Polity Agent

4

Horace Blegg considered the universe as a web of lines interconnecting nodal points which, studied with sufficient intellect, would reveal its holistic nature. How fated is this particular node? He did not personally believe in determinism, but some coincidences seemed almost too coincidental to ignore. He walked out along a gravplated platform to a viewing blister in one half-completed section of the giant ship’s outer skin. To his left he observed the muted glare of ion engines which maintained the vessel’s position in the planet’s shadow. The engines were necessary for correction because the ship’s mass was perpetually changed by materials being brought in through four internal cargo runcibles. Also many smaller vessels docked and undocked all the time, changing its vector. In two days the ship would be completed, and by then, hopefully, it would no longer be necessary to keep it this close to the world in order to relay the thousands of tonnes of equipment coming through the runcibles, and then it could move out into a more comfortable orbit around the sun. Just down to his right he observed the shuttle he had requested, now docking, but there was no hurry.

‘A space tug will arrive in thirty hours,’ said the Golem beside him, which was telefactored from the ship’s newly initiated AI: Hourne—named after one of those who had discovered the nature of the object below, just as the world itself was now called Shayden’s Find, and the sun was called Ulriss.

Down below, the single rocky slab was the planet’s only enduring feature, drifting around on the mostly molten surface like a miniature tectonic plate. Huge autodozers were clearing the millions of tonnes of ash built up on its surface over millennia of constant eruptions. A slab like this would not have survived for so long on such a world but for one circumstance: the magma had accumulated and solidified around a large flat object unaffected by the heat. Others had discovered this object and listed it as a purely natural phenomenon. The woman Shayden, and her two male companions, had come here to study it and found that some fragments of its incredibly tough and durable substance had broken away—enough for them to retrieve and study thoroughly. This substance, something like diamond, also bore certain similarities to memcrystal. Shayden—out of curiosity—attached an optic interface to one piece, and the reams of code feeding back through it astounded her. She realized instantly she had discovered something very important. She also realized that her private business did not have the resources to study this discovery as it should be studied. She returned to the nearest Polity world and reported her find. Before the AI on that world was prepared to commit resources, it needed confirmation so Shayden, Ulriss and Hourne returned here with a Polity Golem called Cento, whose presence cost them their lives.

‘Some lifting job down there,’ Blegg observed.

The Golem stepped forwards and pointed to an area of chain-glass before them. An image appeared—doubtless projected by laser from the Golem’s eye. ‘The artefact is shaped so.’ Blegg observed a fat comma. ‘We believe it is the inner part of an original spiral. Where the crystal is actually breaking down is along that flat leading edge, so we project that it was once like this or larger.’ The comma grew like a snail adding shell, winding out and out. Then this activity paused for a moment, before the growth retreated to its original shape. ‘Thermally protected gravmotors are currently being positioned underneath the object here.’ A multitude of dots appeared like a rash all over the comma shape. ‘And we are introducing sheer planes in the underlying rock so the artefact should separate from it upon lifting.’

‘What about structural integrity?’ Blegg asked.

Now a grid appeared over the shape. ‘Ceramal beams attached directly to the object using high temperature resins,’ the Golem explained. ‘That will be done once we have removed all the ash and rock still resting above it.’

Cento, that other Golem who had come here, being one of the two Golem who tore apart the brass killing machine Mr Crane, had kept a souvenir, Mr Crane’s arm, to replace one of his own that the killing machine tore away. But who would have thought that Skellor, who had no real previous connection with Mr Crane, would want to resurrect that deadly machine, and would be prepared to come to a place like this just to find a missing part? Cento survived the encounter; the humans did not. Mr Crane threw Ulriss into a river of magma, the other two were left exposed unsuited on the surface.

But that was it: another coincidental connection. Cento came here at precisely the time Skellor—a man controlling Jain technology—sought him out. Then they moved on: Cento and Skellor to finally die falling onto the same brown dwarf sun. And here, on this same world, awaited an object likely to be a vast repository of information that was now confirmed as being too young to be a product of the Jain, and too old to be something the Csorians made. It must be Atheter—Blegg did not know why he felt so sure, but he did. And it might provide part of the solution to the danger the likes of Skellor represented. The artefact’s importance necessitated building a ship large enough to house it: it was too valuable to keep in one place where it could become a target.

Blegg turned away from the blister and walked over to the edge of the platform. Launching himself from it, he felt the weakening tug of the gravplates as he sailed towards the inner hull. Landing right below a structural beam, he absorbed momentum with his legs, caught hold of the underside of the beam and shoved himself down to the airlock at which the shuttle was docked. No path yet led from this side to the same airlock as it was one yet to be put into service. Catching one of the grip bars beside the door, he was about to palm the lock plate but realized the inner door was already opening. He hauled himself over to the door, then inside.

‘You’re an avatar, Blegg,’ so Cormac once told him.

Blegg snorted in dismissal of the thought as the airlock filled with air, and he turned off the shimmer-shield over his face. He next pulled off his hotsuit’s helmet and shut off the air supply in the neck ring. He could transport himself over short distances, alter his body to survive in extreme environments, but in reality he was less rugged than most adapted humans, and certainly nowhere near as efficient as the Golem avatar of the Hourne AI to whom he had just spoken. Why would Earth Central have bothered to create so fragile a representative?

