8

 

BLITE

The other ship, the black modern Polity attack ship that had disabled a Polity dreadnought at the border before descending like a raptor on Blite’s The Rose, steadily melded itself to his ship over the ensuing days. But Penny Royal’s motives in making this happen were, as ever, unclear. The process had made all sections of their old vessel inaccessible and confined Blite and his remaining crew to the bridge. However, cam views and other data were available in the screen laminate. Blite availed himself of these between dozes in his acceleration chair. At one point, he gazed at an alcove in one of the newly constructed corridors.

“What the hell is that?” he asked.

“Funny, I thought the job of captain required at least some knowledge of space,” said Greer.

Blite glared at her. “Yes, I know it’s a space suit, but what’s it doing here?”

“Well,” Greer shrugged, “maybe it’s there because we’re out in space?”

Blite glared at her again, then enquired, “Leven?”

“It is a replica. It was made by the previous AI of the attack ship with which we’re currently merging,” the ship mind replied.

“An antique space suit,” said Blite. “So Penny Royal respects other people’s property?”

“Apparently,” Leven replied.

Blite let it go at that, quickly switching to another scene. The suit, sitting there on its own little stool in that alcove, gave him the creeps, but he couldn’t nail exactly why.

Instead, he gazed at a view into the engine room where Penny Royal, or some part of that AI, had gutted the old U-space drive. It was chaotic in there—Penny Royal’s silver tendrils snaking everywhere, black spines pecking like heron beaks at the remains of the drive, components tumbling through the air—but this was an AI at work and “multitasking” hardly got close to what it could do.

“That,” said Brond, stabbing a finger at the screen, “is part of a modern Polity U-drive.”

Blite focused on the object concerned, a large object that looked like a polished aluminium sculpture of someone’s intestines.

“So Penny Royal has taken apart our drive and the drive of the attack ship and is shifting it here,” he said. “How come we’re still in U-space if it’s been dismantled?”

“Beats me,” said Brond.

“Maybe the other ship has more than one drive,” suggested Greer.

“Maybe,” Blite agreed.

New components began to appear one after the other and the AI slotted them into place. Micro-welding arcs flashed, blooms of nanotech spread along surfaces, fixings as small as grains of sand it drove or twisted home, and weird distortions flared around odd organic-looking technology. Blite saw parts of his old drive going into the mix, along with objects he felt certain, having seen examples of it, were of the AI’s own particular technology. It assembled a great mass in the middle of the engine room, inserting supporting struts all around, covering it with sections of casing, snaking in power cables and optics to connect. After two days of watching this, and other reconstruction elsewhere, Blite felt the U-drive stutter, then it faded into a smooth hum of invisible power.

“We are accelerating,” said Leven.

“Accelerating?” asked Blite.

“It is the only word I can use,” said the Golem ship mind. “We’re breaching the time barrier and utilizing impossible amounts of energy drawn from U-space.”

“You what?”

“Time travel is possible,” Leven explained, “but even the prador were afraid of going that far.”

Blite knew time travel was possible and understood why sensible creatures avoided it. You ventured into infinite energy progressions and, in an effort to change history, you might end up destroying it. He’d once heard it described as using a fusion drive to travel from one side of a room to another. You would certainly get to the other side of that room, but there wouldn’t be much of the room left afterwards.

“Penny Royal!” he shouted. “What the fuck are you doing?”

A sound as of a coin dropped into a wine glass occurred behind him and he turned to see a black diamond materialize out of the air, half-seen distortions spreading out all around it and seeming to extend . . . forever.

“Catastrophic cascade will be avoided,” the black AI whispered, whereupon a montage of images and memories opened in Blite’s mind. He saw a grotesque creature like a walking skull, various spaceships on the move and people—some of whom he recognized—caught in snapshots of their lives. This all opened out into something larger, something he just couldn’t grasp. Then it folded and he felt like his mind might be crushed in that fold until, suddenly, it all snapped out of existence. Blite felt sick and wished he’d remembered this penalty for asking questions.

His head bowed and his mouth watering, he said, “I understood none of that.”

Something nibbled at his consciousness, then withdrew.

“A problem has arisen caused by a brief resurrection of Sverl’s prador instincts, and it must be corrected for,” said Penny Royal. “We will only arrive at our destination two weeks before we left our departure point and a catastrophic cascade will be avoided.”

The AI had adjusted its communication methods for this simple human, but it still wasn’t enough.

“What?” Blite said.

The diamond blinked out.

“What’s that about Sverl?” Blite blurted.

Penny Royal didn’t reply, and now the captain was glad that it hadn’t.

The three on the bridge just turned back to gaze at the screen laminate, now seeing the tendrils and pecking black swords retreating. A new U-space drive sat in their engine room, humming contentedly, doing something that terrified both the Polity’s top AIs and even the barking-mad prador.

“You know,” said Brond, “if we’re left with this new drive, we’ll never be able to go into the Polity again. The AIs will never stop hunting us down.”

