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  Gridlinked

  ( Agent Cormac - 1 )

  Neal Asher

  Thousands have been killed on Samarkand and a terraforming project has been destroyed. Agent Cormac must reach it by ship to begin an investigation. But he has incurred the wrath of a vicious psychopath called Arian Pelter, who follows him across the galaxy with a terrifying android in tow.

  GRIDLINKED

  Agent Cormac 01

  Neal Asher

  Acknowledgements

  Thanks, firstly, to 'technical support' in the form of my brother Martin and, secondly, to all those people who have helped or tolerated my struggle up the writing ladder. To my parents for their editing, criticism, and for not telling me to get a proper winter job, and to Caroline for her unflinching support, and to those independent press publishers who believed in me: Anthony Barker (Tanjen), Geoff Lynas (Threads), Tony Lee (Pigasus Press), Graeme Hurry (Kimota), Elizabeth Counihan (Scheherazade), Alf Tyson (Piper's Ash), David Logan (Grotesque), Pam Creais (Dementia 13), Andy Cox (TTA), Chris Reed (BBR) and many others. Also to Simon Kavanagh for his intelligent appraisal of the original manuscript, and to Peter Lavery of Pan Macmillan for spotting a good bet without the intercession of an agent.

  Prologue

  (Solstan 2432)

  A blue snow was falling on the roof of the embarkation lounge, where it melted and snaked across the glass in inky rivulets. Freeman put his coffee on the table, then slumped in the form chair. He winced at the sudden increased throbbing behind his eyes, then turned his watery gaze on the other travellers hurrying across the mosaic floor, their obedient hover-luggage at heel behind them, and with thoughts like grey slugs he tried to remember exactly what had happened last night. He distinctly remembered a half-catadapt woman undressing him in the middle of the dance floor, but beyond that everything was a blur. A deep feeling of guilty depression settled on him and he tried to distract himself by reading the brochure entry in his note screen. It took him two attempts to turn it on.

  The Samarkand buffers are galactic upside, which means more energy comes in than is taken out. This is why the way-station runcible is here rather than on Minostra. Minostra is only capable of supporting a runcible for local transport; that is, under 100 light-years. There, the heat pollution of a galactic runcible would have caused an ecological disaster, whereas on Samarkand the energy, as heat, is used as the impetus—

  'This your first time?'

  Freeman glanced across at the apprehensive individual who took a seat next to him. Typical well-hugger trying to look like a member of the runcible culture, he thought. The vogue slick-pants and corsair shirt told him all he needed to know. The Sensic augmentation behind the man's left ear told him things he did not want to know. Unlike those who lived for the dirill of new worlds and new experiences, this guy's dress was inappropriate and his augmentation a cheap copy likely to scramble his brains within a month. But then who was Freeman to judge? He managed to scramble his brains without mechanical aid.

  'No, been through a few times.' Freeman returned his attention to his note screen. Right at that moment he did not feel in a conversational mood. Vaguely he recalled sweaty nakedness, and wondered if he had screwed her there on the dance floor. Shit.

  —-for a terraforming project. It has been argued that this—

  'Makes me nervous.'

  'What? Sorry?'

  'Makes me nervous. Never understood Skaidon technology, even when I was plugged in.'

  Freeman tried to dispel the laughing face of the cat-woman from his mind.

  'Well, Skaidon was a clever git even before he hooked up with the Craystein computer.'

  —cold world should be—

  'We should be able to understand it, unaugmented.'

  Freeman took a couple of detox tablets from the half-used strip in his top pocket. You weren't supposed to take more than one at a time, but right then he needed them. The pills went down with a gulp of scalding coffee. He coughed, wiped tears from his eyes.

  'No human understands Skaidon tech, even with augmentation. I work on the damned things, and half the time I don't know what I'm doing.'

  On reflection it was not the best thing to say to someone nervous of using a runcible.

  The man stared at him while Freeman finished his coffee and looked yearningly back at the dispensing machine. There might just be time for another one before his slot.

