Line War ac-5

by Neal Asher

  Abruptly, the model went into reverse, the timescale dropping back to zero, back to the present. Now bewildering arrays of grids overlaid and penetrated the planetoid, and different views of it began clicking up at a rate of tens for every second. Mr Crane was obviously looking for something, and within a couple of minutes he found it: an area just over from where the rift installations intersected that equatorial ring of cooling spheres.

  ‘Are you still in contact with ECS?’ Vulture enquired.

  Crane removed his hand from the console; it came away trailing strands as if it had just been pressed in treacle. The model blinked out and the Golem stood and made his way back through the ship, where he picked up the big CTD imploder — which, this time, Vulture suspected the Golem would not be using for some elaborate bluff.

  ‘Are you going to answer me?’

  Yes came the Golem’s reply and, frustratingly, Vulture did not know whether that answer was to his first or second question. He observed Crane open the airlock leading down into the legate vessel, then, with the CTD tucked under his arm, climb down inside.

  ‘What are you doing?’

  The other vessel detached and fell away, but Vulture found himself still able to access the departed ship’s systems. Dropping towards a hot acidic atmosphere, the legate vessel quickly left the Harpy and the wormships high above. Because the physical conjoining was now broken, Vulture checked the integrity of his chameleonware, but then stopped himself, knowing that if anything went wrong now he might have only a few microseconds in which to draw up his last will and testament. Returning his attention to the other vessel, he saw Crane begin to use the landing thrusters, making their firing pattern mirror eruptions below whenever possible. The vessel passed through volcanic clouds, yellow sulphur crystallizing on its hull, then turning brown and flaking away. A shimmering umber desert became visible below, then a line of jagged black mountains rose into view. At the foot of these, to the left, one of the spheres reared up through haze like a massive power station. Coming over the mountains, Crane put the vessel into a leaden glide towards one of the rift installations — a nondescript cylindrical bunker perched on the edge of a cliff overlooking a sea of magma, dead Jain-tech strewn all around it like driftwood. Inside the vessel, Mr Crane, ignoring controls he had already preset, began undressing. He removed his hat and coat, baggy and threadbare pullover, boots — meticulously unfastening them and putting them neatly to one side — worn trousers and then, ridiculously, a pair of long Johns.

  What the hell was the Golem up to?

  On automatic, the legate vessel landed in the shade of a frozen wave of blue-streaked black rock. Crane faced the inner hull, which looked like the inside of an iron bird’s chest cavity, then pushed his hand through and down, unzipping it. He next pushed out through the skin of the Jain-tech vessel, into temperatures hot enough to cook an ox. But, of course, Crane had experienced such temperatures before, when he was murdering people for Skellor on Shayden’s Find.

  Through the vessel’s sensory skin Vulture observed Crane stroll across boiling ground towards a bunkerlike building beyond. A hatch opened in one side and something segmented slid out and accelerated towards the Golem. Its front end reared up and twisted into a stepped spiral for a moment, then twisted back into the flat tip of a copper flatworm. Crane walked on past, ignoring it, and ducked through its exit hole into the bunker. The worm-thing spiralled once more, then flattened out again. Obviously it was using some sort of sensory apparatus and seemed puzzled. Crane had to be somehow subverting things again — making himself invisible to these components of Erebus or else making them consider him one of their own number. After a moment he emerged from the bunker, striding past the worm-thing, which abruptly turned round and slid back towards its home. Re-entering the legate vessel, Crane connected in and squirted up to Vulture a complex two-million-digit code, with a sub-code that could manage a mathematical transform on the main code precisely twenty-eight times. That was the number of these bunker buildings ranged along the rift, each of which Vulture now understood to contain a single multiple-megaton CTD.

