6

In the past, gold, platinum and precious stones were the substances whose ratio of value to volume was the greatest, but as it became possible first to manufacture precious stones and then to mine asteroids and other worlds – some worlds where gold is as common as iron is on Earth – their value fell. The items of the greatest value then became complex electronic chips, AI crystal – in other words, small objects requiring intensive manufacturing. But the techniques employed in making these continually improve, and now the greatest value-to-volume ratio is attached to rarity: Prador diamond slate (thus far mined on only one world), unique organic molecules, or Human and alien antiquities for which there is a thriving black market . . .

– From QUINCE GUIDE compiled by Humans

‘So this is what all the fuss is about?’ says Orbus, peering at a large package resting on the floor of this particular grav area of the Gurnard’s hold. For a moment he half-expects Drooble to comment on the sarcasm in his boss’s tone, but the crewman is presently in the ship’s small medbay, strapped to a slab and with an autodoc force-feeding the required nutrients into his reluctant mouth.

Orbus is calmer now, managing at last to accept the futility of bellowing threats at an AI whose location within the ship he has not been allowed to know, though he has left numerous fist-shaped dents in the Gurnard’s walls. Perhaps he still possesses some hard, stubbornly sane core deep inside him that can still make itself heard.

‘Ostensibly, this is what all the fuss is about,’ replies Gurnard.

‘Nice word that . . . "ostensibly",’ says Sniper from where he currently rests on the other side of the package from Orbus. The drone spears out one big spatulate-ended tentacle, which emits a high whine as it runs across the object lying between them. Dust rises into the air from the contact point, then the drone reaches in with several thinner tentacles to pull the package apart. Within a minute he is piling chunks of crash foam to one side, and then he strips away an inner layer of plasmel to reveal the contents.

The carapace, which extends three metres long, is oval, dished like a crab’s and slightly segmented across the back. It isn’t as deep as the Prador carapaces Orbus has seen, and possesses no visual turret, though there is a large natural-looking hole lying just ahead of the turret’s usual position on the shell. Even so, looking at this thing, he feels it trying to insert itself in that burnt and nightmarish place within his memories.

‘That ain’t Prador,’ he says doubtfully, not even sure whether he wants it to be.

‘He doesn’t know, does he?’ says Sniper.

Orbus glares across at the drone. Yes, he wasn’t in his right mind when he occupied the position of Captain of the Vignette on Spatterjay, but he still hasn’t forgotten the humiliation of being hung from the spar of his own ship by his ankles by this very drone. Admittedly this same drone then rescued him and a few of his crewmen from Vrell’s ship as it rose from Spatterjay’s ocean, but that just seems to add insult to injury.

‘As Captain of this ship,’ he says succinctly, ‘haven’t I got some say about who’s allowed aboard and who can become part of the crew?’

‘You do have some say, Captain,’ Gurnard replies. ‘But the ultimate decision rests with Charles Cymbeline.’

‘Right . . . what is it I don’t know, then?’ Orbus asks resentfully.

Perhaps because of Orbus’s obvious anger at both Sniper and the controlling AI of this ship, Thirteen drifts down from where he was hovering above, to anchor his tail against the top of the exposed carapace.

‘What you do know, Captain,’ the little seahorse drone explains, ‘is what happens to Humans infected with the Spatterjay virus.’

‘Oh really, do I?’

‘Since the objective of all life is to eat and breed,’ says Thirteen sniffily, ‘it is not particularly unusual for life-forms alien to each other to take some sustenance from each other. The effect on Humans of alien viruses and bacteria, or their equivalent in the chain of life, ranges from the insignificant to the catastrophic. And the effect of the Spatterjay virus on Humans, though remarkable, is not unheard of within a planetary ecology. On Earth, too, are found parasites that increase the survivability of their hosts so as to increase their own chances of survival and thus breeding prospects.’

‘Is this going anywhere?’

‘Certainly.’ Thirteen tilts his equine head for a moment. ‘The Spatterjay virus collects parts of the genome of its hosts. It toughens up its hosts in a remarkable way, making them virtually immortal and very hard to kill. This is simply about evolution, for a durable and tough host can remain a carrier of the virus for longer—’

‘Ain’t you forgetting about the leeches?’ Orbus interrupts. Yeah, I’m calm, he tells himself, I can talk about all this reasonably.

