by Neal Asher
Gnores swung round to observe Scrabbler for a moment, and Immanence could guess the first-child's thoughts. Gnores saw himself in the position Vagule now occupied, but only briefly, for arrogance and a deluded belief in his own immortality would soon reassert. Thus it was with all Prador first-children when they first felt obstacles to them becoming a Prime falling aside. How long this lasted depended on the Prador concerned. In Vagule it had not lasted very long at all, which was why Immanence intended to be rid of him. Swift perception of the realities bespoke a worryingly dangerous intelligence in a first-child. Immanence did not need them to be too bright, for he did most of their thinking for them.
"Gnores… the other equipment is being brought up?"
"It is, Father. Second-children will bring it in after him."
Finally, much excitement and skittering around of those second-children still in the corridor announced the approach of Vagule. The first-child dragged himself into the sanctum, Scrabbler and Gnores parting to allow him between them. Vagule scanned each of them, recognising executioners.
"You have failed me, Vagule," said Immanence.
Vagule said nothing—again worrying the captain, for usually the begging and pleading started at this point. The first-child just dipped down lower and rested its claw-tips on the floor.
"But I am not going to kill you."
Vagule perked up suddenly.
That's better.
"In our war against the humans we should not waste resources. And I consider your undeveloped pheromonal glands and cerebral tissue to be valuable resources."
The second-children in the corridor, scrabbling over each other in complete uproar, wheeled the surgical robot into view, then into the chamber. They were obviously experiencing some difficulty with the other larger and heavier object, for there came a rumbling sound, and some loud crunches followed by a couple of squeals and whimpers. Eventually, however, they rolled a large sphere of exotic metal into the sanctum, then cracked open the lid to expose contained grav-motors, steering thrusters, weapons systems, and the central cryo-chamber and attachment equipment.
Emitting a low hissing since seeing the surgical robot, upon seeing this other object Vagule began to squeal.
"Drone shell… no… please?" he managed.
"Step towards me," Immanence ordered.
Vagule turned from side to side, his body quivering and legs dancing a tattoo on the floor. He tried to disobey, but his father's pheromones were strong in this chamber and he could not. He stepped forwards, crouching low before Immanence. The captain reached out with his single large claw, gripped one of Vagule's claws at its base, and twisted it off. Green blood jetted and Vagule shrieked and tried to back away.
"Remain where you are!" Immanence tossed the claw over Gnores and Scrabbler to the second-children, who began fighting over it, then he took hold of the other claw and ripped that off too, sending it after the first. "Strip him now."
Gnores, Scrabbler and those second-children not fighting over the claws, swiftly closed in. Vagule tried to defend himself, but without claws he could not. The crowd swarmed over him, so for a little while he lay buried under a seething mass of his kin. Torn off limbs began to surface in the mass, rapidly broken apart like bait dropped into a shoal of fish. One second-child darted away into the corridor clutching an entire leg, three kin in hot pursuit. Vagule's shrieks slowly petered out, turning to rasping sucking sounds of exhausted agony. When the crowd finally withdrew, only his main body remained, missing all its limbs and even its mandibles.
"Continue," Immanence instructed.
Gnores inserted himself in the hollow back of the surgical robot, sliding his limbs into the pit controls, claws into the slots controlling two spreads of precision limbs and visual turret into the scope interface. After a moment the robot rose on a grav-motor and slid over to Vagule. The procedure thereafter became much more refined and precise than the previous chaos. Using a limb ending in a high-speed circular saw, Gnores cut around Vagule's visual turret, sliced through shell beyond it in a web pattern. With other limbs ending in flat-faced pincers he levered out shell sections with sucking crunches and stacked them to one side, exposing the packed squirmy mass of organs and internal musculature. During a short surgical procedure he removed two whitish pink nodules from either side of Vagule's mouth. These went into the recently arrived cold cylinder. Later, Immanence would have them transplanted into himself: fresh pheromone-producing organs—when they attained their full growth—of tissue that only required small adjustments not to be rejected by his own body.
Gnores hooked out thick optic nerves and tracked them back from the visual turret, which now flopped loose. The pulsing and throbbing within the carapace showed Vagule to be still alive, and he would still be consciously viewing and feeling all this—unconsciousness being a luxury denied to Prador. The optic nerves all linked together and inflated into Vagule's major ganglion, his brain. Gnores hooked up and tracked other nerve trunks away from this and severed them where they branched. Finally he excised the whole mess, cutting the optic nerves close inside the turret at the last. Using nearly all of the surgeon's manipulators he picked up the ganglion and spread out all the nerve trunks in a particular pattern, before turning the lot towards the drone shell. The major ganglion slotted neatly into the central cryo-chamber and, one by one he fed the nerve trunks into the surrounding spread of cryo-tubes to their sockets. With the last one slotted into place, he withdrew. The chamber closed and cold fog began to rise from it as it withdrew deeper into the shell, components rearranged themselves inside and, after a moment, the lid slammed shut.
