Croma Venture: (The Spiral Wars Book Five)

by Joel Shepherd

  “It seems to me the corbi scientists have been learning about biotech mostly like that. It’s not a formal education, and obviously they’re quite brilliant to have learned as much as they have. But this is how they acquire knowledge — by grabbing whatever scraps they get access to. They’ve been unable to hit big facilities like this one because they haven’t had the combat power. And if we’re to find what we want, to save humans and tavalai from this genetic bomb, we’ll never get a better target.”

  “Assuming reeh biotechnology does have anything to do with what the alo/deepynines are using,” Styx countered.

  “Use your big brain and give me a probability on that,” Erik suggested.

  “You want a simple percentage number between one and a hundred,” said Styx. “Human understandings of statistical analysis are infantile. Precise statistical percentages can only be calculated given complete certainty of input data, which given the random nature of all numerical phenomena is impossible.”

  “Computers are only as smart as the data they’re programmed with,” Erik translated. “I’m aware of the issue. Give me a number anyway.”

  “It will be wrong,” said Styx.

  “I don’t care. Humans use fuzzy reasoning all the time, we cut corners, as you’ve observed.”

  “It’s a wonder any of you are still alive.”

  Erik nearly grinned. “And yet I’m still a better pilot than you.” They’d run the sims once, when no one else was looking, and given Styx control of the simulator. Given how much infinitely smarter she was than any human ever born, she ought, many of Phoenix’s computer nerds had insisted, to have outperformed him by some enormous margin. But she hadn’t — though she was now clearly the second-best pilot on Phoenix — and even she admitted that more practice would not help her to catch up with him, given that inexperience was not her problem to begin with. She processed data so much faster, but was far less efficient in knowing which data to ignore. It created bottlenecks in her processing response times that caused her real-time reflexes to lag his by consistent fractions of seconds. AIs, Romki often said, were not optimised for interaction with the real world, and preferred to live inside their own heads. In fact, Erik thought, Styx’s refusal to give a wrong answer even now was a part of the problem. Piloting a starship, you could never be right all the time, but AIs were often reluctant to proceed without higher guarantees of success.

  “Fine,” said Styx. “I calculate that there is a very high probability that alo/deepynine biotechnology has its origins in reeh technology. Eighty percent or higher.”

  “You’re learning to bullshit,” said Erik. “I’m impressed.”

  “I learn from the best,” said Styx.

  “I agree with your eighty percent, for what it’s worth,” said Erik. “And I can’t see that any human, confronted with the scale of that threat, would have any other choice under these circumstances than to proceed. From the human perspective, would you agree with that perspective?”

  “I would,” said Styx. “For what it’s worth, which may not be much. There is also the prospect that whatever technological knowledge we manage to steal, it will be indecipherable.”

  “The Resistance say they have extensive plans on where the splicers keep their data. As for being able to decipher it… that’s where you come in.”

  “Gesul-sa, we are betrayed.” It was Menara, Gesul’s personal head of security, speaking on silent uplink. Gesul stood in his place of honour upon the vast platform, and observed how the grand procession had come to a grinding halt. Where once the leaders of the great Fortitude institutions had approached and presented tokens of allegiance, now there was only the Tongeshlaran in their blue-and-gold robes, occupying the platform’s center, while mobile holoprojectors made great images in the air.

  This image was of Ponapei. All in parren space knew the tale of Ponapei. A world of temples and great natural beauty, beloved by all the houses and ruled by each in its time across the ages. A number of times it had been engulfed by wars, some between parren, other times between parren and chah’nas, and once between parren and tavalai… yet those instances paled compared to the Great Fire of Ponapei, which had engulfed many cities and cut its then-population by half. The machines had done that, but until recently, most parren had lost any memory of which machines. For most of history, parren had been encouraged to forget that there had ever been different kinds. And yet now, the esteemed scholars of the Tongeshla — Fortitude’s greatest college of historical study — arrived on Naraya, and hijacked the great alliance ceremony to show their astounding evidence that it had in fact been drysines that had brought fire to Ponapei.

