Read Online Line War by Neal Asher - Free Book Online
Authors: Neal Asher
Tags: Fiction, General, Science-Fiction, adventure, Space Opera, Space warfare, Life on other planets
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tantrum-prone god. The unit turned slowly in vacuum, gradually being drawn to the intended sphere by its slight gravity. This was obviously not fast enough for, in the fleshy Dragon plain extending below it, a triangular red-glowing cavity opened and a tree of cobra-head pseudopods speared up to snag the approaching object and bring it clumping down on the sphere’s surface like a conjurer’s cup. Once it was in place, the unit followed its installation procedure: barbed spikes stabbing down from its underside to anchor it in place, various probes being thrust down into the alien flesh below it, and all its internal scanning and computer hardware instantly coming online. The pseudopod tree lifted away, hovered for a moment as if undecided about something, then suddenly withdrew back into the sphere. With a huff of vapour the triangular hole snapped shut.
Mika, satisfied that all had gone as expected, held out her hand and under her fingertips a touch console sprang into being. She hit one control only and fell back into blackness and into a seated position. Reaching up she hit the disengage button on her VR helmet and felt the nano-plugs withdraw from her temples. She tilted the helmet back, for the moment keeping her eyes closed, undid the clips along the back of the one VR glove she wore and stripped it off, then carefully opened her eyes to the glare of her research area.
Mika pushed herself out of the VR frame, which at that moment lay in chair format because she had decided not to use all its facilities, and headed for the door.
‘I want to go across right now,’ she said.
‘Certainly,’ came Jerusalem’s immediate reply. ‘A small vessel awaits you in the usual place.’
Mika paused. ‘Usual place?’
‘Yes, where you boarded the last one to transport you across to Dragon.’
Was Jerusalem playing some game here? The last vessel she had taken across had never made it back. She had served merely as a piece of confirmatory evidence taken along by one sphere to help convince the other one that its masters the Makers - who had built Dragon and dispatched it into the Polity - were now extinct and therefore its base programming was no longer applicable. This convincing process had resulted in the two spheres becoming somewhat irked with each other, and to be a mere human being in the vicinity of million-ton alien entities getting irked had not been a healthy option. Mika had nearly died inside her little ship, would have died if the second Dragon sphere had not suddenly grabbed her and, while riffling through her memories for confirmation of everything it had just been told, put her back together like a broken toy. Though quite possibly not the same toy she had been before.
She decided that maybe this time there wasn’t any deliberate subtext to her current exchange with the AI. Nodding reassuringly to herself, she stepped out of her study area and took a familiar route through the cathedral spaces of the great ship which somehow seemed unfamiliar, though she knew it was not they that had changed.
For Mika was sure something had been fundamentally altered within her, and that this was the source of her present feeling of disconnection, of alienation. When the second sphere had dragged her from the wreck of her little ship she had known herself to be dying, most of her bones broken inside her ruptured flesh. In such a situation Jerusalem would have uploaded the mind from her dying body and put it into another, undamaged body. But the sphere chose to repair her . . . and she knew how Dragon spheres were not averse to tinkering with living creatures. Scanning her subsequently, Jerusalem had discerned some oddities that it claimed to be harmless and without apparent purpose, but she wasn’t sure she believed this. Now she wanted to see what Dragon itself had to say about the matter.
Finally reaching the vestibule to the bay, Mika donned a spacesuit before heading out onto a catwalk. The bay
Mika, satisfied that all had gone as expected, held out her hand and under her fingertips a touch console sprang into being. She hit one control only and fell back into blackness and into a seated position. Reaching up she hit the disengage button on her VR helmet and felt the nano-plugs withdraw from her temples. She tilted the helmet back, for the moment keeping her eyes closed, undid the clips along the back of the one VR glove she wore and stripped it off, then carefully opened her eyes to the glare of her research area.
Mika pushed herself out of the VR frame, which at that moment lay in chair format because she had decided not to use all its facilities, and headed for the door.
‘I want to go across right now,’ she said.
‘Certainly,’ came Jerusalem’s immediate reply. ‘A small vessel awaits you in the usual place.’
Mika paused. ‘Usual place?’
‘Yes, where you boarded the last one to transport you across to Dragon.’
Was Jerusalem playing some game here? The last vessel she had taken across had never made it back. She had served merely as a piece of confirmatory evidence taken along by one sphere to help convince the other one that its masters the Makers - who had built Dragon and dispatched it into the Polity - were now extinct and therefore its base programming was no longer applicable. This convincing process had resulted in the two spheres becoming somewhat irked with each other, and to be a mere human being in the vicinity of million-ton alien entities getting irked had not been a healthy option. Mika had nearly died inside her little ship, would have died if the second Dragon sphere had not suddenly grabbed her and, while riffling through her memories for confirmation of everything it had just been told, put her back together like a broken toy. Though quite possibly not the same toy she had been before.
She decided that maybe this time there wasn’t any deliberate subtext to her current exchange with the AI. Nodding reassuringly to herself, she stepped out of her study area and took a familiar route through the cathedral spaces of the great ship which somehow seemed unfamiliar, though she knew it was not they that had changed.
For Mika was sure something had been fundamentally altered within her, and that this was the source of her present feeling of disconnection, of alienation. When the second sphere had dragged her from the wreck of her little ship she had known herself to be dying, most of her bones broken inside her ruptured flesh. In such a situation Jerusalem would have uploaded the mind from her dying body and put it into another, undamaged body. But the sphere chose to repair her . . . and she knew how Dragon spheres were not averse to tinkering with living creatures. Scanning her subsequently, Jerusalem had discerned some oddities that it claimed to be harmless and without apparent purpose, but she wasn’t sure she believed this. Now she wanted to see what Dragon itself had to say about the matter.
Finally reaching the vestibule to the bay, Mika donned a spacesuit before heading out onto a catwalk. The bay
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