4

 

CVORN

The four females, deep in the laying pool at the centre of the spacious chamber, were twenty feet wide and possessed a body shape wildly at variance to male prador. Cvorn remembered that for entertainment during the war he had put some human prisoners into a prador crèche. The humans had failed to identify the females as prador, though admittedly they had little time to do so. He recollected the file he had enjoyed viewing again and again—the humans’ bafflement just before they died screaming on the females’ ovipositors and became the receptacles for prador eggs.

The female shell bore the shape of a human military helmet, with a wide skirt underneath, inside which she could fold her legs and underhands out of sight. Saurian ridges extend from the facial end of the carapace to the rear and the long and vicious ovipositor tail. The visage itself consisted of two large forward-facing eyes between which rose two clublike eye-stalks, each sporting one short-range pupil and one other fibrous sensor whose spectrum did not venture out of the infrared. Her mandibles were long and heavy and almost served as limbs themselves, in that she could rapidly extend them to snatch up prey. Her claws, though short and broad, possessed a clamping pressure that could crack even ceramal.

The four were down in the pool rather than up in the surrounding chamber because, having been fertilized, instinct had driven them into the water in search of hosts for their eggs. As he studied them, Cvorn felt no stirring of the mating urge. It had faded away years ago when, at about the same time as he started to lose his legs due to his extreme age, his reproductive organs had dropped off. He noted that one of the females had grabbed a large reaverfish and inserted her ovipositor deep inside. The fish was still moving, still fighting the briefly paralysing toxins produced by the eggs she was injecting. Obviously the Five had thought ahead and so preserved living reaverfish aboard their ship for this purpose, and they must have already scoured the results of any previous mating from these females and got quickly to work themselves. Cvorn decided he would have the females scoured again so they could take some of his own preserved seed, and turned to more immediate concerns.

With a twist of his claw in a pit control, Cvorn consigned this image off to one side in just one of his hexagonal screens, bringing all five of Vlern’s children back into view in the others. He studied them, only managing to recognize the one named Sfolk because of a dark whorl in his shell beside his visual turret. The sensation Cvorn now experienced was a lot stronger and a lot more satisfying than his previous vague memory of mating. Here was power. The Five were confused about why they were here and did not understand why they were allowing his destroyer to dock; why they were allowing him into their realm.

“Here is where we will capture Sverl,” Cvorn told them, their presence strengthening in the aug network, but remaining subjugated to his will.

In a way this was more satisfying than using a control unit on some thralled life form because generally such creatures had no will or mind of their own. It was also more satisfying than the pheromonal control he exerted over his own children, which was just the natural order of things. When exercising power, Cvorn had always found it best to exercise it against someone. The only drawback here was their bewilderment; the fact that they did not yet understand that he had power over them. But so the situation would have to remain until he was utterly sure he had them in his grip. Then he could fill them in on what had happened to them, enjoy their dismay and watch them squirm.

“How will we capture him?” asked Sfolk, who had confirmed himself as the spokes-prador of the Five.

“We will use my destroyer as bait,” Cvorn replied.

On another screen, he noted his six remaining war drones and twelve of his own armoured children, including his first-child Vrom, now getting ready to head over to the ST dreadnought. His drones would establish themselves in that ship’s cache beside the now-somnolent ones that had belonged to this ship’s previous father-captain. With any luck, he should be able to bend those other drones to his will. Unfortunately, none of Vlern’s drones remained to seize control of, since the Five had wasted them in family conflicts. However, controlling Vlern’s twenty-two remaining second-children might be problematic, and that was why he was sending over Vrom and the others. Best to be rid of them, really, but only when he was sure. Only when the moment was right.

With a crash, which Cvorn felt right down in his sanctum, the two ships docked. Glancing at another screen, he noted his remaining eight second-children waiting with heavily laden grav-sleds and autocarts in the huge tunnel leading to the main airlock. He wished he could have stripped out his destroyer completely, but time was pressing. Though Sverl’s arrival wasn’t imminent, such a chore would take up time Cvorn needed to spend on more important tasks.

“I still do not understand,” said Sfolk. It had taken him a while to reply as he instinctively struggled against the control Cvorn exerted over him, and while he remained confused about allowing Cvorn aboard.

“Observe the world below,” said Cvorn, “and observe its moons.” He turned away from the screens and, hovering on grav-motors, headed to the door from the sanctum, his two thralled human blanks—two heavily muscled males naked but for weapons harnesses—trudging after him. As the sanctum door opened, he mentally transferred image and other data feeds to his aug and control units. A view of virtual hexagonal screens appeared across the vision centres of palp eyes he had lost many years ago.

“I see the world,” said Sfolk.

