by Neal Aher
“I told you Jacob had gone dark. And I showed you what 101 is doing to its . . . its children.”
Of course, as one of those newborn children herself, Riss was vulnerable. On detecting her in the system, the station AI had just tried to kill her.
“Don’t try that again,” the mantis warned. “You could end up dead. And worse than that, you could make the AI aware of the Jacob. Let’s go.”
The refugees, now including others made in the shape of both terran and alien creatures, along with skeletal Golem and some clad in syntheflesh and skin, were moving down the throat of a huge production line. Nearby hung the skeleton of an attack ship, while far behind, one nearing completion was drifting, folded into a boomerang shape by some massive impact. All around debris tumbled, burned, half-melted and often unidentifiable. Dismembered robots clung to some or gyrated free, spider robots swayed like kelp flowers on the ends of power and optic threads.
“Get ready to fight,” said the mantis.
Just ahead, a port opened, and out of it, moving as if doped, came maintenance robots like six-foot-long brushed aluminium cockroaches. They didn’t seem to know what they were doing, for they milled around aimlessly, once out of the port. Just making a tentative probe into the virtual world, Riss discovered that for the mite drones, the battlefield was in the informational realm rather than the physical one, and they were confusing the robots ahead.
“Hit them now,” the mantis instructed, accelerating so fast its limbs tore up glowing slivers of metal.
Despite the mantis’s speed, a drone shaped like a shark reached them first, accelerating on a chemical drive. It hit one of the roach-like maintenance robots and drove it back into two of its kin, then opened its mouth and began biting with chain-glass teeth turning on conveyors in its jaws. The jets from its steering thrusters were simultaneously stabbing out all around, like some odd kind of firework display. Disconnected heads and other body parts tumbled away. The mantis arrived next, chopping with those sharp limbs and spitting a particle beam from between its mandibles. At that moment, a wave passed through the whole station. They’d just surfaced from U-space.
“We stand a chance now,” the mantis observed.
Riss accelerated while formulating a method of attack to suit a conflict that she just wasn’t designed to fight. A missile sped past, made a sharp ninety-degree turn and went straight down into the dark entryway. A moment later, a detonation rippled the deck underneath and numerous roach robots exploded out of that same port in an actinic fountain. This had come from a big war drone lacking any form based on the organic—just a hovering cylinder bristling with weapons. Now, however, the roach robots were no longer milling and Riss recognized that this meant 101 was now aware of her and her allies. Suddenly the little drone found herself confronted by one of the roaches. The thing extruded a tool head from its own skull, two atomic shear fields opening out from it like wings. Riss immediately engaged chameleonware and went into egg insertion mode. She contained no eggs and this wasn’t the prey she was designed to destroy. However, her ovipositor was collimated diamond, capable of penetrating even prador armour.
As Riss shot forwards, underneath those shear fields, she felt something tearing into her chameleonware as the roach lowered those fields to intercept her. It wasn’t quick enough. Riss was under them in a moment, coiling and stabbing upwards, ovipositor penetrating a simple layer of industrial ceramal—three, four times, precisely hitting certain junctions between the robot’s sub-AI processors and transceiver. The roach convulsed, then, waving its limbs aimlessly, began to drift away.
Multiple flashes ensued. Riss saw that nearly all of the roach robots had been disabled or destroyed, but the big war drone was now opening up on something else. Focusing across the production line tube Riss saw more robots swarming out of numerous ports across there.
“Bugger fuck shit,” said the mantis, firing its particle beam across the tube.
Missiles began to impact over there shortly after the numerous strikes from energy weapons, but now something began to reply. Particle beams stabbed back. One a yard across splashed on a hardfield right above the cylindrical war drone. The field held for just a moment, but something glowing white-hot exploded from the side of that drone, then the drone itself glowed briefly and exploded under the direct impact of the beam. One of the mites shot out towards the middle of the tube, limbs windmilling. Then its back opened like a hatch to expose burning components inside. And a swarm of something else, rising on bright drives, began to speed towards them.
