Drysine Legacy (The Spiral Wars Book 2) (34 page)

The tavalai’s nostrils flared, and the screen went blank. Erik gazed at the dead screen for a moment longer, then went and opened the door.

“Everyone hear that?” he asked the bridge as he emerged. It was all first-shift in the chairs, save for Lieutenant Draper in the command chair. Nods all around… and from Trace, who had stayed to listen. Erik took hold of the supports by Draper’s chair and hung there, ducking a little to see the far posts past the command screens. Trace took hold at Kaspowitz’s chair.

“Sir, we’re on full alert with those mines and platforms,” said Draper. “We’ve locked onto the coordination signal, but there’s no way to block it,
Makimakala
could signal an attack at any moment.”

“And for all my bluster,” Erik added, “we’re totally screwed if they do it. I actually think that went kind of well.”

“You think?” Kaspowitz said drily.

“He didn’t once ask about the deepynine drones, nor about how the queen became activated, or how she helped. None of it.”

“Well he thinks you’re nuts for trusting her however it happened,” said Shilu. “With respect, LC.”

“No, he’s not interested in the details,” Erik insisted. “And whether you think she’s going to kill us all or not — when you’re commanding a warship in dangerous circumstances, operational details are everything. He didn’t care. That tells me the operational details of the queen herself are not his main concern.”

“He doesn’t want her to tell us things,” said Trace. Erik nodded. “Tavalai have had humans at a disadvantage regarding old galactic history since we first got into space. He’s using our firepower and intel, but he doesn’t want us to actually learn stuff about the hacksaws.”

“He’s Dobruta,” Erik agreed. “Dobruta have spent thousands of years trying to stop
anyone
from learning stuff about the hacksaws. The fear is that the technology is so seductive that someone will make a deal with a hacksaw queen, promise her life in exchange for power and riches.”

“Which is exactly what it looks like the sard have done,” Trace finished. “And now Captain Pram fears we’re about to do the same thing. It’s their nightmare scenario — a big queen seduces some alien species into resurrecting her race in exchange for power. Tavalai have no faith that any other species are as principled as them.”

“They’ve been fighting humans a long time,” Draper reasoned. “They see us as the enemy, whatever
Phoenix
’s situation. The Captain’s probably scared that instead of solving his problem, he might have just made it worse by giving hacksaw tech to humanity.”

“Only we already
had
hacksaw tech,” said Erik. “Fleet’s got lots of it, only they’ve always agreed with the Dobruta about the dangers of copying it. Much has been destroyed. But if Romki’s right, and the alo became so high-tech in the first place by cooperation with the deepynines, then the most deadly piece of hacksaw tech in the Spiral might be the one we’re standing in. And others like it, that we used to take half of the tavalai’s space away from them.”

“Thus making the galaxy safe for artificial life again,” said Trace. “Deepynine in particular, by removing the main anti-AI force from power. Their big strategic plan that Fleet’s been playing along with. The big question is whether Fleet did it willingly or not. And if not, if they know there’s deepynines behind the entire alo front, then the alo will have to take out Fleet at some later stage… which means the alo will stab us in the back at some point, in time-honoured Spiral tradition.”

“And possibly use the chah’nas to do it,” Erik agreed. “Since the chah’nas just got access to our space. Which means that all of humanity could be about to get whacked, and we could lose…” He glanced across the bridge. Pale, frightened faces stared back at him.

“Billions,” Kaspowitz muttered.

“Hundreds of billions,” Shahaim whispered.

Erik nodded slowly. “So then we’ve agreed that the deepynines are back. They’re doing strategic things. The best way to kill a deepynine is with someone who understands deepynines. Our Dobruta friends on
Makimakala
distrust
all
AIs equally — deepynine or drysine, no difference to them. But humanity is threatened by deepynines, and our new passenger might be the most knowledgable… thing, about how to kill deepynines, in all the galaxy.

“And so I’ve changed my mind.” He gave a little nod to Trace. “It’s good that we’ve woken her up, to the very limited extent that we have. It’s also incredibly dangerous, and we have to be on the highest alert, because everything Captain Pram said about her is true. But at this point we have no choice.

