“A little battered, but alive,” Sepia replied.
“Do you need anything?” I asked.
“I wouldn’t be human if I didn’t,” she replied, “but if you’re talking about immediate needs here, perhaps you’d best talk to Trent.”
I opened the com channel then to all three of them. “Trent, how’s your situation?”
“A fucking mess,” he replied, “but tidying up fast. How is it with you?”
I filled them in on what had occurred here since they’d left and in return Trent, with frequent interjections from the others, updated me on what had happened to them. They knew about Sverl, because he had announced it when stopping a horde of robots from killing them.
“All we need now,” he said, “is to get the shell people closer.”
“Well, I intended moving closer to Sverl’s location anyway, and that’s closer to you,” I replied.
“Look forward to it.”
That was it, then, and no more from Sepia.
I headed straight for my cabin to take off my space suit and apply a numb-patch with complementary healing nanites to my wrist. After a moment’s thought I applied a second patch to the base of my skull and felt the residual ache in my skull fade. I wanted to take a shower next and get something to eat. Instead, I put my space suit back on because I by no means thought all the danger negated, punched up a beaker of coffee and headed off on a tour of the ship, physically checking every area I could reach, before returning to the bridge.
I took my seat, sipped coffee, fired up steering thrusters to take the Lance away from the bay wall, folding away its gecko feet as I did so. Accelerating on thrusters, I checked ahead for obstacles, then gave the ship a brief kick with the fusion engine to send it sailing out into the full glare of the hypergiant, turned and brought the Lance to a halt in relation to the station, and made an inspection through ship’s
sensors.
Room 101 was sizzling like a wet log in a fire. Many of the lumpy deformations in its hull had already disappeared and others were shrinking. All around, streams of hot gas and waste materials were being ejected from various ports. Next I turned my attention outwards and picked up the attack ship occupied by Flute just a few hundred miles out. I opened up com.
“You’ll have to update me on your experiences,” I said.
“Oh, I had some fun,” Flute replied. “Cvorn tried to destroy me but then buggered off at the last moment. Oh, and I’ve got some passengers.”
“What?”
Flute sent me an image feed, which I opened in a frame up on the screen fabric. It showed the interior of the attack ship’s hold. Amidst a diverse collection of luggage squatted three prador second-children. They all wore armour, though one of them had the lid over its carapace hinged open and had partially extracted itself, having slid its mandibles from their armour sleeves so it could munch on some large chunk of flesh. Noting the whorls and scarring of both carapace and mandibles, I guessed that here were three of Sverl’s children.
“Explain,” I instructed.
“Sverl gave me a secondary mission,” Flute explained. “During his fight with Cvorn and crew on the Rock Pool he had to leave these three behind, so he told me to give them a lift. Took me a while to persuade them aboard—they seemed to be enjoying their holiday.”
Riss issued a snort and said, “What, slapping on the tanning lotion and sipping cocktails?”
I glanced at the drone. It was a weak dig at Flute but it was almost as if the drone just had to find some way to sneer. Doubtless, when we were on our way again they would be back to sniping at each other.
I cleared my throat then said, “Okay, follow us in and dock as close beside us as you can.”
“Will do, boss.”
“You’re sure he’s your boss now?” asked Riss, referring to the time Flute was under Sverl’s control.
“Do shut up, Riss,” I said. “Your own record of behaviour hasn’t been without its problems.”
Riss gave a shrug of her long body and turned away.
With a mental touch I propelled the Lance towards the final construction bay adjacent to the hospital. Even as I entered, an AI tried to make contact. Rather than allow that contact through my aug, I put my voice and image up in the screen fabric.
“Your docking coordinates are here,” it told me, the bay coordinates appearing in the frame. “I can use hardfields to bring you in then docking clamps or, if you prefer, which would be understandable, you may land on remora feet.”
This AI sounded a lot more reasonable and was obviously aware of the previous problems I had experienced. I decided to trust it a little. “Use hardfields and docking clamps.”
We slid in over what looked like a vast industrial landscape, but here the other side of the bay was not visible because between us and it sat the immense lozenge shape of a Polity dreadnought. The thing was heavily damaged, with massive blast holes in its hull giving views deep into its charred interior, while its armour was rippled around craters where missiles had not managed to penetrate. Melted and burned com towers stood out from this, and in one area a massive spherical weapons port had been forced out of the ship by some internal explosion, where it hung like a gouged eyeball. I wondered if the thing had been destroyed by Room 101 or in ensuing conflicts between the AIs here.
The hardfields took hold of the Lance and drew it down to an undamaged area of the bay wall, gently, and at the last I felt docking clamps engage. Checking the area, I saw one of Sverl’s kamikazes docked just a few hundred feet away. As I was studying this I noticed a port opening nearby and experienced a moment of paranoia when it expelled a big handler robot. Running on gecko wheels, with multiple grabs to the fore and a cage body behind, it approached my ship.
“What the hell is that robot for?” I asked the AI.
“You have casualties to be unloaded, I understand,” it replied.
“Right, okay.”
With a thought I sent the signal to open the hold doors. Let Trent take responsibility for the shell people—they would only be a hindrance to me.
