5

 

CAPTAIN BLITE

Captain Blite gazed at the figures, relayed directly from his Galaxy Bank account to the new laminate on The Rose’s chain-glass screen, and wondered why he felt so empty. He glanced at the latest offer for the Penny-Royal-tweaked hardfield generator he had aboard. Silly money. He was rich now, all his crew were rich and they had all at last achieved what they had been aiming for. All those years of trading, of risky deals, of working close to the edge of legality and of often being in life-threatening situations, were at an end. They could now retire to luxurious inner Polity worlds. Blite himself could relax on that white sand beach on New Aruba, sipping cocktails while someone else took the risks in The Rose and the other ship he had planned to buy.

Perhaps that was it; perhaps it was because it was all over.

Brondohohan would be buying that mobile submarine house he had always been hankering for. Chont and Haber, who had been packing up their belongings only a short while ago, would at last have the children they had been planning, down to every genetic detail, over the many years. Greer would head for Spatterjay and fulfil her strange wish to have one of the leeches there bite her, and to buy a ship to sail that world’s oceans. Martina could return to her home world wealthy enough to give her rich family the finger. While Ikbal could, well, do whatever it was he wanted to do.

“They’ve gone.”

Blite turned to see Brond enter the bridge and plump himself down in one of the acceleration chairs.

“Chont and Haber?”

“And Ikbal and Martina.”

“Really?”

“Really,” Brond nodded. “Our loving couple are heading to Earth while Ikbal and Martina are on the way to her Gallus Yard. Seems they want to go into business with each other.”

“And they didn’t bother to say goodbye.”

“They did—you just weren’t paying attention.”

Blite nodded. Sure, Chont and Haber had said their goodbyes but, knowing Blite, they had hardly been protracted. The other two, however? Was saying “we’re leaving” the same as goodbye?

“So when are you heading off?” Blite asked then, looking up as Greer entered.

“The second we get permission to leave this fucking place,” said Greer, plonking herself down in the other seat.

Blite glanced at the laminate. Another offer had appeared there—a massive amount of wealth for that generator. He was sure the delays were something to do with that . . .

“So you’re both staying with The Rose?” he asked, glancing at each of them. “It’s all over now. I personally plan to buy a beachfront house on New Aruba, have my liver reinforced and spend the next century trying every drink they have there.”

The two exchanged a look; Greer gave a slow nod and Brond replied, “No you don’t.”

“What do you mean, I don’t?” Blite growled, feeling a familiar comfortable anger rising in him.

Brond continued, “For the others, working with you was a means to an end. Ikbal and Martina always planned to pool their wealth when they had enough and buy their own ship. Chont and Haber always dreamed of settling and having children like some antediluvian couple. It was over for them the moment you filled their accounts. It is not over for us.”

No, Brond was wrong. Blite reckoned his empty feeling was due to it all being over. They were breaking apart and starting a new chapter, going their own ways.

“Sometimes I think I know you better than you do yourself,” said Brond. “You can’t accept how, at least for us three, things have changed.”

“Bollocks,” said Blite.

“Two words,” interjected Greer, “Penny and Royal.”

Blite stared at her, feeling as if he had just been sucker-punched.

“So what?” he managed.

“We can start with the cold hard facts,” said Brond, holding up one large thick finger. “Fact one: Penny Royal is something Polity AIs take very seriously indeed, which is why that poor fuck Sobel, who only had some brief passing encounters with it, is probably in very little pieces now and every one of them being examined down to the submolecular level. Fact two: you had an encounter with Penny Royal that lost you your previous crew. Fact three: Penny Royal smuggled itself out of Masada on our ship and used us to ferry it all over the Graveyard. Fact four: Penny Royal fucked about with our ship and with our minds. Shit, I could go on and on, but y’know . . . fact five: anyone who thinks Polity AIs are moral and always adhere to their own laws is a dickhead.”

Blite realized his mouth was hanging open, and closed it.

“Fact gazillion,” said Greer, pointing at the laminate.

Blite turned to see that the latest offer for the hardfield generator had disappeared and now the station AI had put a mandatory hold on their departure. He didn’t like that at all—not one bit.

“I didn’t like doing that, you know,” he said.

Greer and Brond gazed at him in puzzlement.

“Handing Trent Sobel over to them,” he explained. “I kinda liked the guy.”

