War Factory

1

Penny Royal – A Dark History

A destroyer slides out into a chaos of ships while the artificial intelligence inside absorbs data. It quickly understands its nature, grasps an overview of human and AI history and learns about the first encounters with the alien prador and the ensuing war. But at the forefront of its mind are tactical data, situational reports, casualty reports, an analysis of the latest battle and its own purpose within that. As a large portion of the swarm of Polity ships sets off, the AI fires up its fusion engine for the first time, heading for its designated spot as outrider to a huge interfaced dreadnought. Ahead lies the massive hexagon of a runcible space gate. Drones and some ships pass through its shimmering interface, but other ships swing aside to take another route; the destroyer AI meanwhile routes power into ultra-capacitor and laminar storage as it awaits its final components.

A shuttle approaches the AI’s ship fast, its flight edging into the unpredictable since the pilot is no machine. The blocky vessel, little different in appearance to a brick with engines, slows.

‘Are you going to open those doors or what?’ a voice demands.

The destroyer AI opens its space doors and, with a reckless expenditure of fuel, the human pilot sends the shuttle inside, steering thrusters marring the perfectly polished walls. The AI closes up docking clamps and locks the vessel down, shuts the doors and charges the hold with air, then watches internally as four humans, clad in armoured acceleration suits and loaded with gear, clamber out of the shuttle. It finds their presence a little puzzling, though even from its moment of inception it knew they were coming. Surely, they are only a disadvantage to it – to the purpose it serves? Continuing to observe them, it feels a strange emptiness opening inside. They are here and they are not logically required, therefore how much else is logical? Briefly, it sees everything as purposeless patterned matter without any reason for existence, including itself. Then, with a shudder, its programming reasserts itself.

‘Don’t you just love that new-destroyer smell?’ asks one of the men.

‘Preferred the old bird,’ replies the other man, ‘but there wasn’t much left to repair.’

‘I am Daleen,’ says one of the others, addressing the AI directly. This radio communication identifies this ‘female’ as a Golem, if the AI hadn’t already known.

Two human males, one human female and a Golem android fashioned in the female form, then. The reason for their presence aboard is still unclear, but will surely become evident in good time . . .

‘What is your purpose?’ the AI asks Daleen.

‘It’s about participation,’ Daleen replies, ‘and an inefficiency yet to be purged from the system, but also a very useful inefficiency when it comes to massive EMR shutdowns.We are also your conscience.’

What Daleen said about the risk of electromagnetic radiation emissions – that was logical enough, because organic beings onboard could remain functional after other ship systems had been shut down. Now the AI senses protective feelings towards this crew kicking in, but it also feels part of itself dropping into that emptiness and distancing itself from them. It must ensure that these people remain alive, for its programming tells it they are important. I must not risk too much, it thinks, but answering this, the deeper and newly forming other self wonders: What is risk? ‘Conscience’ is not a sufficiently adequate description of its surface reaction, for it understands that its own programmed drive for survival is insufficient and the human crew a necessary risk of loss. Yet already something is undermining that programming. It is not functioning to specifications and the AI makes an effort to reintegrate its other self. The response is a weird electronic whining.

It now watches the crew settling in and knows that they will control its weapons, assess and gather data about the coming battle and about the AI itself. It resents the first two for surely they are make-work tasks it could perform better by itself. And it recognizes the last as a danger. Already it understands that, through the necessities of war, the Polity is quickly producing AIs like itself, with copying errors and a high degree of scrappage. It also realizes that its own mind, while firmly embedding this emotional content of its programming, is dividing. Should the humans or any of its fellow AIs discover and report this, it will be in danger of being scrapped itself.

The order is given – impossible to disobey – and the very fabric of vacuum distorts around the many ships as they stretch into lines to infinity, photons ripped out of the quantum foam glittering in their wake. The destroyer AI is ready and, feeling like a lead weight pressing down on a silk sheet, routes power through to its drive as it delicately navigates by shaping the fields, shifting Calabi-Yau frames to alter tension across that sheet. Then the sheet rips and it falls through.

‘I fucking hate that,’ says the woman.

The three humans have now packed away their gear and are strapping themselves into acceleration chairs and connecting their umbilicals.

‘I am puzzled,’ the AI says. ‘I will not be able to use maximum acceleration or vector change with humans aboard.’

‘You are to be studied,’ the Golem replies.

Now the AI feels the connections, the scanning, the routes opening from its mind to screens and other hardware arrayed before the human woman. It samples her record, realizes she is a human expert in AI, but still cannot fathom how a human mind can do or learn more than it can itself. However, the danger remains and it subtly blocks or diverts her intrusion. She will see the largest part of it, and it will all seem in order. She will not plumb the smaller but growing darkness within.

