Polity 1 - Prador Moon (7 page)

The huge interior of the ship consisted of movable sections. Weapons platforms and sensor arrays could be presented at the hull and later recalled inside to be repaired by interior autofactories. Living quarters could be shifted to safer areas within, or even ejected should the ship suffer an attack likely to destroy it. The bridge pod could be moved about inside to forever keep its location opaque to enemy scanning, and could similarly be ejected. Tomalon wondered if its present location, so far from his entry point, was a deliberate ploy on Occam's part so the AI could watch him for a little while before they finally sealed their interface, partial and impermanent though it might be.

Finally Tomalon reached the drop-shaft that would take him up to where the bridge pod presently extended, like the head of a giant, golden thistle from the ship's hull. He stepped into the irised gravity field, and as it drew him up he felt no reservations, no second thoughts. It seemed as if he had been preparing for this all his life. Departing the head of the drop-shaft he traversed a corridor he recognised as the one running through the stem to the pod itself. Clinging to the ceiling, a couple of crab maintenance drones observed him and he raised a hand in salute, before finally entering the pod.

Through the chainglass roof the nearby shipyard lay just visible, though the intense activity around it was not. Tomalon turned his attention to the rest of the pod.

Translucent consoles seemingly packed with fairy lights walled this place. Fixed to columns sunk into the black glass floor, in which the spill of optics flickered like synapses, an arc of command chairs faced the chainglass windows in the nose. The prime command chair, which looked more like a throne, lay at the centre of these. Why the other chairs remained here, Tomalon could not guess—the ship and its captain had required no command crew for more than fifty years. In reality the ship only needed a human captain to provide executive permission to its AI, and in fact not even that. Tomalon found himself in the strange position of having to relay Occam's orders to itself—a way of circumventing the old hard-wiring the ship contained.

“Occam,” he asked out loud, and was unsurprised to receive no reply. The AI had always honed down its communications to the barest minimum during previous exchanges. Tomalon wondered if it missed Varence who, no longer supported by this ship's systems and that prosthetic being the intelligence of the AI itself, had quietly slid into death. He nodded to himself, stepped over to the command chair, and after a moment kicked off his slippers then shrugged off his coverall and tossed it on a nearby chair. Naked he seated himself, his forearms resting lightly on the chair arms and feet correctly positioned on the footrest. Immediately, with eerie silence, the interface connections swung out from underneath and behind the throne, and trailing skeins of optic cable closed in on him like an electric hand. The first connections were of the vambraces on both his arms—U-engine, fusion and thruster controls, then others began to mate all over his body. In those first moments he felt as if he were draining away as his consciousness expanded to encompass the ship, and the vast input from its sensors. He began to panic.

“Note the shipyard,” Occam told him, “see how it grows.”

The words brought immediate calm. He focused, and felt his nictitating membranes close down over his eyes and knew that to anyone observing they now looked blind white. But now he saw so much more. The shipyard was growing visibly amidst the swarm of constructor robots and telefactors: scaffolds webbing out into space and hull metal rapidly filling in behind.

“How big is it going to be?”

“Big enough. But what does its present designation tell you?”

Tomalon tried to remember, then found himself pulling the information as if from the aug he no longer wore, taking it from the very mind of Occam. “It does not yet have a name. Its designation is merely Shipyard 001… ah, I see. We may be building hundreds of these?”

“So it would seem. This will be no small war.”

Now Tomalon could look within the ship…himself. He enjoyed access to every internal cam and could gaze through the eyes of every drone or robot. Diagnostic systems came online, and he checked the readiness of the U-space engines, the fusion engines, the multitude of steering thrusters. Information flowed through him and not one detail bypassed him. He felt like a god.

“So, history student, what is the lesson we AIs have learned?”

Confusion, but only for a moment, for his close link to the mind of Occam enabled him to understand the AI's drift. “I can quote direct from a lecture I once heard: 'After the eighteenth century neither bravery nor moral superiority won wars, but factories and production.' That concerned the World War II and America's intervention, though it is equally as applicable now.”

“Quite,” Occam replied. “Do you feel ready to take this product into the fray?”