‘No, I am not forgetting. A mutualism exists between the leeches of your homeworld and the virus – they spread the virus by their bite, and the virus turns its host into a perpetually reusable food resource for the leeches. Such complicated arrangements are often found in very old ecologies.’

Orbus shudders, remembering the thousands upon thousands of such bites he has received, right from the start when the Prador ship brought him to Spatterjay. When added up over the length of his very long life, the sheer quantity of plugs of flesh he lost to those creatures would fill this very hold.

‘As I was saying,’ the little drone continues. ‘The virus collects up the genomes of its many different hosts and is unusual in that it can actually employ said collection of genetic material to mutate its host, rapidly, into something more able to survive, should circumstances change. As I said before, such a basis for survival is remarkable in a contained planetary ecology, but still remains within evolutionary parameters. However, that this same virus can use the Spatterjay genome to mutate Human DNA is more than remarkable. In fact it quite simply cannot be something that naturally evolved.’

Orbus has never heard of this before. The virus has been part of him for so long and its effects so familiar to him and his fellows, that he long ago ceased to question it. Now, described like this, he realizes just how odd it is.

‘Polity AIs have been studying the virus and its effects for some time and have come to the conclusion that it is an artefact, though there is still much debate amongst them as to whether it is a mutated artefact, a random mix of some nanotechnology with a living virus or whatever, but certainly it is fundamentally an artefact. When it was first discovered that it could do to Humans what it already did to the creatures of its own world, some doubt remained about its antecedents. However,’ Thirteen taps his tail against the carapace, ‘now we know that it can do the same to another race that is alien to it, there is no doubt.’

Orbus stares at the carapace and with a shudder remembers the Prador Vrell lurking in his own father’s spaceship under Spatterjay’s ocean. Vrell looked like no other Prador that Orbus had ever seen, but he had not thought deeply about the reasons for this, in fact preferred to push such memories down deep with those other memories. Anyway, at that time he’d had enough problems, like fighting off his own crewmen who were themselves being transformed by the virus inside them whilst they starved, having revived from being harpooned and then drowned, or like trying to fight the control of the spider thrall Vrell had surgically installed in the back of his neck. So this, then, is why Vrell looked the way he did.

‘Are all Prador infected?’ he asks. Prador, he feels, are bad enough in their natural form, but Prador toughened up like an Old Captain? This is the stuff of the worst possible nightmares, and Orbus has quite enough of those to contend with as it is.

‘Nope,’ says Sniper abruptly, ‘just King Oberon and his extended family – and our friend Vrell.’ The big drone taps a tentacle against the carapace. ‘This thing here is the shell of one of Oberon’s Guard – one of his second-children – and this is a secret Oberon will do just about anything to keep.’

Orbus now steps forwards and walks around the shell, perpetually reminding himself this thing is dead and cannot harm him. But now it seems to loom here, inspiring the same feelings of illogical fear in him as some others feel upon seeing a Human skull.

‘Damned big for a second-child,’ he says. ‘So that’s why Vrost, one of the King’s Guard, wanted to kill Vrell. And that’s why the Prador here had tried to wipe out anyone with knowledge of this shell.’ He pauses for a moment. ‘But there’s more to this than us simply coming here to collect this?’

‘You wanna tell him?’ Sniper asks.

‘No,’ Gurnard replies.

The big drone refocuses its orange eyes on Orbus. ‘This shell was Polity property specially routed through Montmartre so the Prador that infiltrated that space station would grab it. The private company that apparently owns it, sends a ship that just happens to be crewed by an Old Captain and a war drone who both really don’t like Prador. Got the picture?’

‘Earth Central Security?’ Orbus asks.

‘It’s all about deniability,’ says Sniper. ‘ECS action in a sensitive area – better than sending a warship into the Graveyard and having the Prador respond with one of their own. ECS employed Cymbeline for this.’

‘I was instructed by Charles Cymbeline,’ says Gurnard, ‘to tell you both, once you found out, that you may return to your homeworld or go wherever you want from here. He will pay you both a year’s standard wage.’

‘So ECS paid him well,’ says Orbus. ‘How many more of these Prador have infiltrated the Graveyard?’

‘Two more that we know of, and there may be others,’ replies the ship AI.

‘So where’s the next one?’ Orbus asks, not able to identify what causes that sick feeling in his stomach. Is it excitement or fear, or something like both tangled together in the twisted wiring of his brain?

‘Inside a small moon right near the edge of the Prador Kingdom.’

