Dark Intelligence (24 page)

Here was a person constantly reliving the roles of both torturer and victim, yet remembering nothing. What was the point of it? Gazing at the ammonite, I realized that it was just another of the grotesque wrecks Penny Royal left behind. Maybe it was a toy to the AI, maybe it was a prototype. Or maybe it was something that had been discarded, like one of the scraps virtuality designers edited from their programs. Was this just a piece lying on the cutting room floor? More than anything, it brought home to me the callous brutality of the thing I was hunting.

“Flute,” I said. “Are we done here yet?”

“We have everything we need,” the mind replied.

“Take us to these coordinates.” I sent the shifting coordinates first taken from the ersatz fossil before me. “Get us underway immediately.”

No more delays—it was time to fry a black AI.

10

SPEAR

The moment my ship exited U-space, I was at the scanner getting a long-range image of the planetoid. Also, for some very obvious reasons, I had now decided to rename my ship the
Lance
. The rock didn’t look like much—just another of the multitude of dark wanderers between stars. But to me, it felt as if I now stood at the gates of Mordor, gazing upon the distant fortress of Barad-dûr. Of course I also felt sure I had been here before. However, the planetoid wasn’t visible on the screen fabric all around me, which displayed just the immediate open vacuum and the distant jewelled swathes of stars, so I felt as if I had yet to make any dangerous commitment.

I had all the ship’s sensors scanning every band of the EM spectrum it was possible for them to scan. In addition, I had recognition programs running, so any data went into secure storage to be checked for anything dangerous before being shunted into analysis. I’d heard some stories about this place, of ship minds driven mad by signals they’d picked up from here. There were tales of human and prador crews driven to murder each other simply by glimpsing something on screen or hearing something over a speaker. It could all be apocryphal, as was so much about Penny Royal. But, knowing that AI’s capabilities, I wasn’t going to discount it either.

There was nothing at first, then I began to pick up chatter. After it had gone through checks and filtering, I recognised space suit radios. The communications were coded, but not unbreakably so—in fact they just used an old wartime military code. Flute cracked it within a few minutes, and a minute after that I heard the first words.

“Pull out now! We’ve got company!” said some woman.

“What do we have in space near to the planetoid?” I asked Flute.

My ship mind drew a small red frame over part of the screen fabric to the left of me and expanded the planetoid to bring it into view there. He was using frames now to highlight things on the screen, but why, I wasn’t sure. All I hoped was that the change from a scope-sight to frames was a sign that my ship’s mind was no longer thinking quite so much like a prador. A chequered pattern flickered across this larger frame, pausing every now and then to expand images of the objects that accompanied the planetoid on its dark journey. First to appear was a prador in-system kamikaze. This was a huge fusion drive, seemingly jury-rigged to a sphere that had contained the device’s mind and world-busting CTD. The sphere had a hole torn in its side to expose a void inside, rather like a mollusc shell where the meat had been stripped out by a predator. Scan readings showed the whole thing was completely dead. Next up was a Polity-designed watch satellite, looted and dead again, with no chameleonware to hide it.

“Both of these have location beacons stuck on them,” Flute observed.

“Any indication of the age of the beacons?” I asked.

“None.”

They could have been put there at any time, then. Though I guessed that those I was hearing down on the planetoid had placed them, which rather indicated their purpose here.

Thereafter Flute studied a series of asteroids, conglomerations of rubble, dust and technological debris. The latter was so melted and deformed it was hard to tell what it had been previously. Then we paused over an area of empty space for some minutes.

“What’s up?” I asked.

“I don’t know,” said Flute, “there’s a strange U-signature at this location but I can’t see anything. I suspect something is concealed by chameleonware.”

Could that be Penny Royal?

“Target the location with a particle beam,” I ordered, then wasn’t sure what to do next. If it was Penny Royal I should hit it immediately, without warning and hard, but there might be something or somebody else there who I had no wish to kill. I decided on a half-measure. “Try a com request first and if that doesn’t work, fire a ranging laser at it—that should be enough warning. If there’s still no response, then beam it.”

