6

 

BLITE

As he opened the outer door of one of The Rose’s airlocks, Blite tried to remember the last time he had taken a spacewalk like this, but the memory evaded him for a moment. He propelled himself out, then, with a blast from his wrist impeller, back down to the hull, engaging his gecko soles and then reeling out his safety line to attach it to a loop beside the airlock. Now he remembered his last spacewalk. Many solstan years ago, he had come out here to check the hull for attached trackers. Micrometeorites had conveniently destroyed exterior cams while The Rose was in parking orbit of the moon on which he had been conducting their latest trade. He’d found the trackers too, and used them to give the thief who had put them there a nasty surprise. But there were no cams out here now. That beam blast that had hit the ship as they escaped from the Par Avion space station had incinerated them.

The burn started halfway along The Rose’s hull. Blite walked to the edge of the metre-wide trench carved down through six inches of armour and into the foamed ceramic insulation beneath. He walked along the edge of this, circumventing where it had gone deep enough to activate the breech sealant circuit and where that sealant had grown a great bubble of the vacuum-set foam like some huge fungus. Beyond this, he reached the section of hull over the engine room. He knew where he was because he could now see the wreckage inside.

The fusion drive wasn’t just fucked, it was all but gone. Par Avion had managed to carve the trench, then centre the beam blast straight up The Rose’s tailpipe just at the last moment. Blite stared at the damage and felt his initial elation at escaping the station, and at once again operating, fade.

“Not so good,” said Brond from inside, where he was watching Blite’s suit feed.

“Megalithic understatement, big boy,” said Greer, also still inside. “I’m amazed the U-drive is still working . . . it is working, isn’t it, Leven?”

“It is, amazingly, hardly damaged at all,” the Golem ship mind replied. “Though, as we are all aware, there is some resonance.”

They had all been feeling the effects of the imbalance in that drive.

“So we can still take the jump into the Graveyard and get those repairs,” said Blite, trying to consign to irrelevance that portion of fear and nausea he had experienced during their jump from Par Avion.

“We can,” Leven replied. “We don’t need much realspace acceleration to engage now, after Penny Royal’s tampering. Maybe just steering thrusters will do . . .”

“But?” Blite prompted.

“The border,” Leven replied.

“Come on—it’s a sieve.”

“It was a sieve.”

“What do you mean?” Blite turned round and began tramping back to the airlock. There wasn’t much he could do out here. They needed to get to somewhere like Molonor in the Graveyard where he could access his Galaxy Bank account and pay for professional repairs to the ship. Even if the Polity blocked his access to that account—which was practically unheard of—he had ensured that he had transferred plenty of portable wealth aboard shortly after the memplant payment went in. They just needed to get to the Graveyard.

“Explain yourself, Leven,” he said, when the mind was tardy in replying.

“It’s a little puzzling,” the mind replied. “The Polity watch stations are on high alert and have sunk their detectors into U-space. Doubtless USERs are ready to be deployed too. Ships are also arriving—attack ships, dreadnoughts and some bigger stuff.”

“This can’t just be down to us,” said Blite as he entered the airlock. Really, if his encounter with Penny Royal, his much-admired new hardfield generator and his escape from Par Avion warranted this kind of response, then he might just as well give himself up now.

“No,” said Leven. “Details are unclear but this seems to be in response to activity on the other side of the Graveyard.”

“The prador are playing up,” said Greer.

“That seems likely,” said Leven. “But, as I said, the details are not clear.”

Once inside his ship, Blite retracted his visor into his suit’s neck ring and pushed the folding hard-shell back off his head. He felt no inclination to take the suit off and, when he arrived in the bridge, the other two were similarly clad. Always best to take precautions like this when your ship has a chunk carved out of its hull like a scale model of Valles Marinaris. He took his seat, rested his elbows on the console before him and brought his fingertips together as he considered.

“If we stay in the Polity then someone or something is going to track us down, make sure we’re completely disabled and take us in,” he said. “Agreed?”

