by Neal Aher
The little drone truly understood now, on an utterly visceral level, what it meant to be involved with paradigm-changing beings—with beings dangerous enough to bring down civilizations, or capable of raising them up.
CVORN
As he returned to his sanctum, Cvorn’s urge to mate was in abeyance and the other hormonal effects had dropped to a low ebb. Perhaps this was why other father-captains had not gone down this route. He had, after all, subjected himself to these effects by accident and not design. Now, with his mind clearer, he was able to think more about his aims beyond his activities onboard his ST dreadnought.
There was no doubt that Sverl had made a lengthy U-space jump, to give himself time to make repairs to his ship’s shielding. He must hope that he could thereby prevent Cvorn from finding out the destination of his next jump, so Cvorn had to consider how to react to that. Immediate attack was the obvious answer, to inflict further damage, but Sverl had to know that and was doubtless making preparations.
Arriving in the corridor leading to his sanctum, Cvorn found Vrom towing away a grav-sled loaded with leftovers. All that remained of the young male that Cvorn had cannibalized for parts was empty carapace, meticulously scraped clean. At some point Vrom must have returned to Cvorn’s sanctum because claws and legs were there too, all cracked open. Their contents were now either being digested in Vrom’s gut or sitting in his personal food store.
“Father,” said Vrom, halting immediately and cowering.
Cvorn just went straight past the first-child to his sanctum door, auging to its controls and opening it. “Bring me a reaverfish,” he said, pausing at the threshold, “a whole one.” And as he entered, he remembered how sex had always made him hungry and how, in those days, he could really pack in the meat.
Inside his sanctum, he approached the pit and saddle controls before the array of screens and settled himself in position but used his aug to operate the ship’s computer system. First, he needed to examine Sverl’s coordinates. Though he could use the ship’s processing to ascertain their point in realspace, that would take some time, and there was a quicker way. He connected through to the ship’s mind—one excised from a first-child over a hundred years ago.
“Give me realspace coordinates for our present jump,” he instructed.
“Calculating,” the mind replied.
There had been no problems of recognition with this mind—no questions about its loyalty to the previous father-captain of this dreadnought. The first-child had been thoroughly stripped down, all personality erased along with all memories of its previous life. All it did was communicate in a very basic way, and calculate U-engine parameters. All it knew was that it received orders from this sanctum, just like the war drones aboard.
After a moment, prador glyphs began scrolling diagonally across one of the screens. Cvorn studied them for a moment but again found using his aug was a better option. He loaded those coordinates, checked them against astrogation maps and studied the data available. Sverl was heading for a trinary system lying far above the galactic plane, beyond the Graveyard, the Kingdom and the Polity. Had he decided to run? Had he decided to relinquish all interest in those three realms?
It didn’t matter. All that mattered was whether this new system held something that might give Sverl a tactical advantage—some way of evading Cvorn while making the kind of repairs he could not make in U-space before he proceeded to his next jump. The stellar objects of this system were a white dwarf and a black dwarf whose mass equalled that of the red dwarf orbiting them. The paths of the two masses were eccentric, and there was no way of saying, without making extensive calculations, which orbited which. Worldlets and asteroids abounded, but with nothing large enough to retain much in the way of atmosphere. The whole system had acted as a billion-year-old asteroid grinder, the result of which was a dense ring of fine dust and gas around the white dwarf. This was shepherded by a series of planetoids, and all was perpetually stirred every three hundred years by a close pass of the red dwarf.
There, thought Cvorn.
It seemed quite likely that Sverl, whose capabilities Cvorn did not doubt, intended to surface into the real either in or close to that ring, and use it for cover. The density of the cloud would negate the effects of energy weapons at long range and would heat up railgun missiles, thus lessening their impact. The cloud would also tend to weaken the integrity of hardfields, but since Sverl would project them close to his ship, that effect was negligible. He probably wouldn’t be able to hide. And though he would have repaired much of the damage to his chameleonware, he wouldn’t have been able to make the repairs in U-space that would conceal the mass of his ship—especially when surrounded by gas and dust which would effect its usability. Therefore, entering that ring gave Sverl both advantages and disadvantages. However, it was still a good choice—probably the best choice Sverl could make.
