by Neal Asher
The fact that sprine killed these creatures, and the detonation of the fusion tacticals inside his two attackers, is all the evidence Sniper needs. Issuing from the alien ship behind him, this field-tech attack on their fellows is further confirmation. The unknown creatures aren’t invading the dreadnought from that other, alien, ship; they are the dreadnought’s erstwhile crew.
Orbus gasps chill air and shudders, needles of cold piercing into his skin. He opens his eyes on eerie, green-tinted illumination, feels a cold floor beneath his back, and under his palm.
Iannus Drooble is dead.
He can’t quite grasp that, for Drooble was his crewman for centuries and seemed almost an extension of his being. Orbus feels hollow now and oddly devoid of anger. Trying to analyse this feeling, a quite drily unemotional and horrible thought occurs to him. Drooble’s death has severed yet another link to his own past; it has cut through the anchor chain linking him to the Vignette and somehow cast him adrift. The death of the crewman might well be the cure he needs and, though he resents that notion, it is a resentment without the power to turn itself into rage.
After a moment he sits upright, muscles creaking, then gazes down at himself, realizing his armoured spacesuit has been removed. Now glancing to one side, he observes Vrell lying down on his stomach, remaining legs sprawled. The clatter and bubble of Prador speech issues from somewhere, and Vrell, still wearing his harness though disarmed, replies to it, and now the harness translator, obviously just turned on by Vrell, supplies the words to Orbus.
‘I will not,’ says Vrell.
‘Why not?’ asks an unknown Prador, its voice now also relayed through Vrell’s translator.
‘Because I choose not to.’
‘But you must be suffering from the injury hunger engendered by the Spatterjay virus, and there beside you is a source of nutrient.
The penny finally drops and Orbus realizes that the ‘source of nutrient’ is himself. He stands up and, in a way he hopes isn’t too obvious, moves away until his back rests against a curving black wall. At least now he will have time to react before Vrell makes a grab for him. Whatever camaraderie Vrell is feeling for Orbus will soon depart as the virus continues its work inside the Prador. After all, Humans suffering from injury hunger for long enough will eat just about anything. Orbus remembers some of the gruesome stories he has heard about Hooper crews stranded on the islands; and about how quite a few crew members mysteriously disappeared, and how the survivors don’t much like discussing the matter. And Prador tend to be even less concerned by moral issues bearing on their food supply.
‘I find that very interesting,’ continues the voice. ‘My understanding of the effect of this mutation is that it produces a beast much better able to survive. One would suppose, being Prador, that survivability equates to ruthlessness; while in Human society a degree of altruism, whether with an evolutionary or moral basis, works better than unrelenting viciousness.’
With shaky effort, Vrell manages to heave himself to his feet, still tilting to one side where the two legs remaining fail to adequately support his weight.
‘Who are you?’ Vrell asks.
A long pause ensues, then the same voice replies, ‘I have now weighed up the pros and cons of telling you the truth. I am the Golgoloth.’
Orbus is surprised at Vrell’s reaction. The Prador instinctively cringes like a dog expecting a blow, which puts him out of balance so that he staggers to one side to rest one edge of his carapace against the wall furthest away from Orbus. His legs are visibly shaking again, and Orbus suspects this has nothing to do with the physical strain they are under.
‘Who is the Golgoloth?’ Orbus asks.
‘A myth,’ Vrell replies. ‘A story used to frighten offspring.’
Orbus contemplates that statement. Taking into account the fact that Prador fathers rather enjoy eating alive some of their own children, if this Golgoloth is something used to scare the young, it must be terrible indeed.
‘Yet here we are almost certainly aboard one section of a massive vessel,’ says Orbus, ‘a vessel the Polity has no knowledge of and which it seems likely was either built in the Graveyard or hidden in here before the border defence stations went fully online. So tell me about this Golgoloth.’
