Hilldiggers

"I'll be with you in ten minutes, Rosebud," Tigger replied. "I gotta reconfigure some of my internal systems anyhow."

"Why did you give me that name?" asked the AI ru

Tigger transmitted the relevant files concerning an old celluloid film called Citizen Kane. After a long delay while he found his way to a corridor that would take him around the spin section, the AI came back with, "But they burnt the sledge."

"It was only a film," replied Tigger, adding, "and a metaphor."

Tigger passed below the outer rim of the section, which slid above him like a moving wooden ceiling, then worked in towards the hub along another corridor snaking through the interior without any regard for up or down. At the end of this corridor he found Flog and Slog awaiting him, in evident agitation.

"Now, why're they here?" Tigger sent to the AI.

"They were bred to fight non-Consensus attackers. My command override controls them, but it does not override their inherent distrust of you, especially now you are moving into so sensitive an area."

"The Polity—" said Slog, reaching out a hand that brushed down Tigger's back.

"— we must permit?" finished Flog, floating backwards before Tigger into the chamber beyond. They were reluctant to allow Tigger into here, perhaps programmed to guard the ship's AI at all costs.

Tigger, only managing to keep himself to the floor by use of his claws, continued pacing forwards.

"We are—"

"— commanded."

Flog opened his mandibles in threatening protest, then, clutching at a grey branch above his head, pulled himself aside, floated over to one wall and clung there. Tigger halted in the centre of the chamber and observed what lay before him. Rosebud seemed like some giant synapse, ten feet across with branching outgrowths piercing its surroundings. Just visible behind it, the wall of the spin section constantly revolved, as if the AI was turning it manually. Tigger could see the design antecedents here, with the AI acting as an interface between the crew—who were mainly located in the spin section—and the rest of the ship. Further development had resulted in the crew doing less, and the interface doing more, until it finally developed consciousness and the crew became mere adjuncts to it.

Now Tigger was ready, his internal structure primed to come apart and shift to the required co

"This is unexpected," said Rosebud. "You will destroy me."

"I will not," Tigger replied.

"I am a river, but you are the sea."

"Though I'll absorb everything that you are, I'll nevertheless keep what you are which is distinct, and return you to yourself once I depart."

"My consciousness will not be my own."

"Sleep, then," Tigger instructed.

Rosebud, though with an organic basis, was an AI many generations removed from Tigger. Primitive, Tigger considered, but not in any derogatory sense. Overall, Rosebud became a rather small adjunct to Tigger's extensive mind. Tigger became the ship, and came to control the ship absolutely.

He studied the fusion drive, which, though controlled by organo-optics, was an additional artefact added to the ship's structure. The ship had been grown with the facility to accept this addition—the ability to grow such an engine being beyond present Brumallian technology. An analogy would be someone growing a human body without legs, but with the nerves and empty sockets in the pelvis exposed and ready to accept grafts of mechanical legs. Similar gaps in the outer body of the ship contained grafts of a rather more lethal nature. He studied their contents, chose one close to his location—a missile cache—and, using ship's systems, opened a missile and began making alterations to it. Simultaneously he began extruding a cell-form metal limb in that same direction.

The engine was ru

The drone focused his attention on the ship's outer skin. It lay three feet thick, layer upon layer of polycarbonates and ceramics, with nerve fibres threading convoluted paths through to access sensor heads dotted like hair follicles over the hull. An outer layer consisted of electromechanical refractive cells, and simple projectors also linked into this network: a simple chameleonware skin that could, within limitations, blend the ship with its background, not just visibly, but along a wider band of the EM spectrum. It was non-reactive, which basically meant the ship would not be picked up by passive sensors unless the drive was operating. However, it would be quickly revealed the moment a searcher used any form of active scan.

Tigger now needed to make this chameleonware wholly reactive, so that if any form of scan intersected with the ship when only vacuum lay behind it, the 'ware could refract it away from the sca

Tigger applied his extensive intellect to the task, then redoubled his efforts when he felt the first terahertz scan from the distant hilldigger.

The Captain of that other ship now knew the precise location of the Brumallian ship. Tigger therefore assigned more and more of his own processing space to the task of hiding. Within what had now become his own body, he observed the dismay of the Brumallian crew as the systems they nurtured fell out of their control. He shut down the drive flame. His cell-form limb reached the missile cache and deposited part of itself inside the casing behind the warhead. Ship's systems closed up the missile and loaded it to a coil-gun barrel extending to breach the hull.

By now the hilldigger was within range to fire a warhead. Tigger detected the flare of a single drive flame departing the massive vessel. He fired his own missile, simultaneously initiating the chameleonware of his ship and the part of himself deposited in the missile. From his own vantage point the missile looked no different, but it contained a Polity antimunitions package that projected a false image of this ship to the distant hilldigger. Those aboard the hilldigger might have detected a brief anomaly—the Brumallian ship repositioning in an eyeblink and abruptly changing course—but the Sudorian missile would not be smart enough to recognise what had happened.