“I don’t believe in predestination,” Isobel snapped, suddenly angry. “I did make my own choices. I did choose my own path.”
“Predestination,” he repeated, turning his head away. “As evolved creatures we can’t escape it. But as creatures who can alter both our bodies and our minds, we can introduce the random . . .”
“You still haven’t told me what you want or who and what you are.”
He turned back. “I studied your transformation and your dealings with Penny Royal—for they are the ones of most interest to me. I am Father-Captain Sverl.”
Isobel took a step back. As she had departed the system of the Rock Pool, going in pursuit of Penny Royal, impelled by instincts that were suicidal in that situation, and gradually being swallowed by the hooder war mind, Sverl had contacted her. The words they had exchanged had been few and inconsequential, but the communication on other levels had been vast. He had displayed his mind to her in all its alien glory, its ongoing distortion and its hungry need for . . .
something
. He had wanted her. He had wanted . . . mental exchanges. And this had terrified her.
“If you have full knowledge of our encounters, you have what you wanted from me, then,” she managed.
“In all but some final details, I do have that information. But it has provided none of the answers I sought. Our only common ground is that we are the victims of Penny Royal. And we have both undergone—and, in my case, am still undergoing—transformation. However, you and I are still very different creatures, Isobel.”
“No shit,” she said. “I’m a human being and you’re a psychotic crab.”
“I was,” Sverl replied, again peering at his hands, “but at this moment I am human—a lesser being, just one third of my whole.”
“Why am I here now?” Isobel asked.
He looked up. “Those final details I mentioned. I have seen everything but those last moments. Your crystal takes me only as far as your intent to kill Thorvald Spear. It takes me to the moment the Weaver seized control of you. Or rather, it commandeered the war mind of which you had become an insignificant portion.”
“But I remember the rest.”
“So you do, but the rest is caught in a time crystal I cannot access. In a manner yet opaque to me, Penny Royal has made that portion of your existence accessible only with your permission. I therefore must assume that it is the portion most important to me.”
Isobel fought to overcome her fear but even as she did so, she felt something dark and huge loom behind this harmless-looking man. She stepped over and seated herself on a rock just a few paces in front of him, reached down and picked up a sea-smoothed flat green pebble and brushed away the grit. She sat upright and hurled it hard and low at the sea. It skipped over the water and, with satisfaction, she counted four bounces. Then, as if Sverl just wanted to remind her who was in control, when she knew it ought to fall into the water the pebble skipped again and again, endlessly across the sea, out towards the bloated sun.
“Then I have something to bargain with,” she said.
“Yes, in a sense you do,” he replied, “but lest you forget, my bargaining position is a stronger one. Please don’t force me to resort to threats, Isobel.”
Yes, he controlled this virtuality, he controlled her. He could put her through an eternity of torment, while only a brief span of time passed for him.
“I want to live,” she said.
“Of course you do, but that is not my choice,” said Sverl. “I have been allowed to activate you by the one who owns you.” Sverl pointed over her shoulder and she turned. Trent Sobel stood there, gazing out to sea.
“Trent!”
He turned and looked at her, reached up to finger that damned earring of his, shook his head dismissively and just faded out of existence. The knowledge dropped easily into her mind. Penny Royal had put her in that earring of his, but here Trent had just been a ghost, an illustration—not real.
“He told me that one day he might resurrect you, Isobel, if he can ever find it in his heart to forgive you.”
Isobel felt suddenly tired and unwell. She reached up to touch her face and felt a hollow forming in her cheek bone.
Not again
.
As she sat there, she became certain that a blood-red eye would open in that developing pit and knew in agonizing detail everything that would ensue. She could be forced to relive her transformation by Penny Royal over and over again. She picked up another stone, a small one, and realized after a moment that it was a purple sapphire, but polished smooth, not faceted. She knew Sverl was manipulating both her virtual form and her mind, subtly impelling her to make the response he sought, and she remembered how he could be much more unsubtle.
