by Neal Aher
An eye-blink later, they were in another part of the Feeding Frenzy, low over that sulphurous world. Here they spotted another of the King’s Guard ships floating before them against the pastel canvas of the gas cloud. A further eye-blink, and the back end of that ship exploded, jerking it round and hurling out a cloud of burning debris. Gost, whose image had remained in its frame, staggered out of view for a moment, then cam-tracking pulled him back. It was obvious he was aboard the ship they had apparently just fired upon.
“I estimate that it will take at least two minutes for your King’s Guard to arrive,” said Penny Royal. “It is interesting to speculate how the line into the future would change should the Prador Kingdom lose its head.”
What? Blite thought.
Gost remained motionless for a moment, then said calmly, “I should have known that you would detect my signal re-routing, and that I wasn’t with my fleet.”
“I am no danger to you unless threatened,” said Penny Royal. “The course I take is my own and the thread I sew here is to repair some things which are personal to me. Understand my capabilities, Gost, if I should still call you that. Do you think I would have come here leaving anything to chance? Do you think I am actually, completely, here?”
“I can do as you request,” said Gost, “and pass Sverl that list of factory station refugees. But Sverl is by no means stupid and will know my intent concerning him. We can’t allow him to survive, so if I appear to assist, he will wonder why I am doing so.”
“Be as convincing as you can,” said the black AI, “but in the end it doesn’t matter. When Sverl has that list he will react precisely as I want him to.”
“Very well, I will pass it on.”
“Good,” said Penny Royal, and a moment later the Black Rose submerged itself in U-space, taking it beyond reach.
Blite let out a tight breath.
“That Gost—” Greer began.
“—was the prador king,” Blite completed.
TRENT
Trent’s return to consciousness within the shell people’s holding area was abrupt and painful. His body ached from head to foot. He clamped down on immediate nausea but failed to suppress it, turned his head to one side and vomited.
“Trent Sobel,” said a voice.
He was sitting in a chair but couldn’t move his arms. Peering down with slowly clearing vision, he saw that his captors had secured them with straps. And, on trying to shift his legs, he felt them likewise bound. Ahead of him was a dais, with some shape upon it. He guessed this was Taiken, the shell people’s apparent leader, and now checked his surroundings. He was in one of those structures he had seen earlier—a building erected out of sheets of plasmel taken from a roll, then hardened to the required shape. The room was circular and domed, with doorways all around built much wider than would be required for the human form. Standing in one of these doorways was a child, a boy of no more than ten solstan years. He wore only a pair of shorts and looked numb, pale and sickly. His right arm was an armoured limb terminating in a claw, while he had a prador manipulatory limb folded against his torso. Surgery must have been recent, as highlighted by the angry red blush around the limb attachment points, and by the white thread scars, of the kind usually left by an old military autodoc, all over his misshapen torso.
Children—really?
While Trent watched, a woman came up behind the child and took up his human hand. Trent went rigid.
Genève?
The woman appeared haunted, until she looked up and met his gaze, then she seemed briefly puzzled. No, she wasn’t Trent’s dead sister. The only similarity was her cropped blonde hair, diminutive form and black eye-shadow and lipstick, if not cosmetically dyed skin. She began to lead the boy away, shooting Trent one last hopeless glance. Trying to ignore the unfamiliar feeling in his chest, Trent began working against the straps. They were a form of translucent plastic in which he could see embedded wires, so they were probably unbreakable, even with his heavy-worlder strength. But the chair, made of pressed fibre, didn’t look so strong.
“That was my son,” said Taiken.
Was the woman Taiken’s wife, and not worth a mention? Trent focused his attention on the dais, now able to see clearly the figure squatting there. Taiken was just about as far along in his transformation as Trent had ever seen in a shellman. He squatted on prador legs issuing from under a prador carapace. Beneath this, as the shellman rose a little to wave one claw towards the doorway, Trent glimpsed the vague shape of a human torso spread out like a specimen on a board. The greatly extended neck from this curved up through the carapace to the shell-enclosed head on the upper side. Mandibles grated before the remains of a human face—its lower jaw missing and just a wide gullet there below where the nose had been removed. Palp eyes issued from the top of the enclosing shell, but they looked prosthetic—false.
“With him the transformation will be complete and without error,” Taiken added.
Trent winced at the thought, then was baffled as to why.
The shellman stank. The smells of decaying human and piscine bodies, and shit and urine, permeated this chamber, which, Trent now realized, resembled a father-captain’s sanctum, even down to the array of hexagonal screens behind Taiken. Trent glimpsed something scuttling across one side of the room and his flesh crawled. He really didn’t need ship lice about when he couldn’t move. Then he remembered how clean the other parts of Sverl’s ship had been and how he had been surprised on seeing no lice there, only Polity cleanbots.
“It is time at last for all my children to achieve the perfection I am only days away from reaching,” said Taiken.
