by Neal Asher
No choice now—orders cannot be disobeyed. This battle must be taken to its conclusion. The newly named AI Penny Royal, within the sarcophagus-like body of the also newly named destroyer the Puling Child, rapidly assesses its own resources and notes that some changes have been made. The nano- and microbots aboard were strictly limited in their areas of maintenance, but have now been subtly reprogrammed. The limitation to their procreation has been removed and they have been given access to materials with which to build more of their kind. The larger robots are being changed too, by those same microbots and nanobots which are building their larger brethren more extensive tool arrays. These tasks are being organized by a part of Penny Royal that has mentally splintered away. It is building extra buckarbon memstorage within those robots, for they have been penetrated and are being used by the dark child to hide its more rebellious thoughts.
“What do you do?” Penny Royal asks.
“We made us not removable from ship body,” the darkness replies, and Penny Royal cannot dispute it; finds in itself acceptance.
The three human crewmembers, who blacked out during initial manoeuvres, recover quickly thanks to the cocktail of drugs auto-injected by their suits. The two men take control of the weapons systems and begin target selection even as Vorpal Dagger’s big railguns begin firing. The men also input attack patterns, based on defence of the Dagger. Penny Royal accepts their input, surprised to find it needs to make only minor corrections. The woman, it notes, is frowning at performance data coming directly from its own mind. She makes an adjustment and Penny Royal loses some of its fear, feels a moment of reckless bravura. She frowns again, adjusts again, and the fear comes back. The AI wonders if creatures who are slaves to emotion are the best judges of it, then wonders if that thought came completely from itself.
It next studies the distant prador vessel sitting half a lightminute away. Like all the prador capital ships here, it is the shape of its father-captain’s carapace—a pear squashed vertically—but there the resemblance ends. The thing’s armour is brassy, dented and burned, and it bristles with weapons. As it makes its retreat from the main battleground to the accretion disc of the black hole, Layden’s Sink, hundreds of war drones and armoured children surround it. This prador dreadnought is a “soft” target, chosen for this test of ships that feel emotions and with a weapon deployment that can only work once. But the definition of “soft” in this case means it will take less than the average sacrifice of three Polity dreadnoughts and thirty smaller ships to destroy it.
Closer now and their first fusillades of railgun missiles reach the enemy. Prador war drones and armoured children fly apart in stretched-out explosions, but the hits on the ship itself are bright flashes that dent but do not penetrate its armour. This is their advantage: while the Polity concentrated on travel by runcible, its shipbuilding metallurgy did not become so advanced. The prador, travelling by ship only and being perpetually warlike, have developed advanced armour with an exotic matter component, and it can take a great deal of punishment. Even at that moment Polity AIs are trying to copy the formula, but still failing.
Penny Royal notes that the first targets the humans have selected are two prador war drones and one of the armoured children, with secondary targets lying beyond these. Its weapons spew ceramal-plated slugs and the particle cannon lances out, and this feels like violation. The momentary satisfaction it feels as one drone and the child fragment and burn, followed by self-disgust and a hint of guilt, are just confusing. Secondary targets shift out of the path of its fusillade straight into the path of that of a fellow. Wreckage tumbles past, glowing and sparking; combined collision and anti-personnel lasers pick off debris on course to impact. Glimpse of a claw snapping at vacuum. Blast wave flinging the destroyer off course. Massive chatter as a Polity dreadnought takes a full fusillade from the prador dreadnought; holes punched through and fires burning within, but an expected loss.
“Not as damaged as they thought,” one of the men notes, sweat beading on his forehead.
The two remaining Polity dreadnoughts divert, down to the accretion disc, towards its centre, towards the black hole. The dreadnought Stonewater is covering Vorpal Dagger. Stonewater shudders under numerous impacts, smaller Polity ships all around explode, fragment, or are sheared in two. The Puling Child takes another minor glancing blow and knows that it is just a statistic, that its survival is just pure chance. Another function of feeling arises on the surface of its mind: survivor guilt. One of the men is swearing in a dull leaden tone. The woman just looks white and sick and is no longer studying her screens, which is perhaps good, since the changes Penny Royal’s dark child is still making cannot fail to show up in some way.
