14

 

SVERL

Sverl watched the show amongst the shell people, trying to suppress an internal shudder every time he saw that horrible drone inject the cure Thorvald Spear had designed. There had been no doubt that the man would find a way because, surely, Penny Royal had manipulated events to this end. Sverl accepted this notion, but felt uncomfortable with it. It was almost like the certainty of religious faith and that wasn’t a great route to go. But how else should he think? The AI had thrown Spear, like the weapon of the same name, at a target it had set up.

Alternatively, perhaps a better analogy—a favourite of the drone Arrowsmith—would be a chess one. Sverl, Spear, the drone Riss, Cvorn and perhaps the likes of Gost, or even Polity AIs, were being brought into play. They, along with the king of the prador, and maybe many other actors too, were being gently nudged into position by the AI on a massive universal chessboard. What had happened to Isobel Satomi had been the result of one manoeuvre, as were the events on the Rock Pool, and what was happening now was yet another. What would be the ultimate checkmate?

No, not chess . . .

Chess involved an opponent perhaps as able as oneself, and it struck Sverl that Penny Royal did not have one. If he stuck with the analogy, the AI was playing both sets of pieces—

“I’m angry, you know,” said Spear via his aug.

After a brief hesitation Sverl asked, “And why is that?”

“You could have done more to help them,” Spear answered. “When you knew what Taiken was doing, you could have flooded the area with knockout gas or something.”

“I could have,” Sverl replied, “but aren’t you humans rather attracted to the idea of free will?”

“You should know—aren’t you partly human?”

Sverl winced at that. “I am, and I question my right to interfere.”

“You saved them once, and most of them ceased to have free will the moment Taiken started using his prador glands . . . but let’s be straight here. You either love being a spectator of Penny Royal’s manipulations so much that you are crippling your own ability to act. Or your human part has the same lack of empathy as was the case with Trent Sobel. You rescued these shell people from the Rock Pool, then just watched as they began to destroy themselves.”

“And as a result, I am being given lectures on morality by someone whose life I saved?”

“I’m just saying that if you had acted sooner there wouldn’t have been so many deaths.”

“And life is important?”

“Of course it is.”

“You are alive.”

“Yes,” said Spear, puzzled.

“And so are all of the shell people,” said Sverl, “depending on how you define death, of course.”

“What?”

“I have been observing, on many levels. Riss has come to understand the sheer extent of Penny Royal’s reach but you have yet to do so. Penny Royal’s victims are not all dead.”

After a long silence, Spear said, “The spine.”

Sverl swung round to eye the aforementioned object, still in the clamps that had inserted it inside the assassin drone Riss. “Exactly.”

“It’s recording them?”

“Thus far I have ascertained that it contains the stripped-down recordings of thousands of dead minds. But it is also in the process of perpetually recording the entirety of thousands of living ones. I do wonder where Penny Royal draws the line. Does it, for example, record the mind of a victim of one of its victims, or perhaps the victim of an accident caused by one of its victims and, if so, how?”

“Fucking hell.”

“But going back to your original point,” Sverl continued, “I saved them from the Rock Pool because the danger to them was a direct consequence of what I am and my actions there. I did not intervene in Taiken’s experiment because, after all, those people did choose to try to transform themselves into prador. The danger to them was a direct consequence of that choice. In essence I know where to draw my line.”

“But you sent Trent Sobel down here and then me to help him.”

“When I understood Penny Royal’s plan for them, I chose not to intervene in that either.”

“But you assisted in it.”

“My assisting was part of the plan too.”

“And what exactly is that plan?”

“Perhaps, in respect of Trent Sobel, Penny Royal wanted to examine the possibility of redemption for a murderer. Perhaps the AI wanted you to become more aware of your capabilities and what you actually are, which is the sum of its victims. Perhaps there was even something there for that horrible fucking snake drone. I don’t know.”

“Found your god, have you, Sverl?”

Sverl found that very discomfiting, considering his earlier thoughts.

“Now, on a more practical level, I have things to do,” he said, “as do you. Bsorol and Bsectil are bringing equipment that you require.” Sverl cut the link and blocked it. He didn’t want to talk to Spear any more. The man’s perspicacity was unnerving.

Sverl now turned his tripartite mind to other things. The repairs to his ship made by robots and second-children were proceeding precisely as predicted, as were the subtle alterations to internal shielding and the parameters of the U-space engine itself. By the time they arrived at his first destination, all this work would be completed. Sverl had deliberately chosen a system sufficiently far away, and a transition through U-space that was sufficiently long, just for that purpose. He had also chosen a destination that would give him a tactical advantage—when Cvorn inevitably surfaced from U-space in pursuit.

