Orbus

by Neal Asher

  ‘Yaggs,’ says Sadurian. ‘Take control of the other nanofactor-that should help us get through this a lot quicker.’ Yaggs turns from his pit controls and heads over to the second factor positioned on the other side of Delf from Sadurian. ‘Now, let’s begin deconstruction and mapping.’ She pauses for a moment, considering. ‘I want you to give me a full factual report on this, but no speculation and no prognosis–just stick to the facts of the now.’ Prador are as good at that sort of report as they are bad at anything involving imagination.

  Even as, molecule by molecule, Delf and Yaggs begin pulling apart the viral genome, Sadurian can see that only a small portion of the original Prador stuff that made Oberon is still there, and that a lot of the virus’s eclectic collection of Spatterjay genetic material is also missing. Why, then, if Oberon is seeking to become something, is he stripping away all these options? Then Sadurian remembers the alien material, that stuff down deep, and realizes Oberon must be steadily stripping away genetic options to reach it. But why?

  ‘One moment…Delf.’ As the Prador pauses, Sadurian stares at her screen. Throughout all her long years here, the alien genome and its effects have been irrelevant to her. Somehow it is locked, some activating principle missing and, though it is quite evidently there, it has no bearing on the reproductive studies, experiments and work she has been conducting. It just sits there: chunks of complicated intertwined molecules which reproduce themselves during cell division but otherwise effect nothing. But Oberon obviously knows different.

  ‘Delf, I want you strip the King’s viral genome of all Spatterjay, Prador or other known genetic material, leaving only that alien junk. Then map it and run the data over to my station.’ Sadurian stands up and heads for the door. ‘Call me when you’re ready.’

  Orbus rolls clear and leaps to his feet, backing away from the Prador. On some level he knows that, armoured as he is, Vrell could not have crushed him, but the Prador grabbed him and picked him up just like it had picked up all his crew, and just like when it grabbed him and dragged him off to install a spider thrall in the back of his neck. All he can think of is that time, as if reliving it. But things are different now, because he is armed with something more effective than a skinning knife. He begins trying to shove his multigun power plug, which has pulled free, back into this suit, but the suit motors amplify the shaking of his hands.

  Vrell studies him for a moment, unreadable and hideously alien, then turns and fires one short blast from his particle cannon straight into a particular pipe, and gas begins to gush out, rapidly fogging the entire area.

  ‘This way,’ Vrell instructs, setting off. Passing two of the big pumps, he stoops over a wide hatch, rapidly undogs it and flings it back on its single hinge. ‘Down here.’

  Orbus moves over by the hatch, his multigun clutched close to his chest, but he still hasn’t managed to plug its power supply back in. He stares at the hatch until a tentacle prods him in the back.

  ‘No time to take in the scenery,’ warns Sniper.

  Orbus jumps down and Sniper follows, turning as he enters the narrow space below. Vrell follows but his carapace jams and he hangs there struggling for a moment, then the proximity mines above detonate and the shockwave shoves him down, breaking off chunks of his shell. He hits a floor hard, lies there apparently stunned for a moment, then abruptly heaves himself to his feet and reaches up with one claw to pull down the hatch and dog it back in place.

  ‘Where now, Prador?’ asks Orbus.

  They need Vrell to guide them through the maze of his ship, but at some point Sniper should be able to take over and the Prador will become superfluous. Then Orbus pauses that line of thought, a sudden doubt inflicting him. He has already tried to kill Vrell once, and afterwards regretted it. Is the situation any different now? Why such anger at simply being snatched up in the Prador’s claw? Yes, yes he knows why; it is because Vrell does not save lives out of any altruism, but because they might be useful to him. No doubt a spider thrall awaits Orbus eventually, wherever Vrell is taking him…

  Vrell just beckons them after him as he is forced to crouch his way along. Judging by the size of this passageway, it was made for third- and second-children only, doubtless the ones given the shittiest jobs aboard a ship like this. The passage curves down, becoming increasingly steep, and Orbus realizes that, with ship’s gravity out, up and down is now governed solely by the planetoid it rests upon. Ahead this steepness makes the transition into a straight drop, and Vrell struggles to find footholds to prevent himself slipping down. Orbus feels one of Sniper’s tentacles wrap round him like a climbing rope, and glances back to see the drone is managing to extend other tentacles to every possible nook and cranny surrounding them. Abruptly Vrell slips, his legs scrabbling and clattering against the walls, then he begins sliding downwards.

