by Neal Asher
He followed quickly, catching up with her as she paused at the top of the stair. Glancing down, he saw that this was indeed a way out. Unfortunately a figure was climbing the stair—the figure of a naked man seemingly fashioned out of black glass.
14
Sverl
“And now that is the only way out,” said Amistad, gesturing with one claw.
Sverl stared at the drone, then where it had gestured towards the centre of the vast sphere they occupied. He could see nothing but the jungle of bracing struts but he knew Amistad was referring to the remaining workable runcible the Atheter device had fixed in place there.
One hour . . .
The big tug out there was working diligently, accelerating them towards the hypergiant. Though they were completely enclosed by the Atheter sphere and he couldn’t directly see that vessel now, its steady pull would, in one hour, take them past the point where hardfield drag in U-space could resist the gravity of the sun. Thereafter, if the tug continued, they would end up in fusion flame within ten hours. What then? Running calculations, Sverl wondered if there was a level of energy the hardfield could not divert into U-space. It would seem so, else why were the Polity and Kingdom forces out there conducting this operation? Or was it that they thought dumping the entirely modified Room 101into the sun was the best they could do to counter the threat it posed? Getting out of a hypergiant’s gravity well would be no easy task, especially as they were now lacking engines.
Or was it the case that, despite the resistance of the hardfield, they would still end up boiling inside here? EMR was getting through the hardfield out there and the sphere was not completely opaque to it. It was now much brighter in here and the temperature had already risen a few degrees—the intense sunlight penetrating through the microscopic holes in the surrounding structure. No, even as he considered this, Sverl studied the system controlling the hardfield and saw that there was a way to alter its opacity, and that the Weaver, who now controlled it, could make it completely block the EMR. However, his latest inspection of the system resulted in him understanding other aspects of its function too: the twist it fed in U-space was the key and, if that key was turned too far, they were doomed.
“So should we leave?” Amistad asked.
“Should have left a while ago,” grumbled Bsorol from where he was clinging to one of the nearby struts.
“You don’t mean that,” said Bsectil, from lower down the same strut.
“Maybe, maybe not,” Bsorol replied cryptically.
“What do tricones taste of?” interjected one of the scattering of second-children, obviously wanting to join in but not quite understanding how to.
Sverl scuttled round and looked directly at them, clattering his mandibles together in irritation, then further annoyed because he hadn’t thought to transmit the sound, non-existent in vacuum, of that. When no further comments were forthcoming he inspected his other surroundings. He and Amistad were standing on the hull of the hauler—abandoned by his children, who apparently wanted a better view of proceedings. The hauler rested against the woven matter of the inner surface of the now-completed sphere. There were no holes in that surface large enough to admit anything bigger than a molecule.
“Strange relationship you have with your children,” commented Amistad, “for a prador.”
“But an interesting one,” suggested Sverl.
“Uhuh . . . so, do you think we should leave?”
“We don’t have to decide yet,” Sverl replied vaguely.
He would wait until the very last moment—the point when they reached imminent destruction—and then he and his children would go through the runcible. What kind of reception they might receive on the other end might prove interesting. However, there was the gabbleduck to consider.
Sverl gazed through some of the remote probes he had dispatched throughout the interior of the sphere. The Weaver was now using up the device that had built this sphere. Still hanging Buddha-like in vacuum, the creature was watching the whirling sphere—now just a couple of yards across. The thing had eaten the last of the original station some hours before and had then steadily shed matter as it finally wove the two hemispheres together into one complete sphere. Recently it had built a stalk extending from an inner surface and was now moving in a steadily widening spiral as it built a platform on that, while itself steadily shrinking.
So, what did the Weaver intend?
He must surely be aware of their situation, but seemed to be paying it little attention. Would he decide, over the next ten hours, to abandon this place? If the Weaver did leave, Sverl decided that he would follow.
As the last hour slunk away, the device completed the platform and had by then reduced itself to a translucent object just a foot across. The Weaver held out one claw and, after its last pass, the thing rose and headed towards the Atheter, steadily shrinking as it did so. Scan readings showed that its mass was now negligible. At the last moment, as it finally reached the Weaver’s claw, it collapsed into something the size of a marble. The Weaver pinched it between two talons then inserted it into a small container hanging from his tool harness. That was it then: a thing that could tear apart and remould a giant space station now reduced to an object smaller than a human eyeball.
“You were watching?” Sverl asked.
“Of course,” Amistad replied, “and probably thinking the same thing as you: a creature capable of creating and manipulating technologies like that might not be too worried about anything Polity and Kingdom ships could do.”
Sverl hadn’t been thinking that, but he was now. In reality the Polity AIs had been quite correct to try and limit and contain the Weaver. The creature was, after all, the product of a highly advanced civilization that had been fighting internecine wars, involving Jain technology, for millennia.