4
Captain Blite
An oppressive dark atmosphere settled throughout the ship after Penny Royal dropped the Black Rose into U-space beyond Room 101. Perhaps much of it was in Blite’s imagination and stemmed from his distaste for what had happened aboard that station. He, Brondohohan and Greer had fled Par Avion to avoid capture and interrogation and gone in pursuit of Penny Royal because they had unfinished business with the AI. They had felt they were involved in something important and yes, after Penny Royal seized their ship at the Line and amalgamated it with a modern Polity attack ship, they had become involved in important events and seen some astounding sights. But for what? The upshot of the black AI’s manipulations had been to drive that assassin drone Riss to kill the prador Sverl in a particularly horrible manner.
Certainly Penny Royal had eliminated a major threat. Sverl, whom Penny Royal had turned into a strange mix of prador, human and AI, was an entity whose mere existence, had it become known of in the Kingdom, might have led to rebellion there and eventual war with the Polity. But all that manipulation just ending in a sordid murder was somehow . . . disappointing. There had to be more to it than that, surely?
But no, it wasn’t Blite’s imagination. Brond and Greer were equally disappointed and seemed as depressed as he had become. Both of them had been communicating in monosyllables until Greer, ever as blunt in her speech as were her heavy-worlder features, had summed things up only a few days before.
“We made a mistake,” she said, more words than she had spoken since their departure from Room 101.
When Blite, while scratching at one thick hairy forearm, just grunted a query, she continued, “We should have stayed at Par Avion and taken whatever came. We were better off out of it.”
“Yeah,” Blite agreed, though still with some
doubts.
“It’s not just that,” said Brond, entering the bridge. He reached out as if trying to grab something out of the air. “It’s not happy either.” He dipped his head towards the rear engine sections of the ship. “Dragging us down,” he added.
He was right, of course. The oppressive atmosphere was exacerbated by their feeling of disappointment; it felt as if they had been cheated of something by the black AI itself. The captain had tried a selection of drugs from his ship’s manufactory but they failed to disperse the miasma that had gathered around him.
“Is that all?” he asked the air of his cabin, but Penny Royal did not respond. Later he walked out and headed to a particular alcove aboard this ship in which sat an antique space suit. “Is that all?” he asked again. Still no reply.
What could he do now? They were passengers aboard a ship they could not control, witnesses to events they did not influence, and they could see no way out. On one level Blite wanted to stay with this, still clinging on to the idea that it was all leading to something bigger. But his pragmatic side was telling him that, given the opportunity, they should get out. Certainly more was due to happen. Why else had Penny Royal stolen those runcibles? But, lying in his cabin, he realized they should definitely part company with Penny Royal, before they parted company with their lives.
Two days later, it seemed something, somewhere, might have been listening to his secret thoughts.
The crash sent Blite hurtling from his bed to slam into the wall of his cabin. Rudely awakened, he snorted blood from his broken nose, floated out from the wall, then slammed down on the floor. Grav was fluxing, which could only mean bad things.
He staggered over to his closet and pulled out his space suit. Grav went off again and he found himself floating as he struggled into the garment, but through training and experience he had it on when grav re-engaged and dropped him to the floor again. He struggled back to his feet and made for the door.
Heading along the corridor to the bridge was like being aboard an ocean ship in a storm. He bounced against the walls; at one point grav reversed and threw him against the ceiling. And, as he finally limped into the bridge, he felt his suit tightening around his ankle, which was either broken or badly twisted. Greer and Brond were already suited and strapped in, working their controls with an air of panic. Brond looked round.
“USER,” he said. An underspace interference emitter had knocked them out of that continuum and back into realspace.
As he finally managed to get to his seat, Blite looked up at the screen images. The bulk of the screen showed starlit space cut in half by a whip tail of fire, close shadowy objects perpetually shifting across it. A subscreen showed a representation of the Black Rose and it was already nearly unrecognizable. One leg of the horseshoe was missing and that whip tail of fire extended from the point of severance. The rest was reformatting, unfolding and folding, changing in much the same way Penny Royal changed its own form. To one side damage reports were scrolling.
“Leven?” Blite enquired, trying to quiet the churning of his stomach.
“A USER knocked us into the real and something got through before either I or Penny Royal could deploy our hardfield,” the Golem ship mind replied.
“What about now?” Blite asked, while thinking that if Penny Royal could see the future then surely it had seen this attack? It then occurred to him, with a tight visceral clench, that perhaps it had, and that explained its infectious mood.
“Problems,” said Leven, and a moment later the entire ship jerked as if it had been slapped by a giant hand.
The subscreen now showed a chunk of the ship peeling up, then glowing brightly and shooting away. The smell of smoke became even more acrid, then a boom echoed throughout and a blast door slammed down across the corridor leading to their cabins. The concertinaed helmet of Blite’s space suit came up, while the visor rose a little way out of its neck ring, then seemed unable to make up its mind.
“Got it!” Greer shouted.
She threw up a frame on the screen, and in it appeared something that looked like an irregular object fashioned out of aerogel, only just visible against starlit space. Partial penetration of chameleonware, Blite realized, but whatever that thing was, it was big.
