I recognized him, of course, because he was a candidate I had rejected before settling on Isobel Satomi. Mr.. Pace was a man who had gone to Penny Royal with the aim of making himself indestructible. He had returned with a body made from self-renewing meta-material based on obsidian and diamond shear planes. I studied some of the technical specs available and, yes, the guy was pretty much blast-proof, but I wondered what his downside was; what grotesque joke Penny Royal had played on him.
The current rumour related to Penny Royal. It was that Mr.. Pace had recently fled the scene of a massacre caused by that AI and returned to his home on a world within the Graveyard. Frustratingly there was next to no detail. Was this what Amistad had been getting at? A moment later the war drone did not let me down, as a data package arrived along the still-open link back to the Polity. Again being cautious, I found out everything I could about the package before opening it, and learned that it was an ECS security tape.
“It’s been a long time,” said a squat heavy-worlder woman with plaited ginger hair.
The figure sitting opposite her at the table wore antediluvian businesswear and had an antique briefcase resting beside his chair. His skin was midnight black and with his attenuated frame he reminded me of images I had seen of the Masai. His hair looked slicked down, almost plastic, however, and his eyes were similar to those of the Sobel line: white pupils, and the rest of the eyes black.
“Long time,” he agreed.
They were in some sort of bar, a panoramic window behind being pattered with red sleet melting and running like strawberry cordial. Beyond lay a mountainous terrain, indigo sky scored with lavender clouds like some spatter pattern from a murder scene.
“Everything is in order and I’ve started up your house systems.” The woman paused for a moment. “What brings you back?”
He reached out and picked up his drink, downed it in one. “I didn’t find what I was looking for there.” He waved a dismissive hand.
“Another dead end?”
“It was for the extremadapt colony.”
“What happened?”
“Penny Royal happened—they’re all dead.”
He closed his hand tightly on his glass, crushing it into splinters. When he inserted the broken glass into his mouth the woman didn’t blink an eye.
“You survived,” she pointed out.
He sat there crunching contemplatively for a moment, then swallowed. Perhaps broken glass was a supplement his strange body needed. “I don’t know whether it was because of me.” He reached down and opened his briefcase. “One can never tell with Penny Royal.” He shrugged. “Anyway, I decided not to hang around.”
From his briefcase, he extracted a simple-looking gun, then he turned to face me. I guessed he was looking at whoever or whatever had made this recording.
“I think you have enough now,” he said, then pointed and fired.
I found myself snapped back onto the bridge of the Lance, Riss gazing at me from the console with her black eye open, and Sepia watching me curiously from her chair. I felt a moment of annoyance, closed my eyes for a second to try and summon up that file again. I got it, and began running through it in search of anything that could give me the location of this Mr.. Pace.
“Do any of you recognize this?” I asked. I knew I didn’t need to send it to either Riss or Sepia because they were both there in my aug with me, but I did send it to Flute.
After a short pause Sepia said, “It’s Rorquin.”
“You’re sure?”
“Hard not to recognize that sky, or the rain.” She shook her head. “It’s caused by a ferric compound blown down towards the equator from the polar desert. Strange world—its axis highly tilted with the poles alternating from deep freeze to hot enough to fry bacon over winter and summer.”
“You went there?”
“Sure, I went to see Mr.. Pace, but he wasn’t home at the time.” She paused for a second while the penny, so to speak, dropped. “Of course he’s—’
“Why did you go to see this Mr.. Pace?” I interrupted.
“Curiosity and a momentary rise in my suicidal impulse.”
“Suicidal?”
“Mr.. Pace is a notoriously private person,” she replied. “And since he’s not inside the Polity he doesn’t have to obey niggling little laws about not killing people who irritate him. Quite a few of my kind have paid him very final visits.”
I nodded, uncomfortable with this revelation because I didn’t really understand the impulse. Uncomfortable too with the dawning idea that Sepia had been eager to join me because being with me was as risky a pursuit as any those suffering from ennui tried. Perhaps I would understand when I grew older. Perhaps it related to that emptiness I felt at the prospect of no longer having Penny Royal to chase. I grimaced at the thought then ran a search to get as much detail as I could on this Mr.. Pace. A minute later a great wedge of data dropped into my aug—so much I had to relay some of it into the Lance’s auxiliary storage.
“Flute,” I said, “take us to Rorquin now.”
9
Sverl
As the last hardfield generator left the bubble-metal tank, shed its outer coverings and sped through the station to its position in the network, Sverl would have breathed a sigh of relief, except he had no lungs.
“Shut it down,” he instructed the AI controlling material feeds to that tank. There hadn’t been any specific instructions about halting the process, but it was plain that starving it of materials would do the job.
“It seems to be doing that all by itself,” the AI concerned replied.
“Data,” Sverl instructed.
