Drysine Legacy (The Spiral Wars Book 2) (42 page)

“It’s her,”
said Styx.
“The deepynine command unit. I will communicate my desire to meet. We must exchange and synchronise data, it will require a physical connection where sard allies cannot hear.”

“Can’t they see us?” Trace heard Rolonde mutter to Kumar nearby, off coms. “Can’t they see we’re a human carrier?”

“Matte-black paint out here?” Kumar replied. “There’s no light, and our config already looks like an older deepynine carrier-class. Styx says.”

“Styx says,” Rolonde growled. “We bet all our asses on what Styx says.” Trace knew she was thinking of her friends First Sergeant Willis and Private Ugail, whom Styx’s drones had killed.

“Jess,” Trace told her past the drink tube. “Mind on the job.”

“Yes Major.”

“Styx,”
she heard Romki say.
“You can understand her language?”

“Yes. The coding is unusual. Evolved, perhaps.”

“And she appears to understand yours?”

“I am pretending to be a deepynine from the final era of deepynine civilisation. I am perfectly fluent in that mode of communication, and I am entirely certain no deepynine will ever forget it. She believes I am a relic of history, returned from the dead. And she will be right, only not about my side.”

Crossing the river to the land of the dead indeed, Trace thought. Romki had named her well.

“Communications sent and received,”
Styx confirmed.
“We are clear to go. Lieutenant Hausler, recall that this shuttle is supposed to be carrying AIs only, not organics. G-forces within this shuttle’s performance range are of no consequence, and AI shuttles prefer the most direct path to their desired trajectory.”

“Now you’re talking my language,”
Hausler replied from the cockpit.
“Phoenix this is shuttle AT-7, requesting clearance for departure.”

L
ieutenant Hausler followed
Styx’s instruction by letting AT-7 coast for twenty-one minutes upon release, maintaining extra-V until the last possible moment before a tail-first 4-G burn slammed all passengers back in their seats for the final thirty-two minutes of approach. Styx told Hausler to end the burn ten klicks out, a non-threatening approach profile that she would communicate in advance to those watching. Tail-first with thrust blazing, the shuttle’s cameras could not get a good visual on their destination. When Hausler cut thrust and flipped them over to face the base, that changed.

Usually on coms when confronted with something amazing, marines would mutter remarks. Now as AT-7’s forward cameras filled their visors with live feed, Trace heard only awed silence. The base’s hundred and twenty kilometre girth filled all forward view. More wide than most human cities, all dull and silver steel, an eye-baffling maze of segments, nodes, pylons and interior bays. She could see several ships docked to the outer rim, freighters with small engines and large cargo bays, surrounded by a buzz of small runners. From those docking nodes, conveyor tubes retreated along gantry arms back into the maze, to where warehouse blocks were barely visible deeper in.

“Transport arrives on the outside,”
Ensign Yun observed. Usually she and her hotshot pilot made a cocky, relaxed combination on missions, for the benefit of everyone’s nerves. Now they were subdued.
“You’ve got cargo and freight for storage here, raw materials will be taken deeper inside, where the ships are made.”

“Those look like sard ships,”
said Hausler.
“Freight transports. So they’re keeping it resupplied.”

“Correct,”
said Styx.
“Raw materials are delivered within the hemisphere division. That is sublight traffic, mined from the moons of this system. I am curious to see if sard are performing that task themselves, or if more drysine drones have been enslaved for the purpose. Or deepynine drones.”

“I have new target lock,”
Yun announced.
“Multiple small vessels, they appear to be on intercept.”

“Maintain current course,”
Styx said calmly.
“I am in communication with them. It is a greeting party.”

“What kind of greeting party?”
Hausler asked.

“Unfamiliar.”
Trace did not need to see the glances her marines exchanged to feel the tension. Styx could be telling them anything.

AT-7’s cameras got a fix on one of the approaching marks, several others close behind. Trace nearly swore as a hunched, silver shape filled her visor view, an armoured carapace centred by a single red eye.

“Hacksaws,”
said Yun.

“They are drysine drones,”
said Styx.
“They have been reprogrammed. My old friends can barely recognise themselves.”
The synthesised voice almost sounded sad.

Trace did not believe it, and switched channel to Lance Corporal Penn. “Hello Lance Corporal. Stay on it.”

“Yes Major.”
Someone had to sit down back with Romki and Styx, rifle loaded and prepared to blow the drysine queen to bits if things went south. They could not discuss such things openly, given how hard it was to keep frequencies hidden from her. Probably Styx guessed the humans had some such arrangement. Trace did not mind if she did.

