Drysine Legacy (The Spiral Wars Book 2)

by Joel Shepherd

  “Spooks,” said Dale. “Lots of Fleet spooks.”

  Ricardo’s eyes widened. “Here?” Dale nodded. “Well Fleet can’t use marines, can they?” Some orders, marines would never obey, not even from Fleet Command. “Are we moving?”

  “Yeah I’m moving,” Dale replied, nodding to his treadmill display. “Faster than you, too. Keep up Corporal.” Ricardo accelerated gamely. She was a six-year vet, the logical choice to replace Lance Corporal Carponi, who’d been killed on Heuron. Dale didn’t doubt Ricardo’s ability, but Carponi had been one of her best friends, and taking his place did not sit well with her.

  They kept at it for another half-hour, then gathered up gear and changed back to marine fatigues without bothering to shower — there were enough vulnerabilities on an alien station without getting cornered naked in gymnasium showers. Lance Corporal Kalo and Private Chavez took up escort duty before and behind, thumping through the growing crowds in full armour — their gym time was on alternate rotations.

  They entered the big mall, a vertical slice through overlooking walkways between levels, a great hubbub of markets down below, and many lively shopfronts up high. Crowds of barabo stood aside for Kalo, as restauranteurs handed out food samples, and music blared, and great holographic displays lit the open space to their right. It was only a few hundred meters to their hotel, and not the most secure environment, but at least it seemed to be mostly barabo here, with no sign of sard or even tavalai.

  A young barabo appeared from the crowd and tugged at Lance Corporal Ricardo’s arm. “Lady! Lady!” He pointed urgently up a side passage. “Human lady! Human lady!”

  “Yes I am a human lady,” Ricardo replied with amusement.

  “Yeah,” said Dale, “I think that means he’s found another human, lady. Up that way. Hey kid. Doba!” The kid looked at him — like all marines, Dale had picked up bits of various alien tongues over the years just by listening. And a lot of barabo in Kazak System seemed to be learning English in anticipation of Fleet’s arrival. “Doba, human? That way?” He pointed up the hall.

  The kid bounced with that all-body nod that barabo did. “Yes! Human!” He pushed past a display of rare plants and up the passage, looking back at them urgently.

  “Great,” said Halep. “Coz that couldn’t possibly be an ambush.”

  Dale waved them up, and they followed the kid up the passage, making a better semblance of combat formation as they went. “Chavez, keep an eye on our barabo tail.”

  “Aye sir.” Meaning that station security had been following them every time they left their accommodation, and would be following them now. Relying, no doubt, on the fact that humans had trouble telling one barabo from another. The passage was thick with restaurants and the smell of cooking, chairs and diners overflowing among the pedestrians, dead animals hanging in display windows. Heck of a place to maintain combat formation, Dale thought. Would a barabo kid lead them into an ambush where so many barabo would die in the crossfire? Would a barabo kid even know he was leading them into an ambush?

  Past Lance Corporal Kalo’s armoured shoulder, Dale saw a robed figure amidst a bunch of dining barabo about some tables. This figure looked different, with thinner shoulders than the barabo. The barabo kid ran up, and the cloaked figure pressed some money into his hand. The kid ran off, and Dale caught a glimpse of a human woman’s face within the cowl.

  She beckoned him in, and Dale went, indicating Ricardo to guard out here. Private Halep went with him, and the woman led them between noisy tables and thick steam from the kitchen, to a dark rear corner. There in a chair, similarly cloaked, sat a human man, chewing a barabo sugar cane to blend in. Or maybe he just liked the taste. He pushed the hood back a little, and Dale saw a dark browed face, thick black hair, heavy-set gravitas and all-too-familiar from countless news reports. Supreme Commander Chankow himself, huddled and scared on this distant alien station, hiding from the very forces he’d once commanded.

  Dale stared at him for a moment. Part of him insisted on saluting. The other part wanted to shoot him in the head. He settled for taking a seat, alongside the commander with his back to the wall where he could see the room. Halep leaned against a wall nearby, watching the diners and trusting Dale to keep an eye on Chankow. God knew what a private would make of this. It was hard enough as a lieutenant, when every impulse screamed at him to show deference. This had been the highest ranking officer humanity had for the last eighteen months of Dale’s war. And for the briefest moment, it drove home to Dale with the force of revelation just how huge a situation Phoenix and her now-deceased captain had fallen into. Not just a selfish indulgence, as those crew who’d abandoned Phoenix had insisted. But the kind of thing that shaped civilisations.

