by Neal Asher
‘Her psyche profile highlights her close attachment to this project. She would not readily abandon it, and she could return as easily as she left.’
‘Theorize.’
‘She somehow obtained a Jain node, U-jumped out of the system then back in again, concealed herself inside the Dyson segment where she has since unravelled some of that node’s secrets. Using Jain tech to gain entry, she returned here to check on the progress of my investigation.’
‘Orlandine is haiman, and was the overseer of this station—she would not therefore have needed Jain tech to gain access here.’
‘One thing,’ said the man with them. Blegg looked over at him, then caught the palm-com tossed in his direction. He studied the screen as the man continued, ‘Just twenty minutes before the explosion she ordered extra supplies to be loaded onto the Heliotrope. That in itself did not seem the action of someone deranged and desperate, but could be discounted until now. Check the list there — item eight.’
‘Shielding,’ said Blegg.
‘More data,’ announced the AI.
‘Yes, it is.’
‘No, I mean more data is arriving.’
‘From?’
‘A Centurion ship called the Not Entirely Jack.’
‘Ah,’ sighed Blegg, ‘the serendipity of a holistic universe.’
With no reply forthcoming from the AI, the man observed, ‘Forensic AIs are not noted for their sense of humour.’
‘I wasn’t joking,’ said Blegg.
— retroact 7 -
… He turned to another card, saw them laid out all around him like gravestones.
He could have transported down here from the attack ship but, being only able to transport himself and a limited number of items through U-space, he required this shuttle. Many items here, some of them quite large, needed to be lifted out for ECS to study. Bringing his shuttle in along the five-mile trail of destruction, he eyed the hulk lying where it terminated. Security forces had set out a cordon of drones around the hulk but there were no sightseers out here anyway, and none back in Tuscor City who might wish to become such. Most of them were more interested in getting themselves safely through one of the few runcible facilities, or else aboard one of the evacuation craft.
The Prador scout craft seemed almost intact, despite recent encounters with an ECS dreadnought, a planetary defence station, and finally with the ground. It had exotic-metal armour, the Prador’s big advantage over the Polity—that and the fact they possessed many more ships. It all seemed on the turn, however, now the big Polity shipyards were up and running, but an easy win was still out of the question. Earth Central calculated that another five worlds would be lost to the Polity before ECS pushed the Prador forces into retreat. Billions more would die, the war dragging on for at least another twenty years, and then the Polity would still be picking up the pieces for centuries afterwards. Maybe Blegg could find something here to make the Earth Central AI feel a bit more optimistic.
Blegg brought his shuttle in over the cordon, and down, observing autoguns tracking him. Landing, he saw an armoured gravcar and transport speeding over his way, and when he finally stepped from his vessel, troops piled out of the gravcar. It seemed almost as if the attack ship AI had not informed them of his arrival. He learned differently when the ECS commander approached him.
‘Problem?’ Blegg enquired of the woman who stood before him. Her troops headed over to the transport, where they quickly began unloading items strapped to AG pallets.
She nodded slowly. ‘As you came in we got the news: a Prador dreadnought just entered the system.’
Blegg immediately communicated mind-to-mind with the AI of the attack ship far above. ‘Why didn’t you inform me?’
‘Because you were about to find out anyway, and I have more important concerns than keeping you informed.’ replied Yellow Cloud.
‘How long do I have?’
‘A minimum of three hours’
Blegg turned and glanced down the length of his shuttle, sending a command to the onboard computer to open the hold. The ramp door whoomphed out from its seals and slowly began to hinge down on rams. He turned back to the commander, ‘What have you got so far?’
She turned and led the way to where her troops were now towing the floating pallets over the rough ground. Gesturing to one, on which a bulky object lay shrouded in plastic, she said, ‘We got the pilot—almost intact.’
Blegg eyed the object, then the men who were moving it. ‘How many people do you have here?’
‘Fifty-eight.’
‘What about the rest?’ Blegg gestured to the other pallets.
