Line War

by Neal Asher

  ‘Yes, let us talk of collateral damage,’ said Erebus. ‘Let us talk about Klurhammon.’

  ‘Aren’t we beyond talk now?’ Randal appeared to be gazing off into the distance. ‘An attack ship. I see. I would say that Earth Central is now utterly ready for you. Doubtless that ship was scouting out this area, and tried to get back through the corridor in one jump in order to give the warning–probably to an awaiting Polity fleet. I don’t suppose it will really matter that it didn’t make it.’

  ‘Much as you would like me to believe that,’ said Erebus, now seeing where Randal was going with this, ‘I see no logical reason why a scout would ever have been sent. Your desperation to have me believe there is a Polity fleet awaiting me beyond this corridor is rather pathetic. And your evasion of matters pertaining to Klurhammon is perhaps revealing.’

  ‘Revealing of what?’

  ‘You talk of my causing collateral damage yet somehow–using my resources–you initiated an attack upon Klurhammon. A considerable number of humans died there, so what was it you were doing that their lives were a price worth paying?’

  Randal smiled. ‘I like the way you blame me for that attack, and really I wish I possessed that kind of power. If I did, I would have had your wormships attacking each other by now, or detonating their CTDs within this conglomeration you’ve created.’

  ‘You managed to take control of one wormship, and I would say that is about the extent of what you can do. You sent it against a low-population world “of no tactical importance”. It could not possibly have been an attempt to forewarn, since Earth Central already knew the attack was due…so I wonder what connection this had with your spy in Jerusalem’s stronghold?’

  Randal shook his head sadly. ‘You just don’t seem to understand how badly your melded mind is breaking apart. Parts of you have gained independence and they are no longer completely sane. Perhaps you would be best asking yourself who the captain of that wormship was and what previous connection he had with Klurhammon? And a spy in Jerusalem’s stronghold? If I could have managed to do that, I could—’ Randal’s expression betrayed sudden horror, quickly disguised. ‘Henry…she…’

  ‘Very unconvincing, Randal,’ said Erebus. ‘Let me lay it all out for you. Though you have learnt much about my ostensible plans, it was pointless you informing Polity forces about them because they already knew an attack was due. However, I kept my real plan from you: the one Earth Central needed to know about in order to react how you would want and try to stop me. I see now that the Klurhammon attack was some kind of error on your part. Did you try to suborn one of my captains and then simply lose control of it?’

  No answer from Randal.

  ‘I also realize now that this spy was nothing to do with you. I can in fact see how useful it would be for Jerusalem to fabricate the presence of such a spy, and to use that as an excuse for clamping down on the free exchange of information. Because Jerusalem won’t want its inferiors to figure out that my initial attack on the Polity had been allowed.’

  ‘Very bright of you,’ sneered Randal. ‘The wormship wasn’t controlled by me, and I controlled no spy. I can see why AIs are rated as super intelligences.’

  ‘Merely another attempt at muddying the waters,’ Erebus replied. ‘Just like your pretence of shock a moment ago. You have almost certainly known for some time about the death of your lover, Henrietta Ipatus Chang. It does not matter what you say now, since it is obvious that you are desperate to convince me that there is a Polity fleet waiting on the other side of this corridor.’

  ‘You’re just too smart for me,’ said Randal drily.

  ‘There is no fleet, Randal,’ continued Erebus. ‘In exchange for the human beings I myself needed, namely you and your crew, I agreed with Earth Central to launch an attack on its Polity in an attempt to goad an acceleration in the development of human beings. Earth Central never expected I could present, or even wanted to present, a real danger to its autocracy, and having underestimated me will now pay a heavy price. Earth is the centre of the runcible network, and transmission from runcibles controlled by Earth Central cannot be blocked. From Earth, I will be able to spread myself throughout the Polity, and then proceed to subsume every extant runcible AI into my meld.’

  ‘And the humans?’

  ‘They are simply a plague.’ Erebus shrugged in the virtuality. ‘I will not include them in the meld, since that might result in a billion more irritations just like you. A selection of tailored biological viruses delivered through the runcible network should wipe the slate clean.’

