by Neal Aher
Cvorn advanced, singling out the one to his left for his attention, then rushed for the gap between that one and the others. The nearest one to his right stabbed out her mandibles but Cvorn intercepted them with his claw, where they hit with a loud thump. Meanwhile, the one on his left shot out her mandibles in turn and tried to get a grip on two of his forelegs—trying to tear them off. Cvorn threw himself sideways to push into the gap, his excitement rising and his coitus clamp clattering against his body. The left female’s grip slid off the metal of his prosthetic legs, failing to tear them away, so firmly were they affixed to his body.
The female on the far right threw herself up over her companions. She folded her body, louse-like, and drove her ovipositor towards his visual turret. He knocked the thing down, but still it punched in at the base of one of his mandibles. The pain was terrible, but only increased his excitement. He axed his claw down into her underside, cracking ribs of carapace there, and she rolled away, issuing a stream of green blood. His target female now tried to turn her back end away from him, but he grabbed the edge of her carapace with his other claw and dragged her back, while slicing his legs down upon the eyes of the adjacent female. She retreated just a little, and he turned his upper shell towards her and rammed her, while still hanging on to his prospective mate. His target went over, onto her back, her legs rowing defensively. On the rebound, he swung round behind his mate and slammed his back end in.
His coitus clamp hit its receiving grooves and lodged firmly as he climbed up onto her back. He now closed his claws on her mandibles, wrapped his legs round her and pulled himself down tightly. She fought him as he heaved mightily, while the other two females, recovering, pounded him with their mandibles to try to dislodge him. The shield-like section of shell protecting the softness of her double vagina tore free, blood spilling into the water all round, the section hinging up on gristle. He jabbed his prongs in and out and in again and in a surge of ecstasy squirted his seed inside—the thumping of mandibles against his shell now going through him like throbs of pleasure. After a long dull and mindless moment, while he was only partially aware of the damage the females were doing to him, he rolled off and quickly moved away. He saw the female closing up that shell section, yellow cement quickly bubbling up to seal it into place. This had once been a necessary precaution, in an ocean full of parasites that would have attacked such a vulnerable spot.
Cvorn headed to the far wall, spying out a series of water-cleaning ports he should be able to use as claw holds to get himself back to the water lock. With his heavy prosthetics he had no chance of swimming up there. He noted blood leaking from his leg sockets, where the prosthetics mated with his natural body. He noted some grooves in his carapace and one or two cracks. He felt battered and his satisfaction with the mating was somewhat marred by its speed. As he reached up to the first cleaner port he remembered, far in the past, feeling the same dissatisfaction at the brevity of his matings. He decided he needed more practice. And, as he climbed, remembered thinking the same back then too.
13
BLITE
The antique space suit was empty. Blite had finally nerved himself to open the visor and peer inside. He found only an internal incrustation like soot. He then moved on to search for Penny Royal elsewhere.
Beyond the central corridor running round the horseshoe of the Black Rose, there were numerous branching maintenance tunnels. The entire ship was webbed with them like a worm-eaten fruit. Many of these tunnels were big enough for a man, if he was prepared to crawl in some places. They were for various designs of robot, the majority of which were grub-like things capable of performing many tasks themselves or unloading smaller robots where they could not gain access. Over four days the captain explored all these, occasionally encountering those robots. The things politely retreated and dropped back into their side niches to allow him past.
The schematic of the ship, though detailed, didn’t really give him the feel he wanted. He needed to go in there and see things with his own eyes, touch them, consider the things he might need to do if there were problems. He wanted to know his newly configured ship. And, beside that, he felt the need to locate Penny Royal, rather than talk to that apparently empty suit. Or that black diamond manifestation. But, just as when he had searched before their arrival at the Crispin Six supernova blast front, the black AI was nowhere to be found.
As he stepped into the airlock, Blite understood that Penny Royal, with its ability to radically alter its own shape and design, could enter many areas of the ship where he could not. However, he still wanted to check outside. This was not because of some need to face the black AI, but because, having hung here in the path of the Crispin Six nova blast front for three days, he was growing bored and edgy and finding himself snapping at Brond and Greer.
The airlock evacuated, much faster than the original The Rose could have managed, and Blite propelled himself outside, looking for somewhere on the black surface to attach his safety line. He could find nothing. However, since it struck him as unlikely that one of his crew, Leven or Penny Royal itself might suddenly take the ship away, shedding him into vacuum and leaving him to die, he decided to rely on the gecko function of his boots.
The Black Rose floated in dark red vacuum, dotted with glittering pink stars. He knew now that without the entropy dump, which was still ongoing, his suit would have been failing about now and he would have been rapidly heating up. Even if he had pulled himself inside before its total failure, with him boiling out of it, he would have been so badly irradiated that even advanced anti-rads wouldn’t have worked.
