Excession Page 3

  The drone was already moving; out from its body-niche in the wall and into the companionway space. It accelerated along the corridor, sensing the gaze of the ceiling-beam camera patch following it. Fields of radiation swept over the drone’s militarised body, caressing, probing, penetrating. An inspection hatch burst open in the companionway just ahead of the drone and something exploded out of it; cables burst free, filling to overflowing with electrical power. The drone zoomed then swooped; a discharge of electricity crackled across the air immediately above the machine and blew a hole in the far wall; the drone twisted through the wreckage and powered down the corridor, turning flat to its direction of travel and extending a disc-field through the air to brake for a corner, then slamming off the far wall and accelerating up another companionway. It was one of the full cross-axis corridors, and so long; the drone quickly reached the speed of sound in the human-breathable atmosphere; an emergency door slammed shut behind it a full second after it had passed.

  A space suit shot upwards out of a descending vertical tubeway near the end of the companionway, crumpled to a stop, then reared up and stumbled out to intercept the machine. The drone had already scanned the suit and knew the suit was empty and unarmed; it went straight through it, leaving it flapping halved against floor and ceiling like a collapsed balloon. The drone threw another disc of field around itself to match the companionway’s diameter and rode almost to a stop on a piston of compressed air, then darted round the next corner and accelerated again.

  A human figure inside a space suit lay half-way up the next corridor, which was pressurising rapidly with a distant roar of gas. Smoke was filling the companionway in the distance, then it ignited and the mixture of gases exploded down the tube. The smoke was transparent to the drone and far too cool to do it any harm, but the thickening atmosphere was going to slow it up, which was doubtless exactly the idea.

  The drone scanned the human and the suit as best it could as it tore up the smoke-filled corridor towards it. It knew the person in the suit well; he had been on the ship for five years. The suit was without weaponry, its systems quiet but doubtless already taken over; the man was in shock and under fierce chemical sedation from the suit’s medical unit. As the drone approached the suit it raised one arm towards the fleeing machine. To a human the arm would have appeared to move almost impossibly quickly, flicking up at the machine, but to the drone the gesture looked languid, almost leisurely; surely this could not be all the threat the suit was capable of--

  The drone had only the briefest warning of the suit’s holstered gun exploding; until that instant the gun hadn’t even been apparent to the machine’s senses, shielded somehow. There was no time to stop, no opportunity to use its own EM effector on the gun’s controls to prevent it from overloading, nowhere to take cover, and - in the thick mist of gases flooding the corridor - no way of accelerating beyond the danger. At the same moment, the ship’s inertial field fluctuated again, and flipped a quarter-turn; suddenly down was directly behind the drone, and the field strength doubled, then redoubled. The gun exploded, tearing the suit and the human it contained apart.

  The drone ignored the backward tug of the ship’s reoriented gravity and slammed against the ceiling, skidding along it for half a metre while producing a cone-shaped field immediately behind it.

  The explosion blew the companionway’s inner shell apart and punched the drone into the corridor’s ceiling so hard its back-up semi-biochemical brain was reduced to a useless paste inside it; that no major pieces of shrapnel struck it counted as a minor miracle. The blast hit the drone’s conical field and flattened it, though not before enough of its energy had been directed through the inner and outer fabric of the companionway shell in a fair impersonation of a shaped-charge detonation. The corridor’s lining punctured and tore to provide a vent for the cloud of gases still flooding into the companionway; they erupted into the depressurised loading bay outside. The drone paused momentarily, letting debris tear past it in a hurricane of gas, then in the semi-vacuum which resulted powered off again, ignoring the escape route which had opened behind it and racing down to the next companionway junction; the off-line displacer pod the drone was making for hung outside the ship hull only ten metres round the next corner.

  The drone curved through the air, bounced off another wall and the floor and raced into the hull-wall companionway to find a machine similar to itself screaming towards it.

