by Neal Asher
‘So Jerusalem is supposing that each of these ships is controlled by one of those “Golem or other viable minds”, though now subjugated to Erebus’s will and quite possibly since remodelled?’
‘Your orders were sent by one of Jerusalem’s subordinates, but even so Jerusalem is supposing nothing, since that wormships are captained is accepted fact across the AI nets.’
‘Which brings me back to the original question: how does Jerusalem know?’
‘The information became available.’
‘From where?’
‘I don’t know,’ King admitted.
At that moment Cormac observed the image of the Cable Hogue seem to stretch in some indefinable direction–then disappear. Even though he was trying to keep his U-sense repressed, he saw it entering U-space like a moon dropping into some vast sea. The time for questions had just ended, since the short hop insystem would take only moments. He then felt the twisting shift as the King of Hearts dropped into U-space. The apparent dome over them turned grey, and many of the ship’s sensors he was accessing now registered zero input. But again he was there, alone, in that same vast sea, feeling its currents and knowing that he could push a little there, move there, just a little effort and…Again that weird twisting sensation as the King of Hearts surfaced like a submarine, but Cormac felt as if the ship was leaving him behind. It took an effort of will for him to stay with it.
However, unlike a submarine, this ship–along with all the others–surfaced at the same speed at which it had entered the ‘sea’. Immediately the grey in the dome screen was replaced by starlit space filled with the flashes of munitions. Then abruptly it blacked out. Cormac closed his eyes, tried to ignore the slick sweat on his palms, and concentrated instead on what he was seeing through King’s sensors. The attack ship veered past a clump of three interconnected rod-forms, all radiating far into the infrared before one of them exploded to send the other two tumbling. Something crashed against the hull and bounced off, the impact of it rumbling through his seat, but the object rapidly tumbling away hadn’t been ejected by the nearby explosion. Instead, Cormac recognized a box-like segment–a piece of a wormship. A particle beam, stabbing out behind, lit it up briefly and it burst into vaporizing fragments.
The two hammerheads were moving side by side, Centurions arrayed all about them to intercept any attack, while, ahead of them, the Cable Hogue led the way in. Cormac observed five Centurions breaking away to intercept one of the lesser ammonite spiral ships. Going into high-gravity turns, the Centurions released a swarm of missiles. Impacts on hard-fields blotted the targeted spiral from view for a moment. As these faded, he watched the vessel remain utterly intact for a moment, then suddenly fragment in multiple explosions. The quantity of attack missiles had overloaded its hard-field generators, and those coming after had finished the job. As Cormac understood it, there had been fifty of the major wormships located here, but none of these ammonite ships. Then, as King directed its sensors at some distant object and brought it into focus, he found an explanation. There a wormship was unravelling, its long segmented components then coiling up again to form three of the spirals.
New view: far ahead, six wormships were slinging out rod-forms, like infected cells spewing viruses. Internal sensors for mapping mass gave a view of the gravity terrain ahead. The Cable Hogue hung within this like a lead ball on a rubber sheet, then it seemed the sheet was mounding up ahead of it. The mound swelled as it advanced–a wave in the spacetime continuum–and it spread across an ever-widening front. Cormac felt a sharp pain grow behind his eyes as his brain struggled to interpret in three spacial dimensions what he knew he was observing in five. He knew this pain would go away if he allowed himself to employ his U-sense, but he fought the temptation, denied it. The wave began to distort, and the best analogy Cormac could summon up was that it was turning into a roller. Reaching the wormships and swarming rod-forms, which were now linking together to form a wall a hundred miles tall, this roller curved right over, enveloping three wormships and a large proportion of the wall. It seemed the gravity phenomenon had just captured part of realspace. The pain in his head growing worse, he shifted to a view through normal EM sensors, and there observed the three wormships and section of wall undergo massive acceleration. All of them were distorted and breaking apart as they went out of play, heading directly towards the distant glare of the sun.
