by Neal Asher
‘Why not wait until everyone is completely clear?’ she asked, once again perching on his tank.
The man himself stood nearby, smoking a cigarette. He told her it was a habit acquired after spending too much time in his youth taking part in VR interactives based on celluloid films that were centuries old. He found it relaxed him.
‘Coloron keeps destroying Jain tech on the surface, but it continues burrowing into the ground. It may be doing so slowly at present, but that’s only because the arcology was necessarily built on solid granite. Once it reaches the softer strata, it’ll speed up. So if we don’t take it out before then, we may lose the planet.’
The arcology was now a silvery line on the horizon from which fires sprouted. Poised like stormclouds over it, atmosphere ships, having hurled down their lightnings, now departed to make way for what was to come. The tank commander tossed her a set of goggles.
‘I thought the hardfields will block the flash?’ she said.
‘They will, but there’s no guarantee they’ll be there all the time.’
Aphran grunted her thanks and pocketed the goggles.
Ground armour, autoguns, tanks like the commander’s, and AG platforms retreated to the shield line, many of them burdened with troops. Behind these, firing continued as more dehumanized residents tried to come out in the wake of Coloron’s forces, only to be taken down by the scanning drones. Then the drones abruptly retreated, like flies shooed away from a corpse. A turquoise bar sliced down from the sky, turning the intervening ground to magma, working rhythmically back and forth before the arcology. Distantly, the cloud-locked sky, generated by massive evaporation of sea water, reflected similar fires around the other perimeters. Columns of smoke cut the sky in between like black tornados. Occasional sheets of flame groped upwards, and explosions constantly shook the ground. It seemed as if the troops had fled the Pit. Five dreadnoughts now occupied space above MA, to add their firepower to Coloron’s own. One of those ships, even now, was probably selecting sources of appalling destruction from its weapons carousel.
‘Do you know yet what we intend to use?’ Aphran paused, considering how easily that ‘we’ came to her lips. ‘Straight nukes or something a bit more exotic?’
‘If I told you, I’d have to shoot you,’ said the commander laconically, grinding out his cigarette butt.
‘You’re a laugh a minute,’ Aphran muttered.
He grinned. ‘Slow burn CTDs, which spread microspheres of antimatter over a wide area. The effective result is an atomic fire. Nothing survives above the atomic level at the hypocentre, while the EM pulse disrupts molecular bonds for a lot further.’
‘Nice,’ said Aphran, wondering again how Separatists had ever come to believe they could triumph against the Polity. Yes, they could detonate bombs, murder citizens, cause major disruption, but in the end, like some angry amateur going up against an experienced fighter, they would inevitably get slapped down. But that was ever the case with terrorist organizations: their doomed-to-failure efforts against superior forces littered historical records. Perhaps that very futility was the attraction.
‘Interesting description,’ said the commander. He paused to take out another cigarette, and watched it self-ignite. ‘We use gravity imploders for a similar purpose in space warfare. They were invented to completely vaporize their target without spreading large fast-moving chunks of it all around a planetary system. On a planet that won’t work, of course, because there’s always a big air-transmitted Shockwave. The whole idea of using slow-burn CTDs is to not chuck around Jain-infected debris.’
‘But we have hardfields here to protect us from a Shockwave,’ Aphran observed.
‘A breeze,’ he said, still studying the end of his cigarette. ‘To achieve an equivalent level of destruction here, using straight CTDs or imploders, would result in there being nothing but bedrock left for a hundred miles all around. The Shockwave would travel around the planet a few times, killing millions in the process. There’d be a tsunami spreading out simultaneously from the seaward side, probably a mile high and travelling at twice the speed of sound.’
Aphran returned her attention to the battle line and those retreating beyond it. It would be a while before the hardfield generators came on, but soon after that the bombardment would commence. She nodded to the commander and made her way over towards a refectory vehicle, then while waiting in the queue, she gazed at the scene on this side of the line – away from the arcology.