  “Menara,” Gesul formulated silently, “please put me in contact with Liala.”

  “Contact is attempted,” Menara replied. “There is a difficulty.”

  Above the platform, the misty sky was bright with the glare of vast screens. Surrounding crowds watched the ongoing pronouncements, the lead scholar of the Tongeshla in his great headdress and robe, telling the tale of how Ponapei had met its end at the claws of the very species of AI that Gesul was attempting to make alliance with. Parren crowds were always quiet and attentive at such grand occasions. But now Gesul fancied he could even hear the distant rush of the Dalla Falls, several kilometres down river. Breathless anticipation. And perhaps, if he could look over the platform’s edge at the riverbanks below, he would see parents escorting children away from the scene, back into the safety of surrounding buildings.

  “Gesul-sa,” said Menara. “If they fire upon us on this platform, we will all die. There is no defence.”

  “We cannot leave the platform,” Gesul replied. “Only fear of the flux holds Sordashan’s hand now. The moment we flee, or look weak, we justify his desire to dispose of us.”

  Awful scenes on the holoprojector. Cities charred beyond recognition. Ashen bodies in the ruins. Great piles of corpses in what had once been a city garden, ornamental trees now reaching to the sky like skeletal fingers. Gesul willed himself to calm. This was predictable. There was even a chance that Sordashan’s carefully choreographed allegations were correct. Gesul had known what he’d been aligning himself with, and went into the venture with his eyes open. Indeed, it was well that the drysines were capable of such terrors. Against what threatened all the Spiral, deep in alo space, they would need to be.

  “Hello Gesul-sa,” said Liala’s voice in his ear. The reception crackled with static, fading even now. “Fortitude authorities have detected our location and will now attempt to kill us. You are hearing their jamming as it focuses upon this place. I will attempt to find some way to boost our signal.”

  “What have you found, child?”

  “War beyond measure. Gesul-sa, I do not know what course to take. All calculation eludes me.”

  “Young queen. You do not need to choose a path. Merely follow the path you are on.”

  “Lis!” Hiro said harshly as Lisbeth wrapped one of Liala’s detached cables several times around her armoured arm and leg with Hiro’s assistance. They were the last ones in the tunnel above the lost city below, Dse Pa, Timoshene, Ruei and Tarmen having made their descent. Hiro’s visor was raised now, coms off, looking at her with hard intensity. “Think about what this means! Fortitude’s leaders had alliance with the deepynines, way back in the Drysine/Deepynine War!”

  “Yes I’m aware of that, Hiro.” Lisbeth managed to somehow keep the tremble from her voice, despite the long drop below, the impending arrival of hostile forces, and the topic of their discussion. “This is what happens when you dig around in old forgotten history, no one finds what they want to find, it all ends in tears.”

  “Lis, the deepynines aren’t supposed to align with any organics at all! They’re the worst, but they helped Fortitude…”

  “I’m not especially surprised,” Lisbeth interrupted, contemplating the fall down past her feet as she sat on the lip of the hole. “The deepynines were in a war, they may be murderous but they’re not stupid, the enemy
of their enemy was their friend and…”

  “Lis, all this time, twenty five thousand years, House Harmony has been reviled for making alliance with the machines! Drakhil did! This is why Harmony’s leaders at the time preserved this part of the city — they wanted to save the proof for all time, that’s why they didn’t let Fortitude’s leaders know they’d saved this part of the old city when they rebuilt or Fortitude would have erased the history themselves.

  “Fortitude’s dominance over Harmony for all those millennia was based on the understanding that Harmony were traitors in the Machine Age, while Fortitude weren’t. This proves that notion wrong!”