I sensed the com request going through via my aug, but there was no response. The ranging laser stabbed out next for a full thirty seconds, again without response. Next the particle beam lanced out, a beautiful lethal blue against vacuum, and splashed against a hardfield.

“Cut it,” I instructed, “but be ready.”

I watched through ship’s sensors. Was there something there? Briefly a sphere had appeared—a glassy shimmer around some object. The sphere then winked out and shortly after it the object did the same.

“It just U-jumped,” said Flute.

“Location?”

“Unknown—perfectly concealed.”

I replayed the sequence of events in my aug and slowed things down. The object had been enclosed in some kind of spherical field—and that couldn’t have been a hardfield because that was impossible. I speculated on it being a chain-glass sphere that had decohered before the thing inside jumped, though why one would want to so enclose an object I had no idea. The thing inside had looked like a Tokomak-powered orbital weapon. Perhaps the Polity had placed it here, or perhaps it was one of Penny Royal’s toys? I simply had no idea.

“Okay,” I said, feeling really uncomfortable with my lack of knowledge. “Keep scanning.”

Next up something quite weird appeared, the sight of which immediately dispelled my anxiety about the previous object. Here a large snake floated in vacuum. It resembled a large thick-bodied cobra, but four limbs were folded below the spread of its hood and it had a long thin ovipositor extending from its tail. It was grey and stony-looking because its chameleonware was out. Staring at it, I felt something tighten up in my chest as I remembered the jungle planet Durana. It was a real memory too, this time—nothing false or doubtful about this.

“Do we have any readings on that?” I asked tightly.

“It is difficult to tell,” Flute replied. “There does not seem to be any visible damage to the item so it may be on minimal power. There is a beacon, but it is some distance from the thing and producing a different signal. I can hit it with a railgun round from here.”

“Do not fire,” I said immediately. Of course Flute’s reaction to seeing an object like this had to be somewhat visceral. Not only was he seeing something built in the shape of a lethal and apparently extinct prador parasite, he was also seeing what was quite obviously a Polity assassin drone. But what the hell was it doing here? A number of possibilities occurred to me. During my researches before entering the Graveyard I’d picked up on plenty of other data concerning the war. Many drones like this one had been disenfranchised by the end of conflict and had gone looking for action elsewhere. Perhaps this one had gone looking for trouble with Penny Royal and ended up brain-fried. Another possibility was that it had disavowed the Polity, as a certain number of its kind had. Maybe it had come here to join Penny Royal, or it could be a guardian, ready to power up and come after the unwary.

“Keep a watch on it and if it begins to move then let me know,” I said. “Is that everything in near space around the planetoid?”

“Everything that might represent a danger to us,” Flute replied. “I have also identified the source of those signals as a ship down on the surface.” The frame about the planetoid expanded, pulling its surface into closer view. Then another frame appeared over part of the surface and expanded that in turn, bringing it into focus. Here rested a large ship, a thing like a big white beetle devoid of legs, with a large open framework behind it and behind that a fusion drive. I noted the space-suited figures moving towards the beetle nose from a nearby tunnel—one of the doorways into Barad-dûr.

“Take us in closer,” I instructed Flute, and felt the surge of the fusion engine kicking in. “Put us geostationary above that ship and maintain.”

Had someone come to negotiate with the devil? If they had, then it was likely they were unpleasant types just like Isobel Satomi. As we drew closer, the last stragglers boarded the ship down on the surface—this confirmed by someone called Mona as she berated them for their tardiness. However, it didn’t launch as the
Lance
drew closer. This Mona, whom I assumed was the captain, probably knew that if I intended to attack, such a move would render them vulnerable.

“Put a com-laser on them—standard Polity com-coding,” I instructed.

“You can talk to them on their suit frequency,” Flute noted.

“I know I can, but I don’t want them to know I can listen in on that.” I paused. “Filter out everything but direct communications between me and whoever I end up talking to. Is that understood?”

“Standard hostile contact communications,” Flute replied, and I didn’t know whether that was from a Polity or a prador war manual.

