by Neal Asher
There.
The hardfield, and thus the station, was now on the move.
“I’m puzzled by the purpose of this,” he said.
“Are you really?” Amistad asked.
“I wouldn’t have said so if I wasn’t,” Sverl replied.
“Well,” explained Amistad, “when someone is giving you a shove, it’s worth glancing in the direction of that shove to divine its purpose.”
Sverl immediately focused exterior sensors in the aforesaid direction.
He looked straight into the face of the hypergiant sun.
“Oh,” he managed.
13
Sfolk
His claws trapped in the soft screens by Penny Royal, Sfolk struggled in the basket that had contained the original captain of the ancient Atheter starship, the squirming of something from those screens continuing up under the carapace of his claw limbs. It wasn’t painful but then, as Sfolk understood it, a lime worm infection wasn’t painful until just before the point when the things started eating major organs. His legs scrabbling for purchase in the basket, he tried to heave his limbs from the screens, but the screen material just stretched a little way towards him then snapped him back when he stopped pulling.
In a moment the sensation reached where his limbs joined to his main carapace, whereupon he could feel it deep inside him but much duller, since there were few afferent nerves there. His vision through his palp eyes fizzed for a moment, showing him deep vacuum and distant stars, while the vision in his main eyes overlaid that with a mathematical display. Diamond-pattern gridlines scrolled across, shapes that might have been glyphs appeared, some of them changing incrementally, curves and geometric patterns sprang from this, then, with an internal snap, his vision returned to normal. The starship was making some kind of connection to him. He felt something twist in his visual centre and elsewhere, and the legs on one side of his body collapsed. He folded the rest of his legs to bring his other side down and settled in the basket—it being obvious now he wasn’t going anywhere.
Next that other vision came back, but this time swapped around, and the grid formed in a familiar hexagonal pattern. He tried to move his palp eyes, but instead found the graphical displays shifting in response and those glyphs, which he just knew to be numbers, were changing too. He wasn’t stupid. He had an aug and recognized that he was undergoing a similar connection routine. Concentrating, he found himself able to shift individual lines, alter geometric shapes, reweave the whole display. Another snap ensued, and suddenly the numbers were prador number glyphs and other instructional glyphs were appearing. The mathematical display divided and divided again. In each section were clear prador glyphs overlaying everything else. One said manoeuvring/relocation, another was a general-purpose word combining armour and energy shields, yet another kept changing, as if whatever program was now running was having difficulty finding an adequate prador explanation. The last, however, was clear, unchanging and very, very attractive. It said “weapons.”
Feeling a prompt inside him like the beating of a heart, he resisted the immediate instinctive urge to select weapons and instead chose manoeuvring/relocation. This display expanded to fill the vision of his palp eyes. All at once he recognized everything there: the “small shift” drive based on something similar to a combination of Mach-effect and grav-engines with finesse of control to move the ship incrementally and the power to sling it about in realspace at speeds up to a quarter of the speed of light; the fusion/ionic drive that kicked in at that point to take it all the way up to just below the speed of light; and last of all the U-space drive. This last he found himself able to understand on a basic level, until he found the links through to the weapons system, to astrogation maps that filled his mind in three dimensions, and to the terrifying optional manoeuvres—one of which involved U-jumping into the heart of a star, then out again. As he tried to access all this, his ganglion began to ache and reality took a sidestep and tried to escape him, and he was back in the simple stuff. Later, perhaps.
Sfolk tried simple manoeuvring, weaving the pattern to spin the ship around slowly. He at once felt the movement and saw the star fields displayed in his main vision shifting round. What would happen if he tried something more violent? Would he end up pulped in this basket? No, he realized, because the damping field would kick in. Care should be used, of course, because that field would halt all the processes of his body and slow down the boosted processing of his mind. Sfolk halted the ship, dismayed, aware that he was thinking about stuff he simply hadn’t known a moment ago. However, he had experienced something similar before with his aug, and his dismay waned.
Next he tried to focus with his main eyes because, perfectly knowing his position in this system, he knew he was facing the Junkyard. Nothing happened for a moment, then new options dropped into his mind. He chose the easiest of them and found himself gazing on one of the wrecked hulks as if it was just a few hundred feet away, every detail clearer than he had known before. He focused again, in a different way, and could see even more detail while still able to see the hulk as a whole. How far could this take him? He pushed further, microscopic detail open, another option opening to give him an analysis of the hull metal, its structure, composition, weaknesses and strengths. At this point the pain returned and he understood that, though he hadn’t reached the limits of this system, he had reached the present limits of his own mind. He retreated, tried other options. While simultaneously moving the Atheter starship towards that hulk, he steadily widened his vista. Pain returned and he accepted that he did not have the capacity for three-hundred-and-sixty-degree vision.
Not yet.
Acceleration pushed him back, and then the basket reoriented so he was being pushed down on his belly plates. He increased acceleration, and felt an impact just before the air seemed to harden around him. His mind slowed, he felt as if he was dying, everything inside him paused for a second. A moment later he was exiting from the other side of a spreading cloud of wreckage. Minimal damage, repairing, something informed him. He realized he had just rammed that hulk and obliterated it. Suppressed dismay began to transform into creeping delight and, while still mentally hanging onto the manoeuvring controls, he decided to take a look at weapons.
