10

The modern haiman is a hybrid of machine and organism, of computer and human mind, incorporating each in equal measure - well, maybe. She is, however, still a long way away from attaining the ultimate true synergy of this combination. Though it has been rumoured that there are those who have, using alien technology, managed to initiate and maintain Al/human mind synergy, this has not been proven and is plainly not true for the majority of haimens. Haimanity therefore sits in a shadowy borderland between humans and AIs, sampling of both but never truly a member of either. Many believe that they are the future of Polity-kind, the post-post-humans. Many others believe they are a dead end, and that trying to fully meld the human with the AI is as likely to succeed as strapping a jet engine to an ox cart in the hope of breaking the sound barrier.

- From How It Is by Gordon

Vulture brought the Harpy and its attached Jain craft back up into the real, only to see the two pursuing wormships materialize almost simultaneously only a hundred thousand miles away.

‘Let me use the chameleonware,’ Vulture requested. ‘We still have a chance to shake them.’ It might indeed have helped, though it was evident the wormships were now using a new scanning format and recognition codes. The one-time bird and now ship AI then tried the chameleonware again, only to find that it still lay beyond his control. Crane, now back in his usual seat beside the ship’s console, had retained ultimate control of the Harpy, and Vulture felt like one of those AIs, before the Quiet War, who had been strictly controlled by their human masters. It was so humiliating. Crane didn’t need to do this to him; all he needed to do was explain himself. The Golem’s dislike of communicating had to be really extreme for him to adopt such measures.

‘Or is it that you don’t want to shake them?’ Vulture enquired.

Crane acknowledged this with a slow nod of his head, then leaned forward and input some new coordinates. Vulture studied them as the two wormships began to close in. Upon detecting a sudden steep rise in radiation from that direction, the AI immediately dropped his ship back into the U-continuum, energies discharging around it like black lightnings as the U-field dragged some small part of a microwave beam strike back down with it.

‘Nearly fried us,’ Vulture observed.

Crane even acknowledged that too, with another tilt of his head. However, as taciturn as Crane appeared towards Vulture, he had certainly been speaking to someone. Though the Golem’s earlier reply to Vulture’s question, ‘Are you still in contact with ECS?’ had been ambiguous, Crane certainly could not have managed such recent feats without Earth Central’s help. However, Vulture felt that there must be more to it than that. Certainly, the Polity AIs, knowing Crane’s intention of going after Erebus for killing the hybrids, would have been prepared to give him any assistance that did not interfere with their own plans, but there were still discrepancies to explain.

ECS had definitely helped Crane get to the location of this ship, the Harpy. Equally, ECS could have given the location of the crashed wormship - the one that killed the hybrids - and it could have given the location of the wormships in the Caldera system too. However, Vulture had a bit of a problem with how Crane had then managed to destroy all those ships. Crane must have known there was a weakness to be exploited, but one that ECS simply could not have been aware of, therefore the brass Golem must have obtained the information elsewhere. Vulture preferred to believe that explanation rather than the alternative - which was that Crane had somehow returned to a previous state and once again fallen through the booby hatch. And now it was time to find out for sure.

As the Harpy travelled through U-space, Vulture next asked, ‘We going anywhere speciAI?’ The coordinates, according to his library, were of a small scattering of asteroids deep in interstellar space and fifteen light years from the nearest star, and, unless there was something else there that Vulture did not know about, the asteroids would be a poor place to hide from the pursuing wormships.

Crane’s response was typical: he silently took out his toys and placed them neatly on the console before him.

‘Are ECS warships waiting there?’ Vulture tried.

The briefest twitch of Crane’s head maybe indicated a negative.

Keeping half an eye on the brass Golem, Vulture began to submerge more fully into the Jain-infected systems of Harpy and the legate craft. He sampled snatches of the code flowing all about him and studied how things were working here. Soon he realized that though some improvements had been made to Harpy’s systems, especially to its chameleonware, the Jain network did not interfere unnecessarily, except through primacy. On the whole it ran in parallel with Harpy’s hardware. That meant Crane could take over whenever he wanted. Sending a few test diagnostics, Vulture found he himself could use parts of that parallel network and he began to look for recorded data, soon finding tens of thousands of caches distributed throughout the Jain substructure.

Some of these sources contained information that was open to analysis. The easiest stuff was visual files and schematics, which Vulture studied avidly. Here a schematic of a wormship segment, there a visual file that had to be part of a virtual model. But it was hopeless. All this stuff could have come from the legate craft, and it neither proved nor disproved whether Crane had been in direct contact with some other entity. Then, out of vast complexity and seemingly endless data horizons, a simple vocal communication:

‘Well, I would guess you’re looking for me?’

‘Who are you?’ Vulture asked, meanwhile running traces to find the source of this voice.

‘I’m Fiddler Randal,’ came the reply.

Vulture traced it back to one particular data store, but even as he accessed that source, its contents began to copy themselves elsewhere.

‘You’re a virus,’ the AI observed.

‘Quite right - but of a kind quite fatal to Erebus.’

‘You supplied Mr Crane with information about the weaknesses underlying Erebus’s attack on the Caldera system?’

‘Certainly,’ Randal replied.

‘I take it that the coordinates we’re now heading to were supplied by you as well?’

‘Correct.’

