Weaponized by Neal Asher

Author:Neal Asher [Asher, Neal]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Pan Macmillan
Published: 2022-03-14T17:00:00+00:00

13

Present

Oren stood before her. A maglev plate, which worked only in the corridors of the car, hovered behind him like a patient dog. The charred remains of the lone cacoraptor Vrease had attacked, and which Lecane hadn’t completely rendered to ash, lay on it wrapped in plasmel. He’d requested, over com, that they be collected and Ursula had demurred, until he argued that this raptor probably had no connection with the others and as such was worthy of the data it could provide. She didn’t tell him that she already knew that to be true. He added that if it was one the others had left behind, it still might have data worthy of study. She didn’t disabuse him of that either and in a flash of irritation she’d agreed. It was only after closing com again she remembered that she still had so many questions to ask him.

Since then her intention to speak to him had slid to the back of her mind. The things he knew, or might know, were important, but not essential to the current mission. Yet, there had been time. They had protean plans of attack but they were utterly dependent on the final situation they encountered. Callum had proposed that, since the car could move faster than the prador ship, it might be an idea to head straight to the radioactive seabed and prepare an ambush there. This was something she had to think on.

But now Oren stood before her.

She gaped at him, trying to remember everything she needed to ask and it all seemed to skate about in her mind. Sure, she remembered the main questions, but the detail seemed vague to her now, the logical chains broken. The arguments she’d prepared that Oren could not simply give formulaic pat answers to, or otherwise circumvent, seemed to slither from her grasp. She stared at him. She’d been moving around the car quite a lot over the last few days and had, in passing, visited his lab a couple of times. Both times he’d not been there. Often, when she thought about him and ran a trace, he was always elsewhere and busy, or something else came along to grab her attention.

‘It’s as if you’ve been avoiding me,’ she said.

He smiled mildly and shrugged. ‘We’ve all been very busy. I’ve been doing some interesting work with Nursum. It seems that when the first strangler fig attacked him it left a lot of its genetic material stuck to his bones. The upgrade incorporated that and perhaps this accounts for his erratic behaviour.’ He began walking, the maglev plate following him obediently.

‘Yes, Nursum,’ she said. ‘Was the cacoraptor genome you used in him different from the one you used in the rest of us?’

He glanced at her. ‘It came from the one in my lab. Because I wanted to use what appeared to be a more advanced and active genome thereafter, I used material from cacoraptors brought down by the multiguns. So the answer to your question is maybe.

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