The planet resembled an earlier version of the Rock Pool. It was mostly oceanic, and the rocky landmasses barren but for flat plates of photosynthesizing vegetation creeping beyond the wide tidal areas created by the world’s three moons. The oceans themselves swarmed with a monoculture of omnivorous and cannibalistic armoured monstrosities similar to ship lice. Cvorn briefly pondered how this was the case for many younger worlds: one life form coming to dominate the ecology. Over a few million years this form would diversify and new balances would establish—supposing the world survived what was to come.

“And the moons?” Cvorn prompted, as he exited his sanctum and headed towards the transfer tunnel to the other ship. His second-children were walking in front of him, bearing his baggage train. Ahead of these Vrom and the other, armoured second-children had already entered the dreadnought—following their orders precisely.

Two of the moons were nothing special. The largest was a standard meteor-pocked sphere while the other was an irregular object rather like a wrack pustule. The third moon was also spherical and pocked, but it had a large shadowy hole at one end and the mass readings were all wrong. Knowing that closer inspection would reveal more, Cvorn waited for Sfolk to understand.

“One is artificial,” said that prador.

Both the Kingdom and the Polity had made hides during the war. They would heat an asteroid to melting point with an energy weapon, then use either field technology or mechanical means to inject gas and blow it up like a balloon. After it cooled, they would cut a hole in one end. The result was a hollow sphere of rock in which to conceal a ship, a fleet or some massive weapon. The Polity had made this one, hence the pocking on its surface as of millennia of meteor impacts—a detail the prador tended to omit.

“We’ll put this dreadnought inside, which will require some cutting, but can be done,” said Cvorn, now reaching the threshold into the other ship. “This will bring the mass reading up close to requirements. We foam-stone in the hole and then the Polity chameleonware I am bringing aboard can conceal any further discrepancies.”

Now moving into the dreadnought, Cvorn turned to the door back into his own destroyer. He felt a pang of regret, then turned to the second-child waiting beside him. “You are ready?”

“Yes, Father,” the child replied.

“Then you now have control of my destroyer—take it to the designated location and await orders.”

The second-child scuttled aboard. It would soon establish itself in Cvorn’s sanctum and take control of the destroyer. Cvorn could have moved the ship to the nearby world and opened fire with its weapons by remote control, but Sverl might intercept the signal. Better to let the second-child carry out this task, because it would obey absolutely, despite the high chance that Sverl would vaporize both destroyer and second-child. Instead, Cvorn was switching now to the dreadnought, establishing a firm grip on the five first-children through the aug network. He swung back round on his grav-motors to face into the dreadnought, feeling a sudden surge of unaccustomed excitement.

“Sfolk,” he said, “remove yourself from this ship’s captain’s sanctum and take yourself to the first-children’s quarters where your brothers are waiting.”

“Vlern . . . Cvorn . . . I don’t understand why I . . .”

“Do it now,” said Cvorn, and pushed mentally, relishing the power.

Sfolk fought, but just could not win and, by the time Cvorn reached the massive diagonally divided door into the captain’s sanctum, Sfolk was scuttling away down a nearby corridor. Cvorn halted at the door, abruptly fighting the urge to send his children after the young adult to bring it back, to tear it apart, and he didn’t know why. Finally, he entered the sanctum; the urge faded as he again contacted all five of Vlern’s children, his control of them now rigid.

“You are to send all your second-children kin to ship’s food store number three,” he instructed, even at that moment usurping Sfolk’s grip on the controls all around him and absorbing data on the dreadnought into his aug. He moved over to the array of screens here, inserted his artificial claws into pit controls and immediately began calling up images there. This was unnecessary because, like Sverl, he could use mental control here, but he felt the need to assert control physically.

He watched Vrom and his own second-children converging on that food store and entering it. Sfolk and crew, he noted, had already used the store as a mortuary; the corpses of the third-, second- and first-children who had been the original ship’s complement were piled high in there. The original father-captain wasn’t there, of course. He lay against the wall some yards behind Cvorn—a father-captain larger and older even than him, all his limbs gone and replaced by prosthetics. Cvorn turned to eye the corpse. Judging by the tool chest here and the pieces cut from the corpse’s carapace, Sfolk had been extracting control units, probably to use to take full control of the drones aboard. Cvorn gazed for a moment at the armoured legs and did not know why he had begun to consider some options for himself. A flash of memory occurred, of being mobile on his own legs, of being young and strong . . . It might be good not to be wholly reliant on his grav-motors to get around. He turned back to the screens.