“Take the damned memories,” she said, and tossed the gem to the man before her.
He snatched it out of the air. “Thank you, Isobel.”
She looked aside, now feeling at once alienated from her identity and yet deeply connected to it too.
“
The problem was separating you from what you’d become, so intricately bound were the two,
”
said a voice she recognized but didn’t want to name to herself. It continued,
“
The Weaver supplied the answer for its own benefit: change what you were becoming, then make the new being reject the old. Thereafter the only remaining problem was to find the line of division. It was perfect, and restored some balance on Masada too.
”
Manipulators were now sprouting out down each side of her extended face. Horror filled her, and this time it wasn’t blunted by a growing hooder psyche; by the predator melding with her own predatory instincts. It wasn’t ameliorated by her knowledge that to survive, she must accept the changes she was undergoing. Everything that had screamed in her when Penny Royal had changed the course of her transformation was screaming again . . . or was that
still screaming
? Had it ever stopped?
On the shore, Isobel reached up to touch her face again. The eye pit was gone and it was again perfect, but it didn’t feel real. None of this was real anyway; it was just data, moving.
“
The war machine left you behind
,”
said Penny Royal. Yes, it was the AI talking to her, the AI she had supposedly killed
.
“
I don’t understand,
”
Isobel managed, her voice horribly distorted by her changing mouth.
“
Why . . . you do this?
”
she tried, but knew it was not a question but a plea for mercy
.
“
I must unravel my past back to its beginning, and it’s to the beginning I will go next,
”
the black AI replied cryptically.
“
That is, when all is done here and events ordered and set on their course to conclusion.
”
It stopped there. Isobel felt a huge surge of excitement but knew that it wasn’t her own. Momentarily, she glimpsed a flash of something completely out of sync with her current “reality.” She saw a human skull walking on metal legs in some strange garden. Trent Sobel sat on a small stool there, fingering his earlobe, while in his other hand he held a long needle.
“
Why!
”
she shrieked
.
“
You wanted to tear your enemies apart, and I provided the tools,
”
said the AI.
“
That was wrong of me. I have now taken all your tools away from you: your war machine body, your ships, your people, your power, and now only you remain.
”
Isobel wailed
.
“
And now you have a small chance to again be what you once were.
”
Isobel’s wail died and the world snapped around her. A shadow passed and aboard this ersatz version of the
Moray Firth.
Isobel turned, feeling good, to gaze at her screen mirror. She was beautiful again, her mind whole, all her memories accessible
.
“
How can that be possible?
”
she asked
.
“
All you need to do,
”
Penny Royal replied,
“
is let go.
”
“
You mean die.
”
“
You reside in me now, Isobel, and now it’s time for you to leave.
”
“
You promise—I have another chance?
”
Isobel asked, suddenly, unutterably weary
.
“
I always keep my promises,
”
said Penny Royal
.
“Thank you, Isobel,” Sverl the human repeated. He was now just a disembodied voice, his human form banished with the view of the sea.
“So I was just a messenger,” she replied. “Not even that—just the message’s container, a way to bring Penny Royal’s words to you.”
“An important one.”
“A cipher, a piece of data, a clue.”
“Perhaps it’s not finished for you yet,” Sverl suggested. “Trent Sobel seeks to redeem himself, and he might revive you in the process.”
“There is nothing left for me,” she replied. “I just want to go away now. He can keep me in his damned earring for all eternity. I don’t care.”
“Sleep, then,” said Sverl.
Blackness descended.
THE BROCKLE
The old Polity destroyer—a heavily armoured bulk a mile long—ejected an escape pod. The pod, just a cone-shaped re-entry capsule, tumbled in vacuum for a while as if to orient itself, then fired up a chemical drive to bring it in towards the detectors and defences about the
Tyburn
. After deep scanning it, they allowed it through. The Brockle meanwhile kept a mental finger on the switch to initiate the
Tyburn
’s thoroughly modernized U-space drive. If the detectors out there picked up the slightest non-standard U-signature from the destroyer, which probably meant the launching of a U-jump missile, the
Tyburn
would be gone, shedding U-field disruptor mines in its wake, and the Brockle’s
agreed
imprisonment would be over.
