Out in the main cabin he found clothing—underwear, a padded shipsuit and slippers—and donned it. This barrier between his nakedness and his surroundings alleviated some of the feeling, but it still sat inside him as if he was shrinking away from some scowling spectre. He looked around, wondering where Leven’s crystal was. He had a vague memory of looking down his body as he lay on the surgical slab. His belt had been gone. Leven was most likely out there tumbling through vacuum, somnolent (which was probably for the best). Blite walked over and tried the door, expecting it to be locked, but it slid back into the wall, revealing a corridor with red carpet moss and small alcoves sheltering sculptures of nightmarish alien life forms. However, there was some security waiting.
“Follow me,” said a crab drone, descending from the ceiling and blinking its rim lights at him. He nodded, subdued, and followed.
“What ship am I aboard?” he managed after a few paces.
“The High Castle,” the drone replied briefly.
“A Polity warship?”
“Gamma-class police action interdiction ship.” The drone paused for a moment. “Yeah, a warship.”
It led him through another set of sliding doors into a small circular lounge and refectory. Here sofas and low tables clustered before a panoramic screen showing a view across the ship itself and into vacuum, while back from them stood a dining table of polished wood with eight matching chairs. Just one person was seated at the table. Greer wore a pale blue shipsuit similar to his own and looked like an inmate in an asylum. She was hollow-eyed, and Blite noticed her hands were shaking as she struggled to push small morsels of food into her mouth.
“Captain,” she said, then ran out of words.
Blite started to head over to her but, spying a food unit inset in one wall, went over to that and punched in his requirements. It shortly delivered him a pressed tray and a capped beaker. He took these up, but instead of going over to join Greer, walked over to the panoramic window and gazed out.
The ship was obviously a large one because before him lay what looked like a plane stretching to a sunrise, which he guessed was the glare of fusion engines. The plane was of metals and composite, scattered with glassy instrument blisters like dome houses, punctuated by com towers and a couple of huge weapons turrets. Distantly he could see someone in a space suit working at the foot of one of those turrets, and that gave him a sense of scale. The weapons turret stood four storeys tall. He turned away, reluctantly heading over to sit down with Greer.
She watched him tiredly but he struggled to find anything to say. He took the lid off the tray and peered at its contents, surprised because the food looked very good. But he had little appetite and so uncapped the beaker and sipped coffee. It tasted just right, but he had trouble swallowing and his stomach began to register a protest. He put it to one side.
“I don’t think Brond made it,” he said.
“Yeah, I heard,” Greer replied. “We should have known that fucker would get one of us killed eventually.” Her words just didn’t seem to have any heat in them.
“It was quick,” Blite replied, again hearing Brond’s truncated scream over suit com. “I was burned,” he continued. “Something questioned me while an autodoc worked on me. All the time I was conscious and without nerve blocking.”
“Yes,” said Greer. Blite assumed she meant the same had happened to her, but she bowed her head and continued her attempts to eat.
“Some woman came in and stopped it,” he continued. “An outlinker—she seemed pretty annoyed.”
“That would be Captain Grafton.” Greer discarded her knife and fork in disgust. “She’s military and I don’t think she likes having . . .” She paused for a moment. “I don’t think she likes having the Brockle aboard. I don’t think she likes it at all.”
“The Brockle?” he repeated. “And why the hell is that thing aboard this ship?”
“It’s apparently an adviser on the . . . Penny Royal situation.” Greer shrugged and winced. “According to Grafton, this ship was on its way to join a small fleet heading out to Room 101. They know what happened there because the king of the prador sent them a recording.” She stopped, looking puzzled. “Apparently we missed something vital about events there.”
“You said ‘was on its way’?” Blite prompted.
“Oh, yeah. It then got diverted on a new mission to intercept Penny Royal.” Greer sat for a long moment in silence before adding, “But Penny Royal got away.”
“So what now?” asked Blite.
“Apparently the Brockle is now gathering data so as to decide on its next course of action.” Greer looked at him directly. “And we’re its main source.”
After a long pause while they digested that, Greer added, “Something doesn’t add up here.”
Blite waited, but Greer’s gaze fixed over his shoulder. Blite turned and saw that a large bald-headed man, with a shipsuit the same as he and Greer wore stretched over his corpulent form, had entered the lounge. He stood with his arms folded and, just for a moment, Blite tried not to recognize who this was.
“Greer Salint,” said the man. “Your presence is required.”
Panicked, Greer took her arms off the table, stood up knocking her chair over and backed away. She looked terrified, but there was nowhere to run. The fat man gestured and Greer grunted as if gut-punched, then woodenly responded to the summons. Blite hated himself for sitting there and doing nothing, and hated how grateful he felt that it was she who had been summoned, and not him.
Sverl
As Sverl exited his sanctum he probed ahead towards what had once been the abode of the Room 101 AI, but unfortunately there were no working cams available there so he had no idea what it was Bsorol had found. Instead, as he walked, unsteady at first but then rapidly growing used to his new form and finding it less cumbersome than his old one, he continued checking throughout the rest of the station.
