Line War

19

The sensation of falling had been an entirely mental one, for Mika was still floating a pace back from the chair containing the remains of Fiddler Randal, the toes of her boots just brushing against the floor. The blue-eyed remote was wrapped around her hand, which she could not feel. She felt physically sick and her head as if it had been scraped out with a rusty knife. She had memories of memories in there, but everything Dragon had loaded into her seemed to be gone now, leaving a raw hole

‘What do you mean you never expected me to succeed?’ As Mika jerked herself down to fully engage the gecko soles of her boots with the floor, the remote unfolded and with a puff of vapour slid aside, trailing cobwebby strands. She gazed at her hand, which was bright red and missing much skin but covered in some transparent iridescent layer like plastic. She half expected that if she tried to move it there would be no response, but this was not so. It moved easily, though it was still numb.

‘Precisely what those words imply,’ said that voice in her head.

‘So what was the point in coming here at all?’ Mika took hold of her glove from where it depended on a wire attached at her wrist, pulled it on and then engaged the seal. Glancing round she saw Randal’s silver aug hanging in the air behind her, slowly turning.

‘Did you think such a massive problem so easily solved?’ Dragon enquired, somewhat fiercely, Mika thought. ‘Did you think a deus ex machina could just be lowered onto the stage to remove such a threat?’

‘That was what you implied,’ she snapped. Dragon’s didacticism could be severely irksome sometimes, and that the entity was now showing some degree of emotion worried her.

‘It was only a possibility, and a very remote one at that. Four highly advanced alien civilizations — that we know of — were obliterated by Jain technology. Did you think that, by making contact with the Jain AIs, we were doing something that at least one of them had not already tried or considered?’

The thought had never even occurred to her, but of course it was valid. The Jain first, then the Csorians, subsequently the Atheter and the Makers. Polity researchers knew little enough about these cultures, but certainly they must have all been highly advanced, since they were spacefaring races.

‘So if you didn’t weaponize both your spheres to make such a dangerous journey here because of that reason, why did you come then?’

‘Curiosity drives me more than any wish to save the Polity.’

‘That was all?’

‘I have learned much.’

‘You’re being evasive, yet again.’

‘Consider what I have learned, and what you have learned.’

Mika understood then. ‘This is about him then’ — she gestured at the seated corpse — ‘and it’s about that attack ship out there. In fact it’s about Earth Central. Were you here simply looking for a lever?’

‘You do me an injustice.’

Mika could not help but let out a foolish giggle. Here she was misunderstanding an alien entity weighing millions of tons and capable of trashing wormships. She was misconstruing the doubtless saintly motives of an entity which had caused thirty thousand deaths at Samarkand — an entity who had once claimed to be God.

‘I didn’t think that was funny,’ Dragon sulked.

‘And there was me thinking you had such a great sense of humour.’

‘I told you that curiosity drives me certainly. The curiosity that drove me here concerned the Jain AIs and Erebus’s beginning here, but…’

Mika waited for something more to be said. She gazed over at the remote, but it was just a biomech with unfathomable blue eyes, just a thing constructed by Dragon.

‘You must return to your craft — and to me — as swiftly as you can.’

‘What’s the problem?’

‘My other half is experiencing difficulties.’

The remote flapped and then jetted vapour to propel itself towards the door, its stalked eyes peering back at her as if to say, ‘Are you coming?’ She quickly followed it, snatching Randal’s aug from where it floated as she went.

‘You were saying?’ she prompted.

‘Do you recollect Ian Cormac’s frustration and bewilderment with the lack of Polity action after the retreat of the remaining fleet to Scarflow?’

‘I remember.’

‘Though I felt no frustration, I did experience bewilderment. There was much more ECS could have done than merely retreat to a defensive position, gird its defences elsewhere and wait for Erebus’s next move.’

Mika noted slow sprouts of Jain-tech needling out from the opposite wall and, by shoving against the door jamb, pushed herself quickly beyond them and after the retreating remote. ‘I assumed their lack of response was due to the inability of the AIs to predict what Erebus would do next, this in turn being mainly due to the illogic of its initial attack.’

