prador
— A highly xenophobic race of giant crablike aliens ruled by a king and his family. Hostility is implicit in their biology and, upon encountering the Polity, they immediately attacked it. Their advantage in this war was that they did not use runcibles (such devices needed the intelligence of AIs to control them and the prador are also hostile to any form of artificial intelligence) and as a result had developed their spaceship technology, and the metallurgy involved, beyond that of the Polity. They attacked with near-indestructible ships, but in the end the humans and AIs adapted and in their war factories out-manufactured the prador and began to win. They did not complete the victory, however, because the old king was usurped and the new king made an uneasy peace with the Polity.
shell people
— a group of cultist humans whose admiration of the prador is such that they are trying to alter themselves surgically to become prador.
Sparkind
— The Sparkind are an elite ECS military force, though with a name deriving from the Spartans (citizens of an ancient Greek city who were noted for their military prowess, austerity and discipline), they cannot trace their ancestry back so far. Sparkind are the direct descendants of the Special Forces that came into being during the Earth-bound wars towards the end of the second millennium: the Special Boat Service, the Special Air Service, Navy SEALS and the like.
—From
Quince Guide
, compiled by humans
the Technician
— The last of the original hooder war machines. Having existed on Masada for two million years in a state of mental somnolence, it recently woke up but was apparently killed by a machine made by the Atheter to wipe out their own civilization.
USER
— Underspace Interference Emitter. This device disrupts U-space by oscillating a singularity through a runcible gate. It is used to push ships out of U-space into the real, or realspace.
U-space
— Underspace is the continuum spaceships enter (or U-jump into), rather like submarines submerging, to travel faster than light. It is also the continuum that can be crossed by using runcible gates, making travel between worlds linked by such gates all but instantaneous.
Caroline Asher
10/7/59 – 24/1/14
You told me to never stop writing just some days before you died.
I’m sorry my love but I did stop.
I tried to forget everything, but now I am remembering.
1
PENNY ROYAL: A DARK HISTORY
A destroyer slides out into a chaos of ships while the artificial intelligence inside absorbs data. It quickly understands its nature, grasps an overview of human and AI history and learns about the first encounters with the alien prador and the ensuing war. But at the forefront of its mind are tactical data, situational reports, casualty reports, an analysis of the latest battle and its own purpose within that. As a large portion of the swarm of Polity ships sets off, the AI fires up its fusion engine for the first time, heading for its designated spot as outrider to a huge interfaced dreadnought. Ahead lies the massive hexagon of a runcible space gate. Drones and some ships pass through its shimmering interface, but other ships swing aside to take another route; the destroyer AI meanwhile routes power into ultra-capacitor and laminar storage as it awaits its final components.
A shuttle approaches the AI’s ship fast, its flight edging into the unpredictable since the pilot is no machine. The blocky vessel, little different in appearance to a brick with engines, slows.
“Are you going to open those doors or what?” a voice demands.
The destroyer AI opens its space doors and, with a reckless expenditure of fuel, the human pilot sends the shuttle inside, steering thrusters marring the perfectly polished walls. The AI closes up docking clamps and locks the vessel down, shuts the doors and charges the hold with air, then watches internally as four humans, clad in armoured acceleration suits and loaded with gear, clamber out of the shuttle. It finds their presence a little puzzling, though even from its moment of inception it knew they were coming. Surely, they are only a disadvantage to it—to the purpose it serves? Continuing to observe them, it feels a strange emptiness opening inside. They are here and they are not logically required, therefore how much else is logical? Briefly, it sees everything as purposeless patterned matter without any reason for existence, including itself. Then, with a shudder, its programming reasserts itself.
“Don’t you just love that new-destroyer smell?” asks one of the men.
“Preferred the old bird,” replies the other man, “but there wasn’t much left to repair.”
“
I am Daleen
,” says one of the others, addressing the AI directly. This radio communication identifies this “female” as a Golem, if the AI hadn’t already known.
Two human males, one human female and a Golem android fashioned in the female form, then. The reason for their presence aboard is still unclear, but will surely become evident in good time . . .
“
What is your purpose?
” the AI asks Daleen.
“
It’s about participation,
” Daleen replies, “
and an inefficiency yet to be purged from the system, but also a very useful inefficiency when it comes to massive EMR shutdowns. We are also your conscience
.”
What Daleen said about the risk of electromagnetic radiation emissions—that was logical enough, because organic beings onboard could remain functional after other ship systems had been shut down. Now the AI senses protective feelings towards this crew kicking in, but it also feels part of itself dropping into that emptiness and distancing itself from them. It must ensure that these people remain alive, for its programming tells it they are important.
I must not risk too much
, it thinks, but answering this, the deeper and newly forming
other
self wonders:
What is risk?
“Conscience” is not a sufficiently adequate description of its surface reaction, for it understands that its own programmed drive for survival is insufficient and the human crew a necessary risk of loss. Yet already something is undermining that programming. It is not functioning to specifications and the AI makes an effort to reintegrate its
other
self. The response is a weird electronic whining.
It now watches the crew settling in and knows that they will control its weapons, assess and gather data about the coming battle and about the AI itself. It resents the first two for surely they are make-work tasks it could perform better by itself. And it recognizes the last as a danger. Already it understands that, through the necessities of war, the Polity is quickly producing AIs like itself, with copying errors and a high degree of scrappage. It also realizes that its own mind, while firmly embedding this emotional content of its programming, is dividing. Should the humans or any of its fellow AIs discover and report this, it will be in danger of being scrapped itself.
The order is given—impossible to disobey—and the very fabric of vacuum distorts around the many ships as they stretch into lines to infinity, photons ripped out of the quantum foam glittering in their wake. The destroyer AI is ready and, feeling like a lead weight pressing down on a silk sheet, routes power through to its drive as it delicately navigates by shaping the fields, shifting Calabi-Yau frames to alter tension across that sheet. Then the sheet rips and it falls through.