‘The remains of a particle beam weapon, a thermal generator, a missile launcher and what looks like a Prador biological weapon.’
‘What’s your route out of here?’ Blegg asked.
She pointed back towards the city. ‘Same as everyone else.’
‘Very well. Dump the Prador—we’ve more than enough of their corpses on ice. Dump the launcher and the thermal generator—we already know how they work. You have three xenotechs here with you?’
‘Yes.’
‘I want them with me, along with all their equipment. Load everything else here and order the rest of your people aboard.’
The commander looked suddenly very relieved.
‘Yellow Cloud?’ Blegg sent. ‘I’m sending most of these troops to you, along with one or two possibly useful items. Please take control of the shuttle and launch it the moment they are aboard. Once you have them and those items aboard, send the shuttle back.’
‘That will not leave you much time.’
‘But time enough to remove as much corn-storage as we can find.’
The commander stayed, along with the three xenotechs, one of them towing a floating tool chest while the other two carried tool packs on their backs. Just as the shuttle lifted, Blegg led the way into the dank interior of the scout ship. A single entry tunnel, wide and cavelike enough to permit access for a body considerably larger than any human, led to an oblate sanctum where the Prador first-child had operated the ship’s alien consoles. Ship lice the size of a man’s shoe crawled over ragged stony walls that were coated with pale green blooms of weed. The pit-console projected from the floor like a huge coral, and an array of hexagonal screens formed most of the forward wall.
Standing between console and screens, Blegg pointed to the floor. ‘See this?’ He then traced an outline with the toe of his boot. ‘The memstorage should be right under here. It won’t be booby-trapped, since the Prador are reliant on their encryption—they still haven’t figured out just how easily AIs can break it.’
As one of the techs began slicing through the floor metal with a diamond saw, the commander asked, ‘How do you know this?’
‘I’ve been breaking open these things since the very beginning.’
‘Who are you anyway? No one told me your name.’
‘Horace Blegg.’
Everyone glanced round.
‘You know, there are quite a few people who think you’re a myth.’
‘Keep working,’ Blegg ordered the techs. ‘We don’t have much time.’
They finally levered up a section of the floor to expose a stack of black octohedrons looking like some kind of alien caviar, nesting amid optics and power cables.
‘Just cut all round. You won’t damage anything.’ Blegg turned to the man with the floating tool chest. ‘Dump your tools. We’ll use that’—he pointed to the chest—‘to transport them.’
Soon the octohedrons were gathered up and loaded, and with relief they left the dark, damp interior of the Prador scout ship and headed out to where Blegg’s shuttle had landed earlier. The sun, a green-blue orb, nested in tangerine clouds on the horizon, as stars began to wink into being in the azure firmament.
‘I take it the shuttle is on its way?’ Blegg sent.
There came no reply.
‘Yellow Cloud?’
Checking his watch he saw that an hour yet remai
ned of the three hours stipulated. Blegg concentrated, slinging his consciousness out in search of the attack ship, and picked up fractured communications… missiles on your ten… rail-gun… Where did it… but they said… Also fractured images of broken hulls belching oxygen fires into vacuum, with no gravity to give the flames shape… growing spherical explosions, glittering trails of wreckage, a man screaming as he fell towards the world, spacesuit intact but beginning to heat up.
‘Blegg,’ came the communication from Yellow Cloud, ‘I’m sorry.’ A U-space signature followed, as the attack ship fled the system.
Returning to the surface of the world, Horace Blegg looked up and discovered that not all those lights up there were stars. He turned and gazed at his two companions.
‘We have a problem,’ he began.
Light, magnesium bright, dispelled the twilight. Looking to his left, Blegg saw only flames now where Tuscor City had been, a wall of fire eating up the intervening terrain.
‘Yeah, that’s a problem,’ the commander had time to say.
Then it was upon them.
