The stairs terminated in a long hall lined with heavy doors, each with a barred window. No doubt at all that this was a prison. Madeleine led the way across to one of them, punched a code into a panel beside it and the door popped open.

  “We keep it here for the security.” She gestured me inside.

  Without hesitating, I stepped through, Harriet coming in behind me. It was fairly obvious what would happen next, and I was glad that they had not yet tried violence. I walked up to plinth at the centre of the cell and gazed at the object resting under a dome of chainglass. A curved chunk of white crystal lay there, rather like the sepal of some huge flower, but with a disc-shaped plug at its base from which protruded hundreds of micro-bayonets for data and power. I pinged it and received a facsimile of the supposed power signature of a farcaster element, but straight away I could see the joins. I peered at it closer, ramping up the magnification of my eyes and probing with a spectroscopic laser. The crystal was plain white quartz cut and polished to the required shape, while the base plug was just a not very good mock-up made of bonded resin. I turned as if to address my host, but just then the door slammed shut.

  “Disappointing,” I said.

  Harriet was also peering at the object. She gave it a dismissive sniff then turned to face me.

  “No good?” she enquired eagerly.

  “Another fake,” I said. “The Client will not be pleased at all.”

  Harriet, opened her mouth and licked her long red tongue over her white teeth. Evidently she wasn’t displeased.

  Through my other eyes—the cams on the bathysphere I’d linked to via my internal transceiver—I watched the Frobishers apply their atomic shear to the door. The door reacted by lifting off its seal then slamming down, smashing the shear and its two operators into the ground, then lifting and dropping slowly above the mess as if like a beckoning hand it was inviting the rest to try again. One of them decided to fire some kind of explosive inside, but the door whipped up to send it bouncing back and it detonated by one swamp car, blowing off one cage wheel. The bathysphere defence system then decided to stop playing. Two hatches opened in the ring girdling the vehicle above the door, extruded two Gatling cannons and began firing. The two cars, their liquid hydrogen tanks soon peppered with holes, exploded, but by then all the humans had become bloody smears across the boggy ground.

  “Stupid,” I said, then landed a heavy boot squarely in the centre of the cell door. The force of my kick buckled the floor underneath my other boot and the door tumbled clanging into the space beyond.

  “Can I?” asked Harriet, stepping from one clawed foot to the other. “Can I now?”

  She had slipped into childlike eager pet mode again. Was that what she was destined to be or was it just a deliberate pose?

  “Off you go,” I conceded, and she shot through the opening, her claws leaving scratches in the metal floor.

  She’ll get herself killed one day, I thought, but not today.

  All the Frobishers had seen was a big and slightly ridiculous lizard, easy to kill with their weapons and only capable of using the natural weapons with which she had been endowed. I agreed, for I knew that with her long claws she wasn’t even capable of picking up a gun let alone firing one. However, Harriet had survived and prevailed during many encounters like this one. I put this down to the fact that she had been a canny and experienced bounty hunter in her time and that though her intelligence had, apparently, dropped a few tens of IQ points, she hadn’t lost that edge.

  I stepped back from the door and pulled open the studs in my canvas trousers, peeled back a patch over my right thigh, and watched the skin there etch out a frame and pop open. Next I reached inside my leg and took out a heavily redesigned QC laser, held it in my right hand and plugged its superconducting power cable into the socket in my right wrist. After a pause I then looked down to a similar patch over my left thigh. I hesitated, then decided otherwise.

  No, not today; not the other gun.

  I stepped up to the plinth, straight-armed the chainglass dome and sent it clanging like a bell across the cell floor. I then extended my other arm and fired the laser, the beam invisible until vapour from the burning artefact etched it out of the air. Playing the high-energy-density beam over the thing, I watched the quartz shatter into hot fragments and the supposed base plug slump into molten ruin, then took my finger off the trigger. The momentary fit of pique had cost me time and I’d wasted more than enough of it on this world and in the Wasteland entire.

