The Brockle thought otherwise. All the intimate details it had gleaned from Blite’s crewmembers proved that Penny Royal, as well as being a paradigm-changing force, was dangerously unstable. The Brockle had requested the other two crewmembers—the couple Chont and Haber Geras—but apparently ECS had intercepted and questioned them on Earth, and released them. This was just plain wrong. It could learn so much more by a joint interrogation of all four. It could make so many comparisons of their experiences. By jointly putting them under pressure and setting them against each other in some VR scenario it could elicit new facts. Didn’t Earth Central understand the necessity for this? Didn’t that AI understand how dangerous Penny Royal was?
In its seat before the window, which gave a view along the thin central body of the
Tyburn
to the section that still contained the remains of some of the colonists, the Brockle ground its ersatz teeth and felt the need for some rebellion of its own. Through the cams in the interrogation room, it gazed upon Ikbal and Martina. Presently they were lying on the floor, the silver worms of nano-fibres visible around their heads, which had also penetrated within. The Brockle was running them through a perfect recall of events aboard
The Rose
while subtly twisting their mental perspective. And every time it did this, further interesting details surfaced. It then focused its attention on the dock, as the woman exited the single-ship and stood wringing her hands and peering round nervously.
Yes, time to push against the terms of its confinement by Polity AIs. The negotiation to reach agreement had been difficult and it had only consented because here it got precisely what it wanted: suspects to interrogate, minds to take apart. Now it wasn’t getting what it wanted.
The Brockle stood and headed out, broke into an unaccustomed jog then, in irritation, melted into a hundred silver worms and shoaled towards the dock. A short while later it exploded into the dock space, seeing the woman separatist from a hundred different perspectives. Quick and dirty, it decided, as it swarmed around her. Then all the worms collapsed in on her with a thunderous crack and enclosed her in a writhing ball.
The Brockle stripped the flesh away from her skull, then the skull away from her brain, which it retained. The shifting bait-ball of worms drifted across the dock, dropping flesh and skin, splinters of bone, and then her headless body. It recorded her brain physically as it took it apart, making a model, and running her mind-state in that. Discarding a slurry of neural matter, it departed the dock, already having extracted enough about her separatist contacts and involvement in other crimes to make a report. Meanwhile, it linked through to its submind in the single-ship. But rather than absorb it, as usual, it delivered some simple instructions: “Return to Omega Six for next pick-up.” As the Brockle well knew, there was no pickup waiting there, at the station where this latest victim had been held.
“Understood,” the submind replied.
Immediately the dock began to evacuate, the woman’s remains steaming on the floor as they rapidly vacuum-dried. The space doors opened and the single-ship began to manoeuvre towards them with blasts of compressed air. Now, almost certainly, the watcher would be informing Earth Central that the ship was departing without the crewmen. However, by the time the Polity’s leading AI responded, the ship would have dropped into U-space. And now there were no more single-ships aboard it could use to return Blite’s crew. This was merely a delaying tactic, because in time another one would arrive with yet another prisoner for interrogation.
Back in its viewing room, the Brockle formed itself back into a fat young man, already dispatching the report on the separatist as it stepped back to its chair. Later, it would return and get rid of the headless and now dried-out corpse. Right now, it checked through its units attached to Ikbal and Martina before formulating the replies it would make during the imminent exchange with Earth Central. Then it needed to think very carefully about endings, and new beginnings.
11
THE PRADOR/HUMAN WAR: RISS
As Room 101 escaped into U-space, Riss continued to try to extract her ovipositor from the wall as the thrum of weapons hitting hardfield defences cut off. Slow data transmission began to re-establish itself. The station had survived! But now, as more and more data and more and more sensors became available, the darkness flooded in. It was filled with drowning minds that were crumbling, falling apart.
“You’re with me, now,” said the mantis, closing one limb around Riss’s body and yanking the little drone from the wall.
They moved fast from Beta Six, the mite drones falling in behind them, with others joining them and appearing from elsewhere. Hollow booms echoed throughout the station, where air was available to transmit the sound. Power surges and outages continued all around, and Riss detected massive data shifts in the computer systems—shifts that made them difficult to penetrate and therefore understand.
