Line War

The head tilted slightly as if to observe her out of one eye that was better than the other. ‘Do to you?’

‘How did the other Dragon sphere — which is essentially part of you — change me after I was injured?’

‘What makes you suppose that it did?’

‘I feel it… and Jerusalem also has noted some physical alterations…’

‘Ah, Jerusalem…’

Mika experienced a sudden sinking feeling. ‘Yes, Jerusalem noted some physical alterations to my body. I would have spotted them myself if I had used a sca

The head nodded. ‘Exactly.’

‘What have you done to me?’

‘We have merely prepared you for what we might encounter.’

‘That being?’

‘Humans are weak and susceptible to Jain intrusion. Their perception of reality is limited, and you will need to see.’

What? ‘Hang on… “what we might encounter”?’

The floor seemed to shift underneath her, and everything outside fell into shadow as the Dragon sphere revolved her away from the sun. She felt a surge of acceleration, only partially countered by the gravplate floor. A strong feeling of déjà vu impinged.

‘Where are we going?’

‘To the very source,’ Dragon replied. ‘Eventually.’

There came a shifting then. Something twisted inside her, and star-speckled space beyond the conferencing unit somehow inverted. The star speckles then became holes, and space between contracted to zero, yet she could still perceive it. She was seeing U-space, yet she remained sane. What had Dragon done to her? Briefly she glimpsed the other Dragon sphere: a massive complexity hollowed out of the underside of reality. And then she and the two spheres fell away from the Scarflow planetary system.

As she clutched the lectern console before her, Mika considered how little, apparently, Jerusalem trusted Dragon, and how she herself trusted Jerusalem not at all.

Construction robots, gathered like an infestation of metallic parasites, were now somnolent around the massive war runcible, and nil-G scaffolds lay distorted in one area where some missile had struck in the past. Debris was scattered about in surrounding space, which necessitated Heliotrope’s collision lasers being in perpetual operation. The runcible was an enormous pentagon with each of its five sides over four miles long — those sides each triangular in section, five hundred yards wide on all three sides. Dotted all around were blisters housing control centres, along with external generators, motors and a multitude of heavy weapons.

Orlandine knew the history of this object as one of a pla

The program she had created was in many ways similar to the kind of hunter-killer or bloodhound programs that Polity AIs had released on the nets to search for her. Having captured some of those programs, she remodelled and endowed them with much of what she had learnt about Jain technology. The way this program now differed from its original form was in size, sheer speed and an ability to reform itself to suit different computer architectures. But its main difference lay in the fact that it would become effectively an extension of her mind.

Sensor data of the war runcible showed that there were still things powered up inside it — systems still operating and maybe one or two somnolent war drones still in residence. Certainly, Polity AIs would never have left such a weapon unguarded. Yes, it was partially decommissioned, but it would have still made a good prize for any invader, or maybe for some stupidly ambitious separatist group. She used Polity transmissions protocols now just to initiate the kind of handshaking routine that ship AIs opened automatically upon arriving anywhere new within the Polity. Immediately a reply came back — Interdict area. No com available. Depart at once — along with a bloodhound program sent to check out Heliotrope. She had expected something like this and allowed the bloodhound to do its checking in an isolated system where it would find that this ship, the Draben, was merely a free trader that had dropped out of U-space to check out the war runcible — the ship’s captain indulging a curiosity that his ship’s AI had strongly advised him against. Meanwhile, her own program slid into the runcible’s computer architecture.

First it isolated part of the architecture and opened a private com cha

Within just a fraction of a second, a partially independent monitoring system began screaming for help from behind a firewall. She slammed through the same firewall and silenced it, but not before it had managed to send a U-space signal. No matter, she thought; it would take some days for anyone to arrive here, and by then she fully intended to have achieved her goals. However, the danger of there existing independent — physically separate — devices aboard the war runcible was one that had not escaped her, hence her move now from passive sensing to utterly aggressive sca

Almost at once she detected signals being transmitted from various different sections of the war runcible. Some of them were plain EM, so did not matter too much, but others she recognized as U-space com. Ru

Meanwhile her program was spreading throughout the rest of the runcible’s computer network, isolating weapons and reactors which might be set to detonate as a last resort. She got them all, one by one, but felt no pride in the achievement. This might have been wartime technology, but it was supera