4
The no man’s land between the Prador Kingdom and the Polity, which quickly acquired the name ‘The Graveyard’, did not remain as barren and lifeless as its name implies, but quickly filled with lowlife. Certain members of both the Prador and Human races found it convenient to locate their businesses where, by treaty, warships cannot be sent and where the security services of both sides have limited ability to intervene. Separatists base themselves there, as do criminal syndicates, the makers of black memloads and smugglers of illegal technologies. It is argued that these traders in Human suffering could easily be cleared out without the use of warships. It is also noted that such an environment is a useful one in which to conduct black operations, and that both sides therefore want the Graveyard to continue just as it is.
– From HOW IT IS by Gordon
‘Now what are two Human blanks doing here?’ wonders Sniper.
‘It’s not so unusual as you might think,’ Gurnard replies. ‘Though many were returned to the Polity in recent years, it is certain that many more still remain within the Third Kingdom, and certainly they tend to turn up out here in the Graveyard – usually having been sold to some criminal organization.’
‘So that’s what we’re dealing with here, is it?’ Sniper asks sarcastically, ‘a "criminal organization"?’ Scanning into the dock he now observes something he has noted elsewhere round and about Montmartre: the Layden-Smiths possess their own internal tubeway network and, fortunately, the bubble carriages they use are larger than Sniper himself. Not being one to let such an opportunity slip by, he begins to subvert security systems around the dock so that he can open a door into it – the cargo bay immediately beyond connects into that same tubeway network. He is extruding something like an electronic lock-pick into the door control when he realizes that Gurnard is not going to be forthcoming with a reply.
‘So let me work my ignorant way through this,’ Sniper continues. ‘The Gurnard, a ship owned by the private individual Charles Cymbeline, is sent into the Graveyard to gather up wartime artefacts collected in this area by his agents. There is a problem with the first of these artefacts that it comes to pick up, and Spatterjay Human blanks are involved. Coincidentally I, a Polity war drone, happen to be aboard the Gurnard and, coincidentally, the Captain of the Gurnard is an Old Captain – someone who narrowly avoided being turned into a blank himself and who has every reason to hate the Prador.’
‘It is a large universe,’ Gurnard observes, ‘and the mind, be it AI or Human, with its tendency to search for patterns, will often find coincidences.’
‘Bollocks.’ With the cargo door now open, Sniper slides into the small vacuum bay. The tubeway network beyond, which is also used for transporting the cargoes delivered here, is a vacuum network, and so Sniper enters it easily.
‘I am not quite sure what you’re driving at here, Sniper.’
‘I smell a rat.’
‘A tendency not unknown to Polity AIs.’
‘Are you going to elaborate on that?’
Now actually inside the Layden-Smiths’ realm, Sniper is well within all the shielding, and more freely able to scan the areas about himself. Almost at once he begins to notice Prador metals and technology. This can be explained by the fact that most of this station is built from salvage, but what cannot be explained is why so much of it is not the superannuated technology of the war.
‘Let us say that there is something about King Oberon and his hugely extended family that he wants to keep a complete secret even from the rest of his own kind.’
‘Yeah, I’m with you on that.’ Sniper knows precisely what that secret is, and if he knows, it is certain that Earth Central Security knows too.
‘Let us say that the Graveyard is a very sensitive area, where ECS forces and the official forces of King Oberon must not come into contact with each other, for that might lead to the start of another all-out-devastating interstellar war.’
‘Right, let’s say that.’
‘However, let us also say that King Oberon is being a bit too pushy and for some years now has been infiltrating his forces into the Graveyard, it being a moot point whether this is in preparation for war or to more firmly secure his defences. ECS will not want open confrontation in this matter, but would rather take limited actions to scotch that infiltration.’
‘I’m sort of with you so far . . .’
‘Having now discovered the major infiltration of a certain space station in the Graveyard, ECS would need to do something about it, but would also want to conceal precisely what they are doing about it. Say they know an agent of Oberon is gradually taking control of the said space station, and they therefore send to that station an item that will reveal, in Polity hands, the secret nature of Oberon’s family. The agent aboard will have to seize said item, and ensure that any knowledge of it cannot be passed on. Those coming to collect the item must also be dealt with and, as we know, when it comes to Prador, "deal with" almost always means kill. However, coincidentally, the privately owned ship sent to collect the item happens to have, in its complement, an Old Captain who, as you say, has every reason to hate the Prador, and also a renegade veteran war drone from the Prador/Human war, currently occupying a state-of-the-art drone shell.’
‘One could guess that some plausibly deniable mayhem might ensue,’ remarks Sniper. ‘Was it also part of the plan that those aboard the survey ship should die?’
‘That was most unfortunate,’ Gurnard opines. ‘They were merely supposed to deliver the item I mentioned and—’
‘You mean,’ Sniper interrupts. ‘The carapace of a Prador, most likely that of a second- or first-child, heavily mutated by the Spatterjay virus?’