They waited patiently and he continued: “I didn’t really get why Penny Royal saved his life and then just didn’t care about him. I told it where I was heading and it said it didn’t matter.” Something else now appeared in the laminate: a demand that they open their ship for inspection. He went on, “He was some part of Penny Royal’s plans. Maybe to test something, maybe to check some Polity response—it’s all a bit too deep for me. I told him that Penny Royal wasn’t finished with him and maybe gave him some hope that wasn’t real.”

“This isn’t over,” said Brond. He grimaced then reached up and tapped a finger against his aug. “Chont and Haber managed to take the runcible out of here, but Martina just told me that she and Ikbal have been arrested on the charge of smuggling proscribed technology out of Masada.”

Blite nodded, pleased that was the only illegality being mentioned. It demonstrated that the care he had taken in his many other operations had been well worth the effort. He guessed that his two crewmembers would be all right, since he now understood that they weren’t the real target. Maybe they would undergo some sort of examination, but they’d survive.

Brond reached across to the controls and tapped one to pull up an exterior cam view. “Yeah, I thought so.”

Blite recognized the four who had just walked out onto the floor of the dock—of course he did; he’d earlier watched them take Sobel away.

“You’re right,” he finally admitted. “I was stupid to think that the Polity would just let us walk away from this . . . Leven, where do you stand?”

The erstwhile Golem and now the ship mind of The Rose replied, “It stinks. Yeah, we aimed to smuggle out technology but we got Penny Royal instead. It’s just an excuse to hold us and get into this ship and take it apart.”

“So you’re not a moral Polity AI ready to bow to your masters?” Blite asked.

“Screw that,” said Leven. “If they have their way, we’ll all be visiting the Brockle, and I don’t want any part of that forensic AI psychopath. I’m part of this ship, remember, and was closer to Penny Royal than all of you.”

The Brockle?

Blite let that one go as he swung his chair round to the console. He opened general com to Par Avion and announced, “Okay, we’ve been patient with you, but now we’re leaving.”

A frame immediately opened in the laminate to show the Golem woman down on the dock, her dracoman and two human companions in view behind her. “You’re locked down and you’re not going anywhere, Captain. Yes, I know you can stick yourselves inside that spherical hardfield but you can’t stay there forever.”

“Not going anywhere?” Blite echoed.

“Be sensible, Captain,” she said.

“Leven,” said Blite. “Chew out those clamps.”

The frame showing the woman flickered, while in the view through the chain-glass screen the lights dimmed all along the docks just before everything out there shaded to amber and something crashed underneath the ship. The hardfield, briefly surrounding The Rose, severed through the dock floor and the clamps holding the ship in place. It flickered again and again. The position and radius of the hardfield—now indicated at the bottom of the laminate screen—changing each time. Each time came another crash and soon debris was flying through the air out there.

Good boy, thought Blite. Leven was carefully chopping apart everything below since they didn’t really want to take a large chunk of the dock with them. Steering thrusters now ignited the scene, The Rose beginning to rise and turn.

“I’m glad to see you cleared the dock,” said Blite, rubbing at his arms because he was suddenly cold. The entropic effects from deploying that hardfield were as evident here as they had been at Carapace City. “And I’m glad to see your three companions are wearing suits—they’ll be needing them.”

“Blite,” said the Golem woman, “you’re just making things worse for yourself.”

Blite nodded. “I guess you got some stats from Masada on the hardfield Penny Royal made for us, but I know for a fact that all your scanning hasn’t been able to penetrate the generator itself.” He eyed the space doors now coming into view and felt the surge as steering thrusters took The Rose towards them.

“Look, be reasonable,” she said. “No one wants to come down hard on you but the Polity needs data on Penny Royal. Surely you realize just how dangerous that thing is?”

“What you didn’t find out,” said Blite, ignoring her entreaty, “is something implicit in the other word used to describe such generators, which is ‘projector.’ It projects. Quite well, really.”

“Fuck,” said the woman, while the three behind her, understanding at once, closed up the shimmershield visors on their suits.

“The doors, Leven,” Blite instructed.

The spherical hardfield appeared far ahead now, just one hemisphere of it covering the space doors. It flickered a couple of times then went out. Shortly afterwards two semicircular chunks of the space doors were tumbling out into vacuum. The roar of escaping air took hold of their ship, hurling it out afterwards. Leven ignited the fusion drive, but it stuttered as the ship mind kept engaging the hardfield around them. Blite glimpsed the flashing of a particle beam as Par Avion fired on them, just trying to disable them, he hoped.

