7

While humans, with their augmentations, up to and including gridlinks and haiman carapaces, ever strive to become more like AIs, it has been rumoured that there are artificial intelligences being created with mental architectures nearer to the human model. What the hell for? There is nothing a human can do that cannot be bettered by our crystal-minded rulers - our betters. Those who argue against this say, ‘What about art, literature, emotion, love, etc.?’ and patently have no real grasp of just how powerful many AIs can be. Your average runcible AI can simultaneously run models or copies of numerous human minds inside itself as programs. It can put them into virtualities and run them through lifetimes of creativity, emotion, whatever, at many hundred times the speed of reality. However, if it is true that AI minds have been built to the same chaotic mental architecture as humanity, they probably run in Golem bodies to provide a nearer facsimile to human life. And it is certain that, if they have been produced, they are merely objects of curiosity - toys for gods.

- From How It Is by Gordon

There were thousands of information packets to access, thousands of sensors to gaze from, all this information arriving by U-space transmitter with only a delay of a few seconds. Azroc gazed upon space battles fought at AI speeds and observed logistical overlays that seemed made to disassemble spaceships, to disassemble lives. He observed AI combatants - who had to be fully aware of their chances of survival - throwing themselves, without even microseconds of hesitation, at wormships and then being obliterated. They adhered to battle plans utterly, some of them already certain of their own destruction in the execution of those same plans. It was admirable, but Azroc was wary of AI pride. For humans were quite capable of behaving the same.

In this latest scene, now viewed from spy satellites and stealth drones, twelve Polity dreadnoughts and twenty attack ships fought to keep forty-two wormships away from an inhabited world with a population of over a billion. Half an hour before there had been seventeen dreadnoughts, but five of them were now just so much debris and cooling gas, as were five of the wormships. Three wormships were already down on the surface of Ramone, unravelling into giant millipede forms and spewing out other war machines to advance on the Megapolis Transheim. Seeing these millipede forms, Azroc was rather reminded of hooders, those lethal life forms found on the planet Masada. Seeing the advancing whole it seemed tame to call it an army - infestation being a much better word.

ECS forces were arrayed against this attack: AG tanks advanced to form lines, autoguns strode out on silver legs, crowds of soldiers proceeded on foot or in gravharnesses, while troop and gun platforms filled the skies above. Battle had already been joined as jets and the flying skyscrapers of atmosphere gunships bombarded Erebus’s forces. While Azroc watched, one enormous gunship tilted, smoke belching from a hole excavated in its side, and fell with horrible grace towards the enemy. Beam weapons and projectiles flashed against its hard-fields till it seemed to be falling through layer upon layer of smoky glass. A particle beam finally stabbed through its defences, cutting it from stem to stern, and it exploded, raining burning debris on its killers.

The whole scene possessed a horrible inevitability. The forces on the ground were not enough, and simple mathematics told Azroc that, beyond this planet, the remaining Polity dreadnoughts and attack ships could not stop further landings - and that, without intervention, they were doomed. However, intervention was already arriving. Azroc flicked away to another scene nearly half a light year distant.

The two hammerhead troop carriers, in shape resembling steel waterfowl with those eponymous heads, were preparing for the run towards Ramone. Gathered about them were forty of the new Centurion-class attack ships, and this would hopefully be enough to get the carriers down on the surface, after which the Centurions could engage directly with the wormships. Maybe the extra troops would be enough to swing the land battle, but the extra Centurions wouldn’t be able to defeat the wormships, which was why something else was on its way.

‘Even I wasn’t sure ships like that existed,’ Azroc said as, right on cue, something massive folded out of U-space just beyond the troop carriers.

‘You did not need to know,’ Jerusalem informed him. ‘But you did see the Battle Wagon?’

‘Well I didn’t know about that either.’ The craft mentioned was the capital ship of the fleet Erebus had first devastated, but in its death throes Battle Wagon had taken out a large proportion of Erebus’s forces. A cylinder eight miles wide and twenty miles long, it was yet a minnow compared to this new arrival.

The Cable Hogue was a vessel that could not safely orbit worlds with any crustal instabilities or oceans, simply because its sheer mass could create devastating tides or earthquakes. It was spherical, like a mobile moon with weapons capable of breaking planets, and was the biggest ship presently available to Jerusalem. Azroc wondered if it might in fact be the biggest ship in the Polity, or if there was something else he didn’t yet know about.

