“Entropy dump,” said Brond.
Blite looked at the data and could see that they were now under huge acceleration, as he replayed that conversation in his mind. He couldn’t quite grasp what the AI had been getting at—but perhaps he would when he viewed a recording of it later.
Next, the lights in their bridge dimmed, the data stream disrupted and for a second he found himself weightless. A microsecond later they were dropping into U-space and power returned.
Edge of the entropy dump?
he wondered. That rather frighteningly indicated that the ship could direct it like a weapon.
“Where now?” he asked.
“The War Factory. Factory Station Room 101,” Penny Royal replied.
CVORN
Vrom was gone and the sanctum gleamed after his cleaning efforts. Even the ship lice had disappeared into their niches and crevices around the stone-effect walls, or under the glowing dead man’s fingers of sea lichen, because they had nothing to glean from the floor. Vrom had been even more meticulous than usual—probably sensing his father’s mood and wanting to ensure no punishable infractions. Cvorn still did not feel so good. He felt like a second-child after a thorough beating, and the vision in his palp eyes had worsened further and their movement felt stiff. He was also anxious about what was to come.
Everything was ready and Cvorn could not be any more prepared, or more on edge. He stomped around his sanctum, perpetually going over his plans but unable to spot the glaring error he was sure was there. At one point, he began using his screens to review other plans concerning the alliances he would make and eventually break, once he had captured Sverl. But these were also plans he had checked over ad nauseam and just thinking about them now brought on a deadening boredom, so he sent them back into storage.
He had to do something.
Cvorn returned his attention to the shoal of reaverfish, the prador females and the lone reaverfish he’d let into the mating pool. He found his tension easing as he watched them and went into a kind of fugue state as the hours slipped by. He even caught the moment when the lone reaverfish began shuddering and shaking as it felt something seriously wrong inside it. When he finally dragged himself back to the present, he found that only an hour remained until his encounter with Sverl. He was hungry again now, but didn’t dare risk his delicate digestive system until after the battle. He didn’t really need to check his plans again, but his earlier paranoia that he had missed something was returning. Nearly everything was as it should be, but an alert glyph it took him a second to recognize drew his attention.
Vlern’s children . . .
Sealed into their quarters all about the ship, three of them were running out of oxygen and sinking into somnolence. However, the fourth had either been astute enough to prepare for something like this, or had got lucky. The young adult Sfolk not only had his own oxygen supply but he had also found a diamond saw with its own power pack and was steadily cutting through one wall. This despite Cvorn’s precaution of cutting electricity to all but the cams in his quarters, meaning most power tools were of no use.
Cvorn observed the scene, his guts bubbling with the intensity of his sudden anger. He wanted to go down there right then, open Sfolk’s quarters and simply tear the creature apart, but did not have the time. He could send Vrom, or some of the others, or maybe a war drone. But that wouldn’t be as satisfying. For a moment, he just stared in frustration at the screens, then, remembering his ascendancy in the Dracocorp aug network, he felt a sudden fear.
How had he forgotten that?
Opening bandwidth, he sought to seize mental control of the young adult, but it was like trying to get a grip on jelly. Presently the jelly collapsed and the connection closed.
“Desist,” he ordered through the cam-com.
Sfolk backed away from the hole he was making in the wall, still gripping the diamond saw in his claws, then tilted up and gazed at the cams in the ceiling.
“The others were naive,” he said. “I knew not to trust any gift from you. I routed the aug through a thrall unit interface set to shut down after a period of time if I didn’t log in.” Sfolk abruptly dropped the diamond saw. “I guess this wasn’t quiet enough.”
What?
Sfolk scuttled over to an open tool chest and took out another item, turned back towards the hole he had been making and raised the object. With a crack, he activated it and billowing smoke highlighted the intense green beam of a quantum cascade laser. It swiftly sliced through material the diamond saw would have taken an age to cut.
“Vrom!” Cvorn clattered, quickly routing his present screen view to the first-child. “Get down there and kill him! When you’ve dealt with him, kill the others!”
“Yes, Father,” Vrom replied.
