“So, in essence, even if the prador had developed these during the war, they still wouldn’t have been able to touch our stations,” replied the watching AI.
“No, of course not,” said the woman, “because of the runcibles.”
Sverl fought the drag of alien memory and snapped out of it, abruptly stumbling from his dais, trailing all the optics and power cables plugged into his skeleton. He swung his claws round, and now gazing through the series of eyes Bsorol had recently installed for him, inspected the spine he held. The dead, Penny Royal’s victims . . . The spine had responded to his need with the memory of a human weapons designer called Croydon who, reaching the age of a hundred and ninety had gone adventuring in the Graveyard and found a terminal adventure in the metal hands of one of Penny Royal’s Golem—it might even have been Mr Grey.
Runcibles . . .
If a runcible was running inside the station it would act like a gravity well to a U-jump missile. The thing would be drawn in even as it attempted to materialize, like an asteroid into a black hole, straight through the U-space meniscus. So, his defence against such missiles would be to get at least one of the runcibles aboard operating—this was of course presupposing that no vital components were missing from them—but still he needed to get the other defences up to and beyond wartime specifications. This would not stop him taking one of the other runcibles apart to get at its singularity to use in a gravity press . . .
“Is this what you want?” Sverl asked, only realizing he had spoken out loud when Bsorol came scuttling over again.
“Father?” asked the first-child.
Sverl gazed on Bsorol, perfectly recalling what Bsorol had been saying earlier.
“You found something in the old AI sanctum?” he enquired. “What did you find?”
“An item of technology.”
“Well, no shit, Sherlock.”
Bsorol expressed some confusion, flicking at one of his mandibles with one claw.
“Why does this need my attention?” Sverl asked.
“It is Penny Royal technology,” said Bsorol.
Sverl gazed at his first-child speculatively.
“Get me unhooked,” he demanded.
Blite
The agony was still there and he knew, on some level, that it didn’t need to be. He managed to query the entity that in some sense was the dark red realm he occupied, and it replied in simple words: “It brings clarity.”
Clarity?
Through his one working eye he could see he was floating in an enclosed space with silver worms shoaling all around him. Something about these niggled at his memory but he couldn’t get past the need to scream, frozen in his throat. His only anchor in reality was the pedestal-mounted autodoc, bowed over him like an insect priest as it steadily turned him while peeling away the charred and melted space suit from his raw skin.
“Tell me again,” said the entity, “about your first encounter with Penny Royal.”
That was it: that was the memory he had been groping for. It had seemed to him that it was Penny Royal here all around him. But why would Penny Royal ask such a question? He wanted to shout at the thing, but he could neither speak nor scream. How could he answer when it wouldn’t allow him a voice? However, memories arose clear in his mind: the deal that went wrong, that strange black thistle seeming to sprout on the ridge above, before transforming into a cloud of knives descending on them, and the deaths . . .
“Now I need to know about your next encounter,” said the entity.
Stripped-away fragments of his suit hung in the air all around, drifting like water weed in some strange aquarium. The autodoc was now steadily removing blistered skin and cooked flesh. Pain increased in waves but thankfully, after removing a section, the autodoc’s printing heads set to work replacing tissue, layer upon layer, and at those points the pain steadily faded away.
Blite fervently wished he had never encountered Penny Royal at all, and damned himself for being lured by that artefact on Masada. He remembered their trek through the Masadan night with a grav-sled on which the object had been loaded and the sudden fear they had felt even as they returned to the space port. He remembered the relief they had felt at being back aboard The Rose, and then the terror when the artefact unfolded itself into something spiny, glistening and black: Penny Royal. On another level he felt some shape to the information contained in his memories being lifted and matched to some other shape, slotting together and being shifted aside, but to where he had no idea.
“And next?” the entity enquired.
Obviously speech was not required. Blite remembered the journey from Masada with Penny Royal aboard to the black AI’s planetoid, the encounter with the salvagers there and the AI going down to that bleak rock to “deactivate its dangerous toys.” The sight of that tokomak generator there seemed of great interest to the unseen being who was questioning Blite because it went over that again and again. Next the journey to the Rock Pool and how the AI defended Carapace City from Cvorn’s attack. Losing himself in memory helped negate the pain, so he sank deeper into it, played it all the way through. Only as he drew towards the end did he have some intimation of how he had arrived in this room and what those silver worms shoaling around him might be.
“Tell me again,” said the entity, “about your first encounter with Penny Royal.”
Blite felt utter horror rolling through him. Was this just going to continue?
By now the autodoc had made numerous repairs and large areas of fresh skin covered his chest and arms. Next it turned its attention to his face, a rose of surgical chain-glass opening above his missing eye and extruding one suspiciously spoon-shaped blade. Blite’s scream remained locked in his throat and his begging was silent.
“What the fucking hell do you think you’re doing!” someone bellowed.
