1
It’s well known that the spatterjay virus optimizes its host for their mutual survival, sometimes causing weird transformations in the said host when this survival is threatened. However, there is still much debate about the extent to which it can alter the structures of the human brain. With some Hoopers, as the residents of Spatterjay are called, long-term viral infection can result in the brain becoming hard-wired so that those affected become incapable of learning anything new or reacting usefully to any situations arising outside of their normal day-to-day lives. Yet it has also been shown that in some other Hoopers the virus is perpetually tampering with the brain, actually connecting to cerebral structure, and that information is exchanged between mind and virus. Some of this information, it would seem, cannot arise simply from that mind’s own experiences, and scientists speculate that, as well as storing an eclectic collection absorbed from the genomes of the creatures it has been hosted by, the virus is capable of storing mental information too. Those who enjoy this close connection between mind and virus also seem to possess greater mental capacity, remembering a great deal of what they have read and experienced. This should not be surprising of course, since one of the greatest instruments for optimizing the survival of a Human is that organ lying between his ears.
– From HOW IT IS by Gordon
A varied collection of interesting crates, boxes, storage cylinders and oddly shaped objects wrapped in crash-foam is strapped securely in the quadrate cargo scaffold of the enormous zero-gravity hold space of the Gurnard. Numerous aisles run through this scaffold to provide access for the autohandlers, which are machines like giant grey earwigs presently crouching in recesses in the distant walls, their job completed some days ago. Amidst the latest cargo to be loaded rests a big plasmel crate, and now, emitting a high whine, a silvery blade stabs through the surface from inside it and cuts round, splitting the crate in two. Then, spreading metal tentacles, the object within the crate pushes the two halves of it apart.
The war drone Sniper blinks open his crystal orange eyes and peers about himself in the darkness, which isn’t actually darkness to him since his sensorium spans so much wider than the limited Human spectrum.
‘Do you think they’ll find out?’ his small companion enquires, as it drifts from the depths of the crate alongside him.
‘I don’t reckon so,’ says Sniper. ‘By the time they realize we’re not still hiding in a sea cave, we’ll be well away.’
While trapped in a static position as the Warden of Spatterjay for ten years, Sniper watched that same world changing, and guessed it would soon no longer be such an exciting place for him. There he obtained this new drone shell for himself – a gleaming nautilus three metres in diameter, constructed of highly advanced ceramal and diamond-fibre composite, which in turn was plated with nanochain chromium, and contained enough lethal weaponry to obliterate a city, or two – and considered heading elsewhere. However, shortly after loading his mind, essentially himself, into this shell, events unfolding upon that world – with the Prador Vrell trying to escape, and the Prador Vrost arriving in a massive space dreadnought to stop him – once again drew him in and allowed him to exercise his special talent for mayhem. But that’s all over and the whole world now seems set to become more civilized; perhaps too civilized for a drone who specializes in blowing things up.
‘It’s not fair,’ says his companion.
Sniper peers at Thirteen, an erstwhile submind of the previous Spatterjay Warden, which now occupies a drone body in the form of an iron seahorse with topaz eyes. The little drone wraps his tail round one of the cargo-frame struts as he studies their surroundings.
‘No such thing as fair,’ Sniper snorts.
Despite his heroic efforts in fighting for the Polity, Sniper is considered a bit of a loose cannon, or rather several loose cannons rolled into one. In fact, many of the Polity’s controlling AIs consider him plain dangerous or, him having obtained that very high-spec drone body, even positively lethal. At the end of the conflict involving Vrell and Vrost, Sniper rescued a Prador war drone containing a downloaded copy of Vrell’s mind. The AIs hadn’t liked that either and, though Sniper made some alterations causing the Prador drone to switch loyalties to the Polity, they nevertheless confiscated it for ‘further study’. Next came the order for Sniper himself to report for ‘assessment’, at which point this seven-hundred-year-old veteran of the Prador/Human war, and numerous subsequent conflicts, decided it really was time to be elsewhere.
‘But you’re a free drone,’ Thirteen complains, ‘just like me.’
Sniper ponders the old and much-abused concept of ‘freedom’. Yes, he is indeed as free as any other citizen in the Polity, and is also given a great deal of freedom of action when it comes to dealing with its enemies. However, he is now very powerful and dangerous and if, just for one moment, the controlling AIs feel his mind is too unstable, or that in some other way he might become a threat, they will be down on him like a falling space station. He doesn’t really understand what it is about his recent behaviour that has impelled them to order him in for assessment, but he has no intention of waiting around to find out.
‘Let’s take a look around in here.’ Sniper pushes himself out from between the two halves of the crate to enter the nearest aisle. Propelling himself forward, and steadying his course with deft touches of his tentacles against the surrounding framework, he begins scanning. Thirteen pushes off after him, lowering his tail down onto the bigger drone’s shell and sticking there.
