by Neal Asher
After hours of internal observation Sverl found no adverse reactions—Penny Royal, who had set this transformation in motion, had done nothing inside him that might rebel against this. In fact, the change had somehow reinforced his earlier feeling of rightness. It was almost as if this was an expected part of his ongoing transformation. Warily, he pushed his prosthetic limbs against the floor and rose. It was better, a lot better. He felt no delay, no strain on his bloated body, no sagging. Now it was time for him to return his attention to events occurring beyond this sanctum. Even while undergoing this surgery he had remained expectant of another attack by Father-Captain Cvorn.
With a thought, he sent the deep scanner folding up on its triple-jointed arm into the ceiling and on firm prosthetic limbs moved over to his array of hexagonal screens and pit controls. Really, with the AI crystal connected to his major ganglion, he didn’t need to use the physical controls here, but inserted his prosthetic claws into two pit controls anyway, enjoying a noticeable increase in their precision. Grinding together prosthetic mandibles, he called up data to his screens but then, realizing that he wasn’t getting quite enough of an overview this way, did engage more fully with his ship’s sensors and communications systems using his AI crystal.
The population of Carapace City was steadily moving out. Two big cargo ships had arrived from the edge of the Graveyard zone on the Polity side and, even though the Graveyard was supposed to be a buffer zone out of which the Prador Kingdom and the Polity had agreed to stay, Sverl knew for sure that the Polity had dispatched them. The ships had sent down shuttles onto which many of the city dwellers had clambered, along with whatever wealth they could drag between them. The citizens hoped to buy passage away from the Rock Pool planet, but they were surprised to learn they would not be charged for the journey. Apparently, some charitable organization, learning of the situation here, had hired these ships to evacuate this world. Charitable wasn’t a word that could be applied to any organization in the Graveyard, which was why, with only a little bit of research, Sverl unearthed the connections back into the Polity.
Sverl watched this evacuation for hours before a voice abruptly said, “Bloody shell people are a pain.”
He was unsurprised by the comment. That the drone down in Carapace City could penetrate his com systems with such ease further demonstrated that it wasn’t a free drone slumming it in the Graveyard but one working for the Polity. However, having isolated the route it used to get in, he had decided to leave the line open.
“Why?” Sverl asked. The shell people were human cultists who had decided they liked the prador more than their own race and so had been attempting to surgically transform themselves into prador. They were certainly odd—but a pain?
“They’re about all who are left here and they just don’t want to go,” the drone replied. “If they go they lose you—their one remaining connection to the prador. Other than their prador-mimicking physical modifications, of course. It’s enough to make a cat laugh.”
The drone tended to come out with these strange phrases—almost certainly delighting in how they baffled Sverl. Running some searches, Sverl was none the wiser, though he supposed the drone was referring to the irony of the situation. The shell people’s affection for the prador was misguided when applied to him. They would probably be horrified to discover that while they tried to turn themselves into prador, he was steadily turning into . . . something else.
“Perhaps I should reveal myself to them,” he suggested.
“Ah-aah! Nil pwan! Do not pass go and do not collect two hundred pounds!”
Sverl emitted a sigh. “If you could elaborate in some comprehensible form of human language?”
“They simply wouldn’t believe you, Sverl,” the drone explained. “In fact it’s quite likely they would slot you into a legend they have of the first shellman—they would see you as one of their kind who is much further along the road to transformation into a prador.”
“That is not at all logical.”
“You have to factor in the human propensity for simplification, Sverl, and for their inability to believe in their own demise and unimportance. It’s the impulse behind the religions—”
Sverl stopped listening the moment his instruments reported the disturbance, just microseconds before an object surfaced from U-space only a hundred thousand miles out from the Rock Pool. Cvorn had obviously been very busy since his last attack, because this time the prador kamikaze, carrying a CTD, a crust-busting contra-terrene device, was travelling at twenty per cent of light speed, and Sverl had just 2.7 seconds in which to react.
