by Neal Asher
Dragon loomed closer, and the image grew steadily clearer, as did the damage the entity had suffered. It was scorched black in places, cut through with reflective rivulets as if its armour had melted and run. In two areas armour was completely missing and revealed a blackened interior, slightly lit red as if embers were glowing inside.
“I’m getting nothing on any com frequency,” said Cog. He glanced round at Angel and raised an eyebrow. Angel shook his head. Cog continued, “But there must be some intelligence still operating in there—it’s now heading directly away from the centre point of USER disruption, so I reckon it’s U-space capable.”
“You aim to moor on the surface?” Trike suggested.
Cog shook his head. “No, we don’t know how close its U-field operates. In fact, we don’t know how it operates at all. We go inside.”
Fusion drive was now working almost at its limit to keep pace with Dragon’s steady acceleration. Was that a coincidence? Trike had seen how fast the thing could move, though he was not sure how, and it was certainly faster than this. Was it waiting for them?
Soon they were above the curved armoured plane of its surface and gazing at white diamond-shaped scales. Some of these were rucked up, especially towards the edge of the burned area they now moved in over. Everything was fused and blackened, covered in shiny patches and streams of hard glass—the scales here had melted. Ahead lay what looked like a mountain range: jags of Dragon’s hide poking up into vacuum. In a moment, they were up over this and descending.
“Something living,” said Cog.
He put up a frame showing a teardrop-shaped island of flesh clinging to one rim of the hole inside. Rising from this were two dragon pseudopods that turned their heads and watched as Cog’s ship slid down past them.
“Do we have a better view inside?” Trike asked matter-of-factly.
Cog worked his control and the view in the frame swung to display the inside. They gazed at blurred black and red, until Cog switched over to image enhancement and the view resolved. Giant strut bones intersected on nodes were scattered throughout the interior. Here and there blackened masses emitted a red glow. Blackened cords clung to the bones and webbed over other spaces like charred muscle. But there were also things that had a more machine-like appearance: clustered cuboid metallic structures like burned-out rail cars or buildings. A thing at the intersection of strut bones looked like a railgun, a giant honeycomb whose compartments contained metal spheres, and others besides.
“Over there.” Cog pulled up another screen frame. “Before we drift further.”
“It’s still accelerating?” asked Trike.
“Faster now,” Cog replied.
“I wondered about that. I reckon it was waiting for us.”
Cog shrugged, neither agreeing nor disagreeing.
Using steering thrusters, he manoeuvred his ship over towards one end of a honeycomb compartment. A mile from where he brought the ship down lay the outer skin of Dragon, while a giant strut bone jutted in overhead. The vessel hit the surface with a crunch.
“Remora docking?” Trike asked.
“Yeah, but maybe not enough,” Cog replied.
The Old Captain worked his console and a series of thumps resounded throughout the ship. Trike recognized these as explosive anchors and hoped there was not some part of Dragon ready to respond to further damage. The ship settled with occasional creaks and thumps as things cooled, or as damaged structure within it realigned—there was still repair work to be done.
“Air pressure too, now,” said Cog. “Local—in some kind of containment field.”
“And a visitor.” Trike pointed.
Far out on the flat surface an object had appeared and was moving rapidly towards them. Cog magnified it in a frame. It either looked like or was what they had seen clinging to the edge of the hole through which they had entered the Dragon sphere. Its appearance was of a giant slug ten feet long, while the two tentacles protruding from its head were stunted Dragon pseudopods. It also reminded Trike of those creatures that had swarmed onto the Cyberat island where he had fought Angel.
“I’m going to go out and take a look,” he said, standing. Still he wanted to move, and still he wanted to strike against someone or something . . .
They all trooped down the spiral stair into the hold area of the ship. There Cog palmed a panel beside the door, and the door started folding down into a ramp. As pressures equalized, Trike expected to smell charred flesh. But what he got instead was a whiff that reminded him of hydraulic oil, with the spicy undertone he had smelled when Dragon had penetrated their ship earlier.
They walked down into open cathedral vastness. Trike’s boots, now he was out of grav and using gecko function, crunched on a surface scabbed with chunks of white ash that turned to dust underneath them. The slug thing drew steadily closer, leaving a dust trail behind. Then, about ten paces out, it halted and seemed to deflate, reshaping and spreading out on the surface to cling like a limpet.
“You’ve got something to say?” Cog called.
The two cobra-headed pseudopods turned in to face each other, as if baffled by the question. After a moment, they swung out again.
“Now I understand,” said Angel. The android abruptly moved forwards, coming to stand right in front of the thing. One pseudopod stabbed down, hitting his chest so hard he staggered. It then turned him to face them, its neck curving off over his shoulder. Angel’s eyes were now glowing the same sapphire as the other pseudopod poised up behind him.
