Dark Intelligence (53 page)

“Still, we’re not stopping and we intend to enter that area,” I said. “Amistad was being just a little too cautious, and he hasn’t got all the facts.”

“Like what?”

I really wished he hadn’t asked that.

“It’s complicated,” I said.

“Isn’t it always? But the quarantine still stands,” Grant paused for a moment, as if checking something. “Apparently your war drone associate assaulted a couple of police officers.”

“Rubbish,” Riss interjected. “I merely defended myself. It wasn’t my fault they fired stunners straight at hardfields and got caught in the back blast.”

“Mmm, debatable. Here’s how it will run. I’ve got a couple of assets moving to intercept you. The moment you enter the zone’s half-mile border, your vehicle will be disabled. If you proceed on foot … or by other means, to enter the zone, you yourselves will be disabled and carted back here.”

“Whatever,” said Riss, doubtless sure of her own abilities.

“Yeah, whatever,” said Grant, and signed off.

Ahead, the flute grasses were getting shorter so I could occasionally see more than a few feet ahead. Riss accelerated, then shortly after that swerved to avoid something. I caught a passing glimpse of a big animal with a lot of teeth, its hide shifting like chameleoncloth to match its background. I’d just seen a siluroyne, which made me think twice about the prospect of walking across this terrain, but I had to put my confidence in Riss. As if to reaffirm just how dangerous it was, we moved into an area where the grasses were actually lower than the front screen of the ATV. And in the distance, where the grasses once again grew tall, I saw a huge birdlike creature striding along, stopping, then darting down a long spike of a beak. During the conflict here many casualties had been due to creatures such as the camouflaged one back there—and now this, this heroyne.

“Fuck,” said Riss. “We’ve got company.”

I thought the drone was referring to the distant creature, which now rose up again with something wriggling in its beak.

“Not there,” Riss added, then tipped her head up.

I looked up through the cab’s skylight, but couldn’t see anything until I turned to peer back through the roof windows in the cargo section. Two objects were hanging in the sky behind us, matching our course. These two upright cylinders looked a little battered, though the weaponry sprouting from top and bottom ends looked perfectly functional.

“Should be no problem for you,” I suggested.

“Unfortunately they are,” Riss replied. “Modern security drones—sub-AI but loaded with some serious shit.”

“They seem quite … plain.”

“Just a fashion,” Riss shot back.

Drones were first formed in fear-inducing shapes during the war. They’d been manufactured quickly and were a little unreliable. After the war, both the need and inclination to make independent drones like Riss had waned. Most were subsequently controlled by AIs or were installed with AI subminds, which was essentially the same thing. Even though Riss looked high-tech, modern and lethal, she was over a hundred years old.

“So we’re stuck.”

“One way to find out—we’re coming up on that half-mile border in about ten minutes.”

Those minutes dragged past, while the vista around us opened out—into low flute grasses and muddy channels dotted with islands of taller grasses. There were also occasional stands of orange and black whiptails. Perfect, I thought—no cover. But in reality, tall flute grasses couldn’t hide us from the senses of the two above.

“Do you have a plan?” I asked, thinking that we’d have to abandon our destination, although I wasn’t quite sure why I didn’t feel much disappointment.

The ATV abruptly decelerated and, glancing at Riss, I wondered if she’d come up with a strategy. Then casting my gaze forwards, I saw why she was slowing.

It stepped out of an island of flute grass, briefly stood up on its hind legs to peer in the direction we were heading, then looked back round at us. Coming to a decision, it settled down into its seated pyramidal form and extended one of its arms. Most of the claws were folded but one protruded upwards. In a manner that any human was culturally programmed to recognize, it waved this repeatedly in the direction we were going.

The ATV kept on slowing, finally coming to a halt.

“Your mouth’s open,” said Riss.

I abruptly snapped it closed but, really, gaping was justified. Here, out in the wilds of the planet Masada, sat the single resurrected example of the Atheter race, the Weaver. Or, to put it another way, I was seeing a gabbleduck thumbing a lift.

