“Surfle peg,” Blite heard distantly.
The gabbleduck disappeared into the grasses again, its course taking it directly towards the building housing the Atheter AI.
“It was carrying something,” said Brond.
“They weave,” said Penny Royal. “They make objects that seem to serve no purpose. And sometimes they make objects whose purpose is obvious, and they abandon both. The active mind of the Weaver speaks to them in dreams they don’t understand, and those dreams are always louder near the AI.”
The gabbleduck now climbed up onto a walkway leading into the AI building, still clutching the object before it. Arriving at the pillars, it hesitated, then discarded the thing like someone guiltily discarding trash. It then passed between two pillars, turned and exited between two others, dropping back down into the grasses. It muttered nonsense as it departed.
“Like votive offerings,” said Blite.
“Not even that logical,” Penny Royal replied.
“Why are we here?” Blite asked, and before he could curse himself for letting that question slip out, Penny Royal answered him.
“Spear will come, because he has to.”
“So?”
“He and I are the lure and Isobel will respond as calculated.”
Blite just waited. Penny Royal knew how much he understood and how much he was capable of understanding, and would either explain or not.
“As a human and a predator she will inevitably gather all her forces around her for an attack here—she will not be able to resist the lure,” Penny Royal informed him. “Those forces will include her cargo ship. And, her trade with the prador having been terminated, one of those ships will inevitably still contain its cargo of the cored and thralled. The accelerating changes within her will starve her—and rather than feed on her own people she will attempt to feed on that cargo. The Atheter war mind growing within her will then detect the Jain element of the Spatterjay virus. Their use of Jain technology kept the Atheter locked in civil war for millennia before they sacrificed everything they were in order to be free of it—and Isobel is now close to her final war machine form. Reacting to that threat, the war mind will begin to dominate, and her changes will accelerate. They will accelerate further every time she encounters any resistance. And when she is here, she will finally be ready.”
That was quite a long speech from the AI. But Blite only understood that Isobel Satomi was coming and that it was quite likely that things would soon turn nasty.
SPEAR
I quickly packed away my meagre luggage, basically just some items that weren’t particularly essential. Riss eyed my rucksack and said, “I don’t suppose you’ve got a CTD knocking around in there, have you?”
That stopped me in my tracks. When Flute informed us that The Rose had arrived here, I’d been shocked and knew I had to react. Subsequent events were baffling but I started getting ready to leave at once, as I would soon know Penny Royal’s location down on the surface of the world. But what then?
I wasn’t armed. I didn’t really have the firepower of the Lance to back me up since it had been effectively neutered, and I certainly didn’t have the option of using the fusion device. All that had been taken away from me as we approached Masada. Even if I could somehow get round that, there were weapons up there that could quickly turn the Lance into vapour. I allowed myself a wry smile at Riss’s comment, remembering that I’d wondered what I’d use against Penny Royal when we met. Strong language it would have to be.
“I guess we’re going to have to view Masada as neutral territory,” I said.
“It would be nice to assume Penny Royal will do the same,” Riss observed drily.
“So what do you suggest?” I said, dropping my rucksack down on the bed, then sitting down beside it.
“I don’t know any more,” said the drone.
That simple statement had many implications. Amistad had called Riss a “one-trick pony.” The snake drone’s motivations were generally absolute. First she’d been a prador killer with just one method of attack, next she sought vengeance on the one that had hollowed her out. But even that was gone now.
“I know what you’re thinking,” said Riss.
“You do?”
“What’s my trick now?”
“Close enough.”
“Answers—we have to confront Penny Royal, whether the black AI is making us do that or not.” Riss paused, head pointing down towards the floor. “I am beginning to understand that I could never transcend what I was, without that self being destroyed. Vengeance filled the void and it’s still there, but as an option only. I think I reflect you in that.”
I nodded and stood, took up my rucksack. “Let’s go.”
The problems started when I tried to send the gravcar to Blite’s ship’s location, relayed to my aug by Flute. The car just sat there with “unable to respond” displayed in red letters on its console screen. When I started auging for an explanation, I hit chaotic disruption in the virtual world. But I did manage to discover that all gravcars had been temporarily grounded, while my destination had been put under a quarantine order.
“Amistad’s blocking us,” I said. “What does the submind say?”
“That it would be best if we stayed where we are, for our own safety.”
“I thought so.” I pointed to the console. “Can you do anything?”
“No. All gravcars are temporarily grounded, but this particular one is grounded until someone comes and repairs the grav-engine.”
“Then we get another one.”
“Too easy to shut down.”
Riss sent something to my aug. Chattering had an all-terrain vehicle rental facility and the ATVs available needed minimal computer control. But Riss could usurp this. No outside signal could shut down a vehicle she controlled. I nodded and climbed out of the gravcar, then we took the stairs from the hotel roof back down to the street.
“It’s two hundred miles,” I said as we headed for the rental place.
“We can cross that in five hours—if I drive.”
“But then there’s the quarantine …”
“Something we’ll have to deal with,” Riss replied. “There’s no actual barrier up and I’m assuming Amistad will only resort to satellite weapons to disable our vehicle, whereupon we can walk in the remaining ten miles.”
