“The fuck!” said Trent, sprawled nearby and holding a hand against his helmet, his expression twisted with pain. I found myself trying to claw open my suit’s helmet. When I realized what I was doing, I hurriedly cut as many links as possible—even shutting down the reception in my aug—but still I could hear the scream. This, more than anything else, demonstrated just how integrally linked I was to the spine, because that’s where I was getting it from.
Of course
, I thought,
Sverl is recorded in there
.
But if Sverl was recorded, did that mean this wasn’t murder? Did that relieve Riss of guilt? Sverl had been quite dismissive of the deaths amongst the shell people because the spine had similarly recorded them. But I guessed he didn’t feel so dismissive now.
Sverl crashed back against the wall, shook himself, then ran straight across the room, bouncing off equipment on the way and finally crashing into the further wall. The inside of the film suit he wore was bulging with vapour, and black fluid was draining into its lower section. I don’t know whether it was a malfunction or if he hoped to end his pain sooner, but suddenly that covering split open and sucked away into a series of holes above each of his limb sockets. An explosion of vapour followed—the fluid splashing to the floor underneath, smoking like acid burning through the metal. Sverl staggered a few paces, leaving something behind. I looked at a chunk of dissolving flesh with vertebrae and bones exposed. It looked like some half-digested animal thrown up by a predator. Sverl had just lost his tail.
He staggered a little further, then went down on his belly. His human eyes were shrivelling now and dropping out of sight. Great splits divided him, yellow pus boiling out and steaming. Then a large chunk of his body fell out like an orange segment, exposing smoking organs and the glint of metal. As I gaped in horror, he continued to fall apart. For long moments, I just lost sight of him in the fog he was generating. The screaming died to a perpetual wail that bore more resemblance to radio interference than the suffering of a sentient being. A pool spread out across the floor—a stew of dissolving tissues like chyme in a bile of immiscible black and red fluids. It was evaporating in vacuum fast; creating a crust, but not as fast as it was coming out of his body, so the crust kept breaking as another flow overran it like lava. The wail stopped and soon after I caught a glimpse of the remains. All that was left was an intricate ceramal ribcage—with prosthetic claws, legs and mandibles still attached. The items inside it bore some resemblance to candelabra and other silver antiques—I spotted a coil ring, AI crystal and a spider’s web of optics. All sat on a steadily deliquescing and spreading pile of organic tissue.
I stood up, feeling sick and empty, and turned in time to see Bsorol finally freeing himself and moving leadenly over to his father’s remains. Bsectil swayed for a moment, then went over and joined his brother. Meanwhile Riss unwound from that column and squirmed brokenly across the plating. Before I realized what she was doing, she had disappeared down a hole in that floor and was gone.
CVORN
Cvorn first watched the transmission in disbelief, then watched the recording three more times with growing depressed acceptance. Sverl was dead and he had died in such a way that even his body could not be used as evidence of what had happened to him. Whatever the drone had injected had utterly destroyed him. Yes, Cvorn might be able to obtain samples of Sverl’s genome from those remains, along with that ceramal skeleton, but he knew they wouldn’t be enough. Certainly his allies believed the story, but the point was to use Sverl to convince others. Prador, generally, were a sceptical lot and that evidence would not convince them. The skeleton was something that Cvorn and his allies could easily have fabricated, while Sverl’s strange genome was something they could have cut and pasted together too. Most other prador would only be more suspicious of its veracity upon learning of the sub-atomic processes that kept it functioning.
So that was it—all over. What should he do now? His goals had not changed. He still wanted the king usurped and he still wanted the prador to continue their war against the Polity, but now he could see no way of bringing either about. Decades of planning ruined.
As he stared at his screens, Cvorn began to feel deeply depressed. Abruptly he approached a bowl sitting on a frictionless column—designed to keep the ship lice from getting to it. Without conscious volition, he began eating the jellied mudfish he found there, only becoming conscious of what he was doing when his claw clattered against the empty bowl. He backed off, fearing what might happen to his insides. Then he realized he was still seeing the bowl despite starting to turn away. His remaining transplanted palp eye was working! He had saved his eye—using the recombinant virus his medical equipment had designed, which he’d drill-injected into his visual turret just a few hours ago. He shifted it around, revelling in the ability to look at things without having to turn his body to face them. Then, a moment later, he realized something else.