‘So Crane trusts you now because the information you supplied before was verified?’

‘He’s a trusting sort of soul.’

‘I don’t think so.’

‘Then maybe he more fully understands the technology I now inhabit than do I. Few manage that, but maybe he can because he is a product of a technically evolved civilization, and in addition because he was supplied with a version of Jain-tech devoid of all its traps.’

‘From Dragon.’

‘Precisely.’

‘But what do you mean by product?’

‘As you are well aware, Jain nodes do not react to artificial intelligences. What is the difference between such intelligences and their naturally evolved creators?’

‘There are many differences.’

‘Let me rephrase the question: how, on an informational level, do you distinguish the two?’

‘Top down and bottom up,’ Vulture replied.

‘Exactly,’ said Randal. ‘Humans and others of their like have evolved moderately logical thought processes through natural selection. Their logic is a skin over chaos. The machine mind is built with pure logic from the bottom up. Therefore machines have to pretend to own that same chaos, so they model it, hence human emulation in Golem.’

Vulture wondered where the hell all this was leading. It seemed insane to be having a debate like this while being pursued by two homicidal wormships.

‘Okay,’ he said, ‘so you’ve established that there is an identifiable difference, though I would argue that the rules of natural selection still apply in the realms of artificial intelligence, though faster. It is argued by some that AIs like myself are simply posthumans. But let’s move on now.’

‘Jain technology does not react to AIs, because it was biased that way by its makers: the Jain AIs. Perhaps they decided that evolved intelligences needed to be cleared out of the way so that the products of those messy organic intelligences - AIs - could get on with ruling the universe.’

‘Products like Erebus?’ Vulture suggested.

‘Erebus is flawed.’

Vulture quickly replayed the conversation and realized that, interesting as it all was, it didn’t really explain much.

‘So you gave Mr Crane information enabling him to wipe out fifty of Erebus’s wormships - a mere fly speck. And now you’ve given him coordinates. Why?’

‘Chameleonware.’

‘Explain.’

‘Another version of myself contacted someone else who, hopefully, by now has fashioned or obtained the means to rub out more than mere fly specks. However, to be successful, she will need the latest chameleonware format and recognition codes that Erebus is using.’

‘Hopefully?’ echoed Vulture, then, reviewing what had just been said, added, ‘We don’t possess that ‘ware and those codes now. It’s all changed.’

‘But the ships pursuing you do.’

Vulture considered how, now he was an integral part of the Harpy, an escape pod would be of no use to him at all.

‘She?’ he queried.

‘Her name is Orlandine, and she controls Jain technology supplied to her directly by Erebus.’

‘But she is no AI.’

‘She was, however, a rare product of evolution sufficiently intelligent to take apart a Jain node while avoiding all its traps.’

‘And I’m supposed to believe this.’

‘Whether you believe it or not is irrelevant, as Mr Crane believes it.’

And there it was really. Vulture could not change their destination. He must trust a virus, a Golem android of questionable sanity and, should he ever survive the wormships, a Jain-infested human. Vulture wasn’t at all optimistic about the outcome of all this.

* * * *

When Dragon finally closed down her outside view from the cyst, Mika felt unutterably weary and drifted into sleep on the soft fleshy floor, where she dreamed of gabbleducks and woven cities and the bitter wars of a civilization fighting infection. When she woke again, in an instant like the time before, she opened her eyes on painful brightness - her view meanwhile re-established. For a moment it seemed Dragon was hovering over a snow-covered midnight plain. However, as the two spheres descended towards that same whiteness some internal detonation turned it orange and threw objects deep within it momentarily into silhouette. Then she began to get a sense of scale and realized they had reached the accretion disc. She decided she must have been put to sleep for the rest of the journey, and this rather begged the question of why Dragon had woken her to witness the twin spheres’ destruction of the five wormships. Maybe this was just more evidence to be added to the dense mass already residing in her skull?

Gazing at the view she felt a sudden deep fascination because, though having witnessed most stellar phenomena, this was not one of them. Also, if Dragon could be believed, this place swarmed with wild Jain technology. Her hands itched to be controlling the instruments she could use to study both this great object and everything it contained.

‘Did the conferencing unit survive?’ she enquired.

It again took a while for Dragon to reply, so perhaps the entity was more concerned with carefully watching everything going on outside than tending to the curiosity of the primitive little being it carried inside itself. Finally, the ceiling of the cyst split open with a liquid tearing sound, showering her with magenta juice. Above, a gap opened up through a mass of what looked like coarsegrained white muscle fibres, then gravity within the cyst abruptly shut down.

The smell from outside the cyst was intense: cloves, putrefaction, hot reptile and raw meat. Mika wrinkled her nostrils and swallowed, sure she could become inured to it, but when she started to experience difficulty breathing realized the air out there wouldn’t keep her alive. She closed up her suit helmet and with relief enjoyed her own air supply, then pushed up from the floor and floated right out of the cyst through an eye-shaped tunnel leading into wider spaces. Here hellish red glows lit up glimpses of crowded organs or mechanisms, and frequently she saw the shifting flashes of sapphire pseudopod eyes. It occurred to her that, without any sense of up or down, she might soon lose her way, but Dragon anticipated her.

‘Follow the remote to the surface,’ came its voice over her suit radio.