“Agreed,” said Brond, while Greer nodded.

“So if all this border activity is about what’s happening on the Kingdom side, then that’s where their attention will be focused.” He gazed at Brond and Greer but they showed no inclination to agree. Like him, they were perfectly well aware that when AIs went on high alert their vision was three-sixty. “We have to try to get through.”

“I guess so,” said Greer, with tired acceptance.

“Leven,” he said, “analyse your data on the activity there and try to take us through where it’s most accessible.”

The Rose jolted as steering thrusters fired up and, listening to the sound penetrating the ship, Blite was sure that one of those thrusters was damaged and on its way out. He gazed out pensively at the starlit vacuum, as armoured shutters drew across to close it off and as his ship accelerated. He winced when he felt a wave of something pass through the bridge, seemingly from the direction of the U-space engine.

“Engaging,” said Leven.

“No shit,” said Greer.

They all felt the surge and the sickening twist of the U-space jump. Blite gazed around at the bridge. On the surface, everything looked the same as always, but now it was as if he had taken psycho-actives. Every physical object around him now appeared incredibly insubstantial. Their gleaming surfaces seemed to represent a very thin skin over absolutely nothing at all—an absence the human mind hadn’t evolved to encompass and from which it wanted to retreat screaming. Blite stood up, swayed unsteadily.

“How long?” he asked.

“Fifty-two hours,” Leven replied.

“Okay,” he said, “we’ll take six-hour shifts: you first, Greer, then Brond.”

Brond also stood up, looking pale and ill.

“I’m going to zone out,” Blite added.

The others would do the same when not on watch—electrically imposed sleep was the best way of getting through this, though the nightmares tended to be lurid. As he headed towards his cabin, Blite wondered if he would be having more like those he’d had just after they left Par Avion. Those had been nasty. Black knives had surrounded him—Penny Royal, obviously. But he was imagining the version of the AI that deserved its seriously bad reputation. It had tittered as it began skinning him.

TRENT

“What do you want?” Trent asked, not wanting to look round.

“You and your lovely earring,” said the Golem behind.

Trent’s hand was still tight round the ship’s joystick. What were his options? Did he really want to spend a lot of time stuck in such a confined place with what he knew was standing behind him? He could return to the moon, to the Brockle . . . No, that really wasn’t an option. He’d rather play Russian roulette with a pulse-gun than go back there. He released his grip, reached down to the chair clamp and released that, then slowly turned his chair round, that skeletal metal hand coming off his shoulder as he did so.

The Penny Royal Golem loomed in the cabin and reminded him of when he had first seen it accompanying Stolman—the mafia boss on the Rock Pool. It was of course without skin or syntheflesh: a human skeleton fashioned of ceramal, but with oversized stepper motors bulging in its joints, the gaps between its ribs filled with some grey material, while its teeth were white and eyes dark blue. But its similarity to the usual skeletal Golem ended there. It was bigger than a standard Golem, and someone had enamelled its polished bones with colourful geometric patterns so it looked like an artefact from some Mayan tomb. Filling the area where a human gut would have resided, twisted round its bones, in its joints, around its neck and part of its skull, was a form of tech that looked organic. In fact, it looked almost as if the Golem had slept in a jungle for a hundred years, then torn itself free with its workings clogged with roots and vines, only these were metallic black and gold and too evenly distributed. The thing was also battered, scratched and scored with laser burns.

It blinked metallic eyelids at him that skeletal Golem usually didn’t possess, then abruptly stepped away from him and sat down on the floor to the rear of the small cabin. There it started individually hinging out the ribs on one side of its chest.

“Why?” Trent asked, then after swallowing drily, “Why do you want me and my earring?”

“Because he wants her.”

The “her” had to be Isobel Satomi and Trent had a horrible suspicion that “he” might be Penny Royal. But surely, that didn’t make any sense, since Penny Royal had passed on the memcording of Isobel to him in the first place. Why would it want that back now?

