Line War (11 page)

The immediate result of the scan came as a major shock. Despite the U-space drive being yet to arrive, 107 immediately started preparations for a fast launch sequence using the resources his vessel already possessed. The brass Golem was carrying a massive CTD imploder under its arm, while the other weapon it carried seemed to have been assembled out of six proton carbines and, worst of all, the Golem was opaque to scan, yet seemed to be putting out signals compatible with the coding used by the wormship.

Problem. Big problem.

Was this Golem prepared to take its own life just to be rid of the wormship? If it was, then any kind of attack on it would result in death for Legate 107. The legate checked the slow progress of the U-space drive, then compared it with the progress of the Golem. At this rate the Golem would arrive first. Attempting delaying tactics, 107 sent out signals to cause the surrounding structures of the wormship to impede the Golem’s progress. To one side of it stood a tower formed from numerous segmented worms of Jain matter twisted together. It began to curve over. The Golem abruptly swung its weapon towards this structure and fired a precise shot into the tower’s base. The massive blast rocked the little craft the legate occupied, but did not bring down the tower, though it froze. The Golem had instantly located and destroyed the two control modules the legate had been using to control the tower. How had it managed to locate them so quickly?

Legate 107 tried to move several other structures into the Golem’s path, but each time a couple of shots from that six-barrelled weapon stopped all further activity. Fear, then. This thing was not going to stop. The legate considered going outside to face it down, then recalculated. So what if it left here without a U-space drive? It could simply shut itself down, spend years traversing vacuum, maybe arrive somewhere after Erebus had finished its work and moved on ... or maybe after Erebus had been destroyed by the Polity. Certainly, staying here
now
did not seem like a healthy option.

The craft’s ability to launch was ready and waiting: booster jets would serve to throw it free of this planetoid, and a small ion drive would then send it on its way. Still observing the brass Golem, the legate ordered the umbilici to detach, and next fired up the boosters. Soon the craft was ten feet up, twenty feet up. Legate 107 expected to feel some satisfaction in having escaped, yet was frustrated by the brass Golem’s reaction, for it merely rested its weapon across its head to prevent its hat blowing away - and meanwhile did not alter its pace. Twelve seconds at current acceleration would fortunately take 107 outside the imploder’s blast perimeter. They counted down easily, and so far no blast. Still connected to the wormship, 107 observed the brass Golem place the imploder on the ground, then sit down on it as if feeling suddenly weary. It took some items from its pocket, on which the legate focused, expecting to see some kind of remote detonator. Not a bit of it, though. The Golem was studying a collection of junk: a small rubber dog, a piece of crystal and a blue acorn . . .

Then suddenly the raptorish ship was descending nearby. Legate 107 immediately sent instructions that would turn the remainder of the wormship’s weapons on both landing ship and Golem.

Nothing happened. Something was blocking the signal.

And now 107’s view through the wormship’s sensors was fading too. The raptor ship landed and taking up the imploder again the Golem trudged onboard. The last image the legate saw was of the hawk-shaped craft ascending, and fading.

What was the purpose of all that? Now far out from the planetoid, the legate started the ion drive and settled down for a journey that might last millennia. But two hours later the crunch of piratical docking claws disabused it of this possibility. Minutes after, a brassy fist punched clear through the hull from the outside, then brass hands began methodically tearing away metal to widen the hole. Legate 107 detached from its throne and began to put online all its internal weaponry - just in time to find itself on the receiving end of that fist. Up off the floor, struggling, impaled on a brass forearm, the legate speared out Jain tendrils and spat fire from its mouth. The other hand came in beside the first and, seemingly oblivious to Legate 107’s defensive weapons, the brass Golem tore the android in half, then proceeded to dismantle those halves.

* * * *

4

Ghost in the machine.
The fact that ghosts can exist in any suitably complex computer architecture has been well documented. They are possible because as complexity increases so does redundancy, which gives the ghosts room to exist. In the past they were just fragments of code, worms and viruses or the by-blows of these. With the advent of it becoming possible to interface a human mind with a computer, and in some cases with AI, these ghosts can be the product of living minds. In smaller systems or memories they can be images, emotions or brief experiences, while in larger systems they can be whole minds transcribed into crystal
-
the mechanisms enabling them to remain intact within the human skull allowing them to remain intact within this architecture. Often they change unrecognizably to survive, becoming strange gibbering entities haunting planetary and interstellar servers, forever fleeing like bedlamites the hunter-killer programs employed to hunt down and erase them. Others become some version of those same hunter-killers, but weird datavores surviving on an odd diet of information and power, and when threatened they scurry for cover in their burrows located in little-used virtualities or memstores.

— From Quince Guide compiled by humans

The interior of the conferencing unit was very similar to a previous building of similar purpose once positioned on Dragon’s surface. The place was packed with equipment for studying Dragon and processing the results, and there were facilities for its human occupants: a small kitchen-diner and bunks that folded out of the walls. In the central area was a massive circular irised hatch allowing direct access to the skin of Dragon right underneath. Mika walked one entire circuit of this hatch, disinclined yet to open it.

‘Jerusalem?’ she queried.

‘I’m here,’ replied the omniscient voice of the AI.

‘How is Dragon helping us now?’

‘Dragon has provided fresh insights into the working of Jain technology - which understandably have to be checked - and has also provided us with all its files on the history of the Makers.’

‘But really you’re still getting nothing solid you can rely on to help us against Erebus.’

‘All information, whether trustworthy or otherwise, can be processed to render useful results.’

