Riss
The collar Sverl had locked her into was very effective. It sat tightly around Riss’s neck, its inner face a form of remora pad. Once it had been stuck in place, it injected nanoscopic hooks deep inside to root. Riss had tried attacking these internally using her nanobot immune system, but the collar issued a reprimand – a focused EM pulse that left her blank and confused. In the process she lost conscious control of those nanobots so they returned to their usual tasks, and the hooks just regrew.
Besides making itself very difficult to remove, the thing’s main function was to interfere with Riss’s many systems, including chameleonware. It had all the ’ware’s components and systems located. And when Riss tried to activate them, they too became subject to one of those directed EM pulses. So now the drone could not use the light-bending effect of her outer skin. She was also denied the underlying powered layer that could bend other radiations. Or the skin microscales that negated any air disturbance. She could not rapidly pulse viruses into any form of directed scanning. She could not use the grav-motor that matched frequencies with grav-plates so no detector would pick up her weight, its effect also twisted through and reflected by a complicated arrangement of hardfields that could defeat most mass detectors. Nor could she use her method of displacing U-com and other U-space systems, so detectors always found them at the wrong realspace location. Riss had even tried moving her internal components, but the collar had tracked them. Sverl knew his stuff, and Riss realized that to remove the collar would require some drastic action that present circumstances did not warrant.
A secondary function of the collar was to prevent any interference with this dreadnought’s computer systems. The moment she tried any of that, it went into rhythmic pulse mode, scrambling her penetration so she could only glean scraps of data and could influence nothing.
‘So where now?’ she asked.
‘Sverl first,’ Spear replied. ‘I want that spine back.’
‘Right. Sverl,’ said Riss.
All scans of the collar revealed that its purpose was dual: it scrambled both chameleonware and attempts at computer penetration, but it hadn’t prevented her taking Spear’s cure inside and injecting it into the shell people, and it showed no signs that it could have. It also hadn’t stopped her from returning to the medical area where Spear had made that cure and breaking into the drugs safe. But then that had been a low-order computer penetration that might not concern Sverl. And it hadn’t prohibited her from removing the flask containing the original enzyme acid and loading that – which really should concern Sverl.
An option was now available to her. If she got close enough to Sverl, she reckoned she could beat any of his defences and have time to drive in her ovipositor at least once. The enzyme acid would dissolve all Sverl’s prador organic tissue. Because it wasn’t as specific as the version Spear had made from it, it would also attack his human tissue. Surely Sverl could not survive that?
As they approached the doors leading out of the fourth quadrant of Sverl’s ship, Riss probed ahead and examined the locking mechanisms and their computer controls, which weren’t very complicated. She felt sure she could open these doors but it would be an unnecessary demonstration of the abilities the drone still retained. Sverl might decide to upgrade the collar and hamstring her further. A moment later, the first door opened. Spear walked through and she followed.
The next door took them out into one of the main corridors, where a second-child paused to gaze at them, started snipping its claws at the air in irritation and began to edge closer. Riss could take the child down in a second and knew the acid would not even be necessary, but again it was probably best to remain low profile. The clattering and bubbling of prador speech issued from a PA speaker – Sverl specifically telling this child to back off. Sverl then gave that same order, concerning all humans, generally throughout the ship. Riss noticed that assassin drones weren’t mentioned in this amnesty. The second-child abruptly turned away and moved off.
‘I’ve been checking on things,’ said Spear as they headed in the opposite direction.
Riss had been monitoring the man since they first met, but had now delved into his aug on levels with which he might not be comfortable. Though the collar prevented Riss from penetrating this ship’s system, it did not react when Riss penetrated other computing hardware, Spear’s aug being one such example. Sverl trusted Spear, so had allowed him access to the ship systems. Riss was using him as a stepping-stone to access them herself – so knew precisely what Spear had been checking and had already guessed his aims.
‘You have?’ Riss enquired innocently.
‘Sverl set his children and robots to work on restoring my ship, but recently pulled them off for other projects.’
Yes, the second-children were working on an old captured attack ship and three prador kamikazes. Riss had leapfrogged from Spear’s aug to grab all the data available on this work, established a link and was watching still. At first she had thought the attack ship and kamikazes were being prepared as weapons to use against Cvorn, but had then been baffled when the second-children started removing the CTDs from the kamikazes.
‘But in my ship, they did manage to tear out everything that was scrapped anyway and replace some items,’ Spear continued. ‘We don’t have a U-space drive or fusion drive, and a lot of armour is missing. But the robots Sverl left on the job have been restoring the ship’s loom and control nexi, ready to integrate all replacement components. They’ve repaired much of the bridge as a point from which to oversee that integration.’
Do you know about Flute? Riss wondered.
‘It’s a standard procedure,’ said the drone. ‘If you can’t do the heavy stuff, get the light stuff done ready to receive it.’
‘They replaced the burned-out screen fabric too,’ said Spear.
When they arrived at Sverl’s sanctum, the diagonally divided door stood firmly closed, while outside, resting against it was the spine. Seeing this, Riss immediately wondered if her collar might also give the prador access to things she didn’t want him to know. No, Sverl was just very busy preparing for the coming encounter with Cvorn . . .