“I am sorry,” a voice wafted into his mind. “You cannot survive this.”
“What the fuck?” Blite looked round. “Penny Royal.”
The black diamond was there dangling over a void that extended to infinity. In that void everything seemed to reside—that ancient space suit too, hanging like a scarecrow. Blite felt a block of math fall into his mind like a brick, some of which he recognized as relating to weapons stats, some relating to hardfield tech.
“Just fucking tell me!” he shouted.
“You must abandon ship.” Penny Royal’s words were factual, leaden and didn’t seem to be produced by the AI at all.
The infinity lying behind the diamond turned like a lock, depositing a lozenge-shaped crystal in mid-air, which dropped as the diamond folded back into infinity and the hole closed. Blite tracked it down to the floor, where it bounced, and realized he was looking at Leven.
“Abandon ship?” Greer asked, horrified.
Blite knew this was no time for discussion. If Penny Royal said they could not survive this, then it was likely to be true. “We go. Now.”
He unstrapped, feeling a breeze on his face just as his visor finally came to a decision and closed up completely.
“Our things,” said Brond over suit com.
“Screw our things,” Blite replied, stooping to sweep up his ship mind’s crystal just before some other impact sent him staggering across the bridge. “Do as you’re told and follow me.” He shoved the crystal into a pouch in his belt.
Concentrating on his own progress, Blite made it to the corridor leading to the ship’s shuttle just before another grav flux threw him into the ceiling and yet another impact then tossed him against a wall. He saw Greer sailing past him and, in zero gravity, towed himself after her, sure now that his ankle was broken.
Greer stopped herself against the wall beside the shimmershield airlock leading into the shuttle bay, pulled herself down and dragged herself through the fluxing shield. Blite reached it next and began to push through, but then the shield blinked out and air pressure blew him into the bay. He slammed straight into the side of the new shuttle clamped in place there—a slightly flattened sphere thirty feet across with six acceleration chairs inside—then found himself being dragged round by the roar of a gale. Over com he heard Greer swearing, then a horrible agonized shriek, quickly truncated, from Brond. At the last moment he managed to grab on to the edge of one of the inset ports and looked back to locate the man. Brond wasn’t visible, but an expanding ball of fire in the bridge was.
Blite held on as the air pressure died, but even the lack of air wasn’t putting out that fire in the bridge. He shifted himself round to the door into the shuttle, opened it and pulled himself inside. No sign of Greer. Getting straight into an acceleration chair, he strapped himself in. By the time he looked up, the inner screen paint had activated and it now appeared as if he was sitting in a chair on a simple platform inside the bay. Now what? Was there a submind of Leven loaded? Apparently not, because a manual control console was rising from the floor. Taking hold of the joystick, he glanced over to bay doors open on vacuum and out there spotted a tumbling shape: Greer.
He disengaged docking hooks and on maglev slid the shuttle out into vacuum. The controls were simple and in a moment he had the shuttle up beside Greer and saw her using her wrist impeller to get to the airlock. Now he used a control inset in his chair’s arm to swing it round, the manual control tracking round with him, and gazed back at the Black Rose. The ship was sheathed in something like St. Elmo’s fire and now bore little resemblance to its original form. The front section looked like a fractured chunk of flint, while the remaining le
g of the horseshoe was attached by a mere thread. That piece was rippling all round, transforming and tightening, its ends becoming rounded and ripples of energy passing down its length.
“I’m in,” Greer informed him.
Blite stared at his erstwhile ship, spotting the distortion in space around it and recognizing it as a U-field generating. He understood then: Penny Royal had somehow managed to separate off one engine section and convert it for a U-jump. This was what it had been talking about when it said, “You cannot survive this.”
“Brond?” queried Greer, now inside and strapping herself in.
Blite did not find the time to reply because some kind of beam weapon struck.
The blast was immense. Blite felt something wrench through his body as space all around turned incandescent before the actual blast wave struck. He felt that too, an instant after the screen paint blanked, and as the top hemisphere of the shuttle shredded away.
Fire surrounded him and he fell screaming into blackness.
Sverl
The big fusion drive towards the rear of the station had been heavily cannibalized by the warring AIs aboard but, with plentiful energy available and no shortage of materials to hand (or claw), Sverl estimated that it could be made workable within just a few days. In fact, he immediately delegated AIs in the engine section to that task. However, the fusion drive wasn’t his main concern. He’d overheard the brief exchange between Riss and Spear as they returned to the man’s ship, and knew that, to a limited extent, the snake drone was correct: There are those who are not going to like this.
It would have been nice to think that the King’s Guard would not be back. The threat Sverl had posed had been eliminated because he was now so distant from the prador he had been. Cvorn’s idea of using him had been based solely on Sverl’s organic change—intending to drum up support by demonstrating how he had been infected with human DNA, because that was what would have elicited a visceral response from the prador masses. But now there was no proof. As he was now, there was no way of identifying him as anything more than an AI with a curious choice of body form. However, he was a prador the king had wanted dead who was now in control of an immense military asset, so it was highly likely the king would not like that. It was also true that the Polity would definitely not like it.