Neal Asher: Polity Agent

‘Arach, you will remain by the runcible. When the evacuees come through, take them immediately to Isolation in B,’ said Celedon.

‘Great, thanks,’ said the spider-drone.

‘Jerusalem?’ Celedon sent.

‘Whenever you are ready,’ replied the AI in the massive ship.

Low energy ion motors on the rim set the station turning. Celedon initiated connection to the source coordinates of the original information package, and routed power into the runcible’s spoon. The Skaidon warp extended, tentatively linked, then made full connection. Suddenly the drain on the station grew huge: more power required, then even more. Shutting down the lasers, Celedon routed through power from the thermal generators. It then began shutting down other systems and rerouting additional power from the station’s many fusion and fission reactors.

‘It seems there is also a direct thermal drain,’ Celedon observed.

Between the bull’s horns of the runcible, the warp turned blank white, and from it cold propagated throughout the station. Frost crystals feathered across the floor and up the walls.

‘Yes, as expected,’ Jerusalem replied.

‘Entropy?’ Celedon suggested. ‘This link to the future a definite confirmation of the universal slide into lower energy states?’

‘No, a confirmation of the vast energy requirement of this runcible link. It is already out of control, and the phenomenon is localized but dispersed. Observe the planet. Observe the sun itself.’

Celedon focused various instruments where directed. The planet, a blue sphere, was now striated with lines of red cloud. Thermal analysis revealed that its entire surface temperature had dropped one degree. In the surface of the sun, directly below where the station orbited, a black spot formed and spread.

‘Ah, hence the hostile contact protocol Starfire?’ Celedon suggested.

‘The hostile will most certainly try to keep the gate open, and certainly try to acquire the technology surrounding it. We will close this gate, severing the link, and the energy will have to go somewhere.’

‘Erm… how localized is this phenomenon?’

‘The radius of the sphere of influence from each runcible extends for the spacial distance between them. The energy drain drops in a near-to-straight line to zero from centre to circumference.’

Celedon could only make an estimate based on the entropic effects on nearby objects—the sun, the planet—and the result it came up with appalled it. This was why, even though AIs knew how to make a time-inconsistent runcible link, they pretended otherwise. The energy requirement increased exponentially and could not be controlled. The link drained energy directly from the space around each runcible gate, and would keep on doing so until surrounded by dead worlds and dead suns. Shutting down such a link resulted in all the absorbed energy exploding from one gate—the one still open, since it was impossible to close them both at the same instant—in the form of a blast wave of subatomic particles forced from the quantum foam. The mathematics involved was esoteric even for AIs, but they calculated that closing such a link, formed between planets ten light years apart with a time inconsistency of a year, even after only a few seconds, could result in the obliteration of one of the gate worlds, and the fatal irradiation of all life within a sphere of nearly a light year. These two gates lay 150,000 light years apart, the time-inconsistency at 830 years, and now the gate had been open for three seconds. And people came through.

Celedon observed, via runcible control, five humans falling through the Skaidon warp, then another five, then another three. There should be another forty-seven humans—and one other. Through Arach’s senses, the AI studied the humans. They bore no visible sign of Jain infestation. Five of them wore the overalls favoured by runcible technicians; there was a four-person Sparkind team, two human and two Golem; the rest obviously civilian scientists, diplomats and crew, all augmented, some of them to haiman level, which meant they were both human and AI. They were all armed, their clothing dirty and ash-smeared. One of the haimans carried a large lozenge of crystal encaged in black metal—probably the AI Victoria from the ship of that name on which they had been passengers.

‘That’s all of us, shut it down as soon as you can!’ shouted one of the overalled figures—a woman with wide green eyes, cropped dark hair and skin as black as obsidian. Celedon identified her as Chaline Tazer Irand, the technician in charge of setting up the runcible in the Small Magellanic Cloud, 830 years in the future.

‘Where are the others?’ Celedon asked through Arach, as that drone shepherded these people towards Isolation.

‘Dead,’ the woman replied, her face exhausted of expression. ‘At least I hope so.’

‘The Maker?’

‘He wants to die with his kind,’ she told him tightly.

Now something else tried to come through. Celedon denied it permission, it being nothing the AI recognized—neither human nor Maker—and tried to shut down the runcible. In response to this, a deluge of information packages came through the gate, many of them opening automatically, and the gate simply would not shut down. Despite the precautions it had taken, the AI saw it could not hold out against this attack. Wormish fragments of code spilled into the gate’s processing spaces and began attempting to assemble.

‘Jerusalem?’

‘Are you asking for permission?’ the other AI enquired. ‘You know what to do.’

Though couched in verbal terms, this communication lasted only a fraction of a second. Long seconds dragged thereafter as the AI waited until the evacuees reached the quarantine airlock and bulkhead doors closed behind them. This gave the attacker enough time to subvert the systems controlling gate maintenance and diagnostics. Since a selection of robots, ranging from the nanoscopic up to ones the size of termites, carried out internal maintenance, this meant the attacker now controlled physical resources. Time for Starfire.

The planar explosives detonated as one, severing thousands of structural members. The slow spin of the station caused sector A to part company with it. The sector tore out the s-con and optic cables linking Celedon to the runcible, but in the last few seconds the AI lost control of it anyway. A radio signal detonated the next explosives, taking out the spindle-side bulkheads. Mr blasted out into space. Debris and ice crystals reflected the green light of the sun. The station shuddered, that one severed segment departing it like a slice from a cake.

As calculated, the segment began to turn. Transmissions now came from it—viral attacks on the station itself. Celedon immediately shut down all its subminds, and anything else that might be vulnerable to subversion. Keeping only a few hardened cameras pointed at the departing object, the AI waited until it turned nose down to the sun, then sent the signal to start its rim fusion engine. Helium plasma briefly washed over the station as the parted segment accelerated down into the gravity well. Then it shuddered. Whatever had been trying to get through the runcible was now inside. Minutes passed, then there seemed movement on the surface. Focusing, the AI observed bright writhing objects breaking through the outer skin. As pieces began to break away, Celedon fried them with masers. The segment’s new occupant realized its danger and swiftly shut down the drive, but the segment lay deep into the sun’s gravity well now, and metal began to ablate away from it as the sun’s heat impacted. Finally it plunged into the furnace right beside the black spot. A U-space signature denatured. There came a burst of Hawking radiation as that runcible went out.