Asimov's SF, June 2007

by Dell Magazine Authors

I looked up. “I never cheated you."

  "No, you promised not to open the outer airlock door if I told you what you wanted to know. My life in exchange for information, and you stuck to your side of the deal. I can't say that makes me feel any better about it."

  "But you're a businessman,” I supplied.

  "But I'm a businessman."

  The boosted woman returned carrying a bottle of ersatz malt and a tumbler that she slammed down on the table before me, before stepping back. I can't say I liked having her behind me. I reached down and carefully opened a belt pouch, feeling the tension notch up a bit. The ophidapt partially unfolded his arms and fully extended his claws. I took out a single blue stone and placed it next to the glass case. Broeven eyed the stone for a moment, then picked it up between gnarled forefinger and thumb. He produced a reader and placed the etched sapphire inside.

  "Ten thousand,” he said. “For what?"

  "That's for services rendered—twenty-three years ago—and if you don't want to do further business with me, you keep it and I leave."

  He slipped the sapphire, and the glass case, into the inner pocket of his heavy coat, then sat upright, contemplating me. I thought for a moment he was going to get up and leave. Trying to remain casual, I scanned around the interior of the bar and noticed it wasn't so full as I'd remembered it being. Everyone seemed a bit subdued, conversations whispered and more furtive, no one getting shit-faced.

  "Very well,” he said. “What information do you require?"

  "Two things: first, I want everything you can track down about gabbleducks possibly in or near the Graveyard.” That got me a rather quizzical look. “And second, I want everything you can give me about Jael Feogril's dealings over the last year or so."

  "A further ten thousand,” he said, and I read something spooked in his expression. I took out another sapphire and slid it across to him. He checked it with his reader and pocketed it before uttering another word.

  "I'll give you two things.” He made a circular gesture with one finger. “Jael Feogril might be dealing out of her league."

  "Go on."

  "Them ... a light destroyer ... Jael's ship docked with it briefly only a month ago, before departing. They're still out there."

  I realized then why it seemed so quiet in the bar and elsewhere in the station. The people here were those who hadn't run for cover, and were perhaps wishing they had. It was never the healthy option to remain in the vicinity of the Prador.

  "And the second thing?"

  "The location of the only gabbleduck in the Graveyard, which I can give you without even doing any checking, since I've already given it to Jael Feogril."

  After he'd provided the information I headed away—I had enough to be going on with, and, maybe, if I moved fast ... I paused on my way back to my ship, seeing that Broeven's female heavy was walking along behind me, and turned to face her. She walked straight past me, saying, “I'm not a fucking waitress."

  She seemed in an awful hurry.

  * * * *

  On the stone floor two opponents faced off. Both were men, both were boosted. Jael wondered if people like them ever considered treatment for excessive testosterone production. The bald-headed thug was unarmed and resting his hands on his knees as he caught his breath, twin-pupil eyes fixed on his opponent. The guy with the long queue of hair was also unarmed, though the plate-like lumps all over his overly muscled body were evidence of subcutaneous armor. After a moment they closed and began hammering at each other again, fists impacting with meaty snaps against flesh, blows blocked and diverted, the occasional kick slamming home, though neither of them was really built for that kind of athleticism.

  Inevitably, one of them was called “Tank"—the one with the queue. The other was called “Norris.” These two had been hammering away at each other for twenty minutes to the growing racket from the audience, but whether that noise arose from the spectators’ enjoyment of the show or because they wanted to get to the next event was debatable.

  Eventually, after many scrappy encounters, Tank managed to deliver an axe kick to the side of Norris's head and laid him out. Tank, though the winner, needed to be helped from the arena too, obviously having over-extended himself with that last kick. Once the area was clear, the next event was announced and a gate opened somewhere below Jael. She observed a great furry muscular back and wide head as a giant mongoose shot out. The creature came to an abrupt stop in the middle of the arena and stood up to the height of a man on its hindquarters. Jael discarded her beer tube and stood, heading over toward the pens. The crowd were now shouting for one of the giant cobras the mongoose dispatched with utterly unamazing regularity. She wasn't really all that interested.