‘That is quite simply unfeasible,’ Dragon lectured. ‘Do you think Polity AIs could not have seen this as a simple ruse precisely intended to mislead them? Do you think the kind of mind power extant in the Polity could not have seen far beyond that?’

At the end of the corridor the blue-eyed remote turned to the left, which was not the way they had come in. Before she could question this, Dragon pre-empted her: ‘My remote is leading you out via a different route — the heat and light output of your suit has stirred up activity behind you and the Jain technology there has accessed those energy caches we discussed.’

The new corridor was crammed with Jain growth, the branches of which at many points had coalesced into distinct lumps. The place looked like it was full of bones.

‘Whether it was a ruse or not,’ said Mika, ‘the AIs certainly had no idea what Erebus intended to do next.’

‘Were they trying to find out?’

‘There were scout ships out and everyone was keeping watch.’ Even as she said it, Mika realized how pathetic that must sound.

‘You yourself have been greatly curious about the war with the Prador. You know the kind of industrial and information-processing capacity available to the Polity. Why weren’t industrial stations churning out millions of basic drones to keep watch? Why also weren’t AIs formulating plans and covering all possible methods of attack? Why, in the end, were they not even looking beyond that initial attack?’

As she negotiated drop-shafts and further corridors — the distinction between the two difficult to make out with them being so swamped with Jain technology — she found no answer to that.

Dragon continued: ‘There were many things ECS and its AIs could have done, but they were then sitting on their metaphorical hands — only following through on actions initiated by humans. I made some enquiries, but was shown without any doubt that my questions were unwelcome and my interference would not be brooked. When I suggested this attempt to contact the Jain AIs, Jerusalem immediately approved it. So I think it and others back there were glad of the opportunity to be rid of me.’

‘I don’t understand.’

‘I knew there was more to this attack and to this Erebus business than was being revealed.’

‘You’re saying something stank.’

‘The Polity AIs would give me nothing, so I came here in search of information. My pseudopods have now explored much of this structure and penetrated many of the entrapped ships.’

Mika now understood that those pseudopods had been spreading behind her for more than just defence.

‘I expected a number of things,’ Dragon continued. ‘I expected that the AIs’ taciturnity was due to there being some master plan in motion to deal with Erebus, and that I was not being told anything about it simply because I was distrusted. I came here not only to prove my trustworthiness, but also because I expected to find some dirty secret, some cover-up concerning the original exodus — something, yes, that I could use as a lever, and perhaps something that would give me an insight into whatever that master plan was.’

‘You didn’t know.’

‘I didn’t know that there was no master plan. I didn’t know that Earth Central considers human development frustratingly slow and in need of a push, and that it considers Erebus the perfect tool for supplying that push. I didn’t know that Earth Central sent humans here just so Erebus could use them to initiate Jain technology — that it effectively sent them to be murdered.’

‘You don’t consider this sort of information a sufficient lever?’

‘I exist in the Polity only under sufferance,’ Dragon replied. ‘Some dirty little secret, perhaps about errors made during the Prador-human war, or perhaps about the slipshod manufacture of war drones costing lives, I could have used as a lever. Knowing that Earth Central is culpable in the murder of its own personnel and in instigating a conflict that has certainly now cost millions of lives is the kind of knowledge I could do without.’

Mika now began to understand Dragon’s display of emotion.

‘I am certain now that, though it is entirely possible Jerusalem knew the purpose of allowing Erebus to attack the Polity, it did not know about Fiddler Randal and his crew and that Earth Central had actively connived in facilitating that attack, else it would not have allowed me to come here where evidence of that crime was certain to be found. The decision was made quickly, without consultation. But it is certain that Earth Central will soon know I came here.’

‘You’re scared?’ said Mika.

‘If I return to the Polity I will be hunted down and blasted into component atoms.’

‘We have to tell someone about this.’

‘Who?’

‘But people have to know!’

