Line War ac-5 Page 11

  But Fiddler Randal still stood before him.

  Some remnant… some remaining piece of the ghost in the system yet to catch up with the destruction of its source?

  ‘You know, for a big melded AI superbeing, you can be pretty dumb.’

  Erebus shrieked and reached out with every available resource for the figure standing before it.

  Laughing, Fiddler Randal dissolved into smoke.

  5

  Artefacts (pt 19). It was said, five hundred years ago, that if the entire human race, then mostly confined to Earth, died or was relocated, little trace of its existence would remain after a further million years. All the metals would oxidize, plastics degrade, buildings and even glass would crumble, all being returned to the soil. Tectonic movement, storm, rain and wind, and the remorseless recycling of life would tear apart other structures. Even the most hardwearing ceramic would be ground up in the course of time. The orbits of artificial satellites would decay and they themselves would burn up, or they would creep away from Earth’s grip to fall into the long dark. Perhaps the longest survivors would be those items left behind on the Moon and a few footprints in the regolith there. After five million years probably nothing would remain on the surface of Earth to attest to it once being occupied by a human civilization. Such is also the case with everything the Jain, Csorians and the Atheter built. The usual artefacts you might expect to find currently in some museum glass case would not, for all three races, fill the smallest storage room in the British Museum. However, when a race’s technology reaches a certain level, other, forever self-renewing artefacts can be found: meaning engineered life. There is a plant called the Atheter Morel growing upon a planetoid called Dust, which extracts platinum from the soil of that world and deposits it on the surface in the form of crystals attached to its seeds. Some asteroids contain similar mining organisms: worms that burrow slowly through the rock and concentrate rare metals within their bodies. There are the less obvious tricones of Masada, said to have been created to grind up the remains of a past civilization. Beyond these examples we move into grey areas where debate can become somewhat heated. There are those that believe there are too many ‘useful’ living things on Earth, and posit that our homeworld must have once been an agricultural world like those on which we now grow biomodules. And maybe humans, or just one part of them, were merely a product, a crop.

  — From Quince Guide compiled by humans

  Dragon had, probably with the collusion of Jerusalem, kidnapped her again. After their initial exchange, Dragon retreated into itself, literally, and ignored her persistent queries. Mika spent frustrating hours trying to elicit some response, then gave up and began using some of the facilities available in the conferencing unit. She fed herself, got some coffee, then settled in the single acceleration chair before a set of consoles and screens that displayed data from the probes sunk into Dragon’s body and from the scanning equipment all around her. Certainly, there was a lot of activity going on down there that went beyond anything she had witnessed before. What she was seeing could not all be about astrogation or Dragon’s internal organic U-space engines. But what was going on exactly?

  Hours of research produced insufficient data for her to interpret, then abruptly the sphere resurfaced into realspace, and the Dragon head with accompanying pseudopods was back to make an announcement: ‘We have arrived.’

  Rather than ask where they had arrived and risk receiving a frustratingly obscure reply, Mika used the units’ scanners and astrogation programs to find out. The answer, swiftly returned, made her stomach tighten as if in anticipation of violence. She stood and gazed out through the transparent walls.

  Without enhancing the view, Mika could clearly see four Polity dreadnoughts and countless attack ships, but then that was unsurprising here, even before the attack on this system by one of Erebus’s wormships. She gazed at the opalized orb of the gas giant, then down at the familiar world Dragon was approaching: Masada. It was here, some years ago, a Dragon sphere had delivered her, Ian Cormac and others, and then sacrificed itself to create an army of dracomen; here Skellor had come in the massive Occam Razor to create mayhem; and here she had once nearly died. But that was not all, for what had once been a relatively unimportant world outside the Line of Polity, ruled by a space-dwelling theocracy but agrarian on its surface, had become of very great importance indeed.

