Croma Venture: (The Spiral Wars Book Five)

by Joel Shepherd

  She was disappointed when the cockpit door did not open to allow her to say goodbye as she pulled herself up to the shuttle’s dorsal hatch… but then, there was air-discipline to observe when the hatches were being opened, and the cockpit would usually keep itself sealed. A Phoenix crewwoman made sure of a secure connection, then opened the outer airlock door. Tiga pulled herself in, joined by Captain Bella and two other corbi crew — the airlock’s limit.

  The airlock cycled — unnecessary if the seal was good, but space travel was all about safety procedures and redundancies, Tiga was learning, and no one taking unnecessary chances. The Captain went first up the connector tube, Tiga waiting until last, then into the corbi ship’s airlock and waiting until it too was cleared.

  The first thing she noticed, in The Traveller’s Midships, was how much smaller it was. Her ears felt blocked, and she yawned to make them pop, taking hold of an old, canvas-strip cargo net up one wall, providing airlock users something to hold onto. The other thing she noticed was that there were no neat storage lockers up the walls here, just canisters and cargo nets lashed to the zero-G sides with belts and elastic straps. Midships was where people and cargo entered and exited a ship, and storage space was obviously more plentiful in zero-G than in the crew cylinder’s gravity. The airlock controls alongside looked old, with plastic levers and buttons, and none of Phoenix’s slick touch-panels and multi-varied displays. Everything looked worn, and the air smelt stale, as though it had been run through the recycler one too many times.

  “This is Tiga of Do’Ran,” Captain Bella told the other crew — there was one operating the airlock, and several others waiting, all in plain jumpsuits with precious few emergency features. “She’s been guiding Phoenix and Makimakala this far. She’s come to join the Resistance.”

  Tiga had steeled herself for a lack of enthusiasm from these grizzled veterans of the war for survival. But she was pleasantly surprised at the hand-clasps and pats on the shoulder from friendly crew who floated to her — about an even mix of male and female, and very little to tell them as one race from another. Humans had gone though the same thing, she’d heard — having once had very distinct races, then getting all mixed up together in the frantic fight following the loss of their homeworld.

  She learned their names — Tiler, Goja, Dagrez, Hema — and thought most of them weren’t enormously older than her. Their accent was odd, but she’d heard enough recordings from Resistance people to not be surprised. In the two centuries since Grandma Elur had been taken by the Croma’Dokran, her own isolated pocket of corbi existence had diverged from mainstream corbi patterns of speech. Resistance-folk who’d heard it insisted it sounded like the croma lisp and drawl.

  They took her through the ship core from Midships — a claustrophobic crawlway without Phoenix’s thoroughfare of moving handlines, and Tiga had to pull her way along as though climbing a tree. Then the rotating access, turning about the core as the crew cylinder spun, and down short ladders into ever-increasing gravity. The rim-level was only half-a-gravity, The Traveller not possessing a wide enough girth to provide that rotation at ergonomically realistic ratios. The ship’s steel walls were bare, no interactive damage-control panelling, no regular yellow-and-black striped emergency stations or vertical acceleration-sling storage. Some of the electronics were exposed, and to Tiga’s untrained eye it did not even look like fluidic systems, but old-fashioned wires and conducting currents. And when she passed a cross-corridor, the upward curve of the cylinder rotation was pronounced. You could probably walk around this ship’s circumference in a quarter the time it took on Phoenix, she thought.

  She was ushered into a room behind the bridge — no table, but some seats encircling some floor-mounted holographics. Not unlike the briefing room on Phoenix, but much smaller and more low-tech. One of the holographics mounts was held together with tape. Captain Bella indicated a seat, and Tiga took it, nervously, as Resistance officers sat around her.

  “A little about you,” requested Captain Bella without preamble, wiping a hand through her greying mane. She was quite old, Tiga thought, unlike most of the crew. “Your parents?”

  “Tebur and Wilud of Temsan,” said Tiga, trying to keep her face straight as she said it. Parting had been hard. Neither her mother or father expected to ever see her again.

