Infinity Engine

by Neal Asher

  “I cannot allow this,” it said.

  Mr Pace had other immediate concerns down on the planet, specifically Blite and Greer. But the man was no longer important, nor was where he was going. The Polity fleet and, if possible, the prador, must continue with their mission and destroy that sphere. Yes, the temporal problem might tear open a massive rift in space-time. But surely that was preferable to allowing the black AI to open the door for itself to super-dense infinite processing, and eternity?

  With a thought, the Brockle threw the High Castle into U-space, its destination chosen. No, it would not be pursuing Thorvald Spear as Mr Pace doubtless intended to do. Spear was a sideshow, a subplot, because the real event was here. Mr Pace had understood a lot, but nowhere near enough. He thought it would be possible to get to Penny Royal before that AI effectively made itself invulnerable. What he had missed and what the Brockle now understood was that the aspects of Penny Royal people now saw were no more the whole AI than one of the Brockle’s own units was all of itself. What Mr Pace had also missed was that Penny Royal’s greatest moment of vulnerability was when it gathered all of itself together inside that sphere and prior to the time when it dropped that sphere into the Layden’s Sink black hole.

  Spear

  We exited U-space with a thump and a shudder and, as I opened my eyes, it felt as if the Lance was revolving axially. Since nothing was being thrown about in the cabin, I knew the sensation was due to my primitive brain interpreting something it hadn’t been evolved to deal with. I think it just slotted it into the memory bank labelled “too much to drink.” Turning my head, I gazed at the tangle of long gold-blonde hair, the long ears, long neck and distinctly female back beside me. It seemed Sepia had been unaffected by our exit into the real, because she was still snoring gently. I swung my legs over the side of the bed, stood and walked to the room’s shower cabinet; only when I was in there did I start asking questions.

  “That didn’t feel right,” I auged.

  “You were given coordinates,” Flute replied, “but no detail.” A system map arrived in my aug and I studied it closely as I washed myself: red giant sun, scattering of planetoids, what looked like technological debris smeared part of the way round the sun on its way to forming a ring, and then the orbital partner, which was strange. The singularities spinning about each other, and spinning individually, were too evenly matched. Their spin and mass were the same—far too close to be anything but artificial. We’d arrived at an artefact probably created by one of the old dead races. I shivered despite the warm water.

  “We’ve arrived?” asked Sepia.

  I again felt the tightness and organic thrill of seeing her naked and wanted to just get back into bed with her. But there were things to do, matters to investigate and, anyway, we’d been making pigs of ourselves for some time now. Precisely this kind of distraction was why I’d set my internal nanosuites to suppress my libido. Intellectually I knew that for best efficiency I should do so again. However, on a visceral level I just didn’t want to. As I dried myself, I shot her the data Flute had sent me, then tried to ignore her nakedness as she flopped back on the bed, one arm above her head, legs open and one knee up, her other hand down stroking her inner thigh.

  After drying, I grabbed up clothing and pulled it on, auging through to get a better view of that debris field. Ships, many ships from throughout the ages of space travel—both human and prador. What was this place? I replayed the scene Amistad had allowed me to view but was none the wiser. Had there been some battle here? No, because if that had been so the ships would have all been from one age.

  “What the hell is this?” I asked out loud.

  “It’s a maelstrom,” Flute informed me via the intercom. “Or a tide pool.”

  “What’s that?”

  “That strange U-space effect we had when we surfaced is part of it,” the second-child mind explained. “The spinning singularities have an effect similar to a U-space mine or missile: they drag things out of U-space.”

  “I don’t think your analogies are very good, prador-child,” interrupted Riss via the same intercom.

  “Well what would you use, smart-arse?”

  “The underlying area of U-space is like the sides of a pitcher plant,” said Riss. “Anything drifting into the vicinity slides down and arrives at the Lagrange here.”

  “Well, as analogies go, that wasn’t much better,” said Flute, then to me, “You know those debris fields of plastic that they had building up in the oceans of Earth? Well it’s a bit like that.”

