War Factory: Transformations Book Two (7 page)

“Back at you with that,” I said. “What are your aims and what is your purpose, then?”

Riss shook her cobra head, her black eye closing.

“Penny Royal, it appears, is trying to heal the damage of its past crimes,” said the drone, “but that AI is more complicated and dangerous than that. I too wish to make some . . . corrections. I have to cogitate on taking revenge for what was done to me, and decide if what was done to me requires it.”

I found myself waiting for a “perhaps,” then shook myself and headed for the door into the ship proper, ghosts all around me, panicking and pulling out their weapons as a shadow flowed out from behind their shuttle.

Another voice then spoke up: “So, I am the mind of a ship with a Polity bio-espionage officer aboard, an assassin drone and I just came close to having a war drone aboard too. Do we have any room aboard for a Golem soldier? Maybe you’d like to oust me and replace me with a Polity attack ship mind?”

“You missed out the word ‘erstwhile,’ Flute,” I said, really irritated now. “We were enemies of the prador but now we’re not. Perhaps you might like to ponder on who chopped you out of your original body and installed you in the case you now occupy.”

Flute just made a snorting sound over the PA.

“You have those coordinates I sent you?” I enquired, turning to head straight for my cabin.

“I have.”

“Then take us there.”

“Very well,” Flute replied.

I entered my cabin and firmly closed the door, went over and threw myself down on my bed, and let the vision come. Laser carbine fire filled the shuttle bay in my mind but, as Garton, I knew this was pointless light and colour. We’d hit this thing down on the surface and inflicted no damage at all after it had grabbed Mesen.

The shadow etched itself into reality as a swarm of black sword blades rose up like snake heads atop silver tubes. It came forwards as we moved back towards the airlock and I knew it would be on us before we could all cycle through. I turned towards the airlock, intent on being the first inside as one of those blades pierced Anderson and hauled him screaming from the deck. I glimpsed his face, the flesh shrinking and darkening over his skull and his eyes sinking away as if the blade was sucking all the juice out of him. I struggled with the airlock controls, shitting myself in an envirosuit not made to process it and feeling embarrassed despite my terror, then felt agonizing pain from front to back. Looking down, I saw the point of a black blade protruding from under my breastbone and began screaming as it hauled me from the floor. But that wasn’t the worst. I felt the blade sucking everything I was, both physically and mentally, in towards itself, whirling down in an agonizing and terrifying maelstrom towards . . . nothing. Just screaming and screaming as I went.

“Spear! Thorvald Spear!” Flute was shouting over the intercom, just as my cabin door opened and Riss entered—the lock obviously no problem for the snake drone. I guessed I had become a bit vocal during that particular nightmare.

“I’m okay,” I said hoarsely, sitting upright.

I reached down and rubbed at my chest, still feeling the hard sharpness of that thing skewering me; still feeling Garton’s death. I wasn’t all right. Garton’s skewering equated to the spine nailed into my mind and I just knew that there were thousands clamouring to tell me their stories through it—the unquiet dead were demanding to be heard.

FATHER-CAPTAIN CVORN

As the latest images and data came in from his spy satellites, Cvorn felt a great deal of satisfaction, but tempered by a degree of chagrin. Cvorn, a huge crablike prador, floating on grav-motors because he had long ago lost his legs and claws, crunched his mandibles together before the visual turret at his fore. He could never have misled Sverl so thoroughly before. Cvorn could never have achieved such an intricately balanced and perfectly targeted piece of destruction when he had been a normal prador father-captain.

When Cvorn had gone to the Rock Pool he had been as baffled as Sverl by the victory of humanity and the AIs over the might of the Prador Kingdom, and he had felt the new king’s betrayal of the prador race just as deeply. Making peace with the humans should not have been an option. Unlike Sverl, however, Cvorn had not gone seeking answers by allowing himself to become the plaything of a black AI. He had brooded, and he had made his plans for vengeance. Meanwhile, over the years, it became apparent that Sverl was changing in some strange way. Affronted by the restraint Sverl steadily placed on him, Cvorn began investigating this, and soon obtained answers by way of ship lice, their tiny brains surgically altered and their carapaces dotted with pin cams, inserted via a sea-floor robot recalled into Sverl’s dreadnought.

