5
SPEAR
Beside Isobel and me, Trent and Gabriel were the only people aboard. Then again, should the second-child prador ganglion that served as this ship’s mind be considered a person? I supposed so, even though it was a crippled thing that wouldn’t make it through the latest iteration of the Turing Test. So make that five people aboard. I wasn’t surprised that there were so few. I knew that Isobel Satomi’s organization was big and that crime lords such as her usually had large entourages. But Isobel had fallen into a trap that heavy augmentation laid for many: she believed she didn’t need so many people around her. Instead, she relied on her own expanded power and control.
“My name is Trent, and you already guessed that my last name is Sobel,” said Trent. “How did you know?”
As I made my selection from the autochef menu and it was delivered out of a slot, I thought about Isobel’s one-time boss, Mr Pace. He had also been a recipient of Penny Royal’s attentions and had gone the same route, living a completely solitary existence walled in by wealth and power. I had considered using him to get me to the Polity destroyer and as a source of the other information I required—uniquely possessed by just a few. But I saw no way I could gain control of him, studying what little data there was on the changes he had undergone. It also seemed he was even more homicidal than Isobel.
Picking up my tray of food, I made my way back to Trent and Gabriel.
“I worked with some of the early adaptogens,” I said. “The HG-92 series used in the Sobel line had certain easily identifiable side-effects.”
He reached up self-consciously and touched his Mohican.
“Like what?” he challenged.
I sat down. “Like white eyes.” Of course, I’d been getting feelings of déjà vu around Trent, but the reason for that was plain, and one I was about to reveal to him.
“Anything else?”
“Probably your pointy head,” Gabriel interjected.
Trent glared at him for a moment, before returning his attention to me.
“However,” I continued, “the main reason I plumped for that particular adaptogen is that facially, you could be Fellander Sobel’s twin. You even sound like him.”
Fellander Sobel used adaptogens to alter himself genetically so he could survive on a high gravity world. His traits were then inherited by his many children, but how many children they had in turn I had no idea. My interest had been limited and had waned when I joined Sylac, then a war and over a century of death got in the way.
“You met him?”
“I injected him with HG-92,” I replied.
Trent stared at me dumbfounded and reached up to toy with that purple sapphire earring. I surmised that the jewel held some significance for him, because he always reached for it in moments of stress. Struggling for something else to say, he stabbed a finger at Gabriel. “What about him?”
I gobbled down some noodles and megaprawn while I studied Gabriel. He was another big lump of a man, but in his case his bulk was due to boosting. His muscle mass had been doubled and, judging by how pumped he looked, increased in density. This inclined me to think that he’d also had some bone lamination and joint reinforcing done, since that kind of muscle could snap normal human bones. He didn’t have a visible aug and his skin was an unnatural pink, his eyes were pale blue and his neatly cut hair was blond. He wore the cut-off top of an acceleration suit which he’d turned into a jacket, an iridescent T-shirt, jeans and light rock-climbing footwear. But there were other more subtle clues about his past.
“Tharsis City, probably … or one of the Chryse hydroponics towns.” I looked up at his face. “I’m guessing you got your tattoos removed here in the Graveyard. No Polity cosmetic surgeon would have been allowed to make such a mess of it.”
The Graveyard, that no-man’s-land lying between the Polity and the Kingdom, was a place lacking expertise. I’d learned that those working at the technological and scientific frontiers generally stayed in the Polity where better resources were available. This fact was my way in, my way to get to Isobel. However, the stuff about tattoo removal was just an educated guess. Martian tattooists employed a self-replicating ink that sometimes ran deep enough to penetrate bone, so problems with their removal seemed likely in such a place.
He grimaced in annoyance and reached up to touch his face. The blotching was just about visible, covering the pattern of a Mars man’s facial tattoos.
“Tharsis City,” he grunted.
“Hah! Gotcha!” said Trent.
