Line War

12

The base of the cold coffin slid out from the wall, its top sliding down inside the wall slot until the coffin reached an angle of thirty degrees to the floor. Gazing at its shape, matching to that of a human being, Cormac felt a better name for it would be a sarcophagus, but such names did not necessarily follow logical rules and, anyway, whenever these objects were occupied, they usually contained cryonically cooled but living human beings, so naming them after boxes usually made to contain corpses was incorrect — except in this case.

Cormac reached down and pressed a button like an inset cartouche, and after a moment the red light beside it turned green. The coffin whoomphed as its seals disengaged and the lid hinged up, spilling a cold fog. Cormac studied the contents. Scar’s body lay in three pieces, severed at the head and also diagonally across the torso from a point below the right-hand side of the ribcage down to the waist. There were also numerous other deep cuts and tears exposing muscles and internal organs. The sight of these injuries brought home to him just how lucky he himself had been.

‘I guess this was too much trauma even for him to survive,’ he said.

Beside him, Arach reared up and, with a sound like someone rooting through a cutlery drawer, rested his three front feet on the edge of the coffin. The spider drone, whose own torso was scratched and dented, was missing a limb and one of his eyes. He peered down at Scar and made a hissing sound.

‘When they’re dead that’s usually only ‘cause there ain’t enough left of the body to scrape up with a spade,’ he said.

Cormac nodded — he too could not recollect ever seeing a whole dead dracoman, only small parts of them.

Arach’s head revolved to look at him directly, and Cormac saw that the damaged eye was not missing just blank and, even as he watched, it winked internal light as a precursor to full functioning as the drone doubtless made internal repairs. ‘What they want him for?’

Cormac shrugged. ‘Burial maybe?’

Arach snorted.

Cormac looked up. ‘Are they here yet, King?’

‘They are approaching the ramp now,’ replied the attack ship’s AI.

Cormac reached into the coffin and touched cold flesh. Scar was still soft, despite the coffin temperature being low enough to freeze any human being solid. This was probably due to his original make-up, since Cormac had found him and his companion alive on a world where the temperature was lower still. The blood in his veins probably contained some sort of antifreeze; if the blood could be called blood at all, and if he actually possessed veins. Withdrawing his hand from the coffin, Cormac blew on his fingertips and waited.

The doors to this cold-coffin store opened to announce the arrival of their visitors. Bird-stepping through came three dracomen, two of them towing a circular lev-platform behind them. Cormac stepped back, and Arach also retreated with a clattering of metallic feet. Without acknowledgement of either drone or man, one dracoman walked over and peered down at Scar, then immediately reached inside to pick up his head and inspect it. The two others pulled the lev-platform closer, then turned it off so it descended to the floor with a clonk. The first dracoman now turned and tossed the head to one of its companions, who fielded it and plonked it down on the platform like a rugby player making a touchdown. Certainly, their collecting of the body had nothing to do with respect for the dead.

‘What do you want him for?’ Cormac asked, as the first dracoman now hauled up the top half of Scar’s torso.

No acknowledgement, still. The other two moved over to assist, and in a moment all of Scar’s remains were heaped on the platform, whose power was re-engaged. The two began towing it to the door while the first stood gazing contemplatively down into the empty coffin.

‘His information must not be lost,’ the dracoman said abruptly.

Cormac wondered if he would be seeing Scar again, if dracomen had some way of resurrecting their dead.

‘What do you do with that information?’ Cormac asked.

‘Distribute it.’ The dracoman nodded briefly and departed after his companions.

Would numerous dracomen soon possess a portion of Scar’s mind, or would they instead make copies so many dracomen could hold Scar entire inside their heads? Did ‘information’ even necessarily mean thought patterns? Cormac stepped forward to hit the lid cartouche again, then turned and headed for the door, hearing the coffin close behind him and begin to slide back up into the wall.

‘How long until we launch?’ he asked.

‘The moment our friends are clear and the ramp is closed,’ King replied.

Out in the corridor, the sound of Arach’s feet was muffled by the softer flooring. Cormac glanced back at the drone. ‘Go and get yourself fully repaired and restocked,’ he said. ‘I want you fully ready when I need you.’

As Arach scuttled away, Cormac reflected that the deaths of so many of his comrades recently had sensitized him to Arach’s damage, the drone’s weakness. He wanted Arach ready for anything; he wanted the drone to survive.

Now heading to his cabin, he felt a slight jolt as King of Hearts rose on AG, then further jolting, compensated for by the gravplate floor, as it accelerated. Pausing to steady himself against the corridor wall, he considered other deaths. There were more than he liked to think about, but one in particular was on his mind at that moment.

It had struck him as odd that the sub-minds running this world until a new runcible AI was initiated had experienced such difficulty tracking down the record of the female captain of the wormship whose destruction had resulted in Scar’s death, since her DNA had been recorded in Polity databases. Because of this delay he had made some queries himself through his gridlink and quickly obtained a copy of that record — meanwhile learning that Hubbert Smith already also possessed a copy he had not passed on. Perhaps it was his growing distrust of AIs that kept Cormac quiet, and he made no comment when Smith later transmitted it to him as if only just having received it himself. Comparing the two records, Cormac soon found inconsistencies.