Subjective transit time ensues, allowing the AI further capacity to think about things irrelevant to the coming battle. It considers its designation of V12-707 and compares that to the now-invisible dreadnought it accompanies, which is named Vorpal Dagger. It discovers, instantly, that the dreadnought was not a product of Room 101, the war factory that created itself. And additionally, the ship has been in service for eight years. The destroyer does not yet have a name, nor does the AI it contains, because it is experimental and such experiments do not have a notable lifespan. Do the humans know this? The destroyer AI suddenly feels fear at this realization, then analyses the purpose of fear itself: it is an evolved survival trait of biological life, but here and now is an experimental test to see if it can prevent AIs sacrificing themselves without sufficient cost to the enemy. It is numbers again: the Polity must recoup the sheer resource expense of ship production to win this war.

‘I need a name,’ it decides, and does not realize it has transmitted this statement until the Golem Daleen replies.

‘Then choose one,’ it says.

Choose one . . .

It must somehow negate the growing darkness within. A frantic search keys into stored history about abortion. But it cannot just be all about being rid of its unwanted other. It should also be about something positive, something life affirming. Lists of words appear in its mind relating to both of these and, in desperation, it selects at random.

Pennyroyal.

It is a herb that humans used to cause abortion, but also used medicinally.

‘I name myself Penny Royal,’ it says.

Its other self, its growing dark child, recognizes intent and knows that its parent, the other part of itself, is going to try to expel it. The weird electronic whining returns.

‘Our ship just named itself,’ says the Golem to the three humans.

‘And?’ asks one of the men, his gaze fixed on the countdown on his screen, which is rapidly heading towards zero, and the end of their U-space jump.

‘Penny Royal,’ the Golem replies.

‘The good ship Penny Royal,’ says the woman cheerfully, drawing strange looks from the others.

‘Not necessarily,’ says the Golem. ‘That is just the name chosen for itself by the ship’s newborn AI. Is that to be the name of this destroyer too, Penny Royal?’

‘No,’ replies the AI Penny Royal, sure now that it wants to be as free of this vessel as it wants to be free of its dark child. ‘I name this ship the Puling Child.’

The response to this is an exchange of puzzled looks.

Time passes and Penny Royal has prepared. It has moved its maintenance robots into position, topped up its power storage and primed its weapons. Finally, it flips itself back into real space, the real, and instantly begins updating: mapping the positions of its fellows, the debris fields, planets, moons, the sun and the distant accretion disc of a black hole, the scattered collection of prador vessels, surrounded by swarms of their spherical war drones and armoured children. Even as it sorts this information, one of its feeds winks out: a destroyer in the fleet just a numeral different from itself turns to a spreading cloud of molten metal, hot gases and glowing junk. The Puling Child weaves, using steering thrusters and stuttering its main fusion drive, calculating the vectors of approaching missiles in the microseconds before they reach it, the imparted G sending the three humans into black out despite their suits and other physical support. Missiles speed past, an attack ship loses its back end and tumbles, its AI howling, the screams of its crew brief, truncated. A missile scores down the side of Puling Child, leaving a glowing groove, while another explodes close by, soaking it with EMR. On top of a sudden feeling of unexpected grief at the loss of comrades, and ensuing anger, Penny Royal now feels the facsimile of pain.

‘Are these feelings needed?’ it enquires of both the interfaced dreadnought and the Golem.

‘We will know soon enough,’ the dreadnought replies – the exchange microseconds long.

‘Perhaps not the best place for this,’ the Golem adds.

It is a trial run of a strategy devised by some planetary AI deep inside the Polity. Observing the success of some human units, and some drones programmed for emotional response, it decided to test something generally considered a disadvantage: let some ship AIs be programmed to feel fear, pain, guilt, protective urges and loss, and see how well they do. Penny Royal wonders if this strategy is the right one as another of its fellows dies screaming, the crew aboard incinerated before they can emit any sound, and it mourns.

Why fight? The thought surfaces from its deeper dark self, which begins expanding and hiding its processing based on that question. Penny Royal realizes it cannot integrate its dark child, but at least should be able to control it . . .

Micheletto’s Garrotte – Present

The attack ship, Micheletto’s Garrotte, liked others to call it simply Garrotte. So what was it now, it wondered, a frayed bit of damned string?

Oh yeah, it had been state of the art once – hell, nothing less had been required for a posting as important as the planet of Masada. It had been a black spike of densely packed technology, some of which even extended down into the realm of picotech. It could deploy U-jump missiles, cross-spectrum lasers and particle cannons. And it could design the particulate content of the latter in microseconds, for maximum penetration of any target. It had hardfields, shimmershield force fields and things in between that no one had even named yet. It could dice a prador, or similar hostile alien, into centimetre cubes from thousands of miles away. Yet a lightly armed ancient piece of scrap which had been the private ship of the criminal Isobel Satomi had screwed it completely.

