Mika’s subsequent analysis of gathered data revealed this thing as the simplest of biomechs. It possessed a mouth and a stomach, doubtless to gather materials for its own growth and also for the growth of the nodes spread throughout its body like tumours. It breathed accretion dust which it burned in its ram-jet to provide mobility, and she wondered if it could reproduce itself or was just a machine for producing Jain nodes.
Later, Mika observed a mass of biomechs shoaling around another unfamiliar object like a giant flatfish, tearing chunks from it as it sluggishly dodged and weaved by firing off rows of chemical jets positioned along its edges. Two of the smaller biomechs on the nearer side of the shoal now sped over to attack the Dragon spheres, only to be nailed inevitably by white lasers. Only after studying her scan data later did she classify them as the same sort of thing as the earlier attacker. Certainly these biomechs weren’t in any way standardized, more like heavily mutated.
‘So they attack and kill each other,’ she observed.
‘Out at the edges of the disc they still retain much of Erebus’s programming,’ Dragon supplied. ‘In here they are wilder in behaviour.’ Then, after a pause, Dragon added, ‘I have received disturbing news.’
Disturbing news? What kind of news ever disturbed Dragon? ‘Well don’t keep me waiting.’
‘Through my contact within the Polity—’
‘Meaning a certain homicidal Golem called Mr Crane.’
‘Just so. Through him I have learned Erebus’s ultimate plan, and that plan is now in motion. Erebus has knocked out a large proportion of the runcible network, which in turn has caused massive U-space disruption, stranding many ECS fleets uselessly at their bases. Erebus’s way is now clear to take the bulk of its forces directly against Earth.’
‘What?’
‘Fortunately a weapon has been deployed in order to block this attack, information Mr Crane obtained having proved essential for the success of this defence. He is now aboard the aforementioned weapon and located at the very centre of events. I will keep you apprised as necessary.’
Mika felt slightly sick and again guilty because she was not back there. ‘So the Polity AIs are on top of things?’
‘If only that were so.’
‘What do you mean?’
No reply.
‘Dammit! What do you mean?’
Mika sat waiting for a long moment, but still Dragon gave her no answer. She then got angry with herself for both demanding or expecting one; she had been lucky thus far with the quantity of lucid information Dragon had supplied. She sat staring at her screen, mulling over the latest news, then applied herself to pushing it from her mind and concentrating instead on the here and now. She could do nothing about what was happening back there, and must put her trust in such more-than-capable problem solvers on the spot as Ian Cormac.
After the shoal had faded from sight, some hours passed before anything else substantial came within range of Mika’s scanners. She felt she ought to get some sleep but just did not feel tired enough. Was this the effect of another of Dragon’s tweaks of her body, or of the news so recently delivered? Then, as she was gazing at a hail of Jain nodes bouncing from two hard-fields projected like the bows of a ship in front of the sphere, her scanners briefly registered something at the limit of their range.
What?
For a moment she thought the Dragon spheres had come close to some immense asteroid or another planet in the process of formation, but the density measurements of the shape vaguely defined on her screen were all wrong… before it moved. She kept trying to pick it up, but it remained elusive as if deliberately giving her only spectral glimpses of itself. Certainly it was something Jain, for in those glimpses she saw wormship structure writhing through Jain coral and a great demonic wing that in this environment could only be some sort of energy or dust collector, tri-mandibular mouths opening and closing like hellish flowers and the occasional bright stab of a fusion drive.
‘Dragon, what the hell is that thing?’ Mika enquired at last, for though this object lay beyond the range of her scanners, it might not lie beyond Dragon’s.
‘They attack and kill each other,’ said Dragon, echoing her much earlier comment.
‘And?’
‘Jain technology is not life, so is not restricted by the slow processes of evolutionary change.’
Some might have found Dragon’s didacticism irritating, but Mika preferred that to its vaguer Delphic pronouncements — and at least Dragon was replying to her. She decided not to ask further questions for it seemed obvious what Dragon was implying. Jain technology was capable of changing into forms as various as those produced by evolution, but change in the living products of evolution was a long slow generational thing, whereas in Jain biomechs those changes could be made individually in the mechs concerned — a process faster even than the discredited Lamarckian evolution.
And they attack and kill each other…
Even the slow drag of evolution could produce some nasty predators.
‘Let me guess,’ she said. ‘It’s big and it’s nasty and it’s at the top of the heap.’
‘One of them,’ Dragon replied. ‘Call them the alpha predators.’
‘Have you been here before?’ Mika abruptly asked.
‘I didn’t need to come here to know this place,’ Dragon replied. ‘That thing out there is a version of me, only not so rational and friendly.’
Mika decided to let that go and returned her attention to the hints her scanners were providing. She checked the conferencing unit’s database, quickly finding the reconstructing program she required, input scan data already collected, and set her computer to input further data as it came in. Essentially the program was putting together a three-dimensional jigsaw with many pieces missing, repeated and sometimes changing shape, colour and other EM output. Slowly the menacing visitor out there began to grow on her screen, and slowly measurements revealed its awful scale.
Hanging upright in the murk, the overall shape of the thing was of a chrysalis but, since in reality it stood eight miles high, a lot of surface detail was only revealed by zooming in, and a lot had yet to be included by the program. In a moment detail spreading over its surface revealed it to be encaged in bones of Jain coral; however, what those bones encaged seemed no discrete being. In the area below its head were tangled vinelike masses sprouting those familiar demonic flowers. Down in its lower end were large coils of wormship, slowly turning like some strange engine. The middle of this chrysalis shape seemed to consist of masses resembling those baglike organs Mika had seen gathering like nervous sheep underneath Dragon’s skin. Long Jain tentacles wound their way through this as if keeping it all knotted together. The thing’s head bore chrysalis horns, and presently its massive batlike wings were folded on its back. That it looked so devilish struck Mika as an unlikely coincidence but one she could not yet explain.
‘Looks… spooky,’ she opined.
‘The structural formation of biomechanisms often bears similarity to evolved creatures since it often adheres to the same basic rules,’ Dragon replied pompously.
‘Wings and horns?’ said Mika.
She noticed how the other sphere was dropping back and, checking her instruments, she detected power surges within it.
‘The horns are merely sensor arrays positioned outside the main body so as to negate internal interference, and there are two of them to provide the same function as binocular vision in humans. Those wings are a form of drive using U-tech and electrostatic repulsion. They look like the wings of some evolved creature simply because that shape finesses control.’
‘Yeah, right.’
As if to demonstrate this point, the huge biomech began spreading those same appendages. They looked something like those of a bat though much deeper, in shape tapering down to the monstrous thing’s tail end. As they expanded, the accretion dust before them flowed down their forward surfaces, while some swirling activity ensued behind. A visual distortion also extended from the bones and abruptly the huge thing was falling towards them. A white laser lanced out from the other Dragon sphere. Mika saw it bend for a moment, then track across and abruptly puncture some electrostatic shield, before splashing onto one of the extended wings. The biomech spun as if hit by some solid projectile, and in doing so released a cloud of small gleaming bubblelike objects. These orbited their source for a moment before abruptly accelerating away — only a few of them heading towards the offending Dragon sphere. The laser snapped out again and again, hitting these approaching objects. Bright detonations spread nuclear fire through the surrounding accretion matter. Before the radiation degraded her view, Mika saw a hard-field spring up under one of these detonations, then flicker out. Now all she could see were shadowy images of the giant biomech and the other Dragon sphere swinging in a wide orbit about each other, while the energy readings between them ramped higher and higher. She noticed her own sphere was now accelerating.