by Neal Asher
‘I am an orphan and have never been able to trace my family. I don’t even know if they are alive. It’s why I take such an interest in other people’s families, and don’t quite understand the lack of interest I often encounter.’
Cormac shrugged and stood.
‘Should I leave now?’ she asked.
He walked over to the drinks cabinet, reflecting that he still could not quite get used to the luxury this vessel provided. Fashioned of something as near to old oak as made no difference, the cabinet was supplied with all types of glasses, a selection of drinks in glass and ceramic bottles, and even contained an ice machine plumbed into the wall. It also possessed a programmable drinks maker concealed behind the lower wooden doors, which was operable by a touch-console inset in the glass top. Via chrome spigots this could provide anything from hot coffee to yak-buttered tea.
‘I would like you to stay,’ he said, picking up two brandy glasses cut from manufactured emerald—probably made aboard this ship. ‘Brandy?’
‘Please.’
He uncapped a bottle, poured, turned with the two glasses to find her standing facing him. She took her glass, sipped, stepped in close to grip the front of his shirt in one hand and pulled his face down into a kiss. With her pressed up against him, he suddenly became much more aware of her as something more than Mika in Medical, Mika explaining Jain tech, cell-welding wounds, and dissecting alien flesh. She stepped back, looking almost angry. He sipped his drink.
‘Don’t you pull away now,’ she warned.
He pursed his lips, turned and deposited his glass back on the cabinet. ‘It seems I have to take you out of that neat little box in my mind now and reassess you.’
‘I’ve got a better idea,’ she said, stepping past him to place her glass down beside his. ‘Let’s just cut all the cerebral crap and get physical. You can do a reassessment afterwards, maybe build some programs to analyse the Mika pheno…’
He slid the back of his hand down her stomach, pushed his fingers into the top of the loose slacks she wore, pulled her close and kissed her hard to shut her up, then towed her behind him towards the sofa. By the sofa she broke away from him, slid a thumb into the stick-seam of her slacks, slid them down, kicked her way out of them.
‘Get undressed and lie down,’ she ordered.
Cormac found no problem in obeying this authority figure. She wore no underwear and was quickly astride him, though still wearing her loose oriental top. Grabbing his penis she slid her hand up and down—now I’m in charge. After a moment she shuffled forwards and, easing herself down with a hissing exhalation, began gently to revolve her hips. He closed his eyes, tried to remember the last time he’d let anyone get this close—so many hurried sexual encounters organized when they could be fitted into his schedule, last time on Elysium while he awaited the end of the quarantine imposed there; the rest of the time using drugs to repress the need, control it, like he controlled every other aspect of himself.
‘Don’t you dare come,’ she ordered, stripping off her top, ‘not yet.’
‘Would you like to tie me down to this sofa?’ he joked.
‘Not right now,’ she replied, ‘I hardly know you well enough for that.’
Cormac laughed, then felt shocked—wondering when was the last time that had happened too.
* * * *
Thorn brought the AG platform down opposite a burnt-out shopping centre and eased it in over a tangle of ceramal beams flaked and distorted by the heat. Twelve dracomen occupied this platform with him, while Scar and eight others occupied the platform immediately behind. He looked around him. The chainglass windows of the shops remained intact, but were blackened from the inside. Burnt bodies lay on quartz paving, black and curled foetal. A low-walled garden, running down the centre of the shopping mall, still smouldered—all the smaller plants incinerated, though jagged cores of cycads still stood. He swung his platform over to the right of this garden, while Scar took his to the other side.
‘Okay,’ Thorn spoke into his comlink, ‘we’ll land up at the end here and see what we can find. Scar, have your people spread out and cover the landing area—not too far mind, we might have to get out of here fast.’
At the end of the mall stood a row of drop-shaft entrances, with a corridor leading away on either side. Thorn swung the platform over near a bar beside the entrance to one corridor. Most of its furniture was scattered but a table and three chairs still stood upright. Grotesquely, one chair still supported a charred corpse slumped over the table.
