by Neal Asher
—from How It Is by Gordon
ORLANDINE
Hovering over the city, Orlandine studied the situation here. Where the runcible facility had been located was now a crater half a mile across. Around that lay a ring of rubble, and scattered beyond were buildings that had just about survived the blast, but would have to be demolished. The rubble crawled with robots. Some with shearfields, laser cutters and heavy grabs burrowed in here and there, while others no larger than ants were deep inside. They extended scans where materials blocked them and diligently searched every crevice. These she keyed into and gazed from a million multifaceted eyes.
She focused on a military autodoc, which was in a space created deep beneath the remains of a foamstone wall. A woman lay there, still breathing but unconscious, as the doc severed her trapped and mangled legs. Meanwhile, only a short distance away, another doc laboured on a corpse so badly burned it could not be identified as either male or female. The thing had trepanned the skull and was now extracting a ruby mem- plant. Both these humans were, in essence, survivors. Others were not. Or, rather, whether they got to live again was debatable. At the crater sat a big zero-freezer—an object like a chunk of honeycomb in a framework to revolve it. The most damaged corpses were put in there to be vitrified and frozen. Those less damaged, across the rubble pile and elsewhere, were going into stasis or stop coffins. And all were flowing in towards the medship, beside which Cog’s ship lay at rest—
“Orlandine!”
She decided to stop ignoring the comlink as, in her Jain mechanism, she descended towards the roof of her old apartment block.
“Yes, I have seen it,” she replied, looking at the face of Diana Windermere.
She had noted the changes in the accretion disc right from the start. They were highly anomalous and she simply had no immediate explanation for them. So she had set the resources she had out there—remaining attack pods and some working debris from wrecked weapons plat- forms—just to gather data.
“So what, in your expert opinion, do you think is going on?” Windermere asked.
Orlandine looked through the failing sensors of one attack pod actually within the cloud. Here she saw a small, heavily cratered moon, grey and silver in the dim light except in one area. A bite out of that moon emitted blue-white light. Matter poured into the crater and flowed towards the centre, as if a singularity had been fixed there. However, from that central point, it fountained out into vacuum. This fountain was dust at first, then coagulated as it rose into lumps that were blurred to scan but showed organization. It could be some crystallization effect, but she very much doubted it. Energies were involved here and she could not locate a source. Nor would she be able to before the attack pod finally failed.
“The Jain tech has been stimulated in some way,” Orlandine replied. “It was activated once before when Dragon injected power into and interrogated the Jain AIs in U-space. I suspect something similar here.”
“Those AIs are causing this?”
“Possibly . . . or it could be a programmed reaction—like an ants’ nest being disturbed with a stick. In this case the stick is a black hole.”
“I’m going to need more than that,” Windermere spat.
Orlandine felt a surge of irritation. In her mind, she had a wide mosaic of explanations for events out there. Most of them had their validity, and all of them were quite a large jump away from being provable. But this was beyond the mind of the woman she was speaking to. Instead she requested another comlink to the mind of Windermere’s ship—to Hogue itself—and transmitted that mosaic of reasoning.
“The black hole. The blister in U-space,” said Windermere.
That gave Orlandine pause. The woman had just upgraded her thinking, meshing with her ship’s AI. Interesting how she could so easily connect and disconnect. Perhaps Morgaine could learn something from her? Orlandine felt she herself had nothing to learn since she no longer possessed a separate human element to connect or disconnect.
“It is the largest imponderable in any calculation or prognosis. The next being the Jain tech itself,” she replied. “We at least know something about Jain tech, but we know very little about a U-space blister opened by a black hole.”
“Suggestions?” Windermere asked.
“I will investigate this phenomenon when my platforms have returned there,” Orlandine replied. “But beyond that I can help you no more than I have.”
She considered adding something more about certain fleets departing but decided against it. She was still dealing with a lot of unknowns and, though this was her realm, she thought it worth keeping the extra Polity and prador firepower around for a while. Besides that, she was reluctant to push. If she told both the fleets to leave, that might compel either the king or Earth Central to . . . react. With the Client here and odd things still occurring in the disc, either might decide their agreements concerning the disc had become a hindrance to the best interests of their realms. She wanted her defences and her weapons platforms at their optimum in such an event.
“Well, thank you for that, at least,” said Windermere, now back fully human and just a little resentful.
Orlandine cut the link, then abruptly changed course. Instead of settling on top of her old apartment building as she had intended, she tilted in mid-air, opened the bands of armour on the back of her mechanism and fired up the fusion drives. She shot straight upwards, the city receding and shrinking behind her, then the continent. Off one edge, fifty miles out in the ocean, she noted the red eye of the Sambre volcano at the base of a plume casting a shadow across the waters. Within just a minute, she punched through a cloud layer and saw the plain of rumpled white spread out below her. Then the sky darkened and stars began to blink into existence. As the air grew thin and faded away entirely, she noted the rhythmic rise and fall of her chest and cancelled it. This facsimile of her human body had no need of air, nor did the remaining elements of her original body, since they were stored inert throughout her wholestructure.
