Polity Agent

17

As a precaution, when the two dragon spheres came together, Mika had again donned her spacesuit. Good thing, too. She grabbed up her pack and quickly stuffed into it anything immediately to hand that might increase her chances of survival: food, drink, energy canisters and medical supplies. Closing up her helmet and visor, she headed for the shimmer-shield, pushed through, then opened the airlock beyond. Stepping outside she looked up to a view not cleaned up by computer like the view from inside. Bright actinic sunlight cut through from one side, between a curved ceiling and curved floor composed of draconic flesh. Masses of pseudopods were sliding down beside her—a massive but eerily silent avalanche. Scales slowly tumbled through vacuum around her, and nearby they dropped sharply on the gravplated walkway. She kicked them aside as she strode towards her craft. She noted, as the gull-door rose at her approach, the docking clamps folding into the metal of the manacle below.

‘Can you hear me, Dragon?’ she asked, halting for a moment.

Nothing.

What was happening? The two spheres were breaking their connection, and thus far she saw no sign of hostility between them. But would she recognize that anyway? Perhaps right now they were fighting some battle on a virtual level, or perhaps they adhered to certain rules of conduct for something like this? They were alien, and despite lengthy investigation remained alien still, so who was to know? However, as Mika ducked into the little craft, the dragon spheres seemed to her like two card-sharps standing up from the table, about to put some distance between each other, making room to manoeuvre before going for their weapons, each hoping to get the drop on his opponent.

The gull door closed and Mika stared at the controls for a moment before taking hold of the joystick. With no AI available to fly the craft for her this time, she must now do so herself. A finger brushed against a touch-plate gave her ‘systems enabled’, then engines droned as she raised the joystick. The craft rose smoothly until it fell outside the influence of the manacle gravplates, then it jerked through vacuum as if a tether had been cut, but with no real loss of control. Mika aimed for the sunlight between the two curved draconic surfaces, the screen before her polarizing on the glare.

Dragon scales hailed against the hull, some of them hitting it quite hard before spinning away, so Mika kept the speed to a minimum. She swung the craft to one side to avoid a dead and discarded pseudopod, but clipped it all the same. Desiccated by vacuum, it shattered into red glittery fragments and black vertebrae.

The previous connection between these portions of Dragon entire now broke apart completely, the two pseudopod trees sinking away. Now Mika saw that the two spheres were visibly drawing apart, microgravity creating whirlpools in the fog of shed scales, and space opening wide before her. She accelerated as blue-green light seemed to fill the intervening space. Some kind of weapon? No, just a storm of ionization. More acceleration, since at any moment she might be caught up in some energy strike many orders of magnitude above this current jungle glow. From the beginning, the dragon spheres had utilized full-spectrum lasers as weapons. She knew the sphere she had recently occupied now contained gravtech weapons, and it struck her as likely that whatever weapons the Polity possessed, these giant spheres either already possessed or could create them within themselves, and they probably owned even more drastic ones than that.

Clear space now in the full glare of the sun. Mika turned the craft about, shut down the engines, and enabled available automatics to keep it from colliding with anything else that might be tumbling about out here. Slowly drawing away, she felt like a mouse scuttling from between two bull elephants beginning to face off.

Then it started.

Almost as one, ripples began to cross the surface of each sphere. They revolved once around each other, while still drawing apart, then accelerated away together. Perhaps ten miles away from her, a laser flashed between them, blackening an area of Mika’s reactive screen. As the screen cleared she saw a mist of plasma and glittering scales rise from the surface of each Dragon sphere, and in one sphere a glowing canyon became visible to her. She realized then that from her present position she did not know which sphere was which, because she could not see the manacle. But, then, how would knowing that help her?

The spheres began revolving around each other again, and now she caught quick glimpses of the manacle on one of them. Then their revolutions slowly drew to a halt, the sphere without the manacle occluding the other from her view. Laser strikes threw it sharply into silhouette, and streamers of plasma fire and debris shot out all around it. Then something seemed to distort space, flattening the one sphere she could see into an ellipse. The wall of distortion sped towards her even as she started the craft’s engines and grabbed the joystick. It struck. The entire craft rippled, emitted a tearing crash, and bucked as if someone had taken hold of the very fabric of space and snapped it up and down like shaking dust from a carpet. The screen disintegrated, blowing out the air supply, metal visible around her suddenly contained whorls and ridges. Then she blotted out any view by coughing blood onto her visor. It felt to her as if someone had smacked an iron bar simultaneously against every bone she contained, then shoved a barbed harpoon through her and twisted it, knotting up her insides.

I am going to die.

Her suit diagnostics made no sense at all, however the static cleaner still operated and shed the blood from the surface of her visor down around her chin. Now she could truly assess the damage to her craft: some god had taken hold of it and twisted it up like an old newspaper.

