Neal Asher - The Engineer Reconditioned

“Then we have to run,” said Abaron, taking the lecture well.

“After dropping our friend off,” said Chapra, then, “Box, do you have a shuttle ready?”

“Yes,” said Box. “Judd will pilot it. The Jain will depart when its machine is small enough to transport.”

“I do not require a pilot,” said the girl/Jain.

“The shuttle is Polity property and requires a Polity pilot.” Chapra wondered about that. Why did Box want Judd as a pilot? The Golem certainly would not be coming back before the Separatist ship arrived. To try and keep track of the Jain? Or was Judd’s purpose more sinister? Maybe the people on that other ship had come here to kidnap and steal rather than kill and destroy. Chapra was sickened by the thought of Separatists getting hold of Jain technology. How much would Polity AIs dislike that prospect? Would they be prepared to kill the Jain to prevent it?

And who was to say the Jain would not go willingly? What did it care about human politics?

The Jain, through the girl, said no more. Its tentacle detached and it slid into the water. The girl staggered then regained her balance. Her face took on a more juvenile appearance. She smiled at Chapra and Abaron, then sat down on the edge of the jetty and dangled her feet in the boiling water. The Jain wrapped itself around its machine almost as if sulking.

The Vorstra runcible sat under a clear dome in a lunarscape etched with sharp-edged shadows. Lakes of silver dust patched the surface, their source the slow crumbling of crowded rock spires. Normally this was a place of interminably slow change and stillness, but now the lakes were moving under the influence of another moon.

Alexion Smith stood before the bull’s horns of the runcible, a carry sack slung over one shoulder, and his hand in the pocket of his baggy trousers. His associates often said he was as much an anachronism as the things he studied. Such criticism was far from his mind at that moment. He gazed up through the dome at a distant silver sphere, and replayed in his mind a comment made by a harried-looking runcible technician:

“Damned thing’s perturbed our orbit, but they said they’d reposition us before moving off.” The Cable Hogue was huge. Alexion had never seen any ship this size, had thought them only the product of holofiction producers and conspiracy theory junkies. With a shake of his head he stepped up onto the black glass dais and through the shimmer of the Skaidon warp. Shortly afterwards the Vorstra moon shuddered in its orbit and the Hogue moved away. An hour later the burn of Laumer engines lit up the sky. In later years, Alexion was delighted to learn that Jain artefacts had been washed up on the shores of the dust lakes. Providential, somehow.

Floating in an observation blister Chapra watched an aqua-landing shuttle drop out of its bay towards the blue and white glare of the planet. She watched the triangle of it grow small and dark in silhouette, then glow and trail vapour as it hit atmosphere and slid into its orbital glide. Judd piloted. The Jain crouched in a cargo bay half filled with saline heated to a nice ninety-seven degrees Celsius. In its many-fingered hand it clutched its creation device shrunk down to the size of a human fist. Chapra smiled at that. How we define things: when it was large it was a machine and small it is a device. What then was the girl now the Jain had left her, now she seemed to have some character of her own? Did individuality mean anything when thought of in connection with the Jain? Could she be an individual, or would that be like calling someone with a severed corpus callosum two separate beings, two individuals? Perhaps so. It was too easy to look at her and see a human girl when she was really a mask over something wholly alien.

“Why did it leave her, Box?” she asked.

“To watch, to learn, to gather information.”

As the AI said this, Chapra felt the slight surge as the ion drive ignited. She saw the flare far to her right like a sunrise and watched as the planet, with apparent slowness, slid aside.

“She could be destroyed along with us.”

“The Jain can make another whenever it wants.”

And that brought it home.

“Make another what?” asked Abaron, coming into the blister and catching hold of one of the frame bars as he stepped out of the ship’s artificial gravity. “We’re picking up G,” he observed. Both of them looked to the black macula, in the reactive glass, where the sun was.

“Girl,” said Chapra.

“It’s not so worrying,” said Abaron. “Humans make humans all the time and are they any more responsible?”

“How very mature of you,” said Chapra with a grin, then a wider grin at his irritation.

“I will be starting ramscoop drive in twenty minutes. It would be better if you were inside the ship at that time,” said Box.

Abaron led the way from the blister. They stepped from it into the corridor gravity of the ship and both turned toward the control room.

“How long before we go translight?” asked Chapra.

“Three hours,” the ship AI told them, and as they entered the control room it went on to say, “You may be interested to know that I have received genetic maps of the five seaweeds from Earth and compared them to the samples from the planet and the ones in the isolation chamber.”

“How old?” asked Chapra.

Box went on, “Cross referencing certain structures, and taking into account mutational variables, I have a extrapolation graph that peaks at four point seven three million years. This would seem to confirm that the Jain’s point of origin in the escape pod was this system and that it has been in stasis for the aforementioned time.”

“Damn,” said Chapra.

“What’s the problem with that?” asked Abaron.

“Not that… we just never got around to asking why it ended up in an escape pod in the first place. We know lots about what it is and what it can do, but nothing about what it was and what it did.”

“I asked,” said Box.

“Well?” said Chapra when Box did not go on.

“Haden is a Jain world, but not the Jain home world. Originally it was two AU from the sun. The Jain we rescued was here to Jainform it. Using its starship it towed the world to its present position and over a period I estimate to be nearly ten thousand years it seeded it with the kinds of life the Jain like. While it was seeding the world an enemy attacked and destroyed its ship. It managed to get away in the escape pod.”

Chapra gave Abaron a look, then sat and tried to absorb that: a ship that could tow worlds about… spending ten thousand years seeding a planet… and an enemy that could destroy such a ship, defeat a Jain.

“Is there anything more about the enemy?” asked Abaron, putting his finger straight on a fear: more superior aliens.

“The enemy was another Jain.”

And of course that was right. The Polity was huge and ever-expanding and humans had encountered many alien life forms, but the greatest enemy had remained the same: other humans. Chapra smiled. Not so damned superior after all. She flicked a couple of touch controls and summoned up views back down the length of the ship. These showed a plain of ceramal scattered with instrumentation, then the tail fading into distance. She always enjoyed watching the ramscoop engines starting: the vast orange wings of force opening out through space. At that moment she could see only the white coronal glare of the ion drive shoving the Box up to scoop speeds. The ramscoop would then power the fusion engines to shove it up to a speed where the translight engines could get a grip on the very fabric of space and pull the ship through into underspace. Chapra did not want to be watching the projection then. She glanced across as something at the edge of the projection caught her eye. There was a flickering there — spatial distortions.