by Neal Asher
Hauling myself up again, I retrieved the spine. I glanced at Riss, who hadn’t even moved. “See what you can do for Sepia,” I said.
“I can help you,” said Riss.
“I said, help her,” I said.
Pace rolled back out. He wore no space suit, of course, but why he had chosen to come against me naked and unarmed was baffling. Still, because of his nakedness I noted that I’d actually managed to put a couple of chips in his adamantine body. But now what? I’d caught him unawares and used his own momentum against him. I could only do the latter again if he rushed me, which he now showed no sign of doing. Also, because I was in a space suit I was clumsier, slower and more vulnerable.
“You’re in my mind, aren’t you?” he said, without moving his lips.
How could I reply to him? My suit PA wouldn’t work in this atmosphere. I replied directly through the spine.
“Why is it necessary to kill me before taking the spine?” I asked.
“Because it’s one way of hurting Penny Royal, before I kill the fucker.”
I knew right away he was lying, of course, and was now deep enough into the upper layers of his mind to know why. My connection to the spine had to be severed before he could make his own. But there was more here that I wasn’t reading. Here was an old and practised mind that was concealing something from me. It had managed to take data out of its own consciousness and conceal it.
He now walked towards me, raising his hand and negligently gesturing with one finger. “I’ll simply rip open your suit. Not only will you suffocate but there’s just enough cyanide in the atmosphere to make even that process more unpleasant.”
“Why must my death be unpleasant?” I asked.
“Because it pleases me.” Even as he said it I sensed his confusion. Why wasn’t he just killing me and moving on?
He closed in to swipe at me, somewhat clumsily. The move telegraphed, I parried it with the spine as I stepped to one side and turned, delivering a kick that sent him staggering and nearly put him down on his face. But I could not keep this up for much longer because now my leg was really hurting and my hands were numb from the impact against the spine. Could I reach him any other way? I tracked the data flows and began to reach into him as I had intended to reach into Riss, and as I now knew I could reach into Penny Royal.
He turned, holding up one hand and inspecting it. Two of the fingers were missing from the hand I had batted away. Almost without volition I shifted the physical format of the spine. Yes, I could stop him. With a ringing sound, turning to a high whine in this atmosphere, the spine shrugged into scales and repositioned, turning into the sword I had earlier pulled from the stone. I just need to cut off a limb or two . . .
Almost as if in response to this the spine changed yet again, returning to its original shape. I stared at the thing, then at Pace. I remembered the Golem aboard the Lance when I first boarded that ship.
“You want to die,” I said.
Sure he did. But taking many with him and causing as much damage as he could as he went. I sensed his history: the people he had casually tossed from the battlements of his castle, the deaths and maimings he had caused during his rise to power, those he had cored and sent to the prador. I glanced over towards where Riss was laboriously removing rubble to uncover a still form.
“And I’ll make sure she’s dead too,” he said calmly.
That was it. I knew then what was being concealed. With a thought, I created a disruptor program in aug and spine, and fed it into the right places. It began at once erasing the Mr Pace in the spine, and it transmitted back to his home world, disrupting and wiping out the copy of him there, before I cut that connection. However, I maintained the link to him—he was still perpetually recording to the spine and that recording being perpetually disrupted. Next I tried sending the disruption to him.
Mr Pace jerked as if I had struck him, staggered and shook his head. I expected him to go down then but after a moment he straightened up and grinned.
“You thought it would be as easy as that?” he asked.
The disruption was transmitting to him, but being perpetually repaired, even as it happened. I knew then that to kill him I had to physically disrupt him. I wondered why this should be. It seemed Penny Royal had set it this way when it gave him this form. A physical act was required.
