7

 

BLITE

Electronically enforced sleep wasn’t enough and Blite was tired and irritable as he headed out of his cabin. The Rose was approaching the border now, and Greer and Brond were awaiting him on the bridge. Of course, actually saying that they were near the realspace border when they were in U-space was supposedly nonsensical, since distance and relative positions were concepts that didn’t apply in that continuum—it was all about energy vectors, five-dimensional leveraging and other terms that could only be described mathematically. But all of that was gibberish to Blite. He stuck with the idea that realspace was the surface of a sea, and that diving below that surface into U-space he could simply travel faster relative to that surface. It was also true that hostiles could drop mines into that sea to force vessels like The Rose to the surface . . .

“I guess we’ll be finding out shortly if we can get through the border,” he said, settling himself in his chair and checking the instruments before him. “How long, Leven?”

“In your terms, just a few minutes,” the Golem ship mind replied.

“Okay,” said Blite. He wasn’t going to allow Leven to draw him into a discussion about the relevance of time in such situations. He sat back and fastened his safety straps. Glancing at Greer and Brond, he saw that they had similarly secured themselves.

“So if a Polity watch station knocks us out of U-space?” said Greer. “What then?”

“You just obeyed my orders,” he said.

“You think that’ll make any difference?”

“Maybe.”

“But we have our hardfield to defend us . . .” suggested Brond.

“Sure we do,” Blite replied with a sneer. “And I guess we can sit under it until our reactor runs out of fuel or we run out of air and food.”

Brond gave that a solemn nod. Really, if the nearest watch station or Polity vessel deployed a USER or some U-space mine or missile, it would fuck them. Polity forces on the border would haul them in and dispatch them back to Par Avion. Ostensibly they would be there to answer charges about criminal damage to the station but, at some point, a forensic AI would get its manipulators on them, digging for information on Penny Royal.

“Maybe we’ll be—” began Greer, whereupon the ship gave a deep shudder.

“Fuck,” said Blite.

A force took hold of them, and everything around Blite twisted out of ghostly perception into hard reality. The ship shook again and something screeched back in the engine room, protesting like a giant cicada scooted from its perch, then it emitted a sound Blite could only think of as a death rattle. The smell of burning permeated the air and error diagnostics filled the screen laminate with red text, scrolling fast. Blite reached out to hit a control and the shutters drew aside to reveal starlit space.

“The drive?” he asked, suddenly calm.

“Fried,” Leven replied. “It was functional but a little dodgy—that U-space mine just finished it off.”

So, even if they could get away from the mine’s disruptive effect using their steering thrusters, they wouldn’t be going much further. Now the diagnostics fled from the laminate, it rippled, and a ship appeared out there. The thing was huge—a gleaming lozenge of blue and silver metal studded with sensors, weapons and other paraphernalia. Blite gazed at some sort of protrusion studded with dishes. It was the shape and probably the size of the Eiffel Tower—just one of many such protrusions on the behemoth of a ship Blite recognized as one of the older-style interfaced dreadnoughts used by the Polity during the war.

“Captain Habitus of the Polity dreadnought Snarl would like to speak to us,” said Leven tiredly, now using steering thrusters to turn them and bring that dreadnought into sight through the main chain-glass screen.

Really, what was there to say?

“Okay, let’s hear him.”

A frame opened in the laminate to reveal a bald-headed corpse-coloured man. His eyes were white, with gridlines across them. He wore what looked like a half-helmet augmentation but one trailing optic cables and fluid pipes. Other pipes and optics ran down his neck into an armoured chest plate studded with high-tech protuberances.

“Snarl is baffled by your attempt to cross here,” said the interfaced captain.

“I thought AIs were intelligent,” said Blite.

“It was calculated to a ninety per cent probability that you would aim to cross here, whereupon the probability immediately dropped below ten per cent because surely you would have been aware we’d make that calculation.”

“Sometimes the coin falls on its edge,” another voice whispered.

“Something else just appeared out there,” said Leven. “Closing in fast.”

“You,” said Habitus, turning his head slightly as if gazing at some other screen with his blind eyes.

“Did I not deliver sufficient warning?” said that voice.

Something flashed out there, then a section of the dreadnought’s hull bulged and burst with a glaring explosion. Gaping, Blite watched that tower tumbling away into space along with other objects of a similar scale. Another explosion ensued, gouting fire from the same hole, then something long and black appeared off to one side of the big ship. In the laminate, Habitus had one hand clutched around the pipes leading into his skull, and his image had turned hazy as if the room he occupied had now filled with smoke.

“Final warning,” said the voice.

“We didn’t know,” said Habitus, his voice echoing as if two people were speaking from inside him slightly out of sync.

“They are mine,” said the implacable voice from that black ship out there.

Now it turned and rapidly accelerated towards The Rose, but as it came, it seemed to be splintering and opening out, rearranging its structure in some impossible manner, turning into a great black tubeworm head descending on them. Within seconds, it slammed into Blite’s ship, and though he was glad he had put his safety straps on, for the impact threatened to tear his chair from the floor, he dreaded what damage it had done to his ship. As he recovered, rubbing at his strained neck and hoping this pain would not be the last thing he felt, he saw that the view through the chain-glass screen was of a dark crystalline mass, shifting as if at the turning of some kaleidoscope. Acceleration followed, shoving him hard down into his seat, followed by just a gentle twist and feeling of wrongness indicating that they had entered U-space.

