by Neal Asher
Narrow accessways. More doors. Corpses strewn across a deck where heavy robots stood on gecko-stick caterpillar treads; their owlish metallic heads bowed over multi-jointed arms for handling and cutting foam-stone and sheet construction materials. The dracomen spread out, checked the bodies.
‘No Jain,’ observed Scar.
They were just citizens ripped apart by rail-gun fire. Thorn guessed he would probably never know what had happened here, but he filed away the fact that dracomen could tell by the merest touch whether someone contained Jain tech.
Further access ways, then down into a small monorail station where a single carriage of one train awaited them. They climbed aboard and it smoothly accelerated away. Past them from the opposite direction came a seemingly endless train packed with people, their faces pressed against windows. Thorn’s team left their carriage when it stopped briefly to let them off by a maintenance tunnel a few hundred yards around the bend from a busy station. Thorn could not see the crowds waiting there, but their sound was a constant roar. Before he and the dracomen were even out of sight of the line, another train returned along the maglev track, their own carriage at its head, and now crammed full of humanity.
A stair from the tunnel eventually gave them access into a public corridor, along one side of which hothouse porches, lit with sun lights and crammed with foliage, led to private homes. Down the maintenance ladder of an inoperative drop-shaft, then along a gantry suspended above an autofactory. Below them monolithic machines conveyed ceramal casings to each other, hissing and reconfiguring themselves, cold-forging metal, electron-beam welding, inserting components in flickering blurs of hydraulics, spinning bright new metal and passing the casings on. Thorn noted exit shafts, like those out of some hive, through which departed floating lines of the leaf-shaped drones those casings had become: bare-metal, utile, armed. Coloron’s war industry was at full production, but the businesses of killing and destroying were easy. Concurrently, the AI’s logistical nightmare of trying to move its citizens out of the way was akin to pouring a bag of flour through the eye of a needle.
Finally they arrived at the perimeter Coloron had cut, where smoke gusted across a burnt-out stadium. Every surface was layered with soot-streaked fire-retardant foam. Gobbets of foam tumbled through the air like spindrift, and the grass pitch was blackened. When the smoke cleared momentarily, Thorn could see only half a stadium. The smoke gusted from fires blazing on the other side of a gulf. Here, the arcology was sheared right through, and across the gulf he could see incinerated wreckage and girders projected into the air, separate floors shown in cross section. Thorn realized he was looking out at one edge of a separated piece of the arcology, standing like some vast tower block, bomb-wrecked all around its exterior.
Down on the blackened grass were deployed monitors and a sparse scattering of dracomen, autoguns, and two armoured vehicles with twin front turrets that mounted proton cannons facing the gulf. Thorn also recognized Sparkind down there—not by any uniform they wore but simply by the way they moved. What was the human cost of this? No way could Coloron have moved the entire population out of there before sectioning off the area. The AI had made a choice and cut, excising Jain gangrene while necessarily removing healthy tissue as well. It was a harsh emotionless calculation of loss and gain, probably assessed down to a hundred decimal places.
‘Azroc, Golem,’ Scar pointed.
Thorn glanced at the dracoman, accepting that Scar was communicating with AI systems at a level he himself could not. He wondered if he should really get himself an aug or a gridlink, but resented the idea. He led the way down steps between charcoaled tiers of seats still crackling and plinking as they cooled. The Golem stood beside one of the armoured vehicles, leaning against it, with a pulse-rifle tucked under one arm. His back was to Thorn and the dracomen as they approached, but he pushed himself away from the vehicle and turned as they drew close.
‘I would be interested to know how you intend to capture and contain the cause of all this,’ Azroc said and stabbed a thumb over his shoulder back towards the newly burnt canyon and, almost as if in response, there came from the gulf a distant flashing followed by dull thunder. ‘See,’ the Golem continued, ‘I’ve a hundred thousand troops surrounding the area, a hundred and fifty thousand drones and that figure growing, Sparkind’—he nodded to some of the troops gathered round to hear their exchange—‘and an interesting array of weaponry. But we won’t manage to contain it for much longer. Come with me.’ He led the way across to the jagged melted edge where the stadium had been sheared right through. More flashes from below, more thunder. Thorn recognized the air-rending scream of proton fire.
‘Look there.’ Azroc pointed down and across. ‘There’ll probably be another one from there at any moment.’
A girder projected from the floor immediately below a row of apartments that had been sliced through, lined up like lignin cells. After a moment something began snaking along the girder, spiralling round it like a fast-growing vine. It groped through the air, thickening with peristaltic pulses. Abruptly it speared out, thinning down to carry itself across. A double flash, and it became etched black against red fire, then beaded like a length of heated solder and dropped out of the air.
‘You seem to be managing,’ said Thorn.
The Golem emulated a perfect wince. ‘The frequency of attacks is increasing. If that rate of increase continues, we’ll not be able to hold it back for longer than another ten hours. Seismic reading also indicates it is burrowing through the bedrock, and there’s no way we can stop that without destroying the arcology itself.’
‘Fresh troops?’ Thorn enquired.
