Dark Intelligence

by Neal Asher

  Isobel considered her deal worth the risk. And, really, if she didn’t go for it, she would probably end up dead at the hands of Copellian or one of his killers. Mr Pace encouraged infighting between lower echelon crime lords like herself and Copellian—it kept them at heel. Copellian had been several rungs of the ladder below her just a few years earlier, but had now become a serious threat to her. His power and reach were expanding rapidly and his killers and contacts were everywhere—and the bounty on her head increased every day. Running was one option, but not a good one. She might survive if she headed into prador territory, but if she did she’d be beating the odds. Prador rules also applied to humans there: they were either predators or prey. She could also head for the Polity, but it was likely she’d be picked up by AI surveillance, whereupon Earth Central Security would be after her as well as Copellian’s people. And ECS’s AIs, assassin drones, monitors and agents tended to be even less forgiving than the crime lord’s killers. She could run elsewhere, but no, she had too much invested here. She had to stay.

  As instructed, she took her smallest shuttle—a vessel not much larger than a gravcar—down to the surface. She landed it near the edge of a crater where sparkling grey and silver dust had spilled like river sediment from gaps in the rim. New coordinates now appeared on her com-screen and she uploaded them to a guidance program in her suit, before pulling on and dogging down her helmet. Isobel then voided her shuttle of air, creating a brief mist all around, opened the single circular door beside her and stepped out into darkness. Her visor then shifted to the same maximum light amplification as her cockpit screen, revealing her surroundings, then blinked up a guide arrow for her. She followed this across rock strewn with flat hexagonal crystals like coins, finally arriving at the elliptical entrance to a cave.

  The opening, as she understood it, was one of many such entrances to Penny Royal’s domain. This wormed throughout the crust of the planetoid like the burrows of bark beetles. As she stepped inside, she spotted something poking up from a hollow in the rock—an appendage like an eyeball, impaled on a thin, curved thorn of metal. Whether it was part of the rogue AI itself or just part of its security system she had no idea, but the thing gave her the creeps.

  Ten metres into the cave she came to a ceramal bulkhead with inset airlock, but this wasn’t the main focus of her attention. Either side of the bulkhead, trapped in snakes of stone that had liquefied and flowed around them in a Medusa tangle, were space-suited figures. She walked up to the first, noting the old design of the suit, and peered into the visor. Light-amp wasn’t high enough so she reached up and clicked on her suit light. The face inside was female, the eyes open and the expression slightly puzzled. No sign of decay, no sign that this woman was either dead or alive. Feeling further doubts about coming here, Isobel turned to the airlock, remembering a recent conversation with Trent—an employee who had been with her from the start.

  “So it’s dangerous, lethal even, but all I have to lose is my life,” she had said, when he had argued against her coming here.

  “No,” he had replied. “Get on the wrong side of Penny Royal—and I’ve yet to know if there’s a right one—and dying will be the least of your problems.”

  “Yes, but Mr Pace got what he wanted …”

  Trent had frowned in puzzlement. “I’m not so sure Mr Pace is happy with what he is.”

  She had no idea what Trent was on about. Mr Pace was wealthy beyond measure and simply could not be killed. She had dismissed Trent in irritation. He hadn’t understood.

  The outer airlock door opened automatically as she approached. She stepped inside and it slammed shut, like a trap. Isobel tried to stay calm and checked the atmosphere reading as the lock pressurized: high in inert gases but still breathable. As the inner door opened, she stepped through, immediately undogging her helmet, then hanging it from her utility belt. Now that she was inside, she felt that she had taken an irrevocable step, and that the time for precautions was over.

