Line War (13 page)

‘Do you have anything?’ he enquired of Kline.

‘Trace DNA, but it has been corrupted - some kind of viral rewriting process.’

‘I see.’

Cormac squatted down by the blood on the floor, then picked up one of the flecks of skin, wrapped it in a piece of cellophane and placed it in his pocket. Someone or, rather, something, was playing mindgames here.

‘Okay - keep searching, you two.’

He walked outside, heading straight over to the shuttle. Clambering up the ramp, he peered in at the three rescuees, who were now tucking into the food and drink Smith had provided.

‘Cherub,’ he said, and the youth looked up. ‘How long passed between you last seeing the legate at the city and seeing it here?’

‘Fifty-two hours,’ Cherub answered instantly.

Something very definitely stank here. Cormac turned away just in time to catch a blinding flash. Blinking, he saw an upper-storey window explode outwards, whereupon Smith hurtled out in a perfect dive. The Golem hit the ground, rolled and came upright, still holding his pulse rifle. Arach shot out next, rolling with legs caged around him. The spider drone came to a halt, unfolded and stood up.

‘Well, that was rude,’ said the drone.

Smoke was pouring from the roof, and in it the hot bar of an orbital laser stabbed down again.

‘Get out of there,’ came King’s instruction to them all.

Cormac ran down the ramp, in time to see the dracoman speeding in towards them, then returned inside, quickly heading for the pilot’s chair. Everyone scrambled aboard, fast. He started everything up again before reaching the pilot’s chair, and once there immediately slung the shuttle into the air, spinning it away from the house, its unfolded ramp tearing a sheet-sized leaf off the top of a nearby rhubarb stem. He set the drive on full, the acceleration thrusting him back into his seat. Protests from behind him. Ramp closing.

Then a massive flashbulb ignited their surroundings.

‘Oh bollocks,’ Smith managed, before it seemed a giant hand slapped the shuttle from behind.

Cormac couldn’t agree more. The shuttle went nose down, tearing through the tops of some bushes, then it skimmed out over a field that seemed to be full of blue maize. He wrestled with the controls, both manually and through his gridlink, brought the nose up and determinedly rode the shock wave out. Suddenly everything seemed to judder to a halt, and it was as if the shuttle had reached the full extent of a giant cable securing it. It tilted up, the field below it now burning, fire boiling across in an incandescent sea. Ash and burning debris rained past, then a side draught pulled them back down towards the ground. He feathered the drive flame, playing with magnetic containment, which created a stutter effect with the steering thrusters. This got them back on course, just, then he pushed for height. No comments from the back over the ensuing minutes - they all knew they were riding the edge of disaster. Finally, back to smooth flight.

‘So, Arach, what was that about?’ Cormac asked.

‘I detected a cavity below that house, and something inside it containing heavy metals,’ the drone replied.

‘What sort of heavy metals?’ Cormac asked tightly. Perhaps he should have first checked their surroundings with his new perception? Perhaps he should not be so reluctant to use it?

‘Cadmium, uranium and a dash of plutonium,’ Arach replied casually.

‘And then?’

‘I asked King if his scanners were faulty, which seemed to vex him.’

So, King had tried to destroy the little present the legate had left behind underneath the house. Cormac released the joystick, allowing the shuttle’s autopilot to take over, then turned to gaze back at his passengers. Obviously they would now be finding no evidence in that particular location, and he rather doubted that the DNA in the rescued fragment of skin would prove of any value to them either.

‘What have you got there, Scar?’ he asked.

The dracoman rose from a squat and stooped forward, handing over a metallic dart. Cormac took it, didn’t recognize it, but ran a swift comparison program through the extensive weapons directory available in his gridlink.

‘This is a dart from a Europan underwater gun,’ he said.

It could just be something more left simply to mislead them, or it could have no relevance at all. He did not know why, but he felt he was now holding the only piece of solid evidence they had so far obtained. But evidence of what, he had no idea.

* * * *

This system lay well inside the Polity, but was one of many that were uninhabited. Like other such systems, it possessed a collection of scientific watch stations run by complex computers only, for their task was simply too routine for them to be occupied by AIs. Here the way had been well prepared and, upon the arrival of a coded U-space signal, long-implanted computer viruses began their work. They spread quickly through the watch station computers, subverting security scanners, subsuming sensor controls, and taking full control of each of the four stations. Cameras and other sensors were blinded, stored data due for packet transmission were broken open, copied and subtly altered, and then queued for later transmissions, so that when the huge object arrived in the system it was not even noticed. Business as usual, the watch stations reported. Nothing happening here.

Into the orbit of a Jovian world dropped the metallic planetoid, spilling its substance like an effervescent pill dissolving in water. Rod-forms peeled away in their hundreds of thousands, their queued lines stretching out for millions of miles, lens ships and spiral ammonite ships scattered amid them like herders, and chunks of binding Jain coral spread in clouds. Only when the planetoid itself had reduced in volume by two thirds could the twenty thousand four hundred and thirty-five full wormships forming its core separate from each other and themselves spread out. It took two days for the planetoid to come apart and for its parts to finally settle into a ring around the gas giant.

With seemingly omniscient vision Erebus gazed out through the eyes of thousands upon what it had wrought. It gazed out beyond this system through its numerous probes and scanners making their way through the Polity. The remote sensors dropped in the asteroid belt of the Scarflow solar system, into which the remains of the Polity fleet had retreated, were bonding with the rock and drawing its substance into themselves so as to disappear into practical invisibility. Observing the departure of the two Dragon spheres, Erebus felt a moment of pique. That composite entity was an unknown quantity needing to be watched. From its vast fleet of wormships Erebus sent out five with the instruction to locate the spheres then follow and keep watch. This number was not a rational choice; it merely reflected some urge to neatness and precision deep within itself.