Obeying the orders of their older brothers, Vlern’s second-children were entering the food store. They milled about in the centre of the room, nervous of the armoured prador gathered along one wall, sending requests to the Five for further orders. The Five did not elaborate—Cvorn did not allow them to. Meanwhile, his destroyer had undocked and was now accelerating away. Within a few hours, it would arrive at the nearby world, descend through the atmosphere to the sea, then drop through that to a deep oceanic trench. There it would be far down enough to defend itself from most long-range weapons Sverl, who would have followed the trail here, might hurl at it, and Sverl, therefore, would have to move in close to launch an effective attack, leaving his back unguarded.

All the second-children arrived in the food store and, from his sanctum, Cvorn issued a signal to close the door. Their breath created a sudden cloud of vapour in that chill place.

Then Vrom and the rest opened fire with Gatling cannons.

The children shrieked and clattered and flew apart in a mess of shattered carapace, disconnected limbs and smoking flesh. The place filled with the fog of their dying. This went on for some minutes, then waned to intermittent firing as Cvorn’s children waded into the mess to finish off any survivors.

Eventually Vrom said, “Task complete.” The first-child tended to speak with the leaden tones of an executioner even when he wasn’t killing someone or something.

“Very good,” said Cvorn, finally managing to overcome the tight visceral surge of excitement he had felt on watching that slaughter. “Establish control in critical areas.” Though he could direct most things from here, Cvorn wanted his children at the weapons and defensive emplacements throughout the ship.

As his children dispersed from the food store, Cvorn opened up the dreadnought’s fusion engines to take it in pursuit of the hollow moon. It would take him perhaps a few days to conceal the ship properly, but that was okay—Sverl, who was undoubtedly pursuing, would be reaching the satellite relay by now so was still some days away.

TRENT

Facilities were basic. Trent had a bed with a case of soldier’s rations underneath, and a toilet that slid out of the wall. He couldn’t wash himself, couldn’t clean his teeth, but luckily had no need to shave since facial hair had been excised from the Sobel line. Obviously he just needed to be delivered alive—his dental health or cleanliness being irrelevant.

The ship’s AI—that submind of this thing called the Brockle—hadn’t spoken to him since they had left Par Avion. After a period of time he couldn’t measure, during which he just ate something, used the toilet and then lay down to sink into a dark malaise, he slept. After that, he began to number his options and knew there weren’t many. He considered suicide but, searching his own clothing, found that he had been relieved of every item that might be of use to that end. All he had was his clothing, his earring, his mind. He couldn’t hang himself even with something to which he could attach a rope made out of his clothing. The ship AI would simply turn off the grav and he’d end up floating about on a rope umbilicus looking like an idiot. Maybe he could bite through his wrists or make some sharp edge out of his earring to open them. Too slow, and surely the AI could react to this in some way. His throat? Yes, maybe, but even as he thought about this he knew it was only an intellectual exercise and that he wasn’t going to do it.

So all that remained was waiting to see what was going to happen to him. He would arrive somewhere, whereupon a forensic AI would begin taking him apart and inspecting those parts in detail. Whether the process would be painful he didn’t know, though he did know that his suffering or otherwise would be a matter of irrelevance to the AI. After that he would be dead, gone, would have ceased to exist. He contemplated that knowledge and suddenly found that it simply didn’t matter. He was a prisoner walking a corridor to the electric chair, the noose, the firing squad, the lethal injection or the disintegrator and it didn’t matter which. He just needed it to be over.

During the ensuing three periods of waking, Trent thought about his past, wished he could change it but accepted he couldn’t. Eventually, he felt a familiar twist in his gut and that drag out of the ineffable. It slapped him hard, brought him back into the moment. Then the ship AI spoke again.

“Deceleration in five minutes,” it said.

Maybe, if he positioned himself just so, he could use the deceleration as a method of suicide. Maybe stand on the edge of the bed and throw himself head-first at the floor as it ramped up. No. Trent walked over to the bed and lay on it, arms down by his sides. This time, though the invisible boot pressing down on him was heavy, he did not lose consciousness. After half an hour, the boot came off, and he sat up, his stomach tight and his clothing soaked with sweat. The ship was manoeuvring, occasional surges dragging him one way or another. He swung his legs over the side of the bed and sat waiting for the executioner.

Docking came next—the familiar crumps as clamps engaged somewhere outside this ship. Next, a horrible sensation traversed his body like some sort of roller passing through his flesh. His vision distorted, everything going in and out of focus then switching to black and white, then sliding into intense colour before returning to normal. He went deaf for a moment before hearing returned with such intensity he could hear the slight shifting of his clothing and the thump of his own pulse. It was as if he was a machine and something was now playing with his slide switches. He wondered if whatever had inspected him saw him that way too. He stood up.