“I thought you were done with us,” said Blite.

“But you are not done with me, are you Captain?” Penny Royal replied.

TRENT

The ancient expression “out of the frying pan and into the fire” was far too simple, Trent felt, to describe his circumstances over the last year. He’d been safe enough as Isobel Satomi’s lieutenant but that had changed as she made her transformation into a hooder. He’d ended up on a ship with the creature she became, as she tried to stop herself from eating him. The mafia boss on the Rock Pool had then captured and tortured him, and subsequently he’d been stuck aboard Isobel’s ship as she conducted her doomed assault on Masada. He’d been in the wreckage of that ship as it fell from orbit, then landed in the grasp of a forensic AI—an AI that had, in fact, taken him apart. He shuddered.

He had felt a momentary breath of freedom in this single-ship, quickly followed by him finding a Penny Royal Golem aboard with him. And now, this ship was settling in some bay aboard a prador dreadnought. “Shit happens” was another old expression that seemed appropriate, though hardly strong enough.

“This prador, Sverl, wants Isobel,” he said. “So why am I here?”

He had been afraid to ask this question because he wasn’t sure he wanted to know the answer. He’d learned, during the short journey to this dreadnought, that Penny Royal had handed over control of this Golem to this Father-Captain Sverl. Apparently, the Golem, who demanded to be called “Mr Grey,” was now free but wanted something from Sverl, for which the payment was the earring in Trent’s pocket. He suspected he was just something to sweeten the present deal—perhaps a gift for Sverl, perhaps to give the prador a taste of the old times. He felt a renewed sense of dread.

“I don’t know,” said Mr Grey, “but no pieces in the game should be neglected.”

The ship settled with a thump, hydraulics whined, and a docking mechanism gave a final shudder as if, like dying prey, it had finally given up. Grey waved one skeletal hand towards the rear of the cockpit but Trent remained in his seat.

“I’ll just wait here,” he said.

Grey held out that hand towards him. “Then give me Isobel.”

Trent put his hand in his pocket and closed it round the purple sapphire. The connection to his sister was still there for him. The original gem had been shattered, then reassembled to hold everything Isobel Satomi had been. Strangely, this hadn’t weakened his connection to the gem, but had tied it even closer to him. He couldn’t just hand it over. He stood up.

“Okay, let’s go.”

In reality he’d had no control over his fate since before the Rock Pool. He should have taken his leave of Satomi before she agreed to take Thorvald Spear to the Polity destroyer he’d been hunting. Then again, what would he have done? He would probably have ended up as the muscle for some other Graveyard crime lord. He wouldn’t have been who he was now . . .

“Snickety snick, double quick,” said Grey, then reached down and with one wrench pulled the optic cables from his chest. He staggered for just a moment, shook his head, then began closing up his ribs as he turned to leave the cockpit.

The door into the ship’s small hold was obviously already open, because a smell as of a breeze wafting across the decaying detritus of a tide line reached Trent’s nostrils as he followed. Grey reached that door and went down the ramp ahead of him, metal clattering on metal. Trent stepped onto the head of the ramp and looked around. This bay was huge and much lighter than he had expected the interior of a prador ship to be. He had anticipated dank organic gloom filled with vicious hissings, but here he saw little to distinguish the place from the hold of some massive Polity ship or space station . . . except for him.

Trent had never seen real prador without armour, but he had seen plenty of image files of them and had even ventured into a few VR scenarios that included them. The prador down on the floor was big, sans artificial armour, and he knew at once that it wasn’t right. Its shell was a mottled blue and black whorled through with grey. It looked like a model of prador fashioned out of a fossil conglomerate, and the modeller hadn’t got the legs right at all. It was also carrying quite a lot of hardware that wasn’t of the expected kind—no Gatling cannon clamped to one claw, no ammunition box and dangling ammunition belt and no shiny-throated particle cannon. It had metal inlaid in its carapace, visual amplifying visors over some of its eyes, a motorized tool-head attached to one claw with a flexible pipe feed leading to a cylindrical carousel mounted on its back. Most of this hardware looked like some sort of amalgam of Polity and prador technology, though the aug seemingly riveted down beside its visual turret was definitely the former. Trent swallowed drily and walked down the ramp after Mr Grey.

“Trent Sobel,” said the prador.

There had been no clattering or bubbling to feed through a translator, so the prador must have spoken mentally through its aug to the speaker residing under a grille beside its mouth.

“Yes, I am,” Trent replied.

“Father will see you now,” it said, “come with me.”

It turned rapidly, feet scraping the metal deck, and headed towards the rear of the bay. Trent glanced at Grey, who gestured that they should follow and they tramped after the prador. Now further out into the bay, Trent saw stuff that definitely wasn’t of the Polity. Over to his right, clamped to the far wall, one above the other, were two blunt-nosed craft with ring-shaped drives to the rear. He identified them as prador kamikazes. Below them on the floor were a series of racks that seemed packed with prador, all back to belly, but these brassy objects were motionless and he recognized prador armour. Glancing to his left, he could not see the far wall. Mega-scale racking stretched from floor to misty ceiling and it was loaded with boxes and cylinders whose contents weren’t identifiable. Amidst them, however, he did spot heavy ground-assault weaponry, including some mobile railguns on caterpillar treads, along with the only recognizable Polity item—what looked to be a partially gutted attack ship.

