Heaving himself back up onto his legs, Vrell flexed his new pair of back limbs, which had unaccountably replaced those that had, on the island, dropped away to expose his sexual organs. These new legs were still soft, and not yet long enough to reach the ground. Did this mean he was an adolescent again? He wasn’t quite sure what it meant. No matter. He would set his blanks to work, then return to studying the account concerning the virus-infected Prador.
The pilot he programmed to repair gravmotors, and the navigator he set to dealing with the various generators and transformers. He set them to replacing coils and components with those kept in storage, or manufacturing new components in the ship’s machine shop. Setting them these tasks was not too onerous, as Ebulan had stored many thrall subprograms for this very purpose. Vrell also designated the two headless blanks to assist where they could; usually just to fetch and carry and help lift heavy items. The other blank he decided he would make dispensable, and with the quadruped robots set it to work on the ship’s fusion plants. One of those was operating so needed no attention, two required realigning and restarting, others were severely damaged and radioactive. Vrell doubted this last blank would survive this to repair them all. Then, setting alarms to alert him should the blanks encounter anything their programs did not encompass, Vrell returned to the story.
The ship, a huge exotic metal destroyer, had returned to the home system, but was ordered to take up orbit around one of the furthest cold planets and there await inspection. The council of Prador leaders, who governed the Second Kingdom, had communicated with the adult Prador aboard, but remained wary.
The report they received from the ship did not tie in with what Prador spies gleaned of the action in which it had been recently involved. Two ships had been sent to drop from U-space outside a Polity system and run in at fast sublight speeds firing antimatter missiles to intersect the course of a defence planetoid. This had all gone according to plan, and the planetoid blown to glowing dust that spread in a ring around the sun. The moon’s defences had been weak, the reason for this becoming evident when the orbital sun lasers of the system’s real defensive weapons began firing. Both ships escaped. However, this returned ship’s report claimed that the lasers had managed to destroy the other ship. Either the spies or the Captain of this surviving ship had been lying.
The order to stand off and wait was disobeyed and the ship in question dropped into U-space, managing an incredibly accurate jump into the orbit of the home world. Immediately, heavy destroyers were ordered to intercept, but not managing so accurate a U-space jump, arrived thousands of kilometres away from the planet. They also could not fire on the ship for fear of causing damage to the groundside population.
Planetary defences opened up and the ship took a terrible battering as it descended into the sea fifty kilometres off the King’s island. The then King, an ancient Prador who had ruled the Second Kingdom unassailably by keeping his council members squabbling with each other, ordered in every available force to defend him. The sea was depth-charged continuously for a month, then a hundred of the early-style Prador drones called in, too. The battle that followed Vrell was able to observe from recordings recovered from those drones lucky to survive. He saw some weirdly shaped Prador, black as night, ascending from the deeps where few should have survived the depth-charging. He recognized many similarities in these to himself now. Many were badly shattered by drone weapons, but they did not die easily and fought back hard, destroying the King’s drones one after the other. They carried the regular Prador weapons, but also ones they had modified, advanced, made more powerful.
Eventually fifty of them gained the shore, clustering about a huge one of their own kind—the size of an adult but hollow of carapace and retaining its full complement of legs as in childhood. Its head jutting forward moved independently of its body on a corded neck. Ashore they faced a force of five thousand adolescents, including armoured drones, some on the ground and some in the air. The battle should have been brief, but it dragged on as these strange new Prador rebels employed energy defence fields and even managed to survive tactical atomic blasts. As they advanced, the King retreated with a personal guard of his own adolescents, giving also the order for the withdrawal to his other forces. But their retreat only allowed the new Prador to more quickly advance. The King finally ordered a massive CTD strike, thereby sacrificing thousands of his own fighters.
What happened next became increasingly unclear to Vrell, as it was difficult to separate truth from propaganda. The island was scoured to the bedrock—nothing remaining of the attacking Prador. The King, out at sea, was deposed by an aggressive faction of his council. All his adolescents were slaughtered, and he himself was apparently injected with a slow-working diatomic acid and floated out above the sea on his own AG so other Prador could watch him die screeching and bubbling. A new King grabbed power, called Oboron, a name unfamiliar amid the previous factional infighting of the council. And so the time of the Third Kingdom began.
This stuff was all utterly new to Vrell. He had known how the present King had scrabbled to power over the burnt-out carapaces of his predecessor and that King’s supporters, but nothing about any attack by virally mutated Prador. Delving deeper, he discovered that the returned ship had been the first to carry human blanks imported from Spatterjay, and read Ebulan’s speculations about experiments, using the Spatterjay virus, being conducted aboard. He scanned a brief report of some discovered wreckage being identified as that of the missing ship used in the attack on the Polity, and supposed the chief Prador aboard it had discovered what was happening aboard its companion vessel, leading to a dispute in which the mutated Prador decided to act preemptively. Nowhere could he find the name of the Prador Captain of the returned ship. And Vrell reflected on how the Third Kingdom had survived for so long, guarded by Oboron’s ruthless army of adolescents constantly encased in layers of concealing armour, and how the same king had remained in power for some seven hundred years, unseen.
After scanning all the records, Vrell ruminated over everything he now knew. Aggression warred with intellect inside him. He wanted away from this planet so he could establish himself back in the Third Kingdom, but he would have to be very careful and very clever in doing so. Though he knew his mind was now functioning differently from that of most Prador—more intelligent and, if it was possible, more ruthless—he was one against many, and should he make the slightest error in his plans for his return, he would not survive the wrath of his own kind… all of his own kind.
9
Amberclams:
these molluscs are one of the best-known of the many genera of burrowing bivalves that live in the ocean floor, or in ‘cast’ sands. Their name stems from the amber colour of their flesh, which is much relished by Hoopers. Pickled amberclams are a staple of the Hooper diet, and the product ‘amber sauce’ — made by allowing de-shelled clams to dissolve in seacane rum—is greatly valued by them. It would be well to remember that this sauce is poisonous to non-Hoopers, causing intoxication, hallucinations, convulsions and sometimes even death. But perhaps the worst side-effect of this product on Polity citizens is that, while hallucinating, they experience the overpowering urge to take a swim—which is never a good idea on Spatterjay.