by Neal Asher
‘Did you love me?’ he asked accepting that the amalgamated being before him was partly the woman he had loved.
‘No, I did not,’ she replied, ‘but I love you now.’
Just one question and one answer left him mute until they surfaced from U-space within sensor range of the wanderer planetoid – home of the black AI Penny Royal.
A prador dreadnought hung out there in vacuum. It resembled the rounded carapace of a terran crab, fashioned of brassy metal, its guts ripped out and strewn across a hundred thousand miles. Focusing on some of the debris, Whip saw creatures like some mix of wolf spiders and fiddler crabs, but large and armoured. These were prador first-children and second-children, but showed no signs of life.
‘I wonder what happened,’ Dr Whip said, speaking at last.
Susan had, annoyingly, taken the only seat on the bridge, and sat with her knees clutched to her chest like some shivering waif.
‘It’s not just humans who have their dealings with Penny Royal, Aster, but the prador too.’ Susan paused, and Dr Whip sensed the energy signatures of her internal nanotech ramping up. ‘A deal turned sour and arrogant prador coming here to exact vengeance on the entity they had tried to cheat. That planetoid contains some serious weaponry, and it is best not to go there without invitation.’
She waved a hand at the console, and a new image resolved in the laminate of the chainglass screen. Now they gazed upon the planetoid itself, cold and dead and no more sinister than a trillion others of its kind strewn across the galaxy.
She turned to gaze at him. ‘And we won’t be receiving an invitation.’
Now he reached out, groping, searching through the strata of the universe, locally, across debris and the whispers of dying computing to a hot intense point where strange machines seemed to be twisting reality. The mechanisms of the planetoid were there, as active and dangerous as a fleet of battleships. They contained intelligence, of a kind, but as adjuncts to a centre – layers of computing about an absent core.
‘Penny Royal isn’t home,’ he stated, disappointment hanging inside him like a lead hook.
‘No, it isn’t,’ Susan agreed.
Dr Whip stepped back and leant his weight against one of the side consoles, certainly disappointed yet, somehow, relieved.
‘You’ve been chasing rumour, following up on sightings, talking to those who have had personal encounters and always, it seems, Penny Royal has stayed beyond your grasp,’ said Susan. ‘Could it be that in your heart the search is all, and that you don’t want to find that AI?’
‘Nonsense,’ said Dr Whip, suddenly intensely uncomfortable.
‘So why is it that you haven’t decided what you will do when you finally stand before Penny Royal?’ Her chair swung round seemingly of its own accord to face him. ‘You have healed people, your steady transformation making you increasingly adept at doing so, yet vaguely you search for the AI that wrought its changes in you and vaguely have some expectation of that encounter.’
‘It would be pointless to ask how you know my mind so well,’ said Dr Whip.
‘I have examined it very closely, which is why I love you.’ She blinked at him, slowly. ‘So what will you do?’
‘It isn’t human love,’ Dr Whip procrastinated.
‘How could it be? Do you see any humans here?’
‘Admittedly not.’
‘What are you going to do, Aster?’
Under the intensity of her gaze, the vague need in him for some resolution, some explanation, something from Penny Royal, clarified in his mind. Of course, it should have been obvious to him right from the beginning – the perfect story arc and conclusion. He knew precisely where he fitted now, and knew precisely what he would do.
‘I am going to heal Penny Royal,’ he stated.
‘Then it’s time.’
Without any orders from Dr Whip, his ship dropped into U-space, coordinates set, destination as inevitable as fate.
The world was hot, an oven of a place where humans survived only at the poles, and even then spent most of their lives in hotsuits or inside insulated houses. Susan stood out amidst them, clad in her usual colourful attire, with the addition of sunglasses, seemingly enjoying the sunshine and a winter temperature in the low sixties. But the looks she received weren’t because as a Golem the temperature was irrelevant to her, but because Golem were generally loyal to the Polity the people here did not trust.
