17

 

SPEAR

The massive space doors of the bay drew open, stretching between them the meniscus of a shimmershield—another example of the kind of technology not usually found aboard a prador ship. I gazed out through this thin veil into the heart of U-space and felt it was reaching in through my eyeballs in an attempt to liquidize my brain. I found myself down on my knees, with my eyes squeezed tightly shut. My fingers were digging into my eyelids as if some part of me had actually decided that the only option was to reach in and tear out my own eyes.

“Told you so,” said Riss.

Chunks of memory surfaced and coagulated into a whole. Others, victims of Penny Royal, had glimpsed this continuum unshielded. They had all survived it and their memories of it had been hazy, which was why I’d thought I could gaze upon it without ill effect. I understood then that the vagueness of their memories was due to the human brain being an inadequate recorder of what lay out there. It simply could not encompass something it had not evolved to cope with.

Yet, even as I understood this, I did begin to cope, sorting data in my mind, my aug and in the Penny Royal extension to my mind that lay inside my ship. I can only compare the experience to reading some text from a universe that was scattered with unknown words, but still, at least, managing to put them into context.

I staggered to my feet, turned and headed towards the open airlock of the destroyer, Riss sliding along drily beside me, and entered. I’d managed the whole of this without opening my eyes. And when I opened them, as the airlock sealed behind me and I stepped inside, everything possessed a shadow that stretched into that unknowable dimension.

“I don’t know why you did that,” said Riss.

I gazed at the snake drone and now it was transparent to me. I could see the shadowy extensions of its U-space communicator and other U-space hardware stretching out from some of its internal components. I could feel one of those extensions reaching out to me, and I could sense the tug of others reaching out to the spine.

“You don’t?” I asked. “Then perhaps you’re as empty as you say.”

Riss closed her black eye and moved on ahead of me, a little huffily, I thought.

On the bridge, Sepia, Trent Sobel and Rider Cole waited—not yet strapped into the three waiting acceleration chairs. These were crammed into a space between the bridge’s renewed horseshoe console and one screen wall. Sepia was still a distraction and I tried to ignore her, then worried about offending her. Glancing into the rear annex, I saw Sverl squatting with Bsorol and Bsectil on either side, propped horizontally against their father in a space too small for all three. The grav of the hold where the Lance rested was dragging them down. A moment later I felt my weight alter slightly then stabilize and the two first-children propelled themselves upwards to now hover above Sverl, who had obviously turned off the grav out there.

“I have also tried this viewing of U-space,” said Sverl. “My prador and human parts always react badly, but my AI component just accepts it as part of a reality that isn’t the linear one of organic evolution.”

“Me too,” said Sepia, “and I had a headache for three weeks, which only mental editing dispelled.”

“There can often be damage,” said Cole, eyeing her intently.

She shook her head in annoyance either at him, or at my stupidity, then stepped over to one of the chairs. She had to unstrap her laser carbine from her back before sitting, and placed it across her lap. Cole sat in the chair beside her, unrolled a computer scroll and began doing some complicated touch-work on it.

Trent just stood staring at the grey swirls in the screen fabric and said, “How long?”

“Minutes only,” I replied. Next, auging into ship’s systems, I changed the imagery to give a facsimile of the realspace our course was taking us through . . . if you made your calculations in a linear organically evolved manner. Stars sped past us, and in the screen fabric ahead, one grew steadily brighter. I could show no more than what was already in my ship’s astrogation files. Had that star ahead gone supernova, this facsimile wouldn’t show it. Nor would it show the position of Room 101, because that was something that Polity AIs had excised from all Polity files. I threw up some frames giving a countdown and realspace distance, then I occupied the acceleration chair positioned inside the horseshoe console. Trent eyed me for a moment then stepped over to the remaining chair beside Sepia and likewise made himself secure.

The sun ahead expanded and shaded to salmon pink and I now began to get some sense of this hypergiant’s immensity. I contracted distances to bring the orbital red dwarf into view, a gas giant out beside it on its millennium-long figure-of-eight course. I saw the whole of the asteroid belt of CO₂ and nitrogen ice, and put a frame over the small black hole now passing through it—leaving a swirl of shattered asteroids behind. The green-belt worlds were there too, quadrate patterns in their surfaces marking out the decaying foundations of an ancient and now long-dead civilization. Everything matched up to Riss’s memory, except Room 101, which the astrogation program had of course failed to include. We fell fast into this, past the red dwarf and the asteroid belt. The sun expanded to fill one screen wall, the truncation of distance perpetually adjusting. But of course none of this was real and, had I been able to gaze upon it all without computer assistance, my eyes would have burned out in a microsecond in a glare millions of times brighter than Sol.

