by Neal Asher
‘Attempt to return,’ came the U-space reply from Erebus—a totally unexpected instruction.
Switching from passive scanning to full power scanning, the Legate began analysing its situation. ECS did not possess enough ships to completely enclose this Dyson segment so there were obvious weaknesses in the blockade. The largest weakness the entity ignored completely, since that seemed an obvious trap. It chose another one and plotted a course accordingly. Maximum acceleration from the segment would put it in range of one of the ECS attack ships for just a few seconds—enough time, however, for it to be destroyed. But few other options remained, so it engaged its ship’s fusion drive.
The spoon-shaped ship turned by a slanted joist, two bright flames ignited to its rear. Accelerating, it left a cloud of icy fog behind it.
‘Would not self-destruction be better?’ the Legate enquired.
‘Is there no possibility of escape?’
‘Escape is possible.’
‘Then you must return to me for reintegration. Resources are not to be wasted. I refuse you permission to destroy yourself under any circumstances. Try your utmost to shake pursuit, but ensure you return here.’
Clear as mud.
The Legate’s ship exceeded 20,000 miles an hour and continued accelerating. The entity itself estimated that seven seconds would take it far enough from the Dyson segment for it to be able to engage U-space drive. If it survived those seven seconds it would be clear. There might be pursuit but, once in U-space it could reconfigure its chameleonware, then after a few more such jumps no ECS ship would have a chance of following. Ahead, a line of glowing orange revealed the segment’s edge. EM shells began to detonate all around, interfering with the ship’s systems. Something blew right behind the Legate, filling the few gaps in the interior with metallic smoke; diagnostics went haywire and some of the ship’s computing ability crashed. However, the engines continued working uninterrupted, and the ship possessed sufficient redundancy to cover this. The orange line thickened; brighter towards the bottom and bluish above, with the occasional flecks of stars—or ships—becoming visible. Then, within a moment, the little ship hurtled out into the open.
Telefactors and drones filled nearby space. A modern Centurion-class attack ship lay close, and missiles streaked in from all sides. The Legate scanned those missiles: decoys mixed with rail-gun accelerated solid projectiles hurtled up from below; CTD and planar warheads came in from above and to the left; and EM shells and more rail-gun projectiles came from the right. The current attack appeared designed to drive it down and to the right, into dense gas, where it would necessarily take longer to drop into U-space. In an instant the Legate had created a defence to take it on through. The ship could survive rail-gun strikes so long as they hit nothing vital. The decoys and EM shells could be ignored. Nothing else must get close.
It altered its course sharply to the right. EM shells ignited all around it, and rail-gun projectiles slammed into the ship. Systems scrambled, fire exploded around the Legate, then vacuum sucked it away through punctures in the hull. Diagnostics briefly online: five projectiles punched right through the ship—inert rail-gun projectiles that missed the ship’s drives, else the craft and Legate would be a spreading cloud of vapour by now. Hull mesh and mycelial repair already working. The Legate glanced down to see part of its own thigh had been torn away, while jags of hot metal penetrated its chest. Ignoring these injuries, it put its ship into a five hundred gravity turn, downwards, then abruptly back up again. It targeted nearby missiles with lasers, but only two of the six weapons worked. A detonating CTD cleared a hole, and the Legate aimed for it. More impacts: sheet lightning of energy discharges throughout the ship, molten metal spattering the screen from the inside. Then, utterly on the edge of disaster, the Legate dropped its vessel into U-space.
* * * *
‘A risky strategy,’ Blegg said.
Cormac shrugged as he gazed at the bridge display. ‘We would have gained very little by trying to capture that ship. The Legate would probably have destroyed itself rather than allow that. Now at least we might learn something.’
At that moment the bridge display blinked out, then came on again to show the grey roiling of U-space—or rather a human-tolerable simulacrum. Feeling that familiar shift into the ineffable, Cormac nodded to himself in satisfaction. He turned to where Jack had thoughtfully provided two reclining chairs and a coffee table, now sitting incongruously at the centre of the black glass floor. He noted that one of those dracomen saddle seats had also appeared. Evidently Scar would be joining them. Cormac walked over and plumped himself down in a recliner.
