by Neal Asher
Sniper now possesses sufficient power to get moving, though not enough to employ antigravity or any of his energy weapons. However, he remains precisely where he is. Despite one of the ex-Guard being destroyed by some type of field projected from the ship behind, there is no guarantee that such a field will not be deployed against Sniper, and there is also no reason to suppose it will again be used against those alien creatures if they decide to come after him again. Over the ensuing hour he bleeds a minimal amount of power to run diagnostics and to instigate those repairs he can afford to make. By the end of this time his fusion reactor is operating at optimum, and he can afford to store hydrogen isotopes as well as oxygen, and also bore down into the ice with more tentacles. Soon afterwards he is fully back up to power and it is time to move.
Sniper carefully eases himself up, extracting tentacles from the ice, then turns over until his head is pointing down into the hollow he previously occupied, whilst keeping one sensor-loaded tentacle aimed towards the dreadnought. He needs to get to that other ship fast, but in a way that has at least a partial chance of going unnoticed. From inside himself he extrudes the iron cylinder of a thermic lance now connected to his internal oxygen supply, begins blowing oxygen through it, and ignites that with a stab of laser. The tool, which in past times he used to bore through the armour of Prador war drones whilst in close combat with them, now burns as bright as a sun. Driving the tips of his tentacles again into the ice to brace himself, he thrusts the lance down, thus turning the ice below him into an explosion of CO2 gas. As he bores down, he detects a response back at the dreadnought, and the ice above him explodes into fragments under rail-gun fire, even as he himself drops into the hole he has been making.
Good, thinks Sniper, as rail-gun missiles glance off his shell and punch into the ice all around him. This attack from the dreadnought will prevent whoever controls the ship ahead from seeing what he is doing. Twenty feet down he enters the water-ice layer, and starts turning it liquid whilst still vaporizing the CO2 ice. The pressure from the gas forces the liquid back behind him along the hole he is making, where it refreezes, though with outgas holes worming through it. With any luck the outgassing at the surface will be attributed to hot rail-gun missiles like the one that just bounced off him.
Moving ahead at a slow crawl Sniper makes some calculations based on the steady ablation of the thermic lance, and realizes that its iron will run out before he reaches his destination. He begins employing his lasers, since they are the only energy weapon left to him, and occasionally heaves chunks of ice out of the way with his tentacles. Above, the rumbling attack from the dreadnought ceases and he wonders if the creatures are on their way out again. He keeps tunnelling hard for another ten minutes before some huge detonation above flashes light down through the ice and shakes his subterranean world, sending cracks shooting down all about him. An electromagnetic pulse temporarily disables systems inside him now inadequately protected by his damaged shell, and he realizes that either a CTD or some nuclear device has been deployed. It strikes him as very likely that it was not actually directed at him -more likely that the dreadnought’s occupants were now turning on the other mystery visitor here.
The yards count down, and the thermic lance grows shorter and shorter, finally burning the last of the iron in its ceramic clamp and sputtering out just as Sniper begins to make his way back up to the surface again. Here, however, the ice is thoroughly cracked, possibly as a result of that recent blast, but more likely from the huge monolithic weight currently resting upon it. Sniper pauses to use the cutting function of his one remaining spatulate-tipped tentacle and also brute force to cut and tear out chunks of ice immediately above, before steadily working his way upwards again.
He passes some kind of anchor strut bedded deep down into the ice beside him, then finally breaks through into an open space. He studies a scorched wall of thermal glass all around him, then peers up into a ceramic tube lined with the business end of a force-field containment system, which even now is forcing dust particles away from the walls. Quickly he drags himself sideways, and working frenetically with both tentacles and laser, begins to cut under the thermal glass, having just realized he is sitting right inside the blast ring of a big fusion engine. However, the wall begins to lift–everything above him begins to lift–and gravitic eddies begin flinging about chunks of ice. The ship is lifting on antigravity, but at any moment those fusion engines could kick in. Sniper gropes his way outside the thermal ring, finding indentations and ceramic bracing struts, and pulls himself up, sticking, like a snail going into hibernation, in the gaps available between blast chambers of the fusion-engine array.
