Line War (36 page)

Clearly a guiding intelligence was lacking here. This was Jain technology initiated into growth by such an intelligence then abandoned. She had studied similar growth burgeoning on an asteroid in orbit about the red giant sun Ruby Eye. This stuff tried to spread itself in the same way as a virus or bacillus - with the kind of cunning selected by evolution but utterly without sentience. By now, if there had been a guiding intelligence, their attack would have been halted, for none of these biomechs managed to get even close to the Dragon spheres, yet they continued to approach with a kind of automated futility.

‘What happens if one of these things actually reaches your surface?’ she asked.

The voice in her head replied, ‘None of them will.’

‘Yeah, but what if?’

‘They would not be able to penetrate me unless many thousands of them reached my surface all at once.’

‘And then?’

‘I would sterilize that area.’

It occurred to Mika that maybe she should have stayed safely inside Dragon, because ‘sterilize’ was almost certainly too mild a term to describe what might be needed here. She returned her attention to her instruments, but then, a moment later, an orange glow in the surrounding fug dragged her attention upward. Though there were all sorts of flashes and detonations occurring about the spheres, they were short-lived, whereas this light remained constant.

‘What’s that?’

‘A planet in the process of formation.’

‘Are we going anywhere near it?’ Mika asked, fascinated.

‘Very close,’ Dragon replied. ‘The entities currently attacking us show no inclination to hold back, therefore are not too bright, and it has become evident that few of them possess anything more than rudimentary engines.’

‘And.’

‘I suggest that you strap yourself tightly into your chair and just watch.’

Mika quickly obeyed, then eased the chair back to get a better view of her surroundings. It seemed as if a wind was blowing out there in the fug because, as well as the constant motion in it from the passage of the Dragon sphere, it was now swirling rapidly and she could detect cross-currents. Something massive then appeared out of it to her left and she observed an asteroid slowly turning, its surface coated with snaky growth so that it seemed like some massive fossil. Biomechs leaped from its surface, chemical drives sputtering to life, but the Dragon spheres outpaced them and soon they and their rocky home had receded from view.

Next Mika felt the tug of gravity at a slant to her present position, which produced the illusion of the floor tilting. The equatorial cannons had ceased firing by now, but Dragon’s white lasers continued to stab through the murk. The meteor lasers of the conferencing unit were also firing, things flashing like firecrackers and blinking out all about her. Slowly, the fug began to clear and she gained a clearer direct view of the pursuing horde. Briefly she glimpsed the other sphere off to one side, then turning her head gazed upon the volcanic glare of a new world in the process of formation.

The world itself was misshapen, probably as the result of a recent impact, for one entire side of it was a magma lake into which a titanic mountain was steadily sinking. Plumes of magma regularly spewed miles into the air, hellish cracks opened even as she watched, and the surface flickered with the constant explosion of strikes from a never-ending meteor storm. It rained meteors here, it rained fire, and fire spewed from the ground, but steadily the Dragon spheres descended towards this chaos.

It seemed to take forever for this nascent world to make the transition from an object hanging in space to a plain extending below her and a horizon ahead. Mika gazed down upon rivers and lakes of lava glaring through a sooty black crust. The tug of the planet was countering that of the gravplates below her, so she felt light in her chair. She imagined herself in some glassy cockpit set into the surface of the Dragon sphere, just below its equator, and oriented towards a point midway between the ground below and the horizon. The sky ahead was cut diagonally with parallel meteor trails, which meant the debris orbiting beyond this world must have formed into a swirl pattern, and the horizon flashed with explosions as if of some distant battle.

A brief flicker of light dragged her attention over to her left, and in a moment she saw a mushroom cloud boiling up into the sky, but it wasn’t some atomic device, just a meteor impacting with the same force. Dragon rocked in the shock wave, and the magma below was whipped up like seawater in a storm, waves of it splashing on sooty shores. Horizontal clouds, like jet vapour trails, spread from either side of the explosion, then were rapidly disrupted by two similar detonations. However, Mika’s gaze was drawn upward, by a constant white flickering as if from some faulty light tube, to the flashing of white lasers.

