by Neal Asher
‘Not a lot we can do really, if it isn’t.’
Oberon focuses his attention on the King, who now looks in a bad way, like some giant bug suffering a dose of Raid. The big mutant is shivering, his dripping fluids now turned pale jade as if tinged with Prador blood. He jerks sharply, snapping a hose from the pillar, jerks again and, with a shower of sparks, tears out a power cable. Sadurian gestures the two third-children towards the pillar, and they edge forward to busily set about reattaching both hose and cable.
‘Oberon, tell me what to do now,’ she asks him.
The King’s massive head swings towards her and stops still, mandibles slowly opening and closing idiotically. Rods of drool dangle from them, and his inner mandibles clatter against each other briefly, spilling drool to the floor.
‘Essential to eliminate competition,’ announces the King, the translation still reaching Orbus through Thirteen. ‘Racial survival imperative…subordinate to survival of squad. Viable alien superfluous.’
The King tilts his head slightly, then lowers his front end while raising his rear, his pose now resembling that of a scorpion or a devil’s coach-horse beetle. Suddenly, his tail smacks into the side of the cylinder, hard enough to nearly fold it in half, before sending it end over end, scattering the two third-children as it hurtles across the room to crash into the wall. The two chrome-armoured children struggle back to their feet just as he emits a horrible whistling shriek, his main mandibles opening up to a span of ten feet. Then his head snaps down on one of them, and mandibles clash about its carapace as he wrenches it from the floor, pulls his main claws from the pit controls and, despite the third-child’s armour, tears away its legs all down one side and then tosses it away. Weighing half a ton or more, the injured creature arcs for twenty feet before slamming hard into another wall, actually penetrating its surface and becoming jammed there.
‘Right,’ says Vrell, again through Thirteen, ‘my friend in here just offlined his pit controls. We go now.’
The second third-child manages to get ten feet before the King comes down on it like a hammer, flattening it to the floor. His claws must be tipped with something incredibly hard and strong, for they drive down straight through the armour and body of the smaller Prador, the sheer impact denting the creature into the floor. Green ichor wells, then fountains up as the King extracts his claw. Sadurian is already running, but Orbus does not give much for her chances until the King’s attention suddenly swings towards Vrell.
‘I require access,’ says the King–only Orbus knows that the thing standing there is no longer Oberon, has in fact ceased to be him for some minutes now. As the haze about them fades, he gazes at the imprisoning posts around himself and the Golgoloth’s children, then immediately breaks into a run, heading to his right, towards where a diagonally divided panel is opening. The Golgo-loth’s children scramble away too, scattering throughout the room, heading for various control stations where they immediately begin digging in with their claws and distorted underhands to tear out components. The King leaps towards Vrell, blindingly fast, but Vrell leaps too. He shoots up from his controls and, with one claw crashing down, propels himself sideways. The King’s claw just misses impaling him to the floor. One side of Vrell’s carapace cannons into a wall, leaving a grooved dent, and he throws himself along the base of it, but the King ignores him as he sinks down over Vrell’s pit controls.
Orbus is at the weapons cache, where he can see Prador weapons piled up, but not his own multigun. It must be somewhere underneath. Grabbing tangled equipment, he throws it hard behind him, towards where the Golgoloth’s children are doing their ruinous work. Fire and smoke suddenly flare. Orbus glances round to witness the King shrieking and peeling himself up painfully, the controls under him sabotaged and burning. Multi-gun, there! Orbus grabs the barrel just as a rail-gun thrums. The King is moving fast, feet actually tearing up floor metal, and missiles ricocheting off shell that must be as hard as ceramal. We’re going to die, thinks Orbus, no way I can punch through that carapace. Powering up the multigun, he sees disappointing figures on its display–ten shots only–ten sprine bullets for the purpose of regicide.
One of the Golgoloth’s first-children is wrenched aloft, its rail-gun firing into the ceiling, but only as long as its bubbling shriek as the King’s mandibles scissor the creature in half. Two of the smaller third-children are now scooped up in his claws, then thumped together to spatter like overripe fruit.
Just fucking concentrate.