‘Yes, exactly – it was assumed that you knew more than you are letting on.’
‘Oh, I’m full of stuff I’m not letting on.’
Gurnard ignores that jibe and continues with, ‘They were merely supposed to deliver the carapace and then swiftly depart. However, it would appear that Oberon’s infiltration here is more extensive than was first thought, and his agents or agent on the spot moved faster than expected.’
‘Hang on a minute.’ Sniper draws to an abrupt halt. ‘When you say agent or agents, you’re not talking about Humans allied with the Prador are you?’
Before Gurnard can reply, Thirteen’s urgent summons comes through, ‘Sniper! Get over here now!’ And along with it come some very interesting scan images.
Sniper accelerates, no longer concerned about keeping himself concealed from the various security systems around him. The tubeway isn’t really designed to have a fusion engine fired up in it, but Sniper is not hugely concerned about that. He occasionally crashes into the walls, causing more damage to them than to himself. And as he hurtles through the station he starts running a system check of his weapons which, of course, could not have been any more functional.
The huge Prador looming immediately ahead of Vrell is clad in heavy armour, looks as big as an adult but, unlike most adults, possesses all of its limbs. Sometimes adults do choose to wear armour like this, the limb casings empty but run by small control units grafted into the adult’s empty limb sockets, but Vrost is not such a creature and certainly still possesses all his limbs. Vrell does not give Vrost a chance to do any more than register his presence before he opens fire, the particle beam directed solely at one of Vrost’s legs.
Vrost shrieks and skitters sideways, trying to protect the one targeted limb, as he himself swings up a rail-gun. Vrell leaps straight up, unencumbered by armour, as a stream of solid projectiles shoots underneath him to smash into hot shrapnel in the corridor behind. He catches one leg against the top of the door, spins round and skitters up the uneven wall, yet, even while doing this, still firing the particle cannon, the beam not wavering from its target for a second. The armour on Vrost’s leg turns white-hot and then gives up, something inside exploding and splitting it open.
Still moving rapidly along above the door, rail-gun missiles cutting a groove through the wall just behind him, Vrell redirects his aim at Vrost’s visual turret, but only for a second because missiles then slam into his own back end, taking off one of his legs and punching through some carapace there. He pushes out from the wall and drops, deliberately not turning to land on all limbs, but hitting edge-on with carapace edge directed towards Vrost to present the smallest target. He throws himself into a roll, heading towards Vrost like a huge plate revolving on its edge, rail-gun missiles ricocheting or cutting grooves down the back of his shell. Even while rolling, he redirects his aim for one short burst that slices into the power feed for Vrost’s weapon. This blows, the s-con cable arcing to the floor, as Vrell tips over and comes down on all limbs. Vrost now moves back, the spin of the rail-gun’s multiple barrels gradually waning. He makes an odd bubbling sound and staggers whilst Vrell aims again at his visual turret, but Vrell does not fire, for he knows this battle is already over.
Vrost had obviously felt secure enough in here to leave his armour vents open. Now they emit an oily brown vapour. Vrell did not need to break the seals on that armour by hitting the leg, because shortly after those doors began to open, Vrost began to die, the nanite invisibly filtering into the Sanctum and doing its work.
Vrost abruptly collapses, his legs folded underneath him, claws still held up threateningly, but even they begin to subside as if too heavy a weight to bear. Now Vrell whirls round and studies the wall around and above the doors. Here the armouring is not so thick as on the exterior, and therefore all the systems less well protected. He makes some close adjustments to the focus and power setting of his particle cannon, and aims at a particular point above and to the left of the doors. The narrow beam punches through the wall, cutting a hole just an inch across. For a moment Vrell thinks he has hit the wrong point, but then boiling hydraulic fluid jets from the hole, and the two doors begin to grind shut. It will be hard to get them open later on, but more important right now is keeping the surviving King’s Guard outside. Vrell returns his attention to his victim.
Vrost is still managing the occasional weak movement, but no more than that.
‘Are you dead yet?’ Vrell enquires, turning to inspect the damage to his own back end. One leg is missing, and though he can see the site of the puncture through his carapace, it has filled with a white tissue that is already skinning over. The pain too is diminishing, now becoming more like that he had felt as a child while shedding carapace prior to a growth spurt. He wonders how long it will take for his leg to grow back. Certainly, sight is already returning to lower eyes he blinded only minutes ago.
‘Not going to die,’ Vrost manages, and Vrell turns back in time to see him heaving himself up a little, then collapsing again.
‘You are right, of course.’ Vrell clips away his particle cannon, then goes over to study the C-shaped wall of pit controls and hexagonal screens via which Vrost controlled his ship, and its crew. Vrost should also possess control units shell-welded to his own carapace and linked into his nervous system – these for greater finesse in control of his drones, certain ship systems and any Human blanks, if he happens to have them aboard.
