Neal Asher: The Voyage of the Sable Keech

The chamber he sought was open. Here a Prador second-child—one of Well’s own siblings—lay in the corner with all its legs folded underneath it. Vrell prodded it with a claw and it moved sluggishly.

‘Attend me,’ he hissed in the Prador tongue.

Suddenly the youngster was up on its legs and brandishing its claws threateningly.

‘Not Father!’ it bubbled.

Knowledge, long ignored as irrelevant during Vrell’s enslavement to his father’s pheromones, suddenly became relevant. This second-child would still be similarly enslaved, and to it Vrell was only a competing adult. It would attack him if it considered him vulnerable, or else escape if it could. Vrell reached over to a nearby rack and inserted his claw into a large triclaw extension, then quickly turned and brought it down hard. The polished steel smashed through the second-child’s legs on one side and knocked it flat to the ground. As it tried to rise again, Vrell hit it once more, this time pulping its remaining legs. He then opened the metal claw and used it to tear off the younger Prador’s claws, before turning round and closing the door manually. He did not want further interruptions from any more of his kin.

‘Not Father,’ the second-child protested from the floor. Vrell considered finishing it off, but there might be things to learn from it, so he ignored it for the present and studied the tools available to him.

The extension he held was too large, so he returned it to the rack and took up the smallest one he could find. He would have liked to use an anaesthetic on himself, but then he would be unable to feel what he was grasping. He dipped the triclaw in a tub of sterilizing grease, closed it, then placed it against the gory hole where the two leeches had entered at the joint of his missing claw. There must be no further delay, as they could start feeding again at any moment. He eased the claw inside himself, tracking the path of one leech by just how much it hurt him. The path curved round, very near a major ganglion, and he adjusted the joints in the extension to follow. There was no doubt when he tracked down the leech, for it thrashed inside him and began chewing to escape. Vrell opened the claw, shoved it even deeper, closed it and pulled.

Vrell knew how humans, subjected to a sufficient level of pain, could lose consciousness. He had seen this many times and learnt the various techniques for preventing it happening. No such luxury was available to himself. He shrieked as he tore the leech out, hissed at it when he held it up before him, all bloody and writhing, its tubular thread-cutting mouth still seeking blindly for flesh. He dropped the vile thing down by the grease tub, picked up the tub itself and crushed the creature to slurry with it. Then he went after the other two.

When the last leech was nothing but a stain on the floor, Vrell swapped the triclaw for a large-bore injector. He fed this inside himself and pumped the leech-made cavities full of collagen foam and growth promoter. Into the cracks in the rear of his carapace he injected quickset porcelain. This done, he found carapace patches of a sufficient size, and stuck them over his other wounds. Now he felt utterly exhausted and was beginning to settle down to rest when that hard clamp of hunger returned with renewed intensity. Any kind of meat would do, but fortuitously Prador had a particular relish for the meat of their own kind. Vrell decided his hunger more important than any information he might obtain, so settled down by the carapace of his sibling, broke it open with the large triclaw, and began eating the contents.

‘Father,’ the Prador second-child kept repeating. ‘Father. Father.’ Until Vrell devoured its major ganglion.

Somewhere a reactor was still functioning, for at last, after days of searching, Vrell managed to find a power source for the bank of hexagonal screens before him. He reinserted his remaining hand into a console pit and called up the ship’s diagnostic programs. Studying the Prador glyphs scrolling down before him, he soon saw that the missile that had brought down this same ship had penetrated the hull very near to his father’s—Ebulan’s—sanctum. That area was now sealed behind airtight doors—the ship’s system reacting to the damage as it would out in space, though the closed-off area was now flooded with water rather than open to vacuum. Repair mesh had grown across the upper hole punched through the hull, and breach sealant had been pumped between these mesh layers and there crystallized. But where the missile had exploded from the lower hull, the mesh had failed to connect up, so no breach sealant had subsequently been pumped in.

Vrell decided that for now, whatever repairs he must make, he would approach them from inside the ship. Only when he had accomplished as many of those as feasible would he venture outside, and only then if absolutely necessary. But those repairs must be made, for he needed access to Ebulan’s sanctum, where the ship’s centralized controls were located. There were also the adjacent storerooms to consider, where thrall and control units were stored. But even inside the ship he must once again enter the water. He shuddered at the thought. Now being an adult he would not regrow his limbs, and could afford to lose no more. However, this venture was unavoidable if he were to survive.

Checking screens, he found two sets of doubled blast doors, one of them accessible from this side of the ship, so he could enter that area without flooding any more of the vessel. He checked the codes for each of those doors and memorized them, then swung away to find the required tools. Luckily, he had entered the ship on the engine side, where most of the maintenance and repair equipment was stored. He soon found a molecular plasticizer, a multipurpose welder and cutter, and a couple of hull-metal sheets which he loaded onto his back. Hopefully there was sufficient hull metal remaining around the breach that he could form back into place, and these two sheets would be all he needed. But if that were not so, then he would just have to make more than one trip, or as many as would be required. He felt a sudden flash of uncharacteristic irritation about that, then wondered why.

Vrell had never expected this to be easy, but the potential benefits were huge. He could return to the Prador Kingdom, inherit his father’s wealth, his father’s property, wives. Strangely, that last thought did not hold its earlier appeal. Vrell shook himself and continued with his task, hanging the equipment on his weapons harness. He next went to one of the many armouries to find a rail-gun that operated underwater, then as an afterthought added a water gun—a device that sucked in water and spat it out in a superheated stream. He would have added more weapons, but possessed only one working claw and one hand to hold them.

The first blast door slid up to reveal a stretch of corridor, empty but for one human hand which Vrell absent-mindedly picked up and ate. As the second door slid up he held his breath which, being Prador, he could do for about a day. Water began to squirt in under pressure, then roared in carrying detritus with it. Soon submerged, Vrell saw he was surrounded by leeches, and though they thumped ineffectually against his now sealed shell, he still used the water gun to explode them into black gobbets of boiled flesh. Moving into his father’s section of the ship, he immediately saw that something strange had happened here.

Someone had cut through the door to Father’s private sanctum. Vrell peered inside, observing a multitude of leeches and whelks, and a couple of glisters clinging to the ceiling. It took him a moment to discern human bones on the floor, a shell cutter lying nearby, and pieces of his father’s carapace scattered all around the room. Vrell stared, and stared, then abruptly understood. As well as the physical attack on his ship, Vrell’s father had been assailed by a viral program. Something obviously had suborned Ebulan’s human blanks and used them to attack him.