‘Erebus managed to hijack some fleet vessels,’ Azroc cautioned.

‘That is a risk we must take, since there was nothing else I could get there quickly enough to be effective.’

‘I see.’ Azroc switched views to another solar system and now gazed upon an image, enhanced from a distance, of a hot planetoid being orbited by a line of wormships. But they had done nothing more there since their arrival, so he switched views again to see glimpses of an occasional wormship and an occasional asteroid. He then reduced distances by a factor of a thousand, which showed him wormships cruising amid a belt of asteroids, and a fleet of Polity vessels, led by something very similar to Battle Wagon, heading out from the inner inhabited world of that solar system towards the asteroid belt.

‘Any idea of what they are doing there?’

Jerusalem showed him another view of six wormships, these ones partially unravelled and wrapped around a chunk of stone a hundred miles across. The stars of fusion drives were currently igniting all over the stone’s surface, their ionization slowly forming into a cometary tail. Evidently the wormships were intent on moving the asteroid.

‘Bombardment?’ Azroc suggested.

‘It seems likely,’ Jerusalem replied. ‘Or else they are using it as just part of an attack plan. If its vector is right, even breaking it up will divert a lot of the Polity fleet there and many of our ships will have to run cover to intercept any of the chunks heading planetwards.’

‘I see,’ said Azroc again, but he wasn’t feeling entirely sure that he did. He flicked back to an overview of the Line area under attack, and closely observed the positions of the target worlds. He then ran an overlay of Polity logistics, supply routes, major population centres, weapons caches and major manufacturing centres. Though these worlds formed a pattern, he could not see how that strategy related to an attack on the Polity as a whole.

Another world under attack: here wormships and Polity ships swirled about each other like two distinct species of fish, and every now and again space seemed to distort when some craft on either side managed to position itself satisfactorily to use some directed gravity weapon without taking out other ships on its own side. The planet currently being defended had already suffered numerous strikes, and since the last time Azroc looked its colour had changed. A massive CTD had landed in the world-encompassing ocean, hit a subduction zone in an oceanic trench and cracked it right open. The ocean was now boiling, pouring up billions of tons of water into the atmosphere in the form of steam. Another strike had turned a minor oceanic city, with a population of eight million, into a boiling ruin. And now the wormships seemed intent on dropping something on the main population centre here. Meanwhile, the Polity ships were hamstrung by the need to intercept missiles instead of attacking their source.

Azroc tried to remain cool in the face of this, as he said, ‘Here, as at eight other worlds, Erebus seems intent on total destruction. So why is he putting ground forces down on Ramone? What tactical importance does that world have?’

‘None known,’ Jerusalem replied.

Was this attack seemingly as lacking in logic as Erebus’s first attack outside the Polity, or would it, like the attack on Hammon, turn out to have some particular reason, however strange that might seem? The attack on that minor world had apparently been cover for the murder of two human beings by a legate. But, even then, what possible relevance could the deaths of two people have to a conflict on this scale?

‘How go the evacuations?’

‘Slowly,’ Jerusalem replied. ‘The runcible network is functioning at full capacity - ‘ Jerusalem paused, which was always significant in a major AI, then continued ‘ - and, as is to be expected, it will not be possible to evacuate even a few per cent of the total populations of those worlds.’

‘Could Erebus’s aim be to overload the runcible network?’ wondered Azroc, utterly sure that this idea was the reason for Jerusalem’s pause.

‘That might be the aim, but for what purpose, if any, is unclear.’

‘Right.’

Azroc returned to his viewing of the destruction currently being wrought out on the edge of the Polity and tried to integrate the whole with what he hoped was a unique perception. Maybe Erebus had been deliberately making apparently illogical moves in order to camouflage some deviously cunning assault. Or maybe that melded AI was as mad as a box of frogs and no pattern would ever emerge. Azroc spent hours studying all that he was able to study, and came to the conclusion that Erebus was preparing for ground assaults to capture about eight worlds, while the rest were to be depopulated or destroyed. He could still see no logic here. If these eight worlds were essential to some plan, why not use greater forces to take them swiftly? As to the rest of the worlds, their depopulation or destruction could serve no purpose at all beyond the sheer carnage wrought there.

‘One thing is evident,’ he abruptly said. ‘We’re seeing only a small percentage of Erebus’s known forces here. So where are the rest?’

