Tarsic agreed. It was all about the balance of power here. With the Batians being armed, Taylor Bloc could not augment his own forces without the mercenaries finding out and perhaps doing something drastic. But Bloc had prepared. Apparently the Kladites here, and the weapons Shive had put under guard, were merely a decoy. Down there, in a crate to which Tarsic now held the computerized key, were fifty armed reifs awaiting their moment.
Soon they came in sight of the sailing ship and the glinting movement of Golem working in the moonlight. There was no electric lighting—the Golem needed none. It would be nice, Tarsic thought, if Bloc could get them on his side. They were neutral however; here under contract from Cybercorp to perform their singular task. Tarsic led the way to the left, away from the ship, through the ankle-deep sawdust. Soon the crates loomed out of the dark, like an infant city with its power cut. He followed a map lit on the small screen of the key and eventually came to the crate indicated. He eyed the looming bubble-metal wall before him and tracked round, locating the seal clips.
‘Let’s get it open,’ he said.
Beric and Sline moved forwards, taking crowbars from under their jackets. Beric began levering off the clips down one edge, while Sline used them on the other edge as a ladder to the crate’s top. The pieces of sprung metal cracked and spanged out into the night. These had been pressed into place on the end of the crate to keep up the pressure on its seals while it was in transit in a lower-cost unpressurized cargo hold. Every time a clip went, Tarsic expected someone to come running. No one came.
‘All done?’ he asked, when his two companions stepped away from the crate.
‘They’re moving about in there,’ said Beric.
‘I thought they’d be in shutdown,’ added Sline.
‘They were shut down, so Aesop told me, but they recently woke. That’s why we are here now.’ Tarsic pointed the key at the crate and sent over the unlocking code.
‘Hang on a minute,’ said Sline. ‘Why lock them in a crate with no way of getting themselves out?’
With a hiss of equalizing pressures, the end of the crate jerked open and began to come down like a ramp. It was utterly dark inside. Tarsic had expected light. He considered Sline’s question and realized he possessed no easy answers. But, being so happy over the promise of new cleansing units for the three of them and a confirmed reservation on the ship’s first voyage, he had not thought to question.
The crate end settled on the ground with a dull whump, stirring up a small storm of sawdust. The darkness within it seemed packed with thick loops of something that shifted with a sound as of rocks grinding together. He realized he was seeing something segmented, maybe two metres thick, crammed into this box in coils. One loop of it began to unravel out of shadow, then something horrible exploded out then up into the night like a demonic jack-in-a-box. Tarsic gazed up into an open cowl of armour plates containing two vertical rows of hot red eyes. Glassy limbs and other sharp appendages ground and clattered together before those eyes like scythes being sharpened. Tarsic stumbled backwards, not comprehending what he was seeing. Sline made a strange keening sound as the terrible hood drenched him in its shadow, then came down like a cupped hand, slamming him to the earth and trapping him underneath. A ripping tearing sucking and disgorging ensued.
‘That hooder must be very hungry,’ said Beric, his tone utterly flat. ‘They normally feed a lot slower than that.’
‘Hooder?’ said Tarsic, still backing up.
Beric turned to him wearily. ‘There’s no point running—and we’re lucky that we feel no pain.’
The creature reared again, dripping reif balm and scattering the now clean bones and various metallic additions that had enabled Sline to survive long after his own death. Beric bowed his head as it slid above him, the rest of the long armoured body uncoiling from its prison, then came down on him like an immense fly swat. Tarsic turned and ran, trying not to hear the horrible gobbling sounds, but he too was quickly smashed down and trapped in hot red shadow, surrounded by a thousand ever-shifting knives. As they closed on him and began cutting, error messages started to burn his night vision. He shut the messages off. Eventually, as the hooder severed his power cables, he went into shutdown knowing now that all hope of the resurrection of his human body was gone. He had just watched it disappear piece by piece into a thousand hungry little mouths.
5
Glister:
glisters bear a striking resemblance to lobsters, though with more fins and other adaptations to oceanic life, even though, like many of Spatterjay’s sea creatures, they do venture ashore. They travel in pods of between three and twenty: one dominant female and the rest of them males. Adolescent males remain solitary, but on becoming adult and therefore sexually active, they are recruited by a female to her pod. The theory has yet to be proven that this mating behaviour developed due to there being some viral infection in male glisters—the female ejecting any infected male seed, and only allowing virus-free matings to fertilize her eggs. Like lobsters, glister females attach their eggs to their under-carapace until they hatch. One hundred and forty varieties of glister have been catalogued, some no larger than a prawn and others up to three metres long. They are obviously successful as a species—fossilized glister shell is a sought-after gem on the planet — but individually their lives are usually short and brutal. Hoopers relish their meat and, because a glister contains psychoactive chemicals in its mouth and brainpan, they usually roast the animal alive, as the only other way to effectively kill it is to smash in its skull, which releases these same chemicals into its flesh. Sometimes Hoopers do deliberately kill glisters by breaking open the head, usually as a precursor to some orgiastic celebration. However, the greatest predator of glisters is by far the molly carp —
Tasting the air, Vrell sought food. All that remained of his own kin, within the spaceship, was empty carapaces and dried gristle, but he still ate those for the vital minerals and calcium they provided. He found things tough and fibrous as wood creeping slowly in hidden crevices, and chomped them, too, with the relish of starvation. Only later did he realize they were the burnt and broken remains of his father’s human blanks, now transformed by the Spatterjay virus. There was however one female blank, complete but for the loss of a hand, shut down by her thrall, yet not beyond being returned to human shape. She had obviously been feeding like a leech, mindlessly, until hunger felled her, but she still lived. The Prador snipped her into pieces with his claws and gobbled down the still-quivering flesh. Only then, with the mind-numbing hunger inside him partially quelled, did he begin to think straight. Immediately he regretted the stupidity of his voracious hunger, for that last blank, once he managed to suborn Father’s control units, would have made a useful tool. And with a little more self-control he could have found meat elsewhere, since the ship carried supplies of it. Now he headed straight for them.
The chilling units in the ship’s larder must have recently failed, for the stored meat was spoiling and crawling with ship’s lice. He ate anyway, spoilt meat being a Prador’s preferred diet. Champing through a slab of meat carved from a food animal of his home planet—a decapod engineered with lungs and internal strengthening that enabled it to grow huge on a diet of kelp—Vrell observed other delicacies hanging along one rack. Only three of these human bodies had spoilt and, eyeing the tatters of clothing still clinging to them, Vrell realized they must have been snatched from some human settlement rather than specially bred back in the Kingdom. The other five humans, having been bred as blanks before being harvested for food because of some defect, contained the Spatterjay virus and had therefore retained some life. Because of their particular damage, changes were in fact being wrought upon them by the virus.