Drysine Legacy (The Spiral Wars Book 2) (28 page)

“You have a sard problem? That tavalai will admit to?”

“Tavalai Fleet Command, no. They will not admit to anything that might damage the sard alliance. But Dobruta, yes. This is the true nature of Makimakala’s mission, Lieutenant Commander. We used to police sard space, because if ever there was a species likely to recover old hacksaw technology and use it, instead of destroying it, it is the sard. But then came the war, and then the manpower shortage, and for the last hundred or so of your years, the Dobruta have been forbidden by the highest tavalai command from policing sard space.”

Erik took a deep breath. He thought it was pretty clear where this was going. “You didn’t come to see us at Joma Station because you heard we had hacksaw technology aboard. You heard that the sard were after us. With ships that are suspiciously advanced.”

“Well both reasons, actually. In combination that we could not ignore. You see, we think the sard have found an old hacksaw base. A ship building base. Sard territory is very large, and even before the sard came into space, thousands of years ago, we had explored only some of it. We catalogued many old hacksaw artefacts, but in all that vastness, there was bound to be much we did not see. And the sard were always bound to find some of it. Thus our previous inspection regime, recently halted. And now, unsurprisingly, the worst Dobruta nightmare appears to be coming true. Sard, with hacksaw technology. In ships, at least.”

“More than ships,” said Erik. “It suggests an alliance, between hacksaws and sard.”

“Well well,”
Captain Pram cautioned, holding up one webbed hand before the screen.
“Perhaps. We took a crippled drone from the docks at Joma Station. It was not fully functional. Reprogrammed, we think.”

“Reprogrammed? I didn’t think that was possible.”

“With human or tavalai technology, it’s not. Sard computing is particularly advanced, but has little in common with this genus of artificial intelligence. So there is only evidence that the sard have found some old base, certainly with shipbuilding technology, and perhaps with some very old worker and warrior drones in storage, all deactivated. They may have reprogrammed them for this purpose.”

“And which purpose is that? It’s clear the sard are after
Phoenix
in particular, but we do not know why.”

Pram made a thoughtful, snaking motion of his head. A peculiarly tavalai gesture, Erik thought. He’d never seen it before. Pram tapped a finger on his jaw, as though coming to a decision.
“Our information is that you have hacksaw queen aboard your ship. We would like to see it.”

C
ommander Nalben
,
Makimakala
’s second-in-command, crouched before the nano-tank holding the queen’s head, and stared. About him stood Erik, Trace, Romki and as much of the senior Engineering crew that could fit into the little bay. Further back, several lightly armoured karasai, carefully watched by similarly armoured marines… but no one was especially concerned of treachery here.

Nalben considered the queen’s head from many angles, eyes wide with an expression that might have been as much dread as fascination. About him, there was no sound from the crowd gathered. Occasionally he’d murmur something into a mike, that
Phoenix
’s com function, activated upon Erik’s irises in a moment of curiosity, showed him was being transmitted back to
Makimakala
with
Phoenix
’s permission. The small camera on the Commander’s eyepieces was doubtless sending visual data back as well, for Dobruta experts there to see.

After a long period of examination, Nalben got to his feet. “This one is a command unit,” he told them all. “You call her a queen. It could be accurate enough… I have studied English well, but the precise background of that word escapes me.”

“A monarch,” Romki could not resist saying. “An old system of human governance, pre-technological.” And broke into rapid Togiri, while various
Phoenix
crew glanced at each other, and rolled their eyes. All save Lisbeth, Erik noted. She stood by Trace’s shoulder, watching Romki with intense interest. Almost as though she could follow the conversation. She’d never told him she’d learned any Togiri at university, though it was not surprising.

“Yes,” Commander Nalben conceded, after Romki had finished. “Yes, a ‘queen’ is as good a term as any. Though this queen may have had others ranked above her in her time. She would have been more like you or I, Lieutenant Commander. Important in our local sphere, yet answering to higher powers in the greater sphere.”

“Is she deepynine?” Romki pressed.

“No,” Nalben said with certainty. And shook his head, with almost comical exaggeration, to make sure the humans understood. It was not a tavalai gesture. “No, she is not deepynine. She is drysine.”

Gasps from several of the techs. Romki looked stunned. “Drysine?” Erik asked. “The ones who wiped out the deepynines with the help of the parren?”