Gravity weapons.

So it seemed the so-called friendly sphere had killed her. She focused out at vacuum, and a cliff of draconic flesh rose up before her. Something wrong: this part of Dragon was no sphere at all, but egg-shaped with an odd twist in it, with fluids boiling out into vacuum from an opening gashed down one side.

Ah, the other guy, was all she thought, before a writhing wheel of pseudopods—the business end of a fast-moving tree composed of those things—slammed up, closed around her vessel, and dragged her down.

Stupid stupid stupid.

Though the underspace interference field knocked her out of U-space nearly fifty AU from the centre of the action—further than Pluto is from Earth—from which action the light of numerous explosions was only now reaching her, Orlandine was still in the same trap as those ECS attack ships. And she was also exposed in open vacuum between the inner system of planets and an outer ring of asteroids shepherded by a collection of cold planetoids.

Running programs to determine the strength of the USER field, Orlandine quickly realized the USER device itself lay somewhere within that inner system, and estimated a travel time of more than a year before she could distance herself far enough from it to drop back into U-space. Heliotrope possessed cold coffins, so for her the journey would not be so interminable, however she did not much relish the idea of leaving herself that vulnerable. Other ECS ships could jump to the interference field’s perimeter within that time, then come in on conventional drives. The longer the field remained functional, the more defences ECS would install around its perimeter, and it seemed likely they might possess weapons capable of knocking other ships out of U-space once the field shut down. So, the longer she remained in this area, the more likely would be her capture.

Checking her scans of the distant battle, she realized that travelling insystem to find somewhere to hide was no tenable option. Hundreds of alien ships swarmed in the area. She did not expect the Polity ships there to survive, nor did she think her presence here would go undetected for long. But another option remained: the asteroid field.

Orlandine fired up the Heliotrope’s fusion engine, turned the vessel, and headed away just as fast as she could. Somewhere amid those cold stones she should be able to find a place to hide her ship, and there power it down to avoid detection while she awaited the conclusion to events now occurring in the inner system.

‘Why are they holding off?’ Thorn enquired. He plugged a monocular into his visor to gaze out over the red jungle towards the enormous spiral ship.

The sky was growing darker now, taking on a milky green hue as the sun descended behind the cloud cover like a heavy rucked-up blanket. In the jungle around the alien ship, things were moving about, and occasionally half-seen shapes drifted high above. To Cormac’s left, where some cataclysm had denuded the ground cover, swirled errant lights like St Elmo’s fire.

Cormac glanced across at Blegg, who now squatted beside the nearest of those strange cubic ruins, which seemed like short sections cut from a square granite pipe with sides a yard thick. Seven cubes altogether were scattered over the area—just some unknowable ruin.

‘What do you think?’ Cormac asked the old Oriental.

Blegg squinted down the slope at the red foliage. ‘We know that if they wanted to wipe us out, it would be no problem to them: they could just drop a warhead. I would say they are reluctant to destroy a possible source of information, potentially valuable, and certainly easier to obtain than, say, trying to capture a Centurion.’

‘So they’ll still try to grab us?’Thorn enquired.

‘That’s what they tried in the jungle. Why else send in what were effectively ground troops when you could sit in the sky and burn the jungle down to bedrock? I believe the killing only started when the dracomen’s resistance to Jain technology got them reclassified as being not worth the effort to capture.’ Blegg looked around to the remaining dracomen and Sparkind positioned in surrounding terrain, then to the autoguns, and finally up at Arach crouching atop the nearby cube. ‘They will come again, and this time their assault will be more organized. We just have to decide what to do.’

‘How difficult is that?’ said Arach. ‘We fight.’

‘Yes, of course,’ said Blegg.

Cormac understood the man’s reservations. NEJ and the other ships remained out of contact, and it seemed likely they had either fled the enemy or been destroyed by it. So now this small ECS force lay isolated at the bottom of a gravity well, with little more than hand weapons available, and the forces arrayed against it seemed huge. In situations like this soldiers generally considered how they might die.

‘I for one have no intention of allowing myself to be captured.’ Cormac reached into his pocket and removed a small multipurpose grenade—a chrome cylinder no larger than a cigarette lighter, but with a charge capable of turning a human body into so much bloody fog. He gestured with the grenade towards Blegg. ‘You, however, have another option. You can escape. You can translate yourself through U-space.’

‘Yes, there’s always that,’ Blegg replied. He sounded tired. ‘But so can you.’

Cormac grimaced and returned the explosive to his pocket. ‘That is our last option,’ he said, not entirely convinced the option lay open to himself anyway. He needed first to open and absorb Jerusalem’s memory package, and it seemed unlikely he would be given the time for that. He looked around, then focused on Thorn, who had now removed his monocular from his visor. ‘Thorn?’ he enquired.

