by Neal Asher
‘Will your companion be able to stop it?’ she asked.
‘For long enough,’ Dragon replied.
‘Long enough for what?’ Mika asked, not really expecting a straight reply.
Dragon’s silence did not disappoint her.
After a moment she realized that the ambient light outside the conferencing unit had risen. Directing her sensors toward her presumed destination, she picked up the tail end of a burst of radiation with an easily recognizable signature: solar wind. Collecting data on her screen from radiations far outside the human spectrum, she quickly built a picture of a distant mottled orb flashing like a faulty bulb. She felt it a privilege to be present, for here was a sun in the process of accruing enough matter to enable it to ignite its fusion fire. Like some massive engine turning sluggishly as it draws on a flattening battery, the sun was coughing and spluttering. Fusion fires were burning around its surface or breaking through the surface from inside, only to go out with gouts of oily smoke, each cough or splutter burning lighter elements to an ash of iron of sufficient quantity to construct tens of thousands of space stations, while the oily clouds were blasts of hard radiation capable of denuding such space stations of life.
Considering that last fact, Mika began to map magnetic fields within sensor range. As expected, she saw that Dragon was bending the solar wind about itself. Unexpectedly she discovered that numerous other objects within range were doing the same and the largest one was directly ahead. She now focused on this one and began to clean up an image. After a few moments she ran diagnostic tests and searches on her instruments, for surely the image they were returning could not be right–some fault in the programming perhaps?
‘Our destination,’ Dragon informed her.
Mika gazed at an immense mass resembling numerous blooms of stag’s horn coral. For a moment she couldn’t understand why the appearance of this thing had impelled her to run those diagnostics, since it seemed no more unusual than the biomech the other Dragon sphere was now battling. Then she realized why: she instinctively felt this place to be the epicentre, the point where Jain technology had first bloomed within the accretion disc, a point where reality seemed increasingly thin, and where something utterly alien lurked on the other side.
This was somewhere she really did not want to be.
14
Scanning and sensing. Humans and most Terran animals use their senses to pick up information about their environment from that environment’s own products. In this way their information-gathering is passive and they are not ‘scanning’. However, there are examples of Terran fauna who do scan: bats with their echo-location and cetaceans with their sonar. Humans, as tool users, have found their own ways to scan now. Be that with a primitive torch or sonar or radar, they inject some energy into their surroundings to gain data from the portion of energy that is bounced back at them. When it comes to AI spaceships, the sensorium for both scanning and sensing has grown to encompass nearly all of the EMR spectrum. Ship AIs can sense most wavelengths of radiation, and they can emit most wavelengths for the purpose of scanning. They can shine a torch into the dark, beam radar pulses, fire off laser radiations across a wide spectrum for numerous specific purposes, and even plot gravity and density maps of surrounding space and the underlying U-continuum.
–From QUINCE GUIDE compiled by humans
Upon instruction the nineteen thousand eight hundred and twenty wormships began to gather at the coordinates Erebus had chosen. As distinct vessels, still with swarms of returning rod-forms about them, they fell towards this centre point and began to link together. First just three wormships closed on each other, tentacle ends connecting like multiple plugs and sockets, loops of snaky structure tightening like linked arms; three wholes joining and commingling.
Though Erebus was a distributed entity, as much present in each and every one of these vessels as it had been in those fighting at the Polity Line until the U-space disruption cut the link, it still needed a firm location for its self–its centre, its ego–and this was usually where the concentration of its vessels was most dense. This necessity annoyed Erebus for such a sense of self and the location of self did not seem consistent with AI melding. However, when the wormships began to come together like this, that annoyance was outweighed by feelings of pleasure, completeness and…security.
As the first three wormships ceased to be even vaguely distinct entities, another five joined them, sucking in behind them swarms of rod-forms and other space-born biomechs. Others were coming in fast behind them, and Erebus felt the centre point of its own being moving into this mass. Perhaps this feeling of location was what the AI needed to dispense with in order to be complete? Erebus was, however, reluctant, for becoming truly distributed might mean a dilution of self. Perhaps Randal was right, and Erebus and its components were not melded at all as long as one component remained dominant. Something to ponder…but later.
After a hundred wormships were bonded together, the process accelerated, ships swirling in orbit about a writhing moonlet of Jain matter as they set their courses down towards its surface. The whole seemed like some incredibly complex and changing Chinese puzzle, and it grew swiftly. Within five hours this core of wormships was being compressed into immobility as the last hundreds were attaching to the outside ahead of a rain of other Jain biomechs. Rod-forms descended like swarms of bluebottles; other mechs like shoals of fish sped in, hard bones of Jain coral grew throughout the moonlet to increase its structural strength; incomplete wormships–the spirals like ammonites–descended and bonded too. In the upper layers the process approached completion, with the rod-forms meshing into sheets in order to swathe the entire object, to smooth out its inconsistencies so that from a distance it would look just like an icy metallic planetoid.
