The Technician

by Neal Asher

  Jem gazed down the barrel of the flack gun at his two prisoners. Blitz still looked rebellious, angry. He backed up against the wall of the van, started to get his feet underneath him. Sharn just looked exhausted and lay with his head against the floor, blood starting to pool around him.

  ‘Tell me why I shouldn’t pull the trigger,’ said Jem.

  Blitz just continued to gaze at him with barely controlled hate, seemingly readying himself to do something stupid. Sanders replied, ‘Because you’re better than them. We’ll just hand them over to the police – let them sort it out.’

  Sort it out.

  Just like with Shree, yes. These two were guilty of kidnap, attempted murder and murder itself, and once found guilty, as they undoubtedly would be, they would be mind-wiped, erased from existence. Quite right. These two, along with their father and their brother Kalash, had set the hooders on Bradacken way station, and they had killed Chanter. There should be no mercy for them. Only now did Jem wonder about his impulse to drag them inside the gravan, and realize he was tired of hate, so very tired of it. He started to lower the weapon.

  Something crashed against the side of the gravan, sending it penduluming through the air, four even grooves visible in the bodywork from the inside. Another thump on the underside as they rose, denting up the floor underneath Jem, an odd whining sound coming from the gravmotor. He staggered, reached out to grab the edge of the door to steady himself, some mental undercurrent telling him he just knew what would happen next. Blitz threw himself forward, hammering his head into Jem stomach, grabbed the gun and wrestled for control of it. Trying to tear the weapon from the man’s grasp, Jem spun him, slamming him against the wall of the van. A bang like some explosive going off and the whole panelled side of the van peeled away, a wind roaring inside. Blitz fell through, and still holding the gun, dragged Jem after.

  ‘It’s fucking got hold of us!’ Grant shouted, wrestling with the controls.

  He hung suspended from the side of the vehicle, one leg wrapped round a remaining panel strut to prevent him falling – Jem considered that the least of his worries. Blitz, suspended below, still clung to the gun, trying to turn the barrel towards Jem.

  Blitz should be clinging for his life, yet killing Jem seemed so much more important to him. No truce, no forgiveness here. The man hated what Jem had ceased to be long ago, and could see nothing else. Blitz had been fed that hate with his mother’s milk and was little more than a mental clone of his father. Jem swung his gaze across to the gabbleduck, up at full stretch from the ground, its body extended out like a great gnarled oak but for the huge quivering sac of its belly. It met his gaze and, for a brief instant, it seemed an understanding passed between them.

  A great calm suffused Jem as he tilted the gun, the barrel towards his own face. Why not, what did any of it matter? Blitz’s grip slipped as a black claw swept across and closed about his legs – that first claw releasing its hold on the gravan. Blitz slipped a finger down to the trigger and pulled it back. The weapon clicked and buzzed, a red empty light flashing on it. Blitz, having loosened his hold on the weapon to press that trigger, now lost his grip entirely and screamed on his way down.

  Jem hung there as the gravan rose, his calm quickly washing away. Oblivion was such an easy choice to make, and too easy when it was no choice at all, as in the case of Sharn, who by the time Sanders reluctantly stooped over him, had already bled out on the floor.

  They returned to Dragon Down mostly in silence, but for one brief exchange.

  ‘So what are you going to do now?’ Sanders asked.

  Jem considered the sons of Ripple-John with the hate impressed in their minds even as those minds developed. He considered Shree, who could not give up the war that made her, and he considered himself, indoctrinated from birth to believe and have faith, then in an odd second life turned into a vessel for the thoughts of another.

  ‘I don’t know what I’m going to do,’ he replied, ‘but I know what I’m going to be.’

  ‘And what’s that?’ Grant asked tiredly, at last thinking to slide his disc gun back into its holster.

  ‘For the first time in my life,’ Jem told them, ‘I’m going to be myself.’

  Epilogue

  Amazing that such seemingly huge claws could weave so intricately, thought Amistad, and so many of them were busy weaving all across the main continent of Masada.

  ‘What do you think it’s making?’ he asked.

  ‘Home,’ replied Penny Royal, completely invisible, but hovering protectively behind Leif Grant.

  The observation tower stood tall behind them, a long-stalked steel mushroom moved here so those squatting on it and in it could keep watch on the growing structure ahead. Amistad had already seen such a structure before, recorded in the eye of a hooder. It stood on the muddy plain amidst a spring growth of flute grass spearing from the ground like a million bloody knives – something a swarm of weaver birds might make, if they swarmed; some similarity to the nests of paper wasps and some to a modular construction space habitat for Humans – a convoluted basketwork city that played a dirge whenever the wind blew from the north.

