by Neal Asher
Diana looked through ship’s sensors at the accretion disc. What had once been the disc’s sun was still shrinking and still displaying the surface patterns it had exhibited prior to the Species ship departing it. But something new had begun to occur.
The matter of the disc still fell into the black hole. In fact, even as she watched, a small planet began breaking up to spread into a ring of debris around the thing, burning and heating up to emit heavy EMR. U-space disruption remained high. But the disruption from the mines which the Clade-controlled prador ships had deployed had faded within the noise of that central event. A line of division had appeared, lying twenty light minutes out, as if a barrier there prevented the material of the disc outside it from falling into the hole. Also, outside the division, swirls had appeared, and remaining planetary bodies, moons and asteroids were breaking up smoothly, like soluble pills dissolving in water.
“So what the hell is happening there?” Diana asked generally, even though she was reviewing the data on these events from Hogue. After a pause, she relayed the data to Orlik and left com open to him. She ensured the others knew this, so there would be no further discussion of the Clade or bounce gates. Orlik needed to be fully aware of the phenomena—perhaps then he would reconsider withdrawing his ships. She felt, in her gut, that separating the two fleets, and having them nose to nose again, might not be a bright idea.
“Combined gravity and U-space phenomena,” said Jabro. “The substance of the cloud is moving very fast.” He shook his head. “Unbelievably fast. There’s also organization in there at levels I can just detect but cannot properly identify.”
“Information too,” said Seckurg.
They turned to look at him.
He explained. “Jain signatures are proliferating and changing. In EMR I’m detecting the kind of back-spill you get from an induction warfare beam, but on a massive scale.”
“Orlik?” she enquired, focusing on the disposition of the two fleets. “Sprag is running through accretion disc data, but hasn’t found any instance of this happening before,” replied the prador. “But then no one dropped a black hole in it before either.”
“Perhaps we are just seeing something that will add formulae to current theories of the universe,” said Diana wryly.
Orlik, who didn’t understand her tone, said, “I think that highly unlikely.” Diana noted that the prador ships were no longer moving out of formation. Orlik had obviously ordered them to hold station.
“I think I should talk to Orlandine—if there is an explanation for this she will have it,” said Diana.
“If she cares to share it.” Jabro’s comment had its elements of anger.
Still changes were occurring in the outer part of the accretion disc. It was becoming increasingly difficult to penetrate. In the human visual spectrum, it turned milky yellow, like a polluted fog. Other EMR began bouncing and scattering, and sometimes the central black hole ceased to be detectible to usual forms of scanning. The fog thickened and then finally it was only possible to locate the black hole on a gravity and U-space map of the system.
“When my scanners become obscured,” said Orlik, “I tend to think someone doesn’t want me to see something.”
“The prador have always been a little paranoid,” Diana replied.
Demonstrating that he did understand human badinage, Orlik came back with, “And of course that’s an evolutionary trait you humans sidestepped?”
THE CLIENT
The Client gazed upon the core of the Species ship in confusion. Her attempts at communication had ranged across the spectrum, in every information format she could think of, including the language of the Jain. She had garnered responses, but nothing whose source was sentient. She had received ancient telemetry which, after analysis, she realized must have been from the far past, when this ship fought the Jain. There was stuff from what seemed to be a damaged translation device—a sub-AI language computer that gave responses as if attempting to learn how to communicate, but never quite managing it. Random information too, utterly out of context.
Finally, frustrated by the lack of any progress and utterly aware of the precarious position she was in, she consigned attempts at communication to a subprogram. Meanwhile, she began to assess damage to her platform and attack pods.
It had been a difficult jump through U-space. Disruption had been high, and she had needed to encompass a massive object in her U-field, within a complex web of combined drives. Having to jump without setting a destination, she had just allowed the nearest gravity well to drag her back up into the real. She could have ended up in the sun or in one of the planets of the Jaskoran system. Or found herself, as seemed usual for her, sitting in a wreck fighting for survival. She had been lucky, but still the situation was not good. Every single U-space drive had been damaged. The drives of her attack pods were a mess. Three of them only had cavities where their drives had been, while another four pods were completely missing. They had sustained minimal physical damage beyond that, and still possessed most of their weapons and defensive capabilities, which was something.
