“
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.