Then suddenly the raptorish ship was descending nearby. Legate 107 immediately sent instructions that would turn the remainder of the wormship’s weapons on both landing ship and Golem.
Nothing happened. Something was blocking the signal.
And now 107’s view through the wormship’s sensors was fading too. The raptor ship landed and taking up the imploder again the Golem trudged onboard. The last image the legate saw was of the hawk-shaped craft ascending, and fading.
What was the purpose of all that? Now far out from the planetoid, the legate started the ion drive and settled down for a journey that might last millennia. But two hours later the crunch of piratical docking claws disabused it of this possibility. Minutes after, a brassy fist punched clear through the hull from the outside, then brass hands began methodically tearing away metal to widen the hole. Legate 107 detached from its throne and began to put online all its internal weaponry — just in time to find itself on the receiving end of that fist. Up off the floor, struggling, impaled on a brass forearm, the legate speared out Jain tendrils and spat fire from its mouth. The other hand came in beside the first and, seemingly oblivious to Legate 107’s defensive weapons, the brass Golem tore the android in half, then proceeded to dismantle those halves.
4
Ghost in the machine. The fact that ghosts can exist in any suitably complex computer architecture has been well documented. They are possible because as complexity increases so does redundancy, which gives the ghosts room to exist. In the past they were just fragments of code, worms and viruses or the by-blows of these. With the advent of it becoming possible to interface a human mind with a computer, and in some cases with AI, these ghosts can be the product of living minds. In smaller systems or memories they can be images, emotions or brief experiences, while in larger systems they can be whole minds transcribed into crystal — the mechanisms enabling them to remain intact within the human skull allowing them to remain intact within this architecture. Often they change unrecognizably to survive, becoming strange gibbering entities haunting planetary and interstellar servers, forever fleeing like bedlamites the hunter-killer programs employed to hunt down and erase them. Others become some version of those same hunter-killers, but weird datavores surviving on an odd diet of information and power, and when threatened they scurry for cover in their burrows located in little-used virtualities or memstores.
— From Quince Guide compiled by humans
The interior of the conferencing unit was very similar to a previous building of similar purpose once positioned on Dragon’s surface. The place was packed with equipment for studying Dragon and processing the results, and there were facilities for its human occupants: a small kitchen-diner and bunks that folded out of the walls. In the central area was a massive circular irised hatch allowing direct access to the skin of Dragon right underneath. Mika walked one entire circuit of this hatch, disinclined yet to open it.
‘Jerusalem?’ she queried.
‘I’m here,’ replied the omniscient voice of the AI.
‘How is Dragon helping us now?’
‘Dragon has provided fresh insights into the working of Jain technology — which understandably have to be checked — and has also provided us with all its files on the history of the Makers.’
‘But really you’re still getting nothing solid you can rely on to help us against Erebus.’
‘All information, whether trustworthy or otherwise, can be processed to render useful results.’
‘But I note your use of the present perfect. Dragon has already provided these things, so what is it doing now?’
‘Dragon assists us in checking certain anomalous facts and provides explanations of mismatches in information streams.’
‘You still cannot trust Dragon.’
‘When someone has demonstrated a tendency towards accomplished lying, one has to view information from such a source with caution.’
‘You don’t trust Dragon.’
‘We don’t trust Dragon.’
Mika nodded to herself, feeling this confirmed something but not sure what. She strolled round until she reached a control panel mounted on a brushed-aluminium column shaped rather like a lectern. Passing her hand over the touch console she activated it, then used the controls to search through a menu screen to find what she wanted. It was coded, she discovered, and only the palms of those on an approved list, when pressed against part of the console, would open the irised hatch. She pressed her own hand down and waited.
All around the circumference of the hatch she heard locks disengaging, then with a liquid hiss the sections of the iris folded back into the outer rim. Immediately a smell as of from a hot terrarium in a reptile house rose from what was exposed below, along with the numbing scent of cloves. She peered over the edge directly at the skin of Dragon. Scales the size of a hand lay in an iridescent swirl across the surface area that bulged up within the circular frame. The whole of it seemed solid as rock but for one retreating red tendril, like a mobile vein, drawing out of sight at one edge.
Mika watched and waited. After a few minutes with nothing more happening she returned her attention to the console and screen. Out of curiosity she called up the list of those personnel authorized to open this hatch and gazed at it in puzzlement. There was only one name on it: her own.
‘Jerusalem?’ she queried.
No reply.
Mika used the console to access other controls within the conferencing unit, then initiated the voice-activated controls — which she soon realized would respond only to her.
‘Full outside view,’ she requested.
The walls all around shimmered and grew transparent. She thoughtfully observed the draconic landscape beyond, the glare of the distant white sun and the glimmer of stars. The other Dragon sphere was not visible, but that didn’t really mean anything. As far as she could see the giant sphere had not moved. She remembered the last time she had been here, and how the unit then planted on the surface of Dragon had been drawn inside immediately prior to the alien entity heading off into space to find its twin. Nothing like that was happening now, and she berated herself for being so paranoid.
‘The structure you occupy is shielded,’ announced the sepulchral voice of Dragon.
Mika turned back as the entity’s exposed surface below her unzipped, pouted for a moment, then began to revolve down into a crevice that opened wider. She peered over the rim into the entrance of a steaming red cavern, saw a flickering of shadow as something began rising up out of it. One limb of a pseudopod tree folded into view like a sprouting plant. Four cobra-head pseudopods then opened out from an inner stamen, their single sapphire eyes gleaming as they surveyed the interior of the unit, as if searching for any danger to their charge. On a thicker ribbed neck rested a human head the size of a boulder. It was different from the last one of its kind she had encountered, and she wondered if Dragon recreated these heads on every occasion. The head resembled that of a fasting shaven-pated priest. His pupils and irises were pure black, his pointed teeth and the interior of his mouth were pure white — as was also the forked tongue that briefly licked out.
Mika applauded ironically then asked, ‘Why did I need to be informed that this structure is shielded?’
The ribbed neck lengthened and looped over, lowering the head just a few yards out in front of her. ‘You did not need to know.’
Familiar infuriating draconic dialogue. She decided to go off at a tangent and get straight to her concerns. ‘What did you do to me last time?’