Next, I felt the twisting around me, as reality cast U-space shadows into madness. With a crump I was sure I imagined, we surfaced into the real as if through some icy crust, and everything all around readjusted. Factory Station Room 101 was too small to be visible to human eyes at this distance. And, as I called it into being in a frame, I sank more into the aug perception of our surroundings through the ship’s sensors. Why, I wondered, was there always the need to translate things for limited human senses?

There lay Room 101: a giant Polity factory station utterly dwarfed by its immense surroundings. It was completely familiar to me. Its harmonica shape was that of so many other wartime factory stations, and Riss’s memories of it were still sharp in my mind. Still, seeing this eighty-mile-long object stirred my awe. As I continued to study it, I began to notice disparities between memory and fact. The station no longer possessed the clean lines it once had; it was lumpy, as if cancerous. Large areas of utter blackness looked like holes in its structure, but analysis revealed these were high-absorption solar leaves scaled across its skin. There were growths and incrustations on its hull and it truly looked like a wreck. Not the usual kind one would find out in vacuum, but the wreck of a ship under a sea. It seemed that the fauna and flora of surrounding waters had occupied Room 101, and it was sinking softly into decay.

“I’m taking my ship in closer,” said Sverl. “No need to hurry just yet.”

I felt the kick of the fusion drive, despite the active grav-plates on my bridge. The perspective slowly changed, but I kept a sharp eye on the data that was being steadily collected by the dreadnought’s sensors elsewhere in this system. And there, within just an hour of our arrival, another U-space signature. I immediately opened up a frame on it and expanded the thing into view, relaxing slightly when I saw a mere prador destroyer.

“Cvorn’s,” Sverl informed me.

It was almost half a system away, poised just out from the red dwarf, but I immediately surmised that Cvorn had sent it after one of the U-signatures. It was probably talking to him even now. Fretting about this as I watched the ship, it took me a moment to realize that something was going on there, because I could see distortion beyond the ship silhouetted by the red dwarf.

“Expand your frame,” Sverl told me.

I issued the mental instruction, now including the whole dwarf star, but could see nothing. I expanded it again then to see a cluster of bright objects in low orbit around the sun. Sensor data was vague for they had hidden themselves well close to the photosphere, but they became clearer as they accelerated out. I put a second frame over them and magnified, just in time to see lines scribing out from them, white against the red. A few seconds later Cvorn’s destroyer was blowing out hardfield projector debris and just a second after that, four intensely powerful particle beams hit it all at once. They just carved across it, splitting it like a peach, subsequent explosions blowing the two halves apart.

“I’m breaking my ship now,” Sverl replied. “Launch at once.”

With a thought, I brushed away docking clamps, but rested my hands on hand-imprinted ball controls in the console to set us moving. Light pressure on the left fired up the fusion engine, rumbling throughout the ship, and set it heading towards the shimmershield. About this, the space doors glared in the pink sunlight, with filtering set close to maximum. I could sense the hold behind burning in the fusion torch. The shimmershield then winked out and, in a blast of escaping air, and a cloud of debris left from my ship’s reconstruction, we fell out into the hot glare of the hypergiant. Even as we went, I applied to Sverl on another level and got data on those ships, and a closer view. They were King’s Guard ships.

Next, I took in the sight of Sverl’s dreadnought etched about its surface with lines of fire, jetting long flames and beginning to slide apart.

“Look to your defences,” said Sverl.

I was already as deep into the system as Flute had been. I therefore managed to throw up a hardfield behind us, at the very moment some titanic explosion went off on the other side of the dreadnought. Checking the weapons cache, I saw that Sverl had resupplied it. In addition, I began making selections. As the giant ship continued to come apart, I saw one of those segments targeted by multiple particle beams beginning to radiate and explosions like volcanic eruptions were appearing all over its surface. I ramped up acceleration to take us away, firing off two chaff shells behind, and then I saw that fleet of massive ships bearing down on us. They’d U-jumped from close to the sun, very accurately indeed.

“Let me into your system,” said Sverl. “We U-jump or we die.”

CVORN

Cvorn gazed up on his screens at the images the security drone was sending from his ship’s interior and just wished he could roll back time. He wished that, rather than sending Vrom off to hunt down Sfolk, he had instead summoned his first-child here. Vrom had obviously outlived his usefulness as a first-child but should have been recycled as a child-mind in a war drone shell. He had failed his mission to take down Sfolk and now it was too late. The screen image showed a steaming pile of severed limbs and claws and a main body divided into neat segments.

