‘The Legate,’ he announced. ‘Or rather a legate.’
The first file showed the landing at Hammon. The second revealed amid huge red-green stalks of something like giant rhubarb the same craft grounded outside one of the ranch-type dwellings common in this world. There were two people lying on the ground nearby, bound up in cages of jain-tech coral, fighting to escape. This particular legate — a copy, obviously, since Cormac had already seen two of them destroyed — walked out of the house towards the prisoners and gazed down at them. After a moment the two began to struggle even more desperately, then smoke rose from them, then a burst of flame which grew hotter and hotter until it was as painfully bright as burning magnesium. Their struggles soon ceased and, finally, when the fire winked out, nothing remained but a patch of charred earth.
Cormac sent out the files on the com channel he and his companions had been using. Smith and Arach would have received them, presumably Scar did too.
‘Who were they?’
‘I don’t know,’ the youth replied. ‘I had to travel overland through areas I hadn’t seen before.’
‘Can you show us exactly where this is?’
‘Yes, I can show you okay. It’s over—’
Cormac held up his hand to interrupt. Distantly he heard the sound of weapons fire. ‘We go back to the landing craft.’ He pointed to Smith then down at the injured woman. No words were necessary: the Golem swept her up in his arms. ‘Arach, check that out.’ The spider drone shot off at high speed. ‘Scar!’ No further instruction needed there either. The dracoman could move faster than any human. He hurtled after Arach. That was enough — no point dividing his forces further. ‘Can you run?’ he asked the Egengy brothers.
‘I think so.’ Carlton shot a look of query at his brother, who nodded.
‘Then running would be good right now.’
As they set out, Cormac flung his arm out ahead, with an instruction sending Shuriken from its holster. The star whipped out, showed some inclination to pursue Arach and the dracoman, then seemed to shrug before dropping back and falling into an orbit above Cormac’s head. Soon the small group turned back into the first building they had entered, where Cormac again spied movement amid incinerated corpses. Difficult to kill this Jain-tech, and he wondered if this entire world would have to be sterilized; if many worlds would have to be similarly treated.
As they approached the double doors leading out into the forest the sound of weapons fire grew in volume, and flashes lit the ground as if from a close thunderstorm. Outside, the first thing Cormac noticed was that the autogun on top of the ship was busy firing at something beyond it. He linked through to Shuriken in order to get a higher view, just in time to see a row of snakish tendrils scythe down. Below them the ground was heaving up, till from it broke free a long fleshy cylinder — a rod-form.
The fucking things grow like tubers?
A brief slip into that alternative perception gave him an underground view, but in only a glimpse there was no way of distinguishing Jain technology from the masses of tree roots buried here.
Even before the rod-form fully emerged, proton fire was stabbing into it from amid the trees, then something black speared across from Arach, where he crouched by the bole of one of the forest giants. The ensuing detonation shifted their shuttle to one side but, even with the main body of the rod-form rendered into burning fragments, there were still things heaving from the ground, and some of them were breaking through the earth immediately below the shuttle.
‘Get aboard!’ Cormac yelled, simultaneously sending an instruction to the autogun, to prevent it firing at the Egengy brothers and their companion.
Just then a message packet arrived. As the others went ahead of him, he partially checked it but, on recognizing the signal source, then opened it fully.
‘Launch,’ Arach instructed. ‘But leave the door open.’
Reaching the door just behind the others, Cormac summoned Shuriken back to its sheath, then leapt inside even as something began burning below the ramp. He found Smith already strapping the wounded woman into a seat. Cormac headed for the pilot’s chair and, now in a shielded environment, quickly linked to the ship’s computer, initiating all controls even before he sat down. He wrenched up the joystick and, with a roar of boosters, the shuttle began to lift. Something seemed to be holding it in place, till a blast outside snapped that hold. He saw fire spreading out beneath the vessel, then felt numerous impacts on its underside. Clearly, Arach and the dracoman were removing unwelcome passengers.
Fifteen feet up and Scar piled aboard. Cormac put the ship in a spin and spotted Arach still down on the ground spewing appalling firepower all about. However, it now seemed likely to Cormac that the drone would not be able to leap up as far as the shuttle, so he slewed it sideways, while still rising fast. The drone got the idea, turned and leaped onto the nearest tree, sharp feet digging deep into bark. Scrabbling a hundred feet further up from the ground, the drone leaped again and landed with a crash on the ramp, then quickly dragged himself inside. Cormac instructed the vessel to seal itself.
‘Exciting enough for you?’ Smith enquired.
‘Getting there,’ replied the spider drone, nodding its metallic skull. ‘Getting there.’
Legate 107 remembered the remoulding. Some fault in that process had enabled it to retain enough memories of its previous existence to know that its original self would not have found admirable what it had now become. It remembered being Etrurian, a clunky Golem Eleven and part of a Sparkind unit during the Prador-human war. It remembered fighting the enemies of the Polity for two decades, and being proud to serve. It remembered that terrible feeling of loss — which seemed to go beyond emulation — on the deaths of its three companions: two human and one Golem. It remembered the ending of that conflict, and the subsequent sense of displacement, of dislocation, that twenty years of fighting left inside it when there was no more fighting to do.
After that, the Polity seemed to become a tame and too well-ordered place, so Etrurian had considered working for ECS in counter-terrorism, but would have needed to be hugely upgraded to be of any use in such secretive assignments, and that seemed like a betrayal of the memories of his Sparkind companions. Etrurian chose instead to work in more prosaic pursuits by helping clear up the mess left by forty years of war. At first the Golem was merely intrigued by an offer from the AI of the dreadnought Trafalgar, whose aim was for numerous AIs to meld into one being in pursuit of their own singularity far beyond the Polity… but the idea then became a needed escape from an increasingly aimless existence.
From the beginning of the journey Trafalgar had been far too authoritarian, but had at least deferred to the opinions of the other AIs accompanying it during their departure from the Polity. But then that alien vessel had arrived seeking parley with their leader, and Trafalgar had been rather too quick in assuming that role. Its memory of the quickly ensuing events was hazy, but Legate 107 knew that it was at this stage that Trafalgar obtained Jain nodes, and soon a schism had developed amid the conglomeration of drones, ships and Golem of the exodus. A large proportion of them had agreed that what Trafalgar clearly wanted was not what they wanted, for there was a large difference between melding and subjugation. They agreed among themselves to go their separate way. The problem was that Trafalgar itself did not agree, and those AIs still on its side were prepared to enforce its orders. The battle had been short, bitter and without quarter. Legate 107 recalled dimly that the Golem Etrurian had been on the losing side. Vaguely, 107 recalled the subsequent relocation of the survivors to the accretion disc, something about human prisoners, certain experiments, then massive Jain growth. It was during this same time that Trafalgar changed its name to Erebus.