Line War

2

The bridge area of the King of Hearts resembled the one Cormac remembered on the original Jack Ketch, with its wide black floor and holo-projection giving him the impression he was standing on a platform out in open space. However, here there were cross-hatched lines traversing the dome above him, destroying part of that illusion, and a whole segment blacked out behind him, while the nose of the attack ship was clearly visible to the fore. It seemed as if he was standing in a viewing dome set just behind the nose, but he knew this area lay well inside the ship’s new armour and its massive composite reinforcements.

No stars were visible through the dome at the moment, since the attack ship was presently in U-space, and the view beyond was a featureless grey. Cormac did not need to register this lack of view to know where they were. His sense of U-space now seemed to take precedence over all his other senses. Even the King of Hearts looked insubstantial all around him. Turning, he could gaze through its structure at the engines, the weapons, to where Scar sat motionless as a rock in his quarters, and to where Arach and Hubbert Smith were sparring in zero gravity.

‘Another attack?’ he enquired, trying to keep himself rooted in the moment and in his present position, for he felt constantly as if he was on the point of drifting, and could be swept away by invisible tides in U-space. He focused now more closely on his immediate surroundings. The bridge he currently occupied had a noticeable lack of chairs — King obviously was not as genial a host as Jack — but at least it did not have those grisly decorations Cormac had seen in the Jack Ketch: the perfect copies of ancient execution devices arrayed like exhibits in a museum.

King did not reply, and Cormac guessed this was because the AI had already stated that there had been another attack. Even though now supposedly again loyal to the Polity, King remained a thorough misanthrope. Cormac therefore tried accessing information directly from the attack ship’s server, but he received utterly no response. Maybe King had simply disabled the device, not liking humans getting too close to its pristine synthetic mind.

‘Tell me about this attack,’ Cormac insisted.

A glaring red dot appeared in the cross-hatching above the ship’s nose, then expanded into a massive red-bordered frame. Within this appeared the image of one of Erebus’s wormships in some area of space where the stars were clustered close together. There was something familiar about these constellations, but then Cormac had seen so many starscapes that wasn’t entirely surprising.

‘The ship arrived shortly after the last underspace interference emitters were withdrawn from the blockade,’ King stated obscurely.

USERs? Cormac only knew of a few places where they had been deployed recently.

‘Where is this, King?’

‘Cull.’

The wormship up there in the frame was pouring out a swarm of objects — it looked as if someone had kicked a woodpile containing a wasps’ nest.

Cull.

King knew plenty about that world, since it was there that both itself and a few fellow AIs had betrayed the Polity to try and grab the Jain technology possessed by, and possessing, the bio-physicist Skellor. The King of Hearts had been the only one of these predators to escape.

‘It used sophisticated chameleonware to get close, but once it began deploying its weapons, that ceased to be an option for it. Unlike the ship involved in that previous attack, this one’s was in the nature of a suicide mission.’

Perfectly on cue, the wormship shuddered, fires igniting inside it, massive explosions tearing away chunks of its structure. Still, however, it continued to emit those bacilliform objects Cormac recognized. ‘Rod-forms’ was the term now being used for them.

Suddenly, within view appeared a Polity dreadnought accompanied by a scattering of the newer Centurion attack ships. One of those vessels employed first a DIGRAW — a directed gravity weapon — for a ripple seemed to speed through space towards the wormship, rod-forms bursting apart in its path. The wormship jerked as it was struck, and then writhed to reform, shedding dead segments of its compartmentalized structure. The attack ships now shot past the alien vessel in a random formation, hitting it with just about every weapon they had. By now the dreadnought was firing too: heavier beam weapons and clouds of missiles that seemed to move just too slowly — many of them glowing and going out under defensive fire. One, however, did get through, and the blast must have momentarily overloaded the instruments that had recorded these events, for King’s screen blanked. When it came back on again, it was to show a collapsing ball of fire, which fell back to a painfully bright point, before exploding out again. Falling away from this, the remains of the wormship had lost coherence, become a loose-strewn tangle, which in a moment flicked out of existence.

‘CTD imploder,’ King noted.

‘Some of it escaped,’ Cormac noted, ‘which rather undermines your suicide-mission theory.’

‘We know where it is, and it will be dealt with,’ King replied flatly.

Cormac grimaced at that then wondered aloud, ‘What was the point of this?’

‘I am receiving transmissions now,’ King informed him.

Cormac waited, arms crossed, enviroboot tapping against the floor. Eventually King deigned to impart to him the relevant information just received: ‘Numerous rod-forms were fired towards Cull. Most of them were destroyed, but two managed to reach atmosphere before they too were destroyed. However, one of them succeeded in firing a single missile.’

‘Damage?’

‘Yes, damage.’

‘Y’ know, King, the Polity consists of humans too and, as much as you may dislike that fact, if you want to be part of the Polity, you’ll have to be ready to talk to them occasionally.’

