Line War

by Neal Asher

  ‘Right,’ conceded Cormac.

  Another abrupt change of direction sent him staggering, so he stepped over to a fixed chair and braced himself against it. Despite the attack ship dodging back and forth, King managed to keep the image of the war runcible steady. Each time Orlandine’s particle beam lashed out, Cormac flinched and drove his fingers harder into the chair back. At one point it flashed particularly close and a sound like a ship’s hull scraping a reef echoed through the bridge. A second later the outside view was momentarily blocked by a cloud of incandescent gas filled with sparking globules of molten metal, for the beam had grazed King’s hull. Then flashes blossomed about the war runcible and, again linking to King’s server, he identified their source as a multitude of hunter-killer missiles being launched.

  ‘I cannot stay here for much longer,’ said King. ‘I will attempt one close run, then I’ll have to pull out. Just be ready.’

  Cormac glanced around at Arach, who was gripping the indents specially cut in the floor for him, then across at Hubbert Smith, who was rigidly ensconced in a chair with his arms crossed and a frown creasing his face. He felt King of Hearts turn again and, reaching out with his U-sense, found the attack ship now heading directly towards the war runcible. He brought that massive objective into full focus, his perception sliding inside it. Concentrating on one of the five horn assemblies, he identified his destination and tried to fix on it. The sensation was like preparing to jump down to the deck of a violently rocking boat. The missiles were now close, their nose cones glaring steel eyes in the blackness.

  Now.

  Cormac felt able to take himself across and knew, at that moment, he could bring more along with him.

  ‘Arach!’

  The drone abruptly scuttled forward and Cormac reached down, placing a hand behind his head as if grabbing the scruff of a pet dog.

  Smith?

  No, there wasn’t time to grab him, for even now King of Hearts was turning to evade the approaching missiles and so moving away from his objective–and anyway he didn’t trust the Golem. As he stepped through nothingness, he felt that his perception of missiles whipping past him could only be illusion. He focused on a landing point, his foot coming down on metal. Gravity snatched hold of him and he realized the metal under his foot was a wall.

  ‘Whoohoo!’ Arach yelled.

  Cormac fell back towards a gravplated floor, turning in mid-air to land heavily on his feet and then roll. He ended up crashing into Arach, who had landed much better. The drone steadied him with one gleaming limb, which Cormac used to haul himself upright.

  Stay with it…

  He still kept King of Hearts within his perception, but warheads were now detonating out there, while something here–perhaps the runcible technology surrounding him–was interfering with his U-sense. Through his gridlink he set the CTD for signal-break detonation, unhooked his rucksack and abandoned it on the floor, then prepared to make the jump back to the attack ship. Too late, for the attack ship was gone–either it was already out of range or one of the detonations had destroyed it. He tried making contact through his gridlink but found too much interference.

  ‘What now, boss?’ Arach enquired

  ‘Can you contact King?’

  ‘Nah,’ said the drone. ‘Lot of EMR out there and there’s signal-blocking in this place.’ Arach reached out to point one limb up.

  Cormac looked up to see that running above them was an open framework of bubble-metal stanchions. Wound around some of these were metallic vinelike growths he recognized instantly.

  ‘I reckon it’s everywhere here,’ the drone added, punctuating this comment by opening his abdomen hatches to extrude his Gatling cannons.

  Cormac again shouldered his rucksack. A brief instruction to Shuriken prepared the weapon for fast release, then he raised his proton carbine and hoped to hell he wouldn’t have to use it.

  ‘She must know that we’re here by now,’ he said.

  ‘How true,’ said a voice he knew was Orlandine’s.