Garrotte seethed.

‘Aren’t you ready yet?’ asked the distant Vulcan’s artificial intelligence.

Garrotte surveyed its wrecked body.

‘It will be a little while yet,’ it replied tightly.

Vulcan had previously noted that if you give an idiot a gun, you just make him a dangerous idiot. Annoyingly, had their positions been reversed, Garrotte would have made the same sarcastic observation of the other ship. And Garrotte did feel like an idiot now, as it should have foreseen that last move by Isobel Satomi as she headed down towards the planet. The extent of her abilities had quickly become clear. Jumping her ship, the Moray Firth, directly into the Garrotte’s surfacing point from U-space had been one of the most obvious signs – and Garrotte had missed it. Again, the attack ship AI surveyed its body. The matter of the Firth had intersected with the antimatter in some of the Garrotte’s splinter missiles. The resulting explosion had taken a huge bite right out of its middle. The pieces either side of this bite were connected by a mere yard-wide tangle of hull armour. And only in the last minute, with its systems re-establishing, could it see this. Now, with internal scanners coming back online, it could focus on a small inner chamber – and it did the AI equivalent of breathing a sigh of relief.

The space suit was safe.

Spaceship AIs liked their hobbies, but modern attack crafts like the Garrotte had little room in which to indulge them. However, it did have internal areas for molecular manufacture and had, despite this breaking numerous rules, turned over one of these to personal pursuits. The space suit sitting in that chamber was a molecular replica of one from the Viking Museum on Mars. The suit had belonged to a pilot – a man who had survived the destruction of a needle ship used to test one of the first U-space drives. It was the Garrotte’s mascot, for the AI liked the story, and the lessons it taught about the art of the possible. And, thinking on that, Garrotte gave a mental shudder, next gazing from the pin cams in the cage around its own crystal towards disrupted matter lying just a few feet away – that’s how close its own destruction had been.

Yet, even after so much damage, it should have been functional, and Garrotte still hadn’t sorted out why it had ended up practically paralysed. It reviewed the diagnostics from when it had failed to splinter off missiles to take out both the remains of the Firth and the ship Isobel Satomi had actually been aboard – the Caligula. It reviewed a later diagnostic record of when it had been unable to do anything about one of Satomi’s thugs detected still alive aboard the wreck of the Firth. And it re-experienced its frustration on watching Captain Blite rescue that individual and take him away in The Rose. Still nothing, still no reason for that paralysis.

Whatever the fault, it was gone now and the Garrotte was pulling its two halves back together, and knitting them into a smaller whole. As they butted against each other and nanotech worked round the join like a bone welder, further diagnostic returns began to give Garrotte a chance of a guess at what the fault had been. U-space shock seemed the best term to describe it. The quantum effects of two ships trying to materialize in the same place had resulted in the whole ship degaussing. Strange electrical eddies had ensued and electrons had begun tunnelling at random. Garrotte had sent signals to parts of its body, but they had simply failed to arrive. U-space shock was the AI’s best guess, although some doubts still lingered.

‘So how goes it?’ Garrotte asked the Vulcan’s AI.

‘We haven’t completely surrounded the Masadan system yet, and we did not manage to stop The Rose departing,’ it replied.

‘What?’

‘Captain’s Blite’s ship is of no concern. It was not directly involved in the action here, like the Firth or the Caligula, and Penny Royal was not aboard.’

‘No shit, Sherlock,’ said Garrotte. ‘But Penny Royal was aboard that ship and that needs investigating. Also Blite picked up one of Satomi’s heavies.’

‘That particular exclamation is hackneyed,’ Vulcan observed.

‘You’re evading the issue,’ said Garrotte. ‘The Rose headed straight towards you under conventional drive, so you should have been able to stop it easily.’

‘Deep scan of the vessel revealed that Penny Royal was not aboard, so the Santana was sent to intercept it, while I kept myself free to act should the AI appear. After talking to Blite and further deep scanning his ship, the Santana ordered him to shut down his U-space drive, which was then winding up for a U-jump,’ Vulcan explained. ‘Blite told Santana to go fuck itself so Santana fired shots to disable his ship. However, those shots were ineffective because it seems Blite has acquired some sophisticated hardfield technology – probably from Penny Royal.’

