The human, p.21
The Human, page 21
‘Okay, we’ve pissed it off,’ she said. ‘Now concentrate on those fuckers.’
The remaining attack pods took the shortest routes they could to get out of the way. The moment a tactically significant portion of them was clear, the weapons platforms opened fire. The beams speared across vacuum, easing out like the rise of liquid in a thermometer from Orlandine’s perspective, and with the distances involved. They carved through the cloud, incinerating objects in their path, but they were not the prime target. Then they struck.
Sensors blanked out in the glare from an ovoid sun, coming back on with heavy filtering. All the beams had hit the enclosing hardfield around the Jain ship. She considered what she had just seen. With that hardfield up, the Jain attack ships could not use their grasers. They could only use them once outside the field and for that the mother ship would have to close it down . . . Orlandine issued no more instructions since the tactical plan dictated the platform response. She just waited.
Even as the attack ships reached the inner perimeter of the field, her platforms began launching a storm of railgun slugs. Those at the edge of her formation also coilgunned out missiles containing high-yield CTDs. Would the mother ship react to this by not yet shutting down its field? No, it just had. Stupidity or supreme confidence? The attack ships continued their approach as the railgun fusillade arrived. The things bucked and flared under numerous impacts but the main hail of slugs rained down towards the mother ship, then simply began vaporizing.
Supreme confidence, Orlandine realized, not entirely sure why that pleased her.
The Client
With her connection firming to it, the Client’s latest remote climbed out into vacuum, and she gazed upon the stars. Out of them, balanced on its fusion drive, an attack pod fell down towards her, tumbling over on thrusters and decelerating to come past her position. She launched, employing the EM drive in her body and accelerated to intercept it, landing easily, with her feet sticking. Did she need to control the pod directly? Yes, because Trike did not have full control in the core, and the core security system there might try to penetrate it. She inserted two triangular-section tentacles into sockets all her tech had recently grown, and took full direct command of the pod.
Taking the pod towards the core, she mapped security ahead while reviewing the codes from Trike, and decided on a direct approach. She flew over the wide upper surface to one of the shallow entrances and nosed in. Just inside, she made a full scan. No detritus lay within the short tunnel so defences could fire on her. With pod weapons poised on a hair trigger, she watched them as she transmitted one of the codes. Security merely tracked her and, after a moment, the door divided in three sections and these folded inwards. She immediately flew into a short wide tunnel. Studying structures on the side of it, she saw, just ahead of where a big maintenance organism was laying down material, a section of slate-like wall. She turned the pod to face this and fired its particle weapon.
The beam speared out and carved a circle, spraying out thousands of squares like scales in a hot plasma cloud. As she completed the circle, a pressure differential blew out the section carved away and it tumbled through vacuum towards her. She jetted the pod sideways and went in, passing the glowing ends of beams which resembled the rib bones of some titanic beast. Veins of organic tech had spread about the inner face of the spherical cavity within. Ahead of her loomed the mouth of a square-section tube. Internal defences all around powered up immediately, then powered down when she told them she was not there. The system possessed enough intelligence to register the damage but now could not trace its source. She entered the tube, the sides of the attack pod almost touching its walls, and flew to the end. Here she settled and stuck it against one wall, then detached from it.
An octagonal hatch sat in the wall at the back of the tube. She ignored this and concentrated on the surface to one side. Extending a limb, she rerouted internal power to the organic laser in her complex hand and fired it up. She scribed a circle and at the last cut, moved aside as this section blew out too. She quickly dived inside as a core repair system came online. Behind her, metallic threads shot across to web the gap, gel surfaces spreading between to crystallize. Ahead, masses of material feed tubes, power lines and semi-organic robots all centred on one object.
