by Neal Aher
“Let’s go,” he said, gesturing to the second-child.
The creature snipped its claws then clattered something. Bsorol whipped round to face it, whacked it on the back again and clattered a reply. It cringed, bubbled, then turned away to head towards the exit from Quadrant Four. As he followed, Trent imagined the content of that conversation. The second-child had probably sought some confirmation that these were humans it couldn’t eat and Bsorol had clarified the matter.
“Like a lot of people in Carapace City, I always watched the news feeds about new arrivals,” said Sepia as they stepped out into one of the ship’s corridors. “If available, those feeds presented potted biographies. You were Isobel Satomi’s most trusted lieutenant, a dangerous man, a killer. What happened?”
Trent felt himself go cold. It was almost as if she was keying into his earlier thoughts.
“Penny Royal,” he replied briefly.
“What?”
“There’s a possibility that it wasn’t the black AI, though,” he said contemplatively. “I was handed over to the Polity and then into the tender care of a forensic AI.” Trent blinked—memories of a bloody maelstrom sunk deep in his mind surfacing for a moment. “It could have been the Brockle, the forensic AI, that changed me. But I’m sure it happened before then. I’m sure it was Penny Royal that tampered with my mind.”
“Uh . . . forensic AI . . . you’re an outlaw who was sentenced to death by the Polity long ago. How the hell did you get away?”
He glanced at her. “It just released me. It’s complicated, but I’m sure part of the reason it did so is because of what Penny Royal did to me. I’m no longer the threat I was.”
“That’s not enough—death sentences are supposed to be immutable.”
“There was some pressure as well.” He shrugged. “Politics.”
She nodded acceptance of that. She was a citizen of the Graveyard and so, unlike most Polity citizens, did not trust in the unalterable justice of the AIs. Those who had lived outside the Polity for any length of time began to see the rust under the paintwork and soon understood that things were never as neat and definitive as often portrayed in that realm.
“So what did Penny Royal do?”
“It gave me empathy, or a conscience, or both, though I would say that one is a product of the other,” Trent replied. “I feel the pain I cause.”
They walked on in silence behind the second-child, then Sepia asked, “Do you regret the change?”
Trent was about to reply that yes, he certainly did, but then reconsidered. Sure, possessing such empathy limited his ability to act. It was painful, traumatic, but only because he functioned in a world where pain and trauma were common. However, he now felt larger, more connected and open to ways of thinking that hadn’t been within his compass before. When he reflected on how he used to be, he saw a limited man, a cipher. The traumas of his early life and the violence of it thereafter had severed and cauterized his emotions and thought processes. He also saw a man who could never have felt the way he now felt about Reece, but whether that was a good thing, he wasn’t sure.
“I don’t know,” was all he would concede.
Was that really what Penny Royal had done? He labelled the change he had undergone as the addition of empathy and conscience, but maybe the black AI had given him nothing at all. Maybe Penny Royal had merely decalcified his brain, scraped the crap off all those functions that had shut down and set them running again. Perhaps conscience and empathy had been petrified and, because they were working again after so long, they felt very raw.
The second-child finally arrived at a wide diagonally divided door, inserted a claw into a pit control beside it for a moment, then stepped back. The door opened into a massive airlock with an identical door at the other end. The prador gestured them inside.
Sepia led the way in, saying, “I notice only the first-children have translators.”
Trent followed her in, a short while later the door rumbling closed behind him. “Maybe it’s better we don’t understand what the second-children say about us.”
“Maybe it’s better they don’t understand what we say about them,” said Sepia. “Seems to me they’re a little lacking in self-control.” She raised her voice with the last few words as the doors opening ahead of them released a cacophony.
Spear’s destroyer sat in the huge hold beyond. Welding spatters were spraying the floor, from robots clustered over it like wasps over a rotting banana. A jointed arm towards its rear end was extending what looked like a complete fusion drive. Second-children were scurrying here and there. Some wore exoskeletal worksuits bristling with tools, others were loaded down with materials. It took a second for Trent to realize what was odd about the picture, then he noted various objects just hanging in the air or scribing straight courses between workers. He understood that grav was off in that area.
While studying the vessel, Trent remembered his first sight of it from the Moray Firth. He and Gabriel had speculated on whether Isobel would give either of them the captaincy of it, after she inevitably ordered them to murder Spear. That was before Spear used a prion weapon to paralyse them and head away with this ship. That was also before Isobel, while transforming into a hooder, had eaten Gabriel.
The second-child who had guided them here clattered something and scuttled off. Trent watched it go, then turned back to the scene before them.
“What can you tell me about him?” Sepia asked.
Trent didn’t need to ask who the “him” might be. “Ex-bio-espionage agent during the war. Resurrected only recently after mouldering in a memplant for a hundred years, but still fucking dangerous. He played Isobel easily and took that ship right out from under her.” Trent nodded towards the Polity destroyer. “He could have killed her and me, but didn’t.” He glanced at Sepia. “And you’ve already seen how smart he is.”
“I’ve seen,” she said.
“So what do you think of him?”
