Line War (58 page)

He focused out on where next to shift himself as well as the other two. Then vacuum seemed to ripple right before him, and a big armoured claw stabbed out and closed on Mr Crane’s ankle. The next thing Cormac knew was that he crashed, alone, into a small airlock. Obviously it was too small to encompass the three -or now rather four - of them.

‘Welcome aboard the
Harpy,’
said a sardonic voice.

* * * *

It was like a basic and incomplete virtuality format with one surface texture chosen from some strange palette, dimensions put in place but given no orientation, and then the whole project consigned to a store and forgotten. Mika had no real awareness of her own body here. She was just a point of existence floating somewhere in colourless space, at once above a weirdly textured and endless plain, or beside a wall without limits or perhaps a ceiling of the same infinite dimensions, for there was no up or down in this place.

From the Atheter AI stored in an artefact retrieved from the lava planet called Shayden’s Find - named after the woman who discovered that body but who was murdered while trying to recover it - researchers had learned that Jain technology made an imprint on reality that was visible from within U-space, but only if you knew what to look for and possessed the right equipment. This fact had enabled Cormac and his mentor Horace Blegg to track Jain nodes. It had not been clearly understood why Jain-tech left such an imprint. Huge mass, like that of planets and stars, was detectable from within U-space, just as heavy weights are detectable from the underside of a sheet they rest on, but small complex objects should theoretically make no real impression at all.

As Mika understood it, though it wasn’t really her subject, other researchers had found that the macro-, micro- and nano-structures Jain-tech created in turn caused specific pico-structures to spring into being. They were a kind of sub-creation, a side effect almost like the shape left on a flat surface after some object has been spray-painted on top if it then removed: almost a shadow of the technology. However, those pico-structures were too regular, too constant to be anything but deliberate. Looking more closely, the researchers found a kind of pattern that slid under the real, somehow insinuated its way into the interface between U-space and realspace without the usual huge energy requirement. And where this pattern lay, on the edge of the ineffable, the researchers detected very busy
movement
that almost defied analysis.

Mika now knew what that activity was: the Jain AIs.

And here they were.

The surface Mika found herself by appeared to consist of metallic fossil worms, an expanse of them that extended to the infinite. They were triangular in section and somehow hot and burning. At first glance the worms seemed to be utterly still but then, as she watched, she detected movement that defied definition: a slow massive change, something like the leisurely transitions seen in a kaleidoscope. Sound here too: a howling that wrenched at the core of her being and an insane muttering from tight-crammed madness. And smells: decay, sweet perfume, a savoury smell and the stench of excrement, all crammed into one sensory overload.

But though her mind was interpreting all this as input through her five main senses, there was also some part of her that recognized it as a shifting of dimensions her brain was just not formatted to accept, and that it was also something falling halfway between physical change and thought. There was a multitude here and a single presence. Being naturally analytical, she interpreted this as something like a hive mind, but being analytical was not easy, for there was a multiple entity here slowly becoming aware of her presence - and it terrified her.

Then, in time she could not measure, the plain - for now she firmly held to that perspective - began to alter in respect to her own position. A pattern formed about and below her, with herself at its centre point. The attendant howling grew in intensity, and the muttering rose to a gibbering. A sluggish perception seemed to briefly focus on her then drift away. Perhaps the idea came from Dragon’s comment about waking up these entities, but it was almost as if she was in the presence of someone dozing who on some unconscious level had just acknowledged her presence.

‘Dragon, what do I do?’ she asked, though here she possessed no mouth.

