by Neal Aher
Riss did nothing but continue scanning and gathering data. She could detect other prador in the area repositioning. They thought they had her now, which demonstrated a lack of dimension to their thinking also found in humans. Certainly, she had no way through here, but she was designed to navigate apparently impossible routes.
Riss stuck her spread head down against the surface she was on, hooked up and stabbed her ovipositor straight into that surface. At high speed, she moved her tail in a circle, widening the hole, then flipped round and nosed into it. On the floor above this ceiling, the prador had welded an armour shield in place, with vibration sensors scattered along it. However, they’d done nothing about the ceramo-foam insulation, sandwiched between armour and ceiling. Vibrating her head at just the right intensity, Riss nosed into that, it turned to dust ahead of her, and she burrowed at high speed. Just as she pulled her ovipositor out of sight, Gatling slugs began punching through the ceiling all around her. One hit her, full on, nearly cutting her in half. She kept moving, the smart materials of her body at that point reforming and rejoining.
Particle cannon fire hit the ceiling next, burning it away and ablating the ceramic foam. By then she was past the armour, across the corridor above and writhing up along a narrow power duct leading to the small home of a beetlebot. She moved out across a floor and along, punching another hole and heading down again. All around prador were moving towards her, because her chameleonware just wasn’t good enough any more. As she slithered along one wall, it exploded just behind her and a particle beam cut forwards. She propelled herself away with maglev, engaged her grav-motor and planed forwards. An autolaser picked her up but reflected away, as railgun missiles turned the ceiling into a colander. But Riss squirmed into a severed power duct and kept going.
It should have been exciting and it should have been fulfilling, but it just felt like a nasty chore. As she worked her way along beside superconducting cables, she bounced attempts to communicate with her. Some of these were from the surrounding prador and from Sverl himself. Strongest, and growing stronger, were the probes from Thorvald Spear, who was rapidly drawing closer.
They’d armoured the autofactory, surrounded it with sensors and weapons and set some particularly clever traps. These showed a deep understanding of her nature and her abilities. But, as ever, there was always a hole. In this case, it lay beside this duct and just ahead. Riss stopped to use her manipulators on a series of pin rivets, punching them out from the inside and squirming out as the inspection plate dropped away. The temperature around her quickly ramped up and things began to melt and burn, but she was into the mouth of a compressed-air pipe before the beam of a particle cannon punched through. Her skin was microscaled like a butterfly’s wing—and when she controlled those scales individually, they could be utterly frictionless where required. Or they could be the opposite. She shot down the pipe in a smooth series of peristaltic heaves, but then suddenly she was slowing. Sverl had just pressurized his sanctum. Vacuum began to suck Riss back, and if she didn’t do something, it would draw her back into the path of that particle beam. She collapsed one side of her skeleton and stuck herself to the side of the pipe, allowing the air past. Then she inched forwards, caterpillar fashion, her skin fully in remora mode.
I’m going to die, she thought—she just wasn’t moving fast enough now and the prador would soon target her. But fate intervened in the form of Gatling fire, chopping through the infrastructure all around her. One slug hit the pipe behind, pinching it shut and cutting the pressure differential. Riss expanded her skeleton and accelerated again, shooting up into Sverl’s sanctum. She hit what was debatably the ceiling, and stuck there in an invisible coil.
“The drone’s in,” Bsorol clattered.
Just then, grav came on, nearly tearing Riss from the ceiling. Bsorol was close to Sverl, brandishing a particle cannon and a Gatling cannon just like his sibling. He also had anti-personnel lasers and a small hardfield generator mounted on the exterior of his armour. The laser fired, obviously tracking via vibration sensors, and hit Riss precisely. She shot away across the ceiling but the laser stayed on her, locating her for Bsorol, who opened fire with both his major weapons. Riss scribed a circle around above the first-child, a slight hint of gleeful amusement arising and then dissipating. One and a half circuits were enough, then a huge circle of ceiling—a foot’s thickness of laminated bubble-metal and armour—crashed down right on top of Bsorol.
