13

Earth Central Security is a hydra of an organization and it has to be said that the ‘Security’ in its title is now both anachronistic and somewhat misleading. ECS started out as a force under the human world government some time before the Quiet War that led to the AIs displacing human leaders. Under Earth Central and the ruling AIs, it retained its title but began to incorporate all the other services, including navies, armies, air forces, the secret national security agencies of the solar system and later parts of the amalgamated health services too. During the Prador—human war the ambulance and military medical services, while remaining conjoined with the main health service, were driven by the necessities of war to link up with ECS to a degree required by its controlling AIs, whose first purpose was the survival of the Polity and not necessarily the health of its individual members. During the latter stages of the same war this organization, while remaining subordinate to ECS, incorporated all units whose purpose was to rescue injured or trapped personnel from ships, space stations, moons and planets. It then became known as ECS Rescue. After the war, certain horrible necessities no longer being a priority, ECS Rescue was divided into ECS Rescue and ECS Medical - the purpose of the first being civilian and military rescue, the role of the second being to provide a military medical service — for the inventiveness of weapons design required increasing specialism when it came to repairing the damage they caused.

- From her lecture ‘Modern Warfare’ by EBS Heinlein

The Salvaston runcible complex was like so many others found on highly populated Polity worlds. It sprawled in the centre of the capital city in a location where on Earth in the previous millennium would have stood the main railway station. Part of this complex contained four cargo runcibles, surrounded by handler robots looking like the titanic offspring of a mating between the goddess Kali and a piece of earth-moving equipment. From the runcible chamber in which these behemoths laboured, tunnels speared away in every direction, gravtrains arriving and departing continually to ferry cargo to various outlying warehouses or alternative transport links. Here there were few humans and most of what happened was automated.

At the centre of the complex lay the main lounge, a waiting and refreshment area for the thousands departing Salvaston or arriving upon it. The lounge itself was a mile across, its ceiling a chainglass confection of peaks and domes. Across a wide marble floor patterned like raspberry-ripple ice cream extended an assortment of restaurants, bars, tea shops and vending machine stalls, amid enormous seating areas. There were even walled gardens boasting a variety of exotic plants and creatures, for instance the one adjoining the Lobster Lobby, into which customers could throw the remains of their dinners to feed the carnivorous ambulatory cacti. There were numerous ponds and fountains too, like the cerulean pool in which swam G-mod goldfish glowing with internal neon. The lounge looked like some massive bazaar, street market, shopping mall and waiting room all rolled into one. However, it was nothing unusual, since places like this evolved wherever travel was nailed down to such a nexus.

What was unusual here today was the proportion of people wearing uniforms. There were troops in chameleoncloth fatigues who, out of courtesy, wore oversuits of some thin white fabric while mixing in civilian company, since there is nothing quite as disconcerting as encountering a disembodied head bobbing about in a crowd. There were also the familiar blue and yellow uniforms of ECS Rescue personnel, and military-issue ECS envirosuits, which possessed the same qualities as chameleoncloth but, their effect being electrically generated, could easily be turned off. Very occasionally, amid this crowd, the menacing shape of a war drone attracted comment and attention.

From this main area concourses radiated off to smaller departure and arrival lounges - the designation of each dependent on what the AI had currently set the nearest runcible to do, which sometimes could be performing both functions. Those departing never had very long to wait, since delays in runcible travel were practically unheard of and all bureaucratic details and security measures were enacted electronically through sensors and augmentations, and at speeds way below the notice of sluggardly human minds. New arrivals from other worlds coming through the fifty-three passenger runcibles were greeted by relatives or quickly went on their way. The proliferation of uniforms today did attract brief notice, but a few enquiries via aug or gridlink soon reassured the curious that this martial presence was due to a huge Polity fleet presently in orbit about Salvaston. Many of them had no need to wonder, since the presence of the fleet was the reason they had come: either preparing to join or simply out of curiosity about what was happening out here.

The arrival designated XAN-7834 from Xanadu might have been able to answer some of their queries, had it been able to talk and had it managed to come intact through the Skaidon warp. The Salvaston AI, monitoring numerous runcibles scattered across the planet and every microsecond making complex calculations it would take a human prodigy a lifetime to complete, kenned the arrival of the passenger in the underspace spoon of the runcible and was immediately niggled by some inconsistencies. There was something odd about the information package describing this traveller, but the AI just could not put its metaphorical finger on it. In an instant it upgraded security in that particular runcible chamber and prepared to deep-scan this new arrival. The spoon began to retract, drawing the traveller towards the real.

Detonation.

