9

 

BLITE

A tension permeated the air throughout the ship, a feeling that the very fabric of the universe had twisted and knotted up all around them. Perhaps this feeling was making him question his impulse to go after Penny Royal, or perhaps that was due to their brief and potentially lethal encounter with the king of the prador. However, most probably it was the knowledge that Penny Royal had taken them back in time—the kind of action that had always been equated with dangerous, universe-destroying lunacy in the fiction he grew up with.

He stood in their new cargo area, eyeing the copious space available. He was aware that being able to fill it with cargo and move it at the speed this ship could manage, he could make a fortune. But he already had one—he was already seriously wealthy from the sale of the memplants Penny Royal had provided. Money wasn’t why he was here, not any more.

Blite turned from the cargo area, went through the bulkhead door leading into the crew quarters and entered the dropshaft around which the cabins had been positioned. He towed himself along this, then went through the next bulkhead door, grav returning and bringing his boots thumping down on the floor of the bridge. Greer was the only one in attendance here—Brond getting some sleep in the large well-appointed cabin he had taken.

“On the prowl again?” she enquired.

He grunted at her and moved on.

After the next bulkhead door was a short corridor terminating in a shimmershield airlock. The shuttle bay beyond was pressurized so Blite didn’t need his helmet. He stretched out a hand to the first shimmershield and pushed it through—the sensation was much like pushing his hand into warm mud. He followed his hand through, the shield softening and yielding quickly, then abruptly blinking out of existence, as did the second shield. Sub-AI computing in the airlock had detected its irrelevance and shut it down.

Blite stepped into the shuttle bay and eyed the new shuttle clamped in place there. The thing was a slightly flattened sphere thirty feet across, with six acceleration chairs inside. Each was on its own revolving base so those inside could take in the view. And it would be a good one since the whole interior of that cabin in the upper hemisphere of the shuttle was lined with screen paint—out in vacuum it could appear to those inside that no ship surrounded them at all. No controls were visible the first time he had stepped inside. However, on asking Leven, he had learned that the shuttle would take a submind of the Golem ship mind and, if that ever failed or was destroyed, a manual control console would automatically rise from the floor. “What if the damage that destroyed the submind also damaged the system for raising that console?” Blite had asked.

“You’d be dead anyway,” Leven had replied.

Blite moved on past the shuttle and into the corridor leading back into the prong of the horseshoe-shape of the ship on this side. He’d taken this route many times before, checked the maintenance hatches leading to the half of the U-space drive that was on this side, then checked through the hatches at the end leading to the fusion array. He liked to visit this place when he felt he had something to say to their resident black AI. Here Penny Royal had made a particular alcove. He halted by this and eyed the antique space suit seated on a stool inside.

This time, unlike on other occasions, he sensed no presence here, just a prickling down his spine when he gazed into the black vacancy of the visor. Nevertheless, he spoke because, really, it didn’t matter where on this ship he spoke. Penny Royal would always hear.

“There’s something I’ve been avoiding asking,” he said. “We went back in time two weeks so you could tell this Gost to pass Sverl the identification of those who escaped Factory Station Room 101, which still strikes me as a little odd—I don’t quite believe that it was an emergency measure because one of the actors in your play went off-script. I reckon you did it because you could. I think you’re exploring your abilities and enjoying your power to manipulate. Whatever . . .” Blite shrugged. “What I want to ask is this: are we now travelling forward those two weeks?”

“No,” Penny Royal replied—voice issuing out of the air all around him.

“I see.” Blite felt relieved at the straight verbal response and wondered if what he was about to say would make him sound like an idiot. But surely everything humans said sounded idiotic to the AI? “When I was a kid I used to play a VR game called Cowl. It was all about time travel and had much in it about infinite energy progressions and energy debts. I understand more now I’m older but by no means have a complete grasp on it all. Because you took us back in time and are not going forward again, aren’t we carrying some portion of universal entropy with us?”

The air before the suit shimmered and a deeper black speck grew in the darkness of the suit, as if from infinite distance, finally halting to form a black diamond hanging just behind the visor. Blite had come to understand that when the AI manifested in this way it was engaging just a little bit more—had become more interested in what he was saying. This also increased the chances of it trying to load data straight to his mind.

“Correct,” said the AI.

“It’s . . . like negative energy . . . part of the heat death of the universe?”

No words now, just a vision of the vastness of space uploaded straight into his head: galaxies and nebulae strewn before him, all their brightness fading into endless dark . . . As Blite returned to the here and now, finding himself down on his knees on the deck, he guessed that he’d been right.

Staying where he was, he hardened his resolve and continued: “And we’re going to be bringing that load back out into the real when we surface in four hours from now.”

“Yes.”

“And that’s . . . dangerous?”

Now he was given a vision of a G-type sun, with peripheral images of the planetary surface of a living world included as a subtext. He watched a wave of something hit the sun and bruise it, watched that mottling spread, and the sun begin to collapse in on itself like the sped-up film of a rotting apple. In the subtext the sky darkened, clouds rolled across it and winter came. He saw jungles collapsing and decaying, then even decay ceasing as they froze. He saw oceans turning to ice, a blizzard covering animal corpses . . .

What the fuck?

Blite tried to shut out the images, and gradually they faded, but he continued his line of enquiry with stubborn persistence, “But that didn’t happen when we went to the Feeding Frenzy . . .”

“I kept the entropic effect balanced by maintaining U-space drive Calabi-Yau frames in juxtaposition with U-space energy draw.”

Whatever. At least the black AI hadn’t tried to load that across to his mind.

Penny Royal continued, and Blite felt the AI was enjoying this.

“Had the king not reacted as I had wished, it would have been necessary for me to take the Calabi-Yau frames out of juxtaposition. The result would have been thirty completely inert King’s Guard ships in darkness—all the energy in the gas cloud snuffed out and the gases no longer radiating,” the AI explained. “I would then have had to find another method of providing Sverl with the information I wanted him to have.”

Okay, I see, you didn’t send the letter I wanted you to send, so here’s a thermo nuke. Blite repressed the urge to giggle insanely. “But still that negative energy needs to be offloaded.”

“Yes, it does, Captain Blite,” said Penny Royal.

A memory now, but one that wasn’t his own: Blite found himself standing in some Polity science museum looking into a holographic star map. His hand operating a half-seen gesture control, he focused the display on a planetary system and a sun lying four light years away, which expanded and were labelled. The system was called Rebus and the sun was called Crispin Six. He then turned away from this, stepping into a childhood memory. He found himself walking towards the arch of a planetary data cache and glancing up at the sign “Read and Learn.”

