Line War

8

In interstellar space, fifteen light years from the nearest star, there appeared a distortion like a flaw at the centre of a diamond. Spontaneously generated photons sparkled all around this apparition, and through it the pentagonal war runcible twisted into being, then tumbled end over end, spewing radioactive fire from one of its five sections.

Ensconced in the control sphere aboard Heliotrope, which was presently docked to the war runcible, Orlandine observed the gyrating stars. That the runcible was tumbling relative to those distant stars was irrelevant to her ultimate purposes but it did offend her sense of neatness. She expressed this opinion to Bludgeon, now completely wired into place as the war runcible’s prime controlling AI. Though Bludgeon was still overseeing the drones fighting the fire in Engine Room Four, it readily acquiesced to her will. Patterned ignition of fusion positioning thrusters corrected the tumble, then a long burn from two thrusters alone brought the runcible on course for their nearby destination.

Better, thought Orlandine.

The fault in U-space Engine Four, and consequent fire, had forced them to surface early into realspace, so they weren’t as close to their destination as she would have liked, but this wasn’t the disaster it could have been.

‘We’ve about got the fire under control now,’ said Knobbler, ‘but there ain’t gonna be much left we can use.’

Orlandine allowed herself a moment of superior amusement before replying, ‘You still have not accepted just what I am capable of with the technology I control.’

‘Yeah, whatever,’ the drone replied.

Via her link through Bludgeon, she observed the devastation in the affected engine room. Her Jain mycelium, already spreading through charred optics, over spills of cooling metal and into those parts of U-space Engine Four that had once contained objects fashioned from what was not precisely matter, began garnering data, though she rather suspected she already knew what had happened there. Upon taking control of the war runcible, it had then been necessary to flee before properly checking everything was in working order. The opportunity of grabbing that cargo runcible from the Clarence Bishop had been one not to be missed, for such a chance might not present itself again for many months, so again there had been no time to check that everything was in working order.

‘You feel I am arrogant,’ said Orlandine, watching Knobbler move through a mist of fire-suppressant gases above a jungle of seared optics. The suppressant gas required had been highly reactive. That now showed on Knobbler himself, for the top surface of his main body blossomed patterns of corrosion like planetary maps.

‘Well, on seeing this…’ The drone prodded at the mess with a long serrated spike protruding from one tentacle. ‘Yes I do.’

The spike was barbed at its tip, Orlandine noted, and doubtless had been designed to do something unspeakable to the Prador enemy. She returned full attention to her link to the mycelia inside the engine room, and nodded to herself as the data began to come in — confirming what she suspected. In the four other engine rooms she began to increase the coverage of mycelial networks growing there. Spider web-thin nets began to spread over outer engine casings, and to find little cracks therein and inject themselves.

‘Knobbler, the outer engine casing was open-cell bubble-metal, which is a particularly unstable metal to use, since it is so easy for the inert gas used to foam it to leak out. That’s what happened, probably after this runcible was decommissioned. This wouldn’t have been a problem if some bright spark had not placed gravplates in there. The inert gas was heavier than air and it just ran out, to be replaced by the ordinary air the human engineers were breathing at the time.’

Though this was the worst affected, two of the other engines had similarly lost the inert gas from their foamed-metal casings. Removing damaging oxygen and reintroducing inert gas into its open-cell structure was not really the most viable solution, so something else would now be required. As she investigated the possibilities, Orlandine admitted to herself that the likelihood of such leakage had almost certainly been covered somewhere in the design of the war runcible, but having an expected lifespan of months had it ever been deployed in combat, that hadn’t really been relevant.

‘Over the years the oxygen caused corrosion within the foamed metal, then induction from the S-con cables embedded in the casing kept it expanding and contracting, causing it to break up internally. The broken metal and its oxides, vibrating at the frequency of the alternating currents passing through the cables to keep the U-tech functional, then acted continually like a grinder. Eventually this grinding action broke through the insulation of an S-con cable, with the result you see.’

‘Nothing quite like twenty-twenty hindsight,’ said Knobbler.

This comment irritated Orlandine enormously, but she knew her irritation stemmed from Knobbler not openly acknowledging her analysis of the accident. It occurred to her then that seconding old war drones like Knobbler to her cause would certainly prevent her developing a god complex.

‘All right,’ she said. ‘I… we just didn’t have time to sort this out. We had to get away from Polity interference, and we had to grab that cargo runcible. It was a risk we simply had to take.’

‘But now we’ve lost an engine,’ Knobbler observed.

‘That’s not a great problem.’

‘It’s not?’

‘No, given time I could build us another one. However, I don’t intend to do that. I’ll just extend the coverage of the other four engines to encompass the entire runcible.’

‘Right.’

Orlandine now turned her attention to the drones Cutter, Slack and Stinger who, having played their part in putting out the fire, were on their way to her ship to carry out the next stage of this operation. It would take them a few minutes to board — time enough for her to set in motion some repairs aboard the war runcible.

From caches distributed throughout the mycelial network in the war runcible — bladders and sacs growing in long-unoccupied human habitations or in wall cavities, which had been gathering to themselves stores of pure elements and useful compounds — she transported to the engine rooms all the materials she required. The mycelia around the four engine casings she set to sucking air from the bubble metal, and microwelding all those little exterior cracks in it, while simultaneously nano-injecting her selected remedy. When this operation was finished, some hours hence, the open cell bubbles within the metal would be full of a form of thermoplastic which would both act as an insulator and prevent further induction-caused grinding. She was rather proud of this solution, but decided not to try bragging about it to Knobbler.

Cutter, Slack and Stinger entered Heliotrope through the cargo lock, since they would all have found the human airlock a little narrow for them. Once they were safely aboard, Orlandine swiftly undocked Heliotrope and dropped it away from the runcible.

