12

 

SVERL

Sverl gazed at the snake drone locked in its clamps, and at the spine driven in through its mouth and deep into its body. Soon the data he required would be available, but he was still undecided about what to do with the drone next. His prador instinct was to obliterate the thing. However, his AI logic told him that it might yet be useful and was perhaps still part of Penny Royal’s plans. His human side remained undecided, agreeing in part with each of the others. He allowed a painful memory to arise for his inspection, recalling that during his encounter with this very drone, he hadn’t even seen it.

The battle had occurred some years after the attack on Factory Station Room 101 and over a small and lifeless Polity world. Sverl was then just getting used to his new dreadnought and had been enjoying carving up space stations abandoned by humans and AIs. Despite being unoccupied, the stations had been left with their weapons set on automatic. The Polity had also deserted a mining operation on the surface of that world and, if the AIs had been using their usual tactics in such a situation, he knew they had probably booby-trapped it.

The Polity had given up on this place since it wasn’t essential to their war effort. And the prador had no real interest in acquiring it. This was why the prador ships on this mission were newly minted ones, with the father-captains aboard just trying out some manoeuvres on the space station. It had been, in essence, a training exercise. And it had therefore been puzzling, what with the Polity having abandoned this place, to have five attack ships fly out of a deep shaft carved into one of the moons. They then launched themselves in a suicidal attack against Sverl and his comrades . . .

THE PRADOR/HUMAN WAR: SVERL

The wide armoured wedge of the space station, now displayed on half of Sverl’s array of screens, hurled up fusillades of railgun missiles from its upper face. It then fired particle beams through briefly opened gaps between the hardfields of its weakening defence. Sverl’s crew scaled their own hard-fields to block those beams. They then replied with beams of their own, as the space station again parted its fields to let missiles through. Those missiles eventually hit Sverl’s defences and exploded into plasma. Meanwhile, the rockets he had fired some hours earlier had rounded the planet, entered atmosphere and were now approaching low over a mountain range. Of course, with an AI or human crew aboard the station, this ploy wouldn’t have worked, but the automatics that had replaced them were particularly stupid.

Sverl turned his attention to the screens showing the approaching attack ships. They were accelerating, their formation loosening. Sverl’s comrades, aboard two other dreadnoughts and four destroyers, were now breaking off to meet the new threat. When these ships had appeared, Father-Captain Vlex, commanding this mission, immediately contacted the rest. He communicated that here was a chance to follow the king’s latest orders to the prador fleets. The war wasn’t going as well as predicted, what with the Polity bringing new weapons and tactics into play. So capturing Polity technology for study was a priority. Vlex wanted to capture attack ships. But Sverl wanted to finish off the space station.

“Full barrage in twenty seconds,” Sverl said, confirming an earlier order.

The missiles below were now accelerating up from the surface in two waves of six. The barrage from his ship commenced with railgun missiles pounding the station’s screens, and bright blue particle beams carving across them. Sverl checked a counter, watched it zero, then saw it thrown into black silhouette as the first wave of missiles struck the station’s defences. Now the station spewed burned-out field projectors from ejector ports, some even exploding directly through its hull. It was as he had thought when the station faced towards him when he arrived: its defence was directional. His second wave of attack struck; nearly all its missiles got through this time. The station bucked as the weapons flared, then dissolved in multiple explosions. Sverl immediately turned his ship; his manipulatory hands locked into saddle controls. Then, with a stab of one claw in a pit control, he fired up his fusion drive—its torch eating up any debris coming his way.

Moving out to join one flank of his fellow ships, Sverl saw the Polity craft coming straight in, breaking formation to go after all of the prador ships. He immediately realized something wasn’t right. Usually a group like this would focus their attack on a viable target—like one of the destroyers. They’d hit it with everything they had, while sowing space with EM chaff. Then, faced with three dreadnoughts, they’d U-jump away.

“Distribute EM mines,” he instructed.

A lone ship came directly towards him, releasing a fusillade of railgun missiles. Sverl didn’t need to order the intercepting hardfields and watched the whole attack wasted against their shielding. He anticipated some clever manoeuvre next, as would be expected from the kind of AI such a ship should contain. But instead the ship charged straight into the EM mines sown directly in its path. One of them detonated, too close to his own craft, the flash briefly knocking out cam images and causing outages even in Sverl’s sanctum aboard his dreadnought. When imagery returned, the Polity attack ship’s weapons and fusion drive had shut down as it hurtled on in, dead.

Sverl decided then that this had to be the Polity, in desperation, copying the prador and using attack ships as kamikazes. They had to contain some massive CTD explosives. Rapidly turning his ship to fling it aside on fusion drive, he put his hardfields out to their furthest extent. In the unlikely event that this wasn’t a kamikaze, he heeded the king’s new orders and fielded the ship in them rather than let it obliterate itself against them. He next caused it to decelerate in a long arc around his ship, expecting that detonation at any moment.

No detonation.

“Something odd about this,” said Vlex.

