by Neal Asher
‘Now would be a good time,’ urged the mind.
‘Oh fuckit,’ said Janer and trotted down the deck to the forecabin. As he mounted the cabin-deck, Ron gave him an amused look that suggested he might want to slow down a bit. Without more ado, Janer told him the mind’s wonderful news. Ron’s expression lost its humour and he looked over Janer’s shoulder as Ambel joined them.
‘Seems we got problems,’ said Ron.
Ambel gazed enquiringly at the two of them.
‘We got Rebecca Frisk and some Batian mercenaries with Prador weapons coming right up our backsides,’ said Ron.
Ambel glanced around at the open sea. ‘We don’t stand a chance out here,’ he said.
‘The island,’ Ron stated.
‘Seems the best option,’ said Ambel.
‘What do you mean?’ asked Janer.
‘Does your Hive mind know how long we’ve got before they reach us?’ asked Ambel.
‘The Warden informs me that at present they’ve stopped to . . . that they have halted their journey. You still have time to reach the island,’ said the mind.
‘We’ve time to reach the island,’ echoed Janer, wondering exactly what their pursuers had stopped to do.
‘Alert the others,’ said Ron. ‘Tell them to get their gear together. We’ll be at the Skinner’s Island in about five hours.’ He turned to Ambel. ‘Might not be time to ferry everyone in.’
‘Beach her then,’ said Ambel, his hands tightening hard enough on the helm to make the wood groan in protest.
Janer went to do as bid encountering Keech on the main deck and telling him what was happening.
‘I thought it a bit improbable that she handed herself over to ECS,’ the monitor said.
‘How’d she manage it?’ Janer asked.
‘Not sure, but I’d bet she’s now not wearing the face I knew her by.’
Janer brooded on that as he rushed to wake Erlin up and to find Pland. Anne had by now joined Ron and Ambel on the cabin-deck.
For the next hour, there was a continuous flurry of activity as supplies were brought on deck and weapons were taken out of waterproof packaging to be checked over. Keech cut the lines holding his scooter to the deck. From its baggage compartment he took out his attaché case and opened it.
As Janer approached him, Keech tossed him an item from the case. Janer nearly dropped it, finding it heavier than he’d assumed.
‘Never seen one of these in real life,’ he muttered.
‘Give your handgun to one of the crew. You won’t be needing it now. That’s a QC laser carbine. Half an hour continuous fire, thousand-metre kill range, and auto-sight.’
Janer handled the weapon as if it had suddenly turned into a snake. ‘Bit drastic,’ he said.
‘You might well need it,’ said Keech.
Janer turned to Forlam, who at that moment came up beside him.
‘Here,’ he said, passing over his handgun. Forlam stared at the weapon for a moment, then suddenly looked pleased and thrust it into his belt. Janer thought it was rather a strange grin the crewman wore.
Forlam pointed at the weapon Keech was quickly assembling from the case. ‘What’s that?’ he asked.
Keech clicked the twin barrels – as of a shotgun – into place, then the folding stock, before opening out the fan of cooling fins from the main body of the weapon. He gave it a slow visual inspection then carefully took up a gigawatt energy canister and screwed it into place underneath.
‘This,’ he murmured, ‘is completely OTT.’ With that, he mounted his scooter, pulled the leg straps across his thighs and secured them in place, then slammed his vehicle up into the sky. He gave no one time to ask where he was going. No one needed to ask.
Amazingly, one of the juniors, who had either somehow survived the burst of rail-gun fire or had gone over the side during the attack, now yelled nearby as darkness seeped out of the sky. Before dawn, one of the mercenaries, perhaps out of boredom, finally shot a shell into him. Roach wished they would do the same to him.
Through a haze of pain, he tried to concentrate on what she was saying.
‘Now I want to be utterly sure of this. Think about it a little before you reply,’ said the woman he now knew was Rebecca Frisk.
