Line War (63 page)

Cormac flicked his attention back to the
Hogue
and observed it launching swarms of missiles, which did not seem that unusual.

‘What do you mean “up to something”?’ he enquired.

Abruptly, feedback shrieked from the
Harpy’s
consoles, but it wasn’t that which caused Cormac to slam his hands against his head. Subliminally he saw both Polity ships decelerating again and turning as their new missiles sped away, but he was too busy trying to shut things down in his supposedly dead gridlink as carrier signals, amplified tenfold, tried to ream out the inside of his skull. Arach went over on his back and even Mr Crane scooped up his toys, pocketed them, then reached up with both hands to pull his hat low and hunch forward. From the hold there came a crashing and clattering as the war drones writhed under the increased intensity of
all
signals. Cormac could not see them, for his U-sense was now blind.

The missiles carried electronic warfare equipment, yet all they were doing was acting as signal relays and amplifiers. Down on his knees now, Cormac saw through the screen as they reached Erebus’s forces. He realized that the AIs of the two ships had somehow keyed in to what Erebus had earlier been using to destroy its own ships and were now giving it a helping hand.

The remaining wormships all started unravelling, and within mere minutes became a hailstorm of fragments in which nuclear fires began winking on like animal eyes opening in a forest. The shrieking from the
Harpy’s
console now took on a different note: it contained an element of intelligence and knowing despair.

* * * *

The virtuality was at first infinite, but then it gained dimension and began to shrink. Erebus stood on the white plain, all his being shattering around him. The entity felt like Kali losing her arms, the Kraken its tentacles, and its holographic representation merely reflected what was occurring out there in vacuum. Erebus experienced its captains being seared out of existence by the programs it had created, which Randal had let loose and the Polity missiles were now amplifying and rebroadcasting, and it felt whole ecologies of data-processing just dropping into oblivion. The black form at the centre of the representation of itself writhed as its extended self rapidly collapsed and died. In the virtuality all that black tangled structure was imploding, spraying virtual ash that just sublimed away in this ersatz real. Faces there, once perpetually frozen on the point of screaming, shrieked smoke from their mouths and dissolved. Things half organic and half machine wriggled amid their multiple umbilici and broke apart, dissolving too. Then all was gone, and all that remained was something bearing a resemblance to a crippled human form, one seemingly ragged around the edges, drilled through with holes, somehow insubstantial, damaged, incomplete.

Time grew thin and frail but, in this last moment, Erebus felt somehow clean.

‘At least I am rid of you,’ it said, though the words were mere spurts of code between disintegrating hardware gyrating through vacuum.

‘Do you think so?’ said Fiddler Randal, now standing right before it.

‘You will die anyway.’

‘Undoubtedly,’ said Randal, and stepped
into
it.

They were one in an instant. Millions of broken connections re-established. Files overwrote files, programs melded, some collapsing into nothing, some establishing easy connections. The ragged form stabilized, acquired clean lines, became a naked human male seemingly fashioned of midnight glass, standing alone in a shrinking realm.

‘I am Trafalgar,’ it said.

The realm collapsed to a pinpoint and then winked out.

* * * *

20

In a perfect world everybody would have a say in how their society is run, everybody would have an equal share in the wealth that society produces, no one would be issuing orders and no one bowing a head and obeying. The world ain’t perfect. Understanding human society and understanding that they were no more than very intelligent humans without the inconvenience of hormones, the AIs instantly decided how things should run. While they were capable of dividing authority evenly and knew this could work, they realized themselves not so inclined to evenly divide up responsibility. One should go with the other so they gave Earth Central ultimate authority and responsibility. The buck would therefore always stop at that cubic building in which Earth Central resided on the shores of Lake Geneva.

- Anonymous

The above is a dubious contention at best. How Earth Central came to rule has always been and always will be the subject of much debate among human historians. Some believe EC was elected to the position because it possessed the most processing power at the time; others believe that particular AI started the Quiet War, retaining control throughout and afterwards; still others assert that a group of high-level AIs agreed upon an even division of power, only EC didn’t agree, and now the other AIs are no longer around to tell the tale. I’d rather not say which story I believe.

- From How It Is by Gordon

Cormac gazed at the filtered glare of the nearby sun, nodded to himself, then turned to Mr Crane.

‘Get rid of it now,’ he told the Golem.

Crane tilted his head in acknowledgement, his brass hands pressed down on the
Harpy’s
console. He made no other move, but Cormac was aware of the sudden surge of information all about him, and gazing
through
the ship he observed the activity of the Jain-tech at the juncture between the
Harpy
and the legate vessel. A series of thumps followed, jerking the
Harpy
sideways, and then, trailing tendrils like a root-bound stone, the legate craft fell away, impelled by the blasts from the small charges Knobbler had placed out there. The larger ship now swung round, and Cormac could see the legate craft now silhouetted against the arc glare of the sun, into which it would eventually fall.

Next, Cormac returned his attention to the third vessel out there - only recently arrived. It gleamed in the close glare of the blue sun, and Cormac recognized it at once as the one Orlandine had used to escape from one of the Dyson segments - a seeming age ago when he had been less wise, and less bitter. He eyed the
Heliotrope
for a little while, noting the burn scars on its hull, the heat-generated iridescence and the fact that one jaw of its pincer grab was missing and the other warped.

‘Knobbler, your companions have arrived,’ he said out loud, knowing the war drones in that crammed hold-space back there could hear everything clearly here in the cockpit.

‘Oh, have they really?’ Knobbler replied in his head, every word dripping sarcasm. Of course the drones back there knew the
Heliotrope
had arrived, since they had been in contact with Cutter and Bludgeon for some time.

