Polity Agent

Prologue

Over the centuries, the huge Celedon station’s original shape, like a spinning top five miles across, had become shrouded by accretions. Now near the end of its journey and its useful life, it was slowing from one eighth of light speed on this particular edge of the Polity sphere because the stars here were dispersed and intergalactic space lay beyond. Its controlling artificial intelligence, Celedon, viewed those aboard through its many camera eyes. The resident and transitory populations had been dropping away for some years simply because they had come to realize there existed so little of interest out here. The usual tourists still arrived, but after taking a look around they soon departed. Various corporations still maintained offices and factories in the rim units, but their number decreased steadily and no new ones had established a foothold here in the last two decades. Even the low-grav and vacuum-adapted outlinker humans, living here from the beginning, were starting to trickle away to more lively stations. There were now many empty rooms, deserted corridors and concourses, and Celedon, having shut down three of the five runcibles aboard simply because these extra instantaneous gateways in from other destinations were no longer required, viewed with chagrin the prospect of the next two boring decades before the station reached its final destination.

Eventually Celedon would put the station in orbit around a star already selected, and there it would remain forever as a static outpost of the Polity. The AI had yet to decide what then to do. Perhaps a massive expansion project might spark a renewal of interest: the station could be opened out and enlarged and bases established on the single Venusian world orbiting the selected sun. Maybe that same world could be terraformed? Those options were all available—or Celedon could itself abandon this structure that was the body into which it had been born, and leave it to the control of subminds and automatic systems. Certainly some of its own subminds would be glad of the opportunity for independence, and a chance at expansion of both their capacity and responsibility. As it mulled over these possibilities, the AI was casually watching a group of children playing a game of zero-G handball, when the information package arrived through runcible C.

‘Ah, three impossible things before breakfast.’

‘What’s that?’ asked a drone located in the embarkation lounge of that runcible.

Celedon turned its attention to the individual concerned: an independent drone, fashioned in the shape of a spider, that the AI had itself employed at the inception of this station. The drone had originally been manufactured as part of a strike force for clearing enemy stations during a war between the Polity and some particularly vicious aliens named the Prador. Celedon remembered sending it to the same lounge five years ago to oversee the closing of that area, and that it had put itself into shutdown mode ever since. It rested on the wide expanse of blue carpet moss, its shiny motionless legs forming a cage around its main body, then those legs slowly started unfolding.

‘The three impossible things are these, Arach. I just received a message sent through a runcible that it is not due to go online for eight hundred and thirty years; from a location the ship containing the components of said runcible has a hundred thousand light years yet to travel before reaching; from a runcible technician who should still be in coldsleep aboard said ship.’

‘And you’re telling me this why?’ Arach asked.

‘The information package arrived through Runcible C. You were merely woken by a safety protocol, and so chanced to overhear me. You may shut yourself down again if you wish.’

‘After hearing that?’ The spider-drone danced in a circle, its eight eyes emitting an infernal glow. ‘You have to be kidding.’

Arach, Celedon remembered, had expressed a degree of boredom before shutting itself down. Not unsurprising considering its antecedents.

Celedon returned its attention to the package received. The U-space coordinates were correct and the runcible signature correct. The AI opened the package and quickly scanned the information it contained, then, realizing the seriousness of the situation, it diverted a full third of its capacity to studying the data more closely, before sending a copy, via Runcible D, to Earth Central—the Polity’s ruling artificial intelligence.

‘Hostile contact protocol Starfire,’ the distant Earth Central AI replied.

Celedon immediately contacted its drones in the three shutdown runcible lounges: the spider itself, the fly, and the pill bug — all erstwhile products of that ancient war effort. ‘Runcibles coming back online. Open all lounges and direct all humans to the runcibles, immediately. You may use non-fatal coercion. Fly, your area is to remain zero-G. Stand by.’

The AI observed lights coming on in the various empty lounges, doors opening, and the nascent shimmer of Skaidon warps growing between the bull’s horns of Runcibles A, B and C. In lounges B and C, Celedon turned the gravplates back on, bringing various objects clattering to the floor. At the same time it put up on all bulletin boards, EVACUATE STATION, ALL INCOMING TRAFFIC IS ON DIVERT, and sent the same message to all personal coms and augmentations, or by voice in private quarters.

‘The sender chose this station for a reason,’ Celedon observed.

‘Certainly,’ EC replied. ‘It is the least visited and the most uninhabited.’

