by Neal Asher
Moving out of the control area Skellor marched down the corridor just as the lights came back on. Soon reaching the armoured door into SA1, he punched in the code he had stripped from Cardaff's mind, before pressing his hand against the palm-lock. Now the DNA he had stripped from the man's body enabled him to cause enough of a delay in which to shoot in filaments and subvert the lock's security program. The lock thunked and the door slid open.
"Skellor," gasped Aphran, groping for where she usually kept her QC laser. She didn't trust him — none of them did after he had moved back from the development of chameleonware for them to his own work.
"Glad to see me?" Skellor smiled.
Aphran was a number of paces away from him, but a boy called Danny stood close enough. Skellor recalled all their names since his change. Nothing he had viewed or known previously was now inaccessible to him. Being direct-linked into the quartz-matrix AI had given him perfect recall as well as huge processing capabilities. Being extended by the Jain substructure enabled him to use those capabilities to devastating effect in the real world. He reached out and caught hold of Danny's shoulder. The boy froze — at first in fear, then because Skellor reached inside him and blocked the relevant nerves.
"Now," Skellor said. "You'll be glad to know that you are going to help me to take over this ship." Taking his hand from Danny's shoulder, he transferred it to the Dracocorp aug behind the boy's ear, and cupped the device in his hand. It felt cold to him, but then very little didn't now.
"Take over an ECS dreadnought?" Aphran sneered.
Skellor nodded as the filaments flowed into the aug and sought out the right connections. Once he found them and connected, he loaded the virus. The boy grunted as if he had been punched. Aphran, her face pale with fear, slapped her hand against her own aug, but the virus was transmitting now and she could do nothing. Skellor folded his arms and watched as she lost her balance and went over. All around the others started to fall over as well. The convulsions hit shortly after, and many of them now were showing the whites of their eyes. Three of them started screaming, which confirmed for him his calculation of a seven to thirteen per cent loss. Stepping further into the Security Area he watched those three die, then waited for the others to recover.
"What have you done?" Aphran asked him as she recovered enough to pull herself to her knees. One of her eyes was bloodshot, the other entirely red. Blood was also seeping from her right ear.
"Just ensuring that you do as you're told," he said. "Now, stand up."
The remaining twenty-seven stood as one, then stared at each other in confusion. Aphran was noticeably grimacing.
"Fight it," warned Skellor, "and it will cause you increasing pain until it kills you. Now, come with me."
They followed.
After collecting a meal and a small bottle of wine from his room's dispenser, Cormac sat down to enjoy them while the room's screen displayed an image of Dragon before him. First pouring out a glass of wine, he then peeled back the meal's wrapper and stared for a moment at what might laughingly be described as a roast dinner, then took up a fork and started stabbing at the odd item of food.
Gant's suggestion that they should put a missile into the creature was perfectly understandable, but how perfect a situation they could manufacture instead by having Dragon attack the Masadan laser arrays. Now having accessed the files transmitted by ECS, Cormac had more of a grasp of what was going on there. There was a special neatness about using Dragon, because of the Theocracy's claim that they were building the launcher to protect themselves from this creature. Cormac was not entirely sure what agreements had been broken, but he very much suspected the Masadans of being terrified of Polity subsumption, and of gaining what allies they could — those including both Separatist groups and Dragon. With their arrays being attacked, the Occam Razor would of course have to go and assist the Masadans — after a suitable delay — and then… Then perhaps ECS could learn, very loudly, of the oppression of Masada's surface populace and their wish to become part of the Polity.
"Show me the Masadan solar system," he said.
The screen changed to show him precisely what he had requested: Masada itself orbiting within the so-called green belt which supposedly made it habitable for humans. Not very much further out from it orbited a gas giant named Calypse that must loom large in its sky. Numerous moons surrounded both planet and giant in complex intersecting orbits. All these bodies were numbered, but he doubted very much if the Masadans used such numbers; for them no doubt the moons had names out of some religious work.
"Give me the Masadan names for those moons," he therefore instructed.
The submind he was dealing with was prompt in its reply, though it gave no verbal response. Down the side of the same display, it now showed him each of the numbers with a name and a brief description. Cormac snorted with surprise as he read through it.
Around Masada itself orbited two moons, Thorn and Lok, both indistinguishable from each other in their irregularity of shape and complex orbits. The last of these were sent into different sequences on each close pass of Calypse's moons, of which four were named:
Amok was small and irregular; the severed testicles of some titan spiralling round the gas giant Calypse. Dante was the largest moon, and the one closest to the giant. It was a sulphurous hell with volcanic activity continually encouraged by the wrenching tides of the giant and its close passes of Masada. Torch was a ball of ice with a slight cometary tail when it was at perihelion; this was due to the flaring of complex ices lighting a tail of ice crystals when tidal forces heated the moon. At aphelion the moon cooled enough for the ices to stop flaring. This was a common phenomenon in comets, but not often seen in moons. Flint was cratered, near geologically dead, and furthest out from Calypse, but was hence the giant's moon that passed closest to Masada on the sunward side of its orbit. It was the kind of moon on which the Polity normally established runcible facilities, but here instead was the base for a shipyard — frameworks and buildings stretching out into space from its surface.
