by Neal Asher
Blegg waved a dismissive hand. ‘Projection integrated with hardfields—an easy trick.’
‘So all the ship AIs, Jack, Jerusalem, the lot… all colluded in this?’
‘They must have, when it became necessary for them to know about my true nature. Earth Central wanted its avatar to be a human leader, as well as a legend, something to give hope and encouragement. It is a trait of the human race to raise some of its members to high regard, quite often when they are not deserving of such, hence the cults of celebrity in earlier centuries. Earth Central wanted to choose one so up-raised, create that one… I resent not being allowed to know myself, even though I am a part of Earth Central itself.’
‘Are you so sure now?’
Blegg pointed to the mound of rubble heaped to one side of the chamber. There, Cormac assumed, lay their entry point. ‘Out there, the enemy knows, which is why it wants to capture me. That mere fact has brought online different programming within me. I realize now that I cannot translate myself through U-space. I never was able to. I step from Valles Marineris on Mars to the runcible there, transport to the runcible on Earth’s Moon, and step from there to the Viking Museum—all memories created in a virtuality.’
‘So down here, you will probably die with us, or be captured.’
‘I will die, if that is the correct term. There is too much of Earth Central within me for capture to be allowed. I will fight for as long as I can, then, when capture seems imminent, I will activate a nanite weapon inside me, and destroy myself. There will be nothing left. But the question that remains is can you escape in the way I cannot?’
‘I won’t leave them.’ Cormac gestured around.
‘But perhaps’, said Blegg, ‘you should find out if that option is available to you.’ He stood up and moved away.
Damn him!
Blegg’s newly discovered self-knowledge made him appear coldly fatalistic, though it did appear they were in a trap from which there seemed no escape. Cormac began moving around the chamber, till he found the remaining Sparkind all gathered in one area, laying out their remaining equipment and checking it over. One Golem, the side of his face burned down to ceramal, stood up when he approached.
‘Assessment?’ Cormac enquired.
‘We have taken heavy losses,’ the Golem told him. ‘Once they break through—at their rate of burrowing, we estimate in ten hours—with our present munitions, and factoring in their likely rate of attack, we should hold them off for a further half an hour.’
Not much hope here, either.
Cormac scanned around. ‘Did Scar survive?’
The Golem pointed over to the mouth of a nearby tunnel. Meanwhile, one of the human Sparkind, who had disassembled and now reassembled a pulse-gun, asked, ‘When we’ve nothing left to shoot them with, what then?’
Cormac instantly accessed information available in his link: Andrew Hailex, 64 years old, joined ECS as a monitor age 25, rose through the ranks then transferred ten years later to GCG — Ground Combat Group. Left after four years to marry and raise three children. Rejoined ECS at age 55 and trained as a Sparkind. Involved in several dangerous actions. Regularly sends messages to his family…
Hailex, of course, looked no older than Cormac appeared — maybe in his twenties—but then few people chose to look old. His scalp was hairless, probably naturally so for he did not possess eyebrows either. He bulked out his envirosuit so seemed likely to be boosted. He grinned—he’d lost a tooth—and his eyes displayed a pinkish tint. He rather reminded Cormac of Gant.
‘I’ll think of something, but if it turns out we have nowhere left to run, what remains for you to do I leave to personal choice,’ Cormac replied. ‘Our attackers are using something related to Jain technology and I rather suspect they won’t be interning us in a nice comfortable prison camp. I’m afraid I’ve no suggestions for you.’ Cormac grimaced, realizing how he had just paraphrased Blegg.
The other man’s grin faded, then he reached out and nudged an open case with his toe. Inside rested two polished aluminium objects the size of coffee flasks: two CTDs, low yield, but enough to raise the temperature in here to that of a sun’s surface.
‘Yes,’ said Cormac, ‘that’s one option.’
Moving off he entered the side cave to which the Golem had directed him. This stretched back only ten yards, and there Scar and two other dracomen sat by a pool down into which the cave roof slanted.
