“Yes, I’m coming,” I replied, straightening up. “Lead on.”
Vrit headed to the right across the same black rock as the ground-down and polished dock stone. But here it was whorled and pitted, scattered with baroque clinging shellfish. After checking to ensure my hover trunk could deal with the uneven surface, I followed him down to a jetty poking out into the sea, a large covered barge moored beside it. I noted a small cargo platform with a rear cargo crane on caterpillar treads standing behind it, and felt a small relaxing of tension. Vrit would not have gone to the trouble to have such an unwieldy device brought if he intended some betrayal … probably. At the foot of the jetty, I turned to look back at the port building and could just see the upper hull and weapons turret of the
Moray Firth
on the other side. I had no doubt that Isobel was watching me at that moment, though I did wonder what she was seeing now that a second hooder eye had opened on her face, which itself had grown longer and now bore some resemblance to an Easter Island statue.
“Come, come.” Vrit had already scrambled across onto a small area of clear deck and was now gesturing to me from the barge with his heavy claw.
I crossed the short ramp, stepping onto the deck as Vrit opened the wide door into the barge’s interior. Lights immediately came on inside and I ducked in after him, stepping down yet another ramp into tatty living quarters. As I waited for my hover trunk to catch up, I noted the rubbish scattered on a single desk—analgesic patches, an auto-dispensary and a scattering of air injectors.
“You know,” I said, as I watched my trunk enter the quarters with almost pernickety distaste, “if you don’t get proper treatment you’ll either get steadily worse and die, or at some point go into anaphylactic shock and die from that.”
Vrit turned sharply. “What’s it to you?”
I shrugged. “I don’t like to see suffering. It’s obvious to me that your human half is reacting to the rest of you.” I paused, then added, “I might be able to help you there.”
Vrit removed his mask, then parted his dragonfly mandible to show a sneering mouth. “It’s reacting because it’s weak, and I don’t need any human help.” He turned away and pushed through the plastic curtains, calling back, “Rather it is the true me rejecting the human.”
I watched the curtains for a moment longer, realizing how that rogue memory had impelled me to offer help. But, even though I was sure the memory hadn’t been Vrit’s, it should have warned me help would not be accepted. Closing my eyes for a second, I wondered what I should do about that memory, but without something like a Polity forensic AI to investigate it, there was nothing I could do. I just had to live with it and continue towards my goals. These experiences only fazed me for a moment and, as in this case, they even provided potentially useful information.
Removing my own mask, I followed the shellman through and looked around. The area beyond the curtains was packed with jury-rigged equipment for testing and repairing computer hardware. This was a mixture of human and prador technology, webbed together with optics and s-con cables, the power being supplied by a stacked capacitor charge tower. At the far end, on an airplast pallet, stood the prador cryopod. The sphere of brassy metal was a metre across, trailing cables and optics to the nearby equipment. Inset in its upper surface were quadrant windows lit by an internal green light. I shivered, not because the thing was chilling the air, but because of the suffering it implied. The prador brain the pod contained would not have willingly left its original body. Once Vrit stood aside and gestured to the thing, I walked over and peered in through one of the windows.
The prador second-child ganglion sat inside in a cube of water ice, a coiled length of organic matter. It lay blurred behind odd crystalline structures that seemed to have grown from it into the surrounding ice. It was almost lost under its numerous plugs, interfaces and skeins of optics that in turn exited the cube to connect to various black-box hardware units. This object rested between two splayed-end columns and I pondered on their similarity to the supports within Polity spaceships for AI crystals. I reached out and rested a hand on the sphere, almost in apology. Though I was not to blame for the events that had resulted in the thing before me, in purchasing it I might be encouraging their repetition.
“What’s it from?” I asked.
“Prador kamikaze—made a solstan year before the end of the war and never used.” Vrit bowed towards the sea almost obsequiously. “Father-Captain Sverl, the ruler of our world, has been trading his limited supply for Polity tech.”
Prador kamikazes, just like their Japanese namesakes, had been used during the war. The only real difference was that they flew in space and carried far more in the way of destructive potential.
“What kind of Polity tech?” I asked, immediately suspicious of this Sverl’s motives.
