Line War (59 page)

‘A little bit of surgical cautery here?’ Randal suggested.

Chunks of Jain coral still containing powered-up processing space heated and exploded into shards like those of shattered porcelain, and the little pieces of Erebus’s mind they contained winked out. Drifting insectile biomechs responded with programmed instinct to the sudden microwave-induced rise of temperature within them by flailing at vacuum with their multi-jointed limbs, then burned and shrivelled up. Shoals of silvery nematode forms wriggled and shot here and there under the impetus of AG-planing drives, then coiled into rings and smoked their substance off into void. Here and there it was more energy-efficient to fire a missile into larger conglomerations of debris, then pick off the scattered targets with whatever energy weapon was most suitable.

It took an hour in all.

‘Now,’ said Erebus, ‘you can only be located in these wormships.’

‘But of course,’ Randal replied. ‘Wherever you are is where you’ll find me.’

Erebus ignored that and studied data on each of the captains of the wormships. Most of them were copies of loyal captains, and twenty-three of the original loyal captains had survived. However, there were thirty-seven ships controlled by captains it had been necessary to meld forcibly, and though Erebus was confident of their utter obedience - for they were part of itself and it controlled them utterly - whenever it allowed them more independence, there was always an undercurrent of resentment which Erebus knew, given a chance, would turn into open rebellion. The worm-ship sent to kill Orlandine’s two brothers had been controlled by one such captain, so perhaps it was that rebel trait in them that had allowed Randal to more easily subvert it.

Thought instantly turned to action. Erebus instructed the suspect ships to detonate their onboard ordnance, whereupon thirty-seven vessels disappeared like a chain of firecrackers and the rest of the wormships fried any large chunks that survived.

There weren’t many.

* * * *

‘What the hell is going on out there?’ Cormac wondered.

Arach and Crane had come in through the airlock shortly after him, but they were the only ones who could enter the
Harpy
that way. The rescued drones, including their leader Knobbler, had necessarily used the cargo door, and now all crammed together in the ship’s small hold.

‘Bit of a falling-out?’ Arach suggested. Cormac expected no reply from Mr Crane - him being the ultimate example of the strong silent type.

‘I don’t see how that’s possible, as all that out there is supposed to be one entity.’

‘I know why,’ piped up the ship’s AI, Vulture.

Cormac glanced for a moment at the console before him, then returned his gaze to the view through the chainglass screen in front of him. ‘Do go on.’

‘Erebus has got a virus,’ Vulture replied. ‘As I recollect, an attack ship called the
Jack Ketch
once had a similar problem.’

‘Aphran.’

‘Eh?’ said Arach.

‘She was a separatist killed by Skellor who somehow copied herself into the Jain structure he created,’ Cormac explained. ‘Jack uploaded her, then experienced considerable difficulty in getting rid of her.’ He paused for moment. ‘Would this virus happen to be called Henrietta Ipatus Chang?’

‘No, not even close,’ said Vulture. ‘I have a copy of him here with me, though he now seems to be in the process of deleting himself. His name was Fiddler Randal.’

It was a name that meant nothing to Cormac.

‘Why is Erebus doing this now?’ he wondered aloud.

‘Orlandine was less than candid with you,’ explained the AI. ‘Through myself and Mr Crane here, Fiddler Randal provided her with the codes and chameleonware that enabled her to conceal the war runcible for long enough, and which are now incidentally keeping us from getting fried. Randal has been working against Erebus for some time, and I expect Erebus has now decided it cannot afford to keep him around.’

‘I see.’ Cormac let out a slow breath.

This was it then. As far as he could see, Erebus did not possess sufficient ships to launch an assault on the Sol system, so that disaster had been averted. Admittedly the enemy entity still had enough vessels to be a real danger to individual planets and could later come to pose a significant threat again, but meanwhile the question about the provenance of Jain nodes within the Polity had been resolved, and an extinction-level threat had been negated. Why then did Cormac still feel frustrated, dissatisfied, annoyed?

It was because the Polity had been faced with a massive threat and had quite simply dropped the ball. Masses of ECS battleships had been moved into position, yet were not actively used and were easily rendered impotent. Erebus had laid the groundwork for an attack capable of penetrating all the way to Earth, and had launched it while intellects that dwarfed mere humans like himself by orders of magnitude had not seen it, having merely reacted to overt attacks and done nothing else. It almost seemed as if Erebus had managed to throw the AIs into total confusion while a single human being - though Orlandine was an extremely capable one -had set out to stop Erebus, and had done so. To say that this all seemed suspiciously odd would be an understatement.

He thought it odd too that Orlandine had done this on her own, yet surely she had not needed to? Yes, she was a murderer who controlled Jain technology, so would have been considered a danger by the Polity AIs and therefore would be in danger from them, but since she clearly knew how Erebus intended attacking she could simply have informed Jerusalem or Earth Central of this attack in safety by remote means. Had she not done so because she wanted to exact personal vengeance on Erebus? That was possible, but he had never known her well enough to judge.

‘What now, boss?’ Arach abruptly broke his train of thought.

Still surveying the massed but considerably reduced number of wormships, Cormac knew that though they now represented little direct danger to Earth, they would have to be dealt with, but here and now he did not possess the means.

‘We wait and we watch,’ he decided. ‘And when they move off, we follow them.’ He paused to consider for a moment. ‘Vulture, have you got U-com available?’

‘Hah! Well, I could send information packets, but I’d never know if they arrived,’ the ship AI replied. ‘It’s still very stirred up out there - the most likely target for communication from here would be Earth itself.’

‘Send information packets that way,’ Cormac instructed. ‘Let them know what happened here, along with the location and present disposition of Erebus’s forces.’

