‘So, you don’t want to talk to me,’ murmured Skellor, walking down the curve of the hull and dropping the last few metres to the ground. He turned to watch Crane follow him, and thought to himself that such words might be bravado. He was now down on a primitive planet with his ship wrecked, while the one he had come to see was unprepared to communicate. And he had just learned he had been carrying a spy with him all the time. It seemed optimistic to hope that Vulture had not managed to get information out to the Polity and its watchdog, ECS. So now, rather than go Dragon hunting, Skellor realized he must make repairs and give himself the option of escape. He looked Crane up and down.
‘I think I will have to send an envoy, though diplomacy is not exactly your forte.’
As Mr Crane brushed dust from his coat, Skellor observed the few rips there repairing themselves. Now, while the Golem straightened his hat, Skellor remembered, from recordings found on the Occam Razor, how Dragon had named Jain technology the enemy and, upon learning of its presence aboard that ship, had been eager to depart.
‘Perhaps Dragon won’t perceive you as so much of a threat as myself, if you are only a machine.’ He stepped forwards and reached out to press his hand against Crane’s chest. Crane did nothing more than blink his black eyes, then tilt his head to look down at the hand. Skellor connected to the mycelium he had installed inside the Golem, and began to look very closely at what it had wrought underneath that brass skin. Certainly, some sections of this mycelium were inaccessible to Skellor, just as they had been in the Separatist woman, Aphran, on the Occam Razor. Also, it had made unexpected changes inside the Golem that had vastly improved the efficiency of his workings. But the mycelium was inferior—a simple analogue of what lived in Skellor, what he was, in fact—and was as vulnerable to him as a spider web is to flame. Skellor encompassed all its transformations and made provision for them in the nanocite counteragent he had created, like a mirror image, the moment he resurrected Mr Crane. And the palm of his hand grew warm as that agent entered the brass killing-machine.
Skellor stepped back and watched on many levels. The mycelium inside Crane began dissolving at the point of contact, and that dissolution spread. Microscopic and macroscopic fibres withered. Memory-storage nodes no iarger than a grain of salt collapsed to dust. Independent nanomachines designed and created by the mycelium for specific purposes, the nanocites were hunted and brought down like wildebeest by a pack of hyenas. Then, when nothing but the hyenas remained, they too began to disintegrate. And Skellor’s vision then became only external. If he had expected any dramatic reaction from the obdurate Golem, he was disappointed. Crane stood there as unchanged as a prehistoric monument—until he raised his head. For a moment, Skellor thought he read petulance in that metal face, but surely that was unlikely.
‘Dragon,’ Skellor said, ‘no doubt you’ll decode this from the fragmented mind of this Golem. I have not come to attack you, but to learn from you. When you are ready, please open a link with me and I will communicate only verbally. I have much to gain from you, and you have much to gain from me.’
Skellor turned, sending the signal through the primitive control module Arian Pelter had used to get Crane on his way. The second-stage sleer, sneaking up through the dust cloud, he had detected some time earlier, and as a footnote to the message he instructed Crane to ‘Deal with that.’
Out of settling dust, the sleer came scuttling and sliding, its mouth cutlery rubbing together with a sound like an automatic hacksaw, with jets of lubricating fluid spraying from glands positioned beside its mouth. Skellor observed the creature analytically, then moved aside. Crane stepped forward and brought his boot down. Hard. The sleer, its head crushed to pulp, rattled its legs against the ground and expired with a sound like an unknotted balloon.
‘Interesting place,’ said Skellor, turning back to the Vulture.
Without looking round, Crane moved off.
11
The Quiet War: This is often how the AI takeover is described, and even using ‘war’ seems overly dramatic. It was more a slow usurpation of human political and military power, while humans were busy using that power against each other. It wasn’t even very stealthy. Analogies have been drawn with someone moving a gun out of the reach of a lunatic while that person is ranting and bellowing at someone else. And so it was. AIs, long used in the many corporate, national and religious conflicts, took over all communication networks and the computer control of weapons systems. Most importantly, they already controlled the enclosed human environments scattered throughout the solar system. Also establishing themselves as corporate entities, they soon accrued vast wealth with which to employ human mercenary armies. National leaders in the solar system, ordering this launch or that attack, found their orders either just did not arrive, or caused nil response. Those same people, ordering the destruction of the AIs, found themselves weaponless, in environments utterly out of their control, and up against superior forces and, on the whole, public opinion. It had not taken the general population, for whom it was a long-established tradition to look upon their human leaders with contempt, very long to realize that the AIs were better at running everything. And it is very difficult to motivate people to revolution when they are extremely comfortable and well off.
— From Quince Guide compiled by humans
The asteroid, with the bridge pod now separate, Jerusalem scoured down to the molecular level. Keeping it in quarantine had become a pointless exercise, and the object only a hindrance until now. The Jerusalem surfaced from U-space like an iron moon coming out of shadow, blood red in the light of the dwarf star. This little-acknowledged system was busy now, and all around ships were appearing with similar alacrity to the Jerusalem, but they were closing in on the research station, Ruby Eye, while the big research vessel itself fell into orbit around the red dwarf. Here, the doors to one of its massive holds opened and the great ship decelerated. Free from restraint now, the asteroid from the belt proximate to Elysium slid smoothly out into space. The Jerusalem then turned, leaving the great rock hovering in black silhouette over the sun, revolving gently as it took the course of its slow orbit.
Something then spat from the Jerusalem: a chainglass sphere two metres in diameter, coin-shaped debonders attached to its poles. It headed straight towards the asteroid and then, ten metres from impact, the de-bonders found the ends of the long silicate molecules making up the glass, and set them unravelling. The sphere became opaque, fuzzy, and when it hit the rocky surface, it disappeared in a cloud of white dust. What it contained, looking like the dirt-clogged root system of a tree, bounced once, seemed to shift as it came down again, and stuck. As the asteroid turned into the harsh heat and light of the sun, the object on its surface stretched as if waking from a long sleep, and began to grow.
They halted out of sight of the minerallier encampment and Anderson began to ready his equipment. Watching the knight assembling his lance, Tergal wondered if he himself might have done better to stay behind. He guessed it was all about the level of damage a weapon could inflict. Bullets from Anderson’s fusile might just penetrate hard carapace, but were just as likely to bounce off.