Polity Agent (30 page)

On fusion burn the telefactor decelerated in a tight arc around the moon, then descended on minimal AG between jagged peaks, silver-faced in the white light. In the past something had clipped one peak, spraying the entire area with slivers of hull metal. In the dusty plain beyond were splash patterns King first took to be the result of meteorite strikes but, on laser spectrometer analysis of the metals therein and by Geiger readings, discovered these to have been caused by small tactical thermonukes. A trench twenty yards long, ceasing for fifty yards then continuing for another ten, had obviously been melted into the ground by some high-powered beam weapon. The pause in it seemed to be where the beam had struck its target in the air, for beyond that point jags of ceramal and spatters of the alloys used to make bubble-metal, littered the landscape, and beyond them lay the crash site.

Whatever came down here had cut a mile-long groove in the ground, shovelling up regolith before it. King directed the telefactor along and above the groove until it reached the wreckage imbedded in the side of the regolith mound. A geoscan having revealed every angle of the distorted wreckage, King built a virtual picture of it in its mind, then began to iron out the distortions. Within minutes the AI recognized a much earlier version of itself: an attack ship but with its nacelles mounting balanced U-space engines rather than armament, its body bearing the solid angles of some ancient military beach-landing craft. Perhaps its mind still remained intact.

Upon further scanning, King drew the telefactor back after spotting some anomalies about this crash site. A tunnel had been bored through to precisely where the mind would be located under the covering of regolith. Around this tunnel there were marks in the ground: footprints.

Humans?

King thought not. Golem had also joined Erebus, so they must be the source.

The tunnel was amply wide enough for the telefactor so the AI sent it inside. It wound down through regolith now bonded with glassy resin, past two bubble-metal beams then up against hull metal, which had been cut through. A spherical cavity lay beyond. The AI recognized this as the armoured casing that contained the mind on these older ships—made to be quickly ejected so that if the ship itself was destroyed, its tactical information would not be lost. All the optical and power connections remained in place through the central pillar. The cage of doped superconductor that contained the crystal mind seemed undamaged—and much larger than the one containing King’s own mind, but then technology had advanced very much since then. The crystal mind itself, however, lay fragmented about the bottom of the sphere like a shattered windscreen. King withdrew the telefactor.

The
King of Hearts
AI
went on to investigate two more sites, discovering just a couple of claw arms which were all that remained of another four-pack drone, then a drone made in the shape of a pangolin, a great dent in its armour, which was partially melted. Every system inside it was utterly fried. King surmised it had been hit directly by an EM shell, so there had been no need to send Golem to make sure no sentience remained in it.

King recalled its telefactor and hesitated about investigating the planet. If Erebus and the other AIs were located here, they would generate visible activity, and information traffic in the ether. None so far detected. Also, did King really want to locate Erebus and its kind? Obviously some disagreement had resulted in the wreckage on that moon, so there seemed no guarantee that King would be welcome. Then again, the AIs manufactured during the Prador War were notoriously cranky and individualistic, so it was perhaps unsurprising that some of them might eventually balk at the idea of melding. Perhaps on the planet itself more could be discovered as to the nature of this disagreement. King redirected the telefactor towards that nearby world, sending two more after it, but these bearing manipulators, cutting gear and the ability to interface with memcrystal. Some little while later the AI discovered that ‘disagreement’ might be rather an understatement for what had occurred there.

A vast 200-mile wreckage field terminated in the mountainous remains of a dreadnought. Radioactivity was high, so it seemed evident that tactical nukes were used, repeatedly. Beam trails cut into the rock all around. The big ship obviously came down in a controlled descent, otherwise there would be nothing now but a large crater, but clearly lost control near the end. It had bounced for 150 miles, then skidded for a further 50 miles until coming to a halt. But it was not alone.

King found wreckage from over three hundred war drones, four attack ships, twelve landers that judging by the remains were filled with Golem, two fast pickets and a mid-level battleship impacted into a cliff. Perhaps Erebus had met its own end here? Perhaps that dreadnought once contained the wayward mind? But a scan of visible numbers on the dreadnought’s hull dispelled that idea. This ship was called the
White Shark.
Here then were the results of an AI on AI conflict between factions in Erebus’s camp. King dropped into boiling atmosphere and began sending out all but two of its stock of telefactors, twenty-three of them. The AI really needed to know what happened here.

The mid-level battleship seemed a lost cause. Evidently having come in very fast, the probability that any crystal survived the impact was remote. Studying all the other wreckage, it soon became evident to King that after the battle the victors conducted a major salvage operation: markings on the ground showed that Golem, telefactors, and drones running on caterpillar treads had stripped usable components from most of the wreckage—what remained being not worth the energy expenditure of lifting from the gravity well. Some of the war-drone minds had been removed, where possible; all that remained of the Golem in the landers was the occasional distorted chassis, also mindless; a beam strike had cut a hole right through the dreadnought, while it lay at rest, and incinerated the mind it contained; one attack-ship mind was missing, the other destroyed; the picket minds lay in heat-distorted fragments. By this King guessed which side was which, and that the losers had been shown no mercy. There seemed nothing more to learn here. But then, as it hovered over the battlefield recalling its telefactors, King turned its attention to the ship impacted into the cliff. No tread marks over that way. Obviously Erebus thought that ship just as much a write-off as King had at first. Perhaps they were both mistaken. King sent four of its telefactors over to the cliff.