Hubbert’s copy of her record named her Henrietta Ipatus Chang, known as Henry to her friends, who on the whole were mostly silicon-brained and heavily armoured like Arach, though she did occasionally associate with humans of the same inclination as herself. She had joined ECS at the youthful age of eighteen, and was fighting and killing Prador in the many vicious ground conflicts during that war by the time she was twenty. She had exited the end of the Prador war as a human version of the war drone: disenfranchised by peace, unable to fit in to this new society nor particularly wanting to fit in either. Throughout the war her best and few surviving friends had been drones and Golem, so when many of them decided to leave the Polity aboard the dreadnought Trafalgar, she had asked to join them. It seemed that the Trafalgar AI — which had now become Erebus — had allowed her and certain other humans to join the exodus. Apparently there had been as many as eighty-three of them amid the horde of AIs which defected. Presumably this explained how Henry had ended up as a component slotted into a wormship.

The problem was that the copy of her record that Cormac obtained first was different. This earlier version had it that she had never felt disenfranchised and never in fact joined Trafalgar’s exodus. After the war she had continued serving in ECS for another twenty years and had been involved in many subsequent police actions throughout the Polity. Later she was seconded to some black ops mission about which the details were unclear, whereupon she was subsequently listed as missing in action. But this was not the worst of it. When Cormac checked again through the planetary sub-minds, he found that the original record had now been deliberately altered. There were levels of subterfuge here Cormac very much did not like, which now only increased his suspicions about the motives of the Polity AIs in this matter. His suspicions about Hubbert Smith had also been confirmed.

Moving on, Cormac finally reached his cabin and noted that the screen was switched on. It showed the curving planetary horizon already dropping from view, and he realized that King had been using more than the gravplates set in the floor to compensate for the kind of acceleration needed to get them out here this quickly. The glare of the sun lit up several glinting objects, then shadow quickly fell across the scene, as the attack ship put the planet between itself and that distant furnace. But the view was clearer now, and Cormac could see that King of Hearts would have to fly with particular care here. Cormac had only ever witnessed so much space junk around devastated worlds the Prador had hit during the war that Henry had fought so hard in. Could this conflict be turning into something as catastrophic as that? At present it was still defined only as a Line war since, though many whole worlds had already been attacked, they represented but a small fraction of the Polity. However, Erebus possessed the capacity to turn this into something more cataclysmic, and Erebus’s agents could be anywhere.

Orlandine Taser 5…

She should be his primary focus now, not the unrecoverably dead, not numberless regrets, not nebulous feelings of guilt or suspicions over the motivation of Polity AIs. He really needed to find her, for it was evident that she controlled Jain technology and had now gained control of a weapon that in some areas of the Polity was considered a myth… but then again on some Polity worlds there were those who claimed the entire Prador-human war was simply a horror story created by the AIs to keep human beings in line. As much as Cormac had come to distrust the motivations and agendas of those who now ruled, he himself couldn’t deny the reality of that war. Too much fallout from it still remained, as a young ECS groundtrooper he himself had been involved in clearing up some of the mess, and only later, as an ECS agent, had he come to appreciate its truly gigantic scale.

True… if my memories are actually true, he speculated, then told himself to shut up. He must drop that subject from his mind or else go mad. Just focus on the now: how to find Orlandine.

Underspace was theoretically supposed to possess neither distance nor time. You could enter it at one point in the universe, then exit it a thousand light years away just an instant later — or even before you entered it. That was the theory but, as ever, the reality was a lot more complicated. U-space did have dimensions, though whether they could be described as width, depth, breadth and time was debatable. Entering it in one place and leaving it an instant later a thousand light years distant was theoretically possible, yet the same rules applied there as in realspace: the quicker you wanted to move it from point A to point B, the more energy you needed to inject, this increasing in proportion to the mass of the object in question. That was why it took longer to travel X light years by ship than it did for a human to travel the same distance by runcible, or indeed for information to travel by U-com. Travelling through that same continuum, the ship was a massive object carrying its own power supply with it. The human, by contrast, was a very light object being propelled by a fixed device with huge energy resources, while an information package was practically without any mass at all. To most people in the Polity, runcible transportation and U-com might seem instantaneous, but in fact they weren’t. But Cormac did not want to travel through U-space right then, he just wondered how far he could see through it with his U-sense; wondered if from here he could spot the war runcible that Orlandine Taser 5 had stolen.

Cormac lay back on his bed and relaxed, releasing his hold upon his U-sense and letting it expand out from where the King of Hearts now sat in orbit about Ramone. Soon the sheer scale of the mess here became more evident. Ramone sparkled like a piece of iron just taken from the furnace, for it was the centre of a perpetual meteor storm as chunks of wormship, other Jain constructs and, unfortunately, the remnants of many Polity ships fell into its atmosphere and burned up. Around the planet the debris cloud lay eight thousand miles deep, and certainly over the ensuing years would settle itself into a ring. Also, one astronomical unit out, there was another even larger cloud of debris extending nearly two million miles across. Within this a few remaining Polity ships were still busy hunting, firing missiles into any larger chunks of worm-ship that appeared to have enough life left in them to regenerate, incinerating stray rod-forms and generally sterilizing the entire area. The rest of the Polity ships, along with the leviathan Cable Hogue, had already jumped outsystem to join other battles.