“I know,” said Blite.

He now called up other images only just becoming available from cams The Rose had never possessed. He called up data and schematics on the other ship’s systems and weapons, as it increasingly, improbably, merged with his own craft. They were becoming one. New schematics were becoming available all the time. And, combining available emerging data and cam views, Blite generated an image in the laminate.

“Well that’s what we look like now,” he said.

The Rose, which some had described as looking like an iron mosque, wasn’t even visible. And what had been a modern Polity attack ship had been radically redesigned. The thing up on the screen was a fat black horseshoe with fusion drive throats inset in the rear two faces, various sensor and weapons protrusions along its double body and a small screen visible to the fore.

“So where are we?” asked Greer.

Blite stared at the image for a while, then called up the schematic and stared at that. There were twinned U-space engines, one located in each prong of the horseshoe. Narrow corridors gave access to them and to the fusion engines from the fore of the ship, where the bridge was located behind that small screen. Crew quarters were to one side of the bridge, with a cargo hold lying just beyond them, while on the other side a bay contained a shuttle of no design Blite could recognize. The Rose just wasn’t there.

“Leven, is this right?” Blite asked.

“It is right, Captain,” Leven replied, “the only parts of your ship that have not been shifted and changed are the bridge and you three. Even I have additional processing and have expanded to encompass some serious U-jump and weapons technology.”

“What the fuck has it done to my ship?” That dreaded clinking sound came from behind him once more and Blite turned his chair to gaze at the black diamond. “That wasn’t a question for you,” he added hurriedly.

“This is your ship,” said Penny Royal.

“As Brond has noted,” said Blite, “if this is our ship then we’ll forever be outcasts from the Polity unless we hand the damned thing over. And even then I think our chances of avoiding being taken apart by a forensic AI are negligible.”

Data imprinted itself on Blite’s consciousness: thousands of files on human individuals, a tree of interconnections, the image of The Rose in dock at Par Avion, a scrolling statistical analysis. Blite groaned, feeling as if he had rammed a compressed-air hose into his skull. Then this data snapped out of his mind again and he bit down on the urge to puke.

“I just got the job as translator,” interjected Leven.

“Go ahead,” Blite managed.

“Without Penny Royal we would have been caught and examined anyway,” said the ship’s mind. “If all goes to plan henceforth and we survive, we can bargain with the Polity, sell this vessel for great wealth and buy another, better vessel than The Rose. In that case, unfortunately, we will not be able to avoid forensic examination. But it will not kill us.”

“What ‘plan’ exactly?” Blite asked, as the diamond blinked out again.

“I don’t know,” Leven admitted. “Though I’m getting hints that it’s in a perpetual state of flux.”

So everything might not go to plan . . .

Blite sat there, mulling all this over. Despite his head feeling as if it had been wire-brushed inside, he couldn’t deny he felt some excitement and awe to be part of this. He’d always supposed he wanted to make his fortune and settle down to a comfortable life somewhere while others continued to expand his business and pay for his lifestyle. That would have been the most he could have achieved: maybe a couple of ships shunting cargo about. He now knew that he wanted something more. He wanted to be part of big events, and to see more of the universe than he possibly could by settling on some holiday world. Now he was involved in something big, had wealth stacked up in his Galaxy Bank account and was sitting inside the kind of ship people like him could usually only gaze upon with envy.

“Okay, Leven,” he said, “tell me what we’ve got here.”

“You’ve got a ship with twinned U-drives that can feed off U-space energy and are the fastest thing I’ve ever seen. The time-jump we’re undertaking, however, is only due to Penny Royal’s intervention and we won’t be able to do that without the black AI aboard. You have two arrays of fusion engines capable of taking this ship up to one tenth of light speed. You have grav-engines that could even land on a star, also feeding off U-space energy. You have three times the hold space of The Rose, and a shuttle.”

“What about weapons?”

“Ah, there we get into territory that goes beyond human language,” said Leven.

“Just give me the gist.”

“Semi-AI U-jump splinter missiles, multi-particulate particle cannons, cross-spectrum lasers, near-c railguns, induction effectors for seizing control of the systems of other ships . . . I think a better question to ask is what haven’t you got.”

“That’s all very nice,” interjected Brond, “but not a great deal of use when it comes to hauling cargo. And there’s one other point to consider.”

“Go on,” said Blite.

“Penny Royal, as far as I can gather, doesn’t tend to do stuff like this without some reason, no matter how obscure it might seem,” Brond continued. “That we have all this hardware, no matter how it was obtained, indicates to me that we’ll probably need it.”

Blite absorbed that and reckoned Brond was on the button, but that didn’t still the excitement or detract from the satisfaction his acquisitive side felt.

“We need a new name for this ship,” he said.

“And you already have it,” guessed Greer.

“I certainly do,” Blite agreed. “I name this ship the Black Rose.”

“Trite,” said Greer dismissively.

