Line War

by Neal Asher

  ‘Can you give me a tactical analysis?’

  ‘ECS fleets brought in to cover the possibility of further attacks in this same quadrant by Erebus are now incapable of U-space travel,’ announced King.

  ‘Which includes the fleet out of Salvaston?’ said Cormac.

  ‘Precisely.’ King continued, ‘Those fleets fighting Erebus’s forces at the Line itself are either confined or wholly engaged with the enemy, so unable to break away, and Jerusalem is out of contact with all of them.’

  ‘This will mean that Erebus’s forces there are also confined,’ observed Smith.

  ‘True,’ said King, ‘but those forces were only a small portion of the total. And there is the war runcible still to consider.’

  ‘So where are the rest of the enemy forces, and where is Orlandine?’ asked Cormac, already guessing the most likely answer.

  The area within the funnel, right up close to the screen, shaded red. ‘Orlandine’s last recorded position was within this area, and it seems likely that Erebus is here too. Now, all that lies between them and Earth is Solar System Defence.’

  ‘Nothing else?’

  ‘Nothing of consequence.’

  ‘That seems somewhat remiss.’

  ‘It is remiss. Erebus has played this perfectly.’

  ‘Perhaps you could explain?’

  ‘Since Erebus’s attack seemed concentrated in this particular quadrant, extra forces were moved in from all surrounding areas. That this attack occurred on the other side of the Polity from the Prador kingdom was not noted. The ECS quadrant forces over on that side are positioned near the Line over there, ready to intercept and if necessary follow in any attacking Prador fleet. They are far distant from Earth so would take some time to reach it. The forces on this side, Erebus has already nailed down. Forces elsewhere within the Polity should be able to get to Earth more quickly…However, Erebus and Orlandine have a straight run on Earth and will now have the time to conduct a sustained attack.’

  Cormac considered the scenario. By appearing incompetent in attacking an ECS fleet outside the Polity itself, and thus revealing itself, Erebus had perhaps led the AIs into a false sense of security. They had assumed they were dealing with something that did not think as logically as themselves, was perhaps even a little insane. They had not expected such a new dimension to the attack–this USER disruption generated by their own runcible network. Or had they? Still he found himself questioning the lack of a more active response from them. And still there were serious questions to be answered about that Ipatus Chang woman. But, even if the AIs were careless of any damage this would inflict on the human race, they must surely care about the damage that could be inflicted upon themselves. Erebus might now bring down Earth, and with the homeworld bring down the Polity’s de facto ruler: Earth Central…Of course, whatever Cormac thought about all this was irrelevant now. There would be no fleet out of Salvaston, so he could do nothing about either Orlandine or Erebus.

  Then again…

  Maybe there was something he could do. In being able to send himself through U-space he possessed an utterly unexpected ability, one even beyond Erebus itself.

  ‘I take it you have a substantial stock of CTDs aboard?’ he suggested.

  ‘I have.’

  ‘Anything small enough for me to carry in a backpack?’

  ‘Most of them are that small…physically, anyway.’

  ‘Sort one out for me then–largest destructive potential but not too heavy.’

  ‘What are you planning?’ asked Smith.

  ‘I’m planning to remove at least one of Erebus’s allies–this Orlandine character,’ Cormac replied. ‘King, when you’re ready, head us towards that war runcible’s last known location.’ He looked round at his three companions, who were watching him expectantly.

  ‘Horace Blegg thought he could transport himself through U-space,’ Cormac began. ‘We now know that isn’t true.’

  ‘And?’ enquired Smith.

  ‘I can.’

  Smith’s expression revealed a convincing emulation of be musement and disbelief. Cormac shuddered, feeling himself become somehow insubstantial, as the bridge dome greyed over and the King of Hearts dropped into the mentioned continuum. He closed his eyes, concentrated on stability, then in his gridlink replayed the images that the attack ship AI had earlier displayed in the viewing dome. After a moment he accessed the ship’s server to obtain precise measurements of the geometry of the funnel displayed, for he had noted that the mouth was very narrow, maybe too narrow. The measurements soon confirmed this.

