Infinity Engine Read online

  Copyright © 2017 by Neal Asher

  First Night Shade Books edition published 2017

  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

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  Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

  Names: Asher, Neal L., 1961- author.

  Title: Infinity engine / Neal Asher.

  Description: New York: Night Shade Books, [2017] | Series: Transformation; book 3

  Identifiers: LCCN 2016039322 | ISBN 9781597808897 (hardback)

  Subjects: | BISAC: FICTION / Science Fiction / Space Opera. | FICTION /

  Science Fiction / Military. | FICTION / Science Fiction / Adventure. |

  GSAFD: Science fiction.

  Classification: LCC PR6101.S54 I54 2017 | DDC 823/.92—dc23

  LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2016039322

  ISBN: 978-1-59780-889-7

  Cover artwork by Adam Burn

  Cover design by Claudia Noble

  Printed in the United States of America

  Table of Contents

  Title Page

  Original Music

  ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

  Cast of Characters

  Glossary

  1

  2

  3

  4

  5

  6

  7

  8

  9

  10

  11

  12

  13

  14

  15

  16

  17

  18

  19

  20

  Epilogue

  Original Music

  Composer Steve Buick has created an album of original music inspired by Infinity Engine. This background music has been designed to enhance the reading experience, to be enjoyed while reading the book itself. Using long, deeply dark soundscape layers—to complement the story’s atmosphere—he aims to add another dimension of reading without distracting from the action. The music can accompany any section of the book and is available from Amazon, iTunes and other digital music stores worldwide. Find out more at www.evokescape.com.

  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, including Adam Burn for his eye-catching cover image, Bella Pagan for her copious structural and character notes and Bruno Vincent for further editing.

  Cast of Characters

  PENNY ROYAL (THE BLACK AI)

  An artificial intelligence constructed in Factory Station Room 101, during the Polity war against the prador. Its crystal mind was faulty, burdened with emotions it could not encompass when it was hurled into the heat of battle. Running the destroyer that it named Puling Child, it fought and survived, then annihilated eight thousand troops on its own side before going AWOL. It changed into something dark then—a swarm robot whose integrated form was like a giant sea urchin. Blacklisted by the Polity for ensuing atrocities, it based itself in the Graveyard—a borderland created between the Polity and the Prador Kingdom after the war. There it continued its evil games, offering transformations for the right price, but ones that were never entirely beneficial for the recipients. It was nearly destroyed in a deal that went wrong. Later restored to function by the scorpion war drone Amistad, it apparently became a good AI. . . . Now the black AI is moving into its endgame, its plans still obscure and its actions paradigm-changing. And still no one knows if its intent is evil.

  THORVALD SPEAR

  Resurrected from a recording of his own mind, a hundred years after the war, he is the only survivor of the eight thousand troops slaughtered by Penny Royal on the planet Panarchia. He resolved to have his revenge on the AI and to that end sought out its old destroyer, whose location he had learned of during the war. Taking command of it, he set out in search of the rogue AI. During this search he discovered that his very desire for vengeance had been created by Penny Royal, for it had tampered with his memories. Nevertheless his quest is reinforced by an artefact he found aboard the destroyer—one of Penny Royal’s spines. It has downloaded memories of its victims into his mind. He did believe himself the instrument the AI created for its own destruction, but now is not sure what to believe at all, other than that he must see this through to its end.

  RISS

  An assassin drone and terror weapon. Made in Room 101 in the shape of a prador parasite which has a passing resemblance to a cobra, her purpose was to inject prador with parasite eggs, spreading infection and terror amidst them. The end of the war meant she lost her purpose for being and, while searching for a new purpose, lost even more when she encountered Penny Royal. Thorvald Spear found her somnolent and bereft near the AI’s home base in the Graveyard. Accompanying him during his quest for vengeance, she was finally manipulated into killing the prador Sverl.

  SVERL

  A prador who disagreed with the new king’s decision to make peace with the Polity. He went renegade and hid out with other prador of similar mind in the Graveyard. He could not understand how it was possible that the prador had started to lose against weak humans and their detestable AIs. He sought understanding of this conundrum from Penny Royal, but got more than he bargained for. Penny Royal initiated his transformation into a grotesque amalgam of prador, human and AI, so he could better understand each. While seeking some resolution to his situation, Sverl was led by Penny Royal to an ancient Polity war factory. There he thought the AI had some task for him, but he was killed by the assassin drone Riss.

  CAPTAIN BLITE

  A trader whose business edges into illegality. During a deal that turned sour he encountered Penny Royal, who killed his crew. His second encounter with the AI was when it used him and his ship as an escape from the world of Masada. With his ship under the control of the black AI, Blite has witnessed its obscure business in the Graveyard and elsewhere and come to realize that it may be correcting past wrongs. After recognizing this, he and his crew were abandoned again on Masada, but the advanced technology left aboard their ship (not to mention their first-hand knowledge of Penny Royal) meant they were of great interest to the Polity AIs. Blite escaped the Polity and continued to pursue Penny Royal. Once again he is dragged into its obscure manipulations . . .

