Line War (35 page)

They entered an elevator shaft whose very presence demonstrated just how antiquated this atmosphere ship must be and perhaps why it had been recently knocked out of the sky. They glided down three floors without anyone joining them, eventually stepped out into a wide hold whose side wall had been torn out by the crash, and headed outside through the jagged gap. Gazing around at the churned-up ground, Cormac located the
King of Hearts
and headed towards it, soon mounting its ramp. Within minutes Cormac was standing on the black glass floor of the bridge, with Arach and Hubbert Smith hovering a pace behind him. The gap in this line-up that Scar should have filled seemed to exacerbate a sore spot inside Cormac’s skull.

‘I take it there’s someone who wants to speak to me?’ he enquired.

‘That is so,’ replied King.

‘Well, now would be a good time,’ Cormac said flatly, assuming King was playing silly games again.

‘Not everyone can be at your beck and call,’ King replied. ‘Just wait one moment.’

Suitably chastened, Cormac waited, but it was not for long. A line suddenly sliced down to the black glass floor and out of it folded the hologram of a human figure.

Cormac recognized this apparition at once. ‘Azroc,’ he said.

The Golem nodded in acknowledgement.

‘You’re a long way from Coloron,’ Cormac observed.

‘I was on that fleet that went to your rescue, the one that Erebus all but wiped out. You could say that the experience has widened my horizons.’

‘All our horizons have now been widened, though maybe our futures have been consequently shortened,’ Cormac replied. ‘We weren’t supposed to be here?’

‘You were given false orders by an agent of Erebus. The same agent’s remains show without a doubt that it was a product of Jain technology—’

‘And yet it managed to infiltrate the heart of your operation there? I thought we had the means of detecting that technology now.’

‘Active Jain technology can, in most cases, be detected by the nature of the code it uses and the EM output of its nanoscale interactions. However, though this agent was created using Jain technology, it wasn’t actually
using
the same.’

‘I see, so there could be any number of these . . . agents among us?’

‘That is so.’

‘Please continue.’

‘Having analysed the infiltrating agent’s files I’ve discovered some quite startling anomalies. For though he was in a position to cause us a great deal of damage, he did not do so.’

‘Waiting to deliver a killer blow, maybe?’

‘Possibly.’

‘You sound unsure.’

‘Even without revealing himself, there were things he could have done that would have resulted in catastrophic failures in our defence, yet the only overt action he took that could have resulted in deaths was to issue you with false orders.’

‘So those false orders prove that my mission was important, and that Erebus wanted to stop me. So did this agent do anything else that’s relevant to me?’

‘It concealed information about the owners of Europan dart guns,’ said Azroc bluntly. ‘The searches have thus far only tracked down and eliminated forty per cent of the guns capable of firing the dart you found. However, something was flagged for immediate attention but concealed by the same agent. It seems two Europan dart guns were sent by a woman on Europa as gifts to her twin sons on Klurhammon.’

‘I presume their files are already on their way to me?’

‘King of Hearts
has them, but really all you need to know is their names.’

‘Enlighten me.’

‘The twins’ names are Aladine and Ermoon, while the mother’s name is Ariadne. Their surname, if such it can be called, is Taser 5.’

Even though that particular investigation had passed out of his remit, Cormac still remembered the surname. It was a particularly important one since another bearer of that name had once been an overseer of the Cassius Project. She was a haiman, a murderer and the owner of a Jain node - which made her particularly dangerous.

‘Orlandine Taser 5,’ he recalled. ‘Tell me, was this infiltrating agent also hampering those trying to find her?’

‘Not really,’ Azroc replied. ‘But then they, besides dispersing hunter-killer programs to try and locate her if she ever used the nets, had decided that Orlandine must have fled the Polity.’

‘Had
decided?’ Cormac noted.

‘Two thefts within the Polity were also flagged and also concealed. The infiltrator created an HK program to hunt down and erase any further information pertaining to them.’

‘Thefts?’ Cormac queried.

