Line War

by Neal Asher

  But it wasn’t just the ship receiving this punishment.

  Azroc began to receive error messages from his own body and realized that some gravity phenomenon was the source of the damage occurring all around him, for something was stretching his bones and putting pressure on his internal hardware. He peered down at his chair and noted that it possessed a safety harness. One-handed he pulled the strap heads across and slotted them into their sockets. Once they were all in place, the full harness tightened, pulling him back against the chair, then soft clamps closed about his shins and rose up to beckon like pincers from the chair arms. He placed his free arm in one of them, but kept his other out to maintain contact with the hand interface.

  ‘Grav out,’ announced Jerusalem, its voice devoid of any human emulation.

  The gravplates shut down and briefly the air was filled with swarms of beetlebots amid smaller things like chrome gnats, and numerous crab drones. Then this collection of ship fauna updated on the situation and used their various methods of propulsion to get themselves back to where they were needed. Inside himself, Azroc felt crystal breaking in a data store, but he possessed multiple back-ups, so there was no problem–yet. Two of his joint motors reported wiring breaks, and the sheering of a nerve linkage left both his feet numb. He dispatched his own hardware repair bots internally and began rerouting, running diagnostics, repairing where he could, otherwise patching or jury-rigging. A sudden jolt lifted his chair right into the air, and he saw that the floor below him had flipped up like a tin lid. All data through the hand interface cut out, then came an enormous shudder as the great ship again surfaced into the real.

  ‘Jerusalem?’

  After a long pause the AI replied over intercom, ‘My phasic modular B folderol.’

  ‘Is it really?’ Azroc enquired.

  ‘Ipso facto total bellish.’

  ‘Yes, mine is too.’

  ‘Repairing.’ Static hissed from the intercom, then came a sound suspiciously like someone kicking a piece of malfunctioning hardware. ‘OK. Better.’

  ‘You’ll talk sense now?’

  ‘When the occasion requires.’

  ‘Are we through?’

  ‘We are near the edge, but the damage I was sustaining has reached its limit. I have lost fifty-eight hard-field generators and had to eject twenty-two fusion reactors. Unfortunately that should have been twenty-four, and now one third of my volume is contaminated with radio-actives.’

  ‘Structural damage too?’

  ‘Yes, but only to secondary internal structures. My main skeleton will realign.’

  Even as Jerusalem said this a great groaning and crashing echoed through the ship. Azroc focused on the floor crack and observed it beginning to close, beetlebots quickly scuttling out of the way. In fact the whole hedron appeared to be twisting back into shape, and as this happened, the raised piece of floor his chair was mounted upon began to settle down again. It was as if, like some human fighter, Jerusalem was casually pushing its dislocations back into place while spitting out chunks of broken tooth. Now the constant din of industry grew in volume, and within the hedron Azroc noted numerous welding arcs and crab drones zipping back and forth with circuit boards or other components clutched in their claws. Glancing down he saw that the crack in the floor directly below him had not yet closed, but the pipes had been reattached and he could see the milky glimmer of nanobot activity at the crack’s edges as they drew material across to bridge it, while a crab drone arrived beside the raised section of floor to cut off its protruding edge and make similar repairs.

  ‘It has occurred to me to wonder what you hope to achieve by getting clear of the interference,’ said Azroc. ‘You are a large vessel and I know you possess some lethal weaponry, but even so what can you do against Erebus?’

  ‘There is,’ replied Jerusalem, ‘a high probability that one other large Polity vessel will be able to penetrate the interference.’

  ‘Then what?’

  ‘Erebus is certainly launching an assault on Earth,’ said the AI. ‘We should still be able to fight a delaying action.’

  Twenty hours later the great ship once more dropped into U-space turbulence, and Azroc was once again able to use the hand interface. The Jerusalem surfaced into the real less than an hour later, smoothly this time, and without anything breaking.

  ‘I see,’ said the Golem.

  Yes, a delaying action.

  Its surface bright with a million points of light that were almost certainly welding arcs, the titanic Cable Hogue hung there, waiting in vacuum.

  18

  Another of these mythical characters is the ridiculous Mr Crane, a ‘brass’ Golem who, like the gods of old, is neither good nor evil, just capricious and dangerous. In him I see the ultimate expression of how humans regard the Golem android. In the far too numerous stories about him we see that he can become everything we fear about them, for he can be an indestructible killing machine, an insane mechanism capable of the viciousness of humans, an amoral murderer. Yet he can be everything we might love and admire too, for he can be just, he can be the relentless crusher of evil and protector of the weak and innocent, and he can even be the strong and reliable friend. And, as the stories tell us, nothing can stand in his way, no doors can keep him out. This last point is the most relevant, I think, for the brass man is a combination of two things: demon and guardian angel. He is a point of transition, representative of the middle ground between barbarity and civilization, the past moving into the future. He is our modern version of the god of doors, for he is Janus.

