7

Prador are not constrained by any morality concerning treatment of their children. Their youngest, their third-children, they keep in confined conditions and encourage to fight with each other. Many of these children are literally torn apart, and those severely wounded soon become the victims of their fellows. In second-childhood the competition continues, but now the children are also selected for intelligence and technical ability, while those not making the grade become lunch for the others. This process continues in first-childhood, though those that fail the challenge are very often not just killed. Much has already been invested in such a child, so its brain and part of its nervous system are cut out to serve as the controlling intelligence in either a drone or a spaceship. It was therefore not unexpected that during the war such children were used as U-space kamikazes – massive flying antimatter bombs used to destroy Polity capital ships, space stations, or sometimes entire worlds.

– WEAPONS DIRECTORY NOTES, E.B.S Heinlein

Records aboard Vrost’s vessel supplied the location of the Graveyard outpost, but the haul is disappointing. Its lone occupant being a single Prador first-child is a sufficient explanation for the outpost’s evident poverty: it is merely a watchpost to relay early warning to the border-defence stations, occupied by a first-child supplied by some Prador family other than King Oberon’s own. It seems that if Vrell wants to track down bigger hauls of resources and materials of Prador manufacture within the Graveyard, he needs to find the location of the King’s Guard. This, then, poses the further problem of how he takes those resources away from them without them wrecking the whole lot when they fusion-suicide. Perhaps it would be better instead to hit a few of the Human settlements here?

In the fluctuating glare of an unstable green sun, Vrell’s spaceship hangs like a pomegranate crushed and split in many places and swarming with mites. Repairs continue apace and, by lying in close orbit to the erratic output of lethal radiation, this offers perfect cover as the ship slowly changes shape, its workforce of sub-AI armour steadily drawing closed the gaps in its hull. The present weapons complement is now 40 per cent functional and, though the internal structure still lies some way from optimum, Vrell is pleased.

After defrosting and then rapidly consuming steaks of flesh hewn from a homeworld decapod food animal, he carefully inspects himself. Ever since ceasing to consume anything containing the Spatterjay virus, he has noted the changes in himself slowing. His form, which was completely disc-shaped when he boarded this ship, has lengthened slightly and the sharp spike of a tail has appeared, something a little like the ovipositor of female Prador – indeed a worrying development. Donning armour he recently adjusted to fit his now elongated form, Vrell decides it is time to tour his new domain, not because there is any of it he cannot easily view from the Sanctum, but because he feels the need for exercise and because things he can hunt scuttle and slither in some of the more shadowy sections of the vessel.

He’d first spotted them while scanning internal repairs to the hull armour overlying one area of the ship that contained, amongst other things, a third-child nursery. Doubtless that is where they came from: the Spatterjay virus having worked its grotesque magic upon the nerveless living dead in the nursery itself. Further scanning confirms this conjecture when Vrell sees that the nursery is utterly empty of corpses.

Arming himself with both a rail-gun and a particle cannon, he sends a control-unit signal to the now repaired Sanctum doors and steps out into the corridor. Even as he enters the drop-shaft at one end, he notes that two of his armoured servants have removed sections of wall to get to the damaged structural members lying beyond, where they are currently welding into place some triangular strengtheners at the beam joints. Briefly accessing their programming, he sees this is growing increasingly complex as it adapts to new circumstances. They are strengthening the superstructure because certain repairs to the hull armour have repositioned load points within the ship. This is something Vrell has already considered with the intention of studying later. He does not know whether to be glad or worried that his slaves have got to the problem before him.

Vrell studies their programming a while longer and notices something else: how odd corruptions in that same programming are generating inadvertent limb movements. Perhaps this is all part of their increasing complexity, for that must give greater room for error, but he doesn’t like it. Later he will have to study this development more closely and, if necessary, shut them all down and reprogram them. It isn’t something he wants to do, seeing how fast their work is now progressing.

Throughout the ship, new metal and new welds gleam, some of the specialized alloys already beginning to take on a dull patina as their outer layers oxidize into a hard coating. Wherever Vrell goes there is activity: maglev trains shifting materials to where required; floating pallets of ordnance being taken to those rail-guns once again operational; numerous pallets of scrap metal and various materials on their way to internal factories for reprocessing; his slaves removing burnt-out optics, computer hardware, re-insulating s-con cables, rebuilding structure. It is all very very gratifying, but Vrell remains utterly aware that no matter how spaceworthy this ship is made, it is still only one ship.

