Line War

by Neal Asher

  I feel just as controlled myself, thought Mika.

  Perspective shifted into a protracted shriek emitted by the AI of Randal’s attack ship as the Jain mycelium spread aboard and found it. Randal was still wrestling with Trafalgar for control, but started losing it once the killing started, and he just could not stop it. Humans died so very easily. He saw his friends now barricaded in the bridge, saw the horror and panic when the inboard defence lasers started up and turned Morrison into a smoking corpse. The panic did not last long, however, since corpses don’t scream. The last of Randal’s grip slipped as the mycelium reached the weapons research module of the Trafalgar and he there saw what remained of the rest of his crew. Here were conducted the other experiments on human beings, which involved using discrete parts of the node technology. How fast does this grow in the human body? How does it make synaptic connections? And many other such questions besides–fifty-eight of them in all. Of course, once the experiments were over, their subjects had to be studied and tested in detail. It was the records that the mycelium accessed down there which told Randal exactly how many of his people lay dead. He could get no accurate count from the scattered pieces of their corpses.

  ‘Why?’ Randal howled. ‘Earth Central, why did you send us here?’

  Obviously this question was one that greatly concerned Dragon, for it repeated and echoed until simple text arose to Mika’s view, and she, and through her Dragon, could read the mission profile.

  These ECS misfits had been sent aboard an attack ship controlled by an AI of dubious reputation, and it seemed they were all dispensable. They were to assist the AI of the Trafalgar in its investigations into a newly discovered alien technology. The orders from Earth Central were vague: they were to receive their detailed instructions from Trafalgar.

  ‘You wanted humans for this…’ said Randal.

  ‘I wanted humans for this,’ Trafalgar replied.

  ‘But you had humans.’

  There it was, revealed in the memory of the AI mind conjoined with Randal’s own. The AIs of the great exodus dividing into two factions, arguing over the nature of the meld they were to make. Argument turning into warfare that ended upon the surface of a hot world, with Trafalgar victorious. It had been fast and vicious, and even though some of the eighty humans accompanying the exodus had been on Trafalgar’s side, none of them had survived. They just got ground up in the machinery.

  ‘Trafalgar,’ Randal asked, his consciousness fading, dying, ‘did Earth Central know?’

  A surge of godlike amusement.

  In that moment: thousands of artificial minds were connecting, some willingly, but some not and then being subjugated by Trafalgar. The informational connection held them in place around the moonlet–chosen because it was so loaded with useful resources–as the Jain-tech spread there and digested rock, refined ores, then began throwing further shoots out into space. Randal witnessed the first ship–an attack ship–being penetrated like a beetle stuck by a pin.

  ‘Warfare promotes development,’ said Trafalgar.

  ‘Earth Central…’ was all Randal could manage.

  ‘Stagnation after the war with the Prador,’ said the battleship AI. ‘Earth Central is arrogant enough to think it can choose its enemies now, and to allow that enemy to attack for the sum purpose of making humans…grow. Such arrogance will be the death of it–and the death of its Polity.’

  ‘Trafalgar—’

  ‘I am now Erebus.’

  Fading as he was, Randal did not understand what that could mean. He pondered the arrogance of AIs for a moment longer, then his mind winked out.

  She was Mika again, and enough herself to feel sickened and horrified.

  ‘You knew,’ she said.

  ‘I did not know,’ Dragon replied. ‘And now I wish I still did not know.’

  Dragon’s voice seemed far above her, as did the winnowed memories of the dead man, Randal; and even their implications began to grow distant. She felt herself at once deep in a dark pool and down in a place where words and thoughts were the products of a mechanistic universe, where free will was a laughable fantasy, and hard reality ground dreams into mere sensory products adhering to rules not dissimilar to those governing the products of evolution. But all this around her now wasn’t a product of evolution; this was something fashioned and, though one of its purposes was indeed survival, that came after its primary purpose of destruction. Somehow, she was deep in Jain-tech–down near its very roots. A vast complexity surrounded her like the flicking of trillions of mechanical relays, but also like the firing of synapses, the mathematical positioning of grains of sand and the crystallization of snow flakes in a blizzard cloud.

