by Neal Asher
“Why didn’t Dragon order them not to fire on us?” asked Bludgeon.
“Probably forgot about us,” said Cutter.
“Whatever,” said Knobbler. “We deal with the situation as it is. The Polity ships might not open fire but the prador don’t have much love of us. Their orders are to maintain a status quo there. They’ll interpret that as blow the shit out of anything that tries to get to the planet. That’s why Diana ordered no ground forces to be sent.”
“Incorrect,” said Bludgeon. “She ordered no ground forces because prador forces would almost certainly follow, and they would all open a data warfare route to both fleets for the Clade.”
“Yeah, the prador would follow—after failing to blast the shit out of the marines on their way down.”
“Okay. Agreed.”
Other drones out in vacuum had their own internal jump engines, such as four scarab beetles the size of grav-trucks, Starfish and the Clam. Those without were rapidly inserting themselves in a motley array of vehicles they seemed to have haphazardly welded together in some scrapyard. While they did so, Knobbler made a link to the empty crystal in the transport—a big old barge they had been using to haul ore. Connection made, he began recording across a submind of himself to run its jump engines. He deliberately avoided giving the mind survival instincts and loaded it up with an “attitude” program. It chortled in amusement when it understood its precise destination.
By now Cutter had reached his and Bludgeon’s vessel and ignited its drive to throw it violently into space. Seeing those two on the way, and making estimates on the readiness of the other drones, Knobbler said, “We go in one hour from now.”
TRIKE
They were heading down to the planet now. Trike could go onto the bridge for the few hours it would take to get to the surface, but that meant being there with Angel . . . within reach. Trike glanced at his pack—he was ready to go in an instant. He then transferred his attention to his cabin console and the little black memtab sitting on it. He stood abruptly, walked over and rapped his long fingers against the screen. Numerous options appeared. He chose “MEMPLAY” and dragged it over to “UNAUGED.” This opened numerous other options and there, because this was Cog’s ship, he found “HOOPER” in the list and chose that.
The screen flickered for a second but, before it could make a query, he picked up the memtab and inserted it into a slot in the console. A hatch slid open beside the screen to reveal a headset, which he pulled out, trailing its optic feed. It took some adjustment to fit it on his head and position the inductor plates. He felt the stab of needles and especially tough nano-fibres going into his skull. The thing did not need to make the same neural connections as a cerebral augmentation because most of it ran on induction, but it did need to make some, as well as inject a specialized neurochem.
“RUN?” the screen queried.
Trike eyed the console chair and decided it was too flimsy. He drew out more optic cable and sat on the floor, his back against the wall.
“Run,” he said out loud.
And a moment later he was Cogulus Hoop, inside his memories.
Cog brought his lander down towards the sea and hung above it on grav for a while as he inspected the island. Having reviewed the history of this place, he understood why the warden of Spatterjay had wanted no further investigation here. This was one of the spots where Jay Hoop had run his coring trade. It was a war grave, a cemetery and, in the past, hoopers had tended to get a little tetchy when the Polity tried to investigate such areas. He slid the landing craft in, finally setting it down on a white sand beach, and climbed out.
The smells and sounds immediately raised a sad nostalgia in him, as they did every time he returned to Spatterjay. He gazed up at the thick wall of jungle, at the tangled vines and at things that looked like vines but were not. They were shorter and writhed eagerly as he drew closer. He began pacing along the edge of the jungle, eventually coming to an area where it had been flattened, and moved in. Leeches lunged at his legs from the crushed and burned vegetation and ground their plug-cutting mouths against his boots, as well as the tough canvas of his trousers. He casually kicked them away. Over to one side he spotted part of the chain-glass screen of Jay’s lander. Then finally, crushed up against a boulder and half buried by a fall of earth from the slope above, he found the lander itself.
The remains of the two corpses were just bones now and widely scattered, so it took him an hour of searching before he found a skull. As he suspected, a hole two inches wide had been bored into its crown. He discarded it and moved on. Remembering his hooper tracking skills, he began to inspect his surroundings more closely. After a while, he found a trail made by large, claw-toed and apparently non-human feet. They led inland to somewhere marked on maps of this island—a place of horrific legend.
Cog stopped to shrug off his pack and take out the components of his particle beamer. He assembled it. He then dropped some mini-grenades into his pocket, hung the pack from a peartrunk tree, and headed on in. The vegetation was more open, with scattered peartrunk trees ready to drop leeches on those daft enough to seek their shade. A lung- bird, like a decaying zombie crow, flexed its stinking wings and launched into the air from a bush of tanglethorn. He traced its ragged flight with his weapon, limbs locked and trigger half-depressed, then lowered it. In the distance, he heard a land heirodont’s mournful groaning and shuddered. He had to admit that, though the wildlife was familiar to him, he was spooked. A little while later, he came upon signs of the island’s occupation a century ago.
