Line War

by Neal Asher

  Once that node was found, Jain technology spread like a plague, and then that section of the Atheter race infected by it turned on the rest of its kind. War ensued, something they had managed to avoid ever since their early planet-bound days. Mika recognized the first biomechs created by Jain-tech going up against similar creations made by the other side: hooders, voracious predators armoured against so much but in the end ineffective when confronted with Jain-based weaponry. Yet, oddly, it was the uninfected gabbleducks who made further technological leaps and won–the first time. The cost was high: billions of Atheter dead, worlds burned down to bedrock, even novas generated in badly infected solar systems to wipe out the pernicious alien technology. But thereafter, with Jain nodes spread everywhere, there was always one of the Atheter who could not deny the lure of possessing such power. Cycle after cycle of conflict ensued, and in that time the Atheter worked out how to detect Jain nodes and destroy them. But the main damage was already done, and something like a religious fervour affected the ancestors of the gabbleducks. They now despaired of technology and what they considered to be its evil. They considered all technology an infection like Jain-tech, and so began to erase it. They were very effective in this. Their colonies died and ultimately, on their homeworld, they erased that thing that had produced this perceived evil: their own minds.

  Mika knew the Jain AIs were awake now and had heard that one story of the death of a civilization, but how could she gauge their reaction? She did not get the time for that. Before she could even consider how to interpret the wash of feeling, movement and shifting of blocks of alien thought, she was impelled to ‘tell’ the next story.

  The Makers also ascended from the mud, but that took some time, for it was mostly what their homeworld consisted of. They never walked upright like humans or gabbleducks, instead were always on their bellies. They developed their fierce intelligence early, even as they dragged themselves from their seas, their physical form little different to that of the Terran mudskipper: a fish slopping about on tidal mud. Their physical advantage was their ability to generate flashes of blinding light, which evolution then refined into an ability to project illusions directly into the eyes of any predator. As with any other intelligent species their climb towards civilization was slow and arduous. But they got there in the end, building a technology hard and diamond-bright in antithesis to the soft pulpiness of their bodies. They wrapped this technology around them as defensively as their illusions. Mika remembered the one Maker she had seen. It was an apparent glass dragon–of the mythical rather than spherical kind–but in reality five parts hardware, four parts illusion and one part living creature.

  In the Small Magellanic Cloud where their home-world was located they discovered Jain technology and, being masters of illusion, they understood it to be a Trojan horse. But they were arrogant and thought they could master it. Their civilization eventually expanded across the Cloud, till they began to look elsewhere for room, but in the main galaxy another civilization was already expanding. Knowing the efficacy of Jain-tech in destroying civilizations, they sent a probe partially based on their own technology to spread Jain nodes there and bring their new rivals down. Bring down the Polity. Only their probe rebelled and did not obey its programming. That was Dragon’s history, for Dragon itself–all four spheres of it–was that probe. A Maker then came to destroy Dragon, but on its way in found the Trafalgar AI and gave it Jain nodes. Humans wrongly sided with the Maker, not knowing its real purpose and believing Dragon to be the villain. So they sent the Maker back to its home aboard a Polity ship which, on its arrival, found only the remnants of a mighty civilization digested by Jain-tech.

  Now something immense was focused on Mika. She felt herself under the pressure of arid analysis, utterly ealien and bewildering. She felt a flow of information and what emphasis was being placed on what parts of it, what was being inspected, what saved and what discarded, and it just did not make any sense to her.

  ‘There were also the ones we named the Csorians,’ she said, somehow. ‘Though we don’t know much about them, we do know that your technology destroyed them too.’

  The focus upon her became even more intense. She felt something riffling through her thoughts. Everything was inspected, copied and secreted away somewhere. Under that massive inspection she felt herself shrinking down to a pinpoint.