“Dragon is here,” he said.
“Then perhaps Dragon can tell us, in plain words, what the fuck is going on?” said Cog.
“I miscalculated,” said Dragon, out of Angel’s mouth.
“No shit,” said Cog. “But I’m going to need more than that.”
“Angel will speak,” Dragon replied.
Angel jerked as if electrocuted, and bowed his head. When he looked up again the sapphire glow receded from his eyes. He gave a very human grimace and shook his head.
“It’s complicated,” he said.
Trike snorted. “I think we’re aware of that.”
“Orlandine started building her runcibles eighty years ago and yet, in all that time, the Wheel—a Jain AI—was free to do what it wanted with me and the wormship it controlled,” he said. “Only when Dragon started to have doubts about what Orlandine was doing, and started investigating, did it supposedly seek out this Jain soldier to send against the defence sphere—to detonate the dead star.”
“Investigating?” Trike asked, rage churning in his belly. First he had wanted to destroy Angel, but it turned out the android was a victim too. This Wheel had then seemed the prime mover in all this, but now it was gone, destroyed in that wormship. All that was left was the Clade . . .
Angel focused on him. “Dragon started gathering data. Apparently, the accretion disc is not that old in interstellar terms. There is something odd about how it was formed. It is the remains of a solar system that was destroyed during a battle between the Jain and some kind of unacceptable offshoot from their family tree. That offshoot was destroyed by the prador just some thousands of years ago. However, one of them survived to help the Polity during its war against the prador.”
“I’m trying to see the relevance of this,” said Trike tightly.
Angel held up one hand. He looked to be in pain as he struggled to get things straight in his skull. “That Jain offshoot left a library accessible only by one of their kind. Dragon obtained the remains of the one who helped the Polity and passed them on to a weapons platform AI who resurrected the individual—a creature the humans name the Client. It seized control of the platform and took it straight into the Prador Kingdom to seek out this library.”
“So, Dragon did this to get the data it wanted on the accretion disc from the creature?” asked Cog.
“Yes, but before it could go there, Dragon was lured here by the easy answers my remains might provide . . . into a trap.” Angel bowed his head and s
hook it. “There’s something else about what the Client is, and what it might do, that is unclear. But certainly something is clear.”
“Something clear would be nice,” said Cog.
Angel continued, “The Wheel’s aim in sending the soldier was to push Orlandine into using her runcibles, into firing a black hole into the accretion disc, before she learned the true origins of that disc. In fact, the soldier, which is more powerful than any of her weapons platforms, ensures it.”
“I see,” said Cog. “Orlandine has a gun that fires black holes.”
Angel looked up. “Precisely.”
“So we are now rushing to stop her from doing precisely what an obviously hostile Jain AI wants her to do?” asked Trike.
Angel shrugged. “Apparently we might be too late. The wormship came here without the soldier so it is likely it has already been sent. It will be months before we are clear of the USER disruption—only then will Dragon know what has happened and how to react.”
Trike finally lost patience with the convoluted explanation of events. “Who is the enemy? Who wants these things to happen? Is it the Clade?”
Angel shook his head. “I don’t think so. It seems the Clade was acting on the Wheel’s orders. It also seems that in acting as it did here, the Wheel was as much a soldier as the one it sent.” Angel paused, then held out his hands in bafflement. “The Wheel might have been a submind, just like the one Orlandine interrogated, sent by a primary Jain AI, or maybe by one of the Jain. We cannot know.”
“We cannot know yet,” said Trike.
As he gazed at the android, he felt an utter certainty that he would know who or what had torn his life apart and put his wife in a cold coffin. He would find it and, whether it was an AI or some ancient surviving alien, he would tear it apart.
THE CLIENT
The Client’s remote and the Jain librarian tumbled through the thin air in the chamber at the centre of the moon. They fought each other and raped each other for data, seeking to dominate. The Client, dispersed through the Librarian and losing consciousness of its self, understood then the negotiation, the mating. One-on-one fights between Jain could not be compared to the way other races fought. If two humans or two prador clashed then one was a loser; one was dead. When Jain fought it was a melding, a compromise. They destroyed parts of each other’s minds and they stole from each other’s minds. Certainly, at the end of these encounters the body of the subservient Jain ended up dead. But the resultant dominant mind in the surviving Jain was irrevocably changed—it was an amalgam of itself and its victim.
This was what was happening now and the Client could not see which one was dominant. But it was certain that she could no longer break away with the data she had seized and that this must proceed to its conclusion. Even as she fought, this encounter seemed crazy and illogical. Here she was, the last of her kind, locked in a battle to the death with the last of the Jain, their minds like two immiscible fluids tangled around each other in a ball.
