Ensconced in a chair in its favoured human form, the Brockle watched through the thousands of pin cams scattered inside the dock. Once the old space doors closed, pressure inside steadily began to climb. When the pressure reached Earth-normal, a door thumped open in the side of the pod and a figure, with a survival suit pulled on over his clothes, climbed out. This was Ikbal Phrose, one of Captain Blite’s old crewmembers. Upon reaching the floor, he turned to help his crewmate, Martina Lennerson Hyde, but she waved him away irritably. Once they were down on the floor they looked about expectantly, then, after a while, Martina pulled open her visor and shouted, “Hey, anyone here?”
The Brockle stood, sensing its body’s units easing apart—the physical expression of its eagerness to get to the interrogation—but it felt frustration too. Its instructions from Earth Central had been quite clear and that AI’s watcher here would report any infraction. The Brockle was to interrogate the two meticulously and examine and record anything of relevance to Penny Royal it could find in their minds. However, it was to do this without causing them great discomfort, because they were only guilty of petty crimes. Also, they were not under sentence of death, so, when the Brockle was finished with them, it must put them on a prison single-ship and dispatch them to Par Avion.
The Brockle felt this was a kind of madness. Since interrogating Trent, it had been taking an increasing interest in the doings of Penny Royal. Long accustomed to examining the common criminals of the Polity, both human and AI, it was now aware that Penny Royal was an uncommon and dangerous offender indeed. The Brockle also understood that its interest in Penny Royal had increased because the black AI was more akin to the Brockle than to other Polity AIs. Like the Brockle, it was a swarm entity and could separate its body into a shoal form with different mind states and even minds, perpetually communicating, absorbing each other and separating. Like the Brockle, some past trauma had driven it into mental expansion and towards behaviour not acceptable in civilized AI society. However, unlike the Brockle, Penny Royal had stepped well over the line and become the AI equivalent of a human psychopath. The Brockle had merely edged a toe over the line, which was why, rather than face extermination, it had allowed Polity AIs to confine it to this prison hulk.
“Proceed to the door,” the Brockle instructed over the old intercom system, opening one of the circular doors at the back of the dock. “Walk along the tunnel and enter the second room on the right.”
“Who is this?” Martina demanded.
“I am to ask you some questions concerning your association with the black AI Penny Royal,” the Brockle replied, its skin turning silvery and splitting as the writhing worm-forms of its swarm body separated further.
“Is this a forensic AI?” asked Ikbal, definitely looking as if he wanted to be elsewhere.
“This will not take long.”
The Brockle separated completely, silver worms shooting forwards like a shoal of garfish, through the door and round into the tunnel beyond. As it travelled, it watched Ikbal shrug then trudge over to the door from the dock and Martina trail reluctantly after him. Shortly they would be in the examination room. And there, the Brockle intended to investigate the limits of its brief. Namely, how Earth Central’s watcher might interpret “great discomfort.”
8
BLITE
The other ship, the black modern Polity attack ship that had disabled a Polity dreadnought at the border before descending like a raptor on Blite’s The Rose, steadily melded itself to his ship over the ensuing days. But Penny Royal’s motives in making this happen were, as ever, unclear. The process had made all sections of their old vessel inaccessible and confined Blite and his remaining crew to the bridge. However, cam views and other data were available in the screen laminate. Blite availed himself of these between dozes in his acceleration chair. At one point, he gazed at an alcove in one of the newly constructed corridors.
“What the hell is that?” he asked.
“Funny, I thought the job of captain required at least some knowledge of space,” said Greer.
Blite glared at her. “Yes, I know it’s a space suit, but what’s it doing here?”
“Well,” Greer shrugged, “maybe it’s there because we’re out in space?”
Blite glared at her again, then enquired, “Leven?”
“It is a replica. It was made by the previous AI of the attack ship with which we’re currently merging,” the ship mind replied.
“An antique space suit,” said Blite. “So Penny Royal respects other people’s property?”
“Apparently,” Leven replied.
Blite let it go at that, quickly switching to another scene. The suit, sitting there on its own little stool in that alcove, gave him the creeps, but he couldn’t nail exactly why.
Instead, he gazed at a view into the engine room where Penny Royal, or some part of that AI, had gutted the old U-space drive. It was chaotic in there—Penny Royal’s silver tendrils snaking everywhere, black spines pecking like heron beaks at the remains of the drive, components tumbling through the air—but this was an AI at work and “multitasking” hardly got close to what it could do.
“That,” said Brond, stabbing a finger at the screen, “is part of a modern Polity U-drive.”
Blite focused on the object concerned, a large object that looked like a polished aluminium sculpture of someone’s intestines.
“So Penny Royal has taken apart our drive and the drive of the attack ship and is shifting it here,” he said. “How come we’re still in U-space if it’s been dismantled?”
“Beats me,” said Brond.
“Maybe the other ship has more than one drive,” suggested Greer.
“Maybe,” Blite agreed.