  'It's my slot shortly. I'm off. Don't worry, it's perfectly safe. Runcibles hardly ever go wrong.'

  Shit - did it again.

  As he moved off across the mosaic floor Freeman felt his head lightening as the black cloud of extreme hangover lifted. He regretted that he had not put that guy's fears to rest, but then nothing but a number of further trips through the gate would do that. With runcible transmissions of quince, i.e. mitter travellers, amounting to somewhere in the billions for every hour solstan, and only the minutest fraction of one per cent of them coming to harm in transit, it was more dangerous crossing this floor.

  At the far end of the lounge were the gates to the runcibles, and near them was a vending machine. Freeman saw there were three people waiting before Gate Two: one catadapt and two human normals. The catadapt was using the coffee machine. He felt a horrible sinking sensation: half-catadapt. It was her; the orange and pink fur in a V down her back was very distinctive, as was the plait from her hair woven down the middle of it. Instead of going over to his gate, he halted by a pillar and studied the news-screen mounted there. The usual media pap, but at least he did not have to speak to it. From the corner of his eye he saw her drinking her coffee as if she really needed it, gulping it down. She men ran to the gate and dirough, discarding her cup on the floor. Was she suffering too? Wouldn't it be the limit if she had been going to Samarkand? The other two people also went through. They must have been heading for the same place, or else resetting would have taken longer. He headed over to the gate, pausing for only a moment as the black horseshoe-crab of a cleaning robot hummed past trailing the acrid odour of strong carpet cleaner. He had a flash of memory. There had definitely been a carpet. He felt a further lifting of the cloud. There had been no carpets on the dance floor.

  By the departure gate Freeman pressed his hand to a plate on the log-on column. His identity, credit rating and destination appeared on a screen to the left of his hand. He pressed again to confirm. The door before him opened and he stepped dirough onto a moving walkway. This took him dirough a long corridor, ribbed like the gullet of some reptile, men to a door leading to the runcible chamber.

  The chamber was a dürty-metre sphere of mirrored glass floored with black glass. The runcible itself stood at the centre of this, mounted on a stepped pedestal. It might have been the altar to some cybernetic god of technology. Nacreous ten-metre-long incurving bull's horns jutted up from the pedestal. Between them shimmered the cusp of a Skaidon warp, or the 'spoon' as it was now called, hence the weird nomenclature Skaidon technology had acquired.

  Five-dimensional singularity mechanics. Skaidon warp. Skaidon technology…

  Much as he hated to admit it, Freeman preferred the runcible spoons and quince of Edward Lear's nonsense poem. He did not like the bit about quince being sliced, since quince was the collective noun for those who travelled using the runcibles. Most people knew the ancient poem now, and Freeman wondered what Lear would think of this novel use of his words. He walked up to the pedestal, mounted the steps to the cusp, stepped dirough, and was gone.

  Shoved into underspace, dragged between shadow stars, Freeman travelled, diumbing his nose at relativity, in the cusp of a technology his unaugmented mind could not comprehend. Between runcibles he ceased to exist in the Einsteinian universe. He was beyond an event horizon, stretched to an infinite surface with no thicknes
s, travelling between stars as billions of mose called 'quince' had done before him.

  Done, in that instant when time is divided by infinity and brought to a standstill.

  Done, in the eternal moment.

  Freeman passed by 253 light-years. The second runcible caught him, dragged him back over the horizon and channelled the vast build-up of energy he was carrying… only… only this time something went wrong. Freeman passed dirough the cusp still holding his charge. The Einsteinian universe took hold of him and ruthlessly applied its laws, and in that immeasurable instant he appeared at his destination, travelling the smallest fraction possible below the speed of light.

