Sverl
The fusion drive seared the rocky ground beyond the city, instantly scouring away the meagre vegetation in a cloud of ash and smoke, rocks cracking and smoking in sun fire and turning molten. Closely linked into his ship’s systems, Sverl hinged out its stabilizing feet and read the error reports but found nothing critical.
Exterior cams showed the feet – great flat skates of exotic alloy folding down on hinged legs driven by massive gas-fed rams, shielded on their inner sides by hardfields – coming down on molten rock and sinking. This was a problem the designers had foolishly failed to compensate for throughout the war, Sverl remembered. He’d known of many instances of ships trapped on the ground after rock hardened about their feet, and Polity forces annihilating them.
He shut down the fusion drive and listened to his ship creaking and groaning around him as it settled. He noted the vessel was tilting slightly and, for a moment, assumed that the ground must be softer over on one side. Upon checking, however, he saw that the landing feet there had sunk no deeper than had the others. Further checking revealed, half a mile to one side, a squat cliff apparently rising out of the ground. It wasn’t rising; the rock on this side of it was sinking. Under the immense weight of the dreadnought a chunk of volcanic rock, under the feet on one side and sitting on softer sedimentary rock, had broken off from that surrounding it and was now sinking. Sverl further probed the ground with his sensors, but even as he did so the rate of sinkage slowed. It would be fine – if they could ever take off again.
‘Bsorol,’ he said, the image of that first-child immediately coming up on one of his screens. Many years of chemically maintained adolescence had twisted Bsorol, his legs bowed and his carapace whorled like old wood. ‘I want a team suited up and outside when feasible. I want thermal-sealed fracture charges pushed into the hardening rock about the landing feet within the next hour.’
‘Yes, Father,’ Bsorol replied. Then, after a hesitation, ‘There are many humans out there.’
Sverl glanced at another screen. Various gravans and gravcars, ATVs and cargo platforms led the crowds moving out from the city. One of these cars had moved too close during the dreadnought’s descent and now lay on its side, its passengers climbing out. Sverl recognized the shellman Taiken, along with what were presumably members of his family: a female and two boys. The other vehicles had sensibly maintained their distance so were okay, while the people on foot had dropped to the ground, a hot smoky wind howling above them. Of course, like many other children aboard, Bsorol had taken an interest in the goings-on in Carapace City. He had also been in proximity with the humans while serving his time guarding the small land-based space port – mostly so Sverl could have a presence there if he needed to act quickly against some threat. However, despite his long years of service to Sverl, Bsorol, like his siblings, was still almost certainly viciously xenophobic. This might be a problem.
‘Yes, there are humans out there,’ Sverl replied, ‘and soon they will be coming aboard this ship to occupy Quadrant Four and the lower holds there.’
‘Why?’ Bsorol asked.
‘Because I am saving them all from the imminent destruction of their city.’
‘But why?’ Bsorol asked again.
Sverl mulled over various replies but knew none of them would make sense to Bsorol. He then realized how things needed to change. Perhaps the time had come to do something he had shied away from for many years. Perhaps he should allow Bsorol and his other children access to augmentation to widen their horizons. They needed to think beyond the mere instinctive urge to exterminate competitors, whether in other prador families or in alien races. But that was for the future. Right now only one option was available.
‘Because I want to and I am father-captain of this ship,’ he replied. ‘And if you continue to question me in this manner you will shortly find yourself in a flash freeze case inside one of my kamikazes. Obey your orders, Bsorol.’
‘Yes, Father,’ Bsorol replied, seemingly relieved at this simplicity.
The ship had settled now and Sverl moved to insert his claws into pit controls. He then hesitated for a moment. By the speed of his reaction to Cvorn’s kamikaze, he had proved that his preference for using manual controls was foolish. He now mentally initiated the lowering of a ship’s ramp. This was the size of an ancient human aircraft carrier and had not been used before – it was intended for ground assault forces that Sverl had never carried. Meanwhile, he began closing bulkhead doors around the route to Quadrant Four and instructing his children in those tunnels and in the quadrant itself to depart. In their home territory his children could not be fully trusted with humans. He could order them to cause no harm, but defining that might be problematic. Since most of these humans were shell people, there could be confusion. The tap a prador would deliver to another of its kind to attract attention would leave even a shellman a quivering mess on the floor.
The shell people outside were on the move again, rounding the ship to the lowering ramp, while more and more of them were coming out of the city. Luckily, the ramp would extend far enough from the ship for them not to have to cross rock melted by the ship’s engines and now still glowing with red heat as it solidified. Focusing in on those leading, Sverl saw that Taiken and his family were now at the forefront on a grav-raft – on its side the words ‘Taiken Fuels’ – while just ahead of this hovered the surfboard shape of the Polity drone.
‘I don’t remember extending an invitation to you, drone,’ he said over the ever-open channel.
