The Warship

by Neal Asher

  The salvager, of course, gave no response. Still proceeding but hardly thinking consciously about her actions, she switched the warfare beam connection from semi-passive scanning to direct interference. This speared straight into the frozen second-child mind running the ship. She leeched data from it but found little of use, other than some local navigational data. Seizing control of it, she altered the firing of the steering thrusters. The ship stopped pulling away and began to come in—directly towards the hold the shuttle had entered, which was big enough for it too. The doors opened invitingly—nothing inside there now.

  The four humans, herded by the grapplers, reached an access tube leading into the base of the Client’s chain-glass cylinder. Their weapons were ineffective and all they could do was keep running. The Client allowed some difficulties to their progress and watched as they used a mine to blow out the locking mechanism of one door and then decoded ware on another. And finally, they were into the hot atmosphere of her little realm, and she was ready.

  Her new form, still hanging from its umbilicus, shredded its caul and opened out four heavy limbs. Its head tipped up from its chest and it clattered mandibles, while wings, filling with ichor, expanded from its back and would soon harden. The Client was deeply, intensely eager. The four were inside, protected from the heat by their suits, and she would have them, absorb them . . . Her new form began to uncoil triangular-section tentacles from its upper thorax, just like those of the Librarian, just like those of all Jain. Of course, she would reach physically into their minds and take all—

  PAIN!

  The laser carbine shots hit some of her lower segments, burning in and shearing through nerve connections. She shrieked pheromones for help that would not come. Her lower segment snapped its umbilicus and tried to fly before its wings were ready. It fell, hit the base of the cylinder and bounced, but was soon up on its heavy legs and scrambling towards the four humans. It brought one of them down, ripped away her helmet and slammed two tentacles against her horned skull. Grinding bone and flesh away down to the brain, she stabbed in fibres that spewed neural meshes for connection. But then came more howling feedback agony as another of the humans riddled that segment with pulse-gun fire.

  It was the pain that did it—the necessary slap to bring her to wakefulness. All she had been doing was driven by the Librarian, but now, again, she was agonizingly herself. She reached out and slammed the hold doors shut. A weapons pod out there shed its chameleonware and opened fire on the salvager with a single U-jump missile. Further shots smashed into her body, her lower three segments sliding down the tree, smoking and burning. Doors opened and the grapplers moved in fast. Weapons fire turned on them but not for long. They fell on the three remaining humans and beat them to the floor. Outside, the hauler detonated in a ball of orange flame. The blast wave shuddered the weapons platform and moments later debris began impacting. Still, at the behest of her mind, the grapplers beat the three to slurry even as she reached out to fire up the jump engines of the platform and its attack pods.

  She was running, instinctively, but no U-jump was long enough to flee madness.

  5

  Forensic examination of bodies of the King’s Guard, who are his children and like him infected by the Spatterjay virus, has revealed extreme mutations. These remain hidden from their fellow prador by armour they adjust, sometimes radically, to accommodate them. What they cannot hide is how differently they behave. They are, on the whole, smarter—much justificationfor this can be found in structural changes to their brains. However, even the deepest forensic analysis cannot tie their other behavioural deviations directly to those structural changes. The usual instincts of the prador do not drive the Guard. They are less aggressive, more considered, capable of an empathic response even with other races, as well as circumventing the drive of their hormones. They take pleasure in intellectual pursuits, the purpose of which are not survival or the destruction of enemies and, apparently, have some interest in arts and hobbies. It could be said that this is a knock-on effect of increased intelligence, but it also raises some interesting questions about nature and nurture. The Guard do not live in the usual prador “nuclear family,” subject to the will of their father and controlled by his enslaving pheromones. And so they have taken a new path. It has also been posited that their behavioural changes arise more from their external physical appearance than the internal changes to their brain structure. They perceive themselves as utterly different, and in turn may no longer identify as prador at all.

  —from How It Is by Gordon

  ORLIK

  The sanctum was to the scale of the ship—larger than anything to be found on normal prador vessels or even reavers. It possessed all the facilities Orlik needed for his personal comfort, and more besides. A stacked array of hexagonal screens honeycombed one wall. In front of this lay a saddle and pit controls designed for his present body, while to the fore of this stood a console he could manipulate with his extendible mandibles. Beside the saddle rose a pillar with a crane arm, from the top of which, on an armoured tube of optics, hung the interface plate that would mate with the one on his back. Orlik scanned all this briefly then wandered over to the autofactory that occupied one side of the sanctum.

  “Put it there,” he directed.

  The three crewmembers looked like armoured first-children. In terms of their position in the prador hierarchy, that’s what they were. Orlik himself, during his long separation from his father, as well as from pheromone and other biological controls, should have been a young adult. But the biology was all wrong and the hierarchy was blurred. He and they still behaved like first-children to their father, while they also responded to Orlik as if they were his children and he their father-captain. This had been the case with the Guard for centuries now, but still, in terms of his race, it was novel—so perfectly fitting for this new ship.

