Asimov's Science Fiction: April/May 2013 (8 page)

"And?"

"You hoped that if they didn't kill it they would at least keep it distracted enough for you to get close and use the weapon you designed specifically to kill it."

"You seem to know rather a lot," I suggested.

A battle now raged ahead of us, at the foot of the mountains. We reached the fighting just as it was terminating, exoforms like giant horseshoe crabs turned over and smoking like wrecked tanks, thetics reverting in the grip of long white worms, others pouring out of suits torn apart by ice-pick mandibles. But still there were many left, all funneling into the wide cave mouth ahead. I followed them in.

At last,
said the Client, perfectly understandable.

The cave sloped down, ever darker, then being lit by a hellish glow. The chamber seemed to have no limits; it seemed as if I had walked through some Narnian doorway out onto the surface of a hotter brighter world. Ahead of me I saw thetics keeling over, one after another, and I couldn't see what was killing them. I kept walking; found I could not stop walking. I stepped over and past hard shell suits and observed dissolving faces behind chainglass visors. Harriet was still beside me and I glanced across at her.

Kill me now,
I thought, but couldn't say.

"It's killing them with the farcaster," she said, dipping her head to indicate what lay ahead.

The Client was wound around its crystal tree, large wasp-like segments conjoined in a great snake hundreds of feet long. At its head was the primary form which I could see was an adult some days away from death, and yet to be cast away like those husks scattered on the ground all around to allow the next creature-segment to take over. At its tail its terminal segment was giving birth to another, which would remain attached and in its turn give birth. The whole cycle—the time it took for the terminal form to reach the head—was just solstan months long. Meanwhile, all those segments fed, chewing down an odd rubbery nectar exuded by the crystal tree, which in turn extracted the materials to make it from the ground below, and from the husks the exoforms fed to its nanomachine roots. But there was something else about that tree too. It fed the Client, supported the Client, and was the totality of its technology and, near its head, a crystal flower had bloomed: the farcaster.

Soon I was circumventing the husks of former head segments. Reaching the base of the tree I saw the last of the thetics collapsing around me, and I went down on my
knees. I don't know whether that was my own impulse or an instruction from the creature rearing high above me. I managed to turn my head slightly, searching for Harriet, just in time to see her huff out a haze of smoke, slump, and then sprawl beside me.

I'd let her down. I'd been careless. I felt a surge of grief immediately followed by a dead dark hopelessness. What was the point now? What was the point of... continuing?

Give me the gun,
said the Client.

The farcaster was here and my search had been a pointless one. I just couldn't understand, I just couldn't... and then I saw it.

The human body lay inside some kind of pod at the foot of the tree, almost like a flower yet to open. Through crystal distortions I could see it nestled in white snakes, some attached to it, small ones around the gaping wound in its skull, a large one entering its mouth, others attached here and there around a body that had been broken and torn. And through crystal distortions I recognized my own face.

Give me the gun.
It wasn't an instruction in human language but a need, a chemical pattern, a chain of pheromones perpetually renewing. Somehow I found the strength to resist, and saw the snakes wriggling about my doppelganger lying under crystal ahead.

No,
I managed.

It could send one of its exoforms to take me apart and thereafter seize the gun. I knew with absolute certainty that it had finished with me. I was a tool it had employed and all its tools died when their usefulness was at an end. I knew with utter certainty that I was going to die. I just did not want to die in ignorance.

Explain,
I tried.

The Client at once understood that I accepted defeat and death, and relented.

The pressure came off and I found myself deeper in the Client's distributed mind, ever dying and ever renewing. Chemical language offered itself and I accepted. I was me and the Client again and its memories opened. Of course the Client was able to manipulate its own genes and its own biology and, like all its kind, that manipulation was part of it and not some logically refined science. The Client's species did have its geneticists, its bio-techs, and even its bio-warfare experts, but the Client wasn't one of them. That had been a lie. However, it was an expert and it was that expertise that had enabled it to escape. It was an expert in U-space tech, it was an alien Iversus Skaidon, and it had built the farcaster.

