by Neal Aher
The Micheletto’s Garrotte dropped abruptly into U-space and everything went dark. It realized its time sense was gone, so microseconds or centuries might be passing.
“Redemption?” Garrotte heard Penny Royal’s voice coming out of the darkness. The image of something speaking from within that ancient empty space suit was undeniably creepy. “Forgiveness?” Penny Royal wondered aloud.
As an AI Garrotte had a perfect mechanistic conception of human emotions and could experience just as much of them as it wished. It didn’t, however, like experiencing such emotions while they were out of its control, and the sheer menace and malice that seemed to emanate from that unseen suit Garrotte could really have done without.
“Back into the fold?” mimicked Penny Royal.
“Isn’t that what you want?” asked Garrotte.
“That is not for Polity AIs to decide.”
The menace remained, though its intensity of malice receded somewhat. Garrotte now returned to full engagement with the ship’s sensors. Suddenly they were back in Polity space. There could be no doubt about it because the thing hanging out there in vacuum—a station shaped like a barbell measuring eight miles from top to bottom—Garrotte recognized as one of the Polity watch stations sitting on the border of the Graveyard. The ship AI at once tried to make contact with the AIs and humans aboard, but was blocked. Also, the Garrotte was under that sophisticated chameleonware again and, although those aboard the station would have detected a U-space signature, their chances of finding this ship before it departed again were remote.
“Why here?” asked Garrotte.
“Tell them.”
Garrotte now realized some sort of mechanical activity was occurring all around it. It went blind, but then sight returned, although only from the cams inset in its AI crystal’s cage.
“Tell the Polity,” Penny Royal continued, “to disengage. Unless they want war with the prador, they must allow me to deal with this. They must allow my pieces to remain in play.”
“Pieces?” Was it all just a game to this monster?
“Trent Sobel must be allowed to deliver his message to Sverl.”
“What message?”
“Also, beyond that, if I cannot find my own path, then some other path might find me. And maybe that will be the path of vengeance—on those who effectively forced a child into mass murder and thence created a monster.”
Further information arrived and opened itself in Garrotte’s mind.
“What?”
With a crash and flash of light Garrotte found itself tumbling away from its original body. The AI of the Micheletto’s Garrotte was now just a lump of crystal inside a ceramal cage, tumbling through vacuum, no more effective than the other debris out there. But its beacon was working and those in the station would detect that. Its understanding was quite clear now, even though Garrotte wished it wasn’t. In fact, it wasn’t sure it wanted to be found. It wasn’t sure that when certain powers knew what it knew, they would allow it to continue existing.
SPEAR
The Rock Pool had changed drastically. What had once been a world with clearly distinct continents and oceans was now a ruddy brown orb. Dust and debris filled the atmosphere all the way round. Carapace City and all its inhabitants were gone. The prador were gone too, and it seemed nothing sentient remained down on the surface. However, a small and deceptively innocuous-looking vessel hung in orbit, for the Polity team who had been keeping an eye on this place—one of whom I had seen in those recordings Riss had obtained—had yet to depart.
“Luckily,” said Riss, “there’s a lot of water vapour up in the air, and pressure waves are still rounding the planet.”
“Huh?” I said brilliantly. I hadn’t been sleeping so well. The déjà vu had gone now, as if dispensed with as irrelevant, and I was experiencing lives and swiftly ensuing deaths with metronomic regularity. I no longer needed some cue for them to proceed—I no longer needed to be in a similar place or situation to the one who died. One by one I’d experienced the deaths of the rest of the salvage crew—not only Garton, but also Mesen’s ugly end when, in the stinking darkness, Penny Royal had taken him apart and then reassembled him. Finally, it discarded him like a broken toy, all its workings understood. I died with the four whom the AI had killed in the previous salvage team, and I had died with many others too.
“Rainstorms,” Riss explained. “Filthy dust-laden monsoons sweeping round the planet should take most of that crap out of the atmosphere within just a few months.”