‘That is something we would all like to know,’ Jerusalem agreed.

* * * *

Cormac was glad to be back once again in realspace. The trip through U-space had seemed even more testing this time, for there had been moments, especially alone in his cabin, when it seemed the King of Hearts completely dissolved around him and he was stranded alone in void. Then, almost like someone who has been suddenly dumped into deep water, he could feel himself beginning to make swimming motions, though in this case the muscles involved were between his ears. There had been other weird moments too, when he found himself in other parts of the ship and could not remember getting there. Had he stepped through U-space?

Frustratingly, he retained no memory of doing so either in his mind or in the memcording facility of his gridlink. This was doubly worrying, since if he had managed to move himself through U-space or had just walked from one location to another, his gridlink should have recorded either activity. That neither had registered might mean the hardware in his head was failing, and he thought he would soon have to get himself checked out. He was not keen on that, however, since he didn’t really trust those who would have to do the checking: Polity AIs.

Later, he told himself. When absolutely necessary.

Now standing in the bridge of the King of Hearts, Cormac tried to put that unreal time out of his head. He glanced at the two chairs and one saddlelike seat provided by King, and wondered why the attack ship AI was at last making some concessions to its passengers. He then concentrated his attention on the magnified image of the nearest hammerhead troop carrier, the torch of its drive spearing out behind it like a focused cutting flame, and the drives of all the other Polity ships beyond it flaming into life too.

‘Weird design,’ he commented, as he felt through his feet the rumbling vibration of the King of Hearts’ own fusion drive igniting.

The troop carrier seemed to possess all sorts of vulnerabilities, like that extended ‘neck’ leading up to its ‘head’. What was that all about?

‘Designed by a human,’ King replied with a deliberate lack of tone. ‘Those two ships out there were to be cruise liners before Jerusalem requisitioned them.’ There was a definite sneer in ‘cruise liners’.

‘What kind of alterations were made to them?’ Cormac asked, for he could see now that, as passenger ships, they would have possessed a certain tranquil grace. Accessing further information about them he found one was called The Swan, which seemed perfectly apt, but the other was called Bertha, which seemed slightly absurd.

‘Jerusalem grabbed them before their construction was finished. They now contain electable re-entry units for the troops, particle cannons and hard-field projectors.’

How long since Jerusalem had become the de facto commander of ECS forces in this Line war? Six months now? Or had these ships already been in the process of being refitted for military purposes before Jerusalem grabbed them?

‘Quick,’ he commented.

‘As you are aware,’ said King, ‘wartime installations have been put online.’

Cormac had once seen one of the eight massive factory stations that had been mothballed after the close of the Prador-human war. It sat out in interstellar space like a giant harmonica; forty miles long, twenty miles wide and ten deep, the square holes running along either side of it the entrances to enormous construction bays. He recollected Mika standing beside him saying, ‘This place was built in only three years and churned out dreadnoughts, attack ships and war drones just about as fast as the construction materials could be transmitted in. It could not keep up with demand during the initial Prador advance, since on average one medium-sized ship got destroyed every eight seconds during that conflict.’ Admittedly that same station was being used to house refugees when he and Mika had observed it, but if the others were now online, taking six months to refit The Swan and Bertha might be considered rather slow.

He continued staring at the two hammerheads, suddenly angry at the glib explanation King had given him, and which he had been quick to back up with his own memories. Abruptly he found himself questioning the kind of AI explanation that up until recently he would have been content with. Yeah, if those massive factory stations were up and running again, then it wouldn’t take so long for them to refit existing ships or turn out something new. However, it should have taken a considerable amount of time to get those stations back up to speed, so when had Earth Central, and the hierarchy of AIs below it, come to the conclusion that there was enough of a threat to the Polity for them to reactivate those mothballed stations? Theoretically there should have been no awareness of a Polity-wide threat until the appearance of Jain technology, which had been signalled by the biophysicist Skellor, and surely that threat could only have become classified as major after the events on Coloron a year later? Yet it seemed the AIs had been preparing for something big for some time, quite possibly even since before Skellor had come on the scene.

In the past Cormac had put this sort of almost prescient behaviour down to the superior intelligence of the AIs. So why was he doubting now? He realized such doubts stemmed from logical inconsistencies. On the one hand the Polity AIs had been preparing, yet on the other, now that Erebus was attacking, they seemed only to be reacting. These were major intelligences working consensually, yet it seemed Erebus had them totally flummoxed. Or was removing this threat not actually at the top of their agenda? He shook his head. He didn’t have time for this right now, but was damned sure he was still going to get some answers.