What toys . . .
The prador mind, he found, was better at grasping this, but only marginally so. However, though numerous toys were detailed, many of them were offline, or warned of fatal energy drains. There were beam weapons described not so much by the coherent energies they could unleash, but by what they were capable of destroying. These energy weapons also opened into a cornucopia of hostile computer life that could be transmitted, but that was far too complicated for translation and remained stubbornly in a form beyond Sfolk’s grasp. There were shear-fields that could be extended beyond the ship like hardfields, and which could be shaped to chop up items in any way desired. Weapons for deploying gravity pulses, waves, the kind of collapsed space generated by a singularity, but, looking further at those options, Sfolk found linkages to the U-space drive and further complexity that lay beyond him. All of these, apparently, could cause fatal power drains—fatal being defined as energy usage that would kill the ship’s ability to move.
Sfolk paused for a moment, remembering his earlier thoughts about the atomic shear he had picked up—thoughts that had arisen in a mind that seemed a bit dull to him now. That anything was working at all should be a matter for awe. This ship, which he had just crashed through a hulk to receive only minor damage, was two million years old. Sfolk continued to ponder that, almost out of respect for the vessel around him, then, with the glee of a second-child provided with his first Gatling cannon, focused his attention on the coil guns.
The Brockle
The Brockle tramped on through rainy night, the soggy ground squelching under its huge weight until it reached the road leading up to the castle. Mentally probing ahead, it delved into the antiquated computer s
ystem of that building, along with its robots and cams, and kept an eye on Mr Pace.
After watching cargo being transferred to his shuttle for a while longer, Mr Pace smiled bleakly and returned inside, making his way down through various castle passageways then up a spiral stair and out atop a castellated tower.
Reaching the archway into the castle and seeing it still partially blocked with fallen rubble, the Brockle paused for a moment, then, with a clap of its hands and a whoomph like a grenade going off, divided into a hundred oaken segmented units. It swarmed up a slope of rubble and through the narrow gap at the top, past a primitive printer-bot exuding high-bond cement to stick blocks of stone back in place in the fallen ceiling, then down the other side, slamming back together at the foot of the slope in gargantuan human form again. It stomped on across a courtyard, smashed open a studded door with a nonchalant flip of its hand, and made its way into the musty torchlit ways of this edifice.
While in the computer system of the castle and watching Mr Pace, it was also aware that it was being watched in turn. Mr Pace knew it was here, yet his reaction was puzzling. He had not tried to launch his shuttle to get away—which of course the Brockle would have stopped. Perhaps he knew the futility of trying to escape. As it was, it seemed he had chosen a place to wait.
Within a few minutes the Brockle was climbing the same spiral stair as Mr Pace, then stepping out onto the wet stone at the top of the tower. The rain had stopped now and overhead the cloud was breaking, while the sun was lighting up the sky behind the mountains. The Brockle eyed Mr Pace as he turned from the battlements—a vaguely amused expression on his adamantine face.
“So what are you?” he enquired.
“I am the Brockle.”
“Ah, yes, I know about you,” Pace replied. “I always wondered, if I was ever captured by the Polity, if you would be able to break the link. Perhaps now it has been ordained that I find out.” He paused thoughtfully for a moment. “Or it might even be that you’re a random element and none of this has been planned.” He shrugged.
“Where is Penny Royal?” the Brockle asked, taking a step forwards. It then paused as something crunched underfoot, and looked down at the crushed mess of some mollusc. Scanning about the top of the tower, it now saw that the stone was covered with things like terran snails, only with the shells sideways extended so they looked almost like little scrolls. Why hadn’t it noticed these before?
“What is your interest?”
“I intend to destroy that AI.”
“Then our interests are similar . . . in a curious manner.”
Now much closer to the man, the Brockle scanned him on deeper levels. Though his mind was distributed, it should be possible to read him. However, it was nearly impossible because to make the connections would require punching through his outer layers of metallic glass.
“Where is Penny Royal?” the Brockle repeated, then looked down.
One of the snail things had just crawled onto the ersatz toe of its boot. It kicked the thing away and returned its attention to Pace, just as a channel opened from him. As the Brockle received coordinates it tried to gain access to him through the channel. The man struggled mentally, but severed the link by powering down the transceivers in his body. He staggered back and rested one hand against the battlements.
“Now, now.” He held up his other hand and waved one finger. “You have what you came here for. That’s the last known location of Penny Royal. Spear and his companions are heading there even now, and I must pursue if I’m to get what I want from that man.”
“So what do you want from him?”
“A way to kill and a way to die.”
This obscure statement rather confirmed what the Brockle had felt as it approached this castle: Mr Pace was a repository of information about the black AI and should not be . . . neglected. It took another pace forwards, crushing another mollusc underfoot, looked down again then around at the rest of them and felt unreasonably annoyed. What was the point of the damned things?
