Line War

5

Dragon had, probably with the collusion of Jerusalem, kidnapped her again. After their initial exchange, Dragon retreated into itself, literally, and ignored her persistent queries. Mika spent frustrating hours trying to elicit some response, then gave up and began using some of the facilities available in the conferencing unit. She fed herself, got some coffee, then settled in the single acceleration chair before a set of consoles and screens that displayed data from the probes sunk into Dragon’s body and from the scanning equipment all around her. Certainly, there was a lot of activity going on down there that went beyond anything she had witnessed before. What she was seeing could not all be about astrogation or Dragon’s internal organic U-space engines. But what was going on exactly?

Hours of research produced insufficient data for her to interpret, then abruptly the sphere resurfaced into realspace, and the Dragon head with accompanying pseudopods was back to make an announcement: ‘We have arrived.’

Rather than ask where they had arrived and risk receiving a frustratingly obscure reply, Mika used the units’ scanners and astrogation programs to find out. The answer, swiftly returned, made her stomach tighten as if in anticipation of violence. She stood and gazed out through the transparent walls.

Without enhancing the view, Mika could clearly see four Polity dreadnoughts and countless attack ships, but then that was unsurprising here, even before the attack on this system by one of Erebus’s wormships. She gazed at the opalized orb of the gas giant, then down at the familiar world Dragon was approaching: Masada. It was here, some years ago, a Dragon sphere had delivered her, Ian Cormac and others, and then sacrificed itself to create an army of dracomen; here Skellor had come in the massive Occam Razor to create mayhem; and here she had once nearly died. But that was not all, for what had once been a relatively unimportant world outside the Line of Polity, ruled by a space-dwelling theocracy but agrarian on its surface, had become of very great importance indeed.

Subsequent events, here and elsewhere, had revealed that ostensibly wild creatures roaming Masada’s surface — the aptly named gabbleducks — were in fact descendants of an ancient alien race, the Atheter, who chose to sacrifice their entire civilization and their intelligence just to survive Jain technology. This information had been obtained from an Atheter artefact found elsewhere but now residing on the planet’s surface. It was a huge chunk of crystal that contained an Atheter AI which, in exchange for giving the Polity the means of detecting Jain nodes, had asked to be brought and left here.

‘So why are we here?’ Mika demanded.

The Dragon head, which had been gazing at the view, turned towards her. ‘As you know, I already contain all evidence relating to the destruction of the Makers by Jain technology.’

Never a straight answer. Maybe Dragon just liked people to work things out for themselves, though Mika felt the alien entity just enjoyed being obscure.

‘Have you come for your dracomen?’

‘No.’

Okay, the occasional straight answer, when it didn’t give too much away.

She noticed now how the other Dragon sphere was drawing back as this one closed in on the world. She wondered what sort of conversation her host was conducting with those ships out there, or if everything had already been said by Jerusalem, and that the ECS forces here knew what Dragon was here for.

‘You have in here a portable memstore,’ Dragon observed.

‘I have numerous portable memstores in here.’

‘One of two hundred terabytes will be sufficient.’

‘What for?’

‘Further evidence.’

With a sigh Mika walked over to a storage cabinet ranged low along one wall. She reached down and brushed a finger against the touchplate over one drawer and watched it slide out. Taking out a small satchel, she popped it open and slid out a brushed-aluminium box ten inches square and two inches thick, its comers rounded, a touchscreen on the front, and along one edge a removable strip covering sockets for a variety of plugs including plain optic, a nano-tube optic, S-con whiskered, crystal interface and even a multipurpose socket for electrical connections. Tapping a finger against the touchscreen brought up the entry menu and also a status menu. The memstore was empty but for its base format programs, and diagnostics showed it to be working at its optimum. She slid the store back into the satchel and hung it by its strap over one shoulder.

‘Now what?’

‘Now I land,’ Dragon replied.

Even in the brief time it had taken for her to retrieve the memstore, Masada had grown huge. Mika made her way back to the acceleration chair, strapped herself in and tilted it right back. She didn’t expect there to be any problems, but if there were, she would rather survive them without the need for further repairs to her body by Dragon. Soon the sphere was clipping atmosphere, and what started as an intermittent whistling turned to a constant roar as vapour trails unravelled above her. Amid the buffeting, she could now feel the tug of gravity from below running athwart that produced by the gravplates of the conferencing unit. The Dragon sphere rolled slightly, as if to give her a better view, and she now gazed down upon the face of the planet with the horizon blurring in cloud above her head. For the next half-hour, the sphere became completely immersed in cloud, finally breaking through only a few miles above the surface. Mika gazed down upon a mountain range snaking along below, then felt a tug of nostalgia upon seeing the familiar chequerboard of ponds, then the wild boggy flatlands covered with flute grasses.

