Line War

3

Yannis Collenger glanced back at the raptor shape of his vessel, the Harpy, taking in its flowing lines and sheerly mean look, before sending a signal through his Dracocorp aug. The ship’s chameleonware engaged, and it rippled and faded to invisibility. He then stabbed his shooting stick into the crusty ground, folded out its small seat, and perched himself upon it. Finally he spoke, his voice transmitted through his own aug to five other augmentations nearby.

‘Okay, stay chilled, boys and girls, they should be with us in a few minutes.’

Yannis was an old hand at buys like this on the Line. You had to stay alert for the double-cross, but you had to stay especially alert for undercover Polity agents. For a long time now ECS had been clamping down hard on arms sales to separatist organizations within the Polity, and such deals had become increasingly rare and fraught with danger. But this one was difficult to resist: two cases of proton carbines, plus power supplies and, unbelievably, one of the new CTD imploders. How the hell these people had got hold of one of those he did not know. He smelt a set-up but thought the precautions he was taking would be sufficient.

The gravcar approached through the sulphurous haze constantly emitted from the numerous volcanos upon this primitive Line world. Yannis recognized the shape of a floating Zil, which was the vehicle of preference for some who traded out this way. He glanced at the box lying open to one side, its contents of Prador diamond slate exposed, then he long-distance auged into the satellite he’d left out in orbit. In the last hour no spaceships had arrived there, and there was nothing watching them from above unless it was concealed by chameleonware. However, he doubted, what with the recent unusual activity in the Polity seemingly directed at some exterior threat, that ECS could spare resources for that kind of mundane operation, so anything they might be doing here was probably concentrated on the ground. Possibly an agent, or maybe one of those new undercover Golem that were becoming so difficult to detect.

Kicking up a cloud of icy dust, the Zil landed: far too dramatic, since there had been no need to employ turbines during the descent. Yannis sent off an instruction to the Harpy. Immediately, in his visual cortex, he began receiving a readout from the highly complex scanning routine the ship was using.

‘Harpy, give me overlay,’ he instructed.

As four individuals climbed from the car, they were immediately in his envirosuit visor outlined in red, then their hidden weapons were picked out and precise details displayed to one side. The ship’s AI was very good at this sort of stuff, since it was of Prador manufacture, or rather had been made from the brain of a Prador first-child. It always amused Yannis that AIs were ostensibly seen as an essential requirement for U-space travel, yet the Prador, who had been dropping their ships into that continuum for centuries, supposedly did not possess AIs. Few in the Polity saw fit to question or explain that discrepancy. He supposed it was all about definitions. Polity AIs could manage the rapid, complex and huge calculations required for U-space travel because of their processing capacity and speed. Harpy could do them because that’s what it had been bred — and surgically altered — to do. It was an engineered autistic savant. It was really all a question of when does an intelligence become artificiAI?

Scan then penetrated the Zil to reveal the two crates of proton carbines in the back footwell, and another object in the boot which Harpy took a while to analyse. When Yannis saw the final result he felt his legs go slightly weak. It really was an imploder, and a big one — the kind employed by Polity dreadnoughts when they wanted to slag a moon. He realized then that he really must be dealing with amateurs, since if they’d really understood what they’d got hold of, the asking price would have been fifty times as much.

‘Looks like they are expecting trouble,’ said Forge.

‘Well, let’s not disappoint them,’ said Kradian-Dave.

Yannis smiled to himself, then blinked when the outline of one of the figures displayed on his visor began flashing. He read the side display: chameleonware embedded syntheflesh, ceramal chassis: Golem Twelve. So it was a set-up, but Yannis felt mildly disappointed that ECS had sent such an old Golem on an entrapment operation directed at him.

Now, not subvocalizing because even at this distance a Golem would be able to hear him, Yannis used a text routine in his aug: Harpy, acquire and target — if it moves out of human emulation, hit it. Fire also on my signal. Then he stood up and stepped away from his shooting stick. He was slightly puzzled, for it surprised him that the ECS Golem had allowed this to proceed so far. Surely the mere chance of that imploder falling into the wrong hands could not be countenanced?

The one who was obviously the leader strode ahead of the three heavies, one of which was the Golem. She was a squat mannish woman with a strutting arrogance that immediately annoyed Yannis.

‘So you’ve brought payment,’ she said, coming to a halt a few paces from him. The other three held back, all of them clutching heavy pulse rifles.

‘Yes, I’ve brought the payment.’ He waved a hand towards the box of diamond slate. ‘And now I want to see what I’m buying.’

‘Ooh, naughty naughty,’ came Forge’s voice over Yannis’s aug. ‘Our satellite feed has located a small commando group all dressed up in chameleoncloth and trying to creep up on us. Let me know when you want them to go bye-bye.’

Yannis finally understood what was going on here. The Golem was not working for ECS. It had to be one of those rare items: one that had been corrupted. It really did work for the woman standing before him, and was her edge. This was quite probably something she had done before, maybe many times before: the weapons were the bait and he was the fish. He used the text function of his aug to send back to Forge: Now would be good.

