Oh please no . . .
He stumbled away, cringing inside, then fell over fragments of chair still attached to his legs, and another claw crashed down on the back of his neck. The flash of a stunner prod numbed his right arm. He drove his left fist up and felt something break under it, retracted his fist as if he had hurt it and curled it against his chest. Then blow after blow rained down on him and a claw closed around his neck. He briefly lost consciousness, then came to, feeling the shellmen binding his arms behind his back and tying further straps around his legs.
“With the others,” said Taiken.
Next, they dragged him along the floor by his jacket collar, shell people all around him, the woman walking beside him holding an armoured hand against her chest. She was coughing, occasionally spitting out gobbets of black jelly. He was glad she was alive and hoped the damage wasn’t permanent.
“He’s . . . nuts,” Trent managed, not sure for a moment if he was referring to Taiken or himself.
“Father . . .” she replied.
“Why the fuck . . . you listen to him?”
“We must obey.”
At length they threw him into a cage, slamming a barred door closed behind him. There were other people here—normal Polity humans, if such a description could be apt. A man walked over, pulled out of his pocket a device Trent recognized as a micro-shear. The man stooped and worked on Trent’s bonds, finally freeing him. Trent heaved himself over, spat out blood and a fragment of tooth and sat upright. He looked round at the people—four of them—then paused to focus on an object sitting just outside the cage. A huge spherical glass bottle sat in a metal framework. Perpetual slithering movement filled it.
“Spatterjay leeches,” he muttered, then turned to the man who had freed him. “It makes no sense,” he continued, “are they all crazy?”
“That’s not a term I like,” said the man, wincing.
“Oh yeah?” said Trent, puzzled.
“I take it you received your offer from Taiken to join them.” The man squatted down beside him.
“Yeah, I did. The man’s a loon. Why do they listen to him?” Trent knew he was ranting, but he just wanted to talk, just wanted to think about anything other than his own recent reactions to violence.
The man grimaced, probably as offended by “loon” as he had been by “crazy.” “Because they have no choice,” said the man. “They could not overcome their internal conflicts in time. Consider what they have been trying to achieve and what the end result should be.”
“All of them looking like crabs?”
“Yes, but more than that.” The man turned off his micro-shear and, as he pocketed it, Trent watched where it went and thought about what use he could make of it. Especially on the lock of that door behind. “Taiken has always been their leader and has always, because of his mental aberrations, wanted to be a prador. But not just any prador. He didn’t want to be a first- or second-child but a father-captain—with his children utterly loyal and obedient.”
“I saw one of his kids . . .” said Trent.
“The two children, are they okay? I worry about the damage . . .”
“Not really . . . But even others called him father.”
“All the adaptogenic drugs, the nano-packages, the surgical material and the tank-grown prador organic materials are sourced from the same prador genome and they all come through Taiken. The people who used them donned their own chains because Taiken retained certain items for himself only: he had father-captain pheromone organs surgically implanted inside him.”
“Pheromonal control,” said Trent, getting it at once.
“He didn’t use this method of control on the Rock Pool, at least not much, because there were too many Polity watchers and too many normal humans about. He needed his people confined to one place, free of interference, in some enclave before he could assert full control. It’s a scenario that has been played out throughout history, generally in religious cults.” The man paused to wave a hand at his surroundings. “I don’t know if this is finally the right place to achieve his dream or whether he has become more delusional.”
“I’d go for the latter,” said Trent. “He’s insane.”
“Insane or otherwise,” said the man, frowning, “Taiken is now a father-captain and all the shell people here who used his products are now his children. They are enslaved to the pheromones he produces and are simply incapable of disobeying him.”
“Shit,” Trent muttered.
“And, as I understand it,” said the man, “Taiken intends to go all the way. He deliberately left his wife unchanged. He intends to use material from a different prador genome to convert her into a prador female.”
Horror climbed up out of Trent’s chest and closed his throat.
Redeem yourself
, Penny Royal had said, and the first-child Bsorol had referred to that too. Trent remembered the words with incredible clarity and considered how, until now, there had been no opportunity. He also now realized that the black AI had crippled his ability to act, by cursing him with empathy.