The door at the rear of the hold was definitely of prador design too. The big oval divided diagonally, the two halves revolving back into the wall on either side. The first-child, because that’s what it had to be, went through and turned to the right. Trent and Grey stepped after it into an oval tunnel that curved away into the distance on either side. It was well lit—Polity lighting panels stretching in lines along both ceiling and floor. Notable too was the lack of rock effect on the walls, the remainder of which someone had been in the process of removing to expose underlying honeycomb plates. Trent stumbled to a halt when he saw something exit a circular hole in the floor to scuttle across and pick up a small chunk of gnarly carapace.

Polity cleanbots?

Where were the prador ship lice? Where were the luminescent growths sprouting from the walls? Why did this place look as if humans had taken over?

A long walk along this tunnel, through similar smaller tunnels, then along one that was even larger, brought them finally to what Trent recognized as the heavy armoured doors into a captain’s sanctum. These revolved aside with an ominous rumbling, whereupon the prador leading them here stepped aside.

“You may enter,” it said.

Trent looked to Grey, waiting for the Golem to lead off, but Grey waved him ahead. “He wants to speak to you alone.”

Right, now I’m going to die, Trent acknowledged to himself.

Same situation here as with the forensic AI—no point in running, and he just needed this to be over. He shrugged himself straight, held his head up, and marched through those doors.

The inside was little like the captain’s sanctums he’d seen pictured, or depicted in VR. It was bright, to start with. Sure, this place had its stacked array of hexagonal screens and the pit controls, the two surgical telefactors attached to one wall, the doors into surrounding stores and the dangling mechanisms used to dismantle and assemble equipment and sometimes to dismantle a father-captain’s children, but unexpected items were here too.

Suitcase manufactories were racked along one wall with shiny insectile Polity robots to either work them or remove their product, while amniotic tanks near them contained squirming and clattering life. Agribots tended a garden full of weird and wonderful plants, some enclosed in chain-glass enviro-bells and, prosaically, a row of tomato plants. Damn it, even trailing geraniums grew from a trough running high on one wall. All about lay the busy movement of robots, conveyors, fluids and contained life forms, as well as the shifting internals of assembly shells big enough to fit gravcars inside.

Trent just stood there with his mouth opening and closing, then the sanctum door ground closed behind him and something huge began to perambulate out from behind a long rack packed with disparate hardware. The shape was wrong, more wrong even than the prador outside. Finally, on gleaming prosthetic limbs, it stepped out into view.

“Welcome, Trent Sobel,” said Father-Captain Sverl.

“Fucking hell,” said Trent, which seemed the only sensible response.

SVERL

Trent Sobel was frightened, but covered it well with his apparently brash demeanour. Sverl studied him for a moment longer, but only with a small portion of his attention. He waved a claw towards a nearby trestle.

“Sit down,” he instructed. “I will get to you shortly. I have something to deal with.”

“In a good way or a bad way?” Trent asked.

“You have nothing to fear from me,” said Sverl, suppressing the urge to snipe. “It is your own kind here you should fear . . .”

Sverl’s focus of attention was via cams on a stunned second-child lying in the corridor outside Quadrant Four, as two of its armoured kin approached it. The creature had gone a little crazy, tearing at a door down there as if it had wanted to rip through with its claws, even while a simple pit control lay within reach beside the door. The other two, who had used a powerful ionic stunner to bring their brother down, were fine, since they were breathing their own air supplies and not the dangerous pheromone-laden air that had leaked from Quadrant Four.

“So what to do, what to do?” asked Mr Grey via their private channel.

The Golem now outside his sanctum was another focus for Sverl’s attention. Mr Grey was a bit of a puzzle and though his aim seemed to be some encounter with Penny Royal, Sverl sensed a deep confusion in the machine. He suspected that the Golem, having only recently returned to full consciousness and free will, was still trying to decide what it really wanted.

“I have now locked all doors in and out of Quadrant Four,” Sverl replied, still watching Trent, who had seated himself. He could not hear this exchange and was now toying with that sapphire earring. “I have also engaged the atmosphere seals on those doors and isolated the air supply in there.”

“The question, the question, the question,” said Grey.

Only because of his direct linkage to Grey’s mind did Sverl understand what the Golem was getting at. It wanted to know what Sverl intended to do about the problem that had impelled him to seal Quadrant Four.

“The reason the second-child reacted so is due to his old biology,” said Sverl, knowing he was procrastinating, “and because of the strange biology of the pheromone itself. My stunned child down there smelled the pheromone produced by one of his own brothers turning into an adult. Since new adults usually turn on their brothers and kill them, my child felt in extreme danger. He also sensed a human element in the pheromone that he could not process.”

“The question,” Mr Grey repeated.

“I saved them from Cvorn,” said Sverl. “Does this mean I must now save them from themselves?” Grey was silent, so Sverl continued. “They have been changing themselves into prador so it was inevitable that one of them would take the next step and try to become an adult prador—an adult with my genome since that is the one they used to change themselves. I am unsurprised that it is Taiken who is now issuing adult control pheromones.”

“There will be death,” said Grey.

