Dark Intelligence (21 page)

Flute had manufactured thirty railgun missiles. Did I really need any more? I had anti-personnel lasers, a working particle cannon and CTDs stolen from Isobel. If these weren’t enough to kill a black AI, then a few extra railgun missiles weren’t going to make much difference, surely? Then I reconsidered.

“Flute,” I said. “I want you to ensure a full stock of railgun missiles, so we will stay here until that is done—if necessary shift us away from the sun for cooling.”

“That would be over eight hundred missiles,” Flute replied.

“No matter. I also want you to scan this system for radioactives.” I paused, then continued, “You said we are capable of making fission bombs, but what about fusion bombs?”

“They can be made.”

“Hardfield containment fusion? Multi-megaton range?”

“Yes—it may be possible to make a fusion bomb ranging into the hundreds of megatons. That is if we use a kiloton-range CTD as the detonating package and hardfield-contained deuterium in the outer shell.”

I certainly had the weapons to kill a black AI, but they might not be enough to root it out of the tunnels in its home. Better then to ensure those tunnels ceased to exist.

9

BLITE

The journey had felt interminable and there was absolutely no doubt for either Blite or his crew that something … dangerous and strange was aboard
The Rose
. Blite had heard tales of weird supernatural goings-on aboard some ships, but had never believed them. He always considered such stories irrational when there were so many other logical explanations available. And there was so much in present technology that could be mistaken for the supernatural. He still didn’t believe the legends, but he now knew how it felt to be aboard a haunted ship.

For twenty hours after Penny Royal revealed itself in the hold, they’d made preparations for escape once
The Rose
returned to realspace. All the time they were doing this, the tension grew with the expectation that the AI would grow bored with toying with them and come after them. Finally, after a further ten hours of waiting, discussion, argument and unbearable tension, Blite decided it was time to go to bed. He just couldn’t maintain such a level of fear. Sleep brought nightmares: replays of that encounter all those years ago, but now it contained novel twists. These involved a screaming crowd of partially dismembered people and a deep-rooted terror of a CTD blast that Blite just knew was about to incinerate them all. Despite the nightmares he woke rested and energetic, but then just a few hours of wakefulness drained him.

The sounds of the ship were not the same as they had been, the difference akin to rapping a rotten log rather than a healthy tree. Everything around him felt less substantial, less reliable. Checking cams in the hold, all he could see were black and silver kaleidoscope-like images. These did nothing to explain the extra power drains there, nor the rise in temperature. Then other things began to happen. Ship’s diagnostics began reporting faults which, before they could even be inspected, vanished. The ship shuddered once—something that shouldn’t be possible in U-space—and which could only be a source of terror to those experiencing it. After that, Blite talked to his ship mind.

“Leven,” he said, “what the hell was that?”

The Golem mind Leven took his time replying. He probably had no more control over this ship now than Blite himself.

“Penny Royal,” he said leadenly.

“What did it do?”

“It’s playing with the Calabi-Yau frames and other components in the drive pod. It seems to be recalibrating the drive.”

“What?” Blite called up cam views into the engine shell, where earlier he had sent Chont and Haber to run some tests—just to keep them busy. Kaleidoscope images again. Trying other cameras, he found the very married couple on the other side of the bulkhead door leading into the engine shell. They were standing facing each other—not talking.

“Everything okay down there?” he asked through the intercom. They both turned simultaneously to look up at the nearest cam, then simultaneously said, “Everything is fine.”

“I want you to go back in and check again,” Blite ordered.

After a few minutes of watching them trying to open the bulkhead door and failing, he said, “Okay, leave it.”

If Penny Royal didn’t want them in there, they wouldn’t be getting in. It also turned out that everything wasn’t in fact fine with either Chont or Haber. Over the ensuing days, this previously inseparable man and woman spent a great deal of effort trying to avoid each other, then finally stopped sharing a cabin. Haber moved her things into one of the passenger cabins.

Brondohohan was next. Shortly after Leven had informed Blite that U-space drive efficiency had increased by eight per cent, the big man said, matter-of-factly, “My brother visited me last night.”

