The Engineer ReConditioned

by Neal Asher

  “I don’t have the equipment for a large-scale planetary action. All I have is delta wing landing craft adapted for orbital bombardment.”

  “We will supply soldiers and landing craft for any ground action. You have the hold space.” Kellor nodded then tilted his head as the crodorman came staggering into the vending area. The man looked drunk and angry. Kellor shook his head in mock sadness and dropped a hand down to his belt. He felt nothing but contempt for bad losers.

  “How soon can you be ready?” asked Conard.

  “There are a few loose ends…”

  The crodorman approached their table, pulling something from his bulky garments.

  “Trazum speck!”

  Kellor knew enough crodorun to recognise the challenge and threat. He stood as the crodorman finally pulled free a cylinder of grey metal. The end of the cylinder shot away to a distance of a metre and hovered suspended, the vague shimmer of field-stiffened monofilament between it and the cylinder. Kellor drew a small flat gun and pointed it. The crodorman paused; that moment again. The gun made a sound like a plastic ruler slapped against a table. The crodorman’s arm fell off. The weapon fell with it and sheared in a half a recently vacated chair. On his feet now Kellor aimed again. The crodorman had time only to look down at the blood pumping from his stump. Again that sound. A hole the size of a strawberry appeared in ridged forehead and spattered customers behind the crodorman with pieces of skull and brain. He fell back over the vending machine which whined under his weight and thanked him for his custom. As Kellor holstered his gun he noted Conard clipping a similar weapon back into a wrist holster. He filed the information away for future reference.

  “That’s one loose end,” he said.

  * * * *

  “It’s female,” said Abaron.

  “I thought you had females,” said Chapra. They were sitting in a small eating area. Chapra was eating prawns and Abaron occasionally gave the plateful a strange look.

  “Female…definitions. I had two sexes and made the fundamental error of assuming that because they were so like Earth crustaceans in every respect they would be the same in meiosis…it’s the trihelical DNA. There are three sexes, all contributing their share of the chromosomes. This is the third.” He pointed at the projection. It showed a crustacean little different in outward appearance to its fellows.

  “So our friend used the device to conduct a sex-change operation,” said Chapra with much amusement.

  “Yes,” said Abaron grudgingly. He looked at the creature curled around its weird machine. “No doubt it is correcting my error with one of the other species.”

  “Why don’t you do the rest?” asked Chapra. “Help it out.” Abaron stared at her for a moment as if trying to decide whether or not she was ridiculing him. He eventually nodded then took up his notescreen and headed out of the room.

  “What has it got in there now?” Chapra asked the empty air. The projection flickered and changed, showed the creature harvesting some of the water weed and feeding it into the machine. The projection then flicked back to real time showing the creature uncurling and moving back from its machine. A cloud of small objects gusted from one white mouth.

  “What is that?”

  “Seeds and spores,” said Box. “Initial analysis shows—” Box’s voice abruptly cut off.

  “Yes…shows what?”

  The silence lasted for racked-out seconds. Chapra felt a chill. It was not often that an AI did not reply, was not there. To her knowledge this could only mean that Box’s entire processing power had come on line. And that power was phenomenal.

  Box said, “I am sorry to delay. There are seeds and spores for one hundred different varieties of water weed.”

  “But there was only one,” said Chapra, and only after she had said it did she realise what Box had told her. “Jesu, it can do that?”

  Box said, “From the plant material it placed in the device the creature has made seeds and spores for one hundred different varieties of water plant. The genetic coding for sixty-four percent of these plant seeds is close enough to the original plant code for it to have altered that genome. The rest fall outside that area of probability as they are bihelical DNA.”

  “It’s an engineer, a fucking genetic engineer.”

  “Shall I continue?”

  “Yes, sorry.”

  “Many of the seeds seem to have their origins in a completely different environment from what is likely the creature’s native one but have been altered to survive in it. Five of the seeds are from Earth seaweeds.”

  “You mean Earth-type?” asked Chapra, even though she knew an AI did not make that kind of mistake.

  “Earth seaweeds, specifically three types of kelp and two bladder wracks. The kelps are Furzbelows or Saccorhiza Polyschides, Sea Belt or—”

  “Yes, yes, you’ve made your point, but what does it mean?”

  “You require my answer to that?”

  “I would like it. I know what mine is.”

  “Very well, this creature is or was a member of star-spanning race with a technology comparable if not superior to our own. At some time it or its kind visited Earth.”

  “Is or was?”

  “We have never before encountered a creature like this yet it has obviously travelled in human space. If its point of origin does turn out to be the system for which we are heading, then the creature might post date the extinction of its own kind by as much as five million years.”

  “How long now until we get there?”

  “Forty-eight solstan hours.”

  Chapra nodded to herself and returned her attention to the projection.

  “Hell,” she said. “What now?”

  The creature had placed the sample pots on the jetty, each of which contained something.

  “I’m going down there.”

  “Judd is on his way.”

  “Yes, I’m sure he is.”

  * * * *

  Diana unclipped the restraining bar from her seat as the interface helmet automatically disconnected itself from her head, from her mind. Abruptly she was human again; limited to a small and fragile bipedal form. It was to be a god to interface with the Cable Hogue. It was also very tiring.

