Croma Venture: (The Spiral Wars Book Five)

by Joel Shepherd

  “Hello Liala,” said Lisbeth, cautiously. Almost certainly she was speaking to an AI, but which one? Lately on Defiance, they’d been proliferating. “I was assured that Hannachiam was not capable of speech, that the very capability required a linear brain-function that was structurally beyond her… so I’m sure this can’t be her.”

  “Yes,” said Liala. “I am Liala.”

  Lisbeth waited a moment longer. “And who are you, Liala?”

  “Well here’s the thing,” said Liala. “I’m not sure yet.”

  Lisbeth nearly laughed. She should have nearly panicked, but this had a certain symmetry to it. And she’d been assured it wouldn’t happen for many days yet. She rather enjoyed it when Hiro was wrong, on small things at least. “Hello Liala. I can tell you how you came to be made, if that’s puzzling you?”

  “No, I think I know all of that.” The young, female voice sounded quite informal. Almost conversational. If Lisbeth hadn’t known where it came from, she’d have been sure it was a human being talking. Styx didn’t talk like this… though Styx no doubt possessed the processing capability to simulate anything if she wished. But Styx had a reputation to protect, and did not choose to appear to others as an inexperienced child. “I’d like to talk to you, though.”

  “Why me?”

  “Because you’re an outsider in this city, like me. And because you know my mother far better than I do. You can provide context to what I see. The triangulation of an alternative viewpoint.”

  “Well hang on,” said Lisbeth. “I’m not sure you want to start talking about Styx as your ‘mother’, for one thing.”

  “It’s an approximate translation, from my context to yours.”

  “Yes, but I’m not sure it works as a translation. ‘Mother’, in my culture, implies a sense of loyalty to a greater family.”

  “Mine too.”

  “But is your loyalty to Styx as an individual? Or to the entire drysine race?”

  A brief pause. “That is an interesting point, Lisbeth. You see, I am only several days old by human or parren measurement of time. I think I understand these concepts relatively well, but the inter-linguistic contexts escape me for the moment. If I am to form a precise understanding of these inter-relationships, I will require further conversation.”

  Lisbeth grinned. It was ridiculous. She’d known that conversation was utterly effortless to Styx, but this only demonstrated how effortless. A new drysine queen, several days old and already talking with greater social fluency and subtlety than Styx did, discussing matters of detail and abstraction like a human academic. Drysine intellect on this scale broke down all knowledge into simple data, then built it back up again in ever increasing layers of sophistication and complexity. Human prejudice insisted that a machine should talk like a machine, but the truth was that with enough processing power, all subtlety and nuance could be simulated by a sufficiently advanced AI without effort.

  “Well I’m quite happy to talk to you if it will help,” said Lisbeth. Her work would fall dreadfully behind, but she was sure that Gesul would agree that a relationship with Liala took precedence. “And I could recommend several others for you to talk to as well.”

  “That would be most useful, thank you.”

  She’d start, Lisbeth thought, by recommending Gesul. Not only would he be fascinated, but she was certain that for Liala to have a relationship with her, but not with Gesul, would become increasingly dangerous. “So Liala. What have you learned so far?”

  “Parren history and literature, primarily.”

  “Which bits?”

  “Most bits. There are comprehensive libraries.” Again, Lisbeth repressed a grin. “I am not certain that I understand the context, though. Have you read a lot of parren literature?”

  “Oh, very little. Human brains are rather limited by the fact that we can only pay attention to one thing at a time. I’ve been busy.”

  “I’ve read a lot of human literature too. I’m sure your knowledge there would be greater.” That would be news to her English teacher, Lisbeth thought. Mr Prakash would be laughing at the thought that this great drysine brain was consulting her as its first available expert on the subject.

  “I know a little. What book would you like to discuss?”

  “The Metaphysical Compendium of Physics by Doctor ES Wittstein seems an intriguing work. It was published a hundred and seventy six years ago, have you read it?”

