The fusion drive wasn’t just fucked, it was all but gone. Par Avion had managed to carve the trench, then centre the beam blast straight up
The Rose
’s tailpipe just at the last moment. Blite stared at the damage and felt his initial elation at escaping the station, and at once again operating, fade.
“Not so good,” said Brond from inside, where he was watching Blite’s suit feed.
“Megalithic understatement, big boy,” said Greer, also still inside. “I’m amazed the U-drive is still working . . . it
is
working, isn’t it, Leven?”
“It is, amazingly, hardly damaged at all,” the Golem ship mind replied. “Though, as we are all aware, there is some resonance.”
They had all been feeling the effects of the imbalance in that drive.
“So we can still take the jump into the Graveyard and get those repairs,” said Blite, trying to consign to irrelevance that portion of fear and nausea he had experienced during their jump from Par Avion.
“We can,” Leven replied. “We don’t need much realspace acceleration to engage now, after Penny Royal’s tampering. Maybe just steering thrusters will do . . .”
“But?” Blite prompted.
“The border,” Leven replied.
“Come on—it’s a sieve.”
“It
was
a sieve.”
“What do you mean?” Blite turned round and began tramping back to the airlock. There wasn’t much he could do out here. They needed to get to somewhere like Molonor in the Graveyard where he could access his Galaxy Bank account and pay for professional repairs to the ship. Even if the Polity blocked his access to that account—which was practically unheard of—he had ensured that he had transferred plenty of portable wealth aboard shortly after the memplant payment went in. They just needed to get to the Graveyard.
“Explain yourself, Leven,” he said, when the mind was tardy in replying.
“It’s a little puzzling,” the mind replied. “The Polity watch stations are on high alert and have sunk their detectors into U-space. Doubtless USERs are ready to be deployed too. Ships are also arriving—attack ships, dreadnoughts and some bigger stuff.”
“This can’t just be down to us,” said Blite as he entered the airlock. Really, if his encounter with Penny Royal, his much-admired new hardfield generator and his escape from Par Avion warranted this kind of response, then he might just as well give himself up now.
“No,” said Leven. “Details are unclear but this seems to be in response to activity on the other side of the Graveyard.”
“The prador are playing up,” said Greer.
“That seems likely,” said Leven. “But, as I said, the details are not clear.”
Once inside his ship, Blite retracted his visor into his suit’s neck ring and pushed the folding hard-shell back off his head. He felt no inclination to take the suit off and, when he arrived in the bridge, the other two were similarly clad. Always best to take precautions like this when your ship has a chunk carved out of its hull like a scale model of Valles Marinaris. He took his seat, rested his elbows on the console before him and brought his fingertips together as he considered.
“If we stay in the Polity then someone or something is going to track us down, make sure we’re completely disabled and take us in,” he said. “Agreed?”
“Agreed,” said Brond, while Greer nodded.
“So if all this border activity is about what’s happening on the Kingdom side, then that’s where their attention will be focused.” He gazed at Brond and Greer but they showed no inclination to agree. Like him, they were perfectly well aware that when AIs went on high alert their vision was three-sixty. “We have to try to get through.”
“I guess so,” said Greer, with tired acceptance.
“Leven,” he said, “analyse your data on the activity there and try to take us through where it’s most accessible.”
The Rose
jolted as steering thrusters fired up and, listening to the sound penetrating the ship, Blite was sure that one of those thrusters was damaged and on its way out. He gazed out pensively at the starlit vacuum, as armoured shutters drew across to close it off and as his ship accelerated. He winced when he felt a wave of something pass through the bridge, seemingly from the direction of the U-space engine.
“Engaging,” said Leven.
“No shit,” said Greer.
They all felt the surge and the sickening twist of the U-space jump. Blite gazed around at the bridge. On the surface, everything looked the same as always, but now it was as if he had taken psycho-actives. Every physical object around him now appeared incredibly insubstantial. Their gleaming surfaces seemed to represent a very thin skin over absolutely nothing at all—an absence the human mind hadn’t evolved to encompass and from which it wanted to retreat screaming. Blite stood up, swayed unsteadily.