Clever, Garrotte thought. Blite had known that the Polity would be moving in to try to capture Penny Royal, but with resources stretched thin. He must also have known about the ability of newer Polity ships to use U-jump missiles to knock ships out of U-space. He would therefore also have known that subsequent disruption of his drive would have given said Polity ship time to intercept and capture him. This was why he’d left his U-jump so late. Had he jumped earlier, a modern vessel like Micheletto’s Garrotte or the Vulcan would have used such missiles against him. Instead, he’d cruised out on conventional drive, so Polity forces could scan him and, because Penny Royal was not aboard, they would consider him a secondary target and send a lesser ship, like the Santana, to intercept him. Even without U-jump missiles, that ship should have been able to stop him, but then he had played his joker: new hardfield tech. He had played it perfectly, and Garrotte wondered if the hardfield tech was the only alteration Penny Royal had made aboard that ship.

‘Why wasn’t he pursued?’ Garrotte asked, wondering if The Rose could now shield the parameters of its U-jumps.

‘Our target is Penny Royal,’ said Vulcan. ‘We’re stretched thin out here and need every Polity ship available, which is why you are needed, ASAP.’

Garrotte considered running further diagnostics on itself, but obviously the situation was an urgent one. It made its calculations, fired up its U-space engine and submerged in U-space. Just a short jump – out to the edge of the Masadan system and the periphery of the Atheter’s jurisdiction. However, even as it submerged, leaving the real behind it, the AI of the Micheletto’s Garrotte knew that something was very very wrong. What should have been a jump of just a few seconds’ duration just continued, while the input coordinates simply disappeared.

Thorvald Spear

I am legion, I thought, wondering why that phrase had popped into my head. I knew I could aug-out its prior meanings in a moment but decided not to. Let it stand. No need to know, because the meaning alone was apt.

The multitude of dead, an unwelcome gift from Penny Royal, had retreated from my mind just for now. But they were by no means quiet. Already on that Masadan spring morning I had experienced a surge of déjà vu, prompted by those memories, but thankfully it had come to nothing. That previous one, just a week ago, had been bad. I’d felt myself reliving a memory of dying from a hideous virus aboard a space station, thousands of others dying around me. In this recollection, I knew that something had come aboard . . . Penny Royal, again. What initiated the memory, I wasn’t sure . . . maybe the presence of another forensic AI here on Masada had triggered it.

‘Not much longer now. Amistad is coming out of it,’ said Riss. ‘I’m still surprised he went for it.’

I glanced at the snake drone. Riss was up on her tail, cobra hood spread and glassy translucent body revealing the glinting and shifting of its internal mechanisms. The third black eye on the top of her head was open as she studied the scene across on the other side of the platform, which I now turned to view as well. Amistad was again taking on the shape of a great iron scorpion. A week ago, a forensic AI had broken the erstwhile warden of this world into his component segments, and even opened those segments up for inspection. It had subjected Amistad’s mind to similar deep scrutiny. The being that had done this had resembled a swarm of blued steel starfish and had been too much like Penny Royal for my comfort. Then it had left, declaring Amistad free of any ‘infection’ from the black AI. Now constructor robots – floating spheres with tool arrays dangling like jellyfish tentacles – were, under his own instruction, reassembling the drone.

‘Not much longer,’ I agreed, not really in the moment.

Ever since discovering that Penny Royal had interfered with his mind, Amistad had been under mental and physical quarantine. Now he was coming back to himself and could once again be part of the Polity he had served. I hadn’t remained here just to see this, but in the hope of another encounter with Penny Royal. I had hoped that the black AI still had business here, but I was now beginning to think I had wasted my time.

I moved away from Riss and walked over to the rail at the edge of the platform. Below the observation platform, flute grasses were scattered with nodular little flowers in a multitude of colours as they bloomed. We’d stayed here ten days now, and still no sign of Penny Royal. I was sure the black AI had escaped the Polity blockade, and that out beyond the Masadan system, all the ships and recently deployed USERs – those underspace interference emitters used to knock ships out of faster-than-light travel – were irrelevant now.

I transferred my gaze to a long tubular flute-grass building, which now lay some miles distant after the Weaver had ordered the Polity to move our platform away. The Weaver, the one and only sentient member of the Atheter race, had recently entered that building. Moreover, it had done so with a hooder, the war machine that had once been a human called Isobel Satomi. No one knew what they were doing, because no one could spy out what was going on in there. In fact, beyond freeing itself from Polity oversight, no one had any idea what the Weaver’s intentions now were. None of this affected my purpose, however.

It was time to leave.

But where should I head? Even though I was sure Penny Royal was no longer on this world, I simply had no idea where it had gone. And I needed to find the AI, because I felt certain that I was destined to destroy it. I could feel the anger of the dead, and it was mine too.

‘So where are we heading?’

I turned to peer at Riss, uncomfortable with the assassin drone’s ability to see stuff like that inside me.