“He looks at me as if he wants to eat me,” she said.
“Surely you’re used to that?”
“Yes, but I get the impression that there might be screaming and blood involved when it’s one of them doing the looking.” She stabbed a thumb behind in the direction the second-child had taken.
“I guess he might seem a little intense,” said Trent.
“Fucking terrifying might be a better description.”
“Enough to drive you away?”
“Definitely not,” she replied. “Shall we go in?”
As they stepped into the hold, a voice called, “This way!”
The snake drone Riss rose out of a floating pile of debris, hovering in mid-air like some weird exclamation mark, then nosed out and writhed towards the destroyer. Her movements were just like a snake, only one that had found invisible ground level, a yard above the floor.
“What’s this about, Riss?” Trent asked, now trying to dismiss the previous conversation from his mind. He was uncomfortable with it and with the fact that he had wanted to continue, to ask Sepia about Reece. It was the kind of exchange he would never have had before—all that relationship stuff. The full extent of his relationships up until the events on Masada had usually involved a secured payment beforehand.
“It’s about our best chance of survival,” the drone replied.
Trent moved to the edge of the hold and from there propelled himself to the mass of cables. He landed heavily, as it had been a while since he had moved about in zero gravity. Sepia sailed past him after the drone, neatly catching the edge of the airlock it had entered, flipping over and coming down on her feet. Trent followed, landed a bit better this time and propelled himself inside after her—then crashed down on his shoulder.
“Grav’s on in here,” she observed.
“No shit,” he replied, struggling to his feet.
They found Spear on a bridge lined with screen fabric displaying various scenes from the work ongoing all around.
“They’re zero freezing the shell p
eople,” said Trent.
Spear gazed at him for a moment, then at Sepia, but the charge between them seemed to have waned a little. He then pointed up at one of the screen frames, which showed the open hold of the destroyer. “We’ll put them in insulated caskets—one hundred per cent heat sealed—and pack them in there. They won’t take up all the room, but that’s because not one of them is actually a whole human being. It’s good that they aren’t, otherwise we wouldn’t have room for Sverl’s second-children.”
“What?” was all Trent could manage.
“We’re tearing out the human quarters now to make room for Sverl, Bsorol and Bsectil—plus Sverl’s war drones. And we should be able to fit other encased child-minds into the weapons cache.”
Riss issued a contemptuous snort at this.
“We’re leaving?” asked Sepia.
Spear glanced at the drone first, obviously annoyed at its attitude, then looked at Sepia. “Perhaps the best way I can put it is that there is a one-in-five chance that we will have to if we want to stay alive.”
“Back up a bit there, will you, and explain?” said Trent tiredly.
“Did you understand what happened last time we surfaced into the real?” Spear asked.
“No,” Trent replied.
He did know that Cvorn had attacked them. He had found himself hanging onto a wall pit control while the ship shuddered around him and grav fluctuated. And he did see part of the upper wall of Quadrant Four bulge and break open like a ripe boil, to spew white-hot gases high above. This was apparently from a shield projector melt-down. But he knew that wasn’t what Spear was getting at.
“Let me explain,” said Spear.
Trent listened and pondered why, once again, frying pans and fires seemed to be part of his destiny.
SVERL
Sverl perambulated about inside his sanctum, inspecting terrariums, aquariums, his little glasshouse and some freestanding plants. He studied some of the other projects he had used to occupy his time ever since the war. He eyed a process for cold-growing AI crystal, much as it grew inside him, and another to isolate his original genetic tissue from the mishmash he now contained. The idea had been that one day he might even be able to grow himself a new prador body. He checked on an attempt to isolate the human genetic tissue within him and identify it by running searches through the massive collections of genomic files in the Polity. As he moved on to peer at the strewn-out parts of a disassembled piece of U-space drive, he realized he wasn’t contemplating what to work on next, but saying goodbye.
For many reasons Riss’s idea was a good one. Cvorn would finally trace them to Factory Station Room 101 and might arrive before they had completed their business there—whatever that might be. But whatever happened, his dreadnought would not be able to survive another encounter with Cvorn. It was already severely damaged, low on munitions and low on stored energy. He needed a method of escape but he also needed a way of actually getting aboard the Factory Station. Riss’s idea that they use Spear’s destroyer to access it, because the automated defences should not react to it, solved both these problems. What would happen thereafter, he had no idea. But Penny Royal was due here, so they could finally confront the black AI. That was all he needed to know.
Not bothering to return to his prador controls—he performed most tasks mentally now—he studied how things were progressing with Spear’s destroyer. His robots and children had almost repaired it and the only thing it lacked was a mind that could drop it into U-space. They wouldn’t need that for the short trip from this dreadnought to Room 101. And, anyway, it was a position Sverl himself could occupy if Flute did not return from his decoy mission. The shell people, all zero frozen and secured in their containers, were now on their way down to the ship. Bsorol and Bsectil were already there, installing Sverl’s war drones and other mind cases in the weapons cache. The remaining second-children were on their way too. All that remained was for Sverl to head over, but still he was hesitant. Now was the time for a course he had been avoiding. He had admitted to himself that his ship, complete and unguarded, was vulnerable. Cvorn would annihilate it as it was, so now it was time for drastic measures to try to save at least some of what he had here.