‘Scar, I want some of your people to scout out that fissure.’ Cormac stabbed a thumb over his shoulder.
Scar stared at him for a long moment, then blinked. ‘I have sent two there already.’
A beat.
‘Are you in communication with them?’
‘Always.’
‘What have they found?’
‘The fissure runs down sheer for fifty yards, then its angle changes to forty-five degrees for another four hundred yards before beginning to level out. My associates have just now reached that point. Seismic scanning ahead indicates a crawl of nearly two miles, then several pools from which tunnels extend under water.’
Cormac noted how the dracoman held his hand submerged in the pool he presently crouched beside, fingers spread out, and wondered if this somehow enabled contact with the two dracomen below.
‘These tunnels?’
‘I know no more yet, however the route to it is too narrow for the autogun, or for Arach.’
Cormac considered their options. If they remained here they’d certainly end up in a fight they could not win.
‘Recall them,’ he said. ‘We’ll be going down there anyway.’ He turned and headed back out into the main cavern.
‘Arach, over here.’
The spider shape reared away from the wall and scuttled over to him. Cormac studied the drone for a moment, then explained the situation.
‘No problem,’ Arach replied and, before Cormac could say any more, scuttled away again. Cormac now called over everyone else in the cavern and gave his instructions, finishing with: ‘Those that need it, get some rest now—we move in two hours.’
* * * *
‘He doesn’t talk much, does he?’ said Samland Karischev, as he gazed out through the massive chainglass screen.
‘Brutus is feeling as frustrated and annoyed as we all are,’ replied Azroc.
Freed from his duties by the Coloron AI, Azroc had immediately transferred to the Brutal Blade, the utile dreadnought run by the AI Brutus, and sometimes jokingly referred to—because of its resemblance to some titanic beast’s liver plated with metal—as the Organ Transplant. Fresh from that devastated world, where an entire arcology capable of housing a billion souls had necessarily been destroyed, the opportunity for some payback filled him with joy even though he was Golem. And when Battle Wagon joined the fleet, now grown to twenty dreadnoughts, numerous attack ships and other warcraft, that joy only increased.
Serious payback: now one of the big boys accompanied them.
Karischev pointed through the screen at the distant vessel. ‘It doesn’t look like much. Why all the excitement?’
Azroc sighed. The Battle Wagon did not look particularly threatening, being a cylindrical object apparently devoid of sensor arrays or evident weapons. ‘It doesn’t look like much because you are now seeing it against a backdrop of vacuum and so do not really have any idea of its scale.’
Karischev, a squat bulky man with a friendly boulder-like face and watery brown eyes, struck Azroc as a bit of an enigma. The man carried no augmentations, either cerebral or physical, and obviously did not bother to change his appearance to anything more aesthetic, as it seemed most humans were inclined to do. He also commanded a strike force of Sparkind ground troops, assigned to Brutal Blade.
‘Big, then?’ Karischev suggested.
‘Eight miles in diameter and twenty miles long. It’s old, built during the Prador War, carries weapons designed to penetrate Prador exotic armour, plus numerous recent upgrades. Much is made of the fact that ships like Brutal Blade can dest
roy worlds. The truth is that a ship like ours could easily depopulate a world, but not actually destroy it. The Battle Wagon, however, could do the job without, as the saying goes, breaking into a sweat.’
‘No shit?’ Karischev’s eyes grew wide.
‘Definitely.’
Karischev turned back to gaze through the screen. ‘Of course, you can be carrying the biggest gun in the world, but that don’t matter a fuck if you ain’t got a target.’
Azroc could only nod in agreement. The information packages sent by the NEJ showed, in the system a light year ahead, enemy forces that the ships now glinting in space all around him could obliterate with ease. But since the USER had deployed and ejected the fleet from U-space, it proceeded on conventional drives. At this rate it would take them more than a year to reach their target, which created all sorts of problems, not least being that the fight would long be over and the enemy would have had a year to prepare for them—unless before that they shut down the USER and fled.
