Polity Agent

11

The sphere composed of two-foot-long metal ants rested in the centre of the Feynman Lounge, individual ants occasionally detaching to be off about their assigned tasks. This new conceit of Polity AIs, in choosing to locate themselves in increasingly bizarre body shapes, elicited the Legate’s contempt, but not sufficiently for it to consider outright confrontation. In retrospect it was a good thing it had not tried taking information from the two women investigating the explosion site. The two ant drones accompanying them—which the Legate had initially discounted—were dangerous, being part of this forensic AI.

Via fibres inserted through a nearby wall, the Legate observed five humans, two haimans and three Golem, all wearing ECS uniforms that identified them as members of the forensic team. The others in the lounge, three advanced haimans sporting carapaces and sensory cowls, were part of the Cassius project. They sat silently, two together on a couch and one in an armchair. The rigorous interrogation they underwent was conducted via optic linkages plugged into their carapaces, the cables snaking back to the AI itself. But within minutes this session ended, whereupon the haimans detached the cables and departed.

The Legate withdrew its spying fibres from the wall and turned round. The room it occupied belonged to a man whose mental capacity was only complemented by a cerebral aug, so it had been easy to enter while he slept and put him into a deeper sleep. After scanning through the information contained in this particular individual’s aug, and by linking into the public com systems of the station, the Legate learnt what was generally known about the incident that occurred here. The explosion had resulted in the death of a haiman called Shoala, and subsequently the rumour mills ground away. Many on the station knew Orlandine’s and Shoala’s relationship to be more than just a working one. Orlandine, though a superb overseer and sublime scientist, was generally considered too focused, too haiman, too unhuman. Much of the current speculation concerned the possibility of her having suffered some paranoid identity dysfunction, that being the expected, though uncommon, madness affecting her kind. The Legate did not believe that theory for a moment. It had studied her for a long time and knew that in this case madness did not come into it. Yes she could kill, but for perfectly logical and, in Polity terms, immoral reasons.

Still concealed by chameleonware, the Legate moved out into the corridors of the station and made its way down to the concourse leading to the Feynman Lounge. Within a few minutes it recognized one of the forensic team: human and possibly gridlinked. The man, a thickset individual with dark hair and bushy eyebrows, strolled along with one of the ant drones scuttling beside him. They chatted like old friends.

‘I just don’t see it,’ the man was saying. ‘She had everything: power, status, family, friends… She could easily re-engineer her personality if she was having problems. She almost certainly ran regular sanity-check programs.’

‘Madness by choice, then,’ the ant suggested. ‘Those who achieve and obtain so much often feel they have lost something indefinable along the way.’

Behind the man, but invisible, the Legate extended its forefinger into a narrow needle, primed with a particular narcotic. It pressed this into the man’s neck, injected, then withdrew it just as the man reached up to scratch the sudden itch.

‘That’s bullshit and you know it,’ the man continued. ‘If you’re haiman, you’re about as pragmatic as it gets. Every organic feeling is quantified and analysed, and if it doesn’t fit underlying drives it’s discarded. All haimans know it’s just neurochemicals.’ The man stumbled briefly. ‘Just…’

The Legate stepped in again and pressed a hand to the back of the man’s neck, injecting fibres through the numbed skin, seeking out and connecting to his auditory nerves. The drug dulled him just enough to edge him into fugue, his state slightly mesmerized.

Precisely mimicking the ant drone’s voice the Legate asked the man directly through his auditory nerve, ‘Where is the evidence being kept?’

‘The old oxygen store, level eight sector three,’ the man replied out loud—not even wondering why the forensic AI would ask him about something it had organized itself.

‘What’s that?’ the genuine ant asked, turning to look up at him, antennae waving.

‘Um?’ The man halted as the Legate withdrew. He rubbed his face. ‘Shit, I’m tired. Unless you’ve got some critical use for me, I’m going to sack out.’

‘I wouldn’t use you in a critical situation if you were tired,’ the ant observed.