  ‘King,’ he said, ‘to get to Earth, both Erebus’s wormships and the war runcible will need to pass along a narrow corridor between intersecting spheres of U-space disruption. I see that this won’t be easy for them.’

  ‘Practically impossible,’ King concurred. ‘It would be easier for them to surface into the real then make a series of short jumps wherever the wash from the disruption allows.’

  ‘So they will have to travel sub-light for appreciable distances?’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘You know what I’m considering?’

  ‘Be nice if we damn well knew too,’ observed Arach.

  ‘Very well.’ Cormac paused, knowing the others would not like this, since it meant they would have to remain aboard ship. ‘With all that Jain technology at Erebus’s disposal, I don’t know why he made Orlandine seize that war runcible, but that she did so must mean it is critical to Erebus’s plans.’

  ‘I think I’m beginning to understand,’ said Smith.

  ‘Bully for you,’ grumped Arach.

  ‘The war runcible is heavily armed,’ Cormac explained. ‘King could not possibly destroy it, hence the need for the Salvaston fleet. However—’

  ‘How did I know there was a “however” coming?’ interrupted Arach.

  ‘However, if King can get me close enough, I can transport myself and the CTD across to take the war runcible out of the equation.’

  ‘That’s if King can even get you close,’ Smith observed, ‘or finds it not surrounded by wormships.’

  ‘Do you have any other suggestions?’

  ‘Not at the moment.’

  ‘So you go across alone?’ Arach was clearly disappointed.

  ‘Alone, yes.’

  ‘Seems pointless.’

  Cormac eyed the drone. ‘Well, I guess I could just curl up, turn off and do nothing.’

  Arach swore, then turned round and scuttled out of the bridge.

  ‘Have that CTD ready for me soon, King,’ Cormac instructed.

  Certainly it seemed Polity AIs might be involved in some Machiavellian scheme, and in the end he would damn well have some answers, even if he had to physically tear them out of Earth Central itself. However, right now he would continue to do his best for those it was his duty to protect, which included some hundred billion humans living in the Sol system.

  As the two Dragon spheres penetrated deeper into the accretion disc, the attacks on them became infrequent. However, Mika found much more to interest her here. Occasional bacilliforms, lenses and segmented fragments of wormship structure put in an appearance, but they were rare and, it seemed to her, acted as if lost. It was the other things now being revealed by her scans that absorbed her interest. The twin spheres penetrated clouds of small ovoids that they repelled with hard-fields, since these objects were so small and numerous it was impractical to destroy them with collision lasers. These were, in fact, Jain nodes–trillions of them–and to Mika’s mind the harbinger of the future destruction of the Polity unless something could be done to completely erase them from existence. Then other larger objects began to appear, and it seemed to Mika that the Dragon spheres were travelling into some Jain-tech evolutionary past in which only the oddities were on display.

  The first of these new phenomena to come into view was a mass of leech-like biomechs wound through a quadrate framework that had seemingly been squeezed into a vaguely spherical shape at least a quarter o
f a mile across. An early version of a wormship, perhaps, or some kind of mutation from the final version? It was difficult to tell. Certainly it was nowhere near as lethal as a wormship since, though the leech-things showed greater activity as the two spheres approached, seemingly reaching out beseechingly and shedding Jain nodes like puffball spores, the whole construct just hung in space as the spheres parted to circumvent it and then made no attempt to pursue them. Mika was busily studying her scans of this construct and thus ascertaining that it contained no drive of any kind when the next new object hurtled like a hunting barracuda out of the murk.

  This biomech was a fifty-foot-long torpedo impelled by a dirty-burning Buzzard ram-jet. Collector fields sprouted from either side of its forequarters, the accretion material they were gathering glowing red-hot as it entered shark’s-gill intakes, so that the object appeared to be sprouting external salamander gills. Its front end opened a tri-mandible mouth as it approached, pink inside like a fuchsia, and Mika was reminded of the calloraptor hybrids Skellor had created for his attack on the planet Masada. She gathered as much data as she could on this thing, and as quickly as possible for, accelerating towards the other Dragon sphere, its future lifespan could be no longer than a few minutes. Eventually a white laser stabbed out from the twin sphere straight down its gullet. Fire exploded from its back end, leaving just a hollow tubular shell glowing red inside, as it tumbled past in the wake of the sphere that had killed it.