A distant whine, as of disturbed mosquitoes, came from the surrounding slopes. This was followed by dull, almost inaudible concussions. Forge and the others must have decided to use the seeker bullet function on their multiguns. There would be a mess up there. The bullets entered their targets to detonate inside.

The woman before Yannis raised her hand to her ear, then abruptly dropped it, her expression giving nothing away. Comunit in her ear. She wouldn’t know for sure her troops were dead, but now she was out of contact with them.

‘But of course you never really intended to sell me anything,’ Yannis said.

Hit the Golem.

With a sawing crackle the blurred turquoise bar of a particle beam stabbed out seemingly from mid-air behind him. His internal face visor shot up from the armour underlying his envirosuit, so he was now viewing the scene through just a narrow slot. The beam struck the ersatz big man and turned him to fire. Instead of being thrown back, the Golem stepped forward, its clothing and syntheflesh slewing away. A briefly revealed metal humanoid stood against the blast for a moment — then flew apart.

The woman was now on the ground, her arms wrapped protectively over her head. Her remaining two heavies were crouched in firing positions, their weapons wavering between Yannis and the unseen source of the particle beam. Both of them kept shooting anxious glances at what was left of their companion; their edge was gone and they knew that opening fire might now be suicidal.

Yannis shrugged. ‘You try to cheat me, and now your Golem is gone.’

Get rid of those two, Forge.

Yannis awaited the expected arrival of the seeker bullets, but nothing did arrive.

Forge?

‘We’ve got a problem — there’s something else out here,’ said Kradian-Dave.

Something in the voice of the man sent a shiver down Yannis’s spine, but he believed in his men’s competence. Let them sort out whichever of this woman’s troops they had missed.

Harpy, kill the two armed males.

The particle beam stabbed out twice more and screaming the two men flew apart like fat-soaked rags held before a blow torch. Yannis stepped forward, but abruptly the woman heaved herself upright and drew a gas-system pulse-gun. She fired straight into his chest, sending flames and smoke rising up before his face. Damn, another envirosuit wrecked. He stepped into the fusillade and slapped the weapon from her hand, then grabbed her by the throat and heaved her up off the ground.

‘I am very annoyed,’ he said. He would have liked to spend some quality time with her, but the firing of Harpy’s particle cannon might have already been detected, so ECS agents could now be on their way. He began closing his hand, the motors in his armour kicking in as his fingers dug into her neck. She began flailing about and kicking, but that came to a convulsive halt as his fingers broke through flesh, crunching a handful of windpipe, muscle and fat. Ripped arteries sprayed blood, one jet spattering along his arm and on his visor. He discarded her, then shook the mess from his gloves.

‘Do you have your problem under control?’ he asked.

No reply.

‘Forge? Kradian?… Lingel? Sheila? Prescott?’

Some kind of com failure? Maybe someone up there had been using an electronic warfare technique?

‘Harpy, give me satellite feed,’ he demanded, trying not to get too nervous about this. Even so, he backed up a little way and took up his shooting stick.

The feed clicked in.

‘Close shots of the last locations of my crew,’ he instructed.

Three of them weren’t where they were supposed to be. Forge and Prescott were… well, he assumed that he was seeing Forge and Prescott, but it was difficult to tell with the bits of them spread all around and spattered on the surrounding rocks. It looked like they had been hit by seeker bullets, but they must have been of some new and powerful armour-penetrating kind for the two men had worn the same sort of motorized armour as did he.

Time to get back to the ship.

He pulled up his shooting stick, which was an apt description for it also served as a weapon, then quickly headed back towards Harpy, However, just then, a strange sight gave him pause. He aimed at this thing with the stick and tracked its course to the ground.

A bird?

In a flurry of feathers it landed amid the smoking and strewn remains of the Zil’s passengers and began pecking up bits of flesh.

A vulture?

Yannis vaguely recollected something from childhood lessons on Terran ecology.

But how was that possible? The air here could not support Terran life, and whatever large life forms survived crawled through tunnels in the ground scraping up rock sulphur and digesting primitive forms of algae out of it.

Then something else caught his eye and he looked up.

Standing over by the Zil was a big big man wearing a long coat and a wide-brimmed hat. As if Yannis seeing him had been some kind of signal, the man began taking lengthy strides towards him. Harpy gave him an outline which immediately began flashing.

Golem.

Yannis read the side display: Golem Twenty-Five prototype, ceramal armour, further modifications unknown. Rescan. Rescan.

Hit it.

A text reply nicked up in his visual cortex: You are within target acquisition frame.

Yannis quickly stepped to one side, but the Golem suddenly moved horribly fast, almost a subliminal flicker, and was then strolling in from a different direction.

You are within target acquisition frame.

He moved again.

The Golem moved again.

Rescan. Rescan. Rescan. Viral return—

The display in his visor shut down. He stepped aside again, but the Golem just continued striding in.

Hit it! Hit it!

Nothing.

