by Neal Asher
Orlik waited, and after a few minutes the king spoke again. “Sprag relayed a copy of the data package to me upon receipt. Windermere is correct. Take no action against that ship, or the Client, unless you are attacked. Your primary focus must be the . . . security of the accretion disc until Orlandine has full control again.”
Ah, back to that, thought Orlik. “But the Species . . .”
“Historical files show that they made every effort to negotiate with us, even offered technological trade—this continued even while we were destroying them.”
“Still . . .”
“I have given my order,” said the king, and cut the link.
Orlik opened the link to Diana again. “I will do nothing, as you recommend.”
“I know,” said Diana tightly, “your king included me in that exchange.” “So, do we separate our fleets and start snapping our claws at each other again?”
“We’ll have to wait for Orlandine to—”
Sprag cut in: “Two hundred of our ships have just opened fire on the vessel.”
COG
Captain Cog lay flat on his back, trying to control his breathing and enforce calm, clear thinking. But he realized he had taken too much damage. The defence system in the Ghost Drive Facility had been harsh and the injuries it had inflicted on him had pushed him towards the kind of change that Trike was undergoing. Not quite the same, but he knew his control was shaky. Still, better than being dead.
He sat upright and looked across at Angel. The android was bent over, one hand against a twisted I-beam, smoking—parts of his body still red hot. Without the android, Cog knew he would not have survived this place. Angel’s ability to scan his surroundings had enabled them to find an area, with the destruction of a few internal defences, where they could hole up for just that bit longer. However, in the end it was another’s intervention that had saved them.
“Orlandine?” Cog asked.
Angel shook himself and stood upright. He pointed through the wreckage. “She is all around us.”
Cog peered beyond the wreckage and had no idea what his companion was talking about. He saw the vine-like growths along the far wall, some of them shifting slightly, like a blind man’s fingers feeling his way. “I don’t understand,” he said.
“It is simple,” said a distorted female voice that seemed to issue out of the air nearby.
“Orlandine?”
“Yes.”
“What happened?”
“You understand that I was comprised of three parts?” she asked. Cog strained for understanding but was at war with himself. Yes, he wanted to think clearly and logically. But he also had an unbelievable hunger and had become very attracted to the idea of taking a bite out of Angel.
“I see your powers of reason are not at their best,” said Orlandine. “I was a haiman composed of a human being melded, as fully as possible, with AI. I conquered the technology of a Jain node and made it my third part, to integrate the other two more closely.”
“I note the use of the past tense,” said Angel.
The android had made some point there, Cog realized, but it escaped him.
Angel nodded, as if he had received a private communication. “Come on,” he said, and began making his way through the wreckage. Cog followed—they were heading out, there would be food . . .
Orlandine continued, “When the Clade attempted to have me assassinated, I had to wipe most of my AI component and detach my Jain element. My aim was reintegration after I fell, but my surviving human fled into the storm drains, where you found me.”
They made their way to an area through which they had not come, so it was clear of wreckage. Then to a dropshaft. Angel stepped in and it wafted him upwards. Cog did the same but found himself stupidly fighting the irised gravity field. When Cog arrived, following Angel, he just hung writhing in mid-air, until the android grabbed and pulled him out, onto the ground floor of one of the towers. He clamped a hand on Angel’s shoulder and tugged him close. His tongue darted out, long and pink, and its leech mouth ground over the android’s face.
“I think not,” said Angel, easily pushing him away.
Cog felt a surge of rage but fought it. He retracted his tongue.
“You will need something,” said Orlandine. “I have instructed Knobbler.”
What? What was she talking about?
“So what happened next?” Angel asked.
“My Jain component was damaged by the Clade but managed to pursue me into the storm drains. Its movement was limited, but it found someone to ride. While in that person, it reinstated its U-com and downloaded one of my backups. It also took control of its carrier and sent him after me.”
“Trike,” said Angel.
“Correct.”
“Isn’t it disturbing it used a human being like that?” Angel asked.
After a long pause, Orlandine replied again with, “Correct.”
Many more of the vine-like growths were here, spearing off in every direction, branching into the ghost drive and other surrounding equipment. Jain tech, Cog finally realized. Those growths, they were Orlandine. Angel led the way through to a glass wall, but it was distorted and twisted by those same growths. The glass was rainbow-refracting between the vine-like strands, like a stained-glass window, so it was nigh impossible to see out.
“He brought my Jain component to me, here, when I was once again on the point of death,” said Orlandine.
“I understand,” said Angel.
Cog really didn’t understand but he held onto one thing. “Trike, is he okay?” He felt it was a silly question to ask but could think of nothing else. He suspected the changes the boy had undergone might not be reversible.
“He is . . . different,” Orlandine replied.
With a screeing sound, a hole opened at eye-level in the glass ahead. It steadily expanded, the vines rolling the edge back and crystal shards dropping to the floor. They stepped out through drifting smoke below a bright, sunlit sky. Cog surveyed the devastation. He could see that a couple of towers were down and rubble was strewn everywhere. Squatting here and there on the battlefield were war drones. Cog got a sudden, nostalgic surge of memory, of a time he hadn’t thought about often in the last century or so. He remembered being in a place similarly wrecked. There were war drones much like these and prador too, like the one standing over beside Trike, as well as those approaching from outside the facility. He took a pace forwards, because there was meat, but Angel’s hand came down on his shoulder.
