by Neal Asher
“And that’s why,” said a hoarse voice, “you let me hear all this.”
Cog peered down at Ruth. Her eyes were open now and she was looking across at Gemmell. She sat up, the sheet dropping away from her naked body. Cog couldn’t help but stare. There wasn’t a single blemish on a torso he had seen open and eviscerated just a few hours ago. Gemmell, meanwhile, held out a jacket for her. He’d got clothing from the fabricator—Cog should have thought of doing that himself. She pulled the garment on, with his unrequired help, and muttered her thanks. Cog turned away and tried to stop his mind slipping into cynicism. When he turned back she had fixed her gaze on him.
“We must bring my husband back,” she stated.
Cog nodded, aware that her eyes were glassy with incipient tears and that something had changed.
ORLIK
The great fog was coagulating, shifting, reshaping. Orlik keyed into the feed from the probes the Cable Hogue had U-jumped out and above the accretion disc. The outer part of the disc seemed to be bunching up in one place and lying directly between the black hole and the fleets. The inner part, still falling in towards the black hole, had also turned opaque.
“It’s very fast,” Windermere commented.
“Sprag?” Orlik enquired.
“Pretty damned anomalous,” Sprag replied. “There are things in there moving at close to light speed, otherwise it could not reshape so fast. We are, after all, looking at something that is nominally eight light hours across.”
Orlik was glad to be reminded. As ever in space, one could lose a sense of scale. So, something was shifting the Jain cloud out there, altering it and making it opaque to scan, somehow skating elements of it across vacuum without dropping them into U-space. This meant utterly- appalling amounts of energy were being used, in ways he, and quite probably Windermere, did not understand. Did the Als?
“Do you understand how this is being done?” he asked. Sprag had, after all, become a high and mighty ship AI.
“I haven’t a clue,” Sprag answered.
“I presume that is your ship AI that I hear speaking,” said Windermere. Orlik bubbled irritation. He hadn’t remembered to cut her out of his exchanges with Sprag. “Yes, that’s my ship AI.”
Windermere looked mildly puzzled. “You speak to it in Anglic.” “Evidently.”
She shrugged. “I hadn’t expected it to sound like that.”
Privately to Sprag, he said, “You could have prevented her from hearing.” “I could have,” Sprag said, “but the cat is out of the box since I communicated with Hogue and the other Polity AIs. They are aware that there’s something unexpected about me for a prador design.”
Orlik could not help feeling a little suspicious about that.
“The cloud is more opaque between us and the black hole,” said Windermere, “but I suspect that opacity would be the same for us wherever we moved and it’s not due to the material shift.” She paused contemplatively. “We don’t even know—”
“Now that’s a material shift,” Sprag broke in.
Orlik had seen it the moment Sprag interrupted and doubtless all the faster minds in the combined fleets had seen it too. Objects were now sliding out of the Jain cloud and heading towards them. Tens of thousands of them. Orlik immediately focused his sensor array on one of them. It looked like a conglomerate of the internal organs of a prador and was coated with bluish metal. Pulling back, he saw that most of the swarm consisted of these, though other objects were evident too. Deeper scanning revealed tangled technology and a super-dense power supply. The things were travelling fast—a high portion of light speed. Even as he watched, they all fired up high-powered ion drives to ramp up their acceleration. But what could such small items, which would take a long time to reach the fleets, do?
A series of particle beams lanced out from the Cable Hogue—probing shots. Orlik saw them strike fifteen of the objects. As the beams winked out they revealed tumbling cinders.
“Take them out,” said Orlik.
The Kinghammer opened fire—a fusillade of railgun slugs hurtling across vacuum. The order, relayed by Sprag, had the rest of the prador ships firing railgun slugs too.
“Why have you stopped firing?” Orlik asked Windermere.
“Because they are ineffective,” she replied.
“What?”
