by Neal Asher
Subsequently stepping from his cabin, he found Arach eagerly awaiting him, unable to keep its spindly legs still.
‘Are we on our way?’ the drone had asked.
‘Yes, we’re on our way.’
Now, aboard the ancient shipyard, Cormac began to make his way towards the runcible open to Coloron, Arach dogging his footsteps.
He found crowds crammed into a vast zero-g distribution centre, at the end of which stood a cargo runcible. The horns of this device encompassed a circular Skaidon warp ten yards across. Guide ropes cut in from all sides, tied off on a massive robotic handler crouched before the runcible itself. The base of this multiarmed behemoth ran on tracks extending the entire length of the distribution centre. Through here, warship building materials had once been transported. The handler then passed these off to other minor handlers in the tunnels branching off all around, which in turn took them to various machine shops or directly to the construction holds. This had not been a place for humans since everything moved here at AI speeds, and any human would have been ground up in the gearing. Now the handlers were still, the centre pressurized, and ECS personnel flocked in the air like khaki birds.
For anyone unused to moving in zero-g, the scene ahead appeared chaotic and confusing. It looked that way because those here felt no need to arrange themselves with any regard to up and down. Cormac launched himself from the tunnel they had traversed, occasionally catching a rope to guide himself towards the handler robot. In this environment, with these ropes strung in every direction, he noted how Arach seemed perfectly in his element. As Cormac drew closer, he saw ranks of ECS soldiers heading through the runcible ahead of him. Behind them came a row of five AG tanks and, spiralling up from the base of the handler robot, followed other military supplies. He noted that most of those waiting around him were ECS Rescue or Medical personnel—perhaps waiting for their fellows ahead of them to provide their bloody work.
‘Lot of hardware,’ Arach observed with relish.
‘Oh yes.’
Reaching the handler, Cormac noticed a haiman directing operations. The man sat ensconced in one of the handler’s huge claws, occasionally making a hand gesture, but most of his directions were being relayed over informational channels. Cormac queried him on that level, and received a priority slot just after the tanks. The haiman saluted, with a finger to his temple, before turning his attention elsewhere.
When the last tank slid through the Skaidon warp, as through the meniscus of a bubble, Cormac remembered that on jumps he made prior to events on the Ogygian, he had actually begun to experience U-space, which was something previously unheard of. He pushed off from the handler, orientating himself carefully to the plane of arrival at the receiving runcible. Arach shot ahead of him, impelled by air jets, and entered the meniscus first. As Cormac floated after, he felt the stirring of concealed memory—of that other gift from Jerusalem.
Now? Release it now?
No, some other time.
He fell, after Arach, through the Skaidon warp to Coloron.
12
I’ve stated before that I really would like to believe in him, simply because of his name. Surely if you are going to create a fictional hero, nay even demigod, you are going to come up with a more resounding name than ‘Horace Blegg’? Upon that basis I spent many weeks tracking stories through the nets, checking facts, trying to contact those involved. Time after time the main protagonists I did manage to contact remained either close-mouthed or denied any knowledge of the man. Mostly, I only managed to contact those who knew someone who knew someone who… and after tracing down many of those to dead ends, I gave up. Trying to find images of the man has been equally frustrating. There are many available, but often they plainly display different people. Through every line of research I encountered convoluted wild goose chases, breaks and missing information. One would suppose that all I really found was proof of his non-existence. I don’t think so. I believe AIs used search and destroy programmes to wipe out much information pertaining to him. I believe they meddled with reality again. I believe in Horace Blegg.
— From ‘How it Is’ by Gordon
Unless an emergency arose, Blegg usually confined his jumps through U-space to the surface of planets. Translating himself through U-space between planets in a system, or between ships, could be hugely tiring. And ships or runcibles were nearly always available, so why waste energy better applied elsewhere? In this case, however, he became impatient. The Hourne lay ten hours’ journey time from Masada, and Blegg felt no real need to remain aboard to see the Atheter artefact down on that world. Also, the runcibles aboard the Hourne had been shut down, since calculating the U-space position of a runcible located on a moon, planet or large station was difficult enough, but doing so for a ship manoeuvring insystem became near impossible. Blegg decided he must leave in his own inimitable fashion. He gazed down from a viewing blister aboard the great ship towards the moonlet called Flint, on which one of the runcibles in this system was sited. He looked into U-space, located both himself and the moonbase nestled amid the ruins of the shipyard, destroyed by Skellor with the Occam Razor’s weapons, and stepped across.
Earth Central immediately began to speak in his head as he found himself walking across the floor of a geodesic dome enclosing the runcible.
‘I have provided a small ship for you at Ruby Eye—it is capable of entering U-space unshielded. U-tech mapping and detection equipment have been installed and programmed to the U-space signature provided by Atheter. The USERs have now been shut down in that area, so you can travel at will there.’
Out loud Blegg replied, ‘I’ll test the signature—I think I know precisely the place.’ The scanners available to the Polity limited the detection range, with resolution increasing as he moved closer to the source. Light years away, Blegg would know the system in which a Jain node was located; at a light hour away he would know on which planet; at a couple of yards he would know which pocket it was in.
