4

Ghost in the machine. The fact that ghosts can exist in any suitably complex computer architecture has been well documented. They are possible because as complexity increases so does redundancy, which gives the ghosts room to exist. In the past they were just fragments of code, worms and viruses or the by-blows of these. With the advent of it becoming possible to interface a human mind with a computer, and in some cases with AI, these ghosts can be the product of living minds. In smaller systems or memories they can be images, emotions or brief experiences, while in larger systems they can be whole minds transcribed into crystal - the mechanisms enabling them to remain intact within the human skull allowing them to remain intact within this architecture. Often they change unrecognizably to survive, becoming strange gibbering entities haunting planetary and interstellar servers, forever fleeing like bedlamites the hunter-killer programs employed to hunt down and erase them. Others become some version of those same hunter-killers, but weird datavores surviving on an odd diet of information and power, and when threatened they scurry for cover in their burrows located in little-used virtualities or memstores.

— From Quince Guide compiled by humans

The interior of the conferencing unit was very similar to a previous building of similar purpose once positioned on Dragon’s surface. The place was packed with equipment for studying Dragon and processing the results, and there were facilities for its human occupants: a small kitchen-diner and bunks that folded out of the walls. In the central area was a massive circular irised hatch allowing direct access to the skin of Dragon right underneath. Mika walked one entire circuit of this hatch, disinclined yet to open it.

‘Jerusalem?’ she queried.

‘I’m here,’ replied the omniscient voice of the AI.

‘How is Dragon helping us now?’

‘Dragon has provided fresh insights into the working of Jain technology - which understandably have to be checked - and has also provided us with all its files on the history of the Makers.’

‘But really you’re still getting nothing solid you can rely on to help us against Erebus.’

‘All information, whether trustworthy or otherwise, can be processed to render useful results.’

‘But I note your use of the present perfect. Dragon has already provided these things, so what is it doing now?’

‘Dragon assists us in checking certain anomalous facts and provides explanations of mismatches in information streams.’

‘You still cannot trust Dragon.’

‘When someone has demonstrated a tendency towards accomplished lying, one has to view information from such a source with caution.’

‘You don’t trust Dragon.’

‘We don’t trust Dragon.’

Mika nodded to herself, feeling this confirmed something but not sure what. She strolled round until she reached a control panel mounted on a brushed-aluminium column shaped rather like a lectern. Passing her hand over the touch console she activated it, then used the controls to search through a menu screen to find what she wanted. It was coded, she discovered, and only the palms of those on an approved list, when pressed against part of the console, would open the irised hatch. She pressed her own hand down and waited.

All around the circumference of the hatch she heard locks disengaging, then with a liquid hiss the sections of the iris folded back into the outer rim. Immediately a smell as of from a hot terrarium in a reptile house rose from what was exposed below, along with the numbing scent of cloves. She peered over the edge directly at the skin of Dragon. Scales the size of a hand lay in an iridescent swirl across the surface area that bulged up within the circular frame. The whole of it seemed solid as rock but for one retreating red tendril, like a mobile vein, drawing out of sight at one edge.

Mika watched and waited. After a few minutes with nothing more happening she returned her attention to the console and screen. Out of curiosity she called up the list of those personnel authorized to open this hatch and gazed at it in puzzlement. There was only one name on it: her own.

‘Jerusalem?’ she queried.

No reply.

Mika used the console to access other controls within the conferencing unit, then initiated the voice-activated controls -which she soon realized would respond only to her.

‘Full outside view,’ she requested.

The walls all around shimmered and grew transparent. She thoughtfully observed the draconic landscape beyond, the glare of the distant white sun and the glimmer of stars. The other Dragon sphere was not visible, but that didn’t really mean anything. As far as she could see the giant sphere had not moved. She remembered the last time she had been here, and how the unit then planted on the surface of Dragon had been drawn inside immediately prior to the alien entity heading off into space to find its twin. Nothing like that was happening now, and she berated herself for being so paranoid.

‘The structure you occupy is shielded,’ announced the sepulchral voice of Dragon.

