by Neal Asher
“The Client, you say,” said the king.
“Yes, apparently resurrected from one of its body husks by the weapons platform AI.”
The king appeared to be more irritated than usual. “I had thought that matter had been dealt with. The weapon used against the Client was . . . effective.”
“So it’s true you ordered that hit,” said EC. “Private contractor, I heard . . . What kind of weapon?”
“No matter. This ‘Client’ is apparently alive again . . .”
“You can trust my word on it.”
“I trust that the platform will eventually be destroyed,” said the king. “The nature of that destruction will no doubt leave no evidence of this ‘Client.’”
“If your weapons are sufficient to the task,” said EC, unable to resist.
“So this ‘Client’ came directly to my kingdom in a damaged weapons platform in search of vengeance. As I understand it, this creature was not so impatient before.”
“My guess is that it hoped to pass itself off as an AI to foment discord between us. Has it tried this?”
The king ignored the question and said, “So vengeance is all it seeks . . .”
Ah...
It seemed the king knew something about the data store that had almost certainly been the Client’s first target.
“What else?” EC asked.
“What else indeed,” said the king. “Now, have you received any communications from Orlandine concerning the wormship fragment aboard one of my destroyers?”
EC had not, but the fact the king was asking this question was revealing. It seemed likely he had not received anything from the destroyer recently. Something must have happened out there because the king’s agents always responded immediately to him.
“I have heard nothing.”
“Nothing . . .”
“Not a peep.”
“Do you have anything further you would like to elucidate?”
“Do you have any questions you would like to ask?”
Abruptly the king’s form shimmered and changed. Now, instead of that huge creature, a prador in armour squatted in the sea grasses. It rose up on its legs and swivelled to take in the view for a moment then swung back to face EC.
“Who are you?” Earth Central asked.
“I am Bavos—king’s envoy,” replied the prador.
EC eyed the creature and considered what sort of submind he should design to deal with it. EC also knew that nothing useful would now get done. The king had withdrawn and diplomatic relations had just taken a downturn. The wreckage out near the Graveyard, from the time this had last happened, was still radiating.
CUTTER
Cutter fell through vacuum towards the prador destroyer, flexing his limbs and bringing his systems up to full power. It felt good to be out of the constriction of Orlandine’s ship, and he loved the way the starlight glinted on all his sharp edges.
“Just like the good old days,” he said.
“Indubitably,” Bludgeon replied. “However, Orlandine did order you to capture and immobilize those two second-children who fired on us. If I recollect aright, you often tried to take captives, and often failed.”
“What’s this?” interjected Orlandine.
Cutter liked the haiman woman. She had after all been a source of much excitement for him three centuries ago, and had got him out of a bit of a rut then. But he sometimes found it annoying how she could operate in the same communications plenum as he and his fellow war and assassin drones. Why did he think like this when it was generally the attitude of AIs like him that humans should upgrade to their level? He guessed it was because she hovered in a grey area between the two.
“Cutter has never managed to capture a prador alive,” Bludgeon explained. “Some situation has always arisen whereby his personal survival has been threatened too severely and he has had to kill his intended captives.”
“That will not happen this time,” Orlandine snapped.
“Well, let’s hope—” Cutter began but she interrupted him.
“And do you know why it will not happen?”
After a brief pause it was Bludgeon who asked. “Why?”
“Because,” Orlandine explained, “on this mission Cutter will place the capture and immobilization of the two second-children above his own survival. Cutter, you will make their capture your primary objective.”
“What?” said Bludgeon. “You can’t be serious.”
Cutter, meanwhile, began chewing this over. Throughout the war and other conflicts he had risked his life, and he had undertaken missions during which his personal survival had been doubtful. However, the bedrock underlying his objectives had mostly been to get out alive. He was, after all, a useful asset and, even on failed missions, he had usually caused severe damage to the enemy. Only twice had mission importance exceeded the value of his own life, and he had been asked to sacrifice himself to such objectives. Obviously he hadn’t—he’d always found ways to complete the mission and survive the experience. This was why Orlandine had made the order. She was pressuring him to complete and to survive.
Cutter turned his inspection inward. As a concept, the mission had loaded to his mind, but he now had to make some alterations. In level of importance, he switched mission concept with personal survival—the process a little rusty and creaking. As these thumped into place he suddenly felt a little danger and a strong frisson of excitement. He remembered that this had happened on those other occasions too. Removing personal survival from the mission equation opened up whole new landscapes of thought—landscapes in which he could run a little crazily. He felt his character profile change in response.
“Fuck, you did it,” said Bludgeon.
“Never underestimate the boredom of assassin drones,” said Orlandine.
