by Neal Aher
“And the moons?” Cvorn prompted, as he exited his sanctum and headed towards the transfer tunnel to the other ship. His second-children were walking in front of him, bearing his baggage train. Ahead of these Vrom and the other, armoured second-children had already entered the dreadnought—following their orders precisely.
Two of the moons were nothing special. The largest was a standard meteor-pocked sphere while the other was an irregular object rather like a wrack pustule. The third moon was also spherical and pocked, but it had a large shadowy hole at one end and the mass readings were all wrong. Knowing that closer inspection would reveal more, Cvorn waited for Sfolk to understand.
“One is artificial,” said that prador.
Both the Kingdom and the Polity had made hides during the war. They would heat an asteroid to melting point with an energy weapon, then use either field technology or mechanical means to inject gas and blow it up like a balloon. After it cooled, they would cut a hole in one end. The result was a hollow sphere of rock in which to conceal a ship, a fleet or some massive weapon. The Polity had made this one, hence the pocking on its surface as of millennia of meteor impacts—a detail the prador tended to omit.
“We’ll put this dreadnought inside, which will require some cutting, but can be done,” said Cvorn, now reaching the threshold into the other ship. “This will bring the mass reading up close to requirements. We foam-stone in the hole and then the Polity chameleonware I am bringing aboard can conceal any further discrepancies.”
Now moving into the dreadnought, Cvorn turned to the door back into his own destroyer. He felt a pang of regret, then turned to the second-child waiting beside him. “You are ready?”
“Yes, Father,” the child replied.
“Then you now have control of my destroyer—take it to the designated location and await orders.”
The second-child scuttled aboard. It would soon establish itself in Cvorn’s sanctum and take control of the destroyer. Cvorn could have moved the ship to the nearby world and opened fire with its weapons by remote control, but Sverl might intercept the signal. Better to let the second-child carry out this task, because it would obey absolutely, despite the high chance that Sverl would vaporize both destroyer and second-child. Instead, Cvorn was switching now to the dreadnought, establishing a firm grip on the five first-children through the aug network. He swung back round on his grav-motors to face into the dreadnought, feeling a sudden surge of unaccustomed excitement.
“Sfolk,” he said, “remove yourself from this ship’s captain’s sanctum and take yourself to the first-children’s quarters where your brothers are waiting.”
“Vlern . . . Cvorn . . . I don’t understand why I . . .”
“Do it now,” said Cvorn, and pushed mentally, relishing the power.
Sfolk fought, but just could not win and, by the time Cvorn reached the massive diagonally divided door into the captain’s sanctum, Sfolk was scuttling away down a nearby corridor. Cvorn halted at the door, abruptly fighting the urge to send his children after the young adult to bring it back, to tear it apart, and he didn’t know why. Finally, he entered the sanctum; the urge faded as he again contacted all five of Vlern’s children, his control of them now rigid.
“You are to send all your second-children kin to ship’s food store number three,” he instructed, even at that moment usurping Sfolk’s grip on the controls all around him and absorbing data on the dreadnought into his aug. He moved over to the array of screens here, inserted his artificial claws into pit controls and immediately began calling up images there. This was unnecessary because, like Sverl, he could use mental control here, but he felt the need to assert control physically.
He watched Vrom and his own second-children converging on that food store and entering it. Sfolk and crew, he noted, had already used the store as a mortuary; the corpses of the third-, second- and first-children who had been the original ship’s complement were piled high in there. The original father-captain wasn’t there, of course. He lay against the wall some yards behind Cvorn—a father-captain larger and older even than him, all his limbs gone and replaced by prosthetics. Cvorn turned to eye the corpse. Judging by the tool chest here and the pieces cut from the corpse’s carapace, Sfolk had been extracting control units, probably to use to take full control of the drones aboard. Cvorn gazed for a moment at the armoured legs and did not know why he had begun to consider some options for himself. A flash of memory occurred, of being mobile on his own legs, of being young and strong . . . It might be good not to be wholly reliant on his grav-motors to get around. He turned back to the screens.