  SFOLK

  A prador first-child. He and his brothers came under the mental control of Father-Captain Cvorn. Sfolk alone managed to free himself from control and afterwards killed Cvorn but as he was escaping in Cvorn’s ship it was badly damaged by other prador ships before entering U-space.

  SEPIA

  A catadapt woman—one with some of the characteristics of a cat. Along with the shell people and other refugees, she was rescued from certain death on the
world Rock Pool by Father-Captain Sverl. With Trent she escaped the gruesome end that Taiken, the leader of the shell people, had in mind for them.

  THE BROCKLE

  A powerful artificial intelligence—a swarm robot consisting of numerous worm-like units that it can pull together into human form. It worked for Earth Central Security in black ops but went too far during one mission and many people were killed. Such was its nature that it would have been difficult for ECS to capture and prosecute it. Instead it “agreed” to confinement aboard a spaceship, the Tyburn, where it acted as an interrogator for ECS. It broke the agreement to go after Penny Royal, which it considers to be a threat ECS is not taking seriously enough.

  AMISTAD

  A war drone (robot) in the form of a giant metal scorpion. At the end of the war he went crazy then AWOL, pursuing a fanatical new interest in madness. It was he who found Penny Royal after that AI had been all but destroyed by an alien device, and resurrected it. Amistad subsequently became warden of Masada with Penny Royal as his closely watched assistant, until the AI hijacked Captain Blite’s ship and escaped.

  THE WEAVER

  The only living member of the Atheter race. The Atheter sacrificed their minds in a kind of racial suicide, leaving only their nonsense-speaking descendants the gabbleducks—creatures like a semi-insectile by-blow of a platypus and Buddha. The Weaver was one of these until it had a surviving mind of one of the Atheter loaded to it. Under Polity law it then became ruler of its home world, Masada.

  TRENT SOBEL

  Killer for hire who worked for the crime lord Isobel Satomi. He survived Satomi’s fall and was given a conscience and empathy by Penny Royal. He has no idea why, but is learning to deal with these attributes.

  GREER

  One of Captain Blite’s loyal crewmembers.

  FLUTE

  At first the frozen mind of a prador child used as the navigational mind of Spear’s ship the Lance, Flute loaded to crystal and became an AI.

  Glossary

  Atheter—One of the millions of long-dead races, recently revived. It was discovered that the gabbleducks of the planet Masada were the devolved descendants of the Atheter. This race chose to sacrifice its civilization and intelligence to escape the millennia of wars resulting from its discovery of Jain technology.

  augmented—To be “augmented” is to have taken advantage of one or more of the many available cybernetic devices, mechanical additions and, distinctly, cerebral augmentations. In the last case we have, of course, the ubiquitous “aug” and such backformations as “auged,” “auging in,” and the execrable “all auged up.” But it does not stop there: the word “aug” has now become confused with auger and augur—which is understandable considering the way an aug connects and the information that then becomes available. So now you can “auger” information from the AI net, and a prediction made by an aug prognostic subprogram can be called an augury.

  —From Quince Guide, compiled by humans.

  first- and second-children—Prador offspring chemically maintained in adolescence.

  Golem—Androids produced by a company Cybercorp—a ceramal chassis usually enclosed in a syntheflesh and syntheskin outer layer. These humanoid robots are very tough, fast and, since they possess AI, very smart.

  Haiman—An amalgam of human and AI.

  hooder—A creature like a giant centipede of the planet Masada. It was discovered that they were the devolved descendants of biomech war machines created by the Atheter throughout their millennia of civil wars.

  Jain technology—A technology spanning all scientific disciplines. Created by one of the dead races—the Jain—its sum purpose is to spread through civilizations and annihilate them.

  nascuff—A device that can externally adjust a person’s nanosuite to their sexual inclination. It is mainly worn to advertise sexual availability or otherwise. When the libido of the one wearing it is shut down the cuff is red. When they are sexually active it is blue.

