Polity Agent

12

Unless an emergency arose, Blegg usually confined his jumps through U-space to the surface of planets. Translating himself through U-space between planets in a system, or between ships, could be hugely tiring. And ships or runcibles were nearly always available, so why waste energy better applied elsewhere? In this case, however, he became impatient. The Hourne lay ten hours’ journey time from Masada, and Blegg felt no real need to remain aboard to see the Atheter artefact down on that world. Also, the runcibles aboard the Hourne had been shut down, since calculating the U-space position of a runcible located on a moon, planet or large station was difficult enough, but doing so for a ship manoeuvring insystem became near impossible. Blegg decided he must leave in his own inimitable fashion. He gazed down from a viewing blister aboard the great ship towards the moonlet called Flint, on which one of the runcibles in this system was sited. He looked into U-space, located both himself and the moonbase nestled amid the ruins of the shipyard, destroyed by Skellor with the Occam Razor’s weapons, and stepped across.

Earth Central immediately began to speak in his head as he found himself walking across the floor of a geodesic dome enclosing the runcible.

‘I have provided a small ship for you at Ruby Eye—it is capable of entering U-space unshielded. U-tech mapping and detection equipment have been installed and programmed to the U-space signature provided by Atheter. The USERs have now been shut down in that area, so you can travel at will there.’

Out loud Blegg replied, ‘I’ll test the signature—I think I know precisely the place.’ The scanners available to the Polity limited the detection range, with resolution increasing as he moved closer to the source. Light years away, Blegg would know the system in which a Jain node was located; at a light hour away he would know on which planet; at a couple of yards he would know which pocket it was in.

Someone striding along, followed by two hover trunks, gave Blegg a momentary glance—but in these days, when so many employed cerebral hardware, it was not unusual to see people apparently talking to themselves.

‘This place you know precisely—a certain brown dwarf perhaps?’ EC suggested.

‘You read my mind.’

He strode up to the runcible dais, ahead of a woman checking her journey slot on a column-mounted console, received a startled then accusatory look from her as he stepped to the warp and through it. He did not need to check that the runcible had reset to his destination—it always did. At Ruby Eye, a station orbiting a red dwarf sun, he snatched direct from the controlling AI’s mind the location of his own ship, then from the runcible lounge stepped a short distance through U-space, and directly aboard.

‘Permission to launch,’ he asked over com, once ensconced in the pilot’s seat.

‘Granted,’ replied Ruby Eye. ‘That was rather quick and, I might add, rather rude.’

‘No time for civilities,’ Blegg replied as the airlock tube retracted and clamps released his ship from the docking tower. He then paused and peered down at himself. When did he change into this envirosuit? For a moment the memory completely evaded him, then it was there. Of course, he had changed aboard the Hourne before to going into VR. He shook his head and smiled to himself, realizing that Cormac’s assertion that Blegg was an avatar of Earth Central had actually been preying on his mind. Existential angst — he really did not need that right now.

Falling away from the station spin in space seemingly fogged red by the light of the nearby dwarf sun, he turned the ship and engaged its fusion drive. One of many subscreens, set into the chainglass along the bottom of the main cockpit screen, showed numerous radar returns as the ship negotiated through a swarm of other vessels. Some of these were clearly evident on one subscreen showing a gravity map of the area. Glimpsing up, he observed such a vessel close to: something like a sharp-nosed monorail carriage towing, on braided monofilament cables, an object like an ancient sea mine. A USER—an underspace interference emitter—one of the devices previously used to confine Skellor to this sector of space while Cormac hunted him down.

Once clear of the crowd, Blegg input coordinates. The ship’s computer could not handle the AI level calculations required to drop it into U-space. Blegg linked to it and did what he always did when himself entering that continuum, but with his ability complemented by the ship’s underspace engine, and he and the ship dropped into endless grey. He gazed at this underlying reality. Receding behind him—though, in truth, words like behind did not apply to his perception of this place—was the eversion generated by the red dwarf, gravity seen from the other side. And scattered nearby this was an even pattern of smaller eversions, curved like fossil worms: these generated by the singularities carried inside the USERs—hence their presence on the gravity map.

Mentally, Blegg cancelled the resurfacing sequence which, without him, the ship would not be able to handle anyway. A sub-screen displayed a warning, but he ignored it and set an alarm to sound once the ship reached its destination in U-space. Then, departing the cockpit, he went to see what facilities the ship itself contained. He found food, then a bed. The ship travelled to U-space coordinates as much here as there, now as then. Blegg rested, travelled no distance, and all, slept.

Time passed in realspace and it also passed in this small piece of realspace submerged by U-fields. But they were separate times, and how they might meet up became merely an energy negotiation. Blegg’s ship took the course of least energy, least resistance. It was possible to go to another time from here, but the consequences could be catastrophic, as the time-inconsistent runcible link between Celedon and the Small Magellanic Cloud demonstrated.

