Drysine Legacy (The Spiral Wars Book 2) (5 page)

A private clambered down the G-ladder to Trace’s side. “Major,” Private Melsh said glumly. “LC.”

“Private,” Erik acknowledged. And looked at Trace, eyebrows raised.

“I gave Private Melsh Furball-supervision duty in the gym,” Trace explained. “And he failed to supervise the Furball. So the Private gets to help midships crew unloading all the fish, lucky man.” Erik sighed, and gave her an exasperated sideways look. Trace rolled her eyes. Melsh winced. “Private,” she said to Melsh, “make yourself scarce for a moment. We’re about to have a command discussion.”

“Yes Major,” said Melsh, just as glumly, and retreated back up the ladder.

“We’ve really got to do something about that,” said Erik.

“So would you rather we aced every menial job and sucked at combat?” she said defensively.

“Shouldn’t have to choose, Trace. I mean it’s just a menial job now, but what if the Furball really did go missing? What if they just wave someone through on guard duty who it turns out is carrying a bomb? Fail to inspect some random civvie who ends up killing a bunch of us?”

Trace sighed, and didn’t argue.

“They’ve been at war a long time, I get it,” Erik pressed while he had the advantage. “Combat is most important. But out here, we’re going to have to learn to be good at all the other, small boring stuff too. Because when people look at the size of us, and figure out how little chance they’ve got in a straight-up fight? They’ll figure the best way to kill us is that small boring stuff that our marines find too dull to bother with.” A hiss from the grapples airlock, as PH-4 opened it from below.

“I’ve told the platoon commanders you’re pissed about it,” Trace offered.

“Well that doesn’t help,” Erik said with exasperation. “Tell them
you’re
pissed about it.”

“I prioritise,” Trace said stubbornly. She’d lost a bunch of them recently. A bunch more had been badly hurt, and were just now recovering. She only showed temper with them sparingly, when she thought morale could handle it. Clearly she didn’t think this was one of those times.

“Well they’re your command,” said Erik. “Figure it out.”

“Aye sir.” For a moment Erik thought she was being sarcastic… before recalling that Trace didn’t do sarcastic. He’d fallen into conversation-mode, but she’d taken it as a direct order. Well, fair enough. The best thing about arguing with Trace was that she didn’t do resentment either. “So when do I get to call you Captain?”

Erik gritted his teeth. Not this again. “You don’t.”

“Look, don’t give me this shit about how you don’t have the command authority to give yourself a promotion. I’m promoting Corporals to Sergeants and Privates to Corporals. The rank fits the job, and we need those jobs filled.
You’re
promoting Warrant Officers to Ensigns and Petty Officers to Warrants, as you need them. No difference here.”

“Not now.” There were voices coming up from the grapples airlock.

“When then? This ship needs a captain, not a temp.”

“When I say so.” Trace’s look was skeptical. One nice thing about a promotion, Erik thought, would be that he’d properly outrank her, rather than this vague, technical thing he had over her now. But he didn’t think for a moment that she’d give him any more peace for it.

Several Charlie Platoon marines emerged from the floor airlock, stomping and whining in heavy powered armour. Amidst the confusion, a lithe brown blur flew down the G-ladder and darted around several stomping suits.

“Ware!” called the marines. “Furball at twelve o’clock! Hey Furball, careful now, stand back.”

“Skah, over here,” Trace called, and Skah came. The little boy was kuhsi, tawny-brown furred and golden-eyed with the most impossibly big, wide ears. “Now keep out of the way of the marines, Skah. That armour is very powerful and it could hurt you if you get in their way.”

“Not Skah, Furbaw!” Skah insisted. He liked the nickname the marines had given him much better. “Nah-ny on shuttuw?”

“Yes, your Mummy is on the shuttle. She’s flown back up from the planet with lots of fish. Do you like fish?”

Skah nodded enthusiastically, big ears flopping. “I catch fish with Nah-ny in Kuchik! Fish good!”

“You caught fish?” Trace asked. Erik watched with mild surprise. Trace’s reputation said nothing of being good with children. “How did you catch fish?”

