As they approached the doors leading out of the fourth quadrant of Sverl’s ship, Riss probed ahead and examined the locking mechanisms and their computer controls, which weren’t very complicated. She felt sure she could open these doors but it would be an unnecessary demonstration of the abilities the drone still retained. Sverl might decide to upgrade the collar and hamstring her further. A moment later, the first door opened. Spear walked through and she followed.
The next door took them out into one of the main corridors, where a second-child paused to gaze at them, started snipping its claws at the air in irritation and began to edge closer. Riss could take the child down in a second and knew the acid would not even be necessary, but again it was probably best to remain low profile. The clattering and bubbling of prador speech issued from a PA speaker—Sverl specifically telling this child to back off. Sverl then gave that same order, concerning all humans, generally throughout the ship. Riss noticed that assassin drones weren’t mentioned in this amnesty. The second-child abruptly turned away and moved off.
“I’ve been checking on things,” said Spear as they headed in the opposite direction.
Riss had been monitoring the man since they first met, but had now delved into his aug on levels with which he might not be comfortable. Though the collar prevented Riss from penetrating this ship’s system, it did not react when Riss penetrated other computing hardware, Spear’s aug being one such example. Sverl trusted Spear, so had allowed him access to the ship systems. Riss was using him as a stepping-stone to access them herself—so knew precisely what Spear had been checking and had already guessed his aims.
“You have?” Riss enquired innocently.
“Sverl set his children and robots to work on restoring my ship, but recently pulled them off for other projects.”
Yes, the second-children were working on an old captured attack ship and three prador kamikazes. Riss had leapfrogged from Spear’s aug to grab all the data available on this work, established a link and was watching still. At first she had thought the attack ship and kamikazes were being prepared as weapons to use against Cvorn, but had then been baffled when the second-children started removing the CTDs from the kamikazes.
“But in my ship, they did manage to tear out everything that was scrapped anyway and replace some items,” Spear continued. “We don’t have a U-space drive or fusion drive, and a lot of armour is missing. But the robots Sverl left on the job have been restoring the ship’s loom and control nexi, ready to integrate all replacement components. They’ve repaired much of the bridge as a point from which to oversee that integration.”
Do you know about Flute?
Riss wondered.
“It’s a standard procedure,” said the drone. “If you can’t do the heavy stuff, get the light stuff done ready to receive it.”
“They replaced the burned-out screen fabric too,” said Spear.
When they arrived at Sverl’s sanctum, the diagonally divided door stood firmly closed, while outside, resting against it was the spine. Seeing this, Riss immediately wondered if her collar might also give the prador access to things she didn’t want him to know. No, Sverl was just very busy preparing for the coming encounter with Cvorn . . .
As Spear picked up the spine, Riss detected a surge of U-space data transfer, immediately followed by an intense physical reaction and out-of-parameter functions in his aug. The man had just started to experience someone else’s memory and used aug-mind synergy to suppress it. Riss backed off mentally—some of the stuff going on in there defied analysis and was therefore dangerous. Spear rested the spine on his shoulder, turned and trudged off.
“What about Flute?” Riss asked, squirming to keep up.
“Dead,” said Spear. “I got some connection, but he told me he was dying. After that, no connection.”
He didn’t know. Riss decided to throw him a bone. “Remember that Flute was a combination of deep-frozen prador second-child ganglion
and
AI.”
Spear went quiet, and now risking another mental peek Riss found him talking to Sverl.
“
What is Flute’s status?
” Spear asked.
“
The second-child brain died,
” Sverl replied.
“
A precise statement,
” Spear observed, “
and lying by omission.
”
“
He recorded across to his AI component.
”
“
I want him back.
”
“
When he has finished carrying out one last chore for me you can have him back.
”
A second later Spear was into Sverl’s system, tracking Flute, locating him in the old attack ship, then pulling up information on the kamikazes. That was almost as fast as a haiman—the nearest the Polity had come to amalgamating human and AI.
“
I see,
” said Spear. “
U-signatures.
”
What’s this?
Riss was baffled.