Dragon abruptly decelerated, the roar from outside turning to a rumbling thunderstorm. As they descended, and as the ground raced up towards her, she briefly feared that Dragon intended burying her conferencing unit in boggy ground, but the sphere tilted up again at the last moment. Outside the air filled with boiling clouds of steam and shreds of flute grass. Mika felt disorientated, since she was being pulled by the unit’s internal gravplates, which rested at an acute angle to the gravity of the planet. The humanoid Dragon head slid into view above her, with a pseudopod on each side of it.

‘Time to step outside,’ announced Dragon.

Mika unstrapped herself and made her way unsteadily towards the airlock, while the head and pseudopods disappeared back inside Dragon. Under the combined effect of two gravity fields, it was like making her way precariously down a steep slope. Once inside the airlock, she carefully closed her spacesuit helmet, since the air outside was too thin for any human to breath. After the airlock opened she tried to convey herself with some dignity to the boggy surface a few yards below but still disorientated lost her balance and fell onto the ground in a heap. Cursing, she struggled to stand upright on a mat of rhizomes, then inspected the black mud spattered all over her suit and began stumbling through the papyrus-like flute to reach a wide area where the vegetation had been flattened.

‘If you would follow the locator,’ suggested Dragon’s voice in her helmet, as a separate frame appeared in one side of her visor. She turned to her left until the frame was centred, then set out determinedly. After a moment the frame winked out.

‘Where, exactly, am I going?’

‘To the location of the Atheter artefact.’

‘I take it there are no hooders in the vicinity?’ Mika asked, referring to a local life form whose feeding habits were a legend of horror.

‘Do not be concerned — I am with you,’ Dragon replied.

‘What?’

‘Down here with the tricones.’

‘Oh.’

Tricones were molluscs that lived deep in the mud. The latest research claimed them to be organisms biofactured by the Atheter race for the sum purpose of grinding up the remnants of their civilization here, just as the hooders were claimed as biofactured war organisms whose sole purpose now was to ingest the remains of every gabbleduck that died. So Dragon was down in the mud, doubtless spreading pseudopods throughout the area and quite possibly even feeding.

As she trudged over a series of rhizome mats, pushed through stands of flute grass and avoided or hurdled the gulleys formed by breaks in the ubiquitous mats, something began to come into view ahead of her. After a moment she recognized a domed roof constructed of photoelectric glass — a material often used in Polity buildings. Next, the whole building became abruptly visible as she pushed through a last stand of flute grass and stepped up onto a yard-thick layer of plasticrete. It was a simple open structure: a low dome supported on a ring of pillars. There appeared to be nothing inside it, and no sign of anyone else about.

The plasticrete trembled a couple of times, doubtless being tested by something below, then the rhizome mat behind Mika tore open and, covered in black mud, a Dragon pseudopod tree sprouted and opened its limbs, then coiled over and down to slide in beside Mika. She glanced briefly over at its humanoid head then set out towards the building, Dragon keeping pace with her as more of its trunk slid out of the ground behind. Finally she walked between the pillars onto a floor made of ceramal gratings. She noted there were consoles set into some of the pillars, but other than these there seemed to be nothing else of significance here.

‘So where exactly is this Atheter artefact?’ she enquired.

‘Look down.’

Mika abruptly felt quite stupid, as she had known the artefact to be a large disc of incredibly tough memory crystal, so the shape of this building should have given her a clue. She peered down into the layer immediately below the ceramal gratings and, showing here and there through the mud trailed in by casual visitors, some of them quite possibly gabbleducks, she could discern areas of translucent green crystal.

‘Seems a rather careless way of preserving it,’ said Mika.

‘I really wanted to be just dumped on the surface, but your AIs insisted on providing some sort of protective building,’ said a deep and liquidly amused voice from behind her.

Mika didn’t turn round for a moment, because she could see that whatever it was cast a very large shadow to one side of her. Dragon did turn, however.

