by Neal Asher
‘Erm…’ The man blinked and tilted his head, obviously accessing data through his aug. ‘Definitely no other damage…’
‘Just answer the question please.’
Sensation abruptly returned to the rest of Cormac’s body, and he slowly eased himself upright.
‘I’m saying it’s offline because the bio-haematic power supply is disconnected and all the laminar storage within the link itself is dead.’
‘Thank you,’ said Cormac, now looking round for his envirosuit. Unable to locate it, he decided it had probably been cut away from his body and discarded. However, he did see other familiar items lying on a steel tray on a work surface over to one side: Shuriken, his thin-gun and some spare clips, that Europan dart.
‘Are you sure you’re all right?’
‘Certainly.’
‘I’ve got other patients—’
‘Please, don’t let me detain you then.’
The surgeon gestured towards the door. ‘One of your—’
‘Yes, I know,’ said Cormac. ‘Hubbert Smith is waiting outside.’
His expression even more puzzled, the medic departed. Cormac lay back again and considered what he had just been told. Either the gridlink was still on in some way that seemed to defy possibility, or else he was gridlinking without the intervention of the technology implanted in his skull. And either this was a new occurrence or the AIs had been lying to him. He was rather uncomfortable with this second option, not because he thought AIs only ever told the truth but because he immediately felt it was the most likely answer. So, not only was he able to perceive things in a way theoretically impossible for a human being, he was even gridlinking bare-brained.
Then full memory returned: And I can move through underspace.
He shuddered, suddenly also remembering his mentor Horace Blegg’s last days while he and Cormac were being pursued by Erebus’s biomechs. Blegg had believed himself able to step through U-space, for that was how, apparently, he had escaped the Hiroshima nuclear bomb at the beginning of his incredibly long life. Blegg could also mentally access the AI nets and talk mind-to-mind with AIs. Only at the end had Blegg learned the truth: he was a construct of Earth Central, his memories of stepping through U-space had been falsified to give the impression of continuity — such a U-space jump usually occurring when that construct faced destruction, when its mind was uploaded, edited, then placed in another construct.
Am I just the new Blegg?
This thought had occurred to Cormac before, but really it was pointless speculation of the same kind as that of some people who wondered if their lives were just virtual realities. He must continue living in the belief that his memories were true, else he would despair. And succumbing to the idea that the next time he faced death he would be uploaded and put into a new body would certainly have fatal consequences if he was wrong. He would continue to live to the best of his abilities — that was the only choice.
‘Smith,’ he said quietly, knowing full well that he did not need to shout in order to attract the attention of a machine capable of hearing the impact of snowflakes.
Hubbert Smith opened the door and entered. He had a standard-range envirosuit draped over his arm, and in one hand held a pair of enviroboots and a sealed pack of disposable underclothes.
‘All better now?’ the Golem enquired.
Cormac still felt battered, perhaps more so mentally than physically, but he had felt worse. The repairs performed by the medic and the autodocs would still take a little while to settle. Though most physical injuries could be repaired, breaks in bones and tears in tissue being welded, there was a point beyond which it was better to let the body itself, and whatever suite of personal nanites that body possessed, take over, with the result that no one leapt up in prime condition from a surgical table.
‘Getting there,’ Cormac replied. ‘Scar and Arach?’
Smith shook his head. ‘They’re both back aboard the King of Hearts. Arach is a little dented but otherwise fine. Scar… Scar is in cold storage.’
Cormac just stared at the Golem for a long moment. What was there to say? All humans and Golem working for ECS knew the risks they ran, and could choose not to undertake them. Cormac liked to think that Scar, even though a construct of Dragon’s, had possessed the same choices, though in that respect he could only rely on the assessments scientists like Mika made. But, that aside, he had obviously lost another friend and comrade, and it hurt. He could not help feeling paranoid about how such comrades were continually being stripped away from him, and about how he himself continued to survive — and change. After a moment he turned his thoughts away from such introspection, instead lifting up his hand and studying it, which just like the rest of his body was utterly and aseptically clean. He peered closely at his fingernails, just in case.
Smith said, ‘Don’t worry — we got the sample. It’s been properly analysed, and now search engines are checking ECS records. If she was a Polity citizen, we’ll soon learn her identity.’
Cormac lowered his hand. ‘Remes said something odd just before that shock wave hit us. Apparently we weren’t supposed to be here at all.’
‘Wild goose chase seem to be the right words to apply.’ Smith placed the garments down on the surgical table.
Cormac slid off the table and stood upright, then opened the pack of underclothes and quickly began pulling them on.
‘So who sent us after the goose?’
‘One of Erebus’s agents operating in Jerusalem’s camp, apparently,’ Smith replied, ‘but I don’t know any further details. When we get back to the ship, you’ll be able to talk to the one investigating this.’
Obviously there was still Jain-tech in the area, and therefore com security was still an issue, otherwise Cormac would have been able to connect to the King of Hearts directly from here by using his gridlink — the one that wasn’t supposed to be functioning. He quickly pulled on the envirosuit and boots, then went to gather his meagre belongings. Strapping on Shuriken and pocketing both the gun and the dart, he briefly wondered what such a scarcity of personal possessions said about him.
