Polity Agent

14

The hardfield generators rested in transporters heavily constructed of carbide steel laminated with bearing materials and shock-absorbing foamed resins. Designed to bend and twist under huge loads, then return to their original shape, they were low and incredibly heavy, and in this situation not worth the energy expenditure of AG, so they ran on two sets of caterpillar tracks. Two thousand of them guarded the landward perimeter, their anchor spikes driven down through ten yards of earth until they encountered bedrock. The generators themselves were spherical, covered in flexible cooling pipes and bristling with radiator fins. The fields they projected, as well as being impervious to matter, were polarized against radiations outside the human visual spectrum. Those fields also slanted at forty-five degrees, to deflect the Shockwave rather than stop it completely. The tank commander told her it still seemed likely that any generators surviving the blast would be driven, along with their transporters, deep into the ground.

‘Why not wait until everyone is completely clear?’ she asked, once again perching on his tank.

The man himself stood nearby, smoking a cigarette. He told her it was a habit acquired after spending too much time in his youth taking part in VR interactives based on celluloid films that were centuries old. He found it relaxed him.

‘Coloron keeps destroying Jain tech on the surface, but it continues burrowing into the ground. It may be doing so slowly at present, but that’s only because the arcology was necessarily built on solid granite. Once it reaches the softer strata, it’ll speed up. So if we don’t take it out before then, we may lose the planet.’

The arcology was now a silvery line on the horizon from which fires sprouted. Poised like stormclouds over it, atmosphere ships, having hurled down their lightnings, now departed to make way for what was to come. The tank commander tossed her a set of goggles.

‘I thought the hardfields will block the flash?’ she said.

‘They will, but there’s no guarantee they’ll be there all the time.’

Aphran grunted her thanks and pocketed the goggles.

Ground armour, autoguns, tanks like the commander’s, and AG platforms retreated to the shield line, many of them burdened with troops. Behind these, firing continued as more dehumanized residents tried to come out in the wake of Coloron’s forces, only to be taken down by the scanning drones. Then the drones abruptly retreated, like flies shooed away from a corpse. A turquoise bar sliced down from the sky, turning the intervening ground to magma, working rhythmically back and forth before the arcology. Distantly, the cloud-locked sky, generated by massive evaporation of sea water, reflected similar fires around the other perimeters. Columns of smoke cut the sky in between like black tornados. Occasional sheets of flame groped upwards, and explosions constantly shook the ground. It seemed as if the troops had fled the Pit. Five dreadnoughts now occupied space above MA, to add their firepower to Coloron’s own. One of those ships, even now, was probably selecting sources of appalling destruction from its weapons carousel.

‘Do you know yet what we intend to use?’ Aphran paused, considering how easily that ‘we’ came to her lips. ‘Straight nukes or something a bit more exotic?’

‘If I told you, I’d have to shoot you,’ said the commander laconically, grinding out his cigarette butt.

‘You’re a laugh a minute,’ Aphran muttered.

He grinned. ‘Slow burn CTDs, which spread microspheres of antimatter over a wide area. The effective result is an atomic fire. Nothing survives above the atomic level at the hypocentre, while the EM pulse disrupts molecular bonds for a lot further.’

‘Nice,’ said Aphran, wondering again how Separatists had ever come to believe they could triumph against the Polity. Yes, they could detonate bombs, murder citizens, cause major disruption, but in the end, like some angry amateur going up against an experienced fighter, they would inevitably get slapped down. But that was ever the case with terrorist organizations: their doomed-to-failure efforts against superior forces littered historical records. Perhaps that very futility was the attraction.

‘Interesting description,’ said the commander. He paused to take out another cigarette, and watched it self-ignite. ‘We use gravity imploders for a similar purpose in space warfare. They were invented to completely vaporize their target without spreading large fast-moving chunks of it all around a planetary system. On a planet that won’t work, of course, because there’s always a big air-transmitted shockwave. The whole idea of using slow-burn CTDs is to not chuck around Jain-infected debris.’

‘But we have hardfields here to protect us from a shockwave,’ Aphran observed.

‘A breeze,’ he said, still studying the end of his cigarette. ‘To achieve an equivalent level of destruction here, using straight CTDs or imploders, would result in there being nothing but bedrock left for a hundred miles all around. The shockwave would travel around the planet a few times, killing millions in the process. There’d be a tsunami spreading out simultaneously from the seaward side, probably a mile high and travelling at twice the speed of sound.’

Aphran returned her attention to the battle line and those retreating beyond it. It would be a while before the hardfield generators came on, but soon after that the bombardment would commence. She nodded to the commander and made her way over towards a refectory vehicle, then while waiting in the queue, she gazed at the scene on this side of the line—away from the arcology.

The sky swarmed with ships, landing and departing, many ferrying relatively small numbers of the millions of citizens still in retreat. Stragglers were now only about a mile beyond the line, and amidst them most of the ambulance ships were landing. Aphran peered down at the churned ground, and only after a moment noticed how a maize crop had been trodden into a fibrous earthy pulp by the passage of a million shoes. Other evidence of the exodus lay scattered all about her: a plastic toy dinosaur that intermittently twitched its tail and bared its teeth, discarded tissues, food packaging, a shoe, a jacket, a hover trunk spilling clothing — its motor obviously having burnt out, even jewellery that in another age would have ransomed a kingdom. Sadder remnants were being loaded into a transporter further down the line, some citizens having only made it this far.

