Dark Intelligence (45 page)

“So that really is their aim?”

“It is.”

“Very well, Cvorn only. But let us return to the matter of my satisfaction. You seem very sure but haven’t explained yourself.”

“Simple enough, really. Penny Royal seems to be in the process of sorting out the messes it made in the past and tying up unfinished business. It also seems to be laying the groundwork for something else—but for what I have no idea. Anyway, you, Sverl, are unfinished business. My guess is that even if you don’t go in search of Penny Royal it will, at some point, come for you.”

Sverl wasn’t sure if he liked that idea, but it would have to be enough. He would stay here and wait to intercept whatever Cvorn threw this way. He had no choice.

“Isobel is going to die,” he stated.

“Not necessarily, but going where she’s going, she’s certainly biting off more than she can chew.”

That particular metaphor translated directly into the prador language and was much used even now. Sverl guessed that all sentient races with mouths and stomachs would have metaphors that were much the same.

“I don’t see how there could be any other outcome but her death.”

“You don’t? Is death the resolution
you
seek?”

“No.”

“Neither is it the one Isobel seeks. Always remember that Penny Royal gives its victims what they want—often providing more of what they want than they in fact wanted.”

“I don’t understand.”

“Few people do,” the drone replied, and broke the communication.

SPEAR

The edge of the rocky shelf on the seaward side of the town was just visible from the hotel’s enclosed balcony. Beyond it lay the mud pan, then a flute-grass peninsula separating it from the sea. And on the mud pan were scattered the shells of dead tricones. The coastal town of Chattering sat on a long flat rock, saved from the grinding mouthparts of those molluscs through being surrounded by that briny mud. Had it been further inland, the rock would have been ground down to nothing in a couple of centuries.

“They have a whole craft industry here devoted to making objects from the shells,” said Riss.

“What kind of objects?” I asked, grateful that the drone was now speaking to me.

After I told her we wouldn’t be heading back to the ship and the Graveyard yet she had snapped at me. She wondered if I’d lost my enthusiasm for hunting down a mass murderer, and generally made acerbic comments about my lack of devotion to duty. It had been a rather hollow tirade, I felt, as if her heart wasn’t in it.

“Fancy boxes, vases and cups—all the usual tat.” The drone turned from gazing out across the town to study me. “So now we’re going to visit a jewellery shop.”

“Yes, we are.”

“I doubt you will learn anything new there,” she replied. “It’s not as if anyone there will know Penny Royal’s location.”

“I’m feeling my way,” I said. “I think that leaving here now would be too hasty. There are things to learn here.” I turned and stepped from the balcony back into the apartment, which I can only describe as the Masadan version of rustic. It possessed furniture made of woven flute grass bonded under a thin layer of transparent resin. A kitchen area consisted of a vending machine providing a few strange drinks and snacks—the intention doubtless being for me to spend my money in the restaurant on the floor below. In addition, the bathroom was a single sanitary booth of the kind designed for small spaceships. I walked over to the bed, picked up my rucksack and shouldered it.

“Are you coming?”

I headed for the door, Riss emitting an irritated hiss as she followed me down into the foyer. A fat jovial catadapt man sat behind the counter. He stood up and grinned.

“Don’t forget your mask,” he said.

I reached into my rucksack to take it out and he nodded, his grin freezing in place as he transferred his gaze to Riss. The revolving pressure door took us out onto a narrow street formed from the town’s base stone. This had footpaths worn into it alongside the buildings, while its centre had been tiled level with slabs of hard white ceramic to carry the few groundcars here. I breathed the muggy swamp air for a moment, started to feel out of breath, then donned the mask. Checking the map in my aug, I turned right and headed along the path, that weird feeling of déjà vu hitting me strongly. I’d never been to this world before, yet I felt that I could find Markham’s without a map. I picked up my pace, trying to shake off the feeling. But, unlike previous occasions, it just grew stronger the closer I came to my destination.