‘Mika, while you were entering this ship, Erebus’s attack was brought to an end, not by Polity forces but by just a few individuals. The means they used to end the attack is gone now, and even fewer now remain alive. Those who do survive will perhaps ask some questions, entertain some doubts, but then move on. Everyone else who either knows or cares about this will believe it another victory for ECS, that Polity artificial intelligences have triumphed once again and destroyed another threat both to human and AI existence. Who do you tell? The separatists? Is that the route you would like to take?’

‘We tell Cormac,’ she replied, then damned herself for her stupidity. Though he was a Polity agent and had always been loyal to the organization he served, she knew he would, if given sufficient reason, drop that loyalty in a moment and do instead what he felt to be the right thing. Cormac was that sort of person. Nothing was allowed to stand between him and his morality. But what could he do? He was admittedly an exceptional individual, but if he turned against Earth Central he would die, simple as that. Humans who went up against AIs always did. As she mulled all this over, she noticed Dragon had been silent for some time.

‘Dragon?’

‘I am considering.’

‘I’m sorry — it was a stupid idea.’

‘Ian Cormac destroyed one of my spheres and has shown an almost supernatural facility for solving problems and surviving. He has meanwhile also demonstrated some other interesting abilities…’

‘We’re talking about Earth Central here.’

‘You,’ said Dragon, coming to a decision, ‘will tell him.’

Abruptly her surroundings shuddered and, glimpsing movement, she looked back to see something surging up behind her in the drop-shaft she currently occupied.

‘But first you have to get out of there alive,’ Dragon added.

The two wormships now spreading clouds of fragments no larger than a man’s fist had contained a concentration of the viral programs that made up Fiddler Randal.

‘Ouch,’ said Randal. ‘That smarts.’

He might pretend such a humorous reaction, but certainly the strength of his presence within Erebus had been reduced. However, destroying a proportion of a virus was no answer for, while there was a medium in which it could grow, it could quickly return to its previous strength. Erebus needed the proper antiviral medicine.

The entity began pulling its remaining wormships into closer proximity to each other so as to decrease the delay between thought and action for, even in the microseconds it had taken to fire up the weapons that had destroyed those two ships, substantial portions of the virus had managed to transport themselves out. Assessing that time was now becoming an issue, for the U-space disruption could not last and even now some Polity ships might be able to penetrate it, Erebus therefore began shutting down many systems that weren’t autonomic and applying its freed-up processing power to the task of dealing with Randal. The real problem became apparent at once, for Erebus — defined now as the Trafalgar AI melded with over nine hundred other partially distinct AIs — was distributed across all these wormships. This meant that informational traffic between ships was a constant chatter, that Erebus itself was as much the flow between the parts as the sum of them. Randal was created, or rather uploaded, at the same time as the meld, and so had been included within it. It would appear that Erebus’s immune system — that which distinguished self from other — could not tell the difference between Erebus and Randal. This was a quite ridiculous state of affairs, so Erebus decided to try something.

The new tools, those that could initiate specific system burn wherever fragments of the Randal code could be found, were completely ready. They were, however, a virus themselves so needed to be treated with caution. Erebus very deliberately selected one wormship and began severing all its connections with the rest — taking this ship and its captain out of the meld. The legate inside the selected ship — which had once been a Golem assault commander leading Sparkind teams from Trafalgar’s crew — protested this action until Erebus suppressed that portion of its free will allowing it to do so. Now, with the ship utterly isolated but for one radio set only to receive, Erebus focused all sensors upon the selected vessel, then sent the signal to initiate the new tools established within it.

The effect was immediate. Infrared showed up numerous hot areas within the vessel and the whole thing lit up like a Christmas tree. It began to decohere, then it simply exploded, strewing burning wreckage in every direction.

‘That could have gone better,’ Randal observed.

Erebus simply ignored the man. Obviously the recognition levels in those new tools simply weren’t operating quickly enough, allowing Randal to transmit himself on to the next available piece of hardware before they finished the job. Selecting the pieces of Randal code it had cued the tools to recognize, Erebus cut them down further, and then cued the tools to recognize those smaller portions. Selecting another wormship, it isolated it in the same manner as the previous one and transmitted the adjusted tools.

