by Neal Asher
The Brockle flowed towards it, units combining into a wave of silvery worms that collapsed on the geodesic sphere and entered through its open hexagonal faces. It severed contacts as it flowed in around the AI, inserting itself into the cuts to intercept anything the AI was sending or receiving.
“What the fucking hell is happening?” Grafton was yelling. Obviously the AI had not quite got around to informing her, which was useful.
The Brockle closed in around the High Castle AI and began to make direct connections to it.
“You,” it said.
“Yes, me,” the Brockle replied as it began riffling through the AI’s mind.
It replayed data input and output from the moment the High Castle AI had recognized something was wrong in the hold. The ship AI had not learned what had tried to penetrate its sensors but had understood something was on the move. However, not knowing what it was, it had not informed its human crew at that point. Reacting to the explosion there, it had surmised some form of sub-AI weapon probably sneaked aboard by separatists. Next, realizing its own chamber was under attack, it had informed them of that. The precise wording was a brief, “I am under attack—initiating defences.” This was useful too: it had not detailed the nature of the attack.
“Informational warfare,” the Brockle replied—no way for Grafton to know it was not the ship AI speaking to her. “Some kind of sub-AI weapon ran a penetration from the hold, attempted to get through to me and failed, so instead tried to do as much damage as possible by detonating the ultra-thermite bombs in the hold.”
“Shit! How the hell did that happen?” asked Grafton.
“I have sent details to Par Avion and the matter is under investigation,” replied the Brockle. “However, for the interim and because of the nature of our mission and who might be involved, we are under quarantine. I have shut down U-com.”
“Could it have been something from Penny Royal?”
“I consider that unlikely but, since there is a possibility, however remote, precautions must be taken.”
“Great start to our mission then.”
Yes, the Brockle had to agree. The danger was over and now the lies and the distortions of the truth to its own ends would come easier. It now effectively controlled this ship, and its own mission could truly begin.
Spear
The ship’s maintenance robots were busily at work behind me in the section of my ship that I had previously opened out to accommodate Sverl and his children. I’d asked Bsorol if he and the rest wanted a lift away from Room 101 once I was capable of leaving. He’d turned monosyllabic but even then made it plain: no, he and the rest were staying. This just added to the frustrated anger I was feeling. Damn it, I’d had to do something, so I’d begun turning that rear section back into cabins. No doubt Trent, Sepia and Cole would be joining me when I finally left, and they would need room. I pondered Sepia for a second, realizing that, just as with the other two, I had been pushing her away, which didn’t strike me as a great idea when body and mind were telling me I wanted her in my cabin, with me. I winced in further irritation. I would deal with that when we left, when we had breathing space . . . Unfortunately, leaving was the problem.
While pondering my difficulty in departing this station I sat back and auged into the ship’s system to call up some previously recorded image data. It displayed on the screen fabric ahead. A rash of stars appeared across the blackness of space. Then a frame opened at the centre of this and focused in, bringing Cvorn’s Series Terminal or ST dreadnought into sharp focus. The renegade prador had obviously made a cautious approach, surfacing his ship from underspace fifty light hours out from Room 101, but he hadn’t been cautious enough. While I watched, the fleet of King’s Guard ships, those great stretched-out golden teardrops, appeared over to one side of the dreadnought and immediately opened fire. Particle beams crossed the intervening gap and I can only say that Cvorn must have been caught napping, because they carved into his ship for a full twenty seconds before there was any reaction. They burned great glowing canyons through its giant weapons array, which stood out like a city of skyscrapers at one end. Exotic hull metal heated and glowed and in some places collapsed. Vast explosions threw out burning debris as from the throats of erupting volcanoes. Then the hardfields went up and fusion drives fired and, shedding fire and chunks of hull like seared skin, the dreadnought tried to get away. The Guard ships stayed on it, pounding away at it, and eventually Cvorn was forced to make an emergency U-jump. Sitting there, watching this scene again, I once more studied the data on the U-signature generated. It didn’t look healthy at all, and I suspected that even if the ST dreadnought had made it back into the real at the terminus of the jump, it had not done so in one piece.
The Guard fleet had then taken itself away—back to the Prador Kingdom, I hoped. The modern Polity attack ship that had been outside the station—the one Penny Royal had arrived on—was gone too. There was nothing out there to stop me leaving, but my ship, the Lance, had one major problem: I had no AI to control its U-space drive. I had been waiting for Flute to return in the decoy ship, but now decided I should start preparing for the possibility that Flute wasn’t coming back. I would have to find a cooperative AI here, or strong-arm an uncooperative one, because I didn’t want to be here any longer than I needed and because, well, because of what Penny Royal had said:
We have returned to my beginning, and now we must return to yours.
Those had been the black AI’s last words to me before folding up and flipping out of existence, and I felt a tight ball of anger inside as I remembered them. What were they supposed to fucking mean?
