Dark Intelligence

  Trent just sat there, feeling a sense of doom. His mood was probably due to the psychological damage he’d sustained along with his injuries. But if she was accessing those weapons, they might well be a part of those “other ways” she was considering. It seemed her earlier idea about getting answers, or some resolution from the AI, had slipped her mind. The main image on the screen now changed to show Blite’s The Rose. It was under fusion drive against a backdrop of stars, the Moray Firth’s targeting frames now blossoming all over it.

  “Isobel … don’t,” he managed.

  She was tighter now; coiled like a spring. Emitting a hiss, she turned towards him, scalpel knives clacking together in her hood. They shed slivers of a material like glass, sharpening themselves.

  “It would be better if Penny Royal doesn’t leave at all,” she said. “Spear will come here to the AI’s last known location.”

  “You saw what it did down on the Rock Pool,” he argued. “Do you think for one second you’ll be able to—”

  Oh Hell. She was firing the weapons.

  He could feel thrumming throughout the ship as the railgun fired, then he saw the impacts flashing on The Rose’s hardfield on screen. A surge of acceleration tried to throw him out of his seat and he hurriedly latched the safety harness in place. Isobel skidded across the floor, her hard feet tearing up metal. Something flashed out there, the screen blanked and the Moray Firth jerked as if slapped by a giant hand. Trent felt his gut tightening and experienced an almost painful awareness of his recent injuries. Just as he’d thought only moments before, she was going to get them both killed.

  “Chameleonware?” said Isobel in disbelief. “They don’t use chameleonware.”

  The Moray Firth abruptly changed direction and the screen came back on, an image flashed up of The Rose, so it couldn’t be using chame-leonware itself. The next moment, the ship’s sensors seemed to be trying to fix on something indefinable. He glimpsed a massive object looming out there, now sliding to one side of the screen. The laminate then went completely white, before another image surged forwards to occupy it. Now another image stared back at them, which clattered prosthetic mandibles and bubbled, noises which were instantly translated into speech he could recognize.

  “Isobel,” said the prador Father-Captain Sverl, “we need to talk.”

  Great, a prador dreadnought on our ass.

  “Isobel,” Sverl repeated.

  “No,” she stated. “Never.”

  The weapons were firing again, striking flat hardfields and lighting the massive dreadnought looming beyond.

  She was attacking?

  “Isobel,” said Sverl once again, managing to impart his huge disappointment through that one translated word.

  Another lurch ensued, followed by an emergency dive into U-space that set Trent’s ears ringing and made his bones feel as if they’d turned to fracturing glass. The screen went grey, shot through with swirls and flickering lights that sucked on the eyeballs, before turning white. At last, Isobel had found some remnant of sanity.

  “It can’t follow us,” she said, rage evident even through her speech synthesizer. “I can shield my drive parameters.”

  The U-jump abruptly terminated, space returning to the screen laminate. The stars were dim and widely scattered here.

  “It cannot follow,” Isobel repeated. “It was told to guard the fucking Rock Pool.”

  Trent didn’t question that. Obviously her communication with the father-captain had been much more extensive than the portion he’d heard. He waited long minutes, and finally Isobel relaxed, as much as her new form allowed.

  “The Rose went into U-space,” she stated, her cowl turned towards Trent. “And I have its coordinates.”

  Great. Wonderful.

  “Wouldn’t it be better to wait at the Rock Pool?” he asked. “That’s surely where Spear will be heading next.”

  “No … not there,” she hissed. “Spear’s not coming here. He won’t be leaving Masada because Penny Royal is going to him.” She paused … to consider? “I need to arrange a new rendezvous with Morgan. We’re going to need some serious firepower for the endgame.”

  “And where will that be?”

  “Masada.”

  Trent felt himself relax into weary acceptance. There was something liberating about being certain of the time and location of your own death.

  SVERL

  Sverl felt very disappointed and just a little bit hurt. Didn’t Isobel Satomi understand how close he and she were? Didn’t she understand their fellow feeling?

