Drysine Legacy (The Spiral Wars Book 2)

by Joel Shepherd

  The tavalai spoke in the staccato vowels of Togiri. “I am Captain Pramodenium,” said the Captain’s translator speaker. “This is my next-in-command, Commander Nalbenaranda. My greetings to you.”

  The oddest thing about talking to tavalai was not knowing where to look. Their heads were so different, long, wide and flat, with widely spaced eyes and a big, flat mouth. Humans were accustomed to gazing upon faces with eyes, nose and mouth all conveniently close together, so expressions could be read without difficulty. But with tavalai, Erik felt he had to almost step back a bit, to get both eyes into the same field of reference.

  “This is my marine commander,” he added, indicating Trace. “Major Trace Thakur. She is my second-in-command.”

  Trace shook the Captain’s hand in turn. “Captain,” she said respectfully. “What brings you to Kazak System?”

  “You do,” said the Captain, without need of the translator. His big, dark eyes swivelled inward to focus on Trace, then Erik. “Makimakala is Dobruta. You have heard of us?”

  “It’s familiar,” Erik lied. In truth, no one had heard of Makimakala at all, and the name did not appear on any Phoenix database. Given how extensively every ibranakala-class ship was traced by Fleet, that was slightly astonishing.

  “We are the oldest unit in all tavalai military forces. The Dobruta were formed at the beginning of the First Free Age, to police the Spiral of AI technology — what you call the hacksaws. We’ve been performing that task for more than eight thousand years. It has come to our attention that you have acquired some of that technology after you destroyed an AI nest. We are here to see those acquisitions destroyed.”

  “Wait,” said Erik. “You came all this way because you heard we had… dead hacksaws aboard?”

  “That is correct. It’s what we do. It’s what we’ve been doing for eight thousand years. The leaders of your civilisation and mine are united in thinking that the AI wars were over twenty five thousand years ago. But in truth, they never entirely ended. The machines will return, if we are careless enough to allow them. The Dobruta have been entrusted to ensure that it never happens.”

  “Romki,” Trace’s uplink crackled in Erik’s ear, a silent prompt. “Romki went to talk with his tavalai friends, on Joma Station. He must have ratted on us.” Because aside from some Fleet officers at Heuron three months ago, they hadn’t told anyone else. Unless some of the crew had been loose-tongued on station with civvies… but they’d been instructed not to discuss it, and in Erik’s experience, officers weren’t the only ones with information discipline. And the language barrier had meant it wasn’t the kind of thing easily discussed with non-humans.

  “Are you in possession of this illegal technology?” the Captain pressed.

  “I don’t discuss Phoenix matters with non-Phoenix crew,” Erik said calmly.

  The tavalai captain tucked his big thumbs into his belt. “Then that is going to cause us a problem. My information was quite specific.”

  “I’m sure it was,” Trace uplinked with displeasure.

  “What kind of a problem?” Erik enquired.

  “An armed kind of problem,” said the tavalai. “Please understand that we bear you no ill will. But destroying old AI remnants where ever we find them is our entire reason for existence. Either you will offer your ship for inspection, or we will find ourselves at odds.” He glanced about and behind them, at the masses of heavily armed marines and karasai. “It does not seem a safe situation. Please consider your position, and what you hope to gain.”

  * * *

  Erik sat in Romki’s Engineering bay, and stared at the head of the AI queen in its nano-tank. The single big red eye stared back, silently clamped in place amidst a silver swirl of micro-machines.

  Lisbeth entered, headed for Romki’s workbench, but stopped when she saw her brother. “Oh. Erik!”

  “Hi Lis. Just taking my three minutes a day of alone-time to think.” He didn’t mean it to sound bitter. It was only the truth — being in command meant that everyone wanted a piece of him, and he rarely had any time to himself. It was more than a personal resentment. Sometimes he genuinely felt that he was missing things, thoughts and revelations he might have had if only he’d more time to think, instead of being rushed all the time by needs and schedules and other people’s problems.

