Dark Intelligence Read online

  DARK

  INTELLIGENCE

  By Neal Asher

  Cowl

  The Technician

  The Owner

  The Departure

  Zero Point

  Jupiter War

  Agent Cormac

  Shadow of the Scorpion

  Gridlinked

  The Line of Polity

  Brass Man

  Polity Agent

  Line War

  Spatterjay

  The Skinner

  The Voyage of the Sable Keech

  Orbus

  Novels of the Polity

  Prador Moon

  Hilldiggers

  Transformation

  Dark Intelligence

  Short-story collections

  Runcible Tales

  The Engineer

  The Gabble

  Novellas

  The Parasite

  Mindgames: Fool’s Mate

  DARK

  INTELLIGENCE

  TRANSFORMATION, BOOK ONE

  NEAL ASHER

  NIGHT SHADE BOOKS

  AN IMPRINT OF START PUBLISHING

  NEW YORK

  Copyright © 2015 by Neal Asher

  First published in the United Kingdom by Tor, an imprint of Pan Macmillan, a division of Macmillan Publishers Limited

  All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced in any manner without the express written consent of the publisher, except in the case of brief excerpts in critical reviews or articles. All inquiries should be addressed to Start Publishing LLC, 375 Hudson Street, 12th Floor, New York, NY 10014.

  Night Shade Books is an imprint of Start Publishing LLC.

  Visit our website at www.start-publihsing.com.

  10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1

  ISBN: 978-1-59780-570-4

  Cover illustration by Jon Sullivan

  Cover design by Claudia Noble

  Printed in the United States of America

  Caroline Asher

  10/7/59—21/1/14

  They say time heals.

  No, it just wears away pain.

  It grinds everything to dust.

  Contents

  Acknowledgements

  1

  2

  3

  4

  5

  6

  7

  8

  9

  10

  11

  12

  13

  14

  15

  16

  17

  18

  19

  20

  ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

  Many thanks to those who have helped bring this novel to your e-reader, smart phone, computer screen and to that old-fashioned mass of wood pulp called a book. At Macmillan these include Julie Crisp, Louise Buckley, Ali Blackburn, Ellie Wood, Jessica Cuthbert-Smith, Sophie Portas, Rob Cox, Neil Lang, James Long and others whose names I simply don’t know. Further thanks go to Jon Sullivan for his eye-catching cover images, Bella Pagan for her copious structural and character notes and Peter Lavery for again wielding his “scary pencil.” And, as always, thank you, Caroline, for putting up with a husband who’s often a number of light years away.

  1

  THORVALD SPEAR

  I woke in crisp white cotton sheets to the sound of skylarks, with the sun beaming through a window somewhere nearby. I gazed up at a lighting panel inset in the pale blue ceiling and smelled comforting lavender with a slight acrid undertone of antiseptic. I could also detect the distant promise of coffee. I felt really good and, after a deep, relaxing breath, sat up to look around. The arched window at one end of the room gave a view of mown lawns scattered with perfect springtime trees. Gentle puffy clouds neatly decorated the sky, with just the stark lines of a single-cargo grav-barge crossing it for contrast. Within the room stood a chair, and side table with a mirror above it. The small touch panel in a bottom corner indicated that it also served as a screen. Next to the bed my clothes lay neatly folded on another wooden chair: including my favourite jeans, ersatz rock-climbing boots and enviro-shirt.

  I whipped the sheet back and got out of bed. Nothing ached, nothing hurt and I felt fit. It then occurred to me to wonder, vaguely, why I might have expected otherwise. I headed over to an open side door into the en-suite, glanced at the toilet but felt no need to use it, then went over to the sink and peered at myself in the cabinet mirror above. No stubble, but then I’d had permanent depilation years ago. I opened the cabinet and took out a small brushbot, inserted it into my mouth and waited while it traversed round my teeth, cleaning them perfectly. Took it out and dropped it into its sanitizer, then went back into my room to dress.

  Vera, as her name-tag declared, arrived just as I was closing the stickseam on my shirt.

  “Oh, you’re awake,” she said, placing a tray on the side table. I walked over, the pungent smells of coffee and toast eliciting something close to euphoria. I picked up the coffee and sipped, finding it as good as it smelled, and studied Vera. She was beautiful, her complexion flawless and the balance of her features perfect. She wore a nurse’s uniform of white and navy blue, a silver crab pendant at her throat, and sensible shoes.

  Crab.

  My mind keyed onto that and I rose to a slightly higher level of consciousness, where I found I wasn’t quite so comfortable.

  “He’ll be waiting for you on the veranda when you’re ready,” she said, then turned to go.

  “Wait,” I said.

  She turned back and gazed at me expectantly, but I couldn’t find the words to express my unease.

  “It’s nothing,” I finished.

  She departed.

  The toast with its butter and marmalade was, like the coffee, the best I’ve ever had. I finished both with relish, then headed for the door. I turned left into a carpeted corridor, then right into a clean decorously appointed sitting room—seemingly translated from centuries in the past. A glass sculpture on a nearby bookcase caught my eye; something insectile squatted there, with hints of light in its depths. It made me as uneasy as that crab pendant and my awareness rose to yet another level. I pushed open paned glass doors and stepped onto a wooden veranda, replaying the moments I had experienced from waking, wondering at their perfection. Then, as I saw the figure sitting at an ornate iron table on the veranda, the confines of my mind began to expand.