“Wike this, wike… grrr!” and Skah made a stiff-fingered thrust with one hand. Adult kuhsi had lethal claws that would skewer a fish, but like most kuhsi children, Skah’s had been clipped. Erik thought that just as well. “And… and then eat wike… wike grrr, and fish aw good, fish taste good!” Miming tearing into the flapping meal with sharp little teeth, all enthusiasm. Trace grinned and ruffled his ears. Three months ago Skah had been sickly and thin, but now he was a bright-eyed, glossy-haired handful. Busy in her new role as
Phoenix
shuttle pilot, his mother found no shame at all in using
Phoenix
marines and crew as her personal babysitting service. Far from minding, the crew had all but made Skah the ship mascot.

“Skah,” said Erik. “Did you make trouble in the gym?”

But Skah’s eyes widened at the sight of someone emerging from the airlock. “Nah-ny!” he shouted, and ran for Tif, who grabbed him up in her flight suit and oxygen tubes, helmet under one arm and little boy in the other. And he erupted in a torrent of coughs and growls in their native tongue, at which Tif blinked, and somehow managed to free her ears from the scarf that bound them over the top of her head — necessary for kuhsi in helmets.

Then she looked up, and saw both of
Phoenix
’s commanding officers watching. “Skah!” she said accusingly. “You nake troubuw?”

“Only small trouble,” Trace assured her. “He ran into a storage crate and spilled some equipment in the corridor.” She glanced at Erik. “Grenades. X-4s.” Erik’s eyes widened. “They’re inert until fired, no danger. Just looked a bit interesting, grenades all over the floor. That reminds me… Melsh!”

“Yes Major!”

“Get down here and help unload this fish!” And to Tif, “Is it good fish? I think we could all use some good fish about now.”

“Fish good,” Tif agreed. “Vieno nice. Pretty. Barabo nice too, we no fight barabo?”

“No Tif,” Erik agreed. “We don’t fight barabo. I like barabo too.”

“Barabo no guns.” Tif looked a little worried. Clearly she understood the situation. “Sard aw here, but barabo no guns.”

Erik sighed. “Yeah. I don’t think that’s going to work out for them either.”

L
isbeth entered
Engineering Bay 8D to find Stanislav Romki at a workpost. He sat with Augmented Reality glasses on, lost hypnotised in that glow of blue light, fingers dancing across invisible icons in the air before him. Integrated into the workbench was a wide transparent cylinder, filled with thick liquid. Within the liquid, held firm with intricate clamps, was the most amazing object Lisbeth had ever seen.

It was a head, of sorts, severed from its mechanical body. The head of a sentient machine, from a race of AI warriors who had ruled this portion of the galaxy for twenty three thousand years, only to then become extinct for another twenty five thousand. Or mostly extinct. This one had a fist-sized hole through its single, big red eye where Major Thakur had put a round through its head. It was not especially well armoured, as rather than being a warrior, this one had been a commander, a higher-sentient intelligence purposed for command and control. A queen, in human understanding, in the hive-like structure of AI society. And Stanislav Romki, since his first moment aboard the
UFS Phoenix
, had found it fascinating beyond description.

“Stan, you should eat,” Lisbeth told him as she came alongside.

“Yes yes yes,” Romki shushed her. “In a minute.”

“No look, I brought you some stir fry,” said Lisbeth, holding the container for him. Romki peered past his glasses, then abandoned his control icons for a moment to take the container and fork.

“Thank you, thoughtful girl.” Romki’s detached fascination for AIs and aliens, and his relative disinterest in human beings, had become something of a joke among
Phoenix
crew. But confronted with something like an AI queen, Lisbeth sympathised. She bent to peer into the big, dead eye behind the curved glass.

“She is completely dead, right?” she asked. “I mean, the size of that hole…” On this angle, she could see right through the queen’s head. The primary rifles used by fully armoured marines were enormous.

“Well yes and no,” said Romki past a mouthful of stir fry. It was a
Phoenix
kitchen staple, and quite tasty too, but became repetitive for every second meal. Recent rumours of fresh fish had everyone excited. “Functionally she’s quite dead — much of the neural processing core has been completely annihilated. She simply lacks the hardware to create a conscious thought.

“But this… this… entire brain structure is something…” he trailed off. Lisbeth had an advanced engineering degree from one of the best colleges in human space. It was specialised in starships more than computers, but she still had enough knowledge to know why Romki couldn’t complete the sentence.

“I know,” she agreed. “It’s incredible.”

