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  For a moment Amistad thought he had fired the missile himself, but no, Penny Royal had just killed part of itself.

  “We have things to do,” said the AI.

  “Quite,” Amistad agreed. “Quite right.”

  No, Amistad now understood perfectly. Penny Royal had not destroyed its eighth state. The AI probably hadn’t had time to copy the vast repository of evil that the sphere had contained, so had undoubtedly uploaded it. In obliterating the physical object, Penny Royal had just been removing the evidence of that act. But what to do? Penny Royal was gone now, had smuggled itself off-world, and Amistad had responsibilities here …

  “Do nothing,” a voice replied.

  In a microsecond Amistad traced it to his own internal U-space transceiver, and a microsecond later identified the source: Earth Central.

  “I thought you didn’t listen to my private thoughts,” he said.

  “I don’t,” Earth Central replied.

  The implications of that were quite simple. After Amistad’s report that Penny Royal had gone missing, Earth Central had ascertained, down to the second, when the drone might consider dropping his tenure as AI warden. It was frightening in some ways and reassuring in others. Amistad understood that, despite his upgrade, he was still a long way down the food chain from the likes of the Polity’s de facto ruler.

  “But something must be done,” Amistad tried.

  “Do you think for one moment that you would be the prime mover in this matter? That you would be allowed to dictate next steps regarding something as dangerous, and as precious as Penny Royal? A quorum of four minds has been analysing every scrap of data available, and … events move to a resolution.”

  “What resolution?”

  A long, in AI terms, pause ensued.

  “Within the next two years—and the quorum can be no more accurate than that—you will receive a visit from a human who will in himself be part of the answer. You must also desist from any intervention in subsequent events.”

  “Can you elaborate on that?”

  “No,” Earth Central replied.

  Amistad pondered the words. He felt, in his steel heart, that more had been said in the long pause before them. Though a quorum of minds might be analysing Penny Royal’s actions, including its abrupt departure from Masada, he was sure those minds were no closer to answers than Amistad himself. He was sure that Earth Central had not elaborated, simply because it could not.

  BLITE

  Blite waited to be turned into something monstrous, waited to be sliced into a million pieces and then reassembled, or waited to die. He knelt with his head bowed, chilled to the heart of his being, terrified. He heard the airlock open and looked round to see Martina poised beside it. With a nod of her head she indicated their way out of the hold, but he remained where he was.

  “You go,” he said.

  Without any further ado she ducked out, closing the door behind her. What was the point? They had nowhere to run … then he thought of a possibility. Penny Royal had just let her go, so maybe it would let him go too. Maybe they could all get to the shuttle and abandon ship …

  Just then Penny Royal shifted as if sensing his thoughts. He looked up at it, then slowly climbed to his feet. All he could do was try to escape. As he began turning towards the airlock, a weird twisting sensation worked its way from his feet, through his body, then out of the top of his head. Other people had different responses, but this was the sensation he had every time his ship dropped into U-space. He hadn’t ordered this and his ship’s mind—previously a Golem that had decided it wanted to view the universe from a different perspective—wouldn’t have accepted orders from his crew. He just knew Penny Royal had taken control of the ship and, as a consequence, removed the possibility of a shuttle escape. So, instead of continuing to the airlock, he turned back to the AI. Oddly, with hope now dispelled, he felt his terror fading.

  Penny Royal was beautiful he realized: the absolute quintessence of sharp lethality. A demon utterly without relation to the human form. Now, in one of those mind-deceiving transformations, it had spread into something resembling a peacock’s tail fashioned of black daggers. It could definitely change the size and shape of its body too. Only a few minutes ago, the black glassy objects had been long spines yet were now flat blades. The lacework of silver that bonded them was also nothing like the thick silver tentacles it had used to raise itself from the grav-sled.

  “Hello Penny Royal,” he said.

  Damn it, he might be about to be chopped into pieces, or whatever. But he was now ashamed of his initial reaction—he would face the devil and swear at it as it tore into him.

  “You will be paid,” said the AI, its voice not issuing from one point but seeming to coagulate out of the air all around, while also echoing in his aug.

  “Paid,” Blite repeated. “I want nothing from you.”

  “You will take me, to the Graveyard. Far side,” said the AI. “Payment.”

  Something folded out of the peacock tail to seemingly peck at the floor. It looked like the head of a silver bird at the end of a long silver neck, with sharp, black beak. For a second Blite thought this was it, it was going to start on him now. But the beak just touched the floor by his feet, depositing some objects, after which the whole bird-head retracted. Blite remained very still for a few seconds, then slowly tilted his head to peer downwards. Four rubies rested on the floor, cylindrical, each the size of the last two joints of his little finger. Rubies in and of themselves were relatively worthless—if he ever had a use for them, he could make them himself with some of the equipment aboard this ship. However, the particular shape of these and the shadowy web-works they contained made him suspect that they were more than simple jewels.

