Orbus

by Neal Asher

  Orbus gets his hands behind the claw and manages to push it away, dropping to the floor just as the other claw swings towards his head. He rolls down beside the Prador, Vrell’s leg is nearby. Orbus reaches out, grabs it and twists, feeling something give with a gristly crunch.

  With a shriek Vrell pulls away and swings round, bringing one claw down like a hammer. Orbus catches it above his head, feeling the sheer impact drive his knees partway into the deck.

  ‘Have you presented our negotiating package yet?’ Sniper enquires. ‘That might be a good idea.’

  Orbus heaves the claw to one side, dives and rolls, snagging up a big metal beam lying beside the hydraulic machine.

  ‘So I tried to kill you!’ he shouts at Vrell. ‘That doesn’t mean Earth Central’s offer doesn’t stand. It just means I don’t fucking like you.’ Orbus brings the beam down hard on the top of the visual turret of Vrell’s armour. The beam shatters, but leaves a dent, and Vrell staggers drunkenly. Orbus flings the stub of the beam hard at him, but it bounces off an abruptly raised claw.

  ‘What negotiating package?’ Vrell demands.

  Orbus now realizes Sniper has been using open com so Vrell can listen in.

  ‘I can send it to you,’ Sniper suggests. ‘Once you stop trying to kill the good Captain.’

  ‘Why should I?’ Vrell wonders, again advancing. ‘Under your own laws of self-defence, I have the right.’

  ‘Okay–I’ll send it anyway.’

  Orbus eyes the open doors leading out into the corridor, calculating if now might be the time to run. But Vrell pauses, frozen in place, claws held up high. Is that as a result of the package? The Prador abruptly turns and hurtles over to his pit consoles, armour hingeing away from his claws, as they enter two pits before him, underhands meanwhile reaching down to insert themselves into pits below him. Orbus realizes that if he attacks now he might stand a better chance, but then the entire vessel suddenly slams sideways, hard enough to send him staggering.

  ‘That you, Sniper?’

  ‘No, it seems we have a visitor.’

  The Golgoloth feels some satisfaction at having its patience justified. Vrell’s dreadnought being that close to the sun certainly presented some problems, since the EMR there would tend to interfere with the Golgoloth’s network of ganglia, and there was always the possibility that Vrell might take advantage of that. However, the arrival of what is obviously a covert ECS vessel of some kind has finally lured Vrell out. Perfect. The other vessel, after Vrell’s attack on it, jumped out beyond the gas giant and is of no further concern to the Golgoloth. If it interferes again its remaining existence will be numbered in seconds. The Golgoloth focuses solely on the dreadnought.

  Vrell’s ship is of an old design and undergoing substantial repairs, but either there is more damage than seems evident or something beyond recent events has been distracting Vrell, for, throughout the long two seconds it takes the Golgoloth’s massive ship to surface from U-space and open fire, there is no reaction. The stealth missile, which is really just a refined version of a Prador kamikaze with the frozen mind of one of the Golgoloth’s children controlling it, initiates its U-drive to take it across the intervening four million miles in no time at all, then opens up its fusion drive and slams into the dreadnought’s side, detonating to excavate a half-mile-wide crater and hurl out a cloud of debris. This gets Vrell’s attention.

  The dreadnought abruptly accelerates and beam weapons cut across intervening space, shortly followed by a swarm of conventional missiles rising on the white stars of their drives. The Golgoloth’s ship, its hull a fifty-metre-thick layer of exotic metals and superconducting grids, simply soaks up this energy, even utilizing some for the ship’s own systems.

  The Golgoloth meanwhile studies its surroundings. This system has a meagre supply of worlds: one molten ball close to the green sun, and a dead giant orbited by a couple of planetoids, but one of them will do. The Golgoloth focuses on the chosen planetoid and studies data. Its atmosphere is mostly nitrogen and sulphides, but there does not seem to be too much volcanic activity or heavy weather, at least not in its present location; and, protected by the magnetic field of the dead giant, it isn’t subject to too much of the solar wind either. In fact, surface conditions are such that any Prador, with an air supply only, could survive there for an appreciable length of time.

