She decided that maybe this time there wasn’t any deliberate subtext to her current exchange with the AI. Nodding reassuringly to herself, she stepped out of her study area and took a familiar route through the cathedral spaces of the great ship which somehow seemed unfamiliar, though she knew it was not they that had changed.
For Mika was sure something had been fundamentally altered within her, and that this was the source of her present feeling of disconnection, of alienation. When the second sphere had dragged her from the wreck of her little ship she had known herself to be dying, most of her bones broken inside her ruptured flesh. In such a situation Jerusalem would have uploaded the mind from her dying body and put it into another, undamaged body. But the sphere chose to repair her… and she knew how Dragon spheres were not averse to tinkering with living creatures. Scanning her subsequently, Jerusalem had discerned some oddities that it claimed to be harmless and without apparent purpose, but she wasn’t sure she believed this. Now she wanted to see what Dragon itself had to say about the matter.
Finally reaching the vestibule to the bay, Mika donned a spacesuit before heading out onto a catwalk. The bay concerned was an upright cylinder with this walkway running around the perimeter and a circular irised hatch occupying the floor. Even as she stepped out on the walkway the hatch in the floor slid open abruptly and a lift raised her intership transport vessel into view.
This one-man vehicle — in shape a flattened stretched ovoid — was without airlocks, any major drive or an internal AI. It could be flown by a pilot when necessary, though most often a remote AI controlled it. It rested on skids, had two directional thrusters mounted to fore, and a small ion drive aft. It looked utterly indistinguishable from the one Mika had so nearly died in. Trying not to hesitate at the thought, she stepped down from the catwalk and climbed inside.
Once properly settled in the single seat, she said, ‘Well, the last time I flew one of these wasn’t so great. If you would, Jerusalem.’
Through her suitcom the AI suggested, ‘Scenic route?’
This was precisely what it had said that last time, and Mika shivered. Then, as she strapped herself in, she decided to give exactly the same reply as previously.
‘If you have sufficient time.’
The wing door sealed itself shut with a crump, and instantly lights began flashing amber in the bay as pumps evacuated the air. As an extra precaution, even though the craft was fully sealed and contained its own air supply, Mika closed up her spacesuit. The grav went off, then the ceiling opened to reveal the stars. Swivelling to point down, the fore thrusters fired to propel the craft out into space. It turned nose-down over the Jerusalem’s outer ring, which from this point always looked like some vast highway running around the equator of a metal planet. The giant research vessel was in fact a sphere five miles in diameter, and the thick band encircling it contained shuttles, grabships, drones and telefactors, all of which constituted the AI’s macro toolkit.
Mika surveyed her surroundings beyond the mighty ship. The inhabited hot world of Scarflow lay to her right, cast into black silhouette by the white glare of its own sun. The gas giant lying within the orbit of that same world was not visible at present. Here and there she caught the reflected glint from an occasional ship, but that was all. Looking at status maps of this system gave her the impression of a comer of space swarming like a disturbed beehive, since, to complement the remains of the fleet that had escaped Erebus, many additional Polity vessels had now arrived. It was only when viewing outside the Jerusalem, without computer enhancements to contract the distances, that you realized how small was all this activity against the sheer scale of… everything.
The craft turned and accelerated towards two white dots like blank cold eyes: the Dragon spheres. As the short journey commenced, Mika considered what she so far knew about them. Four spheres, conjoined, had originally been sent by the Maker civilization, then located in the Magellanic Cloud, to seed Jain nodes that would lead to the eventual destruction of the Polity. Dragon, however, had refused to comply, and a Maker had come here to force the issue. During the ensuing conflict one sphere had managed to cause massive human fatality on a planet called Samarkand, and that’s where Mika and Cormac had come in. He had destroyed the offending sphere, and the Polity had accepted the Makers’ lies. Dragon, though able to disobey the Makers in one respect, could not, because of its base programming, disobey in others. Dragon, in consequence, could not reveal the truth about its purpose.
In a following conflict a second sphere had sacrificed itself to create the dracomen. But why? To produce an army of beings immune to Jain technology, apparently, but, like in everything else to do with Dragon, there were layers of complexity underlying that simple answer. And now, fairly recently, the Polity had learnt that the Makers’ own Jain technology had destroyed them, and it was this fact that had enabled one of the two remaining spheres to break its own programming and subsequently, with Mika’s help, break the second sphere’s programming too. Dragon, it seemed, was now a free agent and a good friend to the Polity.
Mika snorted to herself at the very idea.
The two spheres rapidly expanded in her view, their colour changing from the bland white of reflected sunlight to red and umber shot through with streaks of sapphire and swirls of yellow. The two alien entities swung around each other equidistantly, as if connected by an invisible rod. This was some kind of gravity phenomenon generated by them both, since their natural mass did not provide sufficient pull to keep them in place like this. Avoiding that same phenomenon, her craft descended to take a slow vertical orbit around the second sphere. This one was clearly recognizable to Mika because it was the more badly scarred: nearly torn apart by the same weapon that had almost done for her. After the conflict between the two of them they had merged for a while to conduct some kind of healing process, nevertheless still they retained their scars. Perhaps, like Scar the dracoman, they retained these for identification purposes, or perhaps they just wore them out of some sort of pride.
The little craft now skimmed above hillocks of scaly flesh like cut gemstone, masses of red tentacles nestling in their lees like strange copses. She observed a wide-split seam in the surface at one point, occupied by cobra pseudopods each possessing a single sapphire eye where the head should rightly be. It looked busy down there — a conference of snakes. Eventually the craft broke away from its tight orbit and headed over to the other sphere, where the Dragonscape below was little different, until finally descending towards the flat plain where the conferencing unit lay embedded. It landed beside a single airlock, bouncing and then settling in the low gravity. Mika clambered out, but felt some reluctance to step away from her craft until she saw that curved spikes had folded down from above the skids to anchor it in place, then she bounced and drifted across to the lock.
And entered a Polity embassy in a Dragon’s realm.
3
‘Biomodule’ is a vague term used to describe products of GM organisms used as components in technologies that are distinct from plain biotechnology. Though, on the face of it, this description seems precise enough, problems arise when you try to distinguish our biotech from those other technologies. Surely, if some components of a machine are biomodules, it is biotech itself whether it is a Golem android, a gravcar or an autodozer? The term, and its description, are therefore outdated — in fact they went out of date more than five centuries ago. Biomodules can now be found in just about everything we use. Simple computers contain virally grown nano-wires and fibre optics, and there are now few items we employ that do not contain such computers. These include holographic and temperature-controlled clothing, Devcon Macroboots with their terrain-adjusting soles, Loyalty Luggage, and even tableware capable of warning of the precise content and temperature of food. Biomodules will also be found in the join lines of segmented chainglass visors manufactured to give an optically perfect finish — they are crystals produced inside some GM cacti and are also used in the optics of pin-cams. Human bodies now contain thousands of different varieties of them in whatever suite of nano-machines each body is running. This an old practice that can be traced right back to the first GM production of insulin. Essentially, biomodules should simply be called modules — just one component in our complex and completely integrated technology.