  ‘Trafalgar was an artificial intelligence just like you,’ she said. ‘It used humans to initiate a Jain node and then took control of the technology. Now, calling itself Erebus, it is attacking the Polity and there is every chance the Polity will succumb: another victim of the same weapon you used to destroy the race that created you and I hope another unintended consequence of what you did. We need your help. We need to stop this now.’

  Total utter focus upon her now, and she felt to the absolute core of her being that here was a power that could shut down Jain-tech, slice it off at the roots, or ever so subtly reprogram it into something less hostile. Then the oppressive focus upon her began to wane. All the massed information seemed to dissolve and spread out in the infinite area before her, where, like a drop of ink falling into a sea, it became nothing. Now, with the inspection of her becoming less intense, and because she had been here long enough to begin to integrate the alien, she began to understand, to recognize the Jain AIs’ reaction to her message. It was merely a massive, vastly distributed complete and utter indifference. They didn’t care; the rise and fall of civilizations mattered to them not at all. They felt no guilt about the damage their creation had caused.

  Mika fell to the floor, her hand both burning and frozen, gripping a bulky silver augmentation torn from a dead man’s skull.

  ‘I’ve failed,’ she said.

  ‘I never expected you to succeed,’ Dragon replied.

  Five more wormships gone, numerous rod-forms and other mechs incinerated and not a single captive from the war runcible, which was now just a spreading cloud behind Erebus’s forces. Erebus was angered by this, but such annoyances paled in comparison to the loss inflicted by the runcible–and it paled in comparison to a few words spoken by a ghost.

  ‘I’m your conscience, Erebus. I’m you.’

  Growing steadily angrier, Erebus examined those words from every angle and would not accept them. It realized that there could be no going forward until this parasitic copy of a human mind was completely erased from its own Jain structure so again unleashed the HKs, worms and viral programs to track Randal down, even though they had not succeeded before. Then Erebus set about building a new software toolkit to use for the necessary excision.

  ‘Well,’ said Randal, ‘at least you’ll have fewer places now to search.’

  It was horribly true. Less than a thousand wormships remained to Erebus, and that simply was not enough for an attack on Earth. Twenty thousand would have overwhelmed the defence installations scattered throughout the solar system, but a thousand would be turned to ash before they passed within the orbit of Neptune. Reflecting on this, Erebus brought them all to a full stop. There would be no quick victory now. It was time to run and consolidate elsewhere, to rebuild and approach this matter via a different route–the long route. Erebus was immortal so could spend as long as it wished building resources and planning the downfall of the Polity.

  But first: Randal.

  As the human ghost had said, fewer places to search. Taking into account the expectation that it would later be rebuilding its forces, perhaps now was the time to limit even further the places Randal could hide. The delay between this thought and subsequent action was infinitesimal. Microwave beams deployed by the nine hundred and eighty-three wormships swept about them in perfect concert, hitting rod-form after rod-form and turning each into a puff of white-hot debris. Erebus then began running diagnostic searches to locate every single packet of its own distributed processing space. There were many returns from still-functional remains of ships and other hardware scattered across the expanse of the corridor, and even some weak returns from debr
is falling into the areas of U-space disruption. Erebus targeted the latter first, before it could fall out of reach–high-intensity lasers stabbing over tens of thousands of miles until each of those signals went out–then began the methodical annihilation of everything once part of itself that wasn’t a wormship.

  ‘A little bit of surgical cautery here?’ Randal suggested.

  Chunks of Jain coral still containing powered-up processing space heated and exploded into shards like those of shattered porcelain, and the little pieces of Erebus’s mind they contained winked out. Drifting insectile biomechs responded with programmed instinct to the sudden microwave-induced rise of temperature within them by flailing at vacuum with their multi-jointed limbs, then burned and shrivelled up. Shoals of silvery nematode forms wriggled and shot here and there under the impetus of AG-planing drives, then coiled into rings and smoked their substance off into void. Here and there it was more energy-efficient to fire a missile into larger conglomerations of debris, then pick off the scattered targets with whatever energy weapon was most suitable.