New components began to appear one after the other and the AI slotted them into place. Micro-welding arcs flashed, blooms of nanotech spread along surfaces, fixings as small as grains of sand it drove or twisted home, and weird distortions flared around odd organic-looking technology. Blite saw parts of his old drive going into the mix, along with objects he felt certain, having seen examples of it, were of the AI’s own particular technology. It assembled a great mass in the middle of the engine room, inserting supporting struts all around, covering it with sections of casing, snaking in power cables and optics to connect. After two days of watching this, and other reconstruction elsewhere, Blite felt the U-drive stutter, then it faded into a smooth hum of invisible power.
“We are accelerating,” said Leven.
“Accelerating?” asked Blite.
“It is the only word I can use,” said the Golem ship mind. “We’re breaching the time barrier and utilizing impossible amounts of energy drawn from U-space.”
“You what?”
“Time travel is possible,” Leven explained, “but even the prador were afraid of going that far.”
Blite knew time travel was possible and understood why sensible creatures avoided it. You ventured into infinite energy progressions and, in an effort to change history, you might end up destroying it. He’d once heard it described as using a fusion drive to travel from one side of a room to another. You would certainly get to the other side of that room, but there wouldn’t be much of the room left afterwards.
“Penny Royal!” he shouted. “What the fuck are you doing?”
A sound as of a coin dropped into a wine glass occurred behind him and he turned to see a black diamond materialize out of the air, half-seen distortions spreading out all around it and seeming to extend . . . forever.
“Catastrophic cascade will be avoided,” the black AI whispered, whereupon a montage of images and memories opened in Blite’s mind. He saw a grotesque creature like a walking skull, various spaceships on the move and people—some of whom he recognized—caught in snapshots of their lives. This all opened out into something larger, something he just couldn’t grasp. Then it folded and he felt like his mind might be crushed in that fold until, suddenly, it all snapped out of existence. Blite felt sick and wished he’d rem
embered this penalty for asking questions.
His head bowed and his mouth watering, he said, “I understood none of that.”
Something nibbled at his consciousness, then withdrew.
“A problem has arisen caused by a brief resurrection of Sverl’s prador instincts, and it must be corrected for,” said Penny Royal. “We will only arrive at our destination two weeks before we left our departure point and a catastrophic cascade will be avoided.”
The AI had adjusted its communication methods for this simple human, but it still wasn’t enough.
“What?” Blite said.
The diamond blinked out.
“What’s that about Sverl?” Blite blurted.
Penny Royal didn’t reply, and now the captain was glad that it hadn’t.
The three on the bridge just turned back to gaze at the screen laminate, now seeing the tendrils and pecking black swords retreating. A new U-space drive sat in their engine room, humming contentedly, doing something that terrified both the Polity’s top AIs and even the barking-mad prador.
“You know,” said Brond, “if we’re left with this new drive, we’ll never be able to go into the Polity again. The AIs will never stop hunting us down.”
“I know,” said Blite.
He now called up other images only just becoming available from cams The Rose had never possessed. He called up data and schematics on the other ship’s systems and weapons, as it increasingly, improbably, merged with his own craft. They were becoming one. New schematics were becoming available all the time. And, combining available emerging data and cam views, Blite generated an image in the laminate.
“Well that’s what we look like now,” he said.
The Rose, which some had described as looking like an iron mosque, wasn’t even visible. And what had been a modern Polity attack ship had been radically redesigned. The thing up on the screen was a fat black horseshoe with fusion drive throats inset in the rear two faces, various sensor and weapons protrusions along its double body and a small screen visible to the fore.
“So where are we?” asked Greer.
Blite stared at the image for a while, then called up the schematic and stared at that. There were twinned U-space engines, one located in each prong of the horseshoe. Narrow corridors gave access to them and to the fusion engines from the fore of the ship, where the bridge was located behind that small screen. Crew quarters were to one side of the bridge, with a cargo hold lying just beyond them, while on the other side a bay contained a shuttle of no design Blite could recognize. The Rose just wasn’t there.
“Leven, is this right?” Blite asked.
“It is right, Captain,” Leven replied, “the only parts of your ship that have not been shifted and changed are the bridge and you three. Even I have additional processing and have expanded to encompass some serious U-jump and weapons technology.”
“What the fuck has it done to my ship?” That dreaded clinking sound came from behind him once more and Blite turned his chair to gaze at the black diamond. “That wasn’t a question for you,” he added hurriedly.
“This is your ship,” said Penny Royal.
“As Brond has noted,” said Blite, “if this is our ship then we’ll forever be outcasts from the Polity unless we hand the damned thing over. And even then I think our chances of avoiding being taken apart by a forensic AI are negligible.”
Data imprinted itself on Blite’s consciousness: thousands of files on human individuals, a tree of interconnections, the image of The Rose in dock at Par Avion, a scrolling statistical analysis. Blite groaned, feeling as if he had rammed a compressed-air hose into his skull. Then this data snapped out of his mind again and he bit down on the urge to puke.
“I just got the job as translator,” interjected Leven.
“Go ahead,” Blite managed.
“Without Penny Royal we would have been caught and examined anyway,” said the ship’s mind. “If all goes to plan henceforth and we survive, we can bargain with the Polity, sell this vessel for great wealth and buy another, better vessel than The Rose. In that case, unfortunately, we will not be able to avoid forensic examination. But it will not kill us.”