2
SVERL
In vacuum far above the world Rock Pool, Sverl did not interact physically with his ship control systems and he sent no instructions to his gunners—his age-distorted first- and second-children. In the first tenth of a second, functioning wholly from his AI component, he reluctantly dismissed all those options. In the second tenth of a second, he analysed the positioning of his minefields across near space in relation to the approaching kamikaze and knew that it would miss them. Plotting the thing’s course, he seized control of his ship’s lasers and fired them all, but knew this wouldn’t be good enough either. Almost certainly, he had not tracked down and destroyed all Cvorn’s spy satellites—and the other father-captain had to know how to avoid his defences.
The kamikaze would be heavily protected with reflective armour, and would contain just enough fuel to take it the required distance to the Rock Pool. A missile response was out of the question—it would never get there in time. The angle of approach was a bad one from his point of view too, due to take the kamikaze behind the planet in half the remaining 1.6 seconds to impact.
Particle cannon, then.
Sverl fired, calculating in the marginally slower-than-light progress of his particle beam. It struck the kamikaze outside the planet’s atmosphere. The vehicle, a torpedo-like mass of a hundred tons, shed a scar of red debris across vacuum but still reached atmosphere. On target, the particle beam diffused briefly in atmosphere, then shut down before it could start ploughing into the planet itself.
Sverl, operating at AI speeds, had five whole tenths of a second in which to wonder if he had done enough, then a light like the sun coming out of eclipse flared from behind the Rock Pool and with that glare, fragmented data began to come in. The crust-buster had detonated in atmosphere, fractions of seconds before hitting the surface. The crust of the world had not shattered, tsunamis travelling at thousands of miles an hour would not be sweeping around the planet, and the massive fault under its ocean, which had probably been the intended target, would not be opening. However, no doubt Carapace City on the coast was in for a rough time.
“Prepare—” Sverl began.
“I saw,” the drone down there interrupted.
Sverl now gazed through cams scattered about in the city. Already the alert klaxons were sounding and the population, predominantly shell people now, was running for cover. Meanwhile, one of the shuttles, which had recently launched on its latest trip up to the cargo ships, hesitated in atmosphere, before its pilot must have decided that up was better than down. After a pause, while the pilot doubtless warned the passengers of impending acceleration, the vehicle ignited chemical boosters and stood on a tail of ribbed vermilion fire.
The atmospheric blast wave resulting from the kamikaze’s destruction was bad, its initial impetus as it sped around the planet driving it to over two thousand miles an hour, which gave the city just under five hours to prepare. Sverl calculated on the effects of that wave . . . and then he saw it.
“Cvorn’s thinking seems to have improved,” Sverl noted, while starting up the fusion engines of his ship, his course directly back towards the Rock Pool.
“What?” the drone asked.
Even though he felt leaden inside, knowing what was to come, Sverl felt some satisfaction in being ahead of the drone on this one.
“He calculated on me hitting the kamikaze in atmosphere,” he
explained. “The blast wave is presently spreading out from that point, and its final intersect point is just forty miles south of Carapace City.”
“Shit,” said the drone.
Sverl made further calculations; modelling the whole event in the AI component of his mind. The spreading blast front was almost perfectly circular. In two and a half hours, it would have traversed one hemisphere of the planet and would then proceed to traverse the next hemisphere. Ahead of it, even though it would be slowing, it would compress the atmosphere. As it closed over the second hemisphere in a steadily shrinking circle approximately centred on Carapace City, the pressure would ramp up and up. The effects, when that final circle closed, would be catastrophic, akin to a multi-megaton detonation. Carapace City and all those inside could not survive this.
“Drone,” Sverl instructed. “Tell those remaining that they must get to the eastern edge of the city as fast as they can.” Sverl sent precise coordinates.
“Uh?”
“Four hours is the limit to how long I will wait.” Sverl paused for a second. “I’m sure most of the shell people will come when they know their destination.”