He came at me again, hard. I jabbed the point of the spine at his face, to the left. He dodged right while I stepped right, swinging the butt of the spine round and hammering it into his face, using the force of the impact and a shove with my legs to propel myself up and back, going into a backwards somersault in the low gravity. All this seemed in slow motion to me as I analysed data on him—directly from his mind. The key was there because much of his body consisted of a form of chain-glass. Even as I turned over in mid-air I designed a decoder molecule, and as I landed I began reformatting the surface of the spine to produce that molecule.
I landed on my feet, but the impetus sent me backwards to land on my rump. Subliminally I could see Pace spinning towards me and accelerating with such force he was breaking rocks underfoot. I started to haul myself up fast to respond, but gave up. I was stunned, injured, slow . . . at least that’s what I wanted him to think. I got onto one knee, the spine pointing towards the ground, remembering the Golem that had attacked me aboard my ship when I first took control there, and just how strong and sharp was the spine. Through it now I could see Pace’s intention: to duck down and rip my space helmet open.
Timing is all.
At the last moment I shifted the spine up to my shoulder and rather than duck away launched myself straight at him. The point of the spine hit him in the guts and, with a sound like demolition charge going off, it punched through him. The base of the spine delivered such an impact against me that I had no doubt it had shattered bones. My suit confirmed this as he crashed past me. I found myself in the air, spinning, head pointing down towards the ground as I flipped over lengthways. Eventually I crashed down, on my back. Error messages screamed in a visor dislodged to one side, internal air blew past my face. I clamped a hand over the top of my helmet where one of its rib sections had been torn away and struggled to get to my knees—my right arm stiff against my side and blood running down into my eyes.
Pace was still upright, his back towards me, the spine protruding from it. He turned, staggering slightly and looking puzzled as he pulled at the length of cable wound around its base. Well, I’d got him all right, but I now wondered which of us was going to die first. My suit was responding: a spray head throwing expanding breach foam at the gap beside my visor, more bubbling up under my hand and more boiling out around the dislodged neck ring. However, the outside air was getting in and my breathing was becoming increasingly tight. My surroundings seemed dark now and webbed with yellow veins.
Mr Pace took a few steps towards me, then went down on his knees. The decoder was working, lines of white spreading from the puncture point like cracks. He opened his mouth wide. I don’t know whether he was screaming, or just mildly surprised. A wide section of the upper right-hand part of his chest opened along its upper edge and lifted, then the whole thing hinged down and fell away. Other layers then began bubbling up like heated paint and peeling away. White dust and black flakes snowed away from him until I could see the shape of his skeleton. I then felt the whole of his life just draining, all the years rushing past me and dissolving into blackness. Then, all at once, he dropped forwards onto his face and shattered. The spine stood for a second, then fell over.
Gotcha, I thought.
And as I faded into blackness too, on a moral level, it felt right that in taking his life I had ended my own. Other parts of me cheered his passing, or screamed their objections, in general, to death. Then there was silence.
Amistad
Layden’s Sink, thought Amistad, beginning to see the pattern at last—the one woven this time by Pen
ny Royal, and not by any Atheter.
The giant accretion disc around Layden’s Sink stretched out ahead of their vessel like a vast snowy plain. The black hole itself was of course only discernible by the meagre and difficult-to-detect, or rather distinguish, output of Hawking radiation, currently being all but swamped by the remains of the last star and planetary system the hole was in the process of ingesting. However, Amistad knew that the Hawking radiation here was being studied very closely because it was like no other issuing from any known black hole.
Amistad then pulled back and focused on the structure enclosing him. Its massive strengthening and many other functions he had yet to plumb; its evenly scattered AIs with the black diamonds at their hearts, which he now knew were anchors; and the phenomenally strong enclosing hardfield. Now he knew. Who but he had been closer to the mind of Penny Royal? Who but he had measured that AI’s madness, and then its sanity, and known that he was seeing just one realspace facet of something larger? Who but he really understood the black AI?
Amistad would have grimaced had his scorpion features allowed it, because one of the answers to those questions was, “Don’t be an arrogant prick.” There were, of course, others.