The U-space drive of the platform was also out of commission. The thing itself had twisted, but not beyond the recovery parameters of the memory metals and hydraulic adjustment of its structure. Also, the platform’s weapons and its hardfield were good. This was odd. She realized she must be missing something and began to study the interconnection between the U-space drive and grav-engines, enclosing hardfields and weapons. She started to incorporate the math, buried by sheer quantity of data in her mind, that was integral to the shriek of the Librarian, whose mind was now part of her own. Gradually the shape of it became clearer to her.
The hardfields fed the energy generated by the impact of weapons into the underlying U-twist—a kind of energy storage spring, from which she could also draw energy for all other purposes. But hardfields were also, in themselves, a U-space effect. They put a dividing surface into the real . . . Investigating further, she saw, in the memories of Pragus, that some Polity ships had deployed hardfields to fend off the effects of disrupted U-space on conventional matter . . . The math and the theory pulled together into a perfect whole. A U-space drive was, in effect, a perfectly enclosing hard- field—a bubble that scooted its contents through that continuum. And further hardfields merely enforced the U-field. But what about the energy? Surely it would ramp up to infinity? No. Because dropping into U-space inverted the effect and the twist sat outside the hardfield. But that meant . . .
She switched her attention, via her sensor arrays, to the core of the Species ship. It had bounced out of the U-space blister and, when attacked, had thrown up incomplete hardfields. This made no sense. It should have had the technology to deploy a complete, enclosing hard- field, just like she could, no matter if its U-engines were knocked out of kilter. This, combined with the lack of any sensible communication,meant that something was seriously wrong. And perhaps it had been wrong before the Species ship even left the U-space blister.
Were her people dead? Had the ship simply responded to the attempts to destroy it on automatic?
She brought her attack pods in nearer to the object to get a better view, and to scan the thing closely. The plug of matter, like a thick coin, lay fifty miles across. Its outer rim was pocked with ports, closed off with tri-section doors half a mile in. Around the interior of the ports lay tangled masses of wrecked technology—almost certainly connections to the rest of the destroyed ship. Its upper and lower surfaces were mostly flat planes of armour—an exotic metal and ceramo-carbon composite, with superconducting and bearing layers. These could resist massive stresses and distribute point heat of hundreds of thousands of degrees. It was much more resistant than the armour had been on the rest of the ship. Hit this with a particle beam and it would take whole minutes to make an impression. The composite also reflected much of active scan, which meant that the Client struggled to look inside.
But she could partially see.
Slowly, scanning through
the ports because they weren’t so reflective, she began to build up shadowy images of the interior. Tunnels speared in from the ports and then took all sorts of twists and turns. The whole looked like a massive fruit whose flesh was made up of closely packed technology, wormed through with maggot holes. Near the centre, these all converged on a chamber ten miles across. Scanning also revealed temperature and pressure. The outer tunnels were cool and airy, in her terms, while the central chamber was just right for her: a little over a hundred degrees Celsius at two Earth atmospheres. She realized she had found the living quarters of her kind.
So what now?
First she had to repair those U-space engines. Around the world of Jaskor sat two potentially hostile fleets that could move against her at any moment. She immediately ordered the recall of her attack pods, because she could rebuild their drives more quickly using the facilities of the platform. Next turning her attention to the platform’s drive, she set in motion its repair. Thankfully this time she would not need to build new, super-dense components, as had been the case before. Also, the Jain- tech integrated system throughout the platform meant many other components could be repaired in situ, rather than having to be replaced or hauled off to factory units. As the first attack pod arrived to be drawn into a repair bay, and as robots and Jain tentacles began to disassemble or penetrate the platform drive, she comprehended some idea of the time scale. It would be two hundred solstan hours before she could go anywhere.
