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  I had inserted a memory sliver into this suit before donning it, to make sure I had full control of it via my aug. But I couldn’t really close the suit’s camera feed back to the Moray Firth. With Trent accompanying me, it wouldn’t have made much difference if I had. Isobel was going to learn the history of this destroyer and she wasn’t going to like it at all. What I did next would depend on how she reacted. Upon reaching the destroyer, Trent manually opened the airlock and we stepped through. I kept a close eye on the man, who was carrying a heavy laser carbine. I was more than ready to send the infrasound activation over suit radio, to start the prion cascade in his body.

  The inside of the abandoned ship was thoroughly familiar, yet I had never set foot inside before that moment. I looked down at scratch marks on the floor beside the airlock and just knew they had been caused by a maintenance robot, scrabbling for purchase during heavy acceleration. Suddenly my attitude to this déjà vu flipped over and I became intensely annoyed with it. Would I never again experience the joy of new discoveries, new sights, sounds and smells? Was this the feeling that drove older Polity citizens like my brother to suicidal pursuits, in search of some small fragment of new experience?

  The interior of the old ship wasn’t airless, but the pressure was very low. I felt a visceral certainty that something horrible had happened here, and this extended beyond my knowledge of what had happened. Undeniable proof of this presented itself the moment we rounded the first corner. We found the first body in the corridor leading to the “ship’s cortex,” the globular chamber toward the nose of the ship.

  “One of the crew,” I stated.

  “What the fuck happened to him?” Trent asked, pointing his weapon at the corpse. “Some sort of U-space screw-up?”

  Whether this had been a “him” or a “her” was debatable, I felt. Difficult to sex a desiccated corpse still clad in a blue and green shipsuit. Especially when it was partially buried in a wall that had frozen, apparently partway through a transformation into a nest of adders. Gazing at the corpse, I felt my skin crawling and my space suit seemingly tightening around me. I turned away in a flash of terror. I definitely did not want this person’s memories.

  “This looks like a nano- and micro-machine matter transformation,” I said, knowing perfectly well that it was exactly that.

  “Triggered by the ship’s repair systems?” Isobel asked from the Moray Firth, currently matching the Polity destroyer’s course around a Graveyard green-belt world which had yet to acquire any human name.

  Yes, the ship’s repair systems, breeding constantly and controlled by something that might just give nightmares to a standard planetary AI.

  “So, tell me more about how you located this,” Isobel asked, obviously rattled by what she’d seen through our suit feeds.

  “Like I said before,” I explained. “I used a specialized search of a captured prador database. This ship was dead when they found it and lined it up for salvage, but they never got round to that before the war ended.”

  It was as close to the truth as I wanted to venture. I had used a specialized search of a database, after Panarchia and during my rehabilitation, before joining Krong. But I used the term “database” loosely as it had actually been the mind of a first-child, extracted from the wreckage of a prador dreadnought. Before that, the search teams had brought me the remains of the prador captain to examine, taken from that same dreadnought. Here I found glass worms wound through his major ganglion, and the internal ceramic mouth he had been impelled to use to feed on his own organs. And even before I opened up the first-child’s mind, I had some dark intimation of what I’d found.

  The child had been filled with delight that its beloved father-captain had found an abandoned Polity destroyer. They had docked and proceeded to assay it to see whether it could be adapted for prador use or should be cut up for salvage. Of course father had been delighted—such a find would add to his prestige and his personal fortune. Daddy’s delight lasted until the horrific killings started. The culprit was a Polity assassin drone picked up from the destroyer, they were sure … then the killing stopped and the prador captain ordered his ship undocked and fled.

  The child’s memories stopped there, giving no reason why the dreadnought had subsequently crashed on a human-occupied world. When I found out the destroyer’s Polity name and serial number in the child’s mind I recorded them, then went on to record its location. But I reported none of these. After Panarchia, my personal quest for vengeance had steered me away from authority and towards personal satisfaction. I didn’t know or care where this would lead, such was my need. When the first-child was then taken away for “humane disposal,” the knowledge died with it. I knew then that the prador dreadnought had certainly picked up something from that other ship. But it hadn’t been anywhere near as pleasant as an assassin drone.