The AI opened feeds from sensors in and around the tank and from scanners in the vicinity too. Sverl studied the processes occurring inside and saw that they had changed. Matter flow patterns had altered and the lack of a kernel for the next hardfield generator was plain. But of course Penny Royal would have known just how many of these devices were needed and had limited the process to producing just the required quantity. Sverl turned his attention to the robots and to Bsorol and the second-children, who had rushed in to install heat sinks and transformers around the tank when the temperatures generated by its internal processes were about to breach it.
“You are needed back at the U-space engines,” he instructed Bsorol. “Bsectil is readying them to take the new rings and could do with some help.”
“Yes, Father,” Bsorol replied, collecting up his tools.
Sverl allowed his attention to stray to a shutdown runcible from which ’structor pods were now extracting the gravity box—an octahedral case trailing power cables and being moved as ponderously as a moon in orbit, which was about as much as it massed. This item would make its slow transit back through the station to where the gravity press—a monolithic device the size of an attack ship—was now rolling out of its factory ready to receive its last component. Making the new rings for the drive would take five days, so things were proceeding a lot faster than he had calculated. But urgency remained: Sverl still wanted those engines working and still wanted to take the station away from here. The enclosing hardfield he was about to generate might well be cutting-edge Penny Royal technology but he wouldn’t put it past Polity AIs to find a way of getting through the thing.
He now watched the last hardfield generator exit through a port in the station’s hull and then arc back down towards that hull. The other ninety-five generators were also so positioned and, as this one finally touched down, the network was completed physically. Sverl felt the connection in his mind and experienced the satisfaction a third-child feels upon slotting the last piece of a logic puzzle into place. And the reasons behind it were similar: plain survival.
Now, with a simple mental instruction he could turn on a hardfield to encompass the entire station. Should he do so now? He decided not, for this action required some thought.
&
nbsp; If he turned it on now the Polity AIs out there would have time, while he worked on the engines, to analyse it and perhaps find some way to deal with it. If he didn’t turn it on now there was a chance that they might spot the generators on the hull and destroy some or all of them before he could turn the thing on. Then, of course, there were other possibilities: what if the damned thing didn’t work? What if it interfered with U-drive? what if it—?
“We have a problem,” said the AI he had been speaking to earlier.
“What?”
It opened up those feeds to him again. The matter inside the bubble-metal tank was swirling faster and faster, and the temperature was rising rapidly. The inner sensors had died and those on the outer casing were steadily going out. Even as he watched, he could see some of the supporting struts bending while cracks developed in that outer ceramic casing to reveal a hellish red light glaring from its inner layers. He tried to analyse what was going on inside but it was beyond him. Certainly the liquid materials inside were moving so fast they were creating a powerful gyroscopic effect and a torsion that was working against the supports, but still there were nanoscopic processes occurring, and even stuff on levels below that. The mass in there was turning into something intricate lying partway between physical matter and some kind of plasma-energy mechanism.
So what now, Penny Royal, he wondered.
As he watched, the last of the sensors on the casing died as the cracks grew wider. The scanners he was using, which sat a distance away from the tank, were also beginning to struggle, for the temperature was getting ever higher. Next he saw inner layers ablating and dissolving; being sucked up by the whirling inner mass. Now visible through the cracks, it didn’t actually look hot, but oddly like blue-tinted mercury. Further scanning then revealed that though the casing and surrounding structures were heating up, radiation from the surface of the mass itself was steadily dropping. He had seen strange effects like this before, in fact with the operation of hardfield generators like those sitting out on the hull. He now directed a more distant scanner at this anomaly and wasn’t surprised to discover some kind of U-space phenomenon occurring. The mass was somehow drawing energy from that underlying continuum.
Next, all at once, the entire tank and much of the surrounding infrastructure just collapsed, disappearing into a whirling metallic sphere, the thundering of that collapse felt even here in Sverl’s sanctum. The sphere then began to move, a spinning gravity wave around it sucking in anything within a few hundred feet. It rapidly carved a wide opening through the structure of the station. Sverl gaped. He had been steadily repairing and restoring this structure, and now some device of Penny Royal’s was tearing the guts out of it. What the hell was the purpose of this thing?
“Must eject,” came the brief statement from the AI, then its link with Sverl cut.
It took him a moment to realize the whirling sphere had been bearing down on the AI’s armoured case. The AI had ejected itself and was now bouncing along down a far tunnel. Sverl instructed a tree of ’structor pods at the far end to field it then focused back on the course of that whirling sphere.
The thing was currently travelling in a straight line towards what could only be called the nose of the station—meaning the end that didn’t contain the engines. Measurements showed that the centre point of the thing hadn’t deviated in this straight-line course by even a few inches. But as it ate away infrastructure, its mass was steadily increasing. Sverl plotted its course and sent warnings to any AIs lying in its path, then felt a horrible sinking sensation when he spotted that the one operating runcible aboard the station lay along that path. He again checked the course of the thing and saw that it would pass neatly through the octagonal frame. Then what? He could shut down the runcible and then, with any luck, the thing would finally pass out through the nose of the station and keep going. However, this was certainly at Penny Royal’s instigation and must serve a greater purpose than simply wrecking the interior on its way out.