Peering ahead she observed a diamond-shaped fleshy object peel away from the curved heavily veined surface and flap sluggishly out into the gap in front of her. Bringing her boot down on the same surface, she altered her course to follow it. But as she did so, and gazed around at things she had always wanted to study, close up, something occurred to her. Dragon had told her that the conferencing unit might not survive what was to come, and she had assumed it had been referring to their coming adventure within the accretion disc. Now it seemed likely Dragon had been alluding to the imminent encounter with the wormships. Dragon must have known for some time that they were still following and therefore made preparations to destroy them. Mika felt annoyed Dragon had not told her about this, though she wasn’t sure why, since, amid all the other stuff Dragon did not tell her, it was hardly in the minority.

The flapping remote, which reminded her somewhat of a large skate from Earth’s oceans, continued doggedly. Mika caught hold of a solid glassy strut shaped like a chicken’s wishbone, one end of which disappeared into darkness while the other connected firmly to what looked like an iron acorn extending ten feet across. Through a cavity beyond this object the intermittent strobing of blue light revealed a great cylinder, both of its ends lost to sight. She guessed this must be one of the Dragon sphere’s equatorial weapons. Pushing off again she drifted past a cliff of solid flesh from cavities in which peeked objects like the heads of tube worms. Mika guessed their purpose was to collect for digestion or disposal any dead material drifting through Dragon’s innards.

The remote finally led her to where progress was blocked by great lumpy bags some ten feet across interconnected by numerous gutlike tubes. Her diamond-shaped remote landed on one of these bags and all its kin began to jostle against each other like nervous sheep, then opened a way through. Mika found herself falling back gently towards massive black rib bones, and realized she had come close enough to the sphere’s surface to experience Dragon’s minimal gravity. Settling against one such bone she watched the remote crawl to the newly opened passage and flop inside it, but that being too narrow to fly through, it then progressed with the gait of a wounded bat. She launched herself towards the same passage and followed it inside. Eventually they entered a tunnel, through numerous thick and intricately constructed layers, and Mika was now able to see Dragon’s armour at first hand. She rested a glove against a layer of thick brassy metal, observed further strata holding what looked like glass shock absorbers each as thick as a finger, studied another layer with the appearance of soggy fruitcake, and yet another beyond it with the bluish metallic gleam of superconductor. One of the lumpy bags oozed in to block off the passage behind her and, glancing back to watch this she saw myriad threads jet across the gap and bind together. It seemed Dragon was now sealing off this access to its interior.

Now the gas within the space she occupied fogged and began to draw away into numerous protruding tube ends. Checking her suit readout she watched the pressure drop only momentarily then begin to rise again. When something like enormous eyelids opened above to expose a metal surface inlaid with curved lines meeting at the centre, she deduced Dragon was equalizing the pressure here with what lay beyond that metal surface.

Mika hauled herself up towards what she now recognized as the underside of the hatch leading into the conferencing unit. With a steely slither the irised hatch opened, so she pushed up to the lip and pulled herself over it, then rolled over to lie flat on her back, heavy as lead now on the functioning gravplates.

‘Full outside view,’ she panted.

Something black roiled overhead, the glint of stars was only occasionally visible just above the draconic horizon and, even while she watched, this mass appeared to draw visibly closer.

‘So, Dragon, I take it we have finally arrived,’ she said, directing her voice towards the hatch. No reply, so, after checking the external atmosphere readout before opening her helmet, she sat upright and immediately noted the small impact craters in the floor surrounded by aureoles of metal once molten but now again solidified. Glancing up she could just about pick out, against that roiling black, the patches that the automated repair system had extruded into place. Had she still been here inside when the two spheres went up against the wormships, there was a very good chance she would no longer be alive.

As she removed her gloves and powered down her suit, the diamond-shaped remote rose into view with a sound like flapping leather. However, the moment it crossed above the gravplates it dropped and hit the deck like a huge piece of steak. It lay there struggling weakly, then extruded two stalk eyes which it directed towards her as if in accusation. The eyes were piercing blue, and Mika stared at this draconic creation for a long moment before she stood and walked heavily over to her console.

First she adjusted the light amplification to give her the same view she’d seen from within the cyst. The black mass above quickly shaded to grey, then to white, as if she was gazing into a fog bank. Then she called up feeds from the scanners positioned all about the conferencing unit. In moments she was getting images from wide EM scans penetrating deeper into the mass, and data about its constituents. Mostly it seemed to consist of sparse hydrogen, rock dust and snow, though not necessarily snow composed of water ice. Mika began to identify some larger objects out there, then, discovering that the view behind was exactly the same, realized they were actually within the accretion disc itself. Outside the conferencing unit a thin fog seemed to have settled. While she studied this a white laser stabbed up, and something erupted into red fire where its beam impacted. There followed more and more explosions, and on the surface outside she saw meteor strikes while simultaneously the defensive green gas laser of the unit began lancing out to intercept and vaporize falling debris. Returning her attention to her console screen she recognized some of the approaching objects Dragon was firing upon. There were rod-forms out there, also pieces like the remains of destroyed worm-ships - even a distorted lens-shape, that being another variety of Erebus’s combat ships. But that wasn’t all: there were things like fragments of coral, tree branches, weirdly distorted spiral shells, insectile horrors looking like something sculpted ineptly out of pieces collected in a scrapyard. The variety was bewildering.