Cvorn’s first reaction was a visceral horror and he had almost set in motion one of the many plans he had been toying with for an attack on Sverl. It wasn’t that he had resented Sverl when he first made these plans—all father-captains made such preparations. At the last moment, he stopped himself. He had been thinking long and hard at the bottom of that ocean and, though Sverl had changed, it was notable how his deployment of Polity technology, amalgamated with prador technology, had led to greater efficiencies. Sverl had become very smart and seemed to be on to something. Perhaps Cvorn needed to show some restraint, and to learn.

Sverl was turning into something monstrous—some horrible combination of both prador and human—but this wasn’t the source of his increased intelligence. It took Cvorn many years of watching to realize that Sverl wasn’t just part human, but augmented too. A partial confirmation of this came from a careful study of Sverl’s behaviour, such as how he controlled things around him, like that horrible Golem, and from a further study of all the intercepted computer code. Final confirmation came from an X-ray photograph of Sverl, the X-rays apparently generated when a louse ate into the shielding of a piece of ship equipment. Unfortunately, shortly after the confirmation of Sverl’s augmentation, Cvorn lost access when the other father-captain exterminated all his ship lice and started using Polity cleanbots for the same purpose.

AI crystal was growing around Sverl’s major ganglion—crystal precisely matching that of the Polity AIs. Sverl was turning into the enemy he had wanted to understand. Cvorn, who had always been a little bit brighter than most of the rest of his kind, even understood the irony of that. He also understood that in reality the prador had not been defeated by the humans, but by that glistening thinking rock.

Cvorn tried an aug, designed for the prador ganglion, on one of his second-children. The results had been astounding and Cvorn even began to feel threatened by this child, until he tore off all its limbs, opened up its carapace and ate the contents. The nanoscopic connections in the child’s ganglion had delivered an odd piquancy of flavour. Next, not being too averse to surgical connections to his own brain—he did, after all, have three prador thrall units on his carapace to control his two human blanks and sometimes to control his war drones directly—Cvorn tried an aug on himself. Again, the results were astounding, so he tried a second aug, and then some heavily buffered AI crystal, and fast became addicted to enhancement.

However, Cvorn soon reached the barrier to infinite enhancement: the burn-out of the organic brain. He shivered when he remembered how close he had come to that point. When an organic brain and AI crystal fall into a synergy, intelligence ramps exponentially until the organic brain fails like a first-child attached to the full output of a fusion reactor—something Cvorn had once tried, just for entertainment. He had disconnected and discarded the crystal, and wondered just how Penny Royal had enabled Sverl to survive it.

Still, even enhanced as he had become, Cvorn’s aims and ambitions, unlike Sverl’s, had not changed. He wanted power and the increase of his family beyond those few replacement children he produced artificially in his destroyer’s single incubator. He wanted vengeance against the new king of the prador for his betrayal of his race by seeking a truce with the Polity. In addition, he wanted the prador to win the war against the humans and the AIs, which, in his opinion, had never ended. He hated humans—that had never changed.

Next, understanding that he was unlikely to achieve all these goals alone, he needed allies, and so he turned to the five children of that other refugee from the Kingdom, Vlern—the five young adults Sverl had managed to control and inadvertently weld into an alliance of similar interests, which was how any prador community operated. He contacted one of them, who at length he identified as Sfolk—he often found it difficult to tell them apart. Sfolk was unusually intelligent and their spokes-prador. Cvorn began the slow and very difficult process of building trust with him. First, he revealed Sverl’s true nature to the Five, then he showed the data from his study of the second-child he had auged and offered to put them in contact with his supplier, in the Polity, of prador augs, in exchange for certain agreements. He played them easily at first because they were naive; he played them with more care later as the augs he had given them increased their intelligence. He knew precisely what they wanted—prador females—and offered them a route to that end.

