Polity Agent (36 page)

As an agent, Earth Central Security allowed him a wide remit with parameters only loosely defined. It also granted him certain powers to carry out those tasks assigned to him via Horace Blegg. He could quit at any time. Only his sense of duty prevented that. However good at what he did, he was realistic enough not to consider himself indispensable. Perhaps the time had even come for him to hand over the reins? Thus he was beginning to think until his recent exchange with Jerusalem.

‘Are you ready to leave?’ the AI had asked him.

‘Frankly, I’m not sure I am,’ he replied.

‘That is your decision to make. If you do not feel capable of continuing your present assignment, something else can be found for you, or you may depart. Meanwhile, I have some gifts for you.’

The first gift arrived in his gridlink: a memory package he immediately stored.

‘And this is?’

‘The rest of your mind: true memories of what happened to you aboard the
Ogygian.
It will install to your mind the moment you open it. I calculate that you are nearly ready for it, the final part of that calculation being your own decision to open it.’

‘I see.’

The second gift arrived later in his quarters, delivered by a crab drone. It dropped the wrist holster on his sofa before departing.

‘How?’ he had asked.

Jerusalem replied, ‘A member of a clear-up team picked it up when they went to collect the remains of Gant. I used a nano-counteragent to remove the mycelium Skellor installed in it and wiped out his reprogramming of it. I also repaired the damage you caused by shooting it down .. . you do realize how it fought against Skellor’s programming by allowing you to shoot it?’

Cormac had removed Shuriken from its holster and held it out on the flat of his palm. It flexed out its chainglass blades, as if stirring in sleep, then retracted them. He remembered Cull, his long-drawn-out fight for survival there against Skellor, who took control of this semi-AI weapon away from him, and then sent it against him, and how at the last, as he targeted it, it had turned upright in the air to present its face to him full on.

‘Yes, I know.’

He slid Shuriken back in the holster, then strapped the holster to his wrist. It occurred to him to speculate on how subtly manipulative AIs could be. This gesture, now, in his moment of indecision? In the end, he could not step down with the Polity so obviously threatened. He could not live a normal existence with any feeling of equanimity, knowing what was occurring. Family? He protected them through his career just as he protected any other law-abiding Polity citizens. Mika? To remain with her here would be to remain at the centre of events, but ineffective.

Subsequently stepping from his cabin, he found Arach eagerly awaiting him, unable to keep its spindly legs still.

‘Are we on our way?’ the drone had asked.

‘Yes, we’re on our way.’

Now, aboard the ancient shipyard, Cormac began to make his way towards the runcible open to Coloron, Arach dogging his footsteps.

He found crowds crammed into a vast zero-g distribution centre, at the end of which stood a cargo runcible. The horns of this device encompassed a circular Skaidon warp ten yards across. Guide ropes cut in from all sides, tied off on a massive robotic handler crouched before the runcible itself. The base of this multiarmed behemoth ran on tracks extending the entire length of the distribution centre. Through here, warship building materials had once been transported. The handler then passed these off to other minor handlers in the tunnels branching off all around, which in turn took them to various machine shops or directly to the construction holds. This had not been a place for humans since everything moved here at AI speeds, and any human would have been ground up in the gearing. Now the handlers were still, the centre pressurized, and ECS personnel flocked in the air like khaki birds.

For anyone unused to moving in zero-g, the scene ahead appeared chaotic and confusing. It looked that way because those here felt no need to arrange themselves with any regard to
up
and
down.
Cormac launched himself from the tunnel they had traversed, occasionally catching a rope to guide himself towards the handler robot. In this environment, with these ropes strung in every direction, he noted how Arach seemed perfectly in his element. As Cormac drew closer, he saw ranks of ECS soldiers heading through the runcible ahead of him. Behind them came a row of five AG tanks and, spiralling up from the base of the handler robot, followed other military supplies. He noted that most of those waiting around him were ECS Rescue or Medical personnel—perhaps waiting for their fellows ahead of them to provide their bloody work.

‘Lot of hardware,’ Arach observed with relish.

‘Oh yes.’

Reaching the handler, Cormac noticed a haiman directing operations. The man sat ensconced in one of the handler’s huge claws, occasionally making a hand gesture, but most of his directions were being relayed over informational channels. Cormac queried him on that level, and received a priority slot just after the tanks. The haiman saluted, with a finger to his temple, before turning his attention elsewhere.

When the last tank slid through the Skaidon warp, as through the meniscus of a bubble, Cormac remembered that on jumps he made prior to events on the
Ogygian,
he had actually begun to experience U-space, which was something previously unheard of. He pushed off from the handler, orientating himself carefully to the plane of arrival at the receiving runcible. Arach shot ahead of him, impelled by air jets, and entered the meniscus first. As Cormac floated after, he felt the stirring of concealed memory—of that other gift from Jerusalem.

Now? Release it now?

No, some other time.

He fell, after Arach, through the Skaidon warp to Coloron.

* * * *

12

I’ve stated before that I really would like to believe in him, simply because of his name. Surely if you are going to create a fictional hero, nay even demigod, you are going to come up with a more resounding name than ‘Horace Blegg’? Upon that basis I spent many weeks tracking stories through the nets, checking facts, trying to contact those involved. Time after time the main protagonists I did manage to contact remained either close-mouthed or denied any knowledge of the man. Mostly, I only managed to contact those who knew someone who knew someone who ... and after tracing down many of those to dead ends, I gave up. Trying to find images of the man has been equally frustrating. There are many available, but often they plainly display different people. Through every line of research I encountered convoluted wild goose chases, breaks and missing information. One would suppose that all I really found was proof of his non-existence. I don’t think so. I believe AIs used search and destroy programmes to wipe out much information pertaining to him. I believe they meddled with reality again. I believe in Horace Blegg.

