Dark Intelligence (26 page)

“Persistent fucker, aren’t you,” he said, drawing his pulse-gun.

He aimed carefully and fired, but the jolting of the scooter sent his shot into the water to the left of the fish, kicking up a cloud of steam. He swore, studied the controls on the body of the gun and turned on gyro laser sighting. Now he put a blue spot on a point just back from the fish’s bow wave, clicked on the gyro and the gun came alive in his hand as it tried to keep itself aimed at that point. He fired twice and the fish thrashed, briefly raising its head out of the water and shaking like a dog smacked on the nose. He grinned, but lost it when the scooter hit the edge of the canal and bounced away, nearly flinging him from his seat. Finally managing to wrestle the vehicle to the centre of the canal, he looked back at a raised shark-like head. The reaverfish opened its mouth to expose plenty of black pointy teeth, then its lower jaw split along a vertical slit to expose even more. It protruded its chainsaw tongue from this particular opening.

“Will you fuck off!” Trent shouted, accelerating again.

The fish surged forwards, its tongue scoring the back of the scooter and clipping his leg, its mouth trying to get a grip on the scooter’s tail section and coming away with a chunk of cowling. It fell behind, obviously baffled by this, shook its head to expel a twisted sheet of bubble-metal, then came on again. Trent stared with disbelief at his leg. It had torn his trousers and now blood was welling. Turning angrily, he fired again, but the gyro nearly tugged the gun from his hand, it now having acquired a target somewhere up in the sky. He holstered it and concentrated on his driving, going as fast as he could through a series of bends in the canal, then opening the scooter up as it straightened out. Now there were dilapidated buildings on either side of the canal and shellmen and other disreputable characters were looking on.

Trent concentrated on his navigation, going as fast as he could while avoiding barges and protruding rigs. The light changed and his concentration was so intense that he only realized he’d entered the Carapace as the waterway opened out ahead. The terran hue was from sun-plates set in a ceiling high above. He was now entering a small lake with vessels drawn up all around its perimeter. Behind these was a chaotic panoply of tall buildings, multi-level streets and market stalls, all swarming with humanity. Now on open water he accelerated once more, pulling away from the fish which he’d either hurt or had tired in the chase. Near the end of the lake, he turned his scooter, bringing it to a halt to face the approaching reaverfish. He could have headed for the edge, dismounted and been away with no problem. However, he needed this—he wanted to feel effectual again.

“Right, you fucker,” he said, and accelerated towards it.

ISOBEL

The idiot
, thought Isobel, as she viewed the scene. Trent’s antics showed up in the laminate above her chain-glass screen, projected by the numerous pin cams she’d attached to his clothing when she removed his aug, and the silly keepsake of his sister. What had she told him? Just make a few low-key enquiries to see if traders there had what she required. Don’t draw attention to yourself—because if you do people like Stolman in the local mafia will start taking an interest. However, she recognized Trent’s impulse and understood it to the core of her being. He had probably been driven a bit stir crazy, trapped aboard the
Moray Firth
for so long, and had felt the need for some action. She too felt the need for it, though this didn’t stem from boredom, but the perpetual nag of what she was becoming. In fact, if he did get into trouble she knew she’d be glad of it. She could then accede to her own impulses and have an excuse to leave her ship, to hunt and to kill. Meanwhile, however, she had to suppress her urges and attend to other business.

While the U-space drive was out she’d been unable to use her U-space communicator, their tech being integrated. And even when the drive was operating again, it had still been impossible to use it. The communicator was old design and, unlike newer models, couldn’t operate from within that continuum. Now, time to get things organized.

Isobel put out a call and waited. U-space communication was supposed to be instantaneous but that was a lie. In reality the connection time was constrained by the amount of power you wanted to use, by U-space oddities between points A and B in a continuum where distance was supposed to be meaningless and, of course, by how long it took whoever she was calling to answer. After eight tedious minutes, a tone sounded and an icon blinked up in the laminate. She mentally opened it to see who she was speaking to but, for the moment, did not allow her own image to transmit.

“Morgan,” she said to the beefy, bald and heavily scarred individual who appeared.

