Neal Asher: Polity Agent

Mika considered that, and also considered the utter pointlessness of protesting. AIs, so they would have humanity believe, calculated their actions on the basis of the greater good for all. She just sometimes wondered what their conception of the ‘greater good’ might be.

She tied a loose robe about herself and slumped on her sofa. During her interview with the other three she had felt the Jerusalem enter underspace.

‘Where are we going now?’

‘To the edge of a scene of conflict, though a USER prevents us from entering.’

‘Could you elaborate on that?’

‘You have not been keeping up-to-date. Let me begin by telling you about a being called the Legate…’

As Jerusalem explained the situation, Mika began to feel ashamed. She realized that while she occupied herself with such petty concerns, Cormac might be dying, or already dead.

It would have been foolish to try flying through the approaching Polity fleet, even in U-space, so Orlandine necessarily waited until it entered the inner system.

Too long.

With delight Orlandine had manoeuvred the Heliotrope out of the comet and back into space, but that delight only lasted a few minutes—until the second USER came online. A trap for someone else, obviously, but one that snared her as well.

Again.

But now what? Should she return to her hideaway inside the comet and wait until this ended? Checking U-space interference, she first realized this USER field extended for much further than a mere light year… then that it was strongest in her present location, which seemed to indicate the device generating it must be nearby. Its activation had been perfectly timed so as to drop the Polity fleet ships into a trap in the inner system. Scanning her immediate vicinity revealed the usual quantity of cold lumps of rock, but the candidate she eventually plumped for was a planetoid half the size of Earth’s moon, and only 100,000 miles away from her. Passive scanning revealed it to be much warmer than it should be, at this distance from the sun, and that it contained an ocean of liquid methane inside a crust of rock and water-ice as hard as iron.

Rather than immediately send Heliotrope in that direction, Orlandine waited and began to take measurements. Within a few hours she ascertained that the shift of USER-field strength exactly matched the planetoid’s orbital path. Confirmation, then. Now she needed to figure out how to get herself over there without being detected. The Heliotrope’s drifting path diverged from that of the planetoid, and firing up her engines out here would be like igniting a flare in the darkness, so any detectors would pick her up instantly. It took her only seconds to work out the solution to this dilemma. Using air jets, she could manoeuvre into a position which, in twenty-three minutes, would bring her into collision with one of the asteroidal masses. Prior to that collision she could fire her fusion engines undetected for 0.6 of a second into the asteroid’s surface. This was predicated on any detectors being sited only on the planetoid, which was a risk she would have to take. This move would take her on to the next asteroid. Three similar trajectory changes in all would result in Heliotrope being set on a course to intercept the planetoid’s orbit. Landing there without using the engines would be well within ship’s specs, and Heliotrope possessed mooring harpoons that could prevent it bouncing away in the low gravity. After that things would become rather more complicated, for Orlandine must somehow figure out how to destroy a USER, which she rather suspected lay in the methane sea, a thousand miles below the surface.

As, some hours later, she finally approached the planetoid, Orlandine noted signs of occupation. Large areas had been ground flat in a landscape of contorted ice seemingly formed by the water freezing while large bubbles had spread through it, and subsequently subliming away so that only curves and sharp edges remained. A few blasts from the air jets brought her ship down in one of the clear zones, and she wondered if the craft would have survived a landing in one of those other unlevelled areas. At this temperature water-ice could possess the consistency of steel and much of that contorted ice looked dangerously sharp. Heliotrope’s hull might be constructed of layered composite with an outer skin of ceramal, but it still could be damaged.

As the ship skidded on a gritty layer of flattened ice, blowing up an iridescent cloud, she fired the mooring harpoons and observed their explosive heads drive home. Possibly there were seismic detectors on this planetoid, but hopefully what they detected would be dismissed as just natural settling of the crust.

Now the difficult part…

Controlling Heliotrope’s external hardware directly, the ship being designed as a working vessel rather than simply for transport, Orlandine extruded a drill from its belly and immediately started boring down through ice and rock. While this was in process, she assessed her various supplies and considered her options. Heliotrope contained only five slow-burn CTDs, of the kind used at the Cassius project for melting and causing ice build-ups on large structures to sublime. These might melt a hole through the planetoid’s outer crust, but would have little effect on the USER unless she could position them right next to it, which seemed highly unlikely. However, carefully studying the sensor returns from the drill head, she began to see… possibilities.

Orlandine found the crust of this planetoid rather interesting, and wondered what spectacular events had resulted in such a high concentration of sodium chloride—in the form of frozen brine — and the abundance of other chlorine compounds. Perhaps the planetoid had formed from the debris of a gas giant, for similar concentrations also could be found at the Cassius project. The presence of these chemicals indicated the possible presence of something else here, and eighty yards down she found it: a layer of pure chlorine frozen solid at these temperatures. Whatever process had formed this planetoid must have involved extremely rapid freezing for so reactive a compound not to combine with others. Perfect.

The drill bit finally broke through a hundred yards down and, until Orlandine injected sealant around the shaft, the Heliotrope sat momentarily on a geyser of methane turning partially to snow, but quickly subliming in near vacuum. Withdrawing the drill shaft’s central core, she then pushed a probe down into the methane sea and, using a passive seismic detector, scanned the planetoid’s interior. Very soon she built a virtual image in her mind.

The USER device lay at the sea’s precise centre, the massive singularity it contained holding it in place. From this spherical core protruded numerous structures like aerial-clad city blocks. Just under the planetoid’s crust she detected other devices, perhaps sensors or weapons. One of these lay only half a mile away from her, so instantly she trained Heliotrope’s sensors in its direction on the surface, and discerned how the exterior of this device resembled a cylindrical bunker sheathed in ice. But there seemed no activity from there as yet.

Now maintaining close contact with the ship and all its sensors, ready to launch at a moment’s notice, she eased herself from her seat and moved back into the ship’s hold. Jain technology, inevitably, held the solution. Linking to her nanoassembler, she input the parameters for the nanomachines she required. It soon became apparent that nanomachines would not work in such low temperatures, so a mycelium would be required: one that would spread around the interior of the planetoid’s crust below her, one that could inject itself through ice and rock to seek out the deposits of pure chlorine. Unfortunately she needed to remain here while the mycelium performed its task, because it would need to be powered by the ship’s fusion reactor.