‘My recent problems must have scrambled my brain,’ she said. ‘It happened to you: the changer rebuilds the organic brain and then the program causes a complete download to it from the memcrystal before shutting the whole memplant down. Of course, this is presupposing the organic brain does get rebuilt fully.’
Keech shrugged. ‘It is a risk, agreed.’
Erlin nodded, then unplugged the optic cable from Bloc’s cleanser, wrapped it round her palm console, then put the console aside. From a table nearby on which she had piled Bloc’s clothing prior to examining him, she retrieved his nanochanger. On pressing an inset button on top of Bloc’s cleanser, a lid nipped up exposing a recess for the lozenge-shaped changer.
‘Well, here goes.’ Erlin pressed the changer into place, while Keech moved over to stand beside her. The lozenge clamped down and from all around its edges extruded small golden tubes which mated into sockets in the cleanser. The status lights then turned blue. ‘Okay, let’s get him into a tank and all connected up. He’ll have to forgo his intended prior visit to the Little Flint.’ She glanced around at the other tanks in use. ‘He won’t be alone, anyway.’
Half an hour later as Bloc was floating in his tank, autodoc clinging to him and optics plugged in through his suppurating flesh, the door banged open. Glancing past Keech while she wiped her hands, Erlin observed a crowd of Hoopers dragging in other Hoopers bound up squirming in sail cloth.
‘Looks like my workload just increased,’ she muttered.
The body of her rapist assuaged her hunger for a little while, but her insides processed his meat like a combined waste compactor and acid bath. Her guts bubbling and squirming, she crashed through the forest sending lung birds honking from their perches in the branches. Then, encountering a stand of putrephallus over which more of those horrible baggy birds squabbled, she turned and made her way down to the shore and into the sea. She could feel the organ he had penetrated expanding in slow pulses within her. Her ichor was thundering in her veins. Sometimes it became difficult to think.
Bloated and heavy she no longer floated, and had to push herself off the bottom again and again. Her hunger returned with confusing speed so, moving deeper, she began feeding upon negative-buoyant masses of young rhinoworm corpses. Then a hint of a taste permeated the water, and with it the slow return of vague memory. Yet it was a difficult memory to hold onto, since eating and that growth inside her now seemed so much more important. Bouncing aimlessly along the seabed she tried to regain her earlier sense of purpose, and to recall how it had felt to swim. It was only happenstance that took her to where that taste in the water grew stronger. And her intellect made another bid for freedom.
Something huge churned the water directly above her, as a shape, vaster than any heirodont, turned. Gazing up at the enormous hull, she tried to control her fear, her overpowering urge to return to feed in the island shallows and… something else. Then recognizing the smaller hull being dragged around in the wake of the larger one, she threw all her effort into launching herself from the bottom, using her skirt of blow-water jets to force herself higher. She was thirty metres down from it when the smaller hull began to draw away. With one more jet, she snaked out her longest tentacle and snagged the ship’s rudder. Then, her grip failing, she pulled quickly closer and whipped out another tentacle. Now the sea was roaring past her and she could not understand how the ship could be pulling away with such force. Another tentacle, then another two. Drawing herself in, utterly exhausted, she clamped her skirt around the hull and sucked down to stick there. In a moment she would reach up to see what she could find. In a moment though, after just a little rest…
Sniper observed that Vrell’s ship was taking the slowest route into orbit, climbing steadily around the planet rather than going straight up. The Warden’s sat-eyes were everywhere above the ascending ship, and above them Vrost maintained position. The ship came lumbering up out of the well, its gravmotors continually going on and off, sometimes dropping it back many kilometres, and the fusion drive partially igniting then extinguishing.
‘Does he think Vrost is going to believe that wounded bird act for even a moment?’ asked Thirteen. The little drone had purposely fused itself into place on Sniper’s armour, and now resembled some baroque marine encrustation.
‘There’s a double bluff here somewhere,’ Sniper replied. It was all an interesting game with ostensibly only one outcome. Once clear of the planet, Vrell’s spaceship would be obliterated. Sniper, staying low over the sea just behind the escort of drones and armoured Prador surrounding the ship, was trying to fathom what was really going on.
‘Then perhaps he thinks he can manage a U-space jump before Vrost gets a chance to smear him across the sky?’ Thirteen suggested.
‘Vrell’s options are limited. More likely he hopes to ram Vrost’s ship—to go down fighting. That’s what an adolescent Prador would do,’ said Sniper.
‘But Vrell is an adult.’
‘Take a look at this,’ said Sniper, transmitting some image files across to Thirteen. The little drone fell silent, its coms shutting down as it applied its system space to study the images. Could Vrell properly be described as an adult, or even a Prador at all? Thirteen could decide that for itself after viewing what Sniper had obtained from the camera in the drone cache of Vrell’s ship. Sniper felt the images indicated otherwise, just as they had for these armoured creatures ahead, for one of them had been driven from its armour in that cache. Sniper tried some more surreptitious scans, but again could not penetrate their defences. What was going to happen here seemed almost foregone, and it seemed his prime task now was to gather intelligence by whatever means.
‘Sniper, what are you doing?’ the Warden abruptly asked.
In reply Sniper sent the images to the AI as well.
After a pause the Warden replied, ‘I see, you wish further confirmation. My own attempt to probe that Prador armour resulted in the destruction of both it and its occupant. What are you hoping to achieve here?’
Sniper now sent a snippet from a lecture he had recorded several centuries ago. ‘During any conflict, combatants tend to drop their guard in matters not directly related to that same conflict.’
‘Yes, Sniper, I have fifty thousand hours of recorded intelligence briefings available to me. Why do you think I now have every one of my sat-eyes deployed in the area?’
‘It’s not just that,’ the old drone finally replied. ‘Something else is going on here. And when I’ve figured out what that fucking Vrell is up to, I might be able to find some further opening.’
‘Very well. Keep me informed.’ The Warden withdrew.
Sniper continued cruising behind the pack, trying every subtle scan he could manage. He began to wonder if, for the benefit of ECS Intelligence, he should bring one of those armoured Prador down once the shooting started, and squirrel it away for later examination. Analysing recorded events, however, he realized that was not viable. As well as the one indirectly caused by the Warden, similar minor fusion explosions had occurred both under the sea and in the air during the earlier attack upon Vrell’s ship—doubtless the result of armoured individuals getting damaged beyond hope of recovery, and therefore self-destructing. Vrost would not be leaving any of his troops behind intact, not even as anything more than radioactive gas.
It was while he was running a narrow-beam microwave scan that Sniper incidentally noted a disturbance in the water below him. He peered down to see something speeding along underwater. At first he suspected a heirodont, but it was travelling too fast. Just as he redirected his microwave scan downwards, the object broke the surface, revealing itself as one of the armoured King’s Guard. It had probably just self-repaired on the ocean bed and was now hastening to rejoin its comrades. Suddenly he realized that his scan was not being blocked, so redirected all his scanning gear downwards just as the Prador emerged from the ocean. Sniper found he was getting everything. The images from the camera in the drone cache had provided much information, but now scanning across the spectrum gave him so very much more. Momentarily shutting off his AG, he dropped down beside the armoured entity and probed deep, mapping the architecture of the armour and the entire external and internal anatomy contained within it. His recording of its brain structure would surely be invaluable to forensic Polity AIs. He then recognized scan returns similar to those obtained from Spatterjay wildlife. This Prador was infected by the virus, which had wrought its evident mutations.