“These others?” Sverl gestured with one claw to the other humans.
“A bit cramped—but I’ve had extra acceleration chairs fitted in the bridge.”
“We’re all going to be nice and cosy,” said another voice.
Sverl eyed the snake drone Riss, realizing he had been trying to ignore the thing. He then studied it on a deeper level and noted its attempts to free itself from the collar. No doubt, once outside Sverl’s dreadnought, Riss would eventually break out of the thing. Whether Sverl would then have to destroy the drone depended on what it did when free. If it came anywhere near him with that ovipositor, it would discover that Sverl’s prosthetics and internal bracing skeleton hid a multitude of sins.
“I will install myself now,” said Sverl, moving round the group to Bsectil and Bsorol, sending a coded transmission directly to their augs, “Join me when you’re done here—and bring your full kit.” For most prador, this would have meant armour and weapons, but for these two it meant more than that. Each of them had his own specialized tool kits as well as weapons. Each of them was somewhat more effective than the average armoured prador.
“The EMR pulse-gun?” suggested Bsorol.
“Of course,” Sverl replied. If the snake drone got uppity, it would quickly learn the error of its ways.
Rounding the nose of the ship, Sverl observed where a large section of hull had been folded out and fitted with a ramp leading into the interior. He clambered up this and entered the aforementioned annex, which backed onto the screen fabric-lined bridge, an arch open between. The area was without grav-plates, otherwise Bsorol and Bsectil would not have been able to fit inside too. Occupying the area still pulled down by the grav of the hold, Sverl found the specially made indentations in the floor into which he inserted his feet and secured himself. He opened himself up to his ship’s systems again and, despite his nervousness about relocating, found it made no difference to his control of his environment. That might change, however, should Cvorn arrive and force them to head for Room 101, while Sverl’s dreadnought deliberately tore itself apart behind them.
“Now we are coming to the crux,” said Spear, communicating via his aug.
“Yes,” Sverl replied.
“While we have avoided being destroyed by Cvorn, the vagueness of our quests has been cast much in shadow.”
“Yes.”
“We are either going to Room 101 in pursuit of Penny Royal—or at that AI’s behest. We’re pawns being moved into placed.”
“Yes.”
“Aren’t you uncomfortable with this?”
“No,” said Sverl, and he really meant it.
“I’m not uncomfortable with what we’re doing,” replied Spear, “though I am somewhat disturbed by a notion I cannot shake—that I am pursuing a set destiny. Sometimes it seems that everything I do resembles the actions of one with a religious faith.”
“But what are the alternatives?”
“Too numerous to list.”
“But they are all commonplace, prosaic.”
“And there you nail the heart of it.”
“We have just hours now,” said Sverl. “There is no turning aside and Cvorn is a driver of this. I wonder if that was his sum purposed.”
“And when his purpose is over?”
“Discarded, like a blunt screwdriver,” said Sverl. “I would bet that the series of events leading to his destruction are already in motion.”
“Let’s hope so.”
17
SPEAR
The massive space doors of the bay drew open, stretching between them the meniscus of a shimmershield—another example of the kind of technology not usually found aboard a prador ship. I gazed out through this thin veil into the heart of U-space and felt it was reaching in through my eyeballs in an attempt to liquidize my brain. I found myself down on my knees, with my eyes squeezed tightly shut. My fingers were digging into my eyelids as if some part of me had actually decided that the only option was to reach in and tear out my own eyes.
“Told you so,” said Riss.
Chunks of memory surfaced and coagulated into a whole. Others, victims of Penny Royal, had glimpsed this continuum unshielded. They had all survived it and their memories of it had been hazy, which was why I’d thought I could gaze upon it without ill effect. I understood then that the vagueness of their memories was due to the human brain being an inadequate recorder of what lay out there. It simply could not encompass something it had not evolved to cope with.