‘So how do we get to that one?’ Sniper enquires.

‘Does it matter?’ Orbus asks.

Thirteen just sighs and drifts back up into the air.

Before leaving the Sanctum, Vrell checks and rechecks the situation out in the ship through his control units. It takes a further hour before the last of the Guard collapse and expire, and then the ship is completely his. However, it is still travelling through U-space towards the Prador Third Kingdom, and in its present condition it will survive just about as long as it takes another warship to reach it once it surfaces back into realspace. He needs to take full control as fast as possible.

From Vrost’s storage alcoves, Vrell quickly finds the necessary tools and begins taking apart the C-shaped pit console. Every pit-control is genome-coded to Vrost, which is a fact that Vrell puzzles over until going to inspect the Captain’s armour and finding that the armour on each claw, and on his underhands, can open and fold back so the pits can sample the organic material required from him. He first takes apart each pit control and removes the tiny computer chips encoded with a permanent sample of Vrost’s genome, then wipes clean all remaining programming and memory storage within each control. Next he finds a collection of blank chips, placing them in a reader to encode them with his own genome, before inserting them into each control. The entire task takes a full two days.

That a store of extra blank chips lies available here in the Sanctum is unusual, and further study reveals to him that there is a degree of leeway in the encoded genome. Both the store of chips and the lack of precision in each chip point to a simple fact: Prador infected with the Spatterjay virus are in a perpetual state of mutation. The chips installed can handle this transition for a period but, as the mutation continues, will periodically need to be replaced. While he works, Vrell occasionally snips off a piece of Vrost and gobbles it down. But, reminded by the way these chips work, he knows that this diet, Vrost’s body being laden with the virus, is not the best one. Humans infected with this virus need to regularly ingest certain virus-free nutrients to prevent yet further mutation, and he has no doubt that the same applies to him too.

Finally Vrell reassembles the pit console, which now lies under his control but still remains disconnected from the rest of the ship. He takes up one of the ubiquitous Prador toolboxes and heads out of the Sanctum, leaps up onto the rough wall of the corridor and climbs further up to where he first entered it. It takes him a further two days’ work to reconnect all the optics and repair the other damage he has caused up there. Now to get to that pit console and ensure the destruct order has been deleted, and to then search out all the programming traps Vrost has doubtless left spread throughout the computer architecture of this ship.

Returning to the Sanctum after a lengthy period of work, Vrell reaches out with one claw to again snip away a chunk of Vrost’s body, which is now lacking many of its limbs because Vrell has already eaten them. The body shudders and shifts away from his probing claw. Vrell pauses to study it. Though nerveless and mindless, the chunk of flesh before him is still filled with the virus, still alive and now probably undergoing rapid mutation. Its main purpose, once it achieves some sort of transformation, will be to seek food, and the nearest source of that in here is Vrell himself. Vrell backs away from it then goes over to pick up his discarded particle cannon and reattach it to his harness power supply. Setting the beam to wide focus, he fires upon Vrost’s remains. The effect is quite astounding.

As soon as the corpse begins to burn and char, all its remaining limbs fall away and numerous deep holes open in its surface. Like a hundred tongues, numerous pink leech ends issue from these, their horrible thread-cutting mouths extending like trumpets. Leech ends also extrude underneath and, like starfish legs, try to move Vrost’s remains away from the source of intense heat. Vrell keeps the beam focused on this thing, surprised at how long a lump of semi-living matter can survive a beam able to evaporate steel. Finally it slumps back against one wall, now just a burning oily mass. Vrell keeps the beam on it until absolutely nothing remains, and the adjacent wall and floor begin to burn. Then he finally switches it off.

This, he realizes, is the kind of transformation already occurring in the hundreds upon hundreds of suits of armour aboard. Fortunately it seems an insentient change – base-level survival – and, whatever any Guard turns into, it will not be able to escape its enclosing armour. However, he recalls there were unarmoured Prador aboard, who died when first he released the nanite here: very young Prador yet to receive their armour, and others out of armour for whatever reasons. These, too, will have undergone transformations, and may even now be roaming the ship in search of sustenance. Before getting involved with sorting out the pit-console, Vrell decides he had better take some precautions.

He clips the particle cannon back onto his harness and, one at a time, heaves the members of the Guard who expired within the Sanctum out into the corridor. Next he detaches the clawjack, drags it to insert it, on the inside, into the same holes cut through the door, starts up the jack and draws the doors closed. Now that he feels safe enough to continue, he turns to the console.

