The Engineer ReConditioned

by Neal Asher

  Jurens glanced up from his console. “Pulsed laser. Pretty powerful. They won’t have that in atmosphere and anyway, the missiles have learnt.”

  Kellor noted Conard’s disgusted expression and dismissed it. The display showed the missiles dropping to a mountain range a hundred kilometres from their target. They’d go in ten metres above the ground. There was only one weapon that could get through their shields and armour. Kellor smiled to himself as he watched them close in like hunting wolves. Then his smile dropped away as the two missiles blinked out of existence.

  One weapon…

  “Jurens! Get us out of here! Now!”

  “Wait!” shouted Conard. “The runcible!”

  Jurens ignored Conard, hit the ionic boosters, then poised his hand over the controls for the U-space engines. The Samurai was at a quarter C but it needed just a little more. Kellor slammed his hand down on Juren’s hand, and the ship dropped into U-space. It was a slow drag, the ship straining and the sounds of distorting metal reaching them on the bridge. Over one of the coms someone began screaming as they saw through an incomplete field into the infinite. Kellor felt something dragging at him, at the ship, and it was not the result of a too-quick entry into U-space. When the drag ceased, he allowed himself a grimace at the sweat he felt on his top lip and turned to face Conard’s raging. The General was severely pissed-off. He was glaring and unconsciously clenching and unclenching his hands. His two aides stood quiet in the background. A surreptitious scan had showed them both to be heavily armed. Automatics in the bridge covered them, and Jurens and Speck had weapons to hand. If the General started anything Kellor would finish it. There was no way the man could call on his other forces here. They were all sitting in their gunships which, with an order, Kellor could dump into deep space.

  “They did not seem to me the smartest of missiles,” hissed the General.

  “Get to the point.”

  “You should have used a human team. AIs are not reliable.”

  The sheer idiocy of that comment left Kellor without any reply. How could you argue with that?

  Conard went on, “Humans are chosen of God and are the only ones with the right to sentience!” Oh dear, it got worse and worse. Kellor considered killing him right then and there. It seemed the only kind thing to do. The problem was that Conard had a source of information. Kellor wanted that source before he killed the man.

  “The missile did not strike home because the facility was protected by ground-based singuns. Your entire force would not have got through and if I had taken the Samurai in any closer, they would have gutted it.”

  Conard stood there still clenching and unclenching his hands. After an embarrassingly long time he seemed to get control of himself. He turned and strode out of the bridge. That’s it, thought Kellor, go and kick shit out of one of your subordinates.

  PART FOUR

  The sifting machine had, in strips, methodically sifted a tenth of the desert’s surface to a depth of one metre. At a pace of two kilometres per hour it sucked up the sand, passed it through various grids and sieves, and spat it out behind filling the trench it had made. The sand left behind the machine was level. This would last until the next earthquake or storm. One of either usually came along each day. The process was crude and frowned upon by many archaeologists who claimed that valuable artefacts could be damaged or destroyed. Alexion Smith took the view that anything surviving five million years in that desert would not be damaged by the sifter. His robust approach to archaeology was greatly disliked. But he got results.

  Smith checked the sifter every planetary day—about four solstan days—and made a find on average once every solstan year. Mostly he came to empty out strange-shaped stones and package artefacts from more recent ages for transmission to associates. On this occasion he had a find. In the red light of the giant sun the coralline material was the colour of old blood. Under the lamps it would be pink and Smith knew where he had seen its like before. The excitement he might have felt before was lacking now. Years of research and now, out there, a real living Jain. Smith glanced up at the red sun and the psuedobirds. A shape was coming towards him and it wasn’t a bird. The crab drone landed on the cowling of the sifter with a clattering and scrabbling and once it got its balance it peered at him with stalked eyes.

  “Who are you then?” asked Smith.

  “I am the Cable Hogue,” said the drone in a gravelly voice.

  “Interesting name.”

  “I am a ship AI speaking to you through this drone. The drone is called CH143 though it sometimes calls itself Spider.”

  “It has an independent mind then?”

  “Yes.”

  “Well…what do you want of me?”

  “Your expertise.”

  “Go on.”

  “To advise on matters Jain.”

  Smith dropped the fragment of ancient Jain technology back into the collection box of the sifter.

  “I’ll come,” he said.

  The drone rose from the cowling.

  “You have four hours to get to the runcible here. Go to the Vorstra moon for short range transference to the Cable Hogue.”

  The voice was somehow different this time.

  “I take it Spider speaks now.”

  “Spider spoke then. Only Spider speaks now.”

  Smith nodded and smiled to himself, then returned his attention to what he was being told.

  “By shuttle?” he asked.

  “By runcible,” said the drone.

  “Tell me, what manner of vessel is this Hogue?”

  “A dreadnought.”

