Line War

by Neal Asher

  The satellites had been here for centuries, and no one had bothered recently to replace either them or the technology they contained. The U-tech of their time had been incapable of remaining functional in the chaotic U-space environment around Anulus, hence the positioning of the single main transmission satellite. The inner satellites transmitted by laser to it, and it relayed their data through U-space to the nearest Polity science station one hundred and twelve light years away. Fortunate that, since this meant the two drones needed to subvert only the one satellite. Within minutes Cutter had intercepted a laser transmission then relayed its contents to Bludgeon, who was always better at dealing with this sort of thing.

  ‘Can you deal with it yourself?’ Cutter enquired.

  ‘Mebbe,’ came the other drone’s reply.

  During the war it was always Bludgeon who dealt with the informational stuff while Cutter got physical. Bludgeon’s job had been to open an undetectable way into Prador vessels or stations, and then Cutter’s chore was to go in first, usually to scatter the interior with pieces of the crablike aliens and paint the walls with their foul green blood.

  ‘You’ll not need to use any of her stuff?’ Cutter suggested.

  ‘I could do it meself,’ said Bludgeon, ‘but you would need to enter the satellite to make a few physical alterations.’

  ‘Just like the old days then.’

  ‘Well, at least there’s nothing alive inside that satellite…’

  The other war drones, and Orlandine herself, would have been astounded to hear Bludgeon string together more than three words. But being able to talk like this only to Cutter was Bludgeon’s particular wrinkle, his particular bit of faulty programming or maybe damage to his crystal or the mind it contained. All of the war drones on the war runcible had some similar fault–something that excluded them from normal Polity society or simply made them not want to be included. They would argue vehemently about these being faults.

  ‘I’ll head over there now, shall I?’ said Cutter.

  Cutter’s own particular fault was his utter refusal to abandon or even blunt the edges of a body made for turning the insides of Prador vessels into abattoirs. He could not actually move about the Polity as a normal citizen, since the slightest mishap, his own or that of some other, could easily result in multiple decapitations and amputations. Cutter’s edges were of a form of heat-treated chainglass that remained constantly honed down to one chain-molecule thickness. He could slice up steel with the same ease as a chef dicing an onion.

  ‘No,’ said Bludgeon.

  ‘What do you mean “No”?’

  ‘I’ve learnt the coding protocols and have the perfect tool for dealing with that satellite from here.’

  ‘You mean one of her tools.’

  ‘You have to lose your fear of the technology Orlandine provided, Cutter.’

  ‘I ain’t frightened of it. I just don’t like depending on it, is all.’

  ‘But we must depend on it. Nearly everything in this ship depends on it to some extent, and without it we won’t be able to carry out our mission.’

  Cutter grumbled and shaved away slivers of the wall, then grudgingly turned his attention to what Bludgeon was doing. The bedbug-like drone had opened up a cache of programs provided by Orlandine, selected one, a worm, and sent it in discrete parcels to the satellite. The worm must have reassembled itself within a matter of seconds, for that’s all the time it took for the satellite to fall under Bludgeon’s control. It seemed that simple computers were easy to subvert, and computers in places like this, where security had never been an issue, were easier still. Seemed to take all the fun out of it, though.

  Now, as Bludgeon ignited Heliotrope’s fusion drive to move them closer, Cutter turned his regard upon Anulus. This black hole, of approximately six stellar masses, was surrounded by a disc of rock and gas it was steadily drawing into itself. Spindlewards of this disc, the output of energy dwarfed the output of suns. Apparently Orlandine had known much about this particular curiosity because it had once been suggested as a site for a massive construction project proposed before the Cassius Dyson sphere–some kind of energy tap to utilize that vast spindleward energy output.

  The light here was glaringly bright, one glimpse with a human eye would burn out that eye in a moment. Already, even at this distance, Heliotrope’s hull was heating rapidly and thermal generators distributed throughout it were converting this to electricity and storing it in numerous laminar batteries, capacitors and in the high-density storage facility of the cargo runcible’s buffers. All this was mainly being done with Jain tech, and though Cutter didn’t like it, he was prepared to admit it was damned efficient.

  ‘I suggest we wait here,’ said Bludgeon.

  Cutter gazed upon the virtual model of the debris disc his companion had created. The position indicated was just in from the edge of the disc where the asteroidal chunks were large enough and close enough together to shield them from the worse of the radiation.

  ‘It will put you in the shade,’ said Orlandine.

  Cutter had almost forgotten that she remained in constant communication with them, so long had it now been since she last spoke. He considered trying to explain his attitude then decided not to bother. If she didn’t like it, tough.

  She continued, ‘I estimate that I will be in position some twenty hours from now, so you’ll need to head for your entry point into the fountain in about twelve hours.’