“Yes, isn’t there always,” Sverl replied, now moving over to Trent, who was fidgeting and looking impatient.

“So you want this?” Trent asked, holding up the jewel. Sverl gestured again with one claw, this time towards a nearby work surface. “Place the jewel into the interlink.” He expected some kind of rebellion, but Trent just looked tired as he stood, walked over to the work surface and inspected the set-up there. He found the two polished surfaces of the interlink—a miniature version of the kind of device used to clamp AI crystal in place aboard Polity ships. He held the jewel between them and used the manual lever to close the surfaces together, clamping the jewel.

The connection was immediate and strong; Sverl felt it down to the pit of his being. There were no difficulties here. The identification was clear, options available and absolutely nothing to bar him from delving into the recorded mind of Isobel Satomi. With a thought, he began downloading a copy of the mind the jewel contained and, as that began, he came to some other decisions.

“They are all recorded by Penny Royal,” he said, just to the Golem squatting outside. “What is physical death when this is so? I will not intervene with the shell people, nor will I intervene should you decide to do something about them or—” he glanced at Trent, who was once again seated “—if anyone else should decide so.”

Without a word the Golem, Mr Grey, stood up and moved off down the corridor, heading directly towards Quadrant Four. As he observed this, Sverl moved closer to Trent and settled on his belly before the man. The copying process would take about an hour and Sverl suspected Trent would not leave here without having his jewel returned. Time then, perhaps, to learn some other things . . .

“So, Trent Sobel,” said Sverl, “tell me all about how Isobel Satomi ended up recorded in your earring.”

Trent glanced up. “It happened over Masada,” he said indifferently.

“No, don’t start there,” said Sverl. “Tell me first about that jewel and how it came into your hands.”

Now the man looked haunted and gazed at Sverl with long suspicion.

“How can I know what’s real here?” he finally asked. “You could be just another method the Brockle’s using to catch me off guard, to get information.”

“How can any of us know what is real?” Sverl countered.

“Should I start at the beginning then, again?”

“Yes—that seems the best place.”

SPEAR

A light hour out from the system I studied the images projected in the screen fabric from Flute’s optical scanning, while lightly inspecting the data from more intensive scans in my aug. The world was the Rock Pool’s twin, even down to its collection of moons. Life, of a primitive kind, burgeoned down there too, and the atmosphere was actually breathable for a standard human being, or prador. However, this world had not been prador-formed and there was none of their reaverfish in the sea, just a vast population of creatures very much like trilobites.

“Anything?” I asked.

“I’m still scanning,” said Flute grumpily, still out of sorts after our near-encounter with Sverl’s dreadnought.

“But no sign of Sverl—I thought he would be here ahead of us.”

“Don’t forget that chameleonware,” said Riss.

I felt stupid because I had forgotten the chameleonware, and had half expected Sverl to have materialized here and gone straight in to attack whatever he found. But Sverl wasn’t really prador any more, so would certainly approach this situation with more caution. He was probably somewhere close by, out here with us, I thought.

I continued to stare at the images presented but started fidgeting and felt impatient.

“The problem out here,” I said, “is that you’re passive-scanning stuff that’s an hour out of date. We really ought to move in closer.”

“A-a-dvise against . . . that,” said Flute, as if speaking the words actually caused him pain. “My kind can be . . . tricky.”

I glanced at Riss, who simultaneously swung her head round to gaze at me, then blinked open her black eye. This wasn’t for me. I guessed she was now inspecting Flute’s activities very closely.

I too paid closer attention, feeling there was something wrong about Flute. Data I had previously only been casually looking at I now reviewed and inspected more carefully. In a short while, I found something. Studying neutron flows, Flute had found an object deep in that world’s ocean but had then seemingly decided not to examine that data closely, and instead widen his search. He was now focusing intently on a particular land mass as if sure it concealed something lethal. I was about to mention this, but Riss communicated with me directly through my aug.

“Flute just sent a U-space transmission,” she said. “From what I could catch, it looked like a situational update.”

“What do you reckon?” I asked.

“It’s the father-captain. He gave the second-child mind crystal augmentation. I suspect Flute’s loyalties are not all they should be.”

“But then you would say that.”

“I am just speculating on the data,” said Riss sniffily. “Who else could Flute be updating?”

“Penny Royal?”

“Possible, if the AI got to him, but unlikely. Penny Royal already has its spy aboard.”

Riss was of course referring to the spine and its other connections elsewhere. Again, here was proof that I could trust nothing that Penny Royal had or might have touched. I dithered, wondering what the hell to do, then decided on direct confrontation.

“Flute,” I said, “it seems you have found Cvorn’s destroyer and have neglected to inform me.”

“The scans are not clear,” said Flute.

“That neutrino lensing effect looks very much to me to be the kind you would get from a functional but inactive U-space drive.”

“There could be . . . something . . . else,” Flute managed.

“Flute, who did you send that situational update to?”

After a very long pause, my ship mind replied, “I . . . cannot.”

“Were you, or are you, in communication with Father-Captain Sverl?”

Again, the long pause then, “I cannot.”

“You have scanned that world and found nothing but that object down at the bottom of the ocean,” I said. “You are just completing your scans of the moons and they are just rocks.”

“I suspect . . .”