Another problem arose concerning the living occupants of those few ships in the Polity fleet that carried them. They would have to go into coldsleep if the USER remained functional. The quandary faced by the Battle Wagon AI, now in command of this fleet, was that if the USER did go offline, the entire fleet could jump to the target system at once, and troops might need to be dropped very quickly, but it took some time for humans to recover from the effects of coldsleep.
‘I’m gonna check on my men,’ said Karischev, turning away.
Watching him go, Azroc wondered if bringing along these ground troops was such a good idea anyway. Yes, they might be needed, but thus far the conflict had remained mainly ship to ship—one of those fast AI battles waged on the line of Polity of which rumours abounded but of which he had never found confirmation. It struck him that such vulnerable troops would serve no purpose other than to add to the casualty figures.
18
It is official: we don’t have to die. There are those amongst us now who are over two hundred years old and who may go on just not dying. However this is not immortality in the old sense of the Greek and Roman gods, for though our lives can be extended to infinity (thus far) we are still subject to death. There’s no medical technology that can save you if you stick your head under a thousand-tonne press (though a prior memcording of you can be saved), and there are some virulent killers, both biologically and nanologically based, that can destroy the human meat machine very quickly and effectively. But, as many have noted, not dying is not quite the same as living. Many would try to make themselves utterly secure against death and as such cease to experience life in its conventional sense. What is the point of immortality if you wrap yourself in layers of cotton wool and armour and bury yourself in peat? Many take that route (well, not literally), but many others seize the opportunity to explore, research, experience, to live a full life. However, there are problems with this, for the human brain, though large in capacity and intricate in function, is a finite thing. Memories are lost during regeneration and repair—that drawback cannot be avoided. Moreover, as a human life grows long, memories are shunted aside by the perpetual absorption of the endless continuing input. The solution, though, is now coming clear: memcording. We can now record our memories and even mental functions and store them separately, reload them should we wish. The technology is now available to actually delete stuff from the organic brain. So, the time has arrived when we can actually edit our own minds. It is speculated that in the future we’ll be able to decide what kind of person we are going to be this year, and cut-and-paste our minds to suit. Maybe we’ll decide to load select portions of our minds to more than one body. Perhaps this is due to become the procreation of the future?
— From ‘How it Is’ by Gordon
Warmth enclosed her, but in no way assuaged the pain. Sensing movement, Mika opened her eyes on blackness overlaid with jumbled non-sensical code. Then two words stood out—suit breach—and she realized she was seeing her visor display gone awry. Beyond it, in the minimal light this display provided, the blackness shifted. Further movement, more urgent, and something ungently began stripping her spacesuit from her body. She shrieked as mangled bones twisted inside her leg. Then the visor sank down into the neck ring and wet flesh surged over her face. Stifled, she fought for breath, began to lose consciousness. But next came a warm breeze as the flesh withdrew. She gasped, sucking in stale air smelling of burnt steak.
Ahead of her walls of similar flesh continued to withdraw—she could feel it all moving—then the lights turned on to give her confirmation: small globes affixed in an undulating surface which constantly dripped white fluid. Managing to tilt her head slightly, she peered down at herself. Red tentacles securely bound her against the living wall behind her. It also seemed evident that some of them penetrated her body—she could feel movement inside her. Now, right before her, a cobra pseudopod rose into view.
‘Hello,’ she managed. And even this extremity could not quell her fascination. She was actually, without any technology intervening, inside a Dragon sphere.
The pseudopod swayed from side to side as if seeking the perfect angle from which to strike, its single sapphire eye glowing hypnotically.
‘Can’t we… discuss… this?’
