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.‘The Technician is finished,’ the drone stated.‘The mechanism is still functioning.’‘Then we’re screwed,’ Ergatis suggested.There was something else too, but Amistad was having problems tracking down the memory.The Technician was controlled by the Weaver and had been sent against this threat to the Weaver’s existence, but it had failed, hadn’t it?Amistad abruptly stabilized relative to Masada, a gravmotor at last beginning to function how it should.Fusion drive was down for the moment, but simple steering thrusters were still available.He fired up some of these to begin a long slow acceleration back towards the planet, and in that moment remembered, and at once sent a message to Ergatis.‘You’re kidding!’ the planetary AI replied.‘No I’m not,’ said Amistad, with some relief at last igniting its fusion drive.Within minutes the drone entered atmosphere, and hurtled down to a location in the southern ocean, just hoping that by the time he reached his destination there would be a planet to land on.It just depended on how it was done, in the end.The mechanism, now becoming acquainted with emotion, understood that it had just experienced fear – fear of extinction.Two million years ago it had eradicated all the remaining Atheter war machines down on the surface of the planet, but that had been a demolition job, for they had been powered down and unable to resist.A million years ago it had scrambled the workings of the Technician, at a distance, using techniques that did not involve direct confrontation.But this had been different.Machines like the Technician had been the pinnacle of war technology and had subsequently been used to obliterate both those Atheter and their own machines that had resisted the enforced return to the Homeworld.And just now such a machine had come close to killing the mechanism.It had resisted every warfare technique at the mechanism’s disposal, managing to actually penetrate right down the core.Only there had the mechanism contrived to bring to bear the full force of its field technology to tear the thing apart and eject it, and even now it continued to search out fragments of the shattered device and eject them.Everything about the Technician was dangerous: nanotech spreading from its physical parts, computer warfare programs downloading from the smallest fragments, modulated fields spreading infection.Nearly all gone now, nearly all.There.The mechanism found something alien stuck like a caddis-fly larva case to one of its internal units.This wasn’t part of the Technician – analysis revealed metals and field containment similar to those used by the aliens here.It didn’t seem to be dangerous, so why was it here? Closer study revealed that the end of the glassy cylinder lay open, the field generators within shut down, and whatever they had contained was gone.A metallic smear spread from the open end across the surface it was stuck to.The super-dense metal there possessed a strangely uniform crystalline structure and, even as the Mechanism directed sensors to study this more closely, the metal fractured into even hexagonal chunks that swirled away.The enormous dodecahedral unit, two kilometres across at its widest point and one of hundreds within the mechanism’s horn-shaped body, shuddered as it tumbled, went out of pattern and bounced off its nearest neighbour.A signal generated from it, routed though its U-space transmitters and down to the planet.There, a disruptor abruptly began to rise into the sky as its holding position adjusted.This made no sense.The mechanism tried to isolate the unit, managed to shut down all EM and U-space transmission and reception around the thing, but could not halt its physical movement.They were going out of pattern – it had to be one of the worms or viruses sent by Penny Royal all those years ago.no, no they were gone.Something else was attacking, subverting.The mechanism used a complex field grab to seize hold of one of the floating fragments of metal, meanwhile diverting its other units away from the infected one.Using a deep-scan nanoscope it focused on the structures in the dense metal, recognizable structures, but still room for doubt.Fear again.The mechanism immediately wanted to eject the unit and destroy it.It also wanted to send a destruct signal to the disruptors that had also been affected by it, but there was no way round the deep hard-wired programming now coming online.Unable to stop itself, the mechanism summoned the disruptors back, back through U-space and thumping down in its core, pitiful diseased children called back to be free of their misery.It felt them there, felt patterns generating from them.The painful reality was that there was nothing threatening about those patterns.Yet.Like with Penny Royal.Still it could eject its infected parts, still it could destroy them.Another unit fell, briefly touched by the rogue.The mechanism gazed inside, trying with all its will to deny what it was seeing.Matter and energy were being reordered inside and such now was the mass of data accumulating about that process, it could no longer be denied.It tried, but its orders crippled it.Here then was Jain technology – the one thing the mechanism could never allow within itself, the thing it had been built to free its masters from, by destroying them, their own self-destructive fear of it the utter basis of the mechanism’s programming.The mechanism fought the inevitability of the oblivion, fought its hard wiring, but so deeply ingrained were the orders that they rooted to the core of its being.They took over, carrying through the inevitability of the Atheter’s self-destructive fear.Suddenly this Jain tech felt like infection, filthy life occupying pristine technology, and there was only one way to be free of it, one way to be clean.Its mind in the grip of the same madness that killed a race, the mechanism reached for the succour of cleansing fire, stretched half in and half out of the real, out and down, millions of kilometres drawn thread-thin, finally snapping fully into the real in a place where matter itself burned, and immolated itself in Masada’s sun.Amistad hit the ocean hard, speared down in a tube of superheated steam that slammed shut after half a kilometre, then angled his claws and body to curve his course upwards.Most of the drone’s components remained undamaged by the sudden cooling, designed for even harsher conditions, but those already damaged by the mechanism’s gravity-wave weapon failed, some shattering.Even so, the reduction in temperature accelerated internal repairs: information processing speeded up, some nano-machines forced into somnolence by the heat woke and set to work; microbots, their joints seized by thermal expansion, stretched like arthritic fleas and returned to the job in hand.Then, with one further fusion blast creating a high-pressure steam bubble behind, the drone shot to the surface.Penny Royal wasn’t down below now, nor was the armoured sphere containing Eight – Amistad had seen that on the way in.Exploding from the surface, he planed out, gravmotor functioning intermittently, its fault returning.Ahead, smoke and steam boiled into the sky, a harsh red glow at its base.Huge waves heaved below, their forerunners already hitting the coast two hundred kilometres behind.‘Update,’ the drone requested.‘It seems the mechanism reacted to a Jain technology infection just as its masters programmed,’ Ergatis replied.An image feed opened and Amistad watched the mechanism’s last moments, stretching to an all but invisible line straight into Masada’s sun.Next came a view, and data, from one of the close-watch solar satellites [ Pobierz całość w formacie PDF ]