11
Unlike the independent drones produced throughout the war, or those AI subminds that sometimes either buy or are given their own independence, the security drone for ever remains part of an integrated security system. This is because its mind, on its own, is not actually an artificial intelligence. In any exchange, conversational or informational, with one of these machines, it would seem to be an independent entity, but it is not. The security system itself is the AI (usually the submind of a larger AI), but of a format similar to that of an intelligent hive of social insects. Such machines are just not complex enough to either deliberately or inadvertently build sufficient ego within themselves to wish for independence. Of course, the observant reader will immediately point out cases in which such drones have achieved independence, but those are usually parts of very old security systems that are breaking down – suffering a hivemind version of schizophrenia.
– From THE WEAPONS DIRECTORY
Sadurian gazes into the clean-tank, at the chunk recently shed from the King’s body. The first cursory scan of genetic material from this makes it utterly plain to her that the spermatozoa used to fertilize the latest batch of eggs are not the product of the King’s present body. Sperm produced by something with a genetic make-up like that simply would not produce Prador. If it could fertilize even the modified Prador eggs the King’s females are producing, which is doubtful, the product would resemble the King himself.
How Oberon managed that, Sadurian has no idea, but manage it he had. Quickly running comparisons on her screens, she sees that the sperm recently used closely matches that of a previous mating, some twelve years ago. Somehow the King retained sperm inside him untouched by the devastating viral changes he has undergone since. Or else, since these matings are never witnessed, he has used some other means to preserve and then inject it.
‘Okay, quit the scan, Delf, and let’s start from the basics.’
The chrome-armoured third-child inserts himself into the space made for his kind within the nanofactor apparatus, where he can operate with multi-limbed precision the nanoscope and the array of nanoscopic tools. This is one great advantage the Prador have over Humans for this kind of work, for they simply possess more hands to employ more tools. It is a shame they perpetually need to overcome so many prejudices and mental blocks to conduct such work – then, again, perhaps not. If they had been as adroit as Humans at manipulating genetic code, the outcome of the old war might have been very different.
Screens now display an image comprising both nanoscopic maps and computer-generated images of the King’s present genome, which consists of that which is active, the enclosing viral framework, and the virus’s own eclectic collection of inactive genetic tissue – the stuff it uses to transform its host when survival becomes an issue.
‘Weigh it,’ says Sadurian, ‘before we start with molecular deconstruction.’
Prador glyphs appear along the bottom of Sadurian’s screen, first detailing the overall weight then the separate weights of the three main components. She studies these for a long moment so as to be utterly sure she understands what she is seeing.
‘Yaggs.’ Sadurian glances over her shoulder to where the other chrome-armoured third-child is currently working the laboratory pit controls. ‘Give me data on the unit weight for the mating batch, and then correct for meiosis.’
On a second screen appear recorded images of genome collected from the King’s sperm. Prador meiosis, that process of cell-division that produces the half chromosome weight for spermatozoa, closely resembles that of Human beings, but with the Spatterjay virus introduced into the equation things become a little complex. The spermatozoa carry this parasite which, even at a microscopic level, views anything other than its immediate host as food. This is precisely the problem Sadurian was brought into the Kingdom to solve, and has solved. She therefore knows that her instruction to ‘correct for meiosis’ is no simple matter of doubling up chromosome weight. She sits back and watches the third-child’s calculations as they appear on her screen, mentally checking each one. Finally, Yaggs solves the problem. Sadurian nods to herself and smiles. Her two proteges have, over the last decade, reached the point where they can now take over from her, which is good, because at last Sadurian has begun to conclude that it is time to draw to a close her time here amidst the Prador.
Now running a comparison between Yaggs’s result, which basically gives the weight of the King’s genome from twelve years back, and the result from the tissue currently in the clean-tank, Sadurian sees that the present sample is three-quarters the molecular weight of the old one. She nods to herself, considering the timing of all this: the King began instituting major changes in himself from about the time Ebulan, Vrell’s father, made his illegal excursion to Spatterjay. Oberon must have expected Ebulan to make certain discoveries about the virus or, because of Ebulan’s excursion, have come to the conclusion that those discoveries were inevitable somewhere, and so then began pushing whatever he is doing to himself to the limit. Either that or this is coincidental. Sadurian doesn’t believe in coincidence.