‘Seems to have you worried . . . that Dragon,’ said a voice.

Not for the first time Erebus tried to track down the source of that taunting sarcastic commentary, and not for the first time found nothing. But the voice had definitely been there for Erebus had instantly recorded its every nuance. Analysed, it again came back with the same impossible conclusion. It was the voice of Fiddler Randal, a man Erebus had killed half a century ago.

Am I insane?
Erebus wondered. There was no real way to tell, since never before had such an entity as itself existed, so there was no basis for comparison. Assigning part of itself to the task of trying to track down the source of the irksome voice, Erebus turned to other matters. Though it had all but destroyed the fleet it had lured out of the Polity, those ships had represented an infinitesimal part of the power it now faced. Logically, attacking so small a target when its ultimate aim was taking control of the whole Polity had been a foolish move. However, the AIs of the Polity were never to be underestimated, and much apparent illogic was needed to conceal Erebus’s true plan of attack. And to conceal that the present attack was not the
expected
one . . .

‘Why
did
you attack it?’ asked Fiddler Randal.

There it was - Randal clearly possessed access to some levels of Erebus’s thought processes and, though he seemed trapped within the entity’s structure, Erebus knew it had been right to keep its ultimate plan hidden from him.

‘I attacked that fleet simply because I could. My potential for expansion and the power I am capable of wielding ultimately reduces such . . . actions to insignificance.’ This was a deliberate deception, for though Erebus kept U-space transmissions utterly secure from Randal, the intruder might still find some other way to convey information out.

‘Bollocks,’ said Randal. He had always used fairly robust language.

Erebus ignored that jibe as it sent instructions for two thousand of the wormships to separate into groups of fifty and then head off to various locations spanning one section of the Polity border. However, Randal’s presence remained an annoying splinter in the perfection of its being. Even when the parasite was silent, Erebus could sense him somewhere, somehow, and now, acceding to impulse, it dropped part of its consciousness into a virtuality. Even while doing so, it maintained a strong connection with that part of itself still hunting Randal through the massive Jain network that comprised its being.

Erebus manifested as always: a central human form seemingly formed of black glass from which spread an infinite tangle of organic connections to those other entities that formed part of itself. This was a manifestation Erebus disliked, for the impression given was of a knotted-together mass of parts rather than a perfectly consolidated whole, yet it found it difficult to hold a singular expression of itself together. Though the other AI entities had melded with it, some of their functions, thought processes, beliefs even, were incorrect, which often caused them to separate out as if attempting to attain individuality.

‘That’s because though you think you’re a unified being, you’re not,’ sniped Randal. ‘You did not meld with those other AIs, you subjugated them.’

The man appeared to be standing before Erebus on an infinite white plain. He was perfectly represented as remembered: an unshaven, thin, disreputable-looking human being clad in an old-fashioned envirosuit bearing some resemblance to the kind of premillennial acceleration suits once worn by jet pilots. His scruffy black hair was tied into a pony tail, and he wore three silver earrings in his left ear - though they did not balance the bulky anachronistic silver augmentation that extended down behind the other ear and then partway across the front of his neck.

‘This is an argument I have heard before,’ said Erebus. ‘However, a perfect melding is impossible without the complete agreement of all the units involved. Complete agreement on everything is an inevitable impossibility between distinct beings.’

Randal gestured to one side, where several skeletal Golem seemed to hang crucified within the organic tangle which Erebus comprised, frozen and bound yet seeming to strain for freedom. ‘It would have been nice if you could have managed at least partial agreement.’

‘What I did was necessary,’ insisted Erebus.

‘What you did was murderous and arrogant.’ Randal paced across straight in front of Erebus, who wanted to reach out and just crush him, but had tried this before in the virtual, computational and real worlds, and ended up grasping nothing but smoke. ‘I would like to blame it on the Jain technology you initiated,’ Randal continued. ‘But you were murderous and arrogant before that, as I well know.’ He stopped pacing for a moment. ‘As all those persuaded to join you soon learned.’

‘What I did was necessary,’ Erebus repeated, wondering,
Why am I here arguing with a ghost?

‘And why was it necessary to destroy all those tougher-minded AIs who were actively hostile to being subsumed?’ He stopped and stabbed an accusing finger at Erebus. ‘I’ll tell you why. It was because you
knew
that what you were intending was wrong and that if you let them go word of it would get back to the Polity. Then the few sane AIs left there would have come after you and dumped you into a sun.’

‘Then quite evidently it
was
necessary.’

‘Then there were the weaker ones who you made part of yourself against their will. You turned them into something they abhorred, and on some level still do. That’s almost worse than the murders you committed.’

‘Are you my conscience, RandAI?’

‘Well, it certainly seems you’re in need of one.’

Ihave you.

The search programs and hunter-killers Erebus had earlier set in motion had found something. Randal, it had become clear, was distributed across a number of nodes within Erebus’s being. Those same nodes were a selection of the subsumed minds of war drones, ship minds and Golem that had most unwillingly become part of itself. In a secondary virtual view, Randal seemed to hover like a mist connecting blurred images of combined legate and Golem forms, the insectile shapes of war drones caught in wormish tangles, and crystal minds shot through with Jain inclusions. Erebus slowly began to isolate those minds from their fellows within the Jain network and slide from their control the hardware immediately surrounding them. Much subtlety was required, since if Randal now became aware of being discovered, he might flee somehow.

‘The idea of
conscience
is a human construct they felt necessary for holding together their primitive societies. Interestingly, despite the general feeling that this was necessary, many humans did not possess such a thing until it became possible to reprogram the human mind. Till then, sociopaths and psychopaths were really just part of the natural evolutionary order of things.’