by Neal Asher
He did not stop walking for a quarter of a century.
— retroact ends -
Only seconds passed aboard Heliotrope, then came that twisting sensation as the ship surfaced from U-space. All around lay jewelled stars, the largest visible object being an orange smudge amid blackness. Orlandine rechecked coordinates and dropped the ship out of existence once again, but only for fractions of a second more than previously. Heliotrope surfaced into realspace over an infinite ocean of orange gas, broken with rollers of red cloud and vast spreads of misty white like peeling skin. Orlandine ignited the fusion drive and dived in. Only as the ship penetrated the surface was it revealed how disperse was the gas—a thin fog. Again checking coordinates she oriented the ship, accelerated for an hour, then coasted for a further three. At the end of that time something like a vast steel cliff loomed out of the murk ahead of her.
Orlandine was no outlinker, but she had spent most of her life aboard stations or ships, surrounded by technology, and felt more comfortable in that environment. The ship, though just big enough to live in, was not a place in which she wanted to conduct dangerous experiments. However, in her present straits the idea of descending to a planetary surface was unthinkable—there being no quick escapes for her down there since a U-space drive could not be engaged until the ship lay well clear of the gravity well. She chose an intermediate measure. And she chose a place she knew.
The diamond-shaped fragment, one of the first-constructed building blocks of the Cassius Dyson sphere, consisted of five layers of composite each a half-mile thick, the four-mile-wide gaps between each layer maintained by composite and bubble metal joists, some half a mile wide, braided carbon nanotube cables, massive gravmotors and hardfield generators powered by thousands of fusion reactors. In here there were 25 billion cubic miles in which to lose herself. Of course her intention, in making a U-space jump out of the system, had been to mislead any forensic AIs into thinking she had left the system completely. But, no, this was home to her: she was more familiar with every structure in this place than with any other place in or outside the Polity. Here she could hide most effectively.
She decelerated, hard, turning the Heliotrope so it rose up just beside the wall of composite. Sentinels inside the massive structure detected the ship, discounted it from being a meteorite and therefore offlined collision lasers. Those devices also registered the ship’s presence, but were simple computers and therefore easy enough for Orlandine to access via her carapace. She erased their recent memories.
Within minutes the ship drew opposite one of the mile-wide gaps between layers. She kept it rising, up past another layer of composite, to where the murk began to thin, then turned it, decelerating again, so that the front screen faced into this final top gap running through the structure. With merely human vision, she could see just ten miles into the forest of massive slanted joists and cables before their number and the thickening murk entirely cut off vision. Using her sensory cowl to scan across the entire electromagnetic spectrum, and with her carapace linked into the ship’s sensors, she could see right through to the other side—some 80,000 miles away. This place was awesome, always. How could she possibly leave it?
Orlandine eased the Heliotrope in past a vertical cable a hundred yards thick. Locating herself on a three-D map in her mind and by recourse to microwave beacons throughout the structure, she altered her course past a row of giant joists to which clung arboreal leviathans—generators, reactors, gravmotors. Through exterior sensors she noted the cloud her vessel was creating: the adjustments made by its thrusters causing ices to sublime, blowing up crystal sulphur and the numerous odd compounds that condensed here inside. The cloud would probably go unnoticed, but she slowed considerably and took more care with her course. An hour later, forty miles in, she sighted her destination.
The cylindrical pillar was a mile wide, and vertical rather than slanted like the joists. The inner structure of it, she knew to be almost ligneous. Each hexagonal-in-section cell stood about sixty feet from floor to ceiling, and thus the pillar contained thousands of them. It was for storage space, maybe living areas—that being something to be decided in the distant future—a general-purpose structure placed here prospectively, it being more convenient to do so while the entire segment was under construction. Orlandine brought the Heliotrope down to the base of the pillar, folded out the tips of each half of the ship’s claw, and switched their inner faces to gecko function. She eased the ship forward until the claw’s gecko surfaces bonded to the pillar face, then eased out the head of a plasma cutter from the rear of the claw. Reaching out with the cutter to the full extent of its triple-jointed arm, she began slicing a circle as far as feasible beyond where the claw tips bonded.
