Line War

11

‘Time for you to go, Bludgeon,’ said Orlandine.

The little war drone controlling Heliotrope and its attached cargo runcible merely sent a binary acknowledgement, then the ship threw a flame out behind it and quickly receded from direct view. Once out of the black asteroid field, it would U-jump to the Anulus black hole, but even then Orlandine would maintain the U-space link between the war runcible and Heliotrope, since the weapon and its magazine needed to remain connected.

Now Orlandine turned her attention to the little craft those two wormships had been pursuing. It was still holding off while awaiting her docking instructions, and now she needed to make preparations.

‘Knobbler, send some of your comrades down to Dock Fifteen and make sure they’re ready for trouble.’

‘Already on their way.’

Orlandine checked her internal views and observed the double spider, the scorpion and the hissing cockroach clattering their way through internal corridors to the dock indicated. She scanned them to check what armament they carried and again felt some reservations. The three drones were so thoroughly packed with weapons, munitions, charged-up capacitors and laminar batteries that the accidental detonation of one of them would excise a large portion of the war runcible. She had, on first taking control of the runcible, considered saying something about this to Knobbler, then decided against it. She had to accept that entities as old as these, who had survived the Prador-human war, knew what they were doing.

Through her mycelium spread throughout the war runcible, she quickly shunted energy and other resources to the area around Dock Fifteen. Peering out from that location at the stationary ship, she experienced a moment of horrification on again seeing the legate craft bound underneath it like a sucked-out insect in a spider’s web. She was also extremely wary, since her scans of the vessel were being easily defeated and her informational probes being bounced. She guessed that the voice that had spoken to her belonged to the larger ship’s AI, but she now wondered what his boss might be. It was almost as if a sense of that unknown entity was bleeding back through her scans and probes, with a hint of something dark and powerful.

That other presence aboard the ship worried her, but she needed the information it had obtained. Her first encounter with a wormship — the one that had nearly got her killed and from which she had netted Fiddler Randal — had already demonstrated the dangers of not being completely up to date. She was prepared therefore to risk this ship docking if whatever was aboard could supply her with the required camouflage.

Orlandine again opened her channel to the hovering vessel.

‘What’s your name?’

‘Vulture,’ replied the voice, ‘running a ship called the Harpy. Such a joyous working of serendipity don’t you think?’

Definitely a Polity AI, quite possibly a war drone, given that sort of attitude.

‘Well, Vulture, while you proceed now to Dock Fifteen’ — she sent the location — ‘perhaps you can explain yourself further. Specifically I’d like you to tell me something about this Fiddler Randal.’

‘Fiddler Randal is a virus Erebus picked up at some point. I would guess he was originally a human mind in a flesh-and-blood human. He clearly hates Erebus and wants to see the entity splattered, so copies himself everywhere through Erebus’s structure to work to that end. But why am I telling you this? You yourself either have a copy of Randal or have encountered one.’

The ship had fired up its steering jets and was now propelling itself towards the dock in question. The three drones were already down in the bay area — two of them concealed and only the scorpion visible. Orlandine’s resources were now in place there: she could burn out the entire area with a fire hot enough to fracture ceramal, but perhaps that wasn’t such a great idea considering the munitions those three drones were carrying. More important were her other resources: there she had every worm and virus at her disposal and numerous means of delivering them, both by physical connection and electromagnetic means.

‘How do you know that I have encountered or possess a copy of RandAI?’

‘My one told me.’

‘If you could elaborate?’

‘Stop fucking around, Orlandine. You were advised someone would arrive here bringing precisely what we’re bringing you, so what’s the problem?’

‘Very well.’ Orlandine wanted to question further but guessed she would find out more soon enough. In any event, she couldn’t afford not to let this vessel dock. She studied its slow approach, continued trying to probe it but learned nothing new. The twinned ship finally docked, and she instantly recognized what walked out of it — as did the three war drones waiting in the bay, from the way their weapons came online all at once.

‘You’ve brought something for me,’ she said to the menacing figure.

Mr Crane nodded briefly and information began to flow across to her, even though she had not herself permitted it. For half a second everything stood poised on the edge of disaster, until Orlandine began to take a look at what he had sent: the wealth of secret codes, the multiple methods of configuring the chameleonware she was already spreading throughout the war runcible, and the knowledge that she had a lot of work to do and very little time.