  Subsequent events, here and elsewhere, had revealed that ostensibly wild creatures roaming Masada’s surface — the aptly named gabbleducks — were in fact descendants of an ancient alien race, the Atheter, who chose to sacrifice their entire civilization and their intelligence just to survive Jain technology. This information had been obtained from an Atheter artefact found elsewhere but now residing on the planet’s surface. It was a huge chunk of crystal that contained an Atheter AI which, in exchange for giving the Polity the means of detecting Jain nodes, had asked to be brought and left here.

  ‘So why are we here?’ Mika demanded.

  The Dragon head, which had been gazing at the view, turned towards her. ‘As you know, I already contain all evidence relating to the destruction of the Makers by Jain technology.’

  Never a straight answer. Maybe Dragon just liked people to work things out for themselves, though Mika felt the alien entity just enjoyed being obscure.

  ‘Have you come for your dracomen?’

  ‘No.’

  Okay, the occasional straight answer, when it didn’t give too much away.

  She noticed now how the other Dragon sphere was drawing back as this one closed in on the world. She wondered what sort of conversation her host was conducting with those ships out there, or if everything had already been said by Jerusalem, and that the ECS forces here knew what Dragon was here for.

  ‘You have in here a portable memstore,’ Dragon observed.

  ‘I have numerous portable memstores in here.’

  ‘One of two hundred terabytes will be sufficient.’

  ‘What for?’

  ‘Further evidence.’

  With a sigh Mika walked over to a storage cabinet ranged low along one wall. She reached down and brushed a finger against the touchplate over one drawer and watched it slide out. Taking out a small satchel, she popped it open and slid out a brushed-aluminium box ten inches square and two inches thick, its comers rounded, a touchscreen on the front, and along one edge a removable strip covering sockets for a variety of plugs including plain optic, a nano-tube optic, S-con whiskered, crystal interface and even a multipurpose socket for electrical connections. Tapping a finger against the touchscreen brought up the entry menu and also a status menu. The memstore was empty but for its base format programs, and diagnostics showed it to be working at its optimum. She slid the store back into the satchel and hung it by its strap over one shoulder.

  ‘Now what?’

  ‘Now I land,’ Dragon replied.

  Even in the brief time it had taken for her to retrieve the memstore, Masada had grown huge. Mika made her way back to the acceleration chair, strapped herself in and tilted it right back. She didn’t expect there to be any problems, but if there were, she would rather survive them without the need for further repairs to her body by Dragon. Soon the sphere was clipping atmosphere, and what started as an intermittent whistling turned to a constant roar as vapour trails unravelled above her. Amid the buffeting, she could now feel the tug of gravity from below running athwart that produced by the gravplates of the conferencing unit. The Dragon sphere rolled slightly, as if to give her a better view, and she now gazed down upon the face of the planet with the horizon blurring in cloud above her head. For the next half-hour, the sphere became completely immersed in cloud, finally breaking through only a few miles above the surface. Mika gazed down upon a mountain range snaking along below, then felt a tug of nostalgia upon seeing the familiar chequerboard of ponds, then the wild boggy flatlands covered with flute grasses.

  Dragon abruptly decelerated, the roar from outside turning to a rumbling thund
erstorm. As they descended, and as the ground raced up towards her, she briefly feared that Dragon intended burying her conferencing unit in boggy ground, but the sphere tilted up again at the last moment. Outside the air filled with boiling clouds of steam and shreds of flute grass. Mika felt disorientated, since she was being pulled by the unit’s internal gravplates, which rested at an acute angle to the gravity of the planet. The humanoid Dragon head slid into view above her, with a pseudopod on each side of it.

  ‘Time to step outside,’ announced Dragon.

  Mika unstrapped herself and made her way unsteadily towards the airlock, while the head and pseudopods disappeared back inside Dragon. Under the combined effect of two gravity fields, it was like making her way precariously down a steep slope. Once inside the airlock, she carefully closed her spacesuit helmet, since the air outside was too thin for any human to breath. After the airlock opened she tried to convey herself with some dignity to the boggy surface a few yards below but still disorientated lost her balance and fell onto the ground in a heap. Cursing, she struggled to stand upright on a mat of rhizomes, then inspected the black mud spattered all over her suit and began stumbling through the papyrus-like flute to reach a wide area where the vegetation had been flattened.

