Beyond Trafalgar, tendrils were heavily entangled around a scattering of asteroids, rock that had melted and run and then hardened in vacuum into baroque shapes, hollow crusts of ash and tough volcanic glass. Debris floated free there, and numerous areas were dark with soot. These were the remains that active Jain technology had left behind, like discarded carapaces and rocky snakeskins — matter with the wealth sucked out of it.
‘So,’ she said, ‘the Jain AIs are the roots of Jain technology, yet here it seems to me that the technology is dead, so how can the AIs be here?’ Though she said these words, Mika really did not believe them, for she felt as if she had ventured into some haunted house where violent spectres were about to come crashing through the walls at any moment. Releasing the joystick, she studied her hand, expecting to see it shaking, but oddly it wasn’t.
‘There is little energy to be utilized here,’ Dragon replied. ‘Let me give you another analogy: trees.’
‘Explain.’
‘The most activity you witness in a tree is at the tips of its twigs where the leaves sprout and where it opens its flowers and sheds its pollen, where it grows its fruit, yet the trunk itself is not dead.’
‘How can you be sure this trunk is still alive?’
‘That fact was demonstrated as you travelled in here. I am seeing it now even as I reach the corpse you saw earlier. There is activity here now — though fed merely by the power of your ship’s lights and the heat from its engines.’ Dragon paused, and Mika looked up at the remote to see that its palp eyes were now directed towards Trafalgar. ‘Note the effect of your lights here.’
In an instant Mika saw it. For some minutes her lights had been shining constantly on Trafalgar, and now, over a section of its coral-encrusted hull, a shifting movement appeared like that observed in the skin of a squid when trying to camouflage itself. Mika quickly found a way to turn down the glare, then turned up the light amplification of her visor to its maximum. Though it would have been safer to kill the lights completely, she left them on because, right then, the dark scared her.
‘I see,’ said Dragon.
‘What do you see?’
‘I am examining our long-dead friend,’ Dragon replied. ‘And through my remote I am also seeing something rather anomalous.’
‘What?’ Mika peered at Trafalgar.
‘Attached to the rear of the nose section — on the docking ring.’
The vessels docked there were swamped in Jain technology, but Mika could not see anything more anomalous about them than in anything else here.
‘I see two small shuttles and an attack ship,’ she peered closer, ‘and what looks like some sort of EVA vehicle.’
‘Look closer at the attack ship.’
‘I’m looking but all I’m seeing is an attack ship.’
‘An attack ship like the Jack Ketch in its original form?’
‘Certainly.’
‘And not like the one you saw on the way in?’
‘No, not like that one. This one is more modern… Shit!’
‘Do you understand now?’
‘Tell me about the corpse,’ said Mika.
‘She wore an aug, but its contents are utterly scrambled. The design of the aug, and the design of her spacesuit, are as revealing as the design of that attack ship you’re now looking at.’
Mika was not entirely sure of what to make of any of this, but certainly did not like it. That attack ship down there, docked to the Trafalgar, was of a design that had not appeared until some time after the war, and some time after Trafalgar and the others had departed the Polity. It seemed that someone had run foul of this exodus of the dispossessed.
Or had been sent to seek it out.
Knobbler’s not controlled, came Arach’s communication direct to Cormac’s gridlink. He’s letting me scan inside him and I can’t find any Jain-tech there.
Cormac allowed himself a tired smile — maybe he was making the right decision after all. He gazed at the mackerel-patterned back of the big drone as it propelled itself ahead of them along the corridor. He knew that drones like this one, who had been incepted during the Prador-human war, had been given their own choice of body form.
A spider shape, like Arach’s, was good design. His six legs gave stability for the Gatling cannons; in addition, numerous limbs allowed for fast manoeuvring, and sacrificing one or two of them wasn’t a problem. Anyway, choosing the shapes of known living creatures had a practical justification in that each one had been shaped by billions of years of competitive evolution, so many of them made for perfect war machines. Knobbler was therefore a little at variance to that norm but not greatly so.
As they reached one of the stairwells winding up out of this runcible buffer section and began climbing, Cormac saw the patterns on Knobbler’s back subtly shift and realized what had been nagging at his memory. At first sight Knobbler was little different from Arach, just an insectile monster created to fight. However, Arach did not possess chameleonware because, like most drones manufactured in the big factory stations during the war, resources could not be spared to apply such sophisticated technology to what was supposed to be a short-lived fighting grunt. The mackerel patterns evident on Knobbler were the effect of an old style of chameleonware, so it seemed likely that this ‘ware had gone in when the drone was built during the Prador war. The big drone had been fashioned to work in ship’s corridors much wider than those here aboard the war runcible, and his major weapon was perfectly designed for slicing through hard armour — or rather carapace.
‘You’re an assassin drone,’ Cormac announced.
Still clattering forward, though abruptly turning his viewing tentacle to face back, the drone said, ‘You’re observant. So what?’
‘They built your kind specifically to penetrate Prador vessels.’ Cormac nodded towards the pattern on the drone’s back. ‘You have your own chameleonware. You went aboard to turn Prador into sashimi.’
‘It was a living,’ said Knobbler, turning his viewing tentacle forward again.
Cormac had heard about drones like this but never encountered one before. This was worrying. Knobbler, and the others of his kind here, had deliberately opted out of Polity society in order to spend years guarding a war runcible. Cormac guessed that their being asocial, or even antisocial, had been built in. Knobbler did not have to like humans because he had been created to work alone or perhaps with only a few of his own kind — unlike Arach, who was a war drone constructed to fight beside humans in planetary conflicts. Drones like Knobbler had been terror weapons whose sum purpose was to terrify alien creatures who were nightmares themselves. And it was precisely those of Knobbler’s kind that had departed the Polity along with the Trafalgar. Might it be that Cormac was making a mistake here?
‘Are there many of your kind aboard?’ he asked.
‘A few still,’ Knobbler replied vaguely. ‘Cutter went with Bludgeon on the Heliotrope.’
‘The Heliotrope?’ Cormac queried.
There was a delay before Knobbler replied. Probably he was receiving instructions from Orlandine. ‘The Heliotrope is carrying a cargo runcible which will be used to feed this war runcible its ammunition. Even now it is moving into position.’
‘Where might that be?’
‘Now that I can’t tell you,’ said the drone. ‘Remote as that possibility might be, there’s still a chance you could escape with such information.’
Jain-tech was evident just about everywhere aboard this enormous weapon. Wherever there was a wall panel missing or a junction box open, stuff that looked like steel sculptures of vines and roots lay exposed. Where ceilings were missing, opening the view into other sections of the runcible, larger versions of the same tech, often less metallic and more coraline, could be seen wound around stanchions and I-beams. It seemed Orlandine had occupied this place thoroughly with her tech, and Cormac wondered if she was beginning to produce Jain nodes yet — if she was beginning to go to seed.