Orbus

by Neal Asher

  ‘How long will it take you to reinstate your weapons?’ Vrell asks.

  ‘About forty minutes too long,’ the Golgoloth replies, knocking one drone away, then backing up to insert several underhands into pit controls. There comes an immediate surge that sends Orbus staggering, and causes a wave to splash up against the hardfield behind which the first-children still struggle helplessly.

  ‘So how are you going to survive this, then?’ Vrell asks.

  ‘I am going to throw myself on the King’s mercy,’ the old creature replies. ‘Which is to say, I do not think I am going to survive this.’

  Vrell does not think he will either, though is determined not to give up easily.

  The rail-gun is dead, its power supply cut, and it is a simple matter to find and sever the fibre-optic control system and then, in very short order, to dismantle a great deal of the hardware housed in here. Sniper finds motors which, with just a little alteration, can replace some of his own. He feeds lengths of optic fibre inside himself to be snatched up by his internal toolbox, which uses it to replace damaged optic looms inside him. He is repairing his com gear when the sleet of electromagnetic radiation hits, and he scuttles back out to the mouth of the gun.

  ‘Right,’ says Sniper, much appreciating the scale of the destruction he is witnessing. He watches the show for a little while, steering thrusters hurling up blades of flame all about him as the vessel he currently occupies tries to gain some distance from the blastfront, then he spots the approaching dreadnoughts. ‘Ah fuckit.’ Sniper ducks back inside and begins working again just as hard and fast as he can.

  Two of his minor tentacles he sacrifices, so as to use their working motors to replace irretrievably scrapped ones in his other tentacles. He replaces some of his sensors with ship eyes and other such devices, pillaged from all about him. The moment he puts these online, he feels a surge of nostalgia, for during the war he had often looted available equipment and self-repaired like this. In fact, trying always to be prepared for any eventuality, Sniper had this new drone shell of his deliberately fashioned so that it could adapt to just about any fitting or wiring system. Accurately sliced lengths from the rails of the big gun here now replace the ones in his own, then a section of bar sliced into short lengths supplies at least a little ammunition. Rewinding the coils for his particle cannon will take too long–better to find something inside the ship for that, just as a gravplate from inside can be worked into a suitable replacement for his trashed gravmotors. He is quickly reassembling one of his tentacles when the whole ship shudders and a low thunder echoes from its inner reaches ’ the blastfront has arrived.

  Hot gas gusts in from outside the rail-gun chamber, and a momentary hail of lava spatters through the hole Sniper has cut through the barrel, instantly cooling to stone as it strikes against metallic walls. Using some of his tentacles as shock absorbers, Sniper braces himself and continues working; rapidly rejoining vertebrae motors and replacing nano-chain chromium rings, then finally locking on the pointed sensor tip. Next he fires up the cutting spatula of one of his main tentacles and uses it to slice round a section of the blister’s inner wall, with a couple of lugs at its centre, and employing this as a shield, holds it before him as he re-enters the rail-gun barrel and eases his way up to the hull.

  The shield takes a buffeting from hot gas, and rattles like a tin roof under hail. Far to his right, he can see the glare of a fusion-drive torch throwing out a long red contrail as it also burns surrounding spaceborne matter. Across the hull of the ship pass waves of molten-lava sleet, and every now and again something bigger hits, to spatter and release odd sparkling thermal reactions. However, even as he watches all this, the sleet begins to disperse as a massive shadow falls across him, and Sniper looks up to see the silvered hull of a modern Prador dreadnought blotting out the burning sky, its own drive flame slicing like a white scalpel drawn across blushed skin to release a trail of blood. He watches this vessel for a moment, then attempts to locate the other three–one over there, on the ship horizon, but no others in sight. They are positioned evenly about this ship, but what now, and why so close? Perhaps the environment prevents them using their usual weapons from a distance? No, silly idea.