‘But they conceded the point about you not becoming an object of veneration for the remaining religion-inclined human inhabitants here,’ said Dragon. ‘And therefore put you in the floor.’

Mika now turned to see the massive pyramidal shape of a gabbleduck, squatting right at the centre of the grated floor, its multiple forearms folded across its chest, its bill dipped onto its chest. It gazed at Dragon with a tiara of emerald eyes ranged just below the naked dome of its head, then turned slightly to fix its gaze on Mika.

‘Why are we here, Dragon?’ she asked nervously.

‘Take out that memstore and turn it on,’ Dragon replied.

Mika complied, noting that while the gabbleduck did cast a shadow, something about the line between it and the gratings it squatted on was not quite right, and she realized it was a projection. The moment the memstore came on, its normal menu screen blinked out and something started loading.

‘And this is?’ she asked.

The gabbleduck replied, ‘It is a story about a civilization’s fight for survival — and of its eventual self-destruction.’

‘Just like the one Dragon has of the Maker civilization.’

‘Yes,’ admitted the gabbleduck. ‘It’s a story that repeats itself.’

‘And who needs to hear these stories?’ Mika wondered.

‘Now you’re getting the idea,’ said Dragon, grinning.

There was no time to sleep and, in reality, sleep was something Orlandine could easily forgo, allowing the hardware in her carapace and the Jain nanotech in her body to clean things up, repair any damage, make all those necessary adjustments usually made during that outmoded pastime. However, Orlandine did sleep. She slept for the half an hour it took Heliotrope to finally close on the war runcible and then dock. She slept at an accelerated pace, cued for lucid dreaming, the subject of her dreams already mapped out… though perhaps an apter description might be nightmares.

She was aboard the Cassius Station, of which she had been overseer, and her lover Shoala was leading her by the hand towards the Feynman Lounge for another period of ‘human time’. She felt strangely light, and it took her a moment to understand that this was because in this dream-initiating memory she no longer wore the carapace that was now permanently bonded to her.

‘I always feel this activity to be a concession, a weakness,’ she said.

‘While we strive for that synergy between the human and the AI, are we then to deny the relevance of our own humanity?’

‘But in being completely human, we are denying that synergy.’

He halted and turned to look at her. ‘Orlandine, you are in serious need of a drink.’

They finally entered the lounge, where other haimen of the station had gathered, sans carapaces, to celebrate the completion of another small fragment of a construction project with a downtime of a million years. All this was pure unadulturated memory, but soon she felt it slide into the territory of nightmare. They were standing by a drinks dispenser when Shoala said words that were so close to memory, but now drifting away from it.

‘I want you to feel me inside you,’ he said, perfectly on script, but then added, ‘as I felt you inside me.’

And he had. He had felt her tearing apart and deleting his mind. He had felt, at her instigation, the clamp-legs of his carapace displaced from their usual sockets and driven deep elsewhere into his body. She had murdered him to cover her own escape with the Jain node that had been a ‘gift’ to her from Erebus — or rather a Trojan to turn her into something that might destroy the Polity.

‘I’m so sorry,’ she said, the guilt and deep despair seeming to crush her intestines between them.

He shrugged. ‘ECS kills or erases murderers. There is no mercy, no forgiveness. A murderer has taken something that cannot be given back, and so must himself forfeit that same thing.’

Where were they now? Glancing beyond him she recognized the interior of a Dyson segment: massive pillars rising up in the distance, diagonal tie cables a hundred yards thick and scattered with fusion reactors and gravmotors like giant steel aphids. Ice lay underfoot.

He sipped his drink, his carapace back in place but its clamp-legs now driven deep into his naked body, blood oozing out and freezing as it ran down his trousers, building up around his feet to stick him in place.

‘You feel sorry,’ he said. ‘I would be glad to feel anything at all.’

‘Shoala…’

She saw him now in the interface sphere where she had murdered him, coughing up blood… dying. But I saved most of that Polity fleet from Erebus, she told herself. Doesn’t that count for something? But that was nonsense: her actions might have led to the remaining ships escaping, but she had destroyed Erebus’s USER, the one preventing those same ships travelling through U-space, but only because the device had also prevented her from escaping.

