by Neal Asher
“So that was your plan?” asked the prador.
The lasers were having minimal effect, merely burning up a few stray railgun slugs and putting a little extra strain on the reavers’ hard-field defence.
“Every little counts,” she replied.
Heavy ionization now kept throwing up error reports, and small sparks of lightning flickered from point to point about the platform’s hull. The density out there was getting close to optimum.
On the first test the funnel of hardfields, its wide end directed towards the sun, lasted just a few seconds before field conflicts started blowing generators. The Client changed some parameters, putting more space between the fields, and tested it again. This time it held. Within just a second the ionized gas density at the narrow end of the funnel increased ten-fold, but overall density of the storm she was flying into was not yet enough. She ran a test of the attack pods’ arrays. Yes, they generated a rough tube of hardfields which, when hit with the effector weapons, took a huge positive charge, while the ion storm in the funnel was negative. Charge density just had to reach a particular level. Now she needed what might effectively be called the grid for this giant thermionic valve.
“What are you doing?” asked the prador, as its ships targeted another attack pod and peeled it with particle beams.
The item was a transport platform—just a half-mile squared of bubble-metal and composite driven by rockets at its corners. A negative charge to it in its holding bay gave the platform a positive charge as she launched it. Keeping an induction warfare beam on it managed to steadily ramp up that positive charge as the transport platform hurtled out. Just one more minute . . .
“No,” said the prador. “I am not liking this at all. It is time to stop
playing.”
“Too late,” she replied.
The ion density in the funnel hit optimum—a deep blue glow just two miles ahead and four miles to the side of the weapons platform. The vast mass of negatively charged ionized gas spurted out and curved slightly to the nearest positive—the transport platform—and turned it to plasma. The blue beam, a mile wide, continued to the next positive, the tube of hardfields, but did not slow, and went straight through. It flashed out and struck two of the reavers, peeling the side off one while the other melted and coiled up like a worm dropped on a hot plate. Sun-hot ionic gas leapt from these two to the other ships, one simply exploding. The formation broke, remaining ships scattering and coming under intense fire from the attack pods.
“And which is the frying pan and which is the fire?” the Client sent, but received no reply.
ZACKANDER
Consciousness returned like a blow to the head. Zackander opened his eyes and stared at stone, then tried to push himself up and initiate the grav in the mechanical part of his body. He got nothing. He tried to use the implants, which were actually in the human part of his body, to make contact with someone or something—anything—but they were dead inside him. The beam that had brought him down had been a gas laser, but one twinned with induction warfare EMR that fried most of his cyber element.
But he was a survivor. He was the oldest Cyberat of them all and he was damned if he was going to fall because of Doshane’s betrayal. He looked ahead towards the edge of the slab. He had landed his ship below it and there had to be a way down. He tried to remember the layout of the slab and its surroundings as he had seen them when coming in. Yes, over to the right there was a scree slope. It would be difficult, but all he needed to do was take his time and be careful. Doubtless Doshane had expected him to die without his cyber systems, but Zackander had always been cautious. His human body possessed many connection points to his systems but it was also self-contained. Yes, he would need water and food, but not for some time yet. He began dragging himself to where he was sure the scree slope lay, but the moment the glass ball of his lower half rattled across the stone he heard movement behind him.
Zackander stopped and looked round. There lay the heaped mass of burned and dismembered sea octids. However, some of them had escaped Angel’s particle beam and were now dragging themselves out of the mass. He gazed at them in disbelief. Three of them hauled themselves free and began pecking around themselves as if in irritation, flinging pieces of their fellows about. Grief? he wondered, but then had to think of his own survival. He was producing none of the EMR that he knew attracted these creatures to their prey, but they would certainly be drawn to any sound of movement. He eased himself along and winced, biting down a curse at the sound his chain-glass half made against the rock. One of the three octids paused in its pecking, parrot heads raised high and turning as it tried to triangulate the source of the sound. Zackander kept very still and after a moment the creature returned to its pecking.
He checked around himself. Nearby lay a piece of one of the crea-tures—a sheet of its skin with nodules of blubber on the inner face. He stretched out very slowly to snare it, pulled it over, then inch by inch pulled his chain-glass ball up onto it. He then secured it to the front of the ball using the clips on which he normally attached various tools. He now had a skid that prevented the chain-glass rattling against the rock, and he began to move on.
It seemed to take ages to get across the slab and twice he made noises that alerted the octids, but each time he kept still and waited until they returned to their pecking. Now he peered down the scree slope. He could see his ship and it was intact—Doshane had not yet put a missile into it as he had feared. Quite likely Doshane did not dislike Jain tech as much as he claimed and intended to come back later for the collection inside.
Zackander eased out onto the top of the slope, but no matter how careful he was, scree began to tumble away. That was noisy enough in itself, but then the fall of rocky fragments hit a thruster jutting from the side of his ship with a metallic rattling. All three octids raised their numerous beaked heads and zeroed in on him.
