“
Was it your idea to have the spine in there with us?
” I shot at Grey. It was my escape route and, to prevent my escape, Grey should have further separated me from the thing. Perhaps he had managed to subvert the black AI’s control of him just a little, his intent being that I should cut his link to the spine and thereby cut Penny Royal’s control of him. Or perhaps everything had played out here just as the AI had intended.
“We have to move fast,” I told Trent, as I caught hold of one of the tank’s bracing struts and propelled myself towards him. “We have to stop Riss.”
RISS
Coiled in an air vent over a corridor made for humans, Riss gazed out through the grating. She was watching the second-child guarding the end. She stayed utterly still as she used her inducer hardware to probe both the sensors positioned along the wall and the computing in the child’s armour. Like a safe-cracker listening for clicks, she slowly and carefully shut down some sensors, then tuned down the sensitivity of others. Next, she worked on the second-child’s armour. It had a lot more defences than the prador armour she had encountered during the war—the modifications almost certainly due to Sverl. However, Riss meticulously worked through them, cracking codes, shutting down motors, severing communications.
The second-child, which had previously been fidgeting, grew still. Riss engaged her chameleonware and flew at the grating like a released spring. It tore free on one side and she shot out to hit the opposing wall, stuck there for a moment, then slithered down to the floor and along that to face the prador. It could still move its eye palps and had seen the grating tear open. Almost certainly, it now knew that Riss was here.
Riss gazed at the thing. Though the armour was highly modified, it still possessed the vulnerabilities of the old prador armour to her. She could now dive underneath the thing and, bracing against the floor, drive her collimated diamond ovipositor straight in through one of the leg sockets’ weak points. The enzyme would dissolve the thing in no time at all—fluids and gases spurting out of pressure valves. Then, after a few hours, there would be nothing left but a shell full of liquefied remains. Riss knew precisely how it went, because she’d used hydrofluoric acid before against a prador. The parasite eggs, should she choose to use them, would take longer to act, and the process would spread the parasite to many other prador in this child’s vicinity. But was there any point in killing this second-child? In fact by immobilizing it, rather than just moving straight in to attack, had she already decided not to kill it?
Riss shook herself, not liking where her thoughts were taking her. Her mission objective was Sverl, so there was no point killing this creature. Anyway, her supply of the enzyme and the eggs was limited . . .
She slithered underneath the second-child and up to a corridor junction, scanning ahead all the time. At the junction, knowing what lay around the corner, she squirmed up one wall and along the ceiling. The corridor, though it did possess a ceiling and a floor—oriented by lights in the former and a stain-eater carpet over the latter—was zero gravity. Predictably, the prador in the coin-shaped monorail station at the end was oriented as if the grav-plates were on. Riss knew that all organic creatures found it difficult to shake their attraction to the ideas of up and down. The concepts were integral in both human and prador thought and language.
Riss slithered on until she was just about to enter the monorail station and there halted. The sensor equipment the prador had positioned here was a lot more sophisticated and Riss had been in error—grav-plates were in fact on. Here the prador had designed things precisely to trap her. If she stuck herself to any surface, remora fashion, there were vibration sensors programmed to detect her particular form of locomotion. If she used her internal grav-engine, or maglev, that would be detected too. Usually she could subvert the computing attached to the grav-plates. However, the prador here, most likely Bsectil, had installed some very different hardware that wouldn’t allow that. Riss could penetrate it, but its coding was changing randomly and it was perpetually reprogramming itself too. Bsectil, meanwhile, was heavily armoured and difficult to scan; he had a Gatling cannon in one claw, and the tip folded down from another claw to reveal a particle cannon.
“I know you’re here,” said the first-child over open com.
Something else was happening. The second-child behind had just started moving again—its armour unfreezing. Riss tried another penetration back that way, but coding changes and reprogramming were occurring there now too. Analysing signal traffic, Riss spotted her error. The vibration sensors had been set to tune out certain things, but when one of those things didn’t occur, they broadcast an alert. The thing that had stopped had been the movement Riss had thought was the second-child fidgeting. This then had been a perfectly designed trap.
