by Neal Asher
It was now about survival: his own.
Tobias cringed at his earlier naivety, memory resurging.
“Do you know what this is?” asked Cad.
“No idea.”
A macramé of white threads, wet and organic in a plastic packet. Noodles? Why had Cad ordered him to come here?
“We will demonstrate.”
The threads flowed out on Cad’s ersatz human hand and Tobias was sure he saw them move. Before he could say anything, Cad was up beside him, iron grip on his shoulder, wet hand clamped over his mouth. The things pushed between his lips. He tried to bite down on them but they were as hard as wires. They squirmed into his mouth and then he was down on his knees gagging as they burned to the back of his throat, and flowed up into his sinuses. Hiatus. A moment of clarity and he was standing.
“It’s a neural lace,”said Cad.
But it seemed he was a special case and the neural lace was only for him.
At first he had brought ten people here—underlings really, just people who grouched about Polity interference and played at revolution through their net access. Armchair dissidents. They had been excited to be included, then fearful when they saw Cad and the contents of the crate. But by then it had been too late. The ten had walked out about an hour later, with bombs in their pockets and changed in a way that Tobias knew would always give him nightmares. Why Cad had selected them Tobias was unsure. He suspected they fitted into some intricate plan that involved Orlandine and the distributed parts of her being. And, thinking again on what was about to happen here, he continued to force himself not to look up.
The others...
Cad had said that others were coming to assist in their revolution. Tobias had thought this would be off-world Separatists, human experts— allies aligned to the cause. It was now evident Cad meant nothing of the sort. The others were here now. He had only seen a few of them but enough for him to know that neither Separatism nor humans were of much concern to them.
A sound from above, just faint but enough. Tobias couldn’t stop himself and he glanced up. The tangle in the rafters was unravelling and individuals amidst it began to drop. His allies and friends, his comrades, started to realize that something was wrong. Fraser was the first to know it for certain.
The thing, which must have been what Cad looked like before he took the Golem body, struck Fraser like a heavy steel dart. The sharp tail stabbed in behind his collarbone and deep down into his chest with a hideous crunching sound. He shrieked as it looped over, gripping his head with the frill of tentacles to the back of its polished metal amphibian head. He staggered and crashed over. Two of the others were taken as neatly, the rest not so much. Three were down on the floor thrashing and yelling . . . then screaming. Another was impaled through the chest, pinned to one of the crates. The last two ran but did not get far. Tobias looked on in numb horror as the things pushed themselves in, vertebrae sawing and spraying out gobbets of flesh. He saw Enida walking crablike, an amphibian head beside her own, the point of a tail sticking out of her groin trailing a length of intestine.
Finally the screaming stopped. What happened next perhaps ameliorated the horror, and prevented Tobias from losing his mind. Or maybe it was his neural lace numbing him. Metal protruding from the victims took on an odd layered translucence and began to fold in on itself. Bloated torsos began to shrink. He focused on Enida and watched the thing’s tail seemingly dissolve back into her body, shrugging off the piece of intestine. Then something fibrous came out of her—a writhing shimmering mass. The great spill of blood there steamed, after a moment turning to powder, and was flicked away by the fibres. As these retreated inside Enida, they fixed the rips in her clothing and repaired her skin behind them. The amphibian head, next to her own, started to collapse like a deflating balloon, sucked inside the puncture. Her chest briefly inflated beyond the natural with a crackling gristly sound, then it sank back into place. The fibres closed the wound. A little while later they all began to stand up.
“Now it is time,” said Cad, walking out of hiding between crates. He looked up and Tobias did too, wondering if he had been commanded to do so. Two of the things were still up there and, for a moment, he thought his turn had come to die. But they snaked away through the shadowy rafters and disappeared. Returning his attention to the nine shells of what had been men and women, he watched them head over to the crate of bombs, pulling out three or four each. Faces twitched and grimaced as the things inside them tested out expressions, and they headed for the door.
“How do they fit inside?” Tobias asked.
“Aerogel metals and molecular folding,” Cad replied dismissively, then turned to study him intently. “Orlandine is on her way back from the outer system. By the time she gets here all our assets will be in place.”
Tobias nodded. He had already received notification from her. Tomorrow she wanted her man-toy available to play with.
“I see your mind and that you will follow instructions,” said Cad.
Tobias just had time to register it before crippling agony in his skull dropped him to his knees. He vomited, then raised a hand to his head as the pain shifted to one side and touched something oozing from his ear. Coughing on a sore, ripping sensation in the back of his throat, he felt an object detach, shook his head and it dropped onto the floor before him. The neural lace lay there, bloody and writhing slightly.
“It is time,” Cad repeated.
As he stood up, Tobias understood now. The neural lace had been to keep him under control and to assay his mind. But it was a piece of technology that Orlandine might detect, on top of the other item Tobias would be taking. Some threshold limited what he could carry and what could be done to him. Only this had prevented a thing like Cad from occupying him.