  Something peeled open twin sliding doors at the end of the corridor and a monstrous figure crashed through. Cormac crouched protectively and observed the bastard child of a giant steel octopus and a crab. War drone. One of Arach’s Gatling cannons turned and fired. The thing was lost in flame, then an instant later Arach’s missiles were detonating against a hard-field some yards ahead of it. Arach ceased firing and backed up until standing directly before Cormac. Behind the hard-field, the big drone braced its tentacular limbs against the walls of the corridor. Then its lower waspish abdomen detached and drifted forward. It began turning randomly, and around it the air filled with distortions like hard-edged heat haze. Cormac was unsure of what he was seeing until he spotted a chunk of metal sticking out from one wall clatter to the floor, cut clean through. This object was projecting atomic shear fields, and now it advanced to the hard-field and began to slide through.

  ‘I might survive this,’ observed Arach. ‘But you won’t unless you get the hell out of here.’

  Cormac glanced back down the corridor to another twin door, before facing forward again. He could take himself away in an instant, and he could take Arach with him, but now that he was here he wanted some answers.

  He stood up and held out his rucksack. ‘My death will result in this detonating, but I don’t even have to die. I can transport myself and my companion, in the same way I brought us here, to any other part of this runcible and then send the signal for this to detonate from there.’

  The spinning abdomen was now through the hard-field. When its invisible shears brushed the walls they made sounds like sharpening knives. Cormac reached into his pocket, groped around for a moment, then pulled out the Europan dart. He held it up.

  ‘Orlandine,’ he said, ‘I know you can hear me and I know you can see me. You can probably do so much more than that because of course you’ve deified yourself with a Jain node.’

  Abruptly the thing ahead stopped spinning and just hung motionless in the air.

  ‘Orlandine,’ Cormac continued, ‘I want you to tell me about Klurhammon and your two brothers.’

  The reply was immediate. ‘You could have asked me that while you were still aboard your attack ship. Incidentally, that’s a neat ability you have there. It is one, despite my deification, as you call it, that I don’t possess.’

  ‘I can stop you now,’ Cormac replied. ‘But while I was aboard King of Hearts that was not an option.’

  ‘Why would you want to stop me destroying Erebus?’

  ‘I need to be convinced that is your true purpose.’

  ‘Very well, Ian Cormac of ECS, leave your CTD on the floor there and Knobbler will bring you to me.’

  Cormac paused for a long moment. After all, she had control of Jain technology, probably provided to her by Erebus, and there was the danger she could interfere with his link to the CTD if he gave her time. She was a known murderer and a thief who controlled war drones, like this Knobbler, and a weapon capable of trashing planets. The right and logical thing to do would be to detonate the CTD and remove this threat to the Polity. However, there were too many inconsistencies here–too much he could not see clearly. Erebus had attacked a planet ‘of no tactical importance’ on which her brothers had resided, and this dart he held was discovered there near where two humans had been specifically murdered by a legate.

  He needed answers. However, as he unshouldered the CTD and placed it on the floor, an uncomfortable notion occurred to him. It wasn’t the events on Klurhammon that mainly influenced his decision. He did not want to die. He no longer trusted those he had spent most of his life working for. And she sounded sane.

  ‘Are you sure ’bout this, boss?’ asked Arach.

  ‘Not entirely.’

  ‘Right,’ said the drone, retracting his cannons and closing their hatches.

  Cormac looked beyond Arach to the other drone at the end of the corridor. Abruptly the hard-field winked out and the shear device drew back to reconnect an
d once again become part of Knobbler. The big drone turned fluidly but noisily, before it gestured with a long evil-looking pincer on the end of one tentacle.

  ‘Follow me,’ it said.

  15

  Before the Quiet War, the Earth Central AI was an electronic bureaucrat processing the day-to-day minutiae of running Earth’s government and economy. With most industries being run by machines, it was the job of the political and corporate classes (one and the same by then) to dictate to the lower classes–who were mostly on some form of state handout–every aspect of their lives, or to pursue the really important aspects of their position, such as fattening their bank accounts, screwing their secretaries, being seen with media stars and generally sucking up the cream of society. These human politicians and corporate leaders, who made up the parliament of Earth Central, did not have time for balancing budgets, calculating taxation and running services on a worldwide and often extra-planetary scale. They took their eye off the ball. After the Quiet War, the Earth Central AI became supreme autocrat and a better ruler than the human race had seen before. Better, but not necessarily the best.