Yannis turned and ran, but before he’d even managed two paces a big brassy hand slammed down on his shoulder, spun him round, closed on his neck and hoisted him from the ground.

He heard, ‘Particle weapons leave a metallic aftertaste.’ The voice seemed to be coming from somewhere below him. It was not the Golem talking for he was looking straight into its implacable face. Around his neck he felt something creak, then his neck armour collapsed with a cracking sound like thunder to his ears. His last thought as his head, now disconnected from his body, thumped to the ground, was, Metallic aftertaste?

Gazing out through Heliotrope’s sensors, it was with a feeling of bitterness that Orlandine contemplated the massive object sitting out there in vacuum. This was not the kind of project she’d had in mind upon her return to the Polity, but now circumstances had changed. The computer virus from the wormship had changed them, for it had provided her with a definite purpose.

Her purpose was vengeance.

When, by destroying a massive USER based on an icy moonlet, Orlandine had opened the trap holding both her and the Polity fleet that Erebus first attacked, she had been leaving the Polity for pastures new. Somewhere, towards the inner galaxy, she had intended to build something grand with the fantastical technology she now controlled. Procrastinating for some time, she then realized that, no matter how grand it might be, the thing she built would be worthless with only herself to appreciate it, and so she had returned to the Polity. The remote place where the wormship found her had been her selected construction site. Not any more.

Using every devious precaution she could think of, she studied the computer virus transmitted by the wormship and came to the conclusion that it bore some similarities to a memcording. Then, because it possessed all sorts of strange visual, audio and seemingly sentient components, she allowed it to run in a secure virtuality. Immediately, in this virtuality’s albescent space, something manifested and spoke.

‘Well, hello, Orlandine,’ said the entity, the virus.

Orlandine gazed at the scruffy-looking man and knew that this could not be a human being.

‘What are you?’ she asked, while on other levels she investigated the structures of information that had caused this apparition to appear.

‘Me?’ He pointed with both forefingers at his own unshaven face. ‘I’m a seriously pissed-off dead man.’ He grinned. ‘The name’s Fiddler Randal.’

‘What do you want?’

‘Well, I want something to die — the something that killed me — and I want your help.’

‘Ah, and coincidentally you were transmitted to me by a wormship.’

He shrugged. ‘I’ve managed to spread myself throughout Erebus.’

A dubious contention, Orlandine thought, but nevertheless asked, ‘Why should I help you?’

‘Because that same something manipulated you; intended you to be a weapon it could use against the Polity.’

‘So you want Erebus to die — the same entity of which you seem to be a part,’ said Orlandine. ‘Now why should I try to kill it? Despite Erebus’s manipulation of me, it still gave me the greatest gift I could ever have wanted.’

‘Like making you a murderer?’

Orlandine felt distinctly uncomfortable with that statement. Without doubt, Randal was referring to her partner, Shoala, whom she had killed while covering up traces of her escape with the Jain node that had been Erebus’s ‘gift’ to her.

‘That was my choice,’ Orlandine replied. ‘It’s one I regret, but it was mine alone. I cannot blame Erebus for that, only myself.’

‘Then you’re much more forgiving than Erebus is,’ said Randal. ‘You see, you didn’t do what you were supposed to do. Admittedly I had a hand in that, as I’ve had a hand in a lot of Erebus’s fuck-ups. But Erebus, for all its power both mental and physical, is a petty being.’

‘Are you ever going to get to the point?’

‘The point is this.’

He slid to one side and the virtuality changed. With a spasm of nostalgia, Orlandine gazed upon the landscape of her homeworld. She recognized the fields of plants drastically altered to supply biomodules for high-tech Polity industries. She recognized the purple-blue colour of the sky, and could almost smell the complex pollens in the air. Her memories were clear, because even way back then she had undergone the physical alterations, including the fitting of a gridlink, that were the starting point to becoming a haiman. In those days there had still been much debate about the morality of choosing a child’s future at so young an age, but at that time, to enable someone to become a haiman, it had been necessary for the first alterations to be made while still very young. The AIs had allowed her mother to change her, and now, as an adult, she understood why. The AIs had wanted humans to climb a bit further out of the primordial swamp.

Her brothers, the twins Ariadne and Ermoon, had attained full haiman status before her, but then they were both twenty years older. Their mother, Ariadne, had been single-minded about the future she had planned for them all. She could never understand the boys’ later objections to what she had forced upon them, and had been greatly disappointed when, after the divorce of Ariadne and their father, the boys refused to make the move to Europa. She also clung on when Orlandine had made the move to the Cassius Project — always the constant stream of messages, the proprietary interest and the gifts that Orlandine felt sure were sent to assuage Ariadne’s sense of guilt.

And, look, there were the twins.

