Line War (27 page)

One of the runcible worlds needing to be shut down was now out of the equation. At the cost of twelve wormships deployed to divert fire from a massive Polity dreadnought, another six had managed to make a run on the world called Ramone and slam a one-ton rail-gun missile straight down into the runcible complex in its capital city of Transheim, thereby taking out the planetary AI. The six ships had then been destroyed by the same massive dreadnought. Erebus recognized the
Cable Hogue
and felt a surge of what it could only describe as nostalgia. For in another age Erebus had fought beside that same ship against the Prador.

It would not take long for a new planetary AI to be initiated on Ramone, but it would take much longer to reinstate connections to the massive geothermal power stations buried under the continent on which the city of Transheim sat - stations that provided a vast amount of energy for operating the runcible network.

There were numerous runcibles on an oceanic world called Prometheus, but fifteen of them were notably different from the rest. Before that particular world had been colonized by the Polity, all its surface water had been frozen. Massive heat sinks deep under the ice, connected by superconducting cables to fifteen sets of oversized runcible buffers, had eventually thawed out the ice, and now, when there were abrupt drops in runcible traffic or, in some cases, surges of traffic in particular directions within the same quadrant, excess energy needed to be bled away. When that happened, whole oceans on Prometheus sometimes heated up by a few degrees.

Prometheus was occupied by amphidapt humans, their population level exploding from the start. They lived in undersea cities or inhabited the few island chains. Four of the fifteen runcibles had been located on the islands, but three of them were now gone, and the islands themselves now looked as if they had turned volcanic. Four of the undersea runcibles were gone as well after rail-gun missiles had punched down to strike them in the depths. It would not be long before the remainder were knocked out too, since the fifteen runcibles had mostly been located in areas of low population density, while the Polity AIs had concentrated their defences over the major cities. Remiss of them, though an understandable miscalculation, since all the attacks had been launched against Line worlds of high population. They had thought Erebus’s intent merely to destroy human life.

Erebus had yet to initiate its attack on the two Caldera worlds, for the massive solar collectors and power stations on and about those worlds could easily be adapted for use as weapons. Erebus was here using a different approach, which would reach its resolution within the fifty hours given to Chevron. Once the installations spread around an inner hot planetoid did their job, most of its substance would be blasted towards the Caldera worlds. The destruction wreaked should be extensive enough to knock them both out of the equation too, leaving them no longer able to supplement power usage within the runcible net. The wormships perpetually orbiting the planetoid meanwhile prevented ECS from seeing what was occurring on the surface. At the last moment they would pull away, then follow the debris plume in to finish off any of the power installations remaining. Doubtless the Polity AIs assumed the ships were positioned there to await further orders, and were meanwhile using the time to—

Something wrong.

From numerous different perspectives circling in orbit of the planetoid, Erebus observed a massive explosion erupt between two of the refrigerant-containing spheres. It was clearly an imploder blast: a globe of white fire expanding, then abruptly beginning to contract as the weapon involved generated its temporary massive gravity field. However, since this blast occurred in atmosphere, a shock wave spread out beyond the matter-disrupting hypocentre. It struck the two nearest cooling spheres, rocking and distorting them. Liquid nitrogen poured out of fractures, a fog boiling up to quickly obscure view within the human spectrum.

Was this the start of some attack?

The wormships in orbit began frantically scanning their surroundings for the cause, for any ECS ships would soon reveal themselves when they deployed further weapons. Watching through its thousand eyes, Erebus noticed something else strange occur. The refrigerant was pouring along the pipes towards the next spheres on either side. Upon reaching them, those adjacent spheres in turn released their contents into the next set of pipes -just the flow shock being enough to break the spheres’ internal glass thermos bottles. It was evidently a huge design flaw, and Erebus could blame nothing but itself. The whole strategy was now a write-off for, without the detonation of the rift CTDs, the planetoid wouldn’t. . .

Like a chain of arc-light diamonds springing into existence, the CTDs began to detonate even though Erebus had sent no signal. But not enough of the spheres had yet released their refrigerant for this final nudge to tear the planetoid in half and eject the mass of debris required. However, this should still be sufficient to cause some major planetary redesign. The surface of the planetoid nearest to the detonations distorted. A continental plate collapsed, creating an unbearable pressure that had to be somehow relieved. It came out of the rift: trillions of tons of magma squirting out at a speed way beyond escape velocity on such a rapidly spinning world. It sprayed round like an equatorial flame-thrower. Erebus realized at once that, however impressive, this blast had ejected too little material too soon, so would prove no more than a nuisance to the Caldera worlds.

‘Oh deary deary me,’ said Fiddler Randal.

‘When I find you,’ said Erebus, replying in the same slow drag of human speech while again applying a huge range of computing resources to track down the source of that damned voice, ‘your suffering will be eternal.’

‘Now, am I getting just a hint here that you might feel a little irked? Perhaps in the future you should get in a few Polity designers to check your stuff over before you try to use it?’

Rage surged through Erebus, through
all
of Erebus. Worm-ships juddered to a halt wherever they were located. Walls of rod-forms abruptly collapsed. Polity ships, facing imminent destruction, suddenly found their seemingly single-minded opponents distracted, shooting inaccurately, gaps appearing in what had been adamantine defences. Ten seconds later, this anger faded, and the attacks were back on track. Then Erebus saw the danger, a full half-minute after it should have done. And already a full ten seconds too late.

Get out,
it ordered the forty-nine wormship captains.
Run.

They had all just been sitting there in orbit, gazing down at the approaching firestorm, unable to process what had happened because they shared Erebus’s confusion about the design flaw, and even further paralysed by their master’s anger.