As if in response, the locks securing the door into his cabin clonked and the door unlatched. He thought about just staying where he was and waiting, but that was cowardice. He walked over to the door and opened it, stepped through into the hold, glancing over at the Golem prostrate on its sled, and walked to the loading door, which stood open. He walked down the ramp door onto the grav-plated floor of an internal dock of either a space station or ship. Worn steel gratings rattled underfoot, scratched and dented bubble-metal panels clad the walls, and the circular doors, standing open on tunnels leading from the dock, were of a design he had only seen in a VR fantasy. This place, whatever it was, had the stink of antiquity. It looked as if it must have been built before even the Quiet War. His boots clonking on the gratings, he chose at random and stepped through one of the circular doors.

The tunnel here had a flat floor of bubble-metal, worn through to the closed-cell foam in places by the passage of feet. Just inside the doorway, and on either side, stood columns. On one of these rested a human skull, yet it bothered him not at all. What drew his attention was the glass sculpture on the other column. It was of a hooder and it seemed to be writhing—not in actuality but in some place deep in his mind.

“It was made by one of your associates,” said an echoing voice. “Or should I say one of your superiors.”

“Who’s that?” Trent asked, though he knew the answer.

“Mr Pace, of course,” replied the voice. “He’s an artist I would like to meet, but it is becoming increasingly unlikely that I will.”

Trent hadn’t been asking who made the sculpture because he had recognized the style. Peering ahead, down the long dark tunnel, he saw a white object shifting far in the distance and expanding as it grew closer.

He expected some nightmare to come for him, but then gazed in puzzlement as a large fat youth—a mobile Buddha—resolved out of the gloom and sauntered down the tunnel towards him. This figure was shaven-headed—in fact, his obese body was completely hairless, lacking eyebrows and eyelashes. He wore red plastic sandals and skin-tight swimming shorts. He should have been ridiculous, but his presence weighed in Trent’s mind like a heavy chunk of viciously sharp glass. His eyes were black buttons and there appeared little to read in them, least of all being mercy. Trent backed out onto the dock again to give himself room, though he suspected this would do him no good.

“Trent Sobel,” said the youth. “Welcome to the prison hulk the Tyburn. I am the Brockle and I am here to execute sentence on you.”

Trent stepped back again as this youth, this thing, somehow also a forensic AI, advanced on him. Could he fight it? Should he try? No—this was it, this was how he ended. Fat Boy continued to advance, his gait rolling, then stuttering as his whole body turned silvery and began to shift as if worms were moving under his skin. Lines began to etch themselves into that skin and segmentation began to occur. Trent watched in horror as the man’s thigh unravelled into a long, flat, segmented worm and dropped to the floor, squirming along to keep up.

The Brockle reached for him, fingers melding into things like flat metallic liver flukes that closed on either side of Trent’s face. Its head tilted over, the eyes were sucked within, and began to split. Trent felt other tentacles grabbing his clothing and squirming inside, then stabs of pain all over his head. The grate of hard little drills bit into his skull. He had a moment to think that this wasn’t so bad—he’d suffered more pain than this and endured—then the agony took hold and he screamed.

He screamed until something squirmed into his mouth and complemented the agony with a suffocation that showed no sign of ending.

SVERL

Sverl, who controlled his U-space drive directly with the AI component of his mind, surfaced his dreadnought from that continuum with hardfields flickering on and all weapons ready to deploy in an instant. At AI speeds, he gathered and sorted data from his ship’s sensors. Within seconds he realized that Cvorn wasn’t here, that the satellite data had been misleading.

“It’s a relay,” he announced.

“Cvorn might be prador but he’s not stupid,” Bsorol replied.

“Depending on how you measure stupidity,” interjected his brother Bsectil.

Sverl immediately wondered what he was supposed to make of that. Was this banter something recently acquired along with their new augs or had it always been there, but generally more low-key? Sverl considered his two first-children, who he had decided should try out augmentation before the others. He had to remember first that they weren’t static minds like war drones, kamikazes or ship minds. At least, they weren’t as static as those things would have been if made by prador other than himself. They were pheromonally enslaved creatures whom Sverl kept in a permanent state of chemically maintained adolescence. However, he had maintained them in that state for over a hundred years—a good eighty years longer than was usual, since fathers generally killed and replaced their first-children every two decades. Bsorol and Bsectil were very old, and no reason existed why they should not have continued learning throughout their time. They were older, in fact, than many father-captains in the Kingdom at that moment.

“It seems,” he said, “that since acquiring your augs you are finding your usual tasks less onerous and have time to speculate on and discuss things beyond your remit. I therefore have another task for you to perform.”

“Yes, Father,” said Bsectil meekly, while Sverl detected Bsorol mentally erecting defences in his augmentation. Due to a problem some decades ago with the automatic lacing of his food with growth retardant, Bsorol had come very close to making the transformation into an adult. Sverl now wondered if he had gained a smidgen more free will than his brother.