The inner door opened and Blegg pulled himself through into the cockpit of the small slug-shaped craft, then down into the pilot’s seat, and strapped himself in. He disengaged the airlock and docking clamps, and the shuttle fell away from the ship, turning its flat underside down to face the planet. Taking up the simple joystick, he took control of the descent.

Of course Cormac’s theory was more plausible than Blegg’s own. He might well be a creation of the Earth Central AI and utterly unaware of that fact: a submind brought out of storage when required, with his memories adjusted or augmented to account for any missing time. His body might have been recreated many times. Sometimes it might even be just a projection—how would he know? This was not the first time he considered this possibility, and as always he rejected it. The idea simply withered under the load of his centuries and of all the things he had seen and understood.

Hiroshi pushed his foot against the floating corpse of a woman and shoved it further out. A whole mass of corpses broke away from the bank and began to drift slowly downstream. The sky was dark now and everywhere he looked its blackness sandwiched hellish fires against the ground. He drank his fill of muddy water and bathed his swollen face, then, hanging the shoes around his neck by their laces, pushed himself out into the turbid current. When he finally climbed out from the other side, it was raining big heavy droplets of filthy water that stained like sump oil.

How did I get to the river?

He looked back across to the firestorm raging in the area where his school was located. The fire would have burned him up, so he had stepped away from it, into that other place, then back out by the river—his intended destination.

Or am I mad?

When he finally reached his home street, he found it difficult to decide which part of the rubble mound had once been his house. He identified it only on recognizing Mr Hidachi standing in the street outside what had been his own house next door.

‘Details are being investigated,’ the man said. And, to Hiroshi’s query concerning his own family, repeated, ‘Details are being investigated.’

As he dug, Hiroshi found the head, neck and right arm of his mother, while the incinerated body of his father was only identifiable by his shoes. Something in Hiroshi’s head just shut down then as he crouched amid the ruination. That night came and went, and in the morning thirst drove him back down to the river. Upon his return he thought he smelt grilled squid and his mouth watered, but following his nose only led him to a pile of corpses — most of them human, but occasionally dogs, cats and birds and a single cow swollen up like a balloon. Back in the rubble pile he made a nest for himself and chewed through a handful of dried rice. On his subsequent return to the river he found a floating bottle—the water he brought back from the river made eating the dried rice so much easier. As another night passed mother and father began to smell, so Hiroshi wrapped the rice in a cloth, took up the water bottle, and began to walk. He saw bewilderment all around him, and plainly written on the faces of soldiers clambering down from an armoured car when they saw the raggedy people coming out of the wreckage towards them. He heard the word ‘hibakusha’ for the first time being directed at himself. He was now an ‘explosion affected person’ for no ‘survivors’ must besmirch the memory of the honoured dead.

Days passed, maybe a lot of days. There had been nights, more horror to see, a big pale foreign man giving him a large hunk of chocolate. The war was over, he heard, Japan had lost. He felt he should respond to this with shame, but could only look about him with wonder as nature responded to the cataclysm with frantic, almost desperate growth. White, heavily scented feverfew sprouted everywhere as if the Earth offered up its own medicine for this ill. Hiroshi only realized he had moved outside the bounds of the city when he witnessed a strange scene occur below a charred tree flinging out its own green defences.

The two soldiers wore headbands so smudged with soot, the rising sun emblem was only just visible. The third man, a stiff old officer in a spotless uniform, knelt on the ground. One soldier stood right behind him with his sidearm drawn and held resting by his hip; the other stood a few paces away, calmly smoking a cigarette. The officer wiped a white cloth along his gleaming blade, up and down, up and down, polishing it. He then carefully wrapped the cloth around the section of sharp steel just beyond the handle. Hiroshi thought, He is worried the blade might be dirty, and now he doesn’t want to cut his fingers…

The officer inverted the blade to his stomach and, grunting, drove it in. After a pause he pulled it sideways. He was making a strange nasal sound now and his head turned slightly. Hiroshi supposed that at this point the soldier behind should have shot him in the head. But the subordinate merely held the sidearm up, inspected it, then turned to his companion.

‘We should take the sword,’ he said. ‘The Americans pay well for swords.’

The officer keeled over on his side. His thighs and the entire front of his uniform were saturated with blood, and intestine bulged from the single wound. Shivering, he tried to bite down on his groans. The soldier stooped, tugged the sword away, cleaned the blood off with the same white cloth and placed it to one side. He then began to go through the officer’s pockets and when the dying man tried to resist, pistol-whipped him until he stopped. He tossed a pack of cigarettes he found to his companion, who then also took up the sword. The first soldier pocketed other items, then after a moment he began tugging off the officer’s boots, whereupon the second soldier kicked the officer over onto his back and pressed a foot down on his neck. Casually, almost negligently, he began using the tip of the sword to gouge out the dying man’s eyes. At that moment the first soldier spotted Hiroshi watching, stared for a moment, then abruptly stood up and aimed his sidearm.

Hiroshi stepped aside into he knew not what—but which centuries hence would be called U-space. Shifting only slightly, he stepped out on what he later found to be the island of Osaka, and walked on.

He did not stop walking for a quarter of a century.

