“What happened to the package?” Sverl asked—fast AI com, not human or prador speech, the question arriving in the microsecond before Amistad pulled the trigger.
Amistad paused. Having come under attack his defences had immediately ramped up to their maximum and thus the data package had been routed to secure storage inside him. In the next few microseconds Amistad made his analysis. Sverl had been AI-fast in the transmission of his order to Bsorol and the first-child had been none too tardy in responding. Amistad felt some admiration for the first-child’s bravery. It had to have known that its weapon could not kill Amistad and the likely result of its attack would have been its own death, yet it had not hesitated. The aim of the attack? Of course, so Amistad would switch straight to defensive paranoid mode and not open that package. It was the package that would kill him. The drone shut down targeting and eased off on that internal trigger.
“Routed to secure storage,” Amistad replied mildly.
“Am I safe?” Bsorol asked, with a slight gobbling of the prador tongue that indicated a degree of panic.
“You are safe,” Amistad replied, “and thank you.”
He now focused his attention on the package and treated it like the threat Sverl had supposed it to be. It didn’t take long to etch out the shape of the worms designed to first seize control of his internal U-com, nor the underlying stuff aimed at his weapons.
“Seems you saved me some problems,” he said, not prepared to admit that Sverl and Bsorol might have saved his life. “How did you know?”
“It is obvious that Earth Central would have worked out what is occurring here. Ergo, that the fleet out there is under the control of something else.”
Amistad again tried to open U-com to the fleet, but this time keeping the bandwidth so low no packages could be sent, also routing anything that came from there through buffers and layers of security first.
“I see,” said the entity at the other end. “You were not fooled.”
Amistad wasn’t going to admit that he had come close to it. “Who am I speaking to?”
“The Brockle.”
Before becoming the warden of Masada, Amistad had known more than was generally known about the Brockle, because that creature had been a perfect subject for his special interest at the time: madness. But despite his fascination, he had never encountered it close up. As warden, it had been his decision whether to send Tidy Squad murderers off to it for interrogation. After receiving detail on one such interrogation, he had decided never to send anyone else, because yes, even though murderers should die, he was less sure about how many times they should be killed, nor by how many different methods . . .
All the data Amistad had on that creature rose to the fore of his mind; a whole montage of events. He saw a desperately ill man almost lost in masses of primitive medical technology, old-style optic connections plugged into interface plates that had replaced most of the upper part of his skull. He was old and dying in that era of Earth’s history when the major killers were finally being banished. He was also winning, outpacing the Reaper, but having to sacrifice his body in the process. He was uploading his mind to an organo-metal substrate residing in an upright canister standing beside his bed.
His name was Edmund Brockle.
The montage played on and Amistad saw Edmund Brockle residing in an early iteration of the Soul Bank, living virtual lives and finally, after many years, being transferred in organo-metal form to a first Golem chassis. He saw the turning of the ages as Edmund Brockle transferred again and again, acquiring and discarding bodies and coming at last to rest just after the Quiet War, distributed in the components of a swarm robot. They called him Brockle then, while he worked for ECS rooting out Earth-based terrorists. By the time he was working off-world undermining separatist organizations it was called the Brockle.
To the AIs the Brockle was . . . difficult. It was one of the oldest surviving recordings of a human mind, though much changed over the years. They wanted to protect it; it was almost as if, like some historical monument, the thing had a preservation order on it. However, its behaviour, as Amistad had discovered, had been becoming increasingly erratic and careless of human life. It killed when it was justifiable but not necessary, it exacerbated dangerous situations so it could use drastic measures to resolve them. And in the end, on a world that had been close to seceding from the Polity, it went a step too far. None of the killings it carried out could be quite defined as murder, but their sheer quantity took them beyond the pale. The AIs could not quite decide whether the Brockle should be executed or given a medal, but certainly it could no longer be involved in the same operations. They settled on utilizing its skills as an interrogator, relocated it to an ancient ship called the Tyburn—some behind-the-scenes AI humour influencing that choice—and effectively imprisoned it. But it was an odd kind of imprisonment, for it was one the Brockle had to agree with.
And now it was free.
How and why?
“Why are you here?” Amistad asked.
“To kill Penny Royal,” the Brockle replied.
Of course . . .
Amistad’s question had been more complex than that. Yes, there had been an element of consent in the Brockle’s imprisonment, but there had to have been a degree of consent involved in the Brockle escaping. After a moment of applying the full power of his mind, Amistad could see the reasoning: both the Brockle and Penny Royal were difficult problems but perhaps one of them could resolve the other. Perfectly understanding the nature of the Brockle, the AIs must have fed it certain information on villains who had encountered Penny Royal—just enough data to offend its perverted sense of justice and motivate it to action.
And then they let it off the leash.
“Are you aboard the High Castle?” Amistad asked.
“I am.”
“And how did you manage that?”
“I stole it.”
“And how are its crew and its AI?”
“The ship AI is here.”
“Just like the Garrotte AI is there, yes?”