Now, my people, she thought.
She only had one option. Scanning from outside would not provide her with the answers she required, so she must go inside to find them. But, of course, she would not send the entirety of herself. She quickly decided on an amalgam of the remotes she had used before. She wanted something with the ruggedness of the one she had deployed to penetrate the library, but with the ability to access and glean information, like the ones she had used to fight the Librarian and Dragon. In the last link in the chain of her being, she altered and adjusted the genome of a single cell. Then she injected the nutrients to set the process going. The remote would be on hand long before she was ready to leave this system. Should she send it across at once or wait until she was somewhere she could be free from interference?
No, it would be better to know if her people were alive before trying to U-jump that ship’s core again. To take the platform, pods and that structure far enough away would be as dangerous as the last jump she had made. Yes, she had been prepared to take that risk to rescue her people from destruction. But taking the same chance again to transport what might only be an oversized coffin?
The Client also felt she needed to explore other options. Did her previous resentment towards the prador and the humans any longer apply? Was she being too hasty in excluding them from her calculations? She must never forget that, with what was coming next, she might not be able to run away far enough . . .
BLADE
Blade began pulling out its units from the tunnels, peevish, annoyed. Yes, it was good that the Clade threat here had been eliminated but it couldn’t help thinking, My job. Trike had done well. He’d penetrated the Clade and got precisely what Blade had been after, finding out the locations of other Clade infestations. Then he had done more than well by breaching the coding the Clade used to sacrifice units should they be infiltrated, sequestered or captured. Now they were all lying in Jaskor’s tunnels—inert lumps of complex technology.
Blade hesitated for just a second, then redirected its swarm. Rather than withdrawing, it hunted down the fallen Clade units and started collecting them up. Yes, the things were mindless lumps of hardware, but very sophisticated hardware and they could be given minds—subminds of Blade. This opened up all sorts of interesting possibilities for Clade penetration. The swarm AI, who had once been a black-ops attack ship, now had to think beyond Jaskor to the continuing fight. It was time to dismiss resentment and get on with it.
As it gathered up the Clade, it directed its attention towards Trike. The man showed no inclination to head for the surface. After standing for a while fighting some internal battle, he had set out, taking a route Blade projected led to where the drainage system connected to the underground cave network. Why? It had some idea. It had listened in on the exchange between Trike and Cog. Keying back into the ECS data sphere, it saw that the man’s wife, Ruth, was on the point of resurrection. Perhaps he needed to think about that. Perhaps he needed to flee it. Blade could see how the whole situation posed a bit of a problem. There had been a human relationship and now Trike had ceased to be human. But it wasn’t Blade’s problem—the AI was a soldier, not a relationship counsellor.
“How are you doing?” Blade asked another down in the tunnels.
“I am making repairs, but they go slowly,” replied Angel.
The android had crawled into a hole in the side of the tunnel where part of the wall had collapsed. He was lying on his back. Splits in his body revealed internal glittering movement.
“I thought you were tougher than that,” said Blade.
“I don’t think it was deliberate. Trike used weapons he did not know were at his disposal when he hit me.”
“Meaning?”
“Besides the blow having the force of a hypersonic projectile, he gave me an induction warfare pulse. This killed my ability to absorb, distribute or otherwise disperse the shock. It also generated malware throughout my body that interferes with repairs and continues to attack me even now.”
“Doesn’t sound deliberate at all,” said Blade.
Angel didn’t respond to that.
Blade contemplated that there might be another reason Trike had retreated deep into the tunnels. The man had come close to destroying Angel and was sitting on a big psychopathic impulse. He had also recently taken on some nasty and, almost certainly Jain, military programming. The combination of the two was quite likely toxic. Perhaps Trike was removing himself to a place he would not be a danger to others. Yes, let that be the reason.
