Dark Intelligence (9 page)

Trent led me through further luxuriously appointed corridors to a dropshaft, which led to the deck below. Here the corridors were tile and brushed metal, aseptic and rigorously cleaned by beetlebots. The medical bay was equally as clean, very neat, and did contain some equipment you wouldn’t expect to find out here in the Graveyard. Isobel waited beside a surgical chair that could convert into a table. Her right arm was quivering and she probably hadn’t sat down because it would be too painful for her to do so. She took a step towards me, her hands clenching and unclenching. Seemingly with an effort of will, she forced herself to stop and gestured a dismissal at Trent, who departed with alacrity.

“You understand,” she said immediately, “the penalties for non-payment?”

I glanced up at the ceiling, where a saucer-shaped security drone hung like a lethal light fitting. I presumed its polished throat contained some sort of stunner, tracking me as I walked into the room.

“I’m not stupid,” I replied, putting my bag down on a nearby work surface. “If you could get into the chair?”

“Should I undress?” she asked bluntly.

“Yes,” I replied, it being my practice, back when I worked with Sylac, never to be wholly reliant on remote diagnostic tools. She grimaced and began stripping off her padded clothing, while I walked over to inspect her autodoc.

The thing was a typical Polity design. A nightmare chrome bug that extended on a heavy jointed arm from a movable pedestal—although the bug was presently folded down against the pedestal with its surgical cutlery in sanitizer niches. I went round to its other side to study the manual console, which came on as soon as I stood before it. It wasn’t reacting to me, however. Isobel had turned it on, ensuring I knew that through her haiman augmentations she was deep inside the equipment and would be watching my every move. I worked the touch-board and called up the stats for its integral diagnosticer. As I’d thought: it was modern but not up to haiman standards. I retrieved my Syban interlink, which was a cube of hardware covered with data and sample ports. Next, I opened up a cover on the pedestal, extracted the old diagnosticer core and plugged in the Syban in its place. It would take a while to boot up properly, so I walked around the column to inspect Isobel.

“Interesting,” she said. “Very advanced.”

She was obviously studying the Syban interlink even as it booted up.

“You received haiman augmentations from Penny Royal … well, sort of,” I said, “but your medical tech here only extends to limited human upgrades, like augs.”

She now sat in the chair, breathing heavily—perhaps in pain or exhaustion or as a result of some internal conflict. The look she threw at me carried a simple message: show any sign of disgust and you’re dead. There was also something of an appeal there, buried deep. She wanted sympathy, but it mustn’t be overt and there definitely mustn’t be pity.

Her body looked bruised and it probably was, but the discoloration wasn’t all due to that. Her breasts, which must have at one time been full, were now flaccid sacs. Like her face, her torso was now longer than normal, and its width was unnaturally even. I also noticed her legs were short. As I studied her, it was a good thing my nascuff was operating to suppress certain basic human drives. What I was seeing before me might otherwise have elicited disgust or even horror, which if evident, would certainly have been dangerous here. But I now saw her as no more than an interesting specimen.

I held up my hands. “I’m going to examine you now.”

Her sensory cowl opened and I could see metallic movement in the pupil of one of her eyes as she inspected my hands. After a moment, she nodded. I reached out and used the small touch-plate on the side of the chair to tilt it back and raise the footrest, slowly turning it into a surgical table. When it finally locked, I probed around her collarbone to at least get that initial contact out of the way. She flinched, then relaxed as I began counting ribs.

Knives …

Just for an instant I found myself in darkness, with swirling obsidian and metallic movement all around me, and then came pain. I jerked my hand away and it faded. I immediately realized this fragment of memory was related to the feelings of déjà vu which I had been experiencing from the moment I boarded this ship. Perhaps this was something to do with my time under the spider thrall? No, it didn’t feel like that. I tried to dismiss speculation because I really didn’t need it right now.

“I have eighteen now,” she said, “and two more are growing.” I nodded, not trusting myself to speak for a moment.