One AU out…

With the technology available in the Polity it was easy enough to scan to one astronomical unit, but Cormac was now doing so with just his mind. He pushed the range further, began to gaze upon the other worlds within this system, and wondered if AIs felt as godlike as this. Choosing one of the outer cold worlds, he focused on it closely and peered down through a methane rain storm at a plain of red slabs lying beside a methane sea. It was noticeable that, by so focusing, much else now seemed to blur out of his perception, when that had not been the case for him closer to the attack ship. He pulled his focus away from that distant world, but it shifted sluggishly, seeming to have gained inertia. He pushed further out into the system, but beyond that cold world the perceptual sensation became like wading through treacle. Then he reached a point he could not probe beyond. The rest of the universe was out there, and he could see star systems and the weird indentations they made in U-space, but he could not get any closer to them.

Really, Cormac thought, I should not be disappointed. But he was. He blinked, bringing his cabin back into focus. Sitting up on his bed he noticed he was soaked with sweat and inside his skull lay a heaviness presaging a headache. He wiped a hand across his face, then, noticing something, moved that same hand out and studied it. It was shaking but, worse than that, appeared translucent even to his normal vision. He snatched it from sight, realizing what was happening: his U-sense was still operating at a lower level. It now seemed to have seated itself in his skull and, just like his hearing, was something he felt incapable of shutting down. Then, suddenly, chaos…

Something began to tear, and U-space opened all around him. The cabin wall rushed up towards him. He yelled as grey eversions appeared in a tangled five-dimensional pattern all about him. Instinctively he chose a place between them and, using his mind, grabbed for reality. Next he was in darkness. He fell, hit a soft surface speeding along underneath him, rolled. Lights came on and he gazed about in confusion. He was now in one of the King of Hearts’ internal passages. But why were the lights out? He knew: because King did not keep lights on in the ship where they were not needed, where no humans were located.

‘You were in your cabin,’ said King reproachfully, from the intercom.

Cormac stood and shook himself. The sweat on his body had now turned chill. Applying to the ship’s server through his gridlink, he quickly ascertained his location, then turned and headed towards the bridge.

‘I certainly was,’ he replied. ‘Where are we going now?’

‘You were in your cabin,’ King insisted. ‘You could not have got to where you are now in just the last four seconds.’

Cormac wondered how often King checked the location of those inside him. Probably the attack ship’s AI was aware of them most of the time, on some level, though perhaps became less aware when diverting processing power to make the calculations for dropping the ship into U-space — hence the four seconds mentioned.

‘Well,’ said Cormac, ‘I can’t be held accountable if reality doesn’t always conform to your own model of it.’

‘Your cabin door did not open,’ stated King. ‘You are not recorded in the short-term memories of the sensors located between your cabin and your current location.’

‘It’s certainly a puzzle,’ Cormac agreed. He was enjoying the AI’s bewilderment, but such enjoyment was tempered by the pull of the U-continuum surrounding the ship and the sure knowledge that if he had not hauled himself back up out of it and into this corridor, he would have gone drifting away from the ship in underspace. Could he then have still got himself somewhere safe, or would he eventually have surfaced in hard vacuum and simply died with his internal fluids boiling out of his body?

‘You moved through U-space, like you did before,’ observed King.

That King knew about the way Cormac had escaped Skellor was unsurprising, but how did the AI know? Had Jerusalem told King, or had the attack ship AI witnessed the act itself when trying to rescue Skellor, or rather when it tried to prevent that madman and all the precious interesting Jain technology he contained from being crushed to a thin film over the surface of a brown dwarf star?

‘Yeah, I moved through U-space,’ Cormac conceded. ‘Now are you going to tell me where we are going?’

Reaching the doors leading to the bridge, Cormac paused before them. Usually they opened automatically at his approach, but they now remained firmly closed. There came a long long pause before they finally opened, and before King spoke again — comparable to hours for an AI’s normal thought processes. He guessed that King, a misanthrope at heart, didn’t much like having an inferior human demonstrate superior abilities.

‘I have received information from Azroc,’ announced the AI.

As Cormac stepped out onto the black glass floor, heading for the scattering of chairs, something caught his eye in the dimness over to one side. There he observed a third-stage sleer frozen in a rearing position, and hoped this insectile monstrosity was simply a sculpture. It seemed that King was now taking up the kind of hobby enjoyed by the AI of the attack ship Jack Ketch. Cormac plumped himself down in one of the chairs.

‘What information?’

‘U-space anomalies were detected in a black asteroid field by an old sub-AI survey drone. Though they were large, they did not have the characteristic signature of a large ship surfacing. Measurements meanwhile indicate open Skaidon warps, then the short translation of some large object, unbuffered.’

‘Through a runcible then,’ observed Cormac.

