by Neal Aher
“All right, I can’t see it,” I conceded, “though I do feel sure of it.” I shut off the screen image—I was getting nowhere. “Polity AIs would not suddenly decide to attack the Kingdom—there’s no need. Even during the little time since my resurrection, I can see that the prador aren’t even playing in the same league as the Polity any more and are never going to catch us with our pants round our ankles again. So the activity around the Polity watch stations is in response to the prador activity, not the other way round.”
“Yes,” said Riss.
“As you pointed out, the prador aren’t lining up enough ships for some full-scale attack on the Polity, so they are therefore reacting to something in the Graveyard.”
“Maybe there are forces we haven’t seen yet,” Riss suggested.
“Come on, even with what have to be limited contacts, you were able to discover what was going on in the gas cloud they call the Feeding Frenzy. I’d bet that by now the Polity has spy hardware inspecting every square inch of the Kingdom.”
“So perhaps the Polity has seen other forces.”
“Nope,” I shook my head, “what I’ve seen gathering at the Polity border isn’t enough of a response to some full-scale attack. It looks to me like a softly-softly approach—a measured equivalent response.”
“Maybe there are Polity forces we haven’t seen, then.”
“You do like your role as Devil’s Advocate, don’t you?”
“I’ll concede everything you say,” said Riss. “So what are the prador responding to that they haven’t felt the need to respond to since the war?”
“Well, Sverl and Cvorn are on the move and they haven’t been for the best part of a century . . .” I prompted.
“Not good enough,” said Riss. “If they head for either the Polity or the Kingdom, just the watch stations on either border would be able to take them both out in seconds. They wouldn’t need extra forces to handle only them. So, if your contention that they are the cause of the border activity is true, then we are missing something critical here.”
I thought long and hard about that, unable to dispel the notion that Riss was way ahead of me and simply letting me catch up.
“Okay,” I said, “Cvorn and Sverl weren’t a threat when they first went renegade, so one has to consider what has changed, and that brings us right back to Penny Royal. Sverl, at the black AI’s instigation, has acquired AI abilities—augmentation. Could it be that the Kingdom fears a prador with such abilities?”
“It could be,” said Riss, “but if so, in responding to their fear of Sverl they have elicited a response at the Polity border they should fear even more. If they then go in after Sverl they will elicit a response to that which will make the threat Sverl might pose—as an AI—seem quite petty.”
“Then there has to be something more involved than fear of AI, doesn’t there?”
Riss dipped her head in acknowledgement. “I would suggest that what Sverl represents, rather than what he can do, is the threat.”
I chewed that one over, slowly and carefully, suddenly finding I was enjoying the mental process, discovering that I was enjoying something for the first time since the events on Masada.
“To the prador, Sverl would be an abomination,” I tried.
“Yes.” Riss waited.
“Some factions might feel more strongly than others,” I said.
“Quite,” said Riss.
I closed my eyes and processed the whole matter further.
“Many prador disagreed with the decision to negotiate peace with the Polity,” I said.
“And such prador probably occupy those dreadnoughts gathering at the Graveyard’s border,” said Riss, obviously getting a little impatient now. “And they are not the kind to see a renegade AI as something distinct from the Polity itself.”
It all now fell neatly and horribly into place in my mind. The king of the prador could not allow Sverl to fall into the claws of those rebellious prador—they’d use him as a symbol to incite war. And to prevent that he was prepared to risk sending the King’s Guard into the Graveyard to eliminate Sverl as a threat entirely. It looked as if he was even prepared to risk breaking treaty agreements and ending up in a confrontation with the Polity directly. But could he really get away from bringing on the very war he would be trying to prevent?
“But what’s Cvorn’s involvement?” I asked.
“Cvorn,” said Riss, “disagreed with the new king to such an extent that he became a renegade. He is doubtless working with those prador at the border in some way. He, I would suggest, is trying to find some way to trap Sverl and present him as evidence to the prador at the border. Presumably, they would then demand action and present Sverl as proof—to the Prador Kingdom as a whole—of all their inchoate fears about the Polity. One of two things will follow: either his subjects will force the king to go to war against the Polity or they will rebel. Either way, things will get really messy.”
“You’ve known all this for some time,” I said.
“I have.”
“So why have you waited until now to acquaint me with it?”
“You’ve been busy.”
The snake drone had already demonstrated that she was aware of my connection with the spine, in fact had been the one to reveal it. She was also aware of the data transfers going on between me and that object, so had to be aware of how much they had increased ever since our departure from Masada.
“It doesn’t look like much,” I said, and reached out to rest my fingers on the surface of the spine. “But it contains all one needs to know of hell.”
I felt a surge through my fingers and the dead again clamouring to be heard. My chest tightened and I withdrew my touch.
“It’s better now,” said Riss. “You have more control.”
“I do.” I nodded.
“Then I have a final piece of data you can slip into place.” I looked up into Riss’s black eye and the drone continued, “The memories you sense are from the dead, but they are copies of the period around these deaths only. The data is not sufficient for these victims to be complete beings. They are edited, ciphers, enough for you to know them and to know Penny Royal’s guilt.”