“
Precisely,
” Sverl replied.
“So there you go,” said Spear aloud.
“What?” Riss asked, rapidly withdrawing her probe.
“Now I know what happened to Flute,” Spear continued, “and now you know, supposing you didn’t already.”
“Didn’t already?” Riss repeated.
“Stop being coy—I can feel you in my aug like a splinter in my finger, Riss.”
Not for the first time, Riss considered killing a man. Humans were easier to off than prador. Even without the enzyme acid, which would chew through Spear’s body just a little bit slower than it would go through Sverl’s, Riss could punch holes through his heart or brain stem. And even without a collimated diamond ovipositor, Riss could still simply strangle him.
“Sverl is blocking me,” the drone said.
“Understandable, really,” said Spear. “You told me that Penny Royal hollowed you out and left you without purpose, which is a vague description coming from a machine, but I sense that since coming aboard a prador dreadnought, your homicidal instincts have been on the rise.”
Riss immediately began checking the induction probe she had been using to hitch a ride on the man’s aug. Could it be a two-way street?
“I sometimes wonder, Riss,” Spear continued, “if all Penny Royal took away were the remnants of hope. You were fashioned for one purpose and that ended with the end of the war.”
“I know what Penny Royal took,” Riss asserted, not really knowing at all.
Spear continued relentlessly, “During a war, weapons get superseded and dispensed with. After a war they’re melted down and turned into ploughs.”
“Shut the fuck up, Spear,” Riss hissed.
“Ah, not so empty after all.”
Riss found herself stationary on the floor as the man trudged on ahead, trying to control a surge of rage that was as integral as her power supply. As this waned, she felt bafflement again. What was that? And why had Spear spoken like that? Riss abruptly went after him again, induction probe at full strength, just catching the tail of another surge of data exchange between the spine and the man.
Was that you speaking then?
Riss wondered.
Eventually they arrived at Penny Royal’s erstwhile body, the destroyer Spear had renamed the
Lance
, like the spine he carried on his shoulder. The ship had been moved, much had been torn out and much reconstructed, and now a ramp led up to its open shuttle bay. Spear made his way through the partially reconstructed interior to enter the bridge. Riss followed and watched the man walk across the charred floor, to stand beside a portable prador saddle control. He hoisted the spine off his shoulder and rested it against the saddle.
“We all have our loads to bear,” he said, “and that’s a heavy one.” He turned to look directly at Riss. “I’m sorry, I don’t know why I said what I said before.”
He turned away again and dipped his head to peer at the saddle control. After a moment, it hummed and buzzed to itself, glints of light igniting in small pit controls made to take a second-child’s manipulatory hands. The screen fabric came on all around, turning the ship transparent and showing them the hold in which the destroyer sat. Out on the floor a single constructor robot was perambulating, a coil of high-pressure fuel line sitting on its flat back. It moved out of sight—entering the ship somewhere to the rear.
“I think we can do better,” said Spear.
He was auged into the control, now making linkages to the entire computer system of Sverl’s ship. The screen fabric turned grey, swirled through with shots of nacre. It looked like a malfunction until Riss turned and saw the jut of a sensor spire in one direction, and some bulbous nacelle extended on a pylon in the other. The cams could not quite convey what lay out there—they were looking at a machine interpretation of U-space.
“Just a few minutes now,” said Spear. “Penny Royal’s timing comes close to perfection, though Sverl facilitated that by not allowing us into his sanctum. If we’d gone in and you’d been unable to resist your urge to try killing him, we would have been late.”
Riss just gazed at the man, and yearned for the simplicity of murdering prador.
BLITE
The screen display of the
Black Rose
blended smoothly with reality as they returned to that state. The stars slowed in their dopplering course past them, and objects ahead glimmered and expanded into view. An iron sphere sat in vacuum ahead, other objects positioned in an arc underneath it like lashes below an eyeball. And some other large object lay beyond.
“Leven,” said Blite, but before he could continue, magnification increased to bring these objects closer and data began scrolling down a subscreen in a bottom corner.