“How long until we jump?” Blite asked, weirdly calm.

“A few minutes,” Leven replied.

Those minutes dragged by, but then Blite felt the familiar twist as the U-space engine began to engage. However, something slammed against the ship before it went completely under, and reams of error messages appeared in the lower half of the laminate screen.

“Fuck, they got our fuser,” said Leven.

“Where to, Leven?” asked Blite, still settled in that calm.

“Where else?”

“It has to be the Graveyard,” said Brond. “There has to be an ending somehow so that the Polity will leave us alone. Penny Royal might have finished with us, but we haven’t finished with it.”

“Yeah, right,” said Greer sarcastically.

She understands, thought Blite. Greer understood that Brond, despite seeing through so much, had this last bit arse about face. Blite knew that the words he had spoken to Sobel could be equally applied to himself. Penny Royal had to have seen what was likely to happen here and still had an investment in it. Penny Royal wasn’t finished with them—he was sure of that now, right down to the bedrock of his very being.

SPEAR

Tracking the signal from Cvorn’s spy satellite, I ensured our first jump took us some light weeks from its reception point. This was close enough for us to pick up the light from that source during the period when Cvorn might well have been there—essentially looking into the past.

“It’s just a communications relay,” Flute announced. “Cvorn isn’t there.”

“How do you know Cvorn isn’t there?” Riss asked. “You’re looking into the past.”

“An educated guess,” Flute replied.

Before they could get into their usual bitching at each other, I said, “Even if it is a relay, Cvorn might well have set some sort of trap. Search for mines or any activity at all. We’ll just keep watching for a while.”

Perhaps this wasn’t the right move, but I still needed time with my own particular problem. During our journey here, I had struggled to distance myself from those other memories or to close out their emotional content, but to no avail. However, over the last day I’d made a breakthrough: I had found I could control them, catalogue them, file them and in doing so achieve at least a partial separation from them. Interestingly, I also found I could search them for death memories fitting specified parameters. This led me to a further discovery.

The only person in that vast repository who remembered dying in the bombing of Panarchia was me. This of course made sense. How could Penny Royal have recorded the minds of eight thousand soldiers during their fast and impersonal extinction when it had bombed them on Panarchia? I wondered then if, somehow, I was supposed to represent them all.

We watched the distant deep-space asteroid for a few days or, rather, Flute watched it. I wandered in and out of my laboratory, often stopping to stare at Penny Royal’s discarded spine in its glass cylinder. I considered the option of ejecting the thing into the nearest sun to free myself from its torment, but immediately felt a deep visceral terror and the absolute certainty that I was so bound to the thing that I would burn too. And could I really so easily sacrifice all those lives, and deaths? The spine contained thousands of the dead who, with present technology, Polity AIs could restore to life. In the end I decided to examine the thing further, but over two days procrastinated and failed to mount it in the clamps I’d set up on my central workbench. Finally, on the third day, I got up the courage to take it out of its cylinder, mount it in those clamps, and set to work.

“Nothing happening out there,” Flute announced with irritating regularity, always adding, “or nothing was happening out there two and a half months ago.”

I pondered the possibility of making short U-jumps on the way in and taking snapshot views across the two and a half month period. However, as the Lance U-jumped in and closed in on the present, this would generate a lot of noise not confined by relativity and would warn anyone near that relay of our approach. I therefore procrastinated further.

“Something happening,” Flute finally announced, “but not by that relay.”

“Yes,” Riss agreed, “something’s happening.”

“You boost through my systems?” asked Flute suspiciously.

“I do,” said Riss, “because that’s what they’re for.”

“Is someone going to fill me in?” I asked. I was gazing at a nanoscope image of the surface of Penny Royal’s spine and seeing densely folded crystalline structures that disappeared like fractals below the level of visibility. The nanoscope was highlighting structures and conjunctions of matter that had to be maintained by an inner power source and picotech manipulation. There were compounds there too that could only have been put together by nanotech field manipulation and simply should not have been able to maintain themselves. I felt that unravelling, and understanding, just the surface of this object lay beyond my present abilities, and that fact left me oddly relieved. After all, if I couldn’t understand it, there was no point in investigating further.

Riss turned towards me. “Flute regularly opens a U-space link to update from the Polity on astrogation data: warnings, news . . .”