  Polity—A human/AI dominion extending across many star systems, occupying a spherical space spanning the thickness of the galaxy and centred on Earth. It is ruled over by the AIs who took control of human affairs in what has been called, because of its very low casualty rate, the Quiet War. The top AI is called Earth Central and resides in a building on the shore of Lake Geneva, while planetary AIs, lower down in the hierarchy, rule over other worlds. The Polity is a highly technical civilization but its weakness was its reliance on travel by “runcible”—instantaneous matter transmission gates. This weakness was exploited by the prador.

  prador—A highly xenophobic race of giant crablike aliens ruled by a king and his family. Hostility is implicit in their biology and, upon encountering the Polity, they immediately attacked it. Their advantage in this war was that they did not use runcibles (such devices needed the intelligence of AIs to control them and the prador are also hostile to any form of artificial intelligence) and as a result had developed their spaceship technology, and the metallurgy involved, beyond that of the Polity. They attacked with near-indestructible ships, but in the end the humans and AIs adapted and in their war factories out-manufactured the prador and began to win. They did not complete the victory, however, because the old king was usurped and the new king made an uneasy peace with the Polity.

  shell people—a group of cultist humans whose admiration of the prador was such that they tried to alter themselves surgically to become prador.

  Caroline Asher

  10/7/59–24/1/14

  Time trammels memory and healing is the formation of scar tissue, which never quite fills the hole.

  1

  Haiman Crowther

  Haiman Isembard Crowther relished the solitude of the Well Head, though of course with Owl here he was never quite as alone as he would have liked. The Well Head space station, a cylinder a mile long, hung poised at an angle over the boiling and seemingly infinite sea of the accretion disc around the Layden’s Sink black hole. Its structure was the toughest going, reinforced by the output of grav-engines so the tidal forces would not tear it apart, as they had the worlds and suns whose matter made up the disc. Scaled armour of hardfields at the nose intercepted anything material that might be thrown its way, while further Buzzard magnetic fields simultaneously bent lethal EMR round it and fed upon that radiation. The station sat in perfect balance: drawing energy from its environment and only occasionally having to resort to the output of its array of gigawatt fusion reactors.

  Crowther, his thin form occupying an interface sphere inset halfway along the body of the station, observed data flows and physical phenomena via the multitude of sensors to which the sphere connected, and processed that data in his numerous augmentations. This was his job: studying and analysing this unique black hole. He wasn’t the only one watching. Owl, who had once been a spy drone during the prador/human war and had since seriously upgraded his capabilities, squatted on the skin of the station and could sense just about every known phenomenon in local and non-local space. The drone observed with a depth of perception that Crowther envied. Machine envy, some called it—the force driving human beings to become haiman and, maybe some time in the near future, something more.

  Crowther ran his thin fingers through his mop of blond hair then relaxed and focused on the data now coming in through the Hawking dish. Given the opportunity—that was, pure vacuum and a lot less in the way of matter being dumped into them—black holes evaporated. It might take billions of years, what with the slow trickle of Hawking radiation from them, but eventually they dried up and winked out. This was supposedly the only possible realspace output of such cosmic objects. Other processes operated via U-space—complex, interesting processes that Owl and Crowther were observing too. But none of them was quite as interesting as the Hawking radiation, because from Layden’s Sink it wasn’t always a simple chaotic output. Occasionally radiation exited in organized form, as data. How long this ha
d been going on they had no idea, though according to some historical files this data output had been detected during the war. They had no idea what it was coming from, other than the hole itself. How anything could survive in a form capable of transmitting data as Hawking radiation from behind the event horizon was more than just a puzzle, it was one of the biggest questions facing present-day Polity science.

  “Always behind the curve,” said Crowther, glancing through an exterior sensor pole towards Owl just moments before the pulse of new data waned.

  “Always,” Owl agreed.

  The data never revealed anything new. Whenever it indicated something apparently new, further checking showed that the discovery had been made somewhere. Crowther had been highly excited when a data pulse suggested the potential for a gravity-wave weapon. “Already being fitted to some ships,” Earth Central had replied. Additional data from the black hole had revealed further applications: U-space disruptor mines, missiles, concomitant ways of improving grav-engines and grav-plates and some ways of storing or diverting the energy that runcibles—matter transmission gates—usually relayed to their buffers. He was unsurprised to discover that the leaps had already been made in the Polity, but then another thought occurred and he did some checking on timings. It seemed, on universal time, that sometimes the data issued from the black hole at, as near as he could calculate, the precise moment it came into being in the Polity. Was this some weird kind of reflection or a phenomenon that opened that vast can of worms called predestination?

  “But possibly useful,” Owl added.

  The drone was an odd-looking creature. His ten-foot long body was a teardrop from which extended the four legs with which he gripped the hull of the station. To his fore—the wide point of the teardrop—his face was very much like that of an owl, with two large concave sensor dishes, concentrically ringed with iridescent meta-materials around central white-diamond eyes. When he had first met the drone, Crowther had wondered what it was about its shape that bothered him so. However, a microsecond of puzzlement led to a mental search which, a further microsecond later, pulled up visual files from that compartment of his memory labelled Two-dimensional Art. Owl was reminiscent of the kind of creature painted by the Dutch artist Hieronymus Bosch.