by Neal Asher
Why should I be disappointed? she wondered. What purpose would further deaths serve? Then she mentally shook herself. Why had she entertained such an unwonted thought? Surely the deaths of yet more humans was an end in itself? She now concentrated on the next stage of the plan. At least now ECS would not be able to send relief forces through the affected runcibles.
A brief coded signal started up her ship, which was now located in the bay of the orange sea nearest to her current position. It engaged its antigravity motors, and underwater blasts from its steering thrusters sent it hurtling towards the surface. Viewing the scene through a nearby weather station, she saw the ship surface and begin to rise into the air, sloughing off all the remaining detritus encrusted on its hull. It turned till its nose faced the complex and, firing up its main fusion engine, accelerated in. Within minutes it would be in position overhead.
As a security measure Xanadu had shut down all material transport through the runcibles here and had ordered the complex to be evacuated the moment the separatists began their attack. Now queries began to arrive as to why all the other runcibles on the planet had also shut down. Using the required codes, Chevron sent a previously concocted reply explaining that high-level separatists intended using those other runcibles as an escape route. This would delay any investigation for the further few minutes she required. Now she began searching through the complex’s manifest and found there the expected cache of Golem–all empty-headed and awaiting the download of sub-minds from the AI. She obliged them all by sending a stripped-down version of herself which knew full well what needed to be done next. The door to a sealed warehouse to one side of one of the cargo runcibles opened abruptly and out marched a hundred chrome skeletons.
Chevron then saw, through various cameras, that things were no longer so chaotic inside the complex. Large areas had been abandoned and crowds of people were steadily departing through the main doors. All the separatists were either dead or in custody, while security officers–both Golem and human–were restoring order among those departing or quickly rounding up any stragglers. Already she had received a hundred and twenty queries from these officers about what to do next. Sending another stripped-down version of herself to each of the various ceiling drones, she relished the prospect of them turning all their weapons on those who had not yet managed to flee.
But that’s not what I’m here for…
It was annoyingly true. Why waste time killing humans who, in reality, could have little impact on the plan?
‘Make sure the complex is completely evacuated,’ she ordered. ‘There are further concealed explosives I have yet to locate, and I have intelligence that some of them might be nuclear.’
Few questioned this order, since it came from such an unimpeachable and omniscient source. To expedite matters she put her instructions up on the announcement boards as well. The few still evacuating the main waiting lounge gazed back with some apprehension at the silvery Golem now appearing and departed all the more quickly. As the last of them left, Chevron closed the lounge doors behind them and sealed off all other exits and entrances. She felt satisfied to have them out of the way and glad not to need to start the killing again…
Chevron paused as she again thought how uncharacteristic it was for her to care about what happened to a few humans. Perhaps, simply by occupying the structure formerly occupied by the Xanadu AI, she had taken on some of that entity’s traits. Could that really be possible?
No.
She began running diagnostics, but in the first few seconds there were no returns. Then, abruptly, there were thousands of them, all detailing the intrusion of alien code and alien material technology. She shut off those programs, realizing they had been Xanadu’s and were only detecting Chevron herself. Quickly she ran her own programs and found some of the returns quite worrying. The amount of her substance she had lost while attacking the AI meant she was slightly overextended, which also meant that, though she had killed Xanadu, she was still in the process of displacing what remained of it. In those programs and in that hardware that remained, Xanadu had left something behind. She knew this could not have been created in the short time between the AI realizing it was in danger and it dying, but instead was something it had prepared inside itself for just such an unlikely eventuality.
It was a virus, Chevron concluded, but the more she studied it the more baffled she became. For it was doing things to her she could not quite comprehend. She applied some of her processing power to the task of building antiviral programs, but each time she seemed to have established the antidote and set it to work, the virus mutated. Annoyingly, she could not use her full processing power on it either, since her ship had now arrived in the sky directly above.
Chevron shut down all automated sytems mounted in the pillars extending up to and through the chainglass roof over the main runcible lounge, and the weapons inside them, initiated by sub-AI programming upon detecting the proximity of an unauthorized ship, died. The skeletal Golem had meanwhile opened a weapons cache and, having armed themselves with some serious hardware, were spreading out through the complex to cover all critical corridors and exits. In some areas they followed up behind the security forces, driving the evacuation even faster. No time for further delays.
Upon her instruction, her ship opened a hatch and lowered a carousel missile launcher, which began revolving to spit its load down towards the chainglass roof. The missiles hit like lumps of putty but did not explode; instead lumps of soft technology issued decoder molecules into the chainglass beneath them, which began to come apart. At each impact site the the glass crazed over, small cracks spreading out ahead of a white bruise. Areas of ceiling soon turned to dust, and disintegrating sheets of glass crashed to the floor. Above, the ship retracted its missile launcher while extruding yet another weapon from another hatch. The green beam this shot out was only visible where it penetrated the cloud of dust rising from the collapsing roof. It sliced through the decorous frameworks that had held the variously shaped sheets of glass, and a large portion of the roof structure soon followed the glass down inside. Having retracted this weapon too the ship then descended at high speed, crashing to the floor of the lounge, crushing furniture, bars, eateries and all such human paraphernalia underneath it.
