What showed on the armillary, relayed from the ship’s cameras, was a piece of abstract sculpture: a cone sliced off midway and positioned with its narrowest end resting on a scabrous grey surface. Anguished patterns were playing over the surrounding terrain, blisters spewing spore in random directions, as if their underlying targeting had gone awry. The weapon was slowing now, and though the scene was playing in absolute silence, Volyova could imagine the awful grinding friction; what it would have sounded like, had there been air to carry the sound and ears to be deafened by that titanic scraping roar. Now her bracelet told her, the pressure on the tip had fallen drastically, as if the weapon had finally punctured all the way through the crust, and was now probing into the relative hollowness beneath: the domain of the snakes.
Slowing.
Skull-and-crossbones symbols danced on her bracelet, signifying commencement of molecular weapon attack against the bridgehead. Volyova had expected as much. Already, antibodies would be oozing through the carapace, meeting and matching the alien attackers.
Slowing… and now stopping.
This was as deep as they were going to get. One and one-third of a kilometre of the cone still projected above the cracked surface of Cerberus; what it looked like was some kind of top-heavy cylindrical fortification. The rim armaments were still lancing away at the crustal countermeasures, but now the spore discharges were coming from tens of kilometres away, and it was clear that no immediate threat was posed, unless the crust was capable of improbably rapid regeneration.
The bridgehead would now commence anchoring itself, consolidating its gains, analysing the forms of the molecular weapons being used against it, devising subtly matched reverse strategies.
It had not let Volyova down.
She pivoted her couch round to face the others, noticing — for the first time in ages — that her fist was still locked around a needle-gun.
‘We’re in,’ she said.
It looked like a biology lesson for gods, or a snapshot of the kind of pornography which might be enjoyed by sentient planets.
In the hours immediately after the weapon’s anchoring, Khouri stayed in close consultation with Volyova, reviewing the constantly changing status of the sluggishly fought battle. The geometric forms of the two protagonists reminded her of a conic virus dwarfed by the much larger spherical cell which it was in the business of corrupting. Yet she had to keep reminding herself that even that insignificant cone was the size of a mountain; that the cell was a world.
Nothing very much seemed to be happening now, but that was only because the conflict was being waged primarily on the molecular level, across an invisible, near-fractal front which extended for tens of square kilometres. At first, and without success, Cerberus had tried to repel the invader with highly entropic weapons; trying to degrade the enemy into megatonnes of atomic ash. Now its strategy had evolved towards one of digestion. It was still trying to dismantle the enemy atom by atom, but systematically, like a child deconstructing a complex toy rather than smashing it to pieces, diligently placing each component into its assigned compartment so that it could be used again in the future, in some as yet undreamt-of project. There was logic to this, after all; a few cubic kilometres of the world had been annihilated by the cache-weapons, and Volyova’s device presumably consisted of matter in much the same elemental and isotopic ratios as that which had been destroyed. The enemy was a huge potential reservoir of repair material, obviating the need for Cerberus to consume its own finite resources in the process. And perhaps it always sought motherlodes like this, to repair the inevitable damage wrought by millennia of meteorite strikes and the constant ablative toll of cosmic ray bombardment. Perhaps it had seized Sylveste’s first probe more because it was hungry than out of a misguided sense that it was preserving its own secrecy; as much acting out of blind stimulus as a Venus flytrap, with no thought for the future.
But Volyova’s weapon was not designed to be digested without putting up a struggle.
‘See, Cerberus is learning from us,’ she said from her bridge seat, graphing up schematics of the several dozen different components in the molecular arsenal which the world was now deploying against her weapon. What she was showing looked like a page from an entomology textbook: an array of metallic, differently specialised bugs. Some of them were disassemblers: the front line of the Amarantin defence system. These would physically attack the surface of the bridgehead, dislodging atoms and molecules with their manipulators, tugging apart chemical bonds. They would also engage in hand-to-hand combat with Volyova’s own front-line forces. What matter they succeeded in wresting free they passed back to fatter bugs, behind the immediate battle-front. Like tireless clerks, these units endlessly categorised and sorted the chunks of matter they received. If it was structurally simple, like a single undifferentiated chunk of iron or carbon, they tagged it for recycling and passed it to other even fatter factory bugs which were manufacturing more bugs according to their internal templates. And if the chunks of matter had been organised so that within them was true structure, they were not passed for immediate recycling, but were instead passed to other bugs which dismantled the chunks and tried to figure out if they embodied any useful principles. If so, the principles would be learnt, tailored and passed to the factory bugs. That way, the next generation of bugs would be fractionally more advanced than the last. ‘Learning from us,’ Volyova said again, as if she found the prospect as glorious as it was disturbing. ‘Unpicking our countermeasures and incorporating their design philosophies into its own forces.’
‘You don’t have to sound so cheerful about it.’ Khouri was eating a ship-grown apple.
‘But why not? It’s an elegant system. I can learn from it, of course, but it isn’t the same thing. What’s happening down there is methodical, endless — and there isn’t the tiniest grain of sentience behind any of it.’
She said it with genuine awe.