As Spear picked up the spine, Riss detected a surge of U-space data transfer, immediately followed by an intense physical reaction and out-of-parameter functions in his aug. The man had just started to experience someone else’s memory and used aug-mind synergy to suppress it. Riss backed off mentally – some of the stuff going on in there defied analysis and was therefore dangerous. Spear rested the spine on his shoulder, turned and trudged off.
‘What about Flute?’ Riss asked, squirming to keep up.
‘Dead,’ said Spear. ‘I got some connection, but he told me he was dying. After that, no connection.’
He didn’t know. Riss decided to throw him a bone. ‘Remember that Flute was a combination of deep-frozen prador second-child ganglion and AI.’
Spear went quiet, and now risking another mental peek Riss found him talking to Sverl.
‘What is Flute’s status?’ Spear asked.
‘The second-child brain died,’ Sverl replied.
‘A precise statement,’ Spear observed, ‘and lying by omission.’
‘He recorded across to his AI component.’
‘I want him back.’
‘When he has finished carrying out one last chore for me you can have him back.’
A second later Spear was into Sverl’s system, tracking Flute, locating him in the old attack ship, then pulling up information on the kamikazes. That was almost as fast as a haiman – the nearest the Polity had come to amalgamating human and AI.
‘I see,’ said Spear. ‘U-signatures.’
What’s this? Riss was baffled.
‘Precisely,’ Sverl replied.
‘So there you go,’ said Spear aloud.
‘What?’ Riss asked, rapidly withdrawing her probe.
‘Now I know what happened to Flute,’ Spear continued, ‘and now you know, supposing you didn’t already.’
‘Didn’t already?’ Riss repeated.
‘Stop being coy – I can feel you in my aug like a splinter in my finger, Riss.’
Not for the first time, Riss considered killing a man. Humans were easier to off than prador. Even without the enzyme acid, which would chew through Spear’s body just a little bit slower than it would go through Sverl’s, Riss could punch holes through his heart or brain stem. And even without a collimated diamond ovipositor, Riss could still simply strangle him.
‘Sverl is blocking me,’ the drone said.
‘Understandable, really,’ said Spear. ‘You told me that Penny Royal hollowed you out and left you without purpose, which is a vague description coming from a machine, but I sense that since coming aboard a prador dreadnought, your homicidal instincts have been on the rise.’
Riss immediately began checking the induction probe she had been using to hitch a ride on the man’s aug. Could it be a two-way street?
‘I sometimes wonder, Riss,’ Spear continued, ‘if all Penny Royal took away were the remnants of hope. You were fashioned for one purpose and that ended with the end of the war.’
‘I know what Penny Royal took,’ Riss asserted, not really knowing at all.
Spear continued relentlessly, ‘During a war, weapons get superseded and dispensed with. After a war they’re melted down and turned into ploughs.’
‘Shut the fuck up, Spear,’ Riss hissed.
‘Ah, not so empty after all.’
Riss found herself stationary on the floor as the man trudged on ahead, trying to control a surge of rage that was as integral as her power supply. As this waned, she felt bafflement again. What was that? And why had Spear spoken like that? Riss abruptly went after him again, induction probe at full strength, just catching the tail of another surge of data exchange between the spine and the man.
Was that you speaking then? Riss wondered.
Eventually they arrived at Penny Royal’s erstwhile body, the destroyer Spear had renamed the Lance, like the spine he carried on his shoulder. The ship had been moved, much had been torn out and much reconstructed, and now a ramp led up to its open shuttle bay. Spear made his way through the partially reconstructed interior to enter the bridge. Riss followed and watched the man walk across the charred floor, to stand beside a portable prador saddle control. He hoisted the spine off his shoulder and rested it against the saddle.
‘We all have our loads to bear,’ he said, ‘and that’s a heavy one.’ He turned to look directly at Riss. ‘I’m sorry, I don’t know why I said what I said before.’
He turned away again and dipped his head to peer at the saddle control. After a moment, it hummed and buzzed to itself, glints of light igniting in small pit controls made to take a second-child’s manipulatory hands. The screen fabric came on all around, turning the ship transparent and showing them the hold in which the destroyer sat. Out on the floor a single constructor robot was perambulating, a coil of high-pressure fuel line sitting on its flat back. It moved out of sight – entering the ship somewhere to the rear.
‘I think we can do better,’ said Spear.
He was auged into the control, now making linkages to the entire computer system of Sverl’s ship. The screen fabric turned grey, swirled through with shots of nacre. It looked like a malfunction until Riss turned and saw the jut of a sensor spire in one direction, and some bulbous nacelle extended on a pylon in the other. The cams could not quite convey what lay out there – they were looking at a machine interpretation of U-space.
‘Just a few minutes now,’ said Spear. ‘Penny Royal’s timing comes close to perfection, though Sverl facilitated that by not allowing us into his sanctum. If we’d gone in and you’d been unable to resist your urge to try killing him, we would have been late.’
