Line War

by Neal Asher

  ‘Akiri, are our people now in position?’ she enquired.

  The view witnessed currently through Akiri’s eyes was of an open bar area laid out about what looked like a Caribbean beach in the middle of a wide and crowded concourse.

  ‘Most of them are,’ confirmed Akiri, ‘but we’ve yet to get the main explosives to the Pillar.’

  The methodology was simple. Groups of twenty insurgents each were going for the ten passenger runcibles in operation here, their aim to grab hostages, secure each area and then set explosives on each runcible. This would keep the AI very occupied while the main thrust of their attack got under way against the Pillar–a circular building in which the AI itself was sited at the junction of six concourses.

  Chevron checked again through her multiple views. As Akiri had said, the groups intending to attack the passenger runcibles were mostly in place in the main lounge or various sub-lounges, supposedly awaiting their transmission slots some hours hence. The lev-trolley supposedly loaded with discs of amber, which were in fact explosives, was on its way in. Chevron noted that the person now guiding the trolley along the concourse was not the same one originally given this task. She checked recorded data supplied from the sensors she had hidden in just about every separatist base and home in this city, and was gratified to witness the original trolley pusher being garrotted and then shoved into a sewer rather similar to this one. The woman had apparently had second thoughts about her assignment, her chances of survival and the fallout for her two children…and people didn’t live to have third thoughts within Chevron’s organization.

  ‘When do we start?’ Akiri asked.

  ‘I’ve mined the north wall of the runcible complex,’ Chevron replied, lying as smoothly as ever, ‘but I need to shift the ship into position to get you out, which should take me about another forty minutes.’

  ‘Seems a shame to run after such a victory.’

  ‘But necessary.’ Chevron halted for a moment, noting that the ratadiles were starting to lose their nervousness of her. ‘You simply cannot remain on the world where you killed a runcible AI. You would spend the rest of your life running and be of no real value to the cause thereafter.’

  ‘Okay.’ Akiri was obviously getting nervous. ‘What about groundside and orbital defences?’

  ‘As I told you before, most of them will go down with the AI, and when I bring in an ECS Rescue ship, the rest will ignore it.’ Chevron eyed a big ratadile humping up its ridged back nearby like an angry cat and shuffling forward. ‘You’re not having second thoughts are you, Akiri?’

  ‘No, Chevron.’

  ‘Then do your duty and I will do mine. Now I’ve got to get this ship off the ground. Out.’ She abruptly closed down the link.

  The ratadile raised its long jaws out of the muck and chose that moment to go for her. It surged forward in writhing bounds, then pounced. Chevron’s hand shot up and closed on its throat, stopping dead a ton of pseudo-reptile in mid-air. Its body crashed into her, jaws wide open just before her face, but she was as solid as a girder, nano-filaments having bound her feet to the slippery stone below, and her body as dense as lead. Its neck had snapped with the impact and she gazed for a moment into its zebra-patterned gullet before twitching her hand from side to side to listen to the crunching of its neck bones, then tossed it to one side. She moved on, hearing its kin behind her coming out of hiding to sniff at their dead fellow. She was a hundred yards further along the sewer when she heard the splashing and snarling that told her they had finally realized her victim had made the transition from alpha pack leader into convenience food.

  Chevron pondered on the fact that it was usually only the older ratadiles that attacked humans descending into their domain, which was because of the bloody history of this place before the Polity subsumed it. The creatures had grown used to a regular diet of those who had earned the displeasure of the city governors. That was how humans lived when there wasn’t an AI about to show them what to do.

