Line War (61 page)

‘You don’t consider this sort of information a sufficient lever?’

‘I exist in the Polity only under sufferance,’ Dragon replied. ‘Some dirty little secret, perhaps about errors made during the Prador-human war, or perhaps about the slipshod manufacture of war drones costing lives, I could have used as a lever. Knowing that Earth Central is culpable in the murder of its own personnel and in instigating a conflict that has certainly now cost millions of lives is the kind of knowledge I could do without.’

Mika now began to understand Dragon’s display of emotion.

‘I am certain now that, though it is entirely possible Jerusalem knew the purpose of allowing Erebus to attack the Polity, it did not know about Fiddler Randal and his crew and that Earth Central had actively connived in facilitating that attack, else it would not have allowed me to come here where evidence of that crime was certain to be found. The decision was made quickly, without consultation. But it is certain that Earth Central will soon know I came here.’

‘You’re scared?’ said Mika.

‘If I return to the Polity I will be hunted down and blasted into component atoms.’

‘We have to tell someone about this.’

‘Who?’

‘But people have to know!’

‘Mika, while you were entering this ship, Erebus’s attack was brought to an end, not by Polity forces but by just a few individuals. The means they used to end the attack is gone now, and even fewer now remain alive. Those who do survive will perhaps ask some questions, entertain some doubts, but then move on. Everyone else who either knows or cares about this will believe it another victory for ECS, that Polity artificial intelligences have triumphed once again and destroyed another threat both to human and AI existence. Who do you tell? The separatists? Is that the route you would like to take?’

‘We tell Cormac,’ she replied, then damned herself for her stupidity. Though he was a Polity agent and had always been loyal to the organization he served, she knew he would, if given sufficient reason, drop that loyalty in a moment and do instead what he felt to be the right thing. Cormac was that sort of person. Nothing was allowed to stand between him and
his
morality. But what could he do? He was admittedly an exceptional individual, but if he turned against Earth Central he would die, simple as that. Humans who went up against AIs always did. As she mulled all this over, she noticed Dragon had been silent for some time.

‘Dragon?’

‘I am considering.’

‘I’m sorry - it was a stupid idea.’

‘Ian Cormac destroyed one of my spheres and has shown an almost supernatural facility for solving problems and surviving. He has meanwhile also demonstrated some other interesting abilities . . .’

‘We’re talking about Earth Central here.’

‘You,’
said Dragon, coming to a decision, ‘will tell him.’

Abruptly her surroundings shuddered and, glimpsing movement, she looked back to see something surging up behind her in the drop-shaft she currently occupied.

‘But first you have to get out of there alive,’ Dragon added.

* * * *

The two wormships now spreading clouds of fragments no larger than a man’s fist had contained a concentration of the viral programs that made up Fiddler Randal.

‘Ouch,’ said Randal. ‘That smarts.’

He might pretend such a humorous reaction, but certainly the strength of his presence within Erebus had been reduced. However, destroying a proportion of a virus was no answer for, while there was a medium in which it could grow, it could quickly return to its previous strength. Erebus needed the proper antiviral medicine.

The entity began pulling its remaining wormships into closer proximity to each other so as to decrease the delay between thought and action for, even in the microseconds it had taken to fire up the weapons that had destroyed those two ships, substantial portions of the virus had managed to transport themselves out. Assessing that time was now becoming an issue, for the U-space disruption could not last and even now some Polity ships might be able to penetrate it, Erebus therefore began shutting down many systems that weren’t autonomic and applying its freed-up processing power to the task of dealing with Randal. The real problem became apparent at once, for Erebus - defined now as the Trafalgar AI melded with over nine hundred other partially distinct AIs - was distributed across all these wormships. This meant that informational traffic between ships was a constant chatter, that Erebus itself was as much the flow between the parts as the sum of them. Randal was created, or rather uploaded, at the same time as the meld, and so had been included within it. It would appear that Erebus’s immune system - that which distinguished self from other - could not tell the difference between Erebus and Randal. This was a quite ridiculous state of affairs, so Erebus decided to try something.

The new tools, those that could initiate specific system burn wherever fragments of the Randal code could be found, were completely ready. They were, however, a virus themselves so needed to be treated with caution. Erebus very deliberately selected one wormship and began severing all its connections with the rest - taking this ship and its captain out of the meld. The legate inside the selected ship - which had once been a Golem assault commander leading Sparkind teams from
Trafalgar’s
crew - protested this action until Erebus suppressed that portion of its free will allowing it to do so. Now, with the ship utterly isolated but for one radio set only to receive, Erebus focused all sensors upon the selected vessel, then sent the signal to initiate the new tools established within it.

The effect was immediate. Infrared showed up numerous hot areas within the vessel and the whole thing lit up like a Christmas tree. It began to decohere, then it simply exploded, strewing burning wreckage in every direction.

‘That could have gone better,’ Randal observed.

Erebus simply ignored the man. Obviously the recognition levels in those new tools simply weren’t operating quickly enough, allowing Randal to transmit himself on to the next available piece of hardware before they finished the job. Selecting the pieces of Randal code it had cued the tools to recognize, Erebus cut them down further, and then cued the tools to recognize those smaller portions. Selecting another wormship, it isolated it in the same manner as the previous one and transmitted the adjusted tools.

It took a little longer this time.