Thorn replied, ‘With us out in the open, all they need to do is sit up in the sky and pick us off with stunners or lasers, whatever they choose.’ He patted a hand against the envirosuit he wore. ‘The dracomen might stand a chance but we’ve no chameleonware.’

‘The cave system, then,’ Cormac commented.

‘So it would seem,’ said Thorn. ‘All we have to do is survive down there until rescue arrives—if it is coming at all.’ He paused for a moment. ‘Should we send the dracomen into the jungle? They would stand a better chance out there.’

‘I will try giving that order to Scar, but I don’t see him obeying it,’ Cormac replied.

‘Movement,’ said Blegg, abruptly.

Thorn turned and raised his monocular again. ‘Humanoid figure—a familiar one.’ He made to pass the monocular to Cormac, but Cormac waved it away. Ramping his visual acuity, using a program in his gridlink controlling the muscles around his eyes and configuring signals direct from his optic nerves, he soon identified the Legate walking from the jungle and up the slope towards them. He beckoned Scar over to him while he watched.

‘Scar,’ he said, ‘I am going to talk to this… Legate. And when it doesn’t get what it wants, I suspect we’ll be back into a fire-fight. Myself and the rest of the humans, and Arach, are going to run for the cave system and blow the entrance behind us. I want you to take your people into the jungle—with your camouflage you have a better chance of surviving there.’ Scar just stared at him for a long moment. Cormac continued, ‘This way some of us might survive to deliver a report to ECS forces when they arrive.’

Scar held up one hand, clawed fingers spread. ‘I will send five into the jungle.’

‘This is not open to negotiation, Scar.’

‘No, it is not,’ the dracoman replied, and moved away.

The Legate was now only a few hundred yards away, and Cormac thought it laughable how the entity held its hands up and open as if to show it carried no weapons. He knew all its weapons would be inside it. Once the entity had approached to ten yards away, Cormac stepped forwards. ‘I think that’s about close enough. So tell me, what do you want? I would guess you haven’t come here to surrender to us.’

‘It is good that you retain your sense of humour,’ said the Legate. ‘Allow me to acquaint you with realities.’ It pointed upwards with one overly long finger and, in that instant, com was restored and Cormac received a time-delayed information package from the NEJ. He held this package in his gridlink, as loath to open it now as the memory package gifted to him by Jerusalem. He suspected bad news, but more than that he suspected their com codes had been cracked by whatever this being before him represented.

‘Nobody is to open that package,” he instantly broadcast from his gridlink.

It almost seemed the Legate heard him as well. ‘We have not yet broken your com codes, since the algorithms that control them were created by AI. Had we broken them, be assured that you would now be under my control, as would all here, AIs or those using gridlinks or augs.’ The Legate turned its nightmare head slightly towards Horace Blegg. ‘Including you.’

Cormac decided he must take the risk. ‘All of you, accept nothing via my gridlink for the next minute.’ Out loud he said, ‘Blegg, Thorn, back away from me.’ He looked up at Arach. ‘I want you to soft link to me. Any sign that I’m subject to a subversion program, you take me down then—’ he stabbed a finger at the Legate, ‘then you take him down.’

‘What the—?’Thorn began.

Horace Blegg slapped a hand on his shoulder and began drawing him away. ‘Information package from the NEJ—we don’t know if it is genuine.’

As a further precaution, Cormac reached in his pocket and thumbed up then held down the dead man’s switch on his grenade. Only then did he open the package.

Haruspex and Coriolanus were visible ahead, glaring bright in the light of the near sun. ‘We have all released beacons broadcasting this package, so hopefully it will get through to you,’ Jack informed him. ‘We are attempting to sling-shot around the sun, to make a run on the USER which is located on a moon orbiting the other living world here. While that USER continues functioning, estimated time to the arrival of Polity forces here, one year. Only if the USER is shut down will that estimate reduce. We will reach the USER in seventeen hours. The expected time of arrival thereafter of the dreadnoughts, less than a day.’

The package contained more information, but that was the gist of it.

‘I have no idea what that message contained,’ said the Legate, ‘but presumably you now understand your situation. You are alone here and even a minimal chance of rescue is a long time off. Pure logic should now dictate your next actions. You cannot escape, and if you fight you will all either be captured or killed. I now offer you a deal.’ One long hand gestured to encompass the Sparkind and the dracomen. ‘In exchange for the lives of all these. You’—one finger stabbing towards Cormac—‘and you’—now towards Blegg—‘will hand yourselves over.’

Cormac thumbed the dead man’s switch on the grenade back into position. He did not for one moment believe this entity would allow the others to live, no matter who handed themselves over. Or perhaps they really would be kept alive, which might be worse.

