by Neal Asher
If all Penny Royal’s deals were the equivalent of that curious human term “a poisoned chalice” for the other party, Penny Royal wouldn’t have been able to do business in the Graveyard. Yet the AI had acquired wealth and power and resources. Certainly some did end up regretting their bargains. Sverl’s searches had turned up a few cases where some had been driven to take their own lives or had returned to the Polity for help. Nevertheless, there were nowhere near as many as rumour would have it. Sverl had located four, possibly five twisted agreements, if the rumours about Mr Pace were true. But right now, in the Graveyard, there was only one example other than Sverl, and that was Isobel Satomi. Now she was here again.
On her last visit, Sverl had discovered that someone connected to her wanted to buy one of his second-child minds. Sverl had immediately decided one of the specials should be provided. Now she was back again. And, judging by this Trent’s replies to Stolman’s questions, the deal had gone drastically wrong.
As he reviewed recorded footage transmitted via his Golem, which he had allowed Stolman’s people to find and apparently activate, Sverl’s fascination increased. This Thorvald Spear was seeking Penny Royal and had apparently recommissioned the AI’s old destroyer using Sverl’s special second-child mind. He had also left on this destroyer, having reneged on his deal with Satomi and sabotaged her ship. Satomi now wanted to hunt him down. She knew he’d gone to Penny Royal’s planetoid—presumably mistakenly as the AI was now aboard a small salvage vessel called The Rose. It also seemed, from some of Trent’s garbled comments, that Satomi had encountered The Rose and quite possibly the black AI. This apparently explained how Isobel’s drive was functional again, following Spear’s sabotage.
Sverl settled down on his legs, resting the bottom of his bloated body on the floor. He felt tense, excited, and confused. He could perfectly understand that Satomi was out for revenge on Spear. He could also see why Spear was out for revenge against Penny Royal, judging by the potted biography he’d checked. But he couldn’t fathom Penny Royal’s motivations. Certainly they had changed—else the Polity wouldn’t have accepted the AI back into the fold. And now Sverl was questioning his own way forward. His earlier feeling that his long sojourn under this ocean was coming to an end was growing stronger. In fact, he was starting to feel puzzled as to what had motivated his own century-long procrastination on this world.
BLITE
Penny Royal had become decidedly chatty. Well, in its terms, Blite felt. As the The Rose approached the AI’s nameless planetoid—a place Blite had sworn never to visit—the AI had made an announcement: “I am here to obtain information about a human called Thorvald Spear, who it is likely has visited this place.” Terse replies then ensued to Blite’s further questions. He learned that this Spear was now travelling the Graveyard aboard Penny Royal’s former destroyer. Perhaps the AI had given Blite and his crew information to reassure them in some way. It wasn’t really working.
“So what’s it doing down there?” Brond wondered, when Penny Royal had left the ship.
“Obtaining information,” Blite replied, to which Ikbal issued a snort.
When Blite had seen Mona and her salvage crew down on the planet, he had felt a sudden altruistic impulse. He would talk to her and try to obtain the information Penny Royal required, whatever it was. That way the crew might be more likely to survive the experience. They might not have to go through the terror he and his crew had faced and, to a limited extent, learned to live with. However, he just wasn’t quick enough.
“Shit,” said someone called Tanner, on the surface. “Oh shit.”
Mona hadn’t been using particularly complex coding for their suit transmissions, so it hadn’t been difficult to listen in. They’d heard Mona tell those inside the cave system to get out just as Penny Royal was going in. Had Tanner just run into the AI? Would he survive the experience?
Blite fixed his gaze on the screen, which showed a close-up of Mona’s ship and the entrance the crew had been using to access the cave system. He watched as four space-suited figures stumbled out.
“Shit—I’m alive,” Tanner added.
“Let’s hope it lasts,” replied one of the others.
“Get back now,” instructed the one called Gareth, who was monitoring from their ship. The instruction was hardly necessary, because the four were already running towards it. “Where’s Mona?” Gareth asked.
“She was behind us,” Tanner replied.
After a long pause Gareth just repeated, “Get back to the ship.”
“I wonder what it’s doing with her?” asked Brond.
Greer, who had just entered the bridge with Martina, said, “Do we want to know?”
“We do want to know,” said Martina as she inserted herself into one of the seats. “Penny Royal seems to have changed. It seems to be showing none of its previous nasty inclinations. Even what it did to us, it quickly corrected. But let’s see how it behaves with other people. Let’s see if the change is real.”
“Golem,” said Brond.
Blite swung back to the screen to see five skeletal Golem marching out of the cave entrance, just as the four crewmen entered Mona’s ship. Two grav-sleds, with just a few chunks of salvage on each, trailed after them. They walked in lock-step over to the cargo cage, and waited as the two sleds slid into the cage, whereupon they followed them inside. Blite worked his controls, trying to focus in closer on their activity. They unloaded the meagre salvage from the sleds, then loaded one with other items already within the cage. Then all five seated themselves in the cage, while the reloaded sled floated back out and headed over to the cave entrance.
“Uh?” said Brond.
“Beats me,” Blite replied.