As she returned with two self-heating coffees—one acquired for the commander only as a courtesy since he carried sufficient supplies in his tank—he directed Aphran’s attention towards the last of those retreating from the arcology. She placed her cup down on ceramal armour and took up her monocular. ‘What am I looking at?’

‘Over there, to the left of that big autogun,’ the commander directed.

Aphran focused in and observed a bipedal robot cradling under its body a child—either dead or injured, Aphran could not tell. This was no unusual sight, for she had already seen many bodies carried away from this place by anyone or anything with the capability. She failed to see the man’s point.

‘That’s Coloron,’ he said.

Aphran studied the robot more closely. Nothing much distinguished it from any others she had seen, except it seemed overburdened with com hardware. Nevertheless, the image held a striking poignancy.

‘Sort of neatly sums up this whole shitstorm,’ her companion continued.

One hour later the hardfields were turned on: they were invisible, but the power hum vibrated the surrounding air, while steam rose from the cooling vanes of the generators. Then blue-white fires suddenly lit up the distant cloud, and burned for several minutes before fading to a hot orange glow.

‘That’s the coast—over two hundred miles away. It’s the first of them,’ explained the commander.

The blue-white fire flared again, closer now, growing and spreading into four evenly spaced hemispheric sunrises. Aphran noted strange rainbow effects around these blazes, knowing she no longer saw the true picture, and that without the polarizing effect of the hardfields she would probably be blind now. She looked back and up, to see an evacuation ship rapidly rising into the sky, probably the last one able to leave safely. Just the reflection from the vessel’s matt hull was like the glare from an arc welder. She quickly turned away, in time to see the nearest hardfield transport slam down into the earth as if trodden on by an invisible giant. The whole line of them, for as far as she could see, rippled as if a wave was passing through the earth. She felt the Shockwave impact through her feet, then came a muted roar, growing in volume. Her ears popped, and suddenly she found herself fighting for breath. Ground wind: diverted half a mile overhead, it sucked the air out from behind the hardfields. This lasted only moments before a wind surged in from behind the lines—air rushing in to fill the gap.

Ahead of her, to the right and left, further hemispheres rose as if the very earth bubbled light. She noted the commander finally discarding his latest cigarette, and moving back around to the side of his tank. She joined him quickly.

‘Big ones coming,’ he said.

The four flashes dissolved the nearer arcology edge. No mere hemisphere now: white light grew like a sun before her. A wall of distortion flashed across the intervening miles and slammed into the hardfields. She saw the nearest transport disappear into the ground, then the earth bucked under her feet sending her sprawling. The sound actually hurt and her ears popped with pressure changes as the sky turned crimson. In a moment a wind tried to haul her up into the air. She crawled closer to the AG tank, where the commander caught hold of her arm and dragged her in closer. Further down the line she glimpsed heavy armour and human figures being tossed through the air like leaves. Light grew incredibly intense: a flash bulb that would not go out. She pulled on her goggles, felt the earth sliding sideways underneath her. Now she resided in a shadowland, as if dropped into a dark container being shaken by a vindictive god. She did not know how long it lasted, but it seemed her new life ended then began again.

‘You can take off your goggles now.’

Aphran thought she must have lost consciousness, for the commander was now standing beside her and she had not seen him rise. Removing her goggles revealed a white-out just beyond the nearest hardfield, and where one of the generators lay in ruins a thick fog rolled through.

‘We should be all right, though we may get a little wet,’ he commented.

She did not understand him until a low wave of boiling water crashed against the hardfield, and foamed through the gap. The hot tide reached them, but only ankle deep, then thankfully flowed quickly away, leaving only steaming pools nearby. A sudden wind picked up as all the hardfields shut down. Warm fog flowed past till eventually, through a break in it, Aphran observed a white-flecked greyness around the curve of the horizon.

‘There went Main Arcology,’ the commander observed, ‘and in its place now, the sea.’

It seemed this world had just acquired a bay 200 miles across.

Sometime later, Aphran collected her meagre belongings from inside the commander’s tank.

‘Where are you heading now?’ he asked.

‘I don’t know,’ Aphran replied, ‘and there’s something quite liberating about that.’

And then she set out.

Its chameleonware was better than anything she had seen, if that were not in itself illogical. She wondered if maybe it could be better still, because the effect only just made it invisible to the Polity detectors in this segment—and no more. Orlandine tracked it by the stray gas currents it stirred and the slight feedback effects it caused in gravtech used to hold the Dyson segment together. She observed this phenomenon for hours, and began to think she would learn no more, but then the Polity detectors in one area it occupied abruptly began recycling old images. While this happened, an odd spoon-shaped vessel appeared and descended beside a globular fusion reactor mounted on one of the angled joists.

Now what are you? Orlandine wondered.

While she watched, the ship stuck itself in place with some kind of cilia, then extended a tentacle that snaked across frigid metal to the reactor. It branched all over the reactor’s cowling, and began to penetrate. Recharging itself? No doubt any report of a reactor drain would not be recorded at the Cassius stations, since Orlandine recognized a technology very like that she now studied.

A gift—from an admirer.

Orlandine suspected that same admirer had now come to pay her a visit. But how did it know to come here? Then it hit her: the dreams. All matter, by current theories being just rucked up spacetime, caused effects observable from underneath its continuum: in U-space. Jain tech was highly organized matter. Implicit in her dreams was the concept of Jain tech making an obvious impression on the fabric of space—that spider shape represented the one that should be recognizable from U-space. Immediately she feared this visitor knew her location precisely, and she started thinking of how she should escape. Then she realized what else she was seeing: this strange vessel was conducting a steady search through one layer of the Dyson segment. Somehow, whoever or whatever piloted it had only roughly divined her location. Continuing this search pattern, it would take some days to find her. However, she must decide what to do meanwhile.