Orbus goes down on one knee, takes a long slow breath, steadies the butt of the multigun against his shoulder as he aims. He lets out the breath just as a dark shape slams down on the King’s back. Vrell is being foolishly brave. No, he’s tearing away some of the machinery interlaced through that adamantine carapace, trying to make a gap. The King’s head turns a full hundred and eighty degrees. One scissoring snip and Vrell’s claw goes tumbling through the air, though lacking the green ichor already spattered about the floor by the Golgoloth’s dying children.
Again Orbus steadies his weapon. Seemingly driven by hydraulic motors, a long claw closes on the edge of Vrell’s carapace, cutting and crushing into it as if into pie crust. Vrell gives a shriek, but is victorious as, in his remaining claw, he waves some long silvery mechanism trailing dripping optics and tubes. Vrell is now slammed down on the floor, onto his back, that same long claw wrenching itself along his underside, gutting him. There, in the King’s back, a hole from which trails vinelike electronics, leaking pale green. Orbus fires, just three shots, but then the King turns to scythe a second-child in half while snatching up another, bursting it. The detonations along the King’s back are not even close. Powdery red in the air. And now the hole is facing away from Orbus.
‘Just turn a little, you fucker,’ Orbus whispers.
Vrell knows. Even open like a half-eaten trifle, he manages to right himself, drag himselfacross, snare one of the King’s feet with his remaining claw. The King whirls, flipping Vrell upright, impales him on a claw and then discards him. Vrell bounces away trailing a confetti of internal organs. Geth fires a rail-gun at the King to draw attention to himself, just enough to turn the King around further. Three more shots towards that same hole. Two exterior detonations, but very close. Did the third actually go in? Orbus wonders if he will ever find out as the King, ignoring Geth and perhaps fully recognizing the danger the Old Captain represents, now hurtles towards him. Orbus knocks the setting of his weapon down to two shots, fires at midnight eyes just as the King slams into him like a monorail. Orbus adds his own impetus to the impact by throwing himself back into the weapons cache. Mandibles close on one half of the door, tear it out and skim it away, then they crash inside to close about the Sea Captain’s body, dragging him out like a whelk from its shell, and raising him up before those inner glassy scythes over the glistening ridged tunnel of the King’s mouth.
I don’t think I can survive this, Orbus thinks, swinging his multigun round and firing his two remaining shots straight down the King’s gullet.
The gathering darkness about the thing ahead is again reaching its optimum, and within minutes either one of those ships behind, including the King’s ship, is going to die, or else the blast will be coming the Golgoloth’s way. The ancient hermaphrodite opens new channels that key in more closely to its scattered ganglia, thus becoming them, becoming the ship itself. Through the U-space eyes of that ganglion from a first-child dismantled a hundred years in the past, it peers into the chaos of underspace: a five-dimensional ocean under storm, brain-twisting angles of non-matter revolving into existence then vanishing, waves mounting and rolling into each other, a maelstrom centred over that distant Jain vessel, where cords of the actual underlying structure of the universe suck down energy.
How can they win against this? How can they destroy something that manages to so ably bend the laws of physics?
The Golgoloth does not allow these questions to remain within its distributed mind for long. It simultaneously observes,
through sensors both internal and external and across most of the emitted spectrum, the horde of Jain soldiers it rapidly approaches, and which is rapidly approaching it. Time to focus their attention. Almost as if they are its own limbs, the Golgoloth reaches out with hardfields and closes them like claws. It crushes Jain down to incredibly dense spheres a mere ten inches across, and then releases them, the spheres coming apart, materials recombined, incredibly hot, nothing of what they once formed remaining.
Next the ancient Prador stabs out with its white lasers, like the youngest type of Prador spearing small fish with the tips of its sharp legs. Hardfields scale space ahead, deflecting some of the beams, sometimes burning out, the Jain bodies projecting them raised to sun-surface temperatures and just evaporating into surrounding vacuum.
The intense beam of a particle cannon stabs back, powered via one of three new relays out there. The beam ploughs across the hull of the Golgoloth’s vessel, its impact site one long explosion that cuts a trench fifty feet deep. White lasers reply, only again the Jain throw up hardfield defences that turn space refractive, the beams curving away on new courses, sometimes even turning at sharp angles.
