by Neal Aher
“Biological attack,” said Vlex. “Check those remaining railgun missiles.”
Update from one of the other dreadnoughts—something had been found.
Sverl focused his sensor probe on the Polity missiles and detected only inert iron with a ceramal nose cone. He then ran a penetration program based on a previous seizure of Polity technology. It took an hour before the program found a chink in the chameleonware, and then that disguise unravelled. In the iron was a super-dense shield, capable of blocking the output of an EM mine. In the hollow interior resided a gyroscopic device that had turned the missile, so that the shield faced the exploding mine. This had prevented the EM mines they had used from crashing the chameleonware in the missile. Another device in the missile was using a diamond drill to steadily bore a small hole out to the exterior. The rest of the hollow contained a soup of organics.
“Got it,” said Sverl.
They spent a further five days checking the rest of the attack ships for anything else concealed under chameleonware and discovered further biological weapons—some even hidden in the fusion reactors. Sverl finally sent armoured second-children aboard his capture to isolate the weapons, for now it was essential to take them back to the Kingdom so prador biologists could design an antidote. His children then opened the ship to vacuum, closed it again and spent many hours spraying a standard bio-weapon sterilizer throughout. Using his saddle control, Sverl personally aimed and fired a cable grab. The exotic metal claw cut into the hull like the scythe legs of the probe, and Sverl hauled the ship in. He brought it into an empty hold, then through into a total-seal annex. There he secured it. He didn’t know then that such a precaution was too late, for the real biological weapon had hitched a ride on the armour of one of the second-children and was already aboard.
Sverl knew when it happened. They had just finished up with the world, destroying the remaining space stations and dropping a bomb on the factory complex. Safely ensconced within his sanctum, checking his ship’s status and readiness to leave, he had been surprised when his sanctum door malfunctioned. A circuit had blown, which opened it just the width of his claw. A short while later he felt a sudden horrible pain at the base of one of his legs, and a sudden atavistic fear. He did not comprehend his own alarm and its source in prador evolution, and had he but enquired of his children, he would have discovered that many of them had been experiencing both that pain and that fear too. He did not ask. Father-captains never asked after the health of their children. Shaking himself and still feeling a little spooked, he traced the blown circuit, then the fault that had stopped the backup system kicking in. With the door closed again, his fear faded.
Sverl only learned later that Vlex had had a similar experience, as had the father-captain of the other dreadnought that had taken onboard one of the Polity attack ships. All three dreadnoughts had also developed one other mechanical fault, different in each case. Sverl’s ship had, for no immediately traceable reason, opened and closed an airlock. Vlex’s ship, when it was finally sterilized, was found to have inadvertently fired off a probe before it dropped into U-space. The other captain’s ship, again for no apparent reason, dumped the contents of a water tank out into vacuum.
They headed back to the Kingdom with their captures and during that journey, Sverl got lucky, insomuch as he found out what had really come aboard. He could therefore take steps to counter it. Like all father-captains, his lack of regard for his children was vicious. During the journey, his main first-child began to show immunity to the chemical suppression of his adulthood. Sverl summoned him to his sanctum, where a hemisphere surgical telefactor awaited. He’d also brought a brain case in which to install the first-child’s ganglion—which was destined to control an armoured ground-assault vehicle.
The child came, reluctantly, its legs quivering. Still possessing his own claws and much mobility, Sverl enjoyed an hour with the child, tearing off its legs and claws. But he was surprised and disappointed at its lack of resistance and how quickly it weakened. He then quickly used a circular saw to cut open its carapace. He had intended to dine on some of the living organs before the first-child showed signs of weakening. However, he now decided to use the telefactor to remove its ganglion at once, before it died. What he found when he opened its shell sent him staggering away in horror.
