Cormac eyed the drone. ‘Well, I guess I could just curl up, turn off and do nothing.’
Arach swore, then turned round and scuttled out of the bridge.
‘Have that CTD ready for me soon, King,’ Cormac instructed.
Certainly it seemed Polity AIs might be involved in some Machiavellian scheme, and in the end he would damn well have some answers, even if he had to physically tear them out of Earth Central itself. However, right now he would continue to do his best for those it was his duty to protect, which included some hundred billion humans living in the Sol system.
As the two Dragon spheres penetrated deeper into the accretion disc, the attacks on them became infrequent. However, Mika found much more to interest her here. Occasional bacilliforms, lenses and segmented fragments of wormship structure put in an appearance, but they were rare and, it seemed to her, acted as if lost. It was the other things now being revealed by her scans that absorbed her interest. The twin spheres penetrated clouds of small ovoids that they repelled with hard-fields, since these objects were so small and numerous it was impractical to destroy them with collision lasers. These were, in fact, Jain nodes — trillions of them — and to Mika’s mind the harbinger of the future destruction of the Polity unless something could be done to completely erase them from existence. Then other larger objects began to appear, and it seemed to Mika that the Dragon spheres were travelling into some Jain-tech evolutionary past in which only the oddities were on display.
The first of these new phenomena to come into view was a mass of leech-like biomechs wound through a quadrate framework that had seemingly been squeezed into a vaguely spherical shape at least a quarter of a mile across. An early version of a wormship, perhaps, or some kind of mutation from the final version? It was difficult to tell. Certainly it was nowhere near as lethal as a wormship since, though the leech-things showed greater activity as the two spheres approached, seemingly reaching out beseechingly and shedding Jain nodes like puffball spores, the whole construct just hung in space as the spheres parted to circumvent it and then made no attempt to pursue them. Mika was busily studying her scans of this construct and thus ascertaining that it contained no drive of any kind when the next new object hurtled like a hunting barracuda out of the murk.
This biomech was a fifty-foot-long torpedo impelled by a dirty-burning Buzzard ram-jet. Collector fields sprouted from either side of its forequarters, the accretion material they were gathering glowing red-hot as it entered shark’s-gill intakes, so that the object appeared to be sprouting external salamander gills. Its front end opened a tri-mandible mouth as it approached, pink inside like a fuchsia, and Mika was reminded of the calloraptor hybrids Skellor had created for his attack on the planet Masada. She gathered as much data as she could on this thing, and as quickly as possible for, accelerating towards the other Dragon sphere, its future lifespan could be no longer than a few minutes. Eventually a white laser stabbed out from the twin sphere straight down its gullet. Fire exploded from its back end, leaving just a hollow tubular shell glowing red inside, as it tumbled past in the wake of the sphere that had killed it.
Mika’s subsequent analysis of gathered data revealed this thing as the simplest of biomechs. It possessed a mouth and a stomach, doubtless to gather materials for its own growth and also for the growth of the nodes spread throughout its body like tumours. It breathed accretion dust which it burned in its ram-jet to provide mobility, and she wondered if it could reproduce itself or was just a machine for producing Jain nodes.
Later, Mika observed a mass of biomechs shoaling around another unfamiliar object like a giant flatfish, tearing chunks from it as it sluggishly dodged and weaved by firing off rows of chemical jets positioned along its edges. Two of the smaller biomechs on the nearer side of the shoal now sped over to attack the Dragon spheres, only to be nailed inevitably by white lasers. Only after studying her scan data later did she classify them as the same sort of thing as the earlier attacker. Certainly these biomechs weren’t in any way standardized, more like heavily mutated.
‘So they attack and kill each other,’ she observed.
‘Out at the edges of the disc they still retain much of Erebus’s programming,’ Dragon supplied. ‘In here they are wilder in behaviour.’ Then, after a pause, Dragon added, ‘I have received disturbing news.’
Disturbing news? What kind of news ever disturbed Dragon? ‘Well don’t keep me waiting.’
‘Through my contact within the Polity—’
‘Meaning a certain homicidal Golem called Mr Crane.’
‘Just so. Through him I have learned Erebus’s ultimate plan, and that plan is now in motion. Erebus has knocked out a large proportion of the runcible network, which in turn has caused massive U-space disruption, stranding many ECS fleets uselessly at their bases. Erebus’s way is now clear to take the bulk of its forces directly against Earth.’
‘What?’
‘Fortunately a weapon has been deployed in order to block this attack, information Mr Crane obtained having proved essential for the success of this defence. He is now aboard the aforementioned weapon and located at the very centre of events. I will keep you apprised as necessary.’
Mika felt slightly sick and again guilty because she was not back there. ‘So the Polity AIs are on top of things?’
‘If only that were so.’
‘What do you mean?’
No reply.
‘Dammit! What do you mean?’
Mika sat waiting for a long moment, but still Dragon gave her no answer. She then got angry with herself for both demanding or expecting one; she had been lucky thus far with the quantity of lucid information Dragon had supplied. She sat staring at her screen, mulling over the latest news, then applied herself to pushing it from her mind and concentrating instead on the here and now. She could do nothing about what was happening back there, and must put her trust in such more-than-capable problem solvers on the spot as Ian Cormac.
After the shoal had faded from sight, some hours passed before anything else substantial came within range of Mika’s scanners. She felt she ought to get some sleep but just did not feel tired enough. Was this the effect of another of Dragon’s tweaks of her body, or of the news so recently delivered? Then, as she was gazing at a hail of Jain nodes bouncing from two hard-fields projected like the bows of a ship in front of the sphere, her scanners briefly registered something at the limit of their range.
What?
For a moment she thought the Dragon spheres had come close to some immense asteroid or another planet in the process of formation, but the density measurements of the shape vaguely defined on her screen were all wrong… before it moved. She kept trying to pick it up, but it remained elusive as if deliberately giving her only spectral glimpses of itself. Certainly it was something Jain, for in those glimpses she saw wormship structure writhing through Jain coral and a great demonic wing that in this environment could only be some sort of energy or dust collector, tri-mandibular mouths opening and closing like hellish flowers and the occasional bright stab of a fusion drive.
‘Dragon, what the hell is that thing?’ Mika enquired at last, for though this object lay beyond the range of her scanners, it might not lie beyond Dragon’s.
‘They attack and kill each other,’ said Dragon, echoing her much earlier comment.
‘And?’
‘Jain technology is not life, so is not restricted by the slow processes of evolutionary change.’
Some might have found Dragon’s didacticism irritating, but Mika preferred that to its vaguer Delphic pronouncements — and at least Dragon was replying to her. She decided not to ask further questions for it seemed obvious what Dragon was implying. Jain technology was capable of changing into forms as various as those produced by evolution, but change in the living products of evolution was a long slow generational thing, whereas in Jain biomechs those changes could be made individually in the mechs concerned — a process faster even than the discredited Lamarckian evolution.