Riss just gazed at the man, and yearned for the simplicity of murdering prador.
Blite
The screen display of the Black Rose blended smoothly with reality as they returned to that state. The stars slowed in their dopplering course past them, and objects ahead glimmered and expanded into view. An iron sphere sat in vacuum ahead, other objects positioned in an arc underneath it like lashes below an eyeball. And some other large object lay beyond.
‘Leven,’ said Blite, but before he could continue, magnification increased to bring these objects closer and data began scrolling down a subscreen in a bottom corner.
The prador supply station sat out in clear vacuum many light years from the nearest star. It was a slightly flattened sphere with a square-section protuberance girdling its circumference. Around this, three ships had docked like fish feeding on a bread ball, and Blite at once recognized the long brassy teardrops as the ships of the King’s Guard. All of them were here – the other twenty-seven arrayed in an arc below, neatly lined up like a series of text slashes. Some distance beyond hung a cylinder about which smaller vessels and vacuum construction machines swarmed – scaffolds spreading out from one end to etch out some saucer section. Blite just glanced at this – his focus was mainly on those King’s Guard ships. Then he scanned the data coming in, blinked in disbelief, and returned his attention to that other object.
‘What the fuck is that?’ he wondered.
The structure looked small in perspective, but that was because it lay some distance back from the other objects here. The damned thing was immense: fifty miles long and maybe ten miles thick.
‘The King’s Ship,’ intoned Penny Royal, seemingly right beside his ear.
He glanced round, half-expecting that antique space suit to be standing behind him, but the AI had not seen fit to materialize in any form.
‘The King’s Ship?’ he repeated.
‘Six hundred years,’ said Penny Royal, ‘or less than one.’
‘What?’
A frame opened on the screen and, once again, an armoured prador was there. Blite experienced a familiar surge of irritation, knowing he was just about to witness yet another baffling conversation between this Gost, who was apparently the king of the prador, and Penny Royal. Then he felt glad, because the irritation was surely his own.
‘You again,’ said Gost.
‘Yes,’ Penny Royal replied.
‘What now?’
‘If you lead your Guard to Room 101, you will die,’ the AI replied.
‘Sverl cannot be allowed to exist,’ said Gost. ‘He might be used by subversives to destabilize my Kingdom. This will lead to damaging civil war during which, as I suppress those subversives, they will launch attacks against the Polity. They will hope for a response that would unify all prador under them.’
‘This will not happen.’
‘I calculate that, without my intervention, it will.’
‘I know that it won’t.’
The armoured prador on screen rattled its legs against the floor, evidently in frustrated irritation. Blite knew the feeling.
‘I need more,’ it eventually said.
‘It is time for you to board your ship,’ said Penny Royal. ‘Already you are reaching the stage in which you need larger armour to conceal your development. You need the space to grow, physically and mentally. You will call yourself Oberon.’
‘Very good,’ said Gost. ‘And you’re a Delphic oracle.’
‘You understand human thought.’
‘I still need more.’
‘I can show you a future,’ said Penny Royal.
On screen, the armoured prador abruptly whirled around. One of those black diamonds had appeared in its sanctum. In response to this object, ports all around the walls slammed open to reveal the mirror throats of particle cannons. Seemingly under their regard the diamond separated into six pieces – with something extremely dark and deep lying central to them and only just visible from Blite’s perspective. The king emitted a bubbling scream and retreated out of view. Then the whole scene disappeared in a crash and explosion of blue fire as the particle cannons fired. White-hot chunks of metal and boiling smoke filled the frame before it blanked.
‘What the hell happened?’ said Brond.
‘Patience,’ said Penny Royal.
Blite now looked up at the main view ahead, which had drawn closer. The Guard ships were breaking formation – steering thrusters blading out into darkness and the hot stars of fusion drives igniting. Those docked to the station were detaching too, while anti-munitions lasers probed out, picked out by wisps of vapour issuing from the station.
The sounds continued, slowly died, and then out of the blankness Gost said, ‘I don’t believe you, and I will still take my Guard to Room 101.’ Blite wondered what he had been shown by the black AI.
‘You will believe me,’ said Penny Royal, ‘and now I will give you time to think.’
A surge of something passed through the Black Rose. Blite experienced a falling sensation twinned with an odd feeling of déjà vu. Another surge followed this – setting steering thrusters at full power with the fusion drive igniting. Blite groped for his seat strap, expecting battle, but he still focused on the screen – to see the station and the Guard ships simply die. Fusion drives and steering thrusters went out, the lasers blinked off and light issuing from view ports and bubbles died. Everything went dark; the ships were no longer accelerating, and the constructor robots about the King’s Ship were drifting on courses set before this event. Even far beyond this scene, the stars grew dim.
‘Entropy dump,’ said Brond.
Blite looked at the data and could see that they were now under huge acceleration, as he replayed that conversation in his mind. He couldn’t quite grasp what the AI had been getting at – but perhaps he would when he viewed a recording of it later.
Next, the lights in their bridge dimmed, the data stream disrupted and for a second he found himself weightless. A microsecond later they were dropping into U-space and power returned. Edge of the entropy dump? he wondered. That rather frighteningly indicated that the ship could direct it like a weapon.