The accretion disc seemed to be some living body and the horde now rushing towards the two Dragon spheres its immune response to them. Mika firmly controlled the impulse to run and find somewhere to hide, then began analysing all those weird forms out there in the brief time they were open to her inspection before an equatorial particle cannon, white laser or CTD proceeded to fry them. She realized they were a much more diverse collection of Jain biomechs than those utilized by Erebus, yet none of them approached the size or coherence of a full wormship. There were lenses but all of them deformed, and they often had some other entity attached to them either in symbiosis, mutualism or parasitism — it was difficult to tell. The structures that made up wormships rarely achieved more than a few turns of a spiral, and though numerous bacilliforms now fell like hail towards the Dragon spheres, they never melded together to form those thousand-mile-high walls she had seen in recordings of previous conflicts with these things.

Clearly a guiding intelligence was lacking here. This was Jain technology initiated into growth by such an intelligence then abandoned. She had studied similar growth burgeoning on an asteroid in orbit about the red giant sun Ruby Eye. This stuff tried to spread itself in the same way as a virus or bacillus — with the kind of cunning selected by evolution but utterly without sentience. By now, if there had been a guiding intelligence, their attack would have been halted, for none of these biomechs managed to get even close to the Dragon spheres, yet they continued to approach with a kind of automated futility.

‘What happens if one of these things actually reaches your surface?’ she asked.

The voice in her head replied, ‘None of them will.’

‘Yeah, but what if?’

‘They would not be able to penetrate me unless many thousands of them reached my surface all at once.’

‘And then?’

‘I would sterilize that area.’

It occurred to Mika that maybe she should have stayed safely inside Dragon, because ‘sterilize’ was almost certainly too mild a term to describe what might be needed here. She returned her attention to her instruments, but then, a moment later, an orange glow in the surrounding fug dragged her attention upward. Though there were all sorts of flashes and detonations occurring about the spheres, they were short-lived, whereas this light remained constant.

‘What’s that?’

‘A planet in the process of formation.’

‘Are we going anywhere near it?’ Mika asked, fascinated.

‘Very close,’ Dragon replied. ‘The entities currently attacking us show no inclination to hold back, therefore are not too bright, and it has become evident that few of them possess anything more than rudimentary engines.’

‘And.’

‘I suggest that you strap yourself tightly into your chair and just watch.’

Mika quickly obeyed, then eased the chair back to get a better view of her surroundings. It seemed as if a wind was blowing out there in the fug because, as well as the constant motion in it from the passage of the Dragon sphere, it was now swirling rapidly and she could detect cross-currents. Something massive then appeared out of it to her left and she observed an asteroid slowly turning, its surface coated with snaky growth so that it seemed like some massive fossil. Biomechs leaped from its surface, chemical drives sputtering to life, but the Dragon spheres outpaced them and soon they and their rocky home had receded from view.

Next Mika felt the tug of gravity at a slant to her present position, which produced the illusion of the floor tilting. The equatorial cannons had ceased firing by now, but Dragon’s white lasers continued to stab through the murk. The meteor lasers of the conferencing unit were also firing, things flashing like firecrackers and blinking out all about her. Slowly, the fug began to clear and she gained a clearer direct view of the pursuing horde. Briefly she glimpsed the other sphere off to one side, then turning her head gazed upon the volcanic glare of a new world in the process of formation.

The world itself was misshapen, probably as the result of a recent impact, for one entire side of it was a magma lake into which a titanic mountain was steadily sinking. Plumes of magma regularly spewed miles into the air, hellish cracks opened even as she watched, and the surface flickered with the constant explosion of strikes from a never-ending meteor storm. It rained meteors here, it rained fire, and fire spewed from the ground, but steadily the Dragon spheres descended towards this chaos.

It seemed to take forever for this nascent world to make the transition from an object hanging in space to a plain extending below her and a horizon ahead. Mika gazed down upon rivers and lakes of lava glaring through a sooty black crust. The tug of the planet was countering that of the gravplates below her, so she felt light in her chair. She imagined herself in some glassy cockpit set into the surface of the Dragon sphere, just below its equator, and oriented towards a point midway between the ground below and the horizon. The sky ahead was cut diagonally with parallel meteor trails, which meant the debris orbiting beyond this world must have formed into a swirl pattern, and the horizon flashed with explosions as if of some distant battle.

