Line War

by Neal Asher

  The orange suit was immediately recognizable since she had seen another less than an hour ago. It was stuck to one side of the airlock, bound in place by Jain tendrils. Mika pushed herself down inside the lock and took a closer look. Behind the visor the mouth of the mummified face was wide open as if frozen in a last scream, and inside she could see small spikes of Jain coral. She shuddered and moved on.

  No problem getting through the inner door–it seemed the distortion that had caused her problems with the outer one did not extend here. Beyond was a small chamber for spacesuit storage and recharging. Mika pressed her gecko soles down against the floor and walked across the area to a sliding door. Again she had to pull the cover from a manual control–a handle that folded out to wind the door back on a rack and pinion. The remote drifted up behind her as she peered into the corridor this opened onto.

  Jain growth crowded the floor, walls and ceiling as if this were some jungle cave filled with roots and lianas. She stepped through and, it being zero gravity in here, propelled herself along the corridor, trying her best to not bring a foot or hand down on any of this insidious stuff. However, she had to adjust her course slightly, and there was so much growth she could not avoid touching it. It did not react, however, and it was like pressing her hand against whorled stone.

  ‘Head for the bridge,’ Dragon suggested.

  ‘That’s what I am doing,’ she grumped back.

  A few hundred yards along the corridor she halted her progress by grabbing a door jamb, and gazed inside at a macabre sight. Here stood a serpentine tangle rather like a fig vine, and bound within it was a freeze-dried woman. She was naked, indicating the Jain-tech had caught her by surprise. Mika moved on.

  Eventually she reached a drop-shaft, which soon opened into a short corridor terminating against the doors accessing the bridge. Some minutes of hard effort started the double sliding doors opening, and air hissed out to fog the corridor around her. In this mist she noted black bits like flecks of soot. Reaching out she grabbed some out of the air and inspected them closely. Common houseflies. Dead.

  When the doors were finally open enough, she entered the bridge and looked around her. It appeared some of the ship’s crew had fled here, for the bridge was an ossuary, with skeletons scattered across the floor. She inspected the dead with a critical eye. These were clothed, their envirosuits more durable than the flesh they had contained. It occurred to her then, by the position of the bones, that they had all died before the gravity failed, for they were stuck to the floor by a frozen grey adipocere thick with fly chrysalises, dead flies and even dead maggots. Obviously a few flies had managed to get aboard at some previous port of call and to survive, and this bridge must have remained warm and oxygenated for some time. The ship’s AI? All of the corpses here showed charred bone and burns through gaps in their clothing. Laser burns, probably from the ship’s internal defences. Either the AI itself had been killed and those defences taken out of its control, or it had been melded with Erebus, and carried out this slaughter itself.

  ‘I wonder why the life-support kept on running?’ Mika looked around for the blue-eyed remote and saw it stuck to the wall right above the doors. ‘You’re scanning?’

  ‘I am.’

  ‘What about this ship’s AI?’

  ‘Smashed–so obviously it wasn’t a willing participant in this.’ Dragon then added, ‘I see that it separated life-support here from itself and concealed a trickle feed to it from one of the reactors. It tried its best to hide these people. After taking control of internal defences and killing them all, Erebus must have missed the feed or just ignored it as of no consequence.’

  So what the ship’s AI had done to try to save them had ultimately allowed them to rot away.

  ‘Is there anything here of use to us?’ she asked.

  ‘Perhaps something can be learned from their augs and gridlinks,’ suggested Dragon.

  Mika peered at the array of bones and saw one skull had a bean-shaped aug still attached behind where its ear had once been. She reached down and twisted the aug hard, snapping its bone anchors, then pulled it away. The skull shifted, its jawbone falling loose, and the aug came away trailing fine hairlike strands–the nanofilaments that had connected it to the brain inside. Mika collected four augs in all and dropped them into her belt pouch. Any gridlink would require her either opening up a skull to get to it, or carrying about with her the skull it was in. Both notions seemed too ghoulish.

  ‘I suggest you now head for the docking tunnel to Trafalgar,’ Dragon opined.

  Despite her macabre surroundings Mika did not want to go there. While her own craft had been heading into this huge Jain structure, and while exploring this vessel and wondering what had happened aboard it, she had been struggling to keep from her mind the true reason for her being here. She had come here to wake up the Jain AIs and deliver to them the information inside her head. She could feel herself right beside where things got really thin and knew that somehow those AIs awaited her aboard Trafalgar.

  Orlandine eyed the spider war drone. Its antecedents were similar to those of the drones on this station, and as such it was damned dangerous. Having already scanned it carefully, she knew it was similarly packed with weaponry, but she had prepared programs to seize control of it the moment it tried to employ its hardware. Then she studied the man and the brass Golem in turn. She wasn’t entirely sure which was the more dangerous. This man, this Ian Cormac, was a tough-looking individual with cropped silvery hair, an olive complexion and sharp striking features. His eyes were noticeably grey and cold. He was an agent of ECS, so that certainly meant he was trained to kill–and fast–but he was also a human capable of doing something as yet unheard of: transmitting himself through U-space. And that wasn’t all, for Orlandine had scanned him too. Certainly he was a human being and not some kind of machine, yet the gridlink inside his skull was activating by some means she had not encountered before. It seemed to be connected to some sort of mycelium laced throughout his bones–a structure not dissimilar to Jain-tech.