He stared at the Golem, remembering how it had saved his life while he had been the crime boss Stolman’s captive. But whether that was due to Satomi seizing control of it or at its own instigation he had no idea. At the time it had declaimed, “Thus do the scales fall from my eyes.” He also remembered how, enforcing Satomi’s orders, it had torn the head off the captain of the Glory. This Golem had, at one time, probably been of the normal Polity kind. But then Penny Royal got hold of it, and some time after that Stolman had controlled it with a Dracocorp aug. Then Isobel had usurped that control with the power of her crazy mind. And, though sanity was debatable when it came to artificial intelligences, he felt sure he was in the presence of something insane.

“What should I call you?” he asked, because giving it a name might waylay some of his fear of it.

Still hinging out ribs, it tilted its polished skull.

“Never really considered having a name,” it said.

“Why don’t you consider that now?”

“Snickety snick,” it said.

No, that can’t be right.

One side of its chest was now completely open to expose glittery workings. They didn’t look right to Trent—looked as organic as that stuff spread over the outside of its skeleton. In addition, amidst them, he could just see the Golem’s AI crystal in its ceramal cage. It wasn’t clear or opalescent like the usual home of an AI mind, but burned and it contained blooms like fungus in agar, and Trent could definitely see some cracks. Having exposed all this, it now reached round and tore open the panel in the wall against which it was reclining.

“You must have had a real name once,” he said, “before Penny Royal got hold of you.”

It suddenly snapped up one hand, then one finger. Trent hadn’t even been able to track the movement. No doubt at all that if it decided to kill him he was utterly helpless.

“I remember. I was called John Grey,” it said. “Snickety snick,” John Grey added while, his hands a blur, he tore out and discarded circuit rods from the wall and then detached a skein of fibre-optics from behind where they had been.

“What did Penny Royal do to you, John?” Trent asked. Maybe, if he kept talking, he could defer the point when he ended up in bloody gobbets scattered about this cabin. Such an end struck him as likely since, if Penny Royal wanted Satomi, Trent Sobel himself was most likely irrelevant. Perhaps a little distracting entertainment while this Golem took Isobel’s memcording to the “he” he’d mentioned?

John Grey looked up from sorting cables. “Mr Grey,” he said firmly.

Trent felt his hopes of getting out of this alive retreat even further. He watched as the Golem began plugging the optic cables into his chest. After a few minutes of this Mr Grey said, “Snick,” as he plugged in the last of them—all in a neat ring around his crystal. He then tugged more of the optics out of the wall to give him the slack to stand up and step back towards Trent. Reaching out to press a finger against Trent’s chest, the Golem then dipped his head to inspect his own finger more closely. Trent knew that in an instant Mr Grey could shove that finger straight through him. He cleared his throat, then said, “I didn’t want to die on that moon, and I don’t want to die here.”

Grey looked up. “You didn’t want to die?”

Trent cleared his sticky throat. “No.”

“Neither did I,” said Mr Grey.

Trent was puzzling over what he could possibly say in response to that, just as Grey’s head dipped again, as if he was nodding off, and the ship shuddered like some beast running into a bare power cable, twisted and groaned, and dropped into U-space.

SVERL

The cargo ships that had taken on many of the refugees from the planet were now gone, as was the ship the Polity agents here, at the Rock Pool, had boarded, and Sverl felt slightly disappointed to not be having some exchange with the drone Arrowsmith. Now deep scanning the local system, he picked up the small single-ship orbiting the Rock Pool and noted that the ship contained a Golem that was trying to open communications with him again. He ignored that, instead pondering on his impulse to direct the Golem here. He should not have done so and, more importantly, he should not have come here himself. It seemed likely that some of Cvorn’s spy satellites would still be here so Cvorn might learn his location and know that Sverl had not taken the bait.

Whatever—he would deal with Cvorn in due course.

