"Gabbleducks, heroynes and hooders?" suggested Thorn.
Stanton shook his head. "Not so many heroynes or gabbleducks in these mountains. Siluroynes and hooders cause the most problems, and in the latter case any weapon heavy enough to deal with the problem might attract the notice of the Theocracy."
"Hard to kill?" Thorn's curiosity was piqued.
"Never seen one myself, but I'm told that nothing less than an APW or missile launcher will do the job. Their chitin is something like a carbon composite, and they're mainly made up of that substance and fibrous muscle as dense as antique wood. Small arms just make a lot of holes that do nothing to slow them down, and the heat from lasers quickly disperses through their chitin. Also, for something so large, they move very fast."
"How large and how fast?" Thorn asked.
"I'm told that a hooder once grabbed a proctor, plus his aerofan, from a hundred metres up in the air. As to how fast they move — faster than a man can run, and they hunt grazers that move at a similar rate to the grazers on Earth."
"Like gazelle?"
Stanton glanced at him. "If that's a grazer on Earth, then yes."
"This is all very interesting," said Jarvellis, "but what do we do now?"
Standing up, Stanton replied, "I'm for stretching my legs outside. Anyone coming?" He looked from Thorn to Jarvellis. "Lyric can listen for any signals coming in from them."
As he headed away through the entrance tunnel, Jarvellis turned to Thorn. "You know, every time I land here it confirms for me that the Theocracy has the right idea."
"Living safe in their cylinder worlds?"
"Safe anywhere you're not likely to get eaten," she replied.
Aphran and Danny entered the bridge pod first, soon followed by five other Separatists who looked both tired and frightened. Skellor observed them as they halted just inside the doors and showed no inclination to come further in, and through their augs he sensed the gritty taste of their fear and their confusion at what they were seeing.
Nodding to the command-crew chairs he said, "Take your places."
With their eyes widening in horror, they stared at the chairs with the growths poised underneath them like grasping claws. Through most of them, he sensed continued fear and confusion, but from Aphran he felt sudden panic at her partial understanding of what he wanted. He reinforced the order with something like a mental slap that jerked them all into motion. Inevitably it was Danny who responded first, and was soon in the seat nearest to Skellor.
"You don't need to do this," said Aphran tightly, fighting all the way but unable to stop herself from sitting down.
Skellor did not bother to reply. Whether or not he actually needed to do what he was doing was irrelevant — he was doing what he wanted to do, and because he could. With the seven now seated, he started the Jain structure growing again, observing it climbing around the backs of each chair, fingering over the arms, and fumbling at the clothing of the seven Separatists. At the first penetration of his skin, the man on the end groaned in pain, then his groan was cut off as the filaments penetrated his spine and rapidly made connections as they sped up to his brain. Skellor then shunted over programs to run the man and programs for him to run. Where the man's own experience or memory or skill conflicted with what was now required of him, it was erased — chalk wiped from black slate. Drooling in his chair, the Separatist took control of the almost irrelevant systems of life-support.
Aphran, Skellor noted, was making weak whimpering sounds as an extension of the structure slid over her shoulder and rose up by the side of her face and hung poised there like a cobra. She showed the whites of her eyes as she tried to peer round at it, but was unable to turn her head. She yelled once when it struck, and thereafter lost herself as she unwillingly gained control of the weapons systems of the Occam Razor. But she did not control them as a human being — she controlled them as a submind of Skellor, an extension, a useful tool that possessed as little self-determination as a trigger. Aphran did not drool; she just slumped in her seat and her face lost any vividness of expression it had once possessed.
The others followed, one after the other, and as he delegated control of systems, Skellor freed up much processing power within himself in which to more fully view and understand his conquest. The Occam Razor was a formidable ship, but it was not yet entirely his. Such had been the destructiveness of the burn Tomalon had initiated, there were huge sections of the vessel that Skellor could not yet even see, let alone control. He realized now that he needed a breathing space in which to grow the Jain structure throughout the whole ship, and he understood that here was not the best place to initiate that chore. Using another member of his crew as a sophisticated search-engine — an informational bloodhound — soon revealed to him a simple recording of a conversation that gave him all the information he required. He smiled nastily to himself: so Dragon was going there, outside the Polity, to a world that was utterly primitive by comparison — a place where it would be easy to still the wagging of tongues. With a half-nod to that member of his crew who controlled the U-space engines, he had the Occam taken under, and away. Then, when — through the Jain substructure — he experienced underspace utterly unshielded, he screamed. And one second after, his command crew mimicked him exactly.
12
As she read she could see it would soon be time for the boy to go to bed, for his expression was becoming increasingly glazed. Checking ahead she saw that there wasn't all that much more to read and realized that the boy would soon be taking a greater interest
"On the third day he came into the realm of the gabbleduck, and found that many years had passed since the faithless had come to test themselves, and it had also been many years since the creature had fed, and to Brother Serendipity it seemed but a mound of skin and bone." The woman bit her lip, then pulled her chair round beside her son's, so he could see the picture in the book. The gabbleduck appeared as a pyramidal monstrosity looking down on the little man. Behind the man the heroyne towered hugely, and coiled on the ground behind it rested the siluroyne, picking at its hatchet teeth with one claw. All three creatures had in their expressions something like suppressed amusement. The boy indeed started to pay more attention now.
" 'Please feed me for I have not eaten in many a year and am fading away, spake the gabbleduck. 'Why should I feed you when, strengthened by my food, you might riddle me to my doom? asked the good Brother. 'You have my promise that it will be otherwise, the gabbleduck replied. 'Swear in the name of God and in the name of his prophet Zelda Smythe, the Brother demanded. And so swore the gabbleduck, and in recompense ate the last third of the meat cake gifted by the old woman. That night none dared approach Brother Serendipity and his three protectors as they came at last in sight of the boundary stone of Agatha Compound."
As the cold-coffin opened, Cormac saw a pterodactyl head poised over him, as if contemplating the opening of a can of food. For a second he felt utterly vulnerable, but his previous assessment of their current situation inside the landing craft — inside Dragon — had not changed. If Dragon wanted to kill them, then there was nothing they could do about it. Ignoring the head, he pushed himself up from the coffin and to one side. Turning in midair, he also ignored the always painful return of feeling as he reached over to the adjacent locker and removed his clothing. Only when he was dressed, and with Shuriken strapped to his arm and his thin-gun in his pocket, did he turn to observe Dragon.
"You interfered with the timings on the coffins," he said.