by Neal Aher
“Wow,” said the catadapt woman. She walked over and felt for a pulse at the shellman’s neck, as a pool of blood spread out from his face. “He’s a gonner,” she added.
Trent gaped, facing the raw fact that he had killed in one fast unthinking action. He had wiped out a living human being and could never undo that, no matter how much he wished things had played out differently.
“Maybe he’s got a memplant,” he managed.
The catadapt woman looked at him oddly as she reached over and picked up the stunner. As Trent walked over she pulled another weapon from the shellman’s belt—a neat little pulse-gun.
“Here.” She held the weapon out. “You’ll do better with this than me.”
Trent accepted the thing and it felt familiar, easy, occupying his hand as if that was just the place for it. He stared at the thing, then down at the spreading blood.
“I can’t do this,” he said.
“You seem pretty efficient to me,” said the catadapt.
He gazed at her. Perhaps they should swap weapons? No, even at a glance he could see that she wasn’t familiar with the weapon she held. If they ended up in a firefight, she would be better with the spread of the stunner. She was his responsibility and if they didn’t do this right, she would end up dead. He had to kill Taiken and remove the rot at the centre of this community. Oddly, given that killing now sickened him and his conscience punished him for it, that seemed somehow right.
“Come on,” he said, stepping past the corpse and leading the way.
They reached a door and peered outside. Taiken’s building was just across from them and two guards stood at the door. He guessed that there were others inside too and reckoned he would probably have to go through at least four or five of them before reaching the shellman himself.
“Ooh, nasty.”
Trent whirled and aimed. A figure was crouched over the corpse and trailing metal fingers in the blood. It held those fingers up before its ceramal skull and studied them.
“What the fuck?” The catadapt woman was pointing the stunner at this new arrival, which rather demonstrated how little she knew about the weapon and her prospective target.
“You,” said Trent.
The skeletal Golem, Mr Grey, stood, grinning, but then how could a metal skull have any other expression?
“You know this thing?” said the catadapt.
“It’s the Golem that brought me here, in exchange for something from Sverl,” he replied. “I don’t know why he’s here now.”
“I’m here to help,” said Grey simply.
“Do you know what’s going on?”
“Oh yes, and so does Sverl,” said the Golem. “The father-captain sent me down to assist you.”
“We’ll knock Taiken out . . . capture him . . .”
Grey shook his head. “No, no—you have to kill him.”
“Why?”
“The pheromone glands are in his body,” said Grey, “and they stop producing as he dies. While he lives, his children will just fight to release him until they are all either dead or unconscious.”
Great.
“Would you kill him?” Trent asked, feeling disgusted with himself.
“If you ask me to,” said Grey.
“No Polity AI morality there, then,” said the woman.
Grey focused on her.
“Puss puss,” he said.
The catadapt woman looked at Trent, her expression horrified.
“Grey was a Penny Royal Golem . . .” he began, trying to explain.
“Stolman reactivated him.” She shrugged. “Remember I was on the Rock Pool . . .”
“Yeah,” Trent agreed. “Well, now he’s independent.”
“Then use him, if he’s offering,” she said. “You know what’s going to happen to us if Taiken stays in control here.”
Perhaps this was the easy way out after all. Then Trent didn’t have to do any killing.
“Grey, I want you to go ahead of us. Disable any armed shellmen in our way and, when you reach Taiken . . . finish him.”
“Finish him?” Grey enquired.
Trent hesitated for a moment, trying to still the onset of the shakes. “Kill him.”
“Okay.” Grey walked up to them and they stepped carefully out of his way. Then Grey was off, speeding across the intervening floor towards the two guards.
“Jesus,” said the woman.
Grey left the ground ten feet before the two guards and landed on one of them. They heard a cracking sound and the other guard turned. Before he could react, Grey was on him too. There was another crack, and something bounced across the floor.
“Come on!” Trent set out at a run.
Grey just went straight through the door, tearing it off its hinges as the two guards collapsed behind. As he ran over, Trent scanned the object lying on the ground. It was a human head, with mandibles. He gazed down at it in horror. He’d said disable, but Grey had his own interpretation of that.
“No! Don’t kill them all!”
Trent headed in through the door and knew that having someone or something doing the killing for him did not relieve the guilt. Penny Royal had opened up his conscience and left it a raw and gaping wound.
Inside, another shellman was lying crumpled against one wall, his carapace shattered and internal muscle exposed, coughing up blood. He wasn’t dead, but was certainly disabled. It was a matter of degree.
The door into Taiken’s sanctum hung by one hinge and carnage was inside. Shell people lay scattered about on the floor. Someone was screaming repeatedly and others were groaning in agony. Taiken was thrashing about, the skeletal Golem on his back, its hands clamped on either side of his turret head. Almost as if he had been waiting for Trent to be present, Grey now turned that turret head—one full turn, and then another. He lifted the head away on a fountain of black blood as Taiken collapsed, and discarded it.
Trent walked woodenly into the room, watching some shellmen heaving themselves to their feet. Tilting their heads, if they could, and sniffing, if they had noses.