Carbon dioxide and water ice immediately sublimed from the pillar face. All around, in kaleidoscopic colour, fluorescence bloomed as complex ice made the transition to water ice and then into vapour. The cutter easily punched through the light sheet-bubble metal—the structural strength here mainly derived from laminated composite beams evenly spaced throughout the pillar’s interior. Eventually she finished cutting the circle, and with a delicate adjustment of the Heliotrope’s, thrusters, she backed the ship away, extracting a fifty-foot disc of metal. Then, swinging the ship around, she reversed it into the gap. Utter darkness now, but she mapped every movement and action precisely in her extended haiman mind functioning through the ship’s sensors. At the last she pressed the disc down against the bottom of the cut, and with a couple of stabs from the plasma torch, at its lowest setting, tacked it back into place. She then eased Heliotrope down to the floor of this hexagonal cell, which, with miles of composite layered below it, did possess a degree of gravity. However, that gravity level was low, so she extended the ship’s gecko feet to stick it into place. Turning on exterior lights—not that she really needed them, just for comfort really, human comfort—she gazed around at her new home.
* * * *
Resembling a burnished cylinder, the telefactor, resting in the wooden doorway, extended one of its numerous arms, and from the tip of this extruded a single tool which very quickly removed all the hinge screws. It then passed the door back to one of its fellows, which proceeded to wrap it in thin transparent monofabric before carrying it over to a stack of objects similarly sealed. Thorn glanced round at the dome that enclosed the entire house.
‘I assume we’ll be leaving the air at least,’ he said sarcastically.
‘But of course, though it is being run through filters right now,’ Jack replied from Thorn’s comlink.
Thorn scratched his beard and peered up at the dome roof, as if he might be able to see all the way beyond it to the AI and know if Jack was winding him up. ‘How do we choose where to draw the line between what is, or is not, considered evidence?’
‘She did not have much to do with anyone else here. I am presently loading all records of other arrivals and departures since her initial arrival—about ten years before Skellor came here. Aelvor’s people are meanwhile taking statements from anyone she came into contact with. Masses of data is being collected, but there’s a formula that forensic AIs apply to such situations which keeps evidential collection to manageable limits for the processing power available.’
Thorn watched the telefactor exit the doorway and rise up to the roof, where it began removing and bagging wooden shingles. It occurred to him now that there were definite advantages to being Sparkind rather than a Polity agent. As one of the elite combat groups, you just turned up on site and someone like Cormac pointed you in the right direction with simple instructions like, ‘Kill them’, or ‘Blow up that’.
‘Do we have anything at all yet?’ he asked.
‘Interesting question: we have a lot, but we don’t know what will be of any use. I have set Aphran to analysing data as it comes in—she has been loading forensic cribs direct from the AI net ever since we found Jane von Hellsdorf. Aphran will be working through the chalet as well.’
The whole building w
as to be transported to the NEJ, along with much of the soil surrounding it. Thorn considered the way Jack was using Aphran. ‘So Aphran is still useful.’
‘She is.’
‘And so survives. Or are you only finding uses for her while her consciousness remains entangled with yours?’
‘I am in the process of unravelling that particular Gordian problem.’
‘And then?’
‘We shall see.’
Thorn let that slide. ‘Does she have anything yet?’
‘Ask her.’
Thorn hesitated for a moment, then asked, ‘Aphran, do you have anything for me?’
After a long pause the erstwhile Separatist replied, her voice sounding distracted as if her attention lay elsewhere. ‘There is a vast amount of informational evidence, and I cannot start on the physical evidence until it is delivered up here. But thus far it seems this world has been visited by suspicious characters in their thousands, including Skellor of course. I’m presently searching for anomalies that demonstrate a deliberate attempt at some kind of concealment. Then I have to eliminate various reasons for such concealment. I’ve eliminated six people so far—the last one was a Separatist woman who came here with an adapted version of an oak tree fungus. She apparently wandered off into the deep forest and has not been seen since. Aelvor informs me that she unfortunately fell into the rock crusher of an agrobot.’