A brief flicker of light dragged her attention over to her left, and in a moment she saw a mushroom cloud boiling up into the sky, but it wasn’t some atomic device, just a meteor impacting with the same force. Dragon rocked in the shock wave, and the magma below was whipped up like seawater in a storm, waves of it splashing on sooty shores. Horizontal clouds, like jet vapour trails, spread from either side of the explosion, then were rapidly disrupted by two similar detonations. However, Mika’s gaze was drawn upward, by a constant white flickering as if from some faulty light tube, to the flashing of white lasers.

Up above, it was like looking into storm cloud in which burning coals were shifting. Out of this came swarms of Jain biomechs that the two spheres appeared to be struggling to keep at bay. She glanced across at the other sphere, just visible now, and saw its weapons creating a halo of fire above it. Then something fell past, close by her. It was a rod-form sprouting jain tendrils even as she watched it. Quickly it receded from sight, then a brief greenish fire marked its point of entry into a magma lake below. Then more of them were raining past her. She saw one abruptly stabilize only a few miles out, and begin to rise again, but after a moment it shuddered and just burst apart, spreading fragments like purple skin across the atmosphere. Another managed to rise, but other rod-forms falling from above it changed course to intercept it, sprouting tendrils as they came. They grabbed on like drowning swimmers clutching at one who had managed to stay on the surface, till their combined weight dragged it down. Mika saw the whole mass impact, break apart and begin belching smoke. It was only then that she noticed how much closer to the ground now were the twin Dragon spheres.

‘Why are they falling?’ Mika asked.

‘They cannot sustain gravtech,’ Dragon replied.

Mika remembered then the wild Jain tech she had studied once on that asteroid orbiting Ruby Eye. Confined to that rock, it had not tried to use anything more complicated to escape the surface than some form of rail-gun.

‘That’s because gravtech is related to U-tech, and the latter requires conscious sentient control,’ she suggested.

‘Yes,’ Dragon replied, and she felt some satisfaction with her answer until the entity added, ‘so your AIs tell you.’

It was deluging Jain biomechs now and the surface below kept disappearing amid clouds of smoke. A lens-ship half a mile across, and into whose side it seemed part of a wormship had impacted, fell into view. Jet flames were regularly blasting from numerous orifices underneath it but, though they seemed to be holding it up, they could not stabilize it. It drifted towards her, then the bar of a white laser — made visible by all the smoke — cut across it. Some internal detonation flung the wormish part of it free and it turned over, accelerating towards the ground, where it disappeared into a smoke cloud. Briefly she glimpsed an explosion down there, before Dragon moved beyond it.

After some hours Mika’s fascination with this spectacle began to pall. She shifted her seat upright again and began to check her instruments. Robotically methodical, she collected data, recorded events and then made analyses. She realized that the biomechs, having adapted to the environment of the accretion disc, now could not survive in the environment the Dragon spheres had lured them into. Was this stuff a danger, then, it appearing so simple? Yes, of course it was, for every one of those things out there could produce Jain nodes. In a moment of horror it occurred to her that Jain nodes were already being produced here in huge quantities and ejected from this accretion disc to spread out into space — and these would not take nearly as long to reach human civilization as those ejected by the remnants of the Maker civilization, though the span of time involved would be thousands if not tens of thousands of years. Maybe by then the Polity would be able to stop them, for though ECS now possessed the means of detecting such objects, that would be as much use as being able to detect individual grains in a sandstorm.

Several more hours passed and, as the two Dragon spheres parted to circumvent the massive mountain still sinking into the lake of magma it had made, the pathetic rain of biomechs began to abate. Mika noted that the two spheres were once again higher from the ground. Checking her instruments she saw that the cloud of their pursuers was almost gone, fast draining away. Sensor readings directed behind showed numerous fires with spectrographic readings indicating both metals and organic compounds. Next the two spheres were into cloud, and the gravplates below her became the only pull.

‘Where now?’ she asked.

‘To the core.’

‘The sun?’