The hull of the destroyer loomed closer, two balls containing rail-guns turning in their sockets to track his progress. Cutter spurted blades of white flame to shove himself sideways and came down hard before a set of space doors. The gecko function of his feet did not work so well against prador hull metal and felt particularly ineffective now. He spat a laser at the metal and analysed the spectrum. The metal was more advanced than the old stuff and seemed to have incorporated something of the newer Polity hull metals. Cutter thought that the disguise of these prador as renegades from the Kingdom did not bear close inspection. Rather than trying any other form of foot adhesion, he just used his thrusters to slide himself towards the space doors, which were already opening. Then, as soon as he could get a grip on something, he dragged himself inside, reoriented to internal grav and dropped from ceiling to floor, flipping over as he did so to come down on his feet. The space doors began to close behind him, while ahead five big armoured prador, bristling with weapons, scuttled backwards.
“They’re a little nervous in here,”he observed.
“If I was a prador,” said Orlandine, “I would be a little nervous of an assassin drone with a record like yours. They know who you are, dear Cutter.”
Cutter tilted his head, antennae coiling up and then straightening as he scanned the five ahead of him. He reviewed his personal archives of the estimated four thousand six hundred and nineteen prador he had killed. The figure was an estimate because over two thousand of the count were compliments from the crew of two dreadnoughts and assorted smaller ships he had depopulated—usually by detonating internal weapons caches. He guessed, knowing that, the five ahead should be nervous. However, it was Cutter himself who should be nervous—if things turned nasty here, right now, the assault programs he was running told him he could kill only about two of them before the others took him apart.
“Com open,” said Bludgeon. “The prador assault group leader is called Boris—you also have linked com to Captain Orlik.”
“Boris?” said Cutter privately.
“Yes, Boris,” Bludgeon confirmed.
“Okay, comrades,” he addressed the five before him, “let’s do this.” After a brief pause, the prador p
arted, three to one side and two to the other. One of them, in yellow armour decorated with purple camouflage streaks, gestured with a claw to the next door leading into the ship proper.
“So what’s the plan of attack?” Boris asked.
“Situational update, please,” said Cutter, moving forwards. He felt a little anxious because his assault programs had adjusted the situation in his mind. He was putting himself at a disadvantage now and would only be able to kill one of them if they attacked . . .
Much to his surprise, the prador Boris immediately squirted a file across to him in Polity drone tactical format. As air pressure rose around him and the diagonally divided door ahead separated, he reviewed the information. The two second-children he was after were ensconced in the maintenance and operator cabin behind the railgun ball. They had welded shut the main armoured doors leading into that area and were currently working to isolate all the mechanisms accessible to them that Orlik could access from his sanctum. They already had control of grav in there, which would make an assault quite interesting. Also, they had taken apart the few explosive railgun slugs they could get to and mined the area with stinger mines. These explosive devices were like short-barrelled guns and flung out one exotic metal slug capable of damaging, if not penetrating, prador armour. They had their own weapons too, of course—both armed with particle cannons and just one armed with a heavy Gatling cannon. This was the limit of the file because little data had come from the area for an hour now, since the two of them had found and destroyed the final cam.
“This wasn’t planned,” said Cutter, stepping out into the oval section tunnel beyond.
“Evidently,” said Boris.
The prador’s observation dispelled Cutter’s momentarily pleasant nostalgia on being in such a place. He had wanted to explain his reasoning but it seemed Boris was already there, and he controlled the urge to get snappy. Boris and his friends might well not survive what he was planning so there was no loss in being reasonable now.
“Explain ‘evidently’,” he said.
Boris fell in beside him, perambulating casually, occasionally rapping a claw against the wall as if in time to some song in his mind, which was unlikely—he was prador after all.
“Had it been planned they would have moved in some heavier armament from the weapons cache just a short distance from where they are,” said Boris. “In fact, they were working not far from there when they made this move.”
Boris sent over another file. This showed the two second-children working their way along an optical data feed, decoupling sections and testing them individually. Cutter ran the file quickly in his mind because it was hours long. The two had obviously been trying to trace one of the many worm-generated faults in the ship. He could see how they had started out working efficiently, then began making mistakes, their work rate slowing. Towards the end they were showing signs of confusion, in fact just the sort of behaviour Cutter had seen before when prador had been infected with a Polity bio-weapon parasite. Was this what had happened here?
“Where were they before this?” he asked.
The next file came fast, as if Boris had been expecting the question. Cutter now saw the two working in the hold, bringing up heavy clamps, sliding them in slots up to the fragment of wormship, securing their bases then tightening them on the glistening surface of the thing. It gave Cutter the creeps, that worm.
“This is not relevant to your mission,” Orlandine interjected, obviously watching the whole interplay.
“I beg to differ, haiman,” said Cutter. He glanced at Boris and was even more conscious of the other four prador behind him. Of course, “behind” was not quite the right term, since his vision was three hundred and sixty degrees and his joints could fold in any direction he chose. He could attack something behind with as much alacrity and efficiency as anything in front.
