“Seems we left a little early,” he said, expecting either no reply or a terse and dismissive comment to issue from the air. Surprisingly, a tinkling sound came from behind him and he turned to see a black dot heading towards him from an impossible distance to grow into one of Penny Royal’s black diamonds. It hung there, with the air distorting about it; the captain, just for a moment, sensed vast amusement and a kind of joy.
The feeling abruptly cut off as the diamond disappeared with a sound like a dropped wine glass and Leven’s voice abruptly issued from the ship intercom.
“Must I?” said the ship mind to someone, then, after a pause, “It seems I must.”
“What is it, Leven?” Blite asked.
“Just listen,” said the mind, continuing, “The further beyond Penny Royal’s particular definition of average a being has gone, either by augmentation or by some other mental transformation, the more difficult it is to predict its actions.”
“So it’s predicting actions, not zipping into the future to check?” Blite turned back to his dispenser, took out the insulated beaker of tea and sipped it to check its temperature. It was perfect, as usual with anything produced by this new ship. He gulped down about a quarter of it.
“In a sense it is doing both,” Leven replied.
“What does it mean by that?”
“Its future self informs its actions and it knows when action is required.”
Blite felt the skin crawling on his back again. He thought he understood that, and he didn’t like the implications. In previous conversations with the AI, if he pursued something, he got explanations that lay just off the edge of his comprehension. Or he was left with his skull feeling as if it had been reamed out. Now his ship’s mind was translating these communications. Maybe he would learn more this time.
“So what actions are difficult enough to predict that they warrant our early departure?” he asked.
“Penny Royal can predict the action of the mid-range augments—both human and prador cases—for up to a few months before chaos factors throw calculations into disarray. Higher-functioning entities are difficult, apparently. Polity AIs, Penny Royal has told me, have chosen not to interfere, otherwise all his plans could have come to nothing. Sverl, with his conflicted tripartite mind, is difficult too, but sufficiently within required parameters. The king of the prador is a whole order of magnitude more difficult than Sverl—close to the Polity AIs but with more random elements introduced because of his steady transformation and opaque goals.”
“So how far ahead can Penny Royal predict the king’s actions?”
“A matter of weeks, usually.”
“The king’s done something, then?”
“Penny Royal is uncertain about its prediction of the king’s actions within that time-span.”
“Try to be a bit clearer, Leven.”
“I’m trying my best. It seems, for reasons that extend into esoteric mathematics even I have trouble grasping, that the king might do something . . . unexpected.”
“So where are we going?” Blite asked, not feeling any wiser, but certainly starting to feel a bit less hungover.
“A supply station with a prador designation,” said Leven. “Penny Royal has to check to see if the king is—”
“Doing as predicted,” Blite interrupted. “I get that.” He paused and took another sip, then continued, “But what about the entropy dump? What will happen to the worlds of the Rebus system when we leave without stopping that supernova blast?”
“The entropy dump is complete, I’m told. We are now . . . up to date.”
“So we didn’t have to stay in position for two whole weeks . . .?”
“No, less than two weeks of negation was the best option for Rebus.”
“And now?”
After a long pause, Leven continued, “It seems the Polity observers will not have to evacuate the human population of these planets as planned. They will soon learn that moving the population to a planetary cave system will be enough to ensure their survival. Meanwhile, the brunt of the supernova blast front—striking both the world and the gas giant’s moon—will be nowhere near as powerful. Both of the unique ecologies under observation will be damaged, but will survive.”
Blite swallowed some more tea. “Which is of course quite convenient, what with
someone
having made off with the evacuation runcibles.”
“Quite.”
“And those ecologies were the most important thing to Penny Royal, just as they probably were to the Polity AIs who had aimed to evacuate that place?” he questioned.
Again, that pause, then, “Yes, humans are not rare and either way they would have survived. All that will be lost is their social structure. Once subject to Polity intervention and assistance to survive the damage to their world, they will have to change. If they had been evacuated, it would have been lost anyway.”