Abruptly halting at a shaft leading down to the third-child nursery, Vrell momentarily draws his thoughts away from the day-to-day mundanities of repairing his vessel and considers what else he wants. On Spatterjay it was all about survival, for he knew that there could be no escape for him whilst Vrost’s ship orbited that same world. Vrost would never have allowed Vrell’s ship to leave the planet, and would have scoured the surface until finding and killing him. But what now? In either the Third Kingdom or the Polity he has no doubt that he would be hunted down, because King Oberon will want any dangerous adversary dead, and the Polity AIs would not want a Prador destroyer freely roaming their realm. Within the Graveyard neither side will want to deploy warships for the task, but covert forces will still be arrayed against him. But why bother remaining in any of these three zones when there is a whole universe out there he can lose himself in?

Like all Prador he is instinctively aggressive, and has never questioned his urge to strike back hard at any attacker. Now, questioning this natural response, he feels that the answer involves more than just a survival reaction. In either Polity or Kingdom he cannot hope to remain free, but nor does he want to just run away. Why should he? The bottom line, Vrell surmises, is that he feels himself the subject of a huge injustice. It is simply unfair. And Oberon is now his prime target simply because the King tried to have him killed. Vrell realizes that his present notions of fair and unfair are not natural to the Prador, and he wonders therefore how such Human concepts have lodged themselves in his mind.

Still mulling all this over, he steps into the irised gravity field of the drop-shaft and descends. Then, after negotiating a few corridors and passing on through into a portion of the ship whose ruination does not effect the vessel’s overall running, it is a welcome distraction for him to find monsters there that lie outside his own mind.

A knot of wreckage occupies an area extending half a mile across. Occasional gravplates still function, but often lying athwart each other to create strange effects of perspective. Some lights still work, a few of them casting odd portions of the spectrum as elements in them have burnt out or been dislocated into some infrequently used setting. Superconducting cables, their insulation damaged, occasionally short themselves against twisted I-beams, gases leak to create off-colour fogs twisted into strange shapes by damaged gravplates.

Even for Vrell this is a spooky place, and when the first of the new residents suddenly appears, it seems perfectly in keeping with its surroundings.

The thing looks only vaguely like a Prador third-child. Its numerous legs have grown extensively, in the process acquiring a few more joints, and have now shifted to its four quarters. Studying the thing as it eases itself through the wreckage towards him, Vrell realizes that this new leg positioning is well suited to this partially zero-gravity environment. Its body is now globular, and a huge trumpet-like leech mouth sprouts from its near end, while like Vrost it possesses stalked eyes, though they sprout in a ring about the base of that ever-questing mouth.

Vrell continues watching it, fascination overriding his initial reflex to blast the thing as soon as it appeared. Maybe he should just let it continue on its way, but this is no resident of a planetary jungle going about its day-to-day life; it is a creation of the mutating effects of the virus, searching for food in a place where little food exists. In whatever passes for its mind – some leech-based organ recently grown inside it – any movement means food and, once through the tangle of metal, it throws itself at the moving thing that first attracted it.

Vrell raises his free claw and snaps it closed about the creature’s globular body. It struggles with surprising strength, the sharp tips of its legs scraping frantically against his armoured turret, then the trumpet mouth thunks down against his claw, its complex internal mouthpart of saw-edged discs and bony blades grating against the armour. He pushes it further away from him to inspect it better. To be able to move like this it must have at least grown a rudimentary nervous system, and since Vrell’s nanite is still everywhere throughout this ship, that nervous system must be based on something other than the genome of the third-child it once was.

Further movement out in the tangle of wreckage attracts his attention, and he realizes that other creatures of a similar nature are moving in. He could easily toss this one away from him and hit it with the particle cannon, before turning both of his weapons on the others now approaching, but his curiosity has been stirred. Still clutching his trophy, he abruptly backs out of the area into the better-lit corridors, and retreats to the nearest door. As he goes through, the racket of pursuit reaches him, and turning back he watches through the closing gap in the door the approaching horde of monstrosities. None of them can reach him before the door closes.

Next, Vrell formulates and dispatches new orders through his control units to his armoured slaves, instructing them to destroy any of the mutated Prador they encounter, barring themselves of course, except those in this particular area, which is to be totally sealed off but for this one entrance. Strange random bits of code accompany the acknowledgement received from them. Later, he will deal with that later. He turns and takes his struggling captive towards one of the medical research units aboard the vessel, all weapons forgotten and his focus now upon research.