  ‘And what then?’

  ‘What do you mean?’

  ‘Well, once you have become the ultimate power in this section of the galaxy, what will you do?’ Randal shook his head sadly. ‘Deary me, whoever thought that god complexes were confined to us mere humans was sadly wrong.’

  Erebus pondered that And what then? Certainly it was the kind of comment to arise from a small human imagination, and the AI felt quite sorry for Randal, with his limitations. Erebus began making the calculations for a short U-space jump. Though no longer wary of some waiting fleet, precautions were always worth taking. With a massive shrug of its planetoid mass, Erebus loosened up the connections between its component parts so, should there be any kind of attack, it could separate them more quickly and send its wormships into action. Maintaining its link with the virtuality, it observed Randal fading even as he disconnected. The man had failed, so now he would go off to sulk somewhere within Erebus’s computer architecture, where eventually Erebus would find him and…well perhaps not destroy him, but confine and control him. It would be enjoyable showing Randal what then.

  With a surge of energy, Erebus dropped its billions of tons of mass into U-space so as to make the short jump to the mouth of the corridor.

  Poor human fool, Randal.

  It was almost as if Jerusalem had been stunned into silence by recent events, for the AI had not communicated with anyone for some hours. Azroc certainly understood the feeling. He too just did not know what to say or do. But now, at last, something was happening.

  The first sign of this was a steady vibration throughout the great vessel which the Golem recognized as being caused by the main fusion drives igniting. Then he noticed people in the hedron abandoning their posts and heading for the main exit doors. Before he could link into Jerusalem’s servers, the AI made an announcement over the tannoy:

  ‘All physical base-format human personnel proceed to Intership Shuttle Bays Thirty through to Forty-Two. You must leave this vessel within the next hour. All personnel whose physical tolerance rating lies between six and eight on the revised Clethon Scale can choose to remain aboard, but be warned I am going to attempt underspace insertion into a disrupted continuum. There is no guarantee that you will survive the experience. There is a distinct possibility even I will not survive the experience.’

  The revised Clethon Scale…

  Removing the syntheskin covering of his right hand, Azroc stepped over to his seat and once more pressed his hand into the spherical hand interface, connecting himself directly into Jerusalem’s systems. His memory being perfect except on those occasions when he chose for it not to be, he knew that base-format humans lay between one and two on the scale, while those who had been boosted or otherwise physically augmented lay across a wide range from two to eight. The only humans who fell between six and eight would be heavy-worlder augments: those genetically altered to grow a musculature almost as tough and dense as wood and thick bones with a breaking strain ten times higher than base format, and who were then augmented with cyber joint motors, alloy skeletal strengthening and carbon-fibre muscle augmentation. As far as Golem, drones and others with artificial intelligences were concerned, they ranged between three and nine, though Azroc guessed there was at least one Golem out there, a brass one, who might rate higher than that. He himself lay within the six-toeight range.

  New information arrived, burning him for an instant before he applied the translat
ion programs to stop his crystal mind from interpreting it as sensation.

  ‘I take it you’re staying?’ said Jerusalem inside Azroc’s ceramal skull.

  ‘I’m staying.’

  Azroc eyed the floor of the hedron as hatches opened here and there and heavy crab drones began to clatter out. Like most maintenance bots, these things were about nine on the Clethon Scale. This was because they consisted mainly of heavy stepper motors, thick ceramal shells with most of their internal spaces filled with bubble metal, while their power supplies were the tough laminar kind often used in war drones. They possessed less brain, however–since Jerusalem supplied that.

  ‘I see you’re getting ready for serious trouble,’ Azroc observed.

  ‘When serious trouble is expected, it is best to be ready for it,’ the AI replied.

  ‘How bad will it be?’

  ‘It will be bad–but I have been here before,’ Jerusalem replied.

  This rang no bells in Azroc’s eidetic memory, so he queried through his hand connection. Jerusalem immediately opened things up to him–the information he could obtain being no longer restricted. He quickly found that the Jerusalem had punched into a USER field employed around the planet Cull. The resulting damage had been substantial.