Only seconds passed aboard Heliotrope, then came that twisting sensation as the ship surfaced from U-space. All around lay jewelled stars, the largest visible object being an orange smudge amid blackness. Orlandine rechecked coordinates and dropped the ship out of existence once again, but only for fractions of a second more than previously. Heliotrope surfaced into realspace over an infinite ocean of orange gas, broken with rollers of red cloud and vast spreads of misty white like peeling skin. Orlandine ignited the fusion drive and dived in. Only as the ship penetrated the surface was it revealed how disperse was the gas—a thin fog. Again checking coordinates she oriented the ship, accelerated for an hour, then coasted for a further three. At the end of that time something like a vast steel cliff loomed out of the murk ahead of her.

Orlandine was no outlinker, but she had spent most of her life aboard stations or ships, surrounded by technology, and felt more comfortable in that environment. The ship, though just big enough to live in, was not a place in which she wanted to conduct dangerous experiments. However, in her present straits the idea of descending to a planetary surface was unthinkable—there being no quick escapes for her down there since a U-space drive could not be engaged until the ship lay well clear of the gravity well. She chose an intermediate measure. And she chose a place she knew.

The diamond-shaped fragment, one of the first-constructed building blocks of the Cassius Dyson sphere, consisted of five layers of composite each a half-mile thick, the four-mile-wide gaps between each layer maintained by composite and bubble metal joists, some half a mile wide, braided carbon nanotube cables, massive gravmotors and hardfield generators powered by thousands of fusion reactors. In here there were 25 billion cubic miles in which to lose herself. Of course her intention, in making a U-space jump out of the system, had been to mislead any forensic AIs into thinking she had left the system completely. But, no, this was home to her: she was more familiar with every structure in this place than with any other place in or outside the Polity. Here she could hide most effectively.

She decelerated, hard, turning the Heliotrope so it rose up just beside the wall of composite. Sentinels inside the massive structure detected the ship, discounted it from being a meteorite and therefore offlined collision lasers. Those devices also registered the ship’s presence, but were simple computers and therefore easy enough for Orlandine to access via her carapace. She erased their recent memories.

Within minutes the ship drew opposite one of the mile-wide gaps between layers. She kept it rising, up past another layer of composite, to where the murk began to thin, then turned it, decelerating again, so that the front screen faced into this final top gap running through the structure. With merely human vision, she could see just ten miles into the forest of massive slanted joists and cables before their number and the thickening murk entirely cut off vision. Using her sensory cowl to scan across the entire electromagnetic spectrum, and with her carapace linked into the ship’s sensors, she could see right through to the other side—some 80,000 miles away. This place was awesome, always. How could she possibly leave it?

Orlandine eased the Heliotrope in past a vertical cable a hundred yards thick. Locating herself on a three-D map in her mind and by recourse to microwave beacons throughout the structure, she altered her course past a row of giant joists to which clung arboreal leviathans—generators, reactors, gravmotors. Through exterior sensors she noted the cloud her vessel was creating: the adjustments made by its thrusters causing ices to sublime, blowing up crystal sulphur and the numerous odd compounds that condensed here inside. The cloud would probably go unnoticed, but she slowed considerably and took more care with her course. An hour later, forty miles in, she sighted her destination.

The cylindrical pillar was a mile wide, and vertical rather than slanted like the joists. The inner structure of it, she knew to be almost ligneous. Each hexagonal-in-section cell stood about sixty feet from floor to ceiling, and thus the pillar contained thousands of them. It was for storage space, maybe living areas—that being something to be decided in the distant future—a general-purpose structure placed here prospectively, it being more convenient to do so while the entire segment was under construction. Orlandine brought the Heliotrope down to the base of the pillar, folded out the tips of each half of the ship’s claw, and switched their inner faces to gecko function. She eased the ship forward until the claw’s gecko surfaces bonded to the pillar face, then eased out the head of a plasma cutter from the rear of the claw. Reaching out with the cutter to the full extent of its triple-jointed arm, she began slicing a circle as far as feasible beyond where the claw tips bonded.

Carbon dioxide and water ice immediately sublimed from the pillar face. All around, in kaleidoscopic colour, fluorescence bloomed as complex ice made the transition to water ice and then into vapour. The cutter easily punched through the light sheet-bubble metal—the structural strength here mainly derived from laminated composite beams evenly spaced throughout the pillar’s interior. Eventually she finished cutting the circle, and with a delicate adjustment of the Heliotrope’s, thrusters, she backed the ship away, extracting a fifty-foot disc of metal. Then, swinging the ship around, she reversed it into the gap. Utter darkness now, but she mapped every movement and action precisely in her extended haiman mind functioning through the ship’s sensors. At the last she pressed the disc down against the bottom of the cut, and with a couple of stabs from the plasma torch, at its lowest setting, tacked it back into place. She then eased Heliotrope down to the floor of this hexagonal cell, which, with miles of composite layered below it, did possess a degree of gravity. However, that gravity level was low, so she extended the ship’s gecko feet to stick it into place. Turning on exterior lights—not that she really needed them, just for comfort really, human comfort—she gazed around at her new home.

Resembling a burnished cylinder, the telefactor, resting in the wooden doorway, extended one of its numerous arms, and from the tip of this extruded a single tool which very quickly removed all the hinge screws. It then passed the door back to one of its fellows, which proceeded to wrap it in thin transparent monofabric before carrying it over to a stack of objects similarly sealed. Thorn glanced round at the dome that enclosed the entire house.

‘I assume we’ll be leaving the air at least,’ he said sarcastically.

‘But of course, though it is being run through filters right now,’ Jack replied from Thorn’s comlink.

