by Neal Aher
Trent studied the vessel for just a short while longer, then twisted the joystick to spin his single-ship round. He hit the fusion drive and the acceleration slammed him back into his chair. Virtuality or reality, he couldn’t deny the joy he suddenly felt to be heading away from that place. Within minutes, he was up to full acceleration with the old ship receding far behind. A second later, his instruments indicated some object over to his right, and he diverted his course slightly to get a closer look. The thing, hanging in vacuum there, was a large doughnut with tech jabbed through its centre like a bunched-up collection of rods. He recognized a tokamak fusion reactor wrapped round some serious weapons and wondered if it belonged to the guards, or to the prisoner, then turned his ship away, wondering what next?
“Snickety snick,” said something behind him, and the cold metal of a skeletal Golem hand gripped his shoulder.
“I gotcha,” it added.
5
CAPTAIN BLITE
Captain Blite gazed at the figures, relayed directly from his Galaxy Bank account to the new laminate on The Rose’s chain-glass screen, and wondered why he felt so empty. He glanced at the latest offer for the Penny-Royal-tweaked hardfield generator he had aboard. Silly money. He was rich now, all his crew were rich and they had all at last achieved what they had been aiming for. All those years of trading, of risky deals, of working close to the edge of legality and of often being in life-threatening situations, were at an end. They could now retire to luxurious inner Polity worlds. Blite himself could relax on that white sand beach on New Aruba, sipping cocktails while someone else took the risks in The Rose and the other ship he had planned to buy.
Perhaps that was it; perhaps it was because it was all over.
Brondohohan would be buying that mobile submarine house he had always been hankering for. Chont and Haber, who had been packing up their belongings only a short while ago, would at last have the children they had been planning, down to every genetic detail, over the many years. Greer would head for Spatterjay and fulfil her strange wish to have one of the leeches there bite her, and to buy a ship to sail that world’s oceans. Martina could return to her home world wealthy enough to give her rich family the finger. While Ikbal could, well, do whatever it was he wanted to do.
“They’ve gone.”
Blite turned to see Brond enter the bridge and plump himself down in one of the acceleration chairs.
“Chont and Haber?”
“And Ikbal and Martina.”
“Really?”
“Really,” Brond nodded. “Our loving couple are heading to Earth while Ikbal and Martina are on the way to her Gallus Yard. Seems they want to go into business with each other.”
“And they didn’t bother to say goodbye.”
“They did—you just weren’t paying attention.”
Blite nodded. Sure, Chont and Haber had said their goodbyes but, knowing Blite, they had hardly been protracted. The other two, however? Was saying “we’re leaving” the same as goodbye?
“So when are you heading off?” Blite asked then, looking up as Greer entered.
“The second we get permission to leave this fucking place,” said Greer, plonking herself down in the other seat.
Blite glanced at the laminate. Another offer had appeared there—a massive amount of wealth for that generator. He was sure the delays were something to do with that . . .
“So you’re both staying with The Rose?” he asked, glancing at each of them. “It’s all over now. I personally plan to buy a beachfront house on New Aruba, have my liver reinforced and spend the next century trying every drink they have there.”
The two exchanged a look; Greer gave a slow nod and Brond replied, “No you don’t.”
“What do you mean, I don’t?” Blite growled, feeling a familiar comfortable anger rising in him.
Brond continued, “For the others, working with you was a means to an end. Ikbal and Martina always planned to pool their wealth when they had enough and buy their own ship. Chont and Haber always dreamed of settling and having children like some antediluvian couple. It was over for them the moment you filled their accounts. It is not over for us.”
No, Brond was wrong. Blite reckoned his empty feeling was due to it all being over. They were breaking apart and starting a new chapter, going their own ways.
“Sometimes I think I know you better than you do yourself,” said Brond. “You can’t accept how, at least for us three, things have changed.”
“Bollocks,” said Blite.
“Two words,” interjected Greer, “Penny and Royal.”
Blite stared at her, feeling as if he had just been sucker-punched.
“So what?” he managed.
“We can start with the cold hard facts,” said Brond, holding up one large thick finger. “Fact one: Penny Royal is something Polity AIs take very seriously indeed, which is why that poor fuck Sobel, who only had some brief passing encounters with it, is probably in very little pieces now and every one of them being examined down to the submolecular level. Fact two: you had an encounter with Penny Royal that lost you your previous crew. Fact three: Penny Royal smuggled itself out of Masada on our ship and used us to ferry it all over the Graveyard. Fact four: Penny Royal fucked about with our ship and with our minds. Shit, I could go on and on, but y’know . . . fact five: anyone who thinks Polity AIs are moral and always adhere to their own laws is a dickhead.”
Blite realized his mouth was hanging open, and closed it.
“Fact gazillion,” said Greer, pointing at the laminate.