  –Anonymous

  As her little intership craft drew closer to that bloom of Jain coral, Mika felt easier about piloting the more she comprehended the scale of her surroundings. Out at the edge here the gaps between the branches were up to a half-mile wide, so she felt in little danger of crashing into them since she was equivalent to a gnat flying between the branches of an oak tree. However, it seemed that as those worries abated, they revealed a deeper fear sitting like a lead ball in her gut. Here she was, flying into a massive alien artefact in order to find alien AIs and wake them from their five-million-year sleep. When she actually focused her mind on that, she felt near to the borderlands of madness and didn’t know whether to giggle or scream. So next she forced herself to focus on her immediate surroundings and each consecutive task ahead.

  Travelling past it at only a few hundred miles an hour, she studied the attack ship caught between two branches. It was of an old style not often seen in the Polity nowadays: all sharp corners and flat surfaces, which were a requirement for the kind of chameleonware and armour used then, and two U-engine nacelles protruding so far from the main body that they appeared to be pinioned on the end of wings. She noted how the craft had been penetrated by vinelike Jain tendrils, and distorted and lost much of its substance as if someone had poured acid on the centre of its main body. She visualized the massive bloom here spreading like a slow explosion, and then one branch of Jain-tech shooting out like a Dragon pseudopod to spear this ship and suck the life out of it. Surely the AI aboard had acceded to this, else it would have moved out of the way? Mika had never seen Jain growth travel any faster than the strike of a snake, which over the distances involved here would have appeared as a slow crawl. Then again the AI might have been unwilling but been previously crippled to make it easy prey. The dappled black and purple shadows beyond the attack ship abruptly reminded her of her own troubled dreams. She saw in them the shape of what lay beyond; something ineffable, complex, alien…

  She accelerated and soon her surroundings grew dark enough for even the light amplification of her suit visor to begin struggling and throwing ghostly after-images across her vision. Checking through her craft’s controls she pulled up a radar density map of her surroundings, but it wasn’t really what she was after. Then, far down on the menu because it was an option rarely used, she found the control she wanted and turned it on. With a whine two hatches opened in the craft’s nose and large square lights extruded from them. When their powerful white glare illuminated the way ahead, she wondered what effect the lights might have on her craft’s power supply, but a quick check reassured her that the drain was manageable. Only then did she notice movement to one side.

  For a long moment she dared not look, was almost scared that nothing substantial lay there. Then she angrily forced her gaze over to the left, where two branches forked to create a structure like a scapula. There, on a branch like the trunk of a redwood fashioned of bone, it looked as if someone had poured treacle, which was streaming down in rivulets. She turned the craft, swinging the two beams of light across. Branches were lit for miles ahead until it seemed that in the distance they formed a solid wall, but it was only on that particular branch that there was any sign of movement. It seemed as if a horde of snakes was writhing along it, and after a moment Mika realized what they were.

  ‘Cobras,’ she said, relieved.

  ‘Pardon?’ Dragon queried in her head.

  ‘I thought your remote was the only part of you accompanying me, but now I see that’s not the case.’

  The snakes possessed cobra heads and, every so often, she saw a flash of sapphire. Dragon was extending a mass of pseudopods down this branch parallel to her own course.

  ‘You are incorrect,’ said Dragon. ‘To extend my pseudopods for the full distance you have to travel would be an unacceptable waste of my resources.’

  ‘So what are you up to?’

  ‘I am exploring this area–but I will accompany you for part of the way.’

  It wasn’t much of an answer. Mika eyed the pseudopods and noted that a group of them, having gathered together for a moment, were now parting and sliding on, leaving some large object in their wake.