Obeying the orders of their older brothers, Vlern’s second-children were entering the food store. They milled about in the centre of the room, nervous of the armoured prador gathered along one wall, sending requests to the Five for further orders. The Five did not elaborate—Cvorn did not allow them to. Meanwhile, his destroyer had undocked and was now accelerating away. Within a few hours, it would arrive at the nearby world, descend through the atmosphere to the sea, then drop through that to a deep oceanic trench. There it would be far down enough to defend itself from most long-range weapons Sverl, who would have followed the trail here, might hurl at it, and Sverl, therefore, would have to move in close to launch an effective attack, leaving his back unguarded.
All the second-children arrived in the food store and, from his sanctum, Cvorn issued a signal to close the door. Their breath created a sudden cloud of vapour in that chill place.
Then Vrom and the rest opened fire with Gatling cannons.
The children shrieked and clattered and flew apart in a mess of shattered carapace, disconnected limbs and smoking flesh. The place filled with the fog of their dying. This went on for some minutes, then waned to intermittent firing as Cvorn’s children waded into the mess to finish off any survivors.
Eventually Vrom said, “Task complete.” The first-child tended to speak with the leaden tones of an executioner even when he wasn’t killing someone or something.
“Very good,” said Cvorn, finally managing to overcome the tight visceral surge of excitement he had felt on watching that slaughter. “Establish control in critical areas.” Though he could direct most things from here, Cvorn wanted his children at the weapons and defensive emplacements throughout the ship.
As his children dispersed from the food store, Cvorn opened up the dreadnought’s fusion engines to take it in pursuit of the hollow moon. It would take him perhaps a few days to conceal the ship properly, but that was okay—Sverl, who was undoubtedly pursuing, would be reaching the satellite relay by now so was still some days away.
TRENT
Facilities were basic. Trent had a bed with a case of soldier’s rations underneath, and a toilet that slid out of the wall. He couldn’t wash himself, couldn’t clean his teeth, but luckily had no need to shave since facial hair had been excised from the Sobel line. Obviously he just needed to be delivered alive—his dental health or cleanliness being irrelevant.
The ship’s AI—that submind of this thing called the Brockle—hadn’t spoken to him since they had left Par Avion. After a period of time he couldn’t measure, during which he just ate something, used the toilet and then lay down to sink into a dark malaise, he slept. After that, he began to number his options and knew there weren’t many. He considered suicide but, searching his own clothing, found that he had been relieved of every item that might be of use to that end. All he had was his clothing, his earring, his mind. He couldn’t hang himself even with something to which he could attach a rope made out of his clothing. The ship AI would simply turn off the grav and he’d end up floating about on a rope umbilicus looking like an idiot. Maybe he could bite through his wrists or make some sharp edge out of his earring to open them. Too slow, and surely the AI could react to this in some way. His throat? Yes, maybe, but even as he thought about this he knew it was only an intellectual exercise and that he wasn’t going to do it.
So all that remained was waiting to
see what was going to happen to him. He would arrive somewhere, whereupon a forensic AI would begin taking him apart and inspecting those parts in detail. Whether the process would be painful he didn’t know, though he did know that his suffering or otherwise would be a matter of irrelevance to the AI. After that he would be dead, gone, would have ceased to exist. He contemplated that knowledge and suddenly found that it simply didn’t matter. He was a prisoner walking a corridor to the electric chair, the noose, the firing squad, the lethal injection or the disintegrator and it didn’t matter which. He just needed it to be over.
During the ensuing three periods of waking, Trent thought about his past, wished he could change it but accepted he couldn’t. Eventually, he felt a familiar twist in his gut and that drag out of the ineffable. It slapped him hard, brought him back into the moment. Then the ship AI spoke again.
“Deceleration in five minutes,” it said.
