Neal Asher - Line War

The little craft now skimmed above hillocks of scaly flesh like cut gemstone, masses of red tentacles nestling in their lees like strange copses. She observed a wide-split seam in the surface at one point, occupied by cobra pseudopods each possessing a single sapphire eye where the head should rightly be. It looked busy down there — a conference of snakes. Eventually the craft broke away from its tight orbit and headed over to the other sphere, where the Dragonscape below was little different, until finally descending towards the flat plain where the conferencing unit lay embedded. It landed beside a single airlock, bouncing and then settling in the low gravity. Mika clambered out, but felt some reluctance to step away from her craft until she saw that curved spikes had folded down from above the skids to anchor it in place, then she bounced and drifted across to the lock.

And entered a Polity embassy in a Dragon’s realm.

Yannis Collenger glanced back at the raptor shape of his vessel, the Harpy, taking in its flowing lines and sheerly mean look, before sending a signal through his Dracocorp aug. The ship’s chameleonware engaged, and it rippled and faded to invisibility. He then stabbed his shooting stick into the crusty ground, folded out its small seat, and perched himself upon it. Finally he spoke, his voice transmitted through his own aug to five other augmentations nearby.

‘Okay, stay chilled, boys and girls, they should be with us in a few minutes.’

Yannis was an old hand at buys like this on the Line. You had to stay alert for the double-cross, but you had to stay especially alert for undercover Polity agents. For a long time now ECS had been clamping down hard on arms sales to separatist organizations within the Polity, and such deals had become increasingly rare and fraught with danger. But this one was difficult to resist: two cases of proton carbines, plus power supplies and, unbelievably, one of the new CTD imploders. How the hell these people had got hold of one of those he did not know. He smelt a set-up but thought the precautions he was taking would be sufficient.

The gravcar approached through the sulphurous haze constantly emitted from the numerous volcanos upon this primitive Line world. Yannis recognized the shape of a floating Zil, which was the vehicle of preference for some who traded out this way. He glanced at the box lying open to one side, its contents of Prador diamond slate exposed, then he long-distance auged into the satellite he’d left out in orbit. In the last hour no spaceships had arrived there, and there was nothing watching them from above unless it was concealed by chameleonware. However, he doubted, what with the recent unusual activity in the Polity seemingly directed at some exterior threat, that ECS could spare resources for that kind of mundane operation, so anything they might be doing here was probably concentrated on the ground. Possibly an agent, or maybe one of those new undercover Golem that were becoming so difficult to detect.

Kicking up a cloud of icy dust, the Zil landed: far too dramatic, since there had been no need to employ turbines during the descent. Yannis sent off an instruction to the Harpy. Immediately, in his visual cortex, he began receiving a readout from the highly complex scanning routine the ship was using.

‘Harpy, give me overlay,’ he instructed.

As four individuals climbed from the car, they were immediately in his envirosuit visor outlined in red, then their hidden weapons were picked out and precise details displayed to one side. The ship’s AI was very good at this sort of stuff, since it was of Prador manufacture, or rather had been made from the brain of a Prador first-child. It always amused Yannis that AIs were ostensibly seen as an essential requirement for U-space travel, yet the Prador, who had been dropping their ships into that continuum for centuries, supposedly did not possess AIs. Few in the Polity saw fit to question or explain that discrepancy. He supposed it was all about definitions. Polity AIs could manage the rapid, complex and huge calculations required for U-space travel because of their processing capacity and speed. Harpy could do them because that’s what it had been bred — and surgically altered — to do. It was an engineered autistic savant. It was really all a question of when does an intelligence become artificiAI?

Scan then penetrated the Zil to reveal the two crates of proton carbines in the back footwell, and another object in the boot which Harpy took a while to analyse. When Yannis saw the final result he felt his legs go slightly weak. It really was an imploder, and a big one — the kind employed by Polity dreadnoughts when they wanted to slag a moon. He realized then that he really must be dealing with amateurs, since if they’d really understood what they’d got hold of, the asking price would have been fifty times as much.

‘Looks like they are expecting trouble,’ said Forge.

‘Well, let’s not disappoint them,’ said Kradian-Dave.

Yannis smiled to himself, then blinked when the outline of one of the figures displayed on his visor began flashing. He read the side display: chameleonware embedded syntheflesh, ceramal chassis: Golem Twelve. So it was a set-up, but Yannis felt mildly disappointed that ECS had sent such an old Golem on an entrapment operation directed at him.

Now, not subvocalizing because even at this distance a Golem would be able to hear him, Yannis used a text routine in his aug: Harpy, acquire and target — if it moves out of human emulation, hit it. Fire also on my signal. Then he stood up and stepped away from his shooting stick. He was slightly puzzled, for it surprised him that the ECS Golem had allowed this to proceed so far. Surely the mere chance of that imploder falling into the wrong hands could not be countenanced?