‘Can you give me a view of the Cable?’ he requested.

A rectangular frame immediately expanded to encompass starlit space in which Centurion-class attack ships hung like a shoal of barracuda, their drive flames like white-tailed stars behind them. The frame greyed over for a moment, then the massive Cable Hogue expanded into view. In one respect the warship was less impressive than the hammerheads, since it was a simple sphere, but closer inspection revealed something almost like a cityscape utterly encompassing it.

Cormac had only recently begun accessing the information available about this monster. It employed rail-guns that fired projectiles the size of attack ships. It possessed gravtech weapons, one of which could throw a wave out through space to sweep away just about anything in its path. The throats of its particle cannons were as wide as mine shafts . . . but would it be enough? He imagined so. The problem, however, was that Jerusalem possessed only one ship of this size and power, while Erebus was attacking numerous worlds in separate solar systems.

‘How much longer?’ Cormac asked, then glanced around as Scar, Arach and Hubbert Smith entered the bridge.

‘We’re going to U-jump in just three minutes, when our realspace speed is sufficient for insertion,’ King explained. ‘I suggest that you make yourself secure, as I may have to divert some power from internal gravplates to weapons.’

How thoughtful of the AI, or maybe it just didn’t want then splattered messily around its pristine interior. Cormac dropped into one of the seats and pulled the safety straps across him. Field technology could have held him in place, but even the power for that might soon be needed elsewhere. Hubbert Smith sat down next to him, and Scar took his place on the strange saddle-like affair that accommodated his ostrich-like legs. Arach settled down behind them and, on hearing a clonking sound, Cormac glanced round to see the spider drone engaging its sharp feet in recesses specially made in the floor.

‘Should be interesting to watch the Cable Hogue in action,’ said Smith.

Yes, interesting, thought Cormac. But they would be lucky if King could maintain this stable outside view throughout what was about to come. EMR levels would be high, and the ship’s sensors would be blocking much of it to preserve themselves. King would be switching rapidly to whichever electromagnetic band gave the best view of events unfolding, so just might not have the time to convert that input into a pretty picture for the rest of them. Considering this, Cormac used his U-sense to gaze beyond the attack ship at the fleet surrounding it, then, because it was the kind thing he normally would have done, he also applied to King through his gridlink - going after data direct from King’s sensors. Surprisingly, King gave him access immediately.

‘Better to see it this way,’ said Smith. ‘Almost puts you inside the mind of an attack ship.’

‘Not sure I’d want to be in the mind of this one,’ said Arach.

‘Not as sane and balanced as you, then,’ suggested Smith.

Arach made a clicking sound suspiciously like a bullet being fed into a breech. Smith just grinned and closed his eyes.

So, that meant the two of them already had access to King’s sensors. Cormac then glanced across at Scar and watched the dracoman closing his eyes and baring his teeth. Was he too now viewing the same sensory data? Probably yes, since Dragon had given its creations all the advantages of human augmentation, and then some.

Now gazing out on the surrounding ships, with the view supplied not only by his own new perception but also King’s sensors, from which he could pick and choose across the electromagnetic spectrum rather than be confined to that usual narrow band between infrared and ultraviolet, Cormac dug his fingers into his chair arms, for it was all so much more immediate now and the input seemed almost too much. He felt overexposed and shut down that other sense, though it seemed reluctant to go offline. It annoyed him to think how King would have had no problem with such input, since the AI possessed a far greater ability to process it than did any mere human.

‘I have to wonder how Jerusalem knows there will be a legate down on Ramone,’ he said - maybe searching for a distraction from the cold reality looming beyond the ship.

A thrumming sound suddenly issued through the body of the King of Hearts. It was clearly preparing to drop into U-space, though he guessed this sound was not from the U-space engine but from numerous weapons charging up in readiness. Cormac slackened the tension in his fingers and tried to prepare himself again for an experience that now seemed to be becoming unwholesomely attractive to him, almost like a growing addiction.

‘It is understood that the major wormships are captained by partially distinct entities, which are sub-minds of Erebus. Maintaining a meld of AI minds over such distances is not feasible, hence some self-determination of Erebus’s sub-units must be allowed,’ stated King.