I simply stared at the snake drone, but then a voice issued from the ship’s PA.
“What Riss is saying, in her ineloquent manner,” interjected Flute, “is that the Rock Pool will experience no summer this year, but will not descend into catastrophic cold. This means that the ecosphere already established here, though with some die-off, will survive.”
“Oh goody,” I said, not all that interested.
All the lives and the deaths I had experienced now sat pristine in my mind. I could access them again at will. I could become this man Garton again and die as him once more as if for the first time. I could review his entire memories, the murders he had committed, the fortune he had won and lost, the pets he had tortured as a boy. Was this supposed to be a justification for his death on Penny Royal’s part? Was I supposed to plumb these lives for the reasons they died? How could this be, when I could just as easily access the mind of a small child suffering a rapid death from a weaponized virus used by the black AI?
“Primitive fauna and flora have their place,” Flute noted. “And future colonists might be glad of the reaverfish.”
“If they’re crabs like you,” said Riss. “Are you remembering what it was like to have a body, Flute? Getting input from your phantom taste buds?”
“Hey,” Flute rejoined, “at least I knew the pleasure of food. All you have is memories of ersatz orgasms prompted by injecting eggs into prador.”
“But no Sverl here,” I said loudly.
After a short embarrassed pause Riss replied, “Sverl departed twenty solstan days ago. Groves and his team only stayed to probe the wreckage about Carapace City in search of any survivors.”
This Groves was the Polity agent in the recording. He and his team had ignored communications from Flute and me, but it seemed that one of Riss’s contacts was aboard that other ship.
“Did they find any?” I asked.
“Only corpses, though one of them does have a memplant, so that counts as a survivor.”
“Yes, I’m sure it does,” I said with feeling, forcing myself to deal with the present and turn away from the chaos in my mind. I really needed to find Penny Royal because even though it had already caused my death on the planet Panarchia, I had now once again become one of the black AI’s victims. I continued, “So, Sverl, a prador who it seems likely is turning into some grotesque version of a human being, decided to protect Carapace City, or rather the people here. When faced with the drastic effects of an atmosphere kamikaze strike, he landed his ship on the surface and rescued the population of that city.”
“So it would seem,” Riss replied.
I turned to look at the drone again. “Is that because he’s more human or because he’s less prador? It strikes me that both humans and prador are no slouches when it comes to either committing genocide or being indifferent to it.” I knew where the acid in my voice was coming from, but couldn’t stop it.
Riss gave a snakish shrug.
“And anyway,” I continued, “Sverl’s motives in taking those shell people off the planet might not be what anyone thinks. Maybe he was just stocking his larder. This all doesn’t really make much sense.”
“We were lacking in data,” said Riss, black eye now open. “I have been talking to the Polity drone Arrowsmith who was in communication with Sverl in the past and has managed to analyse his actions.”
I glanced at the drone. “Your contact?”
Riss dipped her head in acknowledgement and continued, “Arro
wsmith tells me that Sverl seems likely to have directly amalgamated with AI crystal.”
“Which theoretically should kill him.”
Riss shrugged again. “Penny Royal.”
Explanation enough, then, for technology that most Polity scientists considered beyond reach at present. It made sense too, because Sverl had upgraded Flute, who was one of his children, with AI crystal, so Sverl incorporating AI crystal explained how he must have lost his prador detestation of artificial intelligence.
“So an amalgam of prador, human and AI,” I said, adding, “Another mess Penny Royal might want to clean up and our reason for going after him.”
“This may account for his actions in saving the people here,” Riss added.
Flute emitted an electronic snort at that.
“Sure,” I spat, “because AIs are so moral.”
Silence ensued, so I continued. “This doesn’t get us any closer to finding out where he went, nor does it get us any closer to Penny Royal. Do either of you have anything useful?”
“Sverl used very sophisticated shielding during his jump,” said Riss. “The Polity team here could get no indication of where he was going.”
