The Warship

by Neal Asher

  “The integral question in my mind is one of loyalty,” said the king. “You fought in the prador/human war and like many of your kind were disenfranchised by its end. What are you loyal to, drone?”

  “Peace,” said Sprag.

  “The utter subjugation or destruction of my kind would ensure peace for the Polity on that front. Peace at any cost?”

  “Peace, self-determination,” said Sprag, adding, “variety.”

  Orlik was baffled. He looked from one to the other and tried to make sense of what he was hearing.

  “And?” the king intoned.

  Sprag shuffled, as if suddenly very uncomfortable. “Okay, you got me.”

  “I need to hear it.”

  “I didn’t necessarily mean peace for the Polity. I am no longer loyal to it,” said Sprag. “I talk with AIs and talk, occasionally, with Earth Central. I prefer a universe with prador in it, being what they are, and becoming what they can become.”

  “That could be to the detriment of the Polity,” the king noted.

  “I doubt it. You know that there is no real balance of power. The games played on the border . . .” Sprag twitched her head. “I want to be where I can stop those games becoming something more. I don’t want to see your kingdom obliterated, nor do I want to see it amalgamated with the Polity.”

  “Would you fire on Polity ships to ensure that end?”

  “I would,” said Sprag simply.

  Orlik was dumbfounded.

  Sprag stretched up higher. “Now tell me what is missing from your AI.”

  “Not yet,” said the king. “First I have to be sure.”

  Orlik felt the wave of it passing through his body, heat and an electrical fizzing. He knew he was just catching the edge of heavy scanning and perhaps a warfare beam emitted from one of the devices on the king’s body. Sprag made an odd brief squealing sound and smoke rose from her body. She arced for a moment, legs drumming against the floor, then straightened and stood there twitching.

  “It wasn’t necessary to turn off my U-com,” she said.

  “No, I see that it was not,” said the king, dipping his head in acknowledgement.

  “So, tell me what’s missing from your AI?” she asked.

  “Consciousness,” he replied.

  “Now ask me your question.”

  “Just as there is an interface for Orlik aboard that ship, there is an interface for something else. A smaller mind, connected in, would act as a catalyst. The smaller mind would be the dominant and a union would occur, creating a larger consciousness.”

  “I’ll do it,” said Sprag.

  Orlik let out a whistling sigh, part amazement and part bafflement. He’d always thought himself pretty clued up about everything happening around him, but now he didn’t know what to think. This would take some digesting.

  “Go to your ship,” said the king. “The both of you.” He swung away and moved ponderously off.

  As he and Sprag headed for the exit, Orlik said, “You and I need to have a long talk.”

  “No hurry,” said Sprag. “I suspect we are going to be talking for a long time anyway.”

  “Well, we were, but obviously I was missing a lot.”

  “Are you sure you were?”

  Orlik considered all those years together. The threats he never carried out, the arguments and the badinage. He had to admit the drone had a point.

  4

  In the early years of warfare on Earth, the electromagnetic pulse weapon was simply a destructive tool that caused an overload in electronic devices, blowing their fuses or otherwise making them unusable. Meanwhile, the transmission of computer viruses was via the connections between one device and another. Induction warfare was first used during the corporate conflicts that preceded the Quiet War. Via specially designed EMP, it induced particular faults in the computers under attack. Later, as this technique was developed, it became possible to induce simple viruses, even in hardware that had no radio or wire link to anything else. When AIs began their Quiet War to bring aberrant humanity under control, they developed the weapon further. Using many wavelengths across the radio and microwave spectrum, and special data packets, they were able to transmit even more complex viruses. Things moved on. With back-beam quantum transmission it became possible to “see” the target and quickly redesign the transmission to cause the effect required. Essentially, what was then an induction warfare beam was also a “spy ray.” Further iterations have led to induction warfare beams capable of seizing remote control of enemy computer hardware, even seizing control of an AI mind— but only if they are without protection. As is always the way with the development of weapons, defences against them are developed in parallel. Now such techniques can use parts or the whole of the entire emitted spectrum. Lasers can be used to penetrate cam systems, as well as the hardware behind them. It is rumoured that there are even microwave and terahertz induction warfare beams that spy upon and sequester organic brains. I would say this is science fiction but, as we are aware, such fiction is very often just a step ahead of reality.