Mika turned back as the entity’s exposed surface below her unzipped, pouted for a moment, then began to revolve down into a crevice that opened wider. She peered over the rim into the entrance of a steaming red cavern, saw a flickering of shadow as something began rising up out of it. One limb of a pseudopod tree folded into view like a sprouting plant. Four cobra-head pseudopods then opened out from an inner stamen, their single sapphire eyes gleaming as they surveyed the interior of the unit, as if searching for any danger to their charge. On a thicker ribbed neck rested a human head the size of a boulder. It was different from the last one of its kind she had encountered, and she wondered if Dragon recreated these heads on every occasion. The head resembled that of a fasting shaven-pated priest. His pupils and irises were pure black, his pointed teeth and the interior of his mouth were pure white - as was also the forked tongue that briefly licked out.

Mika applauded ironically then asked, ‘Why did I need to be informed that this structure is shielded?’

The ribbed neck lengthened and looped over, lowering the head just a few yards out in front of her. ‘You did not need to know.’

Familiar infuriating draconic dialogue. She decided to go off at a tangent and get straight to her concerns. ‘What did you do to me last time?’

The head tilted slightly as if to observe her out of one eye that was better than the other. ‘Do to you?’

‘How did the other Dragon sphere - which is essentially part of you - change me after I was injured?’

‘What makes you suppose that it did?’

‘I feel it . . . and Jerusalem also has noted some physical alterations . . .’

‘Ah, Jerusalem . . .’

Mika experienced a sudden sinking feeling. ‘Yes, Jerusalem noted some physical alterations to my body. I would have spotted them myself if I had used a scanner, so there was no point in Jerusalem denying their existence.’

The head nodded. ‘Exactly.’

‘What have you done to me?’

‘We have merely prepared you for what we might encounter.’

‘That being?’

‘Humans are weak and susceptible to Jain intrusion. Their perception of reality is limited, and you will need to see.’

What? ‘Hang on . . . “what we might encounter”?’

The floor seemed to shift underneath her, and everything outside fell into shadow as the Dragon sphere revolved her away from the sun. She felt a surge of acceleration, only partially countered by the gravplate floor. A strong feeling of déjà vu impinged.

‘Where are we going?’

‘To the very source,’ Dragon replied. ‘Eventually.’

There came a shifting then. Something twisted inside her, and star-speckled space beyond the conferencing unit somehow inverted. The star speckles then became holes, and space between contracted to zero, yet she could still perceive it. She was seeing U-space, yet she remained sane. What had Dragon done to her? Briefly she glimpsed the other Dragon sphere: a massive complexity hollowed out of the underside of reality. And then she and the two spheres fell away from the Scarflow planetary system.

As she clutched the lectern console before her, Mika considered how little, apparently, Jerusalem trusted Dragon, and how she herself trusted Jerusalem not at all.

* * * *

Construction robots, gathered like an infestation of metallic parasites, were now somnolent around the massive war runcible, and nil-G scaffolds lay distorted in one area where some missile had struck in the past. Debris was scattered about in surrounding space, which necessitated Heliotrope’s collision lasers being in perpetual operation. The runcible was an enormous pentagon with each of its five sides over four miles long - those sides each triangular in section, five hundred yards wide on all three sides. Dotted all around were blisters housing control centres, along with external generators, motors and a multitude of heavy weapons.

Orlandine knew the history of this object as one of a planned network of space-based runcibles for shifting large ships, even fleets through space, or for hurling moons at the Prador enemy. The idea for the latter utilization had come about during the initial stages of the great war when a runcible technician called Moria Salem had managed to use a cargo runcible to fling a moon at a Prador ship and destroy it, but the war had ended before this particular device here was ever similarly used. Subsequently, it was partially decommissioned, its controlling AI removing itself to a planetary runcible somewhere deep inside the Polity. However, it was best to be sure about such things.

The program she had created was in many ways similar to the kind of hunter-killer or bloodhound programs that Polity AIs had released on the nets to search for her. Having captured some of those programs, she remodelled and endowed them with much of what she had learnt about Jain technology. The way this program now differed from its original form was in size, sheer speed and an ability to reform itself to suit different computer architectures. But its main difference lay in the fact that it would become effectively an extension of her mind.

