Orbus Read online

  Vrell does an inventory of his present resources: he possesses this armour which, though tough, will not survive a sustained attack; one rail-gun, presently fixed in its clamps below his armoured carapace, and half a load of inert missiles; three grenades; a quarter-power supply and some com lasers.

  He realizes he needs time, lots of time, but unfortunately he does not have it. No matter what their defences, the Prador here cannot remain free from the nanite for long, because Prador, being creatures who can survive abrupt changes in air pressure, and even survive vacuum for an appreciable length of time, tend to be somewhat lax about atmosphere security. Even the Sanctum, doubtless originally made secure against biological attack, will not be able to keep the nanite out for long. It will eventually worm its way in through old seals, and between the gaps in mechanically worn components, or maybe even through holes chewed into the insulating layers by ship-lice. Vrost probably knows all this, and realizes that he too possesses limited time. And when that time runs out, Vrost will most likely run the destruct sequence on this ship.

  Vrell finally reaches the location he has been searching for and, of course, the armoured doors are sealed. However, he knows the weaknesses here–but first some privacy. Initiating his com laser he loads to it one of the viral-attack programs residing in the library of his armour’s CPU, swiftly making alterations to it as he does so. Locating one of the ship eyes in the rough walls here, he fires the laser at it. Vrost takes this as an attack, and counter-attacks through the same com connection. All feeds to Vrell’s CPU blank out, as expected, but the further result is that all the ship eyes in this area are now out of action for as long as it takes Vrost to run diagnostics on them to ensure nothing nasty lurks in their computer architecture. Now reaching down, Vrell slides one claw into the slots in a floor grating, and heaves. With a snapping of bolts, it comes up and he tosses it to one side. Next he unclips his rail-gun and inserts it downwards into the cavity below, which is squirming with ship-lice, and then fires it towards the underside of the door, fanning across its entire lower section. The ensuing racket is incredible as shattered metal, glowing white-hot, explodes up out of the floor cavity. The half-load gone, he tosses in the three grenades over towards one side of the door, then moves swiftly back.

  Fire erupts from below and the blast throws up numerous floor gratings along the corridor. The door, like all Prador doors, is constructed to divide diagonally, with the two halves revolving back into the walls on either side. Thoroughly understanding the mechanism and its weaknesses, Vrell knows that the bottom rail, which takes the weight of the left-hand door, will be the one most weakened. Returning to it, he feels a slight twinge of satisfaction to be proved correct: for the door has dropped right down into the floor below it, leaving a gap he might just be able to squeeze through.

  After a couple of attempts to push through, Vrell has to admit that the gap is not wide enough. To get in, he needs to remove his armour. Removing his armour would usually be a simple matter of sending an instruction to its CPU, but that is now shut down. That means manual routine. He tilts his extendable head down inside the dome of the armour’s turret, and inserts his mandibles into the required control pits. Fast eject ensues.

  The upper carapace rises up on silvered rods, and then hinges back, while compressed air blows his limbs, lubricated with a special gel, out from the armour’s limbs. He lands with a crash just beyond the abandoned armour, then turns to gaze at it scontemplatively. It still stands as if occupied, which might be handy. He clatters over and heaves it round to face down the corridor where he might expect an attack to come from. Again detaching the rail-gun, he slots it over one claw, then reaches inside the armour to operate the control to close it, and the carapace lid hinges back and closes down with a thump. Now it looks as if an armed Prador stands waiting in the corridor.

  Vrell turns back to the door.

  Something cracks within his shell as he squeezes through the gap, and he feels certain that, now he is free of the restricting armour, the physical changes within him will continue apace. He turns his head–something he could not manage in his earlier form–and observes a star-shaped crack in his carapace, opened out and now rapidly filling with new carapace. Another spurt of growth in process. When does this end? Does it end? Now he feels free to inspect his surroundings–and emits a sigh of satisfaction.