He’d thought about it a little when she’d asked him the last time, and the time before – and on every occasion he’d told her the truth. She didn’t care about truth, though. She wasn’t doing this for truth. She was doing it because she liked to see suffering. Roach bit on his tongue as she played the laser, on wide beam, over his feet and legs. He’d screamed the third time she’d done this, in the hope that would satisfy her. But it hadn’t. She’d just go on until there was nothing left of him to scream. It was Frisk’s way, just as it was the way of her husband, or what was left of him.
‘Think carefully now,’ warned Frisk.
She seemed oblivious to everything else – had a crazy look in her eyes and jerky shudders running through her body with metronomic regularity. Roach did pretend to think carefully, while he listened to the low conversation going on behind her.
The mercenary woman was speaking to the Prador. ‘. . . time for this?’
‘Delay . . . Convocation . . . does not matter.’
‘Fucking lunatic.’ That last came from the male mercenary. He seemed to find Frisk’s pursuits contemptible, but then his kind tortured people only for business, not for recreation.
‘Tell me again about Jay,’ demanded Frisk.
Roach leapt at the chance. At least while he was speaking, she wasn’t burning his legs.
‘Ambel . . . y’know, Balem Gosk, kept the head in a box in his cabin. I reckon Peck musta – aaaargh!’
‘Oh I know all about that. Tell me something new, something interesting.’
‘AG vehicle approaching.’
Roach could not identify from where that voice had come. The others were blanks, so perhaps it was their master speaking. He knew that this Prador on board wasn’t an adult. It still had all its legs.
‘Rebecca Frisk, we must return to our vessel,’ grated the translator box of the same Prador.
Roach prayed that this would mean the end.
Frisk stood up and confronted the Prador, angry that her little game had been interrupted.
‘I want to take him with me,’ she spat.
‘We do not have time. To the vessel – now.’
The Prador turned away. The blanks were already leaping from the Ahab, ahead of it. Frisk seemed about to rebel. Abruptly she turned, walked up to one of the mercenaries, and snatched his weapon from him and thrust her carbine into his hands instead. This is it, thought Roach. This is when I end up spread all over the deck.
Frisk, though, did not shoot him. She moved to the deck hatch, kicked it open releasing gouts of smoke, and then fired shot after shot below. Roach could feel the ship shuddering. When she was finished, she grinned at him with satisfaction, before following the Prador from the ship. The mercenaries went last, and without looking back.
Roach couldn’t believe it: he was going to survive. All he had to do was work on these ropes tying him to the mast . . . It was then that he realized what the smoke meant, and what Frisk had been doing. He saw how smoke was also wisping up through the holes in the deck and could hear the crackle of flames from below. He continued to struggle at his bonds, but the torture had weakened him too much and he only had one arm to work with – his broken arm still being dead meat from the shoulder down. He listened to the sound of the Cohorn pulling away, its flaccid sail booming in the wind of its passage, and wondered which would get him first: the fire or the sea.
‘You bitch!’ he yelled, and heard her laughter growing distant. He sat panting for a while, then had another go at his bonds. Doing so, he heard sounds coming up from beside the ship, and had a horrible vision of prill clambering aboard. He stared over at where the ship’s boat had been suspended and saw a rope there jerking. The sound, he began to realize, was a continuous cursing monolog
ue. Shortly after, Boris hauled himself over the rail, the bottom half of his body covered by a writhing mass of leeches. With further cursing and the occasional yelp, Boris began to detach them, one by one. Roach didn’t even have the energy left to yell at him to hurry up, even though he could feel the deck getting hot underneath him.
Keech stared down at the wrecked and burning ship, and the two figures remaining on its deck, then he turned his image intensifier to examine the second ship. Over there, a Prador and a number of humans – any of which might be Frisk herself. He set his scooter on hover, took up his weapon, and aimed. Half charge: he’d flame the deck.
Keech pulled back one of the three triggers, and lit the air between himself and the target ship with a line of purple fire. Seawater erupted and flashed into a ball of flame that splashed across an invisible disk.
