21

Intelligent weapons have been with us for centuries now, ever since the first computer-guided missiles, jet fighters and tanks. As human wars spread out into the solar system, such weapons increased in complexity of function and mind until there were things with the outlook of trained hunting dogs but bodies more lethal. With the introduction of laws concerning AI rights, it should have been unacceptable for governments to create Al-guided bombs, missiles or other intelligent machines that would destroy themselves in the process of destroying an enemy—tantamount to creating AI kamikaze. But such organizations had been sending human beings to their deaths for millennia and did not rank other intelligences any higher. Retaining this attitude when they were finally calling the shots, the AIs proved themselves just faster and brighter versions of ourselves. The virtual world reflected the real world, as it always has ever since the invention of the first computer virus, and during those same solar wars, worms and kill programs were used to great effect. Looking back, some would say, ‘Same shit, different day.’ If only that were so. Unfortunately, intelligent weapons are subject to evolutionary pressures more substantial than those found in the natural world. And tigers now occupy what was once the territory of hunting dogs.

- Excerpt from a speech by Jobsworth

A door opened in whiteness, and a translucent hand gestured Jack through. King and Reaper froze on this level while on another level they utilized all their resources in fighting the worm Aphran had turned back on them. Then the embedded VR programs caught up and the ouroboros separated and struck across the eternal white. A gigantic reptilian maw closed on Reaper with a sound of bones breaking. King hurled himself back—to a tunnel hoovering down from a different direction. Jack closed the door, and the virtuality became a huge white pearl enclosing a muffled screaming. Then it sucked into itself and disappeared with a wet thwack.

‘Two minds,’ said Jack.

‘Quite possibly lethal when you only expect one,’ Aphran replied.

He turned towards her in a brown virtuality, probed on other levels and immediately knew that with the freedom he had allowed her she had taken so much more. She had now embedded herself so deeply in his systems that he could never root her out.

‘They will escape, of course, but perhaps they will be damaged,’ he said. ‘Certainly they will henceforth be more circumspect about virtual attacks.’

‘Certainly.’

‘So now we must prepare for a physical battle.’

Jack reduced this point of awareness, increasing his awareness of himself, of the ship. He noted that automated systems had now closed the cracks in his hull, and his larger internal structures had realigned. However, there was still a lot of small-scale damage, and much preparation yet to make. He initiated the ship’s Golem, and also those robots sturdy enough to tolerate the constant acceleration. Moving slow, the chrome skeletons and other gleaming creatures began working their way through him, making repairs. When Aphran offered her services, almost without thinking he devolved control of many of them to her. He could not fret too much about this—could not fight something that was now more part of himself than even King and Reaper had been.

Ahead, the gas giant loomed like some giant polished spherical agate, surrounded by the detritus cast off from its own shaping. Jack considered how he must use this killing ground if he was to survive, and in the same instant redirected Golem and other robots to the conversion of his two internal manufactories. In his nose he opened the two baleen-tech scoop fuellers for combat refuelling, then detached their ducts from his fuel tanks and reattached them to three dropshafts he aligned, end to end down the length of his body, so as to terminate against one of his rear fusion chambers. The irised gravity fields in the shafts did not have sufficient power for the task intended, but the robot army inside himself began disassembling gravplates to provide the components needed to boost that power. Other internal redesigns devised were mainly for achieving greater structural strength. Maybe, having been incepted from him. King and Reaper would guess what he intended. But they had not done so yet, else they would not be tailing him down towards a gas giant. But, then, it was only because he had been so badly smashed inside that Jack had even contemplated such radical, tactical redesign.

Aphran, briefly separating herself, said, ‘I am almost too close to understand this.’

Jack merely fed through to her his view of the gas giant, adding the spectroscopic analysis of its upper atmosphere which he had made when first arriving in the system. Then he continued to convert himself into a flying particle accelerator.

* * * *

The telefactor released him, and he staggered a couple of paces before going down on his knees. The ground seemed to be shaking, but Cormac could not be sure. The machine protectively circled him on the top of this butte, while he shook his arms trying to return feeling to them and wished the task in his head were so simple.

So this is how madness feels.

