by Neal Asher
“I am pleased with you,” he said.
Tobias looked up, weary and haunted. “Don’t you mean, ‘We are pleased with you’?”
Cad suppressed a snap reply, feeling haunted himself. He understood perfectly what had changed. He, as the Clade, had seen this before with units long separated from the hive mind. He was responding like an individual.
“We are pleased with you.” Once the words were out of his mouth, Cad grew angry at the need to correct himself, but also angry at the deceit he felt in making that correction.
“So what now?” asked Tobias.
“Orlandine is dead, Polity forces are disrupted and shortly we will go on to our next target.” Cad expected Tobias to ask about that next target, as the Clade hammered at his mind with the togetherness of what would come next, but the man didn’t.
“Are you sure Orlandine is dead?”
“You shot her with the weapon and she fell,” said Cad, the Clade quieter now, attentive. He stared at Tobias. He knew the man had fired it at her and he had seen Orlandine fall . . .
“I shot her but she didn’t die.” Tobias gestured towards the balcony. “I was about to shoot her again when she threw herself over the edge.” He pushed a hand against the floor and rose, hunched and waiting.
Cad studied him. Was he useful any more? Could he be deployed for the purposes of the Clade? The whole considered that Tobias still possessed some utility, but Cad stepped forwards, determined by independent thought.
“And now you are free,” he said, stabbing one hand forwards.
Tobias groaned and bowed over. Cad put the gun in his pocket then, with his free hand, grabbed the man’s hair and pulled him upright. Gazing into his eyes, he fingered Tobias’s spine, turned his hand upwards and thrust. Tobias could not believe what was happening to him, Cad could see that.
“Did you expect otherwise?” he enquired.
Tobias could only open and close his mouth repeatedly as Cad closed his hand on the man’s heart, felt its beat, then squashed it like a rotten fruit.
Come to us . . . demanded the Clade.
No, Cad still had business to attend to and things to check . . . not now. He must remain himself for a while longer. He discarded Tobias from his bloody arm and exited the apartment. In the dropshaft he fell, all the way down, landed hard in a crouch then eased upright and stepped out, leaving two footprints in the bubble-metal. This Golem body was tough. Why abandon it?
Dismembered Golem and human beings were scattered across the lobby floor. Burned and broken security drones hung from the ceiling and the walls, and the frontage lay shattered—the result of one Clade unit’s battle with the war drone that had stationed itself here. Shoes crunching on shards of armour glass, Cad walked out into the street and turned left. He kept his focus on this one last task, the clamour of the Clade ever louder in his mind, glittering shapes filling the sky above.
Finally, he reached where Orlandine had fallen and gazed down at a pool of deliquescing Jain tech. There was no sign of her body. Movement in the rubble. He focused on this and stepped closer, but his mind seemed to be rising out of him, taking on a larger view. Shattered tiles spilled aside and a question mark composed of braided Jain tendrils and shifting grey surfaces hooked up before him. Cad reached for the weapon in his pocket but felt control of his Golem body slipping away from him, even as the nub end of the question mark formed a face; a woman’s face— Orlandine. Then Cad rose up and out, a headless Golem body slumping to the ground below him. The compacted substance of his original form expanded, while the integrity of his temporary mind opened out too.
Cad died and he was the Clade, swirling in the sky a thousand strong. He recognized danger and linked energy resources but, even as he sought to target the thing below, it fled. The ion beam hit it and tracked it but, even burning, it kept moving. It collapsed, squirming and coming apart. What remained oozed to the edge of an open drain, slithered over and fell from sight.
Pursue? No—some Jain-tech scrap of Orlandine might remain but it would be ineffective.
7
The Polity is not an empire and the AIs do not have any great interest in seizing control of other worlds, beyond ensuring the safety of themselves and their citizens. Expansion does continue both for Lebensraum and in the spirit of exploration. Separatists have seized control on some worlds and are allowed secession from the Polity, even though it is well within the power of the AIs to oust them. On the border are many places which are protectorates, having negotiated settlements so that they can enjoy autonomy as well as the protection of ECS forces. But the Jaskoran independent state is unique. The world of Jaskor is outside Polity borders, first inhabited during the early diasporas from Earth. But it is also the closest world to an accretion disc filled with dangerous Jain technology. Polity AIs wanted to take control here to stop the spread of this technology, but the accretion disc and Jaskor are close to the Prador Kingdom. The prador king would not tolerate massive Polity forces so near, nor did he want the Polity to have exclusive access to Jain technology. An agreement was therefore forged. The haiman Orlandine and the alien entity Dragon were recruited to guard against the spread of that lethal technology. Her realm would be separate from both Polity and Kingdom, though supplied with material resources from both. When she first began her “project” there, to build a defence sphere of weapons platforms around the accretion disc, Jaskor did have its own government. However, due to her extreme efficiency in dealing with all matters during the centuries of her presence there, the government ceded power to her and she effectively became a dictator.