‘Knobbler, Bludgeon,’ she said, ‘I want you to check the design specs of that war runcible, as almost certainly there’ll be other age-related problems we’ll have to deal with. Though the predicted lifespan of the entire runcible was short, I imagine obsolescence spans will be recorded for individual components.’

‘Sure thing, boss,’ Knobbler replied, while Bludgeon’s reply was merely a code acknowledgement. Of course Orlandine did not have to ‘imagine’ about the obsolescence spans, since she was confident they were there in the specs. Despite its age and present faults, the war runcible had been designed and built by AIs, after all.

‘Now, are you ready back there?’ she enquired of the three drones aboard.

‘We were born ready,’ Cutter replied.

Orlandine didn’t bother pointing out to him that she was the only one aboard who had been ‘born’, and even that was stretching the definition a bit, since she had been ‘born’ at two months gestation and then moved into a haiman re-engineering amniotic tank.

A suitable distance from the runcible she brought Heliotrope to a relative full stop and again opened the cargo doors. Through hull cameras she observed Cutter scrambling out and heading along to the base of Heliotrope’s claw. Even from within the sphere she heard the busy clattering of his feet. Once in position, the praying mantis drone extruded tools from his various sharp limbs and set to work. Further back she observed the other two drones begin to haul out components of a framework constructed to hold the cargo runcible stolen from the Clarence Bishop.

‘Okay,’ said Cutter, ‘that’s the stops off.’

Orlandine knew that already, having received an error message the moment Cutter removed the steel buffers that prevented Heliotrope’s pincer claw from opening too wide.

‘Good work,’ she said, then ordered the claw to open fully.

Cutter reached out to grip one of the claws, and hung there as the two twenty-foot-long pieces of curved ceramal opened out to their buffer point, then beyond, finally grinding to a halt at the limit of their hydraulics. The two claws were now spread so they jutted at approximately ninety degrees to the length of Heliotrope itself. Cutter held station as the other two drones scuttled out, then returned to the base of the claws to ignite arc-light from an extruded welder. Stability was required here, above all, so the drone was now welding the claws in this position, where they would remain immovable.

The two other drones, one of them an iron scorpion and the other resembling two spiders sharing the same abdomen, like nightmare arachnoid Siamese twins, began working with bewildering speed to assemble the prefabricated framework. From the anchor points of the extended jaws of the claw they first bolted together a heavy triangular frame, from the comers of which they extended thin but rigid struts over twenty yards long. Alternately moving out along these struts they affixed cross-braces until reaching the strut ends, where they bolted into place a thicker triangular frame. Seeing it there, Orlandine thought the double-spider drone entirely appropriate for the task, for the finished structure bore a passing resemblance to a spider’s web.

While this was being built, Cutter returned to the hold to bring out the first of the three runcible ‘horn’ assemblies that would be mounted on the outer triangular framework. These items Orlandine had redesigned so that, once the Skaidon warp formed like the meniscus of a bubble between them, they could twist over, enclosing their forward faces underneath that same meniscus. It wasn’t a particularly unusual redesign, and in fact had been used before — when the mechanisms of the runcible itself needed to be protected from what was being pushed through its gate. However, Orlandine intended to use it this time in a particularly unusual way. As Cutter headed out to fix the assembly into place, the other drones returned to the hold for the rest of the runcible components: the buffers, the field-control systems and hard-field projectors that would push the horns themselves out of their assemblies to create whatever aperture — within limits — might be required. And, of course, the masses of heavily insulated optics that would link this stolen cargo runcible to its controlling AI: Bludgeon.

That particular drone had gained much experience in controlling U-space engines of the larger war runcible and, from that massive device’s computer memory, had been learning how to operate runcibles in general as well. When everything was set up, Bludgeon would take control of Heliotrope, and of the cargo runcible it would be deploying. That, of course, left a vacancy aboard the war runcible itself. A vacancy Orlandine herself intended to fill after her rendezvous at the destination ahead, whereupon she would set the huge device on its journey towards Earth.

One of the wormships had landed on the surface of the hot planetoid. It had spread out and was growing in the intense heat, but beyond that it was difficult to see what it was doing down there, since the other wormships in orbit were throwing up a lot of electromagnetic interference.

All the ship receivers were open, and the flow of information they were picking up seemed to pass like a perpetual speeding train through the Harpy’s systems. Vulture mentally flitted around it all, not daring to directly sample even the smallest portion of this traffic, for it would be just like trying to peck at said speeding train. It would rip his head off. Mr Crane, however, was linked into the systems by Jain, or perhaps draconic, nanofilaments bonding through the one hand he rested on the console before him. On an informational level Vulture was very aware of the Golem’s mind interlacing the network like taut-strung piano wires. Crane was sampling the traffic — snatching a bit here, diverting a bit there — and Vulture snapped up these morsels and gleaned from them what he could. Crane’s instruction, when it came, was terse:

Closer.

Vulture felt like physically flinching as he nudged Harpy closer to the circling wormships. The chameleonware was working well, but one slip could be disastrous. There were enough weapons out there to convert the two conjoined ships he controlled into less than atoms.

‘They’re deliberately concealing this,’ remarked Vulture. Being this close, they were managing to obtain a lot of detail. Much more than would be available to the various Polity ships now arriving in this same solar system and forming defences around the two inhabited worlds — known as the Caldera worlds. Odd that, for surely the best form of defence here would be to attack?

Closer.

Vulture took the ship even closer, now edging just below the orbit of the wormships. Any nearer than this and he would have to employ AG to stay up, or else increase orbital acceleration. Both methods were risky, for both could reveal their presence despite the chameleonware. Now, however, the sensors were picking up less interference, and Vulture could see something more of what was occurring below. The wormship down on the surface had distributed itself about the planetoid and was creating installations around the equator like a string of pearls, and yet other installations along the edge of one continental plate. What purpose these served, Vulture could only guess, but he reckoned they wouldn’t be healthy for the two inhabited worlds orbiting further out, on the other side of the sun.

