Line War

by Neal Asher

  ‘But in being completely human, we are denying that synergy.’

  He halted and turned to look at her. ‘Orlandine, you are in serious need of a drink.’

  They finally entered the lounge, where other haimen of the station had gathered, sans carapaces, to celebrate the completion of another small fragment of a construction project with a downtime of a million years. All this was pure unadulturated memory, but soon she felt it slide into the territory of nightmare. They were standing by a drinks dispenser when Shoala said words that were so close to memory, but now drifting away from it.

  ‘I want you to feel me inside you,’ he said, perfectly on script, but then added, ‘as I felt you inside me.’

  And he had. He had felt her tearing apart and deleting his mind. He had felt, at her instigation, the clamp-legs of his carapace displaced from their usual sockets and driven deep elsewhere into his body. She had murdered him to cover her own escape with the Jain node that had been a ‘gift’ to her from Erebus–or rather a Trojan to turn her into something that might destroy the Polity.

  ‘I’m so sorry,’ she said, the guilt and deep despair seeming to crush her intestines between them.

  He shrugged. ‘ECS kills or erases murderers. There is no mercy, no forgiveness. A murderer has taken something that cannot be given back, and so must himself forfeit that same thing.’

  Where were they now? Glancing beyond him she recognized the interior of a Dyson segment: massive pillars rising up in the distance, diagonal tie cables a hundred yards thick and scattered with fusion reactors and gravmotors like giant steel aphids. Ice lay underfoot.

  He sipped his drink, his carapace back in place but its clamp-legs now driven deep into his naked body, blood oozing out and freezing as it ran down his trousers, building up around his feet to stick him in place.

  ‘You feel sorry,’ he said. ‘I would be glad to feel anything at all.’

  ‘Shoala…’

  She saw him now in the interface sphere where she had murdered him, coughing up blood…dying. But I saved most of that Polity fleet from Erebus, she told herself. Doesn’t that count for something? But that was nonsense: her actions might have led to the remaining ships escaping, but she had destroyed Erebus’s USER, the one preventing those same ships travelling through U-space, but only because the device had also prevented her from escaping.

  Orlandine woke instantly, fully alert to the sound of docking clamps engaging. Through her hardware she assessed everything that was happening, then stood up and began heading back through Heliotrope towards the airlock. As she walked she again questioned why she repeatedly initiated those dream sequences, because no amount of self-flagellation could return Shoala to life. Yet, somehow, she needed to remind herself of what price others close to her had paid for the near-supernal power she now possessed, so that she would never treat it lightly and would always use this power to serve a higher purpose.

  Vengeance?

  Yes, she was using her power to exact vengeance for the murder of her two brothers but, just like her destruction of the USER, there would be additional benefit. In this case she would prevent huge loss of life by destroying a powerful inimical being.

  Before entering the airlock she initiated closure of her spacesuit–the visor and segmented helmet rising up simultaneously out of the neck ring and sealing together. The war runcible, though it had been constructed to be inhabited by humans, had long been filled with inert gas in order to preserve it. The lock opened directly into a docking tunnel, which in turn connected to one of the many box-section corridors that burrowed through the runcible’s structure. The gravplates in this section were online at half a G, causing her to drop abruptly to the floor. Checking through the runcible’s computer network she found that the drones were located where she wanted them to be, and set out with long bouncing strides. Soon she arrived at an even wider corridor–one used for transporting heavy equipment–and next she stood before open doors that exposed glints of metallic movement inside. She entered.