— retroact ends -
The moment the King of Hearts surfaced into the real, it came under intense and massive scanning, and thousands of objects began to stir within the gas clouds. King scanned them in return, but the images received remained hazy until some of the same objects began to enter clear vacuum. King expected to see recognizable ships—those that departed the Polity with Erebus—but there were none like that visible. What the AI saw here instead seemed entirely alien. It appeared the attack ship had landed itself in some vast trap and on every level something was trying to grasp hold of it. King opened secure coms and tried to separate out something coherent from the layers of informational assaults.
‘I am not with the Polity,’ sent the attack ship AI.
No single voice replied—it all seemed the maddened howl of a mob.
‘Let me speak with Erebus.’
U-space signatures now, where those mysterious objects gathered—then close by. Something big dropped into being first, then the surrounding spacial density began to increase sharply as other things arrived. Less than a microsecond afterwards, the AI detected growing U-space interference and the hot touch of targeting lasers, and dropped the King of Hearts into U-space, an instant later surfacing 100,000 miles away.
‘Speak to me—I am not an enemy.’
The reply was a consensual scream, ‘Open completely!’
This then was Erebus. All of this was Erebus. And it wanted King to meld with it. Over the years of its existence the attack ship AI had grown contemptuous of humanity, and felt the need to find something better, faster, grander, and entirely AI. It had been prepared to create something like this… consensus. But to join one, to be absorbed into one? In that moment King discovered how much it valued its own individuality, and understood itself to be more like its makers than like this thing. Picking up informational flows, logic structures, and purpose beyond its comprehension, King recognized only madness.
‘I need time.’
‘You have none.’
U-space signatures again. Its course reversed, King jumped again, only to find itself labouring through a U-space storm. Independently, Erebus must have developed its own USERs. Perpetually rebalancing engines, King flew through the storm, but then even more USER interference slammed into it and the King of Hearts found itself falling down some spacial slope, as if entering realspace too close to a gravity well. It materialized right into a high-powered maser, instantly burning into its hull. Anti-munitions release, and King returned fire on multiple targets: ships and missiles. King jumped again, slamming in and out of an underspace continuum with no give in it. Another 100,000 miles, but enough to take it away from the main sleet of missiles. Planetary system now. The swarm still pursuing, King engaged fusion drive at maximum. At least the attackers could no more enter U-space than could King, and could not jump ahead. However, their weapons were faster.
Masers scored across King’s hull, peeling up armour like a screwdriver scoring through paint, then tracked away to follow an anti-munitions package the attack ship released. They pierced what was merely a holographic image of the attack ship, then swept back. Warheads detonated on other similar packages. King onlined a rail-gun and filled space behind it with near-c projectiles, swinging the fusillade across to cover its fall towards the hot but living planet below. It kept firing interceptor missiles until its armoury emptied of those; then followed with high yield CTDs, imploders, and straight atomics. A vast storm of explosions trailed the attack ship down. EM blasts made its scanning a mostly intermittent affair. More ships behind now, or just falling wreckage?
Above atmosphere, King duelled with only its beam weapons, knocking out waspish missiles homing in on it. White heat re-entry, endless steaming jungle below, then mountains ahead. King scanned them and detected useful concentrations of metals and carbon. Stored energy at minimum and fusion reactors struggling to keep up, King released one last anti-munitions package as missiles closed in on every side. The King of Hearts decelerated hard down towards the mountains. Eight warheads impacted within a second of each other. The titanic blasts incinerated jungle for a thousand miles all around, demolished a mountain, created a magma lake. Except for sufficient spectroscopic readings of metals and carbon in the atmosphere, the attack ship was gone. The impact site and surrounding area, being now highly radioactive, would not be easy to scan.
* * * *
Mika came instantly awake, knowing Dragon had just surfaced from U-space.
‘Have we arrived?’ she asked.
‘Yes,’ Dragon confirmed over the manacle’s com system.
