Croma Venture: (The Spiral Wars Book Five)

by Joel Shepherd

  “Styx,” said Arime, feeling cold. Now he felt the pain in his side, and his head felt light. “We don’t do that kind of thing here.”

  “I know,” said Styx. “And thus it falls to me. I will not allow our operations to be compromised by parren disputes. All measures must be taken to identify the extent of the threat.”

  “And yet you’ve found nothing,” said Rolonde. “Let him go, he might still survive.”

  “And cannot be allowed to. He will not report what he has seen here.” One big vibroblade hummed, then smashed through the parren’s helmet. Arime closed his eyes, recalling the fate of his good friend and Phoenix legend Master Sergeant ‘Stitch’ Willis. Cut in half, by blades like that, wielded at Styx’s command. Styx turned to them, nonchalant as she switched to a more important matter. “I did not think the attacking parren force in the lower levels significant enough to trouble our defences by asking for reinforcement. They were outmatched.”

  “And you wanted a toy,” Rolonde muttered.

  “I understand human sentiment on the matter,” said Styx. “But my commitment to Phoenix’s security is absolute. For hundreds of years did I serve, command and fight alongside the parren. I fear that Phoenix’s methods must evolve, in what humans would describe as a more ruthless direction, if we are all to survive what lies ahead.”

  6

  Erik’s network vision displayed the grand procession direct onto his helmet visor. He didn’t even know exactly where the place he was looking at was on Defiance, only that it was very large and very wide, with suspiciously few structural supports to keep the roof up, and was filled with thousands of parren all standing in rows with not an EVA suit in sight.

  “Stands to reason the parren would put all their restoration work into finding a pressurised room large enough for their fucking ceremonies,” Erik said to Trace. “I mean, god forbid they stick a crown on someone’s head before any less than five thousand.”

  “I don’t think that would pass any safety inspection in human space,” Trace agreed, seeing the same vision. In the airless hangar above Hannachiam’s ‘residence’, coms were the only way they’d hear each other. Surrounding them were inflatable, pressurised habitats as would be used on any airless world — an odd sight here, colonising a vast steel expanse of floor that had until recently held the relics of an ancient battlefield. Machines did not need air, and so nearly all of Defiance was like this — unpressurised steel floors, nothing airtight unless specifically made for organic ‘guests’ who’d only materialised in the last part of the last millennia of the Machine Age. Those pressurised habitats were rare, just the few recently revived places like Aronach Dar, granny flats put out by the drysines to accommodate visiting relatives. Or maybe dog kennels, Erik sometimes thought.

  Suited parren civilians now made their way between habitats, working on generators and other support equipment that would not fit inside the crowded workspaces. Most of these parren were House Harmony, and Erik could see a number of them not working hard, no doubt pausing to look at their own visor displays and the great ceremony unfolding there.

  “Do you know if Lisbeth is there?” Trace asked.

  “To the right of the altar,” said Erik. “Third across, red robe.”

  “Oh yeah,” said Trace as she peered. “Fancy that. The first human in all history to achieve any kind of rank with the parren.”

  “Yeah,” said Erik, unable to not feel the pride. “Of course it will upset all the folks back home who complain that Debogandes get too much status as things stand.”

  “They want things to be fair,” said Trace. “There’s no such thing as fair. Attempts to impose fairness upon an unfair universe usually end in disaster.”

  “Major,” said Sergeant Kono. “Descending now.”

  Erik and Trace turned and looked, and from the big hole in the upper level floor that remained the primary access to Hannachiam’s level, some big, squat armour suits were descending on low thrust. Between them dropped a non-armoured EVA suit, yet just as wide at the shoulders and chest. Too wide for humans, and far too wide for parren. They landed, and began low-G bounding toward the humans — unmistakably tavalai and gazing about at the research camp spread across this level.

  Captain Pramodenium made an exasperated gesture at all the parren activity, and Erik actually grinned, and bounced the last few metres to his old friend with enthusiasm. Pram grasped gloves with gloves, wide-set tavalai eyes rolling to look about with mischief. “What have you gone and done now, crazy human?” he said on coms in his perfect, gravelly English. “I leave you for only a short time, and now look at this nonsense.”

