Dark Intelligence (43 page)

“One current theory is that the more of this world’s genetically-modified life forms it eats, the more knowledge of its kin it acquires. It follows that to acquire all the knowledge of its former kind, it must eat everything living on this planet.” Riss gave a snakish shrug. “It is not a theory the AIs subscribe to.”

“Let’s get the hell out of here,” I said, turning away and walking back to our gravcar. Riss followed, saying nothing. I felt a terrible disappointment. From such an unusual, rare and coincidental encounter I’d felt excitement. I’d expected, I don’t know, some sort of revelation? And yet, all I’d found was a creature as wrapped up in its own concerns as any of us, when not trying to maintain a facade of gnomic mystery.

I had to resolve my problems myself; find my own answers. Nothing had really changed for all the solutions still lay with Penny Royal—which I might or might not kill in the process of obtaining them, if it didn’t kill me. Yet, when I reached the gravcar and sat down inside I felt empty. The route back to the space port lay clear in my aug and, intellectually, I planned to head from this world straight back to the Graveyard. There I would search for my nemesis, the black AI. However, as Riss entered and coiled up on the seat beside me I keyed into the maps of this world and ran a search. In less than a second I located the coastal town called Chattering and, as I took the car up into the sky, I studied the town’s map to find Markham’s Exotica.

16

SVERL

“The city will be undefended,” something close by whispered.

Sverl pulled his claws from the pit controls and whirled, bringing them up to rend anything that had entered his sanctum. A black diamond hung in the air, seemingly extruded from elsewhere—the visible portion of a shadow filled with hard sharp edges.

“Defend the city, Sverl, as they run.”

Sverl gazed at this thing, which had to be either some projection from Penny Royal or some extension of the AI through underspace. A thousand questions clamoured in his mind, but each negated the next, to leave him dumb. The diamond, or whatever it was, folded in on itself and disappeared—winking out with a crack at the last.

Defend the city?

Sverl turned back to his controls. “Prepare for rapid descent,” he ordered. “All gunners prepare to open fire on the destroyers and intercept anything from them fired towards the city. I will control our shields.” In the extended AI component of his mind, he system-linked his ship’s remaining hardfields to its weapons. They would now cover gaps, shift out of the way of firing from his gunners and move to intercept anything from the destroyers his gunners couldn’t hit. Then he waited, not quite sure what to expect, but guessing it would be spectacular.

The city’s hardfield began to change shape. His instruments showed him that the underground section had disappeared and now the skirt of the remaining dome was rising, some odd spherical objects seemingly clinging to it. Within a minute, the field straightened into a ten-mile-wide disc above the city. The field was also darker now, with hardly any visible light getting through. It began to shrink rapidly, growing darker still—then a star ignited at its centre. A moment later, the whole thing snapped into a single tight disc half a mile across, ringed by those objects. From this issued a flash that temporarily blinded Sverl’s sensors. When they came back on, a microsecond later, he saw a coherent beam of white light issuing from it—a white laser half a mile thick.

In the smoke-filled air above the city, the beam was visible in both human and prador spectrums. Beyond the Rock Pool’s atmosphere it faded out, but remained visible to other sensors. It struck the moon, which turned to a glaring silver bauble as the beam cut right through it. Plasma and molten rock exploded out of its other side in a two-hundred-mile plume. A few seconds later the moon exploded—three great chunks of rock and rubble flying apart with laceworks of glowing magma. Then all this matter expanded violently in a spherical plasma cloud.

Sverl reacted immediately, diverting power from his shields to fire his fusion engines again. These were now hurling him back down towards the planet and the city, grav-engines set to negative to hurry the process. His dreadnought entered atmosphere in a moment, its hull rapidly heating and leaving a vapour trail. Meanwhile his gunners again opened fire on the two destroyers, which were now eighty miles up from the ocean. The railgun missiles cut red streaks through the air—travelling so fast they were ablating on the way in, their impact power reduced but still considerable as they hit protective hardfields. Returned fire was almost immediate, and Sverl ran his own interceptions as his ship descended to fifty miles, spinning on steering thrusters as it did so. It now had its main drives pointed downwards, decelerating hard. Internal grav took much of the sting out of that deceleration, but Sverl still slammed belly-down against the deck hard enough to wind himself, which wouldn’t have happened if he’d still possessed a carapace.

