by Neal Asher
Her jewellery box! With shaking hands he drew it out and opened the hinged wooden lid. Inside he found various bangles hanging on a wooden rod, with brooches arrayed below. He checked there, but nothing. Next he worked through the drawers, one by one. Isobel possessed a fortune in gem-encrusted rings. In fact, if there had been any chance of him surviving he would have taken this box, along with the diamond slate doubtless stowed in one of these cupboards, but the wealth was irrelevant now.
The next drawer elicited more excitement, for here were her earrings, but it wasn’t there either. His one connection to his sister, his purple sapphire earring, wasn’t there.
Feeling a surge of disappointment, Trent dragged open one of the drawers below, and there it was. He snatched it up quickly, intent on inserting it into his belt pouch, but the gem came apart in his fingers. Glittering fragments of sapphire escaped his grasp, leaving only the pin and the jewel’s setting. He stood there, stunned for a moment, and when he finally tried to reach out to collect them up it was already too late. The fragments were spreading out around him like the debris of some explosion.
Finally, he gave up, and watched those pieces escaping into the surrounding wreckage. Had Isobel done that, or was the damage the result of the ship’s recent crash? Did it matter? Trent slumped, coiled in on himself bringing his knees up to his chest. He had nothing else to do now, nothing left to occupy the short remaining time he had until he died.
“Guilty, Trent Sobel, you are guilty,” whispered a voice. He looked around to try and locate the source, then felt foolish because the Firth was airless and sound couldn’t carry in here.
“Who is that?”
He felt cruel amusement, but not his own. His mouth went abruptly dry. Burning up in atmosphere, or crashing into the planet below, he could accept. In the former case, if things got too bad, he could just stick his pulse-gun underneath his chin and pull the trigger, but this? It was so unfair. His death was a fait accompli, but now a demon had come to take that away from him and probably consign him to something worse.
“For your crimes you are sentenced to death many times over,” Penny Royal continued. “But then, for my crimes, there are perhaps not enough deaths I could suffer.”
Glittering objects were now flicking out of the surrounding debris to collect at a point just a few yards out from him. For a moment he couldn’t quite make out what they were, then with growing puzzlement he understood: pieces of purple sapphire were gathering there.
Granting my last wish before my death?
After a short while they were all in place because movement ceased, then the collection of fragments went black before flashing, his visor darkening to protect his eyes. As that darkness faded, he now saw his purple sapphire hanging before him, complete, intact.
“I return your gem and, in time, Isobel,” said Penny Royal. Trent gaped for a second then reached out and snatched the sapphire down. “Thank you.” He shrugged, slipped the gem into his belt pouch beside its pin and fitting. “But why?”
“Redeem yourself, Trent Sobel.”
What the hell was that supposed to mean, Trent wondered, knowing that the AI had gone and any further questions would be met with silence. However, an answer of a kind arrived as the Moray Firth lurched. He knew at once that this wasn’t due to the ship starting to break up, or from anything else relating to its imminent crash into the planet. Something had just docked. Next, his suit radio crackled into life.
“Trent Sobel, get yourself over here,” said Captain Blite. “We’re getting the hell out of here.”
ISOBEl
Suddenly the blackness was gone. She ran a hand down over the fabric of her loose white silk shirt before sliding it down to her tight black lizard-hide trousers. She turned, feeling good, to gaze at her room’s screen. As ever, this was on its mirror setting. She was a devastatingly beautiful woman: dark, straight hair framing her Asiatic face, a perfect figure and eyes of an unusual blue-purple.
Isobel flinched at some memory. She remembered breaking something that had come to irritate her because it so closely matched the colour of her eyes … eyes she had lost. No, that couldn’t be right. Some nightmare perhaps? These weren’t uncommon, even though she was now so powerful and, aboard her very own spaceship, so safe. She studied her image further, the memory of breaking something fading, but her confusion remained. Something was missing, what was it? It was there, identified in a moment.
Where was the predatory joy she always felt at the sight of her own beauty, sure in the knowledge of how she could use it? Where was the vicious satisfaction in having used it so efficiently to raise herself so high? Why did she feel so sad?
Because this isn’t real.
Even as she admired herself, the transformation began. These stretched her face with scabs of carapace appearing and eye-pits sinking. She shrieked as insect legs stabbed out of her shirt and her body began to writhe, wormlike, and extend. Reaching up, she took hold of a handful of her hair and it simply came out.
“The problem was separating you from what you’d become, so intricately bound were the two,” said a voice she recognized but didn’t want to name to herself. It continued, “The Weaver supplied the answer for its own benefit: change what you were becoming, then make the new being reject the old. Thereafter, the only remaining problem was to find the line of division. It was perfect, and restored some balance on Masada too.”
Manipulators were now sprouting out down each side of her extended face. Horror filled her, and this time it wasn’t blunted by a growing hooder psyche; by the predator melding with her own predatory instincts. It wasn’t ameliorated by her knowledge that to survive, she must accept the changes she was undergoing. Everything that had screamed in her when Penny Royal had changed the course of her transformation was screaming again … or was that still screaming? Had it ever stopped?
“The war machine left you behind,” said Penny Royal. Yes, it was the AI talking to her, the AI she had supposedly killed.
“I don’t understand,” Isobel managed, her voice horribly distorted by her changing mouth. “Why … you do this?” she tried, but knew it was not a question but a plea for mercy.
“I must unravel my past back to its beginning, and it’s to the beginning I will go next,” the black AI replied cryptically. “That is, when all is done here and events ordered and set on their course to conclusion.”
“Why!” she shrieked.
“You wanted to tear your enemies apart, and I provided the tools,” said the AI. “That was wrong of me. I have now taken all your tools away from you: your war machine body, your ships, your people, your power, and now only you remain.”
Isobel wailed.
“And now you have a small chance to again be what you once were.”
Isobel’s wail died and the world snapped again around her. The shadow passed and aboard this ersatz version of the Moray Firth Isobel turned, feeling good, to gaze at her screen mirror. She was beautiful again, her mind whole, all her memories accessible.
“How can that be possible?” she asked.
“All you need to do,” Penny Royal replied, “is let go.”
“You mean die.”
“You reside in me now, Isobel, and now it’s time for you to leave.” “You promise—I have another chance?” Isobel asked, suddenly, unutterably weary.
“I always keep my promises,” said Penny Royal.
Isobel trusted the black AI not at all, but certainly didn’t want to spend her existence as a recording inside it, subject to its every whim. She let go, and found herself falling into blackness, but towards something that glittered. At the last, as she fell into it, she recognized the purple sapphire, even as it scribed her mind into its frozen layers.
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