  ‘I take it you two have met?’ she said.

  Then there was this Golem. She knew the story of the prototype that was stolen from Cybercorp, even though the theft had taken place before she was born. She knew about the tapestry of legend that had grown up about this same killing machine. But the reality of it was even more worrying. Mr Crane was heavily armoured, and what lay inside him was mostly impenetrable to scan, but what she could see hinted that he had been severely remodelled and contained some kind of technology definitely not developed in the Polity. Then there was the other stuff she had received on informational levels. His communications were mostly machine code and almost incoherent in their brevity, yet behind that she got the sense that she was communicating with something as complex and powerful as a major AI, like Jerusalem, Geronamid or even Earth Central itself.

  ‘Yes, we’ve met,’ said Cormac, still gazing at the Golem. ‘Mr Crane was trying to kill me at the time.’

  ‘Then perhaps you know that Dragon helped repair his mind.’ Orlandine smiled at him. ‘He’s all better now.’

  Cormac turned and focused on her, and something about his poise worried her. She knew she could move very fast, but wondered if she might be quite fast enough if he tried anything. Then she dismissed the idea: nothing could be that fast, here.

  ‘You broke my link to the CTD,’ he observed.

  ‘You won’t be needing it.’

  He carefully reached into his pocket and took out the dart, and Orlandine felt her throat constrict. Earlier he had taken it out of his pocket and asked her about her brothers, and she had then instantly made the connection.

  ‘When my mother Ariadne and I were on Europa she missed Ermoon and Aladine a great deal. She saw two of the dart guns for sale in a shop–they use them there in the underground sea–and immediately bought them for my brothers.’

  ‘She then sent the guns to them on Klurhammon,’ Cormac suggested.

  ‘Yes.’r />
  ‘Where Erebus killed both of them?’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘Why?’

  ‘Because I did not use the Jain node he gave me for the purpose intended–I fled with it both from him and from the Polity AIs.’

  ‘To cover your escape you murdered someone–a haiman called Shoala, I believe.’

  ‘I’m not proud of that.’

  ‘Continue,’ said Cormac, the tone telling her that she had been judged for that act and found wanting.

  ‘As I took the node apart I realized I was supposed to use it with less caution than I did use it. I was supposed to become a weapon that destroyed a large portion of the Polity.’ Orlandine paused, appalled at how much this was hurting her. ‘I fled and I continued to learn. I learned how to find Jain nodes and tracked the course of a node aboard one ECS attack ship of a fleet following a legate out of the Polity.’

  ‘I was aboard one of those ships.’

  ‘I see…I followed and I got trapped by the same USER disruption that trapped your fleet. And, for the record, I destroyed that USER thus letting what was left of your fleet escape.’

  ‘How noble of you.’

  Orlandine felt a surge of anger, then quickly repressed it. ‘I did not do what Erebus wanted me to do, and Erebus saw me destroy its USER. Erebus took revenge on me by killing my two brothers. I was sent a recording of their…deaths.’

  ‘So that’s the why,’ said the agent. ‘Now tell me the how.’

  ‘With the resources I now control it was not difficult to seize this war runcible.’

  ‘But how did you manage to put yourself here in Erebus’s path? To have done so surely means you knew something of Erebus’s plans.’

  Orlandine decided to lie to him rather than get involved in explaining the complicated saga of Fiddler Randal. ‘When I returned to the Polity, I encountered one of Erebus’s wormships. I extracted information from it before destroying it.’

  ‘I see.’

  But he had. She could tell he had seen right through her and knew that last utterance to be a lie. It didn’t matter, as she just needed him to believe that she was genuinely here to destroy Erebus. It then occurred to her to wonder why she did so much need him to believe. Certainly he, like that ugly little drone squatting behind him, was dangerous, but she felt confident she could wipe him out in a second. Then she understood what this was all about, what she was feeling here. She wanted absolution.

  ‘And now him?’ he said, raising a hand and pointing at Mr Crane.

  ‘A source of further information,’ she replied. ‘Ever since Erebus destroyed the hybrids on Cull, who were considered by Mr Crane to be in his charge, he has been Erebus’s enemy. He has supplied me with the ’ware and recognition codes that now conceal this war run-cible.’

  Cormac nodded slowly, one hand now hovering over his other wrist. Orlandine had a laser pointed straight at his head from the ceiling. He would die if he threw that nasty little device on his wrist–just as the nasty little device would die too.

  ‘I must return to my interface sphere now,’ she said. ‘Erebus is coming and I have to be ready. So what are you going to do, Agent Ian Cormac?’

  He took his hand away from his wrist. ‘I must wait and see what the outcome is here.’