Like all prador dreadnoughts, Sverl’s ship, when constructed, was an indivisible chunk of technology. Wrapped around its father-captain like layers of armour, it either survived or died with him. However, Sverl had noted the utility of the idea used in some wartime Polity ships of breaking them into a series of components and firing them off on different courses. This option might render a ship unusable, but Polity forces could retrieve surviving components to reassemble them into a whole ship, or to serve as parts of another one. Sverl had taken the idea and applied it to his own dreadnought. The first problem he had faced was that the major complete component was the exotic metal hull wrapped around the rest. It had been necessary to cut it, which made it weaker—a weakness that was part of his problems now with Cvorn. He had then made lines of division, liberally scattered with planar explosives, shear fields, hardfields and rocket motors to provide motive power. He had distributed power sources and other items between them and thus, in the end, Sverl had indeed divided his ship into its eight quadrants. They all contained living quarters, holds, supplies, weapons and other essential items. Two respectively contained the fusion engines and the U-space drive, while the latter also contained Sverl’s sanctum.
Sverl set into motion the automated preparations for division, diverting energy to distributed power storage and lining up command sequences in the system. It took just a moment for the ship to be ready, since it needed little physical preparation—its main task being to close and seal bulkhead doors. Shortly after it surfaced from U-space, the planar explosives and shear fields would be ready to sever physical connections. The hardfields would be ready to throw the quadrants apart, the rockets would send them on courses about the numerous astronomical objects in Room 101’s system.
That’s it, then . . .
Sverl turned and headed to his sanctum door. As the two halves rolled back into the wall he paused, realizing that, though he had often opened and closed these doors to allow others to enter and leave, it had been many years since he himself had stepped beyond them. He stood there, staring into the corridor beyond, analysing his reaction in intricate detail. Then he understood that such an analysis wasn’t required: he was just a tad agoraphobic and frightened.
“I need to get out more,” he said, using human words, and headed out into the corridor.
Within a few minutes, he reached a wide dropshaft—the kind of transport not usually found aboard a prador vessel—programming his route ahead. Irised gravity fields dragged him through his ship, finally depositing him through a ceiling hatch in a grav-plated corridor. He landed with a heavy thump and behind he heard shrieks and panicked bubbling, and turned to eye a couple of second-children he had just avoided crushing. They backed away from him in confusion then, as his pheromonal output reached them in all its intensity, they paused.
“Father?” one of them clattered.
“Of course,” he clattered back.
All his children had known about the changes he had been undergoing, but few of them had actually seen him. Certainly, few of his second-children had come face-to-face with him in decades.
“Shall we proceed?” he asked, waving a claw ahead.
Hugging close to the wall, they scuttled past him, heading on towards the hold containing Spear’s destroyer. He sighed to himself and followed, stepping through after them into organized chaos.
The shell people were now arriving—within hundreds of coffin-sized caskets loaded on a series of grav-sleds now the grav was back on in here. If each of these caskets had only been capable of holding one shell person, then there would not have been near enough of them, nor enough space in the destroyer for them. However, some of these contained as many as three or four people, frozen together and interlocked like a meat supply. All of them were filled with special a
nti-freezes and cell preservers, so that even at a temperature just ten degrees above absolute zero they would become pliable. They could then be separated and placed individually into whatever medium or device would be required for their revivification.
Sverl eyed this scene and peered closely at the small gathering of humans towards the nose of the ship. They in turn were watching Bsorol and Bsectil guiding war drones through a hatch into the weapons cache. He then observed the two second-children with him head over to load caskets. Only once those were aboard could the second-children obey their orders and climb in afterwards. They would pack themselves as tightly as the human amputees, along with, of course, their wide selection of weapons and tools. He moved out, and at once all activity slowed and all eyes, whether set in skulls, visual turrets or up on stalks, turned towards him. He felt suddenly nervous and found himself running a program to control his limbs rather than just using his prador ganglion. Next, slightly irritated, he sent an order directly to Bsorol’s aug and the first-child clattered loudly, putting his prador words through the hold PA. As work recommenced, Sverl walked over to his first-children and the humans.
Here stood Spear, Trent, the catadapt Sepia and the mind-tech Rider Cole. These were all the conscious humans now aboard, for Taiken’s wife had chosen to take herself and her two children through the zero freezer. Sverl had noted Trent Sobel’s bafflement at this and supposed that his new empathy had its limitations. The catadapt and the mind-tech, who had never seen Sverl before, were gaping at him.
“Fucking hell,” said Sepia.
Sverl ignored her, instead coming to stand before Spear.
“My place is ready?” he said, speaking human words. The question wasn’t strictly necessary, because he was continually viewing the changing interior of the ship in one portion of his AI mind.
“It’s an extended annex behind the bridge,” said Spear. “You obviously won’t need to see the screen fabric.”