‘You believe that?’
‘I do.’
‘Then do not carry out this task.’
Aphran looked upon the perilous stack of books. She seemed damned either way: doing this, she could be separated from Jack and wiped out; if she did not do this, it would just take longer.
‘Very well, let it be over.’ She turned from him to her chore, feeling him fade and distance himself from her.
Aphran picked up one book. Some centipedal monstrosity immediately wound itself around her arm and opened its pincers. She caught its head in her fist and crushed it, then opened the book. This one detailed Thellant losing two Separatist cells, one after the other, and fearing a trail would lead back to him, then subsequently learning that his contacts in those cells were all assassinated on their way to interrogation. He suspected ECS, but it seemed a crazy move to kill those who could lead them to other cells. Next, the Legate waiting in Thellant’s apartment, to claim credit for the killings and to make an offer. The centipede broke up into segments, each of which transformed into a scorpion. She knocked some of these away but others stung her. Worms propagated through her. She fought them, pulled more of herself into the virtuality, doubled and redoubled. Four Aphrans picked up books, and fought the killer programs—more of herself in, redoubling. Some versions of herself coming apart, others intercepting vital information from them. All the while, behind her, like strings being cut, she could feel Jack separating himself. Nothing she could do about that now, for she could not turn away from this task until it was done.
In the virtuality a virtual age passed, though only minutes in real time. Virtual pain hurt just as much as the real thing as the Jain tech programs ripped into her, but this Aphran was a product of that same technology. She reconfigured herself, sent in her own programs like informational DDT, stamped and splattered her attackers, cut off self-propagating worms at their source, confined nasty HK programs in briefly generated virtual spaces and then collapsed them to zero. She saw how Thellant’s organization expanded as a direct result of the Legate’s assistance, saw him grow rich and dependent. Numerous meetings between the two of them revealed snippets of information she put together. The Legate was just that: a legate working on behalf of someone or something else. It showed technical abilities beyond that of normal Golem—seeming suspiciously like the product of Jain technology. Eventually she gathered it alclass="underline" everything about Thellant and the Legate. And she now knew how the Legate might be found.
Re-absorbing her alternative selves, Aphran became one again in the virtuality, a neat stack of books before her and shattered chitin spread all around, vaporizing and turning to dust.
‘Give it to me,’ said Jack.
She stood alone, with just one channel open to Jack—her only link outside the virtuality. He had broken away totally and now she could be safely erased. She considered destroying everything she had obtained, or holding onto it and bleeding over small amounts just to extend her existence. But in the end she truly regretted all the things she had done as a Separatist. The arrogance and stupidity of her earlier self appalled and disgusted her.
Enough.
Aphran transmitted all the data, and Jack accepted it.
‘Do I die now?’ she asked.
‘Yes—in every way that matters to the Polity.’
Aphran felt herself contracting, going out, draining away.
No returns from the package he had sent. Thellant realized they must have opened it in some secure fashion to obtain what they wanted. With his being now utterly interlaced through the rescue ship, physically and informationally, he hardly felt his own body. Perpetually he tried to reach out to other vessels, probing for some lever, some way…
‘Thellant N’komo,’ said a voice.
‘You’re the ship AI—Jack Ketch. I know what the name means.’
‘Yes, I imagine you do. But I am not so merciless as that name implies. This is why I am going to offer you a choice.’
‘Oh,’ said Thellant sarcastically, ‘so I don’t get to live happily ever after on my very own little world.’
‘That is your first choice. There are those who would indeed like to isolate you upon such a world. Thorn did not lie when he told you such a place has already been prepared. The trouble is you would not live happily ever after. Over a period of years you would spread around the planet, using its resources to create grand Jain structures, but since the purpose of the technology you now ostensibly control is the destruction of civilizations, and none would be available to you there, you would eventually go to seed.’
‘Seed?’
‘The Legate has told you something of the biophysicist Skellor?’
‘He did.’
‘Though they might believe themselves to be in control of that technology, technical beings are merely its vehicles, merely a means of spreading it. In Skellor it formed nodes within him, seeds. It will do the same in you.’
Thellant already sensed that the technology remained his to command only while their two purposes concurred. The idea of it seeding from him contained more horror for him than could be supposed by others unoccupied by the Jain tech. He knew he would remain aware throughout the procedure, fighting to survive and to hold his consciousness together, but knowing his efforts to be futile. With his sudden tired acceptance of these facts, he felt things hardening inside him, imminent as razors threading through his flesh. Their purposes would utterly diverge should he choose what he already knew to be Jack Ketch’s other option: death. He poised himself on the brink of decision. Should he choose to die, the Jain tech would try to take over, since it put its own survival first, always.
‘Should it last for two seconds, I will take your silence as the latter choice,’ Jack told him.
Thellant clamped down on the structure that spread throughout the ship, felt it writhe and fight him. A spastic vibration threw him about in the flight chair, but stubbornly he kept his mouth clamped shut. He felt the structure within him creating a reply, drafting its acceptance of planetary exile. He glimpsed an image of himself as a soft flesh puppet, translucent and threaded upon black dense technology like a many-clawed gaff.
Not speaking.
Two seconds of eternity, then a shiny nose cone closing down on him like a steel eye. The Jain structure shrieked and thrashed, and the imploder struck. Super gravity drew ship and all down into white antimatter fire.
Thellant went out.
Human swarm crowded and stumbled in from the distance. Scattered evenly across the sky, apparently as far as the arcology edge, hung spherical scanning drones eight feet across, with high-intensity lasers mounted on either side of them. Their targets, Jain-infected humans, might be moving shoulder to shoulder with innocent civilians, and needed to be rendered down to ash. Coloron had calculated eight innocent deaths for every one infected with Jain tech. Cormac thought it ironically appropriate that these drones bore some similarity to Prador War drones. Thus far, fifteen targets had been destroyed, having evaded Coloron’s forces inside the arcology. None of them managed to join the main crowds, and so no collateral damage yet. Was that down to the efficiency of the Polity defence, or just dumb luck?
A line of AG tanks curved from horizon to horizon. Behind it, and above, massed other Polity forces: mobile quadruped rail-guns stamping about impatiently on steel legs, the ends of their huge cylindrical magazines, attached either side of their main bodies, looking like blank eyes; troop transports and swarms of armoured troops, some hovering in AG harnesses, some on platforms mounting particle cannons; atmosphere jets speeding in squadrons overhead, avoiding two massive atmosphere gunships hanging in the sky like city blocks turned sideways; a multitude of drones of all kinds swarming all about like steel insects. This then was the might of the Polity mobilized for ground warfare. Cormac considered it an impressive and sobering sight, but knew the forces assembled here to be only a fraction of a per cent of the whole.