Maybe, if he positioned himself just so, he could use the deceleration as a method of suicide. Maybe stand on the edge of the bed and throw himself head-first at the floor as it ramped up. No. Trent walked over to the bed and lay on it, arms down by his sides. This time, though the invisible boot pressing down on him was heavy, he did not lose consciousness. After half an hour, the boot came off, and he sat up, his stomach tight and his clothing soaked with sweat. The ship was manoeuvring, occasional surges dragging him one way or another. He swung his legs over the side of the bed and sat waiting for the executioner.
Docking came next—the familiar crumps as clamps engaged somewhere outside this ship. Next, a horrible sensation traversed his body like some sort of roller passing through his flesh. His vision distorted, everything going in and out of focus then switching to black and white, then sliding into intense colour before returning to normal. He went deaf for a moment before hearing returned with such intensity he could hear the slight shifting of his clothing and the thump of his own pulse. It was as if he was a machine and something was now playing with his slide switches. He wondered if whatever had inspected him saw him that way too. He stood up.
As if in response, the locks securing the door into his cabin clonked and the door unlatched. He thought about just staying where he was and waiting, but that was cowardice. He walked over to the door and opened it, stepped through into the hold, glancing over at the Golem prostrate on its sled, and walked to the loading door, which stood open. He walked down the ramp door onto the grav-plated floor of an internal dock of either a space station or ship. Worn steel gratings rattled underfoot, scratched and dented bubble-metal panels clad the walls, and the circular doors, standing open on tunnels leading from the dock, were of a design he had only seen in a VR fantasy. This place, whatever it was, had the stink of antiquity. It looked as if it must have been built before even the Quiet War. His boots clonking on the gratings, he chose at random and stepped through one of the circular doors.
The tunnel here had a flat floor of bubble-metal, worn through to the closed-cell foam in places by the passage of feet. Just inside the doorway, and on either side, stood columns. On one of these rested a human skull, yet it bothered him not at all. What drew his attention was the glass sculpture on the other column. It was of a hooder and it seemed to be writhing—not in actuality but in some place deep in his mind.
“It was made by one of your associates,” said an echoing voice. “Or should I say one of your superiors.”
“Who’s that?” Trent asked, though he knew the answer.
“Mr Pace, of course,” replied the voice. “He’s an artist I would like to meet, but it is becoming increasingly unlikely that I will.”
Trent hadn’t been asking who made the sculpture because he had recognized the style. Peering ahead, down the long dark tunnel, he saw a white object shifting far in the distance and expanding as it grew closer.
He expected some nightmare to come for him, but then gazed in puzzlement as a large fat youth—a mobile Buddha—resolved out of the gloom and sauntered down the tunnel towards him. This figure was shaven-headed—in fact, his obese body was completely hairless, lacking eyebrows and eyelashes. He wore red plastic sandals and skin-tight swimming shorts. He should have been ridiculous, but his presence weighed in Trent’s mind like a heavy chunk of viciously sharp glass. His eyes were black buttons and there appeared little to read in them, least of all being mercy. Trent backed out onto the dock again to give himself room, though he suspected this would do him no good.
“Trent Sobel,” said the youth. “Welcome to the prison hulk the Tyburn. I am the Brockle and I am here to execute sentence on you.”
Trent stepped back again as this youth, this thing, somehow also a forensic AI, advanced on him. Could he fight it? Should he try? No—this was it, this was how he ended. Fat Boy continued to advance, his gait rolling, then stuttering as his whole body turned silvery and began to shift as if worms were moving under his skin. Lines began to etch themselves into that skin and segmentation began to occur. Trent watched in horror as the man’s thigh unravelled into a long, flat, segmented worm and dropped to the floor, squirming along to keep up.
