Galactic Empires

by Neil Clarke

  “Okay,” I said as she regained consciousness. “What the fuck killed her?”

  After a moment of peering at the webbing straps binding her into the chair, she said, “You broke my wrist.”

  “Talk to me and I’ll let my autodoc work on it. You set me up, Gene. Is that your real name?”

  She nodded absently, though whether that was in answer to my question I couldn’t tell. “I noticed you said ‘what’ rather than ‘who.’”

  “A human who takes the trouble to skin someone alive and nail them to the ceiling without making a great deal more mess than that shouldn’t be classified as a who. It’s a thing.” I watched her carefully—trying to read her. “So maybe it was a thing . . . rogue golem?”

  “Rho Var Olssen, employed by ECS for wet ops outside the Line, a sort of one-man vengeance machine for the Polity, who maybe started to like his job just a little too much. Who are you to righteously talk about classifications?”

  “So you know about me. I had you typed when you insisted on calling me a murderer. Nothing quite so moralistic as an ECS agent working outside of her remit—helps to justify it all.”

  “Fuck you.”

  “Hit a nerve did I?” I paused, thinking that perhaps I was being a little naïve. She was baiting me to lead me away from the point. “So it was a golem that killed Desorla?”

  “In a sense,” she admitted grudgingly. “She was watched and she said too much—to Jael, specifically.”

  “Tell me more about Jael.”

  Staring at me woodenly she said, “What’s to tell? We knew her interest in ancient technology and we knew she kept a careful eye on people like you. We put something in the way of your sifter and made sure she found out about it.”

  I felt hollow. “The memstore . . . it’s a fake?”

  “No, it’s the real thing, Rho. It had to be.”

  I thought about me lying on the floor of my home with a rock hammer embedded in my skull. “I could have died.”

  “An acceptable level of collateral damage in an operation like this,” she said flatly.

  I thought about that for one brief horrible moment. Really, there were many people on many worlds trying to find Atheter artifacts, but how many of them were like me? How many of them were so inconvenient? I imagined this was why some AI had chosen my life as an “acceptable level of collateral damage.”

  “And what is this operation?” I finally asked. “Are you out to nail Prador?” She laughed.

  “I guess not,” I said.

  “You worked out what Jael was doing yourself. I don’t know how . . . ” She gazed at me for a moment, but I wasn’t going to help her out. She continued, “If she can restore the mind to a gabbleduck, she has an item to sell to the Prador that will net her more wealth than even she would know how to spend. But there’s a problem: you don’t just feed the memstore to the gabbleduck, you’re not even going to be able to jury-rig some kind of linkup using aug technology. That memstore is complex alien tech loaded in a language few can understand.”

  “She needs an AI . . . or something close . . . ”

  “On the button, but though some AIs might venture outside Polity law as we see it, there are certain lines even they won’t cross. Handing over a living Atheter to the Prador is well over those lines.”

  “A Prador AI, then.”

  “The only ones they have are in their ships—their purpose utterly fixed. They don’t have the flexibility.” “So what the fuck—”

  “Ever heard of Penny Royal?” she interrupted.

  I felt a surge of almost superstitious dread. “You have got to be shitting me.”

  “No shit, Rho. You can see this is out of your league. We’re done here.”

  “You put some kind of tracer in the memstore.”

  She gave me a patronizing smile. “Too small. We needed U-tech.”

  Suddenly I got the idea. “You put it in the gabbleduck.”

  “We did.” She stared at me for a long moment, then continued resignedly, “The signal remains constant, giving a Polity ship in the Graveyard the creature’s location from moment to moment. The moment the gab-bleduck is connected to the memstore, the signal shuts down, then we’ll know that Penny Royal has control of both creature and store, and then the big guns move in. This is over, Rho. Can’t you see that? You’ve played your part and now the game has moved as far beyond you as it has moved beyond me. It’s time for us both to go home.”

