Deathstalker 04 - Deathstalker Honor

They were almost hypnotically beautiful, and at first Daniel just stopped and smiled. But the strange colors seemed to seep past his eyes and into his brain, muddying his thoughts, and soon his head began to pound in time to the flaring of the lights.
    “What the hell is that?” he said, turning his gaze away and knuckling his streaming eyes through the suit.
    “The AIs are thinking out loud,” said Jacob. “Or dreaming. It’s the same thing really.”
    After a while the glows faded away. Jacob set off again, Daniel trailing tiredly behind. They passed columns of shining steel, rising and falling endlessly, and giant tanks of colored aerated liquids, and then they came to an endless assembly line for Fury chassis. Coiling robot arms fused metal human arms and legs to bulging chest units with blue steel skulls. Steel fingers twitched, shining legs flexed. And the supply of metal bodies never paused and never ended. Jacob reeled off specifications and endurance limits that Daniel didn’t even try to follow. He thought he was beginning to understand why the AIs wanted him to see all this. He was the first living human ever allowed to see the recent achievements of Shub, and they felt the need to boast, to show how far they’d come from what they used to be. To show how much further they’d progressed from their creators.
    How very human, thought Daniel, smiling.
    Of course, he still had no idea why the AIs had allowed him onto their planet. There had to be some purpose behind it. The AIs did nothing on impulse; everything they did was always just a part of long-term planning. But they’d tell him eventually, no doubt. When they’d finally run out of things to boast about.
    Their next stop was a gallery looking down from a great height over a vast steel valley, at the bottom of which the metal trees from Unseeli were being processed. The heat was appalling, even inside Daniel’s protective suit. Jacob wasn’t bothered. The sheer scale of the process was staggering, even after everything Daniel had already seen. Unseeli’s metal forests had covered their world from pole to pole, and the AIs had harvested every single one of them. Billions of trees, and many billions of tons of metal.
    Daniel didn’t even try to visualize it. Jacob said the processing would be over in a matter of weeks, and Daniel didn’t feel like arguing with him.
    “Heavy metals from the cores of the trunks will go to power stardrives,” said Jacob, leaning perilously over the edge of the gallery for a better look, quite unbothered by any sense of vertigo. “The other metals will be separated out and used for construction of starship hulls. Soon Shub will have a fleet larger than anything Humanity has ever seen, run by an army of Furies and Ghost Warriors.” “How did you find Unseeli?” said Daniel. “I always thought its location was one of Humanity’s best-guarded secrets.”
    Jacob sniffed. “Some human sold us the information long ago. We just waited till we required the metals, and then we just moved in and took what we needed.” “But why wait?” said Daniel. “What’s so special about now?”
    “You’ll see,” said Jacob.
    “Some people say the forest was alive,” said Daniel. “That the trees possessed a group mind, haunting Unseeli with the ghosts of those who used to live there before Captain Silence had the planet scorched.”
    “If there was any such thing, the AIs found no trace of it,” said Jacob.
    “Perhaps ghosts don’t travel well.”
    “It was also said that the trees were too massively useful to have evolved naturally. That they must have been gengineered by some unknown alien race. What if they come back to see who’s been messing with their garden?” “Then Shub will deal with them too,” said Jacob. “It’s their own fault for not building better fences.”
    They moved on, past more conveyer-belt lines, carrying unidentifiable tech from somewhere to somewhere else. Daniel didn’t bother asking what or where. He was pretty sure he wouldn’t have understood the answer anyway. But weary as he was, he still perked up some when Jacob showed him the wreck of the alien starship the AIs had taken from Unseeli. The alien craft was hundreds of feet long, an insane tangle of slender brass columns interrupted by protruding glazed nodes and spiked and barbed projections. It looked more like a warren than a ship, but there was something subtly intriguing about its shape, which bordered on the