The cargo immediately around them was loaded along with their own crate and consists of numerous items acquired on Spatterjay: some big crates of whelk shells; one small crate of wartime artefacts including slave collars, a couple of spider thralls, a complete Human skeleton with something metallic in its skull from which metal threads run down the spine – a full thrall unit, in fact – and a couple of very old pulse-rifles. Sniper recognizes all these illegal exports instantly, because at one time he himself turned a tidy profit by finding and selling such artefacts. Also here rest three cylinders with enviro-control consoles affixed to the exterior. Scanning inside, Sniper observes slow writhing movement and recognizes that each one contains a tangled mass of Spatterjay leeches.
‘I wonder who wants them,’ wonders Thirteen.
‘Always a market for immortality,’ Sniper replies.
‘Yeah, but who wants that kind?’
Though the bite of a Spatterjay leech infects its victim with the primary virus of that world, the longevity it imparts is a mixed blessing. Reinfection at constant intervals is necessary and, if the one infected is injured or starved, the virus can take over completely and turn him into something no longer really Human. This might once have been considered a small price to pay for what amounts to virtual immortality, but with present Polity technologies making it possible for anyone to extend his lifespan indefinitely, it is one most are no longer prepared to pay. More likely those buying a bite from these leeches are attracted more by the idea of turning into something like an Old Captain: a nearly unkillable superhuman capable of bending iron bars with his eyelids.
Next along from these containers is one enormous item secured in another longer and wider cylinder. Scanning inside this, Sniper identifies a creature like a whale with mandibles, its body temperature reduced to just a little above zero, while being held in stasis by chemical and electrical means. Someone, somewhere, must actually want a living ocean heirodont? Maybe that same someone is putting together an aquarium based on the sea-life of Spatterjay, and this and the leeches are intended for that. Such an aquarium would clearly have huge entertainment value, but its owner would have to be damned careful when cleaning the glass.
Beyond the Spatterjay cargo are packed other odd and disparate cargoes. One area contains tons of wood that Sniper tentatively identifies as English oak, boxes full of jars containing either black or green olives in brine, living oysters held in stasis, a hydrogen-powered trial bike, a mass of limestone blocks, some gel-sealed barrels of whisky, living prawn eggs also held in stasis, and much more besides. He surmises that some of these cargoes have been stored here for a very long time while awaiting an opportune moment to be sold – a moment that has never come so far and, in some cases, probably never will.
‘Oops,’ says Thirteen abruptly.
Sniper notes movement from the autohandlers and now one of them peels itself out of its wall recess, and impelled by gas jets, begins drifting up the aisle towards them. The big war drone trains a high-powered laser on it, but otherwise does not react, since he has been expecting something like this. The handler does indeed look like an earwig, albeit one ten feet long, its rear pincers jointed and overly large in proportion to its body, its legs similarly longer and ending in two-fingered grabs, and its head looking more like that of a huge fly. As it draws near, it squirts its gas jets to bring itself to a halt, then reaches out with one of those two-fingered grabs to grasp a nearby stanchion of the cargo framework.
‘I only recollect one time in the past when stowaways were found aboard,’ it declares. ‘The Captain at that time wanted to eject them out of an airlock and, though I thoroughly agreed with his feelings on the matter, I could not allow it. The same Captain went off for mental adjustment shortly after that, his penchant for black mem-loads having caught up with him.’
‘We’re not stowaways,’ Sniper announces. ‘We’re cargo – check your manifest.’
‘Oh yes,’ says the Gurnard’s AI. ‘Crate SPJ15 containing wartime data in secure storage and also a seahorse sculpture. Very amusing.’
‘Well,’ says Sniper, ‘my mind is that same data, and my body the secure storage, and Thirteen here is a fine piece of artwork.’
‘Why, thank you, Sniper,’ says Thirteen.
Gurnard ignores this exchange. ‘Whilst you remained in your crate, I could overlook your presence aboard, but you have now made the transition from cargo to stowaways, or even passengers. If you return to your crate and seal it up, I will forget I ever saw you. If you remain outside of your crate, there will be a further charge to pay.’
‘How much?’ Sniper and Thirteen had been ensconced in that crate for many days and, though he could easily scan far beyond it, he had reached his boredom threshold.
‘Since you do not require food, or air to breathe, the charge will be no more than a third more than the cargo payment,’ the ship AI decides, ‘though your presence aboard would have to be registered at any Polity port we should arrive at.’
‘I see,’ says Sniper, wondering what the ‘however’ is going to be. Gurnard has to be fully aware that Sniper and Thirteen are fugitives from Earth Central Security.
‘However,’ says Gurnard, predictably, ‘should you sign on as members of the crew, I need provide no further details than that two free drones are aboard.’
Sniper is sure there is no rule about listing passengers, because their presence would be registered the moment they left the ship at any Polity destination, so why does the AI of this ship want to sign them up?
‘And, to answer the question you are doubtless asking yourself,’ Gurnard continues, ‘after a brief visit to Aerial Space Station, your presence aboard might be very helpful, for we then head off for some less salubrious destinations in a particularly notorious sector of space.’
‘That being?’
