Croma Venture: (The Spiral Wars Book Five)

by Joel Shepherd

  Draper kept looking at him, wary eyes from flat on his back. Erik slapped his shoulder. “She sims better than you,” he said lightly, turning to follow her back down the corridor.

  “Can smell the fish from here,” Draper muttered, pulling the visor back over his eyes.

  Hiro entered the parren engineering bay with two Domesh escorts and gazed about. There was a lot of gear here that even he didn’t recognise — fabricators, maintenance frameworks, open-sided robotic structures that appeared to turn themselves inside out in their production methods, all humming and throbbing, and apparently autonomous without obvious control functions.

  Beyond the machines he saw a clear circle about a central plinth, surrounded by parren guards and engineers. He walked that way, hearing conversation, quiet and orderly, mostly between the engineers. The parren wore regular spacer jumpsuits, a necessity in Defiance’s pressurised habitats with safety gear never far away, but also there were signs of rank, of caps and headcrests of the minor variety, and other colour and adornment. The guards wore all black, including facemasks, hoods and visors. It made sense that Gesul, more open-minded than many Domesh leaders, had recruited engineers from all different denominations, while only the armed guards were Domesh… though given how other denominations loved to sneak spies into the camps of their rivals, one could never be sure.

  Arriving on the edge of the circle, Hiro saw Lisbeth watching proceedings and chewing a thumbnail, exchanging muted conversation with a slim parren female with a green sash tied at her waist, and an elegant black skullcap. That would be Semaya, Lisbeth’s Chief of Staff. Hiro wasn’t yet perfect at identifying parren on sight, but he was improving. About them, several others, probably Lisbeth’s staff… and behind them, Timoshene, an impassive black sentinel.

  Lisbeth saw him, and looked exasperated. Hiro was used to that, and looked at the object on the plinth. It looked strikingly familiar, wired up to many external connections, all monitored by earnest parren scientists with screens, AR glasses and holographic displays. An irregular silver blob, about the size of a medicine ball from Phoenix’s gym. Unlike the one that had sat in Phoenix’s hold for so long, this one had two eyes like most drysine drones — one large and one small. It shimmered faintly in the multiple floodlights. Not a simple metallic sheen at all, but a chitinous multi-layered coating, reflecting light at unpredictable angles as though the surface itself had depth.

  Lisbeth beckoned to Hiro, and now various parren in the circle were turning to look, with the cool disapproval so common to their kind. Hiro went, noting holographic projectors about the circle, small spheres hung from the ceiling. He thought he could guess what those were for.

  Timoshene studiously ignored him as he arrived by Lisbeth, and cast a visored stare over his escort instead… probably asking them on private coms whether they’d confiscated his weapons. Parren security teams were endlessly divided by these petty rivalries between those who served different masters, even within the same denomination.

  “What are you doing here?” Lisbeth asked, still half-listening to ongoing coms discussion in one ear. “Isn’t Phoenix leaving soon?”

  “I asked the Captain if I could stay with you,” said Hiro.

  To her credit, Lisbeth did not look particularly surprised. “Well you’ll need more than Erik’s approval to do that,” she said.

  “Gesul’s staff agreed. I’ll be attached to your office. Thought I’d come and tell you in person.”

  Lisbeth smiled, a touch sarcastically. “Well that’s noble of you.” She was letting her frizzy brown hair revert to its natural state these days, having lately acquired the confidence to tell her maids to take their severe combs and pins somewhere else, on non-ceremonial days at least. And here in the gravitational habitat, maids were in less supply than they had been in the Kunadeen. “Erik can afford to lose you?”

  Hiro made a face. “Phoenix has plenty of people who’ve been learning the few specialist skills I possess. Most of those skills I can’t execute on a military ship anyway. I’m much better suited to a civilian environment.”

