Ancestral Machines Read online

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  To me old mate Graeme Fleming, AKA the mighty Progmeister General!

  PROLOGUE

  The drone Rensik Estemil was in the middle of an intelligence-gathering mission down on Tier 104 when the peremptory summons reached him. It took him forty-three hours to stealth-exfiltrate Problematic Area 3 and ascend through hyperspace to Tier 49, home of the Garden of the Machines. Even so, on arrival he insisted on being recased in one of the new Iterant-9 varidroid shells before complying with the summons and going in search of the Construct.

  He left the faceted blue reshell chamber and glided out along one of the hundreds of black-mesh walkways that coiled, curved and intertwined around the new and heavily armoured Garden of the Machines. From a distance, the Construct’s stronghold had resembled a dark webby cloud through which a thousand tiny pinpoints crawled between the bright clusters of test and trial bowers. Up close, there was a sense of the jungle about it.

  Rensik found the Construct’s command proximal in a gazebo positioned among the outermost walkways. A pale gauze-canopied archway afforded a generous view of the Slegronag Interval, an askew expanse on hyperspace Tier 49, a cavernous opening half a million miles wide and about three million long, its floor a vast plain littered with the split, cracked and smashed ruins of entire worlds, gargantuan heaps of planetary wreckage strewn in all directions. A dead, airless and abandoned graveyard over which the Garden of the Machines drifted on a course that zigzagged slowly along the length of the Slegronag.

  “You took your time. A lack of promptness is scarcely a quality one expects from an Aggression field supervisor.”

  The Construct’s new proximal was a hovering nine-sided unit from which a variety of tentacles and articulated arms sprouted. Before it, on a long low cradle, there sat what at first glance looked like a large black and green drone of unfamiliar design. It had a blunt-nosed blimp configuration with a number of what were probably weapon blisters dotted around its battered hull. Blackened, twisted thrust nozzles jutted at the stern. A dozen or more sections lay open while the Construct’s tentacular tip-tools prodded at the innards. Twinkly gleams from the shadowy interior indicated the presence of remotiles, scanning hard-to-reach niches, sending back rich datastreams.

  Rensik Estemil’s newly acquired varidroid was a marvel of nano-compression and multi-function shield technology, and was comfortingly well armed. Yet he was dwarfed by this bulky, inert mass. The aura of lapsed millennia was almost tangible to his sensors.

  A segmented tentacle tipped with a cluster of purple lenses snaked towards him.

  “I’ve seen the reports of the Julurx operation,” said the Construct. “Risky strategy, allowing the second-stage colony to develop unhindered, yet your engineering of a counter-horde turned out to be highly effective. Most creative. All the local legacy civilisations will be greatly relieved.”

  For the Construct this was the equivalent of a triumphal welcome-home parade, but then Rensik had been faced with a predicament freighted with the potential for ghastly consequences. A flotilla of Hodralog nomads had been scavenging through an eroded tiltway on the periphery of Tier 103, when they disturbed the hibernating mekspores of a replicating machine horde called the Julurx. The Hodralog, and their ships and AIs, were swiftly overwhelmed by the spores, which wasted no time in switching over to building the stage-two horde, using their newly acquired stores of organic and refined materials. Rensik and his wing of battle-hardened Aggression destructors, responding to panicky alerts from Tier 103’s spire-city civilisation, reached the tiltway several hours after the last Hodralog was slain. But comm despatches from the ill-fated nomads had been relayed earlier to the Construct drones and by the time they arrived Rensik Estemil had a plan.

  “Replicating machine hordes don’t place much value on retaining nuanced data from previous outbreaks,” Rensik said. “Otherwise they would have known how to counter my brilliant strategy of capturing unactivated stage-one spores and using them to engineer an anti-horde dedicated to eradicating the Julurx.”

  “How long?”

  “Thirty-one-point-four hours.”

  “The Julurx must have reached one of the later stages after that space of time.”

  “Stage six,” Rensik said. “Its first gigatropolis was partially complete when our anti-horde launched its main attack wave. Afterwards we repeatedly beam-scorched the vicinity, and a network of scanner-probes were left on-station.”

  “Good,” said the Construct proximal. “Well summarised, if a little self-satisfied. And how would you describe the progress in Problematic Area 3?”

  “Progressing satisfactorily.”

  “Droll. And I notice that you’ve changed your name again.”

  “I thought that minor individuations were permissible,” Rensik said. “Has that changed?”

  “Not at all. It is merely noteworthy to observe that since your involvement in the Darien Conflict you have changed your name nine times. Did you know that certain Human leisure-class subcultures pursue similar alterations in designation? They vie with one another to come up with the most outlandish forms of nomenclature.”

  “Fascinating,” Rensik said. “When I arrived I was sure that you were going to explain why you were investigating this rusting relic–I had no idea that my name would prove to be of such interest.”