  Knobbler was, unsurprisingly, a brute, typical of the type of drone that usually wanted to manifest as something nasty, and overendowed with limbs. He looked like the bastard offspring of an octopus and a fiddler crab, with a definite admixture of earth-moving equipment in his ancestry. His main body was a couple of yards across and as many deep, with a sharp rim just like that of a crab and, also like a crab, this body possessed his main sensorium, including disconcerting squid eyes. The body was also mackerel-patterned–indicating now-inactive old-style chameleonware. Extending below and behind the body was a tail resembling the abdomen of a hoverfly, which he could fold up conveniently against his underside. From the juncture between these sections sprouted numerous heavy and partially jointed tentacles, some supporting him off the floor, others up and groping through the air, but all terminating in the tools of his one-time lethal trade. She gazed around at the others now gathered in this big and slightly archaic engine room. The war drone’s companions were a collection of phobic nightmares, including large versions of a scorpion, a hissing cockroach, a devil’s coach-horse and other forms less easy to equate with a single species. And she understood that, no matter how fast she might react informationally, they could now easily kill her if they so chose.

  They did not so choose. They appeared, in fact, rather enamoured of her plans.

  ‘It’s good to see you all face-to-face,’ she said.

  That elicited a rapid exchange of jokes, story fragments and what could only be described as electronic titters. It was a given that old war drones like these were often more human than some humans these days, and certainly possessed a keener sense of humour. The only problem was that what they might find amusing, most humans would certainly not.

  ‘I’ll not spend time on waffle, because our time is short.’ While transmitting subtexts and back-up information packages to her narrative, she continued. ‘It will take seventy hours for the nearest ECS attack ship or dreadnought to reach us. Before then we need to get these engines running.’

  Spaced evenly about inside the runcible were five U-space engines. She had already assessed them and found that two needed much remedial work, this massive conglomeration of units that was the U-space drive here being one of them.

  ‘Getting them running isn’t the main problem,’ replied Knobbler, acting as spokesman for the rest. ‘but getting them balanced will be.’ For emphasis he snapped one long razor-edged claw at the air. It looked perfectly designed for peeling open Prador carapaces to tear out what lay inside.

  ‘They need a controlling intelligence now the runcible AI has gone,’ observed Orlandine, adding, ‘That will, as you know, be only a temporary position, until I myself am ready to assume it.’ She was carefully scanning her audience on many levels. During the war itself none of them would have been of any use in the role she was now suggesting, but throughout the ensuing years they had all grown in experience, knowledge and wisdom, and they had since then all availed themselves of memory and processing capacity bolt-ons. Even so, half of them were still of little use: they were faulty at their core and would waver under the exigencies of processing the higher maths required for both runcible and U-space operation. Running their specs through filtering programs she came up with three best candidates. One was Knobbler itself, another was the one shaped like a huge bedbug, which named itself Bludgeon, and the last was the one that resembled a preying mantis fashioned out of razor blades–who was named, inevitably, Cutter.

  The implication of her last statement was not lost on the drones. They began one of those fast debates of theirs, into which Orlandine interjected her own selection. Within a few seconds they had decided on Bludgeon for the task. The drone had been acting as a signal relay for some time, when not otherwise engaged in its hobby of creating multidimensional geometries. It was the perfect choice. The bedbug ambled forward, lifted its blind head towards her and awaited further instructions.

  ‘Before we get to work, there is one more thing I ha
ve to add.’ She now addressed them all. ‘You understand my objectives and you relish the prospect of action, but I want it to be clear that you understand the risk.’

  ‘We understand,’ said Knobbler. ‘We were made disposable.’

  Orlandine gazed at the heavily armoured killer.

  ‘Yes, quite.’

  The Golem Azroc strode out onto one floor of the newly completed Hedron aboard Jerusalem and gazed around. Hanging in space in the centre of this dodecahedral chamber was a holographic projection in a perpetual state of flux, constantly dividing into segments showing different spacial scenes–star systems, close-up views of planets, space stations, ships travelling through void–and different maps, logic trees, graphs, schematics. It was a mass of visual information changing too fast for the unaided mind to comprehend, but there weren’t any unaided minds present.