  “Everything nominal,” said Jabro, as if he expected no answer.

  “Nominal,” said Diana, still seeing the shore scenes from Callanasta’s surface. The tsunami had been ten metres high, but the shore baffles had absorbed most of its energy. There had been only minor flooding in some coastal areas. No deaths. But then not many people lived on that world.

  “We should do a weapons test before arrival,” said Jabro. Behind his back Orland grinned at Seckurg, the token Golem on the bridge.

  “Why should we?” asked Diana, her face straight.

  “We don’t want anything to go wrong at the other end,” said Jabro, just as straight-faced.

  “Hogue,” said Diana, addressing the ceiling as was the wont of any addressing an AI, the location of which they were unsure. “Give us a vector on something to blast.”

  “Asteroid field two hours away at present speed. Navigation hazard and mostly the size of Separatist dreadnoughts. Nice that,” said Hogue with relish.

  “How long with the Laumer engines?”

  “One hour. Engines still on diagnostic.”

  “Take them off that and put them online. This is a priority mission.” Deep in the guts of the Cable Hogue, banks of crystalline cylinders phased red-violet then off the visible spectrum. The force holding the ship under the surface of underspace dragged it deeper and slammed it forward. The energy expended was such that the ship left a visible trail behind it in realspace; self-created antimatter sparkled into oblivion as it connected with stray hydrogen atoms and left black lines like stretch marks across vacuum.

  One hour later the Cable Hogue flashed into existence in a field of asteroids with a dispersion of thousands of kilometres. Asteroids glowed and bloomed into expanding spheres of plasma. Jabro segmented an asteroid the s
ize of Earth’s moon, then hit each segment with quark bombs. The resultant flash was mistaken as a nova on a distant world, a hundred years on.

  “That cost us,” said the ship AI, but Jabro was laughing like a maniac and did not hear. Diana smiled to herself, knowing Hogue would not have allowed Jabro access to that particular weapons bank if the cost had been prohibitive. The cost later turned out to be a twenty minute stopover in the troposphere of a gas giant for refuelling, then the Hogue really opened up with its Laumer engines. The result was called The Cable, and it glowed in the skies of many a world for decades.

  * * * *

  The heat licked at the edges of the air blast on Chapra’s face as she entered the isolation chamber. It almost seemed malevolent. Judd walked out ahead of her, to the edge of the jetty, and studied the containers. The creature was floating about ten metres out and Chapra felt that faint sensation that told her she was being ultrasound scanned. After a moment she followed Judd and peered down into the containers.

  “A gift?” she wondered. She squatted down and looked closely. Three of the containers held small quantities of metallic powder. There were small quantities of crystalline substances in a couple of others, and in the remaining three were minute copies of the containers themselves. Chapra reached inside and took one out. Like the originals it was transparent. There was a mere fleck of something inside it. Judd said, “The creature showed increased scanning activity when you spoke and it is showing it again now.”

  Chapra stood up. “Perhaps it understands that this is how we communicate. I imagine that it communicates using ultrasound and pheromones—not an easy language to translate.” She stooped and took up four of the containers. Judd took up the other four.

  “I don’t think these are a gift,” she continued. “I think the creature is letting us know its requirements.” She turned to the door then and halted in surprise. Abaron, dressed in a totally-enclosing environment suit, stood just inside the chamber.

  “Abaron.” She could think of nothing more to say.

  “There is a communication for you,” he said, his voice grating from the PA of the suit. He quickly turned back to the door, hit the control to open it, went through. Chapra and Judd followed him through the lock. In that little chamber Abaron removed his mask while Chapra flicked back her hood. His face was pouring with sweat.

  “Is that suit malfunctioning?” asked Chapra sweetly, then damned herself for insensitivity—at least he was trying. She shook her head. “What do you mean ‘a communication’?”

  “A priority message from a place called Clavers World,” he said.

  “Box? I thought you weren’t letting anything through.”

  “I merely reassigned priority. One of my subminds has been vetting all communications. This particular one may be relevant to all our actions. It is from Alexion Smith and it is on real time.”

  “Him. What the hell does he want?” As she said this Chapra glanced at Abaron and saw the awe on his face. “Strike that,” she said. “Let’s go and find out.”

  * * * *

  Junger twenty-eights, thought Kellor. He stood in the hold of his ship watching, on a nearby viewscreen, the gunships jetting across vacuum from the heavy-lifter shuttle. The General must have bribed someone in the Polity to obtain them. They were dated, and must have been scheduled for destruction at some point. Sixteen of them. Kellor licked his lips. He was not sure he liked this. The money was good and must obviously be in proportion to the risk…but some of the other toys the General had brought aboard bothered him. The tactical atomics weren’t so bad. Kellor had used them himself on many occasions. But the CTDs were. Contra terrene devices were the kind of things to get you really noticed by Earth Central, and it was by not being overly noticeable to EC that Kellor was able to continue to operate. He really hoped the General had no intention of using them against a Polity world—that would really piss off some major minds, and a pissed-off AI was an enemy indeed.

