by Neal Asher
‘Very well, let it be over.’ She turned from him to her chore, feeling him fade and distance himself from her.
Aphran picked up one book. Some centipedal monstrosity immediately wound itself around her arm and opened its pincers. She caught its head in her fist and crushed it, then opened the book. This one detailed Thellant losing two Separatist cells, one after the other, and fearing a trail would lead back to him, then subsequently learning that his contacts in those cells were all assassinated on their way to interrogation. He suspected ECS, but it seemed a crazy move to kill those who could lead them to other cells. Next, the Legate waiting in Thellant’s apartment, to claim credit for the killings and to make an offer. The centipede broke up into segments, each of which transformed into a scorpion. She knocked some of these away but others stung her. Worms propagated through her. She fought them, pulled more of herself into the virtuality, doubled and redoubled. Four Aphrans picked up books, and fought the killer programs—more of herself in, redoubling. Some versions of herself coming apart, others intercepting vital information from them. All the while, behind her, like strings being cut, she could feel Jack separating himself. Nothing she could do about that now, for she could not turn away from this task until it was done.
In the virtuality a virtual age passed, though only minutes in real time. Virtual pain hurt just as much as the real thing as the Jain tech programs ripped into her, but this Aphran was a product of that same technology. She reconfigured herself, sent in her own programs like informational DDT, stamped and splattered her attackers, cut off self-propagating worms at their source, confined nasty HK programs in briefly generated virtual spaces and then collapsed them to zero. She saw how Thellant’s organization expanded as a direct result of the Legate’s assistance, saw him grow rich and dependent. Numerous meetings between the two of them revealed snippets of information she put together. The Legate was just that: a legate working on behalf of someone or something else. It showed technical abilities beyond that of normal Golem—seeming suspiciously like the product of Jain technology. Eventually she gathered it all: everything about Thellant and the Legate. And she now knew how the Legate might be found.
Re-absorbing her alternative selves, Aphran became one again in the virtuality, a neat stack of books before her and shattered chitin spread all around, vaporizing and turning to dust.
‘Give it to me,’ said Jack.
She stood alone, with just one channel open to Jack—her only link outside the virtuality. He had broken away totally and now she could be safely erased. She considered destroying everything she had obtained, or holding onto it and bleeding over small amounts just to extend her existence. But in the end she truly regretted all the things she had done as a Separatist. The arrogance and stupidity of her earlier self appalled and disgusted her.
Enough.
Aphran transmitted all the data, and Jack accepted it.
‘Do I die now?’ she asked.
‘Yes—in every way that matters to the Polity.’
Aphran felt herself contracting, going out, draining away.
* * * *
No returns from the package he had sent. Thellant realized they must have opened it in some secure fashion to obtain what they wanted. With his being now utterly interlaced through the rescue ship, physically and informationally, he hardly felt his own body. Perpetually he tried to reach out to other vessels, probing for some lever, some way…
‘Thellant N’komo,’ said a voice.
‘You’re the ship AI—Jack Ketch. I know what the name means.’
‘Yes, I imagine you do. But I am not so merciless as that name implies. This is why I am going to offer you a choice.’
‘Oh,’ said Thellant sarcastically, ‘so I don’t get to live happily ever after on my very own little world.’
‘That is your first choice. There are those who would indeed like to isolate you upon such a world. Thorn did not lie when he told you such a place has already been prepared. The trouble is you would not live happily ever after. Over a period of years you would spread around the planet, using its resources to create grand Jain structures, but since the purpose of the technology you now ostensibly control is the destruction of civilizations, and none would be available to you there, you would eventually go to seed.’
‘Seed?’
‘The Legate has told you something of the biophysicist Skellor?’
‘He did.’
‘Though they might believe themselves to be in control of that technology, technical beings are merely its vehicles, merely a means of spreading it. In Skellor it formed nodes within him, seeds. It will do the same in you.’
