Isobel moved forwards and Morgan and the others abruptly got out of her way. She needed him, didn’t she? Better to decide her response to such insubordination after she had fed.
“I have to return to the hold,” she said. “Explanations can come after that.”
They followed her as she headed back the way she had come. Through ship’s cams she watched the pulpit handler enter the hold then the space doors there closed. She was eager, but knew she should not allow that to distract her now. Why the hell had she told him where they were going just then? Had some part of her wanted to instigate violence? The answer was obvious: the predator wanted to feed and was pushing her other parts. She watched Morgan and the others through the ship’s internal systems and, just as she reached the bulkhead door into the hold, she saw it.
He reached up to tap three times against his cheekbone, then lowered his hand again. Her analytical part ran through all her memories of Morgan, riffled through them like a speed reader. He didn’t touch his scarred face very much, and she had no recollection of him having ever made that movement before. It was a signal—a simple option when you knew all other forms of communication were being monitored. The augmented woman fell back a few paces, shaking her head and putting on a show of looking frightened. She abruptly turned into a side corridor and moved away. Isobel knew it was all an act and that she was supposed to assume xenophobia had driven this person away. While continuing to watch Morgan and the remaining three, Isobel used the ship’s cam system to track the woman.
She went directly to her cabin and, of course, there were no cams operating inside. Shortly after that, a cam outside the cabin developed a fault, but Isobel was able to access it and correct it.
Too easy; a deliberate distraction.
At the bulkhead door to the hold, Isobel turned to Morgan and the other three.
“Wait here,” she said, mentally opening the door behind her then scuttling backwards through it. As the door closed, she turned to eye the four cold-storage cylinders the pulpit handler had deposited on the floor. Targeting frames immediately overlaid them and she jerked back, a line of translucent pink fire travelling down the length of her body. What? Why was she reacting like this to what were practically corpses? Some sort of hidden weapon? Isobel moved to one side, putting some distance between herself and the containers, trying to order her mind. She checked recorded data on the history of these containers to check for any possible tampering. She also searched for anything unusual in the recorded footage of them being taken from the
Glory
’s hold, yet could find nothing wrong.
With more success, she simultaneously checked an old schematic of the
Caligula
against an updated one, looking for holes in security. It was well concealed and, had her mind and senses not been as ramped up as they were, she would have missed it. Hidden routes had been opened up throughout the ship from the woman’s cabin. Isobel traced one of those routes down to a maintenance door in the corridor leading to this hold. The maintenance robot she required was just off that route, replacing a faulty optic cable, so she turned it and sent it creeping to a new position. Then she froze it into immobility when it detected movement, and gazed through its cam eyes.
The woman was coming and she was carrying something. Isobel focused in and identified a portable proton cannon—and the woman was screwing a giga-Watt energy canister into its underside. Morgan had made preparations to deal with what he’d thought Isobel had become, should she be a threat. But she knew these were inadequate, given what she now knew about herself. She moved back towards the door. She had to deal with this. But that new part of her abruptly wrenched her back to focus on the cold coffins. It was taking over, gathering energy …
A subspacial twist emanated from her, kaleidoscope refractions cutting the air of the hold. Coffins must be expelled, destroyed. Too dangerous this close. Through her haiman augmentation she sent an instruction to one of the coffins for confirmation and simultaneously ordered an emergency expulsion of the hold’s air. She also directed the space door to open even while sending an order—viciously enforced—to the
Glory
for all its cargo to be expelled …
What?
The coffin opened and, with senses stretching into realms her previous augmentations hadn’t reached, she inspected the corpse lying within. The primitive control device inside its empty skull and extending down its spine was unimportant. The blue rings of scar tissue were just organic damage and the virus that had grown from them inside the corpse was prosaic at the microscopic level. However, at sub-microscopic levels, the new part of Isobel recognized danger.
The enemy
.
The wave issued from her instantly, its gravity front smashing into the four coffins and the pulpit handler—slinging them as wreckage through the space doors and far out into vacuum. In the first few seconds this wreckage travelled a hundred miles out, then the
twist
, following it out, enclosed it and collapsed. A brief star blossomed as that twist compressed the wreckage nigh to the point of fusion.
Disruption sufficient; immediate danger eliminated
.
Now she was into the
Caligula’s
weapons. The
Glory
was shedding its cargo, using its fast dump mechanisms—installed against interception during potential Polity police actions. The captain had been reluctant to comply, but his second not so much so after the Golem tore out the captain’s throat. Isobel fired the
Caligula
’s particle cannons, turning each in the procession of coffins into white-hot plasma. It was enough, for the enemy was in an inactive state and unlikely to recover from such a burn, though elements of it might remain in existence.
Potential threat eliminated
.
Isobel swung round to the bulkhead door, as the space door closed and the hold recharged with air. As that other thing receded inside her, the predator took full control. She surged forwards, issuing subspacially generated hardfield shears and went straight through the bulkhead. The woman was stepping from the maintenance hatch even at that moment and Isobel targeted her with her own particle cannon, one shot turning her head to flaming vapour. Morgan tried to run but she came down on him like a giant iron fly swat. She rolled over him as she pursued the others, leaving just a smear of offal behind. The other three she brought down just a few yards later.
She moved on through the ship, no longer human, no longer even able to consider regaining control. And she hunted, killed and fed.
AMISTAD
Through thousands of eyes Amistad watched
The Rose
draw closer to Masada, passing a defence installation that contained one of the new gravity weapons. This device could have picked up the ship in a gravity wave and tossed it into the face of Calypse, or into the sun. But the weapon and its controlling submind remained somnolent, castrated by legalities and the protectorate status of this world. Amistad felt a frustration more related to his war drone past than his present warden status.
“Let
that ship through, and allow it to land.”