With the sound of glassy chimes, the diamond receded deep into the suit and winked out, and Blite knew that the audience was over. Penny Royal would talk, in its way, but it was never an extended conversation. Blite suspected that, like many AIs, it grew bored with mere human exchanges and tended to render up just a little less information than the human required, thereby forcing said human to go off to do some research and thinking. With his mouth dry and a feeling of dread clenching his guts, Blite turned and headed back to the bridge. Penny Royal, he decided, trying to think light thoughts, was a bit didactic, a bit of a pedant, and always annoying and frustrating. But he could not dispel the fear that the AI was about to annihilate a solar system.

SVERL

“I must unravel my past back to its beginning, and it’s to the beginning I will go next,” the black AI replied cryptically. “That is, when all is done here and events ordered and set on their course to conclusion.”

Sverl kept replaying Penny Royal’s words in his head—the words Sverl had found in Isobel Satomi’s mind and were a message from the AI to him. Meanwhile, he checked and rechecked other data sources. Displayed on his screens was old recorded footage of a massive Polity construct under attack by the prador. The thing was described by humans as resembling a giant harmonica and it was one of the largest ever made, measuring eighty miles from end to end, thirty miles wide and fifteen deep. The square holes ran along either side, in pairs of lines, being the entrances to enormous final construction bays. This was one of their greatest factory stations; this was the infamous Factory Station Room 101. And it was, Sverl was sure, the beginning that Penny Royal had referred to, because here was where the AI had its genesis.

Checking the reference, Sverl felt wry amusement, for it might well have represented the prador’s greatest fear—all the panoply of the Polity war effort. This war factory had manufactured its weapons of death hourly, spewing them out into space: dreadnoughts, destroyers, attack ships, drones and assassin drones. This station had delayed the prador advance by managing to keep up with the destruction rate of Polity ships, which was then of one medium-sized vessel every eight seconds. And the prador attempt to take out this factory station had been one of their most costly enterprises of the whole war.

Sverl watched the battle footage unfold. Room 101 was spewing out ships at an incredible rate to counter the attack from a prador fleet. The thing was glowing like hot iron as its temperature climbed beyond anything survivable by organic life forms. At first these ships had been meticulously designed for their task, but as the battle progressed they became little more than heavily armed missiles, sans U-space drives, their armour and the amount of materials otherwise used in their construction varying considerably, and utterly dependent on the rate at which materials were being transmitted into the station by cargo runcible. But these were thinking missiles, sacrificing their brief lives to protect the station. Sverl felt himself wincing as he saw prador dreadnoughts smashed utterly out of shape—their armour unpunctured while everything inside died. He watched so many particle beams playing through space that it seemed that wedges of star fire were flashing into being. Multiple detonations kept changing the shapes of formations while debris and molten-metal laced vacuum. Oxygen fires burned. Armoured prador fried in their suits. First-child kamikazes weaved about like hunting fish but detonated in the stabs of a red laser so intense it had to be fed by some runcible portal grazing off the fusion fire of a sun. Then one of those kamikazes got through the defensive net.

The detonation against the factory’s side was immense, its blast wave frying nearby ships and hurling a whole quarter of the battle formations into disarray. Even so, the gigaton CTD had lost most of its energy against hardfield projectors that were routing the feedback energy from the blast out of the station by runcible. As a result, the explosion only excavated a large chunk out of the side of the structure. Meanwhile, the Polity ships that the thing was still producing took advantage of the disarray, pushing into the prador formations and wreaking havoc. They forced the prador to retreat. Sverl remembered the humiliation he had felt at the time, as he pulled out in his damaged destroyer—the ship he’d captained before this dreadnought. He also remembered his last sight of Room 101. Its giant engines flared into life, hauling it away and then, with a massive wrench felt for light years all around, it dropped into U-space.

Factory Station Room 101 survived that encounter—he saw it himself. So how did one square that with the Polity account, perfectly illustrated by a few lines from the human publication “How It Is” by a character called Gordon. Sverl again viewed those lines:

ECS dreadnought Trafalgar was built halfway through the prador/human war at Factory Station Room 101, before that station was destroyed by a prador first-child “Baka”—basically a flying gigaton CTD with a reluctant first-child at the controls, though slaved to its father’s pheromones and unable to do anything but carry out this suicide mission. Records of the Trafalgar AI’s inception were therefore lost . . .

This was just one sample from the massive amounts of data about Room 101. The rest all said the same thing: a first-child kamikaze had destroyed Room 101. Yet no mention was made of that final U-space jump. AIs confirmed the station’s destruction from debris, from numerous AI accounts of the battle and from the fact that it took no part in the war thereafter. Perhaps it had made a faulty U-jump and ended up trapped in that space continuum, or had been destroyed by the transition back into the real. Still, the excising of the fact that it had jumped, from so many accounts, stank. Sverl did not believe the kamikaze had destroyed the station because of that vital clue that Penny Royal had given him via Isobel. He replayed those words to himself again: “ . . . and it is to the beginning I will go next.”

Penny Royal’s beginning had been in the station that manufactured it—that was incontrovertible fact. Penny Royal, therefore, must be going back to Room 101. Sverl just had to find out where it was but—as Arrowsmith would say—it was like banging his head against a brick wall. Polity AIs had worked diligently to conceal that Room 101 still existed, so it was hardly likely he was going to just stumble across its location. Perhaps they didn’t want to admit to the desertion of such a major AI factory station. Perhaps they didn’t know what had happened?

I have to look elsewhere.

Gost was tardy in replying to Sverl’s call, and when that King’s Guard did appear the armoured dome of his suit was closing on something black, lethal-looking and definitely not the shape of a prador. Sverl was momentarily dumbfounded, but understood that Gost must have allowed him this glimpse of his true form.

“Have you come to a decision?” Gost asked.

Sverl hesitated for a moment, then mentally cancelled the image he generally used to front his communications and allowed his true image to be broadcast.

“I have,” he said.

“I see,” said Gost. “We analysed some of your genome obtained from the ocean of the Rock Pool. However, we were baffled as to how it would be changing you physically.”

“Now you know,” said Sverl.

“You must not be seen by any other prador,” Gost stated.

Sverl felt a moment of chagrin. He really shouldn’t have succumbed to the perfectly calculated lure. Seeing him as he really was had only confirmed Gost’s earlier intent to hunt him down and be rid of him.

“I will not be seen by any other prador,” said Sverl, “and with your help I can remove myself as a threat to the Kingdom.”

“And how can I help exactly?”

“I do not have the kind of access you do to prador databases,” Sverl explained. “I need you to search out data on something for me.”

“Continue.”

“I need to find the location of Polity Factory Station Room 101.”

Gost turned an armoured palp eye to view something to one side—possibly another set of screens, or perhaps it was the output from the kind of AI computing generally frowned on by normal prador.

“The one the Polity claims we destroyed,” Gost stated. “I am running searches now, so perhaps you can explain to me why you need this data.”

“It’s complicated,” said Sverl.

“I am capable of dealing with complicated.”