Then came the blinding turquoise flash of one of the equatorial cannons, and the lens ship exploded, many of the smaller chunks of Jain-tech turning to ash.

‘The intensity of these attacks will increase for a while,’ Dragon observed.

She looked over; there was no sign of a head or pseudopods in the conferencing unit. She assumed Dragon must have reactivated her suit radio, but a check of her wrist display showed that the suit was still powered down.

‘But there should be less of them as we go deeper,’ Dragon added.

Right, thought Mika, talking inside my head now.

It became the least of her worries when she saw on her screen the monstrous horde now heading straight towards them.

* * * *

Knobbler turned off into a wider side corridor more suitable for his bulk while Orlandine headed for the drop-shaft at the far end of the current one. Sending instructions to its control panel, which, like just about everything else aboard this massive beast, was now infested with Jain-tech, she stepped into the shaft and the irised gravity fields wafted her up two floors. She stepped out into a small control centre under a domed chainglass ceiling. A horseshoe of consoles occupied the floor of the circular room, and right in the middle of them a scaffold supporting the control sphere Knobbler had fashioned for her. Its door stood open, a few steps leading up. Orlandine mounted them, entered and ensconced herself in a familiar environment.

Though having remained connected by electromagnetic means to the Jain-tech within the war runcible, Orlandine knew this was not at all ideal. As soon as the Polity tech of the sphere engaged with her carapace, her horizons expanded, and when the Jain mycelia of the runcible, which had earlier invaded this sphere, connected with the part of itself already inside her body, those horizons became vast. She could now see the massive device all at once, in its entirety, from the numerous sensors positioned around its hull and also within it. She could not only see all this visually but across a broad chunk of the EM spectrum, with the option of using even more esoteric scanning methods like gravity mapping. But even that was not all.

Orlandine controlled nearly everything and could equally assume control of all those things currently in the remit of the drones aboard, like the runcible’s weapons. The positional thrusters and fusion engines evenly dispersed about the runcible lay at her virtual fingertips. The four remaining U-space engines she could start at will, though, with one engine missing and the others not yet balanced, that would result in the runcible arriving not only turned inside out - but at four separate locations. Almost negligently she set into motion tuning and balancing programs to extend the coverage of those four engines so that they would work in concert. Then there was the matter of the runcible gate itself. As she assumed that space Bludgeon had previously occupied and never really used, she began to appreciate the massive complexity of the technology. The base control programs loading to her carapace, she saw, were presently at four per cent of her memory/processing space, and when fully loaded in a few minutes they would take up a full eight per cent, but when she started actually using the device, that figure would rise to nearly fifty per cent.

‘Bludgeon,’ she enquired, ‘are you ready yet?’ This was merely a politeness for she was monitoring that drone’s progress too.

‘Eighty-eight per cent,’ the drone replied curtly, not being a talkative soul.

‘At your leisure, then, proceed towards the asteroid,’ Orlandine instructed.

It was at this moment that she felt godlike and decided to enjoy the sensation despite her reservations about it. However, it seemed that fate was working overtime this day, for the moment she began to wonder if her seat in the interface sphere could recline to a more comfortable angle, klaxons sounded throughout the war runcible, and those sensors she had set up to watch their surroundings began screaming for her attention.

‘We’ve got arrivals,’ Knobbler informed her.

‘You don’t say.’

This could perhaps be the expected arrival - early by a couple of days.

The three U-space signatures had appeared some five thousand miles out. Two of them were close together and one was a thousand miles to one side. Orlandine studied the images she was receiving: two wormships accelerating towards a smaller vessel and, by the energy readings, preparing to open fire on it. She guessed the little vessel contained the one she was supposed to meet and suspected the wormships weren’t part of the general plan.

‘Weapons?’ she asked.

‘Ready,’ Knobbler replied.

‘No longer at your leisure, Bludgeon,’ she warned the drone aboard her erstwhile ship. ‘Move with a purpose.’

‘Acknowledged.’

Heliotrope’s drive ignited and it accelerated away from the war runcible. Gathering data, Orlandine began to set in motion the programs for making the calculation needed to receive something through this war runcible gate. It was easy for her, but the sheer speed her mind needed to work and the number of calculations that needed to be completed made her appreciate the feat of that hero of the Prador-human war, Moria Salem - the female runcible technician who, using little more than an advanced augmentation, managed to employ a cargo runcible to throw a small moon at a Prador dreadnought.

Perpetual diagnostic feeds from the mycelium told her that everything was functioning at optimum, so Orlandine quickly ran five fusion reactors up to speed and initiated the Skaidon warp. In the pentagon of vacuum through the centre of the war runcible reality flickered, then a shimmering meniscus sprang into being.

‘Done,’ said Bludgeon.

Glimpsing the scene through Heliotrope’s external cameras, Orlandine saw how a similar meniscus now shimmered between the three horns of the cargo runcible positioned at the nose of her ship.

‘Go to expansion immediately,’ Orlandine replied.