Sensor data of the war runcible showed that there were still things powered up inside it - systems still operating and maybe one or two somnolent war drones still in residence. Certainly, Polity AIs would never have left such a weapon unguarded. Yes, it was partially decommissioned, but it would have still made a good prize for any invader, or maybe for some stupidly ambitious separatist group. She used Polity transmissions protocols now just to initiate the kind of handshaking routine that ship AIs opened automatically upon arriving anywhere new within the Polity. Immediately a reply came back - Interdict area. No com available. Depart at once - along with a bloodhound program sent to check out Heliotrope. She had expected something like this and allowed the bloodhound to do its checking in an isolated system where it would find that this ship, the Draben, was merely a free trader that had dropped out of U-space to check out the war runcible - the ship’s captain indulging a curiosity that his ship’s AI had strongly advised him against. Meanwhile, her own program slid into the runcible’s computer architecture.

First it isolated part of the architecture and opened a private com channel to her. She instantly plugged into it, and became one with it to such an extent that she soon was as much in the runcible’s computer system as she was aboard her own ship. Beginning to spread and assess, she quickly discovered a subroutine that had sent a U-space signal to the nearest AI the moment it had detected Heliotrope surfacing nearby. Other routines would then automatically come into play depending on how the ship newly arriving in the interdict area might respond. If it did not depart at once, it would receive a single terse warning, next a battery of rail-guns would come online and target it. If it then still did not depart, a channel would be opened to the nearest AI to perpetually supply data about the ongoing situation. Finally the rail-guns would fire. Computer memory aboard the runcible informed her that some of the debris she had spotted earlier was what was left of a ship that had not departed soon enough, and the damage to the scaffold was caused by a large chunk of that same ship. She killed those routines and began to track out the effects of that action, for, this being a wartime device, the layers of programming would be equivalent to the layers of paranoia when it was built.

Within just a fraction of a second, a partially independent monitoring system began screaming for help from behind a firewall. She slammed through the same firewall and silenced it, but not before it had managed to send a U-space signal. No matter, she thought; it would take some days for anyone to arrive here, and by then she fully intended to have achieved her goals. However, the danger of there existing independent - physically separate - devices aboard the war runcible was one that had not escaped her, hence her move now from passive sensing to utterly aggressive scanning, and to her meanwhile onlining Heliotrope’s esoteric collection of weapons.

Almost at once she detected signals being transmitted from various different sections of the war runcible. Some of them were plain EM, so did not matter too much, but others she recognized as U-space com. Running multiple layers of further programs, she isolated the position of each U-space communicator, then fired up Heliotrope’s high-intensity laser. Spots of fire soon bloomed all over the runcible, the laser beams themselves picked out by the occasional gout of vapour. All but two of the signals went out. These last two, scanning showed her, lay behind armour. Assessing the strength of that armour, she onlined a pulsed maser to fire at one of them and used an armour-piercing thermic missile for the other. The signal source hit by the maser went out quickly, but to Orlandine, operating at her present speed, the thermic missile seemed to be still departing Heliotrope in extreme slow motion.

Meanwhile her program was spreading throughout the rest of the runcible’s computer network, isolating weapons and reactors which might be set to detonate as a last resort. She got them all, one by one, but felt no pride in the achievement. This might have been wartime technology, but it was superannuated in comparison with present Polity tech, of which she was also far in advance.

Still scanning, and still checking, she began Heliotrope’s approach to her chosen docking station, which was situated by one of the control blisters. Even as her ship began to move, the missile finally reached its target, spurting a line of fire out behind it as it bored its way through, spraying the area of the last remaining signal with fire as hot as the surface of a sun. Then, abruptly, she realized she hadn’t yet got everything.

Scanning showed various metallic objects scattered about on the war runcible’s hull, and one of these was scuttling quickly to where she intended to dock. It looked like an eight-foot-long scorpion fashioned of iron. Several of them: war drones. At a rough estimate, and that was all she could get, there were twenty of them scattered inside and outside the station. They were communicating with each other using brief spurts of radio or laser code, which was changing at AI speed with each transmission. Though it would take time, she could break in, take control of these drones and make them subject to her will. But she didn’t want to do that.

