13

 

BLITE

The antique space suit was empty. Blite had finally nerved himself to open the visor and peer inside. He found only an internal incrustation like soot. He then moved on to search for Penny Royal elsewhere.

Beyond the central corridor running round the horseshoe of the Black Rose, there were numerous branching maintenance tunnels. The entire ship was webbed with them like a worm-eaten fruit. Many of these tunnels were big enough for a man, if he was prepared to crawl in some places. They were for various designs of robot, the majority of which were grub-like things capable of performing many tasks themselves or unloading smaller robots where they could not gain access. Over four days the captain explored all these, occasionally encountering those robots. The things politely retreated and dropped back into their side niches to allow him past.

The schematic of the ship, though detailed, didn’t really give him the feel he wanted. He needed to go in there and see things with his own eyes, touch them, consider the things he might need to do if there were problems. He wanted to know his newly configured ship. And, beside that, he felt the need to locate Penny Royal, rather than talk to that apparently empty suit. Or that black diamond manifestation. But, just as when he had searched before their arrival at the Crispin Six supernova blast front, the black AI was nowhere to be found.

As he stepped into the airlock, Blite understood that Penny Royal, with its ability to radically alter its own shape and design, could enter many areas of the ship where he could not. However, he still wanted to check outside. This was not because of some need to face the black AI, but because, having hung here in the path of the Crispin Six nova blast front for three days, he was growing bored and edgy and finding himself snapping at Brond and Greer.

The airlock evacuated, much faster than the original The Rose could have managed, and Blite propelled himself outside, looking for somewhere on the black surface to attach his safety line. He could find nothing. However, since it struck him as unlikely that one of his crew, Leven or Penny Royal itself might suddenly take the ship away, shedding him into vacuum and leaving him to die, he decided to rely on the gecko function of his boots.

The Black Rose floated in dark red vacuum, dotted with glittering pink stars. He knew now that without the entropy dump, which was still ongoing, his suit would have been failing about now and he would have been rapidly heating up. Even if he had pulled himself inside before its total failure, with him boiling out of it, he would have been so badly irradiated that even advanced anti-rads wouldn’t have worked.

Next, he walked round, following a course between metallic protrusions resembling the low hedges of a maze, on to the front screen. He peered inside to see Greer sitting there, with a VR mask and gloves on—assembling some complicated puzzle, by the looks of it. And while he watched, Brond entered. The man sat down at his console, called something up on his screen then leaned down to take up an old-fashioned touch-board from underneath the console and begin typing. After a moment, he frowned, then looked up. Spotting Blite, he gave a casual salute, then returned to his work.

Blite had seen the man updating this written journal of his, and wondered how he himself might feature in it. He was about to move on but suddenly halted. Greer also had a hobby that recorded more than mere audio, what with all her data-gathering gear and holo-visual . . . Blite suddenly got the strange feeling that he was on to something. He understood why he, and the other two, wanted to be with Penny Royal, but hadn’t really considered the reverse. Was this it? Was it their role to be the AI’s witnesses? What about Blite himself? He made a leap. At some point, forensic AIs would examine them and he wondered, given the times the AI had actually been in his mind, if it might be recording things there. He suddenly felt cold and just a little frightened, and quickly moved on. He circumvented a sensor spine to head towards the back of the ship.

Just around from the bridge, he came to the circular space door giving egress to the shuttle. This was only visible because the maze walls skirted a clear area, around which a near-invisible black line etched out the door’s circumference. Just beyond, he found another black line scribing a stretched-out diamond shape and knew this to be one of the splinter missiles—perhaps one of those capable of U-jumping itself into a target. Beyond this, a row of four inset ports, with amber hardfields deep inside, marked out a laser array. Here and there, on short pillars, stood spherical or extended egg-shaped nacelles, some containing sensor equipment, others holding esoteric weapons. Neatly folded under a red-tinted chain-glass hatch, like some giant burrowing insect made of chrome, lay an exterior maintenance robot. Still no sign of Penny Royal.

Reaching the fusion array at the rear, Blite peered round at the yard-wide tubes of a cluster of seven fusion ports. He stared at these for a long while, aware that their design was quite radical in that they used curved hardfields for containment rather than the usual Tesla bottles. And that fusion actually took place inside them, rather than a short distance behind as had previously been the case with The Rose.

“All right, Penny Royal,” he said, becoming frustrated with his search, “where the fuck are you?”

He began to trudge back to the airlock, but even as he did so, silver veins brightened in the hull’s surface—while scattered between them lay a mottling of dark shapes like sword blades. Blite halted and watched as these lines, like threads drawn onto a reel, pulled in to one point ahead of him, the sword blades following like a shoal of shadow fish. A mass of silver and black coagulated before him and just for a second he got that feeling he sometimes experienced during a U-jump, of a tugging at his senses from a direction he simply could not locate.

He felt something straining in his mind, like trying to focus an astigmatic eye. For a moment he had it locked down, and the growing mass of the black AI before him seemed to invert and turn into a tunnel stretching into the far distance. It then seemed to open out in every direction and multiply infinitely. He felt himself hanging within it as threads of power spread out from his body. Gazing then in a direction impossible to locate clearly, he saw a generator, akin to the one they had seen above Penny Royal’s planetoid. It was hanging in vacuum alongside a whole series of generators, all feeding in power. But they receded and he found himself hanging in vastness, and it was all Penny Royal, and it was more than his mind could encompass. He shut down.

