20

 

SPEAR

The second-child obviously received its orders, because it lowered its bolus gun. I recognized the thing straight away. This weapon used monofilament strings in its projectiles. It was the kind of thing used in jungle fighting to clear foliage and chop up any of the enemy concealed within it. The prador had developed it during a ground conflict, to counter the human warband led by Jebel U-cap Krong and his fighters. I could understand its utility against a snakelike drone. Though it would be unlikely to chop Riss up, it would certainly delay the drone long enough for the second-child to get in close and use its other weapon: an atomic shear.

“Come on,” I said to Trent, and we threw ourselves past the prador.

“The parasite is here,” said Sverl, talking to me again at last.

A monorail station lay ahead. Weapons fire had slagged the corridor leading to it, and it was still glowing in vacuum. I bounced from a sagging wall panel into the station, caught a hand against the ceiling and propelled myself down to land beside the blade track, engaging gecko function. I then moved into a steady lope, briefly wondering if that was a train moving ahead, but then realizing it was Bsectil. The prador shortly leapt up onto a platform beside the track and progressed along it. We caught up with him as he came to stand before a newly installed armoured door.

The door opened ahead of Bsectil and the ensuing blast of escaping atmosphere threw him staggering back towards us. Trent lost his footing and disappeared somewhere behind me, swearing. I managed to bow into it and keep on my feet, Bsectil skidding to a halt just a couple of yards in front of me. As the air blast waned, he charged in. I trudged after him, and a moment later Trent caught up with me.

I took it all in quickly. Bsorol was struggling to drag himself out from under a heavy slab cut from the ceiling. Riss was facing up to Sverl and was completely visible, while Sverl’s prosthetic claws folded open like nightmare Swiss army knives and bristled with hardware. Something flashed and an EM pulse passed through me, leaving my aug streaming error messages and the spine turning hot in my grip. Riss shot away, streaking up one wall with portions of her body turning invisible—as if she were attempting to activate her chameleonware and failing. Weapons spiking from Sverl’s claws tracked her, and a particle beam stabbed out, bright fluorescent orange, and carved through the wall. He missed, and Riss disappeared. Sverl began firing a weapon like a pulse-gun, but each shot issued electrical discharges where it struck. The firing pattern climbed the wall and went across the ceiling. Then that particle beam began stabbing out again too.

“I only have to be successful once,” said Riss, her voice clear over every channel, despite the previous firing of some sort of EM pulse weapon.

I reached into the spine, confidently targeting its connection to Riss and inputting the code that would cause her to eject her weapons load. Something stopped me. The spine resisted me, and then it just fell to pieces in my hands, shards of black glass falling to the floor. I hit the ground next as Sverl’s fusillade tracked down towards me. As I went down, I glimpsed something dropping from the ceiling. Debris? No: Riss. She was a wheel-like blur moving in behind Sverl. Another pulse issued—this one causing visible ionization in the hot vapour that was dissipating in vacuum like a fast-moving wall. I saw Riss tumble out from underneath Sverl, completely out of control, black patches along portions of her body. I didn’t know if she’d managed to hit him with her poisonous cargo or not. She struck a nearby pipe protruding from the floor and then slowly coiled about it.

I rose, eyeing Sverl crouching up against one wall with a steady stream of vapour issuing from his suit, which died as some sealer stopped it. Beside me, the spine reassembled, slotting together like knives going into a drawer. I reached out for it, but knew I was too late. A horrible bubbling shriek swamped every channel—it reached into me through my aug, through the spine, through data connections to surrounding robots—drowning interference. Bsectil just collapsed as if someone had cut his legs out from underneath him, while Bsorol slumped under the load he had been trying to shrug off.

“The fuck!” said Trent, sprawled nearby and holding a hand against his helmet, his expression twisted with pain. I found myself trying to claw open my suit’s helmet. When I realized what I was doing, I hurriedly cut as many links as possible—even shutting down the reception in my aug—but still I could hear the scream. This, more than anything else, demonstrated just how integrally linked I was to the spine, because that’s where I was getting it from.

Of course, I thought, Sverl is recorded in there.

But if Sverl was recorded, did that mean this wasn’t murder? Did that relieve Riss of guilt? Sverl had been quite dismissive of the deaths amongst the shell people because the spine had similarly recorded them. But I guessed he didn’t feel so dismissive now.

Sverl crashed back against the wall, shook himself, then ran straight across the room, bouncing off equipment on the way and finally crashing into the further wall. The inside of the film suit he wore was bulging with vapour, and black fluid was draining into its lower section. I don’t know whether it was a malfunction or if he hoped to end his pain sooner, but suddenly that covering split open and sucked away into a series of holes above each of his limb sockets. An explosion of vapour followed—the fluid splashing to the floor underneath, smoking like acid burning through the metal. Sverl staggered a few paces, leaving something behind. I looked at a chunk of dissolving flesh with vertebrae and bones exposed. It looked like some half-digested animal thrown up by a predator. Sverl had just lost his tail.

He staggered a little further, then went down on his belly. His human eyes were shrivelling now and dropping out of sight. Great splits divided him, yellow pus boiling out and steaming. Then a large chunk of his body fell out like an orange segment, exposing smoking organs and the glint of metal. As I gaped in horror, he continued to fall apart. For long moments, I just lost sight of him in the fog he was generating. The screaming died to a perpetual wail that bore more resemblance to radio interference than the suffering of a sentient being. A pool spread out across the floor—a stew of dissolving tissues like chyme in a bile of immiscible black and red fluids. It was evaporating in vacuum fast; creating a crust, but not as fast as it was coming out of his body, so the crust kept breaking as another flow overran it like lava. The wail stopped and soon after I caught a glimpse of the remains. All that was left was an intricate ceramal ribcage—with prosthetic claws, legs and mandibles still attached. The items inside it bore some resemblance to candelabra and other silver antiques—I spotted a coil ring, AI crystal and a spider’s web of optics. All sat on a steadily deliquescing and spreading pile of organic tissue.

