The Skinner (52 page)

‘Oh bollocks,’ groaned the war drone, as he tumbled through the air. His APW was out, and though he still had missiles to launch, they could not get past the molten metal blocking
his launch tubes – the same mess that had also scrapped his rail-gun. It was all academic really, as he had little chance of staying airborne for any length of time, with his AG gone as well.
Intermittently he spotted the Prador war drone ahead of him. At least it seemed to be having as much trouble as he was. One last chance? Sniper fired his fusion engine at a precisely timed instant,
opened out what remained of his legs, and slammed himself into the other drone. Immediately the Prador accelerated and rolled, trying to shake him off.

‘Y’know,’ said Sniper, ‘when the going gets tough . . .’ And with that he plunged his heavy claw through the split in the Prador’s armour. Its only reply to
him was a thin screaming over the ether as it fell towards one of the atolls below.

‘Sniper . . . Sniper?’ the Warden sent – and didn’t even get back a return signature. ‘SMs One and Two, what happened?’

There was an equivocal humming over the ether before a response came through.

‘Sniper had a run-in with two Prador war drones. We can’t find him,’ explained Two.

‘Yeah, he sure stuffed ’em,’ added One.

‘But it seems they stuffed him also,’ Two then pointed out and, so saying, transmitted a replay of what it had captured and recorded of Sniper’s last moments.

Stubborn to the end, thought the Warden. In such a crisis Sniper could have linked through and transmitted himself, all of himself. But Sniper had preferred to remain individual, had not wanted
to be subsumed. And so, the Warden thought, he is gone in heroic battle. What a waste, and what a disappointment – the Warden had been quite attracted to the idea of
changing
Sniper.

‘One and Two, join your brother drones off the Skinner’s Island,’ instructed the Warden, and then linked through to Twelve. ‘Twelve, I want you down in that trench,
searching for this Prador vessel. We still don’t know quite what we are up against.’

‘On my way,’ sent Twelve.

There were no probes in the area, so Ebulan despatched the nearest one of them available. This same probe – built in the shape of a small Prador, with thrusters
shell-welded underneath – burst from the sargassum where it had been squatting and rocketed up into the sky, then went hypersonic for twenty seconds before shutting down its thrusters and
coasting to the edge of the tsunami. To Ebulan it returned an image of the fleet of ships riding the swells behind the initial huge wave, their sails belled to bursting. Maybe one or two of them
had been sunk, but no more – the CTD concealed inside the
Ahab
had not been close enough to cause any real damage. The probe then transmitted back the information that objects were now
approaching it at hypersonic speeds. This transmission was abruptly curtailed as the probe became an incandescent cloud of metal vapour.

Ebulan crashed around his chamber, in increasing anger, and it was some time before he could think clearly again. Vrell would soon be in the process of making the change, so would be useless to
him now. The pheromones that kept a fully limbed Prador in a state of adolescence until the father of the family died were not present where the adolescent now was, and because the
‘change’ had been suppressed in it for so long, Vrell would make the transformation to adulthood very quickly.

The blanks out there might still be of some use if he dared reconnect their control boxes, but he did not. He did not want again to risk feeling the pain from their bodies. They never felt it
as, though having nervous systems, they had no brains to understand the signals from them – he was the one with the brain. Their thrall units were the nearest things they possessed to
intelligence, and those devices merely translated verbal orders to action, or acted as the interface between the blank’s nervous system and its controlling Prador mind.

No blanks, no Vrell, and no second-children either. Perhaps the war drones, then? Ebulan spun round and slid up to his array of screens. He used the control box of the blank he had cut in half
earlier to try to link through. The whited-out screens threw up nothing but static. The drones had to be all dead?

It was painful to Ebulan to admit to himself that he no longer had any control over this situation, and therefore it might be time to pull out. The thought of doing so left an unpleasant taste
in his mouth – like too-fresh human meat – and was just as upsetting to his digestion. What other options were there? He considered the armament carried by his ship. A brief flight and
a sweep or two by the particle beams, perhaps a CTD for the island itself, and all who had any direct knowledge of his involvement in the coring trade would become so much airborne ash. All the
forms of information storage that the humans so valued were as nothing to the Prador. Only living witnesses counted to them. Ebulan then pondered the consequences of such actions.

The Warden would certainly attack . . . but was that such a problem? The Warden, though it controlled formidable devices, could not move away from the moon. Its SMs, though they could destroy
Ebulan’s war drones – something Ebulan still could not quite get to grips with, as he’d assumed there were only enforcer drones here – stood no chance of getting through
this war craft’s armour, nor of surviving assault by its weapons. How formidable exactly were the weapons the Warden controlled? And would they prove so effective with a planet in between?
Also, though there would still be living witnesses to his proposed actions, all they would truly witness would be an anonymous attack by a Prador destroyer. No one had yet seen Ebulan himself, as
they had in the old days when he came here each Spatterjay year to collect his cargo of cored humans.

The more Ebulan thought about it, the more attractive the case for attacking seemed. It started hormones and juices surging in him that had not flowed for the last thousand years – as they
had once done in that time when he still possessed all his legs and a scattering of arms. That Prador medical science had long established such feelings as the first signs of senility, he did not
even stop to consider.

Erlin was wondering how much longer she, and Anne, had to live. Shortly Frisk and her pet Batians would start to consider them a hindrance rather than useful hostages. As soon
as that time came there would be no hesitation to kill them. The Batians would do it with workmanlike precision. It was what they were employed for, after all. Frisk, however, would do it with
great enjoyment, and probably as slowly and painfully as possible. Erlin had enough judgement of people to recognize a raving psychopath.

‘Halt here,’ ordered Svan.

