The sun ahead expanded and shaded to salmon pink and I now began to get some sense of this hypergiant’s immensity. I contracted distances to bring the orbital red dwarf into view, a gas giant out beside it on its millennium-long figure-of-eight course. I saw the whole of the asteroid belt of CO
2
and nitrogen ice, and put a frame over the small black hole now passing through it—leaving a swirl of shattered asteroids behind. The green-belt worlds were there too, quadrate patterns in their surfaces marking out the decaying foundations of an ancient and now long-dead civilization. Everything matched up to Riss’s memory, except Room 101, which the astrogation program had of course failed to include. We fell fast into this, past the red dwarf and the asteroid belt. The sun expanded to fill one screen wall, the truncation of distance perpetually adjusting. But of course none of this was
real
and, had I been able to gaze upon it all without computer assistance, my eyes would have burned out in a microsecond in a glare millions of times brighter than Sol.
Next, I felt the twisting around me, as reality cast U-space shadows into madness. With a crump I was sure I imagined, we surfaced into the real as if through some icy crust, and everything all around readjusted. Factory Station Room 101 was too small to be visible to human eyes at this distance. And, as I called it into being in a frame, I sank more into the aug perception of our surroundings through the ship’s sensors. Why, I wondered, was there always the need to translate things for limited human senses?
There lay Room 101: a giant Polity factory station utterly dwarfed by its immense surroundings. It was completely familiar to me. Its harmonica shape was that of so many other wartime factory stations, and Riss’s memories of it were still sharp in my mind. Still, seeing this eighty-mile-long object stirred my awe. As I continued to study it, I began to notice disparities between memory and fact. The station no longer possessed the clean lines it once had; it was lumpy, as if cancerous. Large areas of utter blackness looked like holes in its structure, but analysis revealed these were high-absorption solar leaves scaled across its skin. There were growths and incrustations on its hull and it truly looked like a wreck. Not the usual kind one would find out in vacuum, but the wreck of a ship under a sea. It seemed that the fauna and flora of surrounding waters had occupied Room 101, and it was sinking softly into decay.
“
I’m taking my ship in closer,
” said Sverl. “
No need to hurry just yet.
”
I felt the kick of the fusion drive, despite the active grav-plates on my bridge. The perspective slowly changed, but I kept a sharp eye on the data that was being steadily collected by the dreadnought’s sensors elsewhere in this system. And there, within just an hour of our arrival, another U-space signature. I immediately opened up a frame on it and expanded the thing into view, relaxing slightly when I saw a mere prador destroyer.
“Cvorn’s,” Sverl informed me.
It was almost half a system away, poised just out from the red dwarf, but I immediately surmised that Cvorn had sent it after one of the U-signatures. It was probably talking to him even now. Fretting about this as I watched the ship, it took me a moment to realize that something was going on there, because I could see distortion beyond the ship silhouetted by the red dwarf.
“
Expand your frame,
” Sverl told me.
I issued the mental instruction, now including the whole dwarf star, but could see nothing. I expanded it again then to see a cluster of bright objects in low orbit around the sun. Sensor data was vague for they had hidden themselves well close to the photosphere, but they became clearer as they accelerated out. I put a second frame over them and magnified, just in time to see lines scribing out from them, white against the red. A few seconds later Cvorn’s destroyer was blowing out hardfield projector debris and just a second after that, four intensely powerful particle beams hit it all at once. They just carved across it, splitting it like a peach, subsequent explosions blowing the two halves apart.
“
I’m breaking my ship now,
” Sverl replied. “
Launch at once.
”
With a thought, I brushed away docking clamps, but rested my hands on hand-imprinted ball controls in the console to set us moving. Light pressure on the left fired up the fusion engine, rumbling throughout the ship, and set it heading towards the shimmershield. About this, the space doors glared in the pink sunlight, with filtering set close to maximum. I could sense the hold behind burning in the fusion torch. The shimmershield then winked out and, in a blast of escaping air, and a cloud of debris left from my ship’s reconstruction, we fell out into the hot glare of the hypergiant. Even as we went, I applied to Sverl on another level and got data on those ships, and a closer view. They were King’s Guard ships.
