Neal Asher - Hilldiggers

"It could be heading back to Sudoria, to finish what it started," I suggested.

"If it does, it'll find a Polity dreadnought awaiting it," Tigger replied. "But it won't do that—it's intelligent enough to know when to run."

"Are we going to follow?" I enquired.

"No."

Star-bright, the Worm extended as straight as a laser, then suddenly snapped out of existence.

"So it will remain a mystery?" I suggested.

"Yes," Tigger replied.

I smiled, and kept my thoughts to myself.

Brumal and Sudoria had been involved in a century-long war which, without that worm turning up, could have continued for centuries more. So great was the bitter investment in the conflict that for it to end at all—without outside intervention—it needed to end decisively with one very definite winner and one very definite loser. The Worm had turned up shortly before Tigger was sent there to survey the system.

I continued gazing at the same view, my patience that of a machine because my consciousness now resided in one. Eventually Rhodane, being merely human and still recovering from an emotional beating, despite what the AI here had done to her mind, made her excuses and returned to her cabin. Tigger, who until then had remained utterly motionless, got up on all fours, arched his back lazily, then came over to take Rhodane's place beside me.

"If Polity AIs find something they don't understand," I said, "they study it, and they throw huge resources at it until they do understand it."

"There's not much they don't understand," Tigger replied noncommittally.

"I'm not going to dance around this," I continued. "Was that thing something we constructed?"

"No."

"But we knew about it?"

"Well, I didn't bloody know." Tigger turned to glare at me. "Geronamid only just gave me the full story."

I nodded to myself. "In Orduval's book he mentions the Ouroboros—the worm that eats its own tail forever. That was like the original war between the Sudorians and the Brumallians. He admitted to a feeling of superstitious awe that a space-borne worm essentially broke that ring, brought the war to an end. Tell me about nonintervention."

"They discovered it about fifty years ago, and watched it as it wound along the edge of the Polity," said the drone. "It seems it's an alien nanotech device programmed to survey any civilisation it encounters—something like me in a way, though not so bright. The AIs studied it as it studied the Polity. They understood it; they know it."

"Then?"

"They manipulated it. They changed its course to bring it straight into the midst of a fight that had been going on for too long and, before any other ships reached it, knocked it out of U-space and kept it out."

"So they did intervene."

"Yup, they knew that whichever side reached it first would attack it, and, from whatever was left of it, would gain either the technology for U-space travel, gravtech or some other overpowering advantage that could bring the war to an end. And then, after the Worm regenerated, as it was quite capable of doing even from the smallest remnants, it was supposed to simply free itself and depart."

"What happened?"

"Well, even machines can get pissed off. It wanted vengeance, so it began manipulating from its ostensible prison, and when Gneiss put an opportunity in its way in the form of Elsever Strone right in the process of getting impregnated, it grabbed that opportunity, interfered, and made her four apocalyptic children."

"So it could have escaped at any time?"

"Yes, but instead it just used its tools to foment a civil war."

"So why did it go when it did?"

Tigger shrugged. "I guess it expected Harald to finish the job for it."

I considered that answer. By remaining it could have caused more harm, while making certain Harald achieved its aims for it. But then, thinking like that, I was giving human motivations to something utterly alien—and maybe Tigger was too. It was a probe of some kind, so perhaps it had merely been studying the Sudorians, and perhaps fomenting a civil war was a way of providing itself with more information about them. I rather suspected that certain AIs of a higher level than Tigger probably knew the precise answer to that.

"Funny that, about worms—and the war being like an Ouroboros…"

"AIs read books too, and I guess they thought it an elegantly poetic solution. It was also so easy: a little manipulation of an alien device to put the technology it contained right where it was needed, rather than a massive Polity intervention with warships and troops, and then subsequent long-term policing here that needed to last until the two sides stopped hating each other and hating us."

I thought about the recent deaths in Vertical Vienna, and aboard the Combine stations, aboard Fleet ships, and in the civil rioting down on Sudoria's surface. I considered the mass graves on Brumal, and how an earlier Polity intervention could have stopped all that.

"Yes, elegant and poetic," I said.

I turned away from the view, my artificial body feeling suddenly cold and tired.