War Factory: Transformations Book Two (34 page)

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Fire now jetted in from the entrances, and one airlock door tore free, tumbling across the space. Great heavings and groanings impinged, then everything twisted in a way Riss recognized at once, but with those parts of her mind that weren’t in any human-comparable format. Room 101 U-jumped.

CV0RN

Cvorn felt strong, potent, and he was beginning to feel something else as residual cell damage healed what the surgical equipment had missed. The transplant still ached, but that pain was just a gloss over another sensation, which grew steadily stronger. He turned sharply as Vrom entered from his annex, carrying a bulky organic synthesis unit with a precisely temperature-controlled atomizer and fans mounted on top. Vrom placed the device on the floor before Cvorn and quickly moved back. Even the unemotional first-child was now sensing the change in his father and understood that his personal danger had increased.

Cvorn dipped towards the thing, waggled his new palp eyes—an afterthought after the main surgical operation and one he was regretting, because they didn’t seem to be working properly. He studied the control made for a prador manipulator hand he didn’t possess, then made a connection to it via his array of control units and aug.

“So tell me about it,” he said, strangely reluctant to turn the thing on.

“The power usage is very low and is kept topped up by simple inductance from ship systems,” Vrom stated. “Even without topping up it will last decades. The hormones and pheromones are generated from your own genome but otherwise precisely match the mix created by these.” Vrom waved a claw towards the mutilated but still living remains of the young male lying nearby and bubbling weakly in agony, as it had been for many days. “The effect should be the same.”

“But if I activate this now,” said Cvorn, “the pheromone mix in the air here will be doubled.”

“Yes, Father,” Vrom agreed.

Cvorn pointed his claw at the young adult. He had been reluctant to let it die and lose its hormonal output, but now it was no longer required. “Remove him for your own amusement, but ensure he dies within the next hour.”

Vrom immediately turned and headed over to the creature, eager for the rare delicacy. The male’s bubbling increased since it was still aware enough to know what was in store. As Vrom began dragging it to the door into his own annex, where he would doubtless open up its shell and begin dining on the living contents, Cvorn focused his attention throughout the ST dreadnought.
His
ship now.

First, he needed to seal Sfolk and the other three young adults into their quarters so their hormone production would not spread throughout the air ducts. Through his aug, Cvorn cut their quarters out of the ship’s air-supply system, then issued orders to some of his own second-children to go there with air-set resin guns to make those quarters airtight. This wouldn’t kill the four for some time; later, if he felt the urge, Cvorn could deal with them on a more personal level.

Next Cvorn turned on the bio- and gas-attack filtration system. The nano-meshes in these would now take out all large molecules and clear the air. This would take some time so Cvorn set an alert to warn him when the hormone levels in the air dropped below ten per cent of their present level. Then he would turn on the device before him. But he was still wary, and a little puzzled.

Surely, even if prador father-captains had never found themselves breathing the same air supply as five young adults and four females, this effect had been known. Why, then, hadn’t it been more commonly used? Cvorn thought about his own past.

Cvorn’s father had, as was often the case with prador, grown senile and negligent. Whilst chemical suppression of Cvorn’s growth had prevented him, his father’s leading first-child, from turning into an adult, his father had failed to supplement his fading hormonal control of his children. A long time before he had been capable of acting directly against his father, Cvorn had understood this and had prepared, as had his father’s other three first-children. Ironically, if his father hadn’t decided that the time had come for Cvorn to be replaced, the result of the ensuing conflict might have been a lot messier and not necessarily in Cvorn’s favour. As it was, his father summoned him to his sanctum, where two thralled grazer squid awaited with surgical telefactors and one of the new spherical drone shells into which they aimed to install Cvorn’s ganglion. Cvorn knew what was about to happen and therefore had greater motivation to fight his instinct to obey than his brethren. It was the most difficult thing he had ever done—to resist the urge to submit, and then to activate the particle cannon concealed in his claw and turn it on his father. His father had died quickly, the beam punching through the macerating machine he had used in the place of mandibles and into his body, the pressure generated in there by expanding hot gases blowing off the top of his shell, but his pheromones had not faded as quickly as his life.

