The Voyage of the Sable Keech s-2

by Neal Asher

  ‘And this will pull us free?’ Erlin glanced back at the boiling sea.

  ‘If we don’t run out of power first,’ replied Ron, watching the lasers turn more of the walking rhinoworms into macaroni.

  * * * *

  The trench was now right below Sniper and slowly the error messages from his S-cav drive were blinking out. He descended a cliff that sprouted seaweed trees in the branches of which shoals of boxies swam like mobile silver apples. Passing a deep cave, he observed two large eyes watching him, and an ultrasound scan rendered him the strange image of something like a giant whelk, sans shell, protecting its softer body in stone like some kind of hermit crab. Finally reaching the bottom, he scanned at full power with each of his senses, then again picked up something in ultraviolet.

  Prador were riddled with tactical blind spots—it was this that had once enabled Sniper to defeat a number of Ebulan’s drones, even though they carried superior firepower and armour—and he suspected this was how he would now find the hidden spaceship. Doubtless Vrell had concealed it in a deeper part of the trench, but what the Prador had failed to conceal were the leaking radioactives, which were thick in the water here. Choosing the direction from which the current seemed to be sweeping the isotopes, he headed off. Then, ahead of him, against the base of a rocky underwater cliff, he spotted the painfully bright glare of some large pill-shaped metallic object.

  Sniper scanned his find briefly, quickly realizing it was a dumped fusion reactor—its casing cracked and the isotope ash of its last faulty burn poisoning both itself and now its surroundings. Around this object the bottom was littered with dead and dying creatures: some small varieties of whelk and bleached-white heirodonts no bigger than a human arm. Checking his records the drone realized these were creatures whose vision extended into the ultraviolet. They had been attracted by the light—and it had killed them.

  ‘Fuckit,’ Sniper muttered, moving on.

  The reactor could have been dumped during the journey along the trench, so the ship itself could be many kilometres from here. Almost with a sigh, Sniper transmitted his findings to the Warden, then continued trundling along just above the bottom.

  The AI on Spatterjay’s moon responded immediately. ‘You must find that ship soon. The Prador captain is becoming impatient. His drones and his armoured Prador have dropped to the stratosphere, and I don’t think they will hold there for long.’

  ‘This could be a good sign,’ said Sniper. ‘If Vrell had considered the possibility of this reactor being found, he’d have concealed it better. It could be that it was only carried a minimal distance from the ship itself, and then dumped.’

  He now reached the base of a rubble slope in the trench. The remaining error messages in his S-cav drive now merely concerned his jammed ports. This meant weaknesses in his armour, but did not mean the drive itself would not work.

  ‘That is a possibility arising from optimism rather than logic,’ opined the Warden huffily.

  Sniper sent back a U-space raspberry and continued searching.

  Halfway up the slope the drone spotted a small shoal of those heirodonts encountered earlier near the reactor. The water was disturbed and murky around them as they fed upon something. Admitting the possibility of finding another human corpse, though by the readings in ultraviolet not a radioactive one, Sniper motored over.

  The heirodonts dispersed, then circled round again—loath to leave their meal. Revealed was an adult frog whelk, much the size of Sniper himself, its shell crushed under the edge of a large slab of rock. What remained of its extended foot still moved weakly, but its eyes were gone and what he could see of its main body, inside the broken shell, was in tatters. Even while he watched, more of those same heirodonts fled from cracks in the whelk’s shell. The creatures would not have been able to feed on the whelk in any other circumstance. He suspected that having most of its main body eaten had weakened it sufficiently for them to go to work on its tough appendage.

  But there was nothing else important for him here.

  Sniper noted another shoal now coming down towards him. That whelk would not last much longer—would never get the chance to regenerate as did so many of the animals here. Then it hit him: why was the whelk trapped underneath this slab? This slope of rubble must be a recent fall—but what had caused it? Yes, probably the shock wave, but maybe something else. Suddenly back on alert, Sniper opened his scan all around him. The moment it touched the descending shoal, that shoal accelerated. These fish were not flesh—they were black and too evenly shaped—and no creature down here propelled itself by a constant water jet.