Then his world abruptly turns very bright and very hot, as fusion torches ignite all around him.
*
Rail-gun fire hammers into a hardfield with unexpected force, the missiles turning to plasma and the feedback reaching all the way to the source generator. Through internal ship eyes, the Golgoloth observes the generator involved immediately glowing red, overloading thermal converters until they blacken and shrivel. The energy now reverts to kinetic shock, slamming the generator out of its mountings, punching it back through a heavily armoured and insulated wall, and then through a hundred feet of structure beyond. Safeties cut in, sealing the area and evacuating it of air so as to put out the fires.
Locating the active rail-gun, the Golgoloth fires a probing shot with a standard particle cannon. The beam bounces off an angled hardfield projected up from the dreadnought, and plays over the icy plain, churning up a thick cloud of vapour. The Golgoloth next fires a white laser, aimed off-centre to account for hardfield diffraction. It strikes home perfectly on centre on the rail-gun, blows a crater in the top of the dreadnought, then causes further damage somewhere else inside, so that fire spews from several adjacent ports. This tells the ancient hermaphrodite just how substantially things have been altered inside the ship, since standard Prador rail-guns are buffered for feedback. He suspects this is not a mistake the creatures down inside there will make again.
As its vessel rises above the plain and accelerates into the sky, the Golgoloth contemplates, with increasing disquiet, the data relayed by its own ship’s sensors. The creatures within the dreadnought have adapted its technology, actually altered its structure, use field technology as good as the Golgoloth’s own, and against the drone they killed out there have deployed complex weapons combining both the destructive potential of particle cannons and the invasive properties of viral computer warfare. Nothing like this was going on prior to the ship landing; this means they have achieved all this within a matter of hours–which does not bode well for the future.
‘So tell me about these?’ the Golgoloth says, returning its attention to Vrell and Orbus whilst simultaneously initiating a bank of screens and turning them to face towards the two prisoners. All the screens display an image of one of the new creatures currently residing inside the dreadnought.
‘How the fuck should we know?’ asks Orbus. ‘You sent’ em.’
Interesting.
The Human does not seem to know where the creatures come from. However, the dreadnought is big enough to hide anything inside, so Vrell must have somehow kept knowledge of these entities from Orbus. It strikes the Golgoloth as likely that Vrell has conducted experiments using the Spatterjay virus, probably on survivors of the original crew, to produce some variety of super-soldier, which has then turned against him. Is this what Oberon feared? Interesting to speculate, but other problems begin arising.
Green lasers now strike the hermaphrodite’s ship, refracting through its fields just as the Golgoloth has refracted a laser through theirs. The power of the beams is not sufficient to damage armour, but straight away the Golgoloth begins to receive warnings of invasive viruses. This needs to be stopped, now. Operating the ship’s internal robotics, the hermaphrodite’s logistical, ballistic and martial ganglia assemble components into a chemical warhead based on magnesium and selected thermal catalysts, and spit it down
towards the surface. It swerves as it hammers down on the dreadnought and the Golgoloth protects it as best it can with field-tech. It strikes the icy plain and detonates, spewing its burning load across an area of ice a mile across. The reaction is immediate: thick clouds of vapour boil up, and they will shroud the dreadnought totally within minutes. It is a murk even those green lasers should not be able to penetrate.
‘You are notably quiet on this matter, Vrell,’ the Golgoloth observes whilst, with a whole set of programming ganglia, it oversees the destruction of computer viruses generated by those same green lasers. Worrying, because without that growing vapour cloud, the Golgoloth might have lost that battle.
‘You did not send them,’ Vrell states, his body unnaturally still.
Even more interesting.
The Golgoloth has spent centuries dealing with conniving Prador, and immediately recognizes that Vrell is showing confusion, doubt and a degree of fear unrelated to its presence here.