  The armoury is filled to brimming with numerous lethal toys. Twenty new suits of Prador armour stand tilted like close-growing toadstools, harnesses with sensory masks crouch like the desiccated corpses of giant spiders ranged on high shelves, multi-barrel rail-guns are racked ready, ammunition aplenty, explosives stacked in octagonal crates–including CTDs–and some portable particle cannons glitter temptingly. Vrell immediately grabs up a breach section for a missile-launcher and drags it over to the door, hauls up a floor plate and shoves the breach section down inside, finding purchase for it underneath the dropped door, and heaves it back up into place, turning and jamming the breach section to hold it there. Next he finds a welder and quickly welds the two doors together, finishing the job just as the clattering racket of rail-gun fire sounds from out in the corridor.

  Still holding the welder, Vrell scuttles about the room rapidly locating, from his memory of the ship’s schematics, all the ship eyes located in the rough walls, and systematically burns them out. Next he pulls out a maglev toolbox from storage, and tows it across behind him towards the suits of armour. The CPUs are easily accessible, with the suits open, and it is only a matter of minutes to disconnect them from the ship’s systems and select a new frequency for them. All CPUs like this, he knows, contain attack programs that can control the armour without the intercession of the individual wearing it. If the occupant is severely injured, perhaps parboiled by a microwave beam, he could, within limited parameters, make his armour continue fighting for him. Working through one CPU, Vrell finds these programs and, with a speed any normal Prador would find incomprehensible, begins making certain alterations.

  Outside, the sound of rail-guns is replaced by the sawing shriek of a particle cannon. A detonation shudders the door, and it drops a little but holds. Vrell quickly dons a light weapons harness, makes a rapid selection from all the lethal toys available, then goes to find a large box of hull-buster limpet mines. These he places all around the walls of the armoury, seeking out the weakest points that give access to other corridors and chambers of the ship. Placing the CPU link mask of the harness across his lower eyes and mouthparts, he uses his mandibles to tap away at the internal control pits and to link his CPU to the same frequency as the twenty suits of armour, and then instructs them to arm themselves with a large variety of weapons. Twenty empty armour suits move forward with robotic precision, taking up rail-guns, grenades, missile-launchers and portable particle cannons, then move back into a nice neat line.

  But the next task is not so easy.

  These suits all contain fusion tactical explosives so that the occupant can destroy himself if captured, or so that Vrost can detonate it should the occupant be reluctant to do so. This is all about keeping secret the viral transformation of those occupants. However, for obvious reasons, the tacticals remain offline while these suits–in fact while all the suits of the King’s Guard–are aboard ship. It now takes Vrell some minutes of frustrating reprogramming to override that and get the bombs ready to detonate again. Then he is ready. Taking up the detonator for the limpet mines, he begins pulling up floor gratings, even as the sawing note of the particle cannon modifies, and the doors into this room glow red-hot.

  The first two of the King’s Guard to enter the armoury immediately open fire on the suits of armour, which are moving to take cover. The empty suits fire back with their nasty selection of weaponry. One of the Guard is slammed back out into the corridor, all the legs on one side of his body sheared off. The other dives for cover behind a rack of massive replacement coils for a coil-gun. More of the Guard charge in, and soon the air is filled with a sleet of fast-moving chu
nks of hot metal, gouts of fire, and a thickening haze of smoke cut through with the sabre slashes of beam weapons. Stored chemical munitions begin to detonate, and damaged power supplies start to discharge, spreading miniature lightnings down the racks and across the floor gratings. Then the hull-busters begin to go off.

  The first takes out a section of wall twenty feet across, tearing through to an area crammed with loading conveyors supplying the ship’s big guns. The back-blast topples racks and tosses fifteen-ton armoured Prador about like autumn leaves. Four of the suits Vrell controls now make their exit through there. Further blasts open gaps into a main corridor, into a putrid nursery full of dead third-children, and into an adjacent drop-shaft, and into other rooms and other corridors. All but two of the remote-controlled suits exit and flee, fighting a retreat against the pursuing King’s Guard. Soon the armoury is empty of fighters, though the frequent detonations and discharges continue.