However, the advantage to be gained by jumping directly within that gas and dust ring was a small one. No doubt Cvorn had already realized that his weapons would be less effective there and had made adjustments. Cvorn might also believe that this reduction in weapons efficiency was Sverl’s entire purpose in entering that ring. Speculating further, Cvorn might even believe that Sverl was trying to give himself time to make exterior repairs to his shielding and thus hide the U-signature of his next jump. It wasn’t. Sverl knew he would not have the time. If he tried, during a running battle through that gas, his ship would probably end up even more damaged. Crew aboard would be killed, and his U-space drive might even be knocked out. He intended to make no exterior repairs at all, but he did plan to change the odds drastically.

With his AI component, Sverl gazed through cams and sensors at the other work his children and robots were doing inside his ship. His second-children had stopped working on Spear’s ship. Just a few robots remained to make repairs; they weren’t essential for the other task he had set for his second-children, for his ship was oversupplied with such robots. Sverl now focused on where most of the second-children were labouring. Their task was the result of an idea that had germinated when he saw the repairs to Spear’s ship. It was an idea forced to full flower by the sharp reminder given by Riss’s presence here.

Spare components packed the huge hold in Quadrant Three, purchased or otherwise acquired over the long years since the end of the war. An old-style Polity attack ship had been removed from the giant racks along one side of the hold and brought down to the floor. It sat alongside stuff Sverl had acquired during the war. The thing was complete but for the fried electronics inside it, and the sub-AI crystal that had supplanted its actual AI.

Sverl shuddered at the recently reviewed memory. He had captured this ship during that disastrous “training exercise” with Vlex and the others. It was the ship that had carried Riss, hidden within a railgun missile, to his ship that first time.

Of course, Sverl had been fortunate. He again shuddered at the definition of that word in his case. The prador aboard the other two dreadnoughts had all died while they were in U-space. This had actually been an error on the part of the assassin drones. The parasites should not have killed their hosts until sometime after their arrival in the Kingdom, the aim being for that parasite to spread elsewhere. Only Sverl himself had come close to fulfilling that plan. Yet, following his arrival in the Kingdom, he had often wished he had died too.

His earlier self had thought the worst was over after he had removed the infestation from his body, but he had not known about the parasite encystment actually inside the telefactor. Nor had he anticipated the further months of surgical procedures to remove more of those worms, or the secondary procedures because of infections, tissue rejection and organ failures. Or the seemingly endless pain. Yes, he would never forget how he had acquired this attack ship.

His children had now opened up the rear of the attack ship, ready to insert the new U-space drive that was waiting on a grav-sled nearby. In the Kingdom and in the Polity such an operation would have taken place in a major shipyard. Sverl now understood that was because the technical expertise in the Kingdom wasn’t as advanced as in the Polity. There was also a little AI obfuscation going on. The AIs were keeping a firm grip on the technology and didn’t want it generally known that it was now possible to exchange a drive like any other component. Nor did they want it known that operating that technology wasn’t just the province of AIs. Thus they kept their pet humans leashed.

Within a few hours, the second-children and attendant robots had inserted the new drive, and Sverl switched his attention to another area of his ship.

Three kamikaze missiles hung in their cradles, big ugly lumps like squashed spheres with single-burn fusers attached. These already contained U-space drives, and also second-child minds that had been somnolent for many years. Sections of the spheres were detached while spider robots removed the gigaton-range CTDs. Sverl did not want to use these as suicide bombs, though their mission would certainly be a dangerous one. Very soon they would be ready, whereupon the dreadnought’s conveyor system would take them to their launch bays.

“Have you come to a decision yet?” Sverl asked through a particular com channel.

“I’ve yet to understand why you are giving me any choice at all,” replied what had once been his second-child mind, Flute.

“I am beginning to experiment with giving my children free will,” Sverl replied. “I forced you to use Spear to spring Cvorn’s trap, thus creating a conflict in your programming. I do not wish to force you to do anything again.”

“Or could it be that you are not sure you can?” suggested Flute. “Could it be that my recent . . . transformation makes me more difficult to manipulate?”

Transformation . . .

Flute had been dying. The cooling system in his brain case had shut down. And the electro-synaptic activity in his super-cooled ganglion was being blocked by growing resistance in the installed superconductor grid. This was unfortunately not of the room-temperature variety. Had he been the normal kind of cased child-mind, the resupply of power and the repairs to his case would not have been enough. As it was, his ganglion was now just cold dead meat inside that case. However, Flute was a being with two facets, and one of them was AI crystal. The second-child, knowing he could not survive the thaw in his previous form, had copied all of himself across to the crystal. Flute was now, in fact, an AI.

“That is a factor,” admitted Sverl. “With your mind wholly residing in AI crystal, you are indeed not so easy to control. In fact, even before you copied yourself across, you were capable of fighting my orders. However, what I require of you this time does not conflict with your programmed loyalty to Thorvald Spear—it in fact increases his chances of survival. I could, therefore, force you to obey.”

