by Neal Asher
As we dropped lower I could see that this was certainly a place where you wouldn’t want to land carelessly. The mountains were like the jags and shards resulting from a major space station being blown open. Some of them stood like scythe or sword blades. Baroque sculptures of the kind found when streamers of molten metal solidify in vacuum abounded. Everything down there looked sharp. A perfect setting for Penny Royal.
When it was in sight, I focused on a close-up of Penny Royal. I felt the sharp intake of breath in a thousand non-existent throats, overpowering terror and in some cases a weird perverted eagerness. Struggling for a moment, I managed to damp my connection to the spine just enough so that I remained functional, but I couldn’t completely cut it out now. Glancing across at Sepia, I saw that she looked a bit sick and felt the sluggish effect of feedback dampers at her end of our connection. She was taking precautions.
As we passed over the crater I spun the shuttle on steering thrusters and allowed it a couple of stabs of its main drive to bring us to halt relative to the surface below. I then used grav to bring us down, settling with an audible crunch which only made the silence in the craft louder.
“Right.” I stood up, picked up the spine, closed up my helmet and my visor.
Sepia stood as well and, even though our connection was sluggish, I could sense her reluctance. We headed for the airlock, and this time Riss trailed behind rather than shot ahead. Something about this situation didn’t feel right, didn’t feel complete. I went through first, clambering down the ladder onto ground scattered with iridescent metallic crystals. Riss shot out ahead of Sepia and rose high in the thin atmosphere to peer towards the crater while Sepia climbed down the ladder.
As Sepia and I reached the rim we carefully negotiated our way between the monolithic jags of metal, feeling like ants in a scrap shredder. Penny Royal came into sight just as we reached an incline of white chalky rock and drifts of dust—probably some sort of metallic oxide.
I paused to gaze at the AI, time shuddering to a halt around me. My internal crowd seemed to be cheering and jeering like spectators at a Roman arena, at a hated or beloved gladiator stepping out onto the sand. Penny Royal was in constant motion, somewhat like a sea urchin, the spines not only shuffling but moving in and out, shimmering from spikes to flat blades, breaking into collections of blades and reforming. I studied it for a long while, checked distances and scale in my aug. There was no doubt: the AI was nearly four times larger than it had been on the other occasions I had seen it.
There was something else here too, related to my own personal glimpses of U-space and the collective knowledge of it in my mind. I was seeing three-dimensional shapes in their transition through the fourth dimension that is time. They were all I could see as a linear-evolved organic creature of the real but I knew, with a terrible certainty, they were just one facet of something with many more dimensions, and with far greater complexity, than that. I was the Flatlander seeing just the two-dimensional slice of a cube. Penny Royal was here, but it was elsewhere too. I sensed for the first time how vast it was.
I moved closer and at that moment six white ovoids that were scattered around the AI, each a yard across, rose from the ground and sped out. A moment later, a hardfield surrounded us, separating us from the shuttle. We were trapped.
“You have come,” the AI’s voice whispered in my mind, “to learn how to kill.”
Blite
Blite walked over to the bulkhead and slammed a fist against it. He was getting very tired now of being a prisoner—both of circumstances and hostile creatures, like Penny Royal, the Brockle and this Mr Pace. When they’d seen him rise up the stairs they had frozen, and he had captured them fast and easily—by knocking them both out.
“What does he want with us?” Greer asked. “What can he want with us?”
They had been unconscious while Pace loaded them onto his ship, but Blite felt them dropping into U-space just as Greer woke up to a vomiting fit. In fact, it had probably been the sensations of that drop that had helped her on her way.
“I don’t know,” he replied.
The area they were in was spartan: just a room shaped like a comma with ceramal walls, floor and ceiling, the point of the comma where Greer had thrown up and a mass of plasmel crates occupying most of the rest of it. These were secured in a pallet frame. Blite walked over to them and flicked open the latches on the top one. Lifting the lid, he gazed in puzzlement at the contents, reached inside and pulled out a glass statuette. It was big, heavy and quite beautiful. After a moment, he realized it depicted a hooder, partially coiled and with front end raised as if ready to strike. Even as he held it he felt it growing warm in his grasp, lights flickering on in its translucent depths. When it began to move he quickly dropped it back in the crate. As the lights faded it returned to its original shape and froze again.
What the hell?
“Art collector?” wondered Greer, standing at his shoulder.
“Artist,” replied a voice.
They turned to find Mr Pace standing just a short distance away from them, a bulkhead door open behind him. Blite took a calming breath. This guy moved far too fast and silently for comfort.
“Why did you bring us here?” he asked.
“I knew there would be someone,” Pace said. “Come with me.”
He turned and headed for the door. Blite glanced at Greer, who shrugged. What choice did they have? They stepped out into a corridor to see Pace disappearing out of sight. He was gone by the time they saw the dropshaft at the end of the corridor. Here Blite hesitated, then again shrugged and stepped in. If Pace wanted them dead, he hardly needed to tinker with a dropshaft gravity field to kill them.