  “No,” I said. I guessed she didn’t understand how being tortured, then nearly killed, had really ticked me off. “It’s time for you to tell me how to find Jael. I’ve still got a score to settle with her.”

  Jael did not like being this close to a golem. Either they were highly moral creatures who served the Polity and would not look kindly on her actions, and who were thoroughly capable of doing something about them, or they were the rare amoralimmoral kind, and quite capable of doing something really nasty. No question here—the thing crammed in beside her in the airlock was a killer, or, rather, it was a remote probe, a submind that was part of a killer. As she understood it, Penny Royal had these submind golem scattered throughout the Graveyard, often contributing to the title of the place.

  After the lock pressurized, the inner door opened to admit them into the Kobashi. While Jael removed her spacesuit the golem just stood to one side—a static silver skeleton with hardware in its rib cage, cybermo-tors at its joints and interlinked down its spine, and blue-irised eyeballs in the sockets of its skull. She wondered if it had willingly subjected itself to Penny Royal’s will or been taken over. Probably the latter.

  “This way,” she said to it once she was ready, and led the way back toward the ship’s hold. Behind her the golem followed with a clatter of metallic feet. Why did it no longer wear syntheflesh and skin? Just to make it more menacing? She wasn’t sure Penny Royal was that interested in interacting with people. Maybe the usual golem coverings just didn’t last in this environment.

  At her aug command a bulkhead door thumped open and she paused beside it to don a breather mask before stepping through into an area caged off from the rest of the hold. The air within was low in oxygen and would slowly suffocate a human, but it mixing with the rest of the air in the ship while this door was open wasn’t a problem since the pressure differential pushed the ship air into this space. The briefly higher oxygen levels would not harm the hold’s occupant since its body was rugged enough to survive a range of environments—probably its kind was engineered that way long ago. Beyond the caged area in which they stood, the floor was layered a foot deep with flute grass rhizomes—as soggy underfoot as sphagnum. The walls displayed Masadan scenery overlaid with bars so the occupant didn’t make the mistake of trying to run off through them. Masadan wildlife sounds filled the air and there were even empty tricone shells on the rhizome mat for further authenticity.

  The gabbleduck looked a great deal more alert and a lot healthier than when Koober had owned it. As always, when she came in here, it was squatting in one corner. Other than via the cameras in here, she had seen it do nothing else. It was as if, every time she approached, it heard her and moved to that corner, which should not have been possible since the bulkhead door was thoroughly insulated.

  “Subject appears adequate,” said the golem. “It will be necessary to move it into the complex for installation.”

  “Gruvver fleeg purnok,” said the gabbleduck dismissively.

  “The phonetic similarity of the gabble to human language has always been puzzling,” said the golem.

  “Right,” said Jael. “The memstore?” She gestured to the door and the golem obligingly moved out ahead of her.

  She overtook the golem in the annex to the main airlock, opened another bulkhead door, and led the way into her living area. Here she paused. “Before I show you this next item, there are one or two things we need to agree on.” She turned and faced the golem. “The gabbleduck and the memstore must go no deeper into your complex than half a mile.” />
  The golem just stared at her, waiting, not asking the question a human would have asked. It annoyed Jael that Penny Royal probably understood her reasoning and it annoyed her further that she still felt the need to explain. “That keeps it within the effective blast radius of my ship. If I die, or if you try to take from me the gabbleduck or the memstore, I can aug a signal back here to start up the U-space engine, the field inverted and ten degrees out of phase. The detonation would excise a fair chunk of this planetoid.”

  The golem just said, “The AI here is of Prador manufacture.”

  “It is.”

  “My payment will be a recording of the Atheter memstore, and a recording of the Prador AI.”

  “That seems . . . reasonable, though you’ll receive the recording of the Prador AI just before I’m about to leave.” She didn’t want Penny Royal to have time to work out how to crack her ship’s security.

