Dark Intelligence (17 page)

Managing to get her hands underneath her, she tried to push herself up, but her spine bent into a ridiculous curve again. She straightened it, positioned her knees under her, then stood, tottering unsteadily. However, with every movement and the subsequent feedback from that movement she became more sure. It was also noteworthy that her predatory urge was now all but somnolent. She understood the connection then, and the separation—the more she transformed into a hooder, the harder it would be to fight that
irrational
predator. Penny Royal’s transformation of her apparently went deeper than the physical. As a human she had always been a predator, but now she felt that predatory part of her human self separating out into her hooder part. Meanwhile, what remained of her human part, or even humanity, grew weaker and more difficult to maintain.

She moved over to her large cabin screen and, gazing at the blank slab of nanofabric, remembered how in times past she’d had it on the mirror setting. At one time she’d been a beautiful woman. Now it was mostly like this: blank grey. First preparing herself for the undoubted shock, she turned it on with a mental twitch.

Isobel gazed at her reflected image for a long time. Her head was now twice as long as normal, cylindrical, and possessed three pairs of red eyes evenly spaced down its length—her own human eyes now having changed into hooder eyes. The lower set of eyes was positioned just above her mouth and below her nose. Her mouth was now narrower, with a pronounced harelip above. The nose was smaller, melting into her face. She reached up to run a hand over the bald dome of her skull, then reached down to each shoulder, scooping out the tangled mass of her own hair to discard it. Her sensory cowl had grown wider and sprouted more petals. It now extended out to the width of her shoulders, and, reaching back, she felt how it had attached itself to the back of her long head. Feeling along the cowl’s base on either side, she noted that her jacket had ripped—this to accommodate the lower petals of the cowl, which were now attached to her shrinking shoulders.

She stared. She had expected to feel disgust, horror, fear or anger but all those were dispelled by the sight before her. She had passed some stage in her development. Previously she had perceived herself as a deformed human. Now she was something else; now she was hardly human at all.

With slow care she undressed, her clothing snagging on hard pieces of carapace and insectile legs. Her body was now a long column, her breasts sunk away and her nipples and her belly button fading. The legs below were like those of a dwarf, short and bowed, and her feet were toeless stumps. Gazing at that smooth column with its neatly folded legs, scales of carapace protruding in a neat dorsal line behind them, her perceptual change came home to her. For now she saw her human legs as the deformity and the rest as somehow … right.

Still she stared, feeling suddenly completely cold. She reached up to the ugliness that was her human mouth and almost negligently pulled out one of her loose teeth, to cup it in the palm of a hand. She stared at the bloody tooth, framed by a hand which only possessed two fingers and a thumb. A sensation rippled through her and her spiky tail twitched as the predator stirred. A huge need set the manipulators arrayed down each side of her face rippling. She quickly turned away, discarding the tooth.

Selecting the right clothing was a trial. Her usual trousers and blouses just wouldn’t do. In the end, heavy-world support boots and a long dress of rippling nacre over a padded jacket were the only things that made her look remotely human. Exiting her cabin, she headed straight for the ship’s refectory, knowing that lightly cooked vegetables and chicken weaves just wouldn’t do either. She hoped that Trent and Gabriel had remained on the bridge, knowing that they would.

CAPTAIN BLITE

Blite gazed at the metre-wide plastic cube sitting on the labouring sled. The contents of the box were heavier than anything that size had any right to be, and the necessity of having to use a grav-sled worried him greatly. Although it was shielded, there were some watchers here who might see through even that. Masada was a dangerous planet for this kind of operation now it had acquired an AI warden. Wardens in themselves were bad enough, but this one had been a war drone before its upgrade—a slightly psychotic robot fashioned in the shape of a giant steel scorpion. And, as if that wasn’t bad enough, its sidekick was rumoured to be something even stranger and more dangerous …

“I’m sure something’s following us,” said Ikbal.

