by Neal Aher
Cvorn now took a moment to check on the progress of his offspring. He called up an image of the annex pod to the breeding pond and saw that just a few fourth-children clung to the bony remains of the reaverfish. Others were propelling themselves about in the tank and, even as he watched, two of them attacked another child that hadn’t developed properly—the paddle legs on one side of its teardrop-shaped body seemed deformed. They tore into it with sickle hooks, which would be supplanted by growing claws when they finally left the pool. As it struggled to escape, they ripped soft carapace off its back end, whereupon innards spilled out in a long Gordian tangle behind. This they fed upon while their victim struggled to escape. All was as it should be there.
Cvorn next briefly watched the erstwhile second-child head towards Vrom’s quarters. At the door, it reached out and used the pit control. Only a little while before, this would have sliced off its claw. Instead, the door opened and Vlox entered. But there was no time now to take in anything more.
They had arrived.
The ST dreadnought surfaced into the real, sensors picking up the glimmer of photons forced from the quantum foam all around. Cvorn ranged out with his sensors, seeing the ambush world and noting that his departure from the hollow moon had put it in a decaying orbit that would bring it crashing down a hundred years hence. He quickly ascertained that no ships were in view and felt a sinking sensation in his sensitive gut as he wondered if Sverl had managed to make full repairs to his chameleonware. His belated discovery of a vessel lying half a million miles away, with U-space disturbances still new in its vicinity, dispelled this sensation.
With a thought, he turned the ST dreadnought towards this and engaged its fusion engines, as the distant ship’s apparently recent arrival puzzled him. The reason became evident when further sensor data began to come in, and Cvorn swore eloquently in prador. By expanding its U-space field enough to encompass a prador dreadnought, the old style Polity attack ship had created a mass/field energy debt which had a delaying effect. That was why it hadn’t been here long. And it wasn’t Sverl’s ship out there, but one of the decoys.
The attack ship began accelerating away and Cvorn tried to decide if it was worth pursuing. Perhaps it would be better to just charge up his U-space engines and jump to the coordinates of one of the other signatures. He then noted that the attack ship was trying to open communications with him and, taking the necessary precautions, he allowed this.
“Oops,” said the mind in that ship, “wrong ship.”
“Who are you?” Cvorn asked.
“My name is a human one: ‘Flute.’ Which is also the name for a musical instrument humans use. It’s funny, but I can’t actually remember what my old name was—I reckon I left it in my old ganglion.”
“What?”
“It’s refrozen now so I suppose if I was to charge it up and sift corrupted memories, I would be able to find my old name again. But what use is it to me now?”
The mind was babbling with the obvious purpose of delaying Cvorn’s departure after one of the other signatures. Cvorn shouldn’t waste his time on it.
“It’s rather nice to be able to think as clearly as I do now,” Flute added. “And at least I haven’t ended up with a senile old brain like yours.”
Then again . . .
Cvorn opened fire with a particle beam. It stabbed across the intervening distance where inevitably a hardfield intercepted it. However, such a small ship would struggle to engage its U-space drive while thus defending itself. The attack ship turned, setting itself on a course to take it towards the world. Cvorn fired off a swarm of sub-AI missiles—their course set to take them between the attack ship and that world. The mind’s tactics were obvious: it could go in low and slingshot into the atmosphere. Meanwhile Cvorn, with a larger and less manoeuvrable ship, would have to take a longer course. At some point, the world would get between them and, leaving atmosphere, the attack ship would then be able to drop into U-space before Cvorn could recommence his attack.
“So where has Sverl gone?” Cvorn asked.
“Now, if I told you that, we wouldn’t be able to play any more.”
The attack ship changed course, now heading for the hollow moon. Cvorn sent a signal to divert his missiles in that direction and considered launching some more. But how much time and resources was he prepared to expend on capturing a mind that Sverl probably hadn’t informed of his destination anyway?
“I can give you a clue if you like?” said Flute.
“Please do,” said Cvorn.