Sverl checked tactical data and saw that he and his comrades had captured all but one of the attack ships. The one demolished Polity craft had gone after a destroyer that was maintaining a close orbit around the world below. The prador ship killed it with an EM mine but didn’t have hardfields strong enough to slow it down, so it merely moved aside. The rising cloud of fire from the planet’s surface marked its crash site.

“I suggest we deep scan before bringing them aboard,” Vlex added.

Still holding the apparently dead vessel at a distance, Sverl probed it with his sensors and discovered at once that it contained no U-space drive. Updates from his fellows showed that all four remaining attack ships were without such drives. This accounted for them not fleeing but didn’t explain their other odd behaviour. He fired off a sensor probe next and tracked its rapid approach then deceleration down onto the attack ship. It thumped home on the hull and drove in exotic metal scythe legs. Scan results immediately began to pour in, revealing a fusion reactor in safe shutdown, as with the previous scan. But it also showed that it was of the usual Polity design and therefore incapable of exploding. The fusion drive, its electronic controls scrambled, had scrapped itself. The thing was radioactive but no real danger. The ship’s weapons cache was empty but for a few railgun missiles. There were no humans or human remains aboard. All the robots were dead, even including microbots and nanobots. In addition, its AI crystal was shattered. He couldn’t find anything too dense to probe or anything shielded that might be concealing something nasty. It was a puzzle.

“Biological attack,” said Vlex. “Check those remaining railgun missiles.”

Update from one of the other dreadnoughts—something had been found.

Sverl focused his sensor probe on the Polity missiles and detected only inert iron with a ceramal nose cone. He then ran a penetration program based on a previous seizure of Polity technology. It took an hour before the program found a chink in the chameleonware, and then that disguise unravelled. In the iron was a super-dense shield, capable of blocking the output of an EM mine. In the hollow interior resided a gyroscopic device that had turned the missile, so that the shield faced the exploding mine. This had prevented the EM mines they had used from crashing the chameleonware in the missile. Another device in the missile was using a diamond drill to steadily bore a small hole out to the exterior. The rest of the hollow contained a soup of organics.

“Got it,” said Sverl.

They spent a further five days checking the rest of the attack ships for anything else concealed under chameleonware and discovered further biological weapons—some even hidden in the fusion reactors. Sverl finally sent armoured second-children aboard his capture to isolate the weapons, for now it was essential to take them back to the Kingdom so prador biologists could design an antidote. His children then opened the ship to vacuum, closed it again and spent many hours spraying a standard bio-weapon sterilizer throughout. Using his saddle control, Sverl personally aimed and fired a cable grab. The exotic metal claw cut into the hull like the scythe legs of the probe, and Sverl hauled the ship in. He brought it into an empty hold, then through into a total-seal annex. There he secured it. He didn’t know then that such a precaution was too late, for the real biological weapon had hitched a ride on the armour of one of the second-children and was already aboard.

Sverl knew when it happened. They had just finished up with the world, destroying the remaining space stations and dropping a bomb on the factory complex. Safely ensconced within his sanctum, checking his ship’s status and readiness to leave, he had been surprised when his sanctum door malfunctioned. A circuit had blown, which opened it just the width of his claw. A short while later he felt a sudden horrible pain at the base of one of his legs, and a sudden atavistic fear. He did not comprehend his own alarm and its source in prador evolution, and had he but enquired of his children, he would have discovered that many of them had been experiencing both that pain and that fear too. He did not ask. Father-captains never asked after the health of their children. Shaking himself and still feeling a little spooked, he traced the blown circuit, then the fault that had stopped the backup system kicking in. With the door closed again, his fear faded.

Sverl only learned later that Vlex had had a similar experience, as had the father-captain of the other dreadnought that had taken onboard one of the Polity attack ships. All three dreadnoughts had also developed one other mechanical fault, different in each case. Sverl’s ship had, for no immediately traceable reason, opened and closed an airlock. Vlex’s ship, when it was finally sterilized, was found to have inadvertently fired off a probe before it dropped into U-space. The other captain’s ship, again for no apparent reason, dumped the contents of a water tank out into vacuum.

They headed back to the Kingdom with their captures and during that journey, Sverl got lucky, insomuch as he found out what had really come aboard. He could therefore take steps to counter it. Like all father-captains, his lack of regard for his children was vicious. During the journey, his main first-child began to show immunity to the chemical suppression of his adulthood. Sverl summoned him to his sanctum, where a hemisphere surgical telefactor awaited. He’d also brought a brain case in which to install the first-child’s ganglion—which was destined to control an armoured ground-assault vehicle.

The child came, reluctantly, its legs quivering. Still possessing his own claws and much mobility, Sverl enjoyed an hour with the child, tearing off its legs and claws. But he was surprised and disappointed at its lack of resistance and how quickly it weakened. He then quickly used a circular saw to cut open its carapace. He had intended to dine on some of the living organs before the first-child showed signs of weakening. However, he now decided to use the telefactor to remove its ganglion at once, before it died. What he found when he opened its shell sent him staggering away in horror.