Cvorn paused there as Vrom came in from his annex with a whole reaverfish on his back, its head gripped in his claws and tail dragging on the floor behind.
“Put it down over there—” Cvorn waved a claw “—and wait.”
His stomach gave a muffled grumble through his shell and his gullet grew wet with lubricating saliva. The distraction irritated him as he tried to concentrate on his response to Sverl’s likely actions. Through the ship’s system, he ordered an exchange of railgun loads. In one railgun, he ordered the removal of the iron-cored and ceramic armoured slugs presently lined up for first firings. Armoury robots would replace them with sensor probes, when they finished formatting them for the conditions in that ring; these were to be used mainly for mass detection. He ordered two other railguns to be loaded with the much harder to produce and rarer railgun slugs clad with exotic metal alloy. Frictional heating in the cloud would not weaken these. In fact, if fired at sufficient range, their internal iron cores would melt and build up massive pressure, thus increasing their energy upon impact with an exotic metal hull like Sverl’s.
Saliva now dripping out of his mouth and wetting his mandibles, Cvorn conceded defeat and turned from his screens. He walked over to the reaverfish and inspected it, remembering that he must check on the living examples of this species and release one in the mating pool so the female he had mated with could implant her eggs. Vrom moved forwards, the atomic shear flicking on across the edge of his claw, ready to cut up Cvorn’s dinner. Cvorn abruptly rebelled at the idea.
When, many years ago, his remaining two legs and claw had ceased to function properly and finally dropped off, he had taken the route of many father-captains before him. Disdaining the very idea of the new prosthetics, beyond grav-motors attached to his shell, he had his closest first-child chop up and feed his meals into his mandibles. However, when his mandibles abruptly stopped working, his condition necessitated him mincing his food in a macerating machine. This was attached below his mouth and tubed into his gullet—and it was this that made him finally change his mind. New prosthetic mandibles came first and, though they lacked sensitivity, he was delighted with them and soon had prosthetic claws installed too. But he continued to have his first-child cut up his food for him. Now, mobile on new legs, sexually active and with corresponding hormonal effects coursing through his system, Cvorn found he had suddenly lost his inclination for pampering.
“Leave,” he instructed.
Vrom’s pose was one of puzzlement but, when Cvorn swung his claw round, crashing it into the side of Vrom’s carapace, he quickly recovered and retreated. Cvorn now focused his full attention on the fish, reached down, closed a claw around its skull, and snipped. The skull crushed and split, squirting a pale green line of brains across the floor. Cvorn tore up the front end of its head, fed it into his mandibles and began crunching it up. Just minutes later, with a third of the fish gone and his initial ravenous hunger satisfied, he slowed his pace of ingestion and returned his thoughts to Sverl.
Cvorn had done everything he could with the railguns. Now the energy weapons. The particle cannons would never be mu
ch good in that dust ring unless they were used close up, but there were things he could do to increase their efficiency there. The particulate the weapons fired was usually aluminium dust, suspended in nitrogen in an electrostatic field. However, by adding heavy elements, tightening the magnetic tube and ramping up power input he could give the beam greater penetrating power. This wasn’t usually done in vacuum conflict because, beyond a certain point, power input outweighed ultimate yield.
As he considered what heavy elements to add from those available, Cvorn abruptly realized he could set things in motion now. He didn’t have to crouch before this sanctum’s control area to do this . . . with his aug he could do just about anything from any location. Pausing, with a dripping mass of a huge organ resembling a kidney part-way to his mouth, Cvorn understood just how rigid his thinking had been. He should have realized this long before now. He shoved the organ into his mandibles and munched it down, mentally initiating the required changes to the particle cannons.