  Lisbeth turned to the parren on her other side, a dark-clad man with a more traditional veil across head and face atop his jumpsuit, who’d been listening in. She spoke to him in Porgesh, the fluency of which still amazed Hiro. He’d known Lisbeth was smart, but working security for the Debogande household on Homeworld, everyone had made jokes about her lack of application — compared to the rest of the family, anyhow. Now that she’d truly set her mind to something, the results were astonishing.

  “You see, Orun?” the translator crackled in Hiro’s ear, in a fair approximation of Lisbeth’s voice. “I did tell you.”

  “Yes you did, Lisbeth-sa,” said the Domesh named Orun. “I concede.”

  Lisbeth looked back in amusement. “I told Orun that you would prefer to remain with the parren while Phoenix went wandering. Much more your sort of environment, I said. Lots of intrigue.” Her gaze flashed with something more than simple amusement — she knew, that look said, far more than she let on for the parren. ‘I’ll maintain the illusion for now,’ that look said. ‘But if you cause me too much trouble, you’re on your own’. Somewhere in the past year, Lisbeth had not merely acquired competence and authority, but layers.

  “You know me too well,” Hiro said blandly. She knew that he’d never entirely left Federal Intelligence. She knew what concerns drove him now. She was still human, and shared those concerns. But that did not mean she’d let him get in Gesul’s way, no matter what Hiro thought of the consequences of Gesul’s rise for human security.

  “This is Orun, by the way,” she said. “He’s my Chief of Communications… you two haven’t met?”

  Hiro was further introduced to Lisbeth’s Chief Scientist — an Incefahd named Dolesh, and a pair of denominational liaisons named Rafad and Sameel, from denominations with which Hiro was only vaguely familiar. He wasn’t especially surprised that Lisbeth’s staff were not entirely Domesh — it suited Gesul’s style entirely, for the same reason all the scientists and engineers in the room were from across House Harmony. Gesul welcomed a diversity of opinions to inform his leadership, the very reason Lisbeth was here at all, where most parren leaders of most denominations would not welcome her. And so the people with guns and blades, whose loyalty had to be guaranteed, were clad entirely in black, but everyone else was from all corners.

  Hiro wondered how Gesul could trust what those non-Domesh scientists told him, given that their primary loyalties were to the heads of their denominations, not to Gesul personally. No doubt his head scientist would be Domesh, and besides, it would benefit no denomination to interfere with the accumulation of scientific data that would benefit all House Harmony. Perhaps this was Gesul’s way of making clear to all the denominations that they really were all in this together. And now, with Sordashan newly arrived in orbit above them, threatening all House Harmony on Defiance with whatever-it-was that he wasn’t communicating yet, all of the Harmony denomination leaderships would follow Gesul, or perish at Sordashan’s hand.

  “So how does it go?” Hiro asked, nodding to the drysine head on the plinth.

  “Well, they’ve invited Alired to come and watch,” said Lisbeth. “So I’d imagine it’s going well. Feels a bit like old times, doesn’t it?”

  “A drysine queen head surrounded by non-drysine engineers,” said Hiro. “Sure.” It felt… dangerous. And exciting. Hiro could feel it in the air, crackling with energy that had nothing to do with the humming machinery. He knew he’d made the right choice to stay here. On the ship he’d been a rat in a cage until Phoenix made some new port of call… and from what he’d heard, getting out and mingling among the croma wasn’t going to be easy. But here, inserted into Lisbeth’s office at the side of perhaps the second-most-powerful leader in all parren space… there were possibilities. “Do we know what Sordashan’s threatening?”

  “The speculation is that he’s assessing the situation here in person before making any demands,�
�� said Lisbeth. “We know he’s been talking to Alired.”

  “Alired hasn’t accepted the offer to come here?”

  “I don’t think she needs to. She has spies. Briefing Sordashan will take priority.”

  “And that’s where she’s wrong,” said Hiro, gazing at the head on the plinth.

  The holoprojectors began flashing, great sheets of light falling like curtains about the plinth, scrolling images, landscapes, clouds. Parren watched, many gazing up to take in the entire projection, marvelling at their beauty. It was Hannachiam, of course, making commentary the only way she could.

