by Neal Aher
“The second-child brain died,” Sverl replied.
“A precise statement,” Spear observed, “and lying by omission.”
“He recorded across to his AI component.”
“I want him back.”
“When he has finished carrying out one last chore for me you can have him back.”
A second later Spear was into Sverl’s system, tracking Flute, locating him in the old attack ship, then pulling up information on the kamikazes. That was almost as fast as a haiman—the nearest the Polity had come to amalgamating human and AI.
“I see,” said Spear. “U-signatures.”
What’s this? Riss was baffled.
“Precisely,” Sverl replied.
“So there you go,” said Spear aloud.
“What?” Riss asked, rapidly withdrawing her probe.
“Now I know what happened to Flute,” Spear continued, “and now you know, supposing you didn’t already.”
“Didn’t already?” Riss repeated.
“Stop being coy—I can feel you in my aug like a splinter in my finger, Riss.”
Not for the first time, Riss considered killing a man. Humans were easier to off than prador. Even without the enzyme acid, which would chew through Spear’s body just a little bit slower than it would go through Sverl’s, Riss could punch holes through his heart or brain stem. And even without a collimated diamond ovipositor, Riss could still simply strangle him.
“Sverl is blocking me,” the drone said.
“Understandable, really,” said Spear. “You told me that Penny Royal hollowed you out and left you without purpose, which is a vague description coming from a machine, but I sense that since coming aboard a prador dreadnought, your homicidal instincts have been on the rise.”
Riss immediately began checking the induction probe she had been using to hitch a ride on the man’s aug. Could it be a two-way street?
“I sometimes wonder, Riss,” Spear continued, “if all Penny Royal took away were the remnants of hope. You were fashioned for one purpose and that ended with the end of the war.”
“I know what Penny Royal took,” Riss asserted, not really knowing at all.
Spear continued relentlessly, “During a war, weapons get superseded and dispensed with. After a war they’re melted down and turned into ploughs.”
“Shut the fuck up, Spear,” Riss hissed.
“Ah, not so empty after all.”
Riss found herself stationary on the floor as the man trudged on ahead, trying to control a surge of rage that was as integral as her power supply. As this waned, she felt bafflement again. What was that? And why had Spear spoken like that? Riss abruptly went after him again, induction probe at full strength, just catching the tail of another surge of data exchange between the spine and the man.
Was that you speaking then? Riss wondered.
Eventually they arrived at Penny Royal’s erstwhile body, the destroyer Spear had renamed the Lance, like the spine he carried on his shoulder. The ship had been moved, much had been torn out and much reconstructed, and now a ramp led up to its open shuttle bay. Spear made his way through the partially reconstructed interior to enter the bridge. Riss followed and watched the man walk across the charred floor, to stand beside a portable prador saddle control. He hoisted the spine off his shoulder and rested it against the saddle.
“We all have our loads to bear,” he said, “and that’s a heavy one.” He turned to look directly at Riss. “I’m sorry, I don’t know why I said what I said before.”
He turned away again and dipped his head to peer at the saddle control. After a moment, it hummed and buzzed to itself, glints of light igniting in small pit controls made to take a second-child’s manipulatory hands. The screen fabric came on all around, turning the ship transparent and showing them the hold in which the destroyer sat. Out on the floor a single constructor robot was perambulating, a coil of high-pressure fuel line sitting on its flat back. It moved out of sight—entering the ship somewhere to the rear.
“I think we can do better,” said Spear.
He was auged into the control, now making linkages to the entire computer system of Sverl’s ship. The screen fabric turned grey, swirled through with shots of nacre. It looked like a malfunction until Riss turned and saw the jut of a sensor spire in one direction, and some bulbous nacelle extended on a pylon in the other. The cams could not quite convey what lay out there—they were looking at a machine interpretation of U-space.
“Just a few minutes now,” said Spear. “Penny Royal’s timing comes close to perfection, though Sverl facilitated that by not allowing us into his sanctum. If we’d gone in and you’d been unable to resist your urge to try killing him, we would have been late.”
Riss just gazed at the man, and yearned for the simplicity of murdering prador.
BLITE
The screen display of the Black Rose blended smoothly with reality as they returned to that state. The stars slowed in their dopplering course past them, and objects ahead glimmered and expanded into view. An iron sphere sat in vacuum ahead, other objects positioned in an arc underneath it like lashes below an eyeball. And some other large object lay beyond.
“Leven,” said Blite, but before he could continue, magnification increased to bring these objects closer and data began scrolling down a subscreen in a bottom corner.
The prador supply station sat out in clear vacuum many light years from the nearest star. It was a slightly flattened sphere with a square-section protuberance girdling its circumference. Around this, three ships had docked like fish feeding on a bread ball, and Blite at once recognized the long brassy teardrops as the ships of the King’s Guard. All of them were here—the other twenty-seven arrayed in an arc below, neatly lined up like a series of text slashes. Some distance beyond hung a cylinder about which smaller vessels and vacuum construction machines swarmed—scaffolds spreading out from one end to etch out some saucer section. Blite just glanced at this—his focus was mainly on those King’s Guard ships. Then he scanned the data coming in, blinked in disbelief, and returned his attention to that other object.