Sverl now allowed a communications link with the Golem to establish and made an informational request to link deeper, since it was no longer his slave. It allowed this and he gazed through its eyes.

“You have arrived,” said the Golem, who had now apparently acquired the name John Grey. Mr Grey was peering at an image of Sverl’s dreadnought in a small screen. Next, he raised his gaze to focus on a distant speck of that same ship through the main cockpit screen.

“Come over,” said Sverl. “I will open a docking bay.” He felt a mental hesitation within Mr Grey, along with some strange echoing effects and hints of esoteric maths, and so he continued smoothly, “Unless you wish to maintain some distance while we work out what your payment should be.” Sverl had absolutely no idea what such a creature, now free of his control, might want.

“I want to accompany you,” said Grey, dipping his head to peer down at his own body. Sverl now realized why the link seemed so odd. Mr Grey had plugged himself into that little ship to make the required calculations to control the U-space engines, and was still partly lost in that mathematical universe.

“Why?” Sverl asked, then before Grey could reply, said the answer himself: “Penny Royal.”

“Yes.” The affirmation was almost dismissive as Grey turned to gaze at Trent Sobel, who was stepping into the rear of the cabin, his expression wary at first, then alarmed when he saw the image on the small screen.

“Come over,” Sverl repeated, meanwhile mentally sending a signal to open a door into the assault bay. He withdrew, partially, his awareness of what was happening aboard that small vessel remaining just enough to alert him to anything that might require his attention. Next, as the ship fired up its fusion drive and began its approach, he began updating from his various sources within both the Polity and the Kingdom. It soon became evident that he should have been paying more attention to things outside his usual compass.

Something was happening.

In response to occurrences over on the other side of the Graveyard, Polity watch stations and border forces were on high alert. But what those occurrences might be wasn’t very clear from the data he could gather on the Polity side. Most of Sverl’s sources of information in the Kingdom—the data intercepts, status updates and the prador gossip transmitted like a round robin—weren’t making things clear either, so Sverl decided it was time to try another more risky source, and he opened a U-space link deep into the Kingdom.

“Hello Sverl—I’ve been expecting your call,” said the individual at the other end of that link.

“So what exactly is going on, Gost?” Sverl asked of the large armoured prador now displayed across his screens.

Gost was either a large first-child or a young adult that just didn’t behave with the selfishness usually displayed by that kind. Gost was one of the prador king’s large extended family, one of his children, and served his father as one of the King’s Guard. Gost had contacted Sverl many decades ago with an offer of amnesty if he returned to the Kingdom. Sverl hadn’t believed it and, anyway, it had been too late. Part of his surrender involved physically coming before the king and by then Sverl had changed too much and had known what the prador reaction to his change would be: instant extermination. However, after his refusal, their occasional conversations had continued. The king was perfectly well aware of this but allowed it even though Sverl was an outlaw. The king wanted to control his kingdom and to be ready to counter any threat, so he needed all the data he could get. Cutting off communications between Sverl and one of his utterly loyal guards would not have been useful.

“You mean, why is the Polity getting nervous?” Gost enquired.

“Of course.”

“Probably because of the host of dreadnoughts at the Graveyard’s borders and the squadron of King’s Guard reavers gathering in the Feeding Frenzy within the Kingdom.”

“I see,” said Sverl. “And why are such ships gathering?”

“Because of you, Sverl.”

“I didn’t think I was such a threat.”

“Certainly the image I am seeing on my screens is no threat at all,” said Gost. “But I would be interested in seeing what you really look like, and I would be even more interested in taking a peek inside you, specifically around your major ganglion.”

Sverl was lost for words. He just stared at the King’s Guard and clattered nonsense from his prosthetic mandibles.

“I see that you lack a sensible response,” said Gost. “Let me make something plain for you: we know what you are, Sverl. We know what the black AI Penny Royal did to you.”

“And so you wish to erase such an atrocity,” Sverl managed.

