by Neal Asher
* * *
Pelter leant against the door to his room as the nausea hit. Something was happening with his augs, the optic link and the command module. He could feel packets of information being exchanged, linkages being made and broken, busy handshaking. He fumbled his card into the reader beside the door and cursed the fact that his false identity precluded the use of palm-locks. Eventually he got it read and stumbled into his room. Behind him Mr. Crane quietly closed the door. With shaking hands Pelter pulled one, then two patches from a reel. He lifted his grubby mesh shirt, peeled the patches and slapped them against his chest. Only now did he notice the glue marks from previous patches, and the filth. He tried to find it in himself to care. He couldn’t.
The endorphin analogue from the patches leaked into his body, banished nausea and dulled the stabbing pain in the left side of his head. There was relief, but it was minimal until the Sylac aug suddenly shut down. His head immediately began to clear and the virtual vision through the second aug gained an almost painful clarity. Now he could see beyond information frames and graphics that seemed to float in some disconnected space. There was a background now to all this. It was a huge wall of flesh. Scaled flesh.
‘Dragon,’ he said.
There was no answer, just the clarity. With slow and careful steps he walked to the bed and sat down. He must not have this. It was too easy. He tried to reinstate the Sylac aug, and immediately got a surge of sickness again. He bit down on it and forced reinstatement. Pain returned. He realized the second aug was trying to shut down the first. He shut the second aug down and the sickness receded, pain ebbed away. The scaled wall was gone and everything seen through Sylac’s aug was in shades of grey. So: gradual takeover, but he was still in control. With fanatical will he went through the process of shutting down and reinstating each aug in every combination. He was exercising control, but did wonder if he was beginning to enjoy the pain and sickness. Was this because it gave him something to fight?
13
Bubble Metal: These materials were first developed by the Cryon Corporation in 2110. The process of manufacture is simple. A base metal (or alloy) is poured into null-G moulds (hence their development in the first satellite factories) and, while still in a molten state, injected with gas (usually inert). The resultant ‘foamed metal’ is then allowed to cool. Components made by this process are usually high in compressive and tensile strengths, but are prone to corrosion. Further developments brought us anti-corrosive gases and ceramoplastic injectants. This technology has become widely applied, the only solid-cast components now being those used in electronics applications, where the crystal structure or purity of the metal is a requirement.
From a Cryon Corporation catalogue
Cormac gradually woke to the gentle but insistent voice of Hubris calling to him, and immediately felt the silence. He groped for the link like a terminal nicotine addict searching for his first cigarette of the day and finding the packet was empty. Where was the voice in his head and the small synaptic charge that could bring him instantly awake and alert? He experienced a pang of loss and repressed it. He was hearing this voice with his ears.
‘Ian Cormac . . . Ian Cormac . . .’
‘Yes, what is it?’
‘Chaline told me to inform you that her probe is transmitting from the blast-site. There are some anomalies.’
Chaline . . .
He rolled over and reached across the bed, vaguely remembered a disentanglement of sweaty limbs, a kiss on the cheek, a chuckle in the darkness.
‘Tell her I’m on my way.’
He checked the wall clock: ten hours, and not many of them sleep. Feeling only slightly guilty he got out of bed and headed directly for his shower. Ten minutes later he was dressed in trousers and shirt, shuriken snug to his wrist, and heading for Downlink Com, which was the nearest Hubris had to a bridge or operations room.
The room was long, with a large circular chamber at its end from where the probes were dispatched. Its longest walls were packed with screens and other instrumentation. Before five consoles sat people clothed in the distinctive blue coveralls of runcible technicians. Some of them were auged in: optic cables plugged directly from their augs. These technicians remained still; all their activity was between their ears and in the various subminds of Hubris. Chaline was squatting on the floor, below one of the consoles, with a panel open before her and instruments and chips scattered all around. Cormac squatted beside her. She looked up, smiled at him, and he found himself unable to respond.