Panning round, the security drone took in the rest of the scene. Two of the second-children were still alive, though one of them, with its legs missing on one side and its visual turret smashed, was hardly worth salvaging, even though it could regrow its limbs, and the visual turret could be repaired. In the past, Cvorn would have considered this option, with his previously limited ability to produce replacements, but not now. Now, in the birthing tank aboard this ship, his own nymphs were steadily devouring the corpse of a reaverfish—his own fourth-children. Within a few years, he would have plenty of replacements.

The other surviving second-child did look easily salvageable. It was attempting to drag itself off the spike on which Sfolk had impaled it—the same spike Vrom had occupied earlier while Sfolk sliced him up with a carapace saw. This child had missed meeting the same fate when the rapid return of the security drone had curtailed Sfolk’s entertainment. Before the cam images Sfolk had been sending had cut off, Cvorn had watched it all.

“This is what I’m going to do to you,” Sfolk had said as he sliced off Vrom’s limbs, “though there will be refinements.” Vrom’s screaming and bubbling had gone on and on as Sfolk explained those refinements. The medical technology to extend Cvorn’s life, the dissolving of his prongs and coitus clamp in hydrofluoric acid and the cauterizing irons. There was also the final flourish of installing Cvorn’s major ganglion in a brain case, where it would endlessly re-experience the whole aug-recorded episode.

Sfolk, Cvorn decided, was obviously resourceful and smart. But he wasn’t quite smart enough to understand that he had just detailed what would happen to him if Cvorn captured him alive. However, that was unlikely, since Cvorn now intended to make no real attempt at such a capture—the order was kill on sight.

The second-child finally, with much scrabbling, made it to the top of the spike and fell off, landing on its back on the floor with a thud. It struggled there for a while, then finally righted itself by bashing its claws down and flipping over. It stood there shivering, foam dripping from its mandibles. The spike had penetrated between its arrays of manipulatory limbs, through its alimentary tract, inside the ring of its major ganglion and out through the top of its shell. Sfolk had known what he was doing—ensuring he wouldn’t cut any arteries or hit anything critical. The child would steadily recover—that recovery speeded up by Cvorn’s decision.

“You, child,” he said, “what’s your name?”

“Vlox, Father,” it replied.

As he used his aug to order another five security drones initiated, and gave them their orders, he said, “You will now come to Vrom’s quarters, where you will utilize his food supply. You are now my first-child.”

The title always came first. Within a very short time this child would begin to change, feeding on a first-child diet free of the chemical suppressants that had kept it as it was. However, it would still consume suppressants that would prevent it from attaining adulthood. It would rapidly build up a dense bulk of stored fat and would shed its shell. The underlying new shell would remain soft for a few months as it rapidly converted that fat into muscle and other body tissues and grew in size. During this process, its injuries would heal quickly.

“But Sfolk, Father?” the new first-child enquired.

“Any sabotage he tries, I will detect at once,” said Cvorn, more confidently than he felt. “If he tries to reach a shuttle or other craft to escape when we next surface into the real, I will detect that too.” In reality, Cvorn doubted Sfolk would try that. Inside the ship, he was safer than he would be on the outside, where Cvorn could fry him with major weapons.

Cvorn paused for a moment, checked the ship’s manifest and found another four security drones in storage. He released them and gave them the same orders as the others. That was all of them and surely enough to keep Sfolk on the run and out of the way during their next imminent transition from U-space—and whatever might ensue.

Cvorn now took a moment to check on the progress of his offspring. He called up an image of the annex pod to the breeding pond and saw that just a few fourth-children clung to the bony remains of the reaverfish. Others were propelling themselves about in the tank and, even as he watched, two of them attacked another child that hadn’t developed properly—the paddle legs on one side of its teardrop-shaped body seemed deformed. They tore into it with sickle hooks, which would be supplanted by growing claws when they finally left the pool. As it struggled to escape, they ripped soft carapace off its back end, whereupon innards spilled out in a long Gordian tangle behind. This they fed upon while their victim struggled to escape. All was as it should be there.

Cvorn next briefly watched the erstwhile second-child head towards Vrom’s quarters. At the door, it reached out and used the pit control. Only a little while before, this would have sliced off its claw. Instead, the door opened and Vlox entered. But there was no time now to take in anything more.