“But it’s why I’m here,” he said abruptly, to himself.
“What?” asked Sverl.
Perhaps Sverl was another who knew.
“Don’t you see it now?”
“I see that,” said Sverl, highlighting U-signatures appearing all around them.
Amistad watched as the Polity fleet appeared, apparently short of one attack ship but having gained another large vessel. Amistad recognized this as the High Castle. Much had been kept from him about this operation, but he knew the High Castle had been due to take command of its latter stages. No sign, however, of the twenty ships of the King’s Guard just yet.
Riding on the computing of the sphere, he sensed a mass departure through the runcible gate and recognized it as a probing shot. One of the ships out there had just fired a U-jump missile to see if the runcible gate was still operating. Next came the stab of beam weapons turning things hellish out there, followed shortly by something that jostled Amistad where he stood. A gravity weapon had been deployed. The ships out there had again tried to kill them.
How can EC not know?
Earth Central and all the other Polity AIs had access to the same information as Amistad. They knew about the data transmitted out of this black hole via its Hawking radiation, they had to understand the purpose of this vessel—the former Room 101—and they had to know what Penny Royal intended. Why then were they still trying to destroy this ship? Surely they understood that the sphere had to enter the black hole, with Penny Royal aboard, who would doubtless gain access via one of the runcibles it had stolen. If this didn’t happen, disaster would ensue. Therefore, there had to be something Amistad was not seeing.
The drone began reassessing recent events, the whole pattern of Penny Royal’s actions. Isobel Satomi’s transformation had been the method it had employed to provide the Weaver with a new Atheter war machine. Amistad felt that that machine had been a down payment. The AI had then manipulated events to drive Sverl to Room 101 and initiate the transformation here—to open the runcible gateway and set the device running, and then to allow the Weaver through to complete the work.
Sverl and Satomi had been incidental, Amistad thought, their inclusion a way of righting past wrongs. In reality, Penny Royal could have used some other method to provide the war machine and could have done everything Sverl had done here itself. No, the key was Thorvald Spear.
The whole mechanics of this operation had, really, required no humans or prador, so was it their inclusion that had brought the Polity fleet here? Were they here trying to force the black AI’s hand, not trusting it to do what needed to be done? They did not understand the mind of Penny Royal sufficiently to know what it was doing beyond the mere mechanics.
Amistad did.
This was about redemption, about forgiveness, about a need to be understood. The fate of thousands of star systems, perhaps a large portion of the galaxy, was hinging on the decisions of one man.
“You’re quiet,” said Sverl.
Amistad dipped his body down a little, then snipped at vacuum with one claw.
“Let me give you something to ponder,” he said, and immediately transmitted a copy of all the data he had on a research station called the Well Head.
While the erstwhile prador father-captain chewed on that gristly nugget, Amistad began checking on some things that would prove or disprove his theory. Thorvald Spear had needed to be prepared. He had been provided with the spine and that mentally linked him to the recordings of Penny Royal’s victims. He now knew, right down to the visceral level of actually being able to experience the deaths of its victims, the full extent of the black AI’s guilt. He had been given time to grow with it and had been provided with further understanding of the AI by being shown its origins in Room 101. Why Mr Pace? The man was a killer and yet Spear had been manoeuvred to go after him—ostensibly to seek information on Penny Royal’s location, but ultimately to learn or gain something else. What was it?
With the full power of his advanced AI mind, Amistad sifted detail. Mr Pace had been made immortal, as promised, but, as with all such gifts from Penny Royal, it was a poisoned chalice. It was evident he had reached the point of ennui and had been unable to change sufficiently to get past it, resulting in him being trapped in a nightmare eternal life. Beyond his boredom, his hatred of Penny Royal had to be the single most important aspect of his existence. Thus hating the AI and all his manipulations, he would . . .
