Chevron began to receive immediate queries from the security forces in the city, then from all over the planet. At first she fielded them with neat selections of lies but, growing bored with this, quickly put together an automated program to do her lying for her. She knew this would not hold them off for very long, which was confirmed when in a military base some fifty miles away security personnel began cutting links to their planetary AI and moving warcraft out of the hangars. Briefly, before all the feeds from there went offline, she glimpsed the escaping drones she had earlier seen splash down in the lake. Undoubtedly everyone would soon be aware that Xanadu was no longer in control, but they would not be able to react quickly enough.
Chevron put twenty-eight of the passenger runcibles online, outgoing only, while holding the rest in reserve. Twenty-seven she set to particular addresses selected by Erebus long ago. The twenty-eighth she selected at random, then hesitated. Was it necessary now to cause further disruption which could result in further deaths? It was the Xanadu virus talking inside her, she knew, but the intensity of what she was feeling seemed difficult to deny.
Do I really need to send any of these?
Her ship cracked open its ramp hatch, folding down and crushing an automated vending stall underneath it. She continued to fight aberrant impulses that were certainly not her own while gazing through the vessel’s internal sensors to see that the twenty-eight imploders were now ready to go. Brief self-analysis showed her that the delay before each of her actions was growing longer. She was hesitating, procrastinating. Abruptly angry, she sent the required signals.
Peeling themselves from the interior walls of her vessel, metallic octopoid forms settled to the floor and headed for the row of imploders, which sat like large bullets in a long ammunition clip. These Jain biomechs were without solid bodies; open tubular frameworks hanging in their place instead. The first of them reached the first imploder, crouched over it and squatted, the framework contracting about the weapon so the biomech could heave it up from its seating. With a flowing gait the mech then headed for the ramp, its body now a source of obliteration — it was a walking bomb — and the others, picking up their loads too, followed it.
Much shooting was in evidence around the complex now. Chevron linked in to some of her Golem and updated herself on their situation. The moment her ship had descended, security forces in the city had become concerned, but her lying engine had initially kept them from doing anything. Obviously they had now received intelligence from the distant military base from which the warcraft were launching even now. City security officers and military personnel were attacking the runcible complex, while in certain quarters of the city armoured AGCs were rising from the ground but wisely keeping their distance knowing the defences Chevron controlled. At ground level gravtanks were closing in, but it was all far too late in the day. Chevron had meanwhile noted a worrying development: her Golem had been infected with the same virus as herself and, abandoning their proton carbines, had dialled down the power output of their pulse-rifles and were now using non-lethal force to keep the attackers out. At one level this angered her intensely, but on another she felt gladdened. It would not be much longer before this damned morality virus turned her into something she would previously have despised.
Once outside her ship, the octopoids separated into small groups and sped off in different directions. Chevron tracked their progress across the main lounge, along the concourses leading to the various sub-lounges, where she watched individual octopoids finally heading for their assigned runcibles. Now, with each in position, all she had to do was tell them to step through, whereupon detonation of each imploder would take place automatically and simultaneously in the spoon of each receiving runcible.
She didn’t want to.
And when did I summon you here?
The twenty-eighth octopoid was now squatting right outside the pillar she occupied, and the bomb the thing contained would certainly prove a lot more destructive than the explosives the separatists had used earlier.
The morality virus had made much headway inside her — faster than she thought possible — and now she was almost at the stage of not wanting to resist it any more. Only by forcing herself to become angry could she overcome it, and even that was proving more and more difficult. However, for one last time she managed to summon up her former hatred of soft useless humans — and she sent the signal. The octopoids stepped through the Skaidon warp of their allotted runcibles, arriving only instants later at twenty-seven different destinations.
Oh no…
Chevron instantly wanted to summon them back. She had just wrought massive death and destruction, and it was all entirely her fault, yet even that would pall in comparison with the ensuing catastrophe she had ushered in. She desperately wanted to stop this happening, to stop those bombs, but it was all just too late. A combination of growing guilt and the knowledge that she had completed her assignment for Erebus allowed her to relax her grip on herself. She ceased fighting the virus and immediately drowned in a tsunami of remorse.
Belatedly, she realized why she had summoned the twenty-eighth octopoid… as she sent its detonation signal.
13
Earth Central Security is a hydra of an organization and it has to be said that the ‘Security’ in its title is now both anachronistic and somewhat misleading. ECS started out as a force under the human world government some time before the Quiet War that led to the AIs displacing human leaders. Under Earth Central and the ruling AIs, it retained its title but began to incorporate all the other services, including navies, armies, air forces, the secret national security agencies of the solar system and later parts of the amalgamated health services too. During the Prador—human war the ambulance and military medical services, while remaining conjoined with the main health service, were driven by the necessities of war to link up with ECS to a degree required by its controlling AIs, whose first purpose was the survival of the Polity and not necessarily the health of its individual members. During the latter stages of the same war this organization, while remaining subordinate to ECS, incorporated all units whose purpose was to rescue injured or trapped personnel from ships, space stations, moons and planets. It then became known as ECS Rescue. After the war, certain horrible necessities no longer being a priority, ECS Rescue was divided into ECS Rescue and ECS Medical — the purpose of the first being civilian and military rescue, the role of the second being to provide a military medical service — for the inventiveness of weapons design required increasing specialism when it came to repairing the damage they caused.
— From her lecture ‘Modern Warfare’ by EBS Heinlein
The Salvaston runcible complex was like so many others found on highly populated Polity worlds. It sprawled in the centre of the capital city in a location where on Earth in the previous millennium would have stood the main railway station. Part of this complex contained four cargo runcibles, surrounded by handler robots looking like the titanic offspring of a mating between the goddess Kali and a piece of earth-moving equipment. From the runcible chamber in which these behemoths laboured, tunnels speared away in every direction, gravtrains arriving and departing continually to ferry cargo to various outlying warehouses or alternative transport links. Here there were few humans and most of what happened was automated.