‘Arach, over here.’
The spider shape reared away from the wall and scuttled over to him. Cormac studied the drone for a moment, then explained the situation.
‘No problem,’ Arach replied and, before Cormac could say any more, scuttled away again. Cormac now called over everyone else in the cavern and gave his instructions, finishing with: ‘Those that need it, get some rest now—we move in two hours.’
‘He doesn’t talk much, does he?’ said Samland Karischev, as he gazed out through the massive chainglass screen.
‘Brutus is feeling as frustrated and annoyed as we all are,’ replied Azroc.
Freed from his duties by the Coloron AI, Azroc had immediately transferred to the Brutal Blade, the utile dreadnought run by the AI Brutus, and sometimes jokingly referred to—because of its resemblance to some titanic beast’s liver plated with metal—as the Organ Transplant. Fresh from that devastated world, where an entire arcology capable of housing a billion souls had necessarily been destroyed, the opportunity for some payback filled him with joy even though he was Golem. And when Battle Wagon joined the fleet, now grown to twenty dreadnoughts, numerous attack ships and other warcraft, that joy only increased.
Serious payback: now one of the big boys accompanied them.
Karischev pointed through the screen at the distant vessel. ‘It doesn’t look like much. Why all the excitement?’
Azroc sighed. The Battle Wagon did not look particularly threatening, being a cylindrical object apparently devoid of sensor arrays or evident weapons. ‘It doesn’t look like much because you are now seeing it against a backdrop of vacuum and so do not really have any idea of its scale.’
Karischev, a squat bulky man with a friendly boulder-like face and watery brown eyes, struck Azroc as a bit of an enigma. The man carried no augmentations, either cerebral or physical, and obviously did not bother to change his appearance to anything more aesthetic, as it seemed most humans were inclined to do. He also commanded a strike force of Sparkind ground troops, assigned to Brutal Blade.
‘Big, then?’ Karischev suggested.
‘Eight miles in diameter and twenty miles long. It’s old, built during the Prador War, carries weapons designed to penetrate Prador exotic armour, plus numerous recent upgrades. Much is made of the fact that ships like Brutal Blade can destroy worlds. The truth is that a ship like ours could easily depopulate a world, but not actually destroy it. The Battle Wagon, however, could do the job without, as the saying goes, breaking into a sweat.’
‘No shit?’ Karischev’s eyes grew wide.
‘Definitely.’
Karischev turned back to gaze through the screen. ‘Of course, you can be carrying the biggest gun in the world, but that don’t matter a fuck if you ain’t got a target.’
Azroc could only nod in agreement. The information packages sent by the NEJ showed, in the system a light year ahead, enemy forces that the ships now glinting in space all around him could obliterate with ease. But since the USER had deployed and ejected the fleet from U-space, it proceeded on conventional drives. At this rate it would take them more than a year to reach their target, which created all sorts of problems, not least being that the fight would long be over and the enemy would have had a year to prepare for them—unless before that they shut down the USER and fled.
Another problem arose concerning the living occupants of those few ships in the Polity fleet that carried them. They would have to go into coldsleep if the USER remained functional. The quandary faced by the Battle Wagon AI, now in command of this fleet, was that if the USER did go offline, the entire fleet could jump to the target system at once, and troops might need to be dropped very quickly, but it took some time for humans to recover from the effects of coldsleep.
‘I’m gonna check on my men,’ said Karischev, turning away.
Watching him go, Azroc wondered if bringing along these ground troops was such a good idea anyway. Yes, they might be needed, but thus far the conflict had remained mainly ship to ship—one of those fast AI battles waged on the line of Polity of which rumours abounded but of which he had never found confirmation. It struck him that such vulnerable troops would serve no purpose other than to add to the casualty figures.
18
It is officiaclass="underline" we don’t have to die. There are those amongst us now who are over two hundred years old and who may go on just not dying. However this is not immortality in the old sense of the Greek and Roman gods, for though our lives can be extended to infinity (thus far) we are still subject to death. There’s no medical technology that can save you if you stick your head under a thousand-tonne press (though a prior memcording of you can be saved), and there are some virulent killers, both biologically and nanologically based, that can destroy the human meat machine very quickly and effectively. But, as many have noted, not dying is not quite the same as living. Many would try to make themselves utterly secure against death and as such cease to experience life in its conventional sense. What is the point of immortality if you wrap yourself in layers of cotton wool and armour and bury yourself in peat? Many take that route (well, not literally), but many others seize the opportunity to explore, research, experience, to live a full life. However, there are problems with this, for the human brain, though large in capacity and intricate in function, is a finite thing. Memories are lost during regeneration and repair—that drawback cannot be avoided. Moreover, as a human life grows long, memories are shunted aside by the perpetual absorption of the endless continuing input. The solution, though, is now coming clear: memcording. We can now record our memories and even mental functions and store them separately, reload them should we wish. The technology is now available to actually delete stuff from the organic brain. So, the time has arrived when we can actually edit our own minds. It is speculated that in the future we’ll be able to decide what kind of person we are going to be this year, and cut-and-paste our minds to suit. Maybe we’ll decide to load select portions of our minds to more than one body. Perhaps this is due to become the procreation of the future?
— From ‘How it Is’ by Gordon
Warmth enclosed her, but in no way assuaged the pain. Sensing movement, Mika opened her eyes on blackness overlaid with jumbled non-sensical code. Then two words stood out—suit breach—and she realized she was seeing her visor display gone awry. Beyond it, in the minimal light this display provided, the blackness shifted. Further movement, more urgent, and something ungently began stripping her spacesuit from her body. She shrieked as mangled bones twisted inside her leg. Then the visor sank down into the neck ring and wet flesh surged over her face. Stifled, she fought for breath, began to lose consciousness. But next came a warm breeze as the flesh withdrew. She gasped, sucking in stale air smelling of burnt steak.
Ahead of her walls of similar flesh continued to withdraw—she could feel it all moving—then the lights turned on to give her confirmation: small globes affixed in an undulating surface which constantly dripped white fluid. Managing to tilt her head slightly, she peered down at herself. Red tentacles securely bound her against the living wall behind her. It also seemed evident that some of them penetrated her body—she could feel movement inside her. Now, right before her, a cobra pseudopod rose into view.