  –Anonymous

  Mr Crane tumbled through vacuum, vapour steaming from his clothing, his hand clamped on the top of his head to hold his hat in place as if there might be a breeze here to dislodge it, and a hand shoved in his coat pocket, probably to keep a firm hold on his odd collection of toys. Arach, tumbling too, abruptly jetted gas from a humorously placed vent in the rear of his abdomen, made some adjustments with steering vents located underneath the points where his legs joined his thorax, and then drifted over to Cormac. The drone closed a limb about Cormac’s waist, jetted more vapour and propelled the both of them over towards Crane, who reached out and grasped hold of one extended spider limb. A few more jets of gas brought them to a standstill relative to the war runcible, and now Cormac had a clearer view of what was happening.

  Rod-forms and chunks of Jain coral were scattered all about them. Ahead, the war runcible was almost lost amid decohered wormship structure and vinelike growths extruding from the countless rod-forms adhering to its hull. Cormac could see the bright flares of oxygen fires burning aboard, and every so often detonations would fling debris out into space. All this was happening in the silence of vacuum, which somehow made the scene seem more poignant.

  ‘There are eight drones still remaining aboard,’ Arach informed him over his envirosuit radio. ‘But they don’t intend staying there much longer.’

  Cormac could not help them now. Even if he could transport himself back inside through the U-space distortions while not ending up as a decorous moulding in one of the internal walls, he could only bring out one or two of the surviving war drones at a time–and getting themselves out here was something they were perfectly capable of achieving on their own. Anyway, he had more than enough problems of his own right now. Linking to his suit he discovered that his remaining air supply totalled forty minutes, which, by deliberately forcing himself into a somnolent state, he could extend by half–but that appeared to be the extent of his life.

  ‘Anything about Orlandine?’ he enquired.

  After a pause, during which he no doubt communicated with the remaining war drones, Arach replied, ‘There was a beacon operating previously from her interface sphere, but it shut down shortly after she departed the runcible. Knobbler estimates she’s a few hundred miles out by now.’

  Orlandine controlled Jain technology, so it seemed to Cormac that the blast that had flung her from the runcible was unlikely to have killed her. However,
he still did not give much for her chances. Surely Erebus would find her and wreak some hideous vengeance.

  Then, as they hung there in space, a shadow fell across them, and thoughts of what Erebus might do were brought firmly to the forefront of Cormac’s mind. He gazed towards the shadow’s source and watched a wormship slide eerily past. His view utterly unfiltered and straight across hard vacuum was a good one, and he realized how weirdly beautiful was this vessel. His estimate of his own lifespan might be too optimistic, he decided. The wormship, however, showed no sign of being aware of their presence and continued on down towards the runcible, where, as well as the decohering two that were spreading over its surface, three others were also now docked. Perhaps Orlandine would be missed, just like he and his companions had just been, or perhaps Erebus now knew their precise location–and hers–and would either fry them or pick them up later. As he watched the runcible, a massive detonation aboard one of the docked wormships flung out nearly a third of its structure.

  ‘Our hissing cockroach,’ said Arach.

  ‘Pardon?’

  ‘Erebus is trying to capture the war drones,’ the spider drone replied, ‘but it’s not a great plan. Like myself every one of them has a CTD located deep inside its body, just in case of capture by an enemy. I guess the cockroach just waited until he could do the most damage.’

  ‘Should one of those ships come after us, I’ll shift us again,’ said Cormac. ‘So don’t be in too much of a hurry to use your get-out clause.’

  ‘Sure thing,’ Arach replied. ‘I won’t use it anyway until I can’t shoot any more.’

  That figured.

  Seven war drones left. Cormac tried to see more clearly using his U-sense but found himself still gazing into chaos. He ran a program from his gridlink, tightening certain muscles around his eyes to increase their magnification, and then ran a secondary program to clean up the distorted image received by his optic nerves. Now the runcible and its enclosing attackers seemed to loom right over him. He saw the twinned spider now on the surface, boiling metal in a circle all about it, and around that again Jain-tech mounding up into a wave. The drone suddenly seemed out of munitions or energy, for it did nothing as the tangled Jain growth fell upon it and swamped it. Bearing in mind Arach’s recent comments, Cormac flinched in expectation of another large explosion as a bright light flashed through the writhing mass, but this time it was some beam weapon boring a tunnel. The twin spider hurtled out through this cleanly, then simply disappeared.

  Another explosion on the surface, this time excavating a glowing crater. Shooting out from this he saw what he first took to be a biomech but then recognized as the drone Knobbler. A shoal of silvery objects streaked out after the escaping drone but then milled in confusion as it too disappeared.

  The wormship which Cormac had earlier seen heading for the runcible now arrived. More drones were busy escaping, but it intercepted one of them, part of its mass opening to swallow the silvery scorpion whole. For a moment it was as if massive flash bulbs were going off inside the wormship. Cormac managed to turn his head just in time as the bright explosion expanded, ripping the entire ship apart. He then saw three drones slam together, some distance from the runcible, and also disappear like Knobbler. As he puzzled over this, he noticed his perspective was changing. Adjusting his focus back to normal, he peered at Arach and noticed that the drone was releasing a perpetual stream of gas, accelerating all three of them.

