by Neal Asher
No one noticed the additional crate on the sled and, with luck, no one would notice certain other discrepancies until long after the High Castle had departed.
Riss
The tube was too narrow for a human being, but then they never had any real reason to be here. The interior was dotted with an infestation of beetlebots like cockroaches in a drain pipe. Some of them were somnolent—programmed sequences having wound down and no controlling AI to chivvy them back into motion—some of them had simply broken down, while others were still carrying out the same chores they had been performing for over a century.
Riss watched one of them limp over to the head of the feed pipe to a flash furnace, flip the hatch open and peer inside, see that the pipe was packed to the top with compacted dust balls and other waste, then move on to the next one. They all did this because none of them was programmed to accept that some of the furnaces were off, and that the waste they had deposited in the pipes was going nowhere. Finally it reached the pipe leading to the one remaining functional furnace—one lying in the realm of a remaining functional AI—and did what it was programmed to do. It turned, opened its ersatz wing cases and ejected the contents of its crap-collecting gut into the pipe. This block of waste slid smoothly down the frictionless shark-slime interior, propelled by a mechano-electrical form of the cilia found on many bacteria. It had a long way to go—at least four miles before it reached the furnace. There it would be zapped into its component atoms, sieves and nanofibre sorters collecting every element of use which, in essence, was all of them. Every now and again the furnace would shit a brick, maybe of copper, chromium or iron. It would pipe away gases to where required, suck up dusts of buckyballs and carbon nanotubes and propel them to another destination. It was all a very efficient process and the furnace had continued this onerous task for over a century too.
Once the beetlebot had finished its business, Riss painfully squirmed over, her blackened and partially burnt-out body moving with all the alacrity of a broken arm. Her internal systems and meta-materials had yet to heal the damage she had sustained from the combined EM pulse and viral attack, the details of which remained vague, that had scrambled her system down to the picoscopic level.
Reaching the pipe the beetle had used she flipped over the hatch and peered down into the interior. It should be good enough—even the most stubborn organics shouldn’t stick. She brought her rear end round, hooked it up over the top of the pipe and lowered her ovipositor down into it. The eggs should go first, of course, because if she squirted the enzyme acid down there it might damage the interior of the pipe, and form areas where the eggs might stick. This mustn’t happen—the Earth Central Security tactical AI whose instructions she was following wanted all of them down in that furnace—though why wasn’t entirely clear to her.
Riss squeezed and emptied herself of the weapon she had been manufactured to use. Out of her fell the eggs that could hatch into a parasite that would eat a prador from the inside out. Then breed in there and multiply, spread and wipe out whole families of prador.
There was no release as they went—none of the orgasmic pleasure she had felt when injecting prador. Riss supposed that a sick human felt like this when ridding himself of diarrhoea—just a momentary relief from bodily upset. Then she concentrated on internally selecting and loading the enzyme acid to her ovaries and ejecting that down the pipe. Nothing remained inside her now because the internal workings of her system were even more efficient and frictionless than the pipe leading to that distant furnace. Nevertheless, Riss opened her body, painfully looped round and used the small manipulators below her hood to remove the canisters that had held those weapons. She sent them down the pipe after their contents.
Next she contemplated following them herself, but the tactical AI would not let her go. In her mind again flashed up the map of the station indicating the positions of all the surviving renegade AIs, their territories both physical and virtual. Now on that map another location had been highlighted. She moved along the pipe and set out on the slow, painful journey to the place indicated, squirming through further maintenance-bot ducts, fluid pipes, the insulation in walls, through weird structures like metal sculptures of massed fungi, or the hives of alien creatures. Slowly she made her way across a station seemingly riddled with a technological cancer. As she went she carefully avoided any contact with the station’s denizens, for she knew she was in no fit state to handle them.
Four hours later, some of the dead parts of her body revived and some of her internal nano-systems having rebuilt themselves, she slithered out of a port at the destination, and realized she vaguely recognized the place. Hadn’t she been here before?
Cannibalize, reconstitute, the tactical AI instructed her.
Inside this familiar tubular autofactory, Riss squirmed over to one wall and there gazed at a skinless version of herself stuck in place by transparent epoxy. It was dead, its sensor eye grey and not a flicker of power inside. She scanned it deeper, identifying usable components, then plugged in one of her manipulators to feed in power. The skinless parasite facsimile writhed, cracked the epoxy and broke free, and Riss brought it down to the floor. There she scanned again, looking for further activation, but this snake drone’s crystal was doing nothing. It was in fact so full of micro-fractures a sharp tap would turn it to dust. Riss accessed sub-systems below the level of that crystal and through them began taking the thing apart. First she began with what was easy, taking out small spherical nano-packages, opening her own body to eject her own packages, and inserting the new unused ones in their place. Only when these activated and turned to remaining nano-machines from her original packages, to either scrap or reprogram them, did she realize just how badly she had been damaged.