A low plascrete wall crossed his path. Bent over from this were steel posts that had supported a razor-link fence, now down and tangled in lianas. He walked over it and on in. Crumbled buildings similarly coated in vines were scattered all around. Human bones lay visible here and there, but not many, since most of the victims of this place had been transported to the Prador Kingdom. These bones were the result of games Jay and his pirates had played, and of the Polity police action after the war that ended them. He moved on, smelling something dead, and finally stumbled on the putrefying body of a land heirodont. The cowlike animal had a head that seemed a cross between a hippopotamus and a warthog. A piece of wood had been jammed into a ragged hole in the top of its skull. He squatted to pull it out and inspect it, seeing at once a roughly carved copy of a prador thrall unit. It seemed that Jay’s mind had continued its collapse.
“C-hogg-ck.”
Cog recognized something trying to say his name, but it sounded more like the throaty cough of a beast. A shadow fell across him and he looked up at his brother.
Jay was now utterly monstrous. He stood ten feet tall, his body and limbs long and spindly, hands like long-legged spiders. His deep royal blue skin had been ripped open in places, yet, even as Cog watched, the rips were knitting closed. Jay’s head was a nightmare. It resembled that of the heirodont but the teeth were those of a carnivore and it had sprouted big, batlike ears. The eyes were insensate and black.
Cog had no belief in the supernatural and none in absolute good or evil. But at that moment he felt a surge of repulsion for what looked like a miasma of evil. He stood, stepping back, and the thing that had been his brother stooped low to peer at him. Jay was grinning, he was sure of it, delighted by his presence and eager . . . for something. He took another step back, his skin crawling and a primordial terror rising up to choke off his voice. What the hell was happening? Why was he feeling this?
“Jay,” he finally managed.
Jay’s delight increased and he suddenly lunged forwards, closing one big hand around Cog’s torso. Cog found he could not react. He still held his weapon but just couldn’t find the will to use it. A second hand closed over his head, long clammy fingers touching his face. Sticky fibres crawled against his skin.
At once he felt a connection and horror flooded into his mind. The screams of Jay’s victims blended into a tsunami of sound and pain. He saw images of torture as a giggling entertainment and the industrialized cori
ng of human beings. Piles of offal consisting of the brains and spinal cords of victims steamed in sunlight. People shrieked and fought in cages to get away from the human blanks which had come to drag them out.
He heard laughter and saw a woman running through jungle, then the detonation of the explosive collar that took off her head. He sat at a table with Jay’s pirates eating a meal, and witnessed the hilarious sight of that same headless woman serving glister claws, controlled by a spider thrall seated in the ruin between her shoulders. Wave after wave of it assaulted his mind, and it came with an undercurrent, a wordless query he translated as, Isn’t it beautiful? The horror that dragged him back to awareness of his surroundings was some part of himself agreeing.
He lay in the shallow bowl of a rock with the monster crouched over him. Jay held up a corroded trepanning device, used for coring, spattered with blood and smeared with blue fibres. Cog felt the pain as a dull ache, growing in intensity. He reached up to touch the hole in his skull and only just stopped himself following the crazy urge to shove his finger inside. So beautiful . . . He yelled and leapt up, feeling infected, virulent, insane and repulsive. Jay peered at him, head tilted to one side. Grinning again and then nodding as he reached for him. Cog threw himself to one side over the lip of the rock, snatching up his particle weapon from where it had fallen as he shoulder-rolled. Jay loomed above, and he fired. The beam struck and Jay flared in the blast, skin peeling away and falling in sheets, oily flames rising from him. But the beam didn’t penetrate any further than that. Cog hit him again and again, then just stood there pulling the trigger, even when the energy canister became empty. Finally he stopped.
Something moved and made an odd whistling sound in the dying fire. It then unfolded with jerky movements and raised its blind head. What was left was a skeletal thing, honed down and pure white, all fibre and bone and yet still capable of movement. It was a beautiful thing, he thought, and took a step towards it. With a sucking thunk it extruded black eyeballs into empty, charred eye sockets and regarded him. He turned and ran and never looked back.
Trike followed the memory to its conclusion, with Cog fleeing the island in his landing craft, determined to edit the infection from his mind. And now, having experienced it himself, Trike too had felt the touch of evil, and of familiar madness. But would seeing this prevent the same thing from happening to him, as he supposed had been Cog’s intention?
Trike tore the VR set from his head, stood and went to grab up his pack, then headed out through the cabin door, sure he had to duck further than when he had come in.
Leaving claw marks on the frame.
BROGUS
Father-Captain Brogus felt hatred for the Guard in the other reavers and had hoped the ease with which he had infiltrated the prador fleet had been down to inefficiency. But no, it had not been due to a lapse in their security, but because of the thing now in front of him here in his sanctum.
He had selected the second-child for occupancy because it had been clumsy and perhaps a little bit more stupid than average. Though Brogus was all for slaughtering children whose aggressiveness and proximity to adulthood presented a threat to himself, he was much more inclined to kill off those whose lack of intelligence could be a danger. Such was the prador way. If all prador fathers had concentrated on killing only the smart children that might usurp them, the race would have died out long ago.