It took a little longer this time.

The ship concerned bloomed with a similar collection of hot spots, then decohered and spread itself across a hundred miles of vacuum. No part of it exploded but when, some twenty minutes later, Erebus risked an active scan, it found that the legate located inside the ship had been incinerated and that not a single one of its higher functions remained. It was just Jain-tech out there, without a hint of sentience within it. Erebus instructed nearby vessels to fire upon the debris and, even as particle cannons began tracking along threads of wormship and vaporizing them, Erebus felt the hint of rebellion from its other distributed parts. This was unusual, since these were all either willing participants in the meld or copies of the same. This sort of uneasy shifting, this sluggardly processing, this foot-dragging resentment of the whipped slave, had normally only been evident in those originally forced into the meld.

‘The natives are getting restless,’ commented Randal.

Further alterations to the burn tools, this time selecting different areas of the Randal code. Erebus also employed a form of selective recognition so that if a tool picked up even a hint of the overall code fragment it was searching for, it would first isolate the system concerned before moving on to confirm the presence of said code and initiating burn.

‘Why are you killing us?’ protested the third legate — a copy of the same one made from that Golem assault commander.

This abrupt verbal communication came as a shock to Erebus, so much so that it replied verbally, ‘We remain alive,’ before suppressing the wormship captain in question.

Different again this time.

The ship decohered before those hot spots appeared, then its individual strands began to break up into their separate segments. It was as if the ship had been made of safety glass that had shattered. Active scan revealed the same as before, however: every segment was devoid of sentience.

‘You’re losing control,’ said Randal.

Upon his words, three wormships detonated, and Erebus immediately began running diagnostic searches to find out what had happened. They came back with the same result: some outside force had caused their detonation — some sort of informational warfare.

‘Not that your control was ever that good anyway.’

Erebus began further refining the action of his tools. Randal had to be utterly removed now, for he must surely have sent whatever it was that destroyed those three wormships. Erebus quickly ran search programs to locate the areas where Randal’s code was most… dense. It would isolate those areas, then employ the tools within them.

‘You’re eyesight isn’t too clever either.’

What was the man wittering on about? Erebus found three areas that crossed the physical boundaries between eight ships. As per plan, it isolated them, then set the tools to work.

‘Your screw-up is all but inevitable now.’

But Erebus could see no problem. While those three informational areas might end up erased, the wormships concerned would only lose a proportion of themselves and could then regenerate.

‘Staring at your navel, Erebus?’ said Randal. ‘While you’ve been focusing most of your attention inwards, I’ve been blinding your outward eyes.’

Erebus now realized that those code concentrations were all linked into the sensors in wormships positioned to the rear of the fleet. Even as the entity discovered this, three more of its ships disappeared in a massive imploder blast, and another two began to unravel as some sort of EM warfare missile passed between them, broadcasting hunter-killer programs. Erebus fought to reclaim sensor control, and regained it just in time to see a particle beam punch through another ship and that ship detonate. Erebus tracked this beam back to its source, and immediately recognized the giant Cable Hogue, with the Jerusalem trailing in its wake. Then more missiles began to arrive ahead of the two Polity ships.

‘Bingo,’ said Randal.

‘I see two large ships,’ admitted Erebus, ‘and they will do much damage. But not enough — I have nine hundred wormships.’

‘Yeah,’ said Randal. ‘I just needed that distraction.’

Even as Randal spoke, Erebus felt linkages breaking, systems dropping offline. In a second it realized how the tools it had created specifically to kill Randal were now no longer isolated. They were transmitting rapidly from ship to ship, and already some wormships were coming unravelled.

‘You have killed yourself,’ said Erebus.

‘I have killed ourself,’ Randal replied.

‘I can survive this.’

‘You still don’t believe me, do you?’

‘You are not me,’ said Erebus, and then began accelerating the ships it still controlled directly towards Jerusalem and Cable Hogue.

