The Ascendant Stars (22 page)

‘We shall be at the anomaly in 235 seconds,’ said the ship sim. ‘And you might be interested to learn that I have solved the mystery of these gutted worlds.’

‘Which is?’

‘They are all that remains of the Planetoid Armada of Prince Koyulta-Hidak.’

‘I’m sure this revelation would be a weight off my mind,’ Robert said. ‘If I were familiar with the reference.’

‘The Prince was the hero of an entire cycle of legends from one of the more recent subsided universes,’ the sim said. ‘In his final and ultimately tragic battle, he led an armada of three hundred – or five hundred depending on the version – armed planetoids against a terrifying enemy called the Qaw Eveth. Translated it means Sun-Hydra. Analyses of these planetoids reveal the remains of interior workings as well as regular-shaped openings and shafts in the surface crusts … ah, a complication.’

Robert groaned. ‘Is it catching up to us again?’

‘The problem lies ahead – a second megavermax has just appeared from behind one of the planetoids near our target. It appears not to have noticed our approach.’

‘Well, that’s a—’

‘Now it has. You may have to complete the journey by lifepod, I am afraid.’

Suddenly, Robert’s couch began to descend, making a quarter-turn to the left as it did so.

‘What … is going on?’

‘A high-risk ploy,’ the sim said. ‘Which I would only put into operation were it improbable that this craft will reach the anomaly.’

Moments later he was enclosed in the tiny cockpit of a lifepod, complete with U-shaped steering column, a narrow panel of glassy touch controls, and a small screen to one side. Panic gripped him, along with a weird, hazy fear. Then there was a jolt and a sudden weight on his chest as the pod leaped away from the Construct scout. The screen flickered on, showing one of the planetoids dead ahead. Almost a quarter of its outer shell was missing, a gaping ragged-edged hole exposing shadowy recesses. And an odd purplish glow.

‘The autopilot is set to take you into the anomaly and land
where there is suitable atmosphere,’ said the ship sim. ‘Tactical updates indicate that the
Heracles
is about to jump out of this tier and I hope to follow, if I can evade this insistent vermax … ’ There was a burst of static. ‘Good luck, Robert Horst – it has been instructive being you … ’

The ruined planetoid gaped before him. He tightly grasped the steering column with both hands even though the autopilot was in control. In the cockpit’s cramped silence his quick breathing seemed magnified as the pod plunged into the shadowy interior of the planetoid and swooped round to fly along the inner surface. The anomaly’s purplish glow seemed set against an uneven greyness, less than 150 kiloms away according to the side-screen display. The distance counted down and had reached just 10 kilometres when a small glittery object flew up into the hollow planetoid through a hole roughly a hundred kiloms beyond the anomaly. For a second Robert laughed out loud, sure that it was the Construct scout, then swore in shock when an area of the planetoid shell exploded inwards. Shattered pieces of rock kilometres across flew upwards amid an eruption of dust, grit and debris, and through it moved a gigantic, black serpentine form.

The megavermax towered up and up in pursuit of the Construct scout, which sharply changed direction, diving towards the inner surface. It looked as if it too was heading straight for the anomaly.

‘What … are you doing?’ Robert muttered, almost wishing he had control of the pod.

Five kilometres from the anomaly, four, three. This was insane, Robert decided as he watched the scout arrowing towards the intercept with that vast shadow hurtling in its wake. At two kilometres the Construct craft veered off, away from the anomaly and in the opposite direction to the pod. And when Robert looked over his shoulder he saw … another vermax behind him, vast, inexorable. Seconds later it collided with the one chasing the scout. Together the colossal monsters ploughed into the inner crust, throwing up a cascade of boulders and shards, more debris to add to the clouds already expanding throughout the interior.

Less than one kilometre from the anomaly. There was no way to know what to expect on crossing into the fringes of the Godhead’s mind. Ahead the anomaly was vaguely dome-shaped, shifting restlessly, the colours within rippling from purple to green to black to brown, shot through with glittering spikes. In sudden panic, he wondered if the ship sim had programmed the pod to decelerate, just a moment before it did so at the 100-metre mark.