‘I did not send them,’ it affirms.
Oh, what now!
‘Oh, right,’ says Orbus. ‘The buggers just materialized out of thin air?’
The cloud is drawing across the dreadnought, but out of it punches a missile, a very odd-looking missile, shaped like a Pra-dor’s palp-eye. The Golgoloth quickly fires a particle beam at it, but to no effect. The thing is riding up under a domed hardfield umbrella, power being fed into it from underneath by a microwave beam. White laser now, at full intensity, but the power goes nowhere. Golgoloth abruptly shuts the beam weapons off, having realized what is happening. The missile itself is firing the microwave beam. It is feeding power back down to the dreadnought. This means insolent crustaceans down there are using the Golgoloth’s weapons as an energy source. The hermaphrodite launches a single missile which shoots down, under massive acceleration, to detonate against the umbrella. An eye of nuclear fire opens below, which is just a bit more energy than the missile can handle.
As the fire burns and fades, the Golgoloth’s vessel clears atmosphere and heads back towards the fathership. The hermaphrodite begins sending instructions to the vast resources stored within that main ship, making further preparations. It knows this isn’t over, not at all.
‘They are the Guard,’ says Vrell abruptly.
Orbus turns to him. ‘The Guard are all dead and, you know, those didn’t look like armoured Prador to me.’
The Golgoloth considers this for a long moment. Unless Vrell is lying, and managing to do so very convincingly, which might be possible what with him going the same route as Oberon, something very odd is occurring here.
‘How did you kill the Guard?’ it asks.
‘I used a nerve-tissue-eating nanite keyed to the King’s genome,’ Vrell replies. ‘Though as individual Prador they all died, as organisms they did not.’
‘So,’ says the Golgoloth, ‘the virus has resurrected something.’
‘Those ain’t leeches,’ says Orbus.
‘You don’t know.’ Vrell swings his head towards him. ‘I discovered that, at its heart, the Spatterjay virus holds genetic tissue that is alien to us here, and to any life-form on Spatterjay. Vrell gazes back towards the Golgoloth. ‘It seems I am not the only one to have discovered this.’
‘Genetic tissue ain’t intelligent,’ Orbus argues. ‘It doesn’t spontaneously generate a brain full of the knowledge to take over a dreadnought and turn itself into some insect cyborg.’ He gestures towards the screens.
Quite.
Neither Vrell nor Orbus possesses a clear grasp of what is happening, nor does the Golgoloth either. It seems only one being knows the answer here. As the hermaphrodite turns its great splinter of a vessel to reinsert into the father ship, it decides the time has come for another conversation with Oberon.
*
Sadurian pauses in the wide white corridor, tilts her head to listen for a moment, then takes a few paces back and walks over to an alcove set in the wall. Having some knowledge of ancient Earth history, she describes these frequently provided spaces as ‘overtaking lanes’. Their purpose is to offer refuge for junior Prador when their larger brethren come by. Indeed, without them, smaller Prador can end up with shells cracked and limbs missing if they happen to get in the way of their larger kin. Aboard the vessels of normal Prador these refuges are made for third-children to avoid second-children, or for both to avoid the usually belligerent first-children. However, things are rather different here aboard the King’s ship.
Enabling Oberon to produce children was the first of many problems Sadurian overcame during her time here in the Kingdom. Making it possible for those children to grow up was the next and most lengthy task. On Spatterjay, relying on a diet of offworld food and viral inhibitors, the virus-infected children of Humans manage to reach adulthood without too many problems, though there can still be some when they hit adolescence.
