by Neal Asher
“Give me all your data on this,” she demanded.
“It’s not necessary,” said Dragon. “The platform was subverted by an alien incursion. I attacked and the other platforms attacked afterwards. And the USER disruption will have finished the job.”
The underspace interference emitters, the USERs—in this case U-space mines deployed by the other platforms—would have interfered with the jump Weapons Platform Mu had made. It was certainly possible that this had destroyed it because disrupted jumps usually resulted in wreckage at the other end.
“I want that data,” said Orlandine.
There was a delay before it arrived. Orlandine felt this confirmed Dragon was lying. Usually it would have sent such data right away rather than engage in chit-chat. She felt she had been sent something it had cribbed together to back up its story, and consigned it to storage, intending to examine it closely later.
“This rather screws things,” she stated. “We now have a hole in the defence sphere.”
“A new defence platform is being constructed,” Dragon observed. “Also attack pods.”
“And meanwhile?”
“We bring spare pods from the other platforms and I fill the place of Platform Mu,” said Dragon. “But this is not full coverage. I suggest you expedite construction of the new platform.”
“Yes, I should get onto that at once,” Orlandine agreed, though in her heart not agreeing at all. Dragon was telling lies and this seemed to confirm what she suspected this was all about: Dragon did not like what she was doing here and wanted to delay it, not approving of her plan to gate a black hole into the accretion disc. Reaching the inspection pod, she pulled herself inside and with a thought sent it shooting around the inside of the runcible frame. After a moment, she made a hard turn into an exterior stem to the protrusion where her ship was docked.
“Take Platform Mu’s position,” she said abruptly to Dragon. “I’m telling the other platforms to send over spare attack pods.” She did this with just a small portion of her haiman mind. “There should be enough for about half coverage but it will do. We spent many years containing this with a lot less than we have now anyway.”
“Very true,” said Dragon.
She expected it to try and affirm that construction on the new platform, currently in orbit about Jaskor, should be speeded up, and that perhaps resources should all be directed to that end—away from here. But Dragon probably knew she would be suspicious of that, if it had not already surmised she knew it had been lying. She pulled the inspection pod to a halt and propelled herself out of it, not bothering to slot it back in its rack. A few minutes later she was in the airlock to her ship, then inside—already in control and undocking it, sending it out and away from the runcible as she headed for her interface sphere.
Dragon had been reserved about her plan from the start and had grown increasingly uncooperative about it. Either it knew something about the likely results of the plan that it wasn’t telling her, or it simply did not know enough and felt the whole thing was too risky. But had it done what she suspected? She studied data on this Captain Marco but could see nothing there, or elsewhere. All the peripheral data backed up Dragon’s story about an alien entity taking over Platform Mu. But confirmation came in an encrypted file from the AI Pragus, which, as the only one with access to it, Orlandine now read.
All the platform AIs were in danger of being taken over by Jain tech. Orlandine had known that from the start, so had established the backup facility in the Canine Mountains. From there she could seize control of any weapons platform, or rather, any of its systems that had not been subverted. Perhaps she could have done something had she known about the takeover of Platform Mu? Yes, but no alert had been forthcoming until now. Instead she turned her attention to a data store in the facility. This was a ghost drive. Everything an AI did aboard its platform, along with some portion of its surface mentality, was constantly transmitted from the platform to the facility. The information was laid down in petrified storage—written as a molecular code in a carbon substrate—so could not be changed. Energy needed to be supplied for it to be read. It was utterly impervious to any kind of computer life so could not be destroyed by a virus or a worm. Hard-wired history.
Orlandine reviewed what had happened on that platform; the alien husks brought aboard, Pragus’s insatiable AI curiosity and resurrecting the alien. She saw the point when the AI was taken over and when, before anything in the facility could send her an alert, it was disconnected from its ghost drive. Everything Dragon had said, to this point, was true. But what about Dragon’s attack? It was here that Orlandine found the big glaring hole.
Dragon had jumped in close and used a U-jump missile—a supposed attack on the alien entity. The problem here was that detectors on the other platforms had shown no explosion actually within Platform Mu at that point, yet they had detected an odd U-space signature there. Dragon had fired a missile which had been drawn into some kind of gate the alien had opened. Why? Dragon would have identified the gate and known firing such a missile was a waste of time, let alone the second missile. Also, it had been close enough to use other weapons like its powerful white laser. Why did it not use that? One thing was certain, Dragon could have killed the alien. Had it done so, that alien would not have U-jumped and Orlandine would not have lost both a weapons platform and its subsidiary weapons system.
It was about resources, surely?
Dragon knew that to finish the new platform would require a diversion of resources. This would be sure to put other projects on hold. Like her runcibles. This, Orlandine felt, was why Dragon had been dissembling, though it seemed likely there was more to parse here.
“Where are you going?” a voice interrupted her thoughts.
She smiled grimly. “Back to the accretion disc, Cutter.”
As there was no reason to keep anything from the drones here, she put together a précis of recent events in her mind. She dispatched it to them and, after a pause and a lightning-fast debate, Knobbler replied.