Ever since its arrival, there had been no response from the destroyer’s controlling AI to the Brockle’s queries, and it had not used a shuttle to send its prisoners. This particular AI wanted nothing to do with the Brockle—like so many Polity AIs, it saw the Brockle as the mad relative locked in the attic—and, turning its ship away, obviously wanted to leave as quickly as possible. However, just before it dropped into U-space a data package did arrive.
The Brockle opened the package with care. It was unlikely that a simple ship AI could have designed an effective informational attack against an AI like the Brockle, but that did not discount it having brought one from elsewhere. The ship AI had supplied all the requested data. The Brockle had wanted all the technical data the AI could provide about its ship because it was from the same era as Penny Royal’s
Puling Child
, now renamed the
Lance
, and of the same design. Now absorbing the package, the Brockle learned very little of use—it illuminated nothing about the black AI’s past, nor how it had turned into what it now was. Perhaps the destroyer’s prisoners would provide more useful information on Penny Royal.
The escape pod was now heading in towards the space doors, automatically tracked by a gigawatt laser, signalling ahead for permission to dock. The Brockle gave it, evacuating the hold and setting the space doors to open, also shutting down grav on the dock floor. The pod finally drifted in, adjusting with puffs of compressed air to swing upright and settle. The Brockle re-engaged grav to bring it down firmly. It was in now, and would be going nowhere.
Ensconced in a chair in its favoured human form, the Brockle watched through the thousands of pin cams scattered inside the dock. Once the old space doors closed, pressure inside steadily began to climb. When the pressure reached Earth-normal, a door thumped open in the side of the pod and a figure, with a survival suit pulled on over his clothes, climbed out. This was Ikbal Phrose, one of Captain Blite’s old crewmembers. Upon reaching the floor, he turned to help his crewmate, Martina Lennerson Hyde, but she waved him away irritably. Once they were down on the floor they looked about expectantly, then, after a while, Martina pulled open her visor and shouted, “Hey, anyone here?”
The Brockle stood, sensing its body’s units easing apart—the physical expression of its eagerness to get to the interrogation—but it felt frustration too. Its instructions from Earth Central had been quite clear and that AI’s watcher here would report any infraction. The Brockle was to interrogate the two meticulously and examine and record anything of relevance to Penny Royal it could find in their minds. However, it was to do this without causing them great discomfort, because they were only guilty of petty crimes. Also, they were not under sentence of death, so, when the Brockle was finished with them, it must put them on a prison single-ship and dispatch them to Par Avion.
The Brockle felt this was a kind of madness. Since interrogating Trent, it had been taking an increasing interest in the doings of Penny Royal. Long accustomed to examining the common criminals of the Polity, both human and AI, it was now aware that Penny Royal was an uncommon and dangerous offender indeed. The Brockle also understood that its interest in Penny Royal had increased because the black AI was more akin to the Brockle than to other Polity AIs. Like the Brockle, it was a swarm entity and could separate its body into a shoal form with different mind states and even minds, perpetually communicating, absorbing each other and separating. Like the Brockle, some past trauma had driven it into mental expansion and towards behaviour not acceptable in
civilized
AI society. However, unlike the Brockle, Penny Royal had stepped well over the line and become the AI equivalent of a human psychopath. The Brockle had merely edged a toe over the line, which was why, rather than face extermination, it had allowed Polity AIs to confine it to this prison hulk.
“Proceed to the door,” the Brockle instructed over the old intercom system, opening one of the circular doors at the back of the dock. “Walk along the tunnel and enter the second room on the right.”
“Who is this?” Martina demanded.
“I am to ask you some questions concerning your association with the black AI Penny Royal,” the Brockle replied, its skin turning silvery and splitting as the writhing worm-forms of its swarm body separated further.