At the centre of the town was a small square, overlooked on four sides by little baroque churches that could have been transported here directly from some ancient Italian town on Earth. One of them was still in use—religion being a difficult affliction to cure even in people who’d suffered under the vicious Theocracy here. The other three had been converted into an administrative centre and shopping malls. At the centre of the square an object was concealed behind scaffolding draped with silvery monomer. There was still, apparently, much debate about what to do with the Cage. Some felt it should be retained as part of their history and as a curiosity for tourists. Others still remembered friends and relatives dying in it and wanted it torn down and replaced with a fountain.

I headed through the archway, sans doors, into one of the shopping malls, or converted church. The shoppers stopped to stare at my companion, but moved on as if embarrassed by their gauche parochialism. Here were various concerns packed with Polity products: augs, shimmershield breather masks, atomic shears, suitcase-manufactories—the whole works. And behind another window, I saw mannequins in the forms of various human adaptations and guessed what was being sold there. Ahead lay Markham’s, which possessed a complete chain-glass front with a shim-mershield glinting across the single rectangular entrance. Behind the glass, jewellery glittered in various standard displays. Then every now and again, hardfields picked up items and set them dancing through the air, intermittently flashing holograms to give the prices.

I halted and stared at the place, finding myself horrified by its unexpected crassness. I turned and gazed at the other shops within the converted church with a weird feeling of offence rising in me and ended up looking through the arched entrance towards the Cage. Around me the noise and bustle faded, as did the shops, and I saw the previous interior of the church, stark and spartan.

Rows of people were down on their knees on the stone, their clothing ragged and bulging at the fore as if each and every one of them was pregnant, the men included. But the cloth in fact concealed their scoles—large aphid-like creatures that fed them oxygen in exchange for blood. They prayed loudly, ever casting a wary eye over the black-uniformed proctors, the Theocracy’s religious police. These patrolled the building, swinging shock batons. I felt my eyes filling with tears as I looked towards the open wooden doors and the Cage
.

The five inside it were naked, starving and hollow-eyed. They knew the ten days they had been given to make their peace with God were coming to an end, because the oxygen bottles had been wheeled out and the crowds were gathering. In the compartment below the Cage, bound faggots of dry flute grass had been stacked—but these wouldn’t burn on this airless world, hence the oxygen to feed the flames. This was a spectacle theocrats came to see from afar, even from the cylinder worlds of Faith, Hope and Charity. I couldn’t save them, neither could our revolutionary cell. But the thermite block I’d inserted amidst the fuel would bring about a quick end and might even take out a few of the viewing theocrats. I wouldn’t stay to watch. I’d had enough, at last, of pointless rebellion, and now the wealth I had slowly and secretly accumulated would buy me passage with smugglers off-world. I felt bad about this, but knew it was time to look after myself
.

“You can come with us,” the smuggler captain had said. “Or we can drop you off at outlink station Miranda.”

“Where are you going?” I had asked
.

When he told me about the Graveyard and the pickings to be had there I was undecided, but now I was certain. I would go with them. I wasn’t sure that years spent killing Theocracy vicars and proctors would make me a good fit for that strange utopia that was the Polity. I headed out of the church, my proctor’s uniform tight and uncomfortable across my breasts. It had been made to fit a man now decaying under the flute grass rhizome mat. The burning was nigh—because those in the church were standing to follow the Vicar of Chattering out into the milky sunlight—

“Spear!”

The shops returned and the Cage was again shrouded in monomer. I blinked and focused on Riss, who had risen up with her flat cobra head only inches from my face, the single black eye wide open. I realized I was down on my knees and that, all around, people were watching me with suspicion. I quickly stood up, not wanting them to mistake my prone position as a sudden impulse to pray.

Hallucination? No, I had just experienced someone’s memories with a clarity normally only open to AIs. It frightened me and I had no idea what it meant, though I guessed there was some connection to my previous experiences of déjà vu and odd memories. This was, I now felt sure, something Penny Royal had done to me—and coming here had unlocked this memory.

“What’s the matter with you?” Riss asked, now looking up at me from waist level. Her ovipositor was noticeably raised, as threatening as a scorpion’s sting.

