Vrell turned towards the door; he required some new miracle to get him through that. Deciding to try something more prosaic, he drew his rail-gun from his harness, aimed at the door’s edge, and fired. A stream of missiles slammed through the water, leaving white lines, and smashed into the side of the door, then zinged away. Some of the ricochets chipped Vrell’s carapace, but he continued firing until the magazine was empty. He then took his plasma torch to the weakened metal, but only managed to cut a small hole before the torch gave out. Vrell could just about poke his claw through it, but it was still a victory, because now air was bubbling in and the water draining out. He definitely would not suffocate—just starve.
His new limbs were now growing at phenomenal speed, their growth spurt sucking Vrell’s insides empty. His hunger became savage and he scoured his prison for something to eat. There was nothing evident, no living leeches, and no remains of those he had broiled with his water gun. There should have been some in here. It seemed, therefore, that the mission timer had been correct. He knew that leeches could go somnolent for long periods and that it took years for them to die of starvation. He picked the timer back up, studied it for a long moment, then returned it to his harness. What now? What should he do now?
Vrell did have a few options left to try. He detached the rail-gun from its magazine suspended on his harness, then also detached the welding unit. Both of these implements contained laminar batteries—the plasma torch having ceased to function only because he had depleted its gas supply. He disassembled these two devices, removed their batteries, and jammed them into the hole he had made, then scuttled back towards the other blast door. The water level had sunk to the bottom of the hole now. Vrell submerged and pointed his water gun towards the two batteries. Laminar batteries did not respond well to excessive heating. Lowering his eye-palps, Vrell fired.
It took just a minute, in which the air space above him filled with clouds of steam. As the two batteries detonated, the shock wave slammed through the Prador with such force that he reflexively adopted a defensive pose: folding up all his limbs and sinking. When he finally unfolded, the water was hot and acidic, and the air above it unbreathable. Vrell scrambled over to the door to see what damage he had done. The door itself seemed to have shifted back a little way, and after a moment Vrell detected a current—the rest of the water was draining away. He jammed his claw into the buckled corner and, with his feet scrabbling at the floor, shoved as hard as he could. Was he imagining that the door flexed? That was possible, since the door, though armoured, had been constructed in layers of composite, insulation and foamed porcelain so as to absorb rather than deflect shock. Then Vrell remembered the dent he had earlier put in the wall. That too was armoured.
Vrell moved back and watched carefully. The water would constrict his movements, so he must wait. Also, his new limbs had by now attained full growth and were beginning to darken as they hardened. He would need them.
Hours passed as the water level kept on dropping. When it had sunk below his now shrunken and concave belly plates, Vrell once again approached the door. He struck it hard with his old claw, eyed the dent made, hit it testingly with his new claw to find out if that one was strong enough. Seeing it was, he then began to rain blow after blow on the door edge, denting the metal back into the underlayer of foamed porcelain. A gap grew at the edge, wider and wider. All the water rushed out.
You won’t stop me, Father.
Vrell thought of how he had been used, and how he would have been dispensed with. He knew that with the extent of his development he had been close to being considered a dangerous competing adult by his father, and consequently having his limbs stripped off and his shell broken. In presentient times, young Prador, enslaved by their father’s pheromones, would bring food to him. But once one of those youngsters reached adulthood, it would shake off that binding control and kill its father, who by then would be weak and lacking in limbs. Prador technology had changed all that. Fathers stayed strong, enhanced their pheromones, and used thrall technology to enslave other life forms. They killed their young before they reached adulthood, or else sometimes neutered them to keep them loyal, also surgically altered them and linked them into war machines. Meanwhile the fathers just kept on living. Though this was just the Prador way, Vrell was still angry, but he was deliberate in his anger, and it gave him strength.
The door retreated gradually under his blows, the lower corner coming up out of its channel in the floor, and the edge tearing out of the wall. Every time his energy flagged, he thought again about what his father would have done to him, and his strength returned. In his feverish activity, he noticed only subliminally how his shell was much darker now, almost obsidian black. After a wide gap was opened down the side of the door, he flipped sideways and pushed himself into it, to try to lever it open further, and was surprised how far he got before he became jammed. His whole body was now attenuated: the curve of his belly plates replicating the curve of his upper shell with not much bulk between. He levered himself back and forth, getting further through each time. Then something gave, either the door or his shell, he did not know, and he was finally through.
In the dank corridor beyond, Vrell revolved his eye-palps and inspected himself. His body, which had previously borne the shape of a flattened pear, was now concave underneath. His visual turret, at what would have been the apex of the pear, felt loose now, and with an effort he found he could move it. His main shell was also wider, more like the disc-shaped carapace of a prill, his limbs also longer and sharper. Vrell had not allowed himself to think about it closely before, but now what was happening to him seemed quite obvious. The earlier leech bites he had suffered on the island had done nothing, for an inhibitor was included in the broad-spectrum inoculations he had given himself before first leaving this ship. But obviously time and his transformation to adulthood had weakened the effect of those drugs, so they had not been enough to prevent him being infected by the Spatterjay virus from those leeches burrowing under his carapace. Now the virus was changing him. Vrell accepted the fact and shoved it to the back of his mind. Right then he had more important concerns. He went in search of something to eat.
Anything.
Taylor Bloc scanned around the inside of the shuttle, tested the air with an anosmic detector, and smelt that recognizable odour as of an open ancient tomb. In the passenger compartment, besides himself, there were twelve reifications—four of which wore the grey enviro-suits and protective breastplates of his Kladites. Aesop and Bones were not present, having gone on ahead to make arrangements for Bloc’s arrival. Of the Hoopers, one was an Old Captain by the name of Ron, whom one of Bloc’s agents here had hired, two were perhaps crewmen, but the fourth—a Hooper in outworld dress who seemed to spend a lot of time talking to a box on his shoulder—looked very familiar. Bloc tried to remember where he had seen that face before, but it kept on escaping him. Obviously he was not anyone of importance. Bloc was about to dismiss such speculation when the Kladite sitting alongside him turned to him.
‘Forgive my intrusion, Taylor Bloc, but I’ve been watching him too. It is destiny,’ said the reif.
Bloc paused for a long moment before replying, just to make sure this Kladite understood his insolence in speaking without first being addressed. ‘Yes, destiny,’ he said, though having no idea what the reif meant.