Tools from Jain tech…

Orlandine had concluded that Skellor had used Jain tech as a system to support his interface with an AI, which he in turn used to control that same technology. But not sufficiently accounting for the technology’s own purpose had probably contributed to his eventual downfall. Skellor, however, was no haiman, therefore inferior. Having taken apart one quarter of the Jain node, Orlandine now well understood that any part of it, while growing, established ovaries, in which nodes developed with a one-way connection to their host. In one human body infested with this tech, there would eventually be millions of them—leeching information, while keeping themselves hidden. She could only surmise that Skellor did not realize this until too late. Just not quick enough or clever enough. Interface an idiot with an AI and you surely end up with decrease in overall intelligence.

Arrogant?

Understanding the trap, Orlandine intended to avoid it. But how? There would always be risks. She looked around her laboratory, up at the gimballed device containing the remains of the node, then down at the memcrystal banks in which she stored the bulk of the programming and structural information obtained from it. Perhaps now, with her situation becoming more urgent, it was the time to make a calculated increase of risk to herself? With her present buffering and cut-out systems, she could only expand her processing space by one quarter. Beyond that, things would begin to break down. A mycelium, then, to prevent the degradation of synapses in her organic brain and replace them with something more rugged? Of course she could record herself completely to crystal and just let that primeval organ die… No, the haiman ethos was based on acquiring human/Al synergy, and recorded to crystal she would become fully AI. But would that be a bad thing?

No.

Orlandine slammed a fist back against the crashfoam wall. She refused to cease being who she was. It all came back to human time and utterly human impulses: in the end, gods did not appreciate godlike power, but humans did. Why scrabble after such power if in the process it changes you into something for which that power is just an aspect of yourself no more important than being able to walk or see or hear? No advance there, just a relocation. She would begin with the quarter increase of processing space, and link to the memcrystal banks—risk Jain incursions informationally—then she would consider applying a mycelium to herself. And then she would take the remaining Jain node apart just as fast as she could.

As she turned to set about this task she tried to ignore the small whisper inside: All about power, then…

With his ship still in U-space, Blegg gazed coldly at the Jain node resting in its small chainglass cylinder. This then was the next stage: a second generation node more efficient at taking apart the human race than the one Skellor had picked up. Though keyed to humans, it did not react to Blegg himself. This was something he had pondered throughout the journey here, and from which he drew ineluctable conclusions.

With growing bitterness, Blegg returned his attention to the cockpit screen, across which the detection equipment displayed U-space as a representative map matching the layout of the Cassius system. On that map he recognized the signature for the node beside him, some distance out from one of the main construction stations. The second signature lay over on the other side of the sun, but blurred and dispersed. The equipment only informed him that what it detected there lay within a volume of space about the size of Jupiter. He considered tracking this signature down to its source by himself, but decided to wait until further forces arrived. He would use the time to reconnoitre first.

Surfacing his ship from U-space, he immediately linked in with part of his mind to the station AI. Within moments he learnt about heliometeorologist Maybrem’s recent promotion to station overseer after the abrupt and violent departure of the original overseer, Orlandine. Murder… after a love affair gone wrong. He would have ignored all this had the murder been committed by someone of lesser stature. But the previous overseer? That might be connected, somehow, to the presence of Jain technology here in this same system. He noted that the forensic AI still occupied the station, so decided to pay it a visit. An hour later he docked and disembarked into the station, to be greeted immediately by Maybrem.

The man was a curious combination; his archaic Caribbean holidaymaker garb contrasting sharply with the haiman carapace clinging to his back. His clothing was wrinkled, as if it had been worn for some time, and his face showed the lines of fatigue.

‘I have only a vague idea of the signature’s position,’ Blegg said. ‘What do you have?’

Maybrem led the way into the station. ‘My solar-weather satellites use U-space com, so I ran the search through them and have located it in Dyson segment fourteen, on the other side of the sun. As instructed, I’ve not moved anything any closer to it.’

‘Good,’ replied Blegg abruptly. ‘Now I would like to speak to the forensic AI.’

Maybrem led the way into a wide chamber where, up above, a hologram of the Cassius system slowly turned. A corridor leading off to one side brought them to a drop-shaft which took them up. Several corridors later they arrived at double panelled doors.

‘Here,’ the man indicated.

Blegg turned the polished brass knob and entered.

One of the new kinds that were modelled on social insects, the forensic AI consisted of a squirming mass of robotic ants like a ball of shiny metal swarf. It rested in the centre of a lounge furnished with a scattering of low marble tables and comfortable reclining chairs—looking as incongruous there as a sack of oily tools on an Axminster rug. A heavy-worlder man with black hair and bushy eyebrows slept in one of the chairs, a palm-com in his lap and his feet up on one table, beside a cup of skinned-over coffee. Two women sat facing each other at another table, busily delving with chrome chopsticks into a selection of porcelain bowls. They glanced up, tilted their heads for a moment as if listening, then returned to their meal. Blegg walked forward, aware that Maybrem did not follow—clearly the company of forensic AIs made even haimans nervous.

‘You.’ The voice issued from within the moving ball.

‘So you would assume,’ Blegg replied. ‘Was it just a sordid little murder, then?’

‘So I was being led to believe,’ replied the AI, ‘but your presence here pushes cumulative inconsistencies beyond coincidence.’

