“I knocked you out with a directed EM pulse,” said the drone. “There will be no damage.”
“Right.” I just managed to stop myself rubbing at my wrist again.
“Maybe an analgesic patch there,” Riss added. “Later.”
I stared at the drone. Riss must have sneaked back aboard when Trent and the other two set out. Perhaps she had intended to stay in hiding until I reached some other destination and then quietly depart. But now she had revealed herself, almost certainly saving my life in the process, and I had to deal with that.
“So what does E676 want with my ship—there’s no threat out there it needs to escape now,” I said instead.
“I’ve no idea,” Riss replied. “Robots like the one that came aboard before have occupied it but don’t seem to be doing anything. We could suppose the AI would like to U-jump away from this system, but I doubt it’s capable of running a U-space engine.” Riss gave a snakish shrug.
“Another lie, then,” I said.
“Yes—the package it sent was nonsense.”
“I need to take the ship back,” I said.
“Yes.”
“So I need allies.”
The drone didn’t have much to say in response to that because she probably knew precisely what allies I was talking about. I let the silence drag on for a little while before saying, “It wasn’t necessary to kill Sverl.”
“I know that now,” said Riss.
“So how was it that you, a sophisticated AI, didn’t know it before?”
“Because like you I have been manipulated. Played,” said Riss. Then after a pause, “And I have been healed.”
“What!”
“The emptiness and the hate were false constructs,” said Riss. “I was returned to my wartime state, loaded with poison and parasite eggs to inject, a victim prepared for me—everything I thought I’d lost returned to me. When I killed I found his killing to be an empty act, and when Sverl died as he did I lost my hate.”
Though I had more pressing concerns I wanted to move closer to the drone and wring her neck, but knew that would be about as easy as squeezing the life out of a tyre.
“I see,” I said, “so you think this was set up by Penny Royal for you? You think that the AI manoeuvred us all here just so you could find your way out of the hole it dumped you in?”
Riss’s head was dipped and she almost looked ashamed. “I was just a side benefit.” Now she looked up, that black eye open. “The main aim was to lure Sverl out of the Graveyard and eliminate him as a threat to the Kingdom, apparently.”
“I don’t buy that.”
Now Riss appeared eager. “Neither do I.”
“This isn’t over,” I tried, not so sure of myself now.
“No, it isn’t—we are not yet done with Penny Royal, nor it with us.”
That left a sour taste in my mouth. “So we need to get out of here, which is both an immediate problem in that I no longer have a ship—” I waved a hand airily, not sure in what direction the Lance lay—“and a future problem with our lack of a ship mind.” Riss, despite all her faults, had once said she could serve as a ship mind.
“That lack of a mind is a problem that was solved while you were unconscious.”
Another voice issued inside my suit helmet: “You finished now?”
“Flute?” I asked.
“ETA four hours from now,” replied my ship mind. “I hope no one’s going to start shooting at me—I’ve had enough of that.”
Trent
Trent eyed the big robot and swung his particle cannon round to bear on it, while beside him Sepia took aim with her laser carbine. Cole, meanwhile, had backed up and was peering through another doorway.
“Problems back here too,” he said.
Keeping the big robot in his sights, Trent walked backwards and looked through the same doorway. This room did not contain a chair or editing equipment, and the rear wall was missing, opening onto a section of dark station structure filled with half-seen movement. An object launched itself inwards, landing on its back with a heavy thump on the grav-plated floor. Trent felt a shiver of horror as he watched the military autodoc trying to right itself. Transferring his gaze to the other movement out there, he began to identify distinct robots. These weren’t autodocs but something else entirely.
“This is private property,” repeated the big robot, now shifting into motion again.
“Another step,” Trent warned.
“Wait!” Cole rested a hand on his shoulder. “Over here.” He stepped into an editing suite that did contain a chair.
“What is it?” Trent asked. The editing suite was as good a place as any. If they were attacked he was confident he could rapidly destroy any of the robots he had seen and, if things got a bit tight, he could always burn an escape route through the wall. Trent followed with Sepia close behind him. He watched through the doorway as the autodoc, having righted itself, scuttled out of the room opposite but did not come after them. Instead it turned, its feet tearing up carpet moss, shot towards the approaching big surgical robot, then past it and out of sight. Trent then backed off again as the big robot drew closer.
“No trespassers,” it said, then turned ponderously in the direction the autodoc had fled.
Puzzled, Trent followed the big robot down the corridor and into a room just in time to see that one of those other robots had got into the hospital. This thing landed on four legs terminating in wide flat pads and unfolded a long limb from its back, snipping at the air with a three-fingered grab. It stabbed this towards the big robot, but the latter machine smoothly snared it with a surgical clamp, then bore down on it with a diamond wheel. Severing half the limb, it tossed it back where it had come from, then, shambling forwards, booted the smaller robot after it.
