Line War (52 page)

‘I am to follow this stuff to its source?’ she suggested.

‘That would seem to be a good plan,’ said Dragon.

Right, good plan.

Mika propelled herself towards the shafts, glad of zero gravity, for she felt that walking on the floor below her would be like stepping amid sleeping snakes. She misjudged her course slightly and landed against the wall above the level of the shaft mouths, but there were numerous power ducts here she could use to push herself down. Very little Jain growth visible here above the shafts, but then perhaps it was concentrated inside the ducts.

Entering one of the shafts she did not know where to go next, for the growth seemed equally prolific in both directions. The blue-eyed remote slid past her and landed against the far wall, then with a puff of vapour sent itself up into the dark throat of the shaft above her.

‘I take it you know where I’m meant to be going now,’ she said.

‘Yes, I know where you are going.’

As Mika followed her strange flapping guide, she abruptly felt that she did too, for this was exactly the direction some instinct was telling her she should avoid. As she moved she began to hear odd sounds. They could not have been coming from her surroundings, since she was surrounded by vacuum, so were they coming instead from her suit radio? No, it was switched off. They were in her head, obviously: a low drone like a mournful wind, the occasional chittering and a distant sound as of someone sobbing.

‘Are you hearing this too?’ she asked.

‘Hearing what?’ Dragon enquired.

‘Weird sounds.’

‘Resonance,’ said Dragon.

‘Uh?’

‘The Jain AIs are affecting you. You’re vibrating like a tuning fork in an opera house.’ Mika wondered where Dragon had dredged up
that
analogy. The entity continued, ‘My remote resonates in different ways, for it has no ears and not much of a brain.’

‘Why here, Dragon?’ Mika asked. ‘Why here and not somewhere else, like that massive Jain growth in the Coloron arcology?’

‘Everywhere Jain-tech grows, the Jain AIs gather on the underside of U-space. It both creates them and calls them, for such is the nature of U-space that both cases are probable. Nobody looked for them at Coloron, and why should they?’

‘Why would these AIs help us against a technology that . . . sustains them, that they are a part of?’

‘I don’t know.’

Just that, then:
I
don’t know.
Were they here just on the off-chance that alien artificial intelligences, the product of a hostile individualistic race,
might
be prepared to help? Two Dragon spheres had weaponized themselves to come here, and one of them was perhaps still fighting a massive biomech outside just to give her this opportunity. And Dragon
didn’t know?
She then entertained a horrible suspicion. Had Dragon come here simply out of curiosity or did the entity have some other purpose in mind? Was this mission just Dragon’s excuse for coming here?

The remote exited the drop-shaft ahead of her and, as she followed it into the corridor beyond, she recognized the kind of place she was in. Resting against one wall was a wheeled gurney of the kind they had used in ships of this type, rather than gurneys buoyed by antigravity, because of the possibility of power failure. She had just entered
Trafalgar’s
medical area. Ahead she saw that the vinelike growths become narrower, and all seemed to have issued from just one particular door. With a puff of vapour and a flap of its wings, the remote shot in ahead of her, and reluctantly she followed. Here reality seemed to be a light skin over something else, and things kept squirming at the edges of her vision.

Mika halted herself against a ragged door jamb, peering into the room at the long-dead occupants of three surgical chairs. The dried-up corpse in the first chair looked as if it had been fashioned out of plastic then placed in an oven for a while. Bones, exposed through large areas of missing flesh, had sagged and run, and thorns of alien material were sticking up from them. The head rested back in some sort of clamp, from which skeins of optics trailed away to plug into a pillar of computer hardware jutting from the floor behind. She shoved against the door jamb to propel herself over and study the cadaver more closely.

This was a woman. There was a name tag on her ECS Medical uniform that identified Misha Urlennon. Mika shivered at the similarity of their names. Misha’s head had been shaved and it was apparent that numerous probes from the clamp had entered her skull. Mika groped at her own belt for a moment, located a small cache, popped it open and extracted a laser pointer which she used as a probe. The corpse’s dried skin was papery, its ropes of muscle shrunken solid. Missing skin and flesh on its right side gave access to the chest cavity in which the organs lay freeze-dried and also shrunken. Mika turned on the laser and shone it inside, noting scattered components like chrome-covered stones, all linked together by a network of silver wires.

‘What happened to her?’ she wondered.

‘She was a failure, I suspect,’ Dragon replied.

Mika glanced across to the next chair, whose occupant was tangled in threads of Jain-tech which had rooted to the floor and then spread out. These threads grew fatter the further they dispersed from the chair, and it was evident from the state of the floor that they had extracted much of their physical material from it. The
success?
Mika decided to leave off studying this one until last, for here reality lay at its thinnest. This chair and its occupant seemed almost to occupy a different area of space from the rest of the room; it was as if they lay partially removed from the universe. Perhaps they were. Mika pushed herself past them towards the last chair and studied its occupant too - anything to delay what she feared to be an inevitable encounter.

The man in this chair was devoid of head, left arm and the left-hand side of his torso and the top half of his left leg. That side of the chair was gone too, and whatever weapon had been employed here had melted a hole right through the floor. No name tag was visible. Working out that the blast had come from above Mika looked up and gasped. The entire ceiling was concealed by masses of monitoring equipment and weapons. Four cube-shaped ceiling drones hung suspended in frameworks, each deploying the glassy hardware of old-style particle cannons. Obviously the
Trafalgar’s AI
had taken very seriously whatever had been occurring here.

Returning her attention to the half-corpse, Mika again noted those thorny growths sprouting from the bones and the remains of internal hardware. However, there was also Jain-tech growth in the chest cavity, and the right foot was rooted to the floor by tendrils of the same.

