by Neal Asher
‘But really you’re still getting nothing solid you can rely on to help us against Erebus.’
‘All information, whether trustworthy or otherwise, can be processed to render useful results.’
‘But I note your use of the present perfect. Dragon has already provided these things, so what is it doing now?’
‘Dragon assists us in checking certain anomalous facts and provides explanations of mismatches in information streams.’
‘You still cannot trust Dragon.’
‘When someone has demonstrated a tendency towards accomplished lying, one has to view information from such a source with caution.’
‘You don’t trust Dragon.’
‘We don’t trust Dragon.’
Mika nodded to herself, feeling this confirmed something but not sure what. She strolled round until she reached a control panel mounted on a brushed-aluminium column shaped rather like a lectern. Passing her hand over the touch console she activated it, then used the controls to search through a menu screen to find what she wanted. It was coded, she discovered, and only the palms of those on an approved list, when pressed against part of the console, would open the irised hatch. She pressed her own hand down and waited.
All around the circumference of the hatch she heard locks disengaging, then with a liquid hiss the sections of the iris folded back into the outer rim. Immediately a smell as of from a hot terrarium in a reptile house rose from what was exposed below, along with the numbing scent of cloves. She peered over the edge directly at the skin of Dragon. Scales the size of a hand lay in an iridescent swirl across the surface area that bulged up within the circular frame. The whole of it seemed solid as rock but for one retreating red tendril, like a mobile vein, drawing out of sight at one edge.
Mika watched and waited. After a few minutes with nothing more happening she returned her attention to the console and screen. Out of curiosity she called up the list of those personnel authorized to open this hatch and gazed at it in puzzlement. There was only one name on it: her own.
‘Jerusalem?’ she queried.
No reply.
Mika used the console to access other controls within the conferencing unit, then initiated the voice-activated controls — which she soon realized would respond only to her.
‘Full outside view,’ she requested.
The walls all around shimmered and grew transparent. She thoughtfully observed the draconic landscape beyond, the glare of the distant white sun and the glimmer of stars. The other Dragon sphere was not visible, but that didn’t really mean anything. As far as she could see the giant sphere had not moved. She remembered the last time she had been here, and how the unit then planted on the surface of Dragon had been drawn inside immediately prior to the alien entity heading off into space to find its twin. Nothing like that was happening now, and she berated herself for being so paranoid.
‘The structure you occupy is shielded,’ announced the sepulchral voice of Dragon.
Mika turned back as the entity’s exposed surface below her unzipped, pouted for a moment, then began to revolve down into a crevice that opened wider. She peered over the rim into the entrance of a steaming red cavern, saw a flickering of shadow as something began rising up out of it. One limb of a pseudopod tree folded into view like a sprouting plant. Four cobra-head pseudopods then opened out from an inner stamen, their single sapphire eyes gleaming as they surveyed the interior of the unit, as if searching for any danger to their charge. On a thicker ribbed neck rested a human head the size of a boulder. It was different from the last one of its kind she had encountered, and she wondered if Dragon recreated these heads on every occasion. The head resembled that of a fasting shaven-pated priest. His pupils and irises were pure black, his pointed teeth and the interior of his mouth were pure white — as was also the forked tongue that briefly licked out.
Mika applauded ironically then asked, ‘Why did I need to be informed that this structure is shielded?’
The ribbed neck lengthened and looped over, lowering the head just a few yards out in front of her. ‘You did not need to know.’
Familiar infuriating draconic dialogue. She decided to go off at a tangent and get straight to her concerns. ‘What did you do to me last time?’
The head tilted slightly as if to observe her out of one eye that was better than the other. ‘Do to you?’
‘How did the other Dragon sphere — which is essentially part of you — change me after I was injured?’
‘What makes you suppose that it did?’
‘I feel it… and Jerusalem also has noted some physical alterations…’
‘Ah, Jerusalem…’
Mika experienced a sudden sinking feeling. ‘Yes, Jerusalem noted some physical alterations to my body. I would have spotted them myself if I had used a scanner, so there was no point in Jerusalem denying their existence.’
The head nodded. ‘Exactly.’
‘What have you done to me?’
‘We have merely prepared you for what we might encounter.’
‘That being?’
‘Humans are weak and susceptible to Jain intrusion. Their perception of reality is limited, and you will need to see.’
What? ‘Hang on… “what we might encounter”?’
The floor seemed to shift underneath her, and everything outside fell into shadow as the Dragon sphere revolved her away from the sun. She felt a surge of acceleration, only partially countered by the gravplate floor. A strong feeling of déjà vu impinged.
‘Where are we going?’
‘To the very source,’ Dragon replied. ‘Eventually.’