‘The missile contained a form of nerve gas, which was released inside the sleer-human hybrid village.’ Now the picture changed to show a village of globular houses. No sign of any hybrids, though there was a line of what looked like newly dug graves, each marked by a chunk of sleer carapace driven into the ground at its head. ‘Every one of them was killed,’ King added briefly.

Again, another puzzle.

‘Now, first of all, why attack them?’ Cormac paused for a moment. ‘And why use a nerve gas? Surely that required some knowledge of hybrid physiology, when an explosive would have done the job just as well. It seems rather… specific’

Grudgingly King replied, ‘I don’t know.’

‘Is Erebus insane?’

‘I don’t think so.’

‘Then there has to be a logical reason for its recent attacks on Klurhammon and Cull. We have to presume the hybrids represented some sort of danger, and that meanwhile some other threat to Erebus was extant on Klurhammon. How could the hybrids be a danger?’

‘I do not know.’

‘Dragon?’ Cormac wondered.

No reply from King.

‘Something there I guess…’ Cormac kept on turning it over in his mind, aware that minds much greater than his would be looking at the same puzzle. In a moment of inspiration he abruptly cried, ‘Dracomen! Those hybrids are probably like dracomen: immune to being sequestered by Jain technology! The dracomen on Masada must be warned!’

‘It’s being done,’ King replied.

Being done?

He thought it odd that minds so superior to his own had not worked all this out long before him. Suspiciously odd. Only later did he learn of the wormship assault on Masada — the dracoman homeworld — and how that attacking wormship did not last more than ten seconds after surfacing from U-space. Still, this did not explain the anomalous use of nerve gas on Cull.

He turned and left the bridge to go and join his comrades Arach and Smith. With them he hoped to find a distraction from the void currently extending beyond this ship, a void somehow horribly attractive to him and seemingly intent on drawing him in.

This G-type star had been of no more than scientific interest to the Polity, or anyone else, after the arrival of the first probe here nearly a century before, since, even though it lay within Polity space, it was remote from all civilized worlds. This was why the haiman Orlandine had chosen it. She arrived some distance out and immediately activated her ship’s chameleonware to conceal it, before scanning for the kind of automated watch stations Polity AIs tended to scatter about in places like this simply to collect scientific data… and to watch. There were two of them, she discovered, in orbit of the sun’s single gas-giant planet.

Using her ship’s chameleonware, she spent some weeks invisibly approaching the said stations, furtively docking, and in each sowed a Jain mycelium she had prepared. These mycelia absorbed surrounding material and spread out like hair-thin vines, attaching to each station’s power supply and bonding in parallel to instrumentation. Within a few hours she took control and was able to edit the data the sensors were collecting for the stations’ monthly U-space broadcasts to the runcible AI on the nearest civilized world. Next, and most importantly, she took control of the software that activated upon detecting any unusual activity in this planetary system, and instructed it to send that data direct to her. Once this was done she turned off Heliotrope’s chameleonware — a technology she did not like to run for too long since it was so greedy for energy. Now the stations were blind to her presence, and to anything she did here.

Next she landed Heliotrope on the smallest of the eight moons orbiting this sun’s single planet — the gas giant. This moonlet was geologically active, though what erupted in plumes up to five miles high from its icy volcanoes was not magma but liquid nitrogen, dust and methane compounds. The temperature here rose only forty degrees above absolute zero. There were lakes on the moonlet’s surface and sometimes it rained, but water was as solid as iron and instead the stuff that fell from the blue and green clouds to gather on the surface was liquid methane and ethane.

Because of these low temperatures, what with the sun being a glowing orb only slightly larger than the other stars, there was a lack of energy for Orlandine to utilize. A particular one of the higher-energy worlds closer to the giant — a moon sufficiently heated by geological activity for it to geyser boiling sulphur and for liquid water to sometimes flow on its surface — might have been a more suitable choice. However, that same geological activity made it a dangerous place, and she had decided to conduct a lengthy study of it before relocating there. She confidently chose this world first because already she had experience of using her Jain technology in a low-temperature environment, on the occasion of blowing up a similar moonlet.

Before attempting anything else, Orlandine used the ship’s drill to grind down a few feet into the surface and plant a seed which, powered by Heliotrope’s fusion reactor, germinated and began to sprout Jain tendrils. These began boring through the surrounding rock and ice, using microscopic drills, and to in turn sprout nanotubes which periodically grew quantum processors the size of salt grains along their route. In time this structure would begin to find power sources like radioactives, areas of geothermal activity and reactive chemicals. Once she was sure it was busily working as required, Orlandine decided to go outside.

Orlandine’s carapace — a ribbed metal shell attached to her back from the nape of her neck to the base of her spine, loaded with the advanced technology that made her haiman — was now permanently bonded to her body by the mycelium she had used to increase her capabilities close to those of a major AI, but she hardly noticed it now. The spacesuit she wore — and had only removed once to tend to a wound she had received while preparing that previous icy moonlet for destruction — was specially made for haimans and incorporated the carapace. Similarly it incorporated the cut-down assister frame she also wore: a device that plugged into the carapace and presented two metal arms at just above waist level, and of which she possessed greater and more accurate control than over her own arms of flesh, bone and blood.

