Line War

by Neal Asher

  ‘I guess this was too much trauma even for him to survive,’ he said.

  Beside him, Arach reared up and, with a sound like someone rooting through a cutlery drawer, rested his three front feet on the edge of the coffin. The spider drone, whose own torso was scratched and dented, was missing a limb and one of his eyes. He peered down at Scar and made a hissing sound.

  ‘When they’re dead that’s usually only ’cause there ain’t enough left of the body to scrape up with a spade,’ he said.

  Cormac nodded–he too could not recollect ever seeing a whole dead dracoman, only small parts of them.

  Arach’s head revolved to look at him directly, and Cormac saw that the damaged eye was not missing just blank and, even as he watched, it winked internal light as a precursor to full functioning as the drone doubtless made internal repairs. ‘What they want him for?’

  Cormac shrugged. ‘Burial maybe?’

  Arach snorted.

  Cormac looked up. ‘Are they here yet, King?’

  ‘They are approaching the ramp now,’ replied the attack ship’s AI.

  Cormac reached into the coffin and touched cold flesh. Scar was still soft, despite the coffin temperature being low enough to freeze any human being solid. This was probably due to his original make-up, since Cormac had found him and his companion alive on a world where the temperature was lower still. The blood in his veins probably contained some sort of antifreeze; if the blood could be called blood at all, and if he actually possessed veins. Withdrawing his hand from the coffin, Cormac blew on his fingertips and waited.

  The doors to this cold-coffin store opened to announce the arrival of their visitors. Bird-stepping through came three dracomen, two of them towing a circular lev-platform behind them. Cormac stepped back, and Arach also retreated with a clattering of metallic feet. Without acknowledgement of either drone or man, one dracoman walked over and peered down at Scar, then immediately reached inside to pick up his head and inspect it. The two others pulled the lev-platform closer, then turned it off so it descended to the floor with a clonk. The first dracoman now turned and tossed the head to one of its companions, who fielded it and plonked it down on the platform like a rugby player making a touchdown. Certainly, their collecting of the body had nothing to do with respect for the dead.

  ‘What do you want him for?’ Cormac asked, as the first dracoman now hauled up the top half of Scar’s torso.

  No acknowledgement, still. The other two moved over to assist, and in a moment all of Scar’s remains were heaped on the platform, whose power was reengaged. The two began towing it to the door while the first stood gazing contemplatively down into the empty coffin.

  ‘His information must not be lost,’ the dracoman said abruptly.

  Cormac wondered if he would be seeing Scar again, if dracomen had some way of resurrecting their dead.

  ‘What do you do with that information?’ Cormac asked.

  ‘Distribute it.’ The dracoman nodded briefly and departed after his companions.

  Would numerous dracomen soon possess a portion of Scar’s mind, or would they instead make copies so many dracomen could hold Scar entire inside their heads? Did ‘information’ even necessarily mean thought patterns? Cormac stepped forward to hit the lid cartouche again, then turned and headed for the door, hearing the coffin close behind him and begin to slide back up into the wall.

  ‘How long until we launch?’ he asked.

  ‘The moment our friends are clear and the ramp is closed,’ King replied.

  Out in the corridor, the sound of Arach’s feet was muffled by the softer flooring. Cormac glanced back at the drone. ‘Go and get yourself fully repaired and restocked,’ he said. ‘I want you fully ready when I need you.’

  As Arach scuttled away, Cormac reflected that the deaths of so many of his comrades recently had sensitized him to Arach’s damage, the drone’s weakness. He wanted Arach ready for anything; he wanted the drone to survive.

  Now heading to his cabin, he felt a slight jolt as King of Hearts rose on AG, then further jolting, compensated for by the gravplate floor, as it accelerated. Pausing to steady himself against the corridor wall, he considered other deaths. There were more than he liked to think about, but one in particular was on his mind at that moment.