The Golgoloth now tries its own particle cannons, probing here and there, again trying to predict each new hardfield configuration, whilst simultaneously opening five ports in its vessel’s hull and bringing the noses of its U-jump missiles to the surface. Within the five missile-ganglia it rests the touch of its mind, feather-light.
Behind come the King’s dreadnoughts and, following their attack in, the spaceborne Guard are struggling to keep up. The viruses and the Jain worms now arrive, a panoply of computer organisms invading through sensors, through the exposed gas locked throats and crystal eyes of lasers, through transmission and reception dishes. Soon the Golgoloth is fighting internal battles, isolating what it can again, but otherwise shutting down and burning out its own software and hardware, and killing parts of its mind. One of the five missiles is invaded, and the Golgoloth instantly fires it, through normal sensors watching it depart the ship and vanish from realspace. In U-space the missile is rolled up in some multi-dimensional whirlpool, then splashes back out into the real, turning inside-out from front to back, a fraction of a second before its exposed antimatter touches the obverse and turns all into a massive detonation.
The ship passes through intense EM, and that is a relief almost, for briefly all the viral attacks cease. The Jain now lie directly ahead, and from behind the Golgoloth’s ship the dreadnoughts fire into the host a seemingly liquid stream of rail-gun fire, shoals of missiles, and both visible and invisible beams. The Golgoloth, taking a lesson from Sniper, now concentrates hardfields ahead, interweaving them in a single configuration, cone-like, just like the field the war drone used–one the Golgoloth suspects was designed to allow it to travel quickly under water. Jain soldiers rattle off this defence like hail off a greenhouse, but they are nothing compared to what is coming. Ahead, in U-space, the cords draw in, and then, in the real, that ship-killer plaited beam screws out, heading straight towards the Golgoloth.
The thing hits the hardfields, rips them sideways as if flicking scales off a fish. Within the ship generators explode, twist out of their mountings, some even crashing through internal structure with the force of rail-gun missiles. The Golgoloth rails out its own U-jump missiles, directly towards the impact site on its hardfields. In underspace vision the beam appears clearly, a stretched-out spiral burrowing up out of chaos, and wherever it tears into fields, its end resembles a leech’s mouth sliding back and forth against glass. The Golgoloth drops the four missiles out of the real, and with its mind hard-linked into them all, so that they are now parts of itself speeding away, it alters and touches and twists the function of each U-space drive, making nanosecond calculations upon the current position of the beam’s end-point.
Two missiles bounce back up into the real, their subsequent detonations wiping out the rest of the Golgoloth’s defence. As the plaited beam punches forwards, it scoops up the last remaining two like an eel snapping up grubs, and through their eyes the Golgoloth finds itself speeding down a curving well towards something utterly terrifying. In the real, the beam strikes the Gol-goloth’s ship and begins tearing up its hull, boring downwards. The missiles reach their destination, contact blurring away as they then choose–as they always choose so readily–to end it all. A hundred feet down into the Golgoloth’s ship the beam tears, then just ceases. A microsecond later, a bright blue star flashes into existence at the centre of the ship of bones, growing in intensity and eventually occluding it. Next a blastfront spreads, tearing the strange vessel to shreds, converting material to fire and rolling out a doughnut-shaped cloud of luminous gas. In U-space the effect is visible too, as the source point of the USER maelstrom becomes a massive sphere rapidly collapsing in on itself.
The Golgoloth has killed the Jain ship. But now, as chaotic battle continues all about it, the old creature wonders if this will be a victory it can survive.
Shuddering to an abrupt halt, the King locks his mandibles tight enough around the Old Captain–perhaps tight enough to shear any normal Human in half. But with the Spatterjay virus so long occupying Orbus’s body, Vrell knows the man will be as difficult to sever as something constructed of iron and seasoned wood. Perhaps one day Vrell himself will be so tough, but only if he can survive this.
Three shots–one through the side of the King’s body, and now two more straight down his throat. How long before the sprine will take effect?
