by Neal Asher
Not enough.
But even all this was not what angered the Legate most; only its inability to understand did that. It could not comprehend why it had been sent here. Aboard, it carried one more Jain node destined for a Separatist leader actually located within Earth’s solar system. Coming here to find out exactly what had happened endangered that mission and statistically raised, by an unacceptable amount, the chances of the Legate being discovered. What was Erebus thinking? Disconnected from that entity for so long, the Legate could not now know. But neither could it disobey.
The Legate located the construction station initially overseen by Orlandine. Shutting off all drives and dropping its ship’s systems to minimal function, it drifted in, cautious. Now it began delving into the AI network and, as expected, found hunter-killer programs leashed like attack dogs around any information concerning Orlandine. The Legate knew it could destroy them, but doing so would reveal too much. Other methods would have to be employed. Drifting in closer it observed the damage to the station, enclosed under a shimmer-shield, ran programs to assess its cause, but could learn little from that: a fusion explosion—the degree of devastation commensurate with the output of an interface sphere power cell. Its hypocentre was not precisely at the location of Orlandine’s sphere, but much of hers had also been destroyed. What had happened here? Polity AIs must suspect this to be no accident, hence the hunter programs. The Legate constructed and discarded scenarios. Perhaps Orlandine began her takeover and some other haiman learnt of it in time to destroy her—that other haiman sacrificing himself and others in the process? No, the informational takeover would be too fast. Really, there was only one way to find out.
Using minimal power, the Legate nudged its vessel towards the near edge of the shimmer-shield, for fewer sensors would be active there after having been damaged by the explosion. Its ship turned concave side down to hull metal that had been rippled into waves by the blast. The vessel injected nanofilaments to bind itself in place—still invisible to most forms of detection. Then came a shifting of the vessel’s inner components. It heaved like some animal vomiting, split along one side, and the Legate slid out turning its feet down to the metal, stood up, bonding with the similar nanofilaments, and walked. Momentarily the Legate became visible while detaching from the ‘ware effect of its vessel, but then its own ‘ware came on and it faded from existence again. Stepping to the edge of the shimmer-shield it peered inside.
Two ant-shaped drones clung to twisted metalwork and emitted pools of light in which two human women clad in monofilament oversuits worked. The women were scanning and sampling physical evidence. One of them wore an aug; the Legate lightly touched then pulled away from this nexus of the AI network, learning the other woman to be gridlinked. It considered going in there, disabling the drones, and snatching from the humans whatever it could. Too intrusive, too obvious. Anyway, the Legate needed more than just the physical evidence; it needed anything informational which, by the fact that these two worked in here now, would have already been removed to be scanned and assessed by forensic AI.
The Legate turned and strode away across the hull, eventually stopping by a service lock constructed for inspection drones. Scraping sharp fingers across hull it scanned through—ultrasound by touch—and soon located the control mechanisms. A low leakage of atmosphere behind this hatch enabled it to trace out the shape of a service robot lurking inside, like a trapdoor spider. It pressed its palm flat over the control mechanism, injected filaments, each tipped with a micron diameter thermic lance, burnt through the hull, connected, and then feeding power from inside itself operated the mechanism. The hatch thumped up, a slight puff of air escaping, and slid aside. The maintenance drone immediately came online, its lensed sensory head tilting upwards. The Legate reached down, grabbed for it, pulled it out and smashed it down on the hull, once, twice, stabbed a hand through its outer casing and gutted it, located its small crystal mind, crushed that to glittering fragments, then sent the drone on its way into vacuum.
