Asimov's Science Fiction: April/May 2013 (3 page)

Working together the Client and I made something that could kill the prador. I don't know precisely what it was—the vagueness of my memories was due to the accident that destroyed most of my body, for it had also destroyed part of my mind. We were ready. We had our weapon and we had our delivery system. But things had changed in the intervening years. The prador had begun to lose, and even as we lined up the farcaster for its first tests, the old prador king was displaced and they began to retreat, and to negotiate. The AIs put a hold on our project, then they canceled it, seizing the farcaster and breaking it into separate elements, which were cast away all across known space.

What happened then? The war ended, apparently. I never knew, because my remains were clinging to life in one of the Client's growth tanks as it fled into hiding aboard the
Coin Collector.
Apparently there had been some contention about the breaking up of the farcaster during which some unstable weapons activated. I don't know. I just don't know.

Consciousness returned to me while I was alone aboard the
Coin Collector,
my mind somehow enslaved, my task to search out and recover the elements of the far-caster, and to one day take them to the Client, when it allowed me to know its location, so it could at last have its revenge against the prador. I waited patiently for that day, for I wanted revenge too and I wanted freedom, and I knew that the only way I could have them would be to finish the job the prador started so long ago.

The Client had spoken and now, with my connection to it renewed and affirmed, or maybe some parts of my mind reprogrammed and updated, I had no choice but to obey. As I stepped out of the repair cabinet and donned newly cleaned and repaired clothing, I felt sick, bewildered by my human form, and still wishing I could change the past.

"Time to finish this now," I said.

"Finish it?" Harriet perked up.

I did worry about her love of mayhem, for it seemed her main interest now. Once she had been an "exotic dancer" who used various reptiles in her act and then, like many such people for whom appearance is all, she acquired an accelerating addiction to change. First had been changes of skin color and the addition of snake eyes, then scales, claws, and numerous internal changes, adaptogenic drugs and enhancements, and change thereafter for its own sake. At some point the jobs she had taken to supplement her wealth had displaced the dancing, and she became a full-time bounty hunter, and she further adapted herself to that work. I had employed her to hunt down a rogue war drone said to possess some strange piece of U-space tech which just might have been part of the farcaster, but as it turned out wasn't. The drone fried her, leaving not much more than her brain and a bit of nerve tissue. I managed to get her out, in an ab-zero stasis bottle, and thence to a hospital in the Graveyard. I didn't hold out much hope for her. Had we access to a Polity hospital her chances would have been better, but, since quite a few of her bounties were paid upon delivery of a corpse, or parts thereof, she couldn't return to the Polity. The next time I saw her I got a bit of a shock.

Her change into a troodon dinosaur had been out of a catalogue that explored the "limits of the feasible" apparently, and she was idiotically delighted with it. They'd shoe-horned her brain into this reptile body, where it didn't seem to fit right. They'd turned her into something like an upgraded pet that could speak, but didn't possess the hands to do anything more complicated than tear at meat. I felt responsible, and so allowed her to stay at my side.

"Yes, finish it," I said, the feeling that I occupied some nightmare form slowly receding as I worked the controls, targeting both colony rafts and the Cleaver watch post, then pausing to study the only weapons option.

The Frobishers and Cleavers were nasty and certainly deserved some sort of response, but there had to be innocents amidst them. What I was about to do sickened me, but I simply had no choice... or did I? I now struggled against my own mind, because my instructions did offer me some leeway, and I opened com channels covering all the radio and microwave frequencies the two families used, and set the equipment for record and repeat.

"This is a message from Tuppence aboard the
Coin Collector
for all Frobishers and Cleavers," I said. "You have both wasted my time and threatened my life." And now the unscripted bit, "You therefore have one hour to abandon your colony rafts and watch stations. At the end of that hour I will destroy them all." I paused while a knife of pain lanced through my skull, then faded as I selected the single particle cannon for the chore. The pain returned as I set a timer for firing, then continued with, "Perhaps, after this, those of you who might be innocent in this matter will carefully consider your choice of leadership. That is all."