Something had injected parasite eggs into the first-child, which had hatched out into their juvenile form. The short translucent worms were feeding inside, chewing and digesting connective tissue and depositing a chalky substitute in its place. Sverl did not know what they were, but his fear and horror drove him to research. He soon identified his find and knew that the juvenile worms were at that point in their development where they were about to start dividing, penetrating the first-child’s gut and then exiting via its rectum. They would then feed on ship lice until they grew to adult form and mated, moving on to infect other prador. Meanwhile the first-child would steadily weaken as the expanding population inside it moved from connective tissue to muscle. Left finally immobile, it would die as the parasites progressed to their final repast on its major organs, before departing an empty shell.

Sverl understood at once what had happened. This bio-horror had been the real weapon those otherwise empty attack ships had contained. The others had been concealed just enough to be believable. Almost certainly, some sort of assassin drone had deployed the parasite. It had blown the circuit of his sanctum door control, and the pain he had experienced had been it actually injecting parasite eggs. And, checking ship’s logs, Sverl realized that the airlock malfunction had been the assassin drone departing.

Sverl considered his options while completely failing to consider the worms that had begun to grow inside him. He knew that upon his imminent arrival in the Kingdom he would be dead if his fellow prador did not see him countering this threat. He also prepared a report on his situation, and the drastic action he was taking.

He ordered a party of second-children to move twenty iron-burner mines to a hold and remain there with them. Then he ordered the rest of his crew, his children, to that same hold. He sealed all the exits, and next sent his small but growing collection of war drones out of their cache to them, just in case. Then, the moment his dreadnought surfaced into the real in the Kingdom, he sent the detonation code. The mines fired up, super-compressed oxygen and hydrocarbons burning slowly but raising the hold temperature quickly to four thousand degrees. The children barely had time to run and pile themselves up at the firmly sealed doors. By the time the fires went out, nothing remained but brittle chunks of charred carapace. He opened the space doors and the ensuing explosive decompression blew most of the mess out into vacuum.

Next, Sverl completely isolated his sanctum and instituted a bio-attack protocol. Airlocks and space doors opened to vacuum all around his ship, blowing out its internal atmosphere. When the doors closed, canisters of highly toxic and acidic gas flooded everything but his sanctum. By now, prador Command was desperately trying to get in contact, demanding a response. The destroyers were all responding, but none of them had taken aboard attack ships. The other two dreadnoughts were just dead and adrift. Sverl sent his report and the response was swift—dreadnoughts moving in to bracket him, weapons doubtless ready to fire.

“This is not new,” one of the surrounding father-captains told him, and sent data on other similar attacks. He gazed upon captured images of the assassin drones that had done this and shuddered to the core of his being. Studying further reports, he understood that his fellows would not destroy his ship, because they could not waste such a valuable piece of hardware. However, they would not help him either. He was in quarantine until he dealt with this, as had some other father-captains. If he did not, when he finally expired, armoured prador would come aboard to sterilize his ship fully in readiness for another captain.

After studying the data from father-captains who had survived, Sverl sent new orders to his war drones and watched them set out through his ship. They were scanning for certain organics and using lasers to incinerate parasite encystments in living quarters, food supplies and water tanks. He next focused on his two females in their mating pool and regretfully routed the full output from a fusion reactor through superconducting cables to the heat grids. By the time he picked up a laser cutter from his tool cache, fired it up, set it to wide beam and incinerated the remains of his first-child, the water in their pool was boiling. By the time he had searched his own sanctum and burned up the three flattened egg-shapes of parasite encystments, the females were dead and coming apart, while superheated steam was ejecting from their pool, straight out through a port in the side of his ship.

Sverl returned to the data and set up the long series of sterilizations, atmosphere ejections, drone sweeps and the robotic dismantling of equipment to clean it inside. He also ejected and incinerated other equipment he could never classify as clean. This would take many months, but he would need many months to recover. He was now feeling weak and ill. Pus was leaking from his joint sockets, he kept coughing out green slime from his lung and one of his palp eyes was going blind. And he finally admitted to himself what he had long been avoiding: those things were inside him and he had to get them out. He ordered one of his war drones to collect another iron-burner and place it in the smaller abode that his first-child had occupied. The ensuing burn ensured nothing remained alive in there.

Sverl next reluctantly inspected the program those other captains had run through their surgical telefactors, and loaded it to his own. The telefactor returned to its niche to load with extra supplies, then came out again, followed by two secondary surgical robots resembling brass ship lice. Shortly after them came a grav-sled piled with blood and chyme bottles, cylinders of artificial carapace mix, collagen-foam tanks and dehydrated artificial muscle. They came with hundreds of yards of tubing and a big armour-glass disposal tank.

