by Neal Asher
Heading out of the foyer she stepped into the covered street. This area of the city had been one of the wealthier suburbs, generally occupied by those in the higher echelons of the Theocracy. It wasn’t a place where you had to pay to breathe the air in a walkway, or where oxygen debt could lead to enslavement, scole implantation, and eventual demise labouring in squerm ponds. Now, however, things had changed. There were none of those white uniforms with text of the Satagents running from underarm to ankle, and the only bearded fool in long robes was the corner preacher, who hadn’t been in the Brotherhood at all but was a city resident who delighted in lampooning religion and getting into arguments with the believers here, who still formed the larger part of the population.
Within a few minutes she had wended her way to the steel stairs leading up to Mulen’s apartment building, climbed these and walked out into the glassed-over area before the doors and there halted. She gazed about herself with interest for a moment, then reached out to thumb the comscreen beside the door. A dour-looking security guard peered out at her.
‘I have a delivery from Soola’s for Mr Glaffren,’ she said.
‘I don’t know you.’
‘I’m new, but not without training.’
‘Let me see it, then,’ the guard replied.
Resting one hand on her tilted hip she replied, ‘You are seeing it.’
The guard’s face receded a little way as he obviously sat back in his seat. ‘I think you can do better than that.’
Having watched this place for some time, Shree knew precisely what the man required. She ran a finger down the stick seam of her dress and opened it for him, cupping her breasts for a moment and squeezing her nipples, then sliding a hand to her pubis to gently play with herself.
‘Come see me afterwards,’ he said huskily, and the doors unlocked.
Closing up her dress she entered the foyer and headed for the stairs. The whores who regularly came here from Soola’s conducted their main business with Mulen, but then had a little number on the side with the security guard. Apparently the man did not like to go where Mulen had already been, and was conscientious – he kept on watching his camera screens all throughout the ensuing blowjob.
Three flights up, Shree reached the door into Glaffren Shipping and tapped the com screen beside it.
‘Delivery for Mr Glaffren.’
His new face peered out at her for a long moment, then the door unlocked. ‘Remove your clothing in the lower office then come up,’ he said.
The office contained two desks with old computer terminals mounted on them, a collection of squerm essence cylinders in one corner and a scattering of empty wine bottles on one desk. Litter lay scattered across a floor that looked none too clean. Mulen had been letting himself go, just as she intended to let him go. She shed her dress and draped it across the cleanest surface she could see, then climbed the spiral stair to his apartment.
‘Mr Glaffren?’ she said, scanning the kitchen diner she found herself in.
‘Through here.’
He awaited her in his bedroom, flopped back naked on his bed, the half-empty bottle of wine he had been swigging from clutched in his left hand, his penis in his right. Shree wrinkled her nose at the smell of sour sweat and alcohol, then stepped over to the window overlooking Zealos and the covered street two hundred metres below. As she had surmised, the window was one that simply locked down on a seal, and generally outside atmosphere was kept out by a pressure differential. She reached up and began undoing the catches.
‘What in Smythe’s name do you think you’re doing?’
He was up off the bed and coming unsteadily towards her by the time she undid the last catch. She turned, smiling cheekily as he drew close. He hesitated, and in that pause the heel of her hand came up hard into his nose, crushing it and depositing him on his backside on the floor.
‘Whah!’ he managed nasally.
‘I’m here to bring you to account for the fifteen pond workers you personally executed, Proctor Mulen,’ she said. ‘I am a member of the Tidy Squad and it is not our policy to accept the Polity Intervention amnesty.’
‘D’ fuck!’ He reached round and smashed the wine bottle he still held on the corner of a cupboard, then surged to his feet, fast. Shree was glad about that; he was fat, heavy, smelly – she hadn’t wanted to pick him up. He came at her with confidence inspired by her naked, petite and vulnerable-looking female body. Intercepting his arm as he thrust at her with the bottle, she snapped his elbow, turned him and slammed his head against the window, once, twice. As he staggered back she heaved the window off its seals and propelled it aside on its hinge. When he came at her again the throw was simple and neat, and all she’d need to wash was her hands and the hip she rolled him over. He didn’t even touch the window frame, though he did touch the roof of the covered street, and hard.