  Crane launched the legate ship again, using minimal thrust to slide the vessel out and over the edge of the cliff. Full use of thrusters would not easily be detected over the magma sea. Against this background he took the vessel high, then went into another leaden glide towards the nearest sphere in the equatorial line, but then banked to head towards the pipe connecting it to the next one along, fifty miles away. Another code came through to Vulture, which the AI instantly recognized as the detonation code of the CTD imploder Crane had stowed aboard the legate craft. It was the Golem’s way of letting Vulture know what was now going on.

  No need for further communication then. Vulture resurrected the model they had been using earlier and started injecting some new parameters. He watched Crane descend at the midpoint of the pipe, exit the vessel and saunter over to jam the CTD underneath it. The giant spheres contained nitrogen — which was abundant here — cooled until liquid. Each of them was a vacuum flask, the interior layer some kind of glass, the outer layer a heat-resistant ceramic, with vacuum in between. Vulture ran some further calculations, updated the new parameters within the model, then cackled at the results. After a moment his cackling trailed off. In its way, this weakness seemed very odd. It was almost as if Erebus had deliberately introduced a massive flaw in the battle plan here.

  But no matter, for Mr Crane was about to graduate from his previous occupation of ripping out someone’s guts to ripping out the guts of a world, albeit a small one.

  * * * *

  The hammerhead Bertha landed near the city, where it opened down its entire hull into a series of ramps. Polity troops, AG tanks, weapons platforms and striding autoguns began swarming out, like termites from a mound. The King of Hearts landed on its belly in the shade of what appeared to be a steel cliff, but was in fact the side of a massive atmosphere ship downed earlier in the conflict. Cormac headed down the attack ship’s ramp with Arach clattering along to his left, Smith on his right, and Scar already on all fours at the foot of the incline, sniffing at the churned mud. Above him, hard-fields were flaring in the sky like borealis, lasers needling through layers of smoke, and unidentified objects detonating in the air to rain pieces of themselves towards the ground. The racket was abominable: part thunderstorm and partly like the sounds of a demolition project. And the ramp kept shuddering underfoot.

  ‘I’m home,’ said Arach, skittering in half-circles to gaze at the carnage.

  ‘Now now,’ said Hubbert Smith. ‘You know the boss don’t like that kinda talk.’

  Cormac fixed the Golem in his gaze for a long moment, glanced back up the ramp into the King of Hearts, then over at Arach, then down to Scar, who now seemed to be inspecting a clump of earth. He wondered why he’d saddled himself with this comedy duo of AI lunatics and one draconic borderline psychopath, all aboard a ship whose AI hated humans. He shook his head then raised his gaze to the flying platform now descending towards them. Capture a legate, he thought. With this crew. There had been no advice on how he should go about such a task and, according to his orders, the only resources allowed him were those the commander here might deem could be spared. He thought about the last legate they had tried to capture, and where that had led. This whole operation struck him as utterly futile, just make-work for those Jerusalem did not entirely trust. Then it occurred to him that maybe Jerusalem did not trust him simply because somehow the AI had realized he was beginning to perceive agendas outside supposed Polity defence.

  As a flying platform landed on the boggy ground, Cormac eyed its pilot: an ECS ground trooper in chameleoncloth fatigues. He felt a stab of nostalgia for his own time served amid the grunts — things had been so much simpler then. He headed over towards the platform, determined to get things moving, though what things he wasn’t entirely sure yet. Abruptly Scar reached out and caught hold of his arm. The dracoman’s ferocious head jutted forward as it peered intently at the pilot. />
  ‘Problem?’ Cormac enquired, initiating Shuriken through his gridlink and sliding his left hand to where the thin-gun was tucked into the back of his belt.

  ‘Jain?’ said Scar oddly, tilting his head.

  U-sense: immediate. The pilot possessed the usual collection of human organs, but it seemed there was something else inside him. Cormac perceived a blurred stringiness there, as if his flesh was threaded with near-invisible fibres. This was nothing like the snakes of Jain-tech he had observed inside those infested humans on Klurhammon, so he did not know how to react. Maybe this one was a hooper from the planet Spatterjay? The natives of that world apparently had bodies packed with viral fibres. It occurred to him that, while being able to see inside other people or things was quite useful, it would be even more useful to understand what he was seeing there. He spat silent instructions at the other two. In response, Smith moved out further to the right, while Arach opened the two hatches on his back. If this part of the ECS line had been infiltrated by the enemy, things were bound to get fraught rather quickly.

