by Neal Asher
The sphere of the hardfield became visible and the black hole drove the soldier ahead of it, and it began to distort. Inside, like an embryo in a transparent egg, the soldier writhed and turned incandescent. Over the surface of the field hexagonal patterns shimmered into existence. Everything seemed to pause, then the field winked out. She had expected it to collapse once the underlying energy store reached its maximum, but the soldier must have deliberately turned it off before that point. An instant later, before the black hole could pull the soldier in, it created a disc-shaped field between it and the black hole. Now stretched out, and pressed flat against this field, it began to writhe towards its edge. It was glowing white-hot and an even brighter fire underneath it flung it to one side and out. The disc-shaped field collapsed as the soldier, seemingly swimming through vacuum, tried to pull away. But the black hole was not done and dragged the soldier’s tail through the event horizon. It stretched up, still straining to get away, then something inside it gave out and it collapsed backwards like a building falling into its own foundations. A full spectrum EMR blast at the horizon marked its departure from existence, and burned out all sensors. Orlandine found herself tumbling through vacuum in the storm, her consciousness remaining only in the Jain portion of her being. A shadow fell upon her and hydraulic claws closed on the Jain structure around her, hauling it into an armoured space. Hard acceleration blacked out what remained of her mind.
THE CLIENT
Smoke layered the thin air down in the tunnels and chambers deep inside the moon. Ruination lay everywhere. The Client, missing yet another segment after encountering a mobile autogun that had somehow escaped the attack pod’s notice, dropped into the final chamber right at the heart of the moon.
The space was two miles across and a mile deep. She descended to where the attack pod lay, cut in half by a shearfield that had sprung up from the floor as the pod had fried the Librarian’s hardfield defences. Some of its systems were still active, but it was somnolent now, since apparently it had no more defences to destroy. She landed beside the thing and looked towards the construct at the centre of the chamber. Here stood a huge dodecahedron, its faces tangled with technology that looked like some strange language. Numerous power lines and pipes were strewn across the floor as they led into the thing. She was very wary now.
It had been a hard fight to get down here, but not hard enough. This creature had access to all the knowledge of both the Species and the Jain, so where were the completely enclosing hardfields? It had not used everything to keep her out because it wanted her down here. The Librarian’s ostensible aim was to erase the forbidden data and doubtless the Client herself, and just fending her off would not accomplish this. Yet in the shriek, in the challenge, there was an aim utterly integral to what the Jain were. It was an instinctive thing first woven into their genome even before intelligence. However, as she now approached the dodecahedron she could not help but feel she might have misunderstood, and that some unforeseen final trap lay within.
When she reached the side of the huge object, a light ran around the rim of one of its faces. The interlocking technology on that face began to shift into itself—the whole face gradually disappeared like bad pixels on some ancient screen. It was an invitation and seemed like an acknowledgement of her real purpose in coming here, as well as the Librarian’s purpose in allowing her to. She stepped inside and gazed upon the Librarian itself.
The creature resembled a giant black lobster, inlaid with silvery metal. But the whorls and scars in its carapace told of great age. Not its full age, because undoubtedly it periodically renewed itself. Perhaps it had not done so for thousands, or tens of thousands, of years. Its internal organs, or whatever else it had inside, were perhaps perfectly functional and it did not concern itself with outer appearance. It squatted atop an object like a mushroom but with triangular sockets all over its surface. Ribbed tentacles sprouted from behind its head to engage with some of these. Its eyes were blind white. As the Client approached, it shifted position and she felt a wave of scanning pass through her like a blast front. But undeterred, she carried on.
“So, we come at last to this,” she said.
The creature’s reply was a sawing in her mind—complex chains of chemicals in the air and a flickering of holograms all around it. The words were simply an agreement, “We come to this,” but there lay an acknowledgement of the Client’s aims here and its own, as well as of history and context, and levels of negotiability in what was to come. Some of it was incomprehensible, and some of it seemed to slide off into either madness or genius.
