by Neal Asher
“Yes,” replied Box. “There is water flow and an increase in contaminants.”
“I’m going down there.”
“Me too,” said Abaron.
Here’s the test, thought Chapra. He had not been in the isolation chamber since that worm-thing had taken a chunk out of his arm. She watched him stomp out ahead of her and waited for the door to close.
“Was that true…about the runcible?” she asked.
“Would I lie?” asked Box.
Chapra said nothing as she followed Abaron. She was well aware that AIs sacrificed human lives for the greater good of humanity. She did not find this knowledge comforting.
* * * *
As she stepped through the airlock, Chapra caught the tail end of a conversation between the girl, or rather the Jain, and Box. She understood none of it because it ran at high speed. It finished shortly after she and Abaron walked out onto the jetty. She felt suddenly superfluous. Information had already been exchanged, decisions made. The girl turned to her and Chapra saw a girl with her own character and a mind possibly superior to Chapra’s own. Yet the Jain, lying there on the end of the jetty with its weird head turned towards them, was looking through the girl, who to it was just a tool, a lens to bring them into focus for it.
“I have told the Jain of the Separatist ship,” said Box.
“And?” asked Chapra.
“The Jain wishes to be transported to the surface of the planet, which was its wish before I told it about the ship.”
“Why does it want to go there?” asked Abaron.
Chapra glanced at him and saw that he was staring intently at the Jain. His fear was gone. There was hungry fascination in his regard.
“Why I wish to go to the surface is not relevant. Under Polity law you do not have the right to detain me, and I can also demand transport to the nearest habitable planet, which for me is Haden.” Both Chapra and Abaron stared at the girl for a long moment. It was pointless asking how she…it, knew so much about Polity law.
“You are aware of the threat posed to you by the Separatist ship?” she asked.
“I am aware that on this ship I am in greater danger than I would be in the sea below. None of your kind have scanners sensitive enough to detect me in that sea, and should a search be initiated I would much more easily be able to evade it or defend myself.”
“Solves a couple of problems,” said Abaron. “The Jain can hide from them down there and they’ve no reason to attack us without the Jain aboard.”
Chapra glanced at him. He was naïve and in this situation that could be dangerous. “They are not coming here to kill the Jain just because they’re xenocides, but to prevent Jain technology getting into Polity hands, which they’ll view as just a bigger stick for ECS to beat them with. They won’t risk letting us get away. Even with the Jain gone we might already have learned something vital or have acquired some super-science device. There is no doubt that they will try to destroy this ship.”
“Then we have to run,” said Abaron, taking the lecture well.
“After dropping our friend off,” said Chapra, then, “Box, do you have a shuttle ready?”
“Yes,” said Box. “Judd will pilot it. The Jain will depart when its machine is small enough to transport.”
“I do not require a pilot,” said the girl/Jain.
“The shuttle is Polity property and requires a Polity pilot.” Chapra wondered about that. Why did Box want Judd as a pilot? The Golem certainly would not be coming back before the Separatist ship arrived. To try and keep track of the Jain? Or was Judd’s purpose more sinister? Maybe the people on that other ship had come here to kidnap and steal rather than kill and destroy. Chapra was sickened by the thought of Separatists getting hold of Jain technology. How much would Polity AIs dislike that prospect? Would they be prepared to kill the Jain to prevent it?
And who was to say the Jain would not go willingly? What did it care about human politics?
The Jain, through the girl, said no more. Its tentacle detached and it slid into the water. The girl staggered then regained her balance. Her face took on a more juvenile appearance. She smiled at Chapra and Abaron, then sat down on the edge of the jetty and dangled her feet in the boiling water. The Jain wrapped itself around its machine almost as if sulking.
* * * *
The Vorstra runcible sat under a clear dome in a lunarscape etched with sharp-edged shadows. Lakes of silver dust patched the surface, their source the slow crumbling of crowded rock spires. Normally this was a place of interminably slow change and stillness, but now the lakes were moving under the influence of another moon.
