A particle beam, deep blue in vacuum and perhaps a yard in width, struck the shuttle dead centre, bored straight through it and blew molten debris out the other side. Two further detonations ensued, which were probably the chemical propellant tanks for the steering thrusters or the energy-dense power supplies. The shuttle bucked twice, coming apart as it did so, and fell on away from the ship in three pieces. The particle beam fired again and again, nailing those pieces, slagging and tearing them apart. Within a minute there was nothing left larger than a human head.
“Goodbye,” said Flute over my suit radio.
“Bye,” I managed in return, now the paralysis was starting to wear off.
The beam then stabbed out again, hitting the
Lance
this time, over that section of the ship where the bridge was located. Armour plating ablated, dissipating like the dust from a grinding wheel, then the beam punched inside. It seemed to pause there for a moment, the
Lance
caught on it like a bug on a needle, then fire and debris exploded from the shuttle bay. Shortly after that two airlock doors exploded away, the airlocks spewing fire behind them. Much inside that ship had to be fried, including Flute, but Cvorn wasn’t finished yet. A railgun missile hit near the engines, carving a chunk out of the rear of the ship and hurling out a cloud of debris. I watched a lump of glowing jagged armour the size and shape of a speedboat hurtle past us just twenty feet away. A second missile hit near the nose, but the angle of impact was such that it glanced off the armour, exploding into a spray of plasma, and didn’t penetrate. Meanwhile the particle beam began to traverse towards the nose.
But then it all stopped. The beam abruptly winked out and no further missiles arrived.
“What the hell?” said Riss.
The drone turned me in vacuum.
“Stop that,” I said, reaching across to use my wrist impeller. “I at least want to witness this.”
“No, look,” said Riss.
I allowed her to turn me, and now saw the bloom of numerous explosions, and a blue glare shifting from side to side, like the aurora borealis, but in space. I didn’t understand for a moment, then I got it. I was seeing all the stuff Cvorn had just fired at the
Lance
hitting a wall of shielding hardfields. Next, on the moon, which was barely a dot to normal vision, I saw another, far more massive, explosion. I ramped up magnification through my visor, bringing the moon as close to me as possible, the image breaking into pixels, and saw a great chunk of its crust rising up on a cushion of fire. Further impacts followed while, closer to us, particle beams played over that scaling of protective hardfields.
“Someone’s talking,” said Riss.
“Let me hear it.”
“I cannot locate you,” said a voice. “Flute informs me that you are out in vacuum.”
The Polity rescuer?
It seemed very unlikely.
Something shimmered over to one side of us and I saw a black line whip out. A giant grapple slammed into the
Lance
and closed, tearing up the hull as it did so, and began to draw the ship in. I tracked back along that line to its source as the shimmering dissipated to reveal a massive old-style prador dreadnought, from which I could see armoured prador hurtling out into space.
“Fucking prador,” Riss hissed. “Sverl’s here.”
“Drop your chameleonware,” I instructed. “We’re out of choices.”
Riss emitted a hissing growl, but must have obeyed me because the nearest of those armoured shapes swerved abruptly on a powerful chemical rocket and hurtled towards us. It decelerated on that same rocket as it drew close, abruptly silhouetted by a distant explosion. As the creature closed a claw about the both of us, I realized that Sverl’s defences were now failing, for something had got through to detonate against the hull of his dreadnought. Even as our rescuer, or captor, opened up its rocket again and sent us speeding towards a cavernous hold, I saw the emissions of internal explosions. From wartime experience, I knew that these were from hardfield projectors overloading as the shielding took a battering.
We entered that hold, crashing down on a grated floor just as a particle beam got through. Other prador landed as heavily around us, while out in the glare of that beam I saw still others blacken and just evaporate. The beam played into the hold just for a moment, carving a molten trench through the grating, then punching in a plasma explosion through the back wall. But then massive armoured doors slammed shut with a crash that bounced us all from the floor, and cut it off. I watched those doors begin to glow cherry red, as the beam did some damage, then U-space took us.
