Authors: Neal Asher
The flood climbed the beach and flattened the dingle. To one side Drum saw a ship flung inland that he instantly recognized as the
Treader
. He wasn’t high enough for safety, yet
there was nowhere to run now but down the other side. A two-metre-deep torrent of seawater caught him halfway down the far slope and tumbled him the rest of the way. For a moment, he was tempted to
release hold of his weapon and swim for it. Instead, he curled himself in a ball around it, and let the flood take him.
‘What the hell was that?’ said Janer. ‘This a volcanic island?’
Peck managed just a bubbling sound, his broken bones moving about under his skin. The Captains, Ambel and Ron, both watched as the lights faded from the sky, then Ambel made another attempt at
relocating Ron’s dislocated shoulder. It finally slid into place with a muted thud.
‘I don’t know,’ replied Ron, wincing and rubbing at his injured joint. ‘But we got problems enough of our own.’ He went over to his machete and gingerly picked it
up. Inspecting its sprine-coated edge, he nodded with satisfaction.
‘What about you?’ Ambel asked Peck loudly, as if talking to someone hard of hearing.
In his bed of foliage Peck tried to nod in response, then stopped immediately when the bones in his neck crunched. He sat upright and reached to straighten his jawbone while Janer tried not to
turn the other way. There was something really macabre about watching someone with so many broken bones still move about. After he’d finished prodding his numerous fractures, Peck used his
shotgun as a crutch to pull himself to his feet. Both his arms and one leg had not been broken: that was the best that could be said for his injuries.
‘Good lad,’ said Ambel, patting him carefully on the shoulder.
Peck tried nodding again, and pointed back the way they had come.
‘We’ll be back when we’ve seen the bugger dead,’ promised Ambel. ‘I’ll bring you a souvenir.’
‘We’re going after it?’ asked Janer.
‘Too right,’ said Ron.
‘But it’s been poisoned with sprine,’ said Janer.
‘Didn’t seem in a hurry to die though, did it?’ said Ambel.
Ambel and Ron headed for the entrance to the garden. Janer looked at Peck, who waved at him to follow them. At the entrance, he glanced back and saw Peck begin his limping progress back out of
the Hoophold. Beyond the garden, Ambel took the lead, and Janer wondered what to make of that. Did the Old Captain remember something of his own time here?
Shortly, the three came round to the other side of the wall over which the Skinner had scrambled. From there, its further course was only too obvious. It had ripped right through another wall
into a courtyard, on the other side of which was a high tunnel leading straight into the thick dingle. By Janer’s estimation, they were now on the opposite side of the Hoophold to where they
had entered. He followed Ambel and Ron through the tunnel to where the Skinner had opened a path of destruction through the dingle itself.
‘Should be easy enough to follow him now,’ said Ambel.
Ron gave him a look, but reserved comment as they moved on in.
Vrell watched the flood subsiding in the dingle, then shifted his attention in the opposite direction. The island was large but that did not matter. Vrell had all the time he
needed to track down the four of them: Frisk, Balem, Ron and Hoop. No one would be coming to rescue them, now that the Old Captains were all dead. Vrell began to contemplate his dismal future. If
he did not get killed during this hunt, then he must kill himself so as not to become a danger to his father. This seemed his only option, though at that moment Vrell was beginning to wonder why
his father could not come and rescue him. Having been separate from the normal domination of his father’s pheromones for some days, Vrell was even beginning to have thoughts he had never
entertained before, and to brood somewhat more about the fairness of things. He also could not help thinking about his harem mothers, and that too elicited some strange feelings. On top of
everything else, his back pair of legs felt loose. Perhaps it was these upsets to his equilibrium that made Vrell less observant.
The blank did not scream. The only sounds made were a huffing expulsion of air and then an oily crackling as he staggered, burning, back towards the dingle. Vrell crashed away through foliage to
seek cover, and looking back realized that the other blank had not moved. It was clear that his father had not yet resumed contact, so he himself must give verbal instructions to the idiot thrall
unit.
‘Take cover and return fire,’ Vrell grated.
As the blank turned at last to leap into the dingle, the beam of antiphotons struck him in the back. The two burning halves of him were all that reached cover.
‘We’re gonna have a barbecue, Prador!’ yelled Drum.