“Yes,” said Nalben. “There are modalities and technicalities that escape me, that escape all experts today. And in the millennia since the drysines’ fall, the few survivors have modified themselves many times. This queen appears to have many non-standard features. The body she had on the Major’s combat recording of that encounter is certainly non-standard. But the queens in particular are modular, they have many bodies — or they had many, in their prime. They would swap bodies at need, to assume different functions.” He indicated the nano-tank. “But the head remained relatively the same.” He looked slightly dazed, as though struggling to process what it meant. “Argitori, you say?”

“Yes,” said Erik. “An asteroid off the elliptical plane. Argitori has millions of those, they were well hidden provided they did not draw attention to themselves.”

“And the base was not originally a hacksaw base?”

“No. Chah’nas Empire, we think. There was no sign of a spaceship… though in a local system, hacksaws can make local journeys without them, it only takes basic propulsion.”

“Yes,” Nalben agreed. “They do that in hive bases today — send out probes too small to show up on scans, with ion drives that take years to complete surveys and return. Years do not concern AIs, they are patient.”

“Hacksaws in trouble during the deepynine-drysine war could have just abandoned a damaged vessel to make their way to an asteroid,” Romki ventured. “They don’t need escape pods or shuttles. Seven thousand years later, the chah’nas build a new base, and when the chah’nas fall and everyone abandons it, the queen and her tribe move in.”

“Many possibilities,” Nalben agreed, gazing at the tank. “Too many.”

“You’ve encountered others like her before?” Erik pressed.

“Queens and command units? Yes. Never before a drysine.”

Utter silence in the engineering bay, save for the omnipresent whir of ventilation, cylinder rotation and machinery from neighbouring bays. “How many were there?” Trace asked quietly. “At this level, before the war?”

“Probably hundreds,” said Nalben. “A very small number, considering the size of the drysine faction at the time. They were not necessarily the most numerous faction — other factions took their side or the deepynines. But the drysines were elite, perhaps the most advanced ever. Possibly the most intelligent, if we are qualified to judge that. The parren and their allies tagged all the command units and made a special effort to kill them all. They took appalling losses trying, because they knew that should even one command unit survive, it could resurrect the entire AI race, given enough time alone in the dark. For many thousands of years, Dobruta experts supposed that the parren had succeeded in wiping out all drysine command units. Now you have proven otherwise.” He looked at Romki. “You say that someone or something began communications with her before the attack on Joma Station?”

Romki nodded. “Yes, it was some kind of machine-language signal. It interfaced with the intact portions of her brain, the automated functions. I think one of them is communications. We could show you that recording, I’m sure?” With a glance at Erik.

“That would be useful, but I think it’s quite clear what happened here.” Nalben looked at Erik. “The drones that attacked Joma Station were drysine too.”

Erik frowned. “But they were reprogrammed?”

“Yes. I think it logical that the sard have found a ship building base, as we suspected. And that shipbuilding base is drysine. It had advanced shipbuilding technology, which they utilised, lacking such advanced tools themselves. And it had deactivated drysine combat drones aboard, which they reactivated, and reprogrammed to do their bidding. Communications with the automated function of a dead hacksaw queen’s brain is quite difficult for a non-drysine, the codes are complex. But a drysine drone could do it.”

“They were looking for her?” Lisbeth gasped.

“Yes,” said Nalben. “But not in a good way. They were being used to find her. Whether they wanted her destroyed, or reclaimed for some reason, we cannot say.”

“You mean to say that the reason
Phoenix
is being chased by the sard is because of
her
?” Erik asked, pointing at the nano-tank. “They’re after her? Not us?”

“That would be my guess,” Nalben agreed sombrely. “Nothing else makes sense.
Phoenix
is a human political curiosity. Sard have no interest in such things. But old hacksaw technology, they’ve demonstrated great interest in. The last remaining drysine queen of that entire empire? Valuable does not even begin to describe it. If they seek to leverage what she might know.”

“I don’t buy it,” Trace declared, arms folded firmly. Everyone looked at her. “That’s a hell of a move to make, even for sard. Hacksaws have attacked ships before, in the modern era, but rarely stations. In fact, I can’t recall it happening before to a station that big in centuries.”

“Human records are incomplete,” Nalben said solemnly. “It is very rare in other regions, with species tavalai are familiar with. But it has happened.”

“Whatever,” said Trace with determination. “Sard are murderous and often suicidal in their aggression, but this was overplaying their hand. They’ve just declared that they have hacksaw technology, despite knowing how poorly that will be received by tavalai and by humans.”

