Redemption Ark

‘This is not in order. This is most irregular. A limited surgical intervention…’ The machine still had its clusters of sensors locked on to Clavain.

‘Master, this is a direct command. Let us pass.’

The servitor pulled away. ‘Very well. I comply under duress. I will insist that the visit be brief.’

‘We won’t detain you,’ Skade said.

‘No, you will not. You will also remove your weapons. I will not permit high-energy-density devices within my comet.’

Clavain glanced down at his suit’s utility belt, unclipping the low-yield boser pistol he had barely been aware he was carrying. He moved to place the pistol on the ice, but even as he did so there was a whiplike blur of motion from the Master of Works, flicking the pistol from his hand. He saw it spin off into the darkness above him, flung away at greater than escape velocity. Skade and Remontoire did likewise, and the Master disposed of their weapons with the same casual flick. Then the servitor spun round, its legs a dancing blur of metal, and then thrust itself back into the hole.

[Come on. It doesn’t really like visitors, and it’ll start getting irritated if we stay too long.]

Remontoire pushed a thought into their heads. [You mean it’s not irritated yet?]

What the hell is it, Skade?

[A servitor, of course, only somewhat brighter than the norm… does that disturb you?]

Clavain followed her through the collar and into the tunnel, drifting more than walking, guiding himself between the throatlike walls of compactified ice. He had barely been aware of the pistol he carried until it had been confiscated, but now he felt quite vulnerable without it. He fingered his utility belt, but there was nothing else on it that would serve as a weapon against the servitor, should it chose to turn against them. There were a few clamps and miniature grapples, a couple of thumb-sized signalling beacons and a standard-issue sealant spray. The only thing approaching an actual weapon — while the spray looked like a gun, it had a range of only two or three centimetres — was a short-bladed piezo-knife, sufficient to pierce spacesuit fabric but not much use against an armoured machine or even a well-trained adversary.

You know damned well it does. I’ve never had my mind invaded by a machine… not the way that one just did.

[It just needs to know it can trust us.]

While it trawled him he had tasted the sharp metallic tang of its intelligence. How clever is it, exactly? Turing-compliant?

[Higher. As smart as an alpha-level, at the very least. Oh, don’t give me that aura of self-righteous disgust, Clavain. You once accepted machines that were almost as intelligent as yourself.]

I’ve had time to revise my opinion on the subject.

[Is it that you feel threatened by it, I wonder?]

By a machine? No. What I feel, Skade, is pity. Pity that you let that machine become intelligent while forcing it to remain your slave. I didn’t think that was quite what we believed in.

He felt Remontoire’s quiet presence. [I agree with Clavain. We’ve managed to do without intelligent machines until now, Skade. Not because we fear them but because we know that any intelligent entity must choose its own destiny. Yet that servitor doesn’t have any free will, does it? Just intelligence. The one without the other is a travesty. We’ve gone to war over less.]

Somewhere ahead of them was a pale lilac glow that picked out the natural patterning of the tunnel walls. Clavain could see the servitor’s dark spindly bulk against the light source. It must have been listening in to this conversation, he thought, hearing them debate what it represented.

[I regret that we had to do it. But we didn’t have any choice. We needed clever servitors.]

[It’s slavery,] Remontoire insisted.

[Desperate times call for desperate measures, Remontoire.]

Clavain peered into the pale purple gloom. What’s so desperate? I thought all we were doing was recovering some lost property.

The Master of Works brought them to the interior of Skade’s comet, calling them to a halt inside a small, airless blister set into the interior wall of the hollowed-out body. They stationed themselves by hooking limbs into restraint straps attached to the blister’s stiff alloy frame. The blister was hermetically sealed from the comet’s main chamber. The vacuum that had been achieved within was so high-grade that even the vapour leakage from Clavain’s suit would have caused an unacceptable degradation.