Orbus

by Neal Asher

  ‘As Captain of this ship,’ he says succinctly, ‘haven’t I got some say about who’s allowed aboard and who can become part of the crew?’

  ‘You do have some say, Captain,’ Gurnard replies. ‘But the ultimate decision rests with Charles Cymbeline.’

  ‘Right…what is it I don’t know, then?’ Orbus asks resentfully.

  Perhaps because of Orbus’s obvious anger at both Sniper and the controlling AI of this ship, Thirteen drifts down from where he was hovering above, to anchor his tail against the top of the exposed carapace.

  ‘What you do know, Captain,’ the little seahorse drone explains, ‘is what happens to Humans infected with the Spatterjay virus.

  ‘Oh really, do I?’

  ‘Since the objective of all life is to eat and breed,’ says Thirteen sniffily, ‘it is not particularly unusual for life-forms alien to each other to take some sustenance from each other. The effect on Humans of alien viruses and bacteria, or their equivalent in the chain of life, ranges from the insignificant to the catastrophic. And the effect of the Spatterjay virus on Humans, though remarkable, is not unheard of within a planetary ecology. On Earth, too, are found parasites that increase the survivability of their hosts so as to increase their own chances of survival and thus breeding prospects.’

  ‘Is this going anywhere?’

  ‘Certainly.’ Thirteen tilts his equine head for a moment. ‘The Spatterjay virus collects parts of the genome of its hosts. It toughens up its hosts in a remarkable way, making them virtually immortal and very hard to kill. This is simply about evolution, for a durable and tough host can remain a carrier of the virus for longer—’

  ‘Ain’t you forgetting about the leeches?’ Orbus interrupts. Yeah, I’m calm, he tells himself, I can talk about all this reasonably.

  ‘No, I am not forgetting. A mutualism exists between the leeches of your homeworld and the virus–they spread the virus by their bite, and the virus turns its host into a perpetually reusable food resource for the leeches. Such complicated arrangements are often found in very old ecologies.’

  Orbus shudders, remembering the thousands upon thousands of such bites he has received, right from the start when the Prador ship brought him to Spatterjay. When added up over the length of his very long life, the sheer quantity of plugs of flesh he lost to those creatures would fill this very hold.

  ‘As I was saying,’ the little drone continues. ‘The virus collects up the genomes of its many different hosts and is unusual in that it can actually employ said collection of genetic material to mutate its host, rapidly, into something more able to survive, should circumstances change. As I said before, such a basis for survival is remarkable in a contained planetary ecology, but still remains within evolutionary parameters. However, that this same virus can use the Spatterjay genome to mutate Human DNA is more than remarkable. In fact it quite simply cannot be something that naturally evolved.’

  Orbus has never heard of this before. The virus has been part of him for so long and its effects so familiar to him and his fellows, that he long ago ceased to question it. Now, described like this, he realizes just how odd it is.

  ‘Polity AIs have been studying the virus and its effects for some time and have come to the conclusion that it is an artefact, though there is still much debate amongst them as to whether it is a mutated artefact, a random mix of some nanotechnology with a living virus or whatever, but certainly it is fundamentally an artefact. When it was first discovered that it could do to Humans what it already did to the creatures of its own world, some doubt remained about its antecedents. However,’ Thirteen taps his tail against the carapace, ‘now we know that it can do the same to another race that is alien to it, there is no doubt.’

  Orbus stares at the carapace and with a shudder remembers the Prador Vrell lurking in his own father’s spaceship under Spatterjay’s ocean. Vrell looked like no other Prador that Orbus had ever seen, but he had not thought deeply about the reasons for this, in fact preferred to push such memories down deep with those other memories. Anyway, at that time he’d had enough problems, like fighting off his own crewmen who were themselves being transformed by the virus inside them whilst they starved, having revived from being harpooned and then drowned, or like trying to fight the control of the spider thrall Vrell had surgically installed in the back of his neck. So this, then, is why Vrell looked the way he did.

