by Neal Asher
“However,” the unit continued, “this ship will remain part of the plan.”
Brogus felt the hope fade. It had been a vain one. Though the thing he was talking to supposedly had no interest in personal survival, it would do everything in its power to carry through the plans of the swarm entire. And that, in the end, meant it would try to survive and get to him.
The thing abruptly shot out through the door. It hit the other side of the tunnel, where the cannons targeted it and opened fire. Hot blue beams sizzled through the air and vaporized material from the walls. It took a couple of hits, then shot across the tunnel to the opposite wall beside the door. Again the cannons fired, and again it leapt. This continued and Brogus could not understand the purpose. The thing wasn’t advancing down the tunnel but merely ricocheting across it in the same place. After multiple passes, the Clade unit was gone. What had happened? It took a moment for Brogus to realize what the unit’s aim had been. Multiple hits from the particle cannons on the same portion of tunnel wall had weakened it, and now there was a hole.
“It’s in the food store!” he bellowed.
His children at one end of the tunnel charged on past the junction and entered another tunnel, heading in towards a dome-shaped, insulated door. The first-child whom he had spoken to earlier operated the pit control and the door opened, spilling frigid fog. The others charged in. A moment later, Gatling cannons hammered the air. Since the store had no cams, Brogus switched to views through the cams on his children’s suits. Particle beams sawed through fog beside tall cylinders. He saw the Clade unit writhing across the face of one of these. The cylinder slumped under fire and split open, belching a packed mass of steaming mudfish corpses. After a while, the firing tailed off and Brogus anxiously watched the search. Scanners were picking up nothing.
“We’ve lost it,” said the first-child.
“Keep searching,” he instructed, heavy dread nestling inside him.
He had seen what the Clade was capable of. He had witnessed how they compressed themselves through any gap. The thing could be in a power duct or a pipe now. It might even be sitting, waiting patiently, among the mudfish and reaverfish corpses. In the tunnel outside the bounce gate chamber there had been a chance, but not now. Brogus abruptly twisted the pit control and looked for another option, anything, but there seemed no way. His instinct was to remain in his sanctum, to stay in here encysted like a shellfish and defend himself. He knew the instinct well because all father-captains thought the same. But he was also old and wily and understood that remaining here would get him killed. He switched to another view through his screens: the world of Jaskor with its many deep oceans. Then to another: a giant tongue of metal with a powerful fusion drive to the rear, resting on a maglev ramp which led to space doors. He decided to run.
If he fled to another prador ship with some story about Polity assassin drones aboard, they would probably just put a missile straight into him. And even if one did take him aboard, he would soon be identified and punished. The Polity ships were simply not an option. He didn’t think too much about what he would do sitting under the oceans of Jaskor— personal survival was paramount. Rising off his saddle control, he spun towards the doors, ordering them open ahead of him.
Out into the tunnel, he moved fast down it towards the shuttle bay. If only he could take the time to load further supplies. Maybe when he got to the world he would be able to work something with the prador enclave. Also, with the situation chaotic down there, he might get to a ship on the surface . . . He slid to a halt suddenly as the first-child stepped out into the tunnel ahead of him.
“Father . . .” it said.
“You will come with me,” said Brogus.
“I come to make my report,” said the child.
“You will come with me,” Brogus repeated, puzzled.
The child made a nonsensical clicking noise and lowered one claw to the floor.
“Move!” Brogus ordered, surging ahead again. The child tilted forwards, then slowly toppled to one side.
Brogus knew what had happened just a moment before he felt a cracking at his rear end, then sudden stabbing pain. He whirled round and, losing control of his grav, crashed into the wall of the tunnel. Horrible ripping movement pulled at his guts.
“Hello again, we are glad to be here,” said the Clade unit inside him.
Brogus thumped to the floor and gazed along the tunnel, trying to see a way to its end. It darkened and he knew he would never reach it.
ORLIK
Exit from U-space had been rough. The moment the Kinghammersurfaced with a juddering crash, Orlik lost grip on many systems until they realigned. The disruption from the event in the accretion disc seemed to be getting worse, and in that moment, he decided against using U-jump missiles. Anyway, the weapons platform would have an internal bounce gate just like the Hammer did. Settling into the real, he began to reacquire systems and was soon both inside and outside his ship, his perception omniscient. He slid deeper into his amalgamation with its AI, and firing the weapons required little thought—no more than moving a claw or a leg. However, before he had done that, it had been necessary to respond to new data. Diana’s repositioning of her fleet was only a surprise because she had done it so quickly. He saw that his own ships had responded as instructed and confirmed that they were doing the right thing, before he focused fully on the weapons platform.
“What is your purpose here?” Orlik demanded, even as twinned particle beams cut royal blue across vacuum from between the two forward projections of his ship. They stretched towards the weapons platform.
In the brief time it took them to reach the platform, the surrounding attack pods made short U-jumps—spreading out and arcing round. Orlik delegated most of them to his crew, but some pods had obviously had their own problems with the local disruption.
