by Neal Asher
* * * *
Erebus could not locate Fiddler Randal, but the attack ship captain was still indefinably there, somewhere, within the massive conglomerate Jain structure that was Erebus’s own body. No matter, for Randal was just an irritation. Erebus now turned its attention to the masses of data coming in from the forty fleets of attacking wormships, and from sensors and agents positioned throughout the Polity, some even having penetrated as far as the Sol system.
Twelve of those forty groups of fifty wormships had encountered heavy resistance and so would not achieve their apparent goal of destroying or taking over the worlds they had targeted. This did not matter, because the three crucial worlds would fall — the three worlds that acted almost like fuses in the section of the runcible network extending into the nearby quadrant of the Polity. With the linkage of those three worlds into the runcible network broken, Polity AIs would not be able to instantly shut down that same section of the network. It would take them three seconds longer, and that would be enough.
Earth Central Security had apparently responded in the only logical way to this attack, by sending sufficient forces to counter it, yet holding other forces in reserve in the quadrant of the Polity behind that attack should it be a feint. It was all exactly as Erebus required, for those reserve forces, those ECS fleets, were easy to locate in the limited number of solar systems with sufficient industrialization to support them. Every one of them was much larger than the fleet Erebus had first defeated, but no problem there, for Erebus had no intention of confronting them.
Chevron? Erebus enquired, using security measures far in excess of those it used even when communicating with its closest parts.
This particular part of itself Erebus allowed a great deal of self-determination, even its own name. Chevron had been a female-emulating Golem aboard the ship once named Trafalgar, whose limited body had once been Erebus’s own. Chevron had been a loyal ally from the beginning, her indifference to the human race growing throughout the war against the Prador to the point where human life had come to mean nothing to her. In its way such an attitude had been a useful trait during that war, for she had been quite prepared to sacrifice as many human troops as necessary to get the job done. However, in the war’s closing years her indifference had turned into utter contempt, and allowing human beings to die had turned into a hobby where she actively sought to get them killed or else slaughtered them herself if she could get away with it. She had subsequently chosen to depart the Polity aboard the Trafalgar because ECS investigators were getting too close to her, and the idea of an AI melding into something else seemed to her a way to escape what she had become, which, oddly, she felt to be all too human. Now she was a part of Erebus, but one it treated with reserve and caution, like a human might treat its own tendency to excess in deviancy or violence.
I am here, Chevron indicated by transmitting a simple response code.
With a U-space link now established to Chevron via her vessel, Erebus first surveilled the vessel’s location. It was currently down in the shallows of an orange sea whose waters were heavily laden with iron salts. Her ship, a flat segmented grub a quarter of a mile long, had piggybacked to this world’s orbit in the U-field of a large freighter, and then covered its descent using chameleonware. It could not have done so now, what with the security measures presently in place, for the freighter’s mass discrepancy — the difference between its registered mass and its actual mass inclusive of Chevron’s vessel — would have been quickly detected, as would the difficult-to-conceal gravity phenomena associated with an anti-gravity descent. But, then, Chevron had arrived on this world called Xanadu almost five years ago. She had landed before Skellor found his Jain node, before a giant arcology on a world called Coloron had been destroyed to prevent the spread of Jain-tech from yet another node, during a time when Polity AIs were ostensibly only just waking up to the possibility of a major threat to their rule.
Erebus began running checks throughout the vessel, and saw that the complex factory housed inside it had completed eighteen thermonuclear imploders. The ship was still drawing in seawater and separating out needed elements to construct the complex components of each device. Jain roots, piercing two miles deep below the sea floor, were working their way along a seam of pitchblende, from which they were busy extracting uranium dioxide. Further refining of that material took place within the ship itself so the isotopes were separated out. Only uranium 238 — after undergoing neutron bombardment to convert it into plutonium 239 — and uranium 235 were suitable for Erebus’s purpose here; both of them being fissionable materials. Out of preference, Erebus would have used antimatter, as employed in Polity CTD imploders, but even the excellent chameleonware aboard this vessel could not have concealed such a large quantity of that substance. No matter, for the effect would be the same.
Update, Erebus instructed, shifting a portion of its attention to ride the murderous Golem’s senses.
Chevron wore the external human appearance of an elfin blue-eyed blonde — a façade that showed nothing of the dense and complex nano-technology that packed her body from head to foot. She was sitting on the balcony of her luxury apartment in the Columbus Tower. Though it overlooked one of Xanadu’s major cities, more importantly for her, it overlooked the largest runcible facility on Xanadu: a labyrinth of geodesic domes between interconnecting lounges and halls designed to accommodate the huge numbers of people arriving and departing.
The desired update came through as an information packet which Erebus opened in processing space secure even from most of itself. Upon her arrival on this world, Chevron had established herself with the local separatist organisation and quickly worked her way up through its ranks by using abilities an order of magnitude above those possessed by anyone else within it. She had also murdered numerous rivals in interesting and extremely painful ways. She hadn’t needed to, but that was Chevron. Now she was indisputably their leader.