She began disengaging herself from Heliotrope’s interface sphere. This took a little while because she needed to physically disconnect from the Jain-tech aboard, and it tended to not want to let go of her — or, rather, there was some part of her that did not want to let it go. Once the numerous hair-thin tendrils linking her to the main mycelium in the ship were all severed, all that remained was her disconnection from the simpler Polity technology. Upon the disengage instruction, a power supply plug retracted from the spinal socket in her carapace and withdrew into the chair behind her, then lines of optic plugs on the ends of curved arms retracted from the sides of her carapace and hinged back out of sight on either side of her chair. The sensation of physical disconnection, though she did remain connected by electromagnetic means, was almost like being muffled from the rest of the world by a thick blanket, so, to compensate, Orlandine opened up the sensory cowl positioned behind her head as she pushed herself upright using the two limbs of her assister frame.

The door into the interface sphere whoomphed up from its seals and slid aside, and she pulled herself up and out into the corridor beyond. At the end of the corridor she entered her living area, then headed towards the airlock. A series of brief mental instructions started the airlock ahead of her cycling open and simultaneously closed up her spacesuit. The segmented back of her spacesuit helmet rose up between her head and the petals of her sensory cowl, while the ribbed chainglass visor rose up from the front of her suit collar to engage with the helmet at the apex, its segments locking together to give an optically perfect finish. She now considered the possibility of installing a shimmer-shield as a suit visor, since it would be more convenient, and as she entered the airlock, then finally stepped outside, a thought set automated machines within the ship to work on this possibility.

Shutting off all but her human sight, Orlandine saw only shadows. However, light amplification revealed thick ice underfoot, eaten away in places to show numerous laminations glittering in rainbow colours. Scanning deep into the ice with her sensory cowl, Orlandine picked out numerous boulders, the branching of underground streams of ethane and, of course, the rapidly expanding capillary-like structures of her recently planted mycelium. In the distance jagged peaks rose like gnarled canines in a deformed jaw, and beyond them the stars shimmered behind wisps of violet cloud. To her right the tight curve of the horizon was more easily visible, soot-black against a pink dome that was the edge of the gas giant, its magnetic fields creating twisted aurorae outside the normal human visible spectrum. Orlandine was enchanted, fascinated, and the species of joy she felt was almost a pain in her chest. Even through only slightly augmented human senses, this view would have been beautiful; seeing it across a wide band of the electromagnetic spectrum made it glorious. And, standing there knowing her capabilities and reviewing her plans, Orlandine felt herself to be the lord of all she surveyed. This feeling lasted only until the signal arrived.

Orlandine experienced a fraction of a second’s confusion, then she realized the signal was coming simultaneously from the two Polity watch stations, for it seemed they had noted something unusual. Momentarily she feared the phenomenon they had detected might be herself, and that something had gone wrong with the mycelia she had seeded in them. But reviewing the data and transmitted images soon dispelled this notion.

It was coming in fast, impelling itself through vacuum using some form of U-space tech Orlandine recognized but had yet to analyse and understand herself. It was one of Erebus’s wormships: a great Gordian ball of wormish movement miles across. A brief flash, and one sensory feed went out. From the other station Orlandine observed a flare grow then wink out from the location of the blinded station. She turned back to the airlock, quickly ascertaining that the first station had been hit by a microwave beam. By the time she was back inside Heliotrope, the other station was gone too.

Within her ship’s interface sphere she swiftly reconnected herself to Heliotrope while simultaneously breaking its connection to the Jain mycelium in the moonlet’s crust below, and launching the ship. Accelerating up through thin atmosphere she engaged chameleonware and felt some slackening of tension upon entering vacuum. She was now invisible and could escape if she so chose, but she was curious. She checked her power supplies, and began bleeding output from the fusion reactor into the laminar storage and capacitors that supplied her esoteric collection of weapons. At first the moonlet lay between her and the wormship, but rounding it she was able to use her sensors to observe the vessel clearly.

Having destroyed the two watch stations, the wormship had opened out its structure and was now launching rod-shaped devices which were accelerating in groups of three or four towards each moon. There were numerous reasons why it might be doing so, and she decided to take a closer look. She was invisible after all.

At a distance of a hundred thousand miles from the alien vessel, Orlandine now had a perfect view of it, but what it was up to was still not really clear. It could be seeding Jain-tech to build up some kind of cache, it could simply be placing its own watch stations or it could be setting up some kind of base. When Heliotrope was fifty thousand miles from it, the ship’s spread structure abruptly snapped closed like a fist and it began accelerating directly towards her. Orlandine just watched it for a moment. Its choice of direction had to be coincidence, for surely it could not see her. Then abruptly she was receiving something — a computer virus of some kind, but oddly not a very effective one. She could have rejected it, but the information it might deliver could be useful so she consigned it to secure processing space. Then came steeply climbing energy readings from the approaching vessel, and she knew she was in trouble.