  “I’m sorry that we violated your protocols,” Erik said solemnly. “If we filled in the correct forms, do you think your leadership would forgive us?” Pram actually laughed, a chortling grunt that sounded more animal than sentient. “Djojana Naki,” Erik continued to the karasai at Pram’s side. “I see you’ve kept the old man in one piece since we last met.”

  “No simple task,” Naki growled via the translator. His Captain had learned English because tavalai spacer academies taught officers to study their enemies, but karasai were taught simply to shoot them. Erik was very glad that Naki had not been given reason to shoot at him, because Trace rated him highly. She added her own greeting now, more subdued and professional, but genuine enough.

  Pram stepped aside with Erik and pointed toward an arch-like structure that emerged from within a series of cordons and measuring equipment. “Is that her over there?” he asked. There was no mistaking the eagerness in his voice.

  “What happened to those lectures that we should never give an artificial sentience a gender?” Erik said with amusement.

  Pram gave him a sideways look through the visor. “I hear that your personal monstrosity has acquired a body now?”

  “And an alarming habit of dropping in on conversations you could have sworn were private,” Erik warned him.

  Pram grunted. “My warnings about that one stand. But this! I have only heard stories of this, very vague, lost in history. She was pure speculation, little more than a fantasy tale among scholars who once heard a story from someone who heard a story. No proof, and no direct record. And now you’ve found her!”

  “There were a number like her,” Erik replied. “Not many, but several. She knew their locations, but we know that nothing survived there. She was very sad to learn that she is the last.”

  “Sad.” Pram stared at him, big eyes both wide and skeptical behind his visor. “You’re sure?”

  Erik smiled. “Hannachiam is the product of drysine interactions with organics. Drysines took those parts of organic sentience they found most interesting and created an entirely new form of sentience to explore them more thoroughly. Hanna’s like a midway point between organic and machine. She’s more emotional than we are. In some ways, she’s pure emotion. And she’s a friend of mine. Come, let me introduce you, she’s always pleased to meet interesting new people.”

  Erik and Trace led Pram and Naki out from the elevator to Hannachiam’s control level. The space about them was large but not vast, the walls a tangle of cords and connections, organic like the vines of some impenetrable jungle. From amidst the tangle, projector arms made rows, now glowing with a regular, pulsating holographic light. Erik walked to where a circle of smaller holographic panels surrounded a platform and saw the projectors focusing to create a new shape, glowing in that channel of light.

  It was a horse, he saw, and it galloped and whinnied, running circles through the air about the exposed platform. Erik laughed. “Hello Hanna,” he said. “Yes, that’s very much like the horses I used to ride at GreenOaks.” As the further big panels made the shapes of tall trees and a vista of forested mountains as background for the galloping steed. “I told Hanna about horses on my family’s ranch on Homeworld,” Erik explained to the others. “She seems intrigued. I’ve told her about all sorts of stuff on Homeworld, but she’s much more interested in animals and people than buil
dings and cities.”

  Pram, Erik saw, was gazing about within his helmet visor, eyes wide at the surrounding displays. “All of this is her?” he asked. “How does she know what a horse is? Does she have access to Phoenix databases?”

  “I’d imagine so,” said Erik, looking at the near control panels and finding them mostly blank. That was odd. “She can’t really answer questions like that — she has no actual speech function and the chronological ordering of events isn’t how she perceives things. So she can’t, you know, tell you how she’s done something, or explain cause-and-effect very well… Hanna?” As the near panels remained unresponsive, despite him inserting fat, gloved fingers into the sheet of light. “Why aren’t your controls working?”

  The projectors flashed, and multiple beams intersected to create a figure standing to Erik’s left. A figure in a parren EVA suit, equipped with tools and fiddling with something.

  “Someone was down here,” Trace observed. “Looks like security vision.”

  “Hanna,” Erik said with frustration. “Has someone been messing with your controls?”