We were all getting along famously and, as I took my flask out of my pocket and poured some of the contents into a small cup, I wondered if they took part in the coring of human beings. Or maybe they left that chore to thugs of a lesser station. Our conversation progressed to my wartime anecdotes and of course they wanted to try some real Earth whisky. They were still professional too, running personal toxin scanners over their drinks before trying them. It did them no good. They got their dose of prions from the outside of their glasses as I carefully held them while pouring in the precious liquid. This was just to make sure, since they should already have been infiltrated. They would only have needed to touch something I’d touched recently, as these prions had two hours of active life once outside my body. And I had been issuing them from my palms since my examination of Isobel.
A journey of some weeks ensued, to get us to our first destination in the Graveyard. I needed to find a particular sort of mind to control that abandoned Polity destroyer. I chafed at this because I wanted to get to Penny Royal now. However, I couldn’t speed up interstellar travel, and I couldn’t go up against something as dangerous as a black AI without the requisite preparations.
The planet had been contemptuously named the Rock Pool by spacers who travelled here, and it had been adopted with a kind twisted pride by its semi-human residents. Upon our arrival, I found myself speculating on the way humans changed themselves and were changed during their spread beyond Earth. Trent Sobel’s ancestors had altered themselves to adapt to a new environment, while Isobel Satomi’s pursuit of power had been turned against her by an insane godlike intelligence. For others the reasons for their changes were more obscure.
I’d learned more about the people of this world during the journey here. It seemed these were humans who admired the prador and took their admiration to extreme limits. So I shouldn’t have been so surprised at my reaction to my first shellman sighting, the human mimicry of the prador form. I immediately analysed the feeling. Why did I feel such a visceral repulsion here when, in the Polity, I’d seen an adapted and enhanced take on forms much more bizarre than this? Why hadn’t I had a similar reaction to Isobel’s ongoing changes?
It was first, I realized, because in my own terms I’d been fighting the prador just a few months back. I also knew that the outer form of shellmen was an expression of their ugliness within. Admittedly, Isobel’s appearance was the same in that respect, but hers wasn’t through choice. Here, before me, was one of those who hated humanity and now worshipped, with close to religious zeal, a race that applied laws of selection to its children by eating the ones that weren’t suitable. But that wasn’t all. The prador were a race without conscience or empathy; vicious monsters whose predation extended beyond necessity into cruelty. They were creatures that surgically converted their children into biological mechanisms, ruthlessly exterminated rivals and would still, given the chance, exterminate rival humanity. They were, I felt, as close to irredeemably evil as you could realistically get.
Second thoughts occurred and I smiled, not realizing I had reached up to my neck to scratch the psychosomatic itch there. Next, I remembered the cold metal legs of a spider thrall digging into my flesh and I considered that my opinion of the prador might not be a balanced one.
“You’re Spear?” grated the shellman.
“I am Thorvald Spear, yes,” I replied, reaching up to take off my breather mask.
Though he was a foot shorter than me, the shellman was wider a
nd bulkier. His carapace extended a few feet on either side of his back. And this was tipped forward forty-five degrees as if he was labouring under the weight of a heavy iron shield. However, the carapace was supported by the man’s ribs, which extended out to its edges, enclosing his organs up against it. He had two pairs of arthropod legs supporting him and human arms extended about a foot down from where they should be. A heavy crab claw curled in from the buried right shoulder and a narrow claw, rather like that of a langoustine, extended from the left. From the front he looked as if he might fall, but didn’t because of a horseshoe crab tail that poked out behind to balance him. His vaguely humanoid head rose up on a ribbed neck, but his human eyes extended on palps from the top of his skull. A crescent of ruby eyes was embedded where those human eyes should have been, and he possessed the mouthparts of a dragonfly.
It was a non-Polity surgical amalgam job, and not a very good one—judging by the rashes of acne pustules on the man’s human parts where they joined his prador components. The man was definitely suffering an allergic reaction due to a failure in immune system reprogramming.
“And what’s your name?” I enquired.
