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 CO
2
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.
”