  The doors down into the pens were guarded by a thug little different from those who had been in the ring below. He was there because previous security systems had often been breached and some of the fighters, animal, human, or machine, had been knobbled.

  "I'm here to see Koober,” said Jael.

  The man eyed her for a moment. “Jael Feogril,” he said, reaching back to open the door. “Of course you are."

  Jael stepped warily past, then descended the darkened stair.

  Koober was operating a small electric forklift on the tines of which rested the corpse of a seal. He raised a hand to her, then motored forward to drop the load down into one of the pens. Jael stepped over and peered down at the ratty-looking polar bear that took hold of the corpse and dragged it back across ice to one corner, leaving a gory trail.

  Koober, a thin hermaphrodite in much-repaired mesh inlaid overalls, leapt off the forklift and gestured. “This way.” He led her down a stair into moist rancid corridors, then finally to an armored door that he opened with a press of his hand against a palm lock. At the back of the circular chamber within, squatting in its own excrement, was the animal she had come to see—thick chains leading from a steel collar to secure it to the back wall.

  A poor looking specimen, about the size of a Terran black bear, its head was bowed low, the tip of its bill resting against the ground. Lying on the filthy stone beside it were the dismembered remains of something obviously grown hastily in a vat—weak splintered bones and watery flesh, tumors exposed like bunches of grapes. While Jael watched, the gabbleduck abruptly hissed and heaved its head upright. Its green eyes ran in an arc across its domed head. There were twelve or so of them: two large egg-shaped ones toward the center, two narrow ones below these like underscores, two rows of small round ones arcing out to terminate against two triangular ones. They all had lids—the outer two blinking open and closed alternately. Its conjoined forelimbs were folded mummy-like across the raised cross-hatch ribbing of its chest, its gut was baggy and veined, and purple sores seeped in its brown-green skin.

  "And precisely how much did you want for this?” inquired Jael disbelievingly.

  "It's very rare,” said Koober. “There's a restriction on export now and that's pushed prices up. You won't find any others inside the Graveyard, and those running wild on Polity worlds have mostly been tagged and are watched."

  "Why then are you selling it?"

  Koober looked shifty—something he seemed better at doing than looking after the animals he provided for the arena. “It's not suitable."

  "You mean it won't fight,” said Jael.

  "Shunder-club froob,” said the gabbleduck, but its heart did not seem to be in it.

  "All it does is sit there and do that. We put it up against the lion,” he pointed at some healing claw marks in its lower stomach, “and it just sat there and starting muttering to itself. The lion tried to jump out of the arena."

  Jael nodded to herself, then turned away. “Not interested."

  "Wait!” Koober grabbed her arm. She caught his hand, turned it into a wrist lock forcing him down to his knees.

  "Don't touch me.” She released him.

  "If it's a matter of the price..."

  "It's a matter of whether it will even survive long enough for you to
get it aboard my ship, and even then I wonder how long it will survive afterward."

  "Look, I'll be taking a loss, but I'm sure we can work something out...."

  Inside, Jael smiled. When the deal was finally struck she allowed that smile out, for even if the creature died she might well net a profit just selling its corpse. She had no intention of letting it die. The medical equipment and related gabbleduck physiology files aboard Kobashi should see to that, along with her small cargo of frozen Masadan grazers—the gabbleduck's favored food.

  * * * *

  I was feeling slightly pissed off when, after the interminable departure from Paris station, the grabship finally released Ulriss Fire. Even as the grabship carried my ship out I'd seen another ship departing the station under its own power. It seemed that there were those for whom the rules did not apply, or those who knew who to bribe.

  "Run system checks,” I instructed.

  "Ooh, I never thought of that,” replied Ulriss.

  "And there was me thinking AIs were beyond sarcasm."

  "It's a necessary tool used for communicating with a lower species,” the ship's AI replied. I still think it was annoyed that I wouldn't let it use the chameleonware.

  "Take us under,” I said, ignoring the jibe.

  Sudden acceleration pushed me back into my chair, and I felt, at some point deep inside my skull, the U-space engine come online. My perception distorted, the stars in the cockpit screen faded, and the screen greyed out. It lasted maybe a few seconds, then Ulriss Fire shuddered like a ground car rolling over a mass of deep potholes, and a starry view flicked back into place.