Her face was back in his vision. “They don’t have U-space drives. We can move out of the way any time we like.” She shook her head and Orlik surprised himself by recognizing something unpleasant in her expression. “And, in reality, they are not our problem but Orlandine’s.”
The prador ships opened up with particle beams—lines of royal blue slicing across vacuum. Railgun slugs and the beams struck simultaneously. Plasma explosions lit vacuum, the approaching objects blackened dots in silhouette. The beams drilled into these, splashing sun-hot particulate. Then targeting began to get sketchy, as it became difficult to find targets in the steadily increasing EMR. U-com was unaffected, however.
“And there we have it,” said Windermere dryly. “Destroy enough of them and you cannot see the rest. Some will get to us.”
“U-space,” said Orlik, pedantically.
“Take a look,” she replied.
Sprag relayed U-space imagery and a gravity map through his interface. Certainly, Jain signatures were detectible, but they were dispersed, shifting. That, combined with the intense EMR, made it impossible to nail down the positions of the ones that had not been hit.
“We need to relocate,” he said.
The new coordinates arrived even as he spoke the words. Sprag transmitted them to the prador ships as he felt the falling twist of the Kinghammer entering that continuum. A second later, his ship was out again. It now sat slightly above the plane of the accretion disc. Other faster ships were arriving too—slower old-style prador or Polity dreadnoughts trailed behind. The formation was in disarray. The disruption from the black hole, the proximity of other ships making it impossible for each to jump accurately, and the timings, all contributed. But Orlik was pleased to see how quickly his ships regained their positions relative to each other, and to the Polity ships. He wasn’t pleased for long.
“More of the fuckers,” said Sprag.
Other things came too this time: bacilliform objects a hundred feet long, hollow down the centre. These heated up internally so that their ends looked like the throats of furnaces. A moment later, they spewed out intensely orange ion beams. These reached out across vacuum and splashed on hardfields. Again the prador ships replied, and Sprag coordinated fire on the bacilliforms, since they seemed to represent the greatest danger. These could take more than one beam hit, but a railgun slug caused a satisfactory explosion. However, the explosions ramped up EMR again. And still, Orlik noted, the Polity ships were inactive.
“You’re still not firing,” he said tetchily.
“I am not firing because these things will just deplete our armouries,” Windermere replied. “Cease firing.”
It was about the first direct order he had received from her and he didn’t like it. He ground his long mandibles together in irritation. He finally acceded, “Tell them to cut it, Sprag.”
All the prador ships ceased firing at once, though tardy railgun slugs continued to impact. The bacilliforms carried on firing. None of their shots was getting through but obviously they were eating into the fleet’s energy reserves.
“Tactics,” he said.
“Something stinks,” Windermere replied. “This seems too organized to be just another Jain-tech outbreak. If we stay here we will eventually have to open fire. We can back off or keep shifting position . . . I don’t like either. We’re being driven.”
“By what?”
Windermere had no answer for him. He contemplated this for a moment then said, “Orlandine . . .”
“She is aware but saying nothing as yet.”
This got a response.
“My weapons platforms are still rearming and developing weapons and defences,”
said Orlandine. “I will not move them in until they are ready.”
“But what we are seeing here is precisely what your platforms were designed to stop,” Windermere argued.
“As you have noted, these objects are . . . thus far, incapable of jumping through U-space. Their spread is a concern, but they can easily be tracked and dealt with at a later time.”
Orlik grudgingly conceded that she was talking sense. “Tactics,” he repeated. “We’re bleeding power like this.”
“Calculating for all ships,” replied Sprag.
“Perhaps we should go in,” Orlik suggested, broadcasting an image of the accretion disc with a square frame over the inner separation point.
“Too close,” said Windermere tersely. “We’ll have those fuckers coming at us from every direction and they’ll be more concentrated. And still this is not our problem.”
Orlik was annoyed at himself. Trying to think outside the box, he had not recognized that the inner cloud around the black hole would probably contain the same hostiles.
“So what now?”