The man waved a hand and moved on. The ant remained behind, its antennae still waving. It turned its head slowly, beginning to make probing scans of its surroundings. The Legate quickly retreated. Its chameleonware was the best, but no such ‘ware was perfect.

The map of the station which the Legate had already obtained from the sleeping man’s aug precisely located the oxygen store but, even more cautious now, it took the entity some time to reach that place. It waited until others opened doors ahead of it, then turned on an internal gravmotor to bring its weight to zero and used sticky fibres on its feet and hands to propel itself along, just in case some search program should run through the station’s gravplates. It avoided using drop-shafts for similar reasons. The double doors to the oxygen store were heavily armoured—designed to contain any explosion occurring inside. The forensic AI had probably chosen this place to contain the evidence because such stores were generally no longer used—station and ship oxygen now being supplied by machines that split carbon dioxide and merely needed to be emptied of blocks of carbon, and bottled gases for suits being compressed by the suits themselves while aboard the station.

The main doors were multi-locked, but the door of the adjoining storeroom was not. The Legate slipped in there and drilled through the dividing armoured wall. Good thing it chose this route because it soon found inert gases filled the oxygen store, which also doubtless contained detectors to monitor their mix. It injected nano-optics and through them focused on an upright chainglass cylinder containing pieces of blackened memory crystal locked in a web of plasgel. Certainly a recording of everything they contained now resided inside the forensic AI, for the crystal was packed in readiness for transportation to some other evidential cache. The Legate now widened one hole through the wall and extruded from its palm a larger diameter cord packed with nanotubes which it could contract and stretch at intervals of a half inch to guide itself to its target. The cord oozed through the hole, stretched down the wall and groped across the floor towards the chainglass cylinder. Fortunately the cylinder’s end caps were of a thick plastic it could easily cut through by using diamond saws the size of skin cells. Once inside the cylinder the cord frayed into thousands of nanotubes and spread like cobwebs. The Legate connected, injecting power or, where required, light, and began copying the stored data.

So, it seemed Orlandine had been showing an unhealthy interest in Shoala, and apparently tried to scrub out the evidence of that. Fragmentary results revealed relationship problems between them, and that she had tried to re-engineer her personality. All a classic, almost hackneyed, scenario and, without certain other information, entirely believable. However, there was nothing in here about Jain technology or Jain nodes, so as evidence it was all constructed, false. In the end, if the forensic AI did not believe this preferred scenario, it might choose from many others, but none of them involving Jain nodes. The Legate assumed Orlandine had shared information about the node with this Shoala, or maybe he found out, and that led to her killing him. From what was here, the forensic AI would never know. The police arm of ECS would no doubt do their best to find her, but that was entirely the point: only the police arm would bother to do this. Any investigation would not involve major AIs like Jerusalem, because to ECS this was just a sordid little murder.

Orlandine panicked, grabbed the first available U-space capable spaceship, and then fled the Cassius system. Or so, the Legate gathered, went the consensus of opinion here. The entity itself felt that such behaviour just did not fit the haiman’s profile. She did not panic. She felt a huge attachment to the Cassius project, which was one of the reasons she was chosen to receive a node: she would stay put and utilize the item from here, where it would cause the most damage. Had they been wrong about that as well? The Legate disconnected from the stored crystal, withdrew its cord, and sealed the hole through the wall. Understanding that much information about the functioning of this place lay in the public domain, and therefore easily accessible, it headed all the way back to the room it had originally invaded to spy on the forensic AI. The room’s occupant still slept, so the Legate ignored him and searched, eventually finding an old computer terminal that folded down out of one wall. The work of just moments gave access to the humdrum workings of this station, and in one moment more the Legate found the manifest for the Heliotrope, and the loading times.

Orlandine took the time and trouble to refuel the Heliotrope, and load some extra supplies, before supposedly fleeing in panic. The Legate noted the nature of those supplies: a molecular catalyser, an autofactory for synthesizing polymers, sheet rolls of laminated radiation shielding. This last material interested the Legate most: just what you would need to conceal your activities from detection, not what was needed if you intended to flee somewhere remote from detection. The entity now called up on the screen a positional map of the multitude of objects orbiting the Cassius sun, stared contemplatively at this for a moment, then closed the terminal back into the wall and departed.