In a place somewhere between realspace and U-space, the octopoid detonated its imploder. The blast within the spoon expanded it, and also forced its way through the Skaidon warp. The face of that warp, as seen from the side of the runcible chamber, turned incandescent. Filtering through the warp, the energy lased, pumping out gamma radiation in the form of a brief but intensely powerful graser beam. It sliced straight through the runcible complex, evaporating all those travellers waiting for the next slot. It punched through the containment wall, and fire exploded out beyond. The temperature in the arrival/departure lounge rose tenfold within a few seconds. Hundreds of human beings turned to fire, fountains boiled, plants wilted and smoked. It was as if the whole place had suddenly been dropped into some massive furnace. As it shut down every single runcible within its remit, the AI saw that the only things still showing signs of life in there were the staggering silver skeletons of Golem, their syntheflesh now burned away - but even they would not last much longer.

The graser beam melted through the far wall of the lounge, but luckily beyond that lay only sections of the complex containing the cargo runcibles, and there it finally spent its energy slagging the massive handler robots. The fire the beam had generated exploded down neighbouring corridors, where it splashed against rapidly closing blast doors. However, the massive concourse blast doors took time to close, so for a full ten seconds the inferno played down the concourse and erupted into the main lounge.

It was like taking a blowtorch to an ants’ nest. Such scenes had been seen before on news programmes, but witnessing realtime a human being staggering along, screaming, while sheets of skin peeled away from his body had the power to shock even the Salvaston AI. Yet all this death and destruction, Salvaston soon realized, was not the primary objective of the attack.

The Skaidon warp was gone now, shut down, but everything beyond it in U-space had not ceased to exist. Within the spoon the massive blast abruptly ceased expanding then rapidly began to collapse back in on itself. Monitoring this, the AI deduced that the weapon used was an imploder. The implications were obvious, for the AIs had previously discussed this eventuality at length.

The USER, or underspace interference emitter, disrupted the underspace continuum by oscillating a singularity through a runcible gate. An imploder exploded first, then a complicated form of field technology fed off the energy generated by that explosion to cause a massive gravity phenomenon. This collapsed much of what was encompassed within the explosion down into a briefly generated singularity, then the singularity disrupted, releasing the same energy again. The intended result was that anything hit by such a weapon would be rendered down to energy and discrete atoms only. The aim here, however, was the singularity alone.

A singularity within a runcible gate.

The Salvaston AI had now shut down all the runcible gates, though it had not needed to. The disruption from this event spread instantly as a U-space shock wave, encompassing a real-space volume twenty light years across. The runcibles simply would not function and, as was almost certainly the aim, neither would the U-space drives of the Polity fleet hovering in space above. Now utterly cut off from the rest of the Polity until this U-space disruption ended, the Salvaston AI was not to know that this cataclysm had also happened on twenty-seven other worlds.

Chevron had achieved her purpose: now Erebus could move on Earth itself.

* * * *

The events reported from Xanadu did not come to Jerusalem’s attention until 0.001 seconds after a world called Amaranthe abruptly went out of contact, but even then the AI did not realize how critical things were becoming. Only 0.102 seconds later, sensors in solar systems adjacent to Amaranthe detected U-space disruption extending in a twenty-light-year sphere, with that world directly at its centre. This was now an event of extreme tactical importance, since at Amaranthe a whole ECS fleet had been taken out of play, therefore Jerusalem onlined more processing power to deal with the problem. First the AI ordered the refusal of all runcible transmissions from Xanadu, using maximum transmission power for its own orders so that they would arrive at AIs within this quadrant in under a tenth of a second, and at all other AIs across the Polity in under a second. Then, 0.001 seconds later, as another world went offline, the AI understood precisely what was happening and that mere transmission refusal would not stop spoon detonation of the imploders sent from Xanadu, so it now ordered the immediate shutdown of the runcible network in this entire quadrant. And it was only in that same moment that the AI comprehended the entirety of Erebus’s plan of attack.

The earlier attack upon Ramone had knocked out the connections to the massive geothermal power stations buried under the continent on which sat the city of Transheim. The oversized runcible buffers on the oceanic world Prometheus were no longer connected to massive heat sinks situated deep in its ocean. Suicide attacks by Erebus’s wormships had finally taken out the solar energy collectors about the Caldera worlds. These were the main events, but other worlds had lost energy-handling systems that were vital components in the runcible network. The network was now running like a car without brakes, driven by an engine without a cut-off button - for those worlds had been the real targets of Erebus’s onslaught. Immediate shutdown would now cause energy feedbacks resulting in massive death and destruction, even if that option was still available. And it was not.

Then U-com shut down as a wave of disruption slammed out from Scarflow to completely block travel or com through that continuum. Sluggardly interminable minutes later, radio communications began to take up the slack - with inevitable delays -and finally Jerusalem began to learn what had happened on the nearby world.

‘So it seems that Erebus has been one step ahead of us,’ said the Golem Azroc.