  The cave smelled of metal, with a hint of putrefaction and hot electronics. She advanced, then halted abruptly when a figure stepped into view. The skeletal Golem, wearing a silver face, gestured for her to follow as a ribbed umbilicus attached at its waist reeled it in. It led her through a triangular cave where she had to duck to avoid hitting her head, around a mummified human corpse seemingly pinned to the floor by a metre-long chunk of I-beam, then into a circular chamber. The place seemed like a junkyard for spaceship hardware—including fusion reactors and a whole ecology of robots. Except much of this stuff was actually connected and powered up, nestled in a web of s-con and optic cables. In the centre rested a sphere of more apparent junk, impaled on a mass of black spines. The tubing attached to the Golem originated from this sphere and reeled it right in. Here, it seemingly faded from view, but for its face. Then the sphere rotated, bringing that face to centre on her.

  Penny Royal.

  Isobel had heard many descriptions of this rogue AI. That it was a collection of interlinked Golem, or a steel octopus, or perhaps a spiny black flower on a strangler fig. It had even been depicted as a glittering cloud of crystal shards. Every description had been from someone who had actually encountered the AI, and had been verified either by aug-interrogation or from other accounts. She’d soon realized that Penny Royal did not maintain a single form, or perhaps it disguised its true form. Why it would do so was a puzzle, since there was very little in the Graveyard that could cause it harm.

  “You want?” said the Golem.

  Penny Royal, it seemed, did not engage in small talk.

  “I want to be a haiman,” she replied.

  The thugs at his beck and call, his ships and his contacts were not why Copellian was winning. It was his facility with data and planning. He’d installed the latest Polity aug tech within both himself and his lieutenants, and apparently they were now all mentally interlinked. As a result, his operations were always tight, always perfect, and he had grown in power until he felt safe enough to start attacking her. He’d also publicly announced a contract on her. In essence, he was smarter than her, and that had to change.

  “You want to be more powerful and dangerous than Copellian?”

  “I do,” she replied, unsurprised that Penny Royal knew why she was here. “And I have a half-ton of prador diamond slate up in my main ship to pay for that.”

  “Yes,” said Penny Royal.

  “Can you make me into a haiman?”

  “You want to be the predator and him the prey?”

  “Damned right I do,” Isobel replied, feeling slightly bemused by the odd way this exchange was going and Penny Royal’s strange intonation. She decided to affirm her aims: “I want to rip the flesh from his fucking bones!”

  “Ah,” said the black AI, and Isobel wondered if she had overstepped in some way.

  “Shall I get my people to bring that diamond slate down?” she asked.

  “You will be satisfied,” the AI replied.

  It expanded, then came apart. The seeming junk of its outer structure spread to reveal hard-edged blackness and a sinuous, tentacular movement. She began moving backwards as it advanced and turned into a wave of intricate movement, silver and black. She halted and waited. Too late to back out now. The wave fell on her.

  When the agony came she thought it was her punishment for dealing with the devil, especially when she was so powerful and precise afterwards, her haiman augmentations raising her to a mentality she hadn’t even imagined. That the visible hardware on her body wasn’t metallic but organic she just accepted.

  Taking apart Copellian’s operation was simplicity itself after this encounter, so much so that she deliberately complicated it to make it more interesting. The man’s downfall was protracted and humiliating, but he cheated her at the end by taking his own life before she could capture him. Isobel Satomi became a legend in the Graveyard—but her legend soon grew in unexpected ways. It became apparent that what she’d bought from Penny Royal was still changing her, and she jo
ined the ranks of the damned.

  ISOBEL

  This area of town was pretty much safe for Isobel, since large parts of her organization were established in the city, but it was a good idea to take precautions. While she waited outside the Crab Chowder, once her favourite bar, Trent and Gabriel went in first. When entering public places like this, she always liked to have her men in position first. They were much less recognizable than she was and, despite their often-violent tendencies, had fewer enemies.

  “Okay, I got him located,” Trent auged her, also sending a feed from inside the bar. He’d laid a frame over a man sitting at one of the tables, along with the facial recognition confirmation.

  “Can’t see anyone we might have a problem with,” said Gabriel over his comunit. “But we’re positioned to cover you now.”