‘How remiss of her,’ commented Thorn.
‘It seems evident Aelvor does not like saboteurs.’
Thorn laughed then asked, ‘What about Jane von Hellsdorf?’
It was Jack who now replied, ‘One would suppose her bright enough not to try her own wares.’
‘I rather assumed someone forced that aug upon her,’ replied Thorn, turning away from the chalet and heading for the exit from the dome.
‘Most certainly. Her Sensic aug was deliberately sabotaged to scramble her brains, and selling such augs herself she would certainly have known enough to run a diagnostic on it before fitting it.’
‘Are we going to get anything out of her?’
‘I may be able to glean something from a full memcord. Aelvor believes he will be able to make one by utilizing her present Sensic augmentation. I propose to allow him to try.’
Thorn stepped outside. The area was crowded now. A large AG vehicle had arrived first, containing all the equipment the Osterland monitor force might need to deal with a major incident. Now a couple of large airvans were also down, and numerous air-cars. Uniformed monitors from the local police force had spread all around, conducting interviews, taking copies from all privately owned recording media. Scar had pulled his dracomen back into the woods at this stage; if their services were not required, they would return to their shuttle and head back to the NEJ.
Thorn studied a group of people gathered by one of the vans. It was not difficult to distinguish the haiman from the others. He faced away from Thorn, so all that could be seen of him was the ribbing of his metallic carapace, and a tongue of metal reaching up behind his head. Thorn strode over towards him. When he reached only a few paces behind Aelvor, the man turned and the same tongue of metal fanned out behind his head, opening out the petals of his sensory cowl. After a moment they closed up again and Aelvor grinned.
‘Agent Thorn, a pleasure to meet you at last.’ He held out his hand.
Aelvor’s black hair was plaited in a queue that ran down over one shoulder. He was bulky but not fat, one of his eyes was green and the other displayed metallic shifting orthogonal patterns. Thorn shook the proffered hand, felt a restrained strength, and noted the extra gleaming metal limbs folded down on either side of the man’s torso.
‘Likewise,’ said Thorn. ‘I could get used to this place you’re making here.’
‘Consider it just a beginning. The human race has spent thousands of years standardizing everything, and the AIs continue in much the same vein. The reasons for that have all been valid, but now we possess the technology to expand individuality and the unique.’
‘More than one way of skinning a cat,’ Thorn observed.
‘What an obscene expression,’ said Aelvor. He glanced about himself rather theatrically. ‘And talking of obscenity: where is she then?’
Thorn supposed Aelvor had asked that question out of simple politeness—the haiman probably knew intimately the name and personal history of everyone within a radius of a hundred miles, and their positions to within a square yard. He pointed to the incident vehicle and led the way across. Shortly the two of them entered the vehicle’s medical centre to stand over von Hellsdorf’s bed. She lay utterly motionless. An autodoc clung to her side with its various tubes and implements penetrating her torso. At the head of the bed one of Jack’s telefactors stood motionless—a large cylinder bristling with multipurpose limbs. Von Hellsdorf’s aug casing hung open, its guts revealed, and the telefactor held numerous micro-optic feeds in place within it.
‘Okay, let’s get to it, shall we?’ said Aelvor. With a shrug he extended his own two additional metal limbs. Thorn noted incredibly complex hands on them consisting of two sets of three opposing fingers, selector discs for multiple optic and s-con interfaces, and a telescoping device that appeared to end in just a very sharp spike, but which he knew to be the presenting head for micro-manipulators—the rear section probably containing thousands of different micro-tools. With ‘hands’ like those Aelvor could probably remove von Hellsdorf’s brain through her ear and reassemble it outside her head.
As Aelvor moved in the telefactor immediately withdrew its connection to the woman’s aug.