‘Yaggs,’ says Sadurian. ‘Take control of the other nanofactor-that should help us get through this a lot quicker.’ Yaggs turns from his pit controls and heads over to the second factor positioned on the other side of Delf from Sadurian. ‘Now, let’s begin deconstruction and mapping.’ She pauses for a moment, considering. ‘I want you to give me a full factual report on this, but no speculation and no prognosis – just stick to the facts of the now.’ Prador are as good at that sort of report as they are bad at anything involving imagination.
Even as, molecule by molecule, Delf and Yaggs begin pulling apart the viral genome, Sadurian can see that only a small portion of the original Prador stuff that made Oberon is still there, and that a lot of the virus’s eclectic collection of Spatterjay genetic material is also missing. Why, then, if Oberon is seeking to become something, is he stripping away all these options? Then Sadurian remembers the alien material, that stuff down deep, and realizes Oberon must be steadily stripping away genetic options to reach it. But why?
‘One moment . . . Delf.’ As the Prador pauses, Sadurian stares at her screen. Throughout all her long years here, the alien genome and its effects have been irrelevant to her. Somehow it is locked, some activating principle missing and, though it is quite evidently there, it has no bearing on the reproductive studies, experiments and work she has been conducting. It just sits there: chunks of complicated intertwined molecules which reproduce themselves during cell division but otherwise effect nothing. But Oberon obviously knows different.
‘Delf, I want you strip the King’s viral genome of all Spatterjay, Prador or other known genetic material, leaving only that alien junk. Then map it and run the data over to my station.’ Sadurian stands up and heads for the door. ‘Call me when you’re ready.’
Orbus rolls clear and leaps to his feet, backing away from the Prador. On some level he knows that, armoured as he is, Vrell could not have crushed him, but the Prador grabbed him and picked him up just like it had picked up all his crew, and just like when it grabbed him and dragged him off to install a spider thrall in the back of his neck. All he can think of is that time, as if reliving it. But things are different now, because he is armed with something more effective than a skinning knife. He begins trying to shove his multigun power plug, which has pulled free, back into this suit, but the suit motors amplify the shaking of his hands.
Vrell studies him for a moment, unreadable and hideously alien, then turns and fires one short blast from his particle cannon straight into a particular pipe, and gas begins to gush out, rapidly fogging the entire area.
‘This way,’ Vrell instructs, setting off. Passing two of the big pumps, he stoops over a wide hatch, rapidly undogs it and flings it back on its single hinge. ‘Down here.’
Orbus moves over by the hatch, his multigun clutched close to his chest, but he still hasn’t managed to plug its power supply back in. He stares at the hatch until a tentacle prods him in the back.
‘No time to take in the scenery,’ warns Sniper.
Orbus jumps down and Sniper follows, turning as he enters the narrow space below. Vrell follows but his carapace jams and he hangs there struggling for a moment, then the proximity mines above detonate and the shockwave shoves him down, breaking off chunks of his shell. He hits a floor hard, lies there apparently stunned for a moment, then abruptly heaves himself to his feet and reaches up with one claw to pull down the hatch and dog it back in place.
‘Where now, Prador?’ asks Orbus.
They need Vrell to guide them through the maze of his ship, but at some point Sniper should be able to take over and the Prador will become superfluous. Then Orbus pauses that line of thought, a sudden doubt inflicting him. He has already tried to kill Vrell once, and afterwards regretted it. Is the situation any different now? Why such anger at simply being snatched up in the Prador’s claw? Yes, yes he knows why; it is because Vrell does not save lives out of any altruism, but because they might be useful to him. No doubt a spider thrall awaits Orbus eventually, wherever Vrell is taking him . . .
Vrell just beckons them after him as he is forced to crouch his way along. Judging by the size of this passageway, it was made for third- and second-children only, doubtless the ones given the shittiest jobs aboard a ship like this. The passage curves down, becoming increasingly steep, and Orbus realizes that, with ship’s gravity out, up and down is now governed solely by the planetoid it rests upon. Ahead this steepness makes the transition into a straight drop, and Vrell struggles to find footholds to prevent himself slipping down. Orbus feels one of Sniper’s tentacles wrap round him like a climbing rope, and glances back to see the drone is managing to extend other tentacles to every possible nook and cranny surrounding them. Abruptly Vrell slips, his legs scrabbling and clattering against the walls, then he begins sliding downwards.
