Dark Intelligence (33 page)

So how should she approach? There were eighteen armed thugs in and about the warehouse, plus the Golem and Stolman himself. There were two autoguns positioned within the warehouse too. The exterior cams probably connected directly into the Dracocorp aug network, and there were sub-AI security drones covering every entrance. If her aim was to rescue Trent, which she must or she couldn’t really justify being here, she’d have to move quickly and the Golem would be a problem. Even with the weapons she possessed it would take time to shut it down—time in which one of Stolman’s thugs could take a shot at Trent. As she opened her trunk, she decided that she’d try accessing the Dracocorp aug network after all, followed by an attempt to access the mind of that Golem. If Stolman had managed to activate it, then surely it shouldn’t be so difficult to take control away from him.

Isobel made tentative connections to the network and carefully began weaning out data and recognition codes. She quickly understood that she could make no true penetration of the network without being included within it, and so needed a Dracocorp aug of her own. She began to model one in her mind, taking up more and more data threads to process through it. In a moment she’d almost reached the point where she could communicate—and actually become part of the network. She then found that the moment she did so, Stolman would know someone else had joined. At that point, her modelled aug would become partially subservient to his. Moments after that, he’d know who she was and could shut her out again.

However, there was something she could do. She calculated that for at least a few minutes, she could scramble his connection to the Golem. But whether this was a good thing, she couldn’t tell. The Golem might just shut down completely and do nothing. It might become fully conscious and, with it being first enslaved to Penny Royal, become even more dangerous than it was now.

Isobel made her decision and instructed the autogun, which delicately stepped out of the crate and then scuttled up and along one wall. She loaded up with grenades and other armaments, also stripping the covering from her proton cannon. She then selected targets down the street for the missile bundle, took a calming breath as she checked the whole intricate network of her attack plan, then stepped out from behind the auto-handler dray. Streaks of fire flared behind her as the missiles fired, and she felt an ecstatic joy rising up inside her as she surged forwards.

THE WAR: RISS

“You are a drone,” so the station AI had said. “Your physical appearance and function can be changed and I can reformat your mind.”

Riss remembered the crowded final construction bay aboard Factory Station Gdansk 12. This was where she’d been posted to learn her fate at the end of the war. There had been thousands of drones there: war drones built to resemble just about every creature imaginable, terran or alien. Giant scorpions, spiders and ants had been there in abundance, although snakelike forms such as her own were not so prevalent, since many drones liked to have plenty of limbs with which to manipulate their environment. Distinguishing assassin drones from plain war drones had more to do with mental signature than shape—the former tending to be much more taciturn and moody. While there, Riss was reminded of the chaotic departure from her original factory station. She and a few other drones had fled Factory Station Room 101 shortly after it surfaced from U-space. The station had been hugely damaged, its AI was insane, and its secrets were thereafter buried by lies about it being destroyed.

Near to Riss, on Gdansk 12, there had been a pair of drones fashioned like sharks. There was also a particularly irascible drone—somewhat like a giant chromed lobster with particle cannons in its mouth. From these drones, Riss had gained useful intelligence. She learned that many drones, attack ships, destroyers and even some dreadnoughts had gone AWOL since confirmation of the war’s end—just like Room 101 had done earlier in the war. Apparently, these were now heading out of the Polity, unable to accept the end of their function. They were contemptuous of slow humanity and intent on starting something new. Riss had been tempted to head for one of the broadcast rendezvous points, but not tempted enough.

“Are you going to?” she had asked.

“Going to what?” asked the Gdansk AI.

“Change your appearance and function and reformat your mind?” said Riss. “You are, after all, obsolete now.”

“I am going to go somnolent and wait,” replied Gdansk.

“Mothballed.”

“Not a description I like and, even so, I don’t think it will be for long.”

“Me neither,” Riss had replied, heading for the exit.

In the months and then years following the war, a buffer zone was formed between the two realms, by agreement between the new prador king and the Polity. Even as Riss travelled out towards this, hopping from ship to ship, this borderland had acquired the name the Graveyard. It was appropriate, since the Polity worlds here had received the brunt of the prador attack when they weren’t conserving resources for the long haul. The nearby prador worlds too had been subject to a space runcible attack, whose source had been the perimeter of a black hole. The munitions were world-frying x-rays and planetary rubble, travelling at a significant portion of the speed of light.