  "What the fuck happened?"

  "Checking,” said Ulriss.

  I began checking as well, noting that we'd traveled only about eighty million miles and had surfaced to the real in deep space. However, I was getting mass readings out there.

  "We hit USER output,” Ulriss informed me.

  I just sat there for a moment, wracking my brains to try and figure out what a “user” was. I finally admitted defeat. “I've no idea what you're talking about."

  "I see,” said Ulriss, in an irritatingly superior manner. “The USER acronym stands for Underspace Inference Emitter—"

  "Shouldn't that be UIE, then?"

  "Do you want to know what a USER is, or would you rather I began using my sarcasm tool again?"

  "Sorry, do carry on."

  "A USER is a device that shifts a singularity in and out of U-space via a runcible gate, thus creating a disturbance that knocks any ships that are within range out of that continuum. The USER here is a small one aboard the Polity dreadnought currently three thousand miles away from us. I don't think we were the target. I think that was the cruiser now coming up to port."

  With the skin crawling on my back, I took up the joystick and asserted positional control, nudging the ship round with spurts of air from its attitude jets. Stars swung across the screen, then a large ugly-looking vessel swung into view. It looked like a flattened pear, but one stretched from a point on its circumference. It was battered, its brassy exotic armor showing dents and burns that its memform hull and s-con grids had been unable to deal with, and which hadn't been repaired since. Missile ports and the mouths of rail-guns and beam weapons dotted that hull, but they looked perfectly serviceable. Ulriss had neglected to mention the word “Prador” before the word “cruiser.” This is what had everyone checking their online wills and talking in whispers back in Paris.

  "Stealth mode?” suggested Ulriss, with a degree of smugness.

  "Fucking right,” I replied.

  The additional instruments came alight and a luminescent ribbing began to track across the screen before me. I wondered how good the chameleonware was, since maybe bad chameleonware would put us in even greater danger—the Prador suspecting some sort of attack if they detected us.

  "And now if you could ease us away from that thing?"

  The fusion drive stuttered randomly—a low power note and firing format that wouldn't put out too-regular ionization. We fell away, the Prador cruiser thankfully receding, but now, coming into view, a Polity dreadnought. At one time, the Prador vessel would have outclassed a larger Polity ship. It was an advantage the nasty aliens maintained throughout their initial attack during the war: exotic metal armor that could take a ridiculously intense pounding. Now Polity ships were armored in a similar manner, and carried weapons and EM warfare techniques that could penetrate to the core of Prador ships.

  "What the hell is happening here?” I wondered.

  "There is some communication occurring, but I cannot penetrate it."

  "Best guess?"

  "Well, ECS does venture into the Graveyard, and it is still considered Polity territory. Maybe the Prador have been getting a little bit too pushy."

  I nodded to myself. Confrontations like these weren't that uncommon in the Graveyard, but this one was bloody inconvenient. While I waited, something briefly blanked the screen. When it came back on again I observed a ball of light a few hundred miles out from the cruiser, shrinking rather than expanding, then winking out.

  "CTD imploder,” Ulriss informed me.

  I was obviously behind the times. I knew a CTD was an antimatter bomb, but an “imploder"? I didn't ask.

  After a little while the Prador ship's steering thrusters stabbed out into vacuum and ponderously turned it over. Then its fusion engines flared to life and began taking it away.

  "Is that USER still on?” I asked.

  "It is."

  "Why? I don't see the point."

  "Maybe ECS is just trying to make a point."

  The USER continued functioning for a further five hours while the Prador ship departed. I almost got the feeling that those in the Polity dreadnought knew I was there and were deliberately delaying me. When it finally stopped, it took another hour before U-space had settled down enough for us to enter it without being flung out again. It had all been very frustrating.