“Such a typical prador response might be expected . . .”

Gost was offering him something—some insight. Now under pressure, Sverl’s mind went into overdrive, mainly functioning in its AI component. Gost was not behaving exactly like a prador, and neither was the king. No one had seen the king for many years and the king’s children, his guard, were never seen without their armour . . .

“Transformation might not be unique to me,” he suggested.

“It might not,” admitted Gost. “But consider how the majority of untransformed prador would react to you. Consider how some prador, bitter about the termination of the war and certain of their manifest destiny to dominate the universe, might use you.”

“Cvorn,” said Sverl.

“The dreadnoughts on the border of the Graveyard contain Cvorn’s allies who, though surrendering power to my father, the king, have continued to nurture their hate. To them you would be an abomination and utter proof that the war should have been continued to its—in their view—inevitable conclusion: the extermination of all Polity humans and AIs. Unfortunately they are unable to overcome their instincts sufficiently to understand that the true inevitable conclusion of the war would have been the annihilation of most of the prador race, with the remainder being confined to the surfaces of just a few worlds, as a novelty, as a source of interest to godlike artificial intelligences.”

Again, Sverl had difficulty finding any response. What were the King’s Guard that they could see so clearly beyond their instincts? What was the king? Had Penny Royal’s urge to transform extended even into the Kingdom?

“And no, Sverl, neither I nor my kin have been touched by that black AI.”

Shit, a mind reader too.

“And I’m not a mind reader,” Gost added.

After sputtering for a moment, Sverl managed, “Penny Royal was rogue . . .”

“They would not, or would not want to see a distinction: Penny Royal is an AI and therefore of the Polity.”

Sverl paused, banished the shock he felt as a foolish organic reaction, and cogitated for an AI moment, then said, “But Cvorn and his allies would need physical irrefutable evidence, which is me.”

“Yes.”

“Cvorn cannot capture me.”

“Maybe when his only resource was a destroyer . . .”

“Explain.”

“Vlern’s five children raided a world for females and during that raid, and showing abilities not usually within the compass of their kind, they stole an ST dreadnought, which they took to Cvorn in the Graveyard.”

“Why? Why take it to him?”

“Some form of mind control is indicated.”

“I wonder what—”

“So,” Gost interrupted, “Cvorn’s activities in the Graveyard threaten to lead to civil war in the Kingdom, probably followed by all-out war against the Polity. And you are the key. My father now has a quandary to resolve. He can launch an attack against Cvorn’s allies, which would be costly, or he can take the very dangerous risk of sending a squadron of reavers into the Graveyard, to which the Polity would have to respond.”

“To deal with Cvorn,” said Sverl, knowing with leaden certainty that this was not what Gost was getting at. The reavers—the ships of the King’s Guard—would have another target.

“No, Sverl,” Gost said. “There will always be prador like Cvorn but there is only one piece of evidence, ostensibly of Polity perfidy, like you. And so your very existence could trigger a war.”

“So you are preparing to come in to hunt me down and kill me,” said Sverl.

“We could do so by breaking treaties and forcing the Polity to respond with attack ships, which would give Cvorn’s allies an excuse to come in and engage too, to which the Polity would have to respond with dreadnoughts . . . This would provoke the very war we are trying to avoid. Need I go on?”

“You need not,” said Sverl. “What would you have me do? Destroy myself?”

“That would be very convenient for us. Are you offering to do so?”

“I am not.”

“Then you have a few choices remaining if, as I have divined from our previous communications, you have lost your hatred of the Polity and have gained a hatred of warfare and all it entails,” said Gost. Sverl felt some relief that there might be an alternative to his suicide or murder by his own state.

“You must find some other way of removing yourself from the game. While you remain in the Graveyard, you face the certainty of extinction either from us or from Cvorn and his allies. Either you hand yourself over to the Polity or you depart elsewhere.”

“I will ponder on the matter,” Sverl replied.

