by Neal Asher
Anger and frustration boiled through the Client. In this state, she felt justified for having lied to Diana Windermere—concealing the real reason why the Species ship had ended up in that U-space blister, and that it had not been alone. At the time, it had been a simple, almost instinctive reaction. She no longer felt any need to avenge the destruction of her kind in the Kingdom, or the Polity’s betrayal of her. However, she had no particular urge to stop something else destroying them. Also, if the Kingdom and the Polity ended up in a fight for survival against what would come out of the blister next, that would divert their attention from her, and from the remainder of her kind. She was nothing if not pragmatic.
Still focused on the battle, she saw the fleets taking massive damage too. She watched further disruptor beam strikes. A destroyer in the shape of a giant sarcophagus threw out hardfields that blackened and fragmented like burned leaves as a glassy beam drilled through them. Final impact on its nose shuddered the whole vessel into its death throes. It vomited coin-shaped compartments from its side containing its complement of marines. The bright spark of its AI ejected at the last, as the whole thing splintered and began to spin off chunks of its structure.
Then something new. Inevitably, the Species ship hunted out the capital ships. One of those beams reached out for the Cable Hogue. A thousand miles out from itself, the Hogue generated a series of hardfields, simultaneously launching a missile towards them. The Species’ beam struck those outer hardfields and began boring through, as the missile reached the fields at the back and slowed with a blast of fusion. The Hogue generated a further hardfield behind this, as the beam started to cut through the final field of the front series. Then the missile exploded. The blast spread in a disc, just for a little while, then began to collapse back: CTD imploder. A secondary detonation ensued as the beam ground into the last hardfield. It stopped there, then all the way back along its curving length, it frayed like old string and dispersed. The Client was impressed. The Cable Hogue AI, or weapons techs aboard, had figured out a response to the ship’s weapon. But it was a costly one, as the Hogue shed burned-out field projectors like tracer fire.
The Kinghammer next. As it fell away, it survived by deploying the same technique. That was fast, AI fast, yet the ship was a prador one. The Client surmised that the prador were not so averse to that technology as was supposed. Other ships did not have sufficient hardfields to do this, and many of them were shattering, while still others detonated in the output energy of U-twists generating inside them. Almost a third of the ships that had been there were gone.
The fleet was in a trap, the Client understood this. The prador had opened fire on the Species ship and prevented the fleet from escaping by deploying U-space mines, forcing the Polity ships to open fire too. It was either kill that ship or die. But how should she react? First, she needed to move closer. Firing up the fusion drives in Platform Mu and its attack pods, she did so, meanwhile monitoring U-space disruption very closely.
She could attack the fleet and give the Species ship a better chance of survival, but problems would arise from that. If the fleet turned its weapons on her, they could drive the collapse of her hardfield. She wanted her kind to survive but, in reality, not at the expense of her own life. Another option was available, reflected in the way Polity and prador ships reacted when facing final obliteration. The Client knew how things would proceed if, as seemed likely, the Species ship was on the losing side here.
The design of the thing was like a giant ammonite. The growth of that snail-like coil containing weapons, defences and energy supplies had proceeded from an inner core. None of the Species occupied the outer ship—if anything there required their attention, they sent biological remotes, just as she used them herself. Her kind lodged in the heavily defended centre. That would be the last to go—ejected like the captain’s sanctums some of the prador ships managed to expel.
The Client reached out mentally to her attack pods. Like the drive in Weapons Platform Mu, their drives were highly advanced—beyond what was aboard the Polity and prador ships. She would be ready long before those ships could escape the U-space disruption here. She would also be ready before the Species ship could travel in that continuum, because it had heavily damaged its drive when it departed from the blister. Still, what she intended to do would be dangerous and complicated. It would be similar to making a U-space jump too near to a gravity well—a short bounce in and out of that continuum. Calculating a destination would be almost impossible. The bounce would fling her through that continuum, then up and out by the next nearest gravity well. It was almost with a sense of inevitability that she realized that would be the Jaskoran system.
The Client pondered on this. The bounce would put her own drives out of commission for an appreciable time—time enough for the fleet there to attack her. She felt almost as if the universe itself must be working against her. But this was not so—just physics and U-tech. Anyway, the fleet there, at Jaskor, did not have the firepower to penetrate her hard- fields. Her only problem would be if the fleet here, supposing enough of it remained, pursued her. The combined firepower might be enough . . . but that would not be happening. Those ships would soon enough have something else to occupy their attention. She focused her instruments on the accretion disc sun.
The black orb possessed an oversized event horizon for an object of a little over nine solar masses. Now that event horizon had begun to shrink and hexagonal patterns were once again spreading over it. The patterns seemed mechanistic but the Client understood them to be the outward form which the open end of the U-space blister created in the real. And the blister, with the time slopes in it now tilting level and winding up, was finally beginning to close. Measuring the effect, the Client could see that the application of internal U-fields had kept it open, just. Something in there had not wanted it to close. That something was about ready to come out.
ORLANDINE
Orlandine’s view of the action at the accretion disc was intermittent.
