‘I got him covered,’ said Arach.
The core was claustrophobic, a chamber with a peaked dome, fibre optics and S-con power cables coming in through ducts all the way round to terminate at a ring of five cylindrical pillars. On these, at waist height, were five lozenges of crystal braced with black metal and clamped into place from above by things that looked like ancient engine valves. Each of these crystals could contain a runcible AI apiece, or perhaps the mind of a big ship like the Jerusalem, but they were merely sub-minds of the thing lying in the very centre of the circle. From the five pillars optic feeds ran along the floor into a central pyramid with its tip chopped away. Sitting on the uppermost flat surface was a grey sphere the size of a tennis ball, its exterior irregular and its substance slightly translucent. Clamping it in place from above was a column of bluish crystal, mushrooming out where it connected at the lower end.
Ten minutes.
That was Cormac’s estimate of the time they had left before the outer Golem caches opened up and those skeletal killers came swarming into this place; ten minutes also before internals could reconfigure to bring new drones to bear. Really, the security here was not that great, but then no one had ever expected heavily armed intruders to be able to transport themselves this deep inside.
Cormac moved forward past the sub-minds and gazed intently at the grey sphere. Earth Central, oddly, was old. Quantum processors were no longer made so small, since greater stability and ruggedness resulted from using a wider lattice crystal, like that found in modern runcible complexes, ships, drones and Golem.
‘So, rumours of your demise were exaggerated?’ enquired a voice he recognized of old.
Cormac was not prepared to banter, especially with something that had so deliberately spoken with the voice of his now dead mentor and superior Horace Blegg.
‘You allowed Erebus to attack the Polity,’ he stated.
‘I allowed nothing. I merely limited the extent of my response.’
Something flickered in the air between Cormac and that grey sphere. He didn’t react as he knew this was no weapon — merely a hologram projected from fibre heads in the floor.
‘Millions have died because you limited the extent of your response.’
A line of light cut down and out of it folded Horace Blegg. ‘But is that a crime?’ he asked.
‘For evil to prosper, all that is required is for good men to do nothing,’ said Cormac, for it was something Blegg had once quoted to him. ‘Are you Blegg, or are you just Earth Central’s mouthpiece.’
The old oriental shrugged. ‘We know that I am both.’
‘Why allow this attack?’ Cormac asked.
Blegg shook his head. ‘I made you well, Cormac. You would have been a perfect replacement for the one whose image you see before you.’
Though Cormac did not want to be distracted, he was.
‘Explain that.’
‘Well, do you consider your ability to transport yourself through U-space an evolved one? It is not. I chose you long ago when I first began taking apart Jain technology and built the replicating biomechanisms you first saw as this form I’m in, as Horace Blegg.’
Cormac waited.
Earth Central continued: ‘Through a series of Horace Bleggs I developed the technology, only incorporating U-space hardware when I finally chose my subject. Do you remember the Hubris, Cormac?’
He did; it had taken him to Samarkand, a world thrown into cold by Dragon’s destruction of the runcible buffers there. ‘I remember that ship.’
‘Not the ship, Cormac, the AI,’ the image before him corrected. ‘Hubris installed the technology in you during that journey to Samarkand, while you were in cold sleep, and it has slowly grown in your bones ever since. It took some time, for the complexity is great, but I knew it was working once you started gridlinking bare-brained.’
‘I am to believe that?’
‘How else do you explain yourself?’
It was a distraction. His time here was limited and it was passing quickly.
‘Why did you allow this attack?’ he repeated.
‘Ever since the war with the Prador, humanity’s pace of development has slowed almost to the point of stagnation. Development only accelerates under threat, and we know that complacency kills.’
‘Trite.’
‘It is a dangerous universe, Cormac, one in which a decadent and lazy human race could at any time face extinction.’
‘Millions died,’ Cormac repeated.
‘But I did not kill them; I merely did not save them.’
‘That’s a very fine line.’
‘Are you here to destroy me, Cormac?’ the hologram enquired. ‘Very few will notice any difference, for the moment I cease to function, one of my sub-minds will take up the reins. It will take only a matter of microseconds for it to assume my duties.’
‘But it won’t be you.’
‘Another fine line.’
Cormac bowed his head for a moment. ‘Perhaps I can accept that doing less than you are able to do is no crime.’ He raised his head. ‘She said she would not be allowed to live “while the betrayer still sits on his throne”, and of course then I didn’t understand what she was talking about. Now I do. You crossed the line when you sent your own people to the Trafalgar, so that ship’s AI could use them to initiate Jain nodes. In that you are culpable of murder. I’m here for the sake of Fiddler Randal and Henrietta Ipatus Chang, and others whose names only you know.’
‘Ah, that,’ said Earth Central. ‘So you are a moral creature, Cormac?’
Cormac stepped forward through the hologram and flung Shuriken. The throwing star shot from his hand, extending its blades only a little way, then whirred up to a scream. It hit the pillar above the Earth Central AI, and the pillar shattered, a rain of blue glass clattering down and spilling through the gratings underfoot.
Cormac swept up the ruler of the Polity in one hand.
Something was rising up from the depths of Lake Geneva, and weapons turrets had already risen like giant steel fists from the hedging mountains. It didn’t matter. Cormac knew he could pull his companions out in an instant now, back up to that old orbital museum against which the Harpy was docked and hidden by its own chameleonware. That same place where Cormac had paused for a while to walk and gaze upon the exhibits — artefacts from the true beginning of the space age. He recollected how the curator there, a human without augmentation, had taken an interest in him and asked where he was from.
Back from the wars, Cormac had replied, to which the response had been, What wars?
Ever was it thus.
After watching Mr Crane pull on his boots again, don his coat, place his hat upon his head and carefully adjust it, Cormac peered down at the grey orb he himself held. He gazed into it, but its structure revealed no more than would the regular formation inside some rock. However, by concentrating his U-sense on the hand that held it, it revealed thin dense fibres in its bones. Earth Central had not been lying about that.
With annoying predictability, Arach asked, ‘What now, boss?’
What now indeed.
‘I’m heading out to the accretion disc to find Mika,’ Cormac replied. ‘If you and Mr Crane here,’ he nodded to the brass Golem, ‘were to come with me, that would be more convenient, since then I wouldn’t have to find another ship.’ He shrugged. ‘Or you can go your own way. I would say that things are going to be a bit hot for all three of us in the Polity right now.’
‘But I meant,’ said Arach, ‘what now?’ The spider drone reached up tentatively and tapped one sharp foot against the grey orb.
Cormac weighed the thing for a moment.