The Voyage of the Sable Keech s-2

by Neal Asher

  ‘Shut off the engines,’ he calmly instructed. ‘We’ll only be going where this bastard wants to take us.’

  * * * *

  He still called himself Vrell, no matter that his body was now made of metal and his brain was the flash-frozen tissue of a sibling. As he motored back underwater, towards his other self, his internal systems worked ceaselessly to repair the damage caused by the old Polity drone, and he refined deuterium oxide fuel from sea water for his fusion reactor, which in turn was charging up the depleted capacitors and laminar batteries powering his energy weapons. He was puzzled by his earlier actions, unable to fathom why he had not led his opponent within range of those weapons now devastating Vrost’s forces in the air above him. His action had been allowed because the order for him to return to the spaceship took precedence over the one for him to destroy the old drone, but that did not wholly account for his own decision. Perhaps the bitterness of knowing his own chances of surviving this were little above zero lay behind his decision to let the old drone live?

  Black shapes again streaked past him through the water. Some of the other drones and members of the King’s guard had followed him into the sea, but they were no less at the mercy of the ship’s weapons than those above. Reddish explosions detonated behind him and, over com frequencies, he could hear the sound of something dying. Then came contact from the real Vrell:

  ‘Two drones and one King’s guard have fallen into the sea here.’ Vrell sent coordinates. ‘All have been disabled by electromagnetic pulse. The guard’s fusion device has not detonated. Destroy the two drones and retrieve the guard.’

  ‘As you will.’

  The Vrell drone obeyed—he could not do otherwise. However, he was still a copy of the original Vrell, and therefore not something loaded into a drone shell and programmed to military service from the moment he had hatched, so was capable of thinking about the reasoning behind that order.

  The guard’s armour having been disabled by EM and still containing a living occupant, the Prador drone’s initial conjecture was that Vrell wanted a prisoner to interrogate, yet that did not really gel. There would not be enough time to break the guard’s conditioning sufficiently to learn anything useful about Vrost’s plans. The true Vrell might have sought to access systems in the armour so as to break into Vrost’s com frequencies had it not been that the Prador above made little attempt to encode them. It seemed it did not matter what Vrell knew: from an utterly superior position, Vrost intended to obliterate them. Perhaps curiosity then, just that—Vrell wanting to know, or rather confirm, what that armour contained? Of course, such speculation was based on what the drone’s own aims would have been. The real Vrell, however, had moved far beyond him. The drone could not, for example, see any possibility of repairing a surge-damaged U-space engine, yet his creator was obviously making plans to do so.

  The water here was still murky from the first kinetic missile strike, and other clouds of silt and detritus were spreading out from the more recent explosions. The drone occasionally observed, deep down, turbul and smaller whelks snapping up animals damaged by an earlier blast. When he saw a molly carp cruising by in the distance, he felt an instant of fear caused by an emotional residue of his earlier self. Then anger took over and made him want to go after the creature to deliver some payback, but the real Vrell’s orders did not allow for that. The drone watched the molly carp lashing out a tentacle to bludgeon a passing turbul, cutting it nearly in half before beginning to chomp it down. Boxies shoaled around the carp, like silver bubbles from its mouth, as like ship lice they scavenged scraps. But soon the molly carp was out of sight, and the drone approaching the coordinates Vrell had sent.

  The drone immediately detected three metallic objects on the bottom, underneath a cloud of silt. Using his magnetometer, he identified one of the other drones, descended to it, then, from only metres away, extruded a thermic lance and began to bore a hole through its armour. Nothing came over com because the EM pulse had knocked out most of its systems, but doubtless its diagnostic and repair systems, being more hardened to such attacks, were still working, so it knew precisely what was happening to it.

  The lance cut in slowly, for this exotic metal contained superconductive layers and had to be eroded away rather than burnt or melted. Finally the lance broke through. The drone switched it off, retracted it, then lined up his missile port to the hole and fired a torp inside his victim. A jet of fire and molten debris spewed from the cavity. The Vrell drone disposed of the next drone in exactly the same manner, then approached the King’s guard.

  The armoured Prador’s internal repair systems were more advanced than those of a drone. It responded over com, threatening, promising, but never begging. It had seen what had happened to Vrost’s two drones, and assumed itself in for the same treatment. When the Vrell drone noted the guard attempting to move some of its limbs, internally he checked the charge of some of his laminar batteries, then brought an emitter to bear and fired pulses of electromagnetic radiation at the areas containing the motor controls for the guard’s armour. When the guard ceased moving, the Vrell drone clamped his own claw around the limp claw of the other and, blasting up clouds of silt with his turbines, hauled his captive off the bottom and continued back to the ship.

  * * * *

  There were now two sailing ships for her to hunt. At first they moved slowly, and she could easily have caught one of them and pulled it down, but how they managed to sail against the wind puzzled her, so, after only a exploratory touch against one of the rudders, she held back. Slowly she began to understand the interaction of forces involved. The wind was blowing in one direction, the sails angled to catch it. Logic dictated that the wind should push the ship backwards. However, the hull was angled partially into the wind, which was trying to force it sideways through the water. The two forces—wind and water pressure — squeezed the ship between them, like a slippery stone between the opposing faces of a claw, so it shot out sideways, and thus the ship was actually travelling into the wind. This fascinated the giant whelk and, applying this new knowledge to the deep memories of her own life, her understanding of the way forces operated was increased greatly. But the fascination did not last long.

