Line War

by Neal Asher

  It sat there in the centre space like a pinned bug, though a particularly large one, attached to the remains of the moon it had partly eaten. Numerous thick trunks of coral spread out from it, running straight for half a mile to the point she had just passed through, where they bunched together and then branched. Mika recognized the shape of the vessel, the nose a squat wedge with two enormous U-engine nacelles depending behind it, close together, and another jutting up above. Behind these lay a docking ring with a few smaller ships still attached, then its main cylindrical body, which sat in a huge square-section rectangular framework. The cylinder’s spindle doubtless ran in bearings mounted at each end of the framework. This was clearly a body fashioned for centrifugal gravity, which showed that the warship had been built long before the Prador war, then adapted when the conflict began. To the rear of the main body and enclosing framework jutted the engine section terminating in an array of fusion engine combustion chambers. All over the vessel were gun turrets, the throats of rail-gun launchers and hatches for missile racks, some open and with their contents poking out into space as if ready for an attack. The whole structure was tangled in Jain coral, however–in some places completely shrouded and in others with its hull broken open where trunks of the stuff had smashed their way out.

  Beyond Trafalgar, tendrils were heavily entangled around a scattering of asteroids, rock that had melted and run and then hardened in vacuum into baroque shapes, hollow crusts of ash and tough volcanic glass. Debris floated free there, and numerous areas were dark with soot. These were the remains that active Jain technology had left behind, like discarded carapaces and rocky snakeskins–matter with the wealth sucked out of it.

  ‘So,’ she said, ‘the Jain AIs are the roots of Jain technology, yet here it seems to me that the technology is dead, so how can the AIs be here?’ Though she said these words, Mika really did not believe them, for she felt as if she had ventured into some haunted house where violent spectres were about to come crashing through the walls at any moment. Releasing the joystick, she studied her hand, expecting to see it shaking, but oddly it wasn’t.

  ‘There is little energy to be utilized here,’ Dragon replied. ‘Let me give you another analogy: trees.’

  ‘Explain.’

  ‘The most activity you witness in a tree is at the tips of its twigs where the leaves sprout and where it opens its flowers and sheds its pollen, where it grows its fruit, yet the trunk itself is not dead.’

  ‘How can you be sure this trunk is still alive?’

  ‘That fact was demonstrated as you travelled in here. I am seeing it now even as I reach the corpse you saw earlier. There is activity here now–though fed merely by the power of your ship’s lights and the heat from its engines.’ Dragon paused, and Mika looked up at the remote to see that its palp eyes were now directed towards Trafalgar. ‘Note the effect of your lights here.’

  In an instant Mika saw it. For some minutes her lights had been shining constantly on Trafalgar, and now, over a section of its coral-encrusted hull, a shifting movement appeared like that observed in the skin of a squid when trying to camouflage itself. Mika quickly found a way to turn down the glare, then turned up the light amplification of her visor to its maximum. Though it would have been safer to kill the lights completely, she left them on because, right then, the dark scared her.

  ‘I see,’ said Dragon.

  ‘What do you see?’

  ‘I am examining our long-dead friend,’ Dragon replied. ‘And through my remote I am also seeing something rather anomalous.’

  ‘What?’ Mika peered at Trafalgar.

  ‘Attached to the rear of the nose section–on the docking ring.’

  The vessels docked there were swamped in Jain technology, but Mika could not see anything more anomalous about them than in anything else here.

  ‘I see two small shuttles and an attack ship,’ she peered closer, ‘and what looks like some sort of EVA vehicle.’

  ‘Look closer at the attack ship.’

  ‘I’m looking but all I’m seeing is an attack ship.’

  ‘An attack ship like the Jack Ketch in its original form?’

  ‘Certainly.’

  ‘And not like the one you saw on the way in?’

  ‘No, not like that one. This one is more modern…Shit!’

  ‘Do you understand now?’

  ‘Tell me about the corpse,’ said Mika.

  ‘She wore an aug, but its contents are utterly scrambled. The design of the aug, and the design of her spacesuit, are as revealing as the design of that attack ship you’re now looking at.’