Five hours of excavation eventually revealed a distorted mind case. Using a thermic lance, one telefactor cut through the armour, then on the end of an arm it inserted a sensor head. There rested the ship’s mind, broken, in its doped s-con cage, but still perhaps containing much information. A smaller telefactor entered, found a power input point, detached the plug and inserted it into a socket in itself, ready to power up the damaged mind. There King paused it. So, Erebus stripped every usable component from the surrounding wreckage, destroyed or removed all the minds, certainly for the purpose of concealing its destination or intentions from possible pursuers, yet it missed this? King recalled to itself the other three telefactors and, once they snicked away in their cache, used both AG and thrusters to take itself up a hundred miles. The AI thereupon opened secured processing space and routed telefactor control through that. It then powered up the mind case, with the tentative reluctance of someone clicking on the power to dodgy household wiring.

The telefactor dropped to the floor, as the drain sucked power from its gravmotor, then it reached out to begin splicing into the optics connected to the abandoned mind. Nothing yet. Connection made. Diagnostic program loading . . . The worm came through like an express monorail loaded with warheads. It screamed round in the secured processing space, searching for weaknesses. King immediately began loading programs into that space to counter it, take it apart, analyse its structure. The worm, semi-Al, knew itself to be trapped. It transmitted a signal back down the link, instantly broadcast from the telefactor. Five suns ignited below: five one megatonne CTDs.

King accelerated. Four seconds. Time for the signal to reach another location: rail-gun hidden in the sulphurous moon, and now firing a barrage of missiles at half the speed of light. But the
King of Hearts
was a modern Polity attack ship. It stood on its tail, opened up its fusion drive to full power and, accelerating at a hundred gravities, left a single anti-munitions package behind it. The worm broke apart, eating itself, but King already knew the frequency and format of the signal it had sent, and thus transmitted its own present. King’s worm burrowed into the mind it located on the moon: just a drone waiting here to ambush any pursuers, fiercely loyal and ready to destroy itself. It was not quick enough. It had seen the others leave, tracked their departure and then awaited some to return to say its mission was over. King learnt all that in microseconds. Microseconds after, another CTD detonated in the face of the moon, and left a burning sulphurous crater. The barrage of missiles proceeded to detonate around the anti-munitions package, easily fooled into thinking they found their target.

‘I’m coming to find you,’ sang King, accelerating out of the system.

* * * *

As Mika detached herself from the VR frame she felt tired and frustrated. Every time she entered the virtuality now, there awaited a mass of new information to be processed, and she experienced difficulties in keeping on top of it all. While she deconstructed singular molecular structures the work stayed easy enough, but with research now being directed towards what could be formed from those structures and their interrelationships, it got tougher. Much of this work being conducted at AI speeds, it now became the province only of Jerusalem, other AIs aboard, and those humans sufficiently augmented to keep up.

Stepping down from her frame, she surveyed the various screens in her research area and saw that those not frozen were scrolling reams of code. She walked over to the counter on which the screens rested and picked up the item lying there. The aug was similar to the one D’nissan now wore: a flattened bean of gleaming metal with an exposed crystal in the shape of a snail’s shell on one side—that aspect purely aesthetic. Its visual interlink entered via the wearer’s temple, so was not as grotesque as many of its kind, but the device still required surgical installation. Susan James and Prator Colver had both upgraded: the former with an aug like this and the latter with the more conventional kind, though he talked about going fully gridlinked when he could spare the time—that too required surgical intervention since the gridlinking tech needed to be imbedded in the inner surface of his skull.

Mika now faced a choice. In her present unaugmented state she was rapidly becoming obsolete. If she wanted to stay at the forefront of Jain research, she needed to upgrade. Staying as a standard-format human meant she would soon be pushed to one side, handling small peripheral projects. But did she really want to keep up with Colver, James and D’nissan?

Ever since installing that Jain mycelium in herself, on the planet Masada, and the drastic surgical procedure required to remove it, her attitude to invasive augmentation had become rather cautious. Her present situation also posed certain questions about what she was and what she wanted to be. Did she really want to go the haiman route? She thought about Cormac and their recent utterly human liaison. He was gridlinked, but not willingly so -the device had reinstated itself in a way yet to be explained. He had been taken off the gridlink because being linked for so long had compromised his efficiency as an agent, for he lost the ability to connect with humans at a human level, though that lack did not seem so evident to her now. But there the rub: was Mika sufficiently curious about Jain technology to lose her essential humanity in pursuit of its secrets?

Mika entered her living quarters, went over to her bar unit and poured herself a glass of brandy. Taking this with her, she slumped on her sofa.

What do I love?

She loved Cormac, or felt she did—Mika always encountered problems with hazy terms like ‘love’. But what about her research? What were her aims? In the end she was practically immortal, and nor did she require her vocation to put bread in her mouth or a roof over her head. Her reasons for pursuing it were based on a feeling of both duty
and
self-gratification. But the sense of duty became irrelevant when there were those better able to perform the research than her. So what did she enjoy about it? What gratified her? She considered the last few years. On Samarkand she most enjoyed taking apart and studying the Maker-constructed creature there, and subsequently studying the dracomen. On Masada the dracomen again provided that same pleasure, as did her lengthy digging in the mud to find the remains of the dragon sphere that had sacrificed itself there. In the end she reluctantly realized she preferred field work, getting her hands dirty, not the esoteric research now being conducted by the others.

‘Jerusalem,’ she said, ‘they’re leaving me behind.’

The AI replied instantly. ‘Augmented mental function and memory are now almost a prerequisite. The big picture spills out beyond the scope of the human mind.’

‘Precisely,’ Mika said and sipped her brandy. ‘How vital is my contribution?’

‘No one is indispensable.’

‘Well thanks for that.’

‘
I
am not indispensable,’ the AI added.

‘Right.’

‘You are reluctant to augment yourself?’

‘I am. The others are mostly number-crunching now, and are moving increasingly into the AI mental realm. I’m not sure that’s what I want to do.’