ISOBEL

The new Isobel felt firmly and utterly in control, even as something violently knocked the
Caligula
and her other three ships out of U-space. Her immediate conclusion was that an enemy had deployed a USER, but subsequent analysis of the data indicated otherwise. Each of the four ships had suffered from localized effects, if such terms could possibly be used within such a continuum. That meant four targeted devices had hit, perhaps U-space missiles or mines of some kind. She processed that, considered the likelihood of other enemy elements here, but remained resolute about her mission objectives.

“Snickety snick.”

The communication came from a channel under her control. She briefly queried it, vaguely concerned about such unnecessary transferences of data. Information came back from the Golem, who had moved very quickly to insert itself in the
Glorys
old-style ejection pod.

“Sverl sends his regards,” it said.

Isobel reached out for answers, clarification and obedience, but she just slid off the mind. Next it ejected the pod from the
Glory
, hurtling away under an acceleration no human occupant could have survived. She immediately targeted it with the
Caligula
’s weapons, but it had timed its ejection perfectly. For in the next instant she detected a black spike of a ship out there, splintering off missiles and launching them towards her vessels. Suddenly she had nothing to spare except for defence.

“Gloves off properly this time,” said this new aggressor.

The intelligence’s missiles were in pre-jump, she realized, even while targeting them with her own missiles and beam weapons across four ships. She coiled tighter, generating a subspacial twist through the extended mechanisms of her body. This manifested as a gravity wave-front ahead of the
Caligula
. Two missiles jumped just a moment before the gravity wave hit the bulk of them, before it flowed on towards that black ship. Missiles still in pre-jump shattered, igniting like small suns as the anti-matter flasks they contained breached. The twist took out a further missile, U-space disruption flinging it out into the real, where it followed its detonation program. Then one of her other ships, the
Glory
, disappeared in a massive flash. Nothing material of it remaining as it was instantly transformed into light-speed plasma.

Necessary sacrifice
.

More missiles splintered towards her, beam weapons webbing space. Throwing her remaining ships into a massive fusion-drive acceleration towards the centre of this system, Isobel then shut off all safety limiters. She generated a twist in all their drives and micro U-jumped them a hundred thousand miles. Immediately the
Nasturtium
came under fire, hardfields snapping on around it to deflect particle beams—but pseudo FTL matter twists in the beams themselves chewed into those protective fields. And the black ship was still with them.

“Not that fucking easy, Satomi,” said the
Garrotte
.

Next the
Nasturtium
blew a hardfield generator, which exited that ship’s hull as glowing wreckage. It crashed through the craft on the opposite side to a beam strike. Her
Moray Firth
wasn’t being hit so hard, but soon would be targeted more fiercely. The seemingly endless supply of U-jump missiles from that black ship had simply to complete their microseconds-long warm-ups. The
Caligula
now began taking more fire, just to keep its defences occupied, Isobel felt—the black ship was just ridding itself of the irrelevancies before fully concentrating on her.

A second micro U-jump brought them within a hundred thousand kilometres of Masada. Enemy weapons revealed themselves there as a whole spectrum of energies howled out from orbital installations. The
Nasturtium
fell next, a final hardfield collapsing and a particle beam sectioning it from end to end like some hellish milling tool. It peeled open like a banana, then one of the U-jump missiles annihilated it. Isobel sent a twist towards her antagonist, but the black ship micro-jumped itself. Microseconds dragged as slow as days, then years, as a gravity wave weapon fired from Masada’s orbit. Isobel saw her choices abruptly whittled down to one and something inside her hurt at the sacrifice she had to make.

She made the
Moray Firth
micro-jump at precisely the same moment as she reached out again to try and
twist
that black ship. She plotted U-space as she jumped the
Caligula
too, a large percentage of her war mind running the calculations, and they were at once close to Masada. The black ship and the
Moray Firth
surfaced behind her, just outside the gravity well while she was within it. They didn’t surface in precisely the same place, but close enough. They fused and hull melded into hull. But, as they were travelling under differential vectors, they at once tore apart again. This ripped open the hulls of both ships, strewing debris across vacuum. Within that cloud, anti-matter flasks breached and the two ships were lost in multiple detonations—even as the
Caligula
hurtled down into the atmosphere of Masada.

