by Neal Asher
His own aug having processed the download from the other aug, he now knew all he needed to know about Heilberg's next run—all the flight and security protocols, all the codes. Only one thing remained. He turned from the mirror, stooped to remove a small brushed aluminium box from his holdall, then headed for the kitchenette.
Heilberg's head now lay in a pool of his own blood. Conlan stared at the mess for a moment, then took hold of the corpse's ankle and dragged the body into the main living area, smearing a gory trail behind. Stretching Heilberg's right arm out, he placed the aluminium box down beside it and popped the box open. Most people wore their augs on the left-hand side of their heads if they were right-handed and vice versa, and most right-handed people used that hand on palm-readers. Of course, the situation being otherwise with Heilberg's right hand up against his aug, Conlan would have waited until he lowered it before using the bottle. He did not want this hand damaged.
From the box he removed a chainglass scalpel and cut around the wrist, careful not to sever any tendons. This done he used a small hook to stretch out the larger, severed blood vessels and place small clamps on them. Now the tendons, which he stretched out individually and clamped before cutting. The ends of the tendons leading up into the arm snapped out of sight, but those leading into the hand, because of the clamps, remained accessible to him. He continued his surgery, cutting the radius and ulna bones with a small electric saw and slicing remaining flesh. Soon the hand separated, and he set about replacing the clamps on the tendons with specially designed bayonet fittings and those on the blood vessels with similar though hollow fittings. He sprayed a sealant over the raw end to close off the smaller blood vessels and capillaries. This done, he stared at the hand for a moment before rolling up his sleeve and pressing four points in a particular sequence on his forearm. His right hand flopped—all feeling instantly departing it. A quick slice about the syntheskin around his wrist gave him access to the specially designed interface plug between his artificial arm—attached at his shoulder—and artificial hand. He detached the hand, then set about inserting the bayonets into their various ports, before finally pushing the bones into their central clamps—replacing his artificial hand with Heilberg's. He then wrapped around syntheskin tape to cover the join.
Now came the critical part as he waited for the interface port to make its connections. From a small reservoir within his forearm, artificial blood, at the required temperature and pressure, cycled through the hand. Servomotors would pull on the tendons. There was no doubt that both these operations would certainly work. The one that might fail was the injection of copper composite whiskers through flesh to the major muscles in the hand, since he did not have the time or equipment to make nerve connections. He waited, studying a readout screen situated in the aluminium box. When it finally gave him the go-ahead he flexed the hand, then closed it into a fist. Not quite right, and no feeling, no feedback, but it would serve.
Eighteen hours now until the flight. Conlan settled himself in Heilberg's apartment, first eating the bacon cooked under the grill, then attempting to sleep in Heilberg's bed. Time dragged. Conlan dared not take a pill to knock himself out, so spent an uncomfortable six hours in the bed. Later he showered, and wearing a towelling robe once belonging to the corpse—now wrapped in a sheet and shoved out of sight behind the sofa—he tried out Heilberg's disc collection. Finally he found more interesting entertainment in the intricacies of his own aug. Prior to leaving, he changed into a spare flight overall belonging to Heilberg. It wasn't easy with only one truly workable hand, but he did not want any blood on this clothing again. He placed his artificial hand in the man's flight bag, then took it up and headed off to find his grabship, glad to be going since the smell in Heilberg's apartment was becoming none too pleasant.
* * * * *
Immanence observed that the radiation levels were high, as was the quantity of orbital debris not present some months before. There were still some ECS ships limping around the system, but mainly they were just trying to survive. Captain Shree, in his ship parked geostationary above Grant's World along with four troop carriers, did not concern himself about them. The other, smaller Prador ships were conducting the cleanup operation. Shree's concern was for the planet below, and the damnable forces there.
"They are as difficult to remove as a ship louse bored into a shell joint," the captain complained. "I personally have lost two hundred second-children and three first-children, and have necessarily taken some third-children out of storage to raise to the next level. Surface Arm have lost nearly a million second-children, hundreds of first-children, and nearly twenty thousand war drones. The enemy has now established a runcible down there from which we keep picking up U-space interference, but cannot find, and they keep bringing in new forces. Unless we do find it, we cannot win."
"I am here to relay new orders from the King " Immanence told the other captain, revelling in his authority. "We will win here."
Shree made a gobbling sound, probably assuming this to be one of those "sort it out or die" orders from the Prador monarch, and now wondering if there might be any way he could pin failure on Immanence who was now the ranking Prador adult here.
The hierarchical system of the Prador had been medieval and vicious for centuries. The King ruled by dint of being the nastiest and most conniving of them all, and managed to maintain his rule by setting all those below him against each other and ruthlessly crushing any single Prador who became too powerful. Those below him determined their ranking by endless complicated infighting and brief alliances that usually ended in bloody betrayals. The captains of dreadnoughts, like Shree and Immanence, were of the highest rank, having accumulated enough wealth and power to buy into the resources and industrial capacity the King controlled. Those lower down the scale captained smaller ships or provided troops, while those lower still ran the infrastructure of Prador society. All adult Prador ruled huge families with an absolute power the worst human dictators would have envied. In this complicated hierarchical structure, Shree lay a stratum below Immanence. Captain Immanence allowed Shree to assume the worst for a while before putting him right.