Riss flung herself clear, scribed a neat arc through the air and came down just behind Sverl. He spun round and Riss hesitated. Then she felt an intermittent vibration through the floor—the particle cannons of the King’s Guard tearing into the hull of the station.
“I’m sorry,” she said, shutting down her chameleonware because it seemed so cowardly now.
This was a mistake.
20
SPEAR
The second-child obviously received its orders, because it lowered its bolus gun. I recognized the thing straight away. This weapon used monofilament strings in its projectiles. It was the kind of thing used in jungle fighting to clear foliage and chop up any of the enemy concealed within it. The prador had developed it during a ground conflict, to counter the human warband led by Jebel U-cap Krong and his fighters. I could understand its utility against a snakelike drone. Though it would be unlikely to chop Riss up, it would certainly delay the drone long enough for the second-child to get in close and use its other weapon: an atomic shear.
“Come on,” I said to Trent, and we threw ourselves past the prador.
“The parasite is here,” said Sverl, talking to me again at last.
A monorail station lay ahead. Weapons fire had slagged the corridor leading to it, and it was still glowing in vacuum. I bounced from a sagging wall panel into the station, caught a hand against the ceiling and propelled myself down to land beside the blade track, engaging gecko function. I then moved into a steady lope, briefly wondering if that was a train moving ahead, but then realizing it was Bsectil. The prador shortly leapt up onto a platform beside the track and progressed along it. We caught up with him as he came to stand before a newly installed armoured door.
The door opened ahead of Bsectil and the ensuing blast of escaping atmosphere threw him staggering back towards us. Trent lost his footing and disappeared somewhere behind me, swearing. I managed to bow into it and keep on my feet, Bsectil skidding to a halt just a couple of yards in front of me. As the air blast waned, he charged in. I trudged after him, and a moment later Trent caught up with me.
I took it all in quickly. Bsorol was struggling to drag himself out from under a heavy slab cut from the ceiling. Riss was facing up to Sverl and was completely visible, while Sverl’s prosthetic claws folded open like nightmare Swiss army knives and bristled with hardware. Something flashed and an EM pulse passed through me, leaving my aug streaming error messages and the spine turning hot in my grip. Riss shot away, streaking up one wall with portions of her body turning invisible—as if she were attempting to activate her chameleonware and failing. Weapons spiking from Sverl’s claws tracked her, and a particle beam stabbed out, bright fluorescent orange, and carved through the wall. He missed, and Riss disappeared. Sverl began firing a weapon like a pulse-gun, but each shot issued electrical discharges where it struck. The firing pattern climbed the wall and went across the ceiling. Then that particle beam began stabbing out again too.
“I only have to be successful once,” said Riss, her voice clear over every channel, despite the previous firing of some sort of EM pulse weapon.
I reached into the spine, confidently targeting its connection to Riss and inputting the code that would cause her to eject her weapons load. Something stopped me. The spine resisted me, and then it just fell to pieces in my hands, shards of black glass falling to the floor. I hit the ground next as Sverl’s fusillade tracked down towards me. As I went down, I glimpsed something dropping from the ceiling. Debris? No: Riss. She was a wheel-like blur moving in behind Sverl. Another
pulse issued—this one causing visible ionization in the hot vapour that was dissipating in vacuum like a fast-moving wall. I saw Riss tumble out from underneath Sverl, completely out of control, black patches along portions of her body. I didn’t know if she’d managed to hit him with her poisonous cargo or not. She struck a nearby pipe protruding from the floor and then slowly coiled about it.
I rose, eyeing Sverl crouching up against one wall with a steady stream of vapour issuing from his suit, which died as some sealer stopped it. Beside me, the spine reassembled, slotting together like knives going into a drawer. I reached out for it, but knew I was too late. A horrible bubbling shriek swamped every channel—it reached into me through my aug, through the spine, through data connections to surrounding robots—drowning interference. Bsectil just collapsed as if someone had cut his legs out from underneath him, while Bsorol slumped under the load he had been trying to shrug off.
