The prador second-child ganglion sat inside in a cube of water ice, a coiled length of organic matter. It lay blurred behind odd crystalline structures that seemed to have grown from it into the surrounding ice. It was almost lost under its numerous plugs, interfaces and skeins of optics that in turn exited the cube to connect to various black-box hardware units. This object rested between two splayed-end columns and I pondered on their similarity to the supports within Polity spaceships for AI crystals. I reached out and rested a hand on the sphere, almost in apology. Though I was not to blame for the events that had resulted in the thing before me, in purchasing it I might be encouraging their repetition.
“What’s it from?” I asked.
“Prador kamikaze—made a solstan year before the end of the war and never used.” Vrit bowed towards the sea almost obsequiously. “Father-Captain Sverl, the ruler of our world, has been trading his limited supply for Polity tech.”
Prador kamikazes, just like their Japanese namesakes, had been used during the war. The only real difference was that they flew in space and carried far more in the way of destructive potential.
“What kind of Polity tech?” I asked, immediately suspicious of this Sverl’s motives.
Vrit gave an odd crippled shrug. “This one, along with some other items, was to trade for a picoscope, gene-sequencing nanobots and one or two other expensive items.”
The first he’d mentioned was expensive enough. I’d considered acquiring a picoscope—something that just hadn’t existed a hundred years ago. How amazing would it be to see sub-nanoscopic structures and to a limited extent manipulate them? What dissuaded me was my struggle to grasp how the damned thing worked—it having been developed by AI and involving U-space tech. In addition, I couldn’t justify the huge expense with respect to my goals.
I turned back to my trunk, which had now settled down in the middle of the floor as if prudishly trying to distance itself from the surrounding mess. I stepped over and touched my fingertips against the upper surface, whereupon a half-lid hinged silently open to reveal neatly packed Polity computer hardware. I made my selection and stepped back to the prador cryopod, pulling an optic cable from the end of an oval processing unit, and searched for ports in the brassy metal.
“Do you want to hear it talk?” asked Vrit, as I finally found a port and plugged in the optic.
I glanced at him. “You’ve hooked in a translator?”
“Of course,” said Vrit, scratching at one of his rashes with dirty human fingernails.
“Then why not?” It would do no harm, but I preferred my own methods of checking to ensure the second-child ganglion was viable. I peered at data appearing on my comp-unit’s small screen and wiped a hand across it to expand it into a flat holodisplay. Then I waved the display up into the air beside me, where it hung running diagnostic code.
“Pilot,” said Vrit. “Status report.”
A voice, quite obviously tweaked to make it sound less human, spoke from a stalk speaker which sprouted from a console on a nearby work surface.
“I am fully functional,” it said. “System ports 43 to 78 and 80 to 125 are disconnected. Port 79 is running a Polity-format diagnostic. New instruction: allow. Internal battery is at 40%. External source inadequate for maintenance level. Status of U-calculus nil—engine parameters unavailable. Status of—”
“End report,” Vrit ordered, then turned back to me. “Do you want to ask it anything?”
“Will it respond?”
“It will now,” Vrit replied, stabbing a finger down on a touch panel.
I nodded, then turned so I could address the cryopod directly, even though I knew that the microphones were probably over in that console. Something there about respect, I guess, and pity. “Tell me, prador second-child, what is your name?”
A sizzling sound issued from the stalk speaker, then I recognized the bubbling hiss of prador language, followed by confused tense clicks. Its name was something like “Vffloiotsht” but it obviously didn’t know whether to add the clicks for “I am” or “I was” after its name.
“I will call you Flute,” said I. “Henceforth that is your name.”
“Primary instruction confirm?” the second-child suggested.
I glanced at Vrit, who gave a crabbish shrug.
“Confirm,” I said.
“Of course,” said Vrit, “it doesn’t matter to me what you call it … when you’ve paid for it.”
I was satisfied with everything my own hardware was showing me. Inside that cryopod there was indeed the surgically excised brain of a prador second-child, held in organic stasis but adapted to run electro-optics. The Polity AIs had claimed that spaceships could only navigate U-space with an AI aboard to make the necessary calculations. But they no longer bothered to quell the rumours that this was a lie—because otherwise how had the prador, a race without AIs, managed to travel in that same continuum? It turned out they adapted their own children for that purpose, and the surgical procedure was usually carried out without anaesthetic, either as punishment or simply for entertainment.
I stepped back over to my trunk and tapped the second half-lid so that it hinged open. Inside rested a chunk of a nacreous layered glassy substance.
“I believe five pounds of prador diamond slate was the agreed price,” I suggested.
Vrit was over by the trunk in a moment, clicking his langoustine claw across the layers, mandibles wide and human mouth pursed pensively.
“I only take a small percentage,” he said. “I am privileged to act as an agent for the father-captain.”
I swung back to gaze at the cryopod, uncomfortable with this purchase; bothered by the morality of it. However, it was what was required if you wanted to travel through interstellar space without too many Polity AIs noticing. And it was certainly the kind of thing you needed if you intended to reactivate a Polity destroyer that had, essentially, lost its own mind. And you needed a Polity destroyer if you intended to attack a black AI in its own lair.