“I’ve got you,” it said.

Yes, you have, haven’t you, something inside Blite replied.

Blite found himself floating in vacuum, which seemed somehow prosaic and small compared to what he had just experienced. Gradually he became aware of something closing round his ankle and pulling him. He peered down at a silver strand wrapped around it, extending down to the Black Rose, which now lay a thousand feet away. Penny Royal reeled him in and, as it did so, he tried to fathom what he had seen. It reminded him of something he had tried many years ago—something many spacefarers tried at one time or another.

He had ventured out on the hull of his ship while it was in U-space, but had been within the ship’s shielding. Some of his crew had remained conscious, while others, having experienced U-space before, took drugs to knock themselves out. Pre-programmed to do so, the shielding shut down for precisely ten seconds. This was so that Blite, and those inside who had remained conscious, could look at the infinite. Luckily he had used his safety line, because one of those who’d sensibly rendered himself unconscious for the trip later had to come out and retrieve him. It took Blite a week to recover and, at the end of that time, all he could remember was the impression of something being wrong, of experiencing something that his mind just wasn’t capable of recording.

It was like that, he thought, but even then he wasn’t so sure. The feeling was similar, but he could still recollect Penny Royal’s infinity. Perhaps his previous exposure to something similar had immunized him in some way.

“What the hell was that?” he rasped.

“I am not a mind reader, Captain,” the AI replied.

Fucking liar.

“I saw something,” said Blite, “like . . . U-space. And those machines there . . . those generators.”

“I see,” said Penny Royal. “Just prior to you yelling ‘spiders’ and propelling yourself away from the ship, the entropy dump fluctuated. Since this involves a certain degree of U-space manipulation, you must have experienced some overspill.”

The explanation was too neat. The AI had spoken rather than dumped something into his mind. And it had not mentioned “Calabi-Yau frames in juxtaposition” or anything else that he’d struggle to understand. This meant the AI had wanted him to understand it at once, rather than strain his mind around it. As his feet settled against the hull, his boots engaged and the tendril unwound. He felt sure he had been lied to again. But about what and to what purpose, he had no idea. He gazed at Penny Royal, back before him in familiar form—the black head of an artichoke poised on a silver stalk. He remembered that half of the AI had taken possession of the cargo hauler—yet what lay before him looked no smaller than before. What had Leven said about that? Something about U-space phenomenon and the AI doubling in mass before separating?

“So how much longer are we going to be stuck out here?” he asked.

Blite saw a time display rapidly count down ten days—the one he had called up on the Q-dot display on his bedroom wall, when he was a child. He thought about that for a moment, then realized that caught them up with the two weeks of their time jump. He guessed it made a crazy sense.

“Right, okay.” He turned away and began heading towards the airlock.

“Leven knows how long we’ll be here,” said Penny Royal, implying that there had been no need for Blite to come out on the hull. Blite didn’t believe it, and wasn’t even convinced that his impulse to come out here had been his own. He’d seen something more; he’d had something else impressed into his mind. And, he reckoned, he might be no more to the AI than a convenient data-storage crystal.

“Yeah.” He waved a dismissive hand.

He no longer felt impatient or irritable. Right then all he wanted to do was go into his cabin, drink a large amount of a bottle from that crate of Martian vodka he’d bought on Par Avion and curl up on his bed. The thing about wonder and awe, he had found, was that sometimes it sat just a thin skin away from terror.

SPEAR

Sepia had gone off again, apparently to check on the defences of Trent’s new headquarters. She had departed with a lingering and mildly amused glance back at me. Perhaps I’d been too obvious about resetting my nascuff. I hadn’t needed to hold up my arm and watch it change from red to blue after resetting it through my aug. I was glad she was gone, anyway—I didn’t need the distraction. Despite my libido steadily waning as my nanosuite digested testosterone and hormones, reset glands and twisted complex organic chemicals into different shapes, my visceral awareness of her presence hadn’t faded one whit.

Trent had solicitously provided Taiken’s wife, Reece, with a seat in the annex to the surgical theatre. Watching how he treated her, I realized I wasn’t the only one subject to the whims of libidinous Cupid. Perhaps it was something about the air in prador ships. Reece’s other child, who seemed normal enough, was sitting on her lap. Her older boy, Robert, was a bit of a somnambulist—he had been walking round in a trance with his human hand in his mother’s. He’d only shown any animation when Trent and I lifted him onto the surgical table. He had fought us, his claw pinching a chunk out of Trent’s forearm before we could pin him down and inject an anaesthetic. Now, as the pedestal auto-doc bowed over, scanning him from head to foot, I could see the reason for his condition.

Taiken had replaced the boy’s left arm with a prador claw and added a manipulatory arm, which folded against his bloated torso. Both limbs were about the size you would find on a small third-child. Attached to his bones were webworks of shell to support them. The prador nerves of the claw had been connected to the human nerves which led to his missing arm. This was achieved using chemical interface nodes. Artificial nerves had been run from the manipulatory arm into his spine and up to his brain, where a piece of ganglion had been surgically introduced. His blood was a mixture of human and prador blood, heavily laced with antejects. These were produced by an artificial contrivance sunk into his bone marrow. Taiken had also made additions to all the boy’s organs and consequently to all the fluids many of them produced. His entire body chemistry had changed. And unfortunately it would never function properly as it was.