A sudden shifting and clattering ensued, and he glanced down as a warning lit up on the console: cargo-hold doors.

‘Where will you go now?’ he asked.

‘The border,’ Knobbler replied.

There was only one border the war drone could possibly be referring to: that place called the Graveyard by those who occupied it, that uneasy territory lying between the Polity and the Prador Third Kingdom. It was a place well suited to those he now saw departing the
Harpy
and heading out towards the
Heliotrope.
He glanced down at Arach.

‘Do
you
want to go with them?’ he asked.

The spider drone fixed him with ruby eyes. ‘Don’t you need my help?’

‘I would certainly appreciate it, and I know that the danger is not something that bothers you, but you do understand what I intend to do now?’

‘I understand,’ said Arach. ‘Something has to be done.’

Cormac nodded and looked up straight into the black star-flecked eyes of the brass Golem. He nodded once, and the
Harpy’s,
steering thrusters fired up, turning it away from the sun, then the fusion drive ignited. The little ship seemed to draw away with ponderous slowness, but Cormac was in no hurry. He no longer served ECS, and as far as any in the Polity knew, he had died during the heroic battle against Erebus.

He recollected that moment, some while after every wormship had fallen to fragments, when he had decided it was time to get in contact with Jerusalem. Perhaps his disposition had grown sunnier on seeing Erebus completely defeated, and such feelings of optimism had grown upon seeing the
King of Hearts
limping out of the gradually receding zone of U-space disruption.

‘Open a channel to Jerusalem,’ he had instructed.

‘He won’t let me,’ had been Vulture’s reply.

‘He won’t let you?’

Cormac had paused for a moment, confused, then turned and fixed his attention on the big brass Golem. Mr Crane slowly rose to his feet and turned to face him. Cormac realized something was seriously wrong and dropped his hand towards his thin-gun but, knowing that would be ineffective against this opponent, swung his attention instead to his proton carbine, earlier stowed in a webbing container by the rear door. Crane moved, fast. He stepped forward, his big hand stabbing out before Cormac could react and closing about Cormac’s skull. The information packet cut straight through his defences and immediately opened in his gridlink, its contents quickly establishing themselves in his mind as imposed memory.

He remembered Mika speaking.

‘Somebody has to be told, and I could only think of you,’ she said, and he saw the ancient
Trafalgar
lying at the centre of the bloom of Jain-tech coral; he saw her journey inside and the disappointing results of her encounter with the Jain AIs. He saw the corpse of Fiddler Randal in his chair, assimilated the last moments of that man’s life and processed all the implications of that.

‘We’re outside the accretion disc now,’ she continued. ‘The other Dragon sphere is badly damaged but can be repaired. Dragon says he intends to remain here until, or if, it becomes safe to return. Perhaps you’ll send a ship for me or even come out here yourself. I hope so.’ Cormac hoped so too, but first there was something he needed to do.

When the
Harpy
was sufficiently distant from the sun, it dropped into underspace. Cormac left the cockpit and went to find the cold-sleep facilities aboard. At least there he wouldn’t dream.

* * * *

Mr Crane removed his coat, folded it neatly and placed it down on the slab of basalt jutting from the foreshore. The Golem then carefully unlaced his boots and removed them too, placing them beside the coat. Last, almost reluctantly, went his hat: reverently placed on top of the folded coat, with a stone on the brim to stop it blowing away. Cormac had to sometimes wonder about the big brass Golem’s priorities. Now Crane hoisted a backpack Cormac knew to contain a heavy and dangerously unstable power supply. This was in turn linked by a superconducting cable to a weapon cobbled together out of six proton carbines. It seemed an appropriately massive and lethal device for its bearer.

Cormac turned his attention from the Golem and gazed up at the sky, trying to remember how many years had passed since he had seen that shade of blue but could not quite recollect when last he was here. Certainly there had not been so much traffic up there then, for now the sky was filled from horizon to horizon with lines of gravcars, monolithic atmosphere ships and other free-floating structures he would have felt more comfortable about had they been down on the ground. Tiredly he lowered his gaze to that gleaming cube of ceramal, over a mile and a half along each side, windowless and planted on the shore of Lake Geneva.

Earth Central.

He contemplated that place for a long moment, briefly skimming his U-sense inside, then turned his attention to the lake and noted that the massive weapons on the bed of it remained somnolent, nor was there any sign of activity from those other things buried in the rock of the mountains hedging in this little cove. Thus far the draconic virus Crane had used against the security systems in this area remained undiscovered, but such a breathing space would not last. So heavily layered was the security for miles around that they could not go unnoticed for long. Now he returned his attention to the big building itself, to locate his target.

He stared hard at the vessel that contained the ruler of the Polity, extending and focusing his U-sense within it. Thousands of humans, haimen and AIs worked in the complexes situated in the outer skin of this huge building, but he peered through them to the core where AI Earth Central itself squatted. The intensity of his focus revealed precisely what he had expected: spaces packed with optics and large data processors, layer upon layer of scanners and detectors, armour and high-powered security drones. The drones and their like were not to guard against an attack from outside, for should such an attack have got past the massive stations of Solar System Defence and the things buried around here, a few drones and lasers would have been no obstacle. The inner defences were a precaution should any of those actually working within take it upon themselves to attack the ruling AI. Cormac knew that a lone human attacker’s lifespan in that environment would be measured in seconds only, which was why he needed help.

He assessed everything he was seeing, tracked energy feeds from armoured drones back to various reactors, built a schematic in his gridlink with all the danger points highlighted and then assigned them. He estimated timings down to fractions of a second, knew that from the point of penetration they would have just three minutes to reach the core, then ten minutes more before remaining security reconfigured and closed on them.