‘I don’t know very much,’ confesses Vrell. ‘It is supposedly a monster that can travel through darkness to any location, where it cuts out and eats the organs of young Prador. It is claimed to be immortal, and to control the destinies of all Prador….’
Through the intercom, or by whatever other means this Gol-goloth thing is using to talk to them, comes a clattering and bubbling. Orbus waits for a translation, but there is none forthcoming. He suspects he has just, for the first time ever, heard Pradorish laughter.
‘In Prador culture, myth-making indeed struggles to produce anything coherent,’ says the Golgoloth. ‘But Vrell, like all myths, about which your companion doubtless has greater knowledge, being the product of a society where myths easily propagate, the ones concerning me do possess an element of truth.’
‘So what’s true about them?’ Orbus asks.
‘Vrell,’ says the Golgoloth, ‘you really should exercise more control over your food.’
‘Why don’t you answer the question Captain Orbus has asked?’
The eerie glow increases in intensity, then the walls slide into translucence, revealing vague lights lying beyond, then gradually into transparency. Studying his surroundings, Orbus realizes they are enclosed in a cylinder, within a larger chamber. Turbid water, about a foot deep, slops against the outside of the cylinder wall, and the place is packed with optic and power cables and pipes plugged into blocky monoliths of a technology that appears to be more about plumbing than electronics. Platforms mounted on single pillars support other conglomerations of technology, and numerous other cylindrical tanks–much narrower than the one they now occupy–contain organic components blended with hardware and wired in to the whole mass. Here and there, multi-jointed arms terminating in complex manipulators are in the process of either assembling or disassembling various components. Independent robots like segmented iron starfish move through it all, and in the water itself living organisms and odd machines constantly bumble or dart. However, taking all this in at a glance, Orbus’s attention is inexorably drawn to the individual squatting on a platform that seems to be at the focus of all this hybrid technology.
‘The Golgoloth?’ he wonders aloud.
Vrell just jerks away from the transparent wall and moves over to Orbus’s side of the cylinder. Orbus isn’t afraid, realizing that Vrell isn’t moving over to take advantage of this ‘source of nutrient, but just getting as far away as he can from the thing on the platform.
The creature bears some resemblance to normal Prador in that it possesses a similar number of limbs, a carapace and a visual turret. However, it is distinctly asymmetrical, its colouring ranging from a sick yellow to white, its carapace so covered with lines and mismatched depths of shell that it seems to have been decorated with a montage. Orbus recognizes these marks as surgery scars: the result of shell-welding. It is also linked by numerous optics and pipes to two monolithic machines positioned behind it. Things also crawl over its shell, things like mechanical ship-lice. Its turret eyes don’t match: too small on one side and too large on the other. Its palp eyes are also mismatched: one of them blind white and trailing wires from its centre straight into an array of electronic eyes mounted on its back, the other big, and bright green, almost glowing.
‘Is this what your myths describe?’ Orbus asks.
‘It is,’ Vrell confirms.
‘So, let me get this straight,’ says Orbus. ‘A young Prador survives the death of his father and manages to get safely to his father’s ship underneath the Spatterjay ocean, where he is subsequently mutated by the Spatterjay virus. This young Prador manages to get his father’s ship running again, go up against a fully-armed Prador dreadnought and survive yet again, subsequently exterminating the who
le crew of that vessel and taking control of it. Yet now this same Prador is frightened by a fairy tale?’
Vrell abruptly jerks away from the wall and swings his nightmarish head towards Orbus, who suspects he himself has unwittingly just made the transition from ally to food. Certainly Vrell looks greatly in need of something to eat: his belly plates run in parallel with his upper carapace, and the distance between the two has decreased to less than a foot. Where he lost his legs the shape of new legs can now be seen neatly folded underneath a taut translucent skin.
‘I am weakened,’ says Vrell, his mandibles grinding, and a black saliva dripping from the lower part of his mouth.
Orbus takes a pace or two back, whereupon Vrell leans forward and takes one unsteady pace towards Orbus.