“Let the chips fall where they may,” said the Client, in simple human Anglic, refusing any kind of melding or negotiation in the inevitable conflict. She wondered briefly if it was her mind that was too hard-wired.
The Librarian did not reply but merely began detaching its tentacles from the object below. A second wave hit then, inducing an internal viral attack. Even as she leapt, the Client felt her weapons going offline. The Librarian launched too and the two of them slammed together in mid-air. There was no finesse in the attack. The creature just grabbed hold and punched in its triangular-section tentacles. Small shearfields and needle lasers at the ends of the tentacles began boring through the Client’s carapace. Through the holes they made, fibres spewed into her to spread neural meshes and seek out connections inside. She replied by unravelling her own tentacles and forcing them into the Librarian’s body. They tumbled through the air, grotesquely mated and soon tearing into each other’s minds.
As the Librarian groped for connections so it could reach out to her primary self, the Client made her connections too and pushed inwards for information and memories, recording everything that the Librarian was. She saw her home world scattered with cities of a design she did not recognize. But the dying residents in these were her own kind, before the asteroid strike shattered their civilization. The Librarian had used similar methods before: sometimes it was a disease, other times it was an infestation of nano-machines, and what remained was shattered by asteroid strike or by weapons the Species had built themselves. Then, over the ensuing thousands of years, new examples of their kind began to rise again without comprehension of the ruins decaying around them. She delved back through the millennia of manipulation and extermination.
Meanwhile, the Librarian delved deep into the Client’s systems and reached out to her primary form, where its real attack began. The first virus entered piecemeal, apparently aimed to spread throughout the platform, to hunt down and destroy library data. The blocking response was obviously expected. It mutated and fell back on other targets, subverting transmitter control circuitry to ensure that the Client’s primary form could not close down contact. Next, rising out of hidden cylinders in the surface of the moon, came projectors. These hit the platform with induction warfare beams that began to sequester nanotech aboard the platform.
Deeper went the Client, to the time when the Species first arrived. They landed their ships on the world while the Librarian diverted its own vessel to the moon and there began to bore its home. The Client’s kind began to work quickly to establish a technological civilization, spreading out and fast tank-growing children, ever building. The Client searched for the time of the Librarian’s first extermination but instead found something else. The Species had been too noisy and had attracted attention. The weapon dropped out of U-space and into the atmosphere. It hit with disruptor beams, shattering everything, the colonists and the colony. Then it disappeared again, not having detected the Librarian in the moon. A million years passed before the Librarian seeded the world again. Something had happened to the Jain and they did not attack again.
The platform was failing, nanotech running wild and data caches corrupting. The Client’s primary form fought this, shunting data to different stores, many in its attack pods, burning wild nanotech, isolating and partitioning, aware that the destruction had not yet reached the point of no return. The Client and Librarian were now utterly entwined men
tally. Delving deeper, deeper still. She saw the Librarian’s flight from its kind, and before that a great battle with an alliance of Jain set on destroying it.
Meanwhile the Librarian absorbed data from the platform and from what had once been the AI Pragus. It encompassed the Polity and the prador, but they seemed just an addendum to it. From her own scattered points of view, the Client felt the Librarian’s disappointment with the prador extermination of the Species. But its view was long and in many aspects indifferent. This was just another extermination. The prador civilization would fall when the Jain tech in the accretion disc finally scattered, as would the Polity. The Librarian would reseed and the Species would rise again . . .
The Client tried to see past this. She tried to delve to the root of the Jain and what had happened. She saw the perpetual war for dominance that reflected how these creatures had fought and advanced throughout their rise, just as she and the Librarian were fighting now. One of the Jain made itself into a technology; into a destructive assimilator of its own kind. And it deployed.
