Line War (39 page)

Cormac lay back on his bed and relaxed, releasing his hold upon his U-sense and letting it expand out from where the
King of Hearts
now sat in orbit about Ramone. Soon the sheer scale of the mess here became more evident. Ramone sparkled like a piece of iron just taken from the furnace, for it was the centre of a perpetual meteor storm as chunks of wormship, other Jain constructs and, unfortunately, the remnants of many Polity ships fell into its atmosphere and burned up. Around the planet the debris cloud lay eight thousand miles deep, and certainly over the ensuing years would settle itself into a ring. Also, one astronomical unit out, there was another even larger cloud of debris extending nearly two million miles across. Within this a few remaining Polity ships were still busy hunting, firing missiles into any larger chunks of worm-ship that appeared to have enough life left in them to regenerate, incinerating stray rod-forms and generally sterilizing the entire area. The rest of the Polity ships, along with the leviathan
Cable Hogue,
had already jumped outsystem to join other battles.

One AU out.
. .

With the technology available in the Polity it was easy enough to scan to one astronomical unit, but Cormac was now doing so with just his mind. He pushed the range further, began to gaze upon the other worlds within this system, and wondered if AIs felt as godlike as this. Choosing one of the outer cold worlds, he focused on it closely and peered down through a methane rain storm at a plain of red slabs lying beside a methane sea. It was noticeable that, by so focusing, much else now seemed to blur out of his perception, when that had not been the case for him closer to the attack ship. He pulled his focus away from that distant world, but it shifted sluggishly, seeming to have gained inertia. He pushed further out into the system, but beyond that cold world the perceptual sensation became like wading through treacle. Then he reached a point he could not probe beyond. The rest of the universe was out there, and he could see star systems and the weird indentations they made in U-space, but he could not get any closer to them.

Really,
Cormac thought,
I
should not be disappointed.
But he was. He blinked, bringing his cabin back into focus. Sitting up on his bed he noticed he was soaked with sweat and inside his skull lay a heaviness presaging a headache. He wiped a hand across his face, then, noticing something, moved that same hand out and studied it. It was shaking but, worse than that, appeared translucent even to his normal vision. He snatched it from sight, realizing what was happening: his U-sense was still operating at a lower level. It now seemed to have seated itself in his skull and, just like his hearing, was something he felt incapable of shutting down. Then, suddenly, chaos . . .

Something began to tear, and U-space opened all around him. The cabin wall rushed up towards him. He yelled as grey eversions appeared in a tangled five-dimensional pattern all about him. Instinctively he chose a place between them and, using his mind, grabbed for reality. Next he was in darkness. He fell, hit a soft surface speeding along underneath him, rolled. Lights came on and he gazed about in confusion. He was now in one of the
King of Hearts’
internal passages. But why were the lights out? He knew: because King did not keep lights on in the ship where they were not needed, where no humans were located.

‘You were in your cabin,’ said King reproachfully, from the intercom.

Cormac stood and shook himself. The sweat on his body had now turned chill. Applying to the ship’s server through his gridlink, he quickly ascertained his location, then turned and headed towards the bridge.

‘I certainly was,’ he replied. ‘Where are we going now?’

‘You were in your cabin,’ King insisted. ‘You could not have got to where you are now in just the last four seconds.’

Cormac wondered how often King checked the location of those inside him. Probably the attack ship’s AI was aware of them most of the time, on some level, though perhaps became less aware when diverting processing power to make the calculations for dropping the ship into U-space - hence the four seconds mentioned.

‘Well,’ said Cormac, ‘I can’t be held accountable if reality doesn’t always conform to your own model of it.’

‘Your cabin door did not open,’ stated King. ‘You are not recorded in the short-term memories of the sensors located between your cabin and your current location.’

‘It’s certainly a puzzle,’ Cormac agreed. He was enjoying the AI’s bewilderment, but such enjoyment was tempered by the pull of the U-continuum surrounding the ship and the sure knowledge that if he had not hauled himself back up out of it and into this corridor, he would have gone drifting away from the ship in underspace. Could he then have still got himself somewhere safe, or would he eventually have surfaced in hard vacuum and simply died with his internal fluids boiling out of his body?

‘You moved through U-space, like you did before,’ observed King.

That King knew about the way Cormac had escaped Skellor was unsurprising, but
how
did the AI know? Had Jerusalem told King, or had the attack ship AI witnessed the act itself when trying to rescue Skellor, or rather when it tried to prevent that madman and all the precious interesting Jain technology he contained from being crushed to a thin film over the surface of a brown dwarf star?

‘Yeah, I moved through U-space,’ Cormac conceded. ‘Now are you going to tell me where we are going?’

Reaching the doors leading to the bridge, Cormac paused before them. Usually they opened automatically at his approach, but they now remained firmly closed. There came a long long pause before they finally opened, and before King spoke again -comparable to hours for an AI’s normal thought processes. He guessed that King, a misanthrope at heart, didn’t much like having an inferior human demonstrate superior abilities.

‘I have received information from Azroc,’ announced the AI.

As Cormac stepped out onto the black glass floor, heading for the scattering of chairs, something caught his eye in the dimness over to one side. There he observed a third-stage sleer frozen in a rearing position, and hoped this insectile monstrosity was simply a sculpture. It seemed that King was now taking up the kind of hobby enjoyed by the AI of the attack ship
Jack Ketch.
Cormac plumped himself down in one of the chairs.

‘What information?’

‘U-space anomalies were detected in a black asteroid field by an old sub-AI survey drone. Though they were large, they did not have the characteristic signature of a large ship surfacing. Measurements meanwhile indicate open Skaidon warps, then the short translation of some large object, unbuffered.’

‘Through a runcible then,’ observed Cormac.