Having survived the winnowing-out process of third-childhood, Nool makes it to second-childhood as a strong and vicious creature – but no more so than all his contemporaries, since they have undergone the same process. Competition is strong in the ranks of second-childhood, where both their responsibilities and their likelihood of dying increase. Nool soon learns that, though it is an honour to be allowed to serve Father, and such servitude increases the possibility of one being raised to first-childhood, Father’s Sanctum is a very dangerous place to be. Always jealous of his own position and wary of contenders for it, Father’s first-child Golt is ever prepared to crack a youngster’s shell should it step out of line, or even show too much perspicacity. Then there is Father himself, who will deliberately set those directly below him against each other, or often, when the urge takes him, will without hesitation dismember and eat a second-child.

For many years Nool manages to avoid Sanctum duty but, merely his avoiding it for so long and carrying out his assigned tasks with a quiet efficiency inevitably brings him to Father’s notice. With two other second-children, he is given the duties of bringing megafauna steaks for Father to eat, and then cleaning his mandibles afterwards, and this is the first time he even comes within a hundred feet of his ancient parent.

Father is utterly limbless, his massive carapace supported above the gravplates of the Sanctum by grav-units attached to his underside. Control units dot his carapace below his huge heavy mandibles, some of them commanding the five Human blanks arrayed against the back wall of the Sanctum. When he is not wearing his prostheses – metal claws, legs and underarms that slot neatly into cybernetic sockets positioned where his former limbs had been – these Humans sometimes act as his hands. Nool is quick to learn that when Father does don his limbs, this is usually because he wants to make a meal of something that will certainly have other ideas on the matter. Nool sees his first two co-workers go that way, shrieking and bubbling as Father tears them apart and feeds them into mandibles that Nool is instructed to clean afterwards. Thereafter he sees another twelve second-children perish similarly. Why they were chosen and he is not, he can never fathom, but is simply grateful to survive.

The change in him begins to occur shortly after a biological weapon opens in the hold of the ship and wipes out nearly a quarter of the children aboard. Golt tears apart those second-children responsible for in-hold security, and apparently works hard to find the source of this weapon, and to ensure one never gets aboard again. Nool realizes that the first-child is actually terrified for, though conveniently Golt blames those working the hold area, the buck ultimately stops with him. Whilst all this uproar goes on, Nool, when it comes to feeding time, is redirected to a different larder. Shortly after he begins eating the rich meats which, he soon realizes, are not laden with suppressant hormones, his body begins to grow and change. Golt’s reaction, upon seeing these changes, tells Nool all he needs to know: he is turning into a first-child.

Golt becomes immediately violent, attacking him in a corridor in order to tear off one limb and crack his shell, but this mistreatment only seems to accelerate the change, and shortly afterwards Nool is sent on a mission down to the surface of a Prador world, well out of Golt’s reach. When he finally returns, he has attained full first-childhood and, summoned to the Sanctum, finds Father, in full prosthetic array, holding Golt down on the floor and meticulously tearing off all his limbs while the victim shrieks and begs for mercy. Father likes to do this sort of thing himself, though it is two of his Human blanks that operate the surgical machine that eventually opens Golt’s shell and cuts out his major ganglion and a large proportion of his nervous system. This organic material is subsequently flash-frozen and placed in storage for later installation in a drone shell. As a result, Nool is now Father’s first-child.

His ascendancy in that position does not last long.

It seems Golt himself, knowing the hormones and other chemical cocktails that kept him locked in perpetual childhood were no longer working so well, deliberately created the first weaknesses in ship security. Managing to beat Father’s chemical control of him, he wanted his parent dead so that he himself could make the transition to adulthood. Next realizing that some second-children, for Nool was not the only one, were being raised to first-childhood, he became desperate and further weakened security to allow in one of the perpetual attacks devised by Prador competitors. After Golt’s fall, another weakness shows itself straight away with a shell-eating nanite in Father’s food supply, one that eats away part of his mandible before he can resort to an anti-nanite.

The summons to the Sanctum comes shortly afterwards and, still utterly and rigidly under his father’s control, Nool can do nothing but obey it. Father waits, prosthetics already in place, and orders him to the centre of the floor. Nool fights the command but his limbs obey – limbs that are soon being torn out of their sockets and tossed about the Sanctum. This agony lasts for hours, only decreasing and finally shutting down as the most essential parts of Nool are cut away and flash-frozen.

A long time must have passed while Nool sat there in storage. Awake now and gazing out through the numerous sensors in his new shell, he does not recognize the portion of the universe he is seeing. The great defence station he launched from had existed in his own time but is now much changed, and data accessible to him makes him aware that three hundred years have passed. Utterly obedient to command, he flings himself away from the station, making the required U-space calculations to get himself to a particular location. He has weapons lying under his control, but only to be used against any interloper who tries to prevent him getting there – but none do.