  ‘If you would follow the locator,’ suggested Dragon’s voice in her helmet, as a separate frame appeared in one side of her visor. She turned to her left until the frame was centred, then set out determinedly. After a moment the frame winked out.

  ‘Where, exactly, am I going?’

  ‘To the location of the Atheter artefact.’

  ‘I take it there are no hooders in the vicinity?’ Mika asked, referring to a local life form whose feeding habits were a legend of horror.

  ‘Do not be concerned — I am with you,’ Dragon replied.

  ‘What?’

  ‘Down here with the tricones.’

  ‘Oh.’

  Tricones were molluscs that lived deep in the mud. The latest research claimed them to be organisms biofactured by the Atheter race for the sum purpose of grinding up the remnants of their civilization here, just as the hooders were claimed as biofactured war organisms whose sole purpose now was to ingest the remains of every gabbleduck that died. So Dragon was down in the mud, doubtless spreading pseudopods throughout the area and quite possibly even feeding.

  As she trudged over a series of rhizome mats, pushed through stands of flute grass and avoided or hurdled the gulleys formed by breaks in the ubiquitous mats, something began to come into view ahead of her. After a moment she recognized a domed roof constructed of photoelectric glass — a material often used in Polity buildings. Next, the whole building became abruptly visible as she pushed through a last stand of flute grass and stepped up onto a yard-thick layer of plasticrete. It was a simple open structure: a low dome supported on a ring of pillars. There appeared to be nothing inside it, and no sign of anyone else about.

  The plasticrete trembled a couple of times, doubtless being tested by something below, then the rhizome mat behind Mika tore open and, covered in black mud, a Dragon pseudopod tree sprouted and opened its limbs, then coiled over and down to slide in beside Mika. She glanced briefly over at its humanoid head then set out towards the building, Dragon keeping pace with her as more of its trunk slid out of the ground behind. Finally she walked between the pillars onto a floor made of ceramal gratings. She noted there were consoles set into some of the pillars, but other than these there seemed to be nothing else of significance here.

  ‘So where exactly is this Atheter artefact?’ she enquired.

  ‘Look down.’

  Mika abruptly felt quite stupid, as she had known the artefact to be a large disc of incredibly tough memory crystal, so the shape of this building should have given her a clue. She peered down into the layer immediately below the ceramal gratings and, showing here and there through the mud trailed in by casual visitors, some of them quite possibly gabbleducks, she could discern areas of translucent green crystal.

  ‘Seems a rather careless way of preserving it,’ said Mika.

  ‘I really wanted to be just dumped on the surface, but your AIs insisted on providing some sort of protective building,’ said a deep and liquidly amused voice from behind her.

  Mika didn’t turn round for a moment, because she could see that whatever it was cast a very large shadow to one side of her. Dragon did turn, however.

  ‘But they conceded the point about you not becoming an object of veneration for the remaining religion-inclined human inhabitants here,’ said Dragon. ‘And therefore put you in the floor.’

  Mika now turned to see the massive pyramidal shape of a gabbleduck, squatting right at the centre of the grated floor, its multiple forearms folded across its chest, its bill dipped onto its chest. It gazed at Dragon with a tiara of emerald eyes ranged just below the naked dome of its head, then turned slightly to fix its gaze on Mika.

  ‘Why are we here, Dragon?’ she asked nervously.

  ‘Take out that memstore and turn it on,’ Dragon replied.

  Mika complied, noting that while the gabbleduck did cast a shadow, something about the line between it and the gratings it squatted on was not quite right, and she realized it was a projection. The moment the memstore came on, its normal menu screen blinked out and something started loading.

  ‘And this is?’ she asked.

