by Neal Asher
Another thought now arose that seemed to confirm this. Suzeal had been puzzled by the prador setting their ship on course to land on the planet, when it would have been easier for them to hide behind it. This indicated that their purpose in coming here hadn’t just been about shutting down the coring trade and getting evidence on the Old Families involved. It seemed an operation in two parts: seize the station and gather that evidence, then from there initiate phase two, which was to get hold of hooders and commission them. It made sense. The hooders of Masada were inaccessible to the prador since that planet lay in the Polity. But the prador would still have known about the hooders and learned about their ancestry. And the prador very much liked getting their claws on new weapons.
It was all irrelevant, really. Suzeal had allowed me to walk into an ambush, had in fact facilitated it, and when Vrasan had the time or inclination to spare from whatever tasks occupied him now, he would begin cutting me up and removing the quantum crystals inside me. I glanced at him. He’d gone over to one of the big sleds where the two clones were helping him mate some large device into a hole newly opened in his carapace armour. It looked much like a smaller version of the hemisphere he’d installed on the hooder and I reckoned it must be the control hardware. After a time, he returned to the creature and stood at its head, while it grew utterly still. Meanwhile the clones took up heavy tools and began boring out the rivets holding the chains to its carapace.
I studied my manacle – the thing was ceramal and impossible for me to cut or break. I could do with one of those tools, whatever they were. Further scanning of my surroundings revealed nothing I could use. My pack lay over where the clones had been eating, along with my weapons and theirs, but all unreachable. My gaze next strayed to the cave mouth, which I now noticed to be lit. The brightness of the light there brought home to me how dark it had become, so I reckoned night must be falling. I could see one of the clones squatted in there down by one wall. I had no idea why and dismissed it, turning elsewhere. Over on the far side of the valley stood one of the chameleonware devices. It lay too far away for me to throw a stone at it in the hope of knocking it out and, even if I did so, would that bring rescue? That bitch Suzeal. Did it amuse her, as it obviously had before, to think of a clone of Jack Zero, with whom she obviously had some history, subject to the vicious intentions of the prador? Even though she wouldn’t see or know what happened, and the exact prador position would still be unclear to her?
My gaze still on the chameleonware elicited knowledge from Jack Zero. The devices were standard prador manufacture, nowhere near as efficient and complex as the Polity version. I understood now that some of my earlier thoughts on the thing had actually been about Polity tech and not these. They had to be carefully programmed to block signals in the EMR spectrum between those who were concealed behind their field. Their reactivity was limited because, unlike the Polity version, no AI or sub-AI ran them. They didn’t have the backup circuits and, also because of that lack of reactivity, could be knocked out by any suitable EMR blast which was close enough. All of this still seemed no help to me, but something about it just kept niggling at my mind. Then it came to me in a hot flush down my back: They had to be programmed to block the signals under their field. So Suzeal had used me to find the prador. But it required action from me, and seemed likely could still result in my death. She was waiting. She was ready.
But if I was going to die in Suzeal’s bombardment of the prador, then surely that was better than being taken apart by Vrasan? Yes, it was, and I might yet get some chance of escape. I leaned over to my collar.
‘Open previous comlink,’ I said.
‘About bloody time,’ Suzeal replied.
9
‘What are you going to do?’
‘Well I’m—’
The link fizzed out, detected and intercepted by the chameleonware, but tardily. I wondered if it had been enough, and I continued wondering as I sat there, the rain growing heavier. I looked up and speculated on what she’d do first if she had managed to locate me. Perhaps, even now, a satellite up there was inserting a missile into a tube and firing it. The thing would take some minutes to reach this place. There’d be a flash and then oblivion. Or maybe not. She had said she wanted to do something ‘interesting’ with Vrasan, and burning him up in nuclear fire didn’t seem to be that. Surely, being the type she was, she would at least want him to know she was killing him? I began to shove at the post to which they’d secured me. While I did this, lights came on across the encampment, confirming my earlier thought about nightfall and, checking around to ensure I wasn’t observed, I noticed him.
He had moved out from the cave and now crouched at the entrance. Even through the heavy rain and spray, and over my distance from the cave, I could see he didn’t look like one of the clones now – bigger, a pack on his back and a pulse rifle braced across his stomach. I glanced over to the hooder and counted. All five clones were there. When I looked back, he’d moved over to the other side of the cave, concealing himself against the wall so as not to be seen by Vrasan or the clones at work around the hooder. There stood the man-thing, clad in overalls and carrying items he must have taken from one of those, I now guessed, whose head he had torn off.
But how could he be functioning like this? Yes, it was true that heavily virus-mutated prador like Vrasan could be intelligent, but prador were of an utterly different biology from humans and their mutation hadn’t proceeded from injury but something else. My understanding was that humans who were mutated by the virus to this extent lost their minds, diminishing into no more than a beast. Yet, of course, I’d seen intelligent behaviour from him aboard the King’s Ship, so why shouldn’t he have regained that once he was free of his control frame? In retrospect, I realized that his previous behaviour hadn’t aligned with my second-hand, embedded knowledge of such things. Perhaps I should be careful of being so reliant on it – a lot of my other assumptions and speculations could have been wrong too. But this didn’t matter, what concerned me now was how his presence might affect my future – if I had one.