‘Seems like the quickest way,’ observes Sniper.
The war drone draws Orbus in close, then releases his holds and begins sliding too. The slope soon turns into a vertical drop, which then starts curving inwards, and Orbus now reasons this passageway must run in a ring around the inside of the ship. There is no impact, fortunately, and Sniper is sliding again, whilst ahead of them Vrell folds his legs and claws in close, his weapons and other equipment clutched tight to his belly. For a short time they skid down a gradually decreasing slope, making a sound like a sack of tools dropped down an air-conditioning duct. Vrell eventually slides to a halt, lying on his back, while Sniper, his external coating obviously smoother, continues sliding and rams straight into him. Like this they skid another twenty feet before once more grinding to a halt.
‘Handy getaway,’ Sniper observes.
As Sniper spills Orbus free, the Captain stands up and, in one movement, finally plugs in the power supply to his multigun, and the cross-hairs reappear on his visor. He swings the gun towards Vrell, bringing those cross-hairs right over the Prador’s belly. Vrell just lies there on his back, utterly vulnerable, for there is simply no room here for him to right himself. Gripping the ceiling of the passageway, he can push himself along for a little way, but even that will take some time.
‘I am . . . inconvenienced,’ says the Prador.
‘Yeah, looks that way,’ Sniper concurs.
Orbus walks over to Vrell, his aim not deviating. ‘You know, Sniper, we could solve one of our major problems right now.’
Vrell is still in the process of folding his legs back out again, but now he freezes. Is he wondering to himself how quickly he can bring one of his weapons to bear before Orbus pulls the trigger? Surely he must realize Orbus can fill him full of sprine bullets before he can hope to respond. And, then, respond with what? Orbus now knows for certain that Prador close-combat rail-guns cannot penetrate his armour. Will Vrell’s particle cannon prove equally ineffective? Whatever he uses, Vrell will still die. Orbus knows well what sprine does to anyone infected with the Spatterjay virus, for he once used it to execute a member of his own sailing-ship crew.
‘I guess we could,’ Sniper replies. ‘We could go ahead and wipe out the guy who just saved your life.’
Orbus hears the words but can’t quite make sense of them. After puzzling over this for a moment, he realizes his aim has wandered a little, and quickly snaps it back.
Sniper continues, ‘Just one sprine bullet and Vrell ceases to be a problem, and afterwards you, Orbus, will be all better and hardly fucked up at all.’
‘This isn’t about me,’ says Orbus, knowing he is lying. And even as he speaks he finds his anger beginning to recede.
‘You mean it ain’t about you starting to lose grip on your widely scattered marbles the moment you first got a sniff of this place?’ Sniper enquires. ‘Let’s put this in perspective: Prador or not, infected by the virus or not, Vrell doesn’t deserve to die. On Spatterjay he expected to be blamed for the crimes he commited while under the control of his father’s pheromones. He tried to escape, and one of your crewmen died. Do you even remember the man’s name?’
Orbus reaches up to scratch his head, only remembering he can’t when his fingers clonk against the side of his helmet. ‘That’s not important . . .’ he begins.
‘Do you recall the names of any of those you killed just to stay alive when you were a captive of the Prador?’
‘Ah fuckit,’ says the Old Captain, closing his eyes and abruptly swinging his weapon away from Vrell. As the surge of anger continues to recede he knows, instantly, what this is all about. Yes, the smells of this ship evoke nightmares and, yes, the sight of any Prador is enough to scare him. But the anger? It is just a conditioned response, something acquired over his years as the sadistic Captain of a crew of masochists. He wonders just what other natural emotional responses are left within his skull. Any at all? Yes, there have to be. He laughed quite naturally whilst still aboard the Gurnard, and therefore knows he still possesses the capacity for pity, for empathy. Maybe it is simply the case that stress pushes him back into old habits. He opens his eyes to to find himself looking straight down the mirrored barrel of Vrell’s particle cannon.