Something had injected parasite eggs into the first-child, which had hatched out into their juvenile form. The short translucent worms were feeding inside, chewing and digesting connective tissue and depositing a chalky substitute in its place. Sverl did not know what they were, but his fear and horror drove him to research. He soon identified his find and knew that the juvenile worms were at that point in their development where they were about to start dividing, penetrating the first-child’s gut and then exiting via its rectum. They would then feed on ship lice until they grew to adult form and mated, moving on to infect other prador. Meanwhile the first-child would steadily weaken as the expanding population inside it moved from connective tissue to muscle. Left finally immobile, it would die as the parasites progressed to their final repast on its major organs, before departing an empty shell.
Sverl understood at once what had happened. This bio-horror had been the real weapon those otherwise empty attack ships had contained. The others had been concealed just enough to be believable. Almost certainly, some sort of assassin drone had deployed the parasite. It had blown the circuit of his sanctum door control, and the pain he had experienced had been it actually injecting parasite eggs. And, checking ship’s logs, Sverl realized that the airlock malfunction had been the assassin drone departing.
Sverl considered his options while completely failing to consider the worms that had begun to grow inside him. He knew that upon his imminent arrival in the Kingdom he would be dead if his fellow prador did not see him countering this threat. He also prepared a report on his situation, and the drastic action he was taking.
He ordered a party of second-children to move twenty iron-burner mines to a hold and remain there with them. Then he ordered the rest of his crew, his children, to that same hold. He sealed all the exits, and next sent his small but growing collection of war drones out of their cache to them, just in case. Then, the moment his dreadnought surfaced into the real in the Kingdom, he sent the detonation code. The mines fired up, super-compressed oxygen and hydrocarbons burning slowly but raising the hold temperature quickly to four thousand degrees. The children barely had time to run and pile themselves up at the firmly sealed doors. By the time the fires went out, nothing remained but brittle chunks of charred carapace. He opened the space doors and the ensuing explosive decompression blew most of the mess out into vacuum.
Next, Sverl completely isolated his sanctum and instituted a bio-attack protocol. Airlocks and space doors opened to vacuum all around his ship, blowing out its internal atmosphere. When the doors closed, canisters of highly toxic and acidic gas flooded everything but his sanctum. By now, prador Command was desperately trying to get in contact, demanding a response. The destroyers were all responding, but none of them had taken aboard attack ships. The other two dreadnoughts were just dead and adrift. Sverl sent his report and the response was swift—dreadnoughts moving in to bracket him, weapons doubtless ready to fire.
“This is not new,” one of the surrounding father-captains told him, and sent data on other similar attacks. He gazed upon captured images of the assassin drones that had done this and shuddered to the core of his being. Studying further reports, he understood that his fellows would not destroy his ship, because they could not waste such a valuable piece of hardware. However, they would not help him either. He was in quarantine until he dealt with this, as had some other father-captains. If he did not, when he finally expired, armoured prador would come aboard to sterilize his ship fully in readiness for another captain.
After studying the data from father-captains who had survived, Sverl sent new orders to his war drones and watched them set out through his ship. They were scanning for cert
ain organics and using lasers to incinerate parasite encystments in living quarters, food supplies and water tanks. He next focused on his two females in their mating pool and regretfully routed the full output from a fusion reactor through superconducting cables to the heat grids. By the time he picked up a laser cutter from his tool cache, fired it up, set it to wide beam and incinerated the remains of his first-child, the water in their pool was boiling. By the time he had searched his own sanctum and burned up the three flattened egg-shapes of parasite encystments, the females were dead and coming apart, while superheated steam was ejecting from their pool, straight out through a port in the side of his ship.
Sverl returned to the data and set up the long series of sterilizations, atmosphere ejections, drone sweeps and the robotic dismantling of equipment to clean it inside. He also ejected and incinerated other equipment he could never classify as clean. This would take many months, but he would need many months to recover. He was now feeling weak and ill. Pus was leaking from his joint sockets, he kept coughing out green slime from his lung and one of his palp eyes was going blind. And he finally admitted to himself what he had long been avoiding: those things were inside him and he had to get them out. He ordered one of his war drones to collect another iron-burner and place it in the smaller abode that his first-child had occupied. The ensuing burn ensured nothing remained alive in there.