  Lisbeth let out a long breath. Yes, she did see the implications quite clearly. “If this gets out, it’s upheaval,” she said. “Probably the end of Fortitude’s dominance. Civil War, almost certainly.” She stared at Hiro. “Styx knew. She was probably here. She might have even done it. She helped build Liala for exactly this mission, and sent her here with Gesul… Hiro, she’s guiding Gesul right up the ladder, removing his obstacles one at a time because she knows all the old history that could blow up in Fortitude’s face, she helped to make that history.”

  Hiro nodded vigorously to see that she was finally getting it. “More than that — Styx is installing her own personal ally in power at the head of all parren space. All this time Lieutenant Kaspowitz was scared she’d pull some sort of coup on Phoenix — he was thinking way too small, she’s pulling a fucking coup at the top of the Parren Empire!”

  Lisbeth stared at him, restraining with difficulty the urge to tremble. “Not so dramatic, Hiro. Gesul got here on his own, she’s just helping.”

  “She’s fixed the game, Lis. Billions will die in civil war if this gets out… parren civil wars take decades, some take centuries…”

  “You seriously expect me to believe that you care about parren?” Lisbeth retorted angrily. Angry at what, she didn’t know. At fate, for dumping moral burdens of this size on her head. It was beyond comprehension.

  “If your brother’s right,” Hiro replied, “and Major Thakur’s right, and Jokono, Kaspowitz, Romki, everyone who’s signed off on this, humanity’s on the verge of getting attacked by something huge and possibly unstoppable. In a stable parren leadership, Lis, we’ve got a chance of help, parren have a stake in this now too. There can’t be a major leadership transition now. It would take parren out of the equation for decades. If the alo/deepynines just came after humanity, it could all be over in far less time than that.”

  Lisbeth stared at him for a long moment. She knew exactly what he was asking her to do. “Fuck!” she said succinctly, slammed her visor down, grabbed the wire firmly and dropped off the edge. The cables hissed and thrummed against her armoured limbs, and she tightened her grip as her fall accelerated alarmingly. The whizzing steel would have shredded bare hands, but she felt only increased tension and slowing momentum, realising only now that she could barely see a thing as the visor switched to alternative light spectrums and the onrushing rooftop below.

  She hit hard but did not embarrass herself with a fall, and looked around. It was perhaps a square kilometre of city, entombed beneath this low ceiling for the past twenty five thousand years. This giant dome-top led to a taller, vertical towerside, up which Ruei and Dse Pa were already scaling, directed by Timoshene below.

  “Maintain a good firing position on that hole,” he directed them. “Kill any who come through. They will find another way in, but you will buy us time. When they find another way, displace and attempt to draw them away from Liala. Liala believes she can find a functioning major transmitter powerful enough to break through the jamming and transmit images of this city to the surface, and explanations of its nature.”

  Because they’d gotten themselves trapped down here, Lisbeth realised, looking about at their decaying urban tomb. But that had always been the danger of this mission, inevitable from the moment they’d first been detected… however that had happened. Hiro whizzed down the cables beside her, descending from the only way in or out. The way this thing had been built, Lisbeth doubted there would be any other surface they could cut through to escape — everything had to be thick enough that many generations of Fortitude parren had never detected it with radar surveys… thus one very small access point off the floodway above concrete thick enough to cut through. Even drysine lasers had their limits, and cutting upwards or sideways, with unstable heavy loads above, was asking to get crushed. Perhaps it could be done, but it would take hours that House Fortitude was now unlikely to grant them.

  “Wow,” Hiro said grimly, looking around. “Old Fortitude really went all in to beat Harmony, didn’t they?”

  “Converted into a command base, by the look of it,” Timoshene agreed. “Perhaps the coordination center for a major military strike. The histories record no such thing so perhaps they were erased, given the winners of that conflict were later defeated and suppressed for so long.”

  The buildings had many ingress and egress points, honeycombed like wasps’ nests. Habitats for deepynines, just as the buildings of parren cities were habitats for parren. Many black, gaping mouths of entrypoints stared back at Lisbeth, watching her like dark eyes. It would have taken many years to build all of this, surely. How had deepynines managed such an alliance with House Fortitude, right under House Harmony’s nose? Only Harmony hadn’t been entirely in control of parren space then — the drysines had been. So how had the drysines missed it?