“All done,” said Grey cheerfully, shaking gobbets of flesh from his hands as he scrambled from Taiken’s corpse. “Now it gets sticky.”
At the dais, Trent paused. Everything seemed dark around him. He could see no way to escape his responsibility for the carnage. He raised the pulse-gun and gazed down the polished square-section barrel. Perhaps he had a way out after all.
“It will take a little while,” said Grey, “but they’ll do what prador children always do when they lose their father.”
“What?” Trent said numbly, lowering the weapon.
He tried to understand what Grey had said. Then a furore started behind him and he turned in time to see two shellmen, up unsteadily on their feet, snapping at each other with their claws. However, after a moment, they lost interest and began limping towards the exit. What did prador children do when their father died? They fought for dominance. They killed their brothers and sisters and the winner, once released from pheromonal control, turned into an adult.
“Mr Grey,” he said unsteadily. “Get them out of here—we’ll seal this area.”
“Of course,” said Grey, leaping up and striding over to a shellman who was dragging himself aimlessly across the floor, all his prador legs on one side broken.
“And do it without killing any of them,” Trent added.
What had he done? In an act of self-defence, he had ordered this Golem to kill Taiken. And now, as a direct result, all of the shell people would begin killing each other.
He turned to the catadapt. “I don’t know your name.”
“Sepia,” she replied, studying him curiously.
“See if you can get the other human survivors in here.”
“Really?” She raised an eyebrow, obviously annoyed by his peremptory attitude.
“Please,” Trent added.
“Okay.” She moved off.
Trent now began checking the building. Taiken had obviously been a
s paranoid as any adult prador, because the doors did have a stratum of armour in them and he could secure them. However, the shellman had not been thinking straight, because the walls were weak and vulnerable. When Trent saw the behaviour of some of the shell people Grey was driving out, he didn’t think that would be a problem. They were occasionally aggressive to each other, but mostly disorientated. In one room, he found the woman and the boy he had seen earlier. The boy was prostrate on a bed, seemingly catatonic. The woman sat on a chair beside it, a smaller boy sleeping on her lap with his thumb in his mouth.
Trent stood in the doorway and stared. On seeing her close up, she no longer looked anything like his sister Genève. This woman before him with her cropped blonde hair and black make-up, her short wrinkled dress and petite form, looked like a waif. She suffered in comparison to women like Sepia, was more delicate and elfin. Yet in that moment Trent knew that he wanted her.
“Who are you?” he asked abruptly.
“Reece,” she replied. “Taiken’s widow.”
“I’m sorry—” Trent began, feeling his hopes dying stillborn.
“Don’t be,” she interrupted. “He would have killed us all.”
“Still . . .”
She stood up and put the younger child on the bed beside his brother, gazed down at her soiled dress, rubbed at one of the marks, then walked over to stand in front of Trent. The top of her head was level with his chest and he suddenly felt big, clumsy and far too dangerous to be this close to her.
“What’s your name?” she demanded.
“Trent Sobel . . .”
“Well, Trent Sobel, Taiken was in the war, you know, but he didn’t fight.” She studied Trent’s face. “He was on a team that had the difficult job of piecing together how prador society functioned. I met him fifty years after his work there had ended, and by then he had come to admire them.”
Trent didn’t bother to point out how obvious that was, given Taiken’s subsequent behaviour.
“I did love him,” she added.
“I’m sorry,” Trent repeated, not sure what else to say.
She shook her head in irritation then reached out and rested a hand against his chest. “We’re long past apologies, aren’t we?” He found it difficult to meet her eyes. She continued, “You will get us out of this, won’t you?”
“I’ll make sure you and your children are safe,” he promised, now sure he would sacrifice his life to that end.
“Good.” She reached up and grabbed his hair, pulled his head down and kissed him hard. He responded, reaching out to pull her closer, wishing there wasn’t so much material between them. Finally, she drew back and he released her.
“Later,” she said, turning away to go back to her children.
12
SVERL
Sverl gazed at the snake drone locked in its clamps, and at the spine driven in through its mouth and deep into its body. Soon the data he required would be available, but he was still undecided about what to do with the drone next. His prador instinct was to obliterate the thing. However, his AI logic told him that it might yet be useful and was perhaps still part of Penny Royal’s plans. His human side remained undecided, agreeing in part with each of the others. He allowed a painful memory to arise for his inspection, recalling that during his encounter with this very drone, he hadn’t even seen it.
The battle had occurred some years after the attack on Factory Station Room 101 and over a small and lifeless Polity world. Sverl was then just getting used to his new dreadnought and had been enjoying carving up space stations abandoned by humans and AIs. Despite being unoccupied, the stations had been left with their weapons set on automatic. The Polity had also deserted a mining operation on the surface of that world and, if the AIs had been using their usual tactics in such a situation, he knew they had probably booby-trapped it.
The Polity had given up on this place since it wasn’t essential to their war effort. And the prador had no real interest in acquiring it. This was why the prador ships on this mission were newly minted ones, with the father-captains aboard just trying out some manoeuvres on the space station. It had been, in essence, a training exercise. And it had therefore been puzzling, what with the Polity having abandoned this place, to have five attack ships fly out of a deep shaft carved into one of the moons. They then launched themselves in a suicidal attack against Sverl and his comrades . . .
