“It is.”
“My payment will be a recording of the Atheter memstore, and a recording of the Prador AI.”
“That seems … reasonable, though you’ll receive the recording of the Prador AI just before I’m about to leave.” She didn’t want Penny Royal to have time to work out how to crack her ship’s security.
At that moment, the same Prador AI-without speaking-alerted her to activity outside the ship. Using her augs she inspected an external view from the ship’s cameras. One of the tunnel tubes, its mouth filled with some grub- like machine, was advancing toward
“What’s going on outside?” she inquired politely.
“I presume you have no spacesuit for the gabbleduck?”
“Ah.”
Despite her threat, Jael knew she wasn’t fully in control here. She stepped up to one wall, via her aug commanding a safe to open. A steel bung a foot across eased out then hinged to one side. She reached in, picked up the memstore, then held it out to the golem. The test would come, she felt certain, when Penny Royal authenticated that small item.
The golem took the memstore between its finger and thumb and she noticed it had retained the syntheflesh pads of its fingers. It paused, frozen in place, then abruptly its ribcage split down the center and one half of it hinged aside. Within lay optics, the grey lump of a power supply and various interconnected units like steel organs. There were also dark masses spread like multi-armed starfish that Jael suspected had not been there when this golem was originally constructed. It pressed the memstore into the center of one of these masses, which writhed as if in pain and closed over it.
“Unrecognized programming format,” said the golem.
The golem continued, “Estimate at one hundred and twenty gigabytes, synaptic mapping and chronology of implantation….”
Jael felt a sudden foreboding. Though measuring a human mind in bytes wasn’t particularly accurate, the best guestimate actually lay in the range of a few hundred megabytes, so this memstore was an order of magnitude larger. But then, her assumption, and that of those who had found it, was that the memstore encompassed the life of one Atheter. This was not necessarily the case. Maybe the memories and mind maps of a thousand Atheter were stored in that little chunk of technology.
Finally the golem straightened up, reached inside its chest and removed the memstore, passing it back to Jael. “We will begin when the tunnel connects,” it said. “How will you move the gabbleduck?”
“Easy enough,” said Jael, and went to find her tranquilizer gun.
Ulriss woke me with a, “Rise and shine, the game is afoot … well, in a couple of hours-the signal is no longer dopplering so Jael’s ship is back in the real.”
I lay there blinking at the ceiling as the lights gradually came up, then pushed back the heat sheet, heaved myself over the edge of the bunk and dropped to the floor. I staggered, feeling slightly dizzy, my limbs leaden. It always takes me a little while to get functional after sleep, hence the two-hour warning from Ulriss. After a moment, I turned to peer at Gene who lay slumbering in the lower bunk.
“Integrity of the collar?” I enquired.
“She hasn’t touched it,” the ship AI replied, “though she did try to persuade me to release her by appealing to my sense of loyalty to the organization that brought me into being.”
“And your reply?”
“Whilst no right-thinking AI wants the Prador to get their hands on a living Atheter or one of their memstores, your intent to retrieve that store and by proxy carry out a sentence already passed on Jael Feogril should prevent rather than facilitate that. Polity plans will be hampered should you succeed, but, beside moral obligations, I am a free agent and Penny Royal’s survival or otherwise is a matter of indifference to me. Should you fail, however, your death will not hamper Polity plans.”
“Hey thanks-it’s nice to know you care.”
Sleepily, from the lower bunk, Gene said, “You’re rather sensitive for someone who was once described as a walking abattoir.”
“Ah,” I said, “so you’re frightened of me. That’s why you gave me the coding of that U-space signal?”
She pushed back her blanket and sat up. She’d stripped down to a thin singlet and I found the sight rather distracting, as I suspect was the intention. Reaching up, she fingered the metal collar around her neck. “Of course I’m frightened-you’ve got control of this collar.”
“Which will inject you with a short duration paralytic, not blow your head off as I earlier suggested,” I replied.
She nodded. “You also suggested that if I didn’t tell you what you wanted to know you would demonstrate on me the kind of things Jael did to you.”
“I’ve never tortured anyone,” I said, before remembering that she’d read my ECS record.
“Well … not anyone that didn’t deserve it.”
“You would have used drugs, and the other techniques Jael used on you.”
“True,” I nodded, “but I didn’t need to.” I gazed at her. “I think you’ve been involved in this operation for a while and rather resent not being in at the kill. I was your opportunity to change that. I understand-in the past I ended up in similar situations myself.”
“Yes, you liked to be in at the kill,” she said, and stooped down to pick up her clothing from where she had abandoned it on the floor. She’d sacked out after me, which had been okay as soon as I put the collar on her, since Ulriss had been watching her constantly.
I grunted and went off to find a triple espresso.
After a breakfast of bacon, eggs, mushroom steak, beans, a liter of grapenut juice, and more coffee, I reached the stage of being able to walk through doors without bouncing off the doorjamb. Gene ate a megaprawn steak, drank a similar quantity of the juice, and copious quantities of white tea. I thought I might try her breakfast the next time I used stores or the synthesizer. Supposing there would be a next time-only a few minutes remained before we surfaced from U-space. Gene followed me into the cockpit and sat in the co-pilot’s chair, which was about as redundant as the pilot’s chair I sat in, with the AI Ulriss running the ship.
We surfaced. The screen briefly showed stars, then banding began to travel across it. I glanced at the additional controls for chameleonware and saw that they had been activated.
“Ulriss-”
“Jael’s ship is down on the surface of a free-roaming planetoid next to an old vessel that seems to have been stripped and from which bonded-regolith tunnels have spread.”
“So Penny Royal is there and might see us,” I supplied.
“True,” Ulriss replied, “but that was not my first concern.” The view on the screen swung across, magnified, and switched to light amplification, bringing to the fore the planetoid itself and the Prador cruiser in orbit around it.
“Oh shit,” I opined.
We watched the cruiser as, using that stuttering burn of the fusion engine, Ulriss took us closer to the planetoid. Luckily there had been no reaction from the Prador ship to our arrival, and as we drew closer I saw a shuttle detach and head down.
“I wonder if this is part of Jael’s plan,” I said. “I would have thought she’d get the memstore loaded, then meet the Prador in some less vulnerable situation.”
“Agreed,” said Gene through gritted teeth. She glanced across at me. “What do you intend to do?”
“I intend to land.” I adjusted the screen controls to give me a view of Jael’s ship, the one next to it, and the surrounding spread of pipe-like tunnels. “She’s probably in there somewhere with the memstore and the gabbleduck. Shouldn’t be a problem getting inside.”
We watched the shuttle continue its descent and the subsequent flare of its thrusters as it decelerated over the network of tunnels.
“It could get … somewhat fraught down there. Do you have weapons?” Gene asked.