“I do,” Tomalon replied, but he felt a moment of disquiet. His mind seemed to be operating with crystal clarity now and he saw many other historical parallels.

“But you feel some disquiet, I sense?”

“The story of the Hood and the Bismarck occurs to me.”

“Ah, I see: The Hood was the largest and most powerful ship available to Britain at the start of World War II, but Hitler's Bismarck quickly destroyed it. Perhaps now would be a good time for you to check the weapons manifests and acquaint yourself with the armament we carry.”

Tomalon's perception opened into and upon enormous weapons carousels, rail-guns, beam weapons, a cornucopia of death and destruction. He saw that included in this cornucopia were the new CTDs—contra-terrene devices—and realised that, being a god, here were his thunderbolts.

They dined on mince, and slices of quince—

The Trajeen cargo runcible briefly came into view through the shuttle windows: five horn-shaped objects with tips overlapping bases in a curvilinear pentagon. Each of these objects was three hundred metres long with accommodation and R&D units clinging around its outer curve like the cells of a beehive. Tube walkways linked these conglomerations, and many solar panels glimmered like obsidian leaves. An orthogonal nest of plaited nanotube scaffolding poles enclosed the whole. Moria glimpsed the robots, one-man constructor pods and telefactors in the process of dismantling that scaffold. The glare of welders and cutting gear lit stars throughout the complex and plumes of water vapour swirled out like just-forming question marks over vacuum.

The shuttle swung in, taking the runcible out of view for a few minutes. Shadows then fell across the vessel and Moria saw some of those hexagonal units up close as the craft came in to dock. It shuddered into place, docking clamps engaged with a hollow clattering, followed by the whoosh of air filling a docking tunnel. After a moment, the disembarkation light came on and all the passengers began unstrapping themselves and pushing off from their seats to grab the safety rails leading to the airlock. Inside the shuttle it was nil gee, as in the tunnel leading to the complex.

“Best of luck,” said Carolan as they reached the complex itself, then she slapped Moria on the shoulder and moved swiftly away. Moria guessed the woman's haste was instigated by the sight of the ECS officer heading this way across the embarkation area. She had only told Carolan that the AI contacted her concerning her Sylac aug and wanted to speak to her further, not daring to relate the circumstances of that contact. She pushed herself from the docking tube and settled down to the floor as the grav-plates within began to take hold.

“Moria Salem?” asked the man, smiling at her nicely.

“You know I am,” she replied.

“Let's not be unpleasant about this,” he told her, his smile becoming fixed.

Moria eyed him, realising he came suitably equipped to handle “unpleasantness.” His shaven pate gleamed a head and shoulders above her and he probably massed about twice as much—none of that weight being fat. He was either a heavy-worlder or a man substantially boosted: bones and joints reinforced to withstand an implausible muscle mass.

“Where do I go?” Moria asked.

“With me of course.” The man's smile lit again and it almost seemed genuine. Despite herself, Moria began warming to him.

He led her across the embarkation area to a nil-gee drop-shaft along which they towed themselves to a corridor. They traversed further shafts and corridors until reaching one of the tubes crossing vacuum between units of the complex. Moria now realised they were leaving the area in which she normally worked. Through the transparent tube wall she could see stars glimmering all around the swirled marble of Trajeen, and nearby lay a vertiginous view of the cargo runcible and surrounding facilities. A distant speck revealed itself as someone in a spacesuit, striding on gecko boots around a metallic curve, flipping a cable along behind. This gave scale to the view—an impressive though familiar sight to her.

The tunnel terminated at a coded security door. The man pressed his hand against a gene and palm reader of the kind that also ascertained that the hand's owner still lived—certain macabre scenarios briefly flitted through Moria's mind—then he input a code on a touch-plate.

“What's your name?” she asked.

He glanced at her. “George.” An old and strangely prosaic name in this setting.

Beyond the door lay a whole unit Moria knew to be infrequently visited by the usual project crew. Rumour had it that its armour lay a metre thick and that it contained weapons arrays and its own independent drive. Grav dragged them to the floor within the inner lock, and while George opened the second door, Moria glanced up at the scanning drone suspended from the ceiling—suspiciously large power cables plumbed into it.

