Drysine Legacy (The Spiral Wars Book 2) (22 page)

“Why? Why hide it?”

“Because the alo don’t like us having it. They watch us. We know.”

“And humanity’s
scared
of them?” Dale didn’t like this at all — this inexorable sense of his entire world, everything he’d thought he was fighting for these past thirty years, slowly turning upside down. “Then why are we fighting the
tavalai
?”

“Because the tavalai are the main strategic threat, that hasn’t changed. And alo promised to help, and they have — they’ve been invaluable. Humanity is so much stronger now, our territory has increased tenfold, our Fleet is so much more powerful, our industry is… well. Ask your Lieutenant Commander about human industrial power. It seemed a gamble worth taking — ally ourselves with a species that worries us, to improve our position at the expense of the tavalai. Friends close and enemies closer, that sort of thing. And truly, who else in this galaxy could we have allied ourselves to who did
not
worry us?”

He was talking about strategic decisions made at the high reaches of Fleet Command nearly two hundred years ago, Dale thought incredulously. Perhaps longer than that. Chankow and the present Fleet Command had merely inherited them. “But the alo are related somehow to the deepynines?”

Chankow nodded. “Your man Romki found it out… he was nearly silenced many times, as he suspects, but he cleverly became too well-known for that to be safe. And now they’re trying to silence me.”

“And you were willing to sacrifice everyone else to keep this secret,” Dale growled. “My Captain, all of
Phoenix
, Stanislav Romki… only now that it’s your turn, you run for your life and spill your guts to the first person who might protect you. Moral principles are only for other people, huh?”

Chankow swallowed hard. “We’re past that now. The war’s over, the next phase is beginning, and people should know.”

“Right.” Dale took a deep breath. Berating Chankow for his cowardice might feel good, but information was more important. Jokono would be unimpressed at his poor priorities. “What’s this relationship to the deepynines?”

Chankow shook his head. “We don’t know. Honestly, they’ve destroyed every spy ship we’ve sent. Their sensors are too good, venturing into their territory without permission is death. And the last of the deepynine wars were… well, so long ago. Twenty five thousand years. We only know that there are very old records of them making a fighting withdrawal in the direction of what is now alo space, but that space was then thoroughly cleansed by the drysines, who then went on to…”

“Wait. Who are the drysines?”

Chankow blinked at him. “Of course, most of you don’t know… the history of the AI wars is not widely taught. It’s not entirely an accident, we haven’t encouraged it. And the loss of Earth to the krim does dominate our cultural memory.”

“I know the parren uprising,” said Dale. “The parren led the rebellion that unified the organic species of the Spiral against the machines. The chah’nas were the main lieutenants, the tavalai switched from neutral to fully onboard when they started to win.”

Chankow shook his head. “No. I mean yes, there’s that, but far too simple. AI dominance in the Machine Age was total. Organics made progress, but every time they became a threat, one or another faction of AIs crushed them. But the AIs had wars amongst themselves. They evolved in ways that different factions found threatening. Machines don’t tolerate difference well, they’d rather erase a fault completely than accommodate it.

“Some AI factions began to realise this was a weakness. Some started wondering about tolerance, and cooperation. Don’t think this made them ‘nice’ — their idea of cooperation was more like master-slave. But they realised organics had certain strengths they lacked, and cooperation could give them an edge. The drysines were one faction, they started small and expanded over several thousand years. They achieved a strategic understanding with the parren, and combined forces with them. This made them formidable. The parren were significant, but it was primarily the drysines who beat the deepynines, and destroyed the most powerful, centralised force of the Machine Age in a war so large it made our Triumvirate War look like a skirmish. The parren just helped, and rallied other organics to the drysine cause.”

Parren space was on the far side of tavalai space, Dale knew. They were an isolated species now, playing no part in the Triumvirate War, and having little more to do with the tavalai than trade. “So what happened to the drysines?”