First, they needed an escape route: the Five were completely under Sverl’s control and they needed to work round that. While escaping, they should destroy the humans on the Rock Pool. Sfolk had immediately questioned this. Sverl had acquired, like a disease, some affection for the humans of Carapace City. Why aggravate him when, once they escaped, they would probably cease to be of any interest to him? Cvorn was insistent. This was the quid pro quo: he would, via his contacts back in the Kingdom, help them find the females and in return they must help him destroy Carapace City. He told them that his long years of restraint, culminating in his discovery of what Sverl had become, had enhanced his hatred of humans, and he wanted plain old prador vengeance against Sverl. He did not tell Sfolk that for his plans he needed to draw Sverl out and that by killing the humans he aimed to ensure this. He did not tell them that Sverl was the key to restarting the war against the Polity.

However, the first attempt to capture Sverl had been a failure, so his plans had changed. His contacts in the Kingdom had lined up another target for Vlern’s brood, because the location of the females would be of secondary importance to the Five’s method of escape. Of course, having snatched the females, the Five intended to head far away from the Kingdom, and the Graveyard, beyond the reach of other prador and out there begin breeding. Their plans were irrelevant because Cvorn had thwarted them from the beginning. He had neglected to tell them of the odder qualities of the biotech augs that his supplier, Dracocorp, had provided.

3

SVERL

The fusion drive seared the rocky ground beyond the city, instantly scouring away the meagre vegetation in a cloud of ash and smoke, rocks cracking and smoking in sun fire and turning molten. Closely linked into his ship’s systems, Sverl hinged out its stabilizing feet and read the error reports but found nothing critical.

Exterior cams showed the feet—great flat skates of exotic alloy folding down on hinged legs driven by massive gas-fed rams, shielded on their inner sides by hardfields—coming down on molten rock and sinking. This was a problem the designers had foolishly failed to compensate for throughout the war, Sverl remembered. He’d known of many instances of ships trapped on the ground after rock hardened about their feet, and Polity forces annihilating them.

He shut down the fusion drive and listened to his ship creaking and groaning around him as it settled. He noted the vessel was tilting slightly and, for a moment, assumed that the ground must be softer over on one side. Upon checking, however, he saw that the landing feet there had sunk no deeper than had the others. Further checking revealed, half a mile to one side, a squat cliff apparently rising out of the ground. It wasn’t rising; the rock on this side of it was sinking. Under the immense weight of the dreadnought a chunk of volcanic rock, under the feet on one side and sitting on softer sedimentary rock, had broken off from that surrounding it and was now sinking. Sverl further probed the ground with his sensors, but even as he did so the rate of sinkage slowed. It would be fine—if they could ever take off again.

“Bsorol,” he said, the image of that first-child immediately coming up on one of his screens. Many years of chemically maintained adolescence had twisted Bsorol, his legs bowed and his carapace whorled like old wood. “I want a team suited up and outside when feasible. I want thermal-sealed fracture charges pushed into the hardening rock about the landing feet within the next hour.”

“Yes, Father,” Bsorol replied. Then, after a hesitation, “There are many humans out there.”

Sverl glanced at another screen. Various gravans and gravcars, ATVs and cargo platforms led the crowds moving out from the city. One of these cars had moved too close during the dreadnought’s descent and now lay on its side, its passengers climbing out. Sverl recognized the shellman Taiken, along with what were presumably members of his family: a female and two boys. The other vehicles had sensibly maintained their distance so were okay, while the people on foot had dropped to the ground, a hot smoky wind howling above them. Of course, like many other children aboard, Bsorol had taken an interest in the goings-on in Carapace City. He had also been in proximity with the humans while serving his time guarding the small land-based space port—mostly so Sverl could have a presence there if he needed to act quickly against some threat. However, despite his long years of service to Sverl, Bsorol, like his siblings, was still almost certainly viciously xenophobic. This might be a problem.

“Yes, there are humans out there,” Sverl replied, “and soon they will be coming aboard this ship to occupy Quadrant Four and the lower holds there.”

“Why?” Bsorol asked.

“Because I am saving them all from the imminent destruction of their city.”

“But why?” Bsorol asked again.

Sverl mulled over various replies but knew none of them would make sense to Bsorol. He then realized how things needed to change. Perhaps the time had come to do something he had shied away from for many years. Perhaps he should allow Bsorol and his other children access to augmentation to widen their horizons. They needed to think beyond the mere instinctive urge to exterminate competitors, whether in other prador families or in alien races. But that was for the future. Right now only one option was available.