  Three more attacks from ratadiles ensued before Chevron grew bored with this game and turned on her chameleonware. Anyway, sections of the sewer wall here were low-friction plasticrete, or tunnel compression-glass baked out of the surrounding sandy soil by the machines that had bored the tunnels, which meant she was now entering the area of sewers repaired and strengthened to withstand the weight of the runcible complex above. With her visual acuity now set at maximum and special scanning programs running, she soon began to spot the occasional sensor the size of a pinhead and one or two old-style holocams like metal fingers suspended in small gimbals hanging from the ceiling. Here and there ran ducts for optics and superconducting cables, also the occasional pipe for water or liquid hydrogen, through which ran lines of old S-con that required cooling–a past solution for supplying fuel and electricity from the same source.

  Soon Chevron arrived at a point where the remnants of the old sewers ended. At the juncture of five old tunnels stood a cylindrical chamber with walls of plasticrete. Numerous sensors were mounted here, and from the ceiling depended a saucer-shaped security drone whose purpose, doubtless, was to keep vermin from crawling into the numerous shiny pipes that debouched here.

  Chevron studied a row of six of them protruding from the wall. Fresh clean water was pouring from three, but luckily not from the one she required. No raw sewage made it out of the runcible complex, even though thousands of humans passed through there. All of it was processed by engineered bacteria, dried, and then transported out in compacted blocks to be used as fertilizer by the agricultural concerns of this same world. A small proportion of the water removed from that waste was purified and fed into fusion plants, or recycled, but since this was such a busy complex, there was always an excess, and this was where it drained away.

  Chevron walked over to the pipe she wanted and knew that now was the time to really set things in motion. She opened a channel to her ship, where it was sitting underneath the ocean some two hundred miles away from her. The vessel’s machines had now made twenty-eight thermonuclear imploders–one more than required–and was right now detaching from the mycelium that penetrated down through the seabed below it. She gave it further instructions and watched as the quarter-mile-long grub of a vessel shook off years of detritus and begin to drift towards the surface of the orange sea. Once Chevron was in position, she wanted the ship in position too, and as fast as possible. There was no telling how quickly other Polity resources might respond to her attack.

  Time now to go in. She gazed at the grid extending across the mouth of the foot-wide pipe. If she cut that away the damage might later be detected by the sensors here, after she had departed, but of course there was no need for that. She dropped her hands to rest down by her sides and began cancelling her emulation programs. To her own view, though neither the drone nor any of the sensors here could actually see her, her clothing just lost all its colour and turned metallic grey, then began to sink into her body. Similarly went her blond hair, her skin colour, the pigment in her eyes, and soon she was a naked metallic statue. But then her human curves began to flatten out as she extended in height and began to bow forwards, her head growing narrow and protruding like a rhino’s horn. This protuberance writhed its way through one hole in the mesh before her, and the rest began to follow, but not all through the same hole. Her body, now a foot-thick worm of Jain mycelial nano-technology, passed through the mesh like jelly and surged on along the pipe.

  ‘Akiri, I’ve got the ship in the air,’ she lied–as she had always been lying to the separatists here. ‘It’s time for you to begin your attack.’

  Still proceeding along the pipe, Chevron studied the multiple scenes from the runcible complex above her. In one runcible lounge a squat little man in white business-wear opened his particularly bulky briefcase and extracted from it what looked like a large document tube. A twist here and a pull there, and suddenly the tube possessed suspiciously positioned handles.

  ‘Everyone on the floor!’ he bellowed, and then fired a
stream of explosive bullets towards the ceiling. When no one seemed to respond, and as some of his fellow insurgents began to produce their own weapons, he lowered his aim to one man nearby and fired at point-blank range. In another runcible lounge a female fighter for the cause did not see any use in warnings, and simply opened up on a nearby group of tourists. Bodies flew apart, people began screaming, blood spattered everywhere. She then just stood there staring blankly while the insurgents with her shouted their orders and herded hostages together. Similar scenes played out at all the other passenger runcibles, while by the Pillar separatists began collecting large amber discs from the lev-trolley and heading off to place them around the outer wall of that large circular structure.

