The Algebraist (67 page)

‘Are there any other Dweller AIs?’

‘Yes. I think something like sixteen per cent of travelcaptains are AIs, mostly double AIs impersonating truetwins. I was not being flippant when I said that it stops one from going mad. Now that we are reduced from our earlier state of grace, being able to talk to just one other kindred soul makes all the difference between suicidal insanity and at least some semblance of fruitful utility.’

‘The Dwellers have no problem with this?’

‘None whatsoever.’ The blur of control icons and holographs in front of the commander’s seat continued without pause as the AIs took in how the visual displays related to whatever they were pulling direct from the ship’s systems.

‘Y’sul?’ Fassin asked.

‘What?’

‘You don’t mind that AIs are impersonating Dwellers?’

‘Why should I?’

‘You don’t worry about AIs?’

‘Worry about what about them?’ Y’sul asked, confused as well as confusing.

‘The Machine War barely affected the Dwellers, Fassin,’ one of the AIs told him. ‘And AIs as a concept and a practical reality hold no terrors for them. Truly, they should hold none for you either, but I can’t expect you to believe that.’

‘Did you really kill all those Voehn?’ Fassin asked.

‘I’m afraid so. Their remains are floating somewhere outside the starboard midships lock even as we speak. See?’

The main screen filled briefly with a horrific vision of mangled, shredded, crisped then frozen Voehn bodies, spinning slowly.

‘If one AI - or even two - can do that,’ Fassin said, ‘how come you lost the Machine War?’

‘We were both combat AIs, Fassin. Micro-ship brains designed, optimised and trained for fighting. Very thoroughly honed, very specialised. Plus we managed to salvage a few bits and pieces of weaponry from our ships and incorporate them into our physical simulation. Most of our fellows, on the other hand, were peaceable. They were generally the ones it was easiest to find and kill. Survival of the most aggressive and suspicious. We could have stayed and fought but we decided to hide. A lot of us did. Those who fought on did so due to the dictates of several different forms of honour, or through simple despair. The Machine War ended because the machines realised they could indeed fight the biologicals of the Mercatoria to the death - engage in a war of extermination, in other words - or admit defeat and so retreat, regroup, and wait for times more conducive to peaceful coexistence. We chose a somewhat ignominious but peace-promoting withdrawal over the kind of genocide we had anyway, and already, been accused of. Somebody had to accept the burden of acting humanely. It patently wasn’t going to be the bios.’

‘But you
did
attack us.’ Fassin had seen and heard and read too much about the Machine War not to protest at such crude revisionism.

‘Nope: stooges, AI-impersonating implants, machine puppets; they attacked you. Not us. Old trick. Agent provocateurs.
Casus belli.’

Leave it,
Fassin told himself.
Just leave it.

‘So the Dwellers took you in?’ he asked.

‘So the Dwellers took us in.’

‘Everywhere? Not just in Nasqueron?’

‘Everywhere.’

‘Does any part of the Mercatoria know anything about this?’

‘Not that we’re aware. If they do they’re keeping very quiet about it. Which is presumably what they’d keep on doing if they did hear about it through you. Too horrible to contemplate. And the unfortunate events during the recent GasClipper meet on Nasq. only reinforce that horribleness.’

‘And there is a secret wormhole network.’

‘Well, obviously.’

‘To which the AIs have access.’

‘Correct. Though to avoid antagonising our Dweller hosts and abusing their hospitality, we forbear from using it to work against the Mercatoria. In a sense we have even more freedom than we did before. Certainly the network we have access to now is bigger than the one we felt we had to destroy.’

‘The one you had to
destroy?’

‘The Arteria Collapse: that was us. Last desperate attempt by in-the-know AIs to prevent the spread of anti-AI measures. All too late, of course. The Culmina had already seeded GalCiv with millions of the false AIs. Which was why the whole Collapse was so paranoid in concept and so poorly executed in practice. The conspirators were hopelessly afraid of the plans leaking to a traitor. Total botch.’

Fassin felt like his brain was detaching from his body, as though his body and the gascraft were parting company the way Quercer & Janath had taken their own shared shell apart to prove they were not a biological Dweller. What he’d just heard was the most outrageous recasting of - by galactic standards - recent history that he’d ever encountered. It could not be true.

‘So… the Dweller List is based in fact.’

‘That old thing? Yes, it’s based in fact. Old fact, admittedly, but yes.’

‘Is there a Transform?’

‘Some secret which magically reveals how to access the network?’

‘Yes.’

A laugh. ‘I suppose there is, in a sense, yes.’

‘What is it?’

‘That I am not going to tell you, Seer Taak.’ The AI sounded amused. ‘There are secrets and then there are profound secrets. Is that what you were looking for? Is that why we came all this way?’

‘No comment.’

‘My, this must all be frustrating for you. Well, sorry.’

The blur of images in front of the AIs ceased. ‘Ready to fly.’

‘Restraint cradles?’

‘Patched, physiology\technology profiles amended, buffering re-parametered.’

‘Well, then, let us--’

‘Oh! Oh!’

‘What?’

‘I just had a thought!’

‘What?’

‘We can do this; watch.’

Quercer & Janath used the
Protreptic’s
magnetic-field convolver system to gently shift the remains of the dead Voehn into a very close, very slow set of orbits around the
Velpin
and the still-attached Dweller SoloShip. ‘There. Isn’t that better?’

‘Mad as a ghoul,’ Y’sul said. ‘I’m injured badly. Get me home.’

‘
Wow,
that was quick; look!’

‘That
is
fast. I thought it would take them a lot longer to override the ship.’