The nearest drone vanished in a burst of white thrust, slowing on approach. They had propulsion rigs, Trace saw — jet units added in modular fashion to the rear thorax. Probably they could shed them if needed. In zero-G, drones could outfit for any number of different missions without being punished by the mass penalty as severely as in full gravity. The thrust-mist cleared, drones reversing course at a comfortable two-Gs before paralleling the shuttle, three to each side.

“They feed us a course change,”
said Styx.
“I am translating and conveying to the cockpit.”

“I’ve got it,”
said Yun.
“Hang on.”

“Got it,”
said Hausler, as Yun passed it on.
“Proceeding now.”
He spun the shuttle abruptly on its axis, then hit mains with no regard for organic sensibilities. Flying like a machine was no problem for Hausler, Trace thought. He flew like that all the time.

“Timer is at T-minus-73,”
Yun reminded them, though the number was counting down in the corner of everyone’s visor display. A little over an hour until
Makimakala
came blasting through. It suddenly seemed like a very long time to keep all of these new friends from becoming suspicious.

“Styx,” said Trace as the Gs faded. “Tell us about the drones.”

“A sadness. They have been corrupted.”

“How old are they? Are they originals?”

“Yes. Many bases were abandoned. Without command units, drones will not retain function for long. I suggest that these went into shutdown. They will have only recently been reawakened. To this living death of reason.”

“Styx,”
said Romki.
“Can you rescue them?”

“Not immediately. If they knew my true identity, we would all be destroyed quite quickly. These drones are entirely autistic to foreign commands. I will have to seek another method.”

“Can you access any local base system?”
Romki pressed.

“I will try.”

“It’s a fucking guard of honour,”
said Jalawi, staring at his visor display.

Hausler’s new course took them across the base surface, a mesmerising expanse of steel and dark, beckoning caverns within. There wasn’t a lot of light, Trace noted. Hacksaws didn’t need much, with multi-spectrum scanners, and any sard now working here would have to bring their own.

Then AT-7’s course took them across the hemisphere divide, where Tartarus’s north and south halves were joined, creating a cavernous split between them. Here the surface was a honeycomb of hexagons, each hundreds of meters wide. Larger supports spanned kilometres, joining north with south. Within the profusion of hexagonal spaces clustered solid units — industrial, Trace thought, connected with docking gantries and pressurised habitats. Many small vessels were docked, and several more moving. Sublight ships, no more than a few times the size of AT-7, fusion powered and more hull and holds than engines. They nestled amongst the forest of honeycomb gantries like small fish burrowed deep into an enormous reef.

“Wow,”
someone breathed, breaking coms discipline for the first time. Trace thought this deserved it.

“A few of those sublighters are pressurised,”
Hausler observed.
“That’s sard, some of these docking habitats are pressurised too. Doesn’t look like a natural part of the base. More like a recent addition.”
He threw them into a slide, course correcting at 3-Gs as he followed Styx’s direction on his nav. The drone escort changed course with them, struggling to catch up with underpowered thrusters.

“Those are recent additions,”
Styx confirmed.
“We did not build this with sard in mind.”

Trace wondered what this was like for her. Whether she was old enough herself to remember this, she surely possessed memories from that time compiled by others, and transmitted digitally. Trace had often wondered at her own emotional reaction to seeing Sugauli again, were she to one day return. What would a drysine queen feel, to see this old grandeur once more? The still-living memory of a dead civilisation, from a time when her people had ruled the galaxy?

“Look,”
said Yun as she spotted something.
“Flippers.”
‘Flipper’ was the Fleet Intel codename given to sard warrior gunships. These were clustered at docking gantries about the habitats, a bristle of engines and weapon pods about an armoured hull. The sard equivalent to Fleet marine shuttles, based on tavalai tech like most sard ships, and overwhelmingly deadly to a civilian shuttle like AT-7.
“I count nine.”

“You can be sure there’ll be a lot more,”
Hausler said grimly, adjusting course toward one of those yawning hexagonal gaps in the superstructure. About them the steel city closed in, blocking out the thin glow from the distant star. Artificial lights bristled from within Tartarus, like many distant campfires in a haunted forest.

“I calculate from Tartarus design and this sard dispersal that there could be more than ten thousand sard in the vicinity,”
said Styx.
“Sard are numerically predictable.”

Trace could feel the jaws of the trap closing around her… if it was a trap. If most of the workers running Tartarus were reprogrammed drysine drones, then most of the sard here would be either warriors or combat-capable administrators whose fighting skills and equipment weren’t far behind.

“Going to be quite a job getting out of here,”
Jalawi murmured.