A body could only incorporate alien material, without rejecting it, with the use of antejects and adaptogens. But these were suppressing growth in both his prador parts and his human ones. Nothing would knit together. The manipulatory arm would never work. Cancers were springing up like weeds. Scar tissue was swamping nerve interfaces and other interfaces between human and alien flesh, while just keeping the boy alive required constant intervention. In addition, brain growth had stalled and his brain was shrinking. Taiken had turned the boy into a dying chimera and a moron.

Perhaps this boy had not been the best place to start. Having loaded Taiken’s records, I knew that the adults were more rugged and many of them had not, despite appearances, so radically redesigned themselves. Some of them even maintained a physical separation between many of their parts—their prador grafts running on their own chemistry and venous system. The prador interface with their human bodies was often an inorganic one in these cases.

“So what can you do?” asked Trent, peering over my shoulder at the scan results.

“I can surgically remove most of his major grafts,” I said, “but I need something more to rid him of the rest and, as noted, our time is limited. The surgery alone here would take the best part of a day.”

Even as I spoke, I was scanning records in my mind, linking to Bsorol’s work and trying to isolate some key. The gross surgical work, though time-consuming, would be relatively easy—it would be simply like removing a bullet. But getting rid of the rest would be like taking micro-slivers out of a ceramo-glass grenade. I needed something else. I needed some way of taking them apart and rendering them harmless so the human body could reject them. I needed some panacea I could deliver to all the shell people, and quickly. I first considered nanobots, but the amount of programming involved would have been immense, and the equipment Taiken had at his disposal wasn’t up to the task. There had to be a simpler way.

“Enzymic acid,” I said.

It was in Bsorol’s work—an enzyme that slowly dissolved prador carapace to allow a new one to grow. The first-child hadn’t worked out how to stimulate the new growth and so abandoned the idea, instead working on a method to induce the shedding of old carapace. But the enzyme was still interesting. I called up an image of its molecular structure in my mind and examined it from every angle.

“Acid?” asked Reece. She was now standing up at the viewing window, holding her younger child, and had used the intercom.

“An enzyme is a catalyst of biochemical reactions.”

“I know what an enzyme is,” she replied. “I’m questioning the use of the word ‘acid.’”

“Enzyme acid is a catalytic acid. It doesn’t break down or combine with the molecular structures it is destroying. It can work very fast. I believe it was used as a weapon against the prador during the war.” I looked over to Riss, who, having followed us into the surgery had coiled on one of the side work surfaces and apparently gone to sleep.

“Various kinds were developed,” the snake drone replied, raising her head, “but seemed a pointless complication when hydrofluoric acid was available.” The drone’s black eye then opened. “This may be of interest.” The drone sent me a data package.

So, here was the part of the problem that needed solving. I studied complex formulae, molecular models, statistical breakdowns of performance and other data on four different kinds of enzyme. The difficulty, I immediately found, was that all four would be, to some degree, hostile to human tissue. I selected one of them and began redesigning it in my skull to make it a lot more specific and a lot less likely to kill a shellman outright. Walking over to an organo-molecular assembler, I turned it on, reeled out an optic from the side of the thing and plugged it into my aug. First, I had to test the thing out, so I set it to assembling the original enzyme without my modifications. I lost track of time during this task and, when I looked round, Trent was gone and the woman asleep in her chair. I replayed his earlier attempts to get through to me. The shell people were becoming more aggressive, and one of them had torn a hole through the wall of the building. Some out there, having forgone the treatments that maintained their condition when Taiken seized control of them, had collapsed.

“Many of them will still die,” said Riss.

“I know,” I said as I worked.

The assembler had already produced a batch of the first enzyme and opened a hatch in its side to reveal a bottle of the stuff. I walked over to the sleeping boy and used a simple chain-glass scalpel to cut out a piece of carapace and attached human skin. I cut a sliver of this and took it over to a nanoscope, placed it in the sample clamps then got the enzyme and dripped some on, setting the scope to take the sliver inside. The enzyme rapidly took apart prador tissue and more slowly dissolved human tissue.

The shell people’s exterior prador grafts would fall away. Inside them, everything that was of the prador would come apart. Along with all this, their chemically based prador instincts would die too. Many of them would die of blood poisoning, blood loss or one of a hundred other complications.

“I need those amniotic tanks,” I said into the void of Sverl’s computer system. “I need help.”

“Coming,” Bsectil replied.

My final altered enzyme, when the assembler produced it, neatly destroyed prador organic matter and left a sliver of human skin pristine. I felt no great accomplishment because Riss’s words about likely deaths still weighed heavily. Holding the two cold flasks containing the new enzyme, I studied them. I needed to find some way to get this stuff inside the shell people, but was aware that many of them would die from the effects. However, if they didn’t get their portion of this cure, they would continue attacking and killing each other. And they would die anyway from the lack of medical treatment to maintain their condition. I made my calculations from Taiken’s work and the predicted effect of this enzyme. I took up processing in Sverl’s computing as well as in my aug to do this, and on the scales of life and death knew I could save more lives than I would kill, but it wasn’t enough.

I needed some way of keeping these people alive as their grafts died. I felt sure that with the processing power open to me and all the equipment available, there had to be a way, but I just didn’t know enough. I walked over to a second assembler and stared at it. This device could assemble nano-machines and next to it rested a drug manufactory. Surely I could use something here?

