Prador Moon: A Novel of the Polity

by Neal L. Asher

  Ten seconds.

  “You can do this?” Moria asked out loud.

  Over the tumult she heard, “Desperate diseases have desperate remedies.”

  Yeah—right.

  Five seconds.

  It hurtled into view, tumbling end over end, two hundred kilometres across at its widest point, trillions of tonnes of asteroidal iron and stone: Vina—the fast moon. The last seconds counted down as slow as years as the moon loomed before her—a crushing, unimaginable force.

  “Work, damn you!” Moria screamed.

  The moon tumbled into the meniscus, gone. Moria released her hold and errors stacked a thousandfold. The runcible went out.

  Instantly alerted, Immanence turned to his screens, and for a moment could not comprehend the shimmering circle appearing behind his ship, two hundred and forty kilometres across. In panic he started main engines, and manoeuvring thrusters to turn his ship, and began directing weapons towards this new threat. Missiles launched and all four particle cannons began firing.

  “Scrabbler!” he bellowed. “Gnores!” And then, “Vagu—”

  Something briefly occupied the circle and grew immense before him. Immanence did not even have the time to realise what it must be. Sensors transmitted brightness and went out as annihilation arrived.

  Tomalon expected to see the moon hurtling out, but it came so much faster than that. Just a flicker between the runcible and the Prador ship, then an explosion that briefly blanked out sensors within the human visual range. They came back to reveal a streak of incandescence across space, a cometary tail of gaseous iron and rock, and glimmering tarry streaks of exotic metal, already hardening in vacuum into objects almost with the appearance of bones.

  “It worked,” said Tomalon.

  “We were lucky,” Occam replied. “Now we need to be stronger, and better.”

  Jebel Krong felt something loosen inside his chest, but that was all—no fierce joy, no relief. Perhaps the drugs dulled his senses too much. Maybe he would feel it later.

  Lindy let out a series of whoops and was now lying on her back staring up at the tail of fire stretching out from Boh. Urbanus showed no reaction at all, but now turned towards him.

  “There are still Prador here on the runcible,” the Golem reminded them.

  “Yeah, but over on Gatepost One, not here. Let’s at least celebrate that.”

  Urbanus shrugged.

  Annoyed, Jebel decided to try another party.

  “Well, what did you think of that?” he sent to Conlan.

  “Oh Christ! Help me!”

  “Give me visual,” Jebel instructed.

  “Ah fuck you!”

  This last might well have been addressed to Jebel, but he rather thought the source of Conlan’s rage and fear more imminent. But visual came through, nevertheless.

  Mandibles loomed right in front of Conlan’s face. The view changed abruptly, and now the man gazed down at a claw closed around his waist as he was thrust backwards. A subliminal glimpse then inside a small room: smashed computer console, some second-children skittering about excitedly, a bed up against one wall, torn in half. Had Conlan tried to hide underneath it?

  “What’s happening, Conlan?”

  “Stuck me to the wall!”

  The second-children were now doing something—hooking up bags and pipes. Jebel checked the man’s health readout and realised that though he remained mortally wounded, the Prador were giving him fluids and stimulant drugs intravenously. They wanted to keep him alive for as long as possible. Jebel reached into his pocket and removed a small remote control, and still watching the scene through Conlan’s eyes, he called up a particular designation on the remote’s screen and held his thumb poised over the print and DNA reader pad.

  “I can help you, Conlan, but only in one way.”

  “Aaargh!”

  The big Prador in the room had torn away the temporary dressing around Conlan’s torso, and now unravelled something Conlan only glimpsed before turning away, unable to bear the sight. Jebel lowered his thumb. Conlan’s eyes opened on Prador mandibles munching something like bloody spaghetti, then the scene whited out and all contact fizzed away. The intense flash reached Jebel from over two hundred kilometres away. Hauling himself up a little he could just see that initial glare simmering down and now spreading into a glowing ball, slowly dispersing.

  “Well that takes care of numerous problems,” commented Urbanus.

  “What was that?” asked Lindy.

  “The mines on Gatepost One,” Jebel replied.

  “Conlan?”

  “Yes,” said Jebel Krong, his throat tight. He rubbed at the V-shaped scar on his cheek and realised his face was wet with tears. Utterly ridiculous that this last act—killing someone no better than the Prador themselves—finally elicited a response. But he saw if for what it was: a streak of fire through space was just too dispassionate, and this last had been up close, and personal.

  Vagule hung in space utterly devoid of purpose as he observed the smear of gas and debris that was all that remained of his home. He eyed the fading light of the other explosion that killed the rest of his kin, and cold thoughts cycled in his cold mind.

  “Father?” he queried over the ether.

  “Kill the humans! Kill the Humans!” chanted the remaining second-child drones as they accelerated towards the approaching Polity dreadnought.

  Vagule felt the sudden impulse to follow them. Wasn’t this his purpose?

  “They will not manage to kill any humans,” Pogrom observed. “But their loyalty is admirable.”