‘Let’s just shoot the fucker and run for the cave,’ came a communication from Chalder after the minute Cormac designated ran out.

Through his gridlink Cormac broadcast: ‘Start moving towards the cave, but try not to make it too obvious. Arach, the Legate has chameleonware so if it shows any sign of fading out…’

‘I was already doing that,’ the drone replied grumpily.

‘What guarantees can you give that you’ll stick to your word?’ Cormac asked out loud to the Legate. Scanning beyond it, Cormac recorded the scene in his gridlink then ran a comparison program to perpetually analyse that same scene moment by moment. It annoyed him that he had not thought to do so earlier.

‘The only guarantee I can give—’ began the Legate.

It was the trunk of a tree down in the jungle, slightly displaced for half a second.

Chameleonware.

‘Arach!’

‘I see it.’

The Legate disappeared. One of the spider-drone’s Gatling cannons whirred and fired, spewing fire across the intervening ten yards. The Legate reappeared only yards from Cormac, juddered to a halt and survived longer than seemed possible under such a fusillade, then exploded into metallic shreds. Arach’s other cannon whirred and spewed fire. To the right and left of where the Legate had been, huge shapes nickered in and out of being—flat louselike bodies supported ten feet off the ground by bowed insectile legs, their nightmare heads unravelling squidlike grasping tentacles. Both of them collapsed, pieces of them exploding away, clearly visible now as their chameleonware broke down. Cormac squatted for cover and glimpsed Arach springing from his perch just as turquoise fire splashed down onto the rock cube, turning its upper surface molten. The drone ran, with all his weapons now directed up at the sky. Darker shadow fell over them as another spiral ship shut down its chameleonware right above. High intensity laser punching down: five or more dracomen turned instantly to flames. Autoguns now trained on the ship above, but one of them suddenly blasted to silvery fragments. And meanwhile a hellish army swooped up the slope from the jungle.

‘Thorn, mine the entrance as we—’

Thorn turned towards him, grinning perhaps… then he stood in an inferno, coming apart, face melting away from a screaming skull, before toppling disjointed in clouds of greasy smoke. Gone: in an instant.

Thorn…

Further explosions lit the garish scene as the autoguns found targets on the ship above. Even while paralysed mentally Cormac continued to function on an instinctive level. He sent Shuriken streaking down towards a pack of quadruped machines like headless brushed-aluminium Rottweilers, who led the charge from below. The star threw its blades out to maximum extent and howled along just off the ground, as if carrying the anger Cormac should now feel. He took out his grenade and gridlinked to its control mechanism. He ran a simple program, so that the moment he lost consciousness the grenade would detonate. He placed it in the breast pocket of his envirosuit, then, standing fully in view, aimed his proton weapon and, picking his targets in the leading ranks, began to fire. He slewed emotion, became colder. Fuck them, what was the point now in retreating to the cave system?

Shuriken hammered into a thicket of legs, sending many of the dog-things sprawling. Cormac fired continually as silvery flat-worms slid up over the fallen grey bodies like running mercury, each hit of his converted these things to disparate segments—which then extended out tendrils to rejoin and draw together again.

‘Cormac, get to the cave,’ came Blegg’s communication via his link.

‘Go fuck yourself,’ Cormac replied.

‘Do you want reasons?’ Blegg asked. ‘Chalder just died trying to protect you, and others will now die to that same end. Get into the cave!’

A scan of his surroundings: numerous oily fires—difficult to discern which burning figures were human and which dracoman. From ten yards down the slope one of the flatworms reared up, its nose flaring open on a glittering interior. A stun blast smacked into Cormac’s chest and sent him staggering back, then down on his knees. Above him, a flattened torpedo shape, snakish legs tangled underneath, unravelling and reaching for him. Consciousness fading.

Let it go.

A black missile slammed into the hovering shape’s side, detonated and sent it cartwheeling out of sight, coming apart. Spider legs abruptly closed around Cormac and hauled him from the ground. Shuriken came screaming back to the rescue. He just retained the presence of mind to offline the grenade program, and recall the throwing star to its wrist holster, as Arach carried him to cover. Damp darkness then, and a blast throwing dust and rock past him. He finally let go of his consciousness—didn’t want it.

Stalactites poised above Blegg like dragon’s teeth. Damp air groped about his face and somewhere he could hear water trickling. But he focused his attention inward to view another episode in his life, another death, this time on the planet Cheyne III.

