Croma Venture: (The Spiral Wars Book Five)

by Joel Shepherd

  The black, spotted tug was put away, and a third cylinder prepared. From this cylinder came the scrabbling and screeching of something very angry. One of the corbi pulled a cord from beneath the slim bars of the cylinder’s steel door. The cord was tied to the trolley’s leg, as the cord’s other end pulled and danced, and the furious screeching grew worse.

  “Perhaps we should all stand back,” said Tibor, doing that. Everyone retreated a step. “This was once the same species of tug as the first one. These new modifications first appeared on Rando eight hundred years ago. Since then, the reeh have made further modifications, then allowed the accelerated evolution of enhanced genetic mutation to change things of their own accord.”

  He indicated to the corbi holding the cylinder. The door was opened. For a moment, nothing happened. Then a grey blur erupted from the cage, leaped to the trolley, then straight off, directly for Captain Pram’s face. The tether pulled the leap short in mid-air, and the hissing tug fell to the floor. It screeched and clawed, then raced in a circle about the trolley, entangling its cord about the base as everyone backed up another two steps. The cord grew shorter as it circled, then vanished completely. The tug attacked the trolley, then the cord, then went screeching around the other way.

  It was half as big again as the others, Erik saw. Its snout was longer, and filled with long, sharp teeth, while hard claws scrabbled on the polished floor. Its body was wiry and lean with muscle, while the others had been stout. The others might have made nice pets. This one would never.

  “What does this gain the reeh?” Pram asked. “Turning small furry animals aggressive?”

  “Genetic patterns,” said Tibor, above the noise of the furious tug. “All animals, all organic creatures, have genes in combination that can be highlighted, brought forward into the light by eliminating other genes, or by activating epigenetic triggers. Find the right combination and harmless animals can be bred to become extremely dangerous. Those patterns repeat on creatures that evolved on the same worlds. This small creature has a greater genetic similarity with me, in some respects, than I do with any of you, despite us apparently having far more in common. Corbi and tug share the same genetic roots.

  “Find those patterns on a tug and the reeh can learn lessons to be applied to corbi. Or to other creatures. There are native animals on Rando far more naturally fearsome than a tug. Some of those are now terrifying. Some of those have been combined with the control technologies I showed you before, with the spotted tug. Terrifying killers bred for susceptibility to mind control. Reeh use them as footsoldiers. It’s far less expensive to breed or clone such creatures by the thousand than to build machine drones. The economic efficiencies for the reeh are enormous. Across their empire, they use other such creatures for labour drones, or as data-processing slaves, all manner of tasks are assigned to them, and species are bent to suit the task rather than the task being bent to suit the worker.”

  Erik could quite happily have lived his life not knowing that such things were possible, or that perhaps the most successful and powerful species in distant-but-regional space was doing this to more innocent people than anyone knew how to count. Evil didn’t begin to describe it. This proximity to the mind-numbing scale of the horror felt overwhelming.

  The racing tug finally set upon the source of its fury — the knot tying its lead to the trolley leg. Trace saw it coming undone before anyone, savaged by sharp teeth. “Look out!” she commanded, stepping forward and clapping her hands. Djojana Naki rapidly drew his sidearm, but the tug saw Trace’s move and hurled itself at her ankle. Trace grabbed it in a flash, then held it up in her armoured fist as the grey ball of muscle fought against her grip like a furry tornado, claws and teeth ineffective against her glove and forearm protection.

  “Open,” she told the bewildered corbi with the cylinder cage. He opened the door, holding it for Trace as she put the animal into the opening, shoving it far enough down that it could not grab the rim and leap back out. The grateful corbi closed the gate and locked it. Trace regarded him with a marine’s displeasure of barely competent civilians, then glanced at Naki as the big tavalai reholstered his sidearm.

  “Congratulations,” Naki said drily, in English. Trace looked at the sidearm, disdainfully, then stepped back to Erik’s side. Naki made no reply, but Pram noticed, and gave his karasai commander a less impressed glance. Trace just had that way of pointing out other peoples’ inadequacies, sometimes without words. Erik was pleased it was a long time since she’d done it to him.