This technology spread, at its core a growing store of knowledge and power that was irresistible to the Jain. One after another, they tried to do what they had always done, which was to encompass it and assimilate it into themselves. But one after another they fell to it. Some of their AIs, sentient intelligences used as tools in this assimilation, who were able to think in ways outside of organic evolution, fled the mayhem. They fled what now sat in the accretion disc the Polity and the Kingdom so feared. And they fled what sprang from Jain nodes—a technology made to destructively assimilate the Jain, and which continued to do the same with any civilization it encountered. It was of course logical that the first civilization it had destroyed was that of the Jain themselves. Yet, in reality their destruction was not an absolute. Because in the end, what the humans named Jain tech was what the Jain had become.
TRIKE
Utterly controlled, Trike inserted a multi-driver to extract the screws holding down the last in the series of floor plates. The previous three were tipped up against the wall, trailing super-conductor into the hole revealed below. Attached to their undersides were the slabs of technology that created floor gravity—they were deactivated now by the slice that had gone through the plates and down. A Clade unit had come along here and cut through the floor beside the engine mounted in heavy struts below. It had also cut through many of the struts, but what had shut down the ship’s main grav-engine was a severed line of coolant pipes and superconducting cables.
“We’ll have to weld these struts,” said Cog, crouching down beside the engine. “Easy enough to get it running but without bracing it’ll tear itself out of my ship.” He looked up at Trike through his visor, then pointed down at the struts. “Your job.”
After heaving up the last plate, Trike reached over and took up the coil of a composite-printer, fighting to keep his hands steady. Cog seemed to understand that he needed to be doing something to remain in control of himself. He checked the control box, tapped the small display, then plugged its cable into a wall socket. Touching the deposition head against one of the struts, he got a reading—the control box selecting the correct material. He put it into one of the breaks and triggered it. Light flared in the gap and it began to fill with new, tough composite. Cog meanwhile began unscrewing severed pipes. This was something for which any normal human would have required a spanner.
“Air pressure is up.”
Trike looked over at Angel approaching from the rear of the ship. The display in his space suit visor had already told him that he no longer needed to keep that visor closed, but Trike somehow felt safer closely wrapped in the suit. Nevertheless, he touched a control on his wrist and the visor slid down into its neck ring, while the helmet concertinaed behind to form a collar. He continued working, occasionally eyeing Cog inserting the repair sections of pipe Angel handed down to him. It was useful being a hooper. Anyone else would have needed to take out the complete lengths of pipe and replace them, because the things were so rigid and very tough. Cog just pulled them aside, inserted a repair section, pushed them back and tightened them with his fingers. Shortly he was done and sat back with a grunt of satisfaction, looking up.
“And the fusion engine?” he asked.
“Same kind of damage,” Angel replied, squatting at the edge of the hole. “Severed power cables and pipes, but the tritium bead fuser is damaged too.”
“Doable?” Cog asked.
“If you have another pure-water freezing unit.”
“In the stores,” Cog replied.
“Where are the stores?”
Cog inspected Trike’s work as he finished repairing the last strut. He glanced across at the tools and wiring stacked further down the corridor.
“We can finish this later,” he said. “Let’s go take a look.”
Trike swallowed dryly, aware that around Angel he needed to control himself even more. But he could do it. If he just focused on the work, he could do it. He put the deposition welder to one side, hauled himself out of the hole, then onto active grav-plates. Standing near Angel he found his fists clenching and had to keep his mouth clamped shut because it felt like his tongue wanted to escape. Cog followed him up and rested a hand on one shoulder.
“Come on.”
They moved back along the length of the ship, Trike stepping out ahead so he did not have to see the android. He turned into the corridor leading to the stores, finally coming up beside the door. Palming the control beside it, he slid it into the wall and turned on the lights. He studied the racks inside and the larger items on pallets along one wall. Angel must have come here earlier for the pipe fittings . . . He then realized something was wrong. If Angel had come here, then how was it he did not know where the store room was? He started to turn around when two massive arms like docking clamps closed around him, locking his own arms against his sides.
“What the fuck?” he managed, before rage surged up inside him.