  Then…then she was somewhere else.

  *

  Mr Crane had driven his other hand into the metal wall so as to anchor them in place. Cormac tried to locate Arach amid fire and chaos, then spotted the drone at the doors leading into this place–pulling them open, and air blasting past him. Crane’s head twitched, birdlike. Following the direction of the Golem’s gaze, Cormac saw a cloud of rod-forms descending towards the runcible, and beyond them another wormship. The one that was already down, which Cormac could glimpse intermittently as if through heat haze and tumbling prisms, lay over on the other side of the runcible. It had penetrated there and biomechs were entering.

  The weapons operated by the war drones occupying the runcible were taking a heavy toll of the attacking swarm. One moment it seemed the rod-forms were about to reach their target, then abruptly many of them would disappear in firestorms, but the war drones could not keep away the further multitude hurtling in, for there weren’t enough munitions aboard. He wondered if Orlandine, and the drones themselves, had known this would happen. Had they come here prepared to make this sacrifice or had they merely miscalculated? It was now a moot point really.

  Crane dragged Cormac down to the floor, tore his brass hand from the wall and drove it in again further along, by stages moving them both towards where Arach was holding open the exit doors. Cormac gazed through the wall into the corridor beyond, which to his U-sense seemed to be writhing like a hooked earthworm. He could try to take both of them over there, but what would happen if he rematerialized inside a solid wall? That was not something he really wanted to experience. Crane made his way steadily to Arach, who had now wedged his abdomen between the sliding blast doors to keep them open. The Golem swung Cormac around to the door gap immediately above the spider drone, and Cormac heaved himself through. Grav was still operating out in the corridor and he dropped straight to the floor, then was nearly sucked back through, underneath Arach, before slamming his feet against the walls either side of the doors. Looking up he saw brass hands grip each door, wrench them further apart, then a big lace-up boot propelled Arach out into the corridor too. The tumbling drone’s back descended briefly onto Cormac’s chest, driving out his breath, then Arach slid off him and flipped upright, driving several sharp feet straight into the metal of the floor. Then Crane himself came through and dropped heavily, those boots landing with a crash either side of Cormac. Behind him, the doors heaved themselves closed.

  ‘Biomechs,’ observed Arach.

  Cormac’s U-sense gave him glimpses only, so he could not really tell where they were now. ‘Where?’ As Crane stepped away from him, he pushed himself to his feet. The doors were fully closed now. A wind was blowing from a breach, or breaches, elsewhere, but at least it did not threaten to drag him off his feet. Something crashed against the recently shut doors.

  ‘I’ll give you one guess only,’ said Arach, and they moved away from the doors.

  Where could they run to now? Cormac again tried to get some sense of his surroundings through that newfound perception, but still everything seemed chaos. He observed corridors and other internal spaces rippling and twisting, Jain biomechs here and there but never easy to pinpoint; he glimpsed a drone like a twinned spider, weapon ports open on its body to spew streams of curved chainglass blades into what looked like
a horde of steel nematodes. He saw that though the segments of the war runcible had now rejoined, its pentagon was not complete for some explosion had gouged out a huge chunk of its frame. Abruptly he banished these myriad visions from his mind and waved his thin-gun, which he had drawn without thinking, at Mr Crane.

  ‘How did you get here?’ he asked.

  Crane tilted his head slightly, as if listening to something else, then turned and gazed towards one end of the corridor.

  ‘I’m getting something now,’ chipped in Arach. ‘There’s a ship…an AI called Vulture, but he can’t stay docked for much longer.’

  Fire slashed into the corridor, a cloud of smoke boiling in while globules of molten metal splattered the wall opposite the fire’s entry point. Cormac ducked and rolled, glancing back at the doors into the control centre as the powerful laser that had just punched through them continued cutting across. Crane set off with a big loping stride, and Cormac and Arach swiftly followed. As they reached another set of closed doors barring the end of the corridor, an explosion flung chunks of the control centre doors into the corridor behind them. Flames and smoke poured into the passage, then abruptly went into reverse as vacuum sucked them back out. Cormac staggered for a moment against the pull of it, but not as badly this time, the air here being so thin. He turned and dropped to one knee, shoved the thin-gun into his belt, and raised the proton carbine instead. Arach squatted down beside him, Gatling cannons folding out ready, while behind them Crane smashed his fist repeatedly against the divide between the doors to create a gap to get his fingers in.

