Dark Intelligence (12 page)

Our mission was to set up an ambush, then capture a prador—preferably a first-child—whereupon my speciality would come into play. And my main specialism, now more than ever, was the extraction of information from these minds. By whatever means necessary. After that, the data gathered should allow our companion for this assignment to penetrate the mining complex. I glanced over at said companion. The assassin drone had its chameleonware tuned down, so it was just about visible against the jungle backdrop. It looked vaguely like a large thick-bodied cobra, but it had four limbs folded below the spread of its hood and a long thin ovipositor extending from its tail.

I was told its appearance mimicked a particularly nasty prador parasite—one that laid its eggs inside them, which then hatched into larvae that ate out their insides. It was also a parasite the prador had wiped out long ago. However, somehow its genome had been resurrected by forensic AIs, and this drone now carried thousands of fresh eggs, ready to be implanted, inside its armoured skin. The drone was here on the usual mission the Polity assigned to its kind: that of spreading terror amongst the prador. We were here because intelligence had revealed that the mining operation was about to be closed down. So the four father-captains, along with their thousands of children, were soon to be recalled to the prador home world. If the timings were right, the eggs the drone injected would begin hatching out when they arrived. It was a particularly nasty biological weapon, so much so that it even made some of Jebel’s troops a little uncomfortable. I was conflicted. I thought it a horrible weapon too. But, having been a prador captive, I felt a lot less sympathetic while simultaneously disliking this change in my attitude.

We moved on through the jungle, carefully, switching to full chameleonware when we came upon the first crushed-down trails left by prador patrols. There were ten in Krong’s squad, but two had come here a month earlier to reconnoitre. As we drew closer to the mining complex, as yet concealed behind jungle, these two reappeared. I moved over to Krong as he headed forwards to brief them.

“The tracks you see are from punishment patrols,” said the first scout, a woman who looked as if she should still be at school. “They don’t expect a ground attack here, but send out those guilty of minor infractions not punishable by the usual methods.”

The usual prador punishments ranged from a cracked carapace, up to being dismembered and eaten alive by its father. Some were, of course, surgically dismembered, their ganglions being used as the prador version of ship or drone minds.

“Irregular?” Krong asked.

“Nope, regular as clockwork.”

“So you have a place prepared?”

“I do.”

“Why are they a punishment?” I interjected. “The patrols, I mean.”

She turned towards me. “The offler weed.” She gestured to a nearby patch of the stuff that the assassin drone was examining. The gooey blue mass, which I already knew could move as fast as a fried egg sliding out of a greased pan, had frozen. And, becoming aware of threat, it was now extruding a bristling coat of spines.

“The spores lodge in prador joints and grow there,” she continued. “To remove these before returning to the complex, they have to spray themselves with a solution of hydrochloric acid. You can hear them yelling every time.”

Nice. I decided to collect a sample for dispatch to Bio-weapons.

It took us an hour to reach the ambush point. Here, the two who had been in place for a month had already dug a number of hidey-holes. Mine was set well back from the trail and I wasn’t allowed to come out until after the squad had dealt with the patrol. This was apparently due within the hour. Lugging my equipment over, I gazed askance at the eel-like worms poking their thorned heads out of the disturbed soil, then climbed down inside. I pulled the lid over, then inserted my periscope bead up through it, shunting the feed to my visor display.

By the time I had a clear above-ground view, the rest of the squad was completely concealed.

“We’ve got them spotted,” Jebel informed us all through comlinks and augs. “They should be here in forty minutes.”

It was a long uncomfortable forty minutes, during which I had to shut down my visor display, switch over to light amplification and brush thorny-headed eels off my battledress. Then, later, a creature like a foot-long stick insect crawled up my leg. Eventually the prador came into sight: three second-children to the fore, followed by two first-children and then another four second-children. The leading second-children drew right opposite me before it all kicked off. I saw one of them pause and tilt its nose down, its palp eyes bent forwards as if to try and see underneath itself, then the sticky-mine there exploded. A moment after that one of the second two exploded, then two at the rear went, and one of the first-children went down with all its legs sheared off one side. The air filled with Gatling cannon fire and the stabs of particle beams, blue-barbs toppled all around and clumps of vegetation dropped in smoking lumps. I reached up and flipped the lid off my hole, anxious to be out of it.