  We found another dead crewman just outside the narrow tunnel leading to the ship’s cortex. This one had obviously decided on positive action in response to the developing threat. The desiccated corpse was pinned to the ceiling, a pulse-rifle having been driven through its gut. However, closer inspection revealed a blending of pulse-rifle and shipsuit, as if the stock and butt of the weapon had grown from the victim. After seeing that, I looked away quickly, because I didn’t want Isobel, or Trent, to study the corpse too closely. As I ducked into the tunnel I wondered how long it had taken the victim to die, then had to accept that I’d probably never know. The thing that had exited through this tunnel set no limits on the suffering of its victims.

  The ship’s cortex was packed with machinery. A skeletal Golem rested with its back against the wall nearest the door, its android legs missing. Metallic tentacles wound from its pelvis, crossing the floor to plug into a socket in the opposite wall. Below its wrists, its hands branched into micro-manipulators which were scattered with silvery nubs like small steel berries. I recognized these as nano-manipulator heads. Its eyes were gone and in their place was something that looked ridiculously like ancient binoculars. I moved on in and round so I could keep Trent in sight.

  Other maintenance robots were crammed into the area, some still in their original form, others converted in weird fashions. I paused to study a series of hand-sized beetle-bots, arrayed like the tines of a rake along a bar at the end of a long jointed arm. Though I could not fathom the specific purposes of the robots and the Golem, I guessed their overall task: they had been here to change a static object into something very dangerous and mobile.

  “Looks like the ship’s AI was shattered,” Isobel observed.

  Yes, there were flakes of AI crystal scattered all about the area, but nowhere near enough. I moved on to the central clamp—two columns terminating in flat plates extending from floor and ceiling, leaving a gap a foot wide between. Here was where the ship’s AI should have been. I eyed the gap for a moment, then an object lying over beside the wall drew my attention. Something cold crept up my vertebrae as I walked over to study it.

  Here lay a black spine a metre and a half long, the width of an arm at its base and tapering to a needle point. It was pentagonal in cross section with corners I knew to be of atomic sharpness. A ribbed tentacle extended from its base, with a tentacle junction box a hand-breadth down it and a metre of tentacle beyond that—torn off at the end with optics and esoteric electronics protruding. Gazing at the thing, I felt a weird sense of connection as well as the usual familiarity. And neither sensation had anything to do with the numerous descriptions of these that I’d heard. I stepped back, feeling very uncomfortable—worse than I’d ever felt before with this déjà vu, this connection. There was some truth here I simply didn’t want to know about, or just couldn’t allow myself to know about.

  “There’s no AI here,” said Isobel, her voice hollow. “Or at least not all of it.”

  “No,” I replied. Of course there wasn’t.

  “You had better start talking, and quickly,” she said. “That was a piece of Penny Royal back there. What the hell was it doi
ng here, and what the hell is your interest?”

  “The destroyer is called Puling Child,” I explained, because the time for concealment was past. “An amusing reference to a substance called pulegone which can cause babies to be aborted. It can be derived from a terran herb.”

  “That’s all very interesting,” said Isobel acidly. “Now why don’t you cut to the dramatic climax you’re obviously leading up to.”

  “The herb concerned,” I continued, “is pennyroyal, which, incidentally, is the name of the AI that controlled this ship. Penny Royal did not come here, but came from here.”

  “Fuck,” said Isobel vehemently. Then because she couldn’t find anything else to add, “Fuck.”

  6

  ISOBEL

  Isobel watched Spear and Trent returning from the destroyer. Then, after trying to force herself to breathe evenly and calm down, she spoke to Trent privately, “I’m opening the space doors to the hold. Come in through there.”