‘Where now?’ he asked.
‘The War Factory. Factory Station Room 101,’ Penny Royal replied.
Cvorn
Vrom was gone and the sanctum gleamed after his cleaning efforts. Even the ship lice had disappeared into their niches and crevices around the stone-effect walls, or under the glowing dead man’s fingers of sea lichen, because they had nothing to glean from the floor. Vrom had been even more meticulous than usual – probably sensing his father’s mood and wanting to ensure no punishable infractions. Cvorn still did not feel so good. He felt like a second-child after a thorough beating, and the vision in his palp eyes had worsened further and their movement felt stiff. He was also anxious about what was to come.
Everything was ready and Cvorn could not be any more prepared, or more on edge. He stomped around his sanctum, perpetually going over his plans but unable to spot the glaring error he was sure was there. At one point, he began using his screens to review other plans concerning the alliances he would make and eventually break, once he had captured Sverl. But these were also plans he had checked over ad nauseam and just thinking about them now brought on a deadening boredom, so he sent them back into storage.
He had to do something.
Cvorn returned his attention to the shoal of reaverfish, the prador females and the lone reaverfish he’d let into the mating pool. He found his tension easing as he watched them and went into a kind of fugue state as the hours slipped by. He even caught the moment when the lone reaverfish began shuddering and shaking as it felt something seriously wrong inside it. When he finally dragged himself back to the present, he found that only an hour remained until his encounter with Sverl. He was hungry again now, but didn’t dare risk his delicate digestive system until after the battle. He didn’t really need to check his plans again, but his earlier paranoia that he had missed something was returning. Nearly everything was as it should be, but an alert glyph it took him a second to recognize drew his attention.
Vlern’s children . . .
Sealed into their quarters all about the ship, three of them were running out of oxygen and sinking into somnolence. However, the fourth had either been astute enough to prepare for something like this, or had got lucky. The young adult Sfolk not only had his own oxygen supply but he had also found a diamond saw with its own power pack and was steadily cutting through one wall. This despite Cvorn’s precaution of cutting electricity to all but the cams in his quarters, meaning most power tools were of no use.
Cvorn observed the scene, his guts bubbling with the intensity of his sudden anger. He wanted to go down there right then, open Sfolk’s quarters and simply tear the creature apart, but did not have the time. He could send Vrom, or some of the others, or maybe a war drone. But that wouldn’t be as satisfying. For a moment, he just stared in frustration at the screens, then, remembering his ascendancy in the Dracocorp aug network, he felt a sudden fear. How had he forgotten that? Opening bandwidth, he sought to seize mental control of the young adult, but it was like trying to get a grip on jelly. Presently the jelly collapsed and the connection closed.
‘Desist,’ he ordered through the cam-com.
Sfolk backed away from the hole he was making in the wall, still gripping the diamond saw in his claws, then tilted up and gazed at the cams in the ceiling.
‘The others were naive,’ he said. ‘I knew not to trust any gift from you. I routed the aug through a thrall unit interface set to shut down after a period of time if I didn’t log in.’ Sfolk abruptly dropped the diamond saw. ‘I guess this wasn’t quiet enough.’
What?
Sfolk scuttled over to an open tool chest and took out another item, turned back towards the hole he had been making and raised the object. With a crack, he activated it and billowing smoke highlighted the intense green beam of a quantum cascade laser. It swiftly sliced through material the diamond saw would have taken an age to cut.
‘Vrom!’ Cvorn clattered, quickly routing his present screen view to the first-child. ‘Get down there and kill him! When you’ve dealt with him, kill the others!’
‘Yes, Father,’ Vrom replied.
Cvorn winced. The base of his left palp eye had started hurting as if someone was stabbing in a carapace drill. He tried to ignore the pain while making an aug connection to his own war drones, dispatching them to the same quarters. However, Sfolk’s behaviour was puzzling, because he could not hope to escape . . .
Suddenly feeling panic, which made that palp eye hurt even more, Cvorn brought up a ship’s schematic in his mind. The wall Sfolk was cutting through opened into a main tunnel. Even though Vrom would take a while to get there, two war drones, carrying enough weapons to go up against a Polity assault boat, were speeding in that direction and would arrive soon enough.
Something was wrong.
Cvorn deliberately forced himself to be calm and examined the schematics more meticulously. They definitely showed that main tunnel just on the other side of that wall and all the measurements were correct. However, when Cvorn expanded his examination of datum lines and the measurements of the ship as a whole, things ceased to add up. The schematics were wrong. Sfolk had almost certainly interfered with them. Cvorn began working on them, observing the drones – two armoured spheres ten feet across and pocked with missile and energy weapon ports – arrive in that main tunnel and slow to a halt.
‘Request clarification,’ said one of them. ‘Further orders required.’
Wordlessly, Cvorn auged his instructions through, and they both turned towards the wall supposedly adjacent to where Sfolk was cutting, and powered up their particle cannons.
