Dark Intelligence (13 page)

Here lay a black spine a metre and a half long, the width of an arm at its base and tapering to a needle point. It was pentagonal in cross section with corners I
knew
to be of atomic sharpness. A ribbed tentacle extended from its base, with a tentacle junction box a hand-breadth down it and a metre of tentacle beyond that—torn off at the end with optics and esoteric electronics protruding. Gazing at the thing, I felt a weird sense of connection as well as the usual familiarity. And neither sensation had anything to do with the numerous descriptions of these that I’d heard. I stepped back, feeling very uncomfortable—worse than I’d ever felt before with this déjà vu, this
connection
. There was some truth here I simply didn’t want to know about, or just couldn’t allow myself to know about.

“There’s no AI here,” said Isobel, her voice hollow. “Or at least not all of it.”

“No,” I replied. Of course there wasn’t.

“You had better start talking, and quickly,” she said. “That was a piece of Penny Royal back there. What the hell was it doing here, and what the hell is your interest?”

“The destroyer is called
Puling Child,”
I explained, because the time for concealment was past. “An amusing reference to a substance called pulegone which can cause babies to be aborted. It can be derived from a terran herb.”

“That’s all very interesting,” said Isobel acidly. “Now why don’t you cut to the dramatic climax you’re obviously leading up to.”

“The herb concerned,” I continued, “is pennyroyal, which, incidentally, is the name of the AI that controlled this ship. Penny Royal did not come here, but came
from
here.”

“Fuck,” said Isobel vehemently. Then because she couldn’t find anything else to add, “Fuck.”

6

ISOBEL

Isobel watched Spear and Trent returning from the destroyer. Then, after trying to force herself to breathe evenly and calm down, she spoke to Trent privately, “I’m opening the space doors to the hold. Come in through there.”

“You think he’s been playing us?” Trent asked.

Playing us? He brought us to the birthplace of Penny Royal—I don’t think playing anywhere near covers what happened!
She paused, used her haiman augmentation to replay the last few seconds, to be sure she hadn’t said that out loud.

“I do, and if I need to do something about that, I don’t want to make a mess in our living quarters.”

Ersatz toughness, when she wanted to scream hysterically. Or was it? She now recognized the growing predator inside her, and it wanted to tear Spear apart. It wanted to tear
everything
apart.

“Okay, I’ll tell him we’re going to move his second-child mind straight away.”

“You do that.”

Isobel swallowed an odd metallic taste in her mouth and sat back, using her augmentations to tune out the perpetually re-engaging input from her three hooder eyes as she gaped at the image of the destroyer on her screen. Her instinct was to have Trent and Gabriel glue Spear to the deck. They could then work him over for a few hours before using a cut aug on him, to wring every last scrap of information out of his skull. But she wasn’t sure if that instinct was wholly her own. She had to focus on the fact that the man offered a cure, and she should do nothing until either he had given her what she wanted or she found out that he could not.

She reached up and touched her long cheek with quivering fingers. Her head was now twice as tall as a normal human’s, and she could feel another red eye due to open in one of her developing eye pits. The protrusions, which had run up her jaw, now ran up the sides of her face and were longer. Some had acquired a joint, and the swelling towards their ends promised to blossom into a hooder manipulator. Her sensory cowl was still open and had been for a month, when she found she could no longer close it up. Further petals had also sprouted from the sides of her neck. Her arms and legs were shorter too, though she had lost no height because her body had grown longer. She was monstrous and just could not go on like this, surely …

She returned her attention to the screen, her extra eyes switching to infrared and ultraviolet, which was unhelpful for a screen formatted for human eyes. Again she tuned them out—the fight to do so just a little bit more difficult each time. She switched to a cam in the hold which showed, amidst crates of trade goods, where the second-child mind had been stowed. Trent and Spear’s survey of the
Puling Child
had rendered the results Spear had expected, though of course he hadn’t told the truth about why he had expected them. The destroyer was powered down but the fusion reactors could be restarted at any time. All it needed was the second-child’s mind to be installed and it would be ready to fly … that was presupposing Penny Royal hadn’t left any nasty surprises. She found herself shuddering uncontrollably.