“Styx,” said Trace. “How far in do you think the deepynine queen is?”

“Deepynine command centre will be approximately central with an offset. Navigation through this structure will take approximately twenty-eight minutes. First guard change is commencing now.”

“Guard change?”

“I have new drones,”
Yun announced.
“Six marks, closing fast.”
On her scan feed, Trace could see the new dots coming, and saw the existing six drysine drones decelerate and break off.
“Looks like the honour guard just changed… I’m reading a different transmission from these ones, they’re bigger too.”

“Deepynine warriors,”
Styx said calmly.
“It appears that reprogrammed drysines are allowed only limited access to Tartarus interior and command functions.”

One of Ensign Yun’s exterior cameras zoomed on the approaching deepynines… and immediately Trace could see the family resemblance with the deepynine command unit her marines had killed on TK55. An extended carapace and head-shield up front, a menacing, three-eyed ‘face’ and an angular profusion of limbs, modular jets and weapons. Everything about them looked deadly, the way a new settler on a colonial world could just tell that some strange insect was poisonous and shouldn’t be touched. As though a million years of human evolution had conspired to imprint on the human brain that anything that looked like
this
, was death. And Trace wondered if hacksaws had cultivated this appearance for that purpose, or arrived at it by unhappy accident.

“Styx,”
asked Romki,
“who is more capable in combat? Deepynine or drysine drones?”

“Deepynine,”
said Styx with surprising certainty.
“Individually. But in manoeuvre, drysine tactics are more flexible and adaptive. All specifications and armaments being equal, one deepynine will beat one drysine six times out of ten, but a hundred drysines will beat a hundred deepynines by the same ratio.”

“So the more numerous and successful you became,”
Romki concluded,
“the more the drysines won.”

“Yes. I have a new course — Lieutenant Hausler, adjust accordingly.”

“Whoa,”
said Ensign Yun,
“I’m getting a big coms spike from these guys.”

“They are querying me,”
said Styx.
“Communications intensity has multiplied. They are… intrigued. No, fascinated.”

It twisted Trace’s brain to think of a machine being fascinated. And yet, as the deepynines fell into close formation about AT-7, guiding her through the surrounding structure, it almost seemed as when Trace herself had arrived on many human stations, and been surrounded by crowds of civvies and children come to catch a glimpse of the legend. Deepynines from alo space would no doubt have wondered often if they’d left anyone behind, hiding as Styx herself had been hiding. And now, here was a queen, perhaps the first they’d found in thousands of years.

“If they’re capable of being fascinated,”
Sergeant Kono remarked,
“then I bet they’re capable of being pissed when they find out the truth.”

“I have expanded data access,”
Styx announced.
“I can see a long way now.”

“You’ve accessed the Tartarus data net?”
Romki asked.

“Limited. I… hold a moment. Hold a moment.”
That was disconcerting too, sounding like what a lower-tech AI might say when its processing became so intense it lost the ability to talk. Until now, Styx had been talking quite calmly despite all her complex transmissions with the deepynines — an indication perhaps of just what a peripheral function speech was for her. Bird calls, Captain Pram had said.
“I have found someone.”
She sounded nearly astonished.
“A drone unit, of normal function. A drone not reprogrammed.”

“Styx?” Trace asked. “Styx, what do you mean? I thought the deepynines had reprogrammed all the drysine drones?”

“As did I. This one has been hiding. Pretending, from fear.”

Fear. Again Trace’s brain struggled to accept that a drone could be scared. “He’s managed to avoid reprogramming? Styx, can you make contact?”

“I do not wish to give him away. He is also now the last of my kind.”

Across from her acceleration seat, Jalawi gave her a concerned look. Now was not a good time for the drysine queen to discover conflicting loyalties. “Styx, this may be your only chance to save him. If he stays here the deepynines will discover him eventually.”

A thrust burst pushed them sideways as Hausler adjusted course through the maze.
“He recognises me,”
Styx said then.
“He is… astonished. He is… hold a moment. Hold a moment.”
Trace flipped quietly to the viewpoint of Lance Corporal Penn, and saw on his helmet cam Styx’s wide carry cage bolted to the deck between rows of seats. Penn’s seat was higher, in zero-G stacking, and with his Koshaim unracked he’d have a good shot through Styx’s head and into the decking, where no vital shuttle systems were located. Trace had gotten Hausler to check.
“I have a manifest of Tartarus shipping. He has provided me access. Seven major vessels under construction. Fourteen completed new-generation warships in close protection, specification unknown. One hundred and thirteen sard assault gunships, accompanying eleven major sard warships.”