Once inside, the Legate wormed through maintenance ducts and finally came up against inner hull. It placed a finger against this softer material, injected a single microfilament equipped with a cutting head, bored through, then discarded the head in order to online the filament’s optics. Now an inner maintenance shaft. Forefinger and mid finger together, extending bladelike to twice their original length, were blurred along the inner edge by the activity of thousands of microscopic teeth. The Legate pushed its fingers through the wall and cut round in a circle, fast, a cloud of powdery detritus spraying all around. The excised section of wall blew towards it under air pressure. The Legate slid through pulling the removed section back into place. Breach sealant automatically ejected from the wall itself to seal the cut line. An alarm would sound somewhere but, because the sealant had dealt with the problem only a maintenance drone would be sent. The assumption would be of a micrometeorite puncture. By the time they discovered any different, the Legate would be gone from here.
10
Separatism is a cover-all label for those who rebel violently against the rule of AIs and would like to reinstate some mythical halcyon time when humans ruled themselves with justice and wisdom. Their political ideologies are based on a mish-mash of ideas sampled seemingly at random from opaque political tracts that have appeared over the last six hundred years. On the one hand they deify some of the worst dictators of ancient times like Chairman Mao and Stalin, claiming the intransigence of humanity prevented these monsters from establishing true socialist societies, while blithely ignoring the millions these autocrats murdered. Yet on the other hand they demonize AIs as monsters of a similar stripe, and are seemingly unaware of the personal freedom and wealth every human now enjoys, and the fact that the Polity is the only society that has come close to the ideals espoused by reformers of that previous age. And of course, to get what they want, it seems perfectly acceptable for them to commit any kind of atrocity. But in the end one only has to study the histories of those few worlds that came under Separatist control and managed to secede from the Polity. Their descent into chaos has been well documented in every case. As their leaders tried to apply ideologies refined in academia, without any reference to reality, the people divided into factions, sometimes into nation states, and often went to war with each other. Frequently the nuts and bolts of running a civilization were neglected, and social collapse and famine resulted. And in every case ECS has needed to come in to clear up the mess, and to cut down the ideologues hanging from the lamp posts.
— From a speech by Jobsworth
King gazed down upon the new system directly in line of Erebus’s present course. It consisted of a white dwarf star orbited by two gas giants far out in space, a ring of moon-sized planetoids orbiting close to the sun, and one Earth-sized planet orbiting at about the distance of Venus from Sol. Two moons orbited this last planet, obviously stripping away enough atmosphere to prevent the world itself descending into greenhouse cascade. King cruised in with its scanners at maximum function.
The equatorial temperatures of the hot desert planet topped 100 degrees Celsius, and polar temperatures did not drop much below 50, yet atmospheric analysis showed there might be life here. King first concentrated on the moons, soon ascertaining one to be dead rock while the other showed signs of recent volcanic activity, having spewed swathes of brown and yellow sulphur across its surface. Within seconds the AI detected wreckage scattered across the regolith of the first moon. It loaded to one rail-gun a close-scanning telefactor—just a tongue-shaped missile packed with sensory equipment—fired it towards the moon and focused through the moving device.
On fusion burn the telefactor decelerated in a tight arc around the moon, then descended on minimal AG between jagged peaks, silver-faced in the white light. In the past something had clipped one peak, spraying the entire area with slivers of hull metal. In the dusty plain beyond were splash patterns King first took to be the result of meteorite strikes but, on laser spectrometer ana
lysis of the metals therein and by Geiger readings, discovered these to have been caused by small tactical thermonukes. A trench twenty yards long, ceasing for fifty yards then continuing for another ten, had obviously been melted into the ground by some high-powered beam weapon. The pause in it seemed to be where the beam had struck its target in the air, for beyond that point jags of ceramal and spatters of the alloys used to make bubble-metal, littered the landscape, and beyond them lay the crash site.
Whatever came down here had cut a mile-long groove in the ground, shovelling up regolith before it. King directed the telefactor along and above the groove until it reached the wreckage imbedded in the side of the regolith mound. A geoscan having revealed every angle of the distorted wreckage, King built a virtual picture of it in its mind, then began to iron out the distortions. Within minutes the AI recognized a much earlier version of itself: an attack ship but with its nacelles mounting balanced U-space engines rather than armament, its body bearing the solid angles of some ancient military beach-landing craft. Perhaps its mind still remained intact.