Sverl next reluctantly inspected the program those other captains had run through their surgical telefactors, and loaded it to his own. The telefactor returned to its niche to load with extra supplies, then came out again, followed by two secondary surgical robots resembling brass ship lice. Shortly after them came a grav-sled piled with blood and chyme bottles, cylinders of artificial carapace mix, collagen-foam tanks and dehydrated artificial muscle. They came with hundreds of yards of tubing and a big armour-glass disposal tank.
Opening up his sanctum, Sverl headed out and down to the now burned-out and sterile quarters. He settled himself in the middle of the space with the controls of the telefactor before him and stared at them for a long while, utterly reluctant to start. However, he finally forced himself to reach out with one claw and stab it into a pit control to set the program running. The motivator was the definite feeling of something moving about under his shell.
The telefactor slowly revolved as Sverl moved back and settled on the burned floor. It extended a drill on one of its multiple limbs and drove it in beside one of Sverl’s mandibles as one of the secondary robots unreeled spare tubing. The factor then worked round him, making more and more holes, and began inserting tubes, cutting all the while. The pain grew steadily, ramped up with the application of a carapace saw. It also died in places where nerve blocks went in. Sverl issued a bubbling scream as the factor folded back a large section of his main shell, but the agony waned as electricity crackled and paralysis spread through him. He could not stop it now. He felt the drone of a cutter behind his visual turret before it tipped over so he was looking into his own gullet—a view usually impossible for a prador. He smelled burning, wanted to scream again but couldn’t, then his usual view returned as the telefactor tipped his turret back into place.
Now he saw one of the secondary robots dragging one of the worms away and dropping it into the disposal vessel. He saw pieces of his carapace lying on the floor, their insides etched with worm burrows. The other secondary robot began collecting these and dropping them in the vessel too. Despite nerve blocking and a cornucopia of prador painkillers, Sverl lost himself in agony when the factor extracted a great mass of worm-eaten muscle. Unconsciousness, something humans experienced, was not possible for his kind, but the extreme pain did kill coherent thought. He came back to some comprehension of his surroundings some time later, to see a second disposal vessel in place, the other one now full. Agony took him again as the factor removed one of his claws.
And so it went on . . . and on . . .
Sverl finally began to get some intimation that the surgery was ending when he saw the dehydrated muscle being hydrated in a long tray and heard the hissing of a collagen-foam gun. His entire body felt like a raw wound and the pain stayed at a point that seemed just beyond his tolerance, but which he helplessly endured nevertheless. One plus point was that vision had returned to his blind eye and some of the paralysis was receding, so that he could move both palp eyes. He looked down to see his claw, pulled out from his body on stretched tendons, veins and nerves opened up. Artificial muscle was being woven in to replace what had been extracted, and he finally saw that claw go back into place—that smell of carapace glue was the best thing ever.
More glue and then the sound of a shell welder, a mixing drum turning to make replacement carapace. Sverl began to come fully back to himself and could now think clearly enough to know that the program was ending. However, he lost concentration and it was some time before he realized that all the machines were now stationary around him.
Sverl stood, shakily. He felt terrible: even slow movement was agony and seemed to tear things inside him. He knew that if he moved any faster and exerted any effort at all, then something critical would break.
But it was all over. All he needed to do now was recover. He would have to request food supplies from prador in the other ships, since he had incinerated all his own. He needed to eat now, convalesce, build up his strength, barter for replacement females, rebuild his family . . .
But the worst was over.
Or so he thought.
The Sverl of the present turned away from the immobile assassin drone and walked over to one of his work surfaces. There, he selected a metal collar packed with esoteric tech. He would ignore the prador in him for now and not find some ugly end for Riss. He would, however, be all prador if the drone tried anything.