They wafted up one floor, the irised gravity field holding them in place so they could step from the open shaft onto a circular area with doors all around. Mr Pace was waiting by one of these doors.
“Here,” he said, pushing the door open.
Blite walked warily past him into the space beyond, expecting another prison of some kind. He found himself in a strange cabin. It smelled like a greenhouse, while over to the right stood a weird-looking tree. In the centre was a seating pit with a central com-column, while off to the left was what looked like a bed . . . or a huge lily pad.
“I don’t often have guests,” said Mr Pace. “This is the only cabin available.”
Blite turned to peer at the man. He was, of course, quite expressionless, except for that slight, fixed smile. Well, if he was going to call them guests and not lock them in the hold, that was fine . . .
Pace pointed to the tree. The thing had big leaves that looked like those of a ginkgo, gnarled bluish boughs, and was scattered with fruits of all different shapes and colours. “Sustenance is there. Toilet and bathing facilities are there.” He now pointed to what was effectively a hole in the floor with a thing poised above it like the giant looped-over bloom of a trumpet flower, though one rendered in shades of reptilian green. “Keep this with you at all times.” The man now held out a short cylinder of black glass much like the kind he himself was fashioned from.
“I’ll ask as politely as I can, again,” said Blite. “What the hell do you want with us?”
Pace just stood there holding out the cylinder until Blite reluctantly took it. “All you need to know,” he then said, “is that the cargo has a buyer in the Polity who will pay well for all of it and who will never break it up.”
“What?” The man was baffling.
“I care about three things in existence,” said Mr Pace. “My prime concern is my collection, which gave me solace while I made the pieces, at least. My last concern is about trying to exact some vengeance against Penny Royal.” He turned and headed towards the door.
Blite was about to call after him, but then decided it wasn’t worth the risk.
“He didn’t tell us all three,” said Greer.
“Uh?”
> “He told us his prime concern and his last one, but not the one in the middle.”
Blite nodded, peered down at the glass cylinder, and felt he had an inkling of an idea what that third concern might be.
15
Crowther
Poised at the interface of Lunar Runcible Twelve, Isembard Crowther suppressed his frustration as he tuned down his implants. Being a haiman, he had discovered that one of the drawbacks of his extensive augmentations was that if he kept them running at maximum efficiency he experienced something quite unpleasant during runcible travel. Popular culture called it “the scream’—the human response to the brief eternity spent between runcible gateways, and one never remembered by humans. As a haiman, he found that his implants recorded stuff during transition that fed back into his human mind shortly afterwards. If he didn’t tune things down, he always felt, later, that his mind was somehow sitting outside his body and, during the ensuing minutes, pouring back into it like some proto-organic sludge.
He stepped through.
That brief eternity later he stepped out of another interface thousands of light years away aboard the Well Head space station, pondering his latest visit to Earth and what he had achieved. He had now all but finished his historical reconstruction of Panarchia—having moved beyond the war to the final colony. The people of that colony, right here on the line between the Graveyard and the Polity, had been a dubious crowd of pirates, criminals and Polity dropouts who, over eighty years, built up a small city that was mostly a lawless trading post. Panarchia had, by its position, been a good place from which to smuggle goods from the Polity to the Graveyard and vice versa. The smugglers had considered themselves quite smart, little knowing that they were under close surveillance, but allowed to carry on because the world was an ideal entry point to the Graveyard for Polity black ops. In recent years the city had been abandoned as Panarchia became increasingly saturated by the EMR output of the black hole Layden’s Sink and its accretion disc, becoming subject to increasing seismic activity, and as its environment underwent radical changes. However, despite bringing much of the history up to date, it had been, Crowther felt, an ultimately fruitless visit to Earth. He was still no closer to resolving something that had been bugging him for some months now: Penny Royal.
Why had a rogue AI risked itself to penetrate prador lines only to anti-matter bomb eight thousand troops who had been doomed anyway?
The area spanned by the small runcible in the Well Head was an oblate chamber a hundred feet from end to end and seventy feet wide. It was zero gravity and, as usual, Crowther found himself drifting through air without any way to get himself to a solid surface. This was one of the security precautions, while others were dotted around the chamber walls. He eyed the various scanning heads and felt his body flush hot as it underwent active scan. He looked at the other devices in the station that could turn him into a hot cloud of component atoms in a moment and, as always, felt slightly thankful when a hardfield sprang into being beside him and gently propelled him towards the small exit tunnel. Such security, of course, was standard in a research station like this, since it was just the sort of place your average separatist terrorist, with a Luddite hatred for any kind of technological advancement, would like to blow to smithereens.
Landing gently on the lip of the tunnel to his quarters and feeling the pull of grav-plates, Crowther stepped on through. Re-engaging his augmentations, he felt Owl’s request for contact and allowed it, in full. Station data immediately began loading and he discovered that another data pulse had been picked up from the Layden’s Sink black hole while he had been away. Again it was mostly technical data.
“And interestingly,” said Owl, “the data renders possibilities for U-space/hardfield interactions.”
“Interesting,” Crowther agreed.
