by Neal Aher
Cvorn spent many hours crippled by the reaction, sure he had done wrong, expecting punishment, terrified, but as the pheromones in the air faded, he began to feel free and knew he had to act, and now. Already prepared for this too, he went over to his father’s pit controls and penetrated his communications, immediately summoning one of his brethren first-children to the sanctum. He gave no indication that it was he doing the summoning and not his father. That first-child arrived and died, burning in the same beam that had taken out his father. The next suffered the same end too, but the remaining first-child, doubtless now aware that its father’s hormonal control of it was fading fast, did not respond.
Cvorn’s instinct at that point was to go after the other one, but that would have been a bad move. Here in his father’s sanctum, at the heart of their undersea home, he was relatively safe and had direct access to the computer system. He locked down the armoured doors before beginning his steady penetration of that system. First, he removed his father’s three control units from his shell, incidentally dining on his father’s partially cooked flesh and enjoying it immensely. He inserted new nano-connector interfaces into the units, then shell-welded them to his own carapace. The three channels opened to the two grazer squid and his father’s four war drones, who had all been Cvorn’s predecessors, but the coding he needed to control these had gone with the old nano-connectors. However, his father had been a rather old-fashioned prador who used pit controls to access his house computers and these, if he was careful, Cvorn could work with. And the control codes were probably recorded there too. He spent many days ensconced in the sanctum, eating both his father and his two brothers as he worked, and physically changing.
Urges he could not identify began to wash through him, as he no longer ingested the cocktail of chemicals that had maintained his adolescence. As he worked, his whole body felt looser, odd, and he was always hungry. Perhaps the joy he felt in finally penetrating the house computers, both taking control of it and getting hold of the codes for the war drones and grazer squid, was what helped instigate the change. He was just reviewing the list of numerous attempts by his remaining brother to penetrate that same system, with his limited access outside the sanctum, when he felt a sudden tight convulsion at his back end and heard a ripping sound. Abruptly he could no longer feel his back legs. Looking round, he saw them, and a section of intervening carapace drop away. Then a whole new set of feelings impinged as his new prongs and coitus clamp, as yet not fully developed, were exposed to the air.
As was always the case with pre-adulthood prador, Cvorn immediately felt vulnerable and wanted to hide and protect this new acquisition. He recognized the feeling at once: it was an evolved survival mechanism to get him away from aggressive fully adult prador, including his father, who would immediately attack and try to kill such a competitor. This was a form of selection—with only the fast and the strong surviving. In the far past, before prador society developed, pre-adults went into hiding until the transformation was completed, hunting and eating to build up body mass and armour. As full adults, they then returned to compete for females. Cvorn fought the urge, rationality his armour now because he controlled four war drones.
Contacting those drones, who were less sophisticated than the modern version and so could not distinguish between him and his father, he gave them their orders and then watched on his array of hexagonal screens. These drones were actually original body carapaces reinforced with armour, with major ganglions frozen inside and these interfaced with tactical computing. Other internal organs had been removed and replaced with a power supply and other hardware. Being surface-based and grav-technology being expensive, they ran on caterpillar treads. They were armed with twinned Gatling cannons where their claws had been and underslung missile launchers. Cvorn watched them trundle out of their cache and spread out through the undersea home. Before reaching Cvorn’s first-child brother, one of them encountered two second-children. These were already transforming into first-children and were fighting in one of the corridors. A short burst of Gatling fire rapidly converted them into smoking chunks.
The first-child, alerted by this, immediately fled his own small sanctum, headed to an exit portal and out into the ocean. Cvorn was disappointed but understood the impulse. His brother was no longer a first-child either, having also lost his back legs and exposed new tender sexual organs. Cvorn at once changed all the house codes so that the young adult could not get back in. He thereupon watched the drones slaughter all the remaining second-children, and then enter the third-child nursery and there massacre all the males. The females, in their separate annex, would be worth keeping for the usual round of necessary exchanges to prevent inbreeding.
Cvorn next spent many months hiding, ignoring queries from other prador who were his father’s allies or associates, aware that if they knew of his father’s demise they might well consider this abode vulnerable to attack. Gradually, he grew larger. He went through two further sheddings, and as his final fully adult shell hardened and thickened, his fear began to diminish. During his first venture out of his sanctum, he visited his father’s harem to satisfy a strongly growing itch, but used gel contraception. He did not want to inbreed with his mother and knew he needed to exchange these females for some that were more genetically diverse. Returning to his sanctum, he spent some time tending to inevitable mating injuries and decided it was time to announce his presence.
Prador society’s muted reaction to his appearance surprised him until he discovered that inter-house communications were abuzz with other news. Exploration vessels had encountered a new sentient race out at the limits of the Kingdom’s expansion, and his fellows were making the usual preparations. Of course, the prador were destined to rule the universe, and so would not tolerate other intelligences.