Yet, even as I understood this, I did begin to cope, sorting data in my mind, my aug and in the Penny Royal extension to my mind that lay inside my ship. I can only compare the experience to reading some text from a universe that was scattered with unknown words, but still, at least, managing to put them into context.
I staggered to my feet, turned and headed towards the open airlock of the destroyer, Riss sliding along drily beside me, and entered. I’d managed the whole of this without opening my eyes. And when I opened them, as the airlock sealed behind me and I stepped inside, everything possessed a shadow that stretched into that unknowable dimension.
“I don’t know why you did that,” said Riss.
I gazed at the snake drone and now it was transparent to me. I could see the shadowy extensions of its U-space communicator and other U-space hardware stretching out from some of its internal components. I could feel one of those extensions reaching out to me, and I could sense the tug of others reaching out to the spine.
“You don’t?” I asked. “Then perhaps you’re as empty as you say.”
Riss closed her black eye and moved on ahead of me, a little huffily, I thought.
On the bridge, Sepia, Trent Sobel and Rider Cole waited—not yet strapped into the three waiting acceleration chairs. These were crammed into a space between the bridge’s renewed horseshoe console and one screen wall. Sepia was still a distraction and I tried to ignore her, then worried about offending her. Glancing into the rear annex, I saw Sverl squatting with Bsorol and Bsectil on either side, propped horizontally against their father in a space too small for all three. The grav of the hold where the Lance rested was dragging them down. A moment later I felt my weight alter slightly then stabilize and the two first-children propelled themselves upwards to now hover above Sverl, who had obviously turned off the grav out there.
“I have also tried this viewing of U-space,” said Sverl. “My prador and human parts always react badly, but my AI component just accepts it as part of a reality that isn’t the linear one of organic evolution.”
“Me too,” said Sepia, “and I had a headache for three weeks, which only mental editing dispelled.”
“There can often be damage,” said Cole, eyeing her intently.
She shook her head in annoyance either at him, or at my stupidity, then stepped over to one of the chairs. She had to unstrap her laser carbine from her back before sitting, and placed it across her lap. Cole sat in the chair beside her, unrolled a computer scroll and began doing some complicated touch-work on it.
Trent just stood staring at the grey swirls in the screen fabric and said, “How long?”
“Minutes only,” I replied. Next, auging into ship’s systems, I changed the imagery to give a facsimile of the realspace our course was taking us through . . . if you made your calculations in a linear organically evolved manner. Stars sped past us, and in the screen fabric ahead, one grew steadily brighter. I could show no more than what was already in my ship’s astrogation files. Had that star ahead gone supernova, this facsimile wouldn’t show it. Nor would it show the position of Room 101, because that was something that Polity AIs had excised from all Polity files. I threw up some frames giving a countdown and realspace distance, then I occupied the acceleration chair positioned inside the horseshoe console. Trent eyed me for a moment then stepped over to the remaining chair beside Sepia and likewise made himself secure.
The sun ahead expanded and shaded to salmon pink and I now began to get some sense of this hyper
giant’s immensity. I contracted distances to bring the orbital red dwarf into view, a gas giant out beside it on its millennium-long figure-of-eight course. I saw the whole of the asteroid belt of CO2 and nitrogen ice, and put a frame over the small black hole now passing through it—leaving a swirl of shattered asteroids behind. The green-belt worlds were there too, quadrate patterns in their surfaces marking out the decaying foundations of an ancient and now long-dead civilization. Everything matched up to Riss’s memory, except Room 101, which the astrogation program had of course failed to include. We fell fast into this, past the red dwarf and the asteroid belt. The sun expanded to fill one screen wall, the truncation of distance perpetually adjusting. But of course none of this was real and, had I been able to gaze upon it all without computer assistance, my eyes would have burned out in a microsecond in a glare millions of times brighter than Sol.