“I see,” said Flute. “Okay, I’ll do as you ask, but on one condition.”

“And that is?”

“I want your access to my mind closed off henceforth.”

Sverl felt his prador instincts rebelling against the idea and, as had often been the case before, his human side agreed with the prador. The AI part of him considered other options, including the mind being partly controlled, and reflected that grateful independent allies were often more useful than slaves. Sverl decided to go with the AI’s opinion. It was the AIs, after all, who had demonstrated superiority to both humans and prador over a century ago. And Flute had not yet realized how he could change the format of his mind and shut Sverl out anyway—with just a little internal programming.

“Very well,” Sverl sighed, “I will close off the back doors I left and you will be able henceforth to filter any data I send you via this channel.”

“Nope, not good enough,” said Flute. “I want the bandwidth of this channel closed by ninety-eight per cent. I want verbal communications along this route only. No data of any other kind, not even images. I’ll open secondary computing, with a security cache, aboard the ship for anything more complex.”

“A little drastic, don’t you think?”

Sverl observed that Flute’s brain case had now arrived on a grav-sled beside the attack ship. Sverl would have liked to use Spear’s destroyer for this chore, since Flute was more accustomed to its systems, but that ship was still too much of a mess. The attack ship would do for what he had in mind. All that it required was a little tweaking of its U-space engine—the same tweak he would shortly be applying to the engines of the three kamikazes.

“No, I don’t think it’s drastic,” Flute replied. “You’ve already demonstrated that you’re ruthlessly prepared to endanger others if it serves your purpose. You’ve also demonstrated that the changes you have undergone at the mental level are not as radical as you would have others suppose.”

“You make the mistake, despite all the evidence to the contrary,” said Sverl, “of thinking ruthlessness is only a prador trait. Inspect your own mind, consider the war, consider the things that both sides did. You will realize that humans are just as ruthless, that AIs can be even more so, and that both can be as vicious.”

Sverl now sent a program he had been pasting together almost unconsciously. He felt it hit home in the erstwhile second-child and felt it severing links, closing doors. The bandwidth of the communication channel grew narrow, closing from both ends, and Flute receded from him.

After a long pause, Flute replied tetchily, “I guess I have much to learn.”

“Don’t we all,” Sverl replied, now turning his attention to those kamikazes. He asserted his control over their three minds through channels like the one he had just closed and thence to the U-space engines of each craft. When the attack ship that would carry them was ready, he would have to pass information via a different route—supplying data and programs to the secure cache Flute had mentioned. Flute would then have the information to tweak the drive, to make it produce a much larger U-field than that needed by a ship of that size. For, just like the kamikazes, it was a decoy.

SPEAR

The former shellman was naked, just a torso with arms ending at the forearms. His eyes and lower jaw were missing and Bsectil was gripping him around the chest in one claw. This elicited too many bad memories, my own and those of others. But the first-child carried him gently over to row upon row of other erstwhile shell people laid out on the floor, saying, “This one doesn’t need the tank.”

I watched as one of the many military-format autodocs scattered about this crowd scuttled over to the man and set to work. For every one of those who didn’t need to go into an amniotic tank for more critical support, the procedure was about the same. The doc attached a pressure bulb of artificial pan-type blood, injected blood shunts to filter out the captured toxins and inserted thick hollow needles to extract larger concentrations of captured toxins elsewhere in the body. It occasionally fed in tentacle grabs to pull out something too big for the hollow needles. And very occasionally it opened up a patient for still larger items. The program they were running hadn’t required much adjustment because it was one used to extract fragments of shrapnel.

Next, turning my attention to the four large amniotic tanks, I saw that they each contained four amputees, with room for two more. The patients trailed all sorts of tubes and wires to the feed systems in the bases of the tanks so they looked like anthropomorphized epiphytes, and a faun of tank robots swam and scuttled around them. These people were the most damaged ones. They had been near death, having sacrificed some of their major human organs some time in the past and now recently lost the prador replacements for the same. They were on support while whole ecologies of nano-machines rebuilt the missing parts, or while the robots inserted artificial replacements. The tanks were cooled. They had to be. The rapid process generated a lot of heat. Already I could see Bsorol operating the small hoist to lift one of them out—this woman now had an artificial heart, though she would never hear it beat since it was a simple rotary pump.

I watched this operation for a while then, inevitably, my gaze slid to one side of the hoist, where Sepia stood observing the proceedings. Again, she occupied my attention more than she should. I glanced down at my nascuff but it was still blue, which meant that I should be shut down sexually. She looked back at me, hand on her hip, and then looked away. Irritated with myself, I dragged my eyes away, finally bringing them to rest on the dead laid out on a long grav-sled.

