Chevron’s view of events occurring above was becoming dim and intermittent, and shortly the signals from the various cams would be cut off completely by the shielding surrounding her. Things were going very badly for the separatists: eight groups had been wiped out, the remainder surviving by holding hostages, and yet not one runcible had been blown up. According to a mild voice now issuing from the ceiling drones, the survivors had five seconds in which to drop their weapons or they would die. It amused Chevron to see the separatists futilely trying to use their hostages as physical shields, clearly not understanding that at such close range the drones could accurately target the individual pores on their noses.
Around the Pillar itself the amber explosives were all in place, and Chevron noted that the only humans anywhere near the Pillar were separatists. The Xanadu AI had obviously spotted what they were up to some minutes ago and, via their augmentations or by using a directional sound beam, had contacted all the civilians in the area and herded them away. Now the separatists too began to head for safety, and Akiri was the first to walk straight into the hard-fields that surrounded the Pillar. She gazed about her in dismay, realizing what had happened. She then screamed something relating to that strange human concept called ‘freedom’ and sent the detonation signal. The concentric area between Pillar and hard-fields filled with fire, which quickly went out as it burned up all the oxygen. Occasional gaps in the billowing smoke revealed smouldering scraps of what might have once been Akiri and the rest of her team. These gaps also revealed the Pillar itself, its cosmetic outer layer stripped away to expose three feet of ceramal armour. The explosion had been no danger at all to the AI within, just as the remaining separatists elsewhere ceased to be a danger to the passenger runcibles as they quickly surrendered or died.
Once beyond the transformer, Chevron divided to track along single S-con wires, circumvented electro-optic transformers, slid through the laminations of storage crystal and ate along optic fibres, replacing them bit by bit with herself. Now she was coasting by some very heavy security and it was only a matter of seconds before she would be detected. However, finally she was almost in position. It came then: power surges, a particle beam playing up the duct through which she had entered, chemical explosives in crystal laminations detonating, diatomic acid flowing around C-con cables. She surged forward to where thousands of optic cables entered a single black metal conduit, a third of her body destroyed behind her. An atomic shear sliced through those optics, separating her from more of her body, which died in a sudden intense oxygen fire. Then she reached the item to which all those separate optics were connected: a lozenge of crystal six inches long — a quantum processor, a mind. Even as she reached it, interfaces began to physically break away, but she leaped the gap and made rapid connections.
‘What are you?’ wondered the Xanadu AI.
‘I am your death,’ Chevron replied, as she began to rip apart its mind.
12
The human body, like all evolved life, is a collection of mostly cooperating cells that are the product of aeons of parasitism, mutualism and symbiosis. The dracomen, while apparently a similar organism — ostensibly designed by Dragon to show what dinosaurs might have become had not chance wiped them out — are certainly not such a collection of cells. In fact, dracomen do not possess cells as we know them. They do not even possess DNA, as would any true descendant of the dinosaurs. They are not the product of natural selection, of chance nor of the vagaries of nature, for they are biological machines that were designed by an entity capable of ‘having fun’ with the very building blocks of life; of, in fact, creating its own building blocks. The dracomen never possessed appendixes, never suffer from genetic disorders. They do not grow old when their selfish genes have dispensed with them and moved on — because they don’t have genes. They can obviously control their internal workings, for certainly they can create other biological mechanisms in the same way and as easily as they reproduce. They are a superb piece of biological design, though there will always remain the question: for what purpose? Are they superior to humans? Humans have primarily served the purpose of their genes and now, however misconceived it might be, the purpose of their own consciousness. The concept of consciousness is debatable when it comes to dracomen, however.
— From Quince Guide compiled by humans
The base of the cold coffin slid out from the wall, its top sliding down inside the wall slot until the coffin reached an angle of thirty degrees to the floor. Gazing at its shape, matching to that of a human being, Cormac felt a better name for it would be a sarcophagus, but such names did not necessarily follow logical rules and, anyway, whenever these objects were occupied, they usually contained cryonically cooled but living human beings, so naming them after boxes usually made to contain corpses was incorrect — except in this case.
Cormac reached down and pressed a button like an inset cartouche, and after a moment the red light beside it turned green. The coffin whoomphed as its seals disengaged and the lid hinged up, spilling a cold fog. Cormac studied the contents. Scar’s body lay in three pieces, severed at the head and also diagonally across the torso from a point below the right-hand side of the ribcage down to the waist. There were also numerous other deep cuts and tears exposing muscles and internal organs. The sight of these injuries brought home to him just how lucky he himself had been.
‘I guess this was too much trauma even for him to survive,’ he said.
Beside him, Arach reared up and, with a sound like someone rooting through a cutlery drawer, rested his three front feet on the edge of the coffin. The spider drone, whose own torso was scratched and dented, was missing a limb and one of his eyes. He peered down at Scar and made a hissing sound.
‘When they’re dead that’s usually only ‘cause there ain’t enough left of the body to scrape up with a spade,’ he said.
Cormac nodded — he too could not recollect ever seeing a whole dead dracoman, only small parts of them.
Arach’s head revolved to look at him directly, and Cormac saw that the damaged eye was not missing just blank and, even as he watched, it winked internal light as a precursor to full functioning as the drone doubtless made internal repairs. ‘What they want him for?’
Cormac shrugged. ‘Burial maybe?’
Arach snorted.
Cormac looked up. ‘Are they here yet, King?’