‘Didn’t you just make a little slip there?’ enquired Hubbert Smith. ‘When you said “Maintaining a meld of AI minds” didn’t you mean “Keeping these AI minds utterly subjugated”?’

‘Quite,’ replied King.

‘Putting aside Smith’s quite relevant point,’ said Cormac, ‘how does Jerusalem know wormships are controlled by “partially distinct entities”, and that those entities are in fact legates?’

‘The chances are high that at least one of those controlling a wormship down on the planet is a legate, since the proportion of Golem and other viable minds that fled the Polity after the end of the Prador war is high.’

‘So Jerusalem is supposing that each of these ships is controlled by one of those “Golem or other viable minds”, though now subjugated to Erebus’s will and quite possibly since remodelled?’

‘Your orders were sent by one of Jerusalem’s subordinates, but even so Jerusalem is supposing nothing, since that wormships are captained is accepted fact across the AI nets.’

‘Which brings me back to the original question: how does Jerusalem know?’

‘The information became available.’

‘From where?’

‘I don’t know,’ King admitted.

At that moment Cormac observed the image of the Cable Hogue seem to stretch in some indefinable direction - then disappear. Even though he was trying to keep his U-sense repressed, he saw it entering U-space like a moon dropping into some vast sea. The time for questions had just ended, since the short hop insystem would take only moments. He then felt the twisting shift as the King of Hearts dropped into U-space. The apparent dome over them turned grey, and many of the ship’s sensors he was accessing now registered zero input. But again he was there, alone, in that same vast sea, feeling its currents and knowing that he could push a little there, move there, just a little effort and . . . Again that weird twisting sensation as the King of Hearts surfaced like a submarine, but Cormac felt as if the ship was leaving him behind. It took an effort of will for him to stay with it.

However, unlike a submarine, this ship - along with all the others - surfaced at the same speed at which it had entered the ‘sea’. Immediately the grey in the dome screen was replaced by starlit space filled with the flashes of munitions. Then abruptly it blacked out. Cormac closed his eyes, tried to ignore the slick sweat on his palms, and concentrated instead on what he was seeing through King’s sensors. The attack ship veered past a clump of three interconnected rod-forms, all radiating far into the infrared before one of them exploded to send the other two tumbling. Something crashed against the hull and bounced off, the impact of it rumbling through his seat, but the object rapidly tumbling away hadn’t been ejected by the nearby explosion. Instead, Cormac recognized a box-like segment - a piece of a wormship. A particle beam, stabbing out behind, lit it up briefly and it burst into vaporizing fragments.

The two hammerheads were moving side by side, Centurions arrayed all about them to intercept any attack, while, ahead of them, the Cable Hogue led the way in. Cormac observed five Centurions breaking away to intercept one of the lesser ammonite spiral ships. Going into high-gravity turns, the Centurions released a swarm of missiles. Impacts on hard-fields blotted the targeted spiral from view for a moment. As these faded, he watched the vessel remain utterly intact for a moment, then suddenly fragment in multiple explosions. The quantity of attack missiles had overloaded its hard-field generators, and those coming after had finished the job. As Cormac understood it, there had been fifty of the major wormships located here, but none of these ammonite ships. Then, as King directed its sensors at some distant object and brought it into focus, he found an explanation. There a wormship was unravelling, its long segmented components then coiling up again to form three of the spirals.

New view: far ahead, six wormships were slinging out rod-forms, like infected cells spewing viruses. Internal sensors for mapping mass gave a view of the gravity terrain ahead. The Cable Hogue hung within this like a lead ball on a rubber sheet, then it seemed the sheet was mounding up ahead of it. The mound swelled as it advanced - a wave in the spacetime continuum – and it spread across an ever-widening front. Cormac felt a sharp pain grow behind his eyes as his brain struggled to interpret in three spacial dimensions what he knew he was observing in five. He knew this pain would go away if he allowed himself to employ his U-sense, but he fought the temptation, denied it. The wave began to distort, and the best analogy Cormac could summon up was that it was turning into a roller. Reaching the wormships and swarming rod-forms, which were now linking together to form a wall a hundred miles tall, this roller curved right over, enveloping three wormships and a large proportion of the wall. It seemed the gravity phenomenon had just captured part of realspace. The pain in his head growing worse, he shifted to a view through normal EM sensors, and there observed the three wormships and section of wall undergo massive acceleration. All of them were distorted and breaking apart as they went out of play, heading directly towards the distant glare of the sun.

