“Increasing?” said Ikbal disbelievingly.
Blite just detached his line and headed for the ladder.
SVERL
In the sanctum inside his dreadnought, Sverl gazed at his screens in disbelief. He was now sitting in a low geostationary position directly above Carapace City. The unexpected shielding had been of an odd design. It was curved, but all the science he knew had it that the energy losses in distorting such an interface in this way outweighed its effectiveness. It also had no anchored projectors which would take on the kinetic load. Neither could he see any heat sinks or energy convertors for the transformation of such a load to be shunted away. It had initially been powered by The Rose’s fusion reactor, but that alone couldn’t have provided enough power to stop dead the tsunami—let alone the ensuing CTD blasts or particle beams. But of course this was Penny Royal, and the technological know-how down there lay beyond the prador’s scientific prowess. And, unless they were keeping things under wraps, it was beyond the Polity AIs too.
Again checking data, Sverl tried to work out what had been done, and how. Penny Royal had somehow anchored the shield to realspace and used some entropic effect to draw power from that. The temperature down there had dropped rapidly, both behind and ahead of the shield for nearly twenty miles. It dipped below the freezing point of water within the first few miles, rising in a simple curve to the limit of that distance. The energy from the first CTD fired from Cvorn’s ship had routed back, raising the temperature again. But then some U-space effect had kicked in, diverting the bulk of that energy into underspace. Then Penny Royal somehow steadily drew on this again to expand and strengthen the shield. It now completely enwrapped Carapace City, the visible part of it being a dome. But the whole thing formed a perfect sphere, for it also lay underground.
Stunning, and terrifying. How could Sverl ever have contemplated petty vengeance against something capable of doing that? However, more than ever he now wanted a confrontation of a different kind, resolution, absolution, something … He could no more contemplate avoiding the black AI than he could now consider attacking it. There was mystery here; the AI was the source, the centre, the point where Sverl had to be. There was a further puzzle too. Why had Penny Royal defended the city? Sverl took just a moment to come up with the answer, and then wondered if some remnant of his prador arrogance might be kicking in.
Because of me.
Without him, the prador enclave would not have existed on this world. Without him and the changes Penny Royal had wrought in him, Carapace City wouldn’t have been able to exist either, containing as it did the shell people and other humans. No normal prador would have allowed that—only one tempered, or perhaps twisted, by his change into an amalgam of prador, human and AI. This place was a disaster waiting to happen. Even without Penny Royal’s arrival, and Sverl’s response to that, the others would have turned against him at some point. In the ensuing battle, the humans here would have been annihilated. Penny Royal had apparently taken responsibility and come here to prevent that—and in essence to clear up a mess of its own making. But what next? Was Sverl next on the black AI’s agenda?
Procrastinating …
Sverl abruptly realized he had been studying the data and thinking about what it might mean for far too long. Now his prador kin were pig-headedly trying to penetrate a shield that only became stronger after each attack. They were consistently failing to adapt quickly to the new and the different—so now was the time to act. Now, while that shield protected the city, Cvorn and the others had allowed their hatred of humanity to override common sense. So, while they were so distracted, Sverl could get heavy-handed. It was time for some payback for both the attack on him and the deaths caused down there. Cvorn and the others might have failed to destroy the main human population, but they had, by Sverl’s estimation, managed to vaporize hundreds. Those living outside the city were simply gone. The few hundred who hadn’t waited for automated transport out and fled on foot had been killed by their own instinct for self-preservation.
“All gunners,” he announced, again taking control of two of the particle cannons himself, “fire at will—hit those destroyers.”
Targeting images abruptly proliferated across his screens and his children responded with everything from the standard dour, “We obey,” to a few clattering cries of prador delight. He felt some parental pride as firing commenced just a second later, the thrumming of railguns permeating the ship as they hurled down missiles, these travelling nearly as fast as the particle beams that stabbed down with them.
Skute’s ship took the first blow. Three railgun missiles hit it in succession, the first two vaporizing against exotic metal armour. But the force of their blasts did knock the ship down to just above the ocean, compacting it horizontally too so that nothing inside could have survived. However, the third missile penetrated right through, blowing a molten plume down into the waves. Even as Skute’s ship slid sideways on failing engines, the next missiles impacted above the other two destroyers. But these exploded on projected hardfields because the other two had seen the danger at the last moment. Both ships dropped after successive hardfield impacts. They were forced back down into the ocean, glaring like stars and seemingly unravelling as they fired out s-con sink cables. The sea boiled around them as energy convertors aboard turned the energy from those impacts into massive pulses of heat and dispersed light.
So you did prepare, Sverl thought, though it seems Skute was as senile as I supposed.
The burning remains of Skute’s destroyer ploughed into the sea beside the coast, hit the edge of the landmass and bounced up. Then, just as the debris came down again in a cataclysmic crash, a hundred miles south of Carapace City, Sverl’s screens and control unit links alerted him to danger.
The moon?
How had they positioned those?