“I don’t find that reassuring,” I said. “I had considered destroying this object but have a terror of what such an act will do to me, but that’s not all of it. I thought that if I destroyed this, I destroyed the dead—it ceases to be possible to restore them. Now you tell me that this is not so, and that they are gone forever without recompense.”
“Not so.” She shook her head. “Captain Blite docked at Par Avion some while ago and there claimed a reward for something Penny Royal had left with him.”
“His modified hardfield generator?”
“No, he claimed the standard reward offered for returning memplants to the Polity. He handed over thousands of them.” Riss paused for a second, then added, “Penny Royal’s victims.”
I stood just staring at Riss as the full import of her words struck me. All those lives and all those deaths, all that suffering could, in a way, be wiped from accounts. Penny Royal had taken a good shot at redemption but, really, it wasn’t enough. What about those the AI had killed but not recorded? What about the thousands who had suffered or died as a direct or indirect result of its actions?
“Panarchia?” I said.
“No, you’re the only one resurrected from there.”
Nevertheless, I felt a loosening in my chest, a weight coming off me. I turned to regard the spine again. Here was evidence; here was a collection of précis of those who had died. I had no reason to keep them any more and, if I could overcome my fear of what might happen to me when I did so, I could toss this object into a sun. I reached out to touch the thing again and felt its impact reduced, emasculated.
“We still have to find Penny Royal,” I affirmed, and turned away.
7
BLITE
Electronically enforced sleep wasn’t enough and Blite was tired and irritable as h
e headed out of his cabin. The Rose was approaching the border now, and Greer and Brond were awaiting him on the bridge. Of course, actually saying that they were near the realspace border when they were in U-space was supposedly nonsensical, since distance and relative positions were concepts that didn’t apply in that continuum—it was all about energy vectors, five-dimensional leveraging and other terms that could only be described mathematically. But all of that was gibberish to Blite. He stuck with the idea that realspace was the surface of a sea, and that diving below that surface into U-space he could simply travel faster relative to that surface. It was also true that hostiles could drop mines into that sea to force vessels like The Rose to the surface . . .
“I guess we’ll be finding out shortly if we can get through the border,” he said, settling himself in his chair and checking the instruments before him. “How long, Leven?”
“In your terms, just a few minutes,” the Golem ship mind replied.
“Okay,” said Blite. He wasn’t going to allow Leven to draw him into a discussion about the relevance of time in such situations. He sat back and fastened his safety straps. Glancing at Greer and Brond, he saw that they had similarly secured themselves.
“So if a Polity watch station knocks us out of U-space?” said Greer. “What then?”
“You just obeyed my orders,” he said.
“You think that’ll make any difference?”
“Maybe.”
“But we have our hardfield to defend us . . .” suggested Brond.
“Sure we do,” Blite replied with a sneer. “And I guess we can sit under it until our reactor runs out of fuel or we run out of air and food.”
Brond gave that a solemn nod. Really, if the nearest watch station or Polity vessel deployed a USER or some U-space mine or missile, it would fuck them. Polity forces on the border would haul them in and dispatch them back to Par Avion. Ostensibly they would be there to answer charges about criminal damage to the station but, at some point, a forensic AI would get its manipulators on them, digging for information on Penny Royal.
“Maybe we’ll be—” began Greer, whereupon the ship gave a deep shudder.
“Fuck,” said Blite.
A force took hold of them, and everything around Blite twisted out of ghostly perception into hard reality. The ship shook again and something screeched back in the engine room, protesting like a giant cicada scooted from its perch, then it emitted a sound Blite could only think of as a death rattle. The smell of burning permeated the air and error diagnostics filled the screen laminate with red text, scrolling fast. Blite reached out to hit a control and the shutters drew aside to reveal starlit space.
“The drive?” he asked, suddenly calm.
“Fried,” Leven replied. “It was functional but a little dodgy—that U-space mine just finished it off.”
So, even if they could get away from the mine’s disruptive effect using their steering thrusters, they wouldn’t be going much further. Now the diagnostics fled from the laminate, it rippled, and a ship appeared out there. The thing was huge—a gleaming lozenge of blue and silver metal studded with sensors, weapons and other paraphernalia. Blite gazed at some sort of protrusion studded with dishes. It was the shape and probably the size of the Eiffel Tower—just one of many such protrusions on the behemoth of a ship Blite recognized as one of the older-style interfaced dreadnoughts used by the Polity during the war.
“Captain Habitus of the Polity dreadnought Snarl would like to speak to us,” said Leven tiredly, now using steering thrusters to turn them and bring that dreadnought into sight through the main chain-glass screen.
Really, what was there to say?
“Okay, let’s hear him.”
A frame opened in the laminate to reveal a bald-headed corpse-coloured man. His eyes were white, with gridlines across them. He wore what looked like a half-helmet augmentation but one trailing optic cables and fluid pipes. Other pipes and optics ran down his neck into an armoured chest plate studded with high-tech protuberances.
“Snarl is baffled by your attempt to cross here,” said the interfaced captain.