  “Lieutenant. You’re Phoenix?” Chankow whispered urgently. His dark eyes darted furtively about the crowded, smokey restaurant.

  He didn’t know who he was, Dale realised. Phoenix crew had once worn nametags on their uniforms, as per Fleet-wide regulations. But with so many people out to get them, and spying on them from station crowds, that had seemed too easy a gift of intel to their enemies, so the tags had been removed. “Lieutenant Dale, Alpha Platoon, UFS Phoenix.” It was an effort not to add ‘sir’ on the end. That this man deserved it less than a punch in the face did not make thirty years of service reflex just disappear. “What do you want?”

  In Heuron System, Chankow had ordered Phoenix destroyed. Before that, he’d approved, in general principle, to have Captain Pantillo killed to keep him from running for office. It hung in the air between them, an invisible wall. But the fear in Chankow’s eyes could scale any wall.

  “Protection,” said Chankow. And held up a hand to forestall the obvious retort. “Hear me out. I know things. A lot of things. Phoenix is in a tangle much larger than any of you imagine, and I can help you out of it.”

  Dale wrinkled his nose, as though smelling something bad. Few marines were inclined to forgive those who hurt their friends. But equally few marines were stupid enough to throw away help this good. “How did you get here?”

  “Private ship.” He nodded to the robed woman. “Lieutenant Raymond here helped me get out, heard the first rumours of what was coming. Without her and a few others in my staff, I’d be dead.” Dale stared expressionlessly. Chankow took a deep breath, his lip trembling a little. “Outer Neutral Space is the only place where renegades can go.” With a meaningful look. “Barabo worlds don’t mind a few humans settling. But I got here just as Phoenix entered the system, and I found Europa, and Edmund Chandi, and I knew the station would be crawling with Fleet spies. But they’d be watching the FTL departures, so we got a small ship here instead. I was going to hide until the coast had cleared.”

  “They’ve found you,” Dale said bluntly. “My people tell me there’s a bunch of Fleet spooks on the way.”

  “You can beat them!” the robed woman interjected. Lieutenant Raymond, Chankow had said. “You’re Phoenix marines, they’re only covert operations!”

  Dale considered her. Loyalty, from a junior officer. He supposed even a rat like Chankow could fool some poor kid into risking her neck to save him. “I’ve got another mission,” he said. “What’s in it for Phoenix?”

  A restaurant waiter was serving a noisy table nearby. Chankow leaned closer, glancing about. “On Heuron. Your Major Thakur went to meet with a man called Stanislav Romki.”

  “I remember,” Dale said drily.

  “That’s what triggered the attack upon Lieutenant Commander Debogande. And upon her. Our intel said Romki was elsewhere, and would not be back for a long time. Our intel was wrong.”

  Dale nodded. “I already knew all of that.”

  “But you don’t know why. Do you know that the alo were behind the chah’nas first sending aid to Earth?” Dale frowned. “When the krim first invaded Sol System,” Chankow explained. “Our first two hundred years of resistance. The chah’nas say it was their idea to intervene on our behalf. Our historians have accepted that chah’nas did it
because they wished to destabilise tavalai rule, and create a war in that corner of space that would make tavalai look bad, and potentially gain the chah’nas a new ally in restoring their old empire. But humanity’s success over the centuries vastly exceeded the chah’nas’s best expectations.”

  He shook his head. “That’s been the theory, but it’s only partly true. Chah’nas helped us for all those reasons, but it was the alo’s idea in the first place. They’re the true masterminds behind the chah’nas plan to push back the tavalai from the centre of Spiral power.”

  “Why?” Dale asked suspiciously.

  “We don’t know. But we’ve known for a long time there’s a very old AI connection. It’s one of the most well kept secrets. All the old hacksaw bases, stations, cities, manufacturing centres in our space have been either kept secret, moved, or even destroyed, to help keep the secret.”