“How long?” he asked.
“Fifty-two hours,” Leven replied.
“Okay,” he said, “we’ll take six-hour shifts: you first, Greer, then Brond.”
Brond also stood up, looking pale and ill.
“I’m going to zone out,” Blite added.
The others would do the same when not on watch—electrically imposed sleep was the best way of getting through this, though the nightmares tended to be lurid. As he headed towards his cabin, Blite wondered if he would be having more like those he’d had just after they left Par Avion. Those had been nasty. Black knives had surrounded him—Penny Royal, obviously. But he was imagining the version of the AI that deserved its seriously bad reputation. It had tittered as it began skinning him.
TRENT
“What do you want?” Trent asked, not wanting to look round.
“You and your lovely earring,” said the Golem behind.
Trent’s hand was still tight round the ship’s joystick. What were his options? Did he really want to spend a lot of time stuck in such a confined place with what he knew was standing behind him? He could return to the moon, to the Brockle . . . No, that really wasn’t an option. He’d rather play Russian roulette with a pulse-gun than go back there. He released his grip, reached down to the chair clamp and released that, then slowly turned his chair round, that skeletal metal hand coming off his shoulder as he did so.
The Penny Royal Golem loomed in the cabin and reminded him of when he had first seen it accompanying Stolman—the mafia boss on the Rock Pool. It was of course without skin or syntheflesh: a human skeleton fashioned of ceramal, but with oversized stepper motors bulging in its joints, the gaps between its ribs filled with some grey material, while its teeth were white and eyes dark blue. But its similarity to the usual skeletal Golem ended there. It was bigger than a standard Golem, and someone had enamelled its polished bones with colourful geometric patterns so it looked like an artefact from some Mayan tomb. Filling the area where a human gut would have resided, twisted round its bones, in its joints, around its neck and part of its skull, was a form of tech that looked organic. In fact, it looked almost as if the Golem had slept in a jungle for a hundred years, then torn itself free with its workings clogged with roots and vines, only these were metallic black and gold and too evenly distributed. The thing was also battered, scratched and scored with laser burns.
It blinked metallic eyelids at him that skeletal Golem usually didn’t possess, then abruptly stepped away from him and sat down on the floor to the rear of the small cabin. There it started individually hinging out the ribs on one side of its chest.
“Why?” Trent asked, then after swallowing drily, “Why do you want me and my earring?”
“Because
he
wants her.”
The “her” had to be Isobel Satomi and Trent had a horrible suspicion that “he” might be Penny Royal. But surely, that didn’t make any sense, since Penny Royal had passed on the memcording of Isobel to him in the first place. Why would it want that back now?
He stared at the Golem, remembering how it had saved his life while he had been the crime boss Stolman’s captive. But whether that was due to Satomi seizing control of it or at its own instigation he had no idea. At the time it had declaimed, “Thus do the scales fall from my eyes.” He also remembered how, enforcing Satomi’s orders, it had torn the head off the captain of the
Glory
. This Golem had, at one time, probably been of the normal Polity kind. But then Penny Royal got hold of it, and some time after that Stolman had controlled it with a Dracocorp aug. Then Isobel had usurped that control with the power of her crazy mind. And, though sanity was debatable when it came to artificial intelligences, he felt sure he was in the presence of something insane.
“What should I call you?” he asked, because giving it a name might waylay some of his fear of it.
Still hinging out ribs, it tilted its polished skull.
“Never really considered having a name,” it said.
“Why don’t you consider that now?”
“Snickety snick,” it said.
No, that can’t be right
.
One side of its chest was now completely open to expose glittery workings. They didn’t look right to Trent—looked as organic as that stuff spread over the outside of its skeleton. In addition, amidst them, he could just see the Golem’s AI crystal in its ceramal cage. It wasn’t clear or opalescent like the usual home of an AI mind, but burned and it contained blooms like fungus in agar, and Trent could definitely see some cracks. Having exposed all this, it now reached round and tore open the panel in the wall against which it was reclining.
“You must have had a real name once,” he said, “before Penny Royal got hold of you.”