  —Notes from her lecture “Modern Warfare” by E. B. S. Heinlein

  TRIKE

  Time was dragging, but Trike supposed it felt that way to him because every hour, every day he had to battle for focus. His anger should have waned in the constant routine onboard. They were making any repairs they could to Cog’s ship—some of it Trike was sure was just make-work to keep them busy. The rest was eating, defecating, living and sleeping, which for him was only occasional. But the fury remained, and he was struggling to keep a distant object for it in mind, rather than against those around him, especially one of them.

  “Dragon just altered course,” said Cog.

  Trike looked over at him and said nothing, then transferred his gaze to Angel. The erstwhile legate was sitting Buddha-like on the bridge floor. He would react when directly addressed, and he worked when Cog had something for him to do, but mostly he just sat like that. Trike envied him. Doubtless he had the ability almost anything with artificial intelligence had, of slowing down his perception of time. Not for him the counting away of minutes. But envy was a sheen over other emotions. He wanted to kick the android to his feet, make demands, push for something he could react to.

  “Angel,” he snapped, “do you have contact with Dragon?”

  The android opened his eyes and said succinctly, “Dragon has found the wreckage of the black-ops attack ship Obsidian Blade. He is on an intercept course with it.”

  “Any idea what happened to it?” asked Cog.

  “They are communicating,” said Angel. “The Clade happened to it.” He closed his eyes again.

  “A little more detail would be helpful,” said Cog, but Angel did not respond. Cog turned to Trike. “Time to try out that array.”

  They had launched it the day before—a survey pod that could provide a close-up of something Cog didn’t want to get his ship too near to. It hadn’t gone far, just out through the hole in Dragon’s skin to settle on its lip and anchor itself. It gave them a view outside of Dragon that the ship’s instruments couldn’t show, since most of them struggled to penetrate the alien’s hide.

  Cog folded across a small console from his chair arm and worked it. A large frame opened across the screen laminate in front of him, showing the star-speckled space. After a moment, a smaller frame highlighted something in the bottom left-hand corner and expanded it to the main frame.

  “Buggered,” Cog commented.

  Trike hadn’t got a close look at the attack ship previously, but he’d seen enough to know it hadn’t looked like this. The thing had been black, sleek but with hard edges and angles. Now it seemed to have been fried and was hanging open with silvery innards poking out. In many places the smooth black skin was rumpled and white, as if charred. Cog focused in and a closer view revealed snaking repair tentacles shifting things about, crawling robots flashing arc lights and lasers as they worked, and a cloud of smaller maintenance robots all around it. The whole
reminded Trike now not only of something squashed and burned, but also occupied by nature’s small morticians—maggots, flies and mortuary beetles.

  “What are our relative vectors?” he asked Cog.

  “Pretty good,” the Old Captain replied. “It must have been travelling at much the same speed Dragon is now when the Clade hit it, and more or less in the same direction.”

  Trike felt disappointed that he could not bleed off some of his anger by bemoaning this delay.

  As Dragon and the Obsidian Blade drew closer together, the attack ship began drawing in its swarms and closing itself up. But only enough for manoeuvring. Briefly, Cog refocused their view onto the blazing impact points on Dragon’s hide—detritus from the battle they had been involved in. Half an hour later the Blade was over the hole leading inside Dragon and turning on thrusters. It finally slid inside and settled on the surface Cog’s ship occupied, like a big black locust that had been belted with a fly swat.

  “Dragon is being positively altruistic,” said Angel, eyes open again and standing up. “Rescuing everyone.”