As they exited the medbay, Cormac noticed his surgeon in a side room with another patient before the door was quickly closed. All that was left of the individual on the surgical table had been a partially cooked torso and a head. Maybe one of those with a ‘little doctor’ inside keeping him alive? Besides the medical staff there were numerous walking wounded here. He spotted a woman with her right arm missing at the elbow, brain-like tissue sealing the stump, indicating that she also contained a little doctor, and before long he realized that thus far he had not seen a single human being on this world without some kind of augmentation — either visible or embedded like those little doctors or a gridlink. Those gridlinked were evident simply by the way they carried themselves, though Cormac could confirm the presence of the hardware by a quick peek inside their skulls.
‘How many others died during our operation?’ he asked.
‘Only fifteen.’
Cormac knew that, in the context of the casualties of the numerous battles taking place across this section of the Line, it was a comparatively small number, but he felt personally responsible for those fifteen. And because their deaths actually hurt him, it also occurred to him that his usefulness as an ECS agent might well be coming to an end. Conscience was all very well, but guilt was merely a hindrance in an occupation where ‘ruthless’ was part of the job description.
They entered an elevator shaft whose very presence demonstrated just how antiquated this atmosphere ship must be and perhaps why it had been recently knocked out of the sky. They glided down three floors without anyone joining them, eventually stepped out into a wide hold whose side wall had been torn out by the crash, and headed outside through the jagged gap. Gazing around at the churned-up ground, Cormac located the King of Hearts and headed towards it, soon mounting its ramp. Within minutes Cormac was standing on the black glass floor of the bridge, with Arach and Hubbert Smith ho
vering a pace behind him. The gap in this line-up that Scar should have filled seemed to exacerbate a sore spot inside Cormac’s skull.
‘I take it there’s someone who wants to speak to me?’ he enquired.
‘That is so,’ replied King.
‘Well, now would be a good time,’ Cormac said flatly, assuming King was playing silly games again.
‘Not everyone can be at your beck and call,’ King replied. ‘Just wait one moment.’
Suitably chastened, Cormac waited, but it was not for long. A line suddenly sliced down to the black glass floor and out of it folded the hologram of a human figure.
Cormac recognized this apparition at once. ‘Azroc,’ he said.
The Golem nodded in acknowledgement.
‘You’re a long way from Coloron,’ Cormac observed.
‘I was on that fleet that went to your rescue, the one that Erebus all but wiped out. You could say that the experience has widened my horizons.’
‘All our horizons have now been widened, though maybe our futures have been consequently shortened,’ Cormac replied. ‘We weren’t supposed to be here?’
‘You were given false orders by an agent of Erebus. The same agent’s remains show without a doubt that it was a product of Jain technology—’
‘And yet it managed to infiltrate the heart of your operation there? I thought we had the means of detecting that technology now.’
‘Active Jain technology can, in most cases, be detected by the nature of the code it uses and the EM output of its nanoscale interactions. However, though this agent was created using Jain technology, it wasn’t actually using the same.’
‘I see, so there could be any number of these… agents among us?’
‘That is so.’
‘Please continue.’
‘Having analysed the infiltrating agent’s files I’ve discovered some quite startling anomalies. For though he was in a position to cause us a great deal of damage, he did not do so.’
‘Waiting to deliver a killer blow, maybe?’
‘Possibly.’
‘You sound unsure.’
‘Even without revealing himself, there were things he could have done that would have resulted in catastrophic failures in our defence, yet the only overt action he took that could have resulted in deaths was to issue you with false orders.’
‘So those false orders prove that my mission was important, and that Erebus wanted to stop me. So did this agent do anything else that’s relevant to me?’
‘It concealed information about the owners of Europan dart guns,’ said Azroc bluntly. ‘The searches have thus far only tracked down and eliminated forty per cent of the guns capable of firing the dart you found. However, something was flagged for immediate attention but concealed by the same agent. It seems two Europan dart guns were sent by a woman on Europa as gifts to her twin sons on Klurhammon.’
‘I presume their files are already on their way to me?’
‘King of Hearts has them, but really all you need to know is their names.’
‘Enlighten me.’
‘The twins’ names are Aladine and Ermoon, while the mother’s name is Ariadne. Their surname, if such it can be called, is Taser 5.’
Even though that particular investigation had passed out of his remit, Cormac still remembered the surname. It was a particularly important one since another bearer of that name had once been an overseer of the Cassius Project. She was a haiman, a murderer and the owner of a Jain node — which made her particularly dangerous.
‘Orlandine Taser 5,’ he recalled. ‘Tell me, was this infiltrating agent also hampering those trying to find her?’
‘Not really,’ Azroc replied. ‘But then they, besides dispersing hunter-killer programs to try and locate her if she ever used the nets, had decided that Orlandine must have fled the Polity.’
‘Had decided?’ Cormac noted.
‘Two thefts within the Polity were also flagged and also concealed. The infiltrator created an HK program to hunt down and erase any further information pertaining to them.’