Up above, it was like looking into storm cloud in which burning coals were shifting. Out of this came swarms of Jain biomechs that the two spheres appeared to be struggling to keep at bay. She glanced across at the other sphere, just visible now, and saw its weapons creating a halo of fire above it. Then something fell past, close by her. It was a rod-form sprouting jain tendrils even as she watched it. Quickly it receded from sight, then a brief greenish fire marked its point of entry into a magma lake below. Then more of them were raining past her. She saw one abruptly stabilize only a few miles out, and begin to rise again, but after a moment it shuddered and just burst apart, spreading fragments like purple skin across the atmosphere. Another managed to rise, but other rod-forms falling from above it changed course to intercept it, sprouting tendrils as they came. They grabbed on like drowning swimmers clutching at one who had managed to stay on the surface, till their combined weight dragged it down. Mika saw the whole mass impact, break apart and begin belching smoke. It was only then that she noticed how much closer to the ground now were the twin Dragon spheres.

‘Why are they falling?’ Mika asked.

‘They cannot sustain gravtech,’ Dragon replied.

Mika remembered then the wild Jain tech she had studied once on that asteroid orbiting Ruby Eye. Confined to that rock, it had not tried to use anything more complicated to escape the surface than some form of rail-gun.

‘That’s because gravtech is related to U-tech, and the latter requires conscious sentient control,’ she suggested.

‘Yes,’ Dragon replied, and she felt some satisfaction with her answer until the entity added, ‘so your AIs tell you.’

It was deluging Jain biomechs now and the surface below kept disappearing amid clouds of smoke. A lens-ship half a mile across, and into whose side it seemed part of a wormship had impacted, fell into view. Jet flames were regularly blasting from numerous orifices underneath it but, though they seemed to be holding it up, they could not stabilize it. It drifted towards her, then the bar of a white laser - made visible by all the smoke - cut across it. Some internal detonation flung the wormish part of it free and it turned over, accelerating towards the ground, where it disappeared into a smoke cloud. Briefly she glimpsed an explosion down there, before Dragon moved beyond it.

After some hours Mika’s fascination with this spectacle began to pall. She shifted her seat upright again and began to check her instruments. Robotically methodical, she collected data, recorded events and then made analyses. She realized that the biomechs, having adapted to the environment of the accretion disc, now could not survive in the environment the Dragon spheres had lured them into. Was this stuff a danger, then, it appearing so simple? Yes, of course it was, for every one of those things out there could produce Jain nodes. In a moment of horror it occurred to her that Jain nodes were already being produced here in huge quantities and ejected from this accretion disc to spread out into space - and these would not take nearly as long to reach human civilization as those ejected by the remnants of the Maker civilization, though the span of time involved would be thousands if not tens of thousands of years. Maybe by then the Polity would be able to stop them, for though ECS now possessed the means of detecting such objects, that would be as much use as being able to detect individual grains in a sandstorm.

Several more hours passed and, as the two Dragon spheres parted to circumvent the massive mountain still sinking into the lake of magma it had made, the pathetic rain of biomechs began to abate. Mika noted that the two spheres were once again higher from the ground. Checking her instruments she saw that the cloud of their pursuers was almost gone, fast draining away. Sensor readings directed behind showed numerous fires with spectrographic readings indicating both metals and organic compounds. Next the two spheres were into cloud, and the gravplates below her became the only pull.

‘Where now?’ she asked.

‘To the core.’

‘The sun?’

‘Near it,’ Dragon replied. ‘The graveyard of ships orbits close to it, and will fall into the sun some years hence.’

‘Graveyard of ships?’