‘This Human hates me,’ says the Prador.
‘Don’t flatter yourself,’ says Sniper. ‘He hates all your kind, but hates himself even more.’
‘That is not a logical survival trait,’ remarks Vrell.
Just those words alone seem to cut right down to Orbus’s core. He is not quite so screwed up as he was aboard the Vignette, but he still has a long way to go. Behaving as he has been recently, he does not reckon much on his chances getting out of all this alive, but the most critical question he needs to answer is: Do I want to live? He needs to answer that question now, to himself, deep inside. He runs his tongue over his teeth and remembers stringy flesh caught between them, and knows the answer at once. He wants to live. He owes it to all those who didn’t. He owes them more than his wasted centuries; so much more.
‘Are you going to pull the trigger on that thing,’ Orbus snarls. ‘Or are we going to get moving?’
Vrell slowly swings the weapon away from him and returns it to the clips in his harness. ‘Fifty yards further along here, we can break through into the section I secured for the mutated third-children. Some minutes ago the Guard were not present there, but that may have changed.’
‘So we just need to get there,’ says Sniper. The drone reaches out with his major tentacles and slaps them down on the rim of Vrell’s shell. ‘You move ahead, Orbus.’
Only a small gap runs down alongside Vrell, and Orbus eases himself into it, edging past the big mutated Prador, which is fine until Vrell suddenly moves, whereupon Orbus slams himself back against the wall. He realizes his breathing is uneven and recognizes the phobic horror he is feeling but, with rigid determination, pushes himself on. Once safely beyond Vrell, he moves quickly down the passageway and turns to look back. Sniper, his smaller tentacles unfurled all about him, begins pushing, Vrell grinds along slowly at first, then with increasing speed as Sniper edges himself along too. This goes on for some minutes until Vrell calls out, ‘Here – this is the spot.’
‘Where do I cut through?’ Sniper asks.
‘Right below me.’
One spatulate tentacle tip stabs down beside the Prador, going through the floor with a high whine and spurt of metallic dust. Sniper continues cutting in a wide circle and halfway round the floor begins to sag. Further slicing drops the floor lower till, with a whistling sound, Vrell slides from sight and crashes down somewhere below.
‘C’mon!’ Sniper yells, following the Prador down.
Just for a second Orbus considers finding his own way, but realizes that will be suicidal, since he won’t last more than a few minutes if he encounters one of the Guard. Reluctantly he moves to the yawning gap, ups the light amplification of his visor, and sees Vrell and Sniper making their way down a sloping floor, pushing wreckage aside as they go. The floor itself lies twenty feet below him, which even at one-gravity would not hurt him. He steps over the edge and drops, landing with a thump and not even bending his legs to absorb the shock, and then strides after them as fast as the low gravity will allow.
Even as he catches up, he sees Sniper batting away one of the mutated third-children.
Then a beam of a particle cannon cuts through wreckage, strikes Sniper and splashes, then catches Vrell on one side, blowing away part of his shell and three of his legs.
‘They’re here,’ Sniper announces.
So Gurnard isn’t going to venture any closer to the planetoid and intends to sit out here as a spectator only, but Drooble is damned if that is all he himself is going to do. He applies the multidriver to the fixings all around the wall panel, quickly winding them out and sending them clattering to the floor, and meanwhile wonders how long it will take the AI to catch on to what he’s doing. Maybe it’ll stay distracted by that thing sitting out there keeping an eye on them.
Eventually the panel swings down on one remaining lower corner fixing, to expose bunches of fibre-optics and a couple of superconductor feeds sheathed in plasticized ceramic. Drooble unholsters his solid-state laser pistol and studies them for a moment. If his earlier reading of the ship’s schematics is correct, then all the optics and the lower feed are the ones he needs to deal with. He therefore points at the feed and pulls the trigger.
The laser beam crackles as it hits the ceramic coating but, since the purpose of this coating is to prevent the possibility of a short of thousands of amps, it takes a little while to burn through. The moment it does, however, a massive arc flash cuts a crater into the metal behind, the blast throwing Drooble back against the opposite wall of the corridor. The arc burns for a while longer as vaporizing metal erodes the superconductor away, then some safety device kicks in and shuts it down. The corridor lights dim for a second, then come on again.
