Neal Asher: Line War

‘Why allow this attack?’ Cormac asked.

Blegg shook his head. ‘I made you well, Cormac. You would have been a perfect replacement for the one whose image you see before you.’

Though Cormac did not want to be distracted, he was.

‘Explain that.’

‘Well, do you consider your ability to transport yourself through U-space an evolved one? It is not. I chose you long ago when I first began taking apart Jain technology and built the replicating biomechanisms you first saw as this form I’m in, as Horace Blegg.’

Cormac waited.

Earth Central continued: ‘Through a series of Horace Bleggs I developed the technology, only incorporating U-space hardware when I finally chose my subject. Do you remember the Hubris, Cormac?’

He did; it had taken him to Samarkand, a world thrown into cold by Dragon’s destruction of the runcible buffers there. ‘I remember that ship.’

‘Not the ship, Cormac, the AI,’ the image before him corrected. ‘Hubris installed the technology in you during that journey to Samarkand, while you were in cold sleep, and it has slowly grown in your bones ever since. It took some time, for the complexity is great, but I knew it was working once you started gridlinking bare-brained.’

‘I am to believe that?’

‘How else do you explain yourself?’

It was a distraction. His time here was limited and it was passing quickly.

‘Why did you allow this attack?’ he repeated.

‘Ever since the war with the Prador, humanity’s pace of development has slowed almost to the point of stagnation. Development only accelerates under threat, and we know that complacency kills.’

‘Trite.’

‘It is a dangerous universe, Cormac, one in which a decadent and lazy human race could at any time face extinction.’

‘Millions died,’ Cormac repeated.

‘But I did not kill them; I merely did not save them.’

‘That’s a very fine line.’

‘Are you here to destroy me, Cormac?’ the hologram enquired. ‘Very few will notice any difference, for the moment I cease to function, one of my sub-minds will take up the reins. It will take only a matter of microseconds for it to assume my duties.’

‘But it won’t be you.’

‘Another fine line.’

Cormac bowed his head for a moment. ‘Perhaps I can accept that doing less than you are able to do is no crime.’ He raised his head. ‘She said she would not be allowed to live “while the betrayer still sits on his throne”, and of course then I didn’t understand what she was talking about. Now I do. You crossed the line when you sent your own people to the Trafalgar, so that ship’s AI could use them to initiate Jain nodes. In that you are culpable of murder. I’m here for the sake of Fiddler Randal and Henrietta Ipatus Chang, and others whose names only you know.’

‘Ah, that,’ said Earth Central. ‘So you are a moral creature, Cormac?’

Cormac stepped forward through the hologram and flung Shuriken. The throwing star shot from his hand, extending its blades only a little way, then whirred up to a scream. It hit the pillar above the Earth Central AI, and the pillar shattered, a rain of blue glass clattering down and spilling through the gratings underfoot.

Cormac swept up the ruler of the Polity in one hand.

Something was rising up from the depths of Lake Geneva, and weapons turrets had already risen like giant steel fists from the hedging mountains. It didn’t matter. Cormac knew he could pull his companions out in an instant now, back up to that old orbital museum against which the Harpy was docked and hidden by its own chameleonware. That same place where Cormac had paused for a while to walk and gaze upon the exhibits — artefacts from the true beginning of the space age. He recollected how the curator there, a human without augmentation, had taken an interest in him and asked where he was from.

Back from the wars, Cormac had replied, to which the response had been, What wars?

Ever was it thus.

After watching Mr Crane pull on his boots again, don his coat, place his hat upon his head and carefully adjust it, Cormac peered down at the grey orb he himself held. He gazed into it, but its structure revealed no more than would the regular formation inside some rock. However, by concentrating his U-sense on the hand that held it, it revealed thin dense fibres in its bones. Earth Central had not been lying about that.

With annoying predictability, Arach asked, ‘What now, boss?’

What now indeed.

‘I’m heading out to the accretion disc to find Mika,’ Cormac replied. ‘If you and Mr Crane here,’ he nodded to the brass Golem, ‘were to come with me, that would be more convenient, since then I wouldn’t have to find another ship.’ He shrugged. ‘Or you can go your own way. I would say that things are going to be a bit hot for all three of us in the Polity right now.’

‘But I meant,’ said Arach, ‘what now?’ The spider drone reached up tentatively and tapped one sharp foot against the grey orb.

Cormac weighed the thing for a moment.

‘Here, you take this,’ he said, then tossed it to Mr Crane, who snatched it from the air snake-fast.

The brass Golem held the orb for half a second, before saying, ‘He must pay,’ then crushed Earth Central to fragments, and scattered crystal glitter about his lace-up boots.

Cormac guessed Crane must be choosy about what he included in his collection of toys. He gazed down at the glitter for a moment, then up at the sky, trying to fix that blue in his mind. ‘Time to go,’ he said.

Orlandine woke immediately, but her perception was sluggish, crippled because a vast proportion of her resources was simply unavailable. The photovoltaic cells on the surface of her interface sphere were supplying just enough energy for her to wake and to power up the passive sensors dotted about the same surface. Her body temperature sat a spit or two above absolute zero, and though the cryonic technique she had used as she froze would have prevented the formation of damaging ice crystals, she knew there would still be a lot of repairs to make. She also needed much more power than was presently available to be able to think at more than a mere human level, and to see her surroundings with more than the present limited proportion of the electromagnetic spectrum available to her.

Belatedly, she checked the time, wondering if the universe was filled with dead suns and red giants, and whether her present wakefulness was due to her briefly warming herself on its cooling embers. But a mere two hundred years had passed.

Orlandine was astonished, then fatalistic. Unless she had somehow beaten the huge odds stacked against her, there was only one reason for her to be awake now: someone had come looking for her. She wondered why. Surely the Polity AIs would not bother waking her from certain death merely to execute sentence upon her? Or perhaps they were waking her so they could study her? She concentrated her severely hampered faculties on available sensor data.