Dr Whip thought the street looked like something transplanted from a Mediterranean preserve, only the houses weren’t white-washed but built of reflective white and highly insulating foamstone. The vines growing up over pergolas were genetically adapted bougainvillea, and an alien plant sporting blue leaves and nodular black peppercorns favoured in some cuisines, but only after the chemical treatments rendered their lethal poisons inert. Meanwhile the gardens, with their stunning arrays of colour, were protected by shimmershields.
‘Do they all know, or just the ruling families?’ Dr Whip asked, gesturing to the people thronging the street.
‘They have all been warned in a general broadcast,’ Susan replied, ‘and the AIs in the ships above have offered assistance should they require it. However, it seems Penny Royal’s interest is in the ruins at the equator, so is no immediate physical threat to them.’
‘I would have expected the Polity to do something, despite the situation here.’
Susan shook her head. ‘My kind take matters of jurisdiction very seriously. They have offered to land at the equator to seize Penny Royal, but that is precisely where the people here don’t want them.’
‘Because of the ruins.’
‘Because of the ruins,’ Susan agreed.
It was an odd situation, Dr Whip felt. Though the people of this world lived at the poles, the source of their wealth lay at the equator, scattered across a flat island sitting at the centre of a boiling ocean. One of the three known but extinct alien races had once lived here – the Jain. Apparently, evidence existed proving they had moved this world in the process of transforming it to their preferred environment, which was hot, wet, and with an atmospheric pressure twice that of Earth’s. On that island, the locals had found Jain tech artefacts that commanded fortunes in the Polity, because they were dangerous and because the AIs did not want them to fall into the wrong hands. Trade was good here and fortunes being made, however, the people felt sure that the AIs intended to subsume their world into the Polity and take control of the equatorial excavations. In fact, the ruling family already believed that Penny Royal’s presence here was some sort of ruse towards that end.
‘Here we are,’ said Susan, as they turned a corner into another street.
This led straight down to a harbour, the cluttered scene of loading docks and huge barges, cranes, jet foils and grav rafts seeming to shrink into insignificance before the wide hot vermillion ocean below the pink sky.
‘That?’ As they walked down, Dr Whip pointed towards a huge grav-raft settled on the waves, where armed personnel in brown hotsuits incorporating dish-like helmets were loading equipment.
‘Indeed.’
Of course, the inhabitants could not simply ignore the presence of a rogue AI at their excavations and, while they did not want Polity intervention, they had to do something. The ruling family was dispatching a military force along with some serious firepower to oust Penny Royal. Dr Whip felt a degree of pity for them, remembering that gutted prador dreadnought out by the black AI’s planetoid. Meanwhile, after some negotiation, the rulers here had allowed Polity observers to accompany this mission. Susan and Dr Whip were those observers.
As they drew closer to the dock a woman approached them, trailing two subordinates. She was clad in a chameleoncloth hotsuit made distinct from those the others wore by blue armbands, epaulets and, rather than one of those dish helmets, which rather reminded Dr Whip of the kind of headwear worn during World War I on Earth, a flat peaked cap incorporated into her suit. On her breast, she als
o had a patch of chameleoncloth rolled and clipped back to reveal a small display of what appeared to be military decorations.
‘MC Severax,’ she said brusquely as she came to stand before them, gloved hands on her hips. ‘You’re the Polity observers.’
‘Pleased to meet you,’ said Susan, holding out an ignored hand.
Mission Commander Severax gazed at each of them in turn, then said, ‘Neither of you is human.’
‘That is so.’ Susan lowered her hand.
‘Our agreement specified two observers and only one of them could be an artificial intelligence,’ said Severax.
‘My intelligence is not artificial,’ said Dr Whip.
‘But you don’t require a hotsuit.’
‘My body has undergone certain –’
‘MC Severax,’ Susan interrupted, ‘allow me to introduce Dr Whip.’