Next, he walked round, following a course between metallic protrusions resembling the low hedges of a maze, on to the front screen. He peered inside to see Greer sitting there, with a VR mask and gloves on—assembling some complicated puzzle, by the looks of it. And while he watched, Brond entered. The man sat down at his console, called something up on his screen then leaned down to take up an old-fashioned touch-board from underneath the console and begin typing. After a moment, he frowned, then looked up. Spotting Blite, he gave a casual salute, then returned to his work.
Blite had seen the man updating this written journal of his, and wondered how he himself might feature in it. He was about to move on but suddenly halted. Greer also had a hobby that recorded more than mere audio, what with all her data-gathering gear and holo-visual . . . Blite suddenly got the strange feeling that he was on to something. He understood why he, and the other two, wanted to be with Penny Royal, but hadn’t really considered the reverse. Was this it? Was it their role to be the AI’s witnesses? What about Blite himself? He made a leap. At some point, forensic AIs would examine them and he wondered, given the times the AI had actually been in his mind, if it might be recording things there. He suddenly felt cold and just a little frightened, and quickly moved on. He circumvented a sensor spine to head towards the back of the ship.
Just around from the bridge, he came to the circular space door giving egress to the shuttle. This was only visible because the maze walls skirted a clear area, around which a near-invisible black line etched out the door’s circumference. Just beyond, he found another black line scribing a stretched-out diamond shape and knew this to be one of the splinter missiles—perhaps one of those capable of U-jumping itself into a target. Beyond this, a row of four inset ports, with amber hardfields deep inside, marked out a laser array. Here and there, on short pillars, stood spherical or extended egg-shaped nacelles, some containing sensor equipment, others holding esoteric weapons. Neatly folded under a red-tinted chain-glass hatch, like some giant burrowing insect made of chrome, lay an exterior maintenance robot. Still no sign of Penny Royal.
Reaching the fusion array at the rear, Blite peered round at the yard-wide tubes of a cluster of seven fusion ports. He stared at these for a long while, aware that their design was quite radical in that they used curved hardfields for containment rather than the usual Tesla bottles. And that fusion actually took place inside them, rather
than a short distance behind as had previously been the case with The Rose.
“All right, Penny Royal,” he said, becoming frustrated with his search, “where the fuck are you?”
He began to trudge back to the airlock, but even as he did so, silver veins brightened in the hull’s surface—while scattered between them lay a mottling of dark shapes like sword blades. Blite halted and watched as these lines, like threads drawn onto a reel, pulled in to one point ahead of him, the sword blades following like a shoal of shadow fish. A mass of silver and black coagulated before him and just for a second he got that feeling he sometimes experienced during a U-jump, of a tugging at his senses from a direction he simply could not locate.
He felt something straining in his mind, like trying to focus an astigmatic eye. For a moment he had it locked down, and the growing mass of the black AI before him seemed to invert and turn into a tunnel stretching into the far distance. It then seemed to open out in every direction and multiply infinitely. He felt himself hanging within it as threads of power spread out from his body. Gazing then in a direction impossible to locate clearly, he saw a generator, akin to the one they had seen above Penny Royal’s planetoid. It was hanging in vacuum alongside a whole series of generators, all feeding in power. But they receded and he found himself hanging in vastness, and it was all Penny Royal, and it was more than his mind could encompass. He shut down.
“I’ve got you,” it said.
Yes, you have, haven’t you, something inside Blite replied.
Blite found himself floating in vacuum, which seemed somehow prosaic and small compared to what he had just experienced. Gradually he became aware of something closing round his ankle and pulling him. He peered down at a silver strand wrapped around it, extending down to the Black Rose, which now lay a thousand feet away. Penny Royal reeled him in and, as it did so, he tried to fathom what he had seen. It reminded him of something he had tried many years ago—something many spacefarers tried at one time or another.
He had ventured out on the hull of his ship while it was in U-space, but had been within the ship’s shielding. Some of his crew had remained conscious, while others, having experienced U-space before, took drugs to knock themselves out. Pre-programmed to do so, the shielding shut down for precisely ten seconds. This was so that Blite, and those inside who had remained conscious, could look at the infinite. Luckily he had used his safety line, because one of those who’d sensibly rendered himself unconscious for the trip later had to come out and retrieve him. It took Blite a week to recover and, at the end of that time, all he could remember was the impression of something being wrong, of experiencing something that his mind just wasn’t capable of recording.
It was like that, he thought, but even then he wasn’t so sure. The feeling was similar, but he could still recollect Penny Royal’s infinity. Perhaps his previous exposure to something similar had immunized him in some way.
“What the hell was that?” he rasped.
“I am not a mind reader, Captain,” the AI replied.
Fucking liar.
“I saw something,” said Blite, “like . . . U-space. And those machines there . . . those generators.”
“I see,” said Penny Royal. “Just prior to you yelling ‘spiders’ and propelling yourself away from the ship, the entropy dump fluctuated. Since this involves a certain degree of U-space manipulation, you must have experienced some overspill.”