‘Shields,’ was all he managed to say before his scooter dropped out of the sky. Letting his APW hang by its strap, he grabbed the controls, and saw the message flashing up on the screen: ‘emergency dive: evasive’.
A missile screamed past overhead and made a slow turn beyond him. Keech slammed the control column forward and put all the scooter’s power into the dive. Gs threatened to steal his hands from the controls, and tried to drag him from the seat, but his leg straps held him in place. He went into cyber mode as his flesh began to fail, and used his arm motors to pull the scooter out of the dive at the last moment. The missile streaked past two metres below him, entering the sea with a crack. An explosion lit the underside of the waves, with a rapidly spreading disk of light. He was a hundred metres up from the surface when it erupted. No time for self-congratulation, he told himself, as another two missiles sped towards him.
Keech slammed the control column forward again and sped away from the two ships. As he departed, he took two of the guard spheres from his pocket, and held them in his hand. Glancing back he spotted the noses of two missiles like two chrome eyes. The ships themselves were still visible. He went into rapid descent. Only a second or two more and he’d be out of sight. Only a second or two more and the missiles would reach him. He tossed the two spheres up in the air and they shot away behind.
‘Fuck you, monitor!’ Frisk yelled, shaking her fist at the double explosion on the horizon. She turned to Vrell, grinning maniacally. After a moment of gazing at a creature with no emotions she could identify, she sobered and turned towards the forecabin.
‘Bring us about,’ she instructed Drum.
‘No,’ said the Prador – and the ship did not deviate from its course.
‘We have to check,’ said Frisk.
‘There will be nothing to see,’ replied Vrell.
‘We have to be sure!’ Frisk yelled.
Vrell did not consider this worthy of further reply.
‘This is what we’re here for, you shell-brained prawn!’ Frisk yelled and kicked out at something on the deck. A metal staple went skittering across the timber and the sail cautiously opened one red eye to track its progress. But no one seemed to have noticed.
‘Restrain her,’ ordered Vrell.
Abruptly several arms closed about both of Frisk’s. She whipped her head from side to side at Svan and Shib – who were doing the restraining – and considered freeing herself until Svan shoved a gun up under her chin.
‘I’ve had about enough of you,’ said the Batian woman, then looked to Vrell.
‘Take her away and confine her in one of the cabins. She may yet serve a purpose.’ Vrell turned with a complicated scuttling of legs, and regarded Drum still stationary up at the helm. ‘Continue on course, no deviation.’
Drum reached up to scratch at the back of his neck, then nodded and continued with what he had been doing anyway. The Prador noted this unprogrammed action but thought nothing of it. It did not have the experience of humans to know whether such scratching was an autonomous action or not.
‘Well, there went the cavalry,’ said Boris.
‘Yeah,’ said Roach, and gritted his teeth while Boris put in another stitch to close the split in Roach’s arm. It seemed a somewhat pointless exercise, what with a fire raging below and gouts of steam hissing through the holes in the deck.
‘That was Keech,’ explained Boris, now applying the needle and thread to some of the more embarrassing rips in his own tattered trousers.
‘Yeah,’ said Roach and, feeling a vague tingling in his fingers, he tried to flex them. He managed a little movement, but there would be no real strength in either his hand or his arm until flesh and bone began properly to knit. He thought it would be nice if they enjoyed the time to do so.
‘Should we try and put it out?’ Boris wondered.
‘No chance. This ship’s bound with sea gourd resin. Once you get that alight, you ain’t gonna get it out again,’ Roach replied.
‘Maybe the ship’s boat’ll come back,’ Boris suggested, while studying Roach’s expression.
‘The boat ain’t coming back,’ said Roach.
Boris nodded his head once at this confirmation – he hadn’t seen what happened to the juniors in the ship’s rowing boat, but he’d a damned good idea.
Abruptly, the deck tilted, and swathes of steam roared out of the open hatch. Boris and Roach peered over the side at the swarm of leeches attracted by the commotion, and by bits of Goss floating in the water. Beyond this writhing mass, the molly carp was cruising.