  After some minutes have passed, Vrell protrudes one palp eye up through a gap in the floor gratings he is concealed beneath, then quickly snatches it back down as into the room floats a Prador war drone, a big sphere of metal with rail-guns mounted on either side, and other weapons and communication pits studding its surface. He crouches even lower, his legs spread out and his flat, disc-shaped carapace nearly filling up the gap below the gratings. Time to move, so carefully he drags himself off to one side, where the adjoining third-child nursery was partially torn out, extends his head through the narrow gap and raises it slightly, one palp eye directed back towards the war drone. After a moment the drone turns slowly and drifts towards where the Guard set off in hot pursuit of those empty suits of armour, now heading for the hull guns.

  **Using one of his manipulatory hands, Vrell draws a laser, scans the room ahead and targets ship eyes, firing rapid and accurate shots that sear the things out of their sockets. Certainly many of them were dead, at least temporarily, having been knocked out by the EM generated during the battle, but he is just making sure. Now he heaves himself through the gap and, half-scuttling down the wall, drops to the floor. He tugs on a cable, and the maglev toolbox follows him out to crash on the floor then rise again on its maglev field. He tows it across to the further wall and there hunches down for a moment.

  All this activity has made him rather hungry, and here lies an ample supply of meat. He flips his harness mask aside, reaches out with one long and slightly translucent claw to snag up one of the dead third-children. It is already showing signs of viral mutation, but its carapace is still soft, which makes things easier. He feeds its small claws into his mandibles first, crunching them down like a Human eating a stick of celery, works his way around all the legs and small underslung manipulatory limbs, then champs into the main body like a burger. It takes three of the dead to satisfy his appetite and he wonders where all this meat is going, since his carapace has grown so attenuated. Then abruptly his stomach roils and he squats to emit a great flood of watery excrement, which partially answers his question. He flips his mask back into place.

  Accessing the frequency of the armoured suits, he soon discovers that five of them have now been destroyed, but that the battle area continues to spread throughout the ship. Soon, at least two or three of those suits will reach particular areas he has selected. Vrell now focuses his attention on the wall before him, reaches out and flips up the lid of the toolbox, and takes out a stud extractor. He knows that directly behind the big rough-metal wall section before him lies a ten-feet-thick layer of foamed porcelain. This is part of the shock-absorbing internal structure of the ship, and that foam-filled cavity extends deep down inside, to where the Captain’s Sanctum lies.

  2

  As the technology for transporting people and objects through space evolved, it went through many transformations, and the carrier shell is now a relic of a previous military form. When U-space drives were first developed, they were too big for the kind of ships made to manoeuvre in atmosphere or in crowded solar environments. Two methods were adopted to solve this: the mother ship and the carrier shell. The mother ship, a large vessel containing the drive itself, would transport a whole host of smaller ships. The problem with this of course, in a battle, was that if the mother ship was hit, then all the smaller ships would immediately be stranded. Carrier shells were therefore developed to counter this. They comprised a U-space drive, usually toroidal, into which one of the smaller ships could insert itself. With these devices, smaller ships could be deployed at many locations, and the carrier shells, being relatively small, were easily concealed. And should shells and ships be destroyed during a battle, it was statistically likely that most of the remaining ships could get away, even if not in the same carrier shells they arrived in.

  –From THE WEAPONS DIRECTORY

  ‘There’s a drone watching us,’ says Drooble.

  Orbus glances up and locates something that looks like a polished chrome catfish floating some twenty feet above their heads, just below the glass ceiling above which there seems to exist some sort of garden, for the area is packed with plant life.

