by Neal Asher
“Not out of choice—that’s out of my hands,” she said, briefly contemplating how that second phrase no longer applied to her. “However, don’t ever be fooled into thinking I am in any way crippled by this form or that my mental faculties have been damaged. I am in fact so much more capable than I was before.”
Truth there and lies. She was very capable now, but perpetually having to fight for rationality.
“Okay, Isobel.” He nodded. “What do you want?”
“What is the status of our latest cargoes?” she asked.
“The Glory is on its way but the Nasturtium is still in orbit here. I’m aboard and we’re still waiting on the next load from the warehouse.”
“What about the Caligula?”
“In space dock and ready to blow out a few cobwebs.”
“Very well, I’m sending you some coordinates. I want you to head straight there once you’ve prepared, even if the rest of your cargo hasn’t arrived.”
“No delivery?”
“No, our clients in the Kingdom will have to wait a while—I have more pressing business. I want the Caligula fully armed, with a full complement of our troops aboard. I also want you to bring the planetary cache of CTDs … in fact, look upon this as a war footing and bring everything you think necessary.”
“Wow,” he said. “Something nasty?”
“You’re damned right. Don’t let me down.” It had taken another internal battle to come here, rather than head straight for the planetoid. The hooder in her wanted to go directly after Spear, but the more logical human part of her mind had to accept certain realities. Firstly she was low on fuel and secondly, because he now controlled a Polity destroyer, Spear was a dangerous prey indeed.
“As you say, Isobel,” said Morgan.
She cut the transmission and returned her attention to Trent.
FATHER-CAPTAIN SVERL
Father-Captain Sverl grated his prosthetic ceramal mandibles together, raised his great soft bulbous body up on his prosthetic ceramal legs and made a groaning sound beyond the vocal apparatus of any other prador. His first-child Bsorol backed away, still expecting a blow that hadn’t come in many decades. Bsorol was ancient now too, his carapace knotted with strange whorls and outgrowths and his leg segments bent through a hundred years of artificially maintained adolescence.
“Leave now,” Sverl clattered.
The first-child turned and headed for the sanctum door, which ground open to reveal Bsorol’s two assistants—prador that had once been second-children. Like the other twenty-two aboard this submerged dreadnought, they were now just a spit away from being first-children, but for their own distortions and prosthetic replacements for body parts that would not grow back—the growth retardant effecting them all differently.
As the diagonally split sanctum doors closed, Sverl considered his options. Bsorol, who had been analysing Polity data traffic for the best part of a century, had informed him that Penny Royal was back in the Graveyard. The rogue AI had somehow come to terms with the Polity AIs. Did this mean that Sverl could drag himself from his hideaway under the sea, leaving the Rock Pool to exact vengeance? Was vengeance still what he wanted?
Sverl’s war had been a hard one. He had lost two of his capital ships to the Polity, he had come close to dying when his own ship had been hit and he’d spent years recovering from radiation burns that had left him infertile. On his subsequent return to the war, during a simple mission while he accustomed himself to controlling a dreadnought, a Polity assassin drone had boarded his ship. It infected him with parasitic worms that nearly killed him again. He had to exterminate his own children to root out the infection on board—Bsorol and his other children were the last of his family, retrieved from the prador home world later in the war. Then he lost half his body mass to long and agonizing surgical procedures to remove the parasites. After that he received demotions when temporary insanity drove him to attack and destroy two rivals, thus undermining the war effort. The final insult came when he was made an outcast, this upon refusing a summons to return to the Kingdom when the new king decided to terminate the war.
Sverl bubbled anxiety and annoyance as he went over to his array of hexagonal screens and inserted one claw into a pit control.
He just hadn’t been able to return. He had invested and lost too much, suffered too much to obey the one who had called a halt to the war. He had never been able to accept that the war was over for him, as his hatred of the human race and its machines went too deep. Or that’s what he had thought then—so he’d remained in this borderland, this Graveyard.