  “You think he’s been playing us?” Trent asked.

  Playing us? He brought us to the birthplace of Penny Royal—I don’t think playing anywhere near covers what happened! She paused, used her haiman augmentation to replay the last few seconds, to be sure she hadn’t said that out loud.

  “I do, and if I need to do something about that, I don’t want to make a mess in our living quarters.”

  Ersatz toughness, when she wanted to scream hysterically. Or was it? She now recognized the growing predator inside her, and it wanted to tear Spear apart. It wanted to tear everything apart.

  “Okay, I’ll tell him we’re going to move his second-child mind straight away.”

  “You do that.”

  Isobel swallowed an odd metallic taste in her mouth and sat back, using her augmentations to tune out the perpetually re-engaging input from her three hooder eyes as she gaped at the image of the destroyer on her screen. Her instinct was to have Trent and Gabriel glue Spear to the deck. They could then work him over for a few hours before using a cut aug on him, to wring every last scrap of information out of his skull. But she wasn’t sure if that instinct was wholly her own. She had to focus on the fact that the man offered a cure, and she should do nothing until either he had given her what she wanted or she found out that he could not.

  She reached up and touched her long cheek with quivering fingers. Her head was now twice as tall as a normal human’s, and she could feel another red eye due to open in one of her developing eye pits. The protrusions, which had run up her jaw, now ran up the sides of her face and were longer. Some had acquired a joint, and the swelling towards their ends promised to blossom into a hooder manipulator. Her sensory cowl was still open and had been for a month, when she found she could no longer close it up. Further petals had also sprouted from the sides of her neck. Her arms and legs were shorter too, though she had lost no height because her body had grown longer. She was monstrous and just could not go on like this, surely …

  She returned her attention to the screen, her extra eyes switching to infrared and ultraviolet, which was unhelpful for a screen formatted for human eyes. Again she tuned them out—the fight to do so just a little bit more difficult each time. She switched to a cam in the hold which showed, amidst crates of trade goods, where the second-child mind had been stowed. Trent and Spear’s survey of the Puling Child had rendered the results Spear had expected, though of course he hadn’t told the truth about why he had expected them. The destroyer was powered down but the fusion reactors could be restarted at any time. All it needed was the second-child’s mind to be installed and it would be ready to fly … that was presupposing Penny Royal hadn’t left any nasty surprises. She found herself shuddering uncontrollably.

  As Trent and Spear entered the hold, the grav-plates powered up slowly, bringing them down to the floor as the space doors closed. A gale blew in there for a second as the hold filled with air, then Spear removed his helmet and placed it down on a nearby crate. Trent had moved back from Spear, his carbine casually pointed towards the man’s stomach.

  “Gabriel,” said Isobel, standing up and heading unsteadily for the exit. He joined her on the way down and, sensing her mood, drew his pulse-gun. He also had one of those neat cattle prod devices used on Cheyne III to drive dark otters away from boats. Isobel hoped he would not be finding a use for it soon; hoped Spear would be true to his word.

  “Penny Royal,” she stated flatly as she stepped into the hold, determined not to show him both her desperation and her growing need for violence.

  Spear turned towards her, looking annoyingly calm.

  “Penny Royal,” he said, with a slow nod.

  “Why are we here?”

  “Truth?”

  “If you value your skin.” Yes, maybe she’d take that, if he reneged …

  “I was one of the few survivors left on Panarchia, after a division of eight thousand men was CTD-bombed from orbit by that ship,” he stabbed a thumb towards the space doors. “I intend to track down and kill the mind that controlled it—Penny Royal.”

  Isobel stared at him, finding herself flicking to a wider spectrum view as panic tightened her torso. Maybe he wasn’t playing them. Maybe he was simply insane.

  “That explains nothing,” she said, fighting to return her vision to normal.

  “I need a ship to hunt Penny Royal down—it’s not something that can be done through the runcible network,” he explained. “I knew where Penny Royal’s destroyer was and it seemed the best option. There may also be clues aboard to help me in my search.”