Upon further scanning, King drew the telefactor back after spotting some anomalies about this crash site. A tunnel had been bored through to precisely where the mind would be located under the covering of regolith. Around this tunnel there were marks in the ground: footprints.
Humans?
King thought not. Golem had also joined Erebus, so they must be the source.
The tunnel was amply wide enough for the telefactor so the AI sent it inside. It wound down through regolith now bonded with glassy resin, past two bubble-metal beams then up against hull metal, which had been cut through. A spherical cavity lay beyond. The AI recognized this as the armoured casing that contained the mind on these older ships—made to be quickly ejected so that if the ship itself was destroyed, its tactical information would not be lost. All the optical and power connections remained in place through the central pillar. The cage of doped superconductor that contained the crystal mind seemed undamaged—and much larger than the one containing King’s own mind, but then technology had advanced very much since then. The crystal mind itself, however, lay fragmented about the bottom of the sphere like a shattered windscreen. King withdrew the telefactor.
The King of Hearts AI went on to investigate two more sites, discovering just a couple of claw arms which were all that remained of another four-pack drone, then a drone made in the shape of a pangolin, a great dent in its armour, which was partially melted. Every system inside it was utterly fried. King surmised it had been hit directly by an EM shell, so there had been no need to send Golem to make sure no sentience remained in it.
King recalled its telefactor and hesitated about investigating the planet. If Erebus and the other AIs were located here, they would generate visible activity, and information traffic in the ether. None so far detected. Also, did King really want to locate Erebus and its kind? Obviously some disagreement had resulted in the wreckage on that moon, so there seemed no guarantee that King would be welcome. Then again, the AIs manufactured during the Prador War were notoriously cranky and individualistic, so it was perhaps unsurprising that some of them might eventually balk at the idea of melding. Perhaps on the planet itself more could be discovered as to the nature of this disagreement. King redirected the telefactor towards that nearby world, sending two more after it, but these bearing manipulators, cutting gear and the ability to interface with memcrystal. Some little while later the AI discovered that ‘disagreement’ might be rather an understatement for what had occurred there.
A vast 200-mile wreckage field terminated in the mountainous remains of a dreadnought. Radioactivity was high, so it seemed evident that tactical nukes were used, repeatedly. Beam trails cut into the rock all around. The big ship obviously came down in a controlled descent, otherwise there would be nothing now but a large crater, but clearly lost control near the end. It had bounced for 150 miles, then skidded for a further 50 miles until coming to a halt. But it was not alone.
King found wreckage from over three hundred war drones, four attack ships, twelve landers that judging by the remains were filled with Golem, two fast pickets and a mid-level battleship impacted into a cliff. Perhaps Erebus had met its own end here? Perhaps that dreadnought once contained the wayward mind? But a scan of visible numbers on the dreadnought’s hull dispelled that idea. This ship was called the White Shark. Here then were the results of an AI on AI conflict between factions in Erebus’s camp. King dropped into boiling atmosphere and began sending out all but two of its stock of telefactors, twenty-three of them. The AI really needed to know what happened here.
The mid-level battleship seemed a lost cause. Evidently having come in very fast, the probability that any crystal survived the impact was remote. Studying all the other wreckage, it soon became evident to King that after the battle the victors conducted a major salvage operation: markings on the ground showed that Golem, telefactors, and drones running on caterpillar treads had stripped usable components from most of the wreckage—what remained being not worth the energy expenditure of lifting from the gravity well. Some of the war-drone minds had been removed, where possible; all that remained of the Golem in the landers was the occasional distorted chassis, also mindless; a beam strike had cut a hole right through the dreadnought, while it lay at rest, and incinerated the mind it contained; one attack-ship mind was missing, the other destroyed; the picket minds lay in heat-distorted fragments. By this King guessed which side was which, and that the losers had been shown no mercy. There seemed nothing more to learn here. But then, as it hovered over the battlefield recalling its telefactors, King turned its attention to the ship impacted into the cliff. No tread marks over that way. Obviously Erebus thought that ship just as much a write-off as King had at first. Perhaps they were both mistaken. King sent four of its telefactors over to the cliff.