A prador destroyer down at the bottom of that ocean was no danger to us. It would take time to drive itself to the surface and the only weapons it possessed that could be effective against us from down there were missiles, which would also take time to surface. We could be gone from here long before they became a problem. However, I couldn’t ignore Flute’s painfully expressed fear. And there was something else I couldn’t ignore. I turned to Riss.

“Presupposing Cvorn is aiming to capture Sverl and present him as evidence of Polity perfidy to his Kingdom allies,” I said, “I have to wonder how he’d manage it.”

“This has been something of concern,” said Riss.

I continued, “Sverl is aboard a dreadnought. Cvorn just has a destroyer . . .”

“I can only suppose that Cvorn is acting as bait for Sverl, and that the moment he knows the father-captain is here he’ll send a signal to bring in his allies. The present position of his destroyer is a good one if he intends to delay Sverl. It would take many days for Sverl to either safely destroy it down there or root it out, which might be enough time for those allies to get here.”

“Safely?”

“He can do the job a lot quicker if he enters the ocean, but a multitude of traps might be concealed down there: dormant torpedoes and mines are easier to conceal in brine.”

So, Cvorn was in fact here, but Cvorn was not what this was all about. My priority was to keep tabs on Sverl, who I hoped might lead me to Penny Royal. In fact, it occurred to me that the best option to my ends would be to talk to that father-captain. I pondered this for a moment, then something else occurred to me.

“Flute, why did you use a U-space transmission to update Sverl?”

Flute made a sound like a duck trying to quack through a glued-together beak.

“One would suppose,” I said, “that if Sverl was here concealed under chameleonware, then some other form of communication would be easier.”

“Sverl isn’t here,” said Riss.

“That would be my guess,” I agreed. “I think we should withdraw and check other sources for data.”

Via my aug, I also sent to Riss, “I also think we should disconnect Flute and take a long, hard look at his protocols.”

“Agreed,” Riss replied. “Never trusted the little fucker.”

“If necessary, can you adapt yourself to running a U-space drive?”

“If necessary, yes.”

“Flute,” I said out loud, while checking data in my aug, “take us to Golon. I understand it is the nearest inhabited world.”

“I . . .” Flute managed, then began emitting a sound like an angry wasp trapped in a tin can.

“Another U-space communication,” said Riss.

It took much longer than was entirely necessary for Flute to fire up our U-space drive. I strapped myself in, just in case, as I remembered someone dying in circumstances quite similar to this. But it was the unwelcome visitor aboard that dead victim’s ship that had killed him, while the object he had been cautiously heading away from had been Penny Royal’s planetoid.

Flute took us under, the screen fabric turning grey, then flaring back to life with a world looming large before us. That had just been too quick, and I knew the world I was seeing was not Golon, but the oceanic world hiding Cvorn’s destroyer.

“You fucker,” said Riss out loud, whipping round and heading for the door so fast she was a blur. Before she reached it, the bulkhead door slammed shut and locks clonked ominously into place.

“You are obeying your father-captain’s orders, aren’t you, Flute?” I said.

“Zzzzt,” Flute replied.

“Sverl is using us as a probe to gather information, isn’t he?”

“Zzzt.”

Meanwhile there came a crack from over by the door. I glanced over to see that Riss had driven her ovipositor into the wall beside it, had levered the cover off the palm control and was now working inside it with those small limbs usually folded below her hood. It occurred to me that right now Riss probably regretted keeping such an ineffectual body form.

Now more closely linked into my ship’s systems than ever, I felt the hardfields flicking into existence out there and shifting in random patterns. Flute went immediately from passive scanning to active, firing a laser at the sea over that neutrino lensing effect to read vibrations from the surface, probing deep with an X-ray laser for reflections from hardfields or super-dense matter, rattling through other spectrums of EMR to capture whatever lay below. In seconds, in a frame down in one corner of the screen fabric, an image was building, identifiable as a prador destroyer.

“If he wasn’t aware of our presence a moment ago,” I said, “he is now.”

Flute’s response to that was to fire a sensor probe down towards that ocean. I didn’t need any more confirmation: we were Sverl’s sacrificial goat. This Cvorn, who hated the Polity, might be unable to bear such close inspection without making some response, especially as it would be evident to him that the one doing the inspecting was aboard a Polity destroyer. We were either here to lure Cvorn out so Sverl could attack, or merely here to uncover Cvorn’s plans.

Then we were into U-space again—just a brief flicker, in and out. The world was suddenly closer, and next something slammed into us, the screen fabric whiting out, grav fluctuating and something exploding inside the ship. I guessed we had just lost a hardfield projector.

“He’s killed us,” said Riss.

The screen fabric came back on just as our fusion drive fired up, the massive acceleration hardly compensated for by internal grav. I replayed exterior cam views in my mind, saw one of the planet’s moons revolve towards us what looked like a city of weapons inset in a cavity on its surface, and a particle beam lancing out.

ISOBEL SATOMI

Isobel Satomi sat up in her bed and stretched. She felt good, really good, and as she tossed back the heat sheet and swung her legs over the side of the mattress, her mind was utterly clear. This was unexpected, but only in this moment because just prior to it she must have been static data stored in crystal lattices. She remembered that Penny Royal had recorded her to Trent’s sapphire earring, that she had chosen to leave the body of the hooder she had been residing in. But where was that earring now? Who had resurrected her in this familiar virtuality?