They had arrived.

The ST dreadnought surfaced into the real, sensors picking up the glimmer of photons forced from the quantum foam all around. Cvorn ranged out with his sensors, seeing the ambush world and noting that his departure from the hollow moon had put it in a decaying orbit that would bring it crashing down a hundred years hence. He quickly ascertained that no ships were in view and felt a sinking sensation in his sensitive gut as he wondered if Sverl had managed to make full repairs to his chameleonware. His belated discovery of a vessel lying half a million miles away, with U-space disturbances still new in its vicinity, dispelled this sensation.

With a thought, he turned the ST dreadnought towards this and engaged its fusion engines, as the distant ship’s apparently recent arrival puzzled him. The reason became evident when further sensor data began to come in, and Cvorn swore eloquently in prador. By expanding its U-space field enough to encompass a prador dreadnought, the old style Polity attack ship had created a mass/field energy debt which had a delaying effect. That was why it hadn’t been here long. And it wasn’t Sverl’s ship out there, but one of the decoys.

The attack ship began accelerating away and Cvorn tried to decide if it was worth pursuing. Perhaps it would be better to just charge up his U-space engines and jump to the coordinates of one of the other signatures. He then noted that the attack ship was trying to open communications with him and, taking the necessary precautions, he allowed this.

“Oops,” said the mind in that ship, “wrong ship.”

“Who are you?” Cvorn asked.

“My name is a human one: ‘Flute.’ Which is also the name for a musical instrument humans use. It’s funny, but I can’t actually remember what my old name was—I reckon I left it in my old ganglion.”

“What?”

“It’s refrozen now so I suppose if I was to charge it up and sift corrupted memories, I would be able to find my old name again. But what use is it to me now?”

The mind was babbling with the obvious purpose of delaying Cvorn’s departure after one of the other signatures. Cvorn shouldn’t waste his time on it.

“It’s rather nice to be able to think as clearly as I do now,” Flute added. “And at least I haven’t ended up with a senile old brain like yours.”

Then again . . .

Cvorn opened fire with a particle beam. It stabbed across the intervening distance where inevitably a hardfield intercepted it. However, such a small ship would struggle to engage its U-space drive while thus defending itself. The attack ship turned, setting itself on a course to take it towards the world. Cvorn fired off a swarm of sub-AI missiles—their course set to take them between the attack ship and that world. The mind’s tactics were obvious: it could go in low and slingshot into the atmosphere. Meanwhile Cvorn, with a larger and less manoeuvrable ship, would have to take a longer course. At some point, the world would get between them and, leaving atmosphere, the attack ship would then be able to drop into U-space before Cvorn could recommence his attack.

“So where has Sverl gone?” Cvorn asked.

“Now, if I told you that, we wouldn’t be able to play any more.”

The attack ship changed course, now heading for the hollow moon. Cvorn sent a signal to divert his missiles in that direction and considered launching some more. But how much time and resources was he prepared to expend on capturing a mind that Sverl probably hadn’t informed of his destination anyway?

“I can give you a clue if you like?” said Flute.

“Please do,” said Cvorn.

“He’s gone to the most likely of the least likely destinations,” said the mind. “Then again, I might be lying.”

“What is Sverl’s purpose?” asked Cvorn, annoyed by this exchange but knowing that such ship minds were often naive and could sometimes betray themselves.

“To survive and grow, as is the purpose of us all,” said Flute. “Hey, shouldn’t you be railgunning that moon by now? The debris cloud should make things difficult for me.”

Cvorn brought his railguns on line to target the moon and was about to do just that—

—when someone began talking to him down another communications channel he had kept open through U-space.

“Well, here I am, Dad,” said the second-child aboard his old destroyer. “There’s some seriously weird . . . shit! What the fuck is—”

The channel closed with a brief surge of energy and the kind of squawk emitted by a fried U-space communicator.

“Good try,” said Cvorn to the mind in the attack ship.

“Whassup?” said Flute.

Cvorn calmly recalled his missiles and shut down his particle beam. He sent new coordinates to his own ship mind for now he knew precisely where he was going. To where something had just annihilated his old destroyer.

BLITE

Seen through the atmosphere of this green-belt world, the hypergiant sun had a violet hue. It appeared no bigger than Sol did from the surface of Earth because the distance from the sun was much greater. However, because of the intense output of the hypergiant, Blite had his visor filtering heavily. A single cloud mass, resembling some organic grey battleship, rested on the horizon over to one side of this orb, while across its face flew creatures resembling birds at a distance, but more akin to pterodactyls when close. He turned from this scene and took in the one behind.