The King abruptly jerks his head sideways, sending Orbus flying in a flat trajectory across the room, where he hits one wall hard, making a sound like a mollusc shell giving out. Orbus drops soggily from a deep dent in the wall, about which his rarely seen blood is spattered. Prone on the floor, little jerky movements in his body–where there should be no movement at all–betray his tenacious hold on life. Just like Vrell’s hold.
Now the King begins shuddering, then suddenly he raises his head to emit an ululating shriek. He squats low, then hurls himself up with the force of a shuttle launching, his back slamming into the ceiling, then he drops hard, coming down with a crash, legs splayed momentarily in disarray. Then he is running, careering at high speed in a straight line, feet tearing up metal, though sometimes his gait slips out of control. Some of the Golgoloth’s children scatter from his path, but he pays them no heed, just cannoning head-first into the far wall. There he just stands, mandibles buried deep in its surface, tail thrashing like an angry cat’s.
And next he comes apart.
The King drips fluids now turned black from every joint, and then one of his back legs detaches from its carapace socket and topples like a felled tree. As it hits the floor, it breaks up into its individual segments, and what were once internal tissues like muscle, veins and tendons flow out in a black syrupy mess. His tail, at first flicking smoothly, now begins to lock up, this paralysing effect spreading from base to tip, and when that appendage finally grows still, the whole of it falls to pieces. Another leg goes next, followed by a primary claw, then his whole body just comes apart and collapses like an immense stone arch with its keystone removed. The head holds up for a little while longer, then it too drops like a boulder, leaving the sawtooth tips of his mandibles embedded in the wall.
I cannot begin to know how hard you fought, thinks Vrell.
Certainly the King fought against the Jain soldier he had resurrected inside himself, but he knew he might not win and so made careful preparations: severing his connection to the fusion devices inside the Guards’ armour; severing his connection to the destructs of his own ships; placing the Old Captain’s multigun here, ready to hand, loaded with sprine bullets; allowing Vrell access to this ship’s computer systems; and very likely allowing Sadurian’s AI free rein within them in the first place. Of course, the King did not make it easy for himself to be killed. Vrell can now see that Oberon had expected to either defeat the Jain soldier quickly or fight a long losing battle against it–a lo
sing battle that would give the rest of them time to get to the multigun.
The King has knowingly made the ultimate sacrifice for the Prador race, and Vrell wonders if he could do the same.
I should be dead, he reflects. It does not seem right to be so severely damaged and still functional, or even regaining function. Already, with painful wrenching sensations, his sliced-open torso is closing. Not knowing what else to do, he reaches underneath and pushes torn and ruptured organs back inside himself, whereupon the speed at which his body is closing up increases. Unsteadily, he heaves himself to his feet.
‘We succeeded,’ says Geth, now standing with his remaining kin gathered behind him. They all gaze at the scattered fragments of the King, which begin to emit an oily steam–the result of mechanisms woven through his body shorting their power supplies.
‘We succeeded only because he allowed us to succeed,’ says Vrell, walking with great care over to Orbus, who is still lying flat on his back.
The woman, Sadurian, kneels beside him, some sort of medical box ready to hand. The drone, Thirteen, hovers above this.
‘What can I do?’ she asks.
Orbus makes only some mumbling liquid sound in reply.
‘The direct translation of his reply,’ explains Thirteen, ‘is The fucker broke every bone in my body.’
‘A reply that is not particularly helpful,’ Sadurian observes.
‘There is nothing you can do for him now,’ interjects Vrell, ‘except to make sure he is provided with a great deal of nutrient totally uninfected by the virus.’
Vrell is thinking much the same about himself, and hungrily eyeing the scattered remnants of those of the Golgoloth’s children the King dismembered earlier. However, though this is not a usual Prador reaction, he feels it would seem ungrateful to start eating his one-time allies. He swings away to inspect the room, searching for still-usable pit controls. The children certainly did a thorough job of destruction, but over there in the far corner lies one access point that seems only partially trashed. Vrell heads over, inserts one claw and whichever of his underhands do not hang limp and dead underneath him. The unit’s mask rises into position and he inserts his head, immediately accessing the ship’s three-dimensional vir-tuality.