“Reassuring.”
His name was Steve, according to the name tab on his overalls, and he immediately refused to rent us a vehicle.
“Sorry, but I got my orders,” he said.
“Who from?”
“Local cops,” he replied, “but they’re taking their orders direct from one of the warden’s subminds.”
The garage sat just by a bridge that crossed Chattering’s surrounding swamp. Its doors were open and four big cargo ATVs sat inside on cage wheels. These stood taller than the vehicles themselves and contained proactive suspension in their actual structures. I turned to Riss.
“For our own safety, police are coming to conduct us back to our hotel,” said the drone. “But this is low-key intervention.”
I knew what Riss meant. If Amistad really seriously wanted to stop us leaving this place, he could have done a lot more than just sabotage our transport plans and instruct local cops. He could have sent Earth Central Security monitors or agents. He could have taken out that bridge using a particle cannon, or dropped hardfields in our path from orbit. It struck me that the warden was undecided about how to deal with us, so was going through the motions but without much heart. Perhaps the warden felt his responsibility lay in warning us off, but didn’t extend to expending resources on actually stopping us.
“What does the submind say?” I asked.
“Everyone who is so inclined is being warned against heading towards that landing site,” Riss replied. “The submind told me that we aren’t unique and shouldn’t consider ourselves a special case. I asked why, if we aren’t a special case, we have one of Amistad’s subminds completely focused on
us. It’s not talking to me now.”
Weird.
I turned back to Steve and noted he had been watching this exchange boggle-eyed. Behind him one of his ATVs started up its hydrogen turbine engine. I auged through a decent sum to the garage’s account and knew, as he froze, that he had received notification of the payment through his aug.
“We are renting one of your vehicles,” I said, and headed over.
“Hold it right there!” came a shout from behind.
Not quick enough. I sighed and turned to see a man and a woman entering the building. They were both clad in pearl-grey uniforms with blue piping, wore helmets with visors down and had bulky stun guns holstered at their hips, which they had yet to draw.
“Legally,” I said, “you have no right to stop us leaving.”
The female replied. “True, but Steve refused to rent you an ATV and as I understand it your drone has accessed one vehicle and you were about to take it. You have been caught in the act of theft.”
“I resent that,” said Riss.
She turned to gaze at the drone, dropping her hand to her stun gun—then hesitated and slid it across to hook a thumb in her belt. “Resent what?”
“Being described as his drone,” Riss replied. “Are you still so primitive here that you don’t quite get independent machine intelligences?”
She grimaced then said, “Legally I can arrest you now, but I have options. Return to your hotel and stay there and I’m sure Steve will drop any charges.”
I glanced round at Steve who had moved off to one side, certainly to make sure he didn’t get in the way if these two cops started using their stunners.
“This is stupid,” I said.
“It’s no problem,” said Riss. “Let’s go.” The snake drone swung round and continued towards the ATV. I hesitated for a second, then turned to follow.
“I said, hold it!”
Glancing back, I saw that both cops had drawn their weapons.
“This is your last warning,” said the man.
Riss reached the ATV and a door folded down into a ramp, doubtless on her mental command. Behind me I heard the crack and hiss of the stunner energy pulses and flinched. Nothing hit me and, when I looked round, I saw both cops lying twitching on the garage floor. Inside the vehicle was a large cargo area—fifteen feet across and thirty long. I followed Riss to the ATV’s cockpit and took one of the seats beside her as she coiled in the driver’s seat. I thought then that the vehicle was far too big, just to take us where we wanted to go, but I’d yet discover the curious workings of serendipity. Then the joystick shifted forwards without the drone actually touching it.
“Like I said, ‘low key’,” she explained.
Certainly Amistad must have had no real expectation of his methods stopping a determined war drone.
“So why did Amistad try to stop us?” I asked. “That all seemed a pointless waste of time.”
“To slow us. To slow events down to give him time to ponder options and, most importantly, to locate the Weaver. It seems it’s involved, but has apparently gone missing.”
“I see,” I said, not really seeing at all. “What did you use?” I asked, nodding back toward the garage, which was now receding behind us as Riss drove the ATV onto the bridge from Chattering.
“Simple hardfield just a few inches ahead of their weapons,” Riss explained. “It reflected their shots straight back at them … Now, let’s see what this thing can do.”
The ATV accelerated off the bridge onto a road of flattened grasses over rhizome. It just kept on accelerating, then abruptly swerved off the road into the grasses, accelerating still. I calmly pulled across a safety harness as the vehicle exceeded seventy miles an hour, with visibility ahead apparently less than a yard. The hissing of our passage through the grasses turned into a roar.
19
AMISTAD
Amistad’s frustration was increasing, because he still wasn’t getting the full picture here. He paused for a moment to peer down at the metal floor below him, noting the multiple scores and scratches and one point where he had actually punctured it.
Calm down, he told himself, and subsided into stillness.