“They’re fighting back,” said the mantis, “but they’re as naive as you are and don’t understand. Only the subminds and those who returned for repairs, like me, stand any chance.”
Before Riss could ask a question, the mantis routed a data package across. The 101 AI was now killing its children, which didn’t make any sense. The station was wiping AI crystal with EM pulses, as it queued up for insertion into new attack ships. It was also using an informational attack against AI crystal already inside ships—in every stage of construction. It was similarly wiping them too in the process. Many minds were managing to fend this off, so Room 101 was physically attacking them in response.
Maintenance robots were swarming aboard some ships in the early stages of construction, but with minds already in place. They were using any method they could employ to destroy the AI crystal aboard these ships. In some areas, other robots were fighting to stop this—the mentioned subminds presumably controlling them. Meanwhile, in the cramped spaces of final construction bays, complete and near-complete attack ships were fighting to survive. Here, the AI had turned the internal station weapons and giant constructor robots against them.
“Attack ship
Jacob
saw the way the wind was blowing,” said the mantis. “It’s gone dark, hoping not to be noticed.
Jacob
is another like me—just in here for repairs.”
Riss tried to obtain information on that ship by again probing the data flows all around. At first, she could glean nothing, but then began to form a virtual map in her mind. She could see the 101 AI at the centre of the chaos, resembling some angry red amoeba jetting out pseudopods at numerous smaller versions of itself around it. These were throwing up defences such as hardfields and shifting as they shattered. Constellations of other minds—those of the attack ships—were shoaling between, sometimes hiding under similar defences, sometimes flaring out like incendiaries when hit by those pseudopods. Sieving manifests, Riss tried to find the
Jacob
, but could not. Next, everything went angry red and something slammed into her mind.
Riss found herself falling into darkness, tendrils of data trying to lever apart the components of her consciousness. A terrible grief and hopelessness filled her. There seemed no reason for existing, no point in continuing with such a load to bear. Riss ceased to fight and began to feel her mind breaking apart—
A flash of light dispelled the darkness and Riss found herself coiled in vacuum in an area of the station without grav. One of the big steel mites was holding her between two of its limbs, having punched an array of micro-bayonet data plugs through her skin to connect to the systems around her crystal. Hopelessness faded, and the little drone’s mind began pulling together its parts.
“That was fucking stupid,” said the mantis, hovering nearby. “You sure are naive.”
The mite released her and backed off as Riss uncoiled.
“I told you
Jacob
had gone dark. And I showed you what 101 is doing to its . . . its children.”
Of course, as one of those newborn children herself, Riss was vulnerable. On detecting her in the system, the station AI had just tried to kill her.
“Don’t try that again,” the mantis warned. “You could end up dead. And worse than that, you could make the AI aware of the
Jacob
. Let’s go.”
The refugees, now including others made in the shape of both terran and alien creatures, along with skeletal Golem and some clad in syntheflesh and skin, were moving down the throat of a huge production line. Nearby hung the skeleton of an attack ship, while far behind, one nearing completion was drifting, folded into a boomerang shape by some massive impact. All around debris tumbled, burned, half-melted and often unidentifiable. Dismembered robots clung to some or gyrated free, spider robots swayed like kelp flowers on the ends of power and optic threads.
“Get ready to fight,” said the mantis.
Just ahead, a port opened, and out of it, moving as if doped, came maintenance robots like six-foot-long brushed aluminium cockroaches. They didn’t seem to know what they were doing, for they milled around aimlessly, once out of the port. Just making a tentative probe into the virtual world, Riss discovered that for the mite drones, the battlefield was in the informational realm rather than the physical one, and they were confusing the robots ahead.
“Hit them now,” the mantis instructed, accelerating so fast its limbs tore up glowing slivers of metal.
