by Neal Asher
“You’re insane,” said Grafton. “You should have been put down long ago.”
What reply to make to the infantile prattling of a human? The Brockle initiated the ejection of the bridge and watched another plug of the ship depart.
At the far end of this corridor the wall was melted and buckled, and lying on the floor were the remains of the two Golem, syntheflesh and skin burned away, sub-systems trashed, silvery bones distorted. The largest remaining piece was a ribcage with an arm and skull still attached. The Brockle nudged it with one toe but it didn’t move. A scan revealed the crystal inside still powered up, but isolated and unable to move anything other than its own thoughts. Still, the Brockle would throw these remains out of an airlock later—you could never be too careful with Golem. Turning away, it followed a circuitous route to the science section, as now it couldn’t walk through the military section.
“Do you honestly think you can be forgiven?” asked Grafton. “You’ve killed four people—and those are only the ones I know about.”
“It was self-defence,” the Brockle replied, though of course how self-defence was defined might be a little problematic when it came to that woman on Par Avion.
“Brice wasn’t attacking you,” she said.
“Brice?”
“You don’t even know their names, or care.” Grafton paused then continued, “He was the one in the maintenance tunnel. You might be able to argue that you were defending yourself from the other three, even though they were no danger to you, but not him.”
She was right, of course, thought the Brockle. It paused before the partition shield over the door into the science section. Earth Central would never forgive these killings, and would be even less inclined to forgiveness when it realized how wrong it had been about Penny Royal, and how right the Brockle had been. As it pondered that, it ordered the partition open and watched as the piece directly ahead slid up into the ceiling, then the Brockle opened the door and stepped into the science section.
Perhaps, it decided, it should be a bit less altruistic in its actions. Everything it had done thus far had been to protect the Polity against the dangerous black AI Penny Royal, but it had not been thinking very deeply about the consequences of its actions to itself.
Closing the door behind, it now separated, its units forming a neat shoal and speeding ahead. The scientists were in their large open-plan laboratory. They were all in survival suits and working consoles to try and open communications, to try to find out what the hell was going on. The Brockle considered extracting every detail of research from their minds, but then rejected the idea. They had recorded all their data and it doubted they had retained anything in their soft organic brains of any importance. Best just make this quick.
As it sped into the laboratory it continued to ponder the likely results of its actions. Earth Central certainly knew by now that the Brockle had broken the terms of its confinement. Perhaps it had also been fooled into thinking the Brockle had been destroyed aboard the Tyburn, which was almost certainly a spreading cloud of vapour by now, although possibly not. But it was certain that it would eventually learn that the Brockle had escaped in the last single-ship, which had then docked at Par Avion. The woman’s death would be linked to the Brockle’s arrival. However, her killing had been forensically clean and Earth Central would not be able to prove a connection beyond a coincidental one of timing. Her death it could get away with. The larger problem was here with this ship.
The scientists had now seen the Brockle enter. Abandoning their seats in panic, the five humans retreated to the far side of the laboratory, the two Golems defensively to the fore. The Brockle slimmed down its units, flattened their noses into blades rimmed with diamond chains, and accelerated, targeting Golems and humans alike. It struck, hard, punching through soft bodies, crystal, and ceramal, passing through vital organs and then out the other side in a cloud of blood, flesh, and crystal fragments. Smoothly turning in mid-air, it observed them falling.
This ship, it decided, would have to disappear. Without the evidence of the Brockle’s supposed crimes here Earth Central would not be able to pursue retribution. Once Penny Royal was dealt with, the ship could be dropped into a sun. Nothing would remain—no inconvenient memplants like those this science team contained, and no inconvenient memcrystal like those still functioning in the remains of that Golem. But still there was another problem.
Focusing its attention outwards, the Brockle observed the slow departure of the bridge and military sections of the ship. It hesitated, for just a second, then finally admitted the necessity of what it had to do next. The two missiles it launched this time contained one-megaton CTD imploders.
