by Neal Asher
He stood up from his seat, peeling off and discarding the drug patch from his neck. Other children about his age were also rising from their seats and heading for the door.
"Ian, where've you been?" asked Culu, a small blonde-haired girl with a junior aug behind her ear. Like Cormac she was too young to take direct downloads to her brain, but she was getting the nearest to it possible that the laws allowed. Cormac had seen her parents once: twinned augs, visible cybernetic additions like multispec eyes and arm-sockets to take nerve-controlled tools. Culu would not remain long in this class, since she would soon outstrip those receiving a more conventional education like him. When he'd said something about Culu to his mother her reply had been, "I want you to remain human until such a time as you can make an informed choice to be otherwise." Culu seemed human enough to him, and she seemed to like him.
"Digging up dinosaur bones," he told her, which wasn't strictly true, but sounded great. "And I am to be called Cormac from now on," he added. Seeing her fascination with both the bone digging and the name change, he began telling her all about his trip to Montana as they walked outside into the playground. What he found difficult to talk about was the name change, and how it had stuck when, just before their return here, his mother had started treating it with an almost frightening seriousness.
"Hey, Cormac!"
A ball was heading directly towards his head. Almost without thinking about it, he snapped up a hand and caught it. He glanced up, seeing that a security drone had spun on its post above. Had it decided the ball was going to hit him in the face it would have knocked the object out of the air with a well-aimed projectile of its own, or safely incinerated it. The drone, which was a submind of the school AI, would have had plenty of time to do this, since in the time it took Cormac to raise his hand to catch the ball it could probably have completed a couple of crosswords and read a book.
Cormac gazed across at Meecher, the boy who had thrown the ball. Meecher was one of the oldest boys in this school. Cormac wondered if, in another time, he would have been a school bully. Such a creature could not exist here, since the AI just watched too closely.
"There, I told you," said Meecher to a couple of his oppos.
Cormac threw the ball back, hard. The drone swivelled again. Meecher reached for the ball, but didn't get his hands together quick enough and it thumped into his solar plexus. He oomphed, then after a moment shrugged that off and went running after the ball. For reasons beyond the comprehension of an eight-year-old, the AI did not intervene all the time.
Rugged carpet grass coated the playground, and upon this rested play equipment in abundance including climbing frames and slides, and access to bats and balls, grav-skates and much else besides—though no information access since this was all about exercise and "interaction." Already someone was crying because he'd miscalculated a jump on one of the frames and a human attendant was hurrying out. The AI did not intervene in such circumstances: injury by malice was mostly not allowed, injury by stupidity was a learning process.
Running around the perimeter of the ground was a high fence, mainly to prevent balls from bouncing out onto the nearby road still traversed by some hydrocar ground traffic even though most people were now buying gravcars. Cormac joined in with a game of catch, in which the initial aim was to try and get the drone to intervene, but it turned its sensors resolutely away until Meecher tried a throw at the back of Culu's head, whereupon the ball disappeared in a puff of smoke and Meecher shrieked as briefly he became the target of an electron beam stinger. This hadn't happened for a while, since Meecher had been learning to control those impulses stemming from his stirring hormones.
Now the ball game was over, Cormac climbed a nearby frame and gazed about himself. Across the road was a row of balconied three-storey apartment buildings, roofed in photoelectric tiles and with self-contained waste composting and incinerating plants, and water recycling plants filling the gaps between blocks. Wide tree-lined pavements stretched in a curve round to a large water-park, and beyond that rose the mile-high edifices of city central. Gazing in the other direction, Cormac observed suburban sprawl which he knew ran all the way to the coast and beyond, where an underwater city lay. He continued staring in that direction until something began to nag at him, and he finally returned his gaze to the curving pavement.
At first glance it had looked like a car, but now it rose up onto its many legs, and waving its antennae, swung its head from side to side as if trying to pick up some scent. Two green eyes, peridots, seemed blind. It possessed what looked like short mandibles, but they probably weren't used for eating, more likely they were used to clean and maintain the particle cannon and two missile launchers residing where its mouth should have been.
War drone!
Surely this could not be the one they had seen in Montana? Ian Cormac felt certain it was, and he felt certain that it was looking for him.
* * *
The ship loomed like some tarnished bronze mountain, slowly being exposed as autodozers cleared the charred earth and stone around it. Some of the cleared areas were fenced off, but such was the work still to do that numerous points of access had to be left open for the equipment being used—hence the mosquito autoguns now replacing the guard units that had been ensconced in the surrounding spill piles.
Before a deep hole excavated in the ground—apparently where a main hold entrance had been opened—was a small town of bubble units. ECS personnel, not all of them in uniform, swarmed busily like ants before this behemoth.
"There's still Prador in there?" enquired Yallow.
"Certainly," Olkennon replied. "Too many hiding places and the exotic metals used in the ship's construction make it difficult to scan effectively."
"There have been problems?" Cormac suggested.