The Weaver drifted forwards and settled down on the platform. He made a few seemingly negligent gestures with his claws and in response globular shapes oozed from the substance of the platform and began to sprout and rise like fungi—stretching up into stalks topped by wide flat plates. Waving one claw again caused one of these stalks to bow towards him, presenting a flat plate. The Weaver inserted a claw into that plate and manipulated something. All around, the massive structure heaved and tightened and filled with electrical discharges like St. Elmo’s fire. The Weaver watched all this for a long moment, then swung his head round to gaze directly at the probe through which Sverl was watching. Then he gave a gabbleduck grin and suddenly Sverl found his access to exterior probes no longer blocked.
Over the last few hours there had been some changes outside. Ships were now on the move around the sphere. Sverl was at first puzzled by this until he saw some of them shedding heat with thermal lasers and plasma or gas ejections. They were circling now to take turns in the shadow of the sphere to shed this heat. Meanwhile, the vastness of the hypergiant was more evident than ever—filling the view in one direction—while the stars were no longer visible and all seemed bathed in liquid light.
“The opacity of the field is dropping,” Amistad observed.
It was already brighter inside the sphere and Sverl’s probes outside began filtering EMR to prevent their internals being fried. They would, he calculated, last just an hour more at this level because, unlike the ships out there, they were unable to dump heat. He then recalculated, because the hardfield’s opacity was still declining, and now basing his calculations on that rate, realized his probes had minutes only. Meanwhile, internally, he was picking up on massive surges and transferences of energy.
Soon, exterior probes began blinking out, yet, even as they did so a new channel was offered up in their place. Sverl was wary of accepting because, as ever, the kind of bandwidth for video offered plenty of space for a nasty informational weapon. But this channel could only have been opened by the Weaver and, just as with Amistad, that creature would not need to use computer attack if it w
anted to be rid of Sverl. He opened it and found vast options for exterior sensing available to him. This was like keying into a massive pin-cam system, spread out over the entire outer surface of the sphere. As he explored this he noted further changes. The Kingdom and Polity ships were withdrawing. It seemed they were now struggling with the temperature and decided they had escorted the prador tug far enough. Sverl watched them intently, trying different views all the way around the sphere.
Now, he thought, do it now.
But nothing was happening.
“They’re withdrawing,” he said to Amistad. “That tug needs to be dealt with.”
“Then tell the Weaver,” Amistad replied.
Sverl searched for a way to contact that distant gabbleduck, then decided just to use the link he had to the exterior cams.
“Surely time to reposition the hardfield and deal with that tug?” he suggested.
Strange glyphs of some form of text appeared in his visual field, an odd smell impinged on his consciousness and he understood in a moment: pheromone communication. Next came something completely nonsensical, followed by a single view of just to the side of where the tug’s claw arms rested against the hardfield. Areas all across the claws glowed and Sverl understood this was the Weaver’s way of highlighting something. He focused in on one of them, and there saw a slight bulge in the metal.
“What is that?” he asked.
Strange noises and smells ensued, then words: “Total yield: four gigatons . . . or thereabouts.”
Sverl no longer possessed an organic body but he felt the phantom sensation of his guts knotting up and the urge to pull in his limbs under his non-existent carapace to protect them. It was such a simple trap. If they had shut down the field and extended it to chop through the tug it would have resulted in its front end being inside the field. And it was at the front it had concealed a large collection of CTDs, which would have then detonated.
“Phew,” said Bsorol. “That could have been nasty.”
Hearing Bsorol’s voice, Sverl ran checks and saw that his children had linked into the sphere’s system—its computing—shortly after him. He had not given them permission to do so, but now they had moved beyond the father-captain and pheromone-enslaved children relationship. He would have to accept it.
They carried on towards the sun. Sverl registered the EMR levels continuing to rise, while some areas of the metallic interior were beginning to emit in the low infrared. After a further four hours, Sverl’s children went back inside the hauler, either to cool off their armour or out of boredom. Sverl and Amistad, being creatures of metals, meta-materials and pure mind, could last longer. Surprisingly, whatever form of cam hardware the sphere used continued to survive even while it gave a view of the tug as its engines went out then pieces began to drop away from it. The thing did not possess exotic metal armour like a prador warship so could not survive for much longer. Sverl watched the thing begin to sag, twisted by tidal forces in the hypergiant below. It parted company with the hardfield, and shortly afterwards some of its materials began to burn, leaving coloured streaks in the furnace. Then, with an almost physical thump, the EMR began to drop and he registered a weird and dispersed U-space signature. Light levels quickly fell as the hardfield grew opaque, and it was now feeding energy back into that underlying U-space twist. Sverl understood: the Weaver was charging up the sphere—filling the underlying U-space reservoir to its limit. However, this could not go on for much longer, for they were now bathed in a glut of fusion fire.
“I would say,” said Amistad, “in the next two or three minutes.”
“What?”