She negotiated through this paraphernalia to drop down on the surface of the massive white ovoid. Here she found a node – a nexus from which nerve fibres spread all over the exterior – and inserted two tentacles, spreading fibres and making connections. It took her only moments to find the control interface and thence the processes involved in copying. She set this running, tweaking it as she desired. A split in the ovoid opened beside her and rolled back lips to expose a cavity. Detaching her tentacles, she scuttled over and crawled inside. The mouth slammed shut and immediately protuberances, vibrating knives and a thousand other organic versions of the tools a Polity AI surgeon might wield, extruded from the surfaces all around her. She shut down her defences and dropped into somnolence as the bioreactor began to take her, as the remote, apart.
Morgaine
Morgaine gazed through her ship’s sensors at the planet. She also watched through soldier cams and other sensors down there, as Gemmell stepped from the military transport with the woman Ruth at his side. They had arrived on the outskirts of the city where grav-tanks were arrayed on flattened crop fields. She considered how, with a thought, she could use the weapons at her command to obliterate both of them, surgically – an explosion and a cloud of vapour and they would be gone. Childish speculation. She had no intention of killing them, just as she previously had no real intention of putting Gemmell in danger.
‘You have cut the tie.’
Orlandine appeared in human form aboard the virtual bridge Morgaine had created. Orlandine presented a facade much like Morgaine, who also looked completely human – an illusion she had created for Gemmell when she pulled him into this virtuality. Now no longer necessary, she dispelled it, and once again became a withered being wrapped and penetrated by technology, rather like some human subject on the maximum life-support of past and ancient medical technology. And yet, even in this form, she knew she was still much more human than the figure before her.
‘It was well done,’ Orlandine added.
‘The tie that held us together was our inability to let go of our past. I could not release him while he still loved me, so I had to kill that.’ And she had. She had seen his attraction to Ruth and so created the illusion of her own jealousy. In competition with the woman, she apparently restored herself to an earlier youthful form. Her later revelation that this had been a lie would have driven him away. But, entangling Gemmell in the childish and soon-to-be-crushed Separatist plot in Marshallam had been Orlandine’s idea, and a better one. True, Ruth or others might have been killed, but the overall death rates had remained unchanged. The likelihood of Gemmell dying had been low, however.
‘He will be very useful to you,’ said Morgaine. ‘Free of his concerns for me.’
‘And you will be more efficient without your concerns for him.’
‘I have always performed at optimum,’ Morgaine objected.
‘Nevertheless.’ Orlandine began fading, distracted, her attention elsewhere.
‘To business,’ said Morgaine.
Orlandine rose a little out of her distraction to turn her avatar and had it nod once, then disappeared.
All cold function now, Morgaine felt a sense of freedom. Gemmell no longer loved her and the last dregs of her attachment to him were, she felt sure, leaving her. She dismissed the virtuality from her mind, though kept the comlink open to Orlandine, and turned her attention outwards. She had received orders from Diana Windermere, just as Ksov, the commander of the prador fleet here, had received orders from the prador Orlik. Under her command, their combined fleet must turn its focus outwards and concentrate on defending Jaskor from the Jain threat. Despite the phenomenal firepower of the six hundred weapons platforms, the Jain cloud had begun filtering through and objects were on their way here. The leaky barrier the platforms provided would also become more permeable as they necessarily redeployed to face those giant attack ships, even more so when the mother ship itself reached them.
‘You are ready?’ she asked.
Ksov appeared in her vision, chrome-armoured and crouching in his sanctum. ‘Deployment on your word,’ he replied.
‘Then now,’ she said.
Hundreds of drives fired up around Jaskor as prador and Polity ships began to move out of orbit. The Morgaine’s Gate took the lead point of a curved wall of ships, spreading to cover a wide area of space. She had finely calculated their distribution to stop as much as possible reaching Jaskor. But it was a loose net just hundreds of thousands of miles across, deployed against a shoal millions of miles wide. Inevitably, Jain objects would get past, and those items would then be the business of Gemmell and Orlandine.
