by Neal Asher
Soon the new interface plate hung over Orlik’s back and, via his implants, he instituted the connection routine. The crane lowered it, while magnetic positioning centred it and locked it down. With internal routines tidying the imagery and data other ships transmitted by laser com, Orlik could see clearly beyond the ship—part computer projection to account for time delays. He watched three reavers, now remotely controlled by Sprag, mounting a layered hardfield defence against the disruptor beam. They combined their hardfields and launched a series of imploders to try and get the timing right. Hardfields shrivelled and blackened, followed by detonation. He felt Sprag’s satisfaction as the beam strike unravelled back to the alien ship, but felt none himself. The three reavers fell away, parts of their hulls bursting out on explosions of molten metal where field generators had failed to eject. They would not be able to mount a defence like that again.
He checked through the Kinghammer to make a real assessment of the damage. The U-field twist had torn away a huge chunk of the ship and taken eight of his crew along with it—now only fourteen of the Guard remained. Even though he was prador, he felt deep regret about that because he could name each one, and they were Guard he had known for centuries. The damage had taken out a third of the ship’s hardfield generators, half its supply of railgun slugs and one large magazine of missiles. Luckily, that magazine had only contained chemical and fission warheads. Orlik felt a tightening in his guts when he realized what would have happened had it struck the magazine containing CTDs.
The destruction had been localized by the ship’s cellular construction—blast walls had damped the explosion, while a ship-wide superconducting grid had drawn away the heat. Robots were making repairs and memory materials drew energy to reform superstructure. But, checking the materials and components manifest, Orlik saw there wasn’t enough to rebuild the missing structure inside. And, most importantly, not enough to seal up the hull. He looked beyond the ship at the wreckage out there: at gutted reavers and dreadnoughts and spreading clouds of debris. Plenty to cannibalize—if he could survive for long enough.
“We’re ready for that strike,” said Sprag.
Orlik returned to the moment, the whole of a plan gestated over the last twenty minutes returning to the forefront of his mind. He had seen much of this unclearly via his implants, but now he could see so much more. He focused on the old dreadnought concerned. Its crew were abandoning it only clad in armour, hoping to be picked up, while a big shuttle containing its father-captain was easing out of a hold.
“You’re sure about this?” Orlik asked.
“As sure as we can be considering the calculations,” Sprag replied. “I am liaising with Hogue and other Polity AIs to ensure success.”
Orlik wasn’t so sure he liked that, but let it go in the circumstances.
The U-space disruption was settling and this was visible in the attack upon the Species ship. Further detonations there blew up square miles of glowing hull. Some U-jump missiles were at last getting close, though it seemed the vessel had its own bounce gates, so they could not put anything actually inside the thing.
The shuttle finally departed the dreadnought, heading for a nearby reaver. The father-captain’s children struggled and failed to keep up on their suit drives. Controlled by Sprag now, the dreadnought fired up its fusion and moved out of formation, heading towards the Species ship. Orlik tried to follow the drive calculations. The dreadnought was about to attempt a U-space jump—a deliberately imbalanced one. Upon surfacing into the real, it would not be buffering its energy and so, as it materialized, would be out of phase with the universe around it. This meant . . . Orlik was not sure what it meant, but he had heard of runcible failures in the Polity where this occurred. The results had not been kind to the worlds or moons concerned.
“A throw of the dice,” said Sprag. “But what is the Client doing?”
Orlik switched the focus of his attention out to the side of the fleet. Weapons Platform Mu was under heavy fusion drive, its attack pods lit up like stars all around it. The Client had not attacked, as expected, to try to protect her kin. She had in fact avoided the fleet and now seemed intent on heading straight towards the Species ship. This looked almost like an attack run, which made no sense at all.
The dreadnought began to go under. Some effect, by the U-space disruption and perhaps because of its older drive system, made this a protracted affair. It seemed to stretch impossibly thin, and a ring-shaped halo of light generated around its point of departure. It then snapped out of existence. A microsecond later it reappeared, just a streak in vacuum terminating on the Species ship. It came in at a twenty-degree angle from the plane of the ship, and halfway between the axis and the rim. Orlik almost expected it to explode out of the other side of the thing but, for a full second, nothing happened at all. It was as if the universe was in shock and didn’t yet know how to respond. Then a sun ignited on the obverse side from the strike and expanded, a hemisphere of light, a photonic shockwave. This passed on quickly, flashing out. Where it reached the accretion disc, Orlik saw it push radiating dust and gas ahead of it. Meanwhile, the opposite side of the ship began burning, while the impact side rippled and shifted. Hot fire broke out in many places, then the whole vessel disappeared in a sensor-killing final blast that measured in the hundreds of gigatons.
“Shiny,” said Sprag.
Orlik felt unreasonably annoyed by the comment. Such a degree of destruction seemed worthy of at least a moment of silent acknowledgement. As sensors, which had shut down to save themselves from the EMR pulse of the blast, came back online, the image cleared. The Species ship had fragmented. Yes, some of those chunks were bigger than the Kinghammer and the Hogue, but he doubted they presented much of a threat now.
