by Neal Aher
Sverl reached out mentally and seized control of his U-space engines, inputting coordinates and dropping his dreadnought into that continuum. It struck him as likely that Gost would get the coordinates he wanted anyway. If the coming encounter with Cvorn was as dangerous as Sverl supposed, his ship’s systems would probably receive extensive damage. This would negate his ability to conceal his U-space jump coordinates. It also occurred to him that the black AI, whether breaching time or otherwise, possessed a grotesque sense of humour. It had to be that drone that knew the coordinates of Room 101; it had to be Riss.
TRENT
There were five normal people in the shell people’s cage, awaiting their fate (that is, if you counted the catadapt woman as normal), and they had now gathered round. Trent pondered on the meaning of normal. Was he normal, as a heavy-worlder of the Sobel line? His ancestors had chopped about their DNA in such a way that it was further from that of old Earth humans than theirs was from a chimpanzee. He decided that normal in this situation simply had to mean “not one of the shell people.”
“So how do you know all this?” he asked the man, now identified as Rider Cole, while he thought about what he had just been told. Taiken had turned himself into a father-captain and, with the pheromones he now produced, had enslaved all the rest of the shell people.
“I learned about the shell people while in pre-upload studies,” said Cole, who was black haired, sharp faced and fevered. “I’m a doctor.”
“A doctor,” Trent repeated, studying the dubious frown on the face of one of the others listening in.
At one time the title was quite specific, but now it could mean a thousand things. Trent wished he still had his aug because he could have connected to the gold D-link behind this man’s ear and got his full profile and list of qualifications—and whether he had earned them the hard way from studies in slow time or from instantaneous uploads.
“I came here to help them,” said Cole.
Someone snorted in the small gathering.
“To help them turn into prador without turning into stinking wrecks?” asked Trent.
“No, to dissuade them from their course,” said Cole. His expression then changed, looked hungry, and he added, “And persuade them to give me the permission to treat them.”
“Our Rider here hasn’t had much luck persuading them,” interjected the catadapt woman. “Maybe they prefer their kind of madness.”
Trent absorbed that, then focused his attention on Cole again. “What kind of doctor are you?”
Cole shrugged and spread his hands. “A general title might be ’mind-tech.”
Trent studied the D-link aug on the side of the man’s head and now noticed the additions. The second port below the optic plug wasn’t for data but probably for neuro-chemicals which he could feed into a mental network. A series of pinholes in a circle behind that was for plug-in upload and download chips.
“And not working in the Polity,” said Trent.
“There’s little call there for what I do.”
In the Polity, nanoscopic surgical intervention and mental editing could deal with most psychological problems. If you had something organically wrong with your brain then a surgeon would correct that at birth. If it occurred later, a standard autodoc could usually deal with it—an AI surgeon dealing with the more serious stuff. If you had issues you couldn’t deal with, then you’d either edit them out of existence or delete their emotional content. And, of course, if you preferred to retain your malady as some sort of distinguishing feature, you could always do something weird, like try to turn yourself into a prador.
Rider Cole, Trent reckoned, was one of those mind-techs whose work bordered on obsession and illegality. However, he had retained some distorted morality. He was trying to persuade the shell people to accept his treatment, rather than forcing them to accept it. “Well,” Trent said, a sour taste in his mouth at this reminder of mental editing, “if you want to help them now then I suggest you hand over that neat little shear you cut my bonds with.”
When had Penny Royal edited him? In the falling wreck of the Moray Firth, or some time before? When had the AI given him a conscience and the utterly crippling ability to feel the pain of others? Or, and now a stray thought occurred, had it not been Penny Royal but that fucking forensic AI the Brockle? No, he didn’t know why, but he felt sure the black AI had done this.
“I don’t agree with violence,” said Cole, looking fevered again.
Trent nodded to himself. The additions to Cole’s aug gave the game away. The man was obsessive about his work and had obviously been experimenting on himself. He probably wasn’t rational.
