Docking came next—the familiar crumps as clamps engaged somewhere outside this ship. Next, a horrible sensation traversed his body like some sort of roller passing through his flesh. His vision distorted, everything going in and out of focus then switching to black and white, then sliding into intense colour before returning to normal. He went deaf for a moment before hearing returned with such intensity he could hear the slight shifting of his clothing and the thump of his own pulse. It was as if he was a machine and something was now playing with his slide switches. He wondered if whatever had inspected him saw him that way too. He stood up.
As if in response, the locks securing the door into his cabin clonked and the door unlatched. He thought about just staying where he was and waiting, but that was cowardice. He walked over to the door and opened it, stepped through into the hold, glancing over at the Golem prostrate on its sled, and walked to the loading door, which stood open. He walked down the ramp door onto the grav-plated floor of an internal dock of either a space station or ship. Worn steel gratings rattled underfoot, scratched and dented bubble-metal panels clad the walls, and the circular doors, standing open on tunnels leading from the dock, were of a design he had only seen in a VR fantasy. This place, whatever it was, had the stink of antiquity. It looked as if it must have been built before even the Quiet War. His boots clonking on the gratings, he chose at random and stepped through one of the circular doors.
The tunnel here had a flat floor of bubble-metal, worn through to the closed-cell foam in places by the passage of feet. Just inside the doorway, and on either side, stood columns. On one of these rested a human skull, yet it bothered him not at all. What drew his attention was the glass sculpture on the other column. It was of a hooder and it seemed to be writhing—not in actuality but in some place deep in his mind.
“It was made by one of your associates,” said an echoing voice. “Or should I say one of your superiors.”
“Who’s that?” Trent asked, though he knew the answer.
“Mr Pace, of course,” replied the voice. “He’s an artist I would like to meet, but it is becoming increasingly unlikely that I will.”
Trent hadn’t been asking who made the sculpture because he had recognized the style. Peering ahead, down the long dark tunnel, he saw a white object shifting far in the distance and expanding as it grew closer.
He expected some nightmare to come for him, but then gazed in puzzlement as a large fat youth—a mobile Buddha—resolved out of the gloom and sauntered down the tunnel towards him. This figure was shaven-headed—in fact, his obese body was completely hairless, lacking eyebrows and eyelashes. He wore red plastic sandals and skin-tight swimming shorts. He should have been ridiculous, but his presence weighed in Trent’s mind like a heavy chunk of viciously sharp glass. His eyes were black buttons and there appeared little to read in them, least of all being mercy. Trent backed out onto the dock again to give himself room, though he suspected this would do him no good.
“Trent Sobel,” said the youth. “Welcome to the prison hulk the
Tyburn
. I am the Brockle and I am here to execute sentence on you.”
Trent stepped back again as this youth, this thing, somehow also a forensic AI, advanced on him. Could he fight it? Should he try? No—this was it, this was how he ended. Fat Boy continued to advance, his gait rolling, then stuttering as his whole body turned silvery and began to shift as if worms were moving under his skin. Lines began to etch themselves into that skin and segmentation began to occur. Trent watched in horror as the man’s thigh unravelled into a long, flat, segmented worm and dropped to the floor, squirming along to keep up.
The Brockle reached for him, fingers melding into things like flat metallic liver flukes that closed on either side of Trent’s face. Its head tilted over, the eyes were sucked within, and began to split. Trent felt other tentacles grabbing his clothing and squirming inside, then stabs of pain all over his head. The grate of hard little drills bit into his skull. He had a moment to think that this wasn’t so bad—he’d suffered more pain than this and endured—then the agony took hold and he screamed.
He screamed until something squirmed into his mouth and complemented the agony with a suffocation that showed no sign of ending.
SVERL
Sverl, who controlled his U-space drive directly with the AI component of his mind, surfaced his dreadnought from that continuum with hardfields flickering on and all weapons ready to deploy in an instant. At AI speeds, he gathered and sorted data from his ship’s sensors. Within seconds he realized that Cvorn wasn’t here, that the satellite data had been misleading.
“It’s a relay,” he announced.
“Cvorn might be prador but he’s not stupid,” Bsorol replied.