Cvorn continued analysing the schematics in his aug, running a search program and trying to correct obvious errors. Some liquid ran into one of his turret eyes and he blinked it away – too wrapped up in present concerns to heed it. It struck him as likely that what Sfolk had done had been originally in preparation for seizing control of this ST dreadnought from his brothers . . .
There.
The schematic expanded, holes appearing throughout it. However, though this was probably where areas were missing, it was wrong in the area where the drones were cutting, because still it showed just that one wall between Sfolk’s quarters and the main tunnel.
‘Cvorn,’ said Sfolk, his laser shutting down, ‘you can augment, put on legs and take my brother’s prongs, but your brain is still old.’ The young prador now dived into the hole and disappeared out of sight.
Out in the corridor, as Vrom arrived, the drones cut through to expose a vertical maintenance shaft made for first-children, but which was still large enough for the young adult to squeeze down. It was too small, however, for the war drones to enter.
‘Vrom,’ Cvorn instructed, ‘get what resources you need, go after him and kill him. But take nothing that will in any way hamper my attack on Sverl.’
‘Yes, Father,’ said Vrom, then turned away to begin clattering into the communicator beside his mandibles. Cvorn watched and waited until a small squad of heavily armed second-children arrived, along with one of the ship’s internal security war drones – a thing shaped like a melon seed over five feet long. This ignited arc lights in its fore and headed down into the maintenance shaft. The second-children followed, and Vrom a short while after, when he had donned all the hardware they had brought for him.
I really don’t need this now, thought Cvorn, aware it wasn’t a new thought. He eyed a counter in one of his lower screens and, with a further thought, banished the present views in preparation for those outside the ship, rattled his feet against the floor and spat some acid gathering in his gullet. Belatedly he linked to a cam view showing his own sanctum – the only way he could get a good look at himself – and focused it in on his visual turret. His left palp eye was lying over, some pustule having burst underneath it. He reached up with his claw and gently took hold of it and tried to move it back upright. More pus oozed out round its base, then when he released it, it fell forwards and popped back out of its socket. It tumbled down his visual turret, bounced off his mandibles and landed on the floor. Cvorn stared at it, at its withered tail of nerves and veins, then turned away as a ship louse came out to investigate. He returned his attention to his screens. It didn’t matter. He had more important concerns.
Now Sverl, now you’re mine.
Spear
The new screen fabric within the Lance glimmered. It formed a bright circle, expanding from a point at the centre of the ceiling, then spreading out and settling down the walls. With a horrible twisting sensation, probably due to damage Cvorn had inflicted earlier, Sverl’s dreadnought dropped into realspace. As the view was revealed I thought that something had gone seriously wrong. But, updating from Sverl’s system, I understood that we had surfaced actually inside the ring of dust and gas. That was why it looked like some ancient city smog out there.
‘You’ll have to enhance the view,’ said Riss.
‘No, really?’ I said, wondering why I had been growing irritated with the drone lately.
Sverl’s sensors were bringing in a lot more than mere human visual data, so I started to make use of that. The smog cleared on the screen and the stars came back into view, but none of this made me any wiser. I ran the data through a program in my aug and routed it back to the screen fabric, truncating distances and bringing the trinary system about us into the human compass.
The white and black dwarf stars orbited each other far out to my left, whilst the red dwarf sat over to my right. I made a slight adjustment to bring the ring of dust and gas surrounding the white dwarf, in which we sat, into view. This gave the odd effect of sitting inside a massive tunnel that curved off into the far distance. Scattered inside and outside this were asteroids and asteroid clusters, while sprinkled along the ring were planetoids, smoothly spherical after billions of years in this stellar tumbling machine. The whole scene would have been a bit too much computer model and not enough reality, but for the processing I was also running in my aug. This truly gave me a sense of scale and of being there.
‘U-signature,’ observed Riss.
I was already on it, because the drone had only picked it up through my aug connection to Sverl’s system. I etched out a frame beyond our tunnel and there, rucking up a trail of generated photons like fairy dust, Cvorn’s ship scored itself into the real. I brought the frame closer for more detail. This was my first real look at this ST dreadnought and it was fearsome indeed. However, I also saw, straight away, the mistakes that had made this design of ship vulnerable to the Polity. Packing all those weapons in one area wasn’t a great idea.
‘Putting all your eggs in one basket, so Arrowsmith would say,’ Sverl told me, revealing the breadth of his abilities, for surely in such a situation all his concentration should be on Cvorn.
‘The prador have such a saying?’ I asked out loud.
‘Similar,’ said Sverl, ‘a direct translation is “putting all your seed in one female” but the meaning is the same.’
Cvorn was opening fire already. A swarm of railgun missiles began to depart his ship while, on one side, space doors had opened to allow something to nose out. All appeared to move in slow motion. Even when Cvorn fired his particle cannons, the beams groped out at the speed of mercury in a thermometer dropped into boiling water. Finally, the object drew clear of those space doors and I recognized a prador destroyer.
‘Cvorn’s original ship,’ Sverl updated me.