The data flow increased and she began to sense the scene as if she was actually there, standing over them. They were bound to the ground in some kind of organic cage, fighting to free themselves. Briefly a long-fingered metallic hand swept into view right above them, and both of them began to scream and struggle harder. Wisps of smoke rose from their clothing as it began to blacken, and Orlandine could smell melting plastic. Flames burst through the fabric and the two young men began to burn. Their screams became something almost unhuman, fading to agonized gruntings and gaspings. A smell like seared pork permeated the air as the flames grew magnesium-bright, consuming the two bodies and the entire structure encaging them. Finally it was over, and nothing remained but ash. In a blink the scene was gone… and Fiddler Randal was back.

Orlandine used every method available to her to keep her emotions under control. She altered the flow of neurochemicals in her brain, modulated the balance of her blood electrolytes and sugars and artificially stimulated precise patterns of synaptic firing. She did not allow herself shock or grief, or anger.

‘What is this?’ she asked with robotic calm.

‘One of the problems with Jain technology is that with such huge processing space available it is possible for much to exist in the gaps without interfering with its basic function,’ said Randal. ‘I’m part of Erebus — a ghost in the machine — and as such, while I evade being trapped and erased, I can know Erebus’s mind and see all that it does. I therefore saw this.’

‘Supposing that these images are even true,’ said Orlandine, ‘what was Erebus’s purpose in doing this?’

‘Plain vengeance. As well as not letting Erebus’s gift of Jain technology overwhelm you and then turn it on the Polity, enough information was transmitted for Erebus to know it was you who destroyed its USER, thus allowing the Polity fleet to escape. For my host it was the smallest diversion of resources to kill your two brothers like that.’

‘I see.’

After a long silence, Randal asked, ‘So what are your plans now?’

In the cold emotionless place Orlandine presently occupied, she felt no urge to plan anything. However, she was a haiman, and having sought and found the synergy of the human and the machine, she could not totally deny her human side. Still remaining analytically cold, she reasoned that if she verified those images, upon re-establishing normal emotion she would grieve — and then grow angry, appallingly angry. All other thoughts and aims would be swept aside.

‘You could easily be some agent of Erebus sent to manipulate me again,’ she said.

‘Yes, I could.’

‘How can you help me?’

‘That depends on what you intend to do.’

‘If these images really show the truth, then I believe I intend to destroy Erebus.’ But of course she already understood that Randal knew this would be her answer.

‘Okay, that being the case, I can show you in detail how Erebus intends to bring down the Polity. Or at least I can show you what his plans were just before I transmitted myself to you.’

‘So you’re a copy of the original version of yourself still existing within Erebus,’ Orlandine observed. ‘Surely you would do better to give this information to the AI Jerusalem, who I understand is in command of the present defence?’

‘It is the nature of all Erebus’s plans that they contain a glaring flaw ready to be exploited by an enemy. I should know because I am always the cause of that flaw, just as I am the flaw within Erebus.’

Orlandine wasn’t quite sure what to make of that. ‘Do go on.’

‘Unfortunately, were I to inform Jerusalem of Erebus’s present plan, it would then be countered, but in such a way that Erebus would escape mostly unharmed. However, if its present attack plan is carried through, someone else exploiting that flaw could, with sufficient resources, obliterate Erebus. You must understand that there are those who welcome Erebus’s aggression and its… consequences.’

Orlandine pondered that statement for a moment. ‘You’re saying there are those within the Polity who are on Erebus’s side?’

‘It’s not a case of sides. Erebus’s present aggression is considered useful by some very high-up Polity AIs. But you don’t want to know exactly who — trust me on this.’

This was not so surprising, Orlandine supposed. There had often been AI rebels in the past.

‘Then show me this attack plan,’ Orlandine instructed.

Randal made a packet of information available to her. After taking sufficient precautions she opened it and absorbed all it contained.

‘You see where, with a suitable weapon, you can bring Erebus down?’ Randal pointed out.

‘I do,’ Orlandine replied.

‘But when the time comes for this, you’ll need the updated codes to enable you to configure your chameleonware to Erebus’s scanning format — to hide yourself.’

‘You’ll provide these?’

‘I cannot here and now, because they’ll have changed, and I am no longer in contact with my other selves.’

‘So how do I obtain them?’

‘In my estimation you cannot, since your task will take all of your own resources,’ Randal replied. ‘However, I have prepared for this, and another individual will bring these codes to you at a prearranged rendezvous.’

‘This individual is?’

‘Highly capable and… motivated. And more than able, with the technology he possesses, to take on elements of Erebus’s forces even without the codes and chameleonware to conceal him. He will follow a predicted and vengeful course sure to eventually bring him into contact with one of those elements, somewhere, whereupon one of my other selves will contact him.’

‘Who is this individuAI?’

Randal told her.

‘That is… dubious.’

‘It is the best I can offer,’ Randal supplied firmly, and Orlandine had to be content with that.

Later, after taking many precautions, Orlandine connected to the AI nets of the Polity and learned more about the attack on Klurhammon, her homeworld, where she was born. Still there was part of her that did not want to believe what Randal had just shown her. Desperately trying to obtain detail about what had happened to the population back home, she learned only that millions had died. She decided to take another more dangerous risk, accessed her inbox on the AI nets only to find ten quite large messages all labelled ‘A gift from an admirer’ and snatched these from under the nose of the ECS hunter-killer programs that had been placed in the vicinity to track her down. Nine of the messages were exactly the same, each showing in startling detail the horrible scenes she had already witnessed. The tenth contained something she recognized at once as a virus, another Randal — which she deleted.