Three railgun missiles hit his ship before he managed to get his hard-fields up. The impact sent him staggering, his claws coming out of the pit controls. A series of screen segments went out, then automatically switched to other views. He saw a glowing hardfield generator hurled inward from his hull to then tear through the ship’s infrastructure. Other areas filled with fire, while he glimpsed one of his children falling out through a hole in the hull into vacuum.
Arrogance always has its cost.
Glancing round his sanctum, he saw that nothing was damaged or had come loose in here, then forced himself back to his controls. He was aware that at least two of his remaining precious children were gone. However, the others had reacted perfectly as per their training, and quickly focused on the new danger. A layer of rocky camouflage had slewed away from that irregular lump that could only just be defined as a moon. Underneath this, two near-c railguns were spewing a perpetual fusillade of iron-based missiles that must have been manufactured from the moon’s own substance. All of the dreadnought’s energy was being sucked up by its shields, convertors labouring to turn the impact shocks into heat. This was now being spewed from the ship’s dark side, as jets of stored water turned to HO plasma—a store that could not last for much longer. If only Sverl had the kind of technology Penny Royal had used—that way of shunting the energy into U-space then drawing it back to power his shields …
Meanwhile, on the planet below, the two remaining destroyers were exiting the ocean under fusion and anti-grav drive, the massive acceleration probably killing any of the unprepared aboard. For just a second Sverl considered the formula, supposing that two destroyers were no match for one dreadnought. With Skute’s ship down, the advantage should be his, but he now knew that wasn’t true. By positioning those railguns on the moon, Cvorn and the others had managed to take the advantage. He was nailed; he couldn’t even fire up his drive to run because the energy drain would weaken his shields. He had, at best, the time it would take for the two destroyers to clear atmosphere, then a second fusillade from them would tear him apart.
SPEAR
As I headed to the space port and my shuttle, I found myself
sinking into a black depression. Even the magnificent sight of a massive hooder, hurtling through the flute grasses below like an enraged monorail train, failed to lift it, especially when the sight felt so familiar to me. Riss was also without much to say, and I wondered if AIs could be as subject to the foibles of mood as us creatures of flesh and blood. Of course they could—they could do everything we could do and more—and they could also cease to be subject to them any time they chose. Thinking this, I remembered how I wasn’t so different, really. Running a feedback program through my aug’s nano-connections in my skull to restore the neurochemical balance in my brain, I felt the mood fade and a “natural” optimism return.
“Let’s land,” I said.
Riss turned towards me with her black eye closed, but opened a mouth I hadn’t seen open until that moment. It was pink inside with white fangs, and the long sharp tongue was red, mottled with purple.
“It’s dangerous down there,” she replied, mouth movements now matching speech and imparting an appropriate hiss. I wondered if some internal conflict was making her neglect her outward appearance. Yet, this physical accompaniment to speech might have implied the opposite. It could be that previously she had been neglecting her outward appearance.
“I just linked in to the hooder beacon network so I know all their locations and none of them will be close to where we set down,” I replied. “We need to talk.”
My depression was certainly absent now, but the initial reasons for it remained. Instead of perpetually chewing these over in my mind I wanted someone to bounce them off, and I wanted to do it here. I’d spent too long aboard the Lance and wanted to extend my break from it. I set the car to descend, aiming for a large flat rock, on a mound where a channel of muddy water divided into a Y.
“Surely we must hurry back to the Graveyard?” said Riss. “We might miss Penny Royal if we don’t go now.”
“The Graveyard is a big place, and Penny Royal will still exist even if we don’t manage to find it there,” I replied. I took my hand away from the controls as the car abruptly took over. Instead of coming down on the rock, it slewed sideways and landed on the sloping ground beside it, on a bed of short flute grass shoots.
“Penny oysters,” said Riss. “Somehow appropriate.”
Getting no further explanation for the manoeuvre, I queried the car’s computer and received an automatic message from some submind of Amistad’s. Apparently landing on the rocks here was frowned upon. Such a landing would crush the many penny oysters that occupied them and these creatures were protected. Further enquiries rendered the reason for the protection order: penny oysters contained a great deal of the genetically encoded knowledge of the Atheter. They essentially belonged to the single sentient Atheter living on this world, an entity that had named itself the Weaver. The Polity did not want to annoy it by the inadvertent destruction of parts of its databank.
I pulled on my breather mask and stepped out of the car, hard shoots crunching under my boots as I walked over to the rock, hearing the swishing of Riss’s progress behind me. I stood there gazing down at a scattering of translucent domes each about an inch across, stuck to the surface of the stone like limpets. Inside these, I could just about identify the slimy movements of the molluscs they protected.
“I don’t know what I am,” I said.
Rising beside me Riss replied, “Neither do I.”
I glanced at the snake-like drone. “You don’t know what you are, or you don’t know what I am?”
“Both.”
The sun was setting. Some odd illusion suggested that the now-greenish orb was sinking into the clouds, and was about to settle on the land over there. Riss’s reply didn’t particularly baffle me. Recollecting the drone’s story, I imagined that not knowing what she was must be a constant affliction for her. She had been made for one purpose only and was now obsolete. Then Penny Royal had screwed with her mind, leaving a void that had eventually filled with vengeance against that AI.