  “I see,” said Bella, looking at the slate she pulled from her worn jumpsuit pocket. “The Wiluds. From Etha of Wilud, loadmaster on the Peigar.” That had been Grandma Elur’s ship. Rumour was it still existed, somewhere in Croma’Dokran deep space storage.

  “Yes,” said Tiga. “Etha was my great-great-grandfather.”

  “So your Aunt was Sona of Wilud.”

  “Yes.” Tiga’s hands twisted nervously. “She left for the Resistance before I was born. I recall the day I learned she had died.”

  “And now you want to join too?”

  “All corbi are in the Resistance,” Tiga gave the rote reply. “Whether they choose it or not.” A few patronising smiles around the group. It was what Resistance Fleet said disdainfully about some Rando corbi who preferred to live out their lives as best they could, hoping the reeh would leave them alone.

  Captain Bella put the slate aside and looked at her directly. There was something unreadable about her brown-eyed gaze, an expression that was beyond what Tiga’s life experience had taught her how to analyse. “Your impression of these aliens? Let’s start with the Phoenix. An impressive warship.”

  “They’re both impressive. But yes, Phoenix is the more impressive, she was recently refitted with old technology from the Machine Age, if you can believe that.”

  “Which Machine Age?” asked Bella.

  Tiga blinked at her. “Which… the Machine Age.” Bella looked faintly puzzled, but not sufficiently to suggest that she cared. “The rule of the great AI races many thousands of years ago.”

  “Ah, yes,” said Bella, recalling. “That old story.”

  Tiga nearly laughed in amazement, but bit it back. “It’s not a story. Phoenix have an AI queen aboard their ship, and several drones.”

  “You met this queen?”

  “Well no, not exactly… but I saw her, and the drones. The humans and the tavalai believe one of those machine races survived and is now in alliance with another species called the alo…”

  “Yes yes,” said Bella, waving a dismissive hand. “We heard Captain Debogande’s tale. Phoenix is certainly a very advanced ship, but we’ve seen plenty of those with the reeh. What do you make of Phoenix’s marine company?”

  “They’re very good,” said Tiga, feeling more and more uncomfortable. She shouldn’t have. Of course Captain Bella had barely heard of the Machine Age. Its territory had barely extended beyond where croma space was now. Tiga had heard of it because she’d grown up in croma space, and the Machine Age was fundamental to the telling of their history, though not quite as fundamental as it was to the tavalai. And besides, she’d spoken to some of the humans, and been similarly amazed that most humans knew almost nothing of the Machine Age either. For humans the great enemy had been the krim, and then the tavalai who’d supported them. For the corbi it was the reeh. And for these corbi, the nightmare was not an event of the distant past, but something that defined their every waking moment to this very day. “Phoenix Company served all through the Triumvirate War against the tavalai and their allies. Their combat record is one of the best, and their commander, Major Thakur, is a legend of that war.”

  “And yet now they’ve teamed up with these tavalai,” said Bella. “Who they were previously at war with. Why?”

  Tiga took a deep breath. “As I said, the captains of Phoenix and Makimakala both believe that one of these old machine races, the deepynines, have survived in allegiance with the alo. They’re faced with a biotechnology threat, though they would not tell me specifically of its nature. They believe they might be able to find a cure among the Resistance’s scientists. Or failing that, perhaps do their own research with the reeh.”

/>   Dry smiles around the group. “They could try,” someone murmured.

  “Your impression of the Makimakala?” Bella continued.