Thorn scratched his beard and peered up at the dome roof, as if he might be able to see all the way beyond it to the AI and know if Jack was winding him up. ‘How do we choose where to draw the line between what is, or is not, considered evidence?’

‘She did not have much to do with anyone else here. I am presently loading all records of other arrivals and departures since her initial arrival—about ten years before Skellor came here. Aelvor’s people are meanwhile taking statements from anyone she came into contact with. Masses of data is being collected, but there’s a formula that forensic AIs apply to such situations which keeps evidential collection to manageable limits for the processing power available.’

Thorn watched the telefactor exit the doorway and rise up to the roof, where it began removing and bagging wooden shingles. It occurred to him now that there were definite advantages to being Sparkind rather than a Polity agent. As one of the elite combat groups, you just turned up on site and someone like Cormac pointed you in the right direction with simple instructions like, ‘Kill them’, or ‘Blow up that’.

‘Do we have anything at all yet?’ he asked.

‘Interesting question: we have a lot, but we don’t know what will be of any use. I have set Aphran to analysing data as it comes in—she has been loading forensic cribs direct from the AI net ever since we found Jane von Hellsdorf. Aphran will be working through the chalet as well.’

The whole building was to be transported to the NEJ, along with much of the soil surrounding it. Thorn considered the way Jack was using Aphran. ‘So Aphran is still useful.’

‘She is.’

‘And so survives. Or are you only finding uses for her while her consciousness remains entangled with yours?’

‘I am in the process of unravelling that particular Gordian problem.’

‘And then?’

‘We shall see.’

Thorn let that slide. ‘Does she have anything yet?’

‘Ask her.’

Thorn hesitated for a moment, then asked, ‘Aphran, do you have anything for me?’

After a long pause the erstwhile Separatist replied, her voice sounding distracted as if her attention lay elsewhere. ‘There is a vast amount of informational evidence, and I cannot start on the physical evidence until it is delivered up here. But thus far it seems this world has been visited by suspicious characters in their thousands, including Skellor of course. I’m presently searching for anomalies that demonstrate a deliberate attempt at some kind of concealment. Then I have to eliminate various reasons for such concealment. I’ve eliminated six people so far—the last one was a Separatist woman who came here with an adapted version of an oak tree fungus. She apparently wandered off into the deep forest and has not been seen since. Aelvor informs me that she unfortunately fell into the rock crusher of an agrobot.’

‘How remiss of her,’ commented Thorn.

‘It seems evident Aelvor does not like saboteurs.’

Thorn laughed then asked, ‘What about Jane von Hellsdorf?’

It was Jack who now replied, ‘One would suppose her bright enough not to try her own wares.’

‘I rather assumed someone forced that aug upon her,’ replied Thorn, turning away from the chalet and heading for the exit from the dome.

‘Most certainly. Her Sensic aug was deliberately sabotaged to scramble her brains, and selling such augs herself she would certainly have known enough to run a diagnostic on it before fitting it.’

‘Are we going to get anything out of her?’

‘I may be able to glean something from a full memcord. Aelvor believes he will be able to make one by utilizing her present Sensic augmentation. I propose to allow him to try.’

Thorn stepped outside. The area was crowded now. A large AG vehicle had arrived first, containing all the equipment the Osterland monitor force might need to deal with a major incident. Now a couple of large airvans were also down, and numerous air-cars. Uniformed monitors from the local police force had spread all around, conducting interviews, taking copies from all privately owned recording media. Scar had pulled his dracomen back into the woods at this stage; if their services were not required, they would return to their shuttle and head back to the NEJ.

Thorn studied a group of people gathered by one of the vans. It was not difficult to distinguish the haiman from the others. He faced away from Thorn, so all that could be seen of him was the ribbing of his metallic carapace, and a tongue of metal reaching up behind his head. Thorn strode over towards him. When he reached only a few paces behind Aelvor, the man turned and the same tongue of metal fanned out behind his head, opening out the petals of his sensory cowl. After a moment they closed up again and Aelvor grinned.

‘Agent Thorn, a pleasure to meet you at last.’ He held out his hand.

Aelvor’s black hair was plaited in a queue that ran down over one shoulder. He was bulky but not fat, one of his eyes was green and the other displayed metallic shifting orthogonal patterns. Thorn shook the proffered hand, felt a restrained strength, and noted the extra gleaming metal limbs folded down on either side of the man’s torso.

‘Likewise,’ said Thorn. ‘I could get used to this place you’re making here.’

‘Consider it just a beginning. The human race has spent thousands of years standardizing everything, and the AIs continue in much the same vein. The reasons for that have all been valid, but now we possess the technology to expand individuality and the unique.’

‘More than one way of skinning a cat,’ Thorn observed.

‘What an obscene expression,’ said Aelvor. He glanced about himself rather theatrically. ‘And talking of obscenity: where is she then?’

Thorn supposed Aelvor had asked that question out of simple politeness—the haiman probably knew intimately the name and personal history of everyone within a radius of a hundred miles, and their positions to within a square yard. He pointed to the incident vehicle and led the way across. Shortly the two of them entered the vehicle’s medical centre to stand over von Hellsdorf’s bed. She lay utterly motionless. An autodoc clung to her side with its various tubes and implements penetrating her torso. At the head of the bed one of Jack’s telefactors stood motionless—a large cylinder bristling with multipurpose limbs. Von Hellsdorf’s aug casing hung open, its guts revealed, and the telefactor held numerous micro-optic feeds in place within it.