‘The drone was some way distant from the location of these anomalies,’ King went on, ‘and later detected the heat flash of a gigaton event.’

‘Orlandine,’ surmised Cormac thoughtfully.

‘That the war runcible was used is the most likely explanation to fit the data.’

‘So we’re going there, which is good, but what are we going to do once we arrive?’

‘Jerusalem has also ordered one of the reserve fleets out of Salvaston to head for the same location.’

Cormac leaned back and nodded to himself. ‘That’s good,’ he said. ‘Now would you like to tell me about your curious new taste in decor in here?’

Aboard Orlandine’s ship the Heliotrope the old sharp-edged war drone, Cutter, lay folded up in the corridor right beside the ship’s interface sphere. A multicore optic cable, plugged in between his bulbous eyes, trailed down and snaked along the floor into Bludgeon, and thus via the drone and the interface sphere he occupied into the Heliotrope itself. Now, having access to the ship’s sensors and scanners, Cutter watched as his companion surfaced the ship into realspace far out from the Anulus black hole, then himself began scanning for the main transmission satellite he knew to be in orbit here. Bludgeon, meanwhile, started making the necessary preparations to use the cargo runcible in the somewhat hostile environment they would soon be entering. Within a few seconds the sharp-edged drone had it: a hundred-yard-wide coin of metal floating out in deep space. Bludgeon dropped Heliotrope into U-space for a subliminally short time, in order to put the ship between this main transmission satellite and its subordinate satellites, which were positioned close around the black hole and the junkyard of planets it was steadily devouring.

The satellites had been here for centuries, and no one had bothered recently to replace either them or the technology they contained. The U-tech of their time had been incapable of remaining functional in the chaotic U-space environment around Anulus, hence the positioning of the single main transmission satellite. The inner satellites transmitted by laser to it, and it relayed their data through U-space to the nearest Polity science station one hundred and twelve light years away. Fortunate that, since this meant the two drones needed to subvert only the one satellite. Within minutes Cutter had intercepted a laser transmission then relayed its contents to Bludgeon, who was always better at dealing with this sort of thing.

‘Can you deal with it yourself?’ Cutter enquired.

‘Mebbe,’ came the other drone’s reply.

During the war it was always Bludgeon who dealt with the informational stuff while Cutter got physical. Bludgeon’s job had been to open an undetectable way into Prador vessels or stations, and then Cutter’s chore was to go in first, usually to scatter the interior with pieces of the crablike aliens and paint the walls with their foul green blood.

‘You’ll not need to use any of her stuff?’ Cutter suggested.

‘I could do it meself,’ said Bludgeon, ‘but you would need to enter the satellite to make a few physical alterations.’

‘Just like the old days then.’

‘Well, at least there’s nothing alive inside that satellite…’

The other war drones, and Orlandine herself, would have been astounded to hear Bludgeon string together more than three words. But being able to talk like this only to Cutter was Bludgeon’s particular wrinkle, his particular bit of faulty programming or maybe damage to his crystal or the mind it contained. All of the war drones on the war runcible had some similar fault — something that excluded them from normal Polity society or simply made them not want to be included. They would argue vehemently about these being faults.

‘I’ll head over there now, shall I?’ said Cutter.

Cutter’s own particular fault was his utter refusal to abandon or even blunt the edges of a body made for turning the insides of Prador vessels into abattoirs. He could not actually move about the Polity as a normal citizen, since the slightest mishap, his own or that of some other, could easily result in multiple decapitations and amputations. Cutter’s edges were of a form of heat-treated chainglass that remained constantly honed down to one chain-molecule thickness. He could slice up steel with the same ease as a chef dicing an onion.

‘No,’ said Bludgeon.

‘What do you mean “No”?’

‘I’ve learnt the coding protocols and have the perfect tool for dealing with that satellite from here.’

‘You mean one of her tools.’

‘You have to lose your fear of the technology Orlandine provided, Cutter.’

‘I ain’t frightened of it. I just don’t like depending on it, is all.’

‘But we must depend on it. Nearly everything in this ship depends on it to some extent, and without it we won’t be able to carry out our mission.’

Cutter grumbled and shaved away slivers of the wall, then grudgingly turned his attention to what Bludgeon was doing. The bedbug-like drone had opened up a cache of programs provided by Orlandine, selected one, a worm, and sent it in discrete parcels to the satellite. The worm must have reassembled itself within a matter of seconds, for that’s all the time it took for the satellite to fall under Bludgeon’s control. It seemed that simple computers were easy to subvert, and computers in places like this, where security had never been an issue, were easier still. Seemed to take all the fun out of it, though.

Now, as Bludgeon ignited Heliotrope’s fusion drive to move them closer, Cutter turned his regard upon Anulus. This black hole, of approximately six stellar masses, was surrounded by a disc of rock and gas it was steadily drawing into itself. Spindlewards of this disc, the output of energy dwarfed the output of suns. Apparently Orlandine had known much about this particular curiosity because it had once been suggested as a site for a massive construction project proposed before the Cassius Dyson sphere — some kind of energy tap to utilize that vast spindleward energy output.