“The fuck!” said Trent, sprawled nearby and holding a hand against his helmet, his expression twisted with pain. I found myself trying to claw open my suit’s helmet. When I realized what I was doing, I hurriedly cut as many links as possible—even shutting down the reception in my aug—but still I could hear the scream. This, more than anything else, demonstrated just how integrally linked I was to the spine, because that’s where I was getting it from.
Of course, I thought, Sverl is recorded in there.
But if Sverl was recorded, did that mean this wasn’t murder? Did that relieve Riss of guilt? Sverl had been quite dismissive of the deaths amongst the shell people because the spine had similarly recorded them. But I guessed he didn’t feel so dismissive now.
Sverl crashed back against the wall, shook himself, then ran straight across the room, bouncing off equipment on the way and finally crashing into the further wall. The inside of the film suit he wore was bulging with vapour, and black fluid was draining into its lower section. I don’t know whether it was a malfunction or if he hoped to end his pain sooner, but suddenly that covering split open and sucked away into a series of holes above each of his limb sockets. An explosion of vapour followed—the fluid splashing to the floor underneath, smoking like acid burning through the metal. Sverl staggered a few paces, leaving something behind. I looked at a chunk of dissolving flesh with vertebrae and bones exposed. It looked like some half-digested animal thrown up by a predator. Sverl had just lost his tail.
He staggered a little further, then went down on his belly. His human eyes were shrivelling now and dropping out of sight. Great splits divided him, yellow pus boiling out and steaming. Then a large chunk of his body fell out like an orange segment, exposing smoking organs and the glint of metal. As I gaped in horror, he continued to fall apart. For long moments, I just lost sight of him in the fog he was generating. The screaming died to a perpetual wail that bore more resemblance to radio interference than the suffering of a sentient being. A pool spread out across the floor—a stew of dissolving tissues like chyme in a bile of immiscible black and red fluids. It was evaporating in vacuum fast; creating a crust, but not as fast as it was coming out of his body, so the crust kept breaking as another flow overran it like lava. The wail stopped and soon after I caught a glimpse of the remains. All that was left was an intricate ceramal ribcage—with prosthetic claws, legs and mandibles still attached. The items inside it bore some resemblance to candelabra and other silver antiques—I spotted a coil ring, AI crystal and a spider’s web of optics. All sat on a steadily deliquescing and spreading pile of organic tissue.
I stood up, feeling sick and empty, and turned in time to see Bsorol finally freeing himself and moving leadenly over to his father’s remains. Bsectil swayed for a moment, then went over and joined his brother. Meanwhile Riss unwound from that column and squirmed brokenly across the plating. Before I realized what she was doing, she had disappeared down a hole in that floor and was gone.
CVORN
Cvorn first watched the transmission in disbelief, then watched the recording three more times with growing depressed acceptance. Sverl was dead and he had died in such a way that even his body could not be used as evidence of what had happened to him. Whatever the drone had injected had utterly destroyed him. Yes, Cvorn might be able to obtain samples of Sverl’s genome from those remains, along with that ceramal skeleton, but he knew they wouldn’t be enough. Certainly his allies believed the story, but the point was to use Sverl to convince others. Prador, generally, were a sceptical lot and that evidence would not convince them. The skeleton was something that Cvorn and his allies could easily have fabricated, while Sverl’s strange genome was something they could have cut and pasted together too. Most other prador would only be more suspicious of its veracity upon learning of the sub-atomic processes that kept it functioning.
So that was it—all over. What should he do now? His goals had not changed. He still wanted the king usurped and he still wanted the prador to continue their war against the Polity, but now he could see no way of bringing either about. Decades of planning ruined.