  I grimaced, then stepped out of the door to the sounds of distant screams and the cracking and sawing of laser carbines.

  * * *

  The Coin Collector was a pyramid of brassy metal, its edges rounded and measuring a mile long, the throats of its fusion engines nearly covering one face and possessing enough drive power to fry a small moon. As the giant reel inside its EVA bay, which lay a quarter of a mile up from the fusion engines, wound in the bathysphere, I turned to watch Harriet clumsily using a suction sanitizer on her body to clean off all the blood now she’d licked off everything she could reach with her tongue.

  As the bathysphere drew closer to the ancient prador tug, I considered the debacle below. The Frobishers had been utterly unprepared for Harriet and utterly unprepared for me. Harriet had torn into them quickly, leaving the route to the car park scattered with body parts, and had been munching on the same when I had arrived there. More Frobishers had turned up while I was stealing a swamp car and they had managed to get off a few shots before my QC laser fire drove them back and before Harriet finished off the stragglers. I had then taken one of the cars out and set it on automatic before abandoning it. A proton blast had turned it to wreckage about half a mile out, but by then we were well beyond it and soon safe inside the bathysphere. Still, the Client would not be pleased and I did not look forward to that.

  I peered down at the holes burned through my jacket and into the artificial parts of my body, which was most of its parts. My sight was slightly blurred, my other senses dull and my right arm wasn’t working properly. It seemed likely that as well as structural damage there might be some problem with my smart plasm component. This meant I would have to go into a mould and level two consciousness for nerve reintegration, which also increased the likelihood of the Client communicating with me. This annoyed me intensely, as did the Frobisher’s ludicrous attempt to rip me off.

  Had Madeleine Frobisher really thought she could just lure me down, capture me, break into my bathysphere and steal the payment I had brought? Had she completely neglected to factor this ship up here into her plans? Then again perhaps she had factored it in. Perhaps her aim had been not only theft of the payment I had brought but seizure of my ship as well. How naïve. I stood, walked over to one of the array of hexagonal screens and human consoles plugged into prador pit-controls and made a call.

  “Madeleine,” I said, the moment her face appeared in one of the screens. “That was really a rather silly thing to do.”

  “You destroyed the artefact,” she replied. “Why did you do that? It’s something you’ve been hunting down for ages.”

  Odd, I thought, she seemed genuinely puzzled. Working the controls I called up a view of the Frobisher colony raft from a remote I’d dropped on the surface before descent.

  “As you should be well aware, the item you showed me wasn’t genuine,” I replied. “It has not been sitting in your raft over the ages, but was recently made there.”

  “It was not!”

  “Whatever. Your subsequent attempt to imprison me and break into my craft demonstrated your intent.”

  “My intent was to ensure you had brought payment. It was you who started killing my brothers!”

  “Weak Madeleine, very weak.” I paused, a suspicion nagging at me. I relayed an instruction to the Coin Collector for a search of the area surrounding the colony raft. “So, if you didn’t make the thing, where did you really get it from?”

  She gazed at me for a long moment, perhaps realizing her predicament and understanding that lies would not help now. Meanwhile the search produced results: a group of Cleavers watching from around an ancient tripod-mounted holocorder mounted on a platform that was itself fixed to a swamp car. This could not be a regular activity of the Cleavers for surely they would have automatic systems in place to keep watch on their enemies.

  I further worked some controls to bring up an image, from orbit, of the Cleaver colony raft as Madeleine replied, “We stole it from the Cleavers. We found out they were bringing in something valuable from the North and ambushed them.”

  I glanced round at Harriet, who had moved with eerie silence to stand at my shoulder.

  “Squabbling children,” she said, in one of her moments of clarity.

