by Neal Asher
“You must take me to them,” he stated, then, feeling he’d been a bit peremptory, added, “I need to be with my friends.”
“Well, Croos tells me they’re soon to head for the Ghost Drive Facility. Maybe we can get there before they leave. Come on.”
Brull turned in the tunnel and headed off. Trike followed.
THE CLIENT
Dragon was old—a biomech probe created by the civilization of the Makers. They had succumbed to Jain technology only recently in interstellar terms. Polity understanding had it that Dragon was also recent in those same terms, but this was far from the truth. Its missions had been numerous, its journeys vast, its history stretching back and back until lost in hearsay and myth, even in the Maker realm. Yes, they used it as a probe, but was it actually theirs? This remained unclear—it may actually have predated them.
Dragon was also immense.
Now linked with it as one, fighting on the mental as well as physical level, the Client found much data to seize. But it seemed a bottomless well and she struggled to encompass the entity. The first misgivings began to impinge as Dragon riffled through her mind for what it sought. She began to doubt if she could win.
“The psychology is interesting, is it not?” said Dragon.
Somewhere, deep down, she understood the meaning, but she could not stop herself fighting to win, fighting to take more.
“Now I see,” said Dragon.
The entity probed deep in her mind and she could feel its vast focus on what she had learned about the accretion disc. The place had once been a functioning solar system when a Jain caught up with the fleeing ships of the Species there. They were accompanied by their creator, the Librarian, which was Jain but considered an insane aberration by its kind. The ensuing clash had wrecked that solar system and during the battle the place had been seeded with Jain tech. The Jain lost all but its capital ship, which an equivalent Species ship faced off with so the remainder of its kind could flee. They fought over the system’s sun and fell into it, creating a U-space blister that put out the sun. What looked like an accretion disc, out of which a solar system would form, was in fact the wreckage of one.
The Client continued fighting, still determined to win. However, the struggle became an attempt to retain her integrity and continue being herself. The data she had taken from Dragon was useful, interesting and powerful. One thing was clear: Dragon knew the Jain. It had had exchanges with them, and some of what the entity comprised had its basis in their technology. There was something else too. Had Dragon brought back to the Makers the Jain tech that destroyed them?
“This is why the Wheel wanted Orlandine to use her black hole weapon,” said Dragon.
She could see it now too. What had recently happened at the accretion disc was new to her—while those events had been occurring she had been in the Prador Kingdom and then here, battling the prador and the Librarian. She inspected the facts from Dragon’s mind—detail she suspected it had allowed her to take. The Wheel, obviously a Jain AI, had seen Orlandine’s plan and forced her to implement it by deploying the soldier, before Dragon got to the heart of what this concerned: breaking that U-space blister—the trap—which was what the black hole would do.
The two combatants were touching the atmosphere of the gas giant now and its tidal forces were beginning to twist them. They were both all but limbless and denuded of armour—soft and wrapped around each other, entangled like their minds. Only minutes remained before the two bodies would hit acid clouds, then soon after, the heat and pressure which would destroy them. The Client sought comfort in that, as she finally admitted she could not win against this mind. It was just too big, too complicated, too sophisticated. But there was no comfort. They were enwrapped on the mental plenum and she could not withdraw intact.
“But the other preparations?” said Dragon. It was just a comment out of intellectual curiosity because Dragon was not fighting for its existence.
“I don’t know,” said the Client.
The Wheel had done more than force Orlandine’s plans. The Clade was on Jaskor preventing access to the Ghost Drive Facility—wanting the behaviour of the weapons platforms out at the disc to remain unaltered. The attempt to kill Orlandine might be related to that. Or it might, along with the attempt to kill Dragon, be because it wanted to draw both the Polity and prador fleets to the accretion disc. This last seemed likely because the Wheel had taken over and prepared a prador reaver, now probably part of the prador fleet there.
Acid fog surrounded them, beading on their conjoined bodies, sizzling and burning in. They fell with a trail of vapour as it began to ablate them. Soon it was searing deeper, cutting through nerves and interfering with the physical meld. For a moment the Client thought it was this that brought Dragon’s rape of her mind to a halt. Then she realized the entity had just stopped and was fending off her own attacks almost negligently.
“I think it is enough,” said Dragon.
The Client scrabbled for hope, and this grew as she began to feel the entity retracting from her mind.
“Have you learned?” Dragon asked.
She had certainly learned not to bite off more than she could chew, but knew that was not the essence of the question.
“In relation to?” she probed.
“Why the Jain did not spread,” Dragon explained. “Their strength and their weakness.”
Dragon kept on pulling out of her mind—separating from her in ways she could hardly believe were possible. Knowledge remained but it remained hers, while what Dragon had taken was utterly its own. Burning,as well as ablating, the two fell deeper into the gas giant. Half-ruined organs began to collapse under the pressure. The Client felt the physical disconnection, her tentacles breaking, as a reflection of the mental one. Then came a crack and a flare of intense heat. She did not know whether it was because the two remotes hit a layer of reactive volatiles or whether Dragon had initiated something. Suddenly, with an intense feeling of dislocation, as if she had been snapped back by a long length of tightly stretched elastic a million miles long, she slammed home into her body on the weapons platform.
