19

An esteemed colleague once pointed out to me that though it is convenient for major events in fiction to tip on some pivotal moment, for instance for Gollum to bite the finger off Frodo and thus send the ring of power into the fire, reality is rarely like that. He claimed that the march of history carries too much momentum for those small key events to knock it aside. I patted him on the shoulder and agreed, considering the assassination that led to the First World War, the bullet through Kennedy’s skull, the positioning of an iceberg back in 1912 . . . Our stories do not pivot on one point but on thousands of them, moment to moment, every one of them a step in that same long march.

– Anonymous

As Vrell finishes his explanation, Orbus feels his legs grow slightly weak. Shit, his shooting isn’t that great – he managed to miss Vrell – but now so much depends on it. He glances to one side at the Golgoloth’s children, and notices they show the usual Prador signs of stark-staring terror. That is understandable, since both their task and Vrell’s task are likely to get them killed.

‘But with weapons we will be better,’ observes the one named Geth.

‘There will be no time,’ Vrell replies, through Thirteen. ‘Once the Jain soldier has taken him, it will try to destroy us all as quickly as possible. Though it cannot immediately detonate the fusion devices inside the Guard, because the King has switched them over to manual, or the self-destructs of the ships or access to their weapons, since they have been isolated too, it will go for control over the weapons of this ship, and those are formidable. With the help I have, I can freeze his pit controls, but it will not take him long to get to my own, or to others in here. He must be held back for long enough, or we all die.’

It is the longest speech Orbus has ever heard Vrell make, and he ponders its content. How coincidental that their weapons are cached here in this very room, and that Vrell has found Sadurian’s AI hiding within the ship’s system. And how fortunate that the dangers of informational attack from the Jain made it necessary for Oberon to offline those self-destruct mechanisms.

‘How will you know when?’ he asks.

‘I am monitoring,’ Vrell replies, through Thirteen. ‘Oberon has just communicated with the Golgoloth, and I am now analysing their plan of attack for error.’

‘They have one then?’

‘They do but, since Oberon is currently being hijacked by a Jain soldier, there is no guarantee that the information underlying this plan is valid.’

‘Not a lot we can do really, if it isn’t.’

Oberon focuses his attention on the King, who now looks in a bad way, like some giant bug suffering a dose of Raid. The big mutant is shivering, his dripping fluids now turned pale jade as if tinged with Prador blood. He jerks sharply, snapping a hose from the pillar, jerks again and, with a shower of sparks, tears out a power cable. Sadurian gestures the two third-children towards the pillar, and they edge forward to busily set about reattaching both hose and cable.

‘Oberon, tell me what to do now,’ she asks him.

The King’s massive head swings towards her and stops still, mandibles slowly opening and closing idiotically. Rods of drool dangle from them, and his inner mandibles clatter against each other briefly, spilling drool to the floor.

‘Essential to eliminate competition,’ announces the King, the translation still reaching Orbus through Thirteen. ‘Racial survival imperative . . . subordinate to survival of squad. Viable alien superfluous.’

The King tilts his head slightly, then lowers his front end while raising his rear, his pose now resembling that of a scorpion or a devil’s coach-horse beetle. Suddenly, his tail smacks into the side of the cylinder, hard enough to nearly fold it in half, before sending it end over end, scattering the two third-children as it hurtles across the room to crash into the wall. The two chrome-armoured children struggle back to their feet just as he emits a horrible whistling shriek, his main mandibles opening up to a span of ten feet. Then his head snaps down on one of them, and mandibles clash about its carapace as he wrenches it from the floor, pulls his main claws from the pit controls and, despite the third-child’s armour, tears away its legs all down one side and then tosses it away. Weighing half a ton or more, the injured creature arcs for twenty feet before slamming hard into another wall, actually penetrating its surface and becoming jammed there.

‘Right,’ says Vrell, again through Thirteen, ‘my friend in here just offlined his pit controls. We go now.’

