by Neal Asher
Mr Pace was a complicated and interesting creature and it wasn’t beyond the bounds of possibility that he had a way of sensing if he was being scanned. Also, the High Castle was a big ship which would be clearly visible from down there, if not from the sensors of Pace’s nearby ship. The Brockle shrugged off its fear, assuming it stemmed from some remnant of its former human self, and now began to pull itself back together to regain its human form.
The process was much quicker, but the result wasn’t pleasing. The Brockle was reminded of the time aboard Par Avion when it had been necessary to form some of its units into a piece of hover luggage. Despite maximum compression of its units, the resultant human form stood seven and a half feet tall and possessed an extreme girth. But did it matter? Humans, as they had spread out in the galaxy, had taken on all sorts of strange forms when adapting to environments, and many changed themselves radically for aesthetic purposes. There were inhabitants of low-gravity worlds who stood taller, squat troll-like humans on heavy-gravity worlds who were shorter and wider. Some had adopted wings, others had made themselves indistinguishable from terran cetaceans. It was all of no consequence for now the Brockle’s purpose wasn’t subterfuge: it no longer needed to blend in and avoid being noticed.
Coming into the corridor, it saw Blite and Greer ahead of it. Seeing it, they registered shock, then terror. With its intelligence levels higher now, it knew there was little more to learn from them. Briefly it considered erasing them both, but decided against that. They were weak human beings who in no way could hinder the Brockle’s plans. Also, their potential value as hostages should not be discounted.
“Come with me,” the Brockle commanded and trudged towards the door from the lounge, the floor bowing slightly underneath its feet.
The two stood up, looking confused and worried. Only as they did so did the Brockle wonder why it had ordered them to come with it. Was it still so insecure that it dared not leave them alone aboard this ship? Was this another remnant of its past impinging? This was ridiculous really because it could keep watch on them even from down on the surface and easily enough foil any plots from there. Analysing its own thought processes, it could find no answer; however, it did find an answer to why it did not immediately change the order and tell them to stay: dumb pride.
“What do you want?” Blite managed. Greer glanced at him in panic as if he might be provoking a hooder.
“What do I want?” the Brockle repeated, its massively expanded intelligence for a moment providing far too many answers, and very little in way of choosing between them. “I want to save the Polity from its own folly by destroying Penny Royal.” It paused for a moment then added, “And because of what I’ve done to get this far, my reward would be death, though I will choose exile.”
“Feeling underappreciated?” Blite asked.
Greer was now backing away from him. Obviously Blite had had enough and was intent on getting himself killed.
“No, I perfectly understand the consequences of my actions.”
“But it must be hard when you’re being so altruistic.”
“Blite,” said Greer, “please.”
He glanced at her, then shoved his hands into his pockets and dipped his head in acquiescence. The Brockle watched him for a moment longer then turned to head off through the corridors of the ship, and the two of them trailed along behind. The route took it past the open door into the science section, through which Blite and Greer looked and then wished they hadn’t. The Brockle made a note to itself to clear up the mess in there, and also to examine further those remains of the Black Rose.
Finally, they reached the High Castle’s shuttle. The shuttle was state-of-the-art: a packed brick of technology a hundred feet long, a combined chemical and fusion drive, grav-engines, its own hardfields and enough power, strengthening and negating internal grav to enable it to land on a giant world while keeping human passengers alive. The doorway opened into a long compartment that could be used either for passengers or cargo—chairs folded down into the floor. The Brockle ducked into the cockpit, having to deform its shape to get through. It fired up the shuttle’s systems and before it took the shuttle out, checked to see if its passengers were strapped in, then experienced a moment of complete confusion as to why it had bothered.
Thrown by a maglev sling, the shuttle shot out into vacuum. Then, as it hit atmosphere, the fusion torch winked out and grav-engines took over. The Brockle dropped the craft hard through a rain storm, which seemed to be the standard weather here, and fell like a brick towards the valley in front of the castle. A mile above the valley it decelerated on grav and the burst from a chemical rocket, folded down pneumatic feet and landed just about as hard as it could, and still no disturbance was felt inside.
The Brockle turned and headed out of the cockpit as the vessel settled. It eyed its passengers then gestured peremptorily before heading for the door, opening that on to the rainy night and walking down a ramp that bowed under its weight. The two followed obediently but then, upon reaching the bottom of the ramp, they broke away and ran off into the darkness as fast as they could. The Brockle watched them speeding away and considered bringing them back, which it could do as easily as thinking. But, it now questioned their utility as hostages. Perhaps its hidden reason for bringing them down here had been precisely for this—to find a way of releasing them. It shrugged and heaved its gargantuan form on into the darkness.
Sverl
Sverl and Amistad now found themselves beyond the chewed-off end of Room 101, floating in vacuum out from a wall of wreckage thirty miles wide and fifteen deep. The Atheter device was just hovering out from the remains of the last structure it had been digesting, the Weaver slowly drawing closer to it. Beyond them the hemisphere loomed—a great disc filled with golden bones. As the Weaver drew within a few miles of the device, the thing started revolving in place, then slowly began to shift to one side. Sverl scanned it with everything he had available. The density of the thing was much higher than it had been before, complex networks like veins and capillaries flowed with molten materials, all routed to those protrusions from its surface.