‘What are you doing, Drooble?’ Gurnard enquires.
Drooble staggers to his feet, emitting an odd giggle, wipes his face then wishes he hadn’t, as a layer of skin peels off to dangle free. He pulls it off and discards it, then glances up towards the ceiling, half expecting a security drone to drop into view, before approaching the panel again.
Metal is still glowing inside there and most of the optics are burnt through but, being methodical, Drooble takes careful aim and severs the rest of them, before turning away and heading over to a nearby bulkhead door.
‘You are not going to answer me?’ Gurnard enquires.
As expected, the control panel beside the door is dead, and Drooble has to use its manual mechanism to open it. He strides on into the suiting room beyond, tears open a locker that is also without power, pulls out the spacesuit inside and dons it.
‘Ah, I think I see,’ says Gurnard.
‘You do?’ Drooble wonders. ‘Bit slow for an AI, ain’t you?’
‘What makes you think that object out there will let you past when it won’t allow me past?’
‘There’s one way to find out,’ Drooble replies.
‘You are not thinking clearly, Iannus Drooble.’
‘No? Really?’ Drooble opens the next bulkhead door into the shuttle bay and carefully closes it behind him. Then he walks over and operates the door control to the shuttle, which is powered by the shuttle itself, and enters. He takes the pilot’s chair and pulls back the ivory-handled lever to close up the shuttle’s door, then after a pause pulls back the lever next to it to open the space doors. If he has this right, a safety system will have kicked in. This is so that, should the Gurnard come under attack and lose its internal power, the shuttle’s own internal power supply can still be used to open the bay doors.
A ship’s bell begins ringing and he jerks in surprise, before gripping the shuttle’s helm and shuffling into a more comfortable position in the chair, with his feet down on the foot pedals. The space door cracks open with a bang, and a wind begins whistling as the air inside the bay squirts out into vacuum, the noise growing fast to a steady shriek. Obviously the power supplied by the shuttle is enough to open the doors, but not enough to operate the bay-evacuation pumps. Eventually all the air goes, and then Drooble pushes the helm forwards to slide the shuttle out into night.
‘Do you think Orbus will approve of this?’ Gurnard enquires from the console.
‘I don’t care either way,’ Drooble replies.
‘Yes, of course . . . you get to risk your life and, if you survive and the Captain does not approve of what you have done, just maybe he’ll punish you for it . . .’
‘That’s not what this is about.’ But Drooble wonders to himself just what this is about. He wants to be there, not just spectating from the bridge of the Gurnard. He wants to help out as best he can. Doesn’t he?
The shuttle falls away from the big cargo ship towards the icy marble of the planetoid, and towards that other object which, from this perspective, lies just off to one side of it. He opens up the fusion drive, the seat punching him in the back, and grins. Whilst the planetoid seems to grow only marginally, the object that has placed itself between Gurnard and it is rapidly increasing in size. Within minutes it is large enough for him to study some of its detail. It does look like just a big chunk, a big splinter of metal hanging in the void, though now he can see shapes like a cross between fossils of ancient life-forms and old circuitry seemingly etched into its surface. He waits for some reaction from the thing, but there is nothing, not even as he draws parallel to it, then speeds past.
‘So you survived that,’ Gurnard observes.
‘I thought maybe this shuttle would be too small for it to even bother with,’ Drooble replies, uncomfortable with the fact that he is feeling a species of disappointment.
‘There’s the main vessel to contend with yet,’ warns Gurnard. ‘Then the one down on the planet, and maybe Vrell and his dreadnought too.’
‘Not a problem.’ Drooble increases acceleration towards the distant orb.
Since boarding the dreadnought, Sniper had been perpetually scanning the areas immediately surrounding him. Some of the Guard were active at the beginning, but only conducting Vrell’s ongoing repairs of his ship, and others were simply grinding to a halt. However, from half an hour prior to Vrell saying, ‘Something hostile has taken control of the Guard,’ the activity of those armoured corpses aboard the dreadnought has ramped up. The motionless ones have started moving again and those still working have downed tools and moved off. At first all this new activity seemed utterly chaotic, but then a pattern began to emerge as the Guard started isolating reactors, weapons systems, and the ship’s various drives. Next, even worse, some of them faded from view as they brought online some form of chameleonware. And now they are here.