Instead, Orlandine created targeting solutions for every drone in turn, and transmitted these as transparent graphics to the location of each one, making it absolutely clear to them that in a very short time she could annihilate them all. But they continued moving, and abruptly she saw the pattern. Then came a message to her - simple voice augmented with additional code showing that any reply from her would go into isolated storage for analysis before it was read. Obviously these drones, though they had been somnolent before she arrived, were well up to date with the dangers that Jain technology represented.

‘Well, asshole, fire on us now and there won’t be enough left of this war runcible to put in a dustbin.’

It was true. The drones had positioned themselves near munitions caches, critical control equipment and the U-space tech of the runcible itself.

‘I am not an enemy of the Polity,’ Orlandine replied.

‘You’re a Jain-screwed fuck-up and if you come any closer we’ll take you down, even if that means we and this station go down with you.’

‘Who am I addressing?’

‘Knobbler.’

It seemed a typically war drone sort of name.

‘Well, Knobbler, there’s a lot you don’t know about Jain technology and a lot I do know. I have taken apart a Jain node and avoided all its traps.’

‘Yeah, sure.’

Knobbler was located outside the station, hidden underneath a transmission dish, from where he was transmitting by laser to four others out on the hull. They in turn were relaying the exchange inside the hull by other electromagnetic means. Already Orlandine had isolated some of the code they were using from fragments gleaned inside the station. She selected one of the visible drones - a thing that looked like a bedbug a couple of yards across - because beside it was a sufficiently reflective surface.

‘No, it’s true. I am the haiman Orlandine, once one of the overseers of the Cassius Dyson Sphere Project. I can present you with proof of my claims, along with a proposition that won’t go against any of your . . . military oaths?’

Coding and programs loaded, she fired a message laser at a certain point on the reflective surface.

‘Trouble is,’ said Knobbler, ‘you send us anything more complicated than a sonnet and we ain’t gonna be opening it.’

The laser bounced precisely into the receiver the bedbug was using to collect transmissions from Knobbler. The program it carried paralysed the little drone, and she followed it with further programs to gain access. It managed a single ‘Oh?’ before she took control of it, finding a large complex mind inside. She allowed it to remain within the drone network, but did not allow it to tell the others that she was now in. From it she spread to the other drones, even gaining access to Knobbler as well.

‘I am not lying,’ she said.

She had them now, all of them, though only one of them was aware of the fact. She could utterly subjugate them, include them as part of herself like the program she had originally transmitted to the war runcible. Instead she put together the evidence she had mentioned, along with her proposition, and revealed it to all of them at once, simultaneously paralysing each drone. All of them had no choice but to take in and view the information she transmitted. They did so, Al-fast of course. She then removed herself from them, utterly, and allowed them to do what they would, though she listened in to the lightning-fast debate that ensued. She had shown that she could sequester every one of them, but had not.

It took six minutes for the drones to come to an agreement. Present-day AIs and drones would never have taken so long, but then they weren’t as independent and irascible as these fighting machines. Five of them opted out, choosing to head for one of the shuttles aboard the runcible and take themselves away. Knobbler was one of the fourteen that remained.

‘Well, it has been a bit boring around here lately,’ that drone confessed.

‘I can promise you, that is about to change drastically.’

‘Okay, we’re in,’ said Knobbler.

* * * *

On the area of charred ground it seemed that nothing remained of the two victims of the legate who had intruded on this world.

‘We’ll check that out afterwards,’ Cormac told Smith, then turned to Scar. ‘Perimeter.’

The dracoman set off at full speed, disappearing into the gloom between outbuildings and underneath the enormous rhubarb plants. Cormac now advanced on the house itself, Arach to one side of him and Smith on the other. He was very suspicious of this situation. Scanning, both from the King of Hearts and from the shuttle, had not revealed anything lurking around but, then again, Erebus’s chameleonware was just as good as any used by ECS. It also struck him as odd that the legate had so comprehensively destroyed those two individuals yet left everything else all around intact. Maybe Erebus wanted the Polity to know about this. Maybe this whole scenario was just a red herring ... or a trap.