The second third-child manages to get ten feet before the King comes down on it like a hammer, flattening it to the floor. His claws must be tipped with something incredibly hard and strong, for they drive down straight through the armour and body of the smaller Prador, the sheer impact denting the creature into the floor. Green ichor wells, then fountains up as the King extracts his claw. Sadurian is already running, but Orbus does not give much for her chances until the King’s attention suddenly swings towards Vrell.

‘I require access,’ says the King – only Orbus knows that the thing standing there is no longer Oberon, has in fact ceased to be him for some minutes now. As the haze about them fades, he gazes at the imprisoning posts around himself and the Golgoloth’s children, then immediately breaks into a run, heading to his right, towards where a diagonally divided panel is opening. The Golgoloth’s children scramble away too, scattering throughout the room, heading for various control stations where they immediately begin digging in with their claws and distorted underhands to tear out components. The King leaps towards Vrell, blindingly fast, but Vrell leaps too. He shoots up from his controls and, with one claw crashing down, propels himself sideways. The King’s claw just misses impaling him to the floor. One side of Vrell’s carapace cannons into a wall, leaving a grooved dent, and he throws himself along the base of it, but the King ignores him as he sinks down over Vrell’s pit controls.

Orbus is at the weapons cache, where he can see Prador weapons piled up, but not his own multigun. It must be somewhere underneath. Grabbing tangled equipment, he throws it hard behind him, towards where the Golgoloth’s children are doing their ruinous work. Fire and smoke suddenly flare. Orbus glances round to witness the King shrieking and peeling himself up painfully, the controls under him sabotaged and burning. Multi-gun, there! Orbus grabs the barrel just as a rail-gun thrums. The King is moving fast, feet actually tearing up floor metal, and missiles ricocheting off shell that must be as hard as ceramal. We’re going to die, thinks Orbus, no way I can punch through that carapace. Powering up the multigun, he sees disappointing figures on its display – ten shots only – ten sprine bullets for the purpose of regicide.

One of the Golgoloth’s first-children is wrenched aloft, its rail-gun firing into the ceiling, but only as long as its bubbling shriek as the King’s mandibles scissor the creature in half. Two of the smaller third-children are now scooped up in his claws, then thumped together to spatter like overripe fruit.

Just fucking concentrate.

Orbus goes down on one knee, takes a long slow breath, steadies the butt of the multigun against his shoulder as he aims. He lets out the breath just as a dark shape slams down on the King’s back. Vrell is being foolishly brave. No, he’s tearing away some of the machinery interlaced through that adamantine carapace, trying to make a gap. The King’s head turns a full hundred and eighty degrees. One scissoring snip and Vrell’s claw goes tumbling through the air, though lacking the green ichor already spattered about the floor by the Golgoloth’s dying children.

Again Orbus steadies his weapon. Seemingly driven by hydraulic motors, a long claw closes on the edge of Vrell’s carapace, cutting and crushing into it as if into pie crust. Vrell gives a shriek, but is victorious as, in his remaining claw, he waves some long silvery mechanism trailing dripping optics and tubes. Vrell is now slammed down on the floor, onto his back, that same long claw wrenching itself along his underside, gutting him. There, in the King’s back, a hole from which trails vinelike electronics, leaking pale green. Orbus fires, just three shots, but then the King turns to scythe a second-child in half while snatching up another, bursting it. The detonations along the King’s back are not even close. Powdery red in the air. And now the hole is facing away from Orbus.

‘Just turn a little, you fucker,’ Orbus whispers.

Vrell knows. Even open like a half-eaten trifle, he manages to right himself, drag himself across, snare one of the King’s feet with his remaining claw. The King whirls, flipping Vrell upright, impales him on a claw and then discards him. Vrell bounces away trailing a confetti of internal organs. Geth fires a rail-gun at the King to draw attention to himself, just enough to turn the King around further. Three more shots towards that same hole. Two exterior detonations, but very close. Did the third actually go in? Orbus wonders if he will ever find out as the King, ignoring Geth and perhaps fully recognizing the danger the Old Captain represents, now hurtles towards him. Orbus knocks the setting of his weapon down to two shots, fires at midnight eyes just as the King slams into him like a monorail. Orbus adds his own impetus to the impact by throwing himself back into the weapons cache. Mandibles close on one half of the door, tear it out and skim it away, then they crash inside to close about the Sea Captain’s body, dragging him out like a whelk from its shell, and raising him up before those inner glassy scythes over the glistening ridged tunnel of the King’s mouth.