“I’m aware of that,” I said, “I link to it through my aug. It’s how everyone in the Graveyard keeps up to date.”

“There is news concerning the Polity watch stations along the edge of the Graveyard,” said Flute before Riss could continue. “They have been moved to high alert and some assets have been moved into position. I have images.”

I considered dipping into all this myself via my aug, since for a while I hadn’t checked on the few updates available to me in the Graveyard, but decided against that. I had been staring at those images of the surface of the spine for long enough and now I wanted to get away from it and stop focusing through my aug. Standing up, I headed out of my laboratory to the bridge, Riss following me closely, and dumped myself in the chair there.

“Okay, show me,” I instructed.

The usual images up in the screen fabric—the cold and distant stars and one frame displaying the relay asteroid—hazed for a moment. One of the Polity watch stations next appeared—a great thing like an upright barbell. I saw more activity here than I had seen around these stations before. I recognized a squadron of squid-like attack ships shoaling about it, along with a series of lozenge-shaped dreadnoughts. Also visible was a spherical ship even larger than they were. This might be one of the rarely seen Gamma-class vessels, or maybe something even larger.

“There has been no attempt to suppress information about this activity,” Riss lectured. “But there has also been no attempt to make it generally known.”

I nodded. The Polity didn’t try to suppress stuff on this scale because it was a pointless exercise. There would always be some pair of eyes or some cam watching, and people would always broadcast such activities throughout the AI net. In fact, Polity AIs had learned during the war that trying to suppress information about such activities tended to make the citizens of the Polity more suspicious, and the act of suppression itself tended to make the news spread further and faster.

“Interesting,” I said, wondering what the relevance was to us. I turned to gaze at Riss. “And now you can tell me more, I have no doubt.”

Riss blinked a black eye. “Flute is seeing one side of it—from the Polity. What he is not seeing is that it is a response to other activity.”

“And you have your contacts,” I suggested.

“I have my contacts,” Riss agreed. “And I have images if Flute will allow me to display them.”

“Flute . . .” I said warningly.

“Oh, very well,” my ship AI grumped.

The watch station faded. In its place appeared a sulphur-yellow world that had to be sitting inside some sort of gas cloud, perhaps an accretion disc or a nebula. No stars were visible and the world stood out vividly against this background. Sky blue and dark green were swirled together, interspersed with lines of blood red and odd organic-looking formations of fleshy pink. My brain tried to give all this definition, but the shapes kept eluding it. It was just a gas cloud—no more than that. I blinked at the brightness. Space wasn’t always black.

“So what am I seeing?” I asked.

“It just has a number on Polity maps,” Riss replied, “but the prador call it something like the ‘Feeding Frenzy.’ It was a living system before the war but during it, the Polity blew up a close orbiting gas giant, in fact an object better defined as a pre-ignition proto star. The prador lost a major shipyard, thirty-eight dreadnoughts and many other ships and stations here.”

“Blew up? How?”

“We dropped a shielded runcible gate into it while the gate at the other end was moved into position before a stream of near-light-speed asteroids flung out from a spinning black hole.”

“And why have I never heard about this?”

“No one survived the mission and the Polity AIs don’t brag.”

“Yeah, sure,” said Flute.

“Anyway, that was after your time,” Riss added. “Lying on their border with the Graveyard, it is now a useful place of concealment for the prador. Though obviously not as concealing as they think.”

A frame opened over this bright image, bringing into focus some objects poised over the sulphurous world. I now saw about thirty ships of a design I did not recognize: long golden teardrops with dark grooves running down their length.

“King’s Guard,” Riss explained. “Each of these ships is two miles long.”

I let out a slow breath. I’d picked up on some rumours about the prador King’s Guard during my various searches for data on the Graveyard. They were secretive. No one saw them without their body armour and, like some antediluvian human armed forces, they always took home their dead. They came down very hard on any kind of rebellion inside the Prador Kingdom and occasionally intervened in the Graveyard. They were fast, surgical and without the usual mess and titanic destruction that had been the hallmark of the prador during the war.

“An attack? But against who?” I wondered.

The image faded to black, a frame now closing in on other objects. These I immediately recognized and I felt my back crawling. Eight old-style prador dreadnoughts were sitting in the vacuum of deep space.

“It could be that the King’s Guard is mustering either to make some response to these ships or to join them. This could be preparations for an attack on the Polity, yet there really aren’t enough ships for that.” It sounded to me as if Riss wasn’t particularly displeased with the idea of an attack on the Polity and, of course, the potential for all-out war. “The Polity ships could be mustering in response to these or vice versa.”