“You are better than this,” said the android.
“Yes, yes I am,” said Cog, but still found himself pulling against the grip. He took a deep breath, fists clenched, and forced his focus wholly on Trike—a person he knew.
The man no longer looked human. He stood maybe eight feet tall, scraps of his original clothing clinging to him but failing to cover the thickly corded, blue musculature that seemed almost skinless—like an ancient anatomical drawing. Brown and white veins clad his body, while the sides of his torso had issued curving spikes, like a reptile’s teeth. His head jutted forward on a long neck, eyes close together, mouth filled with lethal fangs protruding forward too—the head of a predatory animal. Yet . . . yet he seemed to be in calm repose, when everything about him spoke of danger, action and things being torn apart.
“Cog,” said Trike, his voice only slightly distorted by the fearsome-looking mouth.
“How are you, boy?” Cog asked, finding himself having to repress the urge to giggle.
Trike gazed at him for a long moment, then said, “I am better.” He then fixed his attention on Angel and stiffened. The serenity seemed to disappear. Cog had been aware for some time that Trike had unfinished business with the android, and it seemed that had not changed. After a pause, Trike seemed to make a huge effort, shrugged himself and became looser. He looked up as a shadow fell across them from the big war drone Cog recognized as Knobbler. It descended to land on one side.
“Following instructions,” sa
id the drone.
It flicked out two of its tentacles and an object landed with a thump between them, raising dust and spattering droplets of yellow ichor all around. Cog had time to register that the thing looked like the cross between a lizard and a llama, before he lost all control. He leapt forwards and descended on it, his tongue stabbing down and grinding through scaled hide. A moment of ecstasy suffused him as gobbets of flesh, in a bath of body fluids, flowed up inside his tubular tongue. He could feel the food entering his throat and then dropping into the cavernous emptiness of his stomach. But it wasn’t enough, nor fast enough. He retracted his tongue, rocked back and stabbed a hand down, punching inside the carcass, then tearing out its side. Now Trike was there too. Cog snarled at him, but suppressed it by cramming chunks of a liver-like organ into his mouth. Trike glanced across, casually ripped off the thing’s head and long neck, and began consuming it with appalling efficiency.
Sanity slowly returned and Cog found himself studying the stripped remains. The creature possessed a skeleton of hard, black bone that looked like biological chainmail, with circular links as wide as his hand. This was too tough for him to eat, so he concentrated on the remaining meat and organs. It wasn’t too hard for Trike, however, who broke the thing apart and crunched large pieces down as though they were rock candy. Cog felt no urge to snarl at him now and finally, as his mind started working again, his first thought was, he ate its head. At length, the two of them stood and stepped back from a yellow and purple stain on the ground.
“Better now?” asked Angel, slapping a hand on Cog’s shoulder.
Cog flinched and resisted the urge to turn on him.
“Not really,” he replied. “I still need some suppression and—” he gestured to Trike—”I think he does too. I have diluted sprine back at my ship.”
“Isn’t that risky with him?” said Angel, speaking low.
“I think we’re beyond that now.”
Trike looked over at them with what might have been a grin or a gri- mace—it was difficult to tell. “I have no need for intervention. The Clade still lives.” But the monstrous man’s gaze was balefully fixed on Angel for an uncomfortably long moment, before he swung it round to the building behind. “Where is it now?”
They turned towards the tower, and movement there. Vines, veins and tendrils of Jain tech were streaming out around the hole they had stepped through. A mass grew and gradually began to fill the entrance. As it closed the thing up, it began to bulge towards them, shifting and reshaping, until revealing the form of a human being. The mass presented this human shape, which consisted entirely of writhing movement, and thrust it forwards. The figure then began to settle and meld, taking on the colour of flesh. Its feet touched down onto the dusty ground, as features appeared and eyes opened. Naked, Orlandine stepped forwards, but Cog noted she was still attached to the mass behind her by a hundred umbilici. She looked around at them all, and smiled.
“Where is it now?” Trike repeated.
Orlandine glanced across at Angel. “You understand the situation now?”
“I do,” Angel nodded. “Species ship and the prador opening fire.”
“I must secure Jaskor and rearm the platforms,” she said and turned to Knobbler. “I’ll need you and your crew in orbit, working on our defences.”
“No guarantee it will come here,” said Knobbler.
“That’s not my concern,” she shot back.
Knobbler turned slightly to look towards the prador. Cog knew he should be understanding this interplay but did not. He needed information, but first he needed his mind straight enough to comprehend it.
“Where is the Clade?” Trike insisted.
Finally, Orlandine focused on him. “Aren’t you forgetting something?”
“I am not,” said Trike.
She smiled without humour. “I could do it myself, but I have other tasks to perform. They have an advanced . . . AI surgeon aboard a medship coming down from orbit. They could bring your wife Ruth back to you.”
Trike bowed over as if he had been thumped, or as if he was about to attack. He shook his head from side to side. “The Clade,” he muttered.
