Authors: Neal Asher
‘And this creature, this Skinner, is supposed to be Hoop?’
‘Supposedly. Your best course of action now would be to speak to some of the Old Captains. Tell them who you really are. They’ll respect that.’
‘Would a Captain Ron be one of the ones I should talk to?’
‘Oh yes, definitely.’
‘And a Captain Ambel?’
‘Yes, he and Captain Ron are two of the oldest.’
‘Original slaves?’
‘So it’s rumoured.’
‘Why aren’t there more of them?’
‘Many left Spatterjay. It’s an interesting world but it has its limitations for people entering the latter half of a thousand years of life. Many stayed and died. This world is
dangerous even for Hoopers. Many more killed themselves. There’s a poison here manufactured from the digestive tract of some of the larger leeches. It neutralizes the virus, and acts on the
Hooper body much like that favourite of yours: diatomic acid. A Hooper taking this stuff will come apart in a matter of minutes – spectacularly.’
Keech stood and gazed towards the door. Then he stared at the data crystal Tay had made him.
‘If you’ll permit me,’ he said, ‘I’d like to run some searches through your databanks.’
Tay smiled almost hungrily and gestured to her console. ‘Stay as long as you like. I’m sure there is much more detail you can fill me in on.’
Keech watched her for a moment, then moved over to the console and sat down. He pressed the data crystal back into place then viewed what it contained on the screen.
Tay stood and walked up to stand behind him. ‘Now,’ she said, ‘describe to me exactly how it was when Aphed Rimsc killed you.’
The woman gazed out across the salt flats to where a plume of dust cut across a range of yellow sandstone buttes. Soon this plume opened into a line, abruptly terminating as
the approaching transport turned to head in. Like most Prador methods of transportation, this vehicle, when revealed, bore a close resemblance to the passenger or passengers it carried. It was a
ridged teardrop like a spidercrab’s carapace, with antennae and sensor arrays mounted to the fore and grab claws folded up as ribs underneath. Beyond this, though, the similarities ended. The
transport was bright red and had weapon turrets bulging from the sides. The pictographs of the Prador language adorned every surface, and this vehicle could really move. Behind it the clouds of
salt crystals rolled on and settled, and as the vehicle came past the demesne, a double sonic crash shook the crystal windows before the following cloud obscured the view.
The woman turned from the window and for a moment inspected one of her collection of paintings. This particular canvas depicted a similar scene to the one she had just witnessed, and it had been
painted by the previous resident of this house, being, as far as she knew, nearly a century and a half old. Next to this was a painting of a man and woman standing on a monolithic rock and staring
out to sea, while things that might have been seagulls circled above them. She frowned at this picture before moving to the bar, pouring herself a drink, and then heading out on to the balcony.
Here she watched the transport slow and turn. The taste of salt in the air was sharp on her tongue and she sipped her cool-ice to wash it away. Between two security posts the shimmer-shield
flickered and went out, and the vehicle coasted in over the blue grass lawns and ornamental ponds. With the rumbling and decreasing whine of thruster motors, it settled by the ramp provided for
Prador visitors. The woman went back inside to her comunit to see if there had been any communications yet.
‘Councillor Ebulan requesting audience,’ said the voice.
The woman looked at the face of the human blank on the screen and recognized it as one she had herself provided. She couldn’t remember the female’s name, but then what did it matter
what name you gave a human shell? To the Prador, a blank like this would just have the title ‘Speaker’, as so many did.
‘I’m always glad to see the councillor,’ she said. It would have been impolitic to refuse to receive him. Even with all her wealth, she was still regarded as a second-class
citizen of the Prador Third Kingdom. She finished her drink and went into her bedroom. There she discarded her robe and moved to stand before the wall mirror. Still good, after all this time. She
had made the right choice with this body. The subject had been a beautiful woman with just the right combination of athleticism and femininity. Before coring, she had apparently been the daughter
of an ECS monitor known to that damned Keech. A surprising discovery had been her virginity. The woman smiled at the memory and went to her wardrobe to select appropriate garb.