“They took heavy losses in the fight,” said Chankow. “And the unified parren, chan’nas, tavalai and others realised this was their best and possibly only chance to beat the machines while they were weak. The drysines were ambushed and largely destroyed, and the parren ruled the Spiral for about seven thousand years.”

“Before the chah’nas did the same to them,” Dale murmured.

Chankow nodded. “And then the tavalai did it to the chah’nas. Being stabbed in the back by your trusted lieutenants is a Spiral tradition reaching back twenty thousand years and more. We are aware of this, thinking of the alo, and the chah’nas.”

“You know there’s a tavalai carrier at Joma Station who belong to a force the tavalai have used for thousands of years to police old AI remnants?” said Dale.

“Dobruta,” said Chankow with a nod. “Fleet knows them well. We talk frequently.”

Dale blinked. “You
talk
to a tavalai military faction?”

“The Dobruta thought from the beginning that the Triumvirate War was a waste of time. They thought the main enemy to the tavalai was not humans, chah’nas or alo, but hacksaws. Needless to say, this didn’t go down very well with most tavalai. Many think the Dobruta are traitors. Fleet HQ was happy to keep them out of humanity’s hair by demonstrating to them that we were just as serious about exterminating hacksaws as they were. And we are too, so that was no pretence. Why are these Dobruta interested in
Phoenix
?” And Chankow’s eyes widened slightly. “That tale you spun at Heuron about the hacksaw base! That was actually true?”

“What about sard?” Dale asked, ignoring the question. “We’ve had some sard trouble just now. Did Fleet HQ pay sard to be mercenaries and attack
Phoenix
?”

“Lieutenant,” Chankow said flatly, as some of that old high-ranking confidence reasserted. “Believe me, if sard were that easy to manipulate, we’d have tried it long ago and turned them on the tavalai. No, I’ve no idea why sard would want to kill
Phoenix
specifically. Perhaps you upset someone even more incorrigible than Fleet Command.”

“And the other, non-sard mercenaries who tried to kill us on the way here?” Dale pressed.

Chankow shrugged. “Oh sure. That was probably us. There was quite a large bounty on
Phoenix
, and many opportunists willing to take large risks for a lifetime’s fortune. Whether that bounty still stands with Fleet’s new command… you’d have to ask them.”

“Colonel Khola himself is here on
Europa
to offer us a full pardon.”

Chankow managed a sardonic smile. “My boy. Truly. You’d not live out the year.”

“They need us if they’re going to unite Fleet against the Worlders,” Dale said stubbornly. Only now, considering the possibility that the pardon would be taken away, did he realise how badly he wanted it. And that itself was a revelation.

“You think this is about Spacers versus Worlders?” Chankow shook his head. “That’s a pretence. Worlder rebellions are an annoyance. They don’t keep the Guidance Council awake at night. Alo betrayals and old Spiral history coming back to eat us alive? That’s another story.”

S
tanislav Romki sat
in one of
Phoenix
’s Engineering holds, and gazed at the head of the old hacksaw queen. So far the nano-tank’s micro-bots had struggled to make head or tails of her. The latest human technology they were, yet completely failing to process what they were looking at. They swarmed and fizzed around and within the big hole Major Thakur had blown in the queen’s head, a silver-metallic swirl, but where the programs on the analysis screens would typically give a full diagnostic of the damaged technology and how to fix it, now the numbers just ran and ran. Processing. Like an insect reading a symphony score, Romki thought, and trying to comprehend what it meant.

The Fathers hadn’t built them like this. He wondered if the AIs had kept any of those original hardware models around, in museums for sentiment or interest. He doubted it — hacksaw civilisation had stored memory collectively and made it accessible to all. There was no need to keep mementoes around to remind them. Those early models had been server droids, doing all of the menial tasks that the Fathers hadn’t thought worth an organic’s time.

Why the Fathers had thought to give such droids enough intelligence to resent their lot in life, no one seemed to know. It didn’t seem wise. But mightily upset they’d become, and once the Fathers had been exterminated, the machines had devoted much of their intellect to improving their own design. Twenty five thousand years of improvement had resulted in this, a technology so far removed from its origins, it was like comparing humans to the earliest mammals of the Triassic Period.