  Mika’s subsequent analysis of gathered data revealed this thing as the simplest of biomechs. It possessed a mouth and a stomach, doubtless to gather materials for its own growth and also for the growth of the nodes spread throughout its body like tumours. It breathed accretion dust which it burned in its ram-jet to provide mobility, and she wondered if it could reproduce itself or was just a machine for producing Jain nodes.

  Later, Mika observed a mass of biomechs shoaling around another unfamiliar object like a giant flatfish, tearing chunks from it as it sluggishly dodged and weaved by firing off rows of chemical jets positioned along its edges. Two of the smaller biomechs on the nearer side of the shoal now sped over to attack the Dragon spheres, only to be nailed inevitably by white lasers. Only after studying her scan data later did she classify them as the same sort of thing as the earlier attacker. Certainly these biomechs weren’t in any way standardized, more like heavily mutated.

  ‘So they attack and kill each other,’ she observed.

  ‘Out at the edges of the disc they still retain much of Erebus’s programming,’ Dragon supplied. ‘In here they are wilder in behaviour.’ Then, after a pause, Dragon added, ‘I have received disturbing news.’

  Disturbing news? What kind of news ever disturbed Dragon? ‘Well don’t keep me waiting.’

  ‘Through my contact within the Polity—’

  ‘Meaning a certain homicidal Golem called Mr Crane.’

  ‘Just so. Through him I have learned Erebus’s ultimate plan, and that plan is now in motion. Erebus has knocked out a large proportion of the runcible network, which in turn has caused massive U-space disruption, stranding many ECS fleets uselessly at their bases. Erebus’s way is now clear to take the bulk of its forces directly against Earth.’

  ‘What?’

  ‘Fortunately a weapon has been deployed in order to block this attack, information Mr Crane obtained having proved essential for the success of this defence. He is now aboard the aforementioned weapon and located at the very centre of events. I will keep you apprised as necessary.’

  Mika felt slightly sick and again guilty because she was not back there. ‘So the Polity AIs are on top of things?’

  ‘If only that were so.’

  ‘What do you mean?’

  No reply.

  ‘Dammit! What do you mean?’

  Mika sat waiting for a long moment, but still Dragon gave her no answer. She then got angry with herself for both demanding or expecting one; she had been lucky thus far with the quantity of lucid information Dragon had supplied. She sat staring at her screen, mulling over the latest news, then applied herself to pushing it from her mind and concentrating instead on the here and now. She could do nothing about what was happening back there, and must put her trust in such more-thancapable problem solvers on the spot as Ian Cormac.

  After the shoal had faded from sight, some hours passed before anything else substantial came within range of Mika’s scanners. She felt she ought to get some sleep but just did not feel tired enough. Was this the effect of another of Dragon’s tweaks of her body, or of the news so recently delivered? Then, as she was gazing at a hail of Jain nodes bouncing from two hard-fields projected like the bows of a ship in front of the sphere, her scanners briefly registered something at the limit of their range.

  What?

  For a moment she thought the Dragon spheres had come close to some immense asteroid or another planet in the process of formation, but the density measurements of the shape vaguely defined on her screen were all wrong…before it moved. She kept trying to pick it up, but it remained elusive as if deliberately giving her only spectral glimpses of itself. Certainly it was something Jain, for in those glimpses she saw wormship structure writhing through Jain coral and a great demonic wing that in this environment could only be some sort of energy or dust collector, tri-mandibular mouths opening and closing like hellish flowers and the occasional bright stab of a fusion drive.

  ‘Dragon, what the hell is that thing?’ Mika enquired at last, for though this object lay beyond the range of her scanners, it might not lie beyond Dragon’s.

  ‘They attack and kill each other,’ said Dragon, echoing her much earlier comment.