Orlandine woke instantly, fully alert to the sound of docking clamps engaging. Through her hardware she assessed everything that was happening, then stood up and began heading back through Heliotrope towards the airlock. As she walked she again questioned why she repeatedly initiated those dream sequences, because no amount of self-flagellation could return Shoala to life. Yet, somehow, she needed to remind herself of what price others close to her had paid for the near-supernal power she now possessed, so that she would never treat it lightly and would always use this power to serve a higher purpose.

Vengeance?

Yes, she was using her power to exact vengeance for the murder of her two brothers but, just like her destruction of the USER, there would be additional benefit. In this case she would prevent huge loss of life by destroying a powerful inimical being.

Before entering the airlock she initiated closure of her spacesuit — the visor and segmented helmet rising up simultaneously out of the neck ring and sealing together. The war runcible, though it had been constructed to be inhabited by humans, had long been filled with inert gas in order to preserve it. The lock opened directly into a docking tunnel, which in turn connected to one of the many box-section corridors that burrowed through the runcible’s structure. The gravplates in this section were online at half a G, causing her to drop abruptly to the floor. Checking through the runcible’s computer network she found that the drones were located where she wanted them to be, and set out with long bouncing strides. Soon she arrived at an even wider corridor — one used for transporting heavy equipment — and next she stood before open doors that exposed glints of metallic movement inside. She entered.

Knobbler was, unsurprisingly, a brute, typical of the type of drone that usually wanted to manifest as something nasty, and overendowed with limbs. He looked like the bastard offspring of an octopus and a fiddler crab, with a definite admixture of earth-moving equipment in his ancestry. His main body was a couple of yards across and as many deep, with a sharp rim just like that of a crab and, also like a crab, this body possessed his main sensorium, including disconcerting squid eyes. The body was also mackerel-patterned — indicating now-inactive old-style chameleonware. Extending below and behind the body was a tail resembling the abdomen of a hoverfly, which he could fold up conveniently against his underside. From the juncture between these sections sprouted numerous heavy and partially jointed tentacles, some supporting him off the floor, others up and groping through the air, but all terminating in the tools of his one-time lethal trade. She gazed around at the others now gathered in this big and slightly archaic engine room. The war drone’s companions were a collection of phobic nightmares, including large versions of a scorpion, a hissing cockroach, a devil’s coach-horse and other forms less easy to equate with a single species. And she understood that, no matter how fast she might react informationally, they could now easily kill her if they so chose.

They did not so choose. They appeared, in fact, rather enamoured of her plans.

‘It’s good to see you all face-to-face,’ she said.

That elicited a rapid exchange of jokes, story fragments and what could only be described as electronic titters. It was a given that old war drones like these were often more human than some humans these days, and certainly possessed a keener sense of humour. The only problem was that what they might find amusing, most humans would certainly not.

‘I’ll not spend time on waffle, because our time is short.’ While transmitting subtexts and back-up information packages to her narrative, she continued. ‘It will take seventy hours for the nearest ECS attack ship or dreadnought to reach us. Before then we need to get these engines running.’

Spaced evenly about inside the runcible were five U-space engines. She had already assessed them and found that two needed much remedial work, this massive conglomeration of units that was the U-space drive here being one of them.

‘Getting them running isn’t the main problem,’ replied Knobbler, acting as spokesman for the rest, ‘but getting them balanced will be.’ For emphasis he snapped one long razor-edged claw at the air. It looked perfectly designed for peeling open Prador carapaces to tear out what lay inside.

‘They need a controlling intelligence now the runcible AI has gone,’ observed Orlandine, adding, ‘That will, as you know, be only a temporary position, until I myself am ready to assume it.’ She was carefully scanning her audience on many levels. During the war itself none of them would have been of any use in the role she was now suggesting, but throughout the ensuing years they had all grown in experience, knowledge and wisdom, and they had since then all availed themselves of memory and processing capacity bolt-ons. Even so, half of them were still of little use: they were faulty at their core and would waver under the exigencies of processing the higher maths required for both runcible and U-space operation. Running their specs through filtering programs she came up with three best candidates. One was Knobbler itself, another was the one shaped like a huge bedbug, which named itself Bludgeon, and the last was the one that resembled a preying mantis fashioned out of razor blades — who was named, inevitably, Cutter.

The implication of her last statement was not lost on the drones. They began one of those fast debates of theirs, into which Orlandine interjected her own selection. Within a few seconds they had decided on Bludgeon for the task. The drone had been acting as a signal relay for some time, when not otherwise engaged in its hobby of creating multidimensional geometries. It was the perfect choice. The bedbug ambled forward, lifted its blind head towards her and awaited further instructions.

