The siege of the Garden of the Machines was not going well. The battlefront between the Construct’s Aggression ships and the vessels of the Vor and the Shyntanil was constantly shifting back and forth according to the rhythm of attacks and feints, surprise jumps, decoy manoeuvres, and the unseen war of datanet sabotage. In the overall aggregate could be seen the incontrovertible truth of the enemy’s gradual and inexorable advance.
The Construct was monitoring the tactics of the defence, monitoring the decision-making of the strategic cognitives and the transrational solutions of the conjecturator subminds. At the same time it was overseeing the loading of the contingency craft, the means by which a new Garden of the Machines would be established in a secluded tier far away. It was also giving instructions to the military Rosas, the commanders of the last-ditch defences. Both they and the Roberts had turned out to be exemplars of adaptability and creativity. This, the first Garden of the Machines, might fall but the patterns of their mind-states would live on.
And simultaneously with all the foregoing, the Construct was conducting a conversation with one unexpected visitor while a second waited in storage, frozen, inert.
‘I am certain that he presents no risk,’ said Reski Emantes, a copy of the drone AI that had remained back on Earth. ‘I’ve scanned his code for sleeper scripts and cyst routines and came up empty. You conducted his original excision so I am sure you’ll see that I’ve missed nothing.’
‘That may be so,’ the Construct said. ‘And we may return to this matter later. First, explain why you came here.’
The copy of Reski Emantes was running in a surplus tutorial drone, a small boxy unit with about a dozen spidery articulata. The Construct was temporarily inhabiting a spindle-framed biped unit, and together they faced each other in a windowless inner chamber lit by a full-wall holoconsole. One of its screens was showing code scans and a virtuality sim of the stored AI known simply as Harry.
‘I am here,’ Reski Emantes said, ‘to gain your help in rescuing the fractalised sentience of Julia Bryce.’
‘The leader of the Enhanced research team,’ the Construct said. ‘Ever since they were abducted by the Talavera woman we have been unable to track them. If Bryce is now a fractalised data sentience, does that mean that her physical form is deceased?’
‘It’s somewhat complicated,’ the drone said as it sent the Construct a databurst summary.
The Construct went over it, tracing Talavera’s involvement in obtaining the anti-dark matter and abducting the Enhanced team. It noted Julia’s partnership with the ex-Hegemony AI Harry and their collaboration with the Glow-savvy Nicodemus in their bravura political exploits. Now, it seemed, Talavera, the antidark matter missiles and the Enhanced team had gone to the Great Hub, accompanied by a pair of Vor warships. The Julia sentience had been sent by Nicodemus to an automated Hegemony supply ship near the Great Hub via a data-access flow, along with a mid-cognitive AI as a guide. However, shortly after the down-port all tiernet connections suddenly ceased. But the supply ship’s ident was still registering on independent battle surveys carried out by military tracker guilds, hobbyist netcommunes who regularly sent disposable flyby probes into war zones.
‘And you want me to travel to the Great Hub, find this supply vessel and rescue the Julia sentience,’ the Construct said. ‘Why?’
‘Because Talavera is keeping her body alive, using its neural pathgrids in conjunction with the other Enhanced to run the missile launch and in-flight navigationals. If we can get her back into her own body, into her own head, perhaps she can shut the whole thing down. If not, five hundred stars and their planets and inhabitants could be obliterated.’
The Construct saw how all the disparate pieces fitted together–the Godhead’s subtle aid to the forces of the Spiral Prophecy, their invasion of Darien guaranteeing aggressive responses from the Hegemony and the Imisil, the arrival of the remnants of the Legion of Avatars whose insensate savagery could annihilate all in its path; the revitalisation of the Vor and the Shyntanil; the attack on the Construct’s power base; the ascent of the Godhead itself and its anticipated emergence into an area of objective space where its presence would be mostly unopposed. And 500 stars that were targeted for destruction because…
And that was the mystery, the great unknown ‘why’ that lay at the root of it all.
‘What is your decision?’ said Reski Emantes.
‘A moment…’
Prompted by a steady clamour of alerts, the Construct switched away from the inner chamber, dividing its cognitive awareness between the stream of battlefront feeds and the combat analyses flowing from its semi-autonomous partials. The general assessment was stark–Aggression vessels were falling back from the inner markers and their numbers were down to just over a hundred. The Garden of the Machines would be stormed by Shyntanil and Vor troops in less than fifteen minutes and the entire complex would be overrun in approximately twenty-three minutes.
Part of it sent revised orders to the Rosa squads, another gave new commands to the drones prepping two tierships in the main launch bay, and the rest of it addressed the drone Reski Emantes.
‘I have decided to help you,’ it said. ‘Although you must realise that such a mission has a high chance of failure.’
‘That is hardly a surprise,’ the drone said. ‘Given the various Human-related hazards I’ve had to deal with recently.’
‘We will be travelling aboard a field-boosted tiership,’ said the Construct. ‘The first part of our flight will entail some risk as we will be acting as a diversion while my re-establisher vessel makes good its escape. Once it is safely away, our ship will set course for the Hegemony’s Great Hub. I assume that you would prefer a more robust motility unit than this one.’
‘I won’t really feel safe in anything less than a multiprojector battledrone,’ said Reski Emantes. ‘Something like Perseusystems Ravager 9000 would do nicely.’
‘My apologies, but all that is available are a few type twos and a type three.’
‘I’ll take the type three–at least it doesn’t look like a triangular toy.’