‘Okay, let’s get to it, shall we?’ said Aelvor. With a shrug he extended his own two additional metal limbs. Thorn noted incredibly complex hands on them consisting of two sets of three opposing fingers, selector discs for multiple optic and s-con interfaces, and a telescoping device that appeared to end in just a very sharp spike, but which he knew to be the presenting head for micro-manipulators—the rear section probably containing thousands of different micro-tools. With ‘hands’ like those Aelvor could probably remove von Hellsdorf’s brain through her ear and reassemble it outside her head.

As Aelvor moved in the telefactor immediately withdrew its connection to the woman’s aug.

‘The Sensic’s definition is not the finest but, through its synaptic links, it should be possible to run a memory search program. Unfortunately from her we’ll now only get mnemonically associated fragments—there’ll be no chronological order to them.’ He now made connection with his extra limbs to von Hellsdorf’s aug. ‘You may get a few seconds of childhood where she, say, picks up an apple and bites it. The next fragment may equally be her eating another apple, seeing some child from the perspective of adulthood, or being bitten on the tit by a lover.’

‘Curiously, I do know what mnemonic means,’ observed Thorn.

Aelvor grinned, ‘Of course you do, but with most of my processes running a thousand times faster than… normal, I find I have to make a deliberate effort to communicate by ordinary speech, so I over-compensate. You do realize Jack could easily do what I’m now doing, but AIs are very chary of the haiman inferiority complex and so like us to be included.’

Jack’s voice then spoke from the telefactor. ‘Your inferiority complex seems sadly lacking today, Aelvor… Incidentally, I have just monitored an adrenal surge in the patient.’

‘Memory fragment,’ said the haiman. ‘She just recalled a particularly protracted orgasm.’

Thorn noted how the patterns in Aelvor’s abnormal eye were flickering and changing.

‘Increase in salivary amylase, and stomach acids,’ Jack noted.

‘Crab paste on toast,’ Aelvor explained.

‘Heart rate high, enzymic—’

The woman was suddenly covered in sweat, then the capillaries in her skin turned bright red. One of the telefactor’s arms swept down, knocking away Aelvor’s connection. Thorn felt something slam into his chest and throw him back.

Hardfield…

He hit the wall and slid down. Subliminally he saw the same thing happen to Aelvor. Smoke boiling from the ceiling revealed a laser stabbing up from the telefactor. It reached out blindingly fast, its manipulators hooked under the woman’s armpits, dragged her upright, then with her it rocketed through the hole it had cut. The ensuing blast bowed the ceiling, and a column of fire washed down through the hole. Shortly after, the telefactor crashed back through, blackened, its shell buckled. Very little remained of Jane von Hellsdorf. The air stank of burning bacon.

The Jerusalem dropped out of U-space and cruised into the Cull system. In his own quarters Cormac called up the required views on his screen, and once again looked upon his old adversary. Then, whilst he observed Dragon hanging manacled over the ice giant, he cleared his mind and tried to find the gaps in his memory of events here. He recalled Skellor taking control of the local population and using them as hostages to ensure Cormac’s own surrender. He recalled being a prisoner in some Jain substructure aboard the Ogygian—the colony ship that had originally taken Cull’s inhabitants there from Earth. He recollected being utterly under Skellor’s control, but then things started to get a little fragmentary. He knew Cento had concealed himself aboard the Ogygian and, while a kill program in that ancient ship’s computer held Skellor in thrall, the Golem sabotaged the drive to bring that ship into an inescapable orbit around a brown dwarf. The King of Hearts—a rebel AI attack ship—had then fired grapples onto the Ogygian, and while Cento held onto Skellor, Cormac went out to sever them. Somehow he ended up on one of those grapples, and the King’s AI, rather than killing him for preventing it obtaining the Jain tech that Skellor possessed, had released him to deliver a message to Jerusalem: Honest, I didn’t get any, don’t hunt me down and kill me. But how did Cormac himself escape from that Jain substructure inside Ogygian?

Cormac could only assume that Cento must have released him from the enclosing structure, but something still bothered him about that. He closed his eyes and linked into Jerusalem’s servers, then created a search program to find himself there. Jerusalem had recorded him, repaired his brain, then downloaded that recording back to his repaired brain. Cormac felt certain the AI retained a copy… and there it was.

‘You will find that difficult to access,’ warned Jerusalem from the intercom in his quarters. ‘Your gridlink does not possess the capacity to sort out that mess.’

‘My mind is a mess?’

‘All human minds are a mess. Your gridlink is designed to access computer and AI systems, which are formatted much more logically. Anyway, since it is your own mind that you are attempting to look into, you will be in danger of cerebral feedback and might well end up in a psychotic loop.’

‘Well, then, you do it for me. I want to retrieve a memcording covering the time from my arrival at the brown dwarf up to when I ended up on that grapple.’

‘I fail to see why.’

Drily, Cormac stated, ‘Memory is something past, but experiencing a memcording is current.’

Jerusalem made no reply to that, but the link was made and the memcording flowed across. Cormac loaded it, experienced it. The first time through was hard for him, since the survival mechanism of memory always dulled the pain and the sickness originally experienced. The second time through, he saw it:

He fired five times into Skellor’s head, forcing the man back against the wall. Not enough though—Skellor was no longer human. Two shots to the chest, more to the knees as he tried to spring, and a hand blown apart as it pressed against the wall. Then Cento, scissoring his legs around Skellor’s waist, was tearing away wall panels to embrace a beam behind.