‘Anomalies, you said.’
Her smile faded to puzzlement, then she shrugged and gestured with a debonding torch at a flashing light on the console above her.
‘That’s a contamination warning,’ she said.
‘The probe is at the blast-site,’ he replied.
‘We programmed it to ignore isotopes. We knew it was going to be hot down there, so the warning isn’t about that.’
With a thoughtful expression on her face she laid the torch beside her and began plugging chips back into the panel. He could see she was pissed off by his lack of acknowledgement, but this was business; he couldn’t let last night get in the way, could he? Emotion must not be allowed to interfere.
‘I thought we might have a problem that diagnostics couldn’t trace. Hubris ran a check as well. Everything seems all right here. The problem is with the probe.’ She looked up at the ceiling. ‘Hubris, have you finished running that check on the probe?’
‘I am still checking. The probe seems to be developing structural weaknesses,’ said the ship AI.
‘You used the present tense,’ said Cormac.
‘The process is continuing. Initially the weaknesses were in its sampling arms, now more weaknesses have appeared.’
Cormac turned to Chaline. ‘I know this is not my territory, but it might be an idea to get the probe into orbit or at least out of the blast-site, if that’s still possible.’
‘We’ll want it back for study, you mean,’ she said.
He nodded and she continued to look at him. After a moment she gave him a slow nod in reply, and a look that meant ‘later’, then she addressed the AI. ‘Hubris, how far gone is the probe’s integrity?’
‘It is still capable of taking high G. The weaknesses seem to be developing only in the ceramal components. The probe has a foamed alloy skeleton.’
‘What could cause that? The cold?’ Cormac asked.
Chaline shook her head in perplexity. ‘Ceramal? No . . . Hubris, what is the temperature outside the probe?’
‘One-eighty Kelvin.’
‘I don’t know why I asked. Ceramal retains its structural integrity down to ninety Kelvin.’
‘Acid? Some kind of caustic gas?’ asked Cormac.
‘No, has to be something more specific than that, else the sampling process would have picked it up . . . Wait a minute . . . Hubris, how old were the Samarkand runcible buffers?’
‘The Samarkand runcible was installed solstan 2383.’
‘Yes,’ said Chaline with satisfaction. Cormac raised an eyebrow and she went on. ‘Wide-spectrum superconductors were introduced in 2397. The Samarkand runcible had the old sort; superconducting ceramic-impregnated tungsten steel and bathed in liquid helium. The room-temperature superconductors they had then couldn’t take the kind of surge a runcible buffer receives. We are talking about a huge EM pulse here.’
‘And?’ asked Cormac, wondering why she felt it necessary to over-explain her area of expertise.
‘Don’t you see? Tungsten steel impregnated with ceramic? That is what ceramal is.’
Cormac nodded.
‘So whatever screwed up those buffers is now screwing up your probe,’ Chaline said. ‘Hubris, would it be possible to run an interior microscan of the probe?’
‘Scanning.’
‘What do you expect to find?’
‘Sabotage . . . too specific to be anything else.’
‘How?’
‘Well, the buffers would have
been too cold for some kind of manufactured virus, and are screened to everything bar neutron radiation, so it has to be nanomachines.’
‘If it is nanomachines . . . can you do anything about them? Will you be able to set up your runcible down there?’
Chaline chewed on her knuckle. ‘They would have survived a fusion explosion . . . Getting rid of them is like getting rid of a disease: there’s always one bacillus survives to start the process off again. But . . . but they are not prone to mutation like a bacillus or virus. Once we get a sample, we should be able to make a counteragent.’ She glanced up at his puzzled expression. ‘Counter nanomachines, ones with the singular purpose of hunting down and destroying the nanomachines there. It would take ages though, and years for Samarkand to be clear.’
‘And the new runcible?’
‘Oh, we can protect it. There isn’t a great deal of ceramal used in its construction. The buffers are carbon-seventy-based superconductors. The nanomachines won’t touch them. We will need to set up a proscription scan like that used for weaponry.’