  Mika was not entirely sure of what to make of any of this, but certainly did not like it. That attack ship down there, docked to the Trafalgar, was of a design that had not appeared until some time after the war, and some time after Trafalgar and the others had departed the Polity. It seemed that someone had run foul of this exodus of the dispossessed.

  Or had been sent to seek it out.

  Knobbler’s not controlled, came Arach’s communication direct to Cormac’s gridlink. He’s letting me scan inside him and I can’t find any Jain-tech there.

  Cormac allowed himself a tired smile–maybe he was making the right decision after all. He gazed at the mackerel-patterned back of the big drone as it propelled itself ahead of them along the corridor. He knew that drones like this one, who had been incepted during the Prador–human war, had been given their own choice of body form.

  A spider shape, like Arach’s, was good design. His six legs gave stability for the Gatling cannons; in addition, numerous limbs allowed for fast manoeuvring, and sacrificing one or two of them wasn’t a problem. Anyway, choosing the shapes of known living creatures had a practical justification in that each one had been shaped by billions of years of competitive evolution, so many of them made for perfect war machines. Knobbler was therefore a little at variance to that norm but not greatly so.

  As they reached one of the stairwells winding up out of this runcible buffer section and began climbing, Cormac saw the patterns on Knobbler’s back subtly shift and realized what had been nagging at his memory. At first sight Knobbler was little different from Arach, just an insectile monster created to fight. However, Arach did not possess chameleonware because, like most drones manufactured in the big factory stations during the war, resources could not be spared to apply such sophisticated technology to what was supposed to be a short-lived fighting grunt. The mackerel patterns evident on Knobbler were the effect of an old style of chameleonware, so it seemed likely that this ’ware had gone in when the drone was built during the Prador war. The big drone had been fashioned to work in ship’s corridors much wider than those here aboard the war runcible, and his major weapon was perfectly designed for slicing through hard armour–or rather carapace.

  ‘You’re an assassin drone,’ Cormac announced.

  Still clattering forward, though abruptly turning his viewing tentacle to face back, the drone said, ‘You’re observant. So what?’

  ‘They built your kind specifically to penetrate Prador vessels.’ Cormac nodded towards the pattern on the drone’s back. ‘You have your own chameleonware. You went aboard to turn Prador into sashimi.’

  ‘It was a living,’ said Knobbler, turning his viewing tentacle forward again.

  Cormac had heard about drones like this but never encountered one before. This was worrying. Knobbler, and the others of his kind here, had deliberately opted out of Polity society in order to spend years guarding a war runcible. Cormac guessed that their being asocial, or even antisocial, had been built in. Knobbler did not have to like humans because he had been created to work alone or perhaps with only a few of his own kind–unlike Arach, who was a war drone constructed to fight beside humans in planetary conflicts. Drones like Knobbler had been terror weapons whose sum purpose was to terrify alien creatures who were nightmares themselves. And it was precisely those of Knobbler’s kind that had departed the Polity along with the Trafalgar. Might it be that Corma
c was making a mistake here?

  ‘Are there many of your kind aboard?’ he asked.

  ‘A few still,’ Knobbler replied vaguely. ‘Cutter went with Bludgeon on the Heliotrope.’

  ‘The Heliotrope?’ Cormac queried.

  There was a delay before Knobbler replied. Probably he was receiving instructions from Orlandine. ‘The Heliotrope is carrying a cargo runcible which will be used to feed this war runcible its ammunition. Even now it is moving into position.’

  ‘Where might that be?’

  ‘Now that I can’t tell you,’ said the drone. ‘Remote as that possibility might be, there’s still a chance you could escape with such information.’

  Jain-tech was evident just about everywhere aboard this enormous weapon. Wherever there was a wall panel missing or a junction box open, stuff that looked like steel sculptures of vines and roots lay exposed. Where ceilings were missing, opening the view into other sections of the runcible, larger versions of the same tech, often less metallic and more coraline, could be seen wound around stanchions and I-beams. It seemed Orlandine had occupied this place thoroughly with her tech, and Cormac wondered if she was beginning to produce Jain nodes yet–if she was beginning to go to seed.

  After some minutes they passed through a series of airlocks that Cormac realized must mark the division between two segments of the runcible. Then a few twists and turns further through narrow corridors brought them to a main one, which terminated against a drop-shaft. Before reaching the shaft, Knobbler halted by a side corridor.