Opening up his sanctum, Sverl headed out and down to the now burned-out and sterile quarters. He settled himself in the middle of the space with the controls of the telefactor before him and stared at them for a long while, utterly reluctant to start. However, he finally forced himself to reach out with one claw and stab it into a pit control to set the program running. The motivator was the definite feeling of something moving about under his shell.

The telefactor slowly revolved as Sverl moved back and settled on the burned floor. It extended a drill on one of its multiple limbs and drove it in beside one of Sverl’s mandibles as one of the secondary robots unreeled spare tubing. The factor then worked round him, making more and more holes, and began inserting tubes, cutting all the while. The pain grew steadily, ramped up with the application of a carapace saw. It also died in places where nerve blocks went in. Sverl issued a bubbling scream as the factor folded back a large section of his main shell, but the agony waned as electricity crackled and paralysis spread through him. He could not stop it now. He felt the drone of a cutter behind his visual turret before it tipped over so he was looking into his own gullet—a view usually impossible for a prador. He smelled burning, wanted to scream again but couldn’t, then his usual view returned as the telefactor tipped his turret back into place.

Now he saw one of the secondary robots dragging one of the worms away and dropping it into the disposal vessel. He saw pieces of his carapace lying on the floor, their insides etched with worm burrows. The other secondary robot began collecting these and dropping them in the vessel too. Despite nerve blocking and a cornucopia of prador painkillers, Sverl lost himself in agony when the factor extracted a great mass of worm-eaten muscle. Unconsciousness, something humans experienced, was not possible for his kind, but the extreme pain did kill coherent thought. He came back to some comprehension of his surroundings some time later, to see a second disposal vessel in place, the other one now full. Agony took him again as the factor removed one of his claws.

And so it went on . . . and on . . .

Sverl finally began to get some intimation that the surgery was ending when he saw the dehydrated muscle being hydrated in a long tray and heard the hissing of a collagen-foam gun. His entire body felt like a raw wound and the pain stayed at a point that seemed just beyond his tolerance, but which he helplessly endured nevertheless. One plus point was that vision had returned to his blind eye and some of the paralysis was receding, so that he could move both palp eyes. He looked down to see his claw, pulled out from his body on stretched tendons, veins and nerves opened up. Artificial muscle was being woven in to replace what had been extracted, and he finally saw that claw go back into place—that smell of carapace glue was the best thing ever.

More glue and then the sound of a shell welder, a mixing drum turning to make replacement carapace. Sverl began to come fully back to himself and could now think clearly enough to know that the program was ending. However, he lost concentration and it was some time before he realized that all the machines were now stationary around him.

Sverl stood, shakily. He felt terrible: even slow movement was agony and seemed to tear things inside him. He knew that if he moved any faster and exerted any effort at all, then something critical would break.

But it was all over. All he needed to do now was recover. He would have to request food supplies from prador in the other ships, since he had incinerated all his own. He needed to eat now, convalesce, build up his strength, barter for replacement females, rebuild his family . . .

But the worst was over.

Or so he thought.

The Sverl of the present turned away from the immobile assassin drone and walked over to one of his work surfaces. There, he selected a metal collar packed with esoteric tech. He would ignore the prador in him for now and not find some ugly end for Riss. He would, however, be all prador if the drone tried anything.

SPEAR

In my mind’s eye, I saw the Jacob accelerate away from Factory Station Room 101. It was leaking white-hot smoke from burned-out hardfield projectors and from the many holes punched through its hull as it dodged missiles and the sweep of energy weapons. Crippled and burning ships tumbled through vacuum all around it, newborn minds being snuffed out in the virtual like embers tossed into a pool. I gazed through the Jacob’s sensors and could see the salmon-pink hypergiant sun that Room 101 was now orbiting. Also open to me was the entire reach of the surrounding complex planetary system, which lay beyond human vision. I saw a red dwarf orbiting the hypergiant and a gas giant that once a millennium took a figure-of-eight course. I gazed upon an immense asteroid belt formed mainly of CO₂ and nitrogen ice, and saw this was currently being disturbed. A small black hole was punching through it on its fast orbit around the hypergiant. And I saw green-belt worlds, with the evidence etched on their faces that the Jain civilization had been here.

“Got it,” said a satisfied voice.

The galactic coordinates were clear in my mind as finally, amazingly, the Jacob managed to engage its U-jump engine. But who had spoken? And what had that individual found? I refocused my attention inside the ship, where the mantis and I were crammed. Along with other drones, we had ended up in a scrapyard mass inside the attack ship’s hold. I felt claustrophobic yet was simultaneously aware of clear space all around me. How could this be? It seemed dimensionally distorted—and what the hell was that?

The equally distorted prador loomed over me, mandibles grinding. Room 101 had forged me to kill such creatures, but I had not yet managed to perform this task. However, the instinct was there inside me, as deep rooted as in any organic being. Even though I had no eggs, I flipped myself under the prador ready to drive my ovipositor up into its underside . . . and fell flat on my face.

“Thorvald,” said the prador first-child Bsectil, looking down at me. “Thorvald Spear.”