  “Has she actually been constructive?” Hiro asked. “Or does she just like flashing pictures of grass?”

  “It’s a bit of a puzzle,” said Lisbeth. “Hanna’s logical functions are all administrative. She doesn’t have much technical knowledge, though she has had access to the data-core, via Styx. We still think she’s got some kind of knowledge of a queen’s software template, if you like. Maybe she is the template herself, in some ways — the data-core data’s very raw, it requires a lot more unpacking than we think anyone’s had time to do.”

  “Styx could do it,” said Hiro.

  “And Styx always insists she’s not an engineer, that her brain isn’t optimally configured for those things. The technical complexities here are insane — configuring the software that feeds into a drysine queen’s head… one of the parren scientists figured it out, she said it was more raw computing data than all parren civilisation generated in the first century after parren first made computers.”

  Hiro shook his head. “I think it’s interactive. A two-way process. The queen participates in writing its own software, given the right cues.”

  Lisbeth gave him a skeptical look. “And you’d know this how?”

  “Because all their tech talks to each other all the time,” said Hiro. “You notice it if you’re been running communications ops on it the past half-year, which none of these scientist guys have done. Everything talks to everything else, constantly. It’s a web. A lot of their infant tech is self-actualising, it helps write itself. And it makes each new unit slightly unique, like a snowflake. Which explains why each of the Major’s new drones has a distinct personality, where if their software had all been mass-produced in the same location and fed in remotely, they’d be identical.”

  “So if you’re right,” Lisbeth said thoughtfully, looking at the inert queen, “she won’t be precisely like Styx. That could be a good thing.”

  “Or a bad one,” said Hiro. “Styx is gentle and kind by the standards of her people, across history.”

  “Thanks,” Lisbeth said drily. “Comforting.”

  Hannachiam’s images switched from drifting sheets of rain across mountains, to an old parren cityscape — wood shingled rooves, tall temple towers, pedestrians on old streets alight with glowing lanterns. Watching parren actually gasped, and a few held recording devices to capture the images. Some of those had made it out to parren space, Hiro knew, where Hanna’s pronouncements had acquired a cult following now that everyone knew of her existence. Parren had a mystical side, and for some, Hanna was now a kind of oracle. Hiro was a little surprised that Gesul allowed these recordings to get out… but then, so much of the fear and anger directed against him for having dug up the old drysine past was based on a single, narrow view of what the drysines had been. While Styx was the perfect embodiment of that fear, Hannachiam was the likely antidote. What this new queen would be was anyone’s guess. Hiro thought he could see what Gesul was attempting, but it seemed an awfully big gamble.

  “Anyhow,” said Hiro. “I must go. Good talk.”

  “You’re not going to hang around and see if she wakes up?” Lisbeth wondered.

  “If that’s what everyone’s waiting for, they’re wasting their time. She’ll wake up slowly, consciousness doesn’t just happen like flipping a switch, she’ll have a billion-squared calculations to run per micro-second for the next few days yet, I think. Then she’ll start wondering what’s going on.”

  “Or who she is,” said Lisbeth, with trepidation.

  Hiro smiled. “I don’t think so. The drysines wouldn’t have become the most successful AI race if they’d had any doubt who they were.”

  With the countdown timer inside five minutes, Sordashan, the supreme leader of all parren peoples, contacted Erik directly. “Captain Debogande. You will remain where you are, or your warship will be fired upon and destroyed.”

  “Sordashan-sa,” said Erik, visor down and eyes on the holographic projection of his trajectory, and thinking how strange it was that for all their pageantry, parren didn’t require the multiple honourifics and titles that one might expect. Even the great leaders preferred just one name, as though that single name was to be sufficient to inspire awe and wonder in all those surrounding. “If your fleet fires upon the UFS Phoenix, your fleet will be entirely destroyed, yourself along with it. We did not defeat the deepynine horde by accident, and this ship is now more advanced than anything your people have seen. We mean neither you, nor House Fortitude, any harm. But if you declare yourselves our enemies, you will die.”

