The Warship

by Neal Asher

  “It is time to go,” he finally decided.

  Even as he said it, he fired up the fusion engines with his mind and felt the surge of their power. The Kinghammer began to drop away from the King’s Ship.

  “And now I take us,” said Sprag.

  U-space opened like a great mouth and swallowed them.

  BLADE

  Broken in the belly of the beast, thought Blade, then wondered where the hell that had come from. It had probably arisen across one of the shear planes in its crystal mind. Liquid sapphire had restored some coherence but still the AI had no real sense of itself. Other repairs were ongoing. Internal sensors gave physical data. Its crystal, which had been a faceted ball the size of a football lodged at the intersection of a hundred interface shunts, was now an expanded mass of pieces. Some were welded together with gleaming blue sapphire to make a thousand pieces one hundred. But between those pieces ran layers of graphene repair meshes, s-con whiskers and organo-metal viruses for data transfer. Blade’s mind looked like an accident in a glass factory.

  “The program,” said Dragon.

  The program...

  Blade was reluctant to accept it, but it seemed the only way. At present its awareness was not a centralized thing. Focus was like a switch. One moment it could be completely engaged with scattered drive system components but, if it then wanted to focus on, for example, the particle cannons in its nose, it could only carry over the memory of that drive system while doing so. It was bouncing around in its own mind like a pea rattling in a honeycomb.

  It focused on the program that promised integration but, in its fractured state, Blade knew that even whole, as it had been before the Clade’s attack, it would not have been able to parse the endless layers of code. Or its possibilities. Why, for example, was there an option of U-com micro-transceivers for each fragment of Blade’s physical mind? Why the extra programming for physical movement, spatial perception, dispersed weapons systems and sensory collation? Blade felt a hint of understanding, but also that perhaps it was an issue it was trying to avoid.

  “You are reluctant,” said Dragon.

  Damned right.

  Blade realized then that it was running away from the whys in its own mind. Its fragmented condition made it much easier to fail to understand things it did not want to. Instead, it moved its perception to its exterior sensors, remembering the brief exchange with the entity it sat inside, and remembering its doubts and worries about that program, but distantly, vaguely.

  Its body rested on a platform inside Dragon and just a little way from Cog’s vessel. And it was a mess. Automatics had tried to stitch things together but Blade resembled something that had been twisted and splintered till its guts poked out. But then, it’d done a little better than Dragon, since it seemed that entity had lost its guts—though they appeared to be regrowing.

  Focusing internally, Blade noted how the heat distortion and catalytic damage had rendered all its exterior parts distinct. Its hull could no longer mesh together as a complete whole without replacement or major refurbishment of each part. So it was inside. Its body reflected the state of its mind. Only that could not . . .

  Not for the first time, Blade looked to the empty recesses in its damaged hull where its splinter missiles had been. Why it kept returning to them it did not know, or why their presence seemed to cause such discomfort.

  “Do you believe in fate?” asked Dragon.

  Dragon seemed determined not to let Blade get its thoughts in order, itself in order . . . to sort things out.

  “Predestination is integral since the first atom bounced against the second if your understanding of the universe is wholly mechanistic,” Blade replied, a little snappily. “Depends what GUT theory you espouse.”

  “Of course. Polity AIs have yet to unify all their theories.”

  “Full unification requires the full processing of the thing to be unified, which will only happen at the Omega Point.”

  “That’s one theory,” said Dragon, irritatingly.

  “What’s your point?”

  “Coincidences occur. Neat solutions come together and distinct paths can be mapped.”

  “So?”

  “Twice you have been defeated by the Clade,” said Dragon. “Give me an analogy.”

  Blade considered for just a moment. “It’s like setting a hunting dog on a flock of kestrels.”

  “Perfect.”

  Blade shuddered, wishing it had not drawn that analogy but still not clear why it felt this way. Nothing was clear. The program Dragon had given it, its broken mind and body, its purpose . . .

  “You are the black-ops attack ship Obsidian Blade.”

  “Yes.”

  “Not any more.”

  Blade’s mind bounced out of the exterior sensors to the internal ones. Here too were lines of division. It could see that it retained functionality where systems were distributed, such as with elements of its drive system, defences, maintenance and its autofactories and weapons. However, the damage to its singular U-space drive crippled all that as a whole. Fusion drive was good, but had that been damaged it would have been crippling too. So it was with its mind: a distinct element in one place. Vulnerable . . .

  “Inherently, the Clade may never be destroyed,” said Dragon.

  Fuck off, fuck off, fuck off!

  Denial, but still Blade did not know what it was denying. Dragon was right. Blade knew the history of the Clade and, when it had murdered its way out of the war factory in which it had been made, there had only been six hundred units of it. When it attacked before heading off to Jaskor there had been four times as many. This meant the thing was perpetually renewing and growing. It might even be the case that the two thousand four hundred units Blade had seen were just one portion of the thing entire. The nature of swarm AIs was that they could grow endlessly. This lesson had been learned in recent Polity history with the trouble the forensic swarm AI the Brockle, as well as the legendary Penny Royal, had caused.

