War Factory: Transformations Book Two (43 page)

Amazing.

Riss felt a momentary surge of something other than her usual moroseness, other than her perpetual dark mood . . . something like excitement. So unusual, so unexpected was the feeling that she immediately came to a decision. Spear was making enough of this stuff to deal with the shell people and would probably make no more. However, he had made a test batch of the original enzyme acid—the one that also destroyed human tissue—which he hadn’t destroyed. Instead he had inserted it into a drug safe in Taiken’s surgery-cum-laboratory. Spear had locked the thing with a chip key, but that shouldn’t be a problem for a drone capable of penetrating prador ships and bases. Riss would take it and keep it inside, close, ready to use.

The woman the drone had first inoculated was down on her back, large chunks of her outer shell having fallen away. Instead of displaying bleeding raw flesh underneath, more silvery white skin was visible. The regular human Riss had seen earlier was standing over her, a look of fascinated horror on his face. She was in hibernation, like the previous shellman—one beat of her heart detected as Riss approached. But no further overt signs of life were evident as Riss entered the building, the man following closely.

“How many have you done?” Spear asked when Riss came back to him.

“Eight hundred and forty-two,” Riss replied. “Another seven hundred and sixty to do.”

“The effects?” Spear asked.

Riss routed recordings made of what she had seen outside to the man’s aug. Spear turned introspective for a moment, then smiled.

“It’s working,” he said.

Riss opened up her body for reloading, ridding herself of empty flasks like a gun ejecting spent ammunition. “Of course it’s working, but still there are those who might die while you’re congratulating yourself.”

Spear harrumphed and picked up more flasks from the nearby work surface. While he inserted these into her body, she studied him on other levels, black eye firmly open. Her scanning went deeper than her examination of the shell people outside. The entanglement it had taken her so long to detect and map was still there, now more active than before, and firmly connected to that object up in Sverl’s sanctum. Large data exchanges were perpetual, and Riss wondered if Spear had any conception of what he had become. He wasn’t just a man now. He seemed to be some synergistic sum of the essence of Penny Royal’s victims, a multifaceted being with the kind of mental resources usually only available to an AI.

As the last flask went into place, the drone experienced a moment of confusion, seeing an entanglement echo in U-space and feeling something like an amplifier feedback whine reverberating through her snake body. She snapped the holes in her body closed and abruptly leapt away from Spear to land on the floor some yards away, ovipositor poised to strike.

“You okay?” he asked.

Riss hadn’t been okay for a long time, but hadn’t often been frightened.

“Nothing,” said Riss. “No problem.”

She circumvented Spear widely to get to the door, through it and out. Keeping such a physical distance in the real from the man was a futile exercise. It didn’t change the fact that Riss now seemed to be quantum entangled, via the spine, to him. What did this mean? She now knew that the spine contained recordings of all Penny Royal’s dead victims. But did this now mean it also maintained a connection with all the AI’s live ones? The sheer computing power, the ability, the godlike intelligence involved in such a bonding suggested Penny Royal might be a magnitude above even the kind of Polity AIs that gave Riss the shivers. It also suggested, consequently, that Spear ranked higher too.

The little drone truly understood now, on an utterly visceral level, what it meant to be involved with paradigm-changing beings—with beings dangerous enough to bring down civilizations, or capable of raising them up.

CVORN

As he returned to his sanctum, Cvorn’s urge to mate was in abeyance and the other hormonal effects had dropped to a low ebb. Perhaps this was why other father-captains had not gone down this route. He had, after all, subjected himself to these effects by accident and not design. Now, with his mind clearer, he was able to think more about his aims beyond his activities onboard his ST dreadnought.

There was no doubt that Sverl had made a lengthy U-space jump, to give himself time to make repairs to his ship’s shielding. He must hope that he could thereby prevent Cvorn from finding out the destination of his next jump, so Cvorn had to consider how to react to that. Immediate attack was the obvious answer, to inflict further damage, but Sverl had to know that and was doubtless making preparations.