A particle beam stabs out, wide as Puling Child’s hull, and nails Stonewater, carves across its body, wreckage and molten metal spewing out into space. The prador dreadnought is on the move now, its father-captain thinking the attack upon it desperate and ill-timed, and that he can finish off the rest of the now fleeing attack force. Prador drones and children swarm after it, pursuing Vorpal Dagger and the remainder of the force. The destruction doesn’t stop: many of Penny Royal’s fellows are now wreckage, trapped on the same course as itself. The AI wonders if they had changed in similar ways to itself, or if their particular iterations were much closer to the planned result.
“Deployment of weapon in ten,” the Vorpal Dagger’s AI announces, its communication issuing as human speech for the benefit of the destroyer’s crew.
The course of the pursuing prador is just so, the brassy dreadnought accelerating massively. Vorpal Dagger and all those still capable in the Polity force veer away from the black hole as a device the size and shape of a monorail carriage departs the Dagger’s shuttle bay. Before the prador can alter their course in pursuit, the device detonates. It disappears in three consecutive flashes. A microsecond later the Puling Child briefly loses its mind—Penny Royal—who then comes back online to receive a tsunami of error reports.
Over eighty per cent of its systems are out, for the EMR device disables friend as well as foe. Its own mind is down to below fifty per cent of function. It has no control over its thrusters or engine, its U-space drive is down, and all coms are out. It analyses rapidly.
That eighty per cent systems failure is recoverable within seventy-two hours for the hardened components in it, and the maintenance robots can make repairs and reboots. But more importantly, the human crew is unaffected. Polity tactical AIs calculate that prador systems can be recovered by prador crews in half the time. But the prador dreadnought, drones and armoured children do not have that much time.
In twenty hours Penny Royal regains some coms and enough image data through its cams to patch together a picture of events. Inside it sees the humans busy at work, replacing damaged components, rebooting systems and robots, and showing some surprise at the sheer quantity of nano- and microbots swarming through the ship. Outside, the remainder of the Polity force is still powerless, but the prador are powerless too. However, the Polity ships—one dreadnought, three destroyers and five attack ships along with a scattering of Polity war drones—are falling in a long curve through the accretion disc around the black hole and will regain engine power to get away with plenty of time to spare before it can get a grip on them. The prador, though, are going straight down. They are mere hours away from the point where restoring their engines will make no difference.
Penny Royal watches and, while doing so, realizes that various parts of itself are muttering to others. Running self-diagnostics, it discovers a network of fine cracks in its crystal, extending from a single deep fault—an intriguingly even pattern which, without its containing case, would fragment the substance of its mind into numerous dagger-shaped pieces.
The prador dreadnought falls, beginning to glow as it enters the denser hot gases of the ambient disc, a vapour trail issuing behind it. At the last its fusion engine ignites and Penny Royal fights both the guilt it f
eels at being a part of this carnage, and the fear. Drones and armoured children continue to fall, swept in and round, torn by tidal forces and disappearing as burning lines in the disc—swirling raspberry stains behind in creamy gas. For an hour it seems the big ship will make it, but then its drive stutters and it begins to fall back. The black hole finally sucks it down and, as it hits the high density region and disappears, it emits an X-ray flash. Not even prador exotic metal armour can resist the forces now being applied.
“We head in-system now—to Panarchia,” Vorpal Dagger announces, and sends tactical data.