“You don’t?” Trent stared at him. The urge to lash out rose up inside him but, rather than feel joy at finding an excuse to thump someone, he felt sickened by the prospect. He realized that during the fight in Taiken’s sanctum he had reacted from experience and training, but his emotional response was totally at odds with that impulse now.
“You’ve just told me what’s happening here,” he said, trying to be reasonable. “You’ve just told me how Taiken is taking the next logical steps to becoming more like the prador by pheromonally enslaving the other shell people. So what do you think is going to happen to those of us who refused his offer?”
Cole now looked slightly sick. He knew, all right.
Trent continued, “Taiken could have forced the issue with all of us but he didn’t. Now why do you think that is? What do prador do with human prisoners?”
“Uh,” said Cole.
“Believe me,” Trent continued relentlessly, “those aren’t just here for display purposes.” He pointed to the big glass bottle on its stand outside the cage. “You are of course familiar with the process called ‘coring and thralling’?” Such harmless words until you knew that it was a human being who was cored—brain and part of the spinal column removed—and then thralled—enslaved—by the insertion of a prador thrall unit. But normal human beings could not survive this process, only those toughened from infection by the Spatterjay virus, which was transmitted by the leeches of that world . . .
“So in the bottle, those are Spatterjay leeches . . .” said the catadapt, and now the others turned to gaze fearfully at the glass container.
“On the button,” said Trent. Then, to Cole: “Now hand it over.”
“You have to understand that the shell people are sick,” said Cole. “What is happening to them is a mass psychosis similar to—”
“Yeah, you’ve already told me that.” Trent gazed at the others here, hoping one of them would do something, but already some were moving away to plonk themselves down on the other side of the cage. Didn’t they understand the need to act now?
He gazed down at his hands. They were suddenly sweaty and he felt sick again, knowing, despite his abhorrence of violence, that he had to act.
“This is going to hurt me more than it will hurt you,” he said, looking at Cole.
“Yes, violence is always the answer from your type of—”
Trent lashed out and watched the man keel over as he rubbed his knuckles. He was sure he had judged it right—the rap on Cole’s temple just enough to knock him out—but that didn’t make him feel any better. If he’d judged it wrong, he could have caused a haematoma; he could have killed the man. Tasting bile, he leaned forwards and reached into Cole’s pocket to take out the shear. One of those still standing nearby clapped and Trent glanced up.
“Nice one,” said the catadapt woman. “We’ve been listening to his insanity ever since he got put in here with us. I was going to have to strangle him the next time he suggested a little mental tweak for us all so we could more readily accept our situation.”
Trent shrugged. He’d knocked Cole out because the man seemed unstable enough to be the type to shout for help as Trent made his escape. But what next? Taiken controlled all the shell people, so the next logical act should be to move in on him fast and kill him. Trent would have relished such a prospect in a previous time
, but now didn’t even know if he was capable of the act. Perhaps that was one element of redemption—that it shouldn’t be easy. Here he faced a situation in which he could help a great many people by doing what he had been doing all his life—using physical force to get what he wanted. Yet, now, it was the most difficult task he had ever faced.
“Are we getting out of there, then?” asked the catadapt woman. She waved a hand at those who had sat down again. “These don’t have the balls.”
Trent gazed at her, himself really wanting to go and sit down with the rest. After a further moment, he looked properly at her. She was magnificent: yellow cat’s eyes and elfin ears, a face that was beautiful in a way that somehow seemed beyond standard cosmetic alteration, long gold-blonde hair and a body that was both athletic and lush, clad in a tightly clinging enviro-suit. She was just Trent’s type. In reality she was the type for any heterosexual man. Yet he gazed at her almost with detachment, recognizing that he should be attracted, but seeing in his mind only Taiken’s wife as she cast him that last hopeless glance.
“Yes, we’re going,” he said.
SPEAR
So this is how it ends, I thought.