Despite the mantis’s speed, a drone shaped like a shark reached them first, accelerating on a chemical drive. It hit one of the roach-like maintenance robots and drove it back into two of its kin, then opened its mouth and began biting with chain-glass teeth turning on conveyors in its jaws. The jets from its steering thrusters were simultaneously stabbing out all around, like some odd kind of firework display. Disconnected heads and other body parts tumbled away. The mantis arrived next, chopping with those sharp limbs and spitting a particle beam from between its mandibles. At that moment, a wave passed through the whole station. They’d just surfaced from U-space.
“We stand a chance now,” the mantis observed.
Riss accelerated while formulating a method of attack to suit a conflict that she just wasn’t designed to fight. A missile sped past, made a sharp ninety-degree turn and went straight down into the dark entryway. A moment later, a detonation rippled the deck underneath and numerous roach robots exploded out of that same port in an actinic fountain. This had come from a big war drone lacking any form based on the organic—just a hovering cylinder bristling with weapons. Now, however, the roach robots were no longer milling and Riss recognized that this meant 101 was now aware of her and her allies. Suddenly the little drone found herself confronted by one of the roaches. The thing extruded a tool head from its own skull, two atomic shear fields opening out from it like wings. Riss immediately engaged chameleonware and went into egg insertion mode. She contained no eggs and this wasn’t the prey she was designed to destroy. However, her ovipositor was collimated diamond, capable of penetrating even prador armour.
As Riss shot forwards, underneath those shear fields, she felt something tearing into her chameleonware as the roach lowered those fields to intercept her. It wasn’t quick enough. Riss was under them in a moment, coiling and stabbing upwards, ovipositor penetrating a simple layer of industrial ceramal—three, four times, precisely hitting certain junctions between the robot’s sub-AI processors and transceiver. The roach convulsed, then, waving its limbs aimlessly, began to drift away.
Multiple flashes ensued. Riss saw that nearly all of the roach robots had been disabled or destroyed, but the big war drone was now opening up on something else. Focusing across the production line tube Riss saw more robots swarming out of numerous ports across there.
“Bugger fuck shit,” said the mantis, firing its particle beam across the tube.
Missiles began to impact over there shortly after the numerous strikes from energy weapons, but now something began to reply. Particle beams stabbed back. One a yard across splashed on a hardfield right above the cylindrical war drone. The field held for just a moment, but something glowing white-hot exploded from the side of that drone, then the drone itself glowed briefly and exploded under the direct impact of the beam. One of the mites shot out towards the middle of the tube, limbs windmilling. Then its back opened like a hatch to expose burning components inside. And a swarm of something else, rising on bright drives, began to speed towards them.
They were losing now. Room 101 had turned its full attention, and power, against them. Riss understood that maintenance and construction robots weren’t all that were available to that intelligence. This station also replaced damaged weapons and resupplied Polity forces with munitions, which it was now using.
“Oh well,” said the mantis, “it was worth a shot.”
I’m going to die
, thought Riss,
and I have hardly lived
.
But next, on the other side of the chamber, impacts began tearing apart the gathering horde, punching through the walls and raising the blue spectres of plasma explosions. Three massive detonations ensued, CTDs by the look of them, burning mile-wide craters and spewing white-hot gas into vacuum. Green lasers cut through this gas, picking off missiles one after another, and a particle beam sliced across. A shape then abruptly cut the view short—a thousand feet of armour and weapons shaped like a giant flatworm. There was nothing stripped down about this attack ship. It hung there, hardfields flaring beyond it. On the side that Riss could see, the shuttle bay, a munitions-loading hatch and three other airlocks were opening.
“Time to leave, I think,” said the
Jacob
AI.
BLITE
Blite had ten days to check and recheck coordinates, to tramp around the ship in a state of irritation, to rant at that antique space suit, which always seemed to feel unoccupied now, and fruitlessly to demand answers. The black AI simply did not respond. Blite remained baffled about the choice of destination until he recalculated, factoring in their temporal debt. Then he got frightened. Again, as they approached their new destination, he found himself aboard the bridge with Brond and Greer. Brond was once again running his countdown, and Blite was perpetually telling him to shut up.