9
BLITE
A tension permeated the air throughout the ship, a feeling that the very fabric of the universe had twisted and knotted up all around them. Perhaps this feeling was making him question his impulse to go after Penny Royal, or perhaps that was due to their brief and potentially lethal encounter with the king of the prador. However, most probably it was the knowledge that Penny Royal
had
taken them back in time—the kind of action that had always been equated with dangerous, universe-destroying lunacy in the fiction he grew up with.
He stood in their new cargo area, eyeing the copious space available. He was aware that being able to fill it with cargo and move it at the speed this ship could manage, he could make a fortune. But he already had one—he was already seriously wealthy from the sale of the memplants Penny Royal had provided. Money wasn’t why he was here, not any more.
Blite turned from the cargo area, went through the bulkhead door leading into the crew quarters and entered the dropshaft around which the cabins had been positioned. He towed himself along this, then went through the next bulkhead door, grav returning and bringing his boots thumping down on the floor of the bridge. Greer was the only one in attendance here—Brond getting some sleep in the large well-appointed cabin he had taken.
“On the prowl again?” she enquired.
He grunted at her and moved on.
After the next bulkhead door was a short corridor terminating in a shimmershield airlock. The shuttle bay beyond was pressurized so Blite didn’t need his helmet. He stretched out a hand to the first shimmershield and pushed it through—the sensation was much like pushing his hand into warm mud. He followed his hand through, the shield softening and yielding quickly, then abruptly blinking out of existence, as did the second shield. Sub-AI computing in the airlock had detected its irrelevance and shut it down.
Blite stepped into the shuttle bay and eyed the new shuttle clamped in place there. The thing was a slightly flattened sphere thirty feet across, with six acceleration chairs inside. Each was on its own revolving base so those inside could take in the view. And it would be a good one since the whole interior of that cabin in the upper hemisphere of the shuttle was lined with screen paint—out in vacuum it could appear to those inside that no ship surrounded them at all. No controls were visible the first time he had stepped inside. However, on asking Leven, he had learned that the shuttle would take a submind of the Golem ship mind and, if that ever failed or was destroyed, a manual control console would automatically rise from the floor. “What if the damage that destroyed the submind also damaged the system for raising that console?” Blite had asked.
“You’d be dead anyway,” Leven had replied.
Blite moved on past the shuttle and into the corridor leading back into the prong of the horseshoe-shape of the ship on this side. He’d taken this route many times before, checked the maintenance hatches leading to the half of the U-space drive that was on this side, then checked through the hatches at the end leading to the fusion array. He liked to visit this place when he felt he had something to say to their resident black AI. Here Penny Royal had made a particular alcove. He halted by this and eyed the antique space suit seated on a stool inside.
This time, unlike on other occasions, he sensed no presence here, just a prickling down his spine when he gazed into the black vacancy of the visor. Nevertheless, he spoke because, really, it didn’t matter where on this ship he spoke. Penny Royal would always hear.
“There’s something I’ve been avoiding asking,” he said. “We went back in time two weeks so you could tell this Gost to pass Sverl the identification of those who escaped Factory Station Room 101, which still strikes me as a little odd—I don’t quite believe that it was an emergency measure because one of the actors in your play went off-script. I reckon you did it because you could. I think you’re exploring your abilities and enjoying your power to manipulate. Whatever . . .” Blite shrugged. “What I want to ask is this: are we now travelling forward those two weeks?”
“No,” Penny Royal replied—voice issuing out of the air all around him.
“I see.” Blite felt relieved at the straight verbal response and wondered if what he was about to say would make him sound like an idiot. But surely everything humans said sounded idiotic to the AI? “When I was a kid I used to play a VR game called Cowl. It was all about time travel and had much in it about infinite energy progressions and energy debts. I understand more now I’m older but by no means have a complete grasp on it all. Because you took us back in time and are not going forward again, aren’t we carrying some portion of universal entropy with us?”