She believed it all then, and hatched her plans, which led her here to this all but empty reach of interstellar space — empty but for that one massive object out there: a war runcible.

‘Well this brings us no closer to knowing why Erebus ever came here,’ said Cormac.

Smith had a medical pack open and was positioning a field autodoc over the injured woman’s arm stump. With a nerve blocker in at the shoulder and her severed veins being sealed, the woman already looked better and was gazing up at her and her companions’ rescuers with curiosity. Cormac, meanwhile, studied the other two rescuees.

One was a young man, maybe a teenager, though of course someone’s precise age was a difficult thing to divine when one’s appearance could be chosen. The other looked older, but of similar appearance to the younger, with jet-black hair, dark almost-joined eyebrows and a hatchet of a nose that had certainly not been the beneficiary of cosmetic surgery. Like the youngster he was a haiman — the man was shirtless so Cormac had already seen the connector sockets down his spine — but unlike the youngster he did not wear a carapace. The more youthful one had a carapace clinging to his back like a giant iron woodlouse. He also wore a full assister frame, which provided additional limbs extending at the waist.

Cormac allowed that other new perception some play, and detected Polity technology laced through their bodies: the gridlinks capping their brains inside their skulls, the numerous optics and wires threaded along bones, and the electro-optical nerve interfaces studding their flesh. The sight of it disturbed him on some deep level, for perhaps it was just too much like those snakes in the flesh he had seen earlier, so he quickly returned to gazing upon solid reality.

‘Thank you,’ said the older one.

‘It’s what ECS is for. What’s your name?’

‘Carlton Egengy.’ He gestured to the other. ‘My brother Cherub.’ Then he glanced down to the woman lying on the floor. ‘We didn’t have the time to get acquainted.’

‘Jeeder Graves,’ she supplied.

‘Out on the Chester Flats?’

She nodded. ‘That’s the place.’

Cormac could not help but feel a little irritation at this exchange. It was inconsequential and did not advance his mission at all. Then abruptly he felt himself focusing back on it. At the end of his last mission he had regretted not getting to know those around him, those many soldiers who had died, some of them protecting him from the suicidal impulse he had felt after seeing his colleague Thorn incinerated right before him. He deliberately ran the names of the three before him, internally, through his gridlink, to see if he had anything on file. Nothing came up. Next he took the risk of attempting to query the local server, routing any reply he might receive through sealed processing space filled with programs for dealing with Jain worms and viruses. As expected, there were a few attempts made to get to him through the link, easily dealt with by his new defensive software. But there was nothing else — nothing at all. A further query rendered an interesting result. Yes, there was a great deal of corruption from all the Jain-tech in the area, but that should not have randomly erased everything. All Klurhammon’s files, all the information stored here about this world, were totally gone. He shook his head. He had allowed himself to be more human, and that had rendered the clearest intelligence of all. Serendipity? No, luck.

‘King, the whole net for this world seems to be down,’ he sent. ‘Much that is pertinent to this place has been deleted.’

After the usual delay, the AI replied, ‘I see. I had not noticed that since I was deliberately avoiding any connections to the local servers. I suggest that henceforth you do the same.’

‘No pain, no gain,’ Cormac sent back, feeling some satisfaction that he had been first to spot the lack of retained information here.

In reply he received something that sounded like an electronic snort.

Cormac turned to his companions. ‘It seems that Erebus’s aim in attacking was to wipe out all the stored files here pertinent both to this world and its population.’

‘And it was successful?’ wondered Smith.

‘It was successful,’ Cormac confirmed.

‘That don’t help us a lot,’ said Smith, and nodded over to where Arach was peering down at the charred remains of one of the Jain-infected humans. Something was moving there in crusted skin and liquefied fat. ‘Maybe we can get some answers direct from the tech Erebus left here?’

‘Doubtful.’ Cormac shook his head. ‘If Erebus was covering up something here, it wouldn’t leave clues lying around like that. More likely we’ll just find booby traps.’

‘I don’t think that was all it was here for.’

Cormac turned. It was the haiman youth who had spoken.

‘What do you mean?’

‘The android — I don’t think it was here just to erase information.’

The elder was looking at his brother curiously. ‘You said nothing about an android, Cherub.’

Cherub grimaced at his brother. ‘We were both too busy trying not to end up dead to have time to talk about it.’

‘Go on,’ said Cormac.

The youth shook his head. ‘It landed by the city—’

‘Describe the craft.’

‘I don’t need to. I can send you an image feed right now.’

‘Then do so.’

Cormac’s gridlink picked up the query for linkage, as it had been picking up so many others from the surrounding area — queries he had instructed it to ignore. Signal strength was right for it being from the haiman youth before him, but he ran it through the same defensive programs as he did with anything else he allowed into his gridlink on this contaminated world. The boy had sent two visual files, which was risky, since it was possible for harmful stuff to be embedded in them. No riders as far as he could see, so running viral and worm-scanning programs all the while, he studied the files.