  Sniper spun upright, put his S-cav drive online, and accelerated upwards in an explosion of silt which disappeared amidst more silt rising, as the very ocean began to shake. Explosions nearby knocked out the cone-field of his drive, and set him tumbling for a moment. He saw further explosions below turning the whelk into mincemeat and slivers of shell. The remainder of the swarm of mini-torpedoes now swerved towards him.

  ‘Found it!’ he sent over U-space.

  Below him an avalanche revealed a rising curved edge of metal, and the constant blast along the trench from some massive turbine.

  ‘Get out of there, Sniper,’ the Warden replied. ‘I’ve so far dissuaded our friend from using his coil-gun, but as soon as he knows about this, I suspect he’ll change his mind.’

  ‘That’s my—’

  An explosion right next to him again knocked out Sniper’s cone-field, even as he began to generate it. He scanned for other missiles, could see nothing, then whipped a tentacle through the dispersing cloud of the explosion and drew in, through microtubes, a sample for his internal spectrometer.

  Ceramic missiles?

  Suddenly every moving object around him could prove a threat—missiles fired at him did not have to be metallic. He blew out a cloud of antimunitions beads and motored sideways, scanning behind and below for the precise source of the attack, which had to have originated from somewhere on the rising titanic spaceship now filling the trench from side to side. However, the focused ultrasound pulses hit him from above. They struck the end of one of his large tentacles and tracked in, paralysing that limb then scrambling some of his internal systems when they reached his main body. He loaded and fired hunting torps upwards directly towards the triangulated source, which was behind a spreading cloud of mercury chaff. The source then speared into view, launching another ultrasound pulse. It was another torpedo.

  Sniper veered, angling his course upwards at forty-five degrees away from some rising monolithic extension of the Prador ship. Rerouting internal systems knocked out by ultrasound attack, he made for the edge of the chaff cloud, as his attacker was almost certainly behind it. After firing a couple of torps towards the further edge of the cloud, these missiles being programmed to go around it and intercept whatever they found there, he loaded antimunitions. Rounding the cloud, he opened up with his own ultrasound weapon. He hit one of his own seeking torps and it blew in a flat explosion. The other one kept circling, sniffing for prey that was not here. Just then, rather than communicate, the Warden relayed a recent exchange, compressed to be read at high speed directly into Sniper’s mind:

  ‘If you fire now, you will be destroying a seven-hundred-year-old Polity citizen and ECS employee. You will also kill the crews of two Hooper ships, the Polity passengers and Hooper crew of another larger vessel—and cause untold environmental damage.’

  ‘There is only a drone down there. A few of these Hoopers are not your responsibility. And these so-called Polity citizens, from what I have recently learnt, are nothing more than animated corpses.’

  ‘Nevertheless, I will be forced to employ a U-space weapon, should you fire. It will certainly destroy the projectile as it leaves the coil-gun, but I estimate it will also revolve half of your ship’s bulk into underspace then back out again, inverted.’

  Almost to the microsecond of Sniper finishing the package, a torp streaked up out of the chaff cloud and exploded ag
ainst his underside.

  Where the fuck are you?

  Sniper reserved his shots until he saw a clear target. He began motoring rapidly to the surface, with the pretence of drawing his attacker away from the chaff cloud. In reality he knew the cloud was a decoy to make him think the attacker was there. And after the Warden’s message he had no wish to hang around playing cat and mouse, especially as he seemed to have now taken on the mouse role. Some five hundred metres above the rising Prador ship he fired two missiles towards the cliff-side nearest to him, then focused his scanners below the tumbling rock fall that ensued.

  Nothing.

  He came up out of the trench, again trying to restart his S-cav drive. It came close to engaging, then the cone-field collapsed in a cascade of errors. He put this, and some of the weird readings he was getting on sonar, down to ultrasound damage. He began motoring to one side to get out of the way of the Prador ship. It was now elevated above the trench and sliding sideways, tonnes of rubble and silt pouring from it. Sniper decided he should head for the surface as fast as he could; at least in the air he would be able to use his fusion engine. Then something stopped him dead, as if he’d run into an invisible brick wall.