  ‘And?’

  ‘Jain technology is not life, so is not restricted by the slow processes of evolutionary change.’

  Some might have found Dragon’s didacticism irritating, but Mika preferred that to its vaguer Delphic pronouncements–and at least Dragon was replying to her. She decided not to ask further questions for it seemed obvious what Dragon was implying. Jain technology was capable of changing into forms as various as those produced by evolution, but change in the living products of evolution was a long slow generational thing, whereas in Jain biomechs those changes could be made individually in the mechs concerned–a process faster even than the discredited Lamarckian evolution.

  And they attack and kill each other…

  Even the slow drag of evolution could produce some nasty predators.

  ‘Let me guess,’ she said. ‘It’s big and it’s nasty and it’s at the top of the heap.’

  ‘One of them,’ Dragon replied. ‘Call them the alpha predators.’

  ‘Have you been here before?’ Mika abruptly asked.

  ‘I didn’t need to come here to know this place,’ Dragon replied. ‘That thing out there is a version of me, only not so rational and friendly.’

  Mika decided to let that go and returned her attention to the hints her scanners were providing. She checked the conferencing unit’s database, quickly finding the reconstructing program she required, input scan data already collected, and set her computer to input further data as it came in. Essentially the program was putting together a three-dimensional jigsaw with many pieces missing, repeated and sometimes changing shape, colour and other EM output. Slowly the menacing visitor out there began to grow on her screen, and slowly measurements revealed its awful scale.

  Hanging upright in the murk, the overall shape of the thing was of a chrysalis but, since in reality it stood eight miles high, a lot of surface detail was only revealed by zooming in, and a lot had yet to be included by the program. In a moment detail spreading over its surface revealed it to be encaged in bones of Jain coral; however, what those bones encaged seemed no discrete being. In the area below its head were tangled vinelike masses sprouting those familiar demonic flowers. Down in its lower end were large coils of wormship, slowly turning like some strange engine. The middle of this chrysalis shape seemed to consist of masses resembling those baglike organs
Mika had seen gathering like nervous sheep underneath Dragon’s skin. Long Jain tentacles wound their way through this as if keeping it all knotted together. The thing’s head bore chrysalis horns, and presently its massive batlike wings were folded on its back. That it looked so devilish struck Mika as an unlikely coincidence but one she could not yet explain.

  ‘Looks…spooky,’ she opined.

  ‘The structural formation of biomechanisms often bears similarity to evolved creatures since it often adheres to the same basic rules,’ Dragon replied pompously.

  ‘Wings and horns?’ said Mika.

  She noticed how the other sphere was dropping back and, checking her instruments, she detected power surges within it.

  ‘The horns are merely sensor arrays positioned outside the main body so as to negate internal interference, and there are two of them to provide the same function as binocular vision in humans. Those wings are a form of drive using U-tech and electrostatic repulsion. They look like the wings of some evolved creature simply because that shape finesses control.’

  ‘Yeah, right.’

  As if to demonstrate this point, the huge biomech began spreading those same appendages. They looked something like those of a bat though much deeper, in shape tapering down to the monstrous thing’s tail end. As they expanded, the accretion dust before them flowed down their forward surfaces, while some swirling activity ensued behind. A visual distortion also extended from the bones and abruptly the huge thing was falling towards them. A white laser lanced out from the other Dragon sphere. Mika saw it bend for a moment, then track across and abruptly puncture some electrostatic shield, before splashing onto one of the extended wings. The biomech spun as if hit by some solid projectile, and in doing so released a cloud of small gleaming bubblelike objects. These orbited their source for a moment before abruptly accelerating away–only a few of them heading towards the offending Dragon sphere. The laser snapped out again and again, hitting these approaching objects. Bright detonations spread nuclear fire through the surrounding accretion matter. Before the radiation degraded her view, Mika saw a hard-field spring up under one of these detonations, then flicker out. Now all she could see were shadowy images of the giant biomech and the other Dragon sphere swinging in a wide orbit about each other, while the energy readings between them ramped higher and higher. She noticed her own sphere was now accelerating.