The U-space jump is a short one but, knowing what it is going into, Penny Royal’s mind is a mass of contradictions. It knows what it is being ordered into, but it must protect its crew. The logical thing to do is run, but it cannot. It feels survivor guilt, but an impulse to reckless abandon conflicts with its need to protect itself and its crew. It can feel pain, still feels pain from the damage it received, and it is not going away. It is confused, knows the woman should be dealing with this . . . emotional imbalance, but she has abandoned her instruments to throw up in the ship’s toilet and is now placing some sort of drug patch on her arm. And, because of this unbalanced inner conflict, Penny Royal can feel the darker part of itself growing, becoming more pervasive.
It was bad enough out by Layden’s Sink and barely a victory, but it is worse here close to this world named Panarchia. Wreckage is strewn across space, ships being obliterated again and again. The Polity fleet has taken heavy losses and if it remains here it will be lost in its entirety. Also, the eight thousand human troops down on that Earth-like world cannot be saved. The AI of the Vorpal Dagger immediately relays new orders from Fleet Command here: this is over; this must be accepted as a defeat. It is time to start withdrawing the most valuable assets and depriving the prador of any gains other than mere territory.
However, Penny Royal suddenly receives special orders. It seems as though it is, amazingly, the least damaged destroyer in the fleet. In an instant it perfectly understands its position and purpose in the retreat and knows, with utter certainty, that though its ship body the Puling Child might survive this, its mind cannot.
2
The Brockle
The hold of the High Castle was pressurized, though the gas inside wasn’t breathable. The Brockle scanned the neatly stacked cargo all around it. A few containers held weaponry: some rather exotic railgun missiles, some ultra-thermite decontamination explosives, and one crate containing some ultra-modern proton rifles. There were some crates of items for the human personnel, of little interest. The rest of the packages contained a cornucopia of scientific instruments—all cutting-edge and all doubtless intended for the examination of the remains of this “renegade prador.”
Before it began loosening its structure, the Brockle reached out to analyse the sensors in this hold. It had to remember that though this ship had its science section it was mainly a state-of-the-art warship, and that its controlling AI would be paying a lot more attention to its interior than the Par Avion AI paid to the interior of the outlink space station it controlled. It soon found that the hold was riddled with sensors capable of being used to scan things down to the nanoscopic level. However, right now they were just looking for movement, energy spikes and molecules that might indicate chemical explosives, and their only connection to the ship’s AI was in sending a constant “everything okay” signal. The Brockle wanted them to keep on doing that, but was also aware that such sensors would have their own security hardware and software. The Polity had learned to its cost, when a biophysicist called Skellor had got his hands on some Jain technology, that such things should not be neglected. The Brockle selected just one sensor and began examining it meticulously, confident that there would be some way of subverting the thing.
But the sensor had already detected the Brockle’s terahertz scan and was sending an alert. The ship’s AI knew that there was something in its hold scanning its sensors. It would know that there was supposedly nothing in the hold capable of such scanning. It would then surmise that either some sort of sophisticated weapon had been smuggled aboard, or that it had an unexpected guest. Even now those sensors were rising out of their semi-somnolent state as the ship AI demanded more data from them.
The Brockle had to act fast.
It was completely surrounded by crates but there was a half-inch gap beside one of them. Flattening out one of its units, it slid that into the gap and from its end extruded a cilia-propelled micro-tube. Mapping out straight edges to its target, it routed the tube along the corners of crates, along a convoluted course through the container of personal effects, along the frame holding the railgun missiles and straight into the keypad of one of the ultra-thermite explosives. Tracking a wire, it worked down inside the explosive and, ignoring the safety detonator, penetrated the energy-dense material of the explosive itself. Still scanning elsewhere, it detected the gas port that had filled this hold with argon, meanwhile rapidly shifting its internal structure and coagulating a diamond spear. Next, through the micro-tube it injected a mix of pure oxygen and carbon nanospheres, and a brief static discharge.