Cvorn winced. The base of his left palp eye had started hurting as if someone was stabbing in a carapace drill. He tried to ignore the pain while making an aug connection to his own war drones, dispatching them to the same quarters. However, Sfolk’s behaviour was puzzling, because he could not hope to escape . . .
Suddenly feeling panic, which made that palp eye hurt even more, Cvorn brought up a ship’s schematic in his mind. The wall Sfolk was cutting through opened into a main tunnel. Even though Vrom would take a while to get there, two war drones, carrying enough weapons to go up against a Polity assault boat, were speeding in that direction and would arrive soon enough.
Something was wrong
.
Cvorn deliberately forced himself to be calm and examined the schematics more meticulously. They definitely showed that main tunnel just on the other side of that wall and all the measurements were correct. However, when Cvorn expanded his examination of datum lines and the measurements of the ship as a whole, things ceased to add up. The schematics were wrong. Sfolk had almost certainly interfered with them. Cvorn began working on them, observing the drones—two armoured spheres ten feet across and pocked with missile and energy weapon ports—arrive in that main tunnel and slow to a halt.
“Request clarification,” said one of them. “Further orders required.”
Wordlessly, Cvorn auged his instructions through, and they both turned towards the wall supposedly adjacent to where Sfolk was cutting, and powered up their particle cannons.
Cvorn continued analysing the schematics in his aug, running a search program and trying to correct obvious errors. Some liquid ran into one of his turret eyes and he blinked it away—too wrapped up in present concerns to heed it. It struck him as likely that what Sfolk had done had been originally in preparation for seizing control of this ST dreadnought from his brothers . . .
There
.
The schematic expanded, holes appearing throughout it. However, though this was
probably
where areas were missing, it was wrong in the area where the drones were cutting, because still it showed just that one wall between Sfolk’s quarters and the main tunnel.
“Cvorn,” said Sfolk, his laser shutting down, “you can augment, put on legs and take my brother’s prongs, but your brain is still old.” The young prador now dived into the hole and disappeared out of sight.
Out in the corridor, as Vrom arrived, the drones cut through to expose a vertical maintenance shaft made for first-children, but which was still large enough for the young adult to squeeze down. It was too small, however, for the war drones to enter.
“Vrom,” Cvorn instructed, “get what resources you need, go after him and kill him. But take nothing that will in any way hamper my attack on Sverl.”
“Yes, Father,” said Vrom, then turned away to begin clattering into the communicator beside his mandibles. Cvorn watched and waited until a small squad of heavily armed second-children arrived, along with one of the ship’s internal security war drones—a thing shaped like a melon seed over five feet long. This ignited arc lights in its fore and headed down into the maintenance shaft. The second-children followed, and Vrom a short while after, when he had donned all the hardware they had brought for him.
I really don’t need this now
, thought Cvorn, aware it wasn’t a new thought. He eyed a counter in one of his lower screens and, with a further thought, banished the present views in preparation for those outside the ship, rattled his feet against the floor and spat some acid gathering in his gullet. Belatedly he linked to a cam view showing his own sanctum—the only way he could get a good look at himself—and focused it in on his visual turret. His left palp eye was lying over, some pustule having burst underneath it. He reached up with his claw and gently took hold of it and tried to move it back upright. More pus oozed out round its base, then when he released it, it fell forwards and popped back out of its socket. It tumbled down his visual turret, bounced off his mandibles and landed on the floor. Cvorn stared at it, at its withered tail of nerves and veins, then turned away as a ship louse came out to investigate. He returned his attention to his screens. It didn’t matter. He had more important concerns.
Now Sverl, now you’re mine
.
SPEAR
The new screen fabric within the
Lance
glimmered. It formed a bright circle, expanding from a point at the centre of the ceiling, then spreading out and settling down the walls. With a horrible twisting sensation, probably due to damage Cvorn had inflicted earlier, Sverl’s dreadnought dropped into realspace. As the view was revealed I thought that something had gone seriously wrong. But, updating from Sverl’s system, I understood that we had surfaced actually inside the ring of dust and gas. That was why it looked like some ancient city smog out there.
