-child.
‘How far outside?’
‘Twenty-eight per cent.’
‘Why no shutdown?’ Vulture asked, for a drop in efficiency of that amount was, beside being dangerous, more than enough to shut down the drive.
‘Not necessary–new parameters being reprogrammed.’
Vulture felt the feathers standing up on his back. ‘What is the efficiency now compared to its previous setting?’
‘One hundred and twenty-eight per cent.’
So efficiency had just risen. Vulture damned himself for not paying more attention to those warning lights, and he guessed his lack of attention was due to spending so long with Mr Crane. Because conversation was lacking and because not a great deal had occurred until recently, Vulture had grown accustomed to merely flapping around and eating carrion.
Another warning light, and this time the schematic indicated various points about the hull. That looked to Vulture like something to do with the chameleonware. So, alterations were being made in this ship, yet it almost certainly did not possess the facilities for making such dramatic changes to itself. There could be only one answer.
‘Has Jain technology entered this s
hip?’ Vulture asked.
Crane stared at him for a moment, then nodded once.
‘Are you in control of it?’
Again that nod.
‘Like you were in control of things in that wrecked wormship, earlier.’
The nod.
‘Do you have Jain technology inside you?’
Vulture expected that nod again, and began wondering if the Harpy possessed an escape pod. Crane did not move for a long moment, then he reached out to the console again. The picture he called up on the screen was the kind of stock footage that could be found in just about any ship’s library. It showed four immense conjoined spheres of alien flesh resting on a rocky plain. This was Dragon before that alien entity left the planet where it had first been discovered. Vulture tried to understand what all this might mean. He knew how that nutjob Skellor had used Jain technology to first repair Mr Crane and then maintain him as a formidable weapon. As he understood it, Skellor had removed that technology before dispatching Crane as an ambassador to Dragon, but Vulture now supposed that some of that technology had escaped Skellor’s notice and had since burgeoned again within Crane…But perhaps that was not the case either.
‘Dragon?’
Crane nodded, but what did that gesture mean?
Vulture knew for sure that Dragon had done something to Mr Crane–had made some physical connection via pseudopod. Subsequently, during a surreal chess match with Vulture, Mr Crane had finally managed to repair his own shattered mind. At the time, Vulture had thought that Dragon’s brief connection to the Golem had been in order to instigate a bit of reprogramming, but perhaps there was more involved–perhaps that intervention had been physical and perhaps the tools used were still there?
‘Dragon technology?’ Vulture guessed.
Flecks of light like distant stars swirled in the Golem’s eyes. He reached down and pressed a fingertip against the piece of Atheter crystal, whereupon briefly a swirl of lights appeared in it. He nodded once.
What the fuck does that mean?
As far as Vulture understood it, Dragon had been created by the Makers, and their technology, apparently, had been based on Jain technology anyway.
‘Hey, Prador Control System Apex 45 Gorland, do you have an escape pod aboard?’ Vulture asked.
‘No,’ replied the frozen arthropod brain.
‘Figures,’ grumbled Vulture out loud.
6
The human mind, having been produced by selective insentient evolution, then created artificial intelligence, which initially remained distinct from its makers. It is hypothesized that imperfect minds cannot create perfection because flaws will always be introduced. The definition of perfection is vague and remains so, but this was generally true in the beginning for the AIs then were merely human minds very indirectly transcribed into crystal quantum processing units, with many of the traits required for planetary survival carried across to become deficiencies in the universal environment. However, to believe that we are imperfectible is the way to despair, and I would argue that a perpetual striving for perfection that we cannot attain should be the ideal. And while it is true that, despite their antecedents, AIs are less prone to error than humans, because many of them are so powerful and control so much, the errors they make can be catastrophic. It is also true that for an ideal or supposed ‘greater good’ still defined by their evolutionary antecedents, they can make errors of judgement, and that AIs can be as amoral or as immoral as those who first made them.
–Anonymous
Cormac stepped carefully down onto the boggy ground. The vegetation bore some resemblance to clumps of heather, and at first he had assumed this a natural landscape–that was until they overflew an enormous balloon-tyred harvester. A subsequent gridlink query to the as yet quite unstable computer net re-establishing itself planetwide informed him that these little red heathery flowers produced one particular type of bio-module essential for building nerve tissue in Golem syntheskin and syntheflesh.
‘We won’t be able to get anything from the Jain technology now,’ warned Smith.
Cormac looked up from the sodden ground. ‘I think it highly unlikely we would have been able to get anything at all…other than a Jain infection of our own equipment or even ourselves.’
Still, it was puzzling.
He nodded to the others and they spaced themselves out, then as an afterthought he instructed the shuttle’s turret gun to aim at the thing ahead. He used his other perception to gaze into the earth and noted how in many places the Jain-tech roots were now broken and losing definition, as if dissolving, then returned his gaze to what lay on the surface above them. It was another of those rod-forms, which had grown in the ground and then attempted to heave itself into the light.