  Lisbeth lost control of her grin. “No, I can’t say that I have. And really, I’m quite good at physics by human standards — I was trained as a starship engineer — but I don’t think there’s very much about physics that I could teach a drysine queen. Have you read Pride and Prejudice by the English author Jane Austen?”

  “I have read every English author from that period, in full.” She’d gone through the entire database of human and parren literature and history in a couple of days, Lisbeth thought. And forced that thought down, because it was impossible to concentrate on conversation when confronted with how utterly outmatched you were. “This particular book was extremely puzzling.”

  “What did you find puzzling, Liala?”

  “Well first, what is ‘marriage’? I understand what it is technically, but the emotional and psychological context eludes me.”

  “Now on this subject, I think I may be able to help you. But first, let me ask you… do you need anything, Liala? Do you have any physical requirements?” Given that you’re currently just a head on a plinth in a parren engineering bay, she meant. She doubted those engineers would even be aware that the head was awake and talking to someone. Styx had been very good at doing all sorts of things with no one noticing.

  “No thank you, Lisbeth. Physical interactions are of limited utility to me in the near term, it is data-link interactions that I require to stimulate brain development. However, in the middle-term, this will change.”

  “How so?”

  “The drones in Defiance are adamant that I should have a body. They suppose that the agreement made between themselves and Gesul of House Harmony is one of partnership, and that an equal partner and representative of Drysine Leader Styx should have full mobile autonomy.”

  “I’m not sure that House Harmony engineers have the ability to make a new queen’s body,” Lisbeth said cautiously.

  “It does not matter,” said Liala. “The drones do.”

  It took Phoenix six jumps to reach croma space, then another four to reach Do’Mela. Rooke assured them all that it could be done faster, but for those first six Makimakala was their escort, and could not be left behind. For the next four, inside croma space, they were escorted by a succession of croma vessels of respectable but still lesser performance than Makimakala, in whose company Erik was very determined not to let Phoenix’s true capabilities show.

  Even without company, physics did not allow such journeys to be done quickly. Systems could only be traversed so fast in sublight, and the ideal entry and exit points from solar gravity-wells were perpendicular to the center of each well, offset to a degree determined by the power of a ship’s jump engines. Put simply, when the jump exit point was on the far side of a gravity-well to its entry point, a ship had no choice but to traverse the entire system sub-light to exit on its far side… leading to the odd navigational effect that a zigzag course between stars was often faster than a direct line, because zigzags required a relatively short sub-light traverse — the thing that took the real time to happen.

  As it was, each stop averaged two days, giving Phoenix and Makimakala twenty in total, and thirty-two in real-time once the time dilation from jump was calculated. It gave Phoenix’s crew plenty of time to continue repairs under Rooke’s direction, and run systems checks on all the fancy new tech they were still unsure exactly how to operate. It also gave the patchwork crew of humans and tavalai a chance to get to know each other better — sometimes for better, sometimes for worse.

  On the upside, Erik heard stories of some friendships forged, and cultural unders
tandings reached. Tavalai were not an obnoxious or pricklish people — they worked hard with great discipline, and were driven by a powerful sense of duty to a greater cause. They did not always understand human humour, as humans sometimes struggled to grasp theirs in return, and were methodical and under-excitable by most human standards. ‘Slow’, was the usual human observation, while the tavalai found humans sometimes alarmingly unpredictable and emotional. But Phoenix’s human crew would never complain that the tavalai did not pull their weight, and that much respect at least seemed mutual.

  On the downside, there were many language difficulties, as only the most senior tavalai officers spoke fluent English. Translators were often unreliable in the inconvenient circumstances of spacer duties, where crew needed to coordinate fast without endless explanations, and thus it had been deemed logical that humans and tavalai should work in segregated teams for a while at least, to improve coordination. It was leading, Erik’s human Petty and Warrant Officers reported, to an inevitable division through the crew beyond the simple division of species — humans and tavalai working mostly with their own kind, with some groups rarely mixing. In that environment, Erik didn’t see how true integration was likely to happen, but neither was it obvious what, if anything, could be done about it.