“Now we have to find that base, but here’s the thing. Captain Pram wants to destroy it. It’s giving the sard powerful new weapons that threaten the strategic balance through Outer Neutral Space — first the barabo, and then the tavalai will get it in the neck. I’d like to see it destroyed too, but that’s not our primary objective, and my conversation just now with Captain Pram makes that clear to me. Our primary objective is to find out what the hell’s going on there. Who are these deepynines helping the sard, are they connected to the alo, are they operating independently, et-cetera. Because we’re operating with a blindfold on at the moment, and if we can’t figure what the deepynines are up to, we’ll have no idea what to do next, or just how much danger humanity is actually in.

“This means that we may have to lie to
Makimakala
, and tell them we’re going to help them destroy it, when actually we mainly want to learn from it… which is exactly what
Makimakala
don’t want us to do. So this is going to get very interesting. Do
not
talk about this off-bridge with anyone other than other bridge officers or equivalent rank. We’ll have tavalai coming aboard to talk to our queen at some point, and we don’t want some of the lower-decks motor-mouths blabbing the whole plan to them.”

Slow, thoughtful nods about the bridge. From Trace, a look of considered respect. Kaspowitz gave him a wry smile. “We have a plan?”

“We’ll think of one,” Erik insisted. “First, let’s find out where this damn base is. If there actually is a base, and the tavalai haven’t just been stringing us along.”

“Like we’re going to do to them,” said Shilu with a grimace.

Erik nodded. “Exactly.”

A
s
Phoenix
went
into second-shift, Trace went back to TK55 to supervise operations. Her ride was PH-1, with Lieutenant Hausler wisecracking about being reduced to a ferry service, as
Phoenix
held off forty kilometres from the planetoid in the sun-shadow where the glare would less interfere with instruments, and where incoming ships would take longer to spot them on scan. There were no windows in the shuttle hold, but if she linked to PH-1’s scan feed, she could see
Makimakala
in similar position seven kilometres further out, and
Rai Jang
closer in, the smaller and more mobile ship ready to support marines or karasai up close in case any hacksaws got outside the base.

With Trace were Command Squad, a number of second-shift Engineering crew ready to replace the first-shifters, plus Jokono, Hiro and Romki. The latter was on Trace’s request, as it seemed daft to continue to punish Romki for something that even the LC now agreed was necessary, however pissed he was at how it was done. But then, as Trace told him, if you were going to put people in charge of sensitive operations who were unlikely to follow orders at the best of times, you got what was coming to you. Keeping their premier hacksaw expert locked up so he couldn’t go and see this ancient base seemed more like
Phoenix
cutting off its nose to spite its face.

Lieutenant Hausler flew them into the main starship hangar, and they vacated all air from the shuttle hold before exiting the main rear door. Kono led them out, Command Squad positioning with rifles ready just in case — there were still a few sard loose on the base, Bravo Platoon had nailed one just an hour ago, but no one figured they were more than a nuisance at this point. Pretty soon though they’d be running out of air, and being sard, they might decide to go down fighting. Engineering crew followed, carrying personal hand thrusters and light weapons, and moved toward the huge transit tunnels up which PH-1 could have comfortably continued flying if it weren’t such a pointless risk.

Finally came the civvies, Hiro predictably assured and balanced, Jokono less so, and Romki least of all. Romki stared about at the service rigs the size of city towers, stretching across the cavernous interior, and murmuring incredulities beneath his breath.

“Hey Professor,”
Kono told him as PH-1 shoved gently away on attitude bursts.
“Try to watch where you’re going and don’t get left behind.”

Trace looked at Romki, looking and feeling as tiny as they all did, specks of dust within this ancient construction.
“Amazing,”
he murmured.
“Just amazing.”

At the tunnels’ entrance they rendezvoused with Bravo Second Squad, and deployed into escort formation, marines on the perimeter, spacers and civvies in the middle. Soon they split, Second Squad’s first and second sections taking the techs through new maze-tunnels up to the reactor, where there were power cores to study and dead deepynine drones to be recovered. Third Section took Jokono another way, to where Alpha Platoon had most heavily engaged sard defences, and there were plenty of dead, armoured bugs to examine and hopefully learn things from.

Trace took a familiar off-shoot another way, with Command Squad and Hiro, through the tangled nest of ribbed tunnels and organic-looking conduits, vision set to infra-red to navigate in pitch dark until they reached well-remembered white-grey walls. Bravo First Squad marines guarded the corridor on the way in, and tacnet showed Trace not only other marines in guard formation, but mobile ball-sized drones skipping about the random twists and turns, establishing a picture.

“Hello Tanker, Thunder,” Trace said to the door guards, pulling up with a burst of white thrust. “How’s your air?”