Sverl sent to both of their augs some complex schematics, the location in ship’s stores of his cache of Polity AI crystal, and their orders.

“You want to give the war drones crystal too,” said Bsorol resentfully.

“It’s not the same,” said Sverl. “Your augmentations contain AI crystal and have raised your game, as Arrowsmith would say, because you already have extensive mental capacity. Similar augmentation for them would not take them beyond sub-AI computing.”

“Still,” Bsorol grumped.

“The drones are also completely incapable of disobedience,” Sverl added, “which I am inclined to think is not something beyond your reach. Obey your orders, Bsorol.”

“Yes, Father,” the ancient first-child replied.

Bsorol’s tone had sounded exasperated to Sverl, yet why should it be? He watched them both head away from the two particle cannons to which he had assigned them and towards the indicated store. He observed them very carefully as they collected the designated amount of crystal, adaptors and cross-tech components and then began making their way to the drone cache. He watched Bsorol the most closely because he didn’t think it beyond that first-child to take some components for himself in the hope of grabbing some time on an auto-surgery when Sverl was looking the other way. At the drone cache they began taking apart four war drones and installing the crystal. Perhaps it wasn’t such a great idea, for his own safety, to so “raise the game” of his own children, but Sverl had begun to feel a growing distaste and, perhaps, boredom with his utter control of them. He found them interesting now. Was this because Sverl was becoming more human or more AI, or was he simply feeling the ennui of his years bearing down on him?

Sverl now transferred his main attention back to the satellite relay. Cvorn had mounted it on a small deep-space asteroid mainly consisting of ice and naturally foamed rock. Already his AI component, working with the relay’s signal traffic and with deep scans, had produced some results. He would have to send one of his children or a robot over to make the required physical connections so they could track the signal it was receiving. Perhaps he should assign Bsectil to—

“Snickety snick,” something said.

For just a second Sverl thought this was an attack and brought up all his defences. He recognized the U-space channel and the mental signature, but had expected nothing from there ever again. However, it seemed the Golem that Penny Royal had provided all those years ago still existed.

Sverl had never really been comfortable with the Golem, which was probably why, on the Rock Pool, he had allowed the Mafia boss Stolman to ostensibly find and activate it. Stolman had believed it utterly under his control, but it had acted as a spy for Sverl. Isobel Satomi, when she had penetrated Stolman’s aug network and incidentally ripped apart and eaten that man, had believed she then controlled it. Thereafter, when she had taken it along with her to Masada and to her doom, Sverl had thought it destroyed. Now he began updating from it.

Intelligent enough to recognize the likelihood of its own demise during Isobel’s pointless assault on Masada, the Golem had abandoned ship, sending Sverl’s best wishes to her as it did so, though Sverl hadn’t known. It had then gone somnolent in vacuum, unable to send signals to Sverl because its internal U-space transmitter just wasn’t powerful enough to penetrate the U-space disruption in that system caused by the earlier deployment of USERs. Next, for no immediately apparent reason, Captain Blite had picked it up on his way out of the system, whereupon it covertly rose out of somnolence to observe its surroundings. It had seen that Blite had also picked up Satomi’s second, Trent Sobel, and that the man wore a very interesting earring. Blite handed Trent and the Golem over to the Polity, and both were now in a very sticky situation indeed.

The earring . . .

Isobel Satomi had fascinated Sverl because what Penny Royal had done to her was very similar to what it had done to him. She had wanted power and the AI had turned her into a powerful monster—a hooder. Sverl had wanted knowledge of why the humans and AIs had been winning the war. The AI had given him that knowledge by turning him into an amalgam of prador, AI and human—yet another powerful monster.

He had wanted to talk to Satomi, and to examine her, because he felt sure he had much to learn from her. He’d thought her gone, dead, annihilated at Masada, but now Trent Sobel possessed her memplant. The Golem, via subtle scans, had found Isobel recorded in the purple sapphire hanging from Trent’s ear. How it got there was irrelevant but, having been acquainted with the events on Masada that had culminated in Isobel’s downfall, Sverl knew who had put it there: Penny Royal.

“Does he want it?” the Golem asked, eagerly adding, “He wants it. He wants it!”

Did he?

Through the eyes of his Golem, Sverl saw Sobel’s clothing lying neatly folded on a stone floor with the earring lying on top. The man himself was currently a smeared-out organic mass occupying the crevices of a loose ball of segmented biomech worms. These worms had utterly taken him apart and were examining him down to sub-molecular levels. Sverl could see his disconnected skull in there, its bony jaw opening and closing. He felt the horror and recognized that although Penny Royal was unique, the black AI was not that unique. After Sobel’s inevitable, final, demise the forensic AI there would turn its attention to the Golem and find this communication link.