  ‘Are all Prador infected?’ he asks. Prador, he feels, are bad enough in their natural form, but Prador toughened up like an Old Captain? This is the stuff of the worst possible nightmares, and Orbus has quite enough of those to contend with as it is.

  ‘Nope,’ says Sniper abruptly, ‘just King Oberon and his extended family–and our friend Vrell.’ The big drone taps a tentacle against the carapace. ‘This thing here is the shell of one of Oberon’s Guard–one of his second-children–and this is a secret Oberon will do just about anything to keep.’

  Orbus now steps forwards and walks around the shell, perpetually reminding himself this thing is dead and cannot harm him. But now it seems to loom here, inspiring the same feelings of illogical fear in him as some others feel upon seeing a Human skull.

  ‘Damned big for a second-child,’ he says. ‘So that’s why Vrost, one of the King’s Guard, wanted to kill Vrell. And that’s why the Prador here had tried to wipe out anyone with knowledge of this shell.’ He pauses for a moment. ‘But there’s more to this than us simply coming here to collect this?.’

  ‘You wanna tell him?’ Sniper asks.

  ‘No,’ Gurnard replies.

  The big drone refocuses its orange eyes on Orbus. ‘This shell was Polity property specially routed through Montmartre so the Prador that infiltrated that space station would grab it. The private company that apparently owns it, sends a ship that just happens to be crewed by an Old Captain and a war drone who both really don’t like Prador. Got the picture?’

  ‘Earth Central Security?’ Orbus asks.

  ‘It’s all about deniability,’ says Sniper. ‘ECS action in a sensitive area–better than sending a warship into the Graveyard and having the Prador respond with one of their own. ECS employed Cymbeline for this.’

  ‘I was instructed by Charles Cymbeline,’ says Gurnard, ‘to tell you both, once you found out, that you may return to your homeworld or go wherever you want from here. He will pay you both a year’s standard wage.’

  ‘So ECS paid him well,’ says Orbus. ‘How many more of these Prador have infiltrated the Graveyard?’

  ‘Two more that we know of, and there may be others,’ replies the ship AI.

  ‘So where’s the next one?’ Orbus asks, not able to identify what causes that sick feeling in his stomach. Is it excitement or fear, or something like both tangled together in the twisted wiring of his brain?

  ‘Inside a small moon right near the edge of the Prador Kingdom.’

  ‘So how do we get to that one?’ Sniper enquires.

  ‘Does it matter?’ Orbus asks.

  Thirteen just sighs and drifts back up into the air.

  Before leaving the Sanctum, Vrell checks and rechecks the situation out in the ship through his control units. It takes a further hour before the last of the Guard collapse and expire, and then the ship is completely his. However, it is still travelling through U-space towards the Prador Third Kingdom, and in its present condition it will survive just about as long as it takes another warship to reach it once it surfaces back into realspace. He needs to take full control as fast as possible.

  From Vrost’s storage alcoves, Vrell quickly finds the necessary tools and begins taking apart the C-shaped pit console. Every pit-control is genome-coded to Vrost, which is a fact that Vrell puzzles over until going to inspect the Captain’s armour and finding that the armour on each claw, and on his underhands, can open and fold back so the pits can sample the organic material required from him. He first takes apart each pit control and removes the tiny computer chips encoded with a permanent sample of Vrost’s genome, then
wipes clean all remaining programming and memory storage within each control. Next he finds a collection of blank chips, placing them in a reader to encode them with his own genome, before inserting them into each control. The entire task takes a full two days.

  That a store of extra blank chips lies available here in the Sanctum is unusual, and further study reveals to him that there is a degree of leeway in the encoded genome. Both the store of chips and the lack of precision in each chip point to a simple fact: Prador infected with the Spatterjay virus are in a perpetual state of mutation. The chips installed can handle this transition for a period but, as the mutation continues, will periodically need to be replaced. While he works, Vrell occasionally snips off a piece of Vrost and gobbles it down. But, reminded by the way these chips work, he knows that this diet, Vrost’s body being laden with the virus, is not the best one. Humans infected with this virus need to regularly ingest certain virus-free nutrients to prevent yet further mutation, and he has no doubt that the same applies to him too.