Here on Xanadu Chevron now controlled over two thousand separatists, out of which she had selected five hundred for this mission. They had been training for two years and were armed with weapons manufactured by her own ship: assault rifles and automatic handguns, missile launchers and high explosives. These weapons were all created by Jain-tech, but any such tech inside them was now dead, so it would not give off the kind of signals Polity AIs were constantly on the lookout for. Energy weapons too would have been detected, since no matter what you did with the structure of these, they still needed a power supply that could easily be spotted. Hence her need to employ such anachronistic weapons.
The assault rifles were a perfect example: they folded up, and scan would reveal them as no more than deactivated replicas. Opening them out again would make numerous essential connections. The apparently solid metal inside their barrels would melt and void itself, the neutral propellant inside the bullets contained in their clips would undergo a chemical transformation and be ready to fire in moments. Other weapons also bore an initially harmless appearance and could be activated just as quickly. There were bottles of beer that transformed into grenades containing a potent liquid explosive; an old-style drug injector that turned into an automatic handgun, its drug ampoules transforming readily into bullets; and a crate containing large discs of an amberlike resin — a natural product of this world — that each turned into a planar explosive capable of ripping through ceramal armour.
‘They’ll all die, of course,’ Chevron observed, speaking out loud.
‘And that is a problem to you?’ Erebus wondered, using human speech at the same slow rate while checking through the Golem’s mind on every level below that of their communication.
Chevron shrugged. ‘Security is very tight. At one time you could carry personal armament if you chose to. Even that is no longer allowed.’
Ah. Erebus saw what was bothering Chevron: the humans might all die too quickly. Erebus withdrew from full connection, returning to communication by data transfer.
This is not a problem. The runc
ible AI will see that though the attack was very professional, its faults were utterly human, and therefore ascribe it merely to a separatist source. You will have your time.
‘And when will I have that time?’ Again Chevron spoke out loud. This anthropoid tendency did not worry Erebus. Chevron had stranger habits.
When three particular runcible installations have ceased to exist. And that will have occurred within fifty hours.
‘My people have open bookings, are all located within the vicinity, and are all prepared.’
Not wanting to maintain a U-space link over so great a distance longer than necessary, Erebus now withdrew totally. Chevron was ready and would do what was required once the time was right. Erebus returned its attention to the attack along the Polity border.
One of the runcible worlds needing to be shut down was now out of the equation. At the cost of twelve wormships deployed to divert fire from a massive Polity dreadnought, another six had managed to make a run on the world called Ramone and slam a one-ton rail-gun missile straight down into the runcible complex in its capital city of Transheim, thereby taking out the planetary AI. The six ships had then been destroyed by the same massive dreadnought. Erebus recognized the Cable Hogue and felt a surge of what it could only describe as nostalgia. For in another age Erebus had fought beside that same ship against the Prador.
It would not take long for a new planetary AI to be initiated on Ramone, but it would take much longer to reinstate connections to the massive geothermal power stations buried under the continent on which the city of Transheim sat — stations that provided a vast amount of energy for operating the runcible network.
There were numerous runcibles on an oceanic world called Prometheus, but fifteen of them were notably different from the rest. Before that particular world had been colonized by the Polity, all its surface water had been frozen. Massive heat sinks deep under the ice, connected by superconducting cables to fifteen sets of oversized runcible buffers, had eventually thawed out the ice, and now, when there were abrupt drops in runcible traffic or, in some cases, surges of traffic in particular directions within the same quadrant, excess energy needed to be bled away. When that happened, whole oceans on Prometheus sometimes heated up by a few degrees.
Prometheus was occupied by amphidapt humans, their population level exploding from the start. They lived in undersea cities or inhabited the few island chains. Four of the fifteen runcibles had been located on the islands, but three of them were now gone, and the islands themselves now looked as if they had turned volcanic. Four of the undersea runcibles were gone as well after rail-gun missiles had punched down to strike them in the depths. It would not be long before the remainder were knocked out too, since the fifteen runcibles had mostly been located in areas of low population density, while the Polity AIs had concentrated their defences over the major cities. Remiss of them, though an understandable miscalculation, since all the attacks had been launched against Line worlds of high population. They had thought Erebus’s intent merely to destroy human life.
Erebus had yet to initiate its attack on the two Caldera worlds, for the massive solar collectors and power stations on and about those worlds could easily be adapted for use as weapons. Erebus was here using a different approach, which would reach its resolution within the fifty hours given to Chevron. Once the installations spread around an inner hot planetoid did their job, most of its substance would be blasted towards the Caldera worlds. The destruction wreaked should be extensive enough to knock them both out of the equation too, leaving them no longer able to supplement power usage within the runcible net. The wormships perpetually orbiting the planetoid meanwhile prevented ECS from seeing what was occurring on the surface. At the last moment they would pull away, then follow the debris plume in to finish off any of the power installations remaining. Doubtless the Polity AIs assumed the ships were positioned there to await further orders, and were meanwhile using the time to—
Something wrong.
