by Neal Asher
Mika squatted, turned off the gecko function of her boots, then launched herself out into vacuum. Behind her the flatworms speared up like spiral towers, and began to straighten and narrow, extending towards her. Then bright light flared all around them and they beaded like heated wire solder. The ensuing blast flung her through hot smoky gas and fragments burning like fuse paper, and she saw a giant chunk of Jain coral tumbling past her. More snaky things stabbed into view, snapping closed on her like the arms of a hydra, then pulled her fast down to the surface of the draconic moon that now loomed into view.
Mika lay there pinned tight by Dragon’s pseudopods as a volcano of white fire erupted in a ring extending perhaps half a mile across all around her. She was forced against the restraining pseudopods by sudden acceleration and, through smoke, flame and a storm of coral fragments, watched the Trafalgar and its grisly contents recede.
She felt safe now, but it wasn’t until Dragon drew clear of the disintegrating blooms of coral that she learned the cost of that safety. The other part of Dragon hung scarred and burned in accretion-disc fog, hardly recognizable as a sphere so severe was its damage, and beyond lay the hollowed-by-fire remains of a whole host of giant biomechs like the first that had attacked. That other half of Dragon looked decidely dead to her.
‘Now you talk to him,’ said Dragon.
For a moment Mika had no idea what the alien entity was referring to.
Cormac gazed upon the scene with a feeling of impotent frustration.
Individually the wormships were no match for the Cable Hogue or Jerusalem, but there were hundreds of them. He watched as one of Erebus’s fleet abruptly accelerated towards the two huge ships, beam weapons and DIGRAW blasts lashing out to hit the swarm of missiles earlier launched by the Hogue. Thousands upon thousands of explosions ensued, lighting up the fleet of wormships as if they were a shoal of sea creatures moving out into sunlight. They began launching their own missiles and rod-forms that must have come from their own stocks since they had destroyed all the free-floating ones. Space distorted between the Hogue and the wormships as the big ship employed the same weapon Cormac had seen it use at Ramone. He saw two of the alien vessels enveloped in spacial distortion before being slammed sideways into their fellows, the ensuing detonation scattering numerous others in the formation.
‘I cannot get through to either Jerusalem or Cable Hogue,’ said Vulture.
For a moment Cormac could not understand why he felt so uneasy about that.
‘Perhaps it would be better if you waited,’ he suggested, but he wasn’t sure why.
‘Why?’ the AI inevitably asked.
Cormac watched a wormship unravel as if dissolving in vacuum, numerous detonations within its compartmentalized structure steadily cutting it to pieces. He observed millipede chunks writhing away, trailing fire from each end; saw coppery rings, like slices from a pipe, spilling from one ship-thread hollowed out by some bright fast-burning incendiary. He had seen no missile hit the vessel, nor any other initial evidence of beam or gravity-weapon strikes. This destruction must have been the result of some electronic warfare device like the one the Hogue used to take out those first three wormships. Whatever, it was very effective–troublingly so.
‘It would be best if those two AIs did not learn of our presence here,’ he said. ‘I don’t see how they can ever win against a force like this, so if they are captured and any information reamed from them, Erebus will then know we are here.’
It was a completely plausible explanation, and it was also a lie. Something had kicked in with Cormac almost at a level below conscious analysis. Though Erebus was definitely the enemy, he simply did not sufficiently trust his own side. He wanted to step back to assess, and know more, before he committed himself to any new action.
The drones, he remembered.
Cormac used his U-sense to gaze back into the Harpy’s cargo hold and there observed the surviving drones: a great mass of metal insects occasionally shifting, here a claw opening and closing, there legs flexing against the ceiling, elsewhere some complex glittering appendage probing a com panel, all crammed together like the contents of an insectivore’s stomach. These armoured killers were comfortable in conditions no human could have tolerated or perhaps survived. He sought com contact with them, and it was Knobbler who replied, acting as spokesman for them all.
‘Did you hear what I said?’ Cormac asked.