"You are being merciful?" Harriet inquired.

I stepped back from the controls, the pain redoubling in my skull, and slumped into an acceleration chair. I was aware that I had gone, if only a little, contrary to my orders, and now, somehow, I was punishing myself. Paralyzed, I watched lights flashing and icons appearing on the screen indicating increasingly desperate attempts from both families to get in contact with me. Ever so slowly the pain faded—just a small punishment for a minor infringement, and not the agony that could leave me crippled in hell for days on end. The leeway around my orders enabled me to do such things, enabled me to do many things. I rested a hand on my thigh—the one containing the
other
gun.

"Yes, maybe I'm getting old," I finally managed to rasp in reply to Harriet.

Realizing there would be no immediate action, Harriet paced around the room for a while, before coming back to stand beside my chair, her head dipping as she nodded off into one of her standing dozes.

A quarter of an hour later I observed swamp cars, ATVs, heavy crawlers and people on foot, loaded down with belongings, abandoning both rafts. A further half hour passed, and as the end of the hour approached I heaved myself out of the chair, my head still throbbing with post-punishment pain, and approached the controls. The last minutes counted down, the last seconds, and then the particle cannon fired—any effects here on the ship unfelt.

The side view of the Frobishers' raft showed a beam as wide as a tree trunk stabbing down, its inner core bright blue but shrouded in misty green. Molten metal and debris exploded out from the impact point then, when the beam cut right through the raft to the boggy ground below, the whole thing lifted on an explosion, its back breaking and the two halves heaving upward on a cloud of fire and super-heated steam, before collapsing down as the beam cut out. Another screen showed those on the watching swamp car just gone—a smoking hollow where they had been, while the Cleavers' raft was now just as much a mess as the Frobishers', though viewed from a different perspective. Harriet was at my side, of course, watching with fascination, before turning away in disappointment.

"Tank." I turned now to face precisely such an object over the far side of the sanctum: a cylindrical tank much like one used for fuel oil or gas, but covered with an intricate maze of pipes and conduits. "Take us out of orbit and put us on course for the Graveyard."

"As you instruct," replied a frigid voice.

I immediately felt the vibration through my feet as the fusion engines fired up. The thing inside that tank, which might or might not have been the usual ganglion of a press-ganged prador first-or second-child, could take over.

Everything fell into stillness aboard the
Coin Collector
during U-space jumps. Without orders the thetics just became somnolent; without action and prey to hunt Harriet spent her time dozing or following me about like a lost puppy. On this occasion she was in lost puppy mode, easily keeping pace with my scooter as I drove through the ship, finally pulling up beside yet another massive diagonally slashed elliptical door that opened ponderously as I dismounted. Just outside this door I surveyed twenty thetics standing ready clad in impact armor with pulse-rifles shouldered. They were somnolent, but at a word from me would wake and be ready. In two more U-jumps I would give that word as we tracked down yet another possible element of the farcaster. I bit down on my frustration. When would the Client finally give up and summon me back? When could I finally end this? I walked through the door.

The cauldron was a pale pink glass sphere twenty feet across supported in a scaffold of gold metal extending from the floor to the ceiling fifty feet above. Across the back wall of the chamber were the doors to rows of chemical reactors. Catalytic cracking columns stood guard to one side while on the other squatted an object like a mass of stacked aluminium luggage woven together with tubes. Each case was a nano-factory in itself and the whole generated the smart-plasm being fed into the cauldron—the distillation of a billion processes. Gazing upon this set-up I felt it just did not seem sufficiently high-tech, but looked like something Jules Verne might have dreamed up in a moment of insanity.

Next I lowered my gaze to the rows of molds bracketing the catwalk leading to the cauldron itself. The ones to my right were all closed, like sarcophagi, their contents incubating. To the left half of them were closed, a robot arm running on rails to inject plasm into each. The others were open to reveal polished interiors in the shape of humans, a thetic peeling itself up out of one of them assisted by two more of its kind, while thetics from the other open molds stood in a group behind observing the whole procedure with blue eyes set in milk-white faces, mouths opening and closing as if miming the speech they were incapable of producing.