“Yes.”
Dead, broken up and integrated as one facet of that creature, then.
“But I asked about the crew . . .”
“Unfortunate casualties.”
It struck Amistad as a kind of cowardice on the part of the Polity AIs of which, all of a sudden, he no longer considered himself a member. They had obviously wanted the Brockle to incriminate itself so the reason for a death sentence would be clear—and so it had, first murdering the crew of the High Castle, when it stole the ship, and then further by subsuming the other AIs of the fleet. Even the choice of Garrotte was probably down to cruel utility, for hadn’t that AI been kidnapped by Penny Royal? It had effectively been sent to its death to shut it up. Yes, the reasoning was all too obvious. They wanted to send something powerful against Penny Royal but could not infringe upon treaties with the prador about the Graveyard, and this way they got their wish, along with deniability.
However things turned out thereafter worked for them. If Penny Royal killed the Brockle, then that would be sentence executed; if the Brockle actually managed to kill Penny Royal, that would be good too, and it would have incriminated itself still further.
But all this was before the sphere moved here and the connection was made to the Well Head data. In their indirect and cowardly approach, the Polity AIs had armed and unleashed a monster just as dangerous as Penny Royal itself. And, soon enough, that monster would begin to understand the whole of what was going on here. Amistad cut the com channel and turned to Sverl.
“Thorvald Spear is in serious danger,” said Sverl.
Amistad acknowledged that with a dip of his body—Sverl had understood straight away that though the Brockle had little chance of destroying this sphere, it would soon realize that it could intervene before the main event: on Panarchia.
“An
d there’s nothing we can do,” Sverl added.
“Yes there is,” Amistad replied. “You can make a runcible connection right now.”
Spear
No, you’re not dead, was my first thought.
I didn’t believe in life after death in the religious sense, and I was pretty sure, having already experienced it, that resurrection by memplant didn’t involve quite so much discomfort. My shoulder and calf muscle were balls of pain, miniature prador were rapping their claws against the inside of my skull and playing tunes on my bones. I could breathe, but it felt as if someone had poured glue into one of my lungs. I couldn’t see straight out of the one eye that seemed to be working, while the other felt frozen. I kept blinking my working eye, gradually clearing my vision. A second later, seeing the breach foam half filling my helmet, I realized why that other eye wasn’t working. My visor display next duly informed me that I was injured and needed medical attention, and that my suit was no longer safe. I giggled, laughed, then coughed up something bloody and had to spit it down into the base of my helmet.
“What’s so funny?” asked Riss, her voice over suit com muffled by the crash foam around my head.
Well, nothing was, really, because then I remembered Sepia. I was lying on my side and needed to get up, now. Trying to put my hand down, I found my gauntlet stuck to the top of my helmet and the ridiculousness of that nearly set me off again. After a bit of tugging, and by rocking it from side to side, I finally managed to peel my hand away and, in slow wincing stages, clambered to my feet. I looked down at Mr Pace to see dusty black bones, flakes and thin shells of black crystal, nuggets and slivers of metal. Stepping unsteadily over to him, I stooped to pick up the spine then, as I straightened up, had to fight the urge to vomit.
“Is she alive?” I asked, turning to walk over to Riss and Sepia.
Riss had cleared all the rubble away and was peering through Sepia’s visor. I felt my stomach sinking when I saw the state of her suit. There was breach foam all over it, so a lot of holes. Her right boot was missing and the material of her suit shredded up her calf. Below her knee an emergency seal had obviously closed against her skin, while below that point her leg was black and swollen with bloody cracks in it. The blast had been a fierce one, turning the shuttle’s armour into shrapnel, because it takes a hell of a lot to puncture suits like the ones we were wearing.
“Yes, she’s alive,” said Riss.
I felt something relax inside me. In the end our medical technology was such that the loss of a leg was a brief inconvenience. If a body was alive then all the damage to it could be repaired, and that was even the case when it had been dead for a while . . . depending on what definition of death you used.
“What damage?” I asked as I stooped down beside her and brushed the dust away from her visor.
“Lots,” Riss replied. “Her suit put her into a coma as the only way to keep her alive.”
I gazed at her face. It was hardly recognizable since it was sheened with blood, but then I didn’t suppose my face looked too good either. After a moment I looked up.
“Flute will be here shortly,” said Riss, before I could ask, “though we will need to move to a clearer area for pick up.”
I stood then, turned and limped towards where Penny Royal had been located. In a moment I got a clear view of the centre of the crater and this confirmed what I had glimpsed earlier. The black AI had done it again: it had involved itself, it had been the fulcrum over which events had pivoted. And then it had disappeared. No explanations, no help, just there like a deus ex machina with a morbid sense of humour and little regard for the details, then gone. Yet, as I gazed at the empty area ahead, I felt no anger at all. I suddenly felt at peace with myself because I knew the denouement was due, just as I knew precisely its location.