They would leave nothing but vapour.
8
Sfolk
Hanging in vacuum, after seeing the extremadapt space station destroyed and its inhabitants slaughtered, Sfolk decided he would ask for nothing. He wouldn’t beg for his life and he wouldn’t make any bargains because he knew precisely what that thing was out there. It was Penny Royal, no doubt about it, and one didn’t make deals with that particular AI. Sfolk, his belly full of digesting meat, was feeling stronger now and was thinking a little straighter.
“Even if your only option is vacuum?” a prador voice hissed and bubbled menacingly.
“Even then,” Sfolk clattered, horrified that his thoughts were open to inspection. He swung his palp eyes round to try and locate a target, snapping his claws in frustration.
He didn’t know why he was still alive anyway. He had survived his murderous father and similarly homicidal brothers. He had survived a venture into the Kingdom to steal females and an ST dreadnought. He had survived Cvorn. He had survived an attack by ships of the King’s Guard and a subsequent U-jump with a malfunctioning drive. He had survived all the opponents the extremadapts had slung against him, as well as the recent destruction of their space station, and now he was surviving in vacuum.
The space station was in pieces all around him, all steadily drifting apart. The humans, who just like the shell people had taken on some bizarre forms in an effort to deny their nature, all had to be dead. They’d been ripped apart from the inside by some seed growth of the black AI and, if that hadn’t got all of them, then the remainder had to have breathed space by now . . . just as Sfolk should have been doing. It was frustratingly puzzling. He was breathing air but he could not see how it was being contained around him. Certainly Penny Royal was responsible, but why? It had just murdered hundreds of humans and had never before shown any particular liking for the prador.
“Why am I alive?” he asked.
Some massively complicated file dropped into his aug and thence into his mind. He saw Cvorn in his breeding pond and then the microscopic images of prador seed and eggs. Complex statistical analyses branched from these in directions that didn’t exist in a three-dimensional universe. Reality fined down to layers of code, ever expanding and complicating. His mind felt as if it was coming close to bursting when suddenly it all drained away again. But Sfolk understood that he had just been given an overview, from an AI perspective, of a prador life and all its chances and mischances.
Ask a silly question, he thought, getting angrier at being treated like an idiot. Then he decided on a more pertinent question. “Why are they all dead?” He flinched waiting for the answer to that.
“Because they were guilty,” the black AI replied simply, adding, “and because they were sane.”
The stars of black crystal were coagulating into one mass out there; growing like some strange coral as those stars floated in to attach to the central mass, which intermittently collapsed in on itself. He also felt a constant visceral twist which meant U-tech was operating close by. Sfolk wasn’t sure how he knew, but he felt that the form he was seeing was some sort of protrusion into the real, and that the AI was shunting a portion of itself elsewhere. Next, as he thought about what that might mean, he found
himself on the move.
He began drifting between chunks of wreckage and the occasional steaming remains of extremadapts. Within a few minutes he was falling towards the red giant sun and wondered if Penny Royal had saved him to next toss him towards that furnace. No, Sfolk realized he was thinking too much like a prador. He needed to rein in his aggression and paranoia and try to think clearly if he was to survive. Penny Royal wasn’t like a father-captain who saved one of his children to enjoy torturing it later. At least, Sfolk hoped the AI had its mind set on some other purpose. It probably intended to use him in some way, and that was the only reason he was alive. He glanced over, noting that the AI was travelling with him. It had now collected all its parts and was continuing to collapse, continuing to route much of its substance away, the remainder growing darker and spinier as it did so.