Vrit gave an odd crippled shrug. “This one, along with some other items, was to trade for a picoscope, gene-sequencing nanobots and one or two other expensive items.”
The first he’d mentioned was expensive enough. I’d considered acquiring a picoscope—something that just hadn’t existed a hundred years ago. How amazing would it be to see sub-nanoscopic structures and to a limited extent manipulate them? What dissuaded me was my struggle to grasp how the damned thing worked—it having been developed by AI and involving U-space tech. In addition, I couldn’t justify the huge expense with respect to my goals.
I turned back to my trunk, which had now settled down in the middle of the floor as if prudishly trying to distance itself from the surrounding mess. I stepped over and touched my fingertips against the upper surface, whereupon a half-lid hinged silently open to reveal neatly packed Polity computer hardware. I made my selection and stepped back to the prador cryopod, pulling an optic cable from the end of an oval processing unit, and searched for ports in the brassy metal.
“Do you want to hear it talk?” asked Vrit, as I finally found a port and plugged in the optic.
I glanced at him. “You’ve hooked in a translator?”
“Of course,” said Vrit, scratching at one of his rashes with dirty human fingernails.
“Then why not?” It would do no harm, but I preferred my own methods of checking to ensure the second-child ganglion was viable. I peered at data appearing on my comp-unit’s small screen and wiped a hand across it to expand it into a flat holodisplay. Then I waved the display up into the air beside me, where it hung running diagnostic code.
“Pilot,” said Vrit. “Status report.”
A voice, quite obviously tweaked to make it sound less human, spoke from a stalk speaker which sprouted from a console on a nearby work surface.
“I am fully functional,” it said. “System ports 43 to 78 and 80 to 125 are disconnected. Port 79 is running a Polity-format diagnostic. New instruction: allow. Internal battery is at 40%. External source inadequate for maintenance level. Status of U-calculus nil—engine parameters unavailable. Status of—”
“End report,” Vrit ordered, then turned back to me. “Do you want to ask it anything?”
“Will it respond?”
“It will now,” Vrit replied, stabbing a finger down on a touch panel.
I nodded, then turned so I could address the cryopod directly, even though I knew that the microphones were probably over in that console. Something there about respect, I guess, and pity. “Tell me, prador second-child, what is your name?”
A sizzling sound issued from the stalk speaker, then I recognized the bubbling hiss of prador language, followed by confused tense clicks. Its name was something like “Vffloiotsht” but it obviously didn’t know whether to add the clicks for “I am” or “I was” after its name.
“I will call you Flute,” said I. “Henceforth that is your name.”
“Primary instruction confirm?” the second-child suggested.
I glanced at Vrit, who gave a crabbish shrug.
“Confirm,” I said.
“Of course,” said Vrit, “it doesn’t matter to me what you call it … when you’ve paid for it.”
I was satisfied with everything my own hardware was showing me. Inside that cryopod there was indeed the surgically excised brain of a prador second-child, held in organic stasis but adapted to run electro-optics. The Polity AIs had claimed that spaceships could only navigate U-space with an AI aboard to make the necessary calculations. But they no longer bothered to quell the rumours that this was a lie—because otherwise how had the prador, a race without AIs, managed to travel in that same continuum? It turned out they adapted their own children for that purpose, and the surgical procedure was usually carried out without anaesthetic, either as punishment or simply for entertainment.
I stepped back over to my trunk and tapped the second half-lid so that it hinged open. Inside rested a chunk of a nacreous layered glassy substance.
“I believe five pounds of prador diamond slate was the agreed price,” I suggested.
Vrit was over by the trunk in a moment, clicking his langoustine claw across the layers, mandibles wide and human mouth pursed pensively.
“I only take a small percentage,” he said. “I am privileged to act as an agent for the father-captain.”
I swung back to gaze at the cryopod, uncomfortable with this purchase; bothered by the morality of it. However, it was what was required if you wanted to travel through interstellar space without too many Polity AIs noticing. And it was certainly the kind of thing you needed if you intended to reactivate a Polity destroyer that had, essentially, lost its own mind. And you needed a Polity destroyer if you intended to attack a black AI in its own lair.