Twin particle beams crossed vacuum towards us, while a single beam drove back the other way, its hue turned violet by the dust and gas through which it was passing. Even without my link into Sverl’s system, I could tell we were under heavy fusion acceleration. The Lance was shuddering and internal ship’s gravity was failing to compensate for the drag of acceleration. I could also grab detail on the other things Sverl was doing, such as firing his own railguns and now opening up two sets of space doors in his hull, but I wanted it laid out before me. I ran the incoming data through another program and displaced myself, which was easy enough to do with the data. The scene flickered, major objects not changing position very much but some closer asteroids whipped to different locations. Now I appeared to hang in vacuum ten or twenty miles out from Sverl’s ship.
I watched protective hardfields spring into being, dust swirling behind them as they interfered with ancient currents here. Upon reaching the perimeter of the dust ring, the twin particle beams turned violet too, but against the hardfields they splashed ruby fire. Meanwhile Cvorn’s old destroyer was accelerating off at an angle and beginning to fire a series of missiles. Turning my attention back to Sverl’s destroyer, I saw the first kamikaze leave one bay, while the old attack ship he’d kept was steadily heading out of another. I understood Sverl’s aim here and knew Riss had not – but felt no inclination to keep the drone informed.
Even though Sverl’s dreadnought was under full acceleration, Cvorn’s ST dreadnought was moving fast and closing. Ahead of it, its first railgun missiles began to impact against our hardfields and I felt a steady shuddering thrum through my body. Next, a ball of fire exploded from some port in the side of Sverl’s dreadnought – a hardfield generator burning. All the energy it had absorbed had been converted into heat and motion, but thankfully it was expelled through a disposal port. A short while later fire exploded from other ports and continued burning inside. Sverl hadn’t had a disposal tube lined up for that one and, checking the ship’s system, I saw that it had burned a half-mile course through the ship’s interior.
‘He has designed his weapons well,’ Sverl noted.
‘Not too well, I hope,’ I replied.
‘We shall see.’
The first kamikaze and the old attack ship were now clear and accelerating.
‘Good luck,’ I sent, expecting no reply.
‘I hope not to need it,’ Flute told me.
I saw two more hardfield projectors go, and the storm of explosions against our protective fields created a thousand-milewide cloud of red and orange fire. A particle beam licked through and began grinding against the hull like a hot iron on wood. Railgun missiles followed, and Sverl responded with anti-munitions lasers. These laced the cloud like the threads of a spider’s web under the glare of sunset. All were accurate, but with energy spent on gas and dust, they did not instantly destroy the missiles. Instead they tracked them in the hope of melting or otherwise weakening them to soften their impact. Inevitably, some found their target.
I staggered as three struck, massive plasma explosions reaching out into space, leaving glowing dents in the exotic metal hull armour. One had hit close to the space doors from which one of the last two kamikazes was departing. This sent the craft tumbling, steering thrusters firing to try to stabilize it. Sverl had already closed the space doors Flute and the first kamikaze had used and now hurried to close the doors the last two had utilized. They were a weakness; if just one of those missiles had passed through them, the damage inside would have been massive.
Missiles fired by Cvorn’s old destroyer were now turning in towards our flank. Given time, these would force Sverl to redirect some of his defences, thus weakening his main defence against Cvorn. With his superior firepower, Cvorn would eventually break through and tear Sverl’s ship apart. Sverl, of course, could flee. He could drop his dreadnought into U-space and run. But, with incomplete shielding, he could not hide his U-signature and Cvorn would follow. Wherever Sverl arrived next, the same scenario would play out, only each time Cvorn would wreak more damage on Sverl’s ship. Sverl had known this right from his first encounter with this ST dreadnought – hence his new tactics, hence the kamikazes and the old attack ship.
‘How long?’ I enquired.
‘Minutes only,’ Sverl replied.
Minutes were a long time with shoals of railgun missiles bearing down and two particle beams tearing at the hull. I noted that the tumbling kamikaze had stabilized and was accelerating to position. The three other vessels spaced themselves out evenly around the dreadnought and matched acceleration. They were ready.
More railgun missiles came in, exploding continuously against the hull. Anti-munitions lasers began stabbing out at the other missiles fired by Cvorn’s old destroyer and now powering in under their own drive. I found myself perpetually having to regain my balance and finally went down on one knee with a hand against the floor. The screen fabric was flickering now and black spots were appearing, because the assault was steadily destroying Sverl’s sensors. The illusion was failing, and it finally dissipated with the smell of smoke. I was left kneeling inside a near-useless Polity destroyer, inside a prador dreadnought taking a hellish pounding. Suddenly I felt very mortal. If one missile got through to my location, I was dead. If one knocked out Sverl’s U-space drive, I was dead. If the odds of four to one in our favour didn’t work out, I was dead.
Viewing via my aug now, I saw the last kamikaze reach its required position just as Cvorn’s ST dreadnought entered the dust ring. The dreadnought started firing a series of railgun missiles – marked as somehow different by the hue of the glow they created as they heated under friction. I didn’t need to analyse spectra or talk to Sverl to know that the killing blow was on its way.
‘Now,’ said Sverl.