“We’ve done it,” said Windermere over com.
“Yes we have,” Orlik replied. “My instinctive reaction is relief and to feel victorious, but this was something we were driven to do.”
“We have the rogue ships located,” Windermere stated blandly. “They are even now moving out of formation.”
“Rebels,” Orlik stated. Then, “Sprag?”
“I can make no contact with the bastards, none at all,” Sprag replied. “Every route is closed to me.”
What had happened? He could understand how many father-captains aboard older ships might decide the vessel heading out of the disc was an enemy to be destroyed—anything not prador to them essentially was. But for so many of them to open fire without orders was just too organized. Besides, reavers had also opened fire and, for the Guard who occupied them, such rebellion was unthinkable. With the action over and time to think, he saw that it made no sense at all.
“We cannot afford to have these at our backs,” Windermere stated.
“They will flee,” said Orlik.
“Eighty prador heavy dreadnoughts and reavers allied to neither the Kingdom nor the Polity.” Windermere paused. “They will soon be clear of the debris.”
Orlik had already seen this. Eighty of the two hundred ships remained and they were moving away from any debris that could interfere with their U-jumps. The reavers—more efficient and modern—would go first. He realized he had to make a decision and make it now. No time to talk with the king, no time for hesitation, no time to speculate on why Windermere was pushing him.
“These ships,” he said to his captains, sending a tactical map indicating the eighty ships, “fired without orders and are in direct contravention of the king’s will. They initiated this conflict. Destroy them. The Polity ships will also be opening fire on these targets. Do not fire on the Polity ships.”
“Thank you,” said Windermere.
A gravity wave pulse came first from the Cable Hogue. It rode over three reavers close together, dragged them hundreds of miles through vacuum and discarded them as twisted ruins. Hardfields began lighting up under railgun slug impacts. Orlik watched an old-style dreadnought falling away, spewing molten generators then shuddering under multiple strikes. Other ship
s were taking similar hits. All of it, he noted, was from the Polity ships, since his own captains had yet to process his orders and give their own. A moment later, they too opened fire.
Feeling sick and angry, Orlik watched as the fleet pounded ship after rogue ship to scrap. It felt to him utterly wrong, especially when the Polity ships ensured the utter destruction of each rogue with a CTD imploder. He watched a reaver, cut in half by an explosion, coming apart for just a moment then collapsing back towards a central point. The imploders could not completely collapse such a mass of tough matter, but the ball of twisted beams and buckled armour ceased to resemble a reaver just before the secondary explosion blew it apart. Two ships jumped into U-space. Others tried but the Cable Hogue hit them with its gravity weapon. One semi-jumped when a wave hit—a reaver—it peeled inside out from nose to tail then disappeared in another imploder blast. Orlik counted the ships down in his mind. Twenty went in the first half of a minute. Ten minutes later, they were all incandescing debris.
“Imploders,” Orlik said to Windermere. “Again impressing upon us Polity firepower?”
“I don’t think that necessary,” she replied. “You, Orlik, must see how strange it is that so many ships fired without orders, even reavers containing your own kin? We have no idea what happened in those ships,but we are close to alien sequestering technology we don’t quite understand, so it is best to be sure.”
Her voice and in her expression . . . Orlik, who had always found the subtext in human voice and expression beyond him, saw something there. Could it be she was lying? Could it be that somehow the Polity controlled those ships? He shook himself. No, it made no sense. Windermere could have initiated the attack on the Species ship if she had wanted to. There was no plausible reason for her to have manipulated prador ships into attacking.
“The weapons platform,” Windermere noted, turning to look at something.
Orlik had been partially focused on it all the while, but mostly watching the destruction of his own ships. It still felt like betrayal to him, wrecking them, allowing the Polity to destroy them, killing his fellows, no matter the reasoning behind it. But none of them would be recoverable. No way would a captain who had fired without orders and caused the mayhem here simply hand himself and his ship back over to the Kingdom. There would be no mercy and they knew it. This was supposing the captains had been in control of their ships, which seemed highly unlikely now.
“Run full diagnostic checks on all ships,” he instructed Sprag. “Maybe informational warfare seized hold of them.”
“Running it now,” replied Sprag. “There is another possibility.”
“What?”
“The Clade is the turd in the punch bowl here. It’s a swarm AI of an unknown number of components, initially made to seize control of enemy technology.”
“But how would those units have got aboard our ships?”
“Maybe in the Kingdom?”
“Run full scans for drone incursions too,” Orlik instructed. It was worrying—if the Clade had taken over those two hundred ships, then further units might have encysted themselves aboard any other ship, including his own, awaiting an opportunity for . . . whatever.
He hissed at that, then gave Weapons Platform Mu his full attention.
The platform hammered down towards the fragments of the Species ship. Its hardfield, its damnable, completely enclosing hardfield, was taking debris hits, flaring and darkening in places. Its attack pods were also enclosed in hardfields but managing to dodge the larger chunks of the destroyed ship. What did the Client hope to achieve by heading there? Sprag, closer to his thinking than ever before, immediately highlighted the answer and brought it into focus. Tumbling through the scattered remains was a squat cylinder fifty miles across. He might have mistaken it for just another item of debris, were it not correcting its tumble, and were not pieces of wreckage flaring against its intermittently functioning hardfields.