“Beyond incredible. All the literature on hacksaws says molecular-level processing, quantum computing, but… well, maybe someone in Fleet or in tavalai labs somewhere knows how it works. I’m struggling. There’s at least twenty different kinds of brain structure here, but the main data-retention seems to be almost crystalline. It’s like it
grows
memory and data, and somehow feeds sub-molecular level storage into these incredible crystal matrixes. And I mean, they’re
beautiful.
So beautiful.”

“Maybe the reason we find it so hard to figure out how it works is that we’re organic,” Lisbeth murmured. In the thick fluid submerging the queen’s head, shimmering swarms of dust seemed to swirl. Like a billion microscopic animals, turning together in unison. “The first machines were just server droids when they rebelled against the Fathers. Then over twenty thousand years they evolved into this. Maybe it takes a machine to make another machine this advanced.”

“That’s quite possible,” said Romki, barely listening as he ate.

“Any more ideas about
what
she is? Which branch of AI civilisation she belonged to?”

“Oh god no,” said Romki. “It’s hard enough just trying to figure out how she works. And there were hundreds of branches. That was actually a very complicated civilisation — I mean imagine, twenty three thousand years, spread over so many hundreds and thousands of star systems. How complicated did humans get in just a few thousand years on one planet? But it’s all so long ago now, they were extinct so long before humans even got into space, and all the species that were around at the time would rather forget.”

“And you’ve got her in the nano-tank,” said Lisbeth, looking at the thin veil of swirling metallic dust. “Any chance the micro-machines could actually complete a full circuit?”

It was what the nano-tank was designed to do. You put damaged electrics into it, and the micros swarmed and analysed and figured out which pathways needed to be completed in order to restore function. And then, in human tech at least, they set about joining themselves to create those pathways.

“No, dear girl, look… our queen is a work of art. Such advanced synthetics, almost beyond belief. Our own technology, including those micros, is so primitive by comparison… using them to make her work again would be like trying to restore function to a supercomputer with an elastic band and a couple of paper clips.”

“But you said yes
and
no,” said Lisbeth. “You mean… she’s
not
completely dead?”

“Well this is pure conjecture on my part… but I see no reason why these crystalline neural structures should not retain complete data sets long after the neural mechanism itself has long since ceased to function.”

“You think she’s still alive in there?” Lisbeth breathed. “Waiting to be revived?”

“Well beyond
our
technology, I’m quite sure. More’s the pity.”

Lisbeth gazed at him. “You think we should do it, don’t you? Wake her up?”

Romki raised the glasses for the first time, and looked upon her. His head was bald mostly for shaved convenience, his eyes dark and intelligent, his brows arched like an owl. It was a face that did intelligence and enthusiasm well, and condescension and disdain even better.

“Ms Debogande,” he said with angry amusement. “Which do you imagine is more important? Attempting to make peace between two groups of humans who are hell bent on trying to kill each other due to factors entirely beyond our control? Or researching the true nature of our alo allies? Because if the alo did indeed absorb some portion of the deepynine hacksaws all those thousands of years ago… well, it would explain why their technology is so advanced, for one thing. The most advanced species usually became that way after interacting with other species, but the alo just popped up two thousand years ago, refused to talk to anyone but the chah’nas, refused to let anyone travel in their territory, and were already more advanced than the tavalai. Fishy doesn’t begin to describe it.”

He pointed at the queen. “She might know. She might even tell us, if we asked her. In that synthetic brain may lie the clue to exactly what threat humanity allied itself to, at the beginning of the Triumvirate War… but no, your brother and his muscle-headed Major are still so tied to Fleet’s apron strings that they can’t imagine looking outward toward what’s most important.”

“Well…” Lisbeth blinked, wondering how to explain it to a man like Romki. “Well they’d like to go home,” she said lamely. “Everyone here would like to go home.”

“Exactly,” said Romki, exasperated. “Humanity has been in space for over a thousand years, yet still we look to answers amongst ourselves. One day, Lisbeth Debogande, we will have to grow up. There’s an entire universe out there.” He waved a hand expansively at a wall. “And until we learn to cast off these childish things, and venture forth as a truly grown up species, a species that
belongs
in this galaxy, we will always be in terrible danger from the many things out there that we refuse to understand.”