“How many others have been that close?” he asked carefully, upgrading the assault program running constantly in his mind. He quietly ran targeting solutions with all his weaponry, tilting himself slightly so that the high-intensity laser in his rear could acquire the visor of the nearest prador behind.
“Three others,” Boris replied, “and they have now, of course, been disarmed and placed in confinement—without their armour.”
“Ah,” said Cutter.
“We are not the kind of prador you were accustomed to, Cutter,” said Boris. “You should remember that when it comes to dealing with those two ahead.”
“I would remember that,” Cutter replied, “if I thought they were thinking like prador any more.”
No, he decided, rejecting his previous plan, direct assault through the armoured door was out. The fact that casualties would be too high was one factor, but the smallest one. The largest was that one, or both of the two, would likely be killed.
“Bludgeon?” he enquired.
His partner war drone, as always, was just a small step behind in his thinking, and a tactical assessment of the infrastructure around the rail-gun arrived in Cutter’s mind. He already had the schematic available but Bludgeon’s showed him what kind of explosives could be used to what effect.
“Still pressurized,” he observed. “You have planar explosives?”
“We do,” Boris replied.
“Then here is part of the plan.” Cutter sent it in drone format.
Boris abruptly halted, then turned, gesturing back down the corridor. “Then we go back to where we started—the nearest way outside is the way you came in.”
The whole group turned, two speeding off ahead.
“Those planar explosives,” Boris explained. “Father is not going to like this.”
“I don’t,” interjected the voice of Captain Orlik. “But I bow to this assassin drone’s expertise when it comes to capturing prador.”
Cutter was glad he wasn’t human, with an expression that might be easily read. He felt like a bit of a fraud. He also wondered how Boris and the others would react when he told them to lose their particle cannons and railguns, and take up weapons incapable of penetrating prador armour . . .
ANGEL
Angel watched as the white, squid-like creature swarmed up the algae-drift beach towards him, then noted further disturbances in the ocean behind it. The thing loomed up close, pausing to peck at the drift with the parrot heads at the end of its long limbs, throwing the stuff all around. Then it attacked, and one parrot head snapped down, closing on Angel’s shoulder. The creature was strong, because it managed to shift him slightly to the side. But he reached up and closed a hand around one of the neck-limbs, his fingers sinking through muscular flesh. It squealed and other heads punched down, until he turned and chopped across them. The edges of his hands were razor sharp, and two heads fell, necks writhing and spurting ichor. He stepped in closer, discarding the severed head attached to his shoulder, and reached under the front end of the thing, heaving it up and sending it tumbling down the beach. Eyeing the ocean, he saw it boiling as more and more of the same creatures clambered up onto the shore. A quick scan of the depths showed them packed with these things. He did not have time for this.
Turning back to his transport egg, he scanned up into the sky and linked. Ruth was getting closer in the shuttle, while a spaceship was now dropping from orbit. Trike was coming. Suddenly doubting the extent of his control, he entered Ruth’s mind to be sure she was following his command exactly. Ruth’s emotions were mixed: she was angry with him, livid, but on the other hand felt a strange gratitude to be included in his business once again. She had developed an odd kinship with him, despite the fact he had stripped information from her mind and killed her, then seemingly resurrected her on a whim. Was she suffering from some perverted form of what the humans called Stockholm syndrome?
“You will not harm him,” she said out loud, sensing his connection.
“I will do as I please,” Angel replied in her mind.
The words lacked their earlier sincerity and she sensed this—he seemed to be weak, at some remo
ve. She could not disobey but began to wonder if she might be able to fight him.
“No, you cannot,” said Angel, seizing control of her body. She abruptly reached down, took the knife from her belt and held it up with the point pressed below her eye. “Do I have to give you a reminder?”
“No, you do not have to remind me,” she replied.
But it was all insincere, because he now felt repelled by the idea of harming her. As he dropped the compulsion she pushed the knife back into her belt. He sensed that she felt he was bluffing, but she could not understand why. Through her eyes he saw her take the shuttle down through a cloud that left yellow smears on the screen. A continent lay visible to her left, and the pale green ocean extended from below to the horizon. The island he was on wasn’t visible yet, but she would be there soon enough. Angel glanced at the great mass of creatures now heaving from the sea, climbed back into his transport egg and, with some irritation, slammed the hatch shut.
“You can take the ship and just leave us there, on that island,” she said, the connection still open.
“That would be interesting,” Angel replied. “I suspect that being a hooper, Trike would survive until someone came, but I am not so sure you would.”
“What?”
The egg jerked and shuddered as the creatures reached it. Through external sensors he watched them flooding around it and piling up on top of each other in their eagerness, their anger, whatever it was. Their parrot heads hammered against the hull, and he probed them with scanners to analyse their physical structure—a task he found much more difficult than before. Soon he saw that the situation here was untenable.