Now, with all its active substance drawn together, Erebus gazed about at the system it had occupied. Very little useful Jain-tech remained out there, yet there were few material objects here that had not been touched by it. Bones of Jain coral, which had been used as scaffolds or structural supports during the construction of various biomechs, tumbled through space. Composed of elements that were abundant here, they weren’t worth the trouble of reclaiming. All the asteroids were wormed through with smooth burrows and empty of useful metals and rare elements. Pieces looking like shed carapace glittered in orbit about the gas giant–remnants of the shielding the rod-forms had grown around them while they collected resources down in the the giant’s upper atmosphere. Occasionally, revolving slowly in vacuum, could be found empty organic-looking containers in which some biomech must have made its caterpillar-to-butterfly metamorphosis.
After feeling a moment of disquiet upon noting just how much of a mess it was leaving here, very much more, in fact, than humans left behind them, Erebus filled its processing space with the calculations necessary to align and balance a hundred U-space engines for simultaneous use, then flung the planetoid of Jain technology which it comprised into the grey continuum–heading towards Earth.
With leviathan sluggishness an asteroid turned distantly in black void. Its mass was almost the same as that of the war runcible and, though long-range scanning had indicated its composition to be wrong, Cormac still wanted to take a closer look, for the asteroid lay directly in the area where the runcible gate signature and subsequent massive detonation had been detected. The other items he had also found here were puzzling.
‘There,’ said King. ‘Another one.’
A square red frame appeared in the viewing dome to select out part of the blackness beyond and magnify it–the frame expanding to blot out the asteroid entirely and bring something else into view. At first this could have been mistaken for mere asteroid debris, but after a moment Cormac recognized two identical squat cylindrical segments loosely linked by a fibrous tangle. This tangle resembled optics or maybe tree roots but was actually Jain-tech.
‘What the hell happened here?’
‘Maybe Orlandine had a falling-out with Erebus?’ suggested King.
‘Maybe Erebus wanted to meld with her and she objected to the idea.’
‘Well, you would know about that, wouldn’t you?’
King emitted an angry snort, then went on, ‘It could be that the wormships destroyed here were rebel ones. That human captain you saw certainly wanted to break away from Erebus.’
Cormac nodded. ‘Yeah, could be.’
But Cormac really wasn’t sure, which seemed a permanent state of mind with him lately. Yes there might be elements of Erebus which, like Henrietta Ipatus Chang, wanted to break away, but he did not think there would be many of them, and few of those would even be capable of doing so. Allowing his U-sense to slide beyond the ship, he detected more of those same Jaintech fragments spread widely through space and could feel a buzzing echo in the U-continuum of the dramatic event that had occurred here. Orlandine had used the war runcible to destroy one or more wormships, that seemed certain, and he would have to keep this in mind when they eventually reached her.
The image of the asteroid slid to one side as King of Hearts turned and accelerated past it. Cormac braced himself for the moment the AI would engage its U-drive, yet, when it did so, he felt perfectly stable and in no danger of drifting away. He gazed up at the greyed-out dome and beyond it, and felt the pull of U-space with the enjoyment of revelling in a breeze rather than trying to stay upright in a hurricane.
‘Can you give me a hologram of the war runcible?’ he asked.
‘Certainly,’ King replied.
The war runcible instantly materialized, hanging just above the glass floor of the bridge and slowly turning. Though Cormac had known about this artefact, he had never really speculated on its shape, which now came as something of a surprise to him.
‘Why a pentagon?’ he asked.
‘Just two runcible horns are sufficient to sustain a Skaidon warp large enough to open the way for objects of your size,’ said King. ‘Further horns are required as the size of that warp increases. Four horns are optimum for a runcible of this size, with a fifth one for stability as the warp is extended further.’
‘Why not make bigger horns?’
‘In the first instance, these horns are bigger than those of either a passenger runcible or a normal planetary cargo runcible. In the second instance, do you really want me to explain runcible theory to you?’
‘Maybe not,’ Cormac admitted.
‘Oh good,’ said King, in a tone heavy on the sarcasm.
‘So, where would be the best place to put the CTD?’
A piece of the runcible separated out, carrying away with it some of the hull, a disc-shaped control blister and many internal components. Exposed inside were parallel corridors running through the gaps between three long cylinders that terminated at each end in spheres. Just before the latter, each of the corridors ended against a vertical shaft containing old-style spiral stairs. Even with the section of hologram removed, what remained was still tightly packed with a complicated tangle of ducts, transformers, interconnecting passageways, catwalks and cubic stacks that Cormac recognized as laminar batteries.
‘Why spiral stairs?’ he enquired. ‘I know this runcible is old, but it’s not ancient.’
‘The three cylinders you are seeing are the buffers for this particular segment of the runcible. Detonating the CTD here, or in the equivalent place in any other segment, will take the device completely out of commission.’ King paused contemplatively. ‘Spiral stairs, since you ask, because inductance from the runcible buffers would interfere with the irised gravity field in any conventional drop-shaft. Just consider, when was the last time you saw a drop-shaft located anywhere near a runcible?’
This was true: he never had.
‘What about gravplates–since they’re the same sort of tech?’ he asked.
‘Similar, but they produce a static gravity field, while drop-shafts produce a moving one.’