“I want it,” he replied, “but recognize the limits of possibility.”

He felt pity for Sobel and found himself unsurprised at a response so untypical of a prador. Undoubtedly, in Polity terms the man was deserving of death, but did any being deserve to die in such a way? Sverl also felt a degree of pity for the Golem because, although it was an artificial being, it still possessed a sense of self. It was still capable of suffering, and would soon be facing similar dismantlement. The earring would go too, for Penny Royal had transformed Satomi, and all the data that she was, the AI would take apart and analyse.

“I’ll get it,” the Golem intoned.

“If you can; if you wish,” said Sverl, lining up a particular program in his mind. “I am now releasing you from my grip. Henceforth you are a free entity and may do what you will.” Sverl sent the program that would completely release the Golem and felt it thump home with all the physicality of a hatchet, but the U-space link remained open. He continued, “If you can bring Isobel Satomi to me then I will be glad, and I will reward you in any way I can. However, your first priority now must be to save yourself.”

Sverl now cut the link and began ramping up his security around it. Maybe the Golem could escape, for it was, after all, a product of Penny Royal and more than just a Polity Golem. Maybe it would then be willing to bring him the memcording of Satomi. Most likely, this would be the last he ever heard of it. Most likely, there would be something dangerous occupying the other end of that link next time he opened it, and he had to be ready.

TRENT

Against a background of intense suffering, it started with what he recognized as his earliest memory. He was a boy running along one of the corridors of an arcology on Coloron when Dumal stepped out in front of him. He knew he was about to be beaten and humiliated but, in the present, he couldn’t remember previous beatings and humiliations. Grinning horribly, Dumal spread his arms so Trent could not run past. Suddenly it was all too much and the infant Trent understood that neither flight nor compliance could ever stop this. If he ran away as before, the bigger boy would catch him because of a longer stride. Instead, Trent ducked his head down, kept running, and rammed his head straight into the other boy’s fat gut. Dumal went down on his rump and Trent, his neck hurting, tried to get past, but a hand caught his trousers and dragged him down. The beating that ensued was the worst yet, and subsequent beatings would be just as bad, but Trent had made the decision to fight and refused to back down. The beatings only ceased when Trent caught Dumal in a restricted area and knocked him semiconscious with a length of steel pipe.

“And there’s the decision,” a voice whispered, “murderer.”

Dumal was down and bleeding, nearly unconscious. Trent gazed down at him lying there on the edge of the shaft that speared down to the bedrock of the arcology, just stared, utterly still, no knowledge of how much time was passing, and then, with no real thoughts in his mind, he stooped down and heaved Dumal over the edge. Watching the boy drop, he felt nothing but relief and, after that faded, nothing at all.

Now he felt that the Brockle’s judgement of him was unfair. Further memories ensued, all harsh and cold and painful in their clarity. The Brockle raised his sister in his mind as an obvious comparison. She had suffered like him but she hadn’t turned to crime. The forensic AI then stripped away protective forgetfulness to reveal that Trent’s association with Separatists and other criminal elements on Coloron really had led to her death. It then moved on to his career in the Coloron mafia and his eventual escape from that world, the trail of misery he left behind him, and his arrival in the Graveyard.

He managed to ask why this was happening, not really using words, but from a point of puzzlement in some part of his mind still able to think.

“The pain?” the Brockle enquired. “It occupies your surface consciousness and does not permit you to conceal anything from me. The torturers of old weren’t entirely wrong.”

Something else?

“Yes, I could use other methods, but I’m an old-fashioned AI who believes in punishment.”

My sister . . . who I was . . .

“Oh, that suffering is just your own, now you clearly remember,” the Brockle said conversationally. “You have no real pathology and have always known the difference between right and wrong. Most intelligences know that difference in the context of their particular society and make a choice—often the easiest one. You knew, even as a boy, that perhaps you would have further conflict with Dumal after you beat him with that pipe, but that your status as a victim had ended, and that Dumal would pursue easier prey. But you chose an easy murder instead.”

Trent’s association with Isobel Satomi came next and he was aware that she was the Brockle’s main interest. Everything Trent thought about her, knew about her, every conversation he had had with her and every sight of her, the AI examined in meticulous detail. It focused huge attention on the change she had undergone, and every reference to Penny Royal it checked repeatedly, ad nauseam. Then Thorvald Spear entered their compass, and Trent’s pain abruptly faded. He felt that the AI was now concentrating so intently it had forgotten to torture him.

“He should be examined,” the Brockle hissed.

Trent thought that was for him, but another cold voice replied, “Thorvald Spear has committed no crime.”

“Nevertheless . . .”

“It is not in your remit,” the other voice said. “Finish there.”

“You fear what it will do next?”