‘Thefts?’ Cormac queried.
‘One involved a cargo runcible and the other a mothballed war runcible.’ Azroc winced. ‘And Orlandine stole both of them.’
‘You have to be shitting me.’
‘I shit you not.’
‘So you’re telling me she managed to steal a mobile fortress loaded with runcible tech whose purpose was to move entire Polity fleets or throw asteroids at Prador dreadnoughts and, if necessary, to drop moons on Prador-occupied worlds?’ Cormac spoke with polite precision up to the point of saying, ‘Aren’t these fucking things properly guarded?’
‘It was guarded by over twenty veteran war drones, but it seems they now do her bidding.’
Cormac just stood still for a long moment, then turned slightly and glanced over his shoulder to where Arach was crouching.
‘Oh,’ he said. ‘Then I guess Orlandine is only marginally less of a catastrophe in progress than Erebus is.’
‘One could suppose that there is not much of a distinction to make,’ observed Azroc.
‘Yes.’ Cormac could see it now. All this mayhem here on the border was just distraction. Erebus’s infiltrator was concealing the real attack involving this Orlandine and her war runcible. ‘Do we have any idea where this war runcible is now?’
‘We have no idea at all.’
‘Then we need to find it, and fast.’
‘Evidently,’ Azroc replied with dry bitterness.
11
For the duration of the Prador-human war every type of combat was engaged in and every possible weapon employed. A moon was flung from a cargo runcible to destroy a Prador dreadnought, and there was even hand-to-hand fighting between humans and those huge and lethal aliens — usually with messy and unhappy consequences for the humans, it has to be admitted. Terror was a weapon regularly employed by both sides: the Prador inspired it quite naturally by just being themselves, but for the Polity that weapon was the assassin drone. These killers either operated alone or in pairs. Their prime purpose was to infiltrate Prador dreadnoughts, stations and ground bases in order to turn the adults of that breed into ‘crab salad’. Usually they did this in as messy and frightening manner as possible for the aliens: diatomic acid injected into the carapace; complete removal of the carapace and immobilization so the victim would be eaten alive by its own ship lice; immobilization and slow roasting over a fire; or by taking control of the Prador’s method of locomotion — their adults were often devoid of limbs so used AG, reaction jets or maglev to get about — and attaching numerous mines to it, then using it as a weapon against them. The drones were, like most drones of the time, fashioned in the shape of various lethal arthropods and other nasty creatures. They possessed minds as hard and sharp as their outside appearances. With remorseless cruelty they killed thousands of Prador adults, their sum purpose to inspire sufficient terror in the survivors so they would divert resources to defence that would otherwise have been used for attack. It worked too. There’s nothing quite like knowing that something out there wants to slowly saw you into tiny pieces and feed them to your children, to inspire you to double your guard.
- ‘Modern Warfare’ lecture notes from EBS Heinlein
‘Time for you to go, Bludgeon,’ said Orlandine.
The little war drone controlling Heliotrope and its attached cargo runcible merely sent a binary acknowledgement, then the ship threw a flame out behind it and quickly receded from direct view. Once out of the black asteroid field, it would U-jump to the Anulus black hole, but even then Orlandine would maintain the U-space link between the war runcible and Heliotrope, since the weapon and its magazine needed to remain connected.
Now Orlandine turned her attention to the little craft those two wormships had been pursuing. It was still holding off while awaiting her docking instructions, and now she needed to make preparations.
‘Knobbler, send some of your comrades down to Dock Fifteen and make sure t
hey’re ready for trouble.’
‘Already on their way.’
Orlandine checked her internal views and observed the double spider, the scorpion and the hissing cockroach clattering their way through internal corridors to the dock indicated. She scanned them to check what armament they carried and again felt some reservations. The three drones were so thoroughly packed with weapons, munitions, charged-up capacitors and laminar batteries that the accidental detonation of one of them would excise a large portion of the war runcible. She had, on first taking control of the runcible, considered saying something about this to Knobbler, then decided against it. She had to accept that entities as old as these, who had survived the Prador-human war, knew what they were doing.
Through her mycelium spread throughout the war runcible, she quickly shunted energy and other resources to the area around Dock Fifteen. Peering out from that location at the stationary ship, she experienced a moment of horrification on again seeing the legate craft bound underneath it like a sucked-out insect in a spider’s web. She was also extremely wary, since her scans of the vessel were being easily defeated and her informational probes being bounced. She guessed that the voice that had spoken to her belonged to the larger ship’s AI, but she now wondered what his boss might be. It was almost as if a sense of that unknown entity was bleeding back through her scans and probes, with a hint of something dark and powerful.
That other presence aboard the ship worried her, but she needed the information it had obtained. Her first encounter with a wormship — the one that had nearly got her killed and from which she had netted Fiddler Randal — had already demonstrated the dangers of not being completely up to date. She was prepared therefore to risk this ship docking if whatever was aboard could supply her with the required camouflage.
Orlandine again opened her channel to the hovering vessel.
‘What’s your name?’