  So it seemed, and a plot by the Cleavers to put the Frobishers in my bad books, nicely exacerbated by Madeleine Frobisher’s greed and intent to extend her off-world interests. I’d been dragged into a silly feud, my time had been wasted, my body had been damaged and the Client would be pissed off. However, before I could further consider what the Client’s reaction would be, the bathysphere arrived with a shuddering crash in its docking cage. I would find out soon enough, I decided.

  “Goodbye, Madeleine,” I said, and cut the connection.

  The bathysphere door opened into an oval tube twenty feet across and ten high. Everything aboard the Coin Collector was of a similar scale—this tube apparently matching the size of burrows made by prador yet to grow into huge father-captains and lose their legs in that process. The interior was plain metal, the lower half roughened with fingertip size pyramidal spikes for grip, tubes of varying sizes branching off for the different iterations of prador children. Its design was obviously an old one made long before the prador started designing the décor of their ships to match their home environment and long before the father-captains dared to come out of their lairs. As I strode into it, the human lighting from induction blisters grew brighter, revealing a group of about twenty thetics marching in perfect synchronization across a junction. I headed over to a parking platform for various designs of scooter, Harriet pacing at my side like some faithful hound.

  I mounted a gyroscope-balanced mono-scooter, engaged its drive, and using the detached throttle and steering baton guided it from the platform and up along the tunnel to the end where a steep switchback took me up another level. Harriet followed me all the way, still hound-faithful for, except on the odd occasions when I allowed her to let her instincts reign, she never left my side. Five levels later I arrived at a massive oval door, dismounted and walked towards it. With a loud crump it separated diagonally and the two halves revolved up into the walls, whereupon I entered a small captain’s sanctum packed with human equipment plugged into the ancient prador controls. As I approached the consoles, with their hexagonal screens above, they abruptly came on to show me the views I had been seeing in the bathysphere. I stared at them for a long time, utterly certain now of what was to come, then I turned away.

  Now it was time for me to deal with my injuries and the inevitable upbraiding from the Client—a prospect I did not relish at all. I walked over to a case against one wall, a thing that looked very much like an iron maiden, woodenly stripping off my jacket as I went. I tossed the jacket into a bin beside it, then struggled with my boots, trousers, shirt and undergarments—a thetic would collect them later and clean and repair them. Naked, I opened the front door of the case to reveal a human-shaped indentation inside, turned round and backed into it, Harriet watching me like a curious puppy. I closed up the lid and immediately I felt the bayonet connections sliding into my body, then everything began to shut down.

  Next I gazed from old dying eyes, reality broken into thousands of facets easily interpretable to a distributed mind, even though the dimensions it could perceive were beyond reason to a human one. However, the facets were going out. Pheromone receptors were stuttering too, and synaesthetic interpreters churning nonsense. Meanwhile, down below, the hot tightness came in peristaltic waves and something was snapping open. In hot orange vastness I screamed chemical terror and shed. Nerve plugs and sockets parted and a mass of dry chitin fell, a hollow waspish thing bouncing amidst many of the same, doubled iridescent wings shattering like safety glass.

  And next all was clear again with new eyes to see. Thirty-two wings beat and pheromone receptors began receiving again, while the synaesthetic interpreters turned the language and code of the Client into something I could understand. The creature rose up, a hundred feet tall, opened its beak and with its new black tongue tasted the air of its furnace.

  “You have failed again,” it said.

  * * *

  As the Polity knew to its cost, the prador were vicious predators not prepared to countenance other intelligent entities in their universe. What had not been known, until a year in to the start of the war when it seemed that humanity, the Polity and its AIs faced extinction, was that the prador were already practiced in the art of extermination.

  I was working in bioweapons—the natural place in the war for a parasitologist and bio-synthesist—trying to resurrect a parasite of those giant crablike homicidal maniacs, when I was abruptly reassigned. I later learnt that the parasite was resurrected and delivered as a terror weapon by assassin drones made in its shape. They sneaked aboard prador ships or into their bases, and injected parasite eggs—prador Father-Captains extinguished by the worms chewing out their insides.