Thellant already sensed that the technology remained his to command only while their two purposes concurred. The idea of it seeding from him contained more horror for him than could be supposed by others unoccupied by the Jain tech. He knew he would remain aware throughout the procedure, fighting to survive and to hold his consciousness together, but knowing his efforts to be futile. With his sudden tired acceptance of these facts, he felt things hardening inside him, imminent as razors threading through his flesh. Their purposes would utterly diverge should he choose what he already knew to be Jack Ketch’s other option: death. He poised himself on the brink of decision. Should he choose to die, the Jain tech would try to take over, since it put its own survival first, always.
‘Should it last for two seconds, I will take your silence as the latter choice,’ Jack told him.
Thellant clamped down on the structure that spread throughout the ship, felt it writhe and fight him. A spastic vibration threw him about in the flight chair, but stubbornly he kept his mouth clamped shut. He felt the structure within him creating a reply, drafting its acceptance of planetary exile. He glimpsed an image of himself as a soft flesh puppet, translucent and threaded upon black dense technology like a many-clawed gaff.
Not speaking.
Two seconds of eternity, then a shiny nose cone closing down on him like a steel eye. The Jain structure shrieked and thrashed, and the imploder struck. Super gravity drew ship and all down into white antimatter fire.
Thellant went out.
* * * *
Human swarm crowded and stumbled in from the distance. Scattered evenly across the sky, apparently as far as the arcology edge, hung spherical scanning drones eight feet across, with high-intensity lasers mounted on either side of them. Their targets, Jain-infected humans, might be moving shoulder to shoulder with innocent civilians, and needed to be rendered down to ash. Coloron had calculated eight innocent deaths for every one infected with Jain tech. Cormac thought it ironically appropriate that these drones bore some similarity to Prador War drones. Thus far, fifteen targets had been destroyed, having evaded Coloron’s forces inside the arcology. None of them managed to join the main crowds, and so no collateral damage yet. Was that down to the efficiency of the Polity defence, or just dumb luck?
A line of AG tanks curved from horizon to horizon. Behind it, and above, massed other Polity forces: mobile quadruped rail-guns stamping about impatiently on steel legs, the ends of their huge cylindrical magazines, attached either side of their main bodies, looking like blank eyes; troop transports and swarms of armoured troops, some hovering in AG harnesses, some on platforms mounting particle cannons; atmosphere jets speeding in squadrons overhead, avoiding two massive atmosphere gunships hanging in the sky like city blocks turned sideways; a multitude of drones of all kinds swarming all about like steel insects. This then was the might of the Polity mobilized for ground warfare. Cormac considered it an impressive and sobering sight, but knew the forces assembled here to be only a fraction of a per cent of the whole.
Breaks through the ground line were fenced on either side, the intervening channels leading back to where ECS Rescue and Medical personnel awaited. More of these were arriving from the initial landings beside the arcology. The air ambulances and ships these personnel occupied were also obliged to pass underneath the scanning drones, no exceptions.
‘Would you like to be down there?’ Cormac asked.
Arach, who had been peering for some time over the side of the stripped-down gravcar Cormac guided, turned his nightmare head, opened and closed his pincers, his two large red eyes and other smaller ones gleaming. ‘I would rather be over there.’ Arach gestured with one sharp leg towards the arcology itself. Seemingly on cue, a bright flash from that direction cast long shadows behind the ground forces. Shortly after came a thunderous rumble. Through his gridlink Cormac picked up the news.
‘Another runcible,’ he declared.
Arach grunted, then with a clattering moved up beside Cormac to peer ahead at the arcology. Turquoise fire now stabbed down, again and again, and the thunder became constant. Smoke, fire and debris, carried up in mini tornadoes, became visible.
‘And that?’ asked the drone.
‘Coloron is destroying the coastal edge of the arcology to prevent the Jain tech spreading into the sea,’ he replied. ‘The AI has burnt down to the bedrock for about a mile in, and is keeping that rock molten.’