The sky swarmed with ships, landing and departing, many ferrying relatively small numbers of the millions of citizens still in retreat. Stragglers were now only about a mile beyond the line, and amidst them most of the ambulance ships were landing. Aphran peered down at the churned ground, and only after a moment noticed how a maize crop had been trodden into a fibrous earthy pulp by the passage of a million shoes. Other evidence of the exodus lay scattered all about her: a plastic toy dinosaur that intermittently twitched its tail and bared its teeth, discarded tissues, food packaging, a shoe, a jacket, a hover trunk spilling clothing – its motor obviously having burnt out, even jewellery that in another age would have ransomed a kingdom. Sadder remnants were being loaded into a transporter further down the line, some citizens having only made it this far.
As she returned with two self-heating coffees – one acquired for the commander only as a courtesy since he carried sufficient supplies in his tank – he directed Aphran’s attention towards the last of those retreating from the arcology. She placed her cup down on ceramal armour and took up her monocular. ‘What am I looking at?’
‘Over there, to the left of that big autogun,’ the commander directed.
Aphran focused in and observed a bipedal robot cradling under its body a child – either dead or injured, Aphran could not tell. This was no unusual sight, for she had already seen many bodies carried away from this place by anyone or anything with the capability. She failed to see the man’s point.
‘That’s Coloron,’ he said.
Aphran studied the robot more closely. Nothing much distinguished it from any others she had seen, except it seemed overburdened with com hardware. Nevertheless, the image held a striking poignancy.
‘Sort of neatly sums up this whole shitstorm,’ her companion continued.
One hour later the hardfields were turned on: they were invisible, but the power hum vibrated the surrounding air, while steam rose from the cooling vanes of the generators. Then blue-white fires suddenly lit up the distant cloud, and burned for several minutes before fading to a hot orange glow.
‘That’s the coast – over two hundred miles away. It’s the first of them,’ explained the commander.
The blue-white fire flared again, closer now, growing and spreading into four evenly spaced hemispheric sunrises. Aphran noted strange rainbow effects around these blazes, knowing she no longer saw the true picture, and that without the polarizing effect of the hardfields she would probably be blind now. She looked back and up, to see an evacuation ship rapidly rising into the sky, probably the last one able to leave safely. Just the reflection from the vessel’s matt hull was like the glare from an arc welder. She quickly turned away, in time to see the nearest hardfield transport slam down into the earth as if trodden on by an invisible giant. The whole line of them, for as far as she could see, rippled as if a wave was passing through the earth. She felt the Shockwave impact through her feet, then came a muted roar, growing in volume. Her ears popped, and suddenly she found herself fighting for breath. Ground wind: diverted half a mile overhead, it sucked the air out from behind the hardfields. This lasted only moments before a wind surged in from behind the lines – air rushing in to fill the gap.
Ahead of her, to the right and left, further hemispheres rose as if the very earth bubbled light. She noted the commander finally discarding his latest cigarette, and moving back around to the side of his tank. She joined him quickly.
‘Big ones coming,’ he said.
The four flashes dissolved the nearer
arcology edge. No mere hemisphere now: white light grew like a sun before her. A wall of distortion flashed across the intervening miles and slammed into the hardfields. She saw the nearest transport disappear into the ground, then the earth bucked under her feet sending her sprawling. The sound actually hurt and her ears popped with pressure changes as the sky turned crimson. In a moment a wind tried to haul her up into the air. She crawled closer to the AG tank, where the commander caught hold of her arm and dragged her in closer. Further down the line she glimpsed heavy armour and human figures being tossed through the air like leaves. Light grew incredibly intense: a flash bulb that would not go out. She pulled on her goggles, felt the earth sliding sideways underneath her. Now she resided in a shadowland, as if dropped into a dark container being shaken by a vindictive god. She did not know how long it lasted, but it seemed her new life ended then began again.