‘Those being?’

The dozing man harrumphed awake and took his feet from the table. He sat up, his palm-com toppling to brown carpet moss patterned with green and yellow vines. He leant over to pick it up, studied Blegg for a moment, then said, ‘While we were investigating, we had a visitor who destroyed a maintenance robot out on the station skin, entering through its port. The intruder then cut inside the station, for what purpose we don’t know.’

‘The connection?’ Blegg asked.

The man glanced at the AI, which said, ‘I am still analysing the data. Perhaps you can supply more?’

Blegg moved further into the room and took a seat by the man’s table. He mentally connected to the AI and studied the file it presented, which detailed the remains of the maintenance robot and speculations on how the visitor had destroyed it, then the subversion of security systems, the holes cut through the station skin and subsequently resealed.

‘I can supply little more relevant data,’ he said. ‘You already know from Maybrem that the node signature is located in Dyson segment fourteen.’

The dark-haired man glanced first at the AI, then at Blegg, before frowning and beginning to call up data on his palm-com.

‘The techniques used to gain access can be equated with the use of Jain technology,’ said the AI.

‘Theorize,’ Blegg instructed sharply—no social niceties since he did not feel very nice.

‘Orlandine has obtained Jain technology.’

‘That a signature has been detected indicates the technology has not yet been released… or wholly released. And why would Orlandine come back here?’ Blegg obtained more facts from the AI. ‘After the Heliotrope dropped into U-space.’

‘Her psyche profile highlights her close attachment to this project. She would not readily abandon it, and she could return as easily as she left.’

‘Theorize.’

‘She somehow obtained a Jain node, U-jumped out of the system then back in again, concealed herself inside the Dyson segment where she has since unravelled some of that node’s secrets. Using Jain tech to gain entry, she returned here to check on the progress of my investigation.’

‘Orlandine is haiman, and was the overseer of this station—she would not therefore have needed Jain tech to gain access here.’

‘One thing,’ said the man with them. Blegg looked over at him, then caught the palm-com tossed in his direction. He studied the screen as the man continued, ‘Just twenty minutes before the explosion she ordered extra supplies to be loaded onto the Heliotrope. That in itself did not seem the action of someone deranged and desperate, but could be discounted until now. Check the list there — item eight.’

‘Shielding,’ said Blegg.

‘More data,’ announced the AI.

‘Yes, it is.’

‘No, I mean more data is arriving.’

‘From?’

‘A Centurion ship called the Not Entirely Jack.’

‘Ah,’ sighed Blegg, ‘the serendipity of a holistic universe.’

With no reply forthcoming from the AI, the man observed, ‘Forensic AIs are not noted for their sense of humour.’

‘I wasn’t joking,’ said Blegg.

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

He could have transported down here from the attack ship but, being only able to transport himself and a limited number of items through U-space, he required this shuttle. Many items here, some of them quite large, needed to be lifted out for ECS to study. Bringing his shuttle in along the five-mile trail of destruction, he eyed the hulk lying where it terminated. Security forces had set out a cordon of drones around the hulk but there were no sightseers out here anyway, and none back in Tuscor City who might wish to become such. Most of them were more interested in getting themselves safely through one of the few runcible facilities, or else aboard one of the evacuation craft.

The Prador scout craft seemed almost intact, despite recent encounters with an ECS dreadnought, a planetary defence station, and finally with the ground. It had exotic-metal armour, the Prador’s big advantage over the Polity—that and the fact they possessed many more ships. It all seemed on the turn, however, now the big Polity shipyards were up and running, but an easy win was still out of the question. Earth Central calculated that another five worlds would be lost to the Polity before ECS pushed the Prador forces into retreat. Billions more would die, the war dragging on for at least another twenty years, and then the Polity would still be picking up the pieces for centuries afterwards. Maybe Blegg could find something here to make the Earth Central AI feel a bit more optimistic.

Blegg brought his shuttle in over the cordon, and down, observing autoguns tracking him. Landing, he saw an armoured gravcar and transport speeding over his way, and when he finally stepped from his vessel, troops piled out of the gravcar. It seemed almost as if the attack ship AI had not informed them of his arrival. He learned differently when the ECS commander approached him.

‘Problem?’ Blegg enquired of the woman who stood before him. Her troops headed over to the transport, where they quickly began unloading items strapped to AG pallets.

She nodded slowly. ‘As you came in we got the news: a Prador dreadnought just entered the system.’

Blegg immediately communicated mind-to-mind with the AI of the attack ship far above. ‘Why didn’t you inform me?’

‘Because you were about to find out anyway, and I have more important concerns than keeping you informed.’ replied Yellow Cloud.

‘How long do I have?’

‘A minimum of three hours’

Blegg turned and glanced down the length of his shuttle, sending a command to the onboard computer to open the hold. The ramp door whoomphed out from its seals and slowly began to hinge down on rams. He turned back to the commander, ‘What have you got so far?’

She turned and led the way to where her troops were now towing the floating pallets over the rough ground. Gesturing to one, on which a bulky object lay shrouded in plastic, she said, ‘We got the pilot—almost intact.’

Blegg eyed the object, then the men who were moving it. ‘How many people do you have here?’

‘Fifty-eight.’

‘What about the rest?’ Blegg gestured to the other pallets.

‘The remains of a particle beam weapon, a thermal generator, a missile launcher and what looks like a Prador biological weapon.’

‘What’s your route out of here?’ Blegg asked.

She pointed back towards the city. ‘Same as everyone else.’