Back in the present, Cvorn felt himself bowed under a deep and heavy nostalgia and tried to shake it off, but the weight of memory continued to bear down on him. He relived the excitement of war preparations, the times he had nearly ended up a victim of his own kind, the allies he had made and betrayed and the enemies that had come close to killing him. He remembered his steady vicious climb up through the prador hierarchy, his steady acquisition of wealth and the commissioning of his destroyer. He remembered his first-children. But just one had survived all those years of warfare against the Polity and he now resided in one of his war drones. He remembered growing old and beginning to lose the mating urge during that conflict, then losing his limbs and the equipment for mating after them. Then it was that he regained some of his cowardice, ensuring layers of protection around him—his ships, armour, weapons and enslaved children. He realized he had become brutal then and that much of his aggression was a product of his fear of anything that might harm him . . .
Cvorn shook himself violently, noted that the alarm was sounding from the device Vrom had brought and through his aug immediately turned it on. He had been thinking about his past in relation to the hormonal effect upon him, not to end up reliving its joys and horrors. So again, why wasn’t that effect more commonly used? His immediate thought was that father-captains feared fear itself—that in regressing themselves like this they might end up as cowardly pre-adults again—but Cvorn had felt none of that. He felt now as he had felt when first announcing his presence to the rest of the prador. He felt brave and he felt ready. He also felt something else, something quite powerful and undeniable. Turning, he opened his sanctum doors and headed out. It had been a long time but he still remembered the techniques he had employed to avoid the worst of the injuries. It was time, Cvorn definitely felt, to pay a visit to those females.
THE BROCKLE
The single-ship that had just arrived was one of three used to convey prisoners to and from the Tyburn to face the Brockle. The woman inside was a murderess, but there must be more to it or she would not have ended up here. Her hatred of the Polity had led to her joining a separatist organization and she might be involved in other crimes too. The Polity wanted her reamed
of information and then sentence executed on her.
The Brockle’s latest case had decided that her three sons had no future in the Polity, due to her detestation of the Polity and its AIs. They, despite being legal adults, apparently had no say in the matter. She had tried to force them to accompany her to one of the outlink stations to take a freighter ride outside the Polity. But they had refused, also rebelling further by getting themselves fitted with Polity augs. She had pretended to accept their choice and invited them to her home for a meal, whereupon she had fed them with a self-propagating neurotoxin. This poison, as well as killing them in seconds flat, turned their brains to jelly. So despite the alert broadcast by the augs they wore, they ended up unrecoverably dead.
So prosaic.
The Brockle felt a wave of ennui at the prospect of interrogating her. Maybe if ECS had sent some Golem murderer or the likes of the strange Mr Pace its feelings would have been different. But ennui was followed by angry frustration. Earth Central had informed the Brockle that it could obtain no more of value from Ikbal and Martina after their time with Penny Royal on Captain Blite’s ship. It was ordered to release them, returning them via this very single-ship . . . The Brockle’s contribution to solving the “Penny Royal problem” was now at an end.
The Brockle thought otherwise. All the intimate details it had gleaned from Blite’s crewmembers proved that Penny Royal, as well as being a paradigm-changing force, was dangerously unstable. The Brockle had requested the other two crewmembers—the couple Chont and Haber Geras—but apparently ECS had intercepted and questioned them on Earth, and released them. This was just plain wrong. It could learn so much more by a joint interrogation of all four. It could make so many comparisons of their experiences. By jointly putting them under pressure and setting them against each other in some VR scenario it could elicit new facts. Didn’t Earth Central understand the necessity for this? Didn’t that AI understand how dangerous Penny Royal was?
In its seat before the window, which gave a view along the thin central body of the Tyburn to the section that still contained the remains of some of the colonists, the Brockle ground its ersatz teeth and felt the need for some rebellion of its own. Through the cams in the interrogation room, it gazed upon Ikbal and Martina. Presently they were lying on the floor, the silver worms of nano-fibres visible around their heads, which had also penetrated within. The Brockle was running them through a perfect recall of events aboard The Rose while subtly twisting their mental perspective. And every time it did this, further interesting details surfaced. It then focused its attention on the dock, as the woman exited the single-ship and stood wringing her hands and peering round nervously.
Yes, time to push against the terms of its confinement by Polity AIs. The negotiation to reach agreement had been difficult and it had only consented because here it got precisely what it wanted: suspects to interrogate, minds to take apart. Now it wasn’t getting what it wanted.
The Brockle stood and headed out, broke into an unaccustomed jog then, in irritation, melted into a hundred silver worms and shoaled towards the dock. A short while later it exploded into the dock space, seeing the woman separatist from a hundred different perspectives. Quick and dirty, it decided, as it swarmed around her. Then all the worms collapsed in on her with a thunderous crack and enclosed her in a writhing ball.