  Chevron noted a junction in the pipe ahead, and though she did not have a schematic of the infrastructure directly underlying the runcible complex, she was aware of her precise position and of the location of where she needed to be. She therefore chose the pipe leading to her left and oozed her way into it, since that way took her closest. Just then she detected an increase in pressure ahead of her, scanned along the pipe and found water coming her way. Immediately she extended her fibrous body, both backwards and forwards, and formed a hollow through the centre of it, flattening herself against the inner circumference of the pipe. For if the AI detected a blockage while the separatists were attacking above, it would become suspicious of what might be happening underground. The flow of water hit her and passed through, but she did not have enough time to wait for it to slacken off so oozed on, now a kind of pipe herself.

  Soon, checking her position by scanning a nearby bleed pipe and the magnetic anomaly directly below her, she halted and brought an array of ceramo-carbide cutting heads to bear against the inner surface of the pipe beside her and cut a circular hole three inches across. Lifting up the circle of metal, she oozed into the hole, entirely plugging it with her complex filament body as she flowed through until at last snapping the disc back down and extruding a powerful glue to stick it into place. So far, so easy. Now she occupied a small area through which ran power ducts connected to a fusion reactor she had detected below, and to which the bleed pipe led. Now things were going to get more difficult as she went directly up against the AIs sensors and detectors, which from here on would not be easily fooled. She paused for a moment to check how things were going above.

  The separatist who had shot the man was now lying on the floor with his neck broken, while his target was closing in on another member of that group. The man was no man, as evidenced by the gleaming ceramal and torn syntheflesh exposed under ripped and burned clothing. Oblivious to the bullets still slamming into him, he crashed into three separatists, his movements a blur, and all of them dropped never to rise again. This group had been unlucky enough to run straight into a Golem, and shortly they would all be dead, as would the separatists in four other runcible lounges who had similarly encountered Chevron’s erstwhile kind. Now ceiling drones were also involved and pulse-gun fire had begun to rain down. A detonation tore through one lounge, leaving horrific carnage, as one separatist realized the futility of trying to get near a runcible, the impossibility of evading capture and ever getting out of there alive.

  Chevron meanwhile cut away part of a power duct, and now, her body compressed as thin as a rope, began to flow along inside that. Shortly she began to encounter sensors incorporated in the duct sheath, their micro-optics linking them to security sub-minds. Each one required intricate and perpetual subversion. She knew that any slight change in the feed from the sensors would register with the sub-minds, but the sub-minds themselves would be otherwise distracted by what was going on above her. The importance level of such changes would therefore be lower and, by Chevron’s calculations, would be attributed to the electrical surges through the superconductors within the duct as the weapons being used above drew extra power. Within a minute her foremost part reached the point where the duct ended in individual superconducting cables, wrapped in insulation, passing through thick armour. Now, nearly a hundred feet long, the far-extended body behind her still subverting the sensors, she narrowed even further, chose one particular cable and began to eat away its insulation as she tracked along its length, using herself to replace that insulation. The cable wove here and there, branching to feed various machines along the way. Upon reaching a transformer, she noted she was almost at the limit of her extension and began drawing in her rear end, carefully retracting it from the sensors behind her. Now was the moment of greatest danger, and she prepared herself internally for the possibility of detection. She could lose as much as half her structure without any great decrease in efficiency, but any more than that and her chances of ultimate success began to spiral down.

  Chevron’s view of events occurring above was becoming dim and intermittent, and shortly the signals from the various cams would be cut off completely by the shielding surrounding her. Things were going very badly for the separatists: eight groups had been wiped out, the remainder surviving by holding hostages, and yet not one runcible had been blown up. According to a mild voice now issuing from the ceiling drones, the survivors had five seconds in which to drop their weapons or they would die. It amused Chevron to see the separatists futilely trying to use their hostages as physical shields, clearly not understanding that at such close range the drones could accurately target the individual pores on their noses.