Next, I took in the sight of Sverl’s dreadnought etched about its surface with lines of fire, jetting long flames and beginning to slide apart.
“
Look to your defences,
” said Sverl.
I was already as deep into the system as Flute had been. I therefore managed to throw up a hardfield behind us, at the very moment some titanic explosion went off on the other side of the dreadnought. Checking the weapons cache, I saw that Sverl had resupplied it. In addition, I began making selections. As the giant ship continued to come apart, I saw one of those segments targeted by multiple particle beams beginning to radiate and explosions like volcanic eruptions were appearing all over its surface. I ramped up acceleration to take us away, firing off two chaff shells behind, and then I saw that fleet of massive ships bearing down on us. They’d U-jumped from close to the sun, very accurately indeed.
“
Let me into your system,
” said Sverl. “
We U-jump or we die.
”
CVORN
Cvorn gazed up on his screens at the images the security drone was sending from his ship’s interior and just wished he could roll back time. He wished that, rather than sending Vrom off to hunt down Sfolk, he had instead summoned his first-child here. Vrom had obviously outlived his usefulness as a first-child but should have been recycled as a child-mind in a war drone shell. He had failed his mission to take down Sfolk and now it was too late. The screen image showed a steaming pile of severed limbs and claws and a main body divided into neat segments.
Panning round, the security drone took in the rest of the scene. Two of the second-children were still alive, though one of them, with its legs missing on one side and its visual turret smashed, was hardly worth salvaging, even though it could regrow its limbs, and the visual turret could be repaired. In the past, Cvorn would have considered this option, with his previously limited ability to produce replacements, but not now. Now, in the birthing tank aboard this ship, his own nymphs were steadily devouring the corpse of a reaverfish—his own fourth-children. Within a few years, he would have plenty of replacements.
The other surviving second-child did look easily salvageable. It was attempting to drag itself off the spike on which Sfolk had impaled it—the same spike Vrom had occupied earlier while Sfolk sliced him up with a carapace saw. This child had missed meeting the same fate when the rapid return of the security drone had curtailed Sfolk’s entertainment. Before the cam images Sfolk had been sending had cut off, Cvorn had watched it all.
“This is what I’m going to do to you,” Sfolk had said as he sliced off Vrom’s limbs, “though there will be refinements.” Vrom’s screaming and bubbling had gone on and on as Sfolk explained those refinements. The medical technology to extend Cvorn’s life, the dissolving of his prongs and coitus clamp in hydrofluoric acid and the cauterizing irons. There was also the final flourish of installing Cvorn’s major ganglion in a brain case, where it would endlessly re-experience the whole aug-recorded episode.
Sfolk, Cvorn decided, was obviously resourceful and smart. But he wasn’t quite smart enough to understand that he had just detailed what would happen to
him
if Cvorn captured him alive. However, that was unlikely, since Cvorn now intended to make no real attempt at such a capture—the order was kill on sight.
The second-child finally, with much scrabbling, made it to the top of the spike and fell off, landing on its back on the floor with a thud. It struggled there for a while, then finally righted itself by bashing its claws down and flipping over. It stood there shivering, foam dripping from its mandibles. The spike had penetrated between its arrays of manipulatory limbs, through its alimentary tract, inside the ring of its major ganglion and out through the top of its shell. Sfolk had known what he was doing—ensuring he wouldn’t cut any arteries or hit anything critical. The child would steadily recover—that recovery speeded up by Cvorn’s decision.
“You, child,” he said, “what’s your name?”
“Vlox, Father,” it replied.
As he used his aug to order another five security drones initiated, and gave them their orders, he said, “You will now come to Vrom’s quarters, where you will utilize his food supply. You are now my first-child.”
The title always came first. Within a very short time this child would begin to change, feeding on a first-child diet free of the chemical suppressants that had kept it as it was. However, it would still consume suppressants that would prevent it from attaining adulthood. It would rapidly build up a dense bulk of stored fat and would shed its shell. The underlying new shell would remain soft for a few months as it rapidly converted that fat into muscle and other body tissues and grew in size. During this process, its injuries would heal quickly.