  Smith felt a slight shiver of excitement. It would have to be one hell of a ship to warrant having a runcible aboard. He was about to ask what classification of dreadnought it was when the drone accelerated away with a sonic crack. After a pause he headed for his AGC, his desert boots kicking up plumes of the red sand. The sifter went on sifting.

  * * * *

  “Initially she was your clone. That she is a she, is the least of her alterations,” said Chapra. The girl lay on the examination couch in medlab, her blue eyes wide open, her body motionless. She just stared at the ceiling.

  “There’s the interface in her back,” said Abaron. “What else?”

  “A lot. She wasn’t burned in there even though she was in water that is nearly at boiling point. She can withstand temperatures that would kill a normal human. Very tough. Also her brain is human, but there are sub-brains branching all down her spine. In that sense she is nearly an amalgam of Jain and human.”

  “Normal DNA?”

  “Not trihelical, no—”

  Chapra paused. The girl was sitting upright.

  “Not trihelical, no—” said the girl.

  “She can speak,” said Abaron.

  “She can speak,” said the girl. Only when she heard the girl repeating Abaron’s words did Chapra realise that she had used exactly his voice, as she had spoken with exactly Chapra’s voice before.

  “She is learning, I think,” said Chapra, and listened as the girl repeated it. “We’ll have to give her the meanings of words. She’ll have to be taught.”

  The girl repeated everything she said, then smiled. Chapra did not recollect smiling. She stepped up by the couch and took the girl’s hand, brushed stringy blond hair from her face.

  “Come with me,” she said, and gave a gentle tug. The girl got off the couch. She did not repeat the words. Chapra felt a cold shiver. The girl had recognised the instruction. That was fast. That was AI fast.

  “Let’s go and get you some clothes and something to eat.”

  “Clothes and something to eat,” said the girl.

  Chapra felt that shiver again. It wasn’t fear. It was awe. And her awe increased when in the eating area the girl learned how to use the eating utensils in moments. All the time Chapra and Abaron kept up a running dialogue, some of which the girl repeated and some of which she ignored.

  “I believe the educative process can be speeded,”
said Box, out of the blue. The girl tilted her head. “Hello,” she said.

  The AI turned on the single screen in the eating area and ran the upper and lower case English alphabet, reciting them as they scrolled past. On the second run through the girl recited. Box did the same with the Chinese alphabet, but at twice the speed. The girl recited. The AI ran the Russian alphabet even faster. The girl recited. After that neither Chapra nor Abaron could tell what was being run as the screen was a liminal blur and Box’s and the girl’s voices a babble. Abruptly the screen flickered and divided and Box began to teach a word at a time: sea, seaweed, water, human, hand, eye. Chapra noted the AI presented huge amounts of information with each word. Beside seaweed, Box opened a frame to display many different kinds of seaweed, nanoscopic pictures of genetic helices, cladograms and other graphical information. She and Abaron sat back and watched in fascination. After an hour Judd came in with a touch console and ran its fibre-optic cable to a wall socket. He laid it in the girl’s lap. Shortly after that the screen became a liminal blur once again and the girl’s fingers were moving across the console faster than even Chapra’s. At that point the two humans left. For some it is a comfort to believe there are entities far superior to themselves. For some it is a comfort to know this. For others both views are merely depressing.

  “What do you think it will want?” asked Abaron, as he poured vodka into Chapra’s glass.

  “You mean after it has downloaded everything the girl has learnt?”

  “Yeah.”

  They were sprawled in form-fitting loungers in Abaron’s quarters. This was the first time Chapra had been in there. She noted that the only ornaments were old paper books arrayed on a shelf. A glance at one had shown it to be very old, dating from the twenty-first century before the Reliteration. The language in them was fragmented, almost impossible to understand.

  “I don’t know. What would we want? What would you want if you were woken five million years hence by aliens?”

  Abaron thought about that for a moment then said, “I would want to find out what happened to my own kind. I’d want to get in contact with them. But then that is me. We don’t know how the Jain associate. They may be rabid individualists.”

  “Doubtful. You don’t achieve that level of technology by yourself.”

  “Yeah? It might be old knowledge to them.”

  More vodka poured into the two glasses. Chapra and Abaron were using an old human remedy for what ailed them.

  * * * *

  By the time Chapra was washing down hangover pills with a pint of orange juice the girl was literate in eight Earth languages. She was now rifling Box’s libraries of information. Human limitations slowed her and she had gone through less than one percent of the information stored.

  “Any specific interests?” asked Chapra as she stepped into the shower.

  “She was taking an overview of all the information; dealing in generalities. She now probably has a general idea of human history, present attainments, and socio-political structures. She was avoiding the specific until a couple of hours ago,” said Box.

  “What happened a couple of hours ago then?”

  “She came across the first reference to the Jain and has since been concentrating on all the pertinent information