“Reveal yourself and nobody has to die.” Bsectil waved a claw at something lying on the floor nearby—another collar.
Riss did nothing but continue scanning and gathering data. She could detect other prador in the area repositioning. They thought they had her now, which demonstrated a lack of dimension to their thinking also found in humans. Certainly, she had no way through here, but she was designed to navigate apparently impossible routes.
Riss stuck her spread head down against the surface she was on, hooked up and stabbed her ovipositor straight into that surface. At high speed, she moved her tail in a circle, widening the hole, then flipped round and nosed into it. On the floor above this ceiling, the prador had welded an armour shield in place, with vibration sensors scattered along it. However, they’d done nothing about the ceramo-foam insulation, sandwiched between armour and ceiling. Vibrating her head at just the right intensity, Riss nosed into that, it turned to dust ahead of her, and she burrowed at high speed. Just as she pulled her ovipositor out of sight, Gatling slugs began punching through the ceiling all around her. One hit her, full on, nearly cutting her in half. She kept moving, the smart materials of her body at that point reforming and rejoining.
Particle cannon fire hit the ceiling next, burning it away and ablating the ceramic foam. By then she was past the armour, across the corridor above and writhing up along a narrow power duct leading to the small home of a beetlebot. She moved out across a floor and along, punching another hole and heading down again. All around prador were moving towards her, because her chameleonware just wasn’t good enough any more. As she slithered along one wall, it exploded just behind her and a particle beam cut forwards. She propelled herself away with maglev, engaged her grav-motor and planed forwards. An autolaser picked her up but reflected away, as railgun missiles turned the ceiling into a colander. But Riss squirmed into a severed power duct and kept going.
It should have been exciting and it should have been fulfilling, but it just felt like a nasty chore. As she worked her way along beside superconducting cables, she bounced attempts to communicate with her. Some of these were from the surrounding prador and from Sverl himself. Strongest, and growing stronger, were the probes from Thorvald Spear, who was rapidly drawing closer.
They’d armoured the autofactory, surrounded it with sensors and weapons and set some particularly clever traps. These showed a deep understanding of her nature and her abilities. But, as ever, there was always a hole. In this case, it lay beside this duct and just ahead. Riss stopped to use her manipulators on a series of pin rivets, punching them out from the inside and squirming out as the inspection plate dropped away. The temperature around her quickly ramped up and things began to melt and burn, but she was into the mouth of a compressed-air pipe before the beam of a particle cannon punched through. Her skin was microscaled like a butterfly’s wing—and when she controlled those scales individually, they could be utterly frictionless where required. Or they could be the opposite. She shot down the pipe in a smooth series of peristaltic heaves, but then suddenly she was slowing. Sverl had just pressurized his sanctum. Vacuum began to suck Riss back, and if she didn’t do something, it would draw her back into the path of that particle beam. She collapsed one side of her skeleton and stuck herself to the side of the pipe, allowing the air past. Then she inched forwards, caterpillar fashion, her skin fully in remora mode.
I’m going to die
, she thought—she just wasn’t moving fast enough now and the prador would soon target her. But fate intervened in the form of Gatling fire, chopping through the infrastructure all around her. One slug hit the pipe behind, pinching it shut and cutting the pressure differential. Riss expanded her skeleton and accelerated again, shooting up into Sverl’s sanctum. She hit what was debatably the ceiling, and stuck there in an invisible coil.
“The drone’s in,” Bsorol clattered.
Just then, grav came on, nearly tearing Riss from the ceiling. Bsorol was close to Sverl, brandishing a particle cannon and a Gatling cannon just like his sibling. He also had anti-personnel lasers and a small hardfield generator mounted on the exterior of his armour. The laser fired, obviously tracking via vibration sensors, and hit Riss precisely. She shot away across the ceiling but the laser stayed on her, locating her for Bsorol, who opened fire with both his major weapons. Riss scribed a circle around above the first-child, a slight hint of gleeful amusement arising and then dissipating. One and a half circuits were enough, then a huge circle of ceiling—a foot’s thickness of laminated bubble-metal and armour—crashed down right on top of Bsorol.