Cormac just knew things weren’t operating correctly in his skull. The cold gridlinked Cormac observed this chaotic version of himself trying to re-establish some grip on reality. The aug creature’s attack had left organic damage to his brain, but it had also riddled it with new neural connections and Jain filaments. From both sides Cormac fought doubled perception, because almost like speaker and microphone in conjunction he instinctively knew that he could generate a feedback loop, which in this case would be fatal to him. It was with a kind of horror that he felt his idea of self seemingly slipping away from him, and in his striving to prevent this, he truly understood just how fragile was human awareness, the human ego—how it was just the surface of a very deep and dark pool.

Slowly Cormac returned. He regained organic control of his limbs, rather than through the implants inside his skull. But then he hit against the wall of his own pain. To return completely, he must completely feel the hole that had been ripped in behind his ear, his brain swollen inside his skull, and the central empty pit of a migraine that he knew would turn him blind and puking sick. Skellor brought him back some of the way, though not intentionally.

I will find you, agent. My creatures are coming for you.

Along with Skellor’s threat came an image Cormac processed in his gridlink, breaking the remains of awareness he had positioned there. His head feeling on the point of exploding, he saw that projected image in the blind spot opening before him. Half-human creatures scuttled and loped out into the light. Many had pincers where their mouths should have been, or else opening and closing inside their mouths like the organic version of some grotesque doorknocker. One horror possessed a scorpion’s body with a partially human face moulded in chitin. After it came a centaurish thing with the upper half of a woman connected at the waist to an insectile segmented eight-legged lower half. Madness, utter madness, but what did it all mean?

Blinding pain blossoming behind his eyes, Cormac vomited, but resisted the impulse to respond to that communication. Gritting his teeth against the next heave of his stomach, he groped in the thigh pocket of his environment suit, found a medkit and pulled from it a reel of analgesic patches. He wanted to scream at Skellor that the man could not have made these by-blow monstrosities, that it was all a lie. As the first, second, then third patch began to flood his body with their balm, he perceived that the image was indeed real—and guessed the source of those ugly creatures Skellor now controlled.

As the well into which he was staring slowly contracted, Cormac reached down to his holster and drew his thin-gun to check its load. Besides the one it already contained, he carried four extra clips on his belt. Each of these contained the fine aluminium powder that carried the energetic pulse of the weapon, and each contained the powerful laminar battery that supplied that same energy. But Cormac just shrugged to himself: he was prepared to fight, but it seemed so futile in the end. No matter how horrible were the creatures hunting him, they were not coming of their own free will—he would be killing slaves. Anyway—he glanced at the telefactor -he could pass above such encounters.

He put away the weapon and found a blue-seal dressing in the medkit, pressing it to the hole in his head. Tasting blood, the dressing deformed to fit his skull and probed inside the hole, plugging it, salving exposed nerves and creating frameworks for accelerated regrowth. Water, from a neck spigot built into the suit, thawed the dryness of his mouth. He stood and gazed out over the buttes to where he could see distant fires burning. He would just have to do what he could.

It was then that he heard a familiar whickering sound and caught the glint of something in the air. And, with a sound like a disc cutter slicing into an oil drum, Shuriken smashed into the telefactor.

* * * *

Finally reaching vacuum, Dragon shrugged off planetary dust and, clawing only at the surface of space in a way that Polity AIs and human physicists would have given a lot to know, accelerated towards the sun. A few hours into its journey it detected probing signals from the ships out by the gas giant. Doubtless they considered Dragon to be an imponderable in their infantile plans. Dragon, however, intended to become a severe inconvenience. Now accelerating on a course for a slingshot, the entity focused internally for, being what might be described as the tinkerer quarter of Dragon entire, it had never been able to leave things alone for long. Concentrating on the various engines lodged inside itself—creations with a less biological bent than much else it contained—Dragon began to make adjustments.

While skimming the AI nets of the Polity in search of the innovative, and incidentally avoiding some very nasty programs whose sum purpose was to track the massive entity down, Dragon had been pleased to come across further research into that enigma wrapped up in a dilemma: gravity and its relation to U-space. And, when other killer programs had become active, Dragon knew it was venturing where ECS was developing military hardware. Grabbing as much information as it could without attracting attention, the entity retracted from the AI nets. Studying its theft, Dragon had quickly apprised itself of what ECS was up to, and used this as the basis of its own research project, which had resulted in some of the engines it now contained. These devices consisted of frame-stretched Calabri-Yau shapes—as the humans called them—and massive singularities held out of phase with normal space. It had been generating the latter that had caused the earthquakes back on the planet. Now, using baroque constructs of runcible technology for amplification and focusing, Dragon could do more than cause the ground to shake—the entity could shift and distort the very fabric of space. Obviously the interference device now active in this system stemmed from the same ECS research program Dragon had raided. The entity wanted a closer look—but most importantly it wanted a way out.