  “I did not spend any time there, nor met with any of their crew directly,” said Tiga. Perhaps Captain Bella and her crew did not need to know very much of the outside world in order to fight the reeh, she reconsidered, challenging her own doubts. The war against the reeh was their entire world, as it needed to be. “But Phoenix holds Makimakala in high regard. They’ve worked together before.” She took another deep breath. “But of the two, I believe Makimakala offers the greatest hope for getting an alien government interested in our cause. Phoenix is estranged from her government, she holds very little authority back home. Makimakala is operating within the authority of the tavalai government. Any good impression we could make on her regarding how important this fight is, and how dangerous the reeh are to everyone on that side of the Croma Wall…”

  The corbi on Captain Bella’s right made a spitting gesture. “We’ve been arguing that point with the tavalai since before the reeh came to Rando. The tavalai government’s only contribution to our freedom struggle is to pay the croma not to let our ships through the wall. Ships like yours, Tiga of Do’Ran. Your entire family history, the fortunate isolation of your cousins and uncles in your luxury, is due to the tavalai’s involvement in our struggle.”

  “They’re not all my family,” Tiga bristled at the man. The return stare was unapologetic. “It’s not my fault where I was born, and I came here as soon as I could. And what’s more, you’re not listening to me. Tavalai politics just abruptly changed — their big war against the humans is over, there’s some big upset with their foreign policy department that just got really upset by something that we’re still not clear on, and now they’re scared of these new deepynines…”

  “Who are more likely to hit the humans than the tavalai by the sound of it,” said another crewman. “Why should the tavalai care if their enemies get eaten?”

  “Because they know they’ll be next.”

  “Makimakala might know that,” said Captain Bella. “Most tavalai don’t care. Tavalai never have, they’ve just looked out for themselves for the last ten thousand years, and everyone else can go rot.”

  “Why not…” and Tiga stopped herself short of launching into an argument. She couldn’t do this now, she was trying to make a good impression. But still she could not kill the thought… why not blame the croma instead of the tavalai? Clearly these Resistance fighters blamed the tavalai to some extent for their predicament, but the croma were the more obvious target for dislike. Tavalai may have encouraged them, but it was croma who refused to help, who turned back corbi attempts to find refuge in croma space, who made it illegal for croma to host corbi refugees on their worlds — a prohibition only the Croma’Dokran clan had been prepared to breach, and only then to the smallest degree. And it was the croma who had abandoned them all a thousand years ago, when the reeh had captured Rando, and withdrawn all forces to their new line, then played games with history to pretend that their current line had described the position of their infamous ‘wall’ for all time, as though the joint fight at the corbi’s side had never happened…

  Tiga composed herself with difficulty. We all have our hatreds and old histories, she thought bitterly, looking at the skeptical faces around her. She blamed the croma because the croma were a source of daily frustration, intervening in her life, preventing her freedom. But these people still perhaps had some hope of the croma, the one big, powerful force directly on their doorstep, who while providing no direct assistance were also one of the reeh’s greatest foes. And so it was easier, perhaps, to blame the far-away tavalai, rather than abandoning the one tiny sliver of hope they had left. Hope for a species who grew old to look like the very stones from which they’d made their ancient forts, and whose politics and relationships held much the same character.

  “I got the impression that the Resistance was after the splicer at Zondi System,” she said instead of launching into the argument. “Phoenix and Makimakala might agree with that, given their interest in understanding reeh technology.”

  Captain Bella frowned. “Who told you about the splicer at Zondi System?” ‘Splicer’ was what the Resistance called the reeh research facilities. They did a lot more and worse things there than just splice genes.

  “I’m in the loop,” Tiga retorted. “We get intel on Zondi System.”

  “Got,” said the man to Bella’s right. “Past tense.” Tiga stared at him.

  “That seems the most use we can get from these two,” said Bella. “We’ll check with the Fleet. It will take six days to jump out and check, then return. If these two are still here, we’ll present them with the offer.”

  “Why can’t the Resistance do it themselves?” Tiga asked, despite knowing the answer in advance. She wanted to hear Bella say just how bad things were, to make everyone this cynical.

  “The Splicer’s defences are impossible,” said Captain Bella. “For us in our present state, anyway.” And she smiled, tightly, at the distrust on Tiga’s face. “Have no fear, grounder. We haven’t become quite so awful out here in the war that we’d sacrifice new friends alone. If we think their addition will give us a chance, we’ll commit forces to it ourselves — large forces.”

  “What’s in the Zondi Splicer?”