  On the planet Samarkand, in the Andellan system, Freeman supplied the energy for a thirty-megaton nuclear explosion; the atoms of his body yielding up much of their substance as energy. Eight diousand people died in the explosion. Another 2000 died of radiation sickness in the weeks that followed. A few hundred survived even this, but, without the energy tap from the runcible buffers and wim most installations knocked out, the cold returned to Samarkand and they froze to death. Two survived, but mey were not human, and it was open to conjecture that they were even alive. His family and friends mourned Freeman when mey discovered what had happened to him, and sometimes, when she was in a good mood, a half-catadapt woman smiled at a memory; omer times she winced.

  Like a discarded child-god's building block, the two-kilometre cube of ceramal which was the headquarters of Earth Central Security rested on the shore of Lake Geneva. There were no windows or doors in this structure and, for the 50,000 people that worked mere, the only ingress was via runcible. They came in naked and left naked, and were scrutinized molecule by molecule each way, yet even they had no idea what information was gathered, what decisions were reached, and what orders given. Each time they left, they left part of their minds inside, downloaded into another mind that knew it all.

  Some comedian, at the inception of the project, had christened him Hal, after the computer in an ancient classic, but that was now classified information. Earth Central was an AI, and an exceptionally large AI for a time when a planetary co-ordinator could be lost in an ashtray. Earth Central was the size of a tennis ball, but then terabytes of information were processed in its etched-atom circuits in picoseconds; information received, collated, acted upon. Orders given. The ruler of the human polity was not human.

  Unbuffered jump to Samarkand - confirmed.

  Major buffer failure - confirmed.

  -Analysis Of Cyclic Rebellion by Edward Landel -

  ORDER: AGENT 2XG4112039768 ON RUNCIBLE TRACE.

  Possible alien involvement - unconfirmed. Trace to second quadrant.

  - Terrorism In The Twentieth Century -order: CANCELLED.

  All human life on Samarkand extinguished -projection.

  - Sea Of Death (Hood) -

  ORDER: AGENT PRIME CAUSE TO CHEYNE III.

  'What's the problem, Hal?'

  QUESTION: HOW DO YOU DO THAT?

  Laughter.

  It all took less than a second. The laughter faded as the strange old Oriental disappeared from the chamber. Earth Central experienced chagrin, or a near emulation, then turned to other matters. As it continued to collate extant information and give orders, it continued to absorb the vast body of human knowledge in the infm-itesimally small fractions of seconds between. Hundreds of light-years away, its decisions were acted upon.

  1

  Of course you can't understand it. You're used to thinking in a linear manner, that's evolution for you. Do you know what infinity and eternity are? That space is a curved sheet over nothing and that if you travel in a straight line for long enough you'll end up where you started? Even explained in its simplest terms it makes no sense: one dimension is line, two dimensions are area, three are space and four are space through time. Where we are. All these sit on top of the nullity, nil-space, or underspace as it has come to be called. There's no time there, no distance, nothing. From there all runcibles are in the same place and at the same time. Shove a human in and he doesn't cease to exist because there is no time for him to do so. Pull him out. Easy. How do the runcible AIs know when, who and where? The information is shoved in with the human. The AI doesn't have to know before because there is no time where the spoon is. Simple, isn't it…?

  From How It Is by Gordon

  Angelina Pelter gazed out across a seascape as colour-drained as a charcoal drawing and felt her purpose harden: this was her home, this was the place she must defend against the silicon autocrat Earth Central and all its agents. She looked up at the sky with its scud of oily clouds. It had the appearance of a soot-smeared sheet, pulled taut from the horizon. The sun was a hazy disc imbedded there. She lowered her gaze to where waves the colour of iron lapped against the plascrete slabs on the side of the sea wall. The day reflected her mood.

  'Doesn't it get to you?' she asked him.

  He looked at her blankly. Probably searching his databank for a suitable response, she thought. He was playing the part of a man romantically involved; in love. She wondered just how difficult it had been for him last night, when he had been inside her - if he had felt anything. She shuddered and pushed her hand deeper into her pocket, clasped the comforting warm metal there. How had she been fooled? He was handsome, yes; his hair short-cropped and a sort of silver colour, his skin that bland olive of the bulk of extraterrestrial humanity, his features sharp, striking - so much so that they belied the dead flatness of his grey eyes. But he was not so handsome, so perfect, as to give away what he was. He had faults, scars, the habit of picking his toenails in bed, a tendency not to suffer fools. All emulation, wasn't it?