First Vrell inserts his claws and begins running primary routines up on the hexagonal screens, then he inserts his manipulatory hands into other pits and begins to explore the underlying code to each routine. In every case he finds subroutines which, if the code is being strictly applied to its task, should not be needed. A brief study of one of these subroutines reveals that if he tries to shut down the engines without inserting a certain eight-digit number, they will simply continue functioning. It is all surprisingly easy to deal with, and he understands that all these precautions were taken in case some influence outside the Sanctum itself tried to usurp control. Vrost never expected any enemy to penetrate this far or, rather, Vrost did not care if they did, for he knew that at that point it would no longer matter to him. After checking and checking again, Vrell finally sends the instruction that does in fact shut down the U-space drive. The ship mind, a disembodied and flash-frozen brain of a Prador first-child capable of no more than handling U-space maths, intercepts this instruction and applies it. With a shuddering twist, the ship at last returns to realspace.

Vrell bubbles contentedly to himself, then begins to inspect astrogation data. The ship has surfaced into interstellar space within the Polity, some twenty light-years from the nearest inhabited star system. Within a matter of days some Polity watch station is bound to detect his presence out here, if it has not already been detected, for though light from his ship will take twenty years to reach those Polity sensors positioned to record the radiations of realspace, certain other sensors, as sensitive as the legs of spiders resting on the strands of a web, will very quickly detect the U-space disturbance this ship just caused. He estimates it will take a minimum of ten days for the Polity to get ships here to investigate, unless he is extremely unlucky and Polity ships are already positioned nearby. He must quit this position within eight days, if he does not wish to leave a wake through underspace that any pursuing ship can follow.

Now returning his attention to the rest of the vessel, he begins to run diagnostics and make an extensive inspection of the massive damage he himself inflicted upon it. The outer hull is breached in numerous places; even the exotic armour was unable to sustain the massive impact of his own ship travelling at near relativistic speed. However, Vrell sees that, by altering the internal structure of the ship, and by using spare armour in its stores, the main hull can now be reintegrated as a whole. And, using the same approach to much of the other damage, order can be restored elsewhere: weapons and computer systems put back online, life-support returned to areas now devoid of air, steering thrusters reinstated and sensors replaced or rebuilt. However, a rather large problem remains because, though he can see how all this could be achieved, there is no crew available to do it.

Rattling his legs against the floor, Vrell begins to examine an idea that germinated in his mind the moment he entered this vessel’s armoury. Certainly the ship possesses automatic repair robots that even now are mindlessly trying to fix the damage. Other automatics are putting out the remaining fires and steadily cleaning up radioactive areas; also some of the war drones are provided with manipulators rather than just weapons and thus can be put to work, but all of these measures are nowhere near enough. Vrell needs a workforce, and he knows precisely where one is available.

By consigning many files to compacted storage, he begins to open up programming and memory space, into which he first dumps copies of those programs he used to control those suits of armour taken from the armoury. Gradually he begins to develop these programs, taking them beyond anything Prador generally use, since they become increasingly self-governing and complex, and thus approach that capability hated by most Prador, of artificial intelligence. When he is finally ready, he transmits ten test copies to ten close locations, and through ship eyes observes the result.

Ten of the dead King’s Guard abruptly lurch to their feet, while their suits run self-diagnostics. They test every joint of their legs, every joint of their underslung arms and manipulatory hands, snip their claws at the air, if air surrounds them, check their turret vision, audio and other sensory apparatus, then stand ready for orders. Vrell loads to them a schematic revealing one small section of ruination aboard, gives them instructions on how this schematic must be changed, then directs them to the necessary stores of equipment and materials, before proceeding to watch them intently on every level, to ensure they function as predicted.

Vrell ponders how ghoulish this all is. In a way it is rather like some Prador version of those animated corpses the Humans call reifications, though admittedly, reifications are run by the crystal-stored minds of the Human corpse’s previous occupant rather than the simplistic sub-AI occupants of these suits of armour. He even feels some strange doubts about setting into motion suits still containing the semi-living remains of their previous occupants, for those remains, no matter how insentient or lacking in nerves, will be receiving a perpetual feed-back of motion and data from the suit sensors, and he does not know what effect that might have. But right now he simply has no other options, so he sidelines those doubts as he puts a further fifty suits to work. Within hours, every suit is in motion and the entire ship fills with the racket of reconstruction. Vrell, however, has little time for satisfaction, for within minutes of the last suit picking up a wire-welder and heading out onto the hull to repair cracks, the ship’s sensors begin warning of a U-space disturbance less than a quarter light-year from Vrell’s present position.

