“And that?” he wondered out loud.
A moment later his perspective abruptly changed. And though he still stood on the hull of his ship it seemed he was floating out above the sea, peering down and down, into the depths. A massive blast there had ignited the surrounding ocean and he could feel the force of it rising up. Then he was back again, trying not to throw up.
“Penny Royal?” he managed.
“Captain,” said Greer.
He glanced over to her and saw her pointing over the side of the ship, towards the hold door. Blite now identified the vibration he’d been feeling through his hand, as he squatted with it resting against the deck. The hold door had opened. He stood up, just in time to see one of the globular objects, which he’d last seen when he sat on one in the hold, rise into sight. The hole open into its internal complexity gleamed like a shattered red eye.
“Screw this,” he said and detached his line, walking over to the edge of his ship. He now had a clear view of Penny Royal exiting the hold, in sea-urchin form but with a much more open formation than usual. It had an intricate tangle of silver and black at its core. Five more of those globular objects circled it like huge white soap bubbles. And, more prosaically, one of them was spooling out a heavy s-con cable attached somewhere inside the ship.
After a brief pause Blite asked, “What are you doing?”
The next moment Penny Royal delivered its reply, though whether this was a memory or some kind of manufactured experience, Blite couldn’t tell.
He was lying on sand holding up a shield, fending off the blows from a big studded mace wielded by someone dressed for some serious SM. He knew, absolutely knew, that if he relaxed his grip on that shield he would be beaten to death
.
Then he was back to reality, stumbling away from the edge of his ship, no longer nauseous but just plain scared. He swore quietly. He was going to be a lot more parsimonious with the questions henceforth.
The AI began to rise, the object towing the cable remaining behind it, while the others abruptly shot away. Blite tracked their flight out towards the ocean, then lost them in the remaining dust. He tried again with his monocular and picked up one of them, hovering out towards the edge of the city about fifty feet above the ground. Then he realized he was seeing something else beyond.
The ocean heaved, a low dome of water tens of miles wide rising. Then the surface exploded upwards in spume and steam, as doubtless massive bubbles of superheated steam breached. The whole mass collapsed again with slow grace, but from its edges a disturbance fled. Blite tracked it inwards and watched a wave mounding up as it drew closer to the shore. He lowered his monocular, then searched around for somewhere nearby to reattach his safety line. The mounded wave hit the shore and just kept coming—the ocean simply seeming to eat up the land lying between him and it. He considered swearing, but decided he’d done enough of that.
“Just lost all power,” commented Brond.
Blite looked around. Why had it suddenly grown darker and colder? He raised his monocular again, but it was dead. He reattached it to his helmet to run a diagnostic, but his suit just flashed a power failure warning in his visor, which worryingly simply faded. Again he surveyed his surroundings. On the nearby road, powered vehicles had failed too. After a moment, he realized that he could no longer see the fires over in that direction. He turned towards the three-storey building that had been burning nearby and gazed dumbfounded as the flames died. Then the glow of embers inside the peaked roof just faded.
“What the hell?” he wondered, forgetting his earlier decision about profanity.
Penny Royal was now about a hundred feet up, which was perhaps the full extension of that s-con cable. Beyond it, high in the sky, the prador dreadnought was now little more than a glowing speck.
“Disruptive entropic effects inevitable,” whispered Penny Royal. “Your ship’s reactor does not provide enough power.”
The AI was sucking power out of everything around them, Blite realized, but how and what for? He was damned if he was going to ask and end up flat on his back in another Roman arena virtuality.
“Now Cvorn and the Five make their move,” the AI added. “Skute’s ship is damaged, but on its way up nevertheless.”
Blite switched his attention to the ocean and found his view of it distorted, as if he was seeing it through a slice of amber. The tsunami, which was now little more than a mobile pile of slurry and plant matter, had nearly reached the city. It was about six feet high, but Blite knew such a mass of water would annihilate the rest of the shanty town, probably bring down some of the stronger buildings around him, and could easily turn over his ship.