Having chosen a runcible, the one with a singing AI, he was loading it with the requisite programs. Meanwhile, he had assigned to the AI many of the least altered and damaged maintenance robots which, even as it loaded data, it was deploying about the runcible to make repairs. Fortunately there wasn’t too much damage because the AIs of this station had, over the last hundred years, retained enough sense of self-preservation not to cannibalize the runcibles. The runcibles contained the kind of technology that could lead to catastrophe if tampered with—not least their singularities. Elsewhere repairs were proceeding ever faster. The external weaponry was nowhere near up to spec but every time another factory unit fired up, the rate of repairs increased. It still needed to go faster: a Polity response could arrive at any time.
Launching himself after Bsorol towards where the 101 AI had been, Sverl next took a look in the hospital. There the shell people were steadily being processed and the first of them were now receiving the ministrations of the mind-tech Cole. Finding little more of interest there, Sverl’s attention strayed to the adjacent construction bay. Spear had returned to his ship and, as far as Sverl could gather, was still preparing it for departure. The mind case of Flute was ready to be shifted across from the old attack ship and, once that was done, Spear would go.
“So what exactly is this something you’ve found?” Sverl asked Bsorol as they sailed through vacuum.
“I cannot be certain,” the first-child replied. “Penny Royal technology.”
Bsorol wouldn’t be drawn, and a moment later landed on some of the supporting structure around the old abode of the Room 101 AI. The large pill-shaped structure had been fragile last time Sverl had come here, and after the recent battles it had taken damage. There were large holes in its walls, and clouds of brittle debris floated all around. Bsorol towed himself down to a narrow ledge and in through one of the holes. Following, Sverl scanned the interior, finding things much as they had been before. On his last visit he had quickly surmised that there was n
othing here for him: the Room 101 AI, having instructed one of its maintenance robots, had suicided. Beyond that, all surrounding systems were a burned-out mess. Setting this place up as a centre of operations would have taken more work than any other location in the station. However, this place now had an addition.
With micro-pads in his feet bonding, Sverl stalked across the debris-strewn floor and gazed down at the object resting at the base of the ex-AI’s lower interlink. It was a slightly flattened white sphere a yard across. A hole stood open in its upper surface, revealing packed silver and red complexity. Sverl scanned it, picking up high energy densities, organization extending well below the atomic level, perhaps pico- or even femto-tech. Taking a rough template of its structure, he ran a comparison with something in his memory and found it matched. It seemed that Penny Royal was not finished with him.
“Do you recognize it?” Sverl asked Bsorol.
“I’m not sure,” Bsorol hedged.
“Think back to how Penny Royal defended Carapace City.”
“Yes,” said Bsorol. “I see . . .”
It had been certain that Cvorn would fire on Carapace City and try to incinerate the human population there. Penny Royal, after arriving aboard The Rose, had launched objects like these and used them to raise a hardfield of a type no one had ever seen before. First it had been a curved curtain, then it had completely enclosed Carapace City in an adamantine sphere. Not only that, as Sverl had observed, it shunted the energy from CTD and particle-beam strikes against it into U-space, thereafter drawing it back to reinforce the field. This was precisely the kind of defence Sverl needed for this station. And here it was, revealed to him at precisely the right moment.
“One of them won’t do it,” said Bsorol, who obviously understood more than he was letting on. “Penny Royal used a number of them to generate the field for Carapace City and that was a lot smaller than this station.”
“True,” Sverl replied. “But there must be a way this object can be copied.”
Sverl probed for com frequencies emitted by the thing but found nothing. Then he routed his searches through the spine. A schematic of vast complexity fell into his mind. Its sheer size almost shut him down because it was too big to encompass, let alone understand. In reaction he extended his mind into local AIs to make room, incidentally compressing their mentalities and all but shutting them down. The schematic expanded to render more detail, almost like a Mandelbrot set, and Sverl found himself having to expand further. Another twenty AIs had to make room for him before the schematic reached its true scale, and a further ten minds were needed for him to then process function data. The thing he was looking at was more complex than any living biological entity, more so than a whole ecology even, but it did have one striking similarity.
“It is a Von Neumann machine,” Sverl stated.
“What’s that?” Bsorol asked—only when the first-child used human language over the radio link did Sverl realize that was how he himself had spoken.
“It can reproduce itself,” Sverl clattered.
The required mix was quite simple really, for the machine bore one other similarity to the common biological life thus far found in both the prador and human expansions: it was based on carbon. It contained many other elements, but the bulk of it consisted of the endless methods of combining and shaping carbon. Even as he listed those other elements, Sverl mentally reached out and sequestered a mixing tank used to make bubble-metals and began diverting resources.
“Pick it up,” he instructed.
Even as Bsorol warily stepped forwards and reached down with both claws, tons of carbon dust in the form of buckyballs and nano-tubes was being propelled from storage along a pipe towards that tank. Other pipes began supplying other elements—the correct mix of gases, grits of silicon and rare earths—while furnaces began liquefying a wide selection of metal ingots ready for piping through too.