Immediately to Vrell’s left, a peartrunk tree exploded into burning slivers. Using his manipulatory hands Vrell drew four different weapons simultaneously. As he backed deeper into the
dingle he felt the weirdly pleasurable sensation of one of his back legs breaking off. He aimed one of the weapons, depressed a trigger, and swept the weapon back and forth. Explosions tore apart
the dingle below, and the sound of needle shrapnel hitting trees became a drawn-out high-pitched shriek. Trees and branches fell all around. Vrell next opened up with a heavy QC laser that sent
flashes of red shooting through the ruined trees and set fires burning everywhere.
‘Missed!’ shouted Drum. ‘But I won’t.’
The antiphoton burst struck Vrell’s side and tipped him over. One of his main claws burst open, spraying steaming flesh all about. He lost two hands and the weapons they held – one
of them the shrapnel rail-gun. Vrell uttered a shrieking gobbling sound and backed away at high speed from the searing heat. The antiphoton blast had burnt out two of his eyes and cracked his
carapace. At that moment his remaining back leg dropped off and he abruptly made the transition from adolescent to adult. With this sudden transformation came a new set of imperatives: the first of
them survival.
On his four remaining, though unsteady legs, Vrell turned and ran.
Because of the ground’s vibration, Keech had steadied himself against a tree, but wished he hadn’t when a leech the size of his arm dropped on his head and coiled
round his neck. He reached up and caught hold of its front end just as its questing mouth tried to take his ear off. Wrenching it away in disgust he hurled the leech to the ground then, knocking
down the setting on his APW, he fired at the foul creature. The leech disappeared as the ground erupted in a purple blaze that threw up a wall of debris and hurled all three men backwards. The
sound of the explosion echoed through the dingle.
‘It’s stopped,’ observed Keech, flinging a smouldering branch from across his chest, and standing up.
‘What?’ said Boris, sitting up and gazing about with a slightly stunned expression. After a moment, he located the SM and rested his hand on it.
‘The shaking, the ground’s stopped shaking,’ explained Keech.
‘Yeah,’ said Roach. ‘And didn’t you say something earlier about that damn gun’s settings being screwed?’
Keech flashed him a look of annoyance then turned to Boris. ‘You OK?’
Boris pulled a sliver of wood from his shoulder, then nodded. He stooped and picked up SM13 and carefully brushed ash out of the ribbed pattern of the machine’s casing. At that moment
light flashed in the sky, then the sky darkened. Clouds like bruises swirled overhead, then were dragged into lines.
‘Some kind of explosion – probably Prador weapons,’ Keech observed as he moved on.
He’d gone perhaps ten paces when the same pig-like shriek they had heard earlier came from ahead of him, accompanied by the sound of something crashing through the dingle.
‘It’s all happenin’ now,’ muttered Roach, as he and Boris came up behind Keech.
Tracking the noisy progress of whatever it was out there, Keech then moved on again.
Shortly they came to the path recently broken through the dingle. Here peartrunk trees had been pushed aside and discarded branches crushed flat. Keech glanced both ways along it, then turned to
the others.
‘What is that?’ he asked flatly.
Roach just could not prevent himself looking sneaky, while Boris stared at the ground like a guilty schoolboy.
Keech went on, ‘It’s the Skinner, isn’t it?’
Boris mumbled something.
‘What?’ Keech snapped.
‘The Skinner,’ Boris explained. ‘Reckon it found its body, then someone else found it.’
‘Hoop? . . . They’re killing Hoop?’
‘I reckon.’
Keech glared at the both of them, then turned into the path heading in the direction from which those squeals had come. Boris plodded after him without comment. Roach looked rebellious for a
moment, then sighed and followed as well. They walked with more caution now, because of leeches in the crushed foliage, but even more because of what they were following. Ahead of them, they heard
that squealing yet again, and all three of them halted. Keech stared at the settings on his weapon for a moment. He was just about to continue along the path, when Roach caught his shoulder.
‘Someone comin’,’ the crewman warned.
Keech gestured off to one side, and the three of them quickly moved into the shade of a tilted pear-trunk tree. Three other people soon appeared on the track behind them.
‘That you I see sneaking about in there, Roach?’ said Captain Ron.
‘It weren’t my fault,’ said Roach.
Keech stood up and stepped into the open. Janer momentarily followed him with the raised snout of his laser, then guiltily lowered it.
‘Seen any Skinners hereabouts?’ asked Ron.
Keech looked at him sharply.
‘Can’t miss him,’ continued Ron. ‘Big blue fella even uglier than Roach, and thoroughly pissed off. He went this way.’
Keech glanced farther up the track they had been following. He gave a grim smile. ‘Let’s go,’ he said.