In irritation, Sniper slaps a mutated third-child out of the way and spits two missiles towards the hazy source of that particle beam, then fires off both his own particle cannons at points within the wreckage where he predicts the near-invisible attacker might have gone. The two missiles impact, a double blast casting aside twisted beams and buckled wall panels. Briefly, something that definitely does not look like one of the Guard is flung back out of sight by the blast, whilst another of the same variety is picked out by one of the particle beams.
‘There’s things in here that don’t look like your Guard,’ he observes.
‘They must be from the other ship,’ Vrell replies.
‘Then they got in here bloody quick.’
Something odd about all this, something very odd . . .
Absorbing data from these brief appearances, Sniper reconfigures his scanning routine and gets a snapshot of the attackers’ positions throughout this particular area of the ship. Five of them are here within this sealed-off area, and others are converging from outside it. Then, abruptly, the scanning routine ceases to pick up anything, as the creatures he now sees reconfigure their own chameleonware, quick to work out what data Sniper just acquired. They are fast – horribly so.
Sniper doesn’t know what plans Vrell has been formulating. It certainly seems the Prador wants to find somewhere to hide, so as to formulate them further and begin some furtive attack upon the invaders of his ship. But these new creatures will not give Vrell the time, and now the Prador is crippled too.
‘We have to get out of here,’ announces Sniper. ‘Things are gonna get too hot to handle in here very quickly.’
Vrell is struggling along, managing to keep up for a short distance, then collapsing as the two legs he has left on one side fail to support his weight, probably because of damage to connecting muscles, and maybe because of the pain. However, where the chunk was burned from his shell the wound is already skinning over and bulging, and it seems likely the Prador will not be without legs for too much longer.
‘Help him,’ Sniper says to Orbus.
‘Help him?’
Another cripple, thinks Sniper. Orbus was not the right choice for this little venture. Maybe a few decades cruising round as the Captain of a cargo ship would have resulted in him obtaining some stability, maybe not. But certainly getting thrown straight into conflict with those who damaged him in the first place seems to be undermining the already shaky bulwarks of his mind. Sniper wonders how long it will be before Orbus again decides Vrell is surplus to requirements, for his anger seems to be surfacing in a regular pattern. However, he did manage to control it this last time.
‘Yes, help him.’
Orbus reluctantly moves up beside Vrell and, none too gently, jams his shoulder underneath the place where the Prador has lost its legs. Vrell hisses, but says nothing.
Still scanning about, Sniper realizes their only option now lies far down to his left, where a break in the hull opens to the outside. But what then? In here they will be subject to constant and increasingly lethal attacks, but that does not mean such attacks will cease once they depart the ship.
‘Keep moving.’
Sniper plots out the area down below, then tears away a tangle of beams to give them access to the start of an exit route. Knowing that the enemy may second-guess him, be begins to reprogram some of his missiles, choose alternative routes, prepare mines and other incendiaries, and formulate solutions to various forms of attack. Certainly, he isn’t going up against simple Prador – or their drones – here.
Prador drones . . .
‘What about your drones?’ he abruptly asks Vrell.
‘I am ahead of you,’ Vrell replies. ‘I have recorded orders for them, and I possess the codes to access the drone cache, but I cannot open communication without being detected and leaving myself open to viral attack.’
Sniper picks up a signal from Vrell’s CPU, opens a channel and downloads the data the Prador sends him. Sniper next begins running programming routines to punch him through to the drone cache, but with the static out there, and the alien code running in so many of the ship’s systems, this is like negotiating a briar patch growing on the surface of a swamp.
‘Down here.’ Sniper leads the way down through a gap.
Orbus and Vrell dutifully follow, though Sniper has to help the Prador down through. Even as he lowers Vrell to the floor below, he turns and fires two programmed missiles along their intended route, whereupon, a hundred feet ahead, they swerve into surrounding wreckage. The first explodes, flaring out an EM pulse, whilst the second simply settles, then winds up to speed its chemical reactor in order to power its esoteric hardware. Its nose falls off and it begins projecting. A hundred feet ahead, holographic copies of the three escapees proceed through the wreckage, and abruptly find themselves at the confluence of two particle beams and a stream of rail-gun missiles.