Thus far, there were twenty-eight fatalities. Seven had died after fights for dominance before Riss could inject them. Thirteen had altered themselves too radically to survive—one had even been attempting to turn his human brain into a ring-shaped prador ganglion. The Golem, which still squatted inside the sanctum of its last victim, had killed the remaining eight. I wondered if it had known about their recordings in the spine, or if it just hadn’t cared.

“Thank you,” said Trent.

“There’s still a lot to do,” I replied, uncomfortable with his gratitude. “They’ll need physical support, but what about later?”

“What do you mean?”

“If they were normal victims of accidents or combat they could be supplied with prosthetics or tank-grown limbs. And some could transfer to another medium like the Soul Bank, a Golem chassis or some other form of AI. But they’re not normal and their problems extend somewhat beyond the merely physical.”

“We need a mind-tech,” he said, looking thoughtful.

I stared at him. “A while ago I was talking to Sverl and the subject of free will came up. That applies here. We saved their lives but we’ve changed nothing. Once they’re conscious again they may choose to start turning themselves back into what they were before.”

“Why?” Trent looked desperately puzzled.

“I don’t know. People change themselves for all sorts of reasons. Some do it just for the novelty of being different and some because they simply hate what they are. All sorts of psychological motivations can be involved.” I paused for a moment of reflection, then said, “You should understand this. Isobel Satomi’s later changes might have been involuntary but the things she did to herself before weren’t.”

“It’s crazy,” he said, gazing at the bodies on the grav-sleds. “They need an AI mind-tech to straighten them out . . . mental editing, erasure . . . cutting and pasting.”

As he spoke I considered Sverl, the spine, what had just happened to Riss and what had happened to me. But I replied, “In your past, Trent, you forced people to obey your will, or the will of Isobel Satomi, but now you are a good person?”

He turned and glared at me.

I continued, “And now, as a good person, you again want to force people to your will?”

“I feel responsible.”

“It’s a novelty that wears off,” I replied, and turned to head away.

“What would you do?” he asked.

I turned back. “Ultimately what you can do depends on Sverl, and depends on what happens next with Cvorn—who as you well know is in pursuit of us. Perhaps you won’t have to worry about these people for long.”

“We could end up dead . . .”

“Yes, so if I were you, and felt responsibility beyond saving lives, I would talk to Sverl. Find some way of putting these people on ice. If I made it out alive, I’d then take them back to the Polity and hand them over to the AIs.”

“You’d boot the problem higher up the chain.”

“Yes. I might save the life of a man whom I found shot through the head. However, I wouldn’t stop him if I saw him take up the same gun and apply it to his temple.” I gestured to the former shell people all around. “Most of these are Polity citizens and are well educated, intelligent and technically adroit enough to alter their own bodies radically. But, having studied what they were doing, I know that the alterations they were making, even with constant maintenance, were steadily killing them. And they had to know that. It seems to me that most of them are like that man with the gun.”

“They were committing suicide.”

“Yes.”

“Maybe it was a cry for help?”

“Maybe, but they were making it a long way from any help.”

“Group psychosis?”

“Maybe that too . . .” I paused to reflect on some other data I’d found in Taiken’s files. “Did you know that most of them are very old?”

“No.” He gave me a puzzled look.

“Most of them are of that age when ennui can become a fatal problem.”

“Ah.”

I turned away again, noting Riss rounding the grav-sled and heading towards me. It was time, I felt, to return to my own concerns. I wanted to see my ship, but first I wanted to retrieve the spine from Sverl. And I wanted to put some distance between a certain catadapt and myself.

“I’m not going to let them die,” said Trent.

I nodded once. Here was a man discovering how, sometimes, conscience and empathy could be a form of damnation.

CVORN

Cvorn was attempting to deal with his sickness, any way he knew how. He opened his mandibles and lowered his mouth to the tube sticking up from the container, pressed his claw down on the plunger beside the tube and squirted another gallon of the white fluid dispensed by his surgical telefactor into his gullet. It was simple calcium carbonate to negate the excess of acid in his digestive system, a cellular suspension to reline it, and drugs conveyed by nano-machines to his bile nodes to kill their frenetic activity. He swallowed reflexively, and some of the pain in his first stomach eased. It was best to tube this stuff inside past the taste buds around the edge of his mouth, because it was the foulest thing he had ever tasted. Slowly he was recovering, but had found that he could not yet sate his growing hunger. An earlier attempt to eat some jellied mudfish had resulted in another session of projectile vomiting and uncontrollable diarrhoea. Also, though his visual turret eyes were as good as before, he could only see a blur through his palp eyes and they ached abominably around their bases.

“The screens first,” he said, once he felt able to speak without dribbling.

