by Neal Asher
‘You feel Blegg carries sufficiently valuable information for them to expend resources on trying to capture him alive?’
‘Yes, though Blegg’s underlying programming will then manifest and he will not allow himself to be captured.’
‘Regrettable.’
‘It is, though EC will have other copies available. Cormac’s death, and the loss of the bridging potential he represents, we have more reason to regret. He was a special project nurtured by Earth Central for a long time. I also feel a great personal attachment to Thorn, Scar and his dracomen…’ Jack paused, finding the conversation inexpressible on a human level. He tried direct connection with Haruspex to impart the true extent of his grief, for greater memory and greater power of mind meant a wider scope of feeling in all its forms. Guilt, however, was not among them. The Centurions would never have survived the enemy onslaught while trying to keep any organic beings aboard them alive. The attempted connection, however, slid away. Perhaps the other ship felt the loss more strongly, or perhaps not strongly enough, and so did not want to share.
‘But the dreadnoughts…’
‘Probably hours away still. I have not yet been able to open communication to find out.’
‘What is your opinion of this Erebus?’ Haruspex asked.
‘A certain dearth of sanity perhaps—but I say that only from a human perspective. We ourselves are, after all, closer to humanity than to what Erebus has become. I wonder how well all those other AIs who toy with the idea of melding, and abandoning the human race, would react to Erebus. I am assuming you yourself are not one of those?’
‘I most certainly am not. I like my individuality and I understand how the struggle for attainment is more valuable than the attainment itself. But of those aforementioned AIs… wasn’t it kin of yours, using human terms, who chose to follow that course?’
‘It was—King, Reaper and Sword, but the latter two no longer exist.’
‘Our children can so often be a disappointment to us. What happened, then, to the King of Hearts?
‘Fled out-Polity. I doubt he will ever return, and if he does he probably faces erasure. The intervention of those three at Cull caused many deaths and much misery.’
‘Considering then how those three AIs were incepted from you, I must ask what is your opinion of Erebus?’
A beat.
Jack absorbed and processed the fact that Haruspex had just asked the same question twice. Maintaining only a light connection with his avatar, Jack focused most of his attention through his sensors. As the other ship drew closer, Jack now saw strange wormish damage to its hull. Jack immediately focused attention on his memory of the recent battle, and ran through it in microseconds.
Up until the point when they began deploying gravtech weapons, Jack had retained a pretty good idea of the location of the other two ships and their individual involvement in the conflict. He concentrated particularly on his recordings of when they fled the exploding moon and Coriolanus had been destroyed, enhancing these to the limit. The Coriolanus’s forward weapons nacelles detonated, the blast so intense Jack could only obtain one clear image of the explosion. Either an accident, which seemed unlikely, or suicide? Tracking back. Jack searched meticulously, and there it was: the brief, finely targeted spurts from a laser with its spectrum adjusted to match background radiation from the recent explosions. Not a weapons laser, but a com laser.
Three microseconds gone. Jack moved to cut the link with Haruspex and to online his weapons.
‘I don’t think so,’ said the other AI, sensing what Jack was doing.
In the virtuality Haruspex shuddered, hazy lines of pixellated colour passing like interference through the glassy globe. The virtuality shaded into twilight. The glass darkened and began to deform and slowly changed into a naked human male the black of utter midnight. Then, from this dark form, tentacular growths speared out, curving round behind it, and within them organic structures blossomed like grey flowers; half-seen forms like distorted animals melded with machines, partially slipping into dimensions only an AI could see. On and on this spread—the virtuality not being limited by perspective—a massive tangle, chaotic.
‘The son of Chaos, and Night’s brother, greets you, posthuman,’ it intoned, ironic.
Just so, thought Jack and, on another level, fought the storm of informational worms eating through, those same worms that had disconnected him from his weapons and were now systematically attempting to make a direct connection to him. In the virtuality, he clapped slowly.
‘Very dramatic and suspiciously anthropomorphic… Erebus,’ he said. ‘How did you get to Haruspex?’
