Prador Moon: A Novel of the Polity

by Neal L. Asher

  Gnores replaced all his weapons in his harness, then while walking around the embarkation lounge, listened into the com-chatter of the second-children, and to those channels open back to the ship, which kept him updated. Moving over to a wide window—something unthinkable to a Prador for here would be a weakness in its armour—he gazed at his father’s ship, clearly visible just out from the runcible. The ship stood silhouetted against gaseous incandescence on its other side, and through those channels Gnores learnt it was intercepting a rail-gun attack.

  “Gnores! Gnores! Gnores! A human!”

  Gnores whirled around and accelerated across the lounge to the branching corridors on the other side. Many of them were far too small for him to enter. Besides, he did not know which one he should enter anyway.

  On the com unit he now held in his claw, Gnores traced who spoke, reaching forward with one of his finer under-hands to manipulate the complex controls. XG-12, one of the batch raised to second-childhood shortly after they set out from the Second Kingdom. According to the map he should be a hundred metres over—

  The human charged into sight with XG-12 snapping claws at his heels. Gnores drew and aimed his rail-gun, but then realised the human was unarmed. The creature paused, seeing him, then abruptly ran towards him, making all sorts of strange noises and waving about its soft upper limbs.

  “Desist, XG-12. Return to the search.”

  The second-child slid to a halt, perhaps remembering Gnores’ earlier threat and realising that this might not be defined as a combat situation. It turned away and ran off. The human staggered to a halt before Gnores, gasping, and still intermittently making those noises. Gnores realised it was trying to talk to him, only he carried no translator. He reached out and closed the tips of his claws on its lower torso and picked it up.

  “Father, I have found a human. It is trying to speak to me but I do not understand it,” he sent via one of the channels to the ship.

  After a moment Immanence, having viewed Gnores’ prize through the cameras mounted on the first-child’s carapace, replied, “Gnores, it is not trying to speak to you. It is making those sounds because it is in pain. You have damaged it.”

  Gnores abruptly realised he had squeezed too tightly, for the lower torso of the creature split open and organs were bulging out. There also seemed to be a lot of red liquid dribbling onto the floor. Gnores dropped the human at once. He observed it coiling on its side and trying to push its internal organs back inside.

  “I was sure it was trying to speak to me a moment ago,” he said.

  “Why do you not have a translator with you?” Immanence enquired.

  Gnores felt a sudden flash of embarrassment. Though having brought every variety of hand weapon, scanning gear and equipment for accessing human computer systems, he had entirely forgotten about bringing a translator. Then came the fear. Father would severely punish such a lapse. Such a lapse would probably ensure his removal as a Prime. And there was only one way Primes were ever removed.

  “But this place was supposed to be empty! My mission here was to scan for booby traps and secure—”

  “Upon your return, Gnores,” said Immanence, “we will discuss this further.”

  Gnores sagged as the comlink broke. He stared dimly into his future and realised it did not extend very far. Damned human! He sank into a fug of self-pity and wondered if his father was already ordering a drone shell to be brought up to his sanctum, or if all of Gnores would be food for second-children. The human—some payback there… Gnores forced his attention back to his surroundings. He would keep the human alive. He would be much more careful this time. Maybe he could make that pleasure last until Immanence recalled him. He peered down at the floor and saw a bloody trail leading over to a nearby corridor, the human just dragging himself from sight. Gnores charged over and crashed into the corridor mouth—his shell too large to allow him ingress. For a moment he tore at the walls with his claws, but then the human opened some kind of access hatch and began pulling himself inside. Gnores drew his rail-gun and fired, but too late, for the human escaped.

  Gnores stood grinding his mandibles together and drooling black saliva. After a moment he pushed himself back and whirled away. No matter. It wouldn’t live very long with such injuries. They never did.

  Now. The time was now. Moria restarted the positioning drives on the Trajeen runcible, and observed the massive gateposts separating from each other, slowly at first then accelerating, drawing out the Skaidon warp, the drives’ white blades of flame pointing inwards over the meniscus surface. In her real-time model Moria observed the Occam Razor hurtling down towards Boh, and the Prador vessel dropping lower and lower to keep itself between its opponent and the runcible. Some of the Polity vessel’s missiles came close to hitting the runcible itself. That would spell disaster, but, equally, revealing to the Prador that the Boh runcible was not the Polity ship’s intended target would be disastrous too. But just maybe there lay a way around that. Moria accessed the runcible’s meteor collision lasers and routed through to them a military ballistics program uploaded from the planet. Maybe that would be enough.

  Now the Boh runcible. She started the positional drives there, and watched the ring of white fire bloom. Conlan should be sending the second signal now. She did not have time to check with Jebel, and checking would not change matters.

  Utterly unbelievable pain, almost equalled by the horror of being injured like that. Okay now, all wrapped up and back where it should be. The Prador had pinched his abdomen tightly in the tips of its claws, too tight. If it had gripped him only slightly differently it would have snapped his spine. His bulging guts pressed hard against the serrated inner edges of the claw, which cut in, and his intestines and the lower lobes of his liver belched through the split. He’d got it all back inside, and with the remains of his shirt bound it all in place, and tied that down with the optic cable, but the blood just kept oozing out. He was bleeding internally too. He could feel it. Death did not lie very far away.