The autodoc abruptly retracted its surgical cutlery, rose away from him a little, the clamps that were holding his head in place releasing. He managed to turn his head a little and look across. A door now stood open in the pale green wall and behind the autodoc stood a tall thin woman—an outlinker—clad in tortoiseshell exoskeleton. She was lowering her hand from the doc’s manual control panel, so it seemed she had just turned it off. Blite was now also able to take in more surrounding detail. He was in some sort of apartment or ship’s cabin because, through an archway, he could see a fairly standard washroom. However, all the furniture that had occupied this room had been shoved to one side and crushed into one splintered mass. What the hell was going on here?
All around now the shoaling activity of the silver worms changed. They all began heading towards one point and, tilting his head back, Blite saw them balling together and melding, extending the protrusions of limbs and the fat nub of a head, tightening together and refining the form. At the last came a change of hue to reveal a fat bald man, who opened eyes like black stones.
“Your ship AI instructed you to remain aboard your bridge,” said the man.
“Well sometimes orders have to be questioned,” the woman replied.
“Interrogation is necessary,” said this man.
The woman stepped round the autodoc. She folded her arms, and Blite suspected that was because she was so angry she didn’t trust herself not to strike out.
“Yes, of course we need information,” she said tightly. “But I don’t remember any changes to Polity law that made it acceptable to torture Polity citizens.”
“He and his crew are guilty of numerous crimes,” said the fat man.
“He and his crew are guilty of nothing until that guilt is proven,” said the woman. “As I understand it, charges against them were trumped up only because of their association with Penny Royal.”
“They caused major damage at Par Avion.”
“Yes, to escape being captured and handed over to the likes of you. I think what we’re seeing here rather proves t
hat they made the right decision.” She paused, chewing her bottom lip, then stepped back to the autodoc and began working the manual console. The doc dipped towards Blite and extruded an infuser head down to touch his neck. Blessed numbness spread rapidly downwards from that point, and slowly upwards. As it entered his skull, oblivion shortly followed.
5
Lelic at the Junkyard
“We’ve got a live one,” Henderson hissed.
The realspace region designated The Zone by Lelic’s father was a Lagrange point lying between a fairly common red giant sun surrounded by a scattering of small planetoids and its extremely rare orbital partner: a pair of singularities of just one solar mass each, individually spinning fast but also spinning round each other at close to the speed of light. Something about this combination gave underlying U-space some rather odd properties which, for Lelic and the other extremadapts of The Zone, were profitable ones. The Lagrange was like a section of beach along which currents converged to wash up masses of flotsam and jetsam, though, admittedly, pickings were rarer now than in his father’s time.
“Screen it,” said Lelic, slouched back in the ring of his gel console, stinger gun plus maintenance equipment lying beside him.
The oval screen before him first showed an overview of The Zone, with its long slew of wrecked ships and floating debris which, sometime in the not too distant future, would form a complete ring around the sun. A blister appeared in the screen’s surface and magnified something to bring it hazily into view. He leaned forwards and pressed his webbed hands into the console, stabbed a finger into one of the control cells and summoned up a soft ball control from the depths of the console. Using this, he rolled a cross hair blister from the side of the frame over to the first blister, then stabbed a finger into the “acquire” cell. With a steady rumbling, the biomech cometary tug reoriented and began accelerating. He slouched back, staring at the thing up on the screen as the pixel cells of a clean-up program flickered across it. After a moment he soon found himself gazing up at something that might have been a cylindrical ship until it had been torn open and gutted. Some of the surfaces he could see almost looked like a portion of a crow’s wing, which was an effect he recognized.
“Looks like a chunk of one of the modern attack ships,” he said, bored. Then he stabbed a hand back into the console and pinched out the “acquire” cell, and the rumble of the engines faded. Withdrawing his hand, he shrugged himself into a more comfortable position, picked up his stinger gun and went back to work on it. Opening the stick seam on the side of the breech, he pulled out a series of bee-stingers then picked up a long scraper and shoved it through the breech and down the barrel, pushing out the layer of scar tissue that had formed in the barrel. Organic weapons, he had found, were good because they grew their own projectiles, but bad because, as they got older, they required as much maintenance as a pre-Quiet War senile human. As he worked on the weapon he wondered when he would get to use it again. Of course, it wasn’t often that he did get to use it when there were survivors, because it was usually a case of cutting their dying bodies out of the wreckage.
Lelic’s father, fleeing the Polity with his group of extremadapts, had found this true graveyard within the Graveyard during the war. At first he had thought the great floating mass of spaceships was the result of one of the many battles being fought. He, and his people, had decided to hang around because pickings were rich, while this sector was of little interest to either the prador or the Polity. While they salvaged what they could from the heavily damaged ships, built a small space station from the floating junk knitted together with highly adapted corals capable of growing in vacuum, and generally kept their heads (or whatever else served that purpose in them) down, more ships arrived. And regularly.
