by Neal Asher
“Seckurg?”
“No change in the data—still doesn’t make much sense.”
“The Kinghammer is back,” said Jabro.
Diana was aware of that via Hogue, as she was aware of most occurrences in the vicinity. Jabro did not need to tell her, just as Seckurg did not need to update her on the data transmitted by the alien ship. At one time, she had tried to make bridge operations more efficient: no need for human talk, mind-to-mind data transfer, all of them linked in as, effectively, subminds to Hogue. It hadn’t worked out so well. Humans tended to lose grip on the reality of life and death when they took themselves beyond their evolved senses. She wondered if that disconnection explained Orlandine’s recent . . . errors.
Even as the Kinghammer arrived, Orlik began transmitting positional data, a tactical map. Diana was happy to see that the prador was thinking exactly like her in this instance.
“I agree,” she said to him.
“Now, then,” he replied.
The prador ships began moving and, a moment later, as the Polity ships received their instructions, they started out as well. The two fleets began to meld into an umbrella formation over the departure point of the alien vessel from the disc. They were now fully cooperating in relation to the alien threat. A short while later, when the sensory arrays picked up the EMR from the event, Hogue slotted in a precis of what had happened between the Hammer and Weapons Platform Mu.
“I see that things did not go so well out there,” she said.
“Not so good,” Orlik replied.
“Good tactical move,” said Jabro, excluding Orlik from his comment.
It was. The superior firepower and defences of Mu had squashed and dismissed Orlik. Returning here, he had instituted a logical response to the alien ship but he had also, by melding his fleet with the Polity one, made his ships a much more difficult target for that platform. The Client would now likely think that if it attacked him, Diana would have to respond too, countering a threat to her ally, as well as to their present formation. Whether she would or not she didn’t know yet. It all depended.
“Analysis?” she said to Jabro.
He knew she meant Weapons Platform Mu. “Hardfields just like the ones the rogue AI Penny Royal used. Linked to a U-space twist. We could neutralize the platform and eventually input enough energy to drive the hardfield to collapse, which would destroy it.”
She studied the data he sent and, as ever, it came down to tactics. They could nail the weapons platform but while they were doing that, the seventy or so attack pods would knock all hell out of them. Meanwhile, of course, they had a huge alien ship to deal with.
“Stick to plan,” she said.
“You mean,” Jabro replied, “continue to ignore it and hope for the best?”
“Yeah, that about covers it.”
Diana returned her focus to the alien vessel, as the two-fleet formation shuffled and adjusted to optimum. But it seemed she would not get a second’s breathing space.
“Comlink from Weapons Platform Mu,” Hogue stated for all to hear. “I recommend limited com.”
“Agreed,” said Diana—Hogue meant just talk and no data transfer. There was no telling what the Client might send, given the bandwidth.
“Hello, Client,” she said.
The voice that replied was female, soft, evenly modulated and devoid of threat—deliberately so, Diana was sure. “The situation is complicated,” said the Client.
Diana quelled her “No shit, Sherlock” response and said, “It is complicated. What are your intentions here?”
“I wish to save my kind from extinction. The ship that is about to leave the accretion disc contains my people.”
Diana sat there trying to incorporate that. She realized her mouth was hanging open and closed it. A hundred questions clamoured for her attention and she knew at once that straight verbal exchanges would not be enough—not enough time left.
“This is information,” the Client added, “that I would prefer you not to share with the prador . . . for the present.”
Orlik was already of the opinion that destruction of that ship was the best option. How would he react upon learning that the seven-hundred-mile-wide warship contained further examples of a species his kind had tried to obliterate?
“Your people were at war with the Jain?” she asked.
“Yes they were.”
Too easy...
“So, the Wheel has tried to instigate the destruction of the last of your people?”
After a long pause, the Client replied simply, “Yes.”
Diana thought fast. She had really not liked that pause, and the Client’s “Yes” was too simple, considering its previous assertion about the situation being “complicated.”