Jerusalem focused a fragment of its consciousness on Azroc while simultaneously learning that the graser blast and ensuing firestorm on Scarflow had killed over four thousand people and that an estimated six thousand more would need to be hospitalized, though the figure was not entirely clear yet, since people were still dying. Luckily a big ECS Rescue ship was in orbit about Scarflow and, upon Jerusalem’s instruction, would be landing there within an hour.

‘Yes, so it would seem,’ Jerusalem replied to Azroc.

All of Azroc’s links to the Line war were now down and like Jerusalem he could only guess at what had happened beyond this small section of space. In the control area, where robot fabricators and welders were still repairing the hole torn through the floor, personnel were already sitting back from their consoles, pulling out earplugs or disconnecting optic cables from their augmentations or, in the case of Golem, from their bodies. Jerusalem noted that Azroc was now checking his models of battles that must still be ongoing - this time with reference to this present attack using the runcible network. The Golem nodded, doubtless seeing the pattern, removed his skeletal hand from the palm interface, then slipped his glove of syntheskin back on. He was showing signs of anger almost human in the lack of control, for both his hands were shaking.

This manifestation of humanity was why Jerusalem had given Azroc the position he held, for the Golem, his mind built by imposing loose order on synaptic chaos, was that step closer to being human, just as some humans were a step closer than their fellows to being AI. Doubtless Jerusalem’s flat tones and seeming lack of emotional response to the unfolding events annoyed Azroc too.

‘Erebus specifically attacked several highly populous Line worlds in order to draw a proportion of our forces there,’ the Golem observed. ‘Throughout those attacks he ensured the runcible network components at Ramone, the Caldera Worlds and Prometheus were disabled or destroyed, so that the response time in shutting down the network within this quadrant would be delayed.’

‘Undoubtedly,’ replied Jerusalem, again flat and emotionless.

‘I’m guessing even that was unnecessary?’

Jerusalem focused more processing power on the Golem and carefully introduced some emulation of emotion. ‘How can we possibly know?’ Now, surely the Golem must understand how isolated they were.

‘How long before the disruption settles enough to allow U-com again?’

‘Ten solstan days at least.’

Azroc stood with fists balled and face twisted with rage.

‘And we must be ready for what we find out there,’ Jerusalem added, then returned his attention to local events. This Golem, with his tendency to humanity, was an interesting diversion and a subtext to the larger issue concerning the development of human intelligence, but Jerusalem’s greatest concerns now lay elsewhere. It might be that miscalculations had been made. The threat Erebus posed had pushed, and would continue to push, the human race out of its evident stagnation. However, the threat Erebus posed should never have been allowed to reach this level in the first place. Consequently, it was likely the Polity would incur huge losses - losses it might not easily recover from.

Jerusalem then decided that the resultant developmental benefit of Erebus’s attack on the Polity had been outweighed, and the experiment it had not itself initiated was, as far as it was concerned, over.

* * * *

During the first few hours of the journey through U-space Cormac felt as if he was floating in a grey fog with perilous geometries stretching away from him in every direction, ready to drag him down. He knew, with utter certainty now, that he only had to relax his attention for a little while and he would be outside the attack ship, and then it would be gone, leaving him to drift in numb void. But he had fought the feelings of dislocation, of being neither here nor there, and tried to bring both his immediate surroundings and exterior U-space into sharper focus. The effort had made his brain feel like it was turning to lead in his skull, and increasingly he began to rely on cognitive programs meticulously constructed within his gridlink for the task.

After four hours he had realized that spending time in his cabin indulging in such introspection took his focus away from the reality of the ship around him, which was why he went off to find his remaining companions.

‘Stick me down for five,’ said Arach, his playing cards fanned out before his gleaming ruby eyes.

Cormac peered closely at the spider drone, then increased the magnification of his own eyes to record the reflected image from those red eyes and cleaned it up in his gridlink . . . that device in his skull that apparently was not even functioning. But he had decided it would be best to forget that assertion and just pretend it was.

Now, perfectly lined up in his mind, he apparently knew what cards Arach was holding. He was suspicious, however, since the last time he had tried this Arach’s eyes had immediately turned matt so there was no reflection. The present image therefore had to be false. Cormac now set about analysing why the drone had chosen those particular cards for this false image.

‘I’ll go two,’ said Smith, his cards face down on the table and his hand poised over them, detectors in the skin of his hand primed to pick up any sneaky scanning. Had these been normal playing cards there might have been some need for this, but they were sensitized and would scream if scanned, unless by extremely sophisticated means. Also, had these been normal cards, there would have been no point in even playing the game, since everyone around this table was capable of memorizing the order of the pack even as the cards were picked up and shuffled, and thus capable of analysing most of the resultant probabilities. But these cards electronically shuffled themselves, changing their face value at the end of each game, and the usual fifty-two cards were played, but chosen out of twenty suits of two hundred and sixty cards.