As he arrives above the moon, he is able to now study himself through his own sensors. He is now a torpedo of metal with two U-engine nacelles to his rear on either side of a one-burn fusion drive. At once he knows that his existence in this form will be brief, for he recognizes what he has become. Still unable to do anything but obey, he sets a course to the surface of the moon, engaging the fusion drive, which burns dirty and hard, racking up an acceleration that no creature of flesh could survive unaided. The surface comes up at him fast, and just a microsecond before impact, he carries out his final purpose: detonating the massive contra-terrene device that is his core.

There is no pain, merely a brief unbelievable brightness.

Then nothing.

A great black macula appears on the screen, entirely covering the moon, then slowly fades to show its orb glowing bright and laval, and expanding like bread dough. Great fountains of fire explode from its surface, tearing holes in it and licking out into space. The moon continues to expand and come apart, sheets of molten rock the size of small countries peeling out into vacuum.

‘Now that seems a bit drastic,’ says Drooble.

‘Doesn’t it just?’ Orbus replies, as he swings the shuttle round and heads in towards the Gurnard.

‘Got any explanation for that?’ he asks generally, as he brings the shuttle into the docking bay. Sliding past the bay doors, he observes the silvery shape of Sniper darting in to one side, heading for his own entry point to the ship.

With Gurnard showing no inclination to reply, Thirteen steps in. ‘You could speculate that the Prador King does not want us to obtain any information from there.’

‘But the place had already been hit,’ says Orbus. ‘There was nothing there that would be of any use to anyone.’

Thirteen is silent for a while, mulling this over, then from his position with his tail tethering him to the console to one side of Orbus, simply shrugs.

Soon the shuttle lies again in its bay, the docking clamps locking it down. Orbus waits impatiently for the bay to fill with air, then, when that is done, steps out and hurries through to an adjacent suiting area. Here he orders his suit to open for him. It seems to release its hold on his body reluctantly and, since there is no supporting framework here for it, folds itself down to the floor to sit like some strange metallic sculpture. Drooble also unsuits, more slowly than his Captain, and follows him as he stomps impatiently towards the bridge.

‘So what the hell is going on?’ he asks, as he slumps down in his Captain’s chair and Drooble takes his place at the horseshoe console.

‘As yet I have no explanation,’ replies Gurnard, ‘though certainly something very big is occurring.’

The screen image of the moon now shows it as just a spreading cloud of detritus and hot gas.

‘Yeah, that’s big,’ agrees Drooble, then muffles a giggle.

Orbus glances at him suspiciously, then says, ‘Maybe this isn’t about information. Maybe the Prador simply don’t want anyone to have proof of their spies inside the Graveyard?’

‘Screw that.’ Sniper now looms in the bridge behind them.

Orbus glances over his shoulder. ‘Which means?’

‘I think Sniper means,’ explains Gurnard, ‘that both sides have spies and supposedly secret outposts in the Graveyard, and both sides know it. They are always fighting for advantage here – it is what was once called a cold war.’

‘But discovery of such a base might mean some sort of treaty violation,’ Orbus suggests.

‘Not, I would suggest,’ Gurnard replies, ‘as big a treaty violation as the sending of a Prador suicide bomb into the Graveyard to destroy such a base.’

‘I see.’

‘I am glad you do,’ the ship AI replies, ‘but I certainly don’t.’ Then after a pause adds, ‘I am receiving communications.’

Orbus continues gazing at the spreading cloud of debris. He, Sniper and this ship have been seconded into a secret war here in this borderland: a stupid game of spies and a struggle for some advantage that might never be used. They had been used to remove an advantage gained by the Prador; then been sent to remove another one, only to find someone else got there first. Surely the Prador must know what had happened to their agent down inside that erstwhile moon, so why, upon detecting a Human ship here, did they take the dangerous and unprecedented step of sending a bomb to destroy the remains of both agent and base? No matter what angle he looks at this, he can find no plausible answer.

Abruptly the screen image flickers out, to be replaced by something very different.

‘What is this?’ the Captain asks.

‘Even as the Graveyard was first being established, ECS was sending its robotic spies into the Third Kingdom, just as the Prador were sending theirs into the Polity,’ Gurnard lectures. ‘On both sides many were intercepted, but so many were sent that certainly some must have been missed. A seed, no larger than a wheat grain, was fired into the Prador Kingdom seven hundred years ago and, upon encountering a piece of spaceborn rock, it stuck and germinated, digesting rock and turning itself into a multispectrum scanner and tight-beam U-space broadcast array. Until now it has had nothing much to report.’