“Perhaps we can join forces,” Mr Pace added.
“In what manner?”
“We both want similar things . . .”
The Brockle weighed up what use Mr Pace might be, and decided his information was primary, but his physical presence unnecessary. Also, Mr Pace was at the top of a long list of people the Brockle had expected, at one time or another, to pay a visit to it while it had been aboard the Tyburn. He was one of the criminal overlords who ran the Graveyard; a man guilty of many murders and other atrocities. Taking him apart was perfectly justifiable for the Brockle’s own ends and to the AIs of the Polity.
“Data is what I want now.”
The Brockle fell forwards and separated with a thunderclap, shoaled towards Mr Pace and engulfed him. He didn’t struggle, which was somehow as irritating as these molluscs squirming underfoot. The Brockle blunted chain-diamond saws against his skin, tried peeling away layers with nano-shears but recognized that would take forever, then tried to punch through with the hardest micro-drills at its disposal. It became aware then of a strange sound it took a moment to analyse.
Then it realized Pace was laughing.
Irritation turned to anger. The Brockle concentrated on suppressing that while minutely examining the outer Mr Pace. He was tough, but his outer layers also reacted like projectile armour: hardening at points of impact and distributing load. Micro-fractures were the answer. Mr Pace needed to be subject to a massive shock and, no explosives being immediately available, the Brockle hoisted him up and over the battlements. Some kind of change then ensued: Pace grew rigid and a sort of power surge began to build inside him. The Brockle dropped him, then followed him down. Pace tumbled through the air, a grin fixed rigidly on his features, struck the hard stone below the battlements with a sound like a dropped bell, and shattered. The Brockle swarmed over the pieces, which were steaming in the damp, then fell on them quickly, groping for connections and data to download. Even as it made connections, the data, in quantum storage, began losing coherence as the power earthed out of those pieces.
Connection . . .
The Brockle found something it had never encountered before in all its victims, all those people and machines who had committed every atrocity imaginable. It found true immutable insanity, then the sound of laughter, steadily receding. Desperately, it snatched at diminishing data, incoherent chunks falling into its mind. Then it was gone; Mr Pace was gone. Swirling up, the Brockle raged. Individual units snatched up pieces of the man and scattered them, tore at the underlying stone as if in pursuit of the earthed-out data and left glowing scars. Then it slammed back into human form and found itself stamping on remaining pieces, shattering them to black glassy sand. After a while there were no more in immediate reach and it turned to the tower, punching a hand through the nearest door and ripping it off its hinges.
As the Brockle climbed the spiral stair it felt the madness receding. It had got what it had come here for, and more, but not all of Mr Pace. The man had used the Brockle as a method of suicide and, at the last, had deliberately made alterations inside himself so he would shatter. He had done this either to keep something from the Brockle or perhaps, for no reason at all. There was nothing more to be gained here. It was time to go after Penny Royal.
Still, the Brockle climbed to the top of the tower, walked out on the wet stone and stamped on every one of those molluscs it could find. This wasn’t rational, it knew.
Didn’t care.
Sfolk
The six coil guns, spaced equidistantly around the perimeter of the ship, protruded from each “leaf” of the starship’s body. They could still be used, though their supply of missiles had been depleted . . . two million years ago. They could fire objects on a sliding scale of speeds, where the old prador guns had two speeds: fast for inert slug, slow for self-drive anti-matter or fission missiles whose internals fast acceleration might wre
ck. Muzzle fields could also set them spinning or tumbling, just like bullets from some hand weapons, though Sfolk could not see the purpose of that in ship-to-ship conflict. Some of the missiles, in fact, just one of those remaining, contained a very odd design of Mach-effect engine which it took him a little while to understand. When he did, he clattered his mandibles in amusement. The gabbleducks could shoot round corners.
Now swinging the starship round and back towards the Junkyard, Sfolk called up targeting graphics, but then had to stop all of them loading to his mind because inset tactical displays were coming on he was failing to grasp. But again, maybe he would understand them later. For old times’ sake, though he hadn’t actually taken part in the prador human war, he selected a defunct Polity attack ship, an old-style vessel like a length of sawn-off rectangular bar-stock with two protruding U-space nacelles, both of which had been stripped out by extremadapt salvagers. Part of the hull was missing near the nose, the interior hollowed out, where they had stripped out the weapons system too.
Sfolk focused close on it and, the moment he did, objects inside the hull were outlined and projected outwards. Target assessments were made, the remaining internal system was plotted out and a conclusion drawn: invalid target. He checked through his system looking for something he was sure would be there and, sure enough, he found it: override. One of the coil guns immediately went live, loaded a missile and fired. The thing that exited the gun was two yards long and surprisingly thin. The muzzle fields set it tumbling on its course, without orders from Sfolk—automatics taking care of that. A microsecond later it struck the old derelict and punched through it in a flash of light. The impact was so hard that metal turned instantly to sun-hot vapour causing an explosion akin to that of a tactical nuke. Sfolk had time to register that it had struck at the point where such ships usually contained their AI before the ship separated on the blast, completely sliced in half.