  Invisible.

  Sniper remembered the recording from SM12, just before that drone was destroyed. It had seemed the Prador war drone had moved off very quickly—because one moment it was there and the next moment gone.

  ‘Fuck,’ said Sniper, as a huge exotic metal claw folded out of nowhere and clamped on the forward edge of his shell. ‘Chameleonware.’

  The Prador war drone appeared in one rippling wave, and Sniper immediately fired a contact torp directly towards it. The explosion blasted the two drones aside in a spinning course. The Prador drone’s exotic armour developed a glowing dent, but the shock wave, turning him against the gripping claw, bent Sniper’s armour where it was clamped. A square port opened in the bigger drone and now a torp slammed into Sniper, causing a similar dent. The big drone tried to bring its other claw to bear. Sniper wrapped two tentacles around it, and underwater arm wrestling ensued. Through another tentacle touching the base of that claw Sniper directed the discharge from one of his inner laminar batteries, but the instant he did that, a similar shock slammed into him through the other claw. They were hurtling towards the surface now, born their drives applied to the same task: the Prador drone to get a potential attacker away from its ship, Sniper because he did not want to be in the vicinity of an orbital strike. Despite the shock, however, Sniper still had another option.

  ‘Let’s see you hang on now,’ he sent.

  He initiated his S-cav field, part of it intersecting the other drone, then opened his tractor drive to full power. Within seconds their speed doubled, and they continued accelerating. Some tightly focused ultrasound weapon began gnawing at Sniper’s armour just behind his head. Sniper injected aluminium-film chaff between, to soak up some of the energy. Then they exploded from the ocean’s surface. The field stuttered, went out, and Sniper engaged his fusion drive. That wrench was enough and, peeling away a piece of Sniper’s armour, the big drone tumbled away, snapped taut Sniper’s gripping tentacles, then fell again when the Polity drone released his hold. But, with a flash of white fire, the Prador engaged its own fusion engines and came on, now firing missiles and lasers.

  Employing a hard-field, Sniper smacked the missiles out of the air, and replied with his APW. Violet fire splashed on his opponent’s hard-field, then it replied with its own APW blast. Sniper fired a missile which, exploding, caused a massive directional electromagnetic pulse. He was about to follow up with another APW blast, hopefully cutting through his opponent’s defences, which should have been knocked out by the pulse, when the two missiles he had knocked away earlier tried to hit him from the ocean below, where they had been waiting for this. One he shot down with a laser, but the other exploded just underneath him, delivering a similarly disabling EM pulse.

  Not such a pushover, thought Sniper.

  Reaching then exceeding the speed of sound, the two opponents hurtled over the ocean, leaving a trail of ionized gas, smoke and falling flakes of white-hot armour.

  * * * *

  The coil-gun on the Prador ship was charged and ready to fire, and the Warden had no way of stopping it other than by firing on Vrost’s ship with conventional weapons—thus revealing a lack of anything else effective—or by further bluffing.

  ‘The seven-hundred-year-old drone is now no longer in the way,’ Vrost informed him.

  Sniper’s departure from the scene had been all too evident, and the Warden supposed that the old drone was probably about as happy as he could ever be.

  ‘That still does not negate my original assertion. Vrell’s ship is now much closer to the Sable Keech and the two Hooper ships, and should you fire, the deaths of those aboard the three vessels would be certain,’ said the Warden calmly.

  With another part of itself, the AI observed one of the armoured Prador as it drifted close to one of many orbital eyes, for it was not often that one of this kind got so close to Polity scanning equipment, and such an opportunity should not be missed.