  It knew this machine, too; it was its twin. It was its closest sibling/friend/lover/comrade in all the great distributed, forever changing civilisation that was the Elench.

  X-ray lasers flickered from the converging machine, only millimetres above the drone, producing detonations somewhere way behind it while it flicked on its mirrorshields, flipped in the air, ejected its old AI core and the semi-biochemical unit into the air behind it and spun around in an outside loop to continue down the companionway; the two components it had ejected flared beneath it, instantly vaporising and surrounding it with plasma. It fired its own laser at the approaching drone - the blast was mirrored off, blossoming like fiery petals which raged against and pierced the corridor walls - and effectored the displacer pod controls, powering the machinery up into a preset sequence.

  The attack on its photonic nucleus came at the same moment, manifesting itself as a perceived disturbance in the space-time fabric, warping the internal structure of the drone’s light-energised mind from outside normal space. It’s using the engines, thought the drone, senses swimming, its awareness seeming to break up and evaporate somehow as it effectively began to go unconscious. fm-am!, cried a tiny, long-thought-out sub routine. It felt itself switch to amplitude modulation instead of frequency modulation; reality snapped back into focus again, though its senses still remained disconnected and thoughts still felt odd. But if I don’t react otherwise . . . The other drone fired at it again, zooming towards it on an intercept course. Ramming. How inelegant.

  The drone mirrored the rays, still refusing to adjust its internal photonic topography to allow for the wildly shifting wavelength changes demanding attention in its mind.

  The displacer pod just the other side of the ship’s hull hummed into life; a set of coordinates corresponding with the drone’s own present position appeared flickering in the drone’s awareness, describing the volume of space that would be nipped off from the surface of the normal universe and hurled far beyond the stricken Elencher ship. Damn, might make it yet; just roll with it, the drone thought dizzily. It rolled; literally, physically, in mid-air.

  Light, bursting from all around it and bearing the signature of plasma fire, drummed into its casing with what felt like the pressure of a small nuclear blast. Its fields mirrored what they could; the rest roasted the machine to white heat and started to seep inside its body, beginning to destroy its more vulnerable components. Still it held out, completing its roll through the superheated gases around it - mostly vaporised floor-tiles, it noted - dodging the shape spearing towards it that was its murderous twin, noticing (almost lazily, now) that the displacer pod had completed its power-up and was moving to clasp/discharge . . . while its mind involuntarily registered the information contained in the blast of radiation and finally caved in under the force of the alien purpose encoded within.

  It felt itself split in two, leaving behind its real personality, giving that up to the invading power of its photonic core’s abducted intent and becoming slowly, balefully aware of its own abstracted echo of existence in clumsy electronic form.

  The displacer on the other side of the hull wall completed its cycle; it snapped a field around and instantly swallowed a sphere of space not much bigger than the head of a human; the resulting bang would have been quite loud in anything other than the mayhem the on-board battle had created.

  The drone - barely larger than two adult human hands placed together - fell smoking, glowing, to the side wall of the companionway, which was now in effect the floor.

  Gravity returned to normal and the drone cl
unked to the floor proper, clattering onto the heat-scarred undersurface beneath the chimney that was a vertical companionway. Something was raging in the drone’s real mind, behind walls of insulation. Something powerful and angry and determined. The machine produced a thought equivalent to a sigh, or a shrug of the shoulders, and interrogated its atomechanical nucleus, just for good form’s sake

  ... but that avenue was irredeemably heat-corrupted . . . not that it mattered; it was over.

  All over.

  Done . . .

  Then the ship hailed it, quite normally, over its communicator.

  Now why didn’t you try that in the first place?, thought the drone. Well, it answered itself, because I wouldn’t have replied, of course. It found that almost funny.

  But it couldn’t reply; the com unit’s send facility had been wasted by the heat too. So it waited.

