Neal Asher - Line War

‘I don’t think Erebus stands much chance now of getting through ECS defences in the solar system,’ Randal observed.

‘So your vengeance and my vengeance have both been achieved,’ said Orlandine as she began to analyse how best to use her remaining resources. ‘Doubtless ECS will now not rest until what remains of Erebus is hunted down and obliterated.’

As she saw it, she had only limited options. She could use her remaining energy to place herself in stasis until such time as the underspace disturbance died down, then call for help. The only problem with that was that ECS ships would certainly be the first to reach her, and in the Polity there was no statute of limitations on murder, there were no mitigating circumstances, and there was no way of obtaining absolution for such an act unless you could resurrect the dead. Also the AIs would never trust someone who controlled Jain-tech. If they didn’t execute a death sentence upon her immediately, that would only be because they wanted to study her first.

‘You are almost as arrogant and stupid as Erebus,’ said Randal.

‘Oh, thanks for that,’ she replied distractedly.

She could place herself in stasis and use her remaining power to sort data from the inert sensors on the sphere’s surface, then, if a ship happened nearby, she could raise herself from stasis and direct to the ship her call for help. The chances were that she could then overpower her rescuers. Unfortunately, the statistical chances of a ship coming within range before her power supply ran out — a ship that was not a part of ECS, since they would be the ones primarily traversing this area in the near future — were just about a Planck length above zero.

‘Of course, to call Erebus arrogant and stupid is merely to damn myself.’

That got her attention. ‘What?’

‘You heard.’

‘If you could explain?’

‘I’m not really Fiddler Randal,’ replied Randal. ‘I’m based on a copy of him but I’m really that part of Erebus that disagreed with everything it was doing. I call myself Erebus’s conscience. I guess, that being the case, it could be argued that Erebus really did murder your brothers.’

‘What the fuck?’

Even as she spoke the words, she understood what the presence in the sphere with her was actually saying. Immediately she began running diagnostics and searches within the sphere’s hardware and software, then prepared HKs, worms and viruses: all the killing and deleting programs at her disposal. Oddly, she located the distributed code that was Randal very easily, as if he was making no attempt to hide.

‘I was able to control parts of Erebus — of the other part of me, that is,’ said Randal. ‘ I sent the wormship to Klurhammon, and it was I who gave its captain his instructions.’

‘You manipulated me?’

‘You’ve hit the nail on the head.’

There seemed nothing more she could say. She felt stupid, frustrated, and grief began to well in her throat. Briefly she considered capturing Randal and enacting some hideous vengeance upon him, but she was not some psycho and that was not how she operated. She launched those programs and quietly watched as they wiped Randal out. He began to fade from her consciousness and, as he went, he said just two words: ‘Thank you.’

He was finished. He had achieved his aim and now there was nothing else for him. He had manipulated her right to the end.

She realized there was something moving across her cheek, reached up and touched it, then peered at her moist fingertips. She should rebalance her neurochemicals, restore calm, return her mind to its dry analytical state. But she didn’t want to.

The sphere was now getting colder inside, which would make putting herself into stasis so much easier. She set the mycelium to use the last of the power supply to build photovoltaic cells on the surface of the outside skin, rather than scan for unlikely passing ships. When the sphere finally came within range of a sun, the power from them would then wake her up. Making calculations based on her present trajectory and the trajectories of stars lying within her probability cone she deduced that her chances of coming close to even one of them lay maybe two or three Planck lengths above zero… within this galaxy. Thereafter those odds did not improve in the slightest. She calculated her chances of entering another galaxy were somewhere in the region of one in fifty billion of this happening within the next billion years. Of course, she would eventually run into something, but by then it seemed likely there would be no more Polity or any of its AIs, but by then it was also likely there would be no suns left hot enough to power those photovoltaic cells — if they had not been ablated to dust by micrometeorite impacts over such an immense timescale.

Orlandine began to shut herself down, knowing, with what was a practical certainty, that this was the end for her. But it was a less certain death than most faced, and she had been here once before, before she was born.

The sensation of falling had been an entirely mental one, for Mika was still floating a pace back from the chair containing the remains of Fiddler Randal, the toes of her boots just brushing against the floor. The blue-eyed remote was wrapped around her hand, which she could not feel. She felt physically sick and her head as if it had been scraped out with a rusty knife. She had memories of memories in there, but everything Dragon had loaded into her seemed to be gone now, leaving a raw hole

‘What do you mean you never expected me to succeed?’ As Mika jerked herself down to fully engage the gecko soles of her boots with the floor, the remote unfolded and with a puff of vapour slid aside, trailing cobwebby strands. She gazed at her hand, which was bright red and missing much skin but covered in some transparent iridescent layer like plastic. She half expected that if she tried to move it there would be no response, but this was not so. It moved easily, though it was still numb.