‘You can take off your goggles now.’
Aphran thought she must have lost consciousness, for the commander was now standing beside her and she had not seen him rise. Removing her goggles revealed a white-out just beyond the nearest hardfield, and where one of the generators lay in ruins a thick fog rolled through.
‘We should be all right, though we may get a little wet,’ he commented.
She did not understand him until a low wave of boiling water crashed against the hardfield, and foamed through the gap. The hot tide reached them, but only ankle deep, then thankfully flowed quickly away, leaving only steaming pools nearby. A sudden wind picked up as all the hardfields shut down. Warm fog flowed past till eventually, through a break in it, Aphran observed a white-flecked greyness around the curve of the horizon.
‘There went Main Arcology,’ the commander observed, ‘and in its place now, the sea.’
It seemed this world had just acquired a bay 200 miles across.
Sometime later, Aphran collected her meagre belongings from inside the commander’s tank.
‘Where are you heading now?’ he asked.
‘I don’t know,’ Aphran replied, ‘and there’s something quite liberating about that.’
And then she set out.
Its chameleonware was better than anything she had seen, if that were not in itself illogical. She wondered if maybe it could be better still, because the effect only just made it invisible to the Polity detectors in this segment – and no more. Orlandine tracked it by the stray gas currents it stirred and the slight feedback effects it caused in gravtech used to hold the Dyson segment together. She observed this phenomenon for hours, and began to think she would learn no more, but then the Polity detectors in one area it occupied abruptly began recycling old images. While this happened, an odd spoon-shaped vessel appeared and descended beside a globular fusion reactor mounted on one of the angled joists.
Now what are you? Orlandine wondered.
While she watched, the ship stuck itself in place with some kind of cilia, then extended a tentacle that snaked across frigid metal to the reactor. It branched all over the reactor’s cowling, and began to penetrate. Recharging itself? No doubt any report of a reactor drain would not be recorded at the Cassius stations, since Orlandine recognized a technology very like that she now studied.
A gift – from an admirer.
Orlandine suspected that same admirer had now come to pay her a visit. But how did it know to come here? Then it hit her: the dreams. All matter, by current theories being just rucked up spacetime, caused effects observable from underneath its continuum: in U-space. Jain tech was highly organized matter. Implicit in her dreams was the concept of Jain tech making an obvious impression on the fabric of space – that spider shape represented the one that should be recognizable from U-space. Immediately she feared this visitor knew her location precisely, and she started thinking of how she should escape. Then she realized what else she was seeing: this strange vessel was conducting a steady search through one layer of the Dyson segment. Somehow, whoever or whatever piloted it had only roughly divined her location. Continuing this search pattern, it would take some days to find her. However, she must decide what to do meanwhile.
Tools from Jain tech . . .
Orlandine had concluded that Skellor had used Jain tech as a system to support his interface with an AI, which he in turn used to control that same technology. But not sufficiently accounting for the technology’s own purpose had probably contributed to his eventual downfall. Skellor, however, was no haiman, therefore inferior. Having taken apart one quarter of the Jain node, Orlandine now well understood that any part of it, while growing, established ovaries, in which nodes developed with a one-way connection to their host. In one human body infested with this tech, there would eventually be millions of them – leeching information, while keeping themselves hidden. She could only surmise that Skellor did not realize this until too late. Just not quick enough or clever enough. Interface an idiot with an AI and you surely end up with decrease in overall intelligence.
Arrogant?
Understanding the trap, Orlandine intended to avoid it. But how? There would always be risks. She looked around her laboratory, up at the gimballed device containing the remains of the node, then down at the memcrystal banks in which she stored the bulk of the programming and structural information obtained from it. Perhaps now, with her situation becoming more urgent, it was time to make a calculated increase of risk to herself? With her present buffering and cut-out systems, she could only expand her processing space by one quarter. Beyond that, things would begin to break down. A mycelium, then, to prevent the degradation of synapses in her organic brain and replace them with something more rugged? Of course she could record herself completely to crystal and just let that primeval organ die . . . No, the haiman ethos was based on acquiring human/AI synergy, and recorded to crystal she would become fully AI. But would that be a bad thing?