Sure, Sverl had been enough distorted by the changes he was undergoing to want to rescue the shell people of Carapace City, but a Polity drone, an actual member of his erstwhile enemy? Now considering this notion further, he initiated some powerful scanning of the approaching horde using instrumentation he had acquired from the Polity, amalgamated with prador technology, and since enhanced using his own growing knowledge and abilities. Just a second later, scanning flagged up a Golem too.
‘I’ll be no trouble,’ the drone asserted.
‘Bullshit,’ said Sverl, slipping easily into human parlance as he opened armoured blisters in his ship’s hull and extruded Gatling cannons to target the drone and the two Golem now detected in the crowd. ‘You are not boarding my ship.’
Further scan results began to come in, revealing something odd about one of the gravcars. It looked battered and old but, reading its emissions, Sverl realized its grav-motors were at ninety-nine per cent efficiency. A further hard probe scoured away the chameleonware concealing the fact that it could be vacuum sealed, contained twinned mini-fusion jets and onboard armament, along with a wide selection of lethal hand weapons, including proton rifles, within reach of the three people inside.
‘I’ve been instructed to offer what protection I can to these people,’ the drone replied, but it was now dropping back.
The two men and the woman inside the car weren’t shell people. They could have been just anyone from off-world. Judging by their physiques, augmentations and weaponry, they could be enforcers for some criminal gang. Sverl thought otherwise.
‘You are not boarding my ship, drone,’ he said, ‘nor are the Sparkind unit and that lead Polity agent – those Golem twenty-eights running insufficient chameleonware and the three in that interesting gravcar.’
‘There are Golem twenty-eights here?’ said the drone innocently.
‘You have thirty seconds,’ said Sverl, immediately setting the countdown running. ‘Admittedly the firepower I will have to use will kill many shell people, but I would rather that than have your kind aboard.’
The reaction was instant. The gravcar abruptly swung round in the air and came down in a hard landing ahead of the approaching crowd. Already the two Golem were moving, frighteningly fast, but only towards the car and not to the ramp. They quickly piled into the car and it took off, lighting afterburners when it reached a hundred feet and streaking up into the sky, doubtless heading off to hitch a ride with one of the rescue ships up there. The drone rose to fifty feet and hung in the sky for a moment.
‘Well, it was a long shot but worth a try,’ said the drone. ‘So long, Sverl . . . it’s been interesting.’
‘So long, drone,’ Sverl replied, feeling quite odd as the drone swung round and shot up after the gravcar. He realized the sensation was regret and a kind of loneliness – both feelings that prador experienced infrequently.
Taiken’s raft soon reached the foot of the ramp and began to ascend. Other vehicles followed it up and then the steadily tramping crowd – all weighed down with personal belongings. Scanning towards the city, Sverl watched the stragglers hurrying out. Next, checking through cams inside the city, he was surprised to find it, as far as he could judge, empty of life. Perhaps the drone had been wrong about him not getting them all. Perhaps it had so couched its warnings of the city’s impending destruction that all had heeded them. Then again, these were mainly shell people, whose worshipful attitude to the prador had brought them here.
Over the next hour, the shell people trooped aboard the dreadnought. Sverl issued instructions in human speech over the ship’s PA system and, as Taiken’s raft approached the massive oval diagonally divided door into Quadrant Four, he contacted Taiken via a comunit the man carried on his reaverfish skin harness.
‘Taiken, you are about to enter one of the eight quadrants of this dreadnought. My children have vacated it and you have access to the hold spaces in its lower levels. I have closed the bulkhead doors to other quadrants and am sealing them. Do not try to open those doors. I will instruct my children to do you no harm but instinctive reactions cannot be discounted. Also, pressure changes in the rest of the ship, which my kind can tolerate, could well kill humans – even ones changed as you are. Any questions?’
‘I am familiar with the design of the interior of prador ships,’ said Taiken in an irritatingly superior manner that Sverl knew was aimed at the shell people near him. ‘I know how to obtain water from the dip holes and we have the equipment to access the power supply and convert it for any of our Polity-manufactured equipment. However, we may have insufficient food, though that depends on how long we will be aboard this ship.’
‘There are forty-eight tons of reaverfish carcasses in the hold you have access to,’ Sverl replied. ‘They were frozen shortly after capture so, with the required additives, are suitable for human consumption.’
Usually, prador allowed such carcasses to decay for a while to render them more to the prador taste for stored meat. Sverl had found his tastes changing, for now he liked his stored meat undecayed and had lost his appetite for fresh meat steadily stripped from screaming and terrified enemies.
‘Good, I thank you, Father-Captain,’ said Taiken respectfully. ‘Where are we going?’
‘I have yet to decide,’ Sverl replied, shutting down the communication and sending the signal to open the big door into Quadrant Four.
