Dark Intelligence (20 page)

Her senses told her he was dead and she couldn’t understand why, until she backed up a little and saw the blood pooled all around. Her insectile legs had hit him so hard they had penetrated, and one had gone through his ribcage and into his heart.

“I knew it. Fucking hell. I knew it.”

She looked round to see Trent at the end of the corridor, gazing at her in horror. Then he drew the gas-system pulse-gun he had taken to carrying all the time. Calculations ran through her brain. She was sure she could get to him before he managed to kill her. She could tell him she’d punished Gabriel for his continued infringement of her rules. However, he might not accept that having your face eaten off was suitable punishment for smoking aboard her ship. But mostly, she just wanted to be alone with her prey. Mostly, she just wanted to finish her meal. Suddenly she moved, manipulators hooking in through Gabriel’s eye sockets, legs engaging with the floor again as she dragged him towards the storeroom. Trent fired, on automatic, pulses of white-hot ionized gas slamming into her. Two punched into her right arm, two more entered her side, then a further two slammed into one of her human legs. But she did not release Gabriel. As she went through the door she used her augmentations to order it shut, and locked.

The pain hit next and she shrieked, but it was no human sound. She lay shivering over Gabriel, something twisting inside her. Looking down at her side, she saw just two sooty marks where he had hit her there. However, her right arm, which had felt on fire, now abruptly went numb. Almost without thinking, she dipped towards that shoulder and began cutting. She sliced a circle around it, probing inside to sever ligaments and tendons so fast it was done before she had a chance to feel horrified. The arm dropped to the floor with a thud, but there was no blood. Nothing bled from the arm or from her shoulder joint which, even as she gazed at it, began to film over with something glassy.

“If you come out of there, Isobel, you’re dead.”

It was Trent, speaking to her through the intercom. Managing to return her thought processes to something approaching humanity, she wondered why he hadn’t tried to pursue her inside. After a moment of consideration she realized the reason was obvious. First, he didn’t want to rush in after something like her; secondly, he knew about the weapons this room contained. Isobel dismissed him from her thoughts. She would leave when she was ready to do so. She might have lost one of her human arms but these manipulators were very precise, and she had so many options. She could find a way to use these weapons, and she was stronger than him, much stronger.

Next, coiling round, Isobel began to cut away her damaged and now numb leg. She decided then she would remove both of them. They were no use to her any more.

SPEAR

Though I disliked the delay, it was necessary for us to make one stopover on our route to Penny Royal’s planetoid. The
Puling Child
—I had yet to think of a new name for the destroyer—was depleted of weapons and I was on the way to confront a very dangerous AI. It is a simple fact that you don’t go hunting a lion with an empty rifle. It was two weeks’ travel to the stopover, and I spent the time sleeping for six hours then working for twenty, stopping only to tend to human needs. My body didn’t require sleep but I did use it to stabilize my thinking, and with everything that had occurred I felt I needed that.

With plenty of robot assistance and plenty of time, I stripped out the cabins, moved walls and built equipment. Near the end of those two weeks, I had one large workshop and laboratory, containing all the facilities I would need. I had rid myself of the refectory and moved the food synthesizer in there. I enlarged the bridge, lined the walls and ceiling with screen fabric and set a single acceleration chair in the middle of the floor, partially surrounded by a horseshoe console. I found this setup less claustrophobic than the previous arrangement and it gave me a better field of view for dealing with Penny Royal—I wanted all the advantages possible. Upon arrival at our first destination I sat in the chair and turned on the screen fabric. This immediately created the illusion that I was now sitting in that chair on a bridge floor open to vacuum.

The sun here was a glaring blue giant of about fifty solar masses. From my perspective, it looked about ten times the size of Sol as seen from the surface of Earth. Here the lack of air wouldn’t have killed me, had I actually been exposed in open vacuum. This close to the star, with it putting out twenty thousand times the luminosity of Sol, I would’ve been turned to ash in a second.

“Do you have a target for our raw materials?” I asked, impatient to get this done and be on the way to Penny Royal’s planetoid.