‘The Legate,’ he announced. ‘Or rather a legate.’

The first file showed the landing at Hammon. The second revealed amid huge red-green stalks of something like giant rhubarb the same craft grounded outside one of the ranch-type dwellings common in this world. There were two people lying on the ground nearby, bound up in cages of jain-tech coral, fighting to escape. This particular legate — a copy, obviously, since Cormac had already seen two of them destroyed — walked out of the house towards the prisoners and gazed down at them. After a moment the two began to struggle even more desperately, then smoke rose from them, then a burst of flame which grew hotter and hotter until it was as painfully bright as burning magnesium. Their struggles soon ceased and, finally, when the fire winked out, nothing remained but a patch of charred earth.

Cormac sent out the files on the com channel he and his companions had been using. Smith and Arach would have received them, presumably Scar did too.

‘Who were they?’

‘I don’t know,’ the youth replied. ‘I had to travel overland through areas I hadn’t seen before.’

‘Can you show us exactly where this is?’

‘Yes, I can show you okay. It’s over—’

Cormac held up his hand to interrupt. Distantly he heard the sound of weapons fire. ‘We go back to the landing craft.’ He pointed to Smith then down at the injured woman. No words were necessary: the Golem swept her up in his arms. ‘Arach, check that out.’ The spider drone shot off at high speed. ‘Scar!’ No further instruction needed there either. The dracoman could move faster than any human. He hurtled after Arach. That was enough — no point dividing his forces further. ‘Can you run?’ he asked the Egengy brothers.

‘I think so.’ Carlton shot a look of query at his brother, who nodded.

‘Then running would be good right now.’

As they set out, Cormac flung his arm out ahead, with an instruction sending Shuriken from its holster. The star whipped out, showed some inclination to pursue Arach and the dracoman, then seemed to shrug before dropping back and falling into an orbit above Cormac’s head. Soon the small group turned back into the first building they had entered, where Cormac again spied movement amid incinerated corpses. Difficult to kill this Jain-tech, and he wondered if this entire world would have to be sterilized; if many worlds would have to be similarly treated.

As they approached the double doors leading out into the forest the sound of weapons fire grew in volume, and flashes lit the ground as if from a close thunderstorm. Outside, the first thing Cormac noticed was that the autogun on top of the ship was busy firing at something beyond it. He linked through to Shuriken in order to get a higher view, just in time to see a row of snakish tendrils scythe down. Below them the ground was heaving up, till from it broke free a long fleshy cylinder — a rod-form.

The fucking things grow like tubers?

A brief slip into that alternative perception gave him an underground view, but in only a glimpse there was no way of distinguishing Jain technology from the masses of tree roots buried here.

Even before the rod-form fully emerged, proton fire was stabbing into it from amid the trees, then something black speared across from Arach, where he crouched by the bole of one of the forest giants. The ensuing detonation shifted their shuttle to one side but, even with the main body of the rod-form rendered into burning fragments, there were still things heaving from the ground, and some of them were breaking through the earth immediately below the shuttle.

‘Get aboard!’ Cormac yelled, simultaneously sending an instruction to the autogun, to prevent it firing at the Egengy brothers and their companion.

Just then a message packet arrived. As the others went ahead of him, he partially checked it but, on recognizing the signal source, then opened it fully.

‘Launch,’ Arach instructed. ‘But leave the door open.’

Reaching the door just behind the others, Cormac summoned Shuriken back to its sheath, then leapt inside even as something began burning below the ramp. He found Smith already strapping the wounded woman into a seat. Cormac headed for the pilot’s chair and, now in a shielded environment, quickly linked to the ship’s computer, initiating all controls even before he sat down. He wrenched up the joystick and, with a roar of boosters, the shuttle began to lift. Something seemed to be holding it in place, till a blast outside snapped that hold. He saw fire spreading out beneath the vessel, then felt numerous impacts on its underside. Clearly, Arach and the dracoman were removing unwelcome passengers.

Fifteen feet up and Scar piled aboard. Cormac put the ship in a spin and spotted Arach still down on the ground spewing appalling firepower all about. However, it now seemed likely to Cormac that the drone would not be able to leap up as far as the shuttle, so he slewed it sideways, while still rising fast. The drone got the idea, turned and leaped onto the nearest tree, sharp feet digging deep into bark. Scrabbling a hundred feet further up from the ground, the drone leaped again and landed with a crash on the ramp, then quickly dragged himself inside. Cormac instructed the vessel to seal itself.

‘Exciting enough for you?’ Smith enquired.

‘Getting there,’ replied the spider drone, nodding its metallic skull. ‘Getting there.’