There came a shifting then. Something twisted inside her, and star-speckled space beyond the conferencing unit somehow inverted. The star speckles then became holes, and space between contracted to zero, yet she could still perceive it. She was seeing U-space, yet she remained sane. What had Dragon done to her? Briefly she glimpsed the other Dragon sphere: a massive complexity hollowed out of the underside of reality. And then she and the two spheres fell away from the Scarflow planetary system.
As she clutched the lectern console before her, Mika considered how little, apparently, Jerusalem trusted Dragon, and how she herself trusted Jerusalem not at all.
* * * *
Construction robots, gathered like an infestation of metallic parasites, were now somnolent around the massive war runcible, and nil-G scaffolds lay distorted in one area where some missile had struck in the past. Debris was scattered about in surrounding space, which necessitated Heliotrope’s collision lasers being in perpetual operation. The runcible was an enormous pentagon with each of its five sides over four miles long — those sides each triangular in section, five hundred yards wide on all three sides. Dotted all around were blisters housing control centres, along with external generators, motors and a multitude of heavy weapons.
Orlandine knew the history of this object as one of a planned network of space-based runcibles for shifting large ships, even fleets through space, or for hurling moons at the Prador enemy. The idea for the latter utilization had come about during the initial stages of the great war when a runcible technician called Moria Salem had managed to use a cargo runcible to fling a moon at a Prador ship and destroy it, but the war had ended before this particular device here was ever similarly used. Subsequently, it was partially decommissioned, its controlling AI removing itself to a planetary runcible somewhere deep inside the Polity. However, it was best to be sure about such things.
The program she had created was in many ways similar to the kind of hunter-killer or bloodhound programs that Polity AIs had released on the nets to search for her. Having captured some of those programs, she remodelled and endowed them with much of what she had learnt about Jain technology. The way this program now differed from its original form was in size, sheer speed and an ability to reform itself to suit different computer architectures. But its main difference lay in the fact that it would become effectively an extension of her mind.
First it isolated part of the architecture and opened a private com channel to her. She instantly plugged into it, and became one with it to such an extent that she soon was as much in the runcible’s computer system as she was aboard her own ship. Beginning to spread and assess, she quickly discovered a subroutine that had sent a U-space signal to the nearest AI the moment it had detected Heliotrope surfacing nearby. Other routines would then automatically come into play depending on how the ship newly arriving in the interdict area might respond. If it did not depart at once, it would receive a single terse warning, next a battery of rail-guns would come online and target it. If it then still did not depart, a channel would be opened to the nearest AI to perpetually supply data about the ongoing situation. Finally the rail-guns would fire. Computer memory aboard the runcible informed her that some of the debris she had spotted earlier was what was left of a ship that had not departed soon enough, and the damage to the scaffold was caused by a large chunk of that same ship. She killed those routines and began to track out the effects of that action, for, this being a wartime device, the layers of programming would be equivalent to the layers of paranoia when it was built.
Within just a fraction of a second, a partially independent monitoring system began screaming for help from behind a firewall. She slammed through the same firewall and silenced it, but not before it had managed to send a U-space signal. No matter, she thought; it would take some days for anyone to arrive here, and by then she fully intended to have achieved her goals. However, the danger of there existing independent — physically separate — devices aboard the war runcible was one that had not escaped her, hence her move now from passive sensing to utterly aggressive scanning, and to her meanwhile onlining Heliotrope’s esoteric collection of weapons.
Almost at once she detected signals being transmitted from various different sections of the war runcible. Some of them were plain EM, so did not matter too much, but others she recognized as U-space com. Running multiple layers of further programs, she isolated the position of each U-space communicator, then fired up Heliotrope’s high-intensity laser. Spots of fire soon bloomed all over the runcible, the laser beams themselves picked out by the occasional gout of vapour. All but two of the signals went out. These last two, scanning showed her, lay behind armour. Assessing the strength of that armour, she onlined a pulsed maser to fire at one of them and used an armour-piercing thermic missile for the other. The signal source hit by the maser went out quickly, but to Orlandine, operating at her present speed, the thermic missile seemed to be still departing Heliotrope in extreme slow motion.
Meanwhile her program was spreading throughout the rest of the runcible’s computer network, isolating weapons and reactors which might be set to detonate as a last resort. She got them all, one by one, but felt no pride in the achievement. This might have been wartime technology, but it was superannuated in comparison with present Polity tech, of which she was also far in advance.
Still scanning, and still checking, she began Heliotrope’s approach to her chosen docking station, which was situated by one of the control blisters. Even as her ship began to move, the missile finally reached its target, spurting a line of fire out behind it as it bored its way through, spraying the area of the last remaining signal with fire as hot as the surface of a sun. Then, abruptly, she realized she hadn’t yet got everything.
