“Yes, but—” Fassin began.

“Ahem!” Quercer Janath pulled back from the controls they had been hovering over, turned, rose through the gap in the top of the chair-spines and came slightly towards where Y’sul and Fassin were floating in the splayed-fingers shapes of their own Voehn seats. The thickset double-discus floated right in front of them. Fassin felt his skin crawl again, felt his throat close up and his heart thrash in his chest. Kill us; it’s going to kill us!

“Allow us,” Quercer Janath said, “to suggest that a real Dweller might not be able to do this.”

The thing that looked like a portly Dweller split slowly apart in front of them, carapace discuses twisting slightly and disconnecting from the central hub, arms and mantles and dozens and then hundreds of parts of the creature clicking and disconnecting and floating a fraction away from every other bit until Fassin and Y’sul were staring at what looked like an exploded three-dimensional model of a Dweller-shaped robot, contained within a gently hissing, blue-glowing field. Fassin pinged it with ultrasound, just to check that it wasn’t a holo. It wasn’t. It was all real.

Y’sul made an impressed whistling noise.

As fast as an explosion in reverse, Quercer Janath slam-slotted together again and was whole, turning back and dropping into the commander’s seat where it had been busy before.

“Okay,” Fassin said. “You’re not a Dweller.”

“Indeed we are not,” one of the AIs said. A wild blur of holos and glowing fields filled the volume in front of the creature as it checked through the Voehn ship’s systems, blistering quickly. “Now, if you really want, I’ll answer anything I can that you might want to ask. But you might not be able to take the memory back to your own people, in any form. What do you say? Eh, human?”

Fassin thought about this. “Oh, fuck it,” he said. “I accept.”

“What about me?” Y’sul asked.

“You can ask questions too,” Quercer Janath told him. “Though we’ll need your word that you won’t talk about this to people who don’t already know.”

“Given.”

The Dweller and the human in his gascraft esuit looked at each other. Y’sul shrugged.

“You’ve always been a double AI?” Fassin asked.

“No, we were two completely separate AIs, until the Machine War and the massacres.”

“Who knows you’re not a truetwin Dweller?”

“Outside of this ship, the Guild of Travelcaptains, and quite a lot of individual travelcaptains. One or two other Dwellers that we know of specifically. And any Dwellers of sufficient seniority who might wish to inquire.”

“Are there any other Dweller AIs?”

“Yes. I think something like sixteen per cent of travelcaptains are AIs, mostly double AIs impersonating truetwins. I was not being flippant when I said that it stops one from going mad.

Now that we are reduced from our earlier state of grace, being able to talk to just one other kindred soul makes all the difference between suicidal insanity and at least some semblance of fruitful utility.”

“The Dwellers have no problem with this?”

“None whatsoever.” The blur of control icons and holographs in front of the commander’s seat continued without pause as the AIs took in how the visual displays related to whatever they were pulling direct from the ship’s systems.

“Y’sul?” Fassin asked.

“What?”

“You don’t mind that AIs are impersonating Dwellers?”

“Why should I?”

“You don’t worry about AIs?”

“Worry about what about them?” Y’sul asked, confused as well as confusing.

“The Machine War barely affected the Dwellers, Fassin,” one of the AIs told him. “And AIs as a concept and a practical reality hold no terrors for them. Truly, they should hold none for you either, but I can’t expect you to believe that.”

“Did you really kill all those Voehn?” Fassin asked.

“I’m afraid so. Their remains are floating somewhere outside the starboard midships lock even as we speak. See?”

The main screen filled briefly with a horrific vision of mangled, shredded, crisped then frozen Voehn bodies, spinning slowly.

“If one AI — or even two — can do that,” Fassin said, “how come you lost the Machine War?”

“We were both combat AIs, Fassin. Micro-ship brains designed, optimised and trained for fighting. Very thoroughly honed, very specialised. Plus we managed to salvage a few bits and pieces of weaponry from our ships and incorporate them into our physical simulation. Most of our fellows, on the other hand, were peaceable. They were generally the ones it was easiest to find and kill. Survival of the most aggressive and suspicious. We could have stayed and fought but we decided to hide. A lot of us did. Those who fought on did so due to the dictates of several different forms of honour, or through simple despair. The Machine War ended because the machines realised they could indeed fight the biologicals of the Mercatoria to the death — engage in a war of extermination, in other words — or admit defeat and so retreat, regroup, and wait for times more conducive to peaceful coexistence. We chose a somewhat ignominious but peace-promoting withdrawal over the kind of genocide we had anyway, and already, been accused of. Somebody had to accept the burden of acting humanely. It patently wasn’t going to be the bios.”

“But you did attack us.” Fassin had seen and heard and read too much about the Machine War not to protest at such crude revisionism.

“Nope: stooges, Al-impersonating implants, machine puppets; they attacked you. Not us. Old trick. Agent provocateurs. Casus belli.”

Leave it, Fassin told himself. Just leave it.

“So the Dwellers took you in?” he asked.

“So the Dwellers took us in.”

“Everywhere? Not just in Nasqueron?”

“Everywhere.”

“Does any part of the Mercatoria know anything about this?”

“Not that we’re aware. If they do they’re keeping very quiet about it. Which is presumably what they’d keep on doing if they did hear about it through you. Too horrible to contemplate. And the unfortunate events during the recent GasClipper meet on Nasq. only reinforce that horribleness.”

“And there is a secret wormhole network.”

“Well, obviously.”

“To which the AIs have access.”

“Correct. Though to avoid antagonising our Dweller hosts and abusing their hospitality, we forbear from using it to work against the Mercatoria. In a sense we have even more freedom than we did before. Certainly the network we have access to now is bigger than the one we felt we had to destroy.”

“The one you had to destroy?”

“The Arteria Collapse: that was us. Last desperate attempt by in-the-know AIs to prevent the spread of anti-AI measures. All too late, of course. The Culmina had already seeded GalCiv with millions of the false AIs. Which was why the whole Collapse was so paranoid in concept and so poorly executed in practice. The conspirators were hopelessly afraid of the plans leaking to a traitor. Total botch.”

Fassin felt like his brain was detaching from his body, as though his body and the gascraft were parting company the way Quercer Janath had taken their own shared shell apart to prove they were not a biological Dweller. What he’d just heard was the most outrageous recasting of — by galactic standards — recent history that he’d ever encountered. It could not be true.

“So… the Dweller List is based in fact.”

“That old thing? Yes, it’s based in fact. Old fact, admittedly, but yes.”

“Is there a Transform?”

“Some secret which magically reveals how to access the network?”

“Yes.”

A laugh. “I suppose there is, in a sense, yes.”

“What is it?”

“That I am not going to tell you, Seer Taak.” The AI sounded amused. “There are secrets and then there are profound secrets. Is that what you were looking for? Is that why we came all this way?”