‘Now, that wasn’t a gravity disrupter,’ commented Smith.

‘Next generation,’ King allowed, before they proceeded into an area full of debris, rod-forms and missiles closing in on them from the three remaining wormships and three ammonite spirals.

As one, the Centurions now broke formation to intercept these attackers. The Swan took a hit on its flank, and Cormac saw a hole penetrate deep inside, rimmed with glowing girders. The ship was full of troops, quite a few of them now dead troops. Space further filled with fast-moving chunks of metal and the beams of energy weapons, which were only visible when they intersected something material. A Centurion glowed before becoming a line of fire. One ammonite spiral unravelled as another disappeared in three massive implosions. A wormship squirmed desperately and shed burned segments behind it as it fell towards Bertha. A single rail-gun missile slammed through this Gordian tangle, its material turning to plasma, and the wormship flew apart like ancient safety glass. The missile had come from the Cable Hogue, as did two of the ensuing impacts that spread the remaining wormships across the firmament. Then a particle beam lanced out, bright blue, only just visible by the stray atoms it touched and broke into strange shortlived isotopes. It panned across rod-forms, bursting them like balloons put in the way of an acetylene torch.

Then they were through.

‘I think I can leave you now,’ said the voice of a woman. ‘Nothing else in intercept range at the moment.’

Diana Windermere, thought Cormac. He had already found out all he could about the captain of that massive ship, which was not a lot. She was apparently interfaced with the ship’s AI, which had been an old technique often used before AIs ruled the Polity. Though since refitted many times, that vessel was old, and Windermere herself was its fourth captain. He had no idea when it had been built, since that information was restricted even from him.

The planet Ramone now expanded into view, and the hammerheads, the King of Hearts and the Centurions began decelerating, falling into orbit. Ahead of them, the Cable Hogue accelerated, however. Accessing a logistical display, Cormac guessed the big ship was going to slingshot out again, heading straight for where the action seemed to be turning a volume of space over a hundred thousand miles across into a mobile firestorm. He rather suspected it was now about to get hotter there.

Despite the gravplates beneath him compensating, Cormac felt the distinct tug as the King of Hearts slowed into orbit. The Swan, he noticed, was turning sideways, and seemed unable to correct. Its angle of approach worsened as both itself and its companion troop carrier began to graze atmosphere.

‘What’s going on there?’ he asked.

‘Swan is dead,’ King replied.

It must have been that earlier hit. Lucky shot? Cormac doubted it - you needed to be very lucky indeed to take out a ship’s AI with just one shot. He observed Bertha now moving away from its companion, and the Centurions below it rising to hold station above. The reason for this soon became evident as the body of The Swan seemed to begin disintegrating.

Squares of hull metal started to peel away so the vessel left a trail of them like shed scales. Soon the hull was stripped away all around its main body - the only sections remaining being at its fore, to take the heat of re-entry, on its neck and head, and around its rear engines. It looked like a giant bird from which flesh and feathers had been stripped to expose the bones of its carcass. Then, from within the quadrate girdered superstructure of its main body, The Swan began to eject objects the size and shape of train carriages. Hundreds of them zoomed out, a line of them stretching back right over the curve of the planet, like sleepers waiting for rails. They sucked the substance from The Swan so that within minutes it was possible to see right through its main skeleton. Cormac concentrated on the two lines of ejected re-entry units and observed most of them turning and dipping, nose heat-shields taking the brunt of atmosphere to slow them for AG descent. Some others weren’t managing to turn in time, and began tumbling, breaking apart. His U-sense abruptly kicked in, as if his attempt at repressing it only made it stronger. He saw people dying inside those disintegrating units, and fought hard to shut the image down. Half of the ground force sent here would arrive late and with its numbers depleted, which of course was preferable to it arriving not at all, but that didn’t make him feel any better.

Finally, the hammerhead bridge of Swan detached itself and lifted away, jets igniting underneath to throw it back up into orbit. Headless, the remains of the vessel lost all control, began to turn and, the impact of re-entry now hitting structure not intended for it, it began to burn - the exposed girders heating up and leaving a red scar across the firmament. Then it just broke apart: a melting smoking mass of fragments falling down towards Ramone. As if this was a signal, the Centurions abruptly accelerated, following Swan’s fleeing bridge back up - one of them no doubt primed to pick up the crew aboard it, before all of the Polity attack ships followed Cable Hogue towards that distant conflict. Cormac wondered if there would be anything left for them to engage.

