“You’re going to freeze them?” he asked.
There were dangers, especially in freezing people as damaged as these. Trent wanted to object, to stop this, but was also attracted to the idea of putting the problem that these shell people represented on hold.
“Spear has more information, you say?”
“He will explain,” Bsorol confirmed, now turning to the second-children. Having plugged the zero freezer into the ship’s power, they were now gathering before him. “This child will take you to him.” Bsorol gestured to the second-child he had earlier berated.
Trent eyed the creature. He hoped that it was too frightened of Bsorol to do anything nasty, but did not think for a moment that anything beyond fear, or a large gun, might stop it. He groped down towards his hip where once he had holstered his pulse-gun and wondered if the empathic feelings Penny Royal had burdened him with applied to prador. He didn’t need to think for long. He had winced when Bsorol hit that second-child earlier. He had felt its pain.
“Are you coming?” he asked, turning to Sepia.
“You’re going to see Spear?” she asked.
She appeared nonchalant about it but Trent guessed her feelings were otherwise. In him, when they were in the cage, she had seen someone she had categorized as an operator, accustomed to violence, and just the kind of ally she had needed. Perhaps she had, briefly, considered him as someone she would have liked to know better. But he hadn’t behaved as expected, and when she saw how he was with Reece, she’d become distant. However, the moment she and Spear got close to each other, it seemed the air between them fizzed. Trent understood that his earlier self would have been jealous, even though he had no claim on Sepia. That wasn’t the case now.
“Yes. Spear,” he said.
“Yeah, sure,” she replied. Next, glancing at the second-child, she dropped a hand to the pulse-gun she wore. She’d also found a laser carbine that she carried slung on her back. Perhaps her disappointment in Trent as protective muscle had made her more careful about her own safety.
“Let’s go,” he said, gesturing to the second-child.
The creature snipped its claws then clattered something. Bsorol whipped round to face it, whacked it on the back again and clattered a reply. It cringed, bubbled, then turned away to head towards the exit from Quadrant Four. As he followed, Trent imagined the content of that conversation. The second-child had probably sought some confirmation that these were humans it couldn’t eat and Bsorol had clarified the matter.
“Like a lot of people in Carapace City, I always watched the news feeds about new arrivals,” said Sepia as they stepped out into one of the ship’s corridors. “If available, those feeds presented potted biographies. You were Isobel Satomi’s most trusted lieutenant, a dangerous man, a killer. What happened?”
Trent felt himself go cold. It was almost as if she was keying into his earlier thoughts.
“Penny Royal,” he replied briefly.
“What?”
“There’s a possibility that it wasn’t the black AI, though,” he said contemplatively. “I was handed over to the Polity and then into the tender care of a forensic AI.” Trent blinked—memories of a bloody maelstrom sunk deep in his mind surfacing for a moment. “It could have been the Brockle, the forensic AI, that changed me. But I’m sure it happened before then. I’m sure it was Penny Royal that tampered with my mind.”
“Uh . . . forensic AI . . . you’re an outlaw who was sentenced to death by the Polity long ago. How the hell did you get away?”
He glanced at her. “It just released me. It’s complicated, but I’m sure part of the reason it did so is because of what Penny Royal did to me. I’m no longer the threat I was.”
“That’s not enough—death sentences are supposed to be immutable.”
“There was some pressure as well.” He shrugged. “Politics.”
She nodded acceptance of that. She was a citizen of the Graveyard and so, unlike most Polity citizens, did not trust in the unalterable justice of the AIs. Those who had lived outside the Polity for any length of time began to see the rust under the paintwork and soon understood that things were never as neat and definitive as often portrayed in that realm.
“So what did Penny Royal do?”
“It gave me empathy, or a conscience, or both, though I would say that one is a product of the other,” Trent replied. “I feel the pain I cause.”
They walked on in silence behind the second-child, then Sepia asked, “Do you regret the change?”