As Trent and Spear entered the hold, the grav-plates powered up slowly, bringing them down to the floor as the space doors closed. A gale blew in there for a second as the hold filled with air, then Spear removed his helmet and placed it down on a nearby crate. Trent had moved back from Spear, his carbine casually pointed towards the man’s stomach.

“Gabriel,” said Isobel, standing up and heading unsteadily for the exit. He joined her on the way down and, sensing her mood, drew his pulse-gun. He also had one of those neat cattle prod devices used on Cheyne III to drive dark otters away from boats. Isobel hoped he would not be finding a use for it soon; hoped Spear would be true to his word.

“Penny Royal,” she stated flatly as she stepped into the hold, determined not to show him both her desperation and her growing need for violence.

Spear turned towards her, looking annoyingly calm.

“Penny Royal,” he said, with a slow nod.

“Why are we here?”

“Truth?”

“If you value your skin.” Yes, maybe she’d take that, if he reneged …

“I was one of the few survivors left on Panarchia, after a division of eight thousand men was CTD-bombed from orbit by that ship,” he stabbed a thumb towards the space doors. “I intend to track down and kill the mind that controlled it—Penny Royal.”

Isobel stared at him, finding herself flicking to a wider spectrum view as panic tightened her torso. Maybe he wasn’t playing them. Maybe he was simply insane.

“That explains nothing,” she said, fighting to return her vision to normal.

“I need a ship to hunt Penny Royal down—it’s not something that can be done through the runcible network,” he explained. “I knew where Penny Royal’s destroyer was and it seemed the best option. There may also be clues aboard to help me in my search.”

“That still doesn’t explain why you came to me,” she said tightly.

“I needed someone familiar with the Graveyard …”

“Still not good enough, Thorvald Spear.”

“Okay.” He shrugged in defeat. “As well as being able to get me here, you can also give me the location of Penny Royal’s base—that planetoid. You went there, and it’s not a place I can find on any Polity database.”

She stared at him for a moment, her enhanced mind flicking through this new information, and realized his error. He’d come out of resurrection intent on going after Penny Royal right away. He’d therefore searched for information through the Polity AI net, where the position of Penny Royal’s planetoid had been suppressed. Just as subsequent information had also been suppressed: about Penny Royal’s encounter with something dangerous and alien while in the Graveyard. Then the AI’s near-destruction, and its rescue by a Polity drone called Amistad who took it to the planet Masada. How naive were the citizens of the Polity, to think their AIs revealed everything. She could tell him, but it was not her custom to give away information for free.

“And why should I?”

“Money?” he suggested.

She stared at him for a long time, trying to understand what the emissions coming from him might mean—she could pick them up with her additional hooder senses. They could perhaps be parsed for truth. She realized her stare had gone on for an uncomfortably long time when Gabriel started fidgeting and throwing worried looks her way.

“That will have to be another transaction,” she said tersely. “But right now you have what you want.”

“I will have what I want when my ship mind—” he gestured to the sphere containing the second-child “—is installed.”

“That will be done when you deal with this.” She indicated her own body with a hand that was becoming increasingly unusable.

“No, you get the mind over there first,” he replied with that irritating calm. “You can keep Trent or Gabriel with me at all times. Once it’s in place I will complete our … initial transaction.”

She suddenly knew he was lying. He was trying to keep her hooked while he got that destroyer running. He was obviously technically adept, so probably had some plan to escape in it before completing his part of the deal. All that stuff about hunting down and killing Penny Royal had to be a lie because it was based on yet another lie. Anyone who knew anything about Penny Royal knew about the incident when it turned black. There had been no human survivors of the bombing of Panarchia.

“You seem to be under the illusion that you have some power here,” she said, now considering losses and gains. There was no cure for her here, but she was about to acquire a Polity destroyer—a very expensive item indeed. The money she could make from it in a Graveyard auction should be enough to lure somebody top-flight out of the Polity—someone who really could deal with her problem. Meanwhile her inner predator raised its head and opened its eyes.

“Okay.” He nodded, gazing at her.

She immediately understood he knew she’d seen through him. Perhaps she
was
reading something beyond the human visual spectrum, to receive this insight so clearly?