Weeks of shipboard time passed while Blite and his crew familiarized themselves with his ship’s systems and explored its much-altered interior. Blite often found himself drawn to that antique space suit sitting in its alcove and, when he wanted to speak to Penny Royal, who had disappeared since that last sight of it in the engine room, he found himself addressing the suit. Penny Royal never answered during that time, but that did not dispel Blite’s growing certainty that somehow it was present in the suit. Then at last Leven announced that they were about to surface from U-space. All three humans waited in the bridge for this event. The screen laminate in front of them stayed neutral grey until, as they surfaced smoothly and without noticeable effects, it transformed into glorious colour.

Blite felt his mood lift as he gazed upon a sulphur-yellow world surrounded by a multicoloured gas cloud. This interstellar cathedral with its dark green and sky-blue swirls, its vein-like threads and fleshy clouds, was the kind of sight he wanted to see. Penny Royal was taking them to places he had only dreamed of visiting. At least, he might have dreamed of visiting this one if he only knew where he was.

“This is a place called by the prador the ‘Feeding Frenzy,’” Leven explained.

Blite felt a momentary doubt at the mention of the prador but it did not dispel his buoyant mood. However, Leven’s next words did: “It’s in the Prador Kingdom.”

Oh shit.

No, what was the matter with him? He was in one of the fastest ships known and its weaponry was capable of handling anything. Some brief venture into the outskirts of the Prador Kingdom shouldn’t be a problem.

Now Leven opened a frame down in one corner of the screen laminate, focusing close in over that yellow world. Massive ships, like long golden teardrops, were shoaling out from there on the arc-glare of fusion drives and turning, inevitably, towards them.

“And those are the ships of the King’s Guard,” Leven added.

All Blite could manage in response to that was a grunt of acknowledgement.

SPEAR

We were going down—betrayed by my ship AI and under attack—diving towards the nearby world under full fusion drive. That beam again stabbed out from the thing sitting inside the moon. The Lance stopped it with a hardfield, and another explosion rattled inside our ship—one more projector, unable to take the feedback, turning molten and flying apart. I checked schematics and saw that we could take only two more hits like that before we ran out of projectors, then we would be toast. I glanced round at Riss, who was still trying to get out of the bridge, doubtless on course to rip the heart out of our treacherous ship mind.

“Riss,” I said, “don’t open that door.”

“Little fucker,” Riss replied, now having torn out part of the wall beside the door and with her head inserted deep inside.

“Riss, if you open that door you’ll kill me.”

She withdrew her head and looked over at me. She then doubtless accessed ship’s diagnostics and damage reports, as I was doing constantly, and realized that the corridor outside the door was full of white-hot gas. She desisted.

“We’re dead anyway,” said the drone.

Cvorn’s trap had not involved summoning reinforcements as we had supposed, for they were already here in some form, but I didn’t entirely agree with Riss’s assessment of our chances, and confirmation of my suspicion occurred just a second later. The Lance hummed and juddered as Flute opened up with our railguns to send a swarm of missiles towards that moon. Almost certainly, our opponent’s laser defences and anti-munitions would stop every single one, but they would buy us time. Next, our own particle cannon fired, stabbing through that swarm of slower-moving missiles to splash on an abrupt scaling of hardfields just out from the moon.

“What the hell are we fighting?” I asked.

“A prador ST dreadnought,” Flute replied.

“And you led us right into its firing line,” Riss spat.

Flute was finally speaking clearly now, but this wasn’t the time for recriminations or explanations. Nor was it the time, even if the corridor outside the bridge had not been filled with flame, for Riss to tear the second-child’s mind apart. Right now Flute was our only hope of survival.

“Initiate interface manoeuvre,” I said. “But you need a way of shutting our attacker down at least for a minute.”

It was dangerous to try to enter U-space this close to a gravity well because the chances were that if you actually managed to reenter realspace, you and your ship would be turned inside out. That danger ramped up even higher when you were under attack. Isobel Satomi had somehow managed such manoeuvres while descending on Masada but, at that point, she had been part of an Atheter war mind—an entity capable of doing some seriously weird stuff with U-space. We needed a break, a breather, and there was a chance we could create one.

When I’d been intent on bearding Penny Royal in its lair in that wanderer planetoid, I’d instructed Flute to manufacture the means of expelling the AI from that lair, in burning fragments. Flute had used kiloton CTDs stolen from Isobel Satomi as a detonating package for fissile plutonium-239, transmuted aboard this ship from uranium-238 sieved and enzyme extracted from asteroid dust, the whole wrapped in hardfield-contained deuterium. The result was a fusion bomb in the multi-megaton range.

I was reluctant to use it.

“We have a way of shutting him down,” said Flute, referring to our super-weapon.

“I know,” I replied, still hesitating, but also aware that Flute was now deferring to me rather than acting on his own.

I didn’t want to use that bomb because it was my ace card—the one weapon I had that just might be capable of killing the black AI. However, as I heard another of our projectors go, I decided that actually surviving this encounter might be a good idea too.