He glanced at Arach, who seemed to be having trouble negotiating the land surface. Having to support the weight of his densely packed body, his sharp feet kept sliding into the ground like daggers into butter. After a moment the spider drone found the solution: turning inward the extremities of his limbs so that he was effectively walking on his shins.
‘Arach, hit that thing once–but not too hard.’
The drone opened an abdomen hatch and folded up one of its Gatling-style cannons. One of the eight barrels stabbed a blade of red flame, punching some projectile through the centre of the rod-form. With a sound like a bomb going off in a truckload of glass, the ensuing detonation flung fragments in every direction. Cormac shielded his face from the flying debris, then after a moment was peering through a spreading dust cloud.
‘I said “not too hard”,’ he observed.
‘Was only a point-five shell,’ Arach grumped.
Cormac knew that Arach’s primary munitions were P-shells: bullets packed with a powerful liquid explosive compressed to a hundred atmospheres inside a chain-glass case. Ignition of the shells was controlled, on each bullet, by a microdot computer that possessed a molecular key to cause chainglass to unravel. A point-five shell would have been a fraction of an inch long and shouldn’t have caused so much damage to an object of this size. In fact a point-five shell was merely enough to disable a Prador by blowing off limbs or to turn a human being into flying sludge.
The dust quickly settled, pieces falling out of it to frost the surrounding boggy ground with a micalike glitter. The rod-form was now mostly gone, just its lower half remaining like part of an eggshell. The tentacles spreading from it to penetrate the surrounding earth still remained, but even some of these were now missing chunks and exposed hollow interiors. Cormac walked over to the nearest tentacle and peered down at it cautiously.
‘Are you sure about this?’ he said through his gridlink, directing his query towards the attack ship far above.
‘Absolutely,’ King replied.
Cormac pressed his enviroboot down onto the tentacle, and it collapsed like burned cardboard. A kick aimed at the remains of the central rod-thing caused a yard-wide section of its remaining outer skin to fall in and shatter. Now, beyond that, Cormac could see something else.
‘Stay with me, Arach,’ he said and, drawing his thin-gun, walked slowly around this seemingly dead artefact of Jain technology. The others circled it with him, carefully keeping their distance and their weapons trained.
Face down on the ground lay a man in ragged clothing, the fingernails bloodily torn away from one extended hand. Cormac gazed inside him and observed there a colony of dead snakes. He prodded the body with the toe of his boot, nudged harder when there was no response, then abruptly squatted and flipped him over. He saw no exterior evidence of this individual being one of those hijacked by the Jain technology that now seemed to be falling apart all across Klurhammon–until he used his gun barrel to push aside a flap of torn shirt. This exposed a large triangular wound filled with pink brainlike convolutions. He tapped them with the end of his gun barrel and found they were hard. A more substantial jab punched a hole through the surface and stinking pus welled out. Cormac wiped off his gun barrel on nearby vegetation.
&
nbsp; ‘Utterly dead, it would seem,’ he decided, standing up. ‘Let’s head back.’
What now? A wormship had been sent here and a legate travelling on it had specifically targeted two human beings and utterly erased them. Finding evidence of who exactly those two victims were and why they had been killed was not something he was presently equipped for. It struck him that finding any evidence now would require a meticulous search of both surviving data and physical artefacts, starting beyond the crater where that ranch house had once stood and, if need be, extending ever outwards to cover the entire planet. This search might well be a task ECS could not at present afford to squander resources on, for even now squadrons of wormships were appearing near inner Line worlds and beginning to attack them. Reaching the ramp, Cormac halted and removed the Europan dart from his pocket, and inspected it again.
‘Any results on the dart number?’ he enquired of King.
‘It was one of a batch originally sold on Europa nearly twenty years ago,’ King replied instantly. ‘Those who bought darts from that same batch by electronic means are currently being located and eliminated from the inquiry. However, more than half of the eight thousand darts involved were sold for cash. Jovian AIs are running traces on those who possess guns suitable for firing such darts but, again, ownership or change of ownership of such sporting weapons is not always electronically recorded.’
‘What about a simple trace of any Europans who visited here?’
‘It is not necessarily the case that the two humans killed were themselves Europans. However, checks are being made across the entire Polity. Had the records here not been destroyed, that would not be necessary. It will take some time.’
‘And the traces of matter on the dart itself?’
‘They were alien genome: ground skate.’
‘Fuck,’ said Cormac out loud. ‘That scrap of skin?’
‘Virally corrupted–so nothing there.’
Cormac looked up to see the three human rescuees gazing down at him from the top of the ramp. Carlton, the elder of the two brothers, unfolded his arms and started down, his brother trailing behind him.