When the AI tells them where the Gurnard will be going, Sniper joyfully spins on the spot like a coin.
‘Sign us up,’ he says.
Before becoming a sea captain himself, Orbus spent a century of wandering and crewing on the sailing ships of others, followed by a decades-long period of suicidal wildness, before he finally built his own sailing ship. He vaguely recollects that, at about that same time, he experienced optimism and joy when, knowing he was practically immortal, he decided to properly relish his existence. He is not sure when things then started to fall out of shape, though he knew the cause lay further back in his past, in his long and brutal journey to the world of Spatterjay, from which even now he remembers the first taste of raw Human flesh.
Centuries of violence ensued, during which – aboard two separate ships, for the first was burned down to the keel while in port – he gathered about him a crew amenable to his personal tastes. A sadist ship captain in charge of a crew of masochists – really, who could object to that? But often it went too far, and some innocents were hurt because they joined the crew without really knowing what kind of ship they were joining.
One of Orbus’s longest-serving crewmen stands beside him now, not this time aboard a wooden sailing ship upon that savage ocean, but aboard the old space-hauler the Gurnard, travelling deep in vacuum. Currently they occupy the bridge, which, with its faux-Victorian decoration and high-tech controls cleverly concealed in polished brass, cast iron and wood, might well have been designed by Jules Verne himself.
‘I don’t like your name,’ says Orbus abruptly, a bitter worm coming back to nibble at his mind.
His crewman, who has answered to the name Drooble for longer than most people have lived, squints up at him while trying to think of something provocative to say in response. He finally gives up and asks, ‘What’s wrong with it?’
Orbus represses a surge of irritation because he isn’t even sure why he spoke. Being less than candid, he replies, ‘It sounds like a blend between dribble and droopy, or trouble and . . . it’s a silly name.’ Then his feeling of irritation is back, redoubled, because of the utter pointlessness of this exchange.
Drooble’s expression screws up with the effort of setting his thoughts along unfamiliar courses, so all he manages is, ‘Well, what about the name Orbus?’
‘Nothing wrong with that name,’ says Orbus, trying to quell the familiar and horribly attractive anger growing inside him. ‘What’s your first name?’
The crewman again squints in deep and painful thought, then tentatively replies, ‘Iannus . . . I think.’
‘Then that is the name I will use to address you from now on.’ There, conversation over, no need to get annoyed. Orbus takes several long steadying breaths and tries to shunt it all aside.
The vessel they occupy, along with its reserved and spooky artificial intelligence, is four miles long and precisely the shape that its name implies: it is a spaceship fashioned in the shape of a bottom-dwelling fish, steely-grey in colour, like some chunk of rococo decoration inadvertently snapped off a cast-iron gate. The two men, these two tough, durable and incredibly long-lived Hoopers, gaze out upon blackness through the chainglass window forming one fish eye. Orbus stands a full head and shoulders above his companion, possesses arms as thick as most people’s legs, a rhino-thick body, a grey queue of hair trailing down his back and a sad expression behind a flattened nose. He wears clothing fashioned of heavy canvas and heirodont leather, since any less durable fabrics he would inadvertently tear like wet tissue paper, and coiled at his belt hangs a flexal bullwhip to remind him of the time when he was not such a nice person.
By comparison with his captain, Iannus Drooble is small – yet he is bigger than the Human average. He wears a white cloth shirt and baggy canvas trousers, hobnail boots and a headband. He was infected with the Spatterjay virus some centuries after Orbus, and therefore was not one of the original prisoners of Jay Hoop, but it will not be so long before he, too, will need to start seeking out more durable attire.
Orbus continues to gaze pensively upon the blackness, until a sudden light glares up from below, whereupon he peers down to watch an entire world rise into view, with their destination, the Ariel space station, silhouetted before it like a massive iron cathedral displaced into vacuum.
Back on Spatterjay his mutually sordid relationship with his crew came to an end when a renegade Prador called Vrell, who had been hiding under the sea for ten years, sank the captain’s ship and kidnapped the lot of them to turn into slaves. They were thralled – implanted with Prador enslaving technology – and then forced to work upon the wrecked spaceship that once belonged to Vrell’s father. But something else happened too for, deprived of certain essential nutrients, Orbus and his crew came close to being transformed by the Spatterjay virus infecting them into irretrievably unhuman creatures. Later rescued and fed the required diet, they returned to Humanity. In Orbus’s case, it was a return to an earlier self, one not quite so bitter and sadistic. However, now he wonders about the permanence of that change; and if habits acquired over centuries are so easy to banish.
‘So who is it we’re here to see?’ Drooble asks.
‘One of the co-owners of this ship, a certain Charles Cymbeline.’
‘So y’gonna stay with it?’
‘It’s a second chance for us, Iannus,’ replies Orbus succinctly.