Some hours passed and Sfolk became aware of a distant line of detritus etched against the massive face of the sun. A while later he found himself starting to get quite warm as the detritus began to resolve and he saw the gutted hulks of ships and pieces of ships. This was the Junkyard Lelic and the other extremadapts had talked about. They hadn’t known that he understood them—hardly noticed that he was wearing a biotech aug. Perhaps they thought it was just some growth on his shell? Some of the ships he recognized as old Kingdom craft and wartime prador vessels, but there was a diverse collection of Polity ships there too. As they drew ever closer he saw his ST dreadnought silhouetted against the red glare, badly distorted and with massive holes in its hull, stripped out and looted—nothing but a shell.
Another image now dropped into his mind. He saw humans in one of the inner chambers of the ship. They were standing around the case containing the ship mind, then moving back as a biotech machine bearing some resemblance to Sfolk himself entered. Sfolk then felt time lurch forwards, and the next scene was of that chamber empty.
So, they took the mind? Sfolk looked back towards the spreading wreckage of the station. Surely it was still there?
“Dead,” said Penny Royal, again demonstrating the transparency of Sfolk’s mind to it. “Suicided.”
Ah, some ship minds were made to take that route if the ship was seized by an enemy. The mind had been unable to distinguish Sfolk and his brothers from other prador, but it could certainly tell the difference between a prador and a human being, no matter how bizarrely altered.
“I could repair the drive but there is a better option. They always missed the earliest ship,” the AI added. “Its systems are ancient but it always managed to keep itself concealed.”
Uh?
Soon Sfolk found himself drifting between the hulks, studying weapons damage. Most of the ships here were warships and most of them, he had gathered from Lelic and the others, had received damage to their drives.
“They never realized this system was no accident,” said the AI.
Sfolk shuddered, feeling as if lime worms were crawling under his shell. As he understood it, this system consisted of two sun-mass fast-spinning singularities orbiting each other at speed and in turn orbiting the red giant, which was now a vast curved plain below him. If the system was no accident, then that meant cosmic engineering on an appalling scale. He was aware that the Polity AIs might be capable of such now, but they hadn’t been before the war. And, judging by the ships here, this place had been in existence since long before that. Which begged the question: who built this?
“There,” said Penny Royal.
The number of wrecks had steadily waned and, Sfolk noticed, the hulks at this end of the Junkyard looked ancient indeed. He felt himself decelerating and he also felt uncomfortably hot now. He glanced over at the AI, now in silhouette against the sun. It had returned to its usual form of a black sea urchin—a form of life found in the seas both of Earth and of the prador home world. So what was “there,” then?
Movement drew Sfolk’s attention back to blank vacuum lying ahead. Space now appeared to be flickering—jammed pixels appearing and blinking out as if in a disrupted image feed. A moment later some great blurred mass began to appear as if being forced into being out of the very vacuum. Then, ever so slowly, its overall shape began to resolve. Sfolk was puzzled by what he was seeing until he realized his perspective was giving him an edge-on view of a much wider mass. This frustrated him for a second until he remembered he could do something about it.
He fed image data into his aug to get some measurements and the program etched out in his right palp eye all he could see now as seen from above, then extrapolated. If the extrapolation was correct, he was gazing on an immense ship with a hexagonal central mass, protrusions extending from its faces that terminated in leaf-shaped nacelles. It was all very baroque, intricate, artistic, and its familiarity nagged at him until he understood he was seeing one of the multitude of forms taken on by snowflakes. However, as detail began to become clear, he saw that this was a giant snowflake seemingly made of basketwork—the materials used being coloured metals and composites. In many places its sides weren’t even solid and he could see into its interior to blocky shapes and similarly woven tubes and dividing walls. It was like no ship he had ever seen before. It was alien.
“Who built this?” he asked.
“The insane,” Penny Royal replied.
As Sfolk found himself again on the move towards the thing, he pondered what a black AI like Penny Royal might describe as insane.
