by Neal Asher
“It seems pretty damned dangerous now, seeing as it’s controlling both the High Castle and a Polity fleet.” Amistad found that his weapons had come online again, and he was finding it really difficult to restrain himself from blowing something up. But, here, that would be suicide. “You didn’t know about the origin of the data from the Well Head before you motivated the Brockle to go after Penny Royal, did you?”
“I did not.”
“If the Brockle now succeeds against Penny Royal we are in a world of shit. Something has to be done.”
“It is my calculation that Penny Royal will succeed in its aims, while the Brockle will fail, quite likely terminally.”
“Quite likely!” Amistad paused, then continued, “So if Penny Royal doesn’t deal with the Brockle, you then send the heavy mob after it?”
“Problematic.”
“What?”
“If the Brockle retreats into the Graveyard, as seems likely, we will not be able to pursue. Relations with the Kingdom are at a low ebb, currently.”
“Why?”
“The Brockle used the fleet to destroy many King’s Guard ships.”
“So you can’t go after the Brockle because that will infringe agreements. The Brockle, controlling a small Polity fleet in the Graveyard, is an infringement in itself. Doubtless the king will send further ships after the Brockle, also infringing agreements. Those ships will be destroyed by the Brockle because the prador don’t have anything to protect them from U-jump missiles . . . Now, did you just fuck up big time or are you trying to restart the war with the prador?”
“The situation will resolve satisfactorily,” Earth Central insisted. “You must now leave this area.”
“Satisfactorily? If Penny Royal does not get its redemption are you sure it’ll enter the black hole? Really sure?”
“I calculate that it will, despite Thorvald Spear’s death . . .”
“You’re forgetting Flute and Riss . . .”
“I am not,” EC replied. “There is also a female with Spear called Sepia to take into account.”
Thinking fast, Amistad understood: Earth Central was sure that Penny Royal would enter the Layden’s Sink black hole no matter what, and knew what the black AI wanted from Thorvald Spear. However, the leading AI of the Polity was not sure whether Penny Royal would turn against the Brockle. It started to become clear. EC had known about the Well Head long before Amistad had realized what was going on. EC had known that the Brockle would eventually go to that location after Penny Royal and that the result of that would be the black AI’s failure to gain redemption, and likely the death of Thorvald Spear. Because of that failure and because of that death Penny Royal would definitely turn on the Brockle and destroy it, prior to entering the black hole. The knotty problems of two dangerous renegade AIs solved, the fleet that had destroyed King’s Guard ships, itself destroyed. All neatly bundled up and resolved.
Had he contained organic guts rather than densely packed technology Amistad would have felt sick. However, he did feel his anger gain new heights.
“You bastard.”
“Your routing is in,” said EC. “You are going to Cheyne III, where you will await further examination by forensic AI.”
EC had succeeded in driving the Brockle out of the Tyburn and incriminating itself, and putting it in Penny Royal’s sights, but what had it achieved beyond that? The destruction of those King’s Guard ships . . .
were they part of some power play against the prador? Amistad suspected so. EC had ostensibly managed to send a deniable force against Penny Royal, which also unequivocally demonstrated the Polity’s military superiority to the prador. How similar, wondered Amistad, were the more advanced AIs? So similar that they all played complicated games with the lives of their lesser brethren, and humans and prador?
Amistad fired up his internal drives and drifted back towards the runcible. As he did so he began searching his extensive caches of computer weaponry, while designing tactical responses with his physical weaponry. He recalled in perfect detail everything he knew about the runcible facility on Cheyne III. One thing he was damned certain about: he would not be staying on that world for long.
The Brockle
The four disruptor missiles detonated at points in U-space relative to the surface of the hardfield enclosing the giant sphere. Simultaneously four CTD imploders detonated in the real at exactly the same moment as a gravity wave arrived. The visible detonations spread in discs, striated and iridescent. The sphere actually juddered sideways, the hardfield enclosing it deforming slightly and bruised to deep amber. The particle beam strikes arrived next: twelve of them focused on the centre of this bruise. If the Brockle’s calculations were right, then the underlying twist absorbing all this energy would overload local U-space and, just for a second, the runcible would fail to function. Precisely timed to that theorized second, a U-jump missile presently tried to materialize in the heart of that sphere, its CTD loading measured in the gigatons.
Nothing happened.
Now established completely inside all the ships of the Polity fleet, the Brockle gazed through millions of sensors. It was in command of immensely powerful weapons at the cutting edge of Polity research, and it was simmering with frustration. The sphere seemed impenetrable. Shoaling round inside a cavity inside the High Castle where once the Tuelin Suite had been, the total number of its units aboard this ship having been increased to nine hundred during the journey here, the Brockle lapsed into rage, shedding electrostatics. It wanted to destroy something, but nothing inessential was immediately available—the Tuelin Suite was already being reprocessed, its materials even then being formed into more units of the Brockle itself.
