Line War by Neal Asher Read Free Book Online Page B

seen from a gravcar. There were rivers down there too, but their regular pattern demonstrated artificial antecedents. He glanced down at the terrain map appearing on one of his lower sub-screens, then at the cross on the main chainglass screen before him, and decided he didn’t like the inaccuracy of this so queried the shuttle’s computer through his gridlink. Some delay passed before he had the information about their route lodged in his mind like a memory. The delay irritated him but was a necessary consequence of the surrounding ether being filled with Erebus’s subversion programs. Approaching such matters incautiously might easily result in him coming under control of one of those things down on the ground, and it making him fly this shuttle into a mountain.

    ‘King tells me one of the four survivors is down,’ said Smith abruptly. ‘Probably dead now and being drafted by the opposition.’

    ‘Damn.’ Cormac wished he could go faster. In his gridlink he accessed the plan King had sent while they were still aboard. In what was often termed a ‘third eye’ he studied the layout of their destination: a building complex located underneath a tree canopy. King was having difficulty identifying targets there. By means of heat signatures and observing their patterns of movement, the attack ship AI had ascertained that there was fight going on in the complex and that four - now three - individuals might be under attack from Jain-subverted humans. Unfortunately, though King should be able to hit a target a foot wide from orbit, the heat signatures of the good guys and bad guys were difficult to distinguish from each other. It also might not be that easy to tell the difference up close. Though Cormac had already worked out a plan of attack and imparted it to the others, and they, professionals that they were, had absorbed and understood it, there was still a chance this could turn messy.

    The fields terminated right up against a forest of huge gnarled trees. Accessing information about this world, loaded to his gridlink but not yet loaded to his mind, Cormac learnt that these also constituted a crop - their seed pods producing an interlaced mass of biocontrol modules. Apparently the wood itself could also be wired up as an organic processor, but there was some dispute about felling the trees because of an ongoing investigation into the possibility that they might be sentient. For a moment, as he gazed at the forest, the trees seemed to multiply to infinity, and yet it was as if he knew the position of every one of them. He also glimpsed the buildings presently hidden from normal view.

    ‘Dammit!’

    ‘Problem?’ asked Smith.

    Cormac concentrated and brought his immediate surroundings back into focus. He really didn’t need the distraction of that other perception now.

    ‘No,’ he said. ‘Just a little impatient.’

    Smith gave him a blank look - no doubt registering Cormac’s momentary departure from usual behaviour. Though they had already seen combat together, Cormac was coming to the conclusion that he didn’t entirely trust this Golem. It seemed an old distrust of AI was stirring inside him, though it was odd how this didn’t apply to war drones. Maybe that was because the likes of Arach didn’t pretend to be something they weren’t.

    Drawing closer to the trees, Cormac saw that his first idea about dropping through the canopy might not be feasible, for it was too dense. However, the trees were wide enough apart. . . He spun the shuttle, coming in backwards while using the main engine to decelerate. Crop debris and cinders blew past. Once the vessel was down to below a hundred miles an hour and mainly using antigravity to stay in the air, he spun it back round again and used tertiary thrusters to bring the speed down still further, then nosed into the forest between two massive trunks pocked with dark holes and as twisted as ancient olive trees. Checking coordinates he saw that the first of the