Neal Asher - Prador Moon

"Proverbs are like that… this… Conlan?"

Krong looked at her piercingly. "Your aug is unusual, I understand?"

"It is."

"So too is Conlan's, but he played for the other team. He organised an attack up here to seize this place while he himself piloted the grabship. We were forewarned and managed to stop the former but not the latter. We now have Conlan locked in a cell."

That raised all sorts of questions that Moria ran through and discarded as irrelevant. She concentrated on the heart of it: "Why?"

"He worked for the Separatists here who were apparently being financed, indirectly, by the Prador Kingdom. Apparently the Prador promised to destroy all the AIs and put humans back in charge again."

Moria snorted derisively.

"My thoughts too. Once this place came under Separatist control with the AI destroyed, Conlan was to link in, using his aug, to the connection between this runcible and the one at Boh, taking control of all systems there that were once controlled from this end by the AI. It seems he would have been able to prevent reattachment of the units of the complex there by shutting down environmental controls and seizing control of meteor collision lasers. The technicians there would have been fighting to survive and would have had little time to do the runcible any damage before the Prador arrived to take it." I see.

"You don't seem surprised."

Moria shook her head. "George was slowly uncovering what it's possible for me to do with such an augmentation. Subversion of computer systems was involved but I can see how it would be possible."

"I had a difficult time accepting it myself but for the sophistication of the attack. I thought he was overestimating his abilities." He grimaced. "He did, though apparently not those ones."

"What's happening now?" she asked.

"Two Prador ships are on their way here so any spatial defence we could mount in the limited time will be… ineffective. We've a vessel already in transit to Boh to pick up the technicians there, and once it is loaded, another will be following, its crew detailed to conceal CTD space mines within that runcible's structure. We are also mining this one. There is a Polity dreadnought called the Occam Razor in pursuit of those two ships, but…" Jebel shook his head. "I haven't seen anything we've got manage to stop just one of those bastards."

"So we burn our crops behind us," Moria stated.

"Yes. Intriguing and frustrating though this puzzle concerning your promotion might be, I still have to work on the basis that the best way to stop the Prador seizing these runcibles is to obliterate them. My strongest wish is that the Prador on one particular ship take the Boh runcible aboard before discovering the mines." He gazed out at Trajeen again now.

"Particular ship?" she asked.

He glanced back at her. "One of those is the ship that destroyed Avalon Station. The one that set this war in motion and made me the man I now am." Something bitter, perhaps a little insane, flashed across his expression, then he seemed to take it under control as he turned to face her fully again. "Unless the rate of progress of the two ships changes, they should be here within the week."

Moria shivered; he stood with his hands clasped behind his back, Trajeen precisely haloing his head. Two of the moons were visible; Vina, identifiable by its speed of transit, swung over above him like some ominous sign. He seemed a prophet of doom.

"How many will be evacuated from the planet by then?" It never occurred to her to wonder if she would be among them.

"Not even ten per cent," he replied. "I think we're done talking now." He turned back towards the window.

In her aug she received a transmission from him containing all the records of recent events. It was a dismissal.

Vagule's thoughts cycled with frosty precision in his flash-frozen brain. With his spherical armoured body ensconced on one rack in the drone cache, he observed through his sensors eight others of his kind arrayed in similar racks beside him. Communication being possible he listened in to some of the exchanges between the other drones:

"Father will send us into battle soon and we can kill humans."

"I look forward to demonstrating my loyalty to Father."

"Kill the humans and all Father's enemies."

"I have detected a fault in my rail-gun which will make me less able to serve Father."

"Call for maintenance—to not be perfectly maintained is disloyal."

"I have called for maintenance."

And so it went: the continuous affirmation of purpose with discussions straying into the subjects of weaponry, tactics and occasionally into analysis of previous engagements. Vagule, who could do no less than feel utterly loyal to Immanence, also understood that loyalty to be imposed by electronic means just as it was previously imposed by his father's pheromones. His past life lay open to his inspection and he remembered his father's treatment of him with painful clarity. It seemed that though disobedience was no option, his ability to think about his lot was no longer confused by those physical pheromonal effects. However, most of those here were second-children who only vaguely recollected being anything other than war drones. They did not possess an underlying stratum of memory to run counter to their imposed loyalty. There was, however, one other drone here like himself.

"You are the new drone," said that other.

"I am Vagule."

"Yes, a first-child Prime."

"Who are you?"

"I am Pogrom and I too was a first-child Prime, though only your presence here has reminded me of that."

Vagule knew nothing of any first-child called Pogrom and only then did it occur to him that others went through the same experiences before him.

"When were you a first-child?"

"Back on home-world when Immanence still possessed four legs and both claws and before this ship was built. I do not know how long ago, only that thirty first-children have served since then."

Thirty?

Vagule realised hundreds of years must have passed. "What was your infraction?"

"I became too old and Father's pheromones began to have less and less of an effect upon me. He ordered me upon a mission to attack a rival in the King's Council, one from which I was not expected to return. But I completed my mission—I booby-trapped one of the rival's spare control units with diatomic acid which later ate out his insides when he shell-welded the unit to his under-car apace—and returned."

"Then you served Father well." Surprisingly well, since most Prador adults buried themselves behind layer upon layer of defences and were particularly difficult to kill. During the vicious infighting, which was the way Prador conducted their politics, it was the first- and second-children that did the dying and few adults actually ended up dead. They usually only lost or gained wealth or status.

"Yes, I served Father well. Upon my return he called me to him, and it was obvious he intended to strip my limbs and kill me, for already my back limbs were loosening as I made a slow transition to adulthood. I attacked him and managed to tear off one of his legs before the second-children and new first-child Prime-in-waiting managed to tear off all my limbs."

"You attacked Father?"

"I attacked him and am shamed and, as you must know, not shamed."

"I will serve Father," Vagule stated, but beneath that knew he would rather not.

"Father kept me alive for fifty days, feeding small pieces of my organs to the second-children all the while."

"As is just."

"As is just," the other agreed. "At the end of that period, when my death approached, he transferred me to this drone shell. He was much angered because my attack on him necessitated the installation of his first grav-motor, for he could no longer walk unaided."