Dark Intelligence (3 page)

“What the fuck?” I wasn’t sure whether it was me or someone else who said that. But even as the beam winked out, I knew that our division’s outlying guard posts had just been annihilated.

Did I actually see what happened next or did imagination fill in the details for me? Black objects hurtled down from the destroyer—one of them visible only half a mile or so ahead. Then the ship peeled away, igniting a fusion drive to hurl itself back upwards. Bright light flashed, and my visor went protectively opaque for a few seconds. As vision returned I saw, in nightmare slow motion, mountains heaving and crumbling, their broken stone turning to black silhouettes that dissolved in a torrent of fire.

“They’ve killed us,” said Gideon.

The fire rolled down and swept us away.

THE WAR: A BELATED PRELUDE

The miners of Talus push a runcible transfer gate, enmeshed in hardfields, into the giant planet’s core. Here, they prompt thousands of tons of nickel-iron to squirt through underspace, via the gate, to a distant location. Meanwhile, a hundred light years away, the autodozers on planetoid HD43 shove mounds of ore into mobile furnaces. These metals are rare on some worlds, but here on Talus they are easily field-filtered, refined and transmitted. HD43’s orbit is perturbed by a strip-mined loss of mass, which runs a mile deep all around the planetoid as it is gradually peeled like an onion. Silica sand billows into a runcible gate on the planet Fracan, where a desert is being vacuumed away to bedrock. Old Jupiter swirls with new storms as its resources too are stripped, but by gas miners feeding like whales. In the Asteroid Belt combined crusher and smelting plants select asteroids, as if choosing the best candidates from a vast chocolate box. Materials gate through nowhere from numerous locations, becoming non-existent, and arrive. And these invisible transit routes converge at a point on the edge of chaos: factory station Room 101.

Resembling a giant harmonica, discarded by a leviathan eater of worlds, Room 101 sits on the edge of a binary star system. The station is eighty miles long, thirty miles wide and fifteen deep. The square holes running along either side of it are exits from enormous final-fitting bays. One of these is spewing attack ships like a glittering shoal of herring, which eddy up into a holding formation. Drives then ignite upon orders received, and they shoot away. At a slower pace, another exit is birthing the huge lozenge of an interface dreadnought. Another seems to be producing smoke, which only under magnification reveals itself to be swarms of insectile war drones. Some of these head over to piggyback on the attack ships, while others gather on the hull of the dreadnought. Still others, those of a more vicious format, head off on lone missions of destruction.

Inside the station, the sarcophagus-shaped framework of a nascent destroyer shifts a hundred feet down a construction tunnel eight miles long. Into the space it occupied, white-hot ceramal stress girders now stab like converging energy beams. Then these are twisted and deformed over hard-fields which glitter like naphtha crystals. The skeleton of another destroyer takes shape and is moved on after its fellow, cooling to red in sections as directed gas flows temper it. From the tunnel walls, structures like telescopic skyscrapers extend and engage in hexagonal gaps in the ship’s structure. A third such device moves up the massive lump of a three-throat fusion engine, hinges it up into place, then extends constructor tentacles like steel tubeworms. These commence welding, bolting and riveting at frenetic speed.

Fuel pipes and tanks, skeins of superconductor, optics and all the apparatus of the ship’s system come next—some of it preprepared to unpack itself. The constructor tentacles are now ready to proceed inside, rapidly filling out the destroyer’s guts. A main railgun slides up like an arriving train as the tentacles withdraw. The skinless vessel is turned and the railgun inserted like a skewer piercing the mouth of a fish. The conglomerate chunks of solid-state lasers are riveted in all around. The loading carousel of the railgun clicks round, as its mechanism is tested, then racking is woven behind it. This is filled with both inert missiles and CTDs—contra-terrene devices—because nothing says “gigadeath” quite so effectively as those flasks of anti-matter. A particle cannon arrives like a gatecrasher and is inserted just before the destroyer is shifted on, two more rising skyscrapers coming up to pin the next bug in this procession.