“Vrit,” the shellman replied.
I spotted a human mouth, which was revealed each time Vrit parted his mandibles to speak. The man might well have radically changed his body and adopted a prador name, but he hadn’t gone all the way. Why was that? Why did these people, who supposedly loved the prador and everything those creatures represented, not look more like the prador? Certainly the techniques were available. I grimaced briefly as I realized the answer lay in my first thoughts on spotting this man. The changes they made to themselves were a visible statement about what they didn’t want to be, and that statement would be lost if they completely assumed the guise of their gods. It was all about self-hatred—and a denial of humanity.
“You’ve got payment?” Vrit asked, eyeing my hover trunk as it settled behind me.
The Graveyard was supposed to be a lawless buffer zone where neither Prador Kingdom nor Polity ventured. But in reality, both sides did venture here, and many Graveyard worlds had representatives from both species. However, they weren’t here to do more than keep an eye on each other and look after their own interests. This world, like any within the border, was one you visited at your own risk. I knew things could get a little … difficult when bargaining with shellmen, for they tended to look after their own and hold normal humans in contempt. This was why, though declining Isobel’s offer to have Trent and Gabriel accompany me, I had ensured I could summon them in an instant.
“I’m ready to negotiate,” I replied vaguely, stepping forwards. Apparently inadvertently, I allowed my jacket to fall open to expose the gas-system pulse-gun at my hip. I felt like a fraud but, unfortunately, the threat of violence is often the only way to stop violence.
Vrit stepped back sharply, his palp eyes seeking something across the flat obsidian floor—the dock stone apparently extending into this reception building. I noted how he flinched as he moved, certainly experiencing pain related to the crappy postoperative work on him. Then I followed the direction of his gaze, taking in the mounds of cargo crates, busy auto-handlers and the mix of shell people and Polity citizens. There, perambulating along beside a glass wall, I saw a prador. The great crablike monstrosity had a Gatling cannon affixed along the edge of one claw, with ammunition feeds trailing to a magazine fixed to its underside. It was also completely clad in a form of armour I didn’t recognize—a blue-green metal that seemed to create more bulk than the usual brassy kind. I also couldn’t tell whether it was a first- or second-child, because its size lay somewhere between the two. I stared at the thing and wondered why, despite my recent thinking, I felt no visceral hatred of its kind.
“So where do you have it?” I asked, bringing my attention back to the shellman.
Vrit was still staring at the prador, almost seeming to cringe a little. He snapped his attention back to me. “A barge.” He indicated the wide oval doors at the back of the building.
“Shall we?” I waved a hand vaguely.
Vrit studied me warily for a moment, then turned and set out at a fast scuttle towards the exit. There were no customs inspections here, just a few safety protocols. Vrit put on his mask before opening a door made for humans, in the centre of the main prador door, and stepped into a short exit tunnel. I put my mask back on and followed. Bright pink sunlight glared at the end of this tunnel and soon I could hear the sea again. I could also smell something utterly putrid—which even penetrated my mask—as I had during my walk from the Moray Firth to the reception building.
I paused at the exit to gaze along a black stone shore scattered with stilt houses in the process of marching on stalk legs to oblivion in the wine-coloured waves. This was as close as the shell people could get to the deep-water prador enclave here. This enclave was apparently the home of a disparate group of prador, who had chosen to disobey their king’s order to return to the Kingdom at the end of the war. Beyond that, all I knew was that they were ruled over by one father-captain and that they had established trade links throughout the Graveyard and into both the Polity and the Kingdom. Also, surprisingly for prador, they showed no inclination to come ashore and slaughter everyone.
I also knew that I had never stood here before, but felt on some deep level that I had. These feelings of familiarity were now so much a part of many of my new experiences that I’d almost accepted them. In fact, I suspected I might feel bereft without them. But what came next I just couldn’t accept, because it was too definite, too shocking.