The screens all came on, showing various views of the Rock Pool’s human community. Many of the humans had such a dislike of their own original form that they were distorting and changing it, and how Sverl envied them their choice. He then switched to two particular views he had put in place for his study of human crime, but his heart wasn’t in it, his mind still ranging into memory.
Years passed before he heard rumours of the black AI, the rogue creation of the Polity. It gave him some satisfaction to know that there was something out there that terrified even the Polity’s most lethal AIs, and he took an interest, gathered data. He soon learned that this Penny Royal was adept in technologies unavailable even in the Polity. It could transform beings, grant wishes and might be able to provide Sverl himself the means to realize his greatest wish. He needed to understand why weak fleshy beings and atrocious constructed intelligences had held against prador might. How had it been possible for them to turn the tide of the war, before the new king simply gave up? However, Graveyard gossip had it that Penny Royal’s gifts were poisonous and the technologies and transformations it provided could turn round to bite the recipient.
Sverl hadn’t believed that for a moment, not then.
Investigating the claims, he had found more rumour than truth and recognized this as Polity propaganda. Of course Polity AIs wouldn’t want it known that a being more powerful than them existed and was willing to provide for their enemies. Almost certainly those same AIs had started the rumour mills. They had built up a mythos around this Penny Royal, causing those who might have sought it out to avoid it. They had created a legend, something like that of the prador Golgoloth—frightening tales to scare children. And Sverl had considered himself no child.
Sverl withdrew his claw and the screens automatically shut down. He turned to gaze at the masses of equipment, terrariums and tanks occupying his sanctum, still undecided about what to do next. In retrospect, he realized his hate of the Polity had distorted his reasoning all those years ago. That his mind had been damaged throughout the war exacerbated this. He’d been selective about which Penny Royal stories he’d chosen to believe, listening to tales of those who had gained precisely what they wanted. He’d also been supremely arrogant, as all father-captains were, sure that if there were any catches in a transaction he’d be sure to see them. Thus he had chased down rumour and then firm data. He found the location of Penny Royal’s wanderer planetoid, and went there.
Sverl shuddered to remember his state of mind back then. He’d resolved to demand the means to understand the success of humanity and its AIs. He would take that knowledge to the Kingdom and contact those dissatisfied with the new regime. He’d next gather forces around him and usurp the new king, then lead the prador to slaughter humanity, as was their right and their destiny. And so he’d gone to confront Penny Royal in its burrows, while a fortune in diamond slate was unloaded from his shuttle above. He’d deluded himself that the flower of black knives he found was only a being, conveniently forgetting that it was also a hated Polity artificial intelligence.
In a maelstrom of pain, madness and expanding mental horizons, Penny Royal transformed Sverl. Afterwards, the father-captain climbed to the surface on new prosthetic limbs rather than grav-engines and hardfield repulsion. He definitely felt much more intelligent and potent. And certainly he was more personally dangerous, as Penny Royal had also provided him with a lethal Golem which S
verl now controlled with a thrall unit. He also quickly began to understand more about the war and why it had gone the way it had. He became aware of the aggressive prador society’s drawbacks, which included its avoidance of employing artificial intelligence. But still, though he understood specific details, a general understanding of the Polity lay beyond him. He felt, at that time, that some deep contemplation would be required, for he had yet to grow fully into his greatly expanded mental horizons.
Before even the shell people came, Sverl landed his dreadnought deep in the ocean of the world they subsequently named the Rock Pool. Other dispossessed prador joined him there and began building their underwater city. Trade was established with still other prador enclaves throughout the Graveyard. When the shell people arrived and began their strange physical worship of Sverl’s kind, the immediate instinct of his fellow renegades was to exterminate them. However, that basic paradigm-changing understanding of the Polity still eluded Sverl, and he persuaded them to leave the humans alone. For perhaps they might help him towards the greater understanding he sought. He allowed them to establish and he studied them.