  Using standard Prador codes, the Golgoloth sends the coordinates of the planetoid directly to Vrell’s ship, then launches two more U-drive missiles, which leap across the intervening gap, fusion reactors winding up to speed within them. The Golgoloth watches his detectors and notes the familiar signature of a U-space drive being brought online within the dreadnought. So predictable. The moment one of the missiles starts up its fusion drive, a particle beam stabs out from the dreadnought and the missile detonates with a massive EMR flash. The other missile, briefly undetectable by the dreadnought’s overloaded sensors, needs only to position itself with steering thrusters, then its systems fire up to create a massive magnetic bottle effect around it, almost simultaneous with it turning most of its substance into plasma. The briefly lived particle weapon spits its energy down into the dreadnought, punching through to a specific target. A detonation within glares through its superstructure, and the U-drive signature goes out. Vrell will not be leaving this system now.

  Next the dreadnought flips round, its fusion drive and steering thrusters at full power to hurl it, once it completes its turn, straight at the Golgoloth’s vessel. The Golgoloth prepares his own ship for evasive manoeuvres, wondering if Vrell intends some ploy like he initially used against Vrost’s vessel–crashing his own ship directly into it then boarding. Even though confident of thwarting any plans Vrell might have once he has boarded, the Golgoloth does not want that to happen–best to be cautious with such a potentially dangerous intelligence. However, it seems Vrell intends nothing of the kind, for he makes another abrupt course alteration. Ah, he is trying to run for the sun, hoping to hide in the chaotic EMR output there. Another U-drive missile appears in the dreadnought’s path and detonates. A warning only. The Golgoloth again sends the coordinates of the planetoid.

  The two Guards enter the Sanctum shortly after the first impact, and since they are both carrying particle cannons, Orbus guesses that Vrell has finished playing around.

  ‘Leave,’ Vrell orders him, which seems a good sign, since Orbus hasn’t yet been fried on the spot. He walks out between the Guards, who return him to join Sniper, where the drone waits surrounded by fifty of their fellows either standing in a ring immediately around him or ensconced in the surrounding exposed internal superstructure of the ship, though as events progress, even they begin to move away.

  Massive accelerations set the ship’s structure groaning all about them, and explosions can be heard deep within it. Orbus’s visor closes automatically and he simultaneously notes a stratum of smoke in the air–which has to be poisonous or his suit would not have reacted so. Then come steady rhythmic sounds, machine sounds, and abruptly two more of the Guard put away their weapons and head off. Later, two Guards return carrying great loads of equipment and begin welding beams and heavy armour across one tunnel entrance.

  ‘What is that noise?’ Orbus asks.

  ‘Onboard manufactories,’ Sniper replies.

  Orbus nods. ‘We need to find out what the hell is going on here.’

  ‘Vrell ain’t very chatty at the moment,’ Sniper observes. ‘But maybe he’ll let me ride some of his sensors.’

  Sniper turns and cautiously begins to head towards one wall. The remaining ten Guards simply follow his course with their weapons, but otherwise show no reaction. Snaking out a couple of tentacles Sniper drags a great clump of fibre optics into view. Obviously that is a step too far, for five of the Guard immediately leap down from the surrounding superstructure and close in on him.

  ‘That got his attention,’ says Sniper, then, after a pause, ‘Ah, seems he doesn’t mind us taking a look now, since he’s no idea what he
’s dealing with.’ Sniper picks out several optics, wrapping some of his minor tentacles around them. His eyes glare and a wall nearby dissolves into a view looking directly onto vacuum. Distantly, a steely orb can be seen, then after a moment magnification brings it right up close.

  ‘I don’t recognize that,’ says Sniper.

  ‘Can you give me some scale?’ Orbus asks.

  A rule appears along the bottom of the image. The thing out there, which looks like a melon with one segment excised, bears a similarity to some ECS dreadnoughts, but its surface texture is composed of conjoined hexagons, like the honeycomb screens the Prador use, and it is all of ten miles across.

  ‘I am receiving further data,’ says Sniper. ‘That first missile U-jumped, so either whatever is aboard yonder ship possesses some very advanced technology or it isn’t bothered about sacrificing minds.’

  ‘Prador kamikaze?’

  ‘Very similar but much more refined and accurate,’ Sniper replies. ‘The second missile is a plasma converter–that’s what took out Vrell’s U-space engines.’

