by Neal Asher
In irritation, Sniper slaps a mutated third-child out of the way and spits two missiles towards the hazy source of that particle beam, then fires off both his own particle cannons at points within the wreckage where he predicts the near-invisible attacker might have gone. The two missiles impact, a double blast casting aside twisted beams and buckled wall panels. Briefly, something that definitely does not look like one of the Guard is flung back out of sight by the blast, whilst another of the same variety is picked out by one of the particle beams.
‘There’s things in here that don’t look like your Guard,’ he observes.
‘They must be from the other ship,’ Vrell replies.
‘Then they got in here bloody quick.’
Something odd about all this, something very odd…
Absorbing data from these brief appearances, Sniper reconfigures his scanning routine and gets a snapshot of the attackers’ positions throughout this particular area of the ship. Five of them are here within this sealed-off area, and others are converging from outside it. Then, abruptly, the scanning routine ceases to pick up anything, as the creatures he now sees reconfigure their own chameleonware, quick to work out what data Sniper just acquired. They are fast–horribly so.
Sniper doesn’t know what plans Vrell has been formulating. It certainly seems the Prador wants to find somewhere to hide, so as to formulate them further and begin some furtive attack upon the invaders of his ship. But these new creatures will not give Vrell the time, and now the Prador is crippled too.
‘We have to get out of here,’ announces Sniper. ‘Things are gonna get too hot to handle in here very quickly.’
Vrell is struggling along, managing to keep up for a short distance, then collapsing as the two legs he has left on one side fail to support his weight, probably because of damage to connecting muscles, and maybe because of the pain. However, where the chunk was burned from his shell the wound is already skinning over and bulging, and it seems likely the Prador will not be without legs for too much longer.
‘Help him,’ Sniper says to Orbus.
‘Help him?’
Another cripple, thinks Sniper. Orbus was not the right choice for this little venture. Maybe a few decades cruising round as the Captain of a cargo ship would have resulted in him obtaining some stability, maybe not. But certainly getting thrown straight into conflict with those who damaged him in the first place seems to be undermining the already shaky bulwarks of his mind. Sniper wonders how long it will be before Orbus again decides Vrell is surplus to requirements, for his anger seems to be surfacing in a regular pattern. However, he did manage to control it this last time.
‘Yes, help him.’
Orbus reluctantly moves up beside Vrell and, none too gently, jams his shoulder underneath the place where the Prador has lost its legs. Vrell hisses, but says nothing.
Still scanning about, Sniper realizes their only option now lies far down to his left, where a break in the hull opens to the outside. But what then? In here they will be subject to constant and increasingly lethal attacks, but that does not mean such attacks will cease once they depart the ship.
‘Keep moving.’
Sniper plots out the area down below, then tears away a tangle of beams to give them access to the start of an exit route. Knowing that the enemy may second-guess him, be begins to reprogram some of his missiles, choose alternative routes, prepare mines and other incendiaries, and formulate solutions to various forms of attack. Certainly, he isn’t going up against simple Prador–or their drones–here.
Prador drones…
‘What about your drones?’ he abruptly asks Vrell.
‘I am ahead of you,’ Vrell replies. ‘I have recorded orders for them, and I possess the codes to access the drone cache, but I cannot open communication without being detected and leaving myself open to viral attack.’
Sniper picks up a signal from Vrell’s CPU, opens a channel and downloads the data the Prador sends him. Sniper next begins running programming routines to punch him through to the drone cache, but with the static out there, and the alien code running in so many of the ship’s systems, this is like negotiating a briar patch growing on the surface of a swamp.
‘Down here.’ Sniper leads the way down through a gap.
Orbus and Vrell dutifully follow, though Sniper has to help the Prador down through. Even as he lowers Vrell to the floor below, he turns and fires two programmed missiles along their intended route, whereupon, a hundred feet ahead, they swerve into surrounding wreckage. The first explodes, flaring out an EM pulse, whilst the second simply settles, then winds up to speed its chemical reactor in order to power its esoteric hardware. Its nose falls off and it begins projecting. A hundred feet ahead, holographic copies of the three escapees proceed through the wreckage, and abruptly find themselves at the confluence of two particle beams and a stream of rail-gun missiles.
Sniper returns fire from his present location, his two particle beams stabbing out, and has the satisfaction of briefly seeing one of the invaders lose a claw as its own particle cannon explodes. The holograms leap forward, simultaneously opening fire, and the EM pulse has sufficiently scrambled instrumentation for the unknown attackers not to know which of the figures they see are the real ones.
Leading the way along a different course through the wreckage, Sniper again picks up enough data to penetrate his opponents chameleonware, and again gets a snapshot of their locations before they reformat. In response to this, he drops a series of mines from his store, and begins flinging them all about with deadly accuracy. Where they hit, their gecko function kicks in and they stick. Simultaneously he sends specially designed programs to each. Some will detonate if touched, some upon picking up regular patterns of air movement, others will blow if a weapon is fired within their blast radius. All of this Sniper very carefully designed. He knows he stands no hope of taking out more than one or two of these creatures. He just needs to delay them enough so that he, Vrell and Orbus can get out of here.