In response Flute put a cross-hairs scope circle over to the left of the sun and magnified. I suddenly felt I was rushing towards that point and found myself gripping the arms of my chair. A globular red mass drew into view.

“Fifteen tons of nickel-chrome iron,” Flute explained. “The asteroid is highly refined, having out-gased its impurities while being melted every time at its perihelion. It is currently just below melting point, so little energy will be required to form it.”

While I watched, the image grew larger and larger as we drew closer, then it adjusted back as Flute dropped the magnification. I felt the fusion engine fire up briefly to slow us, then steering thrusters kicked in to position us very close to this mass.

“What about the ship’s cooling mechanisms?” I asked.

“Thermal converters are at full operation,” Flute replied. “I will not need to use refrigeration lasers or plasma expulsion for five hours, which should give me enough time to manufacture forty standard railgun missiles.”

I was about to say “proceed” but Flute wasn’t waiting. Already I could see flat spots appearing on either side of the asteroid as Flute clamped it in hardfields. A moment later a third hardfield began peeling off shavings, which it propelled slowly towards the ship in a neat line. These soon began to glow more intensely as Flute hit them with anti-personnel lasers, before rolling them between further hardfields into neat cylinders, their ends snipped off as if by invisible cigar cutters.

I could have sat there watching the railgun missiles being manufactured for hours, but I needed to do something first. This need pushed me out of my seat and had me heading for my laboratory-cum-workshop. The entire setup here was for one purpose. If I was to confront Penny Royal, I needed more than just this ship and a new stock of weapons. I had to have knowledge of the AI, understanding,
intelligence
, and two items I had moved here might provide these.

I’d taken a nanoscope, nanofactor and various other items from Isobel’s ship. From these, I’d fashioned a variety of other devices and installed them here on work surfaces around the walls. I’d set up contained computing and hung more nanobot-woven screen fabric across one wall, and even installed a hologram-projector. I’d rigged a couple of ship’s robots for specialized tasks—one now dangled from the ceiling like a multi-fingered grab and one was mounted on a movable pedestal. The latter was ready for the object presently clamped in a frame on the central table. I walked over and studied it.

The Golem torso still had Penny Royal’s discarded spine through its chest. I stepped back, folding my arms, then auged through to take control of the machines in this room. First I brought over the pedestal robot, which opened out its two larger arms and closed heavy serrated clamps on either side of the Golem’s chest. It then readied its smaller arms on the rails down its front, reaching in to close neoprene-faced clamps about the base of the black spine, avoiding the sharp edges, then it slowly pulled. I metered the amount of resistance in my mind, watching it build then release as with a horrible screech the spine came free.

Releasing its larger serrated clamps, the robot backed up to retract the spine fully and there I paused it, stepping over to examine the thing it held. Again I felt that weird connectedness to this piece of Penny Royal, that odd familiarity. And though I didn’t like the feelings I experienced being this close to the thing, I gave it a thorough visual inspection. The damned thing wasn’t damaged at all. Even the point was still so sharp it was difficult to see where it ended and where air began. I stepped back and ordered the robot to consign it to a glass cylinder in the corner of the room, sealing it in and surrounding it with inert gas. I would have to give it a closer examination in the future, if only to find out what the hell it was made of, but right now my main interest was the Golem.

The pentagonal hole punched through the android’s chest was as neat as if it was part of the thing’s manufacture. The only materials that could cut through such ceramal were high-compression nanofactured diamond tool bits, or the slugs for portable railguns used to penetrate prador armour. Penny Royal must have been very busy with what had been state-of-the-art manufacturing, back when it transformed itself from a ship’s crystal AI to a thing like a giant sea urchin. The smaller exit hole in the Golem’s back had five neat petals of ceramal ringing it. Again, they looked so even that they could have been made by a machine. I stepped back, now summoning the robot hanging from the ceiling; it descended like a nightmare chandelier.