“Depending on how you measure stupidity,” interjected his brother Bsectil.
Sverl immediately wondered what he was supposed to make of that. Was this banter something recently acquired along with their new augs or had it always been there, but generally more low-key? Sverl considered his two first-children, who he had decided should try out augmentation before the others. He had to remember first that they weren’t static minds like war drones, kamikazes or ship minds. At least, they weren’t as static as those things would have been if made by prador other than himself. They
were
pheromonally enslaved creatures whom Sverl kept in a permanent state of chemically maintained adolescence. However, he had maintained them in that state for over a hundred years—a good eighty years longer than was usual, since fathers generally killed and replaced their first-children every two decades. Bsorol and Bsectil were very old, and no reason existed why they should not have continued learning throughout their time. They were older, in fact, than many father-captains in the Kingdom at that moment.
“It seems,” he said, “that since acquiring your augs you are finding your usual tasks less onerous and have time to speculate on and discuss things beyond your remit. I therefore have another task for you to perform.”
“Yes, Father,” said Bsectil meekly, while Sverl detected Bsorol mentally erecting defences in his augmentation. Due to a problem some decades ago with the automatic lacing of his food with growth retardant, Bsorol had come very close to making the transformation into an adult. Sverl now wondered if he had gained a smidgen more free will than his brother.
Sverl sent to both of their augs some complex schematics, the location in ship’s stores of his cache of Polity AI crystal, and their orders.
“You want to give the war drones crystal too,” said Bsorol resentfully.
“It’s not the same,” said Sverl. “Your augmentations contain AI crystal and have raised your game, as Arrowsmith would say, because you already have extensive mental capacity. Similar augmentation for them would not take them beyond sub-AI computing.”
“Still,” Bsorol grumped.
“The drones are also completely incapable of disobedience,” Sverl added, “which I am inclined to think is not something beyond your reach. Obey your orders, Bsorol.”
“Yes, Father,” the ancient first-child replied.
Bsorol’s tone had sounded exasperated to Sverl, yet why should it be? He watched them both head away from the two particle cannons to which he had assigned them and towards the indicated store. He observed them very carefully as they collected the designated amount of crystal, adaptors and cross-tech components and then began making their way to the drone cache. He watched Bsorol the most closely because he didn’t think it beyond that first-child to take some components for himself in the hope of grabbing some time on an auto-surgery when Sverl was looking the other way. At the drone cache they began taking apart four war drones and installing the crystal. Perhaps it wasn’t such a great idea, for his own safety, to so “raise the game” of his own children, but Sverl had begun to feel a growing distaste and, perhaps, boredom with his utter control of them. He found them interesting now. Was this because Sverl was becoming more human or more AI, or was he simply feeling the ennui of his years bearing down on him?
Sverl now transferred his main attention back to the satellite relay. Cvorn had mounted it on a small deep-space asteroid mainly consisting of ice and naturally foamed rock. Already his AI component, working with the relay’s signal traffic and with deep scans, had produced some results. He would have to send one of his children or a robot over to make the required physical connections so they could track the signal it was receiving. Perhaps he should assign Bsectil to—
“Snickety snick,” something said.
For just a second Sverl thought this was an attack and brought up all his defences. He recognized the U-space channel and the mental signature, but had expected nothing from there ever again. However, it seemed the Golem that Penny Royal had provided all those years ago still existed.
Sverl had never really been comfortable with the Golem, which was probably why, on the Rock Pool, he had allowed the Mafia boss Stolman to ostensibly find and activate it. Stolman had believed it utterly under his control, but it had acted as a spy for Sverl. Isobel Satomi, when she had penetrated Stolman’s aug network and incidentally ripped apart and eaten that man, had believed she then controlled it. Thereafter, when she had taken it along with her to Masada and to her doom, Sverl had thought it destroyed. Now he began updating from it.