Beyond the wave, the captain now saw two prador destroyers rise from the ocean on fusion drive. They resembled the dreadnought, but were sleeker, more horizontally stretched-out versions. They were also much smaller—each being about two miles long.
“The wave,” said someone, Blite wasn’t sure who.
It hit an invisible wall and just stopped. Blite raised his gaze and saw something he hadn’t realized until now. That amber tint in the air stopped about fifty feet up, where those globular objects hung in the sky. Penny Royal had created a massive curved hardfield around the ocean-facing edge of the city.
A shield
, he thought,
of course
.
Was this, Blite wondered, a demonstration of some previously unseen altruism on the part of the AI?
More explosions ensued above the ocean and one of the destroyers tilted, some of its outer protrusions had been torn away and a glowing dent was visible in its hull.
“The mines!” Martina’s shout was just audible in Blite’s closed-up suit, and over the constant roaring that surrounded them. He glanced over at her and saw she had manually opened her visor, and did the same.
The undamaged destroyer abruptly dropped, green lasers stabbing out all around it and lighting up the steam and spume out there. The damaged destroyer also began firing, even as a third began to emerge from the waves. Further detonations ensued, multiple blast waves carrying across the ocean towards the land, and the city. Now, as the tsunami began to ebb, the hardfield began to rise and reconfigure as those spherical objects repositioned themselves in the sky. The airborne field began to form an oval stretched out across the sky facing the ocean, its lower edge now fifty or so feet above the ground. Its upper edge was now maybe two or three hundred feet up.
Blite watched the dying tsunami flowing in. Though its force had been blunted by the hardfield, it was still strong and high enough to wipe out the more distant parts of the shanty town. A blast front followed it, picking up spume and debris on its way in, but it wasn’t as powerful as those first two waves—seemingly dying even as it reached them. He slapped his gloved hands together and huffed out vapour in air turned decidedly chill, stood up and nearly fell over. He was more careful with his footing as he realized that ice was forming on his ship’s hull.
“They’ve got the dreadnought’s mines nailed,” said Brond.
“Well,” said Martina, “the prador did work out how to see through simple chameleonware during the war.”
The laser strikes continued out there, the subsequent detonations progressively further from the three ships, which now hung above the ocean at the same level.
“What I don’t understand,” said Blite, “is why they aren’t going after the dreadnought.”
The world abruptly turned a blinding actinic white, as something detonated against the oval hardfield. The ground and his ship shifted and he went down on his backside. Penny Royal was a black star against that light with streaks of pink lightning issuing from the tips of its spines. And Blite felt the twist passing through his body that he often felt when
The Rose
’s space drive engaged. Steam and smoke rose all around and Blite spotted the fire in that three-storey building briefly flare back into life. Seen through the force-field the glare died, fading to a red macula. As Blite steadied himself and rose up into a squat, he realized he could now no longer see the edges of the shielding. He glanced behind, seeing that amber hue there, and it was now above, too.
“Unfinished business, I reckon,” said Ikbal, now close beside him. He nodded to the surrounding buildings. “The people here were kidding themselves if they thought the prador considered them anything more than vermin.”
Two more blasts ensued, one above, and one behind. These faded too, snapping out like oxygen-starved acetylene flames. A particle beam played across the shield, leaving a diminishing shadow in its path, then winked out. Penny Royal had once terrified Blite, but at length he had grown accustomed to it. He was suspicious of it and sometimes it annoyed him. It left him often baffled, certainly respectful and never less than afraid of what it might do. Now he felt a growing awe.
“Return inside now,” the AI’s voice whispered out of the air. “Danger increasing.”
“Increasing?” said Ikbal disbelievingly.
Blite just detached his line and headed for the ladder.
SVERL
In the sanctum inside his dreadnought, Sverl gazed at his screens in disbelief. He was now sitting in a low geostationary position directly above Carapace City. The unexpected shielding had been of an odd design. It was curved, but all the science he knew had it that the energy losses in distorting such an interface in this way outweighed its effectiveness. It also had no anchored projectors which would take on the kinetic load. Neither could he see any heat sinks or energy convertors for the transformation of such a load to be shunted away. It had initially been powered by
The Rose’s
fusion reactor, but that alone couldn’t have provided enough power to stop dead the tsunami—let alone the ensuing CTD blasts or particle beams. But of course this was Penny Royal, and the technological know-how down there lay beyond the prador’s scientific prowess. And, unless they were keeping things under wraps, it was beyond the Polity AIs too.