Of course he was interested in the black hole data, but his secondary interest in history had been steadily supplanting it. There was a good reason for this because, in the end, the mystery of the source of data from the black hole did not lie in its technical content, but in events. A lot of it could have been coincidental but for that phrase he had encountered amidst the data: Your greatest fear—the room stands open. The black hole. The black AI. Room 101. Crowther was haunted by the feeling of a connection he did not yet understand . . .
“Did we get any of those odd phrases through this time?” he asked.
“Certainly,” Owl replied, and sent him the data.
In his room, as he shed his clothing to expose the data ports running down his spine and along his arms, Crowther puzzled over the phrase, “Beware of scorpions,” then decided that one was probably going to be vague enough to share. It was also vague enough to have millions of interpretations and, like something from a Delphic oracle, would doubtless only reveal its true meaning after the fact.
He took a necessary decontamination shower to free himself of every external microbe while his inner systems dealt with anything else he might have picked up, then stepped through the clean lock into the short pipe leading to his interface sphere. Once inside the sphere and settled in his cradle seat, he relaxed and sent the connection order. All down his back he felt the bayonet data plugs inserting. Resting his arms down, he felt optics plugging into the interfaces there. His world expanded to include the sensory arrays of the station and much extra processing. He gazed out across the accretion disc and, back-filling recent history, saw that there had been a pause in in-fall debris caused when a recent detonation at the event horizon blew everything back. For five hours Layden’s Sink had been utterly exposed, and would be exposed for a further two. He gazed upon darkness. It was boring, though of course everything it implied was not. Next he looked around for Owl and found the drone to the fore of the station, over where the hardfield projectors were housed.
“You’re probing them?” Crowther queried.
“We may, with a little tinkering, be able to utilize this,” the drone replied.
Owl was referring to the recent data which, even as he settled himself in and inspected his surroundings, he had already been absorbing into his enhanced mind. He could see at once what the data implied, but wasn’t exactly happy about the idea of trying to apply it. So, it would appear that a link could be made from the hardfields through to the runcible of the station. This would require taking the runcible off standby, but it would mean energy from any massive impact on the hardfields would be routed back through it into U-space. But what would happen to it there? Ensconced in his interface sphere, Crowther raised an arm trailing optics like wing feathers and scratched his head.
Just as it annoyed him when Owl started tinkering, it also annoyed him when the drone was ahead of him. He now routed the data to different levels and methods of processing, routing “real-world” implications back to his over-conscious. It took him hours to get there: the energy would create an even and controlled disruption, a distortion almost as if the non-fabric of U-space was being put under tension. This implied that the reverse could apply; that the distortion could be tapped for energy.
Crowther suddenly shivered as he absorbed the implications. The process was practically infinite . . . no, no . . . once the distortion . . . once the twist passed beyond a certain point—call it three hundred and sixty degrees—the whole lot would fly back out, almost like a pressure valve breaking. Then what? The idea of such a feedback had further implications concerning the geometry of hardfields; this meant it wasn’t two dimensional . . .
“Got it,” said Owl.
The drone had been very busy. The runcible was muttering and ticking, ripples running across the interface, while maintenance robots in the nose of the station had made alterations to one of the spare hardfield projectors—adding components from one of the contained manufactories aboard, while also extracting some others. The thing was powering up now and the circular scale of a hardfield appeared a hundred yards out from the station.
“You’ve got what?” Crowther asked. “Looks like a standard hardfield to me.”
“Watch,” Owl instructed.
Something odd began happening with the hardfield. While these things were refractive, it was usually just in the same way as a simple sheet of glass. Now, however, as he watched, the hardfield began distorting the view across the accretion disc beyond it; it was lensing. Before Crowther could begin taking his own measurements Owl routed further data to him. The hardfield was now bowed—it bore the shape of some huge contact lens.
“Now let’s test it for impact,” said Owl.
A second later a sensor probe of the kind they occasionally shot at the event horizon of Layden’s Sink launched from the rear of the Well Head. It hurtled out into vacuum, transmitting telemetry as it swung into a curve bringing it back towards the station. Yes, this was it, this was precisely the kind of thing Crowther didn’t like about Owl’s tinkering. Sure, test out some theories, do a little experimentation, but really, try not to kill your companion observer in the process.
As the missile became a dot haloed by its single-burn fuser, Crowther was all too aware of just how tough an object it was. The things were made in a gravity press much like some U-space drive components. Despite the armouring and defences the Well Head possessed, that missile, unless intercepted by a hardfield, would punch right through it like a bullet through a pineapple. And now, of course, the hardfield due to intercept it was one that had been tinkered with.
“Perhaps a backup field?” Crowther suggested.
“Not required,” said Owl dismissively.
A few seconds later the missile hit the convex field, and all its mass turned to plasma in an explosion that spread in an instant to a mile across. While measuring the effects of this, Crowther eyed the hardfield. The thing had turned completely opaque—a black dot like an eyeball at the centre of the explosion. Meanwhile, the projector wasn’t buffering energy but emitting a U-signature.