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.
Four of the bodies were headless, and the fifth without limbs as well. Vrell recalled having snipped away these heads and limbs for Ebulan’s delectation during their voyage here. The first four were now, since the failure of the chillers, growing leech mouths from the severed flesh of their necks. The fifth one was also growing them from where its limbs had been. All of them were constantly moving; writhing slowly on the meat hooks jammed through their ribcages. Vrell knew that, without those hooks, these five would be squirming about on the floor, probably feeding on the other comestibles available here.
He considered a possible option. The coring process entailed the removal of the animal’s higher cerebrum and much of its autonomous nervous system. To then turn the animal into a useful tool required the connection of a Prador thrall unit in place of what had been removed. The Prador had found that such drastic measures were only required in Kingdom animals to prevent any wetware/hardware conflicts when making them do something that went against their instinct. The disadvantage to this was the loss of autonomous function. Only certain uncored animals—made to do simple tasks—could be controlled by spider thralls which burrowed in where required and connected to the nervous system. Adapting humans to either process had been difficult, as it was discovered that both methods of enslavement usually killed the host. That was until Jay Hoop cornered the market in humans infected by the Spatterjay virus, who proved tough and difficult to kill. Ebulan, to his cost, discovered too late that spider thralls could be rejected by the bodies of older Hoopers. For them only a full coring was safe.
Finishing his megafauna steak, Vrell continued eyeing the five human bodies busily making their transformation into the leech form. The fifth, limbless one, would be effectively useless, so he reached up and plucked it down, then cut its tough fibrous flesh into pieces and began inserting them one after the other into his mandibles. Perhaps, even though their nervous systems would be severely degraded by the leech transformation, he might be able to get some use out of the remaining four. Abruptly he spun towards the door.
As Vrell stepped out into the dripping corridor something cracked along his back. He turned an eye-palp, together with his visual turret and mouthparts, which had now separated from his main carapace and risen on a short muscular neck, and observed a long split in his shell, which was now knitting with fibres almost like hull repair mesh. It occurred to him that he had never heard of one of his own kind infected by the virus. Ingesting infected meat would not work because the virus did not long survive in the vitriol that was a Prador’s digestive juices. The only way a Prador could become infected was by inoculation through the shell itself, as had happened to him. But surely some adult Prador would have therefore tried the virus on its own offspring? He must check the ship’s data banks to see if any mention had been made of such. But not now: time to go to work.
Erlin smashed the frog whelk’s shell with a rock, pulled off the eye-stalks because they were gazing at her accusingly, then took out her pen laser and began cooking its flesh. In the twilight, the glare from the device was intense, and she noted the two normal sails edge back from her as they dined on their molluscs. But Zephyr was unmoved, having nothing to fear from the laser. After a moment the device sputtered and gave out, the whelk flesh only partially seared. Erlin had expected this, as she had used it twice before: once on a chunk of rhinoworm and once on another whelk. She had no problem eating raw meat, but had been using the laser rather more to pasteurize than cook it. The less of the virus she took in orally, the slower would be the change it wrought upon her. Already her skin had taken on a bluish tint, and some of her inclinations were edging towards the irrational. But one uncomfortable fact seemed plain to her: she had known about the giant whelk.
Was her memory playing tricks? No, she and Ambel had talked about that creature jokily named Whelkus titanicus, and she recollected reading about it in one of the Warden’s many reports on Spatterjay’s ecology. How then to account for her behaviour on the island? That was easy. She was not immune to the ennui of long life—it had driven her here to find Ambel in the first place—but she had thought herself immune to the near-suicidal pursuits to which that boredom drove others. Obviously she was not, though in her the impulse to self-destruction was unconscious. Her own mind was playing her false. Erlin grimaced. Could that also be why she remained here on this dangerous planet? Was she, rather than trying to learn how to live from Captain Ambel, just staying in a place where it would be easy to die?