Neal Asher: Prador Moon

Docked to the ship like some huge golden parasite, the Prador shuttle yet showed no sign of departing, and the station AI wanted to do something about that. Through exterior cams, when the bandwidth could be spared, Jebel observed a pan-pipes missile launcher squirting its load out into space. No point tracking them, so he focused back on the shuttle. The missiles returned too fast to be seen, and the flash of the silent impacts blanked vision for a moment. Fire rolled across the station skin, and Jebel grabbed the head frame of the cot he sat upon as the medical unit shuddered all around him. As the view cleared he saw the disheartening reality: the shuttle remained untouched. Now linking in and picking up what he could of AI com to ships beyond the station, he understood that the weaponry required to destroy the shuttle might destroy the station itself. AI minds then discussed the idea of slicing through the station to remove this alien tick. But it was not the resultant loss of human life that scotched the idea. Quite simply, though a Prador attack force operated from the shuttle, that vessel might be all that prevented the mother ship from attacking, and against that they could mount little defence.

"How are you?"

Jebel saw Urbanus enter the medical unit, but only now turned his full attention to the Golem. "Sick and in pain."

"Well that won't last—you're going into surgery now. Any personnel with combat training get priority."

"That makes me feel all warm inside."

"Come on." Urbanus tossed him a drug patch, which Jebel peeled and stuck on the side of his neck. As he pushed himself from the cot he experienced a momentary dizziness and found his missing hand begin to ache. Seconds later the patch's contents did their work and he felt suddenly euphoric.

"What's happening?" Jebel asked. "I just watched the AI try to take out the shuttle, but aug com inside the station is censored when it isn't going down."

"About a hundred of them have penetrated the station and cut off the section between the Green Transept Arcade and the Delta rim locks. People are escaping via the runcible within that area, but that cannot last."

Despite the drugs, Jebel's guts knotted up. Cirrella's apartment lay within that area. "What… cannot last?"

Remorselessly Urbanus replied, "The AI will have to destroy the runcible to prevent it falling into Prador… claws."

Jebel's nausea returned, but what else could the AI do? What could Jebel do in his present condition? He needed to return himself to fighting fitness to help her.

They exited the medical unit into a corridor busy with station personnel, many of them guiding grav-sleds stacked with munitions. Towards the end of this corridor he saw another packed full of civilians slowly edging their way along it. Many of them carried small holdalls or other items.

"From the area they took?" Jebel suggested.

"No, evacuation. All the runcibles are open port and the AI is getting people out as fast as it can." He glanced at Jebel. "ECS dreadnoughts out there. You know what will probably happen when they engage that Prador mother ship, and there seems little doubt that they will."

Jebel understood: a station, in close proximity to whatever battle ensued, would be highly vulnerable—a liability. That did not, however, make him feel any better about it.

A row of med bays lay just down from the unit. Urbanus drew to a halt before one door, stood gazing at it for a moment, then stepped aside pushing Jebel back. The door opened and an auto-stretcher planed out—the woman upon it unconscious and clad head to foot in one of those tight suits Jebel recognised as the kind normally worn after major skin replacement. Urbanus guided him through the door to where two med-techs oversaw five surgical slabs and five menacing autodocs. Three of the slabs were occupied and on one of them a vaguely human figure was being tugged about by two of the docs. Jebel spied shattered ribs splayed out, blood-filled tubes and a lung inflating, legs gone at the knee and charred, weeping skin. The rest was a blur of gleaming appendages, the low droning of bone and cell welders, hissing, sucking and crunching sounds. He directed his gaze elsewhere.

"This is him?" asked a thin, blonde-haired woman who poised over another autodoc, reprogramming it. She shot a glance at his missing arm. "Yes, I see it is." Turning, she picked up the case Urbanus had brought from the other med bay, opened this and took out the Golem hand and forearm. "Up on the slab."

Jebel hesitated, feeling this was going too quickly.

"On the slab now!" the woman bellowed. "I've people dying out there!"

Jebel obeyed, guilty because his wound could have waited, and because he was receiving treatment ahead of others in greater need. And why? Because he had been trained in causing precisely the kind of injuries this woman must now treat. He lay back, felt the nerve blocker go into his neck without further delay, and his body turn into a numb piece of steak from below there. Then the autodoc whirred into place over his arm stump as if preparing to dine. Jebel closed his eyes.

Moria gazed up at what was now a familiar image to her, this time appearing on the public screen aboard the shuttle taking her back to the Trajeen cargo runcible: the big Prador chopping the human ambassador in half. Now the presenters were waxing lyrical in reference to this attack on the Polity'sAvalonas that story slowly began to be displaced by stories of other attacks.

"Well," said Carolan Prentis, from the seat beside her, "xenobiologists have been crying about the lack of sentient aliens we've encountered. I wonder how they feel now?"

Still feeling a little shaken, and thoroughly annoyed with herself, Moria glanced at her companion. Carolan wore her blue runcible-technician overall with the same pride as Moria, though her project ranking was lower. Her elfin face, which was undoubtedly the product of cosmetic surgery, reminded Moria of something out of a VR fantasy game (Moria grimaced at the analogy—who was she to know the difference between fantasy and reality?), though Carolan's dark brown eyes with their green flecks and her incongruous cropped blonde hair seemed likely to be the product of genetics. Undoubtedly some ancestor of Carolan's had undergone genetic redesign, for on each wrist a wheel tattoo overlaid scars where spur fingers had been excised.

Moria turned away, gazing internally as her aug—now with the diagnostic finished and her netlink re-established—loaded information from various searches and began rebuilding programs she had earlier deleted. It surprised her to find this woman on the same shuttle as herself. Her surprise doubled to see Carolan now wore an aug too—coincidentally having visited Copranus City for a fitting at the same time.

She turned back towards Carolan. "It probably depends on how close they are to all this." Moria nodded at the screen, now displaying a shot of a moon installation being bombed by one of those horribly massive ships. "I bet they're coming in their pants back on Earth, but out closer to the line they might be a little less happy about it all."

"Mmm, I guess… you know they've been discussing mining the cargo gate?"

"What?"

"Well, we're not that far from the line here and they don't want these Prador getting hold of runcible tech."

"But they don't have AIs."

"Nevertheless…"

Moria thought about those words, we're not that far from the line here, but though she understood on an intellectual level what the newsnets were displaying, she could not quite equate it with the reality she knew.

The shuttle, a fifty-metre cylinder with a rounded nose and two stubby wings, rose steadily on AG, and the fusion flame of its main engine drove it through the Trajeen atmosphere. Moria always preferred this particular shuttle over the more usual delta-wings because of its ample provision of windows. She gazed out at the falling curve of the planet and the gradual winking on of stars in the purple-black firmament.