Polity Agent (37 page)

He turned the hardfields off again.

Back on the underside of reality, he gazed at the star, both distant and close. Scale and distance were merely rules his own mind applied here, and he could ignore them. Thus he did, and gazed upon the underside of seven Jain nodes leaving prickly thornish impressions in this continuum: organization, pattern, standing out from the underlying chaos of reality; of space knotted and wadded into this thing called matter. Blegg turned away, then quickly back when a subscreen blinked on to show text: ‘
U-signature detected—disperse signal’
’. It took him some time to track it down, for it lay nearly two light years away, though close in interstellar terms. Without surfacing from U-space, he reset his ship’s course.

* * * *

- retroact 6 -

‘. . . bright enough to realize the AI rulers were better at governing than any previous human rulers’

He turned to another card, saw them laid out all around him like gravestones.

The autolaser stuttered and crackled, knocking most of the deadly swarm from the air, but it did not manage to hit them all. Corporal Chang made a horrible grunting sound—the impact flinging him up from cover, then the projectile detonating inside him. It blew his guts out and he spun to the ground with only a length of bloody spine attaching his ribcage to his pelvis.

The three remaining members of the unit fired on the nearby slopes with their own seeker guns, then crouched back behind their boulders on the mountain slope. A waste of ammo. The sniper might not even be over that way. It seemed almost as if he knew of Blegg and his abilities, for he had changed over from laser to seeker bullets so there was no way to locate him. But he knew where they were.

‘This guy is not going to be captured alive,’ said Pierce.

Of the recording of events here, Pierce could claim he only stated what he thought were the sniper’s intentions. Reading the man’s expression, Blegg understood the statement to be a promise of intent.

‘Do you still have no idea where this fucker is?’ Blegg asked through his comlink.

‘Only within an area of three square miles, with you at the centre of it,’ Earth Central replied.

‘I thought the cameras on your satellites capable of resolving the date on a coin dropped on the ground?’

‘They do possess that resolution—when there is no cloud cover. It has also become evident this individual obtained, as well as the original tank, a multipurpose assault rifle, development sets of the new chameleon-cloth fatigues and electronic concealment hardware.’

Blegg eyed his companions, ‘Which ECS soldiers have yet to be issued with?’

‘The same.’

Blegg nodded to himself. The man seemed a lone criminal but a very clever one. He had managed to steal a tank which he used to smash into an etched-sapphire repository. Fleeing with millions in that form, he evaded the police cordon. His laundering of the sapphires through various criminal organizations had resulted in the capture of many, but never him. Five years of chasing rumours and fragmentary information finally led to a house, here in the Scottish Highlands. The ECS arrest team botched it—and died. EC shut down transport out of the area and now many four-person teams of highly trained personnel were scouring these mountains. Blegg had joined them—perhaps that had not been his greatest idea. He could transport himself away, but that seemed so unfair on the others here.

‘I have analysed recorded imagery. He is over to your left about two hundred yards away. Get out of there now. Satellite strike will be initiated in two minutes.’

Get out?

It seemed EC had not precisely pinpointed the man’s location, else there would be no need to run. It also seemed the AI decided whatever information could be extracted from the man no longer warranted the loss of any more lives. It was about to burn the area.

‘Leave the autolaser—it should cover us. We go
now!’

Blegg leapt up and led the way from cover. A horrible whining made his back crawl—more seeker bullets. Staying low, they ran just as hard and fast as they could. Snap-crack of a laser, either from the auto or the sniper. Something slammed into Blegg’s back, lifted him from the ground and hurled him face-down in the dirt. His head must have hit a rock, for he lost consciousness.

Later, Blegg learnt that it was the shock wave from the strike that threw him down. Nothing remained of the sniper, though analysis of DNA from his home identified him as a mercenary once employed by the now strictly controlled corporations. No one particularly special. Blegg did not like to contemplate how close he had come to dying, then.

- retroact ends -

* * * *

There was no escape from this situation, and no escape from the realization that he would soon die. With a normally human mind, Thellant might have been able to convince himself otherwise. The best he could hope for now was a quick death. But that knowledge did not allay the frustration, anger and a desperate need to escape.

‘Who is this?’ he asked, while spreading Jain tendrils deep into the systems of the ship, tracking optics and s-con cables, sequestering interfaces, reading stored data, initiating ship’s diagnostics, and his own.

A male voice replied, ‘Well, the one who said “Gotcha!” was Jack—the AI which runs the Centurion-class ship
NEJ.
My name is Thorn.’

‘ECS?’ Accessing a monitoring system Thellant gazed into the area intervening between the four spheres of his stolen ship and there saw wreckage, and metal hardened into splash patterns. The fusion drive had operated through here to a drive-plate mounted underneath, the U-space engine encased above it. Now there was just a hole there.

‘Oh yes.’

‘Do you realize I have fifteen hostages aboard this ship?’ Thellant connected into the cold coffins, just to assure himself this remained true. Nine men and six women, all of them suffering from head injuries beyond the compass of simple autodocs. These were the kind of injuries that required AI intervention, for not only their brains needed reconstructing, but their minds as well.

‘Thellant N’komo, you’ve got tech inside you capable of trashing planets. Over a hundred and fifty thousand people are already dead because of you, and many more will die. And if the Jain tech in MA gets out the planet below might well end up as the target for a few crust crackers. Get real.’

‘Why am I still alive, then?’ Thellant now concentrated his perception outside the Rescue ship via external cameras, the cockpit screen before him, and via Jain tendrils containing optics infiltrated through the ship’s hull. Many ships hovered above him -cargo carriers, passenger liners, Rescue ships—and one large ugly dreadnought was rising over the horizon even now. The last vessel was probably capable of denuding a planet of life, and that might well be its intended purpose. The Centurion-class ship held station down below him, probably because its AI knew that there lay his only possible escape route, no matter how minimal his chances if he attempted it. He studied the vessel carefully, recognizing it to be state of the art. There was just no way out.

