by Neal Asher
Throwing a wave ahead, it surged out of the water, revealing its heavy mutations. Diseased pink and black in coloration, it seemed fleshy and resembled a giant octopus rather than a creature with a carapace. Even its claws didn’t look as if they could shear anything, being more like the claw flesh of a cooked crab extracted from its shell. But it rose up on the edge of the pool and threw itself towards me. So I opened fire.
The pulse gun had little recoil and I managed three shots into its body, below two vertical rows of bony plates that had once been mandibles, before diving aside. It slammed into the wall beside the vent and turned, its bony plates clattering and a wet squeal issuing from deep inside it. I now saw the technology interwoven in its body and the interface plates either side of its head. The control units on its armour plugged into those and at the sight of them my anger resurged. I came up on one knee and fired again, hitting distorted limbs whose jointed sections bowed under its weight. It turned towards me and its visual turret, which I had thought firmly attached, rose up on a ribbed neck and it squealed again. I just kept firing as it came at me, then ran past it to leap over the pool. Its claw hit me in mid-flight and I came down on my shoulder, then rolled upright and continued firing.
My shots were hurting it, but didn’t seem to be slowing it down. I glimpsed the gun’s readout – twelve shots left. It took the shortest route around the pool after me, which luckily drew it away from the vent hole. I aimed carefully, hitting its head and the array of pink eyes there. It lurched back, then abruptly forwards, into the pool and then out again, sprawling where I had been a moment before. But by then I was back at the vent.
With the gun pointed at it, I kept the trigger pressed, while glancing in the vent, and with my other hand I grabbed the carbine. I had the weapon out just as the mutated prador slammed into me. The slick weight of the thing pinned me, and one of the claws closed around my chest. It wasn’t hard, it had no carapace, but it closed tightly and I simply couldn’t breathe. I felt something break, probably a rib, as the thing tried to draw me towards its bony plates, which were now moving like the teeth of a chainsaw, yellow drool spattering from them. I triggered the carbine.
A deep thrum came from between us, followed by sizzling and a puff of steam. The creature shuddered and its weight fell off me. In an explosion of rank black smoke, the beam exited its back. It howled, soaking me with saliva and gobbets of green, then rolled away, coming down on its back, legs waving in the air. I crawled free and fired again, sweeping the beam across. Two of its legs came away, but it flipped and began crawling towards the archway. I hit it again and again, punching burning holes through its body. It tried to heave up but something inside it had been pushed past breaking point and organs prolapsed out of a hole in its underside. Clouds of smoke and steam now filled the sanctum as it finally moved through the arch. I followed, slicing off the remaining legs on one side. But still it kept moving until it had reached its armour. It touched one of the armoured claws with its own fleshy one and the armour parted horizontally with a thunk, the top half rising on polished rods. No, I could not allow this. I moved round, burning off one of its claws and then the other. It was almost immobile now, but stretched up with its head, extending its neck as if it might use this to pull itself into its armour. I burned through the neck, sliced off remaining limbs, then began to cut the body in half even as the carbine flashed a warning and its beam died.
I felt sick and wanted to throw up, but my body quelled that. In the steaming remains I saw movement: an exposed organ pulsing, fibrous muscle quivering, the stumps of legs shifting up and down. A pool of liquid had spread out around the thing, but it was clear and contained only a few green jelly gobbets of what presumably was left of its blood. I had chopped it into pieces yet still it seemed to be alive. I remembered then the man-thing the king had torn apart and how that humanoid was now perfectly intact again. He’d been reassembled straight afterwards, however, while this mutated prador remained in pieces. Could it recover from such appalling injuries? I looked down at one disconnected leg from which a fibrous tendril oozed slowly across the floor towards the main body, and knew that it could. I kicked all the legs far away from the body and when I did the same with the head, the bony plates snapped at me. I threw it back into the pool in the other room. Irrational really, since a prador’s main ganglion – its brain – resided inside its body. I considered cutting into the thing to destroy that brain, but couldn’t bring myself to. I went over to the bayonet plug of the charger, which had been dislodged during the combat, and inserted it back into its socket.
In the same way that my embedded knowledge had told me that normal Polity citizens weren’t aware of the Spatterjay mutation of the king and his family, I also understood that normal prador didn’t know this either. Those that had come aboard from the other ship had been ‘normal’, so I concluded it highly unlikely the prador in the dirty white armour would have allowed them access to its sanctum. Even if any of them did break in, they’d be utterly baffled by what they found. Some strange sea creature dismembered in the cabin; perhaps the remains of the resident’s last meal? What I didn’t know was whether any more of the king’s children were aboard, but I needed to act as if that was the case. The prador would be found and then the ship would be searched.
I lugged the battery back up to the weapons emplacement and slotted it back in place. Grav came on fully this time, but to save power I sought out the relevant cables and disconnected them. When my efforts had me floating off the floor, I activated the gecko function in my envirosuit boots and walked round as if on glue. Everything on the console lit and it threw up a holographic screen above it, crosshairs in the middle and options listed down the side. The particle cannon was out – not enough power for that – but the missiles could be launched. A warning appeared at the bottom informing me AUGLINK DISCON. I reached out, putting my finger into the screen, and banished it off to one side. Now it seemed I could select other options. I chose one, then powered down the console and got out of there.