Other weapons . . . There were few changes he could make to the various available nuclear and chemical bombs, missiles and mines. They were just too slow for what seemed likely to be a running battle over hundreds of thousands of miles. When he finally did get to use them, it would need to be after Sverl’s ship was permanently disabled. Then, peeling that ship open to expose Sverl’s sanctum would be a job for particle beams. As he reached the tail of the reaverfish he searched his mind for other preparations he could make, but all that was left was some tweaking of the spectra of his anti-munitions lasers, so there wouldn’t be so much scatter in the gas of that ring.
He was done: his ship was as ready as it could be—and he had eaten a whole reaverfish. Cvorn moved away from the sticky mess on the floor, now swarming with ship lice, and turned towards his controls. Quite some time remained before his final encounter with Sverl and he started to contemplate how he would fill it—perhaps, after digesting his meal, another visit to the mating pool? But just a moment later he felt intensely weary and his vision blurred for a moment.
What?
His body felt leaden and, as he took a couple of steps towards the controls, a hot tightness began to grow inside him. It was as if some creature was gathering all his organs together and squashing them into one spot. His coitus clamp rattled, then his irised anus abruptly opened, spattering the floor with bright yellow excrement. He moved away from the mess, further squirts of faeces punctuating his journey across the floor to the vacuum disposal port protruding from the wall. But by the time he settled over it, his anus had clamped shut again. This had never happened to him when he had been young. It had only happened in later years during illness, or during the changes he had undergone when he lost his limbs.
Cvorn moved off the port, but not too far away from it, because that tightness inside had turned into deep organ-crushing ache. He felt very tired and found himself losing the thread of his thoughts, his aug responding to his mind with irrelevant data and old memories. He looked around. What was happening with the weapons? What was he doing? Forgetting the disposal port, he walked over to his controls and peered at the array of hexagonal screens. They were scrolling all sorts of rubbish—also in response to his mental confusion. Suddenly a convulsion wracked him and his mandibles extended straight out. It hit him again, then again, saliva pouring in a stream from his gullet. Then a great fountain of half-digested reaverfish and green bile shot out between his mandibles, spattering all over the screens, chunks thudding to the floor and soupy fluids running into pit controls. Another convulsion hit, spraying more of the mess over those controls as Cvorn backed away. Next he lowered his front end to point his mouthparts at the floor, green bile dripping from his burning gullet. That tight pain was still inside but easing a little, and yellow excrement dripped from his half-open anus.
Cvorn was now able to think more clearly. He had been foolish. The hormones in the air and the recent mating had made him forget one important thing. He might have prosthetic limbs and new sexual organs, but everything else inside him was very old, including his digestive system.
THE BROCKLE
Earth Central had not entirely accepted the Brockle’s convoluted explanation for why it had not put Ikbal and Martina aboard the single-ship. And it had said that their agreement must end if the two were not on the next ship to leave. Meanwhile, the Brockle had learned some more about Penny Royal.
Because Amistad had removed the black AI’s eighth state of consciousness, the one that seemed responsible for its many ill deeds, Earth Central Security had forgiven Penny Royal’s past sins. Then when it retrieved that missing part of itself on Masada, ECS retracted the amnesty. But now the Polity AIs were still doing nothing, because of what Penny Royal might do, or might reveal. In addition, judging by everything the Brockle had gleaned from Ikbal and Martina, the black AI was again having trouble with that eighth state.
The similarities between Penny Royal and the Brockle only made the black AI more fascinating. Penny Royal had, in essence, experienced similar problems to the one that had resulted in the Brockle’s agreed confinement here. One of the Brockle’s units had gone astray during its last planetary assignment—an investigation that had ended up turning into a minor civil war. The unit had operated as a discrete being for some years and had actually strayed into territory that was not particularly legal. It had interrogated some innocent citizens and left them permanently damaged.