The explanation was too neat. The AI had spoken rather than dumped something into his mind. And it had not mentioned “Calabi-Yau frames in juxtaposition” or anything else that he’d struggle to understand. This meant the AI had wanted him to understand it at once, rather than strain his mind around it. As his feet settled against the hull, his boots engaged and the tendril unwound. He felt sure he had been lied to again. But about what and to what purpose, he had no idea. He gazed at Penny Royal, back before him in familiar form—the black head of an artichoke poised on a silver stalk. He remembered that half of the AI had taken possession of the cargo hauler—yet what lay before him looked no smaller than before. What had Leven said about that? Something about U-space phenomenon and the AI doubling in mass before separating?
“So how much longer are we going to be stuck out here?” he asked.
Blite saw a time display rapidly count down ten days—the one he had called up on the Q-dot display on his bedroom wall, when he was a child. He thought about that for a moment, then realized that caught them up with the two weeks of their time jump. He guessed it made a crazy sense.
“Right, okay.” He turned away and began heading towards the airlock.
“Leven knows how long we’ll be here,” said Penny Royal, implying that there had been no need for Blite to come out on the hull. Blite didn’t believe it, and wasn’t even convinced that his impulse to come out here had been his own. He’d seen something more; he’d had something else impressed into his mind. And, he reckoned, he might be no more to the AI than a convenient data-storage crystal.
“Yeah.” He waved a dismissive hand.
He no longer felt impatient or irritable. Right then all he wanted to do was go into his cabin, drink a large amount of a bottle from that crate of Martian vodka he’d bought on Par Avion and curl up on his bed. The thing about wonder and awe, he had found, was that sometimes it sat just a thin skin away from terror.
SPEAR
Sepia had gone off again, apparently to check on the defences of Trent’s new headquarters. She had departed with a lingering and mildly amused glance back at me. Perhaps I’d been too obvious about resetting my nascuff. I hadn’t needed to hold up my arm and watch it change from red to blue after resetting it through my aug. I was glad she was gone, anyway—I didn’t need the distraction. Despite my libido steadily waning as my nanosuite digested testosterone and hormones, reset glands and twisted complex organic chemicals into different shapes, my visceral awareness of her presence hadn’t faded one whit.
Trent had solicitously provided Taiken’s wife, Reece, with a seat in the annex to the surgical theatre. Watching how he treated her, I realized I wasn’t the only one subject to the whims of libidinous Cupid. Perhaps it was something about the air in prador ships. Reece’s other child, who seemed normal enough, was sitting on her lap. Her older boy, Robert, was a bit of a somnambulist—he had been walking round in a trance with his human hand in his mother’s. He’d only shown any animation when Trent and I lifted him onto the surgical table. He had fought us, his claw pinching a chunk out of Trent’s forearm before we could pin him down and inject an anaesthetic. Now, as the pedestal auto-doc bowed over, scanning him from head to foot, I could see the reason for his condition.
Taiken had replaced the boy’s left arm with a prador claw and added a manipulatory arm, which folded against his bloated torso. Both limbs were about the size you would find on a small third-child. Attached to his bones were webworks of shell to support them. The prador nerves of the claw had been connected to the human nerves which led to his missing arm. This was achieved using chemical interface nodes. Artificial nerves had been run from the manipulatory arm into his spine and up to his brain, where a piece of ganglion had been surgically introduced. His blood was a mixture of human and prador blood, heavily laced with antejects. These were produced by an artificial contrivance sunk into his bone marrow. Taiken had also made additions to all the boy’s organs and consequently to all the fluids many of them produced. His entire body chemistry had changed. And unfortunately it would never function properly as it was.
A body could only incorporate alien material, without rejecting it, with the use of antejects and adaptogens. But these were suppressing growth in both his prador parts and his human ones. Nothing would knit together. The manipulatory arm would never work. Cancers were springing up like weeds. Scar tissue was swamping nerve interfaces and other interfaces between human and alien flesh, while just keeping the boy alive required constant intervention. In addition, brain growth had stalled and his brain was shrinking. Taik
en had turned the boy into a dying chimera and a moron.
Perhaps this boy had not been the best place to start. Having loaded Taiken’s records, I knew that the adults were more rugged and many of them had not, despite appearances, so radically redesigned themselves. Some of them even maintained a physical separation between many of their parts—their prador grafts running on their own chemistry and venous system. The prador interface with their human bodies was often an inorganic one in these cases.
“So what can you do?” asked Trent, peering over my shoulder at the scan results.
“I can surgically remove most of his major grafts,” I said, “but I need something more to rid him of the rest and, as noted, our time is limited. The surgery alone here would take the best part of a day.”
Even as I spoke, I was scanning records in my mind, linking to Bsorol’s work and trying to isolate some key. The gross surgical work, though time-consuming, would be relatively easy—it would be simply like removing a bullet. But getting rid of the rest would be like taking micro-slivers out of a ceramo-glass grenade. I needed something else. I needed some way of taking them apart and rendering them harmless so the human body could reject them. I needed some panacea I could deliver to all the shell people, and quickly. I first considered nanobots, but the amount of programming involved would have been immense, and the equipment Taiken had at his disposal wasn’t up to the task. There had to be a simpler way.