Inevitably, the station’s residents sent thousands of queries. The most hysterical were from the outlinkers who had made this place their home for a hundred years, for, being zero-G adapted humans, where they might be evacuated to could be a problem. The transient travellers, however, were soon packing their luggage, if not obethently heading towards the runcibles. Celedon itself noted a group of three tourists, who had been exploring a deserted part of the station, now being shepherded towards Runcible C by Arach, the spider-drone. Though they objected loudly, they were moving fast, especially after Arach informed them what non-fatal coercion could mean, and began lasering the carpet right behind them.

‘Least collateral damage by feedback from a time-inconsistent runcible connection?’ Celedon suggested. A runcible connection between the past and the future was considered impossible by many humans. The AIs new better.

‘Precisely,’ Earth Central replied.

‘So you wish me to fully connect?’

‘Yes, but only to Runcible A, and not until you are positioned in low solar orbit with all preparations made that the protocol implies.’

‘Of course.’

The AI maintained its link with Earth Central while making those preparations. Internal scans showed that the original station structure remained as sound as ever. However, expanding that scanning process, the AI found that many of the additions accumulated over the years were not designed to withstand what must ensue. Celedon recorded, formatted and loaded 200 subminds to 200 skeletal Golem and assigned them to expediting the evacuation of those additional structures, making the ones constructed over the rim fusion engines a priority, and then observed the skinless androids, like chromed skeletons, come marching out of storage. It assigned system subminds already initiated to fielding the queries and protests from established residents and companies, then turned its own attention to the outlinkers.

‘Chief Engineer Draesil,’ it said, watching the man through the multiple eyes of a welding robot.

The man was tall, painfully thin, his skin coloured and patterned like the flesh of a kiwi fruit. His hair was black and he wore a tight body garment covered in pockets and strapped-down tools. In this zero-G environment he hung with one arm hooked through a wall loop, peering about himself at the activity of his multicoloured kind.

‘What the hell is going on?’ he asked, his gaze focusing on the nearby robot.

‘Your people must evacuate the station as quickly as possible.’

‘Yes, I think I kind of understood that, but why? Buffer failure or fusion breach?’

‘Neither. This station will be undergoing fusion acceleration burn in fifty-three hours. Though many of those aboard would be able to survive the forces involved, your own kind would not.’ Outlinkers, being adapted to low gravity, were fragile.

‘You still haven’t told me why,’ Draesil snapped.

The AI felt a moment of chagrin. It had noted over its long years of stewardship of this station how humans readily trusted AIs until orders from such entities impinged directly on their lives. Then they started voicing questions and doubts about the abilities and motives of intelligences a thousand times more powerful than any unaugmented human. Thus, in moments of catastrophe, when hard decisions needed to be made quickly, all AIs included in their calculations a human death toll governed by a factor called ‘pigheadedness’.

‘A hostile contact protocol has been ordered by Earth Central. You and your people must all proceed immediately to Runcible Gate A, which will remain a zero-G area, with whatever belongings and personal effects you can carry. All resulting pecuniary losses will be reimbursed.’

Draesil bowed his head. ‘What’s coming through?’

‘I cannot discuss that.’

‘And where are we going?’

‘You will be transmitted to another station’s low-G section. Should it be possible after this crisis, you may return here to me. Otherwise alternative station space will be provided.’

Draesil nodded and pushed himself away from the wall, speaking into his collar comlink as he tumbled freely through the air. ‘This is the real thing, people. We have fifty hours to get out of here. Grab your stuff and head for Runcible A.’

Celedon then turned its attention to other matters, glad that at least the humans in this small section of the station had become someone else’s headache. Seven hundred and thirty people had already gone through the runcibles. The lounges of D and E were becoming very crowded, but now the spider and the pill bug arrived and began directing people to the monorails which would take them around the station’s main disc to the other runcibles opening up. The alacrity with which the crowd obeyed those drones, Celedon put down to atavistic fears: few humans would be inclined to disobey the orders of an iron spider with a leg-span of three yards.

Now, the engines. The main fusion engine lay along the axis of the station, protruding into space below it, so was free to fire up at any time, but Celedon needed to utilize the rim engines now. It observed one area, positioned over one of those four engines, now clear of human occupants, and Golem in the process of leaving too. Celedon began closing the airlocks, but then, after noting something through its cameras, reopened a lock and sent one of the Golem back inside. It shortly returned carrying a large fat cat under its arm, which it handed to a distraught woman who came running back to collect it. Celedon emitted a silicon sigh and closed the final airlock.

The rim engines were of an old design fuelled by deuterium and tritium microspheres. Their tanks were full of liquid deuterium and tritium talc, and had been so for a hundred years. Diagnostics detected no faults, therefore this particular engine stood ready to ignite, but not yet. The Celedon station possessed a slight spin, not for centrifugal gravity, that problem having been overcome long ago with gravplates, but to fling away any docked spacecraft—though the last one of those had departed thirteen years ago. Checking with an astrogation program, the controlling AI, Celedon, waited the required twenty-two minutes and seven seconds.