‘Yes, very impressive,’ Khouri said. ‘Blind replication — nothing smart about it, but because it’s happening simultaneously in a billion-odd places, they win over us by sheer weight of numbers. Isn’t that what’s going to happen? You’re going to sit here and think like hell, and it won’t make a bit of difference to the outcome. Sooner or later they’ll learn every trick you have.’
‘But not just yet.’ Volyova cocked her head towards the schematic. ‘You think I’d have been stupid enough to hit them with the most advanced countermeasures we have? You never do that in war, Khouri. You never expend any more energy — or intelligence — against an enemy than is absolutely appropriate to the situation at hand, just as you never play your best card first in a poker game. You wait, until the stakes justify it.’ And then she explained how the current countermeasures being deployed by her weapon were really very old, and not especially sophisticated. She had adapted them from ancient entries in the holographically distributed database of the warchive. ‘About three hundred years behind the current day,’ she said.
‘But Cerberus is catching up.’
‘Correct, but that rate of technical gain is actually rather stable — probably because of the thoughtless way in which our secrets are being used. There are no intuitive jumps possible, so the Amarantin systems evolve linearly. It’s like someone trying to crack a code by sheer brute-force computation. And because of that, I know rather precisely how long it will take for them to overtake our current level. At the moment they’re catching up by about a decade for every three or four hours of shiptime. Which gives us slightly less than a week before things get interesting.’
‘And this isn’t?’ Khouri shook her head, feeling — not for the first time — that there were many things she did not understand about Volyova. ‘Just how do these escalations take place? Does your weapon carry a copy of the warchive?’
‘No; too dangerous.’
‘Right; it’d be like sending a soldier behind enemy lines with every secret you’ve got. How do you do it? Transmit the secrets down to the weapon only wh
en they’re needed? Isn’t that just as risky?’
‘That’s how it happens, but it’s much safer than you think. The transmissions are encrypted using a one-time pad; a randomly generated string of digits which specifies the change to be made to each bit in the raw signal; whether you add a zero or a one to it. After you’ve encrypted the signal with the pad, there’s no way the enemy can recover the meaning without their own copy of the pad. The weapon needs one, of course — but the copy it carries is stored deep inside, beyond tens of metres of solid diamond, with hyper-secure optical links to the assembler control systems. Only if the weapon were under major attack would there be any risk of the pad being captured — and in that case, I’d simply refrain from transmitting anything.’
Khouri finished the apple down to the seedless core. ‘So there is a way,’ she said, after thinking for a moment.
‘A way to what?’
‘To end all this. We want to do that, don’t we?’
‘You don’t think the damage has already been done?’
‘We can’t know for sure, but supposing it hasn’t? After all, what we’ve seen so far is just a layer of camouflage, and below that a layer of defences designed to protect the camouflage. It’s amazing, yes — and the mere fact that it’s an alien technology means we could probably learn from it — but we still don’t know what it’s hiding.’ She thumped her chair in emphasis, gratified to see Volyova react with a small shiver. ‘It’s something we haven’t reached yet; haven’t even glimpsed — and we won’t, until Sylveste actually goes down there.’
‘We’ll stop him from leaving.’ Volyova patted the needler which was tucked into her belt. ‘We control things now.’
‘And take the risk that he’ll kill us all by triggering the thing in his eyes?’
‘Pascale said it was a bluff.’
‘Yeah, and I’m sure she believes it.’ Khouri didn’t need to say any more; it was obvious from the slow way she nodded that Volyova understood. ‘There’s a better way,’ she continued. ‘Let Sylveste leave if he wants, but we’ll make damn sure he doesn’t have an easy time getting inside.’
‘By which you mean…’
‘I’ll say it, even if you won’t. We have to let it die, Volyova. We have to let Cerberus win.’
TWENTY-NINE
Cerberus/Hades, Delta Pavonis Heliopause, 2566
‘All we know,’ Sylveste said, ‘is that Volyova’s weapon has reached below the outer skin of the planet; perhaps into the level occupied by the machines I saw in my first exploration.’
It was fifteen hours since the bridgehead had anchored itself, during which time Volyova had done nothing, refusing to send in the first of her mechanical spies until now.
‘It seems that those machines are dedicated to maintaining the crust; keeping it repaired when it is punctured, maintaining the illusion of realism, and amassing raw material when it comes by. They’re also the first line of defence.’
‘But what lies below?’ Pascale said. ‘We didn’t get a clear look the night you were attacked, and I don’t think they’re simply resting on bedrock; that there’s a real rocky planet below this mechanised facade.’
‘We’ll know soon enough,’ Volyova said, tight-lipped.
Her spies were laughable in their simplicity; cruder even than the robots which Sylveste and Calvin had used in their initial work on the Captain. It was all part of her philosophy of not letting Cerberus see any technology more sophisticated than was absolutely necessary for the task at hand. The drones were capable of being manufactured in vast numbers by the bridgehead, a profligacy which would outweigh their general lack of intelligence. Each was the size of a fist, equipped with just enough limbs for independent locomotion; just enough eyes to justify its existence in the first place. They had no brains; not even simple networks with a few thousand neurons; not even brains which would have made the average insect seem precociously cranial. Instead, they had little spinnerettes which extruded sheathed optical fibre. The drones were operated by her weapon; all commands and everything they saw routed back and forth through that cable, with quantum privacy guaranteed.
