He also noted the crushed remnants of juvenile Prador carapaces scattered here and there. Ebulan must have killed them first, believing there to be a betrayal from within. The surviving one Vrell had found must have been unable to move from the hospital area when it was summoned. Vrell turned away to be about his task, then swung back as the glisters dropped from the ceiling and sculled towards him. He fired the rail-gun, shattering them and turning the water within the sanctum cloudy. Leeches and whelks quickly moved in to clear up the mess, as they must have earlier cleaned the flesh from the human bones and the meat out of his father’s carapace. Vrell hoped Father had taken a long time to die.
The hole was large, and the surrounding area had been subjected to a plasma fire—little remaining but warped and melted metal. As he hoped, the hull metal was broken open here, and bent down in large jagged sheets. Repair mesh had extruded from the layers, forming a crumpled tangle in the dark waters below, but it had been unable to connect. He spent hours cutting it away with the welder’s plasma setting, then watched it sink to the sea floor five metres below, where it stirred up silt and sent scuttling the razored disks of prill. Then he set to work with the plasticizer, softening the hull metal, hauling it into place and reversing that effect to harden it again. Mesh immediately began to extrude, but there were still some larger holes to deal with. Roughly cutting up the sheets he had brought, he manoeuvred them into position and began to weld. Many hours later he finished and, satisfied the mesh would fill the remaining holes, decided to return to the unflooded section.
Vrell felt tired as he scrambled through the darkness to the blast doors. His sealed wounds were now aching and itching, and there seemed a pressure in them. His tough Prador body was almost immune to any kind of infection, but he was beginning to wonder if he might have picked up some alien bug. He was also, he knew, suffering from oxygen deprivation.
The first door opened and he scrambled inside. He then approached the control panel and tried to get a pump working to extract the water, but it just would not respond. Angry, he slammed his claw against the wall beside the panel, and was surprised to see he had left a dent. Suddenly, the area of flesh underneath the patch over where he had lost his claw began to really hurt. Never mind the water, then. He input the code to open the second blast door. Nothing happened for a moment, then his father’s ident glyph appeared on the hexagonal screen. Vrell realized he had walked into one of the automatic code-change traps his father had spread throughout his ship. The doors now would not open unless an override was sent from Ebulan’s sanctum.
Vrell lost it then, smashing the panel and screen with his claw. This exacerbated the pain radiating from underneath his patches. His legs folded underneath him and he sank to the floor. It was no use; he was finished. Sudden weariness washed over him and he began to drift in and out of consciousness. In one lucid moment he realized this was the result of anoxia, but he was unable to do anything about it. He was going to suffocate in here. Blackness swamped his senses.
Time passed, a very great deal of time.
‘This has to be the most alien skyscape I’ve seen, yet humans created it,’ said Janer.
He had seen many unusual worlds during his indenture and subsequent voluntary service to the hive mind. Here, strange weather patterns, due to the atmosphere’s odd gas mix and aerial algae, divided the sky with cloud layers in varying shades of blue and green like vast floating isles. And now, at sunset, a backdrop of half the sky was a veined explosion of indigo, gold and ruby. The sky alone would have been enough, but there were snairls here as well.
‘Genfactoring was at its height when humans first came here,’ the mind observed.
It spoke to him through the hivelink in his right ear. Two hornets, which were akin to two synapses in the hive mind and were also one facet of its disperse sensorium, rested in the transparent skin-stick box formed to his shoulder. He eyed them, noting the circuit patterns on their thoraxes and abdomens. He had only recently learnt that rather than decoration those patterns were the exterior evidence of the nanocircuitry linking synapse to synapse by radio, rather than by slow pheromonal transfer of thoughts as had originally been the case, for the hive minds had not been averse to benefiting from human technology. Though for humans it had been a shock to discover that they shared Earth with hive intelligences carried by hornet swarms—a fact impossible to accept for some. Even after long familiarity Janer still found the concept problematic.
Janer returned his attention to the spectacular sky, reached out and wiped condensation from the curving transparent shell before him, beyond which he observed a translucent bladder trailing tentacles, swept past by an errant wind.
‘That was one of the earliest adaptations,’ the mind commented.
Janer nodded. He knew this world’s history. When humans first came here the place had been choking on its own aerial algae, the ecosystem teetering on the edge of catastrophe since a volcanic eruption had provided a huge food resource for those floating diatoms, thus causing their population to explode. Computer models predicted as a consequence the extinction of all other life here within five thousand years.
‘Introduced to feed on the algae—an adaptation from the Portuguese man-of-war jellyfish.’ Janer pointed past the creature to a circling flock of rooks in the distance. ‘And they were introduced to feed on them when their population exploded. But in the end they weren’t enough to keep the algal population down. I know what happened here. If you recollect, I was required by you to research the history of this place when I first came here indentured to you.’
‘Of course I recollect. The capacity to forget is a purely human trait.’
Janer snorted and peered through the clouds. There: three huge life forms. Many creatures had been introduced here: alien, Terran, and adaptations of both. The one that had averted the ecological catastrophe was a splicing of humble snails, those same floating jellyfish and a couple of alien forms. The result was snairls.
Floating amid the slate clouds were three behemoth spiral shells like fairy towers. These supported huge grey-and-white snail bodies that probed the air with glistening antlers in search of rich masses of the algae on which the creatures fed.
Snairls hatched from eggs the size of footballs, dropping from the sky like jelly hail. They fed on the thick ground-slicks of dying algae, growing aerogel shells that they filled with helium. By the time they were the size of cows, they achieved buoyancy, and left the ground for richer fields. The genetic manipulation might have stopped with them had it not become a part of the very culture of this place. But here the rulers of humanity were the CGs—Chief Geneticists—and the manipulation continued. Some centuries past, a CG adapted humans to live in the slimy arteries and cysts inside snairl bodies. Now these people sailed the skies in their strange craft, trading genfactored artefacts. They were a long-lived people whose span was delimited by the life of their host. Janer turned away from his viewpoint within Upper Shell to observe the gas bags behind him, and to remember.
He had lived with the crew of this very snairl, the Graaf, and been aboard when it mated with another of its kind, and then died. He had seen the crew die inside it, and a lover die, and been saved from death himself by the hornets he then carried. The fleshy body of the Graaf had long since decayed and dropped away. Now this shell was ballasted, and driven through the sky by motorized screws attached to the huge shell he stood inside. It was also the home to hornets. Thousands of nests occupied Lower Shell—ballast being shed as they increased in number. This shell had seemed a safe haven to this particular hive mind. Other minds occupied other shells. But for the indigent and barely human population, this world belonged to the hornets. It was, inevitably, called Hive.