I don’t think I can survive this, Orbus thinks, swinging his multigun round and firing his two remaining shots straight down the King’s gullet.

The gathering darkness about the thing ahead is again reaching its optimum, and within minutes either one of those ships behind, including the King’s ship, is going to die, or else the blast will be coming the Golgoloth’s way. The ancient hermaphrodite opens new channels that key in more closely to its scattered ganglia, thus becoming them, becoming the ship itself. Through the U-space eyes of that ganglion from a first-child dismantled a hundred years in the past, it peers into the chaos of underspace: a five-dimensional ocean under storm, brain-twisting angles of non-matter revolving into existence then vanishing, waves mounting and rolling into each other, a maelstrom centred over that distant Jain vessel, where cords of the actual underlying structure of the universe suck down energy.

How can they win against this? How can they destroy something that manages to so ably bend the laws of physics?

The Golgoloth does not allow these questions to remain within its distributed mind for long. It simultaneously observes, through sensors both internal and external and across most of the emitted spectrum, the horde of Jain soldiers it rapidly approaches, and which is rapidly approaching it. Time to focus their attention. Almost as if they are its own limbs, the Golgoloth reaches out with hardfields and closes them like claws. It crushes Jain down to incredibly dense spheres a mere ten inches across, and then releases them, the spheres coming apart, materials recombined, incredibly hot, nothing of what they once formed remaining.

Next the ancient Prador stabs out with its white lasers, like the youngest type of Prador spearing small fish with the tips of its sharp legs. Hardfields scale space ahead, deflecting some of the beams, sometimes burning out, the Jain bodies projecting them raised to sun-surface temperatures and just evaporating into surrounding vacuum.

The intense beam of a particle cannon stabs back, powered via one of three new relays out there. The beam ploughs across the hull of the Golgoloth’s vessel, its impact site one long explosion that cuts a trench fifty feet deep. White lasers reply, only again the Jain throw up hardfield defences that turn space refractive, the beams curving away on new courses, sometimes even turning at sharp angles.

The Golgoloth now tries its own particle cannons, probing here and there, again trying to predict each new hardfield configuration, whilst simultaneously opening five ports in its vessel’s hull and bringing the noses of its U-jump missiles to the surface. Within the five missile-ganglia it rests the touch of its mind, feather-light.

Behind come the King’s dreadnoughts and, following their attack in, the spaceborne Guard are struggling to keep up. The viruses and the Jain worms now arrive, a panoply of computer organisms invading through sensors, through the exposed gas-locked throats and crystal eyes of lasers, through transmission and reception dishes. Soon the Golgoloth is fighting internal battles, isolating what it can again, but otherwise shutting down and burning out its own software and hardware, and killing parts of its mind. One of the five missiles is invaded, and the Golgoloth instantly fires it, through normal sensors watching it depart the ship and vanish from realspace. In U-space the missile is rolled up in some multi-dimensional whirlpool, then splashes back out into the real, turning inside-out from front to back, a fraction of a second before its exposed antimatter touches the obverse and turns all into a massive detonation.

The ship passes through intense EM, and that is a relief almost, for briefly all the viral attacks cease. The Jain now lie directly ahead, and from behind the Golgoloth’s ship the dreadnoughts fire into the host a seemingly liquid stream of rail-gun fire, shoals of missiles, and both visible and invisible beams. The Golgoloth, taking a lesson from Sniper, now concentrates hardfields ahead, interweaving them in a single configuration, cone-like, just like the field the war drone used – one the Golgoloth suspects was designed to allow it to travel quickly under water. Jain soldiers rattle off this defence like hail off a greenhouse, but they are nothing compared to what is coming. Ahead, in U-space, the cords draw in, and then, in the real, that ship-killer plaited beam screws out, heading straight towards the Golgoloth.