  ‘Seems like the quickest way,’ observes Sniper.

  The war drone draws Orbus in close, then releases his holds and begins sliding too. The slope soon turns into a vertical drop, which then starts curving inwards, and Orbus now reasons this passageway must run in a ring around the inside of the ship. There is no impact, fortunately, and Sniper is sliding again, whilst ahead of them Vrell folds his legs and claws in close, his weapons and other equipment clutched tight to his belly. For a short time they skid down a gradually decreasing slope, making a sound like a sack of tools dropped down an air-conditioning duct. Vrell eventually slides to a halt, lying on his back, while Sniper, his external coating obviously smoother, continues sliding and rams straight into him. Like this they skid another twenty feet before once more grinding to a halt.

  ‘Handy getaway,’ Sniper observes.

  As Sniper spills Orbus free, the Captain stands up and, in one movement, finally plugs in the power supply to his multigun, and the cross-hairs reappear on his visor. He swings the gun towards Vrell, bringing those cross-hairs right over the Prador’s belly. Vrell just lies there on his back, utterly vulnerable, for there is simply no room here for him to right himself. Gripping the ceiling of the passageway, he can push himself along for a little way, but even that will take some time.

  ‘I am…inconvenienced,’ says the Prador.

  ‘Yeah, looks that way,’ Sniper concurs.

  Orbus walks over to Vrell, his aim not deviating. ‘You know, Sniper, we could solve one of our major problems right now.’

  Vrell is still in the process of folding his legs back out again, but now he freezes. Is he wondering to himself how quickly he can bring one of his weapons to bear before Orbus pulls the trigger? Surely he must realize Orbus can fill him full of sprine bullets before he can hope to respond. And, then, respond with what? Orbus now knows for certain that Prador close-combat rail-guns cannot penetrate his armour. Will Vrell’s particle cannon prove equally ineffective? Whatever he uses, Vrell will still die. Orbus knows well what sprine does to anyone infected with the Spatterjay virus, for he once used it to execute a member of his own sailing-ship crew.

  ‘I guess we could,’ Sniper replies. ‘We could go ahead and wipe out the guy who just saved your life.’

  Orbus hears the words but can’t quite make sense of them. After puzzling over this for a moment, he realizes his aim has wandered a little, and quickly snaps it back.

  Sniper continues, ‘Just one sprine bullet and Vrell ceases to be a problem, and afterwards you, Orbus, will be all better and hardly fucked up at all.’

  ‘This isn’t about me,’ says Orbus, knowing he is lying. And even as he speaks he finds his anger beginning to recede.

  ‘You mean it ain’t about you starting to lose grip on your widely scattered marbles the moment you first got a sniff of this place?’ Sniper enquires. ‘Let’s put this in perspective: Prador or not, infected by the virus or not, Vrell doesn’t deserve to die. On Spatterjay he expected to be blamed for the crimes he commited while under the control of his father’s pheromones. He tried to escape, and one of your crewmen died. Do you even remember the man’s name?’

  Orbus reac
hes up to scratch his head, only remembering he can’t when his fingers clonk against the side of his helmet. ‘That’s not important…’ he begins.

  ‘Do you recall the names of any of those you killed just to stay alive when you were a captive of the Prador?’

  ‘Ah fuckit,’ says the Old Captain, closing his eyes and abruptly swinging his weapon away from Vrell. As the surge of anger continues to recede he knows, instantly, what this is all about. Yes, the smells of this ship evoke nightmares and, yes, the sight of any Prador is enough to scare him. But the anger? It is just a conditioned response, something acquired over his years as the sadistic Captain of a crew of masochists. He wonders just what other natural emotional responses are left within his skull. Any at all? Yes, there have to be. He laughed quite naturally whilst still aboard the Gurnard, and therefore knows he still possesses the capacity for pity, for empathy. Maybe it is simply the case that stress pushes him back into old habits. He opens his eyes to to find himself looking straight down the mirrored barrel of Vrell’s particle cannon.

  ‘This Human hates me,’ says the Prador.

  ‘Don’t flatter yourself,’ says Sniper. ‘He hates all your kind, but hates himself even more.’