“You’ll have to enhance the view,” said Riss.
“No, really?” I said, wondering why I had been growing irritated with the drone lately.
Sverl’s sensors were bringing in a lot more than mere human visual data, so I started to make use of that. The smog cleared on the screen and the stars came back into view, but none of this made me any wiser. I ran the data through a program in my aug and routed it back to the screen fabric, truncating distances and bringing the trinary system about us into the human compass.
The white and black dwarf stars orbited each other far out to my left, whilst the red dwarf sat over to my right. I made a slight adjustment to bring the ring of dust and gas surrounding the white dwarf, in which we sat, into view. This gave the odd effect of sitting inside a massive tunnel that curved off into the far distance. Scattered inside and outside this were asteroids and asteroid clusters, while sprinkled along the ring were planetoids, smoothly spherical after billions of years in this stellar tumbling machine. The whole scene would have been a bit too much computer model and not enough reality, but for the processing I was also running in my aug. This truly gave me a sense of scale and of
being
there.
“U-signature,” observed Riss.
I was already on it, because the drone had only picked it up through my aug connection to Sverl’s system. I etched out a frame beyond our tunnel and there, rucking up a trail of generated photons like fairy dust, Cvorn’s ship scored itself into the real. I brought the frame closer for more detail. This was my first real look at this ST dreadnought and it was fearsome indeed. However, I also saw, straight away, the mistakes that had made this design of ship vulnerable to the Polity. Packing all those weapons in one area wasn’t a great idea.
“
Putting all your eggs in one basket, so Arrowsmith would say,
” Sverl told me, revealing the breadth of his abilities, for surely in such a situation all his concentration should be on Cvorn.
“The prador have such a saying?” I asked out loud.
“
Similar,
” said Sverl, “
a direct translation is ‘putting all your seed in one female’ but the meaning is the same
.”
Cvorn was opening fire already. A swarm of railgun missiles began to depart his ship while, on one side, space doors had opened to allow something to nose out. All appeared to move in slow motion. Even when Cvorn fired his particle cannons, the beams groped out at the speed of mercury in a thermometer dropped into boiling water. Finally, the object drew clear of those space doors and I recognized a prador destroyer.
“
Cvorn’s original ship,
” Sverl updated me.
Twin particle beams crossed vacuum towards us, while a single beam drove back the other way, its hue turned violet by the dust and gas through which it was passing. Even without my link into Sverl’s system, I could tell we were under heavy fusion acceleration. The
Lance
was shuddering and internal ship’s gravity was failing to compensate for the drag of acceleration. I could also grab detail on the other things Sverl was doing, such as firing his own railguns and now opening up two sets of space doors in his hull, but I wanted it laid out before me. I ran the incoming data through another program and displaced myself, which was easy enough to do with the data. The scene flickered, major objects not changing position very much but some closer asteroids whipped to different locations. Now I appeared to hang in vacuum ten or twenty miles out from Sverl’s ship.
I watched protective hardfields spring into being, dust swirling behind them as they interfered with ancient currents here. Upon reaching the perimeter of the dust ring, the twin particle beams turned violet too, but against the hardfields they splashed ruby fire. Meanwhile Cvorn’s old destroyer was accelerating off at an angle and beginning to fire a series of missiles. Turning my attention back to Sverl’s destroyer, I saw the first kamikaze leave one bay, while the old attack ship he’d kept was steadily heading out of another. I understood Sverl’s aim here and knew Riss had not—but felt no inclination to keep the drone informed.
Even though Sverl’s dreadnought was under full acceleration, Cvorn’s ST dreadnought was moving fast and closing. Ahead of it, its first railgun missiles began to impact against our hardfields and I felt a steady shuddering thrum through my body. Next, a ball of fire exploded from some port in the side of Sverl’s dreadnought—a hardfield generator burning. All the energy it had absorbed had been converted into heat and motion, but thankfully it was expelled through a disposal port. A short while later fire exploded from other ports and continued burning inside. Sverl hadn’t had a disposal tube lined up for that one and, checking the ship’s system, I saw that it had burned a half-mile course through the ship’s interior.