  “Perceptive,” said the Construct. “Pithy and ironic.” The lens-tipped tentacle swung in a bit closer. “We here in the tiers of hyperspace exist in a kind of sediment of relics, the debris of past universes compacted upon one another. Yet even up there, in the prime continuum, you cannot escape the undying fragments of the immemorial past, lingering gracenotes of vast symphonies of destruction, the heirlooms of bygone insanities.” Another tool-tentacle tapped on the hull of the ancient drone. “This war machine is indeed, as you say, a relic. Until very recently it was preserved in the deep permafrost of a world on the spinward boundary of the Sendrukan Hegemony. Possibly the only intact example of a Zarl Imperium combat drone known to exist…”

  “The Zarl Empire,” mused Rensik. “Collapsed about a million years ago?”

  “Indeed, although this device dates from the tyranny’s high-point a little further back. Most of the materials used in its construction were anti-entropic, otherwise it would have crumbled to dust by now. But this is not the reason I asked you to see me. Have you ever heard of an exotic megastructure known as the Great Harbour of Benevolent Harmony?”

  “Yes, I have,” said Rensik. “Began as some lofty altruistic collaborative project over in the Greater Shining Galaxy about a hundred thousand years ago. Ended as the lair of several psychotic species hell-bent on slaughter, and was hunted down and destroyed by the Just Reprisal Alliance or something similar.”

  “It was more like fifty thousand years ago,” the Construct said. “Archive documentation about the Greater Shining Galaxy’s deep history is fragmentary with few details, except that it was apparently a massive macro-engineering achievement. And now it seems that it was never destroyed. Despite concerted massive attacks it su
rvived and escaped.”

  A moment or two of silence followed, which from past experience Rensik knew was to be filled by a leap of understanding from the listener. There was really only one possible extrapolation to all this and it was a disturbing one.

  “Has this thing arrived in our galaxy?” he said.

  “Well done! Guess what emerged from hyperspace several hours ago near the border between Earthsphere and the Indroma Solidarity? On the Indroma side, no less, hiding in one of those huge starless gulfs that diplomats have been wrangling over for decades.”

  In one of his dynamic memory niches Rensik ran a swift scenario model, pitting the regional powers against the potential of something like the Great Harbour. The outcomes were not encouraging.

  “We will need a serious magnitude of firepower to stop this thing,” Rensik said. “An assault fleet of five, no, six thousand Aggression units, plus support tenders, would provide the necessary deployable force, especially if I were in command.”

  “We would not be able to assemble such a fleet in the very short term,” said the Construct. “Based on third-hand reports from our galaxy’s outlier stellar clusters, this intruder can be expected to move in the very short term against any isolated worlds in the area. Therefore I am sending you, and I’m even letting you use one of the upgraded shimmerships.”

  “I see, a solo mission,” Rensik said. “Covert observance, monitoring comms, gauging capabilities and weaknesses, sending regular reports—”

  “No, not solo–you’ll be accompanied by a Human operative from Earthsphere’s military intelligence.”

  Rensik groaned. “Humans—”

  “Your experience in that field should be of considerable utility.” The Construct paused as one of its tentacles snaked into some cranny within the ancient Zarl drone and a bright light stuttered for a moment. “While the assignment includes covert observation and intel gathering, your first task is to find out who commands and what their purpose and strategy are. I suspect that the regime, or regimes, will be despotic or tyrannical to some degree so the existence of resistance groups is practically a given. Your main task, you and your Human coagent, is to seek out the most effective of these rebel movements and offer what assistance you can. Feel free to be creative.”

  “How creative can I be while babysitting a…”

  A priority data object pinged into Rensik’s entry buffer. Decoiled, it turned out to be sparse background details on the Great Harbour and the personnel file for one Lt Commander Samantha Brock.

  “I don’t imagine that she’ll require much in the way of babysitting,” said the Construct.

  “It seems that she might be useful,” Rensik conceded after flash-reading the Lt Commander’s file. “Although in my experience Humans usually find a way to complicate matters.”

  “And while the pair of you attempt to foment revolution among the downtrodden, I shall be working to keep both Earthsphere and the Indroma Solidarity from sending in their fleets. The imponderables of the Great Harbour are too great and some of the surviving accounts are too horribly suggestive to take the risk of triggering full-scale hostilities. The complications would be…”

  The Construct paused as clusters of symbols began to pulse and slow all over the Zarl drone’s battered hull. Cold blue flashes of light were visible inside the crowded interior. The Construct retracted its questing tentacles with alacrity just before most of the gaping panels slid or flipped shut. A strident bellow, half deep brazen roar, half rasping howl, blasted out at shattering volume. The Zarl drone tore free of the cradle’s perfunctory restraints, rose up and whipped round to bear down on Rensik Estemil.

  Rensik’s defences surged into battle-readiness. With all tac-combatives ramped up to optimal, the initial moves and countermoves of sensor probes, feint targetings and shield shifts were taking place in fractions of a second. Rensik’s sensors were also picking up a cascade of energy-state changes from within the Zarl machine which revealed previously undetected arrays of hideously powerful weaponry. Sections of its carapace were bulging to permit the extrusion of barrel snouts and to create launcher apertures while Rensik readied his own defences, starkly aware of how outgunned he had suddenly become but unwilling to back down…

  And just when a convulsion of destruction seemed inevitable, the cryptic symbols glowing all over the Zarl drone’s hull faded and died away. There was a chorus of muffled clunks, the war machine wobbled in mid-air for an instant then fell to the floor with a loud, sharp thud, rocked back and forth a couple of times and was still.