‘One involved a cargo runcible and the other a mothballed war runcible.’ Azroc winced. ‘And Orlandine stole both of them.’

‘You have to be shitting me.’

‘I shit you not.’

‘So you’re telling me she managed to steal a mobile fortress loaded with runcible tech whose purpose was to move entire Polity fleets or throw asteroids at Prador dreadnoughts and, if necessary, to drop moons on Prador-occupied worlds?’ Cormac spoke with polite precision up to the point of saying, ‘Aren’t these fucking things properly guarded?’

‘It was guarded by over twenty veteran war drones, but it seems they now do her bidding.’

Cormac just stood still for a long moment, then turned slightly and glanced over his shoulder to where Arach was crouching.

‘Oh,’ he said. ‘Then I guess Orlandine is only marginally less of a catastrophe in progress than Erebus is.’

‘One could suppose that there is not much of a distinction to make,’ observed Azroc.

‘Yes.’ Cormac could see it now. All this mayhem here on the border was just distraction. Erebus’s infiltrator was concealing the
real
attack involving this Orlandine and her war runcible. ‘Do we have any idea where this war runcible is now?’

‘We have no idea at all.’

‘Then we need to find it, and fast.’

‘Evidently,’ Azroc replied with dry bitterness.

* * * *

11

For the duration of the Prador-human war every type of combat was engaged in and every possible weapon employed. A moon was flung from a cargo runcible to destroy a Prador dreadnought, and there was even hand-to-hand fighting between humans and those huge and lethal aliens - usually with messy and unhappy consequences for the humans, it has to be admitted. Terror was a weapon regularly employed by both sides: the Prador inspired it quite naturally by just being themselves, but for the Polity that weapon was the assassin drone. These killers either operated alone or in pairs. Their prime purpose was to infiltrate Prador dreadnoughts, stations and ground bases in order to turn the adults of that breed into ‘crab salad’. Usually they did this in as messy and frightening manner as possible for the aliens: diatomic acid injected into the carapace; complete removal of the carapace and immobilization so the victim would be eaten alive by its own ship lice; immobilization and slow roasting over a fire; or by taking control of the Prador’s method of locomotion - their adults were often devoid of limbs so used AG, reaction jets or maglev to get about - and attaching numerous mines to it, then using it as a weapon against them. The drones were, like most drones of the time, fashioned in the shape of various lethal arthropods and other nasty creatures. They possessed minds as hard and sharp as their outside appearances. With remorseless cruelty they killed thousands of Prador adults, their sum purpose to inspire sufficient terror in the survivors so they would divert resources to defence that would otherwise have been used for attack. It worked too. There’s nothing quite like knowing that something out there wants to slowly saw you into tiny pieces and feed them to your children, to inspire you to double your guard.

- ‘Modern Warfare’ lecture notes from EBS Heinlein

‘Time for you to go, Bludgeon,’ said Orlandine.

The little war drone controlling
Heliotrope
and its attached cargo runcible merely sent a binary acknowledgement, then the ship threw a flame out behind it and quickly receded from direct view. Once out of the black asteroid field, it would U-jump to the Anulus black hole, but even then Orlandine would maintain the U-space link between the war runcible and
Heliotrope,
since the weapon and its magazine needed to remain connected.

Now Orlandine turned her attention to the little craft those two wormships had been pursuing. It was still holding off while awaiting her docking instructions, and now she needed to make preparations.

‘Knobbler, send some of your comrades down to Dock Fifteen and make sure they’re ready for trouble.’

‘Already on their way.’

Orlandine checked her internal views and observed the double spider, the scorpion and the hissing cockroach clattering their way through internal corridors to the dock indicated. She scanned them to check what armament they carried and again felt some reservations. The three drones were so thoroughly packed with weapons, munitions, charged-up capacitors and laminar batteries that the accidental detonation of one of them would excise a large portion of the war runcible. She had, on first taking control of the runcible, considered saying something about this to Knobbler, then decided against it. She had to accept that entities as old as these, who had survived the Prador-human war, knew what they were doing.

