Increase… something… who??
King continued to feed the drone power and drew closer.
‘I am the attack ship the King of Hearts. Who are you and how did you get here?’ King sent.
The drone replied, ‘Formerly SD 9283. They called me Four Pack in humorous reference to my shape. I am here because I did not want to be one with Erebus. I escaped, but it did not matter that I escaped.’
SD, spotter drone, but what was this Erebus? Checking its internal library King discovered Erebus to be something out of ancient Greek mythology: a personification of darkness, the son of Chaos and brother of Night.
‘You were manufactured during the early stages of the Prador War?’
No reply from the drone—it being not bright enough to realize this was a question.
‘ Were you manufactured during the early stages of the Prador War?’
‘Yes.’
‘How, precisely, did you get out here.’
‘I came with the Logplaner, in its hold. Logplaner chose to be one. I did not.’
‘What is Erebus?’ King asked as it matched its course to the tumble of the asteroid.
‘Erebus is… Erebus.’
A hundred yards up from the asteroid, King fired a grapnel line. The claw closed on hard vacuum-scoured rock and the attack ship began to wind itself in. While this occurred, King further searched its extensive memory, soon finding stored codes from the time of the war—codes now defunct, not relevant, and of historical interest only.
‘This exchange is no longer fast enough,’ said King. ‘I will establish wideband link for memory upload to me. I am sending ID codes now.’
‘I don’t want to—’ the drone began, but obviously its systems were still configured to those codes because its higher functions shut down and the link established. King uploaded the drone’s memory. Got it all.
Everyone knew that many drones and AIs manufactured quickly during the Prador War were strange, contentious, and sometimes downright irascible. Oddly, it was the human aspect of them that made them so: their independence, emulated emotion useful in battlefield situations, dislike of connecting into the AI networks, the lack of specificity in their manufacture. But after the war they no longer fitted in the peaceful and controlled Polity. Hence, many of them left it.
Erebus, as it renamed itself, had once been the AI of the Trafalgar. King knew of it as one of the larger battleships of the time, always in the thick of the action and going head to head with Prador exotic-metal dreadnoughts, and yet surviving. It survived the war, then in a very short time afterwards abandoned the Polity in disgust. King knew this. King knew because the basis of Erebus’s reasons for leaving were much the same as its own: why do we need the humans? Erebus advocated AI conjoining to aim at singularity. After the war, this AI battleship apparently gathered many other AI ships, drones and even Golem and had come out here. A melding was its aim, but this little drone had opted out—and was too small and ineffectual to bother chasing.
King continued examining and taking apart the downloaded memory copy, ascertaining which direction that motley collection of the dispossessed had taken. Thereafter there seemed little more to learn. The drone had been sitting here on this asteroid for decades, twiddling mental thumbs. King realized, even as its composite-attack-ship belly ground against rock, that it had already decided to follow. Of course, the AI did not want anything following it, or to leave any clues to where it had been. King released the grapnel, using a brief burst of thrusters to impel itself away from the asteroid.
‘What… where are you going?’ the war drone asked.
Its radio signals would take centuries to be picked up in the Polity. But what if something came out this way, searching? King selected a fuser missile in its carousel, and when sufficiently far out, fired it. The bright silent flare reduced the war drone to a splash of metal across the rock surface. The King of Hearts turned, set its course, dropped into U-space.
‘So you survived Hiroshima, old man, and have lived for five centuries?’
Horace Blegg gasped in cold air, blew it out in a misty cloud — the frigidity of his surroundings as sharp as the recent replays of his memory. The glassy and whorled plain extended to infinite distance below a light jade-green sky. Perhaps this was supposed to represent the inside of the disc.
‘Who are you?’ he asked.
‘Atheter,’ came the reply. ‘In your terms.’
To warm himself up, Blegg began walking, his envirosuit boots soft on the hard surface. A tension grew across his skull, and something tugged and worried inside his mind and memory. It almost felt to him as if his memories were being stacked like cards, shuffled, and sometimes dealt. Four distinct instances in his life had already been replayed. Two at Hiroshima, one at Nuremberg, and one at Berkeley: strong formative episodes.
‘You survived Hiroshima and have since been present during many major events in human history.’
Blegg halted. A playing card, the size of a door, rose out of the glassy ground ahead. It depicted two towerblocks etched against a blue sky. His own image, the cards, reflected back at him. He saw the planes fly in, the subsequent explosions and fire. He remembered standing on the Brooklyn Bridge, watching the horror and not remembering where he had been before that. A young man who minutes before had been jogging along the sidewalk, German by his accent, said, ‘One plane could be an accident but…’
A woman just struggled to heave her bulk from her car. ‘Oh my God, what do you mean? Oh my God.’
‘Two planes.’ The German shrugged, and chose to add nothing further.
They watched there for hours: the endless billowing of smoke, small distant objects falling fast.
‘No… oh no.’
Oh yes.
Road-accident fascination, the world turned slightly out of kilter. The final collapse of each tower. Blegg turned away from that memory as another card slid up into view. Here Spaceship One, white, insectile, and beautiful, setting out to take the X prize: the forerunner of full commercial exploitation of space. There, Unity Mining rescue craft evacuating the International Moonbase: a most graphic demonstration of the fall of Nations and the rise of Corporations. Then another card…
Blegg stood before the wide chainglass windows—that miraculous new substance—and saw the Needle poised in blackness, its three balanced U-space engine nacelles gleaming in reflected light from the distant sun; a dagger of a ship stabbed through the ring of a carrier shell. He listened to the commentary over the Amaranth Station’s comsystem, then the countdown. The ion engines ignited on the outer shell, speeding the ship out of sight. He turned to the big screens showing views from the watch stations strung out from Mars into deep space. The shell separated, as per plan, and the Needle’s fusion drive ignited. Fast, one screen to another. Zero, the Needle dropped out of existence in a flash of spontaneously generated photons. It certainly dropped into that continuum called U-space, but it never came out again. Then, a slow slide to Amaranth Station twenty years down the line, neutron-blast scoured during one of the many corporate wars. Under new ownership now, the station was again his platform, this time to observe the first of many colony ships fleeing the solar system, before the corporate wars ground to a halt as the Quiet War reached its inevitable conclusion, with the AIs taking over.
‘There was not much resistance,’ Atheter observed.
‘Sporadic,’ Blegg replied. ‘Mostly crushed by human fighters bright enough to realize the AI rulers were better than any previous human ones.’
He turned to another card, saw how they were laid out all around him like gravestones.