But it certainly seems this little electronic spy has now hit the jackpot.

In vacuum, the ten dreadnoughts wink into being, faint sparkles of spontaneously generated photons marking their entry point back into realspace. Bearing some resemblance to their makers, they are recognizable as Prador dreadnoughts; however these are sleeker than usual, stretched out so they resemble teardrops – silver teardrops. Their formation is a ring, presently viewed just off from the side. Then something else appears with a massive splash of photons in vacuum, at the precise centre of this ring.

‘Bloody hell!’ Orbus exclaims.

He knows just how big Prador dreadnoughts can be, often extending as much as five miles across, and those dreadnoughts out there look like the largest kind. But this thing utterly dwarfs them. Its shape is that of an upright cylinder, at least fifty miles from end to end, topped with a disc, off-centre and jutting forward, while down on its lower end, affixed on either side, are two massive nacelles in the shape of cored olives. Also positioned randomly along its length are numerous other protrusions: weapons systems, communications arrays, and even ships docked to its surface like aphids clinging to a stem.

‘It seems King Oberon himself has arrived at the border,’ Gurnard observes. ‘But it also seems he is not the only one showing an interest.’

The scene abruptly switches to another area of space. Here, hanging in vacuum, are Polity dreadnoughts of designs as various as the ages in which they were produced. Most are spherical, though often with chunks excised from them and numerous protrusions about their surfaces; others are huge raptorish vessels aerodynamically shaped for battle in atmosphere or spatial gas cloud; and one is a weird-looking thing like a huge metalized liver, but its numerous tubes deploying drives and weapons instead.

‘The other side of the Graveyard, I presume,’ says Orbus.

‘You presume correctly,’ Gurnard replies. ‘And now Charles Cymbeline himself would like to talk to you all.’

‘Realtime U-com?’ Orbus enquires.

‘Yes, it is,’ replies the seated corpse who now appears on the screen.

‘I don’t recollect anything in my job description about chasing and offing Prador spies,’ says Orbus, not because he truly objects but because he feels he ought to say something.

‘But since you did not take your year’s pay and leave, I presume you accept that your job, for which you will be even further well paid, has changed?’

Drooble emits a snigger and Orbus turns to glare at him for a moment, before returning his attention to the screen.

Cymbeline continues, ‘It seems that we have a bit of a situation at the border.’

‘Huh, no shit,’ says Sniper.

Cymbeline grimaces, and it isn’t a pleasant sight, what with various holes opening up in his face. ‘The situation is this: King Oberon, supposedly unaware that the secret is already known by Polity AIs, is determined to keep from us, and from the other Prador in his kingdom, the fact that he and his family have been heavily mutated by the Spatterjay virus. To this end he sent a certain Vrost to Spatterjay specifically to obliterate the Prador Vrell who, whilst not a member of the King’s family, has also been mutated. For, knowing that Prador can be changed by the virus, it would not take long for anyone with half a brain to figure out why the King is never seen and why his family – his so-called King’s Guard – always wear armour.’

‘This is old news for us,’ says Orbus. ‘We were there, remember.’

‘But Vrost failed,’ says Sniper abruptly, ‘didn’t he?’

Orbus turns to peer at the big drone, but there is no recognizable expression to read in that molluscan face and those implacable orange eyes.

‘How did you know that?’ Cymbeline enquires.

‘Vrell is a very very clever Prador,’ says Sniper. ‘When he crashed his spaceship into Vrost’s, destroying his own ship in the process, he wasn’t actually aboard. I saw him, returning to Vrost’s ship along with the King’s Guard. He’d managed to snaffle a suit of their armour.’

Cymbeline nods. ‘ECS would have had no idea what happened after that, if not for one stroke of luck. ECS dreadnoughts were already en route to intercept Vrost’s ship and knock it out of U-space. They weren’t actually going to destroy it, because fortunately Vrost caused no loss of life on Spatterjay, but some display of power was required to make it clear to King Oberon that such ships will not be allowed to enter Polity territory with impunity. However, Vrost’s ship surfaced into the real along that route before a USER could be deployed against it. The Polity dreadnoughts moved to intercept, whereupon it dropped back into U-space and fled, not, as one would have expected, along a direct route past the Graveyard and to the Prador Kingdom, but on a convoluted course into the Graveyard itself.’

‘And that means?’ Orbus prompts.