I stood up, feeling sick and empty, and turned in time to see Bsorol finally freeing himself and moving leadenly over to his father’s remains. Bsectil swayed for a moment, then went over and joined his brother. Meanwhile Riss unwound from that column and squirmed brokenly across the plating. Before I realized what she was doing, she had disappeared down a hole in that floor and was gone.

CVORN

Cvorn first watched the transmission in disbelief, then watched the recording three more times with growing depressed acceptance. Sverl was dead and he had died in such a way that even his body could not be used as evidence of what had happened to him. Whatever the drone had injected had utterly destroyed him. Yes, Cvorn might be able to obtain samples of Sverl’s genome from those remains, along with that ceramal skeleton, but he knew they wouldn’t be enough. Certainly his allies believed the story, but the point was to use Sverl to convince others. Prador, generally, were a sceptical lot and that evidence would not convince them. The skeleton was something that Cvorn and his allies could easily have fabricated, while Sverl’s strange genome was something they could have cut and pasted together too. Most other prador would only be more suspicious of its veracity upon learning of the sub-atomic processes that kept it functioning.

So that was it—all over. What should he do now? His goals had not changed. He still wanted the king usurped and he still wanted the prador to continue their war against the Polity, but now he could see no way of bringing either about. Decades of planning ruined.

As he stared at his screens, Cvorn began to feel deeply depressed. Abruptly he approached a bowl sitting on a frictionless column—designed to keep the ship lice from getting to it. Without conscious volition, he began eating the jellied mudfish he found there, only becoming conscious of what he was doing when his claw clattered against the empty bowl. He backed off, fearing what might happen to his insides. Then he realized he was still seeing the bowl despite starting to turn away. His remaining transplanted palp eye was working! He had saved his eye—using the recombinant virus his medical equipment had designed, which he’d drill-injected into his visual turret just a few hours ago. He shifted it around, revelling in the ability to look at things without having to turn his body to face them. Then, a moment later, he realized something else.

His stomach felt fine and he was hungry for something more.

“Vlox!” he clattered, “I want a quarter reaverfish tail right now!”

“Yes, Father,” Vlox replied through the intercom.

Cvorn walked around the sanctum, shaking himself, half expecting his stomach to rebel, but it still felt fine. Of course, he would have to be careful. And perhaps later he should consider transplants of some of his internal organs. He did, after all, have those few remaining young adults aboard . . . No, on second thought, he had a much better option. He scuttled back to his screens, auging into his system to call up new cam views. Now he gazed into the chamber beside the hatching room. This housed about forty small male third-children, each no larger than a human head. They were swarming over some unidentifiable meat, tearing it apart.

Eyeing all these children, Cvorn considered the option that had occurred to him earlier. He remembered a prador legend about a creature called the Golgoloth, which preyed on the young and used their body parts to extend its own life. It was, of course, complete rubbish, but the idea of so extending one’s life wasn’t at all. If he harvested transplants from his own children, there would be much less likelihood of rejection problems. Now why, to his knowledge, had not other prador tried this out? He began running searches of this ship’s data banks and, though he did discover examples of prador using such transplants, they weren’t common. It made no sense. Was there something in the prador psyche that prevented it—which he had overcome through his previous augmentations? This was worth study, but perhaps later, because now Vlox had arrived with his food.

“Here,” he said, gesturing to the floor before him with one claw.

Vlox scuttled over and deposited the quarter reaverfish tail before quickly turning to head away.

“Remain,” said Cvorn, “I have a task for you.”

“Yes, Father,” said Vlox meekly.

Cvorn tucked into the chunk of fish. Although he did experience a moment of nausea as he finished, it soon went away. He still took down a draft of stomach remedy, just in case.

“Now, Vlox,” he said, turning back. “Take security drones to the quarters of Vlern’s remaining children. Take some second-children too, all armed and armoured. Kill all of them and dismember them. What you do with them is up to you.”

“Yes, Father!” said Vlox eagerly, coming up out of his squat and turning away.

“Inform me at once if you have difficulties—I don’t want any more problems like Sfolk.”

“You won’t, Father!”

Cvorn dipped his body in acknowledgement. Vlox was a young first-child and had not yet learned that making promises to your father about things that might not be in your full control could be unhealthy.

“Go,” he said, and Vlox went.

So what now? Cvorn’s plans had come to nothing, but he felt good, had seen ways of extending his life even beyond a prador’s usual long extent and he controlled an ST dreadnought. He had a growing family now too and really, anything was possible. There might be other ways to achieve his goals—other opportunities arising throughout the long years ahead. He might even outlive the king. Think of that!

He was heading to the door from his sanctum before he realized where he was going. Then he recognized that his intention to visit the females again had been forming in his mind, right from the moment his stomach started to feel better. Eagerly, he scuttled through the tunnels of his ship, his mood so good he didn’t even crack the shell of a second-child who happened to get in his way, merely pushing it to one side instead. Finally, he arrived at the door into the mating pool.

The outer water lock revolved into the wall, spilling water across the floor. Cvorn eyed this and remembered how he had intended to fix the inefficiencies here. Perhaps he would do that next, now he had more time on his claws. Inside the lock he checked the environmental controls. They were still at the levels he had set last time, so it wouldn’t be so cold on his prongs and clamp—which right then were feeling very sensitive indeed. Water gushed in round his feet after he closed the rear door and it was warm—felt good. He hyperventilated and packed in the oxygen for what he felt sure was going to be a marathon session.

Soon he was submerged; he surged down the ramp and dropped to the bottom of the breeding pool. The four females clustered around their feeding pillar—no strays he could corner and mount—but he didn’t care. Clattering his mandibles and snipping his claws, he rushed them, slamming his full weight into the group and bowling a couple of them over. As he selected the nearest who was still down on her feet, he noted an alert in the system—Vlox trying to get in contact with him. He ignored it. Mating lasted a lot longer this time and, as if his body knew his mental intent, he was parsimonious with the seed he squirted inside her. He then grabbed another one, the remaining two not fighting so hard to get him off her. Their instinct was responding to the violence of his attack perhaps, though it was odd that they were so sluggish. Once he had finished his second mating, he paused, but only briefly—just long enough to take note of Vlox’s increasingly urgent attempts to contact him, and ignore them.