Cormac waited for her to continue.
‘To stop it getting taken off planet,’ she explained, as if tired of dealing with an idiot. ‘Samarkand would also have to be limited to runcible transport until it’s clear. Therefore, no ships.’
‘As a way station it wouldn’t get many anyway,’ Cormac said.
‘True,’ said Chaline, and returned to pushing chips back into place.
‘Nanomycelium detected,’ said Hubris, before the silence between them became too stretched.
‘Mycelium?’ asked Cormac.
Chaline looked round and frowned. ‘Fibres like a fungus; we need to get some here for analysis. We’ll have to use class-one isolation—’
Hubris interrupted. ‘It will not be necessary to bring it here. Nanomycelium also detected in shuttle bay.’
Suddenly warning lights began flashing on the walls and the voice of the AI was heard throughout the ship.
‘Warning, possible hull-breach in shuttle-bay area. Section fifteen to be sealed in ten minutes.’
* * *
Downlink Com was not in section fifteen. Cormac, Chaline and the five technicians watched the screens showing that section. There was no panic. If the situation had been dangerous, Hubris would have sealed the section and the people would have been evacuated in emergency suits. As it was, they walked to the section’s exit looking mildly annoyed. At that exit four technicians waited with hand scanners that bore a disturbing resemblance to truncheons. They ran these over each of the evacuees, paying particular attention to the soles of their footwear. While they watched, one irritated man, an ophidapt with a spined crest on his bald head, had to remove his shoes and toss them in a canister by the exit.
‘Will the detector pick them all up?’ Cormac asked.
No one felt inclined to answer him.
‘Let us hope you can make a counteragent, then,’ he finished.
They watched as the section was finally cleared, and the doors closed and hermetically sealed.
‘Hubris, we need samples,’ said Chaline.
The picture being showed to them changed to a view into the shuttle bay. The camera zeroed in on a section of polished floor. On the floor were dull footprints from which spread black fibres like dry rot. The camera pulled back to show a little remote drone hovering a few centimetres from the floor. It was a chrome cylinder not much bigger than a man’s forearm. All along its underside it had pairs of manipulators. In one crab claw it held a sample bottle. As it approached the footprints another arm unfolded. By one of the footprints that arm folded down and smoke spurted up. The yellow laser beam only became visible in that smoke as the drone meticulously cut two strips of flooring, levered them up with what could only be a screwdriver, and dropped them in the bottle.
‘I’ll have to get down to Isolation,’ Chaline said to Cormac. ‘I have a lot of work to do. The entire hull of this ship is ceramal.’ She waited a moment for him to say something. Cormac let her go without comment.
* * *
Back in his cabin, Cormac called up a view into Isolation and watched the dracomen eat yet another meal. Could it have been them? he wondered. Somehow that did not seem Dragon’s style. It was possible, but why would Dragon do such a thing? Why would Dragon want the people of Samarkand killed? Or perhaps he was asking the wrong question. Why would Dragon want the Samarkand runcible destroyed? He shook his head. There was not yet enough evidence to put any theories together.
‘Hubris, any luck with that submind?’
The AI’s reply was quick and succinct. ‘I do not have the capacity to spare for it at the moment.’
‘The mycelium?’
‘Two-thirds of my capacity is being used for decoding it and designing a counteragent.’
‘OK, can you put me through to the submind?’
‘Yes.’
‘—throw away archetypes but keep ideas bathwater baby hell hath no hungry mole lord of pain lord of pain where is edge? Sinter snapping hove to green rotting fruit—’
Running his finger down a touch-strip Cormac turned the sound down. He said to the submind, ‘The runcible buffers were destroyed by a nanomycelium.’
He turned the sound back up.
‘—hungry hungry eater green green grass is green fell into the rainy day bleed break men lizard Janus—’
Men lizard?