Boris instantly dropped his needle and thread and scuttled across to pick up the handgun Roach had dropped earlier.
‘I’ll not have happen to me what happened to my Captain,’ Boris swore.
‘I ain’t neither,’ said Roach, thinking what a waste of time it had been to sew up his arm. It had kept the boy occupied anyway. He stared at the water, ignoring the weapon Boris was handling so nervously. He tried not to wince when Boris reached over and pressed the warm snout of it against his head.
‘Wait a minute,’ he said.
‘No point delaying,’ said Boris. ‘Only makes it harder.’
‘I said wait a minute,’ said Roach, angrily knocking Boris’s hand away.
‘What for?’
‘Look,’ said Roach, pointing at the sea.
An iron seahorse had just risen to the surface, the seawater fizzing all about it, and leeches jerking spastically in their hurry to get away. It tilted so as to glare up at them with one topaz eye, the other one burnt black.
‘We should attack ’em, splash ’em, kill ’em, hit ’em . . .’ was the essence of the communication between drones one to ten with ‘attitude’. All ten of the drones, now they were in atmosphere, had extruded stubby wings to which were attached their weapons pods. In one part of itself, the Warden agreed. Frisk’s ship had encountered one other and left it burning. Sable Keech’s seven-century search for justice and vengeance had ended in a few brief explosions, and it seemed unlikely there would be any chance at another reification for him. But all these were emotional issues. On a flat calculation of life and death, the sailing ship was unimportant. First, the Warden had to find the Prador spacecraft, for from it could issue destruction perhaps an order of magnitude greater.
‘SM Twelve, I want them in pairs, covering the relevant eight sectors – same division as for geostudy. I want all signals reported. Specifically I want thrall-unit carrier waves and command codes. It won’t be a direct transmission, as that would be too easy to trace should we get hold of any thrall units at the receiving end. Somewhere down there, the enemy will have secondary and perhaps tertiary emitters.’
‘Coded U-space signals are difficult to detect,’ observed Twelve.
‘Almost impossible would be a more accurate summation. It is not the signal itself you will detect, but overspill from the secondary emitters before the signal starts tunnelling. On detecting this overspill, you will have found an emitter. I want no action taken against emitters located. Just transmit everything you get to me.’
‘Yes, Warden,’ said Twelve.
The muttering from the other drones, whic
h formed a backdrop to SM12’s reply, made the Warden wonder just how good an idea it had been to load Sniper’s little program into them. No matter – the AI returned its attention to the information packages coming in through from the submind ghost of itself trawling the loose AI net forming around the Prador worlds. These packages now detailed the rabid progression of events in the Third Kingdom and were fascinating. It seemed that the Prador were almost desperate for closer ties and trade opportunities with the Polity and, as had been demonstrated quite graphically before the sector AI, with such drastic changes in the offing, the old guard there was having trouble hanging on to power. Already some further high figures among them had not done so well. Three had been assassinated by direct methods: in two cases by explosives and in the third case by an injection of a putrefying virus. Two others had been killed by their own blanks after control programs had been subverted. Now that was what the Warden had found most interesting.
Ebulan, one of the highest-ranking Prador in the Kingdom, was also of particular interest to the Warden. It was he who once had dealings with Hoop and his merry crew, and who had become rich and consequently powerful on the trade in human blanks. This hideous practice was now becoming frowned on in the Prador Kingdom, because of the change of zeitgeist that had led to this aim for closer ties with the Polity. So Ebulan’s power was waning.
Ebulan – that name came up repeatedly. Could it be that agents of his were the ones here on Spatterjay? If so, what was their purpose?
Floating just below the surface of the waves, the turtle-shaped remote probe folded its emitter dish and switched to passive observation. Twenty similar devices scattered across the surface of the sea performed a similar action, only two of them remaining in the relevant areas to maintain the U-space signal relay. They were not AI these machines – the Prador neither liked nor fully understood such technology – but they had proved more than sufficient to their limited task. Now that would have to change, however.