“I’m okay,” said a space-suited figure, now walking out of the entrance. Mona’s voice was shaky and she’d spoken as if she disbelieved her own words.
“What happened in there?” Gareth asked.
“Yeah,” said Blite, inserting himself into their space suit com, “what happened?”
“It’s rude to butt in like that, Blite,” said Mona, now walking towards the spaceship. “And what the hell are you doing ferrying that particular passenger about?”
“I didn’t have much choice in the matter—I don’t really control my own ship anymore.”
“I’m sorry to hear that,” she said, the implication there that she couldn’t do anything about that. “Anyway, Penny Royal just read me like a book and now has all the information it requires. It informs me that we can take everything we have in the cargo cage right now and that we can return if we wish, but we won’t find anything of value.”
“What about the Golem?” Gareth asked.
“They apparently have ‘holding personalities’ and will obey us after a limited fashion until we deliver them to the destination we’ve been given.” Mona now reached the airlock to her ship. “Get everything fired up, Gareth, we’re getting the hell out of here.” She entered the airlock.
It wouldn’t surprise Blite if they dumped the Golem at some point during their journey back to Montmartre space station. Then again, maybe not. It didn’t seem likely that Mona could persuade her crew to enter the cargo cage to eject them.
Blowing out a ring-shaped cloud of dust, her ship began to lift on chemical thrusters. Then, just a few hundred feet from the ground, it peeled upwards and ignited its fusion drive, the back-blast causing another dust storm on the surface below. Igniting the fusion torch that close to a planet of any kind generally wasn’t done, but Blite supposed they were anxious to leave. Within a few minutes, the ship was spearing past Blite’s just a few miles away.
“Best of luck, Blite,” Mona sent. “I don’t envy you.”
Her ship dropped into U-space before it was properly clear of the planetoid and the effect caused another backwash. The Rose shuddered and twisted in some indefinable way, while weird lighting effects, like travelling lines of nacre, sped over the surfaces of surrounding equipment.
“She’s in a h
urry,” Brond observed.
“Understandable,” Blite replied.
“Perhaps we should have asked her for a lift?” suggested Martina, just to air the thought, just to put it out there.
“Perhaps,” said Blite, but he knew that none of his crew felt so inclined. They really had no idea about Penny Royal’s aims, but were all now in it for the duration, until the end. Precisely why they all felt this way, Blite couldn’t say. Perhaps Penny Royal had reprogrammed them.
“Here it comes,” said Ikbal. “Our passenger returns.”
Glittering darkness exited the cave mouth, stretched up from the ground towards them and snapped out into space. Forming into a disc, it crossed the intervening distance improbably fast. In fact, when Penny Royal made this kind of crossing, Blite had measured an intermittent U-space effect. The ship clattered with the AI’s arrival, and Blite noted the hold door open and close. However, he didn’t need these indicators to know Penny Royal was back. It was as if he could feel the thing breathing on the back of his neck, though it breathed not at all.
The Rose began to move, steering thrusters diverting it and the fusion drive firing up. They watched while the ship swung round the planetoid.
“It’s looking for something again,” commented Leven. “And it seems a little agitated.”
Blite was daring to aug into his ship’s system more than before, and observed it was performing a deep scan of the surrounding space.
“It’s using the same codes as before,” said Leven, speaking direct to Blite through his aug.
“Before?”
“When it located that power plant.”
“Ah.”
After one full orbit of the planetoid Penny Royal drew the ship into a stationary orbit. Then through the system, Blite observed a powerful U-space signal being transmitted with that same coding.
“Something just arrived,” Leven announced a moment later, opening up a frame on blank space.
“I think we’ve been here before,” said Blite, his words confirmed a moment later when one of those spinning-top power plants shed its chameleonware.
Unlike the one before, this was already fully active. In addition, as far as Blite could surmise, it had been elsewhere. The things obviously hid themselves, so it wasn’t a stretch to understand they could run and hide somewhere else upon discovery. As the thing concealed itself once more, The Rose began to move, orientating back towards the planetoid.
“Something’s happening down there,” said Leven, throwing up a view of the surface. Blite fixed his attention on the screen. A ball of fire blew out of a cave mouth and the ground behind it lifted and collapsed, issuing a dust cloud. Leven immediately pulled back the view, to show similar explosions all around the planetoid, numerous collapses etching out the underlying labyrinth of tunnels.
“Why?” he asked.
“Eliminating dangerous toys,” Penny Royal breathed.
The Rose now accelerated, the fusion drive ramping to full power. Blite could sense that they were done here now.
“Where now?” he asked.
His answer was, inevitably, a memory.
He sat on this bridge, two of his old crew with him, studying a report on a particular world. They were discussing whether it might be worth doing business there. They decided against it because, really, there wasn’t much to trade but there were plenty of chances to die.
Blite came out of the memory feeling sick again.
“Why the hell—” Blite began then stopped himself. Penny Royal might answer his questions, but it did so in a manner which wasn’t at all comfortable. Now, gazing at the puzzled expressions around him he said, “We’re going to the Rock Pool.”
“And why are we going there?” Martina asked. “There’s nothing there but shell people, prador and Graveyard scum.”