  Within the hull of the dreadnought, a row of ports opens and the nubs of what might be missiles poke out. Sniper retreats a little way, ready to take cover inside. But, upon seeing that those nubs possess wide flat faces, Sniper realizes he is in little danger from them. After a moment, the first of the row shoots out trailing a black cable. Some yards out, it ignites a series of small thrusters behind its head, to propel itself, and the huge weight of cable behind it, across the gap. The thing thumps down a hundred feet from Sniper, where it flares arc-light as it welds itself to the hull. Only as it hits can its truly enormous scale be assessed. The anchor head lies ten feet across and the cable–some form of braided metal–is two feet thick. A second of these comes hurtling across, then a third. Sniper ducks down again. No response from the vessel he is aboard probably means that not just this rail-gun but all its weapons are offline. Soon, those inside will become Oberon’s captives–unless Sniper can do something about that.

  Carefully controlling his internal toolbox, he makes some final adjustments to his newly repaired com gear, and sends a coded radio broadcast. There is a good chance that all the surrounding crap will block it, but he has to make the effort.

  ‘Hey, Gurnard, can you hear me?’

  After a lengthy delay during which Sniper picks up nothing but static, a surprisingly clear reply comes through. ‘Now, why is it that I’m not surprised to hear from you?’

  ‘Cus in your heart of steel you knew,’ Thirteen interjected, ‘that old drones don’t die. That just happens to everyone else.’

  ‘What is your status?’ Gurnard asks.

  ‘Seriously fucked over, squatting in a rail-gun blister trying to make some repairs.’

  ‘Your timing, is as ever, exquisite, Sniper,’ Gurnard observes. ‘Thirteen, currently residing inside one of my telefactors, has just landed on the surface of the Golgoloth’s ship.’

  ‘The Golgoloth’s ship?’

  A package of information arrives and Sniper opens it in his mind. Right, the Golgoloth. Sniper feels sure he had picked up on something about this during his past, and has the sneaking suspicion the information is part of his missing memories.

  ‘Getting ideas above your station again, Thirteen?’ he asks.

  ‘Hey, I was the last chance for Orbus and Vrell.’

  ‘Right,’ says Sniper.

  ‘Where are you exactly?’ Gurnard enquires. ‘I cannot triangulate in this mess.’

  ‘The rail-gun blister sits directly below one of the dreadnoughts—’ Yet another of the tow lines slams down only a short distance behind Sniper, the hull shuddering, and a wave of magma spatters and arc-fire passing over his position. ‘In fact the blister sits right on a line of towing anchors, one of which missed me by about twenty feet just a second ago.’

  ‘From my point of view, all the lines are attached, so you must be below the one ship that is hidden from me.’ Gurnard pauses, perhaps trying to fit Sniper into whatever crazy plan it is now developing. ‘What are your requirements, Sniper? Perhaps I can get away with sending the other telefactor…’

  ‘I take it the Prador just ignored you?’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘Well, let’s keep it that way.’ Sniper considers for a moment. ‘I take it your telefactor has gravmotors, com lasers and the usual arrays of stepper motors? Does it have limbs as well?’

  ‘Yes, yes, yes–and yes,’ Gurnard adds. ‘I think I see your location now, though not you. Take the starting line of anchors as twelve o’clock, and look to about two.’

  Sniper gazes over in that direction and picks out something making its way across the hull towards him. Only when it turns to circumvent one of the anchors does he take in its shape. The thing is struggling under a load of hardening stone, he sees.

  ‘If your telefac
tor is a big metal bug,’ says Sniper, ‘then I already see it.’

  ‘It is indeed a big metal bug,’ Gurnard replies.

  Sniper settles down to wait until the thing finally drags itself to the edge of the rail-gun port, now moving like some sea creature loaded down with a heavy layer of coral. It pauses for a moment at the edge, then drags itself down, and Sniper feels like a trapdoor spider waiting for its prey.

  ‘Did your plans include getting Thirteen out of this thing?’ he enquires.

  ‘I can use an explosive ejection routine,’ Gurnard replies.

  ‘Well, don’t.’

  Sniper scours away some of the larger chunks of rock before propelling the telefactor through the hole into the rail-gun blister, and then towing it inside. Here he removes even more of the mess, slinging chunks of glutinous magma out into the barrel. A wing case rises, and a concertinaed hatch slides back to reveal a mass of crash foam which, in the next instant, is sliced through from the inside by a laser. Shaking off pieces of foam, Thirteen propels himself out.

