Polity Agent

The classification of Polity warships is only loosely connected to a similar system used for naval vessels of the past. Hence dreadnoughts are the big ones—their name owing more to the definition fears nothing’ than ‘a battleship carrying heavy guns of a uniform calibre’- and attack ships are the smaller ones, though very fast and also carrying some lethal armament. Cruisers lie somewhere between these two — the lines of definition somewhat blurred. However, with the size of ships steadily increasing at one end of the scale and increasing specialization at the other end, new forms of classification have been introduced since the termination of the Prador War. Using the Greek alphabet, dreadnoughts are classified alpha to epsilon, zeta to omicron are used to cover cruisers, and the rest of the alphabet to cover all the specialized warships: attack ships of many different designs, USERs, space tugs and drone or troop transports. Now even this system is falling into disuse. Few people even believe that such behemoths as alpha and beta class dreadnoughts exist. I can assure you that they do, and some others beyond where this system of classification runs out. At the other end of the scale the alphabetical designations have become unwieldy. The most recent state-of-the-art attack ships are designated Iota/Lambda (basic weapons)/Mu+(gravtech weapons)/’ware (Omicron classified) etc. etc. Sometimes they are called Centurion-class attack ships, but mostly we humans just call them by their names now. The complex classifications can just remain lines of code slotted, in the minds of AIs, into specific niches in Gordian battle plans.

—From her lecture ‘Modern Warfare’ by EBS Heinlein

Orlandine detached from her assister frame and her carapace, then returned along the length of the Heliotrope to her living quarters. She was abruptly very hungry—the nutrients her body stored having been used up over the last hundred hours of research. The ship’s galley provided her with a hot prosaic meal of synthetic beef rogan josh, naan bread, and cold beer.

Human time, she thought, feeling the irony of it, yet deciding she needed this interlude to gain a different perspective on all she had learnt.

With one quarter of the node’s substance unravelled, Orlandine now used the tools it provided. A stripped-down simple mycelium grew along the joists and layers of the Dyson segment, powering itself from the many reactors already in place, and giving her views throughout the immense surrounding structure. It connected to all the Polity scanning equipment within the segment, and edited out anything those scanners picked up of her activities, so as to make her effectively invisible to those back at the Cassius stations, and would alert her of anything that might affect her—its own scanners being much more effective than those manufactured by the Polity. However, she had connected this mycelium to an isolated computer, where one of her subpersonae controlled it.