“Maybe I’ll ask about that later,” Blite replied.
ISOBEL
As the cab sped towards Carapace City, travelling faster than was probably usual for this driver, she looked ahead. She had already penetrated one aug network and, using search engines, had drawn plans of the place in her mind. Coming closer, she found another smaller aug network and recognized it as one arising from those odd Dracocorp augs. These were organic augmentations, apparently made by a company set up by Dragon, the self-named trans-stellar alien entity. She decided to avoid that one. She’d encountered these before, worn by Separatists out of the Polity, and recognized them as a trap. One person could use the network to assume dominance over others who were linked in. She penetrated other computing systems, too—cam systems and simple communicators—but avoided the dangerous stuff such as free drones and Golem. Perhaps fortuitously, there didn’t seem to be anything big here; anything which might cause her serious problems. Interlinking all she’d gathered so far, she began dispatching further search engines.
Her first glimpse of Trent, after his pin cam removal, sat in the recorded memory of an ancient security camera. She realized Stolman and his heavies were the ones wearing the Dracocorp augs. Perhaps the computing particular to those augs, coupled with Stolman’s supremacy in the network, had enabled him to activate the Golem. Perhaps that was the answer, given that Penny Royal wasn’t in the vicinity to activate the tech.
Using further cams, she managed to track Trent to a boat, which headed off along a narrow canal that extended from the central pond. But she could find no further cams nearby and there was no computing in the boat or it would have left a trace. The option of using satellite imagery was out too, what with the dome over the central part of the city. Checking ahead, she tried penetrating some tight security systems in the canal-side houses to track him further.
“Looking for someone?” a voice asked.
Isobel immediately felt the predator in her arise, with the urge to attack. She upped her security as she sought the source of that voice. She tried to trace it but found all her attempts slewing away to random computing all over the city.
“I’m here,” said the voice.
A channel opened to one of the security systems she’d been attempting to penetrate, and thence to a specific camera. Though viscerally wanting to attack, she instead assessed the dangers and intellectually was tempted to just pull out and shut down. However, she reasoned that the one she could now see had picked up on her very quickly, and it would remain a danger even if she did pull out.
Just in front of the wall-mounted camera hovered a plain grey drone, rather like a small surfboard with sensors around its rim. It had two topaz eyes to its fore and what looked like limbs of some kind folded up underneath its forward section. She studied it for a moment longer but could divine little from its appearance. When attempting to study it in the virtual world, she just found a glossy surface from which her mind slid away. This was why she’d been intent on avoiding both Golem and drones. They were AI and they could be tricky. The thing she was looking at might be a few centuries old and might even be a planetary AI, slumming it in a beat-up drone body.
“I’m looking for Trent Sobel,” she replied. “Anyone you’re looking for?”
“Nah, I’m not looking for anyone in particular,” the drone replied. “I just like to keep my finger on the pulse.”
The cab had now slowed to pass through the rather less affluent outer suburbs of the city. Here the driver had to negotiate around decaying cars, piles of rubbish and some rather esoteric street planning. At one point, it slowed to a crawl behind a wide electric cart loaded down with what looked like dried-out cacti. Indigents in the area took this opportunity to rush up and bang on the cab to draw attention to their distinctly crappy wares. When they saw Isobel half-coiled across the back seats they rushed away just as quickly.
“And Trent Sobel?” Isobel enquired.
“He’s not having a particularly good day, and it’s going to get worse unless you get to him soon.”
“So you’ve been taking an interest?”
“I always take an interest in Stolman,” said the drone. “He’s an in
teresting sort of guy—what with him sitting at the head of the local Mafia and a pre-enslaving Dracocorp network. And now he’s supposedly controlling a Penny Royal Golem.”
Supposedly?
“So you’re a voyeur?”
“Call me a student of human fallibility.”
“Can you give me Trent’s location?”
“Sure.” The drone sent a data package, which Isobel immediately blocked.
“Just tell me, please.”
“Well, you are a suspicious type,” said the drone, “but then in your trade I guess you have to be. And I’m guessing your recent transformation might have distorted your perspective somewhat.” A noise that could only be described as a titter ensued, then the drone continued, “Tell your driver to take you to the Reaverson Warehouse, Eastish Fourteen.”
“Eastish?”
“Compasses don’t work here. Oh, and here’s a cam you might find useful.”
The package was smaller this time and Isobel routed it into secure storage and made a cursory external examination of it. Then, with as much caution as possible, she opened it. It was simply a code-breaking program to a specific cam in what was supposed to be a secure network. Isobel used it, and immediately opened a view into the Reaverson Warehouse. Ascertaining at a glance that Trent was still alive, she now decided to satisfy her curiosity.
“You’re a Polity drone,” she said. “Yet you’re watching crimes being committed and doing nothing. Why is that?”
“This ain’t the Polity and not every AI is trying to attain sainthood,” the drone replied. “And really, what can you do with that mess called humanity, until it feels inclined to raise itself out of the mire it so enjoys? I mean, look at you, Isobel. You’ve got wealth, power, haiman abilities and yet still you persist in your sordid little pursuits—even when the possibilities open to you are practically infinite.”