No.
Orlandine slammed a fist back against the crashfoam wall. She refused to cease being who she was. It all came back to human time and utterly human impulses: in the end, gods did not appreciate godlike power, but humans did. Why scrabble after such power if in the process it changes you into something for which that power is just an aspect of yourself no more important than being able to walk or see or hear? No advance there, just a relocation. She would begin with the quarter increase of processing space, and link to the memcrystal banks – risk Jain incursions informationally – then she would consider applying a mycelium to herself. And then she would take the remaining Jain node apart just as fast as she could.
As she turned to set about this task she tried to ignore the small whisper inside: All about power, then . . .
With his ship still in U-space, Blegg gazed coldly at the Jain node resting in its small chainglass cylinder. This then was the next stage: a second generation node more efficient at taking apart the human race than the one Skellor had picked up. Though keyed to humans, it did not react to Blegg himself. This was something he had pondered throughout the journey here, and from which he drew ineluctable conclusions.
With growing bitterness, Blegg returned his attention to the cockpit screen, across which the detection equipment displayed U-space as a representative map matching the layout of the Cassius system. On that map he recognized the signature for the node beside him, some distance out from one of the main construction stations. The second signature lay over on the other side of the sun, but blurred and dispersed. The equipment only informed him that what it detected there lay within a volume of space about the size of Jupiter. He considered tracking this signature down to its source by himself, but decided to wait until further forces arrived. He would use the time to reconnoitre first.
Surfacing his ship from U-space, he immediately linked in with part of his mind to the station AI. Within moments he learnt about helio-meteorologist Maybrem’s recent promotion to station overseer after the abrupt and violent departure of the original overseer, Orlandine. Murder . . . after a love affair gone wrong. He would have ignored all this had the murder b
een committed by someone of lesser stature. But the previous overseer? That might be connected, somehow, to the presence of Jain technology here in this same system. He noted that the forensic AI still occupied the station, so decided to pay it a visit. An hour later he docked and disembarked into the station, to be greeted immediately by Maybrem.
The man was a curious combination; his archaic Caribbean holidaymaker garb contrasting sharply with the haiman carapace clinging to his back. His clothing was wrinkled, as if it had been worn for some time, and his face showed the lines of fatigue.
‘I have only a vague idea of the signature’s position,’ Blegg said. ‘What do you have?’
Maybrem led the way into the station. ‘My solar-weather satellites use U-space com, so I ran the search through them and have located it in Dyson segment fourteen, on the other side of the sun. As instructed, I’ve not moved anything any closer to it.’
‘Good,’ replied Blegg abruptly. ‘Now I would like to speak to the forensic AI.’
Maybrem led the way into a wide chamber where, up above, a hologram of the Cassius system slowly turned. A corridor leading off to one side brought them to a drop-shaft which took them up. Several corridors later they arrived at double panelled doors.
‘Here,’ the man indicated.
Blegg turned the polished brass knob and entered.
One of the new kinds that were modelled on social insects, the forensic AI consisted of a squirming mass of robotic ants like a ball of shiny metal swarf. It rested in the centre of a lounge furnished with a scattering of low marble tables and comfortable reclining chairs – looking as incongruous there as a sack of oily tools on an Axminster rug. A heavy-worlder man with black hair and bushy eyebrows slept in one of the chairs, a palm-com in his lap and his feet up on one table, beside a cup of skinned-over coffee. Two women sat facing each other at another table, busily delving with chrome chopsticks into a selection of porcelain bowls. They glanced up, tilted their heads for a moment as if listening, then returned to their meal. Blegg walked forward, aware that Maybrem did not follow – clearly the company of forensic AIs made even haimans nervous.