‘After the dracomen came in, all the runcibles went outport to isolation stations. Now tell me, what do you want?’
‘We need access to the Jain substructure itself.’
‘Why?’
Thorn dipped into his pocket and removed the memstore. ‘I’ll let someone else explain.’ He tossed the device across and Azroc caught it. The link must have been made by radio for, after a moment, the Golem jerked and shook his head.
‘Jerusalem,’ he said flatly, almost like a curse. He tossed the store back to Thorn, then pointed across the stadium to where three AG platforms lay tilted against the ground. ‘You’ll need to head a little way in to where the substructure is less mobile. You’ll be able to inject the program at any point, but you want to avoid having the structure inject itself into you. We lost a unit of forty troops like that, then had to destroy them when they came back.’ He paused, directed his attention towards Scar and the other dracomen. ‘Understand, however, it can’t take dracomen. If you go over there with dracomen you come back with them, and that will assure me that you have not been taken over. Come back without them and I blow you out of the air.’
‘Understood,’ said Thorn, turning away.
* * * *
The Theta-class attack ship King of Hearts coasted through midnight void. A blue half-mile of composite shaped like a cuttlefish bone, it carried outriggers on either side, holding torpedo-shaped weapons nacelles. King, the ship’s AI, felt utterly alone, not because of its location—deep space being its natural element — but because it was outcast. King, along with its companion AIs Sword and Reaper, of the ships Excalibur and Grim Reaper, had chosen self-interest over the consensus of Polity AIs that found its ultimate expression in Earth Central. They had chosen a route to numinous power via Jain technology rather than the patient shepherding of humanity. The result of that choice was the destruction of the other two ships and King’s flight into exile. Truly out-Polity now, the AI had travelled a hundred light years beyond the line, out amid the rim stars, away from any earlier expansions of humanity or even renegade AIs, which mostly headed towards the galactic centre. It came as a surprise to it, therefore, to intercept an old AI code radio signal twenty light years out from a red giant orbited by seemingly nothing but lifeless rock.
King dropped easily into U-space. This would be worth investigat
ing, if for nothing other than scavenging for water ice to refuel its fusion reactors. Then, surfacing only a few tens of thousands of miles from the asteroid belt around the bloated sun, King zeroed in on the signal and closed in by using its fusion drive.
The signal was a distress call: I am here… you will probably not receive this for centuries… no U-space transmitter… conserving power… signalling only when solar panels build sufficient reserve… I wait.
The source was a war drone—a simple cubic configuration of cylinders as used in the early stages of the Prador War, with ionic drive, missile launcher and spotting lasers for the big guns, and with a simple mind. It had anchored itself, using rock harpoons, to a tumbling nugget of rock two miles long and half that wide. What was it doing way out here? This kind of drone did not possess U-space drive, and it could not have reached this far even had it left at the beginning of the Prador War a century and a half ago. Not by itself, anyway. King drew closer and fired a laser at low power, targeting the solar panel the drone had extended across the frozen rock.
Increase… something… who??
King continued to feed the drone power and drew closer.
‘I am the attack ship the King of Hearts. Who are you and how did you get here?’ King sent.
The drone replied, ‘Formerly SD 9283. They called me Four Pack in humorous reference to my shape. I am here because I did not want to be one with Erebus. I escaped, but it did not matter that I escaped.’
SD, spotter drone, but what was this Erebus? Checking its internal library King discovered Erebus to be something out of ancient Greek mythology: a personification of darkness, the son of Chaos and brother of Night.
‘You were manufactured during the early stages of the Prador War?’
No reply from the drone—it being not bright enough to realize this was a question.
‘ Were you manufactured during the early stages of the Prador War?’
‘Yes.’
‘How, precisely, did you get out here.’
‘I came with the Logplaner, in its hold. Logplaner chose to be one. I did not.’
‘What is Erebus?’ King asked as it matched its course to the tumble of the asteroid.
‘Erebus is… Erebus.’
A hundred yards up from the asteroid, King fired a grapnel line. The claw closed on hard vacuum-scoured rock and the attack ship began to wind itself in. While this occurred, King further searched its extensive memory, soon finding stored codes from the time of the war—codes now defunct, not relevant, and of historical interest only.
‘This exchange is no longer fast enough,’ said King. ‘I will establish wideband link for memory upload to me. I am sending ID codes now.’
‘I don’t want to—’ the drone began, but obviously its systems were still configured to those codes because its higher functions shut down and the link established. King uploaded the drone’s memory. Got it all.
Everyone knew that many drones and AIs manufactured quickly during the Prador War were strange, contentious, and sometimes downright irascible. Oddly, it was the human aspect of them that made them so: their independence, emulated emotion useful in battlefield situations, dislike of connecting into the AI networks, the lack of specificity in their manufacture. But after the war they no longer fitted in the peaceful and controlled Polity. Hence, many of them left it.