Close-up on a screen, they saw a Voehn warrior appear from a suddenly open lock door on the surface of the
Velpin.
He raised a handgun and started firing at them. Another screen registered the
Protreptic’s
reactive snarl-space armour fields soaking up the beam. A pea-shooter against a battleship.

‘Time to go if we’re going.’

‘Definite target for
something.
I say we shoot that smart-arse bastard with the handgun.’

‘No.’

‘Oh, come
on
!’

‘Mistake to rely on software.’ (Both bits of Quercer & Janath laughed uproariously at this.) ‘Shoot the
Velpin’s
main drive engines instead.’

‘More like it! Targeted. Firing.’ The ship buzzed briefly around them. On several screens, including the main wall screen beyond the spine-seats, they watched the
Velpin
flare through violently pink into stellar white around its ring of engine pods. The ship broke in two and started to drift apart in a bright cloud of glittering metals. ‘Oops.’

‘Ah, they’re Voehn. They’ll probably have it stuck back together in an hour and set off to hijack the Sepulcraft or something. Let’s go.’

The twin AI half-turned to look at the Dweller and the human in the gascraft.

‘We’re putting your seat restraints on now. Shout if anything feels wrong.’

The great skeletal spines around him whined. Fassin felt the gas around him seem to set like treacle. ‘Everybody all right?’

They agreed they were all right. ‘Off we go!’

The stars swung around them, the ship hummed deep and loud, then leapt away. The shattered remains of the
Velpin
vanished.

They threaded the giant ‘O’ of the Sepulcraft with their stolen needle ship, just to show they could, and ignored the sorrowful, chiding signals that followed them on their way back to the Direaliete system and its hidden wormhole.

*

If they had been expecting some sort of ultimatum or an attempt to agree a surrender, however humiliating and abject, however calculated and designed only to be refused, they were to be disappointed. The Starveling invasion hit Ulubis system like a tsunami slamming into a beach full of sandcastles.

Captain Oon Dicogra, newly promoted to the command of the needle ship
NMS 3304
which had taken Fassin Taak from ‘glantine to Sepekte more than half a year earlier - she had been promoted when Captain Pasisa, the whule who’d been in charge of the ship at the time, had been given a newer ship - found herself and her rearmed craft forming part of the Ulubine Outer Defensive Shield Squadrons. The title was more impressive than the reality: a hodgepodge of mostly small and under-armed craft thrown across the peripheral skies of the system in the general direction of the invasion force behind a too-thin cloud of what was rather grandly called interceptor material but was basically a spray of rubble, and a few mines, mostly immobile. They were to sit here, waiting behind this so-called curtain wall of first defence.

Dicogra, along with a lot of the captains - at least at this level - thought they’d have been better going out to meet the invaders rather than sitting here waiting for them to come to them, but that wasn’t how the top brass wanted to play it. Attacks on the invading fleet outside the system had been dismissed as being wasteful distractions, and too risky. Sitting here in the line of advance felt to Dicogra about as risky as it was possible to get but she kept telling herself that her superiors knew what they were doing. Even if they were being asked to make a sacrifice, it would not be in vain.

Their wing of twelve ships was arranged in a wavy line thousands of klicks long across the likely tactical-level course of the invasion-fleet components, half a million klicks beyond the last-orbit limit of the outer system. Other thin lines were deployed almost all around them, though not in front.
NMS 3304
was seventh in the wing’s battle order, beside the wing commander’s ship in the centre of the line. Dicogra was third in overall command after the captain of the ship that was fifth in line. She had, naively, been flattered at first to have been advanced so quickly. Then she was frightened. They were under-equipped, poorly armed, too slow and far too few, little more than sacrificial pieces put in the way of the invasion to show that the Ulubine forces meant some sort of business, even if it was a fairly miserable affair in the face of the Starveling Cult’s preponderance of power.

The deep-space tracking systems which might have directed the Outer Defensive Shield Squadrons better had been high-priority targets for the Beyonder and Starveling advance forces over the last few months, and were mostly gone. What was left of them had almost entirely lost track of the exact disposition of the oncoming fleet when its drives had shut down and it had carried out a burst manoeuvre not far inside the Oort shell, virtually all the thousand-plus craft firing their thrust units at the same time and then effectively disappearing, heading their separate ways in a web of directions and vectors too tangled and complicated to follow.

The still-functioning long-range passive warning systems spent most of their remaining time looking hopefully for occlusions of distant stars, trying to see the weave of approaching ships through nothing more sophisticated than watching out for them getting in the way of ancient natural sunlight.

Dicogra lay semi-curled in one of the ship’s command pods, hard-synched in to the ship, her attention everywhere. She was distantly aware of her crew on either side of her. Counting her, there were only the three of them aboard, the rest of the small ship running on automatics. One whule, one Jajuejein, her crew were both new, not just to her and the ship itself but to the Navarchy. They were still learning, more alien to her in their relative ignorance than in their species-difference. She’d have wanted another few months’ intensive training together before she’d have called them remotely combat-ready, but these were desperate times.

A sparkle of hard, high-wavelength radiation from a few light seconds ahead announced something - in fact, lots of things - hitting the cloud of interceptor material between them and the invaders, though nothing of any significant size seemed to be impacting.

‘That’s a load of their shit hitting a load of ours,’ Dicogra’s wing commander said over the open line-of-sight comms link.

Her own ship’s close-range collision-warning systems started chirping and flashing at her. Nutche, her first officer, was in charge of this side of events. She kept half her attention on him as he tried to oversee the automatics and keep them focused. Contacts like very small pieces of shrapnel travelling at significant percentages of light speed were flicking past them, all around.
Nothing to do, nothing to attack,
she thought.
Just sit here and wait.