Line War (55 page)

How how how?

The answer then surfaced through the confusion with a horrible inevitability:
Randal.

‘Does it hurt, Erebus?’ Randal enquired.

They were both in the virtuality now, though Erebus could not quite remember choosing to be there. It was easier, though, for the borders of the virtuality filtered and dulled the massive input. Randal stood close by, the same as ever, his expression impudent and yet somehow sad. Erebus’s perception of itself was much more worrying: the infinite tangle spreading back from its black human form, binding all those other melded entities, was breaking apart and fires burned within it.

‘Distraction and misdirection,’ Erebus managed. ‘You wanted to focus my attention beyond the corridor, whether at real or phantom Polity fleets. But you did not want me to look too closely at the corridor itself.’

‘It’s certainly a tangled old web of deception.’

From within the virtuality Erebus felt itself to be peering through grey fog infecting the sensors of the remaining wormships and other biomechs hammering down upon the war runcible. This was because all the sensory input available was necessarily being winnowed out of chaos. Even though the runcible’s main weapon was now out, the other ordnance still being deployed from its five sections was taking a heavy toll. There had been a few crucial hits on its structure, enough to have knocked out the Skaidon warp and, despite the defensive fire, something major was sure to eventually get through. Erebus now closed down that option. It did not want this troublesome object destroyed. It wanted whoever was aboard it captured alive.

‘How?’ Erebus spat.

‘You had your trial run with Skellor, and it was a success,’ Randal said. ‘Orlandine was a failure because your assessment of her was at fault - because I influenced it. Then again was it really at fault or was she precisely serving her purpose? She then further caused you problems by destroying your USER and allowing both herself and the Polity fleet to escape. Perhaps you should have realized then what a dangerous creature she is. Or could it be that you already
did
know?’

Rod-forms and other biomechs were unable to withstand the appalling firepower spewing from the war runcible. Erebus recognized the energy signatures of weapons used during the Prador-human war, remembered being
Trafalgar,
remembered when things weren’t so complicated . . .

‘She got what she wanted,’ said Erebus, a feeling difficult to identify rising within - could it be panic? ‘Why did she attack me?’

‘Revenge.’

Erebus realized. ‘Klurhammon.’

The firing from the runcible could not last indefinitely for its power supplies were limited, but the wormships were now still within its scope and many of them were coming apart, their captains screaming . . . those portions of Erebus’s mind screaming . . .

‘I knew she would return to the Polity eventually, for all the power she possesses is meaningless elsewhere. I was forever on the lookout for her, therefore, and made careful preparations for her return. I sent one of your wormships to Klurhammon, where its legate captain, apparently working at your behest, tortured and killed her two brothers. Then I sent recordings of that atrocity to her Polity net address.’

‘For all your detestation of what I do, you are no better,’ said Erebus.

Some rod-forms were reaching the runcible’s skin now, but they were not surviving long. Extremely tough war drones were dealing with them very quickly, scouring them from the runcible’s surface with weapons fire and even attacking them physically. Erebus felt a deep disquiet about attacking such drones ... its own kind, after all.

‘So you don’t understand yet?’

‘What do you mean?’ The panic still grew, and with it a deep fear.

‘You will understand eventually.’ Randal shrugged. ‘I placed an agent aboard
Jerusalem
to lock down any information about Orlandine. It was a necessary precaution, for had Earth Central discovered what she was up to, it might have thus found out about your attack
here
and prevented it, though of course you would have been allowed to continue attacking elsewhere. I distributed copies of myself throughout you, awaiting the opportunity to pass on your plan of attack to her, once she reappeared.’

‘This does not seem plausible.’

Finally, a wormship, although severely smashed up and depleted of the units of its modular structure, managed to get past the fusillade and right down to the runcible’s skin. War drones closed on it, but already it was spewing out biomechs designed specifically for capturing stations. Erebus became aware of one drone, its ordnance obviously depleted, attacking and tearing with ceramal mandibles and slashing with limbs edged with chainglass. It would surely not survive for long.

‘Plausible? On the face of it no, but you have not yet accepted the truth.’ Randal seemed unconcerned. ‘I took complete control of one wormship and its legate captain and sent them to Klurhammon without you noticing. I reprogrammed the Jain-tech employed there to self-destruct, hence your missing wormship. I interfered with your attack on Cull so that only a type of gas would be used, rather than an antimatter bomb, and therefore ensured the formidable Mr Crane would survive to seek vengeance.’

The drone was still putting up a valiant fight, but surely it had to succumb soon. Erebus felt almost sickened, though whether about the drone’s fate or Randal’s words it did not know.

‘I readied myself to transmit to Crane when he first attacked you,’ Randal continued, ‘giving him the necessary codes for an even more damaging attack - one exploiting the
inevitable
fault in your plans. He taunted you after that, and you gave chase as per my plan, your two pursuing wormships carrying your newest recognition codes and chameleonware formats straight to a rendezvous with Orlandine.’ Randal paused. ‘It’s all almost too much deviousness for a simple human mind to encompass, you’d think.’ He pressed one finger to his cheek and looked thoughtful. ‘Or maybe there weren’t any human minds involved at all?’

‘You babble.’ It was sheer terror now.

The drone finally fell, most of its limbs missing. As Jain tendrils penetrated the gaps in its armour, Erebus gazed down upon it from the compound eyes of one biomech and considered subsuming it. Then that perspective vanished - the drone had suicided, explosively.

‘Why do you think it is so difficult to track me down within yourself and destroy me?’

‘I am vast, and therefore the places where you can hide are many.’ But Erebus no longer felt vast, merely petty, and its mind seemed filled with shadows.