  The holography faded, was then replaced by scenes of a parren ceremony, thousands upon thousands standing in orderly rows, now chanting and moving in unison. Flags waving in the sun, and the glint of ceremonial steel weapons. So not the current, ongoing ceremonies to install Gesul as head of House Harmony.

  “I don’t recognise those,” Pram admitted. “Who does she mean?”

  “I’m not sure,” said Erik, touching more panels, looking for a response. “Hanna’s not always clear. She doesn’t always distinguish between individuals and groups.” The parren scenes now gave way to stage plays, that great parren passion, and actors gesticulating dramatically. “Anyhow, it looks like the hand controls are down. Hanna? I’ve brought some friends to visit you. This is Captain Pramodenium and Major Naki, they’re from the tavalai warship in orbit overhead. They are Dobruta… you know what the Dobruta are, don’t you Hanna?”

  The holography faded, replaced with rippling displays of multiple images about the circle. Underwater scenes, of tavalai swimming in little more than loin cloths. Some held spears, and others hand tools that they used to scrape shellfish off the sides of underwater rocks. None wore breathing apparatus. The visuals looked impossibly old, like scenes of tavalai pre-history.

  Pram and Naki stared. “What is this?” Pram whispered. “Where is this from?”

  “Well she does invent some imagery,” Erik cautioned the tavalai. “She can generate visuals in realtime, it’s not real, it’s just like a movie — her processing power is pretty obscene. And the machines aren’t old enough to have taken visual footage in tavalai pre-history — tavalai were civilised before hacksaws existed.”

  “There were worlds where tavalai reverted to old ways of living,” the translator replied for Naki. “After the machines destroyed most modern industry. This footage could have been taken by tavalai at the time, and found later by drysines. Most today is lost.”

  “I’d be wary of that,” Trace echoed Erik’s caution. “Hannachiam talks and thinks in dreams. Her thought patterns are abstract, it’s all emotion and imagination. Likely you’re seeing what she’s imagining.”

  Images followed rapid-fire, chasing each other around the circle — tavalai warship interiors, tavalai spacers in zero-G, tavalai councils convening in great institutions, tavalai crowds on worlds gathered to hear some debate. Scenes of tavalai civilisation, most of it recent to Erik’s eyes. In Hannachiam’s time tavalai had not been nearly as powerful as this.

  “Well Hannachiam,” said Pram, “you seem to have a healthy respect for the tavalai. This is a pleasant surprise. Many of your kind in your time did not.”

  Images of devastation, a city of some kind. Debris strewn across a street, and tavalai bodies. Amidst them, a small tavalai child, sitting helplessly among the dead, and now staring up at the viewpoint camera in vacant horror. Now a shift, and a tavalai child was lifted from a crib by steel manipulator arms. Robotic arms, it became clear, as the viewpoint pulled back enough to show the owner of the arms was a multi-legged drone. About the drone were hundreds of similar cribs, and tavalai adults, all taking notes in what looked like a reproduction lab of some kind, appearing quite calm and unthreatened.

  Erik looked at Pram again. He just stared, speechless. Erik fancied that his large, semi-amphibious eyes might be a little moister than usual. Tavalai did that too, Erik had discovered, at moments of great emotion. Pram was Dobruta, and had devoted his life to the elimination of hacksaw technology, in the hopes of preventing its horrors from ever visiting his people again. Now he was learning that with Hannachiam at least, it hadn’t been at all that simple.

  “She does have that effect on people,” Erik said quietly.

  “So I hear that we have our history all wrong,” said Pram. “That the hacksaws, after tens of thousands of years treating organic beings like vermin, finally evolved into the drysines. And drysines, it appears, made peace with the parren, and invited Drakhil of the Tahrae to join them. And some tavalai joined too, and others. Fighting for the machines, not against them, as our history has always taught.”

  An image shifted — a tavalai sitting crosslegged in an old wooden hut, weaving baskets from water reeds, thick, webbed fingers surprisingly nimble. Opposite her, multiple drone manipulator arms wove a similar basket, pausing to consider the woman’s work, then to copy. Pram gave Erik a disbelieving look. Imagining drysine drones sitting in pre-historical tavalai huts was too much even for him.

