by Neal Asher
“Ignore them,” Brogus replied, “continue your work.”
The first-child scuttled on, disinclined to ask any more questions. It was an obedient child and not one of these King’s Guard. Those creatures were undisciplined and their commanders gave them too much leeway to satisfy their curiosity.
The two hundred Clade units continued up the tunnel, sometimes in the air, sometimes writhing along the walls. They took a turning and then another. Checking a ship’s schematic, Brogus saw that they, and the unit occupying the second-child, were heading towards the same destination: the bounce gate.
Brogus called up views of that device. Heavy struts supported the ceramal ring and within it shimmered the surface of the warp. Power feeds ran into the ring from a single fusion reactor. Optics ran to it from the cylindrical mind case attached to one of the supporting struts. This contained the flash-frozen ganglion of a prador female. Incapable of speech and lost in some mathematical realm, its sum purpose was to keep open both the bounce gate and its coordinates setting. Because this defence, if damaged, could result in the complete destruction of the ship, it sat in a heavily armoured chamber, self-contained and completely separate from the rest of the vessel.
“So you watch,” said a voice in Brogus’s mind. The Clade unit in the second-child was speaking to him through his neural lace. “Observe then the failure of the prador to apply the correct safety protocols to technology they stole from the Polity.”
“I don’t understand,” said Brogus.
“We are aware of that.”
The second-child arrived at the iris door into the bounce gate sphere, which opened ahead of it. The thing moved inside just before the rest of its kin arrived. But they held off outside, circling as if around concealed prey. While Brogus watched, the unit began extracting itself from the mobile corpse. Its spread-out head began to shrink and bulge up, closing back into its amphibian shape. It developed a ribbed neck and then, with one heave, pulled itself from the second-child. The corpse instantly collapsed, its legs falling apart and brown fluid flowing out of its leg socket holes. The Clade unit shot up to land on one of the support struts, then writhed along it to the mind case. There it hooped over and scribed its pointed tail over the surface of the case, moving it round, with metal dust glittering as it smoked from the contact point. The unit next flipped up a chunk of the case and batted it away. It began to insert itself, its long body shrinking and folding in on itself, winding in like a screw.
“We saw that the stolen technology was what Earth Central allowed the prador to take,” said the Clade. “Of course, the secret is closely kept and will only be revealed to Polity forces in the event of all-out war with the prador.”
Still Brogus did not understand, but felt no inclination to mention the fact.
Once the unit had completely insinuated itself into the mind case, the surface of the warp rippled, as if a stone had been cast into its centre. The rest of the Clade began to enter the sphere. The moment the ripples stopped, one of them shot forwards, straight through the warp and was gone. Again, the thing rippled and then stilled, and another went through. One after the other they exited through the gate.
Brogus was baffled. Bounce gates diverted missiles through into a non-location. Surely those Clade units were now arriving in U-space forever to be trapped there? But of course not. Almost certainly they were going somewhere and doing what the Clade did. But for what end purpose, Brogus did not know.
DIANA
It employed U-space technology we don’t possess,” noted Hogue. “It created a blister which, to use human descriptions, sat in a region between the real and U-space.”
“How was it maintained?” Diana Windermere asked.
“The power of the sun drawn into an entropic drain,” said Hogue blithely. “That’s what stopped the sun’s fusion.”
Diana was appalled. This was toying with the forces of the universe at a fundamental level. This power, real terrifying power, reduced the fleets out here to utter insignificance. Yes, the Polity had ships and weapons that could destroy planets, even some of the giant planets—she was sitting in one now—but actually putting out a sun? Diana focused every instrument at her disposal on the vessel which had come out of that blister.
“Curious shape,” said Hogue.
The thing resembled a fossil ammonite—one of the snail-like creatures of Earth’s prehistory, a ribbed spiral, a sideways-flattened snail— but there the resemblance ended. When it had U-jumped from the sun, interference had been too high to know anything more than the fact that a vessel had appeared. Now she had its scale. It measured two hundred miles thick and over seven hundred miles wide—it was bigger than the Cable Hogue. But what was the mass of this thing? Readings were difficult and the ship was doing something odd to the gravity map of the accretion disc. Its inversion at maximum showed that it massed eight times the Hogue. Yet that inversion altered rhythmically, disappearing with each cycle, so at its minimum it massed nothing at all.
“Weapons?” she wondered. “Jabro?” she asked.
Eric Jabro, in his half-interface of weapons comp, turned his head to look at her, trailing optics from his skull like Medusa’s snakes. “I’m not sure I want to speculate.”
“Readings?”
“Gravity anomalies, as we have seen. Some serious wave-guides in there. Ports all over that could be anything. And—”
The Cable Hogue shuddered, lighting wavered and instrumentation went crazy. Diana felt a sudden emptiness and could not figure out why, until she realized that the Hogue AI had fully disconnected. It lasted just a moment, before everything came back online. Lots of chatter ensued and defences went up.
“Full induction warfare defences online,” Hogue announced. “We’re blocking. Some vessels cannot.”
“An attack?” Diana asked.
