Dark Intelligence (22 page)

“Any ideas what it’s looking for now?” he asked generally.

“The initial scan was for orbital objects,” Leven replied. “This scan is mainly focused on recent surface impacts.”

“So something was in orbit here and Penny Royal is now checking to see if it crashed into the surface?” Blite suggested.

“So it would seem.”

“Another of those machines?” he asked.

“Maybe.”

The waiting became interminable and over the ensuing hours crew left the bridge and returned. Blite himself went off for a sleep for a few hours, returned to check on progress, then went to get something to eat. He was just finishing his food when Brond announced over the intercom, “Planetary scan’s done—it’s now scanning out into the rest of the system.”

Blite returned his tray to the refectory synthesizer and sauntered to the bridge. He was the last to arrive—everyone else was there.

“A ship has been detected,” said Leven. “It’s on an out-system course, operating on fusion with hardfield scoops deployed. Best guess is that it is collecting as much fuel as possible for a long journey without U-space drive.”

“Could be an alien vessel,” Chont suggested.

“Hardly,” Leven replied. “It’s Isobel Satomi’s
Moray Firth.”

ISOBEL

Trent had disabled most of the cameras in the bridge, but he hadn’t known about all of them and hadn’t come close to finding the concealed ones. Still he was trying to take the ship’s systems out of her control and probably believed he was succeeding. He was only making progress because she allowed him to, and she could take it all away with a thought. Now, having assured herself that he wasn’t doing anything unexpected, she returned her attention to her present task.

The glue where her human shoulders had been had set firm. Its nano-fibre bond into her carapace was so deep that neither the pulse-rifle now affixed to her right shoulder, nor the proton cannon joined to her left could come away—unless the carapace concerned was torn off. She’d angled the weapons upwards, accepting her hooder mode of movement and engineering for that, where her head tilted slightly upwards. Generally, from what she knew about hooder anatomy, the rows of eyes running down either side of her face were supposed to be employed for the meticulous dissection of prey. And now she’d noticed that a hard ridge vertically divided what had been her face. However, she’d discovered that these new eyes could focus better than human eyes at long range. This might have been a puzzle, had she not known more. Also, infrared sensors had appeared on the back of her cowl, and essentially these would be on top when she was down and scuttling along the ground. She might have supposed that these were for the sensing of distant prey, but the creature she was becoming sported more sensors than feasible in something that had evolved naturally. And of course that was right.

Knowing just what sort of transformation she was undergoing, she had loaded as much about hooders as she could find out. Recent studies claimed, with a great deal of backup evidence, that hooders were the devolved descendants of biomech war machines. These, it turned out, had been built by one of the three supposedly extinct alien races.

With the weapons now bonded in place, Isobel linked into their targeting and brought up cross hairs in her upper pair of eyes. As she turned her cowl, and thus the weapons, they tracked around the storeroom. She had done the best she could with the resources at her disposal. But still the weapons would need to be sighted in to ensure accuracy, preferably in a large open space. Next she linked into one of the storeroom cams, rose up to face it, and gazed at herself.

Her human arms and legs were gone, what remained having been rapidly absorbed into her growing body and displaced by hard carapace. The limbs themselves she had eaten, just as she had eaten Gabriel. The only difference being that she had eaten her own bones, whereas Gabriel’s sat in a well-chewed stack over to one side. Their laminations and other reinforcements rendered them indigestible, even to a hooder. She had also consumed two boxes full of carbon-fibre fabric, for the growth spurt she had experienced had made her incredibly hungry. Now, from the tip of her tail to the top of her cowl she measured ten feet. Her body segments had more definition, but had yet to acquire the outgrowths which had led some to equate a hooder’s body to a terran vertebrate’s spine. Nothing remained of her human face.