THE WAR: DURANA
I gazed back along the tunnel through the vegetation at the bluebarbs and twizzle vines, the lurking pumpkin cycads and offler weed. The only similarity between the vegetation here and anything terran was the fact that it grew upwards. Nothing had real photosynthesizing leaves, probably because the intensity of the sunlight here didn’t require them. This world’s version of chlorophyll contained in their structure supplied all the energy they needed. The twizzle vines were just pale blue corkscrews that draped over everything. The bluebarbs, though resembling twenty-foot-tall rhubarb dipped in blue printer’s ink, were a variety of fungus. And the cycads could hardly be described as either plant or fungus. They built sugars via induction shifts in the planet’s magnetic field. They also occasionally pulled up their roots and perambulated on a slug-like foot to a better position, after having drained the soil below of minerals. The offler weed was a particularly aggressive slime mould.
“You okay?” asked Krong.
I glanced across at this hero of the Polity and wondered how much longer he would survive. Certainly he was a man driven by his hatred of the prador and a firm loyalty to his perception of everything the Polity stood for. But his methods revealed inconsistencies. Slapping a sticky-bomb on the carapace of a prador, when you could have taken it out at a distance with a missile launcher, wasn’t the most logical way to fight them. Jebel U-cap Krong and his comrades in this squad were all adrenalin junkies. I suspected the AIs allowed him to continue because of some arcane calculation concerning the advantageous publicity he produced. In their war for survival, the AIs and humanity needed their heroes.
“I’ll be okay,” I replied, “just so long as one of our prador friends is intact.”
“We’ll try our best.” He grinned and moved away.
Durana was a world swamped in deep plant growth—a jungle world, if you will. It provided just the kind of preferred hunting ground for Jebel U-cap Krong and his squad of prador-killers. Their techniques did not work
well where there was less concealment and, so Jebel told me, they were assigned to those environments where they could do the most damage. Before Durana they’d been on a desert planet, concealing themselves like trapdoor spiders in caustic white sand. Their goal was to ambush the prador who were installing a titanic ground-based railgun, until one of the new Polity dreadnoughts had spoiled their fun. After a two-hour warning, it dropped a chemical reactor bomb that caused a chain reaction in the desert. This sank the gun emplacement into a lake—a glutinous syrup of something like caustic soda. I’d been with them for that one and the two before. These were the ice moon, where we used boring machines, coming up below the prador like rising sharks. Next was the H3 station on a gas giant, where we used motorized mono-cloth ornithopters, dropping on them from concealing fogs.
I spent four months aboard an Earth Central Security hospital ship recovering from my stint with the prador. The physical harm was dealt with in two weeks, but the other damage took longer. The mind-tech assigned to me kept insisting that my recovery would be sped up by a little memory editing, but I refused that. It seemed essential that I retain the horror as a driver to my need for vengeance. I healed the old way—learning to live with what had happened to me—and when I shipped out I was functional, if a little twitchy. ECS gave me bio-weapons scut work—first developing some nasty viruses and flesh-eating fungal spores—a chore I found less abhorrent than usual. Then afterwards they eased me back into bio-espionage. I began with extracting data from prador corpses and from second-child ganglions surviving in wrecked prador ships or drones. Or I retrieved information from their baroque computer systems. Once I’d proved that I wasn’t going to run away screaming at the mere sight of the enemy, they moved me up to captive prador. During this time, the prisoners from a crashed prador dreadnought provided information about Penny Royal. It was becoming an obsession for me, though not to ECS. Shortly after that, I was considered fit for more active service and was allowed to respond to U-cap Krong’s request for me. He needed a bio-espionage expert and I fitted the bill. I guess my psych profile after my experiences with the prador was just right too.
“Okay, we’re clear,” someone called. “Let’s move on.”
The target here was a prador mining operation. Deep under this jungle was a layer of rare metal that they used in their armour—a metal that had only recently been added to the human periodic table. I had to wonder if the suggested names for it, Ucapium or Krongium, had something to do with our presence here. Those running military PR wouldn’t have been above that.
Our mission was to set up an ambush, then capture a prador—preferably a first-child—whereupon my speciality would come into play. And my main specialism, now more than ever, was the extraction of information from these minds. By whatever means necessary. After that, the data gathered should allow our companion for this assignment to penetrate the mining complex. I glanced over at said companion. The assassin drone had its chameleonware tuned down, so it was just about visible against the jungle backdrop. It looked vaguely like a large thick-bodied cobra, but it had four limbs folded below the spread of its hood and a long thin ovipositor extending from its tail.
