Polity Agent (11 page)

‘Okay, just hold your perimeter there.’ He paused. ‘Jack, how does Aelvor know her location?’

‘Through a locator implant she received during her adjustment,’ Jack replied. ‘Now available through your palm-com.’

Thorn peered at the device open on the seat beside him. It showed the map he was currently referring to, with dots on it to indicate his car and Oakwood. He tapped the second dot with his fingertip. A frame enclosed it, expanding to fill the screen with a map of the small village and the precise location of Jane von Hellsdorf within it. Soon he was flying above a gravel road, along which trundled a large auto harvester loaded with oak trunks. The next moment he planed over the village itself: a small conglomeration of timber-built chalets. As he landed on its central green, Thorn scanned around for a moment before picking up the palm-com. He turned the device until the map positionally aligned, then peered through a side window at a chalet located on the village edge.

‘Scar, close in your perimeter now and bring yourself and eight of your boys in. You have the target?’ he asked.

‘I have the target.’

‘We want her alive, Scar—that’s paramount—so just use stunners, and only if necessary.’

He reached behind to take up a short pulse-rifle, then stepped outside the vehicle. The weapon he held fired pulses of ionized gas and possessed a sliding scale, so could deliver anything from a mild shock to a smouldering hole. He chose the knockout setting, at its lowest level, preferring not to use the weapon at all. When he next looked up, he could see dracomen moving in through the drizzle.

‘Scar, I’ll take the front door.’

Scar merely showed his teeth, then he and the other dracomen moved in around the chalet.

As he reached the door, Thorn paused for a moment, about to reset his weapon to blow out the lock. Then he grimaced to himself and tried the handle. Swiftly opening the door he stepped inside and quickly to one side, levelling his rifle at the one figure visible. But Jane von Hellsdorf wasn’t going to put up a fight. She sat in an oak rocking-chair, drooling and rolling her eyes. Thorn wondered if the crappy Sensic aug fitted on the side of her head had left anything inside worth salvaging.

* * * *

Chaline felt tired after a long shift spent on running runcible alignment checks. Having stripped off her overalls when the alert came through her gridlink, she quickly pulled them back on. She had begun making queries through her link just as Villaeus burst the door open.

‘Come on,’ he gestured.

‘Graham said something about intruders. What—?’

‘No time,’ the Sparkind trooper interrupted. ‘We go now.’

Chaline instinctively glanced around at her belongings, but they were only material things—the most important stuff she stored in her gridlink. And if the likes of Villaeus said, ‘No time,’ he meant it.

As she stepped through the door, he caught her arm and dragged her to one side, behind the cover of two other troopers -Judith and Smith—who were staring down the sights of their pulse-rifles towards the end of the corridor. Chaline noted that they also carried proton weapons slung at their sides, ready to be snatched up. Their initial choice of pulse-rifles was obviously to prevent inflicting too much damage, since the base was merely an inflated dome layered with resin-bonded regolith, and all the interior walls consisted of expanded plasgel which, though enough to block sound and create the illusion of privacy, would hardly stop a determined punch.

‘Back to the chamber.’ Villaeus gave her a shove. ‘U-space signatures all over the base—we’ve got company.’

Chaline hesitantly began moving, glancing nervously behind as the three Sparkind kept up with her. Then she heard pulse-rifle fire, yells echoing and a tearing sound. At that moment Villaeus obviously received directions over com, as he turned suddenly to face down the corridor. Chaline tuned in on the military frequency of Sparkind augs. She could not broadcast that way, but she could listen.

SK5: Confirmed hostile — two civs down in North Section.

SK1: Recoverable?

SK12: In a bucket maybe.

SK11: PRs kill ineffective, but do delay the fuckers, going over to PF.

SK1: Contact, hundred yards, three o’clock on corridor’s twelve.