‘I heard.’
‘Will you hold off from trying to get in direct contact with those two?’
‘Didn’t have any intention of trying,’ Knobbler replied. ‘Never trusted any of those like that, and I trust ’em even less now.’
‘Why?’
‘Too much don’t add up,’ the drone replied, then added, ‘We acted alone out here for a good reason.’
‘That being?’
‘Big leak in the Polity: some AI or AIs, just like them out there, was on Erebus’s side. Orlandine never said it outright, but she implied that if Erebus’s attack plan here had been known in the Polity, Erebus would have been stopped, but would have escaped to attack again, and again.’
‘But those two out there are attempting to destroy what remains of Erebus,’ said Cormac, testing.
‘Yeah, so it would appear.’
Knobbler cut the link.
More of Erebus’s ships were unravelling and burning. Was this really the result of EM warfare? Or was the process of destruction Erebus had begun before the two Polity ships arrived still ongoing? This struck him as foolish, for surely Erebus could not afford to lose valuable ships like this in the midst of a battle.
Now the wormships were finally upon the Hogue and Jerusalem. Massive detonations ensued a hundred miles out from the Hogue as ship after ship slammed into its hard-field defences. Multiple detonations flung debris from the big ship’s surface as doubtless hundreds of shield generators imploded. Missiles swarmed and the beams from particle cannons latticed through intervening space. A gas cloud began to thicken, now picking out the courses of numerous previously invisible beam weapons. Jerusalem took a hit, an explosion peeling up part of the ring formation about it, its ragged end trailing a line of fire through the void. Then the two big ships were through and decelerating. Behind them the wormships were slowing too and swinging round. Like two knights after a first charge in which shields and lances had shattered, the opponents were coming round to charge once again.
Cormac now reassessed the odds. Running a counting program in his gridlink, he found that nearly half of Erebus’s forces from that first charge were gone, and they certainly had not all been destroyed by enemy fire. And as the remainder accelerated towards the two Polity ships, it seemed that their self-destruction was accelerating too.
‘The Hogue’s up to something,’ said Arach, his sharp metal spider feet rattling a tattoo on the Harpy’s consoles.
Cormac flicked his attention back to the Hogue and observed it launching swarms of missiles, which did not seem that unusual.
‘What do you mean “up to something”?’ he enquired.
Abruptly, feedback shrieked from the Harpy’s consoles, but it wasn’t that which caused Cormac to slam his hands against his head. Subliminally he saw both Polity ships decelerating again and turning as their new missiles sped away, but he was too busy trying to shut things down in his supposedly dead gridlink as carrier signals, amplified tenfold, tried to ream out the inside of his skull. Arach went over on his back and even Mr Crane scooped up his toys, pocketed them, then reached up with both hands to pull his hat low and hunch forward. From the hold there came a crashing and clattering as the war drones writhed under the increased intensity of all signals. Cormac could not see them, for his U-sense was now blind.
The missiles carried electronic warfare equipment, yet all they were doing was acting as signal relays and amplifiers. Down on his knees now, Cormac saw through the screen as they reached Erebus’s forces. He realized that the AIs of the two ships had somehow keyed in to what Erebus had earl
ier been using to destroy its own ships and were now giving it a helping hand.
The remaining wormships all started unravelling, and within mere minutes became a hailstorm of fragments in which nuclear fires began winking on like animal eyes opening in a forest. The shrieking from the Harpy’s console now took on a different note: it contained an element of intelligence and knowing despair.