THE PRADOR/HUMAN WAR: SVERL
The wide armoured wedge of the space station, now displayed on half of Sverl’s array of screens, hurled up fusillades of railgun missiles from its upper face. It then fired particle beams through briefly opened gaps between the hardfields of its weakening defence. Sverl’s crew scaled their own hard-fields to block those beams. They then replied with beams of their own, as the space station again parted its fields to let missiles through. Those missiles eventually hit Sverl’s defences and exploded into plasma. Meanwhile, the rockets he had fired some hours earlier had rounded the planet, entered atmosphere and were now approaching low over a mountain range. Of course, with an AI or human crew aboard the station, this ploy wouldn’t have worked, but the automatics that had replaced them were particularly stupid.
Sverl turned his attention to the screens showing the approaching attack ships. They were accelerating, their formation loosening. Sverl’s comrades, aboard two other dreadnoughts and four destroyers, were now breaking off to meet the new threat. When these ships had appeared, Father-Captain Vlex, commanding this mission, immediately contacted the rest. He communicated that here was a chance to follow the king’s latest orders to the prador fleets. The war wasn’t going as well as predicted, what with the Polity bringing new weapons and tactics into play. So capturing Polity technology for study was a priority. Vlex wanted to capture attack ships. But Sverl wanted to finish off the space station.
“Full barrage in twenty seconds,” Sverl said, confirming an earlier order.
The missiles below were now accelerating up from the surface in two waves of six. The barrage from his ship commenced with railgun missiles pounding the station’s screens, and bright blue particle beams carving across them. Sverl checked a counter, watched it zero, then saw it thrown into black silhouette as the first wave of missiles struck the station’s defences. Now the station spewed burned-out field projectors from ejector ports, some even exploding directly through its hull. It was as he had thought when the station faced towards him when he arrived: its defence was directional. His second wave of attack struck; nearly all its missiles got through this time. The station bucked as the weapons flared, then dissolved in multiple explosions. Sverl immediately turned his ship; his manipulatory hands locked into saddle controls. Then, with a stab of one claw in a pit control, he fired up his fusion drive—its torch eating up any debris coming his way.
Moving out to join one flank of his fellow ships, Sverl saw the Polity craft coming straight in, breaking formation to go after all of the prador ships. He immediately realized something wasn’t right. Usually a group like this would focus their attack on a viable target—like one of the destroyers. They’d hit it with everything they had, while sowing space with EM chaff. Then, faced with three dreadnoughts, they’d U-jump away.
“Distribute EM mines,” he instructed.
A lone ship came directly towards him, releasing a fusillade of railgun missiles. Sverl didn’t need to order the intercepting hardfields and watched the whole attack wasted against their shielding. He anticipated some clever manoeuvre next, as would be expected from the kind of AI such a ship should contain. But instead the ship charged straight into the EM mines sown directly in its path. One of them detonated, too close to his own craft, the flash briefly knocking out cam images and causing outages even in Sverl’s sanctum aboard his dreadnought. When imagery returned, the Polity attack ship’s weapons and fusion drive had shut down as it hurtled on in, dead.
Sverl decided then that this had to be the Polity, in desperation, copying the prador and using attack ships as kamikazes.
They had to contain some massive CTD explosives. Rapidly turning his ship to fling it aside on fusion drive, he put his hardfields out to their furthest extent. In the unlikely event that this wasn’t a kamikaze, he heeded the king’s new orders and fielded the ship in them rather than let it obliterate itself against them. He next caused it to decelerate in a long arc around his ship, expecting that detonation at any moment.
No detonation.
“Something odd about this,” said Vlex.
Sverl checked tactical data and saw that he and his comrades had captured all but one of the attack ships. The one demolished Polity craft had gone after a destroyer that was maintaining a close orbit around the world below. The prador ship killed it with an EM mine but didn’t have hardfields strong enough to slow it down, so it merely moved aside. The rising cloud of fire from the planet’s surface marked its crash site.
“I suggest we deep scan before bringing them aboard,” Vlex added.
Still holding the apparently dead vessel at a distance, Sverl probed it with his sensors and discovered at once that it contained no U-space drive. Updates from his fellows showed that all four remaining attack ships were without such drives. This accounted for them not fleeing but didn’t explain their other odd behaviour. He fired off a sensor probe next and tracked its rapid approach then deceleration down onto the attack ship. It thumped home on the hull and drove in exotic metal scythe legs. Scan results immediately began to pour in, revealing a fusion reactor in safe shutdown, as with the previous scan. But it also showed that it was of the usual Polity design and therefore incapable of exploding. The fusion drive, its electronic controls scrambled, had scrapped itself. The thing was radioactive but no real danger. The ship’s weapons cache was empty but for a few railgun missiles. There were no humans or human remains aboard. All the robots were dead, even including microbots and nanobots. In addition, its AI crystal was shattered. He couldn’t find anything too dense to probe or anything shielded that might be concealing something nasty. It was a puzzle.