The light here was glaringly bright, one glimpse with a human eye would burn out that eye in a moment. Already, even at this distance, Heliotrope’s hull was heating rapidly and thermal generators distributed throughout it were converting this to electricity and storing it in numerous laminar batteries, capacitors and in the high-density storage facility of the cargo runcible’s buffers. All this was mainly being done with Jain tech, and though Cutter didn’t like it, he was prepared to admit it was damned efficient.

‘I suggest we wait here,’ said Bludgeon.

Cutter gazed upon the virtual model of the debris disc his companion had created. The position indicated was just in from the edge of the disc where the asteroidal chunks were large enough and close enough together to shield them from the worse of the radiation.

‘It will put you in the shade,’ said Orlandine.

Cutter had almost forgotten that she remained in constant communication with them, so long had it now been since she last spoke. He considered trying to explain his attitude then decided not to bother. If she didn’t like it, tough.

She continued, ‘I estimate that I will be in position some twenty hours from now, so you’ll need to head for your entry point into the fountain in about twelve hours.’

Cutter gazed through Heliotrope’s sensors and thought that ‘fountain’ was much too gentle a word for that thing out there. The debris ring heated as it fell towards the spinning black hole, turning at first molten, then into an incandescent gas and finally to plasma at the event horizon. The radiation and ionization from this process was prevented by the disc itself from spewing out sideways, but there was a larger process involved in the production of these spindlewards polar fountains. The proportion of iron in the debris here was over forty per cent. This, combined with the spin of the black hole, created a magnetic bottle effect which squeezed escaping radiation into narrow channels spearing up and down from the black hole’s poles. The two fountains were fifteen miles wide and consisted of ionized matter — mostly iron — and electromagnetic radiation right across the emitted spectrum. Anulus was like a natural particle-beam weapon — only of the kind you might need in order to take out planets.

The planetary system Erebus occupied with its main forces had changed visibly. Great curtains of rod-forms hung down from space into the upper atmosphere of the gas giant, where they still kept filtering out vital materials even as they were starting to withdraw from that world and separate. Three of the gas giant’s four moons were utterly covered with Jain substructure and had shrunk visibly since Erebus’s arrival here. The last of the rod-forms to have grown deep down within those moons, like animals putting on fat for the winter, were launching to bring vital materials to the orbiting wormships. The moons looked like apples destroyed by maggots.

Nearer the sun, massive mirrors made of sodium film were directing light sufficient to power all this industry, and already this new input was causing visible storms across the face of the gas giant. This was all to plan, since these storms would stir up some final vital elements for the last of the rod-forms to harvest before returning to their mother ships, if they had them. The ships shaped like lenses Erebus had decided to dispense with since they weren’t powerful enough to stand against most ECS warcraft and, not possessing the modular construction of the wormships, tended to be a total loss once they were hit. They had become outmoded, so it was time to move on, and the rod-forms quickly cannibalized them.

While the first fleets of wormships continued their attack on the Polity border, Erebus had watched with some satisfaction as their number here, initially eighteen thousand, grew steadily larger. The ships first increased in size and mass with the intake of materials, then began dividing like bacteria — there was something to be said for the productive methods of life. Now there were over nineteen thousand wormships in orbit around the gas giant and, when the time came to head out, Erebus hoped to be back up to strength with over twenty thousand of the major vessels. But each of the new ships needed a controlling intelligence with at least some degree of independence.

During the Prador-human war Polity AIs had discovered that remotely controlled drones tended to lose that control once conflict started filling the ether with electromagnetic radiation. They had therefore enabled those drones to think for themselves, and this had led to the production of the independent war drone. Similarly, during conflict, Erebus could not remain utterly in control of all its parts so needed to give them their own degree of independence. Therefore all the wormships now had captains, as did many of the smaller vessels. Everything else, including the rod-forms, was controlled by the nearest captain or by Erebus itself. It seemed almost a natural law that delegation was the most efficient way of controlling complex systems.

The first wormships Erebus created had contained the minds of subsumed ship AIs, Golem, war drones and, in one or two unusual cases, even the minds of certain humans. Erebus checked the status of these minds and found, as ever, that its favourites — unlike those AIs that had been subsumed with prejudice — were still loyal to the core. It instructed those trusted AIs, as they had done on previous occasions, to start transcribing copies of themselves, thus creating new captains for the new ships. Once that process was under way, it turned its full attention to the border conflict and again assessed the situation.

Erebus really wanted to recall some of his forces deployed there to join the attack that was about to take place, but it was just not feasible. The event that would signal the beginning of this attack would trap many of them at their current locations, and if Erebus called them in now, before that event occurred, many of the ECS ships were bound to follow, and he did not need them harrying his flanks. It was all very annoying but not unexpected. Then, while searching for some way to surreptitiously pull out some of those vessels, Erebus noticed an odd discrepancy.