“Or all of this,” I said, “could be something to do with Sverl, Cvorn and Penny Royal.”

“Isn’t it arrogant to assume that such events might be related to your main interest?” Riss asked.

“Perhaps,” I said, “but those three characters are the biggest thing happening in the Graveyard now and I don’t believe what we’re seeing here is a coincidence.” I reached round and pulled across the seat’s safety harness. “Flute, take us to that relay right now.”

SVERL

Bsectil, hovering just above the surface of the icy asteroid on which Cvorn had mounted his communications relay, had finished making all the possible close scans and checks Sverl had been unable to make from his dreadnought. The first-child was hesitating now, understandably nervous about descending to the surface.

“Oh well,” he finally said, “it’s been an interesting life.” Emitting streamers of vapour from the impellers of his suit, he dropped to the surface, faster than necessary, and landed with a thump that generated a spreading cloud of ice crystals. There he paused, his sharp feet driven down into the ice, doubtless, as the drone Arrowsmith might have said, kissing his arse goodbye.

“Right, I’m still alive,” he said, heaving his feet out of the ice and towing his tool chest over to the relay.

As Sverl observed him come to a halt by the domed lump of prador metal anchored to the ice, he pondered on how well suited to this kind of environment was the prador form. Glancing at other screens, he observed the humans in Quadrant Four and thought about how much less suited were they. However, they were now all as neatly organized as social insects and scuttling to do Taiken’s bidding. They did have other advantages, it seemed. By now, had it been prador in their situation, there would have been at least a few assassinations, if not some outright battle.

“It all looks suspiciously easy.” Bsectil now had the lid of the relay open and was busily connecting optics and power feeds.

“Probably until you set it to transmit its data,” said Bsorol from down in the drone cache. Aug-linked to Bsectil, he was watching the show while, with prosthetic underhands, simultaneously working inside the openedup armour of a war drone. “Then it will be blam and byebye Bsectil.”

“It will not,” Sverl interjected. “Bsectil will be clear of the asteroid by then and transmission will ensue on a timed delay.”

“Okay,” said Bsorol. “I’ll bet on something blowing when he makes a final connection and if not that, then some nasty virus . . .”

“Quite likely,” Sverl agreed.

Bsectil continued working, then after a few minutes paused with an optic plug held up in the tips of his right claw, the cable from it leading to a simple radio transmitter lying on the ground beside him.

“Here we go,” he said.

Sverl fleetingly wanted to tell him to desist, but Bsectil was quick and had inserted the plug a second later. Sverl analysed why he had not sent that order, because with his AI component there had been enough time. It all came down to his growing suspicions about that relay and its purpose.

“Still alive, I see,” said Bsorol.

“Yeah.” Bsectil launched himself from the asteroid, tool chest in tow, fired up his impellers to distance himself from the asteroid, then ignited a chemical booster attached under his armour to send him hurtling back towards the dreadnought. Sverl, meanwhile, once again scanned near space looking for any booby traps his penetration of this relay might activate. There was nothing: no physical objects larger than a grain of dust within the reach of his scans, unless Cvorn had used some sophisticated form of chameleonware of which Sverl was unaware. He then again probed the ice and rock of the asteroid. Certainly enough crap sat inside the asteroid, which, with a little chameleonware help, might conceal a CTD, but even a planet-buster would do little more than give his dreadnought a bit of a shake at this range.

Bsectil fired his booster again to slow his approach, used his impellers to guide himself down towards an open airlock and went in fast enough to land with a crash that sent him tumbling into the inner door. As the outer door closed, he righted himself and did an odd little dance.

“It’ll be a virus then,” said Bsorol, always the optimist.

Sverl ignored them as the timer ran out and the radio transmission began. Data began coming in and Sverl studied it pensively, certain that this had just been too easy. He now knew precisely to where the relay was retransmitting the signal from the Rock Pool spy satellite. It couldn’t have been clearer. Bsorol and Bsectil were right. If he had been in Cvorn’s position he would have planted a CTD deep within the asteroid set to detonate the moment something began interfering with the device, or maybe lined up some nasty viruses to transmit the moment a physical connection was made. Maybe both. Perhaps this relay transmitted to another one where such a trap had been set, or even through a whole series of them, but he doubted it. Cvorn just hadn’t had the time to set up that many relays.

