‘Another… time,’ he managed on a clicking gulp, then saluted to them and launched his scooter into the sky.

‘Sable Keech, you have broken the law,’ came the voice of the Warden from the com in the scooter’s console.

‘I am aware of the flying regulations around shuttle ports,’ he replied.

‘I should hope so. You are, after all, a monitor. You realize you have been automatically fined?’

‘Yes, I realize, but if I had stayed in the area the five Batians there might have been tempted to try and kill me despite your watching SM — then you’d have had a more serious crime to contend with, one way or another.’

‘I see… I did note the arrival of those five you mention,’ said the Warden.

‘But did not see fit to warn me, even though you must have known I was here and must have known my record with them.’

‘Even though armed, they were doing nothing illegal.’

‘Yes,’ said Keech, ‘but weren’t you hoping they would?’

There came no further comment from the AI, as Keech turned his scooter and headed for the beach from which he had first departed. He set the scooter to land on automatic, as what depth perception he did have — aug assisted — was fading from his eye. With a deal of unsteadiness he dismounted, tucked the cleansing unit under his arm, then staggered across a bank of glossy pebbles, and collapsed on his knees in the green sand beyond.

OUTSIDE PARAM FUNCTION: BALM PUMP 28 % LOAD INCREASE.

It was playing out again, only this time the problem was caused by the drug he had used to try and solve the previous problem.

INVASIVE ORGANIZM SCAN, he instructed, and received an immediate reply.

PRESENT.

He was fast running out of options. With hands that seemed flaccid, he opened his overalls and connected the cleansing unit again. The balm coming out of him was muddy brown this time, and it took a long time for the liquid sapphire to return. The blurred line of red lights held his attention, while he thought about what he must do. The option of dispensing with this reified body and going full AI would require his return to the Dome then to the moon Coram, where the only suitable facilities were available. Full death, he decided, was not an option. The remaining option resided in the lozenge depending from his neck chain. What had the lifecoven woman who had sold it to him said?

‘It reads the blueprint and then it sends off its little builders.’

But even that would require his return to very high-tech medical facilities.

‘Yes, you need to be in a tank for it to work correctly,’ said the woman.

Keech nodded to her, and she stepped back into the dingle at the head of the beach. And he could not quite grasp why this bothered him so, but he was then quickly distracted.

‘Why should you have any more life,’ said a voice beside him.

He glanced across at Corbel Frane.

‘Who are you to ask that question?’ he replied.

Frane smoothed his moustache. ‘In a fair and equitable world we can all ask questions,’ he said.

‘You can’t, because I killed you ages ago.’

Frane seemed affronted as he drifted from hallucination to memory.

OUTSIDE PARAM FUNCTION: CEREBRAL PROBE ERROR.

Cradling the cleanser against his belly, Keech heaved himself to his feet. ‘I’ve got to get help,’ he said.

‘Not one of your favourite pastimes,’ said Francis Cojan, standing at his side.

Keech glanced at the man and saw that he was young, athletic, and smiling, not at all like the last time he had seen him.

‘You need friends to help you. Keech doesn’t believe in friends.’

Keech turned to see Alphed Rimsc on his other side. It was only his voice that Keech recognized, the man’s face having been mostly eaten away by the diatomic acid Keech had put in his suit’s oxygen supply.

‘This is not real, you’re all dead.’

‘Really, where you should be,’ said Corbel Frane, waving a finger at him. ‘I mean, how long has this been going on — seven centuries? Are you mad? How many lives has your vendetta cost?’

Keech gestured at him with a grey claw. ‘That’s not something you would think! That’s me!’

He was about to shout out again when he suddenly realized he was utterly alone on the beach.

‘Shit,’ he said, and gazed down at the two green lights on the cleanser.

REPEAT ERROR MESSAGE, he instructed.

OUTSIDE PARAM FUNCTION: CEREBRAL PROBE ERROR.

In his organic brain — cross-referenced to AI emotional emulation — he got in the nearest he could get to a cold sweat.

DETAIL.

The reply did nothing to ease that feeling.

Capillary blockage to organic cerebrum/Agglutinate balm/AI viral fibre/Ox-3 starvation.

PRESENT DETAIL.

NOMINAL.

That made him feel no better. Cradling the cleansing unit while it continued labouring to clear his fouled balm, he returned to his scooter and slumped down with his back against it. He’d just come as close as it was possible, for a walking corpse, to having a stroke.

Underneath accreted layers of time, perversion, and monstrous deed after monstrous deed, there lay an earlier self that Frisk knew would be horrified at what she had since become. She even found a certain perverse pleasure in that fact — more pleasure than she was extracting in this present pursuit.

The ancient Prador to whom Ebulan himself had been first-child during the Prador/Human war, had maintained that human flesh gained added piquancy from extended suffering. So it was that humans force-grown for meat began to be slaughtered by slow and excruciating factory processes. When they had fled to the Prador Third Kingdom, she and Jay had found satisfaction of their perverse instincts in the holding pens and slaughterhouses there, but only some. For force-grown humans did not have time to acquire the life experience to truly appreciate the horror of their situation.

In later years, after Jay had departed, Frisk had continued to find satisfaction there, but it had decreased as eating human meat had become less fashionable amongst Prador kind. With fewer and fewer force-grown humans available, sometimes years might pass between each sado-sexual release for her. She had tried human blanks before, but always been frustrated.

And thus it was now. The blank, of course, remained utterly indifferent to the things she was doing to him. She realized this was a pointless exercise, but could not restrain herself from carrying it through to the end. Under instruction from his thrall unit, he grew an erection and pumped away at her while she cut and burned him. But because he was also ancient Hooper, the burns quickly scabbed and slewed away, and his skin closed back over the wounds she made like a layer of oil over water, his expression changing not one whit as she inflicted this abuse on him. In the end she grew bored and frustrated at his passivity, and pushed him away. How she wished things were still as they had once been.

‘Move back to the door,’ she instructed.

The blank pushed himself off her and stepped back as instructed. Lying back, she remembered the games she and Jay had once played: the screams of both agony and ecstasy ringing through the pens, the quintessential pleasure of watching some favourite plaything coming to realize that he or she was no longer favoured, and faced only a future of agony and death, then consumption by the Prador. She remembered how, with the correct drugs and techniques, they could extend such an individual’s life for days — even after removing their entire skin. Heady days, now gone for ever.

‘Leave me,’ she instructed the blank, and turned over on to her stomach as the door closed behind him.

Of course, now she was coming back into human-habited space, there would be a surplus of material for her delectation. Most of them would be Hoopers, true, but they would be Hoopers with minds, and even though durable, they could still be made to suffer — it was all a matter of technique. She understood herself well enough to know that her imminent return to the scene of her most ghastly crimes was not really about Jay or Keech — it was about boredom and need.