  The giant whelk realized that, there now being two prey, she could catch one of them straight away and still have another to pursue, thus her quest could both succeed and continue. She was debating with herself which of them to take down when abruptly both vessels turned. Clearly she had been spotted. Surfacing for a moment, she observed the two ships speeding away, then she submerged again, deciding she would go for the second ship, not the primary target.

  This pursuit lasted throughout the day and into the night. The moon gave the water a mercury sheen above her, and her happiness only increased upon encountering a turbul missing its tail and thus unable to escape. Forgetting the ships for a moment, she enjoyed a leisurely pursuit of the fish, before using her line to dice it into pieces which she easily gobbled down. Again moving after her original prey, she noticed a repetitive thumping from the sea bottom. It was a sound recalling unclear memories that elicited unexpected primal reactions in her body. The taste she then picked up in the water caused organs inside her to actually begin moving, rearranging themselves. But no, she was determined not to be distracted—that was all just instinct which would return her to the bottom and to a life abandoned. But then, for a moment, her instinct did override intellect, and she found herself banging a tentacle against her shell and releasing something into the water from glands located below her eyes. In reply, the sea-bottom thumping from the male whelk increased in frequency. She shuddered, took firmer control of herself, closed up the glands, and moved on.

  17

  Peartrunk Trees:

  only the trunks of the younger trees are bulbous at the bottom—i.e. pear-shaped. As these trees age and expand, they develop splits that grow wider until the trunk resembles a cage. The trunks are coated with a thick scaly bark that is the preferred diet of land-dwelli
ng heirodonts. The branches spread out in a wide crown, each one of them terminating in knotty tangles of black twigs from which sprout sparse green-and-blue leaves. This plant produces no fruit or seeds, rather sheds one or more of the twig knots, which then grows into a new tree. Diversification is caused by the tree internally shuffling the alleles in each twig knot. But the strangest thing about the peartrunk tree is its symbiosis with the Spatterjay leech. They, for reasons not clearly investigated, immediately head straight for a peartrunk tree when they come ashore, and roost in its branches. Occlusions through the wood of the branches contain material similar to muscle. When a land heirodont then begins tearing off the bark, the tree sends signals through a primitive nervous system to its branch muscles which shake leeches down on the heirodont to drive it away. Older trees are the most sensitive, and it takes only the presence of animal body heat anywhere near to the trunk to cause this reaction. No one knows why, but older trees are populated exclusively by the permanent land leeches—

  The blanks in the holding area were immobile, since most of their mental capacity was running the calculations Vrell needed to make for undertaking U-space engine repairs. Now that those calculations were nearly complete, he dropped four of the blanks out of the circuit. These were the ones who were still reliable, as they were not so badly suffering from the effects of starvation and from the havoc the Spatterjay virus was wreaking on them. He sent them trudging to the engine room, watching them closely through cameras in the corridors for signs of any unprogrammed movement. They appeared not to be doing anything outside of his control, but he knew they were fast approaching the time when they might reject their spider thralls. Satisfied at seeing them then begin the tasks he had programmed in—detaching all the optic and S-con cables in preparation for opening the engine casing—he turned his attention to his channel to the ship above.

  The remaining blanks nearby, and those spaceship systems he had employed in the same mathematical task, should complete the calculations in a matter of hours. He did not really need the two minds of Aesop and Bones in the sailing ship above for that purpose, but another task had occurred to him.

  Ebulan had died because of his perpetual underestimation of the opposition, and Vrell had no intention of being so arrogant and stupid. Above him lay a shipload of reifications and Hoopers, which Ebulan might have ignored as irrelevant but which Vrell considered a danger that must be either neutralized or otherwise distracted. Vrell had already subtly manipulated Taylor Bloc into refusing to give Captain Ron access to the computer system, thus delaying the departure of the Sable Keech long enough for Vrell to get underneath it.

  Bloc was the key, and now it was time for less subtle manipulation. That reif was full of bitterness and anger and, in human terms, not entirely sane. He possessed an overwhelming need to control which stemmed from a similarly overwhelming desire for adulation. At one stroke Vrell shut down Bloc’s consciousness, causing the reif to slump from the edge of his bed to the floor. Then the Prador began making some alterations to Bloc’s mind. Once he finished, Bloc would have to obey the Prador’s orders, though he retained free will in everything else. Vrell watched through Bloc’s eyes as the latter awoke and struggled to his feet.

  ‘Who are you? What are you?’

  Vrell did not deign to reply just then. He linked through the now-clear channels in Bloc’s mind, and gazed through the eyes of Aesop and the visual receptors of Bones. After a moment, he returned to Bloc both his mobility and the reif’s control of the others.