“I need more data,” she said.
Agreed... Hogue whispered in her mind.
“That will require more trust,” the Client replied.
“Hogue, open up bandwidth,” she said, then looked over at Seckurg. He nodded, understanding. He would be ready with counters for informational warfare, just as Hogue would be ready. In her mind, she saw her ship’s AI send messages to other ship AIs to prepare similarly, then cut all communication with them.
An information package came through from the Client, routed straight into secure storage for examination.
“This could take some time,” said Seckurg.
Diana checked clocks, checked the position of the alien ship and knew they did not have the time. “Hogue, isolate me. Seckurg, route it to me in two minutes.”
“Are you sure about this?” Hogue asked.
“I am the captain of this ship and the commander of this fleet, but we both know I am not essential. Do it.” A slight delay ensued, whereupon she felt the disconnection. Though she still had her implant links, and the optic cables plugged into the back of her skull, Hogue went away. She suddenly felt utterly vulnerable and human, but she was used to that. Quite often she took holidays away from the connection to retain her humanity which, to her, was an edge. She prepared mentally. Her implants and enhancements would take the load, translating the data file into a format her brain could understand. If a hostile program came through with the data . . . well, she shrugged to herself, she felt it a risk worth taking. Warfare, after all, had never been a risk-free enterprise.
The file opened and Diana experienced warfare between the Jain and Species. So, it seemed the Jain were highly xenophobic—no surprise there—and had hunted the Species down across star systems. The final act had been here. What the Polity had always viewed as an accretion disc was in fact the rubble of a solar system which that conflict had destroyed. At the end of it, she felt wrung out, as if she had just lived an epic story in some virtuality. Running searches in her mind, she could find nothing nasty hidden in the data, so sent a tentative query to Hogue. She jerked as informational probes entered her mind, then started to grow hot, her face tingling, a sure sign the AI had an induction warfare beam on her.
“Clear,” Hogue finally said.
She began reconnecting and, as she did so, found that over an hour had passed. She shunted a copy of the history over to Hogue, who scanned it in an instant. It transmitted copies to the other AIs in the fleet, then quickly began transmitting a precis of it to her crew.
“The data is . . . lacking,” Hogue told her privately.
“In what way?” she asked—it had almost seemed to be too much to her.
“We have the history of the Jain and the Species,” said Hogue. “We saw the battle that occurred here and how this accretion disc—if it can any longer be called that—was made. But we do not know how that Species ship ended up in a U-space blister in the sun.”
“Some kind of defensive measure during the battle?”
“We can speculate, or . . .” said Hogue.
“Client,” she said. “Your data seem to have been edited.” She wasn’t sure if the accusation was true, but it was worth making to see if it elicited a response. “We do not know how or
why that ship ended up where it was.”
“This is something I myself do not know,” replied the Client.
Liar, thought Diana. But as she again checked the status of the two fleets, she knew it made no difference at all, even though Hogue was now transmitting this history to the platform AIs. The ship was still heading out. That the Species was an offshoot of the Jain did not make it any less a threat to the weapons platforms—the ship might not be Jain, but Jain tech had invaded it. And now, just minutes remained before it reached the perimeter.
Diana concentrated, summed all this up as an information package, and sent it to the Client.
“I see,” the Client responded. “Then use your fleet to destroy the weapons platforms.”
“I will not,” she said, her voice hard.
Simple reality. The platforms were no threat at all to the Polity, quite the reverse. The Species ship, however, contained Jain tech and could very well be as hostile as the Jain. Defending the Polity came first.
“Then ask the platforms to concentrate their fire on the Jain-tech- infested portions of the ship first,” said the Client.
It didn’t seem to make much sense, since eventually the platforms would destroy the whole thing.
“I see no reason why not,” she said flatly.
“Relayed,” Hogue informed her—sending the whole content of her conversation with the Client to the weapons platforms.