‘Near it,’ Dragon replied. ‘The graveyard of ships orbits close to it, and will fall into the sun some years hence.’

‘Graveyard of ships?’

‘Our sensors are better than yours, Mika,’ said Dragon. ‘We see the old ships in the forest, and through the thin fabric we feel the others.’

Others?

Mika did not ask — and did not even want to know — about some infinite writhing mass seeming to lie just off the edge of her perception.

The back alley was choked with junk: discarded computer hardware, biodegrading litter accumulated in soggy drifts from which frilly golden fungi were sprouting, an ageing open-topped gravcar spattered with bird shit from which the motor had obviously been removed, a couple of flimsy screens still running text while discharging their photoelectric load from the previous day’s sunshine. Chevron gazed around at this mess: it was typically human and her new addition to it would make no difference. She strode over to the car and, with a flip of her shoulder, dumped her wet blanket-wrapped load into the back seats.

Chevron had assumed that obtaining a schematic of the ancient drainage system underneath Xanadu was simply a matter of briefly searching the nets, but surprisingly that basic information had not been there. As it transpired, however, it was possible to discover through the nets someone who did know about it, so Chevron obtained what she required by paying over a few credits to the one historian who, for some unfathomable reason, thought this subject worthy of research. It hadn’t been strictly necessary to kill him afterwards, but he had lived alone so Chevron felt it an easy precaution she could take. Anyway, he was so utterly human in his disorder and habits, and she found him dislikeable, though she admitted to herself there weren’t any humans she did like.

Her load discarded, she now moved over to one side of the alley, and pacing out the distance from the wall of one building, finally halted at a point about halfway along. Below her feet the damp surface of old reused furnace bricks looked no different to anywhere else. She scanned them carefully, then took a further pace forward and squatted down. Holding her hand out, she shifted internal mycelial structures and her fingers extended, flattening out to become sharp at their tips. She reached down and slid them into the crack between two bricks, levering one out with a crunch, then another, then began to scoop them out at high speed and stack them to one side. Within a few minutes she had revealed an old ceramic manhole cover underneath. It was sealed with glassy epoxy, she noticed, so another internal instruction caused her forefinger to blur into motion. She inserted it down alongside the rim of the cover and with a high whine it sliced through the ancient glue. In a moment she had cleared out a groove right round the cover and, inserting all her flattened fingers, levered it up as if using a crowbar. Immediately the stink of human sewage rose up to meet her, and she wrinkled her nose.

Humans were so messy.

Chevron scooped the dislodged bricks into the manhole, since she wanted to leave as little evidence of her presence here as possible. A squealing and hissing ensued down in the darkness, as creatures fled — ratadiles, almost certainly. She first increased the light amplification of her eyes, then lowered herself onto the ladder leading down — it was fortunately made of ceramic so had not rusted — and, after drawing the manhole cover back into place, descended further. Soon she was in the sewer, which, having been constructed to accommodate the heavy rainfall that occurred locally, was large enough to accommodate her standing upright. There would be some tighter sections to negotiate ahead, but no problem, since she would simply change her shape to suit them.

Chevron advanced, wading through knee-deep sewage, meanwhile opening coded communication links. In a moment, as well as the fetid tunnel ahead, she was gazing upon numerous different scenes fed from within the runcible complex some two miles away on the surface. Some of these views were seen through the eyes of the separatists infiltrating the area, relayed by their augs, others were from cams no larger than pinheads positioned strategically to give her a good view of the action.

‘Akiri, are our people now in position?’ she enquired.

The view witnessed currently through Akiri’s eyes was of an open bar area laid out about what looked like a Caribbean beach in the middle of a wide and crowded concourse.

‘Most of them are,’ confirmed Akiri, ‘but we’ve yet to get the main explosives to the Pillar.’

The methodology was simple. Groups of twenty insurgents each were going for the ten passenger runcibles in operation here, their aim to grab hostages, secure each area and then set explosives on each runcible. This would keep the AI very occupied while the main thrust of their attack got under way against the Pillar — a circular building in which the AI itself was sited at the junction of six concourses.