As the new machines set to work she immediately began to feel much more capable and supple, especially when some of the meta-materials of her body began functioning as they should. Next, she stripped out some larger components: vertebrae and rib bones of memory metal to replace those in herself that had been suffering from amnesia; skeins of electromuscle to quickly replace muscle inside her that her internal systems could have repaired, but only over a lengthy period. She worked on her maglev and series of small grav-engines, stripping out the whole wrecked network and replacing it. Then she took a new U-space communicator and even swapped out her impossibly cracked ovipositor. Some damaged memstorage standing separate from her own crystal went next. Her own crystal however, which had developed a few cracks, she could do nothing about. It would crack no further what with binding liquid sapphire injected into the shear planes, but these were still like atomic-thin plates of scar tissue through her brain.
By the time she had finished, very little remained of the drone she had cannibalized, and she had been right—with one inadvertent tap, its crystal had turned it to dust. Now Riss was ready, her body gleaming, translucent, black areas fading like healing bruises. Immediately the tactical AI sent her another location on the station map—just on the other side of this autofactory. Leaving much of her old self behind, Riss slithered through, a red locating dot springing up in her vision and leading her to the edge of a carousel store.
“Gel dot C-density octonitrocubane, with micro detonators,” the tactical AI instructed her, its communications coming through much clearer now.
Riss released the manual lock on the carousel and turned it, pondering the choice of offensive weapon. The gel dot explosive was of an ancient recipe but perfect for any action here since octonitrocubane could explode in vacuum, however there were more powerful explosives made so perhaps it was the only one that was available. She found just one canister of the stuff and stared at it for a long time, puzzled by her reluctance to put the canister inside herself.
“The delay is unacceptable,” said the tac-AI.
Riss reluctantly opened the requisite portion of her body, took the canister up in her small manipulators and hooped over to insert it.
&
nbsp; “Now, Target One,” said the tac-AI, highlighting Riss’s next destination on her internal map. Riss set out, ready to do her duty and kill a renegade AI, but not eager to do it.
Trent
Hanging in vacuum on the periphery of a steel jungle, Trent felt ill at ease. His space suit uncomfortable on his big heavy-worlder body, his helmet rubbing against his—as others had described it—decidedly pointed head and black bristly Mohican. He gazed with white-irised eyes back towards where a small portion of the station had remained relatively normal, and upon all the activity there. The prador weren’t stopping. They’d started in the old autofactory, where the snake drone Riss had killed Sverl, and where they were encapsulating Sverl’s ceramal skeleton and vacuum-dried organic remains under a polymer dome. Next they had cleaned up the detritus in there—the Gatling slugs, the chunks of armour from the weapons Penny Royal had chopped into pieces—and after that had begun stripping out other damaged equipment and repairing the holes in the walls made by the King’s Guard. Trent had first thought it was as if they couldn’t admit that their father was dead and were repairing the defences around him, but now he reckoned that the gorgeous catadapt woman, Sepia, had it right: they were building a mausoleum.
“I wish Spear was coming with us,” said Cole, the mind-tech.
Spear didn’t look much: average height, the well-defined physique of a swimmer—nothing extra—skin tone pale Asiatic, Roman nose below pale green eyes and above a mouth with a slight twist, brown hair . . . But he was effective—they’d seen him kill one of the hostile robots here almost without getting out of breath—but Spear wasn’t being very communicative. He’d come back from the erstwhile abode of the Room 101 AI, where he’d followed Penny Royal, with an air of murderous rage that seemed to permeate out of his space suit and into the surrounding vacuum. Something had seriously pissed him off and Trent, who had been burdened with empathy but still considered himself no coward, had decided to just back off. He guessed that confirmed Spear as a force to be respected.
“I wish one of them was coming with us,” said Sepia, gesturing towards where the first-child Bsorol was operating a micro-deposition welder to repair a beam severed by particle cannon fire.
Trent glanced at her. He thought it more likely that it was Spear’s company she wanted, but his reaction even to her when he returned had been cold and dismissive.
“We should be okay,” said Trent, shouldering his portable particle cannon. “We don’t have anything they want.” Even as he said the words he wondered if he was right.
“Why are they hostile?” asked Cole. “I never got that.”
Trent looked at the man. Cole was a mind-tech and had some complicated augmentations, but apparently they did him no good beyond his particular speciality. Trent, who had lost his aug quite some time ago now, had been using the Lance’s computing capacity to try and gain some understanding of what had happened here.
“Evolution, or perhaps devolution,” he replied. “As far as I’ve been able to gather, many of the AIs here aren’t any more sentient than wild animals. Like wild animals they react with hostility to potential danger and tend to simply take what they want. I suspect that they’re like that because when Room 101 was hunting them, intelligence made them a target, so they gave it up.” He paused. “Bit like the Atheter, in a way.”
“Turning into a philosopher now?” asked Sepia.
Trent turned to her. “Where do we head now?”
She gestured into the metal jungle lying ahead. “Thirty miles that way.”
Trent nodded and propelled himself from the nearest beam, adjusted his course with his wrist impeller and kept a sharp eye out for any movement in their surroundings.
“Are you sure about this?” asked Sepia as they travelled.