“Very well. For my own purposes I need to find Penny Royal. I am sure that the black AI has gone or is going to Room 101. I am guessing that this station is a long way from the Graveyard, and in going there I will remove myself from play. I am sure that, as it has provided me with the data in its own unique way, my presence there is exactly what the AI intends, along with my extraction from the Graveyard. I believe this because I am certain I am a problem Penny Royal wishes to correct.”

“I note a great deal of supposition there,” said Gost.

“But I note a lack of disagreement in you, despite this,” Sverl countered.

“You’ll get none. As long as you remove yourself from the Graveyard, I, and the king, will be happy.”

Happy? An amusing concept for a prador.

After a long pause Gost said, “It appears that we do not know the location of Room 101.” Sverl felt a surge of disappointment at this news, but Gost continued, “Doubtless there are high-up Polity AIs that are trusted with the knowledge, but I suspect you won’t be talking to them. However, a small number of drones and AI ships escaped that station after its U-space jump. Higher AIs in the Polity must have instructed or compelled them to keep quiet about the manner of that station’s disappearance and its subsequent location.”

“One has to wonder why,” said Sverl.

“After a war such as ours there are things that combatants, especially human and AI combatants, would rather not admit to—secrets that must be kept until softened by time.”

“With the prador too?”

“Certainly—you just glimpsed one of them.”

What had really happened to the King’s Guard, and perhaps the king himself? Sverl shook himself and returned to his main interest. “These drones and ships, where are they?”

“Their number was severely reduced during the remainder of the war, and since then many of them have disappeared. Those still extant are keeping quiet. I have a list of them I can transmit to you, but before I do so there is something more you need to know and something more you must do.”

Quid pro quo time.

“Go ahead.”

“It has recently come to our attention just how Cvorn intends to capture you,” said Gost. “The five children of Vlern raided a Kingdom world for females and then stole a ship as they departed. They did this in an area where none of my kind was in attendance and they functioned with cooperation and efficiency far beyond that expected of young adult prador. Imagery on file shows that they are augmented with biotech augs made for prador and purchased from a Polity corporation called Dracocorp.”

Gost paused to give Sverl time to gather data. He did so: soon he had a fair understanding of the enslaving nature of Dracocorp’s products, and their similarity to prador thrall technology.

“Surprisingly,” said Gost, “they returned to the Graveyard rather than fleeing beyond our grasp. Surprising, that is, until we understood the function of their augmentations. As you probably well know.”

“Cvorn is controlling them,” said Sverl. “What sort of ship did they steal?”

“An ST dreadnought.”

“Shit,” said Sverl, which he suspected was an expletive he could find in the language of any sentient species.

“Indeed,” said Gost. “And it is the kind of shit we would prefer to be removed from the Graveyard: a rogue dreadnought in such a politically unstable area . . . Therefore, should you obtain the location of Room 101, I want you to transmit that location to me. Then I want you to lure Cvorn out there. Wherever it is, it is certainly not in the Polity because it would be too difficult to conceal from the population there. Nor is it in the Kingdom. So it must be beyond the Graveyard.”

Sverl pondered that idea. Certainly Gost would like Cvorn at a location where he could be stamped on without infringing on Kingdom agreements with the Polity, but he also no doubt wanted Sverl himself at such a location too.

“I certainly need to get Cvorn off my back,” said Sverl, “and a squadron of the King’s Guard should achieve that aim. I will send you the coordinates, should I find them, but I need you to promise that you will not interfere in my dealings with both Room 101 and Penny Royal.”

“Of course,” said Gost, “and here is the list you require. Interesting, the workings of serendipity, when you consider one of the drones on that list, and its location . . .”

Much to Sverl’s surprise, a list of names and Polity drone designations did arrive as promised. Gost had to know that Sverl was lying about sending those coordinates, just as Sverl knew that Gost was lying about noninterference in Sverl’s affairs—the intent of the King’s Guard was almost certainly to annihilate both Cvorn and himself.

“Keep me informed,” said Gost, and closed the com channel.

Sverl stared at the screen for a long moment. That had been just too easy and the whole exchange stank of half-truths and manipulation. Gost had certainly been lying about something other than his intent concerning Sverl, but right then Sverl couldn’t plumb it. After a moment, he decided to let it go and turned his full attention to the list, ripping through it at top AI speed. Next he saw the name and drone designation Gost had been referring to, experienced a moment of bafflement, then a growing awe.

Serendipity, I name you Penny Royal, Sverl thought.

That it was so predictable how he would react made Sverl feel very small and insignificant. He was just a game piece the black AI was shifting around a board. The sheer chutzpah and godlike manipulation of events was awesome. Or was it something more than that? Had Penny Royal managed to breach time itself? Was the black AI operating like one of those artificial intelligences said to have transcended the restrictions of realspace and embedded itself for eternity in U-space?

Sverl reached out mentally and seized control of his U-space engines, inputting coordinates and dropping his dreadnought into that continuum. It struck him as likely that Gost would get the coordinates he wanted anyway. If the coming encounter with Cvorn was as dangerous as Sverl supposed, his ship’s systems would probably receive extensive damage. This would negate his ability to conceal his U-space jump coordinates. It also occurred to him that the black AI, whether breaching time or otherwise, possessed a grotesque sense of humour. It had to be that drone that knew the coordinates of Room 101; it had to be Riss.

TRENT

There were five normal people in the shell people’s cage, awaiting their fate (that is, if you counted the catadapt woman as normal), and they had now gathered round. Trent pondered on the meaning of normal. Was he normal, as a heavy-worlder of the Sobel line? His ancestors had chopped about their DNA in such a way that it was further from that of old Earth humans than theirs was from a chimpanzee. He decided that normal in this situation simply had to mean “not one of the shell people.”

“So how do you know all this?” he asked the man, now identified as Rider Cole, while he thought about what he had just been told. Taiken had turned himself into a father-captain and, with the pheromones he now produced, had enslaved all the rest of the shell people.

“I learned about the shell people while in pre-upload studies,” said Cole, who was black haired, sharp faced and fevered. “I’m a doctor.”

“A doctor,” Trent repeated, studying the dubious frown on the face of one of the others listening in.

At one time the title was quite specific, but now it could mean a thousand things. Trent wished he still had his aug because he could have connected to the gold D-link behind this man’s ear and got his full profile and list of qualifications—and whether he had earned them the hard way from studies in slow time or from instantaneous uploads.

“I came here to help them,” said Cole.

Someone snorted in the small gathering.

“To help them turn into prador without turning into stinking wrecks?” asked Trent.

“No, to dissuade them from their course,” said Cole. His expression then changed, looked hungry, and he added, “And persuade them to give me the permission to treat them.”

“Our Rider here hasn’t had much luck persuading them,” interjected the catadapt woman. “Maybe they prefer their kind of madness.”