The sanctum was scattered with half-digested chunks of reaverfish that Cvorn’s blanks were steadily collecting in large sacks. Cvorn just waited until Vrom had finished cleaning the vomit-spattered screens and the pit-control console. He was still feeling too ill to have any inclination to aug into his ship’s system. Vrom then moved back to clean off the saddle control, and as he did this, Cvorn remembered how he himself had ceased to use it many years ago when he lost his last manipulatory limb. Perhaps he should finally replace them with prosthetics? No—right then he’d lost any inclination to return himself to a more youthful form.

As Vrom set to work on the floor, Cvorn lowered himself onto the control saddle. He knew the leaden feeling in his legs was psychosomatic. Stepper motors actually drove them, supplied with power from internal laminar storage. But it was still a relief to take the weight off his feet. He then inserted his claws into two pit controls. Despite his claws having nowhere near as much dexterity as manipulatory hands, the pit controls were good enough for some complex work. Flexing his claws open and closed on sliding scales pulled up numerous prador menus and options on his screens. First, he checked up on the state of his ship’s weapons and found that everything he had wanted done was complete. Fifteen hours from now, he would drop into realspace with his railguns and energy weapons fully operational. And he’d immediately go in pursuit of Sverl.

Next, he checked up on his old destroyer, now filling one of this ST dreadnought’s huge docking bays. He’d ordered a second-child aboard, in the expectation that he would not be seeing either it or his old ship again; the child was still in his old sanctum, squatting over the tail portion of a mudfish, steadily snipping off its proto-limbs and feeding them into its mandibles. It looked perfectly contented and seemed to be enjoying its repast, but then it was out of the way of competition with its fellows or from any likelihood of getting its shell cracked by Vrom. Cvorn envied its digestion and now resented the creature itself.

“Child,” he said, speaking through the intercom in that sanctum.

The second-child leapt up and away from its meal, dropping the proto-limb it had been chewing on and cowering.

“Child,” Cvorn repeated, then was momentarily at a loss as to how to continue. However, remembering the preparation he had made for his attack on Sverl, he began to think about his old destroyer, and another angle of attack occurred to him. Dividing Sverl’s attention might be a good idea. He found himself instinctively processing relevant tactical data in his aug and realized he was now starting to feel better.

“When we arrive in realspace, you will launch,” he continued, now thinking and planning as he spoke. “You will head out on a course, relative to mine and Sverl’s position as detailed in your system.” He sent the data by aug, but kept a link open to the child, ready for updates.

“Yes, Father,” said the second-child, its clattering speech muffled by the flesh still sticking to its mandibles.

Yes, if he sent his destroyer out it could flank Sverl and at least limit the number of courses he could take while fleeing. In addition, Sverl would necessarily be concentrating most of his resources on defending himself from Cvorn’s attack. Cvorn checked figures and analysed tactics. The destroyer carried some serious weaponry but, for the task in hand, perhaps something else . . .

Cvorn rose up off the saddle control as he considered this, the leaden feeling in his prosthetic limbs dissipating. Via aug through his ship’s system, he sent requisition orders to numerous arms caches, where robots immediately began loading various items into internal transport tubes or onto grav-sleds. Like most prador, he felt uncomfortable watching machines show even meagre intelligence, but he couldn’t deny that it was useful. The exigencies of the war had resulted in more and more robots aboard prador ships—the kind of concession that led eventually to artificial intelligence, and then to the likes of Sverl.

As he watched the robot preparations, he considered how he would change things for the prador race. The king would inevitably take a final trip out on the ocean of the prador home world, hydrofluoric acid eating his insides. Cvorn would usher in a new age. Perhaps he could institute some new form of technology based on the old ways, with more ganglions taken from prador children running such automated systems. Robot limbs like the ones he had just watched could be controlled directly by prador, just as he controlled his prosthetics. Of course, this would require more children. Rather than take the ganglions from second- and first-children that had ceased to be useful in their normal form, he could breed children especially for the chore.

Third-children were an option too. Prador fathers had never used them before. They left them much to themselves in their crèches to fight for dominance. Only the survivors made the transition to second-children. Chemical reactions in their bodies, caused by them dining on numbers of their fellows, drove that change. But, yes, he could use them before that happened.

Future possibilities looked good, and they looked good for the prador, but first he needed to get some things done. He issued further instructions and watched as his destroyer opened a munitions bay door. A short while later, second-children turned up with grav-sleds loaded with robot missiles. But before loading them, they began manually extracting drum belts of inert railgun slugs to make room.

“You will flank Sverl,” he said to the second-child. “You will sow minefields in his path and fire missiles to the locations I designate.”

“Yes, Father.”

Those missiles were a perfect example of where the prador had gone wrong. They contained semi-intelligent computing, though at a level way below both the prador and Polity definition of AI. Surely he could install third-child ganglions in such weapons, in much the same way as the ganglions of their older brethren were installed in planet-busting kamikazes.

“Your munitions are being loaded now,” said Cvorn. “Oversee this operation and ensure you are ready.”

