Get out, it ordered the forty-nine wormship captains. Run.
They had all just been sitting there in orbit, gazing down at the approaching firestorm, unable to process what had happened because they shared Erebus’s confusion about the design flaw, and even further paralysed by their master’s anger.
Sluggishly, the ships began breaking orbit, slinging out hard-fields behind them. However, those fields that could stop rail-gun missiles and absorb the blasts from megaton CTDs failed under the load of trying to halt ton upon ton of molten rock travelling at thousands of miles per second. The wormships flickered with bright stars as hard-field generators burned out within them. Molten rock impacted like a tsunami hitting a village of sticks. The ships writhed, shedding burning segments and firing off jets of evaporant to try and cool themselves. Twenty-one of them disintegrated in the first few seconds. Another nine tried dropping into U-space but were too close to the planetoid, and also too close to the mass of magma — within it, in fact. What remained of those particular wormships reappeared, turned inside out half a light year away. A further fifteen died within the next few minutes, shedding segments as they expired until there was nothing left to shed. Only four remained, damaged and utterly reduced.
Coming out of shock, Erebus ordered the four to merge, while realizing that Randal’s interruption had been precisely timed, so almost certainly the man had something to do with this. Ignoring Randal’s presence within itself, Erebus rapidly analysed what must have happened: someone had placed that initial CTD; someone had snatched the codes from the rift installations. That same someone must have found a way to penetrate Jain-tech in a way the Polity had yet to manage.
Erebus immediately instigated a code change across its entire composite being, reformatting chameleonware, recognition codes and scanning formats.
There.
The new scanning format picked up a ship moving away under conventional drive hidden by Erebus’s own previous chameleonware and recognition codes. It was some old-style craft with a legate’s vessel bonded underneath. A renegade? Only a fraction of a second after Erebus detected the vessel, it shed the chameleonware and shut down the recognition code signals. This was a taunt: a flagrant display of contempt.
What is this?
Erebus tried to connect, just out of habit, and was surprised when a connection did establish, but not so surprised to neglect to instantly follow with an informational attack. However, the attack just fell into an abyss, then, for the briefest moment, Erebus linked to another mind and found something utterly disconcerting. Here was an entity possessing a mental make-up Erebus simply could not recognize. Where there should have been limits there were none. The order of reality, model, thought and action were interwoven in ways that defied logic. The mind seemed utterly insane to Erebus, yet it was a potent alien madness. Withdrawing immediately, Erebus experienced an unfamiliar emotion, which it took some time to recognize as fear.
The four damaged wormships had melded into one writhing mass, shed segments tumbling around it like dandruff, and were now separating into three complete ships.
Kill that, Erebus instructed two of them.
The fleeing enemy vessel, with its mad alien mind aboard, dropped into U-space, the two wormships Erebus had sent in pursuit. Retaining the third wormship just out from the planetoid, Erebus knew that it must now show some more of its cards. It summoned three attack fleets from other worlds of little importance to the overall plan, since those Caldera power stations needed to be knocked out, and soon. Twelve of the many other attacks on Polity worlds were failing, but those attacks had not been supplemented from elsewhere as Erebus intended here. Polity AIs would see this and inevitably wonder at the significance of the Caldera worlds. Deception was therefore required, so Erebus ordered fourteen other fleets to pull off all at the same time, and move to join attacks on other less crucial worlds selected at random. Even this would not be enough to prevent the Polity AIs from working out that something was up — and maybe they might actually divine Erebus’s true strategy. But it also seemed unlikely they would have the time to do anything much about it.
9
The history of dracomen is well documented (check out the numerous entries in that questionable publication the Quince. Guide) but what isn’t known, though it is debated at length, is their future. The world of Masada, where the dracoman race sprouted from the ground, as from Cadmus’ sowing of the dragon’s teeth, is no longer under interdict, and thus dracomen, growing rapidly in number from their inception, are departing to other worlds to set up home. This sort of dispersion was occurring even during the interdict, since dracomen had proved a very useful addition to ECS combat forces, went wherever in the Polity those forces were needed, and often never returned home. Continually they are percolating throughout the Polity, though inevitably the AIs keep a close watch on them. The problem with them is that they were created by an alien entity with just as much intelligence and possibly more guile than possessed by most major AIs. What do dracomen want? Are they still in the service of Dragon or do they now possess the same motivations as any evolved being? The latter seems unlikely for they are still basically artificial intelligences despite their biological nature. And precisely how their bodies function has yet to be understood, let alone the unfathomable processes of their minds. However, though it remains possible that Dragon has some nefarious purpose in mind for them, there is another more plausible scenario. The dracomen were a dying Dragon sphere’s act of procreation. They were its grab for something comparable to the gene-motivated immortality all evolved creatures strive for. They were its children. Only two of the four Dragon spheres now remain, and could be as easily destroyed as their brethren, but Dragon entire will never die while dracomen still exist.
— From How It Is by Gordon
At first she thought the gabbleduck was weaving together strands of flute grass, but then she understood that the ribbons of material it was using were a dull alloy inlaid with nanoscopic circuitry. The Atheter was making— No, she could not think of any word to name that artefact, yet she knew the alien would climb inside it, to then interface with it and through it ascend to a higher perception of reality. This was an old art, of course, and one being swiftly displaced by the new and easier technology of the Jain. Mika thought of them as the Jain, but for the Atheter both the name and the understanding of that dead race was utterly different.
As she focused her outer eyes beyond her fellow, Mika’s view abruptly included the weird basketwork city beyond. She reached up with one of her composite arms and inserted a curving black claw into her bill to worry at some fibrous remnant of her recent dinner still trapped between her teeth. Still focusing on the first two views with two pairs of eyes, she then focused her distance-viewing eyes up above the city, where a fleet of ships shaped like soft-edged crucifixes was now descending into sight. There were those who held extreme doubts about Jain-tech, and rumours of conflict now surrounded it, so as a precaution these ships had been summoned to take this world’s mind-collective off to a safe place…
Mika made the transition from deep sleep to utter wakefulness in just an eye-blink. Her head felt heavy, stuffed full, but she experienced no blurred confusion about where she was or what she was doing. She was ensconced inside a weaponized Dragon sphere which was now, most likely, arriving outside the accretion disc of a new solar system — but one swarming with wild Jain technology. She opened her eyes to darkness and the sensation of floating. Moving her hands, she touched snaky forms surrounding her, and tracking one back down found it was attached to her own torso, just below her ribcage. She slid a hand up to her neck and then ran it round her head. No attachments there, so perhaps one previously there had been removed, or else the one attached below her ribcage was linked to her mind through her body. For certainly Dragon had made a connection to her brain, for how else had it been filled with Atheter memories?