This entire system of moons was named — so the screen notes informed Cormac — by their discoverer, one Braemar Padesh. Cormac felt the man must have used some strange random search in their naming process. He was already ruminating on whatever preparations were now being made on Flint, and how costly they might prove in human life, when his door chime sounded. Immediately, in the corner of the screen he was gazing at, a view into the corridor outside flicked up.
"Enter," he said, and the door opened behind him.
"There's something you should know," said Mika, walking quickly into the room and perching herself on the edge of his sofa.
"That is?" he asked, after washing down another mouthful of food with a sip of wine.
"There has been some kind of communication between Scar and Dragon."
"Specifically?"
"Just before the sphere was detected Scar showed… signs of distress, collapsed, then went into convulsions."
"Communication?"
"It seems the most likely explanation. I would conjecture some kind of link."
"Why that conjecture?"
"Because dracomen are tough and as far as I can tell there is very little that can cause them distress; because Dragon is here and it has happened now," she replied.
He studied her for a long moment and wondered if she had bothered to ask Scar what had happened to him.
"Where is Scar right now?" he asked.
"With the Golem — Gant." Cormac noted she had no problem describing Gant as such. "They've got to put your prisoners into cold-sleep. Apparently there are communication problems."
Cormac raised an eyebrow, then turned towards his screen. "AI, can you establish a communications link for me with the dracoman, Scar?"
"Drone present," grated the voice of the submind of Occam's he had been using. Immediately the view on the screen changed to show internal structures of the ship swinging past, and finally it drew to a halt on Scar walking along a gangw
ay beside Gant.
"Scar, does Dragon speak to you?" Cormac asked.
Still moving, Scar lifted his head and gazed at the drone that had to be hovering only a couple of metres in front of him, blinked, showed his teeth, but said nothing. Cormac snorted in annoyance: just like his creator — keeping his cards close to his chest.
"Scar, I want you to return here now. You'll join me in the bridge pod when Tomalon is ready, understood?"
Scar gave a sharp nod and halted. Cormac's last view was of Gant slapping the dracoman once on the shoulder, as Scar turned to head back.
"You hope to learn something," Mika stated, clearly uncomfortable with this near-question.
"I like to keep potential dangers close, where I can watch them, and if necessary, deal with them quickly," Cormac replied, spearing a carrot.
Cormac, Scar and Tomalon stood in the retracted bridge pod and watched as ten grabships approached Dragon. Every now and again Cormac glanced at the dracoman. Only when he was turning back to see the first of the grabships positioning itself against the surface of Dragon did he see some sign of what Mika had reported. Scar flinched — then flinched again as the second ship took position. He bared his teeth as the third moved in.
"You can feel it," Cormac said.
Scar nodded.
"What do you feel?"
"Pain."
"As do we all. I thought you could blank it out."
Silence.
"It's not just the pain, is it?"
"It tries to control me."
"Will it succeed?"
"No. But I will."
Succeed at what?
Cormac was about to voice this question when a change in Scar's expression alerted him to something happening on the screen. He instantly looked up. All the grabships were now in position, most of them out of sight from their point of view, and scalpels of fire were probing the night. Dragon was being pushed towards the Occam Razor.
"How will you secure it to the ship?" he asked Tomalon.
"It will secure itself with its pseudopods."
"Any problems?"
"None that are insurmountable. A portion of its body will remain outside U-field, but it informs me that it intends to position itself so as that portion will be part of the radioactive area. That portion will then be left here — cut away."
How to perform surgery with a U-space field generator.
Dragon grew large in the screen. On other screens were views from the various grabships. Cormac saw forests of pseudopodia reaching towards monolithic devices on the dreadnought's hull. He saw the Occam Razor growing larger, and was able to compare the size of the creature with the size of the ship. A Dragon sphere had twice almost destroyed the Hubris, the ship on which he had travelled to Samarkand. But this sphere came like a supplicant to an iron god.
"Are all the scanners operating?" he asked Tomalon.
"They are all operating. The slightest sign of attempted entry, or the slightest sign of nano-attack, and we will know."
"What can be done with it this close?"
"Many things. We can electrocute it, slice it with particle beams or laser, even detonate a thermo nuke between it and the ship."
"And that won't harm the ship?"
Tomalon came back from his sensor to give Cormac a pitying look. "The hull of this ship is half a metre of Thadium s-con ceramal. There are few energy weapons that can touch it, and it can take a surface blast of up to forty megatons."
Cormac wondered if the people inside could. He also knew of one energy weapon that could touch this ship's hull, and wondered how Tomalon would react to being told that the Occam Razor could be destroyed by sunlight. Glancing at the Captain, it also occurred to him that the man looked very much like a creature of myth that could also be destroyed by sunlight, but reckoned Tomalon would not appreciate the humour, and so Cormac continued to watch the show.
There was no feeling of impact as the Dragon sphere took hold where it could and drew itself against the ship. The view of Dragon that Cormac now watched — from one of the grabships as it released — reminded him of a child hugging the legs of a parent. Soon all the grab-ships had returned to their hold.