  Vagule absorbed that: though to kill humans was his purpose as a war drone, that purpose remained implicit rather than a direct order from his father, therefore he found he could get around it, especially since the chances of fulfilling said purpose in these circumstances seemed remote. The only problem was that once round it he began to feel empty again.

  “We must return home and report this,” said Pogrom.

  Vagule spied the other war drone drawing close, burns and scars on its armour from an explosion that destroyed other drones. Once again Vagule absorbed the underlying message. Reporting this incident was utterly proper, it was the returning home bit that seemed problematic: drones did not contain U-space drives.

  “Do you agree?” asked Pogrom.

  If they stayed here they would certainly end up being destroyed by the Polity dreadnought. If they headed for the planet, their chances of survival were just as limited, the greater likelihood being that the dreadnought would detect them long before they reached it.

  “It seems reasonable,” Vagule tentatively agreed.

  “Let us make an inventory of our resources,” Pogrom suggested.

  With sufficient power they could survive for centuries, for in essence they were no longer organic creatures. They found both their power levels to be at a similar level, and began analysing astrogation data for the best route home. For both of them, the best option was for them to link up, and use one fusion burn of eight hours to throw them towards the nearest star, saving some fuel to manoeuvre when they got there. Upon their arrival they would probably be able to find useable ice to convert into fuel and sunlight on which to recharge power cells. During the intervening time, they held sufficient power to maintain their facsimile of life. Many such stopovers would be necessary. Many.

  Vagule and Pogrom linked using extensible grabs, adjusted their attitude to the stars and fired up their drives. Behind them they observed fires flaring and going out as the second-child drones drew close enough to the Polity dreadnought for it to detect them, and erase them. Their defiant cries swiftly died. Eight hours later Vagule and Pogrom shut down their drives, and hurtled through dark to the first of eight hundred distant lights. They did finally arrive in what had once been the Prador Second Kingdom, and it was a strange and alien place. But they were stranger and more alien still after their fifty-three-century journey.

  Exhausted, Moria detached her optic cable and let it drop
. She gazed across at George, his forehead down on the table and utterly still. She wondered if this had killed him as she reached out to unplug his optic cable, but the moment it came free he jerked, placed the flat of his hand on the pseudo wood and slowly pushed himself upright.

  “Are you all right?” she asked, wondering what proverb he would use for his reply.

  He said nothing, just stared at her.

  Moria closed her eyes for a moment. They had done it, she watched it all through the test sensors, but somehow this just did not seem to satisfy and she felt the need for a more human confirmation.

  “Come on,” she said, pulling at the shoulder of his uniform. She stood, her legs shaking and something hollow nestling under her breastbone. George stood also, though she had not expected him to. She led the way out into the corridor, for a moment unable to decide which way to go, unable to simply find her way in this complex even after all she had just achieved. Then she worked it out and headed off. George stumbled along behind her and she wondered if his operation of the internal runcible systems had burnt out what remained of his mind. There was blood leaking from behind his aug and his mouth hung open with a trickle of saliva shining on one side.

  Finally they reached the place where she first encountered Jebel Krong. The windows here gave her the view she required. She walked over to stand before vacuum and reached out her right hand to press it against cool chainglass.

  The gas giant itself stood out visibly larger than surrounding stars, and extending from it coiled a short tail of brightness, fading now. As she watched it she felt George’s hand close about her left hand. She turned to look at him. He closed his mouth, reached up and wiped it.

  He smiled and told her:

  “And hand in hand, on the edge of the sand,

  They danced by the light of the moon,

  The moon,

  The moon,

  They danced by the light of the moon.”

  SHADOW OF THE

  SCORPION

  An Excerpt from the New Polity Novel

  Sitting on an outcrop, Ian Cormac stared at the words and the figures displayed on his palm-top, but could not equate them to anything he knew. A world had been bombed into oblivion and the death toll was a figure that could be read, but out of which it was impossible to extract any real sense and, though the battle lines had not shifted substantially for twelve years and such a cataclysmic event was unusual, it was not a story that could hold for long the attention of a young boy.

  Ian’s attention wandered, and he gazed back down at the rock nibblers swarming over the massive fossil like beetles over a decaying corpse. Slowly, cutting away and removing the intervening stone with small diamond saws and ceramal manipulators, they were revealing the intact remains of—he cleared the recent story from his palm-top screen and returned to an earlier page—an Ed-mon-to-saurus. To one side his mother Hannah sat with her legs crossed, monitoring the excavation on a lap-top open where the name implied. She was clad in a pair of dad’s Sparkind combat trousers, enviroboots and a sky-blue sleeveless top, her fair hair tied back from her smudged face. She was very old—he counted it out in his head—nearly six times his own age, but she looked like an elf-girl since the new treatments cleared the last of the old anti-geris from her system. While he watched she made some adjustments on the laptop’s touch-screen, then transferred her attention to the line of nibblers entering a large crate set to one side. In there, he knew, they were depositing the slivers of stone they had removed, all wrapped in plasmel and all numbered so their position in relation to the skeleton could be recalled. On the side of the crate were stencilled the letters FGP.

  “Why do you want to keep the stone?” he asked.