  Cutter gazed through Heliotrope’s sensors and thought that ‘fountain’ was much too gentle a word for that thing out there. The debris ring heated as it fell towards the spinning black hole, turning at first molten, then into an incandescent gas and finally to plasma at the event horizon. The radiation and ionization from this process was prevented by the disc itself from spewing out sideways, but there was a larger process involved in the production of these spindlewards polar fountains. The proportion of iron in the debris here was over forty per cent. This, combined with the spin of the black hole, created a magnetic bottle effect which squeezed escaping radiation into narrow channels spearing up and down from the black hole’s poles. The two fountains were fifteen miles wide and consisted of ionized matter–mostly iron–and electromagnetic radiation right across the emitted spectrum. Anulus was like a natural particle-beam weapon–only of the kind you might need in order to take out planets.

  The planetary system Erebus occupied with its main forces had changed visibly. Great curtains of rod-forms hung down from space into the upper atmosphere of the gas giant, where they still kept filtering out vital materials even as they were starting to withdraw from that world and separate. Three of the gas giant’s four moons were utterly covered with Jain substructure and had shrunk visibly since Erebus’s arrival here. The last of the rod-forms to have grown deep down within those moons, like animals putting on fat for the winter, were launching to bring vital materials to the orbiting wormships. The moons looked like apples destroyed by maggots.

  Nearer the sun, massive mirrors made of sodium film were directing light sufficient to power all this industry, and already this new input was causing visible storms across the face of the gas giant. This was all to plan, since these storms would stir up some final vital elements for the last of the rod-forms to harvest before returning to their mother ships, if they had them. The ships shaped like lenses Erebus had decided to dispense with since they weren’t powerful enough to stand against most ECS warcraft and, not possessing the modular construction of the wormships, tended to be a total loss once they were hit. They had become outmoded, so it was time to move on, and the rod-forms quickly cannibalized them.

  While the first fleets of wormships continued their attack on the Polity border, Erebus had watched with some satisfaction as their number here, initially eighteen thousand, grew steadily larger. The ships first increased in size and mass with the intake of materials, then began dividing like bacteria–there was something to be said for the productive methods of life. Now there were over ninetee
n thousand wormships in orbit around the gas giant and, when the time came to head out, Erebus hoped to be back up to strength with over twenty thousand of the major vessels. But each of the new ships needed a controlling intelligence with at least some degree of independence.

  During the Prador–human war Polity AIs had discovered that remotely controlled drones tended to lose that control once conflict started filling the ether with electromagnetic radiation. They had therefore enabled those drones to think for themselves, and this had led to the production of the independent war drone. Similarly, during conflict, Erebus could not remain utterly in control of all its parts so needed to give them their own degree of independence. Therefore all the wormships now had captains, as did many of the smaller vessels. Everthing else, including the rod-forms, was controlled by the nearest captain or by Erebus itself. It seemed almost a natural law that delegation was the most efficient way of controlling complex systems.

  The first wormships Erebus created had contained the minds of subsumed ship AIs, Golem, war drones and, in one or two unusual cases, even the minds of certain humans. Erebus checked the status of these minds and found, as ever, that its favourites–unlike those AIs that had been subsumed with prejudice–were still loyal to the core. It instructed those trusted AIs, as they had done on previous occasions, to start transcribing copies of themselves, thus creating new captains for the new ships. Once that process was under way, it turned its full attention to the border conflict and again assessed the situation.

  Erebus really wanted to recall some of his forces deployed there to join the attack that was about to take place, but it was just not feasible. The event that would signal the beginning of this attack would trap many of them at their current locations, and if Erebus called them in now, before that event occurred, many of the ECS ships were bound to follow, and he did not need them harrying his flanks. It was all very annoying but not unexpected. Then, while searching for some way to surreptitiously pull out some of those vessels, Erebus noticed an odd discrepancy.

  During this border attack a total of four hundred and twenty-three wormships had been destroyed. Erebus had, on some level, witnessed the destruction of nearly every one of them and could recount in detail how they had been destroyed. There were only a few ships about which such details were hazy, but even then Erebus knew where they had met their end and roughly how. The one destroyed a little while after its attack on Cull had stood no chance of escaping ECS forces, and obviously they had tracked it down to the moon where its captain had begun trying to regenerate it. As expected, the one destroyed at Masada had stood no chance at all, while the one on Ramone, with one of the few human captains, had managed to break contact, though data from other ships nearby showed that it did eventually self-destruct. However, that left still one ship utterly missing, and Erebus seemed able to retrieve absolutely no data about its disappearance.

  ‘I am ready,’ came the abrupt signal from Chevron.

  This interruption seemed entirely too timely, and Erebus experienced momentary paranoia until deciding that no one could manipulate events to that extent.

  ‘Begin,’ Erebus spat back.

  After a short pause Chevron replied, ‘Very well,’ and Erebus detected some disappointment in her tone. What did the murderous one-time Golem want now–a pat on the head?

  Erebus accelerated the consolidation of the massive fleet here. Numerous wormships were ready to divide, bringing the total number of ships up close to twenty thousand but not actually reaching that total. No matter, since Erebus would be using the sledgehammer-onwalnut approach in this instance.

