by Neal Asher
“Right …” Why the drone had felt the need to tell me that I’d no idea.
“You have a prador second-child mind aboard this Polity destroyer,” said Riss.
I headed for the door, noting the emphasis. “Yes, when I salvaged this particular boat the previous occupant wasn’t aboard. Incidentally, you do know the war has been over for a century?”
“My kind does not have human problems with time.”
“Yeah, of course—some sort of atomic clock inside you, accurate down to the millisecond. But then relativity can screw around with things like that. I often think that the good old organic conception of time can be more practical. I mean, would I really want to feel, deep inside myself, how much time has passed since Panarchia? Feeling the weight of the years I spent as quantum processes, inside a chunk of ruby, might drive me mad.”
“My kind does not have human problems with madness.”
I paused then, because the repetition didn’t sound too good. I might be dealing with something damaged.
“You have got to be kidding me!” I exclaimed. “Or do you exclude from ‘your kind’ the mind that previously occupied this very destroyer? The one who in later years took up residence inside that very planetoid out there?”
“Where is Penny Royal?” asked Riss.
Now that sounded better, and I started walking again.
“Apparently on the planet Masada, acting as the heavy for an AI warden called Amistad. It seems there must be a statute of limitations on AI murderers. I never knew that.”
Riss emitted a perfectly in keeping reptilian hiss.
I finally reached an airlock into the nose section, opened it and stepped inside, not having to wait for pressures to equalize before going through the second door. Beyond it, catwalks wound here and there between the main nose-section components and masses of solid foam filling. I could just see the bulk of the railgun and the loading carousels through skeins of optics and s-con cables, tube-feeds, conveyors and structural beams. There being no grav-plates here, I turned on my boots’ gecko function, tramped down one catwalk and stepped out onto a curving mass of hard foam. I walked up the curve along a path towards the central cylinder of the main armoury. Of course this wasn’t where most of the munitions were kept, since they were distributed against being destroyed by one hit. But it was where most of the assembly or refinement took place.
“So I take it you’re not pleased about that?” I asked.
“Penny Royal should die.”
“Oh I agree, and that is an end I intend to accomplish.”
“What is your name, human?”
“Thorvald Spear, bio-espionage, late of Berners’ division on Panarchia before Penny Royal fried it. I’m a one-time captive of the prador and onetime comrade of Jebel U-cap Krong, in whose service I met a drone just like you. I was recently resurrected after having been dead for over a hundred years.”
Riss didn’t respond to that, not then.
The path led me to an opening through which ran a missile conveyor assembly, which I had to squeeze past to get inside. To my right I noted neat racks of the missiles Flute had manufactured, and at the end of another conveyor, I saw the edge of a loading carousel packed with the same. The spherical mass of the bomb was clamped at its poles and equator, positioned about halfway along the armoury. On either side of it, ship’s robots lay neatly folded and inert. Maybe Flute had tried to use them and Riss had disabled them. Or Flute hadn’t even bothered trying to activate them, knowing they were no match for the thing now wrapped around our bomb.
I moved further into the armoury while studying the drone. Just as she had appeared in vacuum, she resembled a huge cobra with its hood spread. I could see four manipulators extending down below and an ovipositor extending from her tail. However, she now looked very alive as she probed some mechanism on the bomb’s surface with her manipulators, her body in constant motion. She looked as if she were trying to get a good grip on the weapon so as to squeeze the life out it. Her body was metallic, like mercury, nacreous and slightly translucent, so I could see the shadowy movement of its internal workings. In her way, she was quite beautiful. But then you can admire a tiger’s grace before it eats you or, more appositely, you can admire the patterns on a snake’s skin before it strikes.
“Nobody survived Panarchia,” she said as I drew closer.
“History often has to be revised as new facts arise,” I replied, annoyed by this constant response from anyone who knew anything about that world.
“All were accounted for,” Riss insisted.
“Well,” I drew to a halt, “I’ll be the first to admit that my memory isn’t that brilliant. But I distinctly remember, shortly after the bombardment, seeing the prador try a full thrall on Captain Gideon before trying out the spider version on me.”
“Standard humans cannot survive thralling,” Riss observed.
“I was dying before U-cap rescued me.”
“You are incorrect,” said Riss, apparently about to say something more but then falling silent. However, by then my annoyance had taken a firmer hold.
“You seem mightily inclined to preach about what’s possible and what isn’t. I thought that kind of thing was more typical of us stupid, limited human beings!”
“Fascinating.” Riss now released her manipulators from the bomb mechanism, raised her head and swung it round to inspect me. Her eyes were a blank bright blue and positioned just like a cobras. However, she briefly blinked open a third jet-black eye, positioned in a small turret jutting from the top of her flat skull.
“What’s fascinating?” I asked, still irritated.
“I do remember you from the attack on the Durana mining complex. I was that drone,” Riss replied. “They managed to place you in a stasis pod and you were evacuated for medical treatment.”
“So?” Surely I had died there … surely that was the place?
“My kind does not have human problems with time.”
Again that sentence.
“Are you damaged?” I asked.
“I lost system function during my encounter with Penny Royal fifty-eight years ago, but function is now restored,” Riss replied.