  “Oh, well in that case I won’t bother you, I just wanted to check some data and…”

  Erik shook his head and patted the adjoining chair beside him, at the opposing work bench to Romki’s. “No come, sit. I don’t value my time alone as much as my time with you.” He’d have been embarrassed to say something so openly sentimental, just a few years back. To his sister no less. But something was different now, and he found he had no patience for dancing around things as he once had.

  Lisbeth smiled, genuinely touched, and came to sit beside him, and take his hand. “So what’s bothering you?”

  “Everything.”

  “Sure, but what in particular?”

  Erik sighed. Lisbeth was one of the few people on the ship not technically within his chain of command. Commanders weren’t supposed to share worries and frailties with those beneath him, but Lisbeth was hardly that.

  “I think I might have made a mistake,” he said sombrely. “Coming here.”

  Lisbeth gazed at him with concern. “Well I don’t recall it only being your decision.”

  “Sure. But I’m in command. Everything Phoenix does is my responsibility on principle.”

  Lisbeth thought for a moment. “Are you going to accept the Colonel’s offer of pardon?”

  “Well I can’t see how it’s entirely up to me,” Erik said helplessly. “There’s six hundred people on this ship who want to see their families again. It has to be their decision, doesn’t it? But then, if there’s so much at stake, how can I just leave it to a popular vote? Big stakes require leadership. I should lead. But what I think we might have to do… I mean, what we should do, will likely get everyone killed.”

  Lisbeth gripped his hand more firmly. “Erik. The Major doesn’t talk about you directly with me, she’s too professional for that. But it’s obvious she values your opinion. And it’s also obvious that she thinks you should have more confidence in yourself than you do.”

  Erik smiled. “Oh yeah. And she has this odd way of trying to encourage it by second-guessing me at every turn.”

  “Well you know the Major. Everything’s a test. What do you think we ought to do? I mean, Colonel Khola’s offering a full pardon, and justice for the Captain. That’s what you wanted, right? To clear his name? They’ve admitted they were wrong, the guilty have been punished, and we can all go home if we want to, yes?”

  “It didn’t achieve anything, Lis. A turnover in the top leadership… so what? The top leadership changes every few years anyway, Chankow had only been in the job eighteen months, Anjo two years. They’re all disposable. Fleet lives are supposed to mean something, we have all these memorials to the glorious dead and we go on about the terrible loss, but in truth Fleet’s command culture has made us all disposable. Even their own top commanders.

  “I know the Captain hated it. He was all for personal sacrifice, but choosing to sacrifice yourself is a very different thing from having some bunch of faceless bigwigs deciding to sacrifice you without asking you first. I think that’s what attracted him to the Worlder cause in the first place. It’s not that he had any great sympathy for Worlder politics, it was just the lack of personal choice that bugged him. The lack of democracy. I heard him say something like it a few times — what’s the point of saving humanity from alien slavery if we have to sell ourselves into human slavery to do it?”

  “Do you think the new Fleet Command would leave Phoenix alone once we return?” Lisbeth asked quietly. “Do you think they’d keep their word?”

  “Oh probably,” Erik said dismissively. “For as long as it suited them, anyway. That’s not the point. We haven’t won anything, Lis. Fleet didn’t concede to us. They’re just playing
their politics, their numbers games, same as they always do. And they’re asking us to shut up and forget everything that’s happened to do it.

  “And the more I think about what we’ll lose if we do play along and shut up, the more I found myself thinking that the real tragedy won’t be Worlder politics and trying to find some new deal between Spacers and Worlders to avoid a civil war. I mean we’re dealing here with a Fleet that will assassinate its own leadership in order to achieve its objectives. It’s a faceless mob, I’m not even sure who we’d talk to if we could, who could make things stick with Fleet.

  “No, the real tragedy would be this.” He nodded at the queen’s head in the nano-tank. “Human politics will always be there, and will always be hard. But this. This is the first time any powerful human force has tried to get to grips with the big history behind all these human wars. And if Romki’s right about the alo… how would we find out? The alo won’t tell us. Fleet won’t tell us. If we go to alo space ourselves, the alo will kill us — Phoenix is alo-tech, they’re not scared of us, they’ve got a hundred ships this good. More probably.”