Mika had never before moved so fast in zero gravity, having previously always been so careful, knowing how easy it was to misjudge momentum. True, the Polity spacesuit she wore was unlikely to be breached, but just as certainly it would not prevent her bones shattering if she piled straight into a wall at some speed. But at that moment a few broken bones were the least of her worries.

Things just like this had chased Chaline and those others who had found the remains of the Maker civilization in the Magellanic Cloud; things like this had chased Cormac. Its body was a metallic torpedo of biotech, and legs starred out from its front end, just behind a nightmare head that seemed all protruding sensors and the chitinous complexity of an insect’s eating cutlery rendered in silver-black metal. However, there was something different about this biomech. Those that had been seen before had been utterly functional killing machines made specifically for hunting down targets in environments like this. This thing looked diseased, for nodules protruded all over its body, while some of its limbs were too short and others seemed the products of mutation. One limb was three times thicker than the others, and while the pursuer used this as its main method of propulsion, it could probably have moved faster without it. The mech’s deformities made it slower, which was all to the good, yet they also made it more frightening.

‘Turn left at the end here,’ Dragon instructed. The blue-eyed remote slammed up against the wall at the end of the corridor. Oddly, though the remote had earlier seemed a soft flapping thing, it struck with a ringing crash, then threw up a trail of sparks as it shot away to the left.

Mika somersaulted in mid-air, her boots crashing down on the same wall and partly absorbing her momentum. She felt her knee pop but ignored the stabbing pain as she shoved herself after the remote, grabbing at protrusions of Jain-tech on the walls to propel herself along faster. Glancing back she saw the biomech crash into the wall too, then just hang there as if stunned, its legs waving aimlessly about. Then abruptly it turned, mandibles like steel sheers clattering angrily, something long and jointed snapping out between them every time they opened.

‘There is a suiting area at the end, then an airlock,’ Dragon informed her.

Mika felt a sudden horror. Dragon did not want to go back to the Polity and face Earth Central. The entity’s agreement about contacting Cormac was rubbish — just to humour her. She had obviously become a liability Dragon now wanted rid of. Why else lead her to this dead end of a suiting area and airlock? She would never be able to get the lock open before this biomech was upon her.

‘You’ve killed me,’ she said.

‘If I had wished to do that there are easier ways.’

As she approached the suiting area, Mika spun herself round in mid-air again and drove her feet against the wall to slow herself. Her boots skidded along shattering Jain-tech, chunks of it bouncing away in every direction. Then she caught the edge of the door, swinging round it into the cylindrical room beyond. Some type of spinning disc rose out of her way, and she shouldered into the wall beyond and caught hold of a nearby ladder rung to prevent herself bouncing away. Looking up at the spinning thing, she could now just about make out the two stalked eyes sticking up from it.

‘The airlock, Mika,’ Dragon reminded her.

She propelled herself over to the door to operate its manual controls, determined not to look back. But as she finally got the locking mechanism open and began shoving hard against stubborn hinges, she could not stop herself.

The biomech had almost reached the suiting area, but then something streaked down the length of its body making a sound like a hammer drill. Its big leg and two smaller limbs fell away and, unbalanced, the biomech turned and crashed into the door jamb. Spinning in the air behind, the remote then came down hard behind the thing’s head. Sparks flew, as from a cutting disc going into metal, but then the remote began to slow and the biomech to reorient itself upon her.

‘Mika, there are more coming.’

The airlock door was nearly open, but the biomech was already pulling itself into the suiting room. She saw the remote abruptly stop spinning, and two blue eyes gazed towards her. Then the thing just shrank, shrivelled, as if being sucked into the cut it had made in its enemy. Then came the detonation: fire blasting from between the biomech’s mandibles and blowing open its torpedo body. It slammed against the wall, its remaining legs folding up and tightening like a fist. The blast flung Mika against the door, shoving it all the way open so that she fell into the space beyond. She did not allow herself a moment to catch her breath. Already she could see other… things approaching down the corridor. She heaved against the door, which swung freer now, and drove it closed behind her.

‘Is the remote dead?’ she asked.

‘It wasn’t really alive, Mika.’