He peered past the edge of the cave wall then abruptly pulled back. Vrasan, who until that moment had remained still, swung around. The prador might have been facing away from the cave until then but that didn’t mean he hadn’t seen him. Prador used their forward eyes to focus on what they might presently be doing, but their stalked eyes were sentries, forever on the alert for danger. Vrasan began to move towards the cave, but with perfect timing a light streaked down through the roiling sky and hit just at the end of the valley. I glimpsed it as it came down and turned away as bright light flashed red through my closed eyelids. I waited to die, expecting the roar of a blast front to incinerate me. Instead the ground shuddered to an intense crackling. I looked back to see a wall of iridescence shoot along the valley and up its slabbed walls. A glance towards the smoking chameleonware device told me all I needed to know: Suzeal had taken down their ’ware and had yet to begin her real attack.
The prador burst into frenetic motion. The two working the machines suddenly rose out of them on grav – they probably hadn’t been using it before since it was particularly difficult to conceal. Vrasan and the Guard clattered and bubbled loudly, their speech amplified by their armour, bellowing orders. The two descended again to shut down their machinery and rapidly disassemble it, while the Guard joined them, quickly and efficiently loading it all onto the grav-sleds. I watched Vrasan. He’d turned away from the cave and his full attention was on the hooder, which had raised its spoon-shaped head from the ground. I hoped the thing, now freed, would slam down on him, but it meekly swung out from the valley edge, lowered its head and entered the cave.
The man-thing had moved and, scanning around, I couldn’t locate him. Vrasan shot out into the valley, his clones running to keep up. He had them helping with the loading, the operation so fast the clones must have been pre-programmed for it. I kept trying to locate the man-thing, then finally saw him squirming through the mud near where
the clones had been sitting. He gathered up a couple of pulse rifles and my carbine, clips and food, and then took my pack to throw them inside. Once he’d done this, his head swung round and he looked straight towards me. Just then another crack like a thunderbolt split the sky and a streak cut down, straight on the carapace of one of the original prador. Fire exploded underneath the creature while the course of the projectile from above turned into a column of steam. The blast lifted the thing and sent it tumbling along the valley to come down on its back, legs utterly still. More shots came down, three of them hitting nothing but mud and fountaining it up in columns of fire, and a fourth hit the edge of a grav-sled, taking off the corner but not disabling it. Vrasan abruptly spun around and headed back to the cave, while the Guard directed a sled after him. Perhaps he’d simply forget about me.
A hand came down on my arm above the manacle, unfeasibly long fingers wrapping round it. I looked straight into the face of my erstwhile nemesis. He showed his teeth, then reached down with his other hand to tug at the chain securing me. I wondered if the chain was beyond even him. But no, he took hold of it in both hands and pulled. Nothing happened for a moment and I felt like shrieking at him to use the pulse rifles but then the chain snapped with a loud crack. Adrenalin surging, I jumped up and he held my pack out to me. Did he realize it was mine or was this more a case of sharing the load? I took out one pulse rifle and pulled the pack on. He gestured, pointed, and broke into a run towards the end of the valley.
I expected to be scythed down by Gatling fire at any moment. But it didn’t come until we climbed the mound of debris. Hearing it, I dived down the other side as part of the mound behind exploded into splinters of wood and rock. Thankfully my companion had done the same. He showed those teeth again, gesturing ahead. I ignored him, though, and climbed back up a little way to peer over. The prador who’d fired was one of the originals and still continued to pursue us as another rain of what I presumed to be mini-railgun strikes exploded along the valley. One shot punched through a procession of three sleds heading for the cave, blowing half its load away and knocking out its grav so it dropped heavily on the fire underneath. I glanced to the cave and saw two clones run out – two Jacks – who then headed in our direction. I scrambled down again.
My new ally had waited. ‘One prador and two clones coming after us,’ I told him.
He hesitated, looking back up the rubble pile, then nodded and gestured into the banyan. We ran through the trees. A low drone from above, and glimpses of steering-thruster flashes, indicated the pursuing prador had taken to the air. But the foliage and branches were thick up there … I remembered all the detector equipment prador had and reckoned it could easily see us down on the ground. The thing confirmed this by opening fire. Gatling cannon slugs hammered into the trees above, shattering branches, and many slamming into the ground all around. I thought about throwing myself down but realized that I would present a larger target lying down, and it was best to keep running. A heavy thump threw my companion forwards. In the stuttering light of the cannon I saw his overall ripped open to reveal a groove carved down his back and a remaining thrall segment peeled up. He rolled and came upright again, keeping moving as if little of consequence had happened. As I came up beside him he suddenly reached out and dragged me to a wide trunk on one side. Here the branches above were thicker and closer together, and Gatling fire slammed into them, creating a rain of splinters and smoking cannon slugs. This pause afforded some protection but it couldn’t last. The prador would either cut through with the cannon or use something else. He did the latter.