  It had struck him as odd that the sub-minds running this world until a new runcible AI was initiated had experienced such difficulty tracking down the record of the female captain of the wormship whose destruction had resulted in Scar’s death, since her DNA had been recorded in Polity databases. Because of this delay he had made some queries himself through his gridlink and quickly obtained a copy of that record–meanwhile learning that Hubbert Smith already also possessed a copy he had not passed on. Perhaps it was his growing distrust of AIs that kept Cormac quiet, and he made no comment when Smith later transmitted it to him as if only just having received it himself. Comparing the two records, Cormac soon found inconsistencies.

  Hubbert’s copy of her record named her Henrietta Ipatus Chang, known as Henry to her friends, who on the whole were mostly silicon-brained and heavily armoured like Arach, though she did occasionally associate with humans of the same inclination as herself. She had joined ECS at the youthful age of eighteen, and was fighting and killing Prador in the many vicious ground conflicts during that war by the time she was twenty. She had exited the end of the Prador war as a human version of the war drone: disenfranchised by peace, unable to fit in to this new society nor particularly wanting to fit in either. Throughout the war her best and few surviving friends had been drones and Golem, so when many of them decided to leave the Polity aboard the dreadnought Trafalgar, she had asked to join them. It seemed that the Trafalgar AI–which had now become Erebus–had allowed her and certain other humans to join the exodus. Apparently there had been as many as eighty-three of them amid the horde of AIs which defected. Presumably this explained how Henry had ended up as a component slotted into a wormship.

  The problem was that the copy of her record that Cormac obtained first was different. This earlier version had it that she had never felt disenfranchised and never in fact joined Trafalgar’s exodus. After the war she had continued serving in ECS for another twenty years and had been involved in many subsequent police actions throughout the Polity. Later she was seconded to some black ops mission about which the details were unclear, whereupon she was subsequently listed as missing in action. But this was not the worst of it. When Cormac checked again through the planetary sub-minds, he found that the original record had now been deliberately altered. There were levels of subterfuge here Cormac very much did not like, which now only increased his suspicions about the motives of the Polity AIs in this matter. His suspicions about Hubbert Smith had also been confirmed.

  Moving on, Cormac finally reached his cabin and noted that the screen was switched on. It showed the curving planetary horizon already dropping from view, and he realized that King had been using more than the gravplates set in the floor to compensate for the kind of acceleration needed to get them out here this quickly. The glare of the sun lit up several glinting objects, then shadow quickly fell across the scene, as the attack ship put the planet between itself and that distant furnace. But the view was clearer now, and Cormac could see that King of Hearts would have to fly with particular care here. Cormac had only ever witnessed so much space junk around devastated worlds the Prador had hit during the war that Henry had fought so hard in. Could this conflict be turning into something as catastrophic as that? At present it was still defined only as a Line war since, though many whole worlds had already been attacked, they represented but a small fraction of the Polity. However, Erebus possessed the capacity to turn this into something more cataclysmic, and Erebus’s agents could be anywhere.

  Orlandine Taser 5…

  She should be his primary focus now, not the unrecoverably dead, not numberless regrets, not nebulous feelings of guilt or suspicions over the motivation of Polity AIs. He really needed to find h
er, for it was evident that she controlled Jain technology and had now gained control of a weapon that in some areas of the Polity was considered a myth…but then again on some Polity worlds there were those who claimed the entire Prador–human war was simply a horror story created by the AIs to keep human beings in line. As much as Cormac had come to distrust the motivations and agendas of those who now ruled, he himself couldn’t deny the reality of that war. Too much fallout from it still remained, as a young ECS groundtrooper he himself had been involved in clearing up some of the mess, and only later, as an ECS agent, had he come to appreciate its truly gigantic scale.

  True…if my memories are actually true, he speculated, then told himself to shut up. He must drop that subject from his mind or else go mad. Just focus on the now: how to find Orlandine.