‘The Sensic’s definition is not the finest but, through its synaptic links, it should be possible to run a memory search program. Unfortunately from her we’ll now only get mnemonically associated fragments—there’ll be no chronological order to them.’ He now made connection with his extra limbs to von Hellsdorf’s aug. ‘You may get a few seconds of childhood where she, say, picks up an apple and bites it. The next fragment may equally be her eating another apple, seeing some child from the perspective of adulthood, or being bitten on the tit by a lover.’
‘Curiously, I do know what mnemonic means,’ observed Thorn.
Aelvor grinned, ‘Of course you do, but with most of my processes running a thousand times faster than… normal, I find I have to make a deliberate effort to communicate by ordinary speech, so I over-compensate. You do realize Jack could easily do what I’m now doing, but AIs are very chary of the haiman inferiority complex and so like us to be included.’
Jack’s voice then spoke from the telefactor. ‘Your inferiority complex seems sadly lacking today, Aelvor… Incidentally, I have just monitored an adrenal surge in the patient.’
‘Memory fragment,’ said the haiman. ‘She just recalled a particularly protracted orgasm.’
Thorn noted how the patterns in Aelvor’s abnormal eye were flickering and changing.
‘Increase in salivary amylase, and stomach acids,’ Jack noted.
‘Crab paste on toast,’ Aelvor explained.
‘Heart rate high, enzymic—’
The woman was suddenly covered in sweat, then the capillaries in her skin turned bright red. One of the telefactor’s arms swept down, knocking away Aelvor’s connection. Thorn felt something slam into his chest and throw him back.
Hardfield…
He hit the wall and slid down. Subliminally he saw the same thing happen to Aelvor. Smoke boiling from the ceiling revealed a laser stabbing up from the telefactor. It reached out blindingly fast, its manipulators hooked under the woman’s armpits, dragged her upright, then with her it rocketed through the hole it had cut. The ensuing blast bowed the ceiling, and a column of fire washed down through the hole. Shortly after, the telefactor crashed back through, blackened, its shell buckled. Very little remained of Jane von Hellsdorf. The air stank of burning bacon.
* * * *
The Jerusalem dropped out of U-space and cruised into the Cull system. In his own quarters Cormac called
up the required views on his screen, and once again looked upon his old adversary. Then, whilst he observed Dragon hanging manacled over the ice giant, he cleared his mind and tried to find the gaps in his memory of events here. He recalled Skellor taking control of the local population and using them as hostages to ensure Cormac’s own surrender. He recalled being a prisoner in some Jain substructure aboard the Ogygian—the colony ship that had originally taken Cull’s inhabitants there from Earth. He recollected being utterly under Skellor’s control, but then things started to get a little fragmentary. He knew Cento had concealed himself aboard the Ogygian and, while a kill program in that ancient ship’s computer held Skellor in thrall, the Golem sabotaged the drive to bring that ship into an inescapable orbit around a brown dwarf. The King of Hearts—a rebel AI attack ship—had then fired grapples onto the Ogygian, and while Cento held onto Skellor, Cormac went out to sever them. Somehow he ended up on one of those grapples, and the King’s AI, rather than killing him for preventing it obtaining the Jain tech that Skellor possessed, had released him to deliver a message to Jerusalem: Honest, I didn’t get any, don’t hunt me down and kill me. But how did Cormac himself escape from that Jain substructure inside Ogygian?
Cormac could only assume that Cento must have released him from the enclosing structure, but something still bothered him about that. He closed his eyes and linked into Jerusalem’s servers, then created a search program to find himself there. Jerusalem had recorded him, repaired his brain, then downloaded that recording back to his repaired brain. Cormac felt certain the AI retained a copy… and there it was.
‘You will find that difficult to access,’ warned Jerusalem from the intercom in his quarters. ‘Your gridlink does not possess the capacity to sort out that mess.’
‘My mind is a mess?’
‘All human minds are a mess. Your gridlink is designed to access computer and AI systems, which are formatted much more logically. Anyway, since it is your own mind that you are attempting to look into, you will be in danger of cerebral feedback and might well end up in a psychotic loop.’