Though Erebus was a distributed entity, as much present in each and every one of these vessels as it had been in those fighting at the Polity Line until the U-space disruption cut the link, it still needed a firm location for its self — its centre, its ego — and this was usually where the concentration of its vessels was most dense. This necessity annoyed Erebus for such a sense of self and the location of self did not seem consistent with AI melding. However, when the wormships began to come together like this, that annoyance was outweighed by feelings of pleasure, completeness and… security.
As the first three wormships ceased to be even vaguely distinct entities, another five joined them, sucking in behind them swarms of rod-forms and other space-born biomechs. Others were coming in fast behind them, and Erebus felt the centre point of its own being moving into this mass. Perhaps this feeling of location was what the AI needed to dispense with in order to be complete? Erebus was, however, reluctant, for becoming truly distributed might mean a dilution of self. Perhaps Randal was right, and Erebus and its components were not melded at all as long as one component remained dominant. Something to ponder… but later.
After a hundred wormships were bonded together, the process accelerated, ships swirling in orbit about a writhing moonlet of Jain matter as they set their courses down towards its surface. The whole seemed like some incredibly complex and changing Chinese puzzle, and it grew swiftly. Within five hours this core of worm-ships was being compressed into immobility as the last hundreds were attaching to the outside ahead of a rain of other Jain biomechs. Rod-forms descended like swarms of bluebottles; other mechs like shoals of fish sped in, hard bones of Jain coral grew throughout the moonlet to increase its structural strength; incomplete wormships — the spirals like ammonites — descended and bonded too. In the upper layers the process approached completion, with the rod-forms meshing into sheets in order to swathe the entire object, to smooth out its inconsistencies so that from a distance it would look just like an icy metallic planetoid.
Now, with all its active substance drawn together, Erebus gazed about at the system it had occupied. Very little useful Jain-tech remained out there, yet there were few material objects here that had not been touched by it. Bones of Jain coral, which had been used as scaffolds or structural supports during the construction of various biomechs, tumbled through space. Composed of elements that were abundant here, they weren’t worth the trouble of reclaiming. All the asteroids were wormed through with smooth burrows and empty of useful metals and rare elements. Pieces looking like shed carapace glittered in orbit about the gas giant — remnants of the shielding the rod-forms had grown around them while they collected resources down in the the giant’s upper atmosphere. Occasionally, revolving slowly in vacuum, could be found empty organic-looking containers in which some biomech must have made its caterpillar-to-butterfly metamorphosis.
After feeling a moment of disquiet upon noting just how much of a mess it was leaving here, very much more, in fact, than humans left behind them, Erebus filled its processing space with the calculations necessary to align and balance a hundred U-space engines for simultaneous use, then flung the planetoid of Jain technology which it comprised into the grey continuum — heading towards Earth.
With leviathan sluggishness an asteroid turned distantly in black void. Its mass was almost the same as that of the war runcible and, though long-range scanning had indicated its composition to be wrong, Cormac still wanted to take a closer look, for the asteroid lay directly in the area where the runcible gate signature and subsequent massive detonation had been detected. The other items he had also found here were puzzling.
‘There,’ said King. ‘Another one.’
A square red frame appeared in the viewing dome to select out part of the blackness beyond and magnify it — the frame expanding to blot out the asteroid entirely and bring something else into view. At first this could have been mistaken for mere asteroid debris, but after a moment Cormac recognized two identical squat cylindrical segments loosely linked by a fibrous tangle. This tangle resembled optics or maybe tree roots but was actually Jain-tech.
‘What the hell happened here?’
‘Maybe Orlandine had a falling-out with Erebus?’ suggested King. ‘Maybe Erebus wanted to meld with her and she objected to the idea.’
‘Well, you would know about that, wouldn’t you?’
King emitted an angry snort, then went on, ‘It could be that the wormships destroyed here were rebel ones. That human captain you saw certainly wanted to break away from Erebus.’
Cormac nodded. ‘Yeah, could be.’
But Cormac really wasn’t sure, which seemed a permanent state of mind with him lately. Yes there might be elements of Erebus which, like Henrietta Ipatus Chang, wanted to break away, but he did not think there would be many of them, and few of those would even be capable of doing so. Allowing his U-sense to slide beyond the ship, he detected more of those same Jain-tech fragments spread widely through space and could feel a buzzing echo in the U-continuum of the dramatic event that had occurred here. Orlandine had used the war runcible to destroy one or more wormships, that seemed certain, and he would have to keep this in mind when they eventually reached her.
The image of the asteroid slid to one side as King of Hearts turned and accelerated past it. Cormac braced himself for the moment the AI would engage its U-drive, yet, when it did so, he felt perfectly stable and in no danger of drifting away. He gazed up at the greyed-out dome and beyond it, and felt the pull of U-space with the enjoyment of revelling in a breeze rather than trying to stay upright in a hurricane.
‘Can you give me a hologram of the war runcible?’ he asked.
‘Certainly,’ King replied.
The war runcible instantly materialized, hanging just above the glass floor of the bridge and slowly turning. Though Cormac had known about this artefact, he had never really speculated on its shape, which now came as something of a surprise to him.
‘Why a pentagon?’ he asked.
‘Just two runcible horns are sufficient to sustain a Skaidon warp large enough to open the way for objects of your size,’ said King. ‘Further horns are required as the size of that warp increases. Four horns are optimum for a runcible of this size, with a fifth one for stability as the warp is extended further.’
‘Why not make bigger horns?’
‘In the first instance, these horns are bigger than those of either a passenger runcible or a normal planetary cargo runcible. In the second instance, do you really want me to explain runcible theory to you?’
‘Maybe not,’ Cormac admitted.
‘Oh good,’ said King, in a tone heavy on the sarcasm.
‘So, where would be the best place to put the CTD?’
A piece of the runcible separated out, carrying away with it some of the hull, a disc-shaped control blister and many internal components. Exposed inside were parallel corridors running through the gaps between three long cylinders that terminated at each end in spheres. Just before the latter, each of the corridors ended against a vertical shaft containing old-style spiral stairs. Even with the section of hologram removed, what remained was still tightly packed with a complicated tangle of ducts, transformers, interconnecting passageways, catwalks and cubic stacks that Cormac recognized as laminar batteries.
‘Why spiral stairs?’ he enquired. ‘I know this runcible is old, but it’s not ancient.’