Ken MacLeod - Newton's Wake

‘That is what it was doing,’ he affirmed. ‘Our bad luck. Our good luck that Lamont and his ship gained control of the asteroid’s descent.’

Lamont went on. The Hungry Dragon had finally reasoned itself out of the control of the virus. It had then repeated the process to cut the relic’s control over the war machines, and to assume control over them itself. That had, however, left the infected DK ships as autonomous war machines in their own right. These had now been dealt with. All that remained were the war-machine nests they’d established on four asteroids that had been intended as raw material for DK space habitats.

‘These will not be a problem,’ he said. ‘They are now under control again.’

Lucinda could not contain herself. She jumped up. ‘You mean they’re now controlled by your fucking ship !’

Lamont shook his head, matted locks flying. ‘No, no!’ he said. ‘You don’t understand.’ His fingers rampaged through his beard. ‘I haven’t explained this yet. The war machines really are like an immune system, controlled by reflex. When that was compromised, a higher level of processing was awakened. That is what currently controls the skein and all the war machines.’ He blinked hard. ‘It’s … benign, and it’s … friendly towards the colony of Eurydice, which after all is its own work.’

‘How do you know it won’t go off on some Rapture of its own?’

Lamont shrugged and spread his hands. ‘This is not the original mind,’ he said. ‘This is like a ganglion, a subroutine. It’s powerful enough, a superhuman sentience, but it’s not ambitious. Or so the Hungry Dragon assures me.’ He glanced down at Armand. ‘It wants to speak to the Joint Chiefs,’ he added. Armand smiled and nodded.

Lucinda sat down shaken and dismayed, and turned to Kevin and Amelia. ‘We’ve lost the skein. It’s Eurydice’s now.’

Kevin shook his head. ‘No, surely not. We can fight war machines , for fuck sake!’

‘Not an endless supply of them, we can’t!’ Lucinda said. ‘And it isnae just a matter ae war machines anyway. If that muckle thing out there controls the skein itself, who’s to know what it could do? It could switch the gates away fae our planets. Reconfigure the whole skein, for that matter.’

Kevin frowned at her for a moment, nodded slowly, then stood up.

‘Come on,’ he said to the Carlyle fighters. ‘There’s nothing more for us here.’

He led them away from the tables, striding to the door without a backward glance. Their departure was noticed, but not remarked on or, as far as Lucinda could see, regretted except by Morag Higgins, who gazed after her. Lucinda beckoned to her, with a smile and a slight flexure of her fingers; Higgins’s silver lips compressed, and she turned her attention back to Lamont like all the rest. But Armand met Lucinda’s gaze with a sharp glance and a small nod.

Somebody called out:

‘What about Eurydice’s fossil record? What about the fossil war machines?’

Lucinda stopped, turned around. This question had been nagging her too.

‘I understand,’ Lamont said slowly, ‘that the ship was equipped with what are called Darwin-Gosse machines. They are capable of evolving an entire biosphere in virtual space, and creating the result. The ship’s own capabilities well exceeded that. It reshaped Eurydice’s lithosphere. It laid down new strata. It created the fossil record.’

Lucinda remembered what Johnstone had said in the Chernobyl caves, about worked rocks that looked like they’d formed naturally.

‘ But why? ’ she shouted, almost from the exit. ‘Why the hell should it do that?’

‘I have asked it that myself,’ Lamont said, ‘and it told me why it did it.’ He spread his arms wide. ‘For the panache!’

I

t was early afternoon. The clouds had cleared; the shadows of the spike and the space mountain were short, but still covered the camp. Ones and twos of Knights and Eurydiceans here and there stood watch. One reporter pursued Lucinda, but she waved her hand in front of her face and said nothing, and it flew back in to the conference. She jogged over to where the remaining Carlyle fighters were piling on to four of the company’s gravity sleds.

‘We arenae going tae ride these aw the way back tae New Start,’ Lucinda complained, as she caught up with the others.

Kevin gave her a look. ‘We are no,’ he agreed vehemently. “We’re going tae ride them up intae the hills a way and get picked up by one ae our ain starships that hae been lurking out-system. If you’d been paying attention, Amelia’s made the contact and set up the rendezvous.’

Lucinda glanced around the matériel-cluttered encampment as she clambered aboard a sled alongside Amelia and grabbed a handrail. ‘Why not land here?’

Amelia jerked her thumb at the Subtle Conceit . ‘Knights are just a wee bit touchy about bringing one ae our starships down here. Too much possibility for misunderstanding.’

Lucinda chuckled darkly. ‘OK.’

The sleds lifted and accelerated forward. The slipstream whipped her hair, snatched at her breath. They passed out of the great shadows, into the sunlight. It was exhilarating, and it lifted her spirits and diverted her attention from brooding on the catastrophe that had been brought upon the clan. That had been brought upon it by her . She thrust the thought away. The Carlyle ethos was causal, not moral; based on results, not intentions. But even in that unforgiving light she found it possible to think that what had happened wasn’t entirely her fault.

We’ll just have to get into an honest business, she thought. With the income from the skein gone, what could they do? Combat archaeology remained, but with Eurydiceans—or their friendly superintelligence—in control of the skein, and on better terms (as they now seemed) with the Knights, it would be more difficult. But, she thought, looking over the heads of the fighters on the sleds, the clan and the firm could deal with difficulties in its own way, and as it always had. They were still the bloody Carlyles.

And they still had a job to do here. She recalled Armand’s subtle nod.

‘Do you think General Jacques is still with us?’ she asked Amelia, loudly into her ear in rushing wind.

‘Still up for the Return?’ Amelia yelled back. ‘I’m no sae sure. No himself personally, anyway.’

‘But he’s promised his troops!’

‘Aye,’ said Amelia. ‘He has that. So we wait and see, aw right? That’s why we’re going back tae New Start.’

Within about half an hour the flotilla of sleds had crested the nearest ridge, a few hundred metres from a gate—still guarded by war machines, whose sensors pinged them as they passed—and all but the upper parts of the gigantic objects behind them had dropped out of sight. The sleds skimmed along at a few metres above the ground, along a blue-green glen shadowed by flitting clouds. It was a classic U-shaped valley, scoured out by glaciers that had perhaps never existed but in the imagination of a god with a sense of style. Lucinda scanned the sides of the glen, and saw with delight a little flock of small grazing animals, long-limbed and dark-haired, skipping among outcrops of rock and falls of scree. High above, some winged predator circled on an updraft, a black speck in the blue sky. Terraforming, even with Darwin-Gosse machines, was an unpredictable procedure, more a matter of evolution than creation; trial and error. Even this simple food chain, if that was what she was seeing, was itself a triumph.

Something else moved among the rocks. She glimpsed it only out of the corner of her eye, and when she turned it was gone. Her gaze swept the slope—there, something again—a human figure, so well-camouflaged it was as if the grass or shrub had shifted. It darted across the side of the glen, about halfway up, a little ahead of them and running in the direction opposite to theirs, and disappeared behind a rock.