by Neal Asher
The two halves tumbled away from each other, glowing at their severed ends. Old Polity attack ship it might have been but it still possessed seriously tough armour. Had it degraded over time, or had the salvagers stripped away inner s-con and impact-absorbing layers? A missile hit like that should not have cut the thing in half. Certainly the impact would have been severe but such missiles usually turned to plasma at that point. Focusing beyond the wreckage Sfolk finally found the missile—a blurred wheel continuing on into deep space. It should not have survived but that it had now explained the strange muzzle-field effects that could be imparted. Sfolk next tried to find out more about the missiles themselves and as the system struggled to offer up translations he finally realized the things were fashioned of a form of matter that was just untranslatable, which probably meant it hadn’t been either discovered or thought of by the prador.
What next?
“Recharging.”
“What?” Sfolk clattered.
That seemed like a communication from Penny Royal, yet he felt sure the AI had left the ship. He found himself laying in a course to the nearby sun for, of course, recharging. On one level he felt he should feel resentment about being so commanded and being unable to disobey, but it seemed a stray querulous objection that faded even as he considered it. His awareness remained complete, but his motivations had changed. This was an order he was glad to obey—obedience to it was an integral part of his being.
The starship accelerated smoothly, passing between the two halves of the Polity attack ship then swinging round and centring on the red giant—the thing now filling most of the view, its light penetrating the basketwork structure of the ship. As he headed towards this, Sfolk began to grasp the purpose of that remaining mathematical display struggling to interpret itself, now settling on the quite odd combination of energy and a series of universal constants, which kept flickering, as if they were not constant. Stripping away layers he did not understand, Sfolk finally revealed a simple input, output and store display. Output exceeded input by a large margin and the store seemed to be approaching some red line. The moment it hit that, the drive shut down. However, checking navigation, he found that “position” had been released and that his initial acceleration was taking him towards the sun. A moment later he understood the implication of that “position.” The drive system he was currently using could ramp up at high speed but, apparently, it could also stop him dead when switched off. The system had chosen the option not to do so, because the ship needed power.
Over the ensuing hours Sfolk concentrated on learning more of the system, steadily finding that things he had not understood when first taking this position were now becoming clear to him. He even began to make some inroads into that connection between the U-space drive and the weapons system, and started to discover a cornucopia of weapons, and methods of attack. He also began finding numerous methods of defence, many to protect this ship from things he was sure existed neither in Kingdom or Polity arsenals. He now also had more time to think about what this all meant.
The Atheter had been penetrated by the civilization-killing Jain technology. This had led to centuries of civil war and finally to their insane choice to reduce themselves to animals. It was a solution of sorts, for, no longer having a civilization, there was nothing for the Jain tech to key into and subsequently destroy, but it wasn’t one the prador would have chosen, nor the humans, as far as Sfolk understood them.
So, centuries of war and the kind of technical development that was driven by war. It struck Sfolk that they had weaponized just about every aspect of their technology. Like the Polity, they had started a line of development into U-tech and now Sfolk was seeing the results of that. The prador in him was highly excited but something else in him was growing steadily stronger.
The prador would give the Kingdom to one who brought this ship to them, he thought.
A moment later, he realized he had been thinking of the prador as something separate from him, as though he was on the outside, a spectator.
Energy input from the sun ahead remained steady while the store nudged that red line then slid past it. Again the drive fired up—the ship centred on the vast orange-red sphere lying ahead. Sfolk tried to take control, sure that an offset course would be better, but the controls didn’t respond. After a moment he got a message whose rough translation was: energy situation critical, automatic charging—emergency override only. Sfolk relaxed in the embrace of the superior technology of the Atheter. He watched the store bar extend beyond the red line then close in on its end. The input bar had also increased while the output remained steady. Was that enough? No, because once the store bar reached its end the display changed to show three more bars that were all but empty. It took him a moment to interpret the surrounding translations and, when he did, awe tightened his guts. The bars were the same as before but the scale had increased by an order of magnitude, and the energy levels for input, output and store were mere red slivers at one end. Running some rough calculations, he realized that this vessel could handle levels of energy a hundred times those in a prador dreadnought . . . and that was supposing the scale did not go up another order of magnitude later.
The sun grew brighter and bigger. Without magnification it now filled the view ahead. Checking the distance, Sfolk saw that the starship had reached a point where a prador vessel would have needed to start shedding heat, but the system for doing that in this vessel was still offline. He felt a little worried about this and looked throughout the system for temperature anomalies. There was none. The heat was being converted straight into “stored energy.” He next began checking the nature of that storage but found himself looking at U-space math that set his ganglion aching again. However, he understood enough to realize that the “store” seemed to be some kind of blister in the U-continuum; some kind of potential difference between realities: a twist that was steadily winding tighter.