‘I see,’ says the Golgoloth, ‘that despite your strength of mind, Vrell, that viral-injury hunger is at last winning out. However, having scanned both yourself and the Human enclosed in there with you, I see that the result of any contest between you is by no means assured.’
A large arm swings over, above the cylinder they occupy, and at its end is an object shaped like an inverted cup. This clamps down, causing the floor to shudder underneath them, then in the ceiling a hatch divides centrally, the two halves hingeing downwards to drop something inside. It hits the floor with a heavy wet thump, spattering purplish blood across it and up the walls. The animal source of this great chunk of raw flesh, with jagged black bones almost like ribs, is a mystery to Orbus, but the smell clicks some switch even inside himself and his mouth starts watering. It has, after all, been many hours since he has eaten, too.
Vrell totters towards the flesh and almost falls upon it, legs sprawling and head lunging down. He tears up a large flap of it in one claw, brings it to his mouth and saws at it with his mandibles, whereupon it quickly disappears into the grinding plates inside his mouth. He severs another chunk, then another, eating so fast he is scattering loose gobbets of it all about him. Orbus moves over and takes up one of these fragments, bites hard and worries off a mouthful. Whilst chewing, he tries not to think about how its texture so much resembles raw human flesh. He swallows, expecting nausea, but though part of his mind feels disgust at this meal, his digestion is not so picky. His stomach rumbles alarmingly, and he continues to eat.
Again the floor shudders underfoot, and Orbus glances up at the hatch again, expecting another load of food to drop through it, but the hatch remains firmly closed. Returning his attention to Vrell, Orbus notes how the membrane is tearing along his wounded side, and small soft legs are folding out.
‘The speed of regeneration is indeed astounding,’ the Golgo-loth observes, ‘yet there could be severe penalties to pay. For it seems the Spatterjay virus is what you Humans would describe as a Trojan horse.’
‘Oh, you’re speaking to me now?’ Orbus remarks.
‘I find you interesting, Human.’
Orbus guesses this is one of those situations where if you aren’t of interest you are merely rubbish to be discarded, or more likely just food. However, even being an object of interest does not ultimately guarantee fair and equitable treatment. This Golgoloth creature strikes Orbus as no better than any other Prador, where any interest in an individual might result in vivisection just to satisfy that interest.
‘However,’ the Golgoloth continues, whilst turning on its platform as if to gaze, through all the surrounding equipment, at something lying far beyond this vessel, ‘exigency overcomes my curiosity about you–and about Vrell. It seems that those rather strange alien entities of yours out there have decided I am a threat that must now be countered.’
At first Orbus feels some amusement at hearing this creature describe others as ‘quite strange’, but then wonders what is meant by ‘of yours’.
‘It is time for me to put some distance between us and them, so I can have more opportunity to decide what needs to be done next,’ the Golgoloth adds.
13
Throughout those initial and immediately hostile encounters with the Prador, Humans only witnessed first- and second-children. Not until some three years into the war was an adult male actually encountered, and the first females were seen only some years after the war was over. However, just from the Prador genome, forensic AIs were quickly able to surmise much about their life cycle, all of it later confirmed. The males are aggressive, intelligent, and use pheromones to force perpetual servitude from their children until they themselves achieve adulthood…if they are allowed. They keep harems of the less intelligent females, also pheromonally controlled, which they mate with regularly. The females develop their eggs in oviducts, then inject them via ovipositor into the soft bodies of bivalve molluscs like giant mussels. The eggs hatch and, feeding on the host molluscs, the young Prador grow into the first stage of their lives–a stage very few of them progress beyond.
