The Human Read online

  NEAL

  ASHER

  THE HUMAN

  Rise of the Jain, Book Three

  Contents

  Cast of Characters

  1

  2

  3

  4

  5

  6

  7

  8

  9

  10

  11

  12

  13

  14

  15

  16

  17

  18

  19

  20

  Epilogue

  Acknowledgements

  Glossary

  Researchers, innovators and inventors of the world, despite leaden precautionary-principle bureaucracy and pressure from antediluvian NGOs, you keep working and keep taking us into a bright future. Because of you, poverty and child mortality are way down, pollution and famine are disappearing, information is available to many, and ignorance becoming a choice, and many of us living longer lives the emperors of the past would envy.

  I thank you.

  Cast of Characters

  Captain Cogulus Hoop: A centuries-old captain from the world of Spatterjay, known by most as Cog. Just like other humans of that world, he is a hooper, the term used to describe those infected by the Spatterjay virus. Cog is also related to the founder of that world, the infamous pirate Jay Hoop. What many people don’t know is that Cog is also an agent for the Polity. Cog initially set out to help another hooper, Trike, rescue his wife, who had been kidnapped by the legate Angel. This drew him to the Cyberat system, from where they barely escaped alive. They were then attacked by the swarm AI the Clade and Cog’s ship was badly damaged. Dragon took them in, and they sheltered within his vast structure until he then transported them to the planet Jaskor. On this world, Cog and his crew joined Orlandine’s fight against the terror of the Clade, which was seeking to break down her defences there in preparation for the coming of the Jain.

  The Client: An expert weapons developer and the last remaining creature of a civilization called the Species. Her kind were supposedly annihilated centuries ago by the alien prador. The Client, bent on revenge, took over a weapons platform from the defence sphere and travelled to her old home planet, now in the Prador Kingdom. On a moon there she discovered a hidden library holding a treasure trove of data stores, guarded by the Librarian. The Client’s battle with this ancient Jain unlocked the forbidden data she was seeking and finally revealed to her what happened to her kind. This led her to the accretion disc, where Orlandine’s deployment of the Harding black hole had released two ships that had been trapped for millions of years in a U-space blister. The first which appeared held the ancestors of the Client, and she managed to persuade Orlandine to cease attacking them. The second ship let out the fearful shriek of the Jain and is the real enemy.

  Diana Windermere: The captain of the massive Polity dreadnought the Cable Hogue. Sent by Earth Central, at the head of a Polity fleet, to the accretion disc and Jaskor to counter threats against the Polity, including the prador fleet that was sent too, she soon found herself up against an alien ship out of a U-space blister in the accretion disc sun. That was bad enough, but she dealt with it, allying with the prador and Orlandine’s weapons platforms to that end. But now another immense alien ship is coming out . . .

  Dragon: A moon-sized alien biomech who is Orlandine’s partner in her project to build the accretion disc defence sphere. His motives and aims are often opaque, but it is certain that he has a hatred for the Jain technology within that disc.

  Earth Central is the ruling AI of the Polity. However, it can make subminds of itself and, facing the Jain menace, makes one to deal with this. The new EC is locked out from Jaskor and the accretion disc by U-space disruption, and must find a way in.

  Gemmell is the leader of the Polity ground forces down on Jaskor. After facing the hostile swarm AI, the Clade, it now seems, with Orlandine back in control, that his task is coming to an end. It is not.

  Orlandine: The haiman overseer of the defence sphere project. Orlandine controls all the AIs and state-of-the-art weapons platforms that surround and guard the accretion disc, looking to contain the lethal concentration of Jain technology gathered there. She is made up of a complex mix of human, AI and Jain tech herself. When the disc was attacked by an impossibly powerful Jain soldier, seemingly to release the Jain tech, she was forced to launch her ‘special project’. This involved transporting a black hole, via U-space, to the accretion disc, where it could halt the spread of Jain tech once and for all. However, deploying the black hole in fact released two ships from a U-space blister, one of these being the Jain. When its agent, the Clade, attacked Orlandine’s base on Jaskor, Orlandine nearly died in an assassination attempt and was greatly weakened on losing the Jain tech which linked her human and AI self. But she managed to recover it, and the Clade was defeated.

