Free Asimov's Science Fiction: April/May 2013 by Penny Publications Page A

turn my head slightly, searching for Harriet, just in time to see her huff out a haze of smoke, slump, and then sprawl beside me.
    I'd let her down. I'd been careless. I felt a surge of grief immediately followed by a dead dark hopelessness. What was the point now? What was the point of... continuing?
    Give me the gun,
said the Client.
    The farcaster was here and my search had been a pointless one. I just couldn't understand, I just couldn't... and then I saw it.
    The human body lay inside some kind of pod at the foot of the tree, almost like a flower yet to open. Through crystal distortions I could see it nestled in white snakes, some attached to it, small ones around the gaping wound in its skull, a large one entering its mouth, others attached here and there around a body that had been broken and torn. And through crystal distortions I recognized my own face.
    Give me the gun.
It wasn't an instruction in human language but a need, a chemical pattern, a chain of pheromones perpetually renewing. Somehow I found the strength to resist, and saw the snakes wriggling about my doppelganger lying under crystal ahead.
    No,
I managed.
    It could send one of its exoforms to take me apart and thereafter seize the gun. I knew with absolute certainty that it had finished with me. I was a tool it had employed and all its tools died when their usefulness was at an end. I knew with utter certainty that I was going to die. I just did not want to die in ignorance.
    Explain,
I tried.
    The Client at once understood that I accepted defeat and death, and relented.
    The pressure came off and I found myself deeper in the Client's distributed mind, ever dying and ever renewing. Chemical language offered itself and I accepted. I was me and the Client again and its memories opened. Of course the Client was able to manipulate its own genes and its own biology and, like all its kind, that manipulation was part of it and not some logically refined science. The Client's species did have its geneticists, its bio-techs, and even its bio-warfare experts, but the Client wasn't one of them. That had been a lie. However, it was an expert and it was that expertise that had enabled it to escape. It was an expert in U-space tech, it was an alien Iversus Skaidon, and it had built the farcaster.
    I understood now what had killed the thetics and Harriet: energy dense micro-explosives no larger than spores but detonating inside with the force of gunshots. The Client had farcast such explosives into the prador aboard the
Coin Collector,
draining its limited supply of energy and using up those same explosives, before escaping aboard that ship so long ago, the worlds of its kind burning and tearing apart under prador kamikaze assault.
    Why not all,
I wondered.
    It could have made more of these explosives and steadily annihilated every prador in existence, surely? No, because there were trillions of prador and each first-child or second-child, as the Client had learned, could not be killed with just one such explosive. And here was the complete killer of that idea: it needed to know the precise locations of its targets. It needed help; it needed spotters to locate prime targets like father-captains, like the king of the prador. And it needed a weapon that once farcast into such a target would then wipe out all the prador around it—its family. That's where the Polity came in, and that's where I came in: one of the Polity's prime biowarfare experts.
    I felt the rage again. The orders had been explicit: nothing was to remain. Even as I hit the destruct to turn all my computer files to atomic dust and burn up my samplesin thousand-watt laser bursts, the micro-dense explosives tore me apart, and I knew nothing. Now, however, I understood how little trust the Client had of its allies, how it had targeted them all, killing all the humans in the team, shattering the crystal minds of all the AIs. Then, realizing its mistake, it had come for me, and incorporated me—drawn me in