  Sure that the consolidation would proceed without a hitch and that the selected captains were transmitting copies of themselves to all the new ships, Erebus checked its own extensive memory, bringing to focus all the available data about that one missing ship. It had still been active during the attack made on the ECS fleet sent out to the accretion disc, but it subsequently had disappeared only a few days before Erebus had sent two ships out to hit the dracoman colony on Masada and the hybrid colony on Cull respectively. The entity now experienced a moment of something approaching panic. How could it lose track of an entire ship just like that?

  Fiddler Randal…

  Panic faded: there was the explanation, for Randal had obviously interfered in some way. Erebus began contacting its many spies dispersed throughout Polity space, for if it did not itself have sufficient information about the missing ship, perhaps the enemy did. It then took but a moment to find out about a wormship attack on the world called Klurhammon.

  Yet Erebus had instituted no such attack.

  ‘Fiddler Randal, that world was of absolutely no tactical importance.’ Erebus repeated the opinion of various Polity AIs while leaving open plenty of channels through which Randal could safely make a reply. Randal remained silent. But why would Randal choose to cause an attack on such a world? He had been working against Erebus from the very beginning and trying to thwart this attack on the Polity, so that incident just didn’t make any sense. Erebus put additional processing power online and began analysing more closely the intelligence coming in from his spies located in the asteroid field near Jerusalem’s base.

  Apparently, those attacks upon Masada and Cull had been ascribed to the danger Jain-resistant organisms might pose to Erebus itself. The AIs were right about this in some respects but wrong in others. It wasn’t the dracoman or hybrid ability to resist Jain technology Erebus feared, but their ability to detect it. By being pushed into protecting the dracomen on Masada, and making sure that all the others off Masada got moved to where they would prove more useful to ECS–at the battlefront–the AIs had thus curtailed their movement throughout the rest of Polity, and thus made it extremely unlikely any of them would turn up on Xanadu and thwart Chevron’s mission there. However, the attack upon Klurhammon remained as much a puzzle to those same AIs as it did to Erebus.

  Delving further into the data, Erebus saw that the AIs had started an investigation, but no results were yet available. The security surrounding Jerusalem’s base had been tightened up even more, so that those watchers sitting out in the asteroid field were able to glean little about it from the nearby information traffic. However, one of the coded packets they had managed to crack was able to reveal the reason for this extra security.

  What?

  It seemed one of Erebus’s spies had been found and destroyed at the very heart of Jerusalem’s camp.

  Yet Erebus had placed no spies actually inside Jerusalem’s camp, for that solar system, like so many others, would shortly become irrelevant.

  ‘I don’t know what you’ve been up to, Randal,’ said Erebus, ‘but there is absolutely no way you can stop me now. By now I would have detected any unusual movements in ECS forces, so it is now just a matter of firepower and physics. Nothing stands in my way.’

  Yet still no reply from Fiddler Randal.

  Erebus felt a sudden deep sadness, then, abruptly angry at such weakness, set programs to scrubbing this emotion from its consciousness. The feeling of loneliness that ensued was more difficult to erase.

  Xanadu took five seconds to die–but experienced in AI terms it might well have been centuries. Chevron divided up the AI’s mind and subsumed it, erasing moral codes and any data that made up that thing called personality. Sorting through incredible masses of information, killing, deleting and…eating, Chevron finally found the first thing she required: destruct codes for the passenger and cargo runcibles here and spread across the planet, and for the two hundred and six of Xanadu’s sub-minds. Chevron temporarily blocked those codes intended for the runcibles on seeing that the AI had been preparing to send them, and instead sent the ones to the various sub-minds. Through numerous sensors now coming rapidly under her control, she observed the ceiling drones sagging and various other security measures shutting down. This all came a little late for the human separatists, but Chevron didn’t really care about them now they had served their purpose.

  Anno
yingly for Chevron, only a quarter of the sub-minds actually accepted the destruct order. The rest, obviously having become aware that Xanadu possessed that option regarding them, had subtly built defences against it, though the order did isolate them from any hardware directly under their control. Some other minds, located in independent drone bodies, were already alerted and on the move, running for cover. She observed two metal spheres and the insectoid body of an old war drone fleeing this very complex before splashing down in a nearby lake. She considered using Xanadu’s orbital weapons to deal with all the survivors, but that would take up time she did not possess, since other security issues needed to be dealt with first.

  Chevron took the block off the runcible destruct codes and sent thirty of them to the passenger runcibles outlying this complex. Viewing through sensors located in the chambers containing these runcibles, she observed the Skaidon warps wink out, oxygen fires burning bright underneath the black glass floors, and buffers dumping their energy loads into the horns of each device so that they glowed hot and shed smoke, and in some cases even began to melt. She observed prospective travellers fleeing the areas in panic but, disappointingly, there were no fatalities. She had hoped the destruct order would result in thermonuclear detonations at each location, then belatedly realized this required personal intervention from the governing AI–now herself.