  “She’s imagining,” Erik said patiently. “It’s how she talks. I think she means coordination. I don’t think any of the drysines expect us to believe they coordinated with organics out of love, not even Hanna. But organics think in different ways, and drysines came to see that as a strength. Studying those strengths led them to create Hanna.”

  An eruption of images followed — diagrams, drawing, parren and tavalai artists with paintbrushes and pencils, engineers with holographic schematics… and now, abruptly out-of-place, a human orchestra playing some grand old classical tune. His fault, Erik knew, as he’d been introducing her to Tchaikovsky’s symphonies at Lieutenant Shilu’s suggestion, and Hanna would actually listen to them in real-time instead of just processing them for content in milliseconds as Styx would. It suggested a positive relationship between emotion and time, given that Hanna was all emotion, and Styx was not. Now more images — parren commanders seated about what looked like tactical displays, arranging battle plans.

  “Creativity,” Pram murmured, gazing about. “She’s talking about creativity. Organics and machines do it differently. Hannachiam, are you suggesting that organic creativity helped the drysines to beat the deepynines in the great war?”

  The displays faded to peaceful blue skies above golden grass, rippling in a gentle wind. “Serenity usually means ‘yes’,” Erik translated. “She finds your assertion harmonious.”

  “Hanna,” said Trace. “Did you help to plan the great war?”

  Again the female tavalai, weaving baskets in her hut. Beside her now sat a tavalai child, handing her mother new strands of reed as she needed them. Erik smiled. “She helped,” he translated that as well. “I’ve asked her before. I think she was more inspiration and process. And I think that war terrifies her.”

  The image changed to Pram himself. It was hard to see where the viewpoint cameras were situated that could create such an image. As the viewpoint circled, Erik decided that it was a graphical composite, influenced by many perspectives, but primarily a creation of Hanna’s imagination. Now the side-screens displayed an aerial image of a large building compound, surrounded by a jungle of trees. Large shuttles parked on an elevated pad, their small size demonstrating the building’s immensity. More screens showed an interior, a formal setting, many distinguished tavalai seated about the walls of a wide circular chamber. Erik saw many Fleet uniforms, and the obvious ribbons that tavalai wore instead of medals.

  “That is
on the world of Lamaran,” Pram translated for Erik and Trace. “The Dobruta head quarters.”

  “Where does she access such images?” Naki wondered. “She was deactivated long before the Dobruta existed.”

  “There are tens of thousands of parren on Defiance now,” Erik explained. “They bring their databases with them. Hanna’s quite caught up on current events.”

  “No one thought to restrict her information flows?” Pram wondered. “Not that I think it would have been wise or necessary… but parren are conservative. An old mind might interpret new information in destabilising ways. Keeping new databases from intersecting with Defiance mainframe systems would not have been impossible, given some forethought.”

  “Styx shares with her,” Trace explained. “Styx has that autonomy, as Phoenix crew. We couldn’t stop her if we wanted to.”

  “Ah,” said Pram, grimly. Erik was sure the wise old tavalai captain was beginning to grasp why so many parren found Phoenix’s presence on Defiance unsettling. With Styx around, Hannachiam could not be controlled or commanded. Not that Hanna had shown any great need to be controlled or commanded, as she was entirely accommodating of most reasonable activities on Defiance. But parren being parren, they did not like loose ends, to say nothing of loose cannons. Particularly not cannons as powerful as alien super-sentiences who controlled the entire city, and now practised functional autonomy according to her own friends and conscience. And now she had chosen Gesul over Rehnar as head of House Harmony. Parren who did not prefer that change would not forget. “Well, Hannachiam, the Dobruta’s information of recent events in parren space tells us much alarming data about the recent deepynine attack. The slaughter of so many innocent parren lives on Mylor Station has caused us particular alarm.”

  Rain on the screens. The shore of some distant alien beach at dusk, waves crashing upon the sand as the wind blew and rain fell. A small shack far away, a light in the windows as smoke rose from the chimney.