Gridlinked

11

Cormac sat before the viewing screen in the recreation area and let out a deep sigh. He toasted Horace Blegg, men put his glass down on the table beside him. He felt very tired, but had been unable to sleep and a drink seemed the best way to unwind.

'Ship AI…' Cormac began, then paused in chagrin and started again. 'Hubris, is this screen voice-activated?'

'It is,' replied one of the many voices of Hubris, this one more relaxed and easy-going because of the surroundings.

'Give me a view into Isolation Chamber One, please.'

The screen flickered on and showed the two draco-men squatting on the floor of the chamber. They were eating slabs of recon' protein and drinking water from tall beakers. The scene was reminiscent of something from an ancient fairy tale. Cormac winced to himself at that diought, and did not carry it any further.

'Very efficient creatures diese,' said Hubris.

'What do you mean?'

'They are decontaminating themselves. They're using some method of regeneration. There is a high level of damaged and radioactive material from their bodies in their excrement.'

'Nice,' said Cormac. The injection Mika had given him had hurt, and was still hurting. He wondered if she had taken some obscure form of vengeance on him by using it. There were other less painful methods of getting antactives into the bloodstream.

Hubris went on. 'It is an extremely rapid process. They eat as much as is given them and convert it very quickly. They will be wholly regenerated within two days.'

'And should we let them out then?' wondered Cormac.

'That is for you to decide. It is relevant to note that Dragon always served its own purposes, and with little regard for human life.'

Cormac nodded, more to himself than the ship AI. He remembered the two-kilometre perimeter around Dragon on Aster Colora. Dragon had said, 'No machines inside this perimeter.' People had tried, as people do, and that perimeter had become a ring of smashed vehicles, some still containing human remains.

Where are you, Dragon? What do you want?

Cormac turned as the door slid open behind him and Chaline walked in. She looked as tired as he felt, and obviously had the same intention in mind. She got herself a drink from the autobar, then slumped into the seat next to him. As she sipped her drink she studied him with an intensity he found unnerving. He felt compelled to talk.

'Couldn't sleep?' he asked.

'No.' She turned away with a slight smile and rubbed at her eyes with her forefinger and thumb. 'I was readying a probe to go into the blast-site and search out some fragments of the runcible buffer. It seems there's a chance it was not all vaporized.' She looked up at the screen. 'How are our friends getting on?'

Cormac told her what Hubris had told him.

'Dracomen… I had a quick look in the reference section but all I could come up with was this text called 'The Dragon Dialogues'? It read like a philosophy thesis and ran to about ten million words. Fascinating stuff, but I don't really have the time to read it…' She turned to Cormac. 'What was this Dragon then? Not a fire-breather, I gather?'

Cormac hesitated, and then grimaced. 'No, Dragon was the name the creature gave itself, for whatever reason… Hubris, do you have any film of Dragon?'

'Enough to last a lifetime.'

'Show us some, please.'

The screen flickered and showed a contorted rocky plain below a metallic red sky. On that plain stood four vast spheres joined in a row. Pink snow was falling.

'There's Dragon. Each of those spheres is a kilometre across.'

'It was all alive?' asked Chaline incredulously.

'Oh yes, very much so. Xenologists thought it might once have been mobile, but when discovered it was like this. It had pseudopods rooted into the ground for kilometres all around. It must have extracted minerals or something to feed on. No one can say for sure, but later examination of the site found the ground riddled with tunnels and lacking in certain minerals found elsewhere.'

'Later examination?' Chaline asked.

Cormac closed his eyes as a memory, clear as day, flashed into his mind. He remembered a fantastic road made for him, two kilometres long, marked out by pseudopods five metres high and half a metre wide, each one like a white cobra, but with a single blue crystalline eye where its mouth should have been. That had been a long walk.

Chaline returned her attention to the screen again and continued before Cormac could answer. 'It must have been made of more than flesh and bone. At that size it would have collapsed in on itself…'

'Alive and a machine,' said Cormac. 'There were AG readings from it, and the readings of metals, and some pretty strange radiations. It's speculated that its bones were some form of bubble metal, or that it supported itself with AG. No one got close enough to find out.'

'Tell me more,' said Chaline, her fatigue forgotten.

Cormac snorted and shook his head. 'It starts with the scream, doesn't it?' he said, then he looked up at the screen. 'Hubris, you might as well record this. I don't want to have to tell it again.' He turned his attention back to Chaline. 'They say you scream for a fraction of a second when you're transmitted by runcible. I didn't arrive on Aster Colora screaming. I arrived reciting a nonsense poem. I should think you know it. Don't we all?'

And Cormac remembered, and he told her.