Ever since his investigations into the alo had led him to his deepynine discovery, Romki had sought further information about hacksaw civilisation in general. At first it had been hard — he was trained as a xeno-sociologist, which involved a lot of psychology, a little neurology and even a liberal dash of biology. Technology and artificial intelligence were not his fields at all, and at first his right-hemisphere brain had rebelled at all that maths. But then he’d realised how little difference it made that hacksaws were metal and not flesh and blood — they were sentient beings, they’d expressed themselves socially and even politically in their own fascinating and frightening ways, and if one approached their study the same as one approached the study of any other alien society, one could still reach conclusions worth knowing.

Asking the alo about hacksaws was useless, and chah’nas were not a scholarly people. The tavalai knew the most, but even they had a great reluctance to discuss things too deeply. Most human societies would have overcome the trauma of unpleasant events after twenty five thousand years, but not the tavalai. Romki respected the tavalai reverence for the past, but when it interfered so deeply with scholarly inquiry, it became tiresome.

The one group who
had
been prepared to discuss hacksaw civilisation at length were the Dobruta. It had taken a lot of prodding, on several long trips through tavalai space under the protection of academic groups who did not mind sponsoring a human, but eventually he’d convinced them that he was just a scholar, and had no interest in the technology beyond the academic sphere. The things the Dobruta had told him about the hacksaws had been eye-opening indeed, both fascinating and horrifying beyond measure.

He knew that it was dangerous, sending word through tavalai contacts as he had, to get
Makimakala
here to Joma Station. It could be construed as betrayal by
Phoenix
’s commanders, for one thing. And it was certainly possible, if unlikely, that
Makimakala
might make a violent move toward
Phoenix
in their zeal to destroy what was now before him. But
Phoenix
was no pushover, even for an ibranakala-class carrier, and the Dobruta were primarily interested in keeping hacksaw technology out of the hands of people who might develop, copy or spread it.
Phoenix
kept its AI technology on board because it wished to study it en route to discovering how to kill it more effectively. Perhaps with some urging, on this matter at least, the tavalai ship and the human one could find some common ground.

Mostly he needed the Dobruta here so that they could help him figure out what the hell this ‘queen’ really was. If anyone would know, Romki was certain that either
Makimakala
’s command crew, or specialists, would be most likely. Because if he could figure that out, then he had some hope of extracting information from her. That information could then become the best lead he’d yet had in his entire professional career on the alo-deepynine connection, particularly if the queen turned out to be deepynine herself.

But the odds that she was actually deepynine were remote. Besides, he was not even sure if those old designations would hold true today. Hacksaw factions had had certain physical and technological indicators, it was true, and were far more different from each other on a hardware level than the divergent human races of Earth had ever been. But as he understood it, belonging to a particular faction depended as much on the civilisational data-set that an individual unit was plugged into as it did on that unit’s physical design.

How would a surviving deepynine unit identify itself today, when all its civilisational data-set had been dead for so many millennia? It would be like a person from an old Earth nation state, suddenly transported into the current human age. A European of the early nineteen hundreds, with their entire personal identity invested in their own particular nationalism… what would they find today that they could recognise? When not only their old nation state, but all the old racial, religious and political notions that supported it were long dead and obsolete? When Earth itself was long gone, even though the human race continued to thrive? A hacksaw remnant today would not even have that last consolation — their race nearly extinct, their few remnants scattered and in hiding. And there had been so many factions across the thousands of years of the Machine Age, far too many for anyone alive today to count, and each pursuing a different combination of technological and conceptual uniqueness…

The fluid in the nano-tank’s screen reader flickered. Romki frowned. The queen’s head had no powersource, there was no electrical circuit possible — the nano-tank was not directing active power, just a very low analytical current. It was barely enough to make the swarming micro-machines swim, and make pretty pictures of how things might join together before the Major had blown them open with a rifle nearly as big as she was.