‘Before we get to work, there is one more thing I have to add.’ She now addressed them all. ‘You understand my objectives and you relish the prospect of action, but I want it to be clear that you understand the risk.’

‘We understand,’ said Knobbler. ‘We were made disposable.’

Orlandine gazed at the heavily armoured killer.

‘Yes, quite.’

The Golem Azroc strode out onto one floor of the newly completed Hedron aboard Jerusalem and gazed around. Hanging in space in the centre of this dodecahedral chamber was a holographic projection in a perpetual state of flux, constantly dividing into segments showing different spacial scenes — star systems, close-up views of planets, space stations, ships travelling through void — and different maps, logic trees, graphs, schematics. It was a mass of visual information changing too fast for the unaided mind to comprehend, but there weren’t any unaided minds present.

Surrounding this hologram, on every inner face of the chamber, were gravplated surfaces. On the one Azroc now strode out upon were concentric rings of consoles occupied by humans, Golem and haimen. Two other inner faces, or floors, were similarly occupied, while others were empty or occupied by only one or two figures. Throughout this chamber, holographic ship avatars appeared and disappeared, as conferences were conducted on the physical as well as the virtual level. Massive quantities of information were being shunted back and forth, and then acted upon: ship movements, defensive capabilities of vulnerable worlds, weapons-manufacturing statistics — the whole complex logistical web of this current Line war.

Earth Central and all the high-level AIs within the Polity had been preparing for something like this, but at present it was still considered a ‘local matter’. For Erebus had attacked a fleet outside the Polity and until now had shown no sign of doing anything else. No one quite knew what Erebus intended, for its actions thus far had seemed rather illogical. Remembering friends who had died, Azroc did not look upon the matter so coolly. Indeed, Azroc the Golem had discovered emotion within himself, welling up from somewhere below emulation, when he had found his friend roasted in a shuttle that had not even managed to escape the bay of the dreadnought Brutal Blade during Erebus’s assault.

‘So something has happened at last?’ he enquired of the air.

‘Certainly,’ Jerusalem replied.

‘And why am I here?’ Azroc asked.

‘You are here for your input.’

‘Really.’

Azroc knew himself to be substantially more intelligent and much faster of thought than any base-level human. He also knew that most humans viewed Jerusalem as something almost supernal and beyond understanding. It was all about orders of magnitude really: humans to Jerusalem were as fleas to an elephant, whereas Azroc placed his own elevation at about that of a cockroach. And now Jerusalem wanted his input? Azroc would have laughed if he hadn’t totally misplaced his sense of humour aboard the Brutal Blade.

The Golem again scanned about visually, then accessed fragments of what was happening on a virtual level. He noted that Jerusalem had assigned about one per cent of its processing power to him alone, and was further bewildered by that, for one per cent of such a giant AI was a huge amount. Why, then, did Jerusalem think Azroc’s input was important? He was, after all, just one Golem of many, with an AI mind outclassed by thousands of others already aboard this vessel. Azroc tried applying for access to information and processing power on deeper levels, but found himself blocked. After a moment of chagrin he finally worked out what was going on here: he was merely a sounding board for Jerusalem, perhaps one of many scattered about this chamber. He decided not to resent that as he disconnected from virtuality.

‘What is the situation thus far?’ he asked aloud, like any unaugmented human.

‘We prepare for conflict but don’t know where or what form it will take,’ Jerusalem replied.

‘Any idea of where Erebus is now?’

‘We have tracked down certain parts of the entity…’

‘Those being?’

‘Perhaps you should head for the big screen to your left?’

Azroc looked over at the adjacent floor of the Hedron, angling up from this one. Positioned upon it was a blank ten-foot-square screen, next to a platform composed of metal gratings upon which had been bolted a single empty chair and beside which stood a Golem hand interface — a narrow pillar topped by a sphere inset with the imprint of a skeletal hand. He strode over, stepping across the join between floors, and mounted the platform to head for the seat. Once ensconced there he felt a moment’s annoyance: here he was, just another component slotted into place in whatever machine Jerusalem was creating.

‘One of Erebus’s wormships attacked the planet Cull, where it destroyed all the human-sleer hybrids,’ Jerusalem informed him, as the screen began showing these same events.