Trent absorbed that, then focused his attention on Cole again. “What kind of doctor are you?”

Cole shrugged and spread his hands. “A general title might be ’mind-tech.”

Trent studied the D-link aug on the side of the man’s head and now noticed the additions. The second port below the optic plug wasn’t for data but probably for neuro-chemicals which he could feed into a mental network. A series of pinholes in a circle behind that was for plug-in upload and download chips.

“And not working in the Polity,” said Trent.

“There’s little call there for what I do.”

In the Polity, nanoscopic surgical intervention and mental editing could deal with most psychological problems. If you had something organically wrong with your brain then a surgeon would correct that at birth. If it occurred later, a standard autodoc could usually deal with it—an AI surgeon dealing with the more serious stuff. If you had issues you couldn’t deal with, then you’d either edit them out of existence or delete their emotional content. And, of course, if you preferred to retain your malady as some sort of distinguishing feature, you could always do something weird, like try to turn yourself into a prador.

Rider Cole, Trent reckoned, was one of those mind-techs whose work bordered on obsession and illegality. However, he had retained some distorted morality. He was trying to persuade the shell people to accept his treatment, rather than forcing them to accept it. “Well,” Trent said, a sour taste in his mouth at this reminder of mental editing, “if you want to help them now then I suggest you hand over that neat little shear you cut my bonds with.”

When had Penny Royal edited him? In the falling wreck of the Moray Firth, or some time before? When had the AI given him a conscience and the utterly crippling ability to feel the pain of others? Or, and now a stray thought occurred, had it not been Penny Royal but that fucking forensic AI the Brockle? No, he didn’t know why, but he felt sure the black AI had done this.

“I don’t agree with violence,” said Cole, looking fevered again.

Trent nodded to himself. The additions to Cole’s aug gave the game away. The man was obsessive about his work and had obviously been experimenting on himself. He probably wasn’t rational.

“You don’t?” Trent stared at him. The urge to lash out rose up inside him but, rather than feel joy at finding an excuse to thump someone, he felt sickened by the prospect. He realized that during the fight in Taiken’s sanctum he had reacted from experience and training, but his emotional response was totally at odds with that impulse now.

“You’ve just told me what’s happening here,” he said, trying to be reasonable. “You’ve just told me how Taiken is taking the next logical steps to becoming more like the prador by pheromonally enslaving the other shell people. So what do you think is going to happen to those of us who refused his offer?”

Cole now looked slightly sick. He knew, all right.

Trent continued, “Taiken could have forced the issue with all of us but he didn’t. Now why do you think that is? What do prador do with human prisoners?”

“Uh,” said Cole.

“Believe me,” Trent continued relentlessly, “those aren’t just here for display purposes.” He pointed to the big glass bottle on its stand outside the cage. “You are of course familiar with the process called ‘coring and thralling’?” Such harmless words until you knew that it was a human being who was cored—brain and part of the spinal column removed—and then thralled—enslaved—by the insertion of a prador thrall unit. But normal human beings could not survive this process, only those toughened from infection by the Spatterjay virus, which was transmitted by the leeches of that world . . .

“So in the bottle, those are Spatterjay leeches . . .” said the catadapt, and now the others turned to gaze fearfully at the glass container.

“On the button,” said Trent. Then, to Cole: “Now hand it over.”

“You have to understand that the shell people are sick,” said Cole. “What is happening to them is a mass psychosis similar to—”

“Yeah, you’ve already told me that.” Trent gazed at the others here, hoping one of them would do something, but already some were moving away to plonk themselves down on the other side of the cage. Didn’t they understand the need to act now?

He gazed down at his hands. They were suddenly sweaty and he felt sick again, knowing, despite his abhorrence of violence, that he had to act.

“This is going to hurt me more than it will hurt you,” he said, looking at Cole.

“Yes, violence is always the answer from your type of—”

Trent lashed out and watched the man keel over as he rubbed his knuckles. He was sure he had judged it right—the rap on Cole’s temple just enough to knock him out—but that didn’t make him feel any better. If he’d judged it wrong, he could have caused a haematoma; he could have killed the man. Tasting bile, he leaned forwards and reached into Cole’s pocket to take out the shear. One of those still standing nearby clapped and Trent glanced up.

“Nice one,” said the catadapt woman. “We’ve been listening to his insanity ever since he got put in here with us. I was going to have to strangle him the next time he suggested a little mental tweak for us all so we could more readily accept our situation.”

Trent shrugged. He’d knocked Cole out because the man seemed unstable enough to be the type to shout for help as Trent made his escape. But what next? Taiken controlled all the shell people, so the next logical act should be to move in on him fast and kill him. Trent would have relished such a prospect in a previous time, but now didn’t even know if he was capable of the act. Perhaps that was one element of redemption—that it shouldn’t be easy. Here he faced a situation in which he could help a great many people by doing what he had been doing all his life—using physical force to get what he wanted. Yet, now, it was the most difficult task he had ever faced.

“Are we getting out of there, then?” asked the catadapt woman. She waved a hand at those who had sat down again. “These don’t have the balls.”

Trent gazed at her, himself really wanting to go and sit down with the rest. After a further moment, he looked properly at her. She was magnificent: yellow cat’s eyes and elfin ears, a face that was beautiful in a way that somehow seemed beyond standard cosmetic alteration, long gold-blonde hair and a body that was both athletic and lush, clad in a tightly clinging enviro-suit. She was just Trent’s type. In reality she was the type for any heterosexual man. Yet he gazed at her almost with detachment, recognizing that he should be attracted, but seeing in his mind only Taiken’s wife as she cast him that last hopeless glance.

“Yes, we’re going,” he said.

SPEAR

So this is how it ends, I thought.

Reviewing Flute’s assessment of our status and Riss’s prediction of our brief future, I couldn’t see any elbowroom. Our four hardfield projectors were scrap, Flute had fired off all the railgun missiles he had manufactured, the reactor was going into safe shutdown and we were now on stored power—only enough to maintain the ship, control the fires and for the robots to make critical repairs. If we used that power for particle-beam shots or manoeuvring there would be nothing left. I considered these minimal options: by moving the ship we might delay our final destruction by a few minutes, and by firing the particle beam we might be able to intercept and destroy a few incoming projectiles, but we certainly wouldn’t damage that thing in the moon. And it was readying itself to annihilate us.

“We have to get out of here,” said Riss.

I turned to look at the drone.

“That is an option too,” I said.

Riss could eject herself and survive in vacuum for an unlimited period, while Flute could also use the mind ejection system to get out. I could suit up and eject myself from the ship too, but what then? If I survived whatever that ST dreadnought threw at the ship and the consequent blast debris, Cvorn could easily use his weapons to pick us off. And he would almost certainly see us ejecting from the ship. Even worse than that, he might send something out to collect us, whereupon I would become prador entertainment, and probably lunch too. Even if I managed to avoid all that, I would only last as long as my suit air supply, which I doubted would extend enough to keep me alive until some rescuer, summoned by Riss, arrived.