“Oh, that’s all right, then,” said Blite, knowing he was being unfair, but at that moment not caring. “But the main objective wasn’t really anything to do with those worlds was it? It was all about the runcibles. So what does Penny Royal want them for?”
“That I don’t know and am not being told,” Leven replied.
“Figures,” Blite grunted. “No more questions,” he added. Leven hadn’t actually complained. However, even though his voice was computer generated, Blite could tell that he hadn’t enjoyed the position of translator. He had started to get a little shrill towards the end.
Blite gulped down the last of his tea, eyed his shipsuit slung on a clothes horse beside his bed and headed over to his sanitary unit. He needed a piss and hadn’t been inclined to do that while the AI was present in his cabin. Then it was time to get ready but he wasn’t in any hurry. After a shower in the same sanitary unit, he had a long-overdue haircut and a shave. He donned underwear, black jeans and white shirt. Next came an ersatz enviro-suit jacket and intelliboots that closed up comfortably about his feet. He then left the cabin.
Upon his arrival on the bridge, he wondered if Penny Royal had been playing with their minds because Brond and Greer had also cleaned themselves up. Brond was clad in something similar to an ECS combat suit with its white and yellow-gold colouring, as if on some chameleoncloth setting of a desert world. His head was shaven. Greer had plaited her hair, or perhaps some grooming machine had done it for her, and coiled it on the back of her head. She wore skin-tight pale blue knee-shorts and a tight cream top that exposed the ribbed muscle of her belly. She looked the most feminine Blite had ever seen her, despite the belt around her waist holding a pulse-gun on one side and a ceramal combat knife on the other.
“Seems we’re all getting ready for a party,” said Brond.
Feeling uncomfortable, Blite gazed at them for a long moment, then went over and sat in his seat.
“Leven, what’s our status?” he asked.
“Five ship hours from our arrival time and bending relativity to breaking point,” the Golem ship mind replied.
“Time travel again?”
“Yup.”
So where was the next resulting entropy dump? At this prador supply station? Blite stood up again and gazed at the representation the screen laminate was showing—the black of space with stars dopplering past them. Then he suggested, “Breakfast?”
“Sure—I’m ready,” said Brond.
“Me too,” said Greer, looking slightly puzzled as she ran her hand over her flat stomach.
Blite shivered. They all cleaned themselves up and put on fresh clothing, and all three had yet to eat. Was this just one of those cases of a crew falling into a strange consonance with each other, or was the black AI onboard neatly controlling them, setting them running together like all the other components aboard this ship? Or were they simply reacting to some overspill from the AI? Together they trooped out to the communal refectory.
They spent an hour eating and talking generally about past events, then a further hour in speculation about what Penny Royal’s ultimate goals might be.
“We’re pets,” said Brond at one point.
“I think you’re wrong,” Greer replied. “We’re an audience.”
Blite considered both their contentions, remembered his thoughts about them being witnesses, then came up with a further contention of his own. “In a way I reckon you’re both right, but I think we’re something else too.”
They both waited patiently for his explanation. Noteworthy, he felt, how during that last few hours there had been no friction, no contention. They were all being perfectly reasonable and logical and he himself had felt none of his usual surges of irritation. Something in the air supply?
“I think we’re a tie to reality. I think we’re a sample of normality.”
“Normality?” wondered Greer, raising an eyebrow.
“Relative normality,” said Blite, trying to solidify some vague thoughts. “Penny Royal doesn’t need us—our presence aboard this ship is irrelevant to its actions. So why are we here? I have to wonder if, through us stupid, petty, completely physical and relatively normal humans Penny Royal maintains a grip on reality.”
“Vague,” said Greer.
“You’re saying we keep Penny Royal grounded?” suggested Brond.
“Yeah.” Blite nodded, still struggling to put what he felt into words. “Here aboard we have a being capable of manipulating time, of putting the king of the prador on the back foot, of scaring off Polity AIs. I would say Penny Royal is like some world dictator slumming it in a bar to find out what the plebs think.”
“I can live with that, I guess,” said Brond.