After being rescued back on Spatterjay, he knew he had to get away. He had lost his sailing ship, even his love of inflicting pain, and the majority of his crew had undergone a transformation similar to his own – in their case losing their love of the pain he inflicted, which was the only thing that made them feel alive. Staying in that familiar environment, he knew he could easily fall back into his old pointless existence, so when Captain Ron offered him the position of Captain aboard this spaceship it seemed sensible enough to accept, but now he is having second thoughts. During this first crossing from one star system to another, there seemed altogether too much time for reflection . . . too much time for nightmare memories to resurface.
‘You have permission to dock, Captain,’ states a sepulchral voice. ‘Do you wish to take this vessel in yourself?’
‘You do it, Gurnard,’ Orbus replies. ‘It seems pointless me relieving you of a task that you can perform well enough alone.’
He has wondered what was even the point of an Al-controlled ship like this having a Human, or nominally Human, Captain. He himself isn’t needed to pilot it, and many of his tasks just seem like make-work. However, during some long conversations with Gurnard, he has begun to discover there is more to it than that. The AI controls handler and maintenance robots, and one or two survey drones, and though they can deal with much inside the ship, there is also much they cannot manage. Some cargo items require special handling, even certain maintenance, sometimes feeding. Whenever the Gurnard reaches port, Orbus’s job will be to leave the ship and deal with the officialdom at those destinations that aren’t themselves Al-controlled. Also there is the task of obtaining new cargoes, or securing payment from reluctant recipients of existing cargo. All those Human interractions to consider . . . However, these do not seem like jobs for a Captain, and with some technological upgrades, Gurnard could probably handle them. He rather thinks that, this being a privately owned vessel, someone like himself is the cheaper option. He also knows that AIs often deliberately include Human crews simply for company, to keep them grounded, to keep them from disconnecting totally from the material world. And then he wonders if he and Drooble are really the best choice for that role.
The Gurnard shudders slightly and, back towards his right, Orbus glimpses a glare of white light as a fusion drive ignites, then knives of blue flame from steering thrusters. The space station swings around until it lies directly at the ship’s nose, thus visible in neither of the adjacent big eye windows, though now centred on the viewing screen positioned on the wall opposite the Captain’s large reinforced chair. Orbus wanders over and plumps himself down in it, whilst Drooble takes the seat positioned inside a horseshoe console just to the left of him. From here, in the unlikely event that the ship AI should cease to function, they can control the ship, though the option of dropping it into U-space would be lost to them.
As they draw closer to the space station, it grows and grows until once again visible in both eye windows. Checking some readings on a touch-screen that flips up from the ship’s slab currently resting on the arm of his chair, Orbus is amazed to see they are still a hundred miles away from the space dock.
‘Big old place,’ comments Drooble.
Orbus is impressed because, as he understands it, Ariel Station is, in Polity terms, considered a rather provincial and unimportant place. For many centuries he was not really paying much attention to events or progress away from his homeworld, or really anywhere beyond his old sailing ship, the Vignette. Obviously quite a lot has changed since, and maybe he now has the chance to make some remarkable discoveries. Perhaps being the Captain aboard this ship might really be a good thing for him, after all? Perhaps.
After some minutes, the forward fusion drive ignites, underscoring all their views with its white glare and lighting up the station ahead, then, as that cuts out, they come in over a massive platform and slide underneath what looks like a series of Gothic arches fashioned of iron. Beyond this the ship eases into a great quadrate framework, steering thrusters firing rapidly to position it. About them are docked other ships, though mostly of a more immediately functional design than the Gurnard. Snaking between them, from big fuel tanks, umbilici twine like vines, and docking tubes run to station access points hanging amidst this tangle, like great metal flower bulbs on thick stalks. With a crash and a shudder the ship halts, and echoing through its interior can be heard the sound of the station’s docking hardware engaging.
Orbus finds himself urged to his feet by an unaccustomed excitement, and for a very brief moment feels truly alive without there being any pain involved, either that of others or his own. He picks up the ship’s slab from the chair arm, its texture like slate against his calloused fingers, then turns to Drooble. ‘Remember, these people ain’t Hoopers, so be careful with them. They’re delicate.’
Drooble grins weirdly and nods. Orbus studies him for a moment, not convinced that this crewman has lost his love of pain, and feeling certain he is neither safe nor stable, then heads out the back of the bridge located in the Gurnard’s head, Drooble trailing along behind him.
‘A representative of Charles Cymbeline will be waiting for you by the drop-shafts at the far end of First Port Concourse,’ intones Gurnard. ‘You will require no paperwork or other verifications of identity, since all the required information has already been forwarded from Spatterjay.’
That gives Orbus pause for thought as he wonders just what information about him has been sent. It isn’t as if either his history or his reputation is particularly good.
The spine corridor actually curves down into the main body of the ship, but because the floor is grav-plated that curve cannot be perceived. A twenty-minute walk brings them to a point behind the Gurnard’s head, from which they take a side corridor leading to one of the airlock stations in the ship’s docking ring. Drooble starts whistling tunelessly through his teeth; a sound that in previous centuries always annoyed Orbus, but which he now forces himself to ignore. Through the airlock they enter a ribbed docking tube, then after that pass through another lock into a brightly lit cylindrical room, where a reception committee awaits.
