by Neal Asher
“You’re a one-trick pony, Riss,” Amistad eventually replied. “And you can’t kill an AI with an injection of parasite eggs, even if you had any.”
“Admit it,” said Riss, “you fucked up.”
I’d had enough of this.
“What the hell are you two on about!” I snapped. “Riss?”
“Tell him,” the assassin drone said, her gaze still locked with Amistad’s but her head flicking briefly towards me.
Amistad again clicked a claw at the air as if trying to sever some thread—perhaps the one of his own involvement. As this world’s warden, he was effectively stuck here for now, though he could never cut the ties of responsibility.
“Okay,” he said, “I fucked up.”
“I’m still as clueless as before,” I stated.
Amistad swung towards me, breaking the staring contest with Riss, who now deflated a little.
“There is evidence to indicate that Penny Royal did not in fact destroy its eighth state of consciousness, but had uploaded it from its container before I arrived at the caldera.”
“Which means,” said Riss, stretching up again, “that it’s still subject to a death sentence.”
“It means that portion of Penny Royal is still subject to such a sentence,” Amistad shot back.
“Look, fuck all that!” I interjected, “Penny Royal, whether it’s divided into eight fucking states or suffering a psychotic break, is guilty of exterminating Berners’ division on Panarchia!” I paused to pull up some other figures. “Since Panarchia, it is directly guilty of having killed three thousand five hundred and twenty-three human beings and forty-seven AIs.” I groped in my pocket and held up the ammonite fossil. “This is what Penny Royal does—it’s a sadistic torture-loving machine! This is what that fucking thing is!”
Amistad, who until that moment had been in constant, if minimal motion, now froze.
“What is that?” he said.
“This,” I waved the fossil at the warden of Masada. “This is quantum storage giving the location of Penny Royal’s planetoid, but it has room in there for something else. A torture virtuality. You have no idea—”
Amistad moved, fast, the sound of its feet like a series of firecrackers going off, and was looming over me in a second. His massive claw came down and with a delicate precision, which seemed impossible for something so large and heavy, it plucked the fossil from my hand. I took a step back, half expecting an attack, but the big scorpion just retreated. Then, as if sampling some delicacy, it inserted it into its preoral cavity, turned it with mobile setae, then swallowed it.
I turned to glance at Riss, who was now facing me.
“I never saw that,” said the assassin drone. Saw what? I wondered.
“It’s always recording,” said Amistad, as if agreeing with Riss. “So are the dead actually dead?”
I turned back to Amistad who froze again. Noting my attention, he snipped the air again then said, “It’s a self-referencing time crystal. The human mind within is a recording, running in a simplified state. I will transmit it to the Soulbank.”
“So now you see the kind of thing Penny Royal does,” I said, feeling I had somehow lost impetus.
“As you should know too, personally.”
“What?”
“Since learning of your pursuit of Penny Royal, I have taken an interest in you, Thorvald Spear,” said Amistad. “Have you yet admitted to yourself that your memories have been added to and tampered with?”
“I don’t know for sure …” I didn’t want to tell the warden that, though I agreed all the evidence pointed that way, I just couldn’t feel it to be true.
“You have memories of being captured by the prador, with a companion,” Amistad stated. “The prador tried out a full thrall on your companion, who died during the process and whose body died shortly afterwards. They then tried out a spider thrall on you. You survived for a while, in a great deal of pain, and were dying when those same prador were ambushed.”
“By Jebel U-cap Krong,” I replied.
“No, just by a squad of ECS commandos led by someone who’d never met Jebel U-cap Krong. The man with the spider thrall was called Jasper Frettle, not Thorvald Spear. While his companion, who was killed by full thralling, was a woman called Yonella Frettle—his wife. They weren’t soldiers, but citizens on a Polity world. The planet was just being settled when we first encountered the prador and the two were captured when the prador later conquered their world. They were only some of those on which the prador attempted to use thrall devices before they finally admitted that normal humans were too weak. They realized that their limited supply of humans from Spatterjay were the only subjects robust enough to take thrall technology.”
“What?” I said stupidly.
“Jasper Frettle couldn’t live with those memories, so when the process became available he had them edited out of his mind,” Amistad continued relentlessly. “Some may consider that weak, but others consider it a necessary requirement given a potentially unlimited span of life. Just like all such edited memories, his were stored. They still exist in what might be called the miscellaneous files of Soulbank. Those previously inhabiting your memplant, and now also in the soft matter of your brain, are an edited and distorted copy. I have to wonder when Penny Royal managed to get hold of them—and how long that AI has been making its plans …”
“What!”
“They never actually told you where your memplant was found, did they?”
“It was in a shop … jewellery …”
“Yes, Markham’s Exotica lies about two hundred miles from here, in the coastal town called Chattering. Though I do believe she’s opened a branch in the space port’s shopping complex which you recently left.”
I just gaped at Amistad, aware that Riss was studying me very closely. Maybe the assassin drone was again wondering whether she should kill me. Maybe, in her position, I would be wondering the same.
“Of course,” Amistad continued, “there’s no actual proof that Penny Royal visited Markham’s. However, Penny Royal was sighted by one of the clear-up teams on Panarchia after the war—in fact most of that team did not survive the encounter.”