Bathed in actinic light, Dragon slung itself in a tight orbit around the sun, shielding at full power, and always accelerating. Then it used those strange engines inside itself to flip hard out of the well. Travelling at a substantial proportion of light speed, the giant entity shot out into the system. Some hours later the large green sphere of a frozen giant, erratically ringed and orbited by hundreds of icy moonlets, loomed out of the darkness. Dragon then used those engines to decelerate, the gravity wave then propagating ahead of it blowing a methane ice plume from one of the moons so that momentarily it looked like a comet.

The device the ships had brought with them was some distance out from the planet, and would have been difficult to detect had it not contained a million-tonne singularity and been the centre of the U-space storm. Scanning the thing while decelerating around the ice giant, Dragon began to plumb its function. The entity began to see how the USER oscillated the singularity through a partial runcible gate to cause the interference—taking some large heavy object and repeatedly dunking it in the pond that was U-space. Simple, really, and also simple to destroy.

Dragon began building energy for a massive full-spectrum laser strike, but a maser beam struck the entity’s skin seconds before it could fire, and started boring a canyon through its flesh. Screaming inside, Dragon diverted the laser energy into a U-space surge that tilted it into U-space. A microsecond later, the USER interference flung it out again, but a thousand kilometres from its entry point.

‘Well, I haven’t got a lance,’ came the laconic communication.

Turning sharply, the glowing violet attack ship Excalibur came out from hiding behind a single icy moon shaped like a kidney. Straightening, it began firing near-c kinetic missiles.

‘But you can still call me St George,’ Sword sent.

* * * *

A cold wind was scouring away the dust from the plain as if, having been held back by Dragon’s hard-field for so long, it was anxious to make up for lost time. Vulture, having just had one of her sleer nymphs incinerated by Crane’s laser lighter, was now trying to figure out how to prevent one of the fourth-stagers from snipping the head off the rubber dog. Standing at the end of the chainglass box, she shrugged dust from her feathers with avian nonchalance and saw that there was only one way— and it involved supper. Vulture pecked down on her piece, pulled it aside and, holding it down with one claw, snipped away its pincers and saws before flipping the unfortunate creature around in her beak, to get it head first, then swallowing it. The miniature fourth-stager was satisfyingly meaty and wriggled all the way down. Perhaps, in her previous incarnation as a ship AI, Vulture would not have appreciated this treat in the same way. But she was what she was, and as Crane made his next move—advancing the piece of crystal and turning it over—she eyed the other sleers. Of course, the aim was to get the Golem to arrange its pieces in a very particular pattern that Dragon had earlier shown Vulture. It was an arrangement it could have taken Crane a thousand years to achieve by chance, but chance was not having a good time here. The dice were loaded.

* * * *

Cormac tried to recall Shuriken, but the small comscreen on his wrist holster began running alien code diagonally across it. He stripped the holster and threw it aside as if it had become infectious, as it in fact had, then drew his thin-gun and backed away as Shuriken ripped through the telefactor once more. This time the weapon hit a component that ignited like an arc rod and showered out molten metal. The telefactor dropped out of the air as if its strings had been cut, crashed against the side of a butte, then tumbled into the canyon below, where a final bright flare from a discharging power supply killed it.

This, now, was a scenario Cormac had often contemplated, and had played out a couple of times in VR. Knowing how effective Shuriken was in his hands, he had wondered what would happen if he ever came up against someone wielding a similar Tenkian weapon. In none of those scenarios had it been his own weapon, in none of them had he got a blind spot in the centre of his vision into which the lethal device disappeared every time he looked at it directly. Nor had he a head that felt as if it had been slammed in a door five or six times, nor had he OD’d on analgesic patches. It occurred to him then that if Skellor were trying to kill him now, it would at least be quick. Then he told himself not to think like that—speaking to himself was still a very strange experience—and concentrated on the task in hand.