Ah, I would have to be very careful with this snake.
Riss continued, “I will allow one textual communication from your aug giving a precis of your story until now. If I am satisfied, I will relinquish control of this fusion device.”
I felt like telling her to fuck off, but that wasn’t a great idea. Assassin drones were deliberately manufactured to be paranoid and aggressive and they were made quickly, which tended to generate a lot in the way of copying errors. I couldn’t rule out that this one might also be suicidal.
I paused, staring at her while I checked out available resources in my aug. I then collated fact and memory. This started with the background I had passed to Isobel and I added my memories of Panarchia. Then I loaded my recollections of the world where Jebel had rescued me from the prador. Lastly came Durana, where I had died. Then I detailed how these memories were reacquired during my resurrection and listed everything that had happened since. I ran all this through a text conversion program, then through an intelligent precis program. I ended up with ten thousand words of text, just as my aug signalled that a new com channel had opened. When I transmitted all this to Riss she froze for a second, blinked her black eye, then steadily unwound herself from the bomb.
“Are we good?” I asked.
“Fascinating,” said Riss again. “It seems we are of similar purpose and, though you are suffering some confusion, you seem very capable indeed.”
“Flute,” I said, “put us on course for Masada. We need to go and have a talk with the warden there—this Amistad.”
Riss snaked towards me, propelled by some sort of grav, maglev or hardfield interaction, odd distortions appearing in the air all about her.
“I am not in the least bit confused,” I stated.
“You are if you think Penny Royal bombed Panarchia before
our attack on Durana, when we targeted that Ucapium mine,” Riss replied.
“Oh yeah?” I said, wondering if the drone had anything to gain by lying—if it even could. I then groped for independent facts with which to refute its information. Finding none, I continued weakly with, “Well, what happened to you?”
THE WAR: RISS
It was always like coming home, because this was the place she was made for: the odour of decay on a seashore, the clattering and bubbling of prador speech and the constant background rumble of their hard armoured feet traversing the corridors. The spatters of green blood on stone signified the casual violence of the hierarchy and, as constant background, she could hear the hiss and rumble of heavy hydraulics and the sounds of other positively antediluvian machines. These were all the sights, smells and sounds of a prador dreadnought. Coiled in an alcove, she was loaded with limeworm eggs and concealed by chameleonware. She’d located one of those hiding places second-children used if they wanted to avoid a cracked shell from any passing first-child. Here Riss, assassin drone, Special Series Seven, awaited the arrival of her first victim.
It had been surprisingly easy to get aboard. Something major had happened in the Prador Kingdom, which was causing disarray out here on the front. Three prador capital ships had abruptly retreated from Polity forces that they could’ve easily overcome. They’d now gathered to orbit this system’s single ice giant, as something about said major event had called for a mandible-to-mandible meeting between the three father-captains. Their security had been almost non-existent, contemptuous, even. It had therefore taken little effort for Riss to attach herself to a shuttle, slipping inside the ship where the meeting was taking place. Riss had some interest in the events that had led to this meeting, but her main focus was on her mission. Her awareness was taken up with the tight gravid feeling of her meta-material body, and the urge to relieve herself of that feeling by depositing her millions of parasite eggs amidst as many prador as possible. Until that moment, she kept them warm, alive and cosy in a special container inside her, in her womb, her children …
Such was the frantic activity aboard this ship that it wasn’t long before a second-child—a nicely healthy specimen with just a few healing cracks in its shell—felt the need to dodge into the alcove to avoid two first-children facing off in the corridor. Riss uncoiled as the second-child backed towards her, raised her cobra head and darted forwards. She brought the underside of her spread hood down onto the young prador’s shell. It was done gently, almost caressingly, but the sticky lower surface adhered to the carapace. She then squeezed just a few hundred of the microscopic eggs into a pressure chamber at the base of her collimated diamond ovipositor, hooped her body up into a loop, and drove in the long thin spike. She precisely targeted a juncture between one back limb and the main body. With a minor convulsion, she injected the eggs, then immediately flipped herself away into the back of the alcove, ensuring her chameleonware was still optimal even while she revelled in a feeling that was almost … orgasmic.
The second-child whirled round, its claws up and snapping at the air. Riss recognized the creature’s instinctive response to a parasite attack. Had Riss actually been a limeworm parasite, and had she not withdrawn as quickly as she had, the second-child might well have snipped her in half. This example of the kind now lowered its claws, vibrating its mandibles together in obvious prador confusion. It knew that something had hurt it and that it had reacted in a way it didn’t understand. But now the pain was fading even as the eggs spread through its body to encyst in its soft tissues.
Turning back towards the corridor, it watched the two first-children move out of sight, then darted out and away, the incident here already forgotten. Later, the encysted eggs inside it would hatch out into juvenile worms. These would eat it from the inside, growing and dividing, penetrating its gut and then exiting via its rectum. They would feed on ship lice as they grew to adult form and mated, moving on to infect other prador. It was a particularly nasty biological weapon, but one Riss had no compunction in using, for she was made precisely for this task. Riss, effectively, was the weapon. And now, the urge to expel just a few more of those eggs drove her out into the corridor.