When I recruited Isobel Satomi to my cause I’d been bent on vengeance against the AI for the eight thousand troops it had killed on Panarchia. On Masada, the home world of the ancient Atheter race, things had turned a little strange, but I still felt my aim had been reaffirmed. However, after that, my attitude had changed. My memories had been altered by the black AI itself in such a way as to make me vengeful when, with my own true memories, I wouldn’t have been. The spine, that piece of Penny Royal that the AI had left behind in its ship—now mine—contained memcordings from Penny Royal’s victims and I had been experiencing them constantly, their stories reaffirming my need for revenge. I was being manipulated at every turn and crammed full of reasons to attempt to destroy the AI. And yet this was all being done by the AI itself.
Did I still want vengeance? No, the knowledge of that manipulation had led to my vengeful feelings drying up. It had been as if I was locked into a course that I’d long ago lost any emotional investment in. However, the recent result of the AI’s manipulation had reignited my anger. And why was I so angry? Because, as the need for vengeance had faded, I had come to expect more, because I had come to expect this whole drama to lead to something, I don’t know . . . something numinous. All it had led to was the sordid murder of the renegade prador Sverl, whom I’d come to respect and even like, by the snake drone Riss. Penny Royal had even acted to stop me preventing Sverl’s murder, through the intervention of the Golem Mr Grey and via the spine.
So yes, I now wanted to go after Penny Royal again. Yet, ever since setting out after the damned thing, it had become increasingly evident that I had as much chance of destroying Penny Royal as I had of pissing on the sun and putting it out. Penny Royal was dangerous, powerful, seemed to be able to move anywhere at will. Even Polity AIs were scared of the wretched thing. Penny Royal was capable of being a paradigm changer, and a mere resurrected soldier like me had no chance of being effective against such a thing. So, if I could not destroy the blasted AI, at least I might be able to get some answers.
I now brought up a series of frames showing cam views I could access throughout the station. These covered areas controlled by some of the nearest surviving AIs and here I saw that activity was still increasing. And not just in the AIs making repairs—activity had ramped up with all the AIs, and I
was starting to get an intimation of what this meant, especially when seeing robots being manufactured whose only purpose seemed to be destruction.
When I’d realized I might need to recruit an AI here I had started listening in on them. This wasn’t easy because few of them used language in any form I recognized, either human or computer, but I persevered and managed to run some translation programs in my aug. My first success I’d thought was a failure because I couldn’t get a grip on what was going on. However, I slowly began to understand I was listening in on high-speed transactions, bargains, deals, politics, and none of it was entirely sane. Once I realized this, a lot more began to become clear: the AIs that had survived Room 101 had been badly damaged by it. They had, to put it in a mealy-mouthed human context, some challenging problems.
Further careful listening, interspersed with raids on vulnerable databases, made the picture clearer. They had been turned contentious, hostile, by 101’s attacks on them, and in an effort to hide they’d sacrificed intelligence, reducing themselves to AI simulacra of barbarians. Once 101 blew its own brains out, they had turned on each other and fought a lengthy internecine war for territory and resources throughout the station. Before we arrived they had established a peace of sorts—one only maintained by perpetual bargaining and bartering, with the currency being energy and materials. The robot that had attacked us inside my ship had been sent by one of them—firstly in an attempt to gain advantage over its fellows, then desperately in an effort to get off the station when it realized the King’s Guard intended to annihilate it. Next came the bombardment, followed by the attack from Penny Royal, which had destroyed numerous power supplies and thus disabled weapons, allowing a King’s Guard ship to dock. The upshot of this was that the balance of power here had been shattered and, it was now apparent to me, every single AI was preparing for war.
This meant it was going to get dangerous around here and that leaving, even without Flute, must be my priority. I briefly considered summoning Trent and the others back, but it would be quicker to fly to the construction bay adjacent to that hospital and get them aboard there. First I needed a ship mind. Until now I had only been listening—penetrating communications and grabbing unsecured data—and had not spoken directly to any of them. In my aug I inspected the security around a link I had prepared, then finally opened it.
“Hello, construction bay AI designation E676,” I said.
The response was a nonsense babble of computer code interspersed with human language, before the AI abruptly severed the link. I folded my hands in my lap and waited patiently—the link at my end remaining open. Eventually the connection went live again and I found myself speaking to the AI that had sent the robot aboard my ship.
“You are the human,” it said.
“I am one of them,” I replied.
“The others are in territory—zzz—’
The territorial designation was a massive block of code I dropped into secure storage. Then, using the aug equivalent of armoured gloves, I took some of it apart and from this gleaned data concerning power allocations, resource exchanges and interwoven boundaries no human barbarian would understand. I ignored the rest.
“Yes, they are,” I replied.
“Reason for contact?”
“Do you still want to get off this station?”
“Give me your access codes.”
I ignored that and continued, “I need an AI to control my U-space . . .”
I lost impetus as a stray thought suddenly hit me. I’d already seen how much these AIs had regressed. Were any of them even capable of controlling a U-space drive? I continued, “I need an AI to control my U-space drive if I am to get out of this system. Are you capable of controlling a U-space drive?”