The dracomen moved fast once the platforms landed. Two of them headed up the adjoining corridor, three covered the drop-shafts, and all the rest, except Scar, spread out to form a protective perimeter. Scar came over towards him.
‘Where would you suggest?’ Thorn asked, eyeing the dracoman intently.
‘It is all around us,’ Scar replied.
Thorn listened. He could hear creakings and shiftings as of wreckage settling and cooling. There came a faint scuttling sound, too, like rats in the walls. He scannned around and located, just inside the corridor entrance, a row of public-service terminals. ‘Over here.’ He led the way.
Each terminal consisted of a simple touch-console and screen. Thorn propped his proton carbine against the wall, drew his thin-gun and blew a hole in the wall beside one of the screens, then jammed his fingers in beside it and pulled. The flimsy screen tore out of the wall, revealing only the optics behind. No sign of anything unusual there. He holstered his gun, took hold of the wall panel immediately below the screen, wiggled it back and forth then tore it free: more optics, branching off from a main duct, to the console above. He was gazing at this junction when he heard the distinctive sound of a chair scraping back.
Proton fire flashed like summer lightning through a ruby. He glanced aside to see the dracomen firing at something further down the corridor. Pulse-gun fire stitched across the wall above his head. The single alfresco occupant of the bar stood up, pulse-rifle braced at the hip, then disappeared in a flash of red fire, tumbling back in pieces amidst tables and chairs blasted to fragments. Other figures began appearing, weapons firing, dracomen moving to counter them. Then, tentacular new growth began sprouting from the incinerated gardens. Thorn took in all this in a brief glance, reached down and grasped the duct cover, tore it away. Bundled optics behind, but something else as well: grey vines and fibres packing every cavity, silvery tendrils that shifted slightly. He snatched the memstore from his pocket, already extruding a nanofibre interface from one of its end ports. He selected one of the thicker, unmoving vinelike growths and pressed the interface head against it. Immediately hairlike fibres extruded and penetrated, bonding the memstore in place. But other silvery fibres then began whipping from the bundled optics, surrounding the interface head, spreading up around the memstore itself.
Thorn snatched his hand away. Damn.
He pulled back, taking up his carbine, turned and squatted. The dracomen easily held back the human-shaped attackers, but they were not all to be reckoned with. He saw a tentril spear up from the floor, punching through it like a bullet, whipping twice around a dracoman’s legs, then penetrating his chest. No time to try retrieving the memstore, no way to find out if the HK’s penetration had been successful.
‘Go! Go!’ he bellowed.
They ran for the platforms. Thorn boarded one first, lifting it a few feet from the floor. Scar leapt on behind him. A dracoman tried to raise the other one, but something held it down. The dracoman leapt free, just as a mass of tendrils fingered over the edge.
‘Here, now!’ Thorn shouted, holding his platform in position. Scar opened fire on substructure spiralling out of the wall towards them. Thorn saw the impaled dracoman being lifted, struggling, up into the air. A shot from one side cut that tendril at floor level. The dracoman dropped and, as if wrestling with a snake, pulled it from his body and was up and running in a second. Thorn tilted his platform and sent it planing towards the trench cut down through the arcology. The rest o
f dracomen converged fast, firing on growths all around them, leaping up and cramming themselves onto the platform. Just as the last one leapt on, their weight seemed too much, for the platform jerked downwards and skidded against the floor. A red flash and it rose again, something writhing like a nematode around one side rail, until a dracoman blew both it and the rail away. More groping, snakish movement: the shopping precinct looked like a cave filling up with tree roots.
As Thorn slowed the platform to weave his way between the twisted ceramal beams, two humans leaped aboard. Pulse-gun fire into Scar’s stomach, the other one wielding a jag of metal like a sword. Instant reaction: the man with the pulse-gun hurled straight over the side, the other opened neck to crotch with his own weapon—close combat with dracomen being worse than the kind engaged at a distance. Thorn glimpsed the second man slumping back against the rail, his gaping torso fast closing and filling up with pinkish growth, bloodless, before a couple of dracomen hauled him up and flung him over the side. Neither of the humans had uttered a sound.