  Orlik is the captain of a large dreadnought called the Kinghammer and has been sent at the head of a prador fleet from the Kingdom for the same purpose as Windermere. Now fully allied with her, they face the new threat together.

  Trike: Like Cog, Trike is a hooper, with the characteristic size and strength of such men from the Spatterjay world. Trike also displays signs of insanity, which the Spatterjay virus feeds and enhances if not kept under control. Trike’s wife, Ruth, used to help calm Trike and keep the madness at bay. When Ruth was kidnapped and enslaved by the legate Angel, Trike was drawn into the wider battle against this android and a Jain AI called the Wheel. He and Ruth were finally reunited and escaped the Cyberat world together but a fatal attack by the Clade on their ship resulted in Ruth’s death. Angel turned against the Wheel and joined Cog’s ship, but Trike could never let go of his hatred for him. Their fight against the Clade continued on Jaskor, where Trike diverged from Cog and inadvertently took on the Jain tech lost from Orlandine’s body. This transformed him completely, making him an even more powerful fighting machine. Using his new-found strength, and unable to forget his anger towards Angel, he destroyed the android. Ruth was eventually revived once again, but for Trike it was too late. There is no going back from what he has now become.

  1

  Jain technology allegedly destroys civilizations. It killed their own, as well as the ancient alien societies of the Atheter, the Csorians and the Makers. This is all accepted writ, but I have to ask, how did it do this? It is a technological ecology capable of forming matter on the nano and macro scales. But how is this tech different from our own, which can do the same things? It is fast and can spread like a parasitic plant or fungus, feeding on present technology and converting it. It sequesters devices, computers and AIs, and can even seize control of living creatures . . . yet we are capable of making mechanisms to do the same thing. It is reportedly most dangerous when guided by intelligence, and thought somehow to control that user. Does it make those who deploy it evil? An old aphorism has it that guns do not kill people, people kill people while a gun is just a lump of inert metal (or composites). But no, it’s not that simple. A gun provides its owner with power but also an easy way to deploy it, and it is the latter that makes him more likely to use it. Can we then see Jain technology in this light? Can we in the end tie it back to an aphorism older still: power corrupts and absolute power corrupts absolutely?

  From ‘How It Is’ by Gordon

  Orlandine

  Pillars of smoke rose from the city. Disaster-response robots still dug through wreckage and ambulances fled across the sky. On the roof of a superficially damaged apartment block sat what looked like a thirty-foot-tall, partially coiled woodlouse, but with a shifting tentacular mass in its underside – a metallic-sheened nightmare of snakes and worms. From within this mass, tendrils extruded a sarcophagus forwards and down, depositing it on the roof. The shifting tendrils over its surface began peeling back sections to spill out steaming jelly and strange organic structures, some of which were still moving. Steadily they revealed a human woman under a translucent veined caul. She pushed a hand through the caul to split it, leaking clear fluid, and stepped out of it onto the roof. And finally, Orlandine opened her eyes.

  She turned to look over her shoulder at the umbilici connecting her back into the sarcophagus, which had already started collapsing as if under accelerated decay, and thence to her Jain device. After a moment, they detached from her and snaked back to their source. Down her back, and in the back of her skull, holes drew closed. She took another step and reached up to touch her collarbone. Under her fingertips, a circle of pores spewed monofabric across her skin to cover her from neck to feet. Transparent at first, it then turned royal blue. At her waist and feet it thickened to form a wide belt and boots, which took on the texture and colour of tan leather.