‘Why the hell aren’t there ECS ships here attacking?’ Vulture voiced his concerns.

Certainly no ECS ship would be able to sneak this close, since only by using the same Jain-tech chameleonware as Erebus did had they themselves managed to remain so well concealed. Chameleonware was never perfect, but what it did not conceal in their case was being ignored by the nearby wormships, for they saw it simply as part of the same entity as themselves. But that would last only as long as the codes Crane had stolen from the legate craft remained current. And yes, it made sense for ECS to concentrate first on setting up defences around the two inhabited worlds, but Vulture reckoned ECS could at least have sent something in to take a closer look here, and maybe launch a few missiles at these buggers. Then a thought suddenly occurred to him: perhaps ECS had already sent something.

Scan -

Luckily, this planetoid being so hot and emitting radiation across the spectrum, it was not necessary to use a particularly high level of active scan, which again might have revealed their presence. Those equatorial pearls, it transpired, weren’t bombs, as Vulture had assumed; they were cooling spheres. They acted like slowly expanding refrigerators, dumping heat outside themselves and maintaining an internal temperature below minus a hundred and ninety degrees Celsius.

‘Very odd,’ observed Vulture.

Geo-scan and model.

The data began to fall into new configurations, and Vulture started building a model of this world: detailing the composition of its often broken rocky crust, volcanic vents and magma chambers, its chrome-iron core and thick polar caps of iron-oxide-loaded rocks, and even the faults lying along the edges of continental plates.

Enough.

Crane jerked the model away from Vulture’s control. New data began to input. The circlet of cold spheres fell into place, along with tubular interlinking structures. The installations along the continental rift also dropped into place, but with a question mark over their purpose. Intercepted data was added, and Vulture watched as, in the model, the spheres began to dump their frigid contents into the connecting tubes. The entire ring contracted, the sudden massive temperature change turning the crust below it frangible. The planetoid’s rapid spin and misbalance between poles had always applied a torsion force that reached its maximum around the equator. That same force now twisted the planetoid in half. A sudden addition of further data included massive detonations along the continental rift. The model expanded. Vulture watched the planetoid throw almost half its internal substance into vacuum: trillions of tons of matter. Stones, boulders, asteroidal chunks of rock, and an ocean of magma travelled away at thousands of miles per second: a plume of matter spewing out for millions of miles.

A slight alteration of the timescale put the two inhabited worlds in the path of this efflux. It would certainly kill millions of the inhabitants but, most importantly for the wormships, it would render any defences based on the solar mirrors ineffective, for this plume of debris would block out the sun.

‘Smart,’ said Vulture and, checking the timescale, saw that the optimum time for this colossal act of demolition was about forty hours away, with it taking a further twenty hours for the plume to reach the two Caldera worlds.

Abruptly, the model went into reverse, the timescale dropping back to zero, back to the present. Now bewildering arrays of grids overlaid and penetrated the planetoid, and different views of it began clicking up at a rate of tens for every second. Mr Crane was obviously looking for something, and within a couple of minutes he found it: an area just over from where the rift installations intersected that equatorial ring of cooling spheres.

‘Are you still in contact with ECS?’ Vulture enquired.

Crane removed his hand from the console; it came away trailing strands as if it had just been pressed in treacle. The model blinked out and the Golem stood and made his way back through the ship, where he picked up the big CTD imploder — which, this time, Vulture suspected the Golem would not be using for some elaborate bluff.

‘Are you going to answer me?’

Yes came the Golem’s reply and, frustratingly, Vulture did not know whether that answer was to his first or second question. He observed Crane open the airlock leading down into the legate vessel, then, with the CTD tucked under his arm, climb down inside.

‘What are you doing?’

The other vessel detached and fell away, but Vulture found himself still able to access the departed ship’s systems. Dropping towards a hot acidic atmosphere, the legate vessel quickly left the Harpy and the wormships high above. Because the physical conjoining was now broken, Vulture checked the integrity of his chameleonware, but then stopped himself, knowing that if anything went wrong now he might have only a few microseconds in which to draw up his last will and testament. Returning his attention to the other vessel, he saw Crane begin to use the landing thrusters, making their firing pattern mirror eruptions below whenever possible. The vessel passed through volcanic clouds, yellow sulphur crystallizing on its hull, then turning brown and flaking away. A shimmering umber desert became visible below, then a line of jagged black mountains rose into view. At the foot of these, to the left, one of the spheres reared up through haze like a massive power station. Coming over the mountains, Crane put the vessel into a leaden glide towards one of the rift installations — a nondescript cylindrical bunker perched on the edge of a cliff overlooking a sea of magma, dead Jain-tech strewn all around it like driftwood. Inside the vessel, Mr Crane, ignoring controls he had already preset, began undressing. He removed his hat and coat, baggy and threadbare pullover, boots — meticulously unfastening them and putting them neatly to one side — worn trousers and then, ridiculously, a pair of long Johns.

What the hell was the Golem up to?

On automatic, the legate vessel landed in the shade of a frozen wave of blue-streaked black rock. Crane faced the inner hull, which looked like the inside of an iron bird’s chest cavity, then pushed his hand through and down, unzipping it. He next pushed out through the skin of the Jain-tech vessel, into temperatures hot enough to cook an ox. But, of course, Crane had experienced such temperatures before, when he was murdering people for Skellor on Shayden’s Find.

