It began to percolate through Pyke’s soporific mind that comfort and warmth was no longer available, that he lay on cold flat stone, that there was a curved wall all around, its striated surface covered with small beads, about a third of which emitted a bright light. A harsh light that did not help with his blurred sight.
“But during this long, bloody interlude we have investigated the peculiarities of Zavri biology and the nature of the Incarnalith. The Zavri have, under the tutelage of the Shuskar, become the deadliest and most feared fighters anywhere in the Warcage, and have demonstrated their loyalty to the Shuskar on innumerable occasions. A truly impressive irony in the light of the secrets we have managed to unlock.”
And as he stared he felt something through the suffusing, warm drowsiness, a nip on his leg, just a tiny pinprick, like a cold insect bite.
“Perhaps you can feel the first shards of the Incarnalith now. We deliberately induced in you a form of resonating soporific feedback to narcotise your awareness, to deaden the sensitivity, at least at the start. After all, anticipation tends to heighten pain…”
The pinpricks were coming every second or two and they were getting sharper. Then something struck him in the right arm and it felt like an icy razor blade. Pyke cursed and sat up, the alertness of pain shredding the drowsiness, chasing away the fug. Even as he tugged his jacket arm up to see, another brief stabbing sensation hit him in the back. Then, out of nowhere, a tiny dark object flicked in to bury itself in the flesh of his uncovered arm. Pyke swore at the sudden lancing pain then swore again, in disbelief, as the object, a dark blue glassy splinter about an inch long, sank smoothly into the skin, leaving behind a small, fading circular mark. He barely had time to understand what was happening before another shard stuck home, and another, and another…
“Even in its shattered state, the fragment of the Incarnalith still possesses a vestige of Kaldro-Vryn’s awareness and purpose–the fragments know that you are to be their host, although sadly your kind of bio-form cannot accommodate more than a third of the shards. But we are sure that it will be enough…”
By now Pyke was lying back down on the cold hard floor, curled up, arms wrapped around his head, snarling and cursing horribly as the shards kept coming. His clothing was sliced and tattered and it felt as if a mob of sadistic seamstresses were stabbing his arms, back and legs with surgical needles over and over. Spitted and spiked, skewered and perforated, all the wounds merged into a continuous cataract of raw pain.
“We could have rendered you unconscious during this process but the vestigial awareness of Kaldro-Vryn might, out of instinct, have attempted to usurp your undefended mind and quite honestly, Captain, there are too many problems like that around at the moment. But as you may now be discerning, the intromission is almost complete. You are now host to a portion of an Incarnalith, the crystalline matrix of an ancient Zavri ancestor! Imagine that! Now we can give you a little more of that sleepy respite while we send you back to your friends…”
The drowse descended once more, smothering but not quite obscuring the carpet of tiny wounds that lay across his body. As a distraction Pyke imagined the machine’s voice as a neck, a strangely disembodied throat around which he was wrapping his hands, dreaming about strangling that scheming, rotten voice, throttling it…
The next thing he knew, his shoulder was being shaken by a worried-looking Ancil.
“Chief, chief! How’re you feeling?”
Pyke pushed himself into a seated position, breathed in and out deeply, squeezed his eyes tightly shut for a moment then opened them widely and stared at Ancil who was crouching next to him. Then he laughed shakily and grinned in relief at the reality of him and Kref and Mojag and Punzho who were gathered around him.
“I’m feeling that it’s time you had a shave, laddie!” He winked. “Feeling… great, never better!”
“But what happened… to your clothes?”
Glancing down Pyke realised that he had not dreamed all that after all. His demented encounter with the sentient probe and all that gibbering about a Zavri ancestor and those mad flying crystal splinters–it was damn well true. And it had trashed his clothing, which now was little more than a mass of holes held together by rags.
“Bugger it,” he said. “I really liked that jacket.”
“Didn’t you get it at the fabber kiosk on Blacknest Station?” said Ancil. “I’m sure they could—”
“Where,” Pyke said, cutting in, “the hell are we? Right now?”
