by Neal Asher
“I cannot make decisions for Trike,” he said. “As for me, right now, I give you my permission to study me. Let us hope you will have something to study.” Before Clean could question that, Angel ended the communication.
Where the river cut through the shingle beach, Angel scanned the banks and saw where they had been disturbed. He swam over and climbed out, following deep footprints. Again he questioned his present actions and again he came up with the same answers. Despite what he had done in the tunnels, he still felt he owed Trike something. He also felt he needed absolution from the man, some forgiveness. He had to face Trike, alone, and they must resolve what lay between them before either of them could move on. And there he was.
A boulder field lay ahead and Trike sat atop one of them, gazing out to sea at the distant plume of the Sambre volcano. Angel felt a shudder run through him at the utter certainty of the danger he faced here, but resolutely strode forwards. After a moment, Trike slumped, dipping his head, then abruptly swivelled on the boulder and dropped off the side.
“You should not have come,” he said.
“We need to make things right,” Angel replied.
But Trike was already on the move, accelerating, his clawed feet kicking up shingle. Angel stared. He had anticipated something else. He had expected there to be reason but he saw none in the thing hurtling towards him. He turned to run but could not build up the acceleration on the shingle. A clawed hand clamped on his shoulder, nails driving into his metallic skin. Trike hauled him off the ground and threw him hard. Angel slammed headfirst into one of the boulders, the impact smashing his head down against his chest, compacting metallic bones, systems breaking inside him. Induction warfare hit him in a wave, generating hostile viruses, surges blowing out nanowires. He looked up, neck straightening with a crunching, tinny sound of metal components straightening.
“You should not have come,” Trike repeated woodenly, reaching down for him.
20
Somewhere, in U-space, there is a great mass of Jain AIs. Our own AIs assure us of this but, apparently, the only place where it is possible to communicate with these products of the Jain is near the central sun of an accretion disc. This disc is also packed with supposedly dangerous Jain tech, and to engage with the AIs, one must inject energy in the process to enable them to think. We can’t go there—any ships even approaching the area are summarily destroyed. What are we to make of this? I think we must take a long, hard look at our own AIs and speculate on what the future might bring. The prevailing idea is that those Jain AIs voluntarily ensconced themselves in that continuum to escape whatever it was that wiped out their creators... But, of course, we cannot ask them about this. So let me make a new suggestion: their creators imprisoned them there and went on to live out their material existence free from AI interference. The Jain created a massive civilization whose technology we know to be utterly beyond our own. Most certainly, they were peace- loving creatures who made the utopia all races can achieve without soulless AIs holding them back and dragging them into unnecessary conflicts. This civilization existed for millennia, if not millions of years, and achieved the unalloyed heights of racial purity before it moved on. That our AIs, and those quislings in thrall to them, sneer at this analysis, I think proves that the movement of a civilization to a higher plane of existence is valid. I feel the religious zeitgeist of the past just reflected this truth, and that our ruling AIs deliberately quashed it. Are we truly to believe that some rogue technology, created by the Jain, wiped out the later, highly technical alien civilizations of the Atheter and the Csorians? No! They moved on to that higher plane of existence too—one that is denied to us by AI oppression!
—from The Separatist Handbook
ORLANDINE
The wave of U-space disruption slammed out. Orlandine read its intensity on a map of that continuum, until even the instruments for detecting it ceased to function. However, she got enough data to place the accretion disc black hole as its source. No vessels would be travelling through that continuum for some time. Even U-com, the transference of data by electromagnetic means through U-space, crashed.
To Orlandine, it felt as if all her perceptions had slowed, as her project and her mind, distributed throughout the Jaskoran system, began switching over to the slow drag of laser com. She fielded queries from platform Als, from prador and Polity ships, from sub-AI systems, until she raised a subpersona to deal with them all. This provided the various iterations of one answer: “I don’t know.” She then directed a tight, blue- beam BIC com laser into the inner system and asked, “Something does not want to be seen?” She did not have to wait a whole eleven minutes for the circuit of question and response, because a com laser locked on her just a moment later with the continuation of their exchange.
“My species is a branch of the Jain family tree that they tried to wipe out. You saw part of that attempted extermination in the data I sent to Diana Windermere.” The Client paused, then continued, “Must we continue to communicate in this ineffective manner, with such delays?” Orlandine opted to trust, and opened up bandwidth via the laser. Now they could communicate with more than just text, and pack the exchanges with data. She then decided she really needed to speed this up, so created a subpersona to transmit to the Client—one that could ask questions and respond immediately. The Client was equally as fast, and Orlandine recognized the AI format of the data coming in as its subpersona. She routed it to secure storage, but opened bandwidth from it for complex com, and watched it grow within her. At once, it showed her a fleet of alien ships, all of which bore a resemblance to seashells. She identified the Species ship amidst them as they fell into a solar system, closely past a gas giant.
“Four of the Jain allied themselves to attack one of their kind,” the Client persona intoned. “One must understand the Jain to know that it was not the attack that was unusual but the alliance. The progress of Jain society was achieved through constant conflict and theft of knowledge and materials from each other.”
