‘That shot would have destroyed his heart,’ Mika noted.
‘Yes. But the little doctor can grow its own replacement of any major organ destroyed. Right now it will be constructing something a little more efficient than the human heart, while dilating veins and arteries to prevent bleeding and keeping essential parts of the body oxygenated via nanotubes,’ D’nissan explained.
‘Nerve damage?’
‘The mycelium can re-route around most of it.’
‘So this is not really repair but replacement with something different?’
‘Yes, all it does is provide support to whatever remains, and even that is limited.’
‘How far?’
D’nissan nodded at the screen. ‘This is about the maximum damage it can sustain. If the victim was hit three or four times like this, his body would die and his little doctor would die along with it. Remember, that though dispersed, the mycelium is being hit as well.’ He shrugged. ‘It’s like an ordinary human body, without a little doctor mycelium—it can only survive so much.’
‘What about bones?’ Mika asked. With this constant barrage of questions she was trying to distance herself from what she had just seen, and to reacquaint herself with her customary scientific detachment.
‘They’re easy to deal with. It pulls them together and lays down calcium glue within seconds.’ He went on. ‘Essentially, anyone carrying this mycelium would need to take a number of direct substantial hits to be killed. Wounds that before would have resulted in him ending up under an autodoc will now only inconvenience him briefly.’
‘And Jain nodes?’
‘None at all. This technology is clean.’
‘Who will get this “little doctor” treatment first?’
‘Soldiers,’ replied D’nissan bluntly.
Mika gave him a fragile smile then moved away. She had stopped here, on her way to the shuttle that would ferry her over to Dragon, meaning to ask D’nissan his thoughts on augmentation, but after witnessing this test found she could not. The man was doing important work, supplying ECS with what might be a vital advantage should Jain technology once again get loose in the Polity.
‘Test two,’ announced D’nissan.
With some disquiet Mika departed.
Tick tick tick…
The sheer immensity of the ancient shipyard could not be fathomed when viewed from space. High up in a chainglass viewing blister, Cormac stood and gazed down into one construction hold. Far below him, silver bees of robots erected partition walls, floors and ceilings in layer upon layer like the cells of a hive. Now rising a hundred yards up from the original floor, the completed accommodation below them was already being occupied. The logistics of all this were frightening: how do you feed and water so many people, and what about sanitation?
Tick tick tickity tick…
The runcibles inside the yard now all remained online, transmitting in resources from so many different locations. More than a hundred hold spaces, originally used for the construction of dreadnoughts, were being similarly converted. Millions of refugees were encamped on acres of ceramal flooring in the other holds. As things stood, the shipyard was now full, more refugees trickling in only to fill accommodation as soon as the robots built it.
Tickity tick tick t—
‘You can stop that noise now or I’ll leave you behind,’ snapped Cormac.
Turning from the view, he eyed Arach as the spider-drone drew its foreleg back from where it had been tapping the sharp point against the chainglass. Grimacing, Cormac turned away, again considering how the last few days with Mika had affected him. Only a few hours ago he had been reluctant to leave Jerusalem. A doorway into possibility had opened and he began thinking of things that before he always pushed to the back of his mind: the possibility of a settled relationship with someone, his family, his own purpose, and whether it might be time for a change in direction.
As an agent, Earth Central Security allowed him a wide remit with parameters only loosely defined. It also granted him certain powers to carry out those tasks assigned to him via Horace Blegg. He could quit at any time. Only his sense of duty prevented that. However good at what he did, he was realistic enough not to consider himself indispensable. Perhaps the time had even come for him to hand over the reins? Thus he was beginning to think until his recent exchange with Jerusalem.
‘Are you ready to leave?’ the AI had asked him.
‘Frankly, I’m not sure I am,’ he replied.
‘That is your decision to make. If you do not feel capable of continuing your present assignment, something else can be found for you, or you may depart. Meanwhile, I have some gifts for you.’
The first gift arrived in his gridlink: a memory package he immediately stored.
‘And this is?’
‘The rest of your mind: true memories of what happened to you aboard the Ogygian. It will install to your mind the moment you open it. I calculate that you are nearly ready for it, the final part of that calculation being your own decision to open it.’
‘I see.’
The second gift arrived later in his quarters, delivered by a crab drone. It dropped the wrist holster on his sofa before departing.
‘How?’ he had asked.
Jerusalem replied, ‘A member of a clear-up team picked it up when they went to collect the remains of Gant. I used a nano-counteragent to remove the mycelium Skellor installed in it and wiped out his reprogramming of it. I also repaired the damage you caused by shooting it down… you do realize how it fought against Skellor’s programming by allowing you to shoot it?’
Cormac had removed Shuriken from its holster and held it out on the flat of his palm. It flexed out its chainglass blades, as if stirring in sleep, then retracted them. He remembered Cull, his long-drawn-out fight for survival there against Skellor, who took control of this semi-AI weapon away from him, and then sent it against him, and how at the last, as he targeted it, it had turned upright in the air to present its face to him full on.
‘Yes, I know.’
He slid Shuriken back in the holster, then strapped the holster to his wrist. It occurred to him to speculate on how subtly manipulative AIs could be. This gesture, now, in his moment of indecision? In the end, he could not step down with the Polity so obviously threatened. He could not live a normal existence with any feeling of equanimity, knowing what was occurring. Family? He protected them through his career just as he protected any other law-abiding Polity citizens. Mika? To remain with her here would be to remain at the centre of events, but ineffective.
Subsequently stepping from his cabin, he found Arach eagerly awaiting him, unable to keep its spindly legs still.
‘Are we on our way?’ the drone had asked.
‘Yes, we’re on our way.’
Now, aboard the ancient shipyard, Cormac began to make his way towards the runcible open to Coloron, Arach dogging his footsteps.
He found crowds crammed into a vast zero-g distribution centre, at the end of which stood a cargo runcible. The horns of this device encompassed a circular Skaidon warp ten yards across. Guide ropes cut in from all sides, tied off on a massive robotic handler crouched before the runcible itself. The base of this multiarmed behemoth ran on tracks extending the entire length of the distribution centre. Through here, warship building materials had once been transported. The handler then passed these off to other minor handlers in the tunnels branching off all around, which in turn took them to various machine shops or directly to the construction holds. This had not been a place for humans since everything moved here at AI speeds, and any human would have been ground up in the gearing. Now the handlers were still, the centre pressurized, and ECS personnel flocked in the air like khaki birds.