Four attack pods arrived a second late to their formation, tumbling out of control. As they sought to right themselves, he fired on them himself with short railgun bursts. One of them simply exploded, while another took hits then fell away, burning. The two others quickly righted and took no strikes. One of his gunners took over, hitting the stray again and again, trying to drive its hardfield generators to failure. But there were no ejections and it stubbornly persisted.
The particle beams reached the weapons platform, lighting a curved surface over it. That could not be right—it was impossible to bend hardfields.
“My purpose here is observation,” the Client said.
Orlik released a fusillade of near-c railgun slugs at the platform—a spread that covered its entire length. Meanwhile, Sprag was trying to bring something to his attention—about the platform’s hardfields and the technology behind them. It was too deep, too technical to deal with right at that moment.
“You’re lying. You’re somehow deeply involved in all this,” he said, “and coming here was not the most sensible decision to make.”
“Equally, your decision to come out to me was not sensible,” the Client replied.
As Orlik tried to process that, his attention swayed back to the attack pods. His gunners were firing on them all, and filling vacuum with clouds of white-hot metal vapour from slug impacts. Meanwhile, the one that had apparently been damaged was still taking hits and surviving. Telemetry told him it had still made no hardfield ejections. That simply did not make sense.
“Those hardfields,” Sprag insisted.
Orlik absorbed the data overview and looked upon multi-spectrum scans of the attack pods. Computer resolution picked out the shape of the hardfields and they were bubbles surrounding each pod. A U-space map also showed an effect he had never seen before, with inversions related to each pod.
“We’ve seen this shit before,” Sprag stated.
“You may have . . .”
Sprag continued, “The rogue AI Penny Royal used such hardfields. They cannot be penetrated. They can only be overloaded.”
Now the railgun fusillade reached the platform. Multiple impacts s
wamped it in fire and, even as that dispersed, it etched out the hardfield surface which completely enclosed the thing.
“I have to decide whether or not you will be useful,” said the Client.
“Useful! You are insane,” said Orlik.
“Every weapon will be necessary, and they still may not be enough.”
With a thought, Orlik launched a series of CTD warheads, at the same time sinking into plain data-com with Sprag. He needed to know what could overload that platform’s hardfields. The AI was calculating but the answers coming back just seemed to wander off into some fantasy realm.
“Desist,” said the Client. “I no longer have any interest in vengeance. I understand now. Your people are not those that exterminated my kind. Your present king would not choose that course.”
The warheads, travelling more slowly than railgun slugs or energy beams, were drawing closer and closer to the platform. Then came a flickering, and it was as if the platform grew multitudes of glassy spines from various installations along its length. These reached out—an energy weapon? Finally they found their targets—each one hit a warhead. The warheads simply shattered in vacuum and flew into thousands of chunks of debris.
“You get to live,” said the Client, “for a little while, at least.”
Something hit the Kinghammer. Orlik thought it a weapons impact until analysis revealed an energy surge that had shut down the fusion engines and caused imbalances in other drive systems.
“Warfare beam—” Sprag managed and then dissolved from Orlik’s perception. A moment later, something else shrieked into him via his interface, which felt as if it had turned red hot on his body. He slid off his saddle control and reached up to tear the thing from his back. He crashed sideways and rolled as if trying to put out a fire there, then finally came up on his feet.
He was in his sanctum. All the screens were out, his implants were taking nothing but static. He was blind and deaf. Perhaps his crew could still operate their weapons? He doubted it. They were, as the humans would have put it, a sitting duck. But he could feel a pull.
Drive systems were still operating and he could sense, by the direction of the pull, that the ship was turning. A further kick also told him that the fusion engines were back online. He was thankful that they weren’t anywhere near a sun or the like, else he suspected that might have been their destination.
Buzzing sounded nearby, then Sprag’s drone body settled on the deck beside him.
“She said we get to live,” she said.
“For a little while,” Orlik replied. Then, “Is all of you alive?”
“Just some com problems,” Sprag replied.
Orlik walked over to study the interface pad and saw it wasn’t on fire. He noted that some of the screens were also coming back on, and he returned to climb back up onto the saddle control. He wasn’t much inclined to use the interface, so instead inserted his claws in pit controls and tried them. A moment later, he had diagnostics running on all the screens. Following that, sensors began to come back online, giving him views of starlit space.
“The warfare beam shut everything down, even my better self, briefly,” said Sprag. “It could have done a lot more.”
“What got to me?” Orlik asked.
“A viral program that activated your afferent nerves. It probably hurt.”
“It’s gone now?”
“Yes.”
Orlik tried his implants and found some function there. He sent a brief instruction and in response the interface rose up on its optics, repositioned, then came down on his back to reconnect. And he was in. He looked for damage reports and found none. But this was only in passing, as he inserted himself as quickly as possible into weapons and exterior sensors. His perception expanded and now he could see the situation.
Weapons Platform Mu still hung in vacuum, receding behind them. He felt a surge of anger and all the force of the Hammefs weapons systems there to command at a thought. He was aboard the most powerful ship the prador had ever made!