‘Yes, you won’t die,’ Vrell continues, ‘in the usual sense.’ Vrost has ceased either to be able to hear or to reply, for there is no response. However Vrell, having been so long without anyone to really talk to, carries on with his explanation.
‘The nanite destroys your nerve tissue, first entering through the nerves directly under your carapace, and then eating its way in. The biggest lump of nerve tissue, your major ganglion, or brain, it will take longer to destroy.’
The pit controls are genome-keyed to Vrost, encoded and presently shut down because of the damage Vrell himself did above. If he can get out of here to reconnect things up there, whilst avoiding being fried by the remaining members of the Guard who will now be gathering about this Sanctum, the destruct order that Vrost himself almost certainly input would carry on through. That same order would have only been sent via optics, since no Prador would trust such a major function to any kind of electromagnetic means. The control units on Vrost, then – they are the only way.
‘Now, with a normal Prador this would result in death and decay, but like me you’re full of the Spatterjay virus, so the virus will begin to transform you into something else based on its eclectic collection of bits of genome derived from the Spatterjay ecology. It will mindlessly try to survive, though how that will work itself out inside your armour I just don’t know yet. Maybe you’ll just turn into a big Spatterjay leech inside there, before lack of nutrients puts you into biological stasis. I’ll be interested to find out.’
Vrell now goes back over to Vrost and begins minutely inspecting his armour. When a Prador seals itself up in such armour, there are only a few ways to get it open again: either the Prador inside opens it, a superior Prador possesses the codes to open it, or it has to be blown open or sliced apart. Vrost’s superior is Oberon himself, so the exterior-code option is probably no option at all. Vrost certainly won’t willingly open the armour, and probably can’t open it by now. Vrell squats down before his victim and considers how best to approach the problem.
Within Vrost’s visual turret lies the simple manual option for opening the armour, therefore all Vrost needs to do to get himself out is insert his mandibles simultaneously into two control pits. Vrell stands to carefully survey the Sanctum, wishing he’d taken the time to bring the toolbox down with him, but knowing that even seconds counted and such delay could have killed him. Doubtless Vrost’s own tools reside in the various sealed cavities scattered about here, but all of them are only accessible either through punching the correct code into their pit-control locks or by sending a signal from one of the control units presently bonded to Vrost’s own body. So all Vrell has available is the small abrading tool he still clutches in one of his underhands, as well as the particle cannon, a laser and a selection of grenades. With weary annoyance that no simpler and more elegant approach occurs to him, he moves over to Vrost and climbs up onto his shell.
The particle cannon, currently at its lowest and most narrow-beam setting, splashes off the dome of Vrost’s visual turret, and in its range of spread sets the far wall of the Sanctum smoking. After a minute its constant bombardment upon the same spot begins to ablate the exotic metal away, turning the beam splash from fuzzy turquoise to a hot red. When Vrell estimates that only a minimal layer of the armour remains, he shuts the beam off.
Now the abrading tool, which uses up its entire supply of shaped diamond dust to slice out a two-inch circle of exotic metal no thicker than a leaf. Underneath this lie alternate layers of foamed porcelain, s-con grid and inner seal that Vrell simply digs out with the sharp tip of one extended claw, to finally open into a cavity just above Vrost’s head. This confirms that Vrost is of a similar shape to Vrell, for any normal Prador’s immovable head would merely butt up against the seal. However, Vrost’s colouring is very different, in fact distinctly odd.
The next task is interminably frustrating. Vrell snips off a length of fibre-optic cable leading to his harness CPU, feeds the bare end of it into the cavity he has created and uses it as an internal camera; but only after a great deal of poking round does he get some idea of what lies inside there. He locates both the pit controls and Vrost’s weirdly distorted mandibles, and sees he will need to move Vrost’s head quite a bit to line up the two. This he accomplishes by using the laser to burn holes in the top of Vrost’s skull, into which he inserts the tips of his claws to manipulate it round. Finally, with things properly lined up, he strips down s-con wires, burns further holes through Vrost’s head, then inserts the wires down to the appropriate muscle groups. Though the Prador underneath him is all but dead, and his nerves eaten away, his muscles still respond to simple electricity. The whole business takes hours. The first jerk of those mandibles, as Vrell feeds in power from his harness, completely shifts Vrost’s head out of position. Only when he finally combines abrading tool, laser and the snout of his particle cannon to jam the head in place, do Vrost’s mandibles stab themselves into the required control pits.
Vrell leaps back as the upper carapace of the armour rises on silver poles, then hinges back. With a crash and explosion of gas, Vrost is hurled up and forwards from his armour, and lands on the floor of the sanctum with a heavy loose-limbed thump. Vrell moves over to study his erstwhile opponent, and wonders if this is what he himself is destined to become.