The thing struck at an angle with concussive force, wrenching her neck to one side and burning hot behind her ear. A sudden horrible ache suffused her skull, a scratching buzzing vibration intensifying in her eardrum. This, Mika realized, might be how it would feel to have an aug attached without using the correct anaesthetics. She knew when something entered and connected, because this harsh organic world went away again.
‘Show me,’ something said, and started to fast-forward through her memories, like a viewer impatient with the slower parts of a film. Streams of images and sensations screamed through her mind, but this did not seem fast enough. There came a horrible dislocation as something made an imprint of her total mind, peeled it free like a scab from a raw wound, and placed it to one side, then imprinted another and another until her ego and sense of self seemed something viewed through a cut gem, with alternative Mikas playing out in each facet. It scanned her childhood and adolescence at the Life-Coven on Circe, meticulously winnowing out the very smallest detail. Concurrently it whipped through her subsequent training and early career with ECS, but with slower precision it scanned her memories of Samarkand, then, almost with a horrible sensuousness, pored over the memories of Masada, then Cull.
Somewhere, deep behind that chronological separation, she still felt whole however, and sensed something of this mind’s purpose: her entire life as a basis for comparison. And she understood how the entity prepared for a meticulous reading of her memories of the time when it had fallen out of contact with its fellow; through her it intended to check the veracity of the other Dragon sphere’s story.
Upon reaching the time of the USER blockade around Cull — when it had lost contact with the other sphere, which was actually on that world—it allowed Mika to come back together again. Now, like a spectator to her own life, she proceeded to watch those events unfold: her studies of Jain technology; the Jerusalem’s run into the Cull system and brief contact with the other sphere lodged there, the short journey to a nearby system where the old colony ship Ogygian, with Skellor and Cento aboard, crashed into a dead sun; Cormac’s rescue and the lengthy task of putting him back together again. As it checked her memories, Mika could feel a feedback of growing dismay from this portion of Dragon. When it finally reached the events at Celedon, and Cormac’s subsequent interrogation of the other sphere, during which that one finally broke its Maker programming, she became partially aware of her body again—smelling oven smoke, feeling a discordant vibration within the sphere, and the wash of hot air entering her organic cell. As subsequent events played out, a pain grew in her skull and the connection began to break down. Vision and full sensation returned, and with their revival she screamed.
As the pseudopod ripped away from her head, ano
ther pseudo-pod shot into view and wound itself around the first one like a vine. The Dragon sphere then began jolting from side to side, her cell deforming around her. The two pseudopods continued thrashing, as if intent on strangling each other, then through the wall she felt the crump of some massive internal explosion. Acrid stinking smoke filled the area around her. Through watering eyes she observed one of the pseudopods abruptly freeze then grow flaccid, deflating as if all the juice were being sucked out of it. The still-living one rose up, shrugging its opponent away from it like ragged clothing.
‘So… which?’ Mika managed. It seemed this sphere was also in conflict with its Maker programming.
The binding tentacles writhed about her, and she felt those inside her moving as well. She came near to crying out again as pain grew in her in waves, but then something ran cold as ice up her spine and hit the ‘off’ switch in her skull.
Mika’s dreams were dragons.
* * * *
The comet’s course headed to aphelion—out from the system through the asteroid belt—perihelion lay far in its future, after it swung back through the inner system. Previous fly-bys had boiled off most of its ice to leave a core of rock conveniently wormed through with hundreds of huge caverns. Deep scanning of the interior revealed one cavern system suitable for her purposes. Cutting through ten yards of ice would give the ship access. And Orlandine could hide.
After correcting the Heliotrope’s course so that it matched that of the comet, she used the fore-mounted plasma cutter. The ice fluoresced as it made the transition from complex ice to water ice, and then into vapour. Cutting two deep holes, she opened the claw to its widest point, then manoeuvred the ship forwards until a claw tip inserted into each hole. Then she just fired up the cutter to full power and, over ten minutes, gave the comet a tail it had not possessed in many thousands of years, though this time a brief one that quickly faded into vacuum.