“Simplicity,” said E676, and sent another data package.
This went into secure storage too—a brief glimpse inside revealing Skaidon warp math that was all but incomprehensible to me.
“In that case,” I said, abruptly reaching out for my console controls, “perhaps we can come to an arrangement?”
—security breach—
I didn’t recognize the warning and abruptly felt very hot, sweat beading my forehead. Why was I reaching out for the console when I’d come to the conclusion that I could do just about anything through my aug?
“You will have to physically move yourself here,” I noted.
I then peered down at my hand and saw that, using the touch controls, I had called up a frame in the screen fabric and had begun sorting through system controls. I felt puzzled and vaguely worried, but couldn’t control my hands. Next I saw something else in another frame: two of those weird by-blow robots, like the one that had attacked in here, launching themselves from a nearby hatch.
What?
My bafflement turned to panic as my hand, independent of me, selected controls that would open the weapons cache loading hatch. How the hell had that happened? How had this primitive AI managed to take control of me so easily?
“Simple,” said a voice in my mind, “it’s just been waiting for activation.”
Agony followed and I looked down to see a long glassy needle stabbed right through my arm just above the wrist, paralysing my hand. Something long and snaky and translucent reared up beside me, spread a cobra hood and came down on my skull like a hammer. It was so hard I felt sure my skull had cracked as flashes of yellow lightning chased me down into blackness.
—hiatus—
I came to, floating in vacuum, biting down on the urge to throw up. My head hurt badly, as did my wrist, and I really didn’t need Riss’s monologue burbling close by.
“. . . so you have to remember that though these AIs have regressed, they haven’t regressed that much.”
“What are you on about?”
Riss was speaking to me through my suit radio. “Oh, you weren’t quite conscious—sometimes it’s difficult to tell. I was saying that, as you noticed, these AIs have regressed. However, you are an advanced human who was using technology that is far from being a match for an AI. It was an unfair encounter really. E676 defeated you on its own territory with the same ease with which an AI would be defeated by a human barbarian with a hammer, on his territory.”
“You’ve been reading my mind again,” I said.
I was in an enclosed space and something was pressing against my side. Blearily looking down, I saw the spine, jammed through a utility belt that Riss must have put round my waist. I hauled the thing out and batted it away from me, then reached out to a nearby wall. As my gloved hand touched the metal I felt it vibrating, and realized this meant there was a lot of activity in the structure around me. I then set myself turning and saw I was in some narrow maintenance tube that wasn’t aboard my ship. Riss must have got me out again, just as she had when intent on rescuing me from Cvorn’s attack on us. A ship’s maintenance robot crouching against the wall of the tube confirmed this. I tried to aug into surrounding systems but got nothing.
“Well, you do spill an awful lot.”
I ignored that and asked, “Why am I here?”
“I wasn’t fast enough—you’d already punched in the instructions to open up your ship.” After a pause she added, “Also, those controls are keyed to your DNA, so I couldn’t use them.”
“What?”
“E676 now has control of your ship.”
“How did it do it?” I asked, bringing my spin to a halt and focusing on Riss.
The assassin drone had returned to pristine condition, translucent, her mysterious internal workings just visible and her third black eye gleaming. Yet, the last time I’d seen her, she hadn’t looked so good. Though having managed to inject the enzyme acid into Sverl, she’d taken a severe beating in the process. When I last saw her, escaping down a hole in the floor of that autofactory, she’d looked like a mobile burned-out light tube.
“The two data packages, obviously.
”
“Not so obvious to me,” I said tightly. “I routed them into secure storage.”
I was thinking at a glacial pace. I knew I should be alarmed but felt thoroughly lethargic, while my head was fizzing.
“No, they came with their own ‘secure storage’ and let your aug know that they were secure,” Riss explained. “Really, if you’d wanted to talk to that AI you should have done it by restricted bandwidth radio to your ship’s system, and not through your aug. Either that, or you should have used the AI resources easily available to you.”
“You?” I was unable to keep the sneer out of my voice.
“You didn’t know I was in the ship with you,” said Riss. “I meant the spine.”
I glanced at the named object. “I see you ensured it didn’t get left aboard the Lance.”
“That kind of technology is not something we want falling into the hands of the AIs here.” Something in her tone told me that she was leaving much unsaid. I shrugged. The spine was many things, hard and sharp enough to punch through the body of a Golem, able to change its shape, a repository of the dead . . . and of course a piece of Penny Royal—a “paradigm-changing AI.”
Just then my aug started reinstating and I felt frustrated about what that meant: Riss had made it dump all its data, had run a format and it was now returning to its factory settings. But, of course, it had been necessary. Its security had been breached and everything had to go. Those data packages, even as they ran their software to take over my motor controls, had probably been copying themselves throughout.
I rubbed at my wrist, which still ached, then snatched my hand away upon knocking off a scab of breach foam. My suit squirted vapour until further foam bubbled out to seal the hole. I reached up to my aching head, but my fingertips just thwacked against my suit helmet. I needed to wake up.