“Yes, Father,” repeated the second-child, casting a glance at its unfinished dinner, then heading over to the destroyer’s controls. Cvorn watched it climb onto the saddle control and insert dextrous manipulatory limbs, and felt a moment of peevishness. He decided that if it survived the coming encounter, its next encounter would be with a surgical telefactor. He would then use its ganglion, supplanting the sub-AI computing running this ship’s weapons caches.

Having thought about children—their present utility and future uses—Cvorn now turned his attention to the mating pool. The female he had fertilized was squatting by the food pillar, the other two just out from it, protectively on guard. This was nothing to do with instinct—just filial loyalty. Before prador first began banging lumps of diamond slate together and thinking about how much more protection it offered when stuck to their carapaces with wrack resin, competition for mates and for the production of children had been fierce. A female already fertilized by one male was just as much a target for mating as an unfertilized female—even though they tended to fight harder. If a male managed to subdue her and mate with her, he used his prongs first to extract the already fertilized eggs before injecting his own seed. This then stimulated the production of more unfertilized eggs. The other two females must have been fighting their instinct to head to the surface to protect their fellow.

As expected, the female was gravid and ready, the blush and swelling around the base of her ovipositor being clear indicators. Cvorn now checked surrounding sub-systems and found the annex reaverfish tank. There were twenty of the big piscines swimming around in there, perpetually checking on their own feeding pillar, occasionally snapping at each other in irritation. Vlern’s children had clearly been thinking for the future, because all three sexes were present. And chains of reaverfish egg cases drifted amidst kelp trees growing in niches all around. Some of these had split open and fish fry shoaled under the spread of the thick pulpy leaves. Because so many adults and fry were present, it didn’t matter which one Cvorn selected, so he just opened the series of doors in the tunnel leading between tanks.

Immediately one of the fish swam over to investigate, but then quickly turned away, perhaps detecting something in the water it didn’t like. A second and a third fish did the same, then Cvorn found the virtual control to release a blood concentrate into the tunnel. The moment he did this, fish after fish headed directly for it. Cvorn discovered the necessity for that series of doors, when he finally managed to slam one shut behind the leading fish. It swam eagerly into the mating pool, the last door closing behind it, then it became more hesitant. It swam out, its head swinging from side to side as it tried to pick up more of the taste that had brought it here. It detected a taste it did not like at all, and shot back once more towards the tunnel. There it tried to slam its head through the closed door.

Now the two unfertilized prador females began cracking their mandibles together, sending out sonic shocks. The fish moved away from the door, searching for another escape route, but with the shocks slamming through its body it became steadily more confused. The fertilized female scuttled out at high speed, leapt off the floor and began propelling herself with her blade-section limbs. Swiftly closing on the reaverfish, she cracked her mandibles together, repeatedly punching in sonic shocks at closer and closer range. She then grabbed the fish in her mandibles and dragged it down to the bottom. There the female humped her back and drove her ovipositor deep inside it. The injection was over in a moment and the female released the fish, which moved away, and headed back to her companions.

Ever so slowly the fish recovered and just circled around in the mating pool. Cvorn now opened another hatch to another annex pool. The fish was a large lump of meat and, though it was now issuing the chemical signature that prevented the injecting female from attacking it, the other females would soon forget and go after it. Cvorn released blood concentrate in the new tunnel and the reaverfish went through. It headed straight over to patrol round, where it expected to find another feeding pillar, but it found nothing. In a few hours the prador nymphs would start hatching out, and would begin eating it from the inside out. Like the parasites the Polity had resurrected during the war, they would first avoid eating any organ that would kill their host quickly. However, as they grew into what some prador described as fourth-children, their appetites would change.

Eventually the fish would die and be consumed, whereupon the fourth-children would turn on their weaker brethren and eat them, in turn. With lungs wholly displacing their gill systems, the males would head for the surface via a ramp that led into a third-child crèche and to yet another feeding pillar. There they would viciously compete while their ganglions expanded and they steadily turned from savage mindless predators into savage predators with brains. Older prador would then take these male third-children from the crèche to begin the next stage of their education. This, as Cvorn well remembered, usually began with a beating from a second-child. Education thereafter was a weeding-out process. Those that didn’t learn quickly enough became lunch for their older brethren.

BLITE

Blite jerked into wakefulness and rolled out of bed, trying to figure out if he had been dreaming it, or if the Black Rose had really submerged into U-space. He felt bleary and nauseous. All the waiting around at Penny Royal’s command, for who knew what, had made him delve into his liquor supply more than was his custom. He sat on the edge of his bed, rubbing his face, and reached over to the drawers set in the wall beside it, opened one and took out a small bottle. He eyed the dwindling contents, then tipped out two aldetox tablets and dry swallowed them. As he stood up and walked over to his cabin dispenser, he realized that, yes, he could feel the almost subliminal hum of the U-space engines. On autopilot, he used the touchscreen to order a pint of black tea sweetened with honey—aldetox worked better with some liquid in your stomach.