‘Your name is Jericho Lamal Orbus,’ states the Golem.
Captain Orbus gazes at this machine fashioned in the shape of a Human, and surmises it is a late-series model, then he eyes the eight port-security officers standing behind it. They wear what look like bulky envirosuits but which he guesses, by the odd bulges here and there and by the cyber-assisted gauntlets, must incorporate exoskeletal armour. They also carry slammer rifles and wear pepperpot stunguns holstered at their hips. They certainly aren’t taking any chances with him, but then again, why should they? His reputation has preceded him.
‘Haven’t heard my full name in a long time,’ he says, chest tightening.
‘Bit of an odd name, if you ask me,’ comments Drooble, at his side.
Orbus glares at him, resisting the impulse to slam the back of one hand across the man’s face, and Drooble grins back at him. The Golem studies both of them but, not having heard their previous exchange about names, is left guessing. Orbus returns his attention to the machine-man in front of him.
The Golem, who appears just as big and heavily muscled as Orbus himself, shrugs briefly. ‘We obtained your full name from records that pre-date the destruction of Imbretus Station, but obviously what concerns us most here is the information forwarded to us about your life after that event.’
Orbus does not remember much from the time before the Prador seized Imbretus Station and herded himself and so many other Human captives aboard their ship. He knows that, because they subsequently hit the station’s reactors with particle beams, the destruction was so complete that no one in the Polity even realized that captives had been taken. Of course, during the height of the war the AIs could not spare the resources for a rescue, but that did not leaven the bitterness he still feels. The brutality and horror of the ensuing journey is never completely clear in his memory, but it gives him nightmares even now, seven centuries later. He knows that he did terrible things in order to be one of the few survivors to reach Spatterjay alive, where he and those remaining were handed over to the pirate called Jay Hoop. And, once on the planet he now calls home, he clearly remembers being made to walk through tanks of leeches to ensure he was infected by the Spatterjay virus and, later, other unsavoury games.
‘Would that be directly afterwards?’ he asks, peering down at his right hand, which has begun shaking. ‘I don’t think there was much recorded about that time.’
Humans thus infected by the alien virus became incredibly tough and practically immortal, but Jay Hoop wasn’t giving this to them as a gift; he was simply ensuring they were durable enough to withstand coring and thralling, a process whereby most of their cerebrum was chopped out and replaced by Prador thrall technology. All the Human captives were destined to become mindless slaves of the Prador. Orbus himself managed to avoid that process, but still hates to recollect, even vaguely, the things he did in order to survive until ECS police action on Spatterjay freed him and many like him after the war was over.
‘Our greatest concern is your more recent record – namely information recorded since Spatterjay has been under the remit of an AI warden.’
‘Spatterjay is not a Polity world,’ Orbus growls, ‘so anything that happened there is the province of those who rule it.’ Old Captains, like himself, and the living sails that occupy the spars of their ships.
The Golem nods polite agreement. ‘I am not here to arrest you, or to hold you to account for anything you did on your homeworld. I am merely here to deliver a warning.’
Orbus folds his arms to still their shaking, the ship slab still clutched in one hand.
The Golem continues, ‘Whilst you are here aboard Ariel you will be watched very closely, and if you attack anyone, if you resort to violence of any kind, we fully understand that we cannot afford to limit our response. You are one of the original Old Captains, and we are well aware of your capabilities.’
Orbus closes his eyes and dips his head in thought for a moment. Steady, even breaths. Steady. ‘I get you, but that seems a bit unfair. What if someone attacks me?’
The Golem ventures an amused grin as Orbus looks up again. ‘Old Captain Orbus, I don’t think we have anyone aboard who would be that suicidal.’
‘Okay,’ says Orbus. ‘Message understood.’
The Golem turns and nods to his fellow security officers, and they begin to filter away towards the drop-shaft at the rear of the room.
‘What’s your name, sonny?’ Orbus asks the Golem.
‘Triax,’ the Golem replies.
‘Well, Triax,’ says Orbus through clenched teeth, ‘you might find this hard to believe, but I’m a reformed character now. You won’t get any trouble from me.’
The sincerity of that statement is somewhat undermined by crewman Drooble’s snigger.
The Prador Vrell is now hardly recognizable as one of its own kind. The transforming effect of the Spatterjay virus has converted this new adult from an enormous crablike creature with a body shaped like a vertically flattened pear into something much more sleek and dangerous-looking, almost evil. His colouring, once a combination of purple and yellow, is now entirely black. His carapace has grown disc-shaped, with the concave surface underneath nearly following the convex line of his back. His visual turret – at what was once the apex of the pear shape – and his mouthparts have detached from his main body and now extend on a long muscular neck, while his numerous limbs are longer and sharper. However, none of this is visible at the moment for, now aboard the ship the Prador King sent to hunt him down, precisely because he knew Vrell was likely to make such a transformation, he is concealed inside thick and heavy armour.