His stomach felt fine and he was hungry for something more.
“Vlox!” he clattered, “I want a quarter reaverfish tail right now!”
“Yes, Father,” Vlox replied through the intercom.
Cvorn walked around the sanctum, shaking himself, half expecting his stomach to rebel, but it still felt fine. Of course, he would have to be careful. And perhaps later he should consider transplants of some of his internal organs. He did, after all, have those few remaining young adults aboard . . . No, on second thought, he had a much better option. He scuttled back to his screens, auging into his system to call up new cam views. Now he gazed into the chamber beside the hatching room. This housed about forty small male third-children, each no larger than a human head. They were swarming over some unidentifiable meat, tearing it apart.
Eyeing all these children, Cvorn considered the option that had occurred to him earlier. He remembered a prador legend about a creature called the Golgoloth, which preyed on the young and used their body parts to extend its own life. It was, of course, complete rubbish, but the idea of so extending one’s life wasn’t at all. If he harvested transplants from his own children, there would be much less likelihood of rejection problems. Now why, to his knowledge, had not other prador tried this out? He began running searches of this ship’s data banks and, though he did discover examples of prador using such transplants, they weren’t common. It made no sense. Was there something in the prador psyche that prevented it—which he had overcome through his previous augmentations? This was worth study, but perhaps later, because now Vlox had arrived with his food.
“Here,” he said, gesturing to the floor before him with one claw.
Vlox scuttled over and deposited the quarter reaverfish tail before quickly turning to head away.
“Remain,” said Cvorn, “I have a task for you.”
“Yes, Father,” said Vlox meekly.
Cvorn tucked into the chunk of fish. Although he did experience a moment of nausea as he finished, it soon went away. He still took down a draft of stomach remedy, just in case.
“Now, Vlox,” he said, turning back. “Take security drones to the quarters of Vlern’s remaining children. Take some second-children too, all armed and armoured. Kill all of them and dismember them. What you do with them is up to you.”
“Yes, Father!” said Vlox eagerly, coming up out of his squat and turning away.
“Inform me at once if you have difficulties—I don’t want any more problems like Sfolk.”
“You won’t, Father!”
Cvorn dipped his body in acknowledgement. Vlox was a young first-child and had not yet learned that making promises to your father about things that might not be in your full control could be unhealthy.
“Go,” he said, and Vlox went.
So what now? Cvorn’s plans had come to nothing, but he felt good, had seen ways of extending his life even beyond a prador’s usual long extent and he controlled an ST dreadnought. He had a growing family now too and really, anything was possible. There might be other ways to achieve his goals—other opportunities arising throughout the long years ahead. He might even outlive the king. Think of that!
He was heading to the door from his sanctum before he realized where he was going. Then he recognized that his intention to visit the females again had been forming in his mind, right from the moment his stomach started to feel better. Eagerly, he scuttled through the tunnels of his ship, his mood so good he didn’t even crack the shell of a second-child who happened to get in his way, merely pushing it to one side instead. Finally, he arrived at the door into the mating pool.
The outer water lock revolved into the wall, spilling water across the floor. Cvorn eyed this and remembered how he had intended to fix the inefficiencies here. Perhaps he would do that next, now he had more time on his claws. Inside the lock he checked the environmental controls. They were still at the levels he had set last time, so it wouldn’t be so cold on his prongs and clamp—which right then were feeling very sensitive indeed. Water gushed in round his feet after he closed the rear door and it was warm—felt good. He hyperventilated and packed in the oxygen for what he felt sure was going to be a marathon session.
Soon he was submerged; he surged down the ramp and dropped to the bottom of the breeding pool. The four females clustered around their feeding pillar—no strays he could corner and mount—but he didn’t care. Clattering his mandibles and snipping his claws, he rushed them, slamming his full weight into the group and bowling a couple of them over. As he selected the nearest who was still down on her feet, he noted an alert in the system—Vlox trying to get in contact with him. He ignored it. Mating lasted a lot longer this time and, as if his body knew his mental intent, he was parsimonious with the seed he squirted inside her. He then grabbed another one, the remaining two not fighting so hard to get him off her. Their instinct was responding to the violence of his attack perhaps, though it was odd that they were so sluggish. Once he had finished his second mating, he paused, but only briefly—just long enough to take note of Vlox’s increasingly urgent attempts to contact him, and ignore them.