Immediately analysing the disturbance, Vrell becomes aware of what will be surfacing into the real, a microsecond before it does so. The shape of the thing is inherent in the disturbance it is causing, though the light that would confirm that shape would take a quarter of a year to reach the conventional sensors of this ship. It is a cylinder a mile long, with nacelles a quarter of a mile long jutting from either side on wide stanchions, and with a big rear fusion-drive array and a long needle of a nose. No Prador ship possesses such a shape; this is some Polity dreadnought.

Further disturbances follow, one of them only a few millon miles away from him. How did they get here so fast? But, even as he poses himself the question, Vrell knows the answer. Vrost threatened the Polity and conducted an assault on Spatterjay which, though not actually a Polity world, does come partially under Polity aegis. Doubtless the Polity AIs made their own threats, and also made their own preparations. Though they were unable to get warships to Spatterjay in time, they must have sent warships on an intercept course to tally with Vrost’s predicted departure route.

It seems unlikely to Vrell that Vrost’s attack did not cause casualties on Spatterjay, so these ships must be here for some payback. Vrell now has a serious problem for, though repairs can continue whilst his ship travels through U-space, there is still much that cannot be done to the exterior hull within that continuum. Surfacing into the real again, he will still be vulnerable – will in fact almost certainly be obliterated by ships now close enough to be able to trail him wherever he might go. There seems only one dangerous solution left, that being to take this ship where, by treaty, neither Prador nor Polity warships are allowed to venture. It is also a place where he might find further much-needed supplies, for certainly his own kind will be there watching for an attack, just as Humans watch there for the same reason.

Inputting coordinates to the disembodied mind of his vessel, Vrell gives the order for his ship to immediately drop into U-space, despite the fact that, with repairs ongoing, he will lose some of those suits still busy out on the surface of the hull.

As the dreadnought drops out of the real, he remembers the Human name for his new destination: the Graveyard.

The Prador border stations have been in position long enough for light reflected from them to reach the present position of the Gurnard. In fact, powerful telescope arrays in the Polity can detect them, and even deeper within the Polity other arrays can look over seven centuries into the past, to the time when these stations were being constructed. At forty-eight light-years away, resolution here is good enough for Gurnard to provide a clear image of the nearest station, and Orbus now studies that image.

‘Utility overcame aesthetics,’ he observes with a grimace, knowing exactly what will be scuttling about inside those massive constructions.

‘That started back during the war,’ remarks Sniper, ‘with the ships.’

Orbus turns to gaze at the drone. At first he hoped to avoid Sniper up here on the bridge because, though the drone can traverse most of the ship’s corridors, it previously couldn’t fit through the bulkhead door leading into here. However, Sniper has made short work of that problem by cutting out both frame and door, bringing up materials from the ship’s hold, and then rebuilding it all so that now the original door sits within an even larger one.

‘Really,’ says the Captain.

‘Most of ’em, deliberately constructed in the shape of their makers, were built before the war, or up to about halfway through it,’ Sniper explains. ‘When the Second King twigged we weren’t gonna roll over and die, he must have decided that sticking to the crab shape was a waste of metal. A lot of the later ones were still that traditional shape, but only because a lot of their shipyards didn’t get a chance to retool. Elsewhere they didn’t stick to it as strictly, and their stations were built without their egos governing the blueprints.’

‘Thank you for the history lesson,’ says Orbus flatly.

‘Not a problem,’ Sniper replies. ‘But there’s something else to chew on.’

‘That being?’

‘Oberon ordered these stations built, and he may not love the Prador form as much as the rest of his kind . . . or, rather, the kind he once used to belong to.’

Orbus returns his attention to the station.

It bears some resemblance to a titanic brass vase just hanging in vacuum, but many extrusions and incrustations adorn its surface, and certainly what blossom from its mouth are not flowers. This collection of long straight cylinders, scaffolds and square-section pipes is in fact an array of near-c rail-guns, particle cannons and wide-spectrum lasers. Perpetually powered by the tidal forces exerted by the brown dwarf it closely orbits, this defence station can throw out missiles and energy with a destructive potential more often associated with solar flares than with anything built by a sentient race. Such a station would of course be useless should any attacker choose to bypass it through the U-continuum.