"Two of our people from Reverse Engineering disappeared about a month ago. We found their bones dumped below a hatch on the other side. Prador second- and third-children have been seen—usually running away."
"Hence our presence," said Cormac.
"Hence your presence," Olkennon agreed noncommittally.
Cormac was not so sure he believed her. Since the installation of the autoguns in the area they had been guarding, it was inevitable that they would be reassigned, but he felt a suspicion that their reassignment had something to do with Carl and the subtle interrogation they had undergone from Agent Spencer. She had wanted to know every detail of recent events, and much detail of their past association with Carl; then, with a smile and a wave, she departed—giving them no explanation for her questions. He guessed that being grunts, it was not necessary for them to know.
Departing the gravcar that had brought them down by the ship, Yallow and Cormac followed Olkennon towards the bubble-unit encampment. The soil here was orange and dotted with flintlike rocks and pieces of what looked like petrified wood. Such details Cormac took in, but his eyes kept straying back to the Prador vessel. Some structures on the exterior had survived the impact. He recognised the stubs of once-jutting frameworks that surrounded the throats of rail-guns, the remains of reflector shields around lasers—some for communication and some for combat. Inset ports gleamed like spider-eyes around a jutting section like a balding head—the upper part of the squashed pear-shape of the vessel.
Soon they arrived at the encampment, where a man wandered out to meet them. He looked old, which was an uncommon occurrence with the treatments available nowadays. Cormac had seen people like him before and usually found that their lives were so busy they didn't get round to taking the treatments until something actually pushed them into it. His head hair was as grey and wiry as his beard, and his civilian clothing showed signs of wear and the occasional chemical stain—sure sign that he was the type who didn't give a fig for physical appearance.
The man held out a grubby calloused hand, which Olkennon shook, then he turned to study Cormac and Yallow. "So these are the two who will be going in with me."
"They will, Professor Dent."
<
br /> "Very well," he sighed, "let's get moving."
Olkennon turned to the two of them. "You understand your duties?"
Both Cormac and Yallow nodded.
"Keep him alive," she said, then abruptly turned on her heel and marched off.
Professor Dent led the way into the encampment of bubble units, onto main gratings, then to a narrow packed-soil alley, finally stopping at a door and opening it. They all trooped inside and, scanning the cluttered interior, Cormac felt his assessment of the man confirmed. However, no matter how apparently slovenly his appearance or how messy his dwelling, Cormac knew that the professor would not have been here had not some high-level AIs considered his presence important. Dent picked up a large case with a shoulder strap then pointed to two large backpacks resting beside a desk occupied entirely by a tangled mess of Prador technology.
"I'll be needing some help with those," he said. As he moved his pulse-rifle to hang before his stomach, Cormac caught Yallow's frown. Burdened like this they would not be so effective.
"Quick release button on the front," said the professor—obviously not an absent-minded scientist, but someone aware that soldiers needed to be able to respond quickly, and unburdened.
The two hoisted on their packs and the professor led the way out.
"We'll be going to the Captain's Sanctum, and since that is where the Prador adult was located it is deep within the ship," he said.
"As much armour as possible between itself and anyone attacking," said Yallow.
"Certainly."
They trudged out of the encampment and onto a wide road of crumbled stone and sticky mud, which ran level for a little while then cut down into a wide excavation. Soon they saw a metal ramp ahead of them, a heavy autodozer parked on it, perhaps to hold it down. The entrance itself was a sideways oval—designed to accommodate the shape of Prador, but much larger than the largest of their kind.
As they drew closer, the first thing Cormac noticed was the smell, which rolled out like a palpable fog, laden with the putrid decay of things washed up on a seashore, damp, miasmic. He saw Yallow hesitate when this hit them, her expression annoyed perhaps at the way she had reacted.
"You get used to it," said Dent.
"So some of the Prador in there are dead?" Yallow noted.
"Certainly—we haven't found them all." He glanced round at them. "But what you're smelling at the moment is a food store we only discovered recently, and then only because someone accidentally cut its power supply a week ago and its contents began decaying." He pointed back to a group of people clad in full envirosuits gathered around a couple of grav-pallets. "They'll be moving the rotten meat today."
Cormac wondered if any of that meat included something once described as "long-pig," for Prador were not averse to eating human flesh. He considered closing up the visor on his envirosuit, but Yallow hadn't, and the professor wasn't even wearing a suit. Perhaps better to go without his visor closed—even with all its systems operating, a closed suit tended to blunt the senses, and with Prador in here, on their home territory, he needed to stay sharp.
The floor of the hold felt utterly solid underfoot and distant walls appeared to be constructed of layers of ragged slabs on which grew pale green weed like dead man's fingers. There were stacks of Polity-manufacture bubble-metal crates near the entrance, but further back were objects that had occupied this hold before this ship came down. To his left a small scout vessel or shuttle rested like a squat submarine—a miniature copy of the vessel they had just entered since it seemed all Prador ships were modelled on the creatures' own form no matter how impractical that modelling might be. The craft was secured to deck rings by cables extending from holes in its sides. Behind the vessel were racks of thin, pale blue cylinders—perhaps ordinance of some kind for that same vessel.