The assassin drone, probably wanting to ratchet up the terror, shut down its chameleonware as it clung to the uninjured first-child, stabbing its ovipositor in at the point where the prador’s legs joined its body. I could not see the point of this until the first-child, bubbling and hissing like a boiling kettle, also began to steam. It ran, but not far. Its legs began to fall off and it went down like a flying saucer crash-landing, its insides boiling out of leg holes and around the rim of its carapace. I realized the drone had not injected eggs but hydrofluoric acid. Surviving prador ran into the jungle, with Jebel’s squad in hot pursuit. I hauled my equipment out of my hole and climbed out after it. The prador with the missing legs was obviously for me.

Stupidity, inattention, a failure to completely process the dangers—that’s how it happens. I didn’t realize I hadn’t turned on my chameleonware until the first-child swung up a claw, with a Gatling cannon attached. I didn’t hear it fire, only saw the flash and felt something like a speeding train slam into me. I flew backwards, bounced, oddly light, and came down on my back. I couldn’t breathe and already things were turning black. Consciousness lasted long enough for me to see that everything below the middle of my chest was missing, including my arms beyond the elbows.

Then I died … I think. Chronologically, these should have been my last memories of the war. Yet, the earlier firestorm from the anti-matter blasts on Panarchia felt somehow more real. But one must never allow emotion to overrule logic, surely?

SPEAR

Months of travel had taken us deep into the Graveyard now, the world called the Rock Pool far behind us and the Prador Kingdom uncomfortably close. And, sitting in orbit was my Polity destroyer, above the world whose coordinates I retrieved from a prador mind long ago. The thing looked like a giant sarcophagus and, as Trent and I jetted over, I tried not to think about that. I concentrated on inspecting the vessel for damage.

I had inserted a memory sliver into this suit before donning it, to make sure I had full control of it via my aug. But I couldn’t really close the suit’s camera feed back to the
Moray Firth
. With Trent accompanying me, it wouldn’t have made much difference if I had. Isobel was going to learn the history of this destroyer and she wasn’t going to like it at all. What I did next would depend on how she reacted. Upon reaching the destroyer, Trent manually opened the airlock and we stepped through. I kept a close eye on the man, who was carrying a heavy laser carbine. I was more than ready to send the infrasound activation over suit radio, to start the prion cascade in his body.

The inside of the abandoned ship was thoroughly familiar, yet I had never set foot inside before that moment. I looked down at scratch marks on the floor beside the airlock and just knew they had been caused by a maintenance robot, scrabbling for purchase during heavy acceleration. Suddenly my attitude to this déjà vu flipped over and I became intensely annoyed with it. Would I never again experience the joy of new discoveries, new sights, sounds and smells? Was this the feeling that drove older Polity citizens like my brother to suicidal pursuits, in search of some small fragment of new experience?

The interior of the old ship wasn’t airless, but the pressure was very low. I felt a visceral certainty that something horrible had happened here, and this extended beyond my knowledge of what
had
happened. Undeniable proof of this presented itself the moment we rounded the first corner. We found the first body in the corridor leading to the “ship’s cortex,” the globular chamber toward the nose of the ship.

“One of the crew,” I stated.

“What the fuck happened to him?” Trent asked, pointing his weapon at the corpse. “Some sort of U-space screw-up?”

Whether this had been a “him” or a “her” was debatable, I felt. Difficult to sex a desiccated corpse still clad in a blue and green shipsuit. Especially when it was partially buried in a wall that had frozen, apparently partway through a transformation into a nest of adders. Gazing at the corpse, I felt my skin crawling and my space suit seemingly tightening around me. I turned away in a flash of terror. I definitely did not want this person’s memories.

“This looks like a nano- and micro-machine matter transformation,” I said, knowing perfectly well that it was exactly that.