Zackander stared at them, again trying to stay still and silent, but it did not work this time. The octids started to head towards him. Not needing to move quietly now, he scrambled down the slope, losing the piece of flesh that had muffled the noise, his chain-glass half clonking and ringing. He felt scree giving way underneath him, then everything seemed to be on the move and he was falling in a small avalanche of rocky fragments. He folded his hands around his head and just went with it. His shoulder hit hard against something, he somersaulted and came down again, finally slamming into a flat surface. After a moment, he unwound his arms and looked around. He was against the base of his ship, which was down here on its belly. Looking up the slope he saw the three octids now pecking at the stone in confusion. He laughed, which was a mistake, because at once they started to make their way down the slope.
Zackander dragged himself round quickly, for he knew that not far from where he was lay a small maintenance airlock. Behind, he heard the scree avalanching again, then the thump of something heavy and fleshy against his ship. He crawled faster, as fast as he could, and there ahead was the airlock. He pulled himself in below it and for a moment was confused as to why it would not open. He had not sent the command; could not send the command. He stretched up, groping for the manual control, sure that it had frozen after all these years of disuse. The handle pulled out easily and turned smoothly, and the outer door popped open. With a last powerful effort, Zackander hauled himself inside and slammed the door behind him.
He lay panting in the airlock, not having thought further than this. Something kept niggling at his memory but he could not bring it to the fore. He dragged himself to the inner door and hauled himself as upright as he could manage to get to its control panel. The touch-screen presented him with a keypad and the demand for “command code.” He stared at it in bewilderment, then at the ten-second countdown above. He remembered now: one of his security measures. He stared and stared and could not for the life of him remember a code that sat in his lost cyber memory. The countdown zeroed, the outer door opened and the inner one pushed towards him like a plunger.
“Fuck you!” he shouted, but only to himself.
He fell out of his ship but did not reach the ground. Numerous beaked heads were there to catch him.
CYBERAT U-SPACE RESEARCH STATION
Jason was a Cyberat with little in the way of physical additions. All he sported was two extra arms sprouting from the side of his torso—silver like those of a skeletal Golem, but with ten fine fingers on each—along with sensory enhancements, mostly located in a silvery, slug-shaped addition to the crown of his head. Otherwise his enhancements were mental. He, and his crew of five other Cyberat, had watched the battle rage about their home world but had been thankfully distant. Returning to the control centre of the U-space research station, he noted that his crew were still watching their screens as yet more debris flashed to plasma against the station’s hardfields.
“Anything from Zackander?” asked Luterus.
Jason glanced across at the woman, her insect body squatting with legs folded underneath it as she checked her console. He nodded to himself and walked over to his chair, plonked himself down and decided how he was going to tell them: just the facts. He swung his chair round.
“I’ve just been talking to Doshane. He has taken charge—Zackander is dead.” After the exclamations of surprise, and when they had all turned to face him, he continued, “It was Zackander’s research that led to all this. It was he who resurrected the thing that destroyed the Cube, and it was that thing which brought both the legate and the wormship here. He has paid the price for that.”
“Doshane killed him?” Luterus asked.
Jason nodded tightly and studied their expressions. Some of them looked a little lost because Zackander had been in charge here for all their lives, but there was no sorrow. The old Cyberat had been an autocratic bastard.
“Now I know that you all want information on what has happened and that some of you had friends or relatives in the Cube. But we have work to do. If any of you feel you cannot continue here, I will understand.”
Nolan, a Cyberat man on a spiderform body, stood up from a squat and without a word headed for the door. They watched him go, all aware that his brother and sister had run a business permanently sited in the Cube.
“Updates,” said Jason once he was gone.
“We have sustained negligible damage,” said one. “Everything is optimal.”
“The system USER?” asked Jason. “Ready whenever we need it.”
“Good.” Doshane had mentioned that they might close down interstellar traffic to their world while they rebuilt. However, he was not yet their leader—that would have to be voted on. And his suggestion of immediate closure had been voted down by other Cyberat. Still, over the next month Doshane would likely secure his position and win the leadership vote.
“Anything else I should know about?”
“Local U-space has been mildly disrupted by the battle and the recent departures,” said Luterus. “There was also a strange U-signature recently not far away from us, but that might be some shadow effect from what happened here.”
“Okay, I’ll take a look.”
Jason turned back to his console, closed his eyes for a second and established connections through his cerebral enhancements. At the centre of the station, giant electromagnets and grav-motors kept two singularities stable in two separate cases. Jason could, when ordered, shoot these into a chamber lying between the two cases and with the magnets and motors maintain them in a fast orbit around each other. Then, when he put online a highly adapted U-space drive connected to the chamber, this would cause U-space disruption. Nothing would be able to travel through that continuum across a light year centred on this point. This was not something that could be done lightly, because disruption would continue for months, even after he turned the USER off. This was why other Cyberat had voted Doshane down. He was being too hasty.