The thing hits the hardfields, rips them sideways as if flicking scales off a fish. Within the ship generators explode, twist out of their mountings, some even crashing through internal structure with the force of rail-gun missiles. The Golgoloth rails out its own U-jump missiles, directly towards the impact site on its hardfields. In underspace vision the beam appears clearly, a stretched-out spiral burrowing up out of chaos, and wherever it tears into fields, its end resembles a leech’s mouth sliding back and forth against glass. The Golgoloth drops the four missiles out of the real, and with its mind hard-linked into them all, so that they are now parts of itself speeding away, it alters and touches and twists the function of each U-space drive, making nanosecond calculations upon the current position of the beam’s end-point.

Two missiles bounce back up into the real, their subsequent detonations wiping out the rest of the Golgoloth’s defence. As the plaited beam punches forwards, it scoops up the last remaining two like an eel snapping up grubs, and through their eyes the Golgoloth finds itself speeding down a curving well towards something utterly terrifying. In the real, the beam strikes the Golgoloth’s ship and begins tearing up its hull, boring downwards. The missiles reach their destination, contact blurring away as they then choose – as they always choose so readily – to end it all. A hundred feet down into the Golgoloth’s ship the beam tears, then just ceases. A microsecond later, a bright blue star flashes into existence at the centre of the ship of bones, growing in intensity and eventually occluding it. Next a blastfront spreads, tearing the strange vessel to shreds, converting material to fire and rolling out a doughnut-shaped cloud of luminous gas. In U-space the effect is visible too, as the source point of the USER maelstrom becomes a massive sphere rapidly collapsing in on itself.

The Golgoloth has killed the Jain ship. But now, as chaotic battle continues all about it, the old creature wonders if this will be a victory it can survive.

Shuddering to an abrupt halt, the King locks his mandibles tight enough around the Old Captain – perhaps tight enough to shear any normal Human in half. But with the Spatterjay virus so long occupying Orbus’s body, Vrell knows the man will be as difficult to sever as something constructed of iron and seasoned wood. Perhaps one day Vrell himself will be so tough, but only if he can survive this.

Three shots – one through the side of the King’s body, and now two more straight down his throat. How long before the sprine will take effect?

The King abruptly jerks his head sideways, sending Orbus flying in a flat trajectory across the room, where he hits one wall hard, making a sound like a mollusc shell giving out. Orbus drops soggily from a deep dent in the wall, about which his rarely seen blood is spattered. Prone on the floor, little jerky movements in his body – where there should be no movement at all – betray his tenacious hold on life. Just like Vrell’s hold.

Now the King begins shuddering, then suddenly he raises his head to emit an ululating shriek. He squats low, then hurls himself up with the force of a shuttle launching, his back slamming into the ceiling, then he drops hard, coming down with a crash, legs splayed momentarily in disarray. Then he is running, careering at high speed in a straight line, feet tearing up metal, though sometimes his gait slips out of control. Some of the Golgoloth’s children scatter from his path, but he pays them no heed, just cannoning head-first into the far wall. There he just stands, mandibles buried deep in its surface, tail thrashing like an angry cat’s.

And next he comes apart.

The King drips fluids now turned black from every joint, and then one of his back legs detaches from its carapace socket and topples like a felled tree. As it hits the floor, it breaks up into its individual segments, and what were once internal tissues like muscle, veins and tendons flow out in a black syrupy mess. His tail, at first flicking smoothly, now begins to lock up, this paralysing effect spreading from base to tip, and when that appendage finally grows still, the whole of it falls to pieces. Another leg goes next, followed by a primary claw, then his whole body just comes apart and collapses like an immense stone arch with its keystone removed. The head holds up for a little while longer, then it too drops like a boulder, leaving the sawtooth tips of his mandibles embedded in the wall.

I cannot begin to know how hard you fought, thinks Vrell.