Memory from Penny Royal’s spine arose in response to my need. A military doctor called Sykes gazed upon a similar collection of machines. Too many commandos were dying before or during transport from the battlefield to the hospital ship. It was tearing apart this gentle man who had trained as a peacetime doctor of civilian maladies. He called up data in his aug and there studied the parameters of the standard nanosuites most of these soldiers had received throughout their previous lives—the kind of packages he had always recommended. Here were the machines that boosted their immune systems, corrected congenital faults, attacked bacterial and viral infections, quickly closed up capillaries around wounds or swiftly wove clots in severed veins and arteries. They were very useful, these machines, but doctors like him had formatted the whole packages they ran for the general hazards of everyday existence, not for war.

Next, he called up data on the new military nano-package and studied it intently. This was less focused on infections, which were generally slow-moving, and more on traumatic injuries, including amputations, chemical poisoning, munitions shock, beam burns, projectile-killed muscle. It could close off bleeds very quickly and it could weave an impermeable non-reactive skin across open wounds. It could gather toxins and isolate them in bubbles of that same skin. It was a much more aggressive and dangerous package that would need constant reprogramming and tweaking. It could get out of control and inadvertently kill those it was supposed to preserve.

Sykes did not like the thing at all but in the fighting on the planet below it would save many more than it would kill. He used his aug to load its data to the nanobot assembler and set the thing running, feeling he had betrayed his principles . . .

I reached out to the assembler, but before I could touch its controls, my aug had opened a radio link to the thing and was already searching its database. The military package was there and, as I set the machine to make it, I felt thousands of people peering over my shoulder, clamouring for attention, making their suggestions. On an almost unconscious level, I tuned out personalities and focused on data. In that moment, my knowledge became the sum of all theirs. Much of it was of no use, but the cryogenic suspension drug seemed a feasible addition. I allowed the projection of Giano Paulos full access.

He was a historian studying the First Diaspora from the Sol system. Cryo-technicians injected the passengers on the first cryoships with a drug that put their bodies into hibernation. Doctors had already been using this drug on accident victims, putting them into a state of hibernation similar to that of a bear in winter. Someone who might have died from his injuries in an hour would instead take ten hours to die.

Even as I linked to the drug manufactory and searched its database, I saw the problem. In slowing down the shell people’s physiology, I would also slow the spread of the enzyme that would destroy their prador grafts. Microspheres were the answer—the drug enclosed in a slow-dissolving collagen that would release it after the grafts died. That might have been my own knowledge—I was now finding it difficult to make the distinction.

What about the pain, the shock? The solution to that lay in the military nano-package. What about conflicts between these? I laid them out in my mind and explored that, feeling a sudden euphoria at the breadth of my knowledge and the skill available to me. It seemed so simple to make adjustments to the military package so that, after the required delay, it would isolate the enzyme acid. I then considered just tweaking that acid to make it deactivate itself after a certain number of catalytic events.

“You’re too deep,” someone told me, and I felt processing capacity shutting down.

I considered a three-way combination of drugs, nano-machines and adaptogens to stimulate regrowth of amputated limbs or excised organs.

“It’s enough,” said that someone, whom I now recognized as Sverl.

I snapped back into consciousness of my surroundings knowing that it was enough and that further delay would cost lives. Processing came back, but I no longer needed it. I sensed the horde of Penny Royal’s victims and their memories retreating like a fast tide and felt a painful regret at the loss of their additional knowledge. However, just a second later I realized that the retreating tide had left its flotsam and jetsam and that the secondhand knowledge I had used now remained with me. I was suddenly aware of the length of my existence as a fact, as if I had never spent a century locked in artificial ruby but had lived every moment of it. Some portion of those thousands in the spine remained with me, etched into my brain.

“Time to get to work, I reckon,” said Riss, now rising up from the floor beside me.

Her black eye was open, and I spotted other openings too. A series of holes had formed in her skin, revealing glittering internals, with spaces seemingly designed to take the flasks I held.

Of course, here was my delivery mechanism.

RISS

Riss felt gravid, loaded and ready for action as she threaded out through the narrow gap opened by the armoured door, but it just wasn’t the same. Admittedly the prador-eating enzyme she carried bore some similarity to the hydrofluoric acid she had used on occasion during the war, and the microspheres with their contained drug were a little like the parasite eggs she had once carried, but that was the extent of it. Riss wasn’t now heading out to strike terror into the hearts or similar organs of the prador. She wasn’t about to inject a hated enemy with a grotesque and hideous form of death. Riss was heading out to do good.

Perhaps this feeling of dissatisfaction was simply due to what Penny Royal had taken away. Perhaps even containing parasite eggs and going up against a hostile prador would never feel as it should. Perhaps nothing that filled up her internal tanks and caches could fill that other emptiness. Riss knew that she was feeling, and had felt for a long time, something akin to human depression. That is, as depression had been in the days before it could be rubbed out with a five-minute mental reformat—when nothing satisfied, nothing gave pleasure and everything looked bleak. In the same way as some humans had fought that feeling then, Riss tried to use action, business, doing stuff as an antidote. She wished that, as with humans, physical activity would generate endorphins to counter the malaise.

Ahead stood the woman she had spotted earlier. The woman had retained her human form but had grown a prador carapace. Now, because she had not maintained constant immune system reprogram-ming or kept up with antejects and other cocktails of drugs to maintain her condition, she was dying. Down on her knees with her head bowed, she offered an easy target, but Riss decided to study her first. Pus was leaking from the points where the plates of carapace shifted over each other. One such piece had fallen off the back of her hand to expose raw flesh, beaded with blood. Internally she was developing numerous abscesses—and where internal shell connected her immovable plates to underlying bone, the surrounding human flesh was dying. As Riss observed her, she raised her head and, even though her whole system was flooded with toxins and her brain swollen in its skull, she retained at least enough faculties to speak.