A constant beeping dragged Blegg from slumber, and returned him to the cockpit. Two eversions pushed into the range of his perception, one that of a g-type star, and the other the brown dwarf orbiting it.

With care he eased the ship in towards the brown dwarf—as close as it could come without the gravity well forcing it out of U-space in a brief explosion of plasma. Blegg turned his attention to the console, but found the weirdness of perception too distracting. He initiated the hardfields that would cut that out. Immediately the inside of the ship returned to relative normality: a touch-console no longer looked like a three-dimensional kaleidoscope, and his fingers no longer appeared to be infinite tubes. He set the ship’s instruments to scanning for the U-space signature and the response was immediate: three definite matches and four maybes, but to be expected considering the Jain nodes growing inside Skellor were as crushed into the surface of the brown dwarf as he.

He turned the hardfields off again.

Back on the underside of reality, he gazed at the star, both distant and close. Scale and distance were merely rules his own mind applied here, and he could ignore them. Thus he did, and gazed upon the underside of seven Jain nodes leaving prickly thornish impressions in this continuum: organization, pattern, standing out from the underlying chaos of reality; of space knotted and wadded into this thing called matter. Blegg turned away, then quickly back when a subscreen blinked on to show text: ‘ U-signature detected—disperse signal’’. It took him some time to track it down, for it lay nearly two light years away, though close in interstellar terms. Without surfacing from U-space, he reset his ship’s course.

‘… bright enough to realize the AI rulers were better at governing than any previous human rulers’

He turned to another card, saw them laid out all around him like gravestones.

The autolaser stuttered and crackled, knocking most of the deadly swarm from the air, but it did not manage to hit them all. Corporal Chang made a horrible grunting sound—the impact flinging him up from cover, then the projectile detonating inside him. It blew his guts out and he spun to the ground with only a length of bloody spine attaching his ribcage to his pelvis.

The three remaining members of the unit fired on the nearby slopes with their own seeker guns, then crouched back behind their boulders on the mountain slope. A waste of ammo. The sniper might not even be over that way. It seemed almost as if he knew of Blegg and his abilities, for he had changed over from laser to seeker bullets so there was no way to locate him. But he knew where they were.

‘This guy is not going to be captured alive,’ said Pierce.

Of the recording of events here, Pierce could claim he only stated what he thought were the sniper’s intentions. Reading the man’s expression, Blegg understood the statement to be a promise of intent.

‘Do you still have no idea where this fucker is?’ Blegg asked through his comlink.

‘Only within an area of three square miles, with you at the centre of it,’ Earth Central replied.

‘I thought the cameras on your satellites capable of resolving the date on a coin dropped on the ground?’

‘They do possess that resolution—when there is no cloud cover. It has also become evident this individual obtained, as well as the original tank, a multipurpose assault rifle, development sets of the new chameleon-cloth fatigues and electronic concealment hardware.’

Blegg eyed his companions, ‘Which ECS soldiers have yet to be issued with?’

‘The same.’

Blegg nodded to himself. The man seemed a lone criminal but a very clever one. He had managed to steal a tank which he used to smash into an etched-sapphire repository. Fleeing with millions in that form, he evaded the police cordon. His laundering of the sapphires through various criminal organizations had resulted in the capture of many, but never him. Five years of chasing rumours and fragmentary information finally led to a house, here in the Scottish Highlands. The ECS arrest team botched it—and died. EC shut down transport out of the area and now many four-person teams of highly trained personnel were scouring these mountains. Blegg had joined them—perhaps that had not been his greatest idea. He could transport himself away, but that seemed so unfair on the others here.

‘I have analysed recorded imagery. He is over to your left about two hundred yards away. Get out of there now. Satellite strike will be initiated in two minutes.’

Get out?

It seemed EC had not precisely pinpointed the man’s location, else there would be no need to run. It also seemed the AI decided whatever information could be extracted from the man no longer warranted the loss of any more lives. It was about to burn the area.

‘Leave the autolaser—it should cover us. We go now!’

Blegg leapt up and led the way from cover. A horrible whining made his back crawl—more seeker bullets. Staying low, they ran just as hard and fast as they could. Snap-crack of a laser, either from the auto or the sniper. Something slammed into Blegg’s back, lifted him from the ground and hurled him face-down in the dirt. His head must have hit a rock, for he lost consciousness.

Later, Blegg learnt that it was the shock wave from the strike that threw him down. Nothing remained of the sniper, though analysis of DNA from his home identified him as a mercenary once employed by the now strictly controlled corporations. No one particularly special. Blegg did not like to contemplate how close he had come to dying, then.

There was no escape from this situation, and no escape from the realization that he would soon die. With a normally human mind, Thellant might have been able to convince himself otherwise. The best he could hope for now was a quick death. But that knowledge did not allay the frustration, anger and a desperate need to escape.

‘Who is this?’ he asked, while spreading Jain tendrils deep into the systems of the ship, tracking optics and s-con cables, sequestering interfaces, reading stored data, initiating ship’s diagnostics, and his own.