Throughout this time, Sverl also studied himself. Firstly, he noted the extra organic growths and crystal extensions from his major ganglion and recognized them as the source of his extended intelligence. But he did not then understand precisely what they meant. Over time he noted his body’s gradual physical changes and, running intermittent tests of his genome, he discovered that it too was changing. Investigating further, he found picoscopic processes driving the change, but could not discern what was driving them. Only in recent years, with equipment purchased from the Polity, had he discovered underlying femtoscopic processes. He had understood less than one per cent of these. In the end, only his gross physical changes had revealed the truth.
As his visual turret sank into his main body it also spread, drawing his two eye-palps further apart while they shortened. Eventually they disappeared altogether, those eyes then residing in two pits to the fore of his carapace. The vision in his other turret eyes also started to fade. His mandibles, being fashioned of hard metal, remained unchanged. But these sank lower on his carapace while his mouth widened, a split developing from each side and working its way backwards. Doubtless, if he had still possessed manipulatory limbs beneath him, they would either have shrunk or dropped away. To his rear, he sprouted a fleshy tail which, under examination, he found to contain developing vertebrae. All this remained a mystery to Sverl, until a sickening revelation occurred to him when he was studying the shell people above.
While the shell people were humans trying to transform themselves into prador, he was a prador unwillingly being transformed into a joke of a human being. His whole carapace was taking on the shape of a human skull and it was softening, while that horrible and baffling tail was the rest of that disgusting soft creature. He surgically removed it but, over agonizing months, it grew back again. Meanwhile, small delicate white teeth sprouted inside his mouth and his eyes acquired pink fleshy lids that sprouted lashes. At the same time, when he wanted to listen closely to something, he found himself raising his front two pairs of forelegs off the ground—because they were developing nerve connections to his auditory system.
The method of transformation was darkly and grotesquely humorous, in a way Sverl would never have understood as a prador. But there was more, much more. On one level, he seemed to be developing into the organic or human aspect of the enemy, while in his major ganglion he grew nubs of human brain tissue. Understanding this made him realize something he had missed in the decades since his initial transformation. The crystal extensions of his organic brain were, in themselves, artificial intelligence. Penny Royal had given him the ability to understand the enemy, by turning him into both its aspects. He was an amalgam of prador, human and AI. And in the years to come, he felt sure that the first of those would eventually disappear.
As his AI and human components steadily grew, his anger and hatred faded, while large questions expanded in his mind. His need to understand an enemy changed, slowly transforming into a need simply to understand.
PENNY ROYAL’S PLANETOID
Mona drew her scooter to a halt in a long straight tunnel which speared into darkness for five miles in either direction. It was three metres across and perfectly circular through its length. She dismounted and walked over to its curved wall, and reached out to touch the smooth, almost polished stone with one hand. Her glove sensors detected the complete lack of faults beneath her fingertips. Still no answer to the puzzle that had been bothering her ever since they came here for salvage: where were the machines or the machine that did this? Part of the puzzle had been solved—they now knew why there was no rocky debris, the by-products of a boring machine. The stone around these tunnels was denser than elsewhere in the crust—any debris had been shoved aside and melded into the surrounding stone. Appalling amounts of energy must have been involved, yet there was no sign of the incredible machine that had created the tunnels. However, there were thousands of miles of caves worming through the crust of the planetoid and Mona knew she stood no chance of exploring them all.
Dropping her hand, she returned to the scooter, turned it round and began heading back. It might be that there just wasn’t a machine or, rather, that the machine concerned was Penny Royal itself. If that was the case then the implications were frightening. The black AI was terrifying enough, but if it could manipulate matter on this scale itself … Mona shook her head. No, that couldn’t be right. There had to be machines somewhere, or the figures just didn’t add up. Penny Royal couldn’t have done this alone over the sixty or so years it had occupied this place. The task would have required a hundred Penny Royals, or some vast iteration of the black AI no one had ever seen. The thought sent a shiver down her spine.