“You go,” I said. “I’m staying.”

So what of all your plans now, Penny Royal? I thought.

“Flute,” said Riss, “I need control of MR12.”

“Why do you need a maintenance robot?” Flute asked leadenly.

“I cannot get him into a space suit alone.”

“Now hold on a minute—”

Riss’s flat head slapped down on the console beside me. Her snakelike body flicked up and looped over to drive her ovipositor into my torso. The thing hurt quite badly, and I wondered if prador felt such pain when the drone injected its parasite eggs into them. Next, numbness spread from deep inside my chest. I reached over and managed to undo my safety strap, tried to speak with a mouth that felt full of novocaine, stood up and took one step, then slowly toppled. Riss had long ago ejected the last of her parasite eggs, but that ovipositor still worked and the drone had obviously acquired other things to inject. I hit the floor on my side and just lay there.

“You have control of the robot,” said Flute.

“Good,” said Riss, peering down at me. “You can, of course, eject yourself from this ship too, second-child mind, but be assured that I will find you out there.”

“I will not be ejecting myself from this ship,” said Flute. “My father forced me to spring Cvorn’s trap, taking us within range of his hideout on that moon, and I cannot process the conflicted loyalties.”

That will not alleviate the guilt you feel, Flute, I thought.

“I will die with this ship,” Flute added.

The door into the bridge abruptly thumped off its seals, its locking mechanism whining and grating, doubtless due to the damage Riss had caused. It swung open and thick smoke gusted in, shot through with a spindrift of fire-retardant foam. A second later, I saw a maintenance robot enter—a thing like a yard-long water scorpion fashioned of blue metal, with additional limbs sprouting from its head. I saw it was carrying a space suit, just as it moved out of my line of sight. I felt the heat then, and immediately had difficulty breathing.

“The paralytic will wear off in ten minutes,” said Riss, “which should be time enough to get you out into vacuum. I will attempt to keep us both concealed with my chameleonware and I have informed the nearest Polity assets of our situation. One of the rescue ships in transit from the Rock Pool can get here in a month. During that time your suit will put you into low-air hibernation.”

Right, great.

Riss might well be able to conceal us both, but I could already see the big gaping holes in the rest of her reasoning. Cvorn no doubt had some first-child or computerized system watching this ship very closely and would spot any use of an airlock. Perhaps, if I survived the coming attack on the Lance, and subsequent attempts to nail or capture us in vacuum, hibernation might enable me to last a month, but then, no rescue ship would come for us while that dreadnought sat in its moon.

Grav went off, which made it easier for the robot to hoist me up and begin, like a spider cocooning its prey, to feed me into the suit. In just a few minutes, it had suitably wrapped me. Meanwhile I had glimpsed the heavily armed moon in the screen fabric, the ST dreadnought’s weapons coming into view. When the helmet went on and the suit’s air supply kicked in, I started breathing more easily. The suit also protected me from the growing heat, flames now flickering through the smoke. Next I was being propelled to the door, and down along a wrecked and soot-blackened corridor.

“Cvorn is doubtless watching,” said Riss over my suit radio.

No shit, Sherlock.

“We must therefore offer a distraction,” Riss added.

I lost track of where we were in the ship because all I could see was scorched floor and the front end of the robot dragging me along.

“Emergency eject,” said Riss. “You have control of it?”

“I have control,” Flute replied. “Disengaging docking clamps.”

I only realized where we were when the robot pushed me upright and Riss wrapped herself around me. I was facing the space doors to our shuttle bay. I had time only to comprehend this before the release charges detonated all around the doors and they tumbled out into vacuum on the hurricane of escaping air, with Riss, me and the robot thrown out just after them. Riss and I parted company with the robot and tumbled on, then began to stabilize relative to the Lance as Riss applied the internal grav effect that was her main means of locomotion. I was frozen. It felt as if my heart had stopped, though whether from terror or Riss’s injection I couldn’t say. The drone kindly positioned me so I got a good view back towards my ship and now I saw the shuttle launching.

The distraction . . .

It suddenly seemed that we could have a chance of surviving this. Cvorn might just assume that our only means of escape was via that shuttle and look no further. On top of the impetus provided by the escaping air, Riss’s internal drive kept drawing us further away. I watched the shuttle ignite its fusion engine just beyond the ship, but it hardly had time to build up any acceleration, because the moon had now turned fully.

A particle beam, deep blue in vacuum and perhaps a yard in width, struck the shuttle dead centre, bored straight through it and blew molten debris out the other side. Two further detonations ensued, which were probably the chemical propellant tanks for the steering thrusters or the energy-dense power supplies. The shuttle bucked twice, coming apart as it did so, and fell on away from the ship in three pieces. The particle beam fired again and again, nailing those pieces, slagging and tearing them apart. Within a minute there was nothing left larger than a human head.

“Goodbye,” said Flute over my suit radio.

“Bye,” I managed in return, now the paralysis was starting to wear off.

The beam then stabbed out again, hitting the Lance this time, over that section of the ship where the bridge was located. Armour plating ablated, dissipating like the dust from a grinding wheel, then the beam punched inside. It seemed to pause there for a moment, the Lance caught on it like a bug on a needle, then fire and debris exploded from the shuttle bay. Shortly after that two airlock doors exploded away, the airlocks spewing fire behind them. Much inside that ship had to be fried, including Flute, but Cvorn wasn’t finished yet. A railgun missile hit near the engines, carving a chunk out of the rear of the ship and hurling out a cloud of debris. I watched a lump of glowing jagged armour the size and shape of a speedboat hurtle past us just twenty feet away. A second missile hit near the nose, but the angle of impact was such that it glanced off the armour, exploding into a spray of plasma, and didn’t penetrate. Meanwhile the particle beam began to traverse towards the nose.

But then it all stopped. The beam abruptly winked out and no further missiles arrived.

“What the hell?” said Riss.

The drone turned me in vacuum.

“Stop that,” I said, reaching across to use my wrist impeller. “I at least want to witness this.”

“No, look,” said Riss.

I allowed her to turn me, and now saw the bloom of numerous explosions, and a blue glare shifting from side to side, like the aurora borealis, but in space. I didn’t understand for a moment, then I got it. I was seeing all the stuff Cvorn had just fired at the Lance hitting a wall of shielding hardfields. Next, on the moon, which was barely a dot to normal vision, I saw another, far more massive, explosion. I ramped up magnification through my visor, bringing the moon as close to me as possible, the image breaking into pixels, and saw a great chunk of its crust rising up on a cushion of fire. Further impacts followed while, closer to us, particle beams played over that scaling of protective hardfields.

“Someone’s talking,” said Riss.

“Let me hear it.”