However, Prador children, pheromonally controlled by their fathers and heading for permanently inhibited adolescence, grow in violent spurts punctuated by regular shedding of their shells. This process causes the virus’s survival mechanism to switch on at every such occasion. Controlling this requires a cocktail of viral inhibitors, and sometimes even surgical intervention. A small percentage of the children do not survive the process, others need to have their growth halted early. The moment one of the King’s children reaches either first-childhood or some earlier point when the growth spurts need to be halted, it goes into armour. Therefore the usual juvenile hierarchy is somewhat different here. These alcoves are provided for third- and second-children still growing, and therefore unarmoured. Corridor space is given as a priority to all stages of children, just so long as they wear armour. And these are what Sadurian is now avoiding.
The floor vibrates with the approach of an unusual number of Prador to be encountered in this portion of the ship. Sadurian peeks out and along the corridor, to observe a host of over twenty of the Guard thundering towards her. Some of them are small and wear chrome armour like Delf and Yaggs, most wear brassy armour matching that usually worn by the first-children of normal Prador, and a few wear the armour of normal young adults. However, it is debatable as to what stage of development all of these, being Oberon’s children, have reached. Some of the large ones could be either first-children or old virally-developed second-children. The mid-size ones could be at any stage, either under- or overdeveloped. And even the small armoured ones might easily be stunted second-children.
They move at such a pace and in such a chaotic manner that some are clambering over others to proceed. The din they make is incredible, aggravated by the fact that many of them carry weapons and other equipment, and as this riot passes Sadurian’s alcove, showering her with flecks of metal and ceramic, they leave an oily haze of lubricants in the air. She steps out to watch them go, then continues at a saunter towards a destination she is none too anxious to arrive at. But arrive she does.
Diagonally divided, as in most Prador entrances, the twin doors are high and arched but specially fashioned to accommodate something that looks nothing like the general run of Prador kind. Sadurian hesitates before them, laying one hand on the top of her palmtop, where it hooks onto her belt, as if resting it on the butt of a gun. Right then she is thoroughly aware of her vulnerability. Oberon may have set her on a course to discover the data now residing in her palmtop, but that doesn’t mean the King is going to like it. After a moment she walks over to the pit control positioned over her head beside the door, reaches inside and toggles the inner control, feeling something stab into the back of her hand as the pit samples her genetic tissue. She then stands back.
The doors do not open at once, which is usual as the pit control requires approval from Oberon before they do. First comes a grinding clonk inside the walls on either side, then the doors themselves draw ponderously back, allowing a gap no wider than a few feet to give her admittance. She steps into a huge high-ceilinged atrium, pausing for a moment to glance around at the heavy weapons mounted in balcony-like excresce
nces ranged about the walls.
‘Where are you?’ she asks.
After a pause the King replies, his tone sounding distracted. ‘I am in my control centre.’
Sadurian heads for the wide corridor directly ahead, grateful at least that she isn’t to be greeted in the audience chamber, where too many of the terminal audiences are conducted. Along this same corridor she notes some large and dangerous-looking ship-lice feeding on the remains of the King’s last meal–thankfully nothing sentient this time–and she steps warily round them. Periodically these lice need to be exterminated as, becoming infected with the Spatterjay virus, a few undergo transformations that make them even less savoury creatures. Finally she reaches the control centre.
The King is resting his great weight on a series of bars set just a few feet above the floor, his legs drawn up spiderlike above his main body. As Sadurian enters, Oberon keeps his attention focused on the array of hexagonal screens that honeycomb the wall ahead of him, his underarms at rest in a series of pit controls situated directly beneath the bars he rests upon. Sadurian focuses briefly on this monstrous entity before her, then swings her attention to a second monster now displayed on the screens.
The Golgoloth.
Though she knows about this creature, has seen images constructed from hearsay and heard descriptions, and has always been amused by the mythology, Sadurian has never actually seen the thing itself. Its grotesqueness has not been overly elaborated on by the taletellers, yet Sadurian merely gazes at it with analytical curiosity. She has seen worse monstrosities chewing their way out of the King’s birth molluscs, while the one right beside her certainly takes some beating.
‘You have a Human with you, I see, how coincidental,’ says Golgoloth. ‘Why exactly do you have a Human with you?’