‘Okay,’ he said. ‘You still tracking it, Jack?’
‘I am,’ replied the ship’s AI.
‘We have three other state-of-the-art Centurions like the NEJ,’ he explained to Blegg as the Oriental joined him. ‘They all possess the new chameleonware.’
‘Yes.’ Grudgingly said.
Cormac stared at Blegg for a long moment. There now seemed something different about him, something wrong. He did not ask about this, because he knew his chances of receiving a straight answer were minimal. Instead he said, ‘Jack, all the older ships are to deny themselves the ability to track the signature of a Jain node. They’ll probably lose sight of the Legate’s ship after the first two or three jumps. You, and the other three Centurions, start using your ‘ware right now. You’ll relay our coordinates to the other ships, whenever possible, but they are to stand off meanwhile unless we call them in.’
‘You are supposing it will run for home,’ suggested Blegg.
‘I am, yes, but if it doesn’t and looks set to approach any Polity worlds or bases, we’ll then attempt capture. I think it will run for home, and I can only—’
‘Something has occurred,’ Jack interrupted.
The bridge display changed, and once again they gazed upon the Dyson segment hanging in the clouds from the demolished gas giant. Cormac realized he now viewed a recording from one of the dreadnoughts, for he could see the shape of the NEJ much closer to the segment itself. He watched the Legate’s escape, the storm of explosions, and the subsequent winking out of the Legate’s ship, then the NEJ and other ships as they dropped into U-space. The dreadnought held station, and its view closed in on the opposite side of the Dyson segment, where something flashed away at high speed and then also winked out. The view froze, reversed, then a frame enclosed a fusion drive flame and the object it propelled. Selecting that image out, it magnified it for them. Programs rapidly cleaned up the image.
‘The Heliotrope? said Jack.
‘So she was hiding there,’ said Blegg.
Cormac grimaced. ‘Overseer Orlandine.’ He added, ‘I suppose the question we should have been asking was why did the Legate come here?’
‘And the answer?’ asked Blegg.
Cormac shook his head, then asked Jack, ‘Did the Heliotrope escape completely?’
‘It did,’ the AI replied. ‘Only two dreadnoughts remained by the segment, but the Heliotrope did not fall within range of their weapons, even if they had chosen to use them.’
A few facts came together in Cormac’s mind, and he turned to Blegg. ‘She sent us the solution to the Legate’s chameleonware so we would concentrate on that ship, thus giving her the opportunity to escape.’
‘Outstanding reasoning,’ said Blegg.
‘Outstanding sarcasm,’ Cormac replied. ‘But we should have known.’
‘The information came via the AI net,’ Blegg replied. ‘An HK program tracked it only as far as one of the Cassius stations, from where it was broadcast to us. No real way of knowing if she sent it. Do you want to go back?’
Orlandine was a haiman, who had been promoted to become overseer of a project this size, a murderer, and one quite likely to have had contact with this Legate. Yet she had betrayed the Legate to them, and there had been only one node signature detected—the one aboard the Legate’s ship—hadn’t there? Cormac felt a momentary disquiet, remembering
how long it had taken to clean up that signature. Maybe as long as it took a second node to follow through its program with a host and therefore cease to be detectable as a node? This woman could be someone even more dangerous than Skellor. But an AI had once told Cormac that psychos wielding weapons, however dangerous, should not be your prime target: you should always go after the arms trade that supplied them.
‘Continue the pursuit,’ he directed.
* * * *
Settled in a storage area and perpetually updated by Jack, Arach wondered if he had made a big mistake. Space battles, he felt, were okay if there was some chance that enemy ships might need to be boarded, but there had been no need of that. Long pursuits through space were also okay, so long as there might then ensue a planetfall and some subsequent ground-based conflict. But was that likely? For a long time Arach had been shutting himself down for periods that extended over decades. Signing on to Celedon, the station drawing the line of Polity, he had hoped to find some action there. No such luck. This hooking up with a Polity agent known to often get involved in violent conflicts was the drone’s last desperate gamble at relieving boredom. If this did not work, then maybe permanent shutdown? Or perhaps Arach should abandon the Polity altogether and see if he could find some action beyond the line? He would wait and see. In darkness he drew power to charge up his energy reserves, counted and recounted his esoteric collection of missiles, and ran perpetual diagnostic checks on his weapons systems. He would see.