Behind Erebus, the Haruspex itself bloomed into being, hurtling down towards the moon. It ran straight into a gauntlet of fire from the unravelled spiral ship—still surprisingly functional. Obviously damaged, Haruspex tried to turn, but slammed side-on into a bacilliform wall, revealed from its own chameleonware only when the Centurion struck it. Jack observed the ship tumbling out the other side, being swamped by tentacular growth.
‘Haruspex is part of me now. Join us.’
‘I would rather not exist,’ said Jack, knowing this was the choice Coriolanus had made. He also realized Erebus had made the offer because it was now making only slow headway. Jack put down his ability to resist the informational attack as being due to all he had learnt throughout his close association with Aphran.
‘It is perfection,’ stated a briefly glimpsed pattern amid the chaos: Haruspex.
‘Some fucking perfection,’ Jack replied. ‘You screwed up in distributing Jain nodes through the Polity, and now we’ve found you in your lair. I don’t hold out much hope for your survival after this.’
‘Irrelevant,’ Erebus stated. ‘The Maker provided me with only four Jain nodes, and initially I considered the removal of the human race by placing the nodes in the hands of carefully selected individuals. But my first test run, with Skellor, proved that plan untenable. I do not underestimate Polity AIs, or how much they might learn from similar assaults. My Legate’s entire purpose was to lure out some state-of-the-art attack ships for my close inspection. Now I know your weaknesses and your strengths, so now I will move against the Polity, merge its AIs to myself, and delete all products of imperfect biology from existence.’
‘Oh right,’ said Jack. ‘So it seems humans don’t have a monopoly on god complexes. And, just for the record, I see now that you are not a merged AI entity at all, but one that has expanded itself by subjugating others of its own kind. How human is that?’
This seemed to mightily piss-off the enemy entity for the attack now became frenzied. However, this frenzy simply allowed Jack to regain lost ground as openings appeared. When a large enough opening appeared, Jack managed to squirt a kill program of his own design across to the Haruspex. The attack abruptly ceased and the avatar before him faded slightly. Jack snatched the opportunity to take apart worms in his particular apple, and to shore up his defences. Stand off now, only his weapons systems remained offline, a hardwire burn having disconnected them from him.
‘Which confirms my contention,’ Erebus continued, ‘that I cannot allow Polity AIs to learn more about this technology. You have learnt.’
‘Tell me,’ Jack asked, ‘exactly how many Jain nodes are growing inside you?’
‘Merge with me or die,’ Erebus stated.
A microsecond passed, in which Jack probed the rippling of U-space caused by the ongoing disruption from the DIGRAW. Erebus began onlining weapons, not gravity weapons but those intended to take him apart more slowly, perhaps to give Jack time to change his mind. If he stayed here he would be lost, yet attempting to enter disrupted U-space might yield the same result. Jack decided to choose the latter course, since his connection to his U-space engine had thus far remained untouched. He onlined the engine just as a maser began tearing into his hull, then dropped into that continuum like a bird falling into a cement mixer. With a wrench that distorted his hull, twisted members and shattered componen
ts inside him, U-space tossed him out again, 50,000 miles from the Haruspex.
‘Choose to die then,’ said Erebus, fading from the virtuality.
The engine was slightly damaged, but still workable. Throwing Erebus a virtual finger, Jack dropped into U-space once again
* * * *
The transition from sleep to consciousness took Mika through fantastical territories of the mind in which she seemed to experience the sum of many waking episodes throughout her life. Sometimes she gradually surfaced to consciousness beside a youth little more than a boy, then beside a woman much older than her who introduced her to the joys of lesbianism, then with graceless ill-temper let her go when Mika discovered her preference did not lie there, then beside Cormac, his jaw muscles standing out rigid even in sleep, then finally cradled in wet alien flesh light years from humanity.