  He squatted in his sanctum and contemplated her reaction to him. Their verbal communication had been brief and pointless, but communication on other levels had held whole encyclopaedias of meaning. He had sent her his life story and his questions in one informational missile, and it punched through all her defences to then unravel. He knew she could handle the data with her haiman augmentations, and he thought she would understand. The bounce-back had been interesting, since his programs had rooted out much detail on her life and sent it back to him. Then all was overwhelmed by a surge of emotion: an insane rage undershot with human terror.

  Now, mentally riffling through portions of Isobel’s life story, Sverl understood part of her reaction. Her early years, in human terms, had been traumatic. She had been powerless when she saw her family slaughtered, then powerless in drug-dependent sexual slavery and only climbed to power as a mafia whore. By penetrating her defences so easily, Sverl had made her powerless again, hence her human reaction of fear. However, her rage was something else, human on its surface but driven by what she was becoming. Next reaching the more recent parts of her life, Sverl divined her intentions. She intended to hunt both Spear and Penny Royal—her hooder element overriding the rational human in her.

  Sverl clattered his mandibles in frustration. He wanted to pursue her to see if she had some insight, or some answers he needed. He could, in an instant, because she had failed to adequately shield her drive. He also wanted to go after the source of all his … confusion: Penny Royal. However, he could do neither. Penny Royal had saved his life, but in repayment he knew he must protect Carapace City. He had no doubt that Cvorn and the Five had left watchers in that system and if he left they would return here to finish it off. He was stuck here for now.

  Even as he considered his dilemma, it got a little less complex when it became evident where Isobel was headed. He couldn’t go there. No matter what his need for resolution with Penny Royal and regardless of his intense curiosity about Isobel. The Polity AIs on Masada would not respond well to a prador dreadnought approaching their territory, especially near a world occupied by a resurrected Atheter. There were probably assets in place around that world capable of defending it against an entire war fleet. He would be vapour before he even had a chance to explain.

  A visit there would also be suicide for Isobel but now, knowing more about her and what she had become, Sverl doubted that would stop her. He emitted a pradorish sigh, accepting that his curiosity about her was unlikely to be satisfied. He then sent a repeating U-space communication—a general instruction that his Golem would receive the next time Isobel’s ship entered the real. It was a survivor, that one, so it would know what to do.

  It was also unlikely that Penny Royal would stay on Masada. The AI was on the move, set on some unfathomable course that Sverl doubted would limit it to one world. It must eventually go where Sverl could intercept it without running into Polity firepower. What to do?

  His tentative communication to a Rock Pool target was met with an immediate response. “Well that could have gone better, and it could have gone a lot worse,” said the Polity drone down there.

  “I will need to leave,” said Sverl, “but if I go, then Cvorn might come back.”

  “True enough,” said the drone. “When members of your erstwhile kind are on the losing side they love the opportunity to resort to spite. I’d bet the farm that Cvorn is checking feeds from watch satellites and sensors scatte
red all over this system even now.”

  “This world needs to be protected,” said Sverl. “Can’t the Polity do something?”

  “As you well know, Polity or prador intervention in the Graveyard is frowned upon,” said the drone. “If Polity forces were to turn up here, then your king would have to respond, by which time the turd trajectory would be fanwards.”

  It took Sverl a moment to sort out that strange colloquialism, his thoughts straying to the strange human obsession with certain bodily functions.

  “But prador forces are here already,” he said in annoyance.

  “Renegade prador,” said the drone, “who are private individuals with no allegiance to the Kingdom. Just like the private individual humans down here, with their lack of allegiance to the Polity.”

  Sverl contemplated giving up on them as he had, effectively, before. He couldn’t. Penny Royal had protected Carapace City and if Sverl left it, to go after some vague resolution from the black AI, its response might not be so good. Sverl glanced at one of his screens, now showing a cloud of debris spreading equilaterally around the planet. It was visible from below as periodic meteor flashes—all that remained of that moon.