SPEAR
In my mind’s eye, I saw the Jacob accelerate away from Factory Station Room 101. It was leaking white-hot smoke from burned-out hardfield projectors and from the many holes punched through its hull as it dodged missiles and the sweep of energy weapons. Crippled and burning ships tumbled through vacuum all around it, newborn minds being snuffed out in the virtual like embers tossed into a pool. I gazed through the Jacob’s sensors and could see the salmon-pink hypergiant sun that Room 101 was now orbiting. Also open to me was the entire reach of the surrounding complex planetary system, which lay beyond human vision. I saw a red dwarf orbiting the hypergiant and a gas giant that once a millennium took a figure-of-eight course. I gazed upon an immense asteroid belt formed mainly of CO2 and nitrogen ice, and saw this was currently being disturbed. A small black hole was punching through it on its fast orbit around the hypergiant. And I saw green-belt worlds, with the evidence etched on their faces that the Jain civilization had been here.
“Got it,” said a satisfied voice.
The galactic coordinates were clear in my mind as finally, amazingly, the Jacob managed to engage its U-jump engine. But who had spoken? And what had that individual found? I refocused my attention inside the ship, where the mantis and I were crammed. Along with other drones, we had ended up in a scrapyard mass inside the attack ship’s hold. I felt claustrophobic yet was simultaneously aware of clear space all around me. How could this be? It seemed dimensionally distorted—and what the hell was that?
The equally distorted prador loomed over me, mandibles grinding. Room 101 had forged me to kill such creatures, but I had not yet managed to perform this task. However, the instinct was there inside me, as deep rooted as in any organic being. Even though I had no eggs, I flipped myself under the prador ready to drive my ovipositor up into its underside . . . and fell flat on my face.
“Thorvald,” said the prador first-child Bsectil, looking down at me. “Thorvald Spear.”
I rolled over and tried to flip my ovipositor up again, but instead I found myself gazing up at a pair of booted feet as Bsectil backed away.
“What are you doing?” the first-child asked curiously.
I had no parasite eggs loaded but my knowledge of prador p
hysiology was the best it could be. I could certainly mess up a few nerve nexuses with my ovipositor, which should leave it paralysed. Then I could make mincemeat of its major ganglion. I squirmed along the floor after it, but the movement felt strangely alien and wrong. Something was awry with my grav and my body. I must have been damaged in some—
“Sverl said you would feel some confusion at first,” Bsectil observed.
Sverl.
It was Sverl who’d said got it in my head. And, remembering him, I found the dawning reality now facing me somewhat stranger than the one I had just experienced. I stopped squirming across the floor after Bsectil, rolled over and sat up. I had to use my stomach muscles to do so, because I’d temporarily forgotten how to use my arms. I knew at once what had happened. Sverl had penetrated Riss’s memories using Penny Royal’s spine, and my connection to the spine had dragged me into that replay. But that didn’t stop me feeling intensely embarrassed. Finally remembering how to use my arms, I pushed against the floor and stood up.
“So the replay worked. Sverl now knows the location of Room 101,” I said.
“He does,” said Bsectil. “And after one further stop we will be heading straight there.”
I checked the activity back at my ship and saw two second-children lowering Flute’s case from the hole in the side, power supply attached. I checked the channel that connected me to my ship mind, thankfully now devoid of fizzing.
“Flute?”
“I am dead,” the mind replied.
“What do you mean?” I asked, but no reply was forthcoming.
“Do you now wish to see Trent Sobel?” Bsectil asked.
“Yes, why not?”
Bsectil led off again, out of the hold and through the corridors of the ship. During the journey, which lasted a good half-hour, I fully recovered my humanity and was able to separate Riss’s memories out of my mind. I also began to get more of a sense of the sheer scale of this dreadnought, and it occurred to me to wonder why the prador had never used drop-shafts in their ships. The creatures were, after all, much better adapted than humans to such a form of transport. Finally, we reached the area where Sverl had housed the shell people.