From numerous different perspectives circling in orbit of the planetoid, Erebus observed a massive explosion erupt between two of the refrigerant-containing spheres. It was clearly an imploder blast: a globe of white fire expanding, then abruptly beginning to contract as the weapon involved generated its temporary massive gravity field. However, since this blast occurred in atmosphere, a shock wave spread out beyond the matter-disrupting hypocentre. It struck the two nearest cooling spheres, rocking and distorting them. Liquid nitrogen poured out of fractures, a fog boiling up to quickly obscure view within the human spectrum.
Was this the start of some attack?
The wormships in orbit began frantically scanning their surroundings for the cause, for any ECS ships would soon reveal themselves when they deployed further weapons. Watching through its thousand eyes, Erebus noticed something else strange occur. The refrigerant was pouring along the pipes towards the next spheres on either side. Upon reaching them, those adjacent spheres in turn released their contents into the next set of pipes — just the flow shock being enough to break the spheres’ internal glass thermos bottles. It was evidently a huge design flaw, and Erebus could blame nothing but itself. The whole strategy was now a write-off for, without the detonation of the rift CTDs, the planetoid wouldn’t…
Like a chain of arc-light diamonds springing into existence, the CTDs began to detonate even though Erebus had sent no signal. But not enough of the spheres had yet released their refrigerant for this final nudge to tear the planetoid in half and eject the mass of debris required. However, this should still be sufficient to cause some major planetary redesign. The surface of the planetoid nearest to the detonations distorted. A continental plate collapsed, creating an unbearable pressure that had to be somehow relieved. It came out of the rift: trillions of tons of magma squirting out at a speed way beyond escape velocity on such a rapidly spinning world. It sprayed round like an equatorial flame-thrower. Erebus realized at once that, however impressive, this blast had ejected too little material too soon, so would prove no more than a nuisance to the Caldera worlds.
‘Oh deary deary me,’ said Fiddler Randal.
‘When I find you,’ said Erebus, replying in the same slow drag of human speech while again applying a huge range of computing resources to track down the source of that damned voice, ‘your suffering will be eternal.’
‘Now, am I getting just a hint here that you might feel a little irked? Perhaps in the future you should get in a few Polity designers to check your stuff over before you try to use it?’
Rage surged through Erebus, through all of Erebus. Worm-ships juddered to a halt wherever they were located. Walls of rod-forms abruptly collapsed. Polity ships, facing imminent destruction, suddenly found their seemingly single-minded opponents distracted, shooting inaccurately, gaps appearing in what had been adamantine defences. Ten seconds later, this anger faded, and the attacks were back on track. Then Erebus saw the danger, a full half-minute after it should have done. And already a full ten seconds too late.
Get out, it ordered the forty-nine wormship captains. Run.
They had all just been sitting there in orbit, gazing down at the approaching firestorm, unable to process what had happened because they shared Erebus’s confusion about the design flaw, and even further paralysed by their master’s anger.
Sluggishly, the ships began breaking orbit, slinging out hard-fields behind them. However, those fields that could stop rail-gun missiles and absorb the blasts from megaton CTDs failed under the load of trying to halt ton upon ton of molten rock travelling at thousands of miles per second. The wormships flickered with bright stars as hard-field generators burned out within them. Molten rock impacted like a tsunami hitting a village of sticks. The ships writhed, shedding burning segments and firing off jets of evaporant to try and cool themselves. Twenty-one of them disintegrated in the first few seconds. Another nine tried dropping into U-space but were too close to the planetoid, and also too close to the mass of magma — within it, in fact. What re
mained of those particular wormships reappeared, turned inside out half a light year away. A further fifteen died within the next few minutes, shedding segments as they expired until there was nothing left to shed. Only four remained, damaged and utterly reduced.
Coming out of shock, Erebus ordered the four to merge, while realizing that Randal’s interruption had been precisely timed, so almost certainly the man had something to do with this. Ignoring Randal’s presence within itself, Erebus rapidly analysed what must have happened: someone had placed that initial CTD; someone had snatched the codes from the rift installations. That same someone must have found a way to penetrate Jain-tech in a way the Polity had yet to manage.
Erebus immediately instigated a code change across its entire composite being, reformatting chameleonware, recognition codes and scanning formats.
There.
The new scanning format picked up a ship moving away under conventional drive hidden by Erebus’s own previous chameleonware and recognition codes. It was some old-style craft with a legate’s vessel bonded underneath. A renegade? Only a fraction of a second after Erebus detected the vessel, it shed the chameleonware and shut down the recognition code signals. This was a taunt: a flagrant display of contempt.
What is this?
Erebus tried to connect, just out of habit, and was surprised when a connection did establish, but not so surprised to neglect to instantly follow with an informational attack. However, the attack just fell into an abyss, then, for the briefest moment, Erebus linked to another mind and found something utterly disconcerting. Here was an entity possessing a mental make-up Erebus simply could not recognize. Where there should have been limits there were none. The order of reality, model, thought and action were interwoven in ways that defied logic. The mind seemed utterly insane to Erebus, yet it was a potent alien madness. Withdrawing immediately, Erebus experienced an unfamiliar emotion, which it took some time to recognize as fear.