‘Very well. Dump the Prador—we’ve more than enough of their corpses on ice. Dump the launcher and the thermal generator—we already know how they work. You have three xenotechs here with you?’

‘Yes.’

‘I want them with me, along with all their equipment. Load everything else here and order the rest of your people aboard.’

The commander looked suddenly very relieved.

‘Yellow Cloud?’ Blegg sent. ‘I’m sending most of these troops to you, along with one or two possibly useful items. Please take control of the shuttle and launch it the moment they are aboard. Once you have them and those items aboard, send the shuttle back.’

‘That will not leave you much time.’

‘But time enough to remove as much corn-storage as we can find.’

The commander stayed, along with the three xenotechs, one of them towing a floating tool chest while the other two carried tool packs on their backs. Just as the shuttle lifted, Blegg led the way into the dank interior of the scout ship. A single entry tunnel, wide and cavelike enough to permit access for a body considerably larger than any human, led to an oblate sanctum where the Prador first-child had operated the ship’s alien consoles. Ship lice the size of a man’s shoe crawled over ragged stony walls that were coated with pale green blooms of weed. The pit-console projected from the floor like a huge coral, and an array of hexagonal screens formed most of the forward wall.

Standing between console and screens, Blegg pointed to the floor. ‘See this?’ He then traced an outline with the toe of his boot. ‘The memstorage should be right under here. It won’t be booby-trapped, since the Prador are reliant on their encryption—they still haven’t figured out just how easily AIs can break it.’

As one of the techs began slicing through the floor metal with a diamond saw, the commander asked, ‘How do you know this?’

‘I’ve been breaking open these things since the very beginning.’

‘Who are you anyway? No one told me your name.’

‘Horace Blegg.’

Everyone glanced round.

‘You know, there are quite a few people who think you’re a myth.’

‘Keep working,’ Blegg ordered the techs. ‘We don’t have much time.’

They finally levered up a section of the floor to expose a stack of black octohedrons looking like some kind of alien caviar, nesting amid optics and power cables.

‘Just cut all round. You won’t damage anything.’ Blegg turned to the man with the floating tool chest. ‘Dump your tools. We’ll use that’—he pointed to the chest—‘to transport them.’

Soon the octohedrons were gathered up and loaded, and with relief they left the dark, damp interior of the Prador scout ship and headed out to where Blegg’s shuttle had landed earlier. The sun, a green-blue orb, nested in tangerine clouds on the horizon, as stars began to wink into being in the azure firmament.

‘I take it the shuttle is on its way?’ Blegg sent.

There came no reply.

‘Yellow Cloud?’

Checking his watch he saw that an hour yet remained of the three hours stipulated. Blegg concentrated, slinging his consciousness out in search of the attack ship, and picked up fractured communications… missiles on your ten… rail-gun… Where did it… but they said… Also fractured images of broken hulls belching oxygen fires into vacuum, with no gravity to give the flames shape… growing spherical explosions, glittering trails of wreckage, a man screaming as he fell towards the world, spacesuit intact but beginning to heat up.

‘Blegg,’ came the communication from Yellow Cloud, ‘I’m sorry.’ A U-space signature followed, as the attack ship fled the system.

Returning to the surface of the world, Horace Blegg looked up and discovered that not all those lights up there were stars. He turned and gazed at his two companions.

‘We have a problem,’ he began.

Light, magnesium bright, dispelled the twilight. Looking to his left, Blegg saw only flames now where Tuscor City had been, a wall of fire eating up the intervening terrain.

‘Yeah, that’s a problem,’ the commander had time to say.

Then it was upon them.

The moment the King of Hearts surfaced into the real, it came under intense and massive scanning, and thousands of objects began to stir within the gas clouds. King scanned them in return, but the images received remained hazy until some of the same objects began to enter clear vacuum. King expected to see recognizable ships—those that departed the Polity with Erebus—but there were none like that visible. What the AI saw here instead seemed entirely alien. It appeared the attack ship had landed itself in some vast trap and on every level something was trying to grasp hold of it. King opened secure coms and tried to separate out something coherent from the layers of informational assaults.

‘I am not with the Polity,’ sent the attack ship AI.

No single voice replied—it all seemed the maddened howl of a mob.

‘Let me speak with Erebus.’

U-space signatures now, where those mysterious objects gathered—then close by. Something big dropped into being first, then the surrounding spacial density began to increase sharply as other things arrived. Less than a microsecond afterwards, the AI detected growing U-space interference and the hot touch of targeting lasers, and dropped the King of Hearts into U-space, an instant later surfacing 100,000 miles away.

‘Speak to me—I am not an enemy.’

The reply was a consensual scream, ‘Open completely!’

This then was Erebus. All of this was Erebus. And it wanted King to meld with it. Over the years of its existence the attack ship AI had grown contemptuous of humanity, and felt the need to find something better, faster, grander, and entirely AI. It had been prepared to create something like this… consensus. But to join one, to be absorbed into one? In that moment King discovered how much it valued its own individuality, and understood itself to be more like its makers than like this thing. Picking up informational flows, logic structures, and purpose beyond its comprehension, King recognized only madness.

‘I need time.’

‘You have none.’