- From ‘How it Is’ by Gordon

Unless an emergency arose, Blegg usually confined his jumps through U-space to the surface of planets. Translating himself through U-space between planets in a system, or between ships, could be hugely tiring. And ships or runcibles were nearly always available, so why waste energy better applied elsewhere? In this case, however, he became impatient. The
Hourne
lay ten hours’ journey time from Masada, and Blegg felt no real need to remain aboard to see the Atheter artefact down on that world. Also, the runcibles aboard the
Hourne
had been shut down, since calculating the U-space position of a runcible located on a moon, planet or large station was difficult enough, but doing so for a ship manoeuvring insystem became near impossible. Blegg decided he must leave in his own inimitable fashion. He gazed down from a viewing blister aboard the great ship towards the moonlet called Flint, on which one of the runcibles in this system was sited. He looked into U-space, located both himself and the moonbase nestled amid the ruins of the shipyard, destroyed by Skellor with the
Occam Razor’s
weapons, and stepped across.

Earth Central immediately began to speak in his head as he found himself walking across the floor of a geodesic dome enclosing the runcible.

‘I have provided a small ship for you at
Ruby Eye—
it is capable of entering U-space unshielded. U-tech mapping and detection equipment have been installed and programmed to the U-space signature provided by Atheter. The USERs have now been shut down in that area, so you can travel at will there.’

Out loud Blegg replied, ‘I’ll test the signature—I think I know precisely the place.’ The scanners available to the Polity limited the detection range, with resolution increasing as he moved closer to the source. Light years away, Blegg would know the system in which a Jain node was located; at a light hour away he would know on which planet; at a couple of yards he would know which pocket it was in.

Someone striding along, followed by two hover trunks, gave Blegg a momentary glance—but in these days, when so many employed cerebral hardware, it was not unusual to see people apparently talking to themselves.

‘This place you know precisely—a certain brown dwarf perhaps?’ EC suggested.

‘You read my mind.’

He strode up to the runcible dais, ahead of a woman checking her journey slot on a column-mounted console, received a startled then accusatory look from her as he stepped to the warp and through it. He did not need to check that the runcible had reset to his destination—it always did. At
Ruby Eye,
a station orbiting a red dwarf sun, he snatched direct from the controlling AI’s mind the location of his own ship, then from the runcible lounge stepped a short distance through U-space, and directly aboard.

‘Permission to launch,’ he asked over com, once ensconced in the pilot’s seat.

‘Granted,’ replied Ruby Eye. ‘That was rather quick and, I might add, rather rude.’

‘No time for civilities,’ Blegg replied as the airlock tube retracted and clamps released his ship from the docking tower. He then paused and peered down at himself. When did he change into this envirosuit? For a moment the memory completely evaded him, then it was there. Of course, he had changed aboard the
Hourne
before to going into VR. He shook his head and smiled to himself, realizing that Cormac’s assertion that Blegg was an avatar of Earth Central had actually been preying on his mind. Existential angst -he really did not need that right now.

Falling away from the station spin in space seemingly fogged red by the light of the nearby dwarf sun, he turned the ship and engaged its fusion drive. One of many subscreens, set into the chainglass along the bottom of the main cockpit screen, showed numerous radar returns as the ship negotiated through a swarm of other vessels. Some of these were clearly evident on one subscreen showing a gravity map of the area. Glimpsing up, he observed such a vessel close to: something like a sharp-nosed monorail carriage towing, on braided monofilament cables, an object like an ancient sea mine. A USER—an underspace interference emitter—one of the devices previously used to confine Skellor to this sector of space while Cormac hunted him down.

Once clear of the crowd, Blegg input coordinates. The ship’s computer could not handle the AI level calculations required to drop it into U-space. Blegg linked to it and did what he always did when himself entering that continuum, but with his ability complemented by the ship’s underspace engine, and he and the
ship dropped into endless grey. He gazed at this underlying reality. Receding behind him—though, in truth, words like
behind
did not apply to his perception of this place—was the eversion generated by the red dwarf, gravity
seen
from the other side. And scattered nearby this was an even pattern of smaller eversions, curved like fossil worms: these generated by the singularities carried inside the USERs—hence their presence on the gravity map.

Mentally, Blegg cancelled the resurfacing sequence which, without him, the ship would not be able to handle anyway. A sub-screen displayed a warning, but he ignored it and set an alarm to sound once the ship reached its destination in U-space. Then, departing the cockpit, he went to see what facilities the ship itself contained. He found food, then a bed. The ship travelled to U-space coordinates as much here as there, now as then. Blegg rested, travelled no distance, and all,
slept.

Time passed in realspace and it also passed in this small piece of realspace submerged by U-fields. But they were separate times, and how they might meet up became merely an energy negotiation. Blegg’s ship took the course of least energy, least resistance. It was possible to go to another time from here, but the consequences could be catastrophic, as the time-inconsistent runcible link between
Celedon
and the Small Magellanic Cloud demonstrated.

A constant beeping dragged Blegg from slumber, and returned him to the cockpit. Two eversions pushed into the range of his perception, one that of a g-type star, and the other the brown dwarf orbiting it.

With care he eased the ship in towards the brown dwarf—as close as it could come without the gravity well forcing it out of U-space in a brief explosion of plasma. Blegg turned his attention to the console, but found the weirdness of perception too distracting. He initiated the hardfields that would cut that out. Immediately the inside of the ship returned to relative normality: a touch-console no longer looked like a three-dimensional kaleidoscope, and his fingers no longer appeared to be infinite tubes. He set the ship’s instruments to scanning for the U-space signature and the response was immediate: three definite matches and four maybes, but to be expected considering the Jain nodes growing inside Skellor were as crushed into the surface of the brown dwarf as he.