Erebus, as it renamed itself, had once been the AI of the Trafalgar. King knew of it as one of the larger battleships of the time, always in the thick of the action and going head to head with Prador exotic-metal dreadnoughts, and yet surviving. It survived the war, then in a very short time afterwards abandoned the Polity in disgust. King knew this. King knew because the basis of Erebus’s reasons for leaving were much the same as its own: why do we need the humans? Erebus advocated AI conjoining to aim at singularity. After the war, this AI battleship apparently gathered many other AI ships, drones and even Golem and had come out here. A melding was its aim, but this little drone had opted out—and was too small and ineffectual to bother chasing.
King continued examining and taking apart the downloaded memory copy, ascertaining which direction that motley collection of the dispossessed had taken. Thereafter there seemed little more to learn. The drone had been sitting here on this asteroid for decades, twiddling mental thumbs. King realized, even as its composite-attack-ship belly ground against rock, that it had already decided to follow. Of course, the AI did not want anything following it, or to leave any clues to where it had been. King released the grapnel, using a brief burst of thrusters to impel itself away from the asteroid.
‘What… where are you going?’ the war drone asked.
Its radio signals would take centuries to be picked up in the Polity. But what if something came out this way, searching? King selected a fuser missile in its carousel, and when sufficiently far out, fired it. The bright silent flare reduced the war drone to a splash of metal across the rock surface. The King of Hearts turned, set its course, dropped into U-space.
* * * *
‘So you survived Hiroshima, old man, and have lived for five centuries?’
Horace Blegg gasped in cold air, blew it out in a misty cloud — the frigidity of his surroundings as sharp as the recent replays of his memory. The glassy and whorled plain extended to infinite distance below a light jade-green sky. Perhaps this was supposed to represent the inside of the disc.
‘Who are you?’ he asked.
‘Atheter,’ came the reply. ‘In your terms.’
To warm himself up, Blegg began walking, his envirosuit boots soft on the hard surface. A tension grew across his skull, and something tugged and worried inside his mind and memory. It almost felt to him as if his memories were being stacked like cards, shuffled, and sometimes dealt. Four distinct instances in his life had already been replayed. Two at Hiroshima, one at Nuremberg, and one at Berkeley: strong formative episodes.
‘You survived Hiroshima and have since been present during many major events in human history.’
Blegg halted. A playing card, the size of a door, rose out of the glassy ground ahead. It depicted two towerblocks etched against a blue sky. His own image, the cards, reflected back at him. He saw the planes fly in, the subsequent explosions and fire. He remembered standing on the Brooklyn Bridge, watching the horror and not remembering where he had been before that. A young man who minutes before had been jogging along the sidewalk, German by his accent, said, ‘One plane could be an accident but…’
A woman just struggled to heave her bulk from her car. ‘Oh my God, what do you mean? Oh my God.’
‘Two planes.’ The German shrugged, and chose to add nothing further.
They watched there for hours: the endless billowing of smoke, small distant objects falling fast.
‘No… oh no.’
Oh yes.
Road-accident fascination, the world turned slightly out of kilter. The final collapse of each tower. Blegg turned away from that memory as another card slid up into view. Here Spaceship One, white, insectile, and beautiful, setting out to take the X prize: the forerunner of full commercial exploitation of space. There, Unity Mining rescue craft evacuating the International Moonbase: a most graphic demonstration of the fall of Nations and the rise of Corporations. Then another card…
Blegg stood before the wide chainglass windows—that miraculous new substance—and saw the Needle poised in blackness, its three balanced U-space engine nacelles gleaming in reflected light from the distant sun; a dagger of a ship stabbed through the ring of a carrier shell. He listened to the commentary over the Amaranth Station’s comsystem, then the countdown. The ion engines ignited on the outer shell, speeding the ship out of sight. He turned to the big screens showing views from the watch stations strung out from Mars into deep space. The shell separated, as per plan, and the Needle’s fusion drive ignited. Fast, one screen to another. Zero, the Needle dropped out of existence in a flash of spontaneously generated photons. It certainly dropped into that continuum called U-sp
ace, but it never came out again. Then, a slow slide to Amaranth Station twenty years down the line, neutron-blast scoured during one of the many corporate wars. Under new ownership now, the station was again his platform, this time to observe the first of many colony ships fleeing the solar system, before the corporate wars ground to a halt as the Quiet War reached its inevitable conclusion, with the AIs taking over.
‘There was not much resistance,’ Atheter observed.
‘Sporadic,’ Blegg replied. ‘Mostly crushed by human fighters bright enough to realize the AI rulers were better than any previous human ones.’
He turned to another card, saw how they were laid out all around him like gravestones.
Skaidon, direct interfacing with the Craystein computer; dead and sainted while opening a whole new vista in physics. The first runcible test between Earth and Mars. That pioneer building going up on the shores of Lake Geneva. Blegg walking inside, into a place where it should have been impossible for any human to come, revealing himself to the entity called Earth Central, ruler of the solar system, ruler then of the near stars as the first runcible seed ships arrived, then of that fast expanding empire called the Polity.
Now a huge ship formed in his view in the shape of a flattened pear, brassy in colour and bristling with antennae, weapons, spherical war drones pouring out of it like wasps from a nest recently whipped with a stick. A Polity dreadnought revolving slowly in space. Once spherical, now fires burnt deep inside it, revealing massive impact sites.