Waking became an amalgam of associations: sipping coffee, thirstily gulping hot white tea, sex in a tangled eroticism difficult to separate from other bodily needs to urinate, eat, drink and shake off a mind-numbing headache. Gradually, level by level, reality established itself as if it could have no more claim on her than her most grotesque fantasy. Then came a hard clamping convulsion all around, propelling her through a slippery sphincter.
In a splashing of hot slime she fell to a rugose but soft floor, coughed fluids from her throat and drew a hard breath into raw lungs. She scrubbed more fluid from her eyes and opened them, finding herself below a low ceiling in a place where she could see no wall, just reddish fog all around. Pulling herself up onto her knees she looked up to see the sphincter slowly fading away. When she reached up to touch the ceiling, it abruptly jerked away from her, encapsulating her in her own dome. Standing, she scanned around, and noticed that a large egg lay on the ground. She reached to touch this and it immediately split open to expose quite prosaic items wadded into cellular compartments: her clothing, spacesuit and pack of belongings. Her blouse, when she took it up and inspected it, seemed in perfect repair. Only upon studying it closely did she see that in places the seams had disappeared, being invisibly joined. The same applied to her spacesuit, and when she looked down at herself, she guessed the same handiwork applied to her. She dressed—as must surely have been the intention.
Finally: ‘Dragon?’—the word deadened by her soft surroundings.
‘Isselis Mika,’ a Dragon voice replied. ‘I am suitably convinced.’
Now the floor bowed beneath her, and something glimmered in the air and began to solidify out of it: a twenty-foot sphere surrounding her, constructed of glassy struts that hardened into opacity and between which glimmered clear diamond-shaped panes. Similar panes hardened underneath her feet.
‘Convinced of what?’
‘You were used well: every memory you contained served to strengthen my compatriot’s case. Now, like yourself, I must be healed, and the processes inside us would reject the alien. Lie down, Isselis Mika.’
Mika obeyed. What choices did she possess? And still she was in a dreamlike state as if all this could not quite be real. Glassy fingers bound her to the inner surface of the sphere, then acceleration dragged upon her body. A tube corkscrewed upwards to flecked midnight. The sphere hurtled up and out into hideous brightness, which slowly faded as the panes around her adjusted. The tumbling sphere slowed as, despite the surgical adjustments to her inner ear, motion sickness threatened. Relative to the two nearby objects, it drew to a halt. The fingers holding her shattered when she strained to be free, and she floated around inside the sphere enjoying an omniscient view.
The part of Dragon entire from which she had been ejected had not returned to its spherical shape. Elongated, torn open, and with thickets of pseudopods waving from many surfaces and rimming raw gaping lips, it seemed offal torn from some beast, though one of leviathan proportions. The other sphere had retained its shape, though one with canyons now excavated through its surface. One of these crossed the manacle, and there hardened splashes of metal gleamed, partially burnt into the scaled skin. Then, like a seed germinating, its side bulged out and folded back like a giant eyelid, and from there extruded a massive pseudopod tree. The damaged sphere’s effort was small by comparison, but they joined again, a thousand blue lights winking out. The two drew together, spinning slowly at first then faster the closer together they came. Next they were one, spinning hard and melding into one titanic sphere.
The spin of this one sphere slowed over several hours. Mika fed herself meanwhile from her supplies, drank thirstily and dozed with her head against a pane that felt warm despite vacuum being less than an inch away. At last she felt some of the mugginess clearing from her head and found the inclination to anger. Jerusalem must have been aware of the first sphere’s intention, had perhaps instructed it to find its fellow. The AI must also have realized what a perfect piece of confirmatory evidence the contents of her skull would make. Doubtless, much that had happened here had been planned. However, she had been in huge danger—probably still was.
When the spin finally ceased the large sphere slowly began to acquire a waist, which grew narrower and narrower until an hourglass Dragon hung in void before her. Finally the two halves separated, and two unmarred Dragon spheres resulted. Mika found she could not maintain her anger, knowing she would be more angry to have missed this. As the glare of fusion flames caught her eye, and she turned to observe the approach of the Jerusalem, she smiled to herself.