  “The people I’m concerned about wouldn’t be as easy to see,” she replied, then pushed open the door and entered.

  As she stepped inside, she opened out the petals of the sensory cowl behind her head. She located weapons both visible and concealed, plus implanted hardware and augs. She also sought out those hidden behind the surrounding walls to see if they had acquired any weapons since her last external inspection. The situation looked okay so she relaxed a little. As always when entering this place, her attention strayed to a glass crab sculpture, sitting in a niche carved into one wall. The thing was made of rose and blood-red glass and always gave her the creeps, even more so because there were intricacies within that she couldn’t quite fathom—even with her augmented senses. She would have liked to have had the thing scrapped but it was a gift from the indestructible Mr Pace, the Graveyard’s highest crime lord. Shuddering, she dragged her attention away from the thing and closed her cowl. As usual, she found herself having to fight the knotty muscles growing from the bases of its chitin petals where they had sprouted from the back of her neck.

  Whenever she entered a room, conversation died. The speed of its death depended on the attention those within were paying to their surroundings. In the Chowder, where some drank heavily, it died a slow death. She paused, running a fingertip over the row of hard spiky growths protruding along her jawbone. Then she touched one of the pits forming below her eyes, before realizing what she was doing and abruptly snatching her hand down again.

  She shrugged to herself, concealed within the padded suit she wore to hide her other bodily changes, and slowly headed over to the client, or mark, at the table. As she walked, she concentrated on trying to prevent her cybermotors from conflicting with the new ropy muscles enwrapping her dissolving bones. Finally halting to stand over him, she rested one hand on the gas-system pulse-gun at her hip.

  “Thorvald Spear?” she asked.

  He auged his ident to her, along with limited permissions, from a state-of-the-art silver snake behind his ear, then replied, “I am. Won’t you take a seat?”

  His tone was mild and his demeanour convivial, but his aug security was tighter than an airlock seal. She detected a hard wariness in him, and was that twist to his mouth a hint of disapproval? He certainly knew who she was. He probably knew there were arrest warrants out for her covering kidnapping and murder, and he probably knew those words didn’t sufficiently detail her crimes. But he had no right to judge her—he didn’t know her past. There were prador in the Kingdom who still wanted human slaves and she supplied them. So what? It was a hard universe. She thought about her present acquisitions languishing in one of her warehouses. In another five days, the Spatterjay virus should have toughened them up sufficiently for coring and thralling. Then they would be ready to be sold to the prador. Still focused on this Thorvald Spear, something dark twisted inside her and urged her towards violence, to attack. But, as always, she managed to suppress it. However, she did decide that he would join those due for coring, unless his reason for seeing her turned out to be profitable.

  She pulled out a chair and sat down, wincing as her backside settled on the grainy kelp wood, then again as she attempted to relax back. The bone loss in her spine and the growth of chitin plates over her body hurt.

  “Would you like a drink?” he asked.

  “Just water,” she replied.

  She’d tried self-medicating with alcohol and soon learned that method of relaxation didn’t work well with cybermotor conflicts. It had led to torn muscles and further damage to her weakened spine.

  He held up a finger and a vending tray slid through the air to hover above their table. It looked like a maple leaf, but with a jointed arm extending from the stalk and terminating in a three-fingered prehensile hand.

  “Water for my companion, and another rum for me.” He picked up his glass, drained the dregs and passed it up. The tray plucked it away and held it down on its upper surface as it shot away.

  “Those who require my services usually come to me,” she stated.

  “But I piqued your curiosity?” he suggested.

  She dipped her head in acknowledgement, though his message had first stimulated her avarice and belatedly aroused her curiosity. He was out of the Polity, so probably an easy mark, and he apparently had a profitable venture for her. When he’d added that he could also help her with her “problem,” which was now public knowledge, her inner predator was roused.