Cvorn spent many hours crippled by the reaction, sure he had done wrong, expecting punishment, terrified, but as the pheromones in the air faded, he began to feel free and knew he had to act, and now. Already prepared for this too, he went over to his father’s pit controls and penetrated his communications, immediately summoning one of his brethren first-children to the sanctum. He gave no indication that it was he doing the summoning and not his father. That first-child arrived and died, burning in the same beam that had taken out his father. The next suffered the same end too, but the remaining first-child, doubtless now aware that its father’s hormonal control of it was fading fast, did not respond.

Cvorn’s instinct at that point was to go after the other one, but that would have been a bad move. Here in his father’s sanctum, at the heart of their undersea home, he was relatively safe and had direct access to the computer system. He locked down the armoured doors before beginning his steady penetration of that system. First, he removed his father’s three control units from his shell, incidentally dining on his father’s partially cooked flesh and enjoying it immensely. He inserted new nano-connector interfaces into the units, then shell-welded them to his own carapace. The three channels opened to the two grazer squid and his father’s four war drones, who had all been Cvorn’s predecessors, but the coding he needed to control these had gone with the old nano-connectors. However, his father had been a rather old-fashioned prador who used pit controls to access his house computers and these, if he was careful, Cvorn could work with. And the control codes were probably recorded there too. He spent many days ensconced in the sanctum, eating both his father and his two brothers as he worked, and physically changing.

Urges he could not identify began to wash through him, as he no longer ingested the cocktail of chemicals that had maintained his adolescence. As he worked, his whole body felt looser, odd, and he was always hungry. Perhaps the joy he felt in finally penetrating the house computers, both taking control of it and getting hold of the codes for the war drones and grazer squid, was what helped instigate the change. He was just reviewing the list of numerous attempts by his remaining brother to penetrate that same system, with his limited access outside the sanctum, when he felt a sudden tight convulsion at his back end and heard a ripping sound. Abruptly he could no longer feel his back legs. Looking round, he saw them, and a section of intervening carapace drop away. Then a whole new set of feelings impinged as his new prongs and coitus clamp, as yet not fully developed, were exposed to the air.

As was always the case with pre-adulthood prador, Cvorn immediately felt vulnerable and wanted to hide and protect this new acquisition. He recognized the feeling at once: it was an evolved survival mechanism to get him away from aggressive fully adult prador, including his father, who would immediately attack and try to kill such a competitor. This was a form of selection—with only the fast and the strong surviving. In the far past, before prador society developed, pre-adults went into hiding until the transformation was completed, hunting and eating to build up body mass and armour. As full adults, they then returned to compete for females. Cvorn fought the urge, rationality his armour now because he controlled four war drones.

Contacting those drones, who were less sophisticated than the modern version and so could not distinguish between him and his father, he gave them their orders and then watched on his array of hexagonal screens. These drones were actually original body carapaces reinforced with armour, with major ganglions frozen inside and these interfaced with tactical computing. Other internal organs had been removed and replaced with a power supply and other hardware. Being surface-based and grav-technology being expensive, they ran on caterpillar treads. They were armed with twinned Gatling cannons where their claws had been and underslung missile launchers. Cvorn watched them trundle out of their cache and spread out through the undersea home. Before reaching Cvorn’s first-child brother, one of them encountered two second-children. These were already transforming into first-children and were fighting in one of the corridors. A short burst of Gatling fire rapidly converted them into smoking chunks.

The first-child, alerted by this, immediately fled his own small sanctum, headed to an exit portal and out into the ocean. Cvorn was disappointed but understood the impulse. His brother was no longer a first-child either, having also lost his back legs and exposed new tender sexual organs. Cvorn at once changed all the house codes so that the young adult could not get back in. He thereupon watched the drones slaughter all the remaining second-children, and then enter the third-child nursery and there massacre all the males. The females, in their separate annex, would be worth keeping for the usual round of necessary exchanges to prevent inbreeding.