At the back of the hold they came upon one of those diagonally divided doors needed to accommodate the Prador form. It was only partially open, a heavy lock bolt welded to it to engage in a hole drilled into the floor so it lay open only wide enough to allow humans through, and not wide enough to allow Prador second-children out. Doubtless the doors had not been permanently welded in place in case they needed to be opened further to take heavy equipment in. Beyond this door lay a smaller hold, on the right of which stacks of hexagonal crates rose to the ceiling like pillars, and just beyond them—
Cormac and Yallow simultaneously raised their pulse-rifles and took aim, but neither of them fired.
"If they'd been occupied your weapons would have had little effect," said Dent. "But it's good to see you're alert."
Arrayed in a long framework were what looked like five large Prador second-children. But this was armour for the crablike monsters—open at the back and with carapace lids hinged out in two halves, all ready to be quickly occupied. Nearby stood a rack of weapons: vicious looking rail-guns, power-packs and magazines from which hung belts of projectiles, a row of gas lasers and one large particle cannon either for tripod mounting or to be carried by a first-child.
"If there's Prador here," said Yallow, "isn't it dangerous to leave stuff like this lying around?"
Dent just pointed towards the ceiling where material had been cut away and something inset. Though very little showed there, Cormac guessed a security drone had been installed. The AI controlling this excavation and reclamation wanted the Prador aboard to take the bait here, but Cormac suspected that any left alive would avoid so obvious a trap.
At the back of this hold another set of those doors, this time fully open, led into a dim corridor. Cormac and Yallow moved ahead to check it, and immediately brought their weapons to bear on movement along one wall. Ship lice: boot-sized, multi-legged arthropods that scavenged after Prador leavings and in essence served the same purpose as beetlebots aboard Polity ships, though they were also pests that needed to be controlled—the Prador version of rats in the walls. One bent its ribbed carapace into an arc and dropped to the floor. Cormac tracked it across with his pulse-rifle as it headed towards him, tri-mandibles clicking. Professor Dent stepped forwards to trap the creature under his foot, then brought his full weight down and twisted. His boot sank with a liquid crunch, gelatinous ichor squirting out from under his sole.
"Damned things," he said. "They're getting bolder as they get hungrier. If they get locked on to you, you have to cut behind the pincers to get the things out."
"Charming," said Cormac.
As they wound their way through numerous corridors then up one level via a ladder welded to the side of a very wide drop-shaft, Cormac realised Dent was following directions given on small flimsy screens stuck at intervals to the walls. Cormac and Yallow kept to the training manual by checking all areas at junctions before allowing their charge to come on, and Cormac felt that the professor was assessing their every move.
"Warheads in here," he said at one point, gesturing to an open door to one side. "Big rail-gun launchers to the port of the main turret."
Why did they need to know that? It seemed an odd piece of information to provide.
"We go down here," Dent added, pointing ahead to a corridor slanting steeply down into the depths of the ship.
This finally debarked into an even wider corridor. Cormac guessed they now must be close to the Captain's Sanctum for this new corridor was wide enough to allow a Prador adult through. A bad smell wafted along it to them and as they rounded a corner Yallow shed her pack and went down on one knee, taking aim. Cormac just continued walking.
"You don't quite have the reactions of your partner, it would seem," commented Dent.
"I'm guessing they don't smell like that when they're alive," said Cormac, now thoroughly aware that Dent was not all he seemed.
Chagrined, Yallow stood, hoisting up her pack again and cinching it into place.
The Prador first-child lay tilted against one wall. Most of its legs had fallen away, as had one of its claws, to expose carapace sockets in which ship lice were as busy as maggots. As Cormac watched, one of the
horrible scavengers came out of the Prador's mouth between the rigid mandibles.
"How did it die?" Yallow asked.
"Most of them survived the crash," Dent supplied. "But they didn't survive the irradiation, the gassing and the subsequent assault."
Cormac glanced at him. "Irradiation?"
"Neutron tacticals were dropped here," Dent replied. "Then when the Sparkind assault teams arrived they drilled a hole through the ship's turret, which remained exposed above ground, and pumped Hazon nerve gas inside. Then they followed the gas inside and finished off what survivors they could find."
"But some survived even that," Cormac suggested.
"Yes, they were third-children in a sealed hatchery cum nursery. They grew into second-children by feeding on the remains of their relatives while we dug the ship out." He gestured about himself. "We reckon five or six survived out of about thirty of them… Anyway, we go here." He pointed at a set of wide closed doors just beyond the first-child corpse.
"Why not gas the place again?" asked Yallow.
"A waste of resources for a few second-children," Dent replied. "Though we don't always know where they are, we're always certain where they're not."
It seemed a strange statement to make, especially when Dent needed guards to escort him down here, and especially when people had been killed.