“Kill me,” she said, brown drool running out of the side of her mouth.

Riss flipped her ovipositor forwards and drove it into the woman’s chest, punching through carapace and straight into her heart. This was risky because such a wound might kill if the military nano-package didn’t quickly repair it, but Riss calculated that the benefit of faster distribution throughout her body of the load outweighed the risk.

Stab, inject and away, now moving fast towards a shellman lying sideways on the floor—a man trying to pull off his prador legs. Riss didn’t hesitate: she stabbed and injected again. But no orgasmic release ensued. She had no feeling of satisfaction at having performed her function. Riss moved on, now accelerating and not pausing to inspect—rather as she had done when inside the prador ship and victims had been all around. Some of the shell people were technically dead, like the one Riss found lying next to two normal human corpses in a prison cage. However, that was only under an old definition of death that cited a stopped heart and gradual synaptic decay. With the packages and drugs inside them, with that hibernation drug working and nanobots repairing damage, they still had a chance. Death for a human, after all, was now defined as an unrecoverable state, and these days the human mind and body were only unrecoverable after total annihilation.

“So what the hell are you?” asked a voice as Riss finished injecting the shellman in the prison cage. Another man had stepped out of hiding from behind a glass vessel full of squirming Spatterjay leeches.

“I’m Riss,” the drone replied and moved on—a normal human like that was of little interest to her.

Shell person after person felt the stab of Riss’s ovipositor, but she began to feel that just inoculating them as she came upon them wasn’t efficient. She paused to map her surroundings and locate every one. Then, checking the rate at which she was using up her loads, she chose the best course. But, as she set upon this course and found herself chasing a shell-woman who seemed much more able than her fellows, Riss recalculated. Analyses of body temperature, heart rate and other signifiers of general health were called for. Riss paused and redrew the map, selecting those who seemed nearest to death first. The basis of this wasn’t great, but it was the best she could manage in limited time.

Hundreds of inoculations later, Riss headed back for further supplies that Spear should have prepared by now. On the way, she came upon the shellman who had been trying to pull off his own legs. Riss found him prostrate a couple of yards away from his prador additions. Here now lay a naked man, legs severed at the hips, his arms ending in stumps at the forearms and his jaw missing. Silvery white skin covered the point of division at his hips, it lay around his exposed gullet and covered his arms to his shoulders. He had obviously managed to drag himself a short distance from the collection of prador legs and carapaces before the hibernation drug took effect, dropping his mandibles on the way. From those prador parts Riss could hear a steady hissing and saw steam rising. Even as the drone watched, they collapsed a little. The enzyme acid was dissolving them violently and turning them into a slowly spreading pool of sticky fluid.

Amazing.

Riss felt a momentary surge of something other than her usual moroseness, other than her perpetual dark mood . . . something like excitement. So unusual, so unexpected was the feeling that she immediately came to a decision. Spear was making enough of this stuff to deal with the shell people and would probably make no more. However, he had made a test batch of the original enzyme acid—the one that also destroyed human tissue—which he hadn’t destroyed. Instead he had inserted it into a drug safe in Taiken’s surgery-cum-laboratory. Spear had locked the thing with a chip key, but that shouldn’t be a problem for a drone capable of penetrating prador ships and bases. Riss would take it and keep it inside, close, ready to use.

The woman the drone had first inoculated was down on her back, large chunks of her outer shell having fallen away. Instead of displaying bleeding raw flesh underneath, more silvery white skin was visible. The regular human Riss had seen earlier was standing over her, a look of fascinated horror on his face. She was in hibernation, like the previous shellman—one beat of her heart detected as Riss approached. But no further overt signs of life were evident as Riss entered the building, the man following closely.

“How many have you done?” Spear asked when Riss came back to him.

“Eight hundred and forty-two,” Riss replied. “Another seven hundred and sixty to do.”

“The effects?” Spear asked.

Riss routed recordings made of what she had seen outside to the man’s aug. Spear turned introspective for a moment, then smiled.

“It’s working,” he said.

Riss opened up her body for reloading, ridding herself of empty flasks like a gun ejecting spent ammunition. “Of course it’s working, but still there are those who might die while you’re congratulating yourself.”

Spear harrumphed and picked up more flasks from the nearby work surface. While he inserted these into her body, she studied him on other levels, black eye firmly open. Her scanning went deeper than her examination of the shell people outside. The entanglement it had taken her so long to detect and map was still there, now more active than before, and firmly connected to that object up in Sverl’s sanctum. Large data exchanges were perpetual, and Riss wondered if Spear had any conception of what he had become. He wasn’t just a man now. He seemed to be some synergistic sum of the essence of Penny Royal’s victims, a multifaceted being with the kind of mental resources usually only available to an AI.

As the last flask went into place, the drone experienced a moment of confusion, seeing an entanglement echo in U-space and feeling something like an amplifier feedback whine reverberating through her snake body. She snapped the holes in her body closed and abruptly leapt away from Spear to land on the floor some yards away, ovipositor poised to strike.

“You okay?” he asked.

Riss hadn’t been okay for a long time, but hadn’t often been frightened.

“Nothing,” said Riss. “No problem.”