“Take it here.” Sverl sent station coordinates directly to Bsorol’s aug. “Simply place it inside the bubble-metal tank and leave it there.” Sverl paused for a moment then added, “I will have an AI run the process but I want you to stay and oversee it, take some second-children with you and be ready to respond to any eventualities. Go at once.”
The AI currently getting the bubble-metal tank up to speed was more than capable of overseeing the whole process. However, Sverl now had reason to distrust them and wanted his children on claw for the most important work aboard this station.
As Bsorol scuttled away Sverl paused to again study his surroundings. Penny Royal must have left this thing when it had encountered Spear here. Spear hadn’t seen it, but then the man had not been in the most balanced state of mind at the time. Whatever. As he erased the schematic so as to give himself room to think, Sverl had to wonder just what Penny Royal’s intentions were. Rather than running, Sverl had been nudged towards the route of building a hardfield defence. What was it for? What were those black diamonds for? All of this, Sverl felt sure, was no longer about correcting past wrongs, but about Penny Royal’s ultimate aim, whatever that might be. Everything that had gone before had been, in Penny Royal’s terms, a game, but now the black AI was getting deadly serious.
Spear
“Right, I’m going to bed,” I said, dropping my visor as I stepped back inside the Lance.
Still somewhat paranoid after recent events, I’d wanted to keep a close eye on my ship and its surroundings while the caskets of the shell people were being unloaded, and I’d just come inside after making a visual inspection of the hull outside to assure myself nothing had attached itself, and all space doors and hatches were closed. Of course, while those caskets were being unloaded, keeping watch had not occupied me completely, so I had also been overseeing the robots rebuilding the interior, making defences and safety measures so nothing could ever assume control of me or my ship again.
“What?” Riss asked.
“You heard me,” I replied, and just headed back to my rebuilt cabin.
Human biology had been tinkered with for centuries and, for many, sleep was no longer a necessity. However, it had never ceased to be a pleasure. I could go without it—using other methods to imbed memory and clear up the dross in my mind—but these methods never quite got me centred, never allowed me to break from the past and find a point of calm, and sleep did.
Inside my cabin I stripped, sprawled back on my bed and shut my eyes. Of course the way I went to sleep bore little similarity to how primitive humans did it. I just started a sleep program in my aug, with the requisite amounts of deep sleep and REM over a period of eight hours, then shut down as if someone had pulled my power supply.
When I woke, I was reminded of how I felt waking in that virtuality prior to my resurrection. I felt good, rested, stronger and much more able to face the tribulations reality was doubtless preparing to throw at me. I took a shit and a shower, dressed in a clean undersuit and pulled my space suit back on, breakfasted on roast pig apples and porridge, then took a beaker of green tea with me back to the bridge. There I found Riss coiled on a console and wondered if the assassin drone had its own facsimile of sleep. She of course instantly raised her head as I entered, third black eye open as she studied me.
“Right,” I said, “time to get our ship mind back.”
“Are you sure we want it back?” Riss asked.
“Yes, absolutely sure.”
She responded with a snort as I drained my tea and headed for the airlock, but followed anyway. I stepped outside, Riss slithering out behind me.
“Wait,” she said, as I was about to set out towards the old attack ship Sverl had used as a decoy. I glanced down at her and she pointed with her ovipositor. When I couldn’t see what she was pointing at, she sent me an image and rapidly changing coordinates with the station schematic. I gazed internally at the still image and then at the thing in real time and could make nothing of it. Yeah, it was a globular lump o
f technology heading out towards open space. So what? This place was full of all sorts of tech on the move.
“You don’t recognize it?” Riss asked.
“No.”
“While you were sleeping Sverl found something interesting,” Riss began, and while we walked across to the old attack ship filled me in on the technology lying behind Penny Royal’s defence of Carapace City. As we entered the attack ship I pondered why the black AI had left such technology for Sverl to find. I couldn’t help thinking it was there because it would be needed.
Disconnecting all Flute’s feeds was simple because Sverl had given the second-child mind the ability to eject itself from this ship, which of course was very unpradorlike of him, since most prador were not much concerned about the survival of their children in any form. Flute merely had to initiate the disconnection routine while putting actual ejection on hold. The interlinks clamping his case in place separated, while optics and power cables unplugged themselves and snaked away into recesses. I stepped over to the case and gave it a shove towards the exit, then just walked alongside as it drifted. Two shoves more sent it into the hold, where I instructed a maintenance robot to field it.
“I still don’t think this is a good idea,” said Riss.
“So would you like to take Flute’s position controlling the Lance?” I asked.
“This place is awash with AIs that would probably leap at the chance.”
“And they are likely to be as trustworthy, or more so, than you or Flute?”
“She’s just trying to maintain the pose,” Flute interjected. “It must be difficult to find you no longer hate what you’d been programmed to hate. Us beings who actually learned how to think rather than running on crappy code hastily slapped together in this place are more pliant, and more durable.”
Ouch! I winced.
“Yeah, but now you’re no longer an organic being, but running in crystal and all of a sudden finding your horizons expanding.”