  “You’ve seen a lot of bad things,” he said to her on uplink. “But that bothered you. Why?”

  “Free will is my creed,” Trace said shortly. “Every being in the galaxy has the natural right to make its own choices and live or die by them. Slavery is a greater evil than murder. If you ever see me end up like one of those tugs, shoot me.”

  Erik nodded. “And you, me.” Trace nodded back, with hard certainty.

  The riverbed was concrete, or something close to it. It made for a very smooth and fast river current, deprived of the mud, snags and weeds that would typically slow the water’s course. Lisbeth leaned into it, a nervous eye on suit temperatures and power outputs. But the suit seemed to like it, the powerplant’s largest problem was usually cooling, and cold water did a better job helping with that than a vacuum.

  Visibility was awful, which meant no chance of being seen from above, the surface presenting a thick brown of sediment and leaves, and the few bubbles that might emerge from the entirely self-contained life-support systems would be lost amid the surface eddies. Suit sensors showed her where everyone was, highlighting ghostly electronic shadows on her visor, tagged with names in English to remove any doubt. After fifteen minutes of slow walking, bent forward as though leaning into a gale, she felt a light force upon her back, and looked into the visor’s peripheral vision where it compressed the otherwise invisible rear-view into a narrow portion. It took some concentration to make sense of what she was seeing — civilian EVA suits did not have rear-vision, being less concerned than military suits with people sneaking up behind. But after several seconds of squinting she made out the compressed shadow of a large hacksaw drone. A second later, the visor tagged it as ‘Liala’, pushing her forward with a claw to her back.

  “Thank you, Liala,” she said, breathing hard. Powered armour or not, walking into this still took effort. “I wasn’t aware that I was slowing down.”

  “You’re doing quite well, Lisbeth,” Liala replied. “I have thrusters, it is much easier for me.”

  Lisbeth smiled tightly. Diplomacy. She wondered if Styx would be proud or disappointed. Before she could reply, someone ahead called, “Get down!”, followed by a flash of bright light. A drysine laser, sizzling the sediment gloom amid a storm of bubbles. Then came large pieces of tree trunk, tumbling and bouncing in newly-severed segments as the current drove them along.

  A force slammed her face-down, then a shuddering buzz so loud it vibrated her bones. A loud crack! and another storm of bubbles. Then the force was removed from her back, and Lisbeth twisted to look behind and see a large section of trunk tumbling away, now severed again. To her side, Liala’s huge vibroblade forelegs set against the riverbed once more, the water visibly frothing and bubbling against the deadly edge. The bubbling stopped, and the buzzing in Lisbeth’s skull with it.

  “Status!” Timoshene demanded.

  “Lisbeth!” echoed Hiro. “That looked real close, you okay?”

  “I’m fine,” said Lisbeth, pleased to find that her heart was not racing too hard, and she could get up easily enough without her legs shaking much. A fright, certainly, but at this point in her life she’d had much worse. “Liala killed the evil tree trunk and made sure it did not hit me. Thank you Liala, let’s continue.”

  “They weren’t kidding when they said heavy rains upstream,” Hiro remarked.

  “That laser may have given us away,” Ruei said, sounding displeased. “Better to let the tree hit us.”


  “Laser was at low setting,” Dse Pa retorted, staccato and flat with none of Liala’s nuance. “Disperse rapidly in water, invisible at surface. The parren speaks uninformed of drysine capability.”

  “Continue,” Timoshene said drily, and Lisbeth began walking forward. “There are two hundred and fifty one tereks left.”

  Lisbeth blinked on the visor’s coms icon, then linked it to the rear visor image of Liala, still immediately behind. And she wondered what crazy things had happened in her life that Liala’s close presence made her feel safer, where a year ago it would have panicked her to hyperventilating. An isolated coms link established. “Liala, who made the decision to give Dse Pa a vocal function?”

  “I believe he gave himself that function, Lisbeth.”

  Lisbeth blinked. “Drones can do that?”

  “Where appropriate.”

  “Where is it appropriate? Styx was insistent that each level of drysine intellect must know its place.”