‘A near-success?’ she suggested.

‘But not the kind required,’ Dragon added.

Mika turned back to the middle chair but did not want to go near it. Now her attention was fully focused on it and its occupant, they seemed to retreat to a distant point deep in some well. After a moment she pushed herself over and halted beside the chair by grabbing its tendril-coated back.

This one’s head was also clamped. As doubtless the previous one had been, before both head and clamp had been destroyed by a blast from one of the particle cannons above.

‘The success,’ she said. ‘What was happening here?’

‘I think you know.’

‘Spell it out for me.’

‘It is the nature of Jain technology that it cannot react to artificial intelligences. Perhaps this was a safety measure put in place by the Jain AIs to protect later alien versions of their own kind from the technology’s destructive potential, but I think it more likely it was put in place to stop the technology being initiated by intelligences capable of disarming it and plumbing down to its depths, thus uncovering the Jain AIs themselves and maybe doing something about them.’

‘You’re a cynic’

‘A realist, I would suggest.’

‘Jain technology does, however, react to the intelligent products of evolution, such as humans,’ Mika prompted.

‘Just so,’ Dragon continued. ‘Therefore, any artificial intelligence wanting to use Jain technology must employ such a product of evolution to set that technology in motion, then assert control over that technology by means of the said product, until the product itself can be safely dispensed with.’

‘Trafalgar used humans to initiate the Jain nodes it acquired.’ Mika glanced at the other chairs. ‘But it was necessary for the AI to run a few experiments before it got the methodology sorted out. I wonder if these are all of them - as that docked ship could have had hundreds of humans aboard.’

‘Convenient, don’t you think?’

Now what on Earth did Dragon imply by that? Mika reached out with her laser pointer and scraped Jain tendrils aside to expose a name tag fastened to this subject’s old-style envirosuit. This one had been called Fiddler Randal. She gazed
at his hollow eye sockets, studied what remained of his face. His left ear was ragged as if several earrings had been torn out of it, and on the right-hand side of his head was a big silver augmentation which Trafalgar had obviously seen fit to leave in place - probably because old augs like that were difficult to remove without causing cerebral damage.

‘I think you should take off your glove now, Mika, and press your hand to this man’s head, up against his aug,’ Dragon suggested.

You’ve fucked with my body, and you’ve fucked with my mind,
Mika thought as, unable to do otherwise, she undid the seal around her wrist, cancelled the warning that instantly began flashing on her visor and removed her glove. Her suit immediately sealed up about her wrist, but her hand was now exposed to vacuum. She could not make up her mind whether it felt as if it was burning or freezing, but certainly there was vapour coming off it. Turning it over she gazed at the palm and saw that there were patterns shifting across it - the same sort of cubic patterns produced on the surface of a Jain node by the shifting of its nano-technology.

‘What have you done to me?’ she asked.

‘I made you into a tool suitable for this purpose,’ Dragon replied.

Her bare hand contacted cold metal, about which she saw the Jain tendrils stirring. She wanted to pull it away but it now seemed frozen in place. The tendrils extended, like a speeded-up film of grass growing, and touched her skin. Seemingly stirred into more frantic motion by the warmth of her hand, their growth accelerated. Pain ensued, but she felt strangely disconnected from it. Perhaps this was a kindness from Dragon. Blood welled on her skin and boiled dry as the tendrils penetrated. In a moment it seemed an icicle was driving its way up her arm, to her shoulder and then into her neck.

Then the ice entered her brain.

* * * *

The corridor ahead was a danger, Erebus knew this, but there was no avoiding it. No other pattern of U-space disruption offered safer passage through to Earth itself. Even so, Erebus dropped out of U-space some tens of thousands of miles before the constriction and actively scanned ahead. What the AI found there filled it with suspicion and made it bring the entire moonlike mass of itself to a full stop. There was ionization in the vacuum, hot particulate matter, signs of energy output that should not be found out here, so distant from the nearest stars.

Erebus extended its scan, paying particular attention to finding anything that might be trying to conceal itself. For a moment some of the returns hinted that there might be some object directly in its path, but further testing revealed this to be merely a ghosting effect caused by the ionization. However, there
was
ionization here and that needed to be explained, so Erebus just hung there in space for nearly an hour, scanning, checking and very wary.

‘Second thoughts?’ enquired a voice.

Erebus hated that its first reaction at Fiddler Randal’s return was a sense of relief, and immediately after that felt a surge of rage.

‘Second thoughts are for those incapable of making the logical decision first time around,’ Erebus replied.

Randal manifested in the virtuality, casually human but utterly a ghost. Erebus linked through, placing its own manifestation there to confront the interloper.

‘Hey, would that be like the second thoughts of one whose plans were so faulty he managed to lose fifty wormships to one of his own attack plans?’

‘You cannot provoke me.’

‘Oh . . . jolly good.’

‘I understand your hate,’ said Erebus.

‘That’s big of you.’

‘But shouldn’t your hate be directed at my target more than at me?’

‘It is focused there, certainly,’ said Randal, ‘but there is still enough of the human being remaining in me to want to kill you for what you did to all my friends . . . what you did to Henry. You know I still hear her screaming? And there’s still enough human left in me to know that the destruction of your ultimate target is not worth the collateral damage you will be causing.’

Ah, there
...

Because the event lay off to one side, within the area of U-space disruption, the light from it was only now beginning to reach Erebus. The AI observed an attack ship surface into the real in a photonic explosion. Its back end, where the U-space engine had been located, was missing, and its hull was distorted.