“So what’s he got?” enquired Bsorol.

Bsorol, now aware that there had been no nasty virus, had also surmised that the spy satellites around the Rock Pool, and now this relay, were the lure and that where their signal terminated lay a trap. He was asking the next most relevant question. Cvorn had departed the Rock Pool in a prador destroyer that was no match for Sverl’s ship. He had lost his allies when they headed off into the Kingdom in search of prador females and almost certainly would not be getting them back. As the drone Arrowsmith would have it, Vlern’s five children were by now either toast or on the run far from the Kingdom and the Graveyard, probably with King’s Guard in pursuit. But Cvorn had to have something.

What was Sverl missing?

Augmentation?

The thought was like a blow. Cvorn had always been one of the more intelligent father-captains and had clearly demonstrated when he turned on Sverl on the Rock Pool that he had been aware for quite some time of the changes Sverl had undergone. Cvorn was prador enough to have an utter detestation of artificial intelligences, but seeing what had happened to Sverl, he would recognize the distinction between an artificial entity and an augmented natural one. If Cvorn had learned from Sverl and gone down the augmentation route, he would be a lot more dangerous. Sverl was considering what precautions he should take when a U-space link opened through his heavy computer security.

I really don’t need this now, Sverl thought.

“Yes,” he finally said, when it became evident that the communication was voice-only and nothing nasty was queued up to come down the link. “And none of that ‘snickety snick’ nonsense.”

“I got him,” said the Golem.

“You ‘got him’?” said Sverl, “I need more of an explanation than that. And I assume you mean Trent.”

“I listened,” said the Golem.

“And?”

“They simply released him because Penny Royal issued a threat to the Polity if they didn’t do so. The black AI does not like interference in its activities.”

Threat? Now this was interesting.

“Detail.”

The next transmission the Golem sent was a recording. Sverl checked it thoroughly before listening to a brief exchange between the forensic AI the Brockle and some other AI, perhaps even Earth Central itself. Sverl saw how Penny Royal had ensured Trent Sobel’s survival. So the man was part of Penny Royal’s plans and, since he was now a captive of Sverl’s Golem, those plans almost certainly related to Sverl himself.

“Do you have the earring too?” he asked.

“Yes, I have Satomi’s recording,” the Golem replied. “I bring them both.”

Sverl was now torn. He wanted to go after Cvorn but he wanted Isobel Satomi and he wanted his ultimate goal of . . . something from Penny Royal.

“Take yourself to the Rock Pool,” he instructed, since that world lay about midway between the transmission point of the Golem’s signal and his present location. “I must consider this.”

“Okay,” the Golem replied, seemingly unconcerned as it temporarily closed the link.

What to do?

“Father,” said Bsorol, now closing up the armour of the war drone he had been working on, “I’ve been thinking about Cvorn.”

“Me too,” interjected Bsectil, now in the corridor just inside the airlock, trying to straighten out the dented lid of his tool chest.

“And you’ve been thinking about Cvorn in connection with yourselves, haven’t you?”

“Augmentation,” they both said simultaneously.

Sverl was pleased with their reasoning.

“What do you suggest?” he asked.

“One has to go back to first principles and consider why you want to eliminate Cvorn,” said Bsorol.

That was very, very unpradorishly rational.

Sverl glanced at those screens showing the human population aboard and realized that Bsorol had grasped the main point. Sverl wanted to kill Cvorn because of the threat that prador posed to this adopted population. However, Cvorn was likely a bigger threat now than before, and to follow him would probably put this population, and Sverl himself, in even greater danger. But protecting this population was not all of Sverl’s aim. He was still prador enough to want vengeance for Cvorn’s attack on him and for the lives already lost. Still torn, he now considered telling the Golem to come to his present location, so he could take it and Trent aboard and still go after Cvorn. The other prador might or might not have augmented himself and might or might not have set an effective trap. There was only one way—

What now?

His sensors had picked up a U-space signature. Through his AI component, Sverl initiated the chameleonware throughout his ship and took direct control of all its weapons. Was this the jaws of Cvorn’s trap closing?

“Crew, get to battle stations,” he generally ordered, but even as they scuttled to obey, something unexpected materialized into the real.

Sverl studied the old-style Polity destroyer and analysed it as no threat to him, just before he recognized the ship itself. No, this was no attack from Cvorn, but it might be the answer he needed. He opened up a coded U-space link to it—one established long ago to a resource within that attack ship.