SK1 was Villaeus himself. Chaline picked up her pace, admiring the way the three others kept themselves focused down the sights of their weapons while moving smoothly backwards. There came a whooshing roar she recognized as a proton weapon firing. A subprogram in her gridlink offered up the news that PR stood for pulse-rifle and PF for proton fire—a more correct definition than the old, and now dying-out, misnomer ‘APW, since these weapons fired field-accelerated protons not ‘antiphotons’.

SK2: Go PF?

SK1: Civs that way . . . twenty yards, pick it up.

Villaeus turned to her urgently. ‘Run!’

At that moment, a series of swordlike spikes stabbed through the righthand wall of the corridor, then the wall itself caved in and something monstrous avalanched through. A giant silvery-grey beetle head grazed the ceiling, emerging above a divided thorax. The creature came down with a clattering crash, multiply jointed limbs starring out from its body to tear into the walls, ceiling and floor. Once centrally located, it began pulling itself along the corridor towards them. The three troops opened fire, but it moved horribly fast—seeming almost designed for manoeuvring in these corridors. In the midst of her shock, Chaline recognized distinct similarities between this creature and a manufactured beast whose remains she had seen on the planet Samarkand.

SK1: Concentrate fire on the head.

The shots burned holes through the monster, and smoke came billowing out from it. It slowed briefly, but nubs like globules of mercury filled up the cavities, quickly skinning over, and then it came on as before.

SK2: We’ve got another
—

The stretch of wall between Villaeus and his two comrades burst open, and a second creature surged through.

SKI: Fucking PF!

Villaeus rose off the floor, one of the second beast’s limbs tightening around his body like a hawser. He gripped his pulse-rifle in one hand, constantly firing into his attacker’s hideous face. One of his legs suddenly detached at the knee, and in a blurred movement Chaline saw the boot stripped away, cloth, skin, muscles, lengths of tendon, bloody individual footbones taken in different directions.

‘I said run!’ Villaeus screamed. One side of his face had now disappeared, then his right arm and pulse-rifle was jerked from his body. The creature took both rifle and arm apart with equal precision and alacrity. With his left hand the trooper groped desperately for something at his belt. Breaking out of horrified fugue, Chaline turned away as, beyond the monster, purple fire flared again and again, and the roar of proton fire rose and fell. She rounded a corner—to her left more explosions. Then the wall blew in ahead of her and she thought for a moment it was all over, but Judith and Smith rolled neatly through and came quickly upright.

‘Keep moving!’ Judith.

SK1: Detonating now.

The explosion from behind blew Chaline down on her face. Before she could get up, the other two dragged her upright and hurried her on. A sulphurous stink permeated the air, which probably meant a dome breach and the outside atmosphere was leaking in. Time to go.

End it.

Cormac opened his eyes. His heart pounded and he shook with an adrenaline rush. He supposed it no wonder that people once became addicted to such memcordings. You could experience anything: sex of any kind, the actual act of murder lifted from the minds of killers sentenced to death, even the moment of death itself should you so wish. And all without physical danger—though of course some subsequently went mad. Now addiction was simply a matter of choice, for available technologies could root out most of its causes.

‘Chaline’s observation was apposite,’ he observed. ‘It was quite similar to the creature guarding the tunnel down to the Maker’s escape pod on Samarkand. Like that one too, these creatures were designed for just one purpose: to go through that base just as fast as possible and
acquire
everything there.’

‘One notable difference,’ said Asselis Mika, gazing at him steadily. ‘These ones could heal themselves as fast as those calloraptors Skellor made. That means they were a
direct
product of Jain technology. The one on Samarkand, I would say was the result of technology learnt at one stage removed from Jain tech—nowhere near as robust, nor ultimately as treacherous.’

Cormac glanced around at her. Her ginger hair was even longer than when he last saw her, and was now tied back so her elfin face seemed thinner. She wore skin-tight leggings and sandals, a loose blue blouse. But though she had obviously taken some trouble with her appearance, she looked tired, and the blush marks below her ears were a sure sign of someone who spent too much time in full-immersion VR.

