by Neal Asher
“I can always do something,” Clean replied. “But as you say, there is a matter of choice involved. Also a degree of imbalance between the . . . parts of his mind.”
“He’s crazy.”
“His mind is the place to start. Are you coming?”
They headed out of his ship and across the grassy parkland. Cog noticed other activity. Far over to one side a couple of large grav-barges were down. One had a collection of the ovoid ambulances lined up beside it, like those he had seen on a similar, or maybe the same, barge earlier. The other had its side open. Four-legged earthmovers were clambering out and heading into the surrounding buildings. The people around these didn’t wear ECS uniforms but some brown and white concoction— local Disaster Response again. Probably as efficient as ECS, if Orlandine had organized it.
The medship was busy. As he followed the sled inside, Cog observed the walking wounded filing into examination booths. A man coming out of one of these was frowning at the transparent syntheflesh on his arm—bones and veins visible inside it. But already areas of it higher up were becoming cloudy as it adjusted. Inside a glass-fronted surgical area, a woman had her head turned to one side. She didn’t want to watch what the military autodoc—a thing like a huge chromed woodlouse squatting between her legs—was doing to her. It was carefully coiling her intestines back up inside her, cell welding as it went.
Soon he was walking down a long corridor where, behind the windows of clean rooms, radical surgery was underway. Here machines were disassembling and reassembling human beings, repairing faulty components or replacing them, amidst the fast, silvery movement of robotic limbs. Some were so lost in skeins of tubes and optics as to be only briefly visible, but it was a glimpse of hell. He saw one individual who had been flayed by fire, a pedestal-mounted autodoc steadily printing him a new skin from the feet up. Many of these, Cog knew, would have been declared dead in previous ages. Nowadays, with internal nanosuites maintaining the body against decay and other damage, they were merely on hold.
“Here,” said the sled.
It paused by an utterly empty, pristine room. An irised hatch opened low down and the sled slid in, antiviral and biotic UV and pin lasers cleaning it on the way. Cog, remaining outside, glanced around and spotted a fabricator set in one wall, which produced a long rod for him. He walked back to the glass and tapped the rod on the floor. It folded out into a flimsy-looking director’s chair. He sat carefully, but it supported his weight. By the time he was comfortable, Ruth was already out of the cylinder and floating in the middle of the room. The sled and cylinder settled over to one side, while a control block from the sled had come back out and was hovering in the corridor. He realized it was a drone of some kind—a submind of this Mobius Clean, a grey metal cylinder with red glowing eyes on its side and manipulatory limbs folded up at each end.
An iris hatch opened in the wall of the clean room and a ball of something glittering and writhing slid out. Once it was clear of the hatch, it opened out.
“The fuck?” said Cog.
“My form is that of a terran echinoderm: a crinoid,” said the control block.
It was like a mass of undulating feathers ten feet across, whose stems connected at a central point. The feathers were metallic grey and gold, shimmering and iridescent. It was quite beautiful. He doubted those it examined ever thought so, for it probably consisted of every Polity tool for deconstructing living beings, or machines, down to the molecular level. Only now did it occur to Cog that a forensic AI would want to examine Ruth because she had previously been resurrected and controlled by Angel—a being once utterly sequestered by Jain tech, and in turn a slave to a Jain AI. He wondered if he had done the right thing in bringing her here, but it was too late to change the decision.
The thing closed on Ruth and encompassed her. Blindingly fast movement stripped away her clothing. Cog winced at the lack of hesitation that opened her chest and splayed her ribs like fingers. Feathery tendrils dived in, printing and cutting, pulling out wet, bloody items and then putting them back. None of the slow work of a human surgeon here. Utterly precise, down below the cellular level, the forensic AI moved as quickly as a machine possibly could. Cog observed the work for a few minutes and felt some release of tension when he realized the thing was going no further than her injuries. He understood that if it really intended to examine her, she would be in very small pieces by now.
“I need to talk to Trike,” he said abruptly.
The cylinder swung towards him and the red eyes blinked. After a brief pause it said, “He is not responding to the available comlinks.”
“Available comlinks?”
“Your friend has become something more complicated than a man mutated by the Spatterjay virus . . . ah, now he has responded. Speak and he will hear you.”
“Trike, boy—you there?”
“Cogulus.” The voice issuing from the cylinder was Trike’s, but seemed cold and distant.
“Ruth is in with the . . . AI surgeon now. She’ll soon enough be back with us.”
“Yes, I can see,” Trike replied. “I wish her well.”
“Come back to us,” said Cog.
“Sometimes there is no coming back,” Trike said, and Cog knew, even before Clean told him, that Trike had cut the link.
ORLANDINE
Orlandine was aware of the arrival microseconds after it occurred.She gazed upon Weapons Platform Mu. It was dwarfed by the plug of the Species ship it had dragged out of the fight over at the accretion disc, and its attack pods were scattered all around. This collection of vessels had arrived with a crash that sent reverberations through U-space just inside the orbit of Adranas—a giant hot planet in a slow, close orbit around the sun that created an eclipse on Jaskor every one of its years. Within the same instant, Knobbler saw it too, as did the interfaced captain in charge of the fleet here: Morgaine.