When Vrell tore out the previous occupant of this metal outer shell, he discovered it possessed a body shape vaguely similar to his own. It seemed that the Prador, the ‘King’s Guard’ aboard Captain Vrost’s massive dreadnought, had also been transformed by the Spatterjay virus, but wore armour whose exterior appearance more closely matched the normal shape of their kind. They were all part of the Prador King’s extended family, while Vrell’s crime was simply one of genetics. He isn’t part of that family and, with the viral transformation also producing a massive increase in his intelligence, the King considers him too dangerous to live.
The King is right.
As Vrell clatters through the wide corridors of the huge vessel, he pauses to eye a collapsed King’s Guard who is clad in armour like himself. It possesses the exterior shape of armour worn by a sizeable first-child, but Vrell knows that what lies inside is a second-child heavily mutated like himself. It seems that only because, throughout his own transformation, he was severely starved can he manage to fit himself into the same-size armour, for he is a mutated adult.
The fallen Prador waves a claw weakly as oily smoke trickles from its armour’s vents. Vrell has seen others like this still showing signs of life, but they are in the process of dying and many more are already dead. The replicating nanite he fashioned to destroy the nervous systems of those with a particular genetic code – their genetic code, not his – has been very very effective, but Vrell does not intend to allow himself any complacency. Though most of the King’s Guard switched from their armour’s air supply as soon as they arrived aboard, and thus started breathing in the nanite, there is no guarantee all of them did so, and certainly there will be those still working in damaged areas open to vacuum who did not. Also there is the matter of how fast the nanite spread. If any fast-thinking individual had acted quickly enough, many areas of the ship might easily have been sealed off. And then there is the Captain himself. It seems likely that, shortly after the ship dropped into U-space, Vrost would have ascertained something was seriously wrong and sealed off the Captain’s Sanctum.
At the end of the corridor, a drop-shaft leads down into the ship’s bowels where the Sanctum is located. The shaft is currently not functional, but whether that is due to the recent damage Vrell inflicted on the ship by crashing his own craft into it at Spatterjay, or to some security measure, he is uncertain. He hesitates. Enthusiastic after his success with the virus, it was his intention to head straight for the Sanctum – but maybe that is not such a good idea. If Vrost has not succumbed, he will now be totally on his guard and doubtless in control of some lethal security measures.
Entering the shaft, the ship’s schematics already memorized from his armour’s CPU feed, Vrell rapidly clambers upwards. The pull from various grav sections of the ship is disorientating, but not enough to slow him down, for he knows he could be in danger here. Massive gravity immediately engages within the shaft, an irised gravity field slamming down upon him like a falling boulder, but he throws himself up against it and in a moment drags himself away from its pull and into another corridor.
‘So, you survived,’ a familiar voice observes.
‘Are you a child, Vrost?’ Vrell enquires, meanwhile considering other schematics of this ship, the likely death toll aboard and the presently recorded damage, and then beginning to formulate his plans. Ever since boarding, he has been running his armour’s CPU at maximum capacity and rapidly absorbing information in audio, visual and pheromonal form. He now, if his guess about Vrost is correct, probably knows more about this ship than its Captain, though not the secret security protocols of course.
‘So you are not a child,’ Vrost remarks, his tone deliberately devoid of emotion.
So, thinks Vrell. I now understand the situation fully. King Oberon was the first adult Prador to have been transformed by the Spatterjay virus. The Prador dying around Vrell are the King’s second-children and third-children, also transformed but still fully controlled by Oberon. Also, considering the sheer number of the ‘King’s Guard’ spread throughout the Third Kingdom, Oberon must also have found a way to continue breeding such useful offspring.
‘You are a first-child,’ Vrell decides.
Though all of the King’s children have been similarly transformed, Vrell realizes that the change in them is not exactly the same as in him, being an adult. Vrost has made errors he himself would not make – because Vrost is simply not as intelligent. Only the King, Oberon, is therefore Vrell’s equal. However, it would be stupid to underestimate Vrost, so what would Vrell do now if he was currently in the Captain’s situation?
Working with his present knowledge of the ship, Vrell begins making a statistical analysis. It seems likely that with the damage the vessel sustained, at least a hundred of the Guard are currently in secure armour, while making repairs in the evacuated sections. Judging by the speed of the nanite dispersal, and Vrost’s likely reaction time, a further two hundred would probably have managed to close up their armour in time to save themselves. Vrost, being a first-child, should have little regard for his personal safety, and so will have sent all the remaining Guard in pursuit of Vrell. Then there is another problem: the war drones aboard this ship, being run by the frozen brains of adolescent Prador, will all have survived as well. The situation, he feels, is about to get a little fraught.
Vrell does an inventory of his present resources: he possesses this armour which, though tough, will not survive a sustained attack; one rail-gun, presently fixed in its clamps below his armoured carapace, and half a load of inert missiles; three grenades; a quarter-power supply and some com lasers.