  “But don’t you fret,” said the drone. “I’m sure your strange need to get close to something even I might get nightmares about will be satisfied.”

  How did the drone know about that?

  “What do you mean?”

  “Consider the situation,” said the drone. “Penny Royal came here to resolve the problematic situation caused by transforming you. I now suspect it’s in the process of resolving another problematic situation, one caused by the changes it made to Isobel Satomi.”

  “You are being obscure.”

  “I don’t have all the data—my updates from the Polity and elsewhere are limited as I might be captured out here. However, I do know that Thorvald Spear is himself a Penny Royal creation. He hired Isobel Satomi to take him to the AI’s destroyer, betrayed her and wrecked her drive—actions certain to put her hard on his tail. Penny Royal then went and repaired her drive. Later, after the events here, it went into an unshielded jump to Masada, where Spear is located.”

  “You’re still being obscure.”

  “I can’t really be clearer. Penny Royal will know, down to the nth degree, the extent of Isobel’s changes and how she will react. It’s leading her to the kind of resolution you yourself seek.”

  “And still seek,” said Sverl, still not sure he understood what the drone was suggesting. “You said my need will surely be satisfied?”

  “It will, but meanwhile you must stay here to deal with Cvorn, who will undoubtedly hatch some plot to extract vengeance from you—by annihilating the people down here.”

  “And I must also deal with the Five,” Sverl added.

  “No, not the Five—you do them an injustice,” said the drone. “You also haven’t been checking your data.”

  Sverl was dumbfounded for a moment, then did some verifying. In just a moment he discovered what the drone was implying. The two prador destroyers had emergency U-jumped out of this system in different directions. Cvorn’s jump had taken him in towards the Polity, while the Five’s had taken them towards the Kingdom.

  “You have further data?” Sverl asked.

  “I have. The emergency U-jumps took both ships six light years away. The Five jumped again—heading straight into the Kingdom and almost certainly looking for females.”

  “So that really is their aim?”

  “It is.”

  “Very well, Cvorn only. But let us return to the matter of my satisfaction. You seem very sure but haven’t explained yourself.”

  “Simple enough, really. Penny Royal seems to be in the process of sorting out the messes it made in the past and tying up unfinished business. It also seems to be laying the groundwork for something else—but for what I have no idea. Anyway, you, Sverl, are unfinished business. My guess is that even if you don’t go in search of Penny Royal it will, at some point, come for you.”

  Sverl wasn’t sure if he liked that idea, but it would have to be enough. He would stay here and wait to intercept whatever Cvorn threw this way. He had no choice.

  “Isobel is going to die,” he stated.

  “Not necessarily, but going where she’s going, she’s certainly biting off more than she can chew.”

  That particular metaphor translated directly into the prador language and was much used even now. Sverl guessed that all sentient races with mouths and stomachs would have metaphors that were much the same.

  “I don’t see how there could be any other outcome but her death.”

  “You don’t? Is death the resolution you seek?”

  “No.”

  “Neither is it the one Isobel seeks. Always remember that Penny Royal gives its victims what they want—often providing more of what they want than they in fact wanted.”

  “I don’t understand.”

  “Few people do,” the drone replied, and broke the communication.

  SPEAR

  The edge of the rocky shelf on the seaward side of the town was just visible from the hotel’s enclosed balcony. Beyond it lay the mud pan, then a flute-grass peninsula separating it from the sea. And on the mud pan were scattered the shells of dead tricones. The coastal town of Chattering sat on a long flat rock, saved from the grinding mouthparts of those molluscs through being surrounded by that briny mud. Had it been further inland, the rock would have been ground down to nothing in a couple of centuries.

  “They have a whole craft industry here devoted to making objects from the shells,” said Riss.

  “What kind of objects?” I asked, grateful that the drone was now speaking to me.