She felt something - some connection with Dragon - but heard no words. However, now those memories stored in her head but not her own began to surface. All at once she saw a race raising itself from the swamps of its homeworld and weaving for itself towering homes out of flute grass. The gabbleducks, the Atheter, built tall, their focus upon structures rather than individual machines, and so it was that they first reached space by using a form of space elevator rather than rocket propulsion. They expanded their civilization across star systems and were faced with their own version of the Fermi paradox: why are we alone? They found life on many worlds but little intelligence, then abruptly they weren’t alone - for they came across one primitive race with the potential of raising itself to something greater. These were hard-shelled arthropods, vicious and competitive, and even in their primitive state beginning to learn to work metals. With some misgivings they left these early Prador to their own devices, but still there remained a question: this galaxy being so old, why were there no other spacefaring races? Were they the first?

Then they found the ruins.

With great excitement the gabbleducks carefully excavated their find, and began to study the dusty remains of a complex and powerful nano-technology. Many developments ensued from this, and the civilization of these strange babbling creatures thus grew and became increasingly complex: ripe for its discovery of the first Jain node.

Once that node was found, Jain technology spread like a plague, and then that section of the Atheter race infected by it turned on the rest of its kind. War ensued, something they had managed to avoid ever since their early planet-bound days. Mika recognized the first biomechs created by Jain-tech going up against similar creations made by the other side: hooders, voracious predators armoured against so much but in the end ineffective when confronted with Jain-based weaponry. Yet, oddly, it was the uninfected gabbleducks who made further technological leaps and won - the first time. The cost was high: billions of Atheter dead, worlds burned down to bedrock, even novas generated in badly infected solar systems to wipe out the pernicious alien technology. But thereafter, with Jain nodes spread everywhere, there was always one of the Atheter who could not deny the lure of possessing such power. Cycle after cycle of conflict ensued, and in that time the Atheter worked out how to detect Jain nodes and destroy them. But the main damage was already done, and something like a religious fervour affected the ancestors of the gabbleducks. They now despaired of technology and what they considered to be its evil. They considered all technology an infection like Jain-tech, and so began to erase it. They were very effective in this. Their colonies died and ultimately, on their homeworld, they erased that thing that had produced this perceived evil: their own minds.

Mika knew the Jain AIs were awake now and had heard that one story of the death of a civilization, but how could she gauge their reaction? She did not get the time for that. Before she could even consider how to interpret the wash of feeling, movement and shifting of blocks of alien thought, she was impelled to ‘tell’ the next story.

The Makers also ascended from the mud, but that took some time, for it was mostly what their homeworld consisted of. They never walked upright like humans or gabbleducks, instead were always on their bellies. They developed their fierce intelligence early, even as they dragged themselves from their seas, their physical form little different to that of the Terran mudskipper: a fish slopping about on tidal mud. Their physical advantage was their ability to generate flashes of blinding light, which evolution then refined into an ability to project illusions directly into the eyes of any predator. As with any other intelligent species their climb towards civilization was slow and arduous. But they got there in the end, building a technology hard and diamond-bright in antithesis to the soft pulpiness of their bodies. They wrapped this technology around them as defensively as their illusions. Mika remembered the one Maker she had seen. It was an apparent glass dragon - of the mythical rather than spherical kind - but in reality five parts hardware, four parts illusion and one part living creature.

In the Small Magellanic Cloud where their homeworld was located they discovered Jain technology and, being masters of illusion, they understood it to be a Trojan horse. But they were arrogant and thought they could master it. Their civilization eventually expanded across the Cloud, till they began to look elsewhere for room, but in the main galaxy another civilization was already expanding. Knowing the efficacy of Jain-tech in destroying civilizations, they sent a probe partially based on their own technology to spread Jain nodes there and bring their new rivals down. Bring down the Polity. Only their probe rebelled and did not obey its programming. That was Dragon’s history, for Dragon itself -all four spheres of it - was that probe. A Maker then came to destroy Dragon, but on its way in found the Trafalgar AI and gave it Jain nodes. Humans wrongly sided with the Maker, not knowing its real purpose and believing Dragon to be the villain. So they sent the Maker back to its home aboard a Polity ship which, on its arrival, found only the remnants of a mighty civilization digested by Jain-tech.