  ‘You go there.’ The drone extended one of his nightmarish limbs towards the shaft.

  ‘You’re prepared to let us go and see her alone?’ Cormac asked.

  ‘My presence don’t make a wit of difference. Orlandine can look after herself well enough.’ The drone gazed with evil squid eyes at Cormac. ‘Do you think she didn’t know about your CTD the moment you transported yourself aboard?’ With that the drone turned and rumbled away into the shadows.

  ‘Nice guy,’ said Arach.

  ‘Was that sarcasm?’ Cormac asked.

  ‘Y’ think?’

  ‘So Orlandine knew about the bomb I was carrying,’ Cormac mused. ‘She must have known that I could detonate it at any time, so our friend’s,’ he waved a hand towards the dark side corridor, ‘attack on us was not intended to succeed.’

  ‘So what was the intent then?’ asked Arach, as they continued towards the drop-shaft.

  Cormac did not reply for a moment. Orlandine was in possession of some very dangerous technology–both Jain-tech and a war runcible–but she was no arrogant or fanatical separatist leader. Before acquiring her Jain node she had been an overseer of the Cassius Dyson Project and someone did not attain such a position without having a first-class mind. Just to check something he sent a test signal from his gridlink and then frowned at the result.

  Aware that she was probably listening to what he was saying, Cormac replied to Arach, ‘I would say that within a second of my arrival here she had worked out both my abilities and my intent. She knew I could not get back to King of Hearts so wanted to push me.’

  ‘Push you to what?’

  Cormac halted by the drop-shaft. ‘To transport myself somewhere away from the CTD in order to detonate it, because she knew she could block any signal I tried to send to it.’ Cormac paused for a moment. ‘Is that not so, Orlandine?’

  ‘Remarkably fast thinking for a non-haiman,’ Orlandine replied. ‘Are you coming up or are you just going to sulk down there?’

  Cormac stepped into the drop-shaft, felt the irised gravity field take hold of him and drag him up, the steel spider visible between his feet below. He stepped out into some kind of control centre with a domed chain-glass roof. Scooting out behind, then leaping to one side, Arach tentatively opened his gun hatches. A ring of consoles enclosed a scaffold in which had been mounted what Cormac guessed to be an interface sphere, that being the kind of technology a haiman like Orlandine would be used to. He waved a calming hand at the spider drone, and Arach closed down his hatches.

  Walking confidently forward, Cormac said, ‘So what happened to my attack ship?’

  ‘It took the only option available to avoid destruction, and it U-jumped,’ replied Orlandine. ‘It is now some hours of travel away within the disrupted area–that much at least I was able to calculate by its U-vector. Doubtless its U-space engines are wrecked and it has sustained much other damage besides, up to and including the loss of its AI. Obviously I won’t know until the light of that occurrence reaches me here.’ It wasn’t just travel and communication that were slowed to the speed of light, or below, by U-space disruption, but observation too.

  Finally the door to the interface sphere opened and Orlandine herself stepped out. Her holographic image had manifested aboard King of Hearts as an unaugmented female clad in a simple one-piece ship suit. Obviously that had been stock footage, for Orlandine wore a haiman carapace with the petals of a sensory cowl open behind her head, a heavy spacesuit and an assister frame that also provided her with two extra limbs. Capable of looking after herself indeed, but Cormac rather suspected her powers were not primarily those now visible before him. He had no doubt that one wrong move would result in all hell being unleashed from the Jain technology that crammed every nook surrounding him.

  ‘I see,’ he said.

  He saw that his link to the CTD had been cut; he saw that his method of escape was now hours away, if it could even get back here to become effective. He was in a trap, and now the cherry on top of this shit-cake was standing up from where it had been sitting silently on the other side of the room. Even Arach was cringing down a little at the sight.

  ‘Fuck,’ Cormac added. ‘You.’

  Mr Crane reached a hand up to raise his hat in acknowledgement.

  Her head heavy and her stomach tight, Mika felt poised between the two, stretched and almost on the verge of panic. She settled her craft upon a flat area of composite hull that was utterly free of Jain coral or any of those wormish growths, but knew she would not be able to avoid them so easily once she found her way inside. She did not relish the prospect.