This communication channel had opened just a short while after
The Rose
had been knocked out of U-space by the USER and intercepted by the
Garrotte
. It was a channel that hadn’t opened since Amistad’s last communications with the Weaver, the newly evolved Atheter. This was some years ago now, when, under the Weaver’s control, a hooder known as the Technician had destroyed a rogue Atheter killing machine. Thereafter, the Weaver had negotiated with the human ambassador of Masada, Leif Grant. Other points regarding the governing of Masada had been settled between Amistad and Weaver’s Atheter AI. But after the negotiations the Weaver had lost interest, and all communications concerning the running of this world had been from its AI. However, this directive to let
The Rose
land had come direct from the Weaver, who had now disappeared.
Amistad had immediately asked why such a vessel, containing such a dangerous entity, should be let through, but there had been no reply from the Weaver. Similar questions directed towards the Weaver’s Atheter AI had received nil response too. Perhaps the AI just didn’t have the spare processing power to reply, since it was now busy interfering with Polity computing all around this world.
“How are you now?” Amistad asked.
The watch drone, currently stuck sideways in a mud bank a hundred kilometres from the viewing platform, emitted some hisses and squeaks before replying. The drone hadn’t been a Polity employee but had turned up one day, penetrating all sorts of defences, to watch the Weaver. Unusually, the Weaver had not objected to its presence through the AI, and Amistad had quickly routed over an employment contract. The drone had watched the Weaver for over a year without problems, but now there was a problem.
“Like an induction wave tore out my grav,” replied the crab-like drone.
Via its AI, the Weaver had requested much in the way of Polity manufacturing equipment and materials. Upon receiving that equipment, it had at once taken it into its baroque flute grass home. Here all the spyware and pin-head watchers had immediately been deactivated. Polity scanning devices had also failed to penetrate its home for over a year now. Using this equipment, the Weaver had apparently started producing various devices—though these could only be seen when it brought them out of its home. Some of these were perfectly understandable, like the atomic shear it used to cut flute grass. It had also constructed a complex hardfield generator, which it used to fold and weave both grasses and various other materials. Other devices were impenetrable, like the object it used to pull penny molluscs from their rocks, then set them floating while it fed on them. Amistad had at first thought it used hardfields to achieve this, but subsequent investigation detected interference with Van De Walls forces and subtle boson fields. It was this device the Weaver had used to bring down the watchful crab drone.
Amistad briefly replayed the incident. The Weaver had set out on one of its long perambulations, stopping to sample the odd tricone, which it seemed to relish. It occasionally snacked on penny oysters, which it always shifted through the air in precisely measured and unchanging patterns. As usual the crab drone was in tow. But today, during the Weaver’s third snack on those little molluscs, it had sent them into a pattern never seen before. The drone had moved closer and that was when the complex grav pulse had hit it and, with a screeing sound, it had dropped out of the sky into the mud bank. The Weaver had continued feeding for a while before moving off, but what it did thereafter wasn’t known.
The drone being knocked out of play shouldn’t have mattered because watch satellites, arrayed all around Masada, were capable of closely inspecting absolutely anything on the surface. But, shortly after the Weaver polished off its last penny oyster, forty watch satellites—those covering the main continent—simply shut down. Surface surveillance had also crashed and any attempt to gather data from privately owned scanning devices was disrupted. Amistad had been trying for some time to reactivate both the satellites and the surface stuff. But it had soon become apparent that something, presumably the Atheter AI, was interfering on AI levels. Even a request for gabbleduck sightings was being interfered with, with responses to this being scrambled over communication channels and locator beacons suddenly not knowing where they were.
“The Weaver doesn’t want to be watched,” said the drone.
“He’s up to something,” interjected the
Garrotte
AI from out in space. “Something involving Penny Royal.”
“When superior minds start stating the obvious,” said Amistad, “I tend to start questioning the appellation ’superior’.”
“He doesn’t trust us,” said the
Garrotte
. “After the initial negotiations about the protectorate status of this world, he began playing for time. Everything he has done and said since then has been designed to baffle and mislead.”
The world had first been subsumed into the Polity after the fall of its human theocracy but, under Polity protocols, the discovery of an alien autochthon meant it could not be part of the Polity. So the Polity had decided to “protect” this alien on this alien world. Seen through other eyes, that protection translated as isolation and control.
“In the same position, would you trust us?” the crab drone asked from its mud bank.
“Probably not, but I’d tend to trust a loose cannon like Penny Royal even less,” said the
Garrotte
. “I would guess this involves some weapon—some way for the Weaver to attack us.”
“That’s because you were formatted to think in martial terms,” said Amistad.
“As were you.”
“I was, but my horizons have since widened.”
“So what do you reckon?” asked the crab drone.
Amistad thought about the question for a whole microsecond. “I don’t think the
Garrotte
is right about the Weaver looking for a way to attack. More likely he is trying to obtain something to change his status from that of a protected sentient—to strengthen his bargaining position.”
“And Penny Royal is supplying that?”
“Possibly,” said Amistad, now studying the deep scan results of
The Rose
as it descended into the atmosphere of Masada. “Consider that ship’s hardfield,” he added.
“Seriously advanced hardfield linked into U-space tech,” the
Garrotte
surmised. “So a defensive system. I guess that makes sense.”
It did, Amistad felt, though the masses of singular mem-storage units aboard that ship didn’t. And, really, bringing some sort of defensive system here for the Weaver just seemed too simple for Penny Royal. One also had to wonder what the black AI was getting in exchange. Atheter knowledge or technology? Should Penny Royal be allowed such?
The
Garrotte
now added, “Maybe we should relax the rules a little and inadvertently send a multi-megaton CTD imploder
The Rose
’s way?”