by Neal Aher
“I’m not really seeing any upsides for me just yet,” Spear observed.
“There’s something decidedly odd about these King’s Guards,” he shot at Riss. “Even in translation I’ve never heard of prador being so reasonable . . . well, until Sverl . . .”
“A curious definition of reasonable,” said Riss, but she was more interested in studying the signal the Lance was receiving. Room 101 wasn’t even blocking it, so she recorded the channel and coding. It might come in handy.
“The upside is that if you hand Sverl over you get to live,” said the admiral. “Hiding away in that station is a sure way to die.”
The ship shuddered; something was getting through into the construction bay and causing an explosion that tore free a crane almost a mile high from its mountings. Seemingly in concert with this, the signal mutated to carry an aug frequency. Riss observed Spear sorting it and listened in to what the prador on the screen wanted to pass on in secret.
“I am not yet using all my armaments. You have one of your solstan days. You either hand Sverl over, or you give me evidence that Sverl has met with an accident. Your choices and your time are limited, Thorvald Spear.”
That was smart, thought Riss, and agreed somewhat with Spear’s earlier observation. The usual prador archetype would be hitting them with everything available, not talking. This Guard had tried that initially, but now they were inside station defences, it knew it could not take them out without losses so was negotiating.
“You should have put Sverl in a hold,” Riss said to Spear. “You could have ejected him out into vacuum the moment they appeared.”
“And thus the King’s Guard would have no quarrel with me?”
“Yeah, thusly, motherfucker.”
“I see, so Penny Royal managed to empty you of your purpose for existence but neglected to remove the hatred that was one of its drivers?”
“Our best course would be to hand Sverl over, or at least put some distance between us and him when they fry him.”
“Sverl is an ally, Riss,” said Spear.
“Let me kill him,” said the drone.
“You already know my answer to that,” Spear replied.
Stupid human, Riss thought, and began to pay some serious attention to the restraining collar with which Sverl had burdened her.
They were deep into the construction hold now and the ship shuddered in the grip of numerous hardfields. The frame showing the prador admiral blanked out, but didn’t disappear as would be usual. Riss did some checking and found that though the prador had cut the com, something else, from within the station, had inserted itself in that channel.
As the destroyer reached the wall of the hold, clangs reverberated throughout as clamps locked into place. Riss rose up off the floor, hovering, and gazed back towards the rear annex. Sverl had surprisingly little to say now. Perhaps he was considering his options. Meanwhile, Riss was considering one of her own . . .
With the ship safely docked, Spear unstrapped himself, stood and stepped out of the horseshoe console. “Sverl?” he enquired, looking back into the rear annex.
After a long pause Sverl replied, “I trust that Penny Royal has a purpose beyond the destruction of me and this station. I trust that Penny Royal has not lured me here just to . . . solve me.”
“That seems to be a high degree of trust,” said Spear. “That might have been exactly Penny Royal’s intention.”
The ship shuddered again—something else hitting it out there as if to remind them of their danger.
“I am remaining here on this station. You may leave.”
“And I must trust that those ships out there won’t destroy me and my ship out of hand?” said Spear, his tone completely lacking in nuance. He turned to look at the others on the bridge. “I welcome your input.”
“I think we’ve got a problem,” said Sepia, flicking a glance towards the rear annex. “A heavily armed one.”
“Trent?”
“Why is Sverl a threat to the Kingdom?”
“Because he is part human and AI and his transformation can be used as an example of Polity perfidy to foment rebellion.”
“I wonder if the King’s Guard would want to leave any witnesses to that, then.”
There it was, Riss felt. Nothing personal, Sverl, but our best chances of surviving are if we remain here and you don’t survive. The Guard out there know that, too.
“I will make it simple for you. You can go or you can stay,” said Sverl. “I will not leave you any other . . . options.”
Had Sverl somehow heard the aug message Spear had received, Riss wondered.
“Sverl, I don’t quite—” Spear began, just a second before explosive decompression picked him up and dragged him towards the rear annex, and the glare of the hypergiant entered like a thermite blast.
Riss reacted at once, hurling herself towards the arch between annex and bridge and driving her ovipositor deep into the wall. As Spear came within reach, she coiled tightly around him and held him in place. The other humans were still strapped in, so were safe for the moment. But the internal temperature was already rising and some objects were beginning to spill smoke. Still holding tightly to Spear, Riss saw that the entry hatch made for Sverl and his two first-children was gone. She didn’t need to analyse the burns around it to know they had blown it. Sverl was outside the ship, a meniscus extruded by his prosthetics protecting his soft bulky body from vacuum, and darkening to block the intense light. Gripping him on each side, his two first-children had ignited thrusters mounted in their armour to take him away. Checking further through the ship’s systems, Riss saw that, yes, the hold space doors were open and the second-children were spilling out and firing up the thrusters in their armour to take them after their father-captain. And the weapons cache was open too—releasing Sverl’s remaining war drones.
Riss desperately wanted to go after Sverl and end this now, but if she let go of Spear the man would die. The air blast waned—they were now in complete vacuum. Just minutes remained now before it killed Spear.