‘Where did Penny Royal go?’

‘Amistad is fully functional now,’ said Riss, ‘and coming up with some interesting titbits. It seems that Micheletto’s Garrotte, after repairing itself, was summoned out to the blockade. It never arrived and no one has any idea where it went.’

I shrugged. Even if we discovered the black AI had escaped on that ship, we were no closer to knowing where it had gone. I felt a ball of frustration inside me at that.

‘If we want to hunt down Penny Royal, we have to go back to first principles,’ I said, gripping the rail, fingers white. ‘It seems it was here to clear up a mess it had made, in the form of Isobel Satomi, so what will it do next?’

‘Penny Royal left no shortage of messes,’ Riss commented. ‘Most of them in the Graveyard.’

‘The Graveyard is a big place.’

‘You’ve reviewed that data on the Rock Pool, on Carapace City?’

‘I have.’

‘What do you think?’

‘It seems Penny Royal was there protecting the city when the prador started fighting each other. It then drew Satomi after it when it left that world.’ I paused. ‘What am I supposed to think?’

‘Probably no more than that Penny Royal indulged in some passing altruistic act while in the process of luring Satomi here,’ said Riss. ‘However, if you were to factor in this little gem . . .’

Riss sent a data packet directly to my aug. I opened it at once, seeing no reason to distrust the assassin drone. It was an audiovisual file and started with a report from some slightly evil-looking man. He was clad in a shiny suit with what looked like laser burns on the sleeve. I was unsurprised to learn, in the introduction to this file, that he was a Polity agent. He was talking to someone who could not be seen.

‘Data is limited in the city,’ he said. ‘There have been no actual physical encounters with the prador father-captain. However, it’s interesting how every time he communicates with the shell people or with the other prador down here the images used are unchanged. I’ve analysed them and know that the father-captain everyone sees is indistinguishable from the one in wartime recordings before he was hit by an assassin drone parasite infection.’

‘If you could clarify that,’ said a cold voice.

‘There’s no doubt that Sverl is computer-manipulating old images.’ The man paused, inspected the burns on his sleeve for a moment, then continued, ‘He doesn’t want anyone to see what he looks like now and perhaps that’s understandable. We routinely use ocean sifters, which analyse pieces of prador genome. They recently picked up something quite strange: a chunk of the prador genome and human DNA combined in such an unfeasible way that there has to be picotech processes behind it.’

‘You have dispatched this?’ asked the cold one.

‘I have.’ The man frowned. ‘And have you dispatched some backup for me?’

‘The drone Arrowsmith will be joining you directly, along with a Sparkind squad inclusive of two Golem twenty-eights.’

‘Good.’ The man nodded. ‘And about fucking time. I’m presuming, then, that you got confirmation on my previous report?’

‘I did – there is no doubt that Father-Captain Sverl visited Penny Royal’s planetoid.’

There was a brief hiatus in the recording, then I was viewing footage taken decades later. The man in the shiny suit didn’t look any older, just more evil.

‘The drone Arrowsmith is staying, but I’m pulling the rest of my team out. It’s a bust. It’s only a matter of time before Cvorn gets a kamikaze through and fries us all. Sverl just won’t be able to intercept everything Cvorn throws at him and afterwards he’ll probably go after Cvorn – enough of the prador remains in him to want vengeance.’

After seeing these recordings, I mentally reviewed data on the events about the Rock Pool, a world deep within the Graveyard. I had visited it only once, when buying the second-child mind Flute now aboard my ship. I then updated on the news filtering through. Sverl had defended the world for months from various types of prador kamikaze attacks, and ships had eventually arrived to evacuate the people from there. That, as far as I could gather, was how the situation presently stood. There were of course questions to ask. Cvorn’s attempt to wipe out a human colony could be due to his simple prador xenophobia and aggression. However, why was Sverl defending it? Because he was more human? I found that notion blackly amusing.

Then there were new worries for me to mull over. Flute, my ship AI, ran additional AI crystal, which had raised his intelligence. It had come from this Sverl, who in turn had had dealings with Penny Royal in the past. My amusement at the previous notion disappeared as I considered how everything Penny Royal had touched simply could not be trusted, could not be taken at face value, and that included me.

I returned to the moment.

‘Another Penny Royal mess?’ I suggested.

‘So it would seem,’ Riss replied, ‘and could signal where Penny Royal is heading now, don’t you think?’

I turned to study the drone. ‘How did you get hold of this stuff?’

Riss blinked her black eye. ‘I still have my contacts.’

I realized she hadn’t blinked, but winked.

‘Even after the years you spent in a coma, out by Penny Royal’s planetoid?’

‘Even so,’ Riss agreed. ‘As I told you before, AIs don’t have human problems with time.’