‘Polity AIs were unsure of what this meant until some debris was retrieved, shed by Vrost’s ship as it departed for the Graveyard. Included amidst that debris was one of the King’s Guard, who appeared to be completely inactive. Using telefactored robots, because of the possibility of the fusion tactical within the armour being detonated, a forensic AI opened it and made a startling discovery.’

‘Oh, do enlighten us,’ says Sniper with affected boredom.

‘The mutated Prador within was effectively dead, its nervous system eaten away by a very sophisticated and specific nano-weapon – one specific in fact to King Oberon’s genome. It seems certain that this weapon was created by Vrell, and taken aboard Vrost’s ship. It also seems certain that all aboard but Vrell are now dead and that he is in control of that ship. He fled to the Graveyard because, other than heading away from both Polity and Kingdom, that is the only place where neither Polity nor Kingdom ships can pursue without causing a very dangerous political incident.’

‘So it was Vrell that killed our friend down on the moon here?’ asks Orbus, adding with a grimace, ‘Or what was once a moon.’

‘It seems likely,’ Cymbeline replies. ‘The suicide drone was not sent to cover up evidence of a spy outpost, but to destroy any possibility of us finding evidence concerning Vrell’s nature, which could easily have been left there at the scene.’

‘Now ships from both the Polity and the Kingdom are waiting either side of the border,’ Orbus observes.

‘The situation, so I am told, is this,’ Cymbeline explains. ‘If ECS decides that Vrell’s entry into the Graveyard is a treaty violation, and follows him, it seems likely that the King will enter too, which could be . . . very dangerous. ECS is holding off, but if Oberon enters the Graveyard first, in pursuit of Vrell, then Polity ships must perforce be ready to counter that incursion.’

‘Bit of a stand-off,’ observes Orbus.

‘Supposedly, but it is speculated that, despite appearances, Oberon is actually aware Polity AIs know his nature, and he does intend to enter the Graveyard to apparently go after Vrell, hoping ECS will see such an expedition as merely due to his need to keep his family’s secret, and so will not move sufficient forces to counter it, or order other forces into place to back them up.’

‘Right,’ says Orbus, scratching his head.

Cymbeline continues, ‘It may be, however, that he intends to seize Graveyard territory. It is also a possibility that all this has been manufactured as a diversion to cover the initial moves of an all-out attack.’

Sniper snorts with derision.

Cymbeline peers beyond Orbus at the drone. ‘Yes, it seems unlikely, and the reasoning convoluted. However, if the correct moves are not made to counter this possibility, and ECS is proved wrong, that could be a mistake costing billions of lives.’

‘Serious stuff then,’ interjects Drooble, in a not particularly serious tone.

‘This is all very interesting,’ says Orbus firmly, ‘but what’s it got to do with us?’

‘The Gurnard is under contract to ECS, and it is the largest apparently non-military vessel ECS has in the area.’ Cymbeline is as expressionless as a corpse as he continues: ‘ECS knows that, after attacking there, Vrell moved into a certain large sector of the Graveyard, but does not yet have him precisely located within that sector. You are to enter it and begin searching, because before any action is taken, we need to know where Vrell is, what he is doing, and what he intends.’

‘You mean talk to him?’ asks Orbus, a deep anger rising in his chest.

‘Yes, I mean talk to him.’ Cymbeline now gives a jerky shrug. ‘And perhaps, if you see an opportunity, then do something about him.’

Sniper’s laughter is hollow.

The Golgoloth moves on past the last of its first-children, then turns into the aisle taking it past its numerous second-children. For a moment it stops to study some that it has been trying to force into growing symmetrically, by using chemical controls and deliberate starvation of nutrients to certain portions of their bodies. In only one case out of the five has this experiment been a success, but the resultant creature is kept jerking permanently under punishment shocks as it makes no response to its screens. Checking data streams feeding straight into one of its external ganglia, the Golgoloth sees the creature is brain-dead.

Best to cut the losses now. A simple signal increases the punishment shocks to all five children, four of which scream and bubble within their frameworks, smoke rising from their carapaces. After a minute or so all movement ceases, whereupon all the feeds detach from their bodies and all the clamps open. Five Prador corpses drop to the floor below the frameworks, and ship-lice move in on this new bounty. The Golgoloth moves on, considering all it has done to keep itself alive.

Whilst the king he had made consolidated his power, the Golgoloth took some time to confront something that was becoming a bit of a problem for itself: mortality. It had already lived four times the artificially extended span of a normal Prador, but now it was becoming apparent that if it did not do something soon, it might not live to five times that span. The loss of limbs, which heretofore had only been a problem for other normal Prador of extreme old age, had begun to affect even the Golgoloth. It first lost some of its underlimbs and then a leg, but what finally impelled it to action was the loss of a claw.