Once more ensconced in its ship, drifting away from the station, the Legate opened a U-space communication link. At once its mind became a submind of something very much larger, which scanned and recorded its thoughts and recent discoveries.

‘Continue with mission to solar system?’ the Legate enquired.

‘No,’ Erebus replied. ‘Find her first.’

The link broke leaving the Legate momentarily stunned, then its individuality reasserted and it felt angry frustration. Find her? Then what?

Coloron observed the Skaidon warps blink out in Runcibles 5 and 6, as their spoons—their inclusion into U-space—retracted. Around Runcible 6 the crowds had thinned considerably—fewer than 10,000 people remained and they were departing the area very quickly. This was certainly due to the runcible’s proximity to the arcology’s north wall, which reduced its catchment area and therefore put exits to the outside within easy reach. However, over 50,000 people were still crammed into the departure lounges of 5, despite announcements of the runcible’s imminent closure being broadcast through public address systems, displayed in big glaring letters on the bulletin boards, and transmitted continuously through the aug network. The AI was loath to start a panic, since in so large a crowd that would result in deaths, but anyone remaining in this area within the hour would be dead anyway. It amended the announcement to: PROCEED TO RUNCIBLE SEVEN. FIVE TO BE DESTROYED IMMINENTLY! YOU HAVE THIRTY-SIX MINUTES TO CLEAR THE AREA. DETONATION ESTIMATED AT TWO POINT FIVE KILOTONNES. Coloron then started the klaxons sounding, red warning lights flashing and, just to drive the point home, created a feedback loop between the runcible and its buffers, so it started to emit a whine, increasing in frequency at a rate just discernible to the human ear. That started them running. The AI was about to turn its attention elsewhere, when a secure channel opened from above.

‘We have Thellant,’ announced Jack of the NEJ.

‘My joy knows no bounds,’ replied Coloron.

‘This has not slowed the advance of the Jain substructure,’ Jack observed.

‘If anything it seems worse.’

‘There may yet be a way to slow it down.’

Coloron immediately worked out what that way might be. ‘Your spy in the camp?’

‘Yes, Jerusalem’s hunter-killer program has maintained contact. It is presently propagating itself through the Jain informational architecture. Apparently it cannot change the rate of growth but it is, as you say, a spy in the camp, so can relay the disposition of enemy forces and resources.’

‘Link me.’

The ensuing communication with the HK program was nonverbal, and Coloron’s analysis dissected it on many levels. The AI immediately began constructing a virtual map of the substructure overlaid on a map of the arcology. Further analysis revealed stashes of materials behind the line of advance, currently being made ready for easy conversion; energy being bled from fusion reactors and stored in laminar structures, both capacitors and batteries; sneaky mycelial extensions heretofore undetected; and subsumed humans armed and massing for advance. Coloron now checked the disposition of its own defences, and issued orders.

‘Azroc, that’s close enough, pull your forces out.’

The Golem was presently accompanying those of his forces busy incinerating the Jain tech spreading along the walls and through the floor of a long hydroponics chamber. Smoke layered the air from burning vegetation, and fluids pouring from broken tanks onto hot metal boiled up in dirty clouds. Within sight, figures still human in shape but no longer entirely human tried to work their way through. Squatting beside a small proton cannon standing on four insectile legs, Azroc glanced back towards the drone through which Coloron spoke.

‘You’re going to blow it?’ he asked.

Coloron replied, ‘Thellant has been captured, and now new tactical intelligence has become available. The substructure is massing for a push very near your current position and it could reach Runcible 5 within half an hour.’

‘Where do you want us now, then?’