Intelligent enough to recognize the likelihood of its own demise during Isobel’s pointless assault on Masada, the Golem had abandoned ship, sending Sverl’s best wishes to her as it did so, though Sverl hadn’t known. It had then gone somnolent in vacuum, unable to send signals to Sverl because its internal U-space transmitter just wasn’t powerful enough to penetrate the U-space disruption in that system caused by the earlier deployment of USERs. Next, for no immediately apparent reason, Captain Blite had picked it up on his way out of the system, whereupon it covertly rose out of somnolence to observe its surroundings. It had seen that Blite had also picked up Satomi’s second, Trent Sobel, and that the man wore a very interesting earring. Blite handed Trent and the Golem over to the Polity, and both were now in a very sticky situation indeed.
The earring . . .
Isobel Satomi had fascinated Sverl because what Penny Royal had done to her was very similar to what it had done to him. She had wanted power and the AI had turned her into a powerful monster—a hooder. Sverl had wanted knowledge of why the humans and AIs had been winning the war. The AI had given him that knowledge by turning him into an amalgam of prador, AI and human—yet another powerful monster.
He had wanted to talk to Satomi, and to examine her, because he felt sure he had much to learn from her. He’d thought her gone, dead, annihilated at Masada, but now Trent Sobel possessed her memplant. The Golem, via subtle scans, had found Isobel recorded in the purple sapphire hanging from Trent’s ear. How it got there was irrelevant but, having been acquainted with the events on Masada that had culminated in Isobel’s downfall, Sverl knew who had put it there: Penny Royal.
“Does he want it?” the Golem asked, eagerly adding, “He wants it. He wants it!”
Did he?
Through the eyes of his Golem, Sverl saw Sobel’s clothing lying neatly folded on a stone floor with the earring lying on top. The man himself was currently a smeared-out organic mass occupying the crevices of a loose ball of segmented biomech worms. These worms had utterly taken him apart and were examining him down to sub-molecular levels. Sverl could see his disconnected skull in there, its bony jaw opening and closing. He felt the horror and recognized that although Penny Royal was unique, the black AI was not
that
unique. After Sobel’s inevitable, final, demise the forensic AI there would turn its attention to the Golem and find this communication link.
“I want it,” he replied, “but recognize the limits of possibility.”
He felt pity for Sobel and found himself unsurprised at a response so untypical of a prador. Undoubtedly, in Polity terms the man was deserving of death, but did any being deserve to die in such a way? Sverl also felt a degree of pity for the Golem because, although it was an artificial being, it still possessed a sense of self. It was still capable of suffering, and would soon be facing similar dismantlement. The earring would go too, for Penny Royal had transformed Satomi, and all the data that she was, the AI would take apart and analyse.
“I’ll get it,” the Golem intoned.
“If you can; if you wish,” said Sverl, lining up a particular program in his mind. “I am now releasing you from my grip. Henceforth you are a free entity and may do what you will.” Sverl sent the program that would completely release the Golem and felt it thump home with all the physicality of a hatchet, but the U-space link remained open. He continued, “If you can bring Isobel Satomi to me then I will be glad, and I will reward you in any way I can. However, your first priority now must be to save yourself.”
Sverl now cut the link and began ramping up his security around it. Maybe the Golem could escape, for it was, after all, a product of Penny Royal and more than just a Polity Golem. Maybe it would then be willing to bring him the memcording of Satomi. Most likely, this would be the last he ever heard of it. Most likely, there would be something dangerous occupying the other end of that link next time he opened it, and he had to be ready.
TRENT
Against a background of intense suffering, it started with what he recognized as his earliest memory. He was a boy running along one of the corridors of an arcology on Coloron when Dumal stepped out in front of him. He knew he was about to be beaten and humiliated but, in the present, he couldn’t remember previous beatings and humiliations. Grinning horribly, Dumal spread his arms so Trent could not run past. Suddenly it was all too much and the infant Trent understood that neither flight nor compliance could ever stop this. If he ran away as before, the bigger boy would catch him because of a longer stride. Instead, Trent ducked his head down, kept running, and rammed his head straight into the other boy’s fat gut. Dumal went down on his rump and Trent, his neck hurting, tried to get past, but a hand caught his trousers and dragged him down. The beating that ensued was the worst yet, and subsequent beatings would be just as bad, but Trent had made the decision to fight and refused to back down. The beatings only ceased when Trent caught Dumal in a restricted area and knocked him semiconscious with a length of steel pipe.