  ‘You’re extending your defences,’ she commented.

  ‘Astute of you.’

  ‘Against what?’

  ‘It is always sensible to take precautions.’

  Was Dragon taking precautions against whatever might ensue once she reached her destination? That seemed possible, and Mika did not like the idea one bit. Nevertheless, she used the steering jets to line up her craft with that same destination again, feeling somehow unable to do otherwise.

  The visual effects ahead were quite strange, rather like seeing a street light shining through a tree. The branches of Jain coral extended far ahead, her light beams seemingly straightening out their kinks, then seemed to terminate in a distant twiggy wheel. With her view much improved, she accelerated, taking the craft up to over seven hundred miles an hour before collision alarm icons popped up on her screen. She decelerated for a little while until the icons went away, then continued coasting in.

  In the ensuing hour Mika managed to rig the autopilot and so was able to sit back and study her surroundings. She spotted another scout craft caught up in the coral. This one had been cut in two, its halves some distance apart and yet bound within the same branch–she had no idea why. Then, after her view had remained unchanged for some time, this weird environment lost its power to distract her, so she unclipped her notescreen from her belt and set to work categorizing all she had previously seen in the accretion disc. She made notes and ran modelling exercises–anything to stop herself thinking about why Dragon had brought her here.

  ‘Slow down,’ Dragon abruptly instructed.

  In a panic Mika spun the craft with its steering thrusters then used the main engine to decelerate.

  ‘Coordinates on your screen.’

  Mika peered down at a density map of her surroundings, her craft a winking icon amid translucent branches. On one of those branches a small square red frame was also winking. It took her some moments to orient herself, and then know to look up to her left. She could see nothing there so turned the craft to direct its lights that way, revealing some minuscule object secured to a branch. Firing up the steering thrusters again, she took her craft closer, soon seeing something orange resembling the blemish caused by a parasite burrowing into a plant stem. It was only at a distance of a hundred yards that she finally recognized its shape.

  ‘Oh hell.’

  ‘This is interesting,’ Dragon replied.

  Mika slowed her craft but it continued to drift in closer. The Polity had been making spacesuits that particular shade of fluorescent orange for a long time, especially for those working on the outsides of space stations or ships, so that they could be easily seen or easily found–it was a safety thing. But
she guessed the suit makers had never envisaged this scenario. When she was ten yards out from the suit she could see the mummified face behind the visor and the roots of Jain-tech that had punched through the fabric. Did they kill him–or her? Or had the decompression done that?

  ‘We know that some humans did accompany Trafalgar’s exodus from the Polity,’ said Dragon.

  ‘I bet they wished they hadn’t.’

  ‘One has to wonder why this one is stuck out here like this.’

  ‘Trying to escape?’

  ‘Most likely–but I will extend my pseudopods to here to investigate further.’

  Mika backed up her craft and returned to her course. Now she felt tense, the leaden feeling returning to her stomach, perhaps because she was reminded of her own mortality. Jerking the joystick forward she ramped up the acceleration to get away from there as quickly as possible and for some minutes ignored the collision warning icons. Then she felt stupid and eased off, after a moment putting the craft back on autopilot. Glancing up she saw two blue eyes peering down at her. With concern maybe?

  Over the next hour the regular beep of collision icons had the autopilot regularly knocking down her speed. Nearing the centre of the coral bloom, its branches were much closer together and in some cases even melded, with webworks of coral bridging the gaps. Eventually she reached an area that seemed all but impassable, until she checked her density map and found a way through. She carefully edged her craft up close to the mass of coral before her, then peered to one side. There. Turning she motored through a fork, then turned again, her craft bumping against something material nearby. Coral flaked off, frangible as charcoal, and tumbled through vacuum. A short twisting passage to worm through, then she was out the other side and into a wider space.

  ‘The Trafalgar,’ Dragon announced in her head, and Mika immediately felt her mouth turn arid.