  “Erik?” Lisbeth asked carefully. “Do you think that maybe Stan was right?”Erik considered the queen. He wasn’t quite prepared to go that far. “I’d like to ask her some questions,” he said of the queen. “I did tell Trace not to shoot her. I wonder if it’s not too late.”

  “Wake her up?” Lisbeth’s eyes were wide. “I’m not sure even Stan thinks that’s a good idea. And these tavalai Dobruta want her destroyed.”

  “You know, I never did entirely understand that,” Erik confessed. “If we want to know how to fight them, or even to understand the size of the threat, surely we should study them? Not just destroy everything on sight?”

  “You heard the tale of McCauley’s Rock?”

  “Everyone has. But I did some checking on the name, and there was never a research base on McCauley. I think it might be just a story, made up to scare people.”

  “No.” Lisbeth shook her head. “Stan says it’s real, they just changed the name for secrecy. Some researchers really were activating hacksaw brains to learn more about them, and some of those hacksaws really did take over the base by remote and kill everyone there. They can take over foreign systems by remote if they learn them well enough, Stan says. Hack into a marine armour suit and open fire on the other marines, that kind of thing. It’s seriously scary stuff, and I doubt we could guard against it because even with all our most advanced tech, hacksaw tech still basically shouldn’t exist. None of Phoenix’s techs really understand how the queen works. It may as well be magic, for all we can explain it.”

  “All the more reason to study them.”

  “Erik, the tavalai were nearly exterminated by hacksaws. All organic sentient life was. The slavery, the genocides… I mean we humans had it rough, but we’re not the only ones who said ‘never again’. Tavalai think the technology’s seductive, and that they have to resist temptation. The Fathers didn’t resist the temptation, and it destroyed them completely. Tavalai just refuse to make the same mistake. And so they created the Dobruta.”

  “You’ve heard of them?”

  “No, but I’m sure Stan has. And they make perfect sense when you think about it. I mean, Phoenix’s database has never heard of Makimakala, when Fleet track every tavalai warship of that class. So Makimakala wasn’t in the Triumvirate War, despite how desperately the tavalai needed every ship. It was off doing other stuff. Which tells you how seriously the tavalai take that mission.”

  “Yeah,” Erik murmured, staring at the queen. “I bet they’d know a thing or two about her.”

  “You think they’ll attack us to get her?”

  “It’s not impossible. Probably not if we’re ready for it, tavalai aren’t usually that brutal, and Captain Pram seems like a civilised guy.”

  “A civilised guy given the task of preventing hacksaw armageddon,” Lisbeth reminded him. “Don’t underestimate how determined he might be.”

  “No, I won’t. But with the sard after us too, there might be some benefits in having an ibranakala-class right alongside us at dock.”

  “But tavalai and sard are allies,” said Lisbeth.

  Erik shook his head. “Not this tavalai. Tavalai factions do their own thing, they’re not a very cohesive people. Dobruta strike me as obsessive in their task, they’ll take that very seriously. They won’t care who gets in their way — human, sard or barabo.”

  15

  The dock jeep thudded over deckplates, weaving between pedestrians and other vehicles. Trace sat on the rear amidst several from Command Squad, a Phoenix spacer behind the wheel where marines would not fit. Joma Station locals gave them alarmed looks as they passed, three jeeps loaded with human firepower. It was hard not to imagine that most stations would get sick of Phoenix quite quickly, attracting trouble and stomping all over their territory with armoured boots. Already the locals’ expressions upon seeing them had shifted from curiosity to wary disapproval.

  They zoomed past Makimakala at Berth 28, with a casual wave to the tavalai karasai on guard across the dock, weapons pointed unthreateningly at the ceiling. Similar waves came back, tavalai wondering what the crazy humans were up to now. It had been ten hours since Phoenix and Makimakala commands had discussed matters on station dock. Now she’d been pulled from her bunk in the middle of Phoenix’s night-shift — now synchronised to station night-shift — on yet another urgent call.