Reviewing Flute’s assessment of our status and Riss’s prediction of our brief future, I couldn’t see any elbowroom. Our four hardfield projectors were scrap, Flute had fired off all the railgun missiles he had manufactured, the reactor was going into safe shutdown and we were now on stored power—only enough to maintain the ship, control the fires and for the robots to make critical repairs. If we used that power for particle-beam shots or manoeuvring there would be nothing left. I considered these minimal options: by moving the ship we might delay our final destruction by a few minutes, and by firing the particle beam we might be able to intercept and destroy a few incoming projectiles, but we certainly wouldn’t damage that thing in the moon. And it was readying itself to annihilate us.
“We have to get out of here,” said Riss.
I turned to look at the drone.
“That is an option too,” I said.
Riss could eject herself and survive in vacuum for an unlimited period, while Flute could also use the mind ejection system to get out. I could suit up and eject myself from the ship too, but what then? If I survived whatever that ST dreadnought threw at the ship and the consequent blast debris, Cvorn could easily use his weapons to pick us off. And he would almost certainly see us ejecting from the ship. Even worse than that, he might send something out to collect us, whereupon I would become prador entertainment, and probably lunch too. Even if I managed to avoid all that, I would only last as long as my suit air supply, which I doubted would extend enough to keep me alive until some rescuer, summoned by Riss, arrived.
“You go,” I said. “I’m staying.”
So what of all your plans now, Penny Royal? I thought.
“Flute,” said Riss, “I need control of MR12.”
“Why do you need a maintenance robot?” Flute asked leadenly.
“I cannot get him into a space suit alone.”
“Now hold on a minute—”
Riss’s flat head slapped down on the console beside me. Her snakelike body flicked up and looped over to drive her ovipositor into my torso. The thing hurt quite badly, and I wondered if prador felt such pain when the drone injected its parasite eggs into them. Next, numbness spread from deep inside my chest. I reached over and managed to undo my safety strap, tried to speak with a mouth that felt full of novocaine, stood up and took one step, then slowly toppled. Riss had long ago ejected the last of her parasite eggs, but that ovipositor still worked and the drone had obviously acquired other things to inject. I hit the floor on my side and just lay there.
“You have control of the robot,” said Flute.
“Good,” said Riss, peering down at me. “You can, of course, eject yourself from this ship too, second-child mind, but be assured that I will find you out there.”
“I will not be ejecting myself from this ship,” said Flute. “My father forced me to spring Cvorn’s trap, taking us within range of his hideout on that moon, and I cannot process the conflicted loyalties.”
That will not alleviate the guilt you feel, Flute, I thought.
“I will die with this ship,” Flute added.
The door into the bridge abruptly thumped off its seals, its locking mechanism whining and grating, doubtless due to the damage Riss had caused. It swung open and thick smoke gusted in, shot through with a spindrift of fire-retardant foam. A second later, I saw a maintenance robot enter—a thing like a yard-long water scorpion fashioned of blue metal, with additional limbs sprouting from its head. I saw it was carrying a space suit, just as it moved out of my line of sight. I felt the heat then, and immediately had difficulty breathing.
“The paralytic will wear off in ten minutes,” said Riss, “which should be time enough to get you out into vacuum. I will attempt to keep us both concealed with my chameleonware and I have informed the nearest Polity assets of our situation. One of the rescue ships in transit from the Rock Pool can get here in a month. During that time your suit will put you into low-air hibernation.”
Right, great.
Riss might well be able to conceal us both, but I could already see the big gaping holes in the rest of her reasoning. Cvorn no doubt had some first-child or computerized system watching this ship very closely and would spot any use of an airlock. Perhaps, if I survived the coming attack on the Lance, and subsequent attempts to nail or capture us in vacuum, hibernation might enable me to last a month, but then, no rescue ship would come for us while that dreadnought sat in its moon.