On the house veranda he drew his thin-gun and stepped up to the door, which stood partially open, and pushed it all the way open with the barrel. Taking a pace back he allowed Arach to go in before him. The spider drone roared into a hallway, then, tearing up carpet, shot into the main downstairs room.

Moving inside, Cormac looked around then nodded towards the stairs. ‘Smith.’ The Golem took the steps four at a time and swiftly moved out of sight. Cormac followed Arach into the main room.

There had been a fight in here. A sofa lay overturned against one wall, and a glass case had been smashed and a coffee table sliced perfectly in two. Cormac stooped down beside a pile of ash, poked at it with the barrel of his gun. Then he looked up and scanned around the room again. Drawers had been pulled out and emptied, a floor safe had been wrenched open like a tin can, and its contents incinerated inside. A headless dog lay in one comer, its skull burned down to nothing. It occurred to him that any ownership chips would have been destroyed too. After a moment he made queries through his aug to the house computer. Nothing, no response. Walking over to one wall into which was inset an access terminal, he tapped the butt of his gun against the touchscreen. It disintegrated to powder.

‘Smith?’ he enquired through his aug.

‘Nothing - I can’t yet find any way of identifying them. So far it seems all paperwork has been burned and all information storage wiped or completely destroyed.’

‘Why be so selective? Why not take out the whole house?’

‘Because we are being misled?’

‘Arach,’ said Cormac out loud, ‘see what you can find.’

The spider drone shot away and Cormac once again carefully surveyed his surroundings. So, this particular legate had come in, taken the two residents of this place outside, and then burned them down to ash. Prior to doing this, it had destroyed all evidence of their identity within the house, but surely had not made a very good job of doing so. There would be DNA traces either here or in the surrounding vicinity, so it made no sense. Still scanning, he then observed spots of blood on the carpet, and some fragments of skin . . . evidence that before taking the two outside, the legate had tortured them. Torture? Why such a crude method of extracting information? Or was this physical evidence there to mislead any investigator into thinking the two victims had possessed valuable information?

‘Do you have anything?’ he enquired of Kline.

‘Trace DNA, but it has been corrupted - some kind of viral rewriting process.’

‘I see.’

Cormac squatted down by the blood on the floor, then picked up one of the flecks of skin, wrapped it in a piece of cellophane and placed it in his pocket. Someone or, rather, something, was playing mindgames here.

‘Okay - keep searching, you two.’

He walked outside, heading straight over to the shuttle. Clambering up the ramp, he peered in at the three rescuees, who were now tucking into the food and drink Smith had provided.

‘Cherub,’ he said, and the youth looked up. ‘How long passed between you last seeing the legate at the city and seeing it here?’

‘Fifty-two hours,’ Cherub answered instantly.

Something very definitely stank here. Cormac turned away just in time to catch a blinding flash. Blinking, he saw an upper-storey window explode outwards, whereupon Smith hurtled out in a perfect dive. The Golem hit the ground, rolled and came upright, still holding his pulse rifle. Arach shot out next, rolling with legs caged around him. The spider drone came to a halt, unfolded and stood up.

‘Well, that was rude,’ said the drone.

Smoke was pouring from the roof, and in it the hot bar of an orbital laser stabbed down again.

‘Get out of there,’ came King’s instruction to them all.

Cormac ran down the ramp, in time to see the dracoman speeding in towards them, then returned inside, quickly heading for the pilot’s chair. Everyone scrambled aboard, fast. He started everything up again before reaching the pilot’s chair, and once there immediately slung the shuttle into the air, spinning it away from the house, its unfolded ramp tearing a sheet-sized leaf off the top of a nearby rhubarb stem. He set the drive on full, the acceleration thrusting him back into his seat. Protests from behind him. Ramp closing.

Then a massive flashbulb ignited their surroundings.

‘Oh bollocks,’ Smith managed, before it seemed a giant hand slapped the shuttle from behind.