There is no way of telling if Vrost is a first-child; in fact no real way of telling, on first inspection, that he is a Prador at all. Certainly he possesses the correct number of limbs, claws and under-slung manipulatory hands, but Vrost is a rosy pink in colour, though dotted with brown burns caused by the nanite, their position mapping out the major nerve groups. His carapace is elongated slightly, and possesses a scalloped dorsal crest running from behind his long folded neck to his short spiky tail. His head, like Vrell’s, is no longer a turret, and even the turret eyes have separated out on their own stalks.
Now entertaining a suspicion, Vrell steps delicately over and prods Vrost’s carapace. As he suspects, it is soft. Has Vrost spent so long within armour that somehow the Spatterjay mutation has dispensed with his own hard outer layer? Vrell, normally so cold in his assessment of just about anything, now feels a species of deep disgust. Vrost is soft and floppy like those animals with internal skeletons. Like Humans, in fact. Then comes a horrifying attendant thought. The Spatterjay virus gathers up parts of the genome of its various hosts. Could it be that Vrost is partially Human? And could it therefore be that Vrell himself might have acquired some part within him of those contemptible creatures?
This is not a notion Vrell wants to pursue, so he quickly applies himself to the next task in claw and, containing his disgust, heaves Vrost up and over to expose the series of six hexagonal Prador control units bonded to his rubbery skin. With the limited tools to hand, and much ingenuity, he begins to remove them. The task is one he did before, aboard his father’s ship, when he fixed a control unit to his own carapace and rooted it into his own nervous system, then later fixed two more. Six units should not be too much for him to deal with, since he has also learnt much about partitioning such units.
Having thus removed Vrost’s six control units from their rooting modules, Vrell now sets about taking them apart. Each time he encounters a problem that requires a tool, he squats and considers the same problem for a short while, and each time comes up with a solution amidst the limited hardware available. By the time he has the six units sufficiently disassembled for his purpose, his particle cannon and much of his harness, Vrost’s rail-gun and some parts of his armour also lie disassembled and scattered across the floor. Vrell mates the major components of the six units to form three units, subsequently removing his own three units from his own body, but leaving their rooting modules in place. He plugs the three new jury-rigged units into the modules, and sends the internal signal to initiate them. Immediately, a tsunami of data floods his mind and he shrieks and flips over on his back, completely losing control of his body.
Orbus knows that cored and thralled Human blanks were sold to any Graveyard scum that could afford them, and assumed that Smith Storage was being run by scum of that kind, which might well have included the Layden-Smiths. Upon hearing from the little drone that the owners of this station have been out of contact for a while, and upon seeing the wrecked office and then the corpses that lay beyond, he assumed that some Human criminal must have moved in and taken over. But that the two Human blanks were actually controlled by a Prador did not occur to him, and he now realizes it was a rather lethal error to make. He feels a fist clenching up in his guts, as old horrific memories clamour for his attention. The very shape of the thing standing before him burns deeply into his consciousness.
‘Run!’ he shouts at Drooble, but the order is superfluous, for the crewman is already hurling himself behind a big stack of storage boxes.
The Prador hesitates for a moment, then swings its rail-gun away from Orbus and opens fire. The pile of boxes explodes into shreds of plasmel, foam packing and numerous toy soldiers scattered far and wide. With rage surging up through the well of memory, Orbus raises his machete and, with long experience of handling such blades, throws it just as hard as he can. The point of the blade slams into the Prador’s armoured turret with a resounding clang but, as the Prador swings back towards him, it then simply drops out.
‘Bugger,’ says Orbus, his mouth suddenly arid, mesmerized as the monster begins to aim its rail-gun again.
Now lasers flash through air turned dusty by the exploded boxes, their beams issuing from the seahorse drone as it hurtles into the warehouse.
‘Get to cover, you fool!’ the little drone shouts.
Orbus jerks into motion, a cold sweat suddenly suffusing him, and the tightness in his stomach turning to nausea. He heads off running the opposite way to Drooble as rail-gun fire tracks across the ceiling, raining down shattered metal in a trail behind the speeding iron seahorse. The little drone has momentarily blinded the Prador with what Orbus guesses is merely a powerful burst from a com laser, and that is enough for the drone now to become the enemy’s prime target. Ducking into an aisle between shelves, he continues running, intent on losing himself inside this place, at least for a while. Really, he explains to himself, up against a normal Prador of that size he would have faced some pretty serious problems, but to encounter one in exotic metal armour and armed with a rail-gun? He needs to get himself out of here just as fast as he can, and hopefully take Drooble with him if the man is still in one piece. Then something looms at the end of the aisle, and Orbus skids to a sudden halt.
‘Twice bugger,’ he says, and checking to either side of him sees nowhere to dive for cover amidst the crowded shelving.
