by Neal Asher
“Weak, Madeleine, very weak.” I paused, a suspicion nagging at me. I relayed an instruction to the Coin Collector for a search of the area surrounding the colony raft. “So, if you didn’t make the thing, where did you really get it from?”
She gazed at me for a long moment, perhaps realizing her predicament and understanding that lies would not help now. Meanwhile the search produced results: a group of Cleavers watching from around an ancient tripod-mounted holocorder mounted on a platform that was itself fixed to a swamp car. This could not be a regular activity of the Cleavers, for surely they would have automatic systems in place to keep watch on their enemies.
I further worked some controls to bring up an image, from orbit, of the Cleaver colony raft as Madeleine replied, “We stole it from the Cleavers. We found out they were bringing in something valuable from the North and ambushed them.”
I glanced round at Harriet, who had moved with eerie silence to stand at my shoulder.
“Squabbling children,” she said, in one of her moments of clarity.
So it seemed, and a plot by the Cleavers to put the Frobishers in my bad books, nicely exacerbated by Madeleine Frobisher’s greed and intent to extend her off-world interests. I’d been dragged into a silly feud, my time had been wasted, my body had been damaged and the Client would be pissed off. However, before I could further consider what the Client’s reaction would be, the bathysphere arrived with a shuddering crash in its docking cage. I would find out soon enough, I decided.
“Goodbye, Madeleine,” I said, and cut the connection.
The bathysphere door opened into an oval tube twenty feet across and ten high. Everything aboard the Coin Collector was of a similar scale—this tube apparently matching the size of burrows made by prador yet to grow into huge father-captains and lose their legs in that process. The interior was plain metal, the lower half roughened with fingertip-sized pyramidal spikes for grip, tubes of varying sizes branching off for the different iterations of prador children. Its design was obviously an old one, made long before the prador started designing the decor of their ships to match their home environment, and long before the father-captains dared to come out of their lairs. As I strode into it, the human lighting from induction blisters grew brighter, revealing a group of about twenty thetics marching in perfect synchronization across a junction. I headed over to a parking platform for various designs of scooter, Harriet pacing at my side like some faithful hound.
I mounted a gyroscope balanced mono-scooter, engaged its drive, and using the detached throttle and steering baton, guided it from the platform and up along the tunnel to the end where a steep switchback took me up another level. Harriet followed me all the way, still hound-faithful for, except on the odd occasions when I allowed her to let her instincts reign, she never left my side. Five levels later I arrived at a massive oval door, dismounted and walked toward it. With a loud crump it separated diagonally and the two halves revolved up into the walls, whereupon I entered a small captain’s sanctum packed with human equipment plugged into the ancient prador controls. As I approached the consoles, with their hexagonal screens above, they abruptly came on to show me the views I had been seeing in the bathysphere. I stared at them for a long time, utterly certain now of what was to come, then I turned away.
It was time for me to deal with my injuries and the inevitable upbraiding from the Client—a prospect I did not relish at all. I walked over to a case against one wall, a thing that looked very much like an iron maiden, woodenly stripping off my jacket as I went. I tossed the jacket into a bin beside it, then struggled with my boots, trousers, shirt, and undergarments—a thetic would collect them later and clean and repair them. Naked, I opened the front door of the case to reveal a human-shaped indentation inside, turned round and backed into it, Harriet watching me like a curious puppy. I closed up the lid and immediately I felt the bayonet connections sliding into my body, then everything began to shut down.
Next I gazed from old dying eyes, reality broken into thousands of facets easily interpretable to a distributed mind, even though the dimensions it could perceive were beyond reason to a human one. However, the facets were going out. Pheromone receptors were stuttering too, and synaesthetic interpreters churning nonsense. Meanwhile, down below, the hot tightness came in peristaltic waves and something was snapping open. In hot orange vastness I screamed chemical terror and shed. Nerve plugs and sockets parted and a mass of dry chitin fell, a hollow waspish thing bouncing amidst many of the same, doubled iridescent wings shattering like safety glass.