  Am I human now? She continued forward. In fact this body was more human than the one she’d occupied before, since over eighty per cent of it consisted of muscle, bones and organs grown from her original DNA. She had also overwritten the brain so it matched the one she had possessed before her fall from the tower in her Ghost Drive Facility. The fall which had seemed to bring about the end to her human life. This brain contained a copy of her original AI crystal too. And the all-but-meaningless question about her humanity seemed to arise from it – from an earlier primitive self. But this body was an avatar of the device behind her. Yes, part of her consciousness resided in it, but a small percentage of herself. She halted at the edge of the building and, while her apparently human eyes studied the city, she saw so much more.

  Via thousands upon thousands of cams and othe
r sensors, Orlandine gazed upon the Jaskoran system. Inward, the giant hot planet Adranas sat in close orbit about the sun, while a chunk of technology the shape of a thick coin, fifty miles across, sat out from it in a Lagrange point. This core of a ship belonged to an alien race dubbed the Species, but she did not know if it contained any of that kind. It had been unresponsive since being transported from the accretion disc. But certainly one of the Species, the Client, did occupy the nearby Weapons Platform Mu. The Client had tried to save her kin by bringing the ship’s core here, but she had also put this entire system in danger by doing so.

  ‘Was that a good idea?’

  The question surfed in on Orlandine’s perception – someone noting the direction of her regard. She located its source and gazed through cams at Knobbler. The assassin drone had just left Weapons Platform Magus – one that had been under construction in orbit above her, and whose AI the rogue Clade had destroyed. Swirling up behind the big assassin drone, his fellow drones followed him back towards Jaskor. Reviewing their recent activities, Orlandine confirmed they had helped to bring orbital production and construction up to speed but then extracted themselves from the processes and ensconced themselves aboard the platform to return it to operational status. A new AI in place had now taken over. And, once again, these drones were looking for action.

  ‘You mean offering the Client protection?’ she asked.

  ‘I mean just that.’

  Orlandine could no longer view the accretion disc since U-space disruption had cut communication, and her reach was only within this planetary system. But she now knew two ships had been trapped within a U-space blister in the disc’s sun, and the second of those had come out. The first – the Species ship – had been mauled by the combined Polity and prador fleet and her platforms out there, so only its core remained. The second ship was an enemy of the Species: the Jain. These creatures had created a technology that had wiped out their civilization and others, and had come close to bringing down the Polity in the past. With xenophobia and hostility implicit in their biology, the Jain were a danger to all intelligent life. She did not doubt their ship would head here, either to destroy the Species ship core, or to begin the extermination of those the Jain saw only as a resource to be pillaged and discarded in pieces. She analysed her feelings about that and found nothing strong; instead she fell into analysis of the Jain way of life as a survival strategy.

  ‘You think it would have been better to tell the Client to get the hell out of here ASAP?’ she asked distractedly.

  ‘That ship core is obviously a lure for the Jain ship.’

  ‘Do you think that if she had taken it elsewhere the Jain would have gone after it rather than come here?’

  ‘Seems likely.’

  ‘Yes, but then it would come for us all: for the Polity and the Kingdom,’ Orlandine replied. ‘I see keeping the Client here as keeping a grip on useful knowledge – knowledge likely critical to our survival.’

  Though this reasoning had some truth, she understood it had not wholly compelled her to offer the Client sanctuary. The need to acquire knowledge and resources seemed paramount.

  ‘Still . . .’ Knobbler hedged.

  Arrogance and greed? she wondered, then dismissed the thought.

  ‘With the agreement of the Polity and the Prador Kingdom, Dragon and I built weapons platforms to stop Jain technology in the accretion disc spreading into those realms. It was then my aim to drop a black hole into that disc to annihilate the tech and, even though the Jain soldier disrupted this plan, it is still on course.’ She paused, feeling a little pompous, then continued, ‘I have dedicated my life to ridding space of Jain technology.’ She asserted her claim on it. ‘Am I to stand aside now? Am I to think only of survival and let this be someone else’s problem?’

  ‘Your choice,’ said Knobbler. ‘You know we’re with you all the way.’

  Orlandine gave that a digital nod but felt uncomfortable, her reasoning swirling in her mind. In allowing the Client to stay, she would draw that Jain ship here, but with no certainty she could deal with it. Two of the most powerful dreadnoughts from the Kingdom and Polity commanded the combined fleet out there. Yet was she assuming they could not stop that thing while she could?