Coloron transmitted directly into the Golem’s mind a simple map of the present situation. The infestation had started thirty miles in from the shore, and fifty miles in from the northern edge of the arcology. Runcible 5 lay the nearest to it, with 4 and 3 spaced evenly along the shore to the south and the same distance in from the sea. The AI did not want to send any more inhabitants to those runcibles as there were crowds enough there already, and Jain tentacles moved faster along the shore wall than elsewhere. Forty miles in from that row of three runcibles, again evenly spaced, lay 6, 7, 8 and 9. Another fifty miles further in lay 1 and 2. Runcible 10 was located well out of the way, in the recent north-eastern extension. On the map the Jain tech had completely taken over the north-west corner, and now lay only three miles from 5 and twice that distance from 6. Azroc’s forces were currently arrayed in a line cutting off that entire section—those last two runcibles at their backs.

‘Pull back to seven now. I will destroy five and six the moment the substructure reaches them. You have a minimum of thirty-four minutes.’

‘Okay.’ Azroc began signalling to his section commanders.

‘And, Azroc’

‘Yes?’

‘I am about to begin some sterilization.’

‘Understood.’

Coloron knew of some, either Separatist related or suffering from severe troglodytism, who were not obeying the evacuation order. Many of them remained inside the infested area, within reach of Jain tentacles, and many had already been taken over. Little could be done for any of those. From cameras on the particle weapon geostationary above, the AI studied the circular chunk of arcology it had initially excised in the hope of containing the Jain tech. The cavity near the centre of this, made by the Coloron’s first satellite strike, looked like a bullethole filled with steel maggots. The trench cut to separate out the piece of arcology in which this hole lay also squirmed with movement as Jain tech increasingly bridged the gap.

The AI checked all the systems of the toroidal satellite, finding it was up to power, with plenty of fuel available for the fusion reactor of which most of the satellite consisted. Even at that moment, a tanker craft was approaching from a recently arrived cargo carrier. One of its three tanks contained hugely compressed deuterium in the metallic state—further fuel for the reactor—the other two were filled with cupronickel dust to provide the particulate matter for the cannon itself.

I am procrastinating.

That system check had been an unnecessary delay.

‘Firing particle cannon,’ Coloron announced.

The turquoise beam stabbed down through atmosphere and struck the already fire-blackened chunk of arcology just off centre. The beam cut through its various levels like a thermic lance through a beehive. Fire and smoke fountained half a mile into the sky. The cannon satellite, adjusted by the gravplate ring on the fusion-reactor torus, incrementally tilted and began to revolve. Down below, the beam began to cut spirally outwards from its initial strike point. Viewing the scene in infrared, Coloron estimated the extent of the firestorm now exploding through the levels below. Within minutes the beam reduced the originally excised piece of arcology to glowing slag at the bottom of a huge pit. Shutting off the cannon the AI then contemplated what it had done. It had just obliterated about ten cubic miles of arcology and killed thousands of inhabitants, and that seemed likely to be only the beginning. Now checking the map relayed by the HK program, Coloron saw energy flowing away from that same area, and Jain tech material resources being transferred. The substructure, Coloron realized, could be herded.

‘I suggest you cut a line down to bedrock,’ sent Brutus the AI controlling the dreadnought above, which, unusually, bore a different name: the Brutal Blade.

‘That is my intention,’ Coloron replied. ‘With what happens next, such a division will certainly be required.’ The AI viewed the dreadnought through various sateyes arrayed above the particle cannon. It was a utile vessel looking nothing like a blade. Two miles across at its widest point, it bore some resemblance to a gigantic lump of metallized liver, with many organic tubes opening to space—heavy armour gave it its shape and those tubes were its weapons systems. ‘CTD imploder, lowest yield, take out this fusion reactor,’ Coloron ordered, sending the location of the mentioned reactor.

One of the tubes, a linear accelerator, spat out a black sphere that hurtled down into atmosphere, glowed red, then white, and began to ablate. Ten miles up it shed two burning hemispheres. The missile it contained slammed down through a wheat field, igniting a small fire around the surface puncture. A microsecond later, the field bulged up into a hill; it started smoking, then abruptly combusted. Flame jetted from arcology vents within a mile of this, then smoke from those lying beyond them. Crowds of people still moving away along the north-west shore gazed back at debris blasted from the numerous exits in the arcology’s edge. Coloron measured the spread of heat, observed the substructure’s reaction to this latest strike, then sent a map selecting the positions of other reactors, and locations of those enemy materials and energy stores.

