Using minimal power, the Legate nudged its vessel towards the near edge of the shimmer-shield, for fewer sensors would be active there after having been damaged by the explosion. Its ship turned concave side down to hull metal that had been rippled into waves by the blast. The vessel injected nanofilaments to bind itself in place—still invisible to most forms of detection. Then came a shifting of the vessel’s inner components. It heaved like some animal vomiting, split along one side, and the Legate slid out turning its feet down to the metal, stood up, bonding with the similar nanofilaments, and walked. Momentarily the Legate became visible while detaching from the ‘ware effect of its vessel, but then its own ‘ware came on and it faded from existence again. Stepping to the edge of the shimmer-shield it peered inside.
Two ant-shaped drones clung to twisted metalwork and emitted pools of light in which two human women clad in monofilament oversuits worked. The women were scanning and sampling physical evidence. One of them wore an aug; the Legate lightly touched then pulled away from this nexus of the AI network, learning the other woman to be gridlinked. It considered going in there, disabling the drones, and snatching from the humans whatever it could. Too intrusive, too obvious. Anyway, the Legate needed more than just the physical evidence; it needed anything informational which, by the fact that these two worked in here now, would have already been removed to be scanned and assessed by forensic AI.
The Legate turned and strode away across the hull, eventually stopping by a service lock constructed for inspection drones. Scraping sharp fingers across hull it scanned through—ultrasound by touch—and soon located the control mechanisms. A low leakage of atmosphere behind this hatch enabled it to trace out the shape of a service robot lurking inside, like a trapdoor spider. It pressed its palm flat over the control mechanism, injected filaments, each tipped with a micron diameter thermic lance, burnt through the hull, connected, and then feeding power from inside itself operated the mechanism. The hatch thumped up, a slight puff of air escaping, and slid aside. The maintenance drone immediately came online, its lensed sensory head tilting upwards. The Legate reached down, grabbed for it, pulled it out and smashed it down on the hull, once, twice, stabbed a hand through its outer casing and gutted it, located its small crystal mind, crushed that to glittering fragments, then sent the drone on its way into vacuum.
Once inside, the Legate wormed through maintenance ducts and finally came up against inner hull. It placed a finger against this softer material, injected a single microfilament equipped with a cutting head, bored through, then discarded the head in order to online the filament’s optics. Now an inner maintenance shaft. Forefinger and mid finger together, extending bladelike to twice their original length, were blurred along the inner edge by the activity of thousands of microscopic teeth. The Legate pushed its fingers through the wall and cut round in a circle, fast, a cloud of powdery detritus spraying all around. The excised section of wall blew towards it under air pressure. The Legate slid through pulling the removed section back into place. Breach sealant automatically ejected from the wall itself to seal the cut line. An alarm would sound somewhere but, because the sealant had dealt with the problem only a maintenance drone would be sent. The assumption would be of a micrometeorite puncture. By the time they discovered any different, the Legate would be gone from here.
10
Separatism is a cover-all label for those who rebel violently against the rule of AIs and would like to reinstate some mythical halcyon time when humans ruled themselves with justice and wisdom. Their political ideologies are based on a mish-mash of ideas sampled seemingly at random from opaque political tracts that have appeared over the last six hundred years. On the one hand they deify some of the worst dictators of ancient times like Chairman Mao and Stalin, claiming the intransigence of humanity prevented these monsters from establishing true socialist societies, while blithely ignoring the millions these autocrats murdered. Yet on the other hand they demonize AIs as monsters of a similar stripe, and are seemingly unaware of the personal freedom and wealth every human now enjoys, and the fact that the Polity is the only society that has come close to the ideals espoused by reformers of that previous age. And of course, to get what they want, it seems perfectly acceptable for them to commit any kind of atrocity. But in the end one only has to study the histories of those few worlds that came under Separatist control and managed to secede from the Polity. Their descent into chaos has been well documented in every case. As their leaders tried to apply ideologies refined in academia, without any reference to reality, the people divided into factions, sometimes into nation states, and often went to war with each other. Frequently the nuts and bolts of running a civilization were neglected, and social collapse and famine resulted. And in every case ECS has needed to come in to clear up the mess, and to cut down the ideologues hanging from the lamp posts.
— From a speech by Jobsworth
King gazed down upon the new system directly in line of Erebus’s present course. It consisted of a white dwarf star orbited by two gas giants far out in space, a ring of moon-sized planetoids orbiting close to the sun, and one Earth-sized planet orbiting at about the distance of Venus from Sol. Two moons orbited this last planet, obviously stripping away enough atmosphere to prevent the world itself descending into greenhouse cascade. King cruised in with its scanners at maximum function.
The equatorial temperatures of the hot desert planet topped 100 degrees Celsius, and polar temperatures did not drop much below 50, yet atmospheric analysis showed there might be life here. King first concentrated on the moons, soon ascertaining one to be dead rock while the other showed signs of recent volcanic activity, having spewed swathes of brown and yellow sulphur across its surface. Within seconds the AI detected wreckage scattered across the regolith of the first moon. It loaded to one rail-gun a close-scanning telefactor—just a tongue-shaped missile packed with sensory equipment—fired it towards the moon and focused through the moving device.
On fusion burn the telefactor decelerated in a tight arc around the moon, then descended on minimal AG between jagged peaks, silver-faced in the white light. In the past something had clipped one peak, spraying the entire area with slivers of hull metal. In the dusty plain beyond were splash patterns King first took to be the result of meteorite strikes but, on laser spectrometer analysis of the metals therein and by Geiger readings, discovered these to have been caused by small tactical thermonukes. A trench twenty yards long, ceasing for fifty yards then continuing for another ten, had obviously been melted into the ground by some high-powered beam weapon. The pause in it seemed to be where the beam had struck its target in the air, for beyond that point jags of ceramal and spatters of the alloys used to make bubble-metal, littered the landscape, and beyond them lay the crash site.
Whatever came down here had cut a mile-long groove in the ground, shovelling up regolith before it. King directed the telefactor along and above the groove until it reached the wreckage imbedded in the side of the regolith mound. A geoscan having revealed every angle of the distorted wreckage, King built a virtual picture of it in its mind, then began to iron out the distortions. Within minutes the AI recognized a much earlier version of itself: an attack ship but with its nacelles mounting balanced U-space engines rather than armament, its body bearing the solid angles of some ancient military beach-landing craft. Perhaps its mind still remained intact.
Upon further scanning, King drew the telefactor back after spotting some anomalies about this crash site. A tunnel had been bored through to precisely where the mind would be located under the covering of regolith. Around this tunnel there were marks in the ground: footprints.