“Isobel,” he replied, dipping his head in acknowledgement.

She studied him for a moment. He could easily have corrected the deep scar that ran from his forehead across his right eye, transecting his nose to end in a lump on his top lip. His mismatched eyes—one blue and the other brown—could’ve been corrected too. As could all the other dents and hollows on his face and the mottled pink and grey of his skin. He could, should he so wish, look like an Adonis. However, he was a man who enjoyed the shock of his brutal ugliness just as he enjoyed the brutality of his trade. He was her chief of coring and thralling. He was someone who enjoyed inflicting pain and horror and so was perfectly suited to his role. He would also be the one, she felt, who could more easily accept her current appearance.

“Morgan,” she continued. “I am now going to let you see me since you, and others you select, will need to know what I now look like.” She considered delivering some sort of warning, but instead allowed her image through.

Morgan jerked back from his screen, his mouth dropping open, then shook himself and leaned forwards again.

“Gruesome,” he said admiringly, then grinned horribly. “You’re going all the way?”

Isobel considered that for a second. Her transformation into a hooder had been continuing apace, but now, since Penny Royal’s recent intervention, that change itself had taken a different path. The grey patches were now regularly distributed—at her joints, at the tips of her limbs and at the rooted sides of her plates of carapace. They were spreading too, like the effect of heat discoloration in metal, leaving ivory white behind them. Studying this effect at a nanoscopic level, Isobel had found deep changes involving s-con threads and laminations of fullerene and other materials. Her carapace was growing even stronger than its already extreme hooder invulnerability. As for her eyes, which were turning lemon yellow, the changes there were due to genetic changes in a photo-luminescent bacteria living inside; she could not fathom their purpose. Of course Morgan saw none of that—he just saw the monster.

“Not out of choice—that’s out of my hands,” she said, briefly contemplating how that second phrase no longer applied to her. “However, don’t ever be fooled into thinking I am in any way crippled by this form or that my mental faculties have been damaged. I am in fact so much more capable than I was before.”

Truth there and lies. She was very capable now, but perpetually having to fight for rationality.

“Okay, Isobel.” He nodded. “What do you want?”

“What is the status of our latest cargoes?” she asked.

“The
Glory
is on its way but the
Nasturtium
is still in orbit here. I’m aboard and we’re still waiting on the next load from the warehouse.”

“What about the
Caligula?”

“In space dock and ready to blow out a few cobwebs.”

“Very well, I’m sending you some coordinates. I want you to head straight there once you’ve prepared, even if the rest of your cargo hasn’t arrived.”

“No delivery?”

“No, our clients in the Kingdom will have to wait a while—I have more pressing business. I want the
Caligula
fully armed, with a full complement of our troops aboard. I also want you to bring the planetary cache of CTDs … in fact, look upon this as a war footing and bring everything you think necessary.”

“Wow,” he said. “Something nasty?”

“You’re damned right. Don’t let me down.” It had taken another internal battle to come here, rather than head straight for the planetoid. The hooder in her wanted to go directly after Spear, but the more logical human part of her mind had to accept certain realities. Firstly she was low on fuel and secondly, because he now controlled a Polity destroyer, Spear was a dangerous prey indeed.

“As you say, Isobel,” said Morgan.

She cut the transmission and returned her attention to Trent.

FATHER-CAPTAIN SVERL

Father-Captain Sverl grated his prosthetic ceramal mandibles together, raised his great soft bulbous body up on his prosthetic ceramal legs and made a groaning sound beyond the vocal apparatus of any other prador. His first-child Bsorol backed away, still expecting a blow that hadn’t come in many decades. Bsorol was ancient now too, his carapace knotted with strange whorls and outgrowths and his leg segments bent through a hundred years of artificially maintained adolescence.

“Leave now,” Sverl clattered.

The first-child turned and headed for the sanctum door, which ground open to reveal Bsorol’s two assistants—prador that had once been second-children. Like the other twenty-two aboard this submerged dreadnought, they were now just a spit away from being first-children, but for their own distortions and prosthetic replacements for body parts that would not grow back—the growth retardant effecting them all differently.