  “Sarcasm?” Trike suggested tightly.

  “The conversation was interesting.” Angel shrugged. “And difficult . . . it seems Blade has been damaged in ways that make communication . . . strange.” He shook himself. “Nevertheless, Blade has worked out where the Clade went, but wouldn’t tell Dragon until Dragon took it aboard.”

  “So where is that fucker going?” Trike asked. Again he tried to refocus his anger, but still the Clade was distant while Angel stood right here in front of him.

  “Jaskor—the world that is Orlandine’s base of operations.” Angel nodded to the screen frame showing starlit space. “The U-space disruption will finally be settled enough in a few hours, and that’s where Dragon is going too.”

  THE CLADE

  The Clade unit had no name and had possessed little sense of self as an individual. But occupying the body of the man who had once been called Fraser, linked into his brain and his nerves and salvaging the data relevant to its mission, it started to get some inkling of what it was to be a person. An inkling, because even as it moved his limbs, beat his heart and ran other natural processes of his body, its awareness was one portion of a whole, consisting of two thousand four hundred and seven other parts. And it was those as well.

  It was also the woman clad in a spacesuit, finishing the replacement of a supercapacitor in a satellite. She was placing a grenade in a small cavity underneath it, connecting mentally to its detonator as she packed away her tools. A feeling of strange regret about the necessary destruction of the satellite, after the repairs she had made, commingled with crazy joy at the mayhem that would result. Then it was the man upgrading the power core of a BIC communications laser on the side of an orbital smelting plant. He was altering its vector beam to a tighter, more destructive, format. No regrets here, just malicious happiness at the prospect of this com laser frying a hundred and forty microsats in orbit around Jaskor. It was the man in neat blue overalls, with a highspec aug clinging like a crystal slug to the side of his skull, checking schematics and mentally directing service robots to sections of optics in interlink feeds. These were under the floor and above the ceiling of the ejection chamber of the AI Magus, who sat in a lozenge of AI crystal, within a cage of grey metal. The work served no purpose beyond keeping the robots, who each contained a bomb, in position. The resultant blast would destroy the Clade unit in the corpse it controlled, as well as the robots and the AI.

  The Clade unit whose temporary name was Fraser also faced extinction. But this did not matter, for it was one and all. It was also Cad, watching Orlandine’s apartment building from a distant rooftop, focusing in with metal eyes on the figure of Tobias climbing out of a taxi. Yes, it was Cad and the rest, aware that elements of individuality had established in that lone unit, and that they must be expunged. It was also the thirty units lying in a knotted, writhing tangle in the storm drain below Orlandine’s building, waiting for the fall, the collapse and their time to come out and play. It was the unit in the young, apparently pregnant girl walking down the street, ready to abandon its present host when the time was right. She wasn’t pregnant, but the upgrades it had made to itself had increased its density, reducing its collapsibility, so it bulked large inside her. These upgrades were necessary when your next target was an old war drone.

  The unit gazed out through Fraser’s eyes along the concourse. The crowds walking towards the runcible containment sphere had not waned in a year, while none were coming through in the other direction. Some were Polity citizens, here to work on Orlandine’s project but now reacting to Earth Central’s advisory about this world. Golem trudged in too, along with a perambulating drone like a big iron spider. Mostly, these people were Jaskorans, both heeding EC and aware they could explore a big wide universe out there. And none would be returning via this runcible.

  The concourse floor was rugged black glass, the walls and high arched ceiling showed a surface formed to look like limestone blocks. These were also light-emitting—no light panels here. Security was invisible. The scanning gear lay underneath the floor, while most of the weapons sat outside the walls. The concourse itself was a weapon too. Ceramal doors could slam closed at each end in less than a second, while the false limestone was a composite which, with the injection of the right catalyst, could burn, raising the temperature in here to over three thousand degrees. Further, heavier security surrounded the containment sphere, while its AI was actually a subpersona of Orlandine. Its finger was on an off switch that could effectively trash the runcible in a microsecond.