  After I told her we wouldn’t be heading back to the ship and the Graveyard yet she had snapped at me. She wondered if I’d lost my enthusiasm for hunting down a mass murderer, and generally made acerbic comments about my lack of devotion to duty. It had been a rather hollow tirade, I felt, as if her heart wasn’t in it.

  “Fancy boxes, vases and cups—all the usual tat.” The drone turned from gazing out across the town to study me. “So now we’re going to visit a jewellery shop.”

  “Yes, we are.”

  “I doubt you will learn anything new there,” she replied. “It’s not as if anyone there will know Penny Royal’s location.”

  “I’m feeling my way,” I said. “I think that leaving here now would be too hasty. There are things to learn here.” I turned and stepped from the balcony back into the apartment, which I can only describe as the Masadan version of rustic. It possessed furniture made of woven flute grass bonded under a thin layer of transparent resin. A kitchen area consisted of a vending machine providing a few strange drinks and snacks—the intention doubtless being for me to spend my money in the restaurant on the floor below. In addition, the bathroom was a single sanitary booth of the kind designed for small spaceships. I walked over to the bed, picked up my rucksack and shouldered it.

  “Are you coming?”

  I headed for the door, Riss emitting an irritated hiss as she followed me down into the foyer. A fat jovial catadapt man sat behind the counter. He stood up and grinned.

  “Don’t forget your mask,” he said.

  I reached into my rucksack to take it out and he nodded, his grin freezing in place as he transferred his gaze to Riss. The revolving pressure door took us out onto a narrow street formed from the town’s base stone. This had footpaths worn into it alongside the buildings, while its centre had been tiled level with slabs of hard white ceramic to carry the few groundcars here. I breathed the muggy swamp air for a moment, started to feel out of breath, then donned the mask. Checking the map in my aug, I turned right and headed along the path, that weird feeling of déjà vu hitting me strongly. I’d never been to this world before, yet I felt that I could find Markham’s without a map. I picked up my pace, trying to shake off the feeling. But, unlike previous occasions, it just grew stronger the closer I came to my desti
nation.

  At the centre of the town was a small square, overlooked on four sides by little baroque churches that could have been transported here directly from some ancient Italian town on Earth. One of them was still in use—religion being a difficult affliction to cure even in people who’d suffered under the vicious Theocracy here. The other three had been converted into an administrative centre and shopping malls. At the centre of the square an object was concealed behind scaffolding draped with silvery monomer. There was still, apparently, much debate about what to do with the Cage. Some felt it should be retained as part of their history and as a curiosity for tourists. Others still remembered friends and relatives dying in it and wanted it torn down and replaced with a fountain.

  I headed through the archway, sans doors, into one of the shopping malls, or converted church. The shoppers stopped to stare at my companion, but moved on as if embarrassed by their gauche parochialism. Here were various concerns packed with Polity products: augs, shimmershield breather masks, atomic shears, suitcase-manufactories—the whole works. And behind another window, I saw mannequins in the forms of various human adaptations and guessed what was being sold there. Ahead lay Markham’s, which possessed a complete chain-glass front with a shim-mershield glinting across the single rectangular entrance. Behind the glass, jewellery glittered in various standard displays. Then every now and again, hardfields picked up items and set them dancing through the air, intermittently flashing holograms to give the prices.

  I halted and stared at the place, finding myself horrified by its unexpected crassness. I turned and gazed at the other shops within the converted church with a weird feeling of offence rising in me and ended up looking through the arched entrance towards the Cage. Around me the noise and bustle faded, as did the shops, and I saw the previous interior of the church, stark and spartan.

  Rows of people were down on their knees on the stone, their clothing ragged and bulging at the fore as if each and every one of them was pregnant, the men included. But the cloth in fact concealed their scoles—large aphid-like creatures that fed them oxygen in exchange for blood. They prayed loudly, ever casting a wary eye over the black-uniformed proctors, the Theocracy’s religious police. These patrolled the building, swinging shock batons. I felt my eyes filling with tears as I looked towards the open wooden doors and the Cage.