While Smith’s call automatically appeared in the grid displayed in the glass tabletop, Cormac examined the Golem and wondered about those alterations made to Henrietta Ipatus Chang’s record. It seemed evident to him that the black op she was involved in must have originally been something to do with Erebus but, since her abrupt reappearance in that wormship on the surface of Ramone, this connection had been abruptly covered up. Why so, he was not entirely sure, but he was beginning to indulge in some nasty speculations. Certainly Earth Central had known about the threat long before it became apparent. But how? And what had been going on back then?

Frowning, Cormac returned his attention to the others seated around the table. He would have expected them to choose a game like poker, or maybe one of those derivatives of chess in which the pieces actually fought each other on the table top and died messily. That they chose to play contract whist seemed odd to him. He shifted his attention to the next player and found he still felt slightly unnerved by its presence.

He guessed it wasn’t unexpected that an attack ship AI that had named itself King of Hearts might be interested in such a game. What unnerved him was how the AI chose to manifest itself. Hunched over his cards, the ship’s avatar had adopted the external appearance of one of those sleer-human hybrids from the planet Cull, though its internal construction was doubtless based around a Golem chassis. In form it was a male human with silvery faceted eyes and pincers curving from the jawline in front of its beaked mouth.

‘Three,’ it lisped.

Now it was Cormac’s turn to declare how many tricks he intended to win. In the light of the previous bids, he again studied his hand, though not the actual cards but the images in his gridlink. He felt himself becoming the focus of much attention and wondered what the others might be trying to read from him. He deliberately raised his heart rate and made random small movements. Unfortunately he could not alter his pheromonal output, but hoped that would give nothing away. About to go for a safe zero, he suddenly had a sharp perception of himself seated at this table, with the others nearby, and the whole of U-space bearing down claustrophobically.

Something. . .

King’s avatar dropped its cards, then slowly bowed over until its pincers clinked against the glass table. Cormac received the impression of something like a hemispherical shock wave hurtling towards the ship. It passed through and he felt the vessel ejected up into the real. His chair slid back and he oophed as if someone had just gut-punched him, then the ship bucked and rang with a sound like a blow delivered against some massive porcelain bowl.

‘Oh bollocks,’ said Arach, tossing down his cards.

In a moment they were all on their different kinds of feet and heading for the bridge.

‘That felt like a USER,’ said Smith.

Cormac could not comment on that since he very much doubted his own feelings bore any relation to anyone else’s.

‘Could be Erebus,’ suggested Arach hopefully. ‘Or this Orlandine?’ The two hatches on his abdomen opened tentatively.

‘Could be,’ Cormac conceded. He didn’t know why the drone seemed so happy since, if they had just inadvertently encountered one of those two before safely joining the Polity fleet out of Salvaston, Arach’s only involvement with any fight would be his addition to an expanding vapour cloud that had once been the King of Hearts.

Soon they were clattering into the bridge - where Cormac quickly noted that King had added a couple more sculptures to his collection. One was of Scar, a monument or an exercise in tasteless insensitivity? Hard to tell. The other one was a Prador second-child brandishing a multi-barrelled rail-gun much like the weapons Arach currently sprouted from his back.

‘King, what’s happening?’ Cormac asked.

U-space was distant from him now, but still there. It seemed to be heaving underneath the real, like a sea in motion underneath a mat of sargassum, but what this meant Cormac had no clear idea.

‘There has been a major disruption throughout U-space,’ King replied.

‘No shit?’ said Arach dryly.

Cormac glared at the drone. It wouldn’t do to irritate King now, since the attack ship AI did have an inclination to sulkiness. ‘A USER?’ he suggested.

King continued as if the drone hadn’t even spoken. ‘The effect has been similar but is much more chaotic. I am still analysing the data.’

‘Does this mean we are trapped out here?’ wondered Smith.

That thought had not even occurred to Cormac. He gazed out through the ersatz dome at the stars winking in the blackness. Certainly the King of Hearts had been knocked up into the real of interstellar space, so if travelling through U-space had ceased to be an option, he would probably soon have to be making use of a cold-coffin. This idea did not appeal, since who knew what his frigid dreaming mind might do with his body the moment travelling in U-space once again became possible.

‘We were knocked out of underspace by what appears to be some kind of shock wave and, unless there are further waves, we should be able to return to it within the next few minutes.’

‘A shock wave from what and where?’ Cormac asked.

‘Still analysing.’ King paused for a moment, whereupon gridded spheres expanded from numerous surrounding stars to crowd up against each other. Next, grid lines appeared across the starscape, sinking away directly ahead to sketch out a funnel shape running through the intersecting spheres till its neck closed down to almost nothing. This image then became clearer when the whole scene went photo-negative. Cormac blinked at the brightness, since the starscape was now represented as black dots in a white firmament.

‘What am I seeing here?’ he asked.

