‘Not really,’ Azroc replied. ‘But then they, besides dispersing hunter-killer programs to try and locate her if she ever used the nets, had decided that Orlandine must have fled the Polity.’
‘Had decided?’ Cormac noted.
‘Two thefts within the Polity were also flagged and also concealed. The infiltrator created an HK program to hunt down and erase any further information pertaining to them.’
‘Thefts?’ Cormac queried.
‘One involved a cargo runcible and the other a mothballed war runcible.’ Azroc winced. ‘And Orlandine stole both of them.’
‘You have to be shitting me.’
‘I shit you not.’
‘So you’re telling me she managed to steal a mobile fortress loaded with runcible tech whose purpose was to move entire Polity fleets or throw asteroids at Prador dreadnoughts and, if necessary, to drop moons on Prador-occupied worlds?’ Cormac spoke with polite precision up to the point of saying, ‘Aren’t these fucking things properly guarded?’
‘It was guarded by over twenty veteran war drones, but it seems they now do her bidding.’
Cormac just stood still for a long moment, then turned slightly and glanced over his shoulder to where Arach was crouching.
‘Oh,’ he said. ‘Then I guess Orlandine is only marginally less of a catastrophe in progress than Erebus is.’
‘One could suppose that there is not much of a distinction to make,’ observed Azroc.
‘Yes.’ Cormac could see it now. All this mayhem here on the border was just distraction. Erebus’s infiltrator was concealing the real attack involving this Orlandine and her war runcible. ‘Do we have any idea where this war runcible is now?’
‘We have no idea at all.’
‘Then we need to find it, and fast.’
‘Evidently,’ Azroc replied with dry bitterness.
11
For the duration of the Prador-human war every type of combat was engaged in and every possible weapon employed. A moon was flung from a cargo runcible to destroy a Prador dreadnought, and there was even hand-to-hand fighting between humans and those huge and lethal aliens — usually with messy and unhappy consequences for the humans, it has to be admitted. Terror was a weapon regularly employed by both sides: the Prador inspired it quite naturally by just being themselves, but for the Polity that weapon was the assassin drone. These killers either operated alone or in pairs. Their prime purpose was to infiltrate Prador dreadnoughts, stations and ground bases in order to turn the adults of that breed into ‘crab salad’. Usually they did this in as messy and frightening manner as possible for the aliens: diatomic acid injected into the carapace; complete removal of the carapace and immobilization so the victim would be eaten alive by its own ship lice; immobilization and slow roasting over a fire; or by taking control of the Prador’s method of locomotion — their adults were often devoid of limbs so used AG, reaction jets or maglev to get about — and attaching numerous mines to it, then using it as a weapon against them. The drones were, like most drones of the time, fashioned in the shape of various lethal arthropods and other nasty creatures. They possessed minds as hard and sharp as their outside appearances. With remorseless cruelty they killed thousands of Prador adults, their sum purpose to inspire sufficient terror in the survivors so they would divert resources to defence that would otherwise have been used for attack. It worked too. There’s nothing quite like knowing that something out there wants to slowly saw you into tiny pieces and feed them to your children, to inspire you to double your guard.
- ‘Modern Warfare’ lecture notes from EBS Heinlein
‘Time for you to go, Bludgeon,’ said Orlandine.
The little war drone controlling Heliotrope and its attached cargo runcible merely sent a binary acknowledgement, then the ship threw a flame out behind it and quickly receded from direct view. Once out of the black asteroid field, it would U-jump to the Anulus black hole, but even then Orlandine would maintain the U-space link between the war runcible and Heliotrope, since the weapon and its magazine needed to remain connected.
Now Orlandine turned her attention to the little craft those two wormships had been pursuing. It was still holding off while awaiting her docking instructions, and now she needed to make preparations.
‘Knobbler, send some of your comrades down to Dock Fifteen and make sure they’re ready for trouble.’
‘Already on their way.’
Orlandine checked her internal views and observed the double spider, the scorpion and the hissing cockroach clattering their way through internal corridors to the dock indicated. She scanned them to check what armament they carried and again felt some reservations. The three drones were so thoroughly packed with weapons, munitions, charged-up capacitors and laminar batteries that the accidental detonation of one of them would excise a large portion of the war runcible. She had, on first taking control of the runcible, considered saying something about this to Knobbler, then decided against it. She had to accept that entities as old as these, who had survived the Prador-human war, knew what they were doing.
Through her mycelium spread throughout the war runcible, she quickly shunted energy and other resources to the area around Dock Fifteen. Peering out from that location at the stationary ship, she experienced a moment of horrification on again seeing the legate craft bound underneath it like a sucked-out insect in a spider’s web. She was also extremely wary, since her scans of the vessel were being easily defeated and her informational probes being bounced. She guessed that the voice that had spoken to her belonged to the larger ship’s AI, but she now wondered what his boss might be. It was almost as if a sense of that unknown entity was bleeding back through her scans and probes, with a hint of something dark and powerful.
That other presence aboard the ship worried her, but she needed the information it had obtained. Her first encounter with a wormship — the one that had nearly got her killed and from which she had netted Fiddler Randal — had already demonstrated the dangers of not being completely up to date. She was prepared therefore to risk this ship docking if whatever was aboard could supply her with the required camouflage.
Orlandine again opened her channel to the hovering vessel.
‘What’s your name?’
‘Vulture,’ replied the voice, ‘running a ship called the Harpy. Such a joyous working of serendipity don’t you think?’
Definitely a Polity AI, quite possibly a war drone, given that sort of attitude.
‘Well, Vulture, while you proceed now to Dock Fifteen’ — she sent the location — ‘perhaps you can explain yourself further. Specifically I’d like you to tell me something about this Fiddler Randal.’
‘Fiddler Randal is a virus Erebus picked up at some point. I would guess he was originally a human mind in a flesh-and-blood human. He clearly hates Erebus and wants to see the entity splattered, so copies himself everywhere through Erebus’s structure to work to that end. But why am I telling you this? You yourself either have a copy of Randal or have encountered one.’
The ship had fired up its steering jets and was now propelling itself towards the dock in question. The three drones were already down in the bay area — two of them concealed and only the scorpion visible. Orlandine’s resources were now in place there: she could burn out the entire area with a fire hot enough to fracture ceramal, but perhaps that wasn’t such a great idea considering the munitions those three drones were carrying. More important were her other resources: there she had every worm and virus at her disposal and numerous means of delivering them, both by physical connection and electromagnetic means.