While she watched, the three horns disconnected from their seatings and, impelled out by hard-field projectors, their positions relative to each other accurately maintained by laser measurement, they began stretching that meniscus, that Skaidon warp - that skin over reality. They also turned over on their way out, folding that same skin over themselves so that effectively the gate was without any material edges facing forward. This was not necessary right now, but would certainly be necessary for the cargo runcible’s ultimate purpose. Bludgeon seemed to be doing fine, so she returned her full attention to the war runcible and sent instructions to the numerous thrusters peppered over its surface. They ignited at once and the massive structure began to turn.

‘A very critical test,’ Knobbler observed.

‘Stay on those weapons,’ Orlandine replied. ‘This might not work.’

She only momentarily considered instructing the five segments to detach so as to widen the war runcible’s gate, but it was already wide enough. Anyway, it wasn’t hard-fields that would impel them apart but very accurate steering jets. She could see that, with how this device had originally been constructed, the controlling AI would have experienced all sorts of difficulties operating it, especially while coming under attack. Each section of the runcible needed to be very accurately positioned, since the room for error in all the calculations was minute, yet firing the weapons positioned on each section might well knock them out of alignment faster than could be corrected for. With everything now cohered by the Jain mycelium, she could supposedly calculate and factor in the inertial effects of the firing of each weapon full seconds before they even fired. However, right now it would be stupid to risk the alterations she had made failing.

There were other factors also making this easier for her. It wasn’t as if she intended to transfer anything through the runcible that needed to survive that process or pass through at anything less than the speed of a meteor. For normal runcibles, calculations needed to be made to correct for relative speeds by inputting the precise energies at the departure runcible, and bleeding off into the buffer the correct amount at the arrival runcible. Simplified, these calculations involved the input of energy required to push the traveller through the Skaidon warp, plus the energy required to accelerate or decelerate him from his initial relative speed, so he came out of the gate at the other end at zero speed. But that was an extreme simplification.

Another factor in the complex calculations was the C-energy, this being the input energy of the transmission and also that drawn into the runcible buffers at the destination runcible. The events on a world called Samarkand had luridly demonstrated what happened when that energy was not removed by the receiving runcible. There the runcible buffers had been sabotaged, so that one traveller who arrived on that world by runcible came through at a fraction under the speed of light. His arrival had caused massive devastation and loss of life. Ironic, therefore, that he himself had been a runcible technician.

‘I am ready,’ said Bludgeon.

Orlandine studied the situation out in space. The little ship was now running towards them. While it might be either a friend or an enemy, there was no doubt at all about the status of the two pursuing vessels. She aimed a signal laser at the little ship.

‘If you want to survive, I suggest you get out of my targeting frame,’ she sent.

The reply was, ‘Mother of fuck,’ and the ship went into a high-gravity turn that Orlandine realized no human could have survived - which meant there were no humans aboard.

‘Knobbler,’ she said, ‘I’m going to assume that little guy is the one we are here to meet, but damn well keep a rail-gun on him till we find out for sure.’

‘Will do,’ Knobbler replied.

They were ready now - she didn’t want to give those worm-ships time to separate.

‘Proceed,’ Orlandine instructed.

She observed Heliotrope drive the cargo-runcible meniscus down, like a catch-net, onto the tumbling asteroid, swallowing it whole. Since the war runcible was linked only to the cargo runcible, she did not need to check what was now coming through, just make the necessary calculations and apply the required energies to accept that item in the war runcible’s U-space spoon, and then bring it through. And she did not bleed off the C-energy.

The million-ton rock came out through the war runcible’s Skaidon warp. In U-space the asteroid’s speed relative to realspace had been far above the speed of light. As it returned to the domain of Einsteinian physics realspace strictly applied its speed restrictions and the asteroid departed the war runcible at just a fraction below the speed of light. A material object travelling at such velocity was often described as photonic matter. You cannot see light unless its photons enter your eyes, so it should not have been possible to see the path of this object, yet it left a luminous trail like the disperse beam from a particle weapon, for there was a sufficient scattering of atoms throughout this region for it to hit and smash a few of them.

Focusing upon both the wormships, Orlandine did not get to see the impact, for the intense flash of radiation blanked out all sensors aimed in that direction. It didn’t matter that the asteroid only hit one of the wormships full on, as the force of the impact supplied sufficient energy for the cone of the blast to hit the other ship as well. When the sensors cleared again, it was to show a glowing cloud scattered through with wormish fragments.

‘Knobbler,’ she instructed, ‘clear up those bits.’

Immediately, visible particle beams began needling the cloud, selectively burning the fragments to ash. She turned her attention now to the little ship, which was swinging round to head back towards the war runcible.

‘Give me a good reason why I should not destroy you,’ she sent.

‘Chameleonware and recognition codes, apparently,’ replied a voice.

Orlandine could now discern that the approaching craft was in fact two ships bonded together, one of them of the kind customarily used by Erebus’s legates.

‘I’m not so sure that’s reason enough for me to let you even get close to us,’ she said, testing.

‘Well, Fiddler Randal tells me you need the updated version,’ replied the voice. ‘And my boss, even though he don’t say much, tells me you should stop blasting those bits of wormship out there because from one of them he can get you what you want.’

Knobbler’s particle cannons abruptly cut out. Clearly the big drone had been listening.

‘I see,’ said Orlandine.