‘We were merely knocked out of U-space by a side effect of the main event. U-space disruption has expanded from between twenty and thirty different locations, in each case encompassing a volume of twenty light years,’ said King. ‘It seems evident that Erebus has instigated a runcible-based multiple attack against the Polity.’

‘Why so evident?’

‘Fifteen of the planetary systems concerned were the temporary or permanent bases of ECS fleets. Many of the other planetary systems disrupted are those, where Jerusalem’s forces have been engaging. Jerusalem’s own base was also a target.’

‘What kind of runcible-based attack are we talking about here?’ Cormac felt the skin crawling on the back of his neck as he recollected a threat the original Dragon had once made - namely turning runcibles into black holes. Were ‘between twenty and thirty’ Polity worlds therefore now rubble? Were billions of citizens now dead or dying?

‘Once an enemy has obtained access to the runcible network, the most likely scenario is the transmission of imploders to detonate within the target runcible gate, and what I am seeing seems to confirm that. The effect is similar to that generated by a USER: the disruption of a large volume of surrounding U-space, though the disruption will be of limited duration and unstable.’

‘What about the effect upon the worlds involved?’

‘Minimal,’ said King. ‘The gates would emit only gamma radiation, whose destructive potential should not extend beyond any medium-sized runcible complex.’

So, no worlds trashed and no billions killed. Merely thousands, though it seemed wrong to feel so relieved to hear that. Now he speculated on what precisely was going on. Presumably this Orlandine must have used the stolen war runcible to key into the Polity network and thus send the imploders.

‘Can you give me a tactical analysis?’

‘ECS fleets brought in to cover the possibility of further attacks in this same quadrant by Erebus are now incapable of U-space travel,’ announced King.

‘Which includes the fleet out of Salvaston?’ said Cormac.

‘Precisely.’ King continued, ‘Those fleets fighting Erebus’s forces at the line itself are either confined or wholly engaged with the enemy, so unable to break away, and Jerusalem is out of contact with all of them.’

‘This will mean that Erebus’s forces there are also confined,’ observed Smith.

‘True,’ said King, ‘but those forces were only a small portion of the total. And there is the war runcible still to consider.’

‘So where are the rest of the enemy forces, and where is Orlandine?’ asked Cormac, already guessing the most likely answer.

The area within the funnel, right up close to the screen, shaded red. ‘Orlandine’s last recorded position was within this area, and it seems likely that Erebus is here too. Now, all that lies between them and Earth is Solar System Defence.’

‘Nothing else?’

‘Nothing of consequence.’

‘That seems somewhat remiss.’

‘It is remiss. Erebus has played this perfectly.’

‘Perhaps you could explain?’

‘Since Erebus’s attack seemed concentrated in this particular quadrant, extra forces were moved in from all surrounding areas. That this attack occurred on the other side of the Polity from the Prador kingdom was not noted. The ECS quadrant forces over on that side are positioned near the Line over there, ready to intercept and if necessary follow in any attacking Prador fleet. They are far distant from Earth so would take some time to reach it. The forces on this side, Erebus has already nailed down. Forces elsewhere within the Polity should be able to get to Earth more quickly . . . However, Erebus and Orlandine have a straight run on Earth and will now have the time to conduct a sustained attack.’

Cormac considered the scenario. By appearing incompetent in attacking an ECS fleet outside the Polity itself, and thus revealing itself, Erebus had perhaps led the AIs into a false sense of security. They had assumed they were dealing with something that did not think as logically as themselves, was perhaps even a little insane. They had not expected such a new dimension to the attack - this USER disruption generated by their own runcible network. Or had they? Still he found himself questioning the lack of a more active response from them. And still there were serious questions to be answered about that Ipatus Chang woman. But, even if the AIs were careless of any damage this would inflict on the human race, they must surely care about the damage that could be inflicted upon themselves. Erebus might now bring down Earth, and with the homeworld bring down the Polity’s de facto ruler: Earth Central ... Of course, whatever Cormac thought about all this was irrelevant now. There would be no fleet out of Salvaston, so he could do nothing about either Orlandine or Erebus.

Then again . . .

Maybe there was something he could do. In being able to send himself through U-space he possessed an utterly unexpected ability, one even beyond Erebus itself.

‘I take it you have a substantial stock of CTDs aboard?’ he suggested.

‘I have.’

‘Anything small enough for me to carry in a backpack?’

‘Most of them are that small . . . physically, anyway.’

‘Sort one out for me then - largest destructive potential but not too heavy.’

‘What are you planning?’ asked Smith.

‘I’m planning to remove at least one of Erebus’s allies - this Orlandine character,’ Cormac replied. ‘King, when you’re ready, head us towards that war runcible’s last known location.’ He looked round at his three companions, who were watching him expectantly.

‘Horace Blegg thought he could transport himself through U-space,’ Cormac began. ‘We now know that isn’t true.’