THE WAR: DURANA
I gazed back along the tunnel through the vegetation at the bluebarbs and twizzle vines, the lurking pumpkin cycads and offler weed. The only similarity between the vegetation here and anything terran was the fact that it grew upwards. Nothing had real photosynthesizing leaves, probably because the intensity of the sunlight here didn’t require them. This world’s version of chlorophyll contained in their structure supplied all the energy they needed. The twizzle vines were just pale blue corkscrews that draped over everything. The bluebarbs, though resembling twenty-foot-tall rhubarb dipped in blue printer’s ink, were a variety of fungus. And the cycads could hardly be described as either plant or fungus. They built sugars via induction shifts in the planet’s magnetic field. They also occasionally pulled up their roots and perambulated on a slug-like foot to a better position, after having drained the soil below of minerals. The offler weed was a particularly aggressive slime mould.
“You okay?” asked Krong.
I glanced across at this hero of the Polity and wondered how much longer he would survive. Certainly he was a man driven by his hatred of the prador and a firm loyalty to his perception of everything the Polity stood for. But his methods revealed inconsistencies. Slapping a sticky-bomb on the carapace of a prador, when you could have taken it out at a distance with a missile launcher, wasn’t the most logical way to fight them. Jebel U-cap Krong and his comrades in this squad were all adrenalin junkies. I suspected the AIs allowed him to continue because of some arcane calculation concerning the advantageous publicity he produced. In their war for survival, the AIs and humanity needed their heroes.
“I’ll be okay,” I replied, “just so long as one of our prador friends is intact.”
“We’ll try our best.” He grinned and moved away.
Durana was a world swamped in deep plant growth—a jungle world, if you will. It provided just the kind of preferred hunting ground for Jebel U-cap Krong and his squad of prador-killers. Their techniques did not work well where there was less concealment and, so Jebel told me, they were assigned to those environments where they could do the most damage. Before Durana they’d been on a desert planet, concealing themselves like trapdoor spiders in caustic white sand. Their goal was to ambush the prador who were installing a titanic ground-based railgun, until one of the new Polity dreadnoughts had spoiled their fun. After a two-hour warning, it dropped a chemical reactor bomb that caused a chain reaction in the desert. This sank the gun emplacement into a lake—a glutinous syrup of something like caustic soda. I’d been with them for that one and the two before. These were the ice moon, where we used boring machines, coming up below the prador like rising sharks. Next was the H3 station on a gas giant, where we used motorized mono-cloth ornithopters, dropping on them from concealing fogs.
I spent four months aboard an Earth Central Security hospital ship recovering from my stint with the prador. The physical harm was dealt with in two weeks, but the other damage took longer. The mind-tech assigned to me kept insisting that my recovery would be sped up by a little memory editing, but I refused that. It seemed essential that I retain the horror as a driver to my need for vengeance. I healed the old way—learning to live with what had happened to me—and when I shipped out I was functional, if a little twitchy. ECS gave me bio-weapons scut work—first developing some nasty viruses and flesh-eating fungal spores—a chore I found less abhorrent than usual. Then afterwards they eased me back into bio-espionage. I began with extracting data from prador corpses and from second-child ganglions surviving in wrecked prador ships or drones. Or I retrieved information from their baroque computer systems. Once I’d proved that I wasn’t going to run away screaming at the mere sight of the enemy, they moved me up to captive prador. During this time, the prisoners from a crashed prador dreadnought provided information about Penny Royal. It was becoming an obsession for me, though not to ECS. Shortly after that, I was considered fit for more active service and was allowed to respond to U-cap Krong’s request for me. He needed a bio-espionage expert and I fitted the bill. I guess my psych profile after my experiences with the prador was just right too.
“Okay, we’re clear,” someone called. “Let’s move on.”
The target here was a prador mining operation. Deep under this jungle was a layer of rare metal that they used in their armour—a metal that had only recently been added to the human periodic table. I had to wonder if the suggested names for it, Ucapium or Krongium, had something to do with our presence here. Those running military PR wouldn’t have been above that.