Cvorn mated with the third female, and then the fourth, a hollow feeling inside and his prongs feeling sore, sucking dry. He knew he’d emptied his testicle and would have to have it refilled from his cold store. Later he would allow one of his children to develop to adulthood—in captivity—remove its testicle and use viral recombination to match it fully to his own genome. Then there would be no more need for tedious refilling.

Cvorn then moved away, feeling exhausted and hot. Reaching the edge of the breeding pool, he paused and finally responded to Vlox.

“What’s the problem?”

“Father! One of Vlern’s children is missing!”

What?

“Give me visuals.”

The feed came through from a recorded file, showing the quarters of one of the young adults. Just as in Sfolk’s quarters, a hole had been cut in the wall. Cvorn concentrated on this, and pulled the recording back to it again. There was something odd about it . . . Concentration was difficult because he still felt exhausted and hot—perhaps it hadn’t been such a good idea to increase the temperature in the pool. Then, after a moment, he saw it. The debris from the hole in the wall was lying on the floor inside. Yet when Sfolk had cut his hole, the chunk he had carved round had fallen into the space beyond. It might be nothing, but Cvorn now studied the rest of the recording intently. It took just a moment for him to confirm his suspicions. Items were scattered all about the place and storage caches broken open. Vlox and his crew could have done that, but it was unlikely they had made the dents in the walls. Then there, up on the wall, he saw a laser burn. There, on the floor: a dry puddle of prador blood. There had been a fight, and the prador who had been in here had not gone willingly. So how had that happened?

Cvorn saw it clearly now. Sfolk must have cut his way in, but in doing so, he’d allowed oxygenated air into the quarters and that had revived the occupant. A fight had ensued and Sfolk’s brother had gone either unwillingly or in no condition to object. But why?

“Vlox, I hope you have started a search,” he said. No reply was forthcoming and the feed from Vlox had cut off. Cvorn contemplated this for a short while but found he still couldn’t think straight. He looked up at his route out of the pool. He really needed to get out of here and cool down.

“Vlox?”

Still nothing. Cvorn reached out for a claw hold and steadily began to work his way up the side of the tank. Halfway up, Vlox’s link into the ship’s system opened again and he dumped two files. Cvorn opened the first of them, pausing to rest, even though climbing with prosthetics should be no effort.

It was another visual file. He saw Sfolk laboriously raising the inert form of one of his brothers on a hoist, lowering it into an open suit of armour, carefully inserting limbs into the required holes and getting him into place. Before closing the armour, Sfolk used a tube of black sealer foam to paint a whorl beside his brother’s visual turret. Cvorn recognized it as the mark he used to identify Sfolk. Next, Sfolk closed up the armour and then turned to the cam view, pointing with one claw to a thrall unit newly attached to his carapace. As he turned back again the armour began moving, as if the prador it contained was still alive. Cvorn understood at once what that meant. And, as he approached the surface of the pool, he opened the other file.

Sfolk now stood in an airlock . . . no, it wasn’t an airlock but the water lock above! Cvorn tried to move faster, but it seemed as if he was dragging himself through mud. Finally, he reached the water lock and found it firmly shut. He clung there, now feeling the need for air. The thought of that motivated him, because of course an airlock above led into the upper chamber! He dragged himself on, moving slower and slower as he neared the surface of the pool. With a gargantuan effort, he tried to heave himself out but then felt a horrible agonizing ripping down one side. The water around him turned green with his blood. He heaved again and finally crawled out onto the edge. He tried to turn his palp eye to look at the damage. The view blurred as that eye started to fail again, but he could see that the socket for one of his prosthetic legs had pulled right out; the flesh exposed there had an odd purplish red colour. Meanwhile, in the recording, Sfolk had fired up a welder and was running it round the inner door of the water lock, sealing Cvorn in. Cvorn watched as Sfolk turned to the cam view and twisted his mandibles in a prador smile. He then reached out and knocked the environmental heat control right to the top. Of course, it was old news, a recording . . .

Cvorn understood that his prosthetic leg had ripped out because things had been softening around it. He understood why his flesh was that colour—because that was the colour prador flesh turned when it was cooked. He gazed out across the breeding pool at the fog of steam above the bubbling water, but now his sight was beginning to fade. His only pain was coming from that leg socket. If you boil the water surrounding a prador, it won’t even realize it is dying. He couldn’t move now, which meant his nerve channels were too hot. Things were starting to get very unclear . . . he couldn’t quite . . .

BLITE

The King’s Guard ships had stopped bombarding the station. They were now only using their weapons to take out anything the station was throwing at them. Blite switched his attention back to the screen’s lower frame, but it was still blank.

“So that’s it,” said Brond, sounding disappointed. “Penny Royal lured Sverl here to be killed . . . I mean, what the fuck is that?”

“We’re just toys,” said Greer.

Blite returned his attention to the larger scene displayed on the screen. Firing from the station was already waning and the ships were no longer using lasers or other anti-munitions to take out projectiles but had simply tightened up their hardfield screen. Would they leave now, he wondered? Sverl had been their greatest concern and, without him, Cvorn’s rebellion was dead. But Cvorn himself was still out there and would eventually trace Sverl here. Surely the King’s Guard would hang around to tidy up that loose end?

“They’re still up to something,” said Brond, sending a data frame to the screen.

The blades of plasma steering thrusters stabbed vacuum, as the fleet of thirty ships began to spread out. Only four of them were a little tardy, having sustained some damage from the factory station’s defences. The data frame now showed the Black Rose’s sensors picking up EM reflections from the war factory. These weren’t as strong as those from the weapons fire, but were substantial. The Guard ships were scanning the station. But why?

“I think I’ll go and have a chat,” said Blite, standing up.

“I don’t know why you bother,” said Greer. “It never fucking tells you anything outright.”

