“The children of Vlern have learned from Sverl,” whispered Penny Royal, “and have put their augmentations and their bio-weapons to good use. Fortunately for them, they were directed to a place lacking in any elements of the King’s Guard, else things would not be going so well.”
Going so well?
Garrotte presumed that Penny Royal was talking about whoever was in that fast shuttle which the attack boats appeared likely to be about to smear across the sky. And really, even if by some miracle that shuttle managed to avoid those missiles, warships in orbit were moving to intercept. The leading ships were destroyers, while the one coming in behind was somewhat larger. Studying the last vessel, Garrotte noted that it was one of those ships produced towards the end of the war and which the Polity had retrospectively classed as ST dreadnoughts—Series Terminal dreadnoughts. This was a ship the prador had manufactured in response to the rapidly growing number of Polity warships. In building such vessels, they paid more attention to utility and speed of construction than to appearance. The ST dreadnought was about half again the size of standard, was not shaped like a prador carapace but a squat cylinder with powerful fusion drives at one end, fusion steering thrusters protruding all round, and a serious collection of armament sticking out at the other end like a city of skyscrapers. They hadn’t done so well against the Polity because all that weaponry in one place made a plum target, while the steering thrusters were vulnerable too. As a consequence of these weaknesses the designer of that ship had apparently suffered the same fate as the erstwhile king of the prador—being injected with hydrofluoric acid and floated out over one of their oceans.
Still, the shuttle, which had now reached atmosphere and had ramped up enough acceleration to stay ahead of the missiles, stood zero chance of surviving once into vacuum. Even now, the destroyers were probably targeting—
The ST dreadnought had just fired multiple particle beam blasts, each hitting the leading destroyers straight up their tail pipes. Some fusion drives simply died, two detonated, spraying out like magma eruptions and carving chunks out of the ships concerned. Something else then surfaced into the real just behind them and ignited its own fusion drive to go in amongst them. Garrotte just had time to identify a hundred-ton prador kamikaze before it detonated. The flash of the continent-busting explosion blanked all the ships from view for a moment. When they reappeared, they were tumbling away on the blast front.
“Ouch,” said Garrotte.
The blast did not destroy the destroyers because prador armour could take a lot more of a hammering than that. Their crews and captains would have been more than a little shaken up, however. Now the ST dreadnought was accelerating through, one destroyer bouncing away from its hull. Meanwhile the fast shuttle had left atmosphere, but it wasn’t out of trouble yet. The pursuing missiles ignited secondary drives and accelerated faster in vacuum, while the shuttle headed into the incoming blast front.
Now a file arrived in Garrotte’s mind and opened automatically. The ship AI suppressed the horror it felt at Penny Royal having such easy access to its mind and studied, for all of three seconds, something it would have taken an unaugmented human a week to read.
“An interesting social experiment,” Garrotte said, trying to be just pragmatic and logical. “Young prador adults are generally cowardly—forgoing individual combat and securing themselves in their sanctums and leaving the combat to their children. However, without children and forced to live close together and cooperate over many years . . .”
Garrotte waited for Penny Royal to add something more about the young adults from the Rock Pool but then just focused on the battle when the AI didn’t respond. Lasers now—green lasers picked out by the gas and debris of the explosions there. They hit the missiles and tracked them, and one after another, the missiles either died like flames starved of oxygen or detonated. Particle beams next, two of them, blue in vacuum but hazing and turning purplish as they penetrated atmosphere. They each struck the nose of an ascending attack boat and held there, each boat now generating a tail of fire as its armour ablated. An instant later the pilots of those vessels decided on survival, shut down their drives, threw themselves aside on steering thrusters and turned, accelerating back down towards the ocean.
The fast shuttle bucked in the blast front, then tumbled. It next seemed to fire its steering thrusters at random, but Garrotte noted the sequence was perfect to stabilize the vessel for its ensuing decelerating burn in towards the dreadnought, which was turning. The big ship had opened space doors onto a large shuttle bay. What ensued was more of a crash than a docking manoeuvre, but prador were tough and those aboard the shuttle probably survived it. The dreadnought swept the shuttle inside, ramped up its drive to take it back out from the world just as U-signatures began generating all around the area. It submerged into U-space and was gone, before a whole fleet of destroyers and four other dreadnoughts appeared.