A roar now impinged on my consciousness and I turned, leaning back to look up because I had no neck movement in my suit. The Lance dropped down, probably on grav—the roar only issuing from steering thrusters as Flute positioned the ship right to land it in the crater. Seeing the ship here, in this setting, I was struck by the sheer size of the thing. I turned back, then froze. Two people had appeared on the scene. They were clad in quite antique-looking space suits but the pulse-rifles they carried looked state-of-the-art. Damn! When I’d penetrated Mr Pace’s mind I’d found nothing to suggest that he wasn’t alone. However, though a loner in tendency he had still used people to run his operation.
“These are from Pace’s ship?” I asked Riss.
“Yes.”
I started walking back towards them, hurting because I was forcefully trying to disguise my limp.
“Don’t worry,” Riss added. “These are human and not resistant to a collimated diamond ovipositor.”
I let the limp reassert, then over general suit com asked, “Who are you and what do you want?”
“Now there’s a thing,” replied the gruff voice of a man. “The first is easy to answer but the second is tricky. You’re Thorvald Spear, aren’t you?”
“I am.”
“And that, I guess, is what’s left of Mr Pace.” One of the figures pointed down at those same remains.
“It is.”
“In that case,” the man threaded the strap of his pulse-rifle over one arm and held out one hand, “I would like to shake your hand.”
I recognized the face I could see through his visor, but had to seek assistance from my aug. I’d never actually met this man, but he had been as intricately involved in my affairs as Penny Royal itself.
“Captain Blite,” I said. “What brings you here?”
“It’s a long and strange story,” he began.
“Then it is one that will have to wait,” I interrupted. “My companion and I are injured, and we need to get on the move because I have an appointment to keep.” I headed over to Sepia, stooped down and slid my hands underneath her and picked her up.
“Where are you going?” asked Blite.
“To Panarchia.”
“Of course,” he said, shooting a glance towards his companion. “I would like to say we’re done.” He grimaced. “My particular fascination with Penny Royal has cost me too much and I would like to end that now and go back to the Polity.”
“But we can’t,” said his companion.
“No,” Blite shook his head. “I have crewmen to retrieve. We’ll follow you.”
17
Sfolk
The ship had immediately warned Sfolk of the arrival of another ship in the system and, even from the fusion fire of a sun, he was able to focus the Atheter starship’s sensors on that vessel. He recognized it immediately as the destroyer that Penny Royal had been incepted inside, and the one that had come close to being destroyed by Cvorn until grabbed by Sverl—the one containing the human Thorvald Spear. He watched it head to one planetoid and a shuttle being dispatched to the surface. And then, close scanning its destination, he saw that Penny Royal was there. How the AI had got there he had no idea. His instruments did describe certain U-space phenomena related to the AI, but what they meant was unclear.
When the second ship arrived and railgunned the surface, Sfolk immediately began to take the starship up, but then, just beyond the flat plates his claws were bonded into—the controls of this ship—a black diamond winked into existence.
“Wait,” said Penny Royal. “Your time will come.”
Sfolk waited and carefully watched the events playing out on the surface, utterly baffled by their purpose. It seemed to him that Penny Royal was behaving like the extremadapts that had occupied this system: setting opponents against each other for entertainment. However, he saw when the AI shifted: the tight U-signature and the brief vacuum sphere that collapsed without attracting the notice of the opponents on the surface. It seemed it was not even waiting out the result of that conflict. It appeared again briefly in orbit of the planetoid as the human and
the meta-human came together in final combat, but didn’t stay for the outcome of that either.
Sfolk knew at once when the AI was back: sensors informed him of the intrusion and internal countermeasures flicked to a high setting; a U-space gate instantly opened in the centre of the ship somewhere below Sfolk. He even understood the purpose of the gate: it was a way to counter U-jump missiles by routing them away into U-space, which was interesting, for it was a defence the prador did not possess. However, the gate flicked off a moment later and a dark presence now weighed heavily in Sfolk’s consciousness and body. Sfolk understood that he was becoming the ship. Meanwhile he continued to watch the fight on that distant planetoid and saw it run to its conclusion.
“Thorvald Spear killed the other one,” he commented.
“Of course,” Penny Royal replied, then routed coordinates into Sfolk’s mind. The timing, he felt, was eerily perfect for, even as he started the ship’s drive to take it up from the sun, its systems reported that energy levels were now at their maximum.
“Stealthily,” Penny Royal added.
Sfolk required no more instruction than that as he fired the fusion drive and skated around the surface of the sun on an amalgam of grav-engines and hardfields, both anchoring in U-space and pushing against it. He no longer needed to try and force this into his understanding of the universe; he simply did understand it, now at an almost instinctive level. Half a circumference around the sun, he flung the ship up on fusion, the ship glowing like a star itself then blinking out as chameleonware (far in advance of anything even in the Polity) hid it from view. Sfolk baulked a little when the U-space drive started seemingly too early and too close to such a massive gravity well, but realized an instant later that the feeling related to his earlier understanding of how these things worked, and not to the present formidable machine he controlled.