Chevron began to receive immediate queries from the security forces in the city, then from all over the planet. At first she fielded them with neat selections of lies but, growing bored with this, quickly put together an automated program to do her lying for her. She knew this would not hold them off for very long, which was confirmed when in a military base some fifty miles away security personnel began cutting links to their planetary AI and moving warcraft out of the hangars. Briefly, before all the feeds from there went offline, she glimpsed the escaping drones she had earlier seen splash down in the lake. Undoubtedly everyone would soon be aware that Xanadu was no longer in control, but they would not be able to react quickly enough.
Chevron put twenty-eight of the passenger runcibles online, outgoing only, while holding the rest in reserve. Twenty-seven she set to particular addresses selected by Erebus long ago. The twenty-eighth she selected at random, then hesitated. Was it necessary now to cause further disruption which could result in further deaths? It was the Xanadu virus talking inside her, she knew, but the intensity of what she was feeling seemed difficult to deny.
Do I really need to send any of these?
Her ship cracked open its ramp hatch, folding down and crushing an automated vending stall underneath it. She continued to fight aberrant impulses that were certainly not her own while gazing through the vessel’s internal sensors to see that the twenty-eight imploders were now ready to go. Brief self-analysis showed her that the delay before each of her actions was growing longer. She was hesitating, procrastinating. Abruptly angry, she sent the required signals.
Peeling themselves from the interior walls of her vessel, metallic octopoid forms settled to the floor and headed for the row of imploders, which sat li
ke large bullets in a long ammunition clip. These Jain biomechs were without solid bodies; open tubular frameworks hanging in their place instead. The first of them reached the first imploder, crouched over it and squatted, the framework contracting about the weapon so the biomech could heave it up from its seating. With a flowing gait the mech then headed for the ramp, its body now a source of obliteration–it was a walking bomb–and the others, picking up their loads too, followed it.
Much shooting was in evidence around the complex now. Chevron linked in to some of her Golem and updated herself on their situation. The moment her ship had descended, security forces in the city had become concerned, but her lying engine had initially kept them from doing anything. Obviously they had now received intelligence from the distant military base from which the warcraft were launching even now. City security officers and military personnel were attacking the runcible complex, while in certain quarters of the city armoured AGCs were rising from the ground but wisely keeping their distance knowing the defences Chevron controlled. At ground level gravtanks were closing in, but it was all far too late in the day. Chevron had meanwhile noted a worrying development: her Golem had been infected with the same virus as herself and, abandoning their proton carbines, had dialled down the power output of their pulse-rifles and were now using non-lethal force to keep the attackers out. At one level this angered her intensely, but on another she felt gladdened. It would not be much longer before this damned morality virus turned her into something she would previously have despised.
Once outside her ship, the octopoids separated into small groups and sped off in different directions. Chevron tracked their progress across the main lounge, along the concourses leading to the various sub-lounges, where she watched individual octopoids finally heading for their assigned runcibles. Now, with each in position, all she had to do was tell them to step through, whereupon detonation of each imploder would take place automatically and simultaneously in the spoon of each receiving runcible.
She didn’t want to.
And when did I summon you here?
The twenty-eighth octopoid was now squatting right outside the pillar she occupied, and the bomb the thing contained would certainly prove a lot more destructive than the explosives the separatists had used earlier.
The morality virus had made much headway inside her–faster than she thought possible–and now she was almost at the stage of not wanting to resist it any more. Only by forcing herself to become angry could she overcome it, and even that was proving more and more difficult. However, for one last time she managed to summon up her former hatred of soft useless humans–and she sent the signal. The octopoids stepped through the Skaidon warp of their allotted runcibles, arriving only instants later at twenty-seven different destinations.
Oh no…
Chevron instantly wanted to summon them back. She had just wrought massive death and destruction, and it was all entirely her fault, yet even that would pall in comparison with the ensuing catastrophe she had ushered in. She desperately wanted to stop this happening, to stop those bombs, but it was all just too late. A combination of growing guilt and the knowledge that she had completed her assignment for Erebus allowed her to relax her grip on herself. She ceased fighting the virus and immediately drowned in a tsunami of remorse.
Belatedly, she realized why she had summoned the twenty-eighth octopoid…as she sent its detonation signal.