“Target acquired,” Sprag stated.
“Hold fire,” Orlik instructed. “Windermere?” he enquired.
“It’s the core of that ship—maybe like the captain’s sanctums you have aboard your reavers.”
Yes, the sanctums aboard those ships, and aboard the Kinghammer,were well protected and self-contained. The occupants could eject themselves in the event of an enemy destroying the ship.
“So that could contain the Species captain?”
“Or the entire crew.” Windermere paused. “Who knows how they are arranged aboard their ships. They are alien.”
It was amusing in its way, since he and Windermere were alien to each other, yet more akin now than what they faced.
“Should we destroy it?” he asked.
“I think you know the answer.”
“Stand down,” Orlik instructed Sprag.
“You’re the boss,” Sprag replied, a little resentfully Orlik thought.
The weapons platform descended over the still-tumbling object. Attack pods arrayed all around the thing and something shifted. Abruptly, the cylinder stabilized completely, relative to the surrounding pods and platform, and jerked towards a centre point. Debris impacts no longer hit single hardfields but a globe hundreds of miles across. They had little chance of destroying the thing now, even if they wanted to. Then the whole—pods, platform and cylinder—dropped and revolved away, out of existence and into U-space. Gone.
17
It is a fact that Polity artificial intelligences are, at heart, simply information. It can be argued, of course, that that is what all human beings are. But we are more closely tied to our bodies than they are and, when we transfer via memplants or other technologies to another medium or body, we become something else. Arguably, we become AIs.But the AIs themselves can transfer with blithe ease from medium to medium. It does not affect their thought patterns, beyond them having to adjust to new or different capabilities. One must therefore wonder why they tend to stick to one physical form. Those in ships only reluctantly abandon their posts at the point of the vessel’s destruction, as these are their bodies. Golem prefer to be repaired even when massively damaged, and even though swapping to a new body would be easy for them. War drones are quite belligerent about hanging onto their material selves. And swarm AIs never swap out—they just create more of themselves, though they are less reluctant to sacrifice their components. It is theorized that this is all about us. They are keeping themselves easier for us to identify and relate to. They are forgoing just zipping around the universe as transmissions of data from substrate to substrate, and freely using and exchanging the robotics available.They are waiting for us and, meanwhile, holding off on apotheosis.
—from The Gods Among Us by D. Van Vogt
COG
The door to Cog’s ship thumped and then lowered to reveal a grav- sled hovering attentively outside. He peered past it at the view.
The medship was down in a park in the city. Here the depredations of the Clade were not visible. Beetlebots, like silver bubbles, munched their way across a kind of grass that grew in green and white swirls. Flowerbeds were laid out in geometric patterns, bordered by predatory box hedges that prevented the more lively plants from escaping. Pines whispered—tilted to each other in serious conversation. Fountains jetted as usual but were twisted into beautiful glittering patterns by the artful application of force fields. Around the rim, city blocks gazed down on it all. The medship sat amidst this like a slug in a sweet bowl.
“You’re a hooper,” said the sled.
He studied the thing. At one end stood a control block, and it possessed two gleaming lights whose function seemed no more than to give it the appearance of having eyes.
“Evidently,” Cog grumped. “This way.”
He led the way into the ship and up the spiral stairs.
“I’ve always been fascinated by hooper biology,” said the sled. “I’d like to scan you and take some samples, if I may.”
Cog glanced back. He noted the grav-sled hesitating at the stairs, then, shrugging an
d turning upright, it floated up behind him like a wandering door.
“ECS has samples and scans from me on file,” Cog commented. “I take it I am talking to Mobius Clean?”
“You are.” It paused as if in contemplation. “Sure, samples are on file, and scans, but I don’t have those samples and the scans were limited by our knowledge at the time. Recent data from Orlandine’s examination of highly mutated members of the King’s Guard, and other matters, have raised some interesting questions.”
“Other matters?”
“Your companion Captain Trike.”
Cog opened the door into the cryostore, walked over and slid out Ruth’s cylinder. The sled had meanwhile swung level again. Cog pulled the optic-monitoring lead and power feed from the cylinder, then undid the clamps holding it to the frame.
“Trike is a problem,” said Cog. “I don’t know if he can be restored.” “A problem you have seen before,” Clean commented.
Cog eyed the sled. This forensic AI obviously had the highest access if it knew about that. “I saw my brother change, just as Trike did. I could do nothing to stop it and understand that there is an element of choice involved—that the effects are tied to the mind of the one changing. But I never saw him turn into something like Trike.”
“There are rumours on Spatterjay of a monster living on one of the islands.”
“Yeah.” Cog was uncomfortable with this conversation. He picked up the half-ton cryo-cylinder, turned and placed it on the sled, which adjusted perfectly, not even dipping when he released the weight. Clamps popped out of the sled down its length and engaged. The sled reversed for the door.
“Can you do anything about Trike?” Cog asked.