“He’s gone to the most likely of the least likely destinations,” said the mind. “Then again, I might be lying.”
“What is Sverl’s purpose?” asked Cvorn, annoyed by this exchange but knowing that such ship minds were often naive and could sometimes betray themselves.
“To survive and grow, as is the purpose of us all,” said Flute. “Hey, shouldn’t you be railgunning that moon by now? The debris cloud should make things difficult for me.”
Cvorn brought his railguns on line to target the moon and was about to do just that—
—when someone began talking to him down another communications channel he had kept open through U-space.
“Well, here I am, Dad,” said the second-child aboard his old destroyer. “There’s some seriously weird . . . shit! What the fuck is—”
The channel closed with a brief surge of energy and the kind of squawk emitted by a fried U-space communicator.
“Good try,” said Cvorn to the mind in the attack ship.
“Whassup?” said Flute.
Cvorn calmly recalled his missiles and shut down his particle beam. He sent new coordinates to his own ship mind for now he knew precisely where he was going. To where something had just annihilated his old destroyer.
BLITE
Seen through the atmosphere of this green-belt world, the hypergiant sun had a violet hue. It appeared no bigger than Sol did from the surface of Earth because the distance from the sun was much greater. However, because of the intense output of the hypergiant, Blite had his visor filtering heavily. A single cloud mass, resembling some organic grey battleship, rested on the horizon over to one side of this orb, while across its face flew creatures resembling birds at a distance, but more akin to pterodactyls when close. He turned from this scene and took in the one behind.
The Black Rose possessed its own avian qualities: it was black and this light had picked out the scaling of its hull so it resembled some giant raven expiring on the ground. It rested on a bed of vegetation that looked like a mat of gnarled tree roots. Perhaps they were roots extruded from the wall of alien red jungle, lying just a mile away. However, Blite stood on a soft mass of shredded organic matter which extended in a line from his ship to the exposed remains of some built structure. Here lay foundations—adjoining sets of triangular walls just waist high. They were made of a blue and slightly translucent ceramic that was incredibly hard. These were the remains of Jain buildings, so Penny Royal had said, and the AI stood in black thistle form within it. Its own silver roots had spread all around as if it was feeding on the ruins. Blite headed over.
“I don’t need to tell you that they’ve arrived,” he said.
A twenty-foot-wide projection of outer space shimmered into being beside Penny Royal. The view was similar to the one Blite had obtained from the probes he’d scattered around this system upon their arrival. The captain now watched the current replay. The King’s Guard, fresh from destroying Cvorn’s old destroyer, U-jumped close to Sverl’s ship and attacked it while Spear’s Polity destroyer departed. He saw Sverl’s ship breaking into segments, which kept the King’s Guard ships occupied while the destroyer managed to gain some distance. There was a brief conflagration as the Guard belatedly focused their attack on that small ship too late, because it U-jumped across the system to within just a few thousand miles of Room 101.
“I thought you didn’t want the King’s Guard here,” he said. “I thought that was the whole purpose of those
risky jaunts through time.”
“Incorrect,” said Penny Royal. “I did not want the king here.”
“Why?” asked Greer, who had just joined them.
Blite glanced at her, wondering what had compelled her to come out after him.
Penny Royal didn’t reply, so she continued, “Yes, you say he would have died here. I know that, but I fail to see why.”
Penny Royal emitted something that sounded suspiciously like a sigh of boredom, whereupon Greer staggered, clutching at her head. Blite watched her, wincing slightly because he knew what was happening, and waited. Eventually she lowered her hands and turned to him. Her face was pale and he had no doubt she felt sick. Woodenly she said, “The King’s Guard will carry out their orders, hit their target and leave. If the king was here he would have done more and ended up dead.”
Blite had to wonder just what memories Penny Royal had resurrected in her mind to impart that information.
“So what do we do now?” he asked.
A glimpse then through the eyes of his younger self, as he peered into an archaeological dig on one of the first Diaspora worlds.