And next all was clear again with new eyes to see. Thirty-two wings beat and pheromone receptors began receiving again, while the synaesthetic interpreters turned the language and code of the Client into something I could understand. The creature rose up, a hundred feet tall, opened its beak and with its new black tongue tasted the air of its furnace.
“You have failed again,” it said.
As the Polity knew to its cost, the prador were vicious predators not prepared to countenance other intelligent entities in their universe. What had not been known, until a year into the start of the war when it seemed that humanity, the Polity, and its AIs faced extinction, was that the prador were already practiced in the art of extermination.
I was working in bioweapons—the natural place in the war for a parasitologist and bio-synthesist—trying to resurrect a parasite of those giant crablike homicidal maniacs, when I was abruptly reassigned. I later learnt that the parasite was resurrected and delivered as a terror weapon by assassin drones made in its shape. They sneaked aboard prador ships or into their bases, and injected parasite eggs—prador father-captains extinguished by the worms chewing out their insides.
Only once I was aboard the destroyer ferrying me to my destination, along with a large and varied collection of other experts, did I get the story. Before the prador encountered the Polity they had encountered another alien species whose realm encompassed just three or four star systems. Being the prador, they had attacked at once, but then found themselves in a long drawn-out war against a hive species who even in organic form approached AI levels of intelligence, and who quickly developed some seriously nasty weaponry in response to the attack. The war had dragged on for decades but, in the end, the massive resources of the prador Kingdom told against the hive creatures. It was during this conflict that the prador developed their kamikazes, and not during the prador-human war, and it was with kamikazes that the prador steadily annihilated the hive creatures’ worlds. However, one of these multifaceted beings, a weapons developer no less, managed to steal a prador cargo ship and get out through the prador blockade of the systems of its kind. And now, this creature, which the AI’s referred to as the Client, wanted to ally itself with the Polity for some payback.
My memories of my time with the Client are vague. I’m sure we worked together on bioweapons while other experts there worked on the more knotty problem of delivery systems, and other weapons arising from the Client’s science. A bioweapon capable of annihilating every prador it came into contact with was perfectly feasible, but getting it into contact with enough of them wasn’t so easy. Though the prador fought under one king to destroy the Polity, they were often physically isolated. The father-captains remained aboard their ships, only coming into physical contact with their own kin. Many prador wore atmosphere sealed armor perpetually, while others had been surgically transplanted into the aseptic interiors of their war machines. A plague would not spread and, to be effective, would have to be delivered across millions of targets. This seemed impossible, until the farcaster....
U-space tech has always been difficult. A runcible gate will only open into another runcible gate and a U-space drive for a ship is effectively its own gate. Open ended runcibles had been proposed, developed, and had failed. Without the catcher’s mitt there at the other end, nothing without its own integral U-space drive could surface from underspace. It couldn’t work. It wasn’t possible. Except it was.
Because
of the vagueness of my memories of the time I am assuming that the AIs developed the farcaster. The device could, using appalling amounts of energy, generate an open-ended gate. It was possible to point this thing anywhere in the prador kingdom, inside their seemingly invulnerable ships, even inside the armor of individuals, and send something. But there was a problem: the energy requirement ramped exponentially with the size of the portal. To send something the size of a megaton contra terrene device would require the full energy output of a G-type sun for a day, even if the iteration of the farcaster we had was capable of using that amount of energy, which it wasn’t. This was completely unfeasible, and if we could have utilized such massive amounts of power it could have been directed in a much more effective way. However, there were other possibilities. The output of a stacked array of fifty fusion reactors could deploy the device as it stood, and it was possible to open microscopic portals—ones that though small were large enough to send through something like a virus, a spore or a bacterium.