She was obviously getting a little disillusioned with their adventure. Blite nodded to himself as he went. He too should be feeling that way, but it so happened that he wasn’t. On the surface it did look as if Penny Royal had manipulated events here to result in Sverl’s particularly horrific murder. But if that had been the aim, why hadn’t the AI just projected itself into Sverl’s sanctum and ripped his heart out, long ago? Surely, the end game couldn’t be so simple and so sordid?

Blite headed towards the exit from the bridge, turning over in his mind what he intended to ask the AI. He played with the idea of running everything Penny Royal had said to him, and every event in which he had been involved with it, through some sub-AI search and translation programs to see what he could glean. The idea fled as the ship shifted underneath him.

“Leven?” he enquired.

“Our passenger is back and we’re taking off,” the Golem ship mind replied.

“Destination?”

“Ooh, let me guess . . .”

Blite headed back to the bridge, where he sat down. The screen now showed just their immediate surroundings, as they rose from the landmass of this world. The horizon already showed a distinct curve as they speeded away, and he caught a glimpse of a flock of those pterodactyl things scattering from their path. He stared at the screen until he could see nothing but sky, stared longer until the sky began to darken and stars started to appear. He could hold out no more.

“Okay, Penny Royal,” he said. “What now?”

A glassy ringing issued from behind him but he stubbornly kept his eyes on the screen. Perhaps, as the screen flicked back to a previous view from the sats he’d scattered up there, this had been the intention.

The Guard ships were now in a formation surrounding the factory station and, even as Blite watched, they began firing again. They were using particle beams this time, and more surgically too. Blite saw the station’s hardfields occasionally block the beams, but most now were getting through.

“Analysis,” said Blite.

“Looks to me,” said Brond, “like they’re hitting reactors, power storage and cable runs.” Brond paused for a second. “It’s more methodical—if you had the time and you wanted to destroy Room 101 without too many losses on your own side, then this would be the best way to take out the defences.”

“So,” said Blite, “their first attack was to drive Sverl’s allies to attack and kill him, which one of them did. They’ve achieved their goal, so why are they attacking now?”

“Because they’re prador,” said Greer. “Do they need a reason?”

“Greer is right in the first instance but wrong in the second,” interjected Leven.

“Explain,” Blite instructed.

“We know that Cvorn could only use Sverl’s physical body. This was to act as proof that the Polity had been transforming a prador into an amalgam of a hated enemy. He could not use pictures or other computer data, because the prador do not accept such as evidence. Likewise, the King’s Guard cannot accept that transmission of Sverl’s final moments as proof of Sverl’s demise.”

“Yet they forced it.”

“Nevertheless,” said Leven. “The complete obliteration of the station will be certain proof that Sverl is dead.”

Blite chewed at his lip as he considered this, then said, “So, Penny Royal, you got Sverl killed and now you’ll get this station destroyed. Did you come here to see the place that created you annihilated too?”

“Oh, thanks for this,” said Leven. The black AI was forcing the ship’s Golem mind into the role of translator again. “Penny Royal’s focus is not necessarily on major events, apparently.”

So far, so opaque.

“We have seen that in the AI’s progress towards its final goal, it can influence larger events, but this has been a side effect.”

“So what’s its real aim here and what is its final goal—is it finally going to give me a clear answer?”

“The assassin drone Riss and the prador Sverl were both damaged by Penny Royal. Sometimes it is not possible to repair the damage or put the clock back, so a positive way must be found to move beyond it. For Riss . . . You what? . . . Wait a minute . . .”

“Why can’t you talk to me, Penny Royal?” said Blite. “You’re not incapable of straightforward human speech.” Blite swung his chair round to gaze at the black diamond hovering on the bridge.

“Riss had to kill again to accept her own redundancy, and to realize it is possible to move on,” the AI whispered.

“All this just to change an assassin drone’s mind?”

“It was important to her.”

“So in Sverl’s case, the way of moving on was scrappage?”

That frame in the screen flickered and it again began showing the scene inside the station where Sverl had died. Blite stared at Sverl’s remains, but couldn’t see why the AI had displayed them.

“And your final goal?” he asked.

He felt that black diamond nibbling at his mind and wished, too late, that he’d kept a rein on his curiosity. He found himself floating between two endless surfaces of crystalline black and could feel data burrowing between them infinitely fast—because here time had no meaning. It felt as if he was there only for an instant, but for an eternity too. He perceived his mind being pushed to a limit beyond which it would surely break. He returned, gasping, to his seat, the communication ending with a sound like a thermometer breaking.

“What was that?” asked Greer.

Blite just shook his head and tried to concentrate on the screens and the data. He needed to shake the feeling of spiders crawling across his optic nerves.

Once beyond atmosphere, the ship U-jumped, briefly. The feeling was subliminal, and suddenly those King’s Guard ships were a lot, lot closer. Blite gripped the arms of his chair, aware that the Black Rose was now moving very fast towards the station.

“Splinter missiles activating,” Leven warned.

Blite immediately pulled his seat straps across, noting Brond and Greer doing the same. Penny Royal did not want the Guard ships to destroy the station and was about to do something about it. Over to their right, on the screen view, he could see one of the Guard ships suddenly manoeuvring—plasma steering thrusters blading out into space.

“We can’t take them all,” hissed Brond.

“Firing,” Leven stated.

“Show me,” Blite commanded.

Surprisingly, it was a view of the station that came up. Spectrally shifting lasers were stabbing down from the Black Rose, hitting points on its hull. These were spearing into final construction bays, carving off protruding towers and turrets. Sometimes there were explosions where they struck, sometimes no sign of any destruction at all. As Blite watched this he realized that the Black Rose was doing precisely what the prador had been doing, but with much more precision. Reaching out to his console, he selected filtering, and the ship’s system immediately presented him with the view he wanted. Now the beam strikes were visible as simple white lines, while the station seemed shot through with glowing capillaries, veins and hot spots. This was a power map of the station gathered by induction sensors. Around where the lasers were striking the glow representing power often faded. Sometimes it faded elsewhere, and sometimes light returned as some other power supply took up the load.