Many Prador used thrall-controlled beasts, and their own kin, to serve them, and many ancient Prador were without any limbs at all, but the Golgoloth understood that, along with the loss of limbs, old Prador begin to lose contact with reality and end up being assassinated either by competitors – and all Prador are natural competitors – or by their own inadequately controlled first-children. This route was not appetizing for the Golgoloth, so something had to be done.

At the time, Prador already had a long history of experimentation with transplant technology, and why not, since there were plenty of their own kin available to supply the spare parts. But their immune systems being so powerful, rejection was always a severe problem, and the Golgoloth realized that in being able to produce kin of a very close genetic match to itself, it might be able to allay this problem somewhat. But this time, from the brood it produced it selected, rather than normal Prador, those who more closely matched itself.

When its first hermaphrodite child grew to the point where its parts might be harvested, the child acted, obviously aware of what lay in store for it. The creature nearly penetrated through to the Golgoloth’s lair with one of the new beam weapons of that time, and therefore had to be incinerated by the security system. The Golgoloth thus realized that those most closely matching itself genetically were just as intelligent and dangerous as itself. Its next brood it confined in secure cells until they grew large enough, whereupon it could make its first harvest.

The most essential replacement at that point involved a large proportion of an organ that is a combination of both liver and kidneys. To be able to make this transplantation, the Golgoloth spent many years perfecting surgical robots controlled by the increasingly sophisticated computers of the Prador. The job was then done, but the Golgoloth required massive doses of anti-rejection drugs thereafter.

History advanced apace. The Prador race as a whole, though prepared to use sophisticated computers, was never prepared to develop them into artificial intelligences. Instead they used transplant and thrall technology to enslave the organic minds of their own kin. Thus engines for throwing spaceships through underspace were designed by a conglomerate of first-child minds which was immediately exterminated thereafter, for it was felt to be too powerful a thinker. Other similar conglomerates were made and then destroyed and technology advanced rapidly and, still within the era of the Second King, the Prador went to the stars. Upon encountering Humans, their natural xenophobia pushed the Prador to even greater technological advances, and very soon they were ready.

By this time the Golgoloth had perfected its very own personal transplant routine and, after a group of its children attempted to escape their cells, it first tried severing their major nerve trunks and directing all other physical control externally by optic feeds, but that resulted in the degeneration of nerve tissue. Thereafter it took the precaution of confining them in frameworks little different from these now standing before it. This turned out to be the safest and most productive method of confinement, though now the Golgoloth takes the precaution of surgically installing optic feeds in its offspring, so it can more closely observe the growth process, make required refinements, and conduct experiments. Perfecting such techniques during the first encounters with Humankind had also been a necessity, because the Golgoloth realized it would soon need to be able to survive independent of the rest of the Kingdom.

The Second King ignored the Golgoloth’s advice against attacking these horrible soft but obviously quite advanced creatures called Humans. Whilst continuing in an advisory capacity, the hermaphrodite rapidly prepared itself for the predicted fall of the Second Kingdom, for its King was now ancient, stubborn and prone to error. It expected this fall to be brought about by the Humans, so it came as a surprise when a Prador mutated by the Spatterjay virus returned to homeworld to usurp the Second King. In the vessel it had diverted funds from nearly one-tenth of the Prador economy to construct, the Golgoloth managed to escape the ensuing – and lengthy – bloody aftermath.

Exiting the long chamber containing its utterly confined and steadily growing children, the Golgoloth heads for the main communication centre of its vessel. The equipment in that place is easily enough accessed from its armoured lair, but the hermaphrodite is wary of so confining itself, for that leads to a hermetic and defensive state of mind, and it needs to stay sharp if it is to survive in this ever-changing universe.

Upon assuming power, the Third King halted the attack on the Polity and withdrew Prador forces, and the Humans, showing more restraint than any of the Golgoloth’s own kind would have shown, only followed them as far as the original border between their two realms. Had they been Prador, the war would have continued further, probably resulting in yet more denuded planets and further billions dead, and ultimately both the Polity and the Prador Kingdom falling apart. The Golgoloth felt some admiration for these soft creatures until it realized that had it been entirely down to them, the war would have continued, but it was their artificial intelligences that made the cold assessment that a war of extermination was not worth the cost.