Blite paused to gaze back across the landscape of flute grasses rippling in the evening breeze. It was bright out tonight because Calypse, this system’s inevitable gas giant, was on the horizon, while one of the numerous moons of this world was speeding along above. He could see nothing in the flute grasses, no gabbleducks or siluroynes, no hooders and no sign of what Ikbal really feared.

“I’ll say it once and no more,” said Blite, “and you’d better listen good, Ikbal.” He knew he could make no more threat than that. Ikbal had been with him a long time and was well aware of just how far he could be pushed.

“There is no black AI haunting this fucking bog,” he continued. “This Amistad, even if he was a crazy war drone, would not allow such a thing to exist here. The Polity simply would not allow it.”

“Those Tidy Squad guys seemed pretty certain,” said Martina, pacing along behind the grav-sled and controlling it with a remote.

Blite glared at her, then realized that in this light she probably couldn’t see his face through his breather mask. He sighed, took a deep breath and tilted his head back to gaze up at the nebula. Like some sculpture fashioned of glass, it spread across the dark aubergine sky. The sight calmed him, as did the sight of the space port’s foam-stone raft when he lowered his gaze. It was now just a mile ahead.

“Look,” he said, “this place is supposed to have had every kind of shit thrown at it, ever since the Theocracy ruled here.” He held up a gauntleted hand and began counting off on his fingers. “We’re told it’s had revolution—fomented by Polity agents—it’s also had some psychopath arrive in a Polity dreadnought blasting the fuck out of everything. Dragon dumped on them here too and left dracomen.” He lost the thread for a moment. They had actually seen a dracoman working on the landing platform shortly after they landed. The things were lizard-like humanoids, based on an old human idea of what dinosaurs would have evolved into but for the intercession of a large meteorite. And it was a verifiable fact that they were also created by the entity called Dragon—a giant alien biomech that looked nothing like the name it had given itself. The presence of dracomen here somewhat undermined the point he had been intending to make about the plausibility of anything those Tidy Squad members had said.

“Jain tech’s supposedly been let loose here,” he continued doggedly, then had to pause again when he realized he was running out of fingers. He lowered his hand. “It’s also been attacked by some alien machine, a hooder that was apparently an ancient war machine and an
artist
defeated that. And apparently one of the ‘dead’ races is now living here. And do you know what all this tells me?” When there was no reply he continued, “It tells me that this is the perfect place for rumours and conspiracy theories. It tells me that the best thing to do is disbelieve at least half of what you’re told and reserve judgement on the rest. It tells me you got to use your noodle.” He stabbed a finger against his head a little too hard. “It tells me to think twice when I’m told that the Polity has forgiven the black AI Penny Royal and absolved all its sins. Especially when it’s supposedly working here like some security drone, in the service of a fucking warden! And it tells me you really need to shove the face of the one telling you this stuff into the nearest table, repeatedly, until the shit stops coming out of it!”

After a short pause, while Blite stood there panting and wondering where his momentary calm had gone, Brondohohan spoke quietly from the darkness to one side.

“Which was, as I recollect,” he said, “precisely what you did.”

“Of course some of the stories are true,” added Greer from over the other side of the trail.

Getting ready to start shouting, Blite squinted at the heavy-worlder woman. But he could see her pointing at the box sitting on their grav-sled and realized she had a point. At least one of the stories about alien technology was true, because that thing in there seemed to be the real deal. If it hadn’t been, they wouldn’t have been here trying to retrieve it. If it wasn’t, their buyers in the Separatist movement wouldn’t have been so interested.

“Come on, let’s keep up the pace,” he said, realizing they’d slowed to a dawdle, then checked his com-plate for positioning. Chont and Haber were to the rear, with Brondohohan and Greer on each side. Then Ikbal and he were by the sled, Martina controlling it. They were good, and soon they would reach the edge of the space port. He shouldn’t have allowed the fears of his crew to distract him, but he also shouldn’t get complacent now that they only had a little distance to go before reaching his ship. Sure, they wouldn’t have to go through port security, which was a relief. This world’s enterprising brand of homegrown terrorists, the Tidy Squad, had bored a smuggler’s tunnel through the port’s foam-stone raft. But there was still a chance of them being spotted. They still might have to fight their way back to the ship, or even abandon their acquisition and run.