  “Dear lord,” Lisbeth murmured. “We are missing whole gaping swathes of history here. This is like looking back at old Earth before the krim and realising there were several world wars we’d lost all historical memory of.”

  “Twenty five thousand years is a long time,” Hiro reasoned.

  “This way,” came Liala’s voice, and a map-image illuminated on Lisbeth’s visor. “I think I recognise a signature.”

  “A signature of what?” Hiro asked, waving Lisbeth to follow Timoshene’s lead in that direction, himself bringing up the rear. “What are you tracing?”

  “Air molecules,” said Liala. “There is a very unusual phenomenon in this city, I think it may guide us.”

  A hole opened on the dome surface before them, sloping downward, and Timoshene headed inside. Lisbeth took the moment’s walk to cycle through life support and external air sensors, reading figures off the visor even as mechanisms built into the uneven tunnel surface made walking difficult. Immediately, several things struck her as odd.

  “Liala, I understand the air down here is very stale, but I am reading strange concentrations of ammonia and nitrous oxide among other gasses, I think they’ll be making the air hazardous for organics if we remove our helmets. Do you have any explanation?”

  “Lisbeth, as you progress around the next corner, the explanation may present itself. Be careful of these floors, the footing is increasingly treacherous.”

  The footing was increasingly treacherous, with slim magnetic railings built into walls and ceilings as well, a phenomenon they’d all seen plenty of on Defiance. Hacksaw drones could insert feet into those, stiffen their legs and ride them like a roller-coaster at high speed through the structure. Here the rails were bent, decayed or missing in many places, fluidic electronics systems dissolved into goo through sheer age, many thousands of years past being able to drip or puddle, but dried like hard rubber.

  Lisbeth followed Timoshene onto an off-shoot corridor, and stopped. Ahead were Liala and Tanden, peering into a gaping pit where the floor ahead of them was missing for many storeys down. Steel and integrated systems were dissolved, as though someone had dumped a load of industrial acid somewhere up above and let it melt all the way through. The effect was striking, like a layer cake sliced all the way down, only not as appetising.

  On Lisbeth’s visor, the atmospherics sensors spiked with even higher concentrations of harmful gasses. Lisbeth waved an armoured glove through the air before her, and saw no spike from that disturbance. “The air here hasn’t moved for all thi
s time,” she said. “Most of these gasses are heavier in this atmospheric composition, they should have sunk to the bottom of the hole, but here they’re up high. Something’s producing them.”

  “Ecosystems,” said Liala. Her unevenly-sized eyes were fixed on a decaying wall, falling to pieces like the leaves of a crop devoured by pests. “I can see them, on maximum magnification.”

  “Ecosystems of what?”

  “Nanomachines. Defiance had trillions of anti-aging nanos performing simple functions. Those nanos could reproduce and repair, but not evolve. This should not be possible.”

  “But those were drysine nanos,” said Hiro. “These are deepynine.”

  “Yes. I think these have reinterpreted their programming after so long in the dark. They are metabolising the power conduits, I believe… this is the path the primary conduits from the ground grid would take to reach the roof. All life seeks to survive. Short of stored or grid power, or sunlight, these found a new means to live.” Metabolising metals a tiny milligram at a time, Lisbeth thought as she stared down at the enormous hole. For twenty five thousand years.

  “Nano machines are not alive,” Timoshene said distastefully, peering down the long drop.

  “According to many leading parren philosophers, I am not alive,” Liala replied. “These are the primitive semantics of limited organic cognition.”

  “I don’t think AIs are quite in a position to start lecturing organics on the lack of appreciation for multi-varied forms of life,” Lisbeth said frostily. “Can we go around? And you said this would help us find the transmitter you seek… how?” She glanced at Hiro, standing behind them, rifle out. And suffered a cold chill of fear. That rifle’s not big enough for Liala, Hiro. Think of something else.