  Underspace was theoretically supposed to possess neither distance nor time. You could enter it at one point in the universe, then exit it a thousand light years away just an instant later–or even before you entered it. That was the theory but, as ever, the reality was a lot more complicated. U-space did have dimensions, though whether they could be described as width, depth, breadth and time was debatable. Entering it in one place and leaving it an instant later a thousand light years distant was theoretically possible, yet the same rules applied there as in realspace: the quicker you wanted to move it from point A to point B, the more energy you needed to inject, this increasing in proportion to the mass of the object in question. That was why it took longer to travel X light years by ship than it did for a human to travel the same distance by runcible, or indeed for information to travel by U-com. Travelling through that same continuum, the ship was a massive object carrying its own power supply with it. The human, by contrast, was a very light object being propelled by a fixed device with huge energy resources, while an information package was practically without any mass at all. To most people in the Polity, runcible transportation and U-com might seem instantaneous, but in fact they weren’t. But Cormac did not want to travel through U-space right then, he just wondered how far he could see through it with his U-sense; wondered if from here he could spot the war runcible that Orlandine Taser 5 had stolen.

  Cormac lay back on his bed and relaxed, releasing his hold upon his U-sense and letting it expand out from where the King of Hearts now sat in orbit about Ramone. Soon the sheer scale of the mess here became more evident. Ramone sparkled like a piece of iron just taken from the furnace, for it was the centre of a perpetual meteor storm as chunks of wormship, other Jain constructs and, unfortunately, the remnants of many Polity ships fell into its atmosphere and burned up. Around the planet the debris cloud lay eight thousand miles deep, and certainly over the ensuing years would settle itself into a ring. Also, one astronomical unit out, there was another even larger cloud of debris extending nearly two million miles across. Within this a few remaining Polity ships were still busy hunting, firing missiles into any larger chunks of wormship that appeared to have enough life left in them to regenerate, incinerating stray rod-forms and generally sterilizing the entire area. The rest of the Polity ships, along with the leviathan Cable Hogue, had already jumped outsystem to join other battles.

  One AU out…

  With the technology available in the Polity it was easy enough to scan to one astronomical unit, but Cormac was now doing so with just his mind. He pushed the range further, began to gaze upon the other worlds within this system, and wondered if AIs felt as godlike as this. Choosing one of the outer cold worlds, he focused on it closely and peered down through a methane rain storm at a plain of red slabs lying beside a methane sea. It was noticeable that, by so focusing, much else now seemed to blur out of his perception, when that had not been the case for him closer to the attack ship. He pulled his focus away from that distant world, but it shifted sluggishly, seeming to have gained inertia. He pushed further out into the system, but beyond that cold world the perceptual sensation became like wading through treacle. Then he reached a point he could not probe beyond. The rest of the universe was out there, and he could see star systems and the weird indentations they made in U-space, but he could not get any closer to them.

  Really, Cormac thought, I should not be disappointed. But he was. He blinked, bringing his cabin back into focus. Sitting up on his bed he noticed he was soaked with sweat and inside his skull lay a heaviness presaging a headache. He wiped a hand across his face, then, noticing something, moved that same hand out and studied it. It was shaking but, worse than that, appeared translucent even to his normal vision. He snatched it from sight, realizing what was happening: his U-sense was still operating at a lower level. It now seemed to have seated itself in his skull and, just like his hearing, was something he felt incapable of shutting down. Then, suddenly, chaos…

  Something began to tear, and U-space opened all around him. The cabin wall rushed up towards him. He yelled as grey eversions appeared in a tangled five-dimensional pattern all about him. Instinctively he chose a place between them and, using his mind, grabbed for reality. Next he was in darkness. He fell, hit a soft surface speeding along underneath him, rolled. Lights came on and he gazed about in confusion. He was now in one of the King of Hearts’ internal passages. But why were the lights out? He knew: because King did not keep lights on in the ship where they were not needed, where no humans were located.

  ‘You were in your cabin,’ said King reproachfully, from the intercom.

  Cormac stood and shook himself. The sweat on his body had now turned chill. Applying to the ship’s server through his gridlink, he quickly ascertained his location, then turned and headed towards the bridge.

  ‘I certainly was,’ he replied. ‘Where are we going now?’

  ‘You were in your cabin,’ King insisted. ‘You could not have got to where you are now in just the last four seconds.’