* * * *
In U-space the ship repaired itself and within two weeks, ship time, regained optimum function. Some debris still lay around inside it — pieces of rail-gun missiles and burnt-out components—but, given time, the ship’s mycelium would take these apart and incorporate them. The Legate watched nearby disturbances in the continuum, caused by the pursuing warships, and now began to work on plans for evading them. They knew the solution to this vessel’s chameleonware, thanks to Orlandine, so time to do something about that. The Legate ran programs to completely change how that ‘ware operated, created back-up programs for further changes, then, finally ready, it surfaced its ship back into the real.
Seven ships materialized a mere 100,000 miles away in interstellar space: two dreadnoughts and five old-style attack ships. The Legate instantly onlined the new program and accelerated for some distance under conventional drive, before dropping back into underspace, the ‘ware distorting its U-signature too, and concealing the ship in underspace. The Legate travelled for five days in that continuum, and still detected some disturbance in the vicinity, which meant the ships could still detect it, or had chosen a close course by chance. Again into the real.
This time the two dreadnoughts were gone and only three of the attack ships remained. The Legate jumped again, then again before changing the ‘ware program for a second time. Some kind of feedback through the program created ghost distortions during the transition from one continuum to another, but this time no pursuers remained. As a precaution the Legate changed the program yet again, and made three more random jumps, before setting a course of jumps for home. Still some ghosting in the system, but considering how close it had come to destruction, the Legate could live with that.
* * * *
During initial contact, the pseudopods within the manacle withdrew from sight, but the humanoid dragon head remained, its neck sinking out of view, bringing the head to rest in the layer of flesh, like a man sinking in living quicksand and tilting his head back for one final breath. Its expression grew slack and unresponsive, as if something had pulled a plug below. During the ensuing hours the entity’s surrounding liverlike flesh hardened and scales rose out of it, like flakes of skin about to break away but then petrifying to gemlike solidity—crystallizing and growing translucent. Further hours passed.
At last something was happening. Observing the magnified section of the linkage between the two dragon spheres, Mika noticed pseudopods detaching from each other and withdrawing. The bright sunlight that previously shone down on the manacle building for twenty minutes of every hour, as the two spheres revolved around each other in the sun’s orbit, was briefly occluded by a titanic pseudopod tree breaking away from the main connection, its fans opening out then folding in vacuum as it retreated into the other sphere. Mika felt the floor shift and observed the draconic landscape rolling all about in fleshy waves. Then the connection between the two spheres really began to come apart. Shucked off scales rained through space at the parting and even the occasional dead pseudopod. The whole connection unravelled like the severing of some vast fibre-optic skein, through which a sapphire light passed.
‘Discussion over, I see; so you convinced your brother sphere?’ She nervously glanced down at the head, expecting it to re-engage with her at this point, or at least for Dragon to give her some response over the comsystem. None was forthcoming, and it worried her that Dragon could not spare the processing power for a simple communication. Then that changed, as the head jerked out of its torpor and opened its eyes, like a corpse reanimated and prophesying doom.
‘Run to your ship,’ it said, ‘you cannot survive here.’
* * * *
Surfacing after yet another U-space jump, Jack surveyed the planetary system ahead, cataloguing individual planets and scanning for large artificial constructions either on them or in surrounding space. Two light months ahead, the AI picked up some signs of battle: weapons’ flashes with the familiar signature of CTDs and plain atomics, a UV flash followed incrementally by infrared, pinpricks of coherent microwave radiation probably the result of masers firing. The immediacy of U-space signatures was not evident now, since this conflict of course took place two months ago. Scanning did not sufficiently reveal the combatants, though there seemed many low albedo objects in the system at the time. The AI assumed the Legate had surfaced into the real here just to view this scene. Grabbing the opportunity, Jack sent off a U-space information package detailing their present coordinates and events thus far. A return package updated him on the position of a steadily growing fleet of ECS dreadnoughts, a light century behind them.