‘Interesting,’ commented Brutus.

‘After I have cut the division,’ the Coloron instructed, ‘you must take out all those targets at once.’ The AI knew that, on some level of awareness, the Jain substructure would realize the disposition of its forces had been discovered. It would probably find the HK, but by then the damage would be done.

Incrementally again, the particle cannon tilted. The turquoise beam hit the sea this time, evaporating billions of cubic yards of brine. It sliced into the arcology wall then began to burn across. From orbit a cloud mass could be seen forming in its trail. While still metaphorically holding a finger on the firing button, Coloron noted monitors and Rescue staff loading into AG ambulances those injured by the departure of the crowds at Runcible 5. On the map updated by the HK program, the AI saw that the Jain substructure now lay only a mile away from there. The immediate blast radius around 6 was clear of people, though there were still some stragglers within areas likely to be devastated by the Shockwave. The Jain tech lay a mile and a half away from Runcible 6. Coloron waited.

Half an hour passed, then an access panel for an optical junction sprang away from the wall on the furthest edge of one of Runcible 5’s lounges. Something like a long-fingered stainless steel hand groped out, and began to extend its fingers down the wall. On another wall steel buds grew through sheet bubble metal and squeezed out grey tendrils. The last three ambulances departed, whereupon some other ambulances tried returning, because there were still people alive in here. Too late, because Coloron began closing blast doors behind the departing ambulances. Now humanoid figures began appearing, their clothing burnt and hanging in tatters, their bodies blackened, and pinkish slithing movement visible through their wounds. The AI began shutting down systems as soon as it felt informational intrusion—as it had been doing all along throughout the advance of this feral technology. Soon its total perception of the area became limited to a few scattered cameras. Then came the expected intrusion into the systems of the runcible itself.

The runcible buffers held a huge charge, permanently topped up by the fusion reactor located on the floor below the runcible itself. With safety circuits offline, Coloron released this entire charge into the runcible. A warp generated, tuned out of U-space, tried to create space of its own, bounced out into realspace, then collapsed. It sucked in the horns of the runcible, the dais, the fusion reactor, several bodies—some still alive—and much of the surrounding complex, crunching everything down into a spherical superdense mass. At the centre of this mass: fusion.

From the cannon satellite Coloron observed the subsequent explosion flinging millions of tons of debris into the air. A briefly stabilized fusion reaction dropped a yard-wide white sun straight down to the bedrock. As the smoke cleared, the AI observed a glowing two mile-wide crater cut into the top half of the arcology. Eight minutes later a similar crater appeared in place of Runcible 6.Twenty minutes after that, the particle beam cut its way out from the north wall of the arcology.

‘Now,’ Coloron sent to Brutus.

Missile after missile departed the Brutal Blade; a vicious insect swarm hurtling down towards the planet. Coloron almost flinched. The harsh reality of its mind did not permit ignorance of how many had died during the last hour, and of how many were about to die. Yes, Jain technology controlled most of them, but they were people nevertheless. No fewer than 110,000 of them. And even then the advance would continue, for the AI only slowed it down, inconvenienced it.

The planetary system consisted of an immense green gas giant the size of Jupiter, but half as far again from the sun as that Jovian. Further from the sun than it lay a ring of icy planetoids and asteroidal debris, while around it orbited more still. Within its orbit were four planets: one icy world three times the size of Earth and bearing its own ring system, one orbiting close around the sun, and two that lay within the sun’s green belt. The inner of the two green-belt planets was a hot world similar to the one where Erebus had destroyed its rebel faction. King dropped telefactors to study this living planet, for it seemed perfect for a base, yet already King guessed this place to be empty of intelligent life.