Trent felt a leakage of frustration and anger. Obviously, his interrogator did not like the way this was going.

“Penny Royal can change paradigms,” the cold voice said opaquely. “One murderer more, or less, makes no difference.” The voice paused, then continued, “This piece must remain in play.”

“So it is true, what Garrotte has revealed?” said the Brockle. “About Penny Royal’s actions in Panarchia and what happened there?”

“Yes.”

“And the Golem?”

“Release it too.”

“Satomi—her memplant?”

“That goes too.”

Trent sensed some ensuing hesitation, rebellion even.

“Release them,” the cold voice repeated. “Do not infringe upon the terms of your own agreed imprisonment.”

“I would argue that this lies outside those terms.”

“So do U-jump missiles. We could easily deploy them against you if you stray.”

“Do you not think I have not prepared for that?”

“Your choice . . .”

The pain returned redoubled. Trent now screamed on the outskirts of memory as the Brockle examined his generally irrelevant memories of being stuck in an airlock when Penny Royal had visited Satomi’s ship the Moray Firth and repaired its drive. He spent an eternity in hell while it checked and rechecked through the series of events that had led to Satomi’s demise on Masada. It puzzled over why Penny Royal had sent the recording of her mind to Trent’s earring and it fretted about why the black AI had sent Captain Blite to rescue Trent from the wreck of the Firth. Throughout all this Trent still felt that leakage of frustrated anger and was sure that the Brockle was being even more vicious than previously.

“They are wrong. Penny Royal isn’t capable of change,” the forensic AI finally told him, “and you don’t deserve to live.” Whereupon he plummeted into darkness.

Trent woke sprawled on steel gratings and, just like when he woke after being beaten or shot, at the location of that event or in a hospital bed, he remained absolutely still, waiting for the pain. When it didn’t arrive, he opened his eyes and carefully tested his limbs. Though he felt no pain, the memory of agony suffused him bone-deep. Eventually he slid his hands underneath his body and heaved himself upright to look around.

He was still in the dock, the ship he had arrived in resting nearby with its hold door still open, the Golem still on its sled inside. He was naked, his clothing stacked nearby with his earring resting on top. Not much had changed except, when he peered more closely at the floor he had been lying on, he saw it scattered with pieces of bone and small gobbets of flesh, a frosting of blood, some half-dissolved bone-clamps and another item he recognized at once: a titanium splint that had been inserted in his right thigh over three decades ago. He stood up, testing his limbs further, and found he was able to move easily enough, though he felt tender to the core. He examined his arms, torso and legs and found them free of old scars.

“Why am I alive?” he asked.

“A question all beings must pose to themselves,” replied the Brockle tightly.

Suddenly, as if it had edited its presence out of his consciousness and back into its human form, the forensic AI was an overweight youth again, squatting just a few yards away from him. Trent stepped back from it. Perhaps this was how it went: after the examination, it returned him to perfect health for final execution of sentence. He waited for that.

The Brockle waved a chubby hand at the detritus scattered on the floor. “Whenever I reassemble someone I always like to remove the faults. It’s nit-picky of me but that’s the way I am. Perhaps you should consider the removal of your scars the physical expression of disconnection from your past and perhaps, as Penny Royal suggested, you should redeem yourself.”

“When are you going to stop toying with me and get this over with?” Trent asked.

“I am not toying.” The Brockle pointed to the single-ship behind him. “I have removed my submind that usually guides it, but there is a replacement available. Take the ship and go.”

“You still haven’t answered my question.”

“Orders,” the Brockle replied. “Apparently Penny Royal is going to stop a war and you are an important part of its plans. You are a messenger.”

Trent pondered that for a second, then said, “So what did the Garrotte reveal?”

“Not enough, in my opinion, to justify your release,” the Brockle replied. “And not enough to justify a policy of non-interference.”

“Non-interference?” Trent echoed.

It did not reply. Trent blinked and the Brockle was gone. Should he believe all this? Maybe his mind was in some virtuality where the AI was still playing with it, while his body remained in pieces spread throughout the Brockle’s real body of biomech worms. He knew, perfectly well, that it could adjust his perception of time to keep him in such a virtuality for seconds of its own time, but centuries of his.

Trent turned and walked over to his clothing, first picking up his earring to fit back into his ear, but annoyingly the Brockle had even repaired the hole there. He put it to one side and then donned his clothes. Even if this was a virtuality, he had to act and react as if it was real, so now he thought about what to do.

The Brockle had given him a ship but one without an AI and therefore incapable of dropping into U-space. Sure, he could obtain some second-child ship mind somewhere, but he had no idea how long it would take him to arrive at that somewhere. He decided to explore, because he probably needed more than that box of soldier’s rations under his bed aboard.