Trent flinched, thinking about the child he’d just seen, and the frightened human woman who caused a hitch in his chest. He remembered the shellwoman who had bagged him on the way into this place, how she had said, “I am to take you to Father,” and realized he’d just landed up to his neck in it again. So this shellman, this amalgam of human and prador with his decaying grafts, the pus leaking out of his joints and the probability that he had two immune systems trying to attack each other, was only days away from achieving perfection? Ah, Trent now felt something cracking under his right forearm, and the chair leg they had bound his right thigh to felt looser, as it parted from some strut behind.
“You understand,” Taiken continued. “You were with Isobel and you saw her achieve her form of perfection. You have the insight we need.”
Yeah, Trent was with Isobel as she changed into a hooder. And one thing he definitely knew was that sometimes the human mind couldn’t adapt or keep up—it broke instead.
“And I would like you to join us, Trent Sobel.”
Not in your wildest, you fucking lunatic . . . But was that the right thing to say just now? No, best to play along at least until his arms and legs were free.
Trent nodded thoughtfully. “This sounds interesting. Of course, I admire the prador and everything about them, and understand what you are trying to achieve. But I would need to know more. I also have to wonder why you found it necessary to bind me like this.”
“What more do you need to know?” Taiken asked. “And you are bound because you are a dangerous man. You are about to take the first step along our road, whether willingly or not.”
Now the shellwoman stepped into view, pushing a pedestal-mounted autodoc up beside Trent’s chair. While he watched, she detached something from just below the doc. Trent recognized two items: the specially sealed container for a nano-package, and the skin diffuser into which she plugged it.
“I did say that I need to know more,” said Trent reasonably.
“You will know more as you begin to grow your carapace,” said Taiken. “In the act of becoming comes transcendence.”
The guy was out there with the fairies and it was time to act. Trent heaved against his bonds, hard, with all his limbs. The chair came apart underneath him and collapsed. He rolled, ripping himself away from its broken parts and, still tangled in the straps, dived for the autodo
c. He grabbed the pedestal and managed to get partially to his feet, hauling the device up and slamming it straight into the chest of the woman. He heard her carapace crack and, issuing a phlegmy bubbling sound, she went down on her backside. He stared at her, feeling sick, because he hadn’t meant to hit her so hard. Then other shell people, who he had known were standing behind, were on him.
He swung the autodoc into a human head sticking up ridiculously from a disc-shaped carapace, heard a neck break, the head now tilted to one side. Such a blow should have paralysed a human, but this creature just ran off to one side as if still under the control of his prador parts. Trent was suffused with horror at what he had just done. What the hell was the matter with him? This was a fight for survival and he couldn’t keep reacting like this. Mainly to rid himself of the lethal weapon, Trent threw the doc at another of them who was raising a pepper-pot stun gun in its one human hand. The gun went skittering and the autodoc crashed to the floor. A claw closed on his left bicep. He grabbed it with his right hand and pulled, hard, tearing it from its socket, a foul yellow spray hitting his face.
Oh please no . . .
He stumbled away, cringing inside, then fell over fragments of chair still attached to his legs, and another claw crashed down on the back of his neck. The flash of a stunner prod numbed his right arm. He drove his left fist up and felt something break under it, retracted his fist as if he had hurt it and curled it against his chest. Then blow after blow rained down on him and a claw closed around his neck. He briefly lost consciousness, then came to, feeling the shellmen binding his arms behind his back and tying further straps around his legs.
“With the others,” said Taiken.
Next, they dragged him along the floor by his jacket collar, shell people all around him, the woman walking beside him holding an armoured hand against her chest. She was coughing, occasionally spitting out gobbets of black jelly. He was glad she was alive and hoped the damage wasn’t permanent.
“He’s . . . nuts,” Trent managed, not sure for a moment if he was referring to Taiken or himself.
“Father . . .” she replied.
“Why the fuck . . . you listen to him?”
“We must obey.”
At length they threw him into a cage, slamming a barred door closed behind him. There were other people here—normal Polity humans, if such a description could be apt. A man walked over, pulled out of his pocket a device Trent recognized as a micro-shear. The man stooped and worked on Trent’s bonds, finally freeing him. Trent heaved himself over, spat out blood and a fragment of tooth and sat upright. He looked round at the people—four of them—then paused to focus on an object sitting just outside the cage. A huge spherical glass bottle sat in a metal framework. Perpetual slithering movement filled it.
“Spatterjay leeches,” he muttered, then turned to the man who had freed him. “It makes no sense,” he continued, “are they all crazy?”
“That’s not a term I like,” said the man, wincing.
“Oh yeah?” said Trent, puzzled.
“I take it you received your offer from Taiken to join them.” The man squatted down beside him.
“Yeah, I did. The man’s a loon. Why do they listen to him?” Trent knew he was ranting, but he just wanted to talk, just wanted to think about anything other than his own recent reactions to violence.
The man grimaced, probably as offended by “loon” as he had been by “crazy.” “Because they have no choice,” said the man. “They could not overcome their internal conflicts in time. Consider what they have been trying to achieve and what the end result should be.”
“All of them looking like crabs?”
“Yes, but more than that.” The man turned off his micro-shear and, as he pocketed it, Trent watched where it went and thought about what use he could make of it. Especially on the lock of that door behind. “Taiken has always been their leader and has always, because of his mental aberrations, wanted to be a prador. But not just any prador. He didn’t want to be a first- or second-child but a father-captain—with his children utterly loyal and obedient.”