“Now, I didn’t expect that,” said Knobbler.
“Oh, I knew this was going to get more interesting,” said Morgaine.
“Just circumstance,” said Orlandine, while the threads, veins and tentacles of her being tore components from the nearest building in the Ghost Drive Facility.
“Circumstance?” Knobbler asked.
“The Client grabbed the core of the Species ship but could not manage a fully directed jump.”
“Ah,” said Knobbler.
“Ah,” said Morgaine, adding, “It slid to the nearest gravity well: here.”
“It will leave,” Orlandine continued, gazing at her reflection in the mirror-face of the nearest building. “Once it has made repairs and seen to the needs of its surviving kind, it will be gone . . . probably.”
“Lost your human self and found optimism?” said Knobbler. “I didn’t expect that either.”
Narcissus, thought Orlandine. Her reflection showed her human form, standing on ground scattered with shards of mirror glass. But it was an extension of the Jain mass behind her. That mass was now weaving itself, and the looted materials, into an engine that suited her requirements. The object taking form resembled the one that had carried her when she interrogated the submind of the Wheel. It stood twenty feet tall, like a giant partially coiled woodlouse. Already a scattered grav-engine was in place, with the throats of fusion drives ready to open between the ribbed armour plates over its back. Lethal weapons and processing were packed into its structure. It was an interesting exercise in design and the compacting of technology, and very different from previous kinds. Her gaze strayed to the remains of the Clade unit she had deconstructed. She had learned a lot from the thing about folding matter and playing with atomic binding forces.
“I did say ‘probably,’” she replied. “Perhaps I should have said hopefully.”
“I see,” said Knobbler.
“I don’t,” said Morgaine.
Thinking of the man Gemmell, Orlandine shot back at her: “When one interfaces with AI, it can upset one’s focus. Sometimes, one sees all the detail and loses sight of the big picture
, and often the reverse.”
“Meaning?”
“Don’t deny that you are capable of human error until you are incapable of it.” She transmitted a replay of her conversation with Gemmell on the roof of her apartment building. As a social interaction, it was perhaps a bit of a faux pas, but she added in an overview, showing what she felt certain was Morgaine’s thinking. Upon seeing the arrival of the Client, Morgaine was assessing immediate threats in a human-centric manner and had failed to take into account the wider state of play. Just as, in her interactions with Gemmell, she had set herself high and lost sight of one important detail: her selfish love and damage to him by not letting him go.
“That stung,” said Morgaine. “What big picture have I lost?”
Orlandine replied, “The battle is over and the Species ship is no longer a threat. However, the remainder of that ship and the Client are the kind of loose cannons Earth Central does not like having around. The king definitely won’t like it either, most especially in the case of the Client, after what she did in the Kingdom.”
“I have received no orders concerning this,” said Morgaine, doubtfully.
“Yet,” interjected Knobbler.
“Okay, now I understand.”
“Good,” Orlandine replied tightly, and cut the comlink to her.
Orlandine had no doubt that if the Client hung around long enough, the rest of the Polity and prador fleets would move in around Jaskor. There would then be another face-off over the Client and her kind, with Jaskor just a little bit too close for comfort. She decided, in that moment, she would not be sending the armed weapons platforms back to the disc right now. It might be necessary to remind both Polity and prador that this system was an independent state, and maybe it was time for them to go home. And that reminder could well get very messy.
Orlandine now ranged out, first to evacuation platforms. Five of them were already at capacity, containing nearly ten million people. She contacted all the AIs of the hundred platforms in concert.
“The situation may be turning critical,” she said. “When you reach capacity do not wait on further supplies—depart at once.”
“Watch Station Abalone,” said one of the five, seeking confirmation for their destination.
A submind of Earth Central had sent the message through low-level coms some time ago. The watch station sat in a system where the Polity had converted a small world into a place for processing refugees from planetary disasters. Its processing now no doubt included deep scanning and forensic AIs on the lookout for Jain tech. A series of runcibles were also there for dispatching those the AIs had vetted on to their destinations of choice.
“No change on that,” she replied.
Already the five loaded platforms had lit up their fusion engines and were pulling away from Jaskor. Even as she turned her attention to her armed weapons platforms, they began dropping into U-space, leaving photonic ripples like stones cast into a pool of light.
The armed platforms were working as fast as they could to repair their damage and load up with weapons. The industry out there had heated up to the same high point it had attained in the early years, when there had not been, to her mind, sufficient coverage of the accretion disc. Huge robots were whittling down metal asteroids, passing them through furnaces, and thence to moulds for railgun missiles. Gravity presses were crushing matter to make other super-dense slugs. A machine, dubbed the Alchemist by the technicians who tended it, used a particle accelerator, wrapped around a singularity, to turn matter inside out and deposit it in vacuum, magnetic bottles. These were the cores of contra-terrene devices. Then she noticed something new.