‘And?’ enquired Smith.

‘I can.’

Smith’s expression revealed a convincing emulation of bemusement and disbelief. Cormac shuddered, feeling himself become somehow insubstantial, as the bridge dome greyed over and the King of Hearts dropped into the mentioned continuum. He closed his eyes, concentrated on stability, then in his gridlink replayed the images that the attack ship AI had earlier displayed in the viewing dome. After a moment he accessed the ship’s server to obtain precise measurements of the geometry of the funnel displayed, for he had noted that the mouth was very narrow, maybe too narrow. The measurements soon confirmed this.

‘King,’ he said, ‘to get to Earth, both Erebus’s wormships and the war runcible will need to pass along a narrow corridor between intersecting spheres of U-space disruption. I see that this won’t be easy for them.’

‘Practically impossible,’ King concurred. ‘It would be easier for them to surface into the real then make a series of short jumps wherever the wash from the disruption allows.’

‘So they will have to travel sub-light for appreciable distances?’

‘Yes.’

‘You know what I’m considering?’

‘Be nice if we damn well knew too,’ observed Arach.

‘Very well.’ Cormac paused, knowing the others would not like this, since it meant they would have to remain aboard ship. ‘With all that Jain technology at Erebus’s disposal, I don’t know why he made Orlandine seize that war runcible, but that she did so must mean it is critical to Erebus’s plans.’

‘I think I’m beginning to understand,’ said Smith.

‘Bully for you,’ grumped Arach.

‘The war runcible is heavily armed,’ Cormac explained. ‘King could not possibly destroy it, hence the need for the Salvaston fleet. However—’

‘How did I know there was a “however” coming?’ interrupted Arach.

‘However, if King can get me close enough, I can transport myself and the CTD across to take the war runcible out of the equation.’

‘That’s if King can even get you close,’ Smith observed, ‘or finds it not surrounded by wormships.’

‘Do you have any other suggestions?’

‘Not at the moment.’

‘So you go across alone?’ Arach was clearly disappointed.

‘Alone, yes.’

‘Seems pointless.’

Cormac eyed the drone. ‘Well, I guess I could just curl up, turn off and do nothing.’

Arach swore, then turned round and scuttled out of the bridge.

‘Have that CTD ready for me soon, King,’ Cormac instructed.

Certainly it seemed Polity AIs might be involved in some Machiavellian scheme, and in the end he would damn well have some answers, even if he had to physically tear them out of Earth Central itself. However, right now he would continue to do his best for those it was his duty to protect, which included some hundred billion humans living in the Sol system.

* * * *

As the two Dragon spheres penetrated deeper into the accretion disc, the attacks on them became infrequent. However, Mika found much more to interest her here. Occasional bacilliforms, lenses and segmented fragments of wormship structure put in an appearance, but they were rare and, it seemed to her, acted as if lost. It was the other things now being revealed by her scans that absorbed her interest. The twin spheres penetrated clouds of small ovoids that they repelled with hard-fields, since these objects were so small and numerous it was impractical to destroy them with collision lasers. These were, in fact, Jain nodes - trillions of them - and to Mika’s mind the harbinger of the future destruction of the Polity unless something could be done to completely erase them from existence. Then other larger objects began to appear, and it seemed to Mika that the Dragon spheres were travelling into some Jain-tech evolutionary past in which only the oddities were on display.

The first of these new phenomena to come into view was a mass of leech-like biomechs wound through a quadrate framework that had seemingly been squeezed into a vaguely spherical shape at least a quarter of a mile across. An early version of a wormship, perhaps, or some kind of mutation from the final version? It was difficult to tell. Certainly it was nowhere near as lethal as a wormship since, though the leech-things showed greater activity as the two spheres approached, seemingly reaching out beseechingly and shedding Jain nodes like puffball spores, the whole construct just hung in space as the spheres parted to circumvent it and then made no attempt to pursue them. Mika was busily studying her scans of this construct and thus ascertaining that it contained no drive of any kind when the next new object hurtled like a hunting barracuda out of the murk.

This biomech was a fifty-foot-long torpedo impelled by a dirty-burning Buzzard ram-jet. Collector fields sprouted from either side of its forequarters, the accretion material they were gathering glowing red-hot as it entered shark’s-gill intakes, so that the object appeared to be sprouting external salamander gills. Its front end opened a tri-mandible mouth as it approached, pink inside like a fuchsia, and Mika was reminded of the calloraptor hybrids Skellor had created for his attack on the planet Masada. She gathered as much data as she could on this thing, and as quickly as possible for, accelerating towards the other Dragon sphere, its future lifespan could be no longer than a few minutes. Eventually a white laser stabbed out from the twin sphere straight down its gullet. Fire exploded from its back end, leaving just a hollow tubular shell glowing red inside, as it tumbled past in the wake of the sphere that had killed it.