“Riss,” said Spear via his aug, “you can let me go now.”
Riss focused on him fully, and now saw the segmented hood of a space suit up over his skull and his visor closed and polarized. How had she forgotten that the man was wearing a space suit? She knew why. She wasn’t thinking straight, hadn’t been thinking straight for the best part of a century.
Riss uncoiled from the man and flung herself to the lip of the blown hatch to see Sverl and his children heading away. Stay or go? Riss hesitated for just a second, then used her internal grav to fling herself from the ship and in towards the wall of the construction bay. A particle beam scored past, and a Gatling cannon flashed from the prador group. That fucker Bsorol. As the drone propelled herself to cover, she glimpsed the prador heading into the mouth of a tunnel in the construction bay wall. Riss waited until the last of them went out of sight, rose up, then had to duck the swipe of a complex tool grab. The construction robot was small compared to other things out here, but still much larger than Riss. It tried to grab her again, but Riss squirmed away through the air. She grav-planed to the hold wall, engaged the remora function in her skin and squirmed down that. A crash shook the surface underneath her and Riss looked up to see the construction robot tumbling through vacuum, another robot wrapped around it and apparently trying to tear it apart. Beyond it the head of a massive constructor tentacle was open like a giant organic star and multi-limbed construction robots were propelling themselves from open ‘structor pods. Other pods were issuing shearfield blades and ripper arms.
The fuck?
Elsewhere other robots were grappling with each other too. Apparently, their arrival here had started some sort of conflict. There seemed to be no coherence and no cooperation out here at all. Riss moved on, focused on her target, then paused, something else grabbing her attention.
Uh?
She could see the Penny Royal Golem, John Grey, crouching by the nose of the Lance. He had t
o be under Sverl’s control, but what was he waiting there for? However, even as she watched, Grey suddenly moved out and headed off, streaking across the wall of the construction bay and disappearing into a small hatch.
Sverl. Must concentrate on Sverl.
As she entered the mouth of the tunnel, the prador were no longer in sight. But the flashing of weapons indicated their position around a curve far ahead. However, Riss knew that she must rid herself of this collar if she was to get to her prey. She gave chase, coming up behind other pursuers—more construction robots like the one earlier. Each resembled a number of segments chopped out of a steel centipede, with their water-scorpion limbs to the fore. Creeping up on the last one, she saw her opportunity. These things weren’t weapons, but they certainly carried a lot of hardware, including diamond saws and atomic shears . . .
18
SPEAR
The other three had all prepared themselves, following the descent of the ship’s interior into vacuum. Cole and Sepia had managed to fold up the hoods and flexible visors of the survival suits they had worn under their clothing, while Trent was wearing a suit similar to my own that had reacted to the pressure drop. Working through my ship’s system, I closed up the weapons cache hatch and the hold space doors. And as I did this I noticed perpetual interference on the virtual level. Attempts to penetrate my ship’s computing were constant, but weak and incoherent. When I tried to analyse these I found external programs fighting one other, and in fact weakening each other. Further analysis revealed that they were old news—the kind of viral attack used during the war. Even at full strength, they wouldn’t have been good enough to get past the system’s standard informational warfare defences—let alone crack the codes that gave me control of both system and ship.
The blown hatch was more problematic, what with the potentially dangerous level of light penetrating. Luckily, we weren’t in the full glare of the hypergiant, or we would have been getting a lot more than just singed. I would have liked the hatch back, but it was now tumbling away towards one of those tentacle-headed constructor monstrosities. And, even as I watched, one tentacle fielded it, while pods at the ends of other tentacles spilled numerous scorpion-format robots all over it. However, I did still have a hardfield generator available, which would darken to the right degree. I focused it in the gap, but not quickly enough.
Just moments before the field came on, a closer tentacle thrust its pod end inside. I swiftly altered the programming of the projector, so that the field only conformed to the frame of the hatch. With a flash of discharging energy, it sheered straight through the tentacle, but even this was too late. While the severed limb thrashed, the pod at its end divided horizontally and its back end hinged open. Packed inside was something that looked like a complex technological chrysalis—all folded limbs and tubes, polished metal and gleaming lights. The severed tentacle bucked again, spilling this thing, and as it rolled out it began unfolding above the deck. There it thumped down and engaged two long-toed gecko feet.
At first it just seemed a metallic lump, fashioned somewhat organically. Then, as my visor adjusted to the light drop, it rose up. It hunched, twinned sets of arms opening out, these terminating in complex tool hands—with the glimmer of shear fields along curved fingers. It trudged through into the bridge, noticeably collapsing down a little as it came over the grav-plates, then straightening up again. Its head, a squid-like contraption with three glowing blue eyes, had been swinging from side to side until that moment. Then it focused on me, ribbed metal tentacles furling and unfurling. The presence of this machine confirmed that something was decidedly wrong here, supposing I actually needed any confirmation. On top of the weird growths out there and the barely understandable communications I had been receiving, this thing did not look familiar at all. I could remember the kind of robots usually found aboard wartime factory stations and this thing wasn’t one of them. Sure, during the war there had been an inclination to create robots with a more organic look—like Riss—but aboard stations they had always been more utilitarian.