Second-children were fine but, being constrained on where they could go, they weren’t the best of vectors. Riss closed in on the rear of the nearest first-child. Here was a confrontation between the first-children of two separate father-captains. At present, because they were both about the same size as and thus evenly matched, they were still threatening each other and manoeuvring. Chameleonware still operating, Riss attached herself to the rear of the nearest one and punched in her ovipositor, this time injecting a larger load of eggs. The first-child began the instinctive turn but, because of the threat before it, did not go all the way. Its opponent, however, saw this as an opportunity. It slammed into the first prador with a shuddering crash and tried to close a claw on one of its legs. As they grappled, Riss slid underneath the first to target the second, driving her ovipositor into it the base of a manipulator limb. That done, she slithered away, noting the two first-children now backing away from each other. They were reassessing their position as some pragmatic sense suppressed instinct. Then they went their separate ways, both now biological time-bombs and as good as dead.
Now the prize.
Riss began closing in on the inner sanctum, negotiating architecture familiar because it had been programmed into the root of her being. Outer corridors swarmed with armed and nervy prador, and the signs of conflict quivered and bubbled here and there on the floors. However, Riss resisted the urge to inject more eggs, for the three attacks had taken away the edge, relieved some of the urge. Aboard this ship were three father-captains. Admittedly, father-captains did not travel as widely as their first-children, but certain other circumstances made them much better infective vectors. Their sheer body mass enabled them to produce millions of limeworms before the internal damage killed them. Every single member of their brood would visit them at some point and become parasitized. They tended not to admit to themselves that they had a problem and one result of this was a steadily growing madness. Since the father-captains controlled such formidable weapons, this could become a huge hindrance to the prador war effort, which was what, after all, Riss was here to undermine.
Despite the high concentration of prador in the corridors, Riss reached the diagonally divided door to the inner sanctum without discovery. Certainly, she’d had to evade all manner of detection devices, but again the prador here were being slack with their security. The drone had seen this before and had put it down to the prador’s almost psychotic denial of the reality of assassin drones. Here their certainty of the current battle, despite what had caused these three ships to withdraw, had exacerbated their natural arrogance. This was going to be a pleasure—
“Assassin drone Riss,” said an internal voice.
“I hear you, Primeval,” Riss replied through her internal U-space communicator to the distant Polity dreadnought.
“You are to desist and withdraw,” the dreadnought AI continued. “No further action.”
Riss emitted an involuntary hiss. This caused a nearby first-child, who was armed to the mandibles, to swing round in suspicion—inspecting the apparently empty floor before the doors.
“Why?” Riss eventually asked.
“The facts of the matter are not entirely clear,” said Primeval, “but it seems that the prador king has been usurped, and that the usurper has called for a ceasefire. It may be that the war is about to end.”
“I hardly think that likely. This is probably just some ploy to wrong-foot us—to gain some advantage.”
“If that is the case, then we are failing to see it,” Primeval continued. “Our analysis shows a ceasefire gives us the advantage, since our industrial output of weapons now exceeds that of the prador.”
“It seems foolish for me to withdraw now,” Riss argued. “I still have a full load of limeworm eggs. And three father-captains are on the o
ther side of one last door.”
“Orders are orders,” replied Primeval.
“But who’s to say they won’t start fighting again?” said Riss, sure of her own utter reasonableness. “The prador here owe loyalty to the previous king and might decide on a schism from the new one.”
“They have already signalled their intent to withdraw and are calling in all their troops, drones, kamikazes and attack boats.”
“Perhaps I should just stay—”
“The order is direct from Earth Central.”
“We’re stopping? We should finish this—they’ll only attack again when the new king is established.”
“It’s a direct order from the top, Riss: withdraw now.”
“But—”
The signal came directly through the same communications channel—a code Riss hardly recognized until it self-assembled and did its work. It inserted itself in Riss’s version of an autonomic nervous system like a mental laxative. Riss hooped, squeezed and opened, spraying a jet of white carrier fluid filled with her entire load of eggs. The prador, seeing the stream apparently appearing out of nowhere, scribing a dripping line across the sanctum doors, centred one Gatling cannon and fired. It tore a trench across the floor where Riss had been discharging herself just a second previously.
Now attached to the ceiling, Riss felt a sense of emptiness beyond the physical. She squirmed to safety, heading out towards the dreadnought’s open hatches. A stream of recalled drones and armoured prador were flowing through, but the chamelonware still held. She would eject herself out into space, beyond the reach of the ship’s U-fields and wait to be picked up. Beyond that, she just had no idea what to do next, for she faced the end of her entire reason for existence.
ISOBEL
Crouched inside the Moray Firth, now down in the Rock Pool’s small space port, Isobel damned herself for her stupidity as she watched her cameras on Trent fail. She had embarked on this venture with Thorvald Spear—an activity she wouldn’t have contemplated a few years back. She wouldn’t even have met him back then, and so been enticed by his promise of a cure. One of her lieutenants would have negotiated with him and taken him to the destroyer. Though a more likely scenario would have been Spear being dragged off to be tortured, then cut-auged of everything of value in his skull before being dispatched to the prador.