LA 76?
Leg/ankle, he realized, and looked down.
The leech was not large: merely the size and shape of a cucumber. He realized now that this was what Bones had been staring at, probably even as it slithered across the ground towards Bloc’s ankle. He stepped on it with his other foot and pulled his ankle away from it. The creature stretched to almost twice its own length then snapped back to normal size, a lump of grey flesh disappearing into its pink tubular mouth. Bloc put his full weight on it and twisted his foot back and forth until it burst like a huge blackcurrant, then finally stepped away. He tried to remember when last he had updated his dose of Intertox. The new formula lasted longer in reification balms than the stuff Sable Keech had used, but it did need to be frequently renewed.
WARN: CELLULAR REPAIR REQ. SHUTTING BALM FLOW LA76
OUTPARAFUNCT: YABB@~*
MEMSPACE: 00048
Ignoring the corrupted messages, Bloc glanced down by his ankle and saw balm soaking into the dusty soil. He needed to seal that quickly, then he needed to make sure the fence was back up, and the compound scoured of native life forms. He hurried to his quarters. He also needed to update his Intertox dose. He was a long way from the Little Flint and the transformation that awaited him there. To be infected by the Spatterjay virus now could be catastrophic.
Only two of the four human bodies were serviceable. The nervous systems of the others being so badly degraded by their transformation into the leech form, Vrell was unable to use them, so ate them instead. Now, with two extra control units bonded to his carapace, he constantly updated the programming of the remaining two so that they worked as an adjunct to his mind, two extra pairs of hands as was intended. Glimpsing them through ship’s eyes, he watched one of them clearing wreckage and feeding it into one of the multi-furnaces Vrell had earlier ignited, while the other welded cracked bulkheads. Of course, in their earlier state with only leech mouths growing between their shoulders where their heads should have been, they had been of little use. It was only when he connected two cameras into the thrall units of each to give them binocular vision that he managed to utilize them. Now they looked like humans with strange trunklike probosces and insectile eyes rearing up on stalks. Even so, they were not enough.
Vrell checked the reading on his mission timer. Much time had been counted away by the slowly changing glyphs. He had accomplished much, but there was still very much to do. He needed to work faster than this, else he would run out of food long before he was ready.
It had puzzled him why Ebulan, knowing the dangers, had used only a spider thrall on an Old Captain called Drum, rather than fully core the man. Now he knew. Full coring removed every last trace of the original inhabiting intelligence, but most importantly it removed that part of the intelligence best described as ‘know thyself’. To control fully cored humans, like the two below, required a great deal of practice, for the controlled body did not instinctively know simple things like the length of its arms, how far a single pace would take it, or how tightly to grip an object to hold it, and so on. They also did not sense or react to pain. Consequently it had taken Vrell a long time to learn how to control these two, and still they were clumsy and constantly damaging themselves.
Once again fully connected into the ship’s system, Vrell searched for other tools to employ. He found a few small quadruped robots, whose purpose was to act as landward spies, and used them to clean up loose contaminants where a ceramic pile had fragmented. There were few other machines in the ship like them, and Vrell cursed the paranoia that had for so long prevented Prador using AI and other self-governing machines. Then, remembering his entry into the ship, he turned his attention to the drone cache and found there one of his kin.
‘We will kill the old drone,’ came the comment from the flash-frozen and stored brain of a Prador adolescent—still cycling some previous instruction from Ebulan.
Vrell studied diagnostic returns and peered through sonar cameras in the cache. Ebulan had used the brain as a backup recorder for the mobile war drones, so new drones would benefit from the experiences of their predecessors. The brain was stored behind the armoured bulkhead and had been disconnected from its group, probably so no signals could be traced back to the ship itself. Vrell felt his curiosity stirring: what was this old drone it wanted to kill? And, most importantly, what had obliterated the rest of the drones? Could it be the same thing that had brought down the ship itself?
Vrell tried to ascertain as much as possible from the ship’s memory, but there were gaping holes caused by feedback damage, and holes he himself had necessarily made to excise the alien programs remaining in the system from when the Warden had turned Ebulan’s own blanks against him. All he knew for certain was that, while Father had been distracted by this takeover, something had punched through the ship. He keyed into the control drone’s memory and found part of the puzzle. He observed how, one after another, Ebulan’s drones had been duped and destroyed by an ancient ECS war drone.
‘Father,’ said the drone mind.
Vrell ignored it. The adolescent brain presently had no way of knowing, being controlled now by the ship’s systems rather than Ebulan’s pheromones, that it was not the old Prador currently plumbing its memories. Vrell was still curious about what had hit this ship. His survival might depend on knowing that. There was a risk involved in what he decided to do next, but not too serious. Checking system memory, he knew that there were still some of Father’s secondary emitters out in the ocean, and many of them would have stored the last memory downloads from the remaining drones. He laboriously began to decode program traps so he could reinstate outside connections. When that was completed, some days later, the U-space links established in microseconds, and within further microseconds memory returned to the backup brain.
‘Not Father,’ said the adolescent, now knowing Ebulan was dead, before Vrell finished assessing those memories.
Vrell saw the last of the war drones, gutted by the ECS drone but still transmitting, taken high and brought down hard, along with that old ECS drone, to punch through Ebulan’s ship. The blow had been as simple and effective as that. In a way that was a relief, for Vrell had feared some powerful weapons strike from the Warden itself.
‘You are not Father,’ said the adolescent.
‘Obey me,’ said Vrell, reinforcing the order through the ship’s systems.
‘We will kill the old drone.’
As he isolated the brain from the secondary emitters, Vrell thought not. The other drones had not managed the task, and anyway the old drone had destroyed itself in that last attack. Thinking very clearly, Vrell realized what the problem had been: not the weaponry or armour but the minds behind them. That wily old ECS drone had been utterly out-gunned yet won every skirmish. Vrell himself could see how the Prador drones had been far too direct, and blind to the diversity of the ECS drone’s attacks. Knowing what he knew now, Vrell would have been more circumspect, and that was why he opened up a programming link, began to rearrange his sibling’s brain, and to map memories and thought structures across. When he had completed that task, he disconnected the adolescent brain from the ship and opened the bulkhead that protected it. Then he started pumps emptying the cache of sea water, before going in search of the tools he required.
In a time unknown to him, ‘Vrell’ surfaced to awareness, clamped in the cache of his father’s ship. He did an almost instinctive systems check, and immediately discovered his non-standard alterations: extra grav-units, double the thickness of armour and double the power supply, additional Polity tech usually treated with contempt by the Prador, and even claws. He turned an eye-pit towards the other drone shell, and saw that it had been cannibalized to supply him with some of these additions, though the claws themselves were utterly new. He was much more powerful than any other drone ever launched from this ship, but this did nothing to stem the tide of bitter anger that filled him, knowing he was a copy of the original Vrell mapped into the mind of a flash-frozen sibling. And he was unable to disobey the real Vrell, who had long ago returned to Ebulan’s sanctum.