Walking out along the jetty towards the boat supposedly containing a Separatist arms cache, there had been no time for him to think his usual To die like this after so long. One moment the boat rocked there on the waves, solid and substantial, the next it turned into a spreading ball of flame. He recollected briefly seeing the jetty flung up like the rearing back of a snake, then the blast hit him. No pain, just a cessation. Then he woke up in the ECS Rescue ship, recovering from cuts, burns and concussion. The reality, he knew, was that nothing larger than what you might scrape up with a teaspoon then remained of the Horace Blegg who hunted Separatists on Cheyne III. Only memories, constantly copied via a link open to the runcible AI.

Here no such link existed, however, and should he die a new Blegg would only remember up to the point he went out of communication with the NEJ, from where Blegg’s memories had been regularly retransmitted to update his back-up. But of course this sort of thing had happened before—these breaks in the narrative of his apparently endless life. When he was thrown to the ground in the Highlands of Scotland, apparently by the blast from a satellite strike, that was a cut-off point. But he now remembered himself lying twisted on his side and gazing in puzzlement at the ribs of his own chest splayed out like bloody fingers, and seeing circuitry patterns etched into his bones. No bump on the head dispelling consciousness, and it hadn’t been a Shockwave that threw him down either, but an explosive seeker bullet. And he just died, very quickly.

But the false bit? Only these extra memories, only these undone deletions told him which they were. Earth Central falsified the day it took him to return to Geneva, probably only to add a certain variety. In reality, EC just took out of storage another body — another facsimile of humanity neither Golem nor human but something else. Another Blegg. When the antimatter bomb struck Tuscor City, the AI had simply placed on hold all his memories concerning events after he left the attack ship Yellow Cloud. So here, now, that whole episode culminating with the searing hammer of that blast finally reaching him, conflicted in his memory with another memory in which he never went down to the planet, since the arrival of the Prador destroyer gave him no time. The bomb on Amaranth Station turned him into slurry, but that small agonizing moment was deleted and replaced with the memory of him having transported himself out at the last moment. Of course, much that ensued was also false, until a new body could be put into place.

Lies, all lies. And what seemed even more cruel was his emulating a human so closely that he wanted to believe his own myth. The Atheter AI had known, for when he gave it his word it replied, ‘I know—it’s the word of a ruler.’ A partial truth perhaps, since he was merely the creation of a ruler. The Legate had known with its, ‘Had we broken them, be assured that you would now be under my control, as would all here, AIs or those using gridlinks or augs… Including you.’

Blegg rubbed his palms together. They felt gritty, just as they had felt when he climbed to the top of the monolith on Cull to find uncomfortable revelation. Similar revelation had occurred to him before. Captured and dragged into a Separatist base on a moonlet that was only a number on the star charts, he faced torture and interrogation. A ridiculous situation since he had not been on a mission then, merely checking out some fossils that should not have been there. The fast picket that dropped him off was not to return for some weeks, so no cover and no AI on hand to record his memories. They used psychoactive drugs on him, physical torture that left him minus three fingers—removed one joint at a time — minus the skin across his stomach, his testicles crushed and burnt. They could not believe their luck in having captured him. Their leader did not believe it, so the interrogation continued. At some point he became a mewling thing with only a passing resemblance to a human being. Awareness then returned to him with a thump and all the confusion suddenly receded. Clarity of mind became absolute, but what initiated it? They had discovered something very strange about his body, were working to keep him alive to take elsewhere for deeper study and a more meticulous investigation. They talked of the technology for probing minds and other things of a similar nature. Blegg remembered previous deaths, remembered what he was, and knew this could not be allowed. But what could he do? He no longer possessed workable limbs. He decided it was time for him to die. However, then came AI linkage to his mind as the attack ship Yellow Cloud entered the system looking for him. It uploaded his memories as far as and including the moment when the missiles hammered into the base and converted it into a glowing crater in the face of the moonlet. Blegg’s new body thereafter possessed no conscious recollection of this inconvenient episode. It did possess something else, though, should something like this occur again and no attack ship be on hand. It contained the seeds of destruction of itself and much else beside. It became a weapon, as well as a vessel for his consciousness. Of course to use that weapon Blegg had to remember he could die, that he had died many times.

Again Blegg felt that potential awaiting his conscious command. It had been used occasionally since that time on the moonlet, but he had no memories of the circumstances involved, since it was impossible for him to have them. Only after-the-event recordings were open to him: the gutted Prador destroyer he was held captive aboard, sludge smeared across a rocky plateau on a world seceded from the Polity—all that remained of a rebel army—and other less dramatic occasions when he lost contact with the AIs and was in danger of being forced to reveal too much.

This time, however, he realized there would be no new Blegg. Now the truth in all its raw and painful detail stood open to him, just as his facsimile human body now lay open to his internal inspection and under his absolute control. There could be no more Blegg because a certain point had been irrecoverably passed. Time, he felt, for this to be made known.