Riss found ruination, but also occupation. Prador and humans were still there, while salvage hunters and the lone scum of both races were arriving, and a strange outlaw culture began to form. Sometimes hitching rides on ships, sometimes just hanging in orbit over worlds scattered with the titanic remains of industrialized warfare, Riss waited. She did so with the long patience of a machine for the renewal of conflict, for her purpose to be reinstated. There were moments of excitement—border infringements by prador foolish enough to disobey their king, or human rebels hoping to restart conflict. But generally sanity, of a kind, prevailed.

Riss was resting above yet another war-shattered world, thirty-two years after the war, when things changed for her. She’d noticed salvagers below were busily taking apart a crashed Polity attack ship. Then they were running back to their ship, shooting at something in the ruination behind them. Their grav-sleds, loaded down with valuables, had been abandoned. Maybe a somnolent prador drone had been unearthed, though that seemed unlikely near the wreck of a Polity attack ship. Maybe one of Riss’s own kind had activated and driven them off. Any of a hundred other dangers could have been the cause of their panic.

Eventually they reached their ship and from high in orbit Riss could only detect some odd movements and twisting of shadow behind them. They boarded and launched at once, the ground around their ship seeming to lens as if seen through some intense gravity field. Thereafter everything was fine until the ship reached orbit, then it just died—with no power output at all. Riss continued watching, not feeling any need to intervene—at least not yet. An airlock opened, expelling a human, sans space suit, out into vacuum. And now Riss felt it was time to take a look.

Riss grav-planed over to the ship and tried to scan deep inside it. None of the salvage crew was in evidence, though there was a dark area within that she couldn’t penetrate. On the way in she caught hold of the dead human, for there still might be something there that could be saved. Then she dragged the body into the ship’s open airlock and closed the door behind. The airlock was receiving no power so refused to pressurize but, when Riss opened it manually while it was still evacuated, that lack of power also prevented safety latches clicking in. Leaving the corpse behind, Riss headed directly to the area she’d been unable to scan—towards the sounds that seemed to be issuing from some hell—and came upon the edge of it in a dropshaft leading to the engine room. Ahead lay darkness with something seemingly suspended within it, glittering like flakes of mica, and Riss froze. The screams of pain and terror just went on and on, beyond the point where any human could have the energy to sustain them, but still Riss did not go on.

The drone recognized this darkness, and fled.

Riss headed for the airlock, happy to be ignored. Only now the corpse awaited, standing upright, seemingly woven together with silver tendrils, its eyes like flat pieces of obsidian.

“You … not know meaning … of no purpose,” it said.

Riss tried to get past, but hands closed on her snakish body with inhuman strength. Something penetrated, straight in through the route
Primeval
had used to make her expel her last parasite eggs. The thing inside inspected every part of Riss’s mind, focused for a long moment on events surrounding her inception. It was apparently curious about the secret Riss had been forced to keep concerning Factory Station Room 101 and its disappearance. Then it abruptly grew and devoured the foundations of Riss’s mind, leaving emptiness behind, overlaid with a thin veil of consciousness and memory. Released at last, Riss reached the airlock and managed to expel herself out into vacuum, writhing there as the ship came alive again and accelerated away under fusion drive, eventually dropping into U-space.

SPEAR

“Penny Royal was right,” said Riss. “I had not known the true meaning of being without purpose.”

“Time to scrap yourself, then,” Flute interjected before I could reply.

“But something else must have happened,” I said. “How else could I have found you where I did?”

“I cannot say what impelled me. I spent ten years on the edge of oblivion with only one thread keeping me from it: the need to find Penny Royal again. I did, but whether to demand back what it took from me, try for some portion of vengeance or to just achieve that oblivion I don’t know.”

“So what happened?”

“Penny Royal just slapped me aside after it had finished with me. I had no consciousness at all until you brought me aboard this ship—the
Puling Child.”