Jason now turned his attention to the odd U-space signature Luterus had mentioned. It was strange that it could not be nailed down as having a real matter source, such as a ship. He next looked at recordings of the relative area of space where this had occurred, riffling through the electromagnetic spectrum. There was nothing until he reached microwaves, then briefly he saw something tangled and wormish shimmer in and out of existence. He grimaced. It looked a bit like that wormship, and seemed highly likely to be some kind of reflection or echo. Such phenomena weren’t unknown, even with conventional ships, and that wormship certainly had not been conventional.
He now began to study data on the various research projects being conducted here in the collection of particle accelerators but, before he got into it, a request came for a private communication from Nolan.
“What is it, Nolan?” he asked.
“There’s something down here,” Nolan replied.
“Look, I know you’ve had a—“
The link fizzed out for a second, then a voice that certainly wasn’t Nolan’s said, “We are here.”
Jason linked straight in to station security, checking logs. All at once, numerous warnings called for his attention. A supply bay had been opened, shortly after that strange U-space signature was detected. Numerous internal cams were offline. Fluctuating mass readings came up near one of the particle accelerators, then near the USER device.
“The fuck?” he said out loud. Then, having retained his feet, he could feel the floor vibrating through them. He spun his chair around. “We may
have—”
Six snakelike forms, their bodies like chromed backbones, erupted from the floor, ripping up bubble-metal and shattering ceramic tiles. They shot up into the air, and turned axolotl heads to gaze with metallic eyes on the occupants of the control room. Jason just gaped, but then had the presence of mind to try and open a connection back to Doshane.
They blurred into motion with the sound of whips cracking, and Jason felt impact on the side of his neck. He went down, his head hitting the floor hard, and it hurt. In a passing thought, wholly analytical, he understood that he was remaining conscious just a little longer than normal because of his enhancements. Long enough to see his own headless body jerk upright from the chair and take one step, as if about to set out for some urgent appointment, then topple.
CUTTER
Hanging in vacuum outside the ship, Cutter watched the four prador at work around the railgun ball, putting into effect his new plan. They had used a chemical reactor device to de-cohere hull metal and make it soft enough to drill into. One of them was now running a nine-foot drill down beside the ball in one of the places marked all around it. Another was following up, forcing planar charges down to the bottom of every hole already drilled, while the remaining two were driving deep cuts into the metal around the rim.
“We could widen the port and go in through there,” suggested Boris, the prador who was beside Cutter.
Cutter shook his mantis head. “Same problem no matter how we go in. We’d end up in a close fire-fight in an environment they control. Some of us would end up dead and it is likely that both of them would attain that state.”
“Why does she want them alive?” Boris asked.
That was an interesting question and one he hadn’t himself asked.
“So?” he enquired to Orlandine over com.
“I understand Jain technology more than any other human alive, probably more than any other living creature,” Orlandine replied. “And I think I understand this legate, Angel.”
“And?”
“Something has happened here that does not fit my understanding.”
“That is?”
“Oh, Cutter.” Cutter felt her frustrated mental sigh, then she continued, “I understand how a piece of a wormship could subvert the systems of a prador destroyer—it had to be converted to that purpose. It was used as a weapon against this ship, probably just to keep Orlik occupied while the wormship tore apart the Cyberat space station. But I know nothing about it getting into and subverting an organic mind as fast as this has with the two prador.”
“That is a capability of Jain tech,” said Cutter.
“I know it is, but this was very fast, Cutter, and without the Jain tech having much in the way of access, like for example Orlik’s interface, to those two prador. I’m missing something here and I don’t like it. Capture them alive, Cutter, then bring them here.”
“Is that a good idea?”
“Yes, because I want them away and shielded from that worm fragment.” She paused, then added, “Believe me, I have the security and systems for dealing with them and, I have no doubt, once you capture them in the way I expect, they won’t be capable of much.”
The four prador had finished now and, as instructed, had taken up their new weapons and were moving out from the hull of the ship. None of them carried Gatling cannons, and their particle weapons, which were physically implanted in their claws, Orlik had ordered them to deactivate. Instead they carried simple spray guns, tubed to high-pressure tanks on their backs. They hadn’t liked this but, when Cutter had explained, they grudgingly accepted that this was necessary.
“Best I take my position,” said Boris, hefting his own spray gun. With a squirt of a thruster from his armour he drifted away from Cutter and took his place in the ring of five, out from the railgun ball.
“Now that is interesting,” said Orlandine.
“What?”
“It seems Orlik is not aware of how much I know . . . listen.”
Orlik was speaking: “I did not question it to begin with because you are my king, but there is absolutely no doubt she will learn the truth.”
“The truth . . . I am not sure if we even know the truth,” replied another voice that, after a search of memory, Cutter recognized as the one who now named himself Oberon, King of the Prador.
“You broke into his com?” Cutter asked Orlandine.
“No,” she replied. “The king is allowing me to listen.”