She circumvented Spear widely to get to the door, through it and out. Keeping such a physical distance in the real from the man was a futile exercise. It didn’t change the fact that Riss now seemed to be quantum entangled, via the spine, to him. What did this mean? She now knew that the spine contained recordings of all Penny Royal’s dead victims. But did this now mean it also maintained a connection with all the AI’s live ones? The sheer computing power, the ability, the godlike intelligence involved in such a bonding suggested Penny Royal might be a magnitude above even the kind of Polity AIs that gave Riss the shivers. It also suggested, consequently, that Spear ranked higher too.

The little drone truly understood now, on an utterly visceral level, what it meant to be involved with paradigm-changing beings—with beings dangerous enough to bring down civilizations, or capable of raising them up.

CVORN

As he returned to his sanctum, Cvorn’s urge to mate was in abeyance and the other hormonal effects had dropped to a low ebb. Perhaps this was why other father-captains had not gone down this route. He had, after all, subjected himself to these effects by accident and not design. Now, with his mind clearer, he was able to think more about his aims beyond his activities onboard his ST dreadnought.

There was no doubt that Sverl had made a lengthy U-space jump, to give himself time to make repairs to his ship’s shielding. He must hope that he could thereby prevent Cvorn from finding out the destination of his next jump, so Cvorn had to consider how to react to that. Immediate attack was the obvious answer, to inflict further damage, but Sverl had to know that and was doubtless making preparations.

Arriving in the corridor leading to his sanctum, Cvorn found Vrom towing away a grav-sled loaded with leftovers. All that remained of the young male that Cvorn had cannibalized for parts was empty carapace, meticulously scraped clean. At some point Vrom must have returned to Cvorn’s sanctum because claws and legs were there too, all cracked open. Their contents were now either being digested in Vrom’s gut or sitting in his personal food store.

“Father,” said Vrom, halting immediately and cowering.

Cvorn just went straight past the first-child to his sanctum door, auging to its controls and opening it. “Bring me a reaverfish,” he said, pausing at the threshold, “a whole one.” And as he entered, he remembered how sex had always made him hungry and how, in those days, he could really pack in the meat.

Inside his sanctum, he approached the pit and saddle controls before the array of screens and settled himself in position but used his aug to operate the ship’s computer system. First, he needed to examine Sverl’s coordinates. Though he could use the ship’s processing to ascertain their point in realspace, that would take some time, and there was a quicker way. He connected through to the ship’s mind—one excised from a first-child over a hundred years ago.

“Give me realspace coordinates for our present jump,” he instructed.

“Calculating,” the mind replied.

There had been no problems of recognition with this mind—no questions about its loyalty to the previous father-captain of this dreadnought. The first-child had been thoroughly stripped down, all personality erased along with all memories of its previous life. All it did was communicate in a very basic way, and calculate U-engine parameters. All it knew was that it received orders from this sanctum, just like the war drones aboard.

After a moment, prador glyphs began scrolling diagonally across one of the screens. Cvorn studied them for a moment but again found using his aug was a better option. He loaded those coordinates, checked them against astrogation maps and studied the data available. Sverl was heading for a trinary system lying far above the galactic plane, beyond the Graveyard, the Kingdom and the Polity. Had he decided to run? Had he decided to relinquish all interest in those three realms?

It didn’t matter. All that mattered was whether this new system held something that might give Sverl a tactical advantage—some way of evading Cvorn while making the kind of repairs he could not make in U-space before he proceeded to his next jump. The stellar objects of this system were a white dwarf and a black dwarf whose mass equalled that of the red dwarf orbiting them. The paths of the two masses were eccentric, and there was no way of saying, without making extensive calculations, which orbited which. Worldlets and asteroids abounded, but with nothing large enough to retain much in the way of atmosphere. The whole system had acted as a billion-year-old asteroid grinder, the result of which was a dense ring of fine dust and gas around the white dwarf. This was shepherded by a series of planetoids, and all was perpetually stirred every three hundred years by a close pass of the red dwarf.

There, thought Cvorn.

It seemed quite likely that Sverl, whose capabilities Cvorn did not doubt, intended to surface into the real either in or close to that ring, and use it for cover. The density of the cloud would negate the effects of energy weapons at long range and would heat up railgun missiles, thus lessening their impact. The cloud would also tend to weaken the integrity of hardfields, but since Sverl would project them close to his ship, that effect was negligible. He probably wouldn’t be able to hide. And though he would have repaired much of the damage to his chameleonware, he wouldn’t have been able to make the repairs in U-space that would conceal the mass of his ship—especially when surrounded by gas and dust which would effect its usability. Therefore, entering that ring gave Sverl both advantages and disadvantages. However, it was still a good choice—probably the best choice Sverl could make.

Cvorn paused there as Vrom came in from his annex with a whole reaverfish on his back, its head gripped in his claws and tail dragging on the floor behind.

“Put it down over there—” Cvorn waved a claw “—and wait.”

His stomach gave a muffled grumble through his shell and his gullet grew wet with lubricating saliva. The distraction irritated him as he tried to concentrate on his response to Sverl’s likely actions. Through the ship’s system, he ordered an exchange of railgun loads. In one railgun, he ordered the removal of the iron-cored and ceramic armoured slugs presently lined up for first firings. Armoury robots would replace them with sensor probes, when they finished formatting them for the conditions in that ring; these were to be used mainly for mass detection. He ordered two other railguns to be loaded with the much harder to produce and rarer railgun slugs clad with exotic metal alloy. Frictional heating in the cloud would not weaken these. In fact, if fired at sufficient range, their internal iron cores would melt and build up massive pressure, thus increasing their energy upon impact with an exotic metal hull like Sverl’s.