“I don’t know,” replied Windermere acidly. “I’m swiftly coming to the conclusion that Orlandine would like us to do her work for her and that it is perhaps time to leave.” During the ensuing pregnant pause there was no response from Orlandine. Orlik assumed she was either no longer listening, or simply did not care to refute Windermere, who continued, “Either that, or by not bringing her platforms in, she is pushing me to make that decision.”
Your decision, thought Orlik, for your ships.
Windermere continued, “But I’ve had nothing from Earth Central so I think it best we watch and wait until we’re sure what the situation is . . . whether it requires us.”
“It’s pretty damned obvious, really,” said Sprag abruptly. “We jump out, leaving attack ships on watch.”
“In microcosm, Orlandine’s tactics,” commented Windermere, with something of disgust in her voice, Orlik thought. And still no response from Orlandine. “But I agree for the interim . . . I need to talk to Earth Central.”
Via his interface, Orlik noted the new tactical plan. The fleets would jump out two light hours. Fifty-three stealthed attack ships and hundreds of watch probes would be left to spread about the disc, themselves jumping and shifting to avoid confrontation. They would form a sensory sphere that would enable greater penetration of the cloud, through to the black hole. Also one Polity dreadnought, with immense hold space, would stay to pick up remaining survivors scattered about space from the previous encounter with the Species ship. Even as the Kinghammer dropped into U-space, Orlik wondered how long this tactic would remain viable. What if that cloud just kept pumping out Jain-tech objects for months? What if nothing else happened? He really needed to talk to his king.
Hiatus...
Orlik stared at a slightly more distant view of the accretion disc. Meanwhile, a second image, sent by U-com from the attack ships and probes, gradually cleared. This closer view of the disc lost enough of its opacity to reveal the black hole, a beady eye sunk deep inside. Abruptly it became sharper still—the haze dispersing. Now he could see planets, planetoids and asteroids issuing great fountains of matter into vacuum, flickering twists in U-space and massive ionic energy surges. There were plasma vortexes, flashes and streaks of raw power, as of a storm within. And scattered throughout in their millions: coagulating Jain-tech objects. Those things that had already attacked swarmed there like some massive infection.
“We should have scanned like this before,” he commented.
“We’re not seeing clearly because of our scanning,” said Sprag. “Seems something has decided it doesn’t matter what we see now.”
“Look at the black hole,” said Windermere.
It was even smaller, the pattern of conjoined hexagons over its surface bright and clear. A line then cut around its equator and a powerful U-signature crashed through that continuum. It even affected the cloud, causing it to flinch, almost like an amoeba touched with a hot wire.
“Oh hell,” said Windermere. “Whatever’s in there, we’ve just done precisely what it wants.”
“We go back in,” said Orlik, but he knew he was too late.
The even pattern over the surface of the black hole dissolved, spread, the orb briefly flashing to the brightness of a sun and emitting an intense pulse of EMR. Then the thing darkened and shrank, losing its artificial expansion. U-com dropped out as it collapsed, from the size of a G-type star to a minuscule point a mere eight miles across. It was as if the rubberized sheet of U-space had been smacked with an immense club.
And an object had come out.
ANGEL
The storm drains were emptying—their flow of water little more than streams running down their centres. Angel finally hauled himself upright. With mud sucking against his feet, he clumped off in the direction Trike had gone earlier.
I am Golem, he thought.
He understood that Trike had initially intended to knock him out of the way, but then the Jain technology had responded to other levels of his mind. This was why the blow had been so hard, and why it had hit him with induction warfare and destructive viruses. Trike might be consciously trying to accept Angel as one of the good guys, but unconsciously he still wanted to kill him.