I rolled over and tried to flip my ovipositor up again, but instead I found myself gazing up at a pair of booted feet as Bsectil backed away.

“What are you doing?” the first-child asked curiously.

I had no parasite eggs loaded but my knowledge of prador physiology was the best it could be. I could certainly mess up a few nerve nexuses with my ovipositor, which should leave it paralysed. Then I could make mincemeat of its major ganglion. I squirmed along the floor after it, but the movement felt strangely alien and wrong. Something was awry with my grav and my body. I must have been damaged in some—

“Sverl said you would feel some confusion at first,” Bsectil observed.

Sverl.

It was Sverl who’d said got it in my head. And, remembering him, I found the dawning reality now facing me somewhat stranger than the one I had just experienced. I stopped squirming across the floor after Bsectil, rolled over and sat up. I had to use my stomach muscles to do so, because I’d temporarily forgotten how to use my arms. I knew at once what had happened. Sverl had penetrated Riss’s memories using Penny Royal’s spine, and my connection to the spine had dragged me into that replay. But that didn’t stop me feeling intensely embarrassed. Finally remembering how to use my arms, I pushed against the floor and stood up.

“So the replay worked. Sverl now knows the location of Room 101,” I said.

“He does,” said Bsectil. “And after one further stop we will be heading straight there.”

I checked the activity back at my ship and saw two second-children lowering Flute’s case from the hole in the side, power supply attached. I checked the channel that connected me to my ship mind, thankfully now devoid of fizzing.

“Flute?”

“I am dead,” the mind replied.

“What do you mean?” I asked, but no reply was forthcoming.

“Do you now wish to see Trent Sobel?” Bsectil asked.

“Yes, why not?”

Bsectil led off again, out of the hold and through the corridors of the ship. During the journey, which lasted a good half-hour, I fully recovered my humanity and was able to separate Riss’s memories out of my mind. I also began to get more of a sense of the sheer scale of this dreadnought, and it occurred to me to wonder why the prador had never used drop-shafts in their ships. The creatures were, after all, much better adapted than humans to such a form of transport. Finally, we reached the area where Sverl had housed the shell people.

“I will leave you here,” said Bsectil, as the door parted.

“I’d rather you didn’t.”

“You will be safe, so my father says,” said the first-child, turning away and moving off.

I took him at his word and entered, the door closing behind me. I immediately smelled smoke and saw a pillar of it rising from the encampment ahead. As I walked towards this, I saw a shellman lying on the ground, prador limbs torn away and his human throat opened. There were also figures milling aimlessly around the burning building from which the smoke was rising. A radically altered human shambled over to me—a shellwoman who had retained her human form but was armoured head to foot. And she just stopped, facing me. She looked dull and confused.

“Father?” she said, then emitted a strange grating sound from her throat.

I gazed across at the others. They all seemed just as disoriented but, while I watched, two shellmen squared off and started snapping at each other with their claws.

“Give it,” said the shellwoman.

I wasn’t sure how to respond.

“Over here,” called a voice.

I glanced across to see a catadapt leaning out from behind another building.

“Just ignore her and walk over here,” she added. “Nice and calm.”

I turned and did as bid, noting the two fighting shellmen losing interest in each other mid-fight and just wandering off. Now focusing back on the catadapt, I paused, glanced down at my nascuff. I realized I hadn’t reset it since my rather torrid encounter with Gloria Markham on Masada. I looked at the catadapt again. She was gorgeous. My inner reptile brain was laughing and pointing out how I didn’t see that one coming.

“What the hell is going on here?” I asked the catadapt as I reached her.

“Wait a minute.” She raised one hand—one strong, tanned and quite beautiful hand, cat claws protruding. In the other hand, she held a pepper-pot stunner, which she aimed over my shoulder.

I turned. The shellwoman was close, staring at me intently as if trying to figure something out. After a moment, she winced in pain and then thumped the palm of her armoured hand against her head. When she lowered her hand she looked dull again, distracted. Then she turned and ambled off.

“Come on,” said the catadapt. “I’ll leave the explanations to Trent.”

“Sure,” I said, admiring the shape of her back and then her arse as she turned and led off. Then I sighed, followed, and tried to think like an adult rather than a hormonal teenager. However, the woman ahead was a problem. In the Polity, even in my years before and during the war, it was possible to make yourself into any shape you chose. Most people, of course, chose to be beautiful. It was something one enjoyed over the passing decades and eventually became inured to. The basis of physical attraction then slid into another more complicated realm, based on experiences and minutiae difficult to define. Was my reaction to this woman somehow connected to my experience with Sheil Glasser, soon after I awoke from my memplant? She had been a catadapt, after all. No, it wasn’t that—I just didn’t know what it was. This woman was beautiful—who wasn’t?—but something about her just grabbed me by the throat.