As she and Anne stopped in the centre of the courtyard, Erlin could see the crew-woman working her wrists against the cable-cuffs securing her hands behind her back. She thought to warn her of
the futility of trying to break woven ceraplast, but changed her mind – she did not know, after all, how old Anne was – and instead looked away to survey her surroundings.

It was impossible for Erlin not to think about what had once happened here: the horror of it all. A thousand years ago, Jay Hoop and his crew of pirates had landed on this island to establish a
permanent cache of arms and loot. At one time or another, all of them had been bitten by the leeches and to their surprise subsequently discovered that they did not grow old and die, but while
growing older, were becoming stronger and more resistant to injury. With the confidence this imparted, for centuries they had terrorized the quadrant, using this planet – named Spatterjay,
after Jay Hoop’s nickname – as their base. Then had come the Prador, and the war, and . . .

A distant horrid shrieking distracted Erlin from her rumination. She looked around and saw Frisk move over to one side of the courtyard, and then pace along it.

‘We’ll go this way,’ she gestured to a door in the wall. ‘I’ll lead.’ She pointed at Erlin and Anne, ‘You two follow me.’

The two captives crossed the courtyard and began to trail Frisk through the warren of dank corridors, past rooms scattered with such objects as could survive seven centuries of rot and decay. On
the floors lay items of ceramal and glass, silicon and artificial gemstone. Remaining from personal units, comps, and the many other devices carried by the citizens of the Polity seven hundred
years ago, were the practically indestructible chips – the metals and plastic long having corroded and decayed to dust. There were also ornaments and storage crystals, visors from
soldier’s helmets, diverse items of ceramal armour. Erlin was thoroughly aware that these objects were things once carried by Hoop’s captives – things that during the war became
of least value to Hoop and his crew. They had wanted the persons who wore them.

Frisk led them further through the Hold till they reached a high tunnel on the other side. Beyond the tunnel mouth, the dingle was crushed and flattened.

‘Svan, go and check for tracks,’ called Frisk.

Svan trotted past them, sped through the tunnel, and began to examine the soft ground beyond. Frisk looked back at her two prisoners and grinned.

What figure had Keech once quoted? Ten million.
Ten million
humans cored here during the Prador– Human war. And
this
woman had been one of the murderers. Erlin now knew what
Keech had meant when he had predicted Frisk would no longer have the face by which he had known her. The thought of it sickened her.

‘They did come through here, but there’s some sort of animal footprint as well,’ called out Svan.

With a smirk Frisk followed her into the tunnel. Anne and Erlin remained where they were, until Shib barked at them to get moving too. Through the tunnel and out into the dingle, Svan walked
ahead and Frisk shifted to one side. Erlin reflected about how she herself had come here to learn from Ambel how to live – but now it seemed she had in fact come here to die. She turned
suddenly when she heard a horrible high-pitched scream behind her.

The mercenary, Shib, had made the mistake of brushing against a tree. He was now wearing a leech like a feather boa, and seemed unable to overcome his disgust enough to grab it and throw it
away. The creature flowed round his neck, and drove its mouth in against his cheek. Even now the mercenary could not react.

Svan ran past Erlin and grabbed at the leech. With a yank, she tore it from his face and flung it to the ground. Shib still stood there, keening, a circle of flesh missing from his cheek, his
teeth now exposed underneath. Svan backhanded him across the other side of his face, once, twice, knocking him to the ground. The keening suddenly stopped.

‘Get up.’

Shib slowly rose to his feet: shame, fear and madness fighting for predominance in his expression.

‘Keep moving you two,’ said Svan, heading back to lead the way. Erlin thought her insane to leave this humiliated man at her back. When Shib drew his hand laser she assumed he was
going to burn a hole through Svan’s back. Instead, he incinerated the leech, and reholstered the laser.

‘Get a move on,’ he snarled at her.

SM12’s cockle-shell body was of an extremely rugged construction: its outer shells formed of centimetre-thick foamed steel, and its internal components braced in a
ceramal-composite lattice, but even so it knew that the pressure a kilometre down would collapse it as easily as a snail in a vice, if it did not prepare. Floating on the surface, Twelve folded
away its single laser, then using an internal system pumped crash foam at high pressure into all its internal cavities. Next with its shells slightly open, it turned off its AG and sank like the
lump of metal it was.

Five hundred metres down Twelve observed with interest one of the herbivorous deep-water heirodonts cruising past, the leeches on its body turned to strands by the pressure. The creature
resembled a truncated whale, its face, however, just a wall of feeding sieves; its body short and roped with muscle, studded with round fins, and terminating in a wide vertically presented tail. It
suddenly dived when it was past the SM and, as it went rapidly down, the leeches clinging to its skin began to break away. A little relief it would find in the depths, before having to return
upwards to feed and be fed upon.

Twelve followed it down, the drone’s crash foam collapsing into a thick hard layer around its internal components. The substance offered some protection, but the SM knew that some parts of
itself would inevitably get damaged. Essential components, however, would be fine, being constructed on the whole of hard silicon composites and foamed ceramal.

Seven hundred metres down, and the SM’s self-diagnostic program told it that a reflective cylinder in its laser had cracked. Twelve had expected this to happen, as there was no way of
injecting crash foam, or even admitting seawater, into the cavity within the cylinder – and to do so would have screwed the optical perfection of the system anyway. The rate of its descent
was also slowing in proportion as the density of the water increased. The drone dared not reverse its AG to pull itself down faster, as that would be too easily detected. Shortly it passed the
heirodont, which was now thinner than it had been above, the water having compressed it too. The creature’s eyes glimmered from their pits as it turned and sculled hesitantly towards Twelve,
but the drone was well past it before it could decide if this strange-looking object was animal or vegetable.