Azroc frowned, then sent internal instructions to his syntheskin covering. The skin of his right hand internally detached itself, wrinkled for a moment, then puffed up, a split opening around the wrist. From this split he stripped off the syntheskin layer, like a fleshy glove, to reveal the gleaming skeletal hand underneath, which he then placed in the imprint in the sphere. After a moment, a connection established through the pseudo-nerves in his hand: it was a simple two-way connection, not a multitasking link. Through this he could either receive or request information from the AI, but no more than that. Jerusalem was deliberately isolating him from the webworks of data exchange all around, making him a devil’s advocate, someone with a divorced point of view — oversight without involvement. This was a technique often used by AIs when dealing with complicated situations. Jerusalem clearly wanted another point of view, maybe someone who could see the wood rather than the trees.

An information packet suddenly arrived, and it felt like his hand was burning until he applied translation programs to the stream of data coming up through his finger nerves. It simply detailed the events at Cull, but without any interpretation of them.

‘An attack either to mislead or to remove a danger,’ he announced. ‘But how could the hybrids be a danger to Erebus?’

‘There is evidence that they would show the same resistance to being hijacked by Jain-tech as dracomen do.’

‘I see. And were the dracomen similarly attacked?’

Another information packet came through detailing the worm-ship attack on Masada.

‘I would say that Erebus feels it has resources to squander,’ said Azroc.

The pause before Jerusalem’s reply was infinitesimal, but it nevertheless gave the Golem some satisfaction.

‘Why do you say that?’ Jerusalem’s question, of course, was a politeness, for in that minuscule pause the AI would have already worked out Azroc’s reasoning. However, the Golem then experienced a brief moment of confusion, for surely Jerusalem should have worked this out a microsecond after the first attack by Erebus. Was the AI now playing the kind of games with him it usually reserved for humans? What was its purpose in pretending to only understand this matter now? Azroc did not know and felt even more like a mere cockroach.

‘After its attack upon the hybrids,’ he said, ‘Erebus should have known we would work out exactly where it would strike next. It should also have known the precise disposition of Polity ships in the area, and realized what the level of our response would be. Obviously you yourself will be able to make a more accurate calculation than I can, but I would reckon the chances of success of the second attack, with just one ship, were little better than 50 per cent, with a somewhere above 90 per cent chance of the wormship being destroyed whether it was successful or not. Erebus was clearly prepared to sacrifice one of its ships with those odds, therefore has ships to squander. But then I saw that during the attack on the Polity fleet.’

Yet another information packet arrived. Azroc studied it and was puzzled.

‘Perhaps this was intended to draw your eye away from its other two attacks? Or perhaps the other two attacks were to draw your eye away from this one? Certainly there could be no special resistance to Jain-tech on a world like that.’

Jerusalem now informed him, ‘I have received a transmission from the agent investigating this incident. It would seem that a legate landed on that world…’

The screen now showed an image file of the said legate, first at the city of Hammon then later at the ranch house where it murdered the two humans.

‘Who were they?’ Azroc asked.

‘We do not yet know. Evidence of their identities was deliberately erased.’

‘I see. And the wormship, it escaped?’

‘There was nothing there to prevent its attack or to stop it leaving.’

Very puzzling, all of this, but then the actions of this Erebus had been puzzling from the very start. He tried to make some sense out of all this. That many more-powerful minds than his own, with greater access to processing power and numerous data sources, were working on the same problem did not impinge. They would all be thinking in a very similar way, while he, being outside their box, would have to think there.

‘The wormship at Masada was destroyed. The one at Cull was severely damaged but it escaped — so did you track it down?’ he asked.

‘It was dealt with,’ the AI replied curtly. ‘I was considering sending a mission there to see if any useful information could be obtained.’

‘I doubt it.’ Azroc tried to stay outside that box. ‘Anything else there?’

‘Nothing relevant.’

‘So what else do you have?’

Now the screen divided into four, first showing four distinct suns — bar codes along the bottom of each screen division giving their spectra — then next flicking to various positions in those relevant solar systems. The first showed the face of a gas giant, a swarm of fifty wormships drifting across it in silhouette. The second showed a similar number of ships scattered throughout an asteroid field. In the third they were orbiting a gas giant, and in the fourth they formed a ring around a small hot planetoid in close orbit about a sun.