“It’s fine Major,”
said Lance Corporal Tariq ‘Tanker’ Kamov.
“We got refills.”

“Bit creepy in here?” Trace said slyly as she passed between them.

“I dated this new age rock chick in high school,”
said Private Leo ‘Thunder’ Sinha.
“Her bedroom was a bit like this.”

“Not that he ever got to see her bedroom,”
Kamov added. There was light in the walls here at least, not everything was pitch black.

“How did you get the lights on?”
Kono asked them, approaching the transparent door. It slid open on approach, smooth and soundless.

“Residual powercell charge,”
said Kamov.
“Thirty thousand year old batteries, pretty freaky.”

“My god!”
Romki exclaimed behind as he got his first clear view of the massive spherical structure.
“I don’t believe it!”

“You recognise this, Stan?” Trace asked him. The corridors ahead looked almost organic, white or grey in alternating shades, smoothly finished and inlaid with transparent doors or windows in parts. Where the rest of TK55’s AI base looked harsh and dark, this looked almost delicate and crystalline.

“No, I just… I never imagined hacksaws building anything like this. It’s almost… artistic.”

“Yeah well don’t get too impressed,”
Lance Corporal Kamov said grimly.
“Find Ensign Hale, she’ll show you what it’s for.”

They followed the winding corridors and 3D junctions, past several large storage rooms and sealed heavy doors, homing on where tacnet gave Ensign Hale’s location, and that of several more Engineering techs. And emerged into a series of open, spherical rooms, each overlapping the next like a series of merging bubbles. The walls of the bubble rooms were bristling with tall, partly transparent canisters, like inward-facing glass bristles. Trace thought it looked a little like caves on Sugauli, deep within the mountains and gleaming with stalagmites and rare minerals.

Further along, some
Phoenix
techs were working at what might have been a control panel, and several marines were on guard, weapons always ready. Trace gave herself a gentle shove toward a wall, arriving with armoured boots atop a steel capped canister. She flashed an arm light into the glass canisters… and found two thirds of them empty. The other third were filled with withered husks, like dried fruit left too long in the sun. Bodies, she realised. Organic bodies, mummified for endless millennia, surrounded by basic life support that had long since ceased to function.

“Tavalai,”
said Romki, having arrived at Trace’s side, pulling himself head-first for a better look.
“A few parren, a few sard, but mostly tavalai. Very, very old.”

“It’s a medical research facility,”
came Ensign Remy Hale’s voice. Trace glanced to find her drifting across in her heavy suit, various tech-gear dangling off her belt, a burner in one gloved hand. Behind her came Lieutenant Alomaim, a personal armed escort for Engineering’s second-in-command after Second Lieutenant Rooke.
“Medical research for organics.”

“These don’t look at all like willing patients,”
Romki observed, gazing up and around at the gleaming spherical walls.

“Exactly,”
said Hale, halting with a thrust, Alomaim close behind.
“There are examination rooms further on. Lots of cutting implements. It’s a gorgeous piece of architecture, but it’s a horror show. They stored live people here, and did experiments on them. By the tens of thousands, these storage rooms go on and on further back. About a quarter full, all told.”

“Mostly tavalai, parren and sard?”
asked Romki.

“Actually there’s a few barabo too,”
said Hale. Trace thought she looked far less excited than Romki. Horrified, but dealing with it. And she recalled Alomaim saying that Hale had lost a best friend on Joma Station docks. An Engineering tech she’d served with for years.
“And barabo were a long way from spacetravel back when this facility was working. So they were snatching undeveloped barabo off their homeworld, like those old Earth stories about UFOs.”

“Wow!”
Romki breathed.
“Imagine if we found humans here?
That
would rewrite some history!”
Hacksaws had never got that close to human space, but still Trace could see the fascination.

“This is another good reason the Dobruta didn’t want to destroy this base,” she said, staring around. “Tavalai respect their ancestors. This is like holy ground for them.”

“They suffered a fair bit, the froggies,”
Kono conceded heavily.
“This kind of shit must have been going on a lot, all through the Machine Age. Damn glad humans missed it.”

Humans always assumed they’d had the worst of it, Trace thought. Looking about now, she wondered if that was actually true. Losing your homeworld when you were still a one-planet species was about as bad as it got… but it had happened once, then humanity had recovered and moved on. The war against the krim had seemed titanic to humans, the all-encompassing, blood soaked nightmare of a five hundred year conflict. But in galactic terms, it had been a small fight involving just a few dozen systems in an unknown corner of the galaxy, between one up-and-coming species, and one mostly insignificant one.