  The gabbleduck replied, ‘It is a story about a civilization’s fight for survival — and of its eventual self-destruction.’

  ‘Just like the one Dragon has of the Maker civilization.’

  ‘Yes,’ admitted the gabbleduck. ‘It’s a story that repeats itself.’

  ‘And who needs to hear these stories?’ Mika wondered.

  ‘Now you’re getting the idea,’ said Dragon, grinning.

  * * * *

  There was no time to sleep and, in reality, sleep was something Orlandine could easily forgo, allowing the hardware in her carapace and the Jain nanotech in her body to clean things up, repair any damage, make all those necessary adjustments usually made during that outmoded pastime. However, Orlandine did sleep. She slept for the half an hour it took Heliotrope to finally close on the war runcible and then dock. She slept at an accelerated pace, cued for lucid dreaming, the subject of her dreams already mapped out… though perhaps an apter description might be nightmares.

  She was aboard the Cassius Station, of which she had been overseer, and her lover Shoala was leading her by the hand towards the Feynman Lounge for another period of ‘human time’. She felt strangely light, and it took her a moment to understand that this was because in this dream-initiating memory she no longer wore the carapace that was now permanently bonded to her.

  ‘I always feel this activity to be a concession, a weakness,’ she said.

  ‘While we strive for that synergy between the human and the AI, are we then to deny the relevance of our own humanity?’

  ‘But in being completely human, we are denying that synergy.’

  He halted and turned to look at her. ‘Orlandine, you are in serious need of a drink.’

  They finally entered the lounge, where other haimen of the station had gathered, sans carapaces, to celebrate the completion of another small fragment of a construction project with a downtime of a million years. All this was pure unadulturated memory, but soon she felt it slide into the territory of nightmare. They were standing by a drinks dispenser when Shoala said words that were so close to memory, but now drifting away from it.

  ‘I want you to feel me inside you,’ he said, perfectly on script, but then added, ‘as I felt you inside me.’

  And he had. He had felt her tearing apart and deleting his mind. He had felt, at her instigation, the clamp-legs of his carapace displaced from their usual sockets and driven deep elsewhere into his body. She had murdered him to cover her own escape with the Jain node that had been a ‘gift’ to her from Erebus — or rather a Trojan to turn her into something that might destroy the Polity.

  ‘I�
�m so sorry,’ she said, the guilt and deep despair seeming to crush her intestines between them.

  He shrugged. ‘ECS kills or erases murderers. There is no mercy, no forgiveness. A murderer has taken something that cannot be given back, and so must himself forfeit that same thing.’

  Where were they now? Glancing beyond him she recognized the interior of a Dyson segment: massive pillars rising up in the distance, diagonal tie cables a hundred yards thick and scattered with fusion reactors and gravmotors like giant steel aphids. Ice lay underfoot.

  He sipped his drink, his carapace back in place but its clamp-legs now driven deep into his naked body, blood oozing out and freezing as it ran down his trousers, building up around his feet to stick him in place.

  ‘You feel sorry,’ he said. ‘I would be glad to feel anything at all.’

  ‘Shoala…’

  She saw him now in the interface sphere where she had murdered him, coughing up blood… dying. But I saved most of that Polity fleet from Erebus, she told herself. Doesn’t that count for something? But that was nonsense: her actions might have led to the remaining ships escaping, but she had destroyed Erebus’s USER, the one preventing those same ships travelling through U-space, but only because the device had also prevented her from escaping.

  Orlandine woke instantly, fully alert to the sound of docking clamps engaging. Through her hardware she assessed everything that was happening, then stood up and began heading back through Heliotrope towards the airlock. As she walked she again questioned why she repeatedly initiated those dream sequences, because no amount of self-flagellation could return Shoala to life. Yet, somehow, she needed to remind herself of what price others close to her had paid for the near-supernal power she now possessed, so that she would never treat it lightly and would always use this power to serve a higher purpose.