The Black Rose possessed its own avian qualities: it was black and this light had picked out the scaling of its hull so it resembled some giant raven expiring on the ground. It rested on a bed of vegetation that looked like a mat of gnarled tree roots. Perhaps they were roots extruded from the wall of alien red jungle, lying just a mile away. However, Blite stood on a soft mass of shredded organic matter which extended in a line from his ship to the exposed remains of some built structure. Here lay foundations—adjoining sets of triangular walls just waist high. They were made of a blue and slightly translucent ceramic that was incredibly hard. These were the remains of Jain buildings, so Penny Royal had said, and the AI stood in black thistle form within it. Its own silver roots had spread all around as if it was feeding on the ruins. Blite headed over.

“I don’t need to tell you that they’ve arrived,” he said.

A twenty-foot-wide projection of outer space shimmered into being beside Penny Royal. The view was similar to the one Blite had obtained from the probes he’d scattered around this system upon their arrival. The captain now watched the current replay. The King’s Guard, fresh from destroying Cvorn’s old destroyer, U-jumped close to Sverl’s ship and attacked it while Spear’s Polity destroyer departed. He saw Sverl’s ship breaking into segments, which kept the King’s Guard ships occupied while the destroyer managed to gain some distance. There was a brief conflagration as the Guard belatedly focused their attack on that small ship too late, because it U-jumped across the system to within just a few thousand miles of Room 101.

“I thought you didn’t want the King’s Guard here,” he said. “I thought that was the whole purpose of those risky jaunts through time.”

“Incorrect,” said Penny Royal. “I did not want the king here.”

“Why?” asked Greer, who had just joined them.

Blite glanced at her, wondering what had compelled her to come out after him.

Penny Royal didn’t reply, so she continued, “Yes, you say he would have died here. I know that, but I fail to see why.”

Penny Royal emitted something that sounded suspiciously like a sigh of boredom, whereupon Greer staggered, clutching at her head. Blite watched her, wincing slightly because he knew what was happening, and waited. Eventually she lowered her hands and turned to him. Her face was pale and he had no doubt she felt sick. Woodenly she said, “The King’s Guard will carry out their orders, hit their target and leave. If the king was here he would have done more and ended up dead.”

Blite had to wonder just what memories Penny Royal had resurrected in her mind to impart that information.

“So what do we do now?” he asked.

A glimpse then through the eyes of his younger self, as he peered into an archaeological dig on one of the first Diaspora worlds.

“Stop being opaque!” he snapped, not wanting Greer’s recent experience.

The AI’s spines rattled and shifted and it lifted some small object up at the end of one of its tentacles for examination. Blite meanwhile turned away from the dig site in his past and found himself playing chess against Brond in his head, shortly after recruiting the man. Brond’s king was on the run and quite soon Blite would have him. Overlaid on that was his present knowledge that he had been thoroughly mistaken, and that Brond had lured him into a trap. Then the whole scene shattered.

“Clear as mud, as usual,” said Blite, glancing at Greer, who shook her head in annoyance.

“Explain to a child the reason, and it will still ask why,” said the AI.

Fuck you, Penny Royal, thought Blite, and peered closely at the object the AI was holding. It looked like a small egg, quadrate patterns visible all over its surface. The egg grew as bright as a welding arc and disappeared with a crack, leaving a wisp of black smoke.

And fuck you again, thought Blite, turning away and stomping back towards his ship, Greer quickly falling in beside him.

“Curiosity,” said Penny Royal.

Blite halted and turned around, Greer too.

“I wish you wouldn’t keep on dragging me into this,” said Leven from Blite’s suit.

“I’m not.”

“I’m not talking to you.”

“Oh.”

“Here goes, then,” Leven translated. “The King’s Guard have been ordered to remove the threat Sverl poses to the king’s rule. And they are intelligent enough to know the entire substance of that threat: that Sverl is an amalgam of prador, human and AI,” said Leven.

“Wait!” said Blite. “You hearing this, Greer?”

“I’m hearing it, Captain,” she replied.

“Now may I continue?” asked Leven tightly.

“Yeah, go ahead.”

“In the past Factory Station Room 101 was able to fend off an entire prador war fleet—but is no longer capable of the same now. The erstwhile Polity station is much weaker and prador weaponry has changed. Those Guard ships are fully capable now, though with some effort, of getting enough CTDs past station defences to vaporize it completely.”