ECS had instructed the Brockle to shut down its rogue unit and bring all of itself in for forensic examination. The rogue had reacted by finishing its work. Through its interrogations, it had learned that a biotech aug network linked all the leading Polity separatists. It penetrated this and released a particularly nasty program into it that made those augs generate an organic virus. The virus lobotomized the separatists and eight hundred of them died when their autonomous nervous systems shut down. That action, it seemed, was just too much—even though these people had been criminals. ECS again ordered the Brockle to shut down the rogue and come in, but the Brockle now realized ECS was wary of enforcement. Positioned where it was on the world, the Brockle could cause many deaths. ECS then informed it that the innocents the rogue had interrogated had required some mindwork; its actions still might have been forgivable, were it not for one of its victims chewing out his own wrists and bleeding to death.
Antonio Sveeder . . .
He had been an innocent man—the only innocent man the Brockle had killed. However, debate continued about other deaths indirectly attributable to its actions on that world. The Brockle had decided on reabsorption because it wanted to know what had caused its unit to stray so far over the line. The answer had been a simple one: in its dealings with human separatist scum, the unit had come to regard all human beings as a problem. It had, in fact, formed an opinion not much different from that of many AIs. It felt human beings were what held the Polity back. They needed to upgrade, or rather the AIs needed to force them to do so—or dispense with them. On reabsorbing that unit, the Brockle concluded that it had not been far wrong. And, realizing the strength of its position, it negotiated. It would continue to work for the Polity but only in the forensic examination of the already proven guilty. It agreed to confinement only if it could protect itself. Thus, ECS provided the Tyburn, and the Brockle’s careful extraction from its world followed.
But all this was beside the point, which was that Penny Royal was demonstrably unstable, and that its instability was directly attributable to that portion of itself culpable of murder. It was having trouble trying to reintegrate this portion—but that it was trying at all meant that it was reintegrating its guilt too so the whole AI would be under sentence of death. There would be no debate. No consideration about what Penny Royal might do to redeem itself. But even that paled in comparison with recent news.
Time travel . . .
This put everything the Brockle had gleaned from Ikbal and Martina into the shade. They were dealing with a dangerously unstable, paradigm-changing AI that had n
ot only stolen some runcibles but had been fucking with temporal energies. It had been doing stuff that scared even the prador shitless. It had been playing with energy debts and entropic effects, which, if handled badly, could put out star systems or cause nova chain reactions. And what was still the reaction of Earth Central and the other Polity AIs? Hands off, leave alone, no action. Surely, this news alone should have overridden their fear.
The Brockle felt certain that during its years of confinement, some other paradigm must have changed. When had the AIs of the Polity become so forgiving? When had they become so timorous? It was time to move against Penny Royal—and hard. If they weren’t going to do it then someone else had to. And that someone was the Brockle.
The forensic AI stood up from its seat, mulling over what to do. Earth Central had instructed it to put Ikbal and Martina into a coma and leave them alone until the next single-ship picked them up. Their interrogation was over and the ship must return them to Par Avion. The Polity would drop all charges against them and offer the services of a mind-tech, after which they could go on their way. If the Brockle interfered with them again while they awaited the single-ship the watcher would know, and that would be the end of the confinement agreement.
The Tyburn had been useful as a prison hulk before and during the prador/human war, but had ceased to be of use a little while after. Prison was a waste of resources, and Polity AIs had decided it was better now to kill the killers and those hardened recidivists who refused mind-work, and impose fines and enforced mental alterations on those guilty of lesser crimes. However, in this time of plenty, crime wasn’t a big problem. The Tyburn had sat unused for decades until the difficult problem of the Brockle had arisen and it became the only prisoner. If the Brockle again breached its terms of confinement, which meant not doing precisely what ECS told it, it had no doubt that attack ships would arrive sporting U-jump missiles. Previously, the Brockle could fire up the Tyburn’s drive and depart if either side broke the agreement. Now, with the advances in Polity technology, Earth Central thought it had the advantage. Perhaps, despite the Brockle’s new detectors, it did.