Dense red jungle cloaked its land masses. The island that King first studied was swamped with plants very much like cycads. Below these, fast moving vines writhed when in hot sunlight but grew still in shadow. Tripedal saurians patrolled under massive red leaves as thick as mattresses, shooting out jointed tongues in quest of shivering globular prey. Those prey managing to escape ran screaming and wobbling to the safety of sunlight, where they burst in wet explosions spreading some kind of organic sludge. Reproduction probably—King did not have the time or inclination to investigate.

The seas also swarmed with life: armoured arthropods and large floating bivalves, masses of purple bladder weeds that shot out tendrils to drag in prey, a giant legless arthropod with a square mouth the size of a cruiser construction bay, ever sucking up those masses of predatory weed. But here it detected no clear evidence of any Polity technology: no wreckage, no traps. Hollow cubes found on one mountainside were certainly the product of intelligent life, but of ancient origin, and not what King sought.

The AI attack ship recalled its telefactors, returned them to their cache, then turned its attention to the other, cold, world, which also bore life. Such instances of two living worlds existing in the same planetary system, this close together in the green belt, was not exceptional. If one world produced life, it became almost a certainty, over the vast timespans involved, that vulcanism or the debris from meteor impacts would eventually hurl the spores of life over the relatively short distance to the other planet.

This place was frigid and the only liquid water existed around volcanic vents a mile underneath the ice sheet. From these hidden warm seas, wells spiralled to the surface, and by tracing a surface trail from one of these, King came upon a great furry serpent heading out from one of the landmasses towards them. On the land itself grew forests of trees resembling pines in their strategies for surviving cold, though lower in stature, with thicker denser trunks and fruits like cut diamonds. Flying mammals fed upon the latter, while the furry serpents reared up high to graze on the needles. King found no large predators, but soon discovered the reason — the parasites growing inside the many varieties of creature in the forests kept populations down by taking gradual control of their hosts and forcing them down the ice wells, where young parasites could hatch out of their drowning bodies in the warm water below. Closer scanning revealed swarms of the adult form of these things climbing continually up out of the wells. They resembled a minuscule version of the screaming wobbling thing seen on the adjacent world. Here again, deep under the ice, were some of those hollow granite cubes, but still no sign of Erebus’s presence. The AI felt both disappointment and relief as, continuing its straight-line course, it once again dropped into U-space.

A breath of cold wafted from the neck ring of D’nissan’s hotsuit and Mika wondered if it was only that which made her shiver.

‘Who?’ She nodded to the image on the screen.

‘No “who” involved,’ the ophidapt replied. ‘We suppressed cerebral growth in the amniotic tank. Our friend there is lacking in everything but autonomic functions. He possesses less intelligence than that of your average insect, and what he possesses is only by dint of hardware implanted in his skull.’ D’nissan glanced at her. ‘And by that I mean singular insects—not hives of them.’

The shaven-headed man in the isolation chamber stood naked, and utterly still. He bore no expression and his face seemed characterless. However, this did not make Mika feel any less uneasy about what D’nissan intended doing to him.

‘Implantation was successful, then?’

‘Apparently, though we’ll see soon enough if it works.’

Directly opposite the man stood a small tripod-mounted auto-gun.

‘Test one,’ said D’nissan.

The gun fired and a pulse of ionized aluminium slammed into the man’s chest. Smoking gobbets of flesh exploded from his back, spattering the wall behind half a second before he himself hit the wall and slid down leaving a bloody trail. Mika swallowed drily, waited. After a moment the man reached out, pushed himself to his feet, and took three paces forwards. The hole in his chest, the size of a fist, still smouldered, but a ball of veined pink flesh was oozing out to fill it and extinguish the embers. The man turned slowly, presenting himself dutifully to all the scanning heads arrayed around the isolation chamber. The hole in his back was rather larger, and one shattered rib protruded. The flesh welling up there bore the appearance of brain tissue.

‘That shot would have destroyed his heart,’ Mika noted.