Trent was about to reply that yes, he certainly did, but then reconsidered. Sure, possessing such empathy limited his ability to act. It was painful, traumatic, but only because he functioned in a world where pain and trauma were common. However, he now felt larger, more connected and open to ways of thinking that hadn’t been within his compass before. When he reflected on how he used to be, he saw a limited man, a cipher. The traumas of his early life and the violence of it thereafter had severed and cauterized his emotions and thought processes. He also saw a man who could never have felt the way he now felt about Reece, but whether that was a good thing, he wasn’t sure.
“I don’t know,” was all he would concede.
Was that really what Penny Royal had done? He labelled the change he had undergone as the addition of empathy and conscience, but maybe the black AI had given him nothing at all. Maybe Penny Royal had merely decalcified his brain, scraped the crap off all those functions that had shut down and set them running again. Perhaps conscience and empathy had been petrified and, because they were working again after so long, they felt very raw.
The second-child finally arrived at a wide diagonally divided door, inserted a claw into a pit control beside it for a moment, then stepped back. The door opened into a massive airlock with an identical door at the other end. The prador gestured them inside.
Sepia led the way in, saying, “I notice only the first-children have translators.”
Trent followed her in, a short while later the door rumbling closed behind him. “Maybe it’s better we don’t understand what the second-children say about us.”
“Maybe it’s better they don’t understand what we say about them,” said Sepia. “Seems to me they’re a little lacking in self-control.” She raised her voice with the last few words as the doors opening ahead of them released a cacophony.
Spear’s destroyer sat in the huge hold beyond. Welding spatters were spraying the floor, from robots clustered over it like wasps over a rotting banana. A jointed arm towards its rear end was extending what looked like a complete fusion drive. Second-children were scurrying here and there. Some wore exoskeletal worksuits bristling with tools, others were loaded down with materials. It took a second for Trent to realize what was odd about the picture, then he noted various objects just hanging in the air or scribing straight courses between workers. He understood that grav was off in that area.
While studying the vessel, Trent remembered his first sight of it from the
Moray Firth
. He and Gabriel had speculated on whether Isobel would give either of them the captaincy of it, after she inevitably ordered them to murder Spear. That was before Spear used a prion weapon to paralyse them and head away with this ship. That was also before Isobel, while transforming into a hooder, had eaten Gabriel.
The second-child who had guided them here clattered something and scuttled off. Trent watched it go, then turned back to the scene before them.
“What can you tell me about him?” Sepia asked.
Trent didn’t need to ask who the “him” might be. “Ex-bio-espionage agent during the war. Resurrected only recently after mouldering in a memplant for a hundred years, but still fucking dangerous. He played Isobel easily and took that ship right out from under her.” Trent nodded towards the Polity destroyer. “He could have killed her and me, but didn’t.” He glanced at Sepia. “And you’ve already seen how smart he is.”
“I’ve seen,” she said.
“So what do you think of him?”
“He looks at me as if he wants to eat me,” she said.
“Surely you’re used to that?”
“Yes, but I get the impression that there might be screaming and blood involved when it’s one of them doing the looking.” She stabbed a thumb behind in the direction the second-child had taken.
“I guess he might seem a little intense,” said Trent.
“Fucking terrifying might be a better description.”
“Enough to drive you away?”
“Definitely not,” she replied. “Shall we go in?”
As they stepped into the hold, a voice called, “This way!”
The snake drone Riss rose out of a floating pile of debris, hovering in mid-air like some weird exclamation mark, then nosed out and writhed towards the destroyer. Her movements were just like a snake, only one that had found invisible ground level, a yard above the floor.
“What’s this about, Riss?” Trent asked, now trying to dismiss the previous conversation from his mind. He was uncomfortable with it and with the fact that he had wanted to continue, to ask Sepia about Reece. It was the kind of exchange he would never have had before—all that relationship stuff. The full extent of his
relationships
up until the events on Masada had usually involved a secured payment beforehand.
“It’s about our best chance of survival,” the drone replied.
