‘It seems the Legate has just led us into some kind of set defence,’ Cormac observed.
No shit, thought Thorn as he observed a pumpkin-seed object go hurtling past propelled by a bright fusion flame, then tracked by laser and turned to vapour.
‘Why are we visible?’ he asked.
Cormac held up a hand and turned towards the legionary image. ‘You’ve received five hits, what’s your current situation?’
‘They are not explosive, rather Jain subversion tech which, given time, would have completely subsumed this ship. I have destroyed them: three from outside by laser, the other two from the inside with a particle cannon.’
‘You see,’ added the human from the Coriolanus—Bhutan, a thin individual with pallid hairless skin and eyes like razor shards, who sported twinned military augs, one on each side of his head — ’we flew straight into them, so chameleonware was no defence.’ He glanced at Thorn. ‘There are so many of the damned things, we have to use proximity lasers, and the resulting weapons drain negates the ‘ware effect.’
Thorn had not known that fact. ‘The alien vessel?’ he asked.
Cormac replied, ‘Completely ignored, and flying right through them.’
‘Has it seen us?’ Thorn asked.
Cormac glanced at him, then back towards whatever display he observed aboard the NEJ. ‘I think that highly likely,’ he shrugged, ‘so we’ll have to grab it and see what we can learn. I think that what we’ll learn, if anything at all, is that we are very close to its final destination.’
‘Could this be it?’ wondered Haruspex.
In space, through the transparent walls of the Haruspex’s bridge, the AI used a frame to pick out a small area and magnify it, revealing a distant object like some jungle ruin, still swamped in lianas, transported out into vacuum. Like wasps issuing from their nests, the seed objects were swarming out of large barnacle-shaped excrescences on its surface.
Bhutan remarked, ‘Looks like something completely subsumed.’
‘It looks like something that will cease to exist in about thirty seconds,’ Cormac added.
That brought about a silence as they all watched. Perfectly on time, it seemed a pinhole punched through the strange object as if it were drawn on a sheet of black paper held up to the sun. Abruptly it distorted and shrank inwards towards the hole. The view then polarized over some titanic flash, and next they observed an expanding sphere of glowing gas. Within minutes the Centurions penetrated this, sang to the tune of the Shockwave as it peeled their smaller attackers away from them.
‘Alien vessel is jumping,’ Belisarius—a horse head talking.
The scene greyed out for a few seconds, and around Thorn the holograms grew thin as a nightmare crowd. Then the Haruspex shuddered back into the real, with star patterns altered about it.
‘It’s still running in a straight line directly for that high-albedo object,’ Jack observed. ‘I would guess, upon observing us, it paused to receive instructions.’
Thorn sighed and began to unstrap himself.
‘But should we pursue any further,’ asked a new voice, ‘as we now know where to look? Should we not now call in the dreadnoughts? That our quarry is continuing along its original course might indicate that whatever awaits at its destination is not too worried about us.’
Thorn eyed the ancient Japanese man. He had a point: why risk four Centurions against an unknown foe?
‘But do we know where to look?’ Cormac asked. ‘This could merely be diversionary, and I’m not happy about bringing the larger force all the way out here until some target is confirmed.’ He gazed at Blegg. ‘Unless I am instructed otherwise, we continue.’
Blegg shrugged resignedly and disappeared.
Utterly connected and at one with the Heliotrope, as it rose from U-space into the real, Orlandine felt an amusement almost sublime. Her dreams provided her with clues, and her partial interfacing with Jain technology provided the means. Now she could detect a node signature in U-space. In those first moments of abrupt mental growth she assigned programs to the task and, on abandoning the Dyson segment, decided to track down other Jain nodes. And look where that search brought her: full circle.
She identified the four Centurion-class attack ships, way in front of her, only when the trap revealed them, though she had been aware of something in that location, for a node signature registered from there. She then surmised that the other node signature far ahead of them issued from the alien vessel. It further occurred to her that the Polity ships might be using the same tracking methods as herself, which was probably why they did not lose the ship despite its chameleonware being as sophisticated as their own.
But what now?
She had decided to track down node signatures in the hope of observing uncontrolled Jain growth, to learn more and perhaps locate their original source. But pursuing these two could soon become a lethal occupation. Her most sensible move would be to abandon the idea, and flee to somewhere remote where material and energy resources would be easily available to her. A planet was out of the question, for she was still not prepared to take the risk of putting herself in so vulnerable a position at the bottom of a gravity well. Perhaps an asteroid or comet close to a sun… but, even while considering those options, she kept the Heliotrope on the trail of the Polity ships, who in turn might well be following the alien vessel to its home.
There were no disagreements from the AIs about continuing this quest, but that was not unexpected as warship AIs tended not to back down. Cormac felt Blegg’s point only valid so far. Whatever lay ahead might be something small they could easily neutralize. It might be very mobile, in which case halting now would defeat the whole reason for allowing the Legate to escape since, while they awaited the larger force, the Legate and whoever or whatever had sent it might escape. And if the Legate’s master turned out to be something too large for them to handle, then they could run, and only thereafter would it be time to pull in the dreadnoughts and destroyers.
Cormac returned from the bridge to his cabin, and lying on his bunk, worked through in his gridlink all the recordings of recent events. Jack informed him that the large object the NEJ had destroyed with a CTD imploder was once an old Polity ship called the Calydonian Boar. Apparently it had joined up with some other AIs that headed out this way after the Prador War. This suggested those AIs either ran into something utilizing Jain technology or alternatively tech arising from it. Or had used it themselves. The positioning of such a defence implied something to defend, which somewhat undermined his theory about a mobile opponent. He sighed and banished speculation—however it ran, they would achieve their aim here: not to engage and defeat some enemy, but to clearly identify one. It seemed they would know shortly to whom the Maker had handed over its Jain nodes.
He turned his thoughts to other matters. The memory package still awaited his attention, and yet again he began to consider the implications of that. He had once managed to translate himself through U-space, and though he could not see how that might be possible, it seemed nevertheless a damned useful ability to possess. He really needed to re-integrate those memories, to see if he could re-acquire that ability. However, he remained reluctant to venture into that hell, those memories integral to what Skellor made him suffer. Other thoughts impinged: that he could translate himself through U-space might imply that Blegg, who claimed to be able to do the same, might be telling the truth after all, so was not merely some avatar of Earth Central. Perhaps they were both that mythical thing so beloved of holofiction producers: ‘the post-human’. Cormac grunted in annoyance, dismissing the idea. The reality, he felt sure, was that the AIs were the genuine post-humans.