They were losing now. Room 101 had turned its full attention, and power, against them. Riss understood that maintenance and construction robots weren’t all that were available to that intelligence. This station also replaced damaged weapons and resupplied Polity forces with munitions, which it was now using.
“Oh well,” said the mantis, “it was worth a shot.”
I’m going to die, thought Riss, and I have hardly lived.
But next, on the other side of the chamber, impacts began tearing apart the gathering horde, punching through the walls and raising the blue spectres of plasma explosions. Three massive detonations ensued, CTDs by the look of them, burning mile-wide craters and spewing white-hot gas into vacuum. Green lasers cut through this gas, picking off missiles one after another, and a particle beam sliced across. A shape then abruptly cut the view short—a thousand feet of armour and weapons shaped like a giant flatworm. There was nothing stripped down about this attack ship. It hung there, hardfields flaring beyond it. On the side that Riss could see, the shuttle bay, a munitions-loading hatch and three other airlocks were opening.
“Time to leave, I think,” said the Jacob AI.
BLITE
Blite had ten days to check and recheck coordinates, to tramp around the ship in a state of irritation, to rant at that antique space suit, which always seemed to feel unoccupied now, and fruitlessly to demand answers. The black AI simply did not respond. Blite remained baffled about the choice of destination until he recalculated, factoring in their temporal debt. Then he got frightened. Again, as they approached their new destination, he found himself aboard the bridge with Brond and Greer. Brond was once again running his countdown, and Blite was perpetually telling him to shut up.
“Just twenty minutes now,” said Brond. “Sorry.”
“Leven,” said Blite, “I want a view towards Crispin Six when we surface. And I want our hardfields up at full strength then too.”
“What’s up, Captain?” asked Greer.
He felt a surge of annoyance with her. She had the same data he had, so should have worked it out by now. Then he felt annoyed with himself. He had only worked things out in the last day. Should he tell them they might be about to be fried? No, he didn’t think that was going to happen. Penny Royal had demonstrated that it could manipulate time, bend hardfields and feed off the energy of U-space. Penny Royal had demonstrated what Blite could only describe as godlike abilities. And it had kept them safe, or at least alive, so far. Still, the reasons for what was happening now were just as opaque to him as the black AI’s recent theft. What it wanted with a massive cargo ship loaded with three runcibles was beyond him.
“Penny Royal is about to drop us right before the blast front of Crispin Six, which is going supernova,” he explained.
“And without hardfields,” Leven added.
“What?”
“The AI is not allowing me access to anything but sensors,” said the Golem ship mind. “And as usual is offering no explanation.”
“A supernova?” said Brond.
“You know our coordinates,” said Blite. “They put us two weeks, or thereabouts, behind that blast front . . . except, of course, we are now two weeks in the past.”
“And that puts us right on it,” said Brond flatly.
“This ship should be able to take it,” said Greer, with just a hint of doubt.
“Well it looks as if we’re just about to find out,” said Blite, eyeing the co
unter at the bottom of the screen. “Leven, I want EM readings for as far out as you can get them, all around us. Give me a frame bottom left for that. Can you deploy probes?”
“I’m allowed to do that.”
“Two of them then, at maximum acceleration in opposite directions—tangential to the blast front.”
“Will do—preparing them now.”
“Something you’re not telling us, Captain?” Brond suggested.
“You’ll see.”
No time remained for explanations as the counter plummeted to zero. Blite rattled his fingertips against the console before him. He was excited and just a little bit scared, but his earlier doubts about the wisdom of pursuing Penny Royal, of continuing to involve himself with the AI, were gone. He realized, not for the first time, that he was putting himself in danger but felt it was worth it. What was about to happen seemed a perfect example of it: the wonder and awe utterly dwarfing the risk.
“Here we go,” said Brond.