Immanence clattered his mandibles as if applauding. He knew that right now the processes of cerebral connection and flash-freezing were taking place. In a minute or so base programming would initiate, and then Vagule would obey absolutely without the need for pheromonal control. At the last, movement within Vagule's own carapace finally ceased as his body expired.
"Bring me some of that," Immanence ordered.
Scrabbler leant over the carapace and snipped out the organ that served the purpose of a liver in the Prador and held it up to his father. As Immanence crunched and chewed his way through the delicacy, all around his children grew still, watching him. Upon swallowing the last mouthful, he magnanimously waved his claw.
"Enjoy."
A riot ensued. By the end of it the carapace rested up against one wall, completely scraped clean, and all the limbs lay broken open with the meat winnowed out. Ship lice began venturing from their crevices to snatch up stray gobbets, and Prador burps puttered in the air. Then the spherical drone shell abruptly powered up, lights flicking on and off within various pits in its surface: the barrels of rail-guns extruding momentarily, missile hatches opening and closing. It righted itself, then with a low humming rose from the floor and spun to face Immanence.
"Take your position in the drone cache along with the others and await orders," the captain told it.
It swung round, second-children scattering from its path, floated across the sanctum and into the corridor, turned and motored out of sight.
Most satisfactory.
"You have two hundred humans with which to improve on Vagule's results," Immanence told Gnores. "Be on your way."
Gnores moved off with assertive eagerness.
That would soon change.
* * * * *
Short jumping within a planetary system was not exactly the healthiest of occupations, since the presence of massive bodies, like suns, tended to over-complicate the vectors and result in the ship concerned being forced from U-space in very small pieces. This was why most spaceships surfaced a safe distance from any gravity well and approached their destination under conventional drives. Besides sheer convenience, this was why the runcible superseded ships for transportation within the Polity. Also, the resulting lack of ships within the Polity prevented ECS from mounting a creditable defence against the Prador. Strapped into her acceleration chair—for the ride might
be bumpy during this short jump—Moria considered that for a moment. Huge shipyards, currently under construction, were racing to rectify that lack, and she reckoned that should the Polity survive this conflict, such a lack would never again be allowed. This probably meant death to the cargo runcible idea. She unstrapped herself.
The weird sensation of something twisting out of kilter finally passed. The vessel surfaced into the real, intact. She relaxed for a moment, considering the quandary of runcibles and ships. Though for the latter surfacing near gravity wells held dangers, the former were often positioned on planets—right in those wells. It all devolved down to the fast calculations required at the interface, the surfacing point, and to modelling. With a fixed runcible on the surface of a planet, the AI held in its mind a model of the surrounding system—all the space-time maps including those venturing beyond the event horizon of the warp—so it did not need to calculate those. Also an AI lay at each end, making the connection. The nearest analogy she could think of was to ocean travel between two islands. The spaceships were like old-fashioned submarines that needed to surface to see where they were going so they could motor into port without smashing into something. The runcible, however, was a transit tube laid along the ocean bed and whatever used it, be that humans or cargo, could not deviate from its course—entry and exit points were nailed down. Perhaps that was it! Perhaps the problem with the recent test related to drift in the spatial positions of the cargo runcibles! That the tube mouths were not sufficiently nailed down?
"George?" she turned towards him. "Could it be simply spatial drift?" As she said it she winced, realising the AI would have calculated for that and the solution to the problem could not be anything so simple.
No reply from George, however. He remained utterly still, eyes open and staring at the ceiling, still strapped into his seat. Drool ran down his chin.
"George?"
A slight flick of the eyes. Slowly he raised his hand and wiped the back of it across his mouth. He turned his head slightly, focusing on her.
"One for the mouse, one for the crow, one to rot and one to grow," he said.
"What?"
He gave a puzzled frown, then raised his fingers to his mouth and touched his lips as if they betrayed him. "Fine words butter no parsnips," he decided.
Something was seriously wrong.
"What you don't know can't hurt you." He reached out and tapped her aug.
Moria stayed very still for a moment. Necessarily offline throughout the U-jump, her aug had not reinstated now that this ship travelled through realspace towards the cargo runcible. She tried reconnection and there came almost a hesitation, then, via a server on the runcible, she routed into the chaotic Trajeen network. Fragments of news stories reached her first, but she kept getting knocked out of the network and receiving all sorts of strange error messages. Something bad was happening: Separatists… an explosion. Then:
EDDRESS REQUEST >
OFFLINE EDDRESS REQUEST?
ACCEPT?
Moria began to review the information attached to the eddress request, but just stopped at the name:
JEBEL KRONG.
What the hell is he doing here? But then she immediately answered her own question. She knew about Jebel Krong and his Avalonians: stories about him were much relished by the newsnet services, since they were part of the small amount of good news coming from the front. He was here because the Prador were coming. But why did he want to communicate with her? Only one way to find out. She gave permission for her eddress to be used—activating voice and image com.
"Moria Salem" stated the requester.