“What about this ‘curiosity’?”

“The King’s Guard will adhere to their orders and make efforts to destroy Sverl, to remove him as a threat to the king’s rule. Most likely they will do this by simply destroying the station. If the king had been here, rather than order the destruction of Room 101, he would have ordered an assault upon it. This is because he is curious, because he wants to know what Penny Royal is doing and why. Such an assault would have resulted in the king’s death.”

“So basically Penny Royal has answered Greer’s question but not mine,” said Blite.

“I haven’t finished yet,” said Leven, obviously irritated.

“Sorry.”

“Okay, the events here will, apparently, lead to some sort of resolution for two . . . problems . . . well, the nearest I can get to it is ‘actors in a play.’ Simplistically, Penny Royal is clearing up its own messes,” said Leven, “and incidentally solving some other problems along the way.”

“One of those is Sverl? Sverl is one of those actors?”

After a long pause Leven replied, “Yes.”

“And the other? Is that Spear?”

The reply issued from Penny Royal like a ghost muttering in the wind. “Spear is not a problem, but a solution.”

“And what about the answer to my question—what do we do now?” asked Blite.

“We wait here, apparently,” Leven replied.

Blite did not bother asking anything more. He knew, on some unconscious level, that his audience with the black AI was over. Suppressing irritation, he walked away.

RISS

“Identify yourself,” was the essence of the demand, but it sounded like one made by hundreds of individuals. As Spear’s response wasn’t immediate and sensor data showed numerous weapons turrets and other armaments focusing on the Lance, Riss considered taking over. However, that would entail a mental tussle with Spear that might delay things fatally. A moment later Spear sent the Polity identification codes recorded in the ship’s system—it had just taken him a few seconds to find them, that was all.

“Resupply or refit?” was the essence of the ensuing question. As with the demand, it wasn’t phrased in human words.

Spear chose “resupply.” Then whatever he was talking to, at a level somewhere between code and language, replied. “Proceed to these coordinates,” it said, and sent a data package.

Keyed into the sensors, Riss now watched the King’s Guard ships materialize some tens of thousands of miles behind them. The station’s first response took the form of coolant ejections and shade-side shots of coolant lasers. Then the massive structure warmed up by a few degrees in just a few seconds as even bigger weapons arrays powered up. Even so, Riss could see evidence that things definitely weren’t as they should have been. The station was a mess: riotous growths of nano-, micro- and macro-tech gone insane. Some weapons arrays warmed up, then immediately powered down again, others were tardy, and quite a few looked heavily damaged. Also, unlike during the last prador attack on this station, no ships were launching—none at all.

The King’s Guard ships looked decidedly more lethal. In response, they began closing into a tight formation, simultaneously firing swarms of railgun missiles and probing with particle beams. Spear released two more chaff shells and abruptly altered course, raising protective hardfields again a moment later. Beams intersected on their previous position, then began probing out randomly through the chaff. One of them just grazed one of the Lance’s hardfields and the ship shuddered. Riss detected a hardfield projector taken just to the edge of overload. Spear launched two more missiles and changed course again. The two fission bombs they contained exploded—their EM output enough to defeat even sophisticated scanners for a little while. Then probing beams were splashing behind them like flame-throwers hitting a glass wall. They were now inside some set perimeter and coming under the station’s protection. It had also opened fire.

The firing wasn’t neat or coordinated, but the sheer volume of weapons fire was enough to have the Guard ships scaling hardfields together in front of them. High-intensity green lasers hit first, turning hardfields iridescent. And ship-killing particle beams splashed on them next. Some hardfields went out, to be instantly replaced, the ships behind explosively ejecting the molten ruin of field projectors.

If Riss had possessed breath to hold, she would have let it out now.

“I’m guessing these are here for Sverl,” Riss said to Spear via his aug.

“I guess,” Spear replied. “And now they want to talk.”

Spear turned from her to gaze up at the screen fabric, where a frame opened to display a huge prador clad in black armour striped with iridescent blue. The creature was occupying a severely cramped sanctum, machines jammed into the spaces all around it.

“You are Thorvald Spear,” said the prador.

“And you are?”

“Fleet Admiral KG1 is all you need to know.”

“That’s not very friendly.”

“I am prador,” said the admiral.

“So what can I do for you, Fleet Admiral KG1?”