Sverl
Despite a Polity fleet approaching, almost certainly intent on destroying Room 101, and despite the massive changes ongoing throughout the station, Sverl kept finding himself experiencing moments of loss; odd periods when he expected to do something and realized it wasn’t necessary. At one point, just after overseeing a test of some of the station’s U-space drive components, he returned his focus to his immediate surroundings and found himself about to issue orders to Bsectil. Only as he considered what stocks were available did he remember that no, he did not need to eat. At another point his mind strayed to what medical equipment he had available so as to assess the changes his body was undergoing, then remembered he no longer had a body that needed to be checked like that.
You need to get out more.
The drone Arrowsmith had once said that—apparently a human saying. It had been a little joke on the drone’s part about the tendency of prador to hide themselves away in their sanctums. Perhaps the drone had had a point.
Surveying his immediate surroundings again, Sverl’s eye fell on Bsectil, waiting patiently for orders but, as Sverl discovered after a subtle probe, in fact using his aug to play a VR game in which he was blasting humans apart with a railgun. Sverl felt a moment of irritation at this waste of time and energy, and wondered how Bsectil could be usefully employed.
All the main tasks were underway and supervised. The fusion drive had nearly been rebuilt by robots under the instruction of a station AI; other AIs and robots were steadily rebuilding the station’s weapons, but these, in essence, were chores that did not affect their immediate chances of survival. The runcible was ready, and the other main tasks to be completed were the production of the hardfield generators, overseen by Bsorol and a station AI, and the U-space drive, which required the gravity press which was being built. The singularity needed for the press was steadily being inserted into a self-sustaining gravity box—an automatic process that just required energy and time. Building the press into which this box would go would take a while too and would mostly be performed in a factory an AI was already getting ready. Sverl paused for a second. Yes, Bsectil would oversee that. And he would be set to work on readying the drive to receive the rings made by that press. But not yet.
“I’m going for a walk,” said Sverl out loud.
Bsectil jerked, dropping an imaginary chunk of reaverfish which would have somehow magically restored his health after his legs had been burned off one side of his body by a particle cannon blast.
“Father?” he enqui
red.
“Bsorol is working on our hardfields.”
Bsectil was thoroughly confused. They both already knew that. There was no apparent reason for Sverl to mention it.
“He is working,” Sverl stated.
“Yes,” said Bsectil, unsure of where this was leading.
Of course Bsorol had his own pursuits when not employed. Before being dispatched to the bubble-metal tank he had been in his own little sanctum, in the process of filling some aquariums he had made earlier, in which he intended to hatch out some mudfish eggs he had brought from their ship, and which he intended to rear. Really, Sverl shouldn’t be so hard on Bsectil for having his own interests too. At least playing such games kept his mind active and his reactions sharp, rather unlike his previous strange interest in Isobel Satomi, and the gemstone sculpture he had been building of her.
“Let’s go,” said Sverl.
“To Bsorol?” Bsectil asked, puzzled.
“No, there is something I want to do, and there’s something those Polity AIs out there need to be thoroughly aware of,” Sverl replied. “Come on.”
“Do?” Bsectil echoed. “Polity?”
Sverl didn’t reply. It wasn’t as if he had to stay in one spot to respond to any emergencies that might occur, and most essential tasks here were now being completed by station machinery. However, there was just one job that required his physical presence. It wasn’t something he really needed to do, just something for which he felt responsible. And it was also something that might give that fleet out there reason to pause.
“You have a breather with you?” Sverl asked.
“Yes, Father,” Bsectil replied. The first-child wasn’t wearing his armour but as always was kitted out with a harness and a wide selection of attached equipment.
“Good,” Sverl replied, ordering the first door open of the airlock ahead.
He passed through the airlock first and propelled himself away from the spreading mass of infrastructure around his sanctum. Here the weird metallic growths had been all but cleared, original main station skeletal beams exposed and repaired. A short distance out in this massive internal space he fired up his combined maglev and grav drive, but also set himself slowly turning to take in his surroundings. Even though the structural beams that had been exposed were far apart, there were still so many of them, and so many other structures intervening, that he could not see to the outer hull.