Nothing more had been fired at the city, because Cvorn and the Five had expected Sverl to go straight after them. They weren’t therefore wasting any energy on that target—yet. The two destroyers continued accelerating upwards, their fire concentrated on Sverl’s ship, while he centred his fire on them. Within just a few minutes the dictum concerning the relative power of dreadnoughts and destroyers began to yield results. All three ships were managing to intercept anything thrown their way but, while Sverl’s shield-energy convertors were managing the load, the two destroyers were beginning to glow. Their armour was turning red-hot as excess heat distributed around its s-con layer, even while they ejected their maximum in the way of HO plasma cooling.

“Time to warm them up a little more,” Sverl clattered contentedly, just before opening up with all seven of his available particle cannons.

By now the destroyers were up out of atmosphere. It must have been obvious to Cvorn that Sverl had placed his ship between them and the city, and was keeping it so positioned. Risking his own destruction, Cvorn diverted a portion of his firing elsewhere—ejecting ten low-speed railgun missiles to travel concentrically round the world away from the main battleground. It had been done subtly, as if the accidental result of a hard-field generator imploding near the railgun concerned. However, Sverl recognized it for what it was, even as his particle beams struck the hard-fields of those other ships: spite.

The two destroyers glowed like stars, but still managed to keep enough power flowing to their engines to continue accelerating away. Their next manoeuvre was risky indeed, but not as dangerous as staying where they were. Distorted copies of the two stars now became visible, strung out in a long line behind their course. These reflections were blurred, as if seen through the edge of polished diamond slate. And, with hardfields still projecting and while under particle cannon attack, they submerged into U-space and disappeared.

All firing from Sverl’s dreadnought abruptly ceased.

“Stay alert,” Sverl instructed.

“Those ten missiles?” said the astute gunner in Quadrant Six.

“Precisely,” Sverl replied.

An hour later the missiles came over the horizon, travelling at twenty thousand miles per hour just a hundred feet above the ground. Sverl opened fire with particle cannons and, upon counting eight targets vaporized, realized Cvorn had been even more tricky. In a flash of insight, he abruptly brought his ship down in a hard descent, landing in a blast of fusion flame. He settled the ship half on the rubble of the space port and half in the ocean. His sensors now penetrating the depths, and working with ultra- and infrasound, he waited. Five hours later diamond patterns fled across his screens once more. Two hours after that, when the cavitating torpedoes left the ocean, he nailed them just twenty feet above the waves. He took them down before they could even fire up their rocket motors to take them in towards Carapace City.

Now, with the danger apparently over, Sverl decided it was time to face his own personal demon. He would, he decided, leave his ship in his personal ground transporter. He would head to Carapace City and confront Penny Royal. However, when he finally almost reluctantly directed his sensors there, to locate the precise position of
The Rose
, that ship was gone.

TRENT

The creaks and groans in the surrounding canyon could be heard in the ship, but Trent could only just detect them over the other sounds inside. He’d woken from a semi-drugged post-operative slumber, to the sound of atomic shears slicing through internal partitions of carbon foam. He next recognized the crackle of laser cutters, the clattering of robots and the stink of everbond glues. When he finally managed to get himself moving, showered, with some coffee down him, he opened his cabin door to find things much changed.

Steps now led down to a grav-plated walkway traversing the length of the ship. The walls and other cabins were missing, their partitions and various other components stacked towards the rear ahead of the engine section. His own cabin was a slightly distorted cube, sitting at the intersection of internal cross-members. Medical still existed in a similar form, though one side of it opened to a wide floor, across which some of its instruments had been affixed. Storerooms and laboratories were now just open floors—their racking, storage and instruments still in place, but more widely spaced. He could see all the way to the bridge, whose rear section had been opened out. Isobel was at the centre of the floor, now occupying the area where her laboratory-cum-workshop had been. Assisted by the Golem, she was doing something with a tube of monomer fabric, and looked like some monstrous insect cocooning its prey.