In his gridlink, Cormac created a visual patch to fill his blind spot—and felt something like a knife blade going into his cortex. Skellor, it seemed, was playing with him, for Shuriken was now darting around the butte like a mosquito in search of bare skin. Cormac tracked it round, focusing, pushing himself into a fugue of concentration. He could not allow the slightest shake or jitter, as he would get few chances at this. Finally he fired twice, missing the first time with a ranging shot, but hitting with the second. Flung back, with chipped and cracked chainglass blades extending, Shuriken turned upwards so it resembled a gleaming eye gazing down at him. Cormac fired again, centred perfectly on target. Shuriken pulled in its blades like a sparrow folding its wings and dropped out of the sky as had the telefactor before it.

It occurs to me that it is time I used my hostages, Skellor sent.

What do you mean? Cormac asked, not worrying about his signal being located, as Skellor certainly knew where he was right now.

Well, there’s these to begin with.

Images now came through. Cormac was wary of them, expecting some attached virus. He ran them through a scan program, viewed them. The creatures he had earlier seen were turning on each other, tearing each other apart. Why was Skellor doing this?

They’re not sufficiently human, I suspect, Skellor pondered. How about a little look through Tanaquil’s eyes?

Now Cormac’s point of view was of someone up on the city platform and, bleeding through with that, Cormac could feel the rigidly suppressed anguish of this victim of Skellor’s. Tanaquil turned to look as people came towards him from the surrounding buildings. Zombie-like they moved past him, gathering into a crowd rubbing shoulders. The sense of anguish increased and, in the network he was partially in contact with, Cormac could feel the silent screams. The first one to reach the edge, a man dressed in thick clothing and a long padded coat, paused before climbing the two steel fences there, and just stepped off. He bellowed—Skellor returning to him enough control to do that—then others were following him, seemingly eager to throw themselves to their deaths.

No...

The one word came through; Skellor ruthlessly suppressed anything else. Tanaquil now watched a naked woman climbing the same fences. She too went over the edge, screaming. The eyes Cormac was seeing through now blurred with tears. Jeelan. The name broke through Skellor’s rigid control. Just audible came the sounds of bodies impacting far below.

What do you want? Cormac asked.

Why, you.

I should give myself up to save a few natives?

With what felt to Cormac something like a mental shrug, Skellor set a man walking towards the fences. Cormac could hear the man bellowing inside his head, then begging as he climbed the fences. Cormac wanted to shut it out, but was not sure he should.

I’m not so convinced about your lack of empathy, said Skellor. I’m sure you are a very moral man.

Okay, you can have me if you stop the killing.

I’m walking to my way off this world, right now, said Skellor.

Something then came through from the biophysicist, and Cormac routed it into safe storage in his gridlink, expecting this to be an attempt to enslave him. Using the programming equivalent of donning thick gauntlets and safety goggles, he inspected what the biophysicist had sent, and was surprised when all he received was coordinates—an area outside the Sand Towers, some fifty kilometres away from where he stood.

Best you hurry to join me, said Skellor. Let us say, for every fifteen minutes you are out of my sight, I’ll walk another one of them off the edge.

* * * *

Fethan adjusted his vision to infrared and gaped at the hellish scene in the Undercity. Though aware that people often misapplied the term ‘unnatural’ to alien life, that would not have been the case here. The creatures he saw were not the result of evolution, nor, it seemed to him, were they designed for any more useful purpose than to horrify. Why give a human mandibles, why give a huge insect soft hands—and why that other thing with the screaming human face? Yes, he guessed that some reasoning could be applied: give a man mandibles so he could handle alien food, or give that insect hands so it could manipulate tools as easily as a human. But that took no account of the personal suffering caused by such experiments. Anyway, Skellor could not have had time to do all of this, so that left only one other culprit. Fethan shuddered, and wondered what Dragon had been trying to achieve here.

Though many of the creatures in the Undercity were fearsome indeed, none of them attacked Fethan, and he soon realized that they were all aug-controlled and mostly heading away from him, like a procession of the damned heading out for judgement. It was a mystery he decided he might pursue some other time, for the aug creatures he had followed under the platform were teeming here, and he tracked their lines of progress easily back through the darkness. He followed one of these lines, perpetually slapping away those of the insects that dropped onto him from above, also deliberately crushing the same things underfoot. Eventually, in this horrible place, he passed corpses bound to the ground by filaments and sucked dry, with tentacular things writhing in the dirt underneath them. Then he spotted the source of the aug insects.

Fethan would not have recognized the bloated thing as once being human had it not been for some fragments of clothing clinging to its bruised skin and a bracelet buried in the flesh of the one limb that had not been fully absorbed. The head was just a hairy nub over a frogmouth orifice that continuously leaked a foamy mucus squirming with aug insects. This mouth was not for feeding. Fethan guessed that the tentacles extending below this . . . creature were intended for that, and that it had not already dragged him down because he was inedible.