Next, I felt the twisting around me, as reality cast U-space shadows into madness. With a crump I was sure I imagined, we surfaced into the real as if through some icy crust, and everything all around readjusted. Factory Station Room 101 was too small to be visible to human eyes at this distance. And, as I called it into being in a frame, I sank more into the aug perception of our surroundings through the ship’s sensors. Why, I wondered, was there always the need to translate things for limited human senses?
There lay Room 101: a giant Polity factory station utterly dwarfed by its immense surroundings. It was completely familiar to me. Its harmonica shape was that of so many other wartime factory stations, and Riss’s memories of it were still sharp in my mind. Still, seeing this eighty-mile-long object stirred my awe. As I continued to study it, I began to notice disparities between memory and fact. The station no longer possessed the clean lines it once had; it was lumpy, as if cancerous. Large areas of utter blackness looked like holes in its structure, but analysis revealed these were high-absorption solar leaves scaled across its skin. There were growths and incrustations on its hull and it truly looked like a wreck. Not the usual kind one would find out in vacuum, but the wreck of a ship under a sea. It seemed that the fauna and flora of surrounding waters had occupied Room 101, and it was sinking softly into decay.
“I’m taking my ship in closer,” said Sverl. “No need to hurry just yet.”
I felt the kick of the fusion drive, despite the active grav-plates on my bridge. The perspective slowly changed, but I kept a sharp eye on the data that was being steadily collected by the dreadnought’s sensors elsewhere in this system. And there, within just an hour of our arrival, another U-space signature. I immediately opened up a frame on it and expanded the thing into view, relaxing slightly when I saw a mere prador destroyer.
“Cvorn’s,” Sverl informed me.
It was almost half a system away, poised just out from the red dwarf, but I immediately surmised that Cvorn had sent it after one of the U-signatures. It was probably talking to him even now. Fretting about this as I watched the ship, it took me a moment to realize that something was going on there, because I could see distortion beyond the ship silhouetted by the red dwarf.
“Expand your frame,” Sverl told me.
I issued the mental instruction, now including the whole dwarf star, but could see nothing. I expanded it again then to see a cluster of bright objects in low orbit around the sun. Sensor data was vague for they had hidden themselves well close to the photosphere, but they became clearer as they accelerated out. I put a second frame over them and magnified, just in time to see lines scribing out from them, white against the red. A few seconds later Cvorn’s destroyer was blowing out hardfield projector debris and just a second after that, four intensely powerful particle beams hit it all at once. They just carved across it, splitting it like a peach, subsequent explosions blowing the two halves apart.
“I’m breaking my ship now,” Sverl replied. “Launch at once.”
With a thought, I brushed away docking clamps, but rested my hands on hand-imprinted ball controls in the console to set us moving. Light pressure on the left fired up the fusion engine, rumbling throughout the ship, and set it heading towards the shimmershield. About this, the space doors glared in the pink sunlight, with filtering set close to maximum. I could sense the hold behind burning in the fusion torch. The shimmershield then winked out and, in a blast of escaping air, and a cloud of debris left from my ship’s reconstruction, we fell out into the hot glare of the hypergiant. Even as we went, I applied to Sverl on another level and got data on those ships, and a closer view. They were King’s Guard ships.
Next, I took in the sight of Sverl’s dreadnought etched about its surface with lines of fire, jetting long flames and beginning to slide apart.
“Look to your defences,” said Sverl.
I was already as deep into the system as Flute had been. I therefore managed to throw up a hardfield behind us, at the very moment some titanic explosion went off on the other side of the dreadnought. Checking the weapons cache, I saw that Sverl had resupplied it. In addition, I began making selections. As the giant ship continued to come apart, I saw one of those segments targeted by multiple particle beams beginning to radiate and explosions like volcanic eruptions were appearing all over its surface. I ramped up acceleration to take us away, firing off two chaff shells behind, and then I saw that fleet of massive ships bearing down on us. They’d U-jumped from close to the sun, very accurately indeed.
“Let me into your system,” said Sverl. “We U-jump or we die.”