“Don’t, as has often been your wont, allow your pondering to turn into procrastination,” said Gost, then cut the communication, his image shimmering out.

Sverl settled down on the floor of his sanctum, feeling deflated and lost. He really did not want to be the key to starting a conflict between the Kingdom and the Polity, and he definitely did not want to die. Handing himself over to the Polity would take him far from Cvorn’s grasp, but it would probably put him within the grasp of something like that forensic AI the Brockle. If he headed out of the Graveyard and beyond both Polity space and the Kingdom, his need for some sort of resolution with Penny Royal would never be satisfied. So, thinking on these matters, he returned his focus to the approaching single-ship and felt a sudden intimation that an answer might lie there.

“Did you have any problems passing the Polity watch stations?” he enquired, following a suspicion.

“None at all,” replied Grey.

“Who the hell is that?” asked Trent Sobel.

Sverl belatedly realized that Mr Grey was allowing the ship’s computing to translate their communication for the man’s benefit. He felt a momentary annoyance, then again remembered that this Golem was no longer his slave and he had no control of it, no claim on its actions.

“I am Father-Captain Sverl.”

“Right, you’re still here.”

Sverl felt no inclination to disabuse him of the notion that he had remained near the Rock Pool because he now had other things to consider. Despite the Polity watch stations being on high alert, this single-ship had come through. It might have evaded detection, but more likely the watchers had let it through because of whatever threat Penny Royal had made. This all related to Sverl; he felt sure he was still part of the black AI’s plans. He would let them carry him, he decided. Turning from his controls, he headed over to the back wall of his sanctum, sending a mental instruction to open a storeroom and, upon reaching it, began bringing out some equipment. Penny Royal had seen fit to send him Isobel Satomi’s memcrystal, so it clearly wanted him to do something about it. It might be that he wouldn’t need this hardware to penetrate the crystal—that it would take standard optical connections—but he wanted to be prepared.

SPEAR

This Sverl, I decided, was a dangerous character indeed. Not only was he an augmented prador but one using both prador and Polity technology, as demonstrated by his use of sophisticated chameleonware capable of concealing a prador dreadnought at close quarters.

When his ship had appeared like that, I’d just gaped at the thing filling up the screen fabric and waited for a wave of fiery destruction, like the one I’d experienced at Panarchia. But my ship and I weren’t of interest to him, and he took himself away and U-jumped.

We found out why only a short while later. Sverl had made a physical penetration of the relay and now, knowing where it was transmitting its signal to, had gone after it. Or at least so I supposed. He’d also left the thing open, babbling its transmission coordinates across the ether so anyone could follow. And follow we did.

However, I wasn’t going to jump after Sverl without taking precautions, and so I instructed a somewhat terse and moody Flute to take us to a point at least a light hour out from those coordinates. I guessed Flute had been as spooked as I had by the appearance of the father-captain who had made him. Flute remained uncommunicative throughout the journey and I meanwhile reluctantly returned to my inner world.

I could now confine my experience of past lives to times I specifically wanted to explore, so I experienced them in my cabin, prostrate on my bed. I tried once to stop them surging up into my consciousness entirely, but that simply didn’t work. They gnawed at me like a hated addiction. I felt depressed and even experienced physical pain if I didn’t allow at least two or three to reveal themselves to me every twenty hours.

I was now also able to analyse them meticulously and had run up programs in my aug for this purpose. I knew, for example, that of the thousands Penny Royal had killed and cached, one thousand and eight hundred of them were murderers. These included deaths I had not experienced at first-hand because the searches and analyses extended beyond those, to all the spine contained. One thing was also evident: the deaths I had experienced, and whose every instance I could recall at will, could not possibly all reside in my mind. They were in the spine, quantum entangled with my mind, part of my mind despite the separate locations.