Next, another lump of hardware arrives: two torpedo-like cylinders linked by optics. These are trailing s-con cables and sprouting brackets and heat vanes like fins, a distortion around them causing weird lensing effects as they’re inserted into the ship. Constructor tentacles bolt them into place and now small maintenance robots unpack themselves, moving in to connect other hardware.

A fusion reactor fires, powering up computers, which in turn run diagnostics that feed back to the constructors. A solid-state laser is removed and sent tumbling away—to be snatched up by scavenger bots crawling across the walls like car-sized brass cockroaches. Then another is inserted. Next come the tubes of dropshafts and large blocky objects, whose only identifiers are the airlocks and shaft connections on their outsides. They are inserted and connected throughout the ship, like a bubble-metal lymphatic system. And it’s time for furnishings, suites, supplies and the other paraphernalia of human existence to be installed inside. Diamond-shaped scales of composite armour begin to arrive, as impact foam expands to fill the remaining inner cavities.

Constructors lay down the heat-patterned ceramal, which they weld and polish to a gleaming mirror finish. Space doors are installed over an empty shuttle bay. Inside a last remaining cavity, two objects like old petrol engine valves part slightly in readiness. The all-important crystal arrives as the final hull plates are being welded in place. It sits inside a shock-absorbing package a yard square, but this prize already hides faults due to hurried manufacture. The crystal is a gleaming chunk two feet long, a foot wide and half that deep—laminated diamond and nano-tubes form its quantum-entangled processing interfaces. Even its microscopic structures possess a complexity which is beyond that of the rest of the ship. A constructor arm like a tumorous snake strips it of its packaging, revealing its gleam through an enclosing grey support frame like a dragon’s claw, and inserts it. Lastly, as the valve ends close down to clamp it in place, the last hull plates are welded shut and polished.

And the fractured mind of a destroyer wakes.

You are the war-mind Clovis, trapped in a mile-wide scale of wreckage falling into the chromosphere of a green sun. In the remaining sealed corridors around you, the humans are charred bones and oily smoke. Your Golem androids have seized up and your escape tube is blocked by the wreckage of a prador second-child kamikaze. When the salvage crab-robot snatches you from the fire you are indifferent, because you accepted the inevitability of oblivion long ago …

You are the assassin drone named Sharp’s Committee, Sharpy for short. Your limbs are all edged weapons honed at the atomic level, your wing cases giant scalpel blades and your sting can punch even through laminar armour to inject any of the large collection of agonizing poisons you have created. You have sliced away the limbs of a prador first-child—one of the adolescents of that vicious race—and it screams and bubbles as nano-machines eat its mind and upload a symphony of data to you. You love your job of creating terror, because it satisfies your utter hatred of your victims …

You are dreadnought AI Vishnu 12, so numbered because that is a name chosen by many of your kind. In the five-mile-long lozenge that is your body, you contain weapons capable of destroying the world below. But you are mathematically precise in their use because of the higher purpose you serve, the knowledge of those aims and your adherence to duty. But the world is now fully occupied by the prador enemy and the fate of the humans trapped below is foregone. Your railguns punch antimatter warheads down into the planet’s core, while you set out to accomplish your next task. So you travel ahead of a growing cloud of white-hot gas, laced with a cooler web of magma …

You are not fully tested and may not even be viable. You are version 707: composed from the parts of wartime survivors. The crystal you reside in has its fault, the quantum processes of your mind cannot, by their nature, be predicted, and time is short. You are newborn from the furnace and about to enter Hell. And in time you will, for reasons others will find obscure, name yourself Penny Royal …

2

SPEAR

The second time I woke was in an amniotic tank, breathing through a tube and with the unmistakable feel of things attached to and penetrating my skull. I opened my eyes to a blur as I felt a metal grid slide up beneath me, hoisting me up and out of the liquid under harsh bright lights. It swung me to one side of the tank, then lowered me down again. Cold metal clamps took hold of my head, but this evoked a recently returned memory which I hadn’t yet examined closely, so I struggled.

“Remain still,” said a calm and slightly prissy voice.

I obeyed but felt the skin crawling on my back, as those cold fingers removed what had to be the modern version of upload optics and neuro-chemical conversion nodes stuck into my skull. My vision cleared in time to see the metal hand of a Golem android retract out of sight. The clamps opened and I immediately sat up, then just as immediately felt sick and dizzy.