Back in my hideaway I paced around, thinking hard. If I was lucky, it might be that the dismembered prador wouldn’t be discovered until the ship reached its destination, as only then would it be needed to control the clones and the man-thing. I decided I must move. It took three journeys to haul my acquisitions up to the weapons emplacement. I loaded my rucksack with food, tools and water and screwed another energy canister on the carbine. From one of the toolboxes I removed a deposition welder and put it over by the bulkhead door into the dropshaft, but decided not to seal it just yet. Then I waited, and waited, ready to act.
5
Just because I felt ready for the ship to reach its destination didn’t mean it would oblige. Eventually returning to the humdrum necessities of my existence, I ate and drank and, after closing and locking the shaft door, slept for a while. Motion sickness later woke me – sleeping in zero gravity wasn’t great. I sorted cables and managed to turn on two grav-plates in the corridor, but at very low power, then ventured down to my previous hideaway, grabbed a mattress and heat sheet and installed them on the two plates. But I still felt I had to do more, be as prepared as I could. So I went to check on the spacesuit.
After stripping off my envirosuit, I backed into the cabinet, stepping into the boots and closing the spacesuit up around me. Though bulkier than the previous garment, its motors made it easy to move. As I stepped out of the cabinet the concertinaed helmet folded over my head and a visor slid up to seal against it, its head-up display lighting. Touching the controls on one gauntlet, I searched through the HUD to call up the needed controls. Crosshairs appeared, and the link established to the emplacement on the hull. It worked – the weapons turret would be on the move trying to track where the crosshairs pointed, so I quickly shut it down. I checked other options and familiarized myself with controls that had been common to a previous version of me. Backing into the cabinet again, I opened the suit and stepped out. It was stupid to waste power on such exercises. I didn’
t really want to lug the battery, which supplied everything around me and charged the suit, back to that sanctum again.
That sanctum …
No, I didn’t want to go there. Though I feared the discovery of the prador’s remains and what would ensue, I was reluctant to have that fear confirmed. Instead, back in my envirosuit with the carbine strapped across my back, I ventured to the tubes of the ventilation system again to look in on the main force of the prador. They had now cleared a space to work in. Racks had been set up to take Gatling cannons which, it appeared, were undergoing maintenance. Behind these, prador stood one on another in a sheer wall rising fifty feet. Since all their visual turrets pointed towards me, I moved slowly back from the grating and out of sight. Did this indicate our imminent arrival at their target?
I headed to the bay containing the war boat. The prador there were now crowded outside it, running through similar checks, and after a while, in dribs and drabs, began to return aboard. The old shuttle next. The smell hit me even as I approached the vent. The clones and the man-thing were still in the same place and, apparently, had been using the floor for their sanitary arrangements. Then something else froze me in place. Two prador stood in the bay studying the clones and neither were wearing the same kind of armour as their fellows. One’s was polished chrome with a pattern on it like a purple Rorschach blot, while the other was clad in bright yellow with zebra stripes. So there were other members of the Guard aboard; the king’s family. This meant others with the same mutation as White-Armour, and who might check on his sanctum at any time if he’d been out of communication for a while. I realized I had to overcome my reluctance and go to check on that sanctum myself.
Hurrying through the system, I came to the relevant grating and peered inside. Little seemed to have changed so I unbolted it and stepped in, further scanning the interior. My gaze fell upon the laser burns. Any prador coming in here would know there had been a fight. I scrubbed at one with my boot but couldn’t erase it. Then I noticed something swimming in the pool. When I walked over and peered in it disappeared into the murk. I’d kicked the creature’s head in there, and now contemplated the effects the Spatterjay virus could have on organisms. With its eclectic collection of genomes from many creatures, it mutated its host to optimize its survival. I wasn’t aware that it did the same for pieces of said creatures, but this appeared to be the case here. Readying the carbine, I headed cautiously into the nearby room.
The erstwhile prador had consolidated. The main body I’d come close to cutting in half had healed into one large slug-like lump, also producing a head turret either side of which it had sprouted tentacles. I suspected the genome the virus had used to do this must be from a whelk of the Spatterjay world. It had shed most of the tech grafted to its body, which lay in tangles all around, and was currently gripping one of its own severed limbs, feeding on it with the plug-cutting mouth of a Spatterjay leech. It turned its turret head towards me, attempting to focus with two eyes resembling those of the centipede things aboard the King’s Ship, then just continued eating. My gaze strayed to a number of empty food cylinders lying on the floor, obviously pulled from a rack behind. Looking back into the main part of the sanctum, I realized it had collected up the severed legs and brought them in here to eat.
I aimed the carbine at it. Its head sank down and it stopped eating, quivering. Something else I remembered about the virus. Those infected by it, and then heavily damaged, turned into mindless animals and this was what shivered before me now. They could be returned to themselves with correct feeding and antivirals, but the process took some time. Its reaction to my carbine could only be due to some vague memory of pain, surely? I lowered the weapon.