Grav went off, which made it easier for the robot to hoist me up and begin, like a spider cocooning its prey, to feed me into the suit. In just a few minutes, it had suitably wrapped me. Meanwhile I had glimpsed the heavily armed moon in the screen fabric, the ST dreadnought’s weapons coming into view. When the helmet went on and the suit’s air supply kicked in, I started breathing more easily. The suit also protected me from the growing heat, flames now flickering through the smoke. Next I was being propelled to the door, and down along a wrecked and soot-blackened corridor.
“Cvorn is doubtless watching,” said Riss over my suit radio.
No shit, Sherlock.
“We must therefore offer a distraction,” Riss added.
I lost track of where we were in the ship because all I could see was scorched floor and the front end of the robot dragging me along.
“Emergency eject,” said Riss. “You have control of it?”
“I have control,” Flute replied. “Disengaging docking clamps.”
I only realized where we were when the robot pushed me upright and Riss wrapped herself around me. I was facing the space doors to our shuttle bay. I had time only to comprehend this before the release charges detonated all around the doors and they tumbled out into vacuum on the hurricane of escaping air, with Riss, me and the robot thrown out just after them. Riss and I parted company with the robot and tumbled on, then began to stabilize relative to the Lance as Riss applied the internal grav effect that was her main means of locomotion. I was frozen. It felt as if my heart had stopped, though whether from terror or Riss’s injection I couldn’t say. The drone kindly positioned me so I got a good view back towards my ship and now I saw the shuttle launching.
The distraction . . .
It suddenly seemed that we could have a chance of surviving this. Cvorn might just assume that our only means of escape was via that shuttle and look no further. On top of the impetus provided by the escaping air, Riss’s internal drive kept drawing us further away. I watched the shuttle ignite its fusion engine just beyond the ship, but it hardly had time to build up any acceleration, because the moon had now turned fully.
A particle beam, deep blue in vacuum and perhaps a yard in width, struck the shuttle dead centre, bored straight through it and blew molten debris out the other side. Two further detonations ensued, which were probably the chemical propellant tanks for th
e steering thrusters or the energy-dense power supplies. The shuttle bucked twice, coming apart as it did so, and fell on away from the ship in three pieces. The particle beam fired again and again, nailing those pieces, slagging and tearing them apart. Within a minute there was nothing left larger than a human head.
“Goodbye,” said Flute over my suit radio.
“Bye,” I managed in return, now the paralysis was starting to wear off.
The beam then stabbed out again, hitting the Lance this time, over that section of the ship where the bridge was located. Armour plating ablated, dissipating like the dust from a grinding wheel, then the beam punched inside. It seemed to pause there for a moment, the Lance caught on it like a bug on a needle, then fire and debris exploded from the shuttle bay. Shortly after that two airlock doors exploded away, the airlocks spewing fire behind them. Much inside that ship had to be fried, including Flute, but Cvorn wasn’t finished yet. A railgun missile hit near the engines, carving a chunk out of the rear of the ship and hurling out a cloud of debris. I watched a lump of glowing jagged armour the size and shape of a speedboat hurtle past us just twenty feet away. A second missile hit near the nose, but the angle of impact was such that it glanced off the armour, exploding into a spray of plasma, and didn’t penetrate. Meanwhile the particle beam began to traverse towards the nose.
But then it all stopped. The beam abruptly winked out and no further missiles arrived.
“What the hell?” said Riss.
The drone turned me in vacuum.
“Stop that,” I said, reaching across to use my wrist impeller. “I at least want to witness this.”
“No, look,” said Riss.
I allowed her to turn me, and now saw the bloom of numerous explosions, and a blue glare shifting from side to side, like the aurora borealis, but in space. I didn’t understand for a moment, then I got it. I was seeing all the stuff Cvorn had just fired at the Lance hitting a wall of shielding hardfields. Next, on the moon, which was barely a dot to normal vision, I saw another, far more massive, explosion. I ramped up magnification through my visor, bringing the moon as close to me as possible, the image breaking into pixels, and saw a great chunk of its crust rising up on a cushion of fire. Further impacts followed while, closer to us, particle beams played over that scaling of protective hardfields.