Ten minutes later, Shree had retrieved her pack, having given the guard the kind of blow he had neither expected nor wanted, before going on to trash the image files of the surveillance system. She was a number of streets away when an icon appeared to the far right of her visual field informing her of a call through her aug. With a slight mental effort she’d always found difficult to describe to those who had never tried these devices, she accepted the call, and halted to lean against a nearby wall.
‘It’s done?’ enquired the man whose face seemed to appear in midair before her.
‘Certainly.’ Shree studied him.
Thracer was a tough TS unit commander, the maple-leaf scar on his shaven head indication of his route to the Squad from the Overlanders. Perhaps it was time to tell him about how things were changing, to let him in?
How did the Tidy Squad survive whilst being hunted down by AIs and dangerous ECS agents? It did seem that the AIs secretly agreed with the Squad’s work, but she reckoned they were reluctant to close down units like Thracer’s until through the likes of him they’d found and caught the Squad Leader – that person whose identity few knew.
‘Then get your wilderness gear together – you’ll be needing it.’
‘Found another one out there?’
‘No, but it seems target Alpha has left Heretic’s Isle and they’re letting him run.’
‘Dangerous – we know there’s AI interest.’
‘Even so, I have a standing instruction to pass this on to you.’
‘Send me the details,’ she said.
Jeremiah Tombs possessed an iconic status here on Masada, and the Tidy Squad wanted him swept away most of all. But as Shree well knew there was so much more to it than one ex-proctor. The AI interest in Tombs related to the entire status of the planet Masada and getting close to him might lead to a chance to remove even bigger threats to this world. Certainly this would be a very risky kill, very likely a suicidal one, but it was one Shree had always wanted and, as Squad Leader, it had been easy enough to secure it for herself.
As the shore continued to recede, Jem tried to shake from his mind the image of Sanders lying in a pool of blood, and concentrate on the present. He began to examine the controls available to him through the console set just below the rudder arm. Eventually he noted that wrapped around the rudder pivot were small hydraulic motors, connected by an optic into the same console, and surmising that the boat possessed some kind of autopilot, soon found and engaged it, keeping his course due north.
While the boat sailed on, he sat back, flinched at that same bloody image, and again tried to turn his thoughts to other things, but memory seemed a perilous place. His inspection tour of sprawn canals lay clear in his mind, but he struggled, his eyes watering again and an unknowable dread coming to sit on his chest, when he tried to get beyond the point when he landed his aerofan inside Triada Compound. Something unusual had been happening, because he recollected his fellow proctors being stirred up like a mid-pond filled with meat flakes. Something about the rebels? He reached up and touched his head where his Gift had once been attached. It was as if, with its removal, a large portion of me
mory connected to it had been excised too. There had been fear over the aug channels, he was sure of that, terror even.
Behemoth . . .
The name, and some attached meaning, seemed to sit in his skull like a weight bristling with barbed hooks. Behemoth had given them the Gift, but knowledge of that creature’s nature remained confined to the upper echelons. He tried to shake the memory free and realized he was sweating, and yet cold at the same time. Then he saw an image, a brief flash with visual file bar coding running down the side of it, someone in the shipyard of Flint glimpsing some immense shape on a screen, just before a wall of fire fell down on him. Next came screaming, channels snuffing out, a whole portion of the aug network disappearing . . .
Jem found himself coiled in the bottom of the boat in darkness, but painful recall remained with him. Flint had been snuffed out, hadn’t it? That much he retained: one small fragment dragged out of a darkness guarded by something terrifying. And now he just did not have the will to venture there again. He kept himself in the present, found with extreme disgust that he had shit himself.
