Dark Intelligence (40 page)

Now for a new design of space suit …

“Maybe hanging in orbit right here isn’t such a great idea either,” Trent suggested.

Isobel focused on him distractedly without turning, using only her outer cowl sensors, which mainly functioned in the infrared. Even as she did this, she was loading instructions to the cache of mothballed large-maintenance robots she had aboard. They would begin with the partition walls and the conversion of one hold into an airlock. The suit, she decided, would have to be infinitely expandable—made to take new sections and extensions, for she was a growing girl. She would make that herself out of monomer fabric she had aboard. Then, even as she began playing with some tentative designs in her skull, she realized that both the suit and the remodelling were signs of acceptance of what she was becoming.

She now turned to the skeletal android, loading instructions to it, and dispatched it to assist in the remodelling. Trent watched it go, still obviously in disagreement with her decision to keep the thing.

“Agreed, we should change course,” she said abruptly, present circumstances beyond the ship coming back into focus.

In her mind she mapped the local system. The Rock Pool possessed two small moons but, if prador heavy weapons were about to be deployed here they would offer little in the way of safety. The next planet out was presently on the far side of the sun. But further in than the Rock Pool, about a quarter of an orbit round the sun from it, lay a smaller world. This was burning and molten on its sunward side but scattered with giant crevasses on the other. These could easily hide a ship. Perfect.

Isobel paused, noted that during her introspection Trent had headed off to his cabin. She fired up the fusion drive and began heading away, scattering grapefruit-sized com satellites as she went. She would conceal herself, watch and wait. And then, when Spear eventually put in an appearance, she would strike. Though whether she would strike Spear or Penny Royal first she wasn’t sure.

SVERL

The patterns of movement out there had changed. Analysing them closely, Sverl realized that the recalled children belonging to Cvorn, Skute and the Five were heading rapidly for whatever cover they could find—if they hadn’t already made it home. Robots and other assets in the ocean were still converging on the three ships, but this was probably in an attempt to cover that other movement.

The other prador were about to head for the surface; action was imminent.

His attention now focused on one of Cvorn’s perambulating factories. It had ceased moving and was now driving its rock anchors into the bottom. This could be seen as an attempt to save it from damage, since it was so close, but Sverl was suspicious. He withdrew a claw from one pit control and inserted it in another, then connected via his thrall control units to his weapons. He took control of two particle cannons, targeting coming up on two of his array of hexagonal screens. All the other weapons had children at the controls, but they would only react to threat as trained or follow orders, which meant a delay. If anything came from that factory, he would need to act fast.

“Get to cover,” Sverl instructed his remaining three second-children out there. They had a chance of survival, since the main action of any battle would certainly take place out of the ocean. Above water, weapons could be deployed faster and more effectively. He would return for them one day, if he could. It was not as if he had many kin left to spare. Everything else, including his remaining perambulating factory and various robots, he would have to leave too. Time now to move—he didn’t want to be the last to leave the ocean.

“Prepare for battle,” he instructed those aboard, and set water tractor drives running to give his dreadnought clearance. “Respond as you have been trained.”

Immediately the water out there clouded as the tractor drives stirred tons of silt from the bottom. Sverl switched to sonar and ultrasound imaging, noting that billows of silt were now blowing out from under the other three ships as they too set themselves in motion. As he studied the images, they blinked; a shimmering diamond pattern fleeing across both screens. He reacted immediately, firing one particle cannon at Cvorn’s factory, which had to be the source, meanwhile considering the workings of fate. If he had not just switched to ultra- and infrasound imaging, he wouldn’t have seen the recognizable interference caused by cavitating torpedoes.

He also felt a moment of regret. Right up until now there had been a chance, however remote, that the others weren’t going to turn hostile. But even as he regretted their predictably prador-like behaviour, he calmly assessed his initial plans and planned responses. Then he felt his own prador excitement growing at the prospect of, as the humans would put it, taking off his gloves.