“Missiles deployed,” said Leven.

Around them, the ship shrugged and, along the bottom of the screen, U-signature data briefly scrolled then sank away. On and inside the station, there were numerous explosions. Some were only visible on the induction map, while others spewed debris and fire out into space. Blite watched the results. The station was flickering like a malfunctioning light panel—areas going out and coming back on again—but the trend towards blackout was steadily downwards. Darkness coagulated in one area towards the centre—all power going down across thirty miles of station, centred on where Sverl had died.

“The fuck,” said Blite.

Why had Penny Royal attacked the station? Why had it left it open and completely vulnerable to the Guard? The obvious answer was that the AI wanted the Guard to destroy the station. Yet, if that was so, why had it intervened at all? They were doing that anyway. Blite began to summon up the nerve to ask a question, when a frame opened in his screen to show an armoured King’s Guard prador—the one that had delivered its ultimatum to Thorvald Spear. Blite decided to hold off just in case he was about to be provided with an answer.

“I am baffled,” it said, and Blite wondered at the translation.

“You have achieved your primary objective,” said Penny Royal.

“Certainty is required.”

“Physical proof is all you can have.”

Their view of the station behind this frame changed and Blite saw that it was now a straight screen view without magnification. The Black Rose was sitting just a few miles out from the war factory’s hull—the thing looming massively behind them. And white spheres were moving out from his ship, then accelerating. He reached out to his controls and pulled up a tactical display. This showed the entire station, the position of his own ship, and the Guard ships now manoeuvring hundreds of miles out. These movements were all calculated to bring his ship into their direct line of sight and, of course, directly in line with their weapons.

“You are in no position to enforce your will,” the guard said.

“Wrong,” Penny Royal replied.

The Black Rose groaned and Blite transferred his gaze back to the tactical display. Here a sphere of gridlines, which was not a reality but just a mathematical construct, expanded from their ship. It enclosed both it and a chunk of the station behind. He abruptly felt cold and could see vapour on his breath in the suddenly chill air. A moment later, the gridlines disappeared to leave a translucent globe in place. Blite recognized what had happened, because he had seen and felt it happen around Carapace City—just before Cvorn’s attack there. Now the air in the bridge took on an amber tint and seemed to gain solidity. Yet, when he held up his hand, he could not detect anything unusual. He waited for some attack on this massive hardfield, but the prador must have known that such an assault would be futile.

“I cannot leave,” said the admiral.

“Dock, therefore,” said Penny Royal. “Just you.”

“You will lower the field?”

“I will, but I can put it back up in four microseconds. I can also destroy anything hostile within that boundary in even less time.”

Blite got that. Once inside the hardfield, if the admiral fired on the station, he wouldn’t have time for anything more than a few beam strikes. All that would be necessary to stop him was one U-jump missile inside his ship. The frame showing the prador blanked and a long pause ensued.

“Very well,” said the admiral when he reappeared. “The king agrees.”

The frame blinked out.

Blite wondered to himself how different the situation would have been had the king actually been here. It occurred to him that the threat to that entity’s life had come directly from the black AI itself.

One of those big ships out there now began to head in towards the hardfield, which blinked out to let it through. The field acquired gridlines in a subliminal flicker in the tactical display, then reappeared behind the approaching ship. The ship came past them, settling in close to the station’s hull, right over Sverl’s final location.

“Our guest is leaving us,” said Leven.

The dark area was like a macula in Blite’s eye, as it briefly shot across the screen view and out of sight. A red dot appeared in the tactical display and shot down towards the station, disappearing within the vast construction bay nearest to Sverl’s last sanctum.

“It’s a war dock,” Brond observed.

It certainly was. The Guard ship had fired anchor cables and was hoisting itself closer still to the station. Meanwhile, from a point at its midsection, it began extruding a tube. This hit the station hull fast, like a drill going into brass—and the vacuum all around filled with glittering fragments. The moment this happened, two more screen frames opened. One of them showed a view from inside the station, as the war dock bored through the hull. They caught a glimpse of armed and armoured prador clustering in the throat of the war dock, behind a hardfield. The other view was a rapidly changing one from something moving fast inside the station—Penny Royal, of course. Blite rested his elbows on his chair arms, interlaced his fingers and rested his chin on them. Considerate of the AI, he felt, to give them this view.

I am satisfied by the scraps it tosses me, he thought.

A little later, he got up and went to check on the antique space suit. He opened its visor and peered inside for a long time, then with a sigh returned to the bridge.

SPEAR

For maybe a full minute I was blind, in that I could see no more than my immediate surroundings. This included the column Riss had abandoned and to which I was now clinging in turn. It made sense that the Guard had attacked again. And I wondered at Riss’s naivety in thinking that a transmitted recording of Sverl’s death would be enough. What hit us next I didn’t know—the beam strikes had been so fast and had so quickly disrupted power supplies I just didn’t have much time to sort out sensor data. All I did know was that spectrally adjusting lasers had hit the station all along its length. Detonations inside had occurred, taking out reactors and laminar power storage. The moving source of those destructive lasers just hadn’t been clear.

A few sensors powered up again in the section of station immediately around us. And out above the hull, I could see a ship out there. It’s hull metal was like that of the one that had intercepted us at Masada—a modern Polity attack ship—but its shape was wildly different. But that wasn’t even my greatest concern. Now pushing myself away from the column, I tried to understand why that ship had not stopped one of the Guard ships from docking. But this became all too clear when sensors revealed the massive hardfield out there. Penny Royal was here.

“What happened?” asked Trent, releasing the skein of optics to which he had been clinging.

Through station internal cams, I watched the steady, violent progress of the business end of a war dock spearing straight towards us. I considered telling him we were about to die, but found I didn’t actually believe that. I guessed that was exactly how Sverl felt—right up to the moment the enzyme acid started dissolving his body.

“King’s Guard are on their way in,” I said.