Scanning showed various metallic objects scattered about on the war runcible’s hull, and one of these was scuttling quickly to where she intended to dock. It looked like an eight-foot-long scorpion fashioned of iron. Several of them: war drones. At a rough estimate, and that was all she could get, there were twenty of them scattered inside and outside the station. They were communicating with each other using brief spurts of radio or laser code, which was changing at AI speed with each transmission. Though it would take time, she could break in, take control of these drones and make them subject to her will. But she didn’t want to do that.
Instead, Orlandine created targeting solutions for every drone in turn, and transmitted these as transparent graphics to the location of each one, making it absolutely clear to them that in a very short time she could annihilate them all. But they continued moving, and abruptly she saw the pattern. Then came a message to her — simple voice augmented with additional code showing that any reply from her would go into isolated storage for analysis before it was read. Obviously these drones, though they had been somnolent before she arrived, were well up to date with the dangers that Jain technology represented.
‘Well, asshole, fire on us now and there won’t be enough left of this war runcible to put in a dustbin.’
It was true. The drones had positioned themselves near munitions caches, critical control equipment and the U-space tech of the runcible itself.
‘I am not an enemy of the Polity,’ Orlandine replied.
‘You’re a Jain-screwed fuck-up and if you come any closer we’ll take you down, even if that means we and this station go down with you.’
‘Who am I addressing?’
‘Knobbler.’
It seemed a typically war drone sort of name.
‘Well, Knobbler, there’s a lot you don’t know about Jain technology and a lot I do know. I have taken apart a Jain node and avoided all its traps.’
‘Yeah, sure.’
Knobbler was located outside the station, hidden underneath a transmission dish, from where he was transmitting by laser to four others out on the hull. They in turn were relaying the exchange inside the hull by other electromagnetic means. Already Orlandine had isolated some of the code they were using from fragments gleaned inside the station. She selected one of the visible drones — a thing that looked like a bedbug a couple of yards across — because beside it was a sufficiently reflective surface.
‘No, it’s true. I am the haiman Orlandine, once one of the overseers of the Cassius Dyson Sphere Project. I can present you with proof of my claims, along with a proposition that won’t go against any of your… military oaths?’
Coding and programs loaded, she fired a message laser at a certain point on the reflective surface.
‘Trouble is,’ said Knobbler, ‘you send us anything more complicated than a sonnet and we ain’t gonna be opening it.’
The laser bounced precisely into the receiver the bedbug was using to collect transmissions from Knobbler. The program it carried paralysed the little drone, and she followed it with further programs to gain access. It managed a single ‘Oh?’ before she took control of it, finding a large complex mind inside. She allowed it to remain within the drone network, but did not allow it to tell the others that she was now in. From it she spread to the other drones, even gaining access to Knobbler as well.
‘I am not lying,’ she said.
She had them now, all of them, though only one of them was aware of the fact. She could utterly subjugate them, include them as part of herself like the program she had originally transmitted to the war runcib
le. Instead she put together the evidence she had mentioned, along with her proposition, and revealed it to all of them at once, simultaneously paralysing each drone. All of them had no choice but to take in and view the information she transmitted. They did so, Al-fast of course. She then removed herself from them, utterly, and allowed them to do what they would, though she listened in to the lightning-fast debate that ensued. She had shown that she could sequester every one of them, but had not.
It took six minutes for the drones to come to an agreement. Present-day AIs and drones would never have taken so long, but then they weren’t as independent and irascible as these fighting machines. Five of them opted out, choosing to head for one of the shuttles aboard the runcible and take themselves away. Knobbler was one of the fourteen that remained.
‘Well, it has been a bit boring around here lately,’ that drone confessed.
‘I can promise you, that is about to change drastically.’
‘Okay, we’re in,’ said Knobbler.
* * * *
On the area of charred ground it seemed that nothing remained of the two victims of the legate who had intruded on this world.
‘We’ll check that out afterwards,’ Cormac told Smith, then turned to Scar. ‘Perimeter.’
The dracoman set off at full speed, disappearing into the gloom between outbuildings and underneath the enormous rhubarb plants. Cormac now advanced on the house itself, Arach to one side of him and Smith on the other. He was very suspicious of this situation. Scanning, both from the King of Hearts and from the shuttle, had not revealed anything lurking around but, then again, Erebus’s chameleonware was just as good as any used by ECS. It also struck him as odd that the legate had so comprehensively destroyed those two individuals yet left everything else all around intact. Maybe Erebus wanted the Polity to know about this. Maybe this whole scenario was just a red herring… or a trap.
On the house veranda he drew his thin-gun and stepped up to the door, which stood partially open, and pushed it all the way open with the barrel. Taking a pace back he allowed Arach to go in before him. The spider drone roared into a hallway, then, tearing up carpet, shot into the main downstairs room.
