Polity Agent by Neal Asher

of her brain. After a pause she accessed her private files and studied the lists of other things concealed there. Many of them were products of her personal study of the Jain node, yet she had so far only uncovered two per cent of its secrets, and most of those related only to the physical nano technology on its surface. What she now wanted concerned the subversive programming aspects of that technology. The contents of one file would be enough, since the receiver of that file trusted her implicitly. Checking the sphere map she saw he had yet to shed his carapace and depart his interface sphere.
     
    ‘Shoala, I’m sending something over for you to take a look at.’ She copied the file into a message titled ‘Sexual Electronics Part VII’—it was their private joke.
     
    She knew he received and opened it the moment the channels to his sphere began opening to her. Through a visual link she saw him lying back, his eyes closed. He began shivering. How far was she prepared to go? The viral attack isolated his sphere, but in a way that would not be picked up by the others. Now viral monads formed chains, deleting stored information, wrecking memories, trashing files and overwriting them time and again, so nothing could be recovered.
     
    He opened his eyes. ‘Orlandine?’
     
    Her throat tight, she squeezed tears from closed eyes. This was so wrong: virtual murder. A haiman encompassed more than the organic brain. It was that, true, but so much more running in crystal-etched atom processors.
     
    ‘I’m so sorry,’ she said.
     
    ‘Why are you doing this?’
     
    ‘I . . . I cannot give this up. It’s too much . . . It’s what we all seek.’
     
    Of course, the memories of that Jain node, and the lies she told about it, were from human time. It was not something wholly stored in crystal. It also rested between his ears.
     
    He was mostly gone now, just the human part left. Orlandine blocked the signals he was desperately sending to detach himself from his carapace, and she herself began to isolate and control its systems. Into the positional map for its structural supports—the insectile legs of the louse-like carapace—she introduced a half-inch error, and cancelled the pressure-sensitive safeties. Now she stood on the brink and, stepping over it, there would be no return. What she had done thus far would be denned only as an assault, though a serious one for which, if caught, she would certainly lose her haiman status and be subject to adjustment. She sent the final instructions and forced herself to watch.
     
    His carapace retracted its ‘legs’ from the sockets attached to his ribs, hip bones, and head, then repositioned them half an inch up, and reinserted them. No sockets lay waiting where they reinserted. The two on his head pressed against his skull above his ears, one slid off tearing up a flap of scalp, the other pushed his head sideways until it too slid off, ripping more skin. The eight ceramal legs, mis-positioned either side of his torso, penetrated between his ribs, puncturing his heart, lungs, liver. The two over his hips stabbed into his guts. He vomited blood, then coughed out more, his arms and legs thrashing. Arterial blood foamed down inside his carapace in steady pulses, until after a moment he hung limp, blood dripping to the floor.
     
    Orlandine stared. Now, if they ever caught her, she would be mind-wiped. Best to make sure that never happened. The subversion program she had sent could destroy itself, but there would be something left: fragments that might easily be identified as a product of Jain technology. She used that same program to locate his back-up power supply—a head-sized U-charger that ran on an allotropic and isotopic liquid pumped through vanadium-silver grids. She inverted his external power supply and fed it all directly into that charger. The trick was to make sure it drew no more than his expected requirement, but that would be enough. Now less than an hour