Certainly the King fought against the Jain soldier he had resurrected inside himself, but he knew he might not win and so made careful preparations: severing his connection to the fusion devices inside the Guards’ armour; severing his connection to the destructs of his own ships; placing the Old Captain’s multigun here, ready to hand, loaded with sprine bullets; allowing Vrell access to this ship’s computer systems; and very likely allowing Sadurian’s AI free rein within them in the first place. Of course, the King did not make it easy for himself to be killed. Vrell can now see that Oberon had expected to either defeat the Jain soldier quickly or fight a long losing battle against it – a losing battle that would give the rest of them time to get to the multigun.

The King has knowingly made the ultimate sacrifice for the Prador race, and Vrell wonders if he could do the same.

I should be dead, he reflects. It does not seem right to be so severely damaged and still functional, or even regaining function. Already, with painful wrenching sensations, his sliced-open torso is closing. Not knowing what else to do, he reaches underneath and pushes torn and ruptured organs back inside himself, whereupon the speed at which his body is closing up increases. Unsteadily, he heaves himself to his feet.

‘We succeeded,’ says Geth, now standing with his remaining kin gathered behind him. They all gaze at the scattered fragments of the King, which begin to emit an oily steam – the result of mechanisms woven through his body shorting their power supplies.

‘We succeeded only because he allowed us to succeed,’ says Vrell, walking with great care over to Orbus, who is still lying flat on his back.

The woman, Sadurian, kneels beside him, some sort of medical box ready to hand. The drone, Thirteen, hovers above this.

‘What can I do?’ she asks.

Orbus makes only some mumbling liquid sound in reply.

‘The direct translation of his reply,’ explains Thirteen, ‘is The fucker broke every bone in my body.‘

‘A reply that is not particularly helpful,’ Sadurian observes.

‘There is nothing you can do for him now,’ interjects Vrell, ‘except to make sure he is provided with a great deal of nutrient totally uninfected by the virus.’

Vrell is thinking much the same about himself, and hungrily eyeing the scattered remnants of those of the Golgoloth’s children the King dismembered earlier. However, though this is not a usual Prador reaction, he feels it would seem ungrateful to start eating his one-time allies. He swings away to inspect the room, searching for still-usable pit controls. The children certainly did a thorough job of destruction, but over there in the far corner lies one access point that seems only partially trashed. Vrell heads over, inserts one claw and whichever of his underhands do not hang limp and dead underneath him. The unit’s mask rises into position and he inserts his head, immediately accessing the ship’s three-dimensional virtually.

‘You took your time,’ says Sphinx, represented here as a glittering fog filled with cubic structures.

‘I need to gain control of this ship,’ says Vrell.

‘You certainly do,’ the AI replies. ‘The remaining Jain are still fighting, and it is by no means certain that the Golgoloth and the King’s dreadnoughts can defeat them.’

‘There will be many traps throughout this system, and many codes I will need to break,’ says Vrell. ‘King Oberon nearly killed me even just reaching out from the Kingdom to Vrost’s ship, and breaking through to his personal files here tested me to the limit.’

‘There will be no traps,’ says the AI.

‘You have eliminated them?’

‘No, even I would have encountered severe problems had the King seen fit to put any hindrance in my way. He did not, however. He let me in here.’

Vrell is not entirely sure he trusts this artificial intelligence – it is Polity after all. How easy for it to let him now become entangled in lethal computer intricacies? How easy to thus eliminate another possible threat to the Polity?

‘But I see you have doubts,’ says Sphinx. ‘I’ll let someone else reassure you.’

In the virtuality, he slowly slides into existence: first a glassy outline like a vessel waiting to be filled, then colour and substance gradually fill him up, starting first from those great heavy feet pressing down on a non-existent floor.

‘So I am dead,’ says King Oberon.

Vrell almost leaps away from the the mask and pit controls, but manages to restrain himself.

‘You are dead,’ he confirms.

The King’s image nods its head in a peculiarly Human manner, then begins to speak:

‘When your father, Ebulan, travelled to Spatterjay, I sent Vrost there to destroy whatever then arose from that world, whether or not he or any of his children were actually infected by the Spatterjay virus. I could not tolerate competition. I would not tolerate any Prador family other than my own becoming infected and so becoming a danger. To this end I have been as ruthless as any Prador. I have exterminated entire families merely on the suspicion that they know about or have used the virus. Within the Kingdom I have denuded one entire world of life, because my Guard discovered Prador there who were infected. And to the Humans I returned as many of their infected blanks as possible, for purposes of disposal. I have made it illegal for any Prador to own such blanks, ostensibly because of our treaty with the Humans but mainly to free the Kingdom of the virus.’