“So,” said Garrotte, “apart from that interesting file, are you going to offer a further explanation?”
“Access to prador females,” Penny Royal hissed.
Garrotte got it at once: “It is amazing what organic creatures will go through just for the opportunity to mate.”
“Yes,” said Penny Royal.
Garrotte continued, “So, let me sum up: a renegade prador called Vlern joined another prador called Sverl in the Graveyard. He had five first-children and when he died, choking on flesh-paste, they began to make the transformation into adults and to fight amongst themselves. Sverl, however, who has some odd inclinations for a prador, forced them to live together peaceably, to cooperate over many years. During that time, they learned a great deal from Sverl—some of which he was utterly unaware of, like how it is possible to enhance a prador mind—and they learned a great deal from another prador called Cvorn. Finally abandoning Sverl, they came here into the Kingdom for what they have wanted ever since they made their transformation from first-children: prador females.”
Just then,
Micheletto’s Garrotte
submerged itself into U-space. This was probably a good idea because U-space signatures were now appearing out here as prador ships turned up, doubtless to investigate the
Garrotte
’s unscheduled visit. Yet another file arrived in Garrotte’s mind—obviously, Penny Royal wasn’t the talkative type. The five first-children came here, apparently to surrender themselves to the captain of that ST dreadnought, but once aboard released a bio-weapon they had fashioned to kill the entire crew. They took over the dreadnought, then three of them went down to the surface of the world, disguised in armour, to requisition some females—a mission that hadn’t gone quite to plan.
“Did they get them—the females?”
“Yes.”
“So renegade adults have stolen both an ST dreadnought and prador females?”
“Yes. In the shuttle.”
“This is not good.”
“Quite.”
“King’s Guard will get involved?”
“Almost certainly,” said Penny Royal.
Garrotte knew it was babbling when it filled in, “I’m guessing the new king of the prador will not tolerate an enclave of breeding renegade prador, especially prador capable of doing what we just saw. The king will send units of his Guard to deal with the problem. Where do you reckon that dreadnought is going now?”
“The Graveyard.”
“Ah,” said Garrotte. “If the King’s Guard enter neutral space—the Graveyard—the Polity will respond, and that will almost certainly lead to some . . . friction. So, what now?”
“You will have to tolerate me as a passenger for a while longer.”
Like I’ve got a choice
, thought Garrotte.
SPEAR
As we ascended to the parking orbit of the
Lance
in our shuttle, I glanced through the side window back down towards Masada and wondered if I was leaving a place that was about to turn into a war zone. Had Penny Royal known that the Weaver would resurrect that massive hooder war machine, the Technician? Was this another of its messes in the making? Supposedly Penny Royal’s delivery of the changing Isobel Satomi had been about creating a power balance here, though one not in the Polity’s favour, but maybe it had just made the situation more dangerous. I shook my head—I couldn’t concern myself with the Polity’s problems because I had to remain focused on my own goals. Also, as we drew closer to the
Lance
, I could actually feel Penny Royal’s abandoned spine reaching out to me as it waited inside the ship. It was like a black nail in my consciousness, and as it drove deeper I experienced a wave of déjà vu sickening in its intensity.
“You asked Amistad to accompany us,” I said to Riss, trying to distract myself. “Why?”
“I thought it unlikely he wouldn’t—whether in our ship or by some other means,” Riss replied. “I was wrong.”
“You mentioned Amistad’s history?” I queried, fingers driving into the arms of my acceleration chair as I fought against what I knew was coming.
“Yes, that history is the reason I thought he would come.”
“Tell me.”
After a long pause, which simply couldn’t have been due to Riss collecting her thoughts since her AI mind worked faster than meat like me, she said, “Amistad was a war drone whose mind hadn’t been sufficiently desensitized to its task. He was in partnership with a human being whom the prador took, and cored, and this combined with the other horrors of his war drove him insane and he went AWOL for many years.”