She flung Heliotrope to one side, hull temperature rising eight hundred degrees, changed direction again, and fired a selection of missiles from her rail-gun. The EM emitter in one missile screamed up to power; two others exploded, spreading clouds of microscopic signal relays and sodium reflectors. This sophisticated chaff cloud blotted the wormship from her view, just as she hoped it blotted out the enemy’s view of her. But how the hell had it seen her? Her chameleonware could baffle just about any sensor. Then, processing this problem while simultaneously controlling her ship and its weapons, and deciding her subsequent course of action, Orlandine realized how: she had become complacent.

The greater the complexity of any technology, the more room there was for error. Chameleonware worked just as long as the enemy you confronted did not know you possessed it. If that same enemy was as sophisticated as you, it would stop looking for what was there, and start looking for what wasn’t there. In environments like this, where there was little backdrop to hide against, the enemy would find you by locating the inherent errors and holes in your chameleonware. It was time, Orlandine felt, to get the hell out of here.

Using the mycelium inside her body to brace it, she slammed Heliotrope into a hard turn. She fired off still more chaff missiles and ordnance, then glimpsed the stab of a microwave beam cutting through the chaff cloud to her right. The wormship became momentarily visible, explosions blooming all around it as it defended itself from her missiles. Ahead of her lay one of the rod-forms, on course down toward the moonlet she had just abandoned. She hit it with the high-intensity solid-state laser she’d recently installed in the nose of Heliotrope, between the jaws of its forward pincer grab. The laser, a coherent beam no wider than her wrist but pumping out the kind of energy usually reserved for particle weapons, cut straight through the object, then must have hit something vital for it exploded like a balloon full of liquid. She fell through a cloud of skinlike fragments, then accelerated into a tight orbit about the moonlet itself.

Beam weapons fired by the wormship turned ice to vapour on the jagged landscape below, burning gulleys through it thousands of miles long. She saw sharp stone exploding from knife-shaped peaks as they heated just too fast for their mineral structure to sustain. Then she was out, accelerating. The wormship, she noticed, had slowed — clearly it, or whatever drove it, had decided not to pursue.

Orlandine dropped Heliotrope into U-space and fled.

As Cormac took the shuttle down into Klurhammon’s atmosphere, the U-space journey to this world now seemed like a distant dream. He was relieved to be back in the solid world with its solid facts all around him, unpleasant though they might be, and perhaps the term ‘realspace’ now possessed more meaning for him than for others.

An occasional blue-green or red flash lit the screen. Briefly, at one point, he spotted a coherent beam punching down to their left through the cloud layer.

‘King is certainly getting enthusiastic,’ observed Hubbert Smith.

‘Yes,’ replied Cormac acidly, ‘and not showing any inclination to land and grab any of that technology.’

‘You’re such a cynic. King doesn’t want any Jain technology — he can give it up any time he likes,’ quipped Smith.

Cormac glanced over at him. Smith sat in the copilot’s seat, using the instruments there to monitor both general coms and the situation on the planet below.

‘What’s the status now?’ he asked tersely, not in the mood for Smith’s humour.

‘We’re getting no communication from the surface,’ the Golem replied, ‘but that’s not surprising. Any survivors will now know the dangers of using general com channels.’

‘The enemy?’ asked Cormac as cloud engulfed the shuttle.

‘Still active,’ Smith reported.

Cormac glanced back at Arach, but the spider drone was showing enough sensitivity not to do his usual tappity dance at the prospect of a fight. They had all seen the pictures from orbit of the wrecked city, the burned-out homesteads beyond it and the numerous corpses — some still walking. He then looked at Scar, who was squatting beside the spider drone, but the dracoman just wore his usual ferocious expression.

Smith went on, ‘After taking out the larger concentrations of Jain-tech with warheads King is now targeting the smaller stuff in the vicinity of larger groups of refugees. He won’t get everything, however, and still can’t help our particular small group of survivors.’ The Golem turned towards Arach and winked.

The shuttle was now vibrating, and soon punched through the underbelly of the overcast. Below stretched a chequerboard of fields scattered with occasional buildings like game pieces — a landscape that much reminded Cormac of the English countryside seen from a gravcar. There were rivers down there too, but their regular pattern demonstrated artificial antecedents. He glanced down at the terrain map appearing on one of his lower sub-screens, then at the cross on the main chainglass screen before him, and decided he didn’t like the inaccuracy of this so queried the shuttle’s computer through his gridlink. Some delay passed before he had the information about their route lodged in his mind like a memory. The delay irritated him but was a necessary consequence of the surrounding ether being filled with Erebus’s subversion programs. Approaching such matters incautiously might easily result in him coming under control of one of those things down on the ground, and it making him fly this shuttle into a mountain.

‘King tells me one of the four survivors is down,’ said Smith abruptly. ‘Probably dead now and being drafted by the opposition.’