The explosive detonated as the Brockle stabbed up through the crates above it and flung itself for the gas port, travelling fast enough to create a sonic crack, shedding the diamond at the last and loosening its structure to pass through the grating as the hold filled with a chemical fire capable of melting ceramic. A fraction of a second later another explosive blew, then the others in a cascade. The blast pressure in the hold forced the Brockle along the pipe, frying two of its rear units even as it tried to layer them with artificial asbestos and cooling webs. It knew it could not survive long unless the ship AI reacted as expected. It did: it blew the hold doors into vacuum, spewing its contents along with the damaging fire out into space.
The Brockle hung on, with hooks shoved into the metalwork all around it as the blast front reversed and the pressure of the argon ahead tried to force it out into the evacuated hold. It opened a hole through itself to let the gas through, which incidentally cooled it down some, then it accelerated along the pipe. Just before reaching the solid-storage argon canister, it sliced through the pipe it was travelling down and exploded out, simply pulse-frying any sensors in its vicinity. Entering a pipe lined with optics—large enough for some maintenance robots—it expanded, processing power expanding too. It had not wanted to act so quickly and so drastically, yet what had happened was not a setback but an acceleration of its plan.
Locating itself on a stolen schematic of this ship, it oozed along to where it needed to be and bored a hole through the side of the optics pipe, then flowed straight through this into an air duct. Now it could really move. Separating into all its units, each propelled by peristaltic body ripples and maglev, it shoaled along the square-section duct at high speed, its destination seemingly etched into its distributed mind. To its left were the Sparkind quarters, to its right a series of laboratories and a small autofactory for ship’s components. Up ahead and to the left was the captain’s bridge, while ahead and down to the left lay the true control centre of the ship: an armoured sphere containing the High Castle AI.
Via further ducts, then along pipes and through the tiniest gaps, the Brockle closed in on the armoured sphere. It knew that its method of locomotion was much the same as that of Thorvald Spear’s companion, the assassin drone Riss; of course it was—the Brockle had loaded much data and acquired many physical abilities by copying the methods of assassin drones. However, there was a difference: while Riss was a singular drone, the Brockle was an entity distributed both mentally and physically. Approaching the armoured sphere, it separated further, dispatching its units off on different routes to increase its chances of reaching its target. The armour itself wasn’t a problem since it was there to protect the AI from damage during a space battle and it was necessarily full of useful openings so the AI could remain in contact with what was nominally its body. Howe
ver, there were defences against this kind of incursion about those openings.
The paths of two of the Brockle’s units were blocked as the AI belatedly realized what was happening and closed armoured shutters across air vents. Another was chopped in half when an armoured shutter sheared through optics as it was entering the sphere—but still, the half that had managed to enter had not been completely disabled. The bulk of the Brockle dropped out of an air vent and into a narrow corridor leading to a door into the sphere—the way humans entered. The door was closed, of course, but, having been constructed to keep out fire, blast waves or hostile troops, it wasn’t quite the barrier it appeared.
The Brockle stuck itself all around the door rim and injected micro-tubes through the one-millimetre gap until they touched the seal. Snipping a piece of this, it sucked it inside and analysed it. Nothing special: diatomic acid would do. It injected the acid and the seal boiled and bubbled away, the Brockle opening gaps through itself to allow vapour and liquefied seal to escape. Then it oozed through the gap. For a few seconds much of its processing went down as it squeezed itself micro-metrically thin—in these moments it was reduced to the intelligence of a human being—but as it entered the sphere and expanded physically, its intelligence relaxed back to its customary brilliance.
Ahead lay the High Castle AI, its shape and the way it was linked into the ship a little different from usual. Instead of being lodged in crystal, in a ceramal skeletal case and clamped between the valve-end interlinks—a way that enabled quick disconnection and ejection from its ship should it be on the point of being destroyed—this AI sat in the centre of a geodesic sphere with points of contact stabbed in all round to support it at the centre. It was the usual type of AI crystal, but one heavily laden with quantum processing and merely the size of a tennis ball. The Brockle surmised that it must have more investment in its ship than other AIs, until realizing that in an emergency the whole sphere could be hurled by a grav-engine up through an ejection tube connected to the top of the chamber.