‘But I note your use of the present perfect. Dragon has already provided these things, so what is it doing now?’

‘Dragon assists us in checking certain anomalous facts and provides explanations of mismatches in information streams.’

‘You still cannot trust Dragon.’

‘When someone has demonstrated a tendency towards accomplished lying, one has to view information from such a source with caution.’

‘You don’t trust Dragon.’

‘We don’t trust Dragon.’

Mika nodded to herself, feeling this confirmed something but not sure what. She strolled round until she reached a control panel mounted on a brushed-aluminium column shaped rather like a lectern. Passing her hand over the touch console she activated it, then used the controls to search through a menu screen to find what she wanted. It was coded, she discovered, and only the palms of those on an approved list, when pressed against part of the console, would open the irised hatch. She pressed her own hand down and waited.

All around the circumference of the hatch she heard locks disengaging, then with a liquid hiss the sections of the iris folded back into the outer rim. Immediately a smell as of from a hot terrarium in a reptile house rose from what was exposed below, along with the numbing scent of cloves. She peered over the edge directly at the skin of Dragon. Scales the size of a hand lay in an iridescent swirl across the surface area that bulged up within the circular frame. The whole of it seemed solid as rock but for one retreating red tendril, like a mobile vein, drawing out of sight at one edge.

Mika watched and waited. After a few minutes with nothing more happening she returned her attention to the console and screen. Out of curiosity she called up the list of those personnel authorized to open this hatch and gazed at it in puzzlement. There was only one name on it: her own.

‘Jerusalem?’ she queried.

No reply.

Mika used the console to access other controls within the conferencing unit, then initiated the voice-activated controls -which she soon realized would respond only to her.

‘Full outside view,’ she requested.

The walls all around shimmered and grew transparent. She thoughtfully observed the draconic landscape beyond, the glare of the distant white sun and the glimmer of stars. The other Dragon sphere was not visible, but that didn’t really mean anything. As far as she could see the giant sphere had not moved. She remembered the last time she had been here, and how the unit then planted on the surface of Dragon had been drawn inside immediately prior to the alien entity heading off into space to find its twin. Nothing like that was happening now, and she berated herself for being so paranoid.

‘The structure you occupy is shielded,’ announced the sepulchral voice of Dragon.

Mika turned back as the entity’s exposed surface below her unzipped, pouted for a moment, then began to revolve down into a crevice that opened wider. She peered over the rim into the entrance of a steaming red cavern, saw a flickering of shadow as something began rising up out of it. One limb of a pseudopod tree folded into view like a sprouting plant. Four cobra-head pseudopods then opened out from an inner stamen, their single sapphire eyes gleaming as they surveyed the interior of the unit, as if searching for any danger to their charge. On a thicker ribbed neck rested a human head the size of a boulder. It was different from the last one of its kind she had encountered, and she wondered if Dragon recreated these heads on every occasion. The head resembled that of a fasting shaven-pated priest. His pupils and irises were pure black, his pointed teeth and the interior of his mouth were pure white - as was also the forked tongue that briefly licked out.

Mika applauded ironically then asked, ‘Why did I need to be informed that this structure is shielded?’

The ribbed neck lengthened and looped over, lowering the head just a few yards out in front of her. ‘You did not need to know.’

Familiar infuriating draconic dialogue. She decided to go off at a tangent and get straight to her concerns. ‘What did you do to me last time?’

The head tilted slightly as if to observe her out of one eye that was better than the other. ‘Do to you?’

‘How did the other Dragon sphere - which is essentially part of you - change me after I was injured?’

‘What makes you suppose that it did?’

‘I feel it . . . and Jerusalem also has noted some physical alterations . . .’

‘Ah, Jerusalem . . .’

Mika experienced a sudden sinking feeling. ‘Yes, Jerusalem noted some physical alterations to my body. I would have spotted them myself if I had used a scanner, so there was no point in Jerusalem denying their existence.’

The head nodded. ‘Exactly.’

‘What have you done to me?’

‘We have merely prepared you for what we might encounter.’

‘That being?’

‘Humans are weak and susceptible to Jain intrusion. Their perception of reality is limited, and you will need to
see.’

What?
‘Hang on . . . “what we might encounter”?’

The floor seemed to shift underneath her, and everything outside fell into shadow as the Dragon sphere revolved her away from the sun. She felt a surge of acceleration, only partially countered by the gravplate floor. A strong feeling of déjà vu impinged.

‘Where are we going?’

‘To the very source,’ Dragon replied. ‘Eventually.’

There came a shifting then. Something twisted inside her, and star-speckled space beyond the conferencing unit somehow inverted. The star speckles then became holes, and space between contracted to zero, yet she could still perceive it. She was seeing U-space, yet she remained sane. What had Dragon done to her? Briefly she glimpsed the other Dragon sphere: a massive complexity hollowed out of the underside of reality. And then she and the two spheres fell away from the Scarflow planetary system.

As she clutched the lectern console before her, Mika considered how little, apparently, Jerusalem trusted Dragon, and how she herself trusted Jerusalem not at all.

* * * *

Construction robots, gathered like an infestation of metallic parasites, were now somnolent around the massive war runcible, and nil-G scaffolds lay distorted in one area where some missile had struck in the past. Debris was scattered about in surrounding space, which necessitated
Heliotrope’s
collision lasers being in perpetual operation. The runcible was an enormous pentagon with each of its five sides over four miles long - those sides each triangular in section, five hundred yards wide on all three sides. Dotted all around were blisters housing control centres, along with external generators, motors and a multitude of heavy weapons.