Forcing himself into motion, Jem removed his pyjama trousers, cleaned them and himself with seawater, then tossed them to the far end of the boat. By the time he was done he realized the dawn was coming – he’d been out of it for over ten hours. He just sat listening to the thrum of the motor and the steady lapping of the sea against the hull, his mind shut down, nothing to see . . .
The sun, eating a diamond chunk out of the horizon, set him in motion again. He searched lockers set along the sides of the boat, finding a pair of overalls to go over his pyjama jacket, cinched with the belt of a large sheath knife, and a life jacket that he immediately donned. He also found a complex medical kit with inset autodoc like a hibernating metal spider – certainly Polity technology – some fishing gear, then food and drink. A gun would have been useful, but the short, vicious-looking harpoon gun he uncovered would have to do. Thus kitted out, he uncapped and sipped from a bottle containing cold coffee with a vaguely salty taste, ate preserved sausage and dried fruit, and gazed into the distance.
By his estimation it would take him a further three days to reach the mainland, but his hope was that before then one of the cameras up on the laser arrays would spot him and a proctor be sent out by aerofan to investigate. But if this did not occur, what to do?
Peering down at the console screen, he used a small ball control to bring up a map of the main continent. Generally there wasn’t much civilization along the south coast, since the climate, though good, wasn’t right for crop ponds. However, on the other side of the eastern peninsula lay the port of Godhead, where ships docked to unload a kind of alien guano, mined on some island out that way. Abruptly he came to a decision. He had to presume that some of what the computer here was telling him was true, as proven by the position of the sunrise, and so made a course correction to take him round the south-eastern peninsula. Further investigation gave him an exact figure for the journey time of five and a half Masadan days. Time to explore his memories, if he dared.
It took Jem four days to finally drag enough memories clear of the darkness inside his skull to form a small but coherent collection; four days of probing a wound and often finding the pain too much for consciousness. After the second occasion of having to wash his clothing in the sea, he learnt that it was best to strip off his trousers when he tried this, because each time he lost all self-control. Sanders must have cleaned him up each time before . . .
Sanders? Before?
Yes, the rebel doctor he killed while escaping. He saw her clear in his mind naked on a beach, but that memory had to be false because she wore no breather mask.
Surgical alterations. Polity technology.
He shook his head trying to clear that. He would have to sort out the truths and fictions there later, for he did clearly remember her walking outside with him before . . . before he cut her throat. He swallowed, the artificial lining of his mouth dry, concentrated on memories retrieved, sitting there in his skull like a precise interlocking collection of geometric shapes, and studied them closely . . .
Behemoth was an intelligent entity, a massive sphere of alien flesh able to propel itself through vacuum like a spaceship, and wielding weapons from within its body more potent than those of a Theocracy dreadnought. It had destroyed such a warship, but had itself been injured in the process and, wounded and angry, it had come to the Braemar system to exact vengeance. It had arrived screeching for Hierarch Amoloran, who had betrayed its trust, using against the Polity a weapon it had provided so that blame would fall squarely on the creature itself. Upon its arrival it became clear why the Septarchy Friars occupied so many of the aug channels with their chanting: Behemoth had provided the Gift so it could seize control of the Brotherhood and only their racket kept it out. Not finding Amoloran, for he had been replaced by Hierarch Loman, it had turned its weapons on the shipyards of Flint, obliterating them, then it had . . .
Nothing. He couldn’t get beyond that point and now he was weary, needed to sleep rather than render himself unconscious again. Deliberately maintaining a void inside his skull, Jem lay down in the bottom of the boat, allowing the thrum of the motor to lull him. Sleep came and went like a black juggernaut, dragging daylight in behind it as the only indicator that he had slept. He sat up and stretched, then peered out across the sea.
At first he thought he was seeing a bare rock sticking up from the waves, but when he detected movement he realized that yes, a rock was sticking up over there, but it was covered with sealuroynes. Knocking off the autopilot, which obviously wasn’t taking into account the local fauna, he swung his boat away from the colony hoping to bypass it before being seen. However, having only just woken he hadn’t seen the danger soon enough, and the heaving movement there culminated in a wave of the creatures diving into the sea with a concerted splash.