  At that moment, the same Prador AI—without speaking—alerted her to activity outside the ship. Using her augs she inspected an external view from the ship’s cameras. One of the tunnel tubes, its mouth filled with some grublike machine, was advancing toward Kobashi.

  “What’s going on outside?” she inquired politely.

  “I presume you have no spacesuit for the gabbleduck?”

  “Ah.”

  Despite her threat, Jael knew she wasn’t fully in control here. She stepped up to one wall, via her aug commanding a safe to open. A steel bung a foot across eased out then hinged to one side. She reached in, picked up the memstore, then held it out to the golem. The test would come, she felt certain, when Penny Royal authenticated that small item.

  The golem took the memstore between its finger and thumb and she noticed it had retained the syntheflesh pads of its fingers. It paused, frozen in place, then abruptly its rib cage split down the center and one half of it hinged aside. Within lay optics, the grey lump of a power supply, and various interconnected units like steel organs. There were also dark masses spread like multiarmed starfish that Jael suspected had not been there when this golem was originally constructed. It pressed the mem-store into the center of one of these masses, which writhed as if in pain and closed over it.

  “Unrecognized programming format,” said the golem.

  No shit, thought Jael.

  The golem continued, “Estimate at one hundred and twenty gigabytes, synaptic mapping and chronology of implantation . . . .”

  Jael felt a sudden foreboding. Though measuring a human mind in bytes wasn’t particularly accurate, the best guestimate actually lay in the range of a few hundred megabytes, so this memstore was an order of magnitude larger. But then her assumption, and that of those who had found it, was that the memstore encompassed the life of one Atheter. This was not necessarily the case. Maybe the memories and mind maps of a thousand Atheter were stored in that little chunk of technology.

  Finally the golem straightened up, reached inside its chest, and removed the memplant, passing it back to Jael. “We will begin when the tunnel connects,” it said. “How will you move the gabbleduck?”

  “Easy enough,” said Jael, and went to find her tranquilizer gun.

  Ulriss woke me with a “Rise and shine, the game is afoot . . . well, in a couple of hours—the signal is no longer Dopplering so Jael’s ship is back in the real.”

  I lay there blinking at the ceiling as the lights gradually came up, then pushed back the heat sheet, heaved myself over the edge of the bunk, and dropped to the floor. I staggered, feeling slightly dizzy, my limbs leaden. It always takes me a little while to get functional after sleep, hence the two-hour warning from Ulriss. After a moment, I turned to peer at Gene, who lay slumbering in the lower bunk.

  “Integrity of the collar?” I inquired.

  “She hasn’t touched it,” the ship AI replied, “though she did try to persuade me to release her by appealing to my sense of loyalty to the organization that brought me into being.”

  “And your reply?”

  “Whilst no right-thinking AI wants the Prador to get their hands on a living Atheter or one of their memstores, your intent to retrieve that store and by proxy carry out a sentence already passed on Jael Feogril should prevent rather than facilitate that. Polity plans will be hampered should you succeed, but, beside moral obligations, I am a free agent and Penny Royal’s survival or otherwise is a matter of indifference to me. Should you fail, however, your death will not hamper Polity plans.”

  “Hey thanks—it’s nice to know you care.”

  Sleepily, from the lower bunk, Gene said, “You’re rather sensitive for someone who was once described as a walking abattoir.”

  “Ah,” I said, “so you’re frightened of me. That’s why you gave me the coding of that U-space signal?”

  She pushed back her blanket and sat up. She’d stripped down to a thin singlet and I found the sight rather distracting, as I suspect was the intention. Reaching up, she fingered the metal collar around her neck. “Of course I’m frightened—you’ve got control of this collar.”

  “Which will inject you with a short duration paralytic, not blow your head off as I earlier suggested,” I replied.

  She nodded. “You also suggested that if I didn’t tell you what you wanted to know you would demonstrate on me the kind of things Jael did to you.”