Chevron checked again through her multiple views. As Akiri had said, the groups intending to attack the passenger runcibles were mostly in place in the main lounge or various sub-lounges, supposedly awaiting their transmission slots some hours hence. The lev-trolley supposedly loaded with discs of amber, which were in fact explosives, was on its way in. Chevron noted that the person now guiding the trolley along the concourse was not the same one originally given this task. She checked recorded data supplied from the sensors she had hidden in just about every separatist base and home in this city, and was gratified to witness the original trolley pusher being garrotted and then shoved into a sewer rather similar to this one. The woman had apparently had second thoughts about her assignment, her chances of survival and the fallout for her two children… and people didn’t live to have third thoughts within Chevron’s organization.

‘When do we start?’ Akiri asked.

‘I’ve mined the north wall of the runcible complex,’ Chevron replied, lying as smoothly as ever, ‘but I need to shift the ship into position to get you out, which should take me about another forty minutes.’

‘Seems a shame to run after such a victory.’

‘But necessary.’ Chevron halted for a moment, noting that the ratadiles were starting to lose their nervousness of her. ‘You simply cannot remain on the world where you killed a runcible AI. You would spend the rest of your life running and be of no real value to the cause thereafter.’

‘Okay.’ Akiri was obviously getting nervous. ‘What about groundside and orbital defences?’

‘As I told you before, most of them will go down with the AI, and when I bring in an ECS Rescue ship, the rest will ignore it.’ Chevron eyed a big ratadile humping up its ridged back nearby like an angry cat and shuffling forward. ‘You’re not having second thoughts are you, Akiri?’

‘No, Chevron.’

‘Then do your duty and I will do mine. Now I’ve got to get this ship off the ground. Out.’ She abruptly closed down the link.

The ratadile raised its long jaws out of the muck and chose that moment to go for her. It surged forward in writhing bounds, then pounced. Chevron’s hand shot up and closed on its throat, stopping dead a ton of pseudo-reptile in mid-air. Its body crashed into her, jaws wide open just before her face, but she was as solid as a girder, nano-filaments having bound her feet to the slippery stone below, and her body as dense as lead. Its neck had snapped with the impact and she gazed for a moment into its zebra-patterned gullet before twitching her hand from side to side to listen to the crunching of its neck bones, then tossed it to one side. She moved on, hearing its kin behind her coming out of hiding to sniff at their dead fellow. She was a hundred yards further along the sewer when she heard the splashing and snarling that told her they had finally realized her victim had made the transition from alpha pack leader into convenience food.

Chevron pondered on the fact that it was usually only the older ratadiles that attacked humans descending into their domain, which was because of the bloody history of this place before the Polity subsumed it. The creatures had grown used to a regular diet of those who had earned the displeasure of the city governors. That was how humans lived when there wasn’t an AI about to show them what to do.

Three more attacks from ratadiles ensued before Chevron grew bored with this game and turned on her chameleonware. Anyway, sections of the sewer wall here were low-friction plasticrete, or tunnel compression-glass baked out of the surrounding sandy soil by the machines that had bored the tunnels, which meant she was now entering the area of sewers repaired and strengthened to withstand the weight of the runcible complex above. With her visual acuity now set at maximum and special scanning programs running, she soon began to spot the occasional sensor the size of a pinhead and one or two old-style holocams like metal fingers suspended in small gimbals hanging from the ceiling. Here and there ran ducts for optics and superconducting cables, also the occasional pipe for water or liquid hydrogen, through which ran lines of old S-con that required cooling — a past solution for supplying fuel and electricity from the same source.

Soon Chevron arrived at a point where the remnants of the old sewers ended. At the juncture of five old tunnels stood a cylindrical chamber with walls of plasticrete. Numerous sensors were mounted here, and from the ceiling depended a saucer-shaped security drone whose purpose, doubtless, was to keep vermin from crawling into the numerous shiny pipes that debouched here.

Chevron studied a row of six of them protruding from the wall. Fresh clean water was pouring from three, but luckily not from the one she required. No raw sewage made it out of the runcible complex, even though thousands of humans passed through there. All of it was processed by engineered bacteria, dried, and then transported out in compacted blocks to be used as fertilizer by the agricultural concerns of this same world. A small proportion of the water removed from that waste was purified and fed into fusion plants, or recycled, but since this was such a busy complex, there was always an excess, and this was where it drained away.