Trent’s puzzlement cleared. Whatever had taken out that wall must have sealed the area because there was no air loss, which indicated a sneak attack. The hospital AI must have detected it and had sent this big robot to repel it. His training and experience taking over, and suppressing his initial qualms, Trent stepped into the room, flipped out a sighting screen for his cannon, set the thing to brief spurts of fire and targeted one of the invading robots. His first shot blew the thing into pieces—metal clattering and clanging all around and one limb landing smoking in the room. He shot again, destroying another one and, moving past the big surgical robot, aimed at yet another. It was easy. The things were sluggish, ill-made and didn’t have the kind of protective armour found on a war drone. They also seemed confused about the source of what was destroying them. A moment later Sepia joined him and quite soon flames were the only things moving beyond the missing wall.
“That’s about it,” she said, resting her carbine back across her shoulder.
“Seems to be,” said Trent, just a second before explosive decompression picked him up and hurled him towards the missing wall. He sailed through with his visor closing up automatically, hit a beam and bounced away, but managed to snag a second one before he was sucked through a hole in another wall seemingly consisting of wormcasts of metal. As the wind died, more robots began to come through that hole. Trent glanced back into the hospital room and saw that both Sepia and Cole had been snagged by the big robot. A multitude of autodocs ranging from battlefield medics to the kind normally pedestal mounted in clean rooms were swarming behind—some given mobility by caterpillar treads and others sporting spidery legs.
His heart hammering, Trent decided he had chosen sides now. He checked the display and complementary controls on his cannon and saw prador glyphs scrolling. No help there. He called up his visor display and checked for data links within a particular microwave frequency, found what he was after and allowed it. His head-up display immediately asked, “Translate?” He answered yes and began getting a feed he could understand from the cannon.
Its laminar storage was down to
half and the particulate matter it used was down to a third—not many shots left. He propelled himself back from the beam over towards one side of the hole he had been sucked through, meanwhile adjusting the particulate down and reducing power drain by narrowing the beam. He knew he couldn’t be so profligate now. Turning at the last moment, he brought his feet down on the wall, sticking there. Something like a polished copper beetle landed beside him and he kicked it away, and with enforced calm searched through the cannon’s functions. The translation program had given him an overlay of a similar human weapon and in a moment he had cross hairs up in his visor, moving as he moved the cannon.
Meanwhile the hospital robots were swarming into the space and he now had to choose his targets carefully. He aimed and fired at a spiderbot trailing an umbilicus as it came through the hole, blowing away half its body. The umbilicus then abruptly towed it back out of sight. He hit another thing that bore some resemblance to a tailless scorpion, before propelling himself away from the beam and back towards the hospital room, sailing in over an avalanche of defending robots coming out of the hospital. Something slammed into him in mid-air and he swung his cannon down to batter some long-limbed object clinging to his leg. Tumbling out of control, he hit the back wall. Even as he beat at the thing that grasped at him a military autodoc leapt up from the floor and snared it, and they both fell away, tearing at each other. Next Cole caught hold of his foot and towed him down to the floor.
“Thanks,” said Trent.
Cole nodded, his expression grim, and stepped away wielding a large chunk of metal, probably from one of the destroyed robots, which he stabbed into the sensor array of another of those scorpion things. Sepia, meanwhile, was taking shots through the hole in the wall, while to one side the big robot was methodically dismembering any attacker that drew close.
“They’re retreating,” said the catadapt woman over suit radio.
Trent shot another of the scorpion things that had got past her and the big robot and moved forwards. All around him robots were fighting each other but he couldn’t really tell friend from foe. He tapped his wrist control to bring up a menu of com channels in use, but that gave a count into the thousands, then, just using a general Polity com frequency, he asked, “Hospital AI, what the hell is happening here?”
Sepia had now moved back from the hole as hospital robots began swarming back inside. Trent moved to put his back against the wall as their airborne mass streamed past him to the door, all turning to the left out there and heading away.
“No trespassers,” said a familiar voice, the big robot now turning and beginning to clump back across the room. Within a minute it, along with just two others, were the only robots remaining in the room—all the attackers were gone like water swirling down a plug hole. Trent glanced to the two smaller ones remaining and saw that they were printer robots like the one they had seen wall-building on their way here. He watched them disappear in the space beyond and begin rapidly tossing cut sections of wall, consisting of layers of bubble-metal sandwiching insulation foam, back into the room.
“Hospital AI?” Trent tried again, broadcasting across numerous com channels.
“Only me,” said the big robot, still perambulating towards the door-
way.
Trent quickly moved to stand in its path, “You’re the controlling AI here?”
The robot halted and, after a very long pause, doubtfully muttered, “No trespassing.”
“I asked you a question,” Trent insisted.
“You are humans,” said the robot. It began shifting its feet, slowly edging sideways as if preparing to bolt past him. However, it was clearly incapable of bolting anywhere. It struck Trent that it appeared nervous of him. Perhaps it now well understood what the weapon he held could do to it.