  “I think that sometimes organics do not appreciate that drysine society is even more complex and nuanced than their own.”

  “Hard to appreciate when its leaders won’t tell anyone about it,” Lisbeth returned. Liala was much more fun to talk to than Styx. With Styx, one could expect to be crushed by cold logic. Liala had infinitely more patience for silly human curiosity.

  “Hard to discuss adequately when there is so little drysine civilisation currently about,” Liala replied now. “Perhaps when there is more of it about, we can discuss more.”

  “I would like that,” Lisbeth agreed. If there were a lot more drysine civilisation about, talking would be infinitely better than the alternative.

  Another twenty minutes’ walking brought them to a grille in the near-vertical concrete riverbank. Lisbeth expected Dse Pa would cut it, but instead Liala pronounced this particular subsystem infiltrated, and the grille slid open. Dse Pa led the way in, Timoshene, Tarmen and Ruei close behind, then Hiro, Lisbeth and Liala. The brown, murky water swirled powerfully in the sewer entrance, then the sewer began to slope upward. Liala had infiltrated all the sensors here, Lisbeth had no idea how many there were, but logically they were not the first people to think that sewers might be a good way to sneak through Shonedene unnoticed. Liala’s network powers were nothing like as comprehensive as Styx’s, as experience counted for much even with drysine queens. But a few security sensors in the sewer weren’t going present her with a problem.

  Soon Lisbeth’s helmet broke the surface, the visor immediately intensifying infra-red in the tunnel’s blackness. She waded to the side walkway and pulled herself out, feeling much more comfortable now with the armour, even enjoying the immense power in simple motions. She checked her rifle, found it still well-secured to her back, water pouring from her armour. Ahead of her the other armour suits made bright red and yellow blotches on IR, faint tendrils of steam rising from the powerplant exhausts.

  “This is the treatment outlet,” Liala informed them. The sewer-side walk was not wide enough to allow either drysine to emerge from the water here. “The service access will be ahead to the right, a ladder to the ceiling.”

  Dse Pa found it first, pushing half-submerged up the sewer, and Lisbeth wondered how he was going to climb the parren-designed steel rungs on the wall to access the hatch. He jettisoned the manoeuvring thrusters first — the same modular design that drones used to move in space, but equally effective in water — then climbed with astonishing agility up the steel rungs and extended a single foreleg to the overhead hatch. The tip of the leg opened to reveal smaller manipulators, working a hatch-release until it clicked, then opened.

  The opening it presented looked far too small, but Dse Pa’s shoulder-mounted cannon pulled tighter together, the forelegs poked through the hole then divided sideways for leverage, and the entire torso seemed to extend and narrow, as the supple, overlapping segments pulled and slid. A wriggle and a pull, and he was gone, vanishing through the hatch in a flash.

  “It is clear,” came the synthetic male voice on coms. “Proceed up.”

  They followed by file into an unremarkable concrete service tunnel. It led to a door, which Liala pronounced safe to open. On the other side were gantry walkways, and Lisbeth grasped a railing more firmly when she saw the distance of the drop below. It was an enormous tunnel, at least ten metres in diameter, entirely concrete and lit with small lights along its length, vanishing five hundred metres further along where the tunnel went around a bend. Like an underground subway, but larger by a magnitude.

  “The floodway,” said Lisbeth as she recognised it. Gesul said Shonedene had been destroyed by natural causes in its ancient history — a flood, it turned out, not an uncommon thing for this deep valley of rivers and waterfalls. Huge engineering upstream would divert that flood into this tunnel and another parallel just like it. The tunnels would only be used once every few decades, and only fully utilised once a century, on average, channelling metric tons of roaring flood each second and saving the city above from certain devastation.

  The walkways were for access to a cluster of pipes running along the ceiling, which made descending necessary if they were to continue. Extendable ladders unfurled at the touch of simple controls, down which the parren and humans climbed while the drysines hooked the grapple ends of wire tethers to the railing and descended like spiders hanging from gossamer thread.

  “This way,” said Liala, using vocals once more. “Five minutes, I think.”

