Seeds of Earth (10 page)

And all through the audience, the second AI advocate had kept silent, its form that of a coiled, iron-scaled ocean mohoro, a mighty yet enigmatic creature from ancient Sendrukan mythology. While the other advocates had talked of glory and honour, the mohoro had simply stared at him, red-jewelled eyes fathomless, jaws parted to show triple rows of silver fangs.

Now, as he stood in the dimness of the lecture theatre, he reflected upon that encounter and knew that the mohoro's relentless gaze had spoken of the retribution he would suffer if he failed.

But there will be no humiliating blunders,
he thought.
Nor any bitter bones of defeat. I shall steer events, rather than be steered by them.

He considered the images on the screen, segments showing the Earth ambassador's answers to certain questions and switching back to the studio commentators, all sound muted. He smiled faintly as his purpose became a little clearer and glanced at the General.

'While the full glare of media interest is focused here, we cannot afford the luxury of deploying overt force to secure our objectives. We must apply a certain subtlety.'

General Gratach sneered.
'Subtlety! These media insects may buzz and chatter but their stings can still be a threat.''

'Of course,' Kuros said. 'In every circle of life there are ruthless adepts, thus in our dealings with them it will pay to be subtle, especially since we Sendrukans . have a reputation for directness.' He gazed thought fully at his Ezgara bodyguards. 'And if we steer the correct events, we shall gain indirect control by creating a situation in which our direct actions would appear normal. From there it is a short step to neutralising them altogether.'

'So
what is to be our strategy tomorrow}'
the General said.
'Sing the insects and the savages to sleep}'

'Yes - flattery, charm, a dose of anti-Swarm lagwaving, an appropriate measure of self-deprecating humour to encourage trust, and after that normalisation,'

'And if that fails to work in the short term}'

Kuros smiled. 'Voloasti will guide us, old friend. Indirect control is still control.'

He turned to the Ezgara. Eight visored faces were looking his way, blue-armoured, still and waiting, all seemingly identical apart from the nearest, who wore an officer's flash on his temple, a small white triangle. Nothing about their posture betrayed any inner state of mind, but Kuros knew what lay hidden behind those masks.

'Captain,' he said. 'I have a lengthy and demanding assignment that will require two of your most adaptable warriors.'

'By your command, Exalted,' the Ezgara captain said in a flat voice, then pointed at two of the remaining seven; without a word they rose and moved out to stand before the High Monitor. They only came up to Kuros's shoulder, yet he knew that for ferocity and single-minded devotion to duty the Ezgara were unmatched. Then he began to explain the details of this special and undoubtedly dangerous assignment, while off to one side, General Gratach smiled his approval.

LEGION

On Yndyeri Duvo, the Kiskashin line-pirate was experiencing a glow of pride in his mercantile skills. He had managed to resell the Human colony report (tagged with some Human cultural profiles) to a wandering Vusarkan academic, a Piraseri market haruspex and a Makhori scholar with an obsession for all things Human-related. There had been other interested parties, but he decided against further delay in relaying it o | Lord Mysterious. Besides, new merchandise was con tinually arriving: time might be a function of the space-entropy continuum but it was also money, thus money was intimately bound up with the structure of the universe. As he delighted in explaining to the client; and customers to whom he turned his attention as the Human colony report flashed away through the local systemnet to Duvo's sister planet.

Off the western coast of Yndyeri Tetro's single massh e landmass, something stirred in the depths. The waters sparkled and teemed with life all the way from the shallow shoreline out to the continental shelf, until they plunged into descending gradations of shadow, increasingly turbid realms of oceanic gloom thinly populated by rare grotesque creatures. Only a meagre radiance reached the lower depths, reducing jutting features to vague, blurred outlines, yet a ragged trench gaped there, a sheer-sided fissure full of ancient, impenetrable night. And down, further down, where the last vestiges of surface light died in the intense darkness, where a cold, crushing pressure threatened obliteration, down there amongst unseen, undisturbed debris, an awareness stirred.