“Use the bomb, Flute.”

Flute must have had the thing lined up for firing in an instant. I heard and felt the alteration in the tone of our railguns as one of them powered down for a low-speed firing—he could not fire such a device at the speed usual for inert missiles, because the acceleration would tear vital components apart. Up in the screen fabric a red circle marked the until then invisible course of the bomb heading towards the moon. Timing was everything. Cvorn, if it was that prador aboard this ST dreadnought, would soon recognize the threat of a slow-moving object coming towards him. He probably wouldn’t react to it right away because even a gigaton CTD would have to get very close to cause any damage. Flute had to judge when to send the detonation signal—with luck, just moments before Cvorn opened fire on the bomb.

The destroyer’s particle beam speared out again, not towards the bomb but at us. Our last projector went out with a crash and doubtless Cvorn, fully knowledgeable about the kind of equipment an old destroyer like the Lance would carry, was relishing this moment. He wouldn’t fire on us right away—he’d want us to have time to be fully aware of our imminent destruction.

The Lance was shaking now, the planet looming huge across the screen fabric opposite our view of that militarized moon. I felt some satisfaction on seeing a red circle now enclose something rising up from that city of weapons. Cvorn had been dismissive of the approaching bomb and merely fired a missile on an intercept course rather than use some beam weapon. He’d given us more time.

The two circles drew closer together and, at the last moment, I was sure I saw a flash of blue as Cvorn’s particle beam stabbed out. But it could have been my imagination.

Detonation.

Bright light flared inside the first circle, then a black macula briefly blotted it out as exterior cams polarized to prevent the flash burning them out, and as the screen ceased to transmit something that could have blinded me. The explosion was spherical, quickly expanding to the size of that moon and beyond, encompassing the moon even as the ship inside it erected a hardfield wall. Over the ensuing minute the sphere began to distort, seemingly sinking at the poles as its waist continued to expand, ionization appearing like St Elmo’s fire above those poles. Our energy levels climbed; our fusion reactor fed depleted storage to give us enough to power our drive. I felt our U-engine engaging, and the harsh drag away from the real induced a cyclic scream in my skull. The bridge I was sitting within became just a veneer over something my mind could not grasp and I knew that a lot of our U-engine shielding must be gone. The screen fabric turned grey, and we jumped.

In this situation, Flute could not set coordinates far from the action—just make a brief jump permissible with the power available. Reality slammed back into place as I heard something howling from the engine room and smoke began filtering through the hole Riss had carved beside the door.

“What’s our status?” I asked, suddenly all calm.

“U-engine is down, munitions depleted, fusion reactor running safe shutdown,” was Flute’s businesslike reply.

“Or to translate,” said Riss, “we’re about ten minutes from annihilation.”

I saw what the drone meant when our screen fabric came back on. We had jumped, but just two hundred thousand miles out from the world, to the other side of the moon which, even at that moment, was revolving that city of weapons towards us.

TRENT

It had been a seriously odd encounter, and a dangerous one, but Trent had survived, and that was all that really mattered to him right then. With any luck, he would keep on surviving. With any luck, the distorted first-child currently conveying him deep into the bowels of this dreadnought would not be taking him either home for lunch, or to some prador cold store. No, having encountered Sverl, Trent did not think so. Sverl had dispatched him to join the shell people whom he claimed to have rescued from the Rock Pool.

“Father found you interesting,” said the first-child.

Trent stared at the creature, surprised it saw any need to speak. He reached up and flicked the earring now depending from his ear. “He found this interesting. I was just the delivery boy.”

“Father’s interest in Isobel Satomi is relevant to his own condition,” the prador stated.

Was this big ugly monstrosity trying to start a conversation?

“What’s your name?” Trent asked.

The prador made a hissing gurgle that was quite close to the name its translator then issued.

“Well, Bsorol, I now know that your father-captain paid a visit to Penny Royal and is undergoing his own transformation, so understand his interest in Satomi, but I fail to understand his interest in me.”

“Why you?” Bsorol asked.

“What do you mean?”

“Why did Penny Royal save you?”

“To act as a delivery boy,” Trent suggested.

“No. Penny Royal loaded her to the gem in your ear. The AI could have transmitted her directly to my father. You were not necessary.”

“Penny Royal told me to redeem myself . . .”

“Yet there are many like you.”

“Then it probably saved me on a whim.” Trent was starting to get uncomfortable with the idea that he might have some further role in Penny Royal’s plans. “Tell me, what exactly did Sverl want from Penny Royal and what exactly is he turning into?”

“He wanted to understand the enemy in order to thereby defeat him,” said Bsorol. “Penny Royal has given Father the ultimate in understanding, by transforming him into that enemy.”

“He’s turning into a human being? Seems to be going about it in a rather odd fashion.”

“And an AI—he is growing AI crystal around his major ganglion.”