Trent gone
, thought the human part of Isobel.
All three ships gone
. Her organization was all but dead now because, despite her bases on various Graveyard worlds, its heart had been those ships and the people aboard them. All that remained was her and the
Caligula
.

But of course it wasn’t over. Isobel uncoiled, fast, unstoppable, pink fire rippling down her length as she gripped the very fabric of space. She tore out of the
Caligula
’s side, even as an island-burner particle beam stabbed down from its orbital installation. She fell out through fire, the
Caligula
carved in half and tumbling. As the beam quickly tracked across to her she U-jumped herself, leaving twists behind her to defeat any known tracking. Isobel snapped back out of it deep within atmosphere, just twenty feet above the ground—then her initial impetus reasserted itself and flung her down at a forty-five-degree angle. She was travelling at just over two thousand miles an hour.

In the fractions of a second between surfacing into the real and impacting with the ground, she scanned and linked and sucked up data. Hood first, she hit, already knowing both Penny Royal’s and Thorvald Spear’s locations. The latter was heading towards the former, which was convenient. Her impact carved a slot through a foot-thick layer of the rhizome surface and punched her down a hundred feet through wet mud. That rhizome mat split open behind her following the subsequent eruption of mud. A momentary strong feeling of nostalgia stilled her for a second, then she applied herself to burrowing. Even though she’d probably defeated any tracking, those satellites above would doubtless have picked up her impact point. She needed to be deeper, so the catastrophic effects of any weapon capable of reaching her would be unconscionable for the Polity. At first she used the simple hooder method of burrowing, but then applied other forces, accelerating. A coned force-field spread ahead of her and hardfields extended from her limbs like paddles.

“Hello, Isobel,” said a voice in her mind. “Do you understand now?”

She did, because now the whole pattern became clear to her. She had been tempted and lured into bringing all her forces here to inevitable annihilation. Penny Royal’s manipulation had been perfectly couched to fit her personality and the changes it was undergoing, tied in with the transformation of her body. She felt sick with rage at her own gullibility, and at how easily the black AI had played her.

“Why?” she asked, clamping down on that rage.

“Because you are a problem I caused, and one I am solving.”

“I’m coming to kill you,” she replied. “Then I’m going to gut Spear.”

“Yes, of course,” said Penny Royal, “these are your intentions, but are they actually what you want? Are they what
you
want?”

“No more games, Penny Royal—this ends now, today.”

“Doubtless,” the black AI replied.

SPEAR

I unstrapped myself and stood up, heading back into the ATV’s cargo area, where I surveyed the copious space available. Perhaps a fully grown gabbleduck would fit. But the vehicle’s conveniently large size reinforced my deep distrust of reality and the workings of my own mind. As if to affirm that impulse, déjà vu engulfed me again—then someone else’s memory used that moment of distraction to slide into my mind.

The cargo area shrank and was now packed with plastic crates and cylinders on pallets—a shipment of arms.

The enclosed space was lit by the fast-passing light of a moon and outside, somewhere, a gabbleduck was muttering to itself. I’d spread my blanket between two of the pallets and was sitting on it. Having taken off my boots, I was now proceeding to pull down my combats
.

“We’re good,” said Slater from the cab. “No activity being picked up.”

The new chameleonware on the vehicle’s roof would keep us concealed from Theocracy satellites, but only if we remained stationary. The window in that surveillance would open in about five hours. Now it was time to conclude something that had been growing between us for some weeks now
.

“Sure,” I replied, taking off my top
.

By the time Slater came back into the cargo area I was naked, lying back, my arms above my head-

No!

Somehow I shut it down and snapped back into the moment, staggering as present reality cracked back into place around me. I wasn’t a prude, but really, right then I didn’t need a memory of Renata Markham’s sexual adventures. I also had to wonder what the increasing frequency of these flashbacks might mean. As I shook myself out of it I realized the cargo door was opening and lowering to form a ramp and Riss was beside me.