CVORN
Cvorn gazed up on his screens at the images the security drone was sending from his ship’s interior and just wished he could roll back time. He wished that, rather than sending Vrom off to hunt down Sfolk, he had instead summoned his first-child here. Vrom had obviously outlived his usefulness as a first-child but should have been recycled as a child-mind in a war drone shell. He had failed his mission to take down Sfolk and now it was too late. The screen image showed a steaming pile of severed limbs and claws and a main body divided into neat segments.
Panning round, the security drone took in the rest of the scene. Two of the second-children were still alive, though one of them, with its legs missing on one side and its visual turret smashed, was hardly worth salvaging, even though it could regrow its limbs, and the visual turret could be repaired. In the past, Cvorn would have considered this option, with his previously limited ability to produce replacements, but not now. Now, in the birthing tank aboard this ship, his own nymphs were steadily devouring the corpse of a reaverfish—his own fourth-children. Within a few years, he would have plenty of replacements.
The other surviving second-child did look easily salvageable. It was attempting to drag itself off the spike on which Sfolk had impaled it—the same spike Vrom had occupied earlier while Sfolk sliced him up with a carapace saw. This child had missed meeting the same fate when the rapid return of the security drone had curtailed Sfolk’s entertainment. Before the cam images Sfolk had been sending had cut off, Cvorn had watched it all.
“This is what I’m going to do to you,” Sfolk had said as he sliced off Vrom’s limbs, “though there will be refinements.” Vrom’s screaming and bubbling had gone on and on as Sfolk explained those refinements. The medical technology to extend Cvorn’s life, the dissolving of his prongs and coitus clamp in hydrofluoric acid and the cauterizing irons. There was also the final flourish of installing Cvorn’s major ganglion in a brain case, where it would endlessly re-experience the whole aug-recorded episode.
Sfolk, Cvorn decided, was obviously resourceful and smart. But he wasn’t quite smart enough to understand that he had just detailed what would happen to him if Cvorn captured him alive. However, that was unlikely, since Cvorn now intended to make no real attempt at such a capture—the order was kill on sight.
The second-child finally, with much scrabbling, made it to the top of the spike and fell off, landing on its back on the floor with a thud. It struggled there for a while, then finally righted itself by bashing its claws down and flipping over. I
t stood there shivering, foam dripping from its mandibles. The spike had penetrated between its arrays of manipulatory limbs, through its alimentary tract, inside the ring of its major ganglion and out through the top of its shell. Sfolk had known what he was doing—ensuring he wouldn’t cut any arteries or hit anything critical. The child would steadily recover—that recovery speeded up by Cvorn’s decision.
“You, child,” he said, “what’s your name?”
“Vlox, Father,” it replied.
As he used his aug to order another five security drones initiated, and gave them their orders, he said, “You will now come to Vrom’s quarters, where you will utilize his food supply. You are now my first-child.”
The title always came first. Within a very short time this child would begin to change, feeding on a first-child diet free of the chemical suppressants that had kept it as it was. However, it would still consume suppressants that would prevent it from attaining adulthood. It would rapidly build up a dense bulk of stored fat and would shed its shell. The underlying new shell would remain soft for a few months as it rapidly converted that fat into muscle and other body tissues and grew in size. During this process, its injuries would heal quickly.
“But Sfolk, Father?” the new first-child enquired.
“Any sabotage he tries, I will detect at once,” said Cvorn, more confidently than he felt. “If he tries to reach a shuttle or other craft to escape when we next surface into the real, I will detect that too.” In reality, Cvorn doubted Sfolk would try that. Inside the ship, he was safer than he would be on the outside, where Cvorn could fry him with major weapons.
Cvorn paused for a moment, checked the ship’s manifest and found another four security drones in storage. He released them and gave them the same orders as the others. That was all of them and surely enough to keep Sfolk on the run and out of the way during their next imminent transition from U-space—and whatever might ensue.