‘Damn.’ Cormac wished he could go faster. In his gridlink he accessed the plan King had sent while they were still aboard. In what was often termed a ‘third eye’ he studied the layout of their destination: a building complex located underneath a tree canopy. King was having difficulty identifying targets there. By means of heat signatures and observing their patterns of movement, the attack ship AI had ascertained that there was fight going on in the complex and that four — now three — individuals might be under attack from Jain-subverted humans. Unfortunately, though King should be able to hit a target a foot wide from orbit, the heat signatures of the good guys and bad guys were difficult to distinguish from each other. It also might not be that easy to tell the difference up close. Though Cormac had already worked out a plan of attack and imparted it to the others, and they, professionals that they were, had absorbed and understood it, there was still a chance this could turn messy.

The fields terminated right up against a forest of huge gnarled trees. Accessing information about this world, loaded to his gridlink but not yet loaded to his mind, Cormac learnt that these also constituted a crop — their seed pods producing an interlaced mass of biocontrol modules. Apparently the wood itself could also be wired up as an organic processor, but there was some dispute about felling the trees because of an ongoing investigation into the possibility that they might be sentient. For a moment, as he gazed at the forest, the trees seemed to multiply to infinity, and yet it was as if he knew the position of every one of them. He also glimpsed the buildings presently hidden from normal view.

‘Dammit!’

‘Problem?’ asked Smith.

Cormac concentrated and brought his immediate surroundings back into focus. He really didn’t need the distraction of that other perception now.

‘No,’ he said. ‘Just a little impatient.’

Smith gave him a blank look — no doubt registering Cormac’s momentary departure from usual behaviour. Though they had already seen combat together, Cormac was coming to the conclusion that he didn’t entirely trust this Golem. It seemed an old distrust of AI was stirring inside him, though it was odd how this didn’t apply to war drones. Maybe that was because the likes of Arach didn’t pretend to be something they weren’t.

Drawing closer to the trees, Cormac saw that his first idea about dropping through the canopy might not be feasible, for it was too dense. However, the trees were wide enough apart… He spun the shuttle, coming in backwards while using the main engine to decelerate. Crop debris and cinders blew past. Once the vessel was down to below a hundred miles an hour and mainly using antigravity to stay in the air, he spun it back round again and used tertiary thrusters to bring the speed down still further, then nosed into the forest between two massive trunks pocked with dark holes and as twisted as ancient olive trees. Checking coordinates he saw that the first of the concealed buildings was a mile ahead, and very shortly it came into sight — confirming the veracity of his earlier weird glimpse. Something flashed in the forest: weapons fire, maybe explosives.

Cormac brought the shuttle in to land, fast, retaining attack plans in his mind and adjusting them incrementally to the movement of the heat signatures inside that building complex. Three of them were labelled ‘Human?’ but were surrounded by others that possessed no label at all. The whole picture kept blurring and changing. That, Cormac realized, was also part of King’s problem: the shooting was creating its own heat signatures, and it also seemed likely there were fires breaking out in there.

With the shuttle now settling, blowing up clouds of red and gold leaves and what looked like the husks of giant chestnuts, Cormac hit his belt release and stood. Already the side door was opening and Scar heading towards it. The dracoman did not reach it first, of course, for Arach took the ceiling route above him and dropped with a crash on the ramp just as it hit the ground. Then Arach was out amid the swirling leaves, two hatches opening in the top of his abdomen and two Gatling-style cannons folding up into view. Exiting the shuttle last, Cormac strode down the ramp then whirled round, simultaneously sending an instruction through his gridlink. The autogun on the top of the shuttle spun and targeted him for a moment, which was worrying, then settled into a search pattern. That meant it would recognize them when they returned, but anyone else approaching would receive a few warning shots, before being cut in half by pulse-fire.

‘Okay, head out, you two,’ he said, as he turned back to them.

Arach and Scar immediately departed for the loading entrance situated on the forest road. He and Smith meanwhile headed over to where a set of double doors stood open, the ground before them well churned up, and some kind of heavy autohandler standing idle to one side.

Assessing distances, Cormac said, ‘We’ve got two off to the left, about thirty yards in. The others are starting to reposition — they know we’re here.’

Smith lovingly adjusted the settings on his proton carbine. Cormac pulled up his sleeve, called up a list of programs in his gridlink before sending one to Shuriken, then pulled the star from its holster and tossed it out ahead of him. For a moment the weapon seemed dead in the air, then it steadied and whirled up to speed, extending and retracting its chainglass blades in anticipation. Then, as if deciding to behave itself, it pulled back and hung in the air, humming a couple or yards above his shoulder.

‘They’re approaching the door now,’ Cormac noted.

Smith brought the stock of his weapon up to his shoulder and froze to a motionlessness that simply was not human. Cormac folded his arms and just watched as a ragged figure stumbled into view. It was a woman, badly burned, pink blobs where her eyes should have been. She brandished a large spanner and, without hesitation, started forward with plain intent. Cormac considered giving her a warning but knew that though this had once been a human being it wasn’t now. Out of curiosity he allowed his perception of the real to slip, and again his surroundings took on that odd transparency. He now saw inside her body: her internal organs where exactly they should be, but now all entangled with ropes of Jain technology. She looked packed with snakes.