Trent retrieved his weapon. It had come to rest against the pile of dried-out organic detritus sticking Sverl’s ceramal skeleton to the floor. Should we run? I wondered, as I felt the vibration through the floor of that approaching war dock. I reached over and plucked the spine from where I’d stabbed it down into the floor. I’d rammed it in there when the attack on the station began throwing us about. Though separated from direct contact by my suit gloves, I felt a high-pitched, almost gleeful vibration from the thing. Meanwhile a second-child shot in through the entrance, shortly followed by another—then a whole horde of them climbing over each other in their hurry to get inside. I watched them milling about around Sverl’s remains and the two first-children, who still had not moved. How the attack on the station had not thrown them about soon became evident, when Bsectil tore his armoured feet out of the floor.

“Bsorol?” I enquired.

The other first-child also pulled its feet out of the floor and turned partially in my direction. He looked utterly weary and defeated. “Yes.”

“Perhaps we should get out of here?” I suggested.

“We have nowhere to run,” Bsorol replied. “This is as good a place to die as any.”

I hadn’t been paying attention to cam data, or to the vibration I had been feeling through my feet. The latter had stopped, while the former showed armoured prador spilling from the end of the open war dock. They were quickly moving through the disrupted volume of the station around this autofactory, to surround us. Still, there was a chance two humans could get out . . .

“What do we do?” asked Trent, looking decidedly nervous.

The vibration I felt through my hands now turned into a strange screeing in my aug. I saw Bsorol abruptly whirl round, and I turned slightly to face in the same direction. When I auged through, spreading the reach of my consciousness through the station, readings were odd. AIs that had previously been reinstating their sensors were now cutting sensor links or otherwise tuning down their output—hiding. A shadow was approaching rapidly too. The screeing in my aug ramped up, finally terminating with a shudder I felt through my feet. A black diamond threw itself into existence from an infinite distance, materializing just behind Sverl’s skeleton, and I turned to face it.

“Hello Penny Royal,” I said, expecting no answer and getting none.

In a swirling pattern around this gem, matter began crystallizing out of vacuum. It was transparent at first and then darkened, each piece growing into a blade and moving into a shoal. They then began to fall into the diamond’s centre point, coagulating and growing, expanding into Penny Royal’s sea urchin form. Once this was complete—seemingly signalled by it growing darker and somehow more real—it began to drift. The second-children in the room again scrambled over each other in their eagerness to put Bsorol and Bsectil between themselves and this thing.

Penny Royal finally came to a halt again over Sverl’s skeleton, and thereafter just held stationary. A moment later, metal vapour and dust exploded in lines—scribing circles in the surrounding walls. Then blasts ensued, throwing those chunks of wall inwards. Through these came the King’s Guard. They were armoured—their armour painted in bright primary colours, highlighting the colour patterns of prador carapaces. And all were the size of first-children. They didn’t hesitate—immediately opening fire with particle cannons and Gatling guns. I dived for the floor and wrapped my arms about my head, expecting this fusillade to pick me up and tear me apart. The flashing of the guns and the glare of particle cannons continued, as static bloomed over my helmet radio and in my aug. My suit threw up a power failure message in my visor, internal helmet lights faded and went out, and suddenly I started to feel cold. I thought I’d been hit, but then the flashing slowly died and power returned to my suit—its heaters immediately kicking in. Finally, I dared to raise my head.

Bsorol, Bsectil and Sverl’s second-children were still huddled in a group. In a neat circle all around them lay masses of Gatling slugs—some of them still glowing—while areas of the walls and ceiling were scored with particle cannon burns. Yet Sverl’s children were unharmed. On the floor closer to Trent and me were drifts of Gatling slugs too. I moved to my hands and knees and stood, just in time to witness one of the Guard open fire again. Immediately a hardfield appeared around

Sverl’s children, while a second smaller field encompassed Trent and me. Some slugs ricocheted off while the bulk of them, losing their energy by direct impact with the field, just dropped to the floor. After a moment that guard lowered his weapon, shrugged in a very human manner, then moved aside to allow in another much larger version of his kind.

This was the admiral—I recognized the patterning on his armour—but he was much bigger than I’d thought. He was the size of a prador adult, but who could say whether or not he actually was one? He stood there observing the scene for a long moment, then tipped up to focus completely on Penny Royal. I picked up the clattering and bubbling of prador language in my aug, quickly routed it through a translation program and set it running again from the beginning.

“You cannot kill them,” said one, who I presumed to be Penny Royal.

“I can see that,” replied the admiral.

“Take physical proof and leave.”

By the time I’d caught up, the admiral had waved one of the other prador forward. This one moved over to Sverl’s skeleton and dipped down beside it, while keeping two armoured palp eyes focused on Penny Royal. With one sweep of its claw, it scraped up a pile of Sverl’s organic remains. It then moved forwards over these, a hatch opening in its underside, and lowered manipulatory limbs sheathed in a monomer. In one of its hands, it held a large glassy sphere, which it separated in two. It filled this with the remains and closed it, before withdrawing it inside its armour and closing that hatch. Next, it reached out to Sverl’s skeleton, closed a claw around one ceramal rib and rocked it, breaking the scab of Sverl’s remains sticking it to the floor. I felt almost offended by this, and it seemed Penny Royal did too.

A silvery tentacle lashed out, almost too fast to see. The guard stumbled back, half dragging the skeleton with it, then letting go. The legs of Sverl’s skeleton gave way on that side and it collapsed onto them, lying tilted now on those organic remains.

“The skeleton stays,” said Penny Royal.

“It would make my evidence complete,” said the admiral.

“Leave now,” Penny Royal replied, and then added, “Remain here too long and your other prey will flee.”

“Cvorn—yes, we have his location,” said the admiral, “but still . . .” There appeared to be a lot of nervous shuffling amidst these prador, but the admiral was steadfast. “This isn’t logical.”