  Something crashed through from the control centre, impacting into the opposite wall, whereupon it turned. Cormac held fire, unsure whether this was one of the war drones, for, even though very much like the biomechs he had seen earlier, it also bore some resemblance to Orlandine’s allies in its insectile form and ten legs now stabbing out starlike into ceiling, floor and walls. Arach, however, did not hesitate. Cormac merely glimpsed the tri-mandibles, a collection of lens eyes and the numerous silvery tubes protruding from the newcomer’s flat physiognomy before Arach’s cannons roared and the thing disappeared in a multiple explosion. Smoke drew away to show just its legs hanging from where they had lodged–but then another of the same kind crashed through, and with it came silvery worms speeding along just above the floor like hunting garfish.

  ‘Crane, get that damned door open!’

  Cormac now gripped the carbine in just one hand, aiming and then firing using targeting programs in his gridlink. He then initiated Shuriken, stabbing his other arm straight ahead, and the device shot out from his wrist holster. Whining up to speed, it extended its chain-glass blades and rose to the ceiling out of the way just in time for Arach to turn the second big biomech to scrap.

  A blast of air came from behind, hurling Cormac forward so he had to bring his free hand down on the floor for support. Arach backed up, more of the worms having appeared. Shuriken tilted and slammed down, chopping one of the things in half, then ricocheted up into another one, bounced again and again, rattling around in the corridor like a coin shaken in a tube. Silvery wormish bits writhed about on the floor, and the walls and ceiling were soon deeply scored and gashed.

  ‘Open!’ shouted Arach.

  Cormac turned and flung himself after the spider drone and Mr Crane, who were already moving on into the next corridor. Crane turned back to patiently drag the doors shut against the slow pace of their hydraulics. Just in time Shuriken shot in over his head. Cormac held out his arm and the Tenkian weapon retracted its smoking blades and returned to its home like a hunting hawk. Cormac could instantly feel the holster heating up against his wrist. He glanced back along the corridor as numerous objects impacted against the door like knives thudding into wood. There was a drop-shaft at the opposite end, and he sprinted towards it, then abruptly skidded to a halt as two metallic antennae appeared, followed by silvery legs slithering up over the edge.

  ‘Ah fuck.’

  He dropped to one knee and took aim.

  ‘’S okay,’ said Arach, hammering on past him.

  The thing that now heaved itself into view looked even more terrifying than the Jain biomechs they had just destroyed. It was a great brass-and-chrome hissing cockroach with a flat ribbed body and legs that were far too long.

  War drone.

  ‘It’s getting a bit hot round here!’ observed the drone joyously.

  Quite mad, these things.

  Cormac stood up again. ‘We’re heading for Mr Crane’s ship,’ he explained. ‘What about the rest of you on this runcible?’

  The cockroach tilted its head for a moment. ‘Seems reasonable,’ it said. ‘I can’t see much advantage in hanging around here. We’ll either see you there or we won’t–so don’t linger for too long!’ In one disquietingly fluid motion the cockroach turned and shot back into the drop-shaft, clambering up out of sight.

  ‘Where now, Crane?’

  The Golem strode straight towards the shaft, stepped inside and dropped out of view. The others followed, Cormac grabbing the rungs of the shaft ladder while Arach starred his legs out all around the walls of the cylindrical shaft just like one of the Jain biomechs. The irised gravity field was not functioning, but there was pull from gravplates down below, hence the loud crash of Crane’s landing way beneath them. Cormac wondered briefly if such an impact simply did not matter to a machine that tough, before he swiftly clambered down after the Golem.

