by Neal Asher
Okay, I thought, if you insist.
I let her push me back and, withdrawing my hand, got onto the bed and shuffled back. She climbed on with me then proceeded to pull off my clothes. She was fast and expert at that but at a hundred and eighty years old I supposed she ought to be. Clambering astride me, she settled down with a sigh and segued into a slow grind. Interlacing her fingers with mine, she pulled up one of my hands and briefly inspected my nascuff.
“Make it slow,” she said, lowering it.
Via aug I made some adjustments and felt the need to come retract to a leaden ball in my groin. After a moment I freed my hands from hers and reached up to play with her breasts. I really wanted to bite them, but they were a bit out of reach and I felt that we really needed to get to know each other better. Only then did it occur to me to glance at her wrist. She wasn’t wearing a nascuff. I wondered what that meant: a degree of self-control I’d yet to attain over my meagre years? Moving forward, she put her nipples within reach of my mouth, but only for a little while before stretching her legs out behind and lying on top of me. She worked at that for a little while, then, putting a hand round to my arse, slid over to the side, pulling me with her. I went with it and ended up on top of her, long strokes, all the way out and back in. This didn’t last because she came with a nasal groan, her lips pouting.
Perhaps not so much self-control after all.
I was about to make another adjustment to my nascuff when she said, “Don’t you come yet—we’re just getting started.”
“As you command,” I replied, lifting up her legs and pushing her knees back towards her then slipping lower to push into her anus, hearing her groan again and feeling those sharp claws digging into my buttocks.
Some hours later, as I lay on the bed aching and sore in many places, I decided I needed to investigate the functions of my nascuff further and maybe check out my ship’s medical inventory, but only just in case. I was trying to persuade myself that we would probably have cooled down a little by the next time.
Blite
If the sound of blast doors slamming shut had not been enough to let Blite know something was amiss aboard this ship, the sound of weapons firing had been. There had, however, been nothing to see until the missiles launched. Glimpsing them out of the corner of his eye, he had walked over to the panoramic window to see if he could locate their target. When they flared steering thrusters hard to loop right round and come back at the ship, he knew that something was very wrong. One missile must have gone in through some port because the detonation occurred fractionally late, and the blast was all wrong for a hit against the hull. It looked as if the missile had exploded inside and its blast had been focused by a tube.
Even as she ship was still rocking after the first explosion, a second one occurred somewhere out of sight.
“What the hell is going on?” Greer asked leadenly, steadying herself against the window, the deck still rocking under their feet.
Blite turned to stare at her, but right then he had no idea, and wasn’t thinking clearly anyway. He shook his head, trying to clear the nightmare detritus of the last interrogation from his mind.
“They’re abandoning us,” Greer then said.
“What?”
She pointed outside.
Blite turned back to the window and watched first one large plug of the ship eject, and a short while later another. He tried to put things together in his skull and then, as he thought of an explanation, he felt a thrill pass through him from head to foot.
Penny Royal!
It seemed the only explanation. The black AI had somehow boarded this ship, taken out its controlling AI and steadily tried to take control of the whole thing. The captain must have tried to destroy it, then, upon failing, abandoned ship. With any luck that fucking Brockle hadn’t managed to escape, though, admittedly, the black AI was not so black lately. In coming to rescue them like this, it would probably cause their interrogator no harm.
“Are you thinking what I’m thinking?” asked Greer.
“I don’t know. I’m not a mind-reader,” Blite snapped, a surge of irritation rising in him in response to such a silly question.
“Penny Royal,” Greer explained.
Blite took a steadying breath. He shouldn’t get irritated with Greer like that because, if he was honest, his response had been due to his weariness with questions he couldn’t answer. “It seems the only explanation that fits the facts. This ship effectively fired on itself and then they abandoned it in a hurry. I can think of only two things that could cause that and the second of them is Penny Royal.”
“The first?” Greer asked.
“Jain technology.”
She nodded and was about to make some reply when two more missiles launched from the weapons turrets out there. They both turned to watch the line of a brief rocket boost straight towards the two ejected sections of the ship, then the glass before them turned black.
“What the fuck?” said Blite.
The glass slowly cleared, revealing two growing spherical blasts. Then something odd happened. The two spheres of glowing matter stopped expanding and began to shrink again, growing brighter as they did so. As they collapsed down to bright points, the glass went black again, then again, after a moment, turned clear. The two expanding spheres of fire now revealed did not slow or shrink, but just continued to grow larger and cool to orange, parting like damp paper, and then finally reaching the ship as sylphs of red fire. The ship rocked again in the blast front, and vacuum out there steadily grew dark again.
“CTD imploders,” said Greer.
She was stating the obvious but Blite felt too puzzled to grow angry with her. What had happened? If Penny Royal had taken control of this ship then it was the black AI of old, careless of human life, vicious, for it had just murdered the escaping crew. But why CTD imploders? With a sinking sensation in his gut, Blite realized there was another explanation. CTD imploders were used when the aim was for not a single scrap of the target to survive. They were the kind of thing used against vessels, buildings or areas occupied by Jain technology and they might well be the kind of thing used against a black AI.