  “How about,” I suggested, “you just tell me what happens here.”

  “Okay,” said Flute. “The effect created by those singularities, in conjunction with the sun, draws debris here in U-space and ejects it into the real here. Since most ‘real’ debris in U-space are ships with screwed drives or parts of the same, that’s what we’ve got.”

  “So in a way like some of the mechanisms used to clear up the orbital mess around Earth before the First Diaspora,” I said.

  Neither Riss nor Flute replied to that as they doubtless absorbed the implications of the word “mechanisms.” I continued, “So who did Penny Royal ‘slaughter’ here?”

  “There have been rumours,” said Riss.

  “Rumours?”

  It was Sepia who replied by sending me a data package. I opened it at once. It seemed to be a collection of rumour and hearsay, but it did all pertain to a system that looked like this and had a debris field like this too. Details were vague but I got the gist: a colony of human salvagers who stuck the survivors they found into an arena to fight to the death for their entertainment. It was the kind of piratical stuff often dismissed as just stories . . . but then the pirate Jay Hoop and his renegades had seemed just as unlikely, and had been all too real.

  “There is another debris field,” Flute added, now giving me another view.

  By now I was dressed while Sepia had moved to sitting on the side of the bed and looking disappointed. Finally she stood up and walked to the shower with an exaggerated sway to her hips. I sighed. What was it about sex that seemingly regressed people to just a few decades old? Perhaps I had made a mistake getting this involved? No, I dismissed the idea. Taking our relationship on to pleasant recreation didn’t presuppose all the problems of adolescent human mating. I was over a century old, in real terms, and she was much older. She was only playing a part to relieve her boredom. I concentrated on the view Flute had sent me rather than on Sepia soaping herself in the shower.

  The new debris field was sparse and expanding, but plotting the tracks of each of the pieces back soon demonstrated that they all came from a centre point that had come apart a few months ago. Speed and direction of travel showed that whatever had come apart had not done so explosively. This looked more like the debris pattern created by a spinning object with extra impetus given in some cases by explosive decompression—

  “Organo-matrix space station hit by some kind of nano-deconstructor weapon.” Of course, Riss’s martial mind had got there before me. “The inhabitants were extremadapts,” she added.

  “How do you know?”

  “Flute,” said Riss.

  Obviously some coordinates had been relayed because now I got images focused in on one point in space. I gazed upon a drifting spaceship—a system-class hauler—then, through a cockpit screen, at the merman who controlled it. He was sprawled and bloody—looking as if he’d been hit by explosive shells.

  “So,” said Sepia, stepping out of the shower and drying herself. “An extremadapt colony of salvagers with some nasty habits destroyed by Penny Royal. What’s that all about? And does it get you any closer to finding the AI?”

  “You’re scanning, Flute?” I asked.

  “Something on one of the planetoids,” Flute replied. “Anomalous—strange readings.”

  Well, if I was looking for Penny Royal, then those were exactl
y the kind of readings I expected to find. “Take us there.”

  “You’re considering using your nascuff,” said Sepia as she now dressed.

  Now that she mentioned it, I was. I peered down at the narrow bracelet about my wrist. The idea had been floating about in my consciousness from the moment our U-space transition woke me. Adjust my nanosuite and all the complications of sex would be gone. Sepia would just become a pleasant companion and I would no longer be subject to base-level drives and could concentrate on more important matters.

  “I wish you wouldn’t,” she continued. “Limit your experience of life and the ennui hits earlier.” She looked up as she pulled on her knickers. “In your case I guess it will hit shortly after you’ve concluded your business with Penny Royal . . . supposing you’re still alive then.”

  “I’m only just over a hundred years old, you know,” I observed.

  She shrugged. “A number of centuries back you’d have been grateful for the hard-on at that age.”

  “So crude,” I said, grinning, and headed for the door.