Alexion Smith stood before the bull’s horns of the runcible, a carry sack slung over one shoulder, and his hand in the pocket of his baggy trousers. His associates often said he was as much an anachronism as the things he studied. Such criticism was far from his mind at that moment. He gazed up through the dome at a distant silver sphere, and replayed in his mind a comment made by a harried-looking runcible technician:
“Damned thing’s perturbed our orbit, but they said they’d reposition us before moving off.” The Cable Hogue was huge. Alexion had never seen any ship this size, had thought them only the product of holofiction producers and conspiracy theory junkies. With a shake of his head he stepped up onto the black glass dais and through the shimmer of the Skaidon warp. Shortly afterwards the Vorstra moon shuddered in its orbit and the Hogue moved away. An hour later the burn of Laumer engines lit up the sky. In later years, Alexion was delighted to learn that Jain artefacts had been washed up on the shores of the dust lakes. Providential, somehow.
PART FIVE
Floating in an observation blister Chapra watched an aqua-landing shuttle drop out of its bay towards the blue and white glare of the planet. She watched the triangle of it grow small and dark in silhouette, then glow and trail vapour as it hit atmosphere and slid into its orbital glide. Judd piloted. The Jain crouched in a cargo bay half filled with saline heated to a nice ninety-seven degrees Celsius. In its many-fingered hand it clutched its creation device shrunk down to the size of a human fist. Chapra smiled at that. How we define things: when it was large it was a machine and small it is a device. What then was the girl now the Jain had left her, now she seemed to have some character of her own? Did individuality mean anything when thought of in connection with the Jain? Could she be an individual, or would that be like calling someone with a severed corpus callosum two separate beings, two individuals? Perhaps so. It was too easy to look at her and see a human girl when she was really a mask over something wholly alien.
“Why did it leave her, Box?” she asked.
“To watch, to learn, to gather information.”
As the AI said this, Chapra felt the slight surge as the ion drive ignited. She saw the flare far to her right like a sunrise and watched as the planet, with apparent slowness, slid aside.
“She could be destroyed along with us.”
“The Jain can make another whenever it wants.”
And that brought it home.
“Make another what?” asked Abaron, coming into the blister and catching hold of one of the frame bars as he stepped out of the ship’s artificial gravity. “We’re picking up G,” he observed. Both of them looked to the black macula, in the reactive glass, where the sun was.
“Girl,” said Chapra.
“It’s not so worrying,” said Abaron. “Humans make humans all the time and are they any more responsible?”
“How very mature of you,” said Chapra with a grin, then a wider grin at his irritation.
“I will be starting ramscoop drive in twenty minutes. It would be better if you were inside the ship at that time,” said Box.
Abaron led the way from the blister. They stepped from it into the corridor gravity of the ship and both turned toward the control room.
“How long before we go translight?” asked Chapra.
“Three hours,” the ship AI told them, and as they entered the control room it w
ent on to say, “You may be interested to know that I have received genetic maps of the five seaweeds from Earth and compared them to the samples from the planet and the ones in the isolation chamber.”
“How old?” asked Chapra.
Box went on, “Cross referencing certain structures, and taking into account mutational variables, I have a extrapolation graph that peaks at four point seven three million years. This would seem to confirm that the Jain’s point of origin in the escape pod was this system and that it has been in stasis for the aforementioned time.”
“Damn,” said Chapra.
“What’s the problem with that?” asked Abaron.
“Not that…we just never got around to asking why it ended up in an escape pod in the first place. We know lots about what it is and what it can do, but nothing about what it was and what it did.”
“I asked,” said Box.
“Well?” said Chapra when Box did not go on.
“Haden is a Jain world, but not the Jain home world. Originally it was two AU from the sun. The Jain we rescued was here to Jainform it. Using its starship it towed the world to its present position and over a period I estimate to be nearly ten thousand years it seeded it with the kinds of life the Jain like. While it was seeding the world an enemy attacked and destroyed its ship. It managed to get away in the escape pod.”