His particle beam stabbed out slowly through the seawater. It created a growing glassy tube where seawater turned to superheated steam, then ionized hydrogen, oxygen and ozone and smashed other elements to radioactive isotopes. The tube held for a few seconds before turning into a boiling explosion that simply wiped out the view in that direction. Meanwhile Sverl used every source of scanning to track down the torpedoes. The beam finally reached the factory, the red-orange glare of vaporizing steel and carbon lighting up the ocean just as he located the torpedoes. There were two of them, curving round a few miles out. They would approach from the opposite side of his ship to the factory—the side that was out of reach of his particle cannons.

“Quadrant Six, rail, five kilotons, two miles,” he instructed the relevant gunner.

The missile shot out at low speed—at full railgun speed it would simply have smashed against the seawater as if facing an exotic armoured wall. The resultant explosion would blow back, taking out railgun and gunner. A few hundred feet from the ship, it fired up its own drive and accelerated, a burning magnesium glare behind it and great bubbles of superheated steam rising to the surface.

Sverl now saw that his ship had enough clearance from the bottom. Taking his claw from the weapons pit control, he reinserted it in one of the drive controls and fired up his vessel’s multiple fusion engines. If the fired missile didn’t disrupt the two torpedoes’ cavitation drives, or destroy the things, surely his fusion drive would? Then again, surely Cvorn would have known that?

His great ship bore the shape of a prador carapace—a great chunk of exotic metal six miles across, sprouting weapons turrets and sensor arrays like high-tech barnacles. Now, it began to rise rapidly, seemingly poised on top of a newly ignited sun. Sverl touched the ocean tractor drives to set it turning, bringing the two particle cannon ports round to the side. Then a massive detonation either destroyed the two torpedoes, or destroyed any view of them, but he suspected they’d just changed course.

“Quadrant Two, be aware of possible incoming as we breach.” He withdrew one claw from the drive and again reinserted it into weapons, meanwhile asking himself how
he
would have done it. The torpedoes would have their own momentum, so it was a simple calculation to judge where they might exit the ocean’s surface. Another few touches with the tractor drive had his ship turning further.

“Seven and Eight, loose forty of those Polity grav mines directly after we breach,” he instructed. “Use a swarm two dispersion, close at one mile.”

“Father, they will pose a danger,” replied the second-child at the rail-gun and subsidiary weapons arrays in Quadrant Seven. Aboard any other prador ship, posing such a question would have resulted in summary execution. Well, at least after any battle. But Sverl’s children had learned that he expected their input and would, to misapply a human metaphor, provide carrots rather than always wielding the big stick.

“Further dispersion will be by CTD blast from below,” Sverl replied, opening up a control unit link to the big CTD in the mineshaft, which now lay a mile below his ship. “The grav mines will be driven out by the blast front and may well intercept the rising destroyers.”

They were a neat and simple Polity toy, those mines. The grav-engines could be easily shielded because they had just one setting—neutral buoyancy—and they carried proximity-detonated CTDs. They would be a second unpleasant surprise for Cvorn and the rest; the first being what was about to happen below.

BLITE

First had come a rumble and
The Rose
shook underfoot, but Blite had thought nothing of it because he had been on many seismically active worlds. However, the crowd moving down the adjacent road paused as one, as if they had all heard the first footfall of some approaching giant, then picked up their pace. A sense of panic infected the sulphide-laden air. Apparently earthquakes weren’t a common occurrence here.

Standing on the hull of his ship, Blite swung round to peer out to sea through his monocular. He could just see a purplish glare penetrating to the surface of the ocean at the far horizon. It could have been a visual effect characteristic of this world, but when that light changed to a deep red-orange flash, Blite thought otherwise.

“So everyone’s fucking off but us,” said Ikbal.

The Rose
had landed and powered down—with nothing now available to the drive systems. A clattering had started up, followed by an ear-piercing tinnitus whine. Other sounds had followed, until the inside of the ship was filled with a cacophony worthy of an automated factory gathering pace. It became unbearable, hence Blite relocating outside and allowing his crew to follow him.

