by Neal Asher
Stone was now ten metres ahead and somewhat to the left of Bonehead, and consequently much closer to the chamber when its roof peeled up like the top of a sardine can and the droon reared up out of it.
‘Oh fuck,’ was the extent of Tergal’s reaction. Stone flung out its sensory head then abruptly retracted it. The hog began to turn as the droon opened its numerous orange mouths, its head extending as it charged itself with mucal acid. Thorn grabbed Tergal around the waist, heaved him up, then hurled the pair of them sideways off the hog. A sheet of mucus splashed behind them just as they went over the edge and hit the ground. As he released the youth and rolled, Thorn glimpsed the sand hog stumbling back and collapsing on its rear, its two necks and its legs seemingly entangled. Thorn was already on his feet, dragging Tergal upright into a stumbling run, as the hog issued a siren scream and began to boil, its limbs shaking as liquid bubbled from the joints and both heads thrashing from side to side.
‘No… Oh no…’
As Tergal stumbled to a halt, gazing back in horror, Thorn caught him by the shoulder and shoved him onwards. The droon was already stepping out of the VR chamber, its head tracking towards them. Automatic fire crackled as Anderson emptied a clip into the monster, but he might as well have thrown gravel at a rhinoceros. It was the fourth-stage sleer materializing to one side of the droon that gave them time to get to Bonehead and mount, before the old hog turned and fled back towards the draconic devastation. Clinging on beside Tergal and Arden, Thorn observed the illusory sleer flicker out of existence, and the droon turning to watch them go before bowing its head down to the steaming remains of Stone.
* * * *
With the supreme confidence of a most lethal attack ship, Sword accelerated towards Dragon, weapons carousels turning as the AI made its armament selections like some chocolate connoisseur in a Belgian sweet shop. It was aware that Dragon was dangerous and that its previous incarnations had caused huge destruction of human installations and ships—the obliteration of the laser arrays at Masada being ample demonstration. But other AIs had already evaluated these actions, and Sword knew that unless this particular sphere possessed substantially more firepower than its previous incarnations, the AI attack ship would easily be able to flatten it.
‘Interesting move,’ Sword sent, ‘but that’s got to have burnt out a U-space engine, so I have to wonder how many more you have left.’
‘I don’t want this fight,’ Dragon replied, dragging itself across the surface of space to avoid the kinetic missiles fired at it. Beyond it, the blackness filled with multiple flares as many of those missiles impacted an evanescent debris ring.
‘Isn’t that always the protest of those who know they are going to lose?’
Sword tracked the Dragon sphere as it rolled into silhouette in front of the ice giant. How the creature was managing to propel itself was a mystery. Certain spacial anomalies surrounded it, and this made Sword a little more cautious. That caution increased when, precisely at that moment, the communication from King reached it, and it learnt that Reaper was gone.
‘Damn you, Jack.’ Sword spat out this communication on a tight beam towards the gas giant.
‘It’s a dangerous universe,’ Dragon then sent. ‘Don’t overplay your hand.’
There was no way the alien entity could break encoded radio transmissions so quickly. Almost in a fit of pique, Sword fired gas lasers and then masers at Dragon, and followed these with a cloud of smart missiles. The laser strike flashed away on a mirrored hard-field, while the maser strike just seemed to expand that same field without reaching the surface of Dragon.
In answer to the missiles, Dragon belched from some orifice a swarm of small black spheres. When, some minutes later, the two clouds of devices met, it seemed that a small thunderstorm ensued.
Passing over this, the Excalibur pursued Dragon through one orbit of the ice giant, then back out into space towards the USER. As it did so it observed the ripples spreading across the surface of its opponent, and knew the entity was preparing for a massive full-spectrum laser strike. They were too far yet from the USER for such a strike to be effective there, so it must be intended for the Excalibur itself. Preparing its hard-fields and the heat-dispersing lasers linked to the superconducting mesh in its hull, Sword almost felt pity for the creature. It obviously had no idea what it was up against.
‘Arrogance is its own reward,’ Dragon sent.
Abruptly, a single large wave spread out over the surface of the Dragon sphere—but did not stop there. It propagated, impossibly, out into vacuum. In a nanosecond, Sword realized it should have been aware of this possibility, for it was inherent in the device the AI ship guarded. This was USER technology.
Sword began firing all its missiles at once, while diverting energy to structural integrity fields. Missiles and wave met, and the missiles died like bugs under some huge roller. When the gravity wave hit Sword, it was like a tsunami slamming into a wooden sailing ship pinned against a shore. The Excalibur distorted, broke, and Sword screamed over the ether. Inside the AI ship, antimatter escaped its containment in missiles the ship had not managed to eject. This was the real reason the AI had tried to fire all its missiles, as no containment was proof against gravitational breach. It had not succeeded in time. The subsequent explosions did not leave much in the way of debris, and what it did leave rapidly dispersed.
‘Hubris,’ Dragon commented, then tittered to itself.
The wave continued spreading out, its strength diminishing, but it was still strong enough when it hit the USER. The towing ship just fragmented and blew away, while the USER itself distorted but held its relative position as if someone had nailed it to vacuum. Then its singularity containment failed. The device glowed briefly and disappeared in an x-ray flash, as hundreds of tonnes of metal and composite collapsed down to an infinitely small point.
