Shree took a quick glance in the direction he was looking. A young gabbleduck now squatted just a few metres out from them, its head tilted to one side as if it was listening. But then maybe it was tilting its head for another reason, for it looked like someone had taken a knife to its skull, which was crisscrossed with pale blue scars.
‘You here?’ it enquired, the nonsense words too much like a real question for comfort. Then it got up onto all fours and loped in.
Shree backed off, trying to keep her three prisoners and the approaching gabbleduck in her potential field of fire. She watched it step up onto a walkway, lift its feet up and down as if puzzled by this new sensation from them, then continue its approach.
‘Don’t concern yourself,’ said Tombs. ‘It’s completely harmless.’
To Shree’s knowledge there was no such thing as a harmless gabbleduck. Sometimes they might not choose to do harm, other times they were as vicious as siluroynes.
‘Yeah, harmless,’ she spat.
‘I assure you it is,’ Tombs stated, gazing at the gabbleduck as it cautiously stepped between pillars and then into the building. ‘It’s been prepared, and its only motivation is to get to this location, and wait.’
‘Prepared?’ Shree glanced at him.
Tombs studied her carefully. ‘This can only matter to you if you decide not to do what you intend. You are procrastinating, Shree. Is it not time you brought this all to an end? Is it not time for you to express your hatred of a world that fails to live by your rules?’
‘You think you understand me? You?’
‘I think he does,’ said Grant. The soldier folded his arms, suddenly seemed more at ease, which worried Shree.
Tombs glanced at the soldier. ‘She defines herself by a belief in the purity of her hatred. During the rebellion she believed that hatred was of the Theocracy, afterwards she maintained and nurtured it in the Tidy Squad, and has now turned it on the Polity.’
‘Childish psychology,’ said Shree. ‘I am the Tidy Squad and this has nothing to do with hatred but everything to do with justice and freedom. I don’t hate your Theocracy and I don’t hate the Polity – this is just a fight that must be fought.’ Why the hell was she debating this? Was she procrastinating?
Tombs turned back to her. ‘You misunderstand me. I said you believe you hate both of those. In reality you just hate yourself, and that’s why you want to die.’
It was as if he had just sucker-punched her. For a moment she felt small and utterly lost, but then anger swamped in and drowned that. He was taunting her and now the time had come to bring him back to reality. She lowered her aim, didn’t want him to die at once, just to suffer. A burn-cauterized hole in his gut would do it.
Through clenched teeth she said, ‘I think I’ve had just about enough of you, Tombs.’
She pulled the trigger. The thin-gun gave just a little kick as it fired its charge of ionized aluminium dust. The impact flashed before Tombs, something like a two-metre-tall sheet of glass briefly blinking into existence in front him. As the fire dispersed he just stood there, gazing at her. This was why he could taunt her. She fired twice more and both shots impacted on the same hardfield. She swung her aim across and fired at Sanders. A hardfield stopped those shots too.
‘Self-protection,’ said Grant. ‘The Polity AIs gave their alien brother the means to defend itself.’
Shree abruptly holstered her gun, then held up the cylinder, poised her finger over the end.
‘You’ve left me no choice,’ she said.
‘There’s always a choice,’ said Tombs. ‘Just put that on the ground and go – over the next few hours the AIs will be too busy to try finding you.’
‘No,’ said Shree, suddenly feeling very calm. She pressed her finger down, then pulled it away. Certainly, the geostat weapon was not directed down here now, but once the Jain technology started spreading here the Polity AIs would soon react. Feeling a huge burden coming off her shoulders, Shree waited for the end.
Nothing happened.
A void growing in her torso, Shree reached out and pressed her finger down again, and still the cylinder remained inert.
‘I told you Blue ensured you got that item to me,’ said Tombs. ‘Bearing that in mind, you don’t think Blue would have allowed you a way to open it, do you?’
