“It would be better if you were rendered unconscious,” Flute observed, its voice more distinct now that the air was improving.
“Okay,” I said. I would just have to trust the mind and, if I woke up, that trust would be justified.
The autodoc advanced to rest over my collarbone on my uninjured side. Something buzzed and tugged as it penetrated my suit. Numbness spread at that point and I felt the pressure of an object being inserted. This item made contact, input the correct signals, and turned me off like a light.
7
SPEAR
I didn’t quite know where or when I was when I opened my eyes. I couldn’t decide whether I would find myself lying in that resurrection cage on Earth, or coming back to lucidity after one of my “bad” periods while under the spider thrall. Or I could find myself again waking in that Polity hospital station after Panarchia, realizing the nightmare was over. But then memory began to kick in again and I lay still, frightened for a moment to move. Finally I tried to sit up and found that easy enough. I was naked, the autodoc was nowhere in sight and the sheet I lay on was bloody. Some splinters of bone lay on the bed beside me, neatly lined up. I checked my hands first, seeing the thin threadlike scars characteristic of an older style of autodoc. It had used fast cell-welding, which confirmed it was a battlefield design. Clenching and unclenching them, I found they worked fine, though they did feel tender. Whether this was due to damage still needing to heal or my body’s memory of pain I couldn’t say. Next checking my shoulder I found similar scarring there, and it was stiff and painful.
Okay, I was awake and alive, which proved that Flute had not tried to kill me. After all, it could certainly have finished the job through the autodoc.
“Flute,” I said. “I need clothing and I need a space suit.” My own space suit was crumpled on the floor with the remains of my clothing, and all were bloody.
“The cabin you currently occupy has clothing that may still be suitable,” Flute replied. “I have begun diagnostic tests on the space suits in storage—thus far they only seem to require their power supplies recharging and air bottles refilling.”
“Good.”
I swung my legs off the bed, stood and peeled off sticky sheets and walked over to a sanitary unit and checked to see if it would work. It did and I stepped into the shower to scrub away the blood. It was too late now for me to worry about bot infection from the ship’s water. Opening a cupboard, I checked through the men’s clothing there. Some of it was highly degraded—one shirt just ripped in two as I pulled it out—but there were other garments there made from more rugged materials. I ended up clad in chameleoncloth combat trousers locked on some dark rocky landscape setting and a T-shirt. This started running some ancient black-and-white film the moment my body heat set its integral electronics running.
I tramped out of the cabin to the corridor and thence to the tube leading to the airlock. A door beside that revealed racked space suits hanging inside, with lights flickering on their various bits of computer hardware.
“Let me know when they’re ready,” I said.
“Minutes only,” Flute replied.
Only then did I think to check the time through my aug and found that we were now beyond the predicted forty hours for Flute’s diagnostic checks. First I was annoyed at the lost time, but then cheered at the thought that I could just have been waiting around for the diagnostic check to end. Despite the shitty circumstances that had left me unconscious, I could now
move
.
“So what
is
the condition of this ship?” I asked, closing the door and heading off towards the ship’s cortex.
“All human-accessible areas have been deep cleaned of micro- and nanobots. Full deep cleaning of the rest of the ship will take many months since some disassembly will be required. U-space and fusion drives are functional, the reactor is stable, weapons systems are functional but depleted. It will be necessary to take on materials for in-ship manufacturing, as some components will need replacing and some items are in need of resupply.”
“We can travel, though?”
“Yes.”
“What needs replacing?”
“Railgun missiles and warheads. There are no CTDs left. There are also no solid-state laser assemblies and high-temperature fabricated components for the reactor and fusion drive. Some of these items I can make but these would be better supplied from a military depot.”
Heading back toward the ship’s cortex, I knew for sure I needed weapons. Without them, what the hell was I going to do when I found Penny Royal? Use strong language? I also realized by Flute’s use of “military depot” that it was still thinking in terms of war supply and demand. It didn’t seem likely that I could roll up at some ECS military base and select CTDs like tasty snacks from a buffet.