Slipping his earring into his pocket, he turned towards the tunnel the Brockle had come down and saw that the antique door was closed. He walked over to try it and found the manual wheel locked solid. He then tried all the doors in the back wall but they were locked too. Perhaps this was just the result of some alteration of the code in this virtuality, or perhaps this was real, but either way he wasn’t going through those doors. However, in a side wall stood a smaller door he had yet to try. He walked over and it opened easily, but now he felt reluctant to step through. Damn it, he couldn’t keep expecting the worse, so he forced himself to take the step. A tunnel beyond, with walls streaked with actual rust and beaded with condensation, led him to yet another door—this one welded shut. He walked back from it and paused by one of a series of oval portholes of the kind found in First Diaspora cryoships, wiped away condensation and peered out.

From the right issued the orange glare of a sun, or some other astronomical object, and silhouetted against this stood an ancient com tower scattered with radio dishes. He couldn’t actually get a look at the body of the Tyburn but, pushing his face against the cold glass, he could see a massive nacelle poking out down below, so this ship was probably some early U-space vessel like those that left towards the end of the First Diaspora. However, gazing at that old design of nacelle he could see new metal around a bulge towards its rear that indicated that it might well be functional, and might well contain some newer form of U-drive. He grunted to himself and backed away, then headed back out into the dock.

“Okay,” he said, “I’ll leave.”

No reply was forthcoming, but he hadn’t expected one.

He headed over to the open hold of the ship, walked up the ramp and paused to gaze at the Golem lying on its sled. Reality or otherwise, he didn’t want this thing in the ship along with him. He reached out and activated the small control panel on a narrow upright post on the sled, bringing it up off the floor; then, using the “simple towing” setting, he kept a finger on the control as he walked back down the ramp, the sled obediently following. He shut it down on the floor of the dock and returned inside the ship.

On the other side of this hold lay the door into the space that had been his prison. The corridor beyond took him to a cramped engine room filled with the bulk of a fusion drive and fusion reactor and the control columns feeding optics out to the U-space nacelles. Returning along the corridor brought him to the cockpit. This was cramped too, contained a single dusty acceleration chair and console, a viewing laminate in the lower half of a chain-glass screen and a scattering of sweet wrappers across the floor. He brushed the chair down, then sat and reached out to activate the controls. They were of a very old design but he knew he could operate them.

First, he closed the hold, hearing the ramp rumble back up and seal with a satisfying thump. Next, after disengaging docking clamps, he searched for and found “space doors” and set them to open, but when he did so the clamps re-engaged and he heard that rumbling again, shortly followed by a screen warning that the hold was again open, and offering him the option of closing it. What the hell had he done wrong? He closed it once more and again punched the control to open the space doors. He felt the ship turning, the screen now telling him the dock pressure was dropping. Turning a full hundred and eighty degrees, the ship clumped to a halt. He saw sliding space doors, their edges castellated, opening ahead to reveal a swathe of stars.

Am I really free? he wondered, as he took hold of the ship’s joystick and raised it a little, hearing steering thrusters ignite and feeling their rumble through the floor. He pushed the stick forwards and the ship obeyed, taking him rapidly towards the open doors. He shot out into vacuum, the orange eye of some cold Neptunian planet coming clear to his right. With a twist of the joystick, he spun the single-ship round and with it travelling backwards gazed at the Brockle’s lair. The hulk was at least a couple of miles long and he recognized the design. On the end of a long stalk to the fore was a section like a giant bulbous monorail carriage. This was where the crew and passengers were packed in hibernation capsules. This stalk extended from the larger drive section he had just departed, while extending from this were the vanes holding the U-space engine nacelles. Two nacelles were still in place and had obviously been modified, while it looked as if the third had been sliced off. Further inspection along the hull revealed stubby weapons turrets and the dark maws of weapons ports—all obvious additions. He wondered then about the exchange he had overheard: . . . terms of your agreed imprisonment.

Trent studied the vessel for just a short while longer, then twisted the joystick to spin his single-ship round. He hit the fusion drive and the acceleration slammed him back into his chair. Virtuality or reality, he couldn’t deny the joy he suddenly felt to be heading away from that place. Within minutes, he was up to full acceleration with the old ship receding far behind. A second later, his instruments indicated some object over to his right, and he diverted his course slightly to get a closer look. The thing, hanging in vacuum there, was a large doughnut with tech jabbed through its centre like a bunched-up collection of rods. He recognized a tokamak fusion reactor wrapped round some serious weapons and wondered if it belonged to the guards, or to the prisoner, then turned his ship away, wondering what next?

“Snickety snick,” said something behind him, and the cold metal of a skeletal Golem hand gripped his shoulder.

“I gotcha,” it added.