  Cormac wondered how often King checked the location of those inside him. Probably the attack ship’s AI was aware of them most of the time, on some level, though perhaps became less aware when diverting processing power to make the calculations for dropping the ship into U-space–hence the four seconds mentioned.

  ‘Well,’ said Cormac, ‘I can’t be held accountable if reality doesn’t always conform to your own model of it.’

  ‘Your cabin door did not open,’ stated King. ‘You are not recorded in the short-term memories of the sensors located between your cabin and your current location.’

  ‘It’s certainly a puzzle,’ Cormac agreed. He was enjoying the AI’s bewilderment, but such enjoyment was tempered by the pull of the U-continuum surrounding the ship and the sure knowledge that if he had not hauled himself back up out of it and into this corridor, he would have gone drifting away from the ship in underspace. Could he then have still got himself somewhere safe, or would he eventually have surfaced in hard vacuum and simply died with his internal fluids boiling out of his body?

  ‘You moved through U-space, like you did before,’ observed King.

  That King knew about the way Cormac had escaped Skellor was unsurprising, but how did the AI know? Had Jerusalem told King, or had the attack ship AI witnessed the act itself when trying to rescue Skellor, or rather when it tried to prevent that madman and all the precious interesting Jain technology he contained from being crushed to a thin film over the surface of a brown dwarf star?

  ‘Yeah, I moved through U-space,’ Cormac conceded. ‘Now are you going to tell me where we are going?’

  Reaching the doors leading to the bridge, Cormac paused before them. Usually they opened automatically at his approach, but they now remained firmly closed. There came a long long pause before they finally opened, and before King spoke again–comparable to hours for an AI’s normal thought processes. He guessed that King, a misanthrope at heart, didn’t much like having an inferior human demonstrate superior abilities.

  ‘I have received information from Azroc,’ announced the AI.

  As Cormac stepped out onto the black glass floor, heading for the scattering of cha
irs, something caught his eye in the dimness over to one side. There he observed a third-stage sleer frozen in a rearing position, and hoped this insectile monstrosity was simply a sculpture. It seemed that King was now taking up the kind of hobby enjoyed by the AI of the attack ship Jack Ketch. Cormac plumped himself down in one of the chairs.

  ‘What information?’

  ‘U-space anomalies were detected in a black asteroid field by an old sub-AI survey drone. Though they were large, they did not have the characteristic signature of a large ship surfacing. Measurements meanwhile indicate open Skaidon warps, then the short translation of some large object, unbuffered.’

  ‘Through a runcible then,’ observed Cormac.

  ‘The drone was some way distant from the location of these anomalies,’ King went on, ‘and later detected the heat flash of a gigaton event.’

  ‘Orlandine,’ surmised Cormac thoughtfully.

  ‘That the war runcible was used is the most likely explanation to fit the data.’

  ‘So we’re going there, which is good, but what are we going to do once we arrive?’

  ‘Jerusalem has also ordered one of the reserve fleets out of Salvaston to head for the same location.’

  Cormac leaned back and nodded to himself. ‘That’s good,’ he said. ‘Now would you like to tell me about your curious new taste in decor in here?’

  *

  Aboard Orlandine’s ship the Heliotrope the old sharp-edged war drone, Cutter, lay folded up in the corridor right beside the ship’s interface sphere. A multicore optic cable, plugged in between his bulbous eyes, trailed down and snaked along the floor into Bludgeon, and thus via the drone and the interface sphere he occupied into the Heliotrope itself. Now, having access to the ship’s sensors and scanners, Cutter watched as his companion surfaced the ship into realspace far out from the Anulus black hole, then himself began scanning for the main transmission satellite he knew to be in orbit here. Bludgeon, meanwhile, started making the necessary preparations to use the cargo runcible in the somewhat hostile environment they would soon be entering. Within a few seconds the sharp-edged drone had it: a hundred-yard-wide coin of metal floating out in deep space. Bludgeon dropped Heliotrope into U-space for a subliminally short time, in order to put the ship between this main transmission satellite and its subordinate satellites, which were positioned close around the black hole and the junkyard of planets it was steadily devouring.