Now.

Deuterium droplets sprayed into the freezer chamber, where they froze, and next were electrostatically coated with tritium dust. A ring of injectors then fired the resultant microspheres into the main chamber. Once a sphere reached the chamber’s centre, it was captured in a twenty tesla magnetic bottle, then briefly enclosed in a hardfield case, open on one side and with just enough gaps in it to allow access for the beams of high-intensity stacked gallium-arsenide lasers. The lasers fired, igniting fusion, then this process repeated a hundredth of a second later, and kept on repeating. The resultant helium plasma contained less than.00001 isotope contamination, but was still dangerously destructive.

White fire stabbed out of the open side of the hardfield box, and then out of the layered ceramo-carbide combustion chamber. It cut through rooms previously occupied, converted walls, floors, ceilings, coffee tables and sofas to incandescent gas, and blasted out into vacuum. Spearing out from the station edge, it burned red-orange. Mr exploded into space, wreckage followed. The conglomeration of structures peeled away, burst asunder, was flung away by the station’s spin. Celedon noted fire alarms and systems coming online, and going off just as quickly as they collapsed. And then Celedon, the station, slowly began to tilt.

Shutdown.

The fire went out. In two hours’ time a stabilizing burn would be required from rim engine 4, which gave the Golem plenty of time to clear out the last sixty people still within its vicinity. Gazing internally Celedon observed the outlinkers releasing themselves from wall-holds after acceleration ceased. They had not liked that sensation at all, but it made them move much faster towards Runcible A.

Celedon separated out one of the many communications sent to it and replied ‘Forty-seven hours’ to Draesil’s query. Shaking his head in annoyance, the man himself followed a group of outlinker children through the runcible.

Two hours later, the AI initiated the stabilizing burn. The station now pointed directly at what was, by a very roundabout route, its intended destination. Forty-five hours after that, with the station finally emptied of fragile organic life, Celedon turned on the main fusion engine, and shed the accretions on the station’s surface like an old skin. Then, after a three-hour burn followed by a shutdown, the AI again used the rim engines to adjust the station’s attitude before reigniting the main drive. Now, rather than pursue a long curving roundabout route to the destination sun, the station took the most direct route possible taking into account its original velocity. The journey commencing would take three years, but this would not matter to the original sender of the information package. For once Celedon initiated full connection to the sending runcible, the time there, in the future, would not have changed at all.

Deuterium and tritium canisters arrived through Runcible D and the skeletal Golem manhandled them to the monorail train, out of which they had already torn all the furnishings to convert it into a fuel transporter. While they ran this extra fuel down to the main engine, Celedon watched through the eyes of the hundreds of maintenance robots swarming in the sector of the station containing Runcible A. That sector, shaped like a wedge with the tip cut off, was originally devised to be ejected from the station in the event of catastrophic runcible failure. However, over the years, bulkheads had been removed, doors added, its internal structure changed. Supervised by Arach, robots brought out sheets of ceramal-laminated composite from a factory located in the central spindle, to deliver to other robots who powder-welded them into place. Still other robots cut through any structural members Celedon calculated to be unnecessary, leaving only those necessary under the five-G deceleration down towards the green sun. To those remaining structural members holding the sector to the station, Celedon sent Fly to attach planar explosives. These bombs would generate a disc-like explosion which would sever the retaining members nicely.

‘The Jerusalem will be joining you in seventy-three days,’ Earth Central informed the AI abruptly.

‘Should I wait?’ Celedon enquired. ‘I’m only fifty-one days away from achieving low solar orbit.’

‘You should indeed wait. This will give you time to complete your preparations.’

‘My preparations will be completed by the time I achieve low solar orbit.’

‘No they will not,’ EC replied, and followed that pronouncement with an information package.

Celedon scanned the package, learning only now about certain recent events in the Polity and the Jerusalem AI’s involvement in them. Necessarily it both reviewed and looked towards updating many security procedures. Ejecting the A sector of the station was just part of this adjusted hostile contact protocol. The original package had made it aware it must prepare itself for the possibility of attack by Jain technology—a particularly nasty subversive technology left lying around by a long-dead alien race—but now this extra information made it realize precisely what that could mean. As much as an AI could be, Celedon was scared.