‘Are we strolling into an interstellar war?’ wondered Blegg.
Listening in to the conversation, Jack wondered if they might be bringing one along with them.
‘There’s always that possibility,’ Cormac replied as he stepped out into the training area, ‘but why go pissing off the Polity if you’re already involved in such a serious conflict?’
‘Historically speaking, such actions from aggressors have not been unusual.’
‘And you would know, wouldn’t you,’ Cormac muttered sarcastically.
Through internal cameras, Jack observed Blegg and Cormac squaring off to each other once again, and relayed this image to the other ships. The contests fought between the Sparkind throughout this journey were interesting, but this one would be even more so. Jack supposed the two contestants were hardly aware of the betting going on between AIs behind the scenes, just as they seemed unaware that while they fought, they sometimes moved at AI speeds. Of course, since recent revelations to him, Blegg’s mood swayed between indifference and anger, so the results of the contests became less easy to predict. Then, just as the two agents exchanged their first blows, all four ships dropped into U-space.
Many hours later, ship time, the four resurfaced within the system. The Legate’s ship surfaced too, only briefly, then continued on. Jack once again scanned, but found little more than gaseous clouds and small masses of debris from the distantly viewed conflict here. But there was no time to grab any for analysis.
‘It’s not stopping here,’ observed the AI of the Haruspex.
‘There is nothing to stop for, since obviously this is no base,’ the Coriolanus AI interjected.
‘Map and track,’ instructed Jack, dropping into underspace yet again.
In the underlying continuum they compared figures, and traced the course of the Legate’s ship on its way out of the system.
‘The high albedo object�
��it is heading there,’ said Haruspex.
‘Nova or accretion disc?’ wondered the Belisarius AI.
‘Not a nova,’ said Jack, studying previous images. ‘Either an accretion disc or a sun being eaten by a black hole—though, if the latter, I would have expected more X-ray radiation.’
During their next jump through U-space Jack analysed data gathered from the system they had departed. Two living worlds there—one wintry and the other hot and humid. The battle seemed to have centred around the hot world and, checking recorded images, Jack saw evidence of some sort of impact on its surface — something worth checking further should the opportunity arise.
The rest of the planetary system consisted of, further out, a huge gas giant twice the size of Jupiter, a scattering of icy planetoids and asteroids, and one giant frigid world with its own ring system, and a rather odd and low reflective and highly metallic planetoid between the orbits of those two giants. This thing, being small, did not possess sufficient gravity to keep its surface flat, lacked atmosphere and therefore weather to erode down its features, yet it occupied an area swarming with spaceborne detritus so should be pocked with craters. The image Jack viewed showed something smooth as marble. It must be a recent addition to this solar system—a not uncommon occurrence considering the vast number of dark worlds roaming the space between suns.
* * * *
Thorn bowed to his opponent—a man stripped to the waist, exposing a physique that seemed as if forged from iron, the effect redoubled by his skin bearing a metallic tint—then snatched his head back from the path of a foot arcing towards it. Back-fisting the foot along its course, he kicked out for the back of his opponent’s other knee, then withdrew the strike as the attacking foot snapped back towards him. Chalter grinned at him, blinking pinkish albino eyes that were another result of whatever adaptation gave his skin that metallic hue. The man was disconcertingly good, but then Thorn expected no less: all of the soldiers aboard the Haruspex were Sparkind. Chalter now tried bringing his foot down on Thorn’s forward-bent knee, while simultaneously aiming a chop to the side of his head. Thorn withdrew swiftly, not wanting another session with the autodoc, as after his last encounter with Chalter. He spun into a roundhouse kick, just skimming Chalter’s face, followed that with a chop that put the man off-balance, then hammered a blur of punches into his torso. Of course, punching Chalter’s torso seemed about as effective as thumping wood. The blows threw the man back, knocked a little breath out of him, but he grinned and instantly came in to attack again.