Blite turned to see that the latest offer for the hardfield generator had disappeared and now the station AI had put a mandatory hold on their departure. He didn’t like that at all—not one bit.
“I didn’t like doing that, you know,” he said.
Greer and Brond gazed at him in puzzlement.
“Handing Trent Sobel over to them,” he explained. “I kinda liked the guy.”
They waited patiently and he continued: “I didn’t really get why Penny Royal saved his life and then just didn’t care about him. I told it where I was heading and it said it didn’t matter.” Something else now appeared in the laminate: a demand that they open their ship for inspection. He went on, “He was some part of Penny Royal’s plans. Maybe to test something, maybe to check some Polity response—it’s all a bit too deep for me. I told him that Penny Royal wasn’t finished with him and maybe gave him some hope that wasn’t real.”
“This isn’t over,” said Brond. He grimaced then reached up and tapped a finger against his aug. “Chont and Haber managed to take the runcible out of here, but Martina just told me that she and Ikbal have been arrested on the charge of smuggling proscribed technology out of Masada.”
Blite nodded, pleased that was the only illegality being mentioned. It demonstrated that the care he had taken in his many other operations had been well worth the effort. He guessed that his two crewmembers would be all right, since he now understood that they weren’t the real target. Maybe they would undergo some sort of examination, but they’d survive.
Brond reached across to the controls and tapped one to pull up an exterior cam view. “Yeah, I thought so.”
Blite recognized the four who had just walked out onto the floor of the dock—of course he did; he’d earlier watched them take Sobel away.
“You’re right,” he finally admitted. “I was stupid to think that the Polity would just let us walk away from this . . . Leven, where do you stand?”
The erstwhile Golem and now the ship mind of The Rose replied, “It stinks. Yeah, we aimed to smuggle out technology but we got Penny Royal instead. It’s just an excuse to hold us and get into this ship and take it apart.”
“So you’re not a moral Polity AI ready to bow to your masters?” Blite asked.
“Screw that,” said Leven. “If they have their way, we’ll all be visiting the Brockle, and I don’t want any part of that forensic AI psychopath. I’m part of this ship, remember, and w
as closer to Penny Royal than all of you.”
The Brockle?
Blite let that one go as he swung his chair round to the console. He opened general com to Par Avion and announced, “Okay, we’ve been patient with you, but now we’re leaving.”
A frame immediately opened in the laminate to show the Golem woman down on the dock, her dracoman and two human companions in view behind her. “You’re locked down and you’re not going anywhere, Captain. Yes, I know you can stick yourselves inside that spherical hardfield but you can’t stay there forever.”
“Not going anywhere?” Blite echoed.
“Be sensible, Captain,” she said.
“Leven,” said Blite. “Chew out those clamps.”
The frame showing the woman flickered, while in the view through the chain-glass screen the lights dimmed all along the docks just before everything out there shaded to amber and something crashed underneath the ship. The hardfield, briefly surrounding The Rose, severed through the dock floor and the clamps holding the ship in place. It flickered again and again. The position and radius of the hardfield—now indicated at the bottom of the laminate screen—changing each time. Each time came another crash and soon debris was flying through the air out there.
Good boy, thought Blite. Leven was carefully chopping apart everything below since they didn’t really want to take a large chunk of the dock with them. Steering thrusters now ignited the scene, The Rose beginning to rise and turn.
“I’m glad to see you cleared the dock,” said Blite, rubbing at his arms because he was suddenly cold. The entropic effects from deploying that hardfield were as evident here as they had been at Carapace City. “And I’m glad to see your three companions are wearing suits—they’ll be needing them.”
“Blite,” said the Golem woman, “you’re just making things worse for yourself.”
Blite nodded. “I guess you got some stats from Masada on the hardfield Penny Royal made for us, but I know for a fact that all your scanning hasn’t been able to penetrate the generator itself.” He eyed the space doors now coming into view and felt the surge as steering thrusters took The Rose towards them.
“Look, be reasonable,” she said. “No one wants to come down hard on you but the Polity needs data on Penny Royal. Surely you realize just how dangerous that thing is?”
“What you didn’t find out,” said Blite, ignoring her entreaty, “is something implicit in the other word used to describe such generators, which is ‘projector.’ It projects. Quite well, really.”
“Fuck,” said the woman, while the three behind her, understanding at once, closed up the shimmershield visors on their suits.
“The doors, Leven,” Blite instructed.
The spherical hardfield appeared far ahead now, just one hemisphere of it covering the space doors. It flickered a couple of times then went out. Shortly afterwards two semicircular chunks of the space doors were tumbling out into vacuum. The roar of escaping air took hold of their ship, hurling it out afterwards. Leven ignited the fusion drive, but it stuttered as the ship mind kept engaging the hardfield around them. Blite glimpsed the flashing of a particle beam as Par Avion fired on them, just trying to disable them, he hoped.
“How long until we jump?” Blite asked, weirdly calm.