Vrell just gazes silently at this representation of the King. Is this all just a recording or is it interactive? Is some portion, or even the whole of the King’s mind here? Certainly, if there is the capacity here to contain a Polity AI, then there is also the capacity to hold a copy of the King’s mind.

‘I understand this,’ says Vrell finally. ‘On the merely Prador level, it is simple politics to eliminate any competition, but there was also the danger of the Jain—’

‘Of course you understand, Vrell, which is why I chose to give you this opportunity.’

Opportunity?

‘Under my rule, the Prador Kingdom has been stable, has grown wealthy, and managed to avoid extermination by the Polity AIs. It has also grown stale, stagnant, and the race as a whole has ceased to advance.’ The King dips his head, mandibles opening and closing. Vrell needs to force himself to remember that those same mandibles are currently embedded in a wall outside this virtuality, and that the King’s real body lies in steaming pieces. ‘I do not know precisely when, during my long reign, I started to consider the question of the succession. Being Prador, one would have thought I would ever continue to cling to power, ruthlessly continuing to quash any opposition, even killing those within my own family who might rise up to usurp me.’

‘If you have considered the succession, surely you should have prepared one of your own Guard for that position?’ says Vrell.

‘So you might think, but no, for one of my own would bring nothing new to the position. One of my own would only continue the stagnation. So I chose you, Vrell.’

‘You tried mightily hard to have me killed, or even kill me yourself,’ Vrell notes.

‘But you survived, which is all that matters,’ the King replies. ‘Had you not survived, you would not have been worthy, even in your encounter with the Jain soldier that destroyed me. When I sent the Golgoloth to kill you I knew its curiosity would prevent it from doing so, and I expected you to remove that creature from existence.’

Vrell considers that a very dubious claim, but asked, ‘ When did you choose me?’

‘The moment when, in almost impossible circumstances, you managed to board Vrost’s ship,’ came the reply. ‘Now it is time for me to hand over power.’

System-access icons begin to flash into operation all around Vrell: a treasury of opportunity, of power. But are they real? Vrell decides the time for doubt is over, as the battle for survival still rages. Using those same icons, he begins to take control. First he calls up a view of the battle, along with tactical analysis, then he accesses the child minds that control the engines and through them fires up the fusion drive. He gazes at outside views down along the massive cliff face of the ship’s hull and sees great fusion-drive flames indeed stabbing out. Then he pauses.

Weapons?

The icon for them is plainly evident and, if the King and Sphinx are lying to him, operating this will probably kill him. He uses it nevertheless, opens up schematics and control keys, then studies the weapons manifest and proceeds to online massive rail-guns, particle cannons, numerous designs of missiles sitting in silos as big as the entire Gurnard. He next reaches out to touch each of the dreadnoughts as they fight – and receives an unexpected response, an acknowledgement and proof that none beyond this room, excepting the Golgoloth, knows what has happened here.

‘As my King commands,’ responds each of the dreadnought captains in turn.

‘Treat them well,’ says the King, his colour now fading, some program scrubbing him from existence.

More underhands now becoming usable, Vrell inserts them into further pit controls, and then takes up the reins of power.

Orbus sits upright, his entire body creaking. He is starving hungry and knows that his brain isn’t operating properly. He peers at the King’s remains, looks over to Vrell, who is currently ensconced in one of those control thingies. Every now and again the mutated Prador removes his head from the mask, and with one claw snatches up gobbets of meat from a pile deposited beside him. At that moment a slight surge sways Orbus, and he puts a hand down to steady himself. The big ship is on the move and, the King being in no further condition to give orders, that seems likely to be at Vrell’s behest. The Old Captain now turns to focus on Sadurian.

‘Vrell has informed me that you require food, and lots of it,’ she says. ‘He need not have told me, though, for I know all about the viral-injury hunger.’