Exterior sensors now showed the Lance flying into the open mouth of a massive final construction bay. Factory Station Room 101 loomed hugely around them, so they seemed like a small weaver fish swimming into a cave in an undersea cliff. And that analogy was a close one, because strange corals and other growths occupied this cliff. This was also a surface with seemingly volcanic vents opening across it, as the station ejected its own overheated projectors and some missiles got through.

Inside this construction bay, Riss spied giant robotic arms and resupply towers. The drone shivered down all its snaky length—reminded of past times. However, those arms were still and most of the movement here was elsewhere. What looked like massive worm casts covered large areas of the bay interior. An abundance of constructor tentacles writhed from these and elsewhere—ribbed and braided snakes sometimes miles long. These terminated in spiderish tubeworm splays of individual tentacles. Studying an image of one of these heads more closely, Riss saw that the single appendages terminated in coffin-sized objects like polished pistachio nuts. She recognized ‘structor pods—so named because they were made both to construct and “destruct”—and there were thousands upon thousands of them.

“The Prador Kingdom has no quarrel with either the Polity or with you, Thorvald Spear,” said the admiral. “However, the grotesquely changed prador, Sverl, is a threat to our security and I have been ordered to negate that threat.”

“Right now that might be a little problematic for you,” Spear observed.

“I agree. Room 101 is a formidable space station. However, it is no longer runcible-linked for resupply, is no longer manufacturing weapons and is entirely reliant on its static defences. There is also evidence that its main AI no longer controls it and, though there is a possibility I will take losses, I know I can destroy it. I therefore suggest that you turn around and bring Sverl back to me.”

“I’m not really seeing any upsides for me just yet,” Spear observed.

“There’s something decidedly odd about these King’s Guards,” he shot at Riss. “Even in translation I’ve never heard of prador being so reasonable . . . well, until Sverl . . .”

“A curious definition of reasonable,” said Riss, but she was more interested in studying the signal the Lance was receiving. Room 101 wasn’t even blocking it, so she recorded the channel and coding. It might come in handy.

“The upside is that if you hand Sverl over you get to live,” said the admiral. “Hiding away in that station is a sure way to die.”

The ship shuddered; something was getting through into the construction bay and causing an explosion that tore free a crane almost a mile high from its mountings. Seemingly in concert with this, the signal mutated to carry an aug frequency. Riss observed Spear sorting it and listened in to what the prador on the screen wanted to pass on in secret.

“I am not yet using all my armaments. You have one of your solstan days. You either hand Sverl over, or you give me evidence that Sverl has met with an accident. Your choices and your time are limited, Thorvald Spear.”

That was smart, thought Riss, and agreed somewhat with Spear’s earlier observation. The usual prador archetype would be hitting them with everything available, not talking. This Guard had tried that initially, but now they were inside station defences, it knew it could not take them out without losses so was negotiating.

“You should have put Sverl in a hold,” Riss said to Spear. “You could have ejected him out into vacuum the moment they appeared.”

“And thus the King’s Guard would have no quarrel with me?”

“Yeah, thusly, motherfucker.”

“I see, so Penny Royal managed to empty you of your purpose for existence but neglected to remove the hatred that was one of its drivers?”

“Our best course would be to hand Sverl over, or at least put some distance between us and him when they fry him.”

“Sverl is an ally, Riss,” said Spear.

“Let me kill him,” said the drone.

“You already know my answer to that,” Spear replied.

Stupid human, Riss thought, and began to pay some serious attention to the restraining collar with which Sverl had burdened her.

They were deep into the construction hold now and the ship shuddered in the grip of numerous hardfields. The frame showing the prador admiral blanked out, but didn’t disappear as would be usual. Riss did some checking and found that though the prador had cut the com, something else, from within the station, had inserted itself in that channel.

As the destroyer reached the wall of the hold, clangs reverberated throughout as clamps locked into place. Riss rose up off the floor, hovering, and gazed back towards the rear annex. Sverl had surprisingly little to say now. Perhaps he was considering his options. Meanwhile, Riss was considering one of her own . . .

With the ship safely docked, Spear unstrapped himself, stood and stepped out of the horseshoe console. “Sverl?” he enquired, looking back into the rear annex.

After a long pause Sverl replied, “I trust that Penny Royal has a purpose beyond the destruction of me and this station. I trust that Penny Royal has not lured me here just to . . . solve me.”

“That seems to be a high degree of trust,” said Spear. “That might have been exactly Penny Royal’s intention.”

The ship shuddered again—something else hitting it out there as if to remind them of their danger.

“I am remaining here on this station. You may leave.”