Sverl had no idea what he was going to do with these refugees. One option would be to dump them on another inhabited Graveyard world. But wouldn’t doing so just make another world a target for Cvorn? Of course it would. The only way they could truly be safe would be if he were to head for the border lying between the Graveyard and the Polity and hand them over to the AIs. Sverl had a problem with that. Beside the quite possibly lethal consequences of taking a prador dreadnought right to the Polity border, he knew that the Polity AIs were very interested in the works of Penny Royal, and they had to know he was one of them. He felt that if they did not inadvertently destroy him and his ship, they would try to grab him.
So what to do?
Sverl watched the main crowd from Carapace City enter his ship, then the seemingly endless stream of stragglers. He watched the first arrivals divide up various areas and select living spaces. They set up toilets connected into the ship’s waste systems, powered up human lighting, then toned it down to the correct ambiance for shell people, and began settling in. Outside he watched Bsorol, another first-child called Bsectil and five second-children who, in their suits, were indistinguishable from their older siblings, working their way around the landing feet and shoving the charges down into rock which had the consistency of thickening porridge. Next, through a watch post established on an islet jutting up far out in the ocean, he observed the approaching blast front from Cvorn’s kamikaze.
A deep purple band extended across the horizon and steadily thickened, an anvil of grey cloud generating above it and then itself extending all the way across the horizon too. Multiple lightning flashes lit this scene as of a million arc welders working all at once. The purple band and the cloud melded into one and took on the appearance of a massive roller. This grew larger as it drew closer to the islet, finally occupying all space from the surface of the sea up to high in the atmosphere – a great curved wall the colour of human bruises. Ahead of it Sverl noted that the ocean had mounded and that when it finally arrived at Carapace City there would be a tsunami. However, making some rapid AI calculations, he worked out that the growing pressure inside the closing blast front would squeeze the ocean back out, and the resulting wave would actually be small. Also ahead of this front, gunshots of lightning perpetually stabbed down into the sea, as if intent on clearing the way for it. One of these fried Sverl’s watch post and abruptly cut off his view.
Half an hour remained now as Bsorol and his crew returned through a maintenance hatch. One last party of humans was making its way up the ramp – two shell people guiding a small grav-raft on which they had mounted an amniotic tank, its occupant a shellman who had recently undergone drastic surgery. Doubtless the reason for their delay was in finding a way to shift his life-support gear. As they reached the head of the ramp, Sverl began to close it, then paused when he spotted two more shell people heading out from the city. Of course, though he had extensive surveillance of the city, he could not see into every nook and cranny, and there could be other refugees too.
It had been Sverl’s intention to lift off and get into orbit before the blast front arrived, which meant he needed to close the ramp now and leave those two out there – and any coming behind them – to die. However, his ship was more than resilient enough to ride out the storm, especially anchored as it was. He decided to leave the ramp down and close it just before the blast front arrived, to offer the strongest chance of survival.
The two made it inside and no one else followed in the time remaining. Sverl began to close the ramp, satisfied that he had done his best. Then, even as it thumped home and the horizon all around bruised and bled lightning, a woman ran out of the city clad in an environment suit bulked out over prador grafts. She was like a taunt. She was the flaw and the unavoidable death. The blast front lay only minutes away, while the pressure ahead of it was ramping up horribly. Quite likely her environment suit would fail before the front arrived to annihilate everything here not made of prador exotic metal.
What the hell was that?
The maintenance hatch Bsorol had used had popped open again, and out came that first-child, sans armour, hurtling across the hot ground. He was moving as fast as he could, which was not so fast with his twisted limbs, but faster than the woman. As he headed towards her, she stumbled to a halt, stared at him for a moment, then turned and began running back towards the city. Bsorol came up behind her, closed a claw around her waist and snatched her off her feet, then, skidding and kicking up flakes of rock, he turned and headed back. In a minute, he was back at the maintenance hatch and inside, the hatch closing behind him.
At that moment, the dome of Carapace City collapsed as if under some giant invisible foot, spewing debris in a cloud towards the dreadnought. The ship groaned, pressure readings outside climbing exponentially, and the blast front closed to a point. The ship rocked and Sverl staggered, closing one prosthetic claw on the edge of a pit control to steady himself. Damage reports began to stream on one screen, and outside a pillar of swirling air like a tornado rose, sucking on the wrecked city like some giant leech. The storm raged. Carapace City ceased to exist and the wind flung boulders the size of shuttles into the sky. Lightning seared the ground and, with a roar, the pressure peak began to collapse – winds generating outward from this point whipping spume off the ocean. But this was a prador dreadnought wrapped in exotic metal armour. It was the kind of ship that had nearly been the death of the Polity because it was so difficult to destroy. Though it complained, it stood firm.
‘Why?’ Sverl asked through one PA speaker.
‘You ordered the rescue of them all,’ Bsorol replied simply as he prodded the woman in the back with the tip of one claw and sent her staggering along that particular corridor. He was taking her to one of the sealed doors into Quadrant Four, so Sverl unlocked it for him.
‘I don’t find that explanation satisfactory,’ said Sverl.