‘Our sensors are better than yours, Mika,’ said Dragon. ‘We see the old ships in the forest, and through the thin fabric we feel the others.’

Others?

Mika did not ask - and did not even want to know - about some infinite writhing mass seeming to lie just off the edge of her perception.

* * * *

The back alley was choked with junk: discarded computer hardware, biodegrading litter accumulated in soggy drifts from which frilly golden fungi were sprouting, an ageing open-topped gravcar spattered with bird shit from which the motor had obviously been removed, a couple of flimsy screens still running text while discharging their photoelectric load from the previous day’s sunshine. Chevron gazed around at this mess: it was typically human and her new addition to it would make no difference. She strode over to the car and, with a flip of her shoulder, dumped her wet blanket-wrapped load into the back seats.

Chevron had assumed that obtaining a schematic of the ancient drainage system underneath Xanadu was simply a matter of briefly searching the nets, but surprisingly that basic information had not been there. As it transpired, however, it was possible to discover through the nets someone who did know about it, so Chevron obtained what she required by paying over a few credits to the one historian who, for some unfathomable reason, thought this subject worthy of research. It hadn’t been strictly necessary to kill him afterwards, but he had lived alone so Chevron felt it an easy precaution she could take. Anyway, he was so utterly human in his disorder and habits, and she found him dislikeable, though she admitted to herself there weren’t any humans she did like.

Her load discarded, she now moved over to one side of the alley, and pacing out the distance from the wall of one building, finally halted at a point about halfway along. Below her feet the damp surface of old reused furnace bricks looked no different to anywhere else. She scanned them carefully, then took a further pace forward and squatted down. Holding her hand out, she shifted internal mycelial structures and her fingers extended, flattening out to become sharp at their tips. She reached down and slid them into the crack between two bricks, levering one out with a crunch, then another, then began to scoop them out at high speed and stack them to one side. Within a few minutes she had revealed an old ceramic manhole cover underneath. It was sealed with glassy epoxy, she noticed, so another internal instruction caused her forefinger to blur into motion. She inserted it down alongside the rim of the cover and with a high whine it sliced through the ancient glue. In a moment she had cleared out a groove right round the cover and, inserting all her flattened fingers, levered it up as if using a crowbar. Immediately the stink of human sewage rose up to meet her, and she wrinkled her nose.

Humans were so messy.

Chevron scooped the dislodged bricks into the manhole, since she wanted to leave as little evidence of her presence here as possible. A squealing and hissing ensued down in the darkness, as creatures fled - ratadiles, almost certainly. She first increased the light amplification of her eyes, then lowered herself onto the ladder leading down - it was fortunately made of ceramic so had not rusted - and, after drawing the manhole cover back into place, descended further. Soon she was in the sewer, which, having been constructed to accommodate the heavy rainfall that occurred locally, was large enough to accommodate her standing upright. There would be some tighter sections to negotiate ahead, but no problem, since she would simply change her shape to suit them.

Chevron advanced, wading through knee-deep sewage, meanwhile opening coded communication links. In a moment, as well as the fetid tunnel ahead, she was gazing upon numerous different scenes fed from within the runcible complex some two miles away on the surface. Some of these views were seen through the eyes of the separatists infiltrating the area, relayed by their augs, others were from cams no larger than pinheads positioned strategically to give her a good view of the action.

‘Akiri, are our people now in position?’ she enquired.

The view witnessed currently through Akiri’s eyes was of an open bar area laid out about what looked like a Caribbean beach in the middle of a wide and crowded concourse.

‘Most of them are,’ confirmed Akiri, ‘but we’ve yet to get the main explosives to the Pillar.’

The methodology was simple. Groups of twenty insurgents each were going for the ten passenger runcibles in operation here, their aim to grab hostages, secure each area and then set explosives on each runcible. This would keep the AI very occupied while the main thrust of their attack got under way against the Pillar - a circular building in which the AI itself was sited at the junction of six concourses.