“Looks like the head of a sundew,” Amistad commented.
Sverl checked the reference, found images in his extensive files of the terran insectivorous plant, and had to agree.
“I thought big printer-bot when I first saw it working,” Amistad continued, “but those sticky-out things bear more of a resemblance to spinnerets.”
Sverl now had to do some further checking, wondering if Polity drones always referenced obscure stuff about terran biology and culture, for that had been the drone Arrowsmith’s habit too. He then briefly lost himself in a fascination with terran spiders. Yes, the similarity to how spiders made their webs was there. Belatedly, Sverl felt a moment of worry when he considered other possible similarities concerning insect traps and dry little corpses sucked of fluid.
Still revolving, the device halted at a point which, after just a brief check, Sverl found lay on a line running from the centre of the hemisphere and through the middle of the station. It then moved back in towards the station and started carving again, rotating around that axis as it did so, drilling into the structure.
“What now?” he wondered, then fired up his grav drive to take himself after Amistad, who obviously wanted a closer view.
Within a few minutes they came in behind the Weaver, who was following the device through the hole it had already carved half a mile into the station. The thing was working differently now because its reach was limited to its diameter. All around, beams, pipes, factory units, transport systems—everything packed into the station—had been neatly sheered through, the cut faces often mirror bright. Sverl even saw half a fusion reactor, utterly dead inside now after safely shutting down. Was this alteration a tweak? Had the device not been running properly before?
“We’re in the hauler,” Bsorol informed him.
&nb
sp; “Very well,” Sverl replied, quickly checking the status of the repairs to that ship. “When it can fly, take it out of the station and into the hemisphere. Dock near the rim for now—we don’t want to sit ourselves in a possible trap.” It was the stuff about spiders that had instigated that last comment.
“Anything else?” Bsorol enquired.
Sverl had been modelling possible future scenarios for some time to try and figure out what preparations he could make. To the complex computer models he had added all sorts of possibilities concerning what might be happening here. However, in all honesty, he had no idea what Penny Royal was up to. Nor, taking another brief look out beyond the station, what the combined Polity and Kingdom response to it would be.
“Have you got any suggestions?” he asked.
“Can’t think of anything,” Bsorol replied.
“Me neither.”
The device continued cutting straight through the station. Soon it was slicing through the gridwork of new beams before the working runcible. If it continued along this course, it would carve into the frame of the runcible because the thing was offset from the centre line of the station.
“What do I do?” the runcible AI asked, some urgency in its enquiry.
“Let’s just wait a moment,” Sverl replied.
The device halted before reaching the runcible, drifted to one side, then forwards again, and began carving round the runcible frame through all the support structures, but now leaving behind a band of woven matter. Studying closer, Sverl saw that the support beams, power supplies, optic feeds and other equipment had been connected to the inner face of that band.
“Report,” Sverl instructed.
“Brief errors, immediately corrected,” the AI supplied, also sending a data package. Sverl examined the thing. While carving out the runcible from the body of the station the device was immediately connecting it up again. The point where it was cutting had been carefully chosen. Any closer in and it would have wrecked some critical support mechanisms. But then Sverl wondered if that would have mattered—the thing could probably have replaced them.
“So the runcible is being kept,” observed Amistad.
“A U-jump missile in here would destroy even Atheter tech,” Sverl replied.
Over the ensuing hours, the device carved the runcible clean away from the body of the station, leaving it sitting in that woven ring, held in place by strands spiking out from it to various beams. Once this was done, the device set itself back along its previous course, except it started on the other side of the runcible. As it continued, it grew larger and larger, now five miles across. It had grown by another mile by the time it carved through the back of the final construction bay and was a further two miles wide when it reached an inactive runcible and absorbed most of that.
“Like an owl pellet,” Amistad observed.
The drone was referring to the singularity canister the device had left behind, anchored by woven bands to a beam.
Three-quarters of the way down the length of the station and the device had grown to ten miles across, with Sverl and Amistad progressing behind it. The station’s profile was vaguely rectangular and measured thirty miles by fifteen, meaning it had been effectively gutted.
“Doesn’t leave much in the way of debris,” Amistad commented.
Sverl turned his attention to a wall that lay five miles away, he saw severed pipes and powder feeds. Many of these should have been leaking materials, so the device’s reach must be a little more than its diameter. It must have been sucking dry the reservoirs those pipes and feeds led to, either that or blocking them deep inside. As he considered this and wondered what else he might be missing, a subprogram he had set running in an external sensor array alerted him. The ships out there were on the move again.
The big tug was now heading towards them, while the other ships were forming up all around it. Did they intend to try relocating the surrounding hardfield and thus the station itself? What would be the purpose of that?
“Father,” said Bsorol, interrupting his thoughts and opening a cam feed.