Saliva now dripping out of his mouth and wetting his mandibles, Cvorn conceded defeat and turned from his screens. He walked over to the reaverfish and inspected it, remembering that he must check on the living examples of this species and release one in the mating pool so the female he had mated with could implant her eggs. Vrom moved forwards, the atomic shear flicking on across the edge of his claw, ready to cut up Cvorn’s dinner. Cvorn abruptly rebelled at the idea.

When, many years ago, his remaining two legs and claw had ceased to function properly and finally dropped off, he had taken the route of many father-captains before him. Disdaining the very idea of the new prosthetics, beyond grav-motors attached to his shell, he had his closest first-child chop up and feed his meals into his mandibles. However, when his mandibles abruptly stopped working, his condition necessitated him mincing his food in a macerating machine. This was attached below his mouth and tubed into his gullet—and it was this that made him finally change his mind. New prosthetic mandibles came first and, though they lacked sensitivity, he was delighted with them and soon had prosthetic claws installed too. But he continued to have his first-child cut up his food for him. Now, mobile on new legs, sexually active and with corresponding hormonal effects coursing through his system, Cvorn found he had suddenly lost his inclination for pampering.

“Leave,” he instructed.

Vrom’s pose was one of puzzlement but, when Cvorn swung his claw round, crashing it into the side of Vrom’s carapace, he quickly recovered and retreated. Cvorn now focused his full attention on the fish, reached down, closed a claw around its skull, and snipped. The skull crushed and split, squirting a pale green line of brains across the floor. Cvorn tore up the front end of its head, fed it into his mandibles and began crunching it up. Just minutes later, with a third of the fish gone and his initial ravenous hunger satisfied, he slowed his pace of ingestion and returned his thoughts to Sverl.

Cvorn had done everything he could with the railguns. Now the energy weapons. The particle cannons would never be much good in that dust ring unless they were used close up, but there were things he could do to increase their efficiency there. The particulate the weapons fired was usually aluminium dust, suspended in nitrogen in an electrostatic field. However, by adding heavy elements, tightening the magnetic tube and ramping up power input he could give the beam greater penetrating power. This wasn’t usually done in vacuum conflict because, beyond a certain point, power input outweighed ultimate yield.

As he considered what heavy elements to add from those available, Cvorn abruptly realized he could set things in motion now. He didn’t have to crouch before this sanctum’s control area to do this . . . with his aug he could do just about anything from any location. Pausing, with a dripping mass of a huge organ resembling a kidney part-way to his mouth, Cvorn understood just how rigid his thinking had been. He should have realized this long before now. He shoved the organ into his mandibles and munched it down, mentally initiating the required changes to the particle cannons.

Other weapons . . . There were few changes he could make to the various available nuclear and chemical bombs, missiles and mines. They were just too slow for what seemed likely to be a running battle over hundreds of thousands of miles. When he finally did get to use them, it would need to be after Sverl’s ship was permanently disabled. Then, peeling that ship open to expose Sverl’s sanctum would be a job for particle beams. As he reached the tail of the reaverfish he searched his mind for other preparations he could make, but all that was left was some tweaking of the spectra of his anti-munitions lasers, so there wouldn’t be so much scatter in the gas of that ring.

He was done: his ship was as ready as it could be—and he had eaten a whole reaverfish. Cvorn moved away from the sticky mess on the floor, now swarming with ship lice, and turned towards his controls. Quite some time remained before his final encounter with Sverl and he started to contemplate how he would fill it—perhaps, after digesting his meal, another visit to the mating pool? But just a moment later he felt intensely weary and his vision blurred for a moment.

What?

His body felt leaden and, as he took a couple of steps towards the controls, a hot tightness began to grow inside him. It was as if some creature was gathering all his organs together and squashing them into one spot. His coitus clamp rattled, then his irised anus abruptly opened, spattering the floor with bright yellow excrement. He moved away from the mess, further squirts of faeces punctuating his journey across the floor to the vacuum disposal port protruding from the wall. But by the time he settled over it, his anus had clamped shut again. This had never happened to him when he had been young. It had only happened in later years during illness, or during the changes he had undergone when he lost his limbs.

Cvorn moved off the port, but not too far away from it, because that tightness inside had turned into deep organ-crushing ache. He felt very tired and found himself losing the thread of his thoughts, his aug responding to his mind with irrelevant data and old memories. He looked around. What was happening with the weapons? What was he doing? Forgetting the disposal port, he walked over to his controls and peered at the array of hexagonal screens. They were scrolling all sorts of rubbish—also in response to his mental confusion. Suddenly a convulsion wracked him and his mandibles extended straight out. It hit him again, then again, saliva pouring in a stream from his gullet. Then a great fountain of half-digested reaverfish and green bile shot out between his mandibles, spattering all over the screens, chunks thudding to the floor and soupy fluids running into pit controls. Another convulsion hit, spraying more of the mess over those controls as Cvorn backed away. Next he lowered his front end to point his mouthparts at the floor, green bile dripping from his burning gullet. That tight pain was still inside but easing a little, and yellow excrement dripped from his half-open anus.

Cvorn was now able to think more clearly. He had been foolish. The hormones in the air and the recent mating had made him forget one important thing. He might have prosthetic limbs and new sexual organs, but everything else inside him was very old, including his digestive system.