“What ‘plan’ exactly?” Blite asked, as the diamond blinked out again.
“I don’t know,” Leven admitted. “Though I’m getting hints that it’s in a perpetual state of flux.”
So everything might not go to plan . . .
Blite sat there, mulling all this over. Despite his head feeling as if it had been wire-brushed inside, he couldn’t deny he felt some excitement and awe to be part of this. He’d always supposed he wanted to make his fortune and settle down to a comfortable life somewhere while others continued to expand his business and pay for his lifestyle. That would have been the most he could have achieved: maybe a couple of ships shunting cargo about. He now knew that he wanted something more. He wanted to be part of big events, and to see more of the universe than he possibly could by settling on some holiday world. Now he was involved in something big, had wealth stacked up in his Galaxy Bank account and was sitting inside the kind of ship people like him could usually only gaze upon with envy.
“Okay, Leven,” he said, “tell me what we’ve got here.”
“You’ve got a ship with twinned U-drives that can feed off U-space energy and are the fastest thing I’ve ever seen. The time-jump we’re undertaking, however, is only due to Penny Royal’s intervention and we won’t be able to do that without the black AI aboard. You have two arrays of fusion engines capable of taking this ship up to one tenth of light speed. You have grav-engines that could even land on a star, also feeding off U-space energy. You have three times the hold space of The Rose, and a shuttle.”
“What about weapons?”
“Ah, there we get into territory that goes beyond human language,” said Leven.
“Just give me the gist.”
“Semi-AI U-jump splinter missiles, multi-particulate particle cannons, cross-spectrum lasers, near-c railguns, induction effectors for seizing control of the systems of other ships . . . I think a better question to ask is what haven’t you got.”
“That’s all very nice,” interjected Brond, “but not a great deal of use when it comes to hauling cargo. And there’s one other point to consider.”
“Go on,” said Blite.
“Penny Royal, as far as I can gather, doesn’t tend to do stuff like this without some reason, no matter how obscure it might seem,” Brond continued. “That we have all this hardware, no matter how it was obtained, indicates to me that we’ll probably need it.”
Blite absorbed that and reckoned Brond was on the button, but that didn’t still the excitement or detract from the satisfaction his acquisitive side felt.
“We need a new name for this ship,” he said.
“And you already have it,” guessed Greer.
“I certainly do,” Blite agreed. “I name this ship the Black Rose.”
“Trite,” said Greer dismissively.
Weeks of shipboard time passed while Blite and his crew familiarized themselves with his ship’s systems and explored its much-altered interior. Blite often found himself drawn to that antique space suit sitting in its alcove and, when he wanted to speak to Penny Royal, who had disappeared since that last sight of it in the engine room, he found himself addressing the suit. Penny Royal never answered during that time, but that did not dispel Blite’s growing certainty that somehow it was present in the suit. Then at last Leven announced that they were about to surface from U-space. All three humans waited in the bridge for this event. The screen laminate in front of them stayed neutral grey until, as they surfaced smoothly and without noticeable effects, it transformed into glorious colour.
Blite felt his mood lift as he gazed upon a sulphur-yellow world surrounded by a multicoloured gas cloud. This interstellar cathedral with its dark green and sky-blue swirls, its vein-like threads and fleshy clouds, was the kind of sight he wanted to see. Penny Royal was taking them to places
he had only dreamed of visiting. At least, he might have dreamed of visiting this one if he only knew where he was.
“This is a place called by the prador the ‘Feeding Frenzy,’” Leven explained.
Blite felt a momentary doubt at the mention of the prador but it did not dispel his buoyant mood. However, Leven’s next words did: “It’s in the Prador Kingdom.”
Oh shit.
No, what was the matter with him? He was in one of the fastest ships known and its weaponry was capable of handling anything. Some brief venture into the outskirts of the Prador Kingdom shouldn’t be a problem.
Now Leven opened a frame down in one corner of the screen laminate, focusing close in over that yellow world. Massive ships, like long golden teardrops, were shoaling out from there on the arc-glare of fusion drives and turning, inevitably, towards them.
“And those are the ships of the King’s Guard,” Leven added.
All Blite could manage in response to that was a grunt of acknowledgement.
SPEAR
We were going down—betrayed by my ship AI and under attack—diving towards the nearby world under full fusion drive. That beam again stabbed out from the thing sitting inside the moon. The Lance stopped it with a hardfield, and another explosion rattled inside our ship—one more projector, unable to take the feedback, turning molten and flying apart. I checked schematics and saw that we could take only two more hits like that before we ran out of projectors, then we would be toast. I glanced round at Riss, who was still trying to get out of the bridge, doubtless on course to rip the heart out of our treacherous ship mind.
“Riss,” I said, “don’t open that door.”
“Little fucker,” Riss replied, now having torn out part of the wall beside the door and with her head inserted deep inside.
“Riss, if you open that door you’ll kill me.”
She withdrew her head and looked over at me. She then doubtless accessed ship’s diagnostics and damage reports, as I was doing constantly, and realized that the corridor outside the door was full of white-hot gas. She desisted.