He struggled, hauling Cog up and the two of them stumbled to one side. Next Angel was in front of him, taking out a high-pressure injector and discarding the tool bag he’d carried it in. Trike felt the spike go hard into his stomach and the injector whined. He kicked out, his boot thumping into Angel’s torso. The android slammed back high up against the wall. A cold burning filled Trike’s guts as lights counted down on the device still imbedded in him, and its transparent tank emptied of purple fluid. He fought to free his arms, and he and Cog crashed to the floor, even as Angel peeled out of a dent in the wall and fell too. But the Old Captain’s grip remained firm. Then Angel was there, grabbing his kicking legs. He struggled and fought, not knowing how to do anything else. The cold burning spread down into his legs, up into his chest and into his skull. He couldn’t tell how long it lasted, but soon he wasn’t struggling any more, and he just felt tired.
“Sprine?” he asked. It was what Cog used before to quell Trike’s madness.
“Diluted, along with the same stuff I gave you before,” Cog replied, close to his ear. “I thought about trying the stunner I used on you when we were with Lyra, but then you would need to go in a cold coffin too. And I’m not sure if you would stay there.”
“Even frozen?”
“Even that.” Cog paused, then asked, “You done?”
“Yeah,” he replied. “I’m done.” And truly felt a double meaning there.
20
Manipulative minds: Long before the first AIs came online simple computers were beating humans at chess. Chess is all about extrapolation, which in turn is a survival trait. And it comes into its own in warfare, which, after all, is what chess is based upon. During the Quiet War when the AIs, with minimal casualties, took power away from human politicians and rulers throughout the solar system, the AIs played the game—always many moves ahead of their opposition. When Mars forces realized that all their computer systems were no longer working for them, they decided to use their stock of missiles to knock out satellites in which some of t
he AIs were sited. The missiles only got a few miles into the thin air before their solid-burn rockets burned out. The AI that had manufactured them two years before had shifted some decimal points and made the fuel loads two orders of magnitude smaller than they should have been. But that was easy—that was the human outsmarting his pet dog. It is when AIs are trying to outsmart AIs that things get very complicated. Thankfully in our war against the prador this was not an issue, for they had none. But, extrapolation and preparedness being essential to survival, we must ready ourselves for a time, all but inevitable, when we encounter highly intelligent aliens who do possess AI. One can only speculate on the degree of manipulation and the intensity of the game when that occurs. Just as one can speculate on the body count.
—from How It Is by Gordon
EARTH CENTRAL
Earth Central gazed upon wreckage. The final count of weapons platforms destroyed was not yet in because some were still falling into the Harding black hole. AI casualty rate had been low and though materially costly for the defence sphere, it was, ostensibly, an acceptable loss for what had been achieved. Also, as time passed, the remaining platforms would become redundant as the accretion disc, with all the nasty Jain tech, fell through the event horizon. Or at least that was the theory. EC was very worried about what had exacted that cost, along with some other anomalies.
Studying all the data on this soldier in as much detail as possible, EC was as near to being appalled as it was capable of. The thing, even before it transformed itself, had shrugged off hits that no Polity vessel smaller than a dreadnought like the Cable Hogue could survive. Transformed, it had chewed up weapons platforms with ease, and it had taken a black hole to finish it. Even then, there seemed to have been a possibility the soldier could escape it. But that was not all, because its tactics were all wrong.
Orlandine had intelligently deployed USERs but the thing had shown resistance to the U-space disturbance. EC calculated that if it had been a bit sneakier and less inclined to attack, it could have got through the defence into the accretion disc. But it could be argued that it needed the energy from the weapons platform weapons to make its transformation. Only in this transformed state was it capable of detonating the dead sun at the centre of the accretion disc. On that basis Musket Shot had been its intended target, and the fact that Orlandine could gate a black hole at it just dumb luck. But that made no sense. The thing could have dumped itself on some planet close to a sun, far away from the accretion disc, where similar energy and materials were available. It would then have arrived transformed, easily smeared the defence and gone in.