  Lisbeth settled in for the walk, armoured footsteps echoing in the huge tunnel, and a metallic clatter from the drysines. She blinked on a visor icon as she walked, and received a surface feed from the alliance ceremony. All such feeds came through Liala now, as there was a small chance that independent coms access down here might show up on someone’s screen and alert city monitors to their presence. Upon the enormous ceremonial platforms above the river fork, tens of thousands of parren were assembling in brilliant ranks of colour and armour. On the rim of the main platforms, several large shuttles had descended — huge enough to carry thousands each but small upon that expanse. From their bellies, streams of House Fortitude personnel emerged.

  “Sordashan is making an entrance,” she observed.

  “That thing will go for hours,” said Hiro. “We’ve plenty of time yet.”

  Gesul had said that the security in Shonedene would be at its highest during the ceremony, but would be focused looking at direct threats to those attending. Diverted from apparently less-vital regions like the city sewers and floodways, the infiltration team had more chance of penetrating undetected now.

  Why she’d been selected, Lisbeth had some unpleasant ideas. Firstly, Gesul hadn’t just selected her, he’d selected Timoshene. Timoshene was her primary security, attached to her since her abduction by Aristan, and made into her ceremonial Tokara. But even then he’d been secretly a supporter of Gesul, unimpressed with Aristan’s notions on what made a true Domesh. Such loyalty could only be rewarded, and as Lisbeth had risen in Gesul’s service, Timoshene’s status had risen as well.

  Lisbeth knew that while Gesul’s rise had been meteoric, the sheer speed of it had caused difficulties for his security. The number of spies a senior member of any house could insert into an opponent’s administration depended largely upon his influence, and thus his ability to win supporters to his cause. Gesul had had plenty of supporters within the Domesh, but now he was swimming in the big leagues — House Harmony itself, and being the newest denominational leader in the house, he’d had barely any time to build up a retinue of spies. Thus, everyone was fairly sure, his own administration was riddled with those swearing allegiance to other people, while he had few swearing allegiance to him anywhere else. One of those few he trusted completely was Timoshene. But Timoshene was duty-bound to Lisbeth’s side. Thus, Lisbeth suspected, Gesul had sent her not mostly because she was suited, but because Timoshene was, and would now be duty-bound to accompany her.

  Secondly, she knew for a fact that Gesul had concer
ns of Liala’s loyalties. Liala was far less headstrong than Styx, being so new to the world and to the burdens of her heritage, but she was still entirely clear on what her duties were as effectively second-in-command of the drysine race. Now Lisbeth suspected Gesul worried that Liala may have some difficulty taking sides in this conflict of parren factions. It was not impossible, after all, that House Fortitude could contact Liala surrepticiously and tempt her to abandon House Harmony to side her people with the more powerful house. Such a thing would most likely be in the interests of the drysines… if, that was, Sordashan could be trusted to keep such a bargain. And so Lisbeth further suspected that Gesul wanted the sister of Captain Debogande along — the man upon whose good will the fate of the number one drysine commander still rested — to remind Liala of exactly how precarious things might get for Styx, and thus for all drysines, if this particular mission went wrong.

  Lisbeth knew that it was silly to get angry at Gesul for such manoeuvrings. Gesul was parren, and this was how parren did things. Furthermore, she’d continued her service to Gesul with her eyes wide open, and could hardly complain at parren-esque behaviour now, particularly when Gesul was likely correct to have sent her here. But she was angry all the same — at herself as much as Gesul, for always finding herself as the ceremonial hostage to fortune, the piece on the game board to be sacrificed or used to manipulate other people into acting how someone wanted. Well, she thought darkly, she couldn’t have it both ways. On the one hand, being a Debogande had brought her a great deal of influence with the parren, and she’d traded on that influence when it suited her. Now it came with penalties as well.

  “What if Sordashan springs it on us early?” Lisbeth asked.

  “Speculation is not useful,” Timoshene replied. “Focus on the mission. These details we cannot control.”

  “It’s not a question of controlling them,” Lisbeth retorted. “It’s a question of being prepared to respond and change plans if we need to.”