“Missed,” came a communication.
The Brockle immediately sent viruses, self-assembling worms, in fact a cornucopia of lethal computer life, which in the virtual world resembled the Brockle in the physical one.
“Surely you know that’s not going to work now,” said Sverl.
The Brockle wanted to shut down communications with the erstwhile prador, but that would be self-defeating because those communications might eventually afford a route inside the sphere. With a deliberate effort, it calmed itself. Yes, sending everything at once had been foolish and had only come close to working against Amistad because the Garrotte persona had fooled the drone. When Sverl had opened communications again, the Brockle had limited itself to sending small pieces which might eventually assemble into something a bit more dangerous. Though—it checked vectors—there might not be enough time for that. Layden’s Sink now lay ten light minutes away and, at its current rate of progress the sphere would reach it in two solstan days.
“So are you going to remain inside that sphere when it drops into the black hole?” the Brockle asked.
“I think not,” Sverl replied. “We do have a runcible in here, you know.”
“Then why your delay in using it?”
“I’m waiting for Penny Royal.”
“Who will arrive via the runcible?”
After a minutely perceptible delay, Sverl replied, “I guess.”
From this the Brockle surmised that Sverl didn’t know precisely how Penny Royal was going to arrive, but that he did know something else and didn’t want to reveal either his ignorance or his knowledge. No matter. Calmer now, the Brockle was also working out what had gone wrong with the previous attack. It had made assumptions about something difficult to measure: the sphere’s underlying U-space twist was not yet at its full loading and easily absorbing hits without the local U-space overload and concomitant brief runcible failure. However, that loading would increase as it drew closer to the black hole and it seemed likely that Plan A would work. With the twist sucking up energy as the sphere approached the black hole’s event horizon, loading would reach its maximum . . .
At that moment the Brockle had another of those epiphanies that had
become more frequent as it grew. It began making rapid calculations throughout its units at such an intensity that some of them became so hot they began to radiate. Finally reaching its conclusion, it realized that it was a mathematical certainty that right on the event horizon the underlying twist would turn the full three hundred and sixty degrees and lead to the implosion of the hardfield. This was as certain as a spaceship, accelerating through realspace, hitting infinite mass when it reached the speed of light. Some of that energy would have to be routed out of the hardfield and U-twist circuit. This could not be done by runcible. Therefore, at the event horizon the hardfield would have to be shut down for some kind of energy ejection. Of course, this was why the sphere itself had been constructed so strongly—to resist the tidal forces of the black hole, no matter how briefly.
The Brockle pondered this further. As far as it understood the situation, Penny Royal was not actually within that sphere yet. The underlying U-twist, being taken round to its limit, would make it difficult for anything coming into the sphere from elsewhere by any U-space method, though leaving would be less of a problem. The Brockle knew that the AI had its own methods of travelling through U-space, in fact, was now beginning to understand how it itself could so travel. However, the black AI would not be entering the sphere like a U-jump missile because the runcible would act on it just as it did on such missiles. It would have to use the runcible and, because of that twist, it would probably require some kind of realspace anchor within the sphere. This aspect was probably what Sverl was being coy about.
Nevertheless: a runcible. In practical terms runcibles were a closed system—a tunnel through U-space with impenetrable walls—which meant that somewhere Penny Royal would have to enter the real, in its entirety, then enter a runcible to reach the sphere. Of course, this was why it had hijacked the Azure Whale with its three evacuation runcibles aboard. Wherever it brought itself into the real through one of those runcibles before transferring to the sphere was another vulnerable point . . .
It wasn’t relevant.
Those runcibles could now be anywhere in the galaxy and the chances of the Brockle locating them were remote. Its best chance of destroying the sphere was when it reached the event horizon. Penny Royal would be inside by then and, at that point, the Brockle would direct the full firepower of this Polity fleet against it. If the hardfield shut down for an energy ejection, the sphere would be destroyed. If it didn’t shut down, the twist would go past its recovery point and the hardfield would implode, crushing the sphere and Penny Royal down into a singularity—all that order disrupted and crushed.
All the Brockle had to do was wait.
Spear
As we arrived and I began viewing sensor data directly via my aug, I felt a surge of déjà vu. However this time it was not the effect of someone else’s memories but my own. Panarchia lay only a little way ahead—it seemed Flute was getting better and better at calculating U-jumps—and just an hour with the fusion drive and steering thrusters put us in orbit of that world.
Blite, in Pace’s ship, arrived much further out and would take some hours to get to us. As I focused my attention on the world, I wondered if I should bother waiting.