She gestures to one side, where stands one of the chrome-armoured third-children, the same one Orbus saw the King impale earlier. Green blood is clotted all about the hole through its armour, but the creature is mobile and now places a large plastic box on the floor beside Orbus, flipping it open with the tip of one claw. It then moves off to resume the task of levering its fellow from the wall.

Inside the box lie various packages that Orbus recognizes.

‘My food supply,’ says Sadurian. ‘I get some regularly shipped in from the Polity and prepare some of my own here. There are plenty of foods I can eat in the Kingdom, but there are still some things I really miss.’

Orbus reaches in and picks up a large crusty loaf. His stomach instantly grumbles. He now picks up a large block of plastic-wrapped meat of some kind, unwraps it, splits the loaf with his thumb and inserts the meat, then crushes the loaf flat and consumes it all in a rapid series of bites, hardly bothering to chew before swallowing. Next a big carton of orange juice, followed by a box of currant buns, some meaty stew that turns out to be a hot curry, followed by rice that is still dry and uncooked.

Sadurian turns to gaze over at where one side of the room is again transformed into a big screen, but now this is divided into hexagonal segments displaying different views. Only partially sated, Orbus follows her gaze. In one segment a dreadnought burns and Jain soldiers settle down on its surface. Even as he watches, the vessel detonates, removing both itself and its attackers from existence. A separate segment shows another dreadnought duelling with the encroaching Jain, using beam weapons and telefactored missiles. Every so often it takes one of them out, but they draw ever closer. However, the most violent action concentrates about the Golgoloth’s vessel, which is constantly disappearing behind weird hardfield distortions and intense detonations.

Orbus swallows more of the dry rice, washed down with orange juice. ‘How’s it going, then?’

‘By no means decided, but the King has yet to deploy the weapons of his own ship,’ Sadurian replies.

‘The King?’

She nods towards Vrell. ‘The succession has been decided, and the Prador don’t bother with coronations.’

‘Ah,’ says Orbus, but can think of nothing further to add.

The Golgoloth at first was keeping a wary eye on the King’s U-jump missiles, but so intense is the attack upon its own vessel that it has recently neglected to watch them, so some moments pass before it realizes one has winked out of existence, and that a subsequent detonation amidst the Jain is where it then rematerialized. Checking through U-space eyes, the hermaphrodite watches as another missile jumps and is amazed by the convoluted path it weaves, avoiding immediate destruction in the maelstrom, and taking itself just far enough so it can materialize again, fully amidst the Jain. Such guidance, the Golgoloth knows, requires massively complex and immediate calculations, so a first-class mind must be assisting the minds installed within the missiles themselves. The King has to be still alive and guiding those missiles. And now the Golgoloth sees the King’s ship itself entering the fray.

But the Golgoloth has other concerns. The Jain are fast thinkers too, and are now managing to circumvent some of its hardfield defences. How they lock on to those fields and twist themselves round them, the Golgoloth has yet to understand. Certainly it is a tactic that requires a great deal of energy, and the hermaphrodite needs to understand the process quickly if it is to survive. Probing out with a white laser, it manages to pick off one of them, but realizes that, the moment the beam strikes, a burst of microwave radiation pulses from the target. Now it knows.

The Jain it is destroying are themselves transforming their death energy into a pulse of microwaves to supply yet other Jain with enough energy to bypass the Golgoloth’s defences. For every one it kills, another manages to leap a stage closer. At this rate it might manage to kill two-thirds of its attackers, but the rest will eventually reach the ship’s hull. The Golgoloth realizes it is just fighting a delaying action.

Communication.

It is the King’s channel, so the Golgoloth opens it at once.