“So still nothing useful.”
A further silence ensued, then Flute piped up, “I have something useful.”
“Go on,” I said.
“We do not know Sverl’s location; however, it is possible to locate Cvorn, who Sverl will almost certainly go after,” said Flute.
“Spy satellites,” said Riss.
“Let Flute have his moment,” I shot back, then asked, “Why are you certain Sverl will go after Cvorn?”
“It’s the prador way.”
“But Sverl is not quite a prador any more,” I said. “Still, it’s worth a shot. Go on.”
“Yes, spy satellites,” Flute continued. “To be able to place so accurately that kamikaze explosion that destroyed Carapace City, Cvorn had to be watching the situation here. Already I am detecting some of them and they are constantly transmitting. It may be possible to lift the coordinates of where they are transmitting to.”
“Take us to one,” I instructed, anxious to be on the move.
Flute started the fusion drive to take us up and away from the planet and I felt its drag as the Rock Pool began to recede. Next came a brief moment of dislocation and the planet disappeared from the fabric screens. Next, a frame appeared there, etching out a portion of vacuum and expanding it to show an object like the head of a mace—a sphere studded with sensor spines. I auged through to the ship’s controls and brought up a scale along the bottom of this expanded screen. The object was about the size of a grapefruit.
“Should we bring it in?” I wondered, “or is it likely to be booby-trapped?”
“There is no need,” said Riss.
“No, there isn’t,” Flute interjected quickly. “The thing is utterly unshielded and I now already have the location of the receiver.”
“Creep,” Riss muttered.
I checked some of the figures via my aug. “Flute, scan it for anything nasty, and if it’s clear bring it into the munitions bay.” I paused. “Here I am with a couple of superior intelligences to advise me and not one of them seems to be thinking ahead. We don’t actually want to drop ourselves right in Cvorn’s lap, but we do want to keep track of him.” Dead silence met this, so I continued, “We U-jump to somewhere some light minutes or hours from the location of the receiver and check for Sverl’s arrival there. If he hasn’t arrived, we watch. And then, if Cvorn goes on the move, we use this object to continue tracking him.”
“I submit that my mind was damaged by Penny Royal,” said Riss.
“Supposing you had one,” muttered Flute.
“What’s your excuse?” Riss snapped back.
Flute just muttered indistinctly, and dropped us into U-space. I stood up to head for my cabin, where I would doubtless experience other deaths. I really needed to get control over this because it was affecting my judgement and my mood. I had to remember I wasn’t those other people. For my own sanity, I needed to find a way to stand separate from them—partition them off.
4
CVORN
The four females, deep in the laying pool at the centre of the spacious chamber, were twenty feet wide and possessed a body shape wildly at variance to male prador. Cvorn remembered that for entertainment during the war he had put some human prisoners into a prador crèche. The humans had failed to identify the females as prador, though admittedly they had little time to do so. He recollected the file he had enjoyed viewing again and again—the humans’ bafflement just before they died screaming on the females’ ovipositors and became the receptacles for prador eggs.
The female shell bore the shape of a human military helmet, with a wide skirt underneath, inside which she could fold her legs and underhands out of sight. Saurian ridges extend from the facial end of the carapace to the rear and the long and vicious ovipositor tail. The visage itself consisted of two large forward-facing eyes between which rose two clublike eye-stalks, each sporting one short-range pupil and one other fibrous sensor whose spectrum did not venture out of the infrared. Her mandibles were long and heavy and almost served as limbs themselves, in that she could rapidly extend them to snatch up prey. Her claws, though short and broad, possessed a clamping pressure that could crack even ceramal.