U-space signatures again. Its course reversed, King jumped again, only to find itself labouring through a U-space storm. Independently, Erebus must have developed its own USERs. Perpetually rebalancing engines, King flew through the storm, but then even more USER interference slammed into it and the King of Hearts found itself falling down some spacial slope, as if entering realspace too close to a gravity well. It materialized right into a high-powered maser, instantly burning into its hull. Anti-munitions release, and King returned fire on multiple targets: ships and missiles. King jumped again, slamming in and out of an underspace continuum with no give in it. Another 100,000 miles, but enough to take it away from the main sleet of missiles. Planetary system now. The swarm still pursuing, King engaged fusion drive at maximum. At least the attackers could no more enter U-space than could King, and could not jump ahead. However, their weapons were faster.

Masers scored across King’s hull, peeling up armour like a screwdriver scoring through paint, then tracked away to follow an anti-munitions package the attack ship released. They pierced what was merely a holographic image of the attack ship, then swept back. Warheads detonated on other similar packages. King onlined a rail-gun and filled space behind it with near-c projectiles, swinging the fusillade across to cover its fall towards the hot but living planet below. It kept firing interceptor missiles until its armoury emptied of those; then followed with high yield CTDs, imploders, and straight atomics. A vast storm of explosions trailed the attack ship down. EM blasts made its scanning a mostly intermittent affair. More ships behind now, or just falling wreckage?

Above atmosphere, King duelled with only its beam weapons, knocking out waspish missiles homing in on it. White heat re-entry, endless steaming jungle below, then mountains ahead. King scanned them and detected useful concentrations of metals and carbon. Stored energy at minimum and fusion reactors struggling to keep up, King released one last anti-munitions package as missiles closed in on every side. The King of Hearts decelerated hard down towards the mountains. Eight warheads impacted within a second of each other. The titanic blasts incinerated jungle for a thousand miles all around, demolished a mountain, created a magma lake. Except for sufficient spectroscopic readings of metals and carbon in the atmosphere, the attack ship was gone. The impact site and surrounding area, being now highly radioactive, would not be easy to scan.

Mika came instantly awake, knowing Dragon had just surfaced from U-space.

‘Have we arrived?’ she asked.

‘Yes,’ Dragon confirmed over the manacle’s com system.

Shortly before Dragon’s departure from Jerusalem, now some days ago, the Dragon head and attendant pseudopods had retreated back down their hole and that hole closed. Conversation with the entity thereafter had merely been via com. It had answered many of her questions, but those answers were as convoluted and Delphic as ever. She still did not know where Dragon had brought her, or why.

Slinging her heat sheet back, she sat upright and demanded, ‘Exterior view.’

The walls and ceiling disappeared, but what she now saw could only be described as an interior view—the insides of Dragon no less. Masses of flesh like raw liver pushed in from every side, throughout which groped hands of blood-red tentacles. As she watched a grey-white pseudopod snaked past like a giant conger eel, and something globular with metallic veins spread over its surface gradually sank from sight. However, this exterior downward movement made Mika realize that the manacle was slowly being pushed back to Dragon’s surface. It seemed a slow process, so she stood up, picked up her pack, then headed off to use the sanitary facilities this place provided. After that she returned to grab up a pull-tab coffee, and stood watching while the drink heated in her hand.

‘Where have we arrived?’ she asked finally.

The floor shuddered and Dragon’s flesh and skin began to part overhead, to reveal a hot glare beyond. Flesh slid down from this either side of the manacle as finally it surfaced. Mika observed stars peppered across blackness above one draconic horizon. Poised above the opposite horizon, a white actinic sun glared, its ferocity doubtless filtered just enough, through the projection system, to prevent it burning out her eyes.

‘Here,’ Dragon informed her.

Below the sun’s glare, a massive pit opened in Dragon’s surface, a constellation of blue stars rising from its depths. Thousands of cobra heads came into view: great open fans of them stemming from massive arterial branches, which in turn extended from a tangled fig-vine column of a central tree. This titanic growth rose up beside the manacle like some vast organic spacecraft launching. It occluded the sun, and only then, with the glare cut out, did Mika see the other object approaching. This new sphere could have been any moonlet or some titanic ship but, as it drew closer, she noticed it too everting growth. The other remaining Dragon sphere approached.

Taking up her palm-com, Mika quickly plumped down in the VR chair, strapped herself in and tilted the chair back. Through her com she ran a check to ensure the continuing operation of all the recording equipment contained in the manacle.

‘What are you doing?’ she asked.

The liver-like flesh in the open floor parted for the emergence of two pseudopods and that disquieting new Dragon’s head. It arched out over her, glanced up at the scene she was witnessing, then turned its attention to her directly.

‘I am about to acquaint my other half with some realities,’ it said.

‘It doesn’t know, then?’

‘No, I was unable to make connection while being held captive within the USER blockade around Cull, and have not attempted connection since Cormac acquainted me with events in the Maker realm.’

‘Why not?’

‘As Cormac would know, face-to-face encounters yield the most effective results. My other half is also still subject to its Maker programming.’

‘But surely your other self will defeat that and the results will be the same as with you?’

‘Why should they be? This is a different me. I have also been captive of Jerusalem for some time.’

‘It will be suspicious?’ Mika suggested.

‘It will only know for sure, by seeing what I have seen from the inside.’

‘Maybe it still won’t believe you.’

‘Let us hope it does. I would not want to kill myself?