  Dale’s eyes widened. “There’s more than we’ve been told?”

  Chankow nodded. “A lot more. Far more than most people know. Most of it is in space, and most of the exploring and charting is done by Fleet ships. It’s known by relatively few people, so the secret is easy to keep. Technologically it’s relatively useless to us, there’s not much useful tech left, it’s so old and all the good stuff was evacuated by the previous occupants, or destroyed in the old AI wars. But you have to understand the scale of the old AI civilisation, during the Machine Age. Most humans still don’t, we’ve been too preoccupied with our own affairs. The loss of Earth, revenge, territorial expansion.”

  “Why? Why hide it?”

  “Because the alo don’t like us having it. They watch us. We know.”

  “And humanity’s scared of them?” Dale didn’t like this at all — this inexorable sense of his entire world, everything he’d thought he was fighting for these past thirty years, slowly turning upside down. “Then why are we fighting the tavalai?”

  “Because the tavalai are the main strategic threat, that hasn’t changed. And alo promised to help, and they have — they’ve been invaluable. Humanity is so much stronger now, our territory has increased tenfold, our Fleet is so much more powerful, our industry is… well. Ask your Lieutenant Commander about human industrial power. It seemed a gamble worth taking — ally ourselves with a species that worries us, to improve our position at the expense of the tavalai. Friends close and enemies closer, that sort of thing. And truly, who else in this galaxy could we have allied ourselves to who did not worry us?”

  He was talking about strategic decisions made at the high reaches of Fleet Command nearly two hundred years ago, Dale thought incredulously. Perhaps longer than that. Chankow and the present Fleet Command had merely inherited them. “But the alo are related somehow to the deepynines?”

  Chankow nodded. “Your man Romki found it out… he was nearly silenced many times, as he suspects, but he cleverly became too well-known for that to be safe. And now they’re trying to silence me.”

  “And you were willing to sacrifice everyone else to keep this secret,” Dale growled. “My Captain, all of Phoenix, Stanislav Romki… only now that it’s your turn, you run for your life and spill your guts to the first person who might protect you. Moral principles are only for other people, huh?”

  Chankow swallowed hard. “We’re past that now. The war’s over, the next phase is beginning, and people should know.”

  “Right.” Dale took a deep breath. Berating Chankow for his cowardice might feel good, but information was more important. Jokono would be unimpressed at his poor priorities. “What’s this relationship to the deepynines?”

  Chankow shook his head. “We don’t know. Honestly, they’ve destroyed every spy ship we’ve sent. Their sensors are too good, venturing into their territory without permission is death. And the last of the deepynine wars were… well, so long ago. Twenty five thousand years. We only know that there are very old records of them making a fighting withdrawal in the direction of what is now alo space, but that space was then thoroughly cleansed by the drysines, who then went on to…”

  “Wait. Who are the drysines?”

  Chankow blinked at him. “Of course, most of you don’t know… the history of the AI wars is not widely taught. It’s not entirely an accident, we haven’t encouraged it. And the loss of Earth to the krim does dominate our cultural memory.”

  “I know the parren uprising,” said Dale. “The parren led the rebellion that unified the organic species of the Spiral against the machines. The chah’nas were the main lieutenants, the tavalai switched from neutral to fully onboard when they started to win.”

  Chankow shook his head. “No. I mean yes, there’s that, but far too simple. AI dominance in the Machine Age was total. Organics made progress, but every time they became a threat, one or another faction of AIs crushed them. But the AIs had wars amongst themselves. They evolved in ways that different factions found threatening. Machines don’t tolerate difference well, they’d rather erase a fault completely than accommodate it.

  “Some AI factions began to realise this was a weakness. Some started wondering about tolerance, and cooperation. Don’t think this made them ‘nice’ — their idea of cooperation was more like master-slave. But they realised organics had certain strengths they lacked, and cooperation could give them an edge. The drysines were one faction, they started small and expanded over several thousand years. They achieved a strategic understanding with the parren, and combined forces with them. This made them formidable. The parren were significant, but it was primarily the drysines who beat the deepynines, and destroyed the most powerful, centralised force of the Machine Age in a war so large it made our Triumvirate War look like a skirmish. The parren just helped, and rallied other organics to the drysine cause.”