‘Okay,’ said Bsorol, shifting his body in a puzzling way, until Sverl understood it was a very human dismissive shrug and that the first-child was going to offer no further explanation.
Sverl realized that he must take the time to pay more attention to his children, and more closely inspect how they had changed. Meanwhile, however, he had resolved his quandary concerning these refugees and the danger to them from Cvorn. In the end, the only answer was a prador one: Cvorn had to cease being a danger.
Trent Sobel
Blite and the crew were a strange lot. Something very odd about their behaviour definitely had a connection to their time spent in proximity to Penny Royal. But they were easy enough for him to read, and he knew that they didn’t like him very much.
They were honest traders or, rather, they only strained the bounds of Polity law a little, whereas Trent had worked for Isobel Satomi and she had run a coring and thralling business in the Graveyard. This meant kidnapping human victims, infecting them with the Spatterjay virus to make them improbably physically rugged. It meant next cutting out their brains and part of their spinal columns and replacing these with a prador thrall unit. And it meant selling on the resulting animated meat to the prador. He hadn’t been involved in the kidnapping and cutting, his role having been that of an enforcer since Satomi employed him and his partner to stamp down on other criminal organizations that tried to infringe on her territory. Still, even if his victims were the kind who would have done the same to him, he had tortured and murdered people, and he was culpable in the mass murder of Satomi’s coring trade.
The crew had gone dockside from The Rose to have a celebration, and well they might. Here at Outlink Station Par Avion Captain Blite had turned over thousands of memplant crystals to the station AI and subsequently received a payment that had made him and his crew extremely rich. On top of that, they were to receive a reward for handing over two other items they’d picked up on the way out of the Masadan system. Since he was one of those items, Trent Sobel wasn’t in the mood for celebrating and stayed in the small cabin they had allotted him.
While sitting on his bed, he reached up and fingered the new earring provided by Penny Royal. The purple sapphire now contained the memcording of Isobel Satomi’s human mind – extracted from the hooder war machine she had become, but the jewel had previously belonged to his dead sister Genève and remained his only link to her. Blite and his crew had only rescued him from the wreck of the Moray Firth as a favour to that same black AI, and now, in bringing him here, they had as good as killed him.
Redeem yourself, Penny Royal had told him when presenting him with the earring. How the hell could he have done that, even if Blite hadn’t brought him here into Polity territory? What the hell had the AI been playing at – surely it could have predicted that Blite would have entered Polity territory to offload that memcrystal? How the hell could he redeem himself now he faced either mind-wipe or immediate execution of the standing death sentence on him?
‘Sobel,’ said a voice from without – one he didn’t recognize. ‘Come out of that cabin – hands on your head and no weapons. You know the drill.’
This was it. The moment The Rose left the Graveyard he’d known he was in danger. The moment it had docked at Par Avion he’d known the Outlink Station AI would learn he was aboard. Doubtless it had issued the warrant shortly after that and now, outside that door, Polity police were here to take him in. He reached down to the gas-system pulse-gun holstered at his hip. Really, it was a case of die now or die later, doubtless after having every bit of useful data auged out of his mind. He drew the weapon and inspected it. Maybe he could take a few of them down, but there were almost certainly Golem out there, and the fight would not be protracted.
What would his sister think?
The question wasn’t verbal – more of a feeling rising from the under-strata of his mind. He shivered and checked around his cabin, looking for a black diamond materializing out of the air. But no, Penny Royal wasn’t here.
So what would she think? Genève would have been disgusted with him. On Coloron, it had been difficult to have a life much above that of dole status without getting involved in some criminality but she had always stayed honest. She’d tried to keep him honest too but had failed. If he had not become involved with the criminal gangs and separatist organizations, would she still be alive? Could it be that if he’d stayed honest the jewel his sister always wore at her throat would not have come to the notice of certain types, and that they would not have murdered her to acquire it?
Trent abruptly stood up and tossed his weapon down on the bed. He walked over to the door, palmed the lock and, placing his hands flat on his head, stepped out. A hand immediately came down on his shoulder and propelled him into the opposing wall, but he managed to turn his head to avoid breaking his nose. Someone kicked his legs out from under him, wrenched his arms round behind him and used a squirt of hyperglue to stick his wrists together. An inhumanly fast body search ensued, then a buzzing and he felt the hot wash of a powerful body scanner traversing him from head to foot.
‘Clean,’ said the first voice, and then the one who had glued his wrists hauled him to his feet.
There were four of them. The female with the long black hair standing to one side of him with her hand on his shoulder was stunningly beautiful, but by the way she had handled him he reckoned she was Golem. The two men were heavy and thickset – boosted – so unlikely to be Golem because Golem needed no extra muscle. The fourth one was a momentary puzzle to him. At first sight, he thought this individual was some sort of amphidapt, until he moved and Trent saw that his legs hinged like those of a chicken. This one was a dracoman, Trent realized. Then he noted something else: none of them wore the uniform of Polity monitors or station police.