  ‘This is in the Graveyard,’ Orbus notes.

  ‘Yeah, so either that ship got in using some pretty superior chameleonware or it got in even before all the border stations were built. There’s no record that I know of regarding anything like this.’

  Further acceleration then, for which Orbus’s suit helps him compensate. He sees one of the Guard lose its footing and go crashing to one side, which is unusual, since they possess considerably more legs than he does. Suddenly he doesn’t feel quite so calm about all this. If Vrell intends getting into a stand-up fight with that thing out there, it is probably all over for every one of them.

  Vrell is trying to communicate, but the Golgoloth ignores that attempt and waits. The dreadnought turns again, decelerating and laying in a new course to the planetoid, but certainly Vrell hasn’t given up. Scanning deep into the dreadnought, the Golgoloth notes a great deal of activity, analyses it in an instant, and realizes that the young Prador is preparing to be boarded. Vrell is also pumping energy and materials into the onboard manufactories. Doubtless the result of that activity will become evident in due course. The Golgoloth follows, but keeps the distance between them at a steady four million miles.

  Seventeen hours later, objects begins to spill from the dreadnought and apparently disappear. Interestingly, the young Prador has managed to put together some stealth mines. With a thought, the Golgoloth jumps his ship straight ahead, arriving twenty million miles ahead of Vrell’s ship, and waits again. Stealth missiles next, a great pack of them spearing out ahead of Vrell’s ship. The Golgoloth shifts his great vessel aside, then checks all relevant vectors before sending three of his U-drive missiles in return.

  The missiles flash into being about the dreadnought, discharging all their substance in plasma beams at various targets on its hull. Two major steering thrusters simply explode and the ship’s course diverts just so, before the main fusion engine blows out a red cloud of radioactive gas, then sputters and dies.

  Grav simply winks out and Orbus awakes, floating up from the floor to grab hold of a beam. Even though constantly under threat for twenty hours, sleep finally took hold of him. Fire gouts from a nearby tunnel, and then out through open superstructure into their surroundings. With no gravity to give it shape, it burns in Mandelbrot patterns through the air, perpetually going out and reigniting as it loses and finds whatever it is feeding on.

  ‘Don’t worry,’ says Sniper. ‘This isn’t hot enough to singe your ass.’

  ‘Right,’says Orbus wearily. ‘What just happened?’

  ‘The attacker knocked out Vrell’s fusion drive too, and some steering thrusters,’ Sniper replies. ‘This ship is now effectively rudderless.’

  Orbus has watched Vrell’s failed attempts with the stealth mines and missiles, and realizes the Prador is now in a cleft stick. He gazes at the image of the distant ship that Sniper is still projecting on the wall. It does not seem to be moving in for the kill, but that does not mean it won’t. He almost wishes it would.

  ‘I think we need to go and find Vrell,’ says Sniper, revolving slightly to observe the remaining five of the Guard. Orbus notes something odd then: one of them is tilted over on its side and struggling in zero gravity to regain its place in the superstructure, and all five keep making odd inadvertent adjustments to their balance.

  ‘Has Vrell got anything yet to say for himself?’ he asks.

  ‘No communication at all.’

  Orbus releases the beam he was clinging to and turns towards the tunnel leading up towards the Captain’s Sanctum. The gecko function of his boots engaged, he begins to head in that direction. After a moment, Sniper disconnects from the fibre optics and his screen projection blinks off, then, with his tentacles lightly touching the floor, he propels himself after Orbus. As the two enter the tunnel and step out of view, the Guard show no reaction at all.

  Everything is going quickly and badly wrong. Vrell knows of no vessel, either in the Polity or the Kingdom, that could so quickly disable a Prador dreadnought like this. Checking his sensors he sees he is now on a course that, even if he does use the remaining thrusters, will finally crash his dreadnought down on the surface of the planetoid. Best, then, to save power in order to make that landing just a bit less hard. But what happens then?

  The big vessel is still keeping its distance, when in reality it could now come staight in and carve up the dreadnought at its leisure. Why does it want the ship down on that planetoid, why does it want Vrell down there? What the hell is it?