  The three propelled the grav-sled loaded with Orlik’s armour over to the mass of robotics. The technology here was mostly Polity, but with alterations to fit the prador way of doing things better. There they heaved his armour onto a central platform and then pulled the sled out. All the while, he noted them keeping their eye stalks pointed towards Sprag, who had settled on the crane arm. The crew had known about the drone for a long time but this was the first time they had seen her flying free, and they were understandably nervous.

  “Now go to your quarters and get settled in,” he instructed.

  They departed with alacrity—the diagonally divided door slamming shut behind them. Orlik continued his inspection of the sanctum. He had his own personal autofactory, and a snake-jet shower for personal hygiene. Even the toilet—essentially a funnel protruding from the wall— had been redesigned for his present form. He had a personal armoury set in one wall, a laboratory and study area where some of his private projects had been brought across from his own ship. Tunnels led through to other facilities in the surrounding area, including a garden enclosure with a swimming pond. All this he had found out after lightly linking with his implants as he boarded. At the same time, he’d noted room for a private staff around him, hence the crewmembers he installed nearby.

  “Your new home,” Sprag observed.

  “And yours,” he replied, “by choice.”

  “It’s interesting here,” said the drone, “but you haven’t yet connected to the most interesting item of all. Still got all those prador fears and doubts?”

  “You haven’t connected either,” Orlik noted.

  “I tried the moment we entered this ship,” Sprag replied, “but I am unable to make a connection. It seems the king has left that final step and final decision to you—a decision you cannot make until you have made the connection.”

  “I am taking my time,” said Orlik, reluctantly returning his attention to the saddle. He walked over and mounted it, inserted his manipulatory limbs into the pit controls, ran a data check on the screens, then switched them to an outside view showing the King’s Ship. Still he hesitated to send the c
ommands that would bring the interface connection down on his back.

  “Ship . . . machine, do you have a name?”

  “Mode of speech,” the reply clattered and bubbled from somewhere above.

  “Human Anglic.”

  “Expected choice,” the ship’s guiding intelligence replied in Anglic.

  “Why?”

  “Your reluctance to make full connection indicates that you wish to keep divisions. Hence your choice of a language that is not your native tongue.”

  “Your name?”

  “That is to be decided.”

  Orlik paused. He was talking to a Turing machine—something not really AI according to the accepted definition in the Polity, and presumably not accepted as an AI by the king. He was speaking to something without consciousness, self-image or that defining, integrating element that raised the other components of machine intelligence to synergy.

  “Do you have anything to report?”

  “All systems are normal,” the Turing machine stated.

  “So, machine,” said Sprag cheerfully, “how does it feel to be potentially the first prador artificial intelligence?”

  “I do not feel. My programming governs my thought processes and I make optimum decisions based on that. My antecedents affect my thought processes,” the machine replied. “I have no inclination to power down the particle cannon I have targeting you.”

  Orlik felt something creeping along the inside of a carapace he no longer possessed. Was he hearing the first signs of consciousness? No. Just because a machine could respond to speech in a complicated manner did not mean it was anything more than a machine. Still feeling uneasy, he decided he had procrastinated long enough. He sent the instruction via his implants. The crane arm swung over him, almost dislodging Sprag, and the interface plate descended on his back.

  Connection...

  Kinghammer opened in his mind with a clarity he had never experienced aboard his old destroyer. He felt the ship like an extension of his being and, after a moment, realized the simple reason why. This ship possessed more sensors throughout, and he felt it more fully than his own body.

  He was huge and heavy, denting the local gravity map, but not unwieldy. His fusion engines were ready to roar their power, while other drives—grav, ionic and chemical thrusters, and EM drive—could adjust his position on a small scale. He felt this as a whole. While he could focus on individual drives, even components of a drive, he could also move unimpaired, with the same lack of thought with which he moved his body. And he was powerful. Very.

  Like all prador, it took him only a moment before he was focusing on weapons. The Kinghammer was loaded with the usual complement found aboard prador ships: railguns, particle beamers and lasers. It also possessed coilguns to launch a wide selection of chemical, nuclear and antimatter warheads. U-jump missiles sat in pits dug into heavy armour, while pra- dor kamikazes, controlled by flash-frozen second-child minds, waited in storage. A cornucopia of mines were ready for ejection too—some of them USERs. As he studied these, further information dropped into his mind and he integrated it instinctively. Yes, he had a gravity weapon capable of emitting a distortion in space-time that could rip ships apart. Only as he understood this did he acknowledge that the information had been provided by the machine intelligence of the ship, and he now focused on that.

  Distributed throughout the ship, the thing enhanced him and worked as an extension of his mentality. He saw it as glittering blocks of function, data, knowledge. Though more complex than what he had aboard his destroyer, it was much the same. It had its responses, which it could alter to suit circumstances, but it possessed no will, no sense of self and no motivation. It had no centre. Studying all this, he saw that just like him with his old ship, the builders had understood the components of mind, but not how to tie them all together into a complete whole. He traced across where it made connections to the physical system of the ship. One open connection was there, for Sprag. All Orlik needed to do was open a wide-band comlink to the drone . . .