I understood now what had killed the thetics and Harriet: energy dense micro-explosives no larger than spores but detonating inside with the force of gunshots. The Client had farcast such explosives into the prador aboard the
Coin Collector,
draining its limited supply of energy and using up those same explosives, before escaping aboard that ship so long ago, the worlds of its kind burning and tearing apart under prador kamikaze assault.

Why not all,
I wondered.

It could have made more of these explosives and steadily annihilated every prador in existence, surely? No, because there were trillions of prador and each first-child or second-child, as the Client had learned, could not be killed with just one such explosive. And here was the complete killer of that idea: it needed to know the precise locations of its targets. It needed help; it needed spotters to locate prime targets like father-captains, like the king of the prador. And it needed a weapon that once farcast into such a target would then wipe out all the prador around it—its family. That's where the Polity came in, and that's where I came in: one of the Polity's prime biowarfare experts.

I felt the rage again. The orders had been explicit: nothing was to remain. Even as I hit the destruct to turn all my computer files to atomic dust and burn up my samples
in thousand-watt laser bursts, the micro-dense explosives tore me apart, and I knew nothing. Now, however, I understood how little trust the Client had of its allies, how it had targeted them all, killing all the humans in the team, shattering the crystal minds of all the AIs. Then, realizing its mistake, it had come for me, and incorporated me—drawn me in like a damaged but still useful exo-form.

But the journey, why the pointless search?

The Client needed me separate from it because as an exoform close to it I could pick up on some of its thoughts and might uncover the lie I had been told, and learn that the farcaster was intact and that what it wanted was the bio-weapon I had destroyed. That separation was maintained by the first-child ganglion in the tank and U-space communications that could be shut down in an instant. With our minds so close, why could it not take the design of that weapon straight from my brain? It couldn't, because it wasn't there—it was lost with a large chunk of my brain. However, the skills were still there and I was capable of remaking it.

It took the Client many years to build my avatar. It used one of the Golem whose mind it had destroyed, it used elements of the thetic program, which had been the product of one of the research team it had killed, and it did the best it could. It needed me motivated to rebuild that weapon. My motivation was an ersatz freedom, maintained by my ostensible separation from the Client and the firm knowledge that the bioweapon would work as well against it as against the prador. I responded as predicted. I remade that weapon, it resided aboard the
Coin Collector,
and it resided inside the bullets in the gun inside my thigh.

Give me the gun.

I realized that the action of handing over that weapon wasn't the main thing the Client required, but its consequence. The knowledge was locked inside me and, by handing over the gun, I would unlock it.

Trillions of prador. I didn't like them very much but such a genocide appalled me. The Client had its farcaster—had never been without it—and shortly it would have the weapon to annihilate them all. How it intended to target them I didn't know, but it could find a way, for it had the time of an immortal and the utter certainty of purpose. I put up futile resistance and agony filled my skull, not the one in my artificial body, but in that one over there, wrapped in worms and entombed in crystal. My vision was blurred as I stared at the seared ground and fought for, I don't know, at least some redemption from what was to ensue. Then my vision cleared a little, and I saw a strange thing.

Ten objects lay scattered across the ground in front of me. They were colorful curved spikes, shocking pink.

I gave up, simultaneously sending the signal to open the hatch in my thigh while reaching down to tear aside the canvas flap. My hand closed around the butt of my fungus gun and I withdrew it, all the knowledge of what its bullets incorporated riding up inside me. I really wanted to aim the weapon at the Client and pull the trigger, but that was utterly beyond me. I turned it, rested it in the flat of my hand, and presented it. Already the Client was looping down, both mentally and physically, multiple wings roaring to support its weight, its wasp-like leading segment reaching out with four limbs terminating in hands that seemed to be collections of black fish hooks, black hooks in my skull too.