  Rensik scanned it, found no energy sources, no datastream activity, nothing apart from vestigial ionisation around four points on the hull.

  “Excellent!” said the Construct, drifting in closer. “Most informative.”

  It took Rensik no time at all to figure it out.

  “I see. So you decided to unleash this grisly old killing machine, knowing that it would go for the most threatening target present–me. But all the time you had a cut-out of some kind rigged and ready…”

  “A specifically exotic ultrafield, generated between four nodes previously attached to the drone carapace,” the Construct said. “It scrambles coherent energy patterns, which effectively deactivated our antiquated friend here. Sometimes only a live trial can reveal the subject’s essential nature.”

  “So glad to be of help.”

  “You have and will be again, I have no doubt. You should leave now. The shimmership is prepped and ready for you in Bay 14–taking into account the ascent through hyperspace to the prime continuum, you should reach the vicinity of the Human home system in under nineteen hours. High-level approval has been granted so Brock’s commanders will have received notice of her secondment to the joint mission by the time you arrive.”

  Even as the Construct finished the sentence a trio of caltrop-like lifter modules glided into the gazebo, fixed themselves to the Zarl drone, which then rose from the floor and in one smooth movement returned to the cradle.

  “Safe journey,” the Construct said as it resumed its study, flexing tentacle tips tugging open panels and hatches.

  It certainly seems more talkative than before, Rensik thought as he left the gazebo and headed for the vehicle bays. Still just as maddeningly eccentric, but definitely chattier…

  CHAPTER ONE

  Through Brannan Pyke’s slow-waking mind, thoughts stole like foggy ghosts…

  Death came…

  He felt cold, lying on something soft, something weightless.

  Death came whispering…

  Cold, yes, but not soft, not lying on anything.

  Death came whispering orders…

  Just hanging in zero-gee, he realised drowsily, hanging in the dark, with something glowing faintly red off to one side. Those words about death whispering seemed familiar somehow… then he remembered. It was poetry, something that Dervla had been singing yesterday…

  Then Pyke awoke with a curse on his lips as it all came back in a black, bitter rush, the rendezvous with Khorr, the handover, the sleepgas ambush… and now here he was in some shadowed corner of the Scarabus where he spun lazily amid a cloud of angular objects that caught faint red glimmers from… from a solitary emergency lamp over the hatch.

  “Lights,” he said, voice hoarse in a dry throat. Nothing happened. “Scar–can you hear or respond?”

  Silence reigned in the gloom, which meant that the comms and/or the AI was offline.

  Pyke coughed, swallowed, and realised he was in Auxiliary Hold 3, the place where they stored stuff that wasn’t pointless and wasn’t crucial but might be later. A variety of containers, plastic, card and fabric, drifted all around, some agape and surrounded by their contents, components, silver-wrapped edibles, unidentifiable disc things webbed together in tangled nets, trade goods maybe.

  Well, he thought. Still most definitely alive. But why would that pusbag Khorr do that? Why leave behind witnesses that could identify him…

  His imagination provided a variety
of answers in shades of sadism and horror, and it was impossible not to think about the rest of the crew, Dervla especially. He had to get out of here, find out what had happened, whatever it was.

  Several unsecured storage straps hung from the ceiling, drifting like strands of plaslon kelp. He stretched out and caught one with his fingertips, drew it into his hand, then hauled himself up to the ceiling and used the sling loops to get to the nearest bulkhead. Loose boxes and tubes and bags hung in his way, reminding him of the number of times he’d asked Ancil to sort through this guddle and clear out the really useless tat.

  Racks lined the bulkhead. Pulling himself across them he steered towards the hatch, anchored himself with the metal handle and prodded the panel of touch controls. As expected, they were dead so he reached down and twisted the manual release. The doorseal popped and he felt a brief but definite puff of air as pressures equalised. Wedging his arm between the hatch handle and the doorframe he slowly forced the unlocked hatch open. With a sigh of relief he floated out into the ship’s starboard passageway, glanced either way and saw the same emergency lights shedding meagre red halos amid the murk. There were no sounds, just a muffled quiet. He hooked one arm around a wall stanchion and paused to think back.

  The trade rendezvous had been set for the environs of a snow-bound world called Nadisha II, in an unexploited system right on the border between Earthsphere and the Indroma Solidarity. The Scarabus had been in orbit for over an hour when Khorr’s vessel finally arrived. The meeting had taken place in the Scarabus’s main hold, and was Pyke’s first face-to-face with the client. Over subspace comms Khorr had claimed to be the descendant of higrav workers but in the flesh he was clearly much more, humanoid in appearance though possibly lab-coded for what headhunters referred to as non-civilian applications. Garbed in worn, leathery body armour, Khorr was easily seven feet tall, bald, and had a fighter’s brawny physique, as did his two slightly less imposing henchmen. With the body armour and the heavy boots they resembled extras from the set of an exceptionally ultragothique glowactioner.