by Neal Asher
Over the course of four hours he discovered a host of frightening possibilities. It could be the kind of war drone the Polity had used to penetrate prador ships—leaving it to be picked up then, once inside the ship, springing into action. It might be a Golem, but that didn’t account for how it resisted the octopuses. There were numerous other possibilities for dense-tech weapons packed inside that suit. As his time ran out, Lelic decided he would just have to stick with the plan. After an initial burst of hostility the man didn’t seem to be much of a threat. The thing to do would be just to get him into the arena somehow, and see what transpired. They often used direct evacuation to space to clear the mess out of the arena so it should be easy enough to expel the man once the fight was over, if need be.
Exiting his cyst, Lelic next headed straight for the arena, traversed a tubeway up into the arena sphere, grav taking hold of him as he came out onto the viewing platform. For obvious reasons, the first being his lack of legs, he didn’t like gravity this high. However, without it there was always a problem keeping the fighters contained. Also, they were used to grav and performed better in it. Here Lelic really had to use his auxiliary tentacles to propel himself, but there were many handholds available, including the rail overlooking the arena, and the floor was shark-slimed to make things easier.
Already most of the station population of three hundred or so was gathering in the wide variety of couches, chairs, suspension frames and nets in the stand. The stand bar was doing a roaring trade—only a few of the adaptations here had lost the ability to appreciate alcohol. Even Mr Pace was at the back, the skeleton at the feast, as an old expression would have had it. It was unusual to see him at these events because they weren’t usually to his taste. Lelic gazed at him for a long moment then turned away and leaned over the rail and looked down.
The survivor was now standing in the middle of the arena floor and appeared mildly curious about the holocams floating all around him.
“No sensocording,” said Henderson, coming up to squat at Lelic’s side.
He was right, of course. Usually they would either tap into the aug a victim wore or install a new one. That way they got a full sensory recording of what it was like to face a prador in a place like this, and be torn apart. It wasn’t the sort of sensocording that was to Lelic’s taste but some people were prepared to pay a lot of money to experience . . . death.
“How did you get him in there?” Lelic asked.
“Just opened the door and he walked through,” Henderson replied.
Lelic shivered then said, “Okay, then it’s time to bring in Sfolk.” Lelic slid round Henderson to the short walkway leading out to the control pulpit overlooking the arena. As soon as he reached the gel console he checked his feeds. Bidding and betting had attained an almost insane level and, seeing the amounts being wagered, he wondered for a moment about keeping this space-suited figure. That was, if it defeated Sfolk, which now seemed highly likely. Next he ensured the holocams and anosmic recorders were getting everything, then pressed his finger down in the gel to the door control cell. He paused. Gazing down into the arena, he saw the space man turn to face the ceramic door behind which the prador Sfolk lurked. How could he know, unless he had senses beyond human normal?
“Henderson . . .” Lelic said.
“Cannons are targeted,” Henderson said, limpet-stuck to the walkway behind. “If he tries to get out of the arena we’ll fry him. But don’t you think if he was Golem he would have done something by now?”
Lelic dipped his head in agreement and pressed the cell. As the clamshell door began to draw open a prador claw punched at the gap, so it seemed Sfolk was eager . . . well no, that wasn’t quite right. Sfolk had shown a strange reluctance to attack the opponents set against him in the arena at first but, eventually, hunger had taken its toll. Sfolk was starving and had lost any unpradorish moral qualms, knowing dinner awaited.
“Eight will be pleased,” a voice hissed in Lelic’s ear.
“What?” he turned and peered at Henderson.
“I didn’t say anything,” Henderson replied.
Lelic turned back as the door finally revealed the young-adult prador. It was difficult to tell a starving prador from a well-fed one since creatures with carapaces didn’t tend to get any thinner. Only their eagerness gave them away. Sfolk charged straight out towards the suited figure, claws snipping at the air. Lelic quickly put a bet down on the duration of the action upon seeing the confident way the man just stood waiting.
At the last moment Sfolk abruptly skidded to a halt, mandibles clattering and drool dribbling. Then he froze, and uncharacteristically took a few paces back.
What’s this?
Maybe Sfolk’s intelligence had kicked in and he had questioned the wisdom of charging up to someone who didn’t seem inclined to run away. But then instinct took over again and the prador suddenly shot forwards and snapped a claw closed around the man’s hips. Now for some action, Lelic thought, and then felt as if he had been cheated when the prador hoisted the man up and he just hung there doing nothing. The prador then brought in his other claw, carefully, as if he didn’t want to damage his prospective meal, closed it on the fabric of the space suit and tugged. Lelic stared, with his mouth hanging open, as a suit that had resisted the diamond tendrils of four octopuses tore like wet paper. The whole suit parted as if eager to be completely open, and the helmet bounced away. Sfolk then just stood there holding the sagging remains, while black crystalline matter poured out onto the floor of the arena.
Was that it? Had the suit simply been motorized, had it been responding to some residual programming? No, that couldn’t be, because it was of a very old design, wasn’t armoured and showed no signs of motors at the joints. Lelic stared and tried not to think about some of the wartime horrors he had recently been researching.