The ship concerned bloomed with a similar collection of hot spots, then decohered and spread itself across a hundred miles of vacuum. No part of it exploded but when, some twenty minutes later, Erebus risked an active scan, it found that the legate located inside the ship had been incinerated and that not a single one of its higher functions remained. It was just Jain-tech out there, without a hint of sentience within it. Erebus instructed nearby vessels to fire upon the debris and, even as particle cannons began tracking along threads of wormship and vaporizing them, Erebus felt the hint of rebellion from its other distributed parts. This was unusual, since these were all either willing participants in the meld or copies of the same. This sort of uneasy shifting, this sluggardly processing, this foot-dragging resentment of the whipped slave, had normally only been evident in those originally
forced
into the meld.

‘The natives are getting restless,’ commented Randal.

Further alterations to the burn tools, this time selecting different areas of the Randal code. Erebus also employed a form of selective recognition so that if a tool picked up even a hint of the overall code fragment it was searching for, it would first isolate the system concerned before moving on to confirm the presence of said code and initiating burn.

‘Why are you killing us?’ protested the third legate - a copy of the same one made from that Golem assault commander.

This abrupt verbal communication came as a shock to Erebus, so much so that it replied verbally,
‘We
remain alive,’ before suppressing the wormship captain in question.

Different again this time.

The ship decohered before those hot spots appeared, then its individual strands began to break up into their separate segments. It was as if the ship had been made of safety glass that had shattered. Active scan revealed the same as before, however: every segment was devoid of sentience.

‘You’re losing control,’ said Randal.

Upon his words, three wormships detonated, and Erebus immediately began running diagnostic searches to find out what had happened. They came back with the same result: some outside force had caused their detonation - some sort of informational warfare.

‘Not that your control was ever that good anyway.’

Erebus began further refining the action of his tools. Randal had to be utterly removed now, for he must surely have sent whatever it was that destroyed those three wormships. Erebus quickly ran search programs to locate the areas where Randal’s code was most. . . dense. It would isolate those areas, then employ the tools within them.

‘You’re eyesight isn’t too clever either.’

What was the man wittering on about? Erebus found three areas that crossed the physical boundaries between eight ships. As per plan, it isolated them, then set the tools to work.

‘Your screw-up is all but inevitable now.’

But Erebus could see no problem. While those three informational areas might end up erased, the wormships concerned would only lose a proportion of themselves and could then regenerate.

‘Staring at your navel, Erebus?’ said Randal. ‘While you’ve been focusing most of your attention inwards, I’ve been blinding your outward eyes.’

Erebus now realized that those code concentrations were all linked into the sensors in wormships positioned to the rear of the fleet. Even as the entity discovered this, three more of its ships disappeared in a massive imploder blast, and another two began to unravel as some sort of EM warfare missile passed between them, broadcasting hunter-killer programs. Erebus fought to reclaim sensor control, and regained it just in time to see a particle beam punch through another ship and that ship detonate. Erebus tracked this beam back to its source, and immediately recognized the giant
Cable Hogue,
with the
Jerusalem
trailing in its wake. Then more missiles began to arrive ahead of the two Polity ships.

‘Bingo,’ said Randal.

‘I see two large ships,’ admitted Erebus, ‘and they will do much damage. But not enough - I have nine hundred wormships.’

‘Yeah,’ said Randal. ‘I just needed that distraction.’

Even as Randal spoke, Erebus felt linkages breaking, systems dropping offline. In a second it realized how the tools it had created specifically to kill Randal were now no longer isolated. They were transmitting rapidly from ship to ship, and already some wormships were coming unravelled.

‘You have killed yourself,’ said Erebus.

‘I have killed
ourself,’
Randal replied.

‘I can survive this.’

‘You still don’t believe me, do you?’

‘You are not me,’ said Erebus, and then began accelerating the ships it still controlled directly towards
Jerusalem
and
Cable Hogue.

* * * *

Mika had never before moved so fast in zero gravity, having previously always been so careful, knowing how easy it was to misjudge momentum. True, the Polity spacesuit she wore was unlikely to be breached, but just as certainly it would not prevent her bones shattering if she piled straight into a wall at some speed. But at that moment a few broken bones were the least of her worries.

Things just like this had chased Chaline and those others who had found the remains of the Maker civilization in the Magellanic Cloud; things like this had chased Cormac. Its body was a metallic torpedo of biotech, and legs starred out from its front end, just behind a nightmare head that seemed all protruding sensors and the chitinous complexity of an insect’s eating cutlery rendered in silver-black metal. However, there was something different about this biomech. Those that had been seen before had been utterly functional killing machines made specifically for hunting down targets in environments like this. This thing looked diseased, for nodules protruded all over its body, while some of its limbs were too short and others seemed the products of mutation. One limb was three times thicker than the others, and while the pursuer used this as its main method of propulsion, it could probably have moved faster without it. The mech’s deformities made it slower, which was all to the good, yet they also made it more frightening.

‘Turn left at the end here,’ Dragon instructed. The blue-eyed remote slammed up against the wall at the end of the corridor. Oddly, though the remote had earlier seemed a soft flapping thing, it struck with a ringing crash, then threw up a trail of sparks as it shot away to the left.

Mika somersaulted in mid-air, her boots crashing down on the same wall and partly absorbing her momentum. She felt her knee pop but ignored the stabbing pain as she shoved herself after the remote, grabbing at protrusions of Jain-tech on the walls to propel herself along faster. Glancing back she saw the biomech crash into the wall too, then just hang there as if stunned, its legs waving aimlessly about. Then abruptly it turned, mandibles like steel sheers clattering angrily, something long and jointed snapping out between them every time they opened.