  With some exasperation Hannah glanced up at him. “Because, Ian, its structure can tell us much about the process of decay and fossilization. In some instances it is possible to track the process back through time and then partially reconstruct the past.”

  He listened carefully to the reply, then glanced down at the text the speech converter had placed across his screen. It was nice to see that he understood every individual word, though putting them all together he was not entirely sure he grasped her entire meaning and suspected she had, out of impatience, not given him a full answer. It was all something to do with fossilized genes, though of course it was impossible for genes to survive a process millions of years long. She’d once said something about molecular memory, pattern transfer, crystallization… He still couldn’t quite grasp the intricacies of his mother’s work, but was glad to know that many a lot older than him couldn’t either. His mind wandered away from the subject.

  Some dinosaurs had possessed feathers—he knew that. The idea was an old one which his mother said ‘had been discussed, discarded, and gone in and out of fashion’. Cormac preferred them without feathers since such plumage made even the biggest ones look like silly birds rather than monsters. Anyway, he felt she hadn’t really answered the real drive of his question. He knew that the artificial intelligence running the Fossil Gene Project was more interested in the patterns that could be traced within the bones and the occasional rare piece of petrified flesh … or feather. It struck him, at the precocious age of eight, that collecting up all the stone like this was a waste of resources. There was a war on, and a war effort, and it seemed odd to him that his mother had been allowed to continue her work when Prador dread-noughts could arrive in the Solar System at any time and convert it into a radio-active graveyard.

  Ian raised his attention from his mother, focused briefly on the gravcar they’d flown out here in, then gazed out across the rugged landscape of Hell Creek. People had been digging up dinosaur bones here for centuries and finding an intact skeleton like this one was really something. He grudgingly supposed that not everything should stop for the war. Now returning his attention to his palm-top he began again flicking through the news services he had chosen, to pick up the latest about a conflict that had started thirty-seven years before he was born. Though the Prador bombardment of one world was the main story, he searched elsewhere to find news from another particular sector of the Polity and found that after the Hessick Campaign the Prador had suffered heavy losses at a world called Patience, and felt a glow of pride. That was where his father was fighting. Moving on, he then as usual returned to reading about the exploits of General Jebel U-cap Krong. What a name! Jebel Up-close-and-personal Krong; a guy who, during the early years of the war had liked to take-out Prador by sticking gecko mines to their shells.

  “Why did you call me Ian?” he abruptly asked, peering down at his mother.

  She glanced up, still with a hint of exasperation in her expression. “You’re named after your grandfather.”

  Boring.

  Ian checked the meaning of the name on his palm-top and discovered his name to merely be a Scottish version of the name John, which meant ‘beloved of God’ or some such archaic nonsense. He decided then to check on his family name. There was a lot of stuff about kings and ravens, which sounded really good until he came across the literal translation of Cormac as ‘son of defilement’. He wasn’t entirely sure what that meant, and with those kings and ravens at the forefront of his mind, didn’t bother to pursue it.

  “I’d rather be called just Cormac,” he said

  As soon as he had started attending school people began referring to him just as Cormac and even then he had decided he preferred his second name to his first.

  His mother focused on him again. “You and Dax are both ‘Cormac’, Ian—it’s what is called a surname.”

  True enough, but she had chosen to retain her own surname of Lagrange and had passed it on to her other son Alex.

  “It’s what they call me at school,” he insisted.

  “What you might be called at school is not necessarily the best choice…”

  “I want to be called Cormac.”

  This seemed to amuse her no end.

  “Why certainly, young Cormac.”

  He winc
ed. He didn’t really want that prefix. He also understood that she was humouring him, expecting him to forget about this name-change. But he didn’t want to. Suddenly it seemed to take on a great importance to him; seemed to define him more than the bland name ‘Ian’. Returning his attention to his screen he researched it further, and even remained firm about his decision upon finding out what ‘defilement’ meant.

  After a little while his mother said, “That’s enough for now, I think,” and folding her lap-top she stood up. “Another month and we should be able to move the bones.”

  Cormac grimaced. When he was old enough, he certainly would not become an archaeologist and would not spend his time digging up bones. Maybe he would join the medical wing of ECS like Dax, or maybe the Sparkind like his father, or maybe he would be able to join Krong’s force the Avalonians. Then after a moment he reconsidered, understanding the immaturity of his choices. Only little boys wanted to be soldiers.

  “Come on little warrior, let’s go get ourselves some lunch!”

  Cormac closed up his palm-top, then leapt from the rock. He was going to walk but it was so easy to run down the slope. In a moment he was charging towards her, something bubbling up inside his chest and coming out of his mouth as a battle cry. As she caught him he pressed his palm-top against her stomach.

  “Blam!”

  “I take it I’ve been U-capped,” she observed, swinging him round, then dumping him on his feet.

  “He’s blown up loads more Prador!” Ian informed her.

  She gave him a wry look. “There’s nothing good about killing,” she observed.

  “Crab paste!” he exclaimed.

  “I think I’m going to have to check what news services you’re using, Ian.”

  “Cormac,” he reminded her.

  She grimaced. “Yes, Cormac—it slipped my mind.”