He nodded numbly and headed for the door, fingering the vaporizer in his pocket.
ORLIK
The king had more legs than was usual for a prador. His form was that of a louse—a giant thing fifteen feet long, gnarled like old wood and peppered with surgically implanted devices. His mandibles were huge, grasping arms with saw-toothed edges, and he seemed to have acquired other sensory apparatus on his head. His eyes were gleaming emeralds, while his overall coloration was striated pink and white. As Orlik gazed at him, trying to think clearly and fighting the urge to grovel, he wondered if eventually he would attain this form. If he survived.
“You are reminded,” said the king.
The words were Polity Anglic and issued from one of the devices positioned just behind his head.
Yes, I am reminded...
It began to clear, both the confusion in Orlik’s mind and the urge to grovel. As he rose from a crouch, he wondered at that. The king his father either had physical control over how his body issued its pheromones, or he had lost the ability and emitted them from one of the devices. Whichever it might be was irrelevant now. Orlik was reminded and his loyalty had been reinforced. He would obey and serve his father unto death.
“Your creation of AI and interfacing technology is still punishable by death, since you committed the crime before I began relaxing strictures,” said the king, folding his legs to lower himself to Orlik’s level. “It is now no longer an edict, just culturally obscene to most normal prador.”
“It will take more than cancelling the edict to change the views of normal prador,” replied Orlik, then felt a moment of terror for his daring, immediately followed by the urge to cringe. “I’m sorry, I should keep my opinions to myself.”
“You may speak freely.” The king indicated largess with one forelimb that looked capable of gutting Orlik in a second. “Things will change as older father-captains are displaced by their first-children, as is the natural order of things.”
“Natural order of things?” muttered the Polity drone Sprag.
“You have something to say, drone?” asked the king, front end swinging slightly to the side to gaze at her.
“You haven’t had a natural order of things in the Kingdom
since you stopped beating each other with hammers,” said Sprag.
Orlik was aware that Sprag was within reach of the king’s mandibles, as was he, and wondered if he would now see the end of the drone.
“True,” said the king. “Equally applicable to the humans and to any intelligent race. Though I would argue the end to the natural order occurs even before the use of tools. But you are right. I was incorrect. As is the present order of things.”
Orlik was amazed. The king was being so reasonable! Then something out in vacuum beyond the panoramic window caught his attention. A large ship had appeared out there and was sliding into view; reavers scattered from its path like minnows from a hunting pike.
“So,” said the king. “Your name is Sprag, I believe.”
“You believe correctly,” said Sprag, sounding wary.
“You have been a prisoner of Orlik here for a very long time.”
“Indeed.”
The king moved fast, and his mandibles snapped out. There came harsh grating movement of other complex mouthparts and then a cracking sound. The gravity disc to which Sprag had been pinned bounced on the floor and tumbled away on its edge. Orlik stared at the thing in amazement as it rolled in a circle over near the window. Next came a thrumming and there was Sprag, hovering off the floor over to one side of him.
“You know the way out,” said the king. “If you want to go, nothing will stop you and you can take Orlik’s shuttle. It does not have U-space drive but I’ve no doubt you will be able to organize being picked up.” What’s this?
“I see,” said Sprag, her voice somehow stronger now. “And I’ll have no accidents on the way?”
“If I had wanted to destroy you,” said the king, “I would have ordered that long ago. When it became evident, for example, that you had fixed your inner U-space communicator and have been able to talk with AIs in the Polity, even Earth Central itself.”
“I note you said, ‘If I want to go’,” said Sprag. “Maybe I don’t want to.” “That is your choice.” The king turned to Orlik. “Walk with me.” Things had suddenly taken a turn for the weird. Orlik studied the hovering drone. He had captured her three centuries ago, close to the end of the war. He’d all but destroyed her by burning out her power supply with a particle beam shot and she had resided in one of his stores for the best part of a century. Later, when he was learning more about interface technology and AI, he had restored her function. Only then had he nailed her to the gravity disc. Sprag was someone to talk to—an almost equal, something no prador had really needed before and perhaps a sign of how much he had changed. But in the centuries since?
“Have you been in contact with Earth Central?” he asked Sprag, turning to follow the king as he paced slowly towards the window.
“Oh, on and off over the last eighty years,” said Sprag, quite offhand. “Eighty years while nailed to that plate?”
Sprag swivelled in the air then shot ahead to land at the foot of the window. She called back, “I had my opportunities to escape—Earth Central offered to send another drone to free me. But I’m a drone—an artificial intelligence. I don’t need constant physical movement and activities for validation, like you organic creatures.”
Orlik understood but couldn’t believe it. Artificial intelligences could perceive time as they wished, and live in worlds of their own construction in their minds. But he was sure that they did experience boredom.
“Ask yourself,” said the king, “why the drone is not leaving now.”
Oberon had seen straight to the core of it: Sprag was one of those drones disenfranchised by the end of the war. She had stayed in Orlik’s ship because there she had a purpose, and because she had found events around her interesting. But surely if she had been free from Orlik she could have found much more to interest her in the Polity?