  'The dark otters are swarming,' he stated.

  It was a concise observation. He probably knew their number and deviation from standard size. Angelina felt slightly sick and hardly heard his next words.

  'An interesting sight… This is what we have come here to see?'

  Not good enough.

  Arian had been right from the start: he was a plant. She had to do it. She had to do it now. But it was difficult - so very hard to kill someone she had actually allowed through her defences, allowed to make love to her… have sex with her… emulate the actions of mating.

  He stepped away from her, nearer to the edge, and looked down. The sea roiled, as viscid as oil against the sea wall. Below the surface, dark otters were shooting back and forth as they hunted adapted whitebait introduced two centuries before, still to learn that Earth flesh tasted foul and gave no nutrition. Angelina pulled out the weapon it had cost them so much to obtain. Money, and more than one life.

  'Sometimes I think,' he said, turning to her with his face twisted in a parody of understanding, 'that the—'

  He saw the weapon.

  'You made love like a machine,' Angelina said as she levelled the gun at him. The gun was matt black, and had the shape of an old projectile gun, but with LCD displays on its side and a barrel that was an open cube with a polished interior. It was what some called an antiphoton weapon, yet what it projected was not anti-photons, merely field-accelerated protons. It had been a necessary lie, once. Separatists had developed it, and now a Separatist would use it. Angelina had never seen one before, let alone used one. Necessary again. She watched him for a reaction. For a moment he appeared to be listening to something distant, then he slumped in defeat.

  'How long have you known?' he asked, turning his shoulder to her and looking inland to the floodplain and neat fields of adapted papyrus.

  Angelina lied. 'We had you figured out shortly after you arrived. Our scans showed you were human, but we know about chameleonware. You fooled us for a short while with your devil's advocate bit, but you screwed up by knowing too much. You're a fucking emulation. I made love to an android.'

  'So last night meant nothing to you?' he asked.

  'Nothing,' she replied. She would have to do it now, before the tears spilled.

  'Hence the proscribed weapon,' he said, his face blank. He was
talking to stay alive.

  'There'll be nothing left of you, you bastard!'

  'Yes, I can see you—'

  He moved, and the movement was almost too swift for Angelina to follow. She saw something glittery shooting towards her face. He was gone. Her finger closed on the touch-plate. She was knocked backwards. There was a brief pain. Blackness.

  Cormac hit the ground as the air shrieked. The shot cut past him with a violet flash, and then splashed to the ground as Angelina fell. Damp soil exploded, Violet fire flared for a moment and was extinguished. He rolled to his feet as the shuriken came in for its second strike, its chainglass blades extending as it whirred. He hit the recall on its holster and it halted in midair. It returned to him with a vicious reluctance, shaking away blood and pieces of bone. Its auxiliary blades retracted. He watched a runnel the shape of a question mark, which her weapon had cut into the ground, as it glowed a laval red that slowly faded. He held out his arm like a falconer awaiting the return of his bird. After the shuriken had snicked itself away in its metal holster on his forearm, he squatted down by Angelina. There was a lot of blood. Her head was attached by only skin and muscle the width of his finger. He reached out and grasped her hand, as if giving comfort, while final nervous reactions shivered and flexed the body that had clung to him the night before. In a moment the shivering and jerking ceased.

  The AI had, superfluously, told him he was permitted to use maximum sanction. That had always been a favourite AI euphemism for murder. That permission had been implicit the moment she had drawn the weapon. Coldly, Cormac considered his options. The AI had already instructed him that the part he was playing here must be closed down immediately. Well, this effectively did just that. He could not see the rest of the cell welcoming him back after killing their leader's sister.