Now observing the gravitational terrain, Dragon watched the singularity begin its long slow fall towards the ice giant. The entity then made some calculations, and noted that the damage had only just begun—the real spectacular stuff would occur in about fifty solstan years as the giant planet started to collapse in on itself. Dragon gave a titanic shrug and wished there was somewhere to run, but with so many U-space data streams still shut down, even after it had knocked out the USER, the entity realized it was in a Polity trap—that there were others USERs out there. Then, turning its attention back towards the planet, re-establishing that communications link, it uploaded recent data from thousands of small lizard brains. Data from one of those had Dragon accelerating back towards Cull, as inside itself it initiated repairs to its own U-space drives which had been damaged in its first escape from Sword.
The entity worked with some urgency—one Skellor was quite enough.
22
I can, should this flesh-and-blood body fail me, be loaded to silicon or crystal or mag-carbon, or even to a Q-puter (though in the last case I would probably fit inside something the size of a skin cell). I do have a memplant, and keep my account at Soulbank up to date. I could be loaded into a speed-grown blank clone of myself, the body of a mind-wiped criminal or suicide, a Golem or some other android, or a gen-factored body of my own design (had I the wealth). I am practically immortal and still I cannot quite grasp what that means. I could read these words a century down the line. I could read them in a million years… No, it still is not clear to me. Is it time to upgrade myself and move beyond mere humanity, perhaps become the guiding AI of some ship or even a runcible Al? Maybe, for those of us who can bear immortality, this is the path we must take. Is this what our AI children, who are also our brothers and gods, are waiting for?
— Anonymous
Shattered bodies lay below the edge of the platform. Fethan recognized the unmistakable contortion and surrounding spatter pattern, and knew they had died by falling from above. Without much hope of finding any of them alive, he moved over and checked for a few pulses. It was then that he saw the aug creatures struggling to pull free, their
legs straining to draw their tubules from the side of these people’s heads. Moving away, he assumed they were abandoning corpses to find other prey, until a man came stumbling from the ruination, groaning in agony as his aug creature also tried to pull itself free.
The man staggered over to the corpses, dragged the naked body of a woman to him and cradled her head in his lap. He became silent then, rocking back and forth and stroking her misshapen forehead. Fethan noted the liquid smear of brain running from her ear, wanted to help but knew he had nothing to offer. Returning his attention to the man’s aug, he saw that it had almost pulled loose—coils of bloody tubules now between itself and the man’s head. But it seemed that advantaged it nothing, for it began to vibrate and turn grey, then hopped away from its perch and folded up in the dust, dying. Now, Fethan heard the sound of a hailstorm, which he had learned was a common weather condition here.
But this was no hail. Turning, he saw aug creatures, grey and dying in their thousands, falling from the underside of the city platform. He wondered how this particular copy of the kill program felt about destroying its own environment.
I have no urge to self-preservation beyond my task, the master copy replied after he internalized the question.
But surely your task was to kill Skellor?
It is, but when that ceases to be possible, my imperatives change.
You can’t get to Skellor… I mean this copy of you can’t get to him.
Correct. Skellor has disconnected from the network.
You communicate with your copy, then?
Yes.
What are those imperatives now, down here?
For my copy: to save human lives by destroying this enslaving network—Skellor had programmed self-destruction for its human nodes.
That figures.
Fethan noticed that the man was now looking up at him. What must he be seeing? Just someone standing muttering to himself and gazing into the distance? He walked over.
‘Who are you?’ the man croaked.
‘My name’s Fethan.’
‘You… you are not from around here.’
‘No.’
The man was staring with suspicion at Fethan’s chameleon-cloth environment suit while easing the head of his loved one from his lap.
Fethan was old, in the terms of this place, and he knew how to read people. ‘I’m not here to cause harm, but to help,’ he said. ‘It’s because of me, these things’ — he nudged an aug creature with the toe of his boot—‘are now dying.’
The man stood up. ‘Where is the one who caused this?’
‘I don’t know. On the run probably, but I don’t think he’ll get far. Tell me, what are you called?’
The man slumped, suddenly very weary. ‘Tanaquil, Chief Metallier of this city,’ he said, then, ‘Dragon warned us, but how could we believe… this?’
‘Yes, it always comes hard,’ Fethan replied.
* * * *
The droon was still visible through the haze, its body distended by its feasting on Stone so that bare flesh, the colour of custard, showed between ribs of carapace. The thing was evil, Tergal decided. It had killed his stepfather’s sand hog and had no reason to come after them now, having fed so well. The whole situation just wasn’t fair. Tergal angrily scrubbed at a self-pitying tear, then turned his attention to the new madness ahead.
‘We followed him out,’ Anderson told the man Thorn. The knight then turned to Arden and said, ‘That case down by your feet, could you open it?’
The woman did as instructed, passing up the sections of bonded amanis-fibre pole to Anderson. The knight, it would seem, was truly mad. The droon would turn him into smoking slurry before he even got a chance to get close.
