Line War (4 page)

‘Dragon pseudopod, Deena,’ observed the man. ‘That’s what you were detecting here.’

‘Really,’ Deena replied, eyeing Mr Crane.

Mr Crane relinquished the object to the male surveyor, who took it over to a nearby plasmel box and coiled it up inside before slamming the lid.

‘Shall we go now?’ the man asked.

Deena, however, did not seem inclined to leave. She surreptitiously peered down at the screen of her scanner, then abruptly raised it and directed it full at Mr Crane.

‘I’m getting some really queer—’

Crane reached out, plucked the scanner from her hand, crushing it up with his fingers and scattering the bits like he was strewing herbs on some tasty dish.

‘That was Polity property!’ she yelped indignantly.

Crane leaned forward, tilting his head slightly as if he was very interested in what she was saying.

‘We should really go now,’ said the man, grabbing her arm.

Vulture was wondering if this might be about to turn nasty when Crane abruptly snapped upright and gazed towards the sky. Turning to look also, the bird witnessed multiple flashes, muted through the overcast. Maybe lightning, but judging by the Golem’s interest Vulture thought not. Next came a rumbling as of thunder, then a sawing-crackling noise Vulture instantly recognized as the sound of a particle weapon burning through atmosphere.

‘What the hell is that?’ wondered the woman.

Two rod-shaped objects emerged from the clouds, tumbling at first then correcting and arrowing towards the ground, right towards the hybrids’ village. Crane broke instantly into a loping run, one hand clamped to his head to hold his hat in place. The turquoise flare of a particle beam stabbed down blasting one of the rod-shaped objects to fragments. It stabbed down again to hit the other one, but not before its target had spat out some missile. Vulture launched off, keeping pace above the Golem’s head. But from the direction of the village there came no expected detonation, which seemed puzzling. As they finally emerged from the canyon, the bird climbed skywards to get a better view. The monolith and the houses seemed perfectly intact, but something was belching a pale pinkish smoke. Survival instincts kicking in, the bird slowed and deliberately flew higher, gazing down as Mr Crane finally entered the village.

Those hybrids not actually still within their dwellings lay sprawled everywhere on the ground. Crane halted and peered about, then strode over to the missile - still belching smoke - and stamped it into the ground. Then he stood utterly still for some minutes, before jerking into motion again. Walking over to the nearest prone hybrid, he removed his hat, got down on his knees, placing it on the ground beside him, then plunged his brassy hands into the dirt and began scooping out a hole. Evidently the hybrids would not be getting up again.

Vulture circled for some minutes, before observing the ATV heading out of the canyon. He flew down and settled on the ground directly in its path. The vehicle ground to a halt and its two occupants climbed out.

‘What’s going on?’ asked the man.

‘Some kind of poison gas.’ Vulture gestured back with one wing. ‘He’s now burying his dead.’

‘Maybe we can help?’ she suggested.

Vulture could see right through to her motives: here was her ideal chance to get hold of one of the hybrids for her sample boxes.

‘If you really fancy going in there and trying to breathe that stuff?’

She grimaced.

Vulture added, ‘You probably weren’t in that much danger before, when he pulled out that pseudopod for you, but I don’t know what he’ll do after this. He’s never been what you might describe as a balanced personality.’

‘We’re getting out of here,’ said the man, grabbing his colleague’s arm and dragging her back towards the ATV. A short while later the vehicle disappeared between the sandstone buttes.

Vulture waited . . . and waited. As the light grew dim he tucked his head under one wing and snoozed. Finally something alerted him, woke him up to hard-edged starlight.

Mr Crane strode out of the village, glints in his eyes reflecting the stars. His hat in his hand, he halted to one side of Vulture, gazed at the bird for a moment, before firmly placing the hat back on his head.

‘He must pay,’ he said, then snapped his mouth closed, like the lid of a tomb.