Aboard the weapons platform, the Librarian was as deep into computer systems and the Client’s primary form as it was into the remote. But the two battling figures at the centre of the moon were now physically destroying each other. Her fibres and meshes far inside the Librarian, the Client began cutting through nerves, killing musculature, seizing control of and killing major organs. They both started to decohere, which was evident when they bounced against the floor and the Librarian lost a leg, while the remote lost one of its segments. This stage of the fight pushed things to a crisis, and the two fluids of mind ceased to be immiscible.
Two minds began to fall together, no longer tearing at each other.
Two bodies convulsed, drifting to one wall of the dodecahedron and crunching against it. The Client’s remote broke into segments while the Librarian separated at all the joints in its carapace. Stringy connections pulled apart, while grey fluids oozed out and broke into floating blobs. They spread in a cloud of pieces and, with the instruction to “destroy the forbidden data” fading, the Client knew that at last she had won. Segment by segment her perception through the remote went out, and she was again completely in her primary form aboard the weapons platform. Her mind, now spread throughout the computer architecture around her and in her attack pods, was no longer fighting to survive, but fighting to digest all she had taken. She realized that right from the start she had behaved like her ancestors when she had seized the mind of the AI Pragus. And now she had done the same with the Librarian.
Only she remained, larger, more complex, motivations altered and her view of time much longer. But the core of herself, though changed, still retained its key motivations. Still she hated the prador for their extermination of the Species, still she hated the humans for their betrayal, but the emotion was not so strong now. Stronger was a sadness she felt in having killed the last Jain, and sadness that she was the last of her kind. However, deep in the memories of the Librarian she found new hope and a source of excitement.
The Client was about to detach the anchors rooting the weapons platform to the library moon, but reconsidered. Because she had absorbed so much of the Librarian’s mind she now knew that the moon contained a great deal of useful technology. With a thought, she got robots on the move in the weapons platform, heading for the exits. It was time to ransack this place. Afterwards she would have somewhere to go, and something to do. Though as yet she did not know her ultimate goals, or whether they would stem from that portion of herself that was Jain or Species.
It had happened when an alliance of Jain had attacked the Librarian and its newly formed children—the Species—while they fled Jain-occupied space. Starships fought. In eidetic memory, the Client clearly saw a battle so ferocious that even with her knowledge and experience it appalled her. Giant war ships duelled amidst worlds and asteroid fields, used a glaring green sun for cover. Weapons known in the Polity and the Prador Kingdom scored million-mile lines of fire across vacuum. Near-c railgun slugs shattered the crusts of worlds and blew continent-sized debris into space. She saw a moon skewered by a particle beam, like a giant high-speed drill of green fire. Magma exploded from dormant volcanoes scattered about its impact site, while a vast plume of magma and gas from the other side tumbled a hidden ship away like a giant fossilized ammonite, leaking fire. Field-accelerated comets and asteroids pummelled an ice giant, spinning it to rubble and destroying more ships there. But known weapons were not the only ones deployed.
She saw a gas giant collapsing in a shaped, U-space generated gravity field, with fusion igniting and exploding—a disc-shaped blast spread across the entire solar system. The face of the sun bulged and finally speared out a solar flare as wide as worlds to incinerate another target. And there was Jain technology. Everywhere.
Moons writhed with pseudo-life, growing towers out into vacuum. Debris clouds coagulated into crystalline missiles, opened up chemical drives and hurled themselves at colony ships of the Species. Swarms of semi-organic machines fell through vacuum on war craft to tear at hull metal. Tentacles shimmering with shearfields coiled out from asteroid masses to whip at passing ships. But still, the Species ships were triumphant against all but one behemoth of a ship.
At length, she saw the Species war and colony ships fleeing, warded by an immense vessel of their kind. This was facing off against the remaining Jain behemoth—close over the green sun. The two ships duelled with weapons that created vast honeycomb patterns across the surface of the sun and flung out vast eddies of fire. Locked together, tearing at each other, tangled by energies that ribbed into the fabric of the universe, they fell into a pit actually opening in the sun itself. The ensuing blast lifted the upper layers of the sun and blew them outwards. It wasn’t a nova, but close enough to wreck the last worlds of the system. As the Species ships fled on the blast front, the sun darkened, its energy pouring down a well into U-space, and it went out. The remaining ships fell into U-space and escaped, leaving behind the site of a battle that had destroyed a solar system and put out a su
n.
The Client reviewed the memory again, then again. She realized that she might not be the last of the Species, and that the Librarian might not have been the last of the Jain. A blister now lay at the site of that ancient battle—a blister in space-time that could hold others from both their kinds. In her new form as an amalgam of Species and Jain, she did not know which race she preferred to be the survivors. No matter, she was compelled by the elements of both within her. But she must prepare. She could not launch herself immediately back to the site of that conflict, the site of her resurrection, the place both the Polity AIs and the prador feared, and guarded so diligently.
The accretion disc.