—from Quince Guide, compiled by humans
DIANA
The weapons platform AIs were testy. The prador in charge aboard the Kinghammer was an unknown who showed no inclination to talk, and the potential battlefield area was huge. However, at least the combatants were nominally in one place. Neither Diana nor the prador felt any urge to weaken their respective numbers by spreading them out around the accretion disc. The situation here was bad enough, but how should she interpret events on Jaskor? How did they relate?
“So Dragon thinks the Clade wants you to destroy the Ghost Drive Facility?” Diana repeated. She didn’t need the question answered—her mouth, she realized, was working without the intervention of her mind. She continued, “We really need to understand the reasoning behind that before we do anything.”
“Supposing there is any reasoning behind it—Dragon looked pretty beat up,” Morgaine replied. She added, “And supposing Dragon can be in any way trusted, which has not always been the case.”
More pointless words.
“I’m still trying to understand what that ‘only she can change the orders’ is all about,” said Diana. “I will not change them—you take out the facility if the Clade gets into it. One thing is certain: we do not want that fucker seizing control of seven hundred weapons platforms. Because right now, I don’t see anything else that could be more disastrous.” “Understood,” Morgaine replied, but she didn’t sound happy. “Continue as per your orders,” Diana affirmed, then cut the link. While tactical assessments were constantly running on the prador fleet, she focused in on the accretion disc. The platform AIs had been reluctant at first but finally gave her access to the sensors on the weapons pods which were deep within it. The pods themselves were using up their last reserves of energy. Things like vacuum-evolved amoebae snowed towards them. They were fried by the pod’s particle beams at a distance, then by BIC antipersonnel lasers as they drew closer. Most flared to glowing powder but some were getting through and already pods were crusted with lichen-like growths and reporting system failures. They would not last much longer, but that was not Diana’s concern.
Using the pod’s sensors, she focused on the Harding black hole. It now lay as close to the previously inactive star as Venus was to Sol. The star had begun to show signs of activity as the gravity of the black hole distorted the solar orb. She watched bright points of light igniting on its surface, sprea
ding and swirling. Then, like fire starved of oxygen, they turned dull and went out. This made little sense. Each of those fires was tens of thousands of miles across and surely enough to lead to larger ignitions. It was as if something was simply sucking the energy out of them.
“Entropy?” the Hogue AI suggested, backing this up with a mass of U-space calculus it took a moment for Diana to absorb.
It certainly looked like it, judging from the data available. But Polity understanding of the complicated processes that took place inside stars was by no means complete. And a previously inactive star about to be eaten by a black hole was not something anyone had ever seen before.
“Just too many factors we cannot calculate for,” she stated.
The focus of her attention drew out of the accretion disc and back to tactical assessments. They weren’t changing much. Factoring in everything known about common prador ships and the new reavers, Diana calculated that the Polity fleet could take out the prador here. And it was the Hogue itself that tipped the balance. Losses would be heavy—nearly half of the Polity fleet would be destroyed. But those prador ships were not the only ones present.
“You’re thinking about that other factor,” Hogue stated.
She was. She regarded the Kinghammer. It had arrived almost at the same time as the Hogue. What scanning she could get through its very efficient defences revealed a serious piece of hardware. She was confident that one on one it was no match for the Cable Hogue but, with the rest of its fleet and other tactical considerations, things could get very shitty.
THE CLIENT
The Client cut her pain as she discarded the rearmost, damaged segment in the chain of her body. Others that had been hit by pulsegun fire further up the chain were doing fine. Their bodies were in a state of accelerated healing as they fed voraciously, nubs of tissue oozing into the burn holes, debris and waste shitted out and dropping to the base of the cylinder. A robot—a four-limbed thing loaded with cutting gear designed for clearing war damage—clambered up the tree to reach the dead segments still clinging on. With hydraulic snippers, it sheared through charred legs, and those pieces dropped away too. The Client now concentrated on sensor data, trying to ignore the activity below her.
The sun out there glared blue-white, like the output of an arc welder, throwing the shadow of the close-orbiting gas giant onto the face of the larger and more distant ice giant, so it looked like an eyeball. The Client felt deficient under its regard, as she could not stop herself watching the maintenance robots clear up the mess of broken space suits, weapons and human beings below. They had been Graveyard salvagers who, given the opportunity, had not been averse to piratical activity. She knew from the data she had stolen that they were guilty of every crime in the Polity catalogue.
Why did that matter?
The humans had betrayed her in her original form when they stopped her deploying her weapons against the prador. They were primitive organisms no better than the prador that had brought about her murder when she fled after the war. They were creatures who had no real relevance to her beyond the technology she had stolen from them and their current pre-eminence in this sector of the galaxy.
So why did she feel guilty?
She could only put this down to the consciousness of the weapons platform’s original inhabitant—the AI Pragus whom she had absorbed. But only logic could tell her which of her actions and feelings might be dictated by it. Pragus was now part of her, just as the Librarian was. And the latter was the portion that caused her the most concern.