“What the fuck is that?” he wondered.
The structure looked small in perspective, but that was because it lay some distance back from the other objects here. The damned thing was immense: fifty miles long and maybe ten miles thick.
“The King’s Ship,” intoned Penny Royal, seemingly right beside his ear.
He glanced round, half-expecting that antique space suit to be standing behind him, but the AI had not seen fit to materialize in any form.
“The King’s Ship?” he repeated.
“Six hundred years,” said Penny Royal, “or less than one.”
“What?”
A frame opened on the screen and, once again, an armoured prador was there. Blite experienced a familiar surge of irritation, knowing he was just about to witness yet another baffling conversation between this Gost, who was apparently the king of the prador, and Penny Royal. Then he felt glad, because the irritation was surely his own.
“You again,” said Gost.
“Yes,” Penny Royal replied.
“What now?”
“If you lead your Guard to Room 101, you will die,” the AI replied.
“Sverl cannot be allowed to exist,” said Gost. “He might be used by subversives to destabilize my Kingdom. This will lead to damaging civil war during which, as I suppress those subversives, they will launch attacks against the Polity. They will hope for a response that would unify all prador under them.”
“This will not happen.”
“I calculate that, without my intervention, it will.”
“I know that it won’t.”
The armoured prador on screen rattled its legs against the floor, evidently in frustrated irritation. Blite knew the feeling.
“I need more,” it eventually said.
“It is time for you to board your ship,” said Penny Royal. “Already you are reaching the stage in which you need
larger armour to conceal your development. You need the space to grow, physically and mentally. You will call yourself Oberon.”
“Very good,” said Gost. “And you’re a Delphic oracle.”
“You understand human thought.”
“I still need more.”
“I can show you a future,” said Penny Royal.
On screen, the armoured prador abruptly whirled around. One of those black diamonds had appeared in its sanctum. In response to this object, ports all around the walls slammed open to reveal the mirror throats of particle cannons. Seemingly under their regard the diamond separated into six pieces—with something extremely dark and deep lying central to them and only just visible from Blite’s perspective. The king emitted a bubbling scream and retreated out of view. Then the whole scene disappeared in a crash and explosion of blue fire as the particle cannons fired. White-hot chunks of metal and boiling smoke filled the frame before it blanked.
“What the hell happened?” said Brond.
“Patience,” said Penny Royal.
Blite now looked up at the main view ahead, which had drawn closer. The Guard ships were breaking formation—steering thrusters blading out into darkness and the hot stars of fusion drives igniting. Those docked to the station were detaching too, while anti-munitions lasers probed out, picked out by wisps of vapour issuing from the station.
The sounds continued, slowly died, and then out of the blankness Gost said, “I don’t believe you, and I will still take my Guard to Room 101.” Blite wondered what he had been shown by the black AI.
“You will believe me,” said Penny Royal, “and now I will give you time to think.”
A surge of something passed through the Black Rose. Blite experienced a falling sensation twinned with an odd feeling of déjà vu. Another surge followed this—setting steering thrusters at full power with the fusion drive igniting. Blite groped for his seat strap, expecting battle, but he still focused on the screen—to see the station and the Guard ships simply die. Fusion drives and steering thrusters went out, the lasers blinked off and light issuing from view ports and bubbles died. Everything went dark; the ships were no longer accelerating, and the constructor robots about the King’s Ship were drifting on courses set before this event. Even far beyond this scene, the stars grew dim.
“Entropy dump,” said Brond.
Blite looked at the data and could see that they were now under huge acceleration, as he replayed that conversation in his mind. He couldn’t quite grasp what the AI had been getting at—but perhaps he would when he viewed a recording of it later.
Next, the lights in their bridge dimmed, the data stream disrupted and for a second he found himself weightless. A microsecond later they were dropping into U-space and power returned. Edge of the entropy dump? he wondered. That rather frighteningly indicated that the ship could direct it like a weapon.
“Where now?” he asked.
“The War Factory. Factory Station Room 101,” Penny Royal replied.
CVORN
Vrom was gone and the sanctum gleamed after his cleaning efforts. Even the ship lice had disappeared into their niches and crevices around the stone-effect walls, or under the glowing dead man’s fingers of sea lichen, because they had nothing to glean from the floor. Vrom had been even more meticulous than usual—probably sensing his father’s mood and wanting to ensure no punishable infractions. Cvorn still did not feel so good. He felt like a second-child after a thorough beating, and the vision in his palp eyes had worsened further and their movement felt stiff. He was also anxious about what was to come.
Everything was ready and Cvorn could not be any more prepared, or more on edge. He stomped around his sanctum, perpetually going over his plans but unable to spot the glaring error he was sure was there. At one point, he began using his screens to review other plans concerning the alliances he would make and eventually break, once he had captured Sverl. But these were also plans he had checked over ad nauseam and just thinking about them now brought on a deadening boredom, so he sent them back into storage.
He had to do something.