“A few minutes,” Leven replied.
Those minutes dragged by, but then Blite felt the familiar twist as the U-space engine began to engage. However, something slammed against the ship before it went completely under, and reams of error messages appeared in the lower half of the laminate screen.
“Fuck, they got our fuser,” said Leven.
“Where to, Leven?” asked Blite, still settled in that calm.
“Where else?”
“It has to be the Graveyard,” said Brond. “There has to be an ending somehow so that the Polity will leave us alone. Penny Royal might have finished with us, but we haven’t finished with it.”
“Yeah, right,” said Greer sarcastically.
She understands, thought Blite. Greer understood that Brond, despite seeing through so much, had this last bit arse about face. Blite knew that the words he had spoken to Sobel could be equally applied to himself. Penny Royal had to have seen what was likely to happen here and still had an investment in it. Penny Royal wasn’t finished with them—he was sure of that now, right down to the bedrock of his very being.
SPEAR
Tracking the signal from Cvorn’s spy satellite, I ensured our first jump took us some light weeks from its reception point. This was close enough for us to pick up the light from that source during the period when Cvorn might well have been there—essentially looking into the past.
“It’s just a communications relay,” Flute announced. “Cvorn isn’t there.”
“How do you know Cvorn isn’t there?” Riss asked. “You’re looking into the past.”
“An educated guess,” Flute replied.
Before they could get into their usual bitching at each other, I said, “Even if it is a relay, Cvorn might well have set some sort of trap. Search for mines or any activity at all. We’ll just keep watching for a while.”
Perhaps this wasn’t the right move, but I still needed time with my own particular problem. During our journey here, I had struggled to distance myself from those other memories or to close out their emotional content, but to no avail. However, over the last day I’d made a breakthrough: I had found I could control them, catalogue them, file them and in doing so achieve at least a partial separation from them. Interestingly, I also found I could search them for death memories fitting specified parameters. This led me to a further discovery.
The only person in that vast repository who remembered dying in the bombing of Panarchia was me. This of course made sense. How could Penny Royal have recorded the minds of eight thousand soldiers during their fast and impersonal extinction when it had bombed them on Panarchia? I wondered then if, somehow, I was supposed to represent them all.
We watched the distant deep-space asteroid for a few days or, rather, Flute watched it. I wandered in and out of my laboratory, often stopping to stare at Penny Royal’s discarded spine in its glass cylinder. I considered the option of ejecting the thing into the nearest sun to free myself from its torment, but immediately felt a deep visceral terror and the absolute certainty that I was so bound to the thing that I would burn too. And could I really so easily sacrifice all those lives, and deaths? The spine contained thousands of the dead who, with present technology, Polity AIs could restore to life. In the end I decided to examine the thing further, but over two days procrastinated and failed to mount it in the clamps I’d set up on my central workbench. Finally, on the third day, I got up the courage to take it out of its cylinder, mount it in those clamps, and set to work.
“Nothing happening out there,” Flute announced with irritating regularity, always adding, “or nothing was happening out there two and a half months ago.”
I pondered the possibility of making short U-jumps on the way in and taking snapshot views across the two and a half month period. However, as the Lance U-jumped in and closed in on the present, this would generate a lot of noise not confined by relativity and would warn anyone near that relay of our approach. I therefore procrastinated further.
“Something happening,” Flute finally announced, “but not by that relay.”
“Yes,” Riss agreed, “something’s happening.”
“You boost through my systems?” asked Flute suspiciously.
“I do,” said Riss, “because that’s what they’re for.”
“Is someone going to fill me in?” I asked. I was gazing at a nanoscope image of the surface of Penny Royal’s spine and seeing densely folded crystalline structures that disappeared like fractals below the level of visibility. The nanoscope was highlighting structures and conjunctions of matter that had to be maintained by an inner power source and picotech manipulation. There were compounds there too that could only have been put together by nanotech field manipulati
on and simply should not have been able to maintain themselves. I felt that unravelling, and understanding, just the surface of this object lay beyond my present abilities, and that fact left me oddly relieved. After all, if I couldn’t understand it, there was no point in investigating further.
Riss turned towards me. “Flute regularly opens a U-space link to update from the Polity on astrogation data: warnings, news . . .”
“I’m aware of that,” I said, “I link to it through my aug. It’s how everyone in the Graveyard keeps up to date.”
“There is news concerning the Polity watch stations along the edge of the Graveyard,” said Flute before Riss could continue. “They have been moved to high alert and some assets have been moved into position. I have images.”
I considered dipping into all this myself via my aug, since for a while I hadn’t checked on the few updates available to me in the Graveyard, but decided against that. I had been staring at those images of the surface of the spine for long enough and now I wanted to get away from it and stop focusing through my aug. Standing up, I headed out of my laboratory to the bridge, Riss following me closely, and dumped myself in the chair there.