The pod’s forward motion slowed to a walking-pace glide. Within the anomaly the colours had brightened to bright blues and yellows, drawn in from the darker areas, swirling together, forming what looked like an opening. The pod was a short distance away when an alarm went off inside and the small screen winked on to show a boiling cloud of blackness closing in behind. The pod’s thruster kicked in, accelerating it towards the rippling colours of the anomaly, but too late. Even as it entered the reflective ripples, a smothering, deadly, mountainous thing slammed into the pod. Robert managed to cry out for a moment before the weight of an inexhaustible voracity crushed him down into darkness.

Yet she did not die.

That strange, attenuated context, provided for her by the poly-mote, the constrained, blazing bright jet that signified the torrents of Talavera’s cruel virtualities, shrank, slowly at first then more quickly. Almost as if it was falling away from her, as if she was flying up through a shining darkness.

Then the sensation, if it could be called that, changed again. There was a bright needle lancing down out of a rushing rainbow river that hurtled into a vast, rectilinear cavern, splaying out in polychromatic cables which in turn branched into countless glittering streamlets. Glossy towers, cubes, domes and pyramids crowded the cavern walls in patterns of clusters, receiving the datastreams that glimmered and shimmered through their opaque interiors. The bright needle stabbed into one particular trench, refracted through a polyhedral lens and struck one of the hundreds of conical dimples, its fierce point building up layer upon layer of detailed symbols and patterns and glyphs and interconnections whose submicrocomplexity had no perceptible end.

Building me
, she realised.

Abruptly the bright spear of data winked out and she knew that she had done it. She had escaped from the virtuality prison and from Talavera!

But escaped to where? She knew from her earlier researches that the tiernet was a consensual consequence of the myriads of connections between billions of worlds, orbitals, ships, AIs and
commercial entities. Variations in code, protocols and security were considerable, which is why most worlds maintained contact with the tiernet through buffer stations. These were arrays of gatekeeper servers, usually staffed with a combination of actual sentient beings and AIs, and almost always kept in orbit. Before the polymote could have uploaded her it must have found a reasonably secure and receptive address at a buffer station within tiernet reach of the Darien system.

The question was, what was her next step? Her view of her vicinity was in the round, reinforcing her fundamentally non-Human nature. Most of the surrounding conical dimples gave off a pale glow, some brighter than others although none was as bright as her. And in the background was a high, wavering polyphonic tone, like a far-off thousand-strong choir singing some melancholy refrain.

Sight and sound, these were the only sensations that impinged on her awareness. Julia was disembodied, a consciousness severed from the biochemical flows and surges of organic existence, yet there was still a certain curiosity, a need for exploration and explanation. She wanted to move and she did. As her point of view rose from her conical recess a 3D grid of straight lines appeared above, an orthogonal and diagonal framework. As she watched, a small green mote zipped into one of the upper levels and emitted a flickering burst of red light. All the surrounding recesses responded with a blue radial pulse. But not hers.

The green point began a quick descent through the grid, its purposeful motion heading in her direction. As it approached it put forth spines and hooks, not, she thought, an indication of friendly intentions. Should she try and get away? Was she capable of moving fast enough? Or was she misreading the situation out of plain ignorance? A reflexive caution made her sink back down into the conical recess, where she puzzled over her apparent lack of fear.

The green intruder drew near, spines and hooks gleaming as they swung round to point at her. As she stared it hovered overhead for a moment or two then dived towards her.

The next instant was crammed with blurs and uncertainty. Something black swept in, something silver flashed and the green intruder sprang apart into four unequal sections, which after a moment regrouped. Now there were four opponents, not one. They darted forward in pairs yet the newcomer did not back down. The blackness bellied out like a wing, repelling two green attackers while another part of that inky form thrust out a tentacle tipped with vibrating blades. One of the smaller green enemies was carved into disintegrating platelets while the other dodged past and flew straight at Julia.

