Read Online War Factory: Transformations Book Two by Neal Aher - Free Book Online

began screaming as it hauled me from the floor. But that wasn’t the worst. I felt the blade sucking everything I was, both physically and mentally, in towards itself, whirling down in an agonizing and terrifying maelstrom towards . . . nothing. Just screaming and screaming as I went.
    “Spear! Thorvald Spear!” Flute was shouting over the intercom, just as my cabin door opened and Riss entered—the lock obviously no problem for the snake drone. I guessed I had become a bit vocal during that particular nightmare.
    “I’m okay,” I said hoarsely, sitting upright.
    I reached down and rubbed at my chest, still feeling the hard sharpness of that thing skewering me; still feeling Garton’s death. I wasn’t all right. Garton’s skewering equated to the spine nailed into my mind and I just knew that there were thousands clamouring to tell me their stories through it—the unquiet dead were demanding to be heard.
    FATHER-CAPTAIN CVORN
    As the latest images and data came in from his spy satellites, Cvorn felt a great deal of satisfaction, but tempered by a degree of chagrin. Cvorn, a huge crablike prador, floating on grav-motors because he had long ago lost his legs and claws, crunched his mandibles together before the visual turret at his fore. He could never have misled Sverl so thoroughly before. Cvorn could never have achieved such an intricately balanced and perfectly targeted piece of destruction when he had been a normal prador father-captain.
    When Cvorn had gone to the Rock Pool he had been as baffled as Sverl by the victory of humanity and the AIs over the might of the Prador Kingdom, and he had felt the new king’s betrayal of the prador race just as deeply. Making peace with the humans should not have been an option. Unlike Sverl, however, Cvorn had not gone seeking answers by allowing himself to become the plaything of a black AI. He had brooded, and he had made his plans for vengeance. Meanwhile, over the years, it became apparent that Sverl was changing in some strange way. Affronted by the restraint Sverl steadily placed on him, Cvorn began investigating this, and soon obtained answers by way of ship lice, their tiny brains surgically altered and their carapaces dotted with pin cams, inserted via a sea-floor robot recalled into Sverl’s dreadnought.
    Cvorn’s first reaction was a visceral horror and he had almost set in motion one of the many plans he had been toying with for an attack on Sverl. It wasn’t that he had resented Sverl when he first made these plans—all father-captains made such preparations. At the last moment, he stopped himself. He had been thinking long and hard at the bottom of that ocean and, though Sverl had changed, it was notable how his deployment of Polity technology, amalgamated with prador technology, had led to greater efficiencies. Sverl had become very smart and seemed to be on to something. Perhaps Cvorn needed to show some restraint, and to learn.
    Sverl was turning into something monstrous—some horrible combination of both prador and human—but this wasn’t the source of his increased intelligence. It took Cvorn many years of watching to realize that Sverl wasn’t just part human, but augmented too. A partial confirmation of this came from a careful study of Sverl’s behaviour, such as how he controlled things around him, like that horrible Golem, and from a further study of all the intercepted computer code. Final confirmation came from an X-ray photograph of Sverl, the X-rays apparently generated when a louse ate into the shielding of a piece of ship equipment. Unfortunately, shortly after the confirmation of Sverl’s augmentation, Cvorn lost access when the other father-captain exterminated all his ship lice and started using Polity cleanbots for the same purpose.
    AI crystal was growing around Sverl’s major ganglion—crystal precisely matching that of the Polity AIs. Sverl was turning into the enemy he had wanted to understand. Cvorn, who had always been a