He had suddenly become aware that they were no longer in the buried complex, going by the cooler, fresher air that was wafting around.
“Probably better showing than telling,” said Ancil, who helped him to his feet and guided him over to a chest-high barrier of cracked, corroded metal where he leaned on a pipe-rail and stared out at the same massive fissure as before. Only now he was seeing it from high up on the other side of that deep dark trench, standing on a platform made from scavenged panels, tiles and decking. A walkway sloped down to where a bridge, a spidery-looking thing of poles and spars, spanned the gulf to another platform just visible in the shadows on the other side.
“It was that talking minibot who found us, Captain,” said Kref. “We was lost over there and it showed us the way to the bridge but it didn’t say anything about you being here.” The big Henkayan grinned. “And I still got your luggage!” He patted the wrapped bundle hanging from his shoulder.
“Which is a great relief,” Pyke said. “But we still need Khorr so that we can get our hands on a ship, and that murdering piece of slime is still back down there somewhere.”
“Fortunately, the treacherous Khorr is no longer crucial to your plan, Captain,” said a familiar voice whose smug AI amiability made Pyke clench his fists. He glared and took a step backwards as the Inheritor remote rose up from the shadows below the platform, its pinspot muted to a cool blue glow.
“You again,” Pyke said. “So–why is Khorr no longer crucial? I hope you haven’t killed him because I was really saving that pleasure for myself.” After we get him to help us rescue Dervla and Win.
“He’s very much alive and crashing around in the corridors over on the other side, him and his compromised companion.”
“Compromised? Which is supposed to mean what, exactly?”
“It’s a Zavri, inconstant persona thing–anyway, the reason Khorr is superfluous to your needs is because we can reunite you with your ship, the one that G’Brozen Mav borrowed—”
“Stole,” Pyke said. “Get it right, he thiefed it right out from under me, the gouger!”
“As you wish, but the point is that we know where it will be in a few hours’ time and if you allow us access to that portal-junction generator of yours we can input the correct location data. That is Zimzin technology, isn’t it? They really were the masters of portable high-spec devices.”
“That sounds generous,” Pyke said, half suspecting what was coming.
“Look upon it as recompense for a very special task which we would like you to carry out for us. For Kaldro-Vryn.”
Pyke was sombre. “A task, you say? Heard nothing about this when you were whisking me off through the darkness.”
“It comes down to a bargain, Captain, wherein you do something for us and we help you in turn. The shards of the Incarnalith were not an incidental detail, but integral to the job awaiting you.” The floating remote paused, its glowing beam surveying the puzzled faces of the crew. “Ah, so Captain Pyke has not told you about how he has been imbued with the crystal shards of a Zavri ancestor several thousand years old?”
A frowning Ancil looked at Pyke but shrugged before the captain could speak.
“Well, that’s not so unusual,” Ancil said. “Lots of stuff the Captain doesn’t tell us, like this whole thing with Mojag having a copy of Oleg’s mind in the cyber-prosthetic bit of his brain, and how Oleg’s been in charge for a while now…”
Ancil’s voice trailed off and the uncomfortable silence threatened to g
o on forever until Pyke gave Mojag–no, Oleg–a questioning look.
Oleg sniffed. “Well, we were wandering around in those corridors, getting more and more lost by the minute, and you weren’t there so… I decided to tell all, full disclosure. They took it pretty well, too.” There were nods all round.
Not expecting such a matter-of-fact reaction, Pyke was bemused.
“So, you guys aren’t weirded out? See, I thought you might get the cold freaks over it.”
“After the years I’ve been flying with this gang,” Ancil said, “weird seems to be fairly normal to me.”
“Just so,” said Punzho. “Indeed, the last few days have been fairly bizarre, even by our standards.”
“Weird is our middle name,” Kref declared.
Oleg gave a knowing nod and Pyke gave a rueful grin. “Well… excellent! It’s a demented cosmos and I’m proud to be part of it!”