CVORN
As anchors detached from the surrounding rock and the fusion drive ignited inside the moon, turning rock molten behind and punching out through the crust there, Cvorn champed his mandibles and danced around in irritation on his new legs. The trap had been a complete failure. The plan had been for Cvorn’s old destroyer to lure Sverl to the planet. He was supposed to have dived down into its atmosphere and then the ocean in an effort to destroy it. At this point, Cvorn, in his ST dreadnought, could have easily disabled him. Next, after he had steadily and meticulously annihilated all Sverl’s defences, Cvorn had initially considered either a ground or undersea assault. That would have depended on where Sverl went down.
But, after fully investigating the weapons available to him, he had changed his plan. All he would have had to do was move in close and, using lasers, explosives and particle beams, peel that ship down to the core, revealing Sverl’s sanctum. He could have hauled that in, just like Sverl had hauled in that wrecked Polity destroyer out there.
Damn those humans and their ship
, Cvorn thought. But he knew that the failure of the trap had been down to his own eagerness to attack the Polity vessel. He should have simply ignored it and continued waiting for Sverl.
However, Sverl had rescued Cvorn from complete failure simply by not behaving like a prador. And now, as various programs confirmed the data he was seeing, growing excitement supplanted Cvorn’s irritation.
Sverl hadn’t gone to the planet. Probably because of what he was turning into, he had taken the time to attempt to rescue the passengers on that Polity destroyer. Not only that, he’d spent time harpooning the ship and drawing it into his own. Perhaps there had been some survivors aboard who Sverl felt were worth saving. Cvorn had no idea—he didn’t think like a human.
Whatever. Cvorn had directed the firepower of his ST dreadnought against Sverl’s main hardfields and left the partially wrecked destroyer alone. He’d quickly realized he could keep Sverl here longer by not completely destroying that other vessel, and it had worked. He’d had time to burn out enough of Sverl’s hardfield projectors to leave gaps in his defences. Through those gaps he’d then set about destroying anything on Sverl’s ship that looked as if it might scramble or shield U-jump signatures. And that had worked too, for Cvorn now knew Sverl’s next destination.
“Bring my destroyer up,” Cvorn instructed the second-child now appearing on one of his screens. Though the trap had failed, one benefit was that the old destroyer he had left down on the planet as bait had been left unscathed. He had fully expected Sverl to gut it before the trap could be sprung. “When you are clear of the world, bring it to these coordinates.”
No time to lose. If Sverl jumped again shortly after arriving at his next destination, Cvorn wanted to be there soon after, since a U-signature tended to dissipate and the rate at which it did so depended on eddies and tides in that continuum—occurrences that could only be described with exotic mathematics. Admittedly, this ST dreadnought had more power to punch through U-space than Sverl’s craft, although in essence it was contracting time to do so rather than going speedily across a distance, as distances didn’t exist as such in U-space. However, Sverl’s child mind, if that’s what he used, seemed able to calculate and make jumps rather more quickly than normal.
The ST dreadnought was now clear, so Cvorn sent instructions using his aug. The same coordinates went to the first-child mind controlling the twinned U-engines. Smooth as a blood slick, the ship dropped into U-space and was on its way. Cvorn settled down. He could do little more now. The ship was already prepared to chew up Sverl’s when it got into range, and most of Cvorn’s children were ready on the spot to take control of any essential systems from which battle damage might cut him off. But first, many days of travel lay ahead.
Cvorn stared at his screens for a while, took a wander round his sanctum, restless and angry, not knowing what to do with himself now. He was on his second circuit of the sanctum when he abruptly halted. Perhaps now was the time to try something he had been considering ever since boarding this new ship . . .
Cvorn rushed back to his screens and brought up views of the five young adults squatting in the small first-child sanctums to which he had confined them. After a moment, making sure he had identified him correctly, he turned off the feed showing Sfolk and studied the four remaining screens. Though he knew the names of these four, and could identify them via Dracocorp aug connection, he still could not distinguish between them visually. Their markings were quite similar, but it wasn’t just that. Perhaps the lack of visual input from his missing palp eyes was the problem. He selected one screen at random and turned off the rest, establishing aug ident just from the location of this young adult in the ship.
