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  Blite left her sleeping on his bed, a knock-out drug patch stuck to her neck, and headed to one of the ship’s stores to pick up a small atomic shear. He made his way back to the hold airlock, then carved out Ikbal’s welding job with the shear’s force-blade. It took him mere minutes and he wondered why he’d thought it would in any way stop what lay on the other side. There was no doubt that tools like this were part of Penny Royal’s body. Soon he was inside the airlock. Noting that the air in the hold was still good, he opened the inner lock door and stepped through.

  Once inside, Blite just stood there with his mouth hanging open. The back wall of the hold, along with most of another wall, was missing. Somehow their materials had been converted into organic-looking pillars and crossbeams. From where he was standing, he could see all the way to the U-space drive. Notable too, were clumps of hardware that had sprouted from the ship’s structure like puffballs, interlinked by a mycelium of optics and bright silver s-con wires. Penny Royal was where Blite had last seen it. But now it lay right down on the deck in simple black sea-urchin form—if such a creature could measure ten feet across.

  “What have you done to my fucking ship!” Blite roared. Then, remembering just what he was shouting at, along with his own intention to abandon ship as soon as possible, he felt foolish. “What have you done?”

  Some spines twitched towards him but otherwise there was no response. He moved further in, right up to those spines, but felt decidedly vulnerable. With his skin crawling, he stepped back. He walked over to one of the puffball objects, pressed a hand against it and found it solid, also noting small lights gleaming in deep recesses in the surface. There were occasional holes through to packed and highly complex tech. He turned and sat down on it.

  “I want you to leave my crew alone,” he said.

  Again that twitch of spines, then a silvery tentacle extruded from underneath the AI and rose up into a two-foot-high spike. While he watched, the end of the spike, just below the point, swelled into a small sphere which opened lids to reveal a blue human eye. Blite recognized this as an acknowledgement of his presence.

  “Leave my crew alone,” he repeated.

  “Overspill,” said Penny Royal. “Eight must be controlled.”

  “I’ve no idea what you’re talking about.”

  “Previous difficulty,” said Penny Royal, then, “Fixed.”

  The eye-stalk abruptly retracted and Blite just knew that was all the response he would get. After a while longer he stood and left the hold, just in time to hear Martina’s shout of, “Oh no! No!” As he walked back towards the bridge she rushed past him, his bed sheet wrapped around her body; she paused to give him a horrified look, then ran on. He halted, turned and walked back down the corridor to Medical. Greer glanced over at him, still seeming hazy, but also apparently puzzled at her surroundings.

  “Still want to be beautiful?” he asked.

  It took her a moment to understand him, then her expression turned indignant.

  “I am beautiful,” she said.

  He released the reinforced straps holding her and went to find Brondohohan on the bridge. The man looked over at him with a pursed mouth and annoyed expression.

  “I see Ikbal has stopped scratching,” said Brond. “And suddenly I can distinguish between reality and hallucination.”

  “It’s like sharing a ship with a tornado,” said Blite, seating himself in one of the chairs. “I don’t think there’s any intent to hurt us, this time, but it might just inadvertently rip us apart.”

  “A mental maelstrom,” said Brond.

  “Quite.”

  Haber moved back in with Chont after another day, and only a little while after that did Blite learn what their problem had been. They had always been close—a closeness some had described as practically telepathic. After their visit to the engine room they’d found themselves really sensing each other’s emotions, along with the babble behind coherent thought. It had been just too intense, even frightening. Martina refused to speak to him for quite some time afterwards but, when he forced a meeting with her, she reluctantly accepted that all he had done was knock her out.

  Finally, the U-space drive shut down, for they had arrived at their destination. Blite was on the bridge with Martina and Greer, and all three looked at each other and failed to react. They had planned to abandon ship at this point yet, during the journey, something had changed. Faced now with the actual moment, they did nothing.

  “We’re just out from an E6 green-belt planet,” Leven announced. “Penny Royal is presently focusing ship’s scanners on all orbital objects.”

  “It’s looking for something,” said Martina.

  “No shit,” Greer replied.

  “Can you give us a view?” asked Blite.

  He then immediately felt the push and shove of thrusters as the ship’s aspect changed, swinging a milky yellow orb into view.

  “You can control thrusters?” Blite asked.

  “It seems I can do anything I like,” replied Leven, “until I do something Penny Royal doesn’t like.” Then, after a pause, “It’s found something.”

  “Show me,” said Blite.

  A frame appeared superimposed on one side of the planet, which then expanded, but there was nothing in it. Blite was about to ask about that when Leven said, “I’m not even sure what it’s found. There’s some kind of odd low-level U-space signature there. Penny Royal just sent a heavily coded pulse to that area.” Another pause. “Ah, chameleonware.”

  As Blite watched, the designated area of space shimmered and something folded out of it. The thing looked like a spinning top a hundred feet across, its spindle a weird semi-organic tangle. After a moment, he saw that the rim of the thing was an old-style Tokomak fusion torus—much like those the Polity had used to power orbital weapons.

  “Some kind of particle cannon?” Martina suggested.

  It didn’t look much like a cannon to Blite.

  “It’s powering up now and that U-signature is strengthening.” The focus on the object drew back, and Leven then highlighted something in red—a tube spearing down towards the planet from one end of the object’s spindle.

  “Some bizarre kind of ionizing scoop-field to feed the Tokomak from the atmosphere,” said Leven. Then, “The resultant energy is being U-transmitted away.”

  “Where to?” asked Blite.

  “I can’t tell—it’s just going into U-space.”

  The focus closed in again to show the object speckled with lights like spider eyes, a haze of energy all around it. Next, just a moment later, it folded out of existence again.

  “Chameleonware re-engaged,” said Leven needlessly.

  Blite stared at the empty frame, the machine they had just seen sitting leaden in his mind. Penny Royal had activated the thing or, rather, reactivated it, and it was now putting out a great deal of power. He had no idea what this was all about, but didn’t like it at all. Even when the frame closed, he still seemed to feel the Tokomak out there, grazing on and fusing atmosphere and feeding the resulting power into something.

  Leven now said, “Penny Royal just began scanning the surface.”

  Was there a link between that machine and an object down on the surface? Blite felt certain there wasn’t, that the machine had been activated and now the black AI was focusing on other concerns.

  The fusion drive fired then—the orb of the world rapidly expanding. Blite felt a relaxing of tension as the rest of the crew joined them, still none of them showing any inclination to make a rush for the shuttle. Haber asked what was going on and Martina explained, replaying a vid of the machine they had just seen. They discussed the thing and speculated, but could come to no conclusions. Haber and Chont eventually wandered off while Brond and Ikbal installed themselves in the other two chairs.

  Over the ensuing hour, Penny Royal adjusted their course and Blite realized its intention was to scan the entire surface.

  “Any ideas what it’s looking for now?” he asked generally.r />
  “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 ba
nished. 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.