“Adaptability is a survival trait,” said the floating Inheritor remote. “It makes us feel optimistic about your chances in the forthcoming technomachy.”
Pyke smiled, teeth gritted. “And what might be my role in this upcoming pantomime–something gaudy and flamboyant, I hope.”
“With the Zimzin portal device we shall send you to Nagolger, one of the Shuskar fleetworlds–your ship will be there, along with the bold G’Brozen Mav. We urge you to put aside any lingering grudges and lend him your aid and comradeship, using, if necessary, every scrap of deceptive guile you can muster. The Chainer leader’s goal is the same as your own, the Shuskar Citadelworld, but getting there presents a challenge. There are forcefield defences which can strike from what you call hyperspace at any unauthorised vessel which enters the Warcage. The ships stored on the fleetworlds have authority beacons installed, thus it will be necessary to commandeer one of them so that you can traverse the Warcage’s interior and reach the Citadelworld safely. On arrival, you must infiltrate the Shuskar defences and get up close to the main control chamber–at that point the Incarnalith shards will leave your body, in a manner harmless to you, and take over all their instrumentation.”
Pyke was less than overjoyed at the prospect of encountering G’Brozen Mav, never mind having to cooperate with him in carrying what was without a doubt a monstrously unhinged plan (although the part about stealing a ship appealed to his sense of professionalism). But still, this machine, which had the nerve to call him devious, made his shifty-sense tingle every time it spoke. Then there was the matter of Dervla and Win.
“This had better work,” he said, “or I will come back from the dead and pour stale beer into your circuits.”
“We have every confidence in your heroic abilities, Captain.”
“I don’t know if ironic flattery counts,” he said. “Now that we’re clear about my part in this, I need something from you.”
“Something more than a ship, Captain?”
“Two of my crew were captured by Khorr, who handed them over to this Gun-Lord, Xra-Huld.” He stared at the hovering machine. “I need you to find out what happened to them and where they are.”
“We have a somewhat limited access to Shuskar communications and we could scan for any useful information about your people, Captain,” said the remote. “But keep in mind that once the Incarnalith shards assume control of their instrumentation then all their networks will be transparent to us.”
“I’m sure that there’s more to the Big Plan than that,” Pyke said. “After your crystalline friend takes over their machines, and you get your claws on them, then what?”
There was an odd silence which grew, and he suddenly realised that Ancil and the rest were staring at him. “What?”
“Captain,” Ancil said, pointing. “Look!”
Pyke raised his hands and swore when he saw dark blue letters tracing the same word over and over all across the skin on the back, the palms and the fingers–Vengeance.
“That’s Kaldro-Vryn for you,” said the Inheritor remote. “Harsh, but fair. And harsh.”
CHAPTER TWENTY-FOUR
The biomechanoid weapon was deeply embedded in Dervla’s nervous system now, employing finely judged neural cut-outs to isolate her conscious awareness and any physical volition from the rest of her body. Now her body was like a shell and she was like the kernel rattling around inside as it and the gun went about their business.
That’s how it seemed at first but later she realised that this analogy wasn’t right, and as the Dervla-shell lurched around, cradling that horrible living gun, a memory from a couple of years ago just rose up and hit her with a shiver of recognition. Back then she had been on the Scarabus for less than a year during which time she had acquired the beginnings of the basic skillset: weapons, explosives and netrunning, mainly. Pyke had brought them to the Demaneph System, home to the Gulbas Orbital, one of Earthsphere’s bigger navy installations. Pyke’s destination was an asteroid called Plexy’s, a place for cheap refits at knockdown prices. Plexy’s–run by a one-eyed Gomedra called Plexy–relied on a supply of malfed or obsolete equipment scavenged from the Gulbas discard bins by shady types eager for easy cash.
