Their discussion had taken less than a realtime second. Now Jack detected the four missiles accelerating down towards him. In the few microseconds as his link to the other two ships closed down, he routed through a disruptor virus. As the Grim Reaper and the King of Hearts fought against this, he fired an antimunitions package at the missiles. Without guidance, the missiles scanned the package and, recognizing that it contained no heavy elements or chemical explosives, ignored it. They then slammed down on the Jack Ketch, which had surprisingly slowed to a halt before reaching the mountains, and detonated their kilotonne CTDs.
‘Very clever,’ Reaper sent.
The real Jack Ketch reached the mountains, the missiles having detonated on an illusion the antimunitions package had infiltrated into their sensors, which they had not been smart enough to recognize by themselves.
‘Having fun with that disruptor virus?’ Jack asked.
‘What disruptor virus?’
Both ships were still launching munitions, and a cloud of missiles fell down towards Jack. He was at more than a two-to-one disadvantage. Though the atmosphere and cloud cover made their beam weapons ineffective against him, his own beam weapons would also be ineffective against them. However, the other ships could easily use those same weapons against any missiles he fired—destroying them in vacuum long before they reached their intended target. Unfortunately the reverse did not apply to any missiles they fired.
Now, hurtling so fast through valleys and between peaks that his shock wave was killing the hard-shelled creatures below him, Jack began releasing EM warfare beacons and viral chaff. They would take out ten per cent of the missiles pursuing him, other antimunitions would take out a further twenty per cent; at close quarters his beam weapons would account for yet another twenty per cent, then the remaining half of the cloud would obliterate him.
Something a little more drastic was required—and it was something his human passenger could not survive.
‘Sorry, but this is for your own good,’ said Jack.
Jack sealed the VR suite Thorn occupied, and shifted it through to a bay. As an afterthought, the AI transferred across a subprogram of himself before targeting the far draconic plain as he ejected the suite. There came no comment from Thorn—and none was possible after the first missiles zoomed over the warfare beacons, and an EM blast blanked all communication.
Slowing abruptly, the shock wave he created speeding past him on a hurricane-strength dust storm and snow from the highest peaks, Jack settled down and began making rapid and drastic alterations to his internal structure. He shifted all the hard-field projectors used in a U-space jump to his lower hull cavity, and increased the structural strength of the hull layers and supporting members there. All available gravplates he transferred to that lower hull to provide the maximum repelling effect, then he charged up massive capacitors from his fusion reactors to provide a surge of power that would probably burn out all those same plates.
Meanwhile, selecting from his carousels, Jack spewed his own missiles and antimunitions back towards the approaching swarm. A hundred kilometres behind, viral chaff began infecting the systems of missiles no longer controlled by Reaper and King, blocked as they were by the continuous EM output of the warfare beacons. The top of an Everest-sized mountain disappeared in an implosion, then reappeared as fire and gas in an explosion topping five megatonnes. Other airborne implosions followed, but without such drastic effect. Three one-kilotonne CTDs ignited three brief suns down a long valley choked with vegetation and insectile life. The subsequent firestorm was almost as explosive, and a long wall of smoke and ash, red at its heart, rose into the sky. Then Jack’s own missiles arrived and there began a game of seek and destroy amid the mountains, a game that changed their very shape.
Now only five hundred metres from the ground. Jack dropped the other device he had swiftly selected. It hit the ground and activated. The gravity imploder excavated a crater in the bedrock, and in the same microsecond Jack fed power into his gravplates. The balance was perfect, and he only wavered in the air as huge gravitational force tried to drag him down. At the centre point of the implosion, matter was compacted into an antimatter core, and the rocky crater focused the consequent explosion, slamming up into the Jack Ketch. Antigravity working at a level to burn out the plates, layered hard-fields acting as scaled armour, the blast accelerated the attack ship at a thousand gravities on a plume of fire. It left the atmosphere so fast that Reaper and King nearly missed it. Nearly.
‘Respect,’ the King of Hearts AI sent, just before opening up with both particle beams and gamma-ray lasers.
The pterodactyl head of Dragon was up high above its other pseudopods, like a python rearing out of a nest of cobras. All Dragon’s sapphire eyes it directed towards the fading glow on the horizon. The cobra heads were up, Arden knew, because they contained sophisticated scanning equipment—if equipment was the right way to describe the living machinery of Dragon. There was also a shimmer of disturbance beyond Dragon’s field wall, where the telefactor had set down, for the wind from those distant explosions was just reaching them.
‘They are fighting amongst themselves,’ said Dragon.
‘And I’m supposed to be surprised by that?’ asked Arden from where she was perched on a boulder outside her cave.
The head swung towards her. ‘You mistake me: it is the Polity AIs who are fighting amongst themselves.’
Arden felt a sudden shudder of cold. There had always been stories of rogue AIs, but she had considered them as apocryphal as stories about the Jack Ketch and other bloody ships. But Dragon now telling her that the AIs were fighting amongst themselves undermined one of the certainties of her existence.
‘Why?’ she asked.
‘Your AIs rule you efficiently, ruthlessly, and to the maximum benefit of the majority, but having made them in your image, do you expect them to behave any better than yourselves?’
‘I do,’ said Arden. ‘For most humans power is a tool for obtaining sex, money, safety, regard from their fellows, or initially to enforce some hazy ideal, and then primarily because the exercising of power is its own reward. Most of these motives can be discounted as regards our AIs.’
‘But not all of them—especially if you consider Jain technology.’
Of course: since taking power, the ruling AIs had been utterly in control and safe, which was why they could rule humanity so benevolently. Now something both a temptation and potentially lethal, even to them, had been added to the equation and—Arden excused herself the pun—their metal was being tested.
‘You are their alien equivalent,’ Arden observed.
‘Yes,’ said Dragon unhelpfully.
‘Aren’t you, too, tempted by this Jain technology?’
‘All knowledge is a temptation, but how much should one risk to acquire it? To learn about a bomb from reading a book is substantially different from learning about it from the item itself, while you’re deciding which wires to cut.’
‘Dangerous, huh?’
‘There were civilizations which cut the wrong wire.’
‘Were?’
‘Precisely.’
Arden changed the subject. ‘How goes the battle?’
‘It has left this planet now. Two Polity attack ships are attempting to destroy a third one of their own kind. Also, some interference device has been employed to prevent this latter ship fleeing into U-space.’ Dragon paused contemplatively before adding, ‘That device prevents all U-space travel from this system.’