If others of the king’s children came here, it would be some time before they got a coherent explanation from it of what had happened. Most likely their first assumption would be that one of the normal prador had come in and, seeing its real form, attacked it. How would this affect their mission? Had I removed their only control of the clones and thus prevented the prador initiating the attack they intended to make? No, control units were merely hardware, and it would just be a matter of another prador using the right coding to take over. I doubted this prador had been allowed to keep that coding secret, this undoubtedly being a mission instigated by the king. I turned away to head back into the ventilation shaft, but I couldn’t catch a breath because a clattering alarm sounded and the main door to the sanctum started to open.
The two members of the Guard I had seen earlier down in the shuttle bay came in cautiously, even as I tightened the last bolt on the grating and withdrew my arm. They looked around, clattered and bubbled at each other, then simultaneously a clonk sounded as the tips of the lower jaws on their right-side claws hinged down to expose particle cannons. I had no doubt they were reacting to those laser burns.
One of them walked over to the pool, stabbed a claw in and snared what had once been the head of the sanctum’s occupant. It still had its eyes, but had now sprouted flippers which flailed ineffectually. The Guard dropped this back into the pool then followed its fellow into the other room. A short while later they both backed out and one waved a claw at the other, who rapidly departed. The remaining prador perambulated round the sanctum inspecting the laser burns, before returning to the other room. It came out with a container that must have come from some storage I’d missed, but then I’d been rather busy at the time. Setting this down to one side, it returned to the pool, grabbed the head again and with one quick sweep, tossed it into the other room. Squeaking ensued, terminated by a squelchy crunch. The Guard clattered something, and I felt sure whatever had just happened in there had amused it.
Suddenly feeling vulnerable, I moved back from the grating and settled with my back against the wall, the carbine across my lap. The prador also settled down to wait. Perhaps an hour passed before the other one returned, towing a grav-sled piled with equipment. Again there was some exchange between them, and this time I concentrated, picking up a little of it. It had something to do with a ‘command program’ and ‘initiation’. There also seemed to be some debate about allocation of tasks. They finally settled this as they unloaded the equipment. One opened the container and picked out thrall units, obviously taken from the armour in the other room. These it inserted into sockets on the underside of its fellow’s armour, who then departed. Did I feel smug that my assumptions had been confirmed? Not really, since so many of my speculations also included the very high likelihood of my ending up dead.
The remaining prador now began to set up a big framework, almost like a gimbal, but with numerous extra struts and all sorts of adjustable clamps and pincers. I had no idea what this could be for until the prador ventured into the other room and dragged the remains of its squealing and honking fellow creature back into the main sanctum. It then forced the thing into the framework and began tightening the clamps and pincers, finally all but immobilizing it. While it looked as if this might be a method of torture, I assumed otherwise. The armoured prador began setting up tanks around the creature and stabbing drip feeds into its body. It also inserted a large tube into its leech mouth, tightening a clamp around it, and next connecting it to a pump and larger tank on the floor. The pump started to propel something into the leech mouth. Of course, the prador was filling his unfortunate brother full of the correct nutrients, perhaps viral inhibitors and other stuff to aid his recovery. As I moved away, I wondered how long it would be before they started hunting me down.
More waiting. I slept four times and made further inroads into my food and drink supplies, venturing to the cabins below for toilet visits and swiftly departing because of the growing stink. On the third journey for this, my world turned inside out and I nearly lost my grip on the rungs in the dropshaft. The ship had just surfaced from U-space. A surge of adrenalin drove me up to the emplacement and through my gecko-stick boots I could feel the rumbling of movement throughout the ship.
The dome had cleared again and now the holographic di
splay showed a truncated system map with possible targets highlighted. In iconic form it showed a sun, numerous asteroids scattered around it, and a large planet orbited by numerous moons close by. Touching the icons brought up explanatory labels. The star was a K-class orange dwarf while the asteroids were, apparently, the remains of a world called Hamlin. The large planet bore the name Trallion and had breathable air, apparently the result of terraforming, as well as manageable gravity. But installations on the surface were sealed because of ‘hostile environmental factors’, which seemed decidedly vague. I felt it likely to be as much a casualty of the war as the tumbling remains of Hamlin. The Graveyard, stretching across the border between the Polity and the Prador Kingdom, had been the location of much devastation: worlds had been destroyed or depopulated, fleets annihilated, space stations turned into floating scrap.
It seemed highly unlikely Trallion was the prador target. If they wanted control of it, they could just bombard the installations from orbit and then set up their own. No, it was something else. I touched another icon and read about the station Stratogaster, sitting in orbit of that world. A spinning wheel measuring fifty miles across, its separate spaceship dock extended from a moonlet which was in a matched orbit nearby, and its central docking hub sported a still-operational, massive wartime railgun. Here floated a survivor of the war, and it had to be the prize the prador sought. I expected they wanted to establish a larger base in the Graveyard and, rather than build their own, intended to take one over. I looked up, but could see none of these places yet, just a diffuse orange glow issuing from somewhere out of sight.