First I ran a scan and, as the results loaded to my aug for my inspection, I experienced a cold sweat. The spine had gone in underneath the Golem’s crystal and merely scored grooves in its lower surface. It had also nicked the s-con cable that supplied power to its servo motors, but that should not have been enough to stop it. I just didn’t know why I was still alive. I glanced over at the spine in its glass cylinder, puzzled, suspicious.

Giving the robot further instructions had it dismantling and removing the remains of one of the Golem’s arms. Afterwards it inserted a thin, ribbed worm of a tentacle which terminated in a small claw and an interface plug. This sought out and found the Golem’s sensory feed inside its chest, disconnecting it. We were nearly there, as it next found the main socket for direct uploads and downloads, plugging in and forging connections for both power and the necessary frequencies of coherent light. Then the moment I’d been waiting for, when everything came alive in there. And, ensuring there was no way the Golem could make its own connection and do something like seizing control of my robots, I lastly connected it up to my hologram projector—its projection point set out over the floor.

The air fizzed as a white cylinder as tall as me was projected in the centre of the room. A rainbow rippled from its top to its bottom, then blinked out. After a moment the rainbow traversed the white cylinder again, but now it carved away its whiteness to reveal a sculpture inside. A man-sized Oscar appeared, seemingly fashioned of liquid mercury. It had reverted to an industry projection used in Golem manufacture. This was worrying, because it meant its android source had no conception of its own physical appearance, so might contain no useful data at all. I watched it for a while but it did nothing further, so I decided to prod.

“Hello Daleen,” I said.

The Oscar opened its eyes and they were midnight black, which certainly wasn’t in the industry handbook. Its arms separated from its body, it raised one leg, then as it tried to throw itself at me the projection broke up. It briefly became a fractured morass, the kind of images seen through a nanoscope during nanofacture. After a moment the cylinder went white again, before again revealing the Oscar. I eyed it while running through data gathered directly from the Golem’s mind. I could find no response to language prompts, which made me think this Golem had been completely wiped. However, if it had been wiped, I could see no reason why it would have tried to kill me. Again taking care not to let anything out, I selected a language package from a file on my aug and sent it to the Golem. The response this time was different. Instead of opening its eyes it opened its mouth and screamed before breaking up again.

Two hours later, after numerous screams and attempts at attacking me, I finally felt I was getting somewhere. It opened its eyes, didn’t immediately attempt an attack, then opened its mouth and licked its lips with a silver tongue.

“Hello Daleen,” I tried again.

It stared at me for about ten seconds, then something appeared in the air down by its waist. I recognized a nanobot type used in heavy gravity manufacture—they were used to build stuff on the surfaces of dead stars. Then this object fragmented and disappeared.

“Not real,” said Daleen the Golem clearly, then closed its mouth.

“Why did you try to kill me?” I asked.

“You … destroyed.”

“Destroyed?” I was puzzled. “I must be destroyed, or I destroyed something?”

Daleen looked at me with an expression I could only style as contempt and the Oscar began to change. It took on the colours of human skin, grew hair from its scalp and formed recognizable features. After a moment a naked man stood before me, which was wrong, because Daleen’s chosen external form had been female. He was the same height as me with well-defined muscles but these weren’t as prominent as someone who had been boosted—more like the physique of a swimmer. The skin tone was pale Asiatic and he had a Roman nose below pale green eyes, above a mouth with a slight twist as if he found something secretly amusing. His brown hair was long and slightly curly with streaks of grey in it. I considered this image for a moment and decided I must run a check on my body’s standard suite of nanobots and retroviral biotech, because my hair shouldn’t have been turning grey like that. The image was, of course, me.

“I presume you’re making some sort of point,” I said, “but I fail to see it.”

“It doesn’t know,” said Daleen, abruptly seeming panicked, then simply froze.

I tried for a further hour to get more responses from the Golem, but it was just refusing to communicate. In the end I shut down the hologram and shifted Daleen’s torso from the central table to one of the worktops. I then instated a direct connection from the Golem to the hologram projector. It would come back on again the moment Daleen did want to talk, if ever. I then went back to the bridge to check on Flute’s progress.