“I cannot locate you,” said a voice. “Flute informs me that you are out in vacuum.”

The Polity rescuer? It seemed very unlikely.

Something shimmered over to one side of us and I saw a black line whip out. A giant grapple slammed into the Lance and closed, tearing up the hull as it did so, and began to draw the ship in. I tracked back along that line to its source as the shimmering dissipated to reveal a massive old-style prador dreadnought, from which I could see armoured prador hurtling out into space.

“Fucking prador,” Riss hissed. “Sverl’s here.”

“Drop your chameleonware,” I instructed. “We’re out of choices.”

Riss emitted a hissing growl, but must have obeyed me because the nearest of those armoured shapes swerved abruptly on a powerful chemical rocket and hurtled towards us. It decelerated on that same rocket as it drew close, abruptly silhouetted by a distant explosion. As the creature closed a claw about the both of us, I realized that Sverl’s defences were now failing, for something had got through to detonate against the hull of his dreadnought. Even as our rescuer, or captor, opened up its rocket again and sent us speeding towards a cavernous hold, I saw the emissions of internal explosions. From wartime experience, I knew that these were from hardfield projectors overloading as the shielding took a battering.

We entered that hold, crashing down on a grated floor just as a particle beam got through. Other prador landed as heavily around us, while out in the glare of that beam I saw still others blacken and just evaporate. The beam played into the hold just for a moment, carving a molten trench through the grating, then punching in a plasma explosion through the back wall. But then massive armoured doors slammed shut with a crash that bounced us all from the floor, and cut it off. I watched those doors begin to glow cherry red, as the beam did some damage, then U-space took us.

CVORN

As anchors detached from the surrounding rock and the fusion drive ignited inside the moon, turning rock molten behind and punching out through the crust there, Cvorn champed his mandibles and danced around in irritation on his new legs. The trap had been a complete failure. The plan had been for Cvorn’s old destroyer to lure Sverl to the planet. He was supposed to have dived down into its atmosphere and then the ocean in an effort to destroy it. At this point, Cvorn, in his ST dreadnought, could have easily disabled him. Next, after he had steadily and meticulously annihilated all Sverl’s defences, Cvorn had initially considered either a ground or undersea assault. That would have depended on where Sverl went down.

But, after fully investigating the weapons available to him, he had changed his plan. All he would have had to do was move in close and, using lasers, explosives and particle beams, peel that ship down to the core, revealing Sverl’s sanctum. He could have hauled that in, just like Sverl had hauled in that wrecked Polity destroyer out there.

Damn those humans and their ship, Cvorn thought. But he knew that the failure of the trap had been down to his own eagerness to attack the Polity vessel. He should have simply ignored it and continued waiting for Sverl.

However, Sverl had rescued Cvorn from complete failure simply by not behaving like a prador. And now, as various programs confirmed the data he was seeing, growing excitement supplanted Cvorn’s irritation.

Sverl hadn’t gone to the planet. Probably because of what he was turning into, he had taken the time to attempt to rescue the passengers on that Polity destroyer. Not only that, he’d spent time harpooning the ship and drawing it into his own. Perhaps there had been some survivors aboard who Sverl felt were worth saving. Cvorn had no idea—he didn’t think like a human.

Whatever. Cvorn had directed the firepower of his ST dreadnought against Sverl’s main hardfields and left the partially wrecked destroyer alone. He’d quickly realized he could keep Sverl here longer by not completely destroying that other vessel, and it had worked. He’d had time to burn out enough of Sverl’s hardfield projectors to leave gaps in his defences. Through those gaps he’d then set about destroying anything on Sverl’s ship that looked as if it might scramble or shield U-jump signatures. And that had worked too, for Cvorn now knew Sverl’s next destination.

“Bring my destroyer up,” Cvorn instructed the second-child now appearing on one of his screens. Though the trap had failed, one benefit was that the old destroyer he had left down on the planet as bait had been left unscathed. He had fully expected Sverl to gut it before the trap could be sprung. “When you are clear of the world, bring it to these coordinates.”

No time to lose. If Sverl jumped again shortly after arriving at his next destination, Cvorn wanted to be there soon after, since a U-signature tended to dissipate and the rate at which it did so depended on eddies and tides in that continuum—occurrences that could only be described with exotic mathematics. Admittedly, this ST dreadnought had more power to punch through U-space than Sverl’s craft, although in essence it was contracting time to do so rather than going speedily across a distance, as distances didn’t exist as such in U-space. However, Sverl’s child mind, if that’s what he used, seemed able to calculate and make jumps rather more quickly than normal.

The ST dreadnought was now clear, so Cvorn sent instructions using his aug. The same coordinates went to the first-child mind controlling the twinned U-engines. Smooth as a blood slick, the ship dropped into U-space and was on its way. Cvorn settled down. He could do little more now. The ship was already prepared to chew up Sverl’s when it got into range, and most of Cvorn’s children were ready on the spot to take control of any essential systems from which battle damage might cut him off. But first, many days of travel lay ahead.

Cvorn stared at his screens for a while, took a wander round his sanctum, restless and angry, not knowing what to do with himself now. He was on his second circuit of the sanctum when he abruptly halted. Perhaps now was the time to try something he had been considering ever since boarding this new ship . . .

Cvorn rushed back to his screens and brought up views of the five young adults squatting in the small first-child sanctums to which he had confined them. After a moment, making sure he had identified him correctly, he turned off the feed showing Sfolk and studied the four remaining screens. Though he knew the names of these four, and could identify them via Dracocorp aug connection, he still could not distinguish between them visually. Their markings were quite similar, but it wasn’t just that. Perhaps the lack of visual input from his missing palp eyes was the problem. He selected one screen at random and turned off the rest, establishing aug ident just from the location of this young adult in the ship.

“You,” he said to it, “come at once to my sanctum.” He was met with a hint of rebellion because no adult prador went willingly to the sanctum of another adult, at least, not without a great deal of firepower. Cvorn pushed in the small Dracocorp network he had established and felt the creature succumbing to his will. With leaden steps, the young male headed to the door from its sanctum.

Continuing to track the male via aug, Cvorn turned away from the screens and headed over to the body of the dead father-captain still occupying this sanctum. The control units had now been removed and attached to Cvorn, and he’d found it quite simple to link all his units into an array thence controlled via his aug. It meant he no longer needed to access a particular unit to control a particular blank, war drone or piece of robotic equipment.

Under his instruction, his blanks had split the body of the father-captain around its circumference and hinged over the upper carapace. Cvorn brushed aside a couple of ship lice and then tore out a chunk of the musculature around one old leg socket and fed it into his mandibles. As he munched this he sent his instructions and watched his blanks detaching various items, including a carapace saw, from the surgical telefactor hemisphere. He knew that what he intended had been done before, but still found himself wincing at the prospect. He also knew that it had not been done very often, because, having lost certain urges, old adult prador generally didn’t feel inclined to reclaim them. He swallowed, then peered more closely at the interior of the old father-captain. The meat was tasteless, aseptic. Sure, decay had set in a little, but that usually added to the flavour.