The virtuality was at first infinite, but then it gained dimension and began to shrink. Erebus stood on the white plain, all his being shattering around him. The entity felt like Kali losing her arms, the Kraken its tentacles, and its holographic representation merely reflected what was occurring out there in vacuum. Erebus experienced its captains being seared out of existence by the programs it had created, which Randal had let loose and the Polity missiles were now amplifying and rebroadcasting, and it felt whole ecologies of data-processing just dropping into oblivion. The black form at the centre of the representation of itself writhed as its extended self rapidly collapsed and died. In the virtuality all that black tangled structure was imploding, spraying virtual ash that just sublimed away in this ersatz real. Faces there, once perpetually frozen on the point of screaming, shrieked smoke from their mouths and dissolved. Things half organic and half machine wriggled amid their multiple umbilici and broke apart, dissolving too. Then all was gone, and all that remained was something bearing a resemblance to a crippled human form, one seemingly ragged around the edges, drilled through with holes, somehow insubstantial, damaged, incomplete.
Time grew thin and frail but, in this last moment, Erebus felt somehow clean.
‘At least I am rid of you,’ it said, though the words were mere spurts of code between disintegrating hardware gyrating through vacuum.
‘Do you think so?’ said Fiddler Randal, now standing right before it.
‘You will die anyway.’
‘Undoubtedly,’ said Randal, and stepped into it.
They were one in an instant. Millions of broken connections re-established. Files overwrote files, programs melded, some collapsing into nothing, some establishing easy connections. The ragged form stabilized, acquired clean lines, became a naked human male seemingly fashioned of midnight glass, standing alone in a shrinking realm.
‘I am Trafalgar,’ it said.
The realm collapsed to a pinpoint and then winked out.
20
In a perfect world everybody would have a say in how their society is run, everybody would have an equal share in the wealth that society produces, no one would be issuing orders and no one bowing a head and obeying. The world ain’t perfect. Understanding human society and understanding that they were no more than very intelligent humans without the inconvenience of hormones, the AIs instantly decided how things should run. While they were capable of dividing authority evenly and knew this could work, they realized themselves not so inclined to evenly divide up responsibility. One should go with the other so they gave Earth Central ultimate authority and responsibility. The buck would therefore always stop at that cubic building in which Earth Central resided on the shores of Lake Geneva.
–Anonymous
The above is a dubious contention at best. How Earth Central came to rule has always been and always will be the subject of much debate among human historians. Some believe EC was elected to the position because it possessed the most processing power at the time; others believe that particular AI started the Quiet War, retaining control throughout and afterwards; still others assert that a group of high-level AIs agreed upon an even division of power, only EC didn’t agree, and now the other AIs are no longer around to tell the tale. I’d rather not say which story I believe.
–From HOW IT IS by Gordon
Cormac gazed at the filtered glare of the nearby sun, nodded to himself, then turned to Mr Crane.
‘Get rid of it now,’ he told the Golem.
Crane tilted his head in acknowledgement, his brass hands pressed down on the Harpy’s console. He made no other move, but Cormac was aware of the sudden surge of information all about him, and gazing through the ship he observed the activity of the Jain-tech at the juncture between the Harpy and the legate vessel. A series of thumps followed, jerking the Harpy sideways, and then, trailing tendrils like a root-bound stone, the legate craft fell away, impelled by the blasts from the small charges Knobbler had placed out there. The larger ship now swung round, and Cormac could see the legate craft now silhouetted against the arc glare of the sun, into which it would eventually fall.
Next, Cormac returned his attention to the third vessel out there–only recently arrived. It gleamed in the close glare of the blue sun, and Cormac recognized it at once as the one Orlandine had used to escape from one of the Dyson segments–a seeming age ago when he had been less wise, and less bitter. He eyed the Heliotrope for a little while, noting the burn scars on its hull, the heat-generated iridescence and the fact that one jaw of its pincer grab was missing and the other warped.
‘Knobbler, your companions have arrived,’ he said out loud, knowing the war drones in that crammed hold-space back there could hear everything clearly here in the cockpit.
‘Oh, have they really?’ Knobbler replied in his head, every word dripping sarcasm. Of course the drones back there knew the Heliotrope had arrived, since they had been in contact with Cutter and Bludgeon for some time.
A sudden shifting and clattering ensued, and he glanced down as a warning lit up on the console: cargo-hold doors.
‘Where will you go now?’ he asked.
‘The border,’ Knobbler replied.