Oberon’s image appears on some nearby screens, but hazy due to the surrounding disruption. Perhaps because he is so busy, the King merely sends a large tactical information package. The Golgoloth opens it and soon realises it contains a huge amount of redundancy – options to be applied should the first action fail. Since there seems little other hope, it absorbs and applies the first option at once. It begins to move its ship to a slightly different location, increasing the strength of its defence in one area whilst weakening it in another. The Jain react accordingly, like hardened soldiers suspecting any weakened defence is a trap, abruptly concentrating their attack on an area midway between weakness and strength, so as to be ready to take full advantage of either. With a degree of reluctance, because it has already lost so many, the Golgoloth deliberately overloads one of its hardfield generators, which is the one holding the shield to one side of the strong defence, and furthest from the weak area. The generator glows in its mountings and slumps, and a hole opens out there, which the Golgoloth apparently tries to cover using white lasers and particle beams.

Hardened soldiers or otherwise, the Jain take the bait. They make the perfectly credible assumption that, knowing a generator is about to blow, the Golgoloth has tried to lure the Jain away from the area it covers by creating weaknesses elsewhere. By also strengthening defences in yet another area, the Golgoloth has obviously tried to make it all look like an attempt at making a trap, so as to cover up its desperation. But now there is a hole, and the Golgoloth will have to either close it or reposition fields. Here lies the Jain’s opportunity to end this confrontation quickly.

Twenty-seven of them burn out in vacuum, microwave flashing their combined death energy to their surviving fellows. The Golgoloth now realizes that those receiving the energy actually use it to take very short U-jumps themselves, which is how they bypass the hardfields. The rest of the Jain, over fifty of them, use the energy to hop through U-space. It is all perfectly calculated, and the Golgoloth is awed at how the King has managed to predict the shape of local U-space disruption as well as the reactions of these creatures. They all now materialize in one area which, stretching normal terms of geometry to breaking point, lies adjacent to one of least disruption in U-space. Three U-jump missiles, having negotiated a much greater portion of the maelstrom, materialize amidst them and detonate: three small suns igniting.

In a fraction of a second the Golgoloth shuts down several hardfields, then reinitiates them closer to the hull of its own ship. Even so, the shockwave from the triple blast sears five generators out of existence, rocks the ship violently, and punches lethal radiations deep inside it, though thankfully not deep enough to penetrate through to the hermaphrodite itself. The blast also destroys many of the weapons on the side receiving the impact. Steering thrusters firing, the Golgoloth spins its vessel round, bringing to bear lasers and cannons still workable, and begins hitting anything out there larger than football.

Now the King’s ship is right in the middle of the action, rail-guns slamming five-ton inert missiles into Jain hardfields, particle-cannon beams a yard across lancing out and burning up the creatures like flies in an acetylene flame. The remaining dreadnoughts, the pressure now off them, begin to put more effort into attack than defence. Energy crackles through vacuum, ecosystems of missiles and other projectiles swarm, hardfields glitter like giant fragments of broken glass strewn throughout space. Then, within moments, it is all dying, the firing growing intermittent as the dreadnoughts, the King’s ship and the Golgoloth itself pick off stray Jain weapons or fry any questionable objects drifting about out there.

But the Jain are all gone.

The Golgoloth looks at once to its further survival and begins considering some things it has had no time to consider until now. The King has shown himself quite capable of meticulous guidance of U-jump missiles, yet, like rulers everywhere, put someone else in line with a bullet to get the job done, only throwing himself into the fray when there seemed no other option. However, there are no more of his missiles in evidence out there. Quite probably he used them all against the Jain, but even if not, it might take him some time to get more ready to launch, and he might hesitate . . .

‘About now you will be thinking of running,’ says the image of Oberon on his screen. ‘However, you are going nowhere.’

What?

The Golgoloth thinks fast, and quickly realizes its mistake.

The tactical package.

It is already open and fast spreading its concealed attack programs throughout the ship. The Golgoloth tries at first to close it down, then to limit its spread. The creature’s external ganglia begin to go offline, and attacks to its systems begin to issue from other internal locations – other packages presumably planted by the Guard who came aboard. Next, the Golgoloth begins to detect movement inside the ship and, managing to reinstate some internal ship eyes, observes armoured Guard coming out of concealment and closing in on its own position.

Not all of them departed.

‘Oberon prepared for this,’ says that image of the King on the screens. ‘You were never going anywhere but back to the Kingdom.’

The Golgoloth stares at the image as it fades, mandibles clicking together in frustration.