Polity Agent

Natural, she reflected with some amusement, before turning herself off.

The spider web extended to infinity in every direction: the space-time continuum represented as a flat surface for those simple humans who could visualize only a limited number of dimensions.

Glancing to her left she observed the gravity well of a sun drawing the web down into a hole. Another hole, a planet, circled the declivity around its edge. She walked along one strand, careful not to slip and put her foot down into U-space. The strand did not move—her mass made no impression on it. The spider-shaped hole in the web seemed just like a gravity well, but peering inside she could see no spider. She stepped past it and into her apartment in the Cassius station. Shoala handed over a drink that she sipped. It tasted bitter.

‘It’s poison,’ he told her.

His carapace possessed more legs than usual, and they had been driven through his body in many places. He turned away and she noticed that his sensory cowl now sported mandibles. It sliced in a circle, pulled away a hemisphere of his skull with a sucking crunch and discarded it, then began to dine on his brains. He turned back to her.

‘It’s cumulative, mind,’ he said, just as a mandible pushed out beside his eye, then folded back in, pulling the jellied eyeball out of sight into the bloody socket. Her glass hit the carpet and broke into 4,002 fragments. She measured the angles and curves of each one, tracked their courses, calculated masses and subsequent vectors, then began counting individual strands in the carpet moss.

‘A gift from an admirer,’ someone whispered, then chuckled menacingly.

‘Simplistic representations,’ she told Shoala—and the spider clinging to the station’s skin, and the whisperer. ‘It was a mistake for me to sleep.’

‘You think you are sleeping?’ Shoala asked, both his eyes gone now and, his disembodied face hanging before her, bright light shining from behind it, glaring from empty sockets. The face receded, and landed in some deep pit in a large spider web. Carapaces scuttled in to tear it apart.

‘Yes,’ said Orlandine, opening her eyes. She sat upright, completely awake instantly, an array of dream sequences recorded in her gridlink. She shivered, those dreams still clear in her mind.

‘Simplistic,’ she repeated.

But something nagged at her: something evident in that dream sequence, some plain fact she was missing. She wanted to either track it down or dismiss it with certainty, but there came another call for her attention: a signal from the subpersona controlling her Jain-tech mycelium, telling her it now detected something the Polity sca

King studied the artefact from one light year away, and for all the AI knew it was no longer even there—having moved on some time after a year ago. This distance was relatively long to be obtaining such detail, but no effort had been made at concealment since the object emitted across the electromagnetic spectrum. Obviously, these emissions meant that in some way it was, or had been, active.

A flattened cylinder three miles long, it seemed to be formed of a tangle of foot-thick tubes compressed into that same shape—perhaps a ship of some kind, or a station? Other structures on its surface, like giant metallic barnacles, were a year ago firing into space projectiles no larger than a human fist. At this distance, King could get no more detail on them than their size. Estimating the velocity of these, King calculated their present realtime position. They should be one quarter of a light year out, however the AI did not know how long the artefact had been firing off these projectiles, so it added a large degree of error incorporating the time of Erebus’s arrival here, minus some time for this same artefact to be built. The King of Hearts dropped into U-space and surfaced just half a light year out.

Collision alarms…

Calculations wrong. A deliberate trap? King immediately began firing meteor lasers at the swarm of fist-sized objects hammering towards it, turned and ignited its fusion drive to bring its speed up to that of the projectiles. While destroying those that seemed likely to impact on its hull, it spectrally analysed the debris and deep-sca

They were the shape of melon seeds, with cilia-like serrations along their edges, and seemed packed with technology in the haphazard configuration of something alive. They contained power cells, some form of sensor array, small chambers holding hydrogen under sufficient pressure to turn it into the metallic state. The AI realized its danger within a fraction of a second, but that was a fraction of a second too late. Bright stars ignited all around, and King expected massive explosions but, no, the projectiles accelerated inwards as the attack ship began dropping into U-space. Three of them penetrated the U-field before it fully formed, and then slammed into the King of Hearts’s, hull as it surfaced into realspace half a light year away.

Space mines like those once used to destroy Prador vessels?

Still no explosion. King released three telefactors and directed them to the location of each impact. But, even as those devices launched, King felt the incursions through its hull. Immediately extruding antiperso

The outside view showed the melon-seed shape bulging up in the middle, with ridges extending down from the bulge. Sensors in King’s hull now revealed weaknesses in the area. The maintenance robots arrived and began cutting out nearby walls and detaching and moving equipment in the vicinity. Then came a wrinkling of the i