  Only once I was aboard the destroyer ferrying me to my destination, along with a large and varied collection of other experts, did I get the story. Before the prador encountered the Polity they had encountered another alien species whose realm encompassed just three or four star systems. Being the prador they had attacked at once, but then found themselves in a long drawn-out war against a hive species who even in organic form approached AI levels of intelligence, and who quickly developed some seriously nasty weaponry in response to the attack. The war had dragged on for decades but, in the end, the massive resources of the prador Kingdom told against the hive creatures. It was during this conflict that the prador developed their kamikazes, and not during the prador-human war, and it was with kamikazes that the prador steadily annihilated the hive creatures’ worlds. However, one of these multifaceted beings, a weapons developer no less, managed to steal a prador cargo ship and get out through the prador blockade of the systems of its kind. And now, this creature, which the AI’s referred to as the Client, wanted to ally itself with the Polity for some payback.

  My memories of my time with the Client are vague. I’m sure we worked together on bioweapons while other experts there worked on the more knotty problem of delivery systems, and other weapons arising from the Client’s science. A bioweapon capable of annihilating every prador it came into contact with was perfectly feasible, but getting it into contact with enough of them wasn’t so easy. Though the prador fought under one king to destroy the Polity, they were often physically isolated. The father-captains remained aboard their ships only coming into physical contact with their own kin, many prador wore atmosphere sealed armour perpetually, while others had been surgically transplanted into the aseptic interiors of their war machines. A plague would not spread and, to be effective, would have to be delivered across millions of targets. This seemed impossible, until the farcaster …

  U-space tech has always been difficult. A runcible gate will only open into another runcible gate and a U-space drive for a ship is effectively its own gate. Open ended runcibles had been proposed, developed, and had failed. Without the catcher’s mitt there at the other end nothing without its own integral U-space drive could surface from underspace. It couldn’t work. It wasn’t possible. Except it was.

  Because of the vagueness of my memories of the time I am assuming that the AIs developed the farcaster. The device could, using appalling amounts of energy, generate an open-ended gate. It was possible to point this thing anywhere in the prador Kingdom, inside their seemingly invulnerable ships, even inside the armour of individuals, and send something. But there was a problem: the energy requirement ramped exponentially with the size of the portal. To send something the size of a megaton contra terrene device, would require the full energy output of a G-type sun for a day, even if the iteration of the farcaster we had was capable of using that amount of energy, which it wasn’t. This was completely unfeasible and, if we could have utilized such massive amounts of power it could have been directed in a much more effective way. However, there were other possibilities. The output of a stacked array of fifty fusion reactors could deploy the device as it stood, and it was possible to open microscopic portals—ones that though small were large enough to send through something like a virus, a spore or a bacterium.

  Working together the Client and I made something that could kill the prador. I don’t know precisely what it was—the vagueness of my memories was due to the accident that destroyed most of my body, for it had also destroyed part of my mind. We were ready. We had our weapon and we had our delivery system. But things had changed in the intervening years. The prador had begun to lose and even as we lined up the farcaster for its first tests, the old prador king was displaced and they began to retreat, and to negotiate. The AIs put a hold on our project, then they cancelled it, seizing the farcaster and breaking it into separate elements, which were cast away all across known space.

  What happened then? The war ended, apparently. I never knew because my remains were clinging to life in one of the Client’s growth tanks as it fled into hiding aboard the Coin Collector. Apparently there had been some contention about the breaking up of the farcaster during which some unstable weapons activated. I don’t know. I just don’t know.

  Consciousness returned to me while I was alone aboard the Coin Collector, my mind somehow enslaved, my task to search out and recover the elements of the farcaster, and to one day take them to the Client, when it allowed me to know its location, so it could at last have its revenge against the prador. I waited patiently for that day, for I wanted revenge too and I wanted freedom, and I knew that the only way I could have them would be to finish the job the prador started so long ago.