Chapra gave Abaron a look, then sat and tried to absorb that: a ship that could tow worlds about…spending ten thousand years seeding a planet…and an enemy that could destroy such a ship, defeat a Jain.
“Is there anything more about the enemy?” asked Abaron, putting his finger straight on a fear: more superior aliens.
“The enemy was another Jain.”
And of course that was right. The Polity was huge and ever-expanding and humans had encountered many alien life forms, but the greatest enemy had remained the same: other humans. Chapra smiled. Not so damned superior after all. She flicked a couple of touch controls and summoned up views back down the length of the ship. These showed a plain of ceramal scattered with instrumentation, then the tail fading into distance. She always enjoyed watching the ramscoop engines starting: the vast orange wings of force opening out through space. At that moment she could see only the white coronal glare of the ion drive shoving the Box up to scoop speeds. The ramscoop would then power the fusion engines to shove it up to a speed where the translight engines could get a grip on the very fabric of space and pull the ship through into underspace. Chapra did not want to be watching the projection then. She glanced across as something at the edge of the projection caught her eye. There was a flickering there—spatial distortions.
“There has been a miscalculation,” said Box.
Chapra waited. She was getting used to Box’s conversational grenades. She watched, without really seeing, as a wedge of midnight entered realspace, opened ramscoop wings then stood on its tip on fusion fire, braking into the Haden system.
“The Separatist ship is here now,” Box told them.
With a flash the projection disappeared and in the same moment the ship shuddered. Chapra clutched at her chair as she felt the gravity shift. Something was out. She could feel the surge as the ship changed direction. A sudden dragging force. An explosion.
“Shuttle in bay six is ready for launch,” said Box.
Chapra clutched her chair. So, why did she need to know that?
“Come on!” Abaron yelled, grabbing her arm. Then it all hit home. They were being attacked. The Schrödinger’s Box was being destroyed. She stood and ran with Abaron to bay six. The gravity kept fluctuating and the way they ran might have appeared comical at any other time, anywhere else. Great hollow booms echoed from deep in the ship, and she heard distant clangs of metal falling. Chapra felt changes in pressure. Her ears popped, which was terror for anyone who knew space. Hull breach. They reached the irised hatch to bay six. It was firmly closed and would not open on command nor at the controls.
“Box!” Abaron yelled.
Chapra shook her head. This was happening, this was real, she had to accept it. She turned. In the corridor; a shape moving very fast. It was Rhys carrying the girl under his arm. The Golem jerked to an abrupt halt by them and released the girl. She reached out and grabbed Chapra’s hand.
“Step away from the door,” said Rhys, and raised his singun. The weapon made no sound. A fleck of black appeared in the centre of the door and the door screamed as it folded; a sheet of paper crumpled by a fist. Then the door, now a wrinkled ovoid of metal, thumped to the floor. Rhys held out the gun to Abaron. “Here,” he said. Abaron shook his head. Rhys handed it to Chapra. The butt felt slick and the gun was heavy. It was horribly real.
“Aren’t you coming with us?” she asked.
The Golem grinned at her and fled away down a corridor that now seemed to be twisting, splitting. More explosions. They ran into the huge bay and gaped out through a shimmer-shield at a passing vast shape, and the burning of hellish fires. The shuttle crouched like an iron sparrow hiding from the raptor outside. Abaron opened the door. Inside, the girl refused Chapra’s help and strapped herself in. Chapra dropped the gun into a wall pouch. Abaron stared at the controls, his hands clenching and unclenching. Chapra pushed him aside and sat in the pilot’s chair. He took the one next to it. As they strapped in, something crashed and violet fire flared to one side of the bay. The shuttle began to slide down a tilted gravity field.
“Now!” screamed Abaron.