“Which items can you make?” I asked, pausing in the corridor and noting that the corpses were gone. The areas of wall and ceiling where they had been were now pristine.
“Simple railgun missiles can be smelted from debris or asteroid iron using lasers and hardfield moulding. High-temperature components can be made in the same way, but with higher energy demands. Solid-state laser assemblies can be built by nanobot, but that is a lengthy process. CTDs cannot be made with the resources available to this ship.”
Of course, these ships were made so they could resupply most of their own needs. As for the CTDs, it was understandable that running up a chunk of anti-matter might be stretching things. I would have to check to see if Isobel had anything like that secreted away aboard her ship, and there were other options to try.
“What about fusion and fission bombs?”
“It will be possible to make them if the correct ores can be obtained.”
I walked up the tunnel into the ship’s cortex and paused at the entrance, feeling reluctant to enter. But then, dipping my head in for a look around, I saw that any danger from the Golem had been completely eliminated. A mid-sized maintenance robot had cut off its arms, detached its torso from that tentacle and was now detaching the tentacle from its wall socket. I studied the robot for a moment then returned my attention to the Golem. It was still impaled on Penny Royal’s spine. My next step—to get to the source of that spine—was overdue. It was time for me to leave. However, first I had to deal with Isobel Satomi …
ISOBEL
Everything within her mind was accessible, but nothing outside it worked. At first she had struggled endlessly to try and regain control of her body or reach out to her ship’s systems, but she could affect nothing at all. However, straining against her invisible bonds seemed to accelerate other processes in her body. Although she could not move her arms and legs, she found she could now move the hooder manipulators growing out of her face. She could also flex her cowl and see out of yet another newly opened hooder eye. Her connection to these from the predatory part of her consciousness was also so much firmer, which only increased her overall panic. In the end, she deliberately put her mind into a state of semi-consciousness, woken when the door to her cabin opened once again.
“Isobel,” said Spear. He squatted down beside her bed and peered into her face. She tried to reply but this time he was not allowing her to speak. “Looks like your changes are accelerating, but then that’s probably because they’re no longer fighting your body.” He stood up and paced. “This is how the situation stands with you: I have set in reverse the prion cascades in your body, and those in Trent and Gabriel. You’ll all be mobile again in a day or so, but I will be long gone by then. I have helped myself to various items from your vessel, including your surprising collection of CTDs. I have also disabled your U-space drive, but in ways you just won’t be able to repair. It will take you approximately four years to reach the nearest place where you can get that drive repaired. By then either Penny Royal or I will be dead. If by any chance it is I who survives, I’ll have returned to the Polity and will be far beyond your reach.”
After a long pause he again squatted down to gaze into her face. “I was once subject to a spider thrall, Isobel, so doing what I did to you and your men did not come easy to me. However, considering what you have done, you’re lucky I didn’t decide to shove you all out of an airlock.” He was lost for words for a moment, his attention wandering, then he remembered something. “Oh yes, there’s another factor we should consider. You won’t be in any condition to come after me in four years, because by then your arms and legs will be gone. You’ll be crawling on your belly and cutting up food with those things growing out of your face. I don’t know if whatever remains of you by that time will even be interested in me—if you’ll even remember me. Goodbye Isobel.” He stood up and left.
Isobel just lay there screaming silently, then bleeding when one of her facial manipulators, which had now sprouted an object like a scalpel, sliced across her nose. Eventually she managed some self-control and shut herself down—timing a period of unconsciousness to last for two days.
Hiatus …
Isobel Satomi opened her many eyes and the effect was something like the sensory enhancement of her cowl, but with the visual feed coming from different parts of the electromagnetic spectrum. The input went into different mental partitions, and she was able to make selections from these on the basis of need. That need was human at that moment and so everything in the human visual spectrum opened to her. However, she knew at once that her human eyes no longer existed. She rolled onto her back then sat up, but even that action was different. She found herself peeling up from the bed, her spine as supple as a snake’s and paused at a mid-point when her upper body was essentially upright. However, it was curving up from the midpoint of her long torso, which had now grown by at least another six inches.