Unshouldering his APW, he paused for a moment, knowing that this thing before him had once been human. But it was not human now, and what he was about to do amounted to a mercy killing. Conscious of metal pillars nearby, he carefully chose the setting on his weapon. He fired once.

The thing burst before him in a ball of violet fire, and the detonation had aug creatures raining down all around. In the deeper darknesses of the Undercity, other things screeched and bellowed, but none of them came into view. Stepping closer to the steaming mess, Fethan knocked his weapon’s setting right down, and kept firing small bursts to burn the embryonic creatures crawling about in the slimy remains. Afterwards, as the smoke slowly cleared, he saw the rest of the aug creatures still marching away in lines to find their victims. He had destroyed the source of the insectile creatures, but not them.

Fethan stared, wondering how many creatures he could burn before the power supply of his weapon gave out. What else could he possibly do? Then it became obvious. No matter how this looked, it was aug technology—sophisticated computer networking. He extended his forefinger up before his night vision, sent an internal detach signal, then removed the syntheflesh covering. Allowing the kill program to see through his eyes, he slowly surveyed his surroundings, taking in the remains of that thing he had destroyed, the now revealed root-like structures in the ground, the multitude of aug insects.

‘Do you see this?’ he asked.

I see.

‘Where could you go in?’

Try substructure in the ground.

Fethan brushed away earth with his foot, exposing a grey fibrous tentacle that shifted slightly. He stooped and pressed the metal tip of his finger into it. This was Jain tech, he knew, but worth the risk. Fibres parted, his fingertip sank in, and he felt the ache of transference as another killer program transcribed.

* * * *

The Grim Reaper and the King of Hearts were decelerating at slightly different rates, the Reaper eighty thousand kilometres ahead of the King. Jack would have preferred them to be the other way round because, though Reaper was the more aggressive, Jack considered it also the more stupid. Perhaps King had let the Grim Reaper take the point for this very reason. The gas giant was close now, coming up like an undersea blue hole, and Jack was beginning to taste chemicals in the vacuum: hydrogen and hydrogen peroxide, methane and wafts of mercury vapour—a strange combination that was perfect for the AI’s requirements.

‘You are gambling all on one shot, and if that fails you will be vulnerable as you climb back out of the planet’s gravity well,’ Aphran noted.

Jack allowed processing space to stand a projection of his avatar on the ship’s bridge amongst his splintered collection. Aphran, choosing her own routes to processing, placed her own avatar beside him.

‘I should at least get one of them, then the odds won’t be quite the same as they were on Cull,’ he replied.

‘Still the odds will be against you.’

Jack allowed that this was true, but noted that his children had screwed up once already, and might do so again.

The Jack Ketch hammered down and down towards the gas giant, with Jack continually adjusting the human side of his perspective. What began as a mere dot in space grew to fill the fullest extent of vision—seeming to become vaster than the space all around it. Eventually the ship was speeding at an angle down onto a vast plain of cloud much like anything seen in a virtuality. This plain appeared endless, any curve to the horizon not visible to human perception. But Jack wasn’t human, and that made his comprehension of this immensity even greater. It struck him as decidedly operatic.

Constantly adjusting his angle of approach so that a line drawn through his body intersected with the Grim Reaper a quarter of a million kilometres out, Jack turned on ram-scoop fields designed to pick up the sparse hydrogen of interstellar space. Gas funnelled in towards him in a huge thickening wave. This decelerated him more effectively than anything he could have done with his gravmotors. By the time it reached his baleen-tech fuellers, the gas was dense as any liquid, but also turning to plasma. From the fuellers it entered the dropshaft positioned down his length, where irised gravity fields accelerated it to as near light-speed as made little difference. For seconds only could the Jack Ketch act as a pressure valve, but it was enough to make a difference.

The beam of photonic matter lashed up from the gas giant, straight into the nose of the Grim Reaper. The ship did not have time for evasion, but the AI mind inside it had an eternity of nanoseconds to contemplate what was happening to it. There were no real explosions; the beam just took away the ship’s main body, converting it to a plume of plasma many kilometres long. The Reaper’s two weapons nacelles tumbled through space: bird’s wings severed from the bird itself. Turned at its fulcrum, the Jack Ketch, the beam then swept across towards the King of Hearts. The second ship initiated all its hard-fields and flung itself into an eight-hundred-gravity swerve that must have wrecked it internally as much as the Jack Ketch had been, for King had only microseconds to prepare. Jack knew that the other AI understood the futility of what it was doing: it could not outrun the swinging end of a lever hundreds of thousands of kilometres long.