“Returning to the scene of its greatest crime,” I spat, at a loss for anything else to say.
“Doubtless,” Amistad agreed. “After the war, it was discovered that one bio-espionage expert in Berners’ division possessed an early Sylac memplant. Instructions were transmitted to the clear-up teams there to scan for that memplant’s beacon, but it wasn’t found. It was assumed that it must have been destroyed in the CTD conflagration. The old ruby memplants are rugged, but did get destroyed.”
I knew it would take me a long time to agonize over all this and incorporate it. Penny Royal had found my memplant, jiggered with my memories, then placed it in a jeweller’s?
“This changes nothing,” I said. “Penny Royal still has to pay.”
“Of course,” said Amistad. “But first you have to find it or, perhaps, wait until it finds you.”
“I am going to kill Penny Royal,” I affirmed, feeling the hate in the pit of my stomach. But, even as I turned away, I felt that hate briefly transform into a miserable emptiness. If some of my memories weren’t my own, would I discover the same about my emotions?
15
ISOBEL
As the Moray Firth reached orbit, Isobel fervently rejected Trent’s advice. It was true that to kill Spear she’d probably have to destroy his ship and so gain no revenue from acquiring it. And it was also the case that killing him that way would be impersonal and without satisfaction. However, there was one factor which Trent had neglected, which was very important to her business in the Graveyard—reputation. When the changes to her body were noticed by her competitors and the words “she was fucked over by Penny Royal” were finally spoken, her enemies had immediately grown bolder and had needed slapping down. The reaction to her being duped by a mere mortal would be so much worse. She might even draw the attention of
Mr Pace, and she couldn’t allow that. At least, that is how Isobel justified her intentions to herself, to bring Spear down and rip him apart.
But now she had to cease questioning that goal and decide how it might be achieved. Gazing at a screen showing the Rock Pool below, she believed her decision to leave the surface was the right one. If things were blowing up between the prador it would get mighty unhealthy down there. In that respect, it was also likely to be dangerous up here too. However, she had her reasons for not leaving the system. She had instructed Morgan to take the Caligula and the Nasturtium to the coordinates of Penny Royal’s planetoid, because that had been Spear’s next known location. From there she had hoped to find a way of tracking him down. She had known that salvagers had been working there and they might have information about Spear they could pass on. That was irrelevant now, what with her learning that he’d gone to Masada, where it would be suicidal to pursue him. However, Penny Royal was Spear’s target, so if she stayed with the AI, currently onboard The Rose, then certainly Spear would come to her sooner or later.
It all seemed perfectly logical, so why did she feel a deep core of frustration on leaving the Rock Pool? It stemmed from the predatory part of her—a part of her that was getting increasingly aggressive. Spear was her target, but he had only taken advantage of her condition—which was caused by Penny Royal. Actually, the black AI had always been a target for her vengeance, but an unattainable one. Her realistic side had always known that she stood no chance against the AI. Only that logical side of her was not so strong now. Not only did she see Spear as prey—as someone to hunt and tear apart—she saw Penny Royal in that way too. Moreover, now she was putting distance between her and that prey.
Isobel bit down on her frustration, mentally opened up a U-space com to the Nasturtium and waited, only to receive no response. Next she tried the Caligula, but no luck there either. Morgan must be on his way to the planetoid, meaning she wouldn’t be able to contact him until he next came out of U-space.
She left the com channel open, so the man would know she wanted to talk to him at the first opportunity. And with another mental instruction, she increased the magnification through her sensors to give her a close-up of Carapace City. She then tracked down Blite’s ship’s current position. The Rose rested in a clear area just at the edge of the Carapace itself. She had no idea why the black AI had chosen that location, nor what its involvement in the coming storm might be, though it was surely involved.
“So,” said Trent, walking into the bridge, “what’s the plan?”
She whipped round towards him, stopping herself from falling on him at the last second. He jerked away from her, his expression frightened as his hand dropped to the butt of his gun. He took his hand away while allowing himself a steadying breath and stepped on into the bridge, pausing for just a second to eye the Golem standing back against the rear wall.
“Snickety snick,” it said, but even with her close connection to the thing, Isobel couldn’t fathom where that had come from.
She returned her full attention to Trent. He was moving with care, looked exhausted and had lost a deal of body mass. He seated himself carefully in a chair, then sipped from the cup he was carrying. To distract herself from the attractiveness of his vulnerability, she assessed the damage done to her bridge door. When she entered the ship most recently, it had been a squeeze to get through the airlock. The internal corridors had also felt claustrophobic. The dents and scratches around the door were inadvertent, but a sure sign it was time to start remodelling the internal spaces of her ship.
“Was it such a great idea bringing that thing aboard?” he asked.
“I control it completely,” she said, “and it may provide some … connection to Penny Royal.”
“You’re sure?”
“I’m sure.”
He grunted doubtfully, then said, “I’m guessing you think that staying on Penny Royal is a sure route to Spear?”
“I sent Morgan and the bulk of our muscle, along with the Caligula and the Nasturtium, to Penny Royal’s planetoid. The moment I am able to contact Morgan again I’ll summon him here—if we’re still here then.”