“Or I’m a mouse trying to guess the motives of a nuclear physicist,” Blite added.
Blite headed back to his cabin, leaving the other two to their own devices. He called up all available data on Penny Royal on a wall screen, collated by sub-program into a documentary format, then lay back on his bed and watched it. Penny Royal had been the mind of a destroyer that went AWOL after exterminating a human force of some eight thousand soldiers on a world called Panarchia. After that, it had turned into an extreme version of the kind of villains—crime lords—that occupied the Graveyard. Or you could say Penny Royal became an AI equivalent of something out of one of the old religions: a fallen angel, Satan. The black AI was something people went to for some advantage and sold their souls in the process. Dealing with Penny Royal could make you fantastically rich and make your dreams come true, but it could also leave you either dead or in some very personal hell.
After the AI’s near-terminal encounter with some Atheter technology, the war drone Amistad had saved it and brought it back into the Polity fold, apparently forgiven. It had behaved itself for a while on the planet of Masada, but went AWOL again—in Blite’s old ship. This time, it was seemingly on course to ameliorate some of the mayhem it had caused. Apparently, Penny Royal was seeking redemption. But it was following an unnecessarily convoluted route and had opaque motives. Blite also felt sure that it had some goal other than redemption in mind. He sensed that it had stretched out and shaped the game it was playing to that end, but that end purpose eluded him. Certainly, it involved those generators he had seen, it involved three Polity runcibles, and it involved the black AI. He now felt sure he was seeing just one small portion of its whole too: the one facet displayed to the small world of human intelligence.
15
RISS
The collar Sverl had locked her into was very effective. It sat tightly around Riss’s neck, its inner face a form of remora pad. Once it had been stuck in place, it injected nanoscopic hooks deep inside to root. Riss had tried attacking these internally using her nanobot immune system, but the collar issued a reprimand—a focused EM pulse that left her blank and confused. In the process she lost conscious control of those nanobots so they returned to their usual tasks, and the hooks just regrew.
Besides making itself very difficult to remove, the thing’s main function was to interfere with Riss’s many systems, including chameleonware. It had all the ‘ware’s components and systems located. And when Riss tried to activate them, they too became subject to one of those directed EM pulses. So now the drone could not use the light-bending effect of her outer skin. She was also denied the underlying powered layer that could bend other radiations. Or the skin microscales that negated any air disturbance. She could not rapidly pulse viruses into any form of directed scanning. She could not use the grav-motor that matched frequencies with grav-plates so no detector would pick up her weight, its effect also twisted through and reflected by a complicated arrangement of hardfields that could defeat most mass detectors. Nor could she use her method of displacing U-com and other U-space systems, so detectors always found them at the wrong realspace location. Riss had even tried moving her internal components, but the collar had tracked them. Sverl knew his stuff, and Riss realized that to remove the collar would require some drastic action that present circumstances did not warrant.
A secondary function of the collar was to prevent any interference with this dreadnought’s computer systems. The moment she tried any of that, it went into rhythmic pulse mode, scrambling her penetration so she could only glean scraps of data and could influence nothing.
“So where now?” she asked.
“Sverl first,” Spear replied. “I want that spine back.”
“Right. Sverl,” said Riss.
All scans of the collar revealed that its purpose was dual: it scrambled both chameleonware and attempts at computer penetration, but it hadn’t prevented her taking Spear’s cure inside and injecting it into the shell people, and it showed no signs that it could have. It also hadn’t stopped her from returning to the medical area where Spear had made that cure and breaking into the drugs safe. But then that had been a low-order computer penetration that might not concern Sverl. And it hadn’t prohibited her from removing the flask containing the original enzyme acid and loading that—which really should concern Sverl.
An option was now available to her. If she got close enough to Sverl, she reckoned she could beat any of his defences and have time to drive in her ovipositor at least once. The enzyme acid would dissolve all Sverl’s prador organic tissue. Because it wasn’t as specific as the version Spear had made from it, it would also attack his human tissue. Surely Sverl could not survive that?