  Now the entire war runcible bucked, and light glared from five distinct areas within it, precisely where the buffers and the reactors were located within each segment. In pure silence five explosions, the intense blue-white of burning magnesium, joined to become one. The runcible, the surrounding wormships and other Jaintech, all fragmented in this massive blast, then were swamped in an expanding sphere of fire. Observing this, Cormac realized that, unless he shifted again through U-space, his lifespan would be shortened even further. Crane and Arach might both survive that blast front when it reached them, but he was still mere mortal flesh.

  He focused out on where next to shift himself as well as the other two. Then vacuum seemed to ripple right before him, and a big armoured claw stabbed out and closed on Mr Crane’s ankle. The next thing Cormac knew was that he crashed, alone, into a small airlock. Obviously it was too small to encompass the three–or now rather four–of them.

  ‘Welcome aboard the Harpy,’ said a sardonic voice.

  It was like a basic and incomplete virtuality format with one surface texture chosen from some strange palette, dimensions put in place but given no orientation, and then the whole project consigned to a store and forgotten. Mika had no real awareness of her own body here. She was just a point of existence floating somewhere in colourless space, at once above a weirdly textured and endless plain, or beside a wall without limits or perhaps a ceiling of the same infinite dimensions, for there was no up or down in this place.

  From the Atheter AI stored in an artefact retrieved from the lava planet called Shayden’s Find–named after the woman who discovered that body but who was murdered while trying to recover it–researchers had learned that Jain technology made an imprint on reality that was visible from within U-space, but only if you knew what to look for and possessed the right equipment. This fact had enabled Cormac and his mentor Horace Blegg to track Jain nodes. It had not been clearly understood why Jain-tech left such an imprint. Huge mass, like that of planets and stars, was detectable from within U-space, just as heavy weights are detectable from the underside of a sheet they rest on, but small complex objects should theoretically make no real impression at all.

  As Mika understood it, though it wasn’t really her subject, other researchers had found that the macro-, micro-and nano-structures Jain-tech created in turn caused specific pico-structures to spring into being. They were a kind of sub-creation, a side effect almost like the shape left on a flat surface after some object has been spray-painted on top if it then removed: almost a shadow of the technology. However, those pico-structures were too regular, too constant to be anything but deliberate. Looking more closely, the researchers found a kind of pattern that slid under the real, somehow insinuated its way into the interface between U-space and realspace without the usual huge energy requirement. And where this pattern lay, on the edge of the ineffable, the researchers detected very busy movement that almost defied analysis.

  Mika now knew what that activity was: the Jain AIs.

  And here they were.

  The surface Mika found herself by appeared to consist of metallic fossil worms, an expanse of them that extended to the infinite. They were triangular in section and somehow hot and burning. At first glance the worms seemed to be utterly still but then, as she watched, she detected movement that defied definition: a slow massive change, something like the leisurely transitions seen in a kaleidoscope. Sound here too: a howling that wrenched at the core of her being and an insane muttering from tight-crammed madness. And smells: decay, sweet perfume, a savoury smell and the stench of excrement, all crammed into one sensory overload.

  But though her mind was interpreting all this as input through her five main senses, there was also some part of her that recognized it as a shifting of dimensions her brain was just not formatted to accept, and that it was also something falling halfway between physical change and thought. There was a multitude here and a single presence. Being naturally analytical, she interpreted this as something like a hive mind, but being analytical was not easy, for there was a multiple entity here slowly becoming aware of her presence–and it terrified her.

  Then, in time she could not measure, the plain–for now she firmly held to that perspective–began to alter in respect to her own position. A pattern formed about and below her, with herself at its centre point. The attendant howling grew in intensity, and the muttering rose to a gibbering. A sluggish perception seemed to briefly focus on her then drift away. Perhaps the idea came from Dragon’s comment about waking up these entities, but it was almost as if
she was in the presence of someone dozing who on some unconscious level had just acknowledged her presence.

  ‘Dragon, what do I do?’ she asked, though here she possessed no mouth.

  She felt something–some connection with Dragon–but heard no words. However, now those memories stored in her head but not her own began to surface. All at once she saw a race raising itself from the swamps of its homeworld and weaving for itself towering homes out of flute grass. The gabbleducks, the Atheter, built tall, their focus upon structures rather than individual machines, and so it was that they first reached space by using a form of space elevator rather than rocket propulsion. They expanded their civilization across star systems and were faced with their own version of the Fermi paradox: why are we alone? They found life on many worlds but little intelligence, then abruptly they weren’t alone–for they came across one primitive race with the potential of raising itself to something greater. These were hard-shelled arthropoids, vicious and competitive, and even in their primitive state beginning to learn to work metals. With some misgivings they left these early Prador to their own devices, but still there remained a question: this galaxy being so old, why were there no other spacefaring races? Were they the first?

  Then they found the ruins.

  With great excitement the gabbleducks carefully excavated their find, and began to study the dusty remains of a complex and powerful nano-technology. Many developments ensued from this, and the civilization of these strange babbling creatures thus grew and became increasingly complex: ripe for its discovery of the first Jain node.