"Well, I'm pleased to make your acquaintance, Jebel Krong, but why are you talking to me?"
The connection hardened now—she rather suspected military com software to be involved—and his image appeared in her visual cortex. She took in the chameleon-cloth fatigues with their black webbing, the famous crab buttons, and the austere face with his V-shaped scar.
"Big hole in the networks at the present, so I rather suspect you don't have the full story. That hole was once occupied by the one known as George."
"What?"
Moria blinked, looked at her companion—the image of Jebel still retained.
George said, "What's done cannot be undone," and she understood him.
"My god, what happened?"
"Separatists attacked here, and though they did not manage to take control, they did manage to murder the AI."
"But I still don't understand why you have contacted me. Is it because of George here?"
"I beg your pardon?"
"Some confusion, I think. The Trajeen Cargo Runcible AI has a submind…an avatar. Part of its mind resides in a vat-grown human body presently sitting beside me spouting proverbs."
"I see… no, I am not contacting you because of that, though that particular George may be of some use to you. I am contacting you because you are now apparently in charge of the cargo runcible project. In the instants before it was destroyed the AI ordered this. I'm not sure I entirely understand the reasons why, since I have just received orders that both runcibles must be destroyed to prevent the Prador getting hold of them."
"Oh, fuck-shit!"
"Yes, most apposite. We'll discuss the situation further after you dock. Out."
The connection broke and Moria once again turned to George. No proverbs were forthcoming. He merely blinked, held his hand up before his face and wiggled his fingers, his expression slightly puzzled as if never having seen these digits before.
* * * * *
The two Prador vessels caused sufficient disturbance in U-space for Occam to easily follow them, though the term «follow» in a continuum without physical dimension or time strained to breaking point. Tomalon checked realspace maps of the sector and studied the two predicted targets in their path: a transfer station orbiting a red dwarf—one of those places required to control runcible traffic so millions would not arrive at one destination all at once, but now being used to supply ships near the line—and the Trajeen system. He accessed information on the latter and felt his stomach clenching. The human population there stood close to a billion. All sorts of stations and bases were scattered throughout the system, which itself contained two living worlds. Yet, why were those two ships heading there? Yes, being a heavily populated Polity system Trajeen was a viable target, but on the whole the big ships like these were hitting targets of a strictly military significance. Trajeen did not really fit the pattern.
"Why there?" he asked, in his mind.
"Runcibles," Occam replied immediately.
Tomalon already knew they had built and were testing a cargo runcible at Trajeen. But why would the Prador want to seize one of them? A runcible required an AI to operate it and no AI would willingly do so for the Prador. And until now the Prador showed little interest in the devices.
"Why?"
"Because these runcibles, being located out in space, will be much easier to take, especially having been originally taken control of by Prador allies: Separatists."
"What?"
"Allow me to acquaint you with the details contained in a recent communication I have received."So saying the AI swiftly transferred the information to Tomalon's interface. The data-stream being buffered, so Tomalon did not have to take it in all at once, delayed his understanding for a few seconds, then he got the gist.
"The bastards…but I still don't see why. Do the Prador think they can make runcibles work without AIs?"
"Not known. Perhaps that is what they told the Separatists. Perhaps they believe so. A more likely scenario is that they are after the support technology, which in itself has many weapons applications."
Tomalon did not like some of the ideas that began occurring to him: a runcible gate, even without an AI to control it, could be used to instantly accelerate matter to near-c—just one idea without thinking about it very
deeply.
"They must destroy those runcibles," he said out loud.
&
nbsp; Out loud as well, using the com system in the bridge, Occam replied, "That is currently in hand. Now we are about to surface near the transfer station where our two Prador friends have just arrived."
"I should give you weapons clearance."
"You already gave it back at Grant's World."
"You don't need it again?"
"Not unless you cancel that clearance. I advise you not to do that."
It was more of a warning than a threat, but not much more.
As they surfaced from U-space, Tomalon closed up with Occam and banished his interior perception of the bridge, becoming one again with the ship and its sensors. They arrived only minutes behind the two Prador ships, and minutes were all it took. A long, glittering cloud of debris lay directly ahead like a scar across vacuum—all that remained of the transfer station. The two ships lay beyond it, gleaming in red light as they accelerated towards the dwarf sun, probably to slingshot round and fling themselves clear before engaging their U-engines again. Still hurtling along at the velocity with which it earlier entered U-space, theOccam Razor ignited its fusion engines and accelerated too. Weapons turrets and platforms rose, missiles and solid rail-gun projectiles loaded. Tomalon expected Occam to shoot out a swarm of rail-gun missiles as before, but that procedure abruptly stood down.
"Why not?"
"Further information package received. While controlling the craft we left, Aureus also sent telefactors to study the remains of the Prador destroyers. The exotic metal armour contains piezoelectric layers and s-con grids linked to what Aureus finally identified as thermal generators. Small strikes merely provide them with more energy with which to strike back."
"Hence that particle beam they hit us with?"