“But Sfolk, Father?” the new first-child enquired.
“Any sabotage he tries, I will detect at once,” said Cvorn, more confidently than he felt. “If he tries to reach a shuttle or other craft to escape when we next surface into the real, I will detect that too.” In reality, Cvorn doubted Sfolk would try that. Inside the ship, he was safer than he would be on the outside, where Cvorn could fry him with major weapons.
Cvorn paused for a moment, checked the ship’s manifest and found another four security drones in storage. He released them and gave them the same orders as the others. That was all of them and surely enough to keep Sfolk on the run and out of the way during their next imminent transition from U-space—and whatever might ensue.
Cvorn now took a moment to check on the progress of his offspring. He called up an image of the annex pod to the breeding pond and saw that just a few fourth-children clung to the bony remains of the reaverfish. Others were propelling themselves about in the tank and, even as he watched, two of them attacked another child that hadn’t developed properly—the paddle legs on one side of its teardrop-shaped body seemed deformed. They tore into it with sickle hooks, which would be supplanted by growing claws when they finally left the pool. As it struggled to escape, they ripped soft carapace off its back end, whereupon innards spilled out in a long Gordian tangle behind. This they fed upon while their victim struggled to escape. All was as it should be there.
Cvorn next briefly watched the erstwhile second-child head towards Vrom’s quarters. At the door, it reached out and used the pit control. Only a little while before, this would have sliced off its claw. Instead, the door opened and Vlox entered. But there was no time now to take in anything more.
They had arrived.
The ST dreadnought surfaced into the real, sensors picking up the glimmer of photons forced from the quantum foam all around. Cvorn ranged out with his sensors, seeing the ambush world and noting that his departure from the hollow moon had put it in a decaying orbit that would bring it crashing down a hundred years hence. He quickly ascertained that no ships were in view and felt a sinking sensation in his sensitive gut as he wondered if Sverl had managed to make full repairs to his chameleonware. His belated discovery of a vessel lying half a million miles away, with U-space disturbances still new in its vicinity, dispelled this sensation.
With a thought, he turned the ST dreadnought towards this and engaged its fusion engines, as the distant ship’s apparently recent arrival puzzled him. The reason became evident when further sensor data began to come in, and Cvorn swore eloquently in prador. By expanding its U-space field enough to encompass a prador dreadnought, the old style Polity attack ship had created a mass/field energy debt which had a delaying effect. That was why it hadn’t been here long. And it wasn’t Sverl’s ship out there, but one of the decoys.
The attack ship began accelerating away and Cvorn tried to decide if it was worth pursuing. Perhaps it would be better to just charge up his U-space engines and jump to the coordinates of one of the other signatures. He then noted that the attack ship was trying to open communications with him and, taking the necessary precautions, he allowed this.
“Oops,” said the mind in that ship, “wrong ship.”
“Who are you?” Cvorn asked.
“My name is a human one: ‘Flute.’ Which is also the name for a musical instrument humans use. It’s funny, but I can’t actually remember what my old name was—I reckon I left it in my old ganglion.”
“What?”
“It’s refrozen now so I suppose if I was to charge it up and sift corrupted memories, I would be able to find my old name again. But what use is it to me now?”
The mind was babbling with the obvious purpose of delaying Cvorn’s departure after one of the other signatures. Cvorn shouldn’t waste his time on it.
“It’s rather nice to be able to think as clearly as I do now,” Flute added. “And at least I haven’t ended up with a senile old brain like yours.”
Then again . . .
Cvorn opened fire with a particle beam. It stabbed across the intervening distance where inevitably a hardfield intercepted it. However, such a small ship would struggle to engage its U-space drive while thus defending itself. The attack ship turned, setting itself on a course to take it towards the world. Cvorn fired off a swarm of sub-AI missiles—their course set to take them between the attack ship and that world. The mind’s tactics were obvious: it could go in low and slingshot into the atmosphere. Meanwhile Cvorn, with a larger and less manoeuvrable ship, would have to take a longer course. At some point, the world would get between them and, leaving atmosphere, the attack ship would then be able to drop into U-space before Cvorn could recommence his attack.