Penny Royal had had enough by then. I saw hardfield spheres snapping into existence all about the invading prador. As this happened, my suit flashed its warning and again I felt cold—perhaps some sort of energy drain. Gatling cannons, ammunition feeds and boxes fell in neatly chopped up pieces. Particle cannons too—internal components shattering like safety glass. Chunks of armour fell next, in shiny excised flakes, as the Guard went into panicked retreat. Only the admiral held his ground, even as hardfields whittled away at his armour and threatened to expose him to vacuum. Then he ponderously turned and headed away.

“I guess you don’t have to be logical,” was his parting shot.

Finally all the Guard were gone. I saw them returning to their war dock through various sensors, then it began to withdraw into their ship. Their next target, I assumed, would be Cvorn and his ST dreadnought. On some level I would have liked to have seen that, but other more complicated concerns were occupying my mind right then.

“Why are we still alive?” asked Trent.

“Interesting question,” I replied, and walked over towards Penny Royal. Even as I did this, the AI dropped down to one side of Sverl’s skeleton and started moving towards me. Trent, who had followed me, quickly stepped aside. But I stubbornly stood facing the thing. With a small shrug, it diverted round me and slid out through the door. I turned and followed, though whether the impulse to do so was my own I had no idea. I clutched the spine tight, I don’t know why.

I followed the AI through a series of corridors and out to where the structure of the station had been deformed almost into something organic. As I finally stepped out on a metal platform, on the edge of a steel jungle, I realized that none of the others were with me. I guessed that their impulse to stay had not been their own either. Penny Royal moved out into this area and I propelled myself after. At length it arrived at the pill-shaped structure that contained, or had contained, the Factory Station Room 101 AI. There Penny Royal’s spines blurred and, spraying shattered metal all around, it simply bored straight through the wall to the inside. Batting aside that same debris, I followed it inside, pushed myself from a sharp edge down to the floor, and looked around.

Broken machinery was strewn round the place: Golem torn open, robots delimbed, columns of computer hardware gutted. There had been quite a fight in here. Penny Royal hovered beside the splayed ends of a crystal clamp. A skeletal metal container was secured here, in which glinted a few fragments of AI crystal. Other fragments of crystal were scattered on the floor and still others hung in vacuum—slowly drifting as they had been doing for perhaps as much as a century. I moved forwards, now noting that some robots nearby remained undamaged. From these, optic cables snaked in to disappear into a black glass dais below the clamp. I assumed these were robots once directly controlled by the Room 101 AI. The optic cable linkage must have been to prevent them being taken over by any of the attackers.

Moving closer, I looked at a single robot poised over the remains of the Room 101 AI. Even to my eyes, it didn’t look normal. The thing stood on two heron legs like the others here, but the upper section—a cylinder ringed with multiple arms—was missing. A gun had been mounted in this area instead—a simple belt-fed machine gun with a single barrel, which pointed down at the AI case. I guessed the precaution of forging those optic linkages hadn’t worked, and turned to look up at Penny Royal.

The black AI had now extended silvery tentacles and was stirring the floating chunks of crystal into a revolving pattern. It batted one of them towards me and, releasing my hold on the spine, I reached up and caught the thing.

“Great idea to give a factory station AI the empathy and conscience of a human mother—so it’ll be sure to look after all its children.”

The mantis war drone spoke straight out of Riss’s memories, but the tsunami of further memory washed it away. In the memories of Penny Royal’s victims, I had experienced grief. I’d felt the loss of kin and friends, of fortunes and dreams, and I’d felt the tearing physical pain of a mother losing a child. But this was a thousand times worse. As it tore through me, I knew that had I been thoroughly and ordinarily human, it would have turned me to ash. And I found that mentally I could step back from it—even as I tore my feet from the floor and curled foetally around the pain.

The Room 101 AI was not one of the first factory stations AIs made during the war. It was a later evolution, an amalgam of survivor minds. These were harvested from war drones, Golem, ship intelligences and human memcordings—before being inserted into one package. Some of those minds had been survivors precisely because of manufacturing faults caused by the fast production of AI crystal, which would have made them unsuited to peacetime. Some had psychoses, and some thought in ways for which no description existed in human language. The overall intelligence, also incorporating a facsimile of human emotion, was supposed to be a synergistic product of these parts. It was supposed to select the best traits for its task and incorporate them. It didn’t—it incorporated everything, and was unstable right from the start. Earth Central did not replace the AI because it calculated that, under wartime conditions, the drawbacks of doing so outweighed the gains. The AI did its job and did it well—so correcting that mistake could wait for another time.

The grief it felt when each of its children was destroyed motivated it to make the next ones better, more rugged, more able to survive. The hatred it felt for the prador motivated it to create weapons of increasing lethality. This was just as it should be and was the whole point of incorporating that facsimile of human emotion. Using the survivor templates in its mind, it produced some very successful AIs. And, though its failure rate in producing viable offspring was high, it was still acceptable. Then the prador attack changed things.

In response, Room 101 had to produce its children at an ever-increasing rate. It was constrained by circumstances too, so they were not the best it could make. Over a period of just a few days, it produced thousands of these and spewed them straight out into destruction. Worse than this was the fact that it had no time or resources to adjust their crystals—to wipe them of feelings. And so they died, sometimes screaming, sometimes just puzzled, all in close proximity to the AI because it was perforce commanding them. This created a feedback loop, as its children’s emotions flooded through the parent mind. An amplifier whine steadily racked up into a scream. Grief began to cripple the AI and its hate turned inwards.

“Yeah,” said the mantis, mandibles grinding. “The Room 101 AI has gone nuts, it’s barking, it fell out of the silly tree and hit every branch on the way down.”

Post-partum depression? A psychotic break? I don’t know. The war factory AI escaped the prador and then turned on its children. Its logic was self-referencing and insane, as insane as the AI itself had become. If its children were dead already then they could never suffer and never die. But, during a brief change near the end—maybe a glimmer of sanity, maybe not—the AI made a decision. It had one of its most trusted robots alter one of its kind, and it turned the thing against itself. Room 101 had, in human terms, blown its own brains out.