A male voice replied, ‘Well, the one who said “Gotcha!” was Jack—the AI which runs the Centurion-class ship NEJ. My name is Thorn.’

‘ECS?’ Accessing a monitoring system Thellant gazed into the area intervening between the four spheres of his stolen ship and there saw wreckage, and metal hardened into splash patterns. The fusion drive had operated through here to a drive-plate mounted underneath, the U-space engine encased above it. Now there was just a hole there.

‘Oh yes.’

‘Do you realize I have fifteen hostages aboard this ship?’ Thellant connected into the cold coffins, just to assure himself this remained true. Nine men and six women, all of them suffering from head injuries beyond the compass of simple autodocs. These were the kind of injuries that required AI intervention, for not only their brains needed reconstructing, but their minds as well.

‘Thellant N’komo, you’ve got tech inside you capable of trashing planets. Over a hundred and fifty thousand people are already dead because of you, and many more will die. And if the Jain tech in MA gets out the planet below might well end up as the target for a few crust crackers. Get real.’

‘Why am I still alive, then?’ Thellant now concentrated his perception outside the Rescue ship via external cameras, the cockpit screen before him, and via Jain tendrils containing optics infiltrated through the ship’s hull. Many ships hovered above him — cargo carriers, passenger liners, Rescue ships—and one large ugly dreadnought was rising over the horizon even now. The last vessel was probably capable of denuding a planet of life, and that might well be its intended purpose. The Centurion-class ship held station down below him, probably because its AI knew that there lay his only possible escape route, no matter how minimal his chances if he attempted it. He studied the vessel carefully, recognizing it to be state of the art. There was just no way out.

‘Because I want you to answer a few questions.’

‘Go fuck yourself.’ Thellant closed his eyes, and for a moment closed out all perception. He understood that his need to escape was not entirely his own, it being imbedded in and integral to the technology occupying his body, and now this ship, too. It contained no sentience, just an animalistic desperation of the gnawing off a leg in a trap kind.

‘It won’t be me I’ll be fucking, Thellant.’

‘Exactly. So why should I answer questions? We both know that I am not going to get out of this alive. I answer your questions, then you fry me.’

‘Well, we could fry you—a microwave beam should do the job—or we could use what’s called a CTD imploder. You probably haven’t heard of that—collapsing gravity field into an antimatter explosion. Not a great deal left afterwards.’

Thellant opened his eyes. What was this guy about? Was this supposed to persuade him to cooperate?

The man called Thorn went on, ‘Of course we could drop you on some remote world where you could live happily ever after.’

‘Is this what passes for humour in ECS nowadays?’ Even knowing the other man must be lying to him, Thellant experienced an emotional response to the offer that felt almost out of his control. He knew then, in that same instant, that the Jain technology possessed its own agenda, and only allowed him to control it.

‘There’s my quandary,’ said Thorn. ‘I have to try and persuade you that we really are prepared to grant you that indulgence, if you provide the information we require.’

‘And what might that information be?’

‘I want you to tell me exactly how you acquired that Jain node, and I also want you to tell me about the Legate.’

Thellant felt a flush of anger at the mere mention of that name. The cruelty, as he saw it, lay in giving him such power in such intractable circumstances. It had been like gluing a gun into the hand of a hostage who is surrounded by terrorists wielding laser carbines. The result possessed a degree of inevitability. Despite the fact that he seemed certain to die, perhaps he should answer those questions. Maybe that would result in the Polity coming down as hard on that bastard Legate as it seemed certain to do on himself.

‘Tell me about this remote world where I can live happily ever after.’

‘Oh, I can tell you all about that. Obviously Jain technology is of overwhelming interest to researchers human, haiman and AI, and apparently there has been a world specially prepared for just this sort of eventuality. It’s orbited by all sorts of scanning satellites, and has twenty gigatonne-level CTDs sunk into its crust. Basically you get to do what you like for as long as you like down there. However, the moment you try to leave that planet, you leave this life.’

‘That almost sounds plausible,’ said Thellant. And it did, since he could almost believe the Polity might value him highly as a scientific resource, despite the mass slaughter he had caused. ‘Take me to this place first and then I’ll answer your questions.’

‘I think you can probably guess my response to that,’ said Thorn, ‘but I’ll say it anyway. You answer the questions first, you tell me all you know, then you get transported to that world. I could take you there first, but you would be no safer there than you are here.’

‘But I would at least know if you had lied about it,’ Thellant replied.

‘No, you would not. Just consider what is happening here. The Polity is evacuating a billion people from an arcology, so think of the resources and organization that requires. A world as I just described could easily be made ready in the time it took us to transport you there.’

‘Very well.’ Thellant paused for a moment and thought now might be the time to give something. ‘The Legate gave me the Jain node.’

‘Please continue,’ said Thorn after Thellant did not continue.