Blite suppressed his irritation at the man’s need to run a commentary as the Black Rose slid out into the real. The grey of the screen laminate darkened and then blossomed with stars, one of them briefly circled and labelled as Crispin Six.
“Probes away,” said Leven.
Crispin Six looked perfectly normal just for a minute, then it steadily began to grow brighter as the light of its destruction started to reach them. It grew incredibly bright, its light glaring into the bridge. It also began to expand, growing as large and as bright as the sun seen from Earth, then growing duller as the screen automatically limited its emission to something that wouldn’t burn out their retinas. But it continued to grow.
Blite feverishly studied the data down in that left-hand frame, as the nova blast filled the entire screen with its glare. All sorts of nasty radiation should be reaching them now, shortly followed by the particulate storm. Only it wasn’t, and the glare from the screen abruptly turned a dark blood red. The lights in the bridge came back up to compensate.
“You tuned that down a bit too much, Leven,” said Brond.
“No I didn’t.”
“What are the probes giving us?” Blite asked.
“Same as ship’s sensors at the moment—and they’re now eight hundred miles out too,” Leven replied.
“What the fuck is going on?” asked Greer.
“Entropy,” said Blite.
“Uh?”
“The probes just hit the blast front,” said Leven. “Sending readings to the frame.”
Blite now studied the new numbers. The probes had simultaneously entered areas of space where the radiation would have turned a human being into a whiff of vapour in a microsecond. He doubted that his original ship could have survived that, but perhaps this reconfigured ship was different. The probes were doing okay, so they must have been reconfigured in turn.
“Data disrupting,” said Leven. “I’m losing the probes.”
Ah . . .
“Perhaps time for an explanation?” suggested Brond. “Before we die?”
“Okay,” said Blite, “from that time jump, we were carrying entropy. Negative energy, part of the heat-death of the universe—call it what you will. Penny Royal managed to keep it under control while it was chatting with the king of the prador (and then incidentally stealing a cargo hauler laden with runcibles). But now it needs to dump it.”
“With you so far,” said Greer. Both she and Brond had probably indulged in the same VR games as Blite in their youth.
“Penny Royal has placed us in the path of a supernova blast front, directly between that front and a planetary system called Rebus. This has two living worlds, and on one is a human colony. The entropy dump is basically negating the blast here, sucking the energy out of it and extinguishing it.”
The screen was still blood red, and now the data from the probes cut out. How long would they be here, Blite wondered? How long until all that negative energy they were carrying was gone? And would it be enough to wholly negate the blast here? He suspected it would be. Penny Royal wasn’t known for its lack of planning.
“So let me get this straight,” said Brond. “Penny Royal jumped back in time to have a chat with the king of the prador, then used the entropy incurred to blot out a supernova blast and incidentally prevent a human colony being fried?”
“That’s it in essence,” Blite replied.
“Fuck a duck,” said Greer.
Blite leaned back and continued staring at the screen. Here was that awe and that wonder, and how nice to know that Penny Royal was so altruistic. However, the Polity had planned to evacuate this world anyway, which would have worked if the AI hadn’t stolen the runcible gates the Polity had intended for that purpose. It seemed the AI was still cleaning up its own messes, though this time even as it made them. Its motives remained as cloudy as ever.
TRENT
“We should all get out of here, now—that is, unless you want to be cored and thralled,” Trent urged.
“We’re aboard a prador ship. Where are we going to go?” whined one of the three sitting on the other side of the cage. She was a mousy diminutive woman and she looked terrified. He could understand her fear, but could not understand the lack of a response from the two men. One of them looked like the kind of dodgy weasel Trent had been dealing with all his life. The other, the woman’s husband, was the sort of shady businessman found in Carapace City. Both seemed like they would perfectly understand the situation, yet they were just staying put.
“Didn’t you just hear what we were saying?” Trent waved a hand towards the prostrate Cole. “We’re at the mercy of the shell people, just waiting to be cored then enslaved. You know what your future is.”