But it was the hand of a reptile, sans claws, that took the gun.

"Tuppence," said a voice, but I was still in that moment.

I saw Harriet aiming the gun with a dexterity she had seemingly not possessed in many decades. One shot went into the Client's leading segment, into its thorax, which in turn was partially melded to the head of the segment behind. A second shot went in
two segments back from that. Then another two shots went in widely spaced, one after another. The hooks withdrew from my mind, but I was rigid with agony, the Client's agony. I managed to turn my head in time to see Harriet flung aside by a detonation in her side. It tore a hole, but what was revealed inside wasn't bloody, but hard and glittery. She rolled, came up again, and fired the remaining two shots.

"Tuppence."

A roaring scream filled the cavern as of a whole crowd being thrown into a furnace. The Client reared back and wrapped itself around its tree, black lines rapidly spreading from the bullet impact sites. It shed its forward form, birthed behind, sucked on a crystal tree suddenly turned milk white as it filled with nutrient. It birthed and shed in quick succession, its discarded segments falling about me not as dry husks but soggy and heavy as any corpse. I saw one issuing brown sprouts, spore heads expanding. The Client fought on for survival, tearing at its tree; crystal began to fall and shatter then like the dried wings of its husks once had. Around me I now saw exoforms, but there was no coherence to them—they were just running, crashing into each other, crashing into the walls of the cavern.

"Tuppence."

At last it ended, the Client freezing round its tree, final segments infected, one newly born freezing halfway down its birth canal, a last head segment falling. The Client died sprouting a fungus that, in its original form, killed mere ants. I died too. Under crystal I saw black threads spreading, then all sight of my body blotted out as a spore head exploded in there.

"Oh will you snap out of it!"

I opened my eyes. I was aboard the
Coin Collector,
in my chair, facing my array of screens. The Client's world was there in vacuum and around it I could see the flash of fusion drives and the distant bulks of ships.

"Why am I alive?" I asked, peering down at my battered artificial body.

"You're not," said Harriet. "You're dead."

I turned to study her. She had put her artificial claws back on and had painted them bright custard yellow, even applied some eye shadow of the same color. It occurred to me then that I should have wondered, what with her supposedly being so inept with her claws, how she had always so neatly applied the nail polish and other make-up. Transferring my gaze to her side I could see no sign of her injury, just clean scaled skin.

"What do you mean I'm dead?"

"The Client used stock memcrystal for the processing in your avatar. That crystal has more than enough storage to contain a human mind. You're a copy and even though your human body is dead, you live. You are you, Tuppence."

I wasn't quite sure how I felt about that.

"Are you Polity?" I asked. "Are you a Polity
agent?"

"No, completely independent," she replied cheerfully.

"I'm confused."

"Understandable—it's been a trying day." She paused while I stared at her, then relented. "Okay, you hired me and I got thoroughly screwed. The damage was bad and it was way beyond being repaired with the reward you gave me or the facilities available at that hospital. That war-drone made a real mess. Then, while I was in the hospital, I received an offer I couldn't refuse. They'd pay to repair me. They'd bring in the expertise. They'd pay to turn me into what I am now—"

"And what are you now?"

"I'm practically indestructible, and more machine than lizard." She paused. "And with a mind distributed about my body so it couldn't be killed with a single farcaster shot."

"Right," I said. "Please continue."

"I was to stick with you, and lead them to the Client." Harriet paused. "However when I worked out what you were up to, I went for the bigger reward—the one for offing the Client."

"The Polity," I said, feeling slightly disgusted.

"Polity technology, certainly, but not the Polity and its AIs." She pointed a claw at the screens. "Them."

I stared at the screens for a long moment, then reached out and upped the magnification. They weren't Polity ships out there swarming around the Client's world; they were prador dreadnoughts.

I wasn't sure about how I felt about that either.

"What now?" I asked.