“I’m fine,” I said, not wanting to explain, not knowing how to explain. I met the gazes of a few of the people standing around. “I’m okay—dizzy spell. I had the O2 of my breather set too high.”

They began moving away. Whether they believed me or not I couldn’t say, but they didn’t seem to want to get involved. I began walking towards Markham’s again.

“What did it do to you?” Riss asked next, confusing me utterly, ovipositor still poised.

“What?”

“The spine.”

“I don’t understand.”

“I told you that you and it are entangled,” Riss explained. “There was a data transference, though whether from you to it or it to you I don’t know.”

I could see no reason to lie, so said, “Memories.” I tried to gather my thoughts and continued, “Ever since I was resurrected, I’ve been experiencing odd moments of déjà vu and occasionally remembering things that I’m pretty certain never happened to me. I put it down to faults in the reconstruction work on my implant. Just then I had a big one.” I gestured back towards the Cage. “I remembered being present here before an execution and deciding to leave this world, to buy passage on a smuggler’s ship out to the Graveyard. I was a young woman—one of the rebels here.”

“One of Penny Royal’s victims,” Riss stated.

Yes, that was certainly possible. I stared at a series of jewelled rings, spinning in a circle before me within Markham’s display. Then I dropped my gaze to a strangely unnerving glass sculpture—some kind of arthropod with lights glowing in its depths—and considered that nightmare diorama trapped in an ammonite fossil. Penny Royal might well have killed many of its victims, but there was no guarantee it had completely erased them. Some it had certainly recorded. Could it have recorded more than just a few? So was I getting an accidental bleed-over from recorded memories contained within the spine, or from Penny Royal via the spine? Or was the introduction of those memories into my mind a deliberate act on the part of the AI? It being deliberate seemed more likely. What were the chances of one of the AI’s victims having been here—right in the very church where Markham’s opened for business and subsequently put my memplant ruby up for sale? I stepped over to the shimmershield and entered.

She was waiting in the middle of the shop. She appeared anxious, wary and she gazed at me as if she knew me.

“I’ve been expecting you,” said Gloria Markham.

17

ISOBEL

This system lay on the edge of the borderland. Here the Graveyard ended and the Polity began, and a red giant sun was steadily boiling the oceans from what had once, long ago, been a living world. Isobel transferred her gaze from the glowing sphere before her to a frame which she mentally opened up in the laminate. This expanded to fill a quadrant of the screen, showing a large asteroid—but that wasn’t what held her attention.

Just out from this asteroid were three ships, growing rapidly larger as the
Moray Firth
drew closer. These were the
Nasturtium
, the
Glory
and the much larger and more lethal-looking
Caligula
—a ship the colour of old oak, with atmosphere wings folded halfway back into its hull. A big teardrop-shaped weapons nacelle extended forward from below its sharkish nose. Isobel opened another frame.

“So you brought the
Glory,”
she said.

Morgan, who had recently transferred from the
Nasturtium
to the
Caligula
, squinted at her then replied, “Seems they received a cancellation on their stopover. Our clients all of a sudden decided they didn’t want to do business with us anymore.”

This gave Isobel momentary pause. Had her clients in the Kingdom been monitoring her activities and decided she was no longer a safe option to supply their particular kink? Had the king cracked down on them or, and now she might be being paranoid, had some other influence been at work, maybe even Penny Royal? She shook herself, dismissing that line of thought.

Her clients cancelling meant she had an extra ship, but it also probably meant the
Glory
still had its human cargo aboard. Perhaps it would be better to abandon that cargo here for later collection, since carrying the evidence of their crimes to Masada would make her men rather edgy. Not that she intended to let any Polity monitors or military anywhere near them. It would be a quick in and out operation beneath the Polity’s notice—a fast conclusion to the hunt—the kill.

She paused, closing all her eyes and trying to suppress the predator inside. She needed to think a lot more clearly about this. Despite her anxiousness to be on her way, she knew that Morgan and the others would rebel against following her to Masada. This would be the case whether or not they were carrying evidence of their crimes, and she needed to do something about that.