  ‘Secure your ship. Prevent any aboard from moving against me,’ Vrell finally ordered.

  ‘You are Prador.’ Bloc’s observation contained something like yearning, and Vrell realized this stemmed from the reif’s fanatical interest in Prador thrall technology—control technology. Ignoring the further flood of questions that ensued, he turned the bulk of his attention to another matter in hand.

  Despite his present desperate circumstances, Vrell was determined to confirm his suspicions about the King’s guard. The Warden had also obviously been as curious, hence Vrost’s action in destroying the one who had drifted too close to one of die AI’s satellite eyes. The armoured individual now in the drone cache had not detonated for one of two reasons. Either the EM that knocked it out of the sky had fused the relevant circuitry, or else Vrost somehow knew exactly the guard’s location and was awaiting an opportune moment to send the destruction signal—probably when Vrell himself put in an appearance. There was only one real way to find out.

  The Prador heaved himself up off the floor and, with his tool chest trailing along behind him, headed out of his sanctum. He noted, as he travelled the dank corridors of the ship, how the omnipresent lice remained somnolent on the wall, only shifting a little on sensing his presence. Lack of food again. He himself had not eaten for some time, and for longer there had been little for the lice to scavenge. Now suddenly aware of his own hunger, he summoned the two leech-headed blanks from where they had collapsed in the corridor outside the holding area. They joined him just as he reached the door to the cache, where he picked one of them up in a claw and began tearing it apart and feeding gobbets of its flesh into his maw. As he ate he noted how much longer his claws had now become, and how their colour was a translucent black like some kind of glass. Then he entered the cache itself.

  Vrell first eyed what was left of the hooder, squirming over near the portal. It seemed more lively than before, looked longer and thinner, and gaps were growing between its segments. The Prador decided it might be quite a good idea to dump the thing outside sometime very soon, then turned his attention to his prisoner.

  The King’s guard was down on its belly with its legs folded underneath and its claws stretched out slack on the floor before it. Its armour seemed to conform to the pear shape of a Prador first-child, but now, on closer examination, Vrell saw that it was just too big for that. A Prador of this size should be an adult, and therefore lacking some limbs. This one seemed to have all its legs and both its claws, and doubtless, underneath, all its manipulatory arms. Vrell speculated on the possibility that some of these limb casings might be empty of arms or legs, and instead wholly motor-driven. He would not know for sure until he took a look inside it.

  After opening his tool chest, Vrell removed a powerful short-range microwave scanner, and began running it over the golden carapace before him. Soon ascertaining which areas of the armour shielded no vital systems, he summoned his drone over with a thought.

  ‘Cut here,’ he directed, stepping back.

  The drone extended its thermic lance, which ignited with an arc-light flash. Soon the room was full of metallic smoke, and fans hidden in the ceiling began automatically drawing it away. The guard tried moving its claws and legs, but they only quivered a little. It would, in a moment, realize that there was only one way it might survive, and that would be without the encumbrance of dead armour. Vrell felt some satisfaction when he heard the sound of locks disengaging. He silently relayed another instruction to his drone, and moved further back.

  The armour opened with a sucking crump, the entire upper carapace rising on silver rods, then hinging back. The ejection routine was fast, compressed air blowing the occupant’s limbs from their casings. But not fast enough: as the grey and distorted Prador head lifted on a ribbed neck, and one claw and the legs on one side pulled free, the drone repositioned the lance and drove it straight into its grey body. The guard screamed, trying to bring to bear a short assassin-spec rail-gun. The drone snipped that manipulatory arm away, closed its claw on the creature’s neck, and drove the thermic lance deeper into its body, searching out the major ganglions. The guard kept struggling and screaming for some time, green blood and smoke issuing in gushes from its mouth and over its grating mandibles. Eventually its struggles diminished, but never entirely ceased. Vrell knew that, unless this body was utterly destroyed, it would regenerate, though into what was open to speculation. After the drone dumped it down on the floor, beside its armour, Vrell moved
over to investigate.

  The Prador was almost the same size as himself, and its mutation quite similar, the only differences being its lighter colour, the saw-tooth edges on its legs and a thicker carapace around its neck. Was this what Vrell would eventually become? Next he turned his attention to the armour.

  The fusion bomb was easy to locate and remove. It did not require disarming for the EM blast had completely fused its U-space receiver. It was also accessible to the armour’s occupant, so clearly the latter was not expected to try shutting it off. This meant that these guards were utterly loyal to their chain of command, leading up to the King himself, which indicated pheromonal control. What then was this creature? What was Vrell himself? Were they adolescent or adult, or something else entirely?

  Stepping back from the armour, Vrell studied it long and hard. He considered carefully all that its occupant implied—what it meant to the Kingdom and where he himself might fit in, if at all. Eventually he began to turn away, realizing at last the truth of his situation. He would not survive to leave Spatterjay in this ship, even with the U-space engine repaired.

  He must die.

  * * * *

  The Warden dispatched a recording of all recent events through an open link to Earth, and thereafter kept the leading AI up to date with current events. Earth Central could do nothing about what was happening here, except make promises of retribution.