Three blanks walked up the ramp before the councillor drifted out. Ebulan was an old Prador and all his atrophied legs were gone. He was simply a carapace shaped like a flattened pear with a
scalloped rim. Antennae clustered round his fore, and an arc of blood-red spider eyes arrayed the turret front of what might be called his head. Shell-welded to his underside were the four polished
cylinders of his AG units. Underneath the slow grind of his mouthparts had been welded the hexagonal control boxes. The woman counted fifteen of them, which meant he controlled fifteen human
blanks. In Prador terms this was a sign of prestige: Ebulan was wealthy enough to own fifteen cored humans and had the mental strength to run them all, through their thrall units,
simultaneously.
The central blank of the three – the speaker the woman had seen, now clearly identified by pictographs tattooed on her body – stepped ahead of the other two. The woman noted the
armour on the other two, and the heavy hand weapons they carried. It wasn’t hard to work out what they were for. Prador adults were meticulous about their personal safety. Prador adolescents,
who were slaves to their parents’ pheromones, and human blanks, had mostly fought the war.
‘Greetings,’ said Speaker.
‘And to you, Ebulan. It’s been a long time,’ said the woman.
‘What is time?’ Ebulan asked through the mindless speaker.
The woman smiled and fingered the human-skin jacket she wore.
‘Obviously I am honoured by this visit, but I am also curious,’ she said.
‘A social visit,’ said Ebulan, ‘and a small return of favours.’
‘Then please, enter.’
The woman turned and led the way up the ramp. The three blanks followed her. Then came Ebulan, and after him came three adolescent Prador. Two of these were a twentieth of Ebulan’s size
and each walked on six long legs. Folded underneath each of them were four arms ending in their hugely complex manipulatory hands, and in front of them were their heavy crab claws. These sexless
creatures were loyal to their masters only while they remained sexless. Most Prador now used humans rather than their own kin, who were unpredictable and could not be as loyal as something mindless
and under direct control. All high-level Prador like Ebulan had guards of some kind, since Prador politics was never less than lethal. All of the cored humans here, but for the speaker, were
heavily armed. The third Prador adolescent was much larger than the others, and his coloration was deep purple and yellow. The woman realized that this one was not much longer for adolescence but
unlikely to attain adulthood. No doubt he was soon due to have his legs stripped and his shell broken, which was the destiny of most of his kind.
Settled in the room of her demesne especially reserved for Prador visitors, the woman and Ebulan exchanged pleasantries for as long as it took Ebulan to have his blanks check out the whole area
and position themselves. Once he was satisfied a rival had not predicted the visit, and no traps were laid, Ebulan settled down on his AG units.
‘Something has occurred,’ said Ebulan through the speaker.
‘Please tell me,’ said the woman.
‘The reification has returned, at last, to Spatterjay.’
The woman sat very still as a thousand memories shrieked for attention. She felt a brief nausea as her central core went into nerve conflict with the body she had stolen.
‘Does this not interest you, Rebecca?’ asked the councillor.
Rebecca Frisk turned and gazed out of the crystal windows towards the salt flats. Keech – always damned Keech. Even after sending her own body, fitted with the brain and spinal column that
had been in this current body, to ECS, she could not be safe while he . . . existed.
‘He’s still alive,’ she stated.
‘I wonder who you mean,’ said Ebulan.
Frisk glared at him. ‘I mean Keech.’
‘Problematical,’ said Ebulan. He shifted on his AG units as if uncomfortable.
Frisk ignored that and stared out of the window again. ‘Eight contracts and a hundred subcontracts from them, and every one a failure. Two of them were taken up by Batian stone killers.
That bastard almost found out about me when he smeared them,’ she said. She turned to Ebulan. ‘Does he know about Jay?’
‘This I was not able to determine.’
‘He will.’