‘Yes. But the little doctor can grow its own replacement of any major organ destroyed. Right now it will be constructing something a little more efficient than the human heart, while dilating veins and arteries to prevent bleeding and keeping essential parts of the body oxygenated via nanotubes,’ D’nissan explained.

‘Nerve damage?’

‘The mycelium can re-route around most of it.’

‘So this is not really repair but replacement with something different?’

‘Yes, all it does is provide support to whatever remains, and even that is limited.’

‘How far?’

D’nissan nodded at the screen. ‘This is about the maximum damage it can sustain. If the victim was hit three or four times like this, his body would die and his little doctor would die along with it. Remember, that though dispersed, the mycelium is being hit as well.’ He shrugged. ‘It’s like an ordinary human body, without a little doctor mycelium—it can only survive so much.’

‘What about bones?’ Mika asked. With this constant barrage of questions she was trying to distance herself from what she had just seen, and to reacquaint herself with her customary scientific detachment.

‘They’re easy to deal with. It pulls them together and lays down calcium glue within seconds.’ He went on. ‘Essentially, anyone carrying this mycelium would need to take a number of direct substantial hits to be killed. Wounds that before would have resulted in him ending up under an autodoc will now only inconvenience him briefly.’

‘And Jain nodes?’

‘None at all. This technology is clean.’

‘Who will get this “little doctor” treatment first?’

‘Soldiers,’ replied D’nissan bluntly.

Mika gave him a fragile smile then moved away. She had stopped here, on her way to the shuttle that would ferry her over to Dragon, meaning to ask D’nissan his thoughts on augmentation, but after witnessing this test found she could not. The man was doing important work, supplying ECS with what might be a vital advantage should Jain technology once again get loose in the Polity.

‘Test two,’ announced D’nissan.

With some disquiet Mika departed.

Tick tick tick…

The sheer immensity of the ancient shipyard could not be fathomed when viewed from space. High up in a chainglass viewing blister, Cormac stood and gazed down into one construction hold. Far below him, silver bees of robots erected partition walls, floors and ceilings in layer upon layer like the cells of a hive. Now rising a hundred yards up from the original floor, the completed accommodation below them was already being occupied. The logistics of all this were frightening: how do you feed and water so many people, and what about sanitation?

Tick tick tickity tick…

The runcibles inside the yard now all remained online, transmitting in resources from so many different locations. More than a hundred hold spaces, originally used for the construction of dreadnoughts, were being similarly converted. Millions of refugees were encamped on acres of ceramal flooring in the other holds. As things stood, the shipyard was now full, more refugees trickling in only to fill accommodation as soon as the robots built it.

Tickity tick tick t—

‘You can stop that noise now or I’ll leave you behind,’ snapped Cormac.

Turning from the view, he eyed Arach as the spider-drone drew its foreleg back from where it had been tapping the sharp point against the chainglass. Grimacing, Cormac turned away, again considering how the last few days with Mika had affected him. Only a few hours ago he had been reluctant to leave Jerusalem. A doorway into possibility had opened and he began thinking of things that before he always pushed to the back of his mind: the possibility of a settled relationship with someone, his family, his own purpose, and whether it might be time for a change in direction.

As an agent, Earth Central Security allowed him a wide remit with parameters only loosely defined. It also granted him certain powers to carry out those tasks assigned to him via Horace Blegg. He could quit at any time. Only his sense of duty prevented that. However good at what he did, he was realistic enough not to consider himself indispensable. Perhaps the time had even come for him to hand over the reins? Thus he was beginning to think until his recent exchange with Jerusalem.

‘Are you ready to leave?’ the AI had asked him.

‘Frankly, I’m not sure I am,’ he replied.

‘That is your decision to make. If you do not feel capable of continuing your present assignment, something else can be found for you, or you may depart. Meanwhile, I have some gifts for you.’

The first gift arrived in his gridlink: a memory package he immediately stored.

‘And this is?’

‘The rest of your mind: true memories of what happened to you aboard the Ogygian. It will install to your mind the moment you open it. I calculate that you are nearly ready for it, the final part of that calculation being your own decision to open it.’