The déjà vu came laced with a strange species of nostalgia, yet it seemed ridiculous to feel that way about a place where I had died. I remembered the attack ship that brought in my bio-espionage unit—it had been of an old design now only seen in the Graveyard owned by traders or smugglers, and its AI had been an odd creature that always spoke as if it had taken too many drugs. The attack ship took us straight down to the surface, covered by anti-munitions from a dreadnought in orbit. The prador force on the surface of the world was a small one that the Polity forces already down there, under General Berners, should have had no trouble overwhelming. There promised to be prisoners, captured data and machinery, and with luck some explanation as to why the prador had placed such a small force on this depopulated Polity world. In reality the system was in a good tactical position for prador fleet deployment and the surface of the world should have been secured by a larger force. What were they up to?
As we descended, high-powered lasers and particle beams taking out missiles fired by big railguns on the surface, hardfields intercepting the remnants and the ship still shuddering under their impact, we began to find out. Even as my team debarked from the attack ship an intense light glared in the sky and that druggy AI informed us that the dreadnought had just been destroyed. The attack ship launched but didn’t get higher than a few miles before something punched right through it, gutting it with plasma fire and the detonation of its own munitions. The railgun bolt then hit the ground below and my team and I were swept up in the shockwave like leaves. I survived, but five of the eight bio-espionage experts with me didn’t. When Captain Gideon found us, we’d managed to gather the remains of our fellows and to salvage what we could of our equipment. He told us we probably wouldn’t need it since, with the massive prador landing force that had just come down, we probably wouldn’t be taking prisoners but struggling to avoid becoming prisoners ourselves.
“It was bad,” said Sepia, watching me.
“Yes, it was,” I agreed. Obviously my feelings had been bleeding across our link.
“But tactically I still find what happened here baffling.”
“It was simple enough.” I gestured at the world now shown in all its glory up in the screen fabric. “A small force of prador was left as a lure to a larger Polity force. When that arrived, it was isolated by an even larger prador force that had been in hiding—not captured or destroyed, but corralled and left as bait for rescue attempts.”
“No.” She shook her head. “It still doesn’t make sense.”
I continued gazing at Panarchia. The world looked familiar but I could see that it had changed. The colours there were different, swirls of cloud more tightly wrapped, flashes of thunderstorms everywhere, as if the war had never stopped down there. Aurora swept through the ionosphere in curtains of green, pink and electric lemon.
“What doesn’t make sense?” I asked.
“Though that was early in the war, by then we knew the prador and they knew us.” I glanced across at her. She had her foot up on the desk—well on its way to growing back. “The prador had to know that the AIs would not waste a fleet in an attempt to rescue eight thousand men stranded down on the surface. They had to know that the AIs simply wouldn’t countenance such a loss of ships.”
“A fleet was here, nevertheless,” I said.
“Yes, being fed by factory station Room 101. But ships started gating through from that station far too early for them to be a response to what happened there.” She indicated the screen.
“You’ve been checking history files, I take it,” I said, and resisted an impulse, old as humanity, to say, “You don’t understand. You weren’t there.”
“I have,” she replied. “And I have to wonder where one might stop at that trap-within-a-trap thing . . .”
“Meaning?”
“Berners’ division was trapped and used to lure in a Polity fleet. It shouldn’t have worked but the Polity fleet duly arrived—slightly prematurely. It received a pounding from the prador but, in reality, they were affordable losses. While the prador losses were less in terms of ship numbers, they were ships they could not afford to lose because they did not have the kind of production facilities the Polity was making. Sure, they had their own shipyards, but they had nothing like Room 101.”
“That sounds about right,” said Riss. I glanced over to see the drone enter the bridge, having returned from her abode in the weapons cache. “The Polity apparently accepts the challenge but uses it as a way of savaging the prador again.” She paused. “We had plenty of disposable assets because we could manufacture our soldiers . . .”
Yes, all those minds copied and recopied, mixed, briefly tested and sent out to battle from Room 101. Minds like Penny Royal’s and Riss�
�s. I felt suddenly very uncomfortable with the notion.
“The realities of industrialized warfare,” I said. “Heroism is less relevant than firepower and tactics, and all those less important than the production line.”
“It was one of those battles,” said Sepia. “The ones where it looked like the Polity was losing but in reality it sucked up prador resources, leading to their eventual defeat.”
“They weren’t defeated,” said Riss, now floating up off the floor, sliding across through the air and coming down to coil on the console. There she tucked her head down, as if that was the end of her input for the moment.
Sepia gave me a look. “They started negotiating. When had they done that before? It’s arguable that, if the Kingdom had still been strong after the usurpation, the new king would have carried on fighting.”
“Arguable, yes.”
“May I interrupt?” asked Flute over the intercom.
“You just did, but do continue.”
“I have detected a familiar anomaly down on the surface.”
Riss’s head came up then.
“Take us down and land beside it,” I said, sitting upright.
“I can’t—the terrain is rough.”
I felt the skin on my back creeping as I said, “Don’t tell me. The anomaly is down in a mountain range which, before the war, the colonists called the Scalings.”
After a pause Flute replied, “Correct.”
“Take us down as close as you can.” I would have preferred to have gone down by shuttle and have had Flute up here to cover us. But, no shuttle now being available . . .