“Seems we left a little early,” he said, expecting either no reply or a terse and dismissive comment to issue from the air. Surprisingly, a tinkling sound came from behind him and he turned to see a black dot heading towards him from an impossible distance to grow into one of Penny Royal’s black diamonds. It hung there, with the air distorting about it; the captain, just for a moment, sensed vast amusement and a kind of joy.

The feeling abruptly cut off as the diamond disappeared with a sound like a dropped wine glass and Leven’s voice abruptly issued from the ship intercom.

“Must I?” said the ship mind to someone, then, after a pause, “It seems I must.”

“What is it, Leven?” Blite asked.

“Just listen,” said the mind, continuing, “The further beyond Penny Royal’s particular definition of average a being has gone, either by augmentation or by some other mental transformation, the more difficult it is to predict its actions.”

“So it’s predicting actions, not zipping into the future to check?” Blite turned back to his dispenser, took out the insulated beaker of tea and sipped it to check its temperature. It was perfect, as usual with anything produced by this new ship. He gulped down about a quarter of it.

“In a sense it is doing both,” Leven replied.

“What does it mean by that?”

“Its future self informs its actions and it knows when action is required.”

Blite felt the skin crawling on his back again. He thought he understood that, and he didn’t like the implications. In previous conversations with the AI, if he pursued something, he got explanations that lay just off the edge of his comprehension. Or he was left with his skull feeling as if it had been reamed out. Now his ship’s mind was translating these communications. Maybe he would learn more this time.

“So what actions are difficult enough to predict that they warrant our early departure?” he asked.

“Penny Royal can predict the action of the mid-range augments—both human and prador cases—for up to a few months before chaos factors throw calculations into disarray. Higher-functioning entities are difficult, apparently. Polity AIs, Penny Royal has told me, have chosen not to interfere, otherwise all his plans could have come to nothing. Sverl, with his conflicted tripartite mind, is difficult too, but sufficiently within required parameters. The king of the prador is a whole order of magnitude more difficult than Sverl—close to the Polity AIs but with more random elements introduced because of his steady transformation and opaque goals.”

“So how far ahead can Penny Royal predict the king’s actions?”

“A matter of weeks, usually.”

“The king’s done something, then?”

“Penny Royal is uncertain about its prediction of the king’s actions within that time-span.”

“Try to be a bit clearer, Leven.”

“I’m trying my best. It seems, for reasons that extend into esoteric mathematics even I have trouble grasping, that the king might do something . . . unexpected.”

“So where are we going?” Blite asked, not feeling any wiser, but certainly starting to feel a bit less hungover.

“A supply station with a prador designation,” said Leven. “Penny Royal has to check to see if the king is—”

“Doing as predicted,” Blite interrupted. “I get that.” He paused and took another sip, then continued, “But what about the entropy dump? What will happen to the worlds of the Rebus system when we leave without stopping that supernova blast?”

“The entropy dump is complete, I’m told. We are now . . . up to date.”

“So we didn’t have to stay in position for two whole weeks . . .?”

“No, less than two weeks of negation was the best option for Rebus.”

“And now?”

After a long pause, Leven continued, “It seems the Polity observers will not have to evacuate the human population of these planets as planned. They will soon learn that moving the population to a planetary cave system will be enough to ensure their survival. Meanwhile, the brunt of the supernova blast front—striking both the world and the gas giant’s moon—will be nowhere near as powerful. Both of the unique ecologies under observation will be damaged, but will survive.”

Blite swallowed some more tea. “Which is of course quite convenient, what with someone having made off with the evacuation runcibles.”

“Quite.”

“And those ecologies were the most important thing to Penny Royal, just as they probably were to the Polity AIs who had aimed to evacuate that place?” he questioned.

Again, that pause, then, “Yes, humans are not rare and either way they would have survived. All that will be lost is their social structure. Once subject to Polity intervention and assistance to survive the damage to their world, they will have to change. If they had been evacuated, it would have been lost anyway.”

“Oh, that’s all right, then,” said Blite, knowing he was being unfair, but at that moment not caring. “But the main objective wasn’t really anything to do with those worlds was it? It was all about the runcibles. So what does Penny Royal want them for?”

“That I don’t know and am not being told,” Leven replied.

“Figures,” Blite grunted. “No more questions,” he added. Leven hadn’t actually complained. However, even though his voice was computer generated, Blite could tell that he hadn’t enjoyed the position of translator. He had started to get a little shrill towards the end.

Blite gulped down the last of his tea, eyed his shipsuit slung on a clothes horse beside his bed and headed over to his sanitary unit. He needed a piss and hadn’t been inclined to do that while the AI was present in his cabin. Then it was time to get ready but he wasn’t in any hurry. After a shower in the same sanitary unit, he had a long-overdue haircut and a shave. He donned underwear, black jeans and white shirt. Next came an ersatz enviro-suit jacket and intelliboots that closed up comfortably about his feet. He then left the cabin.