  The shaft opened into an an area containing an automated factory. Cold forges, powder-casting machines, mills and lathes, and multi-armed welders and assembler bots stretched out of sight into belching smoke. Detecting it before Cormac even saw it, Arach opened fire and something darted about in the smoke, then crashed out into clear view. Another biomech, this time a ten-foot-long segmented flatworm seemingly fashioned of copper. Beyond it something exploded and the remaining air began roaring out, taking the smoke with it. Revealed now ahead was one of the rod-forms, with Jain tentacles spread out all around it. Wherever its tentacles touched the machines, the walls, the floor and the ceiling, it seemed as if acid was etching away all substance around them. The thing itself was iridescent grey, and it pulsed as if sucking the life from its surroundings.

  Crane turned to the right and, stumbling against the air-blast, Cormac followed. Arach opened fire again, blasting the flatworm thing to shreds and knotted clumps of Jain tendrils. More of those silvery worms shot in at them from the side. Cormac launched Shuriken as Crane snatched one of the objects out of the air and tore it in half. The Tenkian throwing star slashed through three of the attackers all at once, while Cormac used his carbine to pick off others.

  ‘How much further?’ he bellowed as Crane turned off into a side tunnel.

  From behind came another explosion and a wash of fiery smoke. Glancing back, Cormac saw a huge hole torn through to open space as again the smoke went into reverse. But the tug of vacuum moved it slowly now and he managed to keep his feet, which meant there must be hardly any air left at all. Through the gap, like a nightmare train carriage, came the front end of one of those segmented coils from a wormship. Via his U-sense Cormac could see beyond it: another of them was already down on the station, and yet another descending. Countless rod-forms were scattered over the hull too, with Jain growth rapidly filling intervening spaces. The war runcible was all but swamped.

  ‘We’re fucked!’ shouted Arach, his cannons pointing back and firing continuously. ‘The ship’s undocked!’

  Cormac recalled Shuriken even as more silvery missiles sped towards them. He reached out and caught Mr Crane’s arm. The Golem turned and eyed him impassively.

  ‘Here, Arach!’ Cormac shouted.

  The drone backed up against his legs, and Cormac did the only thing he could think of. He encompassed them both and stepped through twisted U-space out into the dark.

  That first jump was rough. A sound, a concert of rending and distorting metal, ran through the Jerusalem. Gazing through the ship’s
sensors at U-space as, being a Golem, he could, Azroc observed chaos parting over hard-fields, as if the ship were forging through a dense mass of transparent asteroids–only asteroids that had been turned inside out and acquired another dimension that Azroc would not have been able to recognize had he been using his human emulation. Then the vessel surfaced in the real with a crash and a cacophony of klaxons. Azroc saw that they were still within sight of Scarflow’s sun. However, Jerusalem informed him that only one reactor had needed to be ejected and that the maintenance drones were meanwhile keeping the damage under control.

  The second jump was rougher still.

  The sounds of rending and crashing continued to echo throughout the Jerusalem, and it vibrated like an unbalanced fan. Crump sounds like the firing of distant heavy guns Azroc understood to be the implosion of hard-field generators. Then, as the hedron began to twist about him, he at first thought he was experiencing some illusion leaking through from U-space, but checking through his hand interface found that the whole of the massive spaceship was now distorting. From the ring of consoles, as if to emphasize this discovery, sparks flared from a couple of sections before the power suddenly cut and fire-suppressant gas gouted out.

  ‘How much of this can you take?’ Azroc enquired.

  Jerusalem must have been too busy to even reply.

  The Golem noted that the floor repair made where Erebus’s infiltrator had destroyed itself was breaking, and a crack rapidly spreading from it. A crab drone immediately scuttled over, brought a sonic drill down at the end of the crack and drove its bit screaming through the floor. This temporarily halted the expansion of the crack, then out of it, like termites swarming from a broken nest, came thousands of small blue-chrome beetlebots which began instantly casting webs and weaving together the gap with glistening threads of high-tensile steel. When something thumped directly below him, Azroc gazed down at another crack already exposing the shattered ends of pipes, and beetlebots flowed out of this too, while from the pipes heads of things like iron caddis-fly larvae slid into view and extended the pipes from where they had broken with a sputum of metal.