Trent absorbed that for a moment, snorted dismissively, then stated, “That’s not possible—attaching AI crystal direct to an organic brain burns out both brain and crystal. It’s what happened to Iversus Skaidon when he invented runcible technology.”

“It’s what happens to a human brain when directly attached to AI crystal,” Bsorol explained patiently. “The prador major ganglion is more distributed, rugged, better supplied with oxygen and nutrients, and in many other fashions is a superior organ.”

“Yeah, shame it wasn’t superior enough to win the war.” The words were out before he could stop them and he warily studied the first-child, prepared to duck and run if it took a swipe at him. Bsorol, however, just perambulated along beside him, grating his mandibles together.

“There is an organo-mineral substrate acting as a buffer to the crystal growing on Father’s ganglion, which also works to prevent that synergistic burn-out. My father is rather like a prador version of your haiman: a combination of human and AI. Which, of course, further enhances his interest in Isobel Satomi.”

“Yeah, I guess—”

Bsorol abruptly whirled round, his claw spearing in and closing around Trent’s chest, hoisting him up and slamming him back against the near wall.

“The prador did not lose the war,” said the first-child, “and the humans did not win it.”

Trent gasped for breath.

“Yes, I perfectly understand that we were losing the war when the old king was usurped and the new king negotiated terms with the Polity,” Bsorol continued. “I also perfectly understand that if the Polity and the Kingdom were to go to war now, we would definitely lose. However, the Polity AIs are responsible for that, not the humans. Had it been just humans and prador fighting, we would have crushed you entirely, just like I could crush you now.”

Bsorol released him and he dropped heavily to the floor, sinking down on his backside. He sat there, gasping for a moment as Bsorol backed off and waited. Finally hauling himself to his feet, he couldn’t resist, “So you’re fairly new to the art of conversation?”

“I am fairly new to controlling my instincts,” said Bsorol. “Come.”

The prador turned and continued up the corridor. Trent followed, pondering the idea of prador adopting AI and augmentations. He wondered just what that might mean in the future for his own kind.

“Here.” Bsorol finally brought him before an oval door. It was large enough for a first-child but definitely too small for a father-captain. The door hissed off a seal and rolled into the wall on one side. “Perhaps here, so my father tells me, you may be able to find some of that redemption,” the prador told him.

“Redemption?”

Bsorol just turned and moved away.

Trent stepped through into a short tunnel, terminating at yet another door. The first door closed behind him, seals sucking down, and then the second opened ahead. He walked through and out into a huge hold space from where he could gaze across at a small city of enviro-tents and the other panoply of temporary human occupation. A woman, seemingly clad in helmet and body armour, beckoned to him. As he walked over, he saw that both helmet and armour were actually part of her body and were her carapace.

“I’m to take you to Father,” she said.

Father?

Peering beyond her, Trent recognized the altered body forms of the people moving about in the encampment. The woman was just a less extreme version of one of the shell people here. He nodded companionably and stepped forwards, only at the last moment hearing movement behind him. He whirled, damning the softening of his instincts, in time to see one of the more heavily altered shell people raising a pepper-pot stunner. The cloud of micro-beads struck him on the chest and sent him staggering, then blackness took him.

BLITE

“They just jumped,” said Leven, referring to a host of giant prador ships.

“No, really?” Blite replied sardonically, stamping on the urge to titter.

Penny Royal simply wasn’t talking, and Leven’s attempt to turn them around and flee had failed. Blite had just watched a total of thirty modern prador ships blink out of existence. Then, moments later, he didn’t need any sensor readings to tell him where they were. One of the behemoths was filling his screen as it drew past. The damned things were shoaling all around like giant sharks.

“Penny Royal,” he tried. “I’m really not so sure being here is a great idea.” It wasn’t a question, so perhaps he was safe from having his brain turned to jelly.

“Listen and learn,” the AI hissed in his ear.

He whirled round, but no black diamond was present. As he turned back, another frame opened in the screen fabric to display an armoured prador squatting in some gleaming sanctum.

“You came,” it said.

“I don’t really know why I’m here,” Blite babbled, but he was obviously out of the com circuit because it was Penny Royal’s reply the prador heard:

“I came,” agreed the AI.

“The ship is interesting,” said the prador. “My tactical assessment is that it could destroy at least five of my vessels before I managed to destroy it.”

“Seven of your vessels,” Penny Royal corrected. “You failed to incorporate the inducers and their effects on your systems.”

“An irrelevant point,” said the prador. “You would still be dust.”

“As would you.”

“That does not concern me—service to my father and king does.”

“Which is why you have not attacked.”

“Yes.”

“I have data,” Penny Royal indicated.

“Yes.”

“It details the future your father and king must pursue to avoid extinction.”

“Extinction can be avoided?”

“For many centuries, yes, but in the end it is inevitable, Gost.”

“I will relay this data to my father, when I receive it. But you wish for something in return?”

“Of course.”

“Tell me.”