Orlandine just stared at him, then answered, “The Clade has taken refuge in the storm drains and caves underneath the city, where the Obsidian Blade is hunting it. Your input is not required.”
Trike snarled, turned and loped away, then began accelerating into a long-stride run. Cog gazed at his retreating back, not sure what to do.
“Cog,” said Orlandine, “that medship is heading for the city now.”
Cog nodded, then set off after Trike. He needed to return to his ship anyway to get that low-dose sprine into his system. Experienced in the changes the virus could make, he knew that the longer he left it, the worse they got. After a moment, he realized that Angel was running to one side of him.
“You sure you want to come?” Cog asked.
“I cannot spend my life running away from him,” Angel replied. “And I don’t think he will be able to continue running away from me.”
15
The armour of yesteryear—the kind preserved in museums on Earth from the conflicts that occurred there before the first diaspora—is as akin to modern-day armour as a sheet of cellophane to human skin. No, even that comparison doesn’t give a wide enough gap. There is none for the outer teguments of living beings. Modern armour is a whole technology in itself and one that developed rapidly after our first encounters with the prador. It is perfectly understood that our deficiency in that respect was nearly the end of us. Armour is in the prador genome, literally, and since they are great metallurgists, their development of it was way ahead of ours. While we were still experimenting with exotic matter in laboratories, they were incorporating it into the hulls of their ships.At that time, Polity ship armour consisted of dense and tough metamaterials, and shock-absorbing closed and open cell structures. Prador weapons melted or cut it to shreds. Superconducting grids were quickly incorporated, as were shifting, bearing layers. Armour tech from the prador led to the use of exotic metals too and within a decade, we were equal to them in this respect. Complex memory materials, iterations of chain-glass, nanochain chromium and other hyperlinked materials, took us further. Also computer control of many processes within the armour made it more adaptable. Armour is now a deeply complex technology that enwraps our ships. It is much akin to a living skin, even with veins and capillaries to shift its substance and heal injuries.
—Notes from her lecture “Modern Warfare” by E. B. S. Heinlein
GEMMELL
On a new descent trajectory, now the action had moved to the city, Gemmell contemplated the data being relayed to his gridlink by Morgaine. He collated it and cut out what was irrelevant to them, then relayed it to the gridlinks, augs and Golem minds of the soldiers behind him in the transport. First the events on the ground. Orlandine had regained control of the Ghost Drive Facility and recalled the platforms. The Clade, meanwhile, had entered the drainage system under the city, to be hunted by the black-ops attack ship Obsidian Blade, transformed into a swarm AI.
“Our mission is still approved?” he asked.
“It is,” Morgaine replied from the console, so all could hear.
“I wondered, what with the Clade back at the city . . .”
“Seems Diana now approves of us getting proactive.”
Gemmell snorted at that. “And how are things up there?” Up in orbit around Jaskor it was all getting a bit crowded.
“It’s a little bit tense here,” commented Morgaine. “The prador aren’t happy, and the platform AIs aren’t saying much. They have, however, dispatched robot shuttles to pick up the refugees in orbit and sent construction and maintenance bots to the orbital facilities.”
“Any word from Orlandine?” he asked, as the troop transport punched through cloud and the landscape opened out underneath. “Plenty of words,” said Morgaine, obviously annoyed.
“Really?”
“She’s strippin
g a hundred platforms of the bulk of their armament and moving them into close orbit. Every atmosphere-capable shuttle and non-military ship is to be deployed moving evacuees to the platforms.” “Your shuttles too, I take it?”
“Yes, the majority of them. Prador shuttles also.”
“Seems an excessive response,” he opined.
“Millions were already queued to leave by runcible and more want to get off-world. I suspect it’s some guilt on her part concerning the thousands who have already died. She’s discharging her responsibility to citizens.”
“So she really expects big problems?”
“It’s not out of the question, with what’s happening.”
True enough. Immediately after agreeing that the Species ship should be left alone, the prador had opened fire on it. Their commander,Orlik, claimed this was not at his order. That event had greatly agitated the prador here, while Polity forces were also unhappy: it felt as if the situation was spinning out of control, and they didn’t know what to do. It looked as if things might be about to blow up between the two realms. Orlandine, in allowing a big evacuation, might be overreacting, but the surface population on Jaskor would be the most vulnerable. A battle breaking out in orbit could result in megadeath below.
Trantor, the squat, bald-headed veteran piloting the transport, took it lower down. They hurtled over desert terrain, scattered with cracked salt pans, towards the blue jut of mountains. The Ghost Drive Facility was there, but that wasn’t where they were going. Gemmell, linked into the shuttle’s sensors, focused on something down on the ground. A giant sprawl of grav-cars and buses had settled on the ground beside a river, the growth on either side the only green. Self-assembling holiday homes were up and thousands of people were in the area. Refugees from the city had first landed in the mountains, then, learning of the Clade heading towards them, had come here. He only looked for confirmation because he knew the locations of most of those who had fled. They were not his concern at present and, checking his gridlink, he saw that a cargo shuttle had been sent from the main city to pick them up. They would be heading up to the evacuee platforms.