The diminished flow of water had left all sorts of detritus in the layer of mud: clumps of waterweed like bleached lettuces leaking blood, oozing transparent nematodes the length of his forearm. Occasional mudfish backed against the wall and barked like asthmatic dogs as he passed. And there were pieces of the Clade. In one area where he found these, he looked up and saw the damage to the tunnel ceiling. He realized this was where Trike had finished off the swarm AI—finally killing it with its own destruct program. Angel moved on, scanning ahead, trying to find some trace of the man. Trike had to be blocking to be so invisible, so did not want to be found. However, he had neglected his traces in the physical world, and soon Angel followed big claw-toed footprints in the mud.
The trail took him into a series of interlinked side tunnels and finally to a shaft plummeting into darkness. Scanning down, he realized that here the flood water poured into natural caves deep below, to underground rivers that flowed to the sea. The sides of the shaft bore the markings of a tunnel borer, just like those underneath the Ghost Drive Facility. Angel eyed the chipped and broken stone where Trike had climbed down by the simple expedient of driving his fingers and toes into the rock. He followed, using the handholds provided.
The bottom of the shaft opened out in the ceiling of a cavern, small stalactites growing around its rim. Angel released his hold and dropped fifty feet, landing heavily in a squat, with stone shattering under his feet. Alerts rippled through his body, since his internal repair systems were not yet up to speed. He rose carefully and searched his surroundings. He could find no footprints here and Trike had a wide choice of caves into which he could have ducked. A river ran down the side of this cavern, flowing into distant darkness towards the sea and Angel followed it. Basic psychology informed his choice. When he passed a series of newly snapped-off stalagmites, he guessed he had made the right decision. Later, a footprint in a sandy deposit beside the river confirmed this.
“Captain Trike!” he bellowed, his voice echoing eerily.
Briefly a flash of EMR far ahead, quickly concealed. He broke into a run, heading for that location, but on reaching it found no one there. But his sensorium, still reinstating from the damage he had received, started giving him more. In infrared he began picking up heat traces on the cavern floor. A few miles further on, and these became clear footprints like those in the mud above. He considered calling again but decided against it—Trike might try to conceal himself further.
The cavern became steadily narrower, the river occupying more of its floor. In a little while Angel walked along a ledge beside it and knew that soon he would have to go into the water. Then he felt the attempts at communication. It wasn’t U-com since he had lost that earlier, along with hi
s connection to the ECS data sphere, but tight beam terahertz com. Too much rock lay between himself and the sender, though, and he failed to lock it down. He responded with his own signal in the direction of the beam. Whoever was there would at least know his location.
Finally, he dropped into the water. The packed density of his body took him straight down to the bottom but then some tinkering with his internal grav brought him back to the surface and he let the flow carry him. He wondered if Trike could do the same now, and what the man’s limitations were. Trike had become terrifyingly strong and fast, his body as densely tech-packed as Angel’s own. But his capabilities were greater. Angel knew that even when he had been linked to his wormship, he could not have done what Trike had done to the Clade. Nor would he have been capable of going one-on-one with a war drone like that lethal creature called Cutter.
Daylight began to penetrate and soon Angel saw a crack above showing sky. This grew steadily, until the cave widened out into a canyon. Com established—this time simple radio—and Angel once again opened into the ECS data sphere. Data flow had slowed because U-com was down, apparently due to a wave of disruption spreading from the accretion disc black hole. He received a query and the identifier for the forensic AI Mobius Clean, but hesitated to open communication. Angel was just the kind of item Earth Central would want taken apart and studied by a forensic AI. But in the end he relented.
“What do you want?”
“You, and Trike.”
“I have no intention of surrendering myself to ECS.”
“And ECS does not have the power here to take you.”
A data package arrived and, after scanning it internally, Angel finally opened it. Apparently Orlandine had given him citizenship of her realm and he now came under her protection.
“All I want from you is the data you will allow,” said Clean. “All I want with Trike is to help him, if he, also a citizen here now, will allow it.” Ahead, the canyon walls fell away and Angel could see the river opening out into the sea, mounded shingle on either side. He thought about why he had decided to follow Trike and the resolution he sought.