Cvorn returned his attention to the shoal of reaverfish, the prador females and the lone reaverfish he’d let into the mating pool. He found his tension easing as he watched them and went into a kind of fugue state as the hours slipped by. He even caught the moment when the lone reaverfish began shuddering and shaking as it felt something seriously wrong inside it. When he finally dragged himself back to the present, he found that only an hour remained until his encounter with Sverl. He was hungry again now, but didn’t dare risk his delicate digestive system until after the battle. He didn’t really need to check his plans again, but his earlier paranoia that he had missed something was returning. Nearly everything was as it should be, but an alert glyph it took him a second to recognize drew his attention.
Vlern’s children . . .
Sealed into their quarters all about the ship, three of them were running out of oxygen and sinking into somnolence. However, the fourth had either been astute enough to prepare for something like this, or had got lucky. The young adult Sfolk not only had his own oxygen supply but he had also found a diamond saw with its own power pack and was steadily cutting through one wall. This despite Cvorn’s precaution of cutting electricity to all but the cams in his quarters, meaning most power tools were of no use.
Cvorn observed the scene, his guts bubbling with the intensity of his sudden anger. He wanted to go down there right then, open Sfolk’s quarters and simply tear the creature apart, but did not have the time. He could send Vrom, or some of the others, or maybe a war drone. But that wouldn’t be as satisfying. For a moment, he just stared in frustration at the screens, then, remembering his ascendancy in the Dracocorp aug network, he felt a sudden fear. How had he forgotten that? Opening bandwidth, he sought to seize mental control of the young adult, but it was like trying to get a grip on jelly. Presently the jelly collapsed and the connection closed.
“Desist,” he ordered through the cam-com.
Sfolk backed away from the hole he was making in the wall, still gripping the diamond saw in his claws, then tilted up and gazed at the cams in the ceiling.
“The others were naive,” he said. “I knew not to trust any gift from you. I routed the aug through a thrall unit interface set to shut down after a period of time if I didn’t log in.” Sfolk abruptly dropped the diamond saw. “I guess this wasn’t quiet enough.”
What?
Sfolk scuttled over to an open tool chest and took out another item, turned back towards the hole he had been making and raised the object. With a crack, he activated it and billowing smoke highlighted the intense green beam of a quantum cascade laser. It swiftly sliced through material the diamond saw would have taken an age to cut.
“Vrom!” Cvorn clattered, quickly routing his present screen view to the first-child. “Get down there and kill him! When you’ve dealt with him, kill the others!”
“Yes, Father,” Vrom replied.
Cvorn winced. The base of his left palp eye had started hurting as if someone was stabbing in a carapace drill. He tried to ignore the pain while making an aug connection to his own war drones, dispatching them to the same quarters. However, Sfolk’s behaviour was puzzling, because he could not hope to escape . . .
Suddenly feeling panic, which made that palp eye hurt even more, Cvorn brought up a ship’s schematic in his mind. The wall Sfolk was cutting through opened into a main tunnel. Even though Vrom would take a while to get there, two war drones, carrying enough weapons to go up against a Polity assault boat, were speeding in that direction and would arrive soon enough.
Something was wrong.
Cvorn deliberately forced himself to be calm and examined the schematics more meticulously. They definitely showed that main tunnel just on the other side of that wall and all the measurements were correct. However, when Cvorn expanded his examination of datum lines and the measurements of the ship as a whole, things ceased to add up. The schemat
ics were wrong. Sfolk had almost certainly interfered with them. Cvorn began working on them, observing the drones—two armoured spheres ten feet across and pocked with missile and energy weapon ports—arrive in that main tunnel and slow to a halt.
“Request clarification,” said one of them. “Further orders required.”
Wordlessly, Cvorn auged his instructions through, and they both turned towards the wall supposedly adjacent to where Sfolk was cutting, and powered up their particle cannons.
Cvorn continued analysing the schematics in his aug, running a search program and trying to correct obvious errors. Some liquid ran into one of his turret eyes and he blinked it away—too wrapped up in present concerns to heed it. It struck him as likely that what Sfolk had done had been originally in preparation for seizing control of this ST dreadnought from his brothers . . .
There.
The schematic expanded, holes appearing throughout it. However, though this was probably where areas were missing, it was wrong in the area where the drones were cutting, because still it showed just that one wall between Sfolk’s quarters and the main tunnel.
“Cvorn,” said Sfolk, his laser shutting down, “you can augment, put on legs and take my brother’s prongs, but your brain is still old.” The young prador now dived into the hole and disappeared out of sight.
Out in the corridor, as Vrom arrived, the drones cut through to expose a vertical maintenance shaft made for first-children, but which was still large enough for the young adult to squeeze down. It was too small, however, for the war drones to enter.
“Vrom,” Cvorn instructed, “get what resources you need, go after him and kill him. But take nothing that will in any way hamper my attack on Sverl.”
“Yes, Father,” said Vrom, then turned away to begin clattering into the communicator beside his mandibles. Cvorn watched and waited until a small squad of heavily armed second-children arrived, along with one of the ship’s internal security war drones—a thing shaped like a melon seed over five feet long. This ignited arc lights in its fore and headed down into the maintenance shaft. The second-children followed, and Vrom a short while after, when he had donned all the hardware they had brought for him.