‘Get us out of here!’
The lander began to rise, tilting to miss the second blimp. Cormac ignored the sound of small-arms fire, because it could cause no damage, but he felt a sinking sensation when something heavy hit the hull.
‘We’ve got a passenger,’ observed Gant leadenly.
Ten of the twelve landers departed Ogygian, the remaining two being unable to break away from the frozen docking clamps. Fethan shaded his eyes, more out of long-acquired habit than from any need to protect them, just as a second lander detonated far ahead and to his right. Clinically he then observed the remains of an ion-drive nacelle go gyrating past, and listened to the patter of other debris against the hull.
Cento? he queried.
It had been the Golem’s idea that they go down in separate landers, so spreading the odds that one of them might reach the surface intact and survive to tell the tale.
No, I wasn’t in that one, the Golem replied over their internal radio link. They could not use the ship-to-ship communicators because that would have alerted Skellor to their presence. Just as, much to Fethan’s chagrin, neither of them could interfere with the landers’ automatic systems to make corrections. Though if it was a choice between that and dying in a conflagration because the vessel hit atmosphere at the wrong angle, then interfere he would.
Any clue where we’re going to put down? he asked.
Too far out to calculate vectors, but I’d guess the target is that city and that, once we’re close enough, a landing program will cut in and bring us down in the flatlands right before it. Certainly, no auto-program would attempt a landing in the terrain lying behind it.
If those programs work.
Fethan sat back, feeling the perished synthetic padding of the seat cracking and breaking as he shifted against the frayed strap holding him in place, and wondered what they would do once they did reach the surface. Maybe by bearding Skellor up here Fethan and Cento would have been risking their lives pointlessly, but merely surviving to tell ECS what had occurred here Fethan did not like either. Maybe he was mostly ceramoplastics and metals, but that did not make him just a damned recording machine. He thought then about the other, even larger, battles.
Ships—ECS ships—had entered the system, employed a USER, then proceeded to attack the Jack Ketch. Instinctively he felt that these attacking ships had to be renegades, but he could not even be sure of that. Maybe Jack had somehow stepped over the line, and ECS had sent these ships to destroy him? Fethan suspected the chances of actually arresting a warship were remote. Whatever, that was a conflict completely beyond his own capabilities, one in which the ships would employ moon-fragmenting and AI-mind-bending weapons in some huge lethal ballet where nanosecond decisions vitally counted. Down on the surface there was perhaps some other conflict in the offing? Skellor was probably still in the city, operating the message laser, and Cormac was almost certainly closing in on him. The agent needed to know everything Fethan now knew.
We’ll have to go into the city to see if we can link up with Cormac and Gant. Maybe we’ll be able to deal with Skellor before it comes to the kill program back at the ship springing its trap.
Perhaps it would be better to pull back and let Skellor come. The interference to Cento’s signal, as much as the actual words, told Fethan he had been duped.
You’re still aboard Ogygian, aren’t you? he said.
More distant now, Cento replied, My feelings are all emulation, but still I feel the need for vengeance. Skellor must pay for… ayden, Hou… and … ss.
Who?
… burnt them… them all… no … be so cruel.
What are you talking about?
Cento spoke more, but Fethan understood none of it, as the transmission now broke up completely.
The thing about watching watchers, Vulture felt, was that no one had invented a greater exercise in futility. She was bored out of her avian skull and beginning to do the most ridiculous things to keep herself entertained. Baiting sleer nymphs out from under the rubble pile located on the opposite side of the outcrop to where the telefactor rested had not been the brightest idea, but at least she had only lost a few feathers. The current game was one recalled from her inception memory banks, and was another pointless exercise almost Zen-like in its futility. Having drawn out the grid on the flat surface of the slab using a piece of natural chalk with an attractive greenish tint deriving from local copper compounds, Vulture picked up a pebble in her beak, tossed it ahead of her, and proceeded with her game of hopscotch. Within a few minutes she was wondering about making the whole thing more interesting by using a sleer nymph rather than a stone. It was then that a shadow drew across her.
‘If your tunnels extend all the way out here,’ she grumbled, ‘then why am I out here watching that lump of fucking scrap? One of your pseudopods could have done it as easily.’
The Dragon head above was not very forthcoming. It tilted for a moment to inspect the hopscotch grid, before returning its attention to Vulture. ‘You like games.’
‘The alternative was twiddling my thumbs.’ Vulture stretched out her wings and gave a loose-jointed shrug.
‘I have a new game for you to play. Win it and you die, lose it and someone else begins to live.’
‘Oh, it’s all just plus points for me then,’ said the ex-ship’s AI acerbically.
‘Do what I want and I will consider all debts repaid, and you will then be free.’
Vulture wondered for the nth time about just flying away, but was not so stupid as to be fooled by her apparent freedom—no doubt there was some sneaky little program sitting inside her, ready to press in the point of a dagger when she did not choose to cooperate.
‘How about if I say screw you?’ she asked, just to be sure.
Dragon tilted this one head, milky saliva dripping from one side of its mouth. ‘Then I take back the flesh you have borrowed, even though it has no thumbs.’
‘Okay.’ Vulture hopped back along the length of her grid; one talon, two talons, then a beat of her wings to carry her up on top of the rock she frequented in order to check that the telefactor had not moved. ‘Tell me about it.’
Dragon described a game—a kind of three-dimensional chess and Rubik’s cube all in one—and how Vulture must play it. The description came across in no human language or machine code previously known to Vulture, but she understood it, was fascinated, and a little horrified by what it all implied for an AI like herself. It meant there was a hell for her kind.
‘But why?’ Vulture eventually asked. ‘Why not just destroy the damned machine?’
‘Because I can,’ Dragon replied cryptically.
Cormac held up his arm and, with merely thought, recalled Shuriken to its holster. Okay, he’d found the snake in the woodpile; now the trick was to pull its fangs without it biting him, blindfolded. ‘Set it on auto—the direction we’re going.’