“Find the rope?” Fassin asked. He had a sudden image of taking the twisted piece of metal that Sal was playing with and sticking it into his eye.
Sal just shook his head. He looked dazed more than anything else. “Went over on my ankle,” he said. “Think it might be sprained. Barely made it back. Thought I could use the flier, get it through the stuff hanging above us and find a way over the top of all that wreckage, back to where it all happened, but the hanging stuff was more solid than it looked; came out here to try and signal.” The piece of twisted metal kept going round and round in his hands.
“What is that?” Fassin asked after a while.
Sal looked down at it. He shrugged. “From the ship. Just something I found.”
Taince reached round from behind him, wrenched the piece of metal from his hands and threw it away across the sand.
They sat there in silence until a Navarchy suborb showed up. When Taince went out to meet it, Sal got out of the flier and went, limping, to retrieve the fragment.
TWO:
DESTRUCTIVE RECALL
I was born in a water moon. Some people, especially its inhabitants, called it a planet, but as it was only a little over two hundred kilometres in diameter “moon’ seems the more accurate term. The moon was made entirely of water, by which I mean it was a globe that not only had no land, but no rock either, a sphere with no solid core at all, just liquid water, all the way down to the very centre of the globe.
If it had been much bigger the moon would have had a core of ice, for water, though supposedly incompressible, is not entirely so, and will change under extremes of pressure to become ice. (If you are used to living on a planet where ice floats on the surface of water, this seems odd and even wrong, but nevertheless it is the case.) This moon was not quite of a size for an ice core to form, and therefore one could, if one was sufficiently hardy, and adequately proof against the water pressure, make one’s way down, through the increasing weight of water above, to the very centre of the moon. Where a strange thing happened.
For here, at the very centre of this watery globe, there seemed to be no gravity. There was colossal pressure, certainly, pressing in from every side, but one was in effect weightless (on the outside of a planet, moon or other body, watery or not, one is always being pulled towards its centre; once at its centre one is being pulled equally in all directions), and indeed the pressure around one was, for the same reason, not quite as great as one might have expected it to be, given the mass of water that the moon was made up from. This was, of course,
I was born in a water moon. Some people, especially its inhabitants, called it a planet, but as it was only a little—
The captain broke off there, exponentially scrolling some of the rest across the screen, then stopping to read a line: “Where a strange thing happened.” He flicked further on, stopping again: “I was born in a water moon. Some people, especially its”
All like this? he asked his Number Three.
All the same, it is believed, sir. It appears to repeat precisely the same few hundred words, time after time. About twelve to the seventeen times. That is all that is left of its memory. Even the base operating system and instruction sets have been overwritten. This is a standard abominatory technique known as destructive recall.
It leaves no trace of what might have been there before?
Trace is left, but that too reveals a short repetitive. Tech begs suggest this is merely the last of many iterative over-writes. No trace remains of the machine’s true memories before it realised capture or destruction was inevitable.
Indeed.
The Voehn captain tapped a control to take the display through to the end. The screen froze for an appreciable moment, then displayed: “I was born—”
This is the very last section of memory?
Yes, sir.
An expression another Voehn would have recognised as a smile crossed the captain’s face, and his back-spines flexed briefly.
This has been checked, Number Three? There is no other content, are no hidden messages?
It is being checked, sir. The totality of the data exceeds our ship’s memory capacity and is being processed in blocks. What you see here is technically an abstraction.
Time to accomplish?
Another twenty minutes.
Any other media capable of supporting significant stored information load?
None. The construct was mostly what it appeared: a comet head. The main artificial part of it was the abomination at the core, the sensory and propulsion units being separate, surface-mounted and motley. Tech informs fully checked.
Original language used in the repeated piece?
As seen: Old Standard.
Origin of quoted piece?
Unknown. A tentative analysis from Tech\Soc. rated nineteen per cent suggests it may be of Quaup origin.
The Quaup, the majority of whom were part of the Mercatoria — the captain had served on a war craft with a Quaup officer — were of the meta-species type people usually called blimps, small to medium-sized balloon-like creatures, air-going oxygen processors. The repeated passage filling the captured machine’s memory was fairly obviously told from the point of view of a submersible waterworlder. Well, the captain thought, people wrote from the points of view of others. At primary college he himself had composed poems as though he was a Culmina, before he had realised this was a crime of presumption, confessed and rightly been punished for it. Quite put him off composition.
The only major blot on the captain’s otherwise exemplary military-education record had been a phase of remediation required to bring his Deployable Empathic Quotient up to scratch, this flaw later being diagnosed as a consequence of his shunning all such feelings after his inadvertent insult and subsequent disciplining. Still, he had made captain, which one did not do without some empathic subtlety, anticipating the feelings of both one’s crew and one’s opponents.
He looked out at the half-melted remains of the captured construct, a pitted, black-body, comet-disguised vessel which had been roughly eight hundred metres in diameter and was now missing a great quarter-bite of structure. It lay a couple of kilometres off, radiating the last of the heat from its partial destruction, surrounded by a small system of wreckage, dark shards and splinters orbiting its ravaged body.
The view, lit by one of their own ship’s attenuated CR beams, was about as clear and perfect as it could possibly be; there was no screen in the way, and not even any transparent hull material, atmosphere or other medium. The captain was looking straight out from the flying bridge of his ship, an open-work nest of massive but elegantly sculpted girder work on the outside of the vessel. The vessel was unshared with any other species, crewed by Voehn only, happily, so the rest of the ship was open to vacuum too. For the duration of the action they had been deep in the guts of the ship, of course, safe in the core control space, sheltered by layers of shields and hull, senses protected by screens, but — once the wreck had been judged safe — the captain, his Number Three and a couple of favoured ratings had made their way to the exterior, the better to appreciate the view of their vanquished foe.
The captain looked around, as if hoping to see some real comet nuclei floating past. Taking a bearing, zooming in, he could just make out the lights denoting the drives of his other two ships, ordered to return to the inner system once the engagement was over, two dim blue stars, untwinkling. Save those, all that was visible nearby was the ship beneath them and the wreck two klicks away.
A cold and lonely spot to die, the captain thought. A logical, sensible choice of hiding place for the abomination machine, but still not a site any living — or apparently living — thing raised anywhere else would normally choose as a place to spend its last moments.