‘How remiss of her,’ commented Thorn.
‘It seems evident Aelvor does not like saboteurs.’
Thorn laughed then asked, ‘What about Jane von Hellsdorf?’
It was Jack who now replied, ‘One would suppose her bright enough not to try her own wares.’
‘I rather assumed someone forced that aug upon her,’ replied Thorn, turning away from the chalet and heading for the exit from the dome.
‘Most certainly. Her Sensic aug was deliberately sabotaged to scramble her brains, and selling such augs herself she would certainly have known enough to run a diagnostic on it before fitting it.’
‘Are we going to get anything out of her?’
‘I may be able to glean something from a full memcord. Aelvor believes he will be able to make one by utilizing her present Sensic augmentation. I propose to allow him to try.’
Thorn stepped outside. The area was crowded now. A large AG vehicle had arrived first, containing all the equipment the Osterland monitor force might need to deal with a major incident. Now a couple of large airvans were also down, and numerous air-cars. Uniformed monitors from the local police force had spread all around, conducting interviews, taking copies from all privately owned recording media. Scar had pulled his dracomen back into the woods at this stage; if their services were not required, they would return to their shuttle and head back to the NEJ.
Thorn studied a group of people gathered by one of the vans. It was not difficult to distinguish the haiman from the others. He faced away from Thorn, so all that could be seen of him was the ribbing of his metallic carapace, and a tongue of metal reaching up behind his head. Thorn strode over towards him. When he reached only a few paces behind Aelvor, the man turned and the same tongue of metal fanned out behind his head, opening out the petals of his sensory cowl. After a moment they closed up again and Aelvor grinned.
‘Agent Thorn, a pleasure to meet you at last.’ He held out his hand.
Aelvor’s black hair was plaited in a queue that ran down over one shoulder. He was bulky but not fat, one of his eyes was green and the other displayed metallic shifting orthogonal patterns. Thorn shook the proffered hand, felt a restrained strength, and noted the extra gleaming metal limbs folded down on either side of the man’s torso.
‘Likewise,’ said Thorn. ‘I could get used to this place you’re making here.’
‘Consider it just a beginning. The human race has spent thousands of years standardizing everything, and the AIs continue in much the same vein. The reasons for that have all been valid, but now we possess the technology to expand individuality and the unique.’
‘More than one way of skinning a cat,’ Thorn observed.
‘What an obscene expression,’ said Aelvor. He glanced about himself rather theatrically. ‘And talking of obscenity: where is she then?’
Thorn supposed Aelvor had asked that question out of simple politeness—the haiman probably knew intimately the name and personal history of everyone within a radius of a hundred miles, and their positions to within a square yard. He pointed to the incident vehicle and led the way across. Shortly the two of them entered the vehicle’s medical centre to stand over von Hellsdorf’s bed. She lay utterly motionless. An autodoc clung to her side with its various tubes and implements penetrating her torso. At the head of the bed one of Jack’s telefactors stood motionless—a large cylinder bristling with multipurpose limbs. Von Hellsdorf’s aug casing hung open, its guts revealed, and the telefactor held numerous micro-optic feeds in place within it.
‘Okay, let’s get to it, shall we?’ said Aelvor. With a shrug he extended his own two additional metal limbs. Thorn noted incredibly complex hands on them consisting of two sets of three opposing fingers, selector discs for multiple optic and s-con interfaces, and a telescoping device that appeared to end in just a very sharp spike, but which he knew to be the presenting head for micro-manipulators—the rear section probably containing thousands of different micro-tools. With ‘hands’ like those Aelvor could probably remove von Hellsdorf’s brain through her ear and reassemble it outside her head.
As Aelvor moved in the telefactor immediately withdrew its connection to the woman’s aug.
‘The Sensic’s definition is not the finest but, through its synaptic links, it should be possible to run a memory search program. Unfortunately from her we’ll now only get mnemonically associated fragments—there’ll be no chronological order to them.’ He now made connection with his extra limbs to von Hellsdorf’s aug. ‘You may get a few seconds of childhood where she, say, picks up an apple and bites it. The next fragment may equally be her eating another apple, seeing some child from the perspective of adulthood, or being bitten on the tit by a lover.’
‘Curiously, I do know what mnemonic means,’ observed Thorn.
Aelvor grinned, ‘Of course you do, but with most of my processes running a thousand times faster than… normal, I find I have to make a deliberate effort to communicate by ordinary speech, so I over-compensate. You do realize Jack could easily do what I’m now doing, but AIs are very chary of the haiman inferiority complex and so like us to be included.’
Jack’s voice then spoke from the telefactor. ‘Your inferiority complex seems sadly lacking today, Aelvor… Incidentally, I have just monitored an adrenal surge in the patient.’
‘Memory fragment,’ said the haiman. ‘She just recalled a particularly protracted orgasm.’
Thorn noted how the patterns in Aelvor’s abnormal eye were flickering and changing.
‘Increase in salivary amylase, and stomach acids,’ Jack noted.
‘Crab paste on toast,’ Aelvor explained.
‘Heart rate high, enzymic—’
The woman was suddenly covered in sweat, then the capillaries in her skin turned bright red. One of the telefactor’s arms swept down, knocking away Aelvor’s connection. Thorn felt something slam into his chest and throw him back.
Hardfield…
He hit the wall and slid down. Subliminally he saw the same thing happen to Aelvor. Smoke boiling from the ceiling revealed a laser stabbing up from the telefactor. It reached out blindingly fast, its manipulators hooked under the woman’s armpits, dragged her upright, then with her it rocketed through the hole it had cut. The ensuing blast bowed the ceiling, and a column of fire washed down through the hole. Shortly after, the telefactor crashed back through, blackened, its shell buckled. Very little remained of Jane von Hellsdorf. The air stank of burning bacon.
The Jerusalem dropped out of U-space and cruised into the Cull system. In his own quarters Cormac called up the required views on his screen, and once again looked upon his old adversary. Then, whilst he observed Dragon hanging manacled over the ice giant, he cleared his mind and tried to find the gaps in his memory of events here. He recalled Skellor taking control of the local population and using them as hostages to ensure Cormac’s own surrender. He recalled being a prisoner in some Jain substructure aboard the Ogygian—the colony ship that had originally taken Cull’s inhabitants there from Earth. He recollected being utterly under Skellor’s control, but then things started to get a little fragmentary. He knew Cento had concealed himself aboard the Ogygian and, while a kill program in that ancient ship’s computer held Skellor in thrall, the Golem sabotaged the drive to bring that ship into an inescapable orbit around a brown dwarf. The King of Hearts—a rebel AI attack ship—had then fired grapples onto the Ogygian, and while Cento held onto Skellor, Cormac went out to sever them. Somehow he ended up on one of those grapples, and the King’s AI, rather than killing him for preventing it obtaining the Jain tech that Skellor possessed, had released him to deliver a message to Jerusalem: Honest, I didn’t get any, don’t hunt me down and kill me. But how did Cormac himself escape from that Jain substructure inside Ogygian?