  ‘That is not a logical survival trait,’ remarks Vrell.

  Just those words alone seem to cut right down to Orbus’s core. He is not quite so screwed up as he was aboard the Vignette, but he still has a long way to go. Behaving as he has been recently, he does not reckon much on his chances getting out of all this alive, but the most critical question he needs to answer is: Do I want to live? He needs to answer that question now, to himself, deep inside. He runs his tongue over his teeth and remembers stringy flesh caught between them, and knows the answer at once. He wants to live. He owes it to all those who didn’t. He owes them more than his wasted centuries; so much more.

  ‘Are you going to pull the trigger on that thing,’ Orbus snarls. ‘Or are we going to get moving?’

  Vrell slowly swings the weapon away from him and returns it to the clips in his harness. ‘Fifty yards further along here, we can break through into the section I secured for the mutated third-children. Some minutes ago the Guard were not present there, but that may have changed.’

  ‘So we just need to get there,’ says Sniper. The drone reaches out with his major tentacles and slaps them down on the rim of Vrell’s shell. ‘You move ahead, Orbus.’

  Only a small gap runs down alongside Vrell, and Orbus eases himself into it, edging past the big mutated Prador, which is fine until Vrell suddenly moves, whereupon Orbus slams himself back against the wall. He realizes his breathing is uneven and recognizes the phobic horror he is feeling but, with rigid determination, pushes himself on. Once safely beyond Vrell, he moves quickly down the passageway and turns to look back. Sniper, his smaller tentacles unfurled all about him, begins pushing, Vrell grinds along slowly at first, then with increasing speed as Sniper edges himself along too. This goes on for some minutes until Vrell calls out, ‘Here–this is the spot.’

  ‘Where do I cut through?’ Sniper asks.

  ‘Right below me.’

  One spatulate tentacle tip stabs down beside the Prador, going through the floor with a high whine and spurt of metallic dust. Sniper continues cutting in a wide circle and halfway round the floor begins to sag. Further slicing drops the floor lower till, with a whistling sound, Vrell slides from sight and crashes down somewhere below.

  ‘C’ mon!’ Sniper yells, following the Prador down.

  Just for a second Orbus considers finding his own way, but realizes that will be suicidal, since he won’t last more than a few minutes if he encounters one of the Guard. Reluctantly he moves to the yawning gap, ups the light amplification of his visor, and sees Vrell and Sniper making their way down a sloping floor, pushing wreckage aside as they go. The floor itself lies twenty feet below him, which even at one-gravity would not hurt him. He steps over the edge and drops, landing with a thump and not even bending his legs to absorb the shock, and then strides after them as fast as the low gravity will allow.

  Even as he catches up, he sees Sniper batting away one of the mutated third-children.

  Then a beam of a particle cannon cuts through wreckage, strikes Sniper and splashes, then catches Vrell on one side, blowing away part of his shell and three of his legs.

  ‘They’re here,’ Sniper announces.

  So Gurnard isn’t going to venture any closer to the planetoid and intends to sit out here as a spectator only, but Drooble is damned if that is all he himself is going to do. He applies the multidriver to the fixings all around the wall panel, quickly winding them out and sending them clattering to the floor, and meanwhile wonders how long it will take the AI to catch on to what he’s doing. Maybe it’ll stay distracted by that thing sitting out there keeping an eye on them.

  Eventually the panel swings down on one remaining lower corner fixing, to expose bunches of fibre-optics and a couple of superconductor feeds sheathed in plasticized ceramic. Drooble unholsters his solid-state laser pistol and studies them for a moment. If his earlier reading of the ship’s schematics is correct, then all the optics and the lower feed are the ones he needs to deal with. He therefore points at the feed and pulls the trigger.

  The laser beam crackles as it hits the ceramic coating but, since the purpose of this coating is to prevent the possibility of a short of thousands of amps, it takes a little while to burn through. The moment it does, however, a massive arc flash cuts a crater into the metal behind, the blast throwing Drooble back against the opposite wall of the corridor. The arc burns for a while longer as vaporizing metal erodes the superconductor away, then some safety device kicks in and shuts it down. The corridor lights dim for a second, then come on again.

  ‘What are you doing, Drooble?’ Gurnard enquires.