"Going under now," said Tomalon.
They went.
8
The gabbleduck was his favourite toy. Once initiated, it just would not stop until it had found all of the toy Brothers he had concealed in the area, then chomped them down, and burped after every one. It made him giggle every time when it did that and, even though she tried to conceal it, he knew his mother was amused as well
"Let's get back to it," she said to him, turning away from the instrumentation that had absorbed her attention for some time now. "Where was I?"
"Babbleguck come home," the boy said without turning from his toy, which had just found a Brother shoved under the edge of the carpet but was having difficulty in pulling the man out by his feet — the victim seemed to have got a grip on the underlay.
"Gabbleduck," the woman corrected, then frowned when she saw her son grin.
"Daddy Duck said, 'Who's been eating from my bowl? and Mummy Duck, finding the soup in her bowl had been supped too, said, 'And who's been eating from mine? Baby Duck, not wanting to be left out, looked in its bowl and said, 'Some bugger's et me soup. "
The picture in the book now showed the room much expanded, the table piled with chewed bones and other detritus from some huge feast. The three gabbleducks were monoliths of alien flesh, bone and muscle that almost filled the rest of the room.
Somebody was talking really fast in a foreign language and she really wished that person would shut up. As she ascended through various levels of awareness, Eldene acknowledged to herself that though she knew what a 'foreign language' was, she had never actually heard one spoken. Obviously it was someone else jabbering away in the orphanage dormitory… no, in the workers' bunkhouse. She'd have to tell them to shut up in a moment. It was quite enough that she was cold and her bed felt slightly damp and lumpy…
As Eldene finally woke up, Fethan whispered in her ear, "Say nothing and make no sudden movements."
Eldene opened her eyes and stared at him. Fethan was crouching right next to her, holding the stinger across his lap. He was clearly visible in the silver-blue light of Amok — one of the larger Braemar moons — and as he glanced at Eldene, his eyes reflected that argent light. With delicate precision, he pointed out into the night.
Carefully Eldene eased herself upright, confused about what had woken her, but wary enough to obey Fethan's instructions. A breeze was evident and for a moment she thought she had been disturbed by the fluting of the grass. Then that other sound repeated, and she froze.
It was just like someone speaking utter nonsense very fast and affirmatively.
"Y'scabbleubber fleeble lobber nabix chope!"
Easing herself higher, Eldene peered in the direction Fethan was pointing. In the moonlight, it did not take her long to discern that something was nosing along the edge of the grasses. All she could see for a moment was a body like a boulder and a long duck bill swinging from side to side, then the creature reared onto its hind legs, opened out its sets of forepaws from the wide triple keel of its chest, and blinked its tiara of greenish eyes as it prepared for its latest oration.
"Y'floggerdabble uber bazz zup zupper," it stated portentously.
"God in Heaven," Eldene whispered, groping for her gun.
Fethan reached out and caught her wrist. "Still and quiet," he hissed. "Gabbleducks are only dangerous when not making any noise."
Gabbleduck!
Eldene had not really believed in them, but now the truth confronted her. She watched as the creature dropped back down and nosed back out into the flute grass, crushing a trail away from them and muttering as it went. When Fethan released her wrist, Eldene let out a suppressed breath and relaxed back against the rock.
"They eat grazers, you said?"
"Yeah, though you'll be unlikely to see any of them, as they run befor
e you can get too close."
Eldene reached for her water bottle, but Fethan tapped her on the shoulder and stood up. "There's something else."
Eldene watched him climb up onto the outcrop, then unwrapped herself from her tarpaulin and followed when he gestured her to do so.
"Lot of activity out there tonight," said Fethan as Eldene joined him, failing to not crush the hemispherical molluscs under her feet no matter how carefully she trod. Fethan pointed over the flute grass, in the direction they had come.
The thing stood on two long thin legs that raised it high above the grass itself. Its body had the shape of a thick bucket seat, its long curved neck extending from what would have been the backrest. Below this neck, Eldene could just make out numerous sets of forearms folded as if in prayer. It had no head as such; the neck just terminated in a long serrated spear of a beak. While she watched, it took one delicate arching step that must have carried it over five metres. She noticed its foot was four-toed and webbed.
"Heroyne?" Eldene guessed.
"Yeah, a small one," Fethan affirmed.
As she watched the heroyne, Eldene felt tears filling her eyes — her recent experiences had been frightening, these creatures were frightening, yet both in their way were wonderful and in utter contrast to her grey toil under the Theocracy.
"Thank you," she said.
Fethan acknowledged this with a nod, and the both of them stood there for some time watching the heroyne as it strode on, occasionally spearing writhing shapes, occasionally shaking its beak at the jabbering of the gabbleduck. The rest of the night Eldene slept only intermittently, woken in turn by the increased fluting from the grasses, the momentary return of the gabbleduck, by nightmares of a heroyne towering over her and tilting its head while it decided if she might be good to eat — and by a tight ball of something in her stomach that she could only describe as happiness.