Now she watched as the Polity craft and the legate craft abruptly separated, the latter accelerating towards the spreading cloud of wormship remains. She saw it target one large chunk of debris, decelerate down towards it, but still slam into it hard and stick for a moment. After a brief pause it then separated and turned, heading back towards the Polity craft.

‘Got your codes and ‘ware,’ said the voice.

‘I will give you docking instructions shortly,’ Orlandine replied coldly.

* * * *

The aseptic smell was so familiar, as were the sounds, the current numbness of his body and the occasional tugging sensation in his flesh. He was in Medical being worked over by an autodoc, probably directed by a human medic. This wasn’t an unusual experience for Cormac, but the profound sadness he felt was unusual, and it arose for reasons he just could not nail down right then.

‘Ah, you’re with us again,’ said a voice.

Cormac tried to open his eyes but found he couldn’t, tried to say something about this but his mouth seemed like a slack bag.

‘Don’t worry about the lack of sensation,’ continued the voice. ‘I had to block you from the neck down to fix the stomach wound and your leg. I also had to knock out some facial and scalp nerves to repair the other damage.’

Great, don’t worry about the numbness, just worry about the damage. Cormac surmised, judging by his bedside manner, that whoever was working on him was not a civilian medic.

‘There, that about does it,’ the voice told him. ‘Your own internal nanites are repairing the concussion damage, and the antiinflammatories should help.’

Annoyed at being unable to perceive his surroundings and still not entirely clear on what had happened to him, Cormac applied for linkage to whatever server lay nearby. There was the usual delay and security issues limited him to the nearest server. He ran a trace using his name and tracked himself down to a military medical unit set up inside the downed atmosphere ship. Hopping from internal cam to cam he tried to find a view of himself. Instead he found Hubbert Smith standing statuelike in a corridor, and though glad that at least the Golem had survived for a moment could not figure out why he should be glad. Then memories returned of hurtling razor-edged lumps of Jain coral carried in a shock wave, of Arach tumbling away, of Scar standing headless . . .

Cormac tried to speak, tried to ask questions but could not, then abruptly closed down on the urge, since this medic probably possessed no knowledge of what had happened anyway but was merely here to stitch back together whatever had survived. Cormac became suddenly cold, now understanding the reason for his earlier sadness. He had certainly lost another long-time associate, possibly two, but would have to wait for confirmation from Hubbert Smith. Turning his focus away from such painful memories, he again tried to find a cam view of himself. Gaining access to the room in which he lay, he discovered the only cams available there were in the autodoc, and he gazed analytically through its sensors. Chrome instruments were aligning pieces of broken bone as the head of a bonewelder moved into position, then Cormac heard the familiar sound of the welder going to work.

Not enough though.

Just then the realization that he had another way to see his surroundings returned to him. His U-sense was slow, reluctant, as if it too had been sleeping. His surroundings slowly came into focus, though that was hardly the correct terminology since he was seeing three hundred and sixty degrees and through everything around him.

‘Shame your gridlink is offline,’ said the voice. ‘You could have helped speed up the repair process yourself by using some of its med programs.’

Uh?

‘There you go.’

Abruptly his sight returned and sensation came back to his face and his scalp, which both felt sore. He gazed up at the white ceiling, then tentatively tried to move his head. It seemed okay. Letting his U-sense drop back into slumber, he looked down at the autodoc poised over his leg, then up to his left at the medic, a blond-haired man with metal eyes and an aug affixed to the right-hand side of his head, from which an optic cable trailed down to connect to a small pedestal doc he was now wheeling back out of the way.

‘Whasss . . . ?’ Cormac paused for a moment to work up some moisture in his mouth. ‘What do you mean, my gridlink is offline?’

While unplugging the fibre optic from his aug, the man gave Cormac a puzzled look. ‘Are you feeling okay?’

Cormac glanced down at the larger autodoc, now retracting from his leg. ‘I’m fine, as far as it goes.’

‘Memory loss?’ the man enquired.

‘Some, but it’s coming back fast.’

‘Well . . . you’ll get these momentary glitches after a head injury like that.’

‘Why are you saying my gridlink is offline?’

It had been taken offline by an AI once it was decided that, after thirty years of access, he had been losing his humanity and thus his effectiveness as an ECS agent. However, it had since spontaneously reinstated itself, though no one seemed able to provide a good explanation why. He supposed that, being simply grateful for its restoration, he had not made sufficient enquiries. Anyway, it was certainly functioning right now.

‘Erm . . .’ The man blinked and tilted his head, obviously accessing data through his aug. ‘Definitely no other damage . . .’

‘Just answer the question please.’

Sensation abruptly returned to the rest of Cormac’s body, and he slowly eased himself upright.

‘I’m saying it’s offline because the bio-haematic power supply is disconnected and all the laminar storage within the link itself is dead.’

‘Thank you,’ said Cormac, now looking round for his envirosuit. Unable to locate it, he decided it had probably been cut away from his body and discarded. However, he did see other familiar items lying on a steel tray on a work surface over to one side: Shuriken, his thin-gun and some spare clips, that Europan dart.

‘Are you sure you’re all right?’

‘Certainly.’

‘I’ve got other patients—’

‘Please, don’t let me detain you then.’

The surgeon gestured towards the door. ‘One of your—’

‘Yes, I know,’ said Cormac. ‘Hubbert Smith is waiting outside.’