“Stop being opaque!” he snapped, not wanting Greer’s recent experience.
The AI’s spines rattled and shifted and it lifted some small object up at the end of one of its tentacles for examination. Blite meanwhile turned away from the dig site in his past and found himself playing chess against Brond in his head, shortly after recruiting the man. Brond’s king was on the run and quite soon Blite would have him. Overlaid on that was his present knowledge that he had been thoroughly mistaken, and that Brond had lured him into a trap. Then the whole scene shattered.
“Clear as mud, as usual,” said Blite, glancing at Greer, who shook her head in annoyance.
“Explain to a child the reason, and it will still ask why,” said the AI.
Fuck you, Penny Royal, thought Blite, and peered closely at the object the AI was holding. It looked like a small egg, quadrate patterns visible all over its surface. The egg grew as bright as a welding arc and disappeared with a crack, leaving a wisp of black smoke.
And fuck you again, thought Blite, turning away and stomping back towards his ship, Greer quickly falling in beside him.
“Curiosity,” said Penny Royal.
Blite halted and turned around, Greer too.
“I wish you wouldn’t keep on dragging me into this,” said Leven from Blite’s suit.
“I’m not.”
“I’m not talking to you.”
“Oh.”
“Here goes, then,” Leven translated. “The King’s Guard have been ordered to remove the threat Sverl poses to the king’s rule. And they are intelligent enough to know the entire substance of that threat: that Sverl is an amalgam of prador, human and AI,” said Leven.
“Wait!” said Blite. “You hearing this, Greer?”
“I’m hearing it, Captain,” she replied.
“Now may I continue?” asked Leven tightly.
“Yeah, go ahead.”
“In the past Factory Station Room 101 was able to fend off an entire prador war fleet—but is no longer capable of the same now. The erstwhile Polity station is much weaker and prador weaponry has changed. Those Guard ships are fully capable now, though with some effort, of getting enough CTDs past station defences to vaporize it completely.”
“What about this ‘curiosity’?”
“The King’s Guard will adhere to their orders and make efforts to destroy Sverl, to remove him as a threat to the king’s rule. Most likely they will do this by simply destroying the station. If the king had been here, rather than order the destruction of Room 101, he would have ordered an assault upon it. This is because he is curious, because he wants to know what Penny Royal is doing and why. Such an assault would have resulted in the king’s death.”
“So basically Penny Royal has answered Greer’s question but not mine,” said Blite.
“I haven’t finished yet,” said Leven, obviously irritated.
“Sorry.”
“Okay, the events here will, apparently, lead to some sort of resolution for two . . . problems . . . well, the nearest I can get to it is ‘actors in a play.’ Simplistically, Penny Royal is clearing up its own messes,” said Leven, “and incidentally solving some other problems along the way.”
“One of those is Sverl? Sverl is one of those actors?”
After a long pause Leven replied, “Yes.”
“And the other? Is that Spear?”
The reply issued from Penny Royal like a ghost muttering in the wind. “Spear is not a problem, but a solution.”
“And what about the answer to my question—what do we do now?” asked Blite.
“We wait here, apparently,” Leven replied.
Blite did not bother asking anything more. He knew, on some unconscious level, that his audience with the black AI was over. Suppressing irritation, he walked away.
RISS
“Identify yourself,” was the essence of the demand, but it sounded like one made by hundreds of individuals. As Spear’s response wasn’t immediate and sensor data showed numerous weapons turrets and other armaments focusing on the Lance, Riss considered taking over. However, that would entail a mental tussle with Spear that might delay things fatally. A moment later Spear sent the Polity identification codes recorded in the ship’s system—it had just taken him a few seconds to find them, that was all.
“Resupply or refit?” was the essence of the ensuing question. As with the demand, it wasn’t phrased in human words.
Spear chose “resupply.” Then whatever he was talking to, at a level somewhere between code and language, replied. “Proceed to these coordinates,” it said, and sent a data package.