Working together the Client and I made something that could kill the prador. I don’t know precisely what it was—the vagueness of my memories was due to the accident that destroyed most of my body, for it had also destroyed part of my mind. We were ready. We had our weapon and we had our delivery system. But things had changed in the intervening years. The prador had begun to lose, and even as we lined up the farcaster for its first tests, the old prador king was displaced and they began to retreat, and to negotiate. The Als put a hold on our project, then they canceled it, seizing the farcaster and breaking it into separate elements, which were cast away all across known space.
What happened then? The war ended, apparently. I never knew, because my remains were clinging to life in one of the Client’s growth tanks as it fled into hiding aboard the Coin Collector. Apparently there had been some contention about the breaking up of the farcaster during which some unstable weapons activated. I don’t know. I just don’t know.
Consciousness returned to me while I was alone aboard the Coin Collector, my mind somehow enslaved, my task to search out and recover the elements of the far-caster, and to one day take them to the Client, when it allowed me to know its location, so it could at last have its revenge against the prador. I waited patiently for that day, for I wanted revenge too and I wanted freedom, and I knew that the only way I could have them would be to finish the job the prador started so long ago.
The Client had spoken and now, with my connection to it renewed and affirmed, or maybe some parts of my mind reprogrammed and updated, I had no choice but to obey. As I stepped out of the repair cabinet and donned newly cleaned and repaired clothing, I felt sick, bewildered by my human form, and still wishing I could change the past.
“Time to finish this now,” I said.
“Finish it?” Harriet perked up.
I did worry about her love of mayhem, for it seemed her main interest now. Once she had been an “exotic dancer” who used various reptiles in her act and then, like many such people for whom appearance is all, she acquired an accelerating addiction to change. First had been changes of skin color and the addition of snake eyes, then scales, claws, and numerous internal changes, adaptogenic drugs and enhancements, and change thereafter for its own sake. At some point the jobs she had taken to supplement her wealth had displaced the dancing, and she became a full-time bounty hunter, and she further adapted herself to that work. I had employed her to hunt down a rogue war drone said to possess some strange piece of U-space tech which just might have been part of the farcaster, but as it turned out wasn’t. The drone fried her, leaving not much more than her brain and a bit of nerve tissue. I managed to get her out, in an ab-zero stasis bottle, and thence to a hospital in the Graveyard. I didn’t hold out much hope for her. Had we access to a Polity hospital her chances would have been better, but, since quite a few of her bounties were paid upon delivery of a corpse, or parts thereof, she couldn’t return to the Polity. The next time I saw her I got a bit of a shock.
Her change into a troodon dinosaur had been out of a catalogue that explored the “limits of the feasible” apparently, and she was idiotically delighted with it. They’d shoe-horned her brain into this reptile body, where it didn’t seem to fit right. They’d turned her into something like an upgraded pet that could speak, but didn’t possess the hands to do anything more complicated than tear at meat. I felt responsible, and so allowed her to stay at my side.
‘"Yes, finish it,” I said, the feeling that I occupied some nightmare form slowly receding as I worked the controls, targeting both colony rafts and the Cleaver watch post, then pausing to study the only weapons option.
The Frobishers and Cleavers were nasty and certainly deserved some sort of response, but there had to be innocents amidst them. What I was about to do sickened me, but I simply had no choice . . . or did I? I now struggled against my own mind, because my instructions did offer me some leeway, and I opened com channels covering all the radio and microwave frequencies the two families used, and set the equipment for record and repeat.
“This is a message from Tuppence aboard the Coin Collector for all Frobishers and Cleavers,” I said. “You have both wasted my time and threatened my life.” And now the unscripted bit, “You therefore have one hour to abandon your colony rafts and watch stations. At the end of that hour I will destroy them all.” I paused while a knife of pain lanced through my skull, then faded as I selected the single particle cannon for the chore. The pain returned as I set a timer for firing, then continued with, “Perhaps, after this, those of you who might be innocent in this matter will carefully consider your choice of leadership. That is all.”
“You are being merciful?” Harriet inquired.