Trent moved to the edge of the hold and from there propelled himself to the mass of cables. He landed heavily, as it had been a while since he had moved about in zero gravity. Sepia sailed past him after the drone, neatly catching the edge of the airlock it had entered, flipping over and coming down on her feet. Trent followed, landed a bit better this time and propelled himself inside after her—then crashed down on his shoulder.
“Grav’s on in here,” she observed.
“No shit,” he replied, struggling to his feet.
They found Spear on a bridge lined with screen fabric displaying various scenes from the work ongoing all around.
“They’re zero freezing the shell people,” said Trent.
Spear gazed at him for a moment, then at Sepia, but the charge between them seemed to have waned a little. He then pointed up at one of the screen frames, which showed the open hold of the destroyer. “We’ll put them in insulated caskets—one hundred per cent heat sealed—and pack them in there. They won’t take up all the room, but that’s because not one of them is actually a whole human being. It’s good that they aren’t, otherwise we wouldn’t have room for Sverl’s second-children.”
“What?” was all Trent could manage.
“We’re tearing out the human quarters now to make room for Sverl, Bsorol and Bsectil—plus Sverl’s war drones. And we should be able to fit other encased child-minds into the weapons cache.”
Riss issued a contemptuous snort at this.
“We’re leaving?” asked Sepia.
Spear glanced at the drone first, obviously annoyed at its attitude, then looked at Sepia. “Perhaps the best way I can put it is that there is a one-in-five chance that we will have to if we want to stay alive.”
“Back up a bit there, will you, and explain?” said Trent tiredly.
“Did you understand what happened last time we surfaced into the real?” Spear asked.
“No,” Trent replied.
He did know that Cvorn had attacked them. He had found himself hanging onto a wall pit control while the ship shuddered around him and grav fluctuated. And he did see part of the upper wall of Quadrant Four bulge and break open like a ripe boil, to spew white-hot gases high above. This was apparently from a shield projector melt-down. But he knew that wasn’t what Spear was getting at.
“Let me explain,” said Spear.
Trent listened and pondered why, once again, frying pans and fires seemed to be part of his destiny.
SVERL
Sverl perambulated about inside his sanctum, inspecting terrariums, aquariums, his little glasshouse and some freestanding plants. He studied some of the other projects he had used to occupy his time ever since the war. He eyed a process for cold-growing AI crystal, much as it grew inside him, and another to isolate his original genetic tissue from the mishmash he now contained. The idea had been that one day he might even be able to grow himself a new prador body. He checked on an attempt to isolate the human genetic tissue within him and identify it by running searches through the massive collections of genomic files in the Polity. As he moved on to peer at the strewn-out parts of a disassembled piece of U-space drive, he realized he wasn’t contemplating what to work on next, but saying goodbye.
For many reasons Riss’s idea was a good one. Cvorn would finally trace them to Factory Station Room 101 and might arrive before they had completed their business there—whatever that might be. But whatever happened, his dreadnought would not be able to survive another encounter with Cvorn. It was already severely damaged, low on munitions and low on stored energy. He needed a method of escape but he also needed a way of actually getting aboard the Factory Station. Riss’s idea that they use Spear’s destroyer to access it, because the automated defences should not react to it, solved both these problems. What would happen thereafter, he had no idea. But Penny Royal was due here, so they could finally confront the black AI. That was all he needed to know.
Not bothering to return to his prador controls—he performed most tasks mentally now—he studied how things were progressing with Spear’s destroyer. His robots and children had almost repaired it and the only thing it lacked was a mind that could drop it into U-space. They wouldn’t need that for the short trip from this dreadnought to Room 101. And, anyway, it was a position Sverl himself could occupy if Flute did not return from his decoy mission. The shell people, all zero frozen and secured in their containers, were now on their way down to the ship. Bsorol and Bsectil were already there, installing Sverl’s war drones and other mind cases in the weapons cache. The remaining second-children were on their way too. All that remained was for Sverl to head over, but still he was hesitant. Now was the time for a course he had been avoiding. He had admitted to himself that his ship, complete and unguarded, was vulnerable. Cvorn would annihilate it as it was, so now it was time for drastic measures to try to save at least some of what he had here.