  Surrounding this hologram, on every inner face of the chamber, were gravplated surfaces. On the one Azroc now strode out upon were concentric rings of consoles occupied by humans, Golem and haimen. Two other inner faces, or floors, were similarly occupied, while others were empty or occupied by only one or two figures. Throughout this chamber, holographic ship avatars appeared and disappeared, as conferences were conducted on the physical as well as the virtual level. Massive quantities of information were being shunted back and forth, and then acted upon: ship movements, defensive capabilities of vulnerable worlds, weapons-manufacturing statistics–the whole complex logistical web of this current Line war.

  Earth Central and all the high-level AIs within the Polity had been preparing for something like this, but at present it was still considered a ‘local matter’. For Erebus had attacked a fleet outside the Polity and until now had shown no sign of doing anything else. No one quite knew what Erebus intended, for its actions thus far had seemed rather illogical. Remembering friends who had died, Azroc did not look upon the matter so coolly. Indeed, Azroc the Golem had discovered emotion within himself, welling up from somewhere below emulation, when he had found his friend roasted in a shuttle that had not even managed to escape the bay of the dreadnought Brutal Blade during Erebus’s assault.

  ‘So something has happened at last?’ he enquired of the air.

  ‘Certainly,’ Jerusalem replied.

  ‘And why am I here?’ Azroc asked.

  ‘You are here for your input.’

  ‘Really.’

  Azroc knew himself to be substantially more intelligent and much faster of thought than any base-level human. He also knew that most humans viewed Jerusalem as something almost supernal and beyond understanding. It was all about orders of magnitude really: humans to Jerusalem were as fleas to an elephant, whereas Azroc placed his own elevation at about that of a cockroach. And now Jerusalem wanted his input? Azroc would have laughed if he hadn’t totally misplaced his sense of humour aboard the Brutal Blade.

  The Golem again scanned about visually, then accessed fragments of what was happening on a virtual level. He noted that Jerusalem had assigned about one per cent of its processing power to him alone, and was further bewildered by that, for one per cent of such a giant AI was a huge amount. Why, then, did Jerusalem think Azroc’s input was important? He was, after all, just one Golem of many, with an AI mind outclassed by thousands of others already aboard this vessel. Azroc tried applying for access to information and processing power on deeper levels, but found himself blocked. After a moment of chagrin he finally worked out what was going on here: he was merely a sounding board for Jerusalem, perhaps one of many scattered about this chamber. He decided not to resent that as he disconnected from virtuality.

  ‘What is the situation thus far?’ he asked aloud, like any unaugmented human.

  ‘We prepare for conflict but don’t know where or what form it will take,’ Jerusalem replied.

  ‘Any idea of where Erebus is now?’

  ‘We have tracked down certain parts of the entity…’

  ‘Those being?’

  ‘Perhaps you should head for the big screen to your left?’

  Azroc looked over at the adjacent floor of the Hedron, angling up from this one. Positioned upon it was a blank ten-foot-square screen, next to a platform composed of metal gratings upon which had been bolted a single empty chair and beside which stood a Golem hand interface–a narrow pillar topped by a sphere inset with the imprint of a skeletal hand. He strode over, stepping across the join between floors, and mounted the platform to head for the seat. Once ensconced there he felt a moment’s annoyance: here he was, just another component slotted into place in whatever machine Jerusalem was creating.

  ‘One of Erebus’s wormships attacked the planet Cull, where it destroyed all the human–sleer hybrids,’ Jerusalem informed him, as the screen began showing these same events.

  Azroc frowned, then sent internal instructions to his syntheskin covering. The skin of his right hand internally detached itself, wrinkled for a moment, then puffed up, a split opening around the wrist. From this split he stripped off the syntheskin layer, like a fleshy glove, to reveal the gleaming skeletal hand underneath, which he then placed in the imprint in the sphere. After a moment, a connection established through the pseudo-nerves in his hand: it was a simple two-way connection, not a multitasking link. Through this he could either receive or request information from the AI, but no more than that. Jerusalem was deliberately isolating him from the webworks of data exchange all around, making him a devil’s advocate, someone with a divorced point of view–oversight without involvement. This was a technique often used by AIs when dealing with complicated situations. Jerusalem clearly wanted another point of view, maybe someone who could see the wood rather than the trees.