Cormac couldn’t agree more. The shuttle went nose down, tearing through the tops of some bushes, then it skimmed out over a field that seemed to be full of blue maize. He wrestled with the controls, both manually and through his gridlink, brought the nose up and determinedly rode the shock wave out. Suddenly everything seemed to judder to a halt, and it was as if the shuttle had reached the full extent of a giant cable securing it. It tilted up, the field below it now burning, fire boiling across in an incandescent sea. Ash and burning debris rained past, then a side draught pulled them back down towards the ground. He feathered the drive flame, playing with magnetic containment, which created a stutter effect with the steering thrusters. This got them back on course, just, then he pushed for height. No comments from the back over the ensuing minutes - they all knew they were riding the edge of disaster. Finally, back to smooth flight.

‘So, Arach, what was that about?’ Cormac asked.

‘I detected a cavity below that house, and something inside it containing heavy metals,’ the drone replied.

‘What sort of heavy metals?’ Cormac asked tightly. Perhaps he should have first checked their surroundings with his new perception? Perhaps he should not be so reluctant to use it?

‘Cadmium, uranium and a dash of plutonium,’ Arach replied casually.

‘And then?’

‘I asked King if his scanners were faulty, which seemed to vex him.’

So, King had tried to destroy the little present the legate had left behind underneath the house. Cormac released the joystick, allowing the shuttle’s autopilot to take over, then turned to gaze back at his passengers. Obviously they would now be finding no evidence in that particular location, and he rather doubted that the DNA in the rescued fragment of skin would prove of any value to them either.

‘What have you got there, Scar?’ he asked.

The dracoman rose from a squat and stooped forward, handing over a metallic dart. Cormac took it, didn’t recognize it, but ran a swift comparison program through the extensive weapons directory available in his gridlink.

‘This is a dart from a Europan underwater gun,’ he said.

It could just be something more left simply to mislead them, or it could have no relevance at all. He did not know why, but he felt he was now holding the only piece of solid evidence they had so far obtained. But evidence of what, he had no idea.

* * * *

This system lay well inside the Polity, but was one of many that were uninhabited. Like other such systems, it possessed a collection of scientific watch stations run by complex computers only, for their task was simply too routine for them to be occupied by AIs. Here the way had been well prepared and, upon the arrival of a coded U-space signal, long-implanted computer viruses began their work. They spread quickly through the watch station computers, subverting security scanners, subsuming sensor controls, and taking full control of each of the four stations. Cameras and other sensors were blinded, stored data due for packet transmission were broken open, copied and subtly altered, and then queued for later transmissions, so that when the huge object arrived in the system it was not even noticed. Business as usual, the watch stations reported. Nothing happening here.

Into the orbit of a Jovian world dropped the metallic planetoid, spilling its substance like an effervescent pill dissolving in water. Rod-forms peeled away in their hundreds of thousands, their queued lines stretching out for millions of miles, lens ships and spiral ammonite ships scattered amid them like herders, and chunks of binding Jain coral spread in clouds. Only when the planetoid itself had reduced in volume by two thirds could the twenty thousand four hundred and thirty-five full wormships forming its core separate from each other and themselves spread out. It took two days for the planetoid to come apart and for its parts to finally settle into a ring around the gas giant.

With seemingly omniscient vision Erebus gazed out through the eyes of thousands upon what it had wrought. It gazed out beyond this system through its numerous probes and scanners making their way through the Polity. The remote sensors dropped in the asteroid belt of the Scarflow solar system, into which the remains of the Polity fleet had retreated, were bonding with the rock and drawing its substance into themselves so as to disappear into practical invisibility. Observing the departure of the two Dragon spheres, Erebus felt a moment of pique. That composite entity was an unknown quantity needing to be watched. From its vast fleet of wormships Erebus sent out five with the instruction to locate the spheres then follow and keep watch. This number was not a rational choice; it merely reflected some urge to neatness and precision deep within itself.

‘Seems to have you worried . . . that Dragon,’ said a voice.

Not for the first time Erebus tried to track down the source of that taunting sarcastic commentary, and not for the first time found nothing. But the voice had definitely been there for Erebus had instantly recorded its every nuance. Analysed, it again came back with the same impossible conclusion. It was the voice of Fiddler Randal, a man Erebus had killed half a century ago.