She led me through the encampment, where similar scenes to the ones I’d just witnessed were playing out. Forcing a retreat to a colder portion of my mind, I studied all those around me and remembered Sverl’s words. I saw the shell people suffering under ill-made transformations that would eventually kill them, just like Vrit—the shellman from whom I had bought Flute. I saw also that there had been fighting because scattered around there lay dismembered corpses. One of these was the body of a normal man, his severed head lying a few yards away.

The catadapt gestured at it. “He thought he would do better alone.”

“That didn’t work out, I take it,” I commented.

“It didn’t work out for two others either, who stayed in the cage where we’d all been kept. Though Rider Cole survived.” She looked at me, then, really looked at me. “I suspect Trent knocking him out saved his life.”

It always annoyed me when someone made an assumption about what I might know, especially when I really didn’t have the facts. Was she trying to establish a connection with me? In irritation, I dismissed the thought and decided not to make any more enquiries.

The catadapt finally brought me to a larger central building and rapped on a door.

“Sepia,” she said. It sounded like a password, but obviously wasn’t.

A frightened-looking woman with cropped blonde hair opened the door, then quickly closed it behind us as the catadapt led me through. I found Trent Sobel sitting at a console in some ersatz captain’s sanctum, looking tired and utterly defeated. Glancing round, I watched the cata-dapt heading off with the other woman. So the catadapt’s name was Sepia.

“Thorvald Spear,” said Trent, standing as I approached. “I should kill you.” He shrugged, shook his head, then reached up to finger that earring of his.

“Trent Sobel,” I said, “I find you in an odd situation, and I was told that you might need my help.”

He glanced to what I had first taken to be some piece of wrecked equipment, beside the dais at the centre of the sanctum. I realized I was seeing a large skeletal Golem, with some kind of organic-looking tech wrapped around it. It was sitting on the floor with its head bent down between its knees. I took a steady breath. Time to really focus . . .

“Taiken took control of the shell people in the same way a father-captain controls his children,” Trent explained. “I had that—” he pointed at the Golem “—kill Taiken because it was our only option. The man wanted us to either become shellmen or face thralling. Taiken’s death released the shell people from hormonal control, but now they’re behaving like prador adolescents after the death of their father and beginning to kill each other.”

“And why do you care?” I asked, cold now.

“It seems my path to redemption is here,” he said.

“Redemption?”

He stood up. “Come with me.”

He led me into a small room provided with a bed, a table, some chairs and jury-rigged computing. It looked recently outfitted—clearly Trent’s little hideaway. He found a bottle of whisky and two glasses and brought them over.

“Taiken’s stock,” he explained, “though I wonder how many years it has been since he enjoyed it.” He sat and poured. I joined him, and remembered sharing whisky with him and his partner aboard the Moray Firth—the glasses tainted with the prions I had later used to shut down their nervous systems.

He explained how Penny Royal had saved him aboard the wreck of that vessel and the AI’s subsequent instruction. He then related the rest of his story, and I began to understand Sverl’s attitude to the black AI’s manipulations. We were just pieces in some complex puzzle. But to what purpose? I had no idea of the overall shape, but felt a strong intimation that this jigsaw of human lives and deaths was the only kind of game that would keep the AI sufficiently interested, engaged. My own part in it remained unclear. On Masada, Penny Royal had provided me with intimate evidence of its own guilt, so my role seemed to be that of executioner. However, on my route to some final encounter with the AI, it seemed I must remain engaged in the game.

“So you want to help the shell people,” I suggested.

“I do now.”

“Because now you are no longer a villain?”

“Because empathy is a painful gift.”

“A conscience is too.”

“I guess.” He sipped his whisky.

“Sverl,” I said, communicating through my aug, “I’m going to need equipment and access to some heavy processing.”

“If you could elaborate . . .” Sverl replied.

I put together a shopping list in my aug and transmitted it. Some of the items were very new and it seemed unlikely Sverl would have them, but it was worth a try. Just half a second later, the list came back, most of the items crossed out.

“I can provide some of the equipment, but I am sending Riss,” said Sverl. “As for the processing, that has been available to you since you acquired your destroyer, with additional functionality since I allowed you to connect into my system.”

“And you’re sending Riss?” I questioned, not inspecting too closely what he meant by that “available processing.”

“Perhaps it is because I have been changed by Penny Royal itself, that I now see the patterns it follows,” said Sverl. “You could not possibly get all the equipment you require up and running in time to be effectual. The shell people are beginning to kill each other even now. And in a short time, because they are not having the medical treatment they constantly require just to stay alive, they will all begin dying.”

“But why Riss?”

“The drone is part of the answer, and the other is one easily within your reach.”

“Why can’t you just tell me?”

“Because I don’t need to.”

Sverl stated the words with finality and when I tried getting in contact with him again, he blocked me. Instead, I concentrated on fully exploring my connection into the father-captain’s system. To Trent I said, “I can probably return many of these people to their base human format. Free them from prador pheromone control and thereby free you from that responsibility.”

“What?” he said, gaping at me.

“Physical damage can be reversed or repaired. We are, after all, dealing with some relatively primitive adaptations, grafts and alterations of body chemistry.”