Riss flung herself clear, scribed a neat arc through the air and came down just behind Sverl. He spun round and Riss hesitated. Then she felt an intermittent vibration through the floor—the particle cannons of the King’s Guard tearing into the hull of the station.
“I’m sorry,” she said, shutting down her chameleonware because it seemed so cowardly now.
This was a mistake.
20
SPEAR
The second-child obviously received its orders, because it lowered its bolus gun. I recognized the thing straight away. This weapon used monofilament strings in its projectiles. It was the kind of thing used in jungle fighting to clear foliage and chop up any of the enemy concealed within it. The prador had developed it during a ground conflict, to counter the human warband led by Jebel U-cap Krong and his fighters. I could understand its utility against a snakelike drone. Though it would be unlikely to chop Riss up, it would certainly delay the drone long enough for the second-child to get in close and use its other weapon: an atomic shear.
“Come on,” I said to Trent, and we threw ourselves past the prador.
“
The parasite is here,
” said Sverl, talking to me again at last.
A monorail station lay ahead. Weapons fire had slagged the corridor leading to it, and it was still glowing in vacuum. I bounced from a sagging wall panel into the station, caught a hand against the ceiling and propelled myself down to land beside the blade track, engaging gecko function. I then moved into a steady lope, briefly wondering if that was a train moving ahead, but then realizing it was Bsectil. The prador shortly leapt up onto a platform beside the track and progressed along it. We caught up with him as he came to stand before a newly installed armoured door.
The door opened ahead of Bsectil and the ensuing blast of escaping atmosphere threw him staggering back towards us. Trent lost his footing and disappeared somewhere behind me, swearing. I managed to bow into it and keep on my feet, Bsectil skidding to a halt just a couple of yards in front of me. As the air blast waned, he charged in. I trudged after him, and a moment later Trent caught up with me.
I took it all in quickly. Bsorol was struggling to drag himself out from under a heavy slab cut from the ceiling. Riss was facing up to Sverl and was completely visible, while Sverl’s prosthetic claws folded open like nightmare Swiss army knives and bristled with hardware. Something flashed and an EM pulse passed through me, leaving my aug streaming error messages and the spine turning hot in my grip. Riss shot away, streaking up one wall with portions of her body turning invisible—as if she were attempting to activate her chameleonware and failing. Weapons spiking from Sverl’s claws tracked her, and a particle beam stabbed out, bright fluorescent orange, and carved through the wall. He missed, and Riss disappeared. Sverl began firing a weapon like a pulse-gun, but each shot issued electrical discharges where it struck. The firing pattern climbed the wall and went across the ceiling. Then that particle beam began stabbing out again too.
“I only have to be successful once,” said Riss, her voice clear over every channel, despite the previous firing of some sort of EM pulse weapon.
I reached into the spine, confidently targeting its connection to Riss and inputting the code that would cause her to eject her weapons load. Something stopped me. The spine resisted me, and then it just fell to pieces in my hands, shards of black glass falling to the floor. I hit the ground next as Sverl’s fusillade tracked down towards me. As I went down, I glimpsed something dropping from the ceiling. Debris? No: Riss. She was a wheel-like blur moving in behind Sverl. Another pulse issued—this one causing visible ionization in the hot vapour that was dissipating in vacuum like a fast-moving wall. I saw Riss tumble out from underneath Sverl, completely out of control, black patches along portions of her body. I didn’t know if she’d managed to hit him with her poisonous cargo or not. She struck a nearby pipe protruding from the floor and then slowly coiled about it.
I rose, eyeing Sverl crouching up against one wall with a steady stream of vapour issuing from his suit, which died as some sealer stopped it. Beside me, the spine reassembled, slotting together like knives going into a drawer. I reached out for it, but knew I was too late. A horrible bubbling shriek swamped every channel—it reached into me through my aug, through the spine, through data connections to surrounding robots—drowning interference. Bsectil just collapsed as if someone had cut his legs out from underneath him, while Bsorol slumped under the load he had been trying to shrug off.