I glanced across at the other three, who were quickly unstrapping themselves. The only one armed was Sepia. And, while I wondered how effective her pulse-gun and laser carbine could be, I wished she did not have them. They might make her more of a target. I backed away, moving over to one wall to reach out carefully and touch a control to release a series of clamps. Penny Royal’s spine fell into my hand, memories surging in my hindbrain like a stormy sea and an utter sense of connection establishing itself. An icon flashed in my visor to tell me atmospheric pressure was up again, and the visor and segmented helmet closed back down into my suit’s neck ring. In the air, I now smelled hot metal and something caustic, like the mist off an acid bath. Next, Trent, Sepia and Cole were on their feet, Sepia bringing her laser carbine up to her shoulder. Part of me wanted to tell her to lower it, yet another, larger part, was assessing how useful she would be.
“I am seizing control of this ship,” said a voice. “Drop your weapons and provide access codes.”
I glanced up at the frame still open in the screen fabric—now displaying a standard com icon of a silver human head. The speaker was using the channel the prador had used, but was clearly much closer. However, the communication wasn’t coming from the unwelcome new robot we’d acquired.
“Who are you?” I asked.
“Construction bay AI designation E676.”
I found myself probing back along the signal, not sure how I was doing this, and glimpsed a mind and then a wider view. E676 was physically transferring itself to a spiderbot carrier. I now knew exactly what was happening—why robots were swarming and fighting each other out there, why the constant attempts to take over my ship’s system. The AIs here had heard what the King’s Guard had said to me. They wanted off this station before he carried out his threat. The robots wanted my ship. The one talking had been just that little bit faster than the rest.
“Give me your access codes,” it demanded again.
“Go fuck yourself,” I replied succinctly.
The robot reacted.
It leapt, one of its tentacles stabbing out and whipping across. It hit Sepia, picking her up and smashing her into the wall. It then caught Cole and sent him spinning as it came down on the bridge’s horseshoe console. It was horribly fast, and in response my time sense changed. My thinking ramped up in a synergetic curve between my aug and my mind. Rage arose in me too, because it had hit Sepia and she might be dead. I saw Trent diving, going into a neat roll that put him underneath the sweep of another tentacle as he snatched up the carbine. On another level, the memory horde, residing in the object I clutched, responded with a tsunami of data. It drained into my mind and my aug, and an instant later became firm knowledge. Some of the people there had been robot designers, programmers and maintenance technicians. From their knowledge, I quickly understood that this thing was an amalgam of two small construction robots, while its upper squidlike head was in fact a type of war drone.
“Hey!” I shouted, moving now with what I felt to be glacial slowness, and the thing began to swing its head back towards me. By now Trent was up in a squat, aiming and firing, burning out its eyes and frying tentacles. Reaching out to my ship’s system, I knocked off the grav at the same time as throwing myself forward, legs ahead. A tentacle skimmed over me, while a second one smacked the carbine from Trent’s grip—before catching him under the chin and sending him flying backwards. The controlling mind wouldn’t be in the parts originating from a construction robot—at least that was my calculation. I closed my legs around the thing below its head. Simultaneously, I swung the spine round and drove it hard into the lobelike structure behind the front of its tentacular head. The shock juddered up my arms but the spine punched through armour, impaling the thing. I released and, bringing grav back up, landed in a squat, then stood and turned. The robot keeled sideways and crashed to the floor.
“Riss,” I said aloud, simultaneously sending the message by aug as I headed o
ver to Sepia. “Leave Sverl alone and get back here.”
“Sorry, no can do,” Riss replied, her words almost lost in static.
“Sverl is an ally,” I reiterated. For a moment, I got a flash of something through Riss’s eyes. The drone had its ovipositor stuck deep into what looked like a standard design of construction robot. It was down on the floor with its limbs moving randomly. On another level, I could sense the drone circumventing a block and penetrating that robot’s simple mind.
“You would kill yourself . . . not taking . . . logical step,” said Riss. “Sverl has to die . . . are to survive. It’s simple.”
“Or you have simply rediscovered your purpose in existing?” I suggested.
“Fuck you,” said Riss, those words coming through quite clearly, and she cut the connection.
I tried to reach out to her, and found something in the spine responding. In a moment I realized it was the copy of Riss in there. Sinking into that and fast-analysing it with a multitude of programs running in parallel, I searched for strengths and vulnerabilities. Annoyingly, I found that I had provided the very weapon she intended to use next. But in a close parallel search, I found the relevant vulnerability. It was a code a Polity AI had once used, which made her dump the parasite eggs she had contained. I could use it to make her dump the enzyme acid she carried. But to do so I had to get close enough to send a powerful enough radio signal.
“Sverl,” I said, opening another channel.
“Yes, I know about the snake drone,” said Sverl.
“I will come to you,” I said.
“Your presence is irrelevant,” he replied, and cut me off too.