“Consciousness?” wondered Flute, then drawled, “Sure.”

“Flute, unless you’ve got something positive to contribute,” I said, “shut up.”

Riss had swung her head like a compass needle towards where Flute was located and opened her black eye fully. I really didn’t need my ship mind pissing off this drone. Thus far, it had been quite open and cooperative, but there was nothing to stop it deciding to give Flute a terminal injection through his case.

“I’m calling this ship the
Lance
now,” I said.

“Why?”

“Because my name is Spear so it amused me. Also, because the piece of Penny Royal I have remaining aboard has similarities … there are other reasons too. It’s complicated.”

“Too complicated for a—” Flute started muttering, then must have decided that wasn’t a positive contribution.

We were under drive, heading towards Masada, where I hoped the drone Amistad could supply missing answers, but we were weeks away from there yet. I’d searched the available data and it did seem that the events on the mining planet of Durana happened before Penny Royal bombarded Panarchia. And now my memories just didn’t make sense.

“I know about that piece,” said Riss. “Have you looked inside?”

“Looked inside?”

“The spine.”

Riss said nothing further and, though it’s pretty difficult to read a machine, I felt sure it was frightened. I studied said machine, and it,
she
, blinked her black eye at me.

“I’ve got other concerns,” I said, “like why my memories just don’t line up with reality. The chronology I had was the Panarchia bombing, followed by the prador capturing and thralling me, Jebel rescuing me, then me serving with Jebel prior to being killed.”

“Sometimes the human mind, in an effort to repair itself, knits things together in the wrong places,” Riss suggested.

“Yes, I’m sure that’s a problem your kind never suffer from,” I snapped, but the jibe had no strength to it, as I considered the … possibilities.

The jungle world where Jebel rescued me from the prador wasn’t all that clear in my memory. I had put it down to having had a spider thrall dug into the back of my neck at the time. However, it didn’t really seem all that different to Durana. I had memories of Panarchia, Durana and the world where Jebel found me, plus the hospital ship and some other events. Yet, the time when I was lying on the ground, after Krong attacked my prador captors, could just as easily have been stitched on. It could’ve been a memory of what happened after the second-child shot me during the ambush on Durana. So what did that mean? Was it that I had served with Jebel Krong, was badly injured and hospitalized, went back into service and ended up serving on Panarchia during the bombing and so … died there?

No, how could that be right? I distinctly remembered seeing the results of Penny Royal’s depredations after Panarchia, and gathering data on that too. The absolute physical proof of that was the ship I was sitting in right at that moment. I had extracted information from a prador mind on its location, supposedly after Panarchia.

Nobody survived Panarchia …

Everybody who knew anything about that world insisted on that fact and I—with my faulty stitched-together recollections—denied it.

My recollection …

I stood up from the horseshoe console, glancing over at Riss, who then watched me silently as I headed for the door. In a moment I found myself in my laboratory, standing beside the glass cylinder containing Penny Royal’s spine. How much coincidence can a story stand without seeming fake? The one survivor of Penny Royal’s main atrocity, before the AI went AWOL, has discovered the location of Penny Royal’s original ship. That one survivor chooses to use one of Penny Royal’s victims to get him to that ship. Upon seeking out Penny Royal in its hideaway, that survivor picks up another of the AI’s victims, who suddenly awakes after half a century of slumber. I had no idea what it all meant, but I felt damned sure I was being manipulated.

I opened the lid of the cylinder, reached inside and closed my hand around the spine. Again, I felt that weird and uncomfortable connection with the thing as I lifted it out and carried it over to the central table.

“Okay,” I said, “let’s see what we can find out.”

With the assistance of Riss, I spent the weeks-long journey to Masada studying the spine. Riss possessed some highly sophisticated scanning gear within her body which I didn’t have in the equipment available to me. The first thing we discovered was that the thing was active. It contained time crystals—cyclic quantum processes that required no input energy at all. It also used other processes to suck power from its surrounding environment, including the zero-point field. There were still other reactions which were hard to define, involving matter transmutation and the braking of the spin state of atoms.