This analysis also confirmed for me that little rationality lay behind the murders. It didn’t matter whether the people were guilty or innocent, contemptible or lovable, young or old. A large portion of them had certainly deserved to die, but there were many innocents too. I think the only reason they weren’t a cross-section of ordinary humanity was because ordinary people weren’t the kind to cross Penny Royal’s path.

I get it, I fucking get it! I wanted to scream at the spine, and at Penny Royal. I understood that no justification existed or could exist. Penny Royal was a mass murderer, an AI psychopath, a fucking computerized and mechanized Hannibal Lector who really deserved to die. Really, I didn’t need to experience any more of those deaths to know that, but they continued relentlessly to play out their horrible sordid dramas in my mind.

“So Sverl catches up with this Cvorn character and obliterates him,” I said during one of my forays outside of my skull, as I studied a nanoscope image of a ring of quantum processors on the surface of the spine. These had no direct connection at all to everything that surrounded them, and they baffled me. What possible purpose could they serve?

“That would be Sverl’s approach, one would suppose,” said Riss cautiously.

“One renegade prador destroys another one, and both have been sitting in the Graveyard since the war,” I said.

“You are reconsidering your idea about there being a connection here with the activity at the Graveyard’s borders,” said Riss.

“Just raising it as a discussion point.”

“So even with Penny Royal’s involvement, you cannot see why Sverl, Cvorn, or both of them might elicit such a response,” Riss pushed.

“All right, I can’t see it,” I conceded, “though I do feel sure of it.” I shut off the screen image—I was getting nowhere. “Polity AIs would not suddenly decide to attack the Kingdom—there’s no need. Even during the little time since my resurrection, I can see that the prador aren’t even playing in the same league as the Polity any more and are never going to catch us with our pants round our ankles again. So the activity around the Polity watch stations is in response to the prador activity, not the other way round.”

“Yes,” said Riss.

“As you pointed out, the prador aren’t lining up enough ships for some full-scale attack on the Polity, so they are therefore reacting to something in the Graveyard.”

“Maybe there are forces we haven’t seen yet,” Riss suggested.

“Come on, even with what have to be limited contacts, you were able to discover what was going on in the gas cloud they call the Feeding Frenzy. I’d bet that by now the Polity has spy hardware inspecting every square inch of the Kingdom.”

“So perhaps the Polity has seen other forces.”

“Nope,” I shook my head, “what I’ve seen gathering at the Polity border isn’t enough of a response to some full-scale attack. It looks to me like a softly-softly approach—a measured equivalent response.”

“Maybe there are Polity forces we haven’t seen, then.”

“You do like your role as Devil’s Advocate, don’t you?”

“I’ll concede everything you say,” said Riss. “So what are the prador responding to that they haven’t felt the need to respond to since the war?”

“Well, Sverl and Cvorn are on the move and they haven’t been for the best part of a century . . .” I prompted.

“Not good enough,” said Riss. “If they head for either the Polity or the Kingdom, just the watch stations on either border would be able to take them both out in seconds. They wouldn’t need extra forces to handle only them. So, if your contention that they are the cause of the border activity is true, then we are missing something critical here.”

I thought long and hard about that, unable to dispel the notion that Riss was way ahead of me and simply letting me catch up.

“Okay,” I said, “Cvorn and Sverl weren’t a threat when they first went renegade, so one has to consider what has changed, and that brings us right back to Penny Royal. Sverl, at the black AI’s instigation, has acquired AI abilities—augmentation. Could it be that the Kingdom fears a prador with such abilities?”

“It could be,” said Riss, “but if so, in responding to their fear of Sverl they have elicited a response at the Polity border they should fear even more. If they then go in after Sverl they will elicit a response to that which will make the threat Sverl might pose—as an AI—seem quite petty.”

“Then there has to be something more involved than fear of AI, doesn’t there?”

Riss dipped her head in acknowledgement. “I would suggest that what Sverl represents, rather than what he can do, is the threat.”