"The King has decided that expending resources here to take this world would delay the push into the Polity for too long." Shree fell silent. Immanence now opened up the communication to all the Prador adults in the system, and all those first-children commanders whose fathers were back within the Kingdom. "AH land forces are to immediately withdraw from the planet. You have five days in which to comply. The ban on tactical fission weapons is now raised so you may use them to cover your retreat. We no longer have a use for this place."
Shree got the idea. "It seems a shame. This world would have made a pleasant addition to the Kingdom."
Immanence guessed the other captain had considered the possibility of staking claim to some portion of Grant's World. He himself would have liked to have done the same. It sometimes felt a little crowded back in the Kingdom and with space like this it would be possible for any adult to greatly extend his family using the same massive creche systems some adults used to provide second- and first-child fodder for ground combat. Increasing the number of children would logically lead to increases in wealth, industrial capacity,power. And maybe then, from such a position, said adult could contemplate a little regicide. Perhaps this too was a reason for the King's decision about this place.
During the ensuing five days, Immanence dropped small sensor drones to observe the retreat and evacuation. He watched retreating Prador cramming onto AG platforms and sliding low over jungle canopy while a line of detonation flashes behind them momentarily blanked vision. Massive fireballs rose and Shockwaves spread in perfect rings as they flattened jungle, which poured smoke flat to the ground before igniting violently. He saw human troops running and burning, then being swept up in ground winds like all the rest of the burning debris. Thousands of square kilometres of jungle burned, along with those human fighters occupying it. But in the air things were not going so
well.
Immanence watched retreating Prador scramble quickly aboard troop transports at the assigned assembly points. Automatic guns and missile launchers covered them there, but not when the transports laboured into orbit. They were guarded by gunboats mounting lasers and missile launchers, and by spherical Prador war drones run by the transplanted cerebral and nerve tissue of second-children. But Polity AI war drones came in fast—weird machines often fashioned in the shape of living creatures. Immanence observed one such formation of things like silvery lice or chouds and shelled molluscs. They approached in a line, then broke, accelerating on fusion drives to employ a seemingly random attack pattern, which in instants resulted in two gunboats dropping, burning, from the sky and a line of four Prador war drones detonating one after another. Remaining Prador defence forces thoroughly engaged, a Polity drone in the shape of some segmented arthropod zipped up underneath the transport, clung for a moment, then darted away. The detonation of the mine it placed blew the transport to small pieces, the blast wave slamming into defenders suddenly finding their opponents gone. Over two thousand Prador ground troops were incinerated.
But it seemed the humans and the AIs were beginning to register the change in tactics and were pulling their own forces back on the surface. Analysing this retreat, Immanence narrowed down the position of the runcible to the north of one of the main continents. He targeted the centre of that spread of jungle. Some Prador forces still remained within the zone, but the loss would not be unacceptable. He launched a single antimatter missile, maximum acceleration all the way down. It cut an orange streak of fire through atmosphere, as it burnt away its ablation shield, and hammered into the ground. A mountain rose then flew apart in a growing sphere of annihilating fire. A fire storm spread, instantly, across thousands of square kilometres of jungle, and the ensuing Shockwave peeled up the topsoil from bedrock. From orbit he observed a massive disk-shaped cloud spread above the detonation site. Beyond, the devastation spread almost like a pyroclastic flow. Within minutes a million square kilometres of jungle turned into something like the surface of a world closely orbiting a sun. No sign, thereafter, of any U-space interference. The runcible was gone.
The evacuation was all but complete on the fourth day, though heavy losses were inflicted by Polity war drones, which carried the fight all the way up into orbit—the drones attacking until depleting all their weaponry, then slamming themselves as hard and fast as possible into any vulnerable Prador ship. At this point Immanence contacted Shree to say, "Now."
Antimatter missiles rained down on the planet, each one, at a minimum, causing devastation the same as that caused by the one Immanence had used to destroy the runcible. Within hours it became impossible to see the continents from orbit, for the atmosphere filled with smoke, steam and debris. Tsunamis slammed around the world washing thousands of kilometres inshore. A fault line reactivated three hundred kilometres inshore of one continent, and dropped everything behind it five metres into the ocean. Some inactive volcanoes exploded violently into action, one active volcano went out. Immanence supposed that, after a winter lasting a century or so, the jungle might return. It would take millions of years before this place evolved large life forms again. All but maybe a few of the large, alien life forms down there were dead.
"Satisfactory," said Immanence. "Now, Shree, with a little stopover to remove a Polity transfer station—a small matter, no more than a nibbling louse—you will accompany me to a system the humans name Trajeen, where we will seize from them a runcible that is not planet-based."
"Do we have need of such things?" Shree asked.
"Some of the technology may come in useful, but if not, what matter? Another human world there awaits our attention."
* * * * *
"What's with Jadris?" said the new copilot. "He can't just do that at the last moment—the AI wants those buffers in position and ready for fitting straight after the test."
"Too much green brandy?" Conlan suggested.