Sniper returns fire from his present location, his two particle beams stabbing out, and has the satisfaction of briefly seeing one of the invaders lose a claw as its own particle cannon explodes. The holograms leap forward, simultaneously opening fire, and the EM pulse has sufficiently scrambled instrumentation for the unknown attackers not to know which of the figures they see are the real ones.
Leading the way along a different course through the wreckage, Sniper again picks up enough data to penetrate his opponents’ chameleonware, and again gets a snapshot of their locations before they reformat. In response to this, he drops a series of mines from his store, and begins flinging them all about with deadly accuracy. Where they hit, their gecko function kicks in and they stick. Simultaneously he sends specially designed programs to each. Some will detonate if touched, some upon picking up regular patterns of air movement, others will blow if a weapon is fired within their blast radius. All of this Sniper very carefully designed. He knows he stands no hope of taking out more than one or two of these creatures. He just needs to delay them enough so that he, Vrell and Orbus can get out of here.
Vrell seems to be getting along a bit better, showing a speed of recovery that would be remarkable in any normal Prador, but Sniper has long been associating with those infected with the Spatterjay virus; he knows what it can do for them. It also occurs to him, knowing the other effects of the virus, that Vrell will soon be needing something to eat, or else he might risk undergoing some nasty changes.
Through . . .
Abruptly Sniper finds himself accessing the drone cache. Through internal ship eyes, he observes rank upon rank of the spherical drones all locked into their storage alcoves along the walls of one massive chamber – in fact hundreds of them. On sending the first code Vrell provided, he observes clamps slowly disengaging from the drones like claws opening up. Meanwhile he sends to each of them Vrell’s instructions: The Guard are hostile, and in collusion with invaders attempting to take over this ship. Hunt and destroy them all without regard to ship structure. As soon as the command arrives, the drones begin departing their alcoves, but just then, some massive explosion rocks the entire chamber, flinging many of them about like loose ball-bearings, and yet more of those creatures he has already seen start to enter, with weapons blazing. Sniper feels both chagrin and not a little fear, on seeing how incredibly fast they react. He intercepts data from the cache, again breaking the enemy’s chameleonware format, and sees that some of them are already withdrawing from around him to counter this new danger. But not enough.
Particle beams lash down all around them. Orbus takes a hit, spins out from his position of supporting Vrell, then opens fire with his multigun.
Time to go.
Sniper fires a series of missiles which shoot ahead of him and then curve down. He advances to grab a floor panel, tear it up and cast it aside. From below comes the first detonation. He snakes out a tentacle, wraps it around Orbus, whose armour is smoking, and drags him in close. Vrell, however, having worked out what the drone is doing, hurls himself to one side, a particle beam splashing on and incinerating wreckage directly above him, then lurches forward and down through the hole. Sniper flings himself after him, powering up his fusion drive as he drops, swinging the flame chambers around a full one hundred and eighty degrees, so he is essentially propelled shell-first downwards. Passing Vrell, he reaches out to snag the Prador and draw him in below the two drive flames. He hits burning and molten wreckage from the first missile explosion, and punches straight through it. Further detonations ensue as Sniper punches his way through three more weakened conglomerations of wreckage. Particle beams and streams of missiles from rail-guns create a storm of fire and metal fragments all about them. Above, mines begin going off, igniting a rapidly receding inferno.
Finally Sniper cannons hard into an unweakened wall of crash-foam directly under a lattice of beams. He drags himself out of the crater he has made, swinging his drives round again, and uses both them and his free tentacles to propel himself, and the other two, across the wall. He fires another missile, which curves down through a hole in the wall and detonates, filling all nearby spaces with burning crash-foam, then hurtles down into this gap and out into icy twilight, bounces on hard ice before releasing his two companions, then skids for two hundred feet before driving his tentacles into it to bring himself to a stop. Orbus and Vrell go skating on past him, finally drawing to a halt some fifty feet further on.
