Neal Asher - The Gabble

“Run system checks,” I instructed.

“Ooh, I never thought of that,” replied Ulriss.

“And there was me thinking AIs were beyond sarcasm.”

“It’s a necessary tool used for communicating with a lower species,” the ship’s AI replied.

I still think it was annoyed that I wouldn’t let it use the chameleonware.

“Take us under,” I said, ignoring the jibe.

Sudden acceleration pushed me back into my chair, and I felt, at some point deep inside my skull, the U-space engine come online. My perception distorted, the stars in the cockpit screen faded, and the screen greyed out. It lasted maybe a few seconds, then Ulriss Fire shuddered like a ground car rolling over a mass of deep potholes, and a starry view flicked back into place.

“What the fuck happened?”

“Checking,” said Ulriss.

I began checking as well, noting that we’d traveled only about eighty million miles and had surfaced to the real in deep space. However, I was getting mass readings out there.

“We hit USER output,” Ulriss informed me.

I just sat there for a moment, wracking my brains to try and figure out what a “user” was.

I finally admitted defeat. “I’ve no idea what you’re talking about.”

“I see,” said Ulriss, in an irritatingly superior manner. “The USER acronym stands for Underspace Inference Emitter-”

“Shouldn’t that be UIE, then?”

“Do you want to know what a USER is, or would you rather I began using my sarcasm tool again?”

“Sorry, do carry on.”

“A USER is a device that shifts a singularity in and out of U-space via a runcible gate, thus creating a disturbance that knocks any ships that are within range out of that continuum.

The USER here is a small one aboard the Polity dreadnought currently three thousand miles away from us. I don’t think we were the target. I think that was the cruiser now coming up to port.”

With the skin crawling on my back, I took up the joystick and asserted positional control, nudging the ship round with spurts of air from its attitude jets. Stars swung across the screen, then a large ugly-looking vessel swung into view. It looked like a flattened pear, but one stretched from a point on its circumference. It was battered, its brassy exotic armor showing dents and burns that its memform hull and s-con grids had been unable to deal with, and which hadn’t been repaired since. Missile ports and the mouths of rail-guns and beam weapons dotted that hull, but they looked perfectly serviceable. Ulriss had neglected to mention the word

“Prador” before the word “cruiser.” This is what had everyone checking their online wills and talking in whispers back in Paris.

“Stealth mode?” suggested Ulriss, with a degree of smugness.

“Fucking right,” I replied.

The additional instruments came alight and a luminescent ribbing began to track across the screen before me. I wondered how good the chameleonware was, since maybe bad chameleonware would put us in even greater danger-the Prador suspecting some sort of attack if they detected us.

“And now if you could ease us away from that thing?”

The fusion drive stuttered randomly-a low power note and firing format that wouldn’t put out too-regular ionization. We fell away, the Prador cruiser thankfully receding, but now, coming into view, a Polity dreadnought. At one time, the Prador vessel would have outclassed a larger Polity ship. It was an advantage the nasty aliens maintained throughout their initial attack during the war: exotic metal armor that could take a ridiculously intense pounding. Now Polity ships were armored in a similar manner, and carried weapons and EM warfare techniques that could penetrate to the core of Prador ships.

“What the hell is happening here?” I wondered.

“There is some communication occurring, but I cannot penetrate it.”

“Best guess?”

“Well, ECS does venture into the Graveyard, and it is still considered Polity territory.

Maybe the Prador have been getting a little bit too pushy.”

I nodded to myself. Confrontations like these weren’t that uncommon in the Graveyard, but this one was bloody inconvenient. While I waited, something briefly blanked the screen.

When it came back on again I observed a ball of light a few hundred miles out from the cruiser, shrinking rather than expanding, then winking out.

“CTD imploder,” Ulriss informed me.

I was obviously behind the times. I knew a CTD was an antimatter bomb, but an

“imploder”? I didn’t ask.

After a little while the Prador ship’s steering thrusters stabbed out into vacuum and ponderously turned it over. Then its fusion engines flared to life and began taking it away.

“Is that USER still on?” I asked.

“It is.”

“Why? I don’t see the point.”

“Maybe ECS is just trying to make a point.”

The USER continued functioning for a further five hours while the Prador ship departed. I almost got the feeling that those in the Polity dreadnought knew I was there and were deliberately delaying me. When it finally stopped, it took another hour before U-space had settled down enough for us to enter it without being flung out again. It had all been very frustrating.

People knew that if a ship was capable of traveling through U-space it required an AI to control its engines. Mawkishly they equated artificial intelligence with the godlike creations that controlled the Polity, somehow forgetting that colony ships with U-space engines were leaving the Solar System before the Quiet War, and before anyone saw anything like the silicon intelligences that were about now. The supposedly primitive Prador, who had nearly smashed the Polity, failed because they did not have AI, apparently. How then did they run the U-space engines in their ships? It came down, in the end, to the definition of AI-something that had been undergoing constant revision for centuries. The thing that controlled the engines in the

Kobashi,

Jael did not call an AI. She called it a “control system” or sometimes, a “Prador control system.”

Kobashi surfaced from U-space on the edge of the Graveyard far from any sun. The coordinates Desorla had reluctantly supplied were constantly changing in relation to nearby stellar bodies, but, checking her scanners, Jael saw that they were correct, if this black planetoid-a wanderer between stars-was truly the location of Penny Royal. The planetoid was not much bigger than Earth’s Moon, was frigid, without atmosphere, and had not seen any volcanic activity quite possibly for billions of years. However, her scans did reveal a cannibalized ship resting on the surface and bonded-regolith tunnels winding away from it like worm casts to eventually disappear into the ground. She also measured EM output-energy usage-for signs of life. Positioning Kobashi geostationary above the other ship, she began sending signals.

“Penny Royal, I am Jael Feogril and I have come to buy your services. I know that the things you value are not the same as those valued by … others. If you assist me, you will gain access to an Atheter memstore, from which you may retain a recording.”

She did not repeat the message. Penny Royal would have seen her approach and have been monitoring her constantly ever since. The thing called Penny Royal missed very little.

Eventually she got something back: landing coordinates-nothing else. She took Kobashi down, settling between two of those tunnels with the nose of her ship only fifty yards from the other ship’s hull. Studying the other vessel, she recognized a Polity destroyer, its sleek lines distorted, parts of it missing as if it had been slowly draining into the surrounding tunnels. After a moment she saw an irised airlock open. No message-the invitation was in front of her.