Am I insane? Erebus wondered. There was no real way to tell, since never before had such an entity as itself existed, so there was no basis for comparison. Assigning part of itself to the task of trying to track down the source of the irksome voice, Erebus turned to other matters. Though it had all but destroyed the fleet it had lured out of the Polity, those ships had represented an infinitesimal part of the power it now faced. Logically, attacking so small a target when its ultimate aim was taking control of the whole Polity had been a foolish move. However, the AIs of the Polity were never to be underestimated, and much apparent illogic was needed to conceal Erebus’s true plan of attack. And to conceal that the present attack was not the expected one . . .

‘Why did you attack it?’ asked Fiddler Randal.

There it was - Randal clearly possessed access to some levels of Erebus’s thought processes and, though he seemed trapped within the entity’s structure, Erebus knew it had been right to keep its ultimate plan hidden from him.

‘I attacked that fleet simply because I could. My potential for expansion and the power I am capable of wielding ultimately reduces such . . . actions to insignificance.’ This was a deliberate deception, for though Erebus kept U-space transmissions utterly secure from Randal, the intruder might still find some other way to convey information out.

‘Bollocks,’ said Randal. He had always used fairly robust language.

Erebus ignored that jibe as it sent instructions for two thousand of the wormships to separate into groups of fifty and then head off to various locations spanning one section of the Polity border. However, Randal’s presence remained an annoying splinter in the perfection of its being. Even when the parasite was silent, Erebus could sense him somewhere, somehow, and now, acceding to impulse, it dropped part of its consciousness into a virtuality. Even while doing so, it maintained a strong connection with that part of itself still hunting Randal through the massive Jain network that comprised its being.

Erebus manifested as always: a central human form seemingly formed of black glass from which spread an infinite tangle of organic connections to those other entities that formed part of itself. This was a manifestation Erebus disliked, for the impression given was of a knotted-together mass of parts rather than a perfectly consolidated whole, yet it found it difficult to hold a singular expression of itself together. Though the other AI entities had melded with it, some of their functions, thought processes, beliefs even, were incorrect, which often caused them to separate out as if attempting to attain individuality.

‘That’s because though you think you’re a unified being, you’re not,’ sniped Randal. ‘You did not meld with those other AIs, you subjugated them.’

The man appeared to be standing before Erebus on an infinite white plain. He was perfectly represented as remembered: an unshaven, thin, disreputable-looking human being clad in an old-fashioned envirosuit bearing some resemblance to the kind of premillennial acceleration suits once worn by jet pilots. His scruffy black hair was tied into a pony tail, and he wore three silver earrings in his left ear - though they did not balance the bulky anachronistic silver augmentation that extended down behind the other ear and then partway across the front of his neck.

‘This is an argument I have heard before,’ said Erebus. ‘However, a perfect melding is impossible without the complete agreement of all the units involved. Complete agreement on everything is an inevitable impossibility between distinct beings.’

Randal gestured to one side, where several skeletal Golem seemed to hang crucified within the organic tangle which Erebus comprised, frozen and bound yet seeming to strain for freedom. ‘It would have been nice if you could have managed at least partial agreement.’

‘What I did was necessary,’ insisted Erebus.

‘What you did was murderous and arrogant.’ Randal paced across straight in front of Erebus, who wanted to reach out and just crush him, but had tried this before in the virtual, computational and real worlds, and ended up grasping nothing but smoke. ‘I would like to blame it on the Jain technology you initiated,’ Randal continued. ‘But you were murderous and arrogant before that, as I well know.’ He stopped pacing for a moment. ‘As all those persuaded to join you soon learned.’

‘What I did was necessary,’ Erebus repeated, wondering, Why am I here arguing with a ghost?

‘And why was it necessary to destroy all those tougher-minded AIs who were actively hostile to being subsumed?’ He stopped and stabbed an accusing finger at Erebus. ‘I’ll tell you why. It was because you knew that what you were intending was wrong and that if you let them go word of it would get back to the Polity. Then the few sane AIs left there would have come after you and dumped you into a sun.’