  “Memplants,” he said. “The Polity gives a reward for every one of these handed in. It is substantial, but it’s hardly enough to pay for a jaunt to the other side of the Graveyard.”

  “First payment,” said the AI.

  A moment later, Blite found himself experiencing a vivid flashback to events many years past, powerless to stop the memories overtaking him.

  He was sitting on the bridge of his ship, gazing at a vid on his tablet, which had been taken on a world called Amber. In the vid, he was sitting in a bar with all of his old crew. While on the bridge, he was remembering the four he had just lost. His throat tight, he quickly closed the file …

  … and found himself on his knees in his hold and back in the present, gasping and nauseated. The four rubies lay in front of his face. He just stared, then after a moment reached out and swept them all up in his fist.

  “Why are you here?” he managed, his voice hoarse as he stood.

  “Transcendence,” Penny Royal replied.

  Blite turned away and headed for the airlock. It meant nothing. Penny Royal could be playing with him, just prolonging his torment in the same way any psychotic killer might. He opened the airlock, progressed through, then headed towards the bridge. But perhaps if he could divine the truth about what he held in his hand … was there some way he could find out if Penny Royal had truly given back his four crewmen, lives it had taken away so many years ago?

  “Captain?”

  Blite looked up to see Brondohohan, Ikbal and Greer waiting in the corridor ahead of him, all three heavily armed and standing behind a tripod-mounted proton cannon. He was quite stunned at how they had moved the thing out of stores and set it up so fast. But of course they had plenty of motivation. Beyond them stood Martina, and then Chont and Haber rushed up carrying yet more weapons. Blite felt proud, but recognized the futility of the defence. Penny Royal didn’t have to come up this corridor to get them and, as he well recollected, such armaments had little effect on the AI.

  “Penny Royal,” he said, “there wasn’t any Separatist buyer for those thralls, was there?”

  Again a memory surfaced, its clarity as painful as a knife, yet it wasn’t one of his memories.

  He saw a man standing on a jetty, shooting a pulse
-gun into an iron-coloured sea. The man was screaming curses as he emptied his weapon, then he turned to look back down the jetty. The thing disintegrated, startting from a point by the shore, falling into dust. When the destruction reached him, he just dissolved into a bloody fog.

  Then Blite was back. He’d managed to stay upright this time but still felt sick. Was that the Separatist? Was that a yes or a no?

  “Why us?”

  Now it was a memory of his own.

  He put down a bet on the fight between a dwarf-form lion and some hideous alien insect. He won because, unexpectedly, the lion managed to bite through the back of its opponent’s ridged neck.

  “How did you know?” someone asked.

  “Just lucky, I guess,” he replied.

  So that was it: a sarcastic comment from the AI. They were just lucky. Back in the present and feeling even more nauseated, Blite asked, “Are you going to stay in the hold?”

  No memory this time; just cryptic words coalescing out of the air. “I must connect all of me.”

  Blite moved forwards to stand directly before his crew. “We’re taking it to the other side of the Graveyard, apparently. We have no choice.”

  “Do you trust it?” Ikbal asked, his face pale with fear.

  “Not in the slightest, which is why I want you to take a welder back there and seal shut the hold airlock.” Ikbal didn’t much like that idea, but bobbed his head in agreement. “Brond …” The man watched him expectantly. “I hope the shuttle is well stocked and fully fuelled. We need to be prepared for … eventualities.” Blite winced, feeling that was too obvious. He considered sending a message to all his crew by aug, but knew that would be no more secure than speaking.

  Brondohohan nodded an acknowledgement and the others exchanged knowing looks. If they tried to use the shuttle while in U-space there was no telling what would happen to them. Theories varied. They might just drop back into realspace or they might do so travelling at a fraction below light speed—a velocity impossible to counter with the shuttle’s engines. They might end up trapped in U-space for eternity, or they might wash up in the real through one of those rumoured U-space maelstroms. As far as Blite knew, no one had found any of the shuttles that had attempted such a thing, though there were stories of strangely distorted wrecks containing the inside-out remains of human beings. However, when they arrived at their destination they just might be able to escape, so they had to be ready.

  ISOBEL

  It was getting more and more difficult for Isobel to stand up. Her feet were almost gone, the bones in her legs were now ridiculously bowed and they were growing shorter at an increasing rate—almost as if her body was sucking them inside. She had considered knocking off the ship’s gravity, making some excuse about conserving power, but knew that wouldn’t wash. Both Trent and Gabriel were aware that energy wasn’t the issue and that their problem was a lack of material resources—mainly propellant for the fusion drive. They would recognize such an action as an admission of debility from her. However, there was another solution.