  Sylac …

  Of course everything was perfect; too perfect. I had no doubt I was Thorvald Spear and that if I concentrated I could remember much of my past. But it bothered me that my recent past wasn’t clear and that I felt no inclination to remember it. I walked over to Dr Sylac, pulled out one of the heavy chairs and sat down, and studied him for a second. He was dressed in an old-time safari suit, a thin, shaven-headed man with an acerbic twist to his mouth and black eyes. This was completely wrong, because at that moment I had a clear recollection of how he’d looked last time I saw him. The extra cybernetic arm with its surgical tool-head no longer protruded from below his right, human, arm. His skull was now unblemished—not laced with scars and the nubs of data interfaces, all ready to plug into a half-helmet augmentation.

  “Interesting scenario,” I said, waving a hand at our surroundings.

  “I wondered how quickly you would notice,” he replied. “You were always the brightest of my … associates.”

  “All too perfect,” I added, “until now.”

  “Standard resurrection package,” he said dismissively. “They create a virtuality to ease one back into existence with the minimum of trauma.” “So why are you here, then?” I asked.

  “They took me out of storage. A reduction in my sentence was promised if I worked on you.” He shrugged. “It seemed like a good deal—I get to return to corporeal
form and I’ve been moved up the Soulbank queue.”

  “Soulbank queue?”

  “Oh yes, after your time.” Sylac paused for a second then continued, “It’s where the dead are stored, either awaiting their chance of resurrection in a new body or leapfrogging through the ages. Some criminals are kept here too …”

  So Sylac’s dodgy games with human augmentation had finally caught up with him. It quite surprised me that the AIs had bothered to store his mind. Some of the things he had done should have resulted in a permanent death sentence.

  “But it’s noticeable,” he continued, “how you haven’t asked how and why you’re here.”

  I stared at him, first realizing that he was part of the process of easing me back into existence, then understanding that his words were a key made to unlock my memories. The war, I remembered. After many years of working in adaptogenics, nanotech and multiple biological disciplines, I’d formed a partnership with Sylac. This was during the first years of the prador/human war—when humans and our AI overlords discovered we weren’t alone in the universe. And our nearest neighbours were vicious alien killers.

  Upon realizing that Sylac was leading me into experimental and illegal territory, I’d said my goodbyes and joined up. My extensive knowledge and skillset were highly regarded by the AIs, the artificial intelligences running the war. In fact, I’d been very highly regarded by them before the war, as they’d wanted to know how my brain worked. Intelligence was something that could be measured and, in some forms, perfectly copied into artificial minds … up to a point. But for some, IQ ceased to be measurable and genius blurred into madness. They called me a genius, but I didn’t like that. I always felt that what they’d seen in me was just another immeasurable facet of human mentality—will power.

  After both real-time and uploaded combat training, I went into bioweapons and bio-espionage. The AIs tried to keep me away from the front, but I went there anyway. I remembered the desperate fighting, my first encounter with the prador, first attempts at interrogating the creatures and the increasing sophistication of our techniques thereafter. Then things became vague again.

  “Are we still losing?” I asked.

  “The war ended over a century ago,” he replied.

  So, a moment of deliberate shock to shake things free in my mind. Even though I recognized it as such, I still felt panic and confusion.

  “It ended about twenty years after you died,” he added.

  I closed my eyes and tried to recall more, but the detail remained hazy and I just couldn’t nail anything down. This was frustrating because clarity of thought had never been a problem for me before. I tried to figure it out, wondering if whatever had been done to enable me to handle revival shock was also interfering with my thinking.

  “My implant,” I finally realized, opening my eyes. I’d died, and someone with my background couldn’t fail to understand what that meant. Sylac had implanted a certain piece of hardware in my skull, and the “me” who was drawing these conclusions was a recording of my original self.

  “They call them memplants or memcrystals now,” he said conversationally. “Yours was the first of many I developed. I sometimes think they’re why I’m still alive. The AIs must have weighed my research on the scales of life and death, and my augmentations resulted in more lives saved than lost. Or maybe it’s that sticky area concerning the definitions of murder and manslaughter, especially when the supposed victim is a willing participant. The AIs would have us believe that if you kill a sentient being, a true death sentence—the utter erasure of you from existence—is automatic. I know otherwise, because there are many like me in storage. And there are many kept there who have committed murder.” He gazed musingly at the parkland beyond the veranda. “Of course it’s much easier to sentence someone to true death when they’re not useful …”

  We won?” I asked, still trying to get my thoughts in order.

  “Debatable,” he replied. “We were winning, but the prador king was usurped. The new king, apparently not so xenocidal, decided that fighting us was no longer a good idea. They retreated but we didn’t have the resources to go after them and finish the job.”

  “My memplant,” I asked, “where was it found?”