Within her cowl, she had two rows of eyes—six pairs—while at either end of the ridge down the centre of her “face,” jointed limbs were folded. These terminated in curved spatulas with small spikes extending from their bases along their inner faces. She knew these were incredibly sensitive and with them she could even feel faults in flat metal that human hands could not detect. On either side of the face ridge, inside the two rows of eyes, glassy tubes had begun sprouting. She had just started being able to move these, waving them ineffectually from side to side. But she knew they would later grow telescopic sections and toothed ends that could bore through flesh. These, she understood, were for feeding on “white fats” and body fluids, with the nightmare now circular mouth at the bottom of the ridge used for larger items.

Rows of jointed limbs terminated in glassy scythes, which had grown early on from the sides of her face. They always remained scalpel sharp, perpetually shedding their inner faces to expose new lethal edges, much in the way a cat sheds its claws. Beyond these lay tangled organics that had recently bubbled out to fill the gap between her face and her cowl. They had the appearance of offal, but were now hardening where they connected to her cowl. The latest additions, on top of all of this, were black tentacles. These were seemingly sprouting at random and one of these had now grown pincers. She knew that later on some would sprout delicate manipulators, similar to those found on an autodoc.

In all, she possessed more appendages to manipulate her environment than any human being. She could control her own ship and she could use all the human-formatted controls easily enough. She could also take things apart in ways no human could manage without supplemental tools. She’d first-hand experience of this, after adapting the weapons now bonded at the base of her cowl, or rather her
hood
. Only one or two problems remained. She knew she’d have to open out various parts of this ship as time progressed, because she was going to grow a lot bigger. And, in her dealings, she would definitely need human agents. This was why she’d decided that synthesized proteins would have to do for a while, and that she would not be killing and eating Trent. Time now, she felt, to venture back out into her ship.

Isobel turned to the door, switching off the lock with her mind—also disabling Trent’s recently added security feature that sent a signal to the bridge. She then opened the door with an insectile limb, the uppermost in the long arrays running down either side of her body. As she moved into the corridor, she ensured that the cams Trent presumed he controlled didn’t alert him. They continued to display an empty corridor in his screens. Then she paused. The heavy dragging noise she had made in exiting had been considerable, despite her care. Trent would hear her coming long before she reached the bridge door, so she initiated her grav-harness. The thing strained to lift her increased weight up off the grav-plated floor, and she progressed with light touches of her limbs to propel her forwards.

Even though she took as much care as possible, she still managed to make a loud clattering just before reaching the bridge door, as she tried to kill her momentum. However, a glance through the cams showed that Trent had not noticed. He was utterly absorbed by the ship’s exterior sensor data, and she could now see an image displayed in the laminate of the chain-glass front screen. Isobel was about to enter, when what he was looking at suddenly hit home: there was a ship out there!

Through her haiman augmentations, she keyed into the data and began scanning through it. This ship had just dropped out of U-space over the nearby planet. It was of a design familiar in the Graveyard but wasn’t one she particularly recognized. It had spent some time there, probably scanning the area, before briefly submerging itself in U-space to come out here. Her first momentary delight upon seeing this vessel was instantly banished. Rather than some random traveller she could ask for help, this appeared to be a ship that had come specifically to this area in search of something, and that something might be her. This could be an enemy. She now needed to be in full control of this situation.

Isobel surged through the door without bothering to open it. Trent looked round and came up out of his seat, his face pale with horror, and groped for his gun. But she was on him in a moment, using one of her forward limbs to slap the weapon from his hand with such force that she felt his wrist break. She slammed him back and down, switching off her harness at the same time so she pinned him to the console with her full weight. He struggled underneath her, terrified, shouting, and she froze. She now struggled herself, fighting the urge to begin feeding which was almost agonizing in its intensity. She needed to tell him she wasn’t going to kill him, to reassure him, but all that came out of her main mouth was a grinding hiss. This was one aspect of her plan she had neglected.

While he continued to struggle, only exciting that part of her that wanted to tear into him further, her more rational self keyed through to the ship’s intercom. She then heaved her weight off him and backed up to the door. He threw himself from the console and glanced once at his gun, which lay on the floor right beside her, then backed up to the other side of the bridge as far away from her as he could get. Trent was looking all around for something he could use as a weapon, seeing nothing and finally, hopelessly, settled into a fighting stance.

