20

Erlin gazed back at the Prador spaceship, hovering just out from the island which the Sable Keech was now rounding. It was itself a metal island, clouds forming around it as sea water boiled off hot cowlings then recondensed in the air.

What’s it waiting for? she wondered, and as if in response to her silent query its fusion engines sputtered and sent the leviathan slowly drifting away. She pursed her lips. At least now, with every second that passed, the chances were reduced of them being caught in the middle of some bombardment from orbit.

‘Look,’ said Sable Keech himself, now standing beside her.

‘I see it,’ she replied.

Lowering his monocular, he caught her shoulder. ‘No there.’ He pointed towards the island shallows where a Hooper ship was making its way out to sea. Its progress was necessarily slow because its rear mast was missing and it was sailing under some temporary rig manipulated by its living sail. Erlin took the monocular Keech passed to her and studied the vessel. At first she did not recognize it, because of its current rig, then realization hit home.

‘The Treader,’ she breathed, then directed her attention to the deck. There seemed a lot of Hoopers aboard, and she wondered what Ambel had got himself into now.

‘Why’s it here?’ Keech asked.

Abruptly Erlin felt guilty, understanding that the Old Captain may have come in pursuit of herself. There seemed no other explanation for him to be way out here, and she wondered if she deserved such concern.

‘Perhaps we should tell…’ she began, but there was no need. The Sable Keech was slowing and turning. ‘Right,’ she said. ‘Right.’ She turned and pushed back through the door leading into the Tank Rooms. She headed over to a nearby restraint table and rested her bottom against it. Looking mildly puzzled, Keech followed her in. She did not want to deal with what she was feeling at that moment, and did not want him asking her questions. Instead she eyed the new occupants of the restraint tables: six Hoopers—dosed up with Intertox but still fighting their bonds—and three others.

‘Maybe we should just drop him over the side,’ she suggested, eyeing the closest to her of the latter. That was not an acceptable Polity approach, but certainly how Captain Ron would like to deal with the problem.

Strapped naked to his table, Bloc showed no sign of movement. She studied his exposed injuries with belated interest, wondering what the hell had originally killed him. Aesop and Bones also lay immobile on tables nearby.

‘Were I not an Earth Monitor, I would tend to agree,’ said Keech. ‘But I want to take him back with me. Would that be possible?’

‘Aesop and Bones, too?’ she asked.

‘Certainly,’ he replied. ‘Tell me, why did Bloc just collapse like that?’

Erlin glanced at the status lights on Bloc’s cleansing unit, which was positioned on a tray folded out from the restraint table. All showed red, and one of the pipes connecting into the reif’s body was black with fouled balm. She then picked up a palm console, connected via an optic cable into the cleanser, and studied its readout.

‘He seized up—not enough memory space for all the information he was processing.’ She gestured at Aesop and Bones. ‘Rather than use one unit to control one thrall, as do the Prador, his unit is partitioned. The readings I’ve been getting show three main partitions, and I’ve been able to assign two of these to Aesop and Bones. The third one is wide-band, its channel operating twenty-seven thralls in parallel. I thought at first this was to control twenty-seven reifs, but that could not possibly work. Again, checking dates, I found that eleven of the thralls went offline while Bloc was on Mortuary Island, before I arrived. Then a further seven of them went offline at just about the time the hooder lost its head.’

Keech grimaced. ‘The figure twenty-seven tells me all I need to know. The number of the beast, you might say—that’s how many body segments a hooder possesses.’

‘He obviously controlled it, though I’d question the extent of that control with him needing to use grazer pheromone to mark out its victims. Anyway, as those eighteen thralls were destroyed, they scrambled formatting in his memory space. Then the Prador somehow linked through the remaining hooder thralls, thereby controlling him. It also used him as a conduit for a while in order to run some sort of mathematical program in the minds of those other two. But that alone wasn’t what pushed him to the limit. His viral infection was causing more and more diagnostic programs to run in his reification hardware, and as a result more error messages kept coming up, taking up more memory space. Then I think the sight of you pushed him over the edge.’

‘Is that mathematical program actually running now?’

‘It did shut down, but out of interest I recorded some of it. Now I’m running it cyclically with some strong memory he has retained, to keep him locked in a virtual loop.’

‘How’s his viral condition now?’

‘Pretty far gone—at about the stage you were at when you resorted to using your nanochanger.’ She gestured to the others. ‘Aesop over there is nowhere near as bad. In fact there are many in a worse state aboard this ship, and,’ she gestured, ‘already in these tanks.’

‘Bones?’ Keech asked.

‘He’s beyond infection. Take a look.’

Keech moved over to Bones and pulled back the reif’s hood. A bare skull grinned up at him, its lensed eyes shuttered and the tip of a metallic tongue protruding between the teeth. He opened the reif’s jacket for further confirmation, and eyed the bare ribcage exposed.

‘He was called Bones when he was still alive,’ Keech noted.

‘Perhaps it amused Bloc to have him resemble his name. I wouldn’t be surprised. So, what about Bloc? What do you want me to do with him?’

‘Can you shut down his control unit? I’d rather he retained no control over these two.’

‘Doubtful. I’ve had a look and it’s closely interfaced with his memory crystal, so one mistake might wipe him out’—she shrugged—‘which would be no bother to me, but is obviously not what you want. How did you know about it anyway? Forlam said you already knew about the thralls.’

‘Bloc was a student of esoteric or alien technologies even before he died. I found that out when I was researching him, just as I found out that some time back he had purchased spider thralls through an agent on Coram. That he had already used the technology seemed the only proper explanation to account for Aesop and Bones. Altering a Prador thrall to control memcrystal would have been no problem to him.’ Keech walked back and stood looking down at Bloc again. ‘Would our best option be him shutting down his own hardware?’

Erlin stared at Keech for a long moment, running her fingers across the scar tissue on her neck. She frowned, then realization dawned.