The platform AIs had obviously not liked how vulnerable they were to the disruptor beam the Species ship had deployed. New structures aboard them, four-field imploder defence devices, had now been created for knocking out such a beam, while all the AIs were running models of induction warfare iterations that might work as protection. She pondered telling them there was no need, because they would be returning to their usual job at the defence sphere. Then, considering what might happen if the Client did not depart peacefully, she decided to leave them to it. The Client, after all, had demonstrated that she possessed that weapon too, and it was best to be prepared for any eventuality.
Was there anything she had missed? She felt so, but she did not have the data to see what. If something more was to occur, she would just have to react, as she had done before. She returned to more immediate concerns.
Her device was ready and, with a thought, she withdrew into it— the tentacles melded into her back and her ersatz skull, picking her up and reeling her in. She sent a new instruction as she settled into the cusp of the device, and watched the sentinel drones she had placed here launching from their towers and heading up into the sky. They were little enough to add to the defences around Jaskor, but there was no point in wasting them. Next she gazed upon the Ghost Drive Facility through a thousand eyes—through the Jain tendrils spread within the buildings.
This place had been a mistake. It had been one of those failures to see both the big and small pictures. In trying to ensure her centralized control of the defence sphere around the accretion disc, she had created a weakness the Clade could exploit. That same urge for complete control had also led her to create the flaw of the platform AIs’ hard-wiring. Just as with that, it was time for the facility to go away. The mechanism was already cued up: the high-temperature enzymes, the energy loops, the evaporation of singularities—all available technology set to eat itself. She sent the instruction and next another. She broke the trunk of Jain tech connecting her to the network in the facility. Beyond the break, it began to burn like a fast fuse, utterly destroying itself, because it would be dangerous for any to be left behind. Ensconced within a device that was as much her as were her hands, Orlandine rose into the sky. She turned so she could gaze down on the facility with ersatz human eyes.
Fires lit the insides of the buildings, as ghost drives burned away just as the Jain tendrils had. Explosions inside systematically blew out the glass at every level. A fusion fire, igniting underground, jetted burning and molten debris into the sky. Next, one after another, the towers started to collapse, sinking down into dusty but glittering ruin. Of course,a more utilitarian approach would have been to deconstruct the place for its spare parts and technology, but Orlandine felt its complete erasure was a necessity for her.
It was very human.
She turned away, opened ribbed armour in her back and ignited fusion drives, shooting towards the city. In the end, she could be human if she wished, but it was not a necessity, nor was it a state that required any more understanding than she had. But sometimes it was satisfying.
TRIKE
Trike shuddered as he felt everything joining up inside him and understood that Orlandine must have experienced this same kind of amalgamation. With her, it had been the three elements of her human self, her Polity AI component and the Jain tech weaving them more closely together. For him, the mixture was different, and darker. He too consisted of three elements: human, Jain tech and the Spatterjay virus. But there was also a problem: his human element was unstable. He had come close to killing Angel back there and still his hostility towards the android sat like a cancerous cyst in his mind. He knew he needed to erase it if he was to be whole, but he didn’t know how. Instead, he veered away from it and concentrated on the other parts of his being, specifically the Spatterjay virus. He knew from information in Orlandine’s backup, much of which he had retained, that the virus contained quantum processors, and now he was accessing their data. And there he found the soldiers.
“Three Clade units ahead,” Blade informed him.
He felt the words were irrelevant because their link provided all the information he needed. He could see a three-dimensional map of the tunnels below the city and much of the connected caves. On top of this, he had a clear view of where the hundreds of Blade’s units were positioned, as well as the confirmed and unconfirmed pos
itions of the Clade. Their traces, the extrapolations on where they might go, and the state of the informational and physical warfare between the two AIs was all laid out.
“If you can engage these two,” he said, sending a plan of attack, “I will take this one.”
Blade acknowledged it without words.
Trike continued to scramble along the tunnel wall after the Blade unit for a few hundred more yards, then dropped into the water and began wading. Internally he prepared himself, freeing up processing space, growing new fibres ready to supplant those that would certainly be broken or burned out in his tongue. He built up other fibres in his hands, coiled and ready to spring out like jellyfish stings. He felt utterly potent but was aware of his overconfidence. Though a Clade unit would be no problem for him physically, the Clade mind he was preparing to invade was another matter. Perhaps he needed more power; it was available within him . . .
The soldiers. Orlandine had only superficially understood them. By going deep, actually connecting to them and incorporating them, he was truly beginning to understand. They were both Jain and a product of the Jain. They were as akin to their creators as cyborg soldiers were to normal human beings—a version of themselves made for an eternal war fought across reality. War on the scale of star systems yet also extended down to nanoscopic aggression. In that war, the survival of the soldier was only made secondary when the mission came first, because you do not discard useful tools. And so, during one conflict, a squad of soldiers finished its mission and had to go completely dark to survive. To achieve this, they downloaded and recorded themselves inside the best medium available to them from the world where their vessel had crashed. That medium happened to be a highly complex virus. Widespread and very tough, it would be difficult to destroy. It already possessed the mechanism for taking and utilizing the genomes of other creatures it fed upon, and from which it propagated. In fact, it reflected what the Jain were, and perfectly fitted their psyche. Trike now began to take on more from them: their arsenal of informational and physical warfare, the schematics governing their form, which in turn was governed by their various mission requirements.