“I saw one of his kids . . .” said Trent.
“The two children, are they okay? I worry about the damage . . .”
“Not really . . . But even others called him father.”
“All the adaptogenic drugs, the nano-packages, the surgical material and the tank-grown prador organic materials are sourced from the same prador genome and they all come through Taiken. The people who used them donned their own chains because Taiken retained certain items for himself only: he had father-captain pheromone organs surgically implanted inside him.”
“Pheromonal control,” said Trent, getting it at once.
“He didn’t use this method of control on the Rock Pool, at least not much, because there were too many Polity watchers and too many normal humans about. He needed his people confined to one place, free of interference, in some enclave before he could assert full control. It’s a scenario that has been played out throughout history, generally in religious cults.” The man paused to wave a hand at his surroundings. “I don’t know if this is finally the right place to achieve his dream or whether he has become more delusional.”
“I’d go for the latter,” said Trent. “He’s insane.”
“Insane or otherwise,” said the man, frowning, “Taiken is now a father-captain and all the shell people here who used his products are now his children. They are enslaved to the pheromones he produces and are simply incapable of disobeying him.”
“Shit,” Trent muttered.
“And, as I understand it,” said the man, “Taiken intends to go all the way. He deliberately left his wife unchanged. He intends to use material from a different prador genome to convert her into a prador female.”
Horror climbed up out of Trent’s chest and closed his throat.
Redeem yourself, Penny Royal had said, and the first-child Bsorol had referred to that too. Trent remembered the words with incredible clarity and considered how, until now, there had been no opportunity. He also now realized that the black AI had crippled his ability to act, by cursing him with empathy.
9
BLITE
A tension permeated the air throughout the ship, a feeling that the very fabric of the universe had twisted and knotted up all around them. Perhaps this feeling was making him question his impulse to go after Penny Royal, or perhaps that was due to their brief and potentially lethal encounter with the king of the prador. However, most probably it was the knowledge that Penny Royal had taken them back in time—the kind of action that had always been equated with dangerous, universe-destroying lunacy in the fiction he grew up with.
He stood in their new cargo area, eyeing the copious space available. He was aware that being able to fill it with cargo and move it at the speed this ship could manage, he could make a fortune. But he already had one—he was already seriously wealthy from the sale of the memplants Penny Royal had provided. Money wasn’t why he was here, not any more.
Blite turned from the cargo area, went through the bulkhead door leading into the crew quarters and entered the dropshaft around which the cabins had been positioned. He towed himself along this, then went through the next bulkhead door, grav returning and bringing his boots thumping down on the floor of the bridge. Greer was the only one in attendance here—Brond getting some sleep in the large well-appointed cabin he had taken.
“On the prowl again?” she enquired.
He grunted at her and moved on.
After the next bulkhead door was a short corridor terminating in a shimmershield airlock. The shuttle bay beyond was pressurized so Blite didn’t need his helmet. He stretched out a hand to the first shimmershield and pushed it through—the sensation was much like pushing his hand into warm mud. He followed his hand through, the shield softening and yielding quickly, then abruptly blinking out of existence, as did the second shield. Sub-AI computing in the airlock had detected its irrelevance and shut it down.
&
nbsp; Blite stepped into the shuttle bay and eyed the new shuttle clamped in place there. The thing was a slightly flattened sphere thirty feet across, with six acceleration chairs inside. Each was on its own revolving base so those inside could take in the view. And it would be a good one since the whole interior of that cabin in the upper hemisphere of the shuttle was lined with screen paint—out in vacuum it could appear to those inside that no ship surrounded them at all. No controls were visible the first time he had stepped inside. However, on asking Leven, he had learned that the shuttle would take a submind of the Golem ship mind and, if that ever failed or was destroyed, a manual control console would automatically rise from the floor. “What if the damage that destroyed the submind also damaged the system for raising that console?” Blite had asked.
“You’d be dead anyway,” Leven had replied.
Blite moved on past the shuttle and into the corridor leading back into the prong of the horseshoe-shape of the ship on this side. He’d taken this route many times before, checked the maintenance hatches leading to the half of the U-space drive that was on this side, then checked through the hatches at the end leading to the fusion array. He liked to visit this place when he felt he had something to say to their resident black AI. Here Penny Royal had made a particular alcove. He halted by this and eyed the antique space suit seated on a stool inside.
This time, unlike on other occasions, he sensed no presence here, just a prickling down his spine when he gazed into the black vacancy of the visor. Nevertheless, he spoke because, really, it didn’t matter where on this ship he spoke. Penny Royal would always hear.
“There’s something I’ve been avoiding asking,” he said. “We went back in time two weeks so you could tell this Gost to pass Sverl the identification of those who escaped Factory Station Room 101, which still strikes me as a little odd—I don’t quite believe that it was an emergency measure because one of the actors in your play went off-script. I reckon you did it because you could. I think you’re exploring your abilities and enjoying your power to manipulate. Whatever . . .” Blite shrugged. “What I want to ask is this: are we now travelling forward those two weeks?”