So why can’t you talk to me as clearly? Blite wondered. Then it occurred to him he was hearing this exchange in language he could understand when both of them could have been speaking the prador tongue . . . or rather the prador mandible, or bubbling throat membrane. Penny Royal had to be translating for the benefit of him and his crew. Perhaps the AI had decided to be a little less obscure after all . . .

“Sverl will contact you again, as he must,” said Penny Royal. “He will be seeking data on the location of Factory Station Room 101.”

“The place where you were created,” said Gost.

“Yes,” was all Penny Royal would allow.

“This data can be supplied,” replied Gost. “We have known the location of that place ever since one of our exploration vessels came upon it half a century ago. The vessel concerned managed to transmit at least that before it was destroyed.”

“And you did not send a force there to in turn destroy the factory station,” Penny Royal noted.

“Our first attempt to destroy it during the war was costly enough and it would be a pointless exercise now. Its continued existence is also a source of amusement to Father—a reminder to Polity AIs of their fallibility since it went insane and fled the conflict.”

“Polity AIs who also know its location . . .” the black AI suggested.

“A select few of them at the top of the hierarchy are aware of this. Those who have discovered its location accidentally either disappear or end up under AI lock. This means they know the location of the station, but cannot pass on that knowledge.”

“Just like the few who escaped the station after it fled,” Penny Royal added.

“Yes, just like them,” said Gost. “So you want me to give these coordinates to Sverl?”

“No, I want you to give Sverl the list of names and identification numbers of those who escaped the station, and nothing else.”

Gost spent a little time chewing that over, then asked, “Why?”

“That is not your concern.”

“But it is,” Gost asserted. “Everything you do is of concern to my king and therefore to me. He perfectly understands the danger you represent, which has already been demonstrated by the readings I took from your U-signature upon your arrival here.”

“I represent no danger to the prador,” said Penny Royal.

“Your U-signature indicates temporal distortions, which are a danger to us all.”

“All U-signatures indicate temporal distortions.”

“This is a matter of magnitude, as you well know,” said Gost. “And it is precisely because of this kind of dangerous meddling that I need a reason to allow you to leave this place.”

Ah fuck, thought Blite. The whole conversation had been going so swimmingly, but unless Penny Royal came up with something, it looked as if they were about to be creamed.

“I have sent you the data I promised,” said Penny Royal, “and ask again that you do not give Sverl the exact location of Room 101 but do provide that list.”

“I am still waiting for that reason,” said Gost.

“They’re moving to surround us,” said Brond, “and one of them just deployed something that looks suspiciously like a Polity USER.”

Just to make sure we don’t jump away, thought Blite, now gazing at the screen view Brond called up of some object, almost like the carriage of a train, issuing from a port in the side of one of those vessels.

“Penny Royal’s up to—”

The Black Rose surged under fusion drive, the air turning amber about them in response and freezing them in position. The USER out there exploded, even as another surge passed through the ship, the one taking them into U-space.

An eye-blink later, they were in another part of the Feeding Frenzy, low over that sulphurous world. Here they spotted another of the King’s Guard ships floating before them against the pastel canvas of the gas cloud. A further eye-blink, and the back end of that ship exploded, jerking it round and hurling out a cloud of burning debris. Gost, whose image had remained in its frame, staggered out of view for a moment, then cam-tracking pulled him back. It was obvious he was aboard the ship they had apparently just fired upon.

“I estimate that it will take at least two minutes for your King’s Guard to arrive,” said Penny Royal. “It is interesting to speculate how the line into the future would change should the Prador Kingdom lose its head.”

What? Blite thought.

Gost remained motionless for a moment, then said calmly, “I should have known that you would detect my signal re-routing, and that I wasn’t with my fleet.”

“I am no danger to you unless threatened,” said Penny Royal. “The course I take is my own and the thread I sew here is to repair some things which are personal to me. Understand my capabilities, Gost, if I should still call you that. Do you think I would have come here leaving anything to chance? Do you think I am actually, completely, here?”

“I can do as you request,” said Gost, “and pass Sverl that list of factory station refugees. But Sverl is by no means stupid and will know my intent concerning him. We can’t allow him to survive, so if I appear to assist, he will wonder why I am doing so.”

“Be as convincing as you can,” said the black AI, “but in the end it doesn’t matter. When Sverl has that list he will react precisely as I want him to.”

“Very well, I will pass it on.”

“Good,” said Penny Royal, and a moment later the Black Rose submerged itself in U-space, taking it beyond reach.

Blite let out a tight breath.

“That Gost—” Greer began.

“—was the prador king,” Blite completed.

TRENT

Trent’s return to consciousness within the shell people’s holding area was abrupt and painful. His body ached from head to foot. He clamped down on immediate nausea but failed to suppress it, turned his head to one side and vomited.

“Trent Sobel,” said a voice.

