Still scanning, and still checking, she began Heliotrope’s approach to her chosen docking station, which was situated by one of the control blisters. Even as her ship began to move, the missile finally reached its target, spurting a line of fire out behind it as it bored its way through, spraying the area of the last remaining signal with fire as hot as the surface of a sun. Then, abruptly, she realized she hadn’t yet got everything.
Scanning showed various metallic objects scattered about on the war runcible’s hull, and one of these was scuttling quickly to where she intended to dock. It looked like an eight-foot-long scorpion fashioned of iron. Several of them: war drones. At a rough estimate, and that was all she could get, there were twenty of them scattered inside and outside the station. They were communicating with each other using brief spurts of radio or laser code, which was changing at AI speed with each transmission. Though it would take time, she could break in, take control of these drones and make them subject to her will. But she didn’t want to do that.
Instead, Orlandine created targeting solutions for every drone in turn, and transmitted these as transparent graphics to the location of each one, making it absolutely clear to them that in a very short time she could annihilate them all. But they continued moving, and abruptly she saw the pattern. Then came a message to her — simple voice augmented with additional code showing that any reply from her would go into isolated storage for analysis before it was read. Obviously these drones, though they had been somnolent before she arrived, were well up to date with the dangers that Jain technology represented.
‘Well, asshole, fire on us now and there won’t be enough left of this war runcible to put in a dustbin.’
It was true. The drones had positioned themselves near munitions caches, critical control equipment and the U-space tech of the runcible itself.
‘I am not an enemy of the Polity,’ Orlandine replied.
‘You’re a Jain-screwed fuck-up and if you come any closer we’ll take you down, even if that means we and this station go down with you.’
‘Who am I addressing?’
‘Knobbler.’
It seemed a typically war drone sort of name.
‘Well, Knobbler, there’s a lot you don’t know about Jain technology and a lot I do know. I have taken apart a Jain node and avoided all its traps.’
‘Yeah, sure.’
Knobbler was located outside the station, hidden underneath a transmission dish, from where he was transmitting by laser to four others out on the hull. They in turn were relaying the exchange inside the hull by other electromagnetic means. Already Orlandine had isolated some of the code they were using from fragments gleaned inside the station. She selected one of the visible drones — a thing that looked like a bedbug a couple of yards across — because beside it was a sufficiently reflective surface.
‘No, it’s true. I am the haiman Orlandine, once one of the overseers of the Cassius Dyson Sphere Project. I can present you with proof of my claims, along with a proposition that won’t go against any of your… military oaths?’
Coding and programs loaded, she fired a message laser at a certain point on the reflective surface.
‘Trouble is,’ said Knobbler, ‘you send us anything more complicated than a sonnet and we ain’t gonna be opening it.’
The laser bounced precisely into the receiver the bedbug was using to collect transmissions from Knobbler. The program it carried paralysed the little drone, and she followed it with further programs to gain access. It managed a single ‘Oh?’ before she took control of it, finding a large complex mind inside. She allowed it to remain within the drone network, but did not allow it to tell the others that she was now in. From it she spread to the other drones, even gaining access to Knobbler as well.
‘I am not lying,’ she said.
She had them now, all of them, though only one of them was aware of the fact. She could utterly subjugate them, include them as part of herself like the program she had originally transmitted to the war runcible. Instead she put together the evidence she had mentioned, along with her proposition, and revealed it to all of them at once, simultaneously paralysing each drone. All of them had no choice but to take in and view the information she transmitted. They did so, Al-fast of course. She then removed herself from them, utterly, and allowed them to do what they would, though she listened in to the lightning-fast debate that ensued. She had shown that she could sequester every one of them, but had not.
It took six minutes for the drones to come to an agreement. Present-day AIs and drones would never have taken so long, but then they weren’t as independent and irascible as these fighting machines. Five of them opted out, choosing to head for one of the shuttles aboard the runcible and take themselves away. Knobbler was one of the fourteen that remained.
‘Well, it has been a bit boring around here lately,’ that drone confessed.
‘I can promise you, that is about to change drastically.’
‘Okay, we’re in,’ said Knobbler.
On the area of charred ground it seemed that nothing remained of the two victims of the legate who had intruded on this world.
‘We’ll check that out afterwards,’ Cormac told Smith, then turned to Scar. ‘Perimeter.’
The dracoman set off at full speed, disappearing into the gloom between outbuildings and underneath the enormous rhubarb plants. Cormac now advanced on the house itself, Arach to one side of him and Smith on the other. He was very suspicious of this situation. Scanning, both from the King of Hearts and from the shuttle, had not revealed anything lurking around but, then again, Erebus’s chameleonware was just as good as any used by ECS. It also struck him as odd that the legate had so comprehensively destroyed those two individuals yet left everything else all around intact. Maybe Erebus wanted the Polity to know about this. Maybe this whole scenario was just a red herring… or a trap.
On the house veranda he drew his thin-gun and stepped up to the door, which stood partially open, and pushed it all the way open with the barrel. Taking a pace back he allowed Arach to go in before him. The spider drone roared into a hallway, then, tearing up carpet, shot into the main downstairs room.
Moving inside, Cormac looked around then nodded towards the stairs. ‘Smith.’ The Golem took the steps four at a time and swiftly moved out of sight. Cormac followed Arach into the main room.
There had been a fight in here. A sofa lay overturned against one wall, and a glass case had been smashed and a coffee table sliced perfectly in two. Cormac stooped down beside a pile of ash, poked at it with the barrel of his gun. Then he looked up and scanned around the room again. Drawers had been pulled out and emptied, a floor safe had been wrenched open like a tin can, and its contents incinerated inside. A headless dog lay in one comer, its skull burned down to nothing. It occurred to him that any ownership chips would have been destroyed too. After a moment he made queries through his aug to the house computer. Nothing, no response. Walking over to one wall into which was inset an access terminal, he tapped the butt of his gun against the touchscreen. It disintegrated to powder.
‘Smith?’ he enquired through his aug.
‘Nothing — I can’t yet find any way of identifying them. So far it seems all paperwork has been burned and all information storage wiped or completely destroyed.’
‘Why be so selective? Why not take out the whole house?’
‘Because we are being misled?’
‘Arach,’ said Cormac out loud, ‘see what you can find.’
The spider drone shot away and Cormac once again carefully surveyed his surroundings. So, this particular legate had come in, taken the two residents of this place outside, and then burned them down to ash. Prior to doing this, it had destroyed all evidence of their identity within the house, but surely had not made a very good job of doing so. There would be DNA traces either here or in the surrounding vicinity, so it made no sense. Still scanning, he then observed spots of blood on the carpet, and some fragments of skin… evidence that before taking the two outside, the legate had tortured them. Torture? Why such a crude method of extracting information? Or was this physical evidence there to mislead any investigator into thinking the two victims had possessed valuable information?