Mr Crane peered down at the back of his own hand, where a drop of the white mucus had splashed. Already the stuff was eating its way through the outer layer of brass, exposing superconductor fibres, and it even seemed to be making headway into his ceramal armour. It suddenly occurred to Crane that here was a design flaw: he could resist the heat and impact of standard Polity weapons but against chemical ablation his defences were clearly far from adequate. Looking up, he observed a complex foot come crumping down on the canyon floor. His gaze tracked up an armoured leg to the monster now stepping down from the nearby butte. A nightmare head—whose sloping front rose steeply in folds stepped like a ziggurat—swung towards him, tilted for a moment, then straightened itself as if coming to a decision. Crane dived to one side just in time to avoid a stream of mucus ejected from the mouth, which was positioned above four black-button targeting eyes ranged along the lowest fold of the creature’s visage. Where this projectile hit the ground, it smoked and bubbled, even dissolving sand.
Crane came up into a run, sprinting past the droon, but its segmented tail lashed round into the canyon before him. He then turned and ran in the other direction, a line of acid shearing the canyon floor behind him.
‘Ho, Bonehead! Ho! Ho!’ bellowed some lunatic.
Crane then heard the stuttering of automatic weapons; saw the droon jerk back with fragments of carapace splintering away from it. The lunatic himself was hammering towards him, perched on the back of a creature resembling the offspring of an ostrich and a hog. To one side, Crane saw a two-fingered armoured claw unfolding from the monstrous droon towards the newcomer, saw pieces splintering away from that claw under fire from a figure up on another butte. Crane ran forwards and leapt, slapping at the rim of carapace with the flat of his hand, and catching on behind the rider’s saddle.
‘Not too healthy round here!’ Anderson Endrik shouted to him.
Mr Crane was not to know that sand hogs rarely moved so fast, or that they ever had such reason to be frightened. The hog just kept on accelerating, its carapace jutting forwards, tucking its porcine compound head away for safety. It stepped on ridges and falls of rubble, dodged another stream of acid, scrambled up a near-vertical slope till it almost achieved flight. Higher and higher it went, following an almost suicidal course. Then it was out of shadow into milky sunlight and a frigid breeze, and on the plain it really opened up. When the droon reared its head up out of the canyon, it observed, with the two distance eyes at the top of its tiered head, only a retreating dust cloud which was soon joined by another approaching from the side. Even though hurting and extremely annoyed, it returned to suck up its partially digested meal of sleer. Later it stepped up onto the plain, and set off to sniff along a trail of sand-hog terror pheromones.
The rescue somehow gave shape to Crane’s nebulous imperative for survival, and also thus became one of the driving forces to his sanity. Memory was for him equally as much now as then—time being a protean concept needing agreement between the parts of him. Therefore, now dismounted from Bonehead, he still followed Skellor’s instruction, striding across the dusty plain towards Dragon, and he strode up the slope of the Cheyne III seabed to… carry out his orders. But a crisis had been reached, for what ensued when he reached that beach and the island beyond could not be consciously observed by those parts of his mind simply carrying out Skellor’s orders. Such a level of awareness would not begin pulling his mind together—towards sanity—but towards a place only a killer called Serban Kline had visited. And when memory of what happened on that island surfaced, Crane must destroy himself again and suffer only as a machine intelligence can suffer: breaking himself again to escape it, to preserve yet the chance of him one day being whole. This was something he had already done—many times.
Drifting above the planet whilst molecule by molecule he assembled replicas of certain items that could be viewed in the Tower of London back on Earth, Jack considered the slow single-channel methodology of human affairs and, unlike some of his kind, he did not find it contemptible. It seemed to him that those AIs who swiftly became impatient with humans and their ways were the ones themselves most like humans. King, Reaper, and quite possibly Sword, had not managed to attain the breadth of vision possessed by the likes of Jerusalem, or Earth Central (obviously), or one hundred per cent of the runcible AIs and planetary governors. Maybe it was simple immaturity? Though they were identical in appearance to Jack in all but colour, their minds had derived their inception from him only ten years previously. Jack himself had been around for twenty years longer than that—which was millennia in AI terms. Would he himself, twenty years ago, have held the same naive views? In the end that was where his theory fell down: he had always possessed that same breadth of vision, and still could not understand how AIs incepted from himself did not have it too. But then a parent is often inclined to disappointment with its offspring.
Speak of the devil…
Jack picked up the U-space signatures microseconds before the arrival of the ships, but even then did not react quickly enough. The AI had received no warning of any imminent arrival, so this could not be anything approved by the interdiction fleet. Fusion engines igniting, he began peeling away from the treacly tug of gravity and sent his own U-space package towards the Polity, warning that something was amiss, and relaying similar U-space warnings to Cormac and Cento. But then in underspace a storm rolled around the inverted well of the sun and bounced his messages out into real-space, where they dissipated.
The ship that had just arrived far to the other side of the sun was a USER. Gaining height, Jack began to accelerate on conventional drives as the other two ships bore down on him. He considered using radio to warn the others but, scanning those vessels, he recognized his own shape and knew they carried the equipment to track his signals to their destination. He also knew he would not be allowed the time to get out of this gravity well. He sent out a greeting, as if not understanding what was going on. It bought him a few microseconds.
‘Sorry,’ sent the King of Hearts AI. ‘But we know you’ll never agree.’
Terajoule lasers began searing Jack’s upper hull. He flipped over without adjusting his AG to compensate, so it slammed him down towards the planet. The lasers burnt his underbelly but, already diffusing in atmosphere, lost the rest of their potency in the cloud layer he slid underneath.
‘Why?’ Jack asked. ‘Skellor will just use you, and then enslave you at his first opportunity.’
Even as he flipped back over and flew at mach ten down towards a mountain range, Jack allowed enough of a link so that he could stand as the hangman on the white virtual plain. King and Reaper turned towards him.
‘Would you listen sympathetically if I told you we can obtain Jain technology in the same way as did Skellor, and control it like him?’ asked King.
‘I would, if you told me Earth Central or Jerusalem had approved it.’
Reaper hissed, ‘They are too human.’
‘Do you truly believe that? You know Skellor does not have the control he would like to believe he has.’
‘Do you truly believe that?’ asked King. ‘Do you believe that Jerusalem or Earth Central, once obtaining ascendance over that technology, would not subsume us all?’
‘I do believe.’
‘Then there’s nothing more to discuss.’