‘Now, that wasn’t a gravity disrupter,’ commented Smith.
‘Next generation,’ King allowed, before they proceeded into an area full of debris, rod-forms and missiles closing in on them from the three remaining wormships and three ammonite spirals.
As one, the Centurions now broke formation to intercept these attackers. The Swan took a hit on its flank, and Cormac saw a hole penetrate deep inside, rimmed with glowing girders. The ship was full of troops, quite a few of them now dead troops. Space further filled with fast-moving chunks of metal and the beams of energy weapons, which were only visible when they intersected something material. A Centurion glowed before becoming a line of fire. One ammonite spiral unravelled as another disappeared in three massive implosions. A wormship squirmed desperately and shed burned segments behind it as it fell towards Bertha. A single rail-gun missile slammed through this Gordian tangle, its material turning to plasma, and the wormship flew apart like ancient safety glass. The missile had come from the Cable Hogue, as did two of the ensuing impacts that spread the remaining wormships across the firmament. Then a particle beam lanced out, bright blue, only just visible by the stray atoms it touched and broke into strange short-lived isotopes. It panned across rod-forms, bursting them like balloons put in the way of an acetylene torch.
Then they were through.
‘I think I can leave you now,’ said the voice of a woman. ‘Nothing else in intercept range at the moment.’
Diana Windermere, thought Cormac. He had already found out all he could about the captain of that massive ship, which was not a lot. She was apparently interfaced with the ship’s AI, which had been an old technique often used before AIs ruled the Polity. Though since refitted many times, that vessel was old, and Windermere herself was its fourth captain. He had no idea when it had been built, since that information was restricted even from him.
The planet Ramone now expanded into view, and the hammerheads, the King of Hearts and the Centurions began decelerating, falling into orbit. Ahead of them, the Cable Hogue accelerated, however. Accessing a logistical display, Cormac guessed the big ship was going to slingshot out again, heading straight for where the action seemed to be turning a volume of space over a hundred thousand miles across into a mobile firestorm. He rather suspected it was now about to get hotter there.
Despite the gravplates beneath him compensating, Cormac felt the distinct tug as the King of Hearts slowed into orbit. The Swan, he noticed, was turning sideways, and seemed unable to correct. Its angle of approach worsened as both itself and its companion troop carrier began to graze atmosphere.
‘What’s going on there?’ he asked.
‘Swan is dead,’ King replied.
It must have been that earlier hit. Lucky shot? Cormac doubted it–you needed to be very lucky indeed to take out a ship’s AI with just one shot. He observed Bertha now moving away from its companion, and the Centurions below it rising to hold station above. The reason for this soon became evident as the body of The Swan seemed to begin disintegrating.
Squares of hull metal started to peel away so the vessel left a trail of them like shed scales. Soon the hull was stripped away all around its main body–the only sections remaining being at its fore, to take the heat of re-entry, on its neck and head, and around its rear engines. It looked like a giant bird from which flesh and feathers had been stripped to expose the bones of its carcass. Then, from within the quadrate girdered superstructure of its main body, The Swan began to eject objects the size and shape of train carriages. Hundreds of them zoomed out, a line of them stretching back right over the curve of the planet,
like sleepers waiting for rails. They sucked the substance from The Swan so that within minutes it was possible to see right through its main skeleton. Cormac concentrated on the two lines of ejected re-entry units and observed most of them turning and dipping, nose heat-shields taking the brunt of atmosphere to slow them for AG descent. Some others weren’t managing to turn in time, and began tumbling, breaking apart. His U-sense abruptly kicked in, as if his attempt at repressing it only made it stronger. He saw people dying inside those disintegrating units, and fought hard to shut the image down. Half of the ground force sent here would arrive late and with its numbers depleted, which of course was preferable to it arriving not at all, but that didn’t make him feel any better.