  There had been no communication, none at all, no demands, nothing until now. All across Masada gabbleducks had begun behaving strangely, weaving odd shapes out of flute-grass stems then abandoning them for Humans to puzzle over. Amistad wondered what Chanter would have made of that – something, certainly. Here though, the Weaver had been disappointingly inactive, just living, like an animal, until the Polity lifter came in to right the Atheter AI and make repairs. It just watched the lifter and the maintenance robots, then, once they departed, it moved into the building and there in its structure wove a small home. Next, over ensuing months, other gabbleducks began to turn up here to weave dwellings for themselves. Were they just animals copying? Were they just somewhat adroit mocking birds? All Polity science could give no definite answer, somewhere between, perhaps, in that territory where physical manipulation of the world came before consciousness of self.

  But now a communication, direct from the Atheter AI: something had to be returned.

  Seeking an answer to the mystery here, Amistad studied the gabbleducks he could see, tried to discern something within the structure ahead, but nothing leapt out. He swung his gaze to the big grav-sled trundling along behind himself, Penny Royal and Grant.

  ‘He comes,’ said the black AI.

  ‘So there’s nothing I can say if it tells us to get the fuck off of Masada,’ said Grant.

  ‘Nothing at all,’ Amistad replied, turning to Grant. ‘In fact Earth Central has already designated evacuation ships.’

  ‘That’s annoying.’

  ‘That’s the AOP, and you agreed it was right when you took the job.’

  After Tombs had departed Masada, doubtless to go and find some place where he could at last ‘be himself’, Leif Grant had sunk back into morose introversion. Then Sanders went and snapped him out of it, renewing something they’d had before and, incidentally, delivering the news that the position of Human ambassador to the Atheter was open to him, if he wanted it.

  Amistad returned his attention to the scene ahead, noting a hundred identifying features on the approaching gabbleduck and knowing it to be the Weaver. It halted five metres in front of them, twitching its head slightly as it studied them. It also seemed to Amistad, by its long pause whilst gazing towards Grant, that the Weaver might be able to see Penny Royal too.

  ‘It’s your show now,’ Amistad told Grant.

  In his capacity as expert on all things Atheter, Amistad was here merely as an adviser. In its capacity as recovering lunatic, Penny Royal was here under Amistad’s charge.

  Grant glanced at the drone, whispered a sarcastic, ‘Thanks a bunch,’ then stepped forward. ‘We’ve brought what you asked for,’ he said out loud.

  A thought from Amistad brought the massive grav-sled round to one side, then had it settling down on the new flute grass with a sound like a steamroller over gravel. Th
e Weaver turned and studied the three huge chunks of the Technician lying on the sled, nodded contemplatively, then turned back towards the trio.

  ‘You have Policy on the occupancy of alien worlds,’ it said.

  Here it comes: get off our planet.

  ‘We do,’ Grant agreed, abruptly folding his arms and looking pained.

  The Weaver pointed at the pieces of the Technician. ‘I have this,’ it said, then stabbed a claw behind. ‘And this.’

  ‘Yess,’ said Grant slowly, unsure where this might be going.

  Humans were just so slow sometimes . . . well, most of the time really. Amistad focused on some of the lower parts of the conglomerate town growing here, noted the damage, the chewed-up basketwork, the ground churned by subterranean activity and dotted with pan-pipes molluscs. There wasn’t much here to build a civilization on when tricones kept eating your foundations.

  ‘You have what we threw away,’ the Weaver noted. ‘You have what we shattered and ground into grit.’

  ‘I see,’ said Grant, and maybe he did, because he smiled.

  The Weaver sat down on its haunches, lifted a claw to its bill and began to work at something between its holly-like white teeth. After a moment it flicked this away, tracked its course to the ground then swung back towards Grant.

  ‘No more gabble. Now we negotiate,’ it said.

  Acknowledgements

  As usual my thanks to the staff at Macmillan, including Julie Crisp, Chloe Healy, Amy Lines, James Long, Catherine Richards, Ali Blackburn, Steve Cox (especially for that ‘No more gabble’) and many others besides. In fact my thanks to all there who help bring this book to shelves in Britain and across the world, so that includes the foreign buyers and translators out there too. I also have to make a special mention here of cover designer Neil Lang and the superb artist Jon Sullivan. Hey, I really like what you’re doing with the covers, guys, I like it a lot. Further thanks must go out to all those fans who find me on my blog, on Facebook and elsewhere, to chat, offer support, advice and generally to reply to the stuff I put out there. With you lot a broadband connection away I feel almost as if I’ve got a social life! And last but not least, all my love to Caroline, without whom I would be a lonely, introvert weirdo, rather than just a weirdo.