  As I entered the bridge the screen-fabric lining came on, the red giant sun centred and frames picking out the scenes I had just viewed through my aug. Riss was coiled on the horseshoe console as usual. I took my seat, eyed the vector digits changing along the base of the fabric then turned my attention to the frame showing the dead extremadapt. With a thought I expanded the frame to get a better look. The merman was only just in one piece and I noted big slices across parts of his body.

  “So what do you reckon happened to him?” I asked.

  Riss swung her head towards me, black eye open. “That I’ve been trying to figure out.” She turned back towards the screen and gridlines appeared over the remains. She then lifted them out of the cockpit onto a second blank white frame. Some severed pieces of tentacle then followed, orbited the corpse for a moment then shot back and attached, while all the other wounds closed up. Something then exploded inside the man’s body, hurling out shrapnel to remake the wounds and sever off pieces of tentacle, blowing open the body so it was once again as I’d first seen it.

  “Explosive shell, then,” I said.

  “Yes, I thought so,” said Riss. “But there are anomalies.”

  The image contracted—the merman returned to a semblance of life. The wounds began appearing again, matching up with lines scribed out from a centre point in his body. Those lines thickened at their base point, sliced off tentacles, formed into an object like the head of a medieval morning star, then the whole thing shifted out of the body, tearing the final massive wounds that had opened the man’s body. I stared at that thing, hovering just out from the corpse, not wanting to admit what I was seeing.

  “Then,” said Riss.

  The star folded itself up, then passed through a surface that had just appeared, leaving a vaguely octagonal hole. Riss banished the blank frame and brought an area of the hauler’s screen into view. The hole was there, blocked from the inside with a mass of solid white foam from an emergency auto-patch. I stared at that for a long moment. The screen was almost certainly chain-glass, which meant it should either be whole, or dust. The only way a hole could be made through such glass was by the intricate manipulation of the chain molecules.

  “Penny Royal,” I said.

  “If so,” said Riss, “then in a smaller form.”

  “Or part of Penny Royal,” said Sepia, entering the bridge.

  “And there was I thinking it had joined the side of light,” I commented.

  Sepia sprawled in the acceleration chair she favoured. “Well, if these extremadapts were playing nasty games with any crew they took from those ships, they probably deserved what they got.”

  I nodded. Sure, if they had been murdering people here, then under Polity law they would be under death sentence, but I couldn’t help feeling that the “slaughter” Penny Royal had committed here was not due to any sense of justice in the AI. Perhaps it was trying to do good, but still enjoyed returning to old nasty habits; exotic murder fitting like an old worn glove.

  “Okay, let’s take a look at this planetoid.”

  A new frame appeared on the screen, along with scrolling stats frames in a console display along the bottom. I ignored that, loading those stats straight from the system into my aug. It was a planetoid similar in size to Ganymede. But there the resemblance ended: it was ruggedly mountainous with needle peaks punching up like fairy towers through methane clouds. There were methane lakes down on the surface, a metallic gleam in many rocky surfaces. I checked its density and saw that it was high. The thing’s consistency was more like that of a metallic asteroid than a little world like Ganymede. Remembering what Sepia had said about people of centuries ago I wondered how one such would react to this: a world heavily laden with metals that had once been precious: gold, platinum and iridium.

  “And the anomaly you were talking about, Flute?” I said.

  Another frame overlaid the planetoid and in that appeared a baffling shape like a twisted-up fragment of glowing silk. Data then arrived in my aug. This shape was the best visual illustration he could do, because the anomaly was a combination of U-space and exotic matter. It was on the other side of the planetoid, which wouldn’t have mattered if the thing hadn’t been formed of such dense metal.

  “Maybe a probe?” suggested Sepia.

  I grimaced.

  “We can get there just as quickly with this ship,” she agreed, reading me on a level that seemed one stratum down from our open aug connection.