Finally, the hammerhead bridge of Swan detached itself and lifted away, jets igniting underneath to throw it back up into orbit. Headless, the remains of the vessel lost all control, began to turn and, the impact of re-entry now hitting structure not intended for it, it began to burn–the exposed girders heating up and leaving a red scar across the firmament. Then it just broke apart: a melting smoking mass of fragments falling down towards Ramone. As if this was a signal, the Centurions abruptly accelerated, following Swan’s fleeing bridge back up–one of them no doubt primed to pick up the crew aboard it, before all of the Polity attack ships followed Cable Hogue towards that distant conflict. Cormac wondered if there would be anything left for them to engage.
‘Could have been worse,’ Smith commented.
‘It could have been better,’ argued Cormac, horrific scenes from inside those disintegrating re-entry units vivid in his mind.
After her return to the conferencing unit, Mika watched the Dragon spheres consume two more asteroids, and the effects of that massive dinner were more than evident. Despite the gravplates within the floor of the unit, Mika could still feel massive shiftings below her and often had to shut off exterior view since the heaving and rippling of the surface outside tended give her a touch of motion sickness, which was strange, since she’d had the standard alterations made to her inner ear to prevent that effect. As far as she could gather, this violent movement was all part of the growth process, for both spheres now measured over five miles in diameter.
A number of the probes originally pushed down inside this particular sphere had been destroyed in the commotion, but she was still obtaining enough information from the remainder to learn that Dragon was making radical alterations to itself, for the sphere’s interior had changed beyond all recognition. The skin immediately underlying the scales was now over twenty feet thick, possessing a complexity of layers that almost went beyond analysis. Almost? Something had been niggling at Mika’s mind as she studied what information she could obtain about some of those multiple layers–the superconducting meshes, the kind of alloys being built up molecular stratum after stratum, and then came definite identification of a metal that had not been included on the human elementary table until humans had first walked on worlds beyond the solar system. That final identification clicked a switch in her mind.
Prador armour.
Some layers of this new epidermis bore close similarities to the armour those enemy aliens had once used on their ships, and which had explained why they so nearly flattened the Polity despite it being run by oh-so-superior AIs. As for the other less familiar layers? She didn’t know. More armouring, doubtless, more methods of defence, some perhaps intended against informational and EM warfare, and sensory apparatus, or whatever. Much of it lay far beyond her ken, and beyond the analytical abilities of the tools she presently controlled. But, certainly, much else was beginning to fall into place.
Those tubes porting around Dragon’s equator, those toroidal structures deep inside its body, those massive power sources flashing into being on her scans, like igniting stars; the networks of heavy superconducting conduits and the darkening of bones as their density increased; the conglomerations of pseudopods that seemed to be able to move about so easily inside, almost like antibodies…or fire crews. Dragon’s weapons had been dangerous enough when it was still in its original form of an organic probe, its spheres measuring merely a mile or so across. Mika realized that she was now seeing Dragon deliberately and massively weaponizing itself. Clearly all that additional growth was for defensive and offensive purposes. But why?
This whole process kept her fascinated, rapt, for hours, but eventually weariness began to overcome her. She therefore set the scanners to continue sweeping the areas of greatest interest, and made doubly sure that all the data being collected was properly backed up, then she finally retired to one of the fold-down bunks and fell instantly asleep.
A moment later she was gazing at the twin Dragon spheres, joined now by pseudopod trees, as they spun down towards a dead sun. She instantly recognized this as a dream, so such imagery was okay; it was the other stuff that really bothered her. She could smell something, like burning, or cooking, or perfume, or putrefaction, and somehow that smell was more layered with meaning than any chunk of recording crystal. And over there, in the darkness at the utter limit of her perception, something tangled, hot and utterly alien encroached on reality. She was gazing at a great mass of steel worms, triangular in section, segmented coils and conglomeratons and layers of them deep as space itself. Then came another smell of cloves, very strong, and something dripped on her face. In an instant she woke.