‘Bit dumb coming here, Sobel,’ said one of the men, now turning to head towards the airlock. This stood open since the station AI had instructed the crew to take The Rose inside to one of the pressurized docking areas.
‘Yeah,’ Trent agreed, as the Golem woman pushed gently against his shoulder and he tramped after them.
When he had learned that Blite was coming here, Trent had argued with the man at length and then, getting nowhere, had wondered about trying to take over the ship. They’d foolishly allowed him to retain his weapon and he was quite capable of killing them all, but then what? The ship’s mind wouldn’t obey him and would take him just where it chose. He could destroy it, dumping the ship out of U-space in the process, then would come a long conventional space journey to some place in the Graveyard – a journey that might be longer than his lifespan, but would certainly result in his lifespan being longer than it was now destined to be. But he owed Blite for rescuing him, the crew weren’t the scum he was used to dealing with, and he rather liked them even though they didn’t like him.
He hadn’t been able to do it. What was wrong with him?
Outside the ship, on a short polished metal floor before a line of cargo and personnel dropshafts, Blite awaited alongside the other item he had picked up beyond Masada. Whether picking it up had been part of the favour Penny Royal had asked of the man Trent didn’t know. All he did know was that Blite had abruptly changed course to intercept this thing. The big, skeletal and weirdly painted Penny Royal Golem that Satomi had taken from the mafia boss Stolman on the Rock Pool was sprawled on a grav-sled. It had been inert when Blite picked it up and had remained so ever since. Blite, now seeing his captors shoving Trent out of the ship, walked over.
‘What’s going to happen to him?’ the captain asked, indicating Trent with a nod. Behind him the dracoman activated the grav-sled, using the small console on a control column jutting up from it, and sent it sliding along the dock.
The Golem woman replied, ‘Usually his sort would be cut-auged for data – his mind wiped in the process. However, those under such a sentence who have encountered Penny Royal go to a forensic AI.’
‘And then?’
‘Sentence on him will be executed, but he’ll be taken apart more meticulously – nothing will remain.’
‘You know, I’m standing right here,’ said Trent.
‘So you are,’ said one of the men, ‘very much unlike the hundreds you murdered.’
‘I wasn’t involved in that side of the business,’ said Trent.
‘Just obeying orders, hey?’
Trent decided it was pointless arguing, so fell silent. Blite stepped closer to him and studied his face intently.
‘Of course,’ said the captain, ‘Penny Royal’s almost certainly not finished with you. Not at all.’ Blite stepped back and nodded once, a weird disconnected expression on his face, and moved off.
What did that mean?
Another shove against his shoulder sent him stumbling. He realized he wasn’t being taken across to the dropshafts but along the dock. They brought him to the ramp leading into another ship. He studied this small powerful-looking vessel as the Golem woman clamped a hand on his shoulder to hold him in place. It was a single-ship – designed for solo delivery missions and rather like an in-system fighter. But it had extended nacelles on either side at the rear that looked like a twinned U-space drive, and another large nacelle extending downward and looking like a weapons pod.
Ahead of him, the dracoman guided the grav-sled up the ramp into a small hold where it locked itself down. One of those behind shoved Trent up the ramp after it, past the sled, through a bulkhead door into a narrow corridor, then across to another small hold converted into a cabin.
‘The glue binding your wrists will be broken down so you should be able to feed yourself,’ said the Golem woman.
Trent turned to gaze at her. ‘So you’re not coming with me?’
‘Oh no.’ She shook her head and smiled. Behind her, the two men exchanged an unreadable look while the dracoman just turned and headed away. ‘Even the good guys like us don’t want to get too close to that thing. It can be . . . disturbing.’
‘Thing?’
‘The Brockle,’ she replied, before stepping out and closing the door behind her, locks engaging all around it with leaden thumps. Trent just stared at the blank metal, not sure what to make of that, then turned and walked over to the bed and sat down. He had been sitting there for maybe half an hour, testing the glue sticking his wrists together, when a voice issued from the intercom.
‘Are you sitting comfortably?’
‘Who are you?’ he asked.
‘Brockle Submind Three,’ the voice replied.
‘Yes, I’m sitting comfortably.’
‘Then I suggest you lie down.’
A high-pitched whistling ensued, and the glue on his wrists abruptly debonded. He felt motion – an odd sideways pressure – and realized that the cabin had reoriented. He lay down on the bed, resting his arms at his sides. After a little more manoeuvring, acceleration came down on him like a giant invisible boot, pressing him deep into the mattress. It ramped up and up, and his consciousness faded out.
Garrotte
‘That is Cvorn,’ said Penny Royal, doubtless meaning the father-captain occupying the ancient prador destroyer. It had just surfaced from U-space, leaving a photonic trail, twenty light minutes out from the binary system – a green sun orbiting a hot blue star that was well on the way to collapsing into a neutron star. Almost certainly, the prador destroyer had yet to see the ST dreadnought awaiting it. Yet still it fired up its fusion engines to take it directly towards the dreadnought’s location, which probably meant this was a pre-planned meeting.