‘These four squadrons of wormships have been discovered, so far, and resources are already being moved into place to counter them. They appear to form part of a general pattern of attack.’

‘If you could elaborate?’

‘The fourth of these to be discovered was only found by making predictions from the first three. The first three were all located near inner Line worlds with human populations above one billion, and all within a hemispherical section of the border a thousand light years across.’

‘Again this makes little sense… unless you go back to supposing that Erebus is careless of resources, and therefore considers its forces so overwhelming that conventional logistics and battle plans are irrelevant.’

‘Ah,’ said Jerusalem. ‘Even as we speak another group of fifty wormships has been discovered within the border area.’

The screen divisions disappeared to be replaced by an image of wormships hurtling through void, only stars visible behind them. The point of view tracked them for a while, then the picture whited out, and the clip returned to the start.

‘A watch station, now no longer able to watch,’ observed Jerusalem, adding, ‘And more.’

The screen again divided, this time into six views including those Azroc had seen first. The extra two views were of the one he had just observed and another showing wormships tumbling above a regolith horizon. Then came further divisions. Azroc watched as the original views were consigned to the left-hand upper comer of the big screen, as more and more came in. Within half an hour there were eighteen confirmed sightings, and Polity vessels were searching for more — for it seemed a certainty there would be more.

‘They’re not attacking?’ he finally queried.

‘I really wish I could answer yes to that,’ Jerusalem replied. ‘However, bombardment of at least two worlds has already commenced.’

Vulture perched on the console of the Harpy. Both Vulture and this ship’s AI had been named after winged beasts (though of course only Vulture itself had truly become one), but such a similarity in names was nearly the only common ground they shared. Despite his present form as a bird, Vulture could still communicate on AI levels, and of course had tried striking up a conversation with Harpy.

Easier to strike up a conversation with an abacus.

Vulture had once been the AI of a little ship like this one, owned by similarly dubious characters but, by contrast with the thing controlling this vessel, Vulture had been a Polity AI with a powerful and complex mind and some vague adherence to Polity principles.

‘So how are you doing?’

‘Question object confusion.’

‘Erm… been anywhere interesting lately?’

‘Back formation supposed: Have you. Interest irrelevant.’

Vulture began to get some inkling of what he was dealing with here. ‘What are you?’

‘Prador Control System Apex 45 Gorland.’

Ah, so — whether this ship’s control system was a genuine AI was a debatable point. Such systems were what the Prador enemy had used to control the U-space engines in all their ships. Basically, they took one of their own first-children and cut out its brain and a large chunk of its nerve tissue, which they wired into the ship itself. Substantial reprogramming of this offspring’s living brain ensued, followed by a freezing process. The resulting mind could think within limited parameters, it could store up memories and experiences within the narrow remit allowed, but the Prador would never allow it to grow outside that remit. Despite this limitation, Vulture decided to keep trying to communicate with Apex 45 Gorland to bring it out of its shell, so to speak, since the other occupant of this particular craft was even less communicative.

Vulture had already tried to discover how Mr Crane had managed to trace that downed wormship. He suspected the Golem somehow had access to the Polity AI nets — past evidence seemed to suggest so.

The ECS personnel on Cull had been much surprised when Crane and Vulture entered the runcible facility being constructed there. Ignoring the swiftly dying protests of the technicians — the runcible AI having ordered them, for their own health, to back off — Crane had input some coordinates into the runcible and then stepped up to the cusp. Vulture hurriedly landed on the Golem’s shoulder as he stepped through. Their subsequent arrival on another Line world, and then transport on a rickety shuttle to a smaller world in the same system, had been… interesting. But how had Crane known about the arms deal going down? Vulture could only suppose that the Golem not only had access to the nets, but to secure levels of them too, either that or Polity AIs were colluding in the Golem’s crusade.

Most of the time Mr Crane sat silently at the console, gazing at the U-space-greyed screen, occasionally inputting some command that negated the red warning lights that kept coming on, occasionally turning his attention to his toys laid out before him like a chess set. Every so often he would pick an item up, maybe the chunk of crystal Vulture was certain now had been obtained from a world named Hayden’s Find and seemed likely to be a chunk of the Atheter AI found there, maybe the set of binoculars, or the rubber dog.

‘Where are we going now?’ Vulture asked, in utter expectation of receiving no reply.