Chevron walked over to the pipe she wanted and knew that now was the time to really set things in motion. She opened a channel to her ship, where it was sitting underneath the ocean some two hundred miles away from her. The vessel’s machines had now made twenty-eight thermonuclear imploders — one more than required — and was right now detaching from the mycelium that penetrated down through the seabed below it. She gave it further instructions and watched as the quarter-mile-long grub of a vessel shook off years of detritus and begin to drift towards the surface of the orange sea. Once Chevron was in position, she wanted the ship in position too, and as fast as possible. There was no telling how quickly other Polity resources might respond to her attack.

Time now to go in. She gazed at the grid extending across the mouth of the foot-wide pipe. If she cut that away the damage might later be detected by the sensors here, after she had departed, but of course there was no need for that. She dropped her hands to rest down by her sides and began cancelling her emulation programs. To her own view, though neither the drone nor any of the sensors here could actually see her, her clothing just lost all its colour and turned metallic grey, then began to sink into her body. Similarly went her blond hair, her skin colour, the pigment in her eyes, and soon she was a naked metallic statue. But then her human curves began to flatten out as she extended in height and began to bow forwards, her head growing narrow and protruding like a rhino’s horn. This protuberance writhed its way through one hole in the mesh before her, and the rest began to follow, but not all through the same hole. Her body, now a foot-thick worm of Jain mycelial nano-technology, passed through the mesh like jelly and surged on along the pipe.

‘Akiri, I’ve got the ship in the air,’ she lied — as she had always been lying to the separatists here. ‘It’s time for you to begin your attack.’

Still proceeding along the pipe, Chevron studied the multiple scenes from the runcible complex above her. In one runcible lounge a squat little man in white businesswear opened his particularly bulky briefcase and extracted from it what looked like a large document tube. A twist here and a pull there, and suddenly the tube possessed suspiciously positioned handles.

‘Everyone on the floor!’ he bellowed, and then fired a stream of explosive bullets towards the ceiling. When no one seemed to respond, and as some of his fellow insurgents began to produce their own weapons, he lowered his aim to one man nearby and fired at point-blank range. In another runcible lounge a female fighter for the cause did not see any use in warnings, and simply opened up on a nearby group of tourists. Bodies flew apart, people began screaming, blood spattered everywhere. She then just stood there staring blankly while the insurgents with her shouted their orders and herded hostages together. Similar scenes played out at all the other passenger runcibles, while by the Pillar separatists began collecting large amber discs from the lev-trolley and heading off to place them around the outer wall of that large circular structure.

Chevron noted a junction in the pipe ahead, and though she did not have a schematic of the infrastructure directly underlying the runcible complex, she was aware of her precise position and of the location of where she needed to be. She therefore chose the pipe leading to her left and oozed her way into it, since that way took her closest. Just then she detected an increase in pressure ahead of her, scanned along the pipe and found water coming her way. Immediately she extended her fibrous body, both backwards and forwards, and formed a hollow through the centre of it, flattening herself against the inner circumference of the pipe. For if the AI detected a blockage while the separatists were attacking above, it would become suspicious of what might be happening underground. The flow of water hit her and passed through, but she did not have enough time to wait for it to slacken off so oozed on, now a kind of pipe herself.

Soon, checking her position by scanning a nearby bleed pipe and the magnetic anomaly directly below her, she halted and brought an array of ceramo-carbide cutting heads to bear against the inner surface of the pipe beside her and cut a circular hole three inches across. Lifting up the circle of metal, she oozed into the hole, entirely plugging it with her complex filament body as she flowed through until at last snapping the disc back down and extruding a powerful glue to stick it into place. So far, so easy. Now she occupied a small area through which ran power ducts connected to a fusion reactor she had detected below, and to which the bleed pipe led. Now things were going to get more difficult as she went directly up against the AIs sensors and detectors, which from here on would not be easily fooled. She paused for a moment to check how things were going above.