‘Cvorn?’ Garrotte prompted, just before yet another package unfolded in its mind like an origami sculpture, neatly depositing information directly into its eidetic memory. Garrotte now knew much more about the events on and around the Rock Pool from the moment Sverl had established himself there. It now knew of Sverl’s changes, of his steady grotesque transformation. It knew Cvorn’s use of Polity technology had given the five young adults in the dreadnought the advantages they had recently made use of. But still Garrotte did not understand.
‘Cvorn has allies in the Kingdom,’ Penny Royal stated. ‘His hatred of humans and of us has, if anything, been exacerbated by his use of our technology. Consider his aims.’
Garrotte began thinking, and deeply. Perhaps something about the presence of Penny Royal aboard this ship had some effect on Garrotte’s thought processes, because soon it began to see an ugly pattern. Yet, this pattern still would not come together, not until Penny Royal provided an image feed . . .
Garrotte found itself gazing through some sort of cam directly into the nearby prador ship’s sanctum. Here it saw an old legless prador – one of the blue-shells, in fact, who claimed direct lineage to the first king of the prador – hovering before his pit controls and hexagonal screens.
‘Observe,’ Penny Royal instructed.
Garrotte studied the scene, and then studied it a lot more closely. The father-captain, who was presumably Cvorn, had the usual set of prador control units welded to his carapace, but next to them was another control unit with its cover and most of its internal circuitry removed. Sitting inside this was the bean-like shape of a Polity aug. Only this was no ordinary Polity aug, for it had scales like a lizard. It was partially alive, a biotech aug. Only one organization made these things: Dracocorp. All AIs knew the danger of Dracocorp augs for they were mechanisms quite similar in their action to those control units Cvorn wore. The one with the prime aug, such as Cvorn in this case, could come to mentally dominate those wearing subordinate units. Crime lords often used them to take full and utter control of their own people.
‘Thrall technology,’ Garrotte stated.
‘Yes,’ Penny Royal prompted.
‘The prador children think he gave them a soft location and augmented mental capacity so they could snatch female prador,’ Garrotte continued, ‘but the ST dreadnought they stole for Cvorn was the real target there. I don’t know what reason they gave themselves for coming back here, rather than just heading off and leaving Cvorn behind. But in reality they have had little choice in the matter and have come back to be slaves.’
‘And his next target?’
‘Sverl,’ said Garrotte – it was obvious now.
‘Cvorn has left just enough clues, just enough data for Sverl to pursue and thus fall into a trap. Sverl, even having rescued the people of Carapace City, will respond, because Cvorn, while he lives, will always be a threat.’
‘And despite everything, Sverl is still a prador,’ said Garrotte.
‘Yes.’
‘And prador tend to kill their enemies rather than avoid them.’
‘If all goes according to Cvorn’s plans, he will gain the evidence he needs of Polity perfidy, which is Sverl himself.’
‘Prador don’t accept recorded data – too easily falsified or tampered with.’
‘An ST dreadnought will be quite capable of disabling Sverl’s ship . . .’
Cvorn hated both the Polity and the new king of the prador for ending the war. He had allies in the Kingdom who would react very strongly to the physical proof of the transformation of a prador into an amalgamation of prador, human and AI. Very strongly indeed. This was the kind of stuff that could bring thousands of prador to Cvorn’s side. It could lead to civil war in the Kingdom, or even to an attack upon the Polity and the renewal of the war. Which was precisely Cvorn’s aim.
This was, as the saying went, serious shit.
‘You have to stop this,’ said Garrotte. ‘You’ve just shown me how easily you can penetrate Cvorn’s ship. If you want redemption, if you want forgiveness, then stop him. With this you can come home. We will accept you back into the fold.’
‘That is not my aim,’ Penny Royal replied.
‘No, you have to—’
The Micheletto’s Garrotte dropped abruptly into U-space and everything went dark. It realized its time sense was gone, so microseconds or centuries might be passing.
‘Redemption?’ Garrotte heard Penny Royal’s voice coming out of the darkness. The image of something speaking from within that ancient empty space suit was undeniably creepy. ‘Forgiveness?’ Penny Royal wondered aloud.
As an AI Garrotte had a perfect mechanistic conception of human emotions and could experience just as much of them as it wished. It didn’t, however, like experiencing such emotions while they were out of its control, and the sheer menace and malice that seemed to emanate from that unseen suit Garrotte could really have done without.
‘Back into the fold?’ mimicked Penny Royal.
‘Isn’t that what you want?’ asked Garrotte.
‘That is not for Polity AIs to decide.’
