Deathstalker Return Read Free Page A

a couple of centuries, and I could have got you into some live shows where the action would have steamed up your eyeballs and made them clang together. Clean living and decency is vastly overrated, if you ask me.”
    Lewis tried to stop scowling. It was making his head ache. “Oz ...”
    “Yes, sir! Right here and ready to serve your every wish, Sir Deathstalker!”
    “God, I hate a cheerful AI,” said Jesamine. “It’s like those recorded announcements you get at starports, when they apologize for your ship running late and screwing up all your connections. You know they don’t really mean it, the bastards. Every time I hear a computer getting cheerful, I just know bad news is coming.”
    “Let me get this straight, Oz,” said Lewis, determined not to get sidetracked. “You claim to be the same AI that served my ancestor, the blessed Owen, two centuries ago during the Great Rebellion. Yes?”
    “Well, yes and no,” said Ozymandias. “I’m not entirely him. He was destroyed twice. First by Owen and his companions when it was discovered that the original Ozymandias had been secretly programmed by the Empire to spy on them. The AIs of Shub managed to preserve a few fragments of the original AI personality and built a new AI around it. Then, later, Owen and Hazel destroyed that Oz after they found it was spying on them for Shub. Not a very lucky personality, when you get right down to it. I’d be worried if I was superstitious, which I’m programmed not to be. Anyway, the AIs of Shub built me around what fragments remained of the second Oz. So I’m not, strictly speaking, Ozymandias. I am a copy of a copy. But I’m as close as you’re going to get, so make the most of me, because I’m bloody good at what I do.”
    “Hold everything,” said Lewis. “Are you saying you’re a part of Shub? Just another of their voices, like the robots I met? And why do I just know you’re going to say ‘Yes and no’?”
    “I don’t know,” said Oz. “Maybe you’re psychic. I am a subpersonality—a fairly separate subroutine with a certain amount of autonomy. So I’m me, but I’m Shub as well, at a distance. I’m all yours, ready and eager to obey your every command, but Shub looks over my shoulder from time to time. And if you’re confused, think how I feel. Shub has raised multitasking to an art form.”
    “Great,” said Rose, not looking up from polishing her sword. “We’ve stolen the only ship in the Empire whose AI suffers from Multiple Personality disorder.”
    “And I hate these clothes too,” said Jesamine, following a logic only she understood.
    Though she did have a point. She and Brett had both had to change their clothing, on the grounds that what they’d been wearing had become more than a little battered and bloodstained during their escape from Logres. (Lewis had just scrubbed his armor clean, Rose had ignored the state of her leathers, and Saturday had licked the gore off his scales with a limber virtuosity that impressed and disturbed the others.) The only spare clothes on board the Hereward came from the captain’s closet. Fortunately, it held a fairly wide collection. Either the previous captain entertained a lot of friends, or he liked to play dress-up on long voyages.
    Jesamine was now wearing a series of overlapping silk creations in dazzling and fiercely clashing hues, all heavily perfumed. On first seeing herself in the mirror, Jesamine had angrily announced she looked like a Mistworld doxy. Brett had asked her how she knew, and the conversation had deteriorated rapidly. Brett himself was now wearing a thermal suit with built-in chameleon tech, so that he could fade into any background. He was very pleased with it, on the grounds that it opened up whole new fields of avoiding trouble and not being found when there were dangerous things that needed doing. Brett firmly believed that fighting was something other people did, and feats of heroism and derring-do were for people who