Mika’s subsequent analysis of gathered data revealed this thing as the simplest of biomechs. It possessed a mouth and a stomach, doubtless to gather materials for its own growth and also for the growth of the nodes spread throughout its body like tumours. It breathed accretion dust which it burned in its ram-jet to provide mobility, and she wondered if it could reproduce itself or was just a machine for producing Jain nodes.

Later, Mika observed a mass of biomechs shoaling around another unfamiliar object like a giant flatfish, tearing chunks from it as it sluggishly dodged and weaved by firing off rows of chemical jets positioned along its edges. Two of the smaller biomechs on the nearer side of the shoal now sped over to attack the Dragon spheres, only to be nailed inevitably by white lasers. Only after studying her scan data later did she classify them as the same sort of thing as the earlier attacker. Certainly these biomechs weren’t in any way standardized, more like heavily mutated.

‘So they attack and kill each other,’ she observed.

‘Out at the edges of the disc they still retain much of Erebus’s programming,’ Dragon supplied. ‘In here they are wilder in behaviour.’ Then, after a pause, Dragon added, ‘I have received disturbing news.’

Disturbing news? What kind of news ever disturbed Dragon? ‘Well don’t keep me waiting.’

‘Through my contact within the Polity—’

‘Meaning a certain homicidal Golem called Mr Crane.’

‘Just so. Through him I have learned Erebus’s ultimate plan, and that plan is now in motion. Erebus has knocked out a large proportion of the runcible network, which in turn has caused massive U-space disruption, stranding many ECS fleets uselessly at their bases. Erebus’s way is now clear to take the bulk of its forces directly against Earth.’

‘What?’

‘Fortunately a weapon has been deployed in order to block this attack, information Mr Crane obtained having proved essential for the success of this defence. He is now aboard the aforementioned weapon and located at the very centre of events. I will keep you apprised as necessary.’

Mika felt slightly sick and again guilty because she was not back there. ‘So the Polity AIs are on top of things?’

‘If only that were so.’

‘What do you mean?’

No reply.

‘Dammit! What do you mean?’

Mika sat waiting for a long moment, but still Dragon gave her no answer. She then got angry with herself for both demanding or expecting one; she had been lucky thus far with the quantity of lucid information Dragon had supplied. She sat staring at her screen, mulling over the latest news, then applied herself to pushing it from her mind and concentrating instead on the here and now. She could do nothing about what was happening back there, and must put her trust in such more-than-capable problem solvers on the spot as Ian Cormac.

After the shoal had faded from sight, some hours passed before anything else substantial came within range of Mika’s scanners. She felt she ought to get some sleep but just did not feel tired enough. Was this the effect of another of Dragon’s tweaks of her body, or of the news so recently delivered? Then, as she was gazing at a hail of Jain nodes bouncing from two hard-fields projected like the bows of a ship in front of the sphere, her scanners briefly registered something at the limit of their range.

What?

For a moment she thought the Dragon spheres had come close to some immense asteroid or another planet in the process of formation, but the density measurements of the shape vaguely defined on her screen were all wrong . . . before it moved. She kept trying to pick it up, but it remained elusive as if deliberately giving her only spectral glimpses of itself. Certainly it was something Jain, for in those glimpses she saw wormship structure writhing through Jain coral and a great demonic wing that in this environment could only be some sort of energy or dust collector, tri-mandibular mouths opening and closing like hellish flowers and the occasional bright stab of a fusion drive.

‘Dragon, what the hell is that thing?’ Mika enquired at last, for though this object lay beyond the range of her scanners, it might not lie beyond Dragon’s.

‘They attack and kill each other,’ said Dragon, echoing her much earlier comment.

‘And?’

‘Jain technology is not life, so is not restricted by the slow processes of evolutionary change.’

Some might have found Dragon’s didacticism irritating, but Mika preferred that to its vaguer Delphic pronouncements - and at least Dragon was replying to her. She decided not to ask further questions for it seemed obvious what Dragon was implying. Jain technology was capable of changing into forms as various as those produced by evolution, but change in the living products of evolution was a long slow generational thing, whereas in Jain biomechs those changes could be made individually in the mechs concerned - a process faster even than the discredited Lamarckian evolution.

And they attack and kill each other. . .

Even the slow drag of evolution could produce some nasty predators.

‘Let me guess,’ she said. ‘It’s big and it’s nasty and it’s at the top of the heap.’

‘One of them,’ Dragon replied. ‘Call them the alpha predators.’

‘Have you been here before?’ Mika abruptly asked.

‘I didn’t need to come here to know this place,’ Dragon replied. ‘That thing out there is a version of me, only not so rational and friendly.’