Upon his arrival on the bridge, he wondered if Penny Royal had been playing with their minds because Brond and Greer had also cleaned themselves up. Brond was clad in something similar to an ECS combat suit with its white and yellow-gold colouring, as if on some chameleoncloth setting of a desert world. His head was shaven. Greer had plaited her hair, or perhaps some grooming machine had done it for her, and coiled it on the back of her head. She wore skin-tight pale blue knee-shorts and a tight cream top that exposed the ribbed muscle of her belly. She looked the most feminine Blite had ever seen her, despite the belt around her waist holding a pulse-gun on one side and a ceramal combat knife on the other.

“Seems we’re all getting ready for a party,” said Brond.

Feeling uncomfortable, Blite gazed at them for a long moment, then went over and sat in his seat.

“Leven, what’s our status?” he asked.

“Five ship hours from our arrival time and bending relativity to breaking point,” the Golem ship mind replied.

“Time travel again?”

“Yup.”

So where was the next resulting entropy dump? At this prador supply station? Blite stood up again and gazed at the representation the screen laminate was showing—the black of space with stars dopplering past them. Then he suggested, “Breakfast?”

“Sure—I’m ready,” said Brond.

“Me too,” said Greer, looking slightly puzzled as she ran her hand over her flat stomach.

Blite shivered. They all cleaned themselves up and put on fresh clothing, and all three had yet to eat. Was this just one of those cases of a crew falling into a strange consonance with each other, or was the black AI onboard neatly controlling them, setting them running together like all the other components aboard this ship? Or were they simply reacting to some overspill from the AI? Together they trooped out to the communal refectory.

They spent an hour eating and talking generally about past events, then a further hour in speculation about what Penny Royal’s ultimate goals might be.

“We’re pets,” said Brond at one point.

“I think you’re wrong,” Greer replied. “We’re an audience.”

Blite considered both their contentions, remembered his thoughts about them being witnesses, then came up with a further contention of his own. “In a way I reckon you’re both right, but I think we’re something else too.”

They both waited patiently for his explanation. Noteworthy, he felt, how during that last few hours there had been no friction, no contention. They were all being perfectly reasonable and logical and he himself had felt none of his usual surges of irritation. Something in the air supply?

“I think we’re a tie to reality. I think we’re a sample of normality.”

“Normality?” wondered Greer, raising an eyebrow.

“Relative normality,” said Blite, trying to solidify some vague thoughts. “Penny Royal doesn’t need us—our presence aboard this ship is irrelevant to its actions. So why are we here? I have to wonder if, through us stupid, petty, completely physical and relatively normal humans Penny Royal maintains a grip on reality.”

“Vague,” said Greer.

“You’re saying we keep Penny Royal grounded?” suggested Brond.

“Yeah.” Blite nodded, still struggling to put what he felt into words. “Here aboard we have a being capable of manipulating time, of putting the king of the prador on the back foot, of scaring off Polity AIs. I would say Penny Royal is like some world dictator slumming it in a bar to find out what the plebs think.”

“I can live with that, I guess,” said Brond.

“Or I’m a mouse trying to guess the motives of a nuclear physicist,” Blite added.

Blite headed back to his cabin, leaving the other two to their own devices. He called up all available data on Penny Royal on a wall screen, collated by sub-program into a documentary format, then lay back on his bed and watched it. Penny Royal had been the mind of a destroyer that went AWOL after exterminating a human force of some eight thousand soldiers on a world called Panarchia. After that, it had turned into an extreme version of the kind of villains—crime lords—that occupied the Graveyard. Or you could say Penny Royal became an AI equivalent of something out of one of the old religions: a fallen angel, Satan. The black AI was something people went to for some advantage and sold their souls in the process. Dealing with Penny Royal could make you fantastically rich and make your dreams come true, but it could also leave you either dead or in some very personal hell.

After the AI’s near-terminal encounter with some Atheter technology, the war drone Amistad had saved it and brought it back into the Polity fold, apparently forgiven. It had behaved itself for a while on the planet of Masada, but went AWOL again—in Blite’s old ship. This time, it was seemingly on course to ameliorate some of the mayhem it had caused. Apparently, Penny Royal was seeking redemption. But it was following an unnecessarily convoluted route and had opaque motives. Blite also felt sure that it had some goal other than redemption in mind. He sensed that it had stretched out and shaped the game it was playing to that end, but that end purpose eluded him. Certainly, it involved those generators he had seen, it involved three Polity runcibles, and it involved the black AI. He now felt sure he was seeing just one small portion of its whole too: the one facet displayed to the small world of human intelligence.