by Neal Asher
"AI… Occam, this is Asselis Mika reporting a malfunction in Cold-sleep Room One." After no response from the intercom set into the control wall, she rushed out into the corridor and tried the intercom there.
"There is no malfunction in Cold-sleep Room One," one of the AI's subminds informed her.
"The Outlinker woman who we recently placed in a coffin there is dead," Mika replied, trying to keep her voice from getting shrill.
"System function return is optimal. There is no problem in Cold-sleep Room One," repeated the sub-mind in a somewhat annoyed tone. Clearly, even though only a submind, it did not like having to point out the obvious to idiots.
"I suggest you send a drone here as fast as you damned well can, because I don't think that rigor mortis and postmortem lividity are particularly healthy symptoms even for someone in cold-sleep! Also, I'm standing out in the corridor at the moment since the com in there does not work either."
"System function return for com is optimal. There is no problem with the com in Cold-sleep Room One. Asselis Mika, do you require medical assistance?"
"I want a direct link with Tomalon or Occam itself," she demanded.
"You have a problem," immediately stated the voice of Tomalon. "Occam is gearing for a full diagnostic check and I have sent Aiden and Cento to assist you."
"Good," said Mika. "I must go back in now to check the other coffins."
"If you do," said the Captain, "do not use your console, as it may be infected."
"You suspect a computer virus," Mika stated.
"Virus or worm, whatever. There are too many safety backups in the cold-sleep control system for it to be anything other than deliberate subversion of programs."
"Murder," muttered Mika, heading back into the room and instantly thinking, like so many of those who have sought to do the best for a patient and failed: How do I tell her son? And there was no one who could answer that question for her, dared she even to ask it.
Every com-unit howled, whether it was mounted on a wall, integrated in a wristcom, or part of the device built inside a Golem's head. Cormac exited his room and broke into a run. Halfway down the corridor he felt something lurch through his body as he passed over a fluxing grav-plate. He immediately halted and stepped over to a nearby handle affixed to the wall and gripped it for support.
"Tomalon? Occam?"
From his wristcom issued a sound that could have been interference but sounded more like a steady keening.
"Aiden? Cento?"
"Online," came the twinned reply.
"What's happening?" he asked.
"All the people in Cold-sleep Room One are dead," replied Aiden flatly.
"Oh God, no…" Tomalon intruded, his voice fading into then out of audibility. Nothing useful there.
"Aiden, get yourself and Mika back up to Medical. I advise you to use the shaft ladders, as the drop-shafts may not be functioning correctly. Do we know who else hasn't gone into cold-sleep yet?"
"There is no one else," replied the Golem.
"Okay." Cormac paused, not wanting to examine too closely what that might mean. "Is Gant still in the Security Area?" he finished.
"He is."
"And still no response from there?"
"None."
"Right, that seems one likely source of our problem. Cento, I want you to join me there."
"Will do," replied Cento. Then, "There is another probable source."
"Yes," replied Cormac, thinking about the millions of tonnes of alien attached to the outside of the ship. "But would Dragon attack like this from such a vulnerable position? It knows that the Occam could turn it to space-borne ash in a few seconds, and anyway every system on that side of the ship is isolated." He believed this was nothing to do with the alien — so it was something else.
"Tomalon?" Cormac asked again.
Again that keening sound, then eventually Tomalon spoke. "They're all dead," he said dully.
"We know that," spat Cormac. "Let's now find out why and prevent any more deaths."
"They are all dead," Tomalon groaned.
"What precisely do you mean?" asked Cormac, suddenly all cold function.
"All of them! All of them!" The voice was Tomalon's and it was also Occam's.
"Do you mean everyone who went into cold-sleep?" It was a question Cormac did not want to ask, but had to.
"Yes," the reply, echoed from intercoms all down the corridor. Almost unconsciously, Cormac reached back with his finger and initiated his shuriken holster. Underneath his sudden frigidity of thought, he felt a ball of anger growing.
"Listen to me carefully, Tomalon. I can understand your and Occam's grief, and feelings of guilt, but you are merely feeding each other's dysfunction. I need you to stabilize ship control and go to maximum internal security alert."
"Initiate Golem?" returned the voice of Tomalon, echoed a fraction of a second later by the voice of Occam.
"No. With this level of subversion we cannot guarantee that they won't be under someone else's control. They are just as much in storage as the people in cold-sleep. Get your drones searching the ship, especially in and around the Security Area. I'll be there soon."
"I… will," the Captain managed.
Now Cormac altered settings on his wristcom and opened a channel that had been isolated for this single purpose.
"Dragon?"
For a long moment there was no reply, then a grudging, "Yes."
"Are you attacking us?" he asked.
There came a roaring, as from a vast crowd-filled auditorium in response to some momentous event. "I am legion," Dragon replied, as this sound slowly died.
"If you do not give direct answers to direct questions, I will send the code to detonate the CTD that presently sits between you and this ship. Perhaps you would survive the blast, but I think it unlikely you would survive being shoved out of the underspace field and being smeared across a few light years."