I am myself, she thought.
It was the truth and wholly the truth, because Dragon had burned through her and altered something at the core of her being. She felt the knowledge of the Librarian there, clear in her mind, just as she felt the knowledge of Dragon too. But she was neither of those. As it withdrew, Dragon had taken the poison: those destructive urges which had been clouding her judgement.
The Librarian was gone.
Clarity fell upon her. She must go, and quickly, to the accretion disc. Even as she made the calculations to drop the weapons platform and its attack pods into U-space, she understood something else. Dragon had nailed a critical aspect of the Jain. Their strength was the ability to rip knowledge from each other and to amalgamate—the weak shredded and the strong growing ever stronger. It was biologically and psychologically rooted in them and stemmed from their deep past, because that was exactly how they had mated. Of course, they had not spread. They could never go far from potential mates—the sources of knowledge and material gains they took from each other. This was why the Librarian had been such an aberration, because it could. But, as Dragon had noted, this impulse, this instinctive need was also their weakness.
The Client began moving her platform and attack pods away from Dragon, viewing the entity all the while, as she waited for the U-space disruption caused by her mines to fade. Dragon was again feeding from the gas giant. It was weak, damaged, perhaps the most vulnerable it had ever been. But she felt no inclination to attack, rend or steal. And that was good because, even as weak as this, Dragon was far beyond her.
9
If you ask someone how many legs does a prador have, the answer (besides “too many’) is usually, “They’re decapods aren’t they?” The true number is either six or eight but if you change “legs” to “limbs” things start to get complicated. Include the claws and you have eight to ten. Taking i
nto account the underslung manipulatory limbs gives a range between ten and eighteen. This is also complicated by the fact that when some prador first-children change into adults, they shed their back set of limbs to expose sexual organs. There are two main family trees of prador. One has eight legs and two claw arms in childhood, then six legs and two claws in adulthood. The other has six legs and two claws when a child, but when changing into an adult, only discards an armoured plate at its back end to release its sexual machinery. So it retains all its legs. Confusing, I know. Then there are the underslung manipulators. There are branches from these two family trees whose number of manipulatory limbs ranges from two to eight. Now factor in that the prador wear armour which does not necessarily reflect the number of limbs inside it and things get more confusing still. And this, of course, is only about the prador we see—the males. You don’t want to know about the variation in number, size and application of the limbs of a female. Seriously, you don’t.
—from How It Is by Gordon
ORLIK
Like the flashing of some giant welder, X-ray flares and heavy EMR were lighting up the accretion disc. The Harding black hole had begun to rip up and digest the star in there and the output would have been enough to fry just about anything . . . except heavily armoured and EMR-hardened warships and weapons platforms. Still, the radiation from the event was interfering with ship’s systems and Orlik feared he might not be as on top of things as his Polity adversaries . . . potential adversaries. However, despite the interference, Orlik was deep in the system and sensors of the Kinghammer and felt like some giant gaseous entity spread out in vacuum, touching all, seeing all.
“Feeling like a god?” enquired Sprag.
“Not really,” Orlik replied, deliberately focusing his attention, and thus Sprag’s attention too, on the Cable Hogue.
The ship was big, moon big. But space stations could be as large, and size was not the issue. They were usually so huge because they contained living accommodation. Prador stations had numerous sanctums and tunnels, breeding pools and nurseries. There were hunting pools if they were big enough, where reaverfish—the namesake of many of those ships out there—swam freely and prador could go in after them for sport. Some even contained ersatz mudflats, where mudfish challenged each other and bred. They tasted better than the frozen versions, especially if they died and decayed for a little while in genuine home world mud. But the Cable Hogue did not contain much living accommodation. As Orlik understood it, its crew did not number any more than ten, though there might be marines stored aboard. It was big because it needed to be to contain its mountainous engines of destruction.
“Intimidating, isn’t it?” suggested Sprag.
“All warships are,” said Orlik.
“My current projection is that we have a sixty per cent chance of winning a fleet-on-fleet engagement.”
Sprag had become part of his mind and he was part of hers. Behind her dryly factual assessment he could sense the doom-laden implications. Because he knew what she knew, though not with so much precision.
“The term ‘winning’ is an interesting choice,” he said.
“It would be a pyrrhic victory and we all know it,” said Sprag. “And you, Orlik, also know that to EC and your king it would be little more than a scuffle breaking out during one of their endless rounds of sabre rattling.”
“Careful, drone—your master, whoever that may be, might not like that kind of talk.”
“Hell, you don’t like it when I say ‘we’ and now you don’t like it when I try for an outside perspective.”
“I guess you can’t win . . .”
“Ho ho. Anyway, Earth Central was never my master. Earth Central was, occasionally, an employer who didn’t seem to have much idea about the concept of wages.”