‘The cables,’ Cento urged over com.

Another clip into the gun. Back towards the blown screen… and there, at the corner of his vision, Jain substructure formed around the shape of a man rooted to the floor, its shell unbroken but no man inside it.

I was inside.

‘I would like to believe,’ said Cormac out loud, ‘that it is just an unfortunate accident that so critical a part of my memory is missing, but I am by nature a suspicious person.’

Jerusalem replied, ‘Your mind needs to heal further before it can accept that. It is something you did that you do not comprehend.’

‘Return it to me.’

‘I cannot. The human mind is a fragile structure at best. The memory of what you did then could be like the inverse of a keystone, especially with your mind in its present condition.’

‘I didn’t think I was that bad.’

‘Why do you think it has taken you so long to start reviewing your memories of that time? Doubtless the explanation to yourself is that only now are those memories relevant to your coming encounter with Dragon.’

Cormac wanted to sneer at that suggestion, but found he could not. Instead he said, ‘Can you at least tell me, in general, what I did?’

‘Oh yes: you used your own mind to translate your body through U-space,’ Jerusalem replied.

Cormac went cold. He shivered. That was purportedly what Horace Blegg could do, but Cormac no longer believed Blegg to be what he claimed. Could he be wrong about that? But he just could not encompass what Jerusalem had told him and felt himself teetering on the brink of some abyss. He tried to dismiss it, to focus on the now.

‘Is there anything else you are keeping from me?’ he asked.

Immediately another memcording arrived.

‘What is this?’ asked Cormac, not daring to open it.

‘To control you, Skellor linked into your mind, but as a consequence you were partially linked into his. This is something you picked up from there—his memory of how he actually obtained his Jain node.’

Cormac viewed it, experienced it: as if he himself stood upon the platform on Osterland and received from Jane von Hellsdorf a Jain node for the bargain price of ten shillings.

‘I should have known about this. This needs following up.’

‘Thorn, some dracomen, and a strange amalgam of the Jack Ketch AI with a dead woman called Aphran, are already investigating. You are not yet stable enough for that kind of mission.’

Cormac reluctantly accepted that.

‘Jack and Aphran…’

Even as he spoke he sought information via the Jerusalem’s servers: the original Jack Ketch had been destroyed fighting rebellious AI warships, including the King of Hearts, but Jack’s mind was retrieved by Dragon, whom Jerusalem finally caught up with in orbit of the brown dwarf where Skellor and Cento died. Then Dragon’s meek surrender and return to the Cull system, some kind of bartering enacted at fast AI speeds, with the result that Dragon gave up the ship mind, then the huge band manufactured by Jerusalem and placed around Dragon’s equator—a guarantee that Dragon would not try to use the gravitic weapons it contained in some escape attempt.

Cormac returned his attention to the screen. Focus!

Dragon must now answer some hard questions for there were clear links between it, the Makers, and Jain tech arising here in the Polity. Cormac needed to decide what those questions should be, and how far he was prepared to go to obtain answers.

Thorn rested with his back against an oak tree and waited. He observed Scar, pacing back and forth next to the dome. The dracomen had come back in during the night, obviously bored with waiting. Thorn’s own training made him very patient, and his experience enabled him to value brief moments of peace during any operation. It gave him time to appreciate things like trees, the starlit sky fading into misty morning, trees, the cool air on his face, more fucking trees.

Those down on the planet had gathered many holocordings and after deep analysis of them, usually of the background, Aphran discovered that three people had visited Jane von Hellsdorf. One of these Aphran picked up in an aug recording, and another in publicity shots taken of the village. The first one Aelvor’s monitors identified as a dissatisfied customer come to complain, and the second as another stallholder come to sell von Hellsdorf his old stock. Both were apprehended and now being questioned by monitors. But in the end what Aphran did not find proved to be of most interest. One of the residents in Oakwood had made holocordings of a barbecue, and in the background a krodorman—a heavy G ‘dapt to one particularly swampy world—showed up knocking on von Hellsdorf’s door. Analysis of the thousands of samples found at the scene revealed no trace of krodorman DNA. This person had left no physical trace of herself—for the figure was female—and they needed to know why.

‘We have her,’ Aphran announced finally, as the sun began to disperse the mist. ‘The Parliament Hotel on Cockleshell Street.’

Thorn stood and began heading for his aircar. ‘Is she still there?’

‘She has been a resident in the hotel for two months, has not yet checked out, but is not presently in her room—the hotel security system has not registered the door to her room being opened in the last two days—ever since we arrived here, in fact. It would seem that, immediately upon our arrival, she paid a visit to Jane von Hellsdorf, forced that aug upon her, then disappeared.’

Scar reached the passenger door of the aircar just as Thorn climbed inside. The dracoman growled low as he shoved the seat back and clambered into the cramped space, putting his feet up on the dashboard. Thorn stared at him for a moment, shrugged resignedly, then took the aircar into the sky. He glanced back and down to see two monitor aircars and two of Jack’s telefactors following him.

‘Jack,’ he said, opening his comlink to the ship AI, ‘have you yet figured out what caused Ms von Hellsdorf to explode?’

The AI replied, ‘A combination of four enzymes released from her liver the moment she experienced an adrenal surge—which became inevitable once someone started delving into her mind. The enzymes instantly began converting her body fat to nitroglycerine.’