His expression even more puzzled, the medic departed. Cormac lay back again and considered what he had just been told. Either the gridlink was still on in some way that seemed to defy possibility, or else he was gridlinking without the intervention of the technology implanted in his skull. And either this was a new occurrence or the AIs had been lying to him. He was rather uncomfortable with this second option, not because he thought AIs only ever told the truth but because he immediately felt it was the most likely answer. So, not only was he able to perceive things in a way theoretically impossible for a human being, he was even gridlinking bare-brained.

Then full memory returned: And I can move through underspace.

He shuddered, suddenly also remembering his mentor Horace Blegg’s last days while he and Cormac were being pursued by Erebus’s biomechs. Blegg had believed himself able to step through U-space, for that was how, apparently, he had escaped the Hiroshima nuclear bomb at the beginning of his incredibly long life. Blegg could also mentally access the AI nets and talk mind-to-mind with AIs. Only at the end had Blegg learned the truth: he was a construct of Earth Central, his memories of stepping through U-space had been falsified to give the impression of continuity - such a U-space jump usually occurring when that construct faced destruction, when its mind was uploaded, edited, then placed in another construct.

Am I just the new Blegg?

This thought had occurred to Cormac before, but really it was pointless speculation of the same kind as that of some people who wondered if their lives were just virtual realities. He must continue living in the belief that his memories were true, else he would despair. And succumbing to the idea that the next time he faced death he would be uploaded and put into a new body would certainly have fatal consequences if he was wrong. He would continue to live to the best of his abilities - that was the only choice.

‘Smith,’ he said quietly, knowing full well that he did not need to shout in order to attract the attention of a machine capable of hearing the impact of snowflakes.

Hubbert Smith opened the door and entered. He had a standard-range envirosuit draped over his arm, and in one hand held a pair of enviroboots and a sealed pack of disposable underclothes.

‘All better now?’ the Golem enquired.

Cormac still felt battered, perhaps more so mentally than physically, but he had felt worse. The repairs performed by the medic and the autodocs would still take a little while to settle. Though most physical injuries could be repaired, breaks in bones and tears in tissue being welded, there was a point beyond which it was better to let the body itself, and whatever suite of personal nanites that body possessed, take over, with the result that no one leapt up in prime condition from a surgical table.

‘Getting there,’ Cormac replied. ‘Scar and Arach?’

Smith shook his head. ‘They’re both back aboard the King of Hearts. Arach is a little dented but otherwise fine. Scar . . . Scar is in cold storage.’

Cormac just stared at the Golem for a long moment. What was there to say? All humans and Golem working for ECS knew the risks they ran, and could choose not to undertake them. Cormac liked to think that Scar, even though a construct of Dragon’s, had possessed the same choices, though in that respect he could only rely on the assessments scientists like Mika made. But, that aside, he had obviously lost another friend and comrade, and it hurt. He could not help feeling paranoid about how such comrades were continually being stripped away from him, and about how he himself continued to survive - and change. After a moment he turned his thoughts away from such introspection, instead lifting up his hand and studying it, which just like the rest of his body was utterly and aseptically clean. He peered closely at his fingernails, just in case.

Smith said, ‘Don’t worry - we got the sample. It’s been properly analysed, and now search engines are checking ECS records. If she was a Polity citizen, we’ll soon learn her identity.’

Cormac lowered his hand. ‘Remes said something odd just before that shock wave hit us. Apparently we weren’t supposed to be here at all.’

‘Wild goose chase seem to be the right words to apply.’ Smith placed the garments down on the surgical table.

Cormac slid off the table and stood upright, then opened the pack of underclothes and quickly began pulling them on.

‘So who sent us after the goose?’

‘One of Erebus’s agents operating in Jerusalem’s camp, apparently,’ Smith replied, ‘but I don’t know any further details. When we get back to the ship, you’ll be able to talk to the one investigating this.’

Obviously there was still Jain-tech in the area, and therefore com security was still an issue, otherwise Cormac would have been able to connect to the King of Hearts directly from here by using his gridlink - the one that wasn’t supposed to be functioning. He quickly pulled on the envirosuit and boots, then went to gather his meagre belongings. Strapping on Shuriken and pocketing both the gun and the dart, he briefly wondered what such a scarcity of personal possessions said about him.

As they exited the medbay, Cormac noticed his surgeon in a side room with another patient before the door was quickly closed. All that was left of the individual on the surgical table had been a partially cooked torso and a head. Maybe one of those with a ‘little doctor’ inside keeping him alive? Besides the medical staff there were numerous walking wounded here. He spotted a woman with her right arm missing at the elbow, brain-like tissue sealing the stump, indicating that she also contained a little doctor, and before long he realized that thus far he had not seen a single human being on this world without some kind of augmentation - either visible or embedded like those little doctors or a gridlink. Those gridlinked were evident simply by the way they carried themselves, though Cormac could confirm the presence of the hardware by a quick peek inside their skulls.

‘How many others died during our operation?’ he asked.

‘Only fifteen.’

Cormac knew that, in the context of the casualties of the numerous battles taking place across this section of the Line, it was a comparatively small number, but he felt personally responsible for those fifteen. And because their deaths actually hurt him, it also occurred to him that his usefulness as an ECS agent might well be coming to an end. Conscience was all very well, but guilt was merely a hindrance in an occupation where ‘ruthless’ was part of the job description.