  ‘Okay,’ he said. ‘Let’s keep moving.’

  As Cormac drew closer to the platform, the pilot turned from the controls he had been inspecting, opened the gate in the safety rail and nodded an acknowledgement. The man’s uniform, Cormac noticed, had been cut away in various places. The right sleeve was missing and a blue wound dressing covered the arm from shoulder to elbow. Material had also been excised around the lower torso above the right hip, and a wound dressing showed through there too. The right leg of his fatigues was gone below the knee, similar dressing stretching from knee to ankle. There was in addition what looked like an undressed burn on one side of his face.

  Reaching the safety gate, Cormac paused to say, ‘Shouldn’t you be in one of the military hospitals?’ He very much wanted an answer, because thus far he had yet to hear anyone infected with Jain technology manage more than a grunt or a snarl.

  The man turned again. ‘A month or so back, with these injuries I would have been, but the little doctors are quite effective.’ Cormac nearly drew his weapon and fired upon seeing that the injury to the man’s face looked more like some sort of cancerous growth. Definitely similar to the stuff seen in the wounds of those controlled by Jain-tech. But as the man’s words impacted, Cormac loosened his grip on the butt of his thin-gun.

  Little doctors?

  Mika had told him about some experiments conducted aboard Jerusalem, describing a human blank — a mindless clone — being shot at close range with a pulse gun. It should have been a killing shot, but the clone survived it and stood up again afterwards. Within the clone had been installed a mycelium based on Jain technology, which acted to repair physical damage and sustain the human body despite such serious injury. This mycelium was very much like one Mika had installed inside herself and others on the planet Masada before discovering that they went on to destroy their host while producing Jain nodes.

  Cormac again tried to access the local military net, but as yet he possessed no encryption keys for this world, and predators — both ECS and enemy — were swarming in informational space ready to find their way in via unprotected transmission or reception.

  King, I really need access, he sent.

  Still working on it — but they’re rather busy here, King replied.

  ‘Stay alert,’ Cormac told the other three as he clambered aboard the platform. Arach scrambled on next, placing himself over to the right of the suspect pilot. Smith and Scar stepped into the space behind him and Cormac leaned on the rail just to the man’s right.

  ‘When were they introduced?’ Cormac asked.

  The man shrugged. ‘About a month ago,’ he replied. ‘My platoon were implanted with them first and realized the greatest danger soonest.’

  ‘That being?’

  ‘Overconfidence.’ The soldier pulled up on the platform’s joystick and with a steadily increasing hum it rose into the air beside the steel cliff.

  ‘If you could explain?’ suggested Cormac.

  Again the shrug. ‘You take a few hits that would otherwise have put you screaming on the ground, and you begin to think you’re invulnerable, so tend to take more risks. We lost half the platoon the moment the enemy realized how much of a danger we were.’

  ‘I see.’

  After a minute the platform rose above the upper surface of the atmosphere ship. Armoured bunkers containing gun emplacements and hard-field generators had been ranged along this surface. The sky out towards the front looked like the flank of some translucent scaled beast — as Polity hard-fields were made perpetually visible by constant impacts. These fields, these scales, were flicking off intermittently to allow firing from Polity forces: here and there the turquoise stab of a particle beam, the stuttering fire of a pulse-cannon drawing punctuated lines in the sky like those made by incendiary bullets, black missiles needling out on drives bright as welder lights. The pilot slid the platform across to an area where numerous aircars and troop carriers were parked, and descended to land beside them. As the platform crunched down on the ceramal surface, Cormac observed soldiers like their pilot scrambling aboard a troop carrier, which was an armoured vehicle like a floating barge. There were a few dracomen among them, Cormac noted. Once all were aboard the carrier, it rose abruptly into the sky and accelerated towards the wall of hard-fields, two of its scales parting quickly to allow the craft through.