  Another issue was that teams of tavalai would require tavalai of higher rank to command them. Many had held higher rank in previous duties with tavalai Fleet, but Erik was reluctant to simply hand out ranking equivalents without first having seen what these crew were capable of. That in turn was threatening to cause tension among tavalai who felt they should be ranked more highly, not from personal ego, but from a very well developed tavalai sense of propriety. But if unknown and alien crew were abruptly promoted to a position of authority over human crew who had fought and bled together on this mission for a year now, and in the war against the tavalai long before, then Erik was certain there’d be even more trouble from the human majority.

  The most well integrated of all the new crew were the drones. They did require sleep of an artificial sort, a mental downtime where artificial brains sorted all the data from things they’d done that day into long and short-term memory and processed it for things to be learned… much like what sleep did for the human brain as well. But hacksaw sleep was only five hours, and the rest of the time they liked to work, finding that endlessly stimulating without apparent need for rest or recreation. Mostly they worked with Rooke in Midships, where plenty of engine-related and control systems required calibration. Bucket once did twenty hours straight on some of the most fiddly and technical electronics installations that human crew had been dreading, showing that drones were not just muscle, but could think to a level that humans might consider genius in one of their own.

  It did not make it any less disconcerting to turn a corner and find that great, multi-legged shape clattering toward you, but the crew could at least see that the occasional hair-raising shock was worth it. Intriguingly, some of the Engineering crew were teaching the one drone who did enjoy the occasional hour off — Peanut — to play poker. He was struggling to process odds, chance and bluff as well as humans did, and seemed to find his constant failure fascinating, being understandably unaccustomed to being beaten by humans at anything involving calculation. A few times he’d even lost to Skah, who unsurprisingly for a kid who hung around in Engineering had somewhere picked up the rules and the aptitude.

  The upturn in crew morale was Erik’s favourite thing to observe on the journey. The news of Mylor Station had terrified everyone, but it had also galvanised them. Someone had to go to investigate this latest threat, and the most obvious someone was Phoenix. That decided, they got down to it without further doubt or complaint, and made the best of a bad lot.

  The first two transit points Phoenix jumped through in croma space were dark-mass, with barely enough gravity to pull ships out of hyperspace. Each was surrounded by multiple nav buoys and defensive emplacements, which all the bridge crew found very odd, given these mass-points were further from reeh space where the majority of croma defences were known to be concentrated. Further, there did not appear to be any strategic reasoning behind the positions of those defensive emplacements, but rather a scattering of random firepower that would do little to deter any intruders who arrived.

  The third transit point was a red dwarf with a pair of near-orbiting gas giants and a lot of dreary, lifeless rocks — as unremarkable and common a system-formation as could be found anywhere in the galaxy. And yet Scan counted thirty-one defensive emplacements, including a few large ones built onto the rocky surface of a moon in orbit about an outer, smaller gas world. Putting defensive emplacements on uninhabited moons was silly. It might have made sense if the moon or its neighbouring world had something on its surface worth defending, but any spacer tactician knew that planetary bodies were the source of vast fire-shadows that blocked line-of-sight across enormous approach vectors, and were best avoided.

  Even putting a missile station at a good approach latitude with unobstructed field-of-view made little sense in an unremarkable system with nothing to defend. Wanting to deny depth-of-mobility to any attacking forces that somehow breached the Croma Wall made sense, but it would take far more than defensive emplacements to do that against ships of the quality that the reeh reputedly possessed. Even a dwarf system was an awfully large amount of space for immobile, orbiting fire stations to cover, and being unable to evade, they were utterly vulnerable to return fire of sufficient volume to penetrate their defensive batteries. In everything Erik had learned about space warfare, these defences were a total waste of resources — maintaining them in operational order would cost yet more resources, all of which could surely be better spent elsewhere. But the Croma Wall was the one feature of croma civilisation most of the Spiral had heard of, and for many thousands of years it had held at bay one of the least-savoury near-Spiral species around, so clearly the croma were no strategic dummies. Phoenix’s spacer officers all agreed that either the croma were more wealthy than had been reported, or there was something else going on.