He has seen something like this not so long ago back on Spatterjay: a floating sphere of exotic metal ten feet across, its surface poxed with the pits for housing weapons and com equipment. In fact it was something like this that first snatched Orbus and his crew from the Vignette, before sinking that hapless ship. For not only is there a damned Prador here, but one of their war drones too.
Then a particle beam repeatedly stabs down from the ceiling, cutting numerous holes and searing across the spherical war drone. A massive detonation ensues, its painfully bright fire spreading across a hardfield wall the drone itself has generated. Should have used the missile first, thinks Orbus, as a blast wave picks him up off his feet and flings him backwards.
As he hits the floor, flat on his back, the Captain watches the drone hurl itself sideways, smashing over a whole row of shelving. Up above it the ceiling now looks like a colander, as beam strikes and missiles slam down through it. The drone is obviously being pushed, for something explodes inside it, almost certainly a hardfield generator, and it spews fire from one of its com-pits. It drops a little, its top glowing white-hot under the impact of further beam strikes, then within a moment it has another hardfield up. Below the drone, unnoticed by anyone but Orbus, something punches up through the floor and, making an odd whickering sound as little steering jets alter its course, it loops round and shoots straight into the drone’s burnt out com-pit.
Sneaky, thinks Orbus, as a second blast-wave picks him up and hurls him back to deposit him in a pile of twisted shelving. He sees the war drone crashing sideways, fire spewing from all the pits in its surface. It bounces and thunders into another row of shelves, bringing them down, while further explosions inside it shoot jets of flame across the warehouse.
Pushing a plasmel crate out of his way, Orbus looks straight across, now the shelving is down, towards the armoured Prador. It has shed the tips of one claw and is firing upwards from this with a previously concealed particle cannon, the turquoise beam lancing up through a snow of fire-retardant foam. Smoke and that same foam form a maelstrom, as an atmosphere breach at one end of the warehouse sucks them straight out into vacuum. Then the floor underneath the Prador erupts, and numerous silver tentacles spear up to wrap around the armoured monster. The Prador shoots upwards, a huge nautiloid drone now clinging to it, and painfully bright fire burns from where they lie in contact. Orbus recognizes this newly arrived war drone immediately, for it once tied him by the ankles to the spar of his own ship.
As drone and armoured Prador crash up through the damaged ceiling and disappear from sight, Orbus feels something like disappointment, but at what he cannot readily analyse. Still tightly wound, he snatches up some twisted shelving metal and crunches it up in one fist, something halfway between a groan and a snarl of frustration issuing from deep within his chest.
‘It might be a good idea to get out of here, Captain!’
Orbus glances to one side to see the seahorse drone hovering there. It points with its tail towards the maelstrom, now sucking entire plasmel cases into its core. Returning his attention to the drone, he just stares at it, slowly opening his hand to drop the ball of scrunched-up metal.
‘Captain,’ the drone repeats, backing well out of range.
Orbus abruptly heaves himself from the battered shelving, glances at the rips in his clothing, then at a big chunk of metal embedded in his right biceps. He tugs this out and flings it away, its flat trajectory slamming it with the force of a bullet into one wall, where it shatters. A very small amount of blood wells for a moment as the deep wound snaps closed like a prudish mouth. Orbus reaches up and wipes his eyes, which he can only assume are watering because of the smoke in here, then he goes to find Drooble.
‘Little bit fraught in here!’ the crewman bellows over the roar of the wind, as Orbus uncovers him. Drooble is grinning, despite the large ragged hole punched right through his righthand side just above his hip and, not having been infected with the Spatterjay virus so long as his Captain, he is bleeding. However, flat ribbons of tissue worm about in his wound as they slowly pull it closed.
One-handed, Orbus grabs him by the belt and picks him up, then runs for the door. The pull from the atmosphere breach is now intense and he leans forward into the gale, chunks of the wreckage all around constantly bouncing off him. Once through the big door, he only has to pull it away from the wall against which he earlier flung it, and the suction slams it shut. For a moment there comes a whistling of escaping air, but this is a bulkhead door and the air pressure on this side soon closes it down on its seals.
‘This is better than being on the Vignette!’ Drooble exclaims excitedly.
Orbus glances down at him, noting that his eyes are slightly crossed and his expression definitely not quite right. He surmises that the damage in his crewman’s side must be more extensive than it appears, for Drooble is already being tampered with by the virus inside him – would that Orbus himself had the same excuse. He slings the man over his shoulder.
‘You should get back to the Gurnard,’ suggests the seahorse drone, now drifting up the stairway ahead.
Orbus peers up at it. ‘Should I?’ he growls. ‘Should I really go back to the Gurnard and see if I can get myself dropped into another shitstorm like this?’
‘I’m sure that wasn’t the intention,’ says Thirteen, not even bothering to eliminate the doubt from his voice.