I stepped back from the controls, the pain redoubling in my skull, and slumped into an acceleration chair. I was aware that I had gone, if only a little, contrary to my orders, and now, somehow, I was punishing myself. Paralyzed, I watched lights flashing and icons appearing on the screen indicating increasingly desperate attempts from both families to get in contact with me. Ever so slowly the pain faded—just a small punishment for a minor infringement, and not the agony that could leave me crippled in hell for days on end. The leeway around my orders enabled me to do such things, enabled me to do many things. I rested a hand on my thigh—the one containing the other gun.
“Yes, maybe I’m getting old,” I finally managed to rasp in reply to Harriet.
Realizing there would be no immediate action, Harriet paced around the room for a while, before coming back to stand beside my chair, her head dipping as she nodded off into one of her standing dozes.
A quarter of an hour later I observed swamp cars, ATVs, heavy crawlers and people on foot, loaded down with belongings, abandoning both rafts. A further half hour passed, and as the end of the hour approached I heaved myself out of the chair, my head still throbbing with post-punishment pain, and approached the controls. The last minutes counted down, the last seconds, and then the particle cannon fired— any effects here on the ship unfelt.
The side view of the Frobishers’ raft showed a beam as wide as a tree trunk stabbing down, its inner core bright blue but shrouded in misty green. Molten metal and debris exploded out from the impact point then, when the beam cut right through the raft to the boggy ground below, the whole thing lifted on an explosion, its back breaking and the two halves heaving upward on a cloud of fire and super-heated steam, before collapsing down as the beam cut out. Another screen showed those on the watching swamp car just gone—a smoking hollow where they had been, while the Cleavers’ raft was now just as much a mess as the Frobishers’, though viewed from a different perspective. Harriet was at my side, of course, watching with fascination, before turning away in disappointment.
“Tank.” I turned now to face precisely such an object over the far side of the sanctum: a cylindrical tank much like one used for fuel oil or gas, but covered with an intricate maze of pipes and conduits. “Take us out of orbit and put us on course for the Gr
aveyard.”
“As you instruct,” replied a frigid voice.
I immediately felt the vibration through my feet as the fusion engines fired up. The thing inside that tank, which might or might not have been the usual ganglion of a press-ganged prador first- or second-child, could take over.
Everything fell into stillness aboard the Coin Collector during U-space jumps. Without orders the thetics just became somnolent; without action and prey to hunt Harriet spent her time dozing or following me about like a lost puppy. On this occasion she was in lost puppy mode, easily keeping pace with my scooter as I drove through the ship, finally pulling up beside yet another massive diagonally slashed elliptical door that opened ponderously as I dismounted. Just outside this door I surveyed twenty thetics standing ready clad in impact armor with pulse-rifles shouldered. They were somnolent, but at a word from me would wake and be ready. In two more U-jumps I would give that word as we tracked down yet another possible element of the farcaster. I bit down on my frustration. When would the Client finally give up and summon me back? When could I finally end this? I walked through the door.
The cauldron was a pale pink glass sphere twenty feet across supported in a scaffold of gold metal extending from the floor to the ceiling fifty feet above. Across the back wall of the chamber were the doors to rows of chemical reactors. Catalytic cracking columns stood guard to one side while on the other squatted an object like a mass of stacked aluminium luggage woven together with tubes. Each case was a nano-factory in itself and the whole generated the smart-plasm being fed into the cauldron—the distillation of a billion processes. Gazing upon this set-up I felt it just did not seem sufficiently high-tech, but looked like something Jules Verne might have dreamed up in a moment of insanity.
Next I lowered my gaze to the rows of molds bracketing the catwalk leading to the cauldron itself. The ones to my right were all closed, like sarcophagi, their contents incubating. To the left half of them were closed, a robot arm running on rails to inject plasm into each. The others were open to reveal polished interiors in the shape of humans, a thetic peeling itself up out of one of them assisted by two more of its kind, while thetics from the other open molds stood in a group behind observing the whole procedure with blue eyes set in milk-white faces, mouths opening and closing as if miming the speech they were incapable of producing.