During this border attack a total of four hundred and twenty-three wormships had been destroyed. Erebus had, on some level, witnessed the destruction of nearly every one of them and could recount in detail how they had been destroyed. There were only a few ships about which such details were hazy, but even then Erebus knew where they had met their end and roughly how. The one destroyed a little while after its attack on Cull had stood no chance of escaping ECS forces, and obviously they had tracked it down to the moon where its captain had begun trying to regenerate it. As expected, the one destroyed at Masada had stood no chance at all, while the one on Ramone, with one of the few human captains, had managed to break contact, though data from other ships nearby showed that it did eventually self-destruct. However, that left still one ship utterly missing, and Erebus seemed able to retrieve absolutely no data about its disappearance.

‘I am ready,’ came the abrupt signal from Chevron.

This interruption seemed entirely too timely, and Erebus experienced momentary paranoia until deciding that no one could manipulate events to that extent.

‘Begin,’ Erebus spat back.

After a short pause Chevron replied, ‘Very well,’ and Erebus detected some disappointment in her tone. What did the murderous one-time Golem want now — a pat on the head?

Erebus accelerated the consolidation of the massive fleet here. Numerous wormships were ready to divide, bringing the total number of ships up close to twenty thousand but not actually reaching that total. No matter, since Erebus would be using the sledgehammer-on-walnut approach in this instance.

Sure that the consolidation would proceed without a hitch and that the selected captains were transmitting copies of themselves to all the new ships, Erebus checked its own extensive memory, bringing to focus all the available data about that one missing ship. It had still been active during the attack made on the ECS fleet sent out to the accretion disc, but it subsequently had disappeared only a few days before Erebus had sent two ships out to hit the dracoman colony on Masada and the hybrid colony on Cull respectively. The entity now experienced a moment of something approaching panic. How could it lose track of an entire ship just like that?

Fiddler Randal…

Panic faded: there was the explanation, for Randal had obviously interfered in some way. Erebus began contacting its many spies dispersed throughout Polity space, for if it did not itself have sufficient information about the missing ship, perhaps the enemy did. It then took but a moment to find out about a wormship attack on the world called Klurhammon.

Yet Erebus had instituted no such attack.

‘Fiddler Randal, that world was of absolutely no tactical importance.’ Erebus repeated the opinion of various Polity AIs while leaving open plenty of channels through which Randal could safely make a reply. Randal remained silent. But why would Randal choose to cause an attack on such a world? He had been working against Erebus from the very beginning and trying to thwart this attack on the Polity, so that incident just didn’t make any sense. Erebus put additional processing power online and began analysing more closely the intelligence coming in from his spies located in the asteroid field near Jerusalem’s base.

Apparently, those attacks upon Masada and Cull had been ascribed to the danger Jain-resistant organisms might pose to Erebus itself. The AIs were right about this in some respects but wrong in others. It wasn’t the dracoman or hybrid ability to resist Jain technology Erebus feared, but their ability to detect it. By being pushed into protecting the dracomen on Masada, and making sure that all the others off Masada got moved to where they would prove more useful to ECS — at the battlefront — the AIs had thus curtailed their movement throughout the rest of Polity, and thus made it extremely unlikely any of them would turn up on Xanadu and thwart Chevron’s mission there. However, the attack upon Klurhammon remained as much a puzzle to those same AIs as it did to Erebus.

Delving further into the data, Erebus saw that the AIs had started an investigation, but no results were yet available. The security surrounding Jerusalem’s base had been tightened up even more, so that those watchers sitting out in the asteroid field were able to glean little about it from the nearby information traffic. However, one of the coded packets they had managed to crack was able to reveal the reason for this extra security.

What?

It seemed one of Erebus’s spies had been found and destroyed at the very heart of Jerusalem’s camp.

Yet Erebus had placed no spies actually inside Jerusalem’s camp, for that solar system, like so many others, would shortly become irrelevant.

‘I don’t know what you’ve been up to, Randal,’ said Erebus, ‘but there is absolutely no way you can stop me now. By now I would have detected any unusual movements in ECS forces, so it is now just a matter of firepower and physics. Nothing stands in my way.’

Yet still no reply from Fiddler Randal.

Erebus felt a sudden deep sadness, then, abruptly angry at such weakness, set programs to scrubbing this emotion from its consciousness. The feeling of loneliness that ensued was more difficult to erase.

Xanadu took five seconds to die — but experienced in AI terms it might well have been centuries. Chevron divided up the AI’s mind and subsumed it, erasing moral codes and any data that made up that thing called personality. Sorting through incredible masses of information, killing, deleting and… eating, Chevron finally found the first thing she required: destruct codes for the passenger and cargo runcibles here and spread across the planet, and for the two hundred and six of Xanadu’s sub-minds. Chevron temporarily blocked those codes intended for the runcibles on seeing that the AI had been preparing to send them, and instead sent the ones to the various sub-minds. Through numerous sensors now coming rapidly under her control, she observed the ceiling drones sagging and various other security measures shutting down. This all came a little late for the human separatists, but Chevron didn’t really care about them now they had served their purpose.

Annoyingly for Chevron, only a quarter of the sub-minds actually accepted the destruct order. The rest, obviously having become aware that Xanadu possessed that option regarding them, had subtly built defences against it, though the order did isolate them from any hardware directly under their control. Some other minds, located in independent drone bodies, were already alerted and on the move, running for cover. She observed two metal spheres and the insectoid body of an old war drone fleeing this very complex before splashing down in a nearby lake. She considered using Xanadu’s orbital weapons to deal with all the survivors, but that would take up time she did not possess, since other security issues needed to be dealt with first.