“Suspicious,” he said. The drones had more doubts about Dragon than she did, but they were a suspicious bunch by nature.
“I need to investigate this,” she said. “And I need to talk to Dragon.”
“We’re coming,” said Cutter, obviously including Bludgeon. Even as the mantis drone spoke, Orlandine saw a capsule launch under high G from the big runcible. She gave a mental shrug and waited, impatiently, as they approached.
EARTH CENTRAL
Earth Central, de facto ruler of the Polity, was not the first AI to bear that name. The current iteration, because it had learned the dangers of arrogance, had grown and changed over the years. At one time EC had been a lump of quantum processing crystal the size of a tennis ball, securely ensconced in a building on the shores of Lake Geneva. Now, however, four constantly updated versions of its root personality resided in four such crystals. One was still by the lake, another deep down in the subterranean ocean of Jupiter’s moon Europa, and another in an armoured space station orbiting a nameless red dwarf in an uninhabited solar system. The fourth was kept inside a heavily defended and weap-onized watch station on the edge of the Graveyard—that no man’s land between the Polity and the Prador Kingdom. Also, EC’s mind, extending beyond its core personality, was further distributed across the Polity and outside it, taking up small portions of processing space in billions of AI minds. Earth Central was vast and not really at the centre at all, and by spreading itself wide it had limited the possibility of its own destruction.
It hadn’t eliminated it.
A human agent, who had once served the Polity, had returned to Earth some centuries ago at the end of the debacle with the AI Erebus. This man, this “Cormac,” had been capable of transferring himself through U-space with the power of his mind. He had also come with a large understandable grievance concerning Earth Central’s disregard for human life. That would be the previous Earth Central—the present one’s predecessor—whose shattered crystal rema
ins still lay on the shore of Lake Geneva.
Cormac was still about, still watching, and the present Earth Central had no confidence that its current distribution was any defence. But there were other dangers that were not predicated on arrogance and carelessness of life, and it was these EC needed to concentrate on. This was why it now made the accretion disc the main focus of its attention—collecting data via the runcible on Jaskor.
It had watchers there: sunk in the close-cell foam of bubble-metal beams aboard weapons platforms, stuck limpet-like to free-floating chunks of asteroid, clinging like galls in the branches of Jaskoran trees, and skimming round in the edges of accretion-disc dust and gas—thousands upon thousands of them. They were all covert and, admittedly, did not possess the full range of sensors and processing EC would like, but they would do. Anything more effective would certainly be detected either by Orlandine, or by the covert watchers the prador king had scattered there.
So, an alien life form had seized control of Weapons Platform Mu and taken it away. EC pondered the data for a full microsecond, and then gave a mental shrug. It looked like internal politics—Dragon seeking to delay Orlandine’s other project, which it had not been much in love with from the start. EC now gazed upon that other project. Here it had only managed to penetrate with a few watchers, who were disguised as essential components in mining machines on one of the gas giant moons not far from the two runcibles. It was difficult to get more watchers there since Orlandine was so paranoid and secretive about it. She was sure that EC would send warships to terminate the project if it knew. EC saw no reason to disabuse her of that notion, since that was something it might yet do. Anyway it seemed there was no—
EC paused, realizing it was making easy assumptions.
The line of thought stopped and EC put a larger portion of itself onto assessing the data for what had happened there. In a brief aside it activated a dormant watcher in the Canine Mountains on Jaskor and gazed upon the Ghost Drive Facility. The place looked like a city of skyscrapers fashioned of black glass and chrome. Here was Orlandine’s uplink to her weapons platforms, where everything they did and much of what they thought was recorded indelibly. Its defences, both physical and informational, were formidable, for this was also a weak point, a nexus, a route whereby someone or something might be able to seize control of the weapons platforms—in fact an option for which EC had been preparing for some time. However, right now was not that time. EC just wanted information.
Via the watcher, EC deployed codes it had gleaned over the last months and ran a surgical penetration of informational defences. The response was just slow enough for EC to be able to grab what it wanted and get out. The facility itself would register a software conflict but then instantly change those codes and it would be many months before EC could manage another such penetration. Now, with the data, the ruling AI of the Polity began to see new angles; layers of subterfuge.
The recordings from Weapons Platform Mu seemed to show that the alien was the Client resurrected. Observational data from other platforms clearly revealed that Dragon had destroyed the Client’s mental backup in U-space. Analysis of the action prior to the platform dropping into U-space also showed that Dragon had perfectly calculated the extent of damage it would receive—enough so that it would look like a serious attempt had been made to stop it, but not actually enough. The Client would have survived the jump, therefore Dragon had allowed it to escape. This was not just about diverting resources from the building of those runcibles. Dragon was playing a much deeper game. But what game?
Analysing . . .
The Client would be bereft without its backup and, almost certainly, seek out data. Its driving impulse of vengeance against the prador would not have changed, so the kind of data it wanted would be its specialism: weapons. Polity sources were closed to it, but there was a vast store of data it would be sure to turn to.
Oh dear.