First the A sector: station spin alone would not be enough to eject it fast enough. After Fly finished placing the planar explosives, Celedon sent the drone to place other explosives around the inner spindle bulkhead. Once the sector detached, these too could be detonated. The air from inside the sector would then blast out, driving it even further from the station. Fortunately this sector also had a rim motor, which was self-contained but for the controlling optic feed. Fly severed that feed and installed a module to enable that motor to be activated by radio.

‘So I must accept the possibility of Jain-controlled humans?’ Celedon idly asked EC.

‘You must, so take what precautions you can.’

Celedon allowed itself the equivalent of a wince. Doubtless Jerusalem would deal with the problem, should Jain technology board the station via that route. The station, and Celedon itself, would certainly not survive the experience.

The corridor running directly from the runcible, through an airlock into sector B, was already ready. Celedon therefore directed Fly and a hundred Golem to start building an isolation area in B. Necessarily, the surrounding areas were hardened to worm and viral attack, so the AI’s only access would be via narrowband voice and video transmission routed through five relays, all of them outside the station, all of them rigged for detonation, and targeted by masers on the rim. Sector A, however, the AI now isolated but for its link to Arach, and to runcible control, which was utterly necessary. The AI felt that the risk of Jain subversion of itself through the former communications route to be outweighed by the inherent risks of not knowing what was going on. The safest option, of course, would be to not allow initiation of any full transmission from that future runcible. But Earth Central commanded and Celedon obeyed. Obviously, further vital information might become available from that transmission.

Fifty-one days later, Celedon fell into orbit around the green sun, some distance inside the orbit of its one Venusian planet. As the temperature climbed, the station’s AI routed heat through superconducting cables to thermal generators on its dark side, where gas lasers then emitted it into vacuum. On the sixtieth day a solar flare arched below, and the side of the station turned to the sun became too radioactive to support human life. But the AI had foreseen this possibility. The A sector, containing Runcible A, now lay away from the solar furnace, and would only be turned towards it at the last possible moment. Precisely on time, on the seventy-third day, Celedon detected a U-space disturbance a million miles out in space, as the titanic Jerusalem folded into existence: a spherical research vessel three miles in diameter with a thick band around its equator containing everything from legions of robotic probes up to U-space tugs and grabships, and weapons.

‘Arach, you will remain by the runcible. When the evacuees come through, take them immediately to Isolation in B,’ said Celedon.

‘Great, thanks,’ said the spider-drone.

‘Jerusalem?’ Celedon sent.

‘Whenever you are ready,’ replied the AI in the massive ship.

Low energy ion motors on the rim set the station turning. Celedon initiated connection to the source coordinates of the original information package, and routed power into the runcible’s spoon. The Skaidon warp extended, tentatively linked, then made full connection. Suddenly the drain on the station grew huge: more power required, then even more. Shutting down the lasers, Celedon routed through power from the thermal generators. It then began shutting down other systems and rerouting additional power from the station’s many fusion and fission reactors.

‘It seems there is also a direct thermal drain,’ Celedon observed.

Between the bull’s horns of the runcible, the warp turned blank white, and from it cold propagated throughout the station. Frost crystals feathered across the floor and up the walls.

‘Yes, as expected,’ Jerusalem replied.

‘Entropy?’ Celedon suggested. ‘This link to the future a definite confirmation of the universal slide into lower energy states?’

‘No, a confirmation of the vast energy requirement of this runcible link. It is already out of control, and the phenomenon is localized but dispersed. Observe the planet. Observe the sun itself.’

Celedon focused various instruments where directed. The planet, a blue sphere, was now striated with lines of red cloud. Thermal analysis revealed that its entire surface temperature had dropped one degree. In the surface of the sun, directly below where the station orbited, a black spot formed and spread.

‘Ah, hence the hostile contact protocol Starfire?’ Celedon suggested.

‘The hostile will most certainly try to keep the gate open, and certainly try to acquire the technology surrounding it. We will close this gate, severing the link, and the energy will have to go somewhere.’

‘Erm… how localized is this phenomenon?’

‘The radius of the sphere of influence from each runcible extends for the spacial distance between them. The energy drain drops in a near-to-straight line to zero from centre to circumference.’

Celedon could only make an estimate based on the entropic effects on nearby objects—the sun, the planet—and the result it came up with appalled it. This was why, even though AIs knew how to make a time-inconsistent runcible link, they pretended otherwise. The energy requirement increased exponentially and could not be controlled. The link drained energy directly from the space around each runcible gate, and would keep on doing so until surrounded by dead worlds and dead suns. Shutting down such a link resulted in all the absorbed energy exploding from one gate—the one still open, since it was impossible to close them both at the same instant—in the form of a blast wave of subatomic particles forced from the quantum foam. The mathematics involved was esoteric even for AIs, but they calculated that closing such a link, formed between planets ten light years apart with a time inconsistency of a year, even after only a few seconds, could result in the obliteration of one of the gate worlds, and the fatal irradiation of all life within a sphere of nearly a light year. These two gates lay 150,000 light years apart, the time-inconsistency at 830 years, and now the gate had been open for three seconds. And people came through.

