Movement to his right. Flinching at the loud clicking of the automatic’s slide as he pulled it back, Thorn quickly stepped to one side and dropped to a crouch. Four shots thundered hollowly in the maze, but they were behind him so he missed locating them by any muzzle flash. Concentrating then on what he was receiving through his echo-location mask, he tried to reacquire a feel of the corridor’s junction before him. Unfortunately the shots had scrambled the touch data, so the mental image he was creating, by swinging his head from side to side, kept shifting—its corners blurring and multiplying off to either side of him.
Then he sensed three images: organic, curved, soaking up sonar. Three images of a man moved around three sharp corners, which in turn were drifting to one side. Thorn raised his gun until the mask was picking it up too, but in three locations, then moved it across until it lined up with the figure—and fired.
The man slammed back against the shifting corner, slid down, then began scrambling away to one side. Thorn tracked him, fired again, and again, until the figure scrambled no more.
Then everything froze.
Two attack ships, the Grim Reaper and the King of Hearts, have entered the system with a USER. I am under attack, and have jettisoned the VR chamber you occupy.
A white line cut down through the dark, and pulled it aside like curtains. Thorn could no longer feel the mask on his face, and the automatic turned to fog in his hand. Suddenly he found himself standing on a white plain—and before him stood Jack Ketch. The hangman lifted up his briefcase and inspected it.
‘You’re being attacked?’ Thorn asked, bewildered. He knew those names—weren’t they Polity ships?
Jack lowered his briefcase and focused on Thorn. ‘Yes, I am. It is unfortunate, but maybe certain AIs would prefer partnership with a parasitic technology rather than with what they deem a parasitic human race.’
‘Why did you eject me?’ Thorn enquired.
‘The method I have by now used to escape would have turned you into a pool of jelly in the bottom of this VR booth you occupy.’ Jack held up an illusory hand as Thorn was about to ask more. ‘What speaks to you now is only a program, and has limited answers. You have reached that limit.’
The hangman blinked out of existence, and the black curtains drew back across. Abruptly, Thorn’s hand filled with the handle of his automatic.
‘Jack? Jack?’
Movement to his right.
What?
Four shots crashed in the dark. One slammed into his shoulder blade and another into the base of his spine. Thorn went down feeling the shock and trauma he had added to this VR program he was running. The addition was to increase his motivation to learn this nightwork technique. He lay there bleeding, gasping, dying. Managing to turn his head, and despite what the shots had done to his mask’s sensitivity, he zoned the man standing over him. Then another shot crashed through his mask and took him into a second virtual darkness, briefly, then back to standing in a corridor in which lights were flickering.
‘End program,’ he said succinctly.
The lights continued to flicker, then died, as the program continued. Thorn put on his echo-location mask, and drew his automatic from its holster. It became a familiar action.
Some time after the Jack Ketch’s departure, the systems within the Ogygian began to shut down, just as fast as they had come on, and Fethan could not understand why. Lifting his hands from the computer console with which he had been trying to set up a com line down to the surface, Cento said, ‘I can’t do anything. It’s shutting down from inside, which it shouldn’t be able to do.’ He gazed at Fethan expectantly.
Fethan looked around inside the bridge. There was an evident intercom system which probably had some connection to the computer, for the broadcast of automatic and emergency messages. There were security cameras everywhere, he knew that, and sensors. So the thing he had fed into the computer was probably viewing them right then, and listening in.
‘I don’t even know what to call you but, whatever you are, can you explain what you are doing?’
The intercom crackled, and a voice Fethan recognized as that of the long-dead captain spoke up: ‘I have no name. I am a weapon.’
Fethan shrugged. ‘Whatever.’
The voice continued, ‘A message laser is presently aimed at this ship, and someone on the surface is running test programs through the ship’s system. If I had left things powered up, then whoever is firing the laser would have known that someone is aboard, or has been aboard.’
‘Skellor?’ Cento wondered.
‘Most likely. The computer contained a record of previous contacts, but none this sophisticated. Now, the sender has slanted the test programs to one objective: finding serviceable shuttles attached to the hull. I surmise that the sender will then instruct shuttles to launch and call them to the surface. I will give you adequate warning.’
‘Why?’ asked Fethan, then silently cursed himself as all kinds of fool.
‘So the two of you can board. The laser is being fired directly from the platform city, and a shuttle will not be able to land there. Any coordinates given, I will suborn slightly so that the one you occupy lands somewhere that gives you time to disembark and get into hiding.’
Cento stated the obvious: ‘We go down with the shuttle.’
‘Precisely,’ replied the killer program. ‘If it is Skellor who has summoned the shuttle, you will not want to be aboard this ship when he arrives here.’
Fethan hefted his APW. ‘I’d have thought, for our purposes, here is precisely where we want to be. We could burn his shuttle before it got a chance to dock.’
Cento turned towards him. ‘And if that shuttle is concealed by his chameleonware?’
‘It’s a risk I’m prepared to take.’
‘But is it a risk you need to take? Your hunter/killer program is here waiting for him to connect with this ship’s computer. This area of space is USER-blockaded.’ Cento held up his own weapon. ‘I would have thought your experiences on Masada, with creatures like the hooders, would have taught you not to have so much confidence in a weapon—or are you just anxious to waste your life?’
A number of things occurred to Fethan just then. He had lived a long time and wasn’t that anxious to die just yet, and yes he was putting too much faith in a weapon, but most importantly he had never told Cento what he himself had put into the ship’s computer. He could only surmise that the Golem and the Jerusalem program had been in contact with each other.
‘So we go to the surface?’
‘We go,’ Cento agreed.
The final deciding factor was that, in the ECS hierarchy, Cento outranked him, and in the end could probably drag even Fethan off this ship.
‘So this is what you want?’ Fethan stared up into one of the security cameras.
‘It is for what I am designed.’
Fethan briefly wondered about the morality of creating sentient programs that were quite prepared to go kamikaze to achieve their ends.
It had come from one of the two attacking ships, as they arrived, then spilled from the memory space of one of Skellor’s sensors into another. He had been about to blow them, thinking this some sort of viral attack, when the package defined its own parameters and waited. He downloaded it to himself and, hardly allowing it to touch him in any way, diverted it to one of the citizens wiping her mind first to make room for the incoming information. It was lucky that he did do this, for then a midnight wave passed through U-space and that dimension effectively disappeared. Skellor felt a cold sweat break out on his skin, and he instantly suppressed that human reaction. He had heard not even a rumour of this kind of technology, and that scared him.