Neal Asher - The Gabble

Jael did not like being this close to a golem. Either they were highly moral creatures who served the Polity and would not look kindly on her actions, and who were thoroughly capable of doing something about them, or they were the rare amoral/immoral kind, and quite capable of doing something really nasty. No question here-the thing crammed in beside her in the airlock was a killer, or, rather, it was a remote probe, a submind that was part of a killer. As she understood it, Penny Royal had these submind golems scattered throughout the Graveyard, often contributing to the title of the place.

After the lock pressurized, the inner door opened to admit them into the Kobashi . While Jael removed her spacesuit, the golem just stood to one side-a static silver skeleton with hardware in its ribcage, cybermotors at its joints and interlinked down its spine, and blue irised eyeballs in the sockets of its skull. She wondered if it had willingly subjected itself to Penny Royal’s will or been taken over. Probably the latter.

“This way,” she said to it once she was ready, and led the way back toward the ship’s hold. Behind her the golem followed with a clatter of metallic feet. Why did it no longer wear syntheflesh and skin? Just to make it more menacing? She wasn’t sure Penny Royal was that interested in interacting with people. Maybe the usual golem coverings just didn’t last in this environment.

At her aug command a bulkhead door thumped open and she paused beside it to don a breather mask before stepping through into an area caged off from the rest of the hold. The air within was low in oxygen and would slowly suffocate a human, but its mixing with the rest of the air in the ship while this door was open wasn’t a problem since the pressure differential pushed the ship air into this space. The briefly higher oxygen levels would not harm the hold’s occupant since its body was rugged enough to survive a range of environments-probably its kind was engineered that way long ago. Beyond the caged area in which they stood, the floor was layered a foot deep with flute grass rhizomes-as soggy underfoot as sphagnum. The walls displayed Masadan scenery overlaid with bars so the occupant didn’t make the mistake of trying to run off through them. Masadan wildlife sounds filled the air and there were even empty tricone shells on the rhizome mat for further authenticity.

The gabbleduck looked a great deal more alert and a lot healthier than when Koober had owned it. As always, when she came in here, it was squatting in one corner. Other than via the cameras in here, she had seen it do nothing else. It was as if, every time she approached, it heard her and moved to that corner, which should not have been possible since the bulkhead door was thoroughly insulated.

“Subject appears adequate,” said the golem. “It will be necessary to move it into the complex for installation.”

“Gruvver fleeg purnok,” said the gabbleduck dismissively.

“The phonetic similarity of the gabble to human language has always been puzzling,”

said the golem.

“Right,” said Jael. “The memstore?” She gestured to the door and the golem obligingly moved out ahead of her.

She overtook the golem in the annex to the main airlock, opened another bulkhead door and led the way into her living area. Here she paused. “Before I show you this next item, there are one or two things we need to agree on.” She turned and faced the golem. “The gabbleduck and the memstore must go no deeper into your complex than half a mile.”

The golem just stared at her, waiting, not asking the question a human would have asked.

It annoyed Jael that Penny Royal probably understood her reasoning and it annoyed her further that she still felt the need to explain. “That keeps it within the effective blast radius of my ship.

If I die, or if you try to take from me the gabbleduck or the memstore, I can aug a signal back here to start up the U-space engine, the field inverted and ten degrees out of phase. The detonation would excise a fair chunk of this planetoid.”

The golem just said, “The AI here is of Prador manufacture.”

“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 Kobashi .

“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.

No shit , thought Jael.

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.”