  Drooble staggers to his feet, emitting an odd giggle, wipes his face then wishes he hadn’t, as a layer of skin peels off to dangle free. He pulls it off and discards it, then glances up towards the ceiling, half expecting a security drone to drop into view, before approaching the panel again.

  Metal is still glowing inside there and most of the optics are burnt through but, being methodical, Drooble takes careful aim and severs the rest of them, before turning away and heading over to a nearby bulkhead door.

  ‘You are not going to answer me?’ Gurnard enquires.

  As expected, the control panel beside the door is dead, and Drooble has to use its manual mechanism to open it. He strides on into the suiting room beyond, tears open a locker that is also without power, pulls out the spacesuit inside and dons it.

  ‘Ah, I think I see,’ says Gurnard.

  ‘You do?’ Drooble wonders. ‘Bit slow for an AI, ain’t you?’

  ‘What makes you think that object out there will let you past when it won’t allow me past?’

  ‘There’s one way to find out,’ Drooble replies.

  ‘You are not thinking clearly, Iannus Drooble.’

  ‘No? Really?’ Drooble opens the next bulkhead door into the shuttle bay and carefully closes it behind him. Then he walks over and operates the door control to the shuttle, which is powered by the shuttle itself, and enters. He takes the pilot’s chair and pulls back the ivory-handled lever to close up the shuttle’s door, then after a pause pulls back the lever next to it to open the space doors. If he has this right, a safety system will have kicked in. This is so that, should the Gurnard come under attack and lose its internal power, the shuttle’s own internal power supply can still be used to open the bay door.

  A ship’s bell begins ringing and he jerks in surprise, before gripping the shuttle’s helm and shuffling into a more comfortable position in the chair, with his feet down on the foot pedals. The space door cracks open with a bang, and a wind begins whistling as the air inside the bay squirts out into vacuum, the noise growing fast to a steady shriek. Obviously the power supplied by the shuttle is enough to open the doors, but not enough to operate the bay-evacuation pumps.
Eventually all the air goes, and then Drooble pushes the helm forwards to slide the shuttle out into night.

  ‘Do you think Orbus will approve of this?’ Gurnard enquires from the console.

  ‘I don’t care either way,’ Drooble replies.

  ‘Yes, of course…you get to risk your life and, if you survive and the Captain does not approve of what you have done, just maybe he’ll punish you for it…’

  ‘That’s not what this is about.’ But Drooble wonders to himself just what this is about. He wants to be there, not just spectating from the bridge of the Gurnard. He wants to help out as best he can. Doesn’t he?

  The shuttle falls away from the big cargo ship towards the icy marble of the planetoid, and towards that other object which, from this perspective, lies just off to one side of it. He opens up the fusion drive, the seat punching him in the back, and grins. Whilst the planetoid seems to grow only marginally, the object that has placed itself between Gurnard and it is rapidly increasing in size. Within minutes it is large enough for him to study some of its detail. It does look like just a big chunk, a big splinter of metal hanging in the void, though now he can see shapes like a cross between fossils of ancient life-forms and old circuitry seemingly etched into its surface. He waits for some reaction from the thing, but there is nothing, not even as he draws parallel to it, then speeds past.

  ‘So you survived that,’ Gurnard observes.

  ‘I thought maybe this shuttle would be too small for it to even bother with,’ Drooble replies, uncomfortable with the fact that he is feeling a species of disappointment.

  ‘There’s the main vessel to contend with yet,’ warns Gurnard. ‘Then the one down on the planet, and maybe Vrell and his dreadnought too.’

  ‘Not a problem.’ Drooble increases acceleration towards the distant orb.

  Since boarding the dreadnought, Sniper had been perpetually scanning the areas immediately surrounding him. Some of the Guard were active at the beginning, but only conducting Vrell’s ongoing repairs of his ship, and others were simply grinding to a halt. However, from half an hour prior to Vrell saying, ‘Something hostile has taken control of the Guard,’ the activity of those armoured corpses aboard the dreadnought has ramped up. The motionless ones have started moving again and those still working have downed tools and moved off. At first all this new activity seemed utterly chaotic, but then a pattern began to emerge as the Guard started isolating reactors, weapons systems, and the ship’s various drives. Next, even worse, some of them faded from view as they brought online some form of chameleonware. And now they are here.