They entered an elevator shaft whose very presence demonstrated just how antiquated this atmosphere ship must be and perhaps why it had been recently knocked out of the sky. They glided down three floors without anyone joining them, eventually stepped out into a wide hold whose side wall had been torn out by the crash, and headed outside through the jagged gap. Gazing around at the churned-up ground, Cormac located the King of Hearts and headed towards it, soon mounting its ramp. Within minutes Cormac was standing on the black glass floor of the bridge, with Arach and Hubbert Smith hovering a pace behind him. The gap in this line-up that Scar should have filled seemed to exacerbate a sore spot inside Cormac’s skull.

‘I take it there’s someone who wants to speak to me?’ he enquired.

‘That is so,’ replied King.

‘Well, now would be a good time,’ Cormac said flatly, assuming King was playing silly games again.

‘Not everyone can be at your beck and call,’ King replied. ‘Just wait one moment.’

Suitably chastened, Cormac waited, but it was not for long. A line suddenly sliced down to the black glass floor and out of it folded the hologram of a human figure.

Cormac recognized this apparition at once. ‘Azroc,’ he said.

The Golem nodded in acknowledgement.

‘You’re a long way from Coloron,’ Cormac observed.

‘I was on that fleet that went to your rescue, the one that Erebus all but wiped out. You could say that the experience has widened my horizons.’

‘All our horizons have now been widened, though maybe our futures have been consequently shortened,’ Cormac replied. ‘We weren’t supposed to be here?’

‘You were given false orders by an agent of Erebus. The same agent’s remains show without a doubt that it was a product of Jain technology—’

‘And yet it managed to infiltrate the heart of your operation there? I thought we had the means of detecting that technology now.’

‘Active Jain technology can, in most cases, be detected by the nature of the code it uses and the EM output of its nanoscale interactions. However, though this agent was created using Jain technology, it wasn’t actually using the same.’

‘I see, so there could be any number of these . . . agents among us?’

‘That is so.’

‘Please continue.’

‘Having analysed the infiltrating agent’s files I’ve discovered some quite startling anomalies. For though he was in a position to cause us a great deal of damage, he did not do so.’

‘Waiting to deliver a killer blow, maybe?’

‘Possibly.’

‘You sound unsure.’

‘Even without revealing himself, there were things he could have done that would have resulted in catastrophic failures in our defence, yet the only overt action he took that could have resulted in deaths was to issue you with false orders.’

‘So those false orders prove that my mission was important, and that Erebus wanted to stop me. So did this agent do anything else that’s relevant to me?’

‘It concealed information about the owners of Europan dart guns,’ said Azroc bluntly. ‘The searches have thus far only tracked down and eliminated forty per cent of the guns capable of firing the dart you found. However, something was flagged for immediate attention but concealed by the same agent. It seems two Europan dart guns were sent by a woman on Europa as gifts to her twin sons on Klurhammon.’

‘I presume their files are already on their way to me?’

‘King of Hearts has them, but really all you need to know is their names.’

‘Enlighten me.’

‘The twins’ names are Aladine and Ermoon, while the mother’s name is Ariadne. Their surname, if such it can be called, is Taser 5.’

Even though that particular investigation had passed out of his remit, Cormac still remembered the surname. It was a particularly important one since another bearer of that name had once been an overseer of the Cassius Project. She was a haiman, a murderer and the owner of a Jain node - which made her particularly dangerous.

‘Orlandine Taser 5,’ he recalled. ‘Tell me, was this infiltrating agent also hampering those trying to find her?’

‘Not really,’ Azroc replied. ‘But then they, besides dispersing hunter-killer programs to try and locate her if she ever used the nets, had decided that Orlandine must have fled the Polity.’

‘Had decided?’ Cormac noted.

‘Two thefts within the Polity were also flagged and also concealed. The infiltrator created an HK program to hunt down and erase any further information pertaining to them.’

‘Thefts?’ Cormac queried.

‘One involved a cargo runcible and the other a mothballed war runcible.’ Azroc winced. ‘And Orlandine stole both of them.’

‘You have to be shitting me.’

‘I shit you not.’

‘So you’re telling me she managed to steal a mobile fortress loaded with runcible tech whose purpose was to move entire Polity fleets or throw asteroids at Prador dreadnoughts and, if necessary, to drop moons on Prador-occupied worlds?’ Cormac spoke with polite precision up to the point of saying, ‘Aren’t these fucking things properly guarded?’

‘It was guarded by over twenty veteran war drones, but it seems they now do her bidding.’

Cormac just stood still for a long moment, then turned slightly and glanced over his shoulder to where Arach was crouching.

‘Oh,’ he said. ‘Then I guess Orlandine is only marginally less of a catastrophe in progress than Erebus is.’

‘One could suppose that there is not much of a distinction to make,’ observed Azroc.

‘Yes.’ Cormac could see it now. All this mayhem here on the border was just distraction. Erebus’s infiltrator was concealing the real attack involving this Orlandine and her war runcible. ‘Do we have any idea where this war runcible is now?’

‘We have no idea at all.’

‘Then we need to find it, and fast.’

‘Evidently,’ Azroc replied with dry bitterness.

* * * *