Through the vessel’s sensory skin Vulture observed Crane stroll across boiling ground towards a bunkerlike building beyond. A hatch opened in one side and something segmented slid out and accelerated towards the Golem. Its front end reared up and twisted into a stepped spiral for a moment, then twisted back into the flat tip of a copper flatworm. Crane walked on past, ignoring it, and ducked through its exit hole into the bunker. The worm-thing spiralled once more, then flattened out again. Obviously it was using some sort of sensory apparatus and seemed puzzled. Crane had to be somehow subverting things again — making himself invisible to these components of Erebus or else making them consider him one of their own number. After a moment he emerged from the bunker, striding past the worm-thing, which abruptly turned round and slid back towards its home. Re-entering the legate vessel, Crane connected in and squirted up to Vulture a complex two-million-digit code, with a sub-code that could manage a mathematical transform on the main code precisely twenty-eight times. That was the number of these bunker buildings ranged along the rift, each of which Vulture now understood to contain a single multiple-megaton CTD.

Crane launched the legate ship again, using minimal thrust to slide the vessel out and over the edge of the cliff. Full use of thrusters would not easily be detected over the magma sea. Against this background he took the vessel high, then went into another leaden glide towards the nearest sphere in the equatorial line, but then banked to head towards the pipe connecting it to the next one along, fifty miles away. Another code came through to Vulture, which the AI instantly recognized as the detonation code of the CTD imploder Crane had stowed aboard the legate craft. It was the Golem’s way of letting Vulture know what was now going on.

No need for further communication then. Vulture resurrected the model they had been using earlier and started injecting some new parameters. He watched Crane descend at the midpoint of the pipe, exit the vessel and saunter over to jam the CTD underneath it. The giant spheres contained nitrogen — which was abundant here — cooled until liquid. Each of them was a vacuum flask, the interior layer some kind of glass, the outer layer a heat-resistant ceramic, with vacuum in between. Vulture ran some further calculations, updated the new parameters within the model, then cackled at the results. After a moment his cackling trailed off. In its way, this weakness seemed very odd. It was almost as if Erebus had deliberately introduced a massive flaw in the battle plan here.

But no matter, for Mr Crane was about to graduate from his previous occupation of ripping out someone’s guts to ripping out the guts of a world, albeit a small one.

The hammerhead Bertha landed near the city, where it opened down its entire hull into a series of ramps. Polity troops, AG tanks, weapons platforms and striding autoguns began swarming out, like termites from a mound. The King of Hearts landed on its belly in the shade of what appeared to be a steel cliff, but was in fact the side of a massive atmosphere ship downed earlier in the conflict. Cormac headed down the attack ship’s ramp with Arach clattering along to his left, Smith on his right, and Scar already on all fours at the foot of the incline, sniffing at the churned mud. Above him, hard-fields were flaring in the sky like borealis, lasers needling through layers of smoke, and unidentified objects detonating in the air to rain pieces of themselves towards the ground. The racket was abominable: part thunderstorm and partly like the sounds of a demolition project. And the ramp kept shuddering underfoot.

‘I’m home,’ said Arach, skittering in half-circles to gaze at the carnage.

‘Now now,’ said Hubbert Smith. ‘You know the boss don’t like that kinda talk.’

Cormac fixed the Golem in his gaze for a long moment, glanced back up the ramp into the King of Hearts, then over at Arach, then down to Scar, who now seemed to be inspecting a clump of earth. He wondered why he’d saddled himself with this comedy duo of AI lunatics and one draconic borderline psychopath, all aboard a ship whose AI hated humans. He shook his head then raised his gaze to the flying platform now descending towards them. Capture a legate, he thought. With this crew. There had been no advice on how he should go about such a task and, according to his orders, the only resources allowed him were those the commander here might deem could be spared. He thought about the last legate they had tried to capture, and where that had led. This whole operation struck him as utterly futile, just make-work for those Jerusalem did not entirely trust. Then it occurred to him that maybe Jerusalem did not trust him simply because somehow the AI had realized he was beginning to perceive agendas outside supposed Polity defence.

As a flying platform landed on the boggy ground, Cormac eyed its pilot: an ECS ground trooper in chameleoncloth fatigues. He felt a stab of nostalgia for his own time served amid the grunts — things had been so much simpler then. He headed over towards the platform, determined to get things moving, though what things he wasn’t entirely sure yet. Abruptly Scar reached out and caught hold of his arm. The dracoman’s ferocious head jutted forward as it peered intently at the pilot.

‘Problem?’ Cormac enquired, initiating Shuriken through his gridlink and sliding his left hand to where the thin-gun was tucked into the back of his belt.

‘Jain?’ said Scar oddly, tilting his head.

U-sense: immediate. The pilot possessed the usual collection of human organs, but it seemed there was something else inside him. Cormac perceived a blurred stringiness there, as if his flesh was threaded with near-invisible fibres. This was nothing like the snakes of Jain-tech he had observed inside those infested humans on Klurhammon, so he did not know how to react. Maybe this one was a hooper from the planet Spatterjay? The natives of that world apparently had bodies packed with viral fibres. It occurred to him that, while being able to see inside other people or things was quite useful, it would be even more useful to understand what he was seeing there. He spat silent instructions at the other two. In response, Smith moved out further to the right, while Arach opened the two hatches on his back. If this part of the ECS line had been infiltrated by the enemy, things were bound to get fraught rather quickly.

‘Okay,’ he said. ‘Let’s keep moving.’

As Cormac drew closer to the platform, the pilot turned from the controls he had been inspecting, opened the gate in the safety rail and nodded an acknowledgement. The man’s uniform, Cormac noticed, had been cut away in various places. The right sleeve was missing and a blue wound dressing covered the arm from shoulder to elbow. Material had also been excised around the lower torso above the right hip, and a wound dressing showed through there too. The right leg of his fatigues was gone below the knee, similar dressing stretching from knee to ankle. There was in addition what looked like an undressed burn on one side of his face.