“Some are getting ready to fuck off,” he replied to Ikbal, “but they all should have left long before now to be far enough away.” He glanced across at the nearby houses in this more salubrious portion of town. The evacuation seemed well organized, fast and pretty calm, but there had been damage to the city and it was still ongoing. He counted four fires, one blazing merrily in the upper floor of a nearby three-storey building. Its flames were now flicking through a peaked roof tiled with some sort of stone—the tiles cracked with sounds like gunshots and slewed to the ground in pieces. He turned his attention to Brond and Martina, who had set up a remote console, linked to the ship’s sensors, there at least being sufficient power to operate those. “Any idea what that was?” he asked.

“Particle beam fired a couple of miles down,” replied Martina grimly. “Looks like it hit something—steel and carbon spectra.”

“Shit.” Blite raised his monocular to his eyes in time to see the ocean boiling out there, and a bright glare below. “Shit, shit,” he added.

First up came four towers, spearing out of the ocean like giant brass asparagus shoots. Below them rose the turret they were attached to, then the rest of the enormous ship was gradually revealed. Blite swallowed drily. He had heard that there was a prador dreadnought down there, but the reality had failed to impinge until now. The behemoth continued to rise, like an island being pushed up by some seismic event. Weapons turrets and pits decorated its surface and, from one of the latter, objects began spewing out. Blite increased magnification to pick out one of these and set his monocular’s chameleon-eye lenses to track it. The thing looked like a thick silver coin, until it engaged chameleonware and disappeared.

“Now those,” said Brond, “are Polity grav mines.”

“Unusual,” Blite replied, trying to keep his tone calm and analytical. “Prador tend to dislike using Polity tech—they see it as an admission that it might be superior.”

As the dreadnought cleared the ocean, particle beams stabbed out and down from two turrets and two bright flashes ignited above the ocean. They were two yellow suns, expanding and flattening as a blast front rolled out across the ocean.

“What was that?” asked Greer, sitting on the edge of the hull with her feet on one of the nacelle struts.

“Secure yourselves now!” Blite shouted, dropping his monocular to swing on its neck strap and reaching to unreel the safety line from his space suit belt. He squatted to clip its hook over one of the hull-mounted rings. “Close up your suits too!” he added, sweeping his suit visor across.

While the others secured themselves like Blite, Chont and Haber were still running back to the ship. They’d been investigating the edge of the Carapace, where it was attached to the ground. Arriving, they quickly scrambled up a ladder on the side of the ship, then fixed their safety lines to that.

“Any detail on that explosion?” Blite asked Martina and Brond over suit radio.

“All of it,” replied Brond. “Two cavitating-drive torpedoes exited the ocean a couple of miles from that ship and fired up rocket motors. The father-captain must have been wise to them because he nailed them straight away.”

“Blast power?”

“About a megaton each—directed. Some sort of armour-piercer.”

By now the blast front had reached the shore and Blite didn’t need a monocular to see it. An explosion of white water marked out the edge of the sea from horizon to horizon, then disappeared in a boiling line of dust. As it drew closer he saw chunks of vegetable matter being hurled up into the air, but felt a momentary relief. If he’d seen rocks being picked up, he’d have known that a safety line wasn’t enough. Hitting the less salubrious suburbs of Carapace City, the blast front picked up even more rubbish as it flattened flimsy shanty dwellings. Blite dipped his head and waited.

It reached them a moment later and their surroundings disappeared in dust and debris. The wind tried to wrench Blite from the hull of his ship, but just didn’t have the strength. However, a square bubble-metal sheet ten feet across came out of this chaos, slamming sideways just beside him and tumbling onward. He licked his lips and took a steadying breath, then raised his monocular to his visor and clicked it onto the attachment points on his suit’s helmet. Linking into his suit’s system, the device’s imaging was now visible inside his visor. He adjusted it through its spectrum to try and get a view through the dust. Infrared just gave him a sun glare now a few miles above the sea, with something else visible down to one side, probably still below the ocean. Ultraviolet was no better. He was about to give up on it, since the dust was already clearing, when another bright light ignited under the sea. This grew, and grew until it blotted everything else out. He detached the monocular—the glare now perfectly visible without them.