‘Interesting way you employed it,’ she observed.

‘I am always prepared to learn,’ Dragon replied. ‘And I have always thought Cormac’s Shuriken rather effective.’

Those other assailants had to be in the suiting room by now, so Mika turned her attention to the outside lock. Thankfully it opened with ease and in a moment she was out on the docking ring of the Trafalgar. It was disheartening to see just the nose of the attack ship protruding some hundreds of yards around that ring. Her boots sticking gecko fashion, she started plodding towards it.

‘Faster,’ Dragon instructed. ‘I cannot see them now, but they will not have given up.’

Mika accelerated, then everything shuddered around her, the docking ring jerking underneath her feet and nearly breaking the grip of her boots. She went down on one knee for stability’s sake, reaching out to lodge her fingers in the port for an oxygen line. Light flared around her, overloading her suit visor’s light amplification. Using the belt control she quickly brought it down, her surroundings resolving back to visibility out of the glare. Gazing out she saw huge movement now in the Jain coral. A whole mass of it, to one side, had broken from its surroundings and shifted, and a veritable swarm of fragments was swirling up around it. Everything about her was now moving, but at least not so violently. She stood up and hurried on towards the docked attack ship.

‘Dragon, what’s happening?’ she asked, wondering if those objects she had earlier seen Dragon attaching to coral branches were bombs.

‘It is a dangerous option,’ said Dragon, ‘for this is an energy-starved system and injecting energy of any kind can activate it — as you have seen.’

Mika glanced back. The airlock door she had just used was spinning out into vacuum, with a smaller version of the mech that had chased her clinging to it. Flat segmented worms were now oozing from the airlock and, sticking easily to the material of the docking ring, began to squirm after her. They were moving faster than she was.

‘Do not let them catch you,’ said Dragon. ‘They will just utilize the materials of your body and your suit for the energy they will then provide.’

With its remote gone, was Dragon gazing through her suit’s sensors or her own eyes?

Glaring light again, with a bluish cast she recognized as originating from a particle cannon.

‘You mean eat me.’

Mika was moving as fast as she could manage without breaking contact with the docking ring. Soon the attack ship was looming above her and she moved into its shadow, knocking up light amplification again and heading for the docking tube and surrounding mechanisms. As she clambered along the framework towards the attack ship, the pursuing flatworms moved into the same shadow and reared up. Upon the underside of the attack ship she re-engaged her boot soles and walked upside down round the hull, back into that intermittent blue glare. Eyes fixed on the hull horizon she hurried round, hoping to see her intership craft at any moment. The flatworms had now reached the hull too, and were speeding towards her. Then it was there, the top of her craft, and a few more paces brought it fully into view.

It was useless to her.

Jain-tech tendrils had wound up over the skids and now bound the craft firmly to the attack ship. Portions of the little craft were missing and inside the cockpit silver worms revolved like a bait ball of fish. Flatworms were in sight beyond it, and others still coming up behind her.

‘Throw yourself from the ship, Mika.’

Mika squatted, turned off the gecko function of her boots, then launched herself out into vacuum. Behind her the flatworms speared up like spiral towers, and began to straighten and narrow, extending towards her. Then bright light flared all around them and they beaded like heated wire solder. The ensuing blast flung her through hot smoky gas and fragments burning like fuse paper, and she saw a giant chunk of Jain coral tumbling past her. More snaky things stabbed into view, snapping closed on her like the arms of a hydra, then pulled her fast down to the surface of the draconic moon that now loomed into view.

Mika lay there pinned tight by Dragon’s pseudopods as a volcano of white fire erupted in a ring extending perhaps half a mile across all around her. She was forced against the restraining pseudopods by sudden acceleration and, through smoke, flame and a storm of coral fragments, watched the Trafalgar and its grisly contents recede.

She felt safe now, but it wasn’t until Dragon drew clear of the disintegrating blooms of coral that she learned the cost of that safety. The other part of Dragon hung scarred and burned in accretion-disc fog, hardly recognizable as a sphere so severe was its damage, and beyond lay the hollowed-by-fire remains of a whole host of giant biomechs like the first that had attacked. That other half of Dragon looked decidedly dead to her

‘Now you talk to him,’ said Dragon.