"I am not attacking. I cannot attack," Dragon immediately replied.
Cormac considered that: how easily it could be a lie. With his finger poised over his wristcom he still considered sending the code that would detonate the CTD, as even if Dragon was not the source of the present danger it would be best to detonate to curtail future dangers. The creature's next words stopped him, however.
"I can see it," said Dragon.
"What can you see?"
"I can see the enemy. It is on your ship and it will take your ship. It is what it does and it is what it is."
"This enemy, what is it?"
"Ancient," said Dragon. "The eater. The body that continues to kill and consume after its mind is burnt. You must return to realspace. I must leave this ship."
"You know your words are opaque to me," said Cormac. "Get pellucid or you'll be leaving this ship in pieces."
"You usually call it 'the Jain', and assume you talk of a dead race of individuals," Dragon replied.
It was all Cormac needed to now understand what was happening.
Skellor.
How so very confident they had been in their superiority, and how so very sure they had been that he had made his escape. Skellor had not escaped; he had begun, from that very moment when they had nearly captured him, to attack. Cormac switched channels back, as he headed for the nearest drop-shaft, so he could address the others.
"We are really in it now: looks like the source of our problems is Skellor, interfaced — as we know — and now possessing active Jain technology," he said. At the shaft itself, he reached in to test that the field was operating, before punching his destination and stepping beyond the threshold. The gravity field dragged in down through the ship, in a curve, so that — without reference to the floor he had stepped from — there was neither up nor down.
"Where's Scar?" he asked of his wristcom as he had to upend himself to walk out of the drop-shaft near the Security Area.
Through Aiden's ears he heard Mika reply, "Scar is still in Medical. He was helping me with one or two things t
here."
Cormac wondered just what experiments she had been doing on Scar this time, then he spun — with Shuriken ready to throw — as Cento came trotting from the side corridor.
"Firing — down there," said the Golem, pointing down a corridor ahead of him and to Cormac's right. Cormac immediately matched the Golem's pace and, as he ran, he pulled his thin-gun from his jacket pocket. He could not yet hear any shooting, but then he did not have a Golem's superb hearing. Their pace increased when they both heard Gant shout, "Give it up!"
Rounding a corner, they had to leap the corpses of two Separatist prisoners. Beyond these, they came to where someone had blown out the walls, and where insulation and wiring were hanging from gaping holes in the ceiling or blasted up from gaps in the floor. Ahead of them was a figure that turned and showed itself to be Gant, and most certainly Golem: between his neck and his groin, his clothing had been blasted away, as had his syntheflesh covering. The column of his spine and the solid node of his chest, with its rib indentations, were exposed; also shielded optic cables that looked more like water pipes than anything else, and the smooth gleaming movement of his pelvis. Ahead of him, two figures were fleeing, and he was about to give chase; but then he turned, obviously now in direct-line communication with Cento.
"What have you got here?" Cormac asked as he and Cento closed.
"Four prisoners. They already got Cardaff and Shenan — though Christ knows how they got her. Their only weapons are a couple of pulse-rifles and a riot gun. I want to take at least one of them alive, but every time I get close they knock me over with that damned gun." With a degree of puzzlement he looked down at the damage those blasts had done to him.
"Okay," said Cormac. "They won't be able to keep both of you off." He glanced at Cento. "The two of you go in fast and grab at least one of them." Both Gant and Cento moved off at his instructions — accelerating away faster than any man could move. Cormac trotted along behind, scanning about himself as he went, utterly aware that there could be another twenty or so Separatists waiting somewhere in ambush. However, there came no yells and no sudden fusillade. The riot gun blasted once, and there was a brief stuttering of pulse-gun fire, before he came upon the scene of Cento holding a man and woman above the floor by the backs of their necks, disarmed and kicking, and of Gant swearing vehemently and climbing to his feet. Soon Gant had rejoined Cento and taken charge of the woman. As Cormac approached, both Golem were holding their prisoners by the biceps, in front of themselves.
"Where are the rest of you?" Cormac immediately demanded, surprised to note that the two were still fighting against the adamantine grip of the Golem — surely they knew they had no chance to escape, so why did they continue to fight?
"About," said the man, through gritted teeth.
Cormac studied the two of them for a moment. "Where's Skellor?" he asked, but the pair just glared at him with a kind of grim desperation, and still they struggled to escape.
"You know, you can either live or die," Cormac warned them, coldly studying their response.
"We're dead already," the man replied, then went rigid, his eyes rolling up inside his head. Cormac saw that he had bitten right through his bottom lip, and observed the blood running out of his ear as his head slumped to one side. Reaching out he tilted the man's head to more closely observe the Dracocorp aug: the thing appeared deflated — like the desiccated corpse of some strange mollusc. He turned to the woman and saw that she was staring at him with a slightly contemptuous twist to her mouth.
"You survived then," she said. "But that's something I can soon enough change."
"What do you mean?" asked Cormac.