  EDDRESS REQUEST >

  OFFLINE EDDRESS REQUEST?

  ACCEPT?

  “What the fuck?” he managed. He looked around at the cramped space, could hear the clattering sound of hard Prador feet not very far away. Perhaps they wanted to exchange messages, for they seemed quite anxious to reacquaint themselves with him. Conlan damned himself for a fool. The moment he saw one of those little bastards faceto-face he knew that running to them had been a suicidal move. The big one, like the one called Vortex appearing on the newsnets, he assumed to be a leader of some kind. Why hadn’t it listened to him?

  The eddress request remained and he considered taking the facility offline, but what the hell did it matter now? He accepted and immediately received a message:

  YOU BROKE MY FUCKING LEG YOU PIECE OF SHIT.

  VOCAL CONNECTION?

  Conlan accepted that and sent, “I hope it really hurts. You still at the bottom of that shaft?”

  “No, Urbanus came and collected me and now I’ve a couple of nice drug patches on my chest—compound fracture, so pretty nasty. He got the bones back into my leg and splinted it. I don’t seem to mind that you’ve probably screwed this operation.”

  Conlan felt he could do with some similar patches himself. Obviously, by his tone over the link, Jebel Krong floated up in the clouds.

  “I’ll tell you what. I haven’t screwed your operation completely, but I still can. You send Urbanus for me, with some of those patches, and maybe I’ll still do what you want.” As he finished delivering that speech, Conlan realised that if speaking out loud he would have needed to pause for breath every few words.

  Jebel’s laughter came ghostly over the link. “So the Prador weren’t talking? Have they got you now, stuck you up on a wall somewhere? You really won’t like what happens next. Remember me telling you?”

  “They don’t have me. I’m in hiding. I’m serious about my offer.”

  “No can do, I’m afraid. This place is crawling with them. We’re
under a chameleonware shield, local, blocking scan. No intention of moving right now. They’ll probably find you soon enough. Bit of advice for you…”

  “What’s that?”

  “Kill yourself.”

  “You are a bastard, Krong.”

  Laughter again, then, “And you’re not?”

  Conlan looked around. He lay in an air duct junction. The Prador might pick him up on their scanners, but they’d have to cut through a lot of metalwork to reach him. By then he could crawl on to somewhere else.

  “How long till the runcible starts moving?” he asked.

  “Any time now.”

  “If I send your signal, and survive … will you hold to your promise to me?”

  “Of course, but I don’t really see you surviving. Are you near a console now?”

  Conlan wasn’t, but further along a nearby duct a vent opened into some private accommodation and there would be one in there. He considered his survival chances. It would be so much easier to lie here and die; already he felt slightly cold and sleepy. Approaching the Prador again would almost certainly result in the scenario Krong once described to him and promised to mimic with pliers and metal snips. If he crawled to that room and sent the signal, Krong’s plan might succeed. But then there were the Prador here. In that room he would be more vulnerable and he doubted he would be able to haul himself up to the vent again.

  “Tell me again your plan?” he asked.

  “Oh, you mean about the mines and such—all complete bollocks, obviously.”

  “What?”

  “Well, I didn’t want you telling your Prador chums. The mine scenario worked just fine for our purposes. And even if you ratted on us the real plan might still work.”

  “So what is your real plan?”

  “You expect me to tell you now? Why should I do that?”

  “Because my guts are hanging out, I’m bleeding internally, and I know the Prador are not my chums.”

  “Love the Polity now do you?”

  “I hate it and all it stands for, but right now I hate the Prador more.”

  After a long pause Jebel spoke more soberly. “Give me a visual link via your aug, and patch in a med diagnostic.”

  “Med diagnostic?”

  “You’ll find it in the functions catalogue. It enables the hospital system of your choice to monitor your health.”

  Conlan first patched through a visual link, which was easy, and gazed down at his leaking torso. Shortly he found the health monitoring function and studied its readout himself. It only confirmed what he already knew: he was dying. He allowed Krong access to that diagnosis.

  “You’re in a bad way, but I guess you don’t need me to tell you that. I’m attaching a graphic for you now showing a future model of what we hope will shortly happen.”

  The attachment came through and Conlan hesitated before opening it. It could contain some military virus or something equally nasty, but he realised he was too tired to care. As he opened the attachment and viewed the scene displayed, and Moria’s projections, he felt a steady vibration through the floor, growing in intensity.

  “The positional drives have just started up,” Krong noted.

  “Can you see … outside? Can you see it?”

  “Certainly can.”

  “Give me a visual link and I’ll do what you want.”

  It came through quickly, and in his third eye Conlan gazed up through a chainglass dome across the Boh runcible, fusion flames of the positional drives gleaming in his vision. He rolled over and began crawling towards that vent, in the end not because he hated the Prador nor loved the Polity, but because of the sheer audacity of what that woman planned.