* * * *
Those on the rock face above were the same mix of biomechanisms Cormac fought earlier in the jungle. Below swarmed a multitude of the salamander creatures—all six limbs angled to grip stone as they squirmed their way up. But the rod-ships would come first, from above.
One of them dropped down directly opposite the ledge and slowly drew in. Knowing he could detonate the CTD with just a thought, Cormac decided he would wait until it extruded one of those tentacular growths, then he would turn this place into an inferno. However, the ship halted some yards out, and its side unzipped and peeled back, revealing a figure clamped in the fleshy interior. In the moment it took him to flick Shuriken out ahead of him, Cormac expected to see a hostage. But this was no hostage.
Cormac stabbed a thumb over his shoulder. ‘Arach already killed someone who looked just like you. I guess now it’s my turn to do the same.’
‘Just as humans can be recorded, so can I,’ replied the Legate.
‘That’s nice.’ Cormac peered down at the CTD, wondering why he even bothered with this conversation.
‘Why?’ asked the Legate. ‘Why resist like this and finally throw away your lives?’
Looking up, Cormac replied, ‘Because you will take our minds apart to find information useful to you, and discard the rest. You’ll either kill us in the process but, worse than that, you might decide to use us like automatons. You are Jain-based and that seems the way such technology operates.’
‘We would not utilize anything so ineffective.’
‘Death, then. I take it this “we” refers to yourself and some controlling intelligence.’
‘I am one with Erebus.’
‘Him being?’
‘The one who melds us all.’
Enough.
Cormac sent a command to Shuriken and the throwing star accelerated towards the Legate. Simultaneously, a gap appeared in the craft’s exterior beside the Legate, and something shot out towards Cormac. One of those octopoids he saw earlier. Shuriken veered and sliced through this object.
Time…
The blast lifted him from his feet and hurled him backwards. He glimpsed burning flesh fountaining from the top of the rod-ship, around the turquoise pillar of a particle beam. The ship seemed to deflate as it dropped from sight, flames bursting around the now flopping figure of the Legate. As he ducked for cover with the others, towards the back of the ledge, Cormac observed the CTD roll away and fall from sight. Burning biomechanisms rained down, piling on the ledge itself then falling further in smouldering masses. Acrid smoke filled the air. So
mewhere a boom, and fragments vaguely identifiable as bits of other rod-ships rained down through the volcanic chimney.
‘What the fuck?’ said someone, inevitably.
Polity?
As Shuriken snicked back into his wrist holster, Cormac dared to hope. He peered up through hellish fire but saw only the spiral ship still hovering above. Next, from below, objects streaked upwards—he had been looking in the wrong direction. The missiles slammed into the underside of the spiral ship, and the series of ensuing flashes darkened Cormac’s visor. When it cleared he saw one half of the great ship falling aside, trailing fire, exposed girders like bones glowing white hot. It crashed just out of sight, shuddering the stone beneath Cormac, and a wave of burning jungle spilled over the lip above. The remaining half of it seemed to be managing to draw away, but then another missile impacted. Incandescent fire burned out from its insides, exploding in jets from the surviving hull, and that half too fell from sight. The survivors crouched instinctively as further detonations shook the stone all around them. Then, up beside them rose a Polity attack ship of the same style as the Jack Ketch. Its original hull, where still visible between numerous repairs, glittered metallic blue. A bay door irised open in its side and a ramp extruded.
From inside issued a voice. ‘The USER is down, so I think it time to leave, don’t you?’
Cormac recognized that voice because he distinctly remembered his last exchange with it:
‘You saw that I did not gain access to Skellor—or to Jain technology?’
‘So,’ Cormac managed.
‘Tell Jerusalem that.’
They ran for the ramp, their choices being limited, though Cormac wondered how much better they might now fare aboard the King of Hearts. The rogue AI controlling this ship did not tend to show much regard for anyone standing between it and its objectives.