Again checking data, Sverl tried to work out what had been done, and how. Penny Royal had somehow anchored the shield to realspace and used some entropic effect to draw power from that. The temperature down there had dropped rapidly, both behind and ahead of the shield for nearly twenty miles. It dipped below the freezing point of water within the first few miles, rising in a simple curve to the limit of that distance. The energy from the first CTD fired from Cvorn’s ship had routed back, raising the temperature again. But then some U-space effect had kicked in, diverting the bulk of that energy into underspace. Then Penny Royal somehow steadily drew on this again to expand and strengthen the shield. It now completely enwrapped Carapace City, the visible part of it being a dome. But the whole thing formed a perfect sphere, for it also lay underground.
Stunning, and terrifying. How could Sverl ever have contemplated petty vengeance against something capable of doing
that?
However, more than ever he now wanted a confrontation of a different kind, resolution, absolution, something … He could no more contemplate avoiding the black AI than he could now consider attacking it. There was mystery here; the AI was the source, the centre, the point where Sverl
had
to be. There was a further puzzle too. Why had Penny Royal defended the city? Sverl took just a moment to come up with the answer, and then wondered if some remnant of his prador arrogance might be kicking in.
Because of me
.
Without him, the prador enclave would not have existed on this world. Without him and the changes Penny Royal had wrought in him, Carapace City wouldn’t have been able to exist either, containing as it did the shell people and other humans. No normal prador would have allowed that—only one tempered, or perhaps twisted, by his change into an amalgam of prador, human and AI. This place was a disaster waiting to happen. Even without Penny Royal’s arrival, and Sverl’s response to that, the others would have turned against him at some point. In the ensuing battle, the humans here would have been annihilated. Penny Royal had apparently taken responsibility and come here to prevent that—and in essence to clear up a mess of its own making. But what next? Was Sverl next on the black AI’s agenda?
Procrastinating …
Sverl abruptly realized he had been studying the data and thinking about what it might mean for far too long. Now his prador kin were pig-headedly trying to penetrate a shield that only became stronger after each attack. They were consistently failing to adapt quickly to the new and the different—so now was the time to act. Now, while that shield protected the city, Cvorn and the others had allowed their hatred of humanity to override common sense. So, while they were so distracted, Sverl could get heavy-handed. It was time for some payback for both the attack on him and the deaths caused down there. Cvorn and the others might have failed to destroy the main human population, but they had, by Sverl’s estimation, managed to vaporize hundreds. Those living outside the city were simply gone. The few hundred who hadn’t waited for automated transport out and fled on foot had been killed by their own instinct for self-preservation.
“All gunners,” he announced, again taking control of two of the particle cannons himself, “fire at will—hit those destroyers.”
Targeting images abruptly proliferated across his screens and his children responded with everything from the standard dour, “We obey,” to a few clattering cries of prador delight. He felt some parental pride as firing commenced just a second later, the thrumming of railguns permeating the ship as they hurled down missiles, these travelling nearly as fast as the particle beams that stabbed down with them.
Skute’s ship took the first blow. Three railgun missiles hit it in succession, the first two vaporizing against exotic metal armour. But the force of their blasts did knock the ship down to just above the ocean, compacting it horizontally too so that nothing inside could have survived. However, the third missile penetrated right through, blowing a molten plume down into the waves. Even as Skute’s ship slid sideways on failing engines, the next missiles impacted above the other two destroyers. But these exploded on projected hardfields because the other two had seen the danger at the last moment. Both ships dropped after successive hardfield impacts. They were forced back down into the ocean, glaring like stars and seemingly unravelling as they fired out s-con sink cables. The sea boiled around them as energy convertors aboard turned the energy from those impacts into massive pulses of heat and dispersed light.