  “Reeh concentrate their Splicers specific to the region of space they’re exploiting,” said the Captain, patronising the newcomer. Tiga tolerated it, barely. “The biggest Splicers are on Rando, obviously. But that’s phase-one experimentation, the more advanced stuff happens offworld, but still in the same region. The Splicer in Zondi System is the primary off-world Splicer for Rando-genetics. Corbi-genetics. All the stuff they’ve done to us, we can find the keys to unravelling it there.” She leaned forward, with the first genuinely ferocious expression Tiga had seen since coming aboard. “And kid, trust me. If these alien friends of yours can help us get it, we’re going to smash it, no matter what it takes or who it costs.”

  Lisbeth stood in the dank, cold tunnel, listening to the shriek of drysine laser cutters and wondering what the hell she’d gotten herself into this time. The laser glare lit the sewer passage ahead, perpendicular to this smaller, elevated access tunnel. Someone had parked a fat-wheeled vehicle in the main sewer beneath the lip of this access tunnel, and Ruei and Tarmen leaped past her now, with heavy, armoured thuds onto its roof, then down to the ground. They made it look so easy.

  The thrumming vibration of her own suit’s powerplant sounded like a nest of wasps, vibrating her limbs with a high-pitched, buzzing tension. She tested her arms for the hundredth time, and felt the resistance in the limbs, like pushing a light weight that faded the more she moved against it. That was the resistance setting, which in her case was the most sedate possible.

  For the past six days she’d been training, and working with parren technicians to configure the marine suit to fit a human. Neither had been easy as suits required a tight fit, and parren and human physiologies were only similar, not identical. But most difficult had been simply learning to operate the machine. Lisbeth was EVA qualified and a little experienced, but marine armour was something else again. Add to that the usual confusion of terms and symbols, as the suit’s visor display showed her everything in a technical jargon version of Porgesh that she was not especially familiar with, and it was all a lot to take in.

  “Okay?” Hiro asked, stepping to her side. His visor was up, lower faceplate covering his mouth, as did hers.

  “I think so.” Just the prospect of stepping out of the tunnel onto the roof of the vehicle, then jumping to the ground, was alarming. The suit was barely half the weight of a fully loaded human marine version — slim, streamlined and certainly looking more advanced. But it still weighed as much as she did, and if it had not clung to her and amplified her body’s every motion with perfection, she’d have collapsed beneath it like a bug crushed by a shoe. Moving over obstacles in it took
nerve. Like a skydiver strapped to a parachute, it required total trust in the equipment on her back, and that it would not plant her face-first in the concrete.

  On the floor beyond the vehicle, Dse Pa worked with his laser, a series of flashing, brilliant glares accompanied by the smoke and sparks of melting steel, and a sound that was half scream, half crackle. Parren workers and marine suits cast staccato shadows upon the sewer walls.

  “We’ll be fine in the water,” Hiro assured her, flipping the faceplate down to glance at his displays. “Just stay to the handholds, it’s only a few hundred metres and the current isn’t too strong today.”

  “I’m not worried about the damn current,” Lisbeth retorted, flipping down her own faceplate. “I’m worried about the timing.”

  Her secondary display, projected to appear as though hovering immediately before her face, was the great ceremony on the parade grounds. On that spit of land, the upstream junction of two river confluences, rose a series of great platforms, like farming terraces built into some ancient hillside. Above them loomed the Fortitude command buildings where the Harmony leadership had been received upon first arrival. Not the temple Lisbeth had supposed when she’d first seen their image, but it looked like one, grandly spectacular.

  Lisbeth’s display now showed the first of what would become hundreds of thousands of parren assembling. Nearly all would be House Fortitude, but many thousands had come with House Harmony, and the other house-phased parren resident upon the world of Naraya had been flown in for the grand occasion. There was a huge, spherical airship floating above that river junction now, display screens showing events realtime to those assembling upon the riverbanks to watch. Lisbeth thought the airship balloon itself could have hosted a game of football played upon its upper surface. Clearly it had been used as a giant display screen before.