He glanced at Smith. ‘Take her down.’

The Golem fired one long burst, cutting from head to groin, and blasted the woman back through the door in two burning halves. One chunk of her impacted the next figure coming out. He merely shrugged the burning mess aside and came on. More difficult to judge this time, since he looked quite normal on the outside. But inside, again, he was full of snakes.

‘Halt right where you are!’ Cormac ordered, then glanced questioningly at the Golem, who opened fire on the man, spreading his burning fragments to light up the interior of the building beyond. That Cormac had instinctively concealed his new ability from Smith showed his growing distrust of AI. Perhaps this reluctance was due to his frustration at the Polity’s insufficiently aggressive response to the threat of Erebus, as much as his feeling that the AIs had some unknown agenda.

‘Definitely infected,’ affirmed Smith, tapping a finger against the side of his head. ‘No human would have temperature and density readings like that.’ Cormac filed that fact away for future reference. There was no time now, but it was possible for him to run a program sensitizing his eyes to infrared, and adding a small ultrasound scanner to his equipment might also be a good idea. He could then pretend he was using current Polity technology to see those snakes too.

‘Okay, let’s step it up now — and switch over to com.’ That was a bit of a misnomer, for none of them really used the standard military comunit. He himself could transmit and receive through his gridlink. Smith and Arach contained equipment for that purpose too, as did Scar, though the dracoman’s way of sending and receiving signals had a biological basis.

On the schematic perpetually updated in his mind Cormac saw that the other two had also encountered expected opposition, for the heat map in the zone they entered now became blurred and chaotic. As he stepped past burning and sizzling remnants of what had once been human beings, he held his breath against the oily smoke and barbecue smell. Once through the doors, he used a gridlink program to ramp up light amplification, and then peered around. The interior of the building extended for a hundred yards with gantries looming up above on either side. Ranged about on the floor space were various sorting machines and conveyors, and he also noted a hopper full of fig-like objects — probably the contents of those spiky husks scattered outside. There were no warm bodies present inside this building but their own, but four were approaching its far end from the complex beyond.

‘That gantry.’ He gestured to the one on their right, wondering if he even needed to say that since they all knew the assault plan. Smith headed off to some nearby stairs, bounded up them un-humanly fast and shot ahead along the gantry. Cormac advanced at a more leisurely pace, meanwhile onlining a program he’d only recently discovered in Shuriken’s control suite — uncertain if it was original or had been added by Jerusalem when that AI had repaired the weapon. Now another image appeared in his mind: triangular and seemingly diamond-rimmed, and viewed from a perspective somewhere just above his head, for he was looking through Shuriken’s eyes. A brief programming prod sent the weapon skimming ahead of him. Simultaneously, he checked the position of the four heat signatures, and saw that Smith was now directly above them.

Almost immediately came a detonation, the flash from it lighting the way ahead, followed by several brief spurts of proton fire. The four, obviously identified as being infected with Jain-tech, had been moving close together, so logically Smith had used a grenade, then finished off anything surviving with his carbine. As Shuriken skimmed over the burning corpses, from its viewpoint Cormac glimpsed a smoking limb groping up, only to be incinerated by another burst of fire from Smith.

Now Shuriken wheeled into another long building. There came a flashing, and the star dodged and weaved, pulse-gun fire tracking across a ceiling above it. Ah, these ones were armed. Shuriken shot to one side and cut straight through a grating — its view now only of the inside of an air-conditioning vent. Heat map again: Arach and Scar had separated, and the dracoman had already reached the tunnel bridge connecting this building with the one where the main action was taking place.

‘In position,’ Scar growled over com, upon reaching the target building.

Arach, too, was now positioned where Cormac wanted him. Himself reaching the burning corpses, Cormac stepped quickly round to one side when he noticed snakish movement in the carnage. Finally reaching the turning that led into the second long building, he halted. ‘Arach?’

‘Two subverted haimen. They’ve got pulse-rifles and assister frames. They’re up in the ceiling beams, just below me.’

‘Smith, do you have yours covered?’ he asked.

‘Four raggety-looking things, but they’ve enough intelligence to keep their heads down now. Our three survivors are hiding behind a big automated packing machine. One of them is wounded and the others are running low on ammunition. They’ve got only one simple shotgun and a couple of pulse-rifles between them.’

‘Scar.’

‘Covered. Two of them. One’s a haiman.’

Cormac again turned on his view through Shuriken and saw, in dim shades, the pair of feet belonging to a man inching along through the vent. Then this view turned into a red and pink explosion, and Shuriken shot out the other side of the corpse shaking splinters of bone from its chainglass blades. One enemy less now for Scar to cover. In a moment the star hit another grating, cut through and shot out of it to hover above three individuals. One of them lay flat on the ground, her right arm missing below the elbow, while another knelt beside her applying a tourniquet.

‘Ah shit,’ said the one still standing, as he raised his pulse-rifle to target Shuriken.

Cormac spoke. ‘Put it down. We’re here to rescue you.’