It soon became apparent that every ship that washed up here did so with a damaged U-space drive. Quite often this damage resulted in the crews, whether prador or human, being dead, but sometimes there were survivors. Lelic’s father, who hadn’t been what one would describe as a humanitarian, quickly came to a decision about that. If anyone got away from this sector and described what was here, then the place would be swarming with Polity forces shortly afterwards, so Lelic’s father ensured none of them did get away. Lelic, having assumed his father’s mantle after strangling the man, found he no longer needed to worry about Polity forces, only other salvagers in the Graveyard. He did keep up his father’s tradition, but with a twist. In fact, it was that aspect of the salvaging operation Lelic enjoyed the most, which was why finding a piece of a modern attack ship bored him, despite its high value. Best to leave it to one of the others of the colony of extremadapts, which had grown somewhat since his father’s time.
“I’m getting life signs,” hissed Henderson.
“What?” Lelic put aside his weapon and leaned forwards. If there was life aboard, then it was likely human life, which meant Lelic might now be able to grab someone to put in the arena. He’d been waiting months to have something to go up against the prador they had captured a few months ago. He set another “acquire” cell and waited anxiously, picking scabs from the keel bone of his chest.
Over the next hour the image of the wreckage grew clear, and Lelic wondered how there could possibly be someone alive in it. That was, until Henderson sent him a scan from the grab pod. There was a space suit trapped in the wreckage, and a scan revealed a heartbeat and internal warmth.
“Snare and secure,” he instructed. “We’ll take it straight back to the station.”
Rather than try to cut this individual free out here, then go through the laborious efforts to get him inside, it would be better done inside the station. Once this man was again mobile and strong enough, it would then be time to match him against that prador young-adult.
Up on the screen he now got a view of Henderson halfway up the grab arm, his bloated form all but filling the bubble and his limpet pads stuck firmly against the surrounding chain-glass. The five-talon jointed claw Henderson controlled opened at the end of the arm over the wreckage. For a moment Lelic was sure he detected movement in the tangled mass, but no, just some optical illusion caused by the meta-material surfaces. Lelic turned his attention back to his console and inserted his hands again, reaching out to touch the cells representing other colonists and raising data blisters on his screen. Already some of them were making bets, and bids for recording rights. Really, pulling in live ones like this was the only excitement they had here.
“That’s got it,” said Henderson.
Henderson had closed the claw over the wreckage and checked it for security, so now Lelic pulled up another soft ball control and used it to turn his tug back to the station. He grinned to himself upon noting that other ships were also heading back out of The Zone. Damn, but he really hoped that the survivor continued surviving, because already a lot of bio credit had been wagered on that prospect.
Blite
Blite lay absolutely still, frozen by the prospect of pain if he moved. After a while he started to get angry and realized he was clenching his fists, and that they didn’t hurt. He opened what he recollected as being his good eye and gazed up at a pale blue ceiling, then carefully opened his other eye. It was okay. Next he closed his eyes and, with utter care, rolled onto his side then pushed himself up. Dragging himself higher on the bed, he sat up and opened his eyes again to check his surroundings.
He was in, by his standards, a quite luxurious cabin. This bedroom was large, with inset wall cupboards, glow-paint walls, a console, a bedside unit and a door in one wall opening into a small washroom. After taking in detail and deliberately not looking at his own naked body, he finally plucked up the nerve to look down at it.
The printed-on flesh and skin grafts were distinct from the rest. They were fresh, lacking in scars—he’d even lost the bullet-hole scar in his right calf—while what remained of his original skin still had a tan acquired from many worlds, still had its blemishes and occasio
nal webs of scarring left by his military autodoc. He raised one hand, completely covered with new skin, and flexed it. It ached and felt sensitive, but he knew that would pass in time, just as the distinction between old and new skin would pass too. But he wondered if the raw feeling and tightness, deep inside—that awareness of his human fragility—would pass too.
Still careful, he swung his legs off the side of the bed and slowly stood up. Dizziness washed through him, then a sudden powerful nausea. He staggered to the washroom door and through, just managing to get to the sink in time to retch. Nothing but bile came up but his body was insistent that there had to be something else. The convulsions came one after another, so hard that he shit watery diarrhoea and dripped it on the floor. He turned and lurched over to the combined shower and sanitary unit and pulled out the toilet bowl. Instead of sitting on it, he collapsed down beside it and retched some more.
He lost track of how long he lay there heaving, eventually coming out of a haze to find himself shivering, his throat raw and his mouth tasting foul. As soon as he managed to start thinking again he became puzzled. Obviously he was aboard the ship—almost certainly a Polity one—that had destroyed the Black Rose. Even in the Graveyard, or just using the old military autodocs he’d had aboard his own ship, there would never have been such ill effects even after such a major physical rebuild, and Polity technology was a lot more advanced. Then he realized what the problem was: it was in his skull. This was the psychological aftermath of his interrogation.
He wearily stood up, folded away the toilet bowl and touched the shower pad. A thin film drew across to separate him from the rest of the washroom and then the water hit him. He dialled up the heat and stood under it until the shivering stopped, then washed himself. By the time he stepped out to snatch up one of the towels provided, some sort of cleanbot had dealt with the shit on the floor and the puke in the sink bowl. Drying himself, he tried to feel stronger, but still felt fragile inside, scared.