As the diagonally split sanctum doors closed, Sverl considered his options. Bsorol, who had been analysing Polity data traffic for the best part of a century, had informed him that Penny Royal was back in the Graveyard. The rogue AI had somehow come to terms with the Polity AIs. Did this mean that Sverl could drag himself from his hideaway under the sea, leaving the Rock Pool to exact vengeance? Was vengeance still what he wanted?

Sverl’s war had been a hard one. He had lost two of his capital ships to the Polity, he had come close to dying when his own ship had been hit and he’d spent years recovering from radiation burns that had left him infertile. On his subsequent return to the war, during a simple mission while he accustomed himself to controlling a dreadnought, a Polity assassin drone had boarded his ship. It infected him with parasitic worms that nearly killed him again. He had to exterminate his own children to root out the infection on board—Bsorol and his other children were the last of his family, retrieved from the prador home world later in the war. Then he lost half his body mass to long and agonizing surgical procedures to remove the parasites. After that he received demotions when temporary insanity drove him to attack and destroy two rivals, thus undermining the war effort. The final insult came when he was made an outcast, this upon refusing a summons to return to the Kingdom when the new king decided to terminate the war.

Sverl bubbled anxiety and annoyance as he went over to his array of hexagonal screens and inserted one claw into a pit control.

He just hadn’t been able to return. He had invested and lost too much, suffered too much to obey the one who had called a halt to the war. He had never been able to accept that the war was over for him, as his hatred of the human race and its machines went too deep. Or that’s what he had thought then—so he’d remained in this borderland, this Graveyard.

The screens all came on, showing various views of the Rock Pool’s human community. Many of the humans had such a dislike of their own original form that they were distorting and changing it, and how Sverl envied them their choice. He then switched to two particular views he had put in place for his study of human crime, but his heart wasn’t in it, his mind still ranging into memory.

Years passed before he heard rumours of the black AI, the rogue creation of the Polity. It gave him some satisfaction to know that there was something out there that terrified even the Polity’s most lethal AIs, and he took an interest, gathered data. He soon learned that this Penny Royal was adept in technologies unavailable even in the Polity. It could transform beings, grant wishes and might be able to provide Sverl himself the means to realize his greatest wish. He needed to understand why weak fleshy beings and atrocious constructed intelligences had held against prador might. How had it been possible for them to turn the tide of the war, before the new king simply gave up? However, Graveyard gossip had it that Penny Royal’s gifts were poisonous and the technologies and transformations it provided could turn round to bite the recipient.

Sverl hadn’t believed that for a moment, not then.

Investigating the claims, he had found more rumour than truth and recognized this as Polity propaganda. Of course Polity AIs wouldn’t want it known that a being more powerful than them existed and was willing to provide for their enemies. Almost certainly those same AIs had started the rumour mills. They had built up a mythos around this Penny Royal, causing those who might have sought it out to avoid it. They had created a legend, something like that of the prador Golgoloth—frightening tales to scare children. And Sverl had considered himself no child.

Sverl withdrew his claw and the screens automatically shut down. He turned to gaze at the masses of equipment, terrariums and tanks occupying his sanctum, still undecided about what to do next. In retrospect, he realized his hate of the Polity had distorted his reasoning all those years ago. That his mind had been damaged throughout the war exacerbated this. He’d been selective about which Penny Royal stories he’d chosen to believe, listening to tales of those who had gained precisely what they wanted. He’d also been supremely arrogant, as all father-captains were, sure that if there were any catches in a transaction he’d be sure to see them. Thus he had chased down rumour and then firm data. He found the location of Penny Royal’s wanderer planetoid, and went there.

Sverl shuddered to remember his state of mind back then. He’d resolved to demand the means to understand the success of humanity and its AIs. He would take that knowledge to the Kingdom and contact those dissatisfied with the new regime. He’d next gather forces around him and usurp the new king, then lead the prador to slaughter humanity, as was their right and their destiny. And so he’d gone to confront Penny Royal in its burrows, while a fortune in diamond slate was unloaded from his shuttle above. He’d deluded himself that the flower of black knives he found was only a
being
, conveniently forgetting that it was also a hated Polity artificial intelligence.