All those months ago, when Brogus had been working at the legate’s command, in fact enslaved to Angel by the neural lace still wrapped around his ganglion, he had chosen the child. It had just made another mistake in a long series of them. The Clade unit had entered through its mouth tail-first, as Brogus held it down. The child had screamed and bubbled and fought, then grown still. Later, when Brogus released it, it had stood up and moved about with a notable lack of clumsiness, though it looked no different.
Recently, however, the occupancy had become more visible. The child died and bacterial decay set in. The unit seemed loath to abandon its host for a new one, though, and sought to keep it intact. This resulted in a glassy sheen to its shell, and metallic wires and connections sprouting at its joints to hold them together. When its stalked eyes fell off and other eyes clouded, the Clade unit shed its visual turret and mouthparts, then mushroomed out its own head there. This spread across the front of its carapace, like a chrome mask with shifting metal eyes.
“We are in position and we wait,” said Brogus. “What are we waiting for?”
He had begun to ask more questions—questions that had never occurred to him before. He felt more leeway in his mind and was certain the neural lace there had begun to degrade. He also entertained doubts and worries, certain that he was being used as a tool, and that his actions would benefit neither the prador race nor his ambition to restore it to its rightful place in the universe.
“We wait for the time to be right,” the unit intoned.
Right for what?
When he first heard rumours of a force in the Graveyard working against both the Polity and the king of the prador, he had sought it out. He was sure that no matter how hostile it might be, it could be of use to him. He understood later that Angel had couched the rumours to lure in someone just like him. All that stuff about the assassination of the king, a plan involving a stolen reaver and releasing something that would severely weaken the Polity. Everything Angel had said when Brogus found him had excited and drawn him closer. Then, before he realized the danger, the Clade was aboard, and he was shrieking and bubbling with his shell open, as one of them installed the neural lace inside him. And then Angel entered his mind, dispelling doubts and questions, as well as his will. But now it had begun to return, stronger every day.
What was his purpose here? He understood what had happened recently from listening in on the chatter amidst the Guard. Apparently, Angel had been just as much a tool of a purported Jain AI as himself. A biomech soldier had launched an assault, the purpose of which had been to detonate the inactive sun at the centre of the disc, thus spreading Jain tech. This tied in with what had supposedly been Angel’s aims. But the attack had failed. The haiman Orlandine had destroyed the biomech by firing a black hole at it.
Firing a black hole...
Brogus set that aside as he tried to think his way to some answers. Was his position in this prador fleet part of a backup plan, put into action because of that failure? He considered the two hundred Clade units aboard his ship.
“Am I to attack the Polity fleet out there?” Brogus asked.
“Why would you think that?” asked the Clade unit.
“It seems likely this would result in further . . . hostilities?”
“You will do as you are commanded.”
“The Clade units aboard?” wondered Brogus.
The usurped second-child swung towards him. “You are here to respond to your fellow prador and, in the unlikely event you are summoned, go to the commander of this fleet. You are a disposable asset.” Brogus took that because he could not respond otherwise, and his mind turned away from it. He worked his pit controls and brought up images on his screen. He gazed at Polity ships, sitting out there like potential Armageddon—at the destroyers, dreadnoughts, attack ships, and finally upon that monster called the Cable Hogue. Were these his targets? He swung his telescope array to point at the accretion disc, picking out some weapons platforms. These? He next looked at the Harding black hole as it closed on the dead sun. No targets there. So he settled to wait, his mind drifting back to the Clade units in the hold. He must hang on for the time to be right, but for what he did not know. He doubted he would live long enough to find out, either.
THE CLADE
In the storm, Cad landed the small grav-car on the roof. He relished how the chaotic weather reflected the destruction in the city all around him. His feelings were there in the Clade entire yet he felt himself apart from it, a nexus, a greater actor in the whole. Probing ahead, he found Orlandine’s security system. Now isolated from all that the haiman had been, it was
easy to penetrate. Oddly, he felt a kinship with it, for he too was separated from a greater whole. Yet, even as he experienced this, the clamour of the Clade arose in his mind, integrating connections which reached for him—a tide of mind in which he could be lost.
He climbed out of the car, the security system’s weapons shutting themselves down as he trashed its ability to recognize friends or to react to dangerous technology. At the mouth to the dropshaft he paused, considering the Golem body he occupied. He was momentarily puzzled by
his reluctance to abandon it because surely it would be easier to move about in his primary form?
Abandon, abandon . . . the Clade demanded.
He stepped into the shaft. No gravity, but that did not matter. He dropped hard then, at the next exit, slammed his feet against the opposing wall, leaving dents as he propelled himself out, rolled and came upright.
Standing before the apartment, he paused again, gazing through the security system’s cams, just to check. But everything seemed in order. He slapped his hand against the door, shattering the locks to spring it open, and strode in. Tobias was sitting on the floor, his back against the sofa and the weapon loosely gripped in one hand. Cad went over to him fast and snatched the weapon away, then moved back.
The gun was a dangerous item. It had to be to kill someone like Orlandine, and its viral component, designed to trash her Polity crystal, was more than capable of bringing down a Clade unit. He held the thing up, abruptly aware that he did not want to die . . .