Vrell seems to be getting along a bit better, showing a speed of recovery that would be remarkable in any normal Prador, but Sniper has long been associating with those infected with the Spatterjay virus; he knows what it can do for them. It also occurs to him, knowing the other effects of the virus, that Vrell will soon be needing something to eat, or else he might risk undergoing some nasty changes.
Through…?
Abruptly Sniper finds himself accessing the drone cache. Through internal ship eyes, he observes rank upon rank of the spherical drones all locked into their storage alcoves along the walls of one massive chamber–in fact hundreds of them. On sending the first code Vrell provided, he observes clamps slowly disengaging from the drones like claws opening up. Meanwhile he sends to each of them Vrell’s instructions: The Guard are hostile, and in collusion with invaders attempting to take over this ship. Hunt and destroy them all without regard to ship structure. As soon as the command arrives, the drones begin departing their alcoves, but just then, some massive explosion rocks the entire chamber, flinging many of them about like loose ball-bearings, and yet more of those creatures he has already seen start to enter, with weapons blazing. Sniper feels both chagrin and not a little fear, on seeing how incredibly fast they react. He intercepts data from the cache, again breaking the enemy’s chameleonware format, and sees that some of them are already withdrawing from around him to counter this new danger. But not enough.
Particle beams lash down all around them. Orbus takes a hit, spins out from his position of supporting Vrell, then opens fire with his multigun.
Time to go.
Sniper fires a series of missiles which shoot ahead of him and then curve down. He advances to grab a floor panel, tear it up and cast it aside. From below comes the first detonation. He snakes out a tentacle, wraps it around Orbus, whose armour is smoking, and drags him in close. Vrell, however, having worked out what the drone is doing, hurls himself to one side, a particle beam splashing on and incinerating wreckage direc
tly above him, then lurches forward and down through the hole. Sniper flings himself after him, powering up his fusion drive as he drops, swinging the flame chambers around a full one hundred and eighty degrees, so he is essentially propelled shell-first downwards. Passing Vrell, he reaches out to snag the Prador and draw him in below the two drive flames. He hits burning and molten wreckage from the first missile explosion, and punches straight through it. Further detonations ensue as Sniper punches his way through three more weakened conglomerations of wreckage. Particle beams and streams of missiles from rail-guns create a storm of fire and metal fragments all about them. Above, mines begin going off, igniting a rapidly receding inferno.
Finally Sniper cannons hard into an unweakened wall of crash-foam directly under a lattice of beams. He drags himself out of the crater he has made, swinging his drives round again, and uses both them and his free tentacles to propel himself, and the other two, across the wall. He fires another missile, which curves down through a hole in the wall and detonates, filling all nearby spaces with burning crash-foam, then hurtles down into this gap and out into icy twilight, bounces on hard ice before releasing his two companions, then skids for two hundred feet before driving his tentacles into it to bring himself to a stop. Orbus and Vrell go skating on past him, finally drawing to a halt some fifty feet further on.
‘Run for that.’ Sniper stabs a tentacle towards an outcrop of ice and stone situated between them and the distant vessel which, now down on the icy plain, looks like the giant fortress of some VR fantasy called Lord of Winter. The two obey him, moving swiftly away. However Vrell is again signalling with his CPU and clearly wants to send Sniper something more.
‘This may be of use,’ Vrell reports. ‘I tried to use it just a moment ago, but I cannot get through. It is the detonation code for the fusion tacticals inside the Guards’ armour.’
‘Not much use against these other buggers,’ Sniper observes.
He squirrels the code away for future use, puts online his internal antigrav and rises twenty feet into the air, turning to face their exit point from the ship. With spurts from his steering jets, he steadily moves away, keeping himself between the exit and his two companions. Whilst doing this, he checks his supplies of munitions and power. Both are severely depleted and, for what is to come, he doubts even the full load would be enough. At intervals he begins cutting holes down into the ice and then shooting off the occasional preprogrammed missile. He needs to stack the odds in his favour.
The Golgoloth realizes that something very untoward is occurring aboard the dreadnought and, on examining the fragments of com it is picking up, knows at once that the source of these events is neither Human nor Prador. The ancient hermaphrodite Prador has never seen code like this before, to the best of his knowledge, anyway. It begins running a search through its extended mind, putting online ganglion after ganglion and, as a precaution, leaving them running, the processing power of his mind and his sheer intelligence growing moment by moment. As a further precaution the Golgoloth begins applying some of those ganglia to the weapons systems of this vessel fragment and the main vessel above–systems it did not previously consider necessary for dealing with a downed dreadnought and its single mutated Prador occupant.
Up above, it readies U-space missiles, reformatting their U-fields so they can actually penetrate down into a gravity well to reach the surface of a planet, their target the dreadnought itself. The Golgoloth begins running hardfield generators up to power, and provides numerous back-up systems for them. It lines up reception dishes on the ship fragment to receive high-powered microwave beams from the fathership–an excess of power the Golgoloth may shortly require. It onlines generators that can produce force-fields of rather esoteric design–the product of a century-long thread of research it finished fifty years back. It now runs diagnostics on equally esoteric beam weapons whose output combines the radiative spectrums and particle emissions in strange and useful ways, and readies its most powerful full-spectrum white lasers. Then it turns its attention to information now becoming available.