* * * *

2

There is an old aphorism that says a gun is just a lump of metal until there is someone there to pull the trigger. It is not inherently evil or wrong in itself, for it is just a thing. This same aphorism cannot be twisted to fit Jain technology, since it is a gun with the trigger already pulled, or else it is the speeding bullet, or perhaps a better analogy would be that it is a landmine. Yet still it is blameless in itself - the blame lies with the Jain AIs who pulled the trigger - or armed the mine -five million years ago. However, the metal, plastics, electronics, switches and even the explosives of a landmine have useful applications elsewhere. Many aspects of Jain technology are similarly very useful, and can be used to further the goals of civilization; after all, a technology is not evil, only the way it is used can be described as that. We now understand that in every case where this pernicious construct has wiped out a civilization, elements of the same technology were used for good by those who had disarmed it. Unfortunately, by then, the armed version had already spread enough to eventually take off that civilization at the knees, and in each case it surely bled to death.

- From Quince Guide compiled by humans

The bridge area of the
King of Hearts
resembled the one Cormac remembered on the original
Jack Ketch,
with its wide black floor and holo-projection giving him the impression he was standing on a platform out in open space. However, here there were cross-hatched lines traversing the dome above him, destroying part of that illusion, and a whole segment blacked out behind him, while the nose of the attack ship was clearly visible to the fore. It seemed as if he was standing in a viewing dome set just behind the nose, but he knew this area lay well inside the ship’s new armour and its massive composite reinforcements.

No stars were visible through the dome at the moment, since the attack ship was presently in U-space, and the view beyond was a featureless grey. Cormac did not need to register this lack of view to know where they were. His sense of U-space now seemed to take precedence over all his other senses. Even the
King of Hearts
looked insubstantial all around him. Turning, he could gaze through its structure at the engines, the weapons, to where Scar sat motionless as a rock in his quarters, and to where Arach and Hubbert Smith were sparring in zero gravity.

‘Another attack?’ he enquired, trying to keep himself rooted in the moment and in his present position, for he felt constantly as if he was on the point of drifting, and could be swept away by invisible tides in U-space. He focused now more closely on his immediate surroundings. The bridge he currently occupied had a noticeable lack of chairs - King obviously was not as genial a host as Jack - but at least it did not have those grisly decorations Cormac had seen in the
Jack Ketch:
the perfect copies of ancient execution devices arrayed like exhibits in a museum.

King did not reply, and Cormac guessed this was because the AI had already stated that there had been another attack. Even though now supposedly again loyal to the Polity, King remained a thorough misanthrope. Cormac therefore tried accessing information directly from the attack ship’s server, but he received utterly no response. Maybe King had simply disabled the device, not liking humans getting too close to its pristine synthetic mind.

‘Tell me about this attack,’ Cormac insisted.

A glaring red dot appeared in the cross-hatching above the ship’s nose, then expanded into a massive red-bordered frame. Within this appeared the image of one of Erebus’s wormships in some area of space where the stars were clustered close together. There was something familiar about these constellations, but then Cormac had seen so many starscapes that wasn’t entirely surprising.

‘The ship arrived shortly after the last underspace interference emitters were withdrawn from the blockade,’ King stated obscurely.

USERs?
Cormac only knew of a few places where they had been deployed recently.

‘Where is this, King?’

‘Cull.’

The wormship up there in the frame was pouring out a swarm of objects - it looked as if someone had kicked a woodpile containing a wasps’ nest.

Cull.

King knew plenty about that world, since it was there that both itself and a few fellow AIs had betrayed the Polity to try and grab the Jain technology possessed by, and possessing, the bio-physicist Skellor. The
King of Hearts
had been the only one of these predators to escape.

‘It used sophisticated chameleonware to get close, but once it began deploying its weapons, that ceased to be an option for it. Unlike the ship involved in that previous attack, this one’s was in the nature of a suicide mission.’

Perfectly on cue, the wormship shuddered, fires igniting inside it, massive explosions tearing away chunks of its structure. Still, however, it continued to emit those bacilliform objects Cormac recognized. ‘Rod-forms’ was the term now being used for them.