Cvorn mated with the third female, and then the fourth, a hollow feeling inside and his prongs feeling sore, sucking dry. He knew he’d emptied his testicle and would have to have it refilled from his cold store. Later he would allow one of his children to develop to adulthood—in captivity—remove its testicle and use viral recombination to match it fully to his own genome. Then there would be no more need for tedious refilling.
Cvorn then moved away, feeling exhausted and hot. Reaching the edge of the breeding pool, he paused and finally responded to Vlox.
“What’s the problem?”
“Father! One of Vlern’s children is missing!”
What?
“Give me visuals.”
The feed came through from a recorded file, showing the quarters of one of the young adults. Just as in Sfolk’s quarters, a hole had been cut in the wall. Cvorn concentrated on this, and pulled the recording back to it again. There was something odd about it . . . Concentration was difficult because he still felt exhausted and hot—perhaps it hadn’t been such a good idea to increase the temperature in the pool. Then, after a moment, he saw it. The debris from the hole in the wall was lying on the floor inside. Yet when Sfolk had cut his hole, the chunk he had carved round had fallen into the space beyond. It might be nothing, but Cvorn now studied the rest of the recording intently. It took just a moment for him to confirm his suspicions. Items were scattered all about the place and storage caches broken open. Vlox and his crew could have done that, but it was unlikely they had made the dents in the walls. Then there, up on the wall, he saw a laser burn. There, on the floor: a dry puddle of prador blood. There had been a fight, and the prador who had been in here had not gone willingly. So how had that happened?
Cvorn saw it clearly now. Sfolk must have cut his way
in
, but in doing so, he’d allowed oxygenated air into the quarters and that had revived the occupant. A fight had ensued and Sfolk’s brother had gone either unwillingly or in no condition to object. But why?
“Vlox, I hope you have started a search,” he said. No reply was forthcoming and the feed from Vlox had cut off. Cvorn contemplated this for a short while but found he still couldn’t think straight. He looked up at his route out of the pool. He really needed to get out of here and cool down.
“Vlox?”
Still nothing. Cvorn reached out for a claw hold and steadily began to work his way up the side of the tank. Halfway up, Vlox’s link into the ship’s system opened again and he dumped two files. Cvorn opened the first of them, pausing to rest, even though climbing with prosthetics should be no effort.
It was another visual file. He saw Sfolk laboriously raising the inert form of one of his brothers on a hoist, lowering it into an open suit of armour, carefully inserting limbs into the required holes and getting him into place. Before closing the armour, Sfolk used a tube of black sealer foam to paint a whorl beside his brother’s visual turret. Cvorn recognized it as the mark he used to identify Sfolk. Next, Sfolk closed up the armour and then turned to the cam view, pointing with one claw to a thrall unit newly attached to his carapace. As he turned back again the armour began moving, as if the prador it contained was still alive. Cvorn understood at once what that meant. And, as he approached the surface of the pool, he opened the other file.
Sfolk now stood in an airlock . . . no, it wasn’t an airlock but the water lock above! Cvorn tried to move faster, but it seemed as if he was dragging himself through mud. Finally, he reached the water lock and found it firmly shut. He clung there, now feeling the need for air. The thought of that motivated him, because of course an airlock above led into the upper chamber! He dragged himself on, moving slower and slower as he neared the surface of the pool. With a gargantuan effort, he tried to heave himself out but then felt a horrible agonizing ripping down one side. The water around him turned green with his blood. He heaved again and finally crawled out onto the edge. He tried to turn his palp eye to look at the damage. The view blurred as that eye started to fail again, but he could see that the socket for one of his prosthetic legs had pulled right out; the flesh exposed there had an odd purplish red colour. Meanwhile, in the recording, Sfolk had fired up a welder and was running it round the inner door of the water lock, sealing Cvorn in. Cvorn watched as Sfolk turned to the cam view and twisted his mandibles in a prador smile. He then reached out and knocked the environmental heat control right to the top. Of course, it was old news, a recording . . .