Polity Agent (7 page)

Thorn did not know precisely what the metallic object stretching around a third of Dragon’s equator could actually do, but its purpose was evident. The entity was under arrest, imprisoned in some way—perhaps the only way possible for restraining a sphere of living tissue nearly a mile in diameter and capable of travelling through space like any Polity ship. The metallic band was its manacle. Dragon, who Skellor came here to find, had also been caught in the trap sprung on that criminal.

‘It seems a shame to leave,’ said Thorn. ‘Things are still pretty interesting around here.’ He reached up, turned off the helmet projection with a tap of his finger, and lifted the VR helmet from his head—it had not been necessary to go to full immersion for this last look around. Unstrapping himself, he stepped down from the frame, then turned to watch as it folded itself together and disappeared discreetly into the wall of the chamber.

‘I take it we
can
leave?’ he added.

Jack, the ship AI, replied, ‘There is a thousand-mile-wide passage through the USER blockade. The twelve gamma class dreadnoughts guarding it have been instructed to let us through.’

‘That’s good.’

The blockade of USERs—underspace interference emitters that prevented ships attaining FTL travel—positioned a hundred light years away from this point in every direction, prevented any other ships getting close. It illustrated more than any other precaution how seriously Earth Central considered the threat of Jain technology. But as he left the VR chamber, Thorn spied four figures loping along the corridor away from him, and wondered about Earth Central’s other agendas.

The four figures were humanoid but reptilian: their skins regulated with green or yellow scales and their gait reverse-kneed, like birds. One of the four glanced over its shoulder with a toadish visage, bared many sharp teeth at him then loped on. Dracomen—120 of them aboard this ship, all kitted out in military combat suits and armed with the best in portable weapons the Polity could offer.

‘Is it just a case of putting all the bad eggs in one basket?’ he asked, heading in the same direction as the four.

‘That is certainly a possibility. Perhaps you’d like to elaborate?’ asked Aphran, abruptly folding out of the air beside him.

He eyed her. ‘Well, we have Jack, a ship AI, now partially melded with the recording of someone who was an enemy of the Polity. That’s one bad egg to start with.’

‘I am no longer an enemy of the Polity for I no longer agree with the Separatist cause,’ she replied.

‘Why the conversion?’

‘I have seen and understood too much.’

‘And I am supposed to believe that?’

‘What anyone believes is irrelevant—the facts of my existence, or otherwise, won’t change,’ she said.

‘Those being?’

‘I’m a second generation memcording of a murderess, and the only reason I haven’t been erased is because I’ve been useful, and because my consciousness has become closely entangled with Jack’s. I am incapable of doing anything harmful against the Polity because of that last factor, and the moment those two conditions change I don’t think I’ll survive long.’

‘Okay, I’ll accept that for now. Another bad egg is myself, who has been in contact with Jain technology—just like yourselves. And then there’s the dracomen: the offspring you might say of the sowing of the dragon’s teeth. They’re a product of Dragon and, though they’ve agreed to join the Polity, we don’t fully understand their biology let alone their motivations.’

‘Yes, those are the eggs,’ said Aphran, and abruptly disappeared.

Thorn considered: Aphran
had
been useful, she also saved Jack when that AI’s ship body—the
Jack Ketch—
was destroyed. Quite probably she did no longer espouse the Separatist cause. However, Polity justice was harsh and unforgiving. As a Separatist she had taken lives, and nothing she had done since could change that.

Reaching the end of the corridor, Thorn palmed the lock beside the armoured door, which proceeded to roll back into the wall. Then he entered a part of the ship that smelt like a terrarium full of snakes. A ramp led him down into a wider corridor, with doors along either side. Flute grass matting covered the floor—something the dracomen must have brought from what had been their homeworld of only a few years, since a Dragon sphere sacrificed its own physical substance there in order to create their kind. Treading over this, Thorn peered through one open door into a small cabin containing four bunks—and two dracomen. One of them sat on the floor, its eyes closed while it assembled the component parts of a rail-gun scattered all around it. The other reclined on a bunk, its feet braced against the bunk above—something it could easily do with the bird-like configuration of its legs. It was studying a palm console, its proton weapon propped beside it. Thorn shook his head and moved on.