Through her mycelium spread throughout the war runcible, she quickly shunted energy and other resources to the area around Dock Fifteen. Peering out from that location at the stationary ship, she experienced a moment of horrification on again seeing the legate craft bound underneath it like a sucked-out insect in a spider’s web. She was also extremely wary, since her scans of the vessel were being easily defeated and her informational probes being bounced. She guessed that the voice that had spoken to her belonged to the larger ship’s AI, but she now wondered what
his
boss might be. It was almost as if a sense of that unknown entity was bleeding back through her scans and probes, with a hint of something dark and powerful.

That other presence aboard the ship worried her, but she needed the information it had obtained. Her first encounter with a wormship - the one that had nearly got her killed and from which she had netted Fiddler Randal - had already demonstrated the dangers of not being completely up to date. She was prepared therefore to risk this ship docking if whatever was aboard could supply her with the required camouflage.

Orlandine again opened her channel to the hovering vessel.

‘What’s your name?’

‘Vulture,’ replied the voice, ‘running a ship called the
Harpy.
Such a joyous working of serendipity don’t you think?’

Definitely a Polity AI, quite possibly a war drone, given that sort of attitude.

‘Well, Vulture, while you proceed now to Dock Fifteen’ - she sent the location - ‘perhaps you can explain yourself further. Specifically I’d like you to tell me something about this Fiddler Randal.’

‘Fiddler Randal is a virus Erebus picked up at some point. I would guess he was originally a human mind in a flesh-and-blood human. He clearly hates Erebus and wants to see the entity splattered, so copies himself everywhere through Erebus’s structure to work to that end. But why am I telling you this? You yourself either have a copy of Randal or have encountered one.’

The ship had fired up its steering jets and was now propelling itself towards the dock in question. The three drones were already down in the bay area - two of them concealed and only the scorpion visible. Orlandine’s resources were now in place there: she could burn out the entire area with a fire hot enough to fracture ceramal, but perhaps that wasn’t such a great idea considering the munitions those three drones were carrying. More important were her other resources: there she had every worm and virus at her disposal and numerous means of delivering them, both by physical connection and electromagnetic means.

‘How do you know that I have encountered or possess a copy of RandAI?’

‘My one told me.’

‘If you could elaborate?’

‘Stop fucking around, Orlandine. You were advised someone would arrive here bringing precisely what we’re bringing you, so what’s the problem?’

‘Very well.’ Orlandine wanted to question further but guessed she would find out more soon enough. In any event, she couldn’t afford not to let this vessel dock. She studied its slow approach, continued trying to probe it but learned nothing new. The twinned ship finally docked, and she instantly recognized what walked out of it - as did the three war drones waiting in the bay, from the way their weapons came online all at once.

‘You’ve brought something for me,’ she said to the menacing figure.

Mr Crane nodded briefly and information began to flow across to her, even though she had not herself permitted it. For half a second everything stood poised on the edge of disaster, until Orlandine began to take a look at what he had sent: the wealth of secret codes, the multiple methods of configuring the chameleonware she was already spreading throughout the war runcible, and the knowledge that she had a lot of work to do and very little time.

* * * *

The accretion disc seemed to be some living body and the horde now rushing towards the two Dragon spheres its immune response to them. Mika firmly controlled the impulse to run and find somewhere to hide, then began analysing all those weird forms out there in the brief time they were open to her inspection before an equatorial particle cannon, white laser or CTD proceeded to fry them. She realized they were a much more diverse collection of Jain biomechs than those utilized by Erebus, yet none of them approached the size or coherence of a full wormship. There were lenses but all of them deformed, and they often had some other entity attached to them either in symbiosis, mutualism or parasitism - it was difficult to tell. The structures that made up wormships rarely achieved more than a few turns of a spiral, and though numerous bacilliforms now fell like hail towards the Dragon spheres, they never melded together to form those thousand-mile-high walls she had seen in recordings of previous conflicts with these things.