‘That’s not really up to me,’ Vulture replied.

Cormac had forgotten for a moment that, though he was talking to an AI, this was not necessarily a Polity AI and the ship he occupied was certainly not ECS. This meant he did not give the orders here. Cormac turned and gazed at Mr Crane, who had seated himself in the pilot’s chair and taken out his toys and arrayed them across the console before him.

‘I take it you are the captain?’

Crane nodded briefly, then jumped a small rubber dog over a lump of crystal as if he was playing some obscure version of draughts.

‘Will you let your ship AI send those packets?’

‘It’s done,’ said Vulture abruptly. ‘I’ve sent them on spiral dispersion so there’s a chance of at least one hitting home. Under Mr Crane’s instructions the packets do not reveal their source. Mr Crane seems wary of letting Earth Central know about us.’

‘Good.’ Not in the least puzzled as to why he was keen on anonymity, Cormac continued to gaze at the Golem. ‘Can we then follow Erebus’s fleet when it moves off - as it is sure to do?’

‘Dodgy, apparently,’ Vulture replied. ‘Erebus is sure to reformat his chameleonware, recognition codes and his scanners, therefore we won’t stay hidden for long.’

Cormac ground his teeth in frustration. Maybe, if they got close enough to one of those wormships, he could transfer himself across, maybe plant a U-space transponder aboard one of them? Just then a massive detonation lit the cabin briefly, before the screen blacked out. When it cleared a moment later, twelve more wormships had turned into clouds of glowing gas.

It seemed Erebus had yet to finish cleaning house.

* * * *

Orlandine slumped, utterly exhausted, peering down at the holes in the front of her spacesuit. The mycelium inside and spread all around her had repaired the holes punched through the interface sphere when it ran straight into the blast front sent out from the destruction of Erebus’s planetoid, and it had now nearly finished repairing the holes in her body. When it was done with that, she would set it to banishing the fatigue poisons from her body, then maybe she would feel a bit better about her current situation.

She was alive, so that was definitely a plus. The possibility that her strike against the planetoid would be insufficient and that enough wormships might survive to overcome the war runcible’s defences had been factored into her calculations. But she had considered this only a remote possibility, and more acceptable because the chance of enough wormships remaining to be able to hit Earth had been vanishingly small. Though she had not miscalculated in the second case, she certainly had in the first. She
had
been arrogant.

Erebus’s planetoid had halted before entering the corridor after detecting ionization that should not be there - ionization caused by her duel with the
King of Hearts -
then had loosened its internal structure before proceeding, which had substantially reduced the effectiveness of her attack. But, most importantly, it had turned up in the first place with something like one third again of the predicted mass. She had greatly underestimated Erebus’s ability to reproduce its wormships.

But I am alive . . .

Yeah, but there was no air left inside the sphere, and its self-contained power supply was down to half. At present the mycelium was feeding her oxygen cracked from the molecular make-up of the sphere’s insulation, and of course its ability to do so was limited by that power supply and by the other limited power resources within this interface sphere.

Erebus didn’t kill me .
. .

Her first thought, as the blast lifted her interface sphere from the war runcible, had been,
That went well, but it could have gone a lot better.
Her sphere then tumbled away through vacuum and the approaching swarm simply ignored her, for to them this sphere tangled in scaffold was just a lump of debris. Their main target remained, however, and it was still firing at them. Some half an hour later the last of the wormships passed quite close to her, continuing to ignore her. She had time to breathe a sigh of relief just before the blast wave of debris struck.

‘So what now, Orlandine?’ she asked herself out loud.

‘I think you die,’ a voice replied in her head.

He must have escaped the virtuality. She had no idea how and cared less.

‘Ah - I’d forgotten about you.’

‘Well, you’ve had a lot on your mind,’ Randal replied.

Despite her tendency towards being a loner, she almost felt glad of the company in the present situation.

The last of the Jain-manufactured scar tissue drained from her largest wound, which only an hour ago had been a three-inch-wide hole caused by a piece of Jain coral punching straight through her torso, through her liver, then out through her back to lodge in her carapace. She now set the mycelium to clear away those fatigue poisons. In a moment she felt optimism returning, but it was leavened by the hard cold practical realities of her situation.

‘I don’t think Erebus stands much chance now of getting through ECS defences in the solar system,’ Randal observed.

‘So your vengeance and my vengeance have both been achieved,’ said Orlandine as she began to analyse how best to use her remaining resources. ‘Doubtless ECS will now not rest until what remains of Erebus is hunted down and obliterated.’

As she saw it, she had only limited options. She could use her remaining energy to place herself in stasis until such time as the underspace disturbance died down, then call for help. The only problem with that was that ECS ships would certainly be the first to reach her, and in the Polity there was no statute of limitations on murder, there were no mitigating circumstances, and there was no way of obtaining absolution for such an act unless you could resurrect the dead. Also the AIs would never trust someone who controlled Jain-tech. If they didn’t execute a death sentence upon her immediately, that would only be because they wanted to study her first.

‘You are almost as arrogant and stupid as Erebus,’ said Randal.

‘Oh, thanks for that,’ she replied distractedly.

She could place herself in stasis and use her remaining power to sort data from the inert sensors on the sphere’s surface, then, if a ship happened nearby, she could raise herself from stasis and direct to the ship her call for help. The chances were that she could then overpower her rescuers. Unfortunately, the statistical chances of a ship coming within range before her power supply ran out - a ship that was
not
a part of ECS, since they would be the ones primarily traversing this area in the near future - were just about a Planck length above zero.

‘Of course, to call Erebus arrogant and stupid is merely to damn myself.’