‘I can transmit you complete memcordings of all my dealings with the Legate.’ Almost without thinking, he began compiling those memories and layering them with every informational weapon he could find within the Jain tech, or could think to create. He considered it a vain hope that the ship’s AI would accept this package, obviously the technology occupying his own body felt otherwise.

‘We’ll establish a tight-beam link with you, and then you may transmit the memcordings across,’ replied Thorn.

Glowing craters pocked the Jain-occupied section of the arcology, amidst which immense fires now raged. The firebreak slowed the substructure’s advance, as did the destruction of Runcibles 5 and 6, but it was those other strikes delivered by Brutal Blade that finally halted it. It then attempted to build up more stashes of resources and energy but, as the HK program relayed their positions, the dreadnought destroyed them too. For two days, the Jain advance stalled, then the HK program went offline, and a microsecond later a viral attack came through the link, and Coloron shut it down. On the third day the Jain advance began again, slower than before, more tentative. However, these events produced other encouraging results.

Over the two days, Coloron diverted the multitude gathering around Runcible 4 to other runcibles further inside the arcology, and diverted the exodus through 3 to the exits positioned in the south-west corner. Those around 7, it began moving elsewhere. All of those runcibles would be next to go. ECS forces, having arrived in strength, now used transports to evacuate many citizens directly through the arcology roof. Along with those forces arrived thousands of drones equipped to scan for Jain tech, and this made it possible to move thousands of people way beyond the quarantine perimeter, which meant a reduction in the population density directly outside, so those inside could evacuate quicker. And they were certainly getting out quicker: the knowledge that a large portion of the arcology had been reduced to radioactive rubble encouraged them to abandon their precious belongings and run. However, though the substructure’s advance might be more tentative now, it was still inexorable, and after 3, 4 and 7 it would next reach Runcible 8—and Coloron itself.

The AI turned its attention to the armoured chamber that contained it. Its brain rested between the interfaces of a thick optical control pillar: a pillow-sized lump of yellow crystal wrapped in a black s-con cagework. For the first time in many years Coloron undogged the locks to the heavy chamber door and opened it. Through the door marched an object like a headless iron ostrich, but standing three yards tall with two arms slung underneath its hollow body. From the hollow, a thick lid lay hinged back bearing emitter dishes, a com laser, and a powerful U-space transceiver. It came to a halt before Coloron.

The AI now focused back on the runcibles in greatest danger. The flow of humanity heading away from them remained uninterrupted. Surprisingly, the crowds around Runcible 3 had nearly cleared, while those leaving the south-west exits just kept on moving, knowing the imminent explosion might reach them there. For the moment, nothing required Coloron’s personal attention, so the AI disconnected.

Sight through thousands of cameras—assigned on the whole to simple recognition programs so the AI could respond to the circumstances they recognized—blinked out. Soft links to sub-minds controlling many aspects of the arcology collapsed. Coloron lost its links to autofactories; to maintenance, surveillance, military and agricultural drones; hospitals and the many varieties of autodocs they contained; servers and other com networks; mining operations; fusion reactors; recycling plants; and to satellites including the particle cannon. Coloron disconnected from its body—the arcology entire.

From vast perception the AI collapsed down to single tunnel vision seen from the crystal it occupied. It observed the robot carrying on through with its program, reaching down and closing three-fingers hands around Coloron’s braincase. Movement then, only visually perceived. The robot held Coloron poised for a moment over the hollow in its body, then lowered the AI down into darkness. The lid slammed shut and a seeming age of sensory deprivation followed. Then connections began to re-establish, and finally Coloron gazed through the sensorium of its new home at the optic interface pillar closing up. It now U-space-linked itself to those of its subminds possessing such facility, and electro-magnetically linked elsewhere, as the arcology’s structure permitted. The losses in not being optically linked amounted to about a third, however the advantage was quite evident: Coloron now need not die along with its arcology.

The barren sandy plateau, scattered with monolithic boulders, lay far from any human habitation on the planet Cull. A mile up, his ship hovering on AG, Blegg focused scanning gear on the location of the Jain node. Eight thousand miles above him, a dreadnought waited with a five megatonne CTD imploder ready to be fired. Why it had not yet been fired was problematic, Earth Central’s instructions to him simply being: ‘Go down there, and see. You can transport yourself out should there be any danger.’

Strange oblate objects were scattered about the base of one slanting sandstone monolith. The movement he could see down there did not look human. Blegg increased magnification and, on one of the subscreens, saw circular entrances into these objects. Something came out of one of them and clambered on top of what must be its dwelling; for scan now revealed these objects to be hollow, and that many contained living creatures. He recognized the scorpion shape of one of the native life forms: a sleer. He focused in, and the creature turned its nightmare head up towards him. It bore a human face.

Dragon.

