‘What now, boss?’ Arach enquired
‘Can you contact King?’
‘Nah,’ said the drone. ‘Lot of EMR out there and there’s signal-blocking in this place.’ Arach reached out to point one limb up.
Cormac looked up to see that running above them was an open framework of bubble-metal stanchions. Wound around some of these were metallic vinelike growths he recognized instantly.
‘I reckon it’s everywhere here,’ the drone added, punctuating this comment by opening his abdomen hatches to extrude his Gatling cannons.
Cormac again shouldered his rucksack. A brief instruction to Shuriken prepared the weapon for fast release, then he raised his proton carbine and hoped to hell he wouldn’t have to use it.
‘She must know that we’re here by now,’ he said.
‘How true,’ said a voice he knew was Orlandine’s.
Something peeled open twin sliding doors at the end of the corridor and a monstrous figure crashed through. Cormac crouched protectively and observed the bastard child of a giant steel octopus and a crab. War drone. One of Arach’s Gatling cannons turned and fired. The thing was lost in flame, then an instant later Arach’s missiles were detonating against a hard-field some yards ahead of it. Arach ceased firing and backed up until standing directly before Cormac. Behind the hard-field, the big drone braced its tentacular limbs against the walls of the corridor. Then its lower waspish abdomen detached and drifted forward. It began turning randomly, and around it the air filled with distortions like hard-edged heat haze. Cormac was unsure of what he was seeing until he spotted a chunk of metal sticking out from one wall clatter to the floor, cut clean through. This object was projecting atomic shear fields, and now it advanced to the hard-field and began to slide through.
‘I might survive this,’ observed Arach. ‘But you won’t unless you get the hell out of here.’
Cormac glanced back down the corridor to another twin door, before facing forward again. He could take himself away in an instant, and he could take Arach with him, but now that he was here he wanted some answers.
He stood up and held out his rucksack. ‘My death will result in this detonating, but I don’t even have to die. I can transport myself and my companion, in the same way I brought us here, to any other part of this runcible and then send the signal for this to detonate from there.’
The spinning abdomen was now through the hard-field. When its invisible shears brushed the walls they made sounds like sharpening knives. Cormac reached into his pocket, groped around for a moment, then pulled out the Europan dart. He held it up.
‘Orlandine,’ he said, ‘I know you can hear me and I know you can see me. You can probably do so much more than that because of course you’ve deified yourself with a Jain node.’
Abruptly the thing ahead stopped spinning and just hung motionless in the air.
‘Orlandine,’ Cormac continued, ‘I want you to tell me about Klurhammon and your two brothers.’
The reply was immediate. ‘You could have asked me that while you were still aboard your attack ship. Incidentally, that’s a neat ability you have there. It is one, despite my deification, as you call it, that I don’t possess.’
‘I can stop you now,’ Cormac replied. ‘But while I was aboard King of Hearts that was not an option.’
‘Why would you want to stop me destroying Erebus?’
‘I need to be convinced that is your true purpose.’
‘Very well, Ian Cormac of ECS, leave your CTD on the floor there and Knobbler will bring you to me.’
Cormac paused for a long moment. After all, she had control of Jain technology, probably provided to her by Erebus, and there was the danger she could interfere with his link to the CTD if he gave her time. She was a known murderer and a thief who controlled war drones, like this Knobbler, and a weapon capable of trashing planets. The right and logical thing to do would be to detonate the CTD and remove this threat to the Polity. However, there were too many inconsistencies here — too much he could not see clearly. Erebus had attacked a planet ‘of no tactical importance’ on which her brothers had resided, and this dart he held was discovered there near where two humans had been specifically murdered by a legate.
He needed answers. However, as he unshouldered the CTD and placed it on the floor, an uncomfortable notion occurred to him. It wasn’t the events on Klurhammon that mainly influenced his decision. He did not want to die. He no longer trusted those he had spent most of his life working for. And she sounded sane.
‘Are you sure ‘bout this, boss?’ asked Arach.
‘Not entirely.’
‘Right,’ said the drone, retracting his cannons and closing their hatches.
Cormac looked beyond Arach to the other drone at the end of the corridor. Abruptly the hard-field winked out and the shear device drew back to reconnect and once again become part of Knobbler. The big drone turned fluidly but noisily, before it gestured with a long evil-looking pincer on the end of one tentacle. ‘Follow me,’ it said.
15
Before the Quiet War, the Earth Central AI was an electronic bureaucrat processing the day-to-day minutiae of running Earth’s government and economy. With most industries being run by machines, it was the job of the political and corporate classes (one and the same by then) to dictate to the lower classes — who were mostly on some form of state handout — every aspect of their lives, or to pursue the really important aspects of their position, such as fattening their bank accounts, screwing their secretaries, being seen with media stars and generally sucking up the cream of society. These human politicians and corporate leaders, who made up the parliament of Earth Central, did not have time for balancing budgets, calculating taxation and running services on a worldwide and often extra-planetary scale. They took their eye off the ball. After the Quiet War, the Earth Central AI became supreme autocrat and a better ruler than the human race had seen before. Better, but not necessarily the best.
— Anonymous
As her little intership craft drew closer to that bloom of Jain coral, Mika felt easier about piloting the more she comprehended the scale of her surroundings. Out at the edge here the gaps between the branches were up to a half-mile wide, so she felt in little danger of crashing into them since she was equivalent to a gnat flying between the branches of an oak tree. However, it seemed that as those worries abated, they revealed a deeper fear sitting like a lead ball in her gut. Here she was, flying into a massive alien artefact in order to find alien AIs and wake them from their five-million-year sleep. When she actually focused her mind on that, she felt near to the borderlands of madness and didn’t know whether to giggle or scream. So next she forced herself to focus on her immediate surroundings and each consecutive task ahead.
Travelling past it at only a few hundred miles an hour, she studied the attack ship caught between two branches. It was of an old style not often seen in the Polity nowadays: all sharp comers and flat surfaces, which were a requirement for the kind of chameleonware and armour used then, and two U-engine nacelles protruding so far from the main body that they appeared to be pinioned on the end of wings. She noted how the craft had been penetrated by vinelike Jain tendrils, and distorted and lost much of its substance as if someone had poured acid on the centre of its main body. She visualized the massive bloom here spreading like a slow explosion, and then one branch of Jain-tech shooting out like a Dragon pseudopod to spear this ship and suck the life out of it. Surely the AI aboard had acceded to this, else it would have moved out of the way? Mika had never seen Jain growth travel any faster than the strike of a snake, which over the distances involved here would have appeared as a slow crawl. Then again the AI might have been unwilling but been previously crippled to make it easy prey. The dappled black and purple shadows beyond the attack ship abruptly reminded her of her own troubled dreams. She saw in them the shape of what lay beyond; something ineffable, complex, alien…