She stood up and walked over to gaze at herself in her screen, which was now on its mirror setting. She was beautiful, as she had once been, and she wondered if she would again have to endure the rapid transformation to ugliness prior to her acceptance of her change into a hooder. She ran her fingers through her black hair, down her neck, and down to cup her breasts. This was what she wanted: just to live in this body again. She slid her hands over her flat stomach, ran her fingers down through her pubic hair and probed one finger into her vagina. The feeling was so intense she quickly snatched her hand away, reminded of the times far in the past when she had touched herself like this while standing before some client. She really didn’t want to perform for some voyeur now. Turning away, she walked over to her wardrobe, opened it and took out underwear and pulled it on, then donned tight black trousers, a pink cotton blouse and sandals, then took some time brushing her hair and applying just a little eyeliner, before selecting a couple of skin-stick ear studs—purple diamonds to match her eyes. But what now?

Maybe Trent had decided to bring her back to life? Or maybe the sapphire earring had passed from his ownership long ago. Perhaps some private individual had powered her up and she was now functioning in a time beyond the Polity?

“Okay, I’m ready,” she said out loud.

With an ominous click, her cabin door unlocked. She turned towards it, walked over and stepped out into a corridor that had definitely not been part of the Moray Firth. Here was a big oval tunnel the shape of those found inside prador vessels, only this one had no artificial rock on the walls, no luminous growths and no lice. She turned to the right and began walking, relishing the feeling of walking upright again, like a human, and not scuttling along on numerous limbs with her belly to the floor. Finally, she came to the large diagonally divided door into a captain’s sanctum. The halves of this rolled aside and disappeared into the walls, but within she could see nothing but darkness. She hesitated.

Did the prador fire up human memplants and venture into virtualities? Had her crystal fallen into the claws of those horrors and, if so, what could they possibly want with her? There was only one way to find out. Obviously, whoever controlled this unreal world was giving her some latitude. But that person wanted something from her too, whether that was to torment her or make her run through endless insane scenarios. She had no power to stop it. She walked slowly into the darkness. Under her feet, she felt the floor become uneven, then her sandals crunched on gravel. Ahead of her, a line etched itself into existence and she smelled the sea. The area above the line abruptly grew lighter, picking out deep blue-grey clouds against a pale sky, the glare of a rising sun keeping everything below in dark silhouette.

“Well, this is unexpected,” said a voice.

The bloated red orb of a sun rose rapidly then slowed above the horizon, while below it heaved a violet sea. Directly ahead lay a beach of rough white sand, upon which waves slopped gently. She heard the cry of something that definitely wasn’t a gull. Checking to her left, she saw an arid landscape scattered with occasional rose-shaped pale green succulents growing at the bases of granite rocks, which stretched into haze and distant spiky peaks. To her right this same landscape rose up to a low hill upon which tall ferns clustered like an encroaching army. In front of her, seated on a rock by the shore, was a man. She walked towards him.

“What is unexpected?” she asked.

The man raised his gaze from inspecting his open hands and looked at her. He was blond, his hair short-cropped, and his eyes were blue. He was pretty enough in his way but didn’t bulk very much in his silly patterned shorts and sleeveless top, and was nowhere near the masculine ideal Isobel preferred.

“How it feels to be really human,” he replied, his voice soft and non-threatening. He reached down and picked up a rock, held it tight in his hand then released it.

Isobel thought about his statement and asked, “Are you an AI slumming it in this virtuality as a human?”

“Partially,” he said, grimacing.

“Haiman?”

“Of a sort.”

“What do you want from me?”

Now he looked sad. “I have studied your entire life, Isobel. I know why you became what you became, and the drivers behind your every action. I was fascinated at first but in the process found a growing abhorrence because, in studying the detail and all the interconnections, one comes to understand that the very concept of choice is a false one.”

“I don’t believe in predestination,” Isobel snapped, suddenly angry. “I did make my own choices. I did choose my own path.”

“Predestination,” he repeated, turning his head away. “As evolved creatures we can’t escape it. But as creatures who can alter both our bodies and our minds, we can introduce the random . . .”

“You still haven’t told me what you want or who and what you are.”

He turned back. “I studied your transformation and your dealings with Penny Royal—for they are the ones of most interest to me. I am Father-Captain Sverl.”

Isobel took a step back. As she had departed the system of the Rock Pool, going in pursuit of Penny Royal, impelled by instincts that were suicidal in that situation, and gradually being swallowed by the hooder war mind, Sverl had contacted her. The words they had exchanged had been few and inconsequential, but the communication on other levels had been vast. He had displayed his mind to her in all its alien glory, its ongoing distortion and its hungry need for . . . something. He had wanted her. He had wanted . . . mental exchanges. And this had terrified her.

“If you have full knowledge of our encounters, you have what you wanted from me, then,” she managed.

“In all but some final details, I do have that information. But it has provided none of the answers I sought. Our only common ground is that we are the victims of Penny Royal. And we have both undergone—and, in my case, am still undergoing—transformation. However, you and I are still very different creatures, Isobel.”

“No shit,” she said. “I’m a human being and you’re a psychotic crab.”

“I was,” Sverl replied, again peering at his hands, “but at this moment I am human—a lesser being, just one third of my whole.”

“Why am I here now?” Isobel asked.