“And I must trust that those ships out there won’t destroy me and my ship out of hand?” said Spear, his tone completely lacking in nuance. He turned to look at the others on the bridge. “I welcome your input.”

“I think we’ve got a problem,” said Sepia, flicking a glance towards the rear annex. “A heavily armed one.”

“Trent?”

“Why is Sverl a threat to the Kingdom?”

“Because he is part human and AI and his transformation can be used as an example of Polity perfidy to foment rebellion.”

“I wonder if the King’s Guard would want to leave any witnesses to that, then.”

There it was, Riss felt. Nothing personal, Sverl, but our best chances of surviving are if we remain here and you don’t survive. The Guard out there know that, too.

“I will make it simple for you. You can go or you can stay,” said Sverl. “I will not leave you any other . . . options.”

Had Sverl somehow heard the aug message Spear had received, Riss wondered.

“Sverl, I don’t quite—” Spear began, just a second before explosive decompression picked him up and dragged him towards the rear annex, and the glare of the hypergiant entered like a thermite blast.

Riss reacted at once, hurling herself towards the arch between annex and bridge and driving her ovipositor deep into the wall. As Spear came within reach, she coiled tightly around him and held him in place. The other humans were still strapped in, so were safe for the moment. But the internal temperature was already rising and some objects were beginning to spill smoke. Still holding tightly to Spear, Riss saw that the entry hatch made for Sverl and his two first-children was gone. She didn’t need to analyse the burns around it to know they had blown it. Sverl was outside the ship, a meniscus extruded by his prosthetics protecting his soft bulky body from vacuum, and darkening to block the intense light. Gripping him on each side, his two first-children had ignited thrusters mounted in their armour to take him away. Checking further through the ship’s systems, Riss saw that, yes, the hold space doors were open and the second-children were spilling out and firing up the thrusters in their armour to take them after their father-captain. And the weapons cache was open too—releasing Sverl’s remaining war drones.

Riss desperately wanted to go after Sverl and end this now, but if she let go of Spear the man would die. The air blast waned—they were now in complete vacuum. Just minutes remained now before it killed Spear.

“Riss,” said Spear via his aug, “you can let me go now.”

Riss focused on him fully, and now saw the segmented hood of a space suit up over his skull and his visor closed and polarized. How had she forgotten that the man was wearing a space suit? She knew why. She wasn’t thinking straight, hadn’t been thinking straight for the best part of a century.

Riss uncoiled from the man and flung herself to the lip of the blown hatch to see Sverl and his children heading away. Stay or go? Riss hesitated for just a second, then used her internal grav to fling herself from the ship and in towards the wall of the construction bay. A particle beam scored past, and a Gatling cannon flashed from the prador group. That fucker Bsorol. As the drone propelled herself to cover, she glimpsed the prador heading into the mouth of a tunnel in the construction bay wall. Riss waited until the last of them went out of sight, rose up, then had to duck the swipe of a complex tool grab. The construction robot was small compared to other things out here, but still much larger than Riss. It tried to grab her again, but Riss squirmed away through the air. She grav-planed to the hold wall, engaged the remora function in her skin and squirmed down that. A crash shook the surface underneath her and Riss looked up to see the construction robot tumbling through vacuum, another robot wrapped around it and apparently trying to tear it apart. Beyond it the head of a massive constructor tentacle was open like a giant organic star and multi-limbed construction robots were propelling themselves from open ‘structor pods. Other pods were issuing shearfield blades and ripper arms.

The fuck?

Elsewhere other robots were grappling with each other too. Apparently, their arrival here had started some sort of conflict. There seemed to be no coherence and no cooperation out here at all. Riss moved on, focused on her target, then paused, something else grabbing her attention.

Uh?

She could see the Penny Royal Golem, John Grey, crouching by the nose of the Lance. He had to be under Sverl’s control, but what was he waiting there for? However, even as she watched, Grey suddenly moved out and headed off, streaking across the wall of the construction bay and disappearing into a small hatch.

Sverl. Must concentrate on Sverl.

As she entered the mouth of the tunnel, the prador were no longer in sight. But the flashing of weapons indicated their position around a curve far ahead. However, Riss knew that she must rid herself of this collar if she was to get to her prey. She gave chase, coming up behind other pursuers—more construction robots like the one earlier. Each resembled a number of segments chopped out of a steel centipede, with their water-scorpion limbs to the fore. Creeping up on the last one, she saw her opportunity. These things weren’t weapons, but they certainly carried a lot of hardware, including diamond saws and atomic shears . . .