  ‘Let’s get to work!’ the little drone says cheerfully, splitting his tail into a two-fingered manipulator.

  Sniper grunts agreement, already spinning the telefactor over and beginning to pull off its legs.

  ‘I want you to release your first-children,’ says Vrell.

  Orbus looks across at Vrell and wonders if the Prador has lost his mind. Pinned up against the wall there is as good a place as any for those buggers, and the only improvement to their situation he can see is if the Golgoloth should move the hardfield tight up to the wall, turning them into organic paintwork.

  ‘That will have the same effect upon me as you detonating that mine,’ the Golgoloth replies. ‘They will turn their weapons on me instantly.’

  ‘Yeah, now why is that?’ Orbus mutters.

  Vrell persists, ‘You will withdraw the force-field far enough to allow them some freedom of movement, but retain it in place between us and them.’

  Very odd, thinks Orbus, perhaps Vrell is remembering his own traumatic upbringing and feels some sympathy for them–a particularly un-Pradorish reaction.

  The force-field abruptly withdraws, dropping the first-children to the floor. Whilst two of the children just cringe back against the wall, the other one shakily moves to the hardfield, presses a claw against it, then raises a gas laser and fires it, but with no target in mind. The beam, just visible in the moisture-laden air, strikes the hardfield and loses coherence. Orbus feels the warmth from it wash across him, but that’s all. The child shuts the beam down.

  ‘Do you want to live?’ Vrell addresses the three of them.

  They make no reply.

  ‘They’re just aggressive fucks, like all Prador,’ remarks Orbus, then glancing at Vrell, ‘present company excepted.’

  ‘Prador are aggressive because to behave otherwise means death,’ says Vrell. ‘Those sufficiently aggressive and motivated get to survive into first-childhood, and in that state can live for some time and even extract some pleasure from life. A very few even get to become adults.’

  Orbus snorts derisively. That seems an overly indulgent explanation of Prador aggression, and pleasure for a Prador first-child usually means stomping on its smaller kin, pain for all enemies of the species, usually followed by them being turned into dinner.

  Vrell continues, ‘But no such options have ever been available to these, have they, Golgoloth?’

  The Golgoloth doesn’t reply.

  ‘We are born, we grow and we are dismantled,’ comes the translation through Vrell’s com gear. It is the first-child with the laser that is speaking, even now backing away from the hardfield to rejoin its fellows. ‘We remain inside our confinement frames, our minds and our bodies constantly exercised to achieve prime growth and health for eventual transplantation.’

  It takes a moment for Orbus to absorb all that, but still he can’t quite make any sense out of it. ‘What’s he on about?’

  Vrell points one claw down at the yellow limbs he tore from the Golgoloth’s body. They float in the water, jerking here and there as ship-lice feed on them. ‘Those legs are not the Golgoloth’s own. This is how it stays alive.’

  Orbus gets it. All those second-children out in the corridor, the ones he has killed and the ones Vrell massacred. Up till then, he had seen only the kind of creatures that tormented him in the past: horrible beasts to be annihilated as quickly as possible. No wonder they came here to kill their parent. He feels suddenly sick at having been there to stop them.

  ‘Confinement frames?’ he asks.

  ‘It has taken me a moment to see past the myths to register what is evident before me,’ says Vrell. ‘I now understand. The Golgoloth is a hermaphrodite and both father and mother to its children. Being such a close genetic match to it, they provide a ready source of transplant replacements to keep it alive. Obviously the Golgoloth will not want any creatures running free which likely possess its own innate intelligence, and who it uses for such an essential purpose.’

  ‘So they spend their lives locked up in frames, being regularly harvested for their parts?’

  ‘Yes.’

  Orbus considers putting a few explosive bullets straight into the creature up there on the platform, but since Vrell himself hasn’t yet chosen that option, there has to be a reason. Most of his life he thought there could be nothing worse than Prador, yet here is the Golgoloth, which is something else again. He swears to himself that, once this creature ceases to be essential to his own and Vrell’s survival, he will not hesitate on the trigger.

  ‘Do you want to live?’ Vrell asks again.