‘Why do that? Killing her beforehand would have kept her secrets safe.’

‘Obviously taking out any investigators nearby would hamper their enquiries. It is the kind of thing done by those who consider ECS personnel as viable targets.’

‘Separatists,’ Thorn replied, stating the obvious.

Jack went on, ‘It is a well-tested methodology to use booby traps to target specialists among what is considered the enemy. In the Second World War the Nazis dropped bombs specifically designed to kill those sent to defuse them… And now my search has revealed that Separatist cells around Krodor have used this method many times.’

‘All very neat,’ said Thorn. ‘Tell me, Aphran, what do you think?’

‘You mean with my deep experience of Separatist methods?’ she replied bitterly.

‘Yes, precisely that.’

‘It makes sense. The prime target for any Separatist is an AI, as they are the direct subordinates of the Earth Central autocrat — sorry Jack—and after that we… they will go to great lengths to kill ECS agents. The likes of yourself are considered prime targets because not only do you serve the autocrat, you are considered traitors to the human race.’

Clear of the mist the aircar glinted in orange-hued sunshine. Soon the main town lay below and Thorn began to ease the car down towards the streets. He checked his palm-com—now lying open and stuck to the dashboard beside Scar’s right foot—identified Cockleshell Street and headed for it.

‘Let’s suppose, then,’ said Thorn, ‘that a Separatist organization learnt, by whatever means, that ECS would soon be taking an interest in Jane von Hellsdorf.’

‘Then I would expect no less than an entire combat group turning up down there,’ Aphran replied.

Thorn grimaced to himself, having already worked out the coming scenario. He decided that landing in Cockleshell Street itself would not be such a good idea, and chose a thoroughfare adjacent to it, but still in view of the hotel.

‘Jack, the entire hotel and surrounding buildings need to be cleared.’

‘I have already informed Osterland and Aelvor.’

Of course Jack was ahead of him—that’s how AIs were.

The message obviously got through because the front doors opened and people began emerging. The two other aircars landed in the street behind Thorn’s vehicle, but the two telefactors held station up in the sky. Four monitors came past the car and headed towards the growing crowd before the hotel. There followed some gesticulation and shouting, but the evacuated people began moving on down the street.

‘Jack, Fethan gave me a little gift before I departed Cull: one of Jerusalem’s HK programs.’

‘Yes, I know,’ the AI replied.

Thorn tilted his head and asked, ‘Aphran, if you yourself planted an explosive device here, in this situation, how would you detonate it?’

‘Net feed. I’d connect it to some com system. The signal would be untraceable. Or I would have assumed so.’

‘But you would need a spotter of some kind, otherwise how would you know when to detonate?’

‘I would either connect the device to something only an ECS agent might try to access—secure storage or something locked like a safe—or I would use a cam system, probably activated by movement, and routed through the same net feed.’

‘Jack, through your telefactors can you scan for a cam inside the hotel?’

‘I have already done so,’ the AI replied. ‘There are two holocameras located in the suspect’s room, linked by optic cables into the room’s netlink.’

‘Presumably there are other optic cables in the room too?’

‘No, our suspect has been much smarter than that: planar explosives packed into a standard lamp—the lamp itself to be activated by an infrared signal from the netlink rather than an optic cable. The lamp has been deliberately raised to head height, the intention being to not only kill, but to destroy any cerebral hardware designed to save anything of the victim’s mind—a subtle touch.’

Thorn reached into his pocket and took out the memstore. ‘Would this HK be able to track the cam signals?’

‘Why not ask it?’ Jack suggested.

Thorn then remembered Fethan saying the hunter-killer program did not talk much. So it could talk, then.

‘Can you hear me?’

The device vibrated in his hand.

‘I hear,’ replied a flat inflection-free voice. Scar peered at the memstore for a moment, then sniffed dismissively.

‘Then you heard what we were discussing. Can you track cam signals through a netlink?’

‘I can.’

Thorn detached his palm-com from the dash and rested it in his lap. He tapped an icon to open its netlink, and with a brief local search closed the connection to the Parliament Hotel. He then pulled out the strip along the lower edge of the touch-console to reveal multiple sockets: optic, nano-tube optic, s-con whiskered, crystal interface, and even a socket that could adapt itself to primitive electrical connections. As he picked it up, the memstore, like a clam sliding out its foot, immediately extruded an optic plug from one of its end ports. Thorn inserted this into the requisite socket.

‘Of course, we need a way to activate the cameras,’ Thorn commented, while watching the hotel’s web display flickering, then breaking up into squares, before blanking out totally.

‘Copy loaded,’ said the box.

‘Are you volunteering?’ Jack enquired of Thorn.

‘Not likely,’ said Thorn. ‘The cam signal might not be enough, but the program should certainly be able to follow the detonation signal.’ He paused for a moment. ‘Erm… HK, have you wrecked this palm-com?’

The com screen came back on, displaying the city map Thorn had used before landing.

‘Can you display where you track the source to?’

‘I can,’ HK replied.

‘Jack,’ said Thorn, ‘send in a telefactor. The watcher will know he’s been blown and won’t be able to get a human target with his bomb, but he won’t be able to resist taking out such a costly piece of Polity hardware instead.’

Even as Thorn spoke, one of the telefactors dropped down in front of the hotel. After a moment he observed something shoot out from it to hit a chainglass bubble window.