  ‘Not a problem,’ he says, lowering his gaze to the concourse lying directly ahead. He finds it odd to see so many people gathered in one place, none of whom he recognizes. For centuries, whenever he attended any gathering on Spatterjay, which was rarely, there was always someone trying to warily avoid him or else issuing some politely trite greeting–or, in the case of another Old Captain, swearing at him. Though here one or two of the surrounding crowd are surreptitiously studying him and Drooble, probably because they recognize the mottled blue scarring on their skins–a sure sign of what they are and where they come from–most of those present just ignore him.

  ‘Come on.’ Orbus leads the way into the crowds, peering about at his surroundings. At ground level, on either side of the concourse, lie entrances to shops, bars, restaurants, and other establishments whose purpose he cannot even guess. Here and there, transparent tubular drop-shafts waft people to upper levels or bring them floating down. What look like private homes, or maybe hotels, rise above the shops and below the ceiling, and tiered all the way along, up there, are chainglass bubble windows and balconies.

  The concourse itself is divided in two by long pools studded with fountains whose spray is twisted into curious shapes by some artistic use of field technology. Little bridges span these pools where, below rainbow weeds, dart shoals of small blue flatfish, while below these can be seen brightly-coloured crustaceans bumbling along the bottom.

  ‘Well, excuse me!’

  Orbus immediately halts, having just inadvertently walked into another man and caused him to drop a bag that spills various pieces of computer hardware and optic cables across the floor. Orbus has tried to be careful, but these people just keep getting in his way. It is very irritating indeed. He steps over the strewn hardware and starts to move on.

  ‘Oh, never fucking mind, will you,’ grumbles the individual, stooping to pick up the scattered mess and scoop it back into his bag.

  The Captain halts again, a shiver of indignation running down his spine, his hands clenching and unclenching and a sudden rage coiling in his belly. No one ever steps in his path back home–because no one there is that stupid. But, of course, they do not know him here. This little man with his twinned augs, cropped red hair and loud shirt does not know that Orbus is capable of pinching off his head just using a thumb and forefinger. He glances aside and notes Drooble watching him curiously, then he glances up and notes that the drone has descended some ten feet, and meanwhile opened a wide black port in its belly. With utterly rigid self-control, Orbus turns back and squats down.

  ‘My apologies, that is rude of me,’ he says, reaching out to help the man scoop his bits and pieces back into the bag.

  The fellow slaps his hand away irritably. ‘Oh go away.’ Then he pauses to stare at the hand he is dismissing, then after a moment raises his gaze to take in Orbus fully. Perhaps it was he, whilst using his augs, who had been the one unaware of his surroundings
. Perhaps the fault is his and it was he who had blundered into Orbus. But now he is focused, intently, on the huge figure now squatting before him.

  ‘That’s…that there…’ He points a finger at the mass of ring-shaped blue scars mottling the back of Orbus’s hand.

  ‘It’s caused by the plug-cutting bite of the Spatterjay leech,’ explains Drooble, standing behind Orbus with a vulture-like patience.

  The Old Captain realizes in that instant that Iannus Drooble is just waiting for him to fail; for him to return once again to the comfort of mindless violence; to become again what he was.

  ‘Once again, my apologies.’ Orbus stands and turns, moving away, glimpsing the brief flash of disappointment in Drooble’s expression.

  ‘He just doesn’t know how close he came to a Davy box,’ Drooble remarks.

  ‘He is nowhere near one at all,’ says Orbus, but with very much more apparent certainty than he feels.

  At the end of the concourse lie the drop-shafts Orbus had been directed to. He sees a woman watching him from beside them and guesses, as she now approaches, that she is Charles Cymbeline’s representative. He studies her and observes that like most females here, she is devoid of the familiar blue scarring and increased muscle bulk characteristic of Hooper women. Her hair is an unnatural green-black, whether through dye or some genetic tweak, he cannot guess. She is pretty and uniformly professional-looking in white businesswear skirt, white jacket, red blouse and spring heels, wears a discreet white aug behind one of her mildly elf-sculpt ears, silver earrings in the shape of fishes, and an inset sensory ruby adorns her forehead. Compared with some of the others he has already seen about here, she is positively prosaic.