Shree felt suddenly very stupid, but then saw a way clear. She stooped and put the cylinder on the ground, held it in place with her foot, drew her gun and fired at the thing. Fire flared across the floor, over her boot and up her leg. She yelled and stepped back, trousers smouldering and then going out.
‘Nano-chromed, case-hardened ceramal, seems to me,’ said Grant. ‘You’d need a proton weapon to get through it.’
Every option was being closed down, but she was damned if she was going to let them win. She stooped and swept the cylinder up in her hand, groaned as it burned her skin, threw herself towards the nearby pillars. Briefly something caught her shoulder – hardfield, trying to stop her, then she was out on the walkway, coming to her feet, running.
18
Jain Technology – A Brief Overview
It now seems evident that this technology was made during some vicious and eons-long civil war between Jain factions. And it also seems evident that it evolved into something more destructive than the faction that made it wanted it to be. It’s why there are no Jain, no Atheter, and quite probably why there are no Csorians either. It’s a whole technology as a booby trap, but one so large that when it goes off it can take out a civilization. It’s a poisoned chalice, Sauron’s ring of power and Pandora’s box, though in the last case the box contains no hope. Once initiated it grants its host the power to seize control of just about any other technology, and to also seize control of other life-forms. Neither Humans nor artificial intelligences are immune to it. It gives its host the power to increase his own intelligence too, and using it, one man could quite easily seize control of a planet, even a solar system. And inherent in its methods is the simple fact that the man will not even consider doing otherwise. Then it takes, it absorbs the pattern of its host, and formats itself to more effectively hijack more of the same kind. It effectively breeds with its host, though it is a one-sided affair. Next it will go to seed, just like an annual plant – switching over to a new program it will produce Jain nodes within its structure and disperse them, and the next intelligent life-form to pick up one of these nodes starts off the whole process again. If it is not stopped, the final result is nothing but a spreading cloud of Jain nodes, each waiting for its next host and its next technical civilization to prey upon. And just one node is enough to wipe out an entire race.
– From QUINCE GUIDE compiled by Humans
The population of Zealos had reduced substantially, as had the populations of the two other northern cities and some of the smaller Human habitats. No one had abandoned the erstwhile rebel cities in their underground caverns, in fact many had fled there. Their safety was illusory. Many of those caverns dated back to the time of the Atheter. It being confirmed that not all the Atheter had agreed to racial suicide, some would certainly have hidden there, and it seemed evident they hadn’t survived.
‘How long now?’ the planetary AI enquired.
‘It’ll be here within two hours, by current estimates – it’s powering up for its last jump of eight light years.’
Ergatis retained a loose contact with Amistad and reviewed the war drone’s plans, trying to figure out where to fit the geostat weapon into them. It didn’t seem to fit, just demonstrated that Amistad had not shaken off its lifelong inclinations. Through its numerous eyes scattered across the surface of the planet, the AI now checked out other arrangements.
The red attack ship, labelled Corpuscle but generally only using its nickname, had landed on the Plate in the Northern Mountains – that place where a gabbleduck had crushed Shardelle Garadon’s ATV. The vessel was down on two rear weapons nacelles of a conventional ovoid shape, and one forward spherical nacelle from which
extended a weapon like a stack of ancient machine guns wrapped in a ton of radiator fins and from which a magazine feed curved back into the body of the ship.
‘Blood,’ Ergatis sent. ‘I thought that weapon was only vacuum spec.’
‘Yeah,’ Blood replied.
‘Perhaps you could explain why you have it deployed?’
‘The percentage of oxygen here cuts down on burn ablation within expected target range. The five-stage neutronium pellets will survive for eight kilometres, thereafter converting to plasma for the next kilometre.’
Ergatis asked no more. Though the megagun fired at a rate of a million rounds per minute at near-c its destructive power was outweighed by many of this and the other attack ships’ weapons. Blood, however, had obviously seen an advantage in having a weapon that effectively changed what it was after eight kilometres. It could be that an opponent, preparing a defence for projectiles might be caught out when those projectiles turned into short-lived spears of plasma.