  An information packet suddenly arrived, and it felt like his hand was burning until he applied translation programs to the stream of data coming up through his finger nerves. It simply detailed the events at Cull, but without any interpretation of them.

  ‘An attack either to mislead or to remove a danger,’ he announced. ‘But how could the hybrids be a danger to Erebus?’

  ‘There is evidence that they would show the same resistance to being hijacked by Jain-tech as dracomen do.’

  ‘I see. And were the dracomen similarly attacked?’

  Another information packet came through detailing the wormship attack on Masada.

  ‘I would say that Erebus feels it has resources to squander,’ said Azroc.

  The pause before Jerusalem’s reply was infinitesimal, but it nevertheless gave the Golem some satisfaction.

  ‘Why do you say that?’ Jerusalem’s question, of course, was a politeness, for in that minuscule pause the AI would have already worked out Azroc’s reasoning. However, the Golem then experienced a brief moment of confusion, for surely Jerusalem should have worked this out a microsecond after the first attack by Erebus. Was the AI now playing the kind of games with him it usually reserved for humans? What was its purpose in pretending to only understand this matter now? Azroc did not know and felt even more like a mere cockroach.

  ‘After its attack upon the hybrids,’ he said, ‘Erebus should have known we would work out exactly where it would strike next. It should also have known the precise disposition of Polity ships in the area, and realized what the level of our response would be. Obviously you yourself will be able to make a more accurate calculation than I can, but I would reckon the chances of success of the second attack, with just one ship, were little better than 50 per cent, with a somewhere above 90 per cent chance of the wormship being destroyed whether it was successful or not. Erebus was clearly prepared to sacrifice one of its ships with those odds, therefore has ships to squander. But then I saw that during the attack on the Polity fleet.’

  Yet another information packet arrived. Azroc studied it and was puzzled.

  ‘Perhaps this was intended to draw your eye away from its other two attacks? Or perhaps the other two attacks were to draw your eye away from this one? Certainly there could be no special resistance to Jain-tech on a
world like that.’

  Jerusalem now informed him, ‘I have received a transmission from the agent investigating this incident. It would seem that a legate landed on that world…’

  The screen now showed an image file of the said legate, first at the city of Hammon then later at the ranch house where it murdered the two humans.

  ‘Who were they?’ Azroc asked.

  ‘We do not yet know. Evidence of their identities was deliberately erased.’

  ‘I see. And the wormship, it escaped?’

  ‘There was nothing there to prevent its attack or to stop it leaving.’

  Very puzzling, all of this, but then the actions of this Erebus had been puzzling from the very start. He tried to make some sense out of all this. That many more-powerful minds than his own, with greater access to processing power and numerous data sources, were working on the same problem did not impinge. They would all be thinking in a very similar way, while he, being outside their box, would have to think there.

  ‘The wormship at Masada was destroyed. The one at Cull was severely damaged but it escaped–so did you track it down?’ he asked.

  ‘It was dealt with,’ the AI replied curtly. ‘I was considering sending a mission there to see if any useful information could be obtained.’

  ‘I doubt it.’ Azroc tried to stay outside that box. ‘Anything else there?’

  ‘Nothing relevant.’

  ‘So what else do you have?’

  Now the screen divided into four, first showing four distinct suns–bar codes along the bottom of each screen division giving their spectra–then next flicking to various positions in those relevant solar systems. The first showed the face of a gas giant, a swarm of fifty wormships drifting across it in silhouette. The second showed a similar number of ships scattered throughout an asteroid field. In the third they were orbiting a gas giant, and in the fourth they formed a ring around a small hot planetoid in close orbit about a sun.