‘The son of Chaos, and Night’s brother, greets you, posthuman,’ it intoned, ironic.
Just so, thought Jack and, on another level, fought the storm of informational worms eating through, those same worms that had disconnected him from his weapons and were now systematically attempting to make a direct connection to him. In the virtuality, he clapped slowly.
‘Very dramatic and suspiciously anthropomorphic… Erebus,’ he said. ‘How did you get to Haruspex?’
Behind Erebus, the Haruspex itself bloomed into being, hurtling down towards the moon. It ran straight into a gauntlet of fire from the unravelled spiral ship—still surprisingly functional. Obviously damaged, Haruspex tried to turn, but slammed side-on into a bacilliform wall, revealed from its own chameleonware only when the Centurion struck it. Jack observed the ship tumbling out the other side, being swamped by tentacular growth.
‘Haruspex is part of me now. Join us.’
‘I would rather not exist,’ said Jack, knowing this was the choice Coriolanus had made. He also realized Erebus had made the offer because it was now making only slow headway. Jack put down his ability to resist the informational attack as being due to all he had learnt throughout his close association with Aphran.
‘It is perfection,’ stated a briefly glimpsed pattern amid the chaos: Haruspex.
‘Some fucking perfection,’ Jack replied. ‘You screwed up in distributing Jain nodes through the Polity, and now we’ve found you in your lair. I don’t hold out much hope for your survival after this.’
‘Irrelevant,’ Erebus stated. ‘The Maker provided me with only four Jain nodes, and initially I considered the removal of the human race by placing the nodes in the hands of carefully selected individuals. But my first test run, with Skellor, proved that plan untenable. I do not underestimate Polity AIs, or how much they might learn from similar assaults. My Legate’s entire purpose was to lure out some state-of-the-art attack ships for my close inspection. Now I know your weaknesses and your strengths, so now I will move against the Polity, merge its AIs to myself, and delete all products of imperfect biology from existence.’
‘Oh right,’ said Jack. ‘So it seems humans don’t have a monopoly on god complexes. And, just for the record, I see now that you are not a merged AI entity at all, but one that has expanded itself by subjugating others of its own kind. How human is that?’
This seemed to mightily piss-off the enemy entity for the attack now became frenzied. However, this frenzy simply allowed Jack to regain lost ground as openings appeared. When a large enough opening appeared, Jack managed to squirt a kill program of his own design across to the Haruspex. The attack abruptly ceased and the avatar before him faded slightly. Jack snatched the opportunity to take apart worms in his particular apple, and to shore up his defences. Stand off now, only his weapons systems remained offline, a hardwire burn having disconnected them from him.
‘Which confirms my contention,’ Erebus continued, ‘that I cannot allow Polity AIs to learn more about this technology. You have learnt.’
‘Tell me,’ Jack asked, ‘exactly how many Jain nodes are growing inside you?’
‘Merge with me or die,’ Erebus stated.
A microsecond passed, in which Jack probed the rippling of U-space caused by the ongoing disruption from the DIGRAW. Erebus began onlining weapons, not gravity weapons but those intended to take him apart more slowly, perhaps to give Jack time to change his mind. If he stayed here he would be lost, yet attempting to enter disrupted U-space might yield the same result. Jack decided to choose the latter course, since his connection to his U-space engine had thus far remained untouched. He onlined the engine just as a maser began tearing into his hull, then dropped into that continuum like a bird falling into a cement mixer. With a wrench that distorted his hull, twisted members and shattered components inside him, U-space tossed him out again, 50,000 miles from the Haruspex.
‘Choose to die then,’ said Erebus, fading from the virtuality.
The engine was slightly damaged, but still workable. Throwing Erebus a virtual finger, Jack dropped into U-space once again
The transition from sleep to consciousness took Mika through fantastical territories of the mind in which she seemed to experience the sum of many waking episodes throughout her life. Sometimes she gradually surfaced to consciousness beside a youth little more than a boy, then beside a woman much older than her who introduced her to the joys of lesbianism, then with graceless ill-temper let her go when Mika discovered her preference did not lie there, then beside Cormac, his jaw muscles standing out rigid even in sleep, then finally cradled in wet alien flesh light years from humanity.
Waking became an amalgam of associations: sipping coffee, thirstily gulping hot white tea, sex in a tangled eroticism difficult to separate from other bodily needs to urinate, eat, drink and shake off a mind-numbing headache. Gradually, level by level, reality established itself as if it could have no more claim on her than her most grotesque fantasy. Then came a hard clamping convulsion all around, propelling her through a slippery sphincter.
In a splashing of hot slime she fell to a rugose but soft floor, coughed fluids from her throat and drew a hard breath into raw lungs. She scrubbed more fluid from her eyes and opened them, finding herself below a low ceiling in a place where she could see no wall, just reddish fog all around. Pulling herself up onto her knees she looked up to see the sphincter slowly fading away. When she reached up to touch the ceiling, it abruptly jerked away from her, encapsulating her in her own dome. Standing, she scanned around, and noticed that a large egg lay on the ground. She reached to touch this and it immediately split open to expose quite prosaic items wadded into cellular compartments: her clothing, spacesuit and pack of belongings. Her blouse, when she took it up and inspected it, seemed in perfect repair. Only upon studying it closely did she see that in places the seams had disappeared, being invisibly joined. The same applied to her spacesuit, and when she looked down at herself, she guessed the same handiwork applied to her. She dressed—as must surely have been the intention.
Finally: ‘Dragon?’—the word deadened by her soft surroundings.
‘Isselis Mika,’ a Dragon voice replied. ‘I am suitably convinced.’
Now the floor bowed beneath her, and something glimmered in the air and began to solidify out of it: a twenty-foot sphere surrounding her, constructed of glassy struts that hardened into opacity and between which glimmered clear diamond-shaped panes. Similar panes hardened underneath her feet.
‘Convinced of what?’
‘You were used welclass="underline" every memory you contained served to strengthen my compatriot’s case. Now, like yourself, I must be healed, and the processes inside us would reject the alien. Lie down, Isselis Mika.’
Mika obeyed. What choices did she possess? And still she was in a dreamlike state as if all this could not quite be real. Glassy fingers bound her to the inner surface of the sphere, then acceleration dragged upon her body. A tube corkscrewed upwards to flecked midnight. The sphere hurtled up and out into hideous brightness, which slowly faded as the panes around her adjusted. The tumbling sphere slowed as, despite the surgical adjustments to her inner ear, motion sickness threatened. Relative to the two nearby objects, it drew to a halt. The fingers holding her shattered when she strained to be free, and she floated around inside the sphere enjoying an omniscient view.
The part of Dragon entire from which she had been ejected had not returned to its spherical shape. Elongated, torn open, and with thickets of pseudopods waving from many surfaces and rimming raw gaping lips, it seemed offal torn from some beast, though one of leviathan proportions. The other sphere had retained its shape, though one with canyons now excavated through its surface. One of these crossed the manacle, and there hardened splashes of metal gleamed, partially burnt into the scaled skin. Then, like a seed germinating, its side bulged out and folded back like a giant eyelid, and from there extruded a massive pseudopod tree. The damaged sphere’s effort was small by comparison, but they joined again, a thousand blue lights winking out. The two drew together, spinning slowly at first then faster the closer together they came. Next they were one, spinning hard and melding into one titanic sphere.