13
Earth Central Security is a hydra of an organization and it has to be said that the ‘Security’ in its title is now both anachronistic and somewhat misleading. ECS started out as a force under the human world government some time before the Quiet War that led to the AIs displacing human leaders. Under Earth Central and the ruling AIs, it retained its title but began to incorporate all the other services, including navies, armies, air forces, the secret national security agencies of the solar system and later parts of the amalgamated health services too. During the Prador–human war the ambulance and military medical services, while remaining conjoined with the main health service, were driven by the necessities of war to link up with ECS to a degree required by its controlling AIs, whose first purpose was the survival of the Polity and not necessarily the health of its individual members. During the latter stages of the same war this organization, while remaining subordinate to ECS, incorporated all units whose purpose was to rescue injured or trapped personnel from ships, space stations, moons and planets. It then became known as ECS Rescue. After the war, certain horrible necessities no longer being a priority, ECS Rescue was divided into ECS Rescue and ECS Medical–the purpose of the first being civilian and military rescue, the role of the second being to provide a military medical service–for the inventiveness of weapons design required increasing specialism when it came to repairing the damage they caused.
–From her lecture ‘Modern Warfare’ by EBS Heinlein
The Salvaston runcible complex was like so many others found on highly populated Polity worlds. It sprawled in the centre of the capital city in a location where on Earth in the previous millennium would have stood the main railway station. Part of this complex contained four cargo runcibles, surrounded by handler robots looking like the titanic offspring of a mating between the goddess Kali and a piece of earth-moving equipment. From the runcible chamber in which these behemoths laboured, tunnels speared away in every direction, gravtrains arriving and departing continually to ferry cargo to various outlying warehouses or alternative transport links. Here there were few humans and most of what happened was automated.
At the centre of the complex lay the main lounge, a waiting and refreshment area for the thousands departing Salvaston or arriving upon it. The lounge itself was a mile across, its ceiling a chainglass confection of peaks and domes. Across a wide marble floor patterned like raspberry-ripple ice cream extended an assortment of restaurants, bars, tea shops and vending machine stalls, amid enormous seating areas. There were even walled gardens boasting a variety of exotic plants and creatures, for instance the one adjoining the Lobster Lobby, into which customers could throw the remains of their dinners to feed the carnivorous ambulatory cacti. There were numerous ponds and fountains too, like the cerulean pool in which swam G-mod goldfish glowing with internal neon. The lounge looked like some massive bazaar, street market, shopping mall and waiting room all rolled into one. However, it was nothing unusual, since places like this evolved wherever travel was nailed down to such a nexus.
What was unusual here today was the proportion of people wearing uniforms. There were troops in chameleoncloth fatigues who, out of courtesy, wore oversuits of some thin white fabric while mixing in civilian company, since there is nothing quite as disconcerting as encountering a disembodied head bobbing about in a crowd. There were also the familiar blue and yellow uniforms of ECS Rescue personnnel, and military-issue ECS envirosuits, which possessed the same qualities as chameleoncloth but, their effect being electrically generated, could easily be turned off. Very occasionally, amid this crowd, the menacing shape of a war drone attracted comment and attention.
From this main area concourses radiated off to smaller departure and arrival lounges–the designation of each dependent on what the AI had currently set the nearest runcible to do, which sometimes could be performing both functions. Those departing never had very long to wait, since delays in runcible travel were practically unheard of and all bureaucratic details and security measures were enacted electronically through sensors and augmentations, and at speeds way below the notice of sluggardly human minds. New arrivals from other worlds coming through the fifty-three passenger runcibles were greeted by relatives or quickly went on their way. The proliferation of uniforms today did attract brief notice, but a few enquiries via aug or gridlink soon reassured the curious that this martial presence was due to a huge Polity fleet presently in orbit about Salvaston. Many of them had no need to wonder, since the presence of the fleet was the reason they had come: either preparing to join or simply out of curiosity
about what was happening out here.
The arrival designated XAN-7834 from Xanadu might have been able to answer some of their queries, had it been able to talk and had it managed to come intact through the Skaidon warp. The Salvaston AI, monitoring numerous runcibles scattered across the planet and every microsecond making complex calculations it would take a human prodigy a lifetime to complete, kenned the arrival of the passenger in the underspace spoon of the runcible and was immediately niggled by some inconsistencies. There was something odd about the information package describing this traveller, but the AI just could not put its metaphorical finger on it. In an instant it upgraded security in that particular runcible chamber and prepared to deep-scan this new arrival. The spoon began to retract, drawing the traveller towards the real.
Detonation.
In a place somewhere between realspace and U-space, the octopoid detonated its imploder. The blast within the spoon expanded it, and also forced its way through the Skaidon warp. The face of that warp, as seen from the side of the runcible chamber, turned incandescent. Filtering through the warp, the energy lased, pumping out gamma radiation in the form of a brief but intensely powerful graser beam. It sliced straight through the runcible complex, evaporating all those travellers waiting for the next slot. It punched through the containment wall, and fire exploded out beyond. The temperature in the arrival/departure lounge rose tenfold within a few seconds. Hundreds of human beings turned to fire, fountains boiled, plants wilted and smoked. It was as if the whole place had suddenly been dropped into some massive furnace. As it shut down every single runcible within its remit, the AI saw that the only things still showing signs of life in there were the staggering silver skeletons of Golem, their syntheflesh now burned away–but even they would not last much longer.