The separatist who had shot the man was now lying on the floor with his neck broken, while his target was closing in on another member of that group. The man was no man, as evidenced by the gleaming ceramal and torn syntheflesh exposed under ripped and burned clothing. Oblivious to the bullets still slamming into him, he crashed into three separatists, his movements a blur, and all of them dropped never to rise again. This group had been unlucky enough to run straight into a Golem, and shortly they would all be dead, as would the separatists in four other runcible lounges who had similarly encountered Chevron’s erstwhile kind. Now ceiling drones were also involved and pulse-gun fire had begun to rain down. A detonation tore through one lounge, leaving horrific carnage, as one separatist realized the futility of trying to get near a runcible, the impossibility of evading capture and ever getting out of there alive.

Chevron meanwhile cut away part of a power duct, and now, her body compressed as thin as a rope, began to flow along inside that. Shortly she began to encounter sensors incorporated in the duct sheath, their micro-optics linking them to security sub-minds. Each one required intricate and perpetual subversion. She knew that any slight change in the feed from the sensors would register with the sub-minds, but the sub-minds themselves would be otherwise distracted by what was going on above her. The importance level of such changes would therefore be lower and, by Chevron’s calculations, would be attributed to the electrical surges through the superconductors within the duct as the weapons being used above drew extra power. Within a minute her foremost part reached the point where the duct ended in individual superconducting cables, wrapped in insulation, passing through thick armour. Now, nearly a hundred feet long, the far-extended body behind her still subverting the sensors, she narrowed even further, chose one particular cable and began to eat away its insulation as she tracked along its length, using herself to replace that insulation. The cable wove here and there, branching to feed various machines along the way. Upon reaching a transformer, she noted she was almost at the limit of her extension and began drawing in her rear end, carefully retracting it from the sensors behind her. Now was the moment of greatest danger, and she prepared herself internally for the possibility of detection. She could lose as much as half her structure without any great decrease in efficiency, but any more than that and her chances of ultimate success began to spiral down.

Chevron’s view of events occurring above was becoming dim and intermittent, and shortly the signals from the various cams would be cut off completely by the shielding surrounding her. Things were going very badly for the separatists: eight groups had been wiped out, the remainder surviving by holding hostages, and yet not one runcible had been blown up. According to a mild voice now issuing from the ceiling drones, the survivors had five seconds in which to drop their weapons or they would die. It amused Chevron to see the separatists futilely trying to use their hostages as physical shields, clearly not understanding that at such close range the drones could accurately target the individual pores on their noses.

Around the Pillar itself the amber explosives were all in place, and Chevron noted that the only humans anywhere near the Pillar were separatists. The Xanadu AI had obviously spotted what they were up to some minutes ago and, via their augmentations or by using a directional sound beam, had contacted all the civilians in the area and herded them away. Now the separatists too began to head for safety, and Akiri was the first to walk straight into the hard-fields that surrounded the Pillar. She gazed about her in dismay, realizing what had happened. She then screamed something relating to that strange human concept called ‘freedom’ and sent the detonation signal. The concentric area between Pillar and hard-fields filled with fire, which quickly went out as it burned up all the oxygen. Occasional gaps in the billowing smoke revealed smouldering scraps of what might have once been Akiri and the rest of her team. These gaps also revealed the Pillar itself, its cosmetic outer layer stripped away to expose three feet of ceramal armour. The explosion had been no danger at all to the AI within, just as the remaining separatists elsewhere ceased to be a danger to the passenger runcibles as they quickly surrendered or died.

Once beyond the transformer, Chevron divided to track along single S-con wires, circumvented electro-optic transformers, slid through the laminations of storage crystal and ate along optic fibres, replacing them bit by bit with herself. Now she was coasting by some very heavy security and it was only a matter of seconds before she would be detected. However, finally she was almost in position. It came then: power surges, a particle beam playing up the duct through which she had entered, chemical explosives in crystal laminations detonating, diatomic acid flowing around C-con cables. She surged forward to where thousands of optic cables entered a single black metal conduit, a third of her body destroyed behind her. An atomic shear sliced through those optics, separating her from more of her body, which died in a sudden intense oxygen fire. Then she reached the item to which all those separate optics were connected: a lozenge of crystal six inches long — a quantum processor, a mind. Even as she reached it, interfaces began to physically break away, but she leaped the gap and made rapid connections.

‘What are you?’ wondered the Xanadu AI.

‘I am your death,’ Chevron replied, as she began to rip apart its mind.