He was sitting in a chair but couldn’t move his arms. Peering down with slowly clearing vision, he saw that his captors had secured them with straps. And, on trying to shift his legs, he felt them likewise bound. Ahead of him was a dais, with some shape upon it. He guessed this was Taiken, the shell people’s apparent leader, and now checked his surroundings. He was in one of those structures he had seen earlier—a building erected out of sheets of plasmel taken from a roll, then hardened to the required shape. The room was circular and domed, with doorways all around built much wider than would be required for the human form. Standing in one of these doorways was a child, a boy of no more than ten solstan years. He wore only a pair of shorts and looked numb, pale and sickly. His right arm was an armoured limb terminating in a claw, while he had a prador manipulatory limb folded against his torso. Surgery must have been recent, as highlighted by the angry red blush around the limb attachment points, and by the white thread scars, of the kind usually left by an old military autodoc, all over his misshapen torso.

Children—really?

While Trent watched, a woman came up behind the child and took up his human hand. Trent went rigid.

Genève?

The woman appeared haunted, until she looked up and met his gaze, then she seemed briefly puzzled. No, she wasn’t Trent’s dead sister. The only similarity was her cropped blonde hair, diminutive form and black eye-shadow and lipstick, if not cosmetically dyed skin. She began to lead the boy away, shooting Trent one last hopeless glance. Trying to ignore the unfamiliar feeling in his chest, Trent began working against the straps. They were a form of translucent plastic in which he could see embedded wires, so they were probably unbreakable, even with his heavy-worlder strength. But the chair, made of pressed fibre, didn’t look so strong.

“That was my son,” said Taiken.

Was the woman Taiken’s wife, and not worth a mention? Trent focused his attention on the dais, now able to see clearly the figure squatting there. Taiken was just about as far along in his transformation as Trent had ever seen in a shellman. He squatted on prador legs issuing from under a prador carapace. Beneath this, as the shellman rose a little to wave one claw towards the doorway, Trent glimpsed the vague shape of a human torso spread out like a specimen on a board. The greatly extended neck from this curved up through the carapace to the shell-enclosed head on the upper side. Mandibles grated before the remains of a human face—its lower jaw missing and just a wide gullet there below where the nose had been removed. Palp eyes issued from the top of the enclosing shell, but they looked prosthetic—false.

“With him the transformation will be complete and without error,” Taiken added.

Trent winced at the thought, then was baffled as to why.

The shellman stank. The smells of decaying human and piscine bodies, and shit and urine, permeated this chamber, which, Trent now realized, resembled a father-captain’s sanctum, even down to the array of hexagonal screens behind Taiken. Trent glimpsed something scuttling across one side of the room and his flesh crawled. He really didn’t need ship lice about when he couldn’t move. Then he remembered how clean the other parts of Sverl’s ship had been and how he had been surprised on seeing no lice there, only Polity cleanbots.

“It is time at last for all my children to achieve the perfection I am only days away from reaching,” said Taiken.

Trent flinched, thinking about the child he’d just seen, and the frightened human woman who caused a hitch in his chest. He remembered the shellwoman who had bagged him on the way into this place, how she had said, “I am to take you to Father,” and realized he’d just landed up to his neck in it again. So this shellman, this amalgam of human and prador with his decaying grafts, the pus leaking out of his joints and the probability that he had two immune systems trying to attack each other, was only days away from achieving perfection? Ah, Trent now felt something cracking under his right forearm, and the chair leg they had bound his right thigh to felt looser, as it parted from some strut behind.

“You understand,” Taiken continued. “You were with Isobel and you saw her achieve her form of perfection. You have the insight we need.”

Yeah, Trent was with Isobel as she changed into a hooder. And one thing he definitely knew was that sometimes the human mind couldn’t adapt or keep up—it broke instead.

“And I would like you to join us, Trent Sobel.”

Not in your wildest, you fucking lunatic . . . But was that the right thing to say just now? No, best to play along at least until his arms and legs were free.

Trent nodded thoughtfully. “This sounds interesting. Of course, I admire the prador and everything about them, and understand what you are trying to achieve. But I would need to know more. I also have to wonder why you found it necessary to bind me like this.”

“What more do you need to know?” Taiken asked. “And you are bound because you are a dangerous man. You are about to take the first step along our road, whether willingly or not.”

Now the shellwoman stepped into view, pushing a pedestal-mounted autodoc up beside Trent’s chair. While he watched, she detached something from just below the doc. Trent recognized two items: the specially sealed container for a nano-package, and the skin diffuser into which she plugged it.

“I did say that I need to know more,” said Trent reasonably.

“You will know more as you begin to grow your carapace,” said Taiken. “In the act of becoming comes transcendence.”

The guy was out there with the fairies and it was time to act. Trent heaved against his bonds, hard, with all his limbs. The chair came apart underneath him and collapsed. He rolled, ripping himself away from its broken parts and, still tangled in the straps, dived for the autodoc. He grabbed the pedestal and managed to get partially to his feet, hauling the device up and slamming it straight into the chest of the woman. He heard her carapace crack and, issuing a phlegmy bubbling sound, she went down on her backside. He stared at her, feeling sick, because he hadn’t meant to hit her so hard. Then other shell people, who he had known were standing behind, were on him.