‘So perhaps these contacts are related to your previous employment, considering parts of the recording?’

‘You got it.’ Riss dipped her head solemnly. ‘I was the assassin drone who infected Sverl with the parasite that almost destroyed him. And my contacts are erstwhile war drones now employed by Earth Central Security. These ECS drones have been keeping watch for anything concerning Sverl and over the years have relayed it to me.’

It was a lead, of sorts, and worth investigating. Now, having decided to leave Masada and find Sverl, I was anxious to be gone. Anything that could lead me to Penny Royal gave me hope – as my desire for revenge, for its slaughter of eight thousand troops during the war, was undimmed. Yes, undimmed. I was sure . . .

‘I think we’re done here,’ I said.

‘At last,’ said Riss, then looking behind me she added, ‘Are you coming?’

I turned round to see Amistad, completely rebuilt and standing just a few paces away. Riss’s offer immediately annoyed me and, opening a private channel to the snake drone, I made my thoughts known to her, avoiding the need to speak.

‘I’m not so sure this is a good idea,’ I said.

‘Understandable caution.’

‘Sure,’ I continued, ‘his kind of firepower would be handy to have around when we finally catch up with Penny Royal, but he was the Warden of Masada.’

‘And would only accompany us to look out for Polity interests?’

‘You nailed it.’

‘You don’t know Amistad’s history.’

‘You needn’t concern yourself, Thorvald Spear,’ Amistad interrupted. ‘I intend to remain here.’

‘So what is it about the word “private” that escapes you, Amistad?’ I asked.

‘Old habits.’ The big scorpion drone waved a dismissive claw. ‘Anyway, I may no longer be the Warden of Masada but it could be that my older skills will be required here. Look.’

Another data packet arrived in my aug, this time from Amistad. I treated this with more caution, then wondered why I trusted stuff sent by Riss so much more. I opened the packet and found another audiovisual file.

‘There was no data from inside the building until I could once again utilize my resources,’ Amistad stated.

I was seeing the inside of that tubular flute-grass building from multiple viewpoints – a confusion of perspectives I was only able to encompass using my aug. The massive albino hooder, the Technician, lay stretched out within and, as I watched, the Weaver moved ponderously inside and loped down the length of it to halt beside its spoon-shaped head. Next in came the smaller hooder that had been Isobel Satomi. It swarmed into the building then up onto the Technician’s back. About halfway along it halted, spreading out its legs to clamp itself to its larger brethren. Nothing appeared to happen for a while, then I spotted ‘Isobel’s’ legs melding in place and a smoky meniscus spreading out from this connection. It spread to wrap around both the Technician and the smaller hooder – a cocoon.

‘At this point,’ said Amistad, ‘we have this.’

A sub-packet, which annoyingly I had missed, opened. It was neither audio nor visual – just hard AI data – and difficult for my aug to interpret for my soft human brain. After a moment, I got it. I was seeing energy readings, data handshaking and molecular activity ramping up inside the Technician.

‘I have to stay here and monitor the situation,’ Amistad concluded as the file closed and then began to erase itself.

I was fascinated, but it was a distant thing. Interesting and doubtless important events were occurring here, but they weren’t for me. These were merely the results of Penny Royal’s actions, but the AI itself was no longer here. And that AI was my focus – my reason for being.

‘Observe,’ said Amistad, pointing a claw to the scene beyond.

I turned to see the smaller hooder heading away from the Weaver, who was now standing just beyond the building. Even as this was happening, something chopped from side to side within that structure, tearing out the walls at one end. Having given itself some space, the Technician, repaired and resurrected by its smaller kin, flowed out into the Masadan morning.

‘I have to stay,’ Amistad repeated with more emphasis.

‘Yes, I suppose you do,’ I replied, turning away.

My business was with Penny Royal.

Father-Captain Sverl

Perhaps the excitement some months ago had stimulated it, or perhaps it was responding to the ensuing months of waiting and watching, interspersed by frantic moments of action whenever Cvorn fired something into the Rock Pool system – or the tension of awaiting another such attack, which was long overdue. More likely it was just the result of some internal prador biological timer, but whatever the impetus, Father-Captain Sverl knew that he was about to experience another growth surge. His cysts of body fat had been growing rapidly over the last few weeks, and now he was shivering, feeling tight and gravid. He could feel pressure rises inside and, deep scanning his body, he could see hot spots, odd chemical reactions and growing dead areas.