Orlik returned to himself, partially, and swivelled a stalked eye to gaze at the actual drone. It was back upright and capable of movement. He wondered what would constitute “wages” for such a thing. But since, as a prador, the concept of payment for services was a vague one, he didn’t pursue the thought.
“Still trying to win my trust, drone?”
“That old chestnut,” said Sprag.
Orlik felt annoyed with himself. He couldn’t keep harping on about this issue. “It’s just some of my irritation—or rather, worry—about the present situation,” he said. “You know what will happen if this goes down, and we are in it together.”
“Ah, you begin to acquire wisdom,” said Sprag. “Irritation is one of the first signs.”
Orlik bubbled annoyance and returned his attention to the Hogue.Yes, he could see what would happen, in fact his linkage to Sprag simply did not allow him to be less than realistic. If the prador and the Polity started fighting here, he would be able to keep the Hogue tied up and quite possibly put some substantial holes in it. In fact, his keeping the Hoguebusy was what could make a win by the prador fleet possible, though they would be celebrating their victory in clouds of wreckage. But in the end, for him, the battle would be a dead loss—dead being the most operative word. He could fuck with the Hogue but it would crush him.
“My own irritation very much extends to the king too,” said Sprag abruptly. “He knows the situation, and in putting you and me in this ship here, he is running what is little more than a beta test. I’ve no doubt that somewhere in the Kingdom another ship like this is already being built and another potential AI prepared.” After a pause she continued, “When I integrated with the machine intelligence, the process was recorded and transmitted. The king now has the next steps towards making a fully conscious AI.”
Orlik acknowledged that with a mental nod. It had hardly seemed worth mentioning that the Kinghammer was merely a test bed, a crucible whose purpose was to provide the king with data. Its surviving the process would just be a bonus. The king and Earth Central were little different in that respect. He then said, “I would suggest otherwise. The king may be building another ship but he will not initiate another AI until he sees how you perform.”
“The updates,” Sprag stated.
“Quite.”
The ship had a constant U-space link to the Kingdom. Everything the Kinghammer did, and even much of the function of Sprag’s mind, was being recorded in the Kingdom. This would continue for as long as U-com remained possible.
Sprag decided to change the subject. “That U-space disruption is up.”
Orlik had noted this too and had expected it. A USER could disrupt that continuum by rattling a singularity in and out of a runcible gate, and U-mines could disorder it with the field-detonation of smaller singularities. So it was logical that an eight-solar-mass black hole eating a sun would have an effect. However, the math Sprag immediately presented in his mind indicated that the disruption should not have been as much as it was. Either the math was wrong or something else was in operation here.
“Perhaps we should forget about our possible imminent demise and enjoy the spectacle,” suggested Sprag. “It won’t be long now. . .”
“Why not?”
The weapons platform AIs had allowed Diana Windermere access to sensor data from the attack pods which had followed the Harding black hole in. Even though they were AIs, they adhered strictly to the agreements between the Polity and the Kingdom. It had surprised Orlik how strict they were about that, and how ready they were to demonstrate they had no loyalty to Earth Central, despite having been manufactured in the Polity. They were neutral and stuck to their job of ensuring that Jain tech did not escape the accretion disc. Therefore, upon allowing Diana in, they had immediately given Orlik access too.
Orlik was about to open up the link again when Sprag drew his attention to one of the reavers. The data opened out for his mental inspection. It was a matter of small concern. The reaver kept drifting out of formation and then back again. Its status updates were tardy and its weapons statistics didn’t match its file. Other lesser problems were evident too: technological mismatches which were revealed only in status updates and
the constant computer chatter between ships. In any other situation this would not have been a problem. But here, where tactical considerations were balanced on a thin blade, the slightest error could lead to catastrophic losses. Orlik scanned data, noted anomalies, then decided to talk to the captain of the vessel.
Captain Brogus appeared to Orlik’s vision squatting in his sanctum. He wore a quite antiquated style of armour, and the sanctum behind looked more like what would be found aboard an older-style dreadnought. But this was not unusual—some of the Guard, even those younger than Orlik, had a bit of a retro or nostalgic outlook.
Rather than go through all the faults and anomalies concerning the reaver, Orlik asked, “You are having problems, Captain Brogus?”
“Yes, I am having problems,” Brogus replied.
Orlik waited for him to elaborate and when he didn’t, said, “Then I would like you to explain them to me.”
Brogus dipped obsequiously then replied, “Two problems, sir. Five of my crew have wire worms. One of them, while conducting maintenance on the system links, managed to laser flash the coding nexus.” After a pause Brogus added, “He will be punished.”
Orlik absorbed this. Wire worms were a minor parasite. They could sometimes be contracted from mudfish steaks which had not been properly sterilized before freezing. To normal prador they were no more than very irritating. To the Guard, with their altered and divergent biology, the effect could range from nothing at all to debilitating. It all made sense and in retrospect Orlik realized he had been lucky not to have had more problems like this, with so many ships here.
“I see—and this is all being dealt with?”