I was standing there holding a breather mask in my new claw, wondering if the shore wind would bring in another of those gusts of hydrogen sulphide. These were becoming frequent, down to new volcanic activity far out under the ocean. I felt strong and armoured against the world with my growing carapace, and I felt a deep kinship with and almost religious love of the prador in their ships under that ocean. The necessity for the mask irritated me, though even the superior prador were as affected by that gas as weak humans. I began to walk, slowly, because my human component felt sick and exhausted. It felt like a gangrenous limb or diseased skin—something to be excised or shed to expose my purity within …
“Are you coming?” asked Vrit, now crouched as if ready to flee or attack.
What the hell was that? I remembered what I had felt when I touched Isobel for the first time. And though I questioned how wrong it had felt, I had accepted it as some fragment of my past arising in my mind. I could not accept this. I had never been here and I had certainly never been a shellman. This was someone else’s memory, hard and clear in my mind.
“Yes, I’m coming,” I replied, straightening up. “Lead on.”
Vrit headed to the right across the same black rock as the ground-down and polished dock stone. But here it was whorled and pitted, scattered with baroque clinging shellfish. After checking to ensure my hover trunk could deal with the uneven surface, I followed him down to a jetty poking out into the sea, a large covered barge moored beside it. I noted a small cargo platform with a rear cargo crane on caterpillar treads standing behind it, and felt a small relaxing of tension. Vrit would not have gone to the trouble to have such an unwieldy device brought if he intended some betrayal … probably. At the foot of the jetty, I turned to look back at the port building and could just see the upper hull and weapons turret of the Moray Firth on the other side. I had no doubt that Isobel was watching me at that moment, though I did wonder what she was seeing now that a second hooder eye had opened on her face, which itself had grown longer and now bore some resemblance to an Easter Island statue.
“Come, come.” Vrit had already scrambled across onto a small area of clear deck and was now gesturing to me from the barge with his heavy claw.
I crossed the short ramp, stepping onto the deck as Vrit opened the wide door into the barge’s interior. Lights immediately came on inside and I ducked in after him, stepping down yet another ramp into tatty liv
ing quarters. As I waited for my hover trunk to catch up, I noted the rubbish scattered on a single desk—analgesic patches, an auto-dispensary and a scattering of air injectors.
“You know,” I said, as I watched my trunk enter the quarters with almost pernickety distaste, “if you don’t get proper treatment you’ll either get steadily worse and die, or at some point go into anaphylactic shock and die from that.”
Vrit turned sharply. “What’s it to you?”
I shrugged. “I don’t like to see suffering. It’s obvious to me that your human half is reacting to the rest of you.” I paused, then added, “I might be able to help you there.”
Vrit removed his mask, then parted his dragonfly mandible to show a sneering mouth. “It’s reacting because it’s weak, and I don’t need any human help.” He turned away and pushed through the plastic curtains, calling back, “Rather it is the true me rejecting the human.”
I watched the curtains for a moment longer, realizing how that rogue memory had impelled me to offer help. But, even though I was sure the memory hadn’t been Vrit’s, it should have warned me help would not be accepted. Closing my eyes for a second, I wondered what I should do about that memory, but without something like a Polity forensic AI to investigate it, there was nothing I could do. I just had to live with it and continue towards my goals. These experiences only fazed me for a moment and, as in this case, they even provided potentially useful information.
Removing my own mask, I followed the shellman through and looked around. The area beyond the curtains was packed with jury-rigged equipment for testing and repairing computer hardware. This was a mixture of human and prador technology, webbed together with optics and s-con cables, the power being supplied by a stacked capacitor charge tower. At the far end, on an airplast pallet, stood the prador cryopod. The sphere of brassy metal was a metre across, trailing cables and optics to the nearby equipment. Inset in its upper surface were quadrant windows lit by an internal green light. I shivered, not because the thing was chilling the air, but because of the suffering it implied. The prador brain the pod contained would not have willingly left its original body. Once Vrit stood aside and gestured to the thing, I walked over and peered in through one of the windows.