For a brief moment the Golgoloth is surprised at the source of this new information, which is a ganglion it brought online only recently: in fact the one that stores all its knowledge about the Spatterjay virus. The Golgoloth knew the virus harboured something entirely alien–a trihelical genome–and the special search reveals that the alien code presently being employed aboard the dreadnought closely matches feedback from those trihelical structures caused by induction scanning. This is an odd fact, but still doesn’t explain what is happening in that ship out there.
Its intelligence now thoroughly heightened, the Golgoloth again reviews what it knows. Oberon wants Vrell destroyed and, even though the Golgoloth is not completely allied with the King, the old hermaphrodite is currently the King’s most powerful resource within the Graveyard. Because of the possible Polity response, sending in ships is not a safe option, yet the King seems ready to now do even that. Vrell, though a dangerous virally mutated Prador, does not seem to represent a sufficient danger to merit being countered by such drastic measures, yet now it appears that the Golgoloth has somehow underestimated him. Whatever is happening aboard that dreadnought is perhaps exactly what Oberon feared.
The Golgoloth returns its attention to its telescopes and scanners, realizing that some sort of battle is occurring within the dreadnought itself. Focusing on two Prador war drones as they pursue something escaping through an upper hatch, it sees an object hazy with chameleonware effect even though repeatedly being struck by weapons fire. Then one of the big rail-guns mounted in the ship’s hull opens fire, slamming quarter-ton missiles into the drones and blowing them apart. The hazy thing returns to the ship, its chameleonware shutting off, and Golgoloth glimpses briefly an insectile armoured shape. Next, figures come careening out through one of the holes in the bottom of the ship, and begin heading towards an outcrop of stone and ice lying midway between the Golgoloth’s vessel and the dreadnought. The old hermaphrodite cautiously focuses all its weapons on them, before studying them intently.
One mutated Prador who is very likely Vrell, one armoured Human and one Polity war drone. This is all very odd. The Golgoloth watches them with interest.
12
Like the Human race the Prador developed electronics by beginning with simple switches and going on to thermionic valves, transistors and then, as they first ventured beyond their world and physical weight became an issue, the integrated circuit. Again like Humans, from this they developed computers to handle the increasing complexities of their civilization. However, because of the ruggedness of the Prador physiology and their lack of regard even for their offspring, and because their biotechnology of that time was so advanced, their thinking machines soon incorporated parts of the surgically excised brains and nervous systems of their children. Later, as Prador understood the possibilities inherent in creating artficial intelligence–something that might eventually prove superior to them–they chose to use the whole brains of their children rather than go that route. AIs were therefore never developed in the Prador Kingdom, and the penalties for either importing or researching them are severe.
–From QUINCE GUIDE compiled by Humans
Sadurian puts the stack of crystal memtabs down on her console and returns to her seat. The tabs contain programs she has not used in many years, first because they are something the Prador very much do not like, and second because long ago she singled out the main reasons for the King’s inability to breed. Mainly it is about the virus being carried as a parasite in the King’s spermatozoa. The issue, however, was not one of Prador genetics, but instead about turning off the chemical switch that sends the virus into survival mode by stunning it prior to fertilization. These programs were constructed to explore what all different kinds of genetic tissue can produce: a computer womb but also something else.
‘It is done?’ she enquires.
‘Done,’ replies Delf, typically laconic.
Sadurian studies th
e tangled molecular maps on her screen, displaying millions of fragments of alien code that are wound up in the mycelial tangle of the Spatterjay virus. Her problem is that, before she starts predicting what the genome produces, she needs to first put it all together. It will be like rethreading a million beads back on a new string, but exactly in the right order. Sadurian begins loading her programs which, requiring no further input from her, now slot themselves together. She glances across at Delf and Yaggs, checks a couple of subscreens, and sees that Delf has now returned to the deconstruction and mapping of the King’s genome. However, it does not matter that these two Prador are here, because they have known about these programs for years, doubtless reported them to Oberon, and so far nothing untoward has happened.
The last crystal memtab goes into the tab-reader slot, then, after a moment, pokes out like a tongue and she extracts it, returning it to the stack.
‘I am ready,’ says a voice from the console, speaking Human Anglic.
‘Okay, Sphinx, check kernel four. You’ll find some interesting data there.’
‘I see,’ replies Sphinx, who is an artificial intelligence.
Because the Prador do not like AIs, those caught experimenting with them tend to end up on the hot end of an electrified spike somewhere in the central caverns of the Prador homeworld’s capital city. That way, it usually takes Prador offenders a week to die. Humans caught smuggling such technology into the Kingdom die more quickly, but that is only a matter of physiology, since the same sort of spike is generally employed in both cases. However, none of this applies to Sadurian, for she is under the King’s protection and knows that if she ever displeases Oberon sufficiently, her end will be quick, messy and dispensed by the King himself.