He looked up. “Those final details I mentioned. I have seen everything but those last moments. Your crystal takes me only as far as your intent to kill Thorvald Spear. It takes me to the moment the Weaver seized control of you. Or rather, it commandeered the war mind of which you had become an insignificant portion.”

“But I remember the rest.”

“So you do, but the rest is caught in a time crystal I cannot access. In a manner yet opaque to me, Penny Royal has made that portion of your existence accessible only with your permission. I therefore must assume that it is the portion most important to me.”

Isobel fought to overcome her fear but even as she did so, she felt something dark and huge loom behind this harmless-looking man. She stepped over and seated herself on a rock just a few paces in front of him, reached down and picked up a sea-smoothed flat green pebble and brushed away the grit. She sat upright and hurled it hard and low at the sea. It skipped over the water and, with satisfaction, she counted four bounces. Then, as if Sverl just wanted to remind her who was in control, when she knew it ought to fall into the water the pebble skipped again and again, endlessly across the sea, out towards the bloated sun.

“Then I have something to bargain with,” she said.

“Yes, in a sense you do,” he replied, “but lest you forget, my bargaining position is a stronger one. Please don’t force me to resort to threats, Isobel.”

Yes, he controlled this virtuality, he controlled her. He could put her through an eternity of torment, while only a brief span of time passed for him.

“I want to live,” she said.

“Of course you do, but that is not my choice,” said Sverl. “I have been allowed to activate you by the one who owns you.” Sverl pointed over her shoulder and she turned. Trent Sobel stood there, gazing out to sea.

“Trent!”

He turned and looked at her, reached up to finger that damned earring of his, shook his head dismissively and just faded out of existence. The knowledge dropped easily into her mind. Penny Royal had put her in that earring of his, but here Trent had just been a ghost, an illustration—not real.

“He told me that one day he might resurrect you, Isobel, if he can ever find it in his heart to forgive you.”

Isobel felt suddenly tired and unwell. She reached up to touch her face and felt a hollow forming in her cheek bone.

Not again.

As she sat there, she became certain that a blood-red eye would open in that developing pit and knew in agonizing detail everything that would ensue. She could be forced to relive her transformation by Penny Royal over and over again. She picked up another stone, a small one, and realized after a moment that it was a purple sapphire, but polished smooth, not faceted. She knew Sverl was manipulating both her virtual form and her mind, subtly impelling her to make the response he sought, and she remembered how he could be much more unsubtle.

“Take the damned memories,” she said, and tossed the gem to the man before her.

He snatched it out of the air. “Thank you, Isobel.”

She looked aside, now feeling at once alienated from her identity and yet deeply connected to it too.

“The problem was separating you from what you’d become, so intricately bound were the two,” said a voice she recognized but didn’t want to name to herself. It continued, “The Weaver supplied the answer for its own benefit: change what you were becoming, then make the new being reject the old. Thereafter the only remaining problem was to find the line of division. It was perfect, and restored some balance on Masada too.”

Manipulators were now sprouting out down each side of her extended face. Horror filled her, and this time it wasn’t blunted by a growing hooder psyche; by the predator melding with her own predatory instincts. It wasn’t ameliorated by her knowledge that to survive, she must accept the changes she was undergoing. Everything that had screamed in her when Penny Royal had changed the course of her transformation was screaming again . . . or was that still screaming? Had it ever stopped?

On the shore, Isobel reached up to touch her face again. The eye pit was gone and it was again perfect, but it didn’t feel real. None of this was real anyway; it was just data, moving.

“The war machine left you behind,” said Penny Royal. Yes, it was the AI talking to her, the AI she had supposedly killed.

“I don’t understand,” Isobel managed, her voice horribly distorted by her changing mouth. “Why . . . you do this?” she tried, but knew it was not a question but a plea for mercy.

“I must unravel my past back to its beginning, and it’s to the beginning I will go next,” the black AI replied cryptically. “That is, when all is done here and events ordered and set on their course to conclusion.”

It stopped there. Isobel felt a huge surge of excitement but knew that it wasn’t her own. Momentarily, she glimpsed a flash of something completely out of sync with her current “reality.” She saw a human skull walking on metal legs in some strange garden. Trent Sobel sat on a small stool there, fingering his earlobe, while in his other hand he held a long needle.

“Why!” she shrieked.

“You wanted to tear your enemies apart, and I provided the tools,” said the AI. “That was wrong of me. I have now taken all your tools away from you: your war machine body, your ships, your people, your power, and now only you remain.”

Isobel wailed.

“And now you have a small chance to again be what you once were.”

Isobel’s wail died and the world snapped around her. A shadow passed and aboard this ersatz version of the Moray Firth. Isobel turned, feeling good, to gaze at her screen mirror. She was beautiful again, her mind whole, all her memories accessible.

“How can that be possible?” she asked.

“All you need to do,” Penny Royal replied, “is let go.”

“You mean die.”

“You reside in me now, Isobel, and now it’s time for you to leave.”

“You promise—I have another chance?” Isobel asked, suddenly, unutterably weary.

“I always keep my promises,” said Penny Royal.

“Thank you, Isobel,” Sverl the human repeated. He was now just a disembodied voice, his human form banished with the view of the sea.

“So I was just a messenger,” she replied. “Not even that—just the message’s container, a way to bring Penny Royal’s words to you.”