After a moment another frame opened in the screen fabric, and out of it a heavily built but attractive woman gazed at me suspiciously. “Who are you and what do you want?” I recognized Mona’s flat tones at once.

“I might ask the same question of you,” I replied, then to my ship mind, “Flute, give me a close-up view of the open framework body of that ship.”

The screen fabric image expanded and I could now see objects inside the framework: hockey-puck fusion reactors stacked like coins, coils of s-con cable and skeins of optics. I could also see other less easily identifiable items of hardware. I felt a sudden surge of disappointment which, after a moment, settled leaden inside me.

“We are capable of protecting ourselves,” said Mona, and at that moment hardfields flickered on above her ship.

Bravado—by now she had to know that a Polity destroyer was sitting in space above her and, even though it was an old destroyer, she must be aware it outgunned her by an order of magnitude.

“That’s a dangerous place to be, down there,” I tried.

“Well, it wasn’t,” she replied.

“Flute, give me a close-up on that nearby tunnel entrance.”

The frame swung aside and focused in to show me a couple of grav-sleds beside that dark maw, both loaded down with looted hardware. It was highly unlikely that if Penny Royal was in residence it would allow salvagers here to tear out the infrastructure. Obviously they’d beaconmarked that space debris for later collection—the kamikaze and observation satellite. But they must have beacon-marked the assassin drone as something to avoid.

“We work for John Hobbs,” said Mona.

I had no idea who this was but, by her tone, I assumed he was some sort of big noise in the Graveyard. What should I do now? I had a large fusion bomb specially made for this place and now no one was home.

“I was looking for Penny Royal,” I said.

“Then why don’t you piss off back to the Polity?” she replied.

“Pretend,” I said, “that I am a very stupid person controlling enough armament to turn you and your ship into a hot smear on the rock down there, and tell me Penny Royal’s location.”

During a pause she spoke over suit radio to some other member of her crew down there.

“What do you reckon?” she asked.

“Some Polity dipshit looking to get screwed by Penny Royal,” a man replied.

“A dipshit in a Polity destroyer, mind.”

“Yeah, there is that.”

“I don’t have to pretend you’re stupid,” she now replied to me. “You haven’t done much checking of information sources outside of the Polity, have you?”

“What relevance has that?”

“AIs tell lies,” she said.

This wasn’t really news to me, since that was something I had learned during the war. Certainly suppression of information about Penny Royal had been frequent. But why now, why lies a hundred years after the fact?

“If you could explain further?” I suggested.

“What should I tell him?” she asked her comrade.

“The truth—I don’t suppose he’s here after the salvage.”

After a long pause she said to me, “Okay, some decades ago Penny Royal got on the wrong side of some alien technology and got smeared. When we heard the news, we came here to see what we could find, but there was still too much signal traffic down here and too much life in automated defence systems. Later, a drone called Amistad came here, put Penny Royal back together and took it off to the planet Masada. There the drone was put in charge and Penny Royal now acts as its enforcer.”

I just sat there gaping at her. All my efforts, all the knowledge I had acquired and all the risks I had taken to get this far and … nothing. Penny Royal wasn’t here. I felt stupid and incredibly frustrated and wanted to scream. I also wanted to reject what she’d just told me, but it was evident the AI wasn’t here and why should she lie? The moment passed, then, and I began thinking clearly again.

Now I understood why these events had been suppressed; why I was only learning about them now. Penny Royal was a mass-murderer who, under Polity law, should face obliteration for its crimes. Polity AIs were very firm in their contention that death was the punishment for murder, with no exceptions. They wouldn’t want it known that Penny Royal had, apparently, been let off the hook. This confirmed what Sylac had said when he spoke to me in that virtuality before my resurrection—how Polity AIs didn’t stick to their own rules about the punishment of murderers. I also realized why it had been so easy for me to get the coordinates of this place from Isobel and why, at the time, I’d felt she was concealing something. She had known Penny Royal wouldn’t be here and, understandably, had felt no reason to stop me heading off on a fruitless quest.