Now I am shitting laser beams! Jack bellowed across the ether.

But then, through either calculation or pure luck, the King of Hearts slid behind one icy moon that took the few seconds remaining of the blast. The moon broke up on a gaseous explosion, began to tumble apart. Behind it, the King of Hearts peeled away and began to swing round.

‘Bugger,’ said Jack, ram-scoops now off and baleen-tech fuellers closed, as he laboured back up out of the gravity well.

* * * *

Running with unhuman speed towards the place where the landers had come down, Skellor felt a sudden surge of joy as he began to realize that he might actually get himself out of this. Not only that, he could take down that ECS shit in the process. But his happiness, as is the wont of such things, was short-lived. Tanaquil’s confusion up there on the city platform alerted him, and in the man’s memory Skellor observed the scaled moon climbing rapidly into the sky. Then, as if this were sucking the energy from him, he suddenly found himself slowing, as a huge human weariness overtook him. Finally he ran out from the Sand Towers at simply human speed and stumbled to a halt, stopping to rest, even supporting himself against a sulerbane plant.

To his left smoke rose from the city of Golgoth and, again focusing through the aug network and through Tanaquil’s eyes, he observed a metallier walk woodenly to the edge of the Overcity platform and hurl himself off. He had set the program now: the entire population, with Tanaquil last, was queuing up to do the same—and one would go off every quarter-hour until they were all gone, whether Cormac joined Skellor at the landers or not. But Skellor’s problem was not there.

Focusing inward to the Jain substructure of which more than eighty per cent of his body consisted, Skellor finally located the growing nodes that were sapping his strength. They had burgeoned secretively, concealed from his internal diagnostics almost with the collusion of those same diagnostics. He felt a perfectly human panic. It was because of these changes inside himself that he had come here at all, yet he had only endangered himself and learned nothing, and now the one who might have had some answers was gone. He had failed.

He reached out almost instinctively, but Crane was also still unavailable to him. Pushing away from the sulerbane plant, Skellor screamed with rage—but focused rage.

He isolated the worst and most hungry of the nodes, then started working to eject it. But his own body, his Jain body, now fought him. Agonizingly, he opened a split in his stomach, and a single node pushed through like a golden eyeball and fell out. Skellor gasped and staggered back against the sulerbane plant. That had taken nearly .. . everything in him. He keyed to the network, searched around, found what he wanted. Within a few minutes a sleer with the face of a woman scuttled out from the Sand Towers towards him. Skellor greeted her with arms open wide and Jain tendrils breaking from his skin, then embraced her and fed. Only minutes later he discarded the empty carapace, and was turning his attention once again to the nodes when, like the stars at Armageddon, the network began to fade.

‘What the hell?’

Precisely, something hissed at him out of the ether, and tried to bore its way into his mind.

You?

He had fought this in the network on Ruby Eye. So how was it here? He reached out, tried to find some human suffering to counter this attack, but the more he groped for victims, the more of them slipped from his grasp. Suddenly he realized the futility of what he was doing. He had to get away, and having control here was nothing to him now. He broke into a run, shut down his connection, killed the pseudo-aug inside himself. He accelerated, now re-energized, travelling faster than any human. He also grinned to himself, for Cormac could know nothing of this and would still come. Skellor would have that victory, at the very least.

* * * *

The lizard possessing the double wings of a dragonfly -obviously—rested in the rigid curve of a sulerbane leaf and with sapphire eyes observed Skellor run on. When he was out of sight it launched into the air to hover above the remains of his prey. Then it descended and began to tear up the few remaining fragments of meat -it too needed to eat after all. Replete, it turned its attention to the golden node resting in the sand nearby and observed vague cubic patterns travelling over its surface. The creature’s programming was simple, but its mind was still somewhat part of the mind of its creator. It still also possessed the survival instinct engendered by its original DNA (which had as its source, human scientists might be frightened to learn, a lizard from the Australian outback, some tens of thousands of years before any human knew what DNA was, as well as another fragment it had amused Dragon to find in a piece of amber). Therefore, seeing that node and recognizing what the cubic patterns meant, the creature took off and fled just as fast as it could back to the sulerbane plant. There, perched again in the curve of a leaf, it knew it had ventured too close to something. Might be infected by something. Its kin, resting on buttes, roosting in empty sleer burrows or secreting themselves in the iron gutters of Golgoth, whilst observing other scenes, other human dramas, as they had ever since Dragon had first created them thirty years before, abruptly shut it out. It began shivering, knowing it would soon be uncreated.