I felt reality lurch and twist around me, drag at me, trying simultaneously to pull me apart and crush me down into singularity. My body reported agony, but it was too intense for me to even scream, and I negated it with a pre-prepared aug program. This effect could have been due to damage to our drive or its shielding, but was also one I could not distinguish from something that had been described as happening during the war. Ships sometimes U-jumped while clustered too close together. It was never a good idea to jump when U-fields could interfere – the ships had a very good chance of surviving, but the crews had a very good chance of dying. This was due to the intense internal electromagnetic disruptions. But sometimes the choices were stark when under heavy attack, during which survival was a matter of decisions made in seconds, or microseconds.
It passed and the screen fabric turned grey swirled with nacre, where it was still receiving data. Now it was time to test those four-to-one odds.
‘Where are we heading now?’ I asked Sverl.
‘Room 101.’
‘Surely another location—’ I began.
‘That was my best shot just now,’ said Sverl. ‘The only option I have left to try, if Cvorn manages to follow us, is to lead him straight into that station’s automated defences.’
‘Which we would not survive anyway,’ I said.
‘Quite,’ said Sverl.
I blinked, set the screen fabric to emit just a plain white light, and stood up. I could still smell smoke and the ship was still shuddering as damaged structures realigned. I could hear distant crashes and clangs and at one point the rumble of an explosion. I focused on Riss, most of her body coiled on the floor, ovipositor sticking straight up, head raised and black eye open as she watched me.
‘Do you understand the strategy now?’ I asked.
‘Yes,’ Riss replied, ‘I understood the moment that first kamikaze launched, when it began to power up a U-drive set to generate an unfeasibly large U-field. The kamikazes and that old attack ship are decoys, and Cvorn won’t know which U-signature to follow.’
‘Good.’ I nodded.
‘I also get that Sverl hasn’t worked out the one survival option that remains open to us, should things go tits up.’
I noted that ‘us’. Riss wasn’t particularly concerned about Sverl’s survival.
‘Then perhaps you should elaborate.’
Riss swung her head around, inspecting our surroundings.
‘Think of Station 101’s automatic defences,’ said the drone.
I understood at once. ‘Sverl, listen to this . . .’
‘Of course,’ Riss added, ‘it’s a survival option limited by the space available . . .’
The Brockle
The micro-fibres had penetrated throughout the Tyburn like the mycelium of some fungus. They had attached themselves to pin cams everywhere, though even that wasn’t entirely necessary. Where they terminated at surfaces in the old prison hulk they had grown microscopic nodules, much like fungal fruiting bodies but packed with sensory equipment. These nodules were especially prevalent in the dock and the rooms the Brockle chose for interrogation. Their terahertz scanning could record and transmit the functions of the Brockle’s shoal body entire, and other scan bands could render close copies of the forensic AI’s thought processes. However, the watcher allowed some privacy, since that depth of scanning generally shut down when the Brockle had no one to interrogate.
The Brockle stood and walked slowly to the interrogation room that contained the comatose Ikbal and Martina. It paused outside the door, aware that deep scanning had not shut down in there. However, in this tunnel it would be at low ebb – just registering that the Brockle had arrived. It reached out and rested one hand flat against a wall – replicating an inadvertent action of the human it mimicked – and at a microscopic level it inspected the scan nodes under its palm. Each node was a highly complex chunk of nanotech, but the micro-fibres feeding back to the watcher’s location were simple photon tubes to convey data in that form.
The Brockle now sweated nano-machines from its palm – simple locators with laser drives to convey them where required. These penetrated the points where the micro-fibres attached to the sensory nodules and began propelling themselves back along the photon tubes. These would not be detected, for they were simply too small to interfere much with the data flow.
Lowering its hand, the forensic AI stepped back and waited patiently. In its mind, it located the position of its nano-machines on an old schematic of this ship and traced their progress. Until now, it had never really made an effort to locate the watcher and it observed the progress with interest over the ensuing hours. The nano-machines passed through various junctions and began heading towards the ship’s nose – where the colonists had slept in their hibernation capsules. It felt vaguely surprised about this, because it had expected the watcher to be nearby. The machines were just beginning to head up through the connecting stalk of the ship when abruptly they ceased to move. This could mean that they had reached the watcher’s location, or it could mean that it had shut down the relevant micro-fibres. No matter – the Brockle knew where to go now.
It turned away from the interrogation room and headed towards the dock, opening one of the rear doors and stepping out onto the metal grating. Here it paused to gaze at the vacuum-dried remains of its last victim and decided that it wouldn’t bother clearing up here after all. Turning right, it went through a smaller door into the short tunnel Trent had entered before he left. It closed the door behind it, because the section lying beyond the next door was unpressurized. Here the signs of decay were more evident and, as it walked, it detected that one of the portals was developing a small atmosphere breach around its rim. No matter.
At the end of the tunnel, it squatted down before the second door, which was welded shut. It reached out and touched a finger against a weld, issuing high-vibration microscopic diamond cutters from its fingertip. Drawing its finger round, it turned the welds to dust, finally, after a couple of passes, revealing the rim of the door. It next turned the handle, having to exert more pressure than any human could possibly have managed. The door cracked off a decaying seal and air began to hiss out through that. The Brockle began to heave the door open, the seal tearing and flapping in the blast of air as the tunnel it occupied evacuated. By the time the door stood open, all the air was gone.