  Orlandine turned away from him and stepped back into her sphere, sweat slick on her back under her carapace. Her many eyes watched him from the ceiling, but he made no move. She guessed he would just wait for that outcome then. If she and he survived it, he would probably try to kill her. ECS agents never forgave murderers.

  16

  …and it was a danger faced by the Polity. We know that some AIs and some haimen disarmed and used elements of the technology. It is speculated that much of our own nanotech was reverse-engineered from Jain artefacts, e.g. the mycelial connectors for augs, the ‘little doctors’ which are usually reserved for those in dangerous occupations, and the probably mythical mycelial ‘ComUtech’ which supposedly enables individual humans to transport themselves through U-space. Of course, as in all things, there is always an element of choice. Just because the Jain AI finger is no longer on the trigger, does not mean the trigger won’t be pulled, or that the gun’s holder won’t pistol-whip someone with it.

  –From QUINCE GUIDE compiled by humans

  Ensconced within her interface sphere Orlandine quickly and fully reconnected herself to the war runcible and began viewing scan-data being flagged for her attention. She ran a deep analysis of a massive disruption in U-space, and this confirmed the initial analysis she had made while speaking to Cormac: something big was on its way towards the corridor through to Earth.

  She called up realtime sensor data through her U-space link to Heliotrope and saw that same ship currently bearing down at a sharp angle on the polar fountain from the Anulus black hole. Even heavily filtered, the view ahead of Heliotrope was a painfully bright storm of energy and ionized matter. The ship was heating up and Cutter was routing the heat through superconductors into thermal generators, then firing the excess energy off into space by means of the vessel’s supply of evaporant. She was about to suggest that starting up the cargo gate would give the vessel some shielding, when Bludgeon turned it on anyway. Mounted on the jaws of the ship’s front grab, the runcible’s triangular gate sprang into being. It could not be seen that it was as reflective as a mirror, for the fountain’s fire turned it into a charcoal silhouette. The energy hitting the other side and passing through the Skaidon warp now accumulated in the U-space spoon, since as yet it had been given no destination.

  ‘Erebus approaches,’ she told the two drones aboard Heliotrope.

  It was Cutter who replied, since Bludgeon was deep in the mathematical realm of runcible mechanics. ‘We’ll be in position within minutes. Bludgeon calculates that, once in, we’ll be driven along the course of the fountain, even with the gate open, since there’ll be pressure against the Skaidon warp.’ Cutter paused contemplatively. ‘But why am I telling you all this? You already know every detail of what is happening here.’

  ‘You’re probably telling me because you’ve spent too much time in the company of habitually taciturn war drones,’ Orlandine quipped.

  ‘Just because they don’t talk that much to you doesn’t make them taciturn,’ Cutter replied. ‘It makes them sensible.’

  Orlandine grimaced, then observed the horns of the cargo runcible now turning in order to wrap the Skaidon warp over themselves. Standing in the world of information at Bludgeon’s shoulder, she noted the drone monitoring the build-up in the spoon, balancing buffer energies and slowly increasing fusion-reactor output to the warp. The little ship now lay only a few miles from the fountain’s edge–and one nudge from the main drive would place it inside that appalling fire. She also noted that Heliotrope’s temperature was still rising, but kept her counsel to herself for a little while. Bludgeon then showed her he knew precisely what to do, for the three horns detached from their seatings and, driven by hard-field projectors, began to expand the triangular warp. Heliotrope’s umbrella needed to be bigger.

  ‘I’ll want you to go to maximum expansion of the cargo gate,’ she explained, then wondered why, since the two drones did not need her input. ‘I will give you plenty of warning,’ she added, then focused her attention at her end, on the barrel of this massive weapon.

  There was no need to run any more tests. Orlandine retuned the chameleonware for a major change in what it was hiding, then started up the war runcible’s Skaidon warp. Though the device was hidden from outside view, her view of it was perfect and she felt a thrill on seeing the meniscus ripple into being across the area enclosed by the five horns: the five runcible sections. It stabilized quickly and she then initiated the separation of these five sections. The feeling for her was almost painful, like pulling off some tightly rooted mental scab. It was almost as if the Jain-tech did not want to break off where she had prepared it to do so, which was odd since it was an insentient technology with no will of its own. Perha
ps, if she survived this, she would investigate the phenomenon, which she suspected, lay somewhere at its very base.

  ‘I am moving to Section Three,’ Knobbler informed her.

  This decision did not surprise her, since that segment of the runcible was the only one not occupied by a war drone. The drones could remotely control the weapons mounted on and in each section, but it would be best to have them nearby should anything go wrong, which it inevitably would when things started to get hot. She watched Knobbler exit rapidly through an airlock and hurtle away from one section in a trajectory that would intersect with the next section round as it moved out. She watched him spread his tentacles ready for landing then returned her attention to embrace the entire runcible. Seeing the huge device coming apart like this, even though she herself had initiated it, gave her a moment of considerable disquiet. Would the Jain mycelium properly counter the inertial effects of weapons fire from each section? Might she even have achieved her aims without expanding the gate like this?