‘Whatever,’ Orbus spits, striding on up the stair. He wants answers, he tells himself, and if necessary he will tear the Gurnard apart to find them. Yet, on some level, his own reasoning feels false. I want to know how to stop, something whispers. I want to know how to control it, and I want to know why I started to cry back there . . .
Outside Smith Storage, klaxons are blaring and a little way along from the door a crowd is now gathering about some kind of wall access. Orbus only realizes what they are up to when he notices those on the periphery pulling on survival suits – simple impervious and reinforced paperwear with a transparent visor and a limited oxygen supply, and the possible difference between life and death in a situation like this. He heads straight for the lift.
‘Hey, Cap’n,’ says Drooble, ‘I think you can put me down now.’
Orbus hoists the man off his shoulder and stands him on his own two feet.
‘See, I’m—’ Drooble’s legs give way and he just slumps to the floor. ‘That’s odd,’ he adds.
Orbus nods to himself. The hideous impact of a rail-gun missile, as well as cutting a chunk out of Drooble’s side, has severed his spine. It will take the man a while longer yet before he is up and about, and he will need to be well fed with non-Spatterjay food items just to stop him becoming markedly stranger than he is already. Orbus again picks him up one-handed and slings him over his shoulder, then enters the lift. Thirteen zips in beside the pair, then heads up to the roof of the compartment, perhaps trying to keep out of the Old Captain’s reach. Orbus hits the touch-pad for the bottom floor, inadvertently driving it through the lift’s wall, and they descend rapidly . . .
But obviously they have not been moving fast enough. ‘Step out of the lift and kneel down on the floor!’ a voice instructs, as the door opens.
Orbus recognizes the ophidapt official, now standing behind four men clad in visored helmets and combat armour, and all armed with pulse rifles – every barrel pointing at Orbus. Doubtless the moment the atmosphere breach occurred, station security personnel started watching the images on their screens from the cams located within the area.
Stepping out of the lift, his legs quivering with the urge to hurl himself forward and just scatter these fools, Orbus enquires viciously, ‘Did you know you’ve got a Prador aboard?’ Though he wonders if the Prador is still aboard, because it seems likely the war drone that attacked it dragged it to where their fight would be less likely to cause inadvertent casualties.
The ophidapt just stares at him for a moment, then again orders him to, ‘Kneel on the floor!’
‘I need to speak to any one of the Layden-Smiths,’ says Orbus, fighting to introduce some calm into his voice. ‘But let me guess, they’ve been out of direct communication with you for a while?’
‘Station property has been severely damaged,’ says the ophidapt, seemingly unable to process what Orbus has said. ‘You are in the area, and obviously have been involved in some way, so I must take you into custody.’
‘I’ve no time for this,’ Orbus growls, groping down for his bull-whip, but it is still up above somewhere.
‘When I fire,’ says Thirteen, ‘run for it.’
Red com-laser light flashes on four visors, and across the eyes of the ophidapt. Orbus ducks to one side and takes to his heels, pulse-gun fire hammering into the lift behind him. He deliberately circumvents the reception committee, so as to put them out of his own reach.
‘Ow!’ says Drooble, and glancing down the Captain sees his crewman’s foot is smoking, so obviously one of the shots was on target even after the drone blinded the marksmen.
Still hurtling along, Orbus soon reaches the long tunnel leading to the docking area. Behind him he hears shouting, but no one starts firing because only a thin skin of metal separates this area from vacuum. Reaching the other end, he takes a couple of turnings to reach the door into the carrier-shell atrium. He kicks it in and strides through, then enters the zero-gravity shell itself. The security drone, obviously alerted, shoots out of its alcove, but Orbus is already sailing across towards it, with one hand reaching out. The drone must be semi-AI and intelligent enough to know its chances of survival, for it snaps back inside its alcove, the hatch slamming shut. Thirty seconds after that, Orbus boards the shuttle and is soon strapping Drooble into a chair.
‘Of course’ – Thirteen settles down to wind his tail around one of the console levers – ‘there’s the problem with all this station’s armament.’
Orbus seats himself, then reaches forwards to click a brass switch positioned before a very archaic-looking horn-shaped mouthpiece. ‘You there, Gurnard?’
‘I am always here,’ the distant ship AI replies.
‘Right,’ says the Captain, ‘you dropped me into this mess and now I want you to get me out of it.’
‘You should be safe enough,’ the AI replies. ‘Sniper informs me that the Prador had seized control of the station weapons but, presently being otherwise occupied, will not be able to deploy them. However, I am now moving in to assist in the unlikely event of any problems.’
The moment the universal dock disengages, Orbus wrenches up the helm and, on steering jets, accelerates the shuttle out of the carrier shell, just far enough not to cause too much damage to the station when he engages the fusion drive. Torch firing up, the shuttle then hurtles out of the station structure, only a few surfaces singed by the fusion flame. Next he flings the shuttle into a hard turn. Numerous red lights ignite on the console and Orbus does not need long to interpret the archaic-looking displays of information on those little screens before him. The missile from one of the big rail-guns just misses them, which means someone has managed to get the weapon up and working, but is firing on manual.
