The King of Hearts drew even closer to the ruined ship, pieces of wreckage bouncing and clattering from the hull before tumbling away into vacuum. King fired his two grapnels, closing their hardened claws into ripped hull metal on either side of the undamaged weapons nacelle, then began to draw the wreck towards him. After a moment he guided his remaining telefactor out of the accommodation specially constructed for the rescuees, back into the bay, and launched it into space. Bringing the telefactor down on the wreck’s twisted hull, he set it to cutting its way in, then returned his attention to the weapons nacelle. He scanned the nacelle and discovered it contained only two imploder missiles—not really a great haul, but better than nothing. He would get the telefactor to cut the missiles free after it checked out the mind inside the ship…
Then the comlink opened. ‘One false move and you’re toast, boy,’ came a voice.
‘Who is this?’ Something about the speaker seemed familiar to King, but he could not identify what because at present the communication came via radio and was voice only.
‘Inspect yourself, King.’
Through the telefactor, King did as instructed. Debris had clattered against him constantly during his approach to the wreck. Some of it, however, had not bounced away, and appeared too suspiciously even in construction to be mere debris. King paraphrased himself: Polity super-intelligences taken for mugs … A neat row of black hemispheres now decorated his hull from stem to stern. Space mines.
‘Now,’ said the voice, ‘I hope I have your attention, because if you do anything reckless and I send a signal to those mines, there won’t be enough left of you to make a decent-sized ingot.’
‘I have humans aboard.’
‘I very much doubt that, unless you’ve found a way to use them for fuel. I know your opinion of anything that is not AI.’
In response King sent images of those he had rescued. There came a delay before the response, as the recipient of those same images no doubt opened the information stream in secure space so as to check for both viruses and veracity.
‘You know ECS policy concerning hostages,’ said the other ship.
‘I know it, but these are not hostages. I rescued them.’
‘The King of Hearts changes his heart?’
‘Something like that.’
‘You know what the ECS response to you might be?’
‘I do… I have not yet decided how to resolve this.’
‘You will open yourself to me for inspection. Completely.’
‘You could be an agent of Erebus—and I would rather the mines be detonated than submit myself to that.’
‘You too could be such an agent… Very well, then, allow me access to your U-space communicator, or would you rather I detonated those mines right now?’
King opened an exterior link to his U-com, permanently monitored and ready to be closed down in an instant. He did not know the contents of the information package the other ship sent, nor what it received in return. But after a moment, the other vessel sent coordinates.
‘You will take us here,’ it instructed.
King brought the U-space engine online and expanded its field to encompass the wreck, before dropping them both into the U-continuum. He noted, through the channel open to his telefactor, that it had by now cut its way into the other ship’s hull. In a short burst of code he gave it other instructions, then felt some relief when he realized the other ship did not seem to detect the signal. He understood then that the mind in the wreck had played its only real strong cards. Its sensors must be severely damaged; what sensitivity they still possessed had been badly degraded by the radiation leakage from the cracked reactor. It would probably not even see the telefactor until the machine was upon it.
Slow hours passed, and finally the telefactor, after cutting its way through much wreckage, entered the chamber containing the other mind, thereupon sending its ‘ready’ signal to King. Now fully engaged through the telefactor, King was in a position to destroy the other AI mind. But… what would be gained?
‘Aren’t you going to do something, then?’ asked the mind in the wreck.
‘This changes nothing,’ said King.
‘Precisely… I’ve been watching your telefactor’s stealthy approach for some time and wondering what you intended.’
King felt slightly embarrassed, like a child caught by its parent in some obviously stupid act. He settled the telefactor down on its base and just let it stay there. Now, in underspace, he noticed much disturbance—many ships.
‘The fleet?’
‘Yes, what remains of it.’
Days passed, during which King observed his passengers settle into a routine, even offered them coldsleep facilities that some accepted. Cormac went first, King felt with some relief, then Andrew Hailex. The dracomen did not require such facilities, having already sunk into some form of hibernation. The Golem merely shut themselves down. King, finding the other ship uncommunicative, also switched himself to a state that truncated his perception of time, any thoughts easing themselves through his mind like ponderous sloths. Eventually the journey ended and, returning to full function, he surfaced into the real.
The planetary system lay within the Polity. Here an inhabited world orbited a hot white sun. It lay second from the sun, outside the orbit of a gas giant and inside the orbit of one cold world the size of Mars, beyond which lay an asteroid field—the remains of some shattered world yet to spread and gather into a ring around the sun. On the colonized planet’s surface, human habitations enclosed in polarized geodesies pocked jungle-swamped land masses as if they were blistering in the heat. The jungle was not alien, merely adapted earth-forms boiling across the landscape to transform the atmosphere into something breathable. Cooling plants like iron cathedrals lasered away heat from the nightside to orbital installations. Huge mirrors, still being constructed in orbit, reflected away some of the sun’s energy to be utilized in massive orbital factories. King swiftly understood that all this energy was being converted into coherent maser beams projected towards the cold planet, to power mining operations there and enable further terraforming. The hot planet, in some future time, would be a world much like the one King had departed, where adapted humans, sandapts and other thermodapts, and doubtless dracomen, could survive in the open. The cold world would probably end up supporting human ‘dapts at the other end of the thermal scale.
Such were the energies being thrown about here, King realized this was a perfect bolt hole for the remains of the fleet, much of which had already materialized within the system. Not only that, other Polity ships, other Polity forces began appearing. Listening in to coms traffic King identified one of them as a ship called the Cable Hogue—a vessel so huge that it could not orbit worlds with crustal instabilities or oceans, since its sheer mass would cause tides and earthquakes—a vessel once only rumour, even to King. Next King identified two Dragon spheres, hanging in space either side of the Jerusalem, which came bearing down on his present position.
Decision time… he could choose either certain destruction or utter submission. Then he realized he had already chosen. King felt, as much as an AI could, an overwhelming fatigue. He knew himself to be in the wrong about so much, and no matter how far he fled he would still be wrong.
‘You wanted me to open myself to inspection,’ he told the other ship he carried with him. ‘You could still be some agent of Erebus here to cause mayhem, so I will open myself to Jerusalem.’
At least, if Jerusalem chose to erase King’s mind, it would be fast.
King opened a link to the approaching ship, dropping his defences, and in an instant Jerusalem’s probe slammed inside him. He knew that, though he willingly allowed this, the sheer power of the mind behind that probe meant it could probably have been performed without his submission. Jerusalem sent HK programs inside King, riffling through his systems, inspecting memories. The link was utterly one-sided, so he gained little from the other mind. However, he did know that Jerusalem was similarly probing the mind of the wrecked ship, and other ships nearby too, just as other minds of equivalent power probed fleet ships throughout the system. Then, the probe abruptly withdrew, the HK programs scurrying after it like hunting dogs. King found himself linked into a three-sided communication.