He gazed across the dank cave in which they now found themselves. Cormac still lay unconscious, and Blegg knew that on some deep level the agent probably fought against waking. Thorn had gone the way of Gant—both of those human Sparkind soldiers dead now, both of the men who had joined Cormac at Samarkand.

Blegg watched his fellow agent, waited, and remembered his many deaths.

Consciousness returned abruptly and painfully and the first clear image in his mind was of Thorn’s face melting apart before him. For a moment he could not equate the image with anything he knew, then the full impact of memory hit him.

My decision.

Cormac opened his eyes, ramping up his light sensitivity in the gloom. He lay against a pack which in turn was propped against a rock. He realized his visor was open, but was breathing okay so did not hurry to close it. The planet’s air mix could sustain human life, with only its temperature being too high on the surface. Cool down here.

He sat upright. ‘What’s the situation?’

Too abrupt a move, for he became suddenly dizzy and nauseous. A huge spider tracked across his vision over to the left — Arach—then Blegg loomed before him.

‘We lost many,’ said the old Oriental. ‘There are only seven dracomen with us down here, though five others made it into the jungle. Three human Sparkind surviving, one of them probably not for much longer. Six Golem Sparkind too, some of them badly burnt but still functional. One remaining autogun and Arach.’

‘The enemy?’ Cormac asked.

‘We collapsed a thousand feet of cave behind us. If they want to kill us, I suspect a near-c projectile could penetrate this deep. However, our scanners can hear them burrowing, so evidently they still want to capture us alive. At their present rate it will take them perhaps ten hours to reach us.’

Cormac checked the timings in his gridlink: fifteen hours before the NEJ and the Haruspex could reach the USER, and he suspected that whatever happened there would be concluded very quickly—one way or the other. He slowly heaved himself to his feet and looked around.

They were located in a large oblate cavern in which tube lights, stuck to the walls, revealed to be toothed with orange and green stalactites and stalagmites. Arach reared up against one wall, perhaps feeling the approach of the burrowers through his feet. To one side of Cormac lay an individual wrapped in a heat sheet, a small autodoc clinging at the neck. Difficult, at a glance, even to know the soldier’s sex, the patient’s head being burned raw and featureless. Some dracomen moved about, checking equipment which ran optics to probes sunk in the surrounding stone. The silvery skeleton of a Golem strode past, shedding pieces of charred syntheflesh.

‘Can we go deeper?’ Cormac asked.

Blegg sighed and plumped himself down on a rock. ‘Yes, we can go deeper. A fissure leads down at an angle over there.’ He pointed past the stripped Golem to a dark cave mouth. ‘But we are only delaying the inevitable.’

Cormac peered at him. ‘You’re normally a little more upbeat than this. Surely our whole lives are spent delaying the inevitable.’ He felt a sudden unreasonable anger at what he felt to be Blegg’s fatalism, while in another layer of his mind understood his own reaction being due to the loss of Thorn. ‘Do you suggest we surrender, then, or just kill ourselves here?’

‘I’m presently suffering from a dearth of suggestions,’ Blegg replied.

Cormac allowed his anger some slack. ‘Then let me suggest that it is time for you, Horace Blegg, to take your leave of us. Since you possess the means.’

Blegg stared at him, and it seemed something metallic glinted in the old man’s eyes. ‘My time has been interesting,’ he stated. ‘Since that runcible connection opened to Celedon station, I have learnt much.’ The gleam faded from his eyes and he gazed off into the darkness and continued more introspectively. ‘As well as obtaining the U-space signature for Jain nodes from an Atheter AI, I obtained the beginning of revelation. That AI replayed for me the key episodes in my life since Hiroshima, and only from that alien perspective did I understand how so very fortunate I was to be present at most of the pivotal events in history since then—not enough to make me overly suspicious, but no small number either.’

‘And this is leading where?’ asked Cormac, impatient now to do something, anything.

Blegg turned and stabbed a finger at him, the metal back in his eyes. ‘You, Ian Cormac, believed me to be an avatar of Earth Central, a construct. I tried to ignore that suggestion because the immediacy of my existence has been too real to me, yet you planted the seed of doubt. Is my history my own, is my mind my own? Am I real? I cannot erase doubt, and I see it would have continued to grow.’

‘Would have?’

‘I never told you where I obtained that Jain node.’

‘True, you did not.’

‘Jain nodes are activated by living intelligent organisms, only thereafter can the technology they produce manage to attack and subvert our technology. Mr Crane obtained Jain nodes on Cull. He kept them and they did not react to him, did not activate—perhaps some safety measure built in by the Jain AIs that created them. My doubts were growing; the accumulation of coincidence throughout my long life has reached a critical point from which I cannot recover without huge erasure of memory and much adjustment. Machines are like that, they reach a point where the work involved in patching and repairing is no longer worth the effort. My usefulness to Earth Central is at an end and, in collusion with Mr Crane, EC opened my eyes to reality. Mr Crane tossed a Jain node to me, and I caught it in my bare hand. No reaction. That I am a being that possesses intelligence, I’ve no doubt, but am I that thing so hazily described as a living organism?’