But it was an awareness without consciousness, an awareness of the environment: sea temperature, tides, currents and the presence of threat-level objects passing above or below sea-level. Awareness of the subjective physical, the balance of mechanical and organic, and the entropic state of both, which was not good. Objective assessment of repair and regulation systems, and of overall integrity, which was well below optimum. And awareness of the information that trickled in via its receptors from time to time, of the ancient biocrystalline matrices which deconstructed, analysed and searched for matches to an array of images in two, three and four dimensions as well as any linguistic equivalents. It was a search that the awareness had repeatedly and tirelessly undertaken for centuries upon centuries, without a single instance of success.

Until now, when the memory buffer received a data packet detailing the discovery of a lost Human colony world called Darien.

The awareness stripped the Darien report down to lists of phrases and words, and stacks of images: its analytic processes sorted them into levels of potential meaning, discarded the obviously trivial, then sorted through the visual data. When it came to the stills and motion images of some ruins which the Humans had uncovered near their settlements, additional processing capacity was quickly brought online as the images were examined down to extrapolated resolutions. The awareness devoted more resources to the analysis, and when it was finally certain it opened pathways in the biocrystalline matrices and let power from the duality core flood through then
.

Tailored glands were stimulated, capillaries relaxed, and enzymes leaked into the heavily shielded organic cortex. Synaptic transfer spread through neural nets dormant for long ages, opening up level after level, augmenting the awareness, feeding a burgeoning brightness . . .

And he awoke to the steel pains of his aged, wounded body, lying on a cold seabed on an alien world in an alien universe. He knew that his aeons-old purpose and duty must have come round at last, otherwise he would still be sleeping, and that was a joy which in some ways helped him to endure the torment of old, old injuries. But when he reached for the memories of when and how he had been damaged, there was nothing, a gap where familiar recollection should have been waiting to be relived. He felt the panicky edge of fear and subdued it, focusing on discovering the reason.

What he found was a terrible swathe of decay which had eaten into one of the biocrystal chines of his cortical augmentation. His awareness function had failed to detect it as the sensor web had itself been affected, and the worst of it was that the rot was still advancing. If unchecked, it would in just a few years kill him.

His thoughts were wry with a black humour.

The analysis of the Darien report was before him, but he decided he would institute a final recovery trawl through the corroded biocrystal while he assessed the data.

He saw the world Darien, a place of lush vegetation and a living landscape of mountains and rivers; he saw the moon and recognised remnants of the enemy's defences with no sign of his presence . . .

With the powers of their machinemind planetoids, the Legion of Avatars cut through the extrinsic and intrinsic layers of material existence and opened an unstable fissure in the face of reality. In vast phalanxes they fled from a dying universe into this one, then used the planetoids to tunnel up through the hyperspace tiers of this one in search of a new home, a new dominion . . .

He saw the colonists, the Humans, saw all their weaknesses and saw how weak they were in the face of the political realities surrounding them . . .

There had been a battle, a gargantuan struggle spread across many thousands of star systems, a savage, resounding clash in which whole worlds and entire sentient species were eradicated as a matter of course . . .

He saw the visual data, the near-complete ruins amid the forest, recognised more of the enemy's work and wondered if it held their deadliest weapon, the one that had defeated the Legion even in the full glory of its might. If so, it could be turned to their advantage ...