To the right now Sfolk watched a mass ejection, cutting up through the helium fusion of the outer layers of the sun. It was the kind of thing that would have fried a prador dreadnought, yet here he was sliding past it in a ship made out of basketwork. He clattered prador laughter, a slightly hysterical bubbling underlining it. Soon the shape of the giant sun was no longer visible because the ship was in the edge of the fire. Input had increased to a third of the way along the new bar. The store was up to a quarter. Sfolk really felt it was time for the ship to slow down and, thankfully, that is exactly what it began to do.
Still no heat anomalies . . .
Cam input was filtered to down below one per cent, but still what he was seeing seemed painfully bright. Outside, sylphs of fire raged and twisted, glutinous as something organic. Spirals twisted into existence then disappeared in a flash to leave oily smokes of darker matter. He checked readings, then rechecked them. There was no doubt now: he was sitting in the middle of a helium fusion fire. He should be a cinder, and a short-lived one too. What would the prador think of this? What would the humans or their AIs think?
Sfolk was sitting inside a two-million-year-old Atheter starship, bathing in the surface of a sun.
Blite
As the shuttle lifted and disappeared into cloud, Blite dropped the visor then the concertinaed helmet of his space suit and breathed an easy breath. They were safe. The Brockle was gone. He glanced across at Greer but her visor was still closed and she was still doubtless using its light-enhancing and magnifying facility while she gazed down at the castle. Then, after another moment, she lowered her visor.
“That’s it, then,” she said.
“Yes, that’s it,” he agreed, but then something errant and out of his control inside him added, “Maybe.”
“Did really well, didn’t we?”
“We’re wealthy,” said Blite.
“We have no ship. Brond is dead and we’ve lost Ikbal and Martina.”
Blite nodded. During its frequent interrogations
of them, the Brockle had revealed that it knew more about Ikbal and Martina than it could possibly have learned second-hand. Then, when the time was right during those interrogations, it revealed how it had killed them . . . and yet not killed them. It had destructively recorded them.
“They’re finished,” she added. “That thing goes up against Penny Royal and there won’t be anything left.”
To her mind, Brond was gone, irretrievable, but the Brockle had recorded Ikbal and Martina, and if it were to release their recordings, their resurrection was possible. She obviously wasn’t thinking clearly and had forgotten what the wealth he had mentioned was based on.
He turned to look back into the cave behind them. Something caught his attention, but he couldn’t process it yet.
They had chosen the cave as a refuge, as a place to hide, but Blite was realistic enough to know that if the Brockle hadn’t wanted to let them go, they would not have escaped. He looked up at the cave roof, at its walls and then down at the floor. The packed earth below and the red Mandelbrot lichens on the walls went some way to conceal it, but he could make out the odd striations on the wall and he could see that the cave was perfectly circular. Something about it niggled at his memory.
“So what the fuck do we do now?” Greer asked.
“I’m thinking,” said Blite and walked over to the wall, pulling off his gauntlet. He ran a finger over the stone. It was glassy and he guessed that if he tried to scratch it with something he’d make no mark at all. It was heat-compressed and toughened stone and now he remembered where he had seen it before. He had studied images like this—what spacefaring adventurer in the Graveyard hadn’t? This looked like the kind of tunnel bored through Penny Royal’s planetoid.
“Still thinking?” Greer asked.
Blite nodded, walked deeper into the cave and stooped to pick up one of the items lying on the floor. It was the discarded tooth of a rock-boring machine, but not the kind that had made this cave. He raised his visor and increased light amplification. The back of the cave was a flat wall, filled in with foamed stone. A borer had been used to cut through that and a yard-wide hole stretched back and back into blackness.
“What is it?” Greer asked.
“I don’t fucking know,” he snapped.
But was starting to get some idea. Mr Pace had been changed by Penny Royal. This cave looked like those produced by Penny Royal and then filled in. It struck him that the rock-borer that had been used here might well have been Mr Pace’s and that he had been trying to find something. What, Blite had no idea. He turned away from the rear of the cave and walked back out to the entrance.
“Maybe we can find some transport there.” He pointed towards the castle. “Then we get to the nearest space port.”
“Then where?”
“You can go wherever you like,” Blite replied, stepping out.
“What about you?” Greer asked, following.
“Those memplants we delivered and were rewarded for were recordings of Penny Royal’s victims,” he said. “Did the AI destructively record them when it killed them, like the Brockle did with Ikbal and Martina? I don’t think so.” He turned towards her. “Do you remember what was said when we handed them over?”
Greer frowned, shook her head.
“Almost twice the total of known deaths, including ones beyond those directly attributable to the AI, many killed as secondary results of its actions. That means people killed when the AI wasn’t even there.”
“So . . .” Greer looked confused, then a light ignited in her brain. “You think it was recording some people all the time?”
“I think it’s worth checking.”
“Penny Royal has recordings of Ikbal, Martina and Brond?”
Blite shrugged, concentrated on his footing down the slope.
“So what are you going to do?” Greer asked.
“We were forced to transport Penny Royal at the beginning. Then we stayed with the AI out of curiosity. Now I feel chewed up and spat out. But I have to get back into the game because I feel responsible for my crew.”