Out in vacuum, she swung into a curving course taking her a quarter of the way around the planet. Meanwhile, she noted the departure of another ten evacuation platforms, and saw the remainder were rapidly filling. Soon she had a direct line of sight into the inner system and where the Client sat in orbit of Adranas, the hot giant planet in close orbit of the Jaskoran sun. It was time to talk.
She could, if she had wished, have opened communication with the Client while down on the surface—through her systems scattered up here, or even via machines she had mining heavy metals from the crust of Adranas itself. But she was wary. If she used com with too many relays involved, she opened windows for informational attack. Also the tech wrapped around her was some way in advance of those elements of her older self. She now viewed Weapons Platform Mu via numerous orbital arrays, noting activity out there. Weapons pods were returning to the platform and others were departing. Doubtless the Client was calling them in for repairs. However, those pods and the platform were markedly undamaged from their short jump through disruption, and not having had a set destination.
“We need to talk,” she said.
She had tightened the U-com and used a completely different coding format from what she operated to link her dispersed parts. Bandwidth, if it could be so described in U-space, stayed narrow. At present, all it could carry was only a binary coding of her words in text.
“You may need to talk,” replied the Client.
The alien had replied at least, so it was prepared to talk. She ignored its snippiness and continued, “Have you communicated with the survivors of that ship yet?”
“I have not.”
“They are not responding to you,” Orlandine guessed.
After a long pause the Client replied, “No, they are not.”
“Perhaps they are in stasis—cryogenic storage?”
Again a long pause then, “Perhaps so.”
“What are your intentions now?”
“To leave.”
“Th
at being your intention, it would be no loss to you to provide me with information.”
“And no gain.”
“Perhaps you should not leave,” Orlandine suggested, then wondered what impulse made her say that. Brief analysis of her own thought processes provided the answer and it disconcerted her. In complex situations, it was always best to keep as many pieces in play, so as to have as many options open as possible. Simplification could lead to impasses and dead ends and was the resort of simpler minds. She realized Dragon thought like this.
“There are prador and Polity forces here that might move against me,” said the Client.
“But you are in neither prador nor Polity territory,” Orlandine noted.
“The realm of Orlandine.”
“Quite.” Orlandine left that for a moment then continued, “I calculate that an attack by the ships here would be unable to breach your defences. Let me propose a deal.”
“I am listening.”
“I will bring you under my aegis as an adviser and order all Polity and prador forces to take no action against you.”
“And they will listen?”
“Six hundred weapons platform will be a great aid to hearing.”
“You mean five hundred platforms.”
Orlandine acknowledged that with a grimace. “Quite.”
“And in return you want . . . what?”
“Your advice, of course. You provided a brief history of what happened here millions of years ago to Diana Windermere in an attempt to stop her firing on the Species ship. I would guess . . . no, I am certain, that the data you provided was limited to that end. You know a lot more about events here and I need that knowledge. You understand the technology much better too—this is materially evident in what you have done to Weapons Platform Mu. I want data, Client.”
Another pause ensued, a much longer one this time. Before the Client could reply, Orlandine continued, “It is a big universe and you can run far away. But do not underestimate the assistance I may be able to provide. Nor should you dismiss how useful it is to have friends.”
“Very well, I accept,” said the Client.
That was very quick and worryingly so. It made her think that the Client had already been thinking along these lines, which indicated the alien might well need assistance and friends.
“Morgaine,” said Orlandine, her attention now directed towards one of the dreadnoughts sitting out from Jaskor. The four-mile-long slab of technology wasn’t state-of-the-art but could still turn moons to rubble. “I’m listening,” replied its interfaced captain.
“The Client is now an adviser in the Jaskoran independent state and as such comes under my protection. Kindly relay this information to Diana Windermere.”
“I will,” replied Morgaine, “but I would be interested to know why you did not tell her yourself.”
“It’s quite simple. She is at the accretion disc and if any orders come from Earth Central concerning the Client it will be you who responds to them.”
“And if I receive such orders to engage?”
“That would be unfortunate.” Orlandine transferred her gaze to the weapons platforms hanging in vacuum out beyond Jaskor. The Morgainemight well be able to turn a moon to rubble, but just one of those platforms could do the same to a planet. She sent an image of the platforms as an addendum to their exchange.
“Understood,” said Morgaine. “Anything else?”
“That’s all for now.”
The link closed and Orlandine noted the same resentment in Morgaine as she had found in Windermere. Inevitably, being in charge of such massive engines of destruction caused a degree of arrogance in the two captains that did not respond well to her. Once a Polity citizen and now an outsider, she did not accede to their will.