It gave her a graphical representation and she understood at once. Their behaviour was rooted in their biology. Sex is a mingling of genetic data, whose purpose is overall evolution to optimum survival, in given environmental circumstances. From the start, for the Jain, sex was genetic rape, a fight—the winner taking the genetic material of its victim, or mate, and making an eclectic selection for the best offspring. But, through evolution and their own alteration of their biology, it extended beyond that. They became potentially immortal and individually followed varying developmental paths. They mated and stole genetic material from each other, sometimes for offspring, more often in order to incorporate the best in themselves. They also pilfered information from each other’s minds, and technology and material resources from one another. They mixed genetically and technologically to advance. Sex and warfare were the same thing to them.
“This was how they lived and how they wanted to live,” it continued. “This was why they never spread out widely, because they wanted to stay proximal to potential mates and victims. The Librarian was an outlier, insane in their terms, who wanted to create a form of their kind more like the social insects of Earth. This was anathema to them, hence the alliance against that one.”
“The Librarian,” Orlandine repeated.
The Client had prepared well, because its persona immediately gave her compacted detail of the Client’s encounters with that entity, though she felt sure it had redacted information from the final encounter, when the Librarian died. Something to investigate another time—she just accepted that the Client had garnered a great deal of knowledge and history from the creature.
“The Librarian created its Species, whereupon four Jain allied to hunt it down and destroy it. Over many centuries, the Species and the Librarian defeated three of them. The last of them, in possession of a new lethal technology, a technology then spreading in the Jain realm, ambushed them in the solar system you saw. And then this happened . . .”
She again saw
the final battle that wrecked a solar system and resulted in a disc of debris that looked like an accretion disc. In this disc spread the remnants of the new lethal technology the Jain had deployed. As she watched the appalling destruction, Orlandine realized, “Their technology killed them.”
“The new Jain technology was essentially one of them. It finally incorporated them all. Yes, it killed them as individuals. Yet the Jain lives on in its way. Like the Atheter in some respects: brute survival of a kind at the cost of conscious intelligence.”
“I understand—the Jain tech in the disc is the detritus of war. I thank you for all of this, but your explanation is incomplete.”
“There were two ships,” the Client persona replied.
She saw the Species ships fleeing: the one that stayed to face the remaining Jain, then both of them falling into a U-space blister in the system’s sun, putting it out.
“A Jain ship is coming,” she stated, remembering the king of the pra- dor’s fear of this. How had he managed to extrapolate that, on so little data?
“Correct,” said the Client persona didactically. “The Wheel’s aim was to release the Jain ship from the U-space blister, but it must have known that the first ship to exit it would be the enemy. My people. It therefore set things up so that ship would be fired on.”
“Okay . . .”
“My people’s ship was damaged when it took the Jain ship into the U-space blister.”
“Why did the Wheel set that up? Wouldn’t the Jain ship, if undamaged, have been able to deal with the Species ship?”
“Data required,” said the persona.
Orlandine waited impatiently for the Client to update the thing. However, in that time she set things in motion, based on what she had received already. She first contacted Gemmell and others down on the planet: no more selectivity with the refugees to the evacuation platforms. Send as many people as possible, as quickly as possible. She then contacted those remaining platforms in orbit: take on more supplies and life support for the refugees and rig for conventional space travel until the disruption has passed. She followed that up by making the necessary alterations to the supply chains. It took only minutes. Eleven minutes later, a large block of data arrived in the persona and it spoke again.
“It was inevitable that driving you to use the black hole would focus the attention of Earth Central and the king of the prador—that those fleets would be sent anyway.”
“But the attempt to have me killed ensured it . . .”
“Yes,” said the persona, obviously ready for this. “But when about to face an enemy, isn’t it a good idea to see them in combat first, preferably with another of your enemies?”
And that’s how the Jain think, thought Orlandine.
“What else may have occurred in that blister, I do not know. There is the temporal issue . . .” The Client persona paused to let that sink in, then continued, “For the Jain to have sent the Wheel means that time was not in stasis within the blister.”
Orlandine realized she had to reassess. Okay, it seemed two warring ships had gone into that blister. And now the “temporal issue.” When that Species ship appeared, they had been thinking in terms of it being locked in a U-space blister—locked in time like an insect in amber. But now the Client had told her the Wheel had been sent from the Jain ship to manipulate exterior events. This meant there had to be a time flow in the blister. She was appalled. Had those two ships, and whatever crews they contained, survived a whole five million or more years in the blister?
“The prador ships that fired . . .” she said. It suddenly seemed so obvious now: the Clade had penetrated them. The swarm AI’s primary purpose had been to get everyone firing on each other, after the platforms destroyed the Species ship. Thus the Jain ship would have safer passage, or perhaps see further action to assess. Was that right? Of course it was. She realized the Clade-controlled ships would have fired on her weapons platforms, had she not recalled them, and that the platforms would have responded.
“Such destruction,” she said, reviewing the mayhem and potential mayhem in her mind.
“It is what they are,” the Client replied, eleven minutes later.