There . . .

Cvorn soon ascertained that much of the flesh he had been chewing down was artificial carbon lattice, electro-muscle and collagen foam. This father-captain had been badly injured in the past and had lost a large amount of his interior body mass. This was puzzling because Cvorn did not recollect the exterior carapace being heavily scarred. Suddenly he realized what this might indicate and switched his gaze to the interior of the upper shell. There he saw the tracery of worm burrows—a neat pattern like a picture of a tree etched into that inner shell. Cvorn staggered back, immediately regurgitating the chunk of flesh he had just eaten and wishing he could bring up the father-captain’s major ganglion, which he had dined on some hours ago.

“Vrom, get in here!” he yelled.

The first-child, who waited in the annex to the captain’s sanctum, always ready to respond to Cvorn’s command, came quickly through a fast-opening side door, a Gatling cannon clutched in one claw already whirling up to speed.

“Father?” Vrom enquired, now lowering his weapon as he saw no immediate danger.

“Get this out of here,” said Cvorn. “Drag it into your annex right now!”

“Yes, Father,” said Vrom, never inclined to question an order.

As the first-child began laboriously heaving the huge corpse to the annex door, Cvorn wondered if he should move out of here for a while and have the place completely sterilized. No, he was being foolish. The parasite infection this father-captain had suffered and survived probably happened during the war. In fact, knowing just how paranoid those who had been infected tended to be—he had after all known Sverl before he paid his visit to Penny Royal and began to change—the chances of there being parasite eggs or nymphs here were lower than for just about anywhere else.

“And when you’re done,” Cvorn added, “I want you back in here when I let our friend in. I’m not sure if my control of him via his aug will be enough. You know what to do.”

Cvorn now turned to the two blanks who were waiting for his orders. He had a program lined up for them to follow. He wondered for a moment whether he was being foolish in what he was about to do. He already knew he was as susceptible to prador pheromones as any child, but in this case he had been enjoying their effect. Perhaps he was behaving irrationally and should have them filtered from the ship’s air supply? No, he would keep them. And he would go through with this.

Setting the blanks’ program running, he turned his back on them, settled down and raised his rear end. They closed in, carapace saw and drill injectors whirring. As one of the injectors went in, what had used to be one of his most sensitive areas went numb. He tried not to think about what the blanks were doing, even though he had reviewed every detail of the procedure. Tapping a little tune with his mandibles, he eyed Vrom as the first-child finally got the corpse into the annex.

“Close the door and be ready,” he instructed, not sure why he didn’t want Vrom here for at least this part of the operation.

A saw went in—the smell of powdered carapace filling the air. He felt various tugs and wished he could close out the squelching sounds that followed. Something thudded to the floor and one of the blanks picked this up and carried it away while the other continued to prepare the socket. Unable to resist, Cvorn now did a status check. He saw through the eyes of the blank behind as it installed nano-nerve interfaces in the large dripping hole in his back end. He saw through the eyes of the other blank as it carried away a chunk of shell with a fleshy mass behind, trailing veins and thread nerves. The face of this shell had indentations where the two injector prongs and coitus clamp had once resided. Cvorn’s worn-out and useless sexual organs were destined for disposal.

The work continued for some while, the second blank returning with cold preserved cartridges of Cvorn’s seed. These it emptied into an artificial testicle and it installed this where his old shrivelled item had been. Meanwhile the young male he’d summoned arrived outside the sanctum door and just settled there—terrified to be at such a location but unable to flee.

“Vrom, come in now,” Cvorn instructed.

The socket was ready and the blanks moving back to stand against the wall. Vrom entered, atomic shear generators fitted to the bases of his claws, the glimmer of their output visible along the internal edges of those claws. Cvorn knew that with these devices Vrom could remove the limbs from any prador in just a few minutes. When the young adult was in here, and thus immobilized, the procedure could continue. Of course, Vrom would have to use the surgical telefactor for the more meticulous work involved, as he removed the young male’s fresh and vigorous sexual organs.

SPEAR

I’d watched the Lance take heavy damage while we were floating in vacuum, and wondered if Flute might have survived. Before he rescued us, Sverl had told us that Flute had informed him we were out in vacuum. Had Sverl received that information before that particle-beam strike, or after?

As Sverl’s armoured prador surrounded us, Riss unwound herself from me.

“I have to go covert,” she said, her snakelike form shimmering.

“Is there any need?” I enquired as Riss’s chameleonware engaged and she disappeared completely. “Though I don’t like how it happened, we’re where we need to be.”

“You are not going covert aboard my ship, parasite,” said another voice over my suit radio. I was surprised—Sverl had penetrated our com very quickly.

Six hardfields flickered into existence to form a rough cube a couple of yards across. Where they intersected along the edges and at the corners they glowed and emitted sparks. I’d seen similar capture boxes used, but only to confine large prey like prador. They couldn’t escape between the inevitable gaps between the hardfield discs. I’d never seen hardfields actually intersecting and touching like this, because such proximity tended to create feedback loops that blew out their projectors. During the war, curving hardfields had been considered impossible. But I had learned of the spherical hardfield Penny Royal used to protect Carapace City. So the technology had unlocked potential yet.

Riss reappeared, hovering and writhing inside the translucent box. Ignoring me, the armoured prador in the hold gathered around her for a moment before abruptly scuttling off to one side. They returned, dragging something they’d retrieved from a floor-to-ceiling rack. It was a box big enough to contain a prador: its sides were sheets of chain-glass and its edges made of heavy ceramal. Once out of the rack, it rose up on either a grav-motor or some form of maglev. They pushed it out over beside the hardfield trap, then opened one side of the thing. Now, hissing and throwing out sparks—noticing which, I checked my visor display and realized the hold was filling rapidly with air—the trap collapsed until just a yard across, with Riss coiled tightly inside. It then shifted over and in through the open side of the glassy box. One of the prador closed up the side, and the hardfield trap flickered, then shattered. Chunks hurtled out in every direction, evaporating harmlessly into nothingness as they went.

“Bring them both to me,” Sverl instructed over ship comms.

The cube rose up and began heading for the rear of the hold where a large door was rattling open—making such a racket probably because the section of wall it revolved up into was near where the particle beam had punched through, buckling it. It jammed for a second but the armoured prador leading the way gave it a solid whack with one claw to set it in motion again. I felt oddly reassured by the sight of a prador treating temperamental technology in so familiar a manner.

“I guess it’s payback time,” said Riss via my aug.

“Payback?”

“Sverl was one of my early victims, but managed to survive the experience.”