  Over the next hour we pursued the planetoid and swung round it to get a view of the other side. When we finally got a good look at it on the screen fabric, I felt my stomach tighten and something cold crawl up my back. I was suddenly aware, via my connection to the spine, of the odd feeling of standing in some vast arena, and the presence of a crowd that had abruptly lapsed into expectant silence. Sitting in the middle of a crater, whose metallic edges cut up into the meagre air of that place like blades, was an object that seemed to be some strange plant, exotic yet familiar. Surrounded by a scattering of spherical devices, much like those independent hardfield generators Sverl had been making, was a tree of entwined silver tentacles topped by a lethal spiky mass as of a giant black sea urchin.

  Penny Royal.

  “I don’t know why,” said Sepia, “but I wasn’t expecting that.”

  The crowd in my mind sighed with a mixture of many conflicting emotions.

  “Sit us geostat, Flute—I’m taking the shuttle down.”

  “Easy target,” Riss mentioned, by the by.

  “I think we’ve moved beyond that, don’t you?”

  “Just saying . . .”

  “And a target that would end up wrapped in an impenetrable hardfield the moment we started slinging railgun slugs at it.”

  “True enough.”

  I focused on Sepia. “You’ll be safer here.”

  “Always the comedian,” she replied.

  I’d expected nothing else.

  “Come on then.”

  She watched me as I walked over to the wall, detached the spine from its clamps and shouldered it, then she turned to head for the shuttle bay ahead of me.

  In the annex leading to the shuttle bay we shed our clothing, pulled on undersuits, then donned favoured space suits. We didn’t talk much, but maintained a constant low-level touch through our aug connection. When I opened the door into the shuttle bay Riss went through ahead and soon all three of us were ensconced inside that vehicle. The bay quickly emptied of air as the shuttle turned towards the space doors, which then opened on the glare of the red giant out there. Almost as if this had instigated Flute taking a look, the ship mind said, “There’s something odd on the sun.”

  “What?” Sepia and I both asked simultaneously.

  Flute opened a connection to the array he was using, first showing the sun at a di
stance then focusing in close, then closer until we were lost in the surface of fire. A swirl appeared, accompanying U-space data scrolled down in a sidebar. Towards the centre of the swirl lay something dark. The colours changed as different filters were used and different EMRs were tried, stripping away layers to reveal a strange, even formation—a pattern that should not be able to exist down there in that furnace.

  “What are we seeing here?” I asked, even as we slid out between the space doors.

  “An energy sink,” Flute replied. “The object appears to be soaking up thermal energy almost as if there is a hole there through to U-space.”

  “A runcible gate?” I asked.

  “No—it’s not working like that.”

  “Another question to ask Penny Royal, then,” interjected Sepia.

  “Keep an eye on it,” I instructed as I turned us on steering thrusters and kicked in the fusion drive.

  The planetoid swung into the main screen and, after a brief period of acceleration, I knocked off the drive. We drifted down, the meagre gravity taking hold of us and drawing us in. I considered swinging round the thing once, then decided against it, switching over to grav-engines, turning us again and tapping fusion for a second to bring our speed down. A few more adjustments with steering thrusters and I had us on a nice vector that would direct us low over Penny Royal’s location. I could then bring us down in one of the few clear areas I could see—an area that glinted with a strange metallic iridescence. Brief analysis revealed it to be a basin almost entirely consisting of a grit of bismuth crystals. I wondered then if this entire planetoid was as unnatural as the two spinning singularities nearby. The heavy concentrations of certain elements seemed to indicate so.

  “Have you handled this shuttle much?” Sepia enquired.

  “Once before,” I replied casually.

  “Yet you’ve used none of the automatics . . .”

  I dipped my head in agreement. I’d never been a shuttle ace and had always used automatics whenever they had been available. However, the clamouring crowd in the spine contained many seat-of-the-pants pilots and it seemed the sum of their experience had filtered through. I hated the idea of using automatics—sacrifice the pleasure of flying something yourself? This had never been a concern of mine before.