It seemed Dragon had just fired off a guided missile straight into the Prador Kingdom. But why? EC analysed all information it had collected on Dragon, or rather the one portion of Dragon at the accretion disc since its arrival there. The analysis took a whole three seconds and something immediately became clear: while Orlandine had been building up the defence sphere, Dragon had been searching. Its periodic ventures into the disc had aimed to access the Jain AIs in search of information. Pattern analysis of its physical, EMR and U-space traces indicated, to a probability of just over 60 per cent, that it was looking for a mind. The implications gave EC further pause, and it returned to other data.
The Species the Client came from had been the subject of much speculation amidst AIs and by Earth Central itself. It seemed highly likely that its purported home world, which now lay within the Kingdom, had not been the world upon which it had evolved. Its antecedents were . . . questionable. And, of the questions asked, one answer oddly fitted all aspects of the present situation.
Now, through forty-two cams, EC gazed into a huge room. Within the armoured walls of this place sat a scattering of gigaton contra-terrene devices. The entire room could be ejected from its site in the Viking Museum on Earth’s moon. If the CTDs weren’t enough to incinerate the room’s contents, or otherwise failed, there were the particle cannons, railguns and missile silos on the surface of Luna that could do the job. Within the room stood twenty pedestals and upon these sat chain-glass spheres containing items, and fragments of items, that looked like anything scooped from an old trash dump on Earth. Only these were intricately and intelligently structured down to a nano-scopic level and below. They were Jain tech and, as such, more dangerous than the bombs that surrounded them.
It was all about this in the end. EC could not see the whole picture as yet, but some broad strokes were becoming clearer. The situation at the accretion disc, which had apparently been stable for a century, had not been stable at all. And it had now received a kick with a large dragon-skin boot.
TRIKE
Chuffing hard on his pipe, and filling the cabin with fragrant smoke, Cog flung his shuttle down towards the surface of the world. It was noisy aboard the ancient thing because it used chemical engines—the only grav effect employed being a primitive engine that simply reduced the weight of the craft.
“You still got the U-mitter connection?” Cog asked, gesturing vaguely upwards with his pipe stem, the craft tilting and nearly turning over until he shoved his pipe back in his mouth and grasped the right-hand joystick again.
Trike nodded. “Yeah, she’s up there.” In his mind he could sense his wife in space above. A little further concentration gave him coordinates in relation to the world, and the world’s U-space coordinates. He shook his head. No, not his wife, just the U-mitter. She was dead.
“Lucky he stopped so far out,” Cog commented. “Gives us a lead on him.”
“But why?” asked Trike.
“Because he needs to prepare, maybe?” Cog pondered for a moment, then continued, “When he took Ruth his wormship wasn’t notably different from other ships found on the Line. It could be he’s altering it so that when he comes in, the Cyberat won’t be alarmed. This world is no push-over.”
That made sense, but did not answer Trike’s underlying “why?”. Until now, Trike had just been responding to the threat to his wife and then pursuing vengeance. But he had never really considered why Angel was doing what he was doing.
“He comes here to seize items of Jain tech, then what?” he asked.
Cog glanced round at him. “That’s the worrying question.”
They skimmed into cloud that looked as nicotine stained as Cog’s fingers, rain like piss sliding off the frictionless screen before them. Finally they dropped out of it into emerald light and sped over the algae-green ocean. White swirls on its surface indicated the presence of underlying rocks or the mammoth creatures Cog’s almanac called hoover slugs.
“Why is he doing what he is doing?” Trike asked.
“Power,” Cog replied, “vengeance . . . We can only speculate.
Perhaps he’s driven by whatever drove Erebus to attack the Polity. Do we know what did that? Beyond the possibility that he was caught up in the programming of Jain tech to destroy civilizations, we can’t know. But in the end, power for its own sake—with the safety it provides—has ever been the driving impulse of villains throughout human history.”
Trike eyed the man. Cog had never really spoken like this before. Cog seemed to realize it too and quickly added, “Do we really need to analyse the bugger?”
The Cube came into view, at first just an outcrop on the landmass but then distinctly cube shaped. As they drew closer the mica-in-stone glitter of windows became visible, as well as the various turrets and protrusions. To the right Trike watched a bulbous ship settling amongst the scattering of ships there and recognized it as a prador shuttle. Soon they were flying in over big grey shapes in the sea that looked like manta rays with stunted wings, and hoover slugs. Then they could see oily-looking atolls crowned with vegetation bearing the appearance of shredded red cabbage.
“Okay, Captain Cogulus,” said a voice from the console. “Take it easy and try not to break anything when you land.”
“Of course,” Cog replied. “You know I’m always careful.”
After a snort the voice replied, “Your idea of careful leaves a little to be desired.”
Cog grinned, and blew out a big cloud of smoke.
“They know you here?”
Cog shrugged.
ANGEL
With his wormship tightly clenched around him, Angel gazed at the view. It had taken four hours to come in from the outer system, where he had paused to alter the shape of the wormship and make a secure link to a deep-space post that connected to Polity information networks. There he had downloaded as much information as he could find on the Cyberat world, and its inhabitants—one in particular.