The Brockle reached for him, fingers melding into things like flat metallic liver flukes that closed on either side of Trent’s face. Its head tilted over, the eyes were sucked within, and began to split. Trent felt other tentacles grabbing his clothing and squirming inside, then stabs of pain all over his head. The grate of hard little drills bit into his skull. He had a moment to think that this wasn’t so bad—he’d suffered more pain than this and endured—then the agony took hold and he screamed.
He screamed until something squirmed into his mouth and complemented the agony with a suffocation that showed no sign of ending.
SVERL
Sverl, who controlled his U-space drive directly with the AI component of his mind, surfaced his dreadnought from that continuum with hardfields flickering on and all weapons ready to deploy in an instant. At AI speeds, he gathered and sorted data from his ship’s sensors. Within seconds he realized that Cvorn wasn’t here, that the satellite data had been misleading.
“It’s a relay,” he announced.
“Cvorn might be prador but he’s not stupid,” Bsorol replied.
“Depending on how you measure stupidity,” interjected his brother Bsectil.
Sverl immediately wondered what he was supposed to make of that. Was this banter something recently acquired along with their new augs or had it always been there, but generally more low-key? Sverl considered his two first-children, who he had decided should try out augmentation before the others. He had to remember first that they weren’t static minds like war drones, kamikazes or ship minds. At least, they weren’t as static as those things would have been if made by prador other than himself. They were pheromonally enslaved creatures whom Sverl kept in a permanent state of chemically maintained adolescence. However, he had maintained them in that state for over a hundred years—a good eighty years longer than was usual, since fathers generally killed and replaced their first-children every two decades. Bsorol and Bsectil were very old, and no reason existed why they should not have continued learning throughout their time. They were older, in fact, than many father-captains in the Kingdom at that moment.
“It seems,” he said, “that since acquiring your augs you are finding your usual tasks less onerous and have time to speculate on and discuss things beyond your remit. I therefore have another task for you to perform.”
“Yes, Father,” said Bsectil meekly, while Sverl detected Bsorol mentally erecting defences in his augmentation. Due to a problem some decades ago with the automatic lacing of his food with growth retardant, Bsorol had come very close to making the transformation into an adult. Sverl now wondered if he had gained a smidgen more free will than his brother.
Sverl sent to both of their augs some complex schematics, the location in ship’s stores of his cache of Polity AI crystal, and their orders.
“You want to give the war drones crystal too,” said Bsorol resentfully.
“It’s not the same,” said Sverl. “Your augmentations contain AI crystal and have raised your game, as Arrowsmith would say, because you already have extensive mental capacity. Similar augmentation for them would not take them beyond sub-AI computing.”
“Still,” Bsorol grumped.
“The drones are also completely incapable of disobedience,” Sverl added, “which I am inclined to think is not something beyond your reach. Obey your orders, Bsorol.”
“Yes, Father,” the ancient first-child replied.
Bsorol’s tone had sounded exasperated to Sverl, yet why should it be? He watched them both head away from the two particle cannons to which he had assigned them and towards the indicated store. He observed them very carefully as they collected the designated amount of crystal, adaptors and cross-tech components and then began making their way to the drone cache. He watched Bsorol the most closely because he didn’t think it beyond that first-child to take some components for himself in the hope of grabbing some time on an auto-surgery when Sverl was looking the other way. At the drone cache they began taking apart four war drones and installing the crystal. Perhaps it wasn’t such a great idea, for his own safety, to so “raise the game” of his own children, but Sverl had begun to feel a growing distaste and, perhaps, boredom with his utter control of them. He found them interesting now. Was this because Sverl was becoming more human or more AI, or was he simply feeling the ennui of his years bearing down on him?
Sverl now transferred his main attention back to the satellite relay. Cvorn had mounted it on a small deep-space asteroid mainly consisting of ice and naturally foamed rock. Already his AI component, working with the relay’s signal traffic and with deep scans, had produced some results. He would have to send one of his children or a robot over to make the required physical connections so they could track the signal it was receiving. Perhaps he should assign Bsectil to—