‘Because I want you to answer a few questions.’

‘Go fuck yourself.’ Thellant closed his eyes, and for a moment closed out all perception. He understood that his need to escape was not entirely his own, it being imbedded in and integral to the technology occupying his body, and now this ship, too. It contained no sentience, just an animalistic desperation of the gnawing off a leg in a trap kind.

‘It won’t be me I’ll be fucking, Thellant.’

‘Exactly. So why should I answer questions? We both know that I am not going to get out of this alive. I answer your questions, then you fry me.’

‘Well, we could fry you—a microwave beam should do the job—or we could use what’s called a CTD imploder. You probably haven’t heard of that—collapsing gravity field into an antimatter explosion. Not a great deal left afterwards.’

Thellant opened his eyes. What was this guy about? Was this supposed to persuade him to cooperate?

The man called Thorn went on, ‘Of course we could drop you on some remote world where you could live happily ever after.’

‘Is this what passes for humour in ECS nowadays?’ Even knowing the other man must be lying to him, Thellant experienced an emotional response to the offer that felt almost out of his control. He knew then, in that same instant, that the Jain technology possessed its own agenda, and only
allowed
him to control it.

‘There’s my quandary,’ said Thorn. ‘I have to try and persuade you that we really are prepared to grant you that indulgence, if you provide the information we require.’

‘And what might that information be?’

‘I want you to tell me exactly how you acquired that Jain node, and I also want you to tell me about the Legate.’

Thellant felt a flush of anger at the mere mention of that name. The cruelty, as he saw it, lay in giving him such power in such intractable circumstances. It had been like gluing a gun into the hand of a hostage who is surrounded by terrorists wielding laser carbines. The result possessed a degree of inevitability. Despite the fact that he seemed certain to die, perhaps he should answer those questions. Maybe that would result in the Polity coming down as hard on that bastard Legate as it seemed certain to do on himself.

‘Tell me about this remote world where I can live happily ever after.’

‘Oh, I can tell you all about that. Obviously Jain technology is of overwhelming interest to researchers human, haiman and AI, and apparently there has been a world specially prepared for just this sort of eventuality. It’s orbited by all sorts of scanning satellites, and has twenty gigatonne-level CTDs sunk into its crust. Basically you get to do what you like for as long as you like down there. However, the moment you try to leave that planet, you leave this life.’

‘That almost sounds plausible,’ said Thellant. And it did, since he could almost believe the Polity might value him highly as a scientific resource, despite the mass slaughter he had caused. ‘Take me to this place first and then I’ll answer your questions.’

‘I think you can probably guess my response to that,’ said Thorn, ‘but I’ll say it anyway. You answer the questions first, you tell me all you know, then you get transported to that world. I
could
take you there first, but you would be no safer there than you are here.’

‘But I would at least know if you had lied about it,’ Thellant replied.

‘No, you would not. Just consider what is happening here. The Polity is evacuating a billion people from an arcology, so think of the resources and organization that requires. A world as I just described could easily be made ready in the time it took us to transport you there.’

‘Very well.’ Thellant paused for a moment and thought now might be the time to give something. ‘The Legate gave me the Jain node.’

‘Please continue,’ said Thorn after Thellant did not continue.

‘I can transmit you complete memcordings of all my dealings with the Legate.’ Almost without thinking, he began compiling those memories and layering them with every informational weapon he could find within the Jain tech, or could think to create. He considered it a vain hope that the ship’s AI would accept this package, obviously the technology occupying his own body felt otherwise.

‘We’ll establish a tight-beam link with you, and then you may transmit the memcordings across,’ replied Thorn.

* * * *

Glowing craters pocked the Jain-occupied section of the arcology, amidst which immense fires now raged. The firebreak slowed the substructure’s advance, as did the destruction of Runcibles 5 and 6, but it was those other strikes delivered by
Brutal Blade
that finally halted it. It then attempted to build up more stashes of resources and energy but, as the HK program relayed their positions, the dreadnought destroyed them too. For two days, the Jain advance stalled, then the HK program went offline, and a microsecond later a viral attack came through the link, and Coloron shut it down. On the third day the Jain advance began again, slower than before, more tentative. However, these events produced other encouraging results.

Over the two days, Coloron diverted the multitude gathering around Runcible 4 to other runcibles further inside the arcology, and diverted the exodus through 3 to the exits positioned in the south-west corner. Those around 7, it began moving elsewhere. All of those runcibles would be next to go. ECS forces, having arrived in strength, now used transports to evacuate many citizens directly through the arcology roof. Along with those forces arrived thousands of drones equipped to scan for Jain tech, and this made it possible to move thousands of people way beyond the quarantine perimeter, which meant a reduction in the population density directly outside, so those inside could evacuate quicker. And they were certainly getting out quicker: the knowledge that a large portion of the arcology had been reduced to radioactive rubble encouraged them to abandon their precious belongings and run. However, though the substructure’s advance might be more tentative now, it was still inexorable, and after 3, 4 and 7 it would next reach Runcible 8—and Coloron itself.

The AI turned its attention to the armoured chamber that contained it. Its brain rested between the interfaces of a thick optical control pillar: a pillow-sized lump of yellow crystal wrapped in a black s-con cagework. For the first time in many years Coloron undogged the locks to the heavy chamber door and opened it. Through the door marched an object like a headless iron ostrich, but standing three yards tall with two arms slung underneath its hollow body. From the hollow, a thick lid lay hinged back bearing emitter dishes, a com laser, and a powerful U-space transceiver. It came to a halt before Coloron.