The tug was now an unrecognizable burning mass. Then, just a minute later, an external flash briefly overloaded even this magical Atheter technology. Of course, the CTD canisters had given way. Sverl felt a surge that sent even him staggering as the sphere rode on a wave of fire across the face of the vast sun. Then came the wrench, and Sverl briefly registered a hundred gravities of acceleration before surrounding vacuum filled with an amber field effect, imposing an immobility that reached to the core of his being. The sphere was now rising out of the fire, a mass ejection from the sun reaching up beside it as if, like a titanic fire elemental, it wanted to drag it back down. And next the U-space twist relaxed just a little, flinging out a surge of energy. This energy was directed at a U-space drive that Sverl could not pinpoint—his scanners registered it all around him. The sphere folded into that continuum, the sun inverting impossibly and falling away.
And they were travelling.
The Brockle
Back aboard the High Castle, the Brockle fought to subdue infective madness as it examined the extra data it had extracted from Mr Pace. Surely it should now head off after Thorvald Spear to the last known location of Penny Royal? No, because already the data from Pace was etching out a larger scenario. Despite his madness, his ennui and his attraction to his own death, the man had still managed to function, powered by his hatred of Penny Royal. He had split himself mentally to survive, much as the black AI itself had and, via the sprawl of his Graveyard criminal operation, succeeded in gleaning every available scrap of information about the AI.
The spine . . .
Yes, that object was apparently a weakness Penny Royal had deliberately introduced, a way the AI could be killed. This was what Mr Pace had been after—still was, in fact, because it now seemed his destruction had not actually resulted in his death. But didn’t he understand the consent utterly integral to both the creation of that object and its use? A larger game was afoot.
The Brockle needed data, and it needed greater capacity, so it instructed the autofactory to begin producing more units, then probed towards Mr Pace’s ship here in orbit over his home world. The data it had extracted from him had revealed much about his information network, which extended into both the Polity and the Kingdom. Within his ship he had U-space transceivers and a complex computer system for sorting the masses of information he received there, all overseen by a distinctly odd ship mind. Tentatively probing the thing, the Brockle discovered it to be a prador mind but not of the usual sort. It was alive, after a fashion, in a state somewhere between hypersleep and consciousness. It was, the Brockle divined, the mind of a prador female. Its thought processes did not include anything beyond the language of mathematics, though there was a conventional language centre there, sitting offline for some reason. Pace delivered his instructions to it via a simple holographic touch display. It was, of course, completely vulnerable, and the Brockle was about to take control of it before he was interrupted.
“Hey ho,” said a voice. “I see you got there.”
It was an uplink from the planet below. The Brockle peered through sensors and saw Mr Pace climbing steps up the side of his castle.
Already?
The Brockle focused more sensors but, beyond discovering a recently used tunnel, could find no trace of whatever had rebuilt or built anew this Mr Pace. Further probing revealed a network of tunnels spread out through the planet’s crust. It ceased scanning these after it had detected four thousand miles of them.
“Got where?” the Brockle replied, stamping on a surge of rage and meanwhile beginning to integrate a new physical unit issuing from the autofactory.
“Ultimately you will learn where Penny Royal will be, but by then it may be too late.”
“You are not sane,” the Brockle observed.
“And you are?” Pace shot back. “Perhaps you should check the main Wasteland feed.”
Now ignoring the female prador mind, the Brockle instantly located that feed in the system of Mr Pace’s ship. It hesitated to cut into the data flow, suspecting some kind of trap, for Mr Pace had already proven more capable than it had supposed. But then it cut in anyway. The feed was from an old prador satellite that had been set, over fifty years ago, to watch Room 101 factory station. The first telemetry was a shock and left the Brockle mom
entarily baffled. It then dug in and began parallel processing every thread of the feed, previously recorded data, absorbing everything there whole into its mind. And it was dumbfounded.
Since the Brockle’s last view of Room 101, the station had been turned into a massive sphere. Apparently the Weaver and Amistad were aboard, and apparently the sphere was Atheter technology. A brief alliance had been forged between the Polity and the prador to deal with the potential threat this sphere represented. A massive tug had been brought in to dump the thing into the nearby hypergiant sun. This effort had failed when the sphere, without any evident U-space drive, submerged itself in underspace just as it was falling into the star.
“Pretty, isn’t it?” said Mr Pace. “You see, that’s where Penny Royal is going and of course we know where that object is going.”
“Some clarity would be good.” The Brockle meanwhile gazed at the Polity fleet, complemented by twenty King’s Guard ships, scattered around the hypergiant. What were they doing? Procrastinating?
“Consider the data being collected at the Well Head,” said Mr Pace, as he stepped out onto the roof of his castle.
The Brockle located this data in Mr Pace’s systems and, just microseconds later, everything slammed together in a coherent whole. It knew the purpose of that giant sphere with its ridiculously powerful hardfield. It knew what Penny Royal intended and recognized the temporal debt the black AI intended to pay back. It also knew why those Polity and prador vessels weren’t on the move. Doubtless the U-space signature had been easy to read and, having divined the destination of the sphere, the AIs had, just like the Brockle, worked out the rest. They had decided to stand down and let Penny Royal finish what it was doing because of the dangers inherent in that temporal debt not being paid.