‘I think we’ll find another layer of automation,’ Sylveste said. ‘Perhaps another layer of defences. But there has to be something worth protecting.’
‘Does there?’ asked Khouri, who had kept her vicious-looking plasma-rifle pointing at him since this meeting had convened. ‘Aren’t you guilty of a few unwarranted assumptions? You keep talking as if there’s something valuable in there we aren’t meant to get our greasy fingers all over, and that’s all that the camouflage is there for; to keep us monkeys out. But what if it’s not like that at all? What if there’s something bad in there?’
Pascale said, ‘She could be right.’
Sylveste contemplated the gun.
‘You shouldn’t patronise yourself into imagining there’s any possibility I haven’t already considered,’ he said, scarcely caring whether it was Khouri or his wife who thought they were being addressed.
‘I wouldn’t dream of it,’ Khouri said.
Ninety minutes after the first spy had unwound its cable and dropped from the opening into the sub-crustal chamber, Sylveste had his first view of what awaited him. At first, he had no idea what it was he was seeing. The giant snakelike forms — damaged and, for all he knew, dead — towered over the drones like the limbs of fallen gods, tangled and haphazard. There was no guessing at the multitude of functions which these vast machines served, although the welfare of the overlying crust seemed likely to be paramount, and it was probably within them that the molecular weapons were first stirred to activity, before being released to attack newcomers. The crust itself was a machine of sorts, of course, but it was a machine constrained by the limitation of resembling a planet. The snakes had no such constraints.
It was less dark than he had been expecting, even though no light was straying through the wound now, which was plugged tight by the intruding weapon. Instead, the snakes themselves seemed to radiate a silvery glow, like the entrails of some phosphorescent deep-sea creature, radiant with bioluminous bacteria. It was impossible to guess at the function of this light; if there even was one. Perhaps it was an unavoidable byproduct of Amarantin nanotechnics. One could see for tens of kilometres, in any case — to the point where the ceiling of the overlying crust curved down to meet the horizon of the floor on which the snakes were coiled. Things with the gnarled, rooty shape of treetrunks supported the roof at irregular intervals. It was like gazing into me moonlit depths of an arboreal forest; unable to glimpse the sky and barely able to glimpse the ground, so thick was the undergrowth. The roots of the trunks tangled and retangled with each other, until they formed a matrix of interlocked roots; graphite-coloured. That was the floor.
‘I wonder what we’ll find below,’ Sylveste said.
Volyova considered infanticide. There was no escaping it: by denying the bridgehead the information it needed to keep evolving counteragents to the machinery being deployed by Cerberus, she was consigning it to a slow death. Without the necessary updates from the ship, the molecular weapon templates in the bridgehead’s core could not be revised. They would remain frozen; capable only of generating spore which were more than two centuries out of date, incapable of parrying the relentless moronic march of progress exhibited by the alien defences. Her wonderful and brutal creation would be digested down to its last usable atom; spread thinly throughout the crustal matrix, where its remains would serve another function entirely, for uncountable millions of years.
Yet it had to be done.
Khouri was right: sabotaging the bridgehead was the only line of influence now remaining. They could not even destroy the weapon, since the cache was under Sun Stealer’s jurisdiction. He would prevent any attempt at that. So what remained was to kill the weapon by slow starvation of knowledge.
Crueller by far.
Although none of the others could see it, her bracelet display was pulsing with the bridgehead’s repeated r
equests for additional data. The weapon had noticed the omission an hour ago, when the scheduled update hadn’t arrived. The first query had been merely technical; a check to see that the communication beam was still online. Later, the weapon had become more urgent; adopting tones of polite insistence. Now it was getting far less diplomatic, throwing the machine equivalent of a tantrum.
It was not yet harmed, since the Cerberus systems had not exceeded its own retaliatory capabilities, but it was getting very agitated, even informing her of how many minutes it had left based on current escalation rates. There were not many. In rather less than two hours Cerberus would match it, and thereafter its fate would simply be a question of the sizes of the opposed forces. Cerberus would win, with absolute mathematical certainty.
Die quickly, Volyova thought.
But even as the plea ran through her mind, something impossible happened.
What little composure Volyova possessed dropped suddenly from her face.
‘What’s wrong?’ said Khouri. ‘You look like you’ve seen —’
‘I have,’ she said. ‘A ghost, I mean. He’s called Sun Stealer.’
‘What’s happened?’ Sylveste asked.
She looked up from the bracelet, jaw slack. ‘He’s just reinstated the transmissions to the bridgehead.’ Her gaze snapped back to her bracelet, as if hoping that whatever she had just seen there had been a mirage. But it was obvious from her expression that whatever inauspicious portent she had read was still there to be divined.
‘What was it that had to be reinstated in the first place?’ Sylveste asked. ‘I’d rather you told me.’
Khouri tightened her grip on the warm leather-cladding of the plasma-rifle. She had been uncomfortable with the situation before, but now she was riding a knife-edge of constant terror.