‘Could have been worse,’ Smith commented.

‘It could have been better,’ argued Cormac, horrific scenes from inside those disintegrating re-entry units vivid in his mind.

* * * *

After her return to the conferencing unit, Mika watched the Dragon spheres consume two more asteroids, and the effects of that massive dinner were more than evident. Despite the gravplates within the floor of the unit, Mika could still feel massive shiftings below her and often had to shut off exterior view since the heaving and rippling of the surface outside tended give her a touch of motion sickness, which was strange, since she’d had the standard alterations made to her inner ear to prevent that effect. As far as she could gather, this violent movement was all part of the growth process, for both spheres now measured over five miles in diameter.

A number of the probes originally pushed down inside this particular sphere had been destroyed in the commotion, but she was still obtaining enough information from the remainder to learn that Dragon was making radical alterations to itself, for the sphere’s interior had changed beyond all recognition. The skin immediately underlying the scales was now over twenty feet thick, possessing a complexity of layers that almost went beyond analysis. Almost? Something had been niggling at Mika’s mind as she studied what information she could obtain about some of those multiple layers - the superconducting meshes, the kind of alloys being built up molecular stratum after stratum, and then came definite identification of a metal that had not been included on the human elementary table until humans had first walked on worlds beyond the solar system. That final identification clicked a switch in her mind.

Prador armour.

Some layers of this new epidermis bore close similarities to the armour those enemy aliens had once used on their ships, and which had explained why they so nearly flattened the Polity despite it being run by oh-so-superior AIs. As for the other less familiar layers? She didn’t know. More armouring, doubtless, more methods of defence, some perhaps intended against informational and EM warfare, and sensory apparatus, or whatever. Much of it lay far beyond her ken, and beyond the analytical abilities of the tools she presently controlled. But, certainly, much else was beginning to fall into place.

Those tubes porting around Dragon’s equator, those toroidal structures deep inside its body, those massive power sources flashing into being on her scans, like igniting stars; the networks of heavy superconducting conduits and the darkening of bones as their density increased; the conglomerations of pseudopods that seemed to be able to move about so easily inside, almost like antibodies ... or fire crews. Dragon’s weapons had been dangerous enough when it was still in its original form of an organic probe, its spheres measuring merely a mile or so across. Mika realized that she was now seeing Dragon deliberately and massively weaponizing itself. Clearly all that additional growth was for defensive and offensive purposes. But why?

This whole process kept her fascinated, rapt, for hours, but eventually weariness began to overcome her. She therefore set the scanners to continue sweeping the areas of greatest interest, and made doubly sure that all the data being collected was properly backed up, then she finally retired to one of the fold-down bunks and fell instantly asleep.

A moment later she was gazing at the twin Dragon spheres, joined now by pseudopod trees, as they spun down towards a dead sun. She instantly recognized this as a dream, so such imagery was okay; it was the other stuff that really bothered her. She could smell something, like burning, or cooking, or perfume, or putrefaction, and somehow that smell was more layered with meaning than any chunk of recording crystal. And over there, in the darkness at the utter limit of her perception, something tangled, hot and utterly alien encroached on reality. She was gazing at a great mass of steel worms, triangular in section, segmented coils and conglomerations and layers of them deep as space itself. Then came another smell of cloves, very strong, and something dripped on her face. In an instant she woke.

That human-in-appearance but utterly unhuman head hovered over her, attached to a neck extending all the way back to the central floor hatch. Beyond it, cobra pseudopods crowded the conferencing unit, shifting about and darting here and there as if inspecting the interior like a crowd of curious tourists. As she sat up and wiped a spattering of milky saliva from her face, Dragon’s human face drew back from her.

‘So you’ve finally remembered me,’ said Mika.

‘I never forgot you for an instant,’ Dragon replied.

Mika snorted contemptuously but felt foolishly pleased by the answer. She swung her legs off the bunk, stood and stretched. ‘So what have you been doing and where are we going?’

‘To answer your first question: we have been making ourself stronger.’