Mika decided to let that go and returned her attention to the hints her scanners were providing. She checked the conferencing unit’s database, quickly finding the reconstructing program she required, input scan data already collected, and set her computer to input further data as it came in. Essentially the program was putting together a three-dimensional jigsaw with many pieces missing, repeated and sometimes changing shape, colour and other EM output. Slowly the menacing visitor out there began to grow on her screen, and slowly measurements revealed its awful scale.

Hanging upright in the murk, the overall shape of the thing was of a chrysalis but, since in reality it stood eight miles high, a lot of surface detail was only revealed by zooming in, and a lot had yet to be included by the program. In a moment detail spreading over its surface revealed it to be encaged in bones of Jain coral; however, what those bones encaged seemed no discrete being. In the area below its head were tangled vinelike masses sprouting those familiar demonic flowers. Down in its lower end were large coils of wormship, slowly turning like some strange engine. The middle of this chrysalis shape seemed to consist of masses resembling those baglike organs Mika had seen gathering like nervous sheep underneath Dragon’s skin. Long Jain tentacles wound their way through this as if keeping it all knotted together. The thing’s head bore chrysalis horns, and presently its massive batlike wings were folded on its back. That it looked so devilish struck Mika as an unlikely coincidence but one she could not yet explain.

‘Looks . . . spooky,’ she opined.

‘The structural formation of biomechanisms often bears similarity to evolved creatures since it often adheres to the same basic rules,’ Dragon replied pompously.

‘Wings and horns?’ said Mika.

She noticed how the other sphere was dropping back and, checking her instruments, she detected power surges within it.

‘The horns are merely sensor arrays positioned outside the main body so as to negate internal interference, and there are two of them to provide the same function as binocular vision in humans. Those wings are a form of drive using U-tech and electrostatic repulsion. They look like the wings of some evolved creature simply because that shape finesses control.’

‘Yeah, right.’

As if to demonstrate this point, the huge biomech began spreading those same appendages. They looked something like those of a bat though much deeper, in shape tapering down to the monstrous thing’s tail end. As they expanded, the accretion dust before them flowed down their forward surfaces, while some swirling activity ensued behind. A visual distortion also extended from the bones and abruptly the huge thing was falling towards them. A white laser lanced out from the other Dragon sphere. Mika saw it bend for a moment, then track across and abruptly puncture some electrostatic shield, before splashing onto one of the extended wings. The biomech spun as if hit by some solid projectile, and in doing so released a cloud of small gleaming bubblelike objects. These orbited their source for a moment before abruptly accelerating away - only a few of them heading towards the offending Dragon sphere. The laser snapped out again and again, hitting these approaching objects. Bright detonations spread nuclear fire through the surrounding accretion matter. Before the radiation degraded her view, Mika saw a hard-field spring up under one of these detonations, then flicker out. Now all she could see were shadowy images of the giant biomech and the other Dragon sphere swinging in a wide orbit about each other, while the energy readings between them ramped higher and higher. She noticed her own sphere was now accelerating.

‘Will your companion be able to stop it?’ she asked.

‘For long enough,’ Dragon replied.

‘Long enough for what?’ Mika asked, not really expecting a straight reply.

Dragon’s silence did not disappoint her.

After a moment she realized that the ambient light outside the conferencing unit had risen. Directing her sensors toward her presumed destination, she picked up the tail end of a burst of radiation with an easily recognizable signature: solar wind. Collecting data on her screen from radiations far outside the human spectrum, she quickly built a picture of a distant mottled orb flashing like a faulty bulb. She felt it a privilege to be present, for here was a sun in the process of accruing enough matter to enable it to ignite its fusion fire. Like some massive engine turning sluggishly as it draws on a flattening battery, the sun was coughing and spluttering. Fusion fires were burning around its surface or breaking through the surface from inside, only to go out with gouts of oily smoke, each cough or splutter burning lighter elements to an ash of iron of sufficient quantity to construct tens of thousands of space stations, while the oily clouds were blasts of hard radiation capable of denuding such space stations of life.

Considering that last fact, Mika began to map magnetic fields within sensor range. As expected, she saw that Dragon was bending the solar wind about itself. Unexpectedly she discovered that numerous other objects within range were doing the same and the largest one was directly ahead. She now focused on this one and began to clean up an image. After a few moments she ran diagnostic tests and searches on her instruments, for surely the image they were returning could not be right - some fault in the programming perhaps?

‘Our destination,’ Dragon informed her.

Mika gazed at an immense mass resembling numerous blooms of stag’s horn coral. For a moment she couldn’t understand why the appearance of this thing had impelled her to run those diagnostics, since it seemed no more unusual than the biomech the other Dragon sphere was now battling. Then she realized why: she instinctively felt this place to be the epicentre, the point where Jain technology had first bloomed within the accretion disc, a point where reality seemed increasingly thin, and where something utterly alien lurked on the other side.

This was somewhere she really did not want to be.

* * * *