  Finally Vrell reassembles the pit console, which now lies under his control but still remains disconnected from the rest of the ship. He takes up one of the ubiquitous Prador toolboxes and heads out of the Sanctum, leaps up onto the rough wall of the corridor and climbs further up to where he first entered it. It takes him a further two days’ work to reconnect all the optics and repair the other damage he has caused up there. Now to get to that pit console and ensure the destruct order has been deleted, and to then search out all the programming traps Vrost has doubtless left spread throughout the computer architecture of this ship.

  Returning to the Sanctum after a lengthy period of work, Vrell reaches out with one claw to again snip away a chunk of Vrost’s body, which is now lacking many of its limbs because Vrell has already eaten them. The body shudders and shifts away from his probing claw. Vrell pauses to study it. Though nerveless and mindless, the chunk of flesh before him is still filled with the virus, still alive and now probably undergoing rapid mutation. Its main purpose, once it achieves some sort of transformation, will be to seek food, and the nearest source of that in here is Vrell himself. Vrell backs away from it then goes over to pick up his discarded particle cannon and reattach it to his harness power supply. Setting the beam to wide focus, he fires upon Vrost’s remains. The effect is quite astounding.

  As soon as the corpse begins to burn and char, all its remaining limbs fall away and numerous deep holes open in its surface. Like a hundred tongues, numerous pink leech ends issue from these, their horrible thread-cutting mouths extending like trumpets. Leech ends also extrude underneath and, like starfish legs, try to move Vrost’s remains away from the source of intense heat. Vrell keeps the beam focused on this thing, surprised at how long a lump of semi-living matter can survive a beam able to evaporate steel. Finally it slumps back against one wall, now just a burning oily mass. Vrell keeps the beam on it until absolutely nothing remains, and the adjacent wall and floor begin to burn. Then he finally switches it off.

  This, he realizes, is the kind of transformation already occurring in the hundreds upon hundreds of suits of armour aboard. Fortunately it seems an insentient change–base-level survival–and, whatever any Guard turns into, it will not be able to escape its enclosing armour. However, he recalls there were unarmoured Prador aboard, who died when first he released the nanite here: very young Prador yet to receive their armour, and others out of armour for whatever reasons. These, too, will have undergone transformations, and may even now be roaming the ship in search of sustenance. Before getting involved with sorting out the pit-console, Vrell decides he had better take some precautions.

  He clips the particle cannon back onto his harness and, one at a time, heaves the members of the Guard who expired within the Sanctum out into the corridor. Next he detaches the clawjack, drags it to insert it, on the inside, into the same holes cut through the door, starts up the jack and draws the doors closed. Now that he feels safe enough to continue, he turns to the console.

  First Vrell inserts his claws and begins running primary routines up on the hexagonal screens, then he inserts his manipulatory hands into other pits and begins to explore the underlying code to each routine. In every case he finds subroutines which, if the code is being strictly applied to its task, should not be needed. A brief study of one of these subroutines reveals that if he tries to shut down the engines without inserting a certain eight-digit number, they will simply continue functioning. It is all surprisingly easy to deal with, and he understands that all these precautions were taken in case some influence outside the Sanctum itself tried to usurp control. Vrost never expected any enemy to penetrate this far or, rather, Vrost did not care if they did, for he knew that at that point it would no longer matter to him. After checking and checking again, Vrell finally sends the instruction that does in fact shut down the U-space drive. The ship mind, a disembodied and flash-frozen brain of a Prador first-child capable of no more than handling U-space maths, intercepts this instruction and applies it. With a shuddering twist, the ship at last returns to realspace.