About fifty dracomen occupied the large chamber at the far end of the corridor. Some of them practised hand-to-hand combat moves in which Thorn recognized some elements of his own training. Why they felt the need to train was beyond him, since a dracoman could tear any normal human apart without breaking into a sweat . . . not that they did sweat. Others sat at tables, on the strange saddle-like affairs they used as chairs. They were either studying or playing games—it was difficult to tell. Another group dismantled a mosquito pulse-gun—a semi AI weapon that wandered about on six legs and did bear some resemblance to that blood-sucking insect. Everyone looked busy.

‘Up here.’

Thorn glanced up. A catwalk ran around the chamber and on it awaited Aphran’s hologram and some more dracomen. Looking higher Thorn saw almost a reflection of what he saw down here. The cylindrical chamber extended across the ship, from hull to hull, and ended in another gravplated floor on the other side. Equidistant between the two floors, where their effect cancelled out, lay a caged zero-G area where more dracomen practised combat moves. He located a nearby stair and climbed up it to join Aphran.

‘What do you think?’ she asked.

‘I haven’t made up my mind yet.’ Thorn studied one of the nearby dracomen. ‘Now, nobody told me
he
was going to be here.’

The dracoman turned. He looked much like his fellows, but for an ugly scar running from one nostril up to just below one eye. Nicknamed Scar, he retained that name like the disfigurement itself, even though dracomen could consciously instruct their bodies to heal such physical damage. He was one of the first two dracomen created by the Dragon sphere destroyed at Samarkand, and, if there could be such a thing, was the leader of his kind.

‘Thornss,’ Scar lisped, blinking huge eyes, his slotted pupils narrowing.

‘Why are you here, Scar?’

‘To serve the Polity.’

‘How?’

‘By obeying.’

‘Obeying who?’

Scar extended first his arm, then one clawed finger. ‘You.’

* * * *

Cormac remembered his first sight of the Maker, of that race called ‘the Makers’. On the planet Viridian it shot out of an ancient missile silo like a white-hot jack-in-the-box. He saw the workings of its body like a glassy display of flasks and tubes in a chemistry laboratory—it seemed the fantastic creation of some godlike glass-maker. His overall impression was first of a Chinese dragon, but then that changed. It seemed made of glass supported by bones like glowing tungsten filaments. It possessed a long swanlike neck ending in a nightmare head with something of a lizard and something of a preying mantis about it. It opened out wings, batlike at first, then taking on the appearance of a mass of sails. A heavy claw, or maybe a hand shaped like a millipede, gripped the edge of the silo. Its glowing bullwhip tail thrashed the air, sprouted sails, fins, light. Only later did he discover his initial belief that this was some kind of energy creature to be false. It was all projection: holographic and partially telepathic. The creature went out of his remit then, to Earth. He later loaded a report from there about this being. The creature’s true nature could not be discovered even by forensic AIs. The projection it generated seemed a defensive measure they could not penetrate, and the only fact confirmed was its need to eat specific kinds of vegetative matter, which only proved it to be an organic lifeform.

‘We weren’t due to go into coldsleep until six months into the journey, as there was still a lot to do,’ explained Chaline. ‘But right away all of us started experiencing these weird dreams. The Maker toned down its projection for a while, then requested a Golem chassis and some stock syntheflesh. It took this into the area it occupied—a spherical zero-G chamber it had made secure against scanning—then after two days the Golem walked out. We didn’t know if it was telefactored from inside the chamber or if the Maker now occupied it somehow. Not then we didn’t. But from that moment the Golem became the Maker to us.’

‘What about the appearance of the Golem itself?’ Cormac asked.

‘Male, dark hair, red eyes—very dramatic. Of course then it renamed itself.’ Chaline gave a cynical shake of her head. ‘Called itself, himself, Lucifer.’

Cormac placed his elbows on the table, interlaced his fingers and rested his chin on them. ‘Do I detect something of Dragon’s humour there?’

‘I don’t know. Humour or hubris—you tell me.’

‘Tell me about the dreams.’