Next Ergatis took a look at the attack ship down only fifty kilometres away from the Atheter AI in the south. This one was resting at forty-five degrees in a hollow it had burnt in the ground, steam still rising all around it and the mud now a hardened shell below.
‘Anoxia,’ Ergatis named the ship, but got no further.
A wordless communication from the dreadnought above just gave coordinates, a time-frame of seconds, and some characteristics of the U-space signature it had detected.
‘Gotta go,’ said Anoxia, even as its fusion drive ignited underneath it like a bomb and flung it into the sky, the ground behind it exploding outwards to leave a smoking crater a kilometre across. Tracking those same coordinates, Ergatis tried to see what it could, detecting a disturbance directly above Zealos, and another a short distance away from the Atheter AI, in fact over the known location of the Technician.
Blood was up too, the Plate behind it glowing red and now marred with slowly cooling ripples. As best it could, using satcams and eyes scattered across the planet, Ergatis tracked both attack ships near the surface and the two above now turning meteoric as they hurtled down, whilst also watching the things now materializing.
Jeremiah Tombs’s description had been apt. Under the bell. From top to bottom they measured half a kilometre and with their slightly flared bases and domed tops closely resembled the kind of bronze bells that might be found in a Buddhist monastery. They also appeared to be hollow, or rather hollow in the way that a tulip is hollow with the functional bit deep inside. A ground view showed what looked like a great bundle of steel rods, which now seemed to be in the process of extruding downwards, and beginning to glow. The colour of these devices was odd, metallic yellows and purples in either a mathematical or decorative configuration. They were also translucent; had not yet fully materialized into the real.
Ergatis tried what scanners were available to it, even hijacking those on the Tagreb mobile observation tower. Certainly these objects were powering up for something, but so tightly woven and interconnected was the technology it was difficult even for a planetary AI to figure out how they functioned. Then, as the extruding rods drew level with the base of the bell above, it did function.
The air hazed below the device, camera eyes directly underneath were immediately disrupted by powerful, rhythmic EM interference. In the street, Humans fell to their knees pressing their hands to their heads, screaming. A wall of pure ceramal alongside one street began to vibrate to the same odd rhythm, shuddered, cracked, then abruptly fell into even chunks each the size of a hand. Chainglass thumped white and turned to dust. Ergatis tried to analyse what weapon was being used here, briefly noted a U-space signature matching the rhythm and directly relayed its data to Amistad.
‘Seems like a sophisticated USER effect,’ Amistad replied. ‘Keep monitor—’
Com shut down, and suddenly Ergatis found it difficult to connect what Amistad was saying to immediate events. What is a USER? What am I?
Then Blood arrived.
The attack ship hurtled over the horizon seemingly pushing a star ahead of it as the megagun fired. Smoky black before the attack ship, the tons of five-stage neutronium beads it spewed ramped up through the spectrum from red to bright white until, half a kilometre away from the device, air friction turned them to plasma. This torch of super-hot gas played over it, but only for a second. The next moment it bucked in the air as Blood closed the half-kilometre gap and hot neutronium beads impacted.
I know what a USER is, Ergatis remembered. Underspace Interference Emitter created by simply oscillating a singularity in and out of a runcible gate to cause disruptions in U-space. This was more precise though, surgical almost. Running internal diagnostics the planetary AI began connecting up further broken links in its mind and realized that, had Blood not attacked at that moment, a further few seconds would have left it with no mind left at all.
People, who a moment ago were on their knees clutching at their skulls, were now staggering for cover. Metallic snow boiled down over Zealos – those metallic beads turned molten, losing their artificial density, expanding and crystallising as they fell. The device had begun to tip, turning its business end up towards the attack ship just as that ship arrowed past.
‘No you don’t,’ said Blood.
The missile must have been released just at the last moment, its sharp curving course a burning question mark as it used up a one-burn fuser engine. The device lit up like a bulb, distorted, shed internal bars and molten metal like a prolapsing robot. As the glare faded the thing became completely visible, utterly solid, then it just dropped out of the sky.