“An important one.”

“A cipher, a piece of data, a clue.”

“Perhaps it’s not finished for you yet,” Sverl suggested. “Trent Sobel seeks to redeem himself, and he might revive you in the process.”

“There is nothing left for me,” she replied. “I just want to go away now. He can keep me in his damned earring for all eternity. I don’t care.”

“Sleep, then,” said Sverl.

Blackness descended.

THE BROCKLE

The old Polity destroyer—a heavily armoured bulk a mile long—ejected an escape pod. The pod, just a cone-shaped re-entry capsule, tumbled in vacuum for a while as if to orient itself, then fired up a chemical drive to bring it in towards the detectors and defences about the Tyburn. After deep scanning it, they allowed it through. The Brockle meanwhile kept a mental finger on the switch to initiate the Tyburn’s thoroughly modernized U-space drive. If the detectors out there picked up the slightest non-standard U-signature from the destroyer, which probably meant the launching of a U-jump missile, the Tyburn would be gone, shedding U-field disruptor mines in its wake, and the Brockle’s agreed imprisonment would be over.

Ever since its arrival, there had been no response from the destroyer’s controlling AI to the Brockle’s queries, and it had not used a shuttle to send its prisoners. This particular AI wanted nothing to do with the Brockle—like so many Polity AIs, it saw the Brockle as the mad relative locked in the attic—and, turning its ship away, obviously wanted to leave as quickly as possible. However, just before it dropped into U-space a data package did arrive.

The Brockle opened the package with care. It was unlikely that a simple ship AI could have designed an effective informational attack against an AI like the Brockle, but that did not discount it having brought one from elsewhere. The ship AI had supplied all the requested data. The Brockle had wanted all the technical data the AI could provide about its ship because it was from the same era as Penny Royal’s Puling Child, now renamed the Lance, and of the same design. Now absorbing the package, the Brockle learned very little of use—it illuminated nothing about the black AI’s past, nor how it had turned into what it now was. Perhaps the destroyer’s prisoners would provide more useful information on Penny Royal.

The escape pod was now heading in towards the space doors, automatically tracked by a gigawatt laser, signalling ahead for permission to dock. The Brockle gave it, evacuating the hold and setting the space doors to open, also shutting down grav on the dock floor. The pod finally drifted in, adjusting with puffs of compressed air to swing upright and settle. The Brockle re-engaged grav to bring it down firmly. It was in now, and would be going nowhere.

Ensconced in a chair in its favoured human form, the Brockle watched through the thousands of pin cams scattered inside the dock. Once the old space doors closed, pressure inside steadily began to climb. When the pressure reached Earth-normal, a door thumped open in the side of the pod and a figure, with a survival suit pulled on over his clothes, climbed out. This was Ikbal Phrose, one of Captain Blite’s old crewmembers. Upon reaching the floor, he turned to help his crewmate, Martina Lennerson Hyde, but she waved him away irritably. Once they were down on the floor they looked about expectantly, then, after a while, Martina pulled open her visor and shouted, “Hey, anyone here?”

The Brockle stood, sensing its body’s units easing apart—the physical expression of its eagerness to get to the interrogation—but it felt frustration too. Its instructions from Earth Central had been quite clear and that AI’s watcher here would report any infraction. The Brockle was to interrogate the two meticulously and examine and record anything of relevance to Penny Royal it could find in their minds. However, it was to do this without causing them great discomfort, because they were only guilty of petty crimes. Also, they were not under sentence of death, so, when the Brockle was finished with them, it must put them on a prison single-ship and dispatch them to Par Avion.

The Brockle felt this was a kind of madness. Since interrogating Trent, it had been taking an increasing interest in the doings of Penny Royal. Long accustomed to examining the common criminals of the Polity, both human and AI, it was now aware that Penny Royal was an uncommon and dangerous offender indeed. The Brockle also understood that its interest in Penny Royal had increased because the black AI was more akin to the Brockle than to other Polity AIs. Like the Brockle, it was a swarm entity and could separate its body into a shoal form with different mind states and even minds, perpetually communicating, absorbing each other and separating. Like the Brockle, some past trauma had driven it into mental expansion and towards behaviour not acceptable in civilized AI society. However, unlike the Brockle, Penny Royal had stepped well over the line and become the AI equivalent of a human psychopath. The Brockle had merely edged a toe over the line, which was why, rather than face extermination, it had allowed Polity AIs to confine it to this prison hulk.

“Proceed to the door,” the Brockle instructed over the old intercom system, opening one of the circular doors at the back of the dock. “Walk along the tunnel and enter the second room on the right.”

“Who is this?” Martina demanded.

“I am to ask you some questions concerning your association with the black AI Penny Royal,” the Brockle replied, its skin turning silvery and splitting as the writhing worm-forms of its swarm body separated further.

“Is this a forensic AI?” asked Ikbal, definitely looking as if he wanted to be elsewhere.

“This will not take long.”

The Brockle separated completely, silver worms shooting forwards like a shoal of garfish, through the door and round into the tunnel beyond. As it travelled, it watched Ikbal shrug then trudge over to the door from the dock and Martina trail reluctantly after him. Shortly they would be in the examination room. And there, the Brockle intended to investigate the limits of its brief. Namely, how Earth Central’s watcher might interpret “great discomfort.”