Sniper scanned the atolls lying far to the right of him, and tried once again to get a signal through.
‘Hey, Warden! What the hell are you doing?’
This time – the first time in many minutes – the Warden replied. ‘What I am doing, Sniper, is decoding a Prador thrall-controller-code, and I would be thankful if there were no
more interruptions.’
‘What about us?’ Sniper asked.
‘Head for the island, and take over there from Twelve. This is not yet finished,’ the Warden replied, then disconnected.
‘You hear that? We’ve got to go and take over from Twelve,’ spat Sniper, who always started to get a little tetchy when he didn’t have anything convenient to blow up.
‘Wonderful,’ said Two, who was developing a definite sarcastic mien.
‘Right on,’ said One, who was still a bit wobbly since receiving the Prador rail-gun hits.
Six never even got a chance to reply, as an explosion knocked it tumbling off course, then a second missile blew it into red-hot scrap.
‘Scatter!’
One enforcer drone shot into the sky and two planed out to the left. Sniper went right, heading for the atolls. On his cleaned-up radar return, he got nothing for a moment, then the two Prador
war drones shot up out of the sea and, ignoring the two enforcers, both came after him.
‘Great,’ Sniper muttered, then sent to them, ‘Why don’t you go play hopscotch on a black hole?’
The Prador replied with two missiles each.
‘Touchy,’ Sniper sent – abruptly changing direction and leaving a cloud of chaff behind him. The missiles went through the chaff, swung round, and zeroed in on him again.
Sniper shot up higher and released a cluster of little parachute mines. These mines perfectly intersected the course of the missiles as they changed direction. Two of the missiles blew and one went
tumbling off course, corrected, then shot back towards the explosion of the others. It, too, detonated shortly after.
‘Mmm, heat-seeking.’
Sniper arced over and accelerated towards the atolls, with the remaining missile closing in. He went low to the surface and headed straight in for one of the atolls. The missile meanwhile drew
closer and closer. At the last moment, Sniper shut off his fusion engine and dropped straight down into the sea. The missile went over him and, with its sensors confused by the sudden disappearance
of the heat source it was pursuing, did not correct in time and slammed straight into the atoll.
Submerged in the shallow water, close to the atoll’s narrow beach, Sniper raised his antennae and scanned. The two Prador drones were still heading right for where he had gone in.
‘Right, how you gonna get out of this one, big shot?’ Sniper muttered to himself. Still in the water he hurriedly altered programs and fed them into his smart missiles. That Prador
missile that had tumbled away had given him a bit of an idea. As the Prador drones drew closer, he shot up into the air, paused for half a second, then fired off four missiles. One missile hit a
screen and exploded, one exploded under rail-gun fire, the remaining two simply tumbled away – and the Prador came hammering on in. Sniper accelerated for the atoll, then was knocked sideways
as rail-gun fire was trained on him. He felt his plates buckling and a couple of his legs fell away. Turning in midair, he opened up with his APW – a short burst only as there was little
power left in the laminar batteries. One of the Prador swerved out of the way, but the other continued in for the kill.
Sniper accelerated straight towards it. ‘Well, I’ll take you with me, fucker!’ he sent.
The Prador extended its screen in front, but a second after, Sniper’s two missiles – which had now corrected from their tumble – hit it from behind. It still came on, its
armour distorted, its screen out, and its engine powering intermittently. Sniper hit it with his APW, then swooped over the top of it as it hurtled towards the sea, a burnt-out shell.
‘You gotta watch that upswing!’ Sniper sent, but had no time to feel satisfaction when another two missiles swung abruptly up from the sea towards him. Again he changed course,
curving down towards the atolls. The second Prador came hurtling towards him just above the waves. Sniper aimed himself at one of the atolls, firing off another three missiles. The atoll erupted in
a fountain of broken coral, just prior to him flying straight into it. He shot out of the other side of this, trailing dust clouds and leaving two explosions behind him, then turned back towards
the approaching Prador. As he fired his APW, violet fire hazed the air between them, terminating on a disk like a white-hot coin – the Prador’s projected shield. The disk went out, and
the fire extinguished shortly after. Both drones fired missiles and opened up with their rail-guns. Two of Sniper’s missiles blew in between, but a third took a curve and came at the Prador
from the side. After the explosion, Sniper had the satisfaction of seeing the drone lurch through the air, with a split opened in its armour – then the missile he had overlooked came up
underneath him and exploded.