Sluggishly, the ships began breaking orbit, slinging out hard-fields behind them. However, those fields that could stop rail-gun missiles and absorb the blasts from megaton CTDs failed under the load of trying to halt ton upon ton of molten rock travelling at thousands of miles per second. The wormships flickered with bright stars as hard-field generators burned out within them. Molten rock impacted like a tsunami hitting a village of sticks. The ships writhed, shedding burning segments and firing off jets of evaporant to try and cool themselves. Twenty-one of them disintegrated in the first few seconds. Another nine tried dropping into U-space but were too close to the planetoid, and also too close to the mass of magma - within it, in fact. What remained of those particular wormships reappeared, turned inside out half a light year away. A further fifteen died within the next few minutes, shedding segments as they expired until there was nothing left to shed. Only four remained, damaged and utterly reduced.

Coming out of shock, Erebus ordered the four to merge, while realizing that Randal’s interruption had been precisely timed, so almost certainly the man had something to do with this. Ignoring Randal’s presence within itself, Erebus rapidly analysed what must have happened: someone had placed that initial CTD; someone had snatched the codes from the rift installations. That same someone must have found a way to penetrate Jain-tech in a way the Polity had yet to manage.

Erebus immediately instigated a code change across its entire composite being, reformatting chameleonware, recognition codes and scanning formats.

There.

The new scanning format picked up a ship moving away under conventional drive hidden by Erebus’s own previous chameleonware and recognition codes. It was some old-style craft with a legate’s vessel bonded underneath. A renegade? Only a fraction of a second after Erebus detected the vessel, it shed the chameleonware and shut down the recognition code signals. This was a taunt: a flagrant display of contempt.

What is this?

Erebus tried to connect, just out of habit, and was surprised when a connection did establish, but not so surprised to neglect to instantly follow with an informational attack. However, the attack just fell into an abyss, then, for the briefest moment, Erebus linked to another mind and found something utterly disconcerting. Here was an entity possessing a mental make-up Erebus simply could not recognize. Where there should have been limits there were none. The order of reality, model, thought and action were interwoven in ways that defied logic. The mind seemed utterly insane to Erebus, yet it was a potent alien madness. Withdrawing immediately, Erebus experienced an unfamiliar emotion, which it took some time to recognize as
fear.

The four damaged wormships had melded into one writhing mass, shed segments tumbling around it like dandruff, and were now separating into three complete ships.

Kill that,
Erebus instructed two of them.

The fleeing enemy vessel, with its mad alien mind aboard, dropped into U-space, the two wormships Erebus had sent in pursuit. Retaining the third wormship just out from the planetoid, Erebus knew that it must now show some more of its cards. It summoned three attack fleets from other worlds of little importance to the overall plan, since those Caldera power stations needed to be knocked out, and soon. Twelve of the many other attacks on Polity worlds were failing, but those attacks had not been supplemented from elsewhere as Erebus intended here. Polity AIs would see this and inevitably wonder at the significance of the Caldera worlds. Deception was therefore required, so Erebus ordered fourteen other fleets to pull off all at the same time, and move to join attacks on other less crucial worlds selected at random. Even this would not be enough to prevent the Polity AIs from working out that something was up - and maybe they might actually divine Erebus’s true strategy. But it also seemed unlikely they would have the time to do anything much about it.

* * * *

9

The history of dracomen is well documented (check out the numerous entries in that questionable publication the Quince.
Guide)
but what isn’t known, though it is debated at length, is their future. The world of Masada, where the dracoman race sprouted from the ground, as from Cadmus’ sowing of the dragon’s teeth, is no longer under interdict, and thus dracomen, growing rapidly in number from their inception, are departing to other worlds to set up home. This sort of dispersion was occurring even during the interdict, since dracomen had proved a very useful addition to ECS combat forces, went wherever in the Polity those forces were needed, and often never returned home. Continually they are percolating throughout the Polity, though inevitably the AIs keep a close watch on them. The problem with them is that they were created by an alien entity with just as much intelligence and possibly more guile than possessed by most major AIs. What do dracomen want? Are they still in the service of Dragon or do they now possess the same motivations as any evolved being? The latter seems unlikely for they are still basically artificial intelligences despite their biological nature. And precisely how their bodies function has yet to be understood, let alone the unfathomable processes of their minds. However, though it remains possible that Dragon has some nefarious purpose in mind for them, there is another more plausible scenario. The dracomen were a dying Dragon sphere’s act of procreation. They were its grab for something comparable to the gene-motivated immortality all evolved creatures strive for. They were its children. Only two of the four Dragon spheres now remain, and could be as easily destroyed as their brethren, but Dragon entire will never die while dracomen still exist.

- From How It Is by Gordon

At first she thought the gabbleduck was weaving together strands of flute grass, but then she understood that the ribbons of material it was using were a dull alloy inlaid with nanoscopic circuitry. The
Atheter
was making— No, she could not think of any word to name that artefact, yet she knew the alien would climb inside it, to then interface with it and through it ascend to a higher perception of reality. This was an old art, of course, and one being swiftly displaced by the new and easier technology of the Jain. Mika thought of them as the Jain, but for the Atheter both the name and the understanding of that dead race was utterly different.

As she focused her outer eyes beyond her fellow, Mika’s view abruptly included the weird basketwork city beyond. She reached up with one of her composite arms and inserted a curving black claw into her bill to worry at some fibrous remnant of her recent dinner still trapped between her teeth. Still focusing on the first two views with two pairs of eyes, she then focused her distance-viewing eyes up above the city, where a fleet of ships shaped like soft-edged crucifixes was now descending into sight. There were those who held extreme doubts about Jain-tech, and rumours of conflict now surrounded it, so as a precaution these ships had been summoned to take this world’s mind-collective off to a safe place . . .