“Yes, we’re humans,” said Trent, baffled.
By now one of the printer robots was back in the room; it had already fixed one section of wall in place and was fitting another like pieces of a jigsaw, its printing heads moving like an ancient typewriter and the join utterly invisible to the human eye. It occurred to Trent that such incidents might be common here, and that they were more like an infestation than an attack.
“I have over a thousand battle casualties,” he continued, “all in need of prosthetics and medical care.”
“They also have mental problems that need . . . resolving,” said Cole, who was standing by the hole and peering out, still clutching that length of metal.
“Injuries?” said the robot, as if some vague memory was arising in its mind. “No trespassers,” it added, before again setting itself in motion.
“I think they’re trying to get in again,” said Sepia.
Trent glanced round at her. She was standing in the doorway, looking in the direction all the other hospital robots had gone. “Strike that—something’s coming through the wall down there.”
Trent sighed. “Well, I guess we’d better help if we still want to have a hospital we can use.” He stepped aside to let the big surgical robot get past and, as it accelerated to a meander, he asked again, “Are you the hospital AI?”
The robot shrugged its complicated metalwork, and replied, “I’m Florence.”
Spear
It was getting chaotic in the station and, when I opened communications with Bsorol, he just dumped me straight into a sensory download from his armour. The prador were in the midst of a battle, shooting down robots swarming all around Sverl’s mausoleum. Some were attacking the prador, some were attacking each other, while others were trying to chew through armoured shields the prador had erected. It just struck me as insane, these prador risking their lives seemingly to protect their father’s remains.
“It looks worse there,” I said. “What the hell is going on?”
“The balance has been further upset,” Riss replied, obviously seeing the same feed as me and as much in my head, or rather in my aug, as before.
“Explain yourself.”
“A tactical AI within the station used the recent disruption as an opportunity to assassinate key AIs elsewhere in the station, which has led to the chaos you’re seeing.”
I stared at the snake drone and wished she had an expression I could read. Earlier her words had implied that she knew more than she was telling, and now I was beginning to wonder what she’d been doing over the days since she had killed Sverl. I shook my head. What did it matter? What did matter was that we were in trouble. It occurred to me then that Trent might have run into similar problems. I tried my suit’s radio to get in contact but got nothing in return, then damned myself for letting them go, though their actions were not really my responsibility. It just seemed stupid to wake and repair the shell people in this place. And why the hell had Sepia gone with them? Surely she was smarter than that . . .
“Which direction do we head to get to the prador?” I asked, looking each way along the maintenance tube.
“Why do you want to get to them?” asked Riss.
“I need my ship back and I need help to get it back,” I explained. “Sverl’s children are the only ones here who have the firepower.”
“Why should they help you?”
“Just tell me which way to go, Riss.”
After a long pause Riss swung her head round to point it in one direction down the tube.
“Thanks,” I said, reaching out to snare the spine, using it against the wall to send me drifting along the way indicated, then reaching up with one hand to push against a protruding handle to speed me up.
“Bsorol, my ship’s been taken over,” I said. “I’m heading your way.”
A three-dimensional map arrived in my aug, with a blinking red dot indicating my position. I tried to orient by checking cam imagery ahead but found it much more difficult now my aug had lost a lot of its programming. Catching another handle, I paused and looked back to see Riss still drifting in the pipe wher
e I had left her. After a moment she shrugged then slithered through vacuum towards me, probably using her maglev or some internal grav-engine against the walls of the tube. As she came up beside me she said, “This way,” and moved on ahead.
“You’re probably not welcome there,” I observed as I followed her.
“They’ll hardly know I’m present,” said Riss.
Of course, she would use her chameleonware.
After just a few minutes the end of the maintenance tube was visible as a pink glare, and my visor automatically compensated for the brightness. When we reached it, I found the tube severed and protruding into an area hollowed out by some blast to leave a spherical chamber lined with wreckage. The glare was coming from somewhere to my left although I could see no opening. However, as I’d seen here before, even a pinhole could admit enough light to bring visibility up to human range, since the hypergiant out there was millions of times brighter than Sol.
Riss headed across the space towards the continuation of the maintenance pipe and I propelled myself after her. However, nearing the wall of wreckage on the other side, she suddenly changed course and I had to use my wrist impeller to stay with her. We landed amidst tangled girders just as something shot out of our intended destination. The thing, which was rapidly changing shape, slammed against one side of the pipe we had travelled down, and then bounced away, moving much more slowly. Now I could see that it was actually two robots grappling with each other. One was one of the usual insect-format maintenance robots here, while the other was a Golem, the android John Grey.
The two tore at each other with rabid ferocity, their limbs blurring, sparks and debris sailing away, but the big Golem was winning. Within just a few seconds Grey had dismembered his opponent and, kicking from its remains, he shot over towards us. He landed hard enough on the girders for me to feel the impact through my hands, and then just gazed at the two of us.