I unfolded, my body aching in response to being so tightly locked, and the inside of my skull felt raw. A jet from my wrist impeller put my feet back on the floor and I walked over and picked up the spine. I’d flung it away as the memory hit me and it had ended up stuck point down in the floor. After a moment, I looked up at Penny Royal.

“What do you want from me?”

“I want you to understand perfectly,” the AI replied.

It took me a moment to recover from actually receiving a reply from the thing.

“You want me to understand you perfectly,” I said, “so you manoeuvred me here so I could learn about your insane creator . . . your insane mother? Are you a poor abused child I must forgive?”

“The facts are plain,” Penny Royal stated.

“I still don’t know what you want,” I said.

“We have returned to my beginning, and now we must return to yours.”

I can’t remember what I screamed at the AI as it folded up like black origami and collapsed. Just the gem remained, briefly, before turning away like some hard insect eye and disappearing into non-existence.

THE BROCKLE

The terms of the Brockle’s confinement had been quite simple. It was to remain aboard the Tyburn until such a time as it was deemed fit to return to Polity AI society. Assessments to this end occurred once a decade. Meanwhile, it would provide full reports on those sent to it for interrogation, under death sentence. It could also execute that sentence as it saw fit. Otherwise, it was to obey its instructions to the letter. The Brockle had chafed under the restrictions but fully understood that its situation was not so bad, considering its past excesses. This was because, in the end, it had become very useful to the Polity. Few other forensic AIs possessed the same kind of insight it possessed and few of them knew the right questions to ask of the criminal mind, especially the human ones. Of course, Earth Central and other Polity AIs put the Brockle’s greater understanding of criminality down to it being of the same kind.

They didn’t understand.

And now, with the essence of Ikbal and Martina contained inside it while their remains floated in a bloody cloud in the interrogation room, it had breached its terms. In respect of these two, it had disobeyed a direct order. It had also, under Polity law, committed murder. And now it was finally about to escape confinement itself.

In the human shape of a large and obese man—a favoured form from its past existence—the Brockle smiled sadly as it strolled out onto the platform of its dock. It had prevented Earth Central taking control of the latest arriving single-ship, by quickly reabsorbing the submind that had piloted it. Now the ship was back here in the dock, with another prisoner aboard for interrogation. Somewhat impatiently, the Brockle scanned the man’s record, and a microsecond later was already bored. Here was another separatist from Cheyne III, guilty of four murders in his past and recently guilty of releasing a bio-agent into a swimming pool complex and killing twenty more people. Monitors arrested him when a simple sniffer had detected the bio-agent on his clothing as he attempted to leave Cheyne III. They’d interrogated him with a cut aug for a rough outline of his associations and to confirm the extent of his crimes. A judicial sub-AI had sentenced him to death, then sent him here so the Brockle could obtain all the details before executing sentence.

But the Brockle was no longer interested. The Brockle had ceased to be interested the moment it began interrogating Trent Sobel—and began to learn of the sheer extent and intricacy of the AI Penny Royal’s manipulations.

Walking over to the edge of the platform, the Brockle halted, folded its arms and gazed at the single-ship. Meanwhile, it checked its firm link to the one unit of its body it would be leaving behind. The thing was now running at full capacity, still connected to the U-space transmitter. It had also taken full control of the Tyburn’s twinned U-space engine. Those engines could not be more ready, and the Brockle had programmed the unit to accept and indeed relish its sacrifice.

After a moment, a door etched itself out in the side of the craft and folded down into a ramp. The convicted man, one Norris Piper, stepped onto the ramp and casually walked down. He gave the Brockle a brief inspection, then put his hands on his hips and studied his surroundings. Obviously, he was one of those who liked admirers to describe him as a “cool one,” and shortly he would say something tough and dismissive.

“So,” he said, “I take it you’re my executioner.” He eyed the Brockle’s girth and added, “I guess the job as a restaurant critic didn’t work out.”

In other circumstances, the Brockle would have immensely enjoyed the interrogation of Norris Piper. It would have toyed with the limits of his endurance, allowing him to believe he was capable of resisting. It would have revelled in his begging and crying, the terror and agony of feeling as it took his mind and body apart. It would have relished his relief when it seemed that it was coming to an end, and then his horrified disbelief when it put him back together and started again. Now the forensic AI had no time for this, because a bigger and more intricate game was afoot, and a greater threat to the Polity existed than Piper could ever be.

It paced forwards, noting Piper laughably adjusting his stance and preparing to fight. Holding one pudgy hand out flat, the forensic AI extruded one of its body units—a growing, silvery, globular mass. It tossed this ball towards Piper but, as it arced over, the man threw himself off the side of the ramp into a perfect roll, coming up onto his feet again. The unit turned at a right angle in mid-air and slapped into his chest just as he came upright. There, it broke into a dozen subunit worms and burrowed. Piper gaped and began shuddering, his body deforming in ways it just shouldn’t, then he howled. Blood and minced flesh exploded from his mouth and ears. His eyes sucked inwards with a thwacking sound and silver worms wiggled from the sockets. He gagged and toppled, hitting the floor like a bag of jelly—everything inside his skin broken down into nothing larger than a fingertip. By that time, the Brockle had reached the top of the ramp, where it paused to look back. The dozen original worms flowed across the floor, melded into one single worm by the time they reached the ramp, squirmed up a leg and entered the Brockle’s mouth.

Gone.

The Brockle turned and entered the single-ship, mentally linked to its controls and prepared it for departure. Behind, when the Brockle entire was gone, its sacrificial unit would drop the Tyburn into U-space and take the ship just outside the Polity. Its designated arrival point was a region scattered with Polity spy satellites—marking a route around the Graveyard that the prador might try—so they would quickly detect it. The Polity would dispatch warships and, after a brief battle, they would destroy the Tyburn. That, as far as Earth Central was concerned, would be the end of the Brockle. However, in reality its first port of call was the nearest: outlink station Par Avion. There it would obtain a better ship so it could hunt down that dangerous and murderous AI, Penny Royal.

Such monsters should not be allowed to exist in the Polity.