While it was here on this world, Dragon had conducted experiments that were morally indefensible at best, and obscene in the extreme. The entity had crossed human DNA with the genome of native insectile creatures to result in by-blows like this. Why do so? Dragon had partially answered this question during Cormac’s interviewing of it, but not really to anyone’s satisfaction. In truth, Blegg felt, Dragon did such things because it could not resist tampering and tinkering, because it liked to upset natural orders and humanity alike, and in the end simply because it could.

Drawing closer to this strange settlement, Blegg brought his ship down. It landed in a cloud of dust just on the outskirts. Blegg abandoned his seat, collected a pulse-rifle and a hand-held scanner now formatted to detecting the U-space signature of a Jain node. As an afterthought, he collected a couple of planar grenades before heading for the airlock.

Dust hazing everything, its taste metallic; a sharp smell as well—something acidic. His foot crunched on shale as he stepped from the extended steps. A few paces from his ship he turned and studied the craft for the first time from the outside. It bore that standard flat-bottomed shape of a general-purpose shuttle, but also sported four nacelles mounted on stubby wings—two positioned behind the nose and two at the rear. It stood on three legs, each possessing three-toed sprung feet. Blegg wondered why someone had chosen to colour it a bright inferno red. With a snort he turned back towards the hybrids’ village.

Blegg began walking, seeing increasing activity ahead. The first of them then came scuttling out to his right: two centaur-like creatures he had already viewed images of when going through the reports of what happened on this world. The larger of these possessed a six-foot-long sleer body, out of which grew the upper half of a bearded man. Making direct mental contact via the ship to the AI nets, he commented, ‘One of those two looks quite young. Could this mean they are breeding?’

‘Dragon would not create them sterile—such precautions are not in its nature,’ came the reply.

Blegg was unsurprised at how quickly the U-space comlink established.

‘Okay, Hal, what game are we playing here?’

EC replied, ‘Just retrieving something Skellor dropped. Dragon is reluctant to part with those nodes it possesses. It seems it does not trust us with them. But we have received a communication from one it did trust.’

‘One of these creatures? Are they like the dracomen, immune to Jain tech?’ He glanced about himself. The two centaur creatures drew closer and scuttled back and forth in agitation. To his left, three humanoid figures appeared out of the roiling dust, which Blegg realized was now thickening. These… people snicked at the air with the pincers protruding from their mouths. Ahead something scuttled past: a sleer body, a human face seemingly frozen in a permanent scream.

‘You will see,’ said the Earth Central AI.

Now the looming presence of the oblate dwellings all around him. He tracked one of the screamers with the barrel of his pulse-rifle as it came close, then swerved away to clamber up onto one of the dwellings. He now turned his attention to his node detector. The readings looked strange for a moment, until he tilted it upwards. The monolith—the Jain node was up there. Blegg considered transporting himself directly to the node’s location, but rejected that idea. He did not know why, and did not concern himself further with the thought.

Eventually a wall of slanting multicoloured layers loomed before him. Things scrabbled and hissed in the wind-gnawed hollows about the monolith’s base. Blegg turned to his left and began to walk round. All about him shadowy shapes loomed and retreated in the haze. Eventually he came to a point where they all seemed to be closing in. Here, carved into the stone, were foot- and hand-holds. He pocketed the detector, slung his pulse-rifle from his shoulder by its strap, and climbed.

Earth Central commented, ‘There comes a time when useful fictions become weaknesses to be exploited.’

‘Meaning?’ asked Blegg. Sleer hybrids clung either side of him to the sandstone face: the screamers.

‘Yes… meaning.’

‘Is it my imagination,’ asked Blegg, ‘or do you sound more and more like Dragon every day?’

On a ledge here, Blegg rested and eyed his companions on the rockface. The air carried less dust this high, so he could see them more clearly, which was not exactly reassuring. He checked the detector and saw that the Jain node lay only twenty yards away, in a straight line running up through and above the monolith. Not so far to climb, so he grimaced and continued, eventually coming up over the edge onto the top.

‘Ah… I see.’

Blegg unslung his pulse-rifle and casually aimed it, not that a weapon like that would do any good. He considered the grenades he carried and rejected the idea, too. Anyway, he could step away through U-space any time he chose.

Only a few yards away from him, the figure stood eight feet tall. It wore a wide-brimmed hat held in place against the wind by one heavy brass hand. Its coat was ragged, and it wore lace-up boots.

Mr Crane.

Perfectly complementing this menacing tableau, a vulture suddenly landed in a cloud of dust and a scattering of oily feathers. Blegg remembered this bird to be another Dragon creation; the mind it contained being the AI from the Vulture—the ship Skellor stole and which the AI had forced to crash here before transmitting itself to Dragon.

‘So, who’s been talking to Earth Central?’ Blegg asked out loud.

The vulture cocked its head and replied, ‘Me, of course.’ It extended a wing towards the big brass Golem. ‘He don’t say much.’

Mr Crane tilted his hat back on the brass dome of his skull, groped in one pocket, then took out a handful of various objects. He stirred them with one finger. Blegg noticed a piece of crystal disturbingly like that of the Atheter artefact, a blue acorn, a small rubber dog, and a golden ovoid. The brass Golem selected the ovoid from among them and held it up before his face like a jeweller inspecting a suspect gem, then, with a flick of his hand, tossed it to Blegg.