“Oh, I see.” After a pause the drone continued, “You won’t be able to save them all.”
“No, I won’t,” Sverl replied, as his dreadnought hit atmosphere hard enough to send him stumbling, before turning over to descend to the planet on fusion drive.
GARROTTE
The Garrotte’s AI realized something had merely allowed it to believe it was in control of its systems. Now, as it transited U-space, it knew that all the essentials—weapons, defences and the drive—were completely beyond its reach. Its earlier inability to function and internal blindness clearly had nothing to do with the quantum effects of two ships trying to materialize in the same place. Now those problems were back and at least half of its mass was completely numb to it, completely dark—an area suspiciously focused around its mascot, that antique space suit.
“Whadda you want?” it asked that darkness, but the darkness again refused to reply. And, of course, Garrotte had a good idea of what, or rather who, that darkness was.
So when had it taken on this uninvited passenger? During Garrotte’s encounter with the Moray Firth above Masada, Penny Royal was down on the surface of the planet. However, that was human thinking and, to a certain extent, the thinking of AIs like itself, predicated on the idea that an entity was a single unit at a single location. Penny Royal had turned itself into a swarm robot and could divide itself up. Evidence existed that it could also manipulate U-space and project itself or elements of itself across that continuum. In fact, plenty of evidence suggested that Penny Royal was quite capable of existing in many places at once. Garrotte now suspected one of them to be a place aboard where there were no scanners and no diagnostic links: the inside of that space suit. It seemed the AI had found the one small weakness in the attack ship’s defences. The black AI had U-jumped inside to the one place Garrotte would not detect it, and when it had done so was unknown.
Beyond the fact that the AI was here, the precedents were more than a little worrying. Remembering the paralysis it had suffered after the crash with the Firth, Garrotte feared that Penny Royal, or its influence, had already been aboard at that point. This suggested that the black AI had predicted events and set up its escape route some time before Isobel Satomi’s transformation into a hooder war machine and her arrival here with her three warships. Garrotte did not think itself capable of such precision, nor was it sure such capabilities lay within the compass of any lesser AI than Earth Central itself.
Unless, of course it’s breaching time, using time travel . . .
No, that wasn’t somewhere the Garrotte wanted to go, and it reflected on how if it had a sphincter, that part would be loosening about now.
“So you’re not going to talk to me?” Garrotte asked.
Almost as if in response to the question, the ship began to surface from U-space, and Garrotte wished it had kept its metaphorical mouth shut.
The moment the Micheletto’s Garrotte returned to the real it went straight into chameleonware mode, faster than was usually possible, so Penny Royal had obviously been tinkering with its system. Its fusion drive then ignited, ramping up acceleration to something way beyond what any human passenger could have survived, and steering thrusters were firing, straining its newly repaired structure. Garrotte found access to its sensors unhindered and so looked around.
They had arrived in the shadow of a gas giant and were currently dodging asteroids on their way out into the light of a sun—a star only marginally brighter than the rest in the firmament. Garrotte mapped the system, picking out an ice giant further out surrounded by a large collection of moons, three inner worlds about the size of Mars and two Earth-mass planets within what some had described as the green belt. For a moment, it lacked enough data to get a location, but by comparing local star systems against internal star maps, Garrotte made a discovery: “Shit, we’re in prador territory—this is the Kingdom!”
Yes, now Garrotte recognized the massive space stations about those two worlds, and the structures under the coastal seas and sprawling onto the landmasses. The stations all tended to be of a similar shape—vertically squashed pears—while many of the spaceships nearby were of a similar design. They had indeed arrived at a planetary system lying inside the Prador Kingdom.
“They are too busy to notice,” whispered a voice seemingly issuing just behind the Garrotte’s metaphorical ear.
“Talking to me now,” Garrotte said.