Arriving in the corridor leading to his sanctum, Cvorn found Vrom towing away a grav-sled loaded with leftovers. All that remained of the young male that Cvorn had cannibalized for parts was empty carapace, meticulously scraped clean. At some point Vrom must have returned to Cvorn’s sanctum because claws and legs were there too, all cracked open. Their contents were now either being digested in Vrom’s gut or sitting in his personal food store.

“Father,” said Vrom, halting immediately and cowering.

Cvorn just went straight past the first-child to his sanctum door, auging to its controls and opening it. “Bring me a reaverfish,” he said, pausing at the threshold, “a whole one.” And as he entered, he remembered how sex had always made him hungry and how, in those days, he could really pack in the meat.

Inside his sanctum, he approached the pit and saddle controls before the array of screens and settled himself in position but used his aug to operate the ship’s computer system. First, he needed to examine Sverl’s coordinates. Though he could use the ship’s processing to ascertain their point in realspace, that would take some time, and there was a quicker way. He connected through to the ship’s mind—one excised from a first-child over a hundred years ago.

“Give me realspace coordinates for our present jump,” he instructed.

“Calculating,” the mind replied.

There had been no problems of recognition with this mind—no questions about its loyalty to the previous father-captain of this dreadnought. The first-child had been thoroughly stripped down, all personality erased along with all memories of its previous life. All it did was communicate in a very basic way, and calculate U-engine parameters. All it knew was that it received orders from this sanctum, just like the war drones aboard.

After a moment, prador glyphs began scrolling diagonally across one of the screens. Cvorn studied them for a moment but again found using his aug was a better option. He loaded those coordinates, checked them against astrogation maps and studied the data available. Sverl was heading for a trinary system lying far above the galactic plane, beyond the Graveyard, the Kingdom and the Polity. Had he decided to run? Had he decided to relinquish all interest in those three realms?

It didn’t matter. All that mattered was whether this new system held something that might give Sverl a tactical advantage—some way of evading Cvorn while making the kind of repairs he could not make in U-space before he proceeded to his next jump. The stellar objects of this system were a white dwarf and a black dwarf whose mass equalled that of the red dwarf orbiting them. The paths of the two masses were eccentric, and there was no way of saying, without making extensive calculations, which orbited which. Worldlets and asteroids abounded, but with nothing large enough to retain much in the way of atmosphere. The whole system had acted as a billion-year-old asteroid grinder, the result of which was a dense ring of fine dust and gas around the white dwarf. This was shepherded by a series of planetoids, and all was perpetually stirred every three hundred years by a close pass of the red dwarf.

There
, thought Cvorn.

It seemed quite likely that Sverl, whose capabilities Cvorn did not doubt, intended to surface into the real either in or close to that ring, and use it for cover. The density of the cloud would negate the effects of energy weapons at long range and would heat up railgun missiles, thus lessening their impact. The cloud would also tend to weaken the integrity of hardfields, but since Sverl would project them close to his ship, that effect was negligible. He
probably
wouldn’t be able to hide. And though he would have repaired much of the damage to his chameleonware, he wouldn’t have been able to make the repairs in U-space that would conceal the mass of his ship—especially when surrounded by gas and dust which would effect its usability. Therefore, entering that ring gave Sverl both advantages and disadvantages. However, it was still a good choice—probably the best choice Sverl could make.

Cvorn paused there as Vrom came in from his annex with a whole reaverfish on his back, its head gripped in his claws and tail dragging on the floor behind.

“Put it down over there—” Cvorn waved a claw “—and wait.”

His stomach gave a muffled grumble through his shell and his gullet grew wet with lubricating saliva. The distraction irritated him as he tried to concentrate on his response to Sverl’s likely actions. Through the ship’s system, he ordered an exchange of railgun loads. In one railgun, he ordered the removal of the iron-cored and ceramic armoured slugs presently lined up for first firings. Armoury robots would replace them with sensor probes, when they finished formatting them for the conditions in that ring; these were to be used mainly for mass detection. He ordered two other railguns to be loaded with the much harder to produce and rarer railgun slugs clad with exotic metal alloy. Frictional heating in the cloud would not weaken these. In fact, if fired at sufficient range, their internal iron cores would melt and build up massive pressure, thus increasing their energy upon impact with an exotic metal hull like Sverl’s.