“I thought AIs were intelligent,” said Blite.
“It was calculated to a ninety per cent probability that you would aim to cross here, whereupon the probability immediately dropped below ten per cent because surely you would have been aware we’d make that calculation.”
“Sometimes the coin falls on its edge,” another voice whispered.
“Something else just appeared out there,” said Leven. “Closing in fast.”
“You,” said Habitus, turning his head slightly as if gazing at some other screen with his blind eyes.
“Did I not deliver sufficient warning?” said that voice.
Something flashed out there, then a section of the dreadnought’s hull bulged and burst with a glaring explosion. Gaping, Blite watched that tower tumbling away into space along with other objects of a similar scale. Another explosion ensued, gouting fire from the same hole, then something long and black appeared off to one side of the big ship. In the laminate, Habitus had one hand clutched around the pipes leading into his skull, and his image had turned hazy as if the room he occupied had now filled with smoke.
“Final warning,” said the voice.
“We didn’t know,” said Habitus, his voice echoing as if two people were speaking from inside him slightly out of sync.
“They are mine,” said the implacable voice from that black ship out there.
Now it turned and rapidly accelerated towards The Rose, but as it came, it seemed to be splintering and opening out, rearranging its structure in some impossible manner, turning into a great black tubeworm head descending on them. Within seconds, it slammed into Blite’s ship, and though he was glad he had put his safety straps on, for the impact threatened to tear his chair from the floor, he dreaded what damage it had done to his ship. As he recovered, rubbing at his strained neck and hoping this pain would not be the last thing he felt, he saw that the view through the chain-glass screen was of a dark crystalline mass, shifting as if at the turning of some kaleidoscope. Acceleration followed, shoving him hard down into his seat, followed by just a gentle twist and feeling of wrongness indicating that they had entered U-space.
“I thought you were done with us,” said Blite.
“But you are not done with me, are you Captain?” Penny Royal replied.
TRENT
The ancient expression “out of the frying pan and into the fire” was far too simple, Trent felt, to describe his circumstances over the last year. He’d been safe enough as Isobel Satomi’s lieutenant but that had changed as she made her transformation into a hooder. He’d ended up on a ship with the creature she became, as she tried to stop herself from eating him. The mafia boss on the Rock Pool had then captured and tortured him, and subsequently he’d been stuck aboard Isobel’s ship as she conducted her doomed assault on Masada. He’d been in the wreckage of that ship as it fell from orbit, then landed in the grasp of a forensic AI—an AI that had, in fact, taken him apart. He shuddered.
He had felt a momentary breath of freedom in this single-ship, quickly followed by him finding a Penny Royal Golem aboard with him. And now, this ship was settling in some bay aboard a prador dreadnought. “Shit happens” was another old expression that seemed appropriate, though hardly strong enough.
“This prador, Sverl, wants Isobel,” he said. “So why am I here?”
He had been afraid to ask this question because he wasn’t sure he wanted to know the answer. He’d learned, during the short journey to this dreadnought, that Penny Royal had handed over control of this Golem to this Father-Captain Sverl. Apparently, the Golem, who demanded to be called “Mr Grey,” was now free but wanted something from Sverl, for which the payment was the earring in Trent’s pocket. He suspected he was just something to sweeten the present deal—perhaps a gift for Sverl, perhaps to give the prador a taste of the old times. He felt a renewed sense of dread.
“I don
’t know,” said Mr Grey, “but no pieces in the game should be neglected.”
The ship settled with a thump, hydraulics whined, and a docking mechanism gave a final shudder as if, like dying prey, it had finally given up. Grey waved one skeletal hand towards the rear of the cockpit but Trent remained in his seat.
“I’ll just wait here,” he said.
Grey held out that hand towards him. “Then give me Isobel.”
Trent put his hand in his pocket and closed it round the purple sapphire. The connection to his sister was still there for him. The original gem had been shattered, then reassembled to hold everything Isobel Satomi had been. Strangely, this hadn’t weakened his connection to the gem, but had tied it even closer to him. He couldn’t just hand it over. He stood up.
“Okay, let’s go.”
In reality he’d had no control over his fate since before the Rock Pool. He should have taken his leave of Satomi before she agreed to take Thorvald Spear to the Polity destroyer he’d been hunting. Then again, what would he have done? He would probably have ended up as the muscle for some other Graveyard crime lord. He wouldn’t have been who he was now . . .
“Snickety snick, double quick,” said Grey, then reached down and with one wrench pulled the optic cables from his chest. He staggered for just a moment, shook his head, then began closing up his ribs as he turned to leave the cockpit.
The door into the ship’s small hold was obviously already open, because a smell as of a breeze wafting across the decaying detritus of a tide line reached Trent’s nostrils as he followed. Grey reached that door and went down the ramp ahead of him, metal clattering on metal. Trent stepped onto the head of the ramp and looked around. This bay was huge and much lighter than he had expected the interior of a prador ship to be. He had anticipated dank organic gloom filled with vicious hissings, but here he saw little to distinguish the place from the hold of some massive Polity ship or space station . . . except for him.