Grudgingly, since Thirteen is currently down in the Medbay with Drooble, and since he knows he should get himself on a civil basis with Sniper, Orbus asks, ‘So how does it stop ships travelling through U-space?’

Sniper points a tentacle towards the screen. ‘The same grav-generators running off that brown dwarf are used to power a big-fuck series of USERs.’

‘USERs?’

‘Underspace interference emitters,’ the drone explains. ‘We do it by rattling a singularity in and out of a runcible gate. Here they go for the bang method. The moment they detect a U-signature within twenty virtual light-years, they invert a U-drive inside a high-powered grav-sphere. The disruption wave through U-space knocks any attacker back into the real. Bit silly, and all for show really, like the Maginot Line.’

Orbus nods, because he has read enough history to understand that reference. Why would the Polity, should it want to attack, send its ships into the Prador Kingdom this way? The Graveyard only extends between where Polity and Kingdom converge, and the main concentration of defence stations is here only. Just as the Nazis circumvented the Maginot Line, so could the Polity go around all this. But of course the reverse applies too and the Polity defence stations on the other side of the Graveyard can equally be bypassed. The whole point is display: each side reminding the other of just what kind of weapons could be deployed, and how many billions might die should they once again go to war.

Orbus knows that the stations on both sides regularly conduct drills and test firings. It seems all very much like the sabre-rattling of the twentieth century, at the very beginning of the nuclear age: the atomic tests that were not really to see if the bombs worked but simply a message: ‘We’ve got this, so watch it.‘

‘But this isn’t why we’re here, is it, Gurnard?’ Orbus asks.

The image on the screen fades and is then shunted aside by another. Into view slides a small dark moon orbiting far out from a frozen planet not much bigger than Earth. With the distances involved here, the sun they both turn about looks only a little larger than the other near stars. The moon itself possesses no particularly distinguishing features; like so many trillions scattered throughout space it is just a ball of rock turned dusty and grizzled by appalling reaches of time.

‘There are indications of a landing on the surface, which is somewhat remiss of the occupant here,’ the ship AI lectures. ‘Deeper scan reveals underground caverns of unusual orderliness.’

‘Do you reckon they’ll fall for all this?’ Orbus asks.

They had made it generally known aboard Montmartre, as those resident there cleared up the mess and fought each other for ultimate control, that the Gurnard was heading out this way to search for wartime artefacts before moving on to the next Human population centre in the Graveyard. They’d meticulously scanned one entire world, numerous asteroids and moonlets, and even discovered a small cache of munitions which, just to keep up the facade, it had been necessary for them to take aboard. Coincidentally, Prador-hating drone and Old Captain would now stumble on a secret Prador station . . .

‘It’s not a case of whether they’ll fall for this,’ says Gurnard. ‘The Prador will know, after this next encounter, that ECS is stomping on its infiltrators in the Graveyard. However, because ECS has sent no military ship, no treaties have been broken so they cannot respond militarily.’

‘But they can respond covertly,’ says Sniper. ‘Beside their other agents here there’s descendants of Prador refugees in the Graveyard . . . so you can bet someone’ll be on our arses soon enough.’

Orbus turns and gazes at the drone. ‘Refugees in the Graveyard?’

‘Yeah, there’s a few renegade adults – descendants of families who escaped when King Oberon started clearing house,’ Sniper replies. ‘Some of ’em still want to get back into favour and return to the Kingdom, and others will reckon it a good idea to get into favour even if they intend staying here. Remember, all Prador believe the war unfinished business.’

‘So what’s the difference between them and the likes of this one?’ Orbus gestures at the screen.

‘Very speciesist of you, Captain,’ quips Sniper. ‘Just because every Prador every Polity citizen has met is a murderous conniving shit doesn’t mean they all are.’

Gurnard explains, ‘Prador like the one at Montmartre and the one below have all installed themselves secretly, and are all directly supplied with weapons and materials from the Kingdom. They have been covertly establishing a foothold here, a dangerous foothold that puts them closer to the Polity than our rulers can tolerate. However, the other Prador established here have shown no inclination to do more than keep their heads down and survive.’

