Now the Boh runcible. She started the positional drives there, and watched the ring of white fire bloom. Conlan should be sending the second signal now. She did not have time to check with Jebel, and checking would not change matters.
Utterly unbelievable pain, almost equalled by the horror of being injured like that. Okay now, all wrapped up and back where it should be. The Prador had pinched his abdomen tightly in the tips of its claws, too tight. If it had gripped him only slightly differently it would have snapped his spine. His bulging guts pressed hard against the serrated inner edges of the claw, which cut in, and his intestines and the lower lobes of his liver belched through the split. He'd got it all back inside, and with the remains of his shirt bound it all in place, and tied that down with the optic cable, but the blood just kept oozing out. He was bleeding internally too. He could feel it. Death did not lie very far away.
EDDRESS REQUEST >
OFFLINE EDDRESS REQUEST?
ACCEPT?
"What the fuck?" he managed. He looked around at the cramped space, could hear the clattering sound of hard Prador feet not very far away. Perhaps they wanted to exchange messages, for they seemed quite anxious to reacquaint themselves with him. Conlan damned himself for a fool. The moment he saw one of those little bastards face-to-face he knew that running to them had been a suicidal move. The big one, like the one called Vortex appearing on the newsnets, he assumed to be a leader of some kind. Why hadn't it listened to him?
The eddress request remained and he considered taking the facility offline, but what the hell did it matter now? He accepted and immediately received a message:
YOU BROKE MY FUCKING LEG YOU PIECE OF SHIT.
VOCAL CONNECTION?
Conlan accepted that and sent, "I hope it really hurts. You still at the bottom of that shaft?"
Conlan felt he could do with some similar patches himself. Obviously, by his tone over the link, Jebel Krong floated up in the clouds.
"I'll tell you what. I haven't screwed your operation completely, but I still can. You send Urbanus for me, with some of those patches, and maybe I'll still do what you want."As he finished delivering that speech, Conlan realised that if speaking out loud he would have needed to pause for breath every few words.
Jebel's laughter came ghostly over the link."So the Prador weren't talking? Have they got you now, stuck you up on a wall somewhere? You really won't like what happens next. Remember me telling you?"
"They don't have me. I'm in hiding. I'm serious about myoffer."
"No can do, I'm afraid. This place is crawling with them. We're under a chameleon ware shield, local, blocking scan. No intention of moving right now. They'll probably find you soon enough. Bit of advice for you…"
"What's that?"
"Kill yourself"
"You are a bastard, Krong."
Laughter again, then, "And you're not?"
Conlan looked around. He lay in an air duct junction. The Prador might pick him up on their scanners, but they'd have to cut through a lot of metalwork to reach him. By then he could crawl on to somewhere else.
"How long till the runcible starts moving?" he asked.
"Any time now."
"If I send your signal, and survive… will you hold to your promise to me?"
"Of course, but I don't really see you surviving. Are you near a console now?"
Conlan wasn't, but further along a nearby duct a vent opened into some private accommodation and there would be one in there. He considered his survival chances. It would be so much easier to lie here and die; already he felt slightly cold and sleepy. Approaching the Prador again would almost certainly result in the scenario Krong once described to him and promised to mimic with pliers and metal snips. If he crawled to that room and sent the signal, Krong's plan might succeed. But then there were the Prador here. In that room he would be more vulnerable and he doubted he would be able to haul himself up to the vent again.
"Tell me again your plan?" he asked.
"Oh, you mean about the mines and such—all complete bollocks, obviously."
"What?"
"Well, I didn't want you telling your Prador chums. The mine scenario worked just fine for our purposes. And even if you ratted on us the real plan might still work."
"So what is your real plan?"
"You expect me to tell you now? Why should I do that?"
"Because my guts are hanging out, I'm bleeding internally, and I know the Prador are not my chums."
"Love the Polity now do you?"
"I hate it and all it stands for, but right now I hate the Prador more."
After a long pause Jebel spoke more soberly. "Give me avisual link via your aug, and patch in a med diagnostic'
"Med diagnostic?"
"You'll find it in the functions catalogue. It enables the hospital system of your choice to monitor your health."
Conlan first patched through a visual link, which was easy, and gazed down at his leaking torso. Shortly he found the health monitoring function and studied its readout himself. It only confirmed what he already knew: he was dying. He allowed Krong access to that diagnosis.
"You're in a bad way, but I guess you don't need me to tell you that. I'm attaching a graphic for you now showing a future model of what we hope will shortly happen."
The attachment came through and Conlan hesitated before opening it. It could contain some military virus or something equally nasty, but he realised he was too tired to care. As he opened the attachment and viewed the scene displayed, and Moria's projections, he felt a steady vibration through the floor, growing in intensity.
"The positional drives have just started up," Krong noted.
"Can you see… outside? Can you see it?"
"Certainly can."
"Give me a visual link and I'll do what you want."
It came through quickly, and in his third eye Conlan gazed up through a chainglass dome across the Boh runcible, fusion flames of the positional drives gleaming in his vision. He rolled over and began crawling towards that vent, in the end not because he hated the Prador nor loved the Polity, but because of the sheer audacity of what that woman planned.
Hellish fire spewed across vacuum as the masers struck twelve targets out of a possible twenty, though it was difficult to be sure of the latter number since the missiles used many techniques of concealment. The ship's meteor defence laser struck five more, but the EM output of those close antimatter blasts threw his sensors into disarray. Two missiles struck his ship, the massive detonations hurling it back towards the runcible, a huge glowing dent in its hull.
Where are the rest?
His sensors finally unscrambled enough for him to see not one but three missiles now past his ship and bearing down on the runcible. A sudden detonation ensued and a drone tumbled out of the extremity of the explosion and then righted itself. A second detonation as a second missile passed through the enfilading fire from two other drones. Those drones were closer to the blast however, and their carrier signals flatlined. Despite the possibility of damage to the runcible, Immanence redirected masers to target the remaining missile—since there seemed few drones in the vicinity—but before his own weapons fired again the missile detonated, spreading a ball of white fire.