Now the head gazed to one side and, following the direction of its gaze, Mika saw one pseudopod engaged with the consoles and screens she had been using earlier. She walked over, took a seat, and immediately one screen banished its datastream to show a picture: a great disc-shaped cloud, white as snow against the black of space.

‘An accretion disc,’ observed Mika.

‘Our destination,’ said Dragon.

She turned to gaze back up at the head. ‘This is where Cormac went. This is where Erebus came from. You can’t be thinking of going up against Erebus?’

‘No.’

‘Then why the preparations?’

The head came closer and dropped down until level with her shoulder, gazing intently at the screen too. ‘Erebus has now begun a large-scale attack against the Polity, which it is presumably directing from somewhere actually within the Polity, but it is here that it transformed itself, became what it now is. Here, in this disc, we will find the roots of Erebus - but here we will also find something else.’

Mika shook herself, aware Dragon had not answered her question about preparations but unable to ignore what it had just said. ‘Attack? What about this attack?’

‘Erebus’s forces have moved against numerous Line worlds, where they are currently conducting bombardments and ground assaults when not being prevented by ECS fleets.’

‘You got this from Jerusalem?’ Mika felt she should be back there, not here running obscure errands for this alien, yet she felt guilty because right here was where she wanted to be.

‘No, I have my own trustworthy source in the Polity.’

‘Source?’

‘My networks of Dracocorp augs have in many cases been infiltrated, so I do not entirely trust the information they supply. But there is one in the Polity who carries a piece of me around inside him, and he will never be . . . infiltrated.’

‘Who is . . . ?’ Mika trailed off, not enjoying asking so many questions.

‘A Golem android called Mr Crane.’

Mika flinched. ‘You don’t trust Polity AIs, you don’t trust Jerusalem, yet you trust that . . . thing?’ Mika grimaced, reconsidering. ‘You might be right at that.’ She found herself focusing on the screen image again. ‘What is this “something else” we’ll find here?’

‘More roots.’

The answer was almost a relief. Dragon had been giving her far too many direct answers - had not waxed Delphic and obscure for some time, which was both out of character and disconcerting.

‘And to deal with these roots you require weapons capable of trashing planets?’ she asked.

‘No, for the foliage and another purpose besides.’ Mika looked round directly at the swaying head, which blinked at her then nodded towards the screen. ‘Even after Erebus’s departure that accretion disc remains a perfect nursery. Inside, there is material and energy in abundance. That place will be virulent with Jain technology.’

Roots, foliage, Jain technology . . .

‘Are you going to explain to me exactly why we are going there?’

‘The journey will take many months,’ said Dragon.

Obviously not. Mika merely said, ‘So?’

Dragon gazed around at the interior of the conferencing unit. ‘This item of Polity technology may not long survive on the surface here.’

‘Then swallow it inside yourself. You’ve done so before.’

‘I cannot draw it within - now.’

‘Skin too thick?’ Mika suggested.

Dragon turned back to her. ‘I will save your data for you.’

‘That’s very kind of you.’

‘Kindness?’ Dragon wondered.

‘But what about me?’

‘I will provide for you, but now you need to go to sleep, for it is time for you to acquire some memories.’

‘I’ve slept enough for the moment, thanks.’

The pseudopod must have moved very quickly, for suddenly it loomed right beside her, just off her shoulder. It wasn’t the one attached to the console, for that one remained in place. Like them all, this one’s sapphire eye was about the size of a fist, and faceted. Peering closely she could detect patterns behind it, like those of old integrated circuits. The underside of the flat cobra-head was a lighter colour than its upper surface, and she could see now how it was coated with multitudes of little fleshy feet, like those on the underside of a starfish. Below the eye itself lay three little slits. One of them opened, dribbling milky fluid, then spat at her.

Something stung the side of her neck. She reached up to touch a hard object, almost like a small beetle had landed there, but it dissolved under her fingertips. Everything abruptly downshifted into slow motion and she felt an icy detachment descend over her. Lowering her hand, she observed the pseudopod advance, lever her forward from her chair back, then snake around her. It amused her to be lifted high and transferred to the red cave spearing down into the titanic alien entity, though something troubled her about seeing another pseudopod snatch up the Atheter memstore and carry it along too.

. . . time for you to acquire some memories?

During the descent she saw pseudopods layering together like stacked teaspoons. The human head flattened itself and joined them.

Any white rabbits down here? Mika wondered, as her consciousness faded.

* * * *