“Triggered by the ship’s repair systems?” Isobel asked from the
Moray Firth
, currently matching the Polity destroyer’s course around a Graveyard green-belt world which had yet to acquire any human name.

Yes, the ship’s repair systems, breeding constantly and controlled by something that might just give nightmares to a standard planetary AI.

“So, tell me more about how you located this,” Isobel asked, obviously rattled by what she’d seen through our suit feeds.

“Like I said before,” I explained. “I used a specialized search of a captured prador database. This ship was dead when they found it and lined it up for salvage, but they never got round to that before the war ended.”

It was as close to the truth as I wanted to venture. I had used a specialized search of a database, after Panarchia and during my rehabilitation, before joining Krong. But I used the term “database” loosely as it had actually been the mind of a first-child, extracted from the wreckage of a prador dreadnought. Before that, the search teams had brought me the remains of the prador captain to examine, taken from that same dreadnought. Here I found glass worms wound through his major ganglion, and the internal ceramic mouth he had been impelled to use to feed on his own organs. And even before I opened up the first-child’s mind, I had some dark intimation of what I’d found.

The child had been filled with delight that its beloved father-captain had found an abandoned Polity destroyer. They had docked and proceeded to assay it to see whether it could be adapted for prador use or should be cut up for salvage. Of course father had been delighted—such a find would add to his prestige and his personal fortune. Daddy’s delight lasted until the horrific killings started. The culprit was a Polity assassin drone picked up from the destroyer, they were sure … then the killing stopped and the prador captain ordered his ship undocked and fled.

The child’s memories stopped there, giving no reason why the dreadnought had subsequently crashed on a human-occupied world. When I found out the destroyer’s Polity name and serial number in the child’s mind I recorded them, then went on to record its location. But I reported none of these. After Panarchia, my personal quest for vengeance had steered me away from authority and towards personal satisfaction. I didn’t know or care where this would lead, such was my need. When the first-child was then taken away for “humane disposal,” the knowledge died with it. I knew then that the prador dreadnought had certainly picked up something from that other ship. But it hadn’t been anywhere near as pleasant as an assassin drone.

We found another dead crewman just outside the narrow tunnel leading to the ship’s cortex. This one had obviously decided on positive action in response to the developing threat. The desiccated corpse was pinned to the ceiling, a pulse-rifle having been driven through its gut. However, closer inspection revealed a blending of pulse-rifle and shipsuit, as if the stock and butt of the weapon had grown from the victim. After seeing that, I looked away quickly, because I didn’t want Isobel, or Trent, to study the corpse too closely. As I ducked into the tunnel I wondered how long it had taken the victim to die, then had to accept that I’d probably never know. The thing that had exited through this tunnel set no limits on the suffering of its victims.

The ship’s cortex was packed with machinery. A skeletal Golem rested with its back against the wall nearest the door, its android legs missing. Metallic tentacles wound from its pelvis, crossing the floor to plug into a socket in the opposite wall. Below its wrists, its hands branched into micro-manipulators which were scattered with silvery nubs like small steel berries. I recognized these as nano-manipulator heads. Its eyes were gone and in their place was something that looked ridiculously like ancient binoculars. I moved on in and round so I could keep Trent in sight.

Other maintenance robots were crammed into the area, some still in their original form, others converted in weird fashions. I paused to study a series of hand-sized beetle-bots, arrayed like the tines of a rake along a bar at the end of a long jointed arm. Though I could not fathom the specific purposes of the robots and the Golem, I guessed their overall task: they had been here to change a static object into something very dangerous and mobile.

“Looks like the ship’s AI was shattered,” Isobel observed.

Yes, there were flakes of AI crystal scattered all about the area, but nowhere near enough. I moved on to the central clamp—two columns terminating in flat plates extending from floor and ceiling, leaving a gap a foot wide between. Here was where the ship’s AI should have been. I eyed the gap for a moment, then an object lying over beside the wall drew my attention. Something cold crept up my vertebrae as I walked over to study it.