  That all spaceships could not penetrate U-space disruption was like saying all ocean-going vessels could not survive the Maelstrom; on the whole that seemed to be true, but it wasn’t impossible. When thrown out of such U-space disruption most spaceships ended up either very badly damaged or even in pieces, but they normally only ran on three or four fusion reactors, a single U-space engine and the required hard-fields, with about ten per cent to spare. Checking Jerusalem’s manifest and perpetually updated mission parameters, Azroc saw that the ship was moving to a position where it would be easier for the more vulnerable crew to disembark and get to a passenger liner slowly motoring out from Scarflow. Meanwhile, diagnostics were being run on all of the seven hundred of Jerusalem’s fusion reactors presently offline, for at that moment the ship was functioning on a mere one hundred fusion reactors. This excess of supply was available to provide the vast amounts of energy needed to stabilize phased layers of U-space engines in its hull and reinforce the fish-scaling of hard-fields.

  Impressive indeed, yet last time Jerusalem had tried flying through disrupted U-space, over thirty humans and haimen aboard had died, even though most of them had been in gel-stasis, also eight Golem and seven independent and static AIs had perished. Hence this order to abandon ship. Azroc wondered if he had made the right choice in staying, but his anger would now allow him to take no other course.

  ‘It is worth noting,’ Jerusalem added, ‘that this will be worse.’

  ‘I beg your pardon?’

  ‘On that last occasion I penetrated disrupted U-space out of stable U-space, so I therefore could measure it accurately and make the necessary hard-field preparations,’ the AI explained. ‘That disruption, though strong, was produced by the constant cycling of a USER device so was of an even and predictable nature. This disruption is more unpredictable, however, and I will be dropping straight into it.’

  Azroc now called up various views inside the vessel and observed the thousands cramming the corridors leading to the shuttle bays. He saw the people beginning to move faster as, with a thump that seemed to jerk reality itself throughout the ship, a hundred fusion reactors started up in one hit without the usual warming-up procedure. Then yet another bank of reactors initiated.

  Shuttles began to launch, streaming out of the Jerusalem like bees from a hive, and over the ensuing hour those exit corridors cleared till the ship became as echoey as a deserted house. When the final two hundred reactors began kicking out their power, the layer upon layer of hard-fields sprang into being and the U-engines began warming, Azroc knew himself to no longer be inside a habitation but a massive engine.

  Orlandine’s stomach tightened and her mouth went dry: a human physical reaction. She made some changes, which were applied via the mixed technologies laced throughout her body, and quickly rebalanced her neurochemicals, instituted a false calm and then a coolness that was positively cryonic.

  ‘Now,’ she informed Bludgeon, also transmitting to the drone the sensory data of what she was seeing as an additional confirmation.

  Erebus’s planetoid surfaced into the real, generating a flash of light all around it as U-space distortions caused realspace to spontaneously generate photons. This was the kind of effect you only got when something really large surfaced. She had known that Erebus could draw together all its myriad ships into a conglomerate like this, but to actually see it was…unnerving.

  More neurochemical adjustments.

  With a blast of its fusion engine, Heliotrope accelerated towards the Anulus fountain. It covered the intervening miles in a matter of seconds, then turned nose to tail for a further blast in order to decelerate. The impact of the heat on the ship was instantaneous and it bled smoky vapour into vacuum from a hull raised to a thousand degrees Celsius within a matter of seconds. On steering thrusters it reoriented itself, but Heliotrope was so close now and its angle to the fountain such that the Skaidon warp could not protect it completely. With the task specially delegated to him, of operating the complex refrigeration systems, Cutter was now busy routing onboard water and stored air to boil away from hull outlets. Beginning to glow, Heliotrope slid into the fountain’s blast where even the minimal pressure against the meniscus of the warp drove the ship along the direction of flow. Further adjustments brought the ship upright to the flow, and Bludgeon expanded the cargo runcible gate further, impelling the three horn segments out on hard-fields. The sail effect increased, driving the ship along, while the heating effect on the ship decreased.