  * * * *

  People knew that if a ship was capable of traveling through U-space it required an AI to control its engines. Mawkishly they equated artificial intelligence with the godlike creations that controlled the Polity, somehow forgetting that colony ships with U-space engines were leaving the Solar System before the Quiet War, and before anyone saw anything like the silicon intelligences that were about now. The supposedly primitive Prador, who had nearly smashed the Polity, failed because they did not have AI, apparently. How then did they run the U-space engines in their ships? It came down, in the end, to the definition of AI—something that had been undergoing constant revision for centuries. The thing that controlled the engines in the Kobashi, Jael did not call an AI. She called it a “control system” or sometimes, a “Prador control system."

  Kobashi surfaced from U-space on the edge of the Graveyard far from any sun. The coordinates Desorla had reluctantly supplied were constantly changing in relation to nearby stellar bodies, but, checking her scanners, Jael saw that they were correct, if this black planetoid—a wanderer between stars—was truly the location of Penny Royal. The planetoid was not much bigger than Earth's Moon, was frigid, without atmosphere, and had not seen any volcanic activity quite possibly for billions of years. However, her scans did reveal a cannibalized ship resting on the surface and bonded-regolith tunnels winding away from it like worm casts to eventually disappear into the ground. She also measured EM output—energy usage—for signs of life. Positioning Kobashi geostationary above the other ship, she began sending signals.

  "Penny Royal, I am Jael Feogril and I have come to buy your services. I know that the things you value are not the same as those valued by ... others. If you assist me, you will gain access to an Atheter memstore, from which you may retain a recording."

  She did not repeat the message. Penny Royal would have seen her approach and have been monitoring her constantly ever since. The thing called Penny Royal missed very little.

  Eventually she got something back: landing coordinates—nothing
else. She took Kobashi down, settling between two of those tunnels with the nose of her ship only fifty yards from the other ship's hull. Studying the other vessel, she recognized a Polity destroyer, its sleek lines distorted, parts of it missing as if it had been slowly draining into the surrounding tunnels. After a moment she saw an irised airlock open. No message—the invitation was in front of her. Heading back into her quarters she donned an armored spacesuit, took up her heavy pulse-rifle with its under-slung mini-launcher, her sidearm, and a selection of grenades. Likely the weapons would not be enough if Penny Royal launched some determined attack, but they might and that was enough of a reason for carrying them. She resisted the impulse to go and check on the gabbleduck, but it was fine, its sores healed and flesh building up on its bones, its nonsensical statements much more emphatic.

  Beyond Kobashi her boots crunched on a scree surface. Her suit's visor set to maximum light amplification, she peered down at a surface that seemed to consist entirely of loose flat hexagonal crystals, like coins. They were a natural formation and nothing to do with this planetoid's resident. However, the thing that stabbed up through this layer nearby—like an eyeball impaled on a thin curved thorn of metal—certainly belonged to Penny Royal.

  Jael finally stepped into the airlock, and noticed that the inner door was open too, so she would not be shedding her spacesuit. For no apparent reason other than to unnerve her, the first lock door swiftly closed once she was through. Within the ship she necessarily turned on her suit lights to complement the light amplification. The interior had been stripped right down to the hull members. All that Penny Royal had found no use for elsewhere, lay in a heap to one side of the lock, perhaps ready to be thrown outside. The twenty or so crew members had been desiccated—hard vacuum freeze-drying and preserving them. They rested in a tangled pile like some nightmare monument. Jael noticed the pile consisted only of woody flesh and frangible bone. No clothing there, no augs, no jewelry. It occurred to her that Penny Royal had not thrown these corpses outside because the entity might yet find a use for them.

  She scanned about herself, not quite sure where to go now. Across the body of the ship from her was the mouth of one of those tunnels, curving down into darkness. There? No, to her right the mouth of another tunnel emitted heat a little above the ambient. Stepping over hull beams, she began to make her way toward it, then silvery tentacular fingers eased out around the lip of the tunnel and heaved out an object two yards across and seemingly formed by computer junk from the ship compressed into a sphere. Lights glimmered inside the tangle and it extruded antennas, and eyes like the one she had seen outside. Settling down, it seemed to unravel slightly, whereupon a fleshless golem unpeeled from its surface, stood upright and advanced a couple of paces, a thick ribbed umbilicus still keeping it connected.