‘Took it completely,’ he said to Mika, then turned and looked up at the ceiling. ‘Jerusalem?’
‘Still here. I am maintaining simple voice transmission and reception only. Any image link has too high a bandwidth.’
‘Okay,’ said D’nissan, ‘it’s a waste of a lot of data, but I recommend full system burn. It subverted everything in the deep scanning sphere, then tried some sort of optical link into me.’
‘Agreed,’ Jerusalem concurred.
Nodding, D’nissan pressed out a sequence on the remote control he held. All through the centre screens flickered out and consoles went offline, with the same sizzling and burnt-circuitry smell as had issued from the scanning sphere. But clearly not everything went off. For a moment D’nissan stared at his remote control, then dropped it onto the floor and stamped on it.
‘Harrison,’ he turned and strode across to a catadapt man working on the far side of the centre, ‘trash those nano-assemblers right now, or they’ll be pumping out Jain mycelium within minutes.’
The catadapt did not hesitate. He picked up the chair he’d been sitting on, and proceeded to smash the two delicate machines with it.
‘Okay everybody,’ continued D’nissan, halting in the middle of the room, ‘we won’t be going back unless this thing is controlled or destroyed. I want all computer systems, all memory storage, anything with enough room to take code, isolated totally. This means that all optics, s-cons, in- and out-circuit emitters must be cut. When we’ve finished, everything must be powered down. I’ll want nothing in here functioning but us.’
Mika gazed at the console she had been using. It was still on, and its screen still scrolled that alien code. She felt a kind of pain when she thought of all the data she would be losing, but then realized it was probably all gone by now anyway—eaten by the virus infecting the whole system here. She reached inside her jacket and pulled out the thin-gun Thorn had given her, and which, infected by his militaristic paranoia, she had carried ever since. She then put five pulses of ionized aluminium into the console, blowing away the touch panels and frying everything inside it.
Colver whistled. ‘I don’t think that’s standard issue aboard Jerusalem? he said.
‘If anyone is still having problems,’ D’nissan said, ‘it seems Asselis Mika has the tool for the job.’
Laughter greeted this, just before the gravplates went off.
‘It’s fighting back,’ said Susan James.
Kilnsman Plaqueast watched the blimps departing from Overcity on an aerial search of the Sand Towers, their powerful searchlights stabbing down into shadowy canyons as they searched for the ship many had seen fly over Golgoth. He muttered and swore to himself about the high-and-mighty and their damned equivocal orders. ‘Erect barricades all around the city, and detain anyone suspicious, as somebody very dangerous and maybe possessing unknown technology might be trying to get in.’ For one thing, just about every citizen of Golgoth was suspicious, but he supposed the order applied only to those coming in from outside. But if he was meant to detain people bearing unknown dangerous technology, hell, how was he supposed to recognize that, and what degree of force should he apply?
Plumping himself down on a rock with his assault rifle across his lap, Plaqueast watched his fellows laying out the portable barricades and setting up the big belt-driven cannon. Already two mineralliers, caught wandering in from the buttes pushing barrows full of those malachite nodules women in Overcity were mad for lately as jewellery, were sitting in the temporary compound with their wrists bound behind their backs and gunny sacks pulled over their heads. Seemed a bit daft to him—their only crime was to go out collecting without sufficient back-up, thinking themselves invulnerable with the new weapons they carried. Already a substantial number of opportunistic collectors like themselves had disappeared amid the Sand Towers, no doubt down a sleer’s digestive tract or under one of the many recent earthquake collapses.
Then, Plaqueast noticed something very strange. The ground was being disturbed by a regular line of indentations heading towards him, yet it was not shaking. Abruptly he realized that he was seeing a series of footprints crushing down the sulerbane sprouts, and he jumped down off his rock bringing his weapon to bear. Then something knocked his rifle spinning away, grabbed his jacket and hoisted him into the air. Suddenly he could actually see the man who had hold of him, and knew he was in trouble, so started yelling. He saw his fellows turning towards him, but could not fathom their puzzled expressions: seeming unable to see him, they were now staring around in confusion. His assailant thumped him in the gut, knocking all the fight out of him, then hit him hard in the face, stunning him, before he slung him over one shoulder and marched away.
‘Over… here…’ Plaqueast wheezed, seeing his fellows stepping out from the barricade, but his capturer just walked up to it, squeezed through a couple of sections, and returned to the shadows of the Undercity.
As breath slowly returned, he began to struggle again, but to no effect. Out of sight of the barricade, the attacker slung him down on the ground below a wall of crumbling sandstone. He then held out a hand on which rested a flat, tick-like thing, its short legs stirring in a foam of slime, then tilted his palm so the little horror dropped onto Plaqueast’s shirt front. He tried desperately to brush it away, but there was a sudden pain in his wrist and paralysis spreading through him in a wave from that point of contact. Then he could only lie terrified as the thing crawled up his shirt, arrived hot on his neck, then attached itself behind his ear and ground agonizingly into his flesh. But there the horror did not end, for something was inside his head, taking his mind apart, ripping away identity, abrading consciousness. Through streaming eyes he saw his capturer had squatted on his heels to watch—and realized he was watching in some other way as well.
Finally, the last bulwarks of his self disintegrated, and Plaqueast was no more… which was merciful since some hours later his now mindless body began to hack and cough violently, bringing up like living vomit things that crawled away, again and again.
14
AIs choose their own names and, being on the whole such infinitely superior entities to us mere humans, their choices cause much speculation. This is perhaps why Earth Central named itself thus — the meaning of its name is simple to understand and only in the convolutions of the most twisted and paranoid brain capable of evoking any layers of conspiratorial meaning. Similarly, the runcible AIs usually take on only the names of the planets they govern. However, for ship AIs, through a fictional tradition hailing back towards the end of the last millennium, things are very different. Many warships will take on names consistent with their task, so there are endless vessels bearing the names of military figures or ancient battles. But still one might be driven to wonder about the arrogance of an AI calling itself Napoleon, or the double meaning inherent in a ship called Napoleon the Pig. Other choices for the names of ships are equally interesting, not to say worrying: for instance Caligula, Titanic VII, Stellar Suppository and Jack Ketch. And what must one think of a sector-class AI (embodied in a giant research vessel) whose sum purpose is to investigate the artefacts left by ancient extinct races which chooses to call itself Jerusalem?