Trent stepped down onto the walkway, paused for a second, then went back to his cabin. Inside he stripped off his first choice of clothing, then donned an undersuit and space suit and clipped the helmet at his belt. Isobel was obviously redesigning the inside of her ship to suit her new form, which he now knew to be more resistant to vacuum than his own. Removing internal partitions and bulkheads might not have weakened the ship much, but it certainly wouldn’t be healthy for him if there was a hull breach. Newly clad, he headed for the platform Isobel now occupied.

She turned her cowl towards him, slowly, almost distractedly. He surmised he hadn’t come upon her unawares this time, so she’d managed to suppress her first instincts. He knew for sure now that she was fighting not to kill him; that she was trying to retain enough humanity so she wouldn’t instantly regard him as prey. She was, he felt, even more dangerous now than she had been when she attacked Gabriel. She also seemed a lot less balanced and logical. Trent was sure that if she didn’t kill him herself, then she would probably drag him into some situation in which they would both end up dead.

“I considered doing away with grav-plates completely,” she said as she returned her attention to her work, “but even my new self retains its attraction to up and down. Also its health is better under gravity stresses. Surprising, really, considering that it is a form that was modified by the Atheter into a war biomech, so it must have been used in vacuum combat.”

Trent now had some inkling of what she was doing. The tube of material ended in an open spoon shape with shimmershield projectors around its rim. In addition, it had a console inside the rim’s base, with multi-jointed, intricate robot arms extending from that to the outside. There were strengthening ribs throughout, maybe some sort of heating system, along with various power supplies, oxygen packs, weapon ports and other items attached. Running down the length of the thing were rows of holes rimmed with electrical molecular bond seals. Those were where her legs would protrude—demonstration if any of her tolerance of raw vacuum. Isobel was making a space suit to fit her new form.

“Enough now,” she said, abruptly pulling away from her work and relinquishing the suit to the Golem. “We have to get moving.”

“Moving?” he queried.

“It may think it’s managing to sneak away, but that’s not going to happen.”

“Sneak away?” Trent asked, feeling stupid.

Isobel clattered across the floor to him and he repressed the urge to leap aside, just stepping out of her way with apparent calm. She went on past him, an odd spicy smell accompanying her. Perhaps this had something to do with her latest surge of growth, after her heavy meal down in the Rock Pool. She was now over twelve feet long and all those gaps in her carapace had closed up. Her hood was now a yard across and she had sprouted more black tentacles amidst the other steadily growing manipulators there. He hesitated to go after her, but followed after one look at the Golem, who of course always appeared to be grinning.

“You’ve been asleep,” she said, “and you haven’t updated yourself.”

“If you recollect, I did have some problems to overcome,” he replied as he tailed her up the walkway towards the bridge. “And of course I no longer have an aug.”

“The blow-up between the prador has occurred,” she explained perfunctorily. “Three destroyers attacked the dreadnought and one was destroyed. Meanwhile, Penny Royal erected a hardfield barrier around Carapace City. When the dreadnought subsequently ran afoul of a rail-gun emplacement on one of the moons, Penny Royal used the energy from the hardfield to destroy the emplacement. The dreadnought then defended the city from the remaining destroyers until they fled, while Penny Royal sneaked off.”

By now Trent was on the bridge floor, gazing through the screen at the canyon in which the
Moray Firth
currently sat. Black crumbly rock rose to either side, with yellow-gold runnels of molten sulphur flowing down the sides and a stream of the same churning below. Disc-shaped objects like mushroom caps clung here and there to the stone. He didn’t know whether they were living or just some sort of mineral formation. He repressed his immediate urge to utter a brainless “what” and just took the time to absorb what she’d told him.

“That’s an appalling amount of energy,” he said, sitting down in the single seat remaining on the bridge floor.

“Stolen energy,” said Isobel, as a view opened in one corner of the screen’s laminate. It showed a truncated view of the solar system, with a white dot rising from the Rock Pool. “Penny Royal generated a small hardfield anchored to realspace and used an entropic effect to take energy from the real. It absorbed energy from attacks on the field and routed that into U-space, tapping it to expand the hardfield all round the city.”