“If he moves a muscle, burn off his feet,”
she auged to Trent, then glanced at the heavy-worlder when he didn’t respond.

“You want some more truth?” Spear asked.

“Trent?”

Something was wrong.

“You, Isobel Satomi, are a murderous bitch,” Spear continued, “and I can think of no punishment, other than you being cored and given to the prador, more appropriate than what’s happening to you now. When it comes to adaptogenics and augmentation I know my stuff. But I’m barely shaping stone axe heads while Penny Royal is making Tenkian robot weapons. I could no more cure you than a witchdoctor could cure brain cancer.”

“Bring him down!” Isobel spat, horrible delight arising now that she knew nothing barred her from attacking him.

Neither Trent nor Gabriel moved a muscle and then, just like an unbalanced sculpture, Trent fell flat on his face. Somehow Spear had got to them and she had to act now. She damned herself for not having a security drone installed down here in the hold, or something else as lethal that she could access with her augmentations. She would have to deal with him herself, right away. She took a step forwards, reaching down for her own pulse-gun, but it suddenly felt as if she was wading through treacle. Her hand reached the butt of her gun, closed round it, then stalled. In panic she cast about for some other option. Maybe she could get maintenance robots into the hold …

Even as she mentally reached out for those robots her connection to the hardware all around her began fizzing. She managed to get some robots on the move, then everything dissolved in static. Spear stepped over to her, reached out with one finger and prodded her chest. She went over like a felled tree, flat on her back.

SPEAR

As I gazed down at Isobel, I seriously considered just leaving her there while I opened the hold doors to transport my ship mind over to the destroyer. I did, after all, have a dangerous AI to hunt down. But I could not overcome the after-effects of my war; I couldn’t take human life so casually. I opened the hold airlock doors, noting a couple of maintenance robots in the corridor outside. She had probably summoned them just as the prion cascade shut down the nerves linking her to her internal modem nodes. They didn’t react to me, so I guessed she hadn’t had enough time to instruct them further.

I quickly dragged her out of the hold then into a nearby storeroom, laying her in a recovery position so she wouldn’t choke on her tongue. Then I went back for Trent and Gabriel. These two, weighing twice as much as her, were more difficult to move. At one point during the sweaty procedure, I considered heading for the bridge and shutting down the grav-plates. But soon they were lying beside her, the three of them like a row of parentheses. I closed the door on them, then used Trent’s carbine to turn the electronic lock into slag, so the door could only be opened manually and from the outside.

Next I crossed the ship to enter the hold space on the other side, where I’d already ascertained they kept their EVA tools. What I required was clamped to one wall: a pulpit zero-gravity handler. The thing was named for its resemblance to a church pulpit, from which you controlled three large mechanical arms, powered up by laminar power storage underneath the platform on which you stood. Two of the arms extended from the top of the pulpit whilst a third came out from below. Each had four alternative sets of manipulators that I could revolve into position. Luckily the grav in this hold was off, so I opened the space doors, detached the device from the wall and climbed into it. After it powered up, I used its chemical steering thrusters to take it out into vacuum. It was easy enough for me to operate, being an ancient piece of machinery that had probably seen service during the war. I had never used such a device before, but of course
felt
as if I had.

Accustoming myself to the controls, I took it round the ship to the first hold. I entered, selected the required manipulators and picked up my new ship mind, Flute. Steering was sluggish with the extra mass, but I found a targeting program I could run, set a course for the destroyer and put the pulpit on automatic. As it slowly took me over, I inspected the damage the ship had received. Though it was intact, it had obviously taken a pounding during that fatal conflict above Panarchia. I wondered what had impelled Penny Royal to abandon it and board that prador dreadnought. And then the AI had made that dreadnought crash, surely leaving itself without U-space transport? Certainly, going black, it wouldn’t have wanted a vessel as easily identifiable as its original shell. But why hadn’t it taken full control of the prador ship? And how had it travelled from the world it crashed on to … elsewhere. It was a puzzle. Unless, of course, you realized that Penny Royal had at that point turned into the AI equivalent of a raving lunatic.