  Around the Pillar itself the amber explosives were all in place, and Chevron noted that the only humans anywhere near the Pillar were separatists. The Xanadu AI had obviously spotted what they were up to some minutes ago and, via their augmentations or by using a directional sound beam, had contacted all the civilians in the area and herded them away. Now the separatists too began to head for safety, and Akiri was the first to walk straight into the hard-fields that surrounded the Pillar. She gazed about her in dismay, realizing what had happened. She then screamed something relating to that strange human concept called ‘freedom’ and sent the detonation signal. The concentric area between Pillar and hard-fields filled with fire, which quickly went out as it burned up all the oxygen. Occasional gaps in the billowing smoke revealed smouldering scraps of what might have once been Akiri and the rest of her team. These gaps also revealed the Pillar itself, its cosmetic outer layer stripped away to expose three feet of ceramal armour. The explosion had been no danger at all to the AI within, just as the remaining separatists elsewhere ceased to be a danger to the passenger runcibles as they quickly surrendered or died.

  Once beyond the transformer, Chevron divided to track along single S-con wires, circumvented electrooptic transformers, slid through the laminations of storage crystal and ate along optic fibres, replacing them bit by bit with herself. Now she was coasting by some very heavy security and it was only a matter of seconds before she would be detected. However, finally she was almost in position. It came then: power surges, a particle beam playing up the duct through which she had entered, chemical explosives in crystal laminations detonating, diatomic acid flowing around C-con cables. She surged forward to where thousands of optic cables entered a single black metal conduit, a third of her body destroyed behind her. An atomic shear sliced through those optics, separating her from more of her body, which died in a sudden intense oxygen fire. Then she reached the item to which all those separate optics were connected: a lozenge of crystal six inches long–a quantum processor, a mind. Even as she reached it, interfaces began to physically break away, but she leaped the gap and made rapid connections.

  ‘What are you?’ wondered the Xanadu AI.

  ‘I am your death,’ Chevron replied, as she began to rip apart its mind.

  12

  The human body, like all evolved life, is a collection of mostly cooperating cells that are the product of aeons of parasitism, mutualism and symbiosis. The dracomen, while apparently a similar organism–ostensibly designed by Dragon to show what dinosaurs might have become had not chance wiped them out–are certainly not such a collection of cells. In fact, d
racomen do not possess cells as we know them. They do not even possess DNA, as would any true descendant of the dinosaurs. They are not the product of natural selection, of chance nor of the vagaries of nature, for they are biological machines that were designed by an entity capable of ‘having fun’ with the very building blocks of life; of, in fact, creating its own building blocks. The dracomen never possessed appendixes, never suffer from genetic disorders. They do not grow old when their selfish genes have dispensed with them and moved on–because they don’t have genes. They can obviously control their internal workings, for certainly they can create other biological mechanisms in the same way and as easily as they reproduce. They are a superb piece of biological design, though there will always remain the question: for what purpose? Are they superior to humans? Humans have primarily served the purpose of their genes and now, however misconceived it might be, the purpose of their own consciousness. The concept of consciousness is debatable when it comes to dracomen, however.

  –From QUINCE GUIDE compiled by humans

  The base of the cold coffin slid out from the wall, its top sliding down inside the wall slot until the coffin reached an angle of thirty degrees to the floor. Gazing at its shape, matching to that of a human being, Cormac felt a better name for it would be a sarcophagus, but such names did not necessarily follow logical rules and, anyway, whenever these objects were occupied, they usually contained cryonically cooled but living human beings, so naming them after boxes usually made to contain corpses was incorrect–except in this case.

  Cormac reached down and pressed a button like an inset cartouche, and after a moment the red light beside it turned green. The coffin whoomphed as its seals disengaged and the lid hinged up, spilling a cold fog. Cormac studied the contents. Scar’s body lay in three pieces, severed at the head and also diagonally across the torso from a point below the right-hand side of the ribcage down to the waist. There were also numerous other deep cuts and tears exposing muscles and internal organs. The sight of these injuries brought home to him just how lucky he himself had been.