The prador supply station sat out in clear vacuum many light years from the nearest star. It was a slightly flattened sphere with a square-section protuberance girdling its circumference. Around this, three ships had docked like fish feeding on a bread ball, and Blite at once recognized the long brassy teardrops as the ships of the King’s Guard. All of them were here—the other twenty-seven arrayed in an arc below, neatly lined up like a series of text slashes. Some distance beyond hung a cylinder about which smaller vessels and vacuum construction machines swarmed—scaffolds spreading out from one end to etch out some saucer section. Blite just glanced at this—his focus was mainly on those King’s Guard ships. Then he scanned the data coming in, blinked in disbelief, and returned his attention to that other object.
“What the fuck is that?” he wondered.
The structure looked small in perspective, but that was because it lay some distance back from the other objects here. The damned thing was immense: fifty miles long and maybe ten miles thick.
“The King’s Ship,” intoned Penny Royal, seemingly right beside his ear.
He glanced round, half-expecting that antique space suit to be standing behind him, but the AI had not seen fit to materialize in any form.
“The King’s Ship?” he repeated.
“Six hundred years,” said Penny Royal, “or less than one.”
“What?”
A frame opened on the screen and, once again, an armoured prador was there. Blite experienced a familiar surge of irritation, knowing he was just about to witness yet another baffling conversation between this Gost, who was apparently the king of the prador, and Penny Royal. Then he felt glad, because the irritation was surely his own.
“You again,” said Gost.
“Yes,” Penny Royal replied.
“What now?”
“If you lead your Guard to Room 101, you will die,” the AI replied.
“Sverl cannot be allowed to exist,” said Gost. “He might be used by subversives to destabilize my Kingdom. This will lead to damaging civil war during which, as I suppress those subversives, they will launch attacks against the Polity. They will hope for a response that would unify all prador under them.”
“This will not happen.”
“I calculate that, without my intervention, it will.”
“I know that it won’t.”
The armoured prador on screen rattled its legs against the floor, evidently in frustrated irritation. Blite knew the feeling.
“I need more,” it eventually said.
“It is time for you to board your ship,” said Penny Royal. “Already you are reaching the stage in which you need larger armour to conceal your development. You need the space to grow, physically and mentally. You will call yourself Oberon.”
“Very good,” said Gost. “And you’re a Delphic oracle.”
“You understand human thought.”
“I still need more.”
“I can show you a future,” said Penny Royal.
On screen, the armoured prador abruptly whirled around. One of those black diamonds had appeared in its sanctum. In response to this object, ports all around the walls slammed open to reveal the mirror throats of particle cannons. Seemingly under their regard the diamond separated into six pieces—with something extremely dark and deep lying central to them and only just visible from Blite’s perspective. The king emitted a bubbling scream and retreated out of view. Then the whole scene disappeared in a crash and explosion of blue fire as the particle cannons fired. White-hot chunks of metal and boiling smoke filled the frame before it blanked.
“What the hell happened?” said Brond.
“Patience,” said Penny Royal.
Blite now looked up at the main view ahead, which had drawn closer. The Guard ships were breaking formation—steering thrusters blading out into darkness and the hot stars of fusion drives igniting. Those docked to the station were detaching too, while anti-munitions lasers probed out, picked out by wisps of vapour issuing from the station.
The sounds continued, slowly died, and then out of the blankness Gost said, “I don’t believe you, and I will still take my Guard to Room 101.” Blite wondered what he had been shown by the black AI.
“You will believe me,” said Penny Royal, “and now I will give you time to think.”
A surge of
something
passed through the
Black Rose
. Blite experienced a falling sensation twinned with an odd feeling of déjà vu. Another surge followed this—setting steering thrusters at full power with the fusion drive igniting. Blite groped for his seat strap, expecting battle, but he still focused on the screen—to see the station and the Guard ships simply die. Fusion drives and steering thrusters went out, the lasers blinked off and light issuing from view ports and bubbles died. Everything went dark; the ships were no longer accelerating, and the constructor robots about the King’s Ship were drifting on courses set before this event. Even far beyond this scene, the stars grew dim.