Too dangerous to touch, but Blegg snapped out a hand and snatched the object from the air. I’m dead, he thought, as he held up his hand and opened it. The Jain node rested in his palm, cubic patterns shifting on its surface.

‘You understand?’ Earth Central asked.

I’m damned.

The Jain node did not react at all.

Jack routed the package from Thellant into secure storage in a virtuality, where it howled like a pack of wolves confined behind a thin door. Aphran held back for a moment. Having witnessed the initial non-reactive scan of this package, she knew it to be layered with Jain tech subversion and sequestering routines, as was expected. However, though Jack perpetually delegated tasks to her, in this one there seemed some hidden purpose—she was too closely entwined with the AI to not realize that. She now extended the boundaries of the virtuality and projected herself inside it. For ease of handling she gave the memory package a form easy to comprehend on a VR level, while on an informational level her programs could take it apart. Swirling chaos eventually collapsed down to a stack of books in which squirmed venomous reptiles and insects—she needed to read these books yet avoid being stung or bitten. Beside her, a thin man appeared. He wore a pinstripe suit, bowler hat, and the glitter of thick spectacles concealed his eyes. Jack Ketch, the hangman.

‘No reservations?’ Jack asked, just like with Freyda, the Separatist.

‘I have some,’ said Aphran. ‘I’ve been working for the Polity under a sentence of erasure, which I know will never be repealed. Why should I continue?’

‘Because as long as you work, that sentence will not be executed.’

‘And because you may be damaged in the process.’

Jack leant forwards. ‘You think?’

‘Yes, though you have been gradually disentangling yourself and I suspect that, while I deal with this’—she gestured to the VR representation—‘you will pull away even more.’

‘Yes,’ Jack replied, ‘the processing power you will require in this task will further weaken your hold on me. I may even be able to separate from you completely.’

‘Does it mean nothing to you that I saved your life?’

‘My life is very important to me—which is precisely the point: my life.’

‘So you are going to erase me, just like you did Freyda.’

‘You believe that?’

‘I do.’

‘Then do not carry out this task.’

Aphran looked upon the perilous stack of books. She seemed damned either way: doing this, she could be separated from Jack and wiped out; if she did not do this, it would just take longer.

‘Very well, let it be over.’ She turned from him to her chore, feeling him fade and distance himself from her.

Aphran picked up one book. Some centipedal monstrosity immediately wound itself around her arm and opened its pincers. She caught its head in her fist and crushed it, then opened the book. This one detailed Thellant losing two Separatist cells, one after the other, and fearing a trail would lead back to him, then subsequently learning that his contacts in those cells were all assassinated on their way to interrogation. He suspected ECS, but it seemed a crazy move to kill those who could lead them to other cells. Next, the Legate waiting in Thellant’s apartment, to claim credit for the killings and to make an offer. The centipede broke up into segments, each of which transformed into a scorpion. She knocked some of these away but others stung her. Worms propagated through her. She fought them, pulled more of herself into the virtuality, doubled and redoubled. Four Aphrans picked up books, and fought the killer programs—more of herself in, redoubling. Some versions of herself coming apart, others intercepting vital information from them. All the while, behind her, like strings being cut, she could feel Jack separating himself. Nothing she could do about that now, for she could not turn away from this task until it was done.

In the virtuality a virtual age passed, though only minutes in real time. Virtual pain hurt just as much as the real thing as the Jain tech programs ripped into her, but this Aphran was a product of that same technology. She reconfigured herself, sent in her own programs like informational DDT, stamped and splattered her attackers, cut off self-propagating worms at their source, confined nasty HK programs in briefly generated virtual spaces and then collapsed them to zero. She saw how Thellant’s organization expanded as a direct result of the Legate’s assistance, saw him grow rich and dependent. Numerous meetings between the two of them revealed snippets of information she put together. The Legate was just that: a legate working on behalf of someone or something else. It showed technical abilities beyond that of normal Golem—seeming suspiciously like the product of Jain technology. Eventually she gathered it all: everything about Thellant and the Legate. And she now knew how the Legate might be found.

Re-absorbing her alternative selves, Aphran became one again in the virtuality, a neat stack of books before her and shattered chitin spread all around, vaporizing and turning to dust.

‘Give it to me,’ said Jack.

She stood alone, with just one channel open to Jack—her only link outside the virtuality. He had broken away totally and now she could be safely erased. She considered destroying everything she had obtained, or holding onto it and bleeding over small amounts just to extend her existence. But in the end she truly regretted all the things she had done as a Separatist. The arrogance and stupidity of her earlier self appalled and disgusted her.

Enough.

Aphran transmitted all the data, and Jack accepted it.

‘Do I die now?’ she asked.

‘Yes—in every way that matters to the Polity.’