Reaching the safety gate, Cormac paused to say, ‘Shouldn’t you be in one of the military hospitals?’ He very much wanted an answer, because thus far he had yet to hear anyone infected with Jain technology manage more than a grunt or a snarl.

The man turned again. ‘A month or so back, with these injuries I would have been, but the little doctors are quite effective.’ Cormac nearly drew his weapon and fired upon seeing that the injury to the man’s face looked more like some sort of cancerous growth. Definitely similar to the stuff seen in the wounds of those controlled by Jain-tech. But as the man’s words impacted, Cormac loosened his grip on the butt of his thin-gun.

Little doctors?

Mika had told him about some experiments conducted aboard Jerusalem, describing a human blank — a mindless clone — being shot at close range with a pulse gun. It should have been a killing shot, but the clone survived it and stood up again afterwards. Within the clone had been installed a mycelium based on Jain technology, which acted to repair physical damage and sustain the human body despite such serious injury. This mycelium was very much like one Mika had installed inside herself and others on the planet Masada before discovering that they went on to destroy their host while producing Jain nodes.

Cormac again tried to access the local military net, but as yet he possessed no encryption keys for this world, and predators — both ECS and enemy — were swarming in informational space ready to find their way in via unprotected transmission or reception.

King, I really need access, he sent.

Still working on it — but they’re rather busy here, King replied.

‘Stay alert,’ Cormac told the other three as he clambered aboard the platform. Arach scrambled on next, placing himself over to the right of the suspect pilot. Smith and Scar stepped into the space behind him and Cormac leaned on the rail just to the man’s right.

‘When were they introduced?’ Cormac asked.

The man shrugged. ‘About a month ago,’ he replied. ‘My platoon were implanted with them first and realized the greatest danger soonest.’

‘That being?’

‘Overconfidence.’ The soldier pulled up on the platform’s joystick and with a steadily increasing hum it rose into the air beside the steel cliff.

‘If you could explain?’ suggested Cormac.

Again the shrug. ‘You take a few hits that would otherwise have put you screaming on the ground, and you begin to think you’re invulnerable, so tend to take more risks. We lost half the platoon the moment the enemy realized how much of a danger we were.’

‘I see.’

After a minute the platform rose above the upper surface of the atmosphere ship. Armoured bunkers containing gun emplacements and hard-field generators had been ranged along this surface. The sky out towards the front looked like the flank of some translucent scaled beast — as Polity hard-fields were made perpetually visible by constant impacts. These fields, these scales, were flicking off intermittently to allow firing from Polity forces: here and there the turquoise stab of a particle beam, the stuttering fire of a pulse-cannon drawing punctuated lines in the sky like those made by incendiary bullets, black missiles needling out on drives bright as welder lights. The pilot slid the platform across to an area where numerous aircars and troop carriers were parked, and descended to land beside them. As the platform crunched down on the ceramal surface, Cormac observed soldiers like their pilot scrambling aboard a troop carrier, which was an armoured vehicle like a floating barge. There were a few dracomen among them, Cormac noted. Once all were aboard the carrier, it rose abruptly into the sky and accelerated towards the wall of hard-fields, two of its scales parting quickly to allow the craft through.

Here are the encryption keys, King informed him.

Cormac applied the keys and immediately gained access to the the local military network, where he promptly accessed battle plans, logistics, deployments — the whole panoply of this widespread conflict. He discovered that the AI in command here had at first needed to continually adjust its plan, as the attack by Erebus’s forces changed tack, slotting it all together with as little waste of resources as possible. Then the fight settled into a brute contest of strength, until now with the arrival of reinforcements. A query supplied him with further information about the ‘little doctors’. After being developed aboard Jerusalem the schematics for their construction were then transmitted to AIs all across the Polity. Whether they were employed in battle was down to the AIs concerned. Here the AI, Ramone, and its physical commanders on the ground, had decided to give this new technology a try, but were still undecided about its efficacy. For a start, it needed to be deployed with considerable forethought about its psychological effects on those carrying it. One hazard was overconfidence — just like the man said.

‘Stand down,’ he told the others, transmitting to them the details. Arach’s hatches slammed shut, Smith reached out and clicked on the safety catch of his proton carbine, and with a metallic slither Scar replaced a carbide hunting knife in the sheath at his belt.

A further query revealed that the ones Cormac needed to see here were called Romos and Remes, avatars created by the city AI to take charge of the defence.

‘Ramone’s avatars?’ he asked of their pilot.

The man pointed silently towards one of the bunkers, before vaulting the platform rail and heading over to join a group of soldiers gathered around the next carrier due to leave. Glancing back towards the hammerhead Bertha, Cormac saw that troop carriers were spiralling into the sky. It seemed that defence was now giving way to attack.

Arach scrambled to the ground, rose up high on his spider legs and gazed intently at the departing craft. Despite the drone being a chromed spider, Cormac could recognize the yearning in its pose. Checking present battle status, he saw that they would soon be following those same carriers out if they were ever going to capture a legate. He stepped from the platform and headed across to the bunker, his team falling in dutifully behind. But how do you successfully capture a legate? No doubt, on facing capture, one of Erebus’s subordinates would automatically try to destroy itself, almost certainly possessing the means to do so internally. So how to stop that in time? The search engines he used presented three possibilities. Firstly a massive EM pulse might do the job, but it might also scramble any useful information to be garnered. Secondly, an informational attack might work, but first he needed to get through the legate’s defences, and even then the chances of success he roughly estimated at one in twenty. Only the third option seemed remotely viable: instant freezing.

As he finally approached the armoured door to the bunker, Cormac sent his search engines off again, this time to check on the availability of certain necessary items in the vicinity. The door before him opened and a Golem with blue skin and pupil-less green eyes stepped out. He recognized it as a Golem immediately — he could see its metal bones.