The Client fell silent and seemed to have no more to add. After a long pause, Jabro said, “The platforms.” Again, it wasn’t needed—she could see the energy readouts. The weapons platforms were preparing to open fire.
14
Induction warfare beams have been developed to the point where they can interfere with information in crystal storage. Or processed in quantum computing. So we must speculate at last on how we may affect matter, and what weapons this could lead to. Lasers heat a target, and this causes chemical changes in the material being struck. Particle weapons heat, but can also cause ablation, electrical disturbance and, with certain particulates, chemical changes. Sonic weapons set up resonance that can destroy the integrity of certain materials. These are all obvious. However, when one considers that an induction warfare beam can influence the quantum state of matter, which is what they do when penetrating computing, one must question what else can be influenced. We know, under laboratory conditions, that it is possible to interfere with, and sometimes change, atomic forces. This then leads to the idea of an energy weapon that can do the same. Could a weapon be created capable of turning an otherwise inert material fissile? It may well be possible to perform alchemy by knocking protons, neutrons and electrons out of atomic structures. And if one could actually tamper with the intermolecular and intramolecular forces, the currently fictional disintegrator or disruptor beam becomes a distinct possibility.
—Notes from her lecture “Modern Warfare” by E. B. S. Heinlein
ORLANDINE
She could sense them in the tower all around, and there were those she could not feel. A visual translation in her mind gave her light spots in the towers, interspersed with dark areas. The former were active weapons platforms, while the latter were those that had been destroyed. Annoyingly, frustratingly, she had only reached a few of them in her initial growth spurt and now felt exhausted. Straining for further contact, her vision strayed to internal cams, where she saw a Jain-tech tentacle developing fast along the glassy floor. It was etching out materials from the floor for its growth, extending towards its target. But she had other concerns too—she must not forget her friends.
Tracking the power draw of weapons, she gazed through cams into an underground level of the facility. Wrecked security drones and autoguns mapped out a path, at the end of which she found Captain Cog. His clothing was in tatters, and he was tearing an autogun out of a wall, while Angel stood at his back, taking shots from another gun, his body radiating red hot. She punched into security and shut it down, but even as the weapons ceased firing on her companions, her attention strayed elsewhere. The Clade was trying to get in. She reached out to her sentinel drones and sensed another presence.
“So you’re alive,” said Bludgeon.
“Yes.” She said no more, instead penetrating the sentinels. The virus Bludgeon had used to shut them down was complex and self-regenerative, so instead of attempting to erase it, she just deleted everything in their sub-AI minds. In her own mind, she slammed together a subpersona—simplified, limited objectives—and began copying it across. Meanwhile she had noticed another situation.
Trike was waiting to die. But then the whine of power supplies all around him began to wind down as Bludgeon informed his fellow drones that the man had not, in fact, killed Orlandine. She added her own input to that:
“He carried my Jain tech, which possessed U-com and was able to load one of my backups from out where we built the runcibles. His kiss saved me.”
“But not your body,” Cutter commented.
“I have retained DNA and can rebuild it if I wish,” she said.
She was trying to be cold and logical about this, but she did feel resentment about her human death and the invasion that had transformed her. She should feel gratitude towards the man but did not and had to stamp on the urge to ask the drones to kill him anyway. They began to swing their weapons away from him and focus their attention elsewhere. She saw what was attracting their notice. The Clade, congregating low down, struggling to form into a spinning patterned mass, while fending off strikes from above.
“Do not attack,” she told them.
“They are about to use another ion-beam strike,” Knobbler informed her.
“I know, but there is no need for you to attack.”
Sentinel drones, which had earlier been slumped and inert on their watch towers, were now active. They began raising their weapons-loaded forelimbs towards the swirling Clade formation. She set them firing, but more as a distraction than anything else, for she had seen, via the facility’s exterior sensors, and through the sentinel drones, the solution arriving, or rather, returning.
“You have found your calling,” she said.
“Seems that way,” replied the erstwhile black-ops attack ship.