Chapra used override to knock out the shimmer-shield. The bay full of air exploded into vacuum, sucking the shuttle out into a Dante night. The acceleration slammed the three of them back into their seats and something went crashing down in the back of the shuttle. Chapra reached and grabbed the control column and using booster steering wrenched the shuttle in the opposite direction from that passing shape. Wreckage was spewing across space, fragments and molten metal, nebulous sheets of fire with no gravity to give them shape, then clear space. Chapra ignited the shuttle’s small but powerful ionic drive. The huge wedge and the fragmenting Box fled behind them. She adjusted their course as now there was only one place to hide. The moons in the system were too small and the only other planet was no option at all it being a gas giant. Chapra tapped controls and one half of the screen showed a reverse view. The wedge was close to the Box, enfilading it with missiles. It wasn’t using lasers on the big ship, nor particle weapons. Missiles were much less wasteful of energy, and much more destructive. Chapra was immediately reminded of the PSR chopping up the sphere of ice in which the Jain had slept. This looked almost surgical—what they saw of it before the screen whited-out.
“What was that?” asked Abaron.
“Laser. Burnt out all our external coms,” said Chapra. She kept the acceleration on and checked a reading from the radar, which did not have enough of its delicate parts outside to be wiped out. Two shapes were accelerating after them. She only hoped they would not have the fuel to sustain that acceleration.
“Smart missiles,” said Abaron, his face white and beaded with sweat.
“Yes.”
They sat in silence watching the trace from the missiles grow stronger, then strong enough for them to see the shape and smooth beauty of these clever weapons. They were close. Chapra was white-knuckling the throttle for the ion drive. There was no way to get anything more out of it. Five wracked-out minutes passed before they realised the missiles were getting no closer.
“How long can we keep this up?” asked Abaron.
“Not much longer. We have to decelerate for the planet.”
“If we do that they’ll get us.”
Chapra nodded and from the instrument readings did a high-speed calculation in her head. In twenty minutes they must begin to decelerate or they would not be able to go into orbit. Not landing was out of the question because there just was not enough fuel for them to keep on running until the Cable Hogue arrived. She realised she had no answers. Unless the missiles ran out of fuel they were dead.
“What do we do?” asked Abaron, obviously willing to defer to her authority. Chapra was about to tell him she did not know, but suddenly she did.
“This shuttle and the missiles are both at maximum acceleration,” she said. She looked at him. “Do you think you can handle the controls. Delicately?”
“What do you want?” he asked.
“On my signal I want you to reduce our acceleration and bring the missiles in as close as you can. Fifty metres. Less if you think you can do it.”
“What are you going to do?”
“Those missiles are probably the same as are being fired at the Box—hull piercers. Detonating them that close to us shouldn’t do us any harm.”
“How do you know that?” he asked dully.
“I’m old. I did other jobs before I studied xenology,” she said.
“How are you going to detonate them?”
Chapra smiled at him, a little crazily, she thought, as she clamped down on that smile. “I’m going to shoot them with the singun.”
Chapra got out of the pilot’s chair and Abaron took over the controls. She went back into the main cabin where the girl watched her intently as she donned a spacesuit. The singun was heavy and she set its controls to the maximum. The singularity would last a full three seconds with each shot. She stepped into the airlock, attached a safety line, then over the suit com said, “I’m going out there now. Start reducing acceleration—gently—in about a minute.”
Out of the artificial gravity of the shuttle Chapra felt the tug of acceleration. It felt to her as if she was leaning out the window of a tower and looking down into fire and darkness. Holding tightly to the singun she rested her arms down the hull and aimed beyond the ionic glare of the shuttle’s engines. Acceleration dropped, then dropped again. Two silvery nubs rose up out of the darkness. She aimed at them and saw the range-finder on the gun going crazy as the ionic halo confused it. She fired and fired again, black bars cut through the glare. She swore, aimed carefully, fired a third time. Her visor polarised. One missile disappeared in a brief flash and the other missile tumbled away. Chapra quickly pulled herself back inside. Her arms and face were burning and she wondered just how many rads she had taken. Inside the shuttle and out of the suit, Chapra rubbed emollient cream on her face. Her arms had been heated inside the suit, but had not burned. She reckoned her face would peel, though funnily enough, the skin under her caste mark was unburned.