Penny Royal had claimed to be delivering a defensive system to the Weaver, which would explain why the crazy gabbleduck had gone AWOL. So Amistad was concentrating his search for the Weaver on routes leading to The Rose. But there were still anomalies. What was Spear’s part in all this, and what was the meaning of the black AI’s obscure hint that, sometime hence, Amistad might cease to be warden of the world?
So, concentrate on Spear first. He was out to exact vengeance on Penny Royal, but only because of the memories the AI had distorted and placed within his memplant. The way he had encountered the Weaver was much too coincidental and, going by their exchange, the Weaver knew about his memories. Subtle mental manipulation could explain the meeting, and secret communications between Penny Royal and the Weaver could explain the latter’s knowledge of Spear. However, he still just didn’t seem to fit …
Amistad abruptly checked the security around Penny Royal’s old ship, now renamed the Lance, then increased it. If Spear didn’t fit, then perhaps his role was just to bring Penny Royal’s ship here, which might hide a multitude of secrets. Perhaps some hidden device aboard? Amistad used local satellites to deep scan that vessel again. As the results came back, he detected nothing that hadn’t been found before. The fusion device aboard was too simple to be involved. Flute was partially AI, but no more dangerous for that than the drone Riss, and the micro- and nanobot culture that was steadily being cleansed from the ship had no power to affect events down here. No, it wasn’t the ship.
Perhaps then, the answer lay in the past? Penny Royal hadn’t of course destroyed its eighth state of consciousness, so maybe there was something else he had missed? Amistad began reviewing recorded data again.
After the events surrounding the arrival of the Atheter device here, Penny Royal had seldom been unmonitored—either physically or virtually. Amistad listed those occasions when Amistad’s perpetual security around the AI had been at its most lax. He then ran programs to sort these, based on current events and tranches of submind-generated possible scenarios.
During a visit Penny Royal made to the Atheter AI, there had been a three-second blank spot. This was partially down to a solar flare, but also connected to a server nexus being destroyed by a Tidy Squad bomb. Amistad reviewed the evidence and found that there was no evidence of any of its members being responsible, despite the close monitoring of the Squad prior to it being closed down. Could Penny Royal therefore have engineered it? Quite possibly. And during those three seconds, it could have had a whole world of communications with the Atheter AI and thence with the Weaver itself. But there was no real proof there beyond the circumstantial.
Penny Royal’s visit to the Technician’s corpse was another potentially connected anomaly. Amistad understood why the Weaver had retained the dead war machine’s corpse. Even though it had been fried by its encounter with the Atheter device—its internal components heavily disrupted—it still contained a lot of dense tech. A Polity forensic AI had deep scanned the tech, and was now only a couple of percentage points into understanding it. It was defined as a corpse, a wreck, but even that was debatable. Penny Royal had visited it in its woven flute grass tomb, shortly after the forensic AI’s visit, and Amistad had watched closely. However, nothing occurred on the virtual level and Penny Royal had only run a brief low-penetration scan of the Technician and then departed—as if reassuring itself that it would be no further problem before dismissing it. Amistad decided to review his recordings of that visit.
Immediately, it was as if he was on some invisible platform inside the Technician’s mausoleum. The tubular building was fifty feet across, its lower section covered with jutting protrusions. Gabbleducks apparently used these to get about inside their structures rather than using floors. As a whole, the building consisted of woven plaits of grass that had been knitt
ed together and bound with a resin extracted from other Masadan plants. The Technician lay stretched out in a woven grass cradle, bone white and massive, some sort of energy weapon having eaten into its carapace all down one side. Upon his first visit, Amistad had noted the lack of putrescene in the air. There was also a lack of prawn-like crustaceans, one variety of this world’s natural undertakers. A corpse here would usually end up swarming with these just minutes after death—this applying even to human corpses, despite their flesh being poisonous to the creatures.
The Technician wasn’t rotting and it wasn’t triggering the usual ecological disposal mechanisms. Subsequent investigations revealed that the woven flute grasses that surrounded it had been combined with other plants. And when these slowly decayed together, they produced an atmospheric preservative. This was molecularly perfect in preventing this giant albino hooder’s decay—almost as if they’d been designed for this purpose.
Amistad continued to watch the memory as darkness filled one of the tubelike connecting tunnels at the end of this structure, and Penny Royal flowed through. The AI was semi-dispersed, here resembling a silver tree decorated with black knife-like leaves, bent over and propelled forwards by some silent gale. Perpetually changing shape as it moved, the AI traversed the length of the Technician, rounded its hood and returned back down its wounded side, stopping halfway. Here is where it conducted its scan, before proceeding to the back of the structure and out again.
No.
Amistad was watching with a whole new intensity and ran things again, from the moment Penny Royal stopped beside the creature. He slowed things down and focused in on every detail. Beside the Technician the AI settled back into another form, with the silver tendrils forming a trunk. The knives all connected to it at their bases and extended into leaf-forms, folding out their dense crystalline structure and realigning it. And again, there it was.
As Penny Royal completed this transformation into its watching form, one of its “knives” darted across to enter the Technician through a hole in its carapace. This object returned just as the AI finished its scan and transformed back into its previous form. The knife slid back into Penny Royal’s form as naturally as a stray fish rejoining its shoal.