The menace remained, though its intensity of malice receded somewhat. Garrotte now returned to full engagement with the ship’s sensors. Suddenly they were back in Polity space. There could be no doubt about it because the thing hanging out there in vacuum – a station shaped like a barbell measuring eight miles from top to bottom – Garrotte recognized as one of the Polity watch stations sitting on the border of the Graveyard. The ship AI at once tried to make contact with the AIs and humans aboard, but was blocked. Also, the Garrotte was under that sophisticated chameleonware again and, although those aboard the station would have detected a U-space signature, their chances of finding this ship before it departed again were remote.
‘Why here?’ asked Garrotte.
‘Tell them.’
Garrotte now realized some sort of mechanical activity was occurring all around it. It went blind, but then sight returned, although only from the cams inset in its AI crystal’s cage.
‘Tell the Polity,’ Penny Royal continued, ‘to disengage. Unless they want war with the prador, they must allow me to deal with this. They must allow my pieces to remain in play.’
‘Pieces?’ Was it all just a game to this monster?
‘Trent Sobel must be allowed to deliver his message to Sverl.’
‘What message?’
‘Also, beyond that, if I cannot find my own path, then some other path might find me. And maybe that will be the path of vengeance – on those who effectively forced a child into mass murder and thence created a monster.’
Further information arrived and opened itself in Garrotte’s mind.
‘What?’
With a crash and flash of light Garrotte found itself tumbling away from its original body. The AI of the Micheletto’s Garrotte was now just a lump of crystal inside a ceramal cage, tumbling through vacuum, no more effective than the other debris out there. But its beacon was working and those in the station would detect that. Its understanding was quite clear now, even though Garrotte wished it wasn’t. In fact, it wasn’t sure it wanted to be found. It wasn’t sure that when certain powers knew what it knew, they would allow it to continue existing.
Spear
The Rock Pool had changed drastically. What had once been a world with clearly distinct continents and oceans was now a ruddy brown orb. Dust and debris filled the atmosphere all the way round. Carapace City and all its inhabitants were gone. The prador were gone too, and it seemed nothing sentient remained down on the surface. However, a small and deceptively innocuous-looking vessel hung in orbit, for the Polity team who had been keeping an eye on this place – one of whom I had seen in those recordings Riss had obtained – had yet to depart.
‘Luckily,’ said Riss, ‘there’s a lot of water vapour up in the air, and pressure waves are still rounding the planet.’
‘Huh?’ I said brilliantly. I hadn’t been sleeping so well. The déjà vu had gone now, as if dispensed with as irrelevant, and I was experiencing lives and swiftly ensuing deaths with metronomic regularity. I no longer needed some cue for them to proceed – I no longer needed to be in a similar place or situation to the one who died. One by one I’d experienced the deaths of the rest of the salvage crew – not only Garton, but also Mesen’s ugly end when, in the stinking darkness, Penny Royal had taken him apart and then reassembled him. Finally, it discarded him like a broken toy, all its workings understood. I died with the four whom the AI had killed in the previous salvage team, and I had died with many others too.
‘Rainstorms,’ Riss explained. ‘Filthy dust-laden monsoons sweeping round the planet should take most of that crap out of the atmosphere within just a few months.’
I simply stared at the snake drone, but then a voice issued from the ship’s PA.
‘What Riss is saying, in her ineloquent manner,’ interjected Flute, ‘is that the Rock Pool will experience no summer this year, but will not descend into catastrophic cold. This means that the ecosphere already established here, though with some die-off, will survive.’
‘Oh goody,’ I said, not all that interested.
All the lives and the deaths I had experienced now sat pristine in my mind. I could access them again at will. I could become this man Garton again and die as him once more as if for the first time. I could review his entire memories, the murders he had committed, the fortune he had won and lost, the pets he had tortured as a boy. Was this supposed to be a justification for his death on Penny Royal’s part? Was I supposed to plumb these lives for the reasons they died? How could this be, when I could just as easily access the mind of a small child suffering a rapid death from a weaponized virus used by the black AI?
‘Primitive fauna and flora have their place,’ Flute noted. ‘And future colonists might be glad of the reaverfish.’
‘If they’re crabs like you,’ said Riss. ‘Are you remembering what it was like to have a body, Flute? Getting input from your phantom taste buds?’
‘Hey,’ Flute rejoined, ‘at least I knew the pleasure of food. All you have is memories of ersatz orgasms prompted by injecting eggs into prador.’
‘But no Sverl here,’ I said loudly.
After a short embarrassed pause Riss replied, ‘Sverl departed twenty solstan days ago. Groves and his team only stayed to probe the wreckage about Carapace City in search of any survivors.’
This Groves was the Polity agent in the recording. He and his team had ignored communications from Flute and me, but it seemed that one of Riss’s contacts was aboard that other ship.
‘Did they find any?’ I asked.
‘Only corpses, though one of them does have a memplant, so that counts as a survivor.’