  Certainly, if the King’s household was organized along the same lines as others of his kind, all his guards would be first-, second- and third-children. There were no fourth-children, as any that survived the ruthless selection process in a Prador brood cave was automatically designated a third-child. The casualty rate being approximately 90 per cent for each generation, out of a thousand Prador nymphs in a brood only a hundred would survive the savage selection process so as to become third-children, while ten would survive to become second-children, and one would get to be a first-child. What this ensured was self-evident, for in the lifetime of an adult Prador, which could be as long as eight hundred solstan years, three to four hundred broods would be engendered. However, first-children rarely made it to adulthood since they were generally killed by their father around their fiftieth year of life, before they could make that final step. This meant that, at any one time, a single adult Prador should have a maximum of twenty-five first-children attending on it. Speculation in the Polity had always been rife about King Oboron and his guard, since the King was older than any other known Prador, with his first-children numbered in the thousands, and all of them wearing that concealing armour.

  ‘Again,’ Vrost replied, ‘Hoopers are not your concern, and the passengers of that ship are already dead.’

  ‘I must warn you I cannot allow you to use that coil-gun,’ said the Warden, groping around for something more to add. ‘And I must also ask whether this behaviour is what passes for diplomatic relations amongst your kind. Would your King be pleased with your actions here—and the way you are threatening the new alliance between the Polity and the Third Kingdom?’

  Vrost was a long time in replying, and during this delay the Warden attempted some gentle probing of the armoured Prador.

  The most probable explanation for the current King and his extended family was that he had discovered some form of longevity but denied it to all but his immediate kin, and that this same serum, process or surgical technique had also stalled his kin’s maturation. This had occurred with some of the earlier anti-geriatric medications used by humans. Specifically there had been a nanotech process—similar to the nanofactories used by reifications—which had read the DNA of its host, then perpetually worked to repair any subsequent damage to that DNA. The disadvantage here was that if the DNA was already damaged before this reading process, the nanomachines would maintain that damage. This meant that someone suffering from cancer would then always have cancer, for any attempt at correction at a genetic level would be defeated by the nanobots. It also meant that if someone took such treatment while a child, he or she would then remain forever a child.

  The armour was near impenetrable: a thick layer of exotic metal sandwiching alternate layers of a superconductor and some other reflective exotic metal. The Warden tried low-level radar and microwave scans, but once the AI upped
the intensity of those, the Prador clearly sensed them, because it turned to face the nearby satellite eye and projected microwave and radio white noise. But there remained another possibility.

  The Warden slowly began altering the position of the nearest satellite eye, to bring it away from the armoured Prador but down into the same level of the ionosphere. Further around the planet, it dropped another eye to the same level.

  ‘Prador do not participate in diplomacy,’ Vrost replied. ‘This must be settled quickly.’

  Shit, thought the Warden.

  ‘Now,’ Vrost continued, ‘that I have obliged you, I would prefer it if you made no further attempt to scan Father’s second-children.’

  One strange piece of information there: the Warden had assumed, by the size of this armoured Prador, that it must be a first-child. The AI then initiated the X-ray scan from his further eye, while using the closer eye as a receiver. The fusion detonation came a microsecond after, converting the armoured second-child into a glowing ball of gas. The flash knocked out the reception on most nearby satellite eyes.

  ‘I repeat,’ said Vrost, ‘attempt no scans.’

  Either suicide or remote detonation initiated by Vrost, the Warden realized. ‘My apologies, that scan was initiated before your warning.’

  The AI was betting on the Prador not comprehending exactly how fast an AI could react. For a moment Vrost gave no reply, and the Warden studied the X-ray picture he had obtained. It was not very clear, but certainly showed that the armour had not conformed to the shape of the being it contained. That looked nothing like any Prador second-child.

  ‘The ocean ship survived the wave caused by my first strike,’ said Vrost. ‘Another strike would only be four hundred kilometres closer and, impacting on a spaceship near the surface, I have just calculated that its detonation would not cause so large a wave.’

  The Warden found himself all out of bluffs. Either Vrost believed the AI could use U-space weapons or he did not. There was nothing more the AI could do, and Vrost, it seemed, did not believe him. The coil-gun fired again.