“Good enough?” she asked.
“Yes,” said the Client, “but understand that if you betray my trust I will destroy you.”
“Fair enough.”
“Now ask your questions.”
“First: what the hell is happening with the accretion disc now?”
“Chaff,” the Client replied. “Something doesn’t want to be seen. Yet.”
COG
Ruth lay comfortably on the bed, breathing evenly, seemingly asleep.
Cog sat on his director’s chair to one side, while on the other Mobius Clean hovered, shimmering. The new occupant of the room had joined them only a few minutes earlier.
“Don’t you both have work to do?” Cog asked.
The forensic AI waved a dismissive, feathery tendril. “I copied across subminds to control the medical machines here. The work is prosaic and uninteresting.”
“Really?”
“Routine interventions and restorations,” Clean replied. “The damage the Clade caused was merely brutish and physical—no viruses or nano-machines, no genetic or mental disruption, just wounds and burns and death.”
“So you are here . . . ?”
“You know why.”
“Trike.”
The crinoid forensic AI shrugged.
“And you?” Cog focused on Gemmell, the commander who had come in too. The man was big, rugged and tough-looking, with cropped black hair and black stubble on an angular and slightly cruel face. Muscle packed his ECS uniform and it certainly wasn’t cosmetic. He had an air about him, a body confidence and strength Cog recognized. This guy would be no pushover, even for an Old Captain.
Gemmell smiled calmly. “I can give orders wherever I am, and my presence is not required unless something untoward happens.” He gestured to Clean. “As with him, it’s all pretty routine now.”
Cog watched as the man returned his attention to Ruth. There was something going on there. He had come here perhaps out of curiosity, but his reaction on seeing Ruth’s face had been . . . notable. Now the man turned away and headed to a fabricator inset in one wall and began inputting instructions. Cog shook himself and turned back to the AI.
“So Trike,” he said.
“There are two items that I wish to inspect. Trike is one of them. The android Angel is the other.”
“You’re done with me then?” Cog eyed the blue square of scar tissue on his arm. He had agreed to give a sample and the AI had taken it before he could reconsider. It had moved fast and excised a chunk of his arm before he had a chance to draw breath.
“Your DNA is interesting in how it relates to your brother Jay Hoop. I can see certain structures that could result in malformations in the brain. In your case, this did not occur. Perhaps Jay was more genetically predisposed towards these but, as we have noted, there is an element of choice in this. It goes back to the old debates about nature and nurture.” “Choice,” Cog repeated woodenly.
“Ten per cent of humans born without genetic assay and correction can be so disposed. Only eight per cent of those experience . . . problems. Those are due to environmental and social factors. Nurture, in essence.” Clean paused for a moment, but Cog had found himself able to read the thing and knew that it wanted to say more. It continued, “I would like a memcording of your mind so as to study this relationship.”
“That’s not going to happen,” said Cog.
“I understand the difficulties related to the Spatterjay virus—”
“As do I,” Cog interrupted. “Memcording the mind of a hooper is difficult because of the viral fibres, but doubtless could be achieved by a forensic AI. You’re not getting one because what goes on between my ears belongs to me. Now let’s talk about Trike.”
His response obviously agitated Clean, but it finally relented, “Okay. I can reduce his viral load and return him to human form without killing him.”
“But?”
“The Jain technology also occupying his body is beyond my present scope. Therefore a cure for Trike would be a lengthy process of experimentation, investigation and constant intervention.”
“Do you think it can be achieved?”
“It is not impossible, but then very little is.” Clean touched a tendril to
Ruth’s head for a moment, then pulled it away. “However, I would need his complete cooperation. I am a forensic AI with many powerful tools at my disposal, but I would not countenance any intervention even on you without your agreement. Old Captains are ridiculously strong and rugged and notoriously difficult to render unconscious. Trike is much more than that. Without his cooperation I could end up dead.”
“So I need to bring him back and he has to be willing,” Cog stated, but distractedly. Gemmell had reached out to brush back a lock of Ruth’s hair which Clean had dislodged, and his hand was lingering overlong on her face.
“Do you know her?” Cog abruptly asked.
Gemmell withdrew his hand. “She reminds me of someone I knew.” He glanced up towards the ceiling. “How she once was.”
“But she’s not that woman,” Cog stated.
“When she was human?” asked Clean.
“Yes, then,” said Gemmell.
Obviously Clean knew about this woman too. Cog got back to the point. “Trike has to be willing . . .”
“Exactly.” Clean shrugged again. “I have been in communication with the android Angel, who has been allowed access to the ECS data sphere here. He has gone after Trike, who has gone deep into the cave systems below us. But I am not sure that Angel can reason with him.”