Trent stared at me for a moment, then said, “Like you could reverse or repair what was happening to Isobel?”

“These are not one of Penny Royal’s transformations.”

He nodded, but he looked a bit less beaten now. I continued, “However, as Sverl just pointed out to me, that’s not our main problem. They are fighting even now and not keeping up with the constant interventions they need to keep themselves alive. So we have little time.” I paused. “We need something now.”

“What?”

“I’m thinking about it.”

By now, with the larger part of my mind and my augmentation, I was deep in Sverl’s computer system. I had made a place for myself and was there uploading stencil programs for the design of nano-machines, complex enzymes, adaptogens and the whole human toolbox of physical transformation at the microscopic and sub-microscopic levels. I had also discovered another body of work in there: Bsectil and Bsorol’s combined research. This looked into reversing the damage to them and the second-children caused by being chemically maintained in adolescence for so long. This work wasn’t barred to me, and I soon found stuff in there I could use.

“So how do we get started?” Trent asked.

“Taiken must have equipment here,” I said. “I’ll need to make some initial examinations and assessments.”

“I’ll show you.” Trent stood up, suddenly energized. I followed him as he moved from his sanctum to an annex containing a surgical theatre. As we entered, I caught myself looking round for any sign of Sepia.

“Will this do?” Trent asked.

It would do for examinations and surgery, and equipment was available for assembling bio-molecules and other organic items. It wasn’t the best, but then, according to Sverl, I didn’t need the best right now. I just wished I knew what the hell I was going to do.

“It’ll do until other equipment arrives,” I said, turning away and walking back out into the sanctum.

Just then, the frightened-looking woman came in through one of the doors, dragging a child behind her. After her came Sepia, armed with a stunner and looking like a warrior maid out of some VR fantasy to me.

“Trent,” said Sepia. “We might have a problem.” She backed away from the door, pointing her stunner towards it.

“I’m never a problem,” said a familiar voice.

Riss came through the door, squirming like a snake but a couple of feet above the floor. I noted that she now wore a collar about her neck, heavy ceramic with inset controls. Next, she lowered her ovipositor to the floor and seemed to balance on it while opening her black eye.

“We’re going to Station 101,” said the drone, with a hint of craziness in her voice that I didn’t like. “And you know what that means?”

“What does it mean, Riss?”

“Eggs!” she exclaimed. “I can get eggs!”

After living for a brief time in that snake skin, I now understood perfectly what she meant. And that made me like her crazy tone even less. I felt, just for a moment, as if the madness of Room 101 was already reaching out to us here. Perhaps it was my hormones.

“Oh good,” I said. “And apparently you are part of an answer I require.”

“Just tell me what to do,” said Riss, which was no help at all.

After a brief, embarrassed pause, Trent said, “Perhaps you can start here.”

I turned to see that the frightened woman was standing close to him, one hand possessively on his arm. He was pointing at the child, who could not have made the choice to have his arm removed and replaced by a claw.

“Yes,” I said, “that’s where I’ll start.”

CVORN

Eager to make the most of the new feelings rising within him, Cvorn wanted to reach his females. He watched impatiently as the first door of the water lock revolved into the wall, spilling fluid from the last time it had been used. The door seals in prador ships were never foolproof, because they had no need to be so. Prador could withstand large changes in atmospheric pressure and losses of air or, in this case, water. And they could easily obtain more from ice asteroids or comets. Cvorn peered at the water running into the gratings about his feet in irritation, but considered how the ship systems reclaimed it anyway. Analysing the feeling, in an attempt to divert his mind from other urges surging through his body, he realized he now disliked an inefficiency he had previously ignored. After fitting his aug, his thinking was tighter, more factual, and his awareness of shortfalls like this was growing. When he was done here, he would set his children and the ship’s robots to work to improve this type of thing.

When he was done here . . .

Once inside the water lock, he found the manual environmental controls, then tried to locate them via his aug through the ship’s system. Someone had disconnected them, which was odd—more work for his children and robots. Perhaps the problems with this lock were due to infrequent use—he was only using it because he wanted quick direct access to the pool rather than using the chamber above. Through his aug, he set the door behind him closing. As it grated home, circular hatches opened in the wall by his feet, water immediately gushing in. Cvorn hyperventilated in preparation. As a male prador, he could survive underwater for a long time and probably didn’t need the extra oxygen in his system. But underwater, it was not good if you had to untangle from a female quickly because you were running out of air—that was when the worst injuries occurred.

Next, he tried mentally to locate the automatics for the inner door, but they weren’t in the system either. The water rose quickly and he shivered when it reached his sensitive prongs and coitus clamp. Damn. He glanced at the environmental control, reached out with his claw and tapped the temperature up a little way, feeling further irritated when he noted how high the scale could go. This was not only inefficient but dangerous, because if that control was accidentally shifted up to its top sterilizing setting, the females would end up boiled alive in their pool.