The man hesitated, lowered his weapon. He was a haiman, Cormac noticed. There seemed to be quite a concentration of them on this world.

‘Okay, Scar, you can burn out those vents now,’ Cormac instructed. ‘The rest of you, take them down.’

The sound of weapons fire became a constant drumming while a glare lit up the huge interior of the building. Drawing his thin-gun, Cormac turned the next comer in time to see two burning shapes slam to the floor and fly apart. He glimpsed a head sheathed in flame and pieces of a haiman assister frame scattered here and there. A steady thumping of thermal grenades then began. All along one wall fire belched from air-conditioning vents. Scar’s three targets were now incinerated in the vents they had been using to creep up on the survivors.

‘Smith?’ Cormac queried laconically.

‘One did get past,’ the soldier admitted. ‘But there’s now pieces of him all over the floor, with that weapon of yours hovering above them.’

‘Any of them still moving?’ Cormac queried generally.

When there came no reply, he holstered his gun and headed over to where the survivors were located. Nothing to learn here from the enemy, but maybe those three would have something to say.

The two Dragon spheres hung in space seemingly indifferent to the buzz of activity surrounding them. Ensconced in VR, Mika was apparently standing out on some invisible floor suspended over vacuum, observing the new conferencing unit being brought by two grabships towards the Dragon sphere that had first been able to break its Maker programming. To those seeing them for the first time, both these incarnations of Dragon were indistinguishable, being just spheres of fleshy alien technology now each extending three miles wide. They had grown by taking in asteroidal matter and processing it into something internally. Mika herself could distinguish between them because she recognized the scars on their surfaces. Of course she could, because she had been present when the two had inflicted the wounds upon each other.

The conferencing unit itself was a domed pressurized accommodation structure five hundred feet across and packed with technology for scanning, research and much else besides. The two grabships released it about a mile away from the first sphere and then quickly departed, like acolytes after leaving an offering for some tantrum-prone god. The unit turned slowly in vacuum, gradually being drawn to the intended sphere by its slight gravity. This was obviously not fast enough for, in the fleshy Dragon plain extending below it, a triangular red-glowing cavity opened and a tree of cobra-head pseudopods speared up to snag the approaching object and bring it clumping down on the sphere’s surface like a conjurer’s cup. Once it was in place, the unit followed its installation procedure: barbed spikes stabbing down from its underside to anchor it in place, various probes being thrust down into the alien flesh below it, and all its internal scanning and computer hardware instantly coming online. The pseudopod tree lifted away, hovered for a moment as if undecided about something, then suddenly withdrew back into the sphere. With a huff of vapour the triangular hole snapped shut.

Mika, satisfied that all had gone as expected, held out her hand and under her fingertips a touch console sprang into being. She hit one control only and fell back into blackness and into a seated position. Reaching up she hit the disengage button on her VR helmet and felt the nano-plugs withdraw from her temples. She tilted the helmet back, for the moment keeping her eyes closed, undid the clips along the back of the one VR glove she wore and stripped it off, then carefully opened her eyes to the glare of her research area.

Mika pushed herself out of the VR frame, which at that moment lay in chair format because she had decided not to use all its facilities, and headed for the door.

‘I want to go across right now,’ she said.

‘Certainly,’ came Jerusalem’s immediate reply. ‘A small vessel awaits you in the usual place.’

Mika paused. ‘Usual place?’

‘Yes, where you boarded the last one to transport you across to Dragon.’

Was Jerusalem playing some game here? The last vessel she had taken across had never made it back. She had served merely as a piece of confirmatory evidence taken along by one sphere to help convince the other one that its masters the Makers — who had built Dragon and dispatched it into the Polity — were now extinct and therefore its base programming was no longer applicable. This convincing process had resulted in the two spheres becoming somewhat irked with each other, and to be a mere human being in the vicinity of million-ton alien entities getting irked had not been a healthy option. Mika had nearly died inside her little ship, would have died if the second Dragon sphere had not suddenly grabbed her and, while riffling through her memories for confirmation of everything it had just been told, put her back together like a broken toy. Though quite possibly not the same toy she had been before.

She decided that maybe this time there wasn’t any deliberate subtext to her current exchange with the AI. Nodding reassuringly to herself, she stepped out of her study area and took a familiar route through the cathedral spaces of the great ship which somehow seemed unfamiliar, though she knew it was not they that had changed.

For Mika was sure something had been fundamentally altered within her, and that this was the source of her present feeling of disconnection, of alienation. When the second sphere had dragged her from the wreck of her little ship she had known herself to be dying, most of her bones broken inside her ruptured flesh. In such a situation Jerusalem would have uploaded the mind from her dying body and put it into another, undamaged body. But the sphere chose to repair her… and she knew how Dragon spheres were not averse to tinkering with living creatures. Scanning her subsequently, Jerusalem had discerned some oddities that it claimed to be harmless and without apparent purpose, but she wasn’t sure she believed this. Now she wanted to see what Dragon itself had to say about the matter.