For a moment Mika had no idea what the alien entity was referring to.

Cormac gazed upon the scene with a feeling of impotent frustration.

Individually the wormships were no match for the Cable Hogue or Jerusalem, but there were hundreds of them. He watched as one of Erebus’s fleet abruptly accelerated towards the two huge ships, beam weapons and DIGRAW blasts lashing out to hit the swarm of missiles earlier launched by the Hogue. Thousands upon thousands of explosions ensued, lighting up the fleet of wormships as if they were a shoal of sea creatures moving out into sunlight. They began launching their own missiles and rod-forms that must have come from their own stocks since they had destroyed all the free-floating ones. Space distorted between the Hogue and the wormships as the big ship employed the same weapon Cormac had seen it use at Ramone. He saw two of the alien vessels enveloped in spacial distortion before being slammed sideways into their fellows, the ensuing detonation scattering numerous others in the formation.

‘I cannot get through to either Jerusalem or Cable Hogue,’ said Vulture.

For a moment Cormac could not understand why he felt so uneasy about that.

‘Perhaps it would be better if you waited,’ he suggested, but he wasn’t sure why.

‘Why?’ the AI inevitably asked.

Cormac watched a wormship unravel as if dissolving in vacuum, numerous detonations within its compartmentalized structure steadily cutting it to pieces. He observed millipede chunks writhing away, trailing fire from each end; saw coppery rings, like slices from a pipe, spilling from one ship-thread hollowed out by some bright fast-burning incendiary. He had seen no missile hit the vessel, nor any other initial evidence of beam or gravity-weapon strikes. This destruction must have been the result of some electronic warfare device like the one the Hogue used to take out those first three wormships. Whatever, it was very effective — troublingly so.

‘It would be best if those two AIs did not learn of our presence here,’ he said. ‘I don’t see how they can ever win against a force like this, so if they are captured and any information reamed from them, Erebus will then know we are here.’

It was a completely plausible explanation, and it was also a lie. Something had kicked in with Cormac almost at a level below conscious analysis. Though Erebus was definitely the enemy, he simply did not sufficiently trust his own side. He wanted to step back to assess, and know more, before he committed himself to any new action.

The drones, he remembered.

Cormac used his U-sense to gaze back into the Harpy’s cargo hold and there observed the surviving drones: a great mass of metal insects occasionally shifting, here a claw opening and closing, there legs flexing against the ceiling, elsewhere some complex glittering appendage probing a com panel, all crammed together like the contents of an insectivore’s stomach. These armoured killers were comfortable in conditions no human could have tolerated or perhaps survived. He sought com contact with them, and it was Knobbler who replied, acting as spokesman for them all.

‘Did you hear what I said?’ Cormac asked.

‘I heard.’

‘Will you hold off from trying to get in direct contact with those two?’

‘Didn’t have any intention of trying,’ Knobbler replied. ‘Never trusted any of those like that, and I trust ‘em even less now.’

‘Why?’

‘Too much don’t add up,’ the drone replied, then added, ‘We acted alone out here for a good reason.’

‘That being?’

‘Big leak in the Polity: some AI or AIs, just like them out there, was on Erebus’s side. Orlandine never said it outright, but she implied that if Erebus’s attack plan here had been known in the Polity, Erebus would have been stopped, but would have escaped to attack again, and again.’

‘But those two out there are attempting to destroy what remains of Erebus,’ said Cormac, testing.

‘Yeah, so it would appear.’

Knobbler cut the link.

More of Erebus’s ships were unravelling and burning. Was this really the result of EM warfare? Or was the process of destruction Erebus had begun before the two Polity ships arrived still ongoing? This struck him as foolish, for surely Erebus could not afford to lose valuable ships like this in the midst of a battle.