“Do you need assistance?” Blade offered, reluctantly.
“All I require is time, and you have other matters to attend to.”
“Good luck,” said Blade, relieved.
The first of its units heaved open a drain grating and rose into the air. Immediately, it became the target for three particle beams, induction warfare and a tripod-mounted micro-bead railgun so powerful its recoil dampers were larger than the gun itself. Blade dropped its unit straight back into the drains but fared better than another unit whose point of egress sat below an airfire drone. A particle beam strike, directly on top of a railgun hit, had obliterated the thing.
“Are you fucking paying attention?” Blade yelled into the data sphere.
“My apologies,” replied Commander Gemmell. “You are clear now.”
“What the hell happened?”
“Orders,” Gemmell replied. “On their own cognizance they fired on the Clade.”
Blade grudgingly accepted that. Other units had risen to the surface unscathed, but those two had been carrying defunct Clade units close to their bodies.
“Okay,” it said.
More units began surfacing. Meanwhile, the soldiers set to guard the drainage system started packing up their gear and withdrawing, while the airfire drones moved to their locations. With nothing left to fight on the surface of the planet, would both go back into storage? Blade thought not. The situation had by no means been settled by the destruction of the Clade here or out at the accretion disc. Though the role of the swarm AI had been major, it had not been the prime one. However, it was the main actor in Blade’s drama, beside Blade itself. And the time had come for the two stories to diverge.
Blade rose and swarmed above the city, swirling around the core of its original self, which hung in the sky like a bone stripped of meat. Next, those carrying the mindless Clade units began sweeping in where tentacular, gecko-stick grabs snared the silvery snakes and dragged them inside, packing them into armoured storage. Soon after all the units were nea
tly packed away, it was time to reconstitute.
Blade’s components spiralled in around the central core of the erstwhile attack ship. Beginning at the stern, they began attaching like leaves to a branch, working their way forwards to the nose. Some were missing, of course. But Blade had a small factory inside that could produce more. Hanging in the sky like a long, open pine cone, but a black and immense one, it took stock. The Client was out there with the core of the Species ship. Weapons platforms were ready to jump to the accretion disc. Prador and Polity war fleets were poised to respond to all of this, and quite possibly to each other, but . . .
Not my business.
On grav-engines, Blade rose into the sky, its component units folding down flat to return it to sleek lethality. The landmass below dropped away, became framed by sea and then by the circle of the world. The black of space encroached, leavened by stars, by warships and the paraphernalia of Orlandine’s project. And it was she who acknowledged Blade’s departure.
“Thank you, Obsidian Blade,” she said. “And good luck.”
“Luck?” Blade enquired. It saw her down below, sliding through the sky from the mountains—a coiled dense mass of technology with something once human at its core.
“Don’t be pedantic—go kick ass.”
“Catch you later,” said Blade. It faced out beyond Jaskor, ducked into U-space and was gone.
19
The accretion disc, whose nearest neighbour is the Jaskoran independent state, contains a large infestation of active Jain tech. This is continuously generating Jain nodes which are the seeds of that virulent and dangerous sequestering technology. Many experts have proposed that the disc is the source of all Jain nodes that have ever been discovered—that it was the site of an experiment which went wrong. However, others claim this is disproven by a find hundreds of light years away and dated at what is cited as the time of Jain extinction five million years ago. The previous experts then argue that, since there is no way to date accretion disc infestation, those Jain nodes discovered later could still have come from the disc. Also, the margin of error for dating both that find and the Jain’s extinction is hundreds of thousands of years wide. The argument continues and is the source of many lengthy dissertations and studies.Such is the way with experts. However, one thing is clear: in much older finds that have been attributed to the Jain, no nodes have been found.They did, at one time, have a complex and highly advanced technology that was without the tendency to eat your face off. Some experts have recently proposed that this validates the earlier thesis that the more recent, dangerous technology was what did for them. Other experts, even now, are preparing their refutations of this.
