pavements stretched in a curve round to a large water-park, and beyond that rose the mile-high edifices of city central. Gazing in the other direction, Cormac observed suburban sprawl which he knew ran all the way to the coast and beyond, where an underwater city lay. He continued staring in that direction until something began to nag at him, and he finally returned his gaze to the curving pavement.
At first glance it had looked like a car, but now it rose up onto its many legs, and waving its antennae, swung its head from side to side as if trying to pick up some scent. Two green eyes, peridots, seemed blind. It possessed what looked like short mandibles, but they probably weren't used for eating, more likely they were used to clean and maintain the particle cannon and two missile launchers residing where its mouth should have been.
Surely this could not be the one they had seen in Montana? Ian Cormac felt certain it was, and he felt certain that it was looking for him.
The ship loomed like some tarnished bronze mountain, slowly being exposed as autodozers cleared the charred earth and stone around it. Some of the cleared areas were fenced off, but such was the work still to do that numerous points of access had to be left open for the equipment being used—hence the mosquito autoguns now replacing the guard units that had been ensconced in the surrounding spill piles.
Before a deep hole excavated in the ground—apparently where a main hold entrance had been opened—was a small town of bubble units. ECS personnel, not all of them in uniform, swarmed busily like ants before this behemoth.
'There's still Prador in there?' enquired Yallow.
'Certainly,' Olkennon replied. 'Too many hiding places and the exotic metals used in the ship's construction make it difficult to scan effectively.'
'There have been problems?' Cormac suggested.
'Two of our people from Reverse Engineering disappeared about a month ago. We found their bones dumped below a hatch on the other side. Prador second- and third-children have been seen—usually running away.'
'Hence our presence,' said Cormac.
'Hence your presence,' Olkennon agreed noncommittally.
Cormac was not so sure he believed her. Since the installation of the autoguns in the area they had been guarding, it was inevitable that they would be reassigned, but he felt a suspicion that their reassignment had something to do with Carl and the subtle interrogation they had undergone from Agent Spencer. She had wanted to know every detail of recent events, and much detail of their past association with Carl; then, with a smile and a wave, she departed—giving them no explanation for her questions. He guessed that being grunts, it was not necessary for them to know.
Departing the gravcar that had brought them down by the ship, Yallow and Cormac followed Olkennon towards the bubble-unit encampment. The soil here was orange and dotted with flintlike rocks and pieces of what looked like petrified wood. Such details Cormac took in, but his eyes kept straying back to the Prador vessel. Some structures on the exterior had survived the impact. He recognised the stubs of once-jutting frameworks that surrounded the throats of rail-guns, the remains of reflector shields around lasers—some for communication and some for combat. Inset ports gleamed like spider-eyes around a jutting section like a balding head—the upper part of the squashed pear-shape of the vessel.
Soon they arrived at the encampment, where a man wandered out to meet them. He looked old, which was an uncommon occurrence with the treatments available nowadays. Cormac had seen people like him before and usually found that their lives were so busy they didn't get round to taking the treatments until something actually pushed them into it. His head hair was as grey and wiry as his beard, and his civilian clothing showed signs of wear and the occasional chemical stain—sure sign that he was the type who didn't give a fig for physical appearance.
The man held out a grubby calloused hand, which Olkennon shook, then he turned to study Cormac and Yallow. 'So these are the two who will be going in with me.'
'They will, Professor Dent.'
'Very well,' he sighed, 'let's get moving.'
Olkennon turned to the two of them. 'You understand your duties?'
Both Cormac and Yallow nodded.
'Keep him alive,' she said, then abruptly turned on her heel and marched off.
Professor Dent led the way into the encampment of bubble units, onto main gratings, then to a narrow packed-soil alley, finally stopping at a door and opening it. They all trooped inside and, scanning the cluttered interior, Cormac felt his assessment of the man confirmed. However, no matter how apparently slovenly his appearance or how messy his dwelling, Cormac knew that the professor would not have been here had not some high-level AIs considered his presence important. Dent picked up a large case with a shoulder strap then pointed to two large backpacks resting beside a desk occupied entirely by a tangled mess of Prador technology.
'I'll be needing some help with those,' he said. As he moved his pulse-rifle to hang before his stomach, Cormac caught Yallow's frown. Burdened like this they would not be so effective.
'Quick release button on the front,' said the professor—obviously not an absent-minded scientist, but someone aware that soldiers needed to be able to respond quickly, and unburdened.
The two hoisted on their packs and the professor led the way out.
'We'll be going to the Captain's Sanctum, and since that is where the Prador adult was located it is deep within the ship,' he said.
'As much armour as possible between itself and anyone attacking,' said Yallow.
'Certainly.'
They trudged out of the encampment and onto a wide road of crumbled stone and sticky mud, which ran level for a little while then cut down into a wide excavation. Soon they saw a metal ramp ahead of them, a heavy autodozer parked on it, perhaps to hold it down. The entrance itself was a sideways oval—designed to accommodate the shape of Prador, but much larger than the largest of their kind.
As they drew closer, the first thing Cormac noticed was the smell, which rolled out like a palpable fog, laden with the putrid decay of things washed up on a seashore, damp, miasmic. He saw Yallow hesitate when this hit them, her expression annoyed perhaps at the way she had reacted.
'You get used to it,' said Dent.
'So some of the Prador in there are dead?' Yallow noted.
'Certainly—we haven't found them all.' He glanced round at them. 'But what you're smelling at the moment is a food store we only discovered recently, and then only because someone accidentally cut its power supply a week ago and its contents began decaying.' He pointed back to a group of people clad in full envirosuits gathered around a couple of grav-pallets. 'They'll be moving the rotten meat today.'
Cormac wondered if any of that meat included something once described as 'long-pig,' for Prador were not averse to eating human flesh. He considered closing up the visor on his envirosuit, but Yallow hadn't, and the professor wasn't even wearing a suit. Perhaps better to go without his visor closed—even with all its systems operating, a closed suit tended to blunt the senses, and with Prador in here, on their home territory, he needed to stay sharp.
The floor of the hold felt utterly solid underfoot and distant walls appeared to be constructed of layers of ragged slabs on which grew pale green weed like dead man's fingers. There were stacks of Polity-manufacture bubble-metal crates near the entrance, but further back were objects that had occupied this hold before this ship came down. To his left a small scout vessel or shuttle rested like a squat submarine—a miniature copy of the vessel they had just entered since it seemed all Prador ships were modelled on the creatures' own form no matter how impractical that modelling might be. The craft was secured to deck rings by cables extending from holes in its sides. Behind the vessel were racks of thin, pale blue cylinders—perhaps ordinance of some kind for that same vessel.
At the back of the hold they came upon one of those diagonally divided doors needed to accommodate the Prador form. It was only partially open, a heavy lock bolt welded to it to engage in a hole drilled into the floor so it lay open only wide enough to allow humans through, and not wide enough to allow Prador second-children out. Doubtless the doors had not been permanently welded in place in case they needed to be opened further to take heavy equipment in. Beyond this door lay a smaller hold, on the right of which stacks of hexagonal crates rose to