  He glanced at me. “Someone who knew my work recognized it. It was set in a brooch in a jeweller’s window, which was an interesting outcome.” He paused, studying me, then reached out to tap my skull. “It’ll be back in place when they truly resurrect you, as there are difficulties involved in copying that technology across to something more modern.”

  Truly resurrect …

  I filed that away for later and made another attempt to think clearly. The memplant Sylac had fitted inside my skull was a ruby. It was a decent size too, being as long as two joints of my little finger. So it being used for jewellery seemed surreal but made sense, although this particular ruby was rather more than it seemed. The quantum computing lattice interlaced throughout its crystal structure gave it that bit extra that allowed me to live.

  “They couldn’t trace its source beyond the shop in which it was found, though there was speculation that it was picked up by salvagers out in the Graveyard—”

  “Graveyard?” I interrupted, feeling like an idiot.

  “A no-man’s-land between our Polity and the Prador Kingdom.”

  “Ah.”

  “The Polity, that human and AI dominion spanning thousands of star systems, had been shocked out of its complacency upon first encountering the prador. The alien monsters that resembled giant fiddler crabs had been unremittingly hostile and genocidal.

  “Your memplant had been damaged before it was recognized for what it was, and the forensic AI that first studied it only made basic repairs. Otherwise, it could have lost the data it contained.” He lifted his hand from the table and stabbed that bony finger at me again. “That data being you.”

  “So they got some expert advice,” I suggested.

  “Absolutely.” He nodded. “It also seems that they felt,” he sneered at the word, “that you were owed a life for your service during the war.”

  “So what now?” I asked.

  “A body awaits you, tank-grown from a sample of your own DNA, stored by wartime Polity medical.”

  “Then it’s time for me to start my life again.”

  “I envy you, but I don’t envy you trying to incorporate your memories. You don’t have full access at the moment.”

  “What do you mean?”

  “I can tell they’re not clear—as I said, the memplant was damaged, almost certainly by the intrusion of search fibres from a prador spider thrall. Not even the AIs can work out how you died. But they, and I, uncovered enough to know that it’s all very ugly.” He turned to gaze at me again. “You can, if you wish, decide to edit those memories out.”

  My immediate reaction was distaste. They’d started using memory editing during the war and, even though it turned battle-stressed and highly traumatized people back into useful soldiers, I hadn’t liked it. It was a cop-out, reneging on responsibility, going through life with blinkers on.

  “I want all my memories,” I said, which was enough to trigger what had been hidden until now.

  A chaotic montage of horror returned, delivered through a tsunami of fire.

  THE WAR: PANARCHIA

  The reality of the war was scribing itself across the sky of Panarchia in brighter text every night. In the beginning it had competition from the accretion disc of Layden’s Sink, a bright oval lighting up half the sky. Perhaps a century hence this black hole would suck down this whole planetary system. Yet now, even that formed a dull backdrop against which Polity and prador forces tore each other apart.

  “Close your visor, soldier,” said Captain Gideon.

  I touched a control on my combat suit’s helmet, and its visor slid silently closed. I needed the light amplification now, anyway. And, during the night here, given the hostile local wildlife, you maintained suit integrity or you stayed in your tent. G
eneral Berners said the octupals, or the “fucking molluscs” as he described them, were an alien import. Yet it struck me that they had burgeoned very nicely thank you, in an environment supposedly not their own. As Gideon settled beside me, I scanned the emplacements around us, uncomfortable with our exposed position, then dropped my gaze to the sheet of solidified lava beneath our feet. This was dotted with small pools where large gas bubbles had burst and looked like a slice of cherry chocolate cake in the twilight. Already some octupals were crawling from those pools, ready to set off on their nightly hunt for prey and for mates—though sometimes they made little distinction between the two. And already I’d heard swearing from some of Gideon’s troops who, like me, had forgotten to close their visors.

  “You ever seen a real octopus?” asked Gideon.

  “Yes,” I replied, returning my attention to the body of the captured prador first-child—one of the vicious children of our enemy. It was sprawled before me beside the foxhole it had made in the rock here. Its legs, manipulator arms and claws were stacked in a pile a few paces away, behind our big autogun. I now had its carapace open, hinged aside on gristle like the lid of a waste bin. I continued sorting through the offal inside, pulling aside various glutinous items to finally expose its main ganglion, or brain. This sat inside a ring-shaped chalky case. Picking up my surgical hammer, I hit hard, cracking open the case. The first-child hissed and bubbled and I felt the stubs where we had cut off its mandibles knocking pathetically against my leg. Still, even knowing what a creature like this would do to me were it mobile, I hated what I was doing.

  “Where?” asked Gideon.

  “Where what?”

  “Where did you see an octopus?”

  “In an aquarium on Earth.”

  “Never been there,” he said dismissively. “Never wanted to go there.”

  I guessed he was trying to distract himself and, with anyone else, I would have assumed he didn’t want to think too much about what I was doing. However, he and the rest of his men had been fighting the prador for a long time and had ceased to have any squeamishness about bioespionage. When the enemy’s inclination was to both kill and eat you, you tended to toss away any human rules of engagement. I wished I could.