I really hadn’t needed to count by feel because, growing from her ribs, I could see prominent thorn-like growths protruding from her sides, with chitin plates spreading around them. And the ribs themselves now reached nearly all the way down to her pelvis. I noticed that the ribs at the top of her torso were much wider and flatter than usual and that the top two were overlapping. I wondered how long it would be before her skin started dying—it was already starting to look unhealthy, though no lesions had yet appeared.

Her arms had shortened too and her shoulders were positioning higher while her neck was thickening. There was no chitin on either her arms or legs and, in both cases, the digits were shrinking. She was down one toe on each foot, and the little finger on each of her hands was a stub. I guessed both sets of limbs were to be dispensed with.

“Could you show me your back?” I asked.

She tried to heave herself over but struggled, and after a hesitation I helped her, and this time nothing arose in my mind from touching her. I counted the neat row of vaguely rectangular plates of chitin down her spine and noted a spiky nub of a tail protruding from its base, then let her rest back.

“You were already making efforts to turn yourself into a haiman before you visited Penny Royal,” I stated.

Her eyes narrowed in suspicion. “How do you know that?”

I waved a dismissive hand. “It’s obvious. What did you have done?”

She assessed me a moment longer before replying, “Joint cyber-motors, twinned sub-AI augs and a sensor band. I had the augs and band removed when I bought black-market gridlink hardware, which failed after two months. The people who sold it to me are all in the Kingdom now—I didn’t thrall them but sold them as flesh breeders.” She paused, studying me for a reaction. “They probably ended up being eaten long ago.”

I reached over and keyed on the autodoc, which folded its insectile head out from the pedestal. It started running through the test routine for its multiple surgical limbs, which rather made it look as if it was preparing for a tasty snack.

“Just relax,” I said as I shifted it over above her face. The thought was there to run something quick and final through its programming, maybe have it cut through her spine and clamp her carotids. But despite my time in bio-espionage, I was no killer. However, it was good that she’d reminded me of what she was, because for a moment there I had started to feel sympathetic.

The doc sampled and scanned her from head to foot and I viewed the scan images and data after it had slid back to a holding position over her stomach.

“The thing about Penny Royal,” I said, “is that, should you ask, it might grant you the ability to leap over tall buildings. But it might neglect to inform you that your landing will be terminal.”

“I know that,” said Isobel.

I busied myself with my microbot factory—relaying the scan results from the autodoc and on their basis making a selection of preprepared microbots. I eventually brought over a blood shunt containing them in solution.

“What’s that?” she asked.

“You understand that your cybermotors are in conflict with your changing body?”

“Of course.”

“You could have countered that with your gridlink or your augs, but you don’t have them. The haiman parts of you that Penny Royal installed don’t even speak the same language as those motors, so cannot access them. To Penny Royal that didn’t matter. How much you suffered during your transformation was irrelevant to it.” I paused, watching her. “You didn’t just ask to be turned into a haiman, did you?”

“Do you think I haven’t thought about that constantly?”

“And?”

“I said I wanted to rip the flesh from someone’s bones,” she replied. “And Penny Royal asked me if I wanted to be the predator and my enemy the prey. I said yes.”

I winced: the words that had damned her.

“Your cybermotors are sealed and encoded. My microbots will access them, whereupon I can reprogram them. Turn them off, in fact.”

“I don’t want them turned off,” she spat, running her fingers down the thorns protruding from her side, “I want this turned off!”

“I can do that, but I will not do it now,” I replied. “Our deal was that I alleviate your immediate cybermotor problem. I will reverse what Penny Royal did to you when I have my ship.”

She really wanted to kill me then and I knew that once she had what she wanted from me she would attempt to do so. She nodded at the blood shunt. “Put that over on the deep scanner.”

I walked over and placed the shunt on the flat plate of a deep-spectrum nanoscope, which powered up immediately. The screen above began riffling through cross sections of the device, then finally paused before expanding one of the microbots into visibility. It was an electrochem device and up close it looked like an earth-moving machine made out of a child’s building blocks. She next scanned a wide selection of these, very fast, then checked their carrier fluid for nanobots. As she finished her inspection my microbot factory beeped, lights flashing on it momentarily. Not only had she scanned the machines I would be putting into her body, but she was checking the program they would be running. After maybe twenty minutes, while I wandered round the room, inspecting the equipment, she was finally finished.