Saliva now dripping out of his mouth and wetting his mandibles, Cvorn conceded defeat and turned from his screens. He walked over to the reaverfish and inspected it, remembering that he must check on the living examples of this species and release one in the mating pool so the female he had mated with could implant her eggs. Vrom moved forwards, the atomic shear flicking on across the edge of his claw, ready to cut up Cvorn’s dinner. Cvorn abruptly rebelled at the idea.

When, many years ago, his remaining two legs and claw had ceased to function properly and finally dropped off, he had taken the route of many father-captains before him. Disdaining the very idea of the new prosthetics, beyond grav-motors attached to his shell, he had his closest first-child chop up and feed his meals into his mandibles. However, when his mandibles abruptly stopped working, his condition necessitated him mincing his food in a macerating machine. This was attached below his mouth and tubed into his gullet—and it was this that made him finally change his mind. New prosthetic mandibles came first and, though they lacked sensitivity, he was delighted with them and soon had prosthetic claws installed too. But he continued to have his first-child cut up his food for him. Now, mobile on new legs, sexually active and with corresponding hormonal effects coursing through his system, Cvorn found he had suddenly lost his inclination for pampering.

“Leave,” he instructed.

Vrom’s pose was one of puzzlement but, when Cvorn swung his claw round, crashing it into the side of Vrom’s carapace, he quickly recovered and retreated. Cvorn now focused his full attention on the fish, reached down, closed a claw around its skull, and snipped. The skull crushed and split, squirting a pale green line of brains across the floor. Cvorn tore up the front end of its head, fed it into his mandibles and began crunching it up. Just minutes later, with a third of the fish gone and his initial ravenous hunger satisfied, he slowed his pace of ingestion and returned his thoughts to Sverl.

Cvorn had done everything he could with the railguns. Now the energy weapons. The particle cannons would never be much good in that dust ring unless they were used close up, but there were things he could do to increase their efficiency there. The particulate the weapons fired was usually aluminium dust, suspended in nitrogen in an electrostatic field. However, by adding heavy elements, tightening the magnetic tube and ramping up power input he could give the beam greater penetrating power. This wasn’t usually done in vacuum conflict because, beyond a certain point, power input outweighed ultimate yield.

As he considered what heavy elements to add from those available, Cvorn abruptly realized he could set things in motion now. He didn’t have to crouch before this sanctum’s control area to do this . . . with his aug he could do just about anything from any location. Pausing, with a dripping mass of a huge organ resembling a kidney part-way to his mouth, Cvorn understood just how rigid his thinking had been. He should have realized this long before now. He shoved the organ into his mandibles and munched it down, mentally initiating the required changes to the particle cannons.

Other weapons . . . There were few changes he could make to the various available nuclear and chemical bombs, missiles and mines. They were just too slow for what seemed likely to be a running battle over hundreds of thousands of miles. When he finally did get to use them, it would need to be after Sverl’s ship was permanently disabled. Then, peeling that ship open to expose Sverl’s sanctum would be a job for particle beams. As he reached the tail of the reaverfish he searched his mind for other preparations he could make, but all that was left was some tweaking of the spectra of his anti-munitions lasers, so there wouldn’t be so much scatter in the gas of that ring.

He was done: his ship was as ready as it could be—and he had eaten a whole reaverfish. Cvorn moved away from the sticky mess on the floor, now swarming with ship lice, and turned towards his controls. Quite some time remained before his final encounter with Sverl and he started to contemplate how he would fill it—perhaps, after digesting his meal, another visit to the mating pool? But just a moment later he felt intensely weary and his vision blurred for a moment.

What?

His body felt leaden and, as he took a couple of steps towards the controls, a hot tightness began to grow inside him. It was as if some creature was gathering all his organs together and squashing them into one spot. His coitus clamp rattled, then his irised anus abruptly opened, spattering the floor with bright yellow excrement. He moved away from the mess, further squirts of faeces punctuating his journey across the floor to the vacuum disposal port protruding from the wall. But by the time he settled over it, his anus had clamped shut again. This had never happened to him when he had been young. It had only happened in later years during illness, or during the changes he had undergone when he lost his limbs.