  Here are the encryption keys, King informed him.

  Cormac applied the keys and immediately gained access to the the local military network, where he promptly accessed battle plans, logistics, deployments — the whole panoply of this widespread conflict. He discovered that the AI in command here had at first needed to continually adjust its plan, as the attack by Erebus’s forces changed tack, slotting it all together with as little waste of resources as possible. Then the fight settled into a brute contest of strength, until now with the arrival of reinforcements. A query supplied him with further information about the ‘little doctors’. After being developed aboard Jerusalem the schematics for their construction were then transmitted to AIs all across the Polity. Whether they were employed in battle was down to the AIs concerned. Here the AI, Ramone, and its physical commanders on the ground, had decided to give this new technology a try, but were still undecided about its efficacy. For a start, it needed to be deployed with considerable forethought about its psychological effects on those carrying it. One hazard was overconfidence — just like the man said.

  ‘Stand down,’ he told the others, transmitting to them the details. Arach’s hatches slammed shut, Smith reached out and clicked on the safety catch of his proton carbine, and with a metallic slither Scar replaced a carbide hunting knife in the sheath at his belt.

  A further query revealed that the ones Cormac needed to see here were called Romos and Remes, avatars created by the city AI to take charge of the defence.

  ‘Ramone’s avatars?’ he asked of their pilot.

  The man pointed silently towards one of the bunkers, before vaulting the platform rail and heading over to join a group of soldiers gathered around the next carrier due to leave. Glancing back towards the hammerhead Bertha, Cormac saw that troop carriers were spiralling into the sky. It seemed that defence was now giving way to attack.

  Arach scrambled to the ground, rose up high on his spider legs and gazed intently at the departing craft. Despite the drone being a chromed spider, Cormac could recognize the yearning in its pose. Checking present battle status, he saw that they would soon be following those same carriers out if they were ever going to capture a legate. He stepped from the platform and headed across to the bunker, his team falling in dutifully behind. But how do you successfully capture a legate? No doubt, on facing capture, one of Erebus’s subordinates would automatically try to destroy itself, almost certainly possessing the means to do so internally. So how to stop that in time? The search engines he used presented three possibilities. Firstly a massive EM pulse might do the job, but it might
also scramble any useful information to be garnered. Secondly, an informational attack might work, but first he needed to get through the legate’s defences, and even then the chances of success he roughly estimated at one in twenty. Only the third option seemed remotely viable: instant freezing.

  As he finally approached the armoured door to the bunker, Cormac sent his search engines off again, this time to check on the availability of certain necessary items in the vicinity. The door before him opened and a Golem with blue skin and pupil-less green eyes stepped out. He recognized it as a Golem immediately — he could see its metal bones.

  ‘What the hell are you doing here?’ the figure enquired.

  ‘You’ve not been informed?’

  ‘No, I heard about your arrival only a few minutes ago, from the King of Hearts’ Obviously one of Ramone’s Golem avatars, the blue one paused and gazed up at the sky, where it now seemed the gods were igniting flashbulbs. He continued, ‘I can’t see what possible purpose is served by—’

  There came a thunderous crash, even louder than the constant racket of the ongoing battle. Cormac spun round to the source of the sound and saw a fire trail stabbing down into the centre of the nearby city. Then abruptly numerous explosions bloomed amid the tall buildings, some of which began toppling. Cormac instantly recognized this as an orbital rail-gun strike. Through his gridlink he found chaos on the military net — servers crashing and bandwidth shrinking to choke off information flow — but he picked up enough to find out that several wormships had made a suicide run on the planet just to deliver that blow, and had subsequently been destroyed by the Cable Hogue.

  ‘We are bereft,’ said the blue avatar.

  Cormac turned back to see him down on one knee.

  ‘What?’

  That strike, King supplied. It took out the planetary AI, Ramone.