“No, we were just scanned,” said a voice behind her. Seckurg, a Golem who had been with her as long as Jabro on weapons comp, stood up from his place in the crew ring. “Now they know most of our capabilities while we haven’t a clue about theirs.” He walked over to the seat which gave him access to the untried modern data warfare stuff, sat down and began plugging optics into his body.
Diana felt a cold sweat. It was novel to her because it was something she hadn’t experienced in over a century.
“So the Jain have arrived,” she stated.
“And we must decide what to do,” said Seckurg ominously.
“You have some thoughts?” she enquired.
“Not good ones.”
“Tell me.”
“Maybe we should just get out of the way.”
Diana seriously considered that. Polity first-contact protocol was an extended hand, though warily, since initial contact with the prador had resulted in them snipping off that hand. Jain technology was a constant threat that had destroyed previous civilizations and had caused the Polity some serious problems. But that did not necessarily mean the Jain themselves would be hostile. She winced, trying to convince herself of that.
“I think it’s a case of just wait and see,” she said. “They have yet to show any hostility.”
“Maybe they’re holding off on that,” suggested Jabro. “They took a big hit with that U-jump.”
Diana checked his assessment of the constantly renewing data. A cloud of debris surrounded the big ship as it moved very slowly under fusion. He had highlighted damage all across it—craters in its surface, distortions to its original structure, hot spots, radioactive contamination, air leaks that spectroscopy detailed as a mix high in chlorine, poisonous to both humans and prador. Then his appraisal drew her to something else. Its U-jump had not caused all of the damage.
Definite signs of weapons strikes were evident on the immense hull: the trenches of tracking beam weapons, cool blast craters and others with skeletal repair structures across them. Further holes looked deliberately excised, as if to expel infection, perhaps of Jain tech running out of control. This was a warship and it had been in ba
ttle. While that indicated the risk of hostilities, it wasn’t damning in itself—the prador and Polity ships out here weren’t exactly passenger liners.
“Still, we wait and see,” she said.
Meanwhile, Hogue pushed for closer linkage. She liked to maintain some separation from her ship’s AI, since long ago she’d decided she didn’t want to end up like the one she had put in charge in the Jaskoran system: Morgaine. Necessity seemed to be getting in the way of that lately and she allowed the contact.
“There is a large problem with the wait-and-see scenario,” said the AI. All her crew heard that, while Hogue loaded to her mind the relevant data. “The weapons platforms.”
“Oh shit,” said Diana, as she understood. “This then is why the Clade has tied down the Ghost Drive Facility.”
“So it would seem . . .” said Hogue.
“Why would it do that? The Clade is the agent of a Jain AI, so why would it want the platforms to fire on a Jain ship?”
“Are you suggesting that other races are never hostile to their own kind?” enquired Hogue.
AIs could get very sarcastic sometimes, Diana felt.
“What’s this about?” asked Jabro, still concentrating on weapons data. “The weapons platforms are set to one task,” she explained. “The only way they can not perform that task is if directly ordered not to do so by Orlandine. She would have to do this via the Ghost Drive Facility.” “And that task is?” asked Jabro, still distracted.
“They cannot let Jain technology out of the accretion disc,” she said. “The moment that ship leaves the disc they will open fire on it.”
Jabro turned. “Then we had better prepare because we’re just about to end up in a fire fight with aliens whose fucking archaeological remains have been destroying civilizations.”
Diana nodded numbly.
11
In retrospect it was quite easy to talk to the prador. Their language was mostly sound-based, incorporating the clicking of mandibles and the bubbling of throat membranes. Sure, there is some extra nuance from limb movement, body position and the presence of certain pheromones in the air. But that is only used in atmosphere, when prador are close together. Their tendency to wear armour, and their venture into space, has enforced the dominance of verbal communication, since pheromones and limb movements are not so easy to transmit. They even have a two-dimensional written language like us, consisting of “letters” that fall somewhere between Chinese logograms and Egyptian hieroglyphs (originally carved on slate or on plaques made from the shells of defeated enemies). So as far as communication was concerned, we were lucky, though not so lucky in other respects. We may not find it as easy with other races we encounter. The problem is not so much that other alien creatures might communicate using light, complex chemicals, U-space Post-it notes or five-dimensional math sketched in vacuum with semi- sentient cucumbers. But it could be that the entire basis of their existence forms their language and is utterly different from our own. How would one even start to talk to a gas-cloud hive entity that feeds on radiation and whose senses are only tuned to gravity anomalies and light diffraction patterns? And, of course, would one want to?
—from How It Is by Gordon
TRIKE
The detonation brought Trike staggering to a halt. Not because of its force, but because of its implications. The prador had blown the tunnel and he could no longer follow Orlandine in, as he desperately wanted to do. The need to get to her seemed stitched through his entire being. But Orlandine wasn’t all that drew him. He had seen Angel duck in there too and the sight had caused something predatory to arise within him. He realized that, though he felt much more under control, that particular wound had not healed.
He transferred his attention to the wall around the facility and the lethal-looking drones squatting on top of their watch towers. He had to get in, but his mind was still operating, and what was driving him wasn’t entirely suicidal. So he assessed the situation around him.