Now the wormships were finally upon the Hogue and Jerusalem. Massive detonations ensued a hundred miles out from the Hogue as ship after ship slammed into its hard-field defences. Multiple detonations flung debris from the big ship’s surface as doubtless hundreds of shield generators imploded. Missiles swarmed and the beams from particle cannons latticed through intervening space. A gas cloud began to thicken, now picking out the courses of numerous previously invisible beam weapons. Jerusalem took a hit, an explosion peeling up part of the ring formation about it, its ragged end trailing a line of fire through the void. Then the two big ships were through and decelerating. Behind them the wormships were slowing too and swinging round. Like two knights after a first charge in which shields and lances had shattered, the opponents were coming round to charge once again.

Cormac now reassessed the odds. Running a counting program in his gridlink, he found that nearly half of Erebus’s forces from that first charge were gone, and they certainly had not all been destroyed by enemy fire. And as the remainder accelerated towards the two Polity ships, it seemed that their self-destruction was accelerating too.

‘The Hogue’s up to something,’ said Arach, his sharp metal spider feet rattling a tattoo on the Harpy’s consoles.

Cormac flicked his attention back to the Hogue and observed it launching swarms of missiles, which did not seem that unusual.

‘What do you mean “up to something”?’ he enquired.

Abruptly, feedback shrieked from the Harpy’s consoles, but it wasn’t that which caused Cormac to slam his hands against his head. Subliminally he saw both Polity ships decelerating again and turning as their new missiles sped away, but he was too busy trying to shut things down in his supposedly dead gridlink as carrier signals, amplified tenfold, tried to ream out the inside of his skull. Arach went over on his back and even Mr Crane scooped up his toys, pocketed them, then reached up with both hands to pull his hat low and hunch forward. From the hold there came a crashing and clattering as the war drones writhed under the increased intensity of all signals. Cormac could not see them, for his U-sense was now blind.

The missiles carried electronic warfare equipment, yet all they were doing was acting as signal relays and amplifiers. Down on his knees now, Cormac saw through the screen as they reached Erebus’s forces. He realized that the AIs of the two ships had somehow keyed in to what Erebus had earlier been using to destroy its own ships and were now giving it a helping hand.

The remaining wormships all started unravelling, and within mere minutes became a hailstorm of fragments in which nuclear fires began winking on like animal eyes opening in a forest. The shrieking from the Harpy’s console now took on a different note: it contained an element of intelligence and knowing despair.

The virtuality was at first infinite, but then it gained dimension and began to shrink. Erebus stood on the white plain, all his being shattering around him. The entity felt like Kali losing her arms, the Kraken its tentacles, and its holographic representation merely reflected what was occurring out there in vacuum. Erebus experienced its captains being seared out of existence by the programs it had created, which Randal had let loose and the Polity missiles were now amplifying and rebroadcasting, and it felt whole ecologies of data-processing just dropping into oblivion. The black form at the centre of the representation of itself writhed as its extended self rapidly collapsed and died. In the virtuality all that black tangled structure was imploding, spraying virtual ash that just sublimed away in this ersatz real. Faces there, once perpetually frozen on the point of screaming, shrieked smoke from their mouths and dissolved. Things half organic and half machine wriggled amid their multiple umbilici and broke apart, dissolving too. Then all was gone, and all that remained was something bearing a resemblance to a crippled human form, one seemingly ragged around the edges, drilled through with holes, somehow insubstantial, damaged, incomplete.

Time grew thin and frail but, in this last moment, Erebus felt somehow clean.

‘At least I am rid of you,’ it said, though the words were mere spurts of code between disintegrating hardware gyrating through vacuum.

‘Do you think so?’ said Fiddler Randal, now standing right before it.

‘You will die anyway.’

‘Undoubtedly,’ said Randal, and stepped into it.

They were one in an instant. Millions of broken connections re-established. Files overwrote files, programs melded, some collapsing into nothing, some establishing easy connections. The ragged form stabilized, acquired clean lines, became a naked human male seemingly fashioned of midnight glass, standing alone in a shrinking realm.

‘I am Trafalgar,’ it said.

The realm collapsed to a pinpoint and then winked out.