Mika knew the Jain AIs were awake now and had heard that one story of the death of a civilization, but how could she gauge their reaction? She did not get the time for that. Before she could even consider how to interpret the wash of feeling, movement and shifting of blocks of alien thought, she was impelled to ‘tell’ the next story.
The Makers also ascended from the mud, but that took some time, for it was mostly what their homeworld consisted of. They never walked upright like humans or gabbleducks, instead were always on their bellies. They developed their fierce intelligence early, even as they dragged themselves from their seas, their physical form little different to that of the Terran mudskipper: a fish slopping about on tidal mud. Their physical advantage was their ability to generate flashes of blinding light, which evolution then refined into an ability to project illusions directly into the eyes of any predator. As with any other intelligent species their climb towards civilization was slow and arduous. But they got there in the end, building a technology hard and diamond-bright in antithesis to the soft pulpiness of their bodies. They wrapped this technology around them as defensively as their illusions. Mika remembered the one Maker she had seen. It was an apparent glass dragon — of the mythical rather than spherical kind — but in reality five parts hardware, four parts illusion and one part living creature.
In the Small Magellanic Cloud where their homeworld was located they discovered Jain technology and, being masters of illusion, they understood it to be a Trojan horse. But they were arrogant and thought they could master it. Their civilization eventually expanded across the Cloud, till they began to look elsewhere for room, but in the main galaxy another civilization was already expanding. Knowing the efficacy of Jain-tech in destroying civilizations, they sent a probe partially based on their own technology to spread Jain nodes there and bring their new rivals down. Bring down the Polity. Only their probe rebelled and did not obey its programming. That was Dragon’s history, for Dragon itself — all four spheres of it — was that probe. A Maker then came to destroy Dragon, but on its way in found the Trafalgar AI and gave it Jain nodes. Humans wrongly sided with the Maker, not knowing its real purpose and believing Dragon to be the villain. So they sent the Maker back to its home aboard a Polity ship which, on its arrival, found only the remnants of a mighty civilization digested by Jain-tech.
Now something immense was focused on Mika. She felt herself under the pressure of arid analysis, utterly alien and bewildering. She felt a flow of information and what emphasis was being placed on what parts of it, what was being inspected, what saved and what discarded, and it just did not make any sense to her.
‘There were also the ones we named the Csorians,’ she said, somehow. ‘Though we don’t know much about them, we do know that your technology destroyed them too.’
The focus upon her became even more intense. She felt something riffling through her thoughts. Everything was inspected, copied and secreted away somewhere. Under that massive inspection she felt herself shrinking down to a pinpoint.
‘Trafalgar was an artificial intelligence just like you,’ she said. ‘It used humans to initiate a Jain node and then took control of the technology. Now, calling itself Erebus, it is attacking the Polity and there is every chance the Polity will succumb: another victim of the same weapon you used to destroy the race that created you and I hope another unintended consequence of what you did. We need your help. We need to stop this now.’
Total utter focus upon her now, and she felt to the absolute core of her being that here was a power that could shut down Jain-tech, slice it off at the roots, or ever so subtly reprogram it into something less hostile. Then the oppressive focus upon her began to wane. All the massed information seemed to dissolve and spread out in the infinite area before her, where, like a drop of ink falling into a sea, it became nothing. Now, with the inspection of her becoming less intense, and because she had been here long enough to begin to integrate the alien, she began to understand, to recognize the Jain AIs’ reaction to her message. It was merely a massive, vastly distributed complete and utter indifference. They didn’t care; the rise and fall of civilizations mattered to them not at all. They felt no guilt about the damage their creation had caused.
Mika fell to the floor, her hand both burning and frozen, gripping a bulky silver augmentation torn from a dead man’s skull.
‘I’ve failed,’ she said.
‘I never expected you to succeed,’ Dragon replied.
Five more wormships gone, numerous rod-forms and other mechs incinerated and not a single captive from the war runcible, which was now just a spreading cloud behind Erebus’s forces. Erebus was angered by this, but such annoyances paled in comparison to the loss inflicted by the runcible — and it paled in comparison to a few words spoken by a ghost.
‘I’m your conscience, Erebus. I’m you.’
Growing steadily angrier, Erebus examined those words from every angle and would not accept them. It realized that there could be no going forward until this parasitic copy of a human mind was completely erased from its own Jain structure so again unleashed the HKs, worms and viral programs to track Randal down, even though they had not succeeded before. Then Erebus set about building a new software toolkit to use for the necessary excision.
‘Well,’ said Randal, ‘at least you’ll have fewer places now to search.’
It was horribly true. Less than a thousand wormships remained to Erebus, and that simply was not enough for an attack on Earth. Twenty thousand would have overwhelmed the defence installations scattered throughout the solar system, but a thousand would be turned to ash before they passed within the orbit of Neptune. Reflecting on this, Erebus brought them all to a full stop. There would be no quick victory now. It was time to run and consolidate elsewhere, to rebuild and approach this matter via a different route — the long route. Erebus was immortal so could spend as long as it wished building resources and planning the downfall of the Polity.
But first: Randal.
As the human ghost had said, fewer places to search. Taking into account the expectation that it would later be rebuilding its forces, perhaps now was the time to limit even further the places Randal could hide. The delay between this thought and subsequent action was infinitesimal. Microwave beams deployed by the nine hundred and eighty-three wormships swept about them in perfect concert, hitting rod-form after rod-form and turning each into a puff of white-hot debris. Erebus then began running diagnostic searches to locate every single packet of its own distributed processing space. There were many returns from still-functional remains of ships and other hardware scattered across the expanse of the corridor, and even some weak returns from debris falling into the areas of U-space disruption. Erebus targeted the latter first, before it could fall out of reach — high-intensity lasers stabbing over tens of thousands of miles until each of those signals went out — then began the methodical annihilation of everything once part of itself that wasn’t a wormship.
‘A little bit of surgical cautery here?’ Randal suggested.
Chunks of Jain coral still containing powered-up processing space heated and exploded into shards like those of shattered porcelain, and the little pieces of Erebus’s mind they contained winked out. Drifting insectile biomechs responded with programmed instinct to the sudden microwave-induced rise of temperature within them by flailing at vacuum with their multi-jointed limbs, then burned and shrivelled up. Shoals of silvery nematode forms wriggled and shot here and there under the impetus of AG-planing drives, then coiled into rings and smoked their substance off into void. Here and there it was more energy-efficient to fire a missile into larger conglomerations of debris, then pick off the scattered targets with whatever energy weapon was most suitable.