‘I see…’

Utterly emphatic and emotionless, Blegg continued, ‘The Hiroshima bomb blast: all gleaned from witness statements, expanded by AI, and extrapolated into a constructed memory for me. The Nuremberg trials: again that gleaning, because so many people have written about them, speculated about them. All construction, too. Later memories come clearer—is that because those are not so far from me in time? No, because the clarity of recording media in later years improved, and from it better memories could therefore be constructed.’

‘You appeared like a projection once on the Occam Razor, but I touched you and found you solid,’ ventured Cormac.

Blegg waved a dismissive hand. ‘Projection integrated with hardfields—an easy trick.’

‘So all the ship AIs, Jack, Jerusalem, the lot… all colluded in this?’

‘They must have, when it became necessary for them to know about my true nature. Earth Central wanted its avatar to be a human leader, as well as a legend, something to give hope and encouragement. It is a trait of the human race to raise some of its members to high regard, quite often when they are not deserving of such, hence the cults of celebrity in earlier centuries. Earth Central wanted to choose one so up-raised, create that one… I resent not being allowed to know myself, even though I am a part of Earth Central itself.’

‘Are you so sure now?’

Blegg pointed to the mound of rubble heaped to one side of the chamber. There, Cormac assumed, lay their entry point. ‘Out there, the enemy knows, which is why it wants to capture me. That mere fact has brought online different programming within me. I realize now that I cannot translate myself through U-space. I never was able to. I step from Valles Marineris on Mars to the runcible there, transport to the runcible on Earth’s Moon, and step from there to the Viking Museum—all memories created in a virtuality.’

‘So down here, you will probably die with us, or be captured.’

‘I will die, if that is the correct term. There is too much of Earth Central within me for capture to be allowed. I will fight for as long as I can, then, when capture seems imminent, I will activate a nanite weapon inside me, and destroy myself. There will be nothing left. But the question that remains is can you escape in the way I cannot?’

‘I won’t leave them.’ Cormac gestured around.

‘But perhaps’, said Blegg, ‘you should find out if that option is available to you.’ He stood up and moved away.

Damn him!

Blegg’s newly discovered self-knowledge made him appear coldly fatalistic, though it did appear they were in a trap from which there seemed no escape. Cormac began moving around the chamber, till he found the remaining Sparkind all gathered in one area, laying out their remaining equipment and checking it over. One Golem, the side of his face burned down to ceramal, stood up when he approached.

‘Assessment?’ Cormac enquired.

‘We have taken heavy losses,’ the Golem told him. ‘Once they break through—at their rate of burrowing, we estimate in ten hours—with our present munitions, and factoring in their likely rate of attack, we should hold them off for a further half an hour.’

Not much hope here, either.

Cormac scanned around. ‘Did Scar survive?’

The Golem pointed over to the mouth of a nearby tunnel. Meanwhile, one of the human Sparkind, who had disassembled and now reassembled a pulse-gun, asked, ‘When we’ve nothing left to shoot them with, what then?’

Cormac instantly accessed information available in his link: Andrew Hailex, 64 years old, joined ECS as a monitor age 25, rose through the ranks then transferred ten years later to GCG — Ground Combat Group. Left after four years to marry and raise three children. Rejoined ECS at age 55 and trained as a Sparkind. Involved in several dangerous actions. Regularly sends messages to his family…

Hailex, of course, looked no older than Cormac appeared — maybe in his twenties—but then few people chose to look old. His scalp was hairless, probably naturally so for he did not possess eyebrows either. He bulked out his envirosuit so seemed likely to be boosted. He grinned—he’d lost a tooth—and his eyes displayed a pinkish tint. He rather reminded Cormac of Gant.

‘I’ll think of something, but if it turns out we have nowhere left to run, what remains for you to do I leave to personal choice,’ Cormac replied. ‘Our attackers are using something related to Jain technology and I rather suspect they won’t be interning us in a nice comfortable prison camp. I’m afraid I’ve no suggestions for you.’ Cormac grimaced, realizing how he had just paraphrased Blegg.

The other man’s grin faded, then he reached out and nudged an open case with his toe. Inside rested two polished aluminium objects the size of coffee flasks: two CTDs, low yield, but enough to raise the temperature in here to that of a sun’s surface.

‘Yes,’ said Cormac, ‘that’s one option.’

Moving off he entered the side cave to which the Golem had directed him. This stretched back only ten yards, and there Scar and two other dracomen sat by a pool down into which the cave roof slanted.