Aphran felt herself contracting, going out, draining away.

No returns from the package he had sent. Thellant realized they must have opened it in some secure fashion to obtain what they wanted. With his being now utterly interlaced through the rescue ship, physically and informationally, he hardly felt his own body. Perpetually he tried to reach out to other vessels, probing for some lever, some way…

‘Thellant N’komo,’ said a voice.

‘You’re the ship AI—Jack Ketch. I know what the name means.’

‘Yes, I imagine you do. But I am not so merciless as that name implies. This is why I am going to offer you a choice.’

‘Oh,’ said Thellant sarcastically, ‘so I don’t get to live happily ever after on my very own little world.’

‘That is your first choice. There are those who would indeed like to isolate you upon such a world. Thorn did not lie when he told you such a place has already been prepared. The trouble is you would not live happily ever after. Over a period of years you would spread around the planet, using its resources to create grand Jain structures, but since the purpose of the technology you now ostensibly control is the destruction of civilizations, and none would be available to you there, you would eventually go to seed.’

‘Seed?’

‘The Legate has told you something of the biophysicist Skellor?’

‘He did.’

‘Though they might believe themselves to be in control of that technology, technical beings are merely its vehicles, merely a means of spreading it. In Skellor it formed nodes within him, seeds. It will do the same in you.’

Thellant already sensed that the technology remained his to command only while their two purposes concurred. The idea of it seeding from him contained more horror for him than could be supposed by others unoccupied by the Jain tech. He knew he would remain aware throughout the procedure, fighting to survive and to hold his consciousness together, but knowing his efforts to be futile. With his sudden tired acceptance of these facts, he felt things hardening inside him, imminent as razors threading through his flesh. Their purposes would utterly diverge should he choose what he already knew to be Jack Ketch’s other option: death. He poised himself on the brink of decision. Should he choose to die, the Jain tech would try to take over, since it put its own survival first, always.

‘Should it last for two seconds, I will take your silence as the latter choice,’ Jack told him.

Thellant clamped down on the structure that spread throughout the ship, felt it writhe and fight him. A spastic vibration threw him about in the flight chair, but stubbornly he kept his mouth clamped shut. He felt the structure within him creating a reply, drafting its acceptance of planetary exile. He glimpsed an image of himself as a soft flesh puppet, translucent and threaded upon black dense technology like a many-clawed gaff.

Not speaking.

Two seconds of eternity, then a shiny nose cone closing down on him like a steel eye. The Jain structure shrieked and thrashed, and the imploder struck. Super gravity drew ship and all down into white antimatter fire.

Thellant went out.

Human swarm crowded and stumbled in from the distance. Scattered evenly across the sky, apparently as far as the arcology edge, hung spherical scanning drones eight feet across, with high-intensity lasers mounted on either side of them. Their targets, Jain-infected humans, might be moving shoulder to shoulder with innocent civilians, and needed to be rendered down to ash. Coloron had calculated eight innocent deaths for every one infected with Jain tech. Cormac thought it ironically appropriate that these drones bore some similarity to Prador War drones. Thus far, fifteen targets had been destroyed, having evaded Coloron’s forces inside the arcology. None of them managed to join the main crowds, and so no collateral damage yet. Was that down to the efficiency of the Polity defence, or just dumb luck?

A line of AG tanks curved from horizon to horizon. Behind it, and above, massed other Polity forces: mobile quadruped rail-guns stamping about impatiently on steel legs, the ends of their huge cylindrical magazines, attached either side of their main bodies, looking like blank eyes; troop transports and swarms of armoured troops, some hovering in AG harnesses, some on platforms mounting particle cannons; atmosphere jets speeding in squadrons overhead, avoiding two massive atmosphere gunships hanging in the sky like city blocks turned sideways; a multitude of drones of all kinds swarming all about like steel insects. This then was the might of the Polity mobilized for ground warfare. Cormac considered it an impressive and sobering sight, but knew the forces assembled here to be only a fraction of a per cent of the whole.

Breaks through the ground line were fenced on either side, the intervening channels leading back to where ECS Rescue and Medical personnel awaited. More of these were arriving from the initial landings beside the arcology. The air ambulances and ships these personnel occupied were also obliged to pass underneath the scanning drones, no exceptions.

‘Would you like to be down there?’ Cormac asked.

Arach, who had been peering for some time over the side of the stripped-down gravcar Cormac guided, turned his nightmare head, opened and closed his pincers, his two large red eyes and other smaller ones gleaming. ‘I would rather be over there.’ Arach gestured with one sharp leg towards the arcology itself. Seemingly on cue, a bright flash from that direction cast long shadows behind the ground forces. Shortly after came a thunderous rumble. Through his gridlink Cormac picked up the news.

‘Another runcible,’ he declared.

Arach grunted, then with a clattering moved up beside Cormac to peer ahead at the arcology. Turquoise fire now stabbed down, again and again, and the thunder became constant. Smoke, fire and debris, carried up in mini tornadoes, became visible.