The Plexy asteroid, in addition to its refurb pits, had been thoroughly tunnelled, its interior a maze of passages and chambers, including a room full of power armour and exosuits. So while the Scarabus was getting its hull shield emitters upgraded, Plexy offered to let Dervla take one of the combat exosuits out for a drive. She remembered seeing the suit–a brute, heavily armoured thing–standing in its charger booth. The original livery must have been dark green and blue but wear and tear had abraded much of the paint job away, leaving bare edges and corners that gleamed in the harsh light of the overheads. Dervla had clambered up, twisted round, slipped arms and legs into their padded grooves while Plexy went over to a control pedestal from where he powered up the suit’s systems. At his prompting she moved the arms and legs a little then made it step forward out of the booth.
And almost seriously overbalanced, feeling the suit tilt forward, fearing that she was going to literally fall on her face–until Plexy activated some autobalance subsystem which snapped the upper torso back, righting her immediately. Over the next hour or so she learned how to walk, how to move her arms, how to monitor the balance sensors, how to swivel, how to pick things up and throw them, how to carry a heavy weapon in one of those big four-fingered hands and how to fire it.
And that, she reckoned, was closer to how she felt now, as if her own body had been turned into unfamiliar flesh which this vile invader, this ancient defiling presence, seemed to understand better than she did. She grew certain that the biomech was secreting narcotising drugs directly into her brain. While conscious and alert, she barricaded herself against any cooperation with the biomech, in thought or deed, but sometimes her awareness blurred and drifted and she could feel herself listening to a smooth, persuasive voice, then answering, then agreeing. Later, even the memories of these interludes seemed dreamlike and disjointed but it was entirely clear that, like Plexy and the exosuit, she was being taught how to cooperate with a tutor–except that this teacher was also her jailer.
Her early life had been a struggle to escape a severe and malicious domination, and later she’d gone to great lengths to avoid falling under the control of others, and yet here she was plunged into a nightmarish version of the very worst of what she had experienced. Being physically at the mercy of pitiless enemies was bad enough but the drugs and their attendant web of soothing lies meant that she was unable to trust herself.
Xra-Huld was perpetually followed by a coterie of aides, retainers, underlings and sycophants, Shuskars each and every one. To this audience the biomech parasite would deliver impromptu, pompous lectures, usually on the subject of its many previous hosts and the countless victories it had gained over a long sequence of enemies. These self-aggrandising monologues were never received with anything less than rapturous, adulatory applause. And as the hours of her grotesque incarceration ground on, Dervla’s contempt for these grovelling Shuskar hangers-o
n was distilled into a strange kind of hate. From the biomech’s comments and other hints, she came to understand that centuries of service to these vile tyrants had twisted the Shuskar into an underclass of indoctrinated minions, driven by the fearful minutiae of a hierarchy wholly dependent on the whim of those same tyrants.
During one of those grandiose lectures, Xra-Huld had spoken of a long quest for the perfect host species, one strong enough and versatile enough to provide a vehicle worth keeping, worth conquering with, one truly capable of fulfilling the all-encompassing ambitions of the biomech and its four companions. It spoke approvingly, almost hungrily, about Human physiology and pondered plans for capturing other Humans. That was when she realised that time was against her, that there was no guarantee that Pyke or anyone could possibly free her from the utter certainty of a capitulation and indoctrination just as total and demeaning as that exhibited by the Shuskar. The only way out was death, an ending, to close the door on her own life.
That, however, would mean gaining a measure of conscious control. And that would mean cooperation, a conceding, presenting a convincing simulacrum of voluntary collaboration. But what would she have to do to persuade the biomech that it was getting what it wanted?
The long, long climb out of the imprisoning depths of Akreen’s mind was temporally arduous–it seemed to be taking forever. As they progressed, Gredaz’s focusing exercises continued to work minor marvels, the spidery trees and bushes now had tiny ash-grey leaves and more than once Akreen saw winged creatures flitting across the misty endless stairway. For a short time it struck him as both exhilarating and freakish that he was travelling through his own mental terrain with a precursor who created enduring spectral surroundings out of… well, out of what, exactly? Twisted, shared perceptions? The unused capacities at the back of his mind?
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