“You’re going after the AI again?”
“I’ll buy a ship, track it down—see if I can retrieve our friends. What you do is up to you.”
He expected her to say, quite forcefully, that she was going her own way or that she would accompany him, but she was silent. He glanced at her, saw she was thinking.
As they trudged back along the valley the sun broke over the mountains. Its light was a strange organic pink, while the cloud immediately around it looked like diced liver. Rain was spitting down, forming into droplets on their suits like a spray of blood, then quickly dropping away from the frictionless material. The ground underfoot was boggy and thick with sphagnum moss and purple clover and oozed yellow water at each step. Scattered here and there were plants Blite recognized as no Earth import: flat rhubarb-like leaves of dull white veined with vermilion, supported on thick almost muscular stems, and slowly propelled along the ground by rhizomes like creeping hands.
By the time they reached the plasticrete road to the castle, the gap in the cloud had closed again, all above a rumbled ceiling the colour of baked clay bricks. As they drew closer, Blite eyed the pile of rubble in the main entrance, crawling with robots, and turned to the left, heading towards that castellated tower—the one with a door that the Brockle had kicked in.
“I’ll go with you,” said Greer just as they rounded a corner to come back in sight of that door, adding, “What the fuck?”
Something was happening at the base of the tower. Over to one side it seemed the ground had burst open to let something out. This massive form was now hunched over where Mr Pace had fallen to the stone. Blite recognized it. The dull grey object was five feet wide at its thickest point and looked like a giant dust mite. It was in fact the kind of drone seen during the war whose speciality was usually informational warfare. It was the kind of thing that didn’t actually go in at the front line but remained behind it, fucking up the enemy’s coms. However, this one had been altered at its front end. Above the splayed insect legs with which it clung to the stone, its long head, which usually sported a hundred different ways of tapping into computer systems and even organic minds, had been replaced with something else. This object protruded like the guts of a piano. Its intricate component parts were constantly in motion, while the robot was steadily swinging it back and forth over the ground as if combing for something. Blite began to walk towards it.
“Are you sure this is a good idea?” asked Greer.
Blite hesitated momentarily. Certainly these drones were the kind that remained behind the lines, but they had never been without their defences. That thing squatting ahead could probably kill him without even pausing in whatever it was doing. Nevertheless, Blite kept walking. As he drew closer, he soon heard the hissing and chittering of matter printers and saw that there was some object being fashioned below that slowly traversing head. Closer still and he made out a black human spine and partially formed skull supported off the ground by threads of glass. Scanning round, he could see none of Mr Pace’s remains. Perhaps the thing had gobbled them up for reprocessing—that perhaps being easier than using new materials. Mentally reviewing what he knew about Pace, he realized this must be the solution to the question mark about him. He had supposedly been indestructible, but nothing is indestructible. Something rebuilt him every time he was destroyed, and here it was.
Next he walked over to where the big drone had burst from the ground, and saw a round tunnel, just like the one they had been hiding in, spearing down into the depths. The tunnel did not look freshly bored so perhaps there were many of them riddling these mountains and leading to this creature’s abode. Perhaps it only filled them in when they had been discovered—like the one where he and Greer had hidden themselves.
“Come on,” he said, gesturing to the wrecked door.
Greer nod
ded and moved towards it ahead of him, saying, “Maybe we should get a move on. I don’t want to be around when he . . . wakes.”
She had obviously understood too.
Rather than climb the spiral stair, they traversed a corridor running round the base of the tower, then kept going through doors and along passageways. They soon found themselves lost inside the building, checking rooms, glancing out of windows to try and locate themselves, searching for some form of transport. Blite tried an antique-looking console but, though it came on, he could not access it.
“We should have just walked away,” said Greer.
“In what direction?” Blite snapped, though he was rapidly coming to the same conclusion.
The castle was spartan inside, but what home comforts did a man seemingly made of obsidian need? They found what looked like guest rooms, but old and dusty and scuttling with grey cap-top beetles and yellow spiders. It was almost with a feeling of inevitability they paused to gaze upon a human skeleton lying on the floor of one room, a pulse-gun lying a few inches away from an outstretched hand. Blite picked the weapon up, checked the charge and found it full, gratefully shoved it in his belt but knew it would be no use against a resurrected Mr Pace. Then, while they were trying to get a higher view of their position, just so they could find a way out again, they walked out onto a roof port and a shuttle, its hold door open down as a ramp, crates stacked inside, a couple of auto-handler drays parked nearby.
Blite eyed the vessel with interest, but then grimaced. Its security would probably be impossible to penetrate and, even if not, where would they go with it? They might get off-world and even enter the spaceship it belonged to, but then their chances of taking control of that would be even more remote. He scanned around and, over on the far side of this roof port, saw a gap in some railings and what looked like the edge of a stair leading down. That was over towards the edge of the castle so at least it looked as if they had found their way out. Before he even started towards this, Greer was ahead of him—having herself assessed their chances of taking the shuttle.