Diana
As the gel drained away around Diana, her body felt leaden. Her implants were down and she had no perception of how much time had passed. A warm flush, starting at the top of her head, passed down her body. She opened and closed her hands and they felt fine, so she sat up, and realized at once that her military nanosuite had knitted her broken bones and repaired other damage. The suite worked fast, but this meant she had been out of full stasis for at least ten hours. How long had she been under? Slowly, almost reluctantly, her implants started coming back online.
‘So we’re still alive.’ Jabro sat up in a nearby gel coffin. He gazed at his right arm in puzzlement, for it too had been broken.
‘Yeah,’ said Dulse.
In the zero gravity of the room, Diana easily flipped herself out of the coffin and engaged her boots to the floor. She felt a lot better, for the nanosuite had repaired more than her bones. She studied her shipsuit, with remaining gel on it drying quickly and flaking away from the exterior. There was still stuff inside the suit, and she would have liked a shower and change of clothes, but discomfort was irrelevant.
‘Let’s get back to it.’ She led the way to the door.
Via her implants, she now saw to her horror they had been in stasis for forty hours, and still Hogue held off on updating her fully. Perhaps it wanted to give her at least some moments of recovery time. No, it was avoiding telling her something. Still logy because of the rubbish floating around inside her body that her nanosuite needed to snare and dispose of, she went over to the door leading to the bridge, but it didn’t open. Instead, another opened leading into the cabin area.
‘There is no rush, for the present,’ said Hogue via intercom. ‘You have time.’
Diana halted, feeling resentful, then saw the feeling as an indication that she wasn’t quite ready to assume her duties. She turned and headed for the other door.
Once inside her cabin, where grav-plates gradually increased their pull to one gee – showing her just how feeble she felt – she stripped off her suit, used the toilet and then took a shower. Before dressing, she gulped down a large flask of liquid her fabricator provided, then ate a big bar of something that tasted like fudge. Both were loaded with complex chemicals, biological support and nanotech. Even as she dressed and started to feel more able, her implants began to come fully online. Finally, she returned to the bridge.
‘We are on course to swing around the cloud and hook up with Morgaine,’ said Hogue aloud. ‘This is the optimum tactical option.’
‘Really?’ said Diana tightly.
Plugging optics into her body, she began to get detail. Orlandine’s six hundred weapons platforms were presently in a firefight with the Jain attack ships and holding their own. Imagery came through into her skull. She saw one of the giant attack ships hurtling through a firestorm and finally dropping its shield. At this point, a disruptor beam hit it and it fell apart, but slowly. A gigaton CTD finished the job and debris rained down on one platform, smashing it to scrap.
‘Orlandine has the disruptor,’ Seckurg commented.
‘So it seems,’ she replied.
Again, she felt resentment, then quickly suppressed it. Hogue’s tactical assessment was correct. The Hogue, the ships it contained and those trailing behind it, she could better deploy in secondary defence against anything that got past those platforms. Already the AI had opened up the massive hull doors and the ships packed inside were easing out and falling away to take up formation around it.
Trike
Ten levels up, the thing came scuttling down the ramp. It bore some appearance of the creature they had seen below but brandished pickaxe mandibles to the fore and moved a lot faster.
‘Get rid of that,’ said Trike, trying to penetrate the system here. The command deck they were heading for had high security and, over long years, had separated out from the rest of the core and gone its own way. Frustratingly, he could detect no signals across the emitted spectrum to decode and thereby gain access via that route. He would have to make physical contact to penetrate and seize control of it.
Cog moved forwards, eager for something to do. He stood in the descending creature’s path and it rushed him, raising its pickaxes. This deceptive move revealed its real weapon. With a body heave, it ejected an object from its mouth. A lump, like the head of a large sundew plant, slammed into the front of Cog’s space armour and sent even him staggering. Issuing tentacles, it began groping and thrashing about him, vapour boiling up from the powerful excreted acid. The acid had little effect on Cog’s armour but, scanning the thing, Trike saw its backup option. He stepped in behind Cog and caught hold of him, rooting his own feet to the ramp. The object detonated, blasting both of them backwards and tearing up the ramp attached to Trike’s feet. He pushed Cog aside, detached the Jain tendrils securing his feet, then leapt up and over the gap just as the creature fired another of its acid bombs. He slapped this aside and it exploded in mid-air, then he kicked the creature hard, lifting it up off its feet. Before it could come down again he double-fisted it sideways and sent it tumbling off the ramp.