Decoder mine.

The missile stuck for a second, then the window abruptly collapsed into dust. As the telefactor cruised inside, immediately the walls either side of the window blew outwards, ahead of a disc of flame. Rubble crashed down into the street, followed by the top half of the telefactor itself.

‘My supply of telefactors is limited,’ Jack observed.

Thorn glanced down at the palm-com, just as the HK grated, ‘Located.’

On the map displayed, a square frame shrank down to a dot. It took half a second for Thorn to realize it lay right next to where he was parked.

‘Out!’ he shouted, grabbing up his pulse-rifle from the passenger foot-well below Scar’s legs. He and the dracoman piled out just as shots slammed into the car roof.

Thorn hit the cobbles, rolled, and came up locating the source of the shots. A chainglass bubble window had revolved halfway down into the wall, revealing a small open balcony. Thorn aimed at the figure standing up there, but hesitated and it disappeared. He damned himself—he had already checked that the weapon was set to stun. Now he fired freely, electrical stun discharges spreading small lightnings all over the balcony. Scar was up and moving on the other side of the car. The dracoman slammed into a street door, slapped something against it, swung aside with his back to the wall. An entry charge detonated, hurling the crumpled composite door inwards—and Scar followed it in.

‘Jack!’Thorn bellowed. ‘Factor!’

The telefactor descended on him like a falling rock. He felt a strange lightness and twisting sensation as its AG field came over him. Reaching up he grabbed one of its limbs. A second limb closed about his chest.

‘Drop me on the balcony. Then you take the roof!’

As the telefactor brought him up level with the balcony, Thorn fired into the room beyond, then kicked himself off from the machine’s skin just as it released him. His foot came down once on the balcony platform, then he dived straight into the room beyond and rolled. A figure to his left, something bouncing across the floor. Thorn surged to his feet and flung himself through the nearest doorway. He kicked the bedroom door shut, dived for the bed, grabbing up the edge of the mattress as he went and pulling it over him. The subsequent blast slammed him into a fitted wardrobe and, when he peered out from behind the mattress, the door was gone, along with most of the partition wall. Wisps of insulating foam floated through the air, and something was burning. As he climbed out over rubble, he targeted an object moving through the smoke, but then identified it as a small spherical robot on four skinny legs, which was spraying fire suppressant at a pool of sticky liquid burning on the floor. He headed for the door through which he had seen the figure retreat, and cautiously peered round it. His head jerked back just in time as something smashed into the door jamb. His comunit began vibrating against his breastbone — security signal. Thorn pulled out the comunit’s earpiece and placed it in his ear.

‘Three… of them,’ Scar immediately alerted him, his sibilant voice only just audible over a constant crackling. ‘Two heading for the roof, and one below… us… between us… autogun… corridor.’

‘I know about the autogun,’ Thorn replied, then asked, ‘Jack, what’s this interference?’

‘EM emitter,’ the AI replied.

‘That’s why it missed me.’

Thorn glanced around the room and focused on the robot. The autogun would not be very sophisticated, as Separatists hated anything with even a hint of AI to it. He stepped back, raising the setting of his pulse-rifle to its maximum, then he picked up the robot and tossed it into the corridor ahead of him. Immediately a projectile weapon began firing, smashing holes into the floor as the robot rose up on its legs. Thorn leaned round the door-jamb. The gun was mounted on a tripod: a servo-aimed belt-fed machine gun with a simple motion detector mounted on top. He aimed at it and fired in one, then quickly ducked back under cover as the gun’s ammo box exploded and filled the corridor with shrapnel. As he darted out into the corridor, he saw the fire robot, completely unharmed, returning diligently to its task.

Reaching a stairwell, Thorn knocked his weapon back down to stun. Just then an explosion shook the entire building.

‘They carry grenades and will die rather than be captured,’ Scar informed him.

‘Problem?’ Thorn enquired.

‘It will wash off.’

Jack now added, ‘The other two are on the top floor, one level up from you. I think they spotted the telefactor.’

Thorn began climbing the stairs, his weapon aimed straight up at the half-landing. This was not a good place to be if someone decided to toss a grenade down, but they had no time for delay if these people would prefer to die rather than be captured. No one visible on the stairs. Reaching the top he peered through an open arch and saw that the top floor contained a swimming pool, some gym equipment, and an old-style VR suit suspended in gimbals. Potted palms offered some cover, as did low partitions around the bar area beyond.

‘I don’t fucking think so!’ someone shouted suddenly.

A pulse-gun fired and a figure spun out from behind a pillar and landed in the pool. Then came the detonation, blowing the same figure up out of the water in tatters, drenching the chainglass ceiling and all surroundings. Thorn quickly moved in—only one opponent left here. He spotted Scar running in from the other side of the pool, levelled his weapon. The ceiling abruptly transformed into a white shower of debonded chainglass as the remaining telefactor dropped through. A black gloved hand speared out from behind the pillar, suspending on one finger a gas-system pulse-gun by its trigger guard.

‘Okay, you’ve got me!’

The gun clattered to the floor and a woman with cropped brown hair stepped out from behind the pillar, her arms held out from her sides, gloved hands wide open. Thorn considered stunning her anyway, but the shattered body in the pool told him all he needed to know. Aphran’s voice, issuing from the telefactor, confirmed this:

‘Freyda, I take it you are not quite prepared to die for the cause?’