“Mona,” Gareth interrupted her thoughts over com, “we’ve got another visitor.”
“Another visitor?” she asked, accelerating. “Yeah, I recognize this ship—it’s The Rose.”
“What the hell is Blite doing here?” she wondered. “Last I heard he was smuggling tech artefacts in the Polity.” She paused as she turned into a side tunnel leading to the place they’d dubbed the “Atrium.” This was a large spherical chamber with a flat gridded floor only a few hundred metres back from the entrance they were using and just beyond that lay their ship. “Don’t answer that—if he’s here then it’s probably for the same reason as us.”
“He’s welcome,” said Gareth. “We’re all but done with this place.”
True, they were done with it now, because they had a full load to haul back. This was heading to Montmartre for John Hobbs’ salvage organization to process. But in reality they hadn’t delved very deeply into this place at all. She was sure there was a lot more to discover here, technological treasures to be revealed. Unfortunately she would not be the only one thinking that—other salvagers would arrive as the news spread that Penny Royal was no longer in residence. Blite was probably just the first of many. But at least he wasn’t the kind who’d resort to piracy and leave them trying to breathe vacuum. Mona had no doubt that Isobel Satomi, with her special problem, would be taking an interest. It was also quite possible that her ultimate boss, with his similar special problem, would take an interest too. Mona felt slightly sick at the thought of ever encountering Mr Pace.
She drove into the Atrium, the scooter’s fibre-rod wheels absorbing any juddering from the floor grate. Ahead she could see some of her crew loading their last two grav-sleds. One now held white oblate spheres, packed with technology they hadn’t been able to identify. The other one contained five skeletal Golem. The Golem would have been almost valueless, were it not for the fact that Hobbs had found a buyer in the Polity. Apparently, a forensic AI wanted to examine them and would pay in diamond slate.
Mona dismounted and headed towards the exit tunnel.
“What’s The Rose’s position right now?” she asked over com.
“Same as that destroyer—sitting
right above us.”
“Any communication?”
“Blite wants to talk to you. Shall I patch him through?”
“Yeah, go ahead.”
A screen image opened in the lower right-hand quadrant of her space suit visor to show the familiar face of Captain Blite. She thought he looked tired, a bit worried and thinner than he had been the last time she saw him.
“Hello, Mona,” he said. “Long time no see.”
“So it is,” she replied, “and before you waste your time: no, I’m not going to negotiate search territories, nor am I going to provide you with any data. If you want data on this place you’d better make a deal with John Hobbs. We’re done here—for now, anyway—and we’re on our way out.”
He dipped his head in acknowledgement then said, “I’m not here for the salvage.”
Mona immediately auged open a private channel and, blocking transmission to Blite, spoke to Gareth in her ship. “You heard that?”
“I did,” Gareth replied, “I’ve put up hardfields and the cannon is online.”
“So what are you here for?” she asked Blite. “I do hope you haven’t branched out.”
It wasn’t uncommon for some salvagers to go rogue and resort to piracy, though Blite had never seemed that sort.
“It’s not a case of what I’m here for,” he replied. “I have a passenger who, as far as I can gather, wants information on any recent visitors here. I did tell it I would ask, but it’s on its way down to you anyway.”
It’s on its way down to you?
“Mona,” said Gareth privately, “the hardfields just went down and the cannon went offline.”
Mona spoke to the four crew still working in the Atrium. “Get these sleds to the cargo cage—now!”
“Oh shit,” said Tanner.
“What is it?” She headed over to where he and Iona were standing. They were staring at the sled where they’d stacked the Golem—and his comment made perfect sense when she took a look herself. The five skeletal Golem had been loaded like logs and were piled to the rear of the sled. They were now slowly extricating themselves—the one on top of the pile lowering a foot to the sled as it began to climb off. Five polished ceramal skulls were now raised, curiously scanning their surroundings with darkly glowing blue eyes.