Like all prador dreadnoughts, Sverl’s ship, when constructed, was an indivisible chunk of technology. Wrapped around its father-captain like layers of armour, it either survived or died with him. However, Sverl had noted the utility of the idea used in some wartime Polity ships of breaking them into a series of components and firing them off on different courses. This option might render a ship unusable, but Polity forces could retrieve surviving components to reassemble them into a whole ship, or to serve as parts of another one. Sverl had taken the idea and applied it to his own dreadnought. The first problem he had faced was that the major complete component was the exotic metal hull wrapped around the rest. It had been necessary to cut it, which made it weaker—a weakness that was part of his problems now with Cvorn. He had then made lines of division, liberally scattered with planar explosives, shear fields, hardfields and rocket motors to provide motive power. He had distributed power sources and other items between them and thus, in the end, Sverl had indeed divided his ship into its eight quadrants. They all contained living quarters, holds, supplies, weapons and other essential items. Two respectively contained the fusion engines and the U-space drive, while the latter also contained Sverl’s sanctum.
Sverl set into motion the automated preparations for division, diverting energy to distributed power storage and lining up command sequences in the system. It took just a moment for the ship to be ready, since it needed little physical preparation—its main task being to close and seal bulkhead doors. Shortly after it surfaced from U-space, the planar explosives and shear fields would be ready to sever physical connections. The hardfields would be ready to throw the quadrants apart, the rockets would send them on courses about the numerous astronomical objects in Room 101’s system.
That’s it, then . . .
Sverl turned and headed to his sanctum door. As the two halves rolled back into the wall he paused, realizing that, though he had often opened and closed these doors to allow others to enter and leave, it had been many years since he himself had stepped beyond them. He stood there, staring into the corridor beyond, analysing his reaction in intricate detail. Then he understood that such an analysis wasn’t required: he was just a tad agoraphobic and frightened.
“I need to get out more,” he said, using human words, and headed out into the corridor.
Within a few minutes, he reached a wide dropshaft—the kind of transport not usually found aboard a prador vessel—programming his route ahead. Irised gravity fields dragged him through his ship, finally depositing him through a ceiling hatch in a grav-plated corridor. He landed with a heavy thump and behind he heard shrieks and panicked bubbling, and turned to eye a couple of second-children he had just avoided crushing. They backed away from him in confusion then, as his pheromonal output reached them in all its intensity, they paused.
“Father?” one of them clattered.
“Of course,” he clattered back.
All his children had known about the changes he had been undergoing, but few of them had actually seen him. Certainly, few of his second-children had come face-to-face with him in decades.
“Shall we proceed?” he asked, waving a claw ahead.
Hugging close to the wall, they scuttled past him, heading on towards the hold containing Spear’s destroyer. He sighed to himself and followed, stepping through after them into organized chaos.
The shell people were now arriving—within hundreds of coffin-sized caskets loaded on a series of grav-sleds now the grav was back on in here. If each of these caskets had only been capable of holding one shell person, then there would not have been near enough of them, nor enough space in the destroyer for them. However, some of these contained as many as three or four people, frozen together and interlocked like a meat supply. All of them were filled with special anti-freezes and cell preservers, so that even at a temperature just ten degrees above absolute zero they would become pliable. They could then be separated and placed individually into whatever medium or device would be required for their revivification.
Sverl eyed this scene and peered closely at the small gathering of humans towards the nose of the ship. They in turn were watching Bsorol and Bsectil guiding war drones through a hatch into the weapons cache. He then observed the two second-children with him head over to load caskets. Only once those were aboard could the second-children obey their orders and climb in afterwards. They would pack themselves as tightly as the human amputees, along with, of course, their wide selection of weapons and tools. He moved out, and at once all activity slowed and all eyes, whether set in skulls, visual turrets or up on stalks, turned towards him. He felt suddenly nervous and found himself running a program to control his limbs rather than just using his prador ganglion. Next, slightly irritated, he sent an order directly to Bsorol’s aug and the first-child clattered loudly, putting his prador words through the hold PA. As work recommenced, Sverl walked over to his first-children and the humans.