  “So you want to charter the Moray Firth?” Isobel enquired.

  “I do.”

  “Expensive.”

  He acknowledged that with a slow nod.

  “So what for?” she asked, wanting to get his first proposal out of the way and move on to her “problem.” It was likely that he was lying, so she could then attack him.

  “I have the probable location of an abandoned Polity destroyer,” he replied. “I wish you to take me to where I can first acquire some … necessities, and then I’d like you to take me to it.”

  She stared at him calculatingly. A Polity destroyer. How likely was that? Being AI-controlled, such ships usually managed to make it home or call for help unless completely trashed. Either he was an idiot with too much time and money on his hands, or he was something else … Isobel opened her sensory cowl again, noted Trent and Gabriel becoming more alert as a result, and once more scanned her surroundings. Bounty hunter seeking her reward? It was possible, but then why the request to meet here, in what was essentially a domain she controlled? Surely he knew her reputation.

  “Both the destroyer and the necessities I mentioned are on the far side of the Graveyard, right on the edge of the Prador Kingdom,” he added.

  She continued to stare at him for a long moment, then said, “The likelihood of anyone finding an abandoned, as opposed to completely trashed, Polity destroyer is slightly remote, don’t you think?”

  The tray returned with the drinks and, while it was putting them on the table, Spear took a small case out of his pocket and placed it in front of him.

  “Well,” he continued as the tray departed, “if it’s not there, I will still pay you the full cost of the job.” He opened the case and slid it across to her.

  She peered down at it, searching with her cowl for poisons or a nano attack, but the six etched sapphires were all the case contained. She carefully reached over and picked up one to hold it close to her eye, linking to its microputer through the close-focus scanner in her artificial pupil. The sapphire was good and, if the other five contained the same amount of credit, there was enough here to pay for a complete refurbishment of the Moray Firth’s primary fusion reactor. She found avarice beginning to win the battle amongst her internal conflicts.

  “This is a down-payment, of course,” he said, “to cover your expenses. There is a netlink to Galaxy Bank here, where you can check on my credit rating.”

  She put the sapphire down. “If, as you say, you know the location of a salvageable abandoned Polity destroyer, you will also be aware that you’ll need an AI to fly it.”

  “Which is why the location of those necessities I mentioned is a place called the Rock Pool.”

  “Shell people,” she stated, wi
thout the rancour she had once felt for that kind.

  “Yes, shell people.”

  “I’ll have to think about that.” She paused, “But you also offered help …”

  He pointed down at the etched sapphires. “Net data on me is limited, so I’ve loaded a private file on me to the transaction memory of sapphire T782. I think you will find it interesting. You’ll also see that the balance of the payment could involve something more valuable to you than money.”

  Still watching him, she reached down and ran her fingers over the sapphires, sensors in her fingertips identifying the correct jewel. Leaning her elbow on the table, she held the sapphire to her eye, accessing its memory right away. She already knew from her own research that this guy was old, he’d fought in the prador/human war, but there was little beyond that. This file filled in more detail which, after a security scan, she loaded directly to her mind.

  “Polity bio-espionage?” she said disbelievingly.

  “That’s the one that leaps out,” he said, “but check the others.”

  She took a few moments to get it all, then, with slow control, placed the jewel back in its case. Yes, he had worked in bio-espionage during the war, but the more interesting stuff was before then. He’d worked in numerous sciences and had even spent time in partnership with the infamous Dr Sylac. Then there was the other data: a report from a forensic AI on his mental stats. A lot of them were at the top of known scales, while others were listed as non-applicable, which meant the AIs had found no sensible way of measuring them. Something long-suppressed rose up inside her then—hope. To undo what Penny Royal had done required a level of skill beyond anything in the Graveyard. Certainly Polity AIs could have done something for her, but considering her history their first inclination would be to dissect and study her. And if that didn’t kill her, they would execute the death sentence on her directly afterwards.