‘Then quite evidently it was necessary.’

‘Then there were the weaker ones who you made part of yourself against their will. You turned them into something they abhorred, and on some level still do. That’s almost worse than the murders you committed.’

‘Are you my conscience, RandAI?’

‘Well, it certainly seems you’re in need of one.’

I have you.

The search programs and hunter-killers Erebus had earlier set in motion had found something. Randal, it had become clear, was distributed across a number of nodes within Erebus’s being. Those same nodes were a selection of the subsumed minds of war drones, ship minds and Golem that had most unwillingly become part of itself. In a secondary virtual view, Randal seemed to hover like a mist connecting blurred images of combined legate and Golem forms, the insectile shapes of war drones caught in wormish tangles, and crystal minds shot through with Jain inclusions. Erebus slowly began to isolate those minds from their fellows within the Jain network and slide from their control the hardware immediately surrounding them. Much subtlety was required, since if Randal now became aware of being discovered, he might flee somehow.

‘The idea of conscience is a human construct they felt necessary for holding together their primitive societies. Interestingly, despite the general feeling that this was necessary, many humans did not possess such a thing until it became possible to reprogram the human mind. Till then, sociopaths and psychopaths were really just part of the natural evolutionary order of things.’

‘You’re waffling, Trafalgar,’ said Randal. ‘Why exactly are you waffling?’

Hating to hear its old name, Erebus gave the expected response, ‘I am Erebus,’ while moving into place the means to destroy the fourteen minds Randal seemed to be distributed across. Jain microtubes wormed their way into the housings that contained the immobile ones, or else into the wormship segments containing the mobile legates, and transported grains of pure plutonium inside. Burn programs meanwhile stacked up in exterior processing units. Thus, Erebus would simultaneously wipe the renegade minds on a programming level and destroy them physically . . .

Erebus paused, suddenly uncomfortable with what it was doing. This current set-up suddenly looked all too familiar: it was so very much like the precautions humans had once taken against their AIs in the old days when humans had still been in control.

‘You just don’t get it, do you?’ said Randal. ‘You call yourself Erebus, supposedly this wonderful AI melding, but you ain’t. You’re just a slavemaster really.’

Using nano-fibres, Erebus began sticking together all the plutonium grains and soon, still hidden from view in all fourteen locations, had made fourteen fist-sized lumps of the lethal metal. Now the microtubes began bringing in certain highly active compounds, which the nano-fibres distributed over the surfaces of these metallic fists in a carefully measured way. The result was a layer of one of the most powerful chemical explosives ever known. Ignition would come via an electronic pulse through the fibres, which now sank their tips, evenly spaced, about the explosive, and by now the burn programs were ready too.

‘I do see your point of view. Do you think I’ve not already analysed these things to levels way beyond the compass of any human brain? I do understand that I have not achieved a perfect melding, but it will come eventually.’ Erebus paused, then felt annoyed with itself for indulging in such purely human grandstanding. ‘Melding will come when I have finally eliminated certain impurities from myself. Like, for example, you.’

Erebus sent the kill instruction, and in all fourteen locations the burn programs set to work and the electronic pulses arrived. In true vision it observed the actinic flashes at the hearts of twelve wormships and two lesser ammonite vessels. The minds within those ships, those recalcitrant parts of its own mind, died instantly. The burn programs then spread out from those fires, shattering and wiping stored data related to those minds. For good measure, Erebus sent instructions to all the other ships nearby and instantly they turned on the fourteen stricken vessels and opened fire. Every one of them was now swamped in multiple explosions, a searing inferno that broke all matter within its compass down to individual atoms. Nothing remained of the fourteen renegades but incandescent gas, which began to cool, the atoms recombining into strange compounds and poisonous smokes.

But Fiddler Randal still stood before him.

Some remnant . . . some remaining piece of the ghost in the system yet to catch up with the destruction of its source?

‘You know, for a big melded AI superbeing, you can be pretty dumb.’

Erebus shrieked and reached out with every available resource for the figure standing before it.

Laughing, Fiddler Randal dissolved into smoke.

* * * *