“You,” he said to it, “come at once to my sanctum.” He was met with a hint of rebellion because no adult prador went willingly to the sanctum of another adult, at least, not without a great deal of firepower. Cvorn
pushed
in the small Dracocorp network he had established and felt the creature succumbing to his will. With leaden steps, the young male headed to the door from its sanctum.
Continuing to track the male via aug, Cvorn turned away from the screens and headed over to the body of the dead father-captain still occupying this sanctum. The control units had now been removed and attached to Cvorn, and he’d found it quite simple to link all his units into an array thence controlled via his aug. It meant he no longer needed to access a particular unit to control a particular blank, war drone or piece of robotic equipment.
Under his instruction, his blanks had split the body of the father-captain around its circumference and hinged over the upper carapace. Cvorn brushed aside a couple of ship lice and then tore out a chunk of the musculature around one old leg socket and fed it into his mandibles. As he munched this he sent his instructions and watched his blanks detaching various items, including a carapace saw, from the surgical telefactor hemisphere. He knew that what he intended had been done before, but still found himself wincing at the prospect. He also knew that it had not been done very often, because, having lost certain urges, old adult prador generally didn’t feel inclined to reclaim them. He swallowed, then peered more closely at the interior of the old father-captain. The meat was tasteless, aseptic. Sure, decay had set in a little, but that usually added to the flavour.
There . . .
Cvorn soon ascertained that much of the flesh he had been chewing down was artificial carbon lattice, electro-muscle and collagen foam. This father-captain had been badly injured in the past and had lost a large amount of his interior body mass. This was puzzling because Cvorn did not recollect the exterior carapace being heavily scarred. Suddenly he realized what this might indicate and switched his gaze to the interior of the upper shell. There he saw the tracery of worm burrows—a neat pattern like a picture of a tree etched into that inner shell. Cvorn staggered back, immediately regurgitating the chunk of flesh he had just eaten and wishing he could bring up the father-captain’s major ganglion, which he had dined on some hours ago.
“Vrom, get in here!” he yelled.
The first-child, who waited in the annex to the captain’s sanctum, always ready to respond to Cvorn’s command, came quickly through a fast-opening side door, a Gatling cannon clutched in one claw already whirling up to speed.
“Father?” Vrom enquired, now lowering his weapon as he saw no immediate danger.
“Get this out of here,” said Cvorn. “Drag it into your annex right now!”
“Yes, Father,” said Vrom, never inclined to question an order.
As the first-child began laboriously heaving the huge corpse to the annex door, Cvorn wondered if he should move out of here for a while and have the place completely sterilized. No, he was being foolish. The parasite infection this father-captain had suffered and survived probably happened during the war. In fact, knowing just how paranoid those who had been infected tended to be—he had after all known Sverl
before
he paid his visit to Penny Royal and began to change—the chances of there being parasite eggs or nymphs here were lower than for just about anywhere else.
“And when you’re done,” Cvorn added, “I want you back in here when I let our friend in. I’m not sure if my control of him via his aug will be enough. You know what to do.”
Cvorn now turned to the two blanks who were waiting for his orders. He had a program lined up for them to follow. He wondered for a moment whether he was being foolish in what he was about to do. He already knew he was as susceptible to prador pheromones as any child, but in this case he had been enjoying their effect. Perhaps he was behaving irrationally and should have them filtered from the ship’s air supply? No, he would keep them. And he would go through with this.
Setting the blanks’ program running, he turned his back on them, settled down and raised his rear end. They closed in, carapace saw and drill injectors whirring. As one of the injectors went in, what had used to be one of his most sensitive areas went numb. He tried not to think about what the blanks were doing, even though he had reviewed every detail of the procedure. Tapping a little tune with his mandibles, he eyed Vrom as the first-child finally got the corpse into the annex.
“Close the door and be ready,” he instructed, not sure why he didn’t want Vrom here for at least this part of the operation.