‘I see,’ says Orbus, knowing he might not be so lucky next time.
The Golgoloth shifts in uneasy slumber, all the tubes and wires mating with its ancient Prador body rattling and squirming wetly in the armoured lair surrounding it. The two internal ganglion grafts it uses for internal monitoring, which never sleep, note that the new muscle grafts to its five-chambered heart have bonded nicely, and sends a signal via cybernetic implant along one of the fibre-optic cables sprouting from scarred and heavily shell-patched carapace. This signal simultaneously shuts down the mechanical pump that is circulating the creature’s green blood and sends electric impulses to probes buried inside heart muscle. The much patched and repaired heart takes up the slack at once, smoothly taking over the task the mechanical pump has performed for the last decade.
Slowly, since the creature is in no hurry to be anywhere, automated systems within its lair begin bringing the Golgoloth’s other external ganglia online, bringing it to consciousness. By incremental degrees it begins to observe its surroundings through both its turret and palp eyes, then makes a visual inspection of all the equipment that keeps it alive and has kept it alive for an appalling time. The only notable damage is to a pipe leading to a blood scrubber, which it must have crushed with its latest single claw graft while in uneasy slumber. But because of the tenfold redundancy in the equipment surrounding it, this isn’t a problem. Next the Golgoloth focuses its attention on the numerous readouts from the array of hexagonal screens standing before it like a chunk of honeycomb, and begins to check upon the running of its abode beyond this armoured lair.
The creature’s children all grow nicely and some of them will soon be ready for harvesting. They are a direct product of the Golgoloth for, being a hermaphrodite, it possesses both Prador sexes and, with a little technical assistance, can mate with itself.
Specifically it studies the largest of its seven hermaphroditic first-children, secured in a slowly expanding growth framework, nutrient feeds and monitoring optics mated into sockets surgically implanted in its body. The child’s remaining claw is now big enough for removal and grafting. Like the Golgoloth itself when it was younger, this first-child’s entire body has grown asymmetrically; one entire side growing twice as fast as the other and therefore one claw reaching the point when it could be harvested before the other one. The Golgoloth now sports the largest of those two claws as a replacement for a previous graft that came under attack from its ridiculously rugged immune system, just like its legs, which are presently under attack and turning an odd custard yellow and will soon need replacing. This first-child cannot provide those limbs, since its own legs were removed to provide the Golgoloth with internal muscle about the socket of its new claw, but the other children are coming along nicely.
The Golgoloth now pushes itself up onto its yellow legs, whilst engaging the antigravity unit on its underside to take the bulk of its weight. As it moves towards the door of its lair, subsidiary feeds automatically separate from its body to snake back to their sources through the foot depth of water upon the floor, whilst its two main life-support units detach from their floor sockets and switch over to internal power. As it advances to the doors, these two units – fat upright floating cylinders with numerous protrusions and inset pit-consoles – drift along behind, keeping their numerous optics and pipes slack enough not to pull free, but not so slack they might become entangled about the creature’s legs.
The doors open and the Golgoloth moves out into the wide corridor, eyeing the mutated ship-lice crawling along the walls to keep pace with it, ever ready for the occasional graft that might drop off. They are a necessary pest here, because they keep the place clear of the build-up of organic detritus. At the end of the corridor the hermaphrodite Prador begins to descend one of the numerous ramps in its abode, and now, with its heart having undergone sufficient testing, begins bringing online more of its external ganglia. In a moment it attains full temporal consciousness, which puts it at the intelligence level of a wakeful and bright but normal Prador. And the Golgoloth begins to remember and consider its immense lifespan.
In the early planet-bound days of the Prador, their aggression kept them in an Iron Age lasting many thousands of years. During that time, technical knowledge was gathered and jealously guarded by various individuals and factions. However, since alliances tended to change very quickly, with betrayal and murder of one’s allies an utterly accepted political tool, this technical knowledge gradually spread. Towards the end of this age of iron, one particular Prador rose to power and achieved planetary dominance first by dint of being extremely aggressive and cunning, and second through the creation of a liquid explosive that led to the invention of the gun. This was a legendary time of rigid control over the factions and rapid technological advance, and by the time the First King became the victim of one of his own jealously guarded weapons, Prador were building flying machines and computers, and had even advanced their biotechnology to the point where they could keep their children in perpetual childhood and install thralls in many of their homeworld creatures. Prador even managed to get into space, and the first bases were established on the two homeworld moons at the end of the First King’s reign.