Accessing a statistical analysis of the situation, he immediately saw that the arcology’s further existence was measured only in days. Jain tech now controlled the coastal edge to the west, and most of the north edge too. It had swamped almost half the arcology, and six of the ten runcibles had been destroyed before it could reach them. Flashes continued to ignite the horizon as missiles from orbit destroyed those fusion reactors coming under Jain control. The millions of citizens remaining inside the arcology now all flowed towards the long south-east edge, since the remaining runcibles inside were about to be closed down.
As he flew the gravcar low over the vast crowd, with scanning drones above tracking his progress, Cormac accessed tactical displays and views through other drones and cameras scattered throughout the arcology. Coloron’s troops steadily retreated, blowing out walls, ceilings and floors wherever it seemed possible such demolition might slow the advance of Jain substructure, and firing on abhuman figures advancing out of the wreckage. He saw squads of soldiers engaged in firefights with armed Jain-controlled humans who could be stopped only by major damage. Cormac broke the links and returned his full attention to his surroundings.
Below, the crowds remained densely packed, humanity spreading in every direction as far as he could see. Ahead, the arcology edge rose into view, like some mountain chain carved into tiers. These levels were occupied by open parks, rectilinear lakes, small cities of expensive mansions, houses and apartments. Communications pylons cut into the sky, vents belched excess heat in the form of steam, monorails weaved from level to level like silver millipedes. As he drew closer to it, Cormac saw people crowding the tiers from which jutted the platforms of gravcar-parks and landing pads. The situation had improved since, only days ago, there had been no free space anywhere on those tiers, just shoulder to shoulder Polity citizens.
‘Coloron, where are you?’ he sent.
In reply he received coordinates on a three-dimensional map of the great structure.
He pointed up to a landing pad jutting from the side of ceramal-braced foam-stone cliff, like some monstrous iron bracket fungus. ‘We go up there.’
He guided the gravcar up through the evenly spaced layer of scanning drones, and soon descended towards a landing pad. To one side of this, people crowded up ramps to climb aboard the multitude of gravcars and other AG transports that were arriving and leaving constantly. A small area of this pad had been fenced off near the edge. Human guards and mosquito-like autoguns patrolled its perimeter. Within rested a lander, a couple of military transports, and a fast atmosphere format gunship. A group of figures stood near the edge itself. As he landed, Cormac noted a bipedal robot he identified, through his gridlink, as Coloron. There were dracomen here too, and as he stepped from the car, he also recognized Thorn.
He turned to Arach. ‘Come on.’
The drone clambered down from the gravcar and walked to heel behind him like some monstrous pet. Cormac advanced to the group on the platform edge just as another actinic flash ignited in the distance. He glanced in that direction, at a sky yellow-brown behind the pall of smoke, to see wreckage exploding into the air and raining down. This havoc was being wrought to prevent an even greater catastrophe, all as a consequence of one man with one Jain node. How many, he wondered, had the Maker brought from its realm and scattered throughout the Polity?
‘Cormac,’ said Thorn, turning to acknowledge him.
Cormac nodded in greeting, glanced across at the dracomen, recognized Scar by his gnathic smile, then returned his attention to Thorn. The man glanced past him at the drone, now squatting with his hindquarters resting on the floor.
‘New recruit?’ he enquired.
‘A volunteer,’ Cormac replied, then, after Thorn’s grimace, ‘allow me to introduce Arach. He’s a war drone who fought in the Prador War.’
‘Ah,’ said Thorn, ‘that accounts for it.’
‘Quite…’ Cormac stabbed a finger down at the deck beneath his feet. ‘Now, I know what’s going on down here on the surface, but I’ve heard nothing from Jack,’
‘We’ve captured Thellant N’komo,’ said Thorn. He nodded to the nearby lander and they both began walking towards it.