“Yes, I see that,” she said tightly, and contemplated all she had learned.
Here was a newly encountered, intelligent race, and the response should be overtures of peace, until whatever reaction they made clarified matters. Was she too obsessed with her mission to prevent Jain technology escaping the disc, and in turn destroying the Polity and the Kingdom? Yes and no. This wasn’t just about the Jain tech. It was about the nature of that technology, which she knew intimately. Its nature was hostile and destructive. Now she had the Client’s data and extrapolated from that. This showed a race whose warlike tendencies rooted in them before they even developed intelligence. They destroyed and pillaged each other and could not countenance a branch from their evolutionary tree, let alone some other alien race. Of course, the Client could have massaged the data, but it fitted. Orlandine was utterly certain the Jain were xenophobes, more extreme even than the prador. For such creatures, not attacking the Polity and the Kingdom would never even be an option.
They must stop that ship.
Orlandine relayed her thinking to the weapons platform AIs who, now devoid of directives, were freethinking and changing fast. She expected some argument on the matter but they were all in immediate agreement with her. They must face the Jain, and deal with it.
Eleven minutes later, another message came through directly from the Client: “It will destroy the fleets out there, and then it will come here. The ship of my kind was severely damaged and . . . there is something wrong with the crew, yet you saw what it did. The Jain ship, undamaged and controlling that technology . . .”
A little while after that came another brief comment, “I don’t know if there is anything, either in the Polity or the Kingdom, that can stop it.”
TRIKE
Trike hauled Angel up by his fractured neck and scanned down the android’s body. He could see points of attack, areas he needed to destroy. He mapped the networks of power and data, the nodal reactors, electromuscle and ceramal skeleton, and drew back his hand for an eviscerating blow. Then he hesitated. What was he doing?
He could feel the Jain tech and the essence of the soldiers responding to the whole of him—both in his conscious and subconscious mind. But its response to the stronger, knotted blackness of his twisted-up anger and hate was greatest, and it fed that into his consciousness, driving him. He had to stop now. Yet even as he tried to pull back, Angel’s fingers screamed with an intense vibration and his hand stabbed up. The spiked fingers hesitated for a second, then started boring into Trike’s forearm. Pain and damage fed back into the system and Trike flung him, his impact cutting a groove through the shingle and sending a wave of stones. Angel rolled out of this and came upright, then accelerated towards Trike. Almost with a kind of relief, Trike faced him.
And with hunger.
Angel slammed into him hard, driving him back a pace and raining blow after blow against his torso. His fists also issued intense disruptive ultrasound pulses, scrambling things inside. Trike backhanded him, snapping his head over on the already damaged neck. It straightened with a crunch and Angel’s eyes reddened. His laser informational warfare beam flashed and blinded Trike, viral propagation in his human mind, ripping in. Humanly blind, Trike could still see so much more with other sensors throughout his body. He spun and drove his foot into Angel’s torso, lifting the android off the ground. Angel reached down, horribly fast, and caught his ankle, spun back in and drove his own foot straight into Trike’s mouth. Teeth broke, even as Trike swept a claw down and drove it into Angel’s back, closing his fingers about artificial ribs.
The hunger grew and emotions and intents blurred. He wanted to break Angel apart and destroy him. But he also wanted to take everything from the android and make it his own. This all made no sense, but still he let it drive him.
The face of a bo
ulder now. Trike slammed Angel into it again and again, bending and fracturing the android’s internal skeleton, seeing inside as components shorted and winked out. He grabbed an arm and heaved, tearing it from its socket and tossing it aside. Angel’s other hand came round at an impossible angle, driving spiked fingers into Trike’s eyes and partway into his skull, spewing attacking nano-machines. Down on the shingle and knee in the back. Trike caught the wrist in his free hand and tore off the other arm. No thought now, no doubts. From the hand gripping Angel’s ribs, he issued tendrils, extending them through the android’s body, penetrating and connecting. Memories were there, knowledge, systems—the whole technical peak of what Angel was—and he began to tear them out. Angel’s head turned to face him on its broken neck.
“It is resolved,” he said.
Nano-machines spreading from the tendrils created material weaknesses, debonded layers and opened cracks. Trike reached down to grab one shoulder, and folded Angel up, snapping his spine. Finally, he withdrew the tendrils and released the ribs in order to take the rest apart, hardly noticing the red glow fading from those eyes.
GEMMELL
The grey slug of a military grav-transport slid through the sky just inside the canyon. Gemmell studied the walls on either side. They were sheer basalt cut through with inclusions of smoky quartz. Here and there clung scrubby bushes loaded with sparse green needles and violet fruit like chillies. Earlier, accessing his gridlink, he had discovered that they were chillies adapted to this world, as was so much of the flora here. A world it seemed Orlandine was now anxious to evacuate as quickly as possible . . .
“How long till we get there?” said Cog.
“What?”
“How long till—”
“Ten minutes,” Gemmell replied tersely, after checking coordinates and airspeed in his link. He returned to overview the changes to the evacuation for a moment. Something critical had happened, something big, and it related to the present disruption of U-com.