“Lately they have lost all respect for tavalai,” said Nalben. “Dobruta have no teeth in sard space any more. And many sard still consider themselves at war with humanity, and that the surrender agreement was a weak and irrelevant tavalai document.”

“Sard aren’t leaders,” Trace continued, undeterred. “They’re followers. They followed the tavalai. Now they’re following old hacksaw technology. They’re no good at any of their own technology except computing. They love maths. Machine logic no doubt appeals to them.”

Erik’s eyes widened as he looked at her. “Go on.”

“What if this isn’t their idea? What if coming after us, after the queen, after Major General Connor, was someone else’s idea? What if they didn’t just find deactivated drysine drones at that ship building base? Or what if we go back even further than that? We pulled up alongside an alo ship at Heuron. All our dead hacksaws reactivated.” Looking at Commander Nalben.

Nalben stared. “They did?”

Trace nodded. “They were responding to something emitting from the alo ship, some kind of command and control frequency hidden in their energy signature. Stan, you’re the one with the whole alo-deepynine conspiracy theory, and Lieutenant Dale’s report of his conversations with Chankow pretty much confirm it. What if, in that moment when we pulled up alongside that alo ship, they knew
exactly
what we had on board? What if they talked to the queen then, just as you saw before the attack on Joma?”

“We wouldn’t have known,” Romki murmured, incredulous. “She wasn’t rigged up to anything then, we had no way to measure it.”

“The deepynines and the drysines fought the biggest, nastiest war the Spiral has ever seen,” Trace continued. “We think it’s over. Assume Stan’s right, and the deepynines are somehow still alive, and allied with the alo. They thought they’d won. No more drysines. Until we park alongside them with a drysine queen.”

“Oh wow,” said Romki, and put his bald head in his hand. “Major you are an evil genius. Yes yes yes… look, they’re hunting us. They’re hunting
her
.” He pointed at the nano-tank. “Deepynines don’t like organics, but they absolutely
despise
drysines. Drysines are their ultimate, existential threat. Drysines exterminated their race. Evidently they’ve rebuilt with alo help, and their very worst horror story would be for us to help the drysines do the same. Which we’re not going to do, but the deepynines don’t know that!”

“They’re trying to wipe out the drysines again like the parren did,” Erik murmured. “By any means necessary. That means they’re
using
the sard.”

Romki nodded vigorously. “Bribing them with gifts of technology! Visions of power! I’ll
bet
you they’ve sent a queen of their own to the sard’s new shipbuilding base. I bet she’s running the whole show from there, helping them to reprogram drysine drones — even sard computing tech wouldn’t allow that, but a deepynine queen could do it. And would tell them how to use those drones, and what to use them on if sard want to keep getting deepynine help. I mean… who hates a drysine queen more than a deepynine queen? And will be more determined to stop at nothing to get her?”

“Well hang on,” Erik cautioned. “That implies she’s not actually dead.”

“Yes,” said Nalben, as though wondering if that comment was safe to answer. “Well technically speaking, she’s probably not.”

T
hree hours
and a lot of long conversations with
Makimakala
later, Erik and his command crew were clustered in his quarters. All were tired, as it was the middle of the ‘night’ as the first-shift body clock measured such things, but Erik did not feel himself at all impaired. There was an electricity in the room, a strange mix of serious intensity and excitement, that he’d never felt before. Being here was crazy. What their mad political circumstance had abruptly transformed into, against all expectations, was certainly frightening, yet Erik felt it was a preferable kind of fear to what they’d faced before. That fear had come with no upside. This fear came with adrenaline.

“Captain Pram says there’s an old AI base,” he told the crew. Trace sat in her customary spot, against the wall where his pillow normally was. Shahaim sat on his other side, Kaspowitz on his desk chair, with Shilu and Karle squeezed behind him. Erik sometimes suspected that the main reason the captain’s quarters had so little room was to regulate the number of people who could attend command briefings. More than six was a bad idea, and wouldn’t fit anyway. “The base is in Bonatai System. It’s a drysine relic, about twenty six thousand years old.”

“Why haven’t the Dobruta destroyed it?” Shahaim asked. “They’re supposed to destroy all AI tech they find.”

“Because they’re hypocrites?” Kaspowitz suggested.