Suddenly, within view appeared a Polity dreadnought accompanied by a scattering of the newer Centurion attack ships. One of those vessels employed first a DIGRAW - a directed gravity weapon - for a ripple seemed to speed through space towards the wormship, rod-forms bursting apart in its path. The wormship jerked as it was struck, and then writhed to reform, shedding dead segments of its compartmentalized structure. The attack ships now shot past the alien vessel in a random formation, hitting it with just about every weapon they had. By now the dreadnought was firing too: heavier beam weapons and clouds of missiles that seemed to move just too slowly - many of them glowing and going out under defensive fire. One, however, did get through, and the blast must have momentarily overloaded the instruments that had recorded these events, for King’s screen blanked. When it came back on again, it was to show a collapsing ball of fire, which fell back to a painfully bright point, before exploding out again. Falling away from this, the remains of the wormship had lost coherence, become a loose-strewn tangle, which in a moment flicked out of existence.

‘CTD imploder,’ King noted.

‘Some of it escaped,’ Cormac noted, ‘which rather undermines your suicide-mission theory.’

‘We know where it is, and it will be dealt with,’ King replied flatly.

Cormac grimaced at that then wondered aloud, ‘What was the point of this?’

‘I am receiving transmissions now,’ King informed him.

Cormac waited, arms crossed, enviroboot tapping against the floor. Eventually King deigned to impart to him the relevant information just received: ‘Numerous rod-forms were fired towards Cull. Most of them were destroyed, but two managed to reach atmosphere before they too were destroyed. However, one of them succeeded in firing a single missile.’

‘Damage?’

‘Yes, damage.’

‘Y’ know, King, the Polity consists of humans too and, as much as you may dislike that fact, if you want to be part of the Polity, you’ll have to be ready to talk to them occasionally.’

‘The missile contained a form of nerve gas, which was released inside the sleer-human hybrid village.’ Now the picture changed to show a village of globular houses. No sign of any hybrids, though there was a line of what looked like newly dug graves, each marked by a chunk of sleer carapace driven into the ground at its head. ‘Every one of them was killed,’ King added briefly.

Again, another puzzle.

‘Now, first of all, why attack
them?’
Cormac paused for a moment. ‘And why use a nerve gas? Surely that required some knowledge of hybrid physiology, when an explosive would have done the job just as well. It seems rather . . . specific’

Grudgingly King replied, ‘I don’t know.’

‘Is Erebus insane?’

‘I don’t think so.’

‘Then there has to be a logical reason for its recent attacks on Klurhammon and Cull. We have to presume the hybrids represented some sort of danger, and that meanwhile some other threat to Erebus was extant on Klurhammon. How could the hybrids be a danger?’

‘I do not know.’

‘Dragon?’ Cormac wondered.

No reply from King.

‘Something there I guess . . .’ Cormac kept on turning it over in his mind, aware that minds much greater than his would be looking at the same puzzle. In a moment of inspiration he abruptly cried, ‘Dracomen! Those hybrids are probably like dracomen: immune to being sequestered by Jain technology! The dracomen on Masada must be warned!’

‘It’s being done,’ King replied.

Being done?

He thought it odd that minds so superior to his own had not worked all this out long before him. Suspiciously odd. Only later did he learn of the wormship assault on Masada - the dracoman homeworld - and how that attacking wormship did not last more than ten seconds after surfacing from U-space. Still, this did not explain the anomalous use of nerve gas on Cull.

He turned and left the bridge to go and join his comrades Arach and Smith. With them he hoped to find a distraction from the void currently extending beyond this ship, a void somehow horribly attractive to him and seemingly intent on drawing him in.

* * * *

This G-type star had been of no more than scientific interest to the Polity, or anyone else, after the arrival of the first probe here nearly a century before, since, even though it lay within Polity space, it was remote from all civilized worlds. This was why the haiman Orlandine had chosen it. She arrived some distance out and immediately activated her ship’s chameleonware to conceal it, before scanning for the kind of automated watch stations Polity AIs tended to scatter about in places like this simply to collect scientific data . . . and to watch. There were two of them, she discovered, in orbit of the sun’s single gas-giant planet.