THE BROCKLE

Earth Central had not entirely accepted the Brockle’s convoluted explanation for why it had not put Ikbal and Martina aboard the single-ship. And it had said that their agreement must end if the two were not on the next ship to leave. Meanwhile, the Brockle had learned some more about Penny Royal.

Because Amistad had removed the black AI’s eighth state of consciousness, the one that seemed responsible for its many ill deeds, Earth Central Security had forgiven Penny Royal’s past sins. Then when it retrieved that missing part of itself on Masada, ECS retracted the amnesty. But now the Polity AIs were still doing nothing, because of what Penny Royal might do, or might reveal. In addition, judging by everything the Brockle had gleaned from Ikbal and Martina, the black AI was again having trouble with that eighth state.

The similarities between Penny Royal and the Brockle only made the black AI more fascinating. Penny Royal had, in essence, experienced similar problems to the one that had resulted in the Brockle’s agreed confinement here. One of the Brockle’s units had gone astray during its last planetary assignment—an investigation that had ended up turning into a minor civil war. The unit had operated as a discrete being for some years and had actually strayed into territory that was not particularly legal. It had interrogated some innocent citizens and left them permanently damaged.

ECS had instructed the Brockle to shut down its rogue unit and bring all of itself in for forensic examination. The rogue had reacted by finishing its work. Through its interrogations, it had learned that a biotech aug network linked all the leading Polity separatists. It penetrated this and released a particularly nasty program into it that made those augs generate an organic virus. The virus lobotomized the separatists and eight hundred of them died when their autonomous nervous systems shut down. That action, it seemed, was just too much—even though these people had been criminals. ECS again ordered the Brockle to shut down the rogue and come in, but the Brockle now realized ECS was wary of enforcement. Positioned where it was on the world, the Brockle could cause many deaths. ECS then informed it that the innocents the rogue had interrogated had required some mindwork; its actions still might have been forgivable, were it not for one of its victims chewing out his own wrists and bleeding to death.

Antonio Sveeder . . .

He had been an innocent man—the only innocent man the Brockle had killed. However, debate continued about other deaths indirectly attributable to its actions on that world. The Brockle had decided on reabsorption because it wanted to know what had caused its unit to stray so far over the line. The answer had been a simple one: in its dealings with human separatist scum, the unit had come to regard all human beings as a problem. It had, in fact, formed an opinion not much different from that of many AIs. It felt human beings were what held the Polity back. They needed to upgrade, or rather the AIs needed to force them to do so—or dispense with them. On reabsorbing that unit, the Brockle concluded that it had not been far wrong. And, realizing the strength of its position, it negotiated. It would continue to work for the Polity but only in the forensic examination of the already proven guilty. It agreed to confinement only if it could protect itself. Thus, ECS provided the Tyburn, and the Brockle’s careful extraction from its world followed.

But all this was beside the point, which was that Penny Royal was demonstrably unstable, and that its instability was directly attributable to that portion of itself culpable of murder. It was having trouble trying to reintegrate this portion—but that it was trying at all meant that it was reintegrating its guilt too so the whole AI would be under sentence of death. There would be no debate. No consideration about what Penny Royal might do to redeem itself. But even that paled in comparison with recent news.

Time travel . . .

This put everything the Brockle had gleaned from Ikbal and Martina into the shade. They were dealing with a dangerously unstable, paradigm-changing AI that had not only stolen some runcibles but had been fucking with temporal energies. It had been doing stuff that scared even the prador shitless. It had been playing with energy debts and entropic effects, which, if handled badly, could put out star systems or cause nova chain reactions. And what was still the reaction of Earth Central and the other Polity AIs? Hands off, leave alone, no action. Surely, this news alone should have overridden their fear.

The Brockle felt certain that during its years of confinement, some other paradigm must have changed. When had the AIs of the Polity become so forgiving? When had they become so timorous? It was time to move against Penny Royal—and hard. If they weren’t going to do it then someone else had to. And that someone was the Brockle.

The forensic AI stood up from its seat, mulling over what to do. Earth Central had instructed it to put Ikbal and Martina into a coma and leave them alone until the next single-ship picked them up. Their interrogation was over and the ship must return them to Par Avion. The Polity would drop all charges against them and offer the services of a mind-tech, after which they could go on their way. If the Brockle interfered with them again while they awaited the single-ship the watcher would know, and that would be the end of the confinement agreement.

The Tyburn had been useful as a prison hulk before and during the prador/human war, but had ceased to be of use a little while after. Prison was a waste of resources, and Polity AIs had decided it was better now to kill the killers and those hardened recidivists who refused mind-work, and impose fines and enforced mental alterations on those guilty of lesser crimes. However, in this time of plenty, crime wasn’t a big problem. The Tyburn had sat unused for decades until the difficult problem of the Brockle had arisen and it became the only prisoner. If the Brockle again breached its terms of confinement, which meant not doing precisely what ECS told it, it had no doubt that attack ships would arrive sporting U-jump missiles. Previously, the Brockle could fire up the Tyburn’s drive and depart if either side broke the agreement. Now, with the advances in Polity technology, Earth Central thought it had the advantage. Perhaps, despite the Brockle’s new detectors, it did.

Some subterfuge might be the best option.

Earth Central needed to be convinced that the Brockle had left the Polity. The Brockle needed time to put some plans into action. Therefore, the watcher aboard this station was a problem. It was one the Brockle felt it should deal with, and right now.