Whilst they speak the moon draws closer on the screen, expanding to nearly fill it. Checking the instruments available to him, through the controls in the arms of his Captain’s chair, Orbus sees that the Gurnard now sits geostationary above it. He stands, turns and walks back, circumventing Sniper and stepping out into the corridor leading down into the ship. The big drone turns with deceptive silence and drifts along behind him like a huge steel spectre.

‘I’ll want to be armed this time,’ remarks Orbus.

‘There is a small armoury inward of the docking ring in "A" segment,’ Gurnard replies, its voice now issuing from the walls. ‘Iannus and Thirteen will meet you there.’

Orbus has spent much time wandering about this ship and he knows precisely where A segment lies within the docking ring, but cannot recollect seeing an armoury there. It also occurs to him that this description ‘small armoury’ might well mean that there is also a big one aboard.

‘I’ll meet you down on the moon,’ says Sniper, abruptly taking a side route to another area of the docking ring and to an airlock he uses to exit the ship. He, of course, has no real need of the contents of an armoury.

Soon, after taking a few twists and turns of corridor and descending a spiral stair installed in what was once a drop-shaft, Orbus steps out to where Thirteen and Drooble wait in a featureless corridor. Inspecting the crewman, Orbus wonders if Drooble will be safe handling weapons. Though there is now no visible sign of the massive wound in his side, he still looks a little . . . odd. But then Orbus cannot recollect a time when Drooble did not look a helmsman short of the full crew.

‘So where’s this armoury?’ the Captain asks.

‘Thirteen says it’s here.’ Drooble grins and bangs a fist against the blank wall, and, almost as if in response to this, the wall divides vertically and begins to part. Soon lights come on within the room lying beyond, and Drooble steps inside.

‘Looks like everything is ready for you, Cap’n.’ Drooble waves his little finger towards a massive, heavily reinforced spacesuit supported in a framework.

Inspecting this item, Orbus notes designs with a nautical theme etched into its surface. This is all entirely in keeping with the rest of the Gurnard, but the sheer size of the suit indicates it was made for an Old Captain – probably for Captain Ron when he held the post Orbus now occupies.

‘Ceramal and diamond-fibre composite plated with nanochain chromium,’ pipes up Thirteen, while hovering right above the suit. ‘Just what Sniper’s covered with.’

As Drooble meanwhile goes over to a rack of proton carbines and makes a selection, Orbus reaches out and presses a control on the front of the suit. With eerie silence the thick chainglass visor withdraws up into the helmet, which in turn hinges back, while the chest plate and groin armour open like double doors, as do the hams of the legs. The rest of the armour of the arms and legs expands on shiny rods. It is all ready for him to step inside and, now it is open, Orbus sees that the suit’s layers are nearly three inches thick in places. He hesitates only for a moment, then turns his back to it, reaches up and grips two bars of the support frame positioned around it for this purpose, heaves himself up and first inserts his legs. Next, as if putting on a coat, he inserts his arms, and the spacesuit methodically draws closed around him.

Orbus steps away from the framework, the suit feeling as light on him as his own clothing. He realizes it possesses motorized joints and wonders why, since he is hardly a weakling. The visor remains open and, raising his arm, he inspects the pretty much standard control panel set into it. On a small screen he can call up information about his air supply, suit diagnostics, the external conditions, and all this and much other information can be transferred to a visor display. Carefully pressing the buttons adapted to his now huge but still oddly sensitive fingers, he checks a few things and finds that the suit’s assister motors are of a design called Lamion.

‘Lamion?’ he enquires.

‘Standard assister motors don’t even match the strength of an Old Captain,’ the drone Thirteen informs him, as it drifts down before him. ‘Lamion motors use nano-scale molecular interactions between microscopic layers of ceramic – they can multiply your strength by up to four times.’

‘So whoever designed this suit had encounters with armoured Prador in mind,’ the Captain observes. ‘I wonder how long ago this was all planned. I wonder if Captain Ron was the one originally intended for this job.’

Drooble has now loaded himself with a proton carbine, a solid-state hand laser and a bandolier of grenades. There is no suit for him here since the standard suits provided aboard will do him fine. Studying the other contents of the armoury, Orbus looks for suitable weaponry to complement his present outfit, and there it is, resting down beside the support framework. He stoops and picks up the huge shiny carbine with a multiplicity of barrels. A heavy power cable trails from it, the plug at its end perfectly designed to fit into the socket positioned just over the captain’s hip. He plugs it in and his visor slams instantly closed. Cross-hairs appear on it, shifting as he moves the gun itself. A side-menu lists a selection of firing modes: laser, particle cannon and a selection of projectiles ranging from inert to high explosive.

