She stepped out to my left. I knew I could not give her the slightest chance or she would take me down yet again. I drove the knife in to the side, cut down, grabbed and pulled. In a gout of icy fog her visor skittered across the stone. Choking, she staggered away from me, even then drawing her pulse-gun, which must have been cold-adapted. I drove a foot into her sternum, knocked the last of her air out. Pulse-gun shots tracked along the frigid stone past me and I brought the edge of my hand down on her wrist, cracking bone and knocking the weapon away.
Her fist slammed into my ribs and her foot came up to nearly take my head off. Blind and suffocating she was the hardest opponent I’d faced hand-to-hand … or maybe it was that rustiness again. But she went down, eventually, and I dragged her to Ulriss Fire before anoxia killed her.
“Okay,” I said as she regained consciousness. “What the fuck killed her?”
After a moment of peering at the webbing straps binding her into the chair, she said,
“You broke my wrist.”
“Talk to me and I’ll let my autodoc work on it. You set me up, Gene. Is that your real name?”
She nodded absently, though whether that was in answer to my question I couldn’t tell. “I noticed you said ‘what’ rather than ‘who.’”
“A human who takes the trouble to skin someone alive and nail them to the ceiling without making a great deal more mess than that shouldn’t be classified as a who. It’s a thing.” I watched her carefully-trying to read her. “So maybe it was a thing … rogue golem?”
“Rho Var Olssen, employed by ECS for wet ops outside the Line, a sort of one-man vengeance machine for the Polity who maybe started to like his job just a little too much. Who are you to righteously talk about classifications?”
“So you know about me. I had you typed when you insisted on calling me a murderer.
Nothing quite so moralistic as an ECS agent working outside of her remit-helps to justify it all.”
“Fuck you.”
“Hit a nerve did I?” I paused, thinking that perhaps I was being a little naive. She was baiting me to lead me away from the point. “So it was a golem that killed Desorla?”
“In a sense,” she admitted grudgingly. “She was watched and she said too much-to Jael, specifically.”
“Tell me more about Jael.”
Staring at me woodenly, she said, “What’s to tell? We knew her interest in ancient technology and we knew she kept a careful eye on people like you. We put something in the way of your sifter and made sure she found out about it.”
I felt hollow. “The memstore … it’s a fake?”
“No, it’s the real thing, Rho. It had to be.”
I thought about me lying on the floor of my home with a rock hammer imbedded in my skull. “I could have died.”
“An acceptable level of collateral damage in an operation like this,” she said flatly.
I thought about that for one brief horrible moment. Really, there were many people on many worlds trying to find Atheter artifacts, but how many of them were like me? How many of them were so inconvenient? I imagined this was why some AI had chosen my life as an
“acceptable level of collateral damage.”
“And what is this operation?” I finally asked. “Are you out to nail Prador?”
She laughed.
“I guess not,” I said.
“You worked out what Jael was doing yourself. I don’t know how…” She gazed at me for a moment but I wasn’t going to help her out. She continued, “If she can restore the mind to a gabbleduck she has an item to sell to the Prador that will net her more wealth than even she would know how to spend. But there’s a problem: you don’t just feed the memstore to the gabbleduck, you’re not even going to be able to jury rig some kind of link-up using aug technology. That memstore is complex alien tech loaded in a language few can understand.”
“She needs an AI … or something close…”
“On the button, but though some AIs might venture outside Polity law as we see it, there are certain lines even they won’t cross. Handing over a living Atheter to the Prador is well over those lines.”
“A Prador AI, then.”
“The only ones they have are in their ships-their purpose utterly fixed. They don’t have the flexibility.”
“So what the fuck-”
“Ever heard of Penny Royal?” she interrupted.
I felt a surge of almost superstitious dread. “You have got to be shitting me.”
“No shit, Rho. You can see this is out of your league. We’re done here.”
“You put some kind of tracer in the memstore.”
She gave me a patronizing smile. “Too small. We needed U-tech.”
Suddenly I got the idea. “You put it in the gabbleduck.”
“We did.” She stared at me for a long moment, then continued resignedly, “The signal remains constant, giving a Polity ship in the Graveyard the creature’s location from moment to moment. The moment the gabbleduck is connected to the memstore, the signal shuts down, then we’ll know that Penny Royal has control of both creature and store, and then the big guns move in. This is over, Rho. Can’t you see that? You’ve played your part and now the game has moved as far beyond you as it has moved beyond me. It’s time for us both to go home.”
“No,” I said. I guessed she didn’t understand how being tortured, then nearly killed, had really ticked me off. “It’s time for you to tell me how to find Jael. I’ve still got a score to settle with her.”
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.