“Hello, Dad,” a voice immediately replied. “What can I do for you?”

Sverl updated from Flute’s mind, quickly incorporating all the events that had occurred aboard the ship the second-child mind controlled, sucking the data into his AI crystal in a matter of seconds, meanwhile ensuring he had Flute under absolute control. It was only as that data began to incorporate across the interface to his organic brain that Sverl experienced a visceral reaction. He seized control of ship’s weapons, charged capacitors and even ignited the drive of one missile. He stood just a microsecond away from obliterating the destroyer out there before he managed to get a grip on himself and cancel what would have been a mass attack. To coin a phrase from Arrowsmith, using a sledgehammer to kill an ant.

Riss . . .

That was the drone’s name. That was the name of this snakelike artificial version of a parasite the prador had wiped out centuries ago. That was the very thing that had attacked Sverl all those years ago during the war. Sverl knew because during his exile on the Rock Pool he had used Polity resources to obtain its name, but had never been able to locate it physically. That was the creature that had laid eggs inside his body; the parasites hatching out and nearly destroying him. The process of removing them had been long and agonizing and left him crippled. Gazing from one of the Polity destroyer’s internal cams, Sverl could not shake his atavistic horror of that drone, and the urge to destroy that ship had not gone away.

“Father?” Flute prompted.

Sverl realized the silence had gone on uncomfortably long. “So Thorvald Spear is following me?” he enquired.

“He is,” replied Flute.

“In the hope that I will bring him closer to Penny Royal?”

Flute took some time replying, struggling against the control Sverl exerted, his loyalties divided. Eventually he gave up. “Yes.”

“The signal should be easy enough to follow,” said Sverl. “You will note that the relay on the nearby asteroid now clearly indicates where it is routing its U-space signal?”

“Yeah, I spotted that,” Flute replied.

“Then follow it, and keep me informed of what you find.”

“You’re not going there?”

“I suspect a trap, and I want to know precisely the nature of that trap,” said Sverl. “Inform me of what you find. If necessary, provoke a response there to clarify the matter. And inform no one aboard of our exchange.”

Flute just emitted a frustrated buzzing in reply.

Sverl’s control of the mind at the other end of this exchange was rigid, and Flute would be unable to disobey, at least for a while. However, Sverl was wise enough to know that a second-child mind with AI enhancements, given enough time, could eventually find some route around rigid orders. Flute would not be given the time.

Sverl now laid in a new course for his ship and opened up his unshielded fusion drive while dropping the chameleonware. However, he did ensure that the other ship could not divine his destination from his dreadnought’s U-space signature as he dropped into that continuum and took himself back towards the Rock Pool.

He had always made sure of a back door into the second-child minds he had sold because of the chance he might be able to use them later. Flute had now proved the worth of that strategy. Flute, and the ship he ran, would follow Cvorn’s signal, while Spear and that disgusting drone would think they were in close pursuit of Sverl. They would spring Cvorn’s trap because, even if that prador could manage to resist attacking such a small Polity vessel, Flute would now force the issue. Flute would probably have time to send a final report back to Sverl.

Probably.

CVORN

The work was proceeding as expected, with ship’s lasers scouring away rock so the ST dreadnought could fit neatly into the hollow moon. As he watched this on his array of screens, Cvorn experienced momentary pain and turned one stalk eye to peer at the human blank working with a shell saw on the side of his carapace, quickly stamping on the urge to shove the creature up against the wall and crush it. It was a silly urge, akin to trashing a laser cutter because it had splashed hot metal into a claw joint. The blank was working to a program Cvorn had created, and he had expected pain at this point since it had just levered out a chunk of scar carapace formed in the socket where one of his legs had once connected to his body. However, the urge was partial confirmation of his theory about the odd feelings he had been experiencing since coming aboard. He just needed to do a little further checking to confirm that theory.

He now brought up new feeds on his screens and contemplated cam views into the laying pool, reminding himself to have the females scoured out so they might take his own seed. He felt a ghost of his mating urge return, a twitching in the remains of his sexual organs and a sense of regret at the fact that one of his children would have to inject his seed mechanically. Analytically he compared this reaction to the one he had experienced while viewing these females at a distance from his destroyer, and saw the difference. This was further confirmation of his hypothesis.

