Polity Agent (25 page)

‘Scar,’ he turned as that dracoman came up to him, ‘make sure they keep you updated. We need to nail this bastard fast.’ He glanced beyond Scar to where twenty other dracomen gathered, all loaded down with proton weapons, hand stunners, and a selection of multipurpose grenades.

Just then a flash ignited the sky with turquoise fire. Out over the arcology a pillar of flame ate round in a circle. Thorn blinked, turned his head away from the glare until it finally died. A thunderous crashing ensued and the shock wave hit, leaving people staggering, shaking the platform and even jouncing the shuttles on their sprung feet. A ball of fire rose into the air from the strike point.

‘Jack,’ Thorn spoke into his comlink. ‘I’m thinking that maybe we have a conflict of interests here. Coloron is still trying to take out the centre and, presuming that to be Thellant N’komo, we lose our reason for being here.’

‘Incorrect,’ the AI replied, ‘Coloron has just cut a perimeter. There will be no further attempts to burn out the centre. All ensuing strikes will be either to create new perimeters or simply to prevent physical spread outside MA.’

Panicked citizens leaving, leaving in gravcars, and maybe just one of their vehicles carrying some small part of what now grew inside here—that’s all it would take.

‘Okay ... do either you or Aphran have anything for me yet?’ Jack was still taking apart the recorded mind of Freyda, while the woman’s body, now a blank slate, went into coldsleep. This task took up much of the AI’s capacity, so the other prisoners had yet to be subjected to the same before being placed in coldsleep. Instead, Aphran had interrogated them throughout the journey here—not verbal interrogation but via their augs. It was a complex and wearing task, more like searching determinedly through scrambled files than asking direct questions.

Jack replied, ‘Thellant’s main base is inside the newly cut perimeter—further proof that he is the host. After the failure of the initial strike to halt Jain growth, Coloron projected a protective
acentric
growth of the structure, so encompassed it inside that last strike. Outside that perimeter, monitors are now moving in on secondary Separatist bases, which on the whole are central to the riots or lie in the no-go zones. Dracomen are meanwhile checking their safe houses. Due to the cell structure of the Separatist organization here, not all of these will necessarily be found.’

‘Right.’ Thorn paused. ‘We need another way to search. Has Coloron tried hunter-killer programs?’

‘Coloron has tried and failed. Its programs are not sufficiently sophisticated to penetrate Jain informational architecture. Coloron is not Jerusalem.’

Thorn reached into his pocket and once again took out the memstore containing the HK program. It was dented now and there was a burn on its surface—from the shots fired through the roof of Thorn’s aircar on Osterland. He thought, however, it gave the box character.

‘Program .. . you are, I take it, up-to-date with current events?’

‘I am,’ the box vibrated.

‘Could you gain access to the Jain growth here via one of the prisoners?’

‘Substructure would be best.’

He pocketed the box. That figured; always the hard way.

Thorn led the way across the landing platform to the drop-shaft terminus positioned centrally, Scar and the other twenty dracomen falling in around him. He knew that his investigation might be coming up against a wall here. Thellant N’komo was the next link in the chain, so they must capture him, question him. But how did you do that considering what it seemed Thellant had become? Thorn could only try his best.

He stepped into the irised gravity field of a shaft, dropped through one of the ceramal tubes below the platform, past where chainglass windows showed packed soil beyond, was slowed at an exit with dracomen backing up behind him, and then stepped out into an open park surrounded by high foam-stone walls pocked with balconies and windows. Ahead, a line of monitors stood ranged behind delicate-stepping autoguns, beyond which a mass of humanity surged past, running until slowed by the crowd density around a nearby exit tunnel.

‘Keep moving. Keep moving,’ some com system instructed them.

Above the crowd hovered two gun platforms manned by monitors. Panic was palpable, and it turned to screams when explosions suddenly shuddered through the arcology. A high-up balcony belched smoke and dropped burning stick figures.

‘Keep moving.’

Thorn paused, checking his palm-com. ‘Just received a map.’ He turned, scanning around. ‘The crowds are too thick here. We need to go that way.’ He led the way to a closed maintenance door, which clunked and rumbled as he approached and slowly swung open. Next, a gantry alongside a sheer steel cliff beside which welding robots rose like the front ends of giant beetles with their wing cases and abdomens chopped away. The gantry widened into a fenced semicircular platform fronting a wide roller door for transferring heavy equipment. The door was jammed. Before Thorn could even speak, Scar fired his proton weapon into the ridged metal surface. In viridian fire, most of the door slewed away like foil in an acetylene flame. They ducked through, avoiding a small sleet of hot metal from one still-burning edge.

Narrow accessways. More doors. Corpses strewn across a deck where heavy robots stood on gecko-stick caterpillar treads; their owlish metallic heads bowed over multi-jointed arms for handling and cutting foam-stone and sheet construction materials. The dracomen spread out, checked the bodies.

‘No Jain,’ observed Scar.

They were just citizens ripped apart by rail-gun fire. Thorn guessed he would probably never know what had happened here, but he filed away the fact that dracomen could tell by the merest touch whether someone contained Jain tech.

Further access ways, then down into a small monorail station where a single carriage of one train awaited them. They climbed aboard and it smoothly accelerated away. Past them from the opposite direction came a seemingly endless train packed with people, their faces pressed against windows. Thorn’s team left their carriage when it stopped briefly to let them off by a maintenance tunnel a few hundred yards around the bend from a busy station. Thorn could not see the crowds waiting there, but their sound was a constant roar. Before he and the dracomen were even out of sight of the line, another train returned along the maglev track, their own carriage at its head, and now crammed full of humanity.

A stair from the tunnel eventually gave them access into a public corridor, along one side of which hothouse porches, lit with sun lights and crammed with foliage, led to private homes. Down the maintenance ladder of an inoperative drop-shaft, then along a gantry suspended above an autofactory. Below them monolithic machines conveyed ceramal casings to each other, hissing and reconfiguring themselves, cold-forging metal, electron-beam welding, inserting components in flickering blurs of hydraulics, spinning bright new metal and passing the casings on. Thorn noted exit shafts, like those out of some hive, through which departed floating lines of the leaf-shaped drones those casings had become: bare-metal, utile, armed. Coloron’s war industry was at full production, but the businesses of killing and destroying were easy. Concurrently, the AI’s logistical nightmare of trying to move its citizens out of the way was akin to pouring a bag of flour through the eye of a needle.

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.