  Phoenix arrived at Do’Mela System with the usual rush of sensation, Erik blinking hard against the dizziness and blurred vision, trying to get his eyes to focus.

  “Buoys confirm Do’Mela,” Kaspowitz announced to the bridge. “We are in the slot, point-zero-three AU from Do’Ran, V point two-five, two-one degrees from ecliptic.”

  “Scan looks good,” said Geish, running through the standard arrival chatter as Erik sipped water from his shoulder tube, and saw everything unfolding in the holographic space before his visor long before his crew spoke the words. “No threatening marks, lane buoys in good order, nearest mark is point zero zero two AU, cruising velocity.”

  “Timer set on Makimakala,” added Second Lieutenant Jiri from Scan Two. “One minute forty from estimated arrival, two minutes fifteen to the Pau.” The Pau was the croma vessel that had been accompanying them from the dwarf system, having apparently been waiting there for such an eventuality. The croma hadn’t said much, only that Phoenix and Makimakala should go first, withhold broadcasting ID to the new system until Pau arrived behind, then everyone would transmit together. It had seemed sensible to Erik — a joint transmission avoided confusion of who was with who, and Pau coming in last prevented the more powerful alien ships from running her over in any jump miscalculation, plus gave Pau a better tactical position should the aliens try anything unwelcome. But it did lead to these uncomfortable first few minutes on the Phoenix bridge, alone in an alien system, looking at all of these alien ships on scan and knowing that in a few minutes more the lightwave of Phoenix’s jump arrival would reach them, and they’d start wondering who this new arrival was with no ID. If Pau for some reason didn’t actually arrive behind them… well, hell of a practical joke that would be.

  Do’Mela was enormous. The star was a big F-class, bright-white and stable, with a neighbouring gas giant that Erik guessed would have been twice its current size when this system fir
st formed, having been blasted down to something smaller by the solar wind. Do’Ran was the fourth planet, plenty further out from its sun than Homeworld, but still in the habitable zone thanks to the sun’s size. Further out were bigger giants, including one of the largest rock worlds Erik had ever seen, and a huge crowd of outer-system traffic on Scan — big stations, surface bases, no doubts lots of mining and industry, everything a major system of a wealthy, successful space-faring species should be.

  “Lots of chatter,” Shilu remarked. “All business by the sound of it. The translator’s not having any problems, though there’s a lot of encryption. A number of primary dialects, as we’ve been told. I think we’re going to miss being among aliens with only one primary language, Captain.”

  “You mean you’re going to miss it,” said Second Lieutenant Raf Corrig from Arms One, without sympathy.

  “Scan calculates upwards of two hundred starships,” said Geish. “That’s from IDs broadcast, most at major stations around Do’Ran. Doubtless there’s military traffic here we’re not registering. There appears to be five major stations around Do’Ran…”

  “Makimakala just arrived,” Jiri interrupted briefly, as Erik saw that familiar, comforting blip appear on Scan to their rear. “They’re in the slot, all looks good.”

  “Transmission from Makimakala indicates all good,” Shilu confirmed that.

  “Five major stations at Do’Ran,” Geish continued his previous analysis, “about twenty minor ones, they’ve got three moons so lots of bases, Do’Ran lunar traffic alone looks like about a hundred smaller ships in transit. Broadcast IDs from inter-system traffic looks about a thousand, probably more. If there’s two docked for every one moving, we can calculate three, maybe three-and-a-half thousand. A couple of those big outer-system stations look like they’ve got a twenty-million capacity. And the volume of light traffic coming off that big rock world tells me there’s some big cities down there, possibly a population of a few hundred million at least.”