  ‘We want to live,’ the first-child agrees.

  ‘This is the situation…’ Vrell explains it in short staccato sentences finishing with, ‘The Jain will kill you, Oberon and any other Prador will automatically kill you, your parent here will put you back in your frames and harvest you. Only with me do you have a chance to live.’

  The first-child abruptly turns away, to go into a huddle with its two fellows.

  ‘Do they really understand?’ Orbus asks.

  ‘The Golgoloth kept their minds functioning, and those minds are like its own. They understand.’

  The first-child turns back. ‘What do you want of us?’

  ‘I want you to gather all your fellows,’ says Vrell. ‘Your parent will then provide you with better weapons, which it almost certainly has aboard. Then I expect you to be prepared to fight, and probably die.’

  ‘Agreed,’ says the first-child.

  ‘What is you name?’ asks Vrell.

  ‘I have none.’

  ‘I will call you Geth,’ says Vrell, then turns away. ‘Golgoloth, drop the hardfield.’

  The telefactor lies in pieces all about them, and Sniper feels so so much better, as if he is surrounded by the remains of a hearty meal. He and Thirteen have installed a gravmotor within his shell, his laser and hardfield generators are up and running, one of his particle cannons too, and even provided with the necessary partic-ulate matter made by grinding up the telefactor’s wing cases, while all his tentacles bend and twist in their usual satisfyingly squirmy manner. All he needs now, to really get up to spec, is a nice supply of programmable missiles and mines, but that is perhaps too much to ask from the hardware currently available.

  ‘Okay,’ he says, ‘let’s see what these fuckers are doing.’

  Thirteen follows him into the rail-gun barrel, and on out to the ship’s hull.

  Space beyond is no longer filled with flame and magma sleet, but has by no means returned to black vacuum. The Golgoloth’s vessel sits in a cloud that is the colour of pink grapefruit juice, threaded with veins of deep red. As Sniper surveys his surroundings, he observes one of the big anchors detaching and slowly winding back into the dreadnought hovering above. Others have already detached, their cables black scribbles in the pink sky, clouds of rock-shards spreading from where they are being wound into their ports and some mechanism strips away magma hardened
on them. Another detaches and then another. Soon all the cables nearby retract, and the dreadnought spits out a long white fusion flame that scores bloody smoke from the surrounding firmament as it begins to move off, finally revealing the King’s ship a thousand kilometres beyond it, but rapidly expanding in dimensions as they draw closer to it.

  A further force wrenches at the Golgoloth’s ship, nearly unseating Sniper from the throat of the rail-gun, and sending Thirteen tumbling away. Sniper spears out a tentacle that snags the little drone, dragging him back.

  ‘What the fuck?’ Thirteen wonders.

  ‘The other achors are still attached,’ Sniper replies. ‘The other dreadnoughts are slowing us–I reckon we’re on the docking side.’

  ‘That a good place to be?’

  ‘I dunno.’ Sniper focuses on the King’s ship, upping magnification. He can now see three massive docking tunnels extruding from a point midway down its fifty-mile height. They are tubular, with blocky structures distributed some half a mile back from their outermost tips, and definitely aren’t the universal kind that finds the correct airlocks and adapts to them. The tips are sharp and barbed, so the docking procedure is going to be a violent one. Also, a swarm of familiar objects clusters in the area, like flies over shit: King’s Guard, thousands of them.

  ‘C’mon.’ Sniper withdraws down the rail-gun barrel and back inside the blister, turning his attention to where he has already cut away part of the inner wall. Spearing out his main tentacles, both cutters now running, he shears through a layer of foamed porcelain, quickly shoving blocks of it behind him, exposing an s-con cooling grid and numerous pipes and fibre optics lining the main outer armour of the blister, then exposing a cap beside the loading mechanism at the back of the barrel itself, through which all of these connections are admitted.

  ‘I could go through the door,’ Thirteen observes, ‘and take out the eyes.’

  Sniper glances round at the little drone, who is pointing one division of his tail at a maintenance hatch underneath the rear of the particle-cannon barrel. The thing is quite small, so obviously isn’t for Prador use but for little robots–like Thirteen.