  “That still doesn’t explain why you came to me,” she said tightly.

  “I needed someone familiar with the Graveyard …”

  “Still not good enough, Thorvald Spear.”

  “Okay.” He shrugged in defeat. “As well as being able to get me here, you can also give me the location of Penny Royal’s base—that planetoid. You went there, and it’s not a place I can find on any Polity database.”

  She stared at him for a moment, her enhanced mind flicking through this new information, and realized his error. He’d come out of resurrection intent on going after Penny Royal right away. He’d therefore searched for information through the Polity AI net, where the position of Penny Royal’s planetoid had been suppressed. Just as subsequent information had also been suppressed: about Penny Royal’s encounter with something dangerous and alien while in the Graveyard. Then the AI’s near-destruction, and its rescue by a Polity drone called Amistad who took it to the planet Masada. How naive were the citizens of the Polity, to think their AIs revealed everything. She could tell him, but it was not her custom to give away information for free.

  “And why should I?”

  “Money?” he suggested.

  She stared at him for a long time, trying to understand what the emissions coming from him might mean—she could pick them up with her additional hooder senses. They could perhaps be parsed for truth. She realized her stare had gone on for an uncomfortably long time when Gabriel started fidgeting and throwing worried looks her way.

  “That will have to be another transaction,” she said tersely. “But right now you have what you want.”

  “I will have what I want when my ship mind—” he gestured to the sphere containing the second-child “—is installed.”

  “That will be done when you deal with this.” She indicated her own body with a hand that was becoming increasingly unusable.

  “No, you get the mind over there first,” he replied with that irritating calm. “You can keep Trent or Gabriel with me at all times. Once it’s in place I will complete our … initial transaction.”

  She suddenly knew he was lying. He was trying to keep her hooked while he got that destroyer running. He was obviously technically adept, so probably had some plan to escape in it before completing his part of the deal. All that stuff about hunting down and killing Penny Royal had to be a lie because it was based on yet another lie. Anyone who knew anything about Penny Royal knew about the incident whe
n it turned black. There had been no human survivors of the bombing of Panarchia.

  “You seem to be under the illusion that you have some power here,” she said, now considering losses and gains. There was no cure for her here, but she was about to acquire a Polity destroyer—a very expensive item indeed. The money she could make from it in a Graveyard auction should be enough to lure somebody top-flight out of the Polity—someone who really could deal with her problem. Meanwhile her inner predator raised its head and opened its eyes.

  “Okay.” He nodded, gazing at her.

  She immediately understood he knew she’d seen through him. Perhaps she was reading something beyond the human visual spectrum, to receive this insight so clearly?

  “If he moves a muscle, burn off his feet,” she auged to Trent, then glanced at the heavy-worlder when he didn’t respond.

  “You want some more truth?” Spear asked.

  “Trent?”

  Something was wrong.

  “You, Isobel Satomi, are a murderous bitch,” Spear continued, “and I can think of no punishment, other than you being cored and given to the prador, more appropriate than what’s happening to you now. When it comes to adaptogenics and augmentation I know my stuff. But I’m barely shaping stone axe heads while Penny Royal is making Tenkian robot weapons. I could no more cure you than a witchdoctor could cure brain cancer.”

  “Bring him down!” Isobel spat, horrible delight arising now that she knew nothing barred her from attacking him.

  Neither Trent nor Gabriel moved a muscle and then, just like an unbalanced sculpture, Trent fell flat on his face. Somehow Spear had got to them and she had to act now. She damned herself for not having a security drone installed down here in the hold, or something else as lethal that she could access with her augmentations. She would have to deal with him herself, right away. She took a step forwards, reaching down for her own pulse-gun, but it suddenly felt as if she was wading through treacle. Her hand reached the butt of her gun, closed round it, then stalled. In panic she cast about for some other option. Maybe she could get maintenance robots into the hold …