He realizes he needs time, lots of time, but unfortunately he does not have it. No matter what their defences, the Prador here cannot remain free from the nanite for long, because Prador, being creatures who can survive abrupt changes in air pressure, and even survive vacuum for an appreciable length of time, tend to be somewhat lax about atmosphere security. Even the Sanctum, doubtless originally made secure against biological attack, will not be able to keep the nanite out for long. It will eventually worm its way in through old seals, and between the gaps in mechanically worn components, or maybe even through holes chewed into the insulating layers by ship-lice. Vrost probably knows all this, and realizes that he too possesses limited time. And when that time runs out, Vrost will most likely run the destruct sequence on this ship.
Vrell finally reaches the location he has been searching for and, of course, the armoured doors are sealed. However, he knows the weaknesses here – but first some privacy. Initiating his com laser he loads to it one of the viral-attack programs residing in the library of his armour’s CPU, swiftly making alterations to it as he does so. Locating one of the ship eyes in the rough walls here, he fires the laser at it. Vrost takes this as an attack, and counter-attacks through the same com connection. All feeds to Vrell’s CPU blank out, as expected, but the further result is that all the ship eyes in this area are now out of action for as long as it takes Vrost to run diagnostics on them to ensure nothing nasty lurks in their computer architecture. Now reaching down, Vrell slides one claw into the slots in a floor grating, and heaves. With a snapping of bolts, it comes up and he tosses it to one side. Next he unclips his rail-gun and inserts it downwards into the cavity below, which is squirming with ship-lice, and then fires it towards the underside of the door, fanning across its entire lower section. The ensuing racket is incredible as shattered metal, glowing white-hot, explodes up out of the floor cavity. The half-load gone, he tosses in the three grenades over towards one side of the door, then moves swiftly back.
Fire erupts from below and the blast throws up numerous floor gratings along the corridor. The door, like all Prador doors, is constructed to divide diagonally, with the two halves revolving back into the walls on either side. Thoroughly understanding the mechanism and its weaknesses, Vrell knows that the bottom rail, which takes the weight of the left-hand door, will be the one most weakened. Returning to it, he feels a slight twinge of satisfaction to be proved correct: for the door has dropped right down into the floor below it, leaving a gap he might just be able to squeeze through.
After a couple of attempts to push through, Vrell has to admit that the gap is not wide enough. To get in, he needs to remove his armour. Removing his armour would usually be a simple matter of sending an instruction to its CPU, but that is now shut down. That means manual routine. He tilts his extendable head down inside the dome of the armour’s turret, and inserts his mandibles into the required control pits. Fast eject ensues.
The upper carapace rises up on silvered rods, and then hinges back, while compressed air blows his limbs, lubricated with a special gel, out from the armour’s limbs. He lands with a crash just beyond the abandoned armour, then turns to gaze at it contemplatively. It still stands as if occupied, which might be handy. He clatters over and heaves it round to face down the corridor where he might expect an attack to come from. Again detaching the rail-gun, he slots it over one claw, then reaches inside the armour to operate the control to close it, and the carapace lid hinges back and closes down with a thump. Now it looks as if an armed Prador stands waiting in the corridor.
Vrell turns back to the door.
Something cracks within his shell as he squeezes through the gap, and he feels certain that, now he is free of the restricting armour, the physical changes within him will continue apace. He turns his head – something he could not manage in his earlier form – and observes a star-shaped crack in his carapace, opened out and now rapidly filling with new carapace. Another spurt of growth in process. When does this end? Does it end? Now he feels free to inspect his surroundings – and emits a sigh of satisfaction.
The armoury is filled to brimming with numerous lethal toys. Twenty new suits of Prador armour stand tilted like close-growing toadstools, harnesses with sensory masks crouch like the desiccated corpses of giant spiders ranged on high shelves, multi-barrel rail-guns are racked ready, ammunition aplenty, explosives stacked in octagonal crates – including CTDs – and some portable particle cannons glitter temptingly. Vrell immediately grabs up a breach section for a missile-launcher and drags it over to the door, hauls up a floor plate and shoves the breach section down inside, finding purchase for it underneath the dropped door, and heaves it back up into place, turning and jamming the breach section to hold it there. Next he finds a welder and quickly welds the two doors together, finishing the job just as the clattering racket of rail-gun fire sounds from out in the corridor.
Still holding the welder, Vrell scuttles about the room rapidly locating, from his memory of the ship’s schematics, all the ship eyes located in the rough walls, and systematically burns them out. Next he pulls out a maglev toolbox from storage, and tows it across behind him towards the suits of armour. The CPUs are easily accessible, with the suits open, and it is only a matter of minutes to disconnect them from the ship’s systems and select a new frequency for them. All CPUs like this, he knows, contain attack programs that can control the armour without the intercession of the individual wearing it. If the occupant is severely injured, perhaps parboiled by a microwave beam, he could, within limited parameters, make his armour continue fighting for him. Working through one CPU, Vrell finds these programs and, with a speed any normal Prador would find incomprehensible, begins making certain alterations.