Keyed into the sensors, Riss now watched the King’s Guard ships materialize some tens of thousands of miles behind them. The station’s first response took the form of coolant ejections and shade-side shots of coolant lasers. Then the massive structure warmed up by a few degrees in just a few seconds as even bigger weapons arrays powered up. Even so, Riss could see evidence that things definitely weren’t as they should have been. The station was a mess: riotous growths of nano-, micro- and macro-tech gone insane. Some weapons arrays warmed up, then immediately powered down again, others were tardy, and quite a few looked heavily damaged. Also, unlike during the last prador attack on this station, no ships were launching—none at all.
The King’s Guard ships looked decidedly more lethal. In response, they began closing into a tight formation, simultaneously firing swarms of railgun missiles and probing with particle beams. Spear released two more chaff shells and abruptly altered course, raising protective hardfields again a moment later. Beams intersected on their previous position, then began probing out randomly through the chaff. One of them just grazed one of the Lance’s hardfields and the ship shuddered. Riss detected a hardfield projector taken just to the edge of overload. Spear launched two more missiles and changed course again. The two fission bombs they contained exploded—their EM output enough to defeat even sophisticated scanners for a little while. Then probing beams were splashing behind them like flame-throwers hitting a glass wall. They were now inside some set perimeter and coming under the station’s protection. It had also opened fire.
The firing wasn’t neat or coordinated, but the sheer volume of weapons fire was enough to have the Guard ships scaling hardfields together in front of them. High-intensity green lasers hit first, turning hardfields iridescent. And ship-killing particle beams splashed on them next. Some hardfields went out, to be instantly replaced, the ships behind explosively ejecting the molten ruin of field projectors.
If Riss had possessed breath to hold, she would have let it out now.
“I’m guessing these are here for Sverl,” Riss said to Spear via his aug.
“I guess,” Spear replied. “And now they want to talk.”
Spear turned from her to gaze up at the screen fabric, where a frame opened to display a huge prad
or clad in black armour striped with iridescent blue. The creature was occupying a severely cramped sanctum, machines jammed into the spaces all around it.
“You are Thorvald Spear,” said the prador.
“And you are?”
“Fleet Admiral KG1 is all you need to know.”
“That’s not very friendly.”
“I am prador,” said the admiral.
“So what can I do for you, Fleet Admiral KG1?”
Exterior sensors now showed the Lance flying into the open mouth of a massive final construction bay. Factory Station Room 101 loomed hugely around them, so they seemed like a small weaver fish swimming into a cave in an undersea cliff. And that analogy was a close one, because strange corals and other growths occupied this cliff. This was also a surface with seemingly volcanic vents opening across it, as the station ejected its own overheated projectors and some missiles got through.
Inside this construction bay, Riss spied giant robotic arms and resupply towers. The drone shivered down all its snaky length—reminded of past times. However, those arms were still and most of the movement here was elsewhere. What looked like massive worm casts covered large areas of the bay interior. An abundance of constructor tentacles writhed from these and elsewhere—ribbed and braided snakes sometimes miles long. These terminated in spiderish tubeworm splays of individual tentacles. Studying an image of one of these heads more closely, Riss saw that the single appendages terminated in coffin-sized objects like polished pistachio nuts. She recognized ‘structor pods—so named because they were made both to construct and “destruct”—and there were thousands upon thousands of them.
“The Prador Kingdom has no quarrel with either the Polity or with you, Thorvald Spear,” said the admiral. “However, the grotesquely changed prador, Sverl, is a threat to our security and I have been ordered to negate that threat.”
“Right now that might be a little problematic for you,” Spear observed.
“I agree. Room 101 is a formidable space station. However, it is no longer runcible-linked for resupply, is no longer manufacturing weapons and is entirely reliant on its static defences. There is also evidence that its main AI no longer controls it and, though there is a possibility I will take losses, I know I can destroy it. I therefore suggest that you turn around and bring Sverl back to me.”