The crowd was booing now, throwing beer tubes and vodka bags, along with various unpleasant items exuded from their wide variety of bodies. Lelic didn’t have to try very hard to judge the mood of his people and knew there would be trouble after such a disappointing bout. He quickly tugged a set of cells into reach and called up the latest status report on one of the biomech killers, which displayed in a stratum in the gel. They were occasionally used, but Lelic was reluctant to set one in motion. If Lelic sent in a biomech, he would have lost two contestants—and it would be such a shame to wipe out such a useful killer, no matter how satisfying his people would find that. Still undecided, Lelic peered down into the arena again and saw something strange.
The black crystalline powder that had poured from the suit Sfolk had discarded had not settled. It hung just below the suit like a stratum of fog, and now it was swirling and rising. When it was about ten feet from the arena floor there came a thump and it exploded in every direction, dispersing as it went. Lelic immediately tasted dry grittiness in his mouth and something niggled inside his lungs. He slid back from the gel console and coughed. What the hell was that? Glancing round, he saw that others in the crowd were coughing and hacking too, though the noises some of them were making weren’t easily identifiable as such. He leaned against the rail beside the pulpit walkway, gazing down, then abruptly realized Sfolk was directly beneath him, peering up. The prador did not look anywhere near as agitated as he should be. Did he know something?
Lelic watched the young-adult as, after a moment, it turned away from him and ambled over to the arena wall below the main stand. Something odd was going on over there because the ceramic armour of the wall had acquired a thread-work across its surface, almost like some sort of mould. Sfolk reached out with one claw and tapped it against the tough material before pulling that claw back and stabbing it forwards. The ceramic just shattered and the prador’s claw punched straight through.
But for the occasional coughs, a dead silence fell in the arena. Then all at once, everyone was in motion. Lelic looked round at Henderson, who was harrumphing like a worn-out
piston engine, his limpet muscles clenching up each time.
“Henderson, shoot him—aim for his legs,” Lelic instructed.
Henderson turned watery black eyes on him then reached with one spade-like hand into the fleshy folds of his body to extract his proton cannon. He took steady aim, but then lowered his weapon as another fit of coughing racked him. Meanwhile, Sfolk had smashed another hole and was lining up for another, making a row of them.
“Henderson!”
“Awright, awright,” said the man. He took aim at the prador, squinting, shrugged to loosen his shoulders and raised his other hand to support his wrist, then he regretfully pulled the trigger.
The proton weapon fizzed and smoked. Henderson convulsed and squawked and luckily his grip slackened and he dropped the weapon. Others were not so lucky with theirs. A blast amidst the main audience tore a green-skinned ectomorph in half and tipped Dorrel and one other over the rail to land in the arena. A woman staggered along beside the rail, clutching a laser carbine, jerking as if in palsy, steam rising from the webbing of flesh between the spines sprouting from her body.
Down in the arena Sfolk turned from demolishing the wall and scuttled over to Dorrel and the other extremadapt struggling to regain their feet. Dorrel, who had always generated such fear and respect, tried to fend him off with tentacles as thick as a normal’s leg. Sfolk just snipped and tore and left the big extremadapt writhing and bleeding. Then he turned away dismissively to snatch up the smaller victim, and squatted to start dismembering him, feeding chunks of bloody flesh into his mandibles. It looked horribly to Lelic as if Sfolk was now the audience, watching the show while shoving tasty snacks into his mouth. Another explosion ensued and, this being far too much for the substantially weakened wall below, the whole seating stand began to sag. Then, in an avalanche of breaking metal and screaming, people started falling into the arena.
Lelic hadn’t survived for as long as he had as the leader of this colony because he was stupid. Quite obviously some sort of nano-weapon had been deployed here and things weren’t going their way. It was time to flee. The part of the stand adjacent to the pulpit had not yet collapsed and from there he could return the way he had come, get aboard his old tug and get the hell out of this space station. He shifted back from the console and felt the walkway crunch underneath his piscine body like shell ice, peered down to see cracks spreading and then, just for a second, he was weightless as the walkway and pulpit simply collapsed into the arena.
Riss
The Lance was now in good order: refuelled, restocked and all power storage up to maximum, everything on the bridge in working order and nothing nasty lurking in the ship’s computing. Spear had also managed to load up the armoury with railgun slugs and some other expendable items, like chaff, from Sverl, who had even provided some chemical explosive missiles. However, Sverl had informed the man that no CTDs were available aboard the station. Riss didn’t believe that for a minute.
“Everything is ready and now it’s time to go,” she said. “So why are we still here?”
He sat in his chair in the bridge with the screen fabric alive all around him, watching all the activity out in the construction bay. There were fewer of those shrub-like growths and ’structor pods now and the robot ecology of the station appeared to be gradually returning to normal.
“We have a few things to finish up,” he said. “I need to find out what Trent, Sepia and Cole intend to do.”
“Why?” asked Riss. “Why should you concern yourself about them any more than the shell people?”