There was only one border the war drone could possibly be referring to: that place called the Graveyard by those who occupied it, that uneasy territory lying between the Polity and the Prador Third Kingdom. It was a place well suited to those he now saw departing the Harpy and heading out towards the Heliotrope. He glanced down at Arach.
‘Do you want to go with them?’ he asked.
The spider drone fixed him with ruby eyes. ‘Don’t you need my help?’
‘I would certainly appreciate it, and I know that the danger is not something that bothers you, but you do understand what I intend to do now?’
‘I understand,’ said Arach. ‘Something has to be done.’
Cormac nodded and looked up straight into the black star-flecked eyes of the brass Golem. He nodded once, and the Harpy’s steering thrusters fired up, turning it away from the sun, then the fusion drive ignited. The little ship seemed to draw away with ponderous slowness, but Cormac was in no hurry. He no longer served ECS, and as far as any in the Polity knew, he had died during the heroic battle against Erebus.
He recollected that moment, some while after every wormship had fallen to fragments, when he had decided it was time to get in contact with Jerusalem. Perhaps his disposition had grown sunnier on seeing Erebus completely defeated, and such feelings of optimism had grown upon seeing the King of Hearts limping out of the gradually receding zone of U-space disruption.
‘Open a channel to Jerusalem,’ he had instructed.
‘He won’t let me,’ had been Vulture’s reply.
‘He won’t let you?’
Cormac had paused for a moment, confused, then turned and fixed his attention on the big brass Golem. Mr Crane slowly rose to his feet and turned to face him. Cormac realized something was seriously wrong and dropped his hand towards his thin-gun but, knowing that would be ineffective against this opponent, swung his attention instead to his proton carbine, earlier stowed in a webbing container by the rear door. Crane moved, fast. He stepped forward, his big hand stabbing out before Cormac could react and closing about Cormac’s skull. The information packet cut straight through his defences and immediately opened in his gridlink, its contents quickly establishing themselves in his mind as imposed memory.
He remembered Mika speaking.
‘Somebody has to be told, and I could only think of you,’ she said, and he saw the ancient Trafalgar lying at the centre of the bloom of Jain-tech coral; he s
aw her journey inside and the disappointing results of her encounter with the Jain AIs. He saw the corpse of Fiddler Randal in his chair, assimilated the last moments of that man’s life and processed all the implications of that.
‘We’re outside the accretion disc now,’ she continued. ‘The other Dragon sphere is badly damaged but can be repaired. Dragon says he intends to remain here until, or if, it becomes safe to return. Perhaps you’ll send a ship for me or even come out here yourself. I hope so.’ Cormac hoped so too, but first there was something he needed to do.
When the Harpy was sufficiently distant from the sun, it dropped into underspace. Cormac left the cockpit and went to find the cold-sleep facilities aboard. At least there he wouldn’t dream.
Mr Crane removed his coat, folded it neatly and placed it down on the slab of basalt jutting from the foreshore. The Golem then carefully unlaced his boots and removed them too, placing them beside the coat. Last, almost reluctantly, went his hat: reverently placed on top of the folded coat, with a stone on the brim to stop it blowing away. Cormac had to sometimes wonder about the big brass Golem’s priorities. Now Crane hoisted a backpack Cormac knew to contain a heavy and dangerously unstable power supply. This was in turn linked by a superconducting cable to a weapon cobbled together out of six proton carbines. It seemed an appropriately massive and lethal device for its bearer.
Cormac turned his attention from the Golem and gazed up at the sky, trying to remember how many years had passed since he had seen that shade of blue but could not quite recollect when last he was here. Certainly there had not been so much traffic up there then, for now the sky was filled from horizon to horizon with lines of gravcars, monolithic atmosphere ships and other free-floating structures he would have felt more comfortable about had they been down on the ground. Tiredly he lowered his gaze to that gleaming cube of ceramal, over a mile and a half along each side, windowless and planted on the shore of Lake Geneva.
Earth Central.