‘Zelda Smythe, guard me now,’ he muttered, and grabbed up the harpoon from by his feet.
He didn’t know for sure whether sealuroynes were dangerous. But they possessed a similar name to the predatory siluroyne, and now they appeared to be in pursuit of him he didn’t want to wait to find out. He turned the motor throttle right round to its stop and the outboard roared, throwing spume out behind and lifting the bow clear of the water. But even this did not seem likely to be fast enough, for the creatures behind were accelerating, playfully hurling themselves up out of the water as they came.
For long minutes he stayed ahead of them, then they were into his wake, their bodies churning the sea like oiled rubber, then leaping out beside his boat, then ahead of it. Seeing one of them leap airborne close to the boat, he shuddered. The things looked like shroud-wrapped corpses, bones more than a mere hint through translucent obsidian skin, underlying arms enwrapping torsos but terminating in odd fan-shaped fins which at the tail opened and closed like the petals of a rose, long stretched bird heads and teardrop eyes containing turning wheels of linked familiar shapes.
Jem found himself choking on terror. He couldn’t look at those eyes. They gazed straight into the darkness in his mind and seemed to be the key to unravelling it. In the rush and splash of their movement all about him, he heard the underlying sharpening of scythes, and it was as if the surrounding creatures were all merging into one menacing whole, rearing up out of the sea into a nightmare hood. Another sound now, and Jem realized it was issuing from him, a chesty keening that seemed to be using up all his air. He dragged his gaze away, the confusing image of the thing they were making spreading before the boat, sharp edges and grey-scaled hide.
Then the boat slammed into it, hurling him forwards. Jem smacked his head on one of the lockers, but though his head covering transmitted pain, no blessed unconsciousness arrived. He curled in the bottom of the boat, crying. When he finally surfaced it was to observe a sea filled with nothing more threatening than waves, and to see his map screen indicating that he had hit the western side of the peninsula he had been trying to navigate around.
Heroyne (an introduction)
As indicated by its name, this creature does bear some resemblance to the heron of Earth, this emphasized by a similarity of environments – of mud flats covered with the reedlike ‘flute grasses’. However, there are no flying creatures on that world that have not been introduced by Humans, and to call an alien organism a bird is to descend into fundamental error. Heroynes look like birds, hatch from eggs and make nests, but there the resemblance ends. The eggs are not hatched in the nests, but carried about on the back of the prime male (image one) of the species, whose body resembles a thick bucket seat, its long curved neck extending from what would have been the backrest. Below this neck, to the creature’s fore, are two sets of arms terminating in spadelike scoops, whose sum purpose is to load the eggs onto its back. The prime male also possesses a long beak just like the secondary male and the female (images two and three respectively), but it is serrated, and no one knows why. The female builds a night nest – a thick pad of interwoven flute-grass stems. After being fertilized by the primary and secondary males it lays eggs in this nest after three months’ gestation, then abandons them, whereupon the primary male collects them up and carries them around until they hatch. Heroyne chicks must then get away from the male as fast as they can whilst the male goes into a brief fugue, after which it will eat them. One thing is known for certain about these creatures: more study is required, because much of their behaviour doesn’t seem to have a logical evolutionary basis.
However . . .
– From THE MASADAN PLANETARY Almanac
The Atheter had constructed the mechanism with meticulous precision, and deeply graven their purpose into its structure. It must erase the active higher thought processes, the sentience and intelligence of the Atheter themselves – a wipeout process affecting not only the content of those minds, but their physical structure too. Upon first initiating, it had spread its pattern disruptors all around the Homeworld to carry out its function on a massive scale, and sometimes, when it was done, too little survived of the animal mind to keep the target alive. However, many did survive the process and, as had been planned, the Atheter returned to the level of animals: gabbleducks. This done, the mechanism followed through with its secondary function: matter disruption to shatter remaining Atheter technology, to render it down small enough for the tricones and the depredations of time.