Next, sitting all the way up with her weight coming down on her buttocks, she could feel a large lump down there and knew that her tail had grown by the same amount as her torso. She swung her legs off the bed and tried to stand, but her feet felt all wrong and she started to fall forwards. The prions had not worn off completely, because nothing was working properly. She felt a moment of panic when she realized she wasn’t putting out her hands to break her fall, tried to turn her face to stop it smashing into the floor and just couldn’t move her neck at all, then halted her fall just a few inches from the floor … but not with her hands.
Creeping horror worked its way up her hard flexible spine. She tried to turn to look back down along the length of her body but still couldn’t move her neck. Something else moved instead, her spine twisting just below her neck at an angle impossible for a human body. Something crunched horribly as if her shoulder blade was dislocating, and now she could see her body. Five hard, insectile legs had torn their way free of her padded clothing to rest upon the floor; thick centipede legs terminating in feet that consisted of rearward-pointing curved hooks. She could feel those legs and she could move them. She felt a sense of irritation with the hard floor below, with a need for soft rhizome-layered ground to dig those hooks into, and thus propel her forwards. She screamed—abruptly folding the legs in to try and hide them—and dropped, smashing her damaged nose against the floor.
“Isobel! Isobel!”
Someone was hammering at the door. She had to get control of herself and she couldn’t let them see her like this. It would be hard enough to dominate them when they learned just how long it would take them to return to civilization.
“I’m okay,” she called then, realizing how odd her mouth felt, wondered how long it would be before she lost the power of human speech. “Go check if that destroyer is still out there, then give me a report over intercom.” She paused, trying to think of other make-work tasks for Trent and Gabriel while she made herself presentable, but finished with, “I’ll join you on the bridge in an hour.”
She could hear muttering out there, then listened more intently and, as words became clear, her inner predator awoke.
“She’s getting more erratic,” said Gabriel. “I bet she just sprouted another fucking leg or eye. It’s gonna be time to move on.”
“Let’s just head for the bridge,” said Trent.
“The destroyer’s gone,” said Gabriel, his voice getting fainter as they moved away. “He told us that anyway.” Then after a pause. “I’ve had enough of this.”
“Have you got prion paralysis in your brain?” Trent enquired mildly.
Isobel now realized she didn’t have to use her substantially increased hearing to continue eavesdropping. She linked into the ship’s system, listened in through microphones, and peered through pin cams, just in time to capture Trent pointing to his ear then up towards the ceiling. Trent knew she was listening and wasn’t going to say anything that might offend her. She listened avidly anyway, finding herself rising back up onto her insect legs and turning. She wanted to go after the two of them. She wanted to get hold of them and …
Isobel fought the predator and her new legs closed up again, but this time she turned her head as she hit the floor. She had to retain control and so deliberately cut the sound and image feeds from Trent and Gabriel’s location. There was no point listening to them anymore, she told herself, because they wouldn’t be saying anything damning now. Instead, she forced herself to link to other ship’s instruments and saw that the destroyer had indeed gone. Spear had also been as good as his word and had disabled the U-space drive. He hadn’t actually broken anything, but he had destabilized energy balances in the Calabi-Yau frames—which was something that would require shipyard retuning to put right. Isobel swore, and concentrated on her immediate problems.
She found herself not only fighting to use her arms, hands and legs, but fighting to
want
to use them—as if her body didn’t consider them relevant any more. At length the predator in her subsided and she did want to stand up again, like a human. But now that felt as if she were trying to move parts of her body that just weren’t there—or as if she was trying to twitch her nose when she simply didn’t possess that ability. She was getting very little feedback or sensation at all. Finally, feeling as if she wanted to cry, she had to admit defeat and run searches using her haiman hardware. They located the nerves for her human limbs and programs deep in storage to fire them up, and then link them back to her mind. As these began to load, sensation returned and she remembered how to move her limbs. The software for such an exercise, if you could call it that, had been wiped from her mind.