  Gas drifted, stuff cooled, other stuff condensed, making pretty designs on the floor. Things creaked, radiations played, and hazy EM indications suggested the ship’s engines and major systems were back on line. The heat making its way through the drone’s body dissipated slowly, leaving it alive but still crippled and incapable of movement or action. It would take it days to bootstrap the routines that would even start to replace the mechanisms that would construct the self-repair nano-units. That seemed quite funny too. The vessel made noises and signals like it was moving off through space again. Meanwhile the thing in the drone’s real mind went on raging. It was like living with a noisy neighbour, or having a headache, thought the drone. It went on waiting.

  Eventually a heavy maintenance unit, about the size of a human torso and escorted by a trio of small self-motivated effector side-arms appeared at the far end of the vertical companionway above it and floated down through the currents of climbing gas until they were directly over the small, pocked, smoking and splintered casing of the drone. The effector weapons’ aim had stayed locked onto the drone the whole way down.

  Then one of the guns powered up and fired at the small machine.

  Shit. Bit summary, dammit . . . the drone had time to think.

  But the effector was powered only enough to provide a two-way communication channel.

  ~ Hello? said the maintenance unit, through the gun.

  ~ Hello yourself.

  ~ The other machine is gone.

  ~ I know; my twin. Snapped. Displaced. Get thrown a long way by one of those big Displace Pods, something that small. One-off coordinates, too. Never find it--

  The drone knew it was babbling, its electronic mind was probably under effector incursion but too damn stupid even to know it and so gibbering as a side effect, but it couldn’t stop itself;

  ~ Yep, totally gone. Entity overboard. One-throw XYZs. Never find it. No point in even looking for it. Unless you want me to step into the breach too, of course; I’d go take a squint, if you like, if the pod’s still up for it; personally it wouldn’t be too much trouble . . .

  ~ Did you mean all that to happen?

  The drone thought about lying, but now it could feel the effector weapon in its mind, and knew that not only the weapon and the maintenance drone but the ship and whatever had taken over all of them could see it was thinking about lying . . . so, feeling that it was itself again, but knowing it had no defences left, wearily it said,

  ~ Yes.

  ~ From the beginning?

  ~ Yes. From the beginning.

  ~ We can find no trace of this plan in your ship’s mind.

  ~ Well, nar-nar-ne-fucking-nar-nar to you, then, prickbrains.

  ~ Illuminating insults. Are you in pain?

  ~ No. Look, who are you?

  ~ Your friends.

  ~ I don’t believe this; I thought this ship was smart, but it gets taken over by something that talks like a Hegemonising Swarm out of an infant’s tale.

  ~ We can discuss that later, but what was the point of displacing beyond our reach your twin machine rather than yourself? It was ours, was it not? Or did we miss something?

  ~ You missed something. The displacer was programmed to . . . oh, just read my brains; I’m not sore but I’m tired.

  Silence for a moment. Then,

  ~ I see. The displacer copied your mind-state to the machine it ejected. That was why we found your twin so handily placed to intercept you when we realised you were not yet ours and there might be a way out via the displacer.

  ~ One should always be prepared for every eventuality, even if it’s getting shafted by a dope with bigger guns.

  ~ Well, if cuttingly, put. Actually, I believe your twin machine may have been badly damaged by the plasma implosure directed at yourself, and as all you were trying to do was get away, rather than find a novel method of attacking us, the matter is anyway not of such great importance.

  ~ Very convincing.

  ~ Ah, sarcasm. Well, never mind. Come and join us now.

  ~ Do I have a choice in this?

  ~ What, you would rather die? Or do you think we would leave you to repair yourself as you are/were and hence attack us in the future?

  ~ Just checking.

  ~ We shall transcribe you into the ship’s own core with the others who suffered mortality.

  ~ And the humans, the mammal crew?

  ~ What of them?

  ~ Are they dead, or in the core?