“My Great Uncle Thani Gialidis once told me that necessity will make hypocrites of us all,” said Erik. “But he’s a politician, so he would say that. Captain Pram says they don’t have a choice — the tavalai politicians won’t let the Dobruta police sard space and continually strangle their funding. They don’t have the resources to fully analyse hacksaw bases for intelligence before destroying them. This base is apparently very big, it would take lots of people to analyse it properly. So they’ve mothballed it instead, so as not to destroy the intel.”

“And tavalai fleet command is okay with that?” Shilu asked skeptically.

“I was given the impression that they have no idea.”

Eyebrows were raised around the group. “We might have more in common with
Makimakala
than we thought,” Trace observed, munching stir fry from a container. “We both have leaders who hate us.”

“One of the reasons they’ve mothballed it,” Erik continued, “is that it has some very fancy databases that even the best Dobruta techs have not been able to access. They think if they can read it, it will provide them with a good map of all the drysine and other bases and facilities through all this region of space. Including the big lost shipbuilding facility we think the sard are using to make those fancy new ships of theirs.”

“So why do they think they can recover that data now?” Kaspowitz wondered.

Erik took a deep breath. They weren’t going to like this bit. “Because they now have access to something they never thought they’d get access to. A drysine queen. They think, though they’re not sure, that it’s possible to recover the drysine neural data storage codings from examining her brain. Which will be like acquiring a code breaker, allowing them to read the stuff in the base.”

“Thus learning where our true target is,” Shahaim said thoughtfully.

“Exactly.”

“So what’s the problem?” Karle wondered, eyeing Erik’s reluctant expression with suspicion. Lieutenant Karle was one kid who, on this trip, was becoming less green by the day.

“We’ll have to partially reactivate the queen’s brain to do it.”

Stares all around. “No,” said Shahaim. “Absolutely not.

“They think it can be done safely,” Erik insisted. “And in a limited way. Not a full reawakening. An accessing of dormant memory and linguistic function.”

“Oh yeah, that’s a
great
idea,” said Kaspowitz. “Because we know hacksaws are so damn easy to control once they start waking up, right? This is a
queen
… the drone technology is ridiculous enough, the queen’s on a whole different level.”

“You can’t just isolate those functions one at a time,” Shilu agreed with alarm. “I’ve had a look at it in my off-time… that stuff’s just crazy, Romki doesn’t understand it, even
Rooke
doesn’t understand it. All those neural systems are integrated, and if you wake one up, you’ll wake up the others…”

“Yeah hang on,” Erik shut him off, holding up a hand. “She’s a disembodied head with a hole blown straight through her CPU…”

“Who can reprogram our ship computers by remote as far as we know!” said Shahaim. “And she doesn’t
have
a central processing unit, that whole neural structure is completely decentralised, that’s part of what makes them so hard to kill! Once she becomes familiar with our systems, we just don’t know what she’s capable of doing…”

“I think it’s an excellent idea,” Trace interrupted. Everyone save Erik looked at her with incredulity… and remembered, as it was sometimes necessary to remember, that Trace was never sarcastic. As was usual in command meetings, she looked deadly serious. “We’ve found a hacksaw threat. Whether it’s connected to the alo, or the sard, or both, or neither, we need to treat it the same as any other threat. You fight threats by first attempting to understand them. If we’re so scared of this threat that we don’t dare even attempt to understand it, then we’ve lost before the fight even starts.”

No one replied. It was hard to argue with, particularly when it came from her, effectively calling them all cowards.

“Right,” said Erik, having little doubt that he hadn’t heard the last of it, no matter how persuasive his marine commander. “The plan is that we head to Bonatai System, find the relic, and
Makimakala
will board and disable the booby traps they’ve put there to stop any curious people who found it in the meantime. Given our luck lately, I doubt it will be that simple, but maybe we’re due an easy run.”

“What about
Rai Jang
?” asked Shahaim, still unhappy.

“I imagine she’s coming too. We haven’t had any contact besides the routine stuff, we’re too busy, but my impression is they’re talking to
Makimakala
. Barabo are tavalai allies, not human, at least for the moment… and Captain Jen is very concerned about any threats to the barabo. Given he’s just seen his station torn up by hacksaws, I’d guess he wants to get to the bottom of this, if only to go back to his government and beg for more ships.”

He looked about at them. There was more to be said, but for now it was enough.