  Something...

  It clicked into Blade’s mind almost with the same snap it had sensed when its mind broke: neither the Brockle nor Penny Royal had been swarm AIs in the beginning. The Brockle in fact had been a man recorded to a substrate as he died, to turn into an AI, only later dividing up into the thing he would become. Penny Royal, well . . . Penny Royal had been the AI of a dreadnought called the Puling Child, which transformed into a swarm AI after its crystal broke . . .

  “Is the path clear now?” Dragon enquired.

  Blade fled to other parts of itself, shifting on and on to a hundred different locations, perceptions, points of view in its own mind, but it could not escape that feeling of inevitability. Finally its thoughts settled and a sense of wholeness returned, and peace, as it accepted what was to come. The program waited in secure storage, ready to run, ready to do what it would do.

  “Yeah, I see it,” Blade replied, then opened its storage and loaded the program.

  EARTH CENTRAL

  Watchers were still transmitting from on and around Jaskor, but the data were incomplete. Earth Central understood that Orlandine was down and it seemed likely that she now only existed in backups she had stored. Dragon was also off the scene, so at present no one was in primary control either in the Jaskoran system or around the accretion disc. But worse was the cause of it all: the Clade loose on Jaskor.

  Seen from above, three Clade units were snaking along above the paving of a street. A burning ground car lay wrecked against the wall of a nearby building, while at the further end of the road people were running. Between the people and the units, a Golem stood holding a laser carbine. He had already been in a fight because he was burned and battered, and had lost syntheflesh from the side of his head as well as down one side of his body. His clothing hung in tatters. Opening fire with the carbine, he hit the lead unit squarely on its axolotl head. The thing squirmed and weaved but the beam remained on target, so it shot to one side and crashed through the display window of a nearby shop. The
Golem aimed at a second unit who abruptly shot up into the air. Again he remained on target, but not for long. The first unit crashed out through a nearby door, shot towards the Golem and whipped its tail round, sending him smashing into a wall. Even as he staggered to his feet, all three units converged on him, tails thrashing and stabbing. Earth Central watched legs tumbling away, and the Golem’s head. A final stab into his torso stilled the remaining arm. The Golem had achieved his aim, for the people at the end of the street reached cover in the surrounding buildings. But he had paid with his life.

  Through its watcher sitting inside one surviving satellite, the ruling AI of the Polity pulled back to get an overview of the entire continent. The runcible facility in the main city was now a smoking crater. In the southern cities similar craters marked where the fast-transit runcibles had been. Other explosions in all the cities had brought down buildings, blown up nerve centres and transport links. In the south, Separatist elements were hunting down and destroying further infrastructure and murdering personnel but hitting a lot of resistance. In the main city the Clade was doing the same, with more success. It was chaos, and the Clade thrived on that. Hundreds of Golem had simply been erased, war drones too, but it went beyond that. The swarm AI was killing and destroying at will, people were running, panic was everywhere. Why was it doing this? Well, the initial aim had obviously been to bring down Orlandine and remove any forces that might move against it. More dead people meant less resistance. But from its history, Earth Central understood the Clade: it was killing now simply because it could, because it enjoyed it. Perhaps it was fortunate that it confined its activities to the main city, because its next likely target lay nearby.

  It was time to act.

  Earth Central switched its attention to a solar system where a red dwarf orbited a neutron star—all sitting in a mass of asteroids and rocky debris. This system had a bright star in its firmament—the accretion disc was not so far away in interstellar terms. Amidst those fragments a fleet of ships awaited. Two hundred modern destroyers hung like giant sarcophagi; a thousand attack ships, black as coal, lurked in the shadows of asteroids. The giant lozenges of standard dreadnoughts had no place of concealment, while another behemoth pretended to be a moon set adrift. The AI focused in on this last vessel.

  The Cable Hogue was immense and heavy—a small moon packed with hardware. Its crew of humans was old and wily and mostly interfaced with its AI and weapons systems, while its captain was the most cunning and battle hardened of them all.

  “Diana,” said EC. “It is time.”

  She sat in her interface throne in her small bridge. Others of her crew were at or actually in their control interfaces all around her, while a wrap-around screen showed views in every direction. She was an attractive, athletic woman with plaited blonde hair hanging over one shoulder. She smiled, showing wrinkles at the sides of her blue eyes. For some reason she maintained an apparent age of about fifty, though she was much, much older than that.

  “I thought it might be,” she said. “Do you have any further orders or data I might require? Do I need any of my excised memories?”

  Windermere had lived for a long time and had, on occasion, edited her mind. She had also removed memories of highly secret missions. EC noted to itself that one such mission might be related. However, it calculated that her reincorporating memories of having encountered a Jain would have no bearing on her chances of success. This would be little more than a police action, some sabre rattling and perhaps a chance to give the prador a cautionary bloody nose.

  “You are up to date on current events at Jaskor and the accretion disc?” EC enquired.

  “Of course.”

  “You are aware of the dangers and priorities?”