Thorn said, ‘That weapon, surely you can’t mean to use it against chummy back there?’ He stabbed a thumb over his shoulder. ‘Or is it for Mr Crane here?’ At Anderson’s puzzled expression, Thorn added, ‘The big brass bastard is called Mr Crane.’
‘What’s the other thing, then?’ asked Anderson.
‘That’s a vulture,’ Thorn replied. ‘Not one of this planet’s usual life forms, I take it?’
‘Not as far as I know,’ replied Anderson, concentrating on the task in hand.
Why this Mr Crane was squatting beside what looked like a big block of glass, playing some game with a vulture, Tergal had no idea. But looking around at the level arena the two were playing in made him realize why Anderson had chosen this spot.
‘Wouldn’t it be better if we just kept going?’ Tergal asked. ‘Maybe the brass man…’
Anderson frowned at him. ‘I fight my own battles.’ The knight turned once again to Arden. ‘Would the power from my fence batteries operate your holocapture device?’
‘It would,’ Arden replied, ‘but they would be drained very quickly. How long would you want it to operate for?’
‘Long enough to drain our pursuer.’
‘We could just keep running,’ Tergal suggested again.
Thorn observed, ‘Feeding has distended its body and revealed gaps in its carapace. Using your carbine I could probably cause it some real damage.’
Arden said, ‘That seems a shame, since they are rare, but it won’t stop coming after us, and perhaps it would be better to face it in daylight. I can run the holocaptures for long enough.’
Tergal made no more suggestions. No one seemed to be listening to him. Then abruptly Anderson turned to him. ‘You can leave us, if that’s what you want.’
Tergal took a ragged breath. ‘I might be frightened, but I’m not stupid.’
* * * *
As he laboured up from hydrogen seas, through storms and chemical maelstroms and acidic hurricanes that would have flayed a human in an eyeblink, Jack realized he was not going to make it. The King of Hearts was bearing down on him just as fast as it could. It had probably used less than ten per cent of its munitions and was also probably very pissed off- though for an attack ship AI that was a normal state of mind. Another scoop run to generate a beam sufficient to destroy the opposing ship was out of the question: the tidal forces exerted by the gas giant would rip apart Jack’s severely damaged structure before he managed a sufficient lase of the surrounding gas to strike at the King of Hearts. Perhaps, Jack idly pondered, now was the time to just turn everything off and let the planet take him. Surely that was preferable to giving King the satisfaction of frying him with masers?
‘Oh no you damned well don’t,’ snapped Aphran. ‘There’s two of us living in here.’
‘I’m open to suggestions,’ Jack said.
‘My first one would be that you don’t give up,’ she offered.
With almost a desultory shrug, Jack began to inventory his weapons. He was still loaded for bear, but that was not the problem: his structure would not be able to bear much more of a load. A near miss with an imploder, or any other CTD for that matter, and he knew he would start to come apart like wet tissue paper. Nevertheless…
‘Oh, I wasn’t really going to give up. That was just an idle speculation. I do have a plan ready.’
‘And what is it?’
‘Time and escape velocity. I just need to give King something to think about.’
An hour later a pillar of flame ignited beside the Jack Ketch as the King of Hearts probed the gas giant’s atmosphere with a megajoule coloured laser, probably only to illuminate the whole area so as to precisely locate its prey.
‘Ah, there you are, Jack,’ King sent.
Jack immediately changed course, but without losing height. This time a tower of incandescence exploded into existence, and the shock wave slapped against the Jack Ketch. Turning his carousels, Jack began selecting and firing missile after missile. Any other weapons were presently out of the question, as they required power from Jack’s own systems to fire, whereas he could launch the missiles under their own power (though in different circumstances he would have launched many of them by rail gun). The swarm rose out of the gas clouds, black in silhouette and poised on achin
gly bright white fusion flames: strange birds in this bizarre sky.
But before they even made it out into open space masers and lasers began picking them off. Some dodged, putting cloud masses between themselves and their eventual target, but in the end they must come out and make themselves more vulnerable. Shooting fish in a barrel was the expression Jack dredged from his memory banks, feeling a bit like a whale. He sent the signal then for the remaining missiles to detonate long before they reached the King of Hearts.
‘Is this part of the plan?’ Aphran asked.
‘Have you no faith?’ Jack countered.
‘I did until I died.’
Jack let that one lie.
Above him, fires burned in the gas giant’s atmosphere, some of them nuclear and with the potential never to extinguish. These concealed Jack from King. Still climbing, Jack tracked the pattern of maser and laser strikes coming through this protective umbrella. Internally, throughout his ascent, he had reattached the ducts from his scoops to his fuel tanks and had been passively taking on hydrogen. Reaching an apex as the umbrella finally began to disperse, he slanted his course tangential to the gas giant, then injected the fuel into the aligned dropshaft he had used as a particle cannon. This time he had no mind to aim the photonic matter at any enemy, just to benefit from the thrust. Under huge acceleration, he shot out from underneath the umbrella, angled slightly down but building up towards escape velocity. He was minutes away from achieving that velocity when he detected small scanning drones in the surrounding area.