I chewed that one over, slowly and carefully, suddenly finding I was enjoying the mental process, discovering that I was enjoying something for the first time since the events on Masada.

“To the prador, Sverl would be an abomination,” I tried.

“Yes.” Riss waited.

“Some factions might feel more strongly than others,” I said.

“Quite,” said Riss.

I closed my eyes and processed the whole matter further.

“Many prador disagreed with the decision to negotiate peace with the Polity,” I said.

“And such prador probably occupy those dreadnoughts gathering at the Graveyard’s border,” said Riss, obviously getting a little impatient now. “And they are not the kind to see a renegade AI as something distinct from the Polity itself.”

It all now fell neatly and horribly into place in my mind. The king of the prador could not allow Sverl to fall into the claws of those rebellious prador—they’d use him as a symbol to incite war. And to prevent that he was prepared to risk sending the King’s Guard into the Graveyard to eliminate Sverl as a threat entirely. It looked as if he was even prepared to risk breaking treaty agreements and ending up in a confrontation with the Polity directly. But could he really get away from bringing on the very war he would be trying to prevent?

“But what’s Cvorn’s involvement?” I asked.

“Cvorn,” said Riss, “disagreed with the new king to such an extent that he became a renegade. He is doubtless working with those prador at the border in some way. He, I would suggest, is trying to find some way to trap Sverl and present him as evidence to the prador at the border. Presumably, they would then demand action and present Sverl as proof—to the Prador Kingdom as a whole—of all their inchoate fears about the Polity. One of two things will follow: either his subjects will force the king to go to war against the Polity or they will rebel. Either way, things will get really messy.”

“You’ve known all this for some time,” I said.

“I have.”

“So why have you waited until now to acquaint me with it?”

“You’ve been busy.”

The snake drone had already demonstrated that she was aware of my connection with the spine, in fact had been the one to reveal it. She was also aware of the data transfers going on between me and that object, so had to be aware of how much they had increased ever since our departure from Masada.

“It doesn’t look like much,” I said, and reached out to rest my fingers on the surface of the spine. “But it contains all one needs to know of hell.”

I felt a surge through my fingers and the dead again clamouring to be heard. My chest tightened and I withdrew my touch.

“It’s better now,” said Riss. “You have more control.”

“I do.” I nodded.

“Then I have a final piece of data you can slip into place.” I looked up into Riss’s black eye and the drone continued, “The memories you sense are from the dead, but they are copies of the period around these deaths only. The data is not sufficient for these victims to be complete beings. They are edited, ciphers, enough for you to know them and to know Penny Royal’s guilt.”

“I don’t find that reassuring,” I said. “I had considered destroying this object but have a terror of what such an act will do to me, but that’s not all of it. I thought that if I destroyed this, I destroyed the dead—it ceases to be possible to restore them. Now you tell me that this is not so, and that they are gone forever without recompense.”

“Not so.” She shook her head. “Captain Blite docked at Par Avion some while ago and there claimed a reward for something Penny Royal had left with him.”

“His modified hardfield generator?”

“No, he claimed the standard reward offered for returning memplants to the Polity. He handed over thousands of them.” Riss paused for a second, then added, “Penny Royal’s victims.”

I stood just staring at Riss as the full import of her words struck me. All those lives and all those deaths, all that suffering could, in a way, be wiped from accounts. Penny Royal had taken a good shot at redemption but, really, it wasn’t enough. What about those the AI had killed but not recorded? What about the thousands who had suffered or died as a direct or indirect result of its actions?

“Panarchia?” I said.

“No, you’re the only one resurrected from there.”

Nevertheless, I felt a loosening in my chest, a weight coming off me. I turned to regard the spine again. Here was evidence; here was a collection of précis of those who had died. I had no reason to keep them any more and, if I could overcome my fear of what might happen to me when I did so, I could toss this object into a sun. I reached out to touch the thing again and felt its impact reduced, emasculated.

“We still have to find Penny Royal,” I affirmed, and turned away.