‘Mostly of hiding and being terrified, very often after either running, crawling or swimming—never really clear.’ She gestured over her shoulder. ‘Graham, the haiman sent along to study Maker/human interaction aboard the ship, approached Lucifer about that phenomenon. The dreams stopped immediately afterwards—about a month before we went into coldsleep. I think Graham regretted that, those dreams being yet another source of data, but the rest of us were glad. Graham then, of course, had us describing all those dreams in detail. He was particularly happy with me,’ she tapped her temple, ‘because I’d recorded some of mine.’

‘And did Graham come to any conclusions?’

She nodded. ‘He reckoned we’d picked up stuff from its subconscious and that the activities we dreamed were of some creature dragging itself across mud to escape predators. He theorized that the Makers were some lifeform much like mudskippers, either that or we’d picked up stuff from their presentient past—the Maker equivalent of the reptile brain.’

Cormac grimaced: it somehow figured that such a creature would project the facade of a godlike alien seemingly constructed of light.

‘Did Lucifer go into coldsleep too?’ he asked.

‘According to Graham, he had enough equipment in his chamber to build something. And Lucifer declared he would be going into hibernation—that’s how he put it. You’d think so, as eight hundred years is a long time.’

‘So then the
Victoria
arrived at the Small Magellanic Cloud and the Maker civilization?’

‘There was no Maker civilization,’ Chaline replied.

Cormac sat back. ‘Ah.’

‘The first thing we saw was a giant space station crammed with hard organic growth—like some plant had germinated inside it, sucked out all the nutrient, and then died. We started our approach to that place and all our meteor lasers started firing. Space all around it was filled with clouds of small hard objects—the size of a golf ball and incredibly dense. Lucifer told us to pull away, or we would die.’

‘Jain substructure, and Jain nodes.’

She stared at him questioningly.

‘Jerusalem, can you update Chaline on recent events: specifically Skellor and his subversion of the
Occam Razor?
And related matters Jain?’

Chaline tilted her head and pressed her fingertips against her temple. Cormac got up and walked over to a nearby dispensing unit, sending his request to it, via his gridlink, before he even got there. A cup of hot green tea awaited him. He took it up and sipped, remaining by the dispenser. It would take Chaline about five minutes to absorb all the information. When he finally finished his tea and returned to his chair, she was shaking her head.

‘Exactly the same. We found ships, and then we found a whole world infested like that.’ She looked up. ‘But it stops, you know? Sentient life sets this Jain technology growing, it takes something, technological knowledge . . . something. Those sentient beings can use it for a while to obtain power, knowledge, whatever, then it seeds, destroying them in the process. Lucifer’s people thought they had it under control.’

‘So what happened?’

‘Obviously they did not have it under control.’

‘I meant during your journey.’

‘Lucifer retreated to his chamber, and for a while the dreams returned. We continued our survey, moving into the heart of the Maker realm. It was small compared to the Polity—mainly in a stellar cluster of about five thousand suns. Apparently this was due to what Lucifer called the “Consolidation”. Their civilization expanded to a certain point, but on becoming aware of other spaceborne civilizations—their first encounter was with Jain technology, so you can imagine how wary that made them—they decided on no further expansion until they felt themselves ready.’

‘So Lucifer came out of his chamber.’

‘Yes, very agitated—it showed, even through the Golem he inhabited—but then his entire species seemed to have been wiped out. I guess that sort of disaster is going to put an overload into the buffers of even the most hardened individualist.’ Chaline shrugged. ‘He provided us with signal codes and frequencies to transmit on—Maker realspace com was on the wide band of the hydrogen spectrum, and U-space com was weirdly encoded. We searched and we called and called, but there was nothing at first. Then we started to get stuff back on Maker channels, but it was loaded with programs we didn’t really want—they propagated like viruses then self-assembled into some really nasty subversion routines. You could call them worms but they were a damned sight more complex than that—nearly AI. It was only with Lucifer’s help that we managed to shut them down. Victoria, the ship AI, needed to completely disconnect herself while we cleared the rest of the systems. One program even took over a nanoassembler and started producing this Jain tech, so we had to eject an entire laboratory into space.’