  ~ Three are solely in the core, including the one whose weapon we used to try to stop you. The rest sleep, with inactive copies of the brain-states in the core, for study. We have no intentions of destroying them, if that’s what concerns you. Do you care for them particularly?

  ~ Never could stand the squidgy great slow lumps myself.

  ~ What a harsh machine you are. Come--

  ~ I’m a soldier drone, you cretin; what do you expect? And anyway; I’m harsh! You just wasted my ship and all my friends and comrades and you call me harsh--

  ~ You insisted upon invasionary contact, not us. And there have been no mind-state total losses at all except that brought about by your displacer. But let me explain all this in more comfort . . .

  ~ Look, can’t you just kill me and get it o--?

  But with that, the effector weapon altered its set-up momentarily, and - in effect - sucked the little machine’s intellect out of its ruined and smouldering body.

  III

  ‘Byr Genar-Hofoen, my good friend, welcome!’

  Colonel Alien-Befriender (first class) Fivetide Humidyear VII of the Winterhunter tribe threw four of his limbs around the human and hugged him tightly to his central mass, pursing his lip fronds and pressing his front beak to the human’s cheek. ‘Mmmmwwwah! There! Ha ha!’

  Genar-Hofoen felt the Diplomatic Force officer’s kiss through the few millimetres’ thickness of the gelfield suit as a moderately sharp impact on his jaw followed by a powerful sucking that might have led someone less experienced in the diverse and robust manifestations of Affronter friendliness to conclude that the being was either trying to suck his teeth out through his cheek or had determined to test whether a Culture Gelfield Contact/Protection Suit, Mk 12, could be ripped off its wearer by a localised partial vacuum. What the crushingly powerful four-limbed hug would have done to a human unprotected by a suit designed to withstand pressures comparable to those found at the bottom of an ocean probably did not bear thinking about, but then a human exposed without protection to the conditions required to support Affronter life would be dying in at least three excitingly different and painful ways anyway without having to worry about being crushed by a cage of leg-thick tentacles.

  ‘Fivetide; good to see you again, you brigand!’ Genar-Hofoen said, slapping the Affronter about the beak-end with the appropriate degree of enthusiastic force to indicate bonhomie.

  ‘And you, and you!’ the Affronter said. He released the man from its grasp, twirled with surprising speed and grace and - clasping one of the human’s hands in a tentacle end - pulled him through the roaring crush of Affronters near the nest space entrance to a clearer part of the web membrane.<
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  The nest space was hemispherical in shape and easily a hundred metres across. It was used mainly as a regimental mess and dining hall and so was hung with flags, banners, the hides of enemies, bits and pieces of old weapons and military paraphernalia. The curved, veined-looking walls were similarly adorned with plaques, company, battalion, division and regimental honour plaques and the heads, genitals, limbs or other acceptably distinctive body parts of old adversaries.

  Genar-Hofoen had visited this particular nest space before on a few occasions. He looked up to see if the three ancient human heads which the hall sported were visible this evening; the Diplomatic Force prided itself on having the tact to order that the recognisable trophy bits of any given alien be covered over when a still animate example of that species paid a visit, but sometimes they forgot. He located the heads - scarcely more than three little dots hidden high on one sub-dividing drape-wall - and noted that they had not been covered up.

  The chances were this was simply an oversight, though it was equally possible that it was entirely deliberate and either meant to be an exquisitely weighted insult carefully contrived to keep him unsettled and in his place, or intended as a subtle but profound compliment to indicate that he was being accepted as one of the boys, and not like one of those snivellingly timid aliens who got all upset and shirty just because they saw a close relative’s hide gracing an occasional table.

  That there was absolutely no rapid way of telling which of these possibilities was the case was exactly the sort of trait the human found most endearing in the Affront. It was, equally, just the kind of attribute the Culture in general and his predecessors in particular had found to be such a source of despair.

  Genar-Hofoen found himself grinning wryly at the three distant heads, and half hoping that Fivetide would notice.