He picked up his brandy, sipped, then said, ‘How are you finding it here?’

She had been aboard the
Jack Ketch
with him during his pursuit of Skellor, but subsequently defected to
Jerusalem
where Jain research was being conducted and greater resources were available to her.

‘Do you resent my defection?’ she asked.

He shook his head. ‘No, you did the right thing. Your expertise was needed here and you’re not really a field operative. So tell me, what have you learnt?’

Mika laughed out loud, gesturing to the panoramic window of the lounge with its ersatz view of the stars. ‘What haven’t we learnt?’

‘I’ve studied the overview on the nanotech thus far uncovered, and I’ve seen how far you are along with counteragents and defences.’ He grimaced. ‘But what precisely
is
Jain technology?’

‘Okay.’ She leant forwards, all enthusiasm now. ‘Put simply: it is self-organizing matter that uses up civilizations for its self propagation. It is not sentient. It is first symbiotic with intelligent beings, then becomes parasitic. Its hosts use the technology to make themselves more powerful, to learn and understand more. But on turning parasitic, the tech absorbs information from them that will enable it to find more of the host’s kind. That information is incorporated into the Jain nodes it then produces while in the process destroying its host.’

‘Made that way or evolved that way?’ wondered Cormac.

Mika shrugged, then glanced up as someone else entered the lounge. Cormac looked up as well. This man was an ophidapt, but he wore a hotsuit, so was obviously a version adapted to low temperature. On the side of his bare scaled head he wore a crystal matrix aug with a buffer to visual and aural interlinks. Despite the technology being discrete, the man lay just a spit away from direct interfacing, and was haiman really. Cormac sent a polite query, and in instant reply received a package telling him all he needed to know.

‘D’nissan, please join us,’ he said.

As one of the scientists who shared Mika’s research into things Jain, Cormac wanted to know what this man had to say. D’nissan studied them for a moment before coming over. ‘An update would be nice.’ He sat down on the sofa next to Mika.

Cormac noticed that, sitting alone on the sofa on the opposite side of the low table, this put himself in the position of interrogator once again. He made a recording of his previous exchange with Mika and transmitted it over.

D’nissan blinked, then said, ‘Pursuant on your previous exchange: it is worth noting that something made can then evolve, and that something evolved can be remade.’ He touched a finger to his crystal matrix aug then shrugged. ‘Our studies of Jain morphology, however, are building a body of evidence weighing in on the former option: Jain technology is a weapon created long ago for the single purpose of wiping out civilizations.’

While Cormac sat silently absorbing that, the door into the lounge opened yet again to admit another visitor. Catching its arrival out of the corner of his eye he suppressed an involuntary shiver. The spider-drone from
Celedon
station had just joined them. So soon after reliving Chaline’s memories, a drone of such a blatantly insectile shape was an unsettling thing to witness. He returned his attention to D’nissan and Mika, as the drone moved off towards the panoramic window.

‘You say it absorbs technical knowledge,’ said Cormac, ‘so what happens when it absorbs U-space tech.’

‘Unless controlled, it won’t, and without a host it would not be capable of retaining that knowledge,’ said Mika.

Cormac gazed at her queryingly, but it was D’nissan who continued: ‘Jain tech uses its acquisitions in, for example, the same way an amoeba uses the physical mechanisms of its body. It is sub-sentient—not conscious. It doesn’t understand what it is doing. It is the very nature of U-space tech that a high level of conscious understanding is required to operate it, hence the fact of runcible and ship AIs controlling it now.’

‘Those creatures ... biomechanisms, if you like’—Cormac eyed the spider drone—‘U-jumped down into that base Chaline occupied,’ he observed.

Mika replied, ‘Yes, but they were controlled by a Maker version of our friend Skellor—that being the
conscious
element.’