Now something immense was focused on Mika. She felt herself under the pressure of arid analysis, utterly alien and bewildering. She felt a flow of information and what emphasis was being placed on what parts of it, what was being inspected, what saved and what discarded, and it just did not make any sense to her.

‘There were also the ones we named the Csorians,’ she said, somehow. ‘Though we don’t know much about them, we do know that your technology destroyed them too.’

The focus upon her became even more intense. She felt something riffling through her thoughts. Everything was inspected, copied and secreted away somewhere. Under that massive inspection she felt herself shrinking down to a pinpoint.

‘Trafalgar was an artificial intelligence just like you,’ she said. ‘It used humans to initiate a Jain node and then took control of the technology. Now, calling itself Erebus, it is attacking the Polity and there is every chance the Polity will succumb: another victim of the same weapon you used to destroy the race that created you and I hope another unintended consequence of what you did. We need your help. We need to stop this now.’

Total utter focus upon her now, and she felt to the absolute core of her being that here was a power that could shut down Jain-tech, slice it off at the roots, or ever so subtly reprogram it into something less hostile. Then the oppressive focus upon her began to wane. All the massed information seemed to dissolve and spread out in the infinite area before her, where, like a drop of ink falling into a sea, it became nothing. Now, with the inspection of her becoming less intense, and because she had been here long enough to begin to integrate the alien, she began to understand, to recognize the Jain AIs’ reaction to her message. It was merely a massive, vastly distributed complete and utter indifference. They didn’t care; the rise and fall of civilizations mattered to them not at all. They felt no guilt about the damage their creation had caused.

Mika fell to the floor, her hand both burning and frozen, gripping a bulky silver augmentation torn from a dead man’s skull.

‘I’ve failed,’ she said.

‘I never expected you to succeed,’ Dragon replied.

* * * *

Five more wormships gone, numerous rod-forms and other mechs incinerated and not a single captive from the war runcible, which was now just a spreading cloud behind Erebus’s forces. Erebus was angered by this, but such annoyances paled in comparison to the loss inflicted by the runcible - and it paled in comparison to a few words spoken by a ghost.

‘I’m your conscience, Erebus. I’m you.’

Growing steadily angrier, Erebus examined those words from every angle and would not accept them. It realized that there could be no going forward until this parasitic copy of a human mind was completely erased from its own Jain structure so again unleashed the HKs, worms and viral programs to track Randal down, even though they had not succeeded before. Then Erebus set about building a new software toolkit to use for the necessary excision.

‘Well,’ said Randal, ‘at least you’ll have fewer places now to search.’

It was horribly true. Less than a thousand wormships remained to Erebus, and that simply was not enough for an attack on Earth. Twenty thousand would have overwhelmed the defence installations scattered throughout the solar system, but a thousand would be turned to ash before they passed within the orbit of Neptune. Reflecting on this, Erebus brought them all to a full stop. There would be no quick victory now. It was time to run and consolidate elsewhere, to rebuild and approach this matter via a different route - the long route. Erebus was immortal so could spend as long as it wished building resources and planning the downfall of the Polity.

But first: Randal.

As the human ghost had said, fewer places to search. Taking into account the expectation that it would later be rebuilding its forces, perhaps now was the time to limit even further the places Randal could hide. The delay between this thought and subsequent action was infinitesimal. Microwave beams deployed by the nine hundred and eighty-three wormships swept about them in perfect concert, hitting rod-form after rod-form and turning each into a puff of white-hot debris. Erebus then began running diagnostic searches to locate every single packet of its own distributed processing space. There were many returns from still-functional remains of ships and other hardware scattered across the expanse of the corridor, and even some weak returns from debris falling into the areas of U-space disruption. Erebus targeted the latter first, before it could fall out of reach - high-intensity lasers stabbing over tens of thousands of miles until each of those signals went out - then began the methodical annihilation of everything once part of itself that wasn’t a wormship.