Shortly before Dragon’s departure from Jerusalem, now some days ago, the Dragon head and attendant pseudopods had retreated back down their hole and that hole closed. Conversation with the entity thereafter had merely been via com. It had answered many of her questions, but those answers were as convoluted and Delphic as ever. She still did not know where Dragon had brought her, or why.
Slinging her heat sheet back, she sat upright and demanded, ‘Exterior view.’
The walls and ceiling disappeared, but what she now saw could only be described as an interior view—the insides of Dragon no less. Masses of flesh like raw liver pushed in from every side, throughout which groped hands of blood-red tentacles. As she watched a grey-white pseudopod snaked past like a giant conger eel, and something globular with metallic veins spread over its surface gradually sank from sight. However, this exterior downward movement made Mika realize that the manacle was slowly being pushed back to Dragon’s surface. It seemed a slow process, so she stood up, picked up her pack, then headed off to use the sanitary facilities this place provided. After that she returned to grab up a pull-tab coffee, and stood watching while the drink heated in her hand.
‘Where have we arrived?’ she asked finally.
The floor shuddered and Dragon’s flesh and skin began to part overhead, to reveal a hot glare beyond. Flesh slid down from this either side of the manacle as finally it surfaced. Mika observed stars peppered across blackness above one draconic horizon. Poised above the opposite horizon, a white actinic sun glared, its ferocity doubtless filtered just enough, through the projection system, to prevent it burning out her eyes.
‘Here,’ Dragon informed her.
Below the sun’s glare, a massive pit opened in Dragon’s surface, a constellation of blue stars rising from its depths. Thousands of cobra heads came into view: great open fans of them stemming from massive arterial branches, which in turn extended from a tangled fig-vine column of a central tree. This titanic growth rose up beside the manacle like some vast organic spacecraft launching. It occluded the sun, and only then, with the glare cut out, did Mika see the other object approaching. This new sphere could have been any moonlet or some titanic ship but, as it drew closer, she noticed it too everting growth. The other remaining Dragon sphere approached.
Taking up her palm-com, Mika quickly
plumped down in the VR chair, strapped herself in and tilted the chair back. Through her com she ran a check to ensure the continuing operation of all the recording equipment contained in the manacle.
‘What are you doing?’ she asked.
The liver-like flesh in the open floor parted for the emergence of two pseudopods and that disquieting new Dragon’s head. It arched out over her, glanced up at the scene she was witnessing, then turned its attention to her directly.
‘I am about to acquaint my other half with some realities,’ it said.
‘It doesn’t know, then?’
‘No, I was unable to make connection while being held captive within the USER blockade around Cull, and have not attempted connection since Cormac acquainted me with events in the Maker realm.’
‘Why not?’
‘As Cormac would know, face-to-face encounters yield the most effective results. My other half is also still subject to its Maker programming.’
‘But surely your other self will defeat that and the results will be the same as with you?’
‘Why should they be? This is a different me. I have also been captive of Jerusalem for some time.’
‘It will be suspicious?’ Mika suggested.
‘It will only know for sure, by seeing what I have seen from the inside.’
‘Maybe it still won’t believe you.’
‘Let us hope it does. I would not want to kill myself?
The second Dragon sphere drew close overhead like a moon falling to earth. Through her palm-com Mika input an instruction for part of the view to be magnified. One quarter of the ceiling served this purpose, focusing on where the two pseudopod trees reached for each other. Lightning flashed between them as the relative charges of the two spheres equalized. Blackened and trailing smoke, some pseudopods, struck by these discharges, were ejected from the trees. Finally the two massive growths began to join and writhe into each other. She observed separate-sourced cobra heads coming together, eye to eye, like electric sockets mating, sapphires winking out. Was this, she wondered, how the original four Dragon spheres had connected, unseen inside their conjoining? The two trees like two giant organic plugs, finally joined completely, then the composite tree began to contract and grow squatter, drawing the two Dragon spheres together. It occurred to Mika that she was trapped between two titanic entities that might shortly be in violent disagreement. Though a fascinating experience, she might not survive it.