‘You okay?’ he enquired, looking back.
Cog sat up. ‘I’m good.’
His suit had a couple of cracks that had filled with breach sealant, while the acid had etched shallow grooves across its surface. He heaved himself to his feet while Trike scanned deeper. Cog’s few injuries had already begun healing. Had a normal Polity human occupied that suit, most of his organs would have been jelly and his bones in splinters at this point.
‘We can expect more of that?’ Cog asked.
‘Yes, until I can penetrate the system up there.’
‘What about other defences? We might be able to deal with creatures like that, but what about disruptor beams, particle cannons or railguns?’
It was a valid question.
‘We’re not yet within the sphere of influence of the system up there. That creature –’ Trike gestured over the edge – ‘seems to have acted on its own cognizance.’
‘Still doesn’t answer my question.’
‘Give me a moment,’ Trike replied.
He went in deeper, tracking around the nervous system surrounding the area cut off above and riffled through defensive protocols, locating weapons, assessing and checking. After a moment, he had it. The Species had not allowed heavy weapons within their living areas because of the danger of precisely Trike’s kind of subversion. He supposed that, were they required in here, it would already be too late. The surrounding security must be wholly organic. But then, as they had seen, organic chemistry could produce some nasty surprises.
‘No heavy weapons up there,’ he told Cog.
They continued up the ramp for a few paces, then Trike broke into a steady lope. Another level up and another creature appeared.
‘I’ll take it,’ he said.
Though more than strong enough to deal with these organic robots, Cog did not move fast enough. Trike slapped away two projectiles before reaching the creature, and caught its pickaxe mandibles as it tried to drive them into his chest. One heave and it went over the side of the ramp. They moved on and the pattern repeated on the next two levels. The level after that something different awaited them.
‘We’re now in that sphere of influence,’ said Trike. ‘Stay alert.’
A thing like the globular robots they’d first met squatted on the ramp this time. However, it had spread four tentacular legs to stick it in place. As he and Cog approached, it exuded a tube and started vibrating, as if a piston engine had started up inside it. Then it fired.
Trike tracked the first projectile, like a large melon seed, as it shot towards him. He had time to scan and analyse it before swaying to one side so it missed him. Heavy compressed carbon with diamond edges, incredibly sharp. Next came a stream of them, issuing at vicious speed.
‘Get down flat!’ Trike shouted, diving to one side.
He had time to see Cog dropping, the stream passing over his head and cutting into one of the Species trees. This splintered in half, but still hung in place, the upper part attached to the ceiling. Further impacts deeper into the forest smashed up shards and wrecked other trees, dropping dead and dried-out occupants to the floor. As Trike caught the edge of the ramp and swung under it, he realized the guardians here had seriously diverged from their original programming. Surely they would not previously have fired something that could damage their creators?
Sticking to the underside of the ramp, he scrambled along to the position below the creature, then swung back up beside it. It turned the barrel of its organic machinegun towards him and he closed his hand around the thing. But its immense strength began to push even him back. He stabbed his hand down, fingers straight, hard claws penetrating, but did not get very deep. Two more tries and he thrust his hand inside. He pulled, opening a gap, then released the barrel and jumped up on top of the creature. Both hands now in the gap, he tore it wider and wider. Projectiles slammed all around the area as the nozzle waved wildly. He had nearly torn the side off the creature before he spied a thick muscular tube shifting projectiles through it with fast peristalsis. He grabbed this and pulled hard. It snapped abruptly and he fell onto the ramp. More shots tracked across to him, punching straight through the ramp, then ceased abruptly, with the nozzle pointing and vibrating, but ammunition cut off.