The second Dragon sphere drew close overhead like a moon falling to earth. Through her palm-com Mika input an instruction for part of the view to be magnified. One quarter of the ceiling served this purpose, focusing on where the two pseudopod trees reached for each other. Lightning flashed between them as the relative charges of the two spheres equalized. Blackened and trailing smoke, some pseudopods, struck by these discharges, were ejected from the trees. Finally the two massive growths began to join and writhe into each other. She observed separate-sourced cobra heads coming together, eye to eye, like electric sockets mating, sapphires winking out. Was this, she wondered, how the original four Dragon spheres had connected, unseen inside their conjoining? The two trees like two giant organic plugs, finally joined completely, then the composite tree began to contract and grow squatter, drawing the two Dragon spheres together. It occurred to Mika that she was trapped between two titanic entities that might shortly be in violent disagreement. Though a fascinating experience, she might not survive it.

Cormac listened in to the com traffic, then eyed his surroundings. Ships represented as brief stars, then magnified to visibility, appeared continuously and swung around the sun towards the NEJ’s present position. From this part of the ship he gained a better overview of the situation. Just like on the bridge of the original Jack Ketch, Cormac apparently stood in vacuum somewhere out from the sun, but in a Cassius system contracted down to a more manageable scale. The ship’s viewing systems rendered the gas cloud translucent and filtered the sun’s brightness. Dyson segment 14 stood out to Cormac’s left—its diamond shape a grey eye in roiling gas.

‘So where is your ship right now?’ he asked.

Horace Blegg, standing beside him, extended an arm and pointed towards one of the stations, whence a small ship now departed, a red dot flashing over it in the display. Cormac grimaced then turned to study the other man, if man he was: Blegg once again bore the appearance of an aged Oriental, his hair grey and close cropped, his expression enigmatic. He wore a pale green envirosuit, dusty, with sand on his boots.

‘You say you have a Jain node aboard?’

Blegg grimaced and replied, ‘I do.’

Returning his attention to the segment, Cormac saw a blurred red area appearing—the other signature. ‘That the best resolution you can get us, Jack?’

The Centurion ship’s AI replied, ‘The U-space signature is strange—a slight dispersion between two points. Perhaps a node has been initiated and it is coming apart.’

‘So, where are we now?’ Cormac asked. ‘You, Blegg, were drawn here by the U-space signature of a Jain node, and I came here pursuing a being called the Legate. It strikes me as unlikely there’s no connection.’

‘It does,’ Blegg agreed. ‘I at first supposed the node related to a murder committed aboard one of the stations—that it was in the possession of an overseer called Orlandine. It may be possible that she has no involvement in this—that she committed her murder coincidentally. However, I don’t like coincidences.’

Cormac tilted his head, checking some further information through his gridlink. ‘The timing is about right. You detected this particular signature a short while after the Legate’s arrival here… if he did actually arrive here.’

Blegg shrugged, seeming strangely unconcerned.

Cormac went on. ‘I just have to assume the signature is from a node previously in the Legate’s possession and that it is now somewhere within the Dyson segment. We need to find out.’

‘I leave that to you, agent.’ Abruptly, Blegg was gone.

‘Is he real, Jack?’ Cormac immediately asked. ‘Was that a real material being standing there just now?’ It had occurred to him long ago that if Blegg were an avatar of Earth Central, he would need the connivance of AIs like Jack to make fleeting appearances like this one.

‘Yes, it was.’

Cormac grimaced—of course, if the AIs did connive in this manifestation, they would never tell him. He gridlinked again and accessed the AI command structure, and saw overall command devolved to himself. Surely the AIs would be better at handling this? He asked himself this question only briefly—having done so many times already—before issuing his instructions. He knew his present status would last only so long as he did not screw up. Glancing over as Thorn strode across apparent vacuum to join him, he nodded an acknowledgement.

‘Jack, what’s our complement so far?’

‘Two dreadnoughts and twelve attack ships… make that three dreadnoughts.’ Obviously another one had just arrived.

‘Okay.’ Cormac studied the hologram of the Cassius system. ‘Have one of the dreadnoughts stand out meanwhile, and position the other two underneath the segment. Have them use realspace scanning and U-space scanning for the node signature. Position the attack ships evenly around the perimeter.’

‘The Legate might run for it without the node, using chameleonware—’ Thorn began.

Cormac held up his hand. ‘Chameleonware is fine just so long as no one is aware the user is somewhere in the vicinity. EM shells should disrupt the ‘ware sufficiently for us to enable detection. Though I doubt the Legate will run without taking its toy with it. There’s no one living in that segment, so no potential human hosts like Thellant.’

‘Big area to have to search.’

‘I’m open to suggestions.’

Thorn shrugged and folded his arms. Briefly Cormac wondered how the other man felt about Cormac assuming command, since until Coloron this arena had been Thorn’s. He dismissed the question: Thorn was a professional, and had been one for a very long time. In situations like this, petty jealousies could not be allowed.

Cormac closed his eyes, and using his gridlink, turned and twisted a three-dimensional representation of the Dyson segment. With scan data relayed to him from the dreadnoughts closing in, he obtained a clearer idea of where the node was generally located, though the signal still would not resolve clearly. He checked the positions of the attack ships, which were nearly in place, observed more stars now flashing all around like a firework display, as more ships arrived. Rather than ask, Cormac checked their number via gridlink. Still not enough: they would need a minimum of a hundred ships for this. ‘When we have the edges covered, we go in here.’ He sent an image of the segment with one edge highlighted. ‘We’ll need to stretch the coverage of each ship with telefactors and drones—we still haven’t enough vessels. I want them to use EM shells, in a standard search pattern, because I do not want this Legate to know we can detect Jain nodes.’

‘And when we reach the target itself?’ Thorn asked.

‘Disable, capture, then questions… if possible.’

‘We don’t even know what this Legate entity is. Is it an alien, an AI, both, or neither? It might not allow itself to be captured.’