  There was a pause. About him the bridge crew kept working, each attentive to his or her own station. Down back, all were aboard save for most of the marines, Trace included. The shuttles were impossible to dock while Phoenix was in the bay, and Erik preferred them to stay on Defiance during the initial launch regardless. If the ship’s fancy new tech didn’t live up to his threats, at least Phoenix Company would survive the resulting fireball.

  “Captain,” came Styx’s voice in his ear, “I have probed their communication defences. They are close enough to surface communications that there are now multiple points of access. I predict a fifty percent success rate in disabling their vessels by this method.”

  “Thank you Styx, let’s hope we don’t need it.”

  “Hope is an unnecessary state of mind. I will act upon your command.”

  “Now you sound like Major Thakur,” said Erik.

  “This is a compliment. Thank you Captain.”

  Erik rolled his eyes. Well, at least Styx was aboard, with Peanut, Bucket and Wowser, all having toiled these last few weeks to get Phoenix ready in time. She still professed to not be thrilled about the mission, but was no longer so negative about it in public. More to the point, Erik thought, staying with Gesul would be exceedingly dangerous in the present circumstances. She had much old history with the parren people, and wars could conceivably be started just to end her life. Worse, Erik did not think Gesul would want her for exactly that reason… and because, if he had any sense at all, he’d fear and distrust her. But she had her new protege in Gesul’s hands, programmed in part by her, who could maintain a drysine command presence with Gesul while Styx herself was gone. Gesul no doubt planned to try and make this new queen answerable more to him than to Styx… which Erik thought was worth a try, but vastly unlikely to succeed.

  “They make no threat to Makimakala,” Sasalaka observed from Erik’s right-and-behind, Helm’s position in the old bridge configuration and the new.

  “Makimakala is a Dobruta vessel and they risk conflict with tavalai if they fire on her,” said Erik. “He figures he can shoot at us and no one back home will care.”

  “He’s right, too,” said Kaspowitz.

  The bridge did not look particularly different at first glance. Only once settled in the chair with all systems activated did Erik truly see the difference. Partly the graphical layers on his visuals were even more precise and clean than before, but mostly in that the things they told him were ridiculous. He was gazing now at Kaspowitz’s projected escape trajectory against the Defiance gravity slope, and then the impossible, physics-defying gravity plunge about the singularity Defiance orbited. The old Phoenix would not have been able to perform the manoeuvres those lines described, not even close. Also there were readings from the powerplant, and range-horizons from the various weapons systems, all off-the-scale compared to what
Erik was accustomed to. He only hoped he could manage to manoeuvre the ship in combat without accidentally squishing all the human crew to a pulp with that crazy, oversized torch mounted on the ship’s rear.

  Two minutes later, Sordashan called him back. “Phoenix. We will discuss this. You are invited to this ship. We will talk as equals.”

  “Sordashan-sa, Phoenix is less than two minutes from launch. I regret the inconvenience, but we have an appointment with the croma.”

  “This meeting with the croma will have strategic implications for all parren. It is forbidden.”

  “Phoenix is on human business, and should you attempt to stop us your reign over all parren will end. You cannot defeat this warship.”

  “And you have equipped House Harmony warships the same as yours. This is a mortal threat to the stability of parren space.”

  “House Harmony has offered to share this technology with you, and has invited you now to inspect various vessels under construction on Defiance. Their firepower is aimed at the deepynines who threaten all parren space, not at House Fortitude, and again, Gesul has pledged repeatedly that the peaceful accord he swore to not make conflict with Tobenrah of House Harmony also extends to Sordashan of House Fortitude. It seems to me that your issues are with Gesul, and I suggest you speak to him instead. Phoenix will launch in one minute.”

  The numbers on his visor continued to wind down. “That’s it,” said Shilu from up front. “I’m getting no more from him.”