“I fucking hate that,” says the woman.
The three humans have now packed away their gear and are strapping themselves into acceleration chairs and connecting their umbilicals.
“
I am puzzled,
” the AI says. “
I will not be able to use maximum acceleration or vector change with humans aboard.”
“
You are to be studied,
” the Golem replies.
Now the AI feels the connections, the scanning, the routes opening from its mind to screens and other hardware arrayed before the human woman. It samples her record, realizes she is a human expert in AI, but still cannot fathom how a human mind can do or learn more than it can itself. However, the danger remains and it subtly blocks or diverts her intrusion. She will see the largest part of it, and it will all seem in order. She will not plumb the smaller but growing darkness within.
Subjective transit time ensues, allowing the AI further capacity to think about things irrelevant to the coming battle. It considers its designation of V12-707 and compares that to the now-invisible dreadnought it accompanies, which is named
Vorpal Dagger
. It discovers, instantly, that the dreadnought was not a product of Room 101, the war factory that created itself. And additionally, the ship has been in service for eight years. The destroyer does not yet have a name, nor does the AI it contains, because it is experimental and such experiments do not have a notable lifespan. Do the humans know this? The destroyer AI suddenly feels fear at this realization, then analyses the purpose of fear itself: it is an evolved survival trait of biological life, but here and now is an experimental test to see if it can prevent AIs sacrificing themselves without sufficient cost to the enemy. It is numbers again: the Polity must recoup the sheer resource expense of ship production to win this war.
“
I need a name,
” it decides, and does not realize it has transmitted this statement until the Golem Daleen replies.
“
Then choose one,
” it says.
Choose one . . .
It must somehow negate the growing darkness within. A frantic search keys into stored history about abortion. But it cannot just be all about being rid of its unwanted
other
. It should also be about something positive, something life affirming. Lists of words appear in its mind relating to both of these and, in desperation, it selects at random.
Pennyroyal
.
It is a herb that humans used to cause abortion, but also used medicinally.
“I name myself Penny Royal,” it says.
Its other self, its growing dark child, recognizes intent and knows that its parent, the other part of itself, is going to try to expel it. The weird electronic whining returns.
“Our ship just named itself,” says the Golem to the three humans.
“And?” asks one of the men, his gaze fixed on the countdown on his screen, which is rapidly heading towards zero, and the end of their U-space jump.
“Penny Royal,” the Golem replies.
“The good ship
Penny Royal,
” says the woman cheerfully, drawing strange looks from the others.
“Not necessarily,” says the Golem. “That is just the name chosen for itself by the ship’s newborn AI. Is that to be the name of this destroyer too, Penny Royal?”
“No,” replies the AI Penny Royal, sure now that it wants to be as free of this vessel as it wants to be free of its dark child. “I name this ship the
Puling Child.
”
The response to this is an exchange of puzzled looks.
Time passes and Penny Royal has prepared. It has moved its maintenance robots into position, topped up its power storage and primed its weapons. Finally, it flips itself back into real space,
the real
, and instantly begins updating: mapping the positions of its fellows, the debris fields, planets, moons, the sun and the distant accretion disc of a black hole, the scattered collection of prador vessels, surrounded by swarms of their spherical war drones and armoured children. Even as it sorts this information, one of its feeds winks out: a destroyer in the fleet just a numeral different from itself turns to a spreading cloud of molten metal, hot gases and glowing junk. The
Puling Child
weaves, using steering thrusters and stuttering its main fusion drive, calculating the vectors of approaching missiles in the microseconds before they reach it, the imparted G sending the three humans into blackout despite their suits and other physical support. Missiles speed past, an attack ship loses its back end and tumbles, its AI howling, the screams of its crew brief, truncated. A missile scores down the side of
Puling Child
, leaving a glowing groove, while another explodes close by, soaking it with EMR. On top of a sudden feeling of unexpected grief at the loss of comrades, and ensuing anger, Penny Royal now feels the facsimile of pain.
“
Are these feelings needed?
” it enquires of both the interfaced dreadnought and the Golem.
“
We will know soon enough,
” the dreadnought replies—the exchange microseconds long.
“
Perhaps not the best place for this,
” the Golem adds.
It is a trial run of a strategy devised by some planetary AI deep inside the Polity. Observing the success of some human units, and some drones programmed for emotional response, it decided to test something generally considered a disadvantage: let some ship AIs be programmed to feel fear, pain, guilt, protective urges and loss, and see how well they do. Penny Royal wonders if this strategy is the right one as another of its fellows dies screaming, the crew aboard incinerated before they can emit any sound, and it mourns.
Why fight?
The thought surfaces from its deeper dark self, which begins expanding and hiding its processing based on that question. Penny Royal realizes it cannot integrate its dark child, but at least should be able to control it . . .
MICHELETTO’S GARROTTE
—PRESENT
The attack ship,
Micheletto’s Garrotte
, liked others to call it simply Garrotte.
So what was it now
, it wondered,
a frayed bit of damned string?
Oh yeah, it had been state of the art once—hell, nothing less had been required for a posting as important as the planet of Masada. It had been a black spike of densely packed technology, some of which even extended down into the realm of picotech. It could deploy U-jump missiles, cross-spectrum lasers and particle cannons. And it could design the particulate content of the latter in microseconds, for maximum penetration of any target. It had hardfields, shimmershield force fields and things in between that no one had even named yet. It could dice a prador, or similar hostile alien, into centimetre cubes from thousands of miles away. Yet a lightly armed ancient piece of scrap which had been the private ship of the criminal Isobel Satomi had screwed it completely.