‘Coloron, where are you?’ he sent.
In reply he received coordinates on a three-dimensional map of the great structure.
He pointed up to a landing pad jutting from the side of ceramal-braced foam-stone cliff, like some monstrous iron bracket fungus. ‘We go up there.’
He guided the gravcar up through the evenly spaced layer of scanning drones, and soon descended towards a landing pad. To one side of this, people crowded up ramps to climb aboard the multitude of gravcars and other AG transports that were arriving and leaving constantly. A small area of this pad had been fenced off near the edge. Human guards and mosquito-like autoguns patrolled its perimeter. Within rested a lander, a couple of military transports, and a fast atmosphere format gunship. A group of figures stood near the edge itself. As he landed, Cormac noted a bipedal robot he identified, through his gridlink, as Coloron. There were dracomen here too, and as he stepped from the car, he also recognized Thorn.
He turned to Arach. ‘Come on.’
The drone clambered down from the gravcar and walked to heel behind him like some monstrous pet. Cormac advanced to the group on the platform edge just as another actinic flash ignited in the distance. He glanced in that direction, at a sky yellow-brown behind the pall of smoke, to see wreckage exploding into the air and raining down. This havoc was being wrought to prevent an even greater catastrophe, all as a consequence of one man with one Jain node. How many, he wondered, had the Maker brought from its realm and scattered throughout the Polity?
‘Cormac,’ said Thorn, turning to acknowledge him.
Cormac nodded in greeting, glanced across at the dracomen, recognized Scar by his gnathic smile, then returned his attention to Thorn. The man glanced past him at the drone, now squatting with his hindquarters resting on the floor.
‘New recruit?’ he enquired.
‘A volunteer,’ Cormac replied, then, after Thorn’s grimace, ‘allow me to introduce Arach. He’s a war drone who fought in the Prador War.’
‘Ah,’ said Thorn, ‘that accounts for it.’
‘Quite…’ Cormac stabbed a finger down at the deck beneath his feet. ‘Now, I know what’s going on down here on the surface, but I’ve heard nothing from Jack,’
‘We’ve captured Thellant N’komo,’ said Thorn. He nodded to the nearby lander and they both began walking towards it.
‘I know.’ Cormac tapped a finger against his head, indicating his gridlink. ‘Von Hellsdorf sold Skellor a Jain node, and there was a direct connection between her and this Thellant.’ Cormac glanced across the devastation and grimaced. ‘Have you got anything out of him yet?’
Ahead of them, Scar and the four dracomen accompanying him boarded the lander.
Thorn replied, ‘A download of all his memories concerning his association with something called the Legate. He layered this with subversion programs, so it’s taken Aphran quite a while to take it apart. We’re getting the results now.’
Cormac paused by the airlock. ‘Those being?’
Thorn gestured inside. ‘Best you come see.’
Cormac glanced back towards Coloron. The AI dipped towards him as if to study him for a moment, then returned its attention to its demolition job. Yet another explosion ignited the horizon, much closer now. Cormac stepped into the lander.
13
The classification of Polity warships is only loosely connected to a similar system used for naval vessels of the past. Hence dreadnoughts are the big ones—their name owing more to the definition fears nothing’ than ‘a battleship carrying heavy guns of a uniform calibre’- and attack ships are the smaller ones, though very fast and also carrying some lethal armament. Cruisers lie somewhere between these two — the lines of definition somewhat blurred. However, with the size of ships steadily increasing at one end of the scale and increasing specialization at the other end, new forms of classification have been introduced since the termination of the Prador War. Using the Greek alphabet, dreadnoughts are classified alpha to epsilon, zeta to omicron are used to cover cruisers, and the rest of the alphabet to cover all the specialized warships: attack ships of many different designs, USERs, space tugs and drone or troop transports. Now even this system is falling into disuse. Few people even believe that such behemoths as alpha and beta class dreadnoughts exist. I can assure you that they do, and some others beyond where this system of classification runs out. At the other end of the scale the alphabetical designations have become unwieldy. The most recent state-of-the-art attack ships are designated Iota/Lambda (basic weapons)/Mu+(gravtech weapons)/’ware (Omicron classified) etc. etc. Sometimes they are called Centurion-class attack ships, but mostly we humans just call them by their names now. The complex classifications can just remain lines of code slotted, in the minds of AIs, into specific niches in Gordian battle plans.
—From her lecture ‘Modern Warfare’ by EBS Heinlein
Orlandine detached from her assister frame and her carapace, then returned along the length of the Heliotrope to her living quarters. She was abruptly very hungry—the nutrients her body stored having been used up over the last hundred hours of research. The ship’s galley provided her with a hot prosaic meal of synthetic beef rogan josh, naan bread, and cold beer.
Human time, she thought, feeling the irony of it, yet deciding she needed this interlude to gain a different perspective on all she had learnt.
With one quarter of the node’s substance unravelled, Orlandine now used the tools it provided. A stripped-down simple mycelium grew along the joists and layers of the Dyson segment, powering itself from the many reactors already in place, and giving her views throughout the immense surrounding structure. It connected to all the Polity scanning equipment within the segment, and edited out anything those scanners picked up of her activities, so as to make her effectively invisible to those back at the Cassius stations, and would alert her of anything that might affect her—its own scanners being much more effective than those manufactured by the Polity. However, she had connected this mycelium to an isolated computer, where one of her subpersonae controlled it.
Orlandine remained wary of applying the physical technology directly to herself, it being only comprehensible down to the level her studying tools could reach. Those tools, and the analytical programs she applied to what they revealed, led her to hypothesize the existence of underlying submolecular structures. It was like seeing a two-hundred-storey building, knowing there must be foundations below it, but suspecting still further floors underground.
Her attitude to the numerous programs copied from the node was different. She loaded them to her carapace—though in isolated storage, just like the ones she had used to attack Shoala. She felt she understood their purposes as individual programs, but did not yet want to include them completely in her crystal consciousness because they might reveal further purpose only in combination. However, being simply packets of information, they could be broken down to a elementary quaternary form, below which nothing could be hidden. At some point she would begin to use them in combination.
Orlandine finished her meal and dropped the compressed-fibre tableware in the recycler. Collecting a chilled glass of synthetic raki, she slumped in her seat again and continued to assess matters at the merely human level.
Something had designed this technology to kill civilizations. It procreated by taking from its first victim information relevant to wiping out that individual’s civilization. A trap for the unwary, it was also a trap for any technological investigation. She simply could not risk incorporating the physical tech without finding ways of divining the purpose of all she still could not see, since it was certainly hostile. Even atomic copies would be too risky, as they might mimic that same purpose. She therefore needed newer and better tools. The technology itself could provide her with them, but that could be dangerous too: the trap might also lie within tools based on the technology. Orlandine sighed, suddenly feeling unutterably weary. She could clear this feeling by running certain programs in the crystal part of her mind, in her carapace, to impart the benefits of sleep to her organic brain. Also, the Polity nanomachines in her body were constantly repairing cellular damage normally attended to naturally during sleep. She chose to sleep properly, however, for maybe the archaic natural process of REM sleep would give her a different perspective. Reclining the chair, she settled back, closed her eyes and used her gridlink to cue herself for lucid dreaming.