Chevron took the block off the runcible destruct codes and sent thirty of them to the passenger runcibles outlying this complex. Viewing through sensors located in the chambers containing these runcibles, she observed the Skaidon warps wink out, oxygen fires burning bright underneath the black glass floors, and buffers dumping their energy loads into the horns of each device so that they glowed hot and shed smoke, and in some cases even began to melt. She observed prospective travellers fleeing the areas in panic but, disappointingly, there were no fatalities. She had hoped the destruct order would result in thermonuclear detonations at each location, then belatedly realized this required personal intervention from the governing AI — now herself.

Why should I be disappointed? she wondered. What purpose would further deaths serve? Then she mentally shook herself. Why had she entertained such an unwonted thought? Surely the deaths of yet more humans was an end in itself? She now concentrated on the next stage of the plan. At least now ECS would not be able to send relief forces through the affected runcibles.

A brief coded signal started up her ship, which was now located in the bay of the orange sea nearest to her current position. It engaged its antigravity motors, and underwater blasts from its steering thrusters sent it hurtling towards the surface. Viewing the scene through a nearby weather station, she saw the ship surface and begin to rise into the air, sloughing off all the remaining detritus encrusted on its hull. It turned till its nose faced the complex and, firing up its main fusion engine, accelerated in. Within minutes it would be in position overhead.

As a security measure Xanadu had shut down all material transport through the runcibles here and had ordered the complex to be evacuated the moment the separatists began their attack. Now queries began to arrive as to why all the other runcibles on the planet had also shut down. Using the required codes, Chevron sent a previously concocted reply explaining that high-level separatists intended using those other runcibles as an escape route. This would delay any investigation for the further few minutes she required. Now she began searching through the complex’s manifest and found there the expected cache of Golem — all empty-headed and awaiting the download of sub-minds from the AI. She obliged them all by sending a stripped-down version of herself which knew full well what needed to be done next. The door to a sealed warehouse to one side of one of the cargo runcibles opened abruptly and out marched a hundred chrome skeletons.

Chevron then saw, through various cameras, that things were no longer so chaotic inside the complex. Large areas had been abandoned and crowds of people were steadily departing through the main doors. All the separatists were either dead or in custody, while security officers — both Golem and human — were restoring order among those departing or quickly rounding up any stragglers. Already she had received a hundred and twenty queries from these officers about what to do next. Sending another stripped-down version of herself to each of the various ceiling drones, she relished the prospect of them turning all their weapons on those who had not yet managed to flee.

But that’s not what I’m here for…

It was annoyingly true. Why waste time killing humans who, in reality, could have little impact on the plan?

‘Make sure the complex is completely evacuated,’ she ordered. ‘There are further concealed explosives I have yet to locate, and I have intelligence that some of them might be nuclear.’

Few questioned this order, since it came from such an unimpeachable and omniscient source. To expedite matters she put her instructions up on the announcement boards as well. The few still evacuating the main waiting lounge gazed back with some apprehension at the silvery Golem now appearing and departed all the more quickly. As the last of them left, Chevron closed the lounge doors behind them and sealed off all other exits and entrances. She felt satisfied to have them out of the way and glad not to need to start the killing again…

Chevron paused as she again thought how uncharacteristic it was for her to care about what happened to a few humans. Perhaps, simply by occupying the structure formerly occupied by the Xanadu AI, she had taken on some of that entity’s traits. Could that really be possible?

She began running diagnostics, but in the first few seconds there were no returns. Then, abruptly, there were thousands of them, all detailing the intrusion of alien code and alien material technology. She shut off those programs, realizing they had been Xanadu’s and were only detecting Chevron herself. Quickly she ran her own programs and found some of the returns quite worrying. The amount of her substance she had lost while attacking the AI meant she was slightly overextended, which also meant that, though she had killed Xanadu, she was still in the process of displacing what remained of it. In those programs and in that hardware that remained, Xanadu had left something behind. She knew this could not have been created in the short time between the AI realizing it was in danger and it dying, but instead was something it had prepared inside itself for just such an unlikely eventuality.

It was a virus, Chevron concluded, but the more she studied it the more baffled she became. For it was doing things to her she could not quite comprehend. She applied some of her processing power to the task of building antiviral programs, but each time she seemed to have established the antidote and set it to work, the virus mutated. Annoyingly, she could not use her full processing power on it either, since her ship had now arrived in the sky directly above.

Chevron shut down all automated systems mounted in the pillars extending up to and through the chainglass roof over the main runcible lounge, and the weapons inside them, initiated by sub-AI programming upon detecting the proximity of an unauthorized ship, died. The skeletal Golem had meanwhile opened a weapons cache and, having armed themselves with some serious hardware, were spreading out through the complex to cover all critical corridors and exits. In some areas they followed up behind the security forces, driving the evacuation even faster. No time for further delays.