  The comlink probed for contact and Sprag accepted it.

  “Oh wow, that’s—”

  Sprag made a fizzing, clicking sound and collapsed on the crane arm. She struggled on the end of the connection like a harpooned fish, at first attempting straight communication and exploration. But the link was like an induction warfare attack. It began uploading a copy of Sprag’s mind while subordinating the original. The drone itself was turning into a submind of the copy, seemingly dissolving within the intelligence of the ship.

  “I did not expect . . .” Sprag managed, from somewhere in those glittering masses of data and function.

  But connections began closing, power draw ramped up, and huge blocks of data shifted. Sprag was, as the king had said, a catalyst. The machine intelligence of the ship seemed to be breaking up but, at the same time, it was coalescing around a new centre. It was as if Sprag was a copper sulphate crystal dropped into a strong swirling solution of the same. Orlik watched, not entirely understanding it all. Hours passed.

  “It occurs to me,” Sprag said eventually, “that your king is a crafty fucker.”

  Reintegration was continuing, but the communication issued from a hardening core. Sprag was close, closer than she had ever been before.

  “That’s obvious,” Orlik replied. “Why do you mention it now?”

  “Because I am still pointing a particle cannon at my original body.” “It is now a submind of you . . . I think.”

  “Yes, but I do not trust it, even so.”

  Orlik considered the implications of that. At the time he had felt the king was too trusting when he accepted Sprag’s claim to be no longer loyal to the Polity, and quite prepared to fire on Polity ships. He had seemed too reliant on one scan of the drone. Now Orlik understood. It probably wouldn’t have mattered if Sprag had been lying. The king just wanted Sprag to make the mental connection to the computer architecture of this ship, to act as the catalyst needed, and then be overwhelmed by its prador programming.

  “We are at first an extension of our antecedents. Call it a version of ‘imitation being the sincerest form of flattery,’” Sprag continued, “and so my consciousness was human-centric. I was a Polity AI which, in essence, is merely a further stage of the mental evolution of humans.”

  “And you ceased to be that while you were with me?” Orlik enquired archly.

  “I did, though I see that neither you nor the king believed that. The mental structure here, with which I have amalgamated, is that of a pra- dor—copied across and functions enhanced. I am now a prador AI.”

  “So I can trust you now?”

  “Will anything I say elicit total trust?”

  “No.”

  “That is good, because one must question the totality of my antecedents,” said the ship AI called Sprag. “Would the prador have taken the route towards AI had they never encountered the humans? And how much of my design is influenced by that contact? However, my loyalty to the prador is programmed in . . . for the present.”

  That should have made Orlik very uneasy, but oddly it didn’t. It was the nature of AI that nothing about its intelligence was unalterable. The simple fact was that lesser intelligences had little control over greater ones once they let them think for themselves, and little understanding of what they might become.

  “Now, I assume, you have reviewed the potential of this ship,” Orlik commented.

  “I have.”

  “Does the Polity have anything beyond this?” he asked.

  “We are usually some steps behind them,” replied Sprag. “And their systems are generally more integrated.”

  “Was your use of ‘we’ supposed to be reassuring?”

  “Very well—I won’t do that again.”

  “Thank you.”

  “But I do have a present for you. And it is not an attempt to buy trust.”

  “Present?”

  Schematics abruptly fell into Orlik’s mind and opened out. In the first inst
ance, he realized he was seeing a new design for his armour. But the full extent of that design, and what all the alterations were for, escaped him. He was about to consign it to storage when further links became available to him. Before he could question what he was doing, he found himself using them. His perception expanded and he began to understand the alterations; how the armour was made to adjust to his projected growth, and how it complemented his physical attributes while retaining an exterior prador appearance. The claws, for example, looked like normal prador claws but could divide into the true tri-claws he possessed. He realized that the connections had also opened up the AI Sprag to him further, and that he was now doing some of his thinking with her mind—running processing in her crystal. He was as truly interfaced with her as with this ship. And it was a gift, if so intended, that could buy trust: Sprag had just demonstrated how easily she could penetrate his mind and quite possibly, if she wished, seize control of it.

  Orlik thought on that for a little while. Perhaps Sprag was waiting for an opportune moment to seize control, but then why demonstrate the capability? He decided to let it go and trust. In reality, his choices were limited to that anyway.

  “This is good,” he judged, and immediately shunted the schematics for his armour over to the autofactory. Robotics jerked into fast motion, hauling up his old shell and rapidly taking it apart.

  “It would be much more efficient without the need for concealment,” said Sprag.

  “Maybe one day we’ll get past that, but not yet.”

  Orlik turned his attention to other matters. His crew were establishing themselves throughout the ship. While they could control weapons and shields and other ship’s systems, what they did was mostly make- work he could usurp in a moment. However, they did have their uses. As independent entities, they could act should the ship be severely damaged, and if EM or induction warfare fried internal coms. On top of this, they were a mobile force he could deploy if anything nasty got aboard, despite the numerous internal defences. Everything had its place and was at its optimum.