  Parren space was on the far side of tavalai space, Dale knew. They were an isolated species now, playing no part in the Triumvirate War, and having little more to do with the tavalai than trade. “So what happened to the drysines?”

  “They took heavy losses in the fight,” said Chankow. “And the unified parren, chan’nas, tavalai and others realised this was their best and possibly only chance to beat the machines while they were weak. The drysines were ambushed and largely destroyed, and the parren ruled the Spiral for about seven thousand years.”

  “Before the chah’nas did the same to them,” Dale murmured.

  Chankow nodded. “And then the tavalai did it to the chah’nas. Being stabbed in the back by your trusted lieutenants is a Spiral tradition reaching back twenty thousand years and more. We are aware of this, thinking of the alo, and the chah’nas.”

  “You know there’s a tavalai carrier at Joma Station who belong to a force the tavalai have used for thousands of years to police old AI remnants?” said Dale.

  “Dobruta,” said Chankow with a nod. “Fleet knows them well. We talk frequently.”

  Dale blinked. “You talk to a tavalai military faction?”

  “The Dobruta thought from the beginning that the Triumvirate War was a waste of time. They thought the main enemy to the tavalai was not humans, chah’nas or alo, but hacksaws. Needless to say, this didn’t go down very well with most tavalai. Many think the Dobruta are traitors. Fleet HQ was happy to keep them out of humanity’s hair by demonstrating to them that we were just as serious about exterminating hacksaws as they were. And we are too, so that was no pretence. Why are these Dobruta interested in Phoenix?” And Chankow’s eyes widened slightly. “That tale you spun at Heuron about the hacksaw base! That was actually true?”

  “What about sard?” Dale asked, ignoring the question. “We’ve had some sard trouble just now. Did Fleet HQ pay sard to be mercenaries and attack Phoenix?”

  “Lieutenant,” Chankow said flatly, as some of that old high-ranking confidence reasserted. “Believe me, if sard were that easy to manipulate, we’d have tried it long ago and turned them on the tavalai. No, I’ve no idea why sard would want to kill Phoenix specifically. Perhaps you upset someone even more incorrigible than Fleet Command.�
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  “And the other, non-sard mercenaries who tried to kill us on the way here?” Dale pressed.

  Chankow shrugged. “Oh sure. That was probably us. There was quite a large bounty on Phoenix, and many opportunists willing to take large risks for a lifetime’s fortune. Whether that bounty still stands with Fleet’s new command… you’d have to ask them.”

  “Colonel Khola himself is here on Europa to offer us a full pardon.”

  Chankow managed a sardonic smile. “My boy. Truly. You’d not live out the year.”

  “They need us if they’re going to unite Fleet against the Worlders,” Dale said stubbornly. Only now, considering the possibility that the pardon would be taken away, did he realise how badly he wanted it. And that itself was a revelation.

  “You think this is about Spacers versus Worlders?” Chankow shook his head. “That’s a pretence. Worlder rebellions are an annoyance. They don’t keep the Guidance Council awake at night. Alo betrayals and old Spiral history coming back to eat us alive? That’s another story.”

  * * *

  Stanislav Romki sat in one of Phoenix’s Engineering holds, and gazed at the head of the old hacksaw queen. So far the nano-tank’s micro-bots had struggled to make head or tails of her. The latest human technology they were, yet completely failing to process what they were looking at. They swarmed and fizzed around and within the big hole Major Thakur had blown in the queen’s head, a silver-metallic swirl, but where the programs on the analysis screens would typically give a full diagnostic of the damaged technology and how to fix it, now the numbers just ran and ran. Processing. Like an insect reading a symphony score, Romki thought, and trying to comprehend what it meant.

  The Fathers hadn’t built them like this. He wondered if the AIs had kept any of those original hardware models around, in museums for sentiment or interest. He doubted it — hacksaw civilisation had stored memory collectively and made it accessible to all. There was no need to keep mementoes around to remind them. Those early models had been server droids, doing all of the menial tasks that the Fathers hadn’t thought worth an organic’s time.