  Surveying space around the planet of Jaskor, Orlandine checked her resources. Sixty redubbed evacuation platforms sat in orbit, steadily taking on refugees from below and packing them inside. In fact, two of them were departing even now – necessarily under fusion drive because of the U-space disruption. Her remaining weapons platforms – six hundred of them – formed a scattered tail in the orbital path of the planet. Amidst them cargo ships brought materials for the platforms to utilize in repairs and upgrades after their encounter with the Species ship out at the accretion disc. They now sported hardfield and imploder defences to put out the disruptor beam which had shattered many of their kind. Their collective AI minds also worked furiously to come up with further ideas: induction and virtual warfare beams to disrupt the disruptor, and other methods to save them when attacked by a U-space twist. This combined gravity and U-space weapon could generate a twist within ships, which then released the energy into the real, tearing out the innards of its target. The small prador and Polity fleet stationed here was making similar changes – past enemies now joined in an uneasy alliance against an even more dangerous threat. But all of their preparations might not be enough.

  ‘Of course, it would be nice if that knowledge of the Client’s you mention was actually available,’ said Knobbler dryly.

  ‘Then I must ensure that it is,’ she replied tersely, feeling again the need for acquisition as a sharp stab in the pit of her stomach.

  Orlandine returned her attention to the inner system. Her exchanges with the alien there had elicited some useful data, but certainly not everything the Client, or that ship’s core, had to offer. She wished she could go out and deal directly with that singular member of the Species, but leaving Jaskor was not a good idea. Maybe the combined fleet of Polity and prador ships those realms had sent to the disc could destroy the Jain ship, or cripple it, or maybe the thing would just sweep them aside. If they did not destroy the Jain ship, the present U-space disruption might not prevent it from coming here. She had to be ready.

  But the Client . . .

  She needed someone in the inner system pushing for data, seeking out the weapons and knowledge they needed, she needed. She considered sending Knobbler but, though a wily and dangerous assassin drone, he did not possess the tools for this job. So who, then? She turned her attention to the ocean of Jaskor, between the coast and the volcanic island of Sambre. She clawed for contact, but someone there, under the sea, shrugged her off. His ability to do this brought home that he was just the man for the job. Captain Trike, she decided, was not going to walk away from this.

  Diana

  Diana Windermere, commander of the interdiction Polity fleet sent to an accretion disc, in what had at first appeared to be a bit of sabre-rattling against the prador, rested her hands on a rail and gazed across a gap of twenty miles to what looked like a vast depiction of an ancient integrated circuit. Though not the largest space inside her ship, for others were scattered throughout the massive structure, this was the only one charged with an atmosphere. She came here sometimes when she needed the . . . space.

  At two hundred miles across, the Cable Hogue was a giant warship. Its Laumer engine alone was bigger than most other ships, while its six conjoined U-space drives were each more than capable of hauling a large asteroid through that continuum. Its mile-thick, incredibly complex armour could deflect or absorb the impacts of most weapons known to the Polity, while it possessed hardfield projectors like pores in its outer tegument. Rumour had it that this behemoth could alter the tides of oceanic worlds it orbited. This was kind of true, but had been in the deliberate assistance of a terraforming project, using the constant output of its gravity weapon – a device that could wreck spaceships like a fast-travelling tsunami would wreck wooden ocean vessels of old.

  It had many other armaments too. Some of its numerous particle beam weapons could project devastating beams a hundred feet wide. Huge armouries inside contained fusion, fission and antimatter missiles ready for it to fling from its coilguns. Its railguns could spit hard slugs at near-c. The number and variety of its lasers she had lost count of long ago. Stranger weapons lurked here too, along with iterations of the conventional she had not tried. Factories within could produce just about anything Diana required. Things already existed in there she had never used nor felt the need to use. No single ship could stand against the Hogue . . . until now. She knew she would require everything her ship had to give and that it might well not be enough.