‘Who destroyed the runcible buffers?’
‘—gain gone flee on invisible wings rotting fruit blackthorn thorns peach—’
Cormac clicked the voice off. For a moment he thought he had something there, but would the runcible AI have known who planted the mycelium? It seemed unlikely. Had it known, it would have transmitted more information before its destruction. Had it known, it would have instantly shut down the runcible. Freeman might have ended up lost in underspace, but that would have been better than him causing the deaths of 10,000 people.
‘Hubris, show me that mycelium in the shuttle bay.’
The picture on the screen changed. There was no word from the AI. Perhaps it was getting impatient with him. He stared at the picture. Even with part of the deck cut away the shape of the dull footprints was evident. They were long and splayed, with a mark for a back toe; obviously not human and obviously the footprints of dracomen, but was that damning evidence? Anyone who had been to the surface could have carried some of the mycelium away with them. The dracomen had been there longer, so it was more likely to be them.
‘Hubris, the dracomen brought the mycelium aboard.’
‘Already aware.’
Cormac rattled his fingers on his desk.
What now?
He could try the dracomen again, but his last attempt at communication had tried his patience to the limit. He was sure they were quite capable of speaking with him in some manner, but one of them just sat there and grinned while the other just sat staring at the food dispenser. Perhaps what he needed was face to face, rather than gestures through the viewing window and speech through the intercom.
‘Damn it!’
He stood up and headed for Isolation.
* * *
As he came from the drop-shaft Cormac saw that Mika was standing before the viewing window to the isolation chamber. She stood in an attitude of deep contemplation, an elbow cupped in one hand and her other hand under her chin. Standing like that she appeared less of a girl. Or was he seeing her differently now? He wondered how old she was. She could be anywhere from eighteen to 300 years. Appearance had not been a way to judge age for the last four centuries. He walked up beside her. She did not acknowledge his presence until he was two paces from her.
‘Ah, Ian Cormac.’
‘Just Cormac. Something bothering you?’
‘No, not really—not bothering me. I’m just intrigued. I did some checking.’ She pointed to the floor of the isolation chamber by the far wall. ‘You see those?’
Cormac looked across and saw what appeared to be a couple of scr
ewed-up polythene bodysuits. He looked from them to the two dracomen, who were squatting motionless in the middle of the chamber, and noticed that they appeared cleaner, brighter.
‘Skins,’ he said. ‘They shed their skins.’
‘They’ve done it three times since they were put in here. They’re regenerating: sloughing off and excreting radiation-damaged cells, and rapidly replacing them.’
‘Yes, Hubris told me.’
She glanced at him. ‘Did it also tell you that they are also immune to cancer, to replication error?’
‘A handy trait, but it is also one we have.’
‘Yes, but ours is done by viral or nanomachine repair of our DNA based on the corrected birth blueprint. We still develop cancers and they still have to be cured. This is completely different.’
‘I don’t know whether or not it is relevant, but, as well as it being proposed that dracoman was one of the race Dragon claimed to represent, it was also proposed that he was some kind of organic machine.’
‘We are all organic machines. No, you miss my point . . . I analysed some of that skin. They are without DNA. They replace cells by direct protein replication. It’s been done before, but no creature has ever evolved that method. Far too complex.’
‘So they are some kind of machine?’
‘If you want to call them that. Philosophy is not my field.’
Cormac felt a twinge of embarrassment. ‘I guess that was a stupid thing to say.’
‘It was.’ She smiled briefly to take the sting away, and went on. ‘But these creatures definitely were made in some way. You call them dracomen and in doing that you infer gender, but they are completely sexless: no self-contained method of reproduction. I would say, considering their antecedents, that they were made to serve a purpose, and that purpose is not their own survival and continuation of their genes, as with us; it is Dragon’s purpose. They are an alien form of the Golem Series—or any other android for that matter.’
‘And what might their purpose be?’
‘I have no idea. All I know is that this Dragon built well.’