Fragmentary memories were being recovered . . . it hard vacuum, a close-quarters grappling struggle with one of the enemy's sentient machines, hooked and edged extensors searching for purchase on each other, then one of his greater tentacles found the jutting edge of.
I
hull plate, wrenched it aside and thrust a high-energy lance into the vitals . . . the knights of the Legion o
^f
Avatars gathered in a council of war, their millions waiting in curved ranks and arrays within the flickering gloom of a deep, desolate tier of hyper space, all intoning the catechisms of convergence . . . and an old, old memory of his own cyborg-form not long after his transformation, the long, armoured carapace patterned in dark reds and greens, the ten greater, articulated tentacles and the six lesser ones tipped with every kind of effector from tearing chainclaws to delicate manipulators, a magnificent new body which had freed him from the pains of the flesh .. . then a part of him realised that there was no memory of his organic appear am e from before his ascent to biomechanical immortality, nothing except the vague recollection that his chist n cyborg-form was utterly different from his old body . . .

He assessed the Darien situation and the strategic implications of its location as well as the fact that the Humans were dispatching a mission to their lost colony. Then he considered various possible journey routes, but not for himself. With its battered substructures, leaking carapace plates, stuttering main drives, and near-defunct sensor array, his biomachine body might be able to drag itself into orbit but the lengthy voyage to Darien would be too hazardous. He would have to delegate that grave responsibility to lesser agents, three Instruments to carry out the task, each one an abridged simulacrum of his own persona, each one created out of his own neural substrate, each one a small loss, and a small addition to his freight of pain.

10

THEO

Theo hated formal occasions, and since the ambassador's arrival three days ago he'd had to endure five of the damn things, at Sundstrom's insistence. Hammergard's main hospital, the McPhail Memorial, a zeplin yard, a root refinery, a church, and a distillery. Today, Ambassador Horst had been due to spend the morning at Pushkinskog, the Uvovo-tended daughter-forest south of Lake Morwen, but plans had changed overnight and now he was visiting Membrance Vale near Landfall Town, to see the hollow shell of the
Hyperion
and to pay his respects to the dead. And Sundstrom had asked Theo to attend, in an unofficial capacity. Tonight, a banquet in honour of the ambassadors was due to be held in thi Assembly ballroom, followed by speeches and a ceilidh.

Theo was strolling along the westward road that led from Landfall to the vales of the Tuulikki Hills, which would take a good thirty minutes on foot. The morning sky was bright and clear, the air cold and laced with
the
odours of growth, ideal weather for walking. Besides, Theo had decided to walk so that he could meet some one on the way, and was pondering once more what Sundstrom had said yesterday. Holger was a few years older than Theo but he considered that they were essentially of the same generation; during the Winter Coup they had been on opposite sides, Sundstrom a Trond councilman who voted against supporting Viktor Ingram's insurrection then went underground to actively work against the coup. That and his political efforts at reconciliation while arguing forcibly for the new Accord policies had persuaded Theo that he was a man of integrity and substance. In addition, just as Theo had had his years in the wilderness after the failure of the coup, so too had Holger been forced to quit politics after the injury that led to his lower-body paralysis. Yet in later life, both found themselves back in the thick of it.

And Sundstrom's mysterious information source troubled Theo. The Enhanced were the living results of a short-sighted genetics programme shut down twenty years ago, most of whom worked on research programmes of one kind or another. Redesigned cortexes and synaptic connectivity had given them astonishing mental abilities, but they suffered from a corresponding lack of social intuition that made it hard for them to deal with ordinary people. Theo had only met a few in his time, but he knew from reliable contacts that the Enhanced were essentially looked upon by government departments not just as a kind of intellectual resource but as a badge of prestige which, once acquired, was retained for as long as possible. The president was supposed to be above this kind of bureaucratic jostling,which made Theo wonder how much political risk he might be taking if he was using Enhanced help.

Before long the road passed into the woods, their overarching branches interweaving to form a leafy tunnel through which spears of sunlight lanced to touch the road with gold. This was a sparsely populated area, and apart from the occasional spinnerbus taking visitors back and forth, Theo saw no one else. When he came to where the road crossed a steep-sided gully, he stepped off the verge and sat down on a weatherbeaten bench overlooking the crevice. Moments later heavy footsteps approached through the undergrowth and an overalled Rory sat down heavily beside him.