The tunnel beyond stretched straight along the stalk connecting the drive-section to the colonists’ section – a place that might still contain their hibernation capsules. No grav here. The grav-plates behind were a recent installation, for the ship had been built before such technology existed. The Brockle pushed itself through and, using handholds jutting from the walls, propelled itself along the tunnel. It paused beside a name etched into a wall, Freedom, and considered the irony of the new name this ship had acquired. Next, it pondered the idea of separating into its individual units, for in that form it could travel faster and be more effective. But in an odd hat-tip to the history of this place, it decided to retain its human form.
The door at the end of the tunnel led into an airlock. Upon opening this, it discovered the seal to be a more modern Polity version and, once it stepped inside and closed the door behind, the airlock pressurized. Just for a second the Brockle wondered if the watcher might be some living creature that needed air, but under analysis the gas turned out to be a mixture of argon and the kind of preservatives usually sprayed into museum cases. With the lock charged, it opened the inner door and pushed itself through.
The colonists’ section still contained the honeycomb frames to take hibernation capsules, with tubeways running through each collection of six for inspection. But for a scattering of capsules, the frames were empty, so perhaps the occupants had reached their destination. Those capsules still in place – cylinders of early chain-glass with metal end-caps and trailing fluid tubes and skeins of wires – still contained their fluid. It was no longer pale green, but dark brown with the emissions of decay. Passing by one of these, the Brockle spied bones inside. It paused, and decided it was time to scan.
Just a minute of induction detection located a power nexus ahead. The Brockle continued along the tubeway to reach a honeycomb frame that contained just one capsule. In this the fluid hadn’t degraded – was still that healthy pale green – while the body inside looked intact. The Brockle moved to inspect it more closely. The naked corpse of a man floated inside. The Brockle stared at it in puzzlement, not quite sure why this body bothered it so, until it saw the chewed-out wrists.
Antonio Sveeder.
Here lay the corpse of the Brockle’s only innocent victim, dead but preserved by old hibernation technology. The presence of this corpse here made no sense. Why had it been moved here? Why had Earth Central installed it in this container? Then the forensic AI saw that green preserving fluid was not all that surrounded Sveeder. Masses of semi-transparent micro-fibres ran through the fluid, penetrating the body throughout. This was the watcher? How could a dead man be a watcher? Abruptly the Brockle felt a surge of irritation, lost its human hue and absorbed its ersatz clothing, then broke into a hundred units shoaling round the hibernation capsule. One of the penalties of taking on human shape it found was that, when in that form, it tended to think like a human being. Perhaps it was because that was precisely what the Brockle had been. In distributed form, it could think more clearly, and now it needed to act.
Touching the chain-glass with one of its units, the Brockle forced a decoder molecule into its surface. The glass turned white, then the cylinder exploded, a pressure differential propelling fluid and decoded chain-glass out from the body. The Brockle waited a short spell, observing the body just hanging there with great globules of the fluid still clinging amidst the skeins of micro-fibres, then moved two of its units into contact. Injecting fibres of its own into the dead flesh, it began exploring the body, soon understanding what EC had done, but failing to understand why.
Polity AIs had interfaced Antonio Sveeder’s brain with an organo-metal substrate, quite similar to the Brockle’s own, to create a sub-AI system based on the man himself. It was a pointless exercise because now little of the man’s own brain remained. Tracing connections to the substrate, the Brockle found a larger than normal data optic leading across the honeycomb frame to the wall, then spearing towards the nose-cone of the Tyburn. It sent one of its units to follow it. That unit shortly reported that the optic connected into a U-space transmitter, so the Brockle immediately severed the optic. Delving further, it quickly put together the entire function of this watcher. Then with a feeling almost of betrayal, it noted an anomaly with the remaining, and quite badly decayed, organic brain.
The man had possessed a memplant!
Damn, this meant that Antonio Sveeder had only died an organic death and now probably resided in a new body of some kind. Surely this also meant that the Brockle’s sentence for murdering him wasn’t—
The Brockle froze. Some sort of sub-system had activated when it severed that connection to the transmitter. Electrical activity occurred in the body, neuro-chem was flooding some areas of organic brain, and nano-fibres throughout were writhing as they stretched and contracted. Antonio Sveeder’s chest rose and fell, ejecting fluid from his lungs and, after a moment, he opened his eyes.
‘So you have chosen to breach the terms of your confinement,’ he said in a phlegmy voice, but one instantly recognizable by the unit that had interrogated him. ‘Think very hard before you go any further. Do you really want to become an outlaw? Do you really want us to hunt you down?’
Stupidly over-dramatic, the Brockle felt. But because Earth Central had designed this set-up, it stabbed to the core of the forensic AI’s being. The Brockle responded in kind. Its entire shoal being fell in on the corpse, exuding meniscus blades and hard little limbs, and tore it to shreds.