That other presence aboard the ship worried her, but she needed the information it had obtained. Her first encounter with a wormship — the one that had nearly got her killed and from which she had netted Fiddler Randal — had already demonstrated the dangers of not being completely up to date. She was prepared therefore to risk this ship docking if whatever was aboard could supply her with the required camouflage.
Orlandine again opened her channel to the hovering vessel.
‘What’s your name?’
‘Vulture,’ replied the voice, ‘running a ship called the Harpy. Such a joyous working of serendipity don’t you think?’
Definitely a Polity AI, quite possibly a war drone, given that sort of attitude.
‘Well, Vulture, while you proceed now to Dock Fifteen’ — she sent the location — ‘perhaps you can explain yourself further. Specifically I’d like you to tell me something about this Fiddler Randal.’
‘Fiddler Randal is a virus Erebus picked up at some point. I would guess he was originally a human mind in a flesh-and-blood human. He clearly hates Erebus and wants to see the entity splattered, so copies himself everywhere through Erebus’s structure to work to that end. But why am I telling you this? You yourself either have a copy of Randal or have encountered one.’
The ship had fired up its steering jets and was now propelling itself towards the dock in question. The three drones were already down in the bay area — two of them concealed and only the scorpion visible. Orlandine’s resources were now in place there: she could burn out the entire area with a fire hot enough to fracture ceramal, but perhaps that wasn’t such a great idea considering the munitions those three drones were carrying. More important were her other resources: there she had every worm and virus at her disposal and numerous means of delivering them, both by physical connection and electromagnetic means.
‘How do you know that I have encountered or possess a copy of RandAI?’
‘My one told me.’
‘If you could elaborate?’
‘Stop fucking around, Orlandine. You were advised someone would arrive here bringing precisely what we’re bringing you, so what’s the problem?’
‘Very well.’ Orlandine wanted to question further but guessed she would find out more soon enough. In any event, she couldn’t afford not to let this vessel dock. She studied its slow approach, continued trying to probe it but learned nothing new. The twinned ship finally docked, and she instantly recognized what walked out of it — as did the three war drones waiting in the bay, from the way their weapons came online all at once.
‘You’ve brought something for me,’ she said to the menacing figure.
Mr Crane nodded briefly and information began to flow across to her, even though she had not herself permitted it. For half a second everything stood poised on the edge of disaster, until Orlandine began to take a look at what he had sent: the wealth of secret codes, the multiple methods of configuring the chameleonware she was already spreading throughout the war runcible, and the knowledge that she had a lot of work to do and very little time.
The accretion disc seemed to be some living body and the horde now rushing towards the two Dragon spheres its immune response to them. Mika firmly controlled the impulse to run and find somewhere to hide, then began analysing all those weird forms out there in the brief time they were open to her inspection before an equatorial particle cannon, white laser or CTD proceeded to fry them. She realized they were a much more diverse collection of Jain biomechs than those utilized by Erebus, yet none of them approached the size or coherence of a full wormship. There were lenses but all of them deformed, and they often had some other entity attached to them either in symbiosis, mutualism or parasitism — it was difficult to tell. The structures that made up wormships rarely achieved more than a few turns of a spiral, and though numerous bacilliforms now fell like hail towards the Dragon spheres, they never melded together to form those thousand-mile-high walls she had seen in recordings of previous conflicts with these things.
Clearly a guiding intelligence was lacking here. This was Jain technology initiated into growth by such an intelligence then abandoned. She had studied similar growth burgeoning on an asteroid in orbit about the red giant sun Ruby Eye. This stuff tried to spread itself in the same way as a virus or bacillus — with the kind of cunning selected by evolution but utterly without sentience. By now, if there had been a guiding intelligence, their attack would have been halted, for none of these biomechs managed to get even close to the Dragon spheres, yet they continued to approach with a kind of automated futility.
‘What happens if one of these things actually reaches your surface?’ she asked.
The voice in her head replied, ‘None of them will.’
‘Yeah, but what if?’
‘They would not be able to penetrate me unless many thousands of them reached my surface all at once.’
‘And then?’
‘I would sterilize that area.’
It occurred to Mika that maybe she should have stayed safely inside Dragon, because ‘sterilize’ was almost certainly too mild a term to describe what might be needed here. She returned her attention to her instruments, but then, a moment later, an orange glow in the surrounding fug dragged her attention upward. Though there were all sorts of flashes and detonations occurring about the spheres, they were short-lived, whereas this light remained constant.
‘What’s that?’
‘A planet in the process of formation.’
‘Are we going anywhere near it?’ Mika asked, fascinated.
‘Very close,’ Dragon replied. ‘The entities currently attacking us show no inclination to hold back, therefore are not too bright, and it has become evident that few of them possess anything more than rudimentary engines.’
‘And.’
‘I suggest that you strap yourself tightly into your chair and just watch.’
Mika quickly obeyed, then eased the chair back to get a better view of her surroundings. It seemed as if a wind was blowing out there in the fug because, as well as the constant motion in it from the passage of the Dragon sphere, it was now swirling rapidly and she could detect cross-currents. Something massive then appeared out of it to her left and she observed an asteroid slowly turning, its surface coated with snaky growth so that it seemed like some massive fossil. Biomechs leaped from its surface, chemical drives sputtering to life, but the Dragon spheres outpaced them and soon they and their rocky home had receded from view.
Next Mika felt the tug of gravity at a slant to her present position, which produced the illusion of the floor tilting. The equatorial cannons had ceased firing by now, but Dragon’s white lasers continued to stab through the murk. The meteor lasers of the conferencing unit were also firing, things flashing like firecrackers and blinking out all about her. Slowly, the fug began to clear and she gained a clearer direct view of the pursuing horde. Briefly she glimpsed the other sphere off to one side, then turning her head gazed upon the volcanic glare of a new world in the process of formation.
The world itself was misshapen, probably as the result of a recent impact, for one entire side of it was a magma lake into which a titanic mountain was steadily sinking. Plumes of magma regularly spewed miles into the air, hellish cracks opened even as she watched, and the surface flickered with the constant explosion of strikes from a never-ending meteor storm. It rained meteors here, it rained fire, and fire spewed from the ground, but steadily the Dragon spheres descended towards this chaos.
It seemed to take forever for this nascent world to make the transition from an object hanging in space to a plain extending below her and a horizon ahead. Mika gazed down upon rivers and lakes of lava glaring through a sooty black crust. The tug of the planet was countering that of the gravplates below her, so she felt light in her chair. She imagined herself in some glassy cockpit set into the surface of the Dragon sphere, just below its equator, and oriented towards a point midway between the ground below and the horizon. The sky ahead was cut diagonally with parallel meteor trails, which meant the debris orbiting beyond this world must have formed into a swirl pattern, and the horizon flashed with explosions as if of some distant battle.