Dark Intelligence (56 page)

“I see that it’s the Polity’s intention to seize Penny Royal,” the Weaver had said, ambling over like some big friendly bear to stand before Spear, Riss and Amistad.

“Doubtless,” Amistad had replied. “It’s what I would have ordered.”

“Under your own laws,” the Weaver had continued, “you have no right of seizure here unless I grant it. I do not.”

“They were probably hoping to get it done before you had time to object,” Amistad had replied, finishing with a scorpion shrug. “But I see your objection has been lodged via your AI. They’ll withdraw now.”

“Yes, to wait outside my territory in the hope of seizing Penny Royal there.”

“Sure.” Amistad hadn’t been too bothered either way.

“They’ll fail,” were the Weaver’s departing words as it turned away.

The others had been listening to the replay and now Brond said, “You have to wonder about our own position now. Legally, that is.”

“In essence, we’ve been transporting about a glorified arms smuggler,” Blite replied, now lowering his monocular. “We did so under duress so we shouldn’t be in trouble.”

“Yeah, sure,” said Martina cynically from inside the ship.

“However,” Blite continued, “it might be an idea for us to make ourselves scarce for a while until things have cooled down here. And maybe we should try to get out before the Polity prepares whatever trap it intends for Penny Royal.”

He reached down and unclipped his line from the hull, heading for the ladder into
The Rose
. The other two followed him down and inside then, as the airlock closed for a final time, he said, “Take us up and away from here, Leven, and try to keep us out of trouble.”

“Will do,” the mind replied.

Blite was about to head for the bridge, but hesitated, heading back to the holds and Engineering. Within a few minutes he was standing before the bulkhead door, which he’d only gone through once since the black AI had been aboard. He hesitated again, realizing that what had resided beyond this door still frightened him, but he told himself not to be so stupid. Penny Royal was now on the rapidly receding ground below, still pulling itself back together. He opened the door.

When he was last in here, the back wall of the hold had been missing, along with most of one other wall. Their materials had been converted into organic-looking pillars and cross-members. He’d been able to see all the way to the U-space drive from this position. There had also been clumps of hardware sprouting from the structure of the ship like puff-balls, interlinked by a mycelium of optics and bright silver s-con wires. And Penny Royal, of course. Now the walls were back and the mycelium was gone. However, two of those puffball objects remained in the middle of the hold, their surfaces indented with lines so that they now looked like huge white pumpkins. Blite stared at these things for a long time, then walked over and studied them more closely.

A memory hit him.

He was a child gazing at his newly upgraded teacher’s shimmering holo-display. All he had to do was speak and the thing would activate. He raised his hand then as an adult, in another memory, and it came down on the lid of a box. He opened this box and gazed greedily at the stack of diamond slate inside
.

Then he returned abruptly to the moment, Penny Royal’s mental tampering at an end. This time he didn’t feel sick, and he knew what to do. He paused, remembering an old story about someone called Pandora, then berated himself for his silliness.

Really, if Penny Royal wanted to shaft him in some way it would do so and there was very little he could do about that.

“Okay,” he said, “open up.”

In eerie silence, the two pumpkins split down their indented lines, their radially divided sections folding down like waterlily petals. Inside were a mass of small, red, crystalline objects, packed together like pomegranate seeds. He reached down, took hold of one of these between his forefinger and thumb and tugged. It came out easily and, as he weighted the ruby in the palm of his hand, he smiled. Artificially generated rubies possessed minor value. However, gazing into the gem, he saw odd refractive layers and quadrate webworks of barely visible silvery wires, so he guessed these also contained quantum computing.

“Who are they?” he wondered aloud, waiting for more memories.

A noise issued from behind him—as if the stem of a wine glass had broken. He turned to see another gem hovering in the air, a black diamond this time. But this had oozed out from the underlying continuum and was fighting to maintain its hold here—so was shrinking and expanding.

“I recorded every individual when I killed them, but it was never enough,” the AI replied. “There are always those who can never be retrieved.”

So, final payment: Penny Royal had given Blite the minds of thousands of people. The thing in his palm, though of unconventional design, was a memplant. The Polity reward for such items was plenty, but multiplied by thousands …

“I have one final favour to ask of you,” said the AI.