‘What the hell are you doing here?’ the figure enquired.

‘You’ve not been informed?’

‘No, I heard about your arrival only a few minutes ago, from the King of Hearts’ Obviously one of Ramone’s Golem avatars, the blue one paused and gazed up at the sky, where it now seemed the gods were igniting flashbulbs. He continued, ‘I can’t see what possible purpose is served by—’

There came a thunderous crash, even louder than the constant racket of the ongoing battle. Cormac spun round to the source of the sound and saw a fire trail stabbing down into the centre of the nearby city. Then abruptly numerous explosions bloomed amid the tall buildings, some of which began toppling. Cormac instantly recognized this as an orbital rail-gun strike. Through his gridlink he found chaos on the military net — servers crashing and bandwidth shrinking to choke off information flow — but he picked up enough to find out that several wormships had made a suicide run on the planet just to deliver that blow, and had subsequently been destroyed by the Cable Hogue.

‘We are bereft,’ said the blue avatar.

Cormac turned back to see him down on one knee.

‘What?’

That strike, King supplied. It took out the planetary AI, Ramone.

Erebus could not locate Fiddler Randal, but the attack ship captain was still indefinably there, somewhere, within the massive conglomerate Jain structure that was Erebus’s own body. No matter, for Randal was just an irritation. Erebus now turned its attention to the masses of data coming in from the forty fleets of attacking wormships, and from sensors and agents positioned throughout the Polity, some even having penetrated as far as the Sol system.

Twelve of those forty groups of fifty wormships had encountered heavy resistance and so would not achieve their apparent goal of destroying or taking over the worlds they had targeted. This did not matter, because the three crucial worlds would fall — the three worlds that acted almost like fuses in the section of the runcible network extending into the nearby quadrant of the Polity. With the linkage of those three worlds into the runcible network broken, Polity AIs would not be able to instantly shut down that same section of the network. It would take them three seconds longer, and that would be enough.

Earth Central Security had apparently responded in the only logical way to this attack, by sending sufficient forces to counter it, yet holding other forces in reserve in the quadrant of the Polity behind that attack should it be a feint. It was all exactly as Erebus required, for those reserve forces, those ECS fleets, were easy to locate in the limited number of solar systems with sufficient industrialization to support them. Every one of them was much larger than the fleet Erebus had first defeated, but no problem there, for Erebus had no intention of confronting them.

Chevron? Erebus enquired, using security measures far in excess of those it used even when communicating with its closest parts.

This particular part of itself Erebus allowed a great deal of self-determination, even its own name. Chevron had been a female-emulating Golem aboard the ship once named Trafalgar, whose limited body had once been Erebus’s own. Chevron had been a loyal ally from the beginning, her indifference to the human race growing throughout the war against the Prador to the point where human life had come to mean nothing to her. In its way such an attitude had been a useful trait during that war, for she had been quite prepared to sacrifice as many human troops as necessary to get the job done. However, in the war’s closing years her indifference had turned into utter contempt, and allowing human beings to die had turned into a hobby where she actively sought to get them killed or else slaughtered them herself if she could get away with it. She had subsequently chosen to depart the Polity aboard the Trafalgar because ECS investigators were getting too close to her, and the idea of an AI melding into something else seemed to her a way to escape what she had become, which, oddly, she felt to be all too human. Now she was a part of Erebus, but one it treated with reserve and caution, like a human might treat its own tendency to excess in deviancy or violence.

I am here, Chevron indicated by transmitting a simple response code.

With a U-space link now established to Chevron via her vessel, Erebus first surveilled the vessel’s location. It was currently down in the shallows of an orange sea whose waters were heavily laden with iron salts. Her ship, a flat segmented grub a quarter of a mile long, had piggybacked to this world’s orbit in the U-field of a large freighter, and then covered its descent using chameleonware. It could not have done so now, what with the security measures presently in place, for the freighter’s mass discrepancy — the difference between its registered mass and its actual mass inclusive of Chevron’s vessel — would have been quickly detected, as would the difficult-to-conceal gravity phenomena associated with an anti-gravity descent. But, then, Chevron had arrived on this world called Xanadu almost five years ago. She had landed before Skellor found his Jain node, before a giant arcology on a world called Coloron had been destroyed to prevent the spread of Jain-tech from yet another node, during a time when Polity AIs were ostensibly only just waking up to the possibility of a major threat to their rule.

Erebus began running checks throughout the vessel, and saw that the complex factory housed inside it had completed eighteen thermonuclear imploders. The ship was still drawing in seawater and separating out needed elements to construct the complex components of each device. Jain roots, piercing two miles deep below the sea floor, were working their way along a seam of pitchblende, from which they were busy extracting uranium dioxide. Further refining of that material took place within the ship itself so the isotopes were separated out. Only uranium 238 — after undergoing neutron bombardment to convert it into plutonium 239 — and uranium 235 were suitable for Erebus’s purpose here; both of them being fissionable materials. Out of preference, Erebus would have used antimatter, as employed in Polity CTD imploders, but even the excellent chameleonware aboard this vessel could not have concealed such a large quantity of that substance. No matter, for the effect would be the same.

Update, Erebus instructed, shifting a portion of its attention to ride the murderous Golem’s senses.

Chevron wore the external human appearance of an elfin blue-eyed blonde — a façade that showed nothing of the dense and complex nano-technology that packed her body from head to foot. She was sitting on the balcony of her luxury apartment in the Columbus Tower. Though it overlooked one of Xanadu’s major cities, more importantly for her, it overlooked the largest runcible facility on Xanadu: a labyrinth of geodesic domes between interconnecting lounges and halls designed to accommodate the huge numbers of people arriving and departing.