Greer was ever a woman to point out the obvious. Her speech was as blunt as her heavy-worlder features, and she replied, “Last I heard you had only one brother and he was toast ten years ago.”

Brondohohan and his brother were initiated in artificial wombs some eighty years apart—the brother sometime before the war and Brond himself sometime after. His brother—Mandohohan—Blite recollected, had reached that stage of life in which boredom became the greatest threat. He’d tried one of the most dangerous sports available: surfing pyroclastic flows.

He hadn’t been very good at it.

“Nevertheless,” said Brond. “It was my brother.”

Next it was Greer’s turn. It took four of them to subdue her and stop her trying to rearrange her face with a commando knife. Finally, drugged to the eyeballs and strapped to a gurney in the medical bay, she admitted that she didn’t want to be a heavy-worlder any more—she wanted to be beautiful. When Blite asked her how trying to cut off her own face might help, she’d just given him a very puzzled look. While she was still there, undergoing some sort of treatment involving drugs and lights that the autodoc had dragged out of its memory bank, Ikbal began his muttering. He didn’t know he was doing it until he was told. And when he tried to stop himself, he started on the scratching and pulling out pieces of his white hair. But it was when Martina entered Blite’s cabin, naked, and demanded he “fuck her hard” that Blite decided enough was enough. Martina had been a lesbian ever since he had known her—her dislike for heterosexual sex almost morbid.

Blite left her sleeping on his bed, a knock-out drug patch stuck to her neck, and headed to one of the ship’s stores to pick up a small atomic shear. He made his way back to the hold airlock, then carved out Ikbal’s welding job with the shear’s force-blade. It took him mere minutes and he wondered why he’d thought it would in any way stop what lay on the other side. There was no doubt that tools like this were part of Penny Royal’s body. Soon he was inside the airlock. Noting that the air in the hold was still good, he opened the inner lock door and stepped through.

Once inside, Blite just stood there with his mouth hanging open. The back wall of the hold, along with most of another wall, was missing. Somehow their materials had been converted into organic-looking pillars and crossbeams. From where he was standing, he could see all the way to the U-space drive. Notable too, were clumps of hardware that had sprouted from the ship’s structure like puffballs, interlinked by a mycelium of optics and bright silver s-con wires. Penny Royal was where Blite had last seen it. But now it lay right down on the deck in simple black sea-urchin form—if such a creature could measure ten feet across.

“What have you done to my fucking ship!” Blite roared. Then, remembering just what he was shouting at, along with his own intention to abandon ship as soon as possible, he felt foolish. “What have you done?”

Some spines twitched towards him but otherwise there was no response. He moved further in, right up to those spines, but felt decidedly vulnerable. With his skin crawling, he stepped back. He walked over to one of the puffball objects, pressed a hand against it and found it solid, also noting small lights gleaming in deep recesses in the surface. There were occasional holes through to packed and highly complex tech. He turned and sat down on it.

“I want you to leave my crew alone,” he said.

Again that twitch of spines, then a silvery tentacle extruded from underneath the AI and rose up into a two-foot-high spike. While he watched, the end of the spike, just below the point, swelled into a small sphere which opened lids to reveal a blue human eye. Blite recognized this as an acknowledgement of his presence.

“Leave my crew alone,” he repeated.

“Overspill,” said Penny Royal. “Eight must be controlled.”

“I’ve no idea what you’re talking about.”

“Previous difficulty,” said Penny Royal, then, “Fixed.”

The eye-stalk abruptly retracted and Blite just knew that was all the response he would get. After a while longer he stood and left the hold, just in time to hear Martina’s shout of, “Oh no! No!” As he walked back towards the bridge she rushed past him, his bed sheet wrapped around her body; she paused to give him a horrified look, then ran on. He halted, turned and walked back down the corridor to Medical. Greer glanced over at him, still seeming hazy, but also apparently puzzled at her surroundings.

“Still want to be beautiful?” he asked.

It took her a moment to understand him, then her expression turned indignant.

“I am beautiful,” she said.