They finally reached the window where Orlik could see the full front end of the massive ship out there. He recognized it at once—its shape was like the egg case of certain sea life forms. This was the Kinghammer. He had heard about it from other Guard in the Kingdom whom the king had allowed to stay in contact with him. It was a state-of-the-art dreadnought, judging by what his contacts knew had gone into it, but much else about it was secret. No one knew who its father-captain was, or if it even had one.
“You are, of course, aware of what has been happening at the accretion disc, since you were somewhat involved,” said the king.
Sure, Orlik knew about some of it from his perspective—about the legate in his wormship, the Wheel and that Jain super-soldier, as well as the failed plot to detonate the inactive sun at the centre of the disc. But he was betting his angle was a very limited one. He nodded his head—a decidedly unpradorish gesture. He felt no urge to interrupt the king.
Oberon continued, “Of course, the apparent events are well known to any who were involved. However, I have no actual proof that this thing, called the Wheel, really was a Jain AI, nor do I have proof that this soldier was a product of the Jain. One must always question the facts when they are in relation to something as dangerous as what lies in that accretion disc. And I must always be aware that Earth Central is never averse to finding ways of reminding me about Polity power.”
“Little paranoia showing there,” said Sprag.
“Be silent, drone,” said the king calmly. “My tolerance does have its limits.” No anger there, but it was very definitely a threat. Sprag turned away to look at the view.
“From my perspective,” said Orlik, still feeling the urge to cringe, “Orlandine was truthful. And as you know, I was close by when she dissected the second-children that had been corrupted, and when she interrogated that submind of the Wheel. It was in a fragment of the wormship which attacked my ship.”
“I trust Orlandine,” said the king. “But I do not trust that she can’t be played by Earth Central. Know that at present the Polity has a large fleet close to the accretion disc.”
Sprag looked round at that and made a harrumphing sound. “Something, drone?” the king enquired.
Sprag seemed to be debating with herself whether or not speaking out might get her squashed, but her mouth won out in the end. “You too have a large fleet close to the accretion disc.”
“One must always be prepared to make responses,” said the king. “True.” Sprag gave a bit of a shrug and turned away.
Orlik was old and he had been around a bit. Here was a drone who could contact Earth Central and the king was talking about possible perfidy on that Al’s part. In human parlance, he could hear the sound of sabres rattling, of barriers being tested.
“I studied at length the interfacing technology you employed in your ship,” said the king. “It incorporates an excessive amount of redundancy. Why is that?”
Orlik felt the danger in the question. “It was easy to make an interface with ten times the capacity I required to control my ship. The surgery to install it was little different in either case. I thought, why not? Better to have more that I might use at a later date.”
“Did you have any plans in this respect?”
“I had none beyond perhaps battle group integration, should you allow my return here, as you have.”
“So you expected that I would, eventually, deploy this technology?” “Yes, Father.”
“You are correct, but the time is not yet.” The king paused contemplatively. “Or rather not yet for all my ships.” He clicked his mandibles in irritation. “I also note that you do not use your interface fully with your ship.”
“I like to delegate to my crew until it becomes necessary to act faster.” “I see, yes, your crew—they are transferring now.”
What’s this?
The king gestured with one mandible at the massive Kinghammer,now fully visible. “In one of my ships I have used this technology. It is currently controlled by a nascent prador AI. But I am taking the Polity route who, before their ships were fully AI controlled, used interfaced captains. You will be that captain, Orlik.”
Orli
k was dumbfounded. He had come here half expecting to be dismembered and shot down a disposal chute, now he was being given control of the largest dreadnought in the Prador Kingdom. But as his shock cleared, he began to see other political machinations. The Polity had always wanted the prador to start using AI. They considered it a civilizing influence—the prador stepping on the road which would take them out of their savagery, and ultimately leading to AIs controlling their realm. Earth Central would, therefore, be very reluctant to launch an attack against a ship that contained the first real prador AI.
“You will take the Kinghammer to Watch Station 01, Orlik,” the king continued. “And you will take command of the fleet I have stationed there. You must be prepared to go to the accretion disc, and soon, I think. And you must be ready for battle, quite possibly with the Polity itself.”
Okay, thought Orlik, a promotion. Prador did not have that human capacity for giggling hysterically, but he was different, and he reckoned he could learn. He reviewed what the king had said.
After a moment he asked, “Nascent AI?”
“Yes, nascent,” replied the king. “And now we come to it . . .” After a long pause he continued, “It runs the ship’s systems. It is capable of responding to complex orders and even of warfare—making fast tactical decisions. It is almost indistinguishable in its capabilities from one of my captains. In fact, it is more capable than many of them.”
“But—” interjected Sprag.
The king swung his nightmare head to gaze upon the drone. Orlik looked too, sensing some undercurrent, but then damned his idiocy for thinking he could somehow read what was going on in Sprag’s mind by studying her insect form.