“Why?” said Greer. “Why kill them?”
He didn’t want to say, but did anyway. “Perhaps that was Penny Royal out there.”
Greer glanced at him. “In two ship ejection containers?”
Of course, she was right. Certainly the AI was capable of separating itself into many parts but what was the likelihood of it separating into two and both of those being trapped at separate locations and simultaneously ejected? Sure, those aboard this ship had managed to intercept the Black Rose and launch an effective attack against it, but managing to deal with Penny Royal that effectively was a miracle too far. He circled round again, coming back to the conclusion that Penny Royal must be aboard and had turned murderous again, and as he did so the door into the lounge opened.
Blite spun round, expecting to see a cloud of black knives coming through and not sure whether he should be glad or sorry about that. Instead the fat young man stepped in—the human form of the Brockle. He was carrying something, which in passing on the way to his quarters, he put down on a table.
“I was right,” he said.
Once the Brockle was out of sight, Blite walked over and peered down at this object. He immediately recognized what looked like a demolition charge of some kind, with a small detonator console attached. He didn’t think the forensic AI would leave such a dangerous object within their reach, and he was right. After a second the block of explosive slumped, turning first to sagging jelly then to liquid that poured off the table, the small console bouncing on the floor.
A moment later he felt the High Castle submerge in U-space.
Spear
We surfaced a good light hour inside the Graveyard’s border, within sight of one of the watch stations, but out of its rea
ch . . . unless, of course, the Polity felt like breaching agreements with the Kingdom to send something in after us. I called up a highly magnified view of the station on the screen fabric and studied it for a long moment. The station, which looked like a barbell, was immense. As I understood it, there were large communities aboard these things but not so large as their size implied because they were packed with detection gear along with offensive and defensive tech.
“Are we in?” I asked.
“Updating via U-com,” Flute replied, then, “Yes, we are in.”
Applying through the ship’s system, I felt my surroundings fade and come to seem ephemeral as I ventured into the AI net. The first thing that started to happen was that my aug began loading massive updates on the research and technologies I was interested in. I stopped that, realizing I would have to be a lot more selective with this stuff if I didn’t want to keep upgrading my aug to handle it. I instead searched for local storage within the Lance to take it. Plenty of options were available and while checking what these were, I found another option that showed no capacity limit. After just a moment of thought I realized this wasn’t actually part of the ship’s system but something that had attached itself to me and my aug: the spine. Quite probably it had the capacity to store more than I would ever need, but I was reluctant to use it since that presupposed I would be hanging onto the damned thing. Instead I chose a data store within the ship’s system.
Next, as I was about to begin searching for the latest news on Penny Royal: a polite request for open aug linkage. I turned round as Sepia stepped into the bridge. I’d left her taking a shower when we arrived here and now she’d dressed herself in another item from the ship’s fabricator: a shiny black catsuit. I considered her request. We’d done it while screwing each other—moving on to literally screwing each other’s brains out, because we were in each other’s mind. It was something I hadn’t even contemplated with Sheil, the catadapt I met shortly after my resurrection, and this demonstrated how I felt about Sepia. However, making such a linkage outside of sex was a further step.
“Do you know,” she said, “in the past, sex has never been the main indicator that a relationship had become serious. It was always about property and commitment. The only way that has changed is that the property is now often mental property.”
She moved over to her seat and lowered herself into it. She looked really good and even though I felt drained by our previous Olympian feats I was already thinking about peeling off that catsuit. But I could not allow that to cloud my judgement. If it were a simple aug-to-aug linkage between us that would be fine, but there was another item in this circuit I had to consider.
I gestured to the spine, now back in its clamp against the wall. “I can open up, but there’s that.”
She acknowledged this with a tilt of her head and waited.
Okay.
I opened up my aug to her while she simultaneously opened hers, and the connections established. It wasn’t exactly mind-reading but lay somewhere between that and speech. During sex it meant never having to ask, “Is this okay?” and never having to say, “Yes, right there.” Now it was as if we both had two augs: a primary and a secondary. She had no control of mine and I had none over hers or, rather, in normal circumstances I had no control over hers, yet I knew that with the added backup of the spine I could probably seize control of it, and through it assert control over her body, or even her thoughts. Now we both knew what the other was doing in their aug. If I ran some system search she would see it. If I communicated by aug she would hear it and could join in. On other levels, via bio-feedback, we could sense how each other felt. It was close, very close, and a kind of commitment.
“Now,” I said, “I don’t know how this is going to affect you. I haven’t secured your linkage so you can pull out fast if it’s too much.”
The spine, which was a constant murmur in my consciousness, an extension and enhancement of it, drew mentally closer at my behest. Thousands of lives and deaths closed in like a clamouring crowd, mental horizons began opening out. I felt myself expanding and the thought that had occurred long ago recurred: I am legion. Sepia’s eyes grew wide, her expression fascinated, and as the clamour increased I saw dawning horror there.