She had managed to key into U-com and sensors in the remains of weapons platforms and some attack pods she had instructed platforms to leave behind. However, after the two hundred prador ships deployed U-space mines, U-com kept crashing and reinstating rhythmically. She gazed upon an old lozenge-shaped dreadnought as a disruptor beam drilled through it. This was just one scene of many in the appalling destruction happening there. On both sides. Another view showed her a CTD blast on the Species ship ripping up a swathe of armour larger than a weapons platform. And the thing was taking hits like this all the time.
The battle was by no means a foregone conclusion. Orlandine could calculate many variables, including whether or not the Client would attack. But the biggest variable of all was the ship itself. She did not know what other weapons it might possess. The probabilities foremost were: the ship would be destroyed with a loss of nearly half of the combined fleets out there, but this was without the Client’s intervention. If the Client did intervene, then it and that ship would destroy the fleet. The only variable in this case was whether the ship would survive. In fact, it was all very simple and did not need the lengthy diversion she had taken into tactics, weapons stats and higher mathematics.
Withdrawing her focus from there, she next gazed through a thousand eyes upon the weapons platforms hanging out in vacuum around Jaskor. Should she send them in? No. The prador had fired on that ship and set this battle in motion, and the Polity ships had joined in. Win or lose, the battle was their concern. She must stick to her purpose, her project: get the platforms back up to spec and re-establish them at the defence sphere when the firing ceased.
While the platforms worked to repair themselves and sent out requisitions for materials to put through their own internal factories, Orlandine finally managed to instate a stable com route to the fleets. On first penetrating the ECS data sphere out there, she received tactical updates, ship manifests and casualty counts.
“Oh, it’s you,” said the Hogue AI, finally realizing s
he wasn’t another ship mind. Next she found herself gazing into the face of Diana Windermere.
“Reports of your demise were exaggerated,” said Windermere, distractedly.
“Do you know why the prador ships opened fire?” Orlandine asked, noting a com delay of thirty-three seconds and so making this exchange secondary to tasks closer to home.
“Clade backup plan,” Windermere stated curtly. “They penetrated those ships.”
Orlandine processed that. It didn’t quite make sense since, having penetrated prador ships, the Clade could have forced the fleets to join the weapons platforms’ attack on the ship. She realized that there were still undercurrents; she did not have the whole picture.
“I will send my platforms back,” she stated, knowing precisely where this comment would lead.
“Now?”
“No, when the conflict out there is resolved—my focus must remain on the accretion disc.”
“We might not be here then,” said Windermere, and cut the link.
Diana was understandably terse being, after all, in the midst of a battle. Orlandine considered sending another message: “Saving your fleet is not my priority. The Jain and their technology loose in the Polity and the Kingdom is.” She also thought of adding that the Species ship had only fired in self-defence, then rejected the whole idea. Windermere and the AIs out there perfectly understood the situation. It would descend into pointless human bickering even to mention who fired first and for what reason. She concentrated instead on the rest of the steadily heating up infrastructure around Jaskor.
Knobbler, along with his crew, had headed up to take control of robot populations aboard the factories and smelting plants. Already processes were kicking into motion and she watched haulers loaded with materials coming in to dock. Human and Golem crews were also quickly getting back to work. Once she apprised them of the situation, all of them—even the humans who had been injured and undergone surgical repair, and by rights could demand some R and R—were keen to get back to work. They were made of different stuff to those eagerly abandoning Jaskor, she felt. So, as she did not need to intervene, she directed her main attention closer to the planet.
One hundred weapons platforms in close orbit were stripping out major armaments and shunting them away by drone ship to other platforms. Thereafter filling out vast internal spaces with the infrastructure for human habitation, they were taking on supplies from Jaskor and from installations in the system. Evacuees from the surface were arriving in a constant stream of ships. She resented the loss of the platforms as weapons, but conceded that she did have a responsibility for the citizens of this world. Each platform should, eventually, be able to take on board a few million people, but only for a short journey. Space being limited, she restricted it to those people who wanted to go straight away. She hoped to get the planetary population down below a hundred million. Should she bring in more platforms to this end? No. By her calculations, disarming these platforms was already a big enough risk. She turned her attention to Jaskor itself.
Big shuttles had landed in the city and tough soldiers in power suits had spread out to herd citizens to areas they could make secure. Or they guarded access points on the ground which the airfire drones, now hovering over the city, could not see. Other craft were landing, transports to the evacuation platforms and shuttles containing technical and medical personnel, who were also spreading out in the city with a purpose. She decided to check the logistics and planning involved in this and tried to access the data flows. Instead, her attempt to make a link routed through to a single human being.
“About time you took an interest,” said Gemmell.
It wasn’t just a verbal link and she realized in a moment that he possessed a gridlink in his skull. She decided on full contact and he allowed it, not that he could have stopped her. She became present with him, standing on the roof of her own apartment building and gazing out at the city. She saw all he could see through the cams carried by the other personnel down there. He turned to look at her. Though just a projection in his mind, she appeared utterly solid to him. He knew this, but still addressed her as if she was physically present.
“Morgaine tells me that things are getting really busy up there.” He gestured with the barrel of a heavy multigun towards the sky.