Trent thought about that question yet again, and once more found himself up against intractable problems with things that at one time had never concerned him, like doing what was right. Like morality.
“Spear told me that if he found a man dying he would save his life,” he said. “If it then turned out that the man had been dying because he’d tried to kill himself, and if he tried to kill himself again, Spear would not intervene.”
“Seems logical enough.”
“Can’t you see how that applies to the shell people?”
“Perhaps,” she conceded. She decided to play devil’s advocate, “But if we are to believe Cole, they have a curable malady . . .”
“All mental problems have a cure,” interjected Cole.
“And how would you style their problem?” she asked.
After a long pause Cole replied, “Religion.”
Trent mulled that over for a moment. He wasn’t sure it was true. The shell people did regard the prador with something close to religious awe and had behaved like members of a brainwashed cult. But he felt there was more to it than that.
“They knew, or at least most of them knew, that what they were doing to themselves was killing them,” he said, going back to his original thread. “We, or rather Spear and Riss, saved their lives. What’s to stop them doing the same thing to themselves again, when we wake them up?”
“Why is it your responsibility?”
I don’t know . . .
“Because I’m making it mine,” said Trent firmly.
“But surely it would be better just to leave them in their caskets and, when you can, hand them over to the Polity?”
Trent glanced at her, wondering if she was deliberately needling him because surely she knew how he felt about Reece—the wife of Taiken, the now dead leader of the shell people. If he got the chance to hand those caskets over to the Polity he would probably never see her again. So was his apparent altruism just a veneer over plain selfishness? He tried not to inspect his thoughts on that too closely.
Beyond the pill-shaped structure that contained the shattered remains of the Room 101 AI, they found themselves in what seemed to be a killing ground. Here robots were tangled in metallic lianas, and splays of ribbed tentacles sprouted from the tops of columns like nightmare technological tubeworms. Nothing was moving, however, and Trent knew that their greatest danger lay beyond here, where functional AIs still guided the robot fauna of the station. After this, the tree-branch growths of station structure began to thin out and they eventually came to a gulf, holding themselves in place on attenuated branches. Across from them lay a wall, disappearing into murk in every direction. Trent could see exposed rooms, chambers, factory complexes and tunnels and was reminded of the wreckage he had seen when separatists had taken out part of the Coloron arcology with a nuke.
“Give me a minute,” said Sepia, schematics glowing in the laminate of her visor and concealing her face. She turned her head slowly from side to side, nodded, then indicated. “Over there—the mouth of that tunnel sitting below that big chemical tank.”
It took Trent a moment to pick it out in the wreckage, but when he was about to send himself sailing across, Sepia caught hold of his shoulder.
“Wait.” She pointed.
There was movement across one section of the wall. Trent stared at this for a second then ramped up his visor’s magnification to pull into view a long line of robots based on the kind used for mid-scale maintenance tasks in a ship’s engine section. These were bigger and clunkier, with heavy limbs similar to those of a water scorpion and seemingly designed more for dismemberment than repair.
“I wonder where they’re off to,” Cole said.
Neither Trent nor Sepia had an answer.
When the line of robots had moved sufficiently far from the tunnel entrance, Trent pushed himself away from his branch and used his wrist impeller to give himself more momentum. Best to keep moving and not think too deeply about his aims. Just concentrate on the mission and not its consequences or dubious morality—he’d had a lifetime of experience doing that.
“What are
the chances of it still being pressurized?” asked Cole.
Doubtful, Trent thought.
“There’s power there. Penny Royal only destroyed power sources and feeds directly to the hull weapons.” Sepia paused. “There’s a controlling AI too. At least it seems like an AI . . .”
Trent came down in the mouth of the tunnel first, then caught Sepia as she landed beside him.
“From here on we walk on gecko,” he said. “You can’t react quickly enough if you’re free-falling through here.”
“I was going to walk,” she said, hurt.
“Yeah, okay.” Trent released her.
The three of them trudged on down the tunnel, around a curve and straight into potential trouble. One of the robots they had seen earlier was facing down the tunnel, while opposing it was a machine resembling the one Spear had killed.
They were both utterly still at first, but then launched into motion and slammed together, silent in the vacuum, their impact felt only through the deck. Trent surmised that they had been facing off, looking for an advantage, and that the appearance of the humans on the scene had tipped things in favour of one of them. The maintenance-bot closed its water scorpion arms around the other, which in turn probed it with steely tentacles, while with metronomic regularity stabbing with a limb that ended in a flat chisel. Tearing up floor metal, they slammed into one wall, their limbs blurring as they shed components, creating a steadily growing bee-swarm of the things about them. Then one of those water scorpion limbs tumbled free, and the other robot was turning the scorpion like a squid feeding on a crab. As the two drifted, it tore up a plate of armour, inserted a glassy tube inside. Then both robots froze. This lasted just a moment before they separated. The water scorpion rolled through vacuum, remaining limbs kicking weakly, the victor now turned towards Trent and his companions. It studied them for a long moment.