The sound of railgun slugs in atmosphere created a sonic thunder. It produced hard white vapour trails that appeared some seconds after impact. Targeted Clade units exploded and their formation scattered in disarray. Obsidian Blade arrived with a thunderous crash, spitting fire in every direction. The shockwave of its arrival rippled the glassy faces of buildings and set some of them swaying. She saw Trike shielding his eyes as dust and debris blew past him, along with two of the smaller, lighter war drones, then returned her attention to greater concerns.
She studied the platform ghost drives to which she had linked. All contained the directive written in by her. She considered alterations but, in the end, realized that circumstances had changed so radically that the need for the directive had passed. She erased it in each drive, and consequently in each connected platform.
“We are preparing to fire,” the platform AIs informed her.
Detail?
A data package arrived and she took it apart in an instant. She saw the situation out there: the Client, the history of the Jain and the Species, and that the accretion disc was the remains of a destroyed solar system. The alien ship, the Species ship, was just about to slide out of the accretion disc and she understood why even the platforms without the directive might open fire. Jain tech aboard that ship remained a danger, while the ship and its complement was an unknown. But now at least she had leeway.
She strained further. Glimpses of the web of herself stretched throughout the Ghost Drive Facility. More platforms fell into her grasp, even as they began firing fusillades of railgun slugs. No way to recall them, but she needed to reach all the platforms and get a grip on this situation. She continued to erase the directive, but they still fired. Their attack pods were on the move, hurtling towards the alien ship and spitting particle
beams. Then Orlandine hit gold.
One branch of herself seized control of a fusion reactor and made connection to a main power feed. Energy flooded through her superconducting fibres and, ramping up the output of the reactor, she had the power she needed. Her Jain tentacles extended rapidly throughout the facility, hot and smoking with the speed of their growth. They spread fibrous root tendrils to suck up materials, sped along optic and power feeds, punched through floors and ceilings. Drawing masses of materials into globular growths at the bases of each tower, they exploded from these, up through the tower dropshafts. The moment they hit the top, they sprouted side-growths that shot into each drive section. In the first few minutes, Orlandine linked to twenty ghost drives, in the next few she had hundreds.
Meanwhile, out at the accretion disc the railgun slugs found their target. Seen as a whole, the great ship seemed to sparkle. But these first shots on its hull punched craters a half-mile wide, spewing out balls of white-hot debris, molten metal and gas. Then came a flickering across vacuum, impacts upon curved surfaces. These hardfields were similar to the one the Client had deployed around Weapons Platform Mu. But they were not fully enclosing and faded in strength towards their edges, wavering on and off like faulty light panels. While many railgun slugs struck them, creating a fire-storm in vacuum, others slammed through to hit the ship. And the attack pods were closer too, their particle beams sometimes deflected, sometimes carving glowing trenches. Were these intermittent hardfields a sign of the damage the ship had received?
The strikes were ferocious and the attack pods began to deploy other weapons. Missiles streaked down. Orlandine saw them altering their acceleration and changing courses. She realized the AIs had detected a frequency to the hardfield failures and that the missiles were also seeking out weak spots. Hundreds of them punched through. Others, whose timing was a bit off, exploded out in vacuum against full fields. The intense EMR flashes of the multiple blasts knocked sensors down and hid the ship behind a giant, spreading plasma storm. Altered sensory data and clean-up programs gave a view of the ship through the storm a moment later. The CTD missiles struck and massive explosions burrowed craters miles wide in the body of the thing and blew out islands of material. The whole seven-hundred-mile-wide monster bucked under the force and distorted. Multiple impacts in some places cut holes right through it. Molten metal sheeted across vacuum from these holes. Hot chemical fires burned around them, warping and blistering the hull and scorching it to expose structural members. Radiant gas blew away what might be access hatches or doors. The ship shuddered and revolved, a great section of its outer spiral, five hundred miles long, unpeeling in apparent slow motion and breaking away.