“She gave you a slap and sent you on your way,” said Sprag, speaking through the interface, as her drone body settled on the crane.
Orlik seethed and acknowledged it with a wave of one claw.
“She certainly did,” he said, then addressed his crew. “This engagement is over—we are returning to the fleet.”
THE CLIENT
The Client watched the prador ship continuing on its way, no longer puzzled by her reluctance to destroy it. What she had told the prador aboard was true, and she genuinely felt it now. The prador had destroyed her civilization and, since their medical technology allowed for longevity, some involved in that act were certainly still around. However, they were no longer in charge. She surmised, had this present kingdom found the Species, genocide would not have been its immediate intent. It might have ensued, but that was debatable and beside the point. What was the point? Simply that she no longer had any taste for vengeance— that anger no longer drove her.
But what did? What did she want now?
Her immediate objectives were plain. She wanted to ensure the survival of those of her kind inside that spaceship. And beyond that? She did not know, so instead just focused on present aims and problems.
The imminent danger was the weapons platforms opening up on the ship as it left the accretion disc. Her concern that the two fleets would join in with this destruction had been eased because the data she had ripped from the Kinghammer while disabling it indicated otherwise. She was now up to date. The Wheel, by deploying the Clade on Jaskor, had manipulated events to ensure the platforms’ directive could not be rescinded. The Polity commander here, and the prador Orlik, were aware of that. Also, it seemed that Orlandine had survived and might still be able to stop the weapons platforms.
But what if she could not?
The Client reviewed the weapons and resources at her disposal and one fact became plain. Though she could negligently deal with a ship like the Kinghammer, she would not be able to go up against the concerted might of over seven hundred weapons platforms. Some other option had to be contemplated.
DIANA
The comlink was open and Hogue had transmitted language and translation files. The alien ship probably did not need them, because its earlier scan of the fleets had breached their data storage.
“Please reply,” she said, not for the first time.
Data was coming in but fractured and bearing no relation to anything she sent. It was like trying to speak to a shattered AI that had lost any sense of consciousness. She switched over to the stuff that was coming through in Anglic to see if she could make any sense of that. All the rest, Hogue and Seckurg were handling, or rather, trying to handle.
“Sector 4582 the whiteness of night deliquescence add sprine,” said . . . something.
It was like attempting to understand a gabbleduck. What was being said edged close to making sense, but never quite got there.
“The weapons platforms you see will fire on you if you leave the accretion disc,” she said, feeling she was betraying the platform AIs by delivering this warning. As a necessity, she once again transmitted holographic data sets. These described a weapons platform, along with a rendering of the accretion disc, as well as the dimensions of the defence sphere in overlay. “Incursion ageing to slow time,” replied the thing.
“Please remain in the accretion disc,” she said.
“Dead,” it replied.
“Yes, you will be dead if you leave the accretion disc,” she stated. “Oak trees,” it replied.
“Are these actual responses?” she asked Seckurg.
He glanced round. “I think so. It’s not talking over you and the Anglic speaking stops when you stop. But it’s almost as if you’re speaking into a very old and faulty Turing analogue.”
“The data?”
“Pretty random, and the only thing that stands out with sifting is a Jain U-space signature some error points away from standard.”
“Hogue?”
&
nbsp; “It is time to do something,” replied the AI out loud. Through its connection to her it sent tactical analysis of various scenarios and how they might play out. She sank deeper into it and chose the perhaps least provocative option, then opened another comlink.
“Rhodus,” she said, and sent her request to it in the data plenum.
“We don’t do warning shots,” the platform AI replied.
“You didn’t, but this is a rather special situation.”
“Agreed.”
“It’s happening,” said Jabro.
Through her link, Diana watched as one platform fired a missile. Jabro’s assessment flicked into her mind via Hogue. She saw that the missile was a CTD, coil-launched to one per cent of light speed, because a higher acceleration would wreck it. A few thousand miles from the platform, its own drive kicked in—a one-burn fuser that applied the same acceleration as the coilgun but over a longer period. It would reach the alien ship in minutes. It then occurred to her that the platform that had launched the missile might not be doing precisely what she had asked, but she said nothing.
Meanwhile all the platforms were on the move. U-jump signatures flashed all around the accretion disc and platforms were appearing adjacent to the disc at the ship’s predicted departure point. They were much closer than the two fleets—interdicted space lying between. Diana had seen no reason to test the platform AIs’ further instructions concerning ships which breached the defence sphere space. Other platforms, nearer by, were under heavy fusion drive to reposition. All were surrounded by swarms of attack pods. The platforms were preparing for a hostile reaction.
The missile streaked in, flashes around it as particulates began burning off its forward hardfields and its defence lasers began hitting anything larger in its path. A few minutes later, it was sixty thousand miles from its target, whereupon it detonated. Diana breathed a sigh of relief. It would not have surprised her if the platform had decided on hitting the thing anyway, rather than this warning shot.
The blast was an expanding sphere of fire at first, then began to flatten out as it cooled, finally starting to separate into two discs as the ship reached it. The vessel passed through, swirling things up, but did not slow.