Outside, the sound of rail-guns is replaced by the sawing shriek of a particle cannon. A detonation shudders the door, and it drops a little but holds. Vrell quickly dons a light weapons harness, makes a rapid selection from all the lethal toys available, then goes to find a large box of hull-buster limpet mines. These he places all around the walls of the armoury, seeking out the weakest points that give access to other corridors and chambers of the ship. Placing the CPU link mask of the harness across his lower eyes and mouthparts, he uses his mandibles to tap away at the internal control pits and to link his CPU to the same frequency as the twenty suits of armour, and then instructs them to arm themselves with a large variety of weapons. Twenty empty armour suits move forward with robotic precision, taking up rail-guns, grenades, missile-launchers and portable particle cannons, then move back into a nice neat line.
But the next task is not so easy.
These suits all contain fusion tactical explosives so that the occupant can destroy himself if captured, or so that Vrost can detonate it should the occupant be reluctant to do so. This is all about keeping secret the viral transformation of those occupants. However, for obvious reasons, the tacticals remain offline while these suits – in fact while all the suits of the King’s Guard – are aboard ship. It now takes Vrell some minutes of frustrating reprogramming to override that and get the bombs ready to detonate again. Then he is ready. Taking up the detonator for the limpet mines, he begins pulling up floor gratings, even as the sawing note of the particle cannon modifies, and the doors into this room glow red-hot.
The first two of the King’s Guard to enter the armoury immediately open fire on the suits of armour, which are moving to take cover. The empty suits fire back with their nasty selection of weaponry. One of the Guard is slammed back out into the corridor, all the legs on one side of his body sheared off. The other dives for cover behind a rack of massive replacement coils for a coil-gun. More of the Guard charge in, and soon the air is filled with a sleet of fast-moving chunks of hot metal, gouts of fire, and a thickening haze of smoke cut through with the sabre slashes of beam weapons. Stored chemical munitions begin to detonate, and damaged power supplies start to discharge, spreading miniature lightnings down the racks and across the floor gratings. Then the hull-busters begin to go off.
The first takes out a section of wall twenty feet across, tearing through to an area crammed with loading conveyors supplying the ship’s big guns. The back-blast topples racks and tosses fifteen-ton armoured Prador about like autumn leaves. Four of the suits Vrell controls now make their exit through there. Further blasts open gaps into a main corridor, into a putrid nursery full of dead third-children, and into an adjacent drop-shaft, and into other rooms and other corridors. All but two of the remote-controlled suits exit and flee, fighting a retreat against the pursuing King’s Guard. Soon the armoury is empty of fighters, though the frequent detonations and discharges continue.
After some minutes have passed, Vrell protrudes one palp eye up through a gap in the floor gratings he is concealed beneath, then quickly snatches it back down as into the room floats a Prador war drone, a big sphere of metal with rail-guns mounted on either side, and other weapons and communication pits studding its surface. He crouches even lower, his legs spread out and his flat, disc-shaped carapace nearly filling up the gap below the gratings. Time to move, so carefully he drags himself off to one side, where the adjoining third-child nursery was partially torn out, extends his head through the narrow gap and raises it slightly, one palp eye directed back towards the war drone. After a moment the drone turns slowly and drifts towards where the Guard set off in hot pursuit of those empty suits of armour, now heading for the hull guns.
Using one of his manipulatory hands, Vrell draws a laser, scans the room ahead and targets ship eyes, firing rapid and accurate shots that sear the things out of their sockets. Certainly many of them were dead, at least temporarily, having been knocked out by the EM generated during the battle, but he is just making sure. Now he heaves himself through the gap and, half-scuttling down the wall, drops to the floor. He tugs on a cable, and the maglev toolbox follows him out to crash on the floor then rise again on its maglev field. He tows it across to the further wall and there hunches down for a moment.
All this activity has made him rather hungry, and here lies an ample supply of meat. He flips his harness mask aside, reaches out with one long and slightly translucent claw to snag up one of the dead third-children. It is already showing signs of viral mutation, but its carapace is still soft, which makes things easier. He feeds its small claws into his mandibles first, crunching them down like a Human eating a stick of celery, works his way around all the legs and small underslung manipulatory limbs, then champs into the main body like a burger. It takes three of the dead to satisfy his appetite and he wonders where all this meat is going, since his carapace has grown so attenuated. Then abruptly his stomach roils and he squats to emit a great flood of watery excrement, which partially answers his question. He flips his mask back into place.
Accessing the frequency of the armoured suits, he soon discovers that five of them have now been destroyed, but that the battle area continues to spread throughout the ship. Soon, at least two or three of those suits will reach particular areas he has selected. Vrell now focuses his attention on the wall before him, reaches out and flips up the lid of the toolbox, and takes out a stud extractor. He knows that directly behind the big rough-metal wall section before him lies a ten-feet-thick layer of foamed porcelain. This is part of the shock-absorbing internal structure of the ship, and that foam-filled cavity extends deep down inside, to where the Captain’s Sanctum lies.