The Brockle stripped the flesh away from her skull, then the skull away from her brain, which it retained. The shifting bait-ball of worms drifted across the dock, dropping flesh and skin, splinters of bone, and then her headless body. It recorded her brain physically as it took it apart, making a model, and running her mind-state in that. Discarding a slurry of neural matter, it departed the dock, already having extracted enough about her separatist contacts and involvement in other crimes to make a report. Meanwhile, it linked through to its submind in the single-ship. But rather than absorb it, as usual, it delivered some simple instructions: “Return to Omega Six for next pick-up.” As the Brockle well knew, there was no pickup waiting there, at the station where this latest victim had been held.
“Understood,” the submind replied.
Immediately the dock began to evacuate, the woman’s remains steaming on the floor as they rapidly vacuum-dried. The space doors opened and the single-ship began to manoeuvre towards them with blasts of compressed air. Now, almost certainly, the watcher would be informing Earth Central that the ship was departing without the crewmen. However, by the time the Polity’s leading AI responded, the ship would have dropped into U-space. And now there were no more single-ships aboard it could use to return Blite’s crew. This was merely a delaying tactic, because in time another one would arrive with yet another prisoner for interrogation.
Back in its viewing room, the Brockle formed itself back into a fat young man, already dispatching the report on the separatist as it stepped back to its chair. Later, it would return and get rid of the headless and now dried-out corpse. Right now, it checked through its units attached to Ikbal and Martina before formulating the replies it would make during the imminent exchange with Earth Central. Then it needed to think very carefully about endings, and new beginnings.
11
THE PRADOR/HUMAN WAR: RISS
As Room 101 escaped into U-space, Riss continued to try to extract her ovipositor from the wall as the thrum of weapons hitting hardfield defences cut off. Slow data transmission began to re-establish itself. The station had survived! But now, as more and more data and more and more sensors became available, the darkness flooded in. It was filled with drowning minds that were crumbling, falling apart.
“You’re with me, now,” said the mantis, closing one limb around Riss’s body and yanking the little drone from the wall.
They moved fast from Beta Six, the mite drones falling in behind them, with others joining them and appearing from elsewhere. Hollow booms echoed throughout the station, where air was available to transmit the sound. Power surges and outages continued all around, and Riss detected massive data shifts in the computer systems—shifts that made them difficult to penetrate and therefore understand.
“They’re fighting back,” said the mantis, “but they’re as naive as you are and don’t understand. Only the subminds and those who returned for repairs, like me, stand any chance.”
Before Riss could ask a question, the mantis routed a data package across. The 101 AI was now killing its children, which didn’t make any sense. The station was wiping AI crystal with EM pulses, as it queued up for insertion into new attack ships. It was also using an informational attack against AI crystal already inside ships—in every stage of construction. It was similarly wiping them too in the process. Many minds were managing to fend this off, so Room 101 was physically attacking them in response.
Maintenance robots were swarming aboard some ships in the early stages of construction, but with minds already in place. They were using any method they could employ to destroy the AI crystal aboard these ships. In some areas, other robots were fighting to stop this—the mentioned subminds presumably controlling them. Meanwhile, in the cramped spaces of final construction bays, complete and near-complete attack ships were fighting to survive. Here, the AI had turned the internal station weapons and giant constructor robots against them.
“Attack ship Jacob saw the way the wind was blowing,” said the mantis. “It’s gone dark, hoping not to be noticed. Jacob is another like me—just in here for repairs.”
Riss tried to obtain information on that ship by again probing the data flows all around. At first, she could glean nothing, but then began to form a virtual map in her mind. She could see the 101 AI at the centre of the chaos, resembling some angry red amoeba jetting out pseudopods at numerous smaller versions of itself around it. These were throwing up defences such as hardfields and shifting as they shattered. Constellations of other minds—those of the attack ships—were shoaling between, sometimes hiding under similar defences, sometimes flaring out like incendiaries when hit by those pseudopods. Sieving
manifests, Riss tried to find the Jacob, but could not. Next, everything went angry red and something slammed into her mind.
Riss found herself falling into darkness, tendrils of data trying to lever apart the components of her consciousness. A terrible grief and hopelessness filled her. There seemed no reason for existing, no point in continuing with such a load to bear. Riss ceased to fight and began to feel her mind breaking apart—
A flash of light dispelled the darkness and Riss found herself coiled in vacuum in an area of the station without grav. One of the big steel mites was holding her between two of its limbs, having punched an array of micro-bayonet data plugs through her skin to connect to the systems around her crystal. Hopelessness faded, and the little drone’s mind began pulling together its parts.
“That was fucking stupid,” said the mantis, hovering nearby. “You sure are naive.”
The mite released her and backed off as Riss uncoiled.