Five hours of excavation eventually revealed a distorted mind case. Using a thermic lance, one telefactor cut through the armour, then on the end of an arm it inserted a sensor head. There rested the ship’s mind, broken, in its doped s-con cage, but still perhaps containing much information. A smaller telefactor entered, found a power input point, detached the plug and inserted it into a socket in itself, ready to power up the damaged mind. There King paused it. So, Erebus stripped every usable component from the surrounding wreckage, destroyed or removed all the minds, certainly for the purpose of concealing its destination or intentions from possible pursuers, yet it missed this? King recalled to itself the other three telefactors and, once they snicked away in their cache, used both AG and thrusters to take itself up a hundred miles. The AI thereupon opened secured processing space and routed telefactor control through that. It then powered up the mind case, with the tentative reluctance of someone clicking on the power to dodgy household wiring.
The telefactor dropped to the floor, as the drain sucked power from its gravmotor, then it reached out to begin splicing into the optics connected to the abandoned mind. Nothing yet. Connection made. Diagnostic program loading… The worm came through like an express monorail loaded with warheads. It screamed round in the secured processing space, searching for weaknesses. King immediately began loading programs into that space to counter it, take it apart, analyse its structure. The worm, semi-Al, knew itself to be trapped. It transmitted a signal back down the link, instantly broadcast from the telefactor. Five suns ignited below: five one megatonne CTDs.
King accelerated. Four seconds. Time for the signal to reach another location: rail-gun hidden in the sulphurous moon, and now firing a barrage of missiles at half the speed of light. But the King of Hearts was a modern Polity attack ship. It stood on its tail, opened up its fusion drive to full power and, accelerating at a hundred gravities, left a single anti-munitions package behind it. The worm broke apart, eating itself, but King already knew the frequency and format of the signal it had sent, and thus transmitted its own present. King’s worm burrowed into the mind it located on the moon: just a drone waiting h
ere to ambush any pursuers, fiercely loyal and ready to destroy itself. It was not quick enough. It had seen the others leave, tracked their departure and then awaited some to return to say its mission was over. King learnt all that in microseconds. Microseconds after, another CTD detonated in the face of the moon, and left a burning sulphurous crater. The barrage of missiles proceeded to detonate around the anti-munitions package, easily fooled into thinking they found their target.
‘I’m coming to find you,’ sang King, accelerating out of the system.
* * * *
As Mika detached herself from the VR frame she felt tired and frustrated. Every time she entered the virtuality now, there awaited a mass of new information to be processed, and she experienced difficulties in keeping on top of it all. While she deconstructed singular molecular structures the work stayed easy enough, but with research now being directed towards what could be formed from those structures and their interrelationships, it got tougher. Much of this work being conducted at AI speeds, it now became the province only of Jerusalem, other AIs aboard, and those humans sufficiently augmented to keep up.
Stepping down from her frame, she surveyed the various screens in her research area and saw that those not frozen were scrolling reams of code. She walked over to the counter on which the screens rested and picked up the item lying there. The aug was similar to the one D’nissan now wore: a flattened bean of gleaming metal with an exposed crystal in the shape of a snail’s shell on one side—that aspect purely aesthetic. Its visual interlink entered via the wearer’s temple, so was not as grotesque as many of its kind, but the device still required surgical installation. Susan James and Prator Colver had both upgraded: the former with an aug like this and the latter with the more conventional kind, though he talked about going fully gridlinked when he could spare the time—that too required surgical intervention since the gridlinking tech needed to be imbedded in the inner surface of his skull.