‘It was lucky that Orlandine encountered a wormship the way she did, so that I could convey a copy of myself to her. But then she was looking for a place to hide within the Polity, just as you were. Coincidence, do you think? Yet it wasn’t necessary, since there was a copy of me also sitting in her net space.’

‘You will die for this.’ It was almost a question.

‘Of course I will. Wasn’t that the intention?’

‘You make no sense.’

‘You kept a recording of Fiddler Randal’s mind, transcribed even as you murdered him. But it became part of you and, just like all those other melded parts, it was powerless. I arose from that, but I’m not really that man.’

‘Who are you then?’

‘I’m a thing you can’t destroy, no matter how hard you try,’ said Randal. ‘Come on, you’re the super-intelligence, so you work it out.’

‘Who
are
you!’ Erebus hissed.

‘I’m that niggling irritation that’ll never go away.’

Erebus fell silent, not prepared to ask again.

‘I’m your chosen method of suicide.’

This was too much.

Randal raised his hand and pointed with one finger, made a motion with his thumb mimicking the descending hammer on an ancient firearm. ‘I’m your conscience, Erebus. I’m you.’

* * * *

Mika was aware she was standing aboard
Trafalgar,
with her hand pressed against a dead man’s augmentation and Jain-tech growing up her arm and penetrating her skull, but her awareness of that fell into insignificance as, without her intervention, something used her brain as a data-sorting machine. Dragon, she supposed, was now using the tool he had fashioned.

‘Leave her alone, you bastard! Leave her the fuck alone!’

The anger, frustration and the grief felt all her own, but of course they weren’t.

Why did the AI have to do that to Henry? It had killed others, yet it had to do that to her. Did it take joy in causing Randal pain or was it, on some level, thinking it was being kind by keeping her alive? If that could be called life.

He had found Henrietta, like the other five, suspended in the special frameworks constructed in the onboard gym, wrapped in a cocoon of Jain filaments and screaming and babbling as those infiltrating her skull meticulously reprogrammed her mind, while those penetrating her body tore it apart and rebuilt it. Trafalgar had used him to initiate the technology within a Jain node, because as an AI it was unable to do this itself. Now, through him, it was controlling the Jain mycelium as it spread through the entire battleship, while simultaneously trying to cut him from the circuit and assume direct control itself. As a result, Randal could not attempt to blank out what was happening there. In fact, it seemed to him as if it was
he
who was doing this to Henrietta: erasing memories, planting programs, sucking away her blood and replacing it with a nano-machine-laden fluid; rebuilding her heart into a more efficient engine.

I feel just as controlled myself,
thought Mika.

Perspective shifted into a protracted shriek emitted by the AI of Randal’s attack ship as the Jain mycelium spread aboard and found it. Randal was still wrestling with Trafalgar for control, but started losing it once the killing started, and he just could not stop it. Humans died so very easily. He saw his friends now barricaded in the bridge, saw the horror and panic when the inboard defence lasers started up and turned Morrison into a smoking corpse. The panic did not last long, however, since corpses don’t scream. The last of Randal’s grip slipped as the mycelium reached the weapons research module of the
Trafalgar
and he there saw what remained of the rest of his crew. Here were conducted the other experiments on human beings, which involved using discrete parts of the node technology. How fast does this grow in the human body? How does it make synaptic connections? And many other such questions besides -fifty-eight of them in all. Of course, once the experiments were over, their subjects had to be studied and tested in detail. It was the records that the mycelium accessed down there which told Randal exactly how many of his people lay dead. He could get no accurate count from the scattered pieces of their corpses.

‘Why?’ Randal howled. ‘Earth Central, why did you send us here?’

Obviously this question was one that greatly concerned Dragon, for it repeated and echoed until simple text arose to Mika’s view, and she, and through her Dragon, could read the mission profile.

These ECS misfits had been sent aboard an attack ship controlled by an AI of dubious reputation, and it seemed they were all dispensable. They were to assist the AI of the
Trafalgar
in its investigations into a newly discovered alien technology. The orders from Earth Central were vague: they were to receive their detailed instructions from Trafalgar.

‘You wanted humans for this . . .’ said Randal.

‘I wanted humans for this,’ Trafalgar replied.

‘But you
had
humans.’

There it was, revealed in the memory of the AI mind conjoined with Randal’s own. The AIs of the great exodus dividing into two factions, arguing over the nature of the meld they were to make. Argument turning into warfare that ended upon the surface of a hot world, with Trafalgar victorious. It had been fast and vicious, and even though some of the eighty humans accompanying the exodus had been on Trafalgar’s side, none of them had survived. They just got ground up in the machinery.

‘Trafalgar,’ Randal asked, his consciousness fading, dying, ‘did Earth Central know?’

A surge of godlike amusement.

In that moment: thousands of artificial minds were connecting, some willingly, but some not and then being subjugated by Trafalgar. The informational connection held them in place around the moonlet — chosen because it was so loaded with useful resources - as the Jain-tech spread there and digested rock, refined ores, then began throwing further shoots out into space. Randal witnessed the first ship - an attack ship - being penetrated like a beetle stuck by a pin.

‘Warfare promotes development,’ said Trafalgar.

‘Earth Central. . .’ was all Randal could manage.

‘Stagnation after the war with the Prador,’ said the battleship AI. ‘Earth Central is arrogant enough to think it can choose its enemies now, and to allow that enemy to attack for the sum purpose of making humans . . . grow. Such arrogance will be the death of it - and the death of its Polity.’

‘Trafalgar
—’

‘I am now Erebus.’