“Not mine,” said the businessman, who was sweating heavily. “Anyway, I believe none of this. Taiken has always been square and reasonable in his dealings. Even if he has gone over the edge, the others won’t let him carry on.”
The guy was a coward, pretending he failed to understand. Trent focused on the weasel. “What about you?”
The man gestured to the door. “Do go ahead—I’ll join you shortly.”
Trent assessed him in a moment. He would allow Trent to open up the cage but he’d then run, hide, try to survive. Maybe he would manage to do so. Did Trent have any right to force the issue?
“I’m going after Taiken,” said Trent. “He’s the key, because without him controlling them, the shell people will return to sanity.”
Wouldn’t they?
Trent turned and headed over to the cage door, turning on the small shear. It was fashioned like a normal penknife, with a chain-glass blade that folded out. When turned on, it produced a molecular debonding field around its edge. He studied the cage lock for a moment. It was a simple mechanical kind with a bar engaging in a hole in its frame, the gap between door and frame sufficient. Inserting the blade, he pushed it down. The thing produced a high-pitched buzzing and just sat on the bar while the handle grew hot, then all at once it started going through, steel dust dropping from the cut. It then made a cracking sound and stopped. He’d burned it out.
“So we’re not going anywhere,” said the catadapt.
Trent tried to pull the knife out, but it was stuck. He stepped back then, using all his heavy-worlder strength, he drove his boot against the door. He lashed out once, twice and then it sprang open.
“Yes we are,” he said, stooping to pick up the knife as he stepped through. He tried it again but the thing was dead. Still, the blade was chain-glass and very sharp, so he kept it. What now? Operating as he always had before, he would now try to obtain a more effective weapon. Next, he would sneak up on Taiken and simply put a burst of pulse-fire through his head. Even if his sensibilities towards violence had changed, he was clean out of other ideas.
“We need weapons,” he said. “Any thoughts?”
“The shell people are armed.” The woman shrugged.
Trent gazed at the vessel full of leeches, then beyond it to a room he hadn’t been able t
o see from the cage. Here sat a surgical chair with a pedestal autodoc poised beside it. Other equipment included a small rack, holding six ready-prepared thralling units. He must set this firm in his mind—it was what would happen to them if they just did nothing. Returning to the room containing the cage, he saw the weasel heading through the door into the corridor beyond; Trent followed. The catadapt woman quickly caught up with him, now carrying something she’d picked up in the surgery. It was the autodoc’s jointed spare limb and looked heavy enough to serve as a club.
“Shit,” said the weasel.
He was out in the corridor ahead of them as one of the shellmen came round the far corner. This individual walked on four prador legs, but lacked the wide prador carapace. His torso, jutting up from the fore of a short-ribbed body, possessed one human arm, one claw and a perfectly normal head. The man had yet to wipe out his humanity by having mandibles attached to his face. But he still looked like some weird insect centaur. He reacted immediately, drawing a pepper-pot stunner and triggering it. The cloud of paralytic beads hit the weasel full in the face, some outliers striking Trent and the catadapt woman. Trent felt his cheek grow numb and saw her grabbing at her arm. The weasel went over like a falling log while the shellman ran forwards, correcting his aim for another shot.
Trent was momentarily at a loss, but then his training, conditioning and experience took over. The defunct shear knife was a weighty thing with its super-dense power supply in the handle, and the chain-glass blade was not only practically unbreakable but sharp enough to cut through steel—even without its debonding field. He had a split second to weigh it, judge the distance and throw, but no time at all to think of consequences. The knife whipped through the air with all his heavy-worlder strength behind it and went blade-first straight into the shellman’s left eye. The man jerked back, his shot going up into the ceiling. His legs lost coordination and he collapsed on them, his torso still upright and the stunner skittering out of his grip. Reaching up with his human hand, he touched the nub of the handle protruding from his eye socket, his expression puzzled. Then with a sigh he slowly bowed over, scraping with his claw as if trying to clear something out of the way, until his forehead finally came to rest against the floor.