The viewpoint was from the edge of the hemisphere. It showed a swarm of objects crossing from the ragged end of the station there. Close focus revealed hastily rigged forms of transport: impellers strapped on, robots gutted to take new loads and straight escape ejections. The AIs were heading across.
“I instructed them to leave,” Sverl said.
“Yes,” Bsorol replied, “but see what’s happening now.”
The image feed sped up, showing the AIs spreading out in the hemisphere and anchoring themselves. About half of them had gathered in an area in the apex of the hemisphere, while all the others had spread out in a suspiciously even pattern. The cam view now focused on one of these. This AI was sitting in the stripped-out back of a scorpion-format robot, which was gripping the base of one of those cross-strut “bird bones.” While Sverl watched, a rod like the shoot of a plant oozed up from the underlying mesh, spread threads all over the robot and, coming apart, it and the AI began sinking into the base of that strut. Sverl immediately checked his comlinks to all the station AIs. They were still open and the responses from the AIs showed a strange lack of concern.
“Positioning,” they replied, “have reached insertion point.”
Delving deeper, Sverl soon found that apparently he had given instructions about where they should place themselves in the hemisphere, and about how to integrate. Of course those instructions must have issued from the physical and mental centres of these entities, from the black diamonds in them. How to respond? The answer was the same one as before: do nothing, hope for the best.
“And now it’s approaching the drive,” commented Amistad.
“Whatever Penny Royal is building . . . or rather having built here, I’m sure needs to be moved,” Sverl asserted.
“Well, if you suppose it needs to be moved, then you must have some idea of what it’s for,” said Amistad. “So what is it for?”
Room 101 was being converted into a huge spherical object, a thing woven by (and packed with) Atheter technology. Was it a ship of some kind, or just another immobile space station? Why did it need the huge strength it obviously possessed when, as far as Sverl could see, it had nothing that looked like offensive weapons? Why had the AIs been evenly distributed around inside that hemisphere and linked in to the underlying system? Why were half the AIs gathered in that one spot? The answer to this last was obvious: they were ready to distribute themselves just like their brethren when the sphere was finished. Yet Sverl was no nearer to knowing why.
“I’ve no idea,” he replied. “I just feel that whatever Penny Royal intends has got nothing to do with this system . . . it’s . . . too remote.”
“In the Polity then, or in the Kingdom?”
Perhaps this entire thing was some kind of weapon. Penny Royal hadn’t been the nicest of entities in the past and on Masada it had regained its nasty aspect in the form of its eighth state of consciousness. Could it be that all the good deeds were just a cover and Penny Royal was returning to what it did so well: fucking people up? Just on a grander scale than ever?
Looking out, he saw the Polity ships had accelerated and, as they approached the hardfield, their formation was spreading. Still he had no idea what this was all about.
The device now reached the rear of the compartments containing the U-space drive of the station, and it did not slow at all. It chewed its way through and, slightly offset from the drive itself, sliced down along it just as if it was any other part of the station. As it did this, iridescent surfaces cut across vacuum behind the device, then something exploded. The blast, brighter even than the penetrating sunlight, was followed by an expanding sphere of luminous fire. Sverl registered the temperature of his skeletal ceramal body rising rapidly, and cautionary reports began scrolling in his mind.
We’re too close, he thought. But
the Weaver was closer still.
The sphere of fire continued to expand, and washed around the bubble enclosing that floating gabbleduck. It then began to break into streamers and slow. Next, all at once, it started retreating, back towards the Atheter device and disappearing into its protrusions as if they were vacuum hoses sucking up smoke. And the device moved relentlessly on.
“What were you saying about this thing needing to be moved?” Amistad enquired.
Sverl groped around for a clever reply, but settled for, “Screw you.” He would have done better but his concentration was now focused on that big tug out there, closing in on the hardfield and now decelerating to reduce the impact.
“You’re seeing this?” he asked.
“Certainly,” Amistad replied. “I penetrated your systems about twelve milliseconds after I arrived here.”
Big-head, thought Sverl.
The other ships were now spreading out around the sphere, weapons definitely to bear. Why? Then Sverl understood. He could respond to this tug by briefly shutting down the hardfield and repositioning it further out, thus chopping the tug in half. The ships were just waiting for that brief shutdown. Was that the purpose? To try and elicit that kind of response from him?
The tug now impacted and Sverl felt a shudder deep in the core of his being. What would happen? Would the field shift, would the station or, rather, what remained of the station, drift over to one side and impact against its inner curve? He ran some analysis, having to delve into some of the exotic math related to how the whole thing worked. No, if it was even possible to move the hardfield, the object inside would move with it. The reason for this related to the entire mass being fixed to the energy sinks into U-space: stasis forces were at work here that operated on the large scale but not the minor scale, which was why they could actually move within the field. In its way the effect was comparable to weak atomic binding forces.
Sverl focused exterior sensors on the relative positions of a series of astronomical objects in the system and began collecting data and measuring. Meanwhile the tug’s nuclear engines were firing up. As he waited for results, he wondered why the hell they had chosen such an antediluvian vessel for this chore, whatever it was.