  “You have some reservations,” said Conard. A few paces behind him stood his two young aides, their expressions utterly devoid of emotion and in Kellor’s opinion, intelligence.

  “I always have reservations when I don’t know all the details,” Kellor replied. The General stood with a swagger stick tucked under one arm and managed not to look ridiculous. His uniform was neat and spotless on a diminutive frame. His face wore a mildly thoughtful expression. But Kellor had begun to understand what went on behind that expression. General David Conard hated the Polity, and most especially its AIs, with fanatical intensity. He would die to bring it down. And he would kill anyone to bring it down. Kellor considered himself a better man. As far as he was concerned people could live how they liked. He only killed for money.

  “There is nothing much to add. You must first sever communications using those…missiles.” He said the last word with contempt. It was his disgust at the thought of using smart missiles that had made Kellor finally realise the depth of Conard’s hatred of AIs. “And on our subsequent arrival in the system take out the Polity ship you’ll find there.”

  “And that’s all?”

  “Yes, and as I said before, ‘There must be no survivors; complete obliteration’.”

  “And it’s only a Polity science vessel?”

  “Yes.”

  “No colony on the world?”

  “No.”

  “That’s all right then.”

  Kellor turned to watch as the first of the gunships entered the hold of the Samurai. They had four-man crews, which meant his own crew would be outnumbered by about twenty. He would have to prepare for that eventuality. He turned back to Conard.

  “Why?” he asked.

  “I’m sorry?”

  “Why do you want to destroy a Polity science vessel? Surely there are better military targets?”

  “That does not concern you.”

  Kellor pretended to think about it then nod reluctant agreement. He had noted and filed the edge to Conard’s voice. That edge had not been there at the beginning. Something had changed and the mission had acquired greater urgency. If the Separatists were becoming desperate to destroy that vessel then it carried something of huge potential value. With his back to the General, Keller allowed himself a cold little smile and glanced to the squat muscular bulk of his first officer. Jurens returned his look then nodded back to Conard. Kellor turned to watch.

  The General strode over to a group of four of his soldiers who had come aboard the Samurai in the first Junger. One of these was either ill or drunk and his fellows were attempting to support him. As the General approached they quickly stepped away. Conard did not hesitate. He kicked the soldier in his testicles then kicked his feet away from under him. As the man lay on the deck groaning Conard reached down and pulled something from his neck and tossed it aside. Jurens stepped up beside Kellor.

  “H-patch,” he said. “Confederation soldiers like to stay stoned so’s they don’t have to think about what they’re being ordered to do. Arseholes.”

  The General, just to drive the point home, began systematically kicking in the soldier’s ribs. The man probably couldn’t feel it. Jurens spat on the deck and turned away. Kellor followed his first officer from the hold. He too, as a young mercenary, had suffered such officers as Conard.

  PART THREE

  Alexion Smith looked neither old nor young. There was nothing fashionable nor particularly unfashionable about his appearance. He had short blond hair, a thin non-descript face set as a background for calm green eyes, and wore a ribbed and neatly patched environment suit. He looked…utilitarian. From years of association Chapra knew that this was because such things as fashion just held no interest for him. His love was for things long dead and buried: ancient ruins and ancient bones, preferably alien ruins and alien bones. He sat now at ease in a deep armchair in a projection that occupied the air over the consoles in the control room. Behind him was a window through which could be seen a barren landscape below a sky half-filled with a red-giant sun. Weird
birds drifted in charcoal silhouette.

  “Alex, it’s nice to see you,” said Chapra as she dropped into her swivel chair. Abaron took a seat in the background.

  “It is nice to see you, Chapra, though I wouldn’t recognise you. I take it you got fed up with the grey hair and sagging tits?”

  Chapra grinned at the sound of a sharply indrawn breath behind her. “I did. I find that in this form it is easier for me to get what I want. Appearance is all even in this cosmetic age. What is it, Alex? What’s given you priority over half a million other callers?”

  Alexion looked out his window for a moment before returning his attention to Chapra.

  “I was fascinated by your discovery out there, Chapra, and supposing that the escape pod is five million years old I considered that discovery within my remit. I’ve been watching and paying attention…picking up on every scrap of information…The evidence is mostly mythological, philological…you know as well as I that you can excavate languages and stories as well as ruins—”

  “What’s your point, Alex?”

  Alexion looked at her very directly, “Based on the construction of the escape pod—remains of one exactly the same were found in the Csorian time vault—and based on the machine it…uses—the shape of that machine was etched into the walls of the same vault and no-one knew what it was until now—and based on thousands of other fragments of information collated by AI, there is an eighty-three per cent probability that the creature you have there is…Jain.”

  Chapra shivered and heard Abaron curse. She immediately wanted to object; but the Jain died out millions of years ago, they’re just dust and legends and racial memories of gods…Alexion went on, “In the Sarian mythos the Jain were the great sorcerers, the transformers. Their houses were said to be black water-filled boxes built in the equatorial deserts. Their symbol was the triangle. And if that is not enough, the world to which you are heading, has been posited for over a century as likely a Jain home world.”

  “Okay, I’m convinced,” said Chapra. “But how is this to affect what I am doing here?”