“Penny Royal tampered with my memories, added to them and maybe subtracted from them too,” I said. “But memory is merely one aspect of a mind’s structure. I have to wonder if its software has been tampered with too, as well as the information in storage.”
“Yes,” was the full extent of Riss’s assistance with that matter.
“I no longer know what is and isn’t true, or whether I can trust myself,” I said. “Do I really hate Penny Royal? Yes, I was killed at Panarchia by that AI and lost a lot of friends there. But I never really saw the things it did after that event and I had absolutely zero time to nurture my supposed need for vengeance.”
“All you do know,” said Riss, now turning towards me and opening that black eye again, “is what isn’t true about yourself.”
I nodded. It was growing darker now, stars appearing in the aubergine sky and the vast nebula displayed across it etching itself into existence. It was a beautiful sight, one which I of course somehow already knew. But, at that moment, it didn’t seem to matter. I could appreciate it, even against a background of unwarranted familiarity. “I was never captured by the prador and I never suffered under one of their spider thralls. I never saw the atrocities committed by Penny Royal after Panarchia and I never grew to consider myself the ultimate tool of retribution against that AI.” I paused to watch one of this world’s fast-moving moons come tumbling up over the horizon. It threw shadows all about us, one of them quite odd.
“Y’know,” I continued, “if someone wanted to fashion a tool—a hunter intent on going after Penny Royal no matter what—that would be me. Yet it would appear that Penny Royal itself forged me.”
“Perhaps it wants to be punished,” said Riss, now turning to look behind us.
“So I am its form of suicide, or something?”
The drone’s lack of reply made me think she had no more answers than I did. As I stood there contemplating my situation, I raised my gaze to further stars now blinking into existence. Straight away, I saw something up there, cruising across. For a second I thought it was one of the orbital objects, until it drew to a halt. I was looking at an old-style ship’s crab drone: a two-foot-wide pill of metal, with two glinting topaz eyes close together on its rim and claws folded in on either side of them.
“We’re being watched,” I said.
“Oh, really,” Riss drawled.
Riss was still looking behind us, so, with the skin on my back creeping, I casually turned around. It had squatted down where the watercourse divided; a great bulk nearly the size of an African elephant. In this light and in its present pose, it did look something like that animal too. It was drinking—I could now hear the slurping sounds—but then it finished, reared back and sat on its haunches. Its body sagged into a pyramid of flesh, its tiara of green eyes gleaming below the shiny dome of its head. It snapped its big duck’s bill open and closed as if it was relishing the drink, exposing white spiky teeth inside.
“No beacons on these,” I suggested quietly, thinking of the hooder alerts.
“And especially not on this one,” Riss replied.
This one?
I now saw that it held a tricone in one of its black claws—three laterally connected cones of shell with something glistening in the ends of each. While we watched, it inserted a long talon into one cone and levered out part of the mollusc’s triple body. It inspected the morsel for a moment, then inserted it into its bill and champed it down. It then levered out the other two parts and ate them, studying the empty shell before discarding it. Then, in one rippling movement, it was across the stream and heading up the slope towards us. I felt a momentary frisson, for I knew that no part of me had ever seen a gabbleduck feeding.
“Be aware,” grated a voice nearby, “that if you attempt any violence I will be forced to either stun or eliminate you—that includes you, snake drone.”
“Really?” said Riss.
I glanced around to see that the crab drone was now hovering just a couple of yards behind us.
“Rea
lly,” it replied. “I might not have the Watts myself but I’ve got narrow beam masers pointed at both of you from orbit.”
Now I understood what Riss meant by “this one”—the drone was its protection. And here, rapidly approaching us like an eager two-ton puppy, came this planet’s autochthon. The Weaver, as it was known, was the resurrected and only living example of an Atheter. Descendant of a race that had, arguably, exterminated itself. Thankfully the creature slowed as it drew closer. But still it loomed over us as it stooped down and inspected us both in turn, as if short-sighted. Seemingly satisfied, it settled back on its haunches again. I stared at the thing, and it stared back. I now saw that it carried various bits of technology, hanging from a wide girdle made of intricately woven flute grasses. And affixed to the side of its head was what looked suspiciously like a G-Chrome aug. Reaching down to its girdle, it bifurcated one of its forelimbs so each section displayed three claws, and plucked off an object with one set.
“Why?” it said, quite distinctly.
“Why what?” I asked, the frisson failing to depart, because all of this felt so new for a change. But I also wondered what the chances were of me setting down just there—on the one place on this planet where this creature had stopped for its evening meal. I knew there was such a thing as coincidence, but my recent experiences made me feel it wasn’t as common as one would suppose.
“Is existence more important than veracity?” the Weaver enquired. The object it held wasn’t anything I recognized. The nearest approximation was that it resembled the internal auditory workings of a human ear, fashioned out of blue metal and glass. It had to be some newly recreated piece of Atheter technology. “Penny Royal,” it added with something like a sigh.
“What about Penny Royal?” I asked, frisson turning to excitement.
Of course, in the years since this creature had been resurrected it was quite likely to have had its encounters with the black AI.
“Do you like your iteration?” it asked.