  It took an hour in all.

  ‘Now,’ said Erebus, ‘you can only be located in these wormships.’

  ‘But of course,’ Randal replied. ‘Wherever you are is where you’ll find me.’

  Erebus ignored that and studied data on each of the captains of the wormships. Most of them were copies of loyal captains, and twenty-three of the original loyal captains had survived. However, there were thirty-seven ships controlled by captains it had been necessary to meld forcibly, and though Erebus was confident of their utter obedience–for they were part of itself and it controlled them utterly–whenever it allowed them more independence, there was always an undercurrent of resentment which Erebus knew, given a chance, would turn into open rebellion. The wormship sent to kill Orlandine’s two brothers had been controlled by one such captain, so perhaps it was that rebel trait in them that had allowed Randal to more easily subvert it.

  Thought instantly turned to action. Erebus instructed the suspect ships to detonate their onboard ordnance, whereupon thirty-seven vessels disappeared like a chain of firecrackers and the rest of the wormships fried any large chunks that survived.

  There weren’t many.

  ‘What the hell is going on out there?’ Cormac wondered.

  Arach and Crane had come in through the airlock shortly after him, but they were the only ones who could enter the Harpy that way. The rescued drones, including their leader Knobbler, had necessarily used the cargo door, and now all crammed together in the ship’s small hold.

  ‘Bit of a falling-out?’ Arach suggested. Cormac expected no reply from Mr Crane–him being the ultimate example of the strong silent type.

  ‘I don’t see how that’s possible, as all that out there is supposed to be one entity.’

  ‘I know why,’ piped up the ship’s AI, Vulture.

  Cormac glanced for a moment at the console before him, then returned his gaze to the view through the chainglass screen in front of him. ‘Do go on.’

  ‘Erebus has got a virus,’ Vulture replied. ‘As I recollect, an attack ship called the Jack Ketch once had a similar problem.’

  ‘Aphran.’

  ‘Eh?’ said Arach.

  ‘She was a separatist killed by Skellor who somehow copied herself into the Jain structure he created,’ Cormac explained. ‘Jack uploaded her, then experienced considerable difficulty in getting rid of her.’ He paused for a moment. ‘Would this virus happen to be called Henrietta Ipatus Chang?’

  ‘No, not even close,’ said Vulture. ‘I have a copy of him here with me, though he now seems to be in the process of deleting himself. His name was Fiddler Randal.’

  It was a name that meant nothing to Cormac.

  ‘Why is Erebus doing this now?’ he wondered aloud.

  ‘Orlandine was less than candid with you,’ explained the AI. ‘Through myself and Mr Crane here, Fiddler Randal provided her with the codes and chameleonware that enabled her to conceal the war runcible for long enough, and which are now incidentally keeping us from getting fried. Randal has been working against Erebus for some time, and I expect Erebus has now decided it cannot afford to keep him around.’

  ‘I see.’ Cormac let out a slow breath.

  This was it then. As far as he could see, Erebus did not possess sufficient ships to launch an assault on the Sol system, so that disaster had been averted. Admittedly the enemy entity still had enough vessels to be a real danger to individual planets and could later come to pose a significant threat again, but meanwhile the question about the provenance of Jain nodes within the Polity had been resolved, and an extinction-level threat had been negated. Why then did Cormac still feel frustrated, dissatisfied, annoyed?

  It was because the Polity had been faced with a massive threat and had quite simply dropped the ball. Masses of ECS battleships had been moved into position, yet were not actively used and were easily rendered impotent. Erebus had laid the groundwork for an attack capable of penetrating all the way to Earth, and had launched it while intellects that dwarfed mere humans like himself by orders of magnitude had not seen it, having merely reacted to overt attacks and done nothing else. It almost seemed as if Erebus had managed to throw the AIs into total confusion while a single human being–though Orlandine was an extremely capable one–had set out to stop Erebus, and had done so. To say that this all seemed suspiciously odd would be an understatement.