  “I am. After killing Orlandine the Clade’s next target is likely to be the Ghost Drive Facility—that is, if its aim is to seize control. It cannot be allowed access. However, there is no way that the king of the prador isn’t also aware of the power vacuum at Jaskor and the disc.”

  “Other things to take into account,” said EC. “The Kinghammer just returned to the prador fleet at their watch station. The king has installed a new captain aboard that ship—indications are that this is the prador Orlik, whom Orlandine assisted. I did have a contact close to Orlik, but other sources have informed me that he and his crew boarded the Kinghammer. They say that the ship has a prador AI aboard too. One must also factor in a great deal of distrust . . .”

  “Ah, I see. A prador AI.” She paused for a second. “You did have a contact?”

  “It was an intermittent source of data that is no longer responding,” EC replied, fairly certain that Sprag was now somewhere inside the King’s Ship spilling the contents of her resentful and erratic mind. “I suspect that the king was aware of it and has shut it down.”

  While Diana was mulling that over, EC took a look through another of its watchers. Here it gazed upon a border watch station, its shape a pyramid mounted on a cylindrical column, hanging in vacuum. U-signatures were generating there, and prador reavers and other ships slid out of the real. The Kinghammer watched over them like some immense shepherd. The king was moving fast.

  Diana continued, “Even though the king knows about the events at Jaskor, as well as what occurred previously with the Wheel and the Jain soldier’s attack, he cannot trust that this is not all some Polity plot to seize full control of the accretion disc.” She paused for a second. “Understandable really, since your base programming seems to owe much to Machiavelli.”

  “Quite. The king cannot be confident that the Clade is not working for me, for example. He cannot be sure that the Soldier and the Wheel were actually Jain.”

  “And now he is testing barriers, probing, trying to get to the truth. He will believe nothing and block me at every turn. And with a prador AI involved, things could get even more complicated.”

  “Your plans?”

  “I’ll send a small fleet to Jaskor,” Diana replied. Even as she said this, EC noted that her entire fleet had begun moving out of the asteroid field. “The danger there is the Clade getting to the Ghost Drive Facility. I will not send in ground forces; I have to look at the big picture. If the facility is taken, I’ll destroy it from orbit.”

  “Big picture,” EC repeated. This was why she had always been so successful: ruthless practicality. The loss of life on Jaskor was a detail. Stopping the Clade from achieving its apparent aim would be her main objective there. She would quarantine the world and hit the facility if required, because sending ground forces in would open up com channels and ways for the Clade to access her ships. It would also be a complication the prador might not react well to.

  “My main fleet will go to the disc,” she continued, “because that’s where the greatest danger lies. It is not beyond reason to surmise that the king might want to gain access to Jain technology, though he indicates otherwise. And we know where that will lead. There is also the timing. This . . .”

  She sent a data package that EC opened at once. It showed the Harding black hole deep in the accretion disc, which was now distorted around it as if seen through a flawed crystal. All the data on timings and vectors was there. It was only a matter of days before the black hole ate the inactive star at the centre of the disc.

  “Good travelling,” said EC.

  “Of course,” Diana replied, cutting the link.

  The fleet began dropping out of the real. The attack ships went first, flickering away with barely any fuss. Destroyers and dreadnoughts went next, some of them leaving long lines of afterimages, others stirring up photonic flashes from the quantum foam of the universe. The Cable Hogue went last, hitting U-space like some giant ocean warship setting out into a rough sea, splashing that continuum. It engaged its Laumer drive and shot away, leaving a glowing wake in vacuum. Though the last to leave, it would be the first to arrive—shortly before the prador fleet got to the accretion disc. EC did wonder, however, if the Kinghammer might be waiting—he knew frustratingly little
about that vessel.

  TRIKE

  Trike gazed at his hand, noting that his fingers seemed to be longer. But this was because travel through U-space was warping his perceptions, for that same hand also appeared to be a hole through into another universe. The weird effects offered occasional distraction from the things twisting up his insides, at least, as if the crazier his surroundings the calmer he was within.

  “Still no improvement in the shielding,” Cog commented. The Old Captain was peering at him intently, either to keep him in focus or because he was watching and waiting for Trike to do something . . . irrational.

  Dragon had finally dropped them out of the real and they had been travelling through U-space for some days now. The entity’s drive was functional but its shielding from that continuum had perhaps been damaged in its battle with the Clade. Or perhaps not. Did Dragon actually need to shield itself from effects that seemed confined to evolved creatures like Trike himself? Whatever. The effects were dampened and at least Trike wasn’t screaming and trying to tear out his eyes.

  “Not much longer now,” Trike replied, something odd about his mouth.

  He swung round, a hot flush travelling through his body and his fists clenching. Angel was standing and studying the screen display. The tightness in him returned like a coiled spring.

  “Dragon is talking again,” the android announced, watching him carefully.

  “But does he have anything interesting to say?”

  “Very interesting.” Angel’s eyes possessed a reddish flickering in their blackness. “Dragon has updates on events. It seems Orlandine destroyed the Jain soldier with the black hole, which is now falling into the accretion disc. It will, within the next few days, eat the inactive star at the centre of the disc.”