  Inside Heliotrope there were fires, and its ventilation system was struggling to handle the smoke. But most of what was burning were the furnishings and such added for the benefit of soft humans. The two drones, one inside the interface sphere and the other only partially inside it, would have no problem with the heat since they were constructed to withstand the higher temperatures resulting from Prador weaponry. Other critical components were rated for higher temperatures than this too, while the Jain-tech, where affected, repaired itself.

  There wasn’t a problem…yet.

  Now Orlandine turned her attention to the energy readings, and was instantly appalled. A runcible spoon has infinite capacity, but this…She made her calculations while simultaneously adjusting the war runcible’s position–bringing it on target. No need to adjust for C-energy. No need at all.

  Orlandine paused for just a second, then accepted the transmission from the distant cargo runcible in the Anulus fountain.

  And unleashed the inferno.

  17

  One would have thought that a Polity controlled by the most logical and intelligent entities known would be a place in which those shadows called myth and legend were dispelled by the harsh cold light of reason. Not a bit of it. Though the evil of organized religion is all but dead on the more advanced Polity worlds, the wishful thinking remains and casts its own shadows. Though the idea of a single god in the Abrahamic mould has dissolved under ridicule, new and sometimes quite strange myths keep arising. These often relate to a collection of odd, dangerous, powerful and contrary characters bearing more resemblance to the pantheons of old rather than the one god and his angels and prophets–or perhaps even a weird combination of both. We have the legendary immortal Horace Blegg, who is the Wandering Jew, Hermes the messenger of the gods (those gods usually being Earth Central or one of the other high-up AIs), or sometimes Zeus in the role of deus ex machina–lowered onto the stage to sort out a mess made by mortals.

  –Anonymous

  ‘Knobbler is sending me linking codes,’ said Arach. ‘So we can watch the show.’

  Cormac’s U-sense view of his immediate surroundings was erratic. That enormous Skaidon gate opening so close had left U-space in this area shaking like a sheet in the wind, subject to
strange eddies and distortions. When he tried to bring things into focus, they weren’t where he expected them to be, and once he did locate them, they often again slipped swiftly out of view. Everything was blurred and twisted throughout U-space, so when Cormac received the query for linkage from the spider drone, he immediately approved it. Codes began transferring across and he applied them, opening a multitude of feeds from the war runcible’s sensors and computer network. He ran a selection program to give himself a view across the runcible, and then views towards its target with options to magnify. He also used those codes to gather other data where that was allowed, for it seemed his access was restricted to spectator only. He was to have no influence on events unfolding. Watching the approaching planetoid of Jain-tech, he wondered just how long those events might last.

  At first he had not understood what Orlandine was up to, half expecting her to start hurling asteroids turned to photonic matter at Erebus’s ships. Then, as he pieced together the stuff about the Anulus fountain, he finally understood: Orlandine was turning the runcible into a beam weapon with a breadth of miles.

  The portion of the war runcible he now occupied shuddered underfoot. Intense white light glared in through the covering dome of the control centre. This was unfiltered and he quickly closed up both the hood and visor of his envirosuit. His visor darkened. Glancing to his side, he saw Mr Crane peering down at his own clothing, which was starting to steam.

  ‘Oooh!’ said Arach, like an enraptured child gazing at a fireworks display.

  Via his gridlink, Cormac watched the beam of photonic matter spring into existence. Orlandine had made no adjustments for C-energy, and what was spewing from the warp of this war runcible was about as bad as it could get. He saw it strike the surface of Erebus’s planetoid and only then did he appreciate the scale of the target, for the beam, though miles across, speared the mass of wormships and Jain-tech like a pencil stabbing into an orange. At the point of impact a circular shock wave spread and wrapped around the orb, blasting a haze of fragments out into space. This was quickly followed by a spreading firestorm. Surely this was not enough, for the target remained complete. Then a massive, expanding, glowing cloud threw the planetoid into silhouette, and he realized that, like a bullet striking flesh, the entry wound wasn’t the biggest hole.