  “I’ve never tortured anyone,” I said, before remembering that she’d read my ECS record. “Well . . . not anyone that didn’t deserve it.”

  “You would have used drugs, and the other techniques Jael used on you.”

  “True”—I nodded—”but I didn’t need to.” I gazed at her. “I think you’ve been involved in this operation for a while and rather resent not being in at the kill. I was your opportunity to change that. I understand— in the past I ended up in similar situations myself.”

  “Yes, you liked to be in at the kill,” she said, and stooped down to pick up her clothing from where she had abandoned it on the floor—she’d sacked out after me, which had been okay as soon as I put the collar on her since Ulriss had been watching her constantly.

  I grunted and went off to find a triple espresso.

  After a breakfast of bacon, eggs, mushroom steak, beans, a liter of grapenut juice, and more coffee, I reached the stage of being able to walk through doors without bouncing off the doorjamb. Gene ate a megaprawn steak, drank a similar quantity of the juice, and copious quantities of white tea. I thought I might try her breakfast the next time I used stores or the synthesizer. Supposing there would be a next time—only a few minutes remained before we surfaced from U-space. Gene followed me into the cockpit and sat in the copilot’s chair, which was about as redundant as the pilot’s chair I sat in with the AI Ulriss running the ship.

  We surfaced. The screen briefly showed stars, then banding began to travel across it. I glanced at the additional controls for chameleonware and saw that they had been activated.

  “Ulriss—”

  “Jael’s ship is down on the surface of a free-roaming planetoid next to an old vessel that seems to have been stripped and from which bond-ed-regolith tunnels have spread.”

  “So Penny Royal is there and might see us,” I supplied.

  “True,” Ulriss replied, but that was not my first concern. The view on the screen swung across, magnified, and switched to light amplification, bringing to the fore the planetoid itself and the Prador cruiser in orbit around it.

  “Oh, shit,” I opined.

  We watched the cruiser as, using that stuttering burn of the fusion engine, Ulriss took us closer to the planetoid. Luckily there had been no reaction from the Prador ship to our arrival, and as we drew closer I saw a shuttle detach and head down.

  “I wonder if this is part of Jael’s plan,” I said. “I would have thought she’d get the memstore loaded, then meet the Prador in some less vulnerable situation.”

  “Agreed,” said Gene through gritted teeth. She glanced across at me. “What do you intend to do?”

  “I intend to land.�
�� I adjusted to screen controls to give me a view of Jael’s ship, the one next to it, and the surrounding spread of pipelike tunnels. “She’s probably in there somewhere with the memstore and the gabbleduck. Shouldn’t be a problem getting inside.”

  We watched the shuttle continue its descent and the subsequent flare of its thrusters as it decelerated over the network of tunnels.

  “It could get . . . somewhat fraught down there. Do you have weapons?” Gene asked.

  “I have weapons.”

  The Prador shuttle was now landing next to Jael’s vessel.

  “Let me come in with you,” said Gene.

  I didn’t answer for a while. I just watched. Five Prador clad in armored spacesuits and obviously armed to the mandibles departed the shuttle. They went over to one of the tunnels and gathered there. I focused in closer in time to see them move back to get clear of an explosion. It seemed apparent that they weren’t there at either Jael’s or Penny Royal’s invitation.

  “Of course you can come,” I said eventually.

  Jael frowned at the distant sound of the explosion and the roar of atmosphere being sucked out—the latter sound was abruptly truncated as some emergency door closed. There seemed only one explanation: the Prador had placed a tracker on the Kobashi when she had gone to meet them.

  “Can you deal with them?” she asked.

  “I can deal with them,” Penny Royal replied through its submind golem.

  The AI itself continued working. Before Jael, the gabbleduck was stretched upright, steel bands around its body, and a framework clamping its head immovable. It kept reaching up with one of its foreclaws to probe and tug at the framework, but, heavily tranquilized, it soon lost interest, lowered its limb, and began muttering to itself.