A prador behind gave me a violent shove that sent me sprawling. I stood up and looked back at what, by its size, might have been a second-child—hard to tell with that armour. What was definitely a first-child, just behind it, brought an armoured claw down hard on the first creature’s back, the clang so loud I was sure something must have broken. The second-child merely went down on its belly, then scrambled up and out of range. The first-child clattered something at it, then turned to me and waved a claw towards the door.

“Keep moving, human,” it said.

I was sure I had just seen a second-child berated for its treatment of me, which struck me as decidedly odd for prador. But this was Sverl’s ship and I knew that the father-captain had changed in strange ways. Had I just seen an example of his altered morality passed on down through his children? I followed Riss’s prison out of the hold.

“Yes, you mentioned that before,” I said to Riss.

“Oh, yeah.”

“Will he recognize you?”

“He recognizes what I am, which is probably more than enough.”

I was about to say something about prador morality and the changes this Sverl was supposed to be undergoing, but found I didn’t have the energy to pursue it. Prador were vicious bastards but, as I had noted before, that description could fit plenty of humans and AIs too. And any of the three could be justified in being a bit miffed after having had done to them what Riss had done to Sverl.

Now I surveyed the distinctly aseptic corridor, the Polity cleanbots scuttling here and there and all this in an illumination unexpectedly lacking in the sepulchral quality I knew, from memories not my own, usually to be found inside such ships. Memory surged for a moment, but I ignored it and it waned.

“Flute, did you survive?” I asked via my aug, but the response was only a fizzing.

Finally, we were led into a sanctum that bore a closer resemblance to a botanist’s laboratory than the control centre of a murderous father-captain. Riss’s box settled in a clear space at the centre, while the two first-children entered and stood guard inside the door, which closed behind them. Sverl rose up on prosthetic limbs from the usual array of screens. I noted the tail, which looked like an amphibian attached to his rear, then gazed upon the massive skull his body had become.

“Two human visitors in such a short time,” he said mildly. “Gost must never know of this—it would definitely rouse suspicion even in him.” He moved over to Riss’s box and peered inside with large, human-looking eyes. “And you.”

“Hello Sverl,” said Riss, now scraping her ovipositor down the glass separating them, her voice issuing from some speaker set in the ceramal frame holding that sheet. “My, didn’t Penny Royal fuck you up?”

“That is debatable,” Sverl replied. “And by now you must be aware that the chain-glass between us is not responding to the usual decoding molecule and EM frequency you’ll be deploying. It is a laminate of chain-glass and transparent sapphire so you would first need to cut through the inner layer of sapphire to get to the first sheet, disintegrate that, then cut through the next layer of sapphire. You would have to do this twenty-four times. Now look up.”

The drone lowered her ovipositor to rest it tip-down on the floor of the box so she appeared balanced on it, then did so. I looked up as well and amidst all the equipment, all the folded-away robots, power cables and optics, I saw a large cone sitting directly over Riss, base down, with mesh across the base.

“What you are seeing,” said Sverl, “is an EM pulse cannon of my own design. It has enough power to fry every circuit inside you, though I am currently setting it merely to take out everything but your crystal. So, no more attempts to get through that glass, and would you kindly desist in trying to penetrate my computer systems? I very much doubt you have the mental watts for that, but if you do make the slightest inroad, you’re toast.”

I thought this particular father-captain had a very odd turn of phrase. He sounded like a war drone laying out the situation. Perhaps this was the result when you combined something as martial as a prador with AI crystal and human DNA. Sverl now turned towards me and walked over. I really wanted to run away, but had nowhere to go.

“So you are Thorvald Spear,” he said.

“I certainly am,” I replied. “Pleased to meet you, Father-Captain Sverl. Tell me, who was this other human you had here? Is he still around?” I had been searching the vicinity for the odd discarded bone but it was as clean in here as the corridors outside, if a little more cluttered. “I would like to meet this person if he or she is still around. I’m sure we’ve got—”

“Understandably you are nervous,” Sverl interrupted, “which is why you are babbling. I am not going to kill you and I am not going to eat you. In fact, right now my robots and some of my children are repairing your ship for your eventual departure. Meanwhile we have a shared interest, which is Penny Royal. We both want something from that AI and you may, if you wish, accompany me in my pursuit of it.”

“You know where Penny Royal is?” I asked.

“I do not,” said Sverl, turning now and pointing a claw at Riss, “but that horrible worm in there does.”

“I do fucking not!” Riss exclaimed hotly.

“You do,” said Sverl. “I have learned from Isobel Satomi that Penny Royal is returning to its beginning.”

Riss froze. She had no reply to that. Into the ensuing silence, and feeling as if I’d just been gut-punched, I interjected: “Isobel Satomi?”

Sverl waved a dismissive claw. “The visitor I had was Trent Sobel, who is now with the shell people. He carries the mind of Isobel Satomi in a jewellery item. I accessed her mind and learned that Penny Royal had left a clue there as to its next destination.”

“Shell people?” I asked, still distrusting Sverl and wondering if they were in some onboard larder.

With a clattering of metal limbs against the deck, Sverl turned towards me once more. “They are aboard in their own section of the ship, currently extending their doomed experiment in becoming prador, by now trying to form themselves into a family unit. Now, as Penny Royal instructed, Trent Sobel has his chance to redeem himself.”

I felt a little bit better about that, but not much. “In their own section” did not sound like larder, but the fact that Trent was here meant there was one human aboard who might have a reason to try to kill me. It was almost too much to incorporate and I just stood there with my mouth open as I tried to put it all together.

Sverl turned back to Riss and stepped closer so he was almost touching the glass.

“I know the last known location of Factory Station Room 101,” said Riss, subdued, “but I cannot pass on that information. It is under AI lock.”

Room 101?

Just then, the door grumbled open and I turned to see the two first-children parting to allow in a second-child sans armour. It looked distorted, this creature, its carapace sagged as if it had been partially melted, and its legs bowed under its weight. Did it look nervous? How could I possibly read its expression? Nevertheless, there was something about it of someone carrying an unexploded bomb as it entered the sanctum, bearing the spine of Penny Royal from my ship.

“Of course it is under AI lock,” said Sverl. “How else was the secret kept? Isn’t it fortunate therefore that the means of unlocking that information has been provided? Or, perhaps, aren’t we seeing all the pieces of an ever-developing puzzle, created by a black AI, slotting inevitably into place?”

“You keep that fucking thing away from me,” said Riss, who until this moment had shown no particular fear of the spine.

Suddenly her ovipositor was screeing at the glass, fragments falling inside. Next, her assault on the chain-glass turned an inner layer opaque, before it peeled away, falling to dust. I felt a thump of an EM wave passing through my body. It sent me staggering and my aug went offline. When I had recovered my balance and looked at Riss, she had dropped to the bottom of her prison and now lay still.

“I did warn you,” said Sverl.