‘What information?’
‘U-space anomalies were detected in a black asteroid field by an old sub-AI survey drone. Though they were large, they did not have the characteristic signature of a large ship surfacing. Measurements meanwhile indicate open Skaidon warps, then the short translation of some large object, unbuffered.’
‘Through a runcible then,’ observed Cormac.
‘The drone was some way distant from the location of these anomalies,’ King went on, ‘and later detected the heat flash of a gigaton event.’
‘Orlandine,’ surmised Cormac thoughtfully.
‘That the war runcible was used is the most likely explanation to fit the data.’
‘So we’re going there, which is good, but what are we going to do once we arrive?’
‘Jerusalem has also ordered one of the reserve fleets out of Salvaston to head for the same location.’
Cormac leaned back and nodded to himself. ‘That’s good,’ he said. ‘Now would you like to tell me about your curious new taste in decor in here?’
Aboard Orlandine’s ship the Heliotrope the old sharp-edged war drone, Cutter, lay folded up in the corridor right beside the ship’s interface sphere. A multicore optic cable, plugged in between his bulbous eyes, trailed down and snaked along the floor into Bludgeon, and thus via the drone and the interface sphere he occupied into the Heliotrope itself. Now, having access to the ship’s sensors and scanners, Cutter watched as his companion surfaced the ship into realspace far out from the Anulus black hole, then himself began scanning for the main transmission satellite he knew to be in orbit here. Bludgeon, meanwhile, started making the necessary preparations to use the cargo runcible in the somewhat hostile environment they would soon be entering. Within a few seconds the sharp-edged drone had it: a hundred-yard-wide coin of metal floating out in deep space. Bludgeon dropped Heliotrope into U-space for a subliminally short time, in order to put the ship between this main transmission satellite and its subordinate satellites, which were positioned close around the black hole and the junkyard of planets it was steadily devouring.
The satellites had been here for centuries, and no one had bothered recently to replace either them or the technology they contained. The U-tech of their time had been incapable of remaining functional in the chaotic U-space environment around Anulus, hence the positioning of the single main transmission satellite. The inner satellites transmitted by laser to it, and it relayed their data through U-space to the nearest Polity science station one hundred and twelve light years away. Fortunate that, since this meant the two drones needed to subvert only the one satellite. Within minutes Cutter had intercepted a laser transmission then relayed its contents to Bludgeon, who was always better at dealing with this sort of thing.
‘Can you deal with it yourself?’ Cutter enquired.
‘Mebbe,’ came the other drone’s reply.
During the war it was always Bludgeon who dealt with the informational stuff while Cutter got physical. Bludgeon’s job had been to open an undetectable way into Prador vessels or stations, and then Cutter’s chore was to go in first, usually to scatter the interior with pieces of the crablike aliens and paint the walls with their foul green blood.
‘You’ll not need to use any of her stuff?’ Cutter suggested.
‘I could do it meself,’ said Bludgeon, ‘but you would need to enter the satellite to make a few physical alterations.’
‘Just like the old days then.’
‘Well, at least there’s nothing alive inside that satellite…’
The other war drones, and Orlandine herself, would have been astounded to hear Bludgeon string together more than three words. But being able to talk like this only to Cutter was Bludgeon’s particular wrinkle, his particular bit of faulty programming or maybe damage to his crystal or the mind it contained. All of the war drones on the war runcible had some similar fault — something that excluded them from normal Polity society or simply made them not want to be included. They would argue vehemently about these being faults.
‘I’ll head over there now, shall I?’ said Cutter.
Cutter’s own particular fault was his utter refusal to abandon or even blunt the edges of a body made for turning the insides of Prador vessels into abattoirs. He could not actually move about the Polity as a normal citizen, since the slightest mishap, his own or that of some other, could easily result in multiple decapitations and amputations. Cutter’s edges were of a form of heat-treated chainglass that remained constantly honed down to one chain-molecule thickness. He could slice up steel with the same ease as a chef dicing an onion.
‘No,’ said Bludgeon.
‘What do you mean “No”?’
‘I’ve learnt the coding protocols and have the perfect tool for dealing with that satellite from here.’
‘You mean one of her tools.’
‘You have to lose your fear of the technology Orlandine provided, Cutter.’
‘I ain’t frightened of it. I just don’t like depending on it, is all.’
‘But we must depend on it. Nearly everything in this ship depends on it to some extent, and without it we won’t be able to carry out our mission.’
Cutter grumbled and shaved away slivers of the wall, then grudgingly turned his attention to what Bludgeon was doing. The bedbug-like drone had opened up a cache of programs provided by Orlandine, selected one, a worm, and sent it in discrete parcels to the satellite. The worm must have reassembled itself within a matter of seconds, for that’s all the time it took for the satellite to fall under Bludgeon’s control. It seemed that simple computers were easy to subvert, and computers in places like this, where security had never been an issue, were easier still. Seemed to take all the fun out of it, though.
Now, as Bludgeon ignited Heliotrope’s fusion drive to move them closer, Cutter turned his regard upon Anulus. This black hole, of approximately six stellar masses, was surrounded by a disc of rock and gas it was steadily drawing into itself. Spindlewards of this disc, the output of energy dwarfed the output of suns. Apparently Orlandine had known much about this particular curiosity because it had once been suggested as a site for a massive construction project proposed before the Cassius Dyson sphere — some kind of energy tap to utilize that vast spindleward energy output.
The light here was glaringly bright, one glimpse with a human eye would burn out that eye in a moment. Already, even at this distance, Heliotrope’s hull was heating rapidly and thermal generators distributed throughout it were converting this to electricity and storing it in numerous laminar batteries, capacitors and in the high-density storage facility of the cargo runcible’s buffers. All this was mainly being done with Jain tech, and though Cutter didn’t like it, he was prepared to admit it was damned efficient.
‘I suggest we wait here,’ said Bludgeon.
Cutter gazed upon the virtual model of the debris disc his companion had created. The position indicated was just in from the edge of the disc where the asteroidal chunks were large enough and close enough together to shield them from the worse of the radiation.
‘It will put you in the shade,’ said Orlandine.
Cutter had almost forgotten that she remained in constant communication with them, so long had it now been since she last spoke. He considered trying to explain his attitude then decided not to bother. If she didn’t like it, tough.
She continued, ‘I estimate that I will be in position some twenty hours from now, so you’ll need to head for your entry point into the fountain in about twelve hours.’
Cutter gazed through Heliotrope’s sensors and thought that ‘fountain’ was much too gentle a word for that thing out there. The debris ring heated as it fell towards the spinning black hole, turning at first molten, then into an incandescent gas and finally to plasma at the event horizon. The radiation and ionization from this process was prevented by the disc itself from spewing out sideways, but there was a larger process involved in the production of these spindlewards polar fountains. The proportion of iron in the debris here was over forty per cent. This, combined with the spin of the black hole, created a magnetic bottle effect which squeezed escaping radiation into narrow channels spearing up and down from the black hole’s poles. The two fountains were fifteen miles wide and consisted of ionized matter — mostly iron — and electromagnetic radiation right across the emitted spectrum. Anulus was like a natural particle-beam weapon — only of the kind you might need in order to take out planets.