Finally reaching the vestibule to the bay, Mika donned a spacesuit before heading out onto a catwalk. The bay concerned was an upright cylinder with this walkway running around the perimeter and a circular irised hatch occupying the floor. Even as she stepped out on the walkway the hatch in the floor slid open abruptly and a lift raised her intership transport vessel into view.

This one-man vehicle — in shape a flattened stretched ovoid — was without airlocks, any major drive or an internal AI. It could be flown by a pilot when necessary, though most often a remote AI controlled it. It rested on skids, had two directional thrusters mounted to fore, and a small ion drive aft. It looked utterly indistinguishable from the one Mika had so nearly died in. Trying not to hesitate at the thought, she stepped down from the catwalk and climbed inside.

Once properly settled in the single seat, she said, ‘Well, the last time I flew one of these wasn’t so great. If you would, Jerusalem.’

Through her suitcom the AI suggested, ‘Scenic route?’

This was precisely what it had said that last time, and Mika shivered. Then, as she strapped herself in, she decided to give exactly the same reply as previously.

‘If you have sufficient time.’

The wing door sealed itself shut with a crump, and instantly lights began flashing amber in the bay as pumps evacuated the air. As an extra precaution, even though the craft was fully sealed and contained its own air supply, Mika closed up her spacesuit. The grav went off, then the ceiling opened to reveal the stars. Swivelling to point down, the fore thrusters fired to propel the craft out into space. It turned nose-down over the Jerusalem’s outer ring, which from this point always looked like some vast highway running around the equator of a metal planet. The giant research vessel was in fact a sphere five miles in diameter, and the thick band encircling it contained shuttles, grabships, drones and telefactors, all of which constituted the AI’s macro toolkit.

Mika surveyed her surroundings beyond the mighty ship. The inhabited hot world of Scarflow lay to her right, cast into black silhouette by the white glare of its own sun. The gas giant lying within the orbit of that same world was not visible at present. Here and there she caught the reflected glint from an occasional ship, but that was all. Looking at status maps of this system gave her the impression of a comer of space swarming like a disturbed beehive, since, to complement the remains of the fleet that had escaped Erebus, many additional Polity vessels had now arrived. It was only when viewing outside the Jerusalem, without computer enhancements to contract the distances, that you realized how small was all this activity against the sheer scale of… everything.

The craft turned and accelerated towards two white dots like blank cold eyes: the Dragon spheres. As the short journey commenced, Mika considered what she so far knew about them. Four spheres, conjoined, had originally been sent by the Maker civilization, then located in the Magellanic Cloud, to seed Jain nodes that would lead to the eventual destruction of the Polity. Dragon, however, had refused to comply, and a Maker had come here to force the issue. During the ensuing conflict one sphere had managed to cause massive human fatality on a planet called Samarkand, and that’s where Mika and Cormac had come in. He had destroyed the offending sphere, and the Polity had accepted the Makers’ lies. Dragon, though able to disobey the Makers in one respect, could not, because of its base programming, disobey in others. Dragon, in consequence, could not reveal the truth about its purpose.

In a following conflict a second sphere had sacrificed itself to create the dracomen. But why? To produce an army of beings immune to Jain technology, apparently, but, like in everything else to do with Dragon, there were layers of complexity underlying that simple answer. And now, fairly recently, the Polity had learnt that the Makers’ own Jain technology had destroyed them, and it was this fact that had enabled one of the two remaining spheres to break its own programming and subsequently, with Mika’s help, break the second sphere’s programming too. Dragon, it seemed, was now a free agent and a good friend to the Polity.

Mika snorted to herself at the very idea.

The two spheres rapidly expanded in her view, their colour changing from the bland white of reflected sunlight to red and umber shot through with streaks of sapphire and swirls of yellow. The two alien entities swung around each other equidistantly, as if connected by an invisible rod. This was some kind of gravity phenomenon generated by them both, since their natural mass did not provide sufficient pull to keep them in place like this. Avoiding that same phenomenon, her craft descended to take a slow vertical orbit around the second sphere. This one was clearly recognizable to Mika because it was the more badly scarred: nearly torn apart by the same weapon that had almost done for her. After the conflict between the two of them they had merged for a while to conduct some kind of healing process, nevertheless still they retained their scars. Perhaps, like Scar the dracoman, they retained these for identification purposes, or perhaps they just wore them out of some sort of pride.

The little craft now skimmed above hillocks of scaly flesh like cut gemstone, masses of red tentacles nestling in their lees like strange copses. She observed a wide-split seam in the surface at one point, occupied by cobra pseudopods each possessing a single sapphire eye where the head should rightly be. It looked busy down there — a conference of snakes. Eventually the craft broke away from its tight orbit and headed over to the other sphere, where the Dragonscape below was little different, until finally descending towards the flat plain where the conferencing unit lay embedded. It landed beside a single airlock, bouncing and then settling in the low gravity. Mika clambered out, but felt some reluctance to step away from her craft until she saw that curved spikes had folded down from above the skids to anchor it in place, then she bounced and drifted across to the lock.

And entered a Polity embassy in a Dragon’s realm.