Finally they arrived at the perimeter Coloron had cut, where smoke gusted across a burnt-out stadium. Every surface was layered with soot-streaked fire-retardant foam. Gobbets of foam tumbled through the air like spindrift, and the grass pitch was blackened. When the smoke cleared momentarily, Thorn could see only half a stadium. The smoke gusted from fires blazing on the other side of a gulf. Here, the arcology was sheared right through, and across the gulf he could see incinerated wreckage and girders projected into the air, separate floors shown in cross section. Thorn realized he was looking out at one edge of a separated piece of the arcology, standing like some vast tower block, bomb-wrecked all around its exterior.
Down on the blackened grass were deployed monitors and a sparse scattering of dracomen, autoguns, and two armoured vehicles with twin front turrets that mounted proton cannons facing the gulf. Thorn also recognized Sparkind down there—not by any uniform they wore but simply by the way they moved. What was the human cost of this? No way could Coloron have moved the entire population out of there before sectioning off the area. The AI had made a choice and cut, excising Jain gangrene while necessarily removing healthy tissue as well. It was a harsh emotionless calculation of loss and gain, probably assessed down to a hundred decimal places.
‘Azroc, Golem,’ Scar pointed.
Thorn glanced at the dracoman, accepting that Scar was communicating with AI systems at a level he himself could not. He wondered if he should really get himself an aug or a gridlink, but resented the idea. He led the way down steps between charcoaled tiers of seats still crackling and plinking as they cooled. The Golem stood beside one of the armoured vehicles, leaning against it, with a pulse-rifle tucked under one arm. His back was to Thorn and the dracomen as they approached, but he pushed himself away from the vehicle and turned as they drew close.
‘I would be interested to know how you intend to capture and contain the cause of all this,’ Azroc said and stabbed a thumb over his shoulder back towards the newly burnt canyon and, almost as if in response, there came from the gulf a distant flashing followed by dull thunder. ‘See,’ the Golem continued, ‘I’ve a hundred thousand troops surrounding the area, a hundred and fifty thousand drones and that figure growing, Sparkind’—he nodded to some of the troops gathered round to hear their exchange—‘and an interesting array of weaponry. But we won’t manage to contain it for much longer. Come with me.’ He led the way across to the jagged melted edge where the stadium had been sheared right through. More flashes from below, more thunder. Thorn recognized the air-rending scream of proton fire.
‘Look there.’ Azroc pointed down and across. ‘There’ll probably be another one from there at any moment.’
A girder projected from the floor immediately below a row of apartments that had been sliced through, lined up like lignin cells. After a moment something began snaking along the girder, spiralling round it like a fast-growing vine. It groped through the air, thickening with peristaltic pulses. Abruptly it speared out, thinning down to carry itself across. A double flash, and it became etched black against red fire, then beaded like a length of heated solder and dropped out of the air.
‘You seem to be managing,’ said Thorn.
The Golem emulated a perfect wince. ‘The frequency of attacks is increasing. If that rate of increase continues, we’ll not be able to hold it back for longer than another ten hours. Seismic reading also indicates it is burrowing through the bedrock, and there’s no way we can stop that without destroying the arcology itself.’
‘Fresh troops?’ Thorn enquired.
‘After the dracomen came in, all the runcibles went outport to isolation stations. Now tell me, what do you want?’
‘We need access to the Jain substructure itself.’
‘Why?’
Thorn dipped into his pocket and removed the memstore. ‘I’ll let someone else explain.’ He tossed the device across and Azroc caught it. The link must have been made by radio for, after a moment, the Golem jerked and shook his head.
‘Jerusalem,’ he said flatly, almost like a curse. He tossed the store back to Thorn, then pointed across the stadium to where three AG platforms lay tilted against the ground. ‘You’ll need to head a little way in to where the substructure is less mobile. You’ll be able to inject the program at any point, but you want to avoid having the structure inject itself into you. We lost a unit of forty troops like that, then had to destroy them when they came back.’ He paused, directed his attention towards Scar and the other dracomen. ‘Understand, however, it can’t take dracomen. If you go over there with dracomen you come back with them, and that will assure me that you have not been taken over. Come back without them and I blow you out of the air.’
‘Understood,’ said Thorn, turning away.
The Theta-class attack ship King of Hearts coasted through midnight void. A blue half-mile of composite shaped like a cuttlefish bone, it carried outriggers on either side, holding torpedo-shaped weapons nacelles. King, the ship’s AI, felt utterly alone, not because of its location—deep space being its natural element — but because it was outcast. King, along with its companion AIs Sword and Reaper, of the ships Excalibur and Grim Reaper, had chosen self-interest over the consensus of Polity AIs that found its ultimate expression in Earth Central. They had chosen a route to numinous power via Jain technology rather than the patient shepherding of humanity. The result of that choice was the destruction of the other two ships and King’s flight into exile. Truly out-Polity now, the AI had travelled a hundred light years beyond the line, out amid the rim stars, away from any earlier expansions of humanity or even renegade AIs, which mostly headed towards the galactic centre. It came as a surprise to it, therefore, to intercept an old AI code radio signal twenty light years out from a red giant orbited by seemingly nothing but lifeless rock.
King dropped easily into U-space. This would be worth investigating, if for nothing other than scavenging for water ice to refuel its fusion reactors. Then, surfacing only a few tens of thousands of miles from the asteroid belt around the bloated sun, King zeroed in on the signal and closed in by using its fusion drive.
The signal was a distress calclass="underline" I am here… you will probably not receive this for centuries… no U-space transmitter… conserving power… signalling only when solar panels build sufficient reserve… I wait.
The source was a war drone—a simple cubic configuration of cylinders as used in the early stages of the Prador War, with ionic drive, missile launcher and spotting lasers for the big guns, and with a simple mind. It had anchored itself, using rock harpoons, to a tumbling nugget of rock two miles long and half that wide. What was it doing way out here? This kind of drone did not possess U-space drive, and it could not have reached this far even had it left at the beginning of the Prador War a century and a half ago. Not by itself, anyway. King drew closer and fired a laser at low power, targeting the solar panel the drone had extended across the frozen rock.