“Oh yeah.”

“It is a favour, because you do not have to grant it.”

“Tell me.”

The AI told him and left the decision to him, and then the diamond winked out. Exiting the hold, still carrying the ruby in the palm of his hand so he could deliver the good news to his crew, Blite said, “Leven, slight course alteration.”

SPEAR

The gravcar sent to take us back to Chattering, and perhaps thence to the space port, arrived and settled. I sat on an up-tilted chunk of rhizome and watched the scene before me. The black crystals—those Chinese puzzle pieces—seemed to be straining and twisting, yet I couldn’t visibly see them moving. I wondered why, in the growing darkness, I could see them so clearly, sense them so personally.

“So do you have any answers for me?” I asked of them, but received no reply. I turned to Riss, “Anything?”

“Nothing,” the snake drone replied.

“And you?” I asked Amistad.

“Nothing either,” the erstwhile warden of Masada replied. “I’ve tried everything I can to get some answers, but it’s not responding on any level.” Amistad paused for a second. “I did consider giving it a nudge or two with some missiles, but just got ordered to stand down.”

“By who?”

“Earth Central.”

“Oh.”

“Seems we’re to remain hands and claws off until Penny Royal leaves the Masadan system and departs Atheter space. A reception committee is being prepared.”

Whatever
, I thought, pretty sure that the AI spread out on the ground before me had all its future options mapped out, including its route away from here. If, that is, its intention was to leave.

I turned back to Riss. “So what does all this mean for us?”

“We were used?” Riss suggested.

“Yes,” I turned back to regard Penny Royal, “but I don’t think this is the end.”

Perhaps a minute or so later, one of the crystalline objects shot up to hang in the air just ten feet above the ground. Another leapt up, slapping against the first with a sound reminiscent of a domino being clacked down on a board, then came another and another. I watched them forming into a large black gem as I stood up and began walking over, Riss falling in behind me.

“Why did you alter my memories?” I asked. “Why did you give me the memories of others and torment me with their recollections? And why are you, through that spine of yours aboard my ship, still interfering with my mind?

At the last question I halted, gazing up at the AI, close.

“You made me hate you,” I said, “when in reality I never knew you.”

The surface of the black gem shifted; then, with a sound like a sharpening stone passing across some giant scythe, it extruded its black spines and grew, in half a second, back into its urchin form.

“Of course I can’t demand answers from something as powerful as you,” I continued quietly. “You’re still treating other beings like toys, just as you always did.”

I suddenly sensed the object hanging before me tilting in some way, as if it was paying greater attention to me. In that moment I felt like an ant falling under the regard of a passing naturalist, small, noticed but inferior, and that made me abruptly angry again.

“Are you going to fucking answer me?”

Now Penny Royal began to rise, gently, like a released balloon.

I couldn’t stand it; I couldn’t bear that the black AI was just going to leave me as baffled as ever. I wanted to strike at it in some way, to try to call some attack from the
Lance
, but knew I couldn’t. Stupidly, I found myself looking at the ground in search of rocks, anything to throw at the enigmatic thing above.

“Answers?” Penny Royal whispered.

The connection, always there in some ghostly fashion, hardened. An avalanche came down on me, the vessel formed to receive it. The verbal answers Penny Royal might give no longer mattered, because suddenly I was remembering, and remembering far too much.

The momentary terror and brief bright pain which was the end for three of Blite’s old crew was clearer in my mind than our journey here. The rage that was Isobel Satomi, and her anxiety and ambition, were all there within my grasp. The horror and the agony of a man skinned by skeletal Golem and nailed to a ceiling was clear, but then faded as other memories clamoured for my attention. I found myself down on my knees as too much input for a human mind to contain unfolded in my skull, and was contained. Then I was down on my face, experiencing thousands of lives, and deaths, all running in parallel. I remembered it all; all that was in their minds, as if the memories were my own; all the memories of Penny Royal’s victims. Should I call these false memories? No, because, like those I was resurrected with, they weren’t necessarily my own—but they were true.