A target frame appeared over the nearest of the oceanic worlds, which, by Garrotte’s calculations, lay over fifty light minutes away. Garrotte took the hint and focused in on it, watching across the spectrum, cleaning up imagery and mapping all visible structures in its mind. Something was definitely going on down there.
A series of explosions had just torn apart one section of an undersea city, the spume from them only now surfacing. As Garrotte watched, a fast shuttle, its design quite sharkish and more aerodynamic than was the prador custom, exploded from the sea and accelerated vertically. Shortly afterwards two near-world attack boats of the kind seen during the war—great bulky teardrop-shaped vessels ringed with weapons nacelles—shot out of the ocean in pursuit. Even as they left the water, they shed missiles which ignited their fusion drives and hurtled up ahead of them. Garrotte felt sure that the fast shuttle stood no chance at all. Those attack boats looked clumsy but possessed phenomenal acceleration and enough armament to rip up a city.
“The children of Vlern have learned from Sverl,” whispered Penny Royal, “and have put their augmentations and their bio-weapons to good use. Fortunately for them, they were directed to a place lacking in any elements of the King’s Guard, else things would not be going so well.”
Going so well?
Garrotte presumed that Penny Royal was talking about whoever was in that fast shuttle which the attack boats appeared likely to be about to smear across the sky. And really, even if by some miracle that shuttle managed to avoid those missiles, warships in orbit were moving to intercept. The leading ships were destroyers, while the one coming in behind was somewhat larger. Studying the last vessel, Garrotte noted that it was one of those ships produced towards the end of the war and which the Polity had retrospectively classed as ST dreadnoughts—Series Terminal dreadnoughts. This was a ship the prador had manufactured in response to the rapidly growing number of Polity warships. In building such vessels, they paid more attention to utility and speed of construction than to appearance. The ST dreadnought was about half again the size of standard, was not shaped like a prador carapace but a squat cylinder with powerful fusion drives at one end, fusion steering thrusters protruding all round, and a serious collection of armament sticking out at the other end like a city of skyscrapers. They hadn’t done so well against the Polity because all that weaponry in one place made a plum target, while the steering thrusters were vulnerable too. As a consequence of these weakn
esses the designer of that ship had apparently suffered the same fate as the erstwhile king of the prador—being injected with hydrofluoric acid and floated out over one of their oceans.
Still, the shuttle, which had now reached atmosphere and had ramped up enough acceleration to stay ahead of the missiles, stood zero chance of surviving once into vacuum. Even now, the destroyers were probably targeting—
The ST dreadnought had just fired multiple particle beam blasts, each hitting the leading destroyers straight up their tail pipes. Some fusion drives simply died, two detonated, spraying out like magma eruptions and carving chunks out of the ships concerned. Something else then surfaced into the real just behind them and ignited its own fusion drive to go in amongst them. Garrotte just had time to identify a hundred-ton prador kamikaze before it detonated. The flash of the continent-busting explosion blanked all the ships from view for a moment. When they reappeared, they were tumbling away on the blast front.
“Ouch,” said Garrotte.
The blast did not destroy the destroyers because prador armour could take a lot more of a hammering than that. Their crews and captains would have been more than a little shaken up, however. Now the ST dreadnought was accelerating through, one destroyer bouncing away from its hull. Meanwhile the fast shuttle had left atmosphere, but it wasn’t out of trouble yet. The pursuing missiles ignited secondary drives and accelerated faster in vacuum, while the shuttle headed into the incoming blast front.
Now a file arrived in Garrotte’s mind and opened automatically. The ship AI suppressed the horror it felt at Penny Royal having such easy access to its mind and studied, for all of three seconds, something it would have taken an unaugmented human a week to read.
“An interesting social experiment,” Garrotte said, trying to be just pragmatic and logical. “Young prador adults are generally cowardly—forgoing individual combat and securing themselves in their sanctums and leaving the combat to their children. However, without children and forced to live close together and cooperate over many years . . .”