It suddenly snapped up one hand, then one finger. Trent hadn’t even been able to track the movement. No doubt at all that if it decided to kill him he was utterly helpless.
“I remember. I was called John Grey,” it said. “Snickety snick,” John Grey added while, his hands a blur, he tore out and discarded circuit rods from the wall and then detached a skein of fibre-optics from behind where they had been.
“What did Penny Royal do to you, John?” Trent asked. Maybe, if he kept talking, he could defer the point when he ended up in bloody gobbets scattered about this cabin. Such an end struck him as likely since, if Penny Royal wanted Satomi, Trent Sobel himself was most likely irrelevant. Perhaps a little distracting entertainment while this Golem took Isobel’s memcording to the “he” he’d mentioned?
John Grey looked up from sorting cables. “Mr Grey,” he said firmly.
Trent felt his hopes of getting out of this alive retreat even further. He watched as the Golem began plugging the optic cables into his chest. After a few minutes of this Mr Grey said, “Snick,” as he plugged in the last of them—all in a neat ring around his crystal. He then tugged more of the optics out of the wall to give him the slack to stand up and step back towards Trent. Reaching out to press a finger against Trent’s chest, the Golem then dipped his head to inspect his own finger more closely. Trent knew that in an instant Mr Grey could shove that finger straight through him. He cleared his throat, then said, “I didn’t want to die on that moon, and I don’t want to die here.”
Grey looked up. “You didn’t want to die?”
Trent cleared his sticky throat. “No.”
“Neither did I,” said Mr Grey.
Trent was puzzling over what he could possibly say in response to that, just as Grey’s head dipped again, as if he was nodding off, and the ship shuddered like some beast running into a bare power cable, twisted and groaned, and dropped into U-space.
SVERL
The cargo ships that had taken on many of the refugees from the planet were now gone, as was the ship the Polity agents here, at the Rock Pool, had boarded, and Sverl felt slightly disappointed to not be having some exchange with the drone Arrowsmith. Now deep scanning the local system, he picked up the small single-ship orbiting the Rock Pool and noted that the ship contained a Golem that was trying to open communications with him again. He ignored that, instead pondering on his impulse to direct the Golem here. He should not have done so and, more importantly, he should not have come here himself. It seemed likely that some of Cvorn’s spy satellites would still be here so Cvorn might learn his location and know that Sverl had not taken the bait.
Whatever
—he would deal with Cvorn in due course.
Sverl now allowed a communications link with the Golem to establish and made an informational request to link deeper, since it was no longer his slave. It allowed this and he gazed through its eyes.
“You have arrived,” said the Golem, who had now apparently acquired the name John Grey. Mr Grey was peering at an image of Sverl’s dreadnought in a small screen. Next, he raised his gaze to focus on a distant speck of that same ship through the main cockpit screen.
“Come over,” said Sverl. “I will open a docking bay.” He felt a mental hesitation within Mr Grey, along with some strange echoing effects and hints of esoteric maths, and so he continued smoothly, “Unless you wish to maintain some distance while we work out what your payment should be.” Sverl had absolutely no idea what such a creature, now free of his control, might want.
“I want to accompany you,” said Grey, dipping his head to peer down at his own body. Sverl now realized why the link seemed so odd. Mr Grey had plugged himself into that little ship to make the required calculations to control the U-space engines, and was still partly lost in that mathematical universe.
“Why?” Sverl asked, then before Grey could reply, said the answer himself: “Penny Royal.”
“Yes.” The affirmation was almost dismissive as Grey turned to gaze at Trent Sobel, who was stepping into the rear of the cabin, his expression wary at first, then alarmed when he saw the image on the small screen.
“Come over,” Sverl repeated, meanwhile mentally sending a signal to open a door into the assault bay. He withdrew, partially, his awareness of what was happening aboard that small vessel remaining just enough to alert him to anything that might require his attention. Next, as the ship fired up its fusion drive and began its approach, he began updating from his various sources within both the Polity and the Kingdom. It soon became evident that he should have been paying more attention to things outside his usual compass.