‘I see.’ Cormac gazed at the hologram before him and tried to imprint it on his mind. For back-up he applied to King’s server and downloaded the entire schematic to his gridlink. He turned to go, then paused to ask, ‘How long until we reach the corridor through to Earth?’
‘Less than an hour now.’
Cormac headed for his cabin.
The true size of those blooms of Jain coral only became evident as Dragon drew close enough to them for Mika to see something caught in the fork of two branches amid the many. Gazing at it she wondered if it might be some sort of biomech crouching there ready to leap on passers-by, then she saw writing on its side and abruptly recognized an old-style attack ship, whereupon everything jumped up a magnitude in scale. Only then did she pay full attention to the data provided by her sensors now scrolling up on her screen.
From behind, where the other Dragon sphere faced off the massive Jain biomech, came perpetual surges of EMR–in consonance with the waxing and waning of the light out there. The two were still battling, but it was not this that riveted her attention. The incoming data now gave her the true scale of the partially conjoined spherical blooms. Each of the seven possessed a diameter of no less than five thousand miles. Mika cursed silently.
‘Note the density,’ said the Dragon inside her head.
Yes, these structures certainly occupied a substantial volume of space, yet their density was akin to that of bushes, or maybe a better analogy would be tumbleweeds.
‘Density noted,’ said Mika. ‘What’s that supposed to tell me?’
‘I’m guessing that Trafalgar landed on a moonlet or an asteroid, which it then processed during the first phases of acquiring and controlling Jain-tech,’ Dragon replied. ‘The rest of the AI exodus was gathered in close orbit about that same landing place.’
The Dragon sphere was now getting incredibly close to the nearest bloom of coral. Looking up from the conferencing unit was a disquieting experience, because this bloom stretched from horizon to horizon. It was as if an endless ceiling from which depended a forest of bone trees descended towards her, or maybe a mass of the kind of branching stalactites found in the caves of low-gravity worlds. Deeper in, amid the tangle, she saw the boxy shape of a scout ship melded into a limb of coral, where numerous thin branches had sprung from it as if it were the core of an epiphyte.
‘So now that we are at the centre of things,’ ventured Mika, ‘are you going to be more precise about why we’ve come here?’ She asked this almost because she felt that she should, not because she hoped for any clear answer from Dragon and not, oddly, because she needed an answer.
‘You must go to Trafalgar for me,’ said Dragon. ‘I am fairly certain that it lies at the centre of this particular bloom of Jain technology.’
Mika felt a rumbling vibration through the floor and, when movement at the horizon attracted her attention, she looked over to see a pseudopod tree spearing towards the bone forest. She watched as it reached the Jain coral and penetrated, fraying and spreading out as it did so. The vibration steadied at a low note and, checking scan returns, Mika saw that, in relation to the mass before them, Dragon was now stationary. The sphere had clearly moored itself to their destination.
‘Let me get this straight,’ she said. ‘You want me to fly my little intership craft right into that mess–and to the very centre, about two and a half thousand miles in?’
‘Yes.’
Mika glanced across at the flapping skatelike guide that had led her out from the interior of Dragon, and it returned her gaze steadily with its blue palp eyes. She then thought about dracomen, those entities Dragon created with the same ease that a human would fashion a clay doll. ‘Why don’t you send a probe?’
‘But I am sending a probe,’ Dragon replied. ‘You.’
‘It’s very dangerous out there. I’ve already witnessed that.’
‘It is not so dangerous out there now.’
‘You still haven’t told me why you aren’t sending your own organic probe,’ Mika insisted. ‘If you don’t tell me why, I won’t go.’
Of course she knew Dragon wanted her to go be
cause of the new memories sitting like lumps of rock in her skull, but she wanted certainties.
‘Very well,’ said Dragon, almost resignedly. ‘Because you are an evolved creature. You are not a product of Jain technology, in fact you are not a product of any technology.’
‘That’s as clear as mud.’
‘Perhaps you have not vocalized it yet, Mika,’ said Dragon, ‘but you know what is in there.’
Gazing at that tangled forest of Jain substructure, she surmised that here it formed only a thin surface over something else. ‘I feel something…but I don’t really understand.’ Mika turned her attention to the blue palp eyes still staring at her. ‘Can’t you for once explain clearly?’ However, even as she made this request, she stood up, checked the integrity of her spacesuit and turned towards the airlock.
‘Long ago when all four of my spheres still existed and I myself was sited on the planet Aster Colora, I summoned a Polity ambassador to me. I was still struggling with my Maker programming then, and trying every method I could manage to circumvent it–hence my history of Delphic and obscure pronouncements.’
Reaching the airlock, Mika glanced round to see the remote flopping along the floor behind her. ‘Is this story going anywhere?’ she enquired.
‘The ambassador sent was Ian Cormac,’ said Dragon. ‘He solved the problem I set him in his usual inimitable manner, with cold logic and with a CTD concealed in his rucksack. He would not be suitable for this purpose.’
‘What purpose?’
‘Being demonstrably human.’
With her helmet and visor closed up Mika stepped through the shimmer-shield towards the outer door. The remote flopped after her.