If he turned the runcible off it would leave the station open to attack by U-space missiles. What would happen the moment that thing hit the U-space meniscus if he left the runcible on? Usually normal material objects hitting a disconnected runcible gateway would drop straight into U-space without destination. They tended just to disappear. But this thing was by no stretch of the imagination normal.
As Sverl tried to think his way through this quandary it seemed almost inevitable that more woes would come to burden him. The AI commander of the Polity fleet now wanted to talk to him. He opened the link and waited.
“I don’t know what the fuck you think you’re doing, Sverl,” said Garrotte, “but it doesn’t look to me like you’re doing as you were told.”
“A slight problem has occurred,” Sverl replied, trying to think of some reasonable explanation. There wasn’t one. Those ships out there had to be picking up on a large mass of material, with a strange U-signature, moving through the ship.
After a pause, Garrotte continued, “We gave you the time, and now your time has run out. I have my orders.”
Particle beams with the power to kill cities stabbed in from the two dreadnoughts, while the attack ships began dropping into U-space. In the microsecond he had, Sverl knew he could delay no longer and turned on the hardfield. The station, already shuddering around him with the wrecking progress of that whirling mass, heaved like some giant oceangoing liner ploughing into a mud bank. Through outer sensors, the bright glare of the hypergiant dimmed and took on an orange tint. All around the hull the hardfield generators lifted, and an immense hardfield in the shape of a bacillus expanded out around the station.
Within, the station lights dimmed and fusion reactors stuttered as their power just drained away. Sverl measured an overall temperature drop throughout the station of nearly fifty degrees as the entropic effect of the field kicked in.
The beams hit, splashing against the barrier, tearing like giant energy drillbits as they traversed it. Behind them they left black shadows that slowly faded, then, after a moment, they weren’t splashing at all, but seemingly terminating against the field like standing rods. Within the station, power levels began to rise again and Sverl allowed himself a moment of relief. Next, analysing through his own and the station’s U-tech, Sverl saw that the field was sucking up the energy, translating it into U-space and then drawing it back through the projectors to further power itself. The field was no longer drawing on its near surroundings. This was just as it should be and just as it had been at Carapace City. However, there was another draw on this energy source, and that was the whirling mass now accelerating towards the functional runcible.
“What shall I do?” asked the runcible AI.
“Sing?” Sverl suggested, and then suppressed a very human giggle.
Directly outside the station, beyond the hardfield which had now stabilized just over a mile out from the hull, the attack ships reappeared, splinter missiles issuing from their crow’s wing hulls. Sverl detected two attempts at firing U-jump missiles; energy anomalies from the runcible as it sucked them up. They had probably just been a probe to ensure that method of attack would not be effective. However, if he shut the runcible down now they would know at once and the hardfield would be no defence. No doubt it would just remain in place, feeding off the energies thrown against it, while the station turned to white-hot vapour inside.
Next came the railgun shots, sparkling down the length of the station, the blasts nowhere near as radiant as they should have been, their vaporized metal rapidly cooling in proximity to the vampire effect of the field. And the sphere continued accelerating. CTDs followed, turning space beyond the field as bright as if the station was sitting in the chromosphere of a sun. Gravity-wave weapons then shook them and something else that caused blisters in the field, but they healed a moment later. Sverl paid some attention to that, but his main focus remained on the sphere as it now finally came to and touched the U-space menisc
us. He felt fatalistic about it. Doubtless humans and prador alike had felt like this when faced by catastrophe: a tsunami coming in, an asteroid plummeting, a sun going nova. What could he do? Absolutely nothing at all.
The whirling sphere touched, and then just passed straight through the meniscus and out the other side. The gravity wave around it collapsed briefly, so caused no harm to the runcible—then it continued on its course towards the nose of the station. After passing through the space beyond the runcible, it began eating infrastructure again. Sverl calculated that it now had fifty times the mass it had started out with.
“Well that was interesting,” said Garrotte, the U-space comlink still open.
“Perhaps we have different definitions of ‘interesting’,” Sverl replied.
“So I see you have one of Penny Royal’s hardfields . . .”
“Observant of you.”
“Well, I suppose you won’t be a problem to us while you remain inside it,” said Garrotte. “And, of course, the moment you drop it is the moment you cease to exist.”
The sphere had just passed along the back of a final construction bay, tearing up metal, sucking down resupply towers and massive cranes. It now lay a quarter of a mile across and its constant destruction was beginning to extend beyond its limited area. It was eating through some main structural beams, ripping out supporting and bracing structures so that its progress was now marked out by distortions that reached out to the very hull.
“So what are you going to do now, Sverl?” Garrotte asked.
Sverl considered sending an image feed of what was going on inside the station, but rejected the idea. Why should he explain or justify his actions to entities who had just tried to fry him? Screw them. After a moment he severed the comlink and just concentrated on the sphere.