Logic told her that her earlier self would not have seen the salvagers as a threat, nor shut down the chameleonware upon realizing that the partially concealed platform acted as a lure. One look at the platform’s weapons and attack pods would have been enough to drive them away. Had they been stupid enough to persist, she would have destroyed them. She wouldn’t have done this in any great rage—merely like a human swatting an annoying fly. Certainly she would have felt no urge to grab and mine them for data and materials, because she would have known they had nothing of much use to her. All that was the Librarian, and she didn’t understand it—there hadn’t been a lot of thinking involved. It had been an instinct rooted in millions of years of history.
While the technology she had unleashed continued converting the weapons platform, the Client knew she had to investigate her aberration and correct it. Peering down yet again, she focused on the body she had created to steal data from the humans’ minds. Responding to her mental prod, one of the grapplers below set into motion and picked up the corpse. She tracked it to the exit and out, along gangways and through tunnels, finally coming to one of the disposable lab units. The equipment inside was in fact the same as that which Pragus had used to examine the dead forms of her original body. The grappler took the corpse inside, and the lab unit began the examination she had quickly programmed.
As the surgical and scanning equipment set to work in there, she felt the momentary resurgence of a need to acquire data, as well as the urge to be in that lab unit doing it. She repressed it, but it still remained as an inchoate undercurrent to her logical mind. The chain-glass blades sliced the body open and other equipment scanned and weighed the various organs. It tracked their connections and nerves, and found the termini of those in a simple brain, in turn linked to an organic microwave emitter for transmitting data back to her main form. The equipment examined the tentacles closely, and she tried not to feel satisfaction at seeing how perfectly they matched those of the Librarian. Delving deeper, she saw the genetic changes she had made to create this form and finally there was nothing more to learn from it. Time to discard it . . . even that thought was driven by a deeper impulse.
This deeper urge was to seize hold of a prey, rip it apart and take everything useful from it, then dispose of the rest. To incorporate what she took in herself. The humans called their version of it the reptile brain—the part of their mind that drove fighting, fucking and fleeing. She had her own version, somehow made incredibly strong by her amalgamation with the Librarian. Did this mean that, though she was Species, at the core of her being she was truly Jain? Or had the Librarian tinkered with that inner reptile? Was it just the essence of that entity driving her?
As the Client pondered these things and considered how to examine and alter her own mind, it seemed that the outer world would not leave her alone. She had begun to design search engines to release into her consciousness, though as yet not even sure what to look for, when her instruments alerted her to a U-signature. She started searching near space for danger and, rising up from that undercurrent, for other bodies and minds to pillage.
It appeared a little way out from the gas giant and she recognized it instantly. The Client felt such an urge of acquisitiveness that she had fired up the platform’s fusion engines before it became a conscious idea. She did, however, manage to prevent herself U-jumping directly to the spot, but only because that required more conscious thought and calculation. She fought against what now seemed to be her own instincts.
The object was a sphere fifty miles across. Dragon—the entity which had set her upon her course into the Prador Kingdom, to the remains of what had been her home planet and the Librarian. Here was a creature that had been knocking around the universe for millennia, if not longer. Dragon knew things she did not; things which Polity AIs and the prador were unaware of. It was a mysterious being that operated with baffling cunning in the realms of higher AI. Not only that, but the biology of the creature had proved to be incredibly complicated and it was probably a more adept engineer of that biology than the Client herself. Here was something that could render data and material gains orders of magnitude beyond what she could gain from mere salvagers, or anything else in either the Kingdom or the Polity.
And the Client felt it again: the hunger, the urge to incorporate, amalgamate, to take and to be.
“You chose a hot world to hide away in,” said Dragon over U-com. “Mistake . . . But it was the agent you sent out . .
. pointless search . . . the assassin attached herself to . . . who led her back to you.”
It was a slap in the face and a wake-up that prompted further self-examination. Dragon was talking about her death. Those memories were vague since much had been lost when she was killed. But she knew she had sent out an agent ostensibly to seek out parts of the farcaster weapon she had created for the Polity. An assassin had tagged along with that agent to get to her. There had been some kind of gun and the agonizing death whose memory she flinched away from.
“I found her . . . the assassin. A little money gave me the location of your grave,” said Dragon.
That could only mean that Dragon had obtained the remains from which her present self had been resurrected. It had ensured those remains were delivered to this weapons platform, which she then took over and escaped on from the accretion disc. She was a tool Dragon had employed and was perhaps still employing, though to what end was unclear.
The creature was drawing closer to the gas giant and sensors indicated it was using complicated field tech there. The Client now saw that Dragon was damaged: a massive hole in its surface and burns many miles long. Down in the gas clouds a maelstrom began turning, and out of the centre of this rose a plume. It steadily stretched out, finally reaching the sphere, whereupon it flooded inside, through the hole. Dragon’s temperature rose and volcanic pores opened on its surface and began to bleed black smoke. Was it feeding? Its communications were sporadic, as if it was struggling to speak. The damage was severe and the Client felt regret at possible data lost. But if Dragon was wounded it might also be a weaker and easier prey.
“Data is what we need,” said Dragon.
The Client hurriedly checked com for viruses, for it seemed as if the entity was reading her mind.
“The library of the Species provides . . . one of the Species, alive, is a counterbalance . . . another card in the game,” Dragon added.
Finally the Client spoke. “You drove me to seek it.”