Here stood Spear, Trent, the catadapt Sepia and the mind-tech Rider Cole. These were all the conscious humans now aboard, for Taiken’s wife had chosen to take herself and her two children through the zero freezer. Sverl had noted Trent Sobel’s bafflement at this and supposed that his new empathy had its limitations. The catadapt and the mind-tech, who had never seen Sverl before, were gaping at him.
“Fucking hell,” said Sepia.
Sverl ignored her, instead coming to stand before Spear.
“My place is ready?” he said, speaking human words. The question wasn’t strictly necessary, because he was continually viewing the changing interior of the ship in one portion of his AI mind.
“It’s an extended annex behind the bridge,” said Spear. “You obviously won’t need to see the screen fabric.”
“These others?” Sverl gestured with one claw to the other humans.
“A bit cramped—but I’ve had extra acceleration chairs fitted in the bridge.”
“We’re all going to be nice and cosy,” said another voice.
Sverl eyed the snake drone Riss, realizing he had been trying to ignore the thing. He then studied it on a deeper level and noted its attempts to free itself from the collar. No doubt, once outside Sverl’s dreadnought, Riss would eventually break out of the thing. Whether Sverl would then have to destroy the drone depended on what it did when free. If it came anywhere near him with that ovipositor, it would discover that Sverl’s prosthetics and internal bracing skeleton hid a multitude of sins.
“I will install myself now,” said Sverl, moving round the group to Bsectil and Bsorol, sending a coded transmission directly to their augs, “
Join me when you’re done here—and bring your full kit
.” For most prador, this would have meant armour and weapons, but for these two it meant more than that. Each of them had his own specialized tool kits as well as weapons. Each of them was somewhat more effective than the average armoured prador.
“
The EMR pulse-gun?
” suggested Bsorol.
“
Of course,
” Sverl replied. If the snake drone got uppity, it would quickly learn the error of its ways.
Rounding the nose of the ship, Sverl observed where a large section of hull had been folded out and fitted with a ramp leading into the interior. He clambered up this and entered the aforementioned annex, which backed onto the screen fabric-lined bridge, an arch open between. The area was without grav-plates, otherwise Bsorol and Bsectil would not have been able to fit inside too. Occupying the area still pulled down by the grav of the hold, Sverl found the specially made indentations in the floor into which he inserted his feet and secured himself. He opened himself up to his ship’s systems again and, despite his nervousness about relocating, found it made no difference to his control of his environment. That might change, however, should Cvorn arrive and force them to head for Room 101, while Sverl’s dreadnought deliberately tore itself apart behind them.
“
Now we are coming to the crux,
” said Spear, communicating via his aug.
“
Yes,
” Sverl replied.
“
While we have avoided being destroyed by Cvorn, the vagueness of our quests has been cast much in shadow.
”
“
Yes.
”
“
We are either going to Room 101 in pursuit of Penny Royal—or at that AI’s behest. We’re pawns being moved into placed.
”
“
Yes.
”
“
Aren’t you uncomfortable with this?
”
“
No,
” said Sverl, and he really meant it.
“
I’m not uncomfortable with what we’re doing,
” replied Spear, “
though I am somewhat disturbed by a notion I cannot shake—that I am pursuing a set destiny. Sometimes it seems that everything I do resembles the actions of one with a religious faith.
”
“
But what are the alternatives?
”
“
Too numerous to list.
”
“
But they are all commonplace, prosaic.
”
“
And there you nail the heart of it.
”
“
We have just hours now,
” said Sverl. “
There is no turning aside and Cvorn is a driver of this. I wonder if that was his sum purposed.
”
“
And when his purpose is over?
”
“
Discarded, like a blunt screwdriver,
” said Sverl. “
I would bet that the series of events leading to his destruction are already in motion.