  He thought it odd too that Orlandine had done this on her own, yet surely she had not needed to? Yes, she was a murderer who controlled Jain technology, so would have been considered a danger by the Polity AIs and therefore would be in danger from them, but since she clearly knew how Erebus intended attacking she could simply have informed Jerusalem or Earth Central of this attack in safety by remote means. Had she not done so because she wanted to exact personal vengeance on Erebus? That was possible, but he had never known her well enough to judge.

  ‘What now, boss?’ Arach abruptly broke his train of thought.

  Still surveying the massed but considerably reduced number of wormships, Cormac knew that though they now represented little direct danger to Earth, they would have to be dealt with, but here and now he did not possess the means.

  ‘We wait and we watch,’ he decided. ‘And when they move off, we follow them.’ He paused to consider for a moment. ‘Vulture, have you got U-com available?’

  ‘Hah! Well, I could send information packets, but I’d never know if they arrived,’ the ship AI replied. ‘It’s still very stirred up out there–the most likely target for communication from here would be Earth itself.’

  ‘Send information packets that way,’ Cormac instructed. ‘Let them know what happened here, along with the location and present disposition of Erebus’s forces.’

  ‘That’s not really up to me,’ Vulture replied.

  Cormac had forgotten for a moment that, though he was talking to an AI, this was not necessarily a Polity AI and the ship he occupied was certainly not ECS. This meant he did not give the orders here. Cormac turned and gazed at Mr Crane, who had seated himself in the pilot’s chair and taken out his toys and arrayed them across the console before him.

  ‘I take it you are the captain?’

  Crane nodded briefly, then jumped a small rubber dog over a lump of crystal as if he was playing some obscure version of draughts.

  ‘Will you let your ship AI send those packets?’

  ‘It’s done,’ said Vulture abruptly. ‘I’ve sent them on spiral dispersion so there’s a chance of at least one hitting home. Under Mr Crane’s instructions the packets do not reveal their source. Mr Crane seems wary of letting Earth Central know about us.’

  ‘Good.’ Not in the least puzzled as to why he was keen on anonymity, Cormac continued to gaze at the Golem. ‘Can we then follow Erebus’s fleet when it moves off–as it is sure to do?’

  ‘Dodgy, apparently,’ Vulture replied. ‘Erebus is sure to reformat his chameleonware, recognition codes an
d his scanners, therefore we won’t stay hidden for long.’

  Cormac ground his teeth in frustration. Maybe, if they got close enough to one of those wormships, he could transfer himself across, maybe plant a U-space transponder aboard one of them? Just then a massive detonation lit the cabin briefly, before the screen blacked out. When it cleared a moment later, twelve more wormships had turned into clouds of glowing gas.

  It seemed Erebus had yet to finish cleaning house.

  Orlandine slumped, utterly exhausted, peering down at the holes in the front of her spacesuit. The mycelium inside and spread all around her had repaired the holes punched through the interface sphere when it ran straight into the blast front sent out from the destruction of Erebus’s planetoid, and it had now nearly finished repairing the holes in her body. When it was done with that, she would set it to banishing the fatigue poisons from her body, then maybe she would feel a bit better about her current situation.

  She was alive, so that was definitely a plus. The possibility that her strike against the planetoid would be insufficient and that enough wormships might survive to overcome the war runcible’s defences had been factored into her calculations. But she had considered this only a remote possibility, and more acceptable because the chance of enough wormships remaining to be able to hit Earth had been vanishingly small. Though she had not miscalculated in the second case, she certainly had in the first. She had been arrogant.

  Erebus’s planetoid had halted before entering the corridor after detecting ionization that should not be there–ionization caused by her duel with the King of Hearts–then had loosened its internal structure before proceeding, which had substantially reduced the effectiveness of her attack. But, most importantly, it had turned up in the first place with something like one third again of the predicted mass. She had greatly underestimated Erebus’s ability to reproduce its wormships.