Upon her instruction, her ship opened a hatch and lowered a carousel missile launcher, which began revolving to spit its load down towards the chainglass roof. The missiles hit like lumps of putty but did not explode; instead lumps of soft technology issued decoder molecules into the chainglass beneath them, which began to come apart. At each impact site the the glass crazed over, small cracks spreading out ahead of a white bruise. Areas of ceiling soon turned to dust, and disintegrating sheets of glass crashed to the floor. Above, the ship retracted its missile launcher while extruding yet another weapon from another hatch. The green beam this shot out was only visible where it penetrated the cloud of dust rising from the collapsing roof. It sliced through the decorous frameworks that had held the variously shaped sheets of glass, and a large portion of the roof structure soon followed the glass down inside. Having retracted this weapon too the ship then descended at high speed, crashing to the floor of the lounge, crushing furniture, bars, eateries and all such human paraphernalia underneath it.

Chevron began to receive immediate queries from the security forces in the city, then from all over the planet. At first she fielded them with neat selections of lies but, growing bored with this, quickly put together an automated program to do her lying for her. She knew this would not hold them off for very long, which was confirmed when in a military base some fifty miles away security personnel began cutting links to their planetary AI and moving warcraft out of the hangars. Briefly, before all the feeds from there went offline, she glimpsed the escaping drones she had earlier seen splash down in the lake. Undoubtedly everyone would soon be aware that Xanadu was no longer in control, but they would not be able to react quickly enough.

Chevron put twenty-eight of the passenger runcibles online, outgoing only, while holding the rest in reserve. Twenty-seven she set to particular addresses selected by Erebus long ago. The twenty-eighth she selected at random, then hesitated. Was it necessary now to cause further disruption which could result in further deaths? It was the Xanadu virus talking inside her, she knew, but the intensity of what she was feeling seemed difficult to deny.

Do I really need to send any of these?

Her ship cracked open its ramp hatch, folding down and crushing an automated vending stall underneath it. She continued to fight aberrant impulses that were certainly not her own while gazing through the vessel’s internal sensors to see that the twenty-eight imploders were now ready to go. Brief self-analysis showed her that the delay before each of her actions was growing longer. She was hesitating, procrastinating. Abruptly angry, she sent the required signals.

Peeling themselves from the interior walls of her vessel, metallic octopoid forms settled to the floor and headed for the row of imploders, which sat like large bullets in a long ammunition clip. These Jain biomechs were without solid bodies; open tubular frameworks hanging in their place instead. The first of them reached the first imploder, crouched over it and squatted, the framework contracting about the weapon so the biomech could heave it up from its seating. With a flowing gait the mech then headed for the ramp, its body now a source of obliteration — it was a walking bomb — and the others, picking up their loads too, followed it.

Much shooting was in evidence around the complex now. Chevron linked in to some of her Golem and updated herself on their situation. The moment her ship had descended, security forces in the city had become concerned, but her lying engine had initially kept them from doing anything. Obviously they had now received intelligence from the distant military base from which the warcraft were launching even now. City security officers and military personnel were attacking the runcible complex, while in certain quarters of the city armoured AGCs were rising from the ground but wisely keeping their distance knowing the defences Chevron controlled. At ground level gravtanks were closing in, but it was all far too late in the day. Chevron had meanwhile noted a worrying development: her Golem had been infected with the same virus as herself and, abandoning their proton carbines, had dialled down the power output of their pulse-rifles and were now using non-lethal force to keep the attackers out. At one level this angered her intensely, but on another she felt gladdened. It would not be much longer before this damned morality virus turned her into something she would previously have despised.

Once outside her ship, the octopoids separated into small groups and sped off in different directions. Chevron tracked their progress across the main lounge, along the concourses leading to the various sub-lounges, where she watched individual octopoids finally heading for their assigned runcibles. Now, with each in position, all she had to do was tell them to step through, whereupon detonation of each imploder would take place automatically and simultaneously in the spoon of each receiving runcible.

She didn’t want to.

And when did I summon you here?

The twenty-eighth octopoid was now squatting right outside the pillar she occupied, and the bomb the thing contained would certainly prove a lot more destructive than the explosives the separatists had used earlier.

The morality virus had made much headway inside her — faster than she thought possible — and now she was almost at the stage of not wanting to resist it any more. Only by forcing herself to become angry could she overcome it, and even that was proving more and more difficult. However, for one last time she managed to summon up her former hatred of soft useless humans — and she sent the signal. The octopoids stepped through the Skaidon warp of their allotted runcibles, arriving only instants later at twenty-seven different destinations.

Oh no…

Chevron instantly wanted to summon them back. She had just wrought massive death and destruction, and it was all entirely her fault, yet even that would pall in comparison with the ensuing catastrophe she had ushered in. She desperately wanted to stop this happening, to stop those bombs, but it was all just too late. A combination of growing guilt and the knowledge that she had completed her assignment for Erebus allowed her to relax her grip on herself. She ceased fighting the virus and immediately drowned in a tsunami of remorse.

Belatedly, she realized why she had summoned the twenty-eighth octopoid… as she sent its detonation signal.