‘And that?’ asked the drone.

‘Coloron is destroying the coastal edge of the arcology to prevent the Jain tech spreading into the sea,’ he replied. ‘The AI has burnt down to the bedrock for about a mile in, and is keeping that rock molten.’

Accessing a statistical analysis of the situation, he immediately saw that the arcology’s further existence was measured only in days. Jain tech now controlled the coastal edge to the west, and most of the north edge too. It had swamped almost half the arcology, and six of the ten runcibles had been destroyed before it could reach them. Flashes continued to ignite the horizon as missiles from orbit destroyed those fusion reactors coming under Jain control. The millions of citizens remaining inside the arcology now all flowed towards the long south-east edge, since the remaining runcibles inside were about to be closed down.

As he flew the gravcar low over the vast crowd, with scanning drones above tracking his progress, Cormac accessed tactical displays and views through other drones and cameras scattered throughout the arcology. Coloron’s troops steadily retreated, blowing out walls, ceilings and floors wherever it seemed possible such demolition might slow the advance of Jain substructure, and firing on abhuman figures advancing out of the wreckage. He saw squads of soldiers engaged in firefights with armed Jain-controlled humans who could be stopped only by major damage. Cormac broke the links and returned his full attention to his surroundings.

Below, the crowds remained densely packed, humanity spreading in every direction as far as he could see. Ahead, the arcology edge rose into view, like some mountain chain carved into tiers. These levels were occupied by open parks, rectilinear lakes, small cities of expensive mansions, houses and apartments. Communications pylons cut into the sky, vents belched excess heat in the form of steam, monorails weaved from level to level like silver millipedes. As he drew closer to it, Cormac saw people crowding the tiers from which jutted the platforms of gravcar-parks and landing pads. The situation had improved since, only days ago, there had been no free space anywhere on those tiers, just shoulder to shoulder Polity citizens.

‘Coloron, where are you?’ he sent.

In reply he received coordinates on a three-dimensional map of the great structure.

He pointed up to a landing pad jutting from the side of ceramal-braced foam-stone cliff, like some monstrous iron bracket fungus. ‘We go up there.’

He guided the gravcar up through the evenly spaced layer of scanning drones, and soon descended towards a landing pad. To one side of this, people crowded up ramps to climb aboard the multitude of gravcars and other AG transports that were arriving and leaving constantly. A small area of this pad had been fenced off near the edge. Human guards and mosquito-like autoguns patrolled its perimeter. Within rested a lander, a couple of military transports, and a fast atmosphere format gunship. A group of figures stood near the edge itself. As he landed, Cormac noted a bipedal robot he identified, through his gridlink, as Coloron. There were dracomen here too, and as he stepped from the car, he also recognized Thorn.

He turned to Arach. ‘Come on.’

The drone clambered down from the gravcar and walked to heel behind him like some monstrous pet. Cormac advanced to the group on the platform edge just as another actinic flash ignited in the distance. He glanced in that direction, at a sky yellow-brown behind the pall of smoke, to see wreckage exploding into the air and raining down. This havoc was being wrought to prevent an even greater catastrophe, all as a consequence of one man with one Jain node. How many, he wondered, had the Maker brought from its realm and scattered throughout the Polity?

‘Cormac,’ said Thorn, turning to acknowledge him.

Cormac nodded in greeting, glanced across at the dracomen, recognized Scar by his gnathic smile, then returned his attention to Thorn. The man glanced past him at the drone, now squatting with his hindquarters resting on the floor.

‘New recruit?’ he enquired.

‘A volunteer,’ Cormac replied, then, after Thorn’s grimace, ‘allow me to introduce Arach. He’s a war drone who fought in the Prador War.’

‘Ah,’ said Thorn, ‘that accounts for it.’

‘Quite…’ Cormac stabbed a finger down at the deck beneath his feet. ‘Now, I know what’s going on down here on the surface, but I’ve heard nothing from Jack,’

‘We’ve captured Thellant N’komo,’ said Thorn. He nodded to the nearby lander and they both began walking towards it.

‘I know.’ Cormac tapped a finger against his head, indicating his gridlink. ‘Von Hellsdorf sold Skellor a Jain node, and there was a direct connection between her and this Thellant.’ Cormac glanced across the devastation and grimaced. ‘Have you got anything out of him yet?’

Ahead of them, Scar and the four dracomen accompanying him boarded the lander.

Thorn replied, ‘A download of all his memories concerning his association with something called the Legate. He layered this with subversion programs, so it’s taken Aphran quite a while to take it apart. We’re getting the results now.’

Cormac paused by the airlock. ‘Those being?’

Thorn gestured inside. ‘Best you come see.’

Cormac glanced back towards Coloron. The AI dipped towards him as if to study him for a moment, then returned its attention to its demolition job. Yet another explosion ignited the horizon, much closer now. Cormac stepped into the lander.