As he stared at his screens, Cvorn began to feel deeply depressed. Abruptly he approached a bowl sitting on a frictionless column—designed to keep the ship lice from getting to it. Without conscious volition, he began eating the jellied mudfish he found there, only becoming conscious of what he was doing when his claw clattered against the empty bowl. He backed off, fearing what might happen to his insides. Then he realized he was still seeing the bowl despite starting to turn away. His remaining transplanted palp eye was working! He had saved his eye—using the recombinant virus his medical equipment had designed, which he’d drill-injected into his visual turret just a few hours ago. He shifted it around, revelling in the ability to look at things without having to turn his body to face them. Then, a moment later, he realized something else.
His stomach felt fine and he was hungry for something more.
“Vlox!” he clattered, “I want a quarter reaverfish tail right now!”
“Yes, Father,” Vlox replied through the intercom.
Cvorn walked around the sanctum, shaking himself, half expecting his stomach to rebel, but it still felt fine. Of course, he would have to be careful. And perhaps later he should consider transplants of some of his internal organs. He did, after all, have those few remaining young adults aboard . . . No, on second thought, he had a much better option. He scuttled back to his screens, auging into his system to call up new cam views. Now he gazed into the chamber beside the hatching room. This housed about forty small male third-children, each no larger than a human head. They were swarming over some unidentifiable meat, tearing it apart.
Eyeing all these children, Cvorn considered the option that had occurred to him earlier. He remembered a prador legend about a creature called the Golgoloth, which preyed on the young and used their body parts to extend its own life. It was, of course, complete rubbish, but the idea of so extending one’s life wasn’t at all. If he harvested transplants from his own children, there would be much less likelihood of rejection problems. Now why, to his knowledge, had not other prador tried this out? He began running searches of this ship’s data banks and, though he did discover examples of prador using such transplants, they weren’t common. It made no sense. Was there something in the prador psyche that prevented it—which he had overcome through his previous augmentations? This was worth study, but perhaps later, because now Vlox had arrived with his food.
“Here,” he said, gesturing to the floor before him with one claw.
Vlox scuttled over and deposited the quarter reaverfish tail before quickly turning to head away.
“Remain,” said Cvorn, “I have a task for you.”
“Yes, Father,” said Vlox meekly.
Cvorn tucked into the chunk of fish. Although he did experience a moment of nausea as he finished, it soon went away. He still took down a draft of stomach remedy, just in case.
“Now, Vlox,” he said, turning back. “Take security drones to the quarters of Vlern’s remaining children. Take s
ome second-children too, all armed and armoured. Kill all of them and dismember them. What you do with them is up to you.”
“Yes, Father!” said Vlox eagerly, coming up out of his squat and turning away.
“Inform me at once if you have difficulties—I don’t want any more problems like Sfolk.”
“You won’t, Father!”
Cvorn dipped his body in acknowledgement. Vlox was a young first-child and had not yet learned that making promises to your father about things that might not be in your full control could be unhealthy.
“Go,” he said, and Vlox went.
So what now? Cvorn’s plans had come to nothing, but he felt good, had seen ways of extending his life even beyond a prador’s usual long extent and he controlled an ST dreadnought. He had a growing family now too and really, anything was possible. There might be other ways to achieve his goals—other opportunities arising throughout the long years ahead. He might even outlive the king. Think of that!
He was heading to the door from his sanctum before he realized where he was going. Then he recognized that his intention to visit the females again had been forming in his mind, right from the moment his stomach started to feel better. Eagerly, he scuttled through the tunnels of his ship, his mood so good he didn’t even crack the shell of a second-child who happened to get in his way, merely pushing it to one side instead. Finally, he arrived at the door into the mating pool.
The outer water lock revolved into the wall, spilling water across the floor. Cvorn eyed this and remembered how he had intended to fix the inefficiencies here. Perhaps he would do that next, now he had more time on his claws. Inside the lock he checked the environmental controls. They were still at the levels he had set last time, so it wouldn’t be so cold on his prongs and clamp—which right then were feeling very sensitive indeed. Water gushed in round his feet after he closed the rear door and it was warm—felt good. He hyperventilated and packed in the oxygen for what he felt sure was going to be a marathon session.