  A berth past Makimakala, they stopped, the jeep rocking as marines leapt off. Staff Sergeant Kono took the lead with Privates Arime and Rolonde, the other half of Command Squad behind her, sick of being left behind when she went out on station. Not that they didn’t understand her need to share herself around — more that to be in Command Squad meant that the company commander’s safety was your responsibility above all else. Compared to that priority, everyone else could go jump.

  An elevator took them to the upper rim, then into an open garden square, synthetic sunlight from the high ceiling, thick green trees and simulated flowing streams. Such ‘natural’ designs on stations made nice open space for hotel frontings, and Kono lead them into one such, hotel staff talking with Joma Station police, looking agitated. Another elevator, and a corridor with several marines guarding it, standing by an open door.

  Trace ducked to make sure her Koshaim didn’t catch on the doorframe, and found herself looking at a crime-scene. Directly inside the door was a body, shot twice in the chest at close range. Human. Not one of hers, or anyone she recognised from Phoenix. The corpse wore a once-nice suit, and a pistol remained locked in his cold hand.

  “Major,” said Jokono in the room beyond. Trace was not surprised to see Hiro with him. Phoenix’s own terrible twosome, some called them. Running off on their own at each station stop, not sleeping in Phoenix block accommodation, but renting their own rooms, making their own friends, talking to all kinds of people. Last she’d heard, Jokono had been having dinner with Joma Station security chiefs and getting a guided tour of the place. Doubtless the barabo were all intrigued to meet a human counterpart with such high connections as Family Debogande, and Lieutenant Shahaim was keeping Jokono well financed, so everyone could be suitably wined and dined.

  “Hello boys,” said Trace, stepping carefully past the body, as Command Squad added their security presence to the hallway outside. Into the main bedroom she saw another body on the floor by a bed. There was a bloodstain on the bedcovers, and a big pool of red on the floor. So he’d been shot from about where she was now standing, had bounced off the bed and fallen to the floor. The shots were again precise, and tightly clustered, suggesting professional work. “Your room Hiro?”

  “One of two,” said Hiro. “My actual room is across the hall. This is the one registered in my cover name.”

  “Ah,” said Trace, dialling down the armour tension now that she was standing near unarmored people. “A trap.”

  Hiro nodded. He looked calm as ever, but the calmness was slightly force
d, his breathing elevated, his eyes more active than usual. He’d done the shooting, Trace reckoned. No real surprise. “I was looking for other humans on station. There’s about four hundred, most of them on business, looking for opportunities once Fleet starts moving this way. A few government, obviously. These were Fleet Intel, operations branch.”

  “You found that out when they tried to kill you?”

  “No, I knew already. I ran into these guys a lot in my previous job. I had dinner with another of them last night — we were both pretending to be businessmen, we talked bullshit for most of the evening, we both knew exactly who the other really was. If you’ve been in the game long enough, you can just tell.

  “And then these two came into my registered room, not knowing I was actually sleeping just down the hall.”

  “Sloppy,” Trace suggested.

  “They thought I’d drunk the drink my dinner guest drugged. I faked it. I should have been out cold in bed, it was slow-acting.”

  Trace nodded thoughtfully, looking at the second bed — pillows had been piled beneath the covers to look like a person sleeping. It had evidently held their attention for long enough. The pillow-man had two holes in him, and the dead man by the bed had a silencer on his pistol. Hiro must have come in the door behind them so fast they’d not realised their mistake until too late.

  “Their IDs are very good,” said Jokono, holding the men’s wallets. “The kind of top work you’d expect from Fleet Intel. The thing is, I managed to trace them to the ship they came in on.”

  “You did?” Trace was astonished. On an alien station, with no access to central databases, that seemed impossible. “How?”

  “Never you mind,” said Jokono with a faint smile. “The thing is, they arrived just yesterday off a ship from Lucient.”

  “Same place Europa came from,” Hiro added.

  “It’s the closest human system,” said Jokono, “so it makes sense. There were thirty-six humans on that ship. A very, very disproportionate number of them being very fit, youngish, male, etc, etc.”