It all slammed together into a coherent whole. For the AI to be forgiven, to be redeemed, the one capable of forgiving must also possess the power to refuse forgiveness: to condemn, and carry out the sentence. However, Spear, for all his history in bio-espionage, was not a killer. There could be no doubt that he had been placed in a situation where it had become necessary for him to kill and, crucially, to kill using the spine. Of course, Mr Pace was recorded in the spine and retransmitted for resurrection in a new hard body every time he was destroyed or managed to destroy himself. No doubt he had either acquired or been given some insight into the purpose of the spine and the purpose of Spear. Knowing Mr Pace’s history, his intention would be a simple one: kill Spear so as to undermine Penny Royal’s plans, then take the spine and kill Penny Royal.
The purpose of Mr Pace was to teach Thorvald Spear how to kill.
But why Thorvald Spear?
Amistad gazed through composite long-range sensors at the planetary system steadily being drawn towards the accretion disc and Layden’s Sink. Spear had been selected because he was the only survivor of the first atrocity Penny Royal had committed when, as the mind of the destroyer Puling Child, it had anti-matter bombed over eight thousand Polity troops into oblivion.
“I begin to understand,” said Sverl.
“You do?”
“If this does not happen the paradox that non-event would generate would tear open space-time on an unimaginable scale.”
“Do you grasp the purpose of Thorvald Spear?”
“Not quite.”
“He, as the essence of all Penny Royal’s victims, must forgive the AI for matters to proceed. All of this hinges on him.”
After a long pause Sverl queried, “The ships out there . . . surely they understand?”
“Perhaps. Now we are here EC will surely have made the connections.” No, Amistad knew that was wrong. Earth Central could think much faster than Amistad himself. Upon discovering the destination of this sphere, EC would have worked it all out. Perhaps it would have sent the fleet to ensure that the sphere reached its destination. But it would never have risked a temporal rift by ordering another attempt to destroy the sphere.
Something was badly wrong.
Amistad transmitted a précis of his
latest thinking to Sverl and kept the connection open. “Let’s see what they have to say,” he said, and then tried to open a U-space com channel to the fleet. Nothing happened. Amistad wondered if this was due to some change in the nature of the surrounding sphere and its hardfield. No, U-space missiles had been fired, had ducked under the hardfield and been dragged into the well of the runcible so nothing should be blocking his communications out. A moment later, he got a connection to the ship AI Garrotte.
“Amistad,” said Garrotte.
“What the hell do you think you’re doing?”
“My job,” replied that AI. It seemed much less voluble than usual, perhaps because it truly appreciated the seriousness of the situation.
“Which should now be one of observation only.”
“My job is to destroy Penny Royal.”
“I cannot believe that EC has not integrated the Well Head situation . . .”
“It has. I am sending you a data package.”
The package arrived and began integrating it at once: the AI sitting beyond time inside the black hole was not Penny Royal. The black AI was actually trying to create the destructive paradox by supplanting the AI there. The sphere had to be stopped and Penny Royal destroyed. Amistad studied the data closely, then even closer, checking deep into the assessment backup files included.
“It all seems to make perfect sense,” Sverl observed, still riding Amistad’s mind.
“Yes,” Amistad agreed, “apart from one simple fact: there was no proof that the AI in the black hole is not Penny Royal, none at all. Yet the nature of much of the data collected at the Well Head, both its format and its subject, indicated that it is.”
“Is there something we’re missing here?” Sverl inquired.
“Almost certainly,” Amistad agreed then to Garrotte said, “I call bullshit on that.”
“I have further data,” said Garrotte.
Another larger package arrived and Amistad, anxious to know Earth Central’s reasoning, was about to open it when the particle beam struck his carapace. The impact of the ionized particulate scored into his armour and sent him staggering. He whirled, claws up and weapons systems going live, a targeting frame dropping over the first-child Bsorol and many choices available: Amistad only had to decide whether to fry, slow-cook or blow the creature apart.