  Munching on a chunk of bloody synthesized steak, she opened a door into a storeroom just ahead of the hold. She was always hungry now, always eating—and she tried to control her urge to use the manipulators down each side of her face to take it apart and feed it into her mouth. Taking a step inside, she studied the racks of supplies. Here were pulse-rifles and other armaments, a grav-scooter and a selection of grav-sleds. She also spotted a proton cannon still in its original boxes, yet to be assembled, and a heap of prador armour. She’d stripped that off a drifting prador corpse that had probably died during the war. She found it difficult to move further into the room and in the end relented, relinquishing the steak to her facial manipulators. That way she could use the remains of both hands for support.

  Eventually she found a suitcase on one of the shelves. Inside, neatly packaged in foam, lay a grav-harness. Leaving it where it was for the moment, she deliberately sped up her snack, for when she consigned food to these manipulators, they ran on some unconscious program that involved carefully slicing off layers of meat. Once the last scrap had vanished into her mouth, now triangular in its steady transformation into a vertical slot, she stripped off her dress, then her padded jacket. She had no concerns about Trent or Gabriel coming across her like this—they tended to know where she was and avoided her.

  Now naked, she found the sight of her twisted little legs even more detestable. The neat armoured torso seemed so much more right, as it blended into her extended head and sensory cowl. She studied her arms and hands. She had lost two fingers from each hand and her arms were shorter and more bowed, but they weren’t disappearing at the same rate as her legs. She suspected this was something to do with usage. Aboard this ship she really didn’t do much walking around—spending a lot of time in her acceleration chair in the bridge or on her bed in her cabin—but she did use her hands a lot. But that would change. Gabriel had already come upon her unannounced, finding her operating a touch-board with her facial manipulators. She also suspected that her legs would disappear even more quickly once she made use of the grav-harness.

  She pulled the thing out of the suitcase and shrugged it on over what remained of her shoulders. She closed the belt around her, above where her waist had been, between a pair of insectile legs, and then found she had to open everything up to its full extension to get the leg straps to reach. It was necessary to position the belt further down, between another set of her hooder legs. The main control hung loose on her chest and she tightened the straps. They were still at the extension she had required last time she used this thing, when she had breasts. The grav-lift itself came both from this unit and from the nanofactured Higgs fabric in the harness itself.

  Next she hit the power-up tab, began to increase the lift on a touch-bar then realized the last time she had used this she had not even been a haiman—just a slightly augmented human. Dropping her hand, she immediately linked through to the harness’s controls and used her mind to operate them. The thing tightened about her, as if attached to an invisible hoist positioned above. She took the control all the way up until her feet came up off the ground, noting how much heavier she was now—nearly twice her previous weight. In fact she was now as heavy as Trent or Gabriel. This massive weight gain wasn’t surprising. She had recently grasped that, despite her shrunken legs, she now stood taller than the two men. It also appeared that everything she ate was converted into hooder flesh and armour, for she couldn’t remember the last time she had taken a shit.

  She then adjusted the lift down again so her boots were resting on the floor, and picked up her jacket. Suddenly, she sensed a powerful smell and at first didn’t know what it was. She went utterly still, all senses stretched to their maximum. After a moment she identified tobacco smoke: Gabriel down here enjoying one of his disgusting cigars. She had told him again and again not to smoke aboard her ship, yet he continued to disobey her. In the past this had been mildly irritating but right now it made her livid. He was also walking down the corridor towards her and any moment now would be opposite the door—he would see her, naked, just wearing this grav-harness. Suddenly she’d had enough. She was spending far too much time concealing her changes from them. Wasn’t she their boss? Shouldn’t they just obey her orders and keep their obvious abhorrence of her to themselves?

  In a moment he was there and glanced inside, startled. She saw him all across the hooder spectrum. She saw right into him; saw the pulse of his blood through his veins, saw his bones, and the distinction between fat and muscle. He just didn’t look like Gabriel to her; he looked like prey.

  “Isobel!” he managed, but she was already on the move.

  Part of it was unconscious, but a much larger part, her predator, knew what it was doing. She shut off the harness completely and dropped, her hooder legs clattering against the floor. Skidding against the roughened metal, they propelled her forwards, then up at forty-five degrees. Her face slammed into his, her hooder legs clamping to h
is body, her full weight slamming him back against the wall. He tried to shove her away but she twisted and he couldn’t keep his footing, falling sideways. Even as he fell, her manipulators dug into his face, slicing neatly round his cheeks and taking them away. This exposed his back teeth on either side, then he was down on his back with her on top of him. She tried to close her cowl around his head and couldn’t manage it, but still her manipulators sliced and levered. He kicked and struggled underneath her but just couldn’t get away. Then, by the time she had taken off his face, he grew still.

  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.