‘Scar, I want some of your people to scout out that fissure.’ Cormac stabbed a thumb over his shoulder.

Scar stared at him for a long moment, then blinked. ‘I have sent two there already.’

A beat.

‘Are you in communication with them?’

‘Always.’

‘What have they found?’

‘The fissure runs down sheer for fifty yards, then its angle changes to forty-five degrees for another four hundred yards before beginning to level out. My associates have just now reached that point. Seismic scanning ahead indicates a crawl of nearly two miles, then several pools from which tunnels extend under water.’

Cormac noted how the dracoman held his hand submerged in the pool he presently crouched beside, fingers spread out, and wondered if this somehow enabled contact with the two dracomen below.

‘These tunnels?’

‘I know no more yet, however the route to it is too narrow for the autogun, or for Arach.’

Cormac considered their options. If they remained here they’d certainly end up in a fight they could not win.

‘Recall them,’ he said. ‘We’ll be going down there anyway.’ He turned and headed back out into the main cavern.

‘Arach, over here.’

The spider shape reared away from the wall and scuttled over to him. Cormac studied the drone for a moment, then explained the situation.

‘No problem,’ Arach replied and, before Cormac could say any more, scuttled away again. Cormac now called over everyone else in the cavern and gave his instructions, finishing with: ‘Those that need it, get some rest now—we move in two hours.’

‘He doesn’t talk much, does he?’ said Samland Karischev, as he gazed out through the massive chainglass screen.

‘Brutus is feeling as frustrated and annoyed as we all are,’ replied Azroc.

Freed from his duties by the Coloron AI, Azroc had immediately transferred to the Brutal Blade, the utile dreadnought run by the AI Brutus, and sometimes jokingly referred to—because of its resemblance to some titanic beast’s liver plated with metal—as the Organ Transplant. Fresh from that devastated world, where an entire arcology capable of housing a billion souls had necessarily been destroyed, the opportunity for some payback filled him with joy even though he was Golem. And when Battle Wagon joined the fleet, now grown to twenty dreadnoughts, numerous attack ships and other warcraft, that joy only increased.

Serious payback: now one of the big boys accompanied them.

Karischev pointed through the screen at the distant vessel. ‘It doesn’t look like much. Why all the excitement?’

Azroc sighed. The Battle Wagon did not look particularly threatening, being a cylindrical object apparently devoid of sensor arrays or evident weapons. ‘It doesn’t look like much because you are now seeing it against a backdrop of vacuum and so do not really have any idea of its scale.’

Karischev, a squat bulky man with a friendly boulder-like face and watery brown eyes, struck Azroc as a bit of an enigma. The man carried no augmentations, either cerebral or physical, and obviously did not bother to change his appearance to anything more aesthetic, as it seemed most humans were inclined to do. He also commanded a strike force of Sparkind ground troops, assigned to Brutal Blade.

‘Big, then?’ Karischev suggested.

‘Eight miles in diameter and twenty miles long. It’s old, built during the Prador War, carries weapons designed to penetrate Prador exotic armour, plus numerous recent upgrades. Much is made of the fact that ships like Brutal Blade can destroy worlds. The truth is that a ship like ours could easily depopulate a world, but not actually destroy it. The Battle Wagon, however, could do the job without, as the saying goes, breaking into a sweat.’

‘No shit?’ Karischev’s eyes grew wide.

‘Definitely.’

Karischev turned back to gaze through the screen. ‘Of course, you can be carrying the biggest gun in the world, but that don’t matter a fuck if you ain’t got a target.’

Azroc could only nod in agreement. The information packages sent by the NEJ showed, in the system a light year ahead, enemy forces that the ships now glinting in space all around him could obliterate with ease. But since the USER had deployed and ejected the fleet from U-space, it proceeded on conventional drives. At this rate it would take them more than a year to reach their target, which created all sorts of problems, not least being that the fight would long be over and the enemy would have had a year to prepare for them—unless before that they shut down the USER and fled.

Another problem arose concerning the living occupants of those few ships in the Polity fleet that carried them. They would have to go into coldsleep if the USER remained functional. The quandary faced by the Battle Wagon AI, now in command of this fleet, was that if the USER did go offline, the entire fleet could jump to the target system at once, and troops might need to be dropped very quickly, but it took some time for humans to recover from the effects of coldsleep.

‘I’m gonna check on my men,’ said Karischev, turning away.

Watching him go, Azroc wondered if bringing along these ground troops was such a good idea anyway. Yes, they might be needed, but thus far the conflict had remained mainly ship to ship—one of those fast AI battles waged on the line of Polity of which rumours abounded but of which he had never found confirmation. It struck him that such vulnerable troops would serve no purpose other than to add to the casualty figures.