‘The drone was some way distant from the location of these anomalies,’ King went on, ‘and later detected the heat flash of a gigaton event.’

‘Orlandine,’ surmised Cormac thoughtfully.

‘That the war runcible was used is the most likely explanation to fit the data.’

‘So we’re going there, which is good, but what are we going to do once we arrive?’

‘Jerusalem has also ordered one of the reserve fleets out of Salvaston to head for the same location.’

Cormac leaned back and nodded to himself. ‘That’s good,’ he said. ‘Now would you like to tell me about your curious new taste in decor in here?’

* * * *

Aboard Orlandine’s ship the
Heliotrope
the old sharp-edged war drone, Cutter, lay folded up in the corridor right beside the ship’s interface sphere. A multicore optic cable, plugged in between his bulbous eyes, trailed down and snaked along the floor into Bludgeon, and thus via the drone and the interface sphere he occupied into the
Heliotrope
itself. Now, having access to the ship’s sensors and scanners, Cutter watched as his companion surfaced the ship into realspace far out from the Anulus black hole, then himself began scanning for the main transmission satellite he knew to be in orbit here. Bludgeon, meanwhile, started making the necessary preparations to use the cargo runcible in the somewhat hostile environment they would soon be entering. Within a few seconds the sharp-edged drone had it: a hundred-yard-wide coin of metal floating out in deep space. Bludgeon dropped
Heliotrope
into U-space for a subliminally short time, in order to put the ship between this main transmission satellite and its subordinate satellites, which were positioned close around the black hole and the junkyard of planets it was steadily devouring.

The satellites had been here for centuries, and no one had bothered recently to replace either them or the technology they contained. The U-tech of their time had been incapable of remaining functional in the chaotic U-space environment around Anulus, hence the positioning of the single main transmission satellite. The inner satellites transmitted by laser to it, and it relayed their data through U-space to the nearest Polity science station one hundred and twelve light years away. Fortunate that, since this meant the two drones needed to subvert only the one satellite. Within minutes Cutter had intercepted a laser transmission then relayed its contents to Bludgeon, who was always better at dealing with this sort of thing.

‘Can you deal with it yourself?’ Cutter enquired.

‘Mebbe,’ came the other drone’s reply.

During the war it was always Bludgeon who dealt with the informational stuff while Cutter got physical. Bludgeon’s job had been to open an undetectable way into Prador vessels or stations, and then Cutter’s chore was to go in first, usually to scatter the interior with pieces of the crablike aliens and paint the walls with their foul green blood.

‘You’ll not need to use any of
her
stuff?’ Cutter suggested.

‘I could do it meself,’ said Bludgeon, ‘but you would need to enter the satellite to make a few physical alterations.’

‘Just like the old days then.’

‘Well, at least there’s nothing alive inside that satellite . . .’

The other war drones, and Orlandine herself, would have been astounded to hear Bludgeon string together more than three words. But being able to talk like this only to Cutter was Bludgeon’s particular wrinkle, his particular bit of faulty programming or maybe damage to his crystal or the mind it contained. All of the war drones on the war runcible had some similar fault - something that excluded them from normal Polity society or simply made them not want to be included. They would argue vehemently about these being
faults.

‘I’ll head over there now, shall I?’ said Cutter.

Cutter’s own particular fault was his utter refusal to abandon or even blunt the edges of a body made for turning the insides of Prador vessels into abattoirs. He could not actually move about the Polity as a normal citizen, since the slightest mishap, his own or that of some other, could easily result in multiple decapitations and amputations. Cutter’s edges were of a form of heat-treated chainglass that remained constantly honed down to one chain-molecule thickness. He could slice up steel with the same ease as a chef dicing an onion.

‘No,’ said Bludgeon.

‘What do you mean “No”?’

‘I’ve learnt the coding protocols and have the perfect tool for dealing with that satellite from here.’

‘You mean one of
her
tools.’

‘You have to lose your fear of the technology Orlandine provided, Cutter.’

‘I ain’t frightened of it. I just don’t like depending on it, is all.’

‘But we must depend on it. Nearly everything in this ship depends on it to some extent, and without it we won’t be able to carry out our mission.’

Cutter grumbled and shaved away slivers of the wall, then grudgingly turned his attention to what Bludgeon was doing. The bedbug-like drone had opened up a cache of programs provided by Orlandine, selected one, a worm, and sent it in discrete parcels to the satellite. The worm must have reassembled itself within a matter of seconds, for that’s all the time it took for the satellite to fall under Bludgeon’s control. It seemed that simple computers were easy to subvert, and computers in places like this, where security had never been an issue, were easier still. Seemed to take all the fun out of it, though.

Now, as Bludgeon ignited
Heliotrope’s
fusion drive to move them closer, Cutter turned his regard upon Anulus. This black hole, of approximately six stellar masses, was surrounded by a disc of rock and gas it was steadily drawing into itself. Spindlewards of this disc, the output of energy dwarfed the output of suns. Apparently Orlandine had known much about this particular curiosity because it had once been suggested as a site for a massive construction project proposed before the Cassius Dyson sphere -some kind of energy tap to utilize that vast spindleward energy output.

The light here was glaringly bright, one glimpse with a human eye would burn out that eye in a moment. Already, even at this distance,
Heliotrope’s
hull was heating rapidly and thermal generators distributed throughout it were converting this to electricity and storing it in numerous laminar batteries, capacitors and in the high-density storage facility of the cargo runcible’s buffers. All this was mainly being done with Jain tech, and though Cutter didn’t like it, he was prepared to admit it was damned efficient.

‘I suggest we wait here,’ said Bludgeon.

Cutter gazed upon the virtual model of the debris disc his companion had created. The position indicated was just in from the edge of the disc where the asteroidal chunks were large enough and close enough together to shield them from the worse of the radiation.