After the death of the First King, a thousand years of warfare ensued. Knowledge was never lost, only jealously guarded, and after a large alliance of factions managed to run a scientific project for long enough to split the first atom, the entire race faced extinction with the onset of the nuclear age. Startlingly, however, some sanity prevailed, and the Prador managed to agree amongst themselves rules of engagement that would not result in their world ending up as a radioactive wasteland. And it was during this time that the Golgoloth hatched from an egg implanted in one of the seashore birth molluscs.
Reaching a wide armoured portal leading into the nurseries, the Golgoloth sends a coded signal and slowly the portal divides diagonally, its two heavy halves rolling back into the walls. Entering the long chamber, it studies the large first-child lying directly ahead. The child’s turret eyes are locked perpetually on an array of screens before it. But its palp eyes turn towards the creature that is both its father and mother, and it struggles ineffectually in the framework keeping it permanently imprisoned. Then it jerks suddenly. Obviously it did not give the required response to something appearing on one of its screens, and therefore received its punishment shock. The Golgoloth learnt long ago that just as exercising its children’s muscles results in the best limb grafts, keeping their minds active results in the best ganglia either for internal grafting or for connecting into its distributed mind.
It meanwhile moves on. Later it will activate its surgical robots and take that claw perpetually flexing under electrical stimulus.
The Golgoloth supposes itself a product of mutation because, despite controls of nuclear weapons being introduced before it hatched, they were used previously and still used later on occasion. Usually, one such as itself is not even allowed to survive into third-childhood, for adult male Prador are ruthless in their selection of those children they allow to live. But the Golgoloth’s father was an oddity himself, with very low fertility – perhaps the mutation actually began with him – and because of a strange interest in the grotesque he allowed the Golgoloth to live and kept it as a curiosity. Only later did he realize that this odd asymmetric and crippled child possessed a formidable intelligence. He realized it too late, only shortly before the self-renewing diatomic acid the Golgoloth invented had eaten right through his shell.
After murdering its father, the Golgoloth moved to take over their home’s security system and use it to exterminate all its first- and second-children kin. Thereafter it used chemical and thrall control over the remaining third-children, and itself stayed hidden and undiscovered for many years. During this time it studied and experimented and, by delivering a few severe lessons, discouraged its neighbours from trying to seize its land or other property. It also studied history, particularly its favourite period: the time of the First King. The Golgoloth felt that the Prador way was ridiculously wasteful, for with them strictly controlled under some powerful autocrat, all the stupid internecine conflicts could be terminated. The Golgoloth considered itself for that position, but knew a king must be visible and that, upon seeing the Golgoloth, all the other Prador would turn upon it. Studying its neighbours, however, it saw few candidates suitable for the position, and so set about experimenting upon itself.
The first self-fertilized eggs it produced, and itself injected into a birth mollusc, simply died, and after some months of study the Golgoloth came to the conclusion that though sperm and egg were sound, the fertilized eggs were not receiving the required nutrients in its body. Next it tried removing such fertilized eggs from its own body and inserting them into one of Father’s wives, but they would not let the Golgoloth anywhere near them, so it became necessary to completely delimb one of them for the process. The eggs grown inside this female, and then manually injected into a birth mollusc, did actually hatch out, but they produced many grotesques even more distorted than the Golgoloth itself. They also produced three Prador who, though having some internal mutations, appeared to be sound, so the Golgoloth allowed those to live.
Now reaching the next first-child, the Golgoloth peers closely at legs permanently stretching and flexing within the framework. Really, even the ones on the child’s fast-growing side aren’t yet ready for removal and grafting, and the Golgoloth knows that, unless it raids its emergency supply, it will be losing some of its own sickly legs before replacements are ready here. No matter, the hermaphrodite long ago created blocks and filters for its nerves; the process is no more painful than shedding old carapace, and it can increase antigravity support for its body. Next time it will ensure more children are available for spare parts, for it has come a long way in this process from its first attempts.
One of those children it allowed to survive from its first brood died before reaching third-childhood – a fault in its digestive system – and a second died from a minor injury because its blood possessed no clotting agent. The third survived to grow and learn quickly under the Golgoloth’s guidance. He was intelligent, this Prador, and quite normally aggressive and competitive. The Golgoloth trained him to direct this aggression much more constructively than his fellows, and through gradual stages relinquished responsibility, turning from master to teacher and adviser. The Prador grew to adulthood with the Golgoloth ever there in the background; like a weirdly distorted shadow. Then, with only a light guiding claw, this adult began to make astute moves, ruthless takeovers, very specific assassinations. He mated frequently and produced a rapidly growing batch of children, though their number did not match that of those that were meantime necessarily and secretly destroyed. The Golgoloth trained these children, then went on to use the same techniques on the children of those Prador who became allies.
Two decades of conflict and expansion followed, then a final large conflict that for a brief time went nuclear. At the end of this the homeworld was ruled by a new King, and they called his reign the Second Kingdom, in deference to the legendary First Kingdom. The Golgoloth was both mother and father of this King – kingmaker in every sense.