Whip felt glad not to have to continue with his explanation. Severax meanwhile fell silent and stared at him intently, her hands now down at her sides and her mouth falling open. He probed her gently and realised she had just received some kind of shock. He sensed excitement in her, whereupon she abruptly closed her mouth and raised a gloved hand to gesture at the vessel behind.
‘You can wait for me in the wheelhouse,’ she said. ‘We’ll be done loading in half an hour.’ She turned abruptly and marched off, her two subordinates casting glances behind as they followed her.
‘You underestimate your own fame, Doctor,’ said Susan, leading the way to one of the gangplanks stretching from the dock to the grav-raft. ‘There aren’t many people this close to the Graveyard who don’t know who you are and, of those military personnel who know you, there aren’t any who would not be glad to have you along on a mission.’
‘Really?’
‘Really, and especially a mission like this one, which even MC Severax realises is very unlikely to succeed and will very likely result in heavy casualties.’
‘Why then are they going?’ he asked as they walked along the deck of the raft towards the fore.
‘It’s a gesture,’ Susan replied. ‘They have to assert their authority here and make some response to Penny Royal, even if that response is likely to fail.’
‘Stupid.’
‘Yes.’
Serpents swam in the boiling water, long glassy things with paddle limbs like swan feathers and heads out of Chinese dragon fantasies. A large shoal of them accompanied the small armada for a little while on the way out, then mostly seemed to lose interest. Some remained, however, and these Dr Whip probed and studied. Their insides were fascinating and, obviously, a modification from some form evolved for colder waters. Were these too a product of the Jain? No, searching his massive data store Dr Whip came up with the answer. They were an import a mere forty years old from a similarly hot world within the Polity where geneticists had patched them together from the Terran DNA of seahorses and the alien code of a native creature of that world.
‘So what’s the plan?’ asked Susan.
MC Severax stood in a steering lectern, her hand down on a palm control. She glanced at Susan and seemed disinclined to reply, but when the Whip turned to face her, she did.
‘We’ve transmitted first requests and then demands to Penny Royal that it leave our world. We sent these in every way we could. We even sent a sub-AI drone,’ she replied.
‘What happened to it?’ asked Whip quickly, leaving Susan’s next question stillborn.
‘It came back,’ said Severax. ‘It was no longer sub-AI and it screamed as it dismantled itself in the Senate.’
‘The plan?’ Susan pushed.
Severax glanced at her in irritation. ‘We fired a missile too – five kiloton warhead.’
‘And that came back?’ Susan asked.
‘It flew straight into the Senate building and settled on the senate floor.’ She shook her head angrily. ‘The area has been evacuated – no one dares touch the damned thing.’
Whip’s attention strayed to the other vessels accompanying this big grav-raft. He could feel the multiple lives inside and counted just over a thousand heavily-armed troops. Other vessels contained mosquito autoguns but, surprisingly, not much in the way of large ordnance.
‘No further missiles to be fired,’ he stated.
‘No,’ said Severax.
‘Because they might be sent back armed this time?’
Severax stiffened. ‘There’s that, and Penny Royal’s present location. The AI was out on the sifting plain when we fired the first missile. It’s now in the ruins.’
Whip sensed her resentment. She was a military commander already hamstrung before going into battle.
‘We go in by land,’ she continued. ‘Then we blow the shit out of Penny Royal.’ She turned to Susan. ‘That’s the plan.’
Had their vessels been conventional boats and not grav-craft, landfall would have been a problem, Dr Whip saw. The coastline was a stone wave – a five-metre high cliff made concave by the attrition of the sea and rounded elsewhere by erosion. As they approached, the grav-barge heaved underneath them and rose out of the sea to bring more of the landscape ahead into view. A flat plain of rock and orange dirt lay beyond the shore – that mentioned sifting plain – but only for a mile or so for it ended against a forest. The trees, like massive asparagus sprouts, stood widely spaced. Very quickly, the armada reached this, then it slowed and all its vessels began to drop to the ground.