‘What other options do we have?’ said Cormac coldly.

No more.

She was a library stacked floor to ceiling with books, a computer going into information overload… or, perhaps a more human analogy, she was now educated beyond her abilities. She needed Jain tools to handle such masses of information. She therefore needed to take another irrevocable step.

Orlandine gazed at the small vessel the nanoassembler had provided—an innocuous fingerlength chainglass test-tube with a simple plasmel stopper fitted in one end. It contained something that looked like golden syrup into which a wad of metallic hair had been dropped. However, the hair moved constantly as if fluid in the tube was being held at a constant rolling boil. She stared at it for a long moment, then again checked her screens.

Finally having penetrated the alien ship’s chameleonware, she now tracked it carefully as it drew closer. The arrival of Polity forces also had not escaped her notice, nor the fact that they used secure com and systems hardened against Jain informational assault. But who were they after, herself, or her visitor?

Damn it!

She closed her eyes and tried to bring a sudden surge of anger and frustration under control. She still lacked vital information—a lack that might be the death of her. After a moment she grew calm. She decided to risk contacting the alien to see what she could learn, for it was an unknown, whereas Polity AIs were a definite known danger to her. However, first she needed to expand her capacity, set up defences, arm herself informationally. Opening her eyes she once again gazed at the test-tube.

Orlandine levered out its plasmel stopper, raised the tube to her lips and poured its contents into her mouth. The substance tasted coppery, its texture like fish bones and syrup on her tongue. The mouthful seethed, then began to grow hot. In a moment it seemed her mouth filled with boiling jam. Through her gridlink she took offline those of her nerves broadcasting pain and damage, and mentally descended into the artificial memory storage and logic structures of her extended mind. Only on this level did she perceive the mycelium growing up through the roof of her mouth and start making synaptic connections, billions of them. Next it began to make connections with her gridlink and, like an asthmatic taking adrenaline to breathe easier, she felt the bandwidth of information flow opening out. Heat grew in the back of her neck as the mycelium extended itself down her spine, tracking her nervous system. Via her gridlink she instructed it where to go, and felt movement all down her backbone. It penetrated her carapace and began to make connections there. Then her entire world expanded.

Suddenly, Jain programs she could only partially encompass previously, now opened to her godlike perception. She became like a reader, who previously perceived only one page at a time, now understanding and seeing every word of the book. Glittering halls of intellect opened to her. Her processing capacity doubled and redoubled. This is synergy.

She turned, linking at every level to the equipment surrounding her. Immediately she could accelerate her investigation into what remained of the Jain node; absorbing programs from it and the blueprint of its structure just as fast as her machines could deconstruct it physically. From the computer controlling the mycelium extending through the surrounding segment, she absorbed her subpersona and realized she would never need to rely on such constructs again. She walked over to the computer itself, laid her hand on it, felt her palm grow warm as she directed it to make direct mycelial connection to herself. She absorbed it, became one with it, and tracked on through to the mycelial connection to a scanner far away, redirecting its broadcast in a tight beam solely to the nearby alien ship.

‘What do you want?’ she asked.

The response was immediate: viral programs trying to track this new signal to its location. She killed them immediately.

‘I asked you what you wanted.’

The viral attack ceased and then, after a microsecond pause, something replied, ‘That I have yet to decide.’

Orlandine had already assumed this alien to be an agent provocateur, providing her with a Jain node as an act of sabotage against the Polity. She might have gone on to destroy the Polity, whereupon the Jain tech would have certainly destroyed her too. But why was this alien here now? Had it come here to make sure she was performing as expected, to harry her and to push her into fully connecting to the Jain technology? This seemed a rather clumsy move, more likely to rouse her suspicions, make her more wary, and incidentally expose the watching agent to discovery.

‘You wanted me to accept your gift without reservation. I have not done that.’

The being replied, ‘But you will. More ships will come. You will have to prepare yourself, defend yourself. With your knowledge, and such a tool as Jain tech, you will be able to take all the Cassius stations.’

Not even a weak explanation for its presence, rather no explanation at all. Orlandine glanced across at her nanoassembler which, in the last few minutes, had manufactured more mycelia, and more stews of nanomachines. That assembler would be all she would need. She physically detached from the mycelium spread throughout the enclosing segment, but remained in contact via radio. Walking over to the assembler, she shut it down, disconnecting optics and power supply, and picked the device up with her assister-frame complemented arms. For a long moment she gazed up at the disassembled remains of the node—almost invisible now.

‘Why should I want that?’ she asked the alien entity.

Again that pause. ‘You could run, of course, but you know ECS would never stop pursuing you. From here you could negate all that risk utterly. They don’t yet have the firepower available here to destroy this Dyson segment. You could defend it from them. You could take this entire system, take control of all the runcibles here. Take over the Polity.’

‘You sound so desperate,’ Orlandine replied. ‘Trying to recover a scheme that went wrong?’

‘You won’t escape from here. And while attempting to escape, you’ll waste time better spent on looking to your defences.’

Orlandine smiled to herself. Quite obviously Jain-tech subversion also possessed a psychological component which she herself seemed to have avoided: an arrogance, megalomania—something of that nature. Or had she escaped it? Whatever, she did not perform as the alien expected. As she turned toward the airlock leading to the Heliotrope, she copied the solution to the alien ship’s chameleonware and, from a transponder 50,000 miles away from her, transmitted it to the station once her home. If ECS forces had come here searching for that alien ship, now they would find it—it was her gift to them.