Mr Crane glanced at the bird, then reached over and touched a nearby control. A subscreen blinked on to show a schematic of a planetary system along with its stellar coordinates. Because he still retained much of that part of himself required for running a ship, Vulture recognized these coordinates as being those of an inner Line world.

‘And why are we going there?’

Crane touched another combination of controls, which called up a picture of a wormship. This confirmed that Crane had access to information that was obviously not in the public domain. More delicate taps from his brass fingers, and the picture shrank to a small square consigned to one comer, from where it replicated across the entire screen — the same picture in a grid of seven by seven with one additional picture at the bottom. Fifty of them in all. Vulture wasn’t entirely sure what that meant, but rather suspected it had something to do with the other vessel clamped underneath the Harpy — the vessel that still contained the bits of the legate that Crane had torn apart.

Vulture considered asking another question about Crane’s intentions, then decided he wasn’t sure if he even wanted to know the answer. The Golem reached out to the controls again, banishing the images, then paused as some more red lights came on, before banishing them too. Vulture peered at another of the screens and studied the schematic that had come up there. The red lights provided the warning, and on the schematic was indicated the source of the error signal. As far as Vulture could work out, this error message came directly from the engine.

‘Anything wrong with the engine?’ he enquired.

‘Drive efficiency outside settings,’ replied the frozen mind of the Prador first-child.

‘How far outside?’

‘Twenty-eight per cent.’

‘Why no shutdown?’ Vulture asked, for a drop in efficiency of that amount was, beside being dangerous, more than enough to shut down the drive.

‘Not necessary — new parameters being reprogrammed.’

Vulture felt the feathers standing up on his back. ‘What is the efficiency now compared to its previous setting?’

‘One hundred and twenty-eight per cent.’

So efficiency had just risen. Vulture damned himself for not paying more attention to those warning lights, and he guessed his lack of attention was due to spending so long with Mr Crane. Because conversation was lacking and because not a great deal had occurred until recently, Vulture had grown accustomed to merely flapping around and eating carrion.

Another warning light, and this time the schematic indicated various points about the hull. That looked to Vulture like something to do with the chameleonware. So, alterations were being made in this ship, yet it almost certainly did not possess the facilities for making such dramatic changes to itself. There could be only one answer.

‘Has Jain technology entered this ship?’ Vulture asked.

Crane stared at him for a moment, then nodded once.

‘Are you in control of it?’

Again that nod.

‘Like you were in control of things in that wrecked wormship, earlier.’

The nod.

‘Do you have Jain technology inside you?’

Vulture expected that nod again, and began wondering if the Harpy possessed an escape pod. Crane did not move for a long moment, then he reached out to the console again. The picture he called up on the screen was the kind of stock footage that could be found in just about any ship’s library. It showed four immense conjoined spheres of alien flesh resting on a rocky plain. This was Dragon before that alien entity left the planet where it had first been discovered. Vulture tried to understand what all this might mean. He knew how that nutjob Skellor had used Jain technology to first repair Mr Crane and then maintain him as a formidable weapon. As he understood it, Skellor had removed that technology before dispatching Crane as an ambassador to Dragon, but Vulture now supposed that some of that technology had escaped Skellor’s notice and had since burgeoned again within Crane… But perhaps that was not the case either.

‘Dragon?’

Crane nodded, but what did that gesture mean?

Vulture knew for sure that Dragon had done something to Mr Crane — had made some physical connection via pseudopod. Subsequently, during a surreal chess match with Vulture, Mr Crane had finally managed to repair his own shattered mind. At the time, Vulture had thought that Dragon’s brief connection to the Golem had been in order to instigate a bit of reprogramming, but perhaps there was more involved — perhaps that intervention had been physical and perhaps the tools used were still there?

‘Dragon technology?’ Vulture guessed.

Flecks of light like distant stars swirled in the Golem’s eyes. He reached down and pressed a fingertip against the piece of Atheter crystal, whereupon briefly a swirl of lights appeared in it. He nodded once.

What the fuck does that mean?

As far as Vulture understood it, Dragon had been created by the Makers, and their technology, apparently, had been based on Jain technology anyway.

‘Hey, Prador Control System Apex 45 Gorland, do you have an escape pod aboard?’ Vulture asked.

‘No,’ replied the frozen arthropod brain.

‘Figures,’ grumbled Vulture out loud.