‘I know.’ Cormac tapped a finger against his head, indicating his gridlink. ‘Von Hellsdorf sold Skellor a Jain node, and there was a direct connection between her and this Thellant.’ Cormac glanced across the devastation and grimaced. ‘Have you got anything out of him yet?’
Ahead of them, Scar and the four dracomen accompanying him boarded the lander.
Thorn replied, ‘A download of all his memories concerning his association with something called the Legate. He layered this with subversion programs, so it’s taken Aphran quite a while to take it apart. We’re getting the results now.’
Cormac paused by the airlock. ‘Those being?’
Thorn gestured inside. ‘Best you come see.’
Cormac glanced back towards Coloron. The AI dipped towards him as if to study him for a moment, then returned its attention to its demolition job. Yet another explosion ignited the horizon, much closer now. Cormac stepped into the lander.
13
The classification of Polity warships is only loosely connected to a similar system used for naval vessels of the past. Hence dreadnoughts are the big ones—their name owing more to the definition fears nothing’ than ‘a battleship carrying heavy guns of a uniform calibre’- and attack ships are the smaller ones, though very fast and also carrying some lethal armament. Cruisers lie somewhere between these two — the lines of definition somewhat blurred. However, with the size of ships steadily increasing at one end of the scale and increasing specialization at the other end, new forms of classification have been introduced since the termination of the Prador War. Using the Greek alphabet, dreadnoughts are classified alpha to epsilon, zeta to omicron are used to cover cruisers, and the rest of the alphabet to cover all the specialized warships: attack ships of many different designs, USERs, space tugs and drone or troop transports. Now even this system is falling into disuse. Few people even believe that such behemoths as alpha and beta class dreadnoughts exist. I can assure you that they do, and some others beyond where this system of classification runs out. At the other end of the scale the alphabetical designations have become unwieldy. The most recent state-of-the-art attack ships are designated Iota/Lambda (basic weapons)/Mu+(gravtech weapons)/’ware (Omicron classified) etc. etc. Sometimes they are called Centurion-class attack ships, but mostly we humans just call them by their names now. The complex classifications can just remain lines of code slotted, in the minds of AIs, into specific niches in Gordian battle plans.
—From her lecture ‘Modern Warfare’ by EBS Heinlein
Orlandine detached from her assister frame and her carapace, then returned along the length of the Heliotrope to her living quarters. She was abruptly very hungry—the nutrients her body stored having been used up over the last hundred h
ours of research. The ship’s galley provided her with a hot prosaic meal of synthetic beef rogan josh, naan bread, and cold beer.
Human time, she thought, feeling the irony of it, yet deciding she needed this interlude to gain a different perspective on all she had learnt.
With one quarter of the node’s substance unravelled, Orlandine now used the tools it provided. A stripped-down simple mycelium grew along the joists and layers of the Dyson segment, powering itself from the many reactors already in place, and giving her views throughout the immense surrounding structure. It connected to all the Polity scanning equipment within the segment, and edited out anything those scanners picked up of her activities, so as to make her effectively invisible to those back at the Cassius stations, and would alert her of anything that might affect her—its own scanners being much more effective than those manufactured by the Polity. However, she had connected this mycelium to an isolated computer, where one of her subpersonae controlled it.
Orlandine remained wary of applying the physical technology directly to herself, it being only comprehensible down to the level her studying tools could reach. Those tools, and the analytical programs she applied to what they revealed, led her to hypothesize the existence of underlying submolecular structures. It was like seeing a two-hundred-storey building, knowing there must be foundations below it, but suspecting still further floors underground.
Her attitude to the numerous programs copied from the node was different. She loaded them to her carapace—though in isolated storage, just like the ones she had used to attack Shoala. She felt she understood their purposes as individual programs, but did not yet want to include them completely in her crystal consciousness because they might reveal further purpose only in combination. However, being simply packets of information, they could be broken down to a elementary quaternary form, below which nothing could be hidden. At some point she would begin to use them in combination.