The desired update came through as an information packet which Erebus opened in processing space secure even from most of itself. Upon her arrival on this world, Chevron had established herself with the local separatist organisation and quickly worked her way up through its ranks by using abilities an order of magnitude above those possessed by anyone else within it. She had also murdered numerous rivals in interesting and extremely painful ways. She hadn’t needed to, but that was Chevron. Now she was indisputably their leader.

Here on Xanadu Chevron now controlled over two thousand separatists, out of which she had selected five hundred for this mission. They had been training for two years and were armed with weapons manufactured by her own ship: assault rifles and automatic handguns, missile launchers and high explosives. These weapons were all created by Jain-tech, but any such tech inside them was now dead, so it would not give off the kind of signals Polity AIs were constantly on the lookout for. Energy weapons too would have been detected, since no matter what you did with the structure of these, they still needed a power supply that could easily be spotted. Hence her need to employ such anachronistic weapons.

The assault rifles were a perfect example: they folded up, and scan would reveal them as no more than deactivated replicas. Opening them out again would make numerous essential connections. The apparently solid metal inside their barrels would melt and void itself, the neutral propellant inside the bullets contained in their clips would undergo a chemical transformation and be ready to fire in moments. Other weapons also bore an initially harmless appearance and could be activated just as quickly. There were bottles of beer that transformed into grenades containing a potent liquid explosive; an old-style drug injector that turned into an automatic handgun, its drug ampoules transforming readily into bullets; and a crate containing large discs of an amberlike resin — a natural product of this world — that each turned into a planar explosive capable of ripping through ceramal armour.

‘They’ll all die, of course,’ Chevron observed, speaking out loud.

‘And that is a problem to you?’ Erebus wondered, using human speech at the same slow rate while checking through the Golem’s mind on every level below that of their communication.

Chevron shrugged. ‘Security is very tight. At one time you could carry personal armament if you chose to. Even that is no longer allowed.’

Ah. Erebus saw what was bothering Chevron: the humans might all die too quickly. Erebus withdrew from full connection, returning to communication by data transfer.

This is not a problem. The runcible AI will see that though the attack was very professional, its faults were utterly human, and therefore ascribe it merely to a separatist source. You will have your time.

‘And when will I have that time?’ Again Chevron spoke out loud. This anthropoid tendency did not worry Erebus. Chevron had stranger habits.

When three particular runcible installations have ceased to exist. And that will have occurred within fifty hours.

‘My people have open bookings, are all located within the vicinity, and are all prepared.’

Not wanting to maintain a U-space link over so great a distance longer than necessary, Erebus now withdrew totally. Chevron was ready and would do what was required once the time was right. Erebus returned its attention to the attack along the Polity border.

One of the runcible worlds needing to be shut down was now out of the equation. At the cost of twelve wormships deployed to divert fire from a massive Polity dreadnought, another six had managed to make a run on the world called Ramone and slam a one-ton rail-gun missile straight down into the runcible complex in its capital city of Transheim, thereby taking out the planetary AI. The six ships had then been destroyed by the same massive dreadnought. Erebus recognized the Cable Hogue and felt a surge of what it could only describe as nostalgia. For in another age Erebus had fought beside that same ship against the Prador.

It would not take long for a new planetary AI to be initiated on Ramone, but it would take much longer to reinstate connections to the massive geothermal power stations buried under the continent on which the city of Transheim sat — stations that provided a vast amount of energy for operating the runcible network.

There were numerous runcibles on an oceanic world called Prometheus, but fifteen of them were notably different from the rest. Before that particular world had been colonized by the Polity, all its surface water had been frozen. Massive heat sinks deep under the ice, connected by superconducting cables to fifteen sets of oversized runcible buffers, had eventually thawed out the ice, and now, when there were abrupt drops in runcible traffic or, in some cases, surges of traffic in particular directions within the same quadrant, excess energy needed to be bled away. When that happened, whole oceans on Prometheus sometimes heated up by a few degrees.

Prometheus was occupied by amphidapt humans, their population level exploding from the start. They lived in undersea cities or inhabited the few island chains. Four of the fifteen runcibles had been located on the islands, but three of them were now gone, and the islands themselves now looked as if they had turned volcanic. Four of the undersea runcibles were gone as well after rail-gun missiles had punched down to strike them in the depths. It would not be long before the remainder were knocked out too, since the fifteen runcibles had mostly been located in areas of low population density, while the Polity AIs had concentrated their defences over the major cities. Remiss of them, though an understandable miscalculation, since all the attacks had been launched against Line worlds of high population. They had thought Erebus’s intent merely to destroy human life.

Erebus had yet to initiate its attack on the two Caldera worlds, for the massive solar collectors and power stations on and about those worlds could easily be adapted for use as weapons. Erebus was here using a different approach, which would reach its resolution within the fifty hours given to Chevron. Once the installations spread around an inner hot planetoid did their job, most of its substance would be blasted towards the Caldera worlds. The destruction wreaked should be extensive enough to knock them both out of the equation too, leaving them no longer able to supplement power usage within the runcible net. The wormships perpetually orbiting the planetoid meanwhile prevented ECS from seeing what was occurring on the surface. At the last moment they would pull away, then follow the debris plume in to finish off any of the power installations remaining. Doubtless the Polity AIs assumed the ships were positioned there to await further orders, and were meanwhile using the time to—

Something wrong.

From numerous different perspectives circling in orbit of the planetoid, Erebus observed a massive explosion erupt between two of the refrigerant-containing spheres. It was clearly an imploder blast: a globe of white fire expanding, then abruptly beginning to contract as the weapon involved generated its temporary massive gravity field. However, since this blast occurred in atmosphere, a shock wave spread out beyond the matter-disrupting hypocentre. It struck the two nearest cooling spheres, rocking and distorting them. Liquid nitrogen poured out of fractures, a fog boiling up to quickly obscure view within the human spectrum.

