"Particular ship?" she asked.
He glanced back at her. "One of those is the ship that destroyedAvalon Station. The one that set this war in motion and made me the man I now am." Something bitter, perhaps a little insane, flashed across his expression, then he seemed to take it under control as he turned to face her fully again. "Unless the rate of progress of the two ships changes, they should be here within the week."
Moria shivered; he stood with his hands clasped behind his back, Trajeen precisely haloing his head. Two of the moons were visible; Vina, identifiable by its speed of transit, swung over above him like some ominous sign. He seemed a prophet of doom.
"How many will be evacuated from the planet by then?" It never occurred to her to wonder if she would be among them.
"Not even ten per cent," he replied. "I think we're done talking now." He turned back towards the window.
In her aug she received a transmission from him containing all the records of recent events. It was a dismissal.
Vagule's thoughts cycled with frosty precision in his flash-frozen brain. With his spherical armoured body ensconced on one rack in the drone cache, he observed through his sensors eight others of his kind arrayed in similar racks beside him. Communication being possible he listened in to some of the exchanges between the other drones:
"Father will send us into battle soon and we can kill humans."
"I look forward to demonstrating my loyalty to Father."
"Kill the humans and all Father's enemies."
"I have detected a fault in my rail-gun which will make me less able to serve Father."
"Call for maintenance—to not be perfectly maintained is disloyal."
"I have called for maintenance."
And so it went: the continuous affirmation of purpose with discussions straying into the subjects of weaponry, tactics and occasionally into analysis of previous engagements. Vagule, who could do no less than feel utterly loyal to Immanence, also understood that loyalty to be imposed by electronic means just as it was previously imposed by his father's pheromones. His past life lay open to his inspection and he remembered his father's treatment of him with painful clarity. It seemed that though disobedience was no option, his ability to think about his lot was no longer confused by those physical pheromonal effects. However, most of those here were second-children who only vaguely recollected being anything other than war drones. They did not possess an underlying stratum of memory to run counter to their imposed loyalty. There was, however, one other drone here like himself.
"You are the new drone," said that other.
"I am Vagule."
"Yes, a first-child Prime."
"Who are you?"
"I am Pogrom and I too was a first-child Prime, though only your presence here has reminded me of that."
Vagule knew nothing of any first-child called Pogrom and only then did it occur to him that others went through the same experiences before him.
"When were you a first-child?"
"Back on home-world when Immanence still possessed four legs and both claws and before this ship was built. I do not know how long ago, only that thirty first-children have served since then."
Thirty?
Vagule realised hundreds of years must have passed. "What was your infraction?"
"I became too old and Father's pheromones began to have less and less of an effect upon me. He ordered me upon a mission to attack a rival in the King's Council, one from which I was not expected to return. But I completed my mission—I booby-trapped one of the rival's spare control units with diatomic acid which later ate out his insides when he shell-welded the unit to his under-car apace—and returned."
"Then you served Father well." Surprisingly well, since most Prador adults buried themselves behind layer upon layer of defences and were particularly difficult to kill. During the vicious infighting, which was the way Prador conducted their politics, it was the first- and second-children that did the dying and few adults actually ended up dead. They usually only lost or gained wealth or status.
"Yes, I served Father well. Upon my return he called me to him, and it was obvious he intended to strip my limbs and kill me, for already my back limbs were loosening as I made a slow transition to adulthood. I attacked him and managed to tear off one of his legs before the second-children and new first-child Prime-in-waiting managed to tear off all my limbs."
"You attacked Father?"
"I attacked him and am shamed and, as you must know, not shamed."
"I will serve Father," Vagule stated, but beneath that knew he would rather not.
"Father kept me alive for fifty days, feeding small pieces of my organs to the second-children all the while."
"As is just."
"As is just," the other agreed. "At the end of that period, when my death approached, he transferred me to this drone shell. He was much angered because my attack on him necessitated the installation of his first grav-motor, for he could no longer walk unaided."
"You angered Father and were rightly punished," Vagule stated, feeling a core of jealousy for he had not done so much.
"Let us now do weapons inventories, for that is always interesting," said Pogrom.
"Yes, let us do that," Vagule replied, knowing this was as much fun as he was going to have, ever again.
7
But what shall we do for a ring—
Spying through the many sensory heads positioned in the vast hold, as became his custom, Immanence observed, listened to, and smelt the remaining human prisoners. Very few of them were standing, and most of them situated themselves in a small, close mass on the side away from the sewerage drains. They made themselves as comfortable as possible using clothing stripped from the dead. One human sat at the perimeter clutching a human leg bone which he used to club ship lice that scuttled too close to the female corpse beside him. He obtained this bone some while back from the remains of a man who tried to attack Gnores and was eaten alive in front of his fellows for his efforts.
Now, while the captain watched, another human subdued the one with the bone while two others dragged the female corpse from the crowd to beside one of the drains where later a second-child would come for it. Earlier they all, like the bone wielder, had concealed and protected their dead, obviously suffering some primitive reaction upon guessing the final destination for those corpses: dissection for study, then to be eaten. But obviously someone had taken charge—removing these items before the smell rendered their imprisonment less pleasant than at present.
Well over two hundred died since Gnores took over from Vagule, but not all of those died as a direct result of the new Prime's experiments. Immanence eyed the numerous reports on autopsies conducted by Scrabbler. Out of the total of seven hundred and sixty prisoners taken aboard, twenty-one died quickly from injuries suffered during capture and a further fifty-three from subsequent infections—mainly from those injuries caused when second-children ripped away their cerebral hardware; two died giving birth—one of the children stillborn and the other dying a day later; three hundred and eighty died as a result of thrall implantation and thirteen killed themselves. That should have left two hundred and ninety-one prisoners, but in the last few days over a hundred of the remainder died.
Scrabbler quickly ascertained the cause as a virulent cross-species disease spreading in the hold, its effects much amplified amid a despairing and much weakened population. It seemed the disease was a viral mutation from something carried by ship lice—who, given the opportunity, fed on both the dead and the living—and it possessed interesting possibilities. Scrabbler was now working on even more deadly strains, and methods of producing them in a sporuler form suitable for dumping in large quantities into the upper atmosphere of a world.