  Hellish fire spewed across vacuum as the masers struck twelve targets out of a possible twenty, though it was difficult to be sure of the latter number since the missiles used many techniques of concealment. The ship’s meteor defence laser struck five more, but the EM output of those close antimatter blasts threw his sensors into disarray. Two missiles struck his ship, the massive detonations hurling it back towards the runcible, a huge glowing dent in its hull.

  Where are the rest?

  His sensors finally unscrambled enough for him to see not one but three missiles now past his ship and bearing down on the runcible. A sudden detonation ensued and a drone tumbled out of the extremity of the explosion and then righted itself. A second detonation as a second missile passed through the enfilading fire from two other drones. Those drones were closer to the blast however, and their carrier signals flatlined. Despite the possibility of damage to the runcible, Immanence redirected masers to target the remaining missile—since there seemed few drones in the vicinity—but before his own weapons fired again the missile detonated, spreading a ball of white fire.

  What?

  He analysed what happened, and laughed his Pradorish laugh: the runcible’s own meteor defences had fired up, destroying the missile. But the laughter did not last. For a moment he thought the runcible itself damaged from the close blast and now burning, then realised the flames he was seeing were too evenly spaced for that.

  “Gnores, what is happening down there?”

  “I am investigating now, Father. It seems that the engines used to position each section of the runcible are now operating.”

  Gnores did not sound particularly enthusiastic about his investigation, but Immanence could do nothing about that right then. He returned his attention to sensor data, seeing the Polity vessel decelerating hard and slightly altering its course, but that did not account for why it ceased firing. Immanence used manoeuvring thrusters to reposition his own ship to retain maximum cover of the runcible, then turned his attention to the damage received.

  Numerous casualties and quite a lot of wreckage, but not sufficient to be concerned about. He redirected some of the stored power to memory metal layers in the hull and observed the dent gradually easing out. Again a scan of the runcible.

  “Gnores, the runcible is spreading its five sections.”

  “Yes, I am aware of that… Father.”

  Immanence champed angrily. He again adjusted the position of his vessel, moving it further out to cover this expansion, still blocking line-ofsight from the Polity ship. But if Gnores did not come up with an explanation soon, Immanence decided he would move away. He did not like what was happening there. Then, at that moment, he became aware of a com channel signalling for his attention.

  The Separatist.

  “Explain,” said Immanence succinctly.

  “There’s a Polity warship … out there,” said the one called Conlan.

  “I am aware of that.”

  “They got through … somehow. I’m injured.”

  “Explain!” Immanence spat.

  “They want to destroy it.”

  Immanence spun round in frustration on his grav-motors.

  “Explain yourself clearly, human!”

  “The technicians—those few left here at Trajeen—they managed to break into the system—got control of the positional drives out there. They know you want it, and the Polity ship is there to destroy it. They’re spreading it out… making it more difficult for you to cover.”

  “I see.” Immanence cut the link. He eased his vessel out further, to keep the runcible covered. So this was why the Polity ship ceased firing: it was waiting until the five sections of the runcible presented easier targets and would then pick them off. Even now those sections lay on the edges of a circle a hundred kilometres across. The complex around it also separated, though Gnores and most of the second-children lay inside the largest piece attached to one gatepost.

  “Gnores, recall all the second-children to the gatepost you presently occupy and concentrate your search there. Be thorough and be quick.”

  “Yeah…whatever.”

  Gnores would pay very heavily indeed for that. Immanence gazed through the cams on the firstchild’s carapace and saw that he was lingering by one of the corridors, peering down at a trail of human blood. Quickly
reviewing the situation there, the captain saw that all the second-children were returning to that one gatepost, but was further angered to find that those inside that part of the complex were no longer searching for booby traps, but the injured human who had escaped. Gnashing his mandibles in frustration, Immanence cut the link and returned his attention to matters he could attend to now. Gnores would have to wait.

  The Polity ship was manoeuvring again. Runcible a hundred and twenty kilometres wide. Immanence again shifted his ship to cover it; lower down towards Boh, the five gateposts marking points on the circumference of a perfect circle behind him. The Polity ship’s tactics were admirable: Immanence needed to move his ship further and further out to cover the runcible, this meanwhile meant a greater chance of missiles getting round him. He would, he already decided, concentrate on defending the gatepost Gnores occupied, for snatching part of this runcible would be better than none at all.

  Twenty seconds.

  Moria was panicking, correction after correction, small stabs of the positional drives and adjustments to field strengths and energy feeds, calculations screaming through her mind like a hysterical crowd. The meniscus spread before her like a new horizon, wavering, seeming close to going out, the further gateposts out of sight. One small error and it would fail. Already the drain from the solar satellites had maxed out.

  Fifteen seconds.

  Fluctuation: G3. In her virtual vision the meniscus began bowing in between posts three and four. In less than a hundredth of a second an AI on the planet shut down the smaller runcible there for the evacuees, and opened its own processing space for her. The screaming crowd of calculations spilled in and spread, and gave her room for just one more. She ran it, sent the corrections, watched the bow straightening out again.