The woman looked at him with slight puzzlement and Conlan rather suspected his mimicking of Heilberg's voice might be wrong. "What did you hear?" he asked.
She shrugged. "He auged in to opt out of this flight, saying he was sick, then he took his aug offline, so he must be unwell to not be taking calls. But it's not like him to be so irresponsible."
Conlan studied her as she moved off ahead of him. She was an attractive woman with a bald skull, fine coffee skin and an evident athleticism that did not detract from her femininity. But then Polity cosmetic surgery made it possible for anyone to be attractive. Maybe she had been born an ugly troglodyte with warts, bad breath and suppurating acne.
At the security gate into the flight bay, she stepped ahead of him to press her hand against the palm reader, then walked through. He glanced up, noting the drone hanging Damoclean overhead, and placed Heilberg's hand against the reader. Nothing happened, no alarms and no sudden activity from the drone, and he walked through trying not to show any reaction.
"Green brandy you say?" she asked him.
Conlan scanned the four ships presently resting in the huge bay and felt a brief moment of panic. All four of them were grabships stripped of their claws, and all three held runcible buffer sections dogged under their forward cockpits. He had no idea which one was Heilberg's. Fortunately the copilot moved on ahead of him. He wished she would stop talking. He didn't know her name or what her association with Heilberg might be. They could have been lovers, they might have shared in-jokes and all that sad paraphernalia born of friendships.
Rather than head for any of the ships she turned to the right, and only when he called up schematics of this area in his aug did he realise she was heading for the changing room.
Idiot!
It would have looked hugely suspicious if he'd climbed aboard without donning a spacesuit first. Though these ships were very rugged, safety procedures on what was effectively a construction site required crew to wear spacesuits.
Within the changing area others were stripping off clothing before open lockers, hanging the clothing inside and then donning their suits. Relief again when he saw that each locker bore a name stencilled on the door. He walked up to Heilberg's and pressed his hand against the reader beside it. Nothing happened. Conlan just stood there swallowing dryly.
"Is that bloody thing still playing up?" asked the copilot.
"So it would seem," he replied, not knowing what to do next. She provided the answer for him by reaching over and thumping the wall beside the plate as she passed. The door popped open. Conlan felt a great gratitude towards—he checked the name on the locker she came to a halt before—Anna Vasco.
Conlan stripped off his clothing and donned the spacesuit, surreptitiously making adjustments so it fitted him properly. He glanced aside at Anna, and seeing her utterly naked, tanned and sleek as she pulled out her suit, felt a surge of excitement. She glanced at him, noting his attention, and, rather deliberately he felt, dropped her suit then bent over, with her naked behind towards him, to pick it up. Of course, he knew, by the standards of general humanity, that between his ears lay a twisted ugly mess. He was a psychopath, and he knew that his heterosexual wiring had fused with other parts of his psyche. Hence the prospect of killing a sexually attractive woman excited him in an entirely different way from how he felt about Jadris and Heilberg. Unfortunately, he could not pander to the part of himself requiring the act to be protracted. The woman must die quickly. Such a shame.
Suitably attired, and with their bowl helmets tucked under their arms, they headed out towards the ships. Again Conlan let Anna take the lead, and thus discovered that Heilberg's ship lay second from the left. They boarded, stooping through the cramped body of the vessel, which was racked out and packed with the kinds of hand tools Conlan often employed for purposes other than those intended. He smiled at a row of electric screwdrivers and remembered how it once took him many hours and many hundreds of self-tapping screws to kill one man, and the subsequent long-running joke in th
e Organization that if you crossed Conlan you were screwed.
In the bulbous chainglass cockpit Anna took the copilot's seat while Conlan strapped himself in where Heilberg once sat. Of course Anna's presence was for the same reasons as the spacesuits—a precautionary measure—and having little to do, she chattered. Conlan kept his replies monosyllabic so as not to offer any encouragement while they waited for their slot. Soon the two ships ahead of Heilberg's moved through the ship lock at the end of the bay, and his turn came. The maglev in the bay automatically drew the ship into the lock, the entry doors sealing behind. High-speed pumps screamed up to full function, their sound gradually receding as they removed from the lock the medium for carrying sound. The outer doors opened with a puff of residual atmosphere, and maglev, and the station's spin, threw the grabship out into vacuum. Showing confident professionalism, Conlan started the vessel's fusion engine—pointed away from the station—and made the required corrections to bring it on course for the cargo runcible.
"Is there something wrong with your hand?" Anna asked.
Difficult to hide, and her question would have been the first of many. One more task, then, for Heilberg's hand. He straightened it and chopped back hard, smashing Anna's nasal bones up into her head. She snorted a spray of blood all over the cockpit screen as she choked into silence. Conlan inspected the hand. The force of the blow had torn it from the interface clamps and it now stuck out at an odd angle from his forearm. He removed it, and replaced it with his own artificial one—glad of the return of feeling and sensitivity, for he would need all his faculties for what he intended. But before he set about preparing for that task,he unstrapped Anna from her seat and dragged her into the back. He found her presence distracting.
5
Which they ate with a runcible spoon—