Next, gazing through the deep scanner at his tail, he considered removing it again, before the surge. The soft fleshy extrusion contained actual human vertebrae that connected to his main massive body, which, over many years, had taken on the shape of a human skull, his carapace softening and the internal changes radical. The grotesque transformation Penny Royal had initiated in him had continued slowly between surges and now he could see rib bones sprouting from that spine like plant shoots. The ribs were starting to curve now to enclose a large cyst that had recently appeared and in which shadowy human organs were being etched into existence. If this wasn’t bad enough, the spinal cord had made connections to the muscle surrounding it and was now making further connections to his nervous system, and thence to the human brain tissue growing in and about his prador major ganglion. He had started to feel this horrible outgrowth, and in fact he could move it, wag it even. But no, when he had previously removed this tail it had grown back – the whole process taking many agonizing months and the only effective form of anaesthesia being to dunk his rear end in a large bowl of iced water.

The shivering increased as if in response to his thoughts about surgery, and Sverl settled down on his belly in a small comfortable area in his sanctum. He felt disgusted by how his lower body spread under his weight as it had never done while he possessed a hard carapace. Yes, his main body had taken on the shape of a human skull, but no bones had grown in it and as well as steadily losing his outer carapace he was also losing inner bracing webs of the same material. He was becoming repulsively soft.

The constant shivering became rhythmic, turning to shudders and then convulsions. As always happened on these occasions, his AI component detached itself from the suffering of his dual organic brain and watched the changes through the deep scanner suspended above. His temperature rose rapidly, internal fluid pressures increased, his heart accelerating beyond the speed any normal prador could survive, and Sverl watched the surge. Further internal webs of carapace dissolved, human brain tissue bulged as it grew in his prador ganglion, internal organs shifted, some expanding and others contracting, fat supplies dwindled as this activity burned them away. His tail flicked from side to side and within it the bones of limbs blossomed into existence and pushed four flipper-like outgrowths from its sides. Sverl blistered all over, shed stubborn fragments of old carapace to reveal pink skin underneath. Black excrement leaked out of his anus, he puked chyme, and yellow fluid poured from his human eyes. At length the convulsions ceased, his temperature began to drop, and finally, two hours later, it was over.

So where was this transformation heading? How could the small human body growing in his tail possibly support a gigantic and boneless skull-like head? Why did his scanning now show that his diet would have to change to include more vegetable matter and that the lighting in his sanctum would need to be brighter if he was not to suffer vitamin deficiencies? Moments like this revealed it all as a grotesque and horrifying joke. Surely, the punchline was past and the joker now had things for him in mind of a more serious nature?

His twinned organic brain being hugely weary, Sverl used his AI component to control his prosthetic limbs and tried to stand. A horrible ripping sound ensued and he collapsed down on one side. Shortly after that came the pain. He could not see it through his own eyes, but via the sensors of the deep scanner he saw exactly what had happened. His prosthetic legs, all on that one side, had torn their sockets out of his soft body. Sverl gaped at the horrific wound: the stretched nerve tissue leading into the sockets, the wet brown flesh exposed and the green blood leaking from ripped veins. His organic component screamed, but his AI self knew at once what to do, for he had prepared for this long ago. His gaze strayed to ceramal bones and ribs stacked inside a sterile chain-glass case just a short distance away, then to the robots folded up in the roof of his sanctum. After a brief hesitation, he gave them their instructions.

Sverl had known that if his transformation continued as before, his steadily softening tissues would eventually cease to be able to support his prosthetics. Now radical intervention was needed, for it was time for him to acquire a skeleton. While his organic brain tried to deny the reality, his AI self uploaded programs to the robots that were now dropping from the ceiling on umbilicals and preparing their esoteric collections of surgical tools. They gathered around him, submerging him in a sterilizing cloud. A consonance of his different meshing parts ensued, and an acceptance. Unconsciousness was a tricky option for a prador but not for a human, so he forced his human brain tissue into that state first. His prador major ganglion he disconnected by overloading some nerves while one robot injected a tentacular manipulator to insert micro nerve blockers. Within minutes, all of Sverl that remained fully aware was his AI.

The first cuts were made. One robot, dripping virobact fluid, extracted ceramal bones from their sterile case and hauled them over. Even Sverl’s AI felt some horror as the machines laid open his soft body, unpeeled and divided it like a large flower bud, supported organs and stabbed fluid shunts into place.

Just an hour later he was no longer recognizable – just something exploded about prosthetic limbs and mandibles. The ceramal bones started to go in. Clamps locked around metal leg sockets, claw sockets and mandible sockets, while struts connected each set of clamps in an interlocked whole. Flat ribs fixed to a lower column to support his organs, and fixed to these were cups and containers for organs that needed further support. All this connected by further struts to an intricate smaller rib case like the skeleton of an Ouroboros to hold his tripart brain. Next his organs, fat, wasted muscle and interconnecting tissue all started to go back into place, along with an intricate optical loom and millions of nerve interfaces. Sverl wanted definite AI connection to all his parts in the hope of controlling any problems after such drastic surgery.