”
“
Let’s hope so.
”
17
SPEAR
The massive space doors of the bay drew open, stretching between them the meniscus of a shimmershield—another example of the kind of technology not usually found aboard a prador ship. I gazed out through this thin veil into the heart of U-space and felt it was reaching in through my eyeballs in an attempt to liquidize my brain. I found myself down on my knees, with my eyes squeezed tightly shut. My fingers were digging into my eyelids as if some part of me had actually decided that the only option was to reach in and tear out my own eyes.
“Told you so,” said Riss.
Chunks of memory surfaced and coagulated into a whole. Others, victims of Penny Royal, had glimpsed this continuum unshielded. They had all survived it and their memories of it had been hazy, which was why I’d thought I could gaze upon it without ill effect. I understood then that the vagueness of their memories was due to the human brain being an inadequate recorder of what lay out there. It simply could not encompass something it had not evolved to cope with.
Yet, even as I understood this, I did begin to cope, sorting data in my mind, my aug and in the Penny Royal extension to my mind that lay inside my ship. I can only compare the experience to reading some text from a universe that was scattered with unknown words, but still, at least, managing to put them into context.
I staggered to my feet, turned and headed towards the open airlock of the destroyer, Riss sliding along drily beside me, and entered. I’d managed the whole of this without opening my eyes. And when I opened them, as the airlock sealed behind me and I stepped inside, everything possessed a shadow that stretched into that unknowable dimension.
“I don’t know why you did that,” said Riss.
I gazed at the snake drone and now it was transparent to me. I could see the shadowy extensions of its U-space communicator and other U-space hardware stretching out from some of its internal components. I could feel one of those extensions reaching out to me, and I could sense the tug of others reaching out to the spine.
“You don’t?” I asked. “Then perhaps you’re as empty as you say.”
Riss closed her black eye and moved on ahead of me, a little huffily, I thought.
On the bridge, Sepia, Trent Sobel and Rider Cole waited—not yet strapped into the three waiting acceleration chairs. These were crammed into a space between the bridge’s renewed horseshoe console and one screen wall. Sepia was still a distraction and I tried to ignore her, then worried about offending her. Glancing into the rear annex, I saw Sverl squatting with Bsorol and Bsectil on either side, propped horizontally against their father in a space too small for all three. The grav of the hold where the
Lance
rested was dragging them down. A moment later I felt my weight alter slightly then stabilize and the two first-children propelled themselves upwards to now hover above Sverl, who had obviously turned off the grav out there.
“I have also tried this viewing of U-space,” said Sverl. “My prador and human parts always react badly, but my AI component just accepts it as part of a reality that isn’t the linear one of organic evolution.”
“Me too,” said Sepia, “and I had a headache for three weeks, which only mental editing dispelled.”
“There can often be damage,” said Cole, eyeing her intently.
She shook her head in annoyance either at him, or at my stupidity, then stepped over to one of the chairs. She had to unstrap her laser carbine from her back before sitting, and placed it across her lap. Cole sat in the chair beside her, unrolled a computer scroll and began doing some complicated touch-work on it.
Trent just stood staring at the grey swirls in the screen fabric and said, “How long?”
“Minutes only,” I replied. Next, auging into ship’s systems, I changed the imagery to give a facsimile of the realspace our course was taking us through . . . if you made your calculations in a linear organically evolved manner. Stars sped past us, and in the screen fabric ahead, one grew steadily brighter. I could show no more than what was already in my ship’s astrogation files. Had that star ahead gone supernova, this facsimile wouldn’t show it. Nor would it show the position of Room 101, because that was something that Polity AIs had excised from all Polity files. I threw up some frames giving a countdown and realspace distance, then I occupied the acceleration chair positioned inside the horseshoe console. Trent eyed me for a moment then stepped over to the remaining chair beside Sepia and likewise made himself secure.