‘Why not go over the top of those trees?’ Dr Whip asked as they disembarked.
‘Nowhere to land on the other side,’ replied Severax. She gestured towards the forest. ‘The ruins are in the middle of this lot.’
‘An attack from the air, then?’ he suggested.
‘No, our tacticians feel that the systems of our transports will be too easy for Penny Royal to seize control of.’
Whip glanced at Susan, who shook her head. Implicit in that statement was the simple reality that the black AI could probably seize control of any computer system these people possessed. They were going up against it poorly armed, poorly prepared and with unreliable technology. This gesture warfare would be costly for those now disembarking from the surrounding craft. As Severax stepped down from her podium and headed for the exit he plodded along behind her, remembering the last time he’d been in a similar situation. It had been a fight between two salvage organisations inside an old prador ground base. They had been inside what they were fighting for, so did not use highly destructive weapons, and the gunplay had devolved into hand-to-hand combat. Whip, employed by one side, had helped who he could, but many died before he could reach them.
‘How many of your people have memplants?’ he asked.
Severax glanced round at him as her staff approached. She reached up and touched a small red patch on her hotsuit on her left shoulder.
‘About half,’ she said.
Whip nodded and then placed his doctor’s bag on the ground as a row of chrome-shiny mosquito guns marched past him. He opened it and gazed at the contents for a moment, shook his head then allowed his senses to range. In a moment, he picked up the memplants many of the soldiers contained. If these were badly injured, he would merely shut down their consciousness so they did not suffer. The others, however, would be a big problem. Yes, he could deal with many injuries, but they were not his major hurdle, because here that was the heat. The moment a projectile or energy weapons hit any of these people, their hotsuits would be open, thus exposing them to oven temperatures.
Whip pressed a tab in the bag and watched a small console fold out, then, with a sour smile, pressed the tab again and watched it fold back. He had not needed to program the thing manually in twenty years. Next, he reached into the bag’s system with his mind and selected what he required. The microbots he chose sported numerous spider-like spinnerets and where generally used on victims of fire – quickly knitting a temporary layer of artificial skin over burns. Just a few tweaks resulted in a tougher more heat-resist
ant skin. He set the bots to multiplying in two spray containers then took them out of the bag.
‘Here,’ he said, tossing one to Susan.
She had been facing away, but snapped round and caught the thing with ease.
‘They do have suit repair kits,’ she said.
‘I know, but some of the damage might be extensive.’
MC Severax now moved off with her command staff, but others were approaching. Their hotsuits were brown like the rest, but also bore light blue stripes. He recognised a badge on the right breast of each of these: a caduceus, but again the wrong one. Dr Whip felt a flash of annoyance, then shivered – the hint of some knowledge just evading his grasp.
‘Dr Volger,’ said an individual stepping out from this new group. ‘It’s a pleasure to meet you.’ He held out a gloved hand.
Dr Whip stood up and shook that hand.
‘They’re moving in now,’ said Susan.
Whip looked over and saw this was indeed the case. Mosquito autoguns had formed a line and strode into the trees, the scattered troops moving in behind. After these floated ordnance-loaded grav-sleds the medics would no doubt later utilize for casualties.
‘You’ll be joining us I hope?’ Volger asked, gesturing to the rest of the medics.
‘I presume you’ll be spreading out amidst the troops,’ said Whip.
‘Of course,’ said Volger, irritated, worried. That Whip would stay with a group of medics had not really been the man’s question.
‘I’ll do what I can,’ said Whip.
He squatted down again, closed his bag and took it up. Without a backward glance, he strode towards the troops, now reaching out to them with his extraordinary senses. The greatest concentration of those without memplants advanced on the right wing, so he headed there. Soon he walked amidst them, troops glancing at him, some smiling, others just frightened. He moved on, aware of Susan falling in to one side of him and one of the medics on his other side.
‘Do you feel it?’ Susan asked.