‘I see.’

The second gift arrived later in his quarters, delivered by a crab drone. It dropped the wrist holster on his sofa before departing.

‘How?’ he had asked.

Jerusalem replied, ‘A member of a clear-up team picked it up when they went to collect the remains of Gant. I used a nano-counteragent to remove the mycelium Skellor installed in it and wiped out his reprogramming of it. I also repaired the damage you caused by shooting it down… you do realize how it fought against Skellor’s programming by allowing you to shoot it?’

Cormac had removed Shuriken from its holster and held it out on the flat of his palm. It flexed out its chainglass blades, as if stirring in sleep, then retracted them. He remembered Cull, his long-drawn-out fight for survival there against Skellor, who took control of this semi-AI weapon away from him, and then sent it against him, and how at the last, as he targeted it, it had turned upright in the air to present its face to him full on.

‘Yes, I know.’

He slid Shuriken back in the holster, then strapped the holster to his wrist. It occurred to him to speculate on how subtly manipulative AIs could be. This gesture, now, in his moment of indecision? In the end, he could not step down with the Polity so obviously threatened. He could not live a normal existence with any feeling of equanimity, knowing what was occurring. Family? He protected them through his career just as he protected any other law-abiding Polity citizens. Mika? To remain with her here would be to remain at the centre of events, but ineffective.

Subsequently stepping from his cabin, he found Arach eagerly awaiting him, unable to keep its spindly legs still.

‘Are we on our way?’ the drone had asked.

‘Yes, we’re on our way.’

Now, aboard the ancient shipyard, Cormac began to make his way towards the runcible open to Coloron, Arach dogging his footsteps.

He found crowds crammed into a vast zero-g distribution centre, at the end of which stood a cargo runcible. The horns of this device encompassed a circular Skaidon warp ten yards across. Guide ropes cut in from all sides, tied off on a massive robotic handler crouched before the runcible itself. The base of this multiarmed behemoth ran on tracks extending the entire length of the distribution centre. Through here, warship building materials had once been transported. The handler then passed these off to other minor handlers in the tunnels branching off all around, which in turn took them to various machine shops or directly to the construction holds. This had not been a place for humans since everything moved here at AI speeds, and any human would have been ground up in the gearing. Now the handlers were still, the centre pressurized, and ECS personnel flocked in the air like khaki birds.

For anyone unused to moving in zero-g, the scene ahead appeared chaotic and confusing. It looked that way because those here felt no need to arrange themselves with any regard to up and down. Cormac launched himself from the tunnel they had traversed, occasionally catching a rope to guide himself towards the handler robot. In this environment, with these ropes strung in every direction, he noted how Arach seemed perfectly in his element. As Cormac drew closer, he saw ranks of ECS soldiers heading through the runcible ahead of him. Behind them came a row of five AG tanks and, spiralling up from the base of the handler robot, followed other military supplies. He noted that most of those waiting around him were ECS Rescue or Medical personnel—perhaps waiting for their fellows ahead of them to provide their bloody work.

‘Lot of hardware,’ Arach observed with relish.

‘Oh yes.’

Reaching the handler, Cormac noticed a haiman directing operations. The man sat ensconced in one of the handler’s huge claws, occasionally making a hand gesture, but most of his directions were being relayed over informational channels. Cormac queried him on that level, and received a priority slot just after the tanks. The haiman saluted, with a finger to his temple, before turning his attention elsewhere.

When the last tank slid through the Skaidon warp, as through the meniscus of a bubble, Cormac remembered that on jumps he made prior to events on the Ogygian, he had actually begun to experience U-space, which was something previously unheard of. He pushed off from the handler, orientating himself carefully to the plane of arrival at the receiving runcible. Arach shot ahead of him, impelled by air jets, and entered the meniscus first. As Cormac floated after, he felt the stirring of concealed memory—of that other gift from Jerusalem.

Now? Release it now?

No, some other time.

He fell, after Arach, through the Skaidon warp to Coloron.