A particle beam lanced down, setting the tree ablaze. Branches exploded in the sudden heat and gaps emerged. Then other detonations started to occur all around us. These were strikes from above, marked by lines of vapour stretching up into the dark sky. The particle beam cut off and, shifting out a little way, I managed to see the prador hovering above. He hung there for a moment, wavered as if indecisive, then shot away. As he left I saw something fired by him streaking towards us.
‘Run!’ I shouted, even as I did so.
We got maybe ten paces before the tree exploded. The blast picked me up in a wall of burning splinters, mauled me like an angry giant and deposited me at the foot of another tree. I lay there stunned for a moment, but the danger hadn’t ended and we needed to move quickly. I stood, not even thinking about probable injuries, retrieved my pulse rifle and tried to orient myself. My companion came round the tree peeling splinters out of his neck and pointed. We ran on.
I briefly wondered about what had happened. I would’ve liked to believe that Suzeal had, after a transmission delay, seen our situation and tried to help out. But the likely explanation seemed to be that once viable targets had moved into the cave, Suzeal had switched to the prador after us. As we kept going and no clones came at us, I thought further. The first railgun shot, almost certainly from one of her satellites, had been very accurate, but those that came subsequently put the lie to that. Lucky shot, I guessed. Her hardware almost certainly wasn’t controlled by AI, just like the big railgun she had on the station wasn’t either, so that couldn’t sufficiently account for atmospheric effects. It also had its spectrum of scan limited by the cloud, the darkness and perhaps by remaining chameleonware effect. Still, she had small weapons in orbit and when I’d encountered the hooder and the droon it had been a clear morning, with no ’ware active. She could’ve helped me then.
We ran on, but I began to lag and then bounced off a tree I’d simply not seen.
‘I can’t keep this pace,’ I told him.
He glanced at me, hardly even breathing deeply, and slowed to a jog. After seeing that even this was becoming a struggle for me, he slowed to a walk. The fire in the trees was now receding behind us; it had also become difficult to see, even though the cloud above had begun to clear and moonlight beamed through occasional gaps. I listened intently, still expecting to hear the clones running up behind us. That they hadn’t yet appeared I put down to the lack of light. They were rugged and tough like my new friend, but couldn’t see in the dark any better than me.
‘I don’t suppose you can talk,’ I said.
He shook his head once, then held up his fingers to his lips. I nodded understanding.
Wider gaps began to appear above, showing the cloud breaking up rapidly, perhaps due to the effect of the railgun missiles. They must have expended a huge amount of energy up there, but it was more likely to be the breeze I’d begun to feel, though that could’ve been an effect of the shots too. My companion abruptly halted and looked around. After a moment, he walked over to a nearby banyan trunk, reached out to take hold in a couple of places, then turned and nodded me over. He only began to climb once he’d seen me following. I wearily struggled to reach the crown of the thing until he leaned over and hauled me up as if I weighed nothing. The crown stood wide, small pools occupying gaps, moss, lichen and alien epiphytes and bromeliads growing in abundance. He reached out and grabbed my chin, directing my gaze elsewhere, then pointed and made a walking motion with two fingers. My thoughts leaden, it took me a moment to understand what he meant.
The tree we stood on was one trunk of a banyan but not the whole plant, which could cover an area of miles. Thick branches arced over to other trunks and I got the idea as he stepped onto one and began moving along it, heading towards the side of the valley. Going on hands and knees at first, I gained confidence, finally walking upright like him. Gecko function was a failure as my boots caked with moss, but the branches were plenty wide enough. It was, I reflected, this kind of growth that had saved us from being minced by railgun slugs.
We travelled in this manner for some time until he later turned and squatted, holding his finger up to his lips. I squatted too and heard movement below, then carefully risked a peek over the edge. Expecting to see one of the clones down there, it took me a moment to identify something very different, as plated darkness flowed between the trees. It was about as wide as the branch we crouched on and ro
ughly twenty feet long. A small hooder, perhaps an infant? I didn’t know enough even to guess since my knowledge only covered their capabilities and durability. It was well to be reminded that the dangers here were not only from the prador. As the thing passed out of sight, my com device chose that moment to buzz a couple of times and my companion looked round at me hissing, teeth exposed in what was definitely not a grin. I tapped the control screen to turn it on, then quickly worked through it to turn off the communicator.
It soon became increasingly difficult to find branches which could support us as the trunks got smaller and the banyan steadily petered out, displaced by those white fungus trees whose residents had tried to eat my face. I didn’t like the idea, but after we’d been forced to double back a couple of times, I whispered to attract his attention and pointed downwards. He nodded agreement and we descended.
Once we were under the fungus trees, I put up my hood and closed my visor. The horrible worms pattered down and tried to find access to me, but I brushed them away. My companion seemed oblivious to them and, not having much luck penetrating his skin, most fell away. Walking behind him, I noted some still clinging on around the now dry wound in his back and the remains of his thrall there. They were tenacious, but these too eventually fell away as we came to a slab-strewn slope at the edge of the valley. We climbed up this, into the bright moonlit night. This moon wasn’t the one which looked like a half-bitten apple, but a larger orb, orange and smooth with its own small glittery ring system. I felt incredibly tired but, while scanning my surroundings, also incredibly alive.