Her paranoia was perfectly as expected, and too late. She’d scanned my hands before I touched her, but, as with her scan of the blood shunt, her focus had been on microscopic mechanisms. She hadn’t anticipated biological attack. Anyway, the prions had oozed out of my pores shortly
after
her scan and were now entering her body. Here they could multiply and spread to nerve-tech interfaces throughout, and to various portions of her spinal cord. There they would make primary protein folds in preparation for the tertiary fold, which in turn would lead to targeted prion cascades. I could then initiate these with a range of infrasound pulses at frequencies to which they had been sensitized.

“Continue,” she said flatly.

I collected the blood shunt and placed it against her forearm, where it numbed her nerves before making its connection to a vein. I walked back round to the console and used the Syban software to access the process, so I could track it through the autodoc’s diagnostic sensors. The autodoc simultaneously rose to a metre above her body for better coverage. The microbots quickly spread from her arm throughout her bloodstream, penetrating her flesh and coagulating around the nubs of cybermotors sitting in her every joint. These included all those down her spine, and in her fingers, toes and jaw. They next began penetrating electrochem interfaces, radio ports and sonar receivers. All I got was babble at first, but the Syban soon started to make sense of it, finally cracking the coding and listing a number of options. I ignored all the sub-options available and chose the one at the very top, turning off all her cybermotors.

Isobel emitted a sigh, and relaxed on the table.

“Better?” I enquired, now switching back to her original diagnosis. From that, I sent a formulation based on her nervous system to a drug manufactory on the work surface behind me.

“Yes, better,” she replied, raising her head.

She did look a lot more relaxed and a lot less like someone suffering an illness. But the downside was that her added alertness suddenly seemed more alien, predatory and dangerous. She appeared more as she was: someone undergoing a major physical change. Isobel raised her head to look at me and I noticed that the pits below her eyes appeared more indented and the thorns protruding along her jawbone were already longer. As I turned to the drug manufactory, I thought it a good idea not to inform her that her transformation would be speeding up, now that she was no longer fighting her cybermotors. I eventually returned with a plain old syringe containing a slow-release drug implant.

“Why that?” she asked, still suspicious. “Why a painkiller?” She had obviously been watching the manufactory closely.

“As you have obviously just discovered,” I said. “I may have fixed your cybermotor problem, but there will still be pain. This is afferant-nerve specific so will not hamper you.”

She gave a sharp nod of agreement and I injected the implant above her groin.

“Are we agreed that I’ve fulfilled the initial part of our deal?” I asked.

She sat upright. “We’re agreed.”

Then she screamed.

Trent crashed through the door and, before I could say a word, kicked my legs out from under me and delivered a numbing punch to my kidneys as I went down. He had the barrel of a pulse-gun in my face before I could draw a breath, one heavy-worlder hand around my throat. Then he looked up at Isobel.

“The fuck?” he said.

He too had now seen the demonic red eye that had opened below Isobel’s right-hand human eye. I wondered what horror this had enabled her to see, to make her scream like that. Perhaps her future, as she changed into a predator—something that could rip the flesh from people’s bones. I wondered what she would see as her face grew longer, and as more eyes opened, and while she made her steady transformation from a human being into a hooder.

5

SPEAR

Beside Isobel and me, Trent and Gabriel were the only people aboard. Then again, should the second-child prador ganglion that served as this ship’s mind be considered a person? I supposed so, even though it was a crippled thing that wouldn’t make it through the latest iteration of the Turing Test. So make that five people aboard. I wasn’t surprised that there were so few. I knew that Isobel Satomi’s organization was big and that crime lords such as her usually had large entourages. But Isobel had fallen into a trap that heavy augmentation laid for many: she believed she didn’t need so many people around her. Instead, she relied on her own expanded power and control.