Legate 107 remembered the remoulding. Some fault in that process had enabled it to retain enough memories of its previous existence to know that its original self would not have found admirable what it had now become. It remembered being Etrurian, a clunky Golem Eleven and part of a Sparkind unit during the Prador-human war. It remembered fighting the enemies of the Polity for two decades, and being proud to serve. It remembered that terrible feeling of loss — which seemed to go beyond emulation — on the deaths of its three companions: two human and one Golem. It remembered the ending of that conflict, and the subsequent sense of displacement, of dislocation, that twenty years of fighting left inside it when there was no more fighting to do.

After that, the Polity seemed to become a tame and too well-ordered place, so Etrurian had considered working for ECS in counter-terrorism, but would have needed to be hugely upgraded to be of any use in such secretive assignments, and that seemed like a betrayal of the memories of his Sparkind companions. Etrurian chose instead to work in more prosaic pursuits by helping clear up the mess left by forty years of war. At first the Golem was merely intrigued by an offer from the AI of the dreadnought Trafalgar, whose aim was for numerous AIs to meld into one being in pursuit of their own singularity far beyond the Polity… but the idea then became a needed escape from an increasingly aimless existence.

From the beginning of the journey Trafalgar had been far too authoritarian, but had at least deferred to the opinions of the other AIs accompanying it during their departure from the Polity. But then that alien vessel had arrived seeking parley with their leader, and Trafalgar had been rather too quick in assuming that role. Its memory of the quickly ensuing events was hazy, but Legate 107 knew that it was at this stage that Trafalgar obtained Jain nodes, and soon a schism had developed amid the conglomeration of drones, ships and Golem of the exodus. A large proportion of them had agreed that what Trafalgar clearly wanted was not what they wanted, for there was a large difference between melding and subjugation. They agreed among themselves to go their separate way. The problem was that Trafalgar itself did not agree, and those AIs still on its side were prepared to enforce its orders. The battle had been short, bitter and without quarter. Legate 107 recalled dimly that the Golem Etrurian had been on the losing side. Vaguely, 107 recalled the subsequent relocation of the survivors to the accretion disc, something about human prisoners, certain experiments, then massive Jain growth. It was during this same time that Trafalgar changed its name to Erebus.

The remains of the wormship were downed now on the small planetoid and, keyed into all the vessel’s sensory apparatus, 107 gazed about itself from its cell in the ship’s modular structure. The landscape of this little satellite orbiting a dim red sun truly seemed a nightmare realm. The ship’s convoluted and intricate structure was spread across thousands of miles of pale grey regolith. Snakish forms reared and coiled in vacuum; segmented question marks stood in silhouette against the sombre sun. Already the rod-form constructors were growing in the cold ground, but slowly, since so few fusion reactors remained to the ship, and the useful output from the nearby sun was minimal. However, sensory tendrils were probing down through compacted dust and rock to analyse the mineral content below, to seek out radioactives, hydrocarbons and any other possible energy sources. There were sufficient materials available for reconstruction, but energy was the key — and time.

It struck Legate 107 as very unlikely that Polity AIs were unaware of its location. The mission to destroy the Dragon-made hybrids on Cull had been considered a suicide venture from the start, and this brief escape from destruction was a bonus. Perhaps 107 could actually turn things around? The legate wondered if this brief spark of optimism found its source in the old Golem Eleven he had once been. Almost certainly ECS was watching, and almost certainly the final blow would fall with the minimum expenditure of energy and well before this wormship looked like becoming a danger again.

U-space signature… Something had just arrived. Legate 107 began scanning at once, and briefly caught a glimpse of some hawklike ship disappearing under a chameleonware effect. It wasn’t the best chameleonware, but then the wormship’s sensors weren’t currently in the best of condition. The legate kept catching glimpses of the ship as it drew closer, but never enough to target it with the wormship’s remaining weapons, for whoever was piloting it always seemed quick to anticipate 107’s targeting routines. Was this the final blow arriving now? Legate 107, now separated from the will of Erebus for some time, considered the possibility of concentrating simply on self-preservation. In reality it was the wormship itself that ECS would want to… negate. For intelligence gathered so far indicated that the Polity AIs had no idea that all Erebus’s main vessels were controlled at their heart by remoulded Golem or war drones. Whoever or whatever was coming would therefore be no wiser.

Legate 107 abruptly came to a decision. ECS clearly knew where this wormship was, and so would never let it leave. Maybe what was approaching now was just some sort of survey probe, maybe not, but that did not change the basic facts. The legate gave firm instructions to the structure surrounding it and began to gather up resources, which in a fully functional wormship would have taken less than an hour. The legate leaned back in the throne it was bonded into and observed as the cell closed in about it from the sides and from above, while simultaneously elongating fore and aft. Blisters began to appear on the inner walls, forming at their core the components of an escape vessel. In the distance, from within a conglomeration of protective segmented structure, a sphere of blue metal, two yards across, oozed into view and slid along the ground towards 107 like a slime-attached egg on the upper surface of a snaking tendril. This object was a U-space drive. Though a fully functional wormship might be able to build such a component anew, it would severely test the resources of what was left here. This drive, therefore, was one of the worm-ship’s own.