* * * *

As Anderson mounted Bonehead and Arden climbed up behind him to sit on one of his strapped-down packs, Thorn eyed Tergal and then his strange mount. Its carapace was much like that of a horseshoe crab, but more stretched out, and its forelimbs also were similar to that creature’s. Its rear limbs, however, resembled the powerful reverse-kneed legs of a land bird, but armoured with chitin. It showed no sign of eyes or antennae until it flipped up its complicated dual, feeding and sensory, heads—sometimes appearing independently from under different areas of the carapace rim, or sometimes joined like mating components in a child’s build-your-own-monster kit. As the creature dropped down onto its crawler legs, Thorn grabbed at the rim and jumped on. He then moved up behind Tergal and, gripping the back of the youth’s saddle, squatted down carefully, as the creature rose back up again. Soon the two sand hogs were advancing through a haze of dust, the ground still shaking as parts of the plain collapsed into the kilometre-deep hollow Dragon had left behind them.

‘I heard him call his own beast Bonehead,’ Thorn said to Tergal. ‘So what’s this chap called?’

‘Stone,’ Tergal replied briefly.

‘I see it’s smaller than Anderson’s . . . sand hog. Is that because it’s younger, or of a different sex?’

Tergal glanced at him as if he had said something idiotic, which Thorn supposed he doubtless had.

‘Stone’s the younger hog, and females aren’t used as mounts—there’s fewer of them and they tend to stray very quickly. They’re pampered and kept for breeding.’

‘Ah.’

Within a few hundred metres, the sand hogs were stepping carefully across uprooted boulders and ground that had been churned up by Dragon’s departure. Thorn noted the iridescence of scattered Dragon scales, shed pseudopods like snake skins, and other abandoned, unfathomable devices obviously of draconic origin. He wryly considered just how Mika would kill for a chance to be here studying these things. Then he directed his attention ahead to where the ejected VR chamber still rested at the edge of this widespread devastation. The monster, which Arden had named a droon, was nowhere in sight and, with that particular danger no longer evident, Thorn felt he should consider what to do next. He was still experiencing a feeling of unreality, and was aware of the danger of VR detachment which led people to believe that nothing happening around them mattered. Even so, as they drew athwart the VR chamber, though still sufficiently detached not to be making any plans, his reactions had not slowed at all.

Stone was now ten metres ahead and somewhat to the left of Bonehead, and consequently much closer to the chamber when its roof peeled up like the top of a sardine can and the droon reared up out of it.

‘Oh fuck,’ was the extent of Tergal’s reaction. Stone flung out its sensory head then abruptly retracted it. The hog began to turn as the droon opened its numerous orange mouths, its head extending as it charged itself with mucal acid. Thorn grabbed Tergal around the waist, heaved him up, then hurled the pair of them sideways off the hog. A sheet of mucus splashed behind them just as they went over the edge and hit the ground. As he released the youth and rolled, Thorn glimpsed the sand hog stumbling back and collapsing on its rear, its two necks and its legs seemingly entangled. Thorn was already on his feet, dragging Tergal upright into a stumbling run, as the hog issued a siren scream and began to boil, its limbs shaking as liquid bubbled from the joints and both heads thrashing from side to side.

‘No ... Oh no . . .’

As Tergal stumbled to a halt, gazing back in horror, Thorn caught him by the shoulder and shoved him onwards. The droon was already stepping out of the VR chamber, its head tracking towards them. Automatic fire crackled as Anderson emptied a clip into the monster, but he might as well have thrown gravel at a rhinoceros. It was the fourth-stage sleer materializing to one side of the droon that gave them time to get to Bonehead and mount, before the old hog turned and fled back towards the draconic devastation. Clinging on beside Tergal and Arden, Thorn observed the illusory sleer flicker out of existence, and the droon turning to watch them go before bowing its head down to the steaming remains of Stone.