Inside, the carpeted corridor absorbed sound, and muted lighting from ornate light fitments lay easy on the eye. The carpet itself was decorated with repeating representations of the Trajeen AI and computer network. AIs were represented as red triangles, subminds were minor orange triangles, with variously coloured dots indicating servers and computers, and the whole being tangled in a three-dee web of com channels. The walls were clad with pillow-shaped foamstone blocks. Not so much bustle here—an oddly quiet and comfortable niche for something requiring no comfort. George led her to wooden panel doors and opened them onto a wide lounge alongside which long windows gave a panoramic view across the runcible.

“Please, take a seat.” George gestured to a sofa.

Moria perched on the edge of one plush black fabric-covered sofa and surveyed the lounge. It seemed likely to her that much of this room's contents were either antique or indistinguishable reproduction. The oval table lying between the two sofas appeared to be made of genuine Earth-import wood, or maybe the table itself had been imported. Along one wall, on a worktop of polished stone, stood a collection of computers extending from the earliest PCs to present day. Behind them the racked wall contained a huge collection of ancient storage media: tapes, discs of many different sizes and formats, stacks of silicon data storage units, digital paper, carbon rod and early crystal, and much else she could not identify. In one corner squatted an insectile telefactor with forelimbs folded across its body as if it were in prayer; behind it lay the atmosphere-sealed shelves of a carousel packed with books. She realised the computers were all wired in and, by wear in the carpet below, that the telefactor frequently used them. It seemed the AI enjoyed access to much ancient information, though to what purpose she could not guess. A hobby? Historical research?

“A drink?”

Moria turned to see George standing by a drinks cabinet.

“Do you have greenwine?”

“Certainly.”

He found a bottle Moria knew to be a rare vintage, and poured two glasses before coming over. He placed the drinks on the table and seated himself on the sofa opposite.

“So when does the AI talk to me?” She took a sip of her drink—ice cold in a crystal goblet lightly dusted with frost.

“It is talking to you now,” George replied.

A beat.

“You're a Golem?”

“No, I am physically human but mentally a submind of the Trajeen System Cargo Runcible AI.” He gestured towards his chest. “This body was grown in a vat, the mind programmed as an adjunct to myself.”

Moria had not known this to be possible. It might not be, for AIs did not necessarily tell the truth.

“Okay.” She took another drink to hide her confusion, then decided to play along with this. “Other than the fact that the aug I'm wearing might be something other than standard, I've something else bothering me.”

George waited.

She continued: “Why did Sylac use his own name if he is a fugitive?”

“He conducted many operations in his surgery in Copranus City, working under the pseudonym Doctor Runciman Hyde.” George winced. “A rather telling pseudonym… Only with you did he use his correct name. He is arrogant and wants us to know about his work. By using his true name, prior to closing his surgery and moving on, he knew we would eventually find out, and track down all those upon whom he conducted nonstandard augmentation.”

“He has gone then?”

“We are searching for him at present, but he had two weeks in which to make his escape. Precisely at the time you experienced the enhanced level of aug function aboard the shuttle, over a hundred others experienced the same. However, only through you did we identify him.”

“So what now?”

“Now I must make an assessment of you, your aug, and the synergetic combination you represent.” George leaned forwards and now Moria noticed something weird about his eyes: the irises seemed to have become evenly spoked and metallic. “I will make an optic linkage to your aug, and in a virtuality of your choosing, we will explore your potential or… otherwise.”

“I suppose that virtuality is the only choice I have in this matter?”

“Precisely.”

* * * * *

“I think we interrupted their dinner break,” said Jean, adding, “It seems they like to play with their food.”

Alan Grace, a tough and experienced ECS monitor, pulled himself down beside a laser drill rig and vomited. With no gravity to drag it down the vomit shot with amazing speed across ten metres of air space to splash on a wall. The other two ECS monitors were further back in the factory, short ropes securing them to the floor and one of them tightening a tourniquet just above the other's right knee. Below that knee remained nothing but shreds. The woman felt no pain though, the drug patch on her neck having sent her to glittering fairyland.