“Oh,” said Shahaim, recognising the meeting was nearly over. “First-shift procedural, there will be memorial service at 1400. We’ll be too busy for uniforms, but there will be flags in b-2 mainroom, shipwide prayer and trumpets at 1410.”

Somber nods all around.

“And
then
,” Shahaim added with forced enthusiasm, “you’ll never guess what day navcomp says it is today, because I had completely forgotten. It’s Exodus. And god knows how navcomp calculates these things across hundreds of lightyears based upon a time system from a world that Exodus commemorates us losing…” She gave Kaspowitz an accusing look. He shrugged. “Anyway, today is Exodus, so at 1730, to give second-shift a chance to do other duties first, we’ll do that service as well, then we’ll play the B9, and the usual. So some warrants are going to be very busy today.”

Because ship warrant officers and petty officers usually got stuck with ceremonial stuff, particularly on operations when the senior crew were too busy. Her glance at Erik suggested he might want to cancel it, given everything else.

“Yes they will be busy,” Erik said instead. It would do no one on
Phoenix
any good, he was certain, to forget who they were and where they came from. Out here, surrounded by aliens, there had never been a better time to remember what it meant to be human, and what they were ultimately all fighting for. “Is that it? Good, let’s go.”

As they filed out of the captain’s cabin at the rear of the bridge, Erik found Lieutenant JC Crozier of Delta Platoon waiting — for Trace, he assumed. And was surprised when she spoke to him instead. “LC, could I have a moment?”

Trace gave her a concerned look as she passed, but Crozier wouldn’t meet her gaze. “Of course Lieutenant, come in.” The cabin emptied, he invited her inside and shut the door. “Go ahead.”

She stood firmly at ease, hands tight behind her back, feet apart. Erik was accustomed to seeing her so cool and confident, but now she looked neither. “Sir, I wanted to apologise.”

Erik frowned. “For what?”

“I had dock command on Joma Station when the hacksaws hit. When the Major took command she immediately countermanded my tactical stance, and went full deployment up the dock. It changed the tactical situation immediately.” She swallowed hard. “I screwed up sir. Seventeen spacers died on station, all on my watch. Spacers without armour or serious weapons, relying on my marines for protection. I owe you and all the spacers on
Phoenix
an apology. I’m sorry.”

The pain of it hit Erik in the gut. It was every officer’s nightmare — personal failure, costing the lives of fellow crew. JC Crozier had been an officer in the marine corps for twelve years, all of them in combat. She’d been posted to
Phoenix
four years ago, when the previous commander of Delta Platoon had been killed in action. Trace rated all of her Lieutenants very highly — Dale at the top, for sheer experience, then Crozier, Zhi and Jalawi about equal in the middle, with Alomaim still a little green, but with enormous potential.

He felt slightly ridiculous with her apologising to him. His combat experience was minimal next to hers, and indeed next to all the marine officers save Alomaim. She was about his age, but had seen so much more of the war.

“Well firstly,” he said, “the Major tells me that the one hacksaw breakthrough that killed most of our spacers would have happened irrespective of who was in charge — it came from below dock level, it was a total surprise and sometimes the enemy is just clever. The Major holds herself responsible for signing off on the evac plan and on the placement of the accommodation block to begin with.”

“Well that’s not quite correct sir, it was my…”

“I’m not finished.” Crozier swallowed her objection. “Secondly, we shouldn’t have been there in the first place. That was a treacherous environment and we were in over our heads — we just didn’t know how deep. It was my responsibility to know how deep, and that makes it my fault for putting
Phoenix
on that dock, at that time.

“Thirdly, we’ve all screwed up. Given what we do, and the responsibilities placed upon us, those mistakes will cost lives. It’s inevitable, and inevitable things aren’t anyone’s fault. If you let it chew you up, you’ll cause more damage still, and right now your platoon needs you, and
Phoenix
needs you. The Major tells me she has complete faith in you, and I have complete faith in the Major’s judgement. So do me a favour and don’t ever come to me again apologising for things that aren’t your fault, because if every officer did it who felt responsible for some snafu, I’d never get anything done. Okay?”

Crozier nodded tightly. “Yes sir. Thank you sir.”

“Good, now get.” And gave her a whack on the backside as she departed, because it was what the Captain had always done to crew feeling sorry for themselves. The door closed behind her, and he let out a deep breath, and took a moment to collect himself. It had been a pretty good speech, he thought. If only he didn’t feel like such a fraud delivering it.