"I wish we could extend their lives," I said.

"Why?" asked Harriet, completely baffled.

"Four years and two days seems to be the point beyond which returns diminish," I replied. "I wonder if that limitation is why the Polity scrapped the idea?"

"The Polity?" wondered Harriet, her thinking even slower in these periods of inaction.

The thetics had been an attempt by the Polity to produce large quantities of disposable soldiers—a project with which I felt sure the Client and I had been involved during the war. Or perhaps we weren't? There had been other researchers, scientists, and experts of every kind on that ship sent to that first meeting with the Client, so perhaps the thetics were the result of some research by one of them? Perhaps when the Client had run, just after the farcaster had been broken up, it had stolen data and equipment too? How else had it obtained the samples with which to rebuild all this here? I shook my head, frustrated by the confusion. Where the thetic technology had come from and what my involvement had been were questions that would probably remain unanswered—they probably lay in that portion of my mind taken away by the accident.

Unfortunately, as well as the thetics' life-span being limited, both the amount of programming they could take and the damage they could withstand was limited too. Smart-plasm was all very well for quick production of disposable hominids, but on
receiving damage under fire such constructs tended to quickly revert to their original form, and crawl out of their uniforms like particularly nervous slime molds.

"Golem chassis," I said as I walked on through the cauldron room toward the back corner.

My own body was an amalgam of a Golem base frame, smart-plasm, and an early form of syntheskin outer covering—as a whole a more rugged combination. I wasn't entirely sure what human parts I had retained: perhaps my brain, perhaps only part of my brain, maybe just some crystal recording from that original flesh. I wondered if it had been a bioweapon that had taken away the rest of me, and wondered if it had been one I had designed.

"Golem chassis," Harriet repeated, with less intelligence than a parrot.

I decided not to bother making a suggestion I had made before, of giving her prosthetic Golem hands to replace her unwieldy claws. She wasn't interested when her mind was at a high point, and would be less interested now.

A smaller door at one rear corner of this chamber took me into my private laboratory. Here I felt the tension begin to ebb. It wasn't as if I could somehow be disobedient here, ignore the Client's orders, or cease my endless search for farcaster elements, but somehow its grip on my existence seemed less rigid in this place. Perhaps it was because here I occupied those parts of my mind not concerned with that search—those being the parts wholly focused on my original interests so long ago.

Oddly, the effect seemed the same for Harriet, though she had no alien entity controlling her mind. Her interest perked up as she surveyed all the complicated equipment, peered at nanoscope screens, and clumsily tried to pick up objects made for human hands and not claws painted with shocking pink polish. I say oddly because elsewhere her interests didn't often stray into the scientific.

I checked on a brain worm first; version 1056 and now a long way away from the parasite that forced ants to climb to the top of stalks of grass when a sheep might be strolling by and thus pass itself on to said sheep. This particular beauty would make a prador, if it was aboard a spaceship, suffer terminal claustrophobia. Not only would it want to get out of the ship, it would be completely unable to wear any kind of protective suit. Of course, prador could survive in vacuum for an appreciable time, but still the victim of this parasite would eventually die. I'd yet to test it out, and didn't think I ever would.

Next to the bug was one that caused a prador's carapace to grow as soft as sponge, and the next was a fungus that dined on their nerve tissue. I only checked on them briefly before moving on to the latest version of my favorite fungus—perfect now in every detail and perhaps a precise copy of a fungus that the Client possessed. Thus I occupied my spare time pursuing my interests in parasites and biological weapons. Thus, by pursuing the lines of research I had followed with the Client, I tried to restore some lost memory. Staring at the latest nanoscope images and latest computer models of the function of this last fungus, in all its different genetic settings, I tried to remember seeing them before, but there was nothing.