The battle had abruptly moved away from him. The Clade had streamed up into the sky and was swirling around the facility walls. Meanwhile, the war drones had not followed. Some were on the ground, but most of them were up in the air, moving around together to keep themselves between the Clade and the facility. He understood. The swarm AI knew that Orlandine was on her way inside, the very thing it was there to prevent, and its next move would surely be to attack.
“And what the hell are you?”
Trike looked round. The big mantis drone had landed with hardly a sound and, tilting its head from side to side, studied him with its bulbous compound eyes.
“I could ask the same question,” Trike shot back.
“I am a beautifully designed war drone called Cutter,” it replied.
Trike grunted and looked past the drone to the hillside he had run down earlier. Brull was making his way down, minus one leg and a claw, his armour smoking. He wondered if the Guard regrew limbs. Then he returned his attention to Cutter. “I need to get inside.” He pointed at the Ghost Drive Facility.
“Well, I’ve seen that you would be useful.” Cutter looked out at the Clade. The swarm was pouring higher into the sky—way above the facility. “We’ll just have to see what happens.”
The Clade continued streaming upwards until it was very high. Meanwhile, the war drones moved in close over the top of the facility, but still, like the Clade, outside of the zone where the guardian drones must react. The Clade then began circling again, its formation growing tighter and tighter. Trike knew the thing’s intent—he had seen it when the Clade fired on Orlandine and the enclave prador. Only then it had not been the whole swarm. The moment this became apparent to him it obviously became clear to the war drones, because their formation broke and they moved swiftly out of the way.
“They’re going to destroy it,” he said.
“Have I missed anything?” asked Brull, now arriving. Trike noticed that his voice had a wheezy bubbling sound and guessed he hadn’t been lying about not using a translator.
“Why don’t you attack?” Trike asked, turning to Cutter. “Stop them doing this?”
“Orlandine built that place well,” said the drone, “and its capabilities have always been well shielded and kept secret.”
The Clade was now a glinting disc in the sky with an even pattern to the side they could see. Finally, from the centre, a bright white ion beam stabbed down at the facility . . . and struck the disc of a hardfield. Trike felt a rumble through his feet. Burned-out shield generator?
“Oh hell,” said Cutter. “They’re after her.” He abruptly launched and sped away. The other drones were also heading up into the sky.
“What did he mean?” Trike turned to Brull, hoping for an answer.
“He means they’re trying to kill Orlandine,” Brull replied. “She’s down in the caves underneath where the hardfield ejector ports open. The Clade probably can’t break the defences here before the drones get to them, but they might manage to fry everything in those caves.”
Trike watched in anguish and need as another beam lanced down. These feelings weren’t all his own because he hadn’t even met this Orlandine. But he felt something for the people he did know down in the caves. Cog and Angel were there, though for the latter his interest was more proprietary. At some point, he recognized, things needed to be settled between him and that android.
The drones, hurtling up towards the Clade, opened fire, but it seemed that the swarm AI formation also had defensive capacity. Missiles detonated before reaching it. Railgun fusillades highlighted circular hard- fields, while particle beams bent away from their targets or lost coherence to feather out and disperse. Then, from another direction, came twinned particle beams much more powerful than those of the drones,the flashing of BIC lasers and a heavy railgun strike. This multiple attack bit into the edge of the formation. Burning and broken Clade units fell from the sky as the entire mass tried to reorient towards this new threat. Trike found himself analysing the attack in a way he nev
er could have before. He knew it had been successful because induction warfare beams had been used to disrupt the Clade’s defences, even though those beams were invisible to him. This was also how the next missile got through.
The blast blinded him and he turned away, blinking at the ground to get the shadows from his eyes. When he looked up again, he saw the formation broken and Clade units eaten up in an expanding ball of flame. Then came the ship—long and black and looking like a giant splinter of black volcanic glass, which of course was why it was called Obsidian Blade. Trike grinned.
The Blade hurtled through the fireball with a sonic boom, dispersing fire and revealing the Clade in disarray. As it passed, numerous units simply exploded under the impact of near-c railgun slugs. With another air-wrenching crash, the Blade turned upright and slammed to a hard stop. The grav effect it used to do this shook the ground and blew up a dust storm in the mountains below it. But the Clade reacted fast, hurtling towards the ground to avoid another pass. He saw them drop down behind a mountain, losing units to the war drones pursuing. Then they swept out, and round, and straight into the side of the Ghost Drive Facility.
The sentinel drones there reacted fast, but not fast enough. More Clade burned and broke, but the main mass slammed through the wall, ripping it down. A thousand knives travelling at the speed of sound. Trike saw watch towers go down and beyond them one of the tall buildings rocked, then twisted and dropped like a drill going into the ground. But by that time he was already running—he could get in now.
THE CLADE
The unit possessed no name. As it slid through the meniscus of the warp of the bounce gate, it received the final update from the whole of the Clade. They were all to shut down com upon reaching their destinations, as the prador would certainly detect any U-com activities between units amidst their fleet. Status was good, but now that Orlandine was so close to the Ghost Drive Facility, the primary phase of the mission was precarious. She might prevent the weapons platforms from firing on the ship, therefore the Clade needed to be ready to institute the backup plan.