‘Run for that.’ Sniper stabs a tentacle towards an outcrop of ice and stone situated between them and the distant vessel which, now down on the icy plain, looks like the giant fortress of some VR fantasy called Lord of Winter. The two obey him, moving swiftly away. However Vrell is again signalling with his CPU and clearly wants to send Sniper something more.
‘This may be of use,’ Vrell reports. ‘I tried to use it just a moment ago, but I cannot get through. It is the detonation code for the fusion tacticals inside the Guards’ armour.’
‘Not much use against these other buggers,’ Sniper observes.
He squirrels the code away for future use, puts online his internal antigrav and rises twenty feet into the air, turning to face their exit point from the ship. With spurts from his steering jets, he steadily moves away, keeping himself between the exit and his two companions. Whilst doing this, he checks his supplies of munitions and power. Both are severely depleted and, for what is to come, he doubts even the full load would be enough. At intervals he begins cutting holes down into the ice and then shooting off the occasional preprogrammed missile. He needs to stack the odds in his favour.
The Golgoloth realizes that something very untoward is occurring aboard the dreadnought and, on examining the fragments of com it is picking up, knows at once that the source of these events is neither Human nor Prador. The ancient hermaphrodite Prador has never seen code like this before, to the best of his knowledge, anyway. It begins running a search through its extended mind, putting online ganglion after ganglion and, as a precaution, leaving them running, the processing power of his mind and his sheer intelligence growing moment by moment. As a further precaution the Golgoloth begins applying some of those ganglia to the weapons systems of this vessel fragment and the main vessel above – systems it did not previously consider necessary for dealing with a downed dreadnought and its single mutated Prador occupant.
Up above, it readies U-space missiles, reformatting their U-fields so they can actually penetrate down into a gravity well to reach the surface of a planet, their target the dreadnought itself. The Golgoloth begins running hardfield generators up to power, and provides numerous back-up systems for them. It lines up reception dishes on the ship fragment to receive high-powered microwave beams from the fathership – an excess of power the Golgoloth may shortly require. It onlines generators that can produce force-fields of rather esoteric design – the product of a century-long thread of research it finished fifty years back. It now runs diagnostics on equally esoteric beam weapons whose output combines the radiative spectrums and particle emissions in strange and useful ways, and readies its most powerful full-spectrum white lasers. Then it turns its attention to information now becoming available.
For a brief moment the Golgoloth is surprised at the source of this new information, which is a ganglion it brought online only recently: in fact the one that stores all its knowledge about the Spatterjay virus. The Golgoloth knew the virus harboured something entirely alien – a trihelical genome – and the special search reveals that the alien code presently being employed aboard the dreadnought closely matches feedback from those trihelical structures caused by induction scanning. This is an odd fact, but still doesn’t explain what is happening in that ship out there.
Its intelligence now thoroughly heightened, the Golgoloth again reviews what it knows. Oberon wants Vrell destroyed and, even though the Golgoloth is not completely allied with the King, the old hermaphrodite is currently the King’s most powerful resource within the Graveyard. Because of the possible Polity response, sending in ships is not a safe option, yet the King seems ready to now do even that. Vrell, though a dangerous virally mutated Prador, does not seem to represent a sufficient danger to merit being countered by such drastic measures, yet now it appears that the Golgoloth has somehow underestimated him. Whatever is happening aboard that dreadnought is perhaps exactly what Oberon feared.
The Golgoloth returns its attention to its telescopes and scanners, realizing that some sort of battle is occurring within the dreadnought itself. Focusing on two Prador war drones as they pursue something escaping through an upper hatch, it sees an object hazy with chameleonware effect even though repeatedly being struck by weapons fire. Then one of the big rail-guns mounted in the ship’s hull opens fire, slamming quarter-ton missiles into the drones and blowing them apart. The hazy thing returns to the ship, its chameleonware shutting off, and Golgoloth glimpses briefly an insectile armoured shape. Next, figures come careening out through one of the holes in the bottom of the ship, and begin heading towards an outcrop of stone and ice lying midway between the Golgoloth’s vessel and the dreadnought. The old hermaphrodite cautiously focuses all its weapons on them, before studying them intently.
One mutated Prador who is very likely Vrell, one armoured Human and one Polity war drone. This is all very odd. The Golgoloth watches them with interest.