* * * *

With the supreme confidence of a most lethal attack ship, Sword accelerated towards Dragon, weapons carousels turning as the AI made its armament selections like some chocolate connoisseur in a Belgian sweet shop. It was aware that Dragon was dangerous and that its previous incarnations had caused huge destruction of human installations and ships—the obliteration of the laser arrays at Masada being ample demonstration. But other AIs had already evaluated these actions, and Sword knew that unless this particular sphere possessed substantially more firepower than its previous incarnations, the AI attack ship would easily be able to flatten it.

‘Interesting move,’ Sword sent, ‘but that’s got to have burnt out a U-space engine, so I have to wonder how many more you have left.’

‘I don’t want this fight,’ Dragon replied, dragging itself across the surface of space to avoid the kinetic missiles fired at it. Beyond it, the blackness filled with multiple flares as many of those missiles impacted an evanescent debris ring.

‘Isn’t that always the protest of those who know they are going to lose?’

Sword tracked the Dragon sphere as it rolled into silhouette in front of the ice giant. How the creature was managing to propel itself was a mystery. Certain spacial anomalies surrounded it, and this made Sword a little more cautious. That caution increased when, precisely at that moment, the communication from King reached it, and it learnt that Reaper was gone.

‘Damn you, Jack.’ Sword spat out this communication on a tight beam towards the gas giant.

‘It’s a dangerous universe,’ Dragon then sent. ‘Don’t overplay your hand.’

There was no way the alien entity could break encoded radio transmissions so quickly. Almost in a fit of pique, Sword fired gas lasers and then masers at Dragon, and followed these with a cloud of smart missiles. The laser strike flashed away on a mirrored hard-field, while the maser strike just seemed to expand that same field without reaching the surface of Dragon.

In answer to the missiles, Dragon belched from some orifice a swarm of small black spheres. When, some minutes later, the two clouds of devices met, it seemed that a small thunderstorm ensued.

Passing over this, the Excalibur pursued Dragon through one orbit of the ice giant, then back out into space towards the USER. As it did so it observed the ripples spreading across the surface of its opponent, and knew the entity was preparing for a massive full-spectrum laser strike. They were too far yet from the USER for such a strike to be effective there, so it must be intended for the Excalibur itself. Preparing its hard-fields and the heat-dispersing lasers linked to the superconducting mesh in its hull, Sword almost felt pity for the creature. It obviously had no idea what it was up against.

‘Arrogance is its own reward,’ Dragon sent.

Abruptly, a single large wave spread out over the surface of the Dragon sphere—but did not stop there. It propagated, impossibly, out into vacuum. In a nanosecond, Sword realized it should have been aware of this possibility, for it was inherent in the device the AI ship guarded. This was USER technology.

Sword began firing all its missiles at once, while diverting energy to structural integrity fields. Missiles and wave met, and the missiles died like bugs under some huge roller. When the gravity wave hit Sword, it was like a tsunami slamming into a wooden sailing ship pinned against a shore. The Excalibur distorted, broke, and Sword screamed over the ether. Inside the AI ship, antimatter escaped its containment in missiles the ship had not managed to eject. This was the real reason the AI had tried to fire all its missiles, as no containment was proof against gravitational breach. It had not succeeded in time. The subsequent explosions did not leave much in the way of debris, and what it did leave rapidly dispersed.

‘Hubris,’ Dragon commented, then tittered to itself.

The wave continued spreading out, its strength diminishing, but it was still strong enough when it hit the USER. The towing ship just fragmented and blew away, while the USER itself distorted but held its relative position as if someone had nailed it to vacuum. Then its singularity containment failed. The device glowed briefly and disappeared in an x-ray flash, as hundreds of tonnes of metal and composite collapsed down to an infinitely small point.

Now observing the gravitational terrain, Dragon watched the singularity begin its long slow fall towards the ice giant. The entity then made some calculations, and noted that the damage had only just begun—the real spectacular stuff would occur in about fifty solstan years as the giant planet started to collapse in on itself. Dragon gave a titanic shrug and wished there was somewhere to run, but with so many U-space data streams still shut down, even after it had knocked out the USER, the entity realized it was in a Polity trap—that there were others USERs out there. Then, turning its attention back towards the planet, re-establishing that communications link, it uploaded recent data from thousands of small lizard brains. Data from one of those had Dragon accelerating back towards Cull, as inside itself it initiated repairs to its own U-space drives which had been damaged in its first escape from Sword.

The entity worked with some urgency—one Skellor was quite enough.

* * * *