The air before the suit shimmered and a deeper black speck grew in the darkness of the suit, as if from infinite distance, finally halting to form a black diamond hanging just behind the visor. Blite had come to understand that when the AI manifested in this way it was engaging just a little bit more—had become more interested in what he was saying. This also increased the chances of it trying to load data straight to his mind.
“Correct,” said the AI.
“It’s . . . like negative energy . . . part of the heat death of the universe?”
No words now, just a vision of the vastness of space uploaded straight into his head: galaxies and nebulae strewn before him, all their brightness fading into endless dark . . . As Blite returned to the here and now, finding himself down on his knees on the deck, he guessed that he’d been right.
Staying where he was, he hardened his resolve and continued: “And we’re going to be bringing that load back out into the real when we surface in four hours from now.”
“Yes.”
“And that’s . . . dangerous?”
Now he was given a vision of a G-type sun, with peripheral images of the planetary surface of a living world included as a subtext. He watched a wave of something hit the sun and bruise it, watched that mottling spread, and the sun begin to collapse in on itself like the sped-up film of a rotting apple. In the subtext the sky darkened, clouds rolled across it and winter came. He saw jungles collapsing and decaying, then even decay ceasing as they froze. He saw oceans turning to ice, a blizzard covering animal corpses . . .
What the fuck?
Blite tried to shut out the images, and gradually they faded, but he continued his line of enquiry with stubborn persistence, “But that didn’t happen when we went to the Feeding Frenzy . . .”
“I kept the entropic effect balanced by maintaining U-space drive Calabi-Yau frames in juxtaposition with U-space energy draw.”
Whatever
. At least the black AI hadn’t tried to load
that
across to his mind.
Penny Royal continued, and Blite felt the AI was enjoying this.
“Had the king not reacted as I had wished, it would have been necessary for me to take the Calabi-Yau frames out of juxtaposition. The result would have been thirty completely inert King’s Guard ships in darkness—all the energy in the gas cloud snuffed out and the gases no longer radiating,” the AI explained. “I would then have had to find another method of providing Sverl with the information I wanted him to have.”
Okay, I see, you didn’t send the letter I wanted you to send, so here’s a thermo nuke
. Blite repressed the urge to giggle insanely. “But still that negative energy needs to be offloaded.”
“Yes, it does, Captain Blite,” said Penny Royal.
A memory now, but one that wasn’t his own: Blite found himself standing in some Polity science museum looking into a holographic star map. His hand operating a half-seen gesture control, he focused the display on a planetary system and a sun lying four light years away, which expanded and were labelled. The system was called Rebus and the sun was called Crispin Six. He then turned away from this, stepping into a childhood memory. He found himself walking towards the arch of a planetary data cache and glancing up at the sign “Read and Learn.”
With the sound of glassy chimes, the diamond receded deep into the suit and winked out, and Blite knew that the audience was over. Penny Royal would talk, in its way, but it was never an extended conversation. Blite suspected that, like many AIs, it grew bored with mere human exchanges and tended to render up just a little less information than the human required, thereby forcing said human to go off to do some research and thinking. With his mouth dry and a feeling of dread clenching his guts, Blite turned and headed back to the bridge. Penny Royal, he decided, trying to think light thoughts, was a bit didactic, a bit of a pedant, and always annoying and frustrating. But he could not dispel the fear that the AI was about to annihilate a solar system.
SVERL
“
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.
”
Sverl kept replaying Penny Royal’s words in his head—the words Sverl had found in Isobel Satomi’s mind and were a message from the AI to him. Meanwhile, he checked and rechecked other data sources. Displayed on his screens was old recorded footage of a massive Polity construct under attack by the prador. The thing was described by humans as resembling a giant harmonica and it was one of the largest ever made, measuring eighty miles from end to end, thirty miles wide and fifteen deep. The square holes ran along either side, in pairs of lines, being the entrances to enormous final construction bays. This was one of their greatest factory stations; this was the infamous Factory Station Room 101. And it was, Sverl was sure, the beginning that Penny Royal had referred to, because here was where the AI had its genesis.