It came down sideways across a street, one end hitting the top of an apartment and collapsing it like a sugar stick, the other end coming down on warehouses. It took down everything it landed on without slowing, thundered into the ground, crushing foamstone, sinking to half its width. The entire foamstone raft of Zealos rocked with the impact. Stress sensors and other monitoring devices recorded that the raft had cracked, and continued to monitor the crack growing wider. Super-dense metals, no doubt – Ergatis estimated a weight approaching one megatonne.
Between eight and nine hundred people had died, some in the crushed buildings, other scattered elsewhere in the city, from ricochets, suffocation, accidents caused by something turning their minds momentarily to mush. Other sensors began registering movement and Ergatis immediately knew that the death toll it had just calculated would not be all.
‘Blood, I need a quarter-kilotonne blast right here.’ Ergatis sent the coordinates along with the request, its attention fixed on the wreckage where the device had come down, where survivors were staggering into view, trying to find somewhere to go.
‘Why?’ the attack ship asked, as it swung round and back in towards the city.
‘Because though the device has cracked the city raft, it is not lying over the crack – one half of Zealos will be at ninety degrees to the ground within four minutes if we don’t do something.’
‘Understood.’
The missile came down, a black line scraped against the sky, hit precisely underneath the fallen device. In a massive explosion tonnes of foamstone fountained out from underneath it, hardly dislodging it at all. Then it dropped, disappearing into hot rubble like a lead weight sinking through wet porridge, and the half of the city that had already risen ten metres, sank back down, cushioned by displaced mud. No sign of the survivors Ergatis had seen, just the shock wave would have turned them to a bloody fog. The AI upped its death count by a further hundred, then wondered if there was any point in counting when it simultaneously received visuals from Amistad showing what had just materialized in the Braemar system, and notification of further U-space signatures in the atmosphere of Masada.
‘It is here,’ Tombs had said, ‘the mechanism is here,’ just before something began rearranging the inside of Grant’s head. He was on the floor again, his side hurting – Shree had cracked one of his ribs. He clutched at the gratings as the floor suddenly seemed t
o become a wall. Next came the panic: he didn’t know how he had got here, he wasn’t sure where ‘here’ was, then he wasn’t sure who he was.
The thunderous crashing he did identify – a triple sonic boom of something moving fast through atmosphere, fast and low – then the meaning of the words ‘sonic boom’ fled his mind. Tombs, still standing impossibly on the wall Grant clung to, said something. Grant gazed at him in incomprehension, a sound in his head like someone hand-sawing through a log. He pressed a palm against his temple, still clinging with the other hand, knew only confusion. Someone began yelling, and he only realized it was him as a flashbulb light filled his surroundings, the world took a deep breath, then blasted it all out at once.
The wind picked him up, sent him rolling until something hard and angular came down, clamping him in place. He gazed in terror at the big claw pressing on his chest, then up into an array of green eyes below a scarred and domed head. Flute-grass stems blasted across, followed by spatters of smoking mud and a heavy black smoke, then the claw lifted away and a Human hand closed on the front of his jacket. Tombs hauled him to his feet.
‘They can only delay it for a while,’ Tombs said, and pointed.
Grant gazed out beyond the pillars to where a massive bell-shaped object hung tilted in the sky, shedding black debris and pouring smoke. Next the sleek blue shape of a Polity attack ship sped past, its sonic boom a solid sound that sent him staggering. He spotted Sanders, crouched, her hands over her ears, squatted down beside her. In its passage the attack ship left another massive blast. That flashbulb went off again and Grant was glad he hadn’t been looking at that moment. When he did look out towards the object, one massive chunk of it peeled away in a cloud of fire, then just fell. As it disappeared from sight the second shock wave hit, but this time Grant was ready for it, bracing both himself and Sanders. Looking up again as the wind threw debris between the pillars, he saw that Tombs stood utterly steady, as if made of iron.