I was told its appearance mimicked a particularly nasty prador parasite—one that laid its eggs inside them, which then hatched into larvae that ate out their insides. It was also a parasite the prador had wiped out long ago. However, somehow its genome had been resurrected by forensic AIs, and this drone now carried thousands of fresh eggs, ready to be implanted, inside its armoured skin. The drone was here on the usual mission the Polity assigned to its kind: that of spreading terror amongst the prador. We were here because intelligence had revealed that the mining operation was about to be closed down. So the four father-captains, along with their thousands of children, were soon to be recalled to the prador home world. If the timings were right, the eggs the drone injected would begin hatching out when they arrived. It was a particularly nasty biological weapon, so much so that it even made some of Jebel’s troops a little uncomfortable. I was conflicted. I thought it a horrible weapon too. But, having been a prador captive, I felt a lot less sympathetic while simultaneously disliking this change in my attitude.
We moved on through the jungle, carefully, switching to full chameleonware when we came upon the first crushed-down trails left by prador patrols. There were ten in Krong’s squad, but two had come here a month earlier to reconnoitre. As we drew closer to the mining complex, as yet concealed behind jungle, these two reappeared. I moved over to Krong as he headed forwards to brief them.
“The tracks you see are from punishment patrols,” said the first scout, a woman who looked as if she should still be at school. “They don’t expect a ground attack here, but send out those guilty of minor infractions not punishable by the usual methods.”
The usual prador punishments ranged from a cracked carapace, up to being dismembered and eaten alive by its father. Some were, of course, surgically dismembered, their ganglions being used as the prador version of ship or drone minds.
“Irregular?” Krong asked.
“Nope, regular as clockwork.”
“So you have a place prepared?”
“I do.”
“Why are they a punishment?” I interjected. “The patrols, I mean.”
She turned towards me. “The offler weed.” She gestured to a nearby patch of the stuff that the assassin drone was examining. The gooey blue mass, which I already knew could move as fast as a fried egg sliding out of a greased pan, had frozen. And, becoming aware of threat, it was now extruding a bristling coat of spines.
“The spores lodge in prador joints and grow there,” she continued. “To remove these before returning to the complex, they have to spray themselves with a solution of hydrochloric acid. You can hear them yelling every time.”
Nice. I decided to collect a sample for dispatch to Bio-weapons.
It took us an hour to reach the ambush point. Here, the two who had been in place for a month had already dug a number of hidey-holes. Mine was set well back from the trail and I wasn’t allowed to come out until after the squad had dealt with the patrol. This was apparently due within the hour. Lugging my equipment over, I gazed askance at the eel-like worms poking their thorned heads out of the disturbed soil, then climbed down inside. I pulled the lid over, then inserted my periscope bead up through it, shunting the feed to my visor display.
By the time I had a clear above-ground view, the rest of the squad was completely concealed.
“We’ve got them spotted,” Jebel informed us all through comlinks and augs. “They should be here in forty minutes.”
It was a long uncomfortable forty minutes, during which I had to shut down my visor display, switch over to light amplification and brush thorny-headed eels off my battledress. Then, later, a creature like a foot-long stick insect crawled up my leg. Eventually the prador came into sight: three second-children to the fore, followed by two first-children and then another four second-children. The leading second-children drew right opposite me before it all kicked off. I saw one of them pause and tilt its nose down, its palp eyes bent forwards as if to try and see underneath itself, then the sticky-mine there exploded. A moment after that one of the second two exploded, then two at the rear went, and one of the first-children went down with all its legs sheared off one side. The air filled with Gatling cannon fire and the stabs of particle beams, blue-barbs toppled all around and clumps of vegetation dropped in smoking lumps. I reached up and flipped the lid off my hole, anxious to be out of it.
The assassin drone, probably wanting to ratchet up the terror, shut down its chameleonware as it clung to the uninjured first-child, stabbing its ovipositor in at the point where the prador’s legs joined its body. I could not see the point of this until the first-child, bubbling and hissing like a boiling kettle, also began to steam. It ran, but not far. Its legs began to fall off and it went down like a flying saucer crash-landing, its insides boiling out of leg holes and around the rim of its
carapace. I realized the drone had not injected eggs but hydrofluoric acid. Surviving prador ran into the jungle, with Jebel’s squad in hot pursuit. I hauled my equipment out of my hole and climbed out after it. The prador with the missing legs was obviously for me.
Stupidity, inattention, a failure to completely process the dangers—that’s how it happens. I didn’t realize I hadn’t turned on my chameleonware until the first-child swung up a claw, with a Gatling cannon attached. I didn’t hear it fire, only saw the flash and felt something like a speeding train slam into me. I flew backwards, bounced, oddly light, and came down on my back. I couldn’t breathe and already things were turning black. Consciousness lasted long enough for me to see that everything below the middle of my chest was missing, including my arms beyond the elbows.
Then I died … I think. Chronologically, these should have been my last memories of the war. Yet, the earlier firestorm from the anti-matter blasts on Panarchia felt somehow more real. But one must never allow emotion to overrule logic, surely?
SPEAR
Months of travel had taken us deep into the Graveyard now, the world called the Rock Pool far behind us and the Prador Kingdom uncomfortably close. And, sitting in orbit was my Polity destroyer, above the world whose coordinates I retrieved from a prador mind long ago. The thing looked like a giant sarcophagus and, as Trent and I jetted over, I tried not to think about that. I concentrated on inspecting the vessel for damage.