‘How many others died during our operation?’ he asked.
‘Only fifteen.’
Cormac knew that, in the context of the casualties of the numerous battles taking place across this section of the Line, it was a comparatively small number, but he felt personally responsible for those fifteen. And because their deaths actually hurt him, it also occurred to him that his usefulness as an ECS agent might well be coming to an end. Conscience was all very well, but guilt was merely a hindrance in an occupation where ‘ruthless’ was part of the job description.
They entered an elevator shaft whose very presence demonstrated just how antiquated this atmosphere ship must be and perhaps why it had been recently knocked out of the sky. They glided down three floors without anyone joining them, eventually stepped out into a wide hold whose side wall had been torn out by the crash, and headed outside through the jagged gap. Gazing around at the churned-up ground, Cormac located the King of Hearts and headed towards it, soon mounting its ramp. Within minutes Cormac was standing on the black glass floor of the bridge, with Arach and Hubbert Smith hovering a pace behind him. The gap in this line-up that Scar should have filled seemed to exacerbate a sore spot inside Cormac’s skull.
‘I take it there’s someone who wants to speak to me?’ he enquired.
‘That is so,’ replied King.
‘Well, now would be a good time,’ Cormac said flatly, assuming King was playing silly games again.
‘Not everyone can be at your beck and call,’ King replied. ‘Just wait one moment.’
Suitably chastened, Cormac waited, but it was not for long. A line suddenly sliced down to the black glass floor and out of it folded the hologram of a human figure.
Cormac recognized this apparition at once. ‘Azroc,’ he said.
The Golem nodded in acknowledgement.
‘You’re a long way from Coloron,’ Cormac observed.
‘I was on that fleet that went to your rescue, the one that Erebus all but wiped out. You could say that the experience has widened my horizons.’
‘All our horizons have now been widened, though maybe our futures have been consequently shortened,’ Cormac replied. ‘We weren’t supposed to be here?’
‘You were given false orders by an agent of Erebus. The same agent’s remains show without a doubt that it was a product of Jain technology—’
‘And yet it managed to infiltrate the heart of your operation there? I thought we had the means of detecting that technology now.’
‘Active Jain technology can, in most cases, be detected by the nature of the code it uses and the EM output of its nanoscale interactions. However, though this agent was created using Jain technology, it wasn’t actually using the same.’
‘I see, so there could be any number of these… agents among us?’
‘That is so.’
‘Please continue.’
‘Having analysed the infiltrating agent’s files I’ve discovered some quite startling anomalies. For though he was in a position to cause us a great deal of damage, he did not do so.’
‘Waiting to deliver a killer blow, maybe?’
‘Possibly.’
‘You sound unsure.’
‘Even without revealing himself, there were things he could have done that would have resulted in catastrophic failures in our defence, yet the only overt action he took that could have resulted in deaths was to issue you with false orders.’
‘So those false orders prove that my mission was important, and that Erebus wanted to stop me. So did this agent do anything else that’s relevant to me?’
‘It concealed information about the owners of Europan dart guns,’ said Azroc bluntly. ‘The searches have thus far only tracked down and eliminated forty per cent of the guns capable of firing the dart you found. However, something was flagged for immediate attention but concealed by the same agent. It seems two Europan dart guns were sent by a woman on Europa as gifts to her twin sons on Klurhammon.’
‘I presume their files are already on their way to me?’
‘King of Hearts has them, but really all you need to know is their names.’
‘Enlighten me.’
‘The twins’ names are Aladine and Ermoon, while the mother’s name is Ariadne. Their surname, if such it can be called, is Taser 5.’
Even though that particular investigation had passed out of his remit, Cormac still remembered the surname. It was a particularly important one since another bearer of that name had once been an overseer of the Cassius Project. She was a haiman, a murderer and the owner of a Jain node — which made her particularly dangerous.
‘Orlandine Taser 5,’ he recalled. ‘Tell me, was this infiltrating agent also hampering those trying to find her?’
‘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.