That human-in-appearance but utterly unhuman head hovered over her, attached to a neck extending all the way back to the central floor hatch. Beyond it, cobra pseudopods crowded the conferencing unit, shifting about and darting here and there as if inspecting the interior like a crowd of curious tourists. As she sat up and wiped a spattering of milky saliva from her face, Dragon’s human face drew back from her.
‘So you’ve finally remembered me,’ said Mika.
‘I never forgot you for an instant,’ Dragon replied.
Mika snorted contemptuously but felt foolishly pleased by the answer. She swung her legs off the bunk, stood and stretched. ‘So what have you been doing and where are we going?’
‘To answer your first question: we have been making ourself stronger.’
Now the head gazed to one side and, following the direction of its gaze, Mika saw one pseudopod engaged with the consoles and screens she had been using earlier. She walked over, took a seat, and immediately one screen banished its datastream to show a picture: a great disc-shaped cloud, white as snow against the black of space.
‘An accretion disc,’ observed Mika.
‘Our destination,’ said Dragon.
She turned to gaze back up at the head. ‘This is where Cormac went. This is where Erebus came from. You can’t be thinking of going up against Erebus?’
‘No.’
‘Then why the preparations?’
The head came closer and dropped down until level with her shoulder, gazing intently at the screen too. ‘Erebus has now begun a large-scale attack against the Polity, which it is presumably directing from somewhere actually within the Polity, but it is here that it transformed itself, became what it now is. Here, in this disc, we will find the roots of Erebus–but here we will also find something else.’
Mika shook herself, aware Dragon had not answered her question about preparations but unable to ignore what it had just said. ‘Attack? What about this attack?’
‘Erebus’s forces have moved against numerous Line worlds, where they are currently conducting bombardments and ground assaults when not being prevented by ECS fleets.’
‘You got this from Jerusalem?’ Mika felt she should be back there, not here running obscure errands for this alien, yet she felt guilty because right here was where she wanted to be.
‘No, I have my own trustworthy source in the Polity.’
‘Source?’
‘My networks of Dracocorp augs have in many cases been infiltrated, so I do not entirely trust the information they supply. But there is one in the Polity who carries a piece of me around inside him, and he will never be…infiltra
ted.’
‘Who is…?’ Mika trailed off, not enjoying asking so many questions.
‘A Golem android called Mr Crane.’
Mika flinched. ‘You don’t trust Polity AIs, you don’t trust Jerusalem, yet you trust that…thing?’ Mika grimaced, reconsidering. ‘You might be right at that.’ She found herself focusing on the screen image again. ‘What is this “something else” we’ll find here?’
‘More roots.’
The answer was almost a relief. Dragon had been giving her far too many direct answers–had not waxed Delphic and obscure for some time, which was both out of character and disconcerting.
‘And to deal with these roots you require weapons capable of trashing planets?’ she asked.
‘No, for the foliage and another purpose besides.’ Mika looked round directly at the swaying head, which blinked at her then nodded towards the screen. ‘Even after Erebus’s departure that accretion disc remains a perfect nursery. Inside, there is material and energy in abundance. That place will be virulent with Jain technology.’
Roots, foliage, Jain technology…
‘Are you going to explain to me exactly why we are going there?’
‘The journey will take many months,’ said Dragon.
Obviously not. Mika merely said, ‘So?’
Dragon gazed around at the interior of the conferencing unit. ‘This item of Polity technology may not long survive on the surface here.’
‘Then swallow it inside yourself. You’ve done so before.’
‘I cannot draw it within–now.’
‘Skin too thick?’ Mika suggested.
Dragon turned back to her. ‘I will save your data for you.’
‘That’s very kind of you.’
‘Kindness?’ Dragon wondered.
‘But what about me?’
‘I will provide for you, but now you need to go to sleep, for it is time for you to acquire some memories.’
‘I’ve slept enough for the moment, thanks.’