Celedon observed, via runcible control, five humans falling through the Skaidon warp, then another five, then another three. There should be another forty-seven humans—and one other. Through Arach’s senses, the AI studied the humans. They bore no visible sign of Jain infestation. Five of them wore the overalls favoured by runcible technicians; there was a four-person Sparkind team, two human and two Golem; the rest obviously civilian scientists, diplomats and crew, all augmented, some of them to haiman level, which meant they were both human and AI. They were all armed, their clothing dirty and ash-smeared. One of the haimans carried a large lozenge of crystal encaged in black metal—probably the AI Victoria from the ship of that name on which they had been passengers.

‘That’s all of us, shut it down as soon as you can!’ shouted one of the overalled figures—a woman with wide green eyes, cropped dark hair and skin as black as obsidian. Celedon identified her as Chaline Tazer Irand, the technician in charge of setting up the runcible in the Small Magellanic Cloud, 830 years in the future.

‘Where are the others?’ Celedon asked through Arach, as that drone shepherded these people towards Isolation.

‘Dead,’ the woman replied, her face exhausted of expression. ‘At least I hope so.’

‘The Maker?’

‘He wants to die with his kind,’ she told him tightly.

Now something else tried to come through. Celedon denied it permission, it being nothing the AI recognized—neither human nor Maker—and tried to shut down the runcible. In response to this, a deluge of information packages came through the gate, many of them opening automatically, and the gate simply would not shut down. Despite the precautions it had taken, the AI saw it could not hold out against this attack. Wormish fragments of code spilled into the gate’s processing spaces and began attempting to assemble.

‘Jerusalem?’

‘Are you asking for permission?’ the other AI enquired. ‘You know what to do.’

Though couched in verbal terms, this communication lasted only a fraction of a second. Long seconds dragged thereafter as the AI waited until the evacuees reached the quarantine airlock and bulkhead doors closed behind them. This gave the attacker enough time to subvert the systems controlling gate maintenance and diagnostics. Since a selection of robots, ranging from the nanoscopic up to ones the size of termites, carried out internal maintenance, this meant the attacker now controlled physical resources. Time for Starfire.

The planar explosives detonated as one, severing thousands of structural members. The slow spin of the station caused sector A to part company with it. The sector tore out the s-con and optic cables linking Celedon to the runcible, but in the last few seconds the AI lost control of it anyway. A radio signal detonated the next explosives, taking out the spindle-side bulkheads. Mr blasted out into space. Debris and ice crystals reflected the green light of the sun. The station shuddered, that one severed segment departing it like a slice from a cake.

As calculated, the segment began to turn. Transmissions now came from it—viral attacks on the station itself. Celedon immediately shut down all its subminds, and anything else that might be vulnerable to subversion. Keeping only a few hardened cameras pointed at the departing object, the AI waited until it turned nose down to the sun, then sent the signal to start its rim fusion engine. Helium plasma briefly washed over the station as the parted segment accelerated down into the gravity well. Then it shuddered. Whatever had been trying to get through the runcible was now inside. Minutes passed, then there seemed movement on the surface. Focusing, the AI observed bright writhing objects breaking through the outer skin. As pieces began to break away, Celedon fried them with masers. The segment’s new occupant realized its danger and swiftly shut down the drive, but the segment lay deep into the sun’s gravity well now, and metal began to ablate away from it as the sun’s heat impacted. Finally it plunged into the furnace right beside the black spot. A U-space signature denatured. There came a burst of Hawking radiation as that runcible went out.

‘Observe,’ said Jerusalem, the moment Celedon reinstated coms.

From the point of impact a pattern of hexagons began to spread. It held definition for a while, then began to break apart, and finally disappeared. Celedon surveyed the damage to its station, its body, then ignited one of the remaining rim engines to pull itself away from the sun. The damage was severe, but a mere mote compared to what must have happened at the other runcible involved.

‘In eight hundred and thirty years,’ Jerusalem said, ‘and a hundred and fifty thousand light years away from here, there will be an explosion of such magnitude it will cause a chain reaction between close suns. The Small Magellanic Cloud will probably be sterilized of all life, and probably most other forms of self-organizing matter, as was the intention.’

‘Jain technology.’

‘Yes, precisely. Of course we will not see the light for a very long time.’