Out into the particle-beam-cut gap, things uncoiling from the wreckage all around, still groping for the AG platform which lurched under its heavy load. Then Azroc’s forces opened up and they planed off through a cavern of fire, smoke and ash belching all around them. When finally they landed, troops quickly surrounded them, the presence of the dracomen assuring them no Jain tech had been brought across. Thorn noted how Scar showed no signs of damage, though he had taken at least three shots directly in the stomach. The dracoman penetrated by a Jain tendril stood for a while with head bowed, with two others of its kind watching it carefully. Eventually it straightened up and looked around, whereupon the other two moved off unconcerned.
‘Well, that went well,’ said Thorn. What a complete and dangerous waste of time.
Just then, Jack’s voice issued from his comlink.
‘I have just received a signal which, knowing its source, I handled with some caution…The hunter-killer program is in, and it is searching for Thellant N’komo.’
Thorn whistled, grinned.
* * * *
Two big transports were down—titanic landers resembling the inverted hulls of ocean liners—a third still hovered in the sky, casting a massive shadow. Thorn scanned back towards the arcology with his monocular. It was as if someone had punctured holes in an enormous tin can and fluid ran out. Increasing the magnification, it now seemed he saw ants flooding from a nest. Higher magnification still and the monocular began whirring as it adjusted its lenses to compensate for shake. Now he truly saw the hundreds of thousands of people, family groups or individuals, loaded down with belongings or trailed by hover luggage. Antigravity platforms and gravcars manned by ECS troops or monitors hovered over these crowds. Yet it all appeared surprisingly orderly outside. There had been some sporadic shooting, but that was unsurprising with such a mass of humanity to control.
To one side a line of AG platforms and grav-transports flowed like train carriages. These contained the injured, and those wearing Dracocorp augs who were now stunned and sedated. Tracking this line of traffic out, Thorn focused on the motley collection of ships gathered beyond the large landers. The badly injured or ill were being stretchered to a twin-hulled H-ship dispatched by the medical arm of ECS. Beyond this, domed tents spread like a rash of blisters on the landscape almost to the horizon. Still other ships were scattered amid all this: some privately owned vessels, smaller hospital and rescue ships, or smaller landers sent down, from a couple of old passenger liners still in orbit, to bring supplies to this rapidly growing refugee camp.
‘What are the figures now?’ Thorn lowered the monocular.
Via Thorn’s comlink, Jack replied, ‘Coloron informs me that the runcibles here have been kept open-port to the Isostations for a week. Capacity sixty thousand every hour, but it rarely reaches that. Eight million in that first week. Runcible technicians have moved fast to set up another five runcibles on a less populated world undergoing terraforming. The population there is low, about ten million. Earth Central made the calculation that risking ten million lives there, it might save many more from here. EC is also opening up more of the big shipyards to turn into Isostations and Coloron has brought three more runcibles online here. Nearly twenty million via that route thus far.’
‘What about that liner?’Thorn enquired.
‘The Britannic can take aboard fifty thousand. Its landers can take up to about five thousand at a time, so it will very soon be full.’
‘Spit in a rainstorm,’ muttered Thorn, watching one of the landers launch. Just contemplating the figures involved was nightmarish. In two weeks the AI had managed to move off-planet only two per cent of MA’s billion population. One per cent a week at the present rate. Two solstan years minimum, to accommodate them all working on that basis, it was hopeless. ‘Anything else?’
‘Other ships are arriving, including a dreadnought within a few days. This means a wider area can be covered by orbital weapons. Coloron has extended the perimeter, as you can probably see from where you stand. That reduces the evacuation time here, considerably. Had we two weeks to spare, we could get most inhabitants clear of the arcology.’
‘How long do we have?’ Thorn asked.
With a cold exactitude, Jack replied, ‘Being optimistic: one week. By then the Jain substructure will have spread throughout the entire arcology, but it will reach the runcibles before then. And before then it’ll be subsuming those still remaining inside.’