‘Yes, I’m sure it does,’ I said with feeling, forcing myself to deal with the present and turn away from the chaos in my mind. I really needed to find Penny Royal because even though it had already caused my death on the planet Panarchia, I had now once again become one of the black AI’s victims. I continued, ‘So, Sverl, a prador who it seems likely is turning into some grotesque version of a human being, decided to protect Carapace City, or rather the people here. When faced with the drastic effects of an atmosphere kamikaze strike, he landed his ship on the surface and rescued the population of that city.’
‘So it would seem,’ Riss replied.
I turned to look at the drone again. ‘Is that because he’s more human or because he’s less prador? It strikes me that both humans and prador are no slouches when it comes to either committing genocide or being indifferent to it.’ I knew where the acid in my voice was coming from, but couldn’t stop it.
Riss gave a snakish shrug.
‘And anyway,’ I continued, ‘Sverl’s motives in taking those shell people off the planet might not be what anyone thinks. Maybe he was just stocking his larder. This all doesn’t really make much sense.’
‘We were lacking in data,’ said Riss, black eye now open. ‘I have been talking to the Polity drone Arrowsmith who was in communication with Sverl in the past and has managed to analyse his actions.’
I glanced at the drone. ‘Your contact?’
Riss dipped her head in acknowledgement and continued, ‘Arrowsmith tells me that Sverl seems likely to have directly amalgamated with AI crystal.’
‘Which theoretically should kill him.’
Riss shrugged again. ‘Penny Royal.’
Explanation enough, then, for technology that most Polity scientists considered beyond reach at present. It made sense too, because Sverl had upgraded Flute, who was one of his children, with AI crystal, so Sverl incorporating AI crystal explained how he must have lost his prador detestation of artificial intelligence.
‘So an amalgam of prador, human and AI,’ I said, adding, ‘Another mess Penny Royal might want to clean up and our reason for going after him.’
‘This may account for his actions in saving the people here,’ Riss added.
Flute emitted an electronic snort at that.
‘Sure,’ I spat, ‘because AIs are so moral.’
Silence ensued, so I continued. ‘This doesn’t get us any closer to finding out where he went, nor does it get us any closer to Penny Royal. Do either of you have anything useful?’
‘Sverl used very sophisticated shielding during his jump,’ said Riss. ‘The Polity team here could get no indication of where he was going.’
‘So still nothing useful.’
A further silence ensued, then Flute piped up, ‘I have something useful.’
‘Go on,’ I said.
‘We do not know Sverl’s location; however, it is possible to locate Cvorn, who Sverl will almost certainly go after,’ said Flute.
‘Spy satellites,’ said Riss.
‘Let Flute have his moment,’ I shot back, then asked, ‘Why are you certain Sverl will go after Cvorn?’
‘It’s the prador way.’
‘But Sverl is not quite a prador any more,’ I said. ‘Still, it’s worth a shot. Go on.’
‘Yes, spy satellites,’ Flute continued. ‘To be able to place so accurately that kamikaze explosion that destroyed Carapace City, Cvorn had to be watching the situation here. Already I am detecting some of them and they are constantly transmitting. It may be possible to lift the coordinates of where they are transmitting to.’
‘Take us to one,’ I instructed, anxious to be on the move.
Flute started the fusion drive to take us up and away from the planet and I felt its drag as the Rock Pool began to recede. Next came a brief moment of dislocation and the planet disappeared from the fabric screens. Next, a frame appeared there, etching out a portion of vacuum and expanding it to show an object like the head of a mace – a sphere studded with sensor spines. I auged through to the ship’s controls and brought up a scale along the bottom of this expanded screen. The object was about the size of a grapefruit.
‘Should we bring it in?’ I wondered, ‘or is it likely to be booby-trapped?’
‘There is no need,’ said Riss.
‘No, there isn’t,’ Flute interjected quickly. ‘The thing is utterly unshielded and I now already have the location of the receiver.’
‘Creep,’ Riss muttered.
I checked some of the figures via my aug. ‘Flute, scan it for anything nasty, and if it’s clear bring it into the munitions bay.’ I paused. ‘Here I am with a couple of superior intelligences to advise me and not one of them seems to be thinking ahead. We don’t actually want to drop ourselves right in Cvorn’s lap, but we do want to keep track of him.’ Dead silence met this, so I continued, ‘We U-jump to somewhere some light minutes or hours from the location of the receiver and check for Sverl’s arrival there. If he hasn’t arrived, we watch. And then, if Cvorn goes on the move, we use this object to continue tracking him.’
‘I submit that my mind was damaged by Penny Royal,’ said Riss.
‘Supposing you had one,’ muttered Flute.
‘What’s your excuse?’ Riss snapped back.
Flute just muttered indistinctly, and dropped us into U-space. I stood up to head for my cabin, where I would doubtless experience other deaths. I really needed to get control over this because it was affecting my judgement and my mood. I had to remember I wasn’t those other people. For my own sanity, I needed to find a way to stand separate from them – partition them off.