Unshouldering his APW, he paused for a moment, knowing that this thing before him had once been human. But it was not human now, and what he was about to do amounted to a mercy killing. Conscious of metal pillars nearby, he carefully chose the setting on his weapon. He fired once.
The thing burst before him in a ball of violet fire, and the detonation had aug creatures raining down all around. In the deeper darknesses of the Undercity, other things screeched and bellowed, but none of them came into view. Stepping closer to the steaming mess, Fethan knocked his weapon’s setting right down, and kept firing small bursts to burn the embryonic creatures crawling about in the slimy remains. Afterwards, as the smoke slowly cleared, he saw the rest of the aug creatures still marching away in lines to find their victims. He had destroyed the source of the insectile creatures, but not them.
Fethan stared, wondering how many creatures he could burn before the power supply of his weapon gave out. What else could he possibly do? Then it became obvious. No matter how this looked, it was aug technology—sophisticated computer networking. He extended his forefinger up before his night vision, sent an internal detach signal, then removed the syntheflesh covering. Allowing the kill program to see through his eyes, he slowly surveyed his surroundings, taking in the remains of that thing he had destroyed, the now revealed root-like structures in the ground, the multitude of aug insects.
‘Do you see this?’ he asked.
I see.
‘Where could you go in?’
Try substructure in the ground.
Fethan brushed away earth with his foot, exposing a grey fibrous tentacle that shifted slightly. He stooped and pressed the metal tip of his finger into it. This was Jain tech, he knew, but worth the risk. Fibres parted, his fingertip sank in, and he felt the ache of transference as another killer program transcribed.
The Grim Reaper and the King of Hearts were decelerating at slightly different rates, the Reaper eighty thousand kilometres ahead of the King. Jack would have preferred them to be the other way round because, though Reaper was the more aggressive, Jack considered it also the more stupid. Perhaps King had let the Grim Reaper take the point for this very reason. The gas giant was close now, coming up like an undersea blue hole, and Jack was beginning to taste chemicals in the vacuum: hydrogen and hydrogen peroxide, methane and wafts of mercury vapour—a strange combination that was perfect for the AI’s requirements.
‘You are gambling all on one shot, and if that fails you will be vulnerable as you climb back out of the planet’s gravity well,’ Aphran noted.
Jack allowed processing space to stand a projection of his avatar on the ship’s bridge amongst his splintered collection. Aphran, choosing her own routes to processing, placed her own avatar beside him.
‘I should at least get one of them, then the odds won’t be quite the same as they were on Cull,’ he replied.
‘Still the odds will be against you.’
Jack allowed that this was true, but noted that his children had screwed up once already, and might do so again.
The Jack Ketch hammered down and down towards the gas giant, with Jack continually adjusting the human side of his perspective. What began as a mere dot in space grew to fill the fullest extent of vision—seeming to become vaster than the space all around it. Eventually the ship was speeding at an angle down onto a vast plain of cloud much like anything seen in a virtuality. This plain appeared endless, any curve to the horizon not visible to human perception. But Jack wasn’t human, and that made his comprehension of this immensity even greater. It struck him as decidedly operatic.
Constantly adjusting his angle of approach so that a line drawn through his body intersected with the Grim Reaper a quarter of a million kilometres out, Jack turned on ram-scoop fields designed to pick up the sparse hydrogen of interstellar space. Gas funnelled in towards him in a huge thickening wave. This decelerated him more effectively than anything he could have done with his gravmotors. By the time it reached his baleen-tech fuellers, the gas was dense as any liquid, but also turning to plasma. From the fuellers it entered the dropshaft positioned down his length, where irised gravity fields accelerated it to as near light-speed as made little difference. For seconds only could the Jack Ketch act as a pressure valve, but it was enough to make a difference.
The beam of photonic matter lashed up from the gas giant, straight into the nose of the Grim Reaper. The ship did not have time for evasion, but the AI mind inside it had an eternity of nanoseconds to contemplate what was happening to it. There were no real explosions; the beam just took away the ship’s main body, converting it to a plume of plasma many kilometres long. The Reaper’s two weapons nacelles tumbled through space: bird’s wings severed from the bird itself. Turned at its fulcrum, the Jack Ketch, the beam then swept across towards the King of Hearts. The second ship initiated all its hard-fields and flung itself into an eight-hundred-gravity swerve that must have wrecked it internally as much as the Jack Ketch had been, for King had only microseconds to prepare. Jack knew that the other AI understood the futility of what it was doing: it could not outrun the swinging end of a lever hundreds of thousands of kilometres long.
Now I am shitting laser beams! Jack bellowed across the ether.
But then, through either calculation or pure luck, the King of Hearts slid behind one icy moon that took the few seconds remaining of the blast. The moon broke up on a gaseous explosion, began to tumble apart. Behind it, the King of Hearts peeled away and began to swing round.
‘Bugger,’ said Jack, ram-scoops now off and baleen-tech fuellers closed, as he laboured back up out of the gravity well.
Running with unhuman speed towards the place where the landers had come down, Skellor felt a sudden surge of joy as he began to realize that he might actually get himself out of this. Not only that, he could take down that ECS shit in the process. But his happiness, as is the wont of such things, was short-lived. Tanaquil’s confusion up there on the city platform alerted him, and in the man’s memory Skellor observed the scaled moon climbing rapidly into the sky. Then, as if this were sucking the energy from him, he suddenly found himself slowing, as a huge human weariness overtook him. Finally he ran out from the Sand Towers at simply human speed and stumbled to a halt, stopping to rest, even supporting himself against a sulerbane plant.
To his left smoke rose from the city of Golgoth and, again focusing through the aug network and through Tanaquil’s eyes, he observed a metallier walk woodenly to the edge of the Overcity platform and hurl himself off. He had set the program now: the entire population, with Tanaquil last, was queuing up to do the same—and one would go off every quarter-hour until they were all gone, whether Cormac joined Skellor at the landers or not. But Skellor’s problem was not there.
Focusing inward to the Jain substructure of which more than eighty per cent of his body consisted, Skellor finally located the growing nodes that were sapping his strength. They had burgeoned secretively, concealed from his internal diagnostics almost with the collusion of those same diagnostics. He felt a perfectly human panic. It was because of these changes inside himself that he had come here at all, yet he had only endangered himself and learned nothing, and now the one who might have had some answers was gone. He had failed.