Letting his monocular hang by its strap around his neck, Thorn gripped the rail tight. He felt sick. As a Sparkind trooper on Samarkand he had witnessed the results of a catastrophe in which 30,000 died. On Masada and its surrounding cylinder worlds, and in Elysium, that figure rose to a million. Here, already, the estimated number of deaths exceeded 100,000. A week? Maybe another 10 million through the runcibles, and maybe half the surviving population safely outside the arcology. What then? Thorn’s problem was that he knew precisely ‘what then’. The moment Jain tech got close to the runcibles, they would be blown. At some point Coloron or Earth Central would declare the risk of Jain tech spreading planetwide too high. The calculation would probably be made to a hundred decimal places. Then MA would be incinerated down to the bedrock. Unless the projection changed drastically, there would still be half a billion people remaining inside. The magnitude of it was unbearable.
‘Still nothing from the HK?’
‘No, nothing at all.’
* * * *
The sun was shrouded in the cloud generated by the titanic destruction of the Cassius gas giant, though that fug occasionally revealed drifting structures, glittering scaffolds of pseudomatter, immense space stations and swarms of vessels—all evidence of the massive million-year construction project taking place here. The ship surfaced from U-space one astronomical unit out, and travelling at three quarters the speed of light, it used ramscoop to decelerate: opening out orange wings radiating from the abundant hydrogen being dragged in around it, soon followed by the sun-bright ignition of a fusion drive. This vessel bore none of the sleek lines of other Polity ships, seeming more like some ancient vehicle’s engine block, greatly enlarged and transported out into space. It was in fact mostly engine: a leviathan tugboat for hauling moon-sized masses. The arrival of such a ship here at the Cassius project being a common occurrence, it was merely noted by the humans, haimans and AIs directly concerned with it, and slotted into the vast calculation of construction as a nail might be slotted into a similar calculation for a house. Just a few noted, and dismissed, the slight discrepancy between ship and U-space field. Fewer still observed the other object that came through with it and rapidly veered away from its course: it was too small, too inconsequential seeming in a project of this scale.
This second object was thirty feet long, curved like the head of a spoon, in colour silver-green fading to black at the edges, and bore patterns like umber veins in its surface. It clawed at the very fabric of space to decelerate in a way Polity phy
sicists and AIs were only just beginning to understand, and implement. As it slowed, its chameleonware initiated and made it invisible throughout most of the radiated spectrum. Its insides were packed like the guts of some nematode—though with organs seemingly silver-plated when not of the same grey-green metal as the hull. Sunk inside this, and connected to it, the Legate scanned all signals, comprehended the underlying U-scape, viewed information just as it viewed the growing scene before it, angrily.
Firstly, she had obviously not yet made any physical contact with the Jain node. That was annoying but acceptable, and factored into the calculation. But thereafter she had not reacted as predicted by all the psyche tests and cerebral assessments. She was extremely intelligent for a buffered amalgam of human and AI, but still a loner, a power seeker, and asocial. Feeling trapped and constrained by the Polity she should have grasped at all the Jain node implied, for she had known nothing of its parasitic/destructive tendency. She had delayed and delayed until forewarned. But even that should not be unconscionable.
Orlandine’s arrogance should have been such that she would believe herself able to control the technology despite its revealed purpose, use it, grow and become godlike—discarding what she did not want of it in the process. That had been Erebus’s initial assessment, for the AI itself only later had discovered the layering of Jain tech’s depth of purpose. It was made to fool intelligent, borderline supernal, technical but—most importantly—arrogant beings. She should have taken the bait. By doing so here, she would by now have taken over this entire Cassius project, spread vastly around the sun incorporating all nearby sentients, all the stations and ships and the giant puzzle pieces of the incomplete Dyson sphere. From here, while she still maintained control, she would have used the numerous runcibles to spread out into Polity, subsuming worlds, stations, incorporating AIs. Weaving the Polity into the whole it should be, and reducing human beings to what they essentially were: flesh puppets. At the peak of spread she would then have discovered just how effective a weapon was the Jain node—being made for individuals like her, and civilizations like this. Perhaps some of the Polity might still have survived.