  ‘Your suit lights will not be able to provide it with enough energy to attack you. That fact is plain physics,’ Dragon reassured her.

  ‘Yeah, but what if there are any caches of energy here?’ she said tightly.

  ‘There are,’ Dragon replied, ‘but my remote contains sophisticated scanning equipment, so I will warn you in plenty of time if there is any danger.’

  ‘Great.’

  Mika checked through the screen display until she found ‘gecko function’, and then initiated it. As if it had descended with glue on its runners, the craft stuck in place. She killed its lights, the light amplification of her visor still providing her with an adequate view of her surroundings, though the ghosting effects were numerous. Using the controls at her belt, she called up the visor display and checked the options available. Her suit possessed its own lights, apparently, though she had not noticed them when putting it on. Complemented by the light amplification, they were very low intensity, which was just fine right now. She turned them on and immediately her surroundings became sharp and clear. It took her a little while to determine that the light was provided by photo-emitters located on her chest: a series of glassy discs which she had noticed earlier but assumed to be sensors of some kind. She inspected them, placing her fingers over their brightness and observing the shadows cast. Then abruptly she shook herself: no more procrastination.

  Mika hit the door control and waited while the cabin automatically purged–blowing a cloud of vapour outside, which drifted off like a crippled spectre. The door then opened, and she unstrapped herself and stepped out, using her visor menu to again select ‘gecko function’, this time for her boot soles. Taking a few paces away from the craft, she felt as if she was walking through treacle. Halting, she gazed at a spot where Jaintech had torn a hole through the attack ship’s hull from the inside and then sli
thered out to spread over the exterior. She could probably squeeze her way in through there but, no matter what Dragon said, she wanted to actually touch that stuff as little as possible. Mika started heading for the airlock situated further along the hull, then paused and turned upon noticing sudden movement.

  The remote had eased itself down the side of her craft and, with a ripple passing through its body from nose to tail, propelled itself out into vacuum. Mika thought for a moment that it must have made some sort of mistake, for surely it now had no way of getting itself back to the attack ship, but it flapped its skate wings and changed direction, as if it was actually flying through air.

  ‘How the hell is it doing that?’ asked Mika.

  ‘Doing what?’

  ‘Flying.’

  ‘In the sense that you mean, it is not flying,’ Dragon replied. ‘For the duration of your journey here it has been converting much of its material structure to reaction mass, which it is now ejecting through numerous pores on its wing surfaces.’

  Now Mika noticed the fog of vapour spreading out from the remote, and how the flapping of its wings did not seem to correlate with its motion. After a moment the flapping ceased as it brought itself to a full stop and focused its stalked eyes towards her. As she continued towards the airlock, it followed her like a pet bat.

  No matter how modern a ship might be, airlocks were always provided with a simple manual option in case the power should fail. Of course, had there been air inside this ship it would have been impossible for her to open the inner, manual, part of the lock from the outside, for it hinged in and the air pressure would have held it in place. Judging by the holes she could see in the ship’s hull she very much doubted there was any air left, though there was always the possibility of some being trapped inside the lock itself.

  The lock door was flush with the hull, and the manual lever lay underneath a cover that detached easily once she pressed in the catches either side of it. She tossed the cover away and watched it tumble towards the surrounding dark forest. Grabbing the handle she pressed in the safety release, which moved easily, then pulled the handle around the length of its traverse, and felt the clonk of the locking mechanism through her feet. She shoved against the lock door, but it would not move. Probably the seal was stuck. Standing upright, she stamped down on the door with one foot, being careful not to detach herself totally from the hull. The door hinged in enough to make it distinct from the rest of the hull. Another stamp dropped it an inch further. Crouching down, Mika lodged the fingers of one hand under the edge of the frame and with her other hand pushed down on the door. It resisted for a moment, then something ripped and it hinged all the way inside. She noted chunks of hardened breach foam floating about within the airlock and realized what had happened. The damage to the ship had distorted the shape of the door frame, so sealant had been automatically injected. That probably hadn’t helped those still inside the ship. Mika peered down further into the airlock and found confirmation of that last suspicion.