He swung the autodoc into a human head sticking up ridiculously from a disc-shaped carapace, heard a neck break, the head now tilted to one side. Such a blow should have paralysed a human, but this creature just ran off to one side as if still under the control of his prador parts. Trent was suffused with horror at what he had just done. What the hell was the matter with him? This was a fight for survival and he couldn’t keep reacting like this. Mainly to rid himself of the lethal weapon, Trent threw the doc at another of them who was raising a pepper-pot stun gun in its one human hand. The gun went skittering and the autodoc crashed to the floor. A claw closed on his left bicep. He grabbed it with his right hand and pulled, hard, tearing it from its socket, a foul yellow spray hitting his face.

Oh please no . . .

He stumbled away, cringing inside, then fell over fragments of chair still attached to his legs, and another claw crashed down on the back of his neck. The flash of a stunner prod numbed his right arm. He drove his left fist up and felt something break under it, retracted his fist as if he had hurt it and curled it against his chest. Then blow after blow rained down on him and a claw closed around his neck. He briefly lost consciousness, then came to, feeling the shellmen binding his arms behind his back and tying further straps around his legs.

“With the others,” said Taiken.

Next, they dragged him along the floor by his jacket collar, shell people all around him, the woman walking beside him holding an armoured hand against her chest. She was coughing, occasionally spitting out gobbets of black jelly. He was glad she was alive and hoped the damage wasn’t permanent.

“He’s . . . nuts,” Trent managed, not sure for a moment if he was referring to Taiken or himself.

“Father . . .” she replied.

“Why the fuck . . . you listen to him?”

“We must obey.”

At length they threw him into a cage, slamming a barred door closed behind him. There were other people here—normal Polity humans, if such a description could be apt. A man walked over, pulled out of his pocket a device Trent recognized as a micro-shear. The man stooped and worked on Trent’s bonds, finally freeing him. Trent heaved himself over, spat out blood and a fragment of tooth and sat upright. He looked round at the people—four of them—then paused to focus on an object sitting just outside the cage. A huge spherical glass bottle sat in a metal framework. Perpetual slithering movement filled it.

“Spatterjay leeches,” he muttered, then turned to the man who had freed him. “It makes no sense,” he continued, “are they all crazy?”

“That’s not a term I like,” said the man, wincing.

“Oh yeah?” said Trent, puzzled.

“I take it you received your offer from Taiken to join them.” The man squatted down beside him.

“Yeah, I did. The man’s a loon. Why do they listen to him?” Trent knew he was ranting, but he just wanted to talk, just wanted to think about anything other than his own recent reactions to violence.

The man grimaced, probably as offended by “loon” as he had been by “crazy.” “Because they have no choice,” said the man. “They could not overcome their internal conflicts in time. Consider what they have been trying to achieve and what the end result should be.”

“All of them looking like crabs?”

“Yes, but more than that.” The man turned off his micro-shear and, as he pocketed it, Trent watched where it went and thought about what use he could make of it. Especially on the lock of that door behind. “Taiken has always been their leader and has always, because of his mental aberrations, wanted to be a prador. But not just any prador. He didn’t want to be a first- or second-child but a father-captain—with his children utterly loyal and obedient.”

“I saw one of his kids . . .” said Trent.

“The two children, are they okay? I worry about the damage . . .”

“Not really . . . But even others called him father.”

“All the adaptogenic drugs, the nano-packages, the surgical material and the tank-grown prador organic materials are sourced from the same prador genome and they all come through Taiken. The people who used them donned their own chains because Taiken retained certain items for himself only: he had father-captain pheromone organs surgically implanted inside him.”

“Pheromonal control,” said Trent, getting it at once.

“He didn’t use this method of control on the Rock Pool, at least not much, because there were too many Polity watchers and too many normal humans about. He needed his people confined to one place, free of interference, in some enclave before he could assert full control. It’s a scenario that has been played out throughout history, generally in religious cults.” The man paused to wave a hand at his surroundings. “I don’t know if this is finally the right place to achieve his dream or whether he has become more delusional.”

“I’d go for the latter,” said Trent. “He’s insane.”

“Insane or otherwise,” said the man, frowning, “Taiken is now a father-captain and all the shell people here who used his products are now his children. They are enslaved to the pheromones he produces and are simply incapable of disobeying him.”

“Shit,” Trent muttered.

“And, as I understand it,” said the man, “Taiken intends to go all the way. He deliberately left his wife unchanged. He intends to use material from a different prador genome to convert her into a prador female.”

Horror climbed up out of Trent’s chest and closed his throat.

Redeem yourself, Penny Royal had said, and the first-child Bsorol had referred to that too. Trent remembered the words with incredible clarity and considered how, until now, there had been no opportunity. He also now realized that the black AI had crippled his ability to act, by cursing him with empathy.