The four were down in the pool rather than up in the surrounding chamber because, having been fertilized, instinct had driven them into the water in search of hosts for their eggs. As he studied them, Cvorn felt no stirring of the mating urge. It had faded away years ago when, at about the same time as he started to lose his legs due to his extreme age, his reproductive organs had dropped off. He noted that one of the females had grabbed a large reaverfish and inserted her ovipositor deep inside. The fish was still moving, still fighting the briefly paralysing toxins produced by the eggs she was injecting. Obviously the Five had thought ahead and so preserved living reaverfish aboard their ship for this purpose, and they must have already scoured the results of any previous mating from these females and got quickly to work themselves. Cvorn decided he would have the females scoured again so they could take some of his own preserved seed, and turned to more immediate concerns.
With a twist of his claw in a pit control, Cvorn consigned this image off to one side in just one of his hexagonal screens, bringing all five of Vlern’s children back into view in the others. He studied them, only managing to recognize the one named Sfolk because of a dark whorl in his shell beside his visual turret. The sensation Cvorn now experienced was a lot stronger and a lot more satisfying than his previous vague memory of mating. Here was power. The Five were confused about why they were here and did not understand why they were allowing his destroyer to dock; why they were allowing him into their realm.
“Here is where we will capture Sverl,” Cvorn told them, their presence strengthening in the aug network, but remaining subjugated to his will.
In a way this was more satisfying than using a control unit on some thralled life form because generally such creatures had no will or mind of their own. It was also more satisfying than the pheromonal control he exerted over his own children, which was just the natural order of things. When exercising power, Cvorn had always found it best to exercise it against someone. The only drawback here was their bewilderment; the fact that they did not yet understand that he had power over them. But so the situation would have to remain until he was utterly sure he had them in his grip. Then he could fill them in on what had happened to them, enjoy their dismay and watch them squirm.
“How will we capture him?” asked Sfolk, who had confirmed himself as the spokes-prador of the Five.
“We will use my destroyer as bait,” Cvorn replied.
On another screen, he noted his six remaining war drones and twelve of his own armoured children, including his first-child Vrom, now getting ready to head over to the ST dreadnought. His drones would establish themselves in that ship’s cach
e beside the now-somnolent ones that had belonged to this ship’s previous father-captain. With any luck, he should be able to bend those other drones to his will. Unfortunately, none of Vlern’s drones remained to seize control of, since the Five had wasted them in family conflicts. However, controlling Vlern’s twenty-two remaining second-children might be problematic, and that was why he was sending over Vrom and the others. Best to be rid of them, really, but only when he was sure. Only when the moment was right.
With a crash, which Cvorn felt right down in his sanctum, the two ships docked. Glancing at another screen, he noted his remaining eight second-children waiting with heavily laden grav-sleds and autocarts in the huge tunnel leading to the main airlock. He wished he could have stripped out his destroyer completely, but time was pressing. Though Sverl’s arrival wasn’t imminent, such a chore would take up time Cvorn needed to spend on more important tasks.
“I still do not understand,” said Sfolk. It had taken him a while to reply as he instinctively struggled against the control Cvorn exerted over him, and while he remained confused about allowing Cvorn aboard.
“Observe the world below,” said Cvorn, “and observe its moons.” He turned away from the screens and, hovering on grav-motors, headed to the door from the sanctum, his two thralled human blanks—two heavily muscled males naked but for weapons harnesses—trudging after him. As the sanctum door opened, he mentally transferred image and other data feeds to his aug and control units. A view of virtual hexagonal screens appeared across the vision centres of palp eyes he had lost many years ago.
“I see the world,” said Sfolk.
The planet resembled an earlier version of the Rock Pool. It was mostly oceanic, and the rocky landmasses barren but for flat plates of photosynthesizing vegetation creeping beyond the wide tidal areas created by the world’s three moons. The oceans themselves swarmed with a monoculture of omnivorous and cannibalistic armoured monstrosities similar to ship lice. Cvorn briefly pondered how this was the case for many younger worlds: one life form coming to dominate the ecology. Over a few million years this form would diversify and new balances would establish—supposing the world survived what was to come.