snapping open. In hot orange vastness I screamed chemical terror and shed. Nerve plugs and sockets parted and a mass of dry chitin fell, a hollow waspish thing bouncing amidst many of the same, doubled iridescent wings shattering like safety glass.
And next all was clear again with new eyes to see. Thirty-two wings beat and pheromone receptors began receiving again, while the synaesthetic interpreters turned the language and code of the Client into something I could understand. The creature rose up, a hundred feet tall, opened its beak and with its new black tongue tasted the air of its furnace.
"You have failed again," it said.
As the Polity knew to its cost, the prador were vicious predators not prepared to countenance other intelligent entities in their universe. What had not been known,until a year into the start of the war when it seemed that humanity, the Polity, and its AIs faced extinction, was that the prador were already practiced in the art of extermination.
I was working in bioweapons—the natural place in the war for a parasitologist and bio-synthesist—trying to resurrect a parasite of those giant crablike homicidal maniacs, when I was abruptly reassigned. I later learnt that the parasite was resurrected and delivered as a terror weapon by assassin drones made in its shape. They sneaked aboard prador ships or into their bases, and injected parasite eggs—prador father-captains extinguished by the worms chewing out their insides.
Only once I was aboard the destroyer ferrying me to my destination, along with a large and varied collection of other experts, did I get the story. Before the prador encountered the Polity they had encountered another alien species whose realm encompassed just three or four star systems. Being the prador, they had attacked at once, but then found themselves in a long drawn-out war against a hive species who even in organic form approached AI levels of intelligence, and who quickly developed some seriously nasty weaponry in response to the attack. The war had dragged on for decades but, in the end, the massive resources of the prador Kingdom told against the hive creatures. It was during this conflict that the prador developed their kamikazes, and not during the prador-human war, and it was with kamikazes that the prador steadily annihilated the hive creatures' worlds. However, one of these multifaceted beings, a weapons developer no less, managed to steal a prador cargo ship and get out through the prador blockade of the systems of its kind. And now, this creature, which the AI's referred to as the Client, wanted to ally itself with the Polity for some payback.
My memories of my time with the Client are vague. I'm sure we worked together on bioweapons while other experts there worked on the more knotty problem of delivery systems, and other weapons arising from the Client's science. A bioweapon capable of annihilating every prador it came into contact with was perfectly feasible, but getting it into contact with enough of them wasn't so easy. Though the prador fought under one king to destroy the Polity, they were often physically isolated. The father-captains remained aboard their ships, only coming into physical contact with their own kin. Many prador wore atmosphere sealed armor perpetually, while others had been surgically transplanted into the aseptic interiors of their war machines. A plague would not spread and, to be effective, would have to be delivered across millions of targets. This seemed impossible, until the farcaster....
U-space tech has always been difficult. A runcible gate will only open into another runcible gate and a U-space drive for a ship is effectively its own gate. Open ended runcibles had been proposed, developed, and had failed. Without the catcher's mitt there at the other end, nothing without its own integral U-space drive could surface from underspace. It couldn't work. It wasn't possible.
Except it was.
Because of the vagueness of my memories of
And next all was clear again with new eyes to see. Thirty-two wings beat and pheromone receptors began receiving again, while the synaesthetic interpreters turned the language and code of the Client into something I could understand. The creature rose up, a hundred feet tall, opened its beak and with its new black tongue tasted the air of its furnace.
"You have failed again," it said.
As the Polity knew to its cost, the prador were vicious predators not prepared to countenance other intelligent entities in their universe. What had not been known,until a year into the start of the war when it seemed that humanity, the Polity, and its AIs faced extinction, was that the prador were already practiced in the art of extermination.
I was working in bioweapons—the natural place in the war for a parasitologist and bio-synthesist—trying to resurrect a parasite of those giant crablike homicidal maniacs, when I was abruptly reassigned. I later learnt that the parasite was resurrected and delivered as a terror weapon by assassin drones made in its shape. They sneaked aboard prador ships or into their bases, and injected parasite eggs—prador father-captains extinguished by the worms chewing out their insides.
Only once I was aboard the destroyer ferrying me to my destination, along with a large and varied collection of other experts, did I get the story. Before the prador encountered the Polity they had encountered another alien species whose realm encompassed just three or four star systems. Being the prador, they had attacked at once, but then found themselves in a long drawn-out war against a hive species who even in organic form approached AI levels of intelligence, and who quickly developed some seriously nasty weaponry in response to the attack. The war had dragged on for decades but, in the end, the massive resources of the prador Kingdom told against the hive creatures. It was during this conflict that the prador developed their kamikazes, and not during the prador-human war, and it was with kamikazes that the prador steadily annihilated the hive creatures' worlds. However, one of these multifaceted beings, a weapons developer no less, managed to steal a prador cargo ship and get out through the prador blockade of the systems of its kind. And now, this creature, which the AI's referred to as the Client, wanted to ally itself with the Polity for some payback.
My memories of my time with the Client are vague. I'm sure we worked together on bioweapons while other experts there worked on the more knotty problem of delivery systems, and other weapons arising from the Client's science. A bioweapon capable of annihilating every prador it came into contact with was perfectly feasible, but getting it into contact with enough of them wasn't so easy. Though the prador fought under one king to destroy the Polity, they were often physically isolated. The father-captains remained aboard their ships, only coming into physical contact with their own kin. Many prador wore atmosphere sealed armor perpetually, while others had been surgically transplanted into the aseptic interiors of their war machines. A plague would not spread and, to be effective, would have to be delivered across millions of targets. This seemed impossible, until the farcaster....
U-space tech has always been difficult. A runcible gate will only open into another runcible gate and a U-space drive for a ship is effectively its own gate. Open ended runcibles had been proposed, developed, and had failed. Without the catcher's mitt there at the other end, nothing without its own integral U-space drive could surface from underspace. It couldn't work. It wasn't possible.
Except it was.
Because of the vagueness of my memories of
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