Was this the start of some attack?

The wormships in orbit began frantically scanning their surroundings for the cause, for any ECS ships would soon reveal themselves when they deployed further weapons. Watching through its thousand eyes, Erebus noticed something else strange occur. The refrigerant was pouring along the pipes towards the next spheres on either side. Upon reaching them, those adjacent spheres in turn released their contents into the next set of pipes — just the flow shock being enough to break the spheres’ internal glass thermos bottles. It was evidently a huge design flaw, and Erebus could blame nothing but itself. The whole strategy was now a write-off for, without the detonation of the rift CTDs, the planetoid wouldn’t…

Like a chain of arc-light diamonds springing into existence, the CTDs began to detonate even though Erebus had sent no signal. But not enough of the spheres had yet released their refrigerant for this final nudge to tear the planetoid in half and eject the mass of debris required. However, this should still be sufficient to cause some major planetary redesign. The surface of the planetoid nearest to the detonations distorted. A continental plate collapsed, creating an unbearable pressure that had to be somehow relieved. It came out of the rift: trillions of tons of magma squirting out at a speed way beyond escape velocity on such a rapidly spinning world. It sprayed round like an equatorial flame-thrower. Erebus realized at once that, however impressive, this blast had ejected too little material too soon, so would prove no more than a nuisance to the Caldera worlds.

‘Oh deary deary me,’ said Fiddler Randal.

‘When I find you,’ said Erebus, replying in the same slow drag of human speech while again applying a huge range of computing resources to track down the source of that damned voice, ‘your suffering will be eternal.’

‘Now, am I getting just a hint here that you might feel a little irked? Perhaps in the future you should get in a few Polity designers to check your stuff over before you try to use it?’

Rage surged through Erebus, through all of Erebus. Worm-ships juddered to a halt wherever they were located. Walls of rod-forms abruptly collapsed. Polity ships, facing imminent destruction, suddenly found their seemingly single-minded opponents distracted, shooting inaccurately, gaps appearing in what had been adamantine defences. Ten seconds later, this anger faded, and the attacks were back on track. Then Erebus saw the danger, a full half-minute after it should have done. And already a full ten seconds too late.

Get out, it ordered the forty-nine wormship captains. Run.

They had all just been sitting there in orbit, gazing down at the approaching firestorm, unable to process what had happened because they shared Erebus’s confusion about the design flaw, and even further paralysed by their master’s anger.

Sluggishly, the ships began breaking orbit, slinging out hard-fields behind them. However, those fields that could stop rail-gun missiles and absorb the blasts from megaton CTDs failed under the load of trying to halt ton upon ton of molten rock travelling at thousands of miles per second. The wormships flickered with bright stars as hard-field generators burned out within them. Molten rock impacted like a tsunami hitting a village of sticks. The ships writhed, shedding burning segments and firing off jets of evaporant to try and cool themselves. Twenty-one of them disintegrated in the first few seconds. Another nine tried dropping into U-space but were too close to the planetoid, and also too close to the mass of magma — within it, in fact. What remained of those particular wormships reappeared, turned inside out half a light year away. A further fifteen died within the next few minutes, shedding segments as they expired until there was nothing left to shed. Only four remained, damaged and utterly reduced.

Coming out of shock, Erebus ordered the four to merge, while realizing that Randal’s interruption had been precisely timed, so almost certainly the man had something to do with this. Ignoring Randal’s presence within itself, Erebus rapidly analysed what must have happened: someone had placed that initial CTD; someone had snatched the codes from the rift installations. That same someone must have found a way to penetrate Jain-tech in a way the Polity had yet to manage.

Erebus immediately instigated a code change across its entire composite being, reformatting chameleonware, recognition codes and scanning formats.

There.

The new scanning format picked up a ship moving away under conventional drive hidden by Erebus’s own previous chameleonware and recognition codes. It was some old-style craft with a legate’s vessel bonded underneath. A renegade? Only a fraction of a second after Erebus detected the vessel, it shed the chameleonware and shut down the recognition code signals. This was a taunt: a flagrant display of contempt.

What is this?

Erebus tried to connect, just out of habit, and was surprised when a connection did establish, but not so surprised to neglect to instantly follow with an informational attack. However, the attack just fell into an abyss, then, for the briefest moment, Erebus linked to another mind and found something utterly disconcerting. Here was an entity possessing a mental make-up Erebus simply could not recognize. Where there should have been limits there were none. The order of reality, model, thought and action were interwoven in ways that defied logic. The mind seemed utterly insane to Erebus, yet it was a potent alien madness. Withdrawing immediately, Erebus experienced an unfamiliar emotion, which it took some time to recognize as fear.

The four damaged wormships had melded into one writhing mass, shed segments tumbling around it like dandruff, and were now separating into three complete ships.

Kill that, Erebus instructed two of them.

The fleeing enemy vessel, with its mad alien mind aboard, dropped into U-space, the two wormships Erebus had sent in pursuit. Retaining the third wormship just out from the planetoid, Erebus knew that it must now show some more of its cards. It summoned three attack fleets from other worlds of little importance to the overall plan, since those Caldera power stations needed to be knocked out, and soon. Twelve of the many other attacks on Polity worlds were failing, but those attacks had not been supplemented from elsewhere as Erebus intended here. Polity AIs would see this and inevitably wonder at the significance of the Caldera worlds. Deception was therefore required, so Erebus ordered fourteen other fleets to pull off all at the same time, and move to join attacks on other less crucial worlds selected at random. Even this would not be enough to prevent the Polity AIs from working out that something was up — and maybe they might actually divine Erebus’s true strategy. But it also seemed unlikely they would have the time to do anything much about it.