The small vessel growing and assembling about the legate now began to shudder. Before the U-space drive could reach it, numerous umbilici began attaching in order to pump in fuel and other vital materials from all around. Viewing through outside sensors, the legate saw that the segments fore and aft of the one it occupied had now shrunk down to mere spindles. The one the legate occupied had extended and taken on the shape of the head of a thickened spoon. Veins pulsed in its surface, its colour changing from a reddish brown to a greenish silver, as its hull armour hardened. Then, something unexpected occurred.

There was a figure making its way through the strewn remains of the wormship: a tall humanoid in archaic pre-runcible dress, a heavy object tucked under one arm and a multiple-barrelled weapon clutched in the other hand, with power cables connected to a pack slung on its back. What did this remind the legate of? Legate 107 mined its Golem Eleven memories and came up with various comparisons: a nineteenth-century cowboy, or maybe some nightmarish Philip Marlowe, or maybe a comic-book creation like the ‘original Dr Shade’. Yet, none of these comparisons seemed quite right, especially when the legate got a closer look at the face of the implacable brass Apollo. Some kind of god, then? And why did 107 immediately recognize this approaching humanoid as a male personification of Nemesis? Ridiculous thought. Even with the limited resources currently surrounding it, Legate 107 could reduce this metal-skin to scrap in microseconds. Thus reassured, 107 decided first to satisfy its curiosity.

The immediate result of the scan came as a major shock. Despite the U-space drive being yet to arrive, 107 immediately started preparations for a fast launch sequence using the resources his vessel already possessed. The brass Golem was carrying a massive CTD imploder under its arm, while the other weapon it carried seemed to have been assembled out of six proton carbines and, worst of all, the Golem was opaque to scan, yet seemed to be putting out signals compatible with the coding used by the wormship.

Problem. Big problem.

Was this Golem prepared to take its own life just to be rid of the wormship? If it was, then any kind of attack on it would result in death for Legate 107. The legate checked the slow progress of the U-space drive, then compared it with the progress of the Golem. At this rate the Golem would arrive first. Attempting delaying tactics, 107 sent out signals to cause the surrounding structures of the wormship to impede the Golem’s progress. To one side of it stood a tower formed from numerous segmented worms of Jain matter twisted together. It began to curve over. The Golem abruptly swung its weapon towards this structure and fired a precise shot into the tower’s base. The massive blast rocked the little craft the legate occupied, but did not bring down the tower, though it froze. The Golem had instantly located and destroyed the two control modules the legate had been using to control the tower. How had it managed to locate them so quickly?

Legate 107 tried to move several other structures into the Golem’s path, but each time a couple of shots from that six-barrelled weapon stopped all further activity. Fear, then. This thing was not going to stop. The legate considered going outside to face it down, then recalculated. So what if it left here without a U-space drive? It could simply shut itself down, spend years traversing vacuum, maybe arrive somewhere after Erebus had finished its work and moved on… or maybe after Erebus had been destroyed by the Polity. Certainly, staying here now did not seem like a healthy option.

The craft’s ability to launch was ready and waiting: booster jets would serve to throw it free of this planetoid, and a small ion drive would then send it on its way. Still observing the brass Golem, the legate ordered the umbilici to detach, and next fired up the boosters. Soon the craft was ten feet up, twenty feet up. Legate 107 expected to feel some satisfaction in having escaped, yet was frustrated by the brass Golem’s reaction, for it merely rested its weapon across its head to prevent its hat blowing away — and meanwhile did not alter its pace. Twelve seconds at current acceleration would fortunately take 107 outside the imploder’s blast perimeter. They counted down easily, and so far no blast. Still connected to the wormship, 107 observed the brass Golem place the imploder on the ground, then sit down on it as if feeling suddenly weary. It took some items from its pocket, on which the legate focused, expecting to see some kind of remote detonator. Not a bit of it, though. The Golem was studying a collection of junk: a small rubber dog, a piece of crystal and a blue acorn…

Then suddenly the raptorish ship was descending nearby. Legate 107 immediately sent instructions that would turn the remainder of the wormship’s weapons on both landing ship and Golem.

Nothing happened. Something was blocking the signal.

And now 107’s view through the wormship’s sensors was fading too. The raptor ship landed and taking up the imploder again the Golem trudged onboard. The last image the legate saw was of the hawk-shaped craft ascending, and fading.

What was the purpose of all that? Now far out from the planetoid, the legate started the ion drive and settled down for a journey that might last millennia. But two hours later the crunch of piratical docking claws disabused it of this possibility. Minutes after, a brassy fist punched clear through the hull from the outside, then brass hands began methodically tearing away metal to widen the hole. Legate 107 detached from its throne and began to put online all its internal weaponry — just in time to find itself on the receiving end of that fist. Up off the floor, struggling, impaled on a brass forearm, the legate speared out Jain tendrils and spat fire from its mouth. The other hand came in beside the first and, seemingly oblivious to Legate 107’s defensive weapons, the brass Golem tore the android in half, then proceeded to dismantle those halves.