Someone striding along, followed by two hover trunks, gave Blegg a momentary glance—but in these days, when so many employed cerebral hardware, it was not unusual to see people apparently talking to themselves.
‘This place you know precisely—a certain brown dwarf perhaps?’ EC suggested.
‘You read my mind.’
He strode up to the runcible dais, ahead of a woman checking her journey slot on a column-mounted console, received a startled then accusatory look from her as he stepped to the warp and through it. He did not need to check that the runcible had reset to his destination—it always did. At Ruby Eye, a station orbiting a red dwarf sun, he snatched direct from the controlling AI’s mind the location of his own ship, then from the runcible lounge stepped a short distance through U-space, and directly aboard.
‘Permission to launch,’ he asked over com, once ensconced in the pilot’s seat.
‘Granted,’ replied Ruby Eye. ‘That was rather quick and, I might add, rather rude.’
‘No time for civilities,’ Blegg replied as the airlock tube retracted and clamps released his ship from the docking tower. He then paused and peered down at himself. When did he change into this envirosuit? For a moment the memory completely evaded him, then it was there. Of course, he had changed aboard the Hourne before to going into VR. He shook his head and smiled to himself, realizing that Cormac’s assertion that Blegg was an avatar of Earth Central had actually been preying on his mind. Existential angst — he really did not need that right now.
Falling away from the station spin in space seemingly fogged red by the light of the nearby dwarf sun, he turned the ship and engaged its fusion drive. One of many subscreens, set into the chainglass along the bottom of the main cockpit screen, showed numerous radar returns as the ship negotiated through a swarm of other vessels. Some of these were clearly evident on one subscreen showing a gravity map of the area. Glimpsing up, he observed such a vessel close to: something like a sharp-nosed monorail carriage towing, on braided monofilament cables,
an object like an ancient sea mine. A USER—an underspace interference emitter—one of the devices previously used to confine Skellor to this sector of space while Cormac hunted him down.
Once clear of the crowd, Blegg input coordinates. The ship’s computer could not handle the AI level calculations required to drop it into U-space. Blegg linked to it and did what he always did when himself entering that continuum, but with his ability complemented by the ship’s underspace engine, and he and the ship dropped into endless grey. He gazed at this underlying reality. Receding behind him—though, in truth, words like behind did not apply to his perception of this place—was the eversion generated by the red dwarf, gravity seen from the other side. And scattered nearby this was an even pattern of smaller eversions, curved like fossil worms: these generated by the singularities carried inside the USERs—hence their presence on the gravity map.
Mentally, Blegg cancelled the resurfacing sequence which, without him, the ship would not be able to handle anyway. A sub-screen displayed a warning, but he ignored it and set an alarm to sound once the ship reached its destination in U-space. Then, departing the cockpit, he went to see what facilities the ship itself contained. He found food, then a bed. The ship travelled to U-space coordinates as much here as there, now as then. Blegg rested, travelled no distance, and all, slept.
Time passed in realspace and it also passed in this small piece of realspace submerged by U-fields. But they were separate times, and how they might meet up became merely an energy negotiation. Blegg’s ship took the course of least energy, least resistance. It was possible to go to another time from here, but the consequences could be catastrophic, as the time-inconsistent runcible link between Celedon and the Small Magellanic Cloud demonstrated.
A constant beeping dragged Blegg from slumber, and returned him to the cockpit. Two eversions pushed into the range of his perception, one that of a g-type star, and the other the brown dwarf orbiting it.
With care he eased the ship in towards the brown dwarf—as close as it could come without the gravity well forcing it out of U-space in a brief explosion of plasma. Blegg turned his attention to the console, but found the weirdness of perception too distracting. He initiated the hardfields that would cut that out. Immediately the inside of the ship returned to relative normality: a touch-console no longer looked like a three-dimensional kaleidoscope, and his fingers no longer appeared to be infinite tubes. He set the ship’s instruments to scanning for the U-space signature and the response was immediate: three definite matches and four maybes, but to be expected considering the Jain nodes growing inside Skellor were as crushed into the surface of the brown dwarf as he.
He turned the hardfields off again.
Back on the underside of reality, he gazed at the star, both distant and close. Scale and distance were merely rules his own mind applied here, and he could ignore them. Thus he did, and gazed upon the underside of seven Jain nodes leaving prickly thornish impressions in this continuum: organization, pattern, standing out from the underlying chaos of reality; of space knotted and wadded into this thing called matter. Blegg turned away, then quickly back when a subscreen blinked on to show text: ‘ U-signature detected—disperse signal’’. It took him some time to track it down, for it lay nearly two light years away, though close in interstellar terms. Without surfacing from U-space, he reset his ship’s course.
— retroact 6 -
‘… bright enough to realize the AI rulers were better at governing than any previous human rulers’
He turned to another card, saw them laid out all around him like gravestones.