“A sensitive war drone,” I stated.
Suddenly I was seeing two different scenes. I was aboard the
Lance
’s shuttle, but experiencing a memory dropping into my mind from the spine.
I was also aboard something larger, with two companions, sitting in one of four seats behind the cockpit. We were silent as our craft took us into orbit, daring to hope we had escaped that thing inside the old prador supply ship crashed on the surface. Unlike Mesen, who on the way down had occupied the now empty seat
.
“Yeah, go figure,” said Riss.
“So he was cured?” I managed.
“No, he found the cure for himself during some resolution with the son of his human partner. Thereafter he was assessed as no longer being such a danger, and went his own way; pursued his own interests.”
Ahead, the space doors into the shuttle bay opened—my ship’s AI, Flute, welcoming us home.
“And what were those interests?” I cancelled Flute’s attempt to take control and guide us in and took hold of the joystick myself. I wanted to be doing something to distract myself from the scene playing out in my head. I wanted to keep it at a distance and stay in the present,
my
present.
“Madness,” Riss replied.
I turned to the snake drone, noting that her black eye was once again open as she inspected me with her enhanced sensorium. Again, she was seeing my interaction with the spine.
“Madness?” I said, feeling that other time receding at least a little.
“Amistad was interested in all aspects of madness—the shape of it, its methodology, its causes and its cures, and how it is defined. An interest that, in itself, was a kind of madness. It led Amistad to Penny Royal, whom an ancient Atheter device had attacked and left on the edge of extinction. It led to him repairing Penny Royal and then attempting to understand and cure the black AI’s madness.”
“Something of a severe fuck-up.” Ahead of me lay the
Lance
, but overlaid on that was another ship rather like Captain Blite’s vessel. I jerked in my seat as something thumped into the rear of the shuttle, but I had remained sufficiently disconnected to know this had happened to the
other
shuttle.
“True, perhaps,” Riss dipped her head in acknowledgement. “It also led Earth Central to select Amistad as the overseer and then Warden of Masada because here was the world of a race that had apparently gone insane and committed suicide. Who better to understand such a race?”
I ruminated on that for a moment as I manoeuvred the shuttle into its bay, and as the space doors closed behind. As I groped around for further distractions, an odd bit of data—just a memory of something I’d read once—surfaced in my mind for my inspection.
“How was the name Masada selected?” I asked.
“It was chosen by the first hierarch of the theocracy that established itself here. They felt themselves to be akin to the Zealots in the ancient fortress of the same name—their world a bastion of their faith.”
“Strange coincidence, considering those same Zealots committed mass suicide rather than surrender to Roman rule.”
“Yes, perhaps.”
Riss’s use of the word “perhaps” was beginning to irritate me. “I still don’t see why you expected Amistad to come with us.” I unstrapped and stood, heading for the airlock as, with a thump, docking clamps engaged around the shuttle. Opening the inner door, I checked the exterior atmosphere reading, waited until the warning light flicked from wasp-stripe amber to pure green, then opened the outer door.
“Because madness is Amistad’s overriding interest,” said Riss from behind, “and Masada seemed a saner place and of less interest to him. I expected him to join us because we’re heading towards a greater madness.”
I paused for a moment, waiting for it, and Riss did not let me down.
“Perhaps,” the snake drone added.
“Do go on,” I said, noting how this discussion of madness equated to my present problem. Did I have multiple personality disorder? Maybe. Other memories intruded again, as Penny Royal’s spine tightened its hold.
I was Garton, a killer for hire taken on by this salvage team only a few months ago because the team that found a prador supply ship had encountered some problems—had lost personnel and had had to abandon the site. They had assumed they might find another team working there, or maybe a stray surviving prador. But not the thing we found in that ship . . .
“I expected Amistad to join us for his own confrontation with Penny Royal. I did not expect him to interfere with
your
aims, though while it seems you understand your
purpose
, your true aims are not clear. Do you still seek revenge?” Riss paused to let that sink in. It did, hard. I felt anger at Penny Royal and a need for vengeance so strong it was a taste like iron in my mouth, but was this anger truly mine?