The woman continued, "I told you, on Callorum, that you were over the Line, but being arrogant ECS you just had to push too far. Well, you've pushed me to this, and you'll pay for it."
"Skellor?" Cormac asked.
"Oh yes, I control every one of these prisoners and I'll soon control this ship. It'll be interesting to see what the Polity can do about a subverted AI dreadnought nicely filled with a technology that's about a million years ahead of its own… I'll be seeing you, Ian Cormac."
With that, the woman convulsed in the same way as the man, and died.
Skellor smiled a triumphant smile to himself as he stood before this newest door. It was with some relish that he contemplated getting his hands on that ECS bastard and doing something really drastic: maybe rewiring his nervous system so that everything he felt caused him pain, and rewiring his head so he could never faint or die of shock. But that was for the future, when he had complete control of this ship. Right now, he must get complete control. He turned to the door and placed his hand against the palm lock.
He now found that he did not require a sample of the specific DNA for those doors that were DNA-locked, as he had discovered that the locking codes only keyed to a thousand or so specific and short base sequences. Having discovered the positioning of these sequences in the polynucleotide chains enabled him to create a skeleton key in his right hand — actually altering the genetic structure in the skin of that hand to suit. Of course, this did not work without him sending filaments into the locking system to subvert security routines and listen, like a safebreaker, while he changed over to specific sequences to suit the lock. The door he now stood before opened after a few seconds, and he strode through, quickly followed by Aphran and Danny.
"My God," said Aphran, her dull tone belying the words.
This entire room was a storehouse of Golem. Skellor surveyed the racks of skinless androids for a moment before moving on — these were not for him, not yet.
With Cento and Gant at his back, Cormac stepped into Medical and studied the scene. Mika now stood over Apis, who was slumped in a chair. Scar stood to one side, watching the boy intently — perhaps now learning more about human grief than he had ever known before. When the boy looked up, Cormac met his gaze for a moment then turned away. He could offer him no comfort: the boy's mother was dead — murdered by Skellor almost by default, while the man had been killing five hundred other people aboard this ship.
Cormac switched his gaze to the ceiling. "Tomalon, are you listening in?" he asked.
"I hear you," replied the familiar grating voice that was an amalgam of both Tomalon and Occam.
"Okay, I want you to use all the subminds and stored personalities at your disposal to initiate those of the ship's Golem you consider safe. How quickly can you do that, and how many can you provide us with?"
"I can have all the Golem with you in one hour — they have not been subverted. From the subminds and personalities I have, I can run as many copies as required."
Cormac glanced at the two Sparkind Golem. "Do you still have copies of Aiden and Cento?"
"I do."
"Run copies from them: they're Sparkind so they'll probably be more useful in this situation than technicians or researchers."
"Understood."
"What about Skellor: any sign of him?"
"None."
"The escaped prisoners?"
"I have located fifteen of them, and have that matter under control."
Cormac now turned his attention to those gathered in the room with him.
It was like a raw bloody wound in his side, where part of his flesh had been excised, but neither that, not the damage to Occam, nor the excision and destruction of a whole internal system, caused him the greatest pain. That was caused by guilt. They had been his responsibility. Five hundred human beings had given themselves over to his care and his infallibility, and now they were all dead. Tomalon had screamed and raged earlier, but the cold machinery of the bridge pod sucked away his cries, and they were as ineffectual as the dead themselves. Grief was not the answer: vengeance was. While, with one facet of himself and Occam combined, he watched Cormac's briefing, he hunted with the rest of himself.
The four he'd located hiding in hold LS-45 had not moved, and shortly the high-speed surveillance drones would reach them. Tomalon considered also sending the hul
l-repair robot from LS-33, but a diagnostic probe revealed that it had discharged its laminar batteries. Looking through the same robot's two normal and two tracking eyes, he saw through the clearing smoke that the two Separatists were most definitely dead: teeth broken and internal organs shattered, skin blistered where it was not charred. He'd known that, during the long game of hide-and-seek, the two would at some point make the mistake of trying to get past the slow-moving robot, not realizing that though the robot was slow, the wire-feed to its seam-welder was not. It had electrocuted them both when they made that mistake.
The drones were nearly there now. Another thirty seconds would see the four Separatists in LS-45 dealt with. Though shaped like arrowheads, the drones had no sharp edges, but that was of no consequence when they could accelerate to Mach II within only a few tens of metres.
With tears running from his whitened eyes Tomalon now turned his attention to the nine escaped prisoners he had located in LS-26. Four of them were in an outer hold space that possessed an external hatch. They'd panicked when he'd shut them in, but they carried nothing with them they could use to cut through the ceramal door. Their five fellows were coming to their aid with all speed — obviously summoned via the Dracocorp augs they all wore — but it seemed unlikely they would get there before the second hull-repair robot, which was trundling round the hull, reached the hatch. With a kind of horrible glee, Tomalon felt the Occam part of himself calculating vectors from the four — trying to work out which of them would first be sucked out of the fifteen-centimetre-square hatch.