Oberon, then as now, was incredibly intelligent and dangerous, and had he understood the true nature of the previous King’s rise to power, he would not have let the Golgoloth escape. However, shortly after establishing himself on homeworld he found this out, and dispatched numerous returning warships to search for the escapee. The Golgoloth then fled from hideaway to hideaway in the Third Kingdom, coming close to capture on many occasions. Finally it chose a destination where warships could not follow, and established itself in the borderland, the Graveyard.

Entering its spherical communications centre, the Golgoloth climbs onto a circular dais positioned at the very centre, which is then propelled upwards by a wide pillar. From here it can observe the hundreds of surrounding screens, and sometimes, using those same screens, create VR effects about itself that entirely banish the surrounding room and produce the illusion of placing the hermaphrodite just about anywhere its sensors are positioned. Through an external ganglion it initiates a whole bank of hexagonal screens directly before it. For a moment they show only an enormous wide open area, all aseptically white. Then something even more monstrous than the Golgoloth itself steps into view.

‘So you are not dead,’ says this thing.

‘And you, as always, are very much alive, King Oberon,’ the Golgoloth replies.

Consciousness slides within grasp, and then away again, in the mind that knows itself as the Prador Ebror – yet, in brief moments of lucidity, knows that it cannot be Ebror. Does not the nanite Vrell released destroy all nerve tissue, including the major ganglion? How can Ebror now exist without a brain to hold him?

The armour within which these thoughts occur first contained Ebror’s heavily mutated Prador body, whose shell had softened over the years, and often, in those years immediately before his death, attached itself to the inside of his armour. But now rapid change is occurring. The original Prador nervous system is gone, but the Spatterjay virus immediately seeks to replace it by copying from the relevant strands of some glister genome it contains.

Growth is rapid but the viral organism in which this network of nerves and neurons grows rapidly burns up nutrients, and is soon starving. Aware, on some base level, that it is constantly in motion, the organism grows leech mouths with which to feed, but they suck ineffectually against the armour’s interior. It tries a human skull, jaws and teeth, lines it with flesh, but this also beats itself to no purpose against hard metal confining it. It attaches glister nerves to Prador eyes and other senses, sees that it truly is moving in an environment where other things move, other things that must surely be food, but it just cannot reach them. In its efforts to do so, it reattaches to Prador muscles that also fight against the armour, but to no effect. It grows hard little claws, tubular siphons, belts of teeth and, surprisingly, even manages to obtain some nutrient as it chews up the softer lining inside the armour, but this is a limited resource.

Once all this insulation is gone, along with anything else that can possibly be digested, the viral creature goes through its entire collection of Spatterjay genomes as it tries every possible insentient strategy it can find to feed – and gets nowhere. Genetic strands are tried, energy burnt, and the strands themselves digested as the virus hungrily breaks up the phosphates, sugars and other compounds that bind them together. Working its way down through the layers of collected genomes, it eventually runs out of familiar options to try and reaches those segments of alien code that lie at its heart.

The moment the virus touches the first segment, rapid change ensues. The alien genome keys in to certain ancient chemical sockets within the virus, and takes command of it, impelling it to immediately link to every other fragment of alien code it contains. Now completely in control, the alien genome begins shutting down all futile attempts to escape from the enclosing armour. It shuts down every superfluous use of energy and applies all remaining resources to grow a new neural structure: a brain. It then begins loading into this the mind of the Prador Ebror, which – even though Ebror’s brain has been destroyed – is imprinted on the virus itself. It shortly follows this with an upload of quantum-stored information from itself, though only a little, for there is not yet enough room for it all. The segments also begin to throw off the structures of life, its life: its equivalents to proteins, amino acids, enzymes and RNA, and gradually unravels throughout the process. All of these structures are infinitely more complex, yet more ordered, than everything used beforehand, and they quickly begin to digest and displace their predecessors.

As the new brain grows, the larger portions of it take over control of the viral mycelium and use it to explore its environment, building a virtual model of that environment within the mind, applying other loaded data, then coming up with entirely new strategies. The mycelium uses acids to etch away metal from the interior of the armour, forms this into nano-wires at its core, creates an electrical network and wires it into organo-electric interfaces in the brain. Free ends of the mycelium then connect into little joins and junctions in the armour, and begin inserting the nano-wires. It makes connections at random, some direct and some inductive, but, utterly not at random, it interprets the data gathered and tentatively begins to input some of its own.

Sub-AI programs created by Vrell begin to change, corrupt, and reorder themselves, and the armour they control begins to shift and shudder in disturbing ways.

And something that has been dead for four million years starts to open its eyes.