Having the ability to taste one part in a million of fresh ichor in the water, also possessing the thickest armour and the most efficacious mouthparts of any of the
marine predators there, glisters were rapacious predators and assiduous scavengers. The four – a female and fertilizing males one to three – descended from their slimy home
underneath a clump of decaying sargassum, and with tails flicking and flat legs extended as stabilizers, homed in on the delicious taste of dead or dying whelks, and that slightly hormonal hint
of turbul in a feeding frenzy – that time in which the big fish became rather careless. The ever-spreading cloud of broken shell, fragments of flesh and essential juices, had lured to its
perimeter a shoal of boxies, which fed with frenetic determination and a careful eye on the surrounding depths. As the glisters closed, the boxies fled, but the great crustaceans weren’t
interested in giving chase to them. Instead, they ground and chattered their mouthparts while contemplating the long meaty bodies of turbul rolling and feeding on whelks – still oblivious
to their surroundings. Leeches now were also homing in to latch on to turbul for a moment, then ooze away with a bleeding prize, and even prill were descending from above like flying saucers
with particularly vicious landing gear. And the glisters knew they would have to be quick, before their potential banquet became a dispersed cloud of floating canapés.
‘Atoll GCV 1232, beginning census scan,’ said SM13.
‘You only say that to irritate me,’ said Sniper, as they hovered above an atoll like a huge apple core thrust down into the sea.
‘The Warden’s right, you know,’ said the iron seahorse drone. ‘You’re getting cranky in your old age.’
‘And you think counting snails is a worthwhile pastime?’
‘No, but it’s amazing what interesting items you can find out here and what they’ll fetch in the auctions on Coram, and it beats subsumption every time,’ replied
Thirteen.
‘I don’t have to be wary of that. I’m a freed drone. I worked off my construction fees and indenture centuries ago. If I want to become part of the Warden, I can. I don’t
want to, yet.’
‘Planting stealth mines on Prador dropbirds was how you paid your way out, as I recollect. You consider that a worthwhile pastime? Some of us are not so inclined to the martial occupation.
Perhaps you should try subsumption at least once, it’d straighten out a few of your kinks.’
‘I’ve got kinks?’ Sniper paused for a moment. ‘What interesting items?’
‘Amberclam pearls, fossilized glister shell. I even found a vein of green sapphire once,’ replied Thirteen.
‘You never told me about this before,’ said Sniper.
‘Well, after the trouble I got into through snatching thrall units for you, I thought it best to keep quiet for a while.’
After a contemplative silence Sniper said, without heat, ‘We gonna count these fucking snails or what?’
The little drone turned towards Sniper with light glinting in its amber eyes, then it turned its nose and tilted it in the direction of one side of the atoll.
‘I’ll go this way round and you go the other. We’ll meet on the other side. This is the last one in sector fifty-two, then we can move on to fifty-three, which should be more
interesting. There’s molly carp there.’
‘Oh joyful day,’ said Sniper. ‘You know why the Warden wants this census?’
‘The way I got it was “A study to assess the long-term impact of runcible heat pollution and on which to base any future plans for environmental restructuring”.’
‘Make-work,’ said Sniper, drifting down to the surface of the sea and lowering his back two legs into the water. The scanning probes in his feet now operating, he slowly began to
trawl around the atoll. A subprogram he was running, now counted hammer whelks and catalogued them according to size and species. Sniper then ran one of his military programs to work out the
minimum size of charge required to smash certain shells and kill their occupants. He did not test his theories until SM13 was out of sight. The trail of small underwater explosions the war drone
left behind him was also undetectable. Five hours later, the two drones met on the other side of the atoll.
‘You know, I don’t get why you came here to work with the Warden,’ said Thirteen, as they cruised on to pastures new.
‘Easy enough. I wanted to spend time on a Line world like this: more chance of some sort of action. Nothing’s got out of hand in the Polity for a long time now, and things are
boringly peaceful. The few Separatist actions are normally flattened by ECS agents before there’s any need to deploy war drones.’
Below them the water was the colour of jade, fractured by the occasional white wake from some cruising sea leviathan. The sky was a lighter green shading to blue, and steel-grey clouds held the
setting sun as if in a broken pewter vessel. Sniper remembered a day when, above seas very like this, he had been engaged in hunting down two inferior Prador war drones. They had been of old utile
design: just flattened spheres of armour wrapped around an AG unit, a mind, and magazines for the antipersonnel guns they had welded underneath. Such was the way of things: when a technology had
been taken to its limit of efficiency and utility, you could make it look pretty. This flying brooch next to him was definitely one of the latest examples of that. But those Prador war drones had
not reached that point.