–From QUINCE GUIDE compiled by Humans
The dreadnought is changing even as Sniper watches. Creatures still scuttle around outside, working on the hull, but now numerous specialized robots are joining them. The work is being carried out at a pace he has only ever seen once before, and that during the war, inside one of the big AI-guided warship constructor stations. Some sort of chemical disintegrator has spread out in a wave, causing the piled-up ice debris around the vessel to smoke away into a fog bank that is only now dispersing. The entire structure of the ship has tightened so that it no longer looks like a rotten pomegranate sagging to the ground, and the numerous gaps in its hull are being knitted together. Also, every now and again, momentary geometric distortions appear in the surrounding haze, as if the creatures are testing force-fields just as esoteric as those projected by the vessel that is down on the ice behind him. Sniper understands, with utter certainty, that something nasty has been unleashed here, but what the fuck it is he has no idea.
Slowly, incrementally, Sniper’s fusion reactor recharges the laminar power storage inside him. However the reactor is running out of hydrogen and certain other essential elements, so he uses one tentacle to bore down through the ice beside him, sampling as he goes. Upper layers consist mainly of CO2 ice with occasional layers softened by liquid nitrogen, which outgasses the moment he reaches them. He needs water ice, which he finally hits ten feet down. Now boring through this, he begins drawing water-ice dust inside himself, heating it until it becomes liquid, then electrolysing it out, the hydrogen going to the reactor and the oxygen into a pressure vessel inside him.
It is a slow and meticulous process that could result in disaster if he does not monitor it constantly. His energy levels are so low that the amount of energy input to keep the fusion process running eats up nearly 90 per cent of the consequent output. Of the remaining 10 per cent he employs much to keep himself powered up, to heat the water, electrolyse it and run the oxygen compressor, and also to power the tentacle still boring down into the water ice. In total the available energy going into laminar storage is climbing from a piddling 1 per cent of reactor output–just about enough to power a food processor.
‘C’ mon,’ Sniper mutters to himself, then in annoyance notes how much power is used up by just speaking out loud.
Bugger.
It will take him at least an hour to build up useful reserves, and now he needs to think about how to use them. Even fully powered up and fully armed, he still stands little chance against whatever it is the Guard has turned into, so what other options are available? Deciding to use up a little of the slowly accumulated power, he eases forward from his shell, turning his head to gaze towards the spot where the shuttle was destroyed.
Wreckage is strewn across the surface over there, though covering only a small percentage of the whole because most of it has melted its way down into the ice. A splash of red blood marks where Drooble died, and scattered around it lie gobbets of flesh and what looks like three-quarters of a skull emptied of its contents. There is no sign of Orbus, though Sniper realizes that rail-gun hits on his armour could have heated it enough for it to melt his rem
ains downwards out of sight. No red blood where he was standing either, but then Old Captains don’t really have much of the stuff running round in their veins. However, it is odd that there seems to be no sign at all of Vrell’s remains. He would not have melted into the ice and, having been struck by a rail-gun, the Prador should have left a lot more than that little spatter of green gore on the surface. No sign of any chunks of black carapace, nor stray legs or chunks of Prador flesh either.
Trying to replay his memories of those events makes Sniper painfully aware of how much memory he has lost, but one thing is becoming plain: whilst there had been force-field activity before him, when some sort of spherical field crushed one of his attackers, there must also have been similar activity behind him. So perhaps Orbus and Vrell are still alive? It seems most likely to Sniper that, somehow, whatever is occupying that larger vessel has snatched them up. He needs to find out for sure, and to find out he needs to get aboard that vessel undetected, which is problematic since he doesn’t even possess the energy to pull himself out of this hole.
Half an hour passes and his laminar storage has risen to 8 per cent. Having detected traces of the three naturally occurring isotopes of hydrogen–deuterium, protium and tritium–he takes the risk of refining these out, since not so much energy is required to fuse them. After that he choses his moment, then reconfigures his reactor injectors to utilize them. It pays off with a short-lived energy boost that knocks his laminar storage up to 14 per cent. He draws off some of this to power another of his tentacles, merely to clear the powdered ice from his shell. This ploy allows a larger proportion of the meagre light available here to reach the photovoltaic cells scattered about his surface. It takes another half-hour for their input to match the energy he has expended in cleaning himself, but by then his laminar storage surpasses 30 per cent.