  Vrell bubbles contentedly to himself, then begins to inspect astro-gation data. The ship has surfaced into interstellar space within the Polity, some twenty light-years from the nearest inhabited star system. Within a matter of days some Polity watch station is bound to detect his presence out here, if it has not already been detected, for though light from his ship will take twenty years to reach those Polity sensors positioned to record the radiations of realspace, certain other sensors, as sensitive as the legs of spiders resting on the strands of a web, will very quickly detect the U-space disturbance this ship just caused. He estimates it will take a minimum of ten days for the Polity to get ships here to investigate, unless he is extremely unlucky and Polity ships are already positioned nearby. He must quit this position within eight days, if he does not wish to leave a wake through underspace that any pursuing ship can follow.

  Now returning his attention to the rest of the vessel, he begins to run diagnostics and make an extensive inspection of the massive damage he himself inflicted upon it. The outer hull is breached in numerous places; even the exotic armour was unable to sustain the massive impact of his own ship travelling at near relativistic speed. However, Vrell sees that, by altering the internal structure of the ship, and by using spare armour in its stores, the main hull can now be reintegrated as a whole. And, using the same approach to much of the other damage, order can be restored elsewhere: weapons and computer systems put back online, life-support returned to areas now devoid of air, steering thrusters reinstated and sensors replaced or rebuilt. However, a rather large problem remains because, though he can see how all this could be achieved, there is no crew available to do it.

  Rattling his legs against the floor, Vrell begins to examine an idea that germinated in his mind the moment he entered this vessel’s armoury. Certainly the ship possesses automatic repair robots that even now are mindlessly trying to fix the damage. Other automatics are putting out the remaining fires and steadily cleaning up radioactive areas; also some of the war drones are provided with manipulators rather than just weapons and thus can be put to work, but all of these measures are nowhere near enough. Vrell needs a workforce, and he knows precisely where one is available.

  By consigning many files to compacted storage, he begins to open up programming and memory space, into which he first dumps copies of those programs he used to control those suits of armour taken from the armoury. Gradually he begins to develop these programs, taking them beyond anything Prador generally use, since they become increasingly self-governing and complex, and thus approach that capability hated by most Prador, of artificial intelligence. When he is finally ready, he transmits ten test copies to ten close locations, and through ship eyes observes the result.

  Ten of the dead King’s Guard abruptly lurch to their feet, while their suits run self-diagnostics. They test every joint of their legs, every joint of their underslung arms and manipulatory hands, sni
p their claws at the air, if air surrounds them, check their turret vision, audio and other sensory apparatus, then stand ready for orders. Vrell loads to them a schematic revealing one small section of ruination aboard, gives them instructions on how this schematic must be changed, then directs them to the necessary stores of equipment and materials, before proceeding to watch them intently on every level, to ensure they function as predicted.

  Vrell ponders how ghoulish this all is. In a way it is rather like some Prador version of those animated corpses the Humans call reifications, though admittedly, reifications are run by the crystal-stored minds of the Human corpse’s previous occupant rather than the simplistic sub-AI occupants of these suits of armour. He even feels some strange doubts about setting into motion suits still containing the semi-living remains of their previous occupants, for those remains, no matter how insentient or lacking in nerves, will be receiving a perpetual feed-back of motion and data from the suit sensors, and he does not know what effect that might have. But right now he simply has no other options, so he sidelines those doubts as he puts a further fifty suits to work. Within hours, every suit is in motion and the entire ship fills with the racket of reconstruction. Vrell, however, has little time for satisfaction, for within minutes of the last suit picking up a wire-welder and heading out onto the hull to repair cracks, the ship’s sensors begin warning of a U-space disturbance less than a quarter light-year from Vrell’s present position.

  Immediately analysing the disturbance, Vrell becomes aware of what will be surfacing into the real, a microsecond before it does so. The shape of the thing is inherent in the disturbance it is causing, though the light that would confirm that shape would take a quarter of a year to reach the conventional sensors of this ship. It is a cylinder a mile long, with nacelles a quarter of a mile long jutting from either side on wide stanchions, and with a big rear fusion-drive array and a long needle of a nose. No Prador ship possesses such a shape; this is some Polity dreadnought.