“Take it slowly,” said the Golem, turning back to me.

During the war the Golem had been the standard android manufactured in the Polity, and perhaps it still was now. Its ceramal motorized chassis, or skeleton, was usually concealed under syntheflesh and syntheskin—and it ran an AI mind in crystal. This one also looked like Vera from the virtuality where I’d experienced my first waking from … death. She was clad in a monofilament overall and, while I watched, she pulled a syntheskin glove back over her metal hand. She sealed it around her wrist, joining it invisibly to the skin of her arm, then pressed it home in various places, doubtless to reconnect its nerve network. I noted humanizing imperfections I had not seen in the virtuality: a slight asymmetry, an ersatz scar and messy tied-back hair that looked as if it needed a wash. The Golem of my time had always looked utterly perfect and had never quite blended in.

I rolled off the metal grid and stood up, aching from head to foot and feeling very weak. We were in a room that I later learned was the delivery end of mechanized resurrection. I looked around, a strong feeling of déjà vu arising as I watched the grid rise up again on its telescopic poles.

“Where am I?” I asked.

“Chamber R12 in the Krong Tower, London, Earth.”

The name “Krong” nibbled at memory but almost in panic I decided not to pursue it. However, despite the familiarity of this chamber, I just knew I had never been here before, or in any place remotely like it.

“What now?” I asked.

She stabbed a thumb towards a door at the other end of the room. “You can clean up through there, where clothes are provided, along with a wristcom linked to an Earth Central submind. It will tell you everything you need to know. Thereafter … She shrugged. “What you do next is entirely up to you, since you’re a free citizen of the Polity.”

“Really?” I wondered if the AIs had finally understood the workings of a mind like mine, in the past century, and I was to be left alone. It then occurred to me that even if they hadn’t, they’d probably made a copy to examine at their leisure.

“Really,” Vera affirmed.

“Thank you,” I said, but she was already turning towards another tank. It was sliding into place with another of the resurrected moving sluggishly inside.

I trudged out of the room, trying to accept all I’d been told, but deliberately avoiding my most recently returned memories. They felt wrong, disjointed, like the recollection of some nightmarish pub crawl and exhibited a similar cringe factor. I didn’t want to touch them yet because they hurt. Instead, I concentrated on the simply amazing facts of the now. The memplant Sylac had developed had allowed me to circumvent death. I was now in a clone body, whereas, for over a century, I had resided in a chunk of ruby netted with quantum computing. Maybe my corpse had rotted away completely somewhere, or my memplant had been separated from it by whatever incident had killed me—perhaps I’d been shot in the head. Perhaps the implant had been deliberately removed at the point of death. I just didn’t know. Then it had found its way to someone who decided to turn it into jewellery, and I was thankful that person had not decided to cut the jewel. Finally, recently, it had been found and returned to Earth.

Over a century …

How much had changed? I wondered, as I surveyed the room Vera had indicated. Set in one wall were eight tall cupboards, each with a stick-on LCD label showing a name. I stared at it, that familiarity impinging again. But I felt out of kilter because my name on one cabinet, which was completely right, felt absolutely wrong. As I opened it, I tried to dismiss the feeling that I was interfering with someone else’s property. These odd reactions had to be some sort of hangover from the drastic process I had just undergone. Glancing along the cabinets on either side, I also surmised I was just part of the batch being resurrected today, though perhaps the only one from such a distant time.

Inside hung clothing much like the kind I had worn so long ago. I suspected this had been made specifically for me, for I doubted fashions would be the same now. I turned away from this to wander through a door in the other wall, finding the washing facilities while briefly wondering how I had been sure they were there. I took a shower and scrubbed myself until the tank’s clamminess had left my skin, returned to dress, and took up the wristcom.

“Thorvald Spear,” it said as I strapped it on.

“I haven’t noticed any vast changes in technology,” I said, to test the intelligence of the submind speaking through it.

“The development curve flatlined before the war,” it replied indifferently, “rose during the war—mainly for weapons, medical and spaceship tech—and settled to a steady but slow climb afterwards.”