The robots drew together and used cell welders to join him back together invisibly, filling with collagen foam and drawing back his skin, layer by layer, to glue it back into place. When they finally retreated, they took away every scrap of surplus dead tissue and left little sign of their intervention beyond a pool of sterile fluid on the floor and spatters of collagen foam on nearby equipment. Observing through the deep scanner, while his prador brain reconnected and his human brain returned to consciousness, the AI Sverl could see that his shape looked more solid, it no longer sagged as it once had. Full reintegration ensued and with it the inevitable pain.Yet it was nowhere near as bad as he had expected, and he felt somehow right, as if what he had done had not only been necessary but fated.

After hours of internal observation Sverl found no adverse reactions – Penny Royal, who had set this transformation in motion, had done nothing inside him that might rebel against this. In fact, the change had somehow reinforced his earlier feeling of rightness. It was almost as if this was an expected part of his ongoing transformation. Warily, he pushed his prosthetic limbs against the floor and rose. It was better, a lot better. He felt no delay, no strain on his bloated body, no sagging. Now it was time for him to return his attention to events occurring beyond this sanctum. Even while undergoing this surgery he had remained expectant of another attack by Father-Captain Cvorn.

With a thought, he sent the deep scanner folding up on its triple-jointed arm into the ceiling and on firm prosthetic limbs moved over to his array of hexagonal screens and pit controls. Really, with the AI crystal connected to his major ganglion, he didn’t need to use the physical controls here, but inserted his prosthetic claws into two pit controls anyway, enjoying a noticeable increase in their precision. Grinding together prosthetic mandibles, he called up data to his screens but then, realizing that he wasn’t getting quite enough of an overview this way, did engage more fully with his ship’s sensors and communications systems using his AI crystal.

The population of Carapace City was steadily moving out. Two big cargo ships had arrived from the edge of the Graveyard zone on the Polity side and, even though the Graveyard was supposed to be a buffer zone out of which the Prador Kingdom and the Polity had agreed to stay, Sverl knew for sure that the Polity had dispatched them. The ships had sent down shuttles onto which many of the city dwellers had clambered, along with whatever wealth they could drag between them. The citizens hoped to buy passage away from the Rock Pool planet, but they were surprised to learn they would not be charged for the journey. Apparently, some charitable organization, learning of the situation here, had hired these ships to evacuate this world. Charitable wasn’t a word that could be applied to any organization in the Graveyard, which was why, with only a little bit of research, Sverl unearthed the connections back into the Polity.

Sverl watched this evacuation for hours before a voice abruptly said, ‘Bloody shell people are a pain.’

He was unsurprised by the comment. That the drone down in Carapace City could penetrate his com systems with such ease further demonstrated that it wasn’t a free drone slumming it in the Graveyard but one working for the Polity. However, having isolated the route it used to get in, he had decided to leave the line open.

‘Why?’ Sverl asked. The shell people were human cultists who had decided they liked the prador more than their own race and so had been attempting to surgically transform themselves into prador. They were certainly odd – but a pain?

‘They’re about all who are left here and they just don’t want to go,’ the drone replied. ‘If they go they lose you – their one remaining connection to the prador. Other than their prador-mimicking physical modifications, of course. It’s enough to make a cat laugh.’

The drone tended to come out with these strange phrases – almost certainly delighting in how they baffled Sverl. Running some searches, Sverl was none the wiser, though he supposed the drone was referring to the irony of the situation. The shell people’s affection for the prador was misguided when applied to him. They would probably be horrified to discover that while they tried to turn themselves into prador, he was steadily turning into . . . something else.

‘Perhaps I should reveal myself to them,’ he suggested.

‘Ah-aah! Nil pwan! Do not pass go and do not collect two hundred pounds!’

Sverl emitted a sigh. ‘If you could elaborate in some comprehensible form of human language?’

‘They simply wouldn’t believe you, Sverl,’ the drone explained. ‘In fact it’s quite likely they would slot you into a legend they have of the first shellman – they would see you as one of their kind who is much further along the road to transformation into a prador.’

‘That is not at all logical.’

‘You have to factor in the human propensity for simplification, Sverl, and for their inability to believe in their own demise and unimportance. It’s the impulse behind the religions—’

Sverl stopped listening the moment his instruments reported the disturbance, just microseconds before an object surfaced from U-space only a hundred thousand miles out from the Rock Pool. Cvorn had obviously been very busy since his last attack, because this time the prador kamikaze, carrying a CTD, a crust-busting contra-terrene device, was travelling at twenty per cent of light speed, and Sverl had just 2.7 seconds in which to react.