Tavalai had been under the machines for more than twenty thousand years. They’d had no singular catastrophic loss in that time as great as humanity losing Earth, but the slaughter had still been huge, and it had stretched on for such a long time, with no end in sight. Human popular culture was full of stories about the futility of life on Earth under the krim, the violent death of entire communities and cities that followed resistance, and the hopeless drudgery of compliance. The only true resistance had been off-world, and young Earth men and women determined to fight had quickly learned that to truly make a difference, they had to leave Earth, and join the new human Fleet, equipped by the chah’nas, and striking the krim in the places where it truly hurt.

That had continued for a century and a half, with a brief respite only when the tavalai had intervened in a misguided attempt to make a peace that some Earth-bound humans had wanted, but no Fleet-based humans would accept. Fleet had fought the tavalai instead, and when the tavalai finally gave up in disgust, the krim killed Earth as the best way of stemming the flow of Fleet recruits.

Five hundred years of horror, so many lifetimes and generations lost in the maelstrom. But how well would humanity have endured
this
? Twenty thousand years, beneath the machines? Trace had seen images, never particularly popular among humans, so wrapped up in their own self-righteous victimhood. But still there was a segment of human culture fascinated by the aliens, and their crazy tales of ancient history and AI wars. There were movies, some human, some not. There were even some real images, unfaded as the years would not age digital data.

Concentration camps. Sentient beings herded like farm animals of old, branded, spiked and burned. Screams and sobbing, instant death for those who resisted, slow death for many who didn’t. Mass annihilation for whole peoples who got in the way, for little more than inconvenience. Some beings had been allowed to live undisturbed, for simple luck that the machines had no interest in them. Others were able to be useful. Some periods of relative calm lasted centuries. But always it came back eventually, and the many, many attempts at armed uprising were crushed without mercy or success.

At least humanity took its hit in one fast punch, Trace thought. We got knocked down, then got straight back up again. This endless, living death of hope seemed suddenly far worse. No wonder the Dobruta had been at their task so long. And no wonder they were so scared at the prospect of any of this, even a tiny whisper from the past, coming back.

“And this was a drysine base,”
Alomaim reminded them.
“The
good
hacksaws. Just imagine the deepynines.”

“Don’t want to, thanks,”
said Hale in a small voice, turning herself to jet back to her work. Alomaim gave her a pat on the shoulder, and they shared a look that Trace could not see past the visors. Hale left in a white thrust-burst, and Romki went off after Hale to join the techs and see what they’d learned.

“Hey,” said Trace to her Lieutenant on direct coms. Alomaim came to her, so she could nearly see his eyes past the heavy visor, above the fearsome visage of armoured combat mask and breather. “How’s she doing?” Nodding after Ensign Hale.

“She’s good. She’s tough. For a spacer.”

“And how are you doing?” Pointedly. There were few secrets on warships, and Ahmed Alomaim and Remy Hale was a relatively open one. It wasn’t interfering with his work here that Trace could see — Hale was senior
Phoenix
crew currently on the base, and so deserved the most senior protection. He wasn’t ditching responsibilities just to hang with his girl.

“I’m fine Major. I’m doing my job.”

“I know you are. Just remember that she’s a rank below you, and technically it’s fraternisation.” Technically Fleet regs said a lot of things weren’t allowed. In reality, individual ships spent too much time out in deep space on their own to be regularly subjected to outside standards review. Standards were set by the ship’s senior officers, and as the saying went, the standard you walked past was the standard you accepted. Trace had never yet in her entire career walked past a below-par operational standard, and very few at-par ones either, with her marines at least. But most of the time, this kind of thing was different. “Look, I don’t care who you poke while off-duty. If I see the slightest evidence that it’s affecting your field performance, then I’ll care. But I know your professional standards, and I suspect you’d catch it before it got to that.”

Alomaim took a deep breath.
“I’ll find somewhere else to guard.”

“I didn’t say that. I just said be careful. It’s already got me paying attention, because I have to pay attention to everything my Lieutenants do. It’s not like I don’t have other things to pay attention to.”

Alomaim nodded slowly.
“Yes Major. I’ll be careful.”
He turned and jetted away. Regret tried to creep up on Trace unawares. She smacked it down hard. Other people might have the luxury of telling those beneath them to live their lives and be happy. She didn’t. Too much was riding on her Lieutenants not screwing up.