Cvorn next spent many months hiding, ignoring queries from other prador who were his father’s allies or associates, aware that if they knew of his father’s demise they might well consider this abode vulnerable to attack. Gradually, he grew larger. He went through two further sheddings, and as his final fully adult shell hardened and thickened, his fear began to diminish. During his first venture out of his sanctum, he visited his father’s harem to satisfy a strongly growing itch, but used gel contraception. He did not want to inbreed with his mother and knew he needed to exchange these females for some that were more genetically diverse. Returning to his sanctum, he spent some time tending to inevitable mating injuries and decided it was time to announce his presence.

Prador society’s muted reaction to his appearance surprised him until he discovered that inter-house communications were abuzz with other news. Exploration vessels had encountered a new sentient race out at the limits of the Kingdom’s expansion, and his fellows were making the usual preparations. Of course, the prador were destined to rule the universe, and so would not tolerate other intelligences.

Back in the present, Cvorn felt himself bowed under a deep and heavy nostalgia and tried to shake it off, but the weight of memory continued to bear down on him. He relived the excitement of war preparations, the times he had nearly ended up a victim of his own kind, the allies he had made and betrayed and the enemies that had come close to killing him. He remembered his steady vicious climb up through the prador hierarchy, his steady acquisition of wealth and the commissioning of his destroyer. He remembered his first-children. But just one had survived all those years of warfare against the Polity and he now resided in one of his war drones. He remembered growing old and beginning to lose the mating urge during that conflict, then losing his limbs and the equipment for mating after them. Then it was that he regained some of his cowardice, ensuring layers of protection around him—his ships, armour, weapons and enslaved children. He realized he had become brutal then and that much of his aggression was a product of his fear of anything that might harm him . . .

Cvorn shook himself violently, noted that the alarm was sounding from the device Vrom had brought and through his aug immediately turned it on. He had been thinking about his past in relation to the hormonal effect upon him, not to end up reliving its joys and horrors. So again, why wasn’t that effect more commonly used? His immediate thought was that father-captains feared fear itself—that in regressing themselves like this they might end up as cowardly pre-adults again—but Cvorn had felt none of that. He felt now as he had felt when first announcing his presence to the rest of the prador. He felt brave and he felt ready. He also felt something else, something quite powerful and undeniable. Turning, he opened his sanctum doors and headed out. It had been a long time but he still remembered the techniques he had employed to avoid the worst of the injuries. It was time, Cvorn definitely felt, to pay a visit to those females.

THE BROCKLE

The single-ship that had just arrived was one of three used to convey prisoners to and from the
Tyburn
to face the Brockle. The woman inside was a murderess, but there must be more to it or she would not have ended up here. Her hatred of the Polity had led to her joining a separatist organization and she might be involved in other crimes too. The Polity wanted her reamed of information and then sentence executed on her.

The Brockle’s latest case had decided that her three sons had no future in the Polity, due to her detestation of the Polity and its AIs. They, despite being legal adults, apparently had no say in the matter. She had tried to force them to accompany her to one of the outlink stations to take a freighter ride outside the Polity. But they had refused, also rebelling further by getting themselves fitted with Polity augs. She had pretended to accept their choice and invited them to her home for a meal, whereupon she had fed them with a self-propagating neurotoxin. This poison, as well as killing them in seconds flat, turned their brains to jelly. So despite the alert broadcast by the augs they wore, they ended up unrecoverably dead.

So prosaic
.

The Brockle felt a wave of ennui at the prospect of interrogating her. Maybe if ECS had sent some Golem murderer or the likes of the strange Mr Pace its feelings would have been different. But ennui was followed by angry frustration. Earth Central had informed the Brockle that it could obtain no more of value from Ikbal and Martina after their time with Penny Royal on Captain Blite’s ship. It was ordered to release them, returning them via this very single-ship . . . The Brockle’s contribution to solving the “Penny Royal problem” was now at an end.