I don’t know how much time passed before I again became aware of my surroundings. Penny Royal was gone, and I was being carried gently in the claws of a giant steel scorpion. Recognizing that I had regained consciousness, Amistad put me down, feet first, on the viewing platform overlooking Masada, and dawn.

“I understand now,” I said, an edge of hysteria in my voice as I staggered and managed not to fall flat on my face.

It wasn’t just the dead who had clamoured for my attention—and I could still sense their muted howling in my mind. There was a piece of Captain Blite too. Perhaps Penny Royal had recorded him as some safeguard against him dying, or perhaps just for the purpose he served now—to inform me.

“Blite thought Penny Royal had come here to commit suicide,” I said, then stumbled over to a nearby wall and rested my back against it.

“Suicide,” Riss echoed, probably more in touch with that idea than many other AIs.

I nodded.

Gazing at me, Amistad lectured, “The AI’s purpose here was to separate Isobel from what she was becoming, to reverse the changes. But it also wanted to restore balance—to take the Weaver out from under Polity oversight and to free it.”

“Yes,” I said.

“So what have you learned?” the scorpion drone asked.

With poetic timing the sun breached the horizon. I stared at it, fighting to pull together the disparate pieces of my mind, which now seemed as scattered as Penny Royal had been. I just shook my head. In a strange way I felt like that poor soul trapped in the pyrite of that ammonite fossil I had taken from Isobel—stripped down, incomplete, fractured and forever repeating the same actions. I couldn’t find the words then to describe how things had turned full-circle. How I’d set out seeking vengeance and lost that impulse as I learned how my memories had been altered. Now that need for retribution had returned in full force, incited by the clamouring dead. A certainty was arising inside me that I was destined to kill the black AI. And this formed the core around which my mind began to reassemble itself.

TRENT

I was right about the bulkheads
, thought Trent, as he gazed through the gaping hole in the side of the
Moray Firth
and looked down on the surface of Masada. He was right about many things, such as that Isobel would end up getting him killed. Sure, he was alive right now, but he wouldn’t last for much longer. Despite the drugs his suit had injected, the pain from his busted ribs and broken shoulder was now considerable too—those bones doubtless cracked apart along fracture lines that had been scribed into his very being. And the manner of his demise was just a question of whether the Polity got to him before orbital decay finished the job. Both options were death sentences.

“How are you doing?” he asked.

The ship mind—a prador second-child Isobel had never bothered to name—replied with gibberish. It was screwed. Its casing had been breached, its cooling system was down and it was steadily proceeding from supercold to just very cold, which would be enough to finish it off. Anyway, what more did he need from it? Before it stopped making sense entirely, he’d managed to get it to confirm that his own course led to oblivion.

So where did you put it, Isobel?

He’d searched the storage on and about the bridge and, despite the wreckage, felt sure he’d checked every possible location. If she’d left it in Medical then that was a problem. Seeking relief from his injuries, he’d already ascertained that Medical was that object tumbling into the Masadan atmosphere about ten miles down. It had to be in her research area—the place he’d been most reluctant to search because, well, if it wasn’t there then that was it, it was probably gone for good.

With infinite care, Trent made his way through the wrecked ship. The research area platform had been torn away from its mountings, but that was irrelevant now grav was down. Propelling himself across a short gap to come down feet first on to it, wincing, he looked around. The most likely place to look was a cylindrical store with drawers and cupboard doors making up its entire surface. It was where she kept various small and valuable technological items. She’d also transferred some personal items she’d wanted to keep here, with her portable wealth, after she’d dismantled her cabin.

Checking his watch, Trent saw that he had about another two hours before the
Firth
really started to fall. As he searched a series of further crates and boxes, he wondered how it would play out. Would the
Firth
burn up in such an oxygen-depleted atmosphere? Probably not, but it would still heat up, and a lot. Perhaps if he secured himself somewhere deep in the ship, away from the fucking great hole in its side, he might not get fried—but to what purpose? So he could die when the ship broke up, hitting the oceans down there, or making a deep muddy crater in some landmass? But the
Firth
would most likely not even get that far. Would the Polity allow a large chunk of life-threatening wreckage to hit the planet? No, they’d vaporize it before it got anywhere close.