“Enough?” I asked.
She shook her head, and I felt the secondary impression of her aug harden. She started filtering and sorting just as I had. She was handling it but I realized that both she and her aug, which, after all, wasn’t a very modern one, were reaching their limit.
“There,” I said, and began to damp the connection. She could take maybe ten per cent of it. I understood, my mind bubbling with the synergy of the recent connection, that if I opened fully to the spine as I sometimes did in moment of crisis, the feedback would knock Sepia unconscious and afterwards her aug would probably need reformatting.
She looked a little ill now as she said, “How do you take it all?”
“Maybe I’ve had time to acclimatize,” I said. “Or maybe my mind isn’t what it was—I wouldn’t be surprised to discover that Penny Royal had tampered with more than my memories.” At high speed I put together a précis of the situation concerning my false and altered memories and dispatched it to her. “Speaking of whom,” I finished, and then began searching through my connection to the AI net for data on that black AI.
There was a mountain of data, of course, as there would always be masses of data on any notorious character. However, when I started using specialized filtering to get rid of rumour, hearsay and stuff that was plain made up, the mountain collapsed to a steadily shrinking hill. I soon began to realize that there was nothing there about the black AI’s visit to Room 101. I decided then to run another search, this one on Sverl, ran it through bespoke filters and found the same result: nothing about Room 101. The AIs were still keeping a lid on that.
Returning to the Penny Royal data, I found more detail on Room 101, but nothing that would indicate the AI’s present location. I was scouring through a report concerning rumours of the Black Rose being spotted in the Kingdom, which essentially put it beyond my reach, when my aug informed me someone wanted to talk. Internally I gazed at the request for an open data channel, checked its routing and found it was from somewhere in the Polity, then finally tracked it down to Masada.
“So who wants to speak to you from there?” Sepia asked over our connection.
“One way to find out,” I replied.
I gave my permission, but for limited bandwidth—voice only.
“Hello, Thorvald,” said a familiar voice.
“Hello, Amistad,” I replied.
“A little paranoid, I see,” said the war drone. “Let’s go VR.”
I hesitated for a second, but could see no reason why Amistad might want to launch some mental attack against me, so I opened up the bandwidth. In a moment I found myself standing in a white open space, then detail began to fill in around me. A moment later I was on the viewing platform of Amistad’s tower overlooking the wilds of Masada. Amistad, a war drone shaped like a giant steel scorpion, squatted ahead of me, peering over the rail. I walked up to stand beside him. As I did so, I was aware of a presence at my shoulder, but here Sepia was invisible.
“Anything much happening here?” I asked.
The drone gestured with one claw. “The Weaver is pushing for his world to become an associate member of the Polity—something that has never happened before. It’s all politics with a hint of sabre-rattling.”
I gazed out across a chequer board of squirm ponds and over to my right could see the raft of Masada’s space port. Amistad’s tower had withdrawn from its position overlooking the Weaver’s woven home.
“Tedious for you, I should think,” I commented.
“It is,” Amistad agreed, “though there are some strange wrinkles that do make things a little more interesting.”
“Like?”
“This ne
w thing, this ‘associate status’, will be inclusive of the Weaver’s right to use the Polity runcible network. Many AIs are not happy about that at all.”
“Perhaps it wants to take a tour?”
“Perhaps.”
“But that isn’t why you got in contact with me . . .”
“No.” Amistad turned from the rail with a rattle of hard feet to face me. “You’re looking for Penny Royal again.”
“You could say I’ve never stopped.”
“There’s a data lockdown on anything pertaining to Room 101. The AIs don’t want to let that one out of the bag unless they have to.”
“So it seems.”
“I’ve been keeping myself updated.”
“Get to the point, will you?”
“The point,” said Amistad, “is that Isobel Satomi and Sverl were not the only ones who were drastically changed by Penny Royal. You need to refine your search bearing that in mind.”
“Why are you telling me this?”
“Because I’m beginning to understand what Penny Royal is up to and it seems likely that you are the only one who can stop it . . . supposing it needs to be stopped.”
“You can’t just—”
That was it: end of conversation. The tower and the world of Masada faded around me and I again found myself in white space. I cancelled the virtuality, and the bridge edged just a little way back into the reality I occupied.
“Interesting friends you have,” Sepia commented.
I glanced at her. “You should have seen who—” I looked at my console—Riss was back in place as if she’d never been away—“we gave a lift to on that world.”
“I think I’m going to need some updating on events before you arrived on Sverl’s ship. I understand much of the story, but I’m certainly missing on some detail.”
“Will do,” I replied, “when we’re on the move again.”
Next I tinkered with my search engines and filters and ran the pile of rumour and hearsay through again to bring up anything current concerning those the black AI was supposed to have altered. It was right at the top of the remaining pile, a name: Mr.. Pace.