Trudging on through the Masadan evening, Blite wondered which of the stories about this place he really believed. Though he considered the one about the ancient alien machine and the hooder dubious, there were none he could definitively discount. He understood himself enough to know that his angry response to that Tidy Squad idiot glooming on about Penny Royal had two sources. He didn’t want his crew spooked and, tough as they were, that was just the kind of thing to get under their skins. He also didn’t want to believe it himself, because Penny Royal was already under his skin. Blite shivered.

He still clearly remembered that operation twenty-eight solstan years ago. He supplied some thralls and control units smuggled out of Spatterjay to some
collector
on the edge of the Graveyard. The buyer had apparently been a rich Polity citizen, keen to add to his collection of wartime memorabilia. Only, when Blite and his crew delivered the items, it turned out that the buyer was a front for some nascent coring operation in the Graveyard itself. Shortly after the buy, the heads of this were meeting someone who would repair and activate what they really wanted: working prador thrall technology.

The buy was going bad, quickly, because the shits involved had decided that their large amounts of weaponry gave them a bargaining advantage. It was all about to turn into a nasty firefight when the other side’s repairman turned up, and then it turned into a complete nightmare. The meet had been in a valley on a heavy gravity world, where plants grew iron-hard and close to the ground, and where most humans wore motorized suits. Blite had looked up as he prepared to open fire and order the thrall tech they had come with to be blown up. On the ridge above, a metal flower had bloomed. A giant black thistle-head atop a stalk of braided silver snakes. He stared at it in shock as, like a slow black explosion, it came apart. Its individual spikes turned as they sped away to point down into the valley, all settling to hang still in the air—a wall of daggers woven through with silver lace.

“Penny Royal!” one of the opposition called, gazing at Blite with a superior smile.

Blite immediately wondered about the possibility of surviving what was about to happen here; if he left this valley alive, he would be glad to do so. He knew about Penny Royal. However, it seemed the opposition did not for, like so many fools, they had obviously struck some sort of bargain with the devil.

The second shout of that name came filled with panic, as the wall of knives suddenly swept down. Pulse-fire and the snap and crackle of laser carbines filled the valley. The light in the sky went out, then a discharge like pink lightning left one motorized suit belching fire and smoke. Something picked up Blite and deposited him on his back, his bones crunching. A massive explosion followed and dust rolled through. Blite lay there for maybe an hour as the firing stuttered to a halt, as the screaming died away and the dust settled. Finally heaving himself to his feet, he went to take a look around.

The eight heavily armed thugs who had accompanied the buyers were out of their suits, gasping in the poisonous air. They were naked, crawling along the ground, the tops of their skulls missing, each with a prador thrall in place in the emptied cavity inside. Two of the buyers had survived as well. Their bodies were melded at the waist and they scuttled on all eight of their limbs like a prador, hexagonal control units sprouting from their skins like technological pustules. They no longer looked sane, drooling, with eyes rolling. Blite walked away, realizing that Penny Royal had done what they wanted. The rogue AI had made the thralls and control units work. The problem with Penny Royal, as any sensible Graveyard trader knew, was that it often did a lot more of what the recipient
didn’t
want. Back at his shuttle, he found two of his six-man crew waiting for him. There were no life-signs from the other four suits and, after much indecision, he went back to look for them. All he found were four empty suits, coated inside with a black tar-like substance.

“You okay, boss?”

Blite snapped out of his reverie and glanced at Martina, who was watching him with concern.

“Fine,” he said, realizing that the space port raft lay directly ahead. He had lost himself in memory for rather longer than he had supposed. He shivered again and checked their surroundings, suddenly feeling that coming here had been his worst idea in twenty-eight years. He called up a map on his com-plate, then pointed off to the right, towards the smugglers’ tunnel. After he’d returned his plate to his pocket, he drew his flak gun.

“Pick up the pace,” he instructed, “and stay alert.”

Not that there was anything they could possibly do if that nightmare came for them.