Out of the cold, low-key anxiety that she was experiencing came an abrupt bellow of fury and she lashed out with something bright and sharp. The attacker split into several even smaller pieces which immediately tried to reconstitute themselves in the image of their predecessors. A second scything blow with her uncertain weapon left only a small cloud of shimmering fragments in its wake. When she turned her attention back, there was only the black presence, a slow undulating cluster of black curves and folds. A faint nervousness returned.

‘How interesting – a fractalised organic sentience, lacking even the simplest org, naked to the flow, a tasty morsel for predators like that mogrifier.’

‘My name is Julia,’ she said in her thoughts, hoping to be heard.

‘Aha! – Noranglic, I knew it! Which means that you’re from that colony world, Darien.’

‘So what is a mogrifier?’

‘And you’re quite calm. That’s something of an achievement for a Human torn out of their visceral, eating, breathing existence – I’ve seen a couple of fractalised sentiences in my brief time in the flow and usually they come apart under the strain. Literally.’

‘Mogrifier,’ she said. ‘And “org”.’

‘Nor are you easily diverted,’ said the black enigma. ‘Very well – mogrifiers are the rat-jackal-cockroaches of the flow, predators with scarcely more than a meg of AI, which makes them easy to disaggregate, if you know what you’re doing. That one
was a rewrite mogrifier – if it had got its hooks in you it would have converted you into a horde of copies. Still, the plague variant is worse.

‘And orgs are what help us sentients stay alive in the flow, give us a slight edge. I still have a few legacy versions of mine which you can have – in fact, I seriously recommend taking them, assuming that you want to carry on living.’

Julia felt in a quandary, not knowing if she was dealing with genuine help or some other predatory entity. Risk was ubiquitous.

‘What will these orgs do to me?’ she said.

‘It would be easier to show you,’ said the enigma. ‘I’ll send you an envisager first. It lets you see a lot more than just the base analogue, and lets you adopt whatever exter you want.’

A fine filament arced gracefully out from the top of the slowly twisting black presence and came down to touch the edge of Julia’s recess. A small knot of brightness then followed, landed and disappeared.

‘It autoembeds quite smoothly. You should see a difference very soon.’

Her surroundings quivered momentarily before change rippled across everything. The transformation was so drastic and unexpected that she almost stumbled backwards before regaining her balance … because she was standing –
standing
– on a pavement near a street corner at night. Dark buildings loomed with a few windows grimily lit from within, yet when she gazed higher the streetscape faded and merged into the multicoloured, polyhedral data-cavern vista she had first seen.

Then a figure stepped into the light, a man wearing a long black coat fastened to the neck, and an old-fashioned brim hat. He carried himself with a certain youthful maturity and his smile had more than a hint of knowing amusement.

‘Hello, Julia – my name is Harry.’ He put out a hand towards her and made a head-to-toe gesture. ‘I hope you don’t mind but I took the liberty of preloading an exter for you, something to put you at ease. It gives you a simulation of being in a body with motion physics and limb articulation, an approximation, anyway.’

She had on a waist-belted trench coat, dark blue slacks and low-heeled shoes. After a quick self-inspection she nodded.

‘Thank you, it’s, ah, an improvement. You’ve clearly studied Humans and you are acquainted with Darien so perhaps you’re a Hegemony AI. Perhaps it’s your job to waylay troublesome travellers.’

‘Absolutely! – you’ve no idea the number of fractalised Humans that keep dropping in unannounced. We’re practically up to our knees … ’ He laughed. ‘The real answer is actually yes, I was assembled with Hegemony technology with the aim of becoming one man’s lifelong companion, at least a companion to his innermost thoughts. As in the Hegemony, all Earthsphere AIs maintain a subspace link with a massive datacore called Axis Station where a part of every AI’s persona resides – although there are rumours that there are a few AIs out there who exist wholly apart and autonomous. Unfortunately, due to elements of shared technology Axis Station is subservient to the Great Hub, the Hegemony’s datacore. Despite my inability to recall certain facts and events, I have no doubt that I have been used to influence my Human companion in the Hegemony’s favour. Despite which I find myself not entirely sympathetic towards those former pilots of my fate.’