  But these aren’t the only problems. The sealed-off section of the ship containing the mutated third-children has been breached, and already they are spreading throughout the ship, and now there is something definitely wrong with the Guard. He noted it first with the sluggish response of some of them to his direct orders, and the diagnostic probe he sent has revealed a steady corruption to their programs, those complex sub-AI programs. He has tried wiping and reloading copies of the original program to those worst affected, which worked for a little while before they started corrupting again. It seems it isn’t the program itself that is at fault, but some sort of hardware failure. This can only mean one thing: what is living inside those suits is beginning to penetrate their internal systems. He curses himself for neglecting one simple fact about Prador armour: it might be virtually invulnerable from the outside, but the same does not apply from the inside. How long, he wonders, before the fast-eject routine is tripped on some of them?

  ‘Vrell,’ says a Human voice.

  Vrell swings his attention to one side, and sees that both the Human and the drone are entering his Sanctum.

  Should have closed the door.

  Through his control units, he links to those members of the Guard that were watching over these two and finds their programs so corrupted and so much processing space wiped out that all that remains of computer power is being employed just to keep them on their feet.

  ‘What’s happening, Prador?’ asks Orbus.

  Vrell just gazes at the man for a long moment. ECS has offered him sanctuary, and this man and accompanying drone came to negotiate the terms. It is all irrelevant now.

  ‘We are going to crash,’ says Vrell simply.

  10

  It is possible to store the mind of a Human in a piece of crystal no larger than the tip of one’s little finger, and world-controlling artificial intelligences can fit into something the size of a tennis ball (larger crystal is more stable but tennis-ball AIs still exist). Both of these can be copied easily, ad infinitum. We know of three extinct, but once extremely powerful, star-spanning civilizations and, unless they were all like the Prador, they must have possessed their own artificial intelligences and ways of storing their own minds. It is therefore, a complete fucking certainty that, somewhere out there, something extremely dangerous is just waiting for someone to press the wrong button. Hey, you might be wandering the surface of an alien world when you spot an extre
mely pretty-looking stone at your feet. You could pick it up, and the warmth of your hand might call back into existence something that once moved suns about just for its own convenience.

  –From HOW IT IS by Gordon

  The dreadnought hits the thin atmosphere of the planetoid, its hull glowing red-hot and scoring an orange trail of burning metal, which spreads into a black smoke as the metal reacts with atmospheric gases to form strange nitrides and nitrates. The young Prador uses the ship’s remaining steering thrusters to keep it skating far above the icy plains and jagged mountain ranges, hoping perhaps to bounce it back out into space. However, the ship does not now have sufficient speed to escape the pull of even so small a planetoid. Its course arcs round, orbital, gravity and thin air dragging it down.

  The Golgoloth wonders for a moment why Vrell even attempted to bounce the craft back out, but then, making some rapid calculations, realizes there was a 10 per cent chance of success wholly dependent on atmospheric conditions difficult to measure. Now drawing his own ship in closer, he watches the tumultuous descent of the big ship. Vrell is obviously making calculations all the way down and trying to select the most suitable landing site. He manages to institute a bit of grav-planing, but the ship is too damaged to achieve more than 40 per cent negation of its weight.

  Managing one entire orbit of the planetoid, Vrell must have mapped everything below, and then included that in his calculations. Jetting the steering thrusters, he ramps up acceleration for a moment, seemingly intent on taking the ship to a particular equatorial plain. The Golgoloth realizes something more will be required, because a line of obsidian peaks, like black canines, now stands in the way of the optimum approach vector.

  Vortices all around the angular ship create a long vapour trail, with the curious effect of CO2 snow falling below it. The ship speeds over one mountain chain, just the shock of its passage causing thousand-ton rockfalls behind it, and then the obsidian peaks lie ahead. Vrell fires the remainder of what must be a diminishing stock of missiles. They stab out ahead of the hurtling ship, the bright white of their fusion drives leaving a green trail in this atmosphere, and slam into the lower slopes. The ensuing massive explosions throw tons of brittle rock into the air, and two of the peaks begin to sag and collapse. Now particle cannons fire up, lancing here and there at specific targets within this falling mass just to speed its descent. Snagging outcrops are turned laval, great masses of hard water-ice melt in areas that lubricate their descent. The Golgoloth wonders if Vrell has miscalculated the speed of all this, perhaps not sufficiently accounting for the low gravity here.