The water rose up over his carapace and finally over his visual turret. But before it reached the ceiling of the water lock, an indicator rattled in the fluid to tell him he could open the inner door. He slammed his prosthetic claw against a large impact control on one wall. Such a large, heavy button here to operate the lock was understandable, because any prador here could be in such a state it might end up wrecking something less durable. However, he was finding he enjoyed the newly extended power offered by his aug to control his surroundings mentally. He decided he must do something about that impact control too.

The inner door opened at last into the murk of the mating pool and Cvorn propelled himself out, ready to swim over to the far side. On his previous viewing, he had seen that one of the females had separated herself from the others. The three other females had gathered in the middle around the feeding pillar. He hoped to get past them, and get on with his business before they detected him. However, he hadn’t taken his prosthetic legs and claws into account, for they immediately dragged him down.

He hit the bottom with a heavy crump that the other females would have certainly detected through the floor of the pool. He quickly headed to his left, sticking close to the wall in the hope of circumventing them. He could now just see the feeding pillar and the humped shapes gathered around it. They were all rising up on their legs and he could hear the harsh clatter of their powerful far-reaching mandibles through the water. He could also taste their readiness for mating and feel the skittering of their ovipositors against the floor. In fact, if he had just waited a little longer, they would have abandoned the pool for the chamber above, where it would have been much easier to hunt them down.

Soon he saw the isolated female ahead, but she was now moving away from the wall and quickly heading towards her companions. Cvorn swerved to intercept her, coming in from the side, and tried to close a claw on the edge of her carapace. She turned slightly as she fled, and one mandible shot out sideways, clanging against his claw and knocking it away. He’d forgotten that trick. It had, after all, been a long time.

The female now joined her three fellows, who all turned to face him. Cvorn halted and gazed at them, remembering how some of his contemporaries had surgically crippled their females by removing their mandibles. Others had ensured the females had guards affixed over their ovipositors, to prevent them being used as a weapon during mating. Still others had even had their females locked into body cages that prevented any movement at all, making mating a completely risk-free exercise. Cvorn, however, was of the old school. He understood the evolutionary imperative that made females so hostile towards the males that wanted to mate with them. It was because only the strongest, most aggressive and most resilient males should be able to reproduce. But that wasn’t why he preferred his females to be free-ranging. He’d tried confined or crippled females and it just wasn’t the same. Violent sex was much more satisfying.

Cvorn advanced, singling out the one to his left for his attention, then rushed for the gap between that one and the others. The nearest one to his right stabbed out her mandibles but Cvorn intercepted them with his claw, where they hit with a loud thump. Meanwhile, the one on his left shot out her mandibles in turn and tried to get a grip on two of his forelegs—trying to tear them off. Cvorn threw himself sideways to push into the gap, his excitement rising and his coitus clamp clattering against his body. The left female’s grip slid off the metal of his prosthetic legs, failing to tear them away, so firmly were they affixed to his body.

The female on the far right threw herself up over her companions. She folded her body, louse-like, and drove her ovipositor towards his visual turret. He knocked the thing down, but still it punched in at the base of one of his mandibles. The pain was terrible, but only increased his excitement. He axed his claw down into her underside, cracking ribs of carapace there, and she rolled away, issuing a stream of green blood. His target female now tried to turn her back end away from him, but he grabbed the edge of her carapace with his other claw and dragged her back, while slicing his legs down upon the eyes of the adjacent female. She retreated just a little, and he turned his upper shell towards her and rammed her, while still hanging on to his prospective mate. His target went over, onto her back, her legs rowing defensively. On the rebound, he swung round behind his mate and slammed his back end in.

His coitus clamp hit its receiving grooves and lodged firmly as he climbed up onto her back. He now closed his claws on her mandibles, wrapped his legs round her and pulled himself down tightly. She fought him as he heaved mightily, while the other two females, recovering, pounded him with their mandibles to try to dislodge him. The shield-like section of shell protecting the softness of her double vagina tore free, blood spilling into the water all round, the section hinging up on gristle. He jabbed his prongs in and out and in again and in a surge of ecstasy squirted his seed inside—the thumping of mandibles against his shell now going through him like throbs of pleasure. After a long dull and mindless moment, while he was only partially aware of the damage the females were doing to him, he rolled off and quickly moved away. He saw the female closing up that shell section, yellow cement quickly bubbling up to seal it into place. This had once been a necessary precaution, in an ocean full of parasites that would have attacked such a vulnerable spot.

Cvorn headed to the far wall, spying out a series of water-cleaning ports he should be able to use as claw holds to get himself back to the water lock. With his heavy prosthetics he had no chance of swimming up there. He noted blood leaking from his leg sockets, where the prosthetics mated with his natural body. He noted some grooves in his carapace and one or two cracks. He felt battered and his satisfaction with the mating was somewhat marred by its speed. As he reached up to the first cleaner port he remembered, far in the past, feeling the same dissatisfaction at the brevity of his matings. He decided he needed more practice. And, as he climbed, remembered thinking the same back then too.