Isobel rapidly found numerous recordings of her own voice, from when she had been human, and fed them into a speech program. She struggled to try and connect that to her thought processes, then, realizing it would take at least a few minutes, just selected five words. She strung them together.

“I … will … not … harm … you,” she said through the intercom.

“Like you didn’t harm Gabriel,” he spat back.

She kept working the program even as she selected more words.

“One time,” she managed. “No … deceleration.”

She did not have the required vocabulary in her own recorded speech. Not once, in all of it, had she used the words “self” and “control” together. However, as the program began to make the required connections, she did find the second of them and added, “No me control.”

“Is there anything of Isobel left in there?” he asked. “You can’t even speak.”

Still he had not relaxed his fighting stance and he was edging back towards her. She knew precisely how he thought. He supposed his only chance against her would be to get hold of his gun again. Obviously, he had not studied the data aboard this ship on hooders, or he would know that nothing less than a proton cannon could harm her. She felt a surge of irritation with him, facing her like this. Not only was she turning into a hooder, but she could turn him into a smoking smear with just the weapons now attached to her carapace. While continuing to struggle with the language program, she reached down with one of her lower limbs and almost dismissively sent his gun skittering back towards him.

“Kill … me … then.”

The fool didn’t hesitate. He threw himself forwards into a roll, snatched up the pulse-gun in his left hand and came back up onto his feet. She resisted the urge to fall on him, and turned her face away. She might be practically invulnerable but really didn’t want to lose any of her eyes or fine manipulators since, as she understood it, they could take days to grow back.

Pulse-gun shots stitched their way up her body and then concentrated on the back of her hood. She felt slight impacts followed by warmth that rapidly dissipated. The back of her hood warmed up even more, became noticeably hot, and that heat spread out and down. It was quite pleasurable, in fact. A beep sounded; his gun telling him he had only a few shots left. Isobel let them hit and turned just as he tried a fast reload, but fumbled it because of his broken wrist, dropping both empty and full combined compressed nitrogen and power cartridges to the floor. He was panting, but he didn’t try to retrieve the full cartridge. Isobel stared, frozen again, his vulnerability so
tempting
. He broke the spell by reaching up with the barrel of his gun to tap it against that damned earring of his, and now she felt anger, swiftly ramped up by analysis of its cause. Of course, his earring annoyed her now because it was a reminder. The purple sapphire was precisely the same colour as her human eyes, or rather, as they had been.

“Are you done now?” Isobel finally enquired, now her voice synthesizer program was completely connected. “Or would you like to try a few of those neat kicks you learned?”

He just stood there, staring at her, and while he did so she distracted herself by considering how she might glue a portable voice synthesizer to her carapace.

“I’m done,” he said, struggling to holster his weapon, then cradling his broken wrist.

“Then go down to medical and get yourself fixed up,” she replied. “Spear at least left us an autodoc you can use.”

She moved aside from the door and held herself as rigid as she could, though she couldn’t stop her facial manipulators reaching yearningly towards him. After a hesitation he moved forwards, stooping to sweep up his gun cartridges before exiting through the door. She read the wariness in his expression but at least there was no disgust there. Gabriel, she surmised, would not have been the same. He had been showing signs of the same xenophobic reaction to her as he had in the past towards prador and shell people. Perhaps this was why she hadn’t held back with him, she reasoned. But she also recognized that Gabriel’s reaction to her might have been the more sensible one.

She decided the acceleration chair by the console would be a hindrance, dipped her hood low and swept it sideways. The chair tore from its mountings and crashed into the wall of the bridge. Next she rose up over the console to inspect the other ship’s image in the laminate screen. Almost as an afterthought, Isobel closed the armoured shutters across the front screen—it might be a ten-inch thick slab of chain-glass, but an energy weapon’s flash-through could damage even her. Now she noted the other ship’s thrusters were firing, bringing it in closer, so she directed a com-laser at it.