‘Rail, inert,’ he says, and the cluster of barrels turns. He rests his sensitive forefinger against the trigger and points the weapon at Drooble, who abruptly backs away, but not without an expression of horrible anticipation.

‘Disarm, now,’ Orbus adds, then unplugs the power cable and rests the weapon across his shoulder. ‘Let’s go.’

Drooble follows his Captain back out into the corridor, his expression now one of disappointment. Orbus wonders if the man is disappointed at not being shot, or by his own wish that he had been, but it is difficult enough for him to sort out his own emotions without getting into those of his deranged crewman. Why, for example, is he himself sweating, and why does he now feel a sickness in his guts almost like hunger?

The trip down to the surface is marked only by Drooble’s constant litany of complaints as he struggles into a spacesuit with the appearance of a diving suit from Jules Verne’s novel Twenty Thousand Leagues under the Sea. Orbus brings the shuttle down on the floor of a valley between mountains of grey stone cut through with striations of white like hoar frost. Because of the sheer size of the suit Orbus wears, they necessarily depart the shuttle one at a time through the airlock.

‘Something odd here,’ comes Sniper’s voice over the suit radio.

They bounce easily up a nearby slope to enter what is ostensibly a natural cave mouth, where in Orbus’s visor light amplification kicks in. Hissing between his teeth he peers down at the recognizable footprints of sharp Prador feet in the ochre dust. As Gurnard noted: it is remiss of the occupant here to leave signs of a recent landing on the surface, and just as remiss to leave signs like this if its mission is supposedly covert. Advancing into the gloom, he swings his multigun across to align the visor cross-hairs over Sniper, as the drone revolves to face them.

‘Looks like he’s already had some visitors.’ Sniper gestures with one tentacle to the back of the cave where a ceramic airlock door, its exterior disguised with a layer of rough stone, lies in two halves on the floor. Beyond this the inner door is gone, as is the intervening airlock chamber itself.

As they cautiously make their way in, Orbus immediately notes severed trunking clips, now empty, along one wall and the many similarly empty cavities intended to hold some sort of equipment. The s-con cables and fibre-optics have been torn out of here, other hardware also removed. The rock also bears molten scars, blast craters, laser burns, and the distinctive jagged grooves cut by rail-gun fire.

‘Abandoned?’ wonders Thirteen, poised over one blast crater.

‘Someone hit this place hard,’ says Sniper. ‘Dunno if anyone here would have been capable of doing any abandoning.’

‘Bugger,’ says Drooble, gazing with disappointment at his proton carbine.

Orbus also feels a leaden disappointment, though countered by an odd sense of relief. Will he ever know what he really wants? Will any of his emotions ever be unambiguous?

A thorough exploration of all the caves reveals the same story throughout: most of the equipment that must have occupied these spaces is now gone. Orbus begins to notice how this place was stripped selectively. Ceramics and plastics were left behind, but just about every scrap of metal taken. He notes bolt-holes in floors where reactors were once mounted, what seems likely to have been a storage cave, and empty bolt-holes in regular patterns across the floor where even the racking was looted. Other holes and fixings indicate where armouring was previously fixed around certain deep chambers. Apart from the few aforementioned scraps, only one other thing remains: this place’s erstwhile resident.

‘No useful metal in him,’ Drooble quips.

‘Or still on him,’ Sniper adds.

Obviously this one was not a member of the King’s Guard, since the burnt remains lying curled against the wall show none of the mutations displayed by the carapace retrieved from Montmartre, or by the Prador Vrell, and anyway, as Orbus now understands it, any attack upon one of the King’s Guard would result in the attacker being incinerated when the Guard, if losing the fight, detonates its armour’s fusion tactical. Perhaps the fact of the resident here not being such a formidable opponent is why this place was chosen as a target. He walks over to the creature’s remains, his multigun never wavering from it, and peers down carefully. This is the best sort of Prador to encounter: a dead one.

‘What the hell is going on here?’ he asks. ‘If this is the result of a Polity operation, we wouldn’t have been sent here. So who did this?’

None of his companions can supply an answer.

‘Gurnard?’ he enquires.

The ship AI’s reply is immediate. ‘Time for you to leave that place, just as quickly as you can.’

‘Why?’

‘A Prador kamikaze just exited U-space and is on its way here, now.’