  At the end of the concourse were visible security arches. Reaching these, Fraser peered into the sphere itself. The booking pillars had been removed to speed up the exodus—the AI identified people and set their destinations as they went through the runcible. The thing itself consisted of densely packed technology in the shape of great bull’s horns, on a black glass dais. The cusp of the runcible was a shimmering disc between them, like a sheet of film. As he moved into the chamber via the staff security arch, the thing beeped. He halted and stood waiting casually. From the peak of the arch a security drone, like a brass crab without legs and claws, dropped down on its power cable. With red lights shifting about its rim, the drone’s opened mouth gleamed yellow light and worked a spiral course around Fraser from head to toe. He shifted as if in discomfort, for this was the correct reaction to the heavy scanning—it made human skin grow hot and itchy. But the drone would find nothing. All it would see was his clothing and empty pockets, and a human body. The Clade had long ago learned how to conceal itself and was way beyond any new scanning methods invented in the Polity, while the five two-kiloton contra-terrene devices, or CTDs, resided under heavy shielding in his guts.

  When the drone retreated, Fraser moved into the chamber and scanned the crowds. He watched lines of people walking into the cusp and disappearing—shunted light years away. He picked out other staff—two women wearing the same blue and white work gear as himself, standing over an open floor panel, taped off from the crowds. They were runcible technicians checking a power feed. He raised a hand to them and they returned the greeting, then he shouldered his way over to the buffer furthest from them. Four of these buffers stood equally spaced around the runcible, like the curved stones of a prehistoric circle. Usually they were positioned elsewhere but because of the massive security surrounding the sphere, as well as other considerations, they had been placed within it. Each was a hypercapacitor whose capability actually extended into a U-space fold. Fraser walked up to the thing and leaned his back against it.

  The Clade unit was in and nothing could change the outcome. The rest of the Clade was in position now too and all preparations had been made. Four other individuals, just like him, lounged near the fast-transit runcibles in the south, where security had been weaker. For matters to proceed, the locus of power here in the Jaskoran system, and out at the accretion disc, had to die. The Clade was pleased with the sm
ooth intricacy of its plan, delighted by the prospect of chaos, while also, on other levels, disappointed not to have been caught yet.

  ORLANDINE

  Orlandine felt troubled as she stepped from her shuttle out onto the rooftop of her apartment building. It was raining heavily, with occasional hailstones falling to bounce and break like spilled sugar cubes. Thunder rumbled constantly, sheet lightning flickering red above and issuing sporadic pink ground shots. She watched as a ball of light appeared above the decorative mast of a nearby building, then spiralled down around it, to disappear with a crack when it hit the roof. It was all a fascinating and beautiful display but did nothing to dispel her concerns.

  She had been so sure she was doing the right thing in launching the Harding black hole into the accretion disc, yet now it seemed she had been manipulated. In a way, though, this was not her greatest worry. That she hadn’t spotted the glaring mistakes the soldier had made during its attack put into question the workings of her brain. A base format human could have spotted them, so where was her omniscient and powerful mind now? She was supposed to be better; she was supposed to be able to see both detail and the whole; she was supposed to be transcendent. In essence, her errors put into question her entire ethos, the haiman ethos—everything she was.

  This then put into question other things. She had at first dismissed Knobbler’s contention about the dead star at the centre of the disc, but now it began to occupy more and more of her thinking. It was behaving like a proto-star, yet planets orbited within the accretion disc, not the planetesimals usual in the early stage of solar system formation, concurrent with a star’s ignition. Nascent solar systems did sweep up stray planets, but so many? Not impossible but still . . .

  And her mind. As she stepped into the dropshaft, she went back to that. What did she need to change, or sacrifice, to return herself to a more harmonious and inclusive view of reality? Could it be that the three elements of her being were in conflict? Should she shut down her Jain elements, or her Polity AI component? Should she be rid of the last of her humanity?