by Neil Clarke
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 in 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 a spurt 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 and s-con grids had been unable to deal with, and that 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 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 been 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 underslung minilaun
cher, 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. 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.
During the Prador-Human war it had been necessary to quickly manufacture the artificial intelligences occupying stations, ships, and drones, for casualties were high. Quality control suffered and these intelligences, which in peacetime would have needed substantial adjustments, were sent to the front. As a matter of expediency, flawed crystal got used rather than discarded. Personality fragments were copied, sometimes not very well, successful fighters or tacticians recopied. The traits constructed or duplicated were not necessarily those evincing morality. Some of these entities went rogue and became what were described as black AIs.
Like Penny Royal.
Standing at his shoulder, the boosted woman, Gene, gave Koober the confidence to defy me. I’d already told him that I knew Jael had bought the gabbleduck from him, I just wanted to know if he knew anything else: who else she might have seen here, where she was going . . . anything really. I was equally curious to know how Broeven’s ex-employee had ended up here. It struck me that this went beyond the bounds of coincidence.
“I don’t have to tell you nothing, Sandman,” he said, using my old name with its double meaning.
“True, you don’t,” I replied. I really hated how the scum I’d known twenty years ago all seemed to have floated to the top. “Which is why I’m prepared to pay for what you can tell me.”
He glanced back at his protection, then crossed his arms. “You were the big man once, but that ain’t so now. I got my place here at the Arena and I got a good income. I don’t even have to speak to you.” He unfolded his arms and waved a finger imperiously. “Now piss off.”
Not only was he defiant, but stupid. The woman, no matter how vigilant, could not protect him from a seeker bullet or a pin, coated with bone-eating nanite, glued to a door handle. But I didn’t do that sort of stuff now. I was retired. I carefully reached into my belt pouch and took out one of my remaining etched sapphires. I would throw it, and while the gem arced through the air toward Koober and the woman, I reckoned on getting the drop on them. My pepper-pot stun gun was lodged in the back of my belt. Of course I’d take her down first. I tossed the gem and began to reach.
She moved. Koober went over her foot and was heading for the ground. The sapphire glimmered in the air still as the barrel of the pulsegun centered on my forehead. I guess I was rusty, because I didn’t even consider throwing myself aside. For a moment I just thought, That’s it, but no field-accelerated pulse of aluminum dust blew my head apart. She caught the gem in her other hand and flipped it straight back at me. With my free hand I caught it, my other hand relaxing its grip on my gun and carefully easing out to one side, fingers spread.
“I believe my boss just told you to leave,” she said.
Koober was lying on the floor swearing, then he looked up and paused—only now realizing what had happened.
I nodded an acknowledgment to Gene, turned, and quickly headed for the stair leading up from the pens, briefly glimpsed an oversized mongoose chewing on the remains of a huge snake on the arena floor, then headed back toward the market where I might pick up more information. What the hell was a woman like her doing with a lowlife like Koober? It made no sense, and the coincidence of her being here just stretched things too far. I wondered if Broeven had sent her to try to cash in— guessing I was probably after something valuable. Such thoughts concerned me—that’s my excuse. She came at me from a narrow side-tunnel. I only managed to turn a little before she grabbed me, spun me round, and slammed me against the wall of the exit tunnel. I turned, and again found myself looking down the barrel of that pulse-gun. People around us quickly made themselves scarce.
“Koober had second thoughts about letting you go,” she said.
“Really?” I managed.
“He is a little slow, sometimes,” she opined. “It occurred to him, once you were out of sight, that you might resent his treatment of you and come back to slip cyanide in his next soy burger.”
“He’s a vegetarian?”
“It’s working with the animals—put him off meat.”
I watched her carefully, wondering why I was still alive. “Are you going to kill me?”
“I haven’t decided yet.”
“Have you ever killed anyone?”
“Many people, but in most cases the choice was theirs.”
“That’s very moral of you.”
“So it would seem,” she agreed. “Koober is shit-scared of you. Apparently you’re a multiple murderer?”
“Hit man.”
“Murderer.”
Ah, I thought I knew what she was now.
“I think you know precisely who I am and what I was,” I said. “Now I’m a xeno-archaeologist trying to track down stolen goods.”
“I stayed here too long,” she said distractedly, shaking her head. “It was going to be my pleasure to shut Koober down.” She paused for a moment, considering. “You should stay out of this, Rho. This has gone beyond you.”
“If you say so,” I said. “You’ve got the gun.”
She lowered her weapon, then abruptly holstered it. “If you don’t believe me, then I suggest you go and see a dealer in biologicals called Desorla. Apparently Jael visited her before coming to see Koober, and their dealings involved Jael shooting out the cameras and security drones in Desorla’s office.”
“Just biologicals?”
“Desorla has . . . connections.”
She moved away and right then I felt no inclination to go after her. Maybe she was feeding me a line of bullshit or maybe she was giving me the lead I needed. If not, I’d come back to the pen well prepared.
In the market, one of the stall holders quickly directed me toward Desorla’s emporium. I
entered through one of the floor-level doors and found no activity inside. A spiral staircase led up, but a gate had been drawn across it and locked. I recognized the kind of lock immediately and set to work on it with the tools about my person. Like I said, I was rusty, it took me nearly thirty seconds to break the programs. I climbed up, scanned the next floor, then climbed higher still to the top floor.
The office was clean and empty, so I kicked in the flimsy door into the living accommodation. Nothing particularly unusual here . . . then I saw the blood on the floor and the big glass bottle on her coffee table. Stepping round the spatters I peered into the bottle, and, in the crumpled and somewhat scabby pink mass inside, a nightmare eyeless face peered out at me. Then something dripped on top of my head. I looked up . . . .
Over by the window I caught my breath, but no one was giving me time for that. Arena security thugs were running toward the emporium and beyond them I could see Gene striding off toward the exit. I opened the window just as the thugs entered the building below me, did a combination of scramble and fall down the outside of the building and hit the stone flat on my back. I had to catch my breath then. After a moment I heaved myself upright and headed for the exit, closing up the visor and hood of my envirosuit and keeping Gene just in sight. I went fast through an airlock far to the left of her, and some paces ahead of her, and was soon running down counting arches. I drew my carbide knife and dropped down beside one arch, hoping I’d counted correctly.
She stepped out to my left. I knew I could not give her the slightest chance or she would take me down yet again. I drove the knife in to the side, cut down, grabbed and pulled. In a gout of icy fog her visor skittered across the stone. Choking, she staggered away from me, even then drawing her pulse-gun, which must have been cold-adapted. I drove a foot into her sternum, knocked the last of her air out. Pulse-gun shots tracked along the frigid stone past me and I brought the edge of my hand down on her wrist, cracking bone, and knocking the weapon away. Her fist slammed into my ribs and her foot came up to nearly take my head off. Blind and suffocating, she was the hardest opponent I’d faced hand-to-hand . . . or maybe it was that rustiness again. But she went down, eventually, and I dragged her to Ulriss Fire before anoxia killed her.