He released the reinforced straps holding her and went to find Brondohohan on the bridge. The man looked over at him with a pursed mouth and annoyed expression.

“I see Ikbal has stopped scratching,” said Brond. “And suddenly I can distinguish between reality and hallucination.”

“It’s like sharing a ship with a tornado,” said Blite, seating himself in one of the chairs. “I don’t think there’s any intent to hurt us, this time, but it might just inadvertently rip us apart.”

“A mental maelstrom,” said Brond.

“Quite.”

Haber moved back in with Chont after another day, and only a little while after that did Blite learn what their problem had been. They had always been close—a closeness some had described as practically telepathic. After their visit to the engine room they’d found themselves
really
sensing each other’s emotions, along with the babble behind coherent thought. It had been just too intense, even frightening. Martina refused to speak to him for quite some time afterwards but, when he forced a meeting with her, she reluctantly accepted that all he had done was knock her out.

Finally, the U-space drive shut down, for they had arrived at their destination. Blite was on the bridge with Martina and Greer, and all three looked at each other and failed to react. They had planned to abandon ship at this point yet, during the journey, something had changed. Faced now with the actual moment, they did nothing.

“We’re just out from an E6 green-belt planet,” Leven announced. “Penny Royal is presently focusing ship’s scanners on all orbital objects.”

“It’s looking for something,” said Martina.

“No shit,” Greer replied.

“Can you give us a view?” asked Blite.

He then immediately felt the push and shove of thrusters as the ship’s aspect changed, swinging a milky yellow orb into view.

“You can control thrusters?” Blite asked.

“It seems I can do anything I like,” replied Leven, “until I do something Penny Royal doesn’t like.” Then, after a pause, “It’s found something.”

“Show me,” said Blite.

A frame appeared superimposed on one side of the planet, which then expanded, but there was nothing in it. Blite was about to ask about that when Leven said, “I’m not even sure what it’s found. There’s some kind of odd low-level U-space signature there. Penny Royal just sent a heavily coded pulse to that area.” Another pause. “Ah, chameleonware.”

As Blite watched, the designated area of space shimmered and something folded out of it. The thing looked like a spinning top a hundred feet across, its spindle a weird semi-organic tangle. After a moment, he saw that the rim of the thing was an old-style Tokomak fusion torus—much like those the Polity had used to power orbital weapons.

“Some kind of particle cannon?” Martina suggested.

It didn’t look much like a cannon to Blite.

“It’s powering up now and that U-signature is strengthening.” The focus on the object drew back, and Leven then highlighted something in red—a tube spearing down towards the planet from one end of the object’s spindle.

“Some bizarre kind of ionizing scoop-field to feed the Tokomak from the atmosphere,” said Leven. Then, “The resultant energy is being U-transmitted away.”

“Where to?” asked Blite.

“I can’t tell—it’s just going into U-space.”

The focus closed in again to show the object speckled with lights like spider eyes, a haze of energy all around it. Next, just a moment later, it folded out of existence again.

“Chameleonware re-engaged,” said Leven needlessly.

Blite stared at the empty frame, the machine they had just seen sitting leaden in his mind. Penny Royal had activated the thing or, rather, reactivated it, and it was now putting out a great deal of power. He had no idea what this was all about, but didn’t like it at all. Even when the frame closed, he still seemed to feel the Tokomak out there, grazing on and fusing atmosphere and feeding the resulting power into
something
.

Leven now said, “Penny Royal just began scanning the surface.”

Was there a link between that machine and an object down on the surface? Blite felt certain there wasn’t, that the machine had been activated and now the black AI was focusing on other concerns.

The fusion drive fired then—the orb of the world rapidly expanding. Blite felt a relaxing of tension as the rest of the crew joined them, still none of them showing any inclination to make a rush for the shuttle. Haber asked what was going on and Martina explained, replaying a vid of the machine they had just seen. They discussed the thing and speculated, but could come to no conclusions. Haber and Chont eventually wandered off while Brond and Ikbal installed themselves in the other two chairs.

Over the ensuing hour, Penny Royal adjusted their course and Blite realized its intention was to scan the entire surface.