“I’m making preparations—the weapons platforms have to go back,” she replied.
“Seems like a plan.” He shrugged. “Interesting that you’ve used so many of them for evacuation.”
“I have my responsibilities.”
“Seems to me you think things are going to get very shitty here and want to cut down the casualty rate.”
She nodded. Thousands of calculations running through her mind, thousands of scenarios playing out. Too many anomalous factors had mounted up towards a likelihood of . . . things getting shitty.
“You have at least some awareness of the situation,” was all she said.
He gave her an amused look. “You mean, I’m slightly closer to being as enhanced as you and hence much closer to being an AI, and that I am at least not stupid.”
His regard made her feel quite uncomfortable and she suddenly realized her projection was naked. A touch at her shoulder had her covered in an environment suit in a moment, whereupon she felt stupid. She was only data to herself and an illusion to him, yet she had behaved as if she was physically present on the roof.
Pointing down to the city, he continued, “We’ll have things in order here, at least on the surface. No sign of any Clade units coming up. I’m detecting action from down below but I’m not getting anything from Blade about it.”
Orlandine nodded. Blade was keeping things very tight down there since it didn’t want open coms the Clade could penetrate. Her last communication with it had been about Trike, and since then it had closed to her. Another link into the tunnels had also closed. Trike had delivered her Jain tech and backup but it had not detached from him. She had long ago excised the tech’s destructiveness, but its propensity to subsume remained, and it had effectively made him an adjunct to herself. She did not want the connection and was thankful when Angel broke it. She had thought the android had passed it over to Blade, but it seemed that wasn’t the case. Perhaps Angel felt he owed Trike something and thus gave him complete autonomy. Or the android hoped to quell the murderous impulse Trike had towards him and which, through her connection to Trike, Orlandine had felt was like some cancerous tumour in his mind. Whatever. Willingly, Trike was now Blade’s tool, weapon, bloodhound.
“Blade has been given new orders,” she said. “Its task is to neutralize the Clade.”
Gemmell looked back at her. “That is a statement that’s open to interpretation.”
She nodded and added, “All of the Clade. To do that it must access the swarm AI to learn where every unit of it is.”
“Well, we know where another two hundred units are . . . probably not so many now.”
“Yes, we do.”
There seemed nothing more to discuss and, anyway, Gemmell had as much access to information on the events here, and at the accretion disc, as her. Nor did she need anything from him. But still she lingered. She saw him abruptly shift position, then frown down at the building below. As a projection in his mind, she did not feel it, but her other senses did.
“It’s a quake from the Sambre volcano,” she said. “Nothing to worry about.”
He nodded briefly, doubtless accessing data on the forming island through his gridlink. They stood thus for a moment longer.
“Is it difficult, being so much more than human?” he asked abruptly. “I am more efficient, I have a mind that has the strength of an AI and I control . . . much.”
“That’s not what I asked.”
“It has its problems.”
“Like leaving humanity behind. . .”
Orlandine absorbed and processed data on many levels and, in an instant, she knew the story of this man’s relationship with the interfaced ship captain Morgaine. She als
o realized why she had lingered: because this was a human moment and she was clinging to such remnants. But her human body was gone and she recognized these fragments now as just habits, familiar patterns of thought . . . superfluous.
“You must force a choice,” she said. “One of you must break the link. Morgaine keeps you because it requires of her no effort to do so.”
He winced, smiled tiredly. “Yeah, you’re not the first to point that out.” Orlandine nodded to him once and pulled her awareness back to the Ghost Drive Facility, dissolved to his perception like fog.
ORLIK
Orlik peered up with one stalked eye towards the interface cable. It hung in tatters, still emitting the occasional spark. The rest of the skein of optics and a couple of s-con leads lay across his back. But now,at last, his implants were working again and he could implement the disconnection routine. He did so, then shrugged, sloughing the interface plate and its connected skein from his back.
“We’re still alive,” he said, looking around his sanctum.
A missing wall exposed the superstructure of the ship. He could see twisted I-beams and other wreckage and then stars, and explosions, beyond an emergency shimmershield.
“For how much longer?” wondered Sprag.
Sprag’s voice issued from her drone body, which had caught hold of the rim of the hole through which vacuum decompression nearly expelled it. The drone released her hold and flew over, wings clattering. She then tilted to look up at the ceiling as a robot arm folded out and swung round on its base to detach the tattered skein up there. A second arm appeared with a new skein and interface plate, and plugged it in, running it down to the small crane poised over Orlik.
“You’re doing that,” Orlik stated.
“I am,” Sprag replied, now speaking directly to Orlik’s implants as the drone settled on the crane.
“Situational report,” Orlik demanded.
“We are winning,” Sprag replied.
Orlik could not quite encompass this tactical assessment via his implants. High EMR disruption penetrated inside the Kinghammer, and radio data transfer was patchy, especially now the ship had an enormous hole in its side. It didn’t feel at all like winning to him. The kind of destruction he could see out there ranked as high as some he had seen during the prador/human war, when massed fleets had gone head-to-head.