“So we’re staying,” he said.
She dipped her hood in response, already remodelling the blueprint of her ship in her head as she turned back to study the screen. She had to suppress thoughts about how enjoyable it would be to peel the flesh from Trent’s bones and how good he would taste. Internal walls would have to go, she decided, leaving structural members in place. She would leave Medical and some other human areas in place, but the rest would have to be opened out. She wouldn’t use the human airlocks any more, but the hold doors. Perhaps she should turn one of the holds into an airlock itself? Trent’s cabin would stay—even if he didn’t survive to occupy it, then someone else could use it …
Now for a new design of space suit …
“Maybe hanging in orbit right here isn’t such a great idea either,” Trent suggested.
Isobel focused on him distractedly without turning, using only her outer cowl sensors, which mainly functioned in the infrared. Even as she did this, she was loading instructions to the cache of mothballed large-maintenance robots she had aboard. They would begin with the partition walls and the conversion of one hold into an airlock. The suit, she decided, would have to be infinitely expandable—made to take new sections and extensions, for she was a growing girl. She would make that herself out of monomer fabric she had aboard. Then, even as she began playing with some tentative designs in her skull, she realized that both the suit and the remodelling were signs of acceptance of what she was becoming.
She now turned to the skeletal android, loading instructions to it, and dispatched it to assist in the remodelling. Trent watched it go, still obviously in disagreement with her decision to keep the thing.
“Agreed, we should change course,” she said abruptly, present circumstances beyond the ship coming back into focus.
In her mind she mapped the local system. The Rock Pool possessed two small moons but, if prador heavy weapons were about to be deployed here they would offer little in the way of safety. The next planet out was presently on the far side of the sun. But further in than the Rock Pool, about a quarter of an orbit round the sun from it, lay a smaller world. This was burning and molten on its sunward side but scattered with giant crevasses on the other. These could easily hide a ship. Perfect.
Isobel paused, noted that during her introspection Trent had headed off to his cabin. She fired up the fusion drive and began heading away, scattering grapefruit-sized com satellites as she went. She would conceal herself, watch and wait. And then, when Spear eventually put in an appearance, she would strike. Though whether she would strike Spear or Penny Royal first she wasn’t sure.
SVERL
The patterns of movement out there had changed. Analysing them closely, Sverl realized that the recalled children belonging to Cvorn, Skute and the Five were heading rapidly for whatever cover they could find—if they hadn’t already made it home. Robots and other assets in the ocean were still converging on the three ships, but this was probably in an attempt to cover that other movement.
The other prador were about to head for the surface; action was imminent.
His attention now focused on one of Cvorn’s perambulating factories. It had ceased moving and was now driving its rock anchors into the bottom. This could be seen as an attempt to save it from damage, since it was so close, but Sverl was suspicious. He withdrew a claw from one pit control and inserted it in another, then connected via his thrall control units to his weapons. He took control of two particle cannons, targeting coming up on two of his array of hexagonal screens. All the other weapons had children at the controls, but they would only react to threat as trained or follow orders, which meant a delay. If anything came from that factory, he would need to act fast.
“Get to cover,” Sverl instructed his remaining three second-children out there. They had a chance of survival, since th
e main action of any battle would certainly take place out of the ocean. Above water, weapons could be deployed faster and more effectively. He would return for them one day, if he could. It was not as if he had many kin left to spare. Everything else, including his remaining perambulating factory and various robots, he would have to leave too. Time now to move—he didn’t want to be the last to leave the ocean.
“Prepare for battle,” he instructed those aboard, and set water tractor drives running to give his dreadnought clearance. “Respond as you have been trained.”
Immediately the water out there clouded as the tractor drives stirred tons of silt from the bottom. Sverl switched to sonar and ultrasound imaging, noting that billows of silt were now blowing out from under the other three ships as they too set themselves in motion. As he studied the images, they blinked; a shimmering diamond pattern fleeing across both screens. He reacted immediately, firing one particle cannon at Cvorn’s factory, which had to be the source, meanwhile considering the workings of fate. If he had not just switched to ultra- and infrasound imaging, he wouldn’t have seen the recognizable interference caused by cavitating torpedoes.
He also felt a moment of regret. Right up until now there had been a chance, however remote, that the others weren’t going to turn hostile. But even as he regretted their predictably prador-like behaviour, he calmly assessed his initial plans and planned responses. Then he felt his own prador excitement growing at the prospect of, as the humans would put it, taking off his gloves.
His particle beam stabbed out slowly through the seawater. It created a growing glassy tube where seawater turned to superheated steam, then ionized hydrogen, oxygen and ozone and smashed other elements to radioactive isotopes. The tube held for a few seconds before turning into a boiling explosion that simply wiped out the view in that direction. Meanwhile Sverl used every source of scanning to track down the torpedoes. The beam finally reached the factory, the red-orange glare of vaporizing steel and carbon lighting up the ocean just as he located the torpedoes. There were two of them, curving round a few miles out. They would approach from the opposite side of his ship to the factory—the side that was out of reach of his particle cannons.