Sepia and Cole were people he had known only briefly, and though his association with Trent was more complicated, he hadn’t really known him for much longer. The man was procrastinating, just like he had on Masada.
Ignoring the question, he continued, “And I have to get the spine back from Sverl.”
“What for?” asked Riss. “You were all for tossing it out of an airlock at one point.”
“Because it’s integral,” he snapped.
“I do have further diagnostic checks to make too,” interjected Flute.
Riss managed to suppress the urge to make some snappy reply to that. Obviously the ship mind had seen a chance to side with Spear against Riss.
“Shut up, the both of you.” Spear stood up and headed for his cabin.
Riss watched him go, then applied to Flute for access to the ship’s sensors and com gear rather than use her usual route through Spear’s aug.
“Why should I trust you?” asked Flute.
“Why should I trust you?” Riss shot back.
“Sverl no longer controls me.”
“So you say.”
“I can prove it.”
“Go on then.”
Flute immediately sent a list of channel access codes and in her mind Riss gazed at them in disbelief. She rose up off the floor and slid up onto the console round Spear’s chair and opened her black eye. Surely, this could not be real? Would the second-child mind be so stupid?
With all her penetration gear operating, Riss carefully opened those channels and saw that they opened directly into Flute’s mind. Soon she understood that Flute had given her unrestricted access. She could do anything to or see anything in the second-child’s mind. She began sorting data and connections, delving deep for hidden protocols—hidden orders that Flute would have no option but to obey—and found none. She next ran at high speed back through the mind’s memory, replaying in detail Flute’s thoughts during the time of his betrayal, when he had almost sent the Lance to its destruction by Cvorn’s ST dreadnought. There Riss began to feel discomfited, for Flute had been unable to disobey Sverl’s orders, yet had fought with every resource available not to put them in danger. Later Riss replayed the exchange between Flute and Sverl during which the mind had demanded and got complete freedom from Sverl. Finally she withdrew, but hesitated on closing off access.
Flute had nearly killed them and, at the time, Riss had sworn to herself that he would pay for that. Now, here was the second-child’s mind, thought translated to crystal, utterly open to her. Until this moment she had only inspected its contents, but the option was there for her to do more. She could insert a whole ecology of destructive viruses and worms if she wanted. She could route through it and shut down power to it, she could set off the ejection routine and send it at high speed from the ship, ensuring its course took it straight into the armour of that dreadnought in the final construction bay out there. She could, right now, kill Flute.
But where had her tendency to destructive action taken her? It had taken her into a darkness that had led to Penny Royal and empty hate, and it had finally led her to Sverl screaming as his body dissolved. Riss withdrew and closed down those channels.
“Enough?” Flute enquired.
“Enough,” Riss replied, “but I’ve no intention of changing the contentious nature of our relationship.”
“I wouldn’t have it any other way,” said the mind.
Riss now, again, applied for sensor and com access, and Flute granted it instantly. Riss then used the com system to link into the growing and increasingly sane system of Room 101, first passing the inspection of a local AI and, surprisingly, being allowed access elsewhere. She first ranged to one end of the station to inspect through cams the work going on around the U-space drive and check on any data concerning it she could find. Surprisingly, there wasn’t as much work going on there as she had expected. Next, tracing those second-children that had been at work there, she found them otherwise employed around the bubble-metal plant now producing Penny Royal’s hardfield generators. Sure, it was understandable that Sverl had directed resources first to defence, but why had he diverted such resources to one of the runcibles?
Riss now inspected the cargo runcibles concerned, seeing the system checks and components tests were reaching an end, and again tried to figure out why Sverl had wanted the thi
ng operating. Was he now so cosmopolitan that he was prepared to accept visitors from the Polity? Was he suffering some delusion in which Polity AIs were perfectly accepting of a prador controlling a major weapons-producing station like this? Perhaps Riss was just missing something.
She moved then to generally inspecting the rest of the station and found that Sverl had not rid himself of all the masses of tentacle trees of ’structor pods but had found plenty of employment for them. All around the station they were steadily chewing up wreckage and useless structures mindlessly constructed by the technology that had escaped control here and conveying it to various furnaces and reprocessing plants. Riss was enjoying herself watching a great mass of them grazing on metallic moulds spread across the hull when Flute abruptly interrupted.
“We have a problem,” said the mind.
“What now?” Riss snapped, feeling less concerned about Flute’s loyalty than before, but by no means intending to get all buddy-buddy with the thing.
“Sverl informs me that if we want to leave we have to leave shortly.”
“Why’s that then?”
Flute supplied a link to a telescope array on the hull of the station, plus coordinates. Riss winced when she saw what had arrived, then mentally shrugged. She hadn’t exactly been made for a quiet life.
Crowther
The disconnection routine was fast, and here, with numerous radio and laser links all around him to perpetually update his connection with the Well Head’s systems, Crowther hardly felt any reduction in his overall intelligence. This was a bit of a problem because lately the data output of Layden’s Sink had waned, strangely, as if it was taking a breather, as if it was pausing on the cusp of some change. And this left Crowther bored.