Orbus by Neal Asher

Author:Neal Asher [Asher, Neal]
Language: eng
Format: epub, mobi
Tags: Fantasy, Fiction, Science Fiction
ISBN: 9780230737051
Publisher: Macmillan
Published: 2009-09-04T07:00:00+00:00

By slow degrees the soldier attains consciousness, knowing itself as Ebror, yet even throughout the process also knowing that Ebror the Prador is just an organic recording, a sub-component of itself, the point of the needle it uses to puncture the membrane separating itself from existence. Instinctively it retains that conscious component so it can review Ebror’s memories and understand the world it now finds itself in. It does all this for limited and clearly defined purposes: for the survival of itself and its squad and also for the destruction of the enemy.

Studying genetic tissue contained within its viral body, the soldier thoroughly understands Prador and all they are about. Reviewing substantial samples of DNA from Human beings, it gains some understanding of them too. All are the enemy. Its own species are the enemy outside its squad. Anything living – other than itself and its squad – is the enemy. This rules out confusion.

When the squad’s spaceship was attacked all those eons ago, and forced to crash-land on the planet, their time had been limited. They knew their present physical bodies would not be able to survive the ensuing attack, and so they took a very unusual route. Upon discovering the surrounding ecology of the planet to be dominated by a complex viral mycelium, they spliced this with the nano-mycelium that maintained both their vessel and their own bodies, incorporating into it their own genome and direct recordings of their long memories. It remained part of the vessel and part of themselves until the expected attack arrived, destroying both them and their ship, whereupon their bastard child spread in the oceans. They became somnolent then, sleeping, and incorporated as part of an ecology.

With an internal awareness that was a major evolutionary advantage of its kind from the beginning, the soldier explores its body and gradually understands the processes that have brought it to consciousness. The plan was for resurrection to ensue some brief years after their destruction, but the programming was too hurried, mistakes were made. Having incorporated them, the mycelial virus should have, after the running down of an internal biological clock, recoded some of the creatures it went on to infest, and turned them into exact copies of the original squad. Instead, the clock stopped and the virus just kept incorporating, at first at random, genetic samples taken from the creatures of its own world – burying the squad deep. Evolution then played its part too, so that this incorporation of genetic tissue became a tool for viral survival. Had there been no outside interference with that world, the soldier would have remained sleeping for ever.

However, the virally infected Prador, of which Ebror is one, were killed by a specific nanite that completely wiped out their nervous systems, leaving only a blank slate. They were thereafter left confined in armoured shells, completely cut off from any food supply. The result was a sequence of mutations within the shell, as the virus tried every single one of its strategies for survival, but failed.

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