The autolaser stuttered and crackled, knocking most of the deadly swarm from the air, but it did not manage to hit them all. Corporal Chang made a horrible grunting sound—the impact flinging him up from cover, then the projectile detonating inside him. It blew his guts out and he spun to the ground with only a length of bloody spine attaching his ribcage to his pelvis.
The three remaining members of the unit fired on the nearby slopes with their own seeker guns, then crouched back behind their boulders on the mountain slope. A waste of ammo. The sniper might not even be over that way. It seemed almost as if he knew of Blegg and his abilities, for he had changed over from laser to seeker bullets so there was no way to locate him. But he knew where they were.
‘This guy is not going to be captured alive,’ said Pierce.
Of the recording of events here, Pierce could claim he only stated what he thought were the sniper’s intentions. Reading the man’s expression, Blegg understood the statement to be a promise of intent.
‘Do you still have no idea where this fucker is?’ Blegg asked through his comlink.
‘Only within an area of three square miles, with you at the centre of it,’ Earth Central replied.
‘I thought the cameras on your satellites capable of resolving the date on a coin dropped on the ground?’
‘They do possess that resolution—when there is no cloud cover. It has also become evident this individual obtained, as well as the original tank, a multipurpose assault rifle, development sets of the new chameleon-cloth fatigues and electronic concealment hardware.’
Blegg eyed his companions, ‘Which ECS soldiers have yet to be issued with?’
‘The same.’
Blegg nodded to himself. The man seemed a lone criminal but a very clever one. He had managed to steal a tank which he used to smash into an etched-sapphire repository. Fleeing with millions in that form, he evaded the police cordon. His laundering of the sapphires through various criminal organizations had resulted in the capture of many, but never him. Five years of chasing rumours and fragmentary information finally led to a house, here in the Scottish Highlands. The ECS arrest team botched it—and died. EC shut down transport out of the area and now many four-person teams of highly trained personnel were scouring these mountains. Blegg had joined them—perhaps that had not been his greatest idea. He could transport himself away, but that seemed so unfair on the others here.
‘I have analysed recorded imagery. He is over to your left about two hundred yards away. Get out of there now. Satellite strike will be initiated in two minutes.’
Get out?
It seemed EC had not precisely pinpointed the man’s location, else there would be no need to run. It also seemed the AI decided whatever information could be extracted from the man no longer warranted the loss of any more lives. It was about to burn the area.
‘Leave the autolaser—it should cover us. We go now!’
Blegg leapt up and led the way from cover. A horrible whining made his back crawl—more seeker bullets. Staying low, they ran just as hard and fast as they could. Snap-crack of a laser, either from the auto or the sniper. Something slammed into Blegg’s back, lifted him from the ground and hurled him face-down in the dirt. His head must have hit a rock, for he lost consciousness.
Later, Blegg learnt that it was the shock wave from the strike that threw him down. Nothing remained of the sniper, though analysis of DNA from his home identified him as a mercenary once employed by the now strictly controlled corporations. No one particularly special. Blegg did not like to contemplate how close he had come to dying, then.
— retroact ends -
There was no escape from this situation, and no escape from the realization that he would soon die. With a normally human mind, Thellant might have been able to convince himself otherwise. The best he could hope for now was a quick death. But that knowledge did not allay the frustration, anger and a desperate need to escape.
‘Who is this?’ he asked, while spreading Jain tendrils deep into the systems of the ship, tracking optics and s-con cables, sequestering interfaces, reading stored data, initiating ship’s diagnostics, and his own.
A male voice replied, ‘Well, the one who said “Gotcha!” was Jack—the AI which runs the Centurion-class ship NEJ. My name is Thorn.’
‘ECS?’ Accessing a monitoring system Thellant gazed into the area intervening between the four spheres
of his stolen ship and there saw wreckage, and metal hardened into splash patterns. The fusion drive had operated through here to a drive-plate mounted underneath, the U-space engine encased above it. Now there was just a hole there.
‘Oh yes.’
‘Do you realize I have fifteen hostages aboard this ship?’ Thellant connected into the cold coffins, just to assure himself this remained true. Nine men and six women, all of them suffering from head injuries beyond the compass of simple autodocs. These were the kind of injuries that required AI intervention, for not only their brains needed reconstructing, but their minds as well.
‘Thellant N’komo, you’ve got tech inside you capable of trashing planets. Over a hundred and fifty thousand people are already dead because of you, and many more will die. And if the Jain tech in MA gets out the planet below might well end up as the target for a few crust crackers. Get real.’
‘Why am I still alive, then?’ Thellant now concentrated his perception outside the Rescue ship via external cameras, the cockpit screen before him, and via Jain tendrils containing optics infiltrated through the ship’s hull. Many ships hovered above him — cargo carriers, passenger liners, Rescue ships—and one large ugly dreadnought was rising over the horizon even now. The last vessel was probably capable of denuding a planet of life, and that might well be its intended purpose. The Centurion-class ship held station down below him, probably because its AI knew that there lay his only possible escape route, no matter how minimal his chances if he attempted it. He studied the vessel carefully, recognizing it to be state of the art. There was just no way out.