Lastly, he carefully studied the analysis, now scrolling diagonally across his screens, of the ST dreadnought’s air supply and simultaneously checked studies of prador physiology he’d loaded to his aug. Yes, that settled it. The dreadnought’s air was full of the hormonal output of five young males and those females. He was breathing in complex organic compounds generated by decades of frustration in the five males having been satisfied, also by sexually active females, and now by the frustration once again growing in the males. It was a situation rare in the Kingdom because adult males tended to isolate themselves, and Cvorn only found final confirmation in some very old studies. The potent mix in the air was making him feel younger; he was having feelings he hadn’t experienced for well over a century.

Cvorn now ordered the blank working on his carapace to withdraw as he rose up on his grav-plates and swung round from the screens to face his other blank and Vrom, who were both at work. Ensconced in the hemispherical shell of a surgical telefactor, its complex multiple limbs working busily, Vrom was removing the last prosthetic limb from the corpse of this ship’s previous captain. Meanwhile, the other blank was working on the limbs Vrom had just removed, replacing worn components and renewing the nano-fibre connectors.

With a thought, as he settled back to the floor, Cvorn ordered the first blank back to work on his carapace, exposing the flesh, blood vessels and stunted nerves underneath the scar carapace filling his leg sockets. He knew that this wish to be able to walk again, even on prosthetic limbs, was down to that potent mix in the air, but he didn’t fight it. He could have had the Five, and the females, isolated, and the air filtered and cleaned of organics, but did not. Despite some irrational impulses, he was enjoying feeling so alive.

Steadily and methodically, the first blank worked round all his leg sockets, shut down the shell saw and replaced it in its charging point in the telefactor, then returned to pick up the chunks of scar carapace and take them away. Meanwhile Vrom had removed the last leg from the corpse. The blank now came back to clean out Cvorn’s open wounds with antiviral and antibacterial spray, also washing out the shell dust. Cvorn clattered his mandibles, again suppressed the urge to kill something and waited for the ensuing analgesic sprays.

“Would you like to be an adult, Vrom?” he abruptly asked.

Without stopping work, Vrom replied, “Only if my father wishes it so.”

Vrom was as obedient as a blank and Cvorn suddenly found that irritating. Again, analysing his irrational reaction, Cvorn could make no clear connection with those hormonal effects. His irritation stemmed from boredom with such an expected response. Vrom was following his program, just like the blank now coming over with a prosthetic limb ready for fitting. Cvorn divided his attention, simultaneously watching this blank while also focusing through his aug on input from both inside and outside the ship.

The Five, confined to their various sections within the ship, were all very active. They were searching data, disassembling and reassembling equipment including weapons, checking cam views available to them, and sometimes just running around aimlessly. These actions were all an outward expression of their inner frustration, which Cvorn studied via his Dracocorp aug domination of them. They could smell the females and wanted to mate but his instruction, firm in their minds, was as solid a barrier as the locked doors around them. They were now aware of how thoroughly he controlled them, fought against it in their own ways and really wanted to do something, but just kept running up against that dominance and finding themselves unable to act. And their hormonal output was like smoke from smouldering corpses on a battlefield.

As Cvorn now watched the enlargement of the hole into the asteroid, he rejected his earlier plans to simply dispense with the Five. Right now, he wanted them frustrated and pumping out all those lovely organics. Perhaps later, when he had made some complete analysis of this process and could artificially produce what they were producing, he’d get rid of them, but not yet.

With coincidental simultaneity, the dreadnought slid into the asteroid at the same time as Cvorn’s first new limb slid into its socket in his body. As the great ship stabilized, extending telescopic feet to the surrounding rock walls, the blank shell-welded the limb into place. As the ship, using grav-motors, incrementally turned the rock to the required position, the nano-fibres began to penetrate inside Cvorn and find their nerve attachment points. And by the time the ship’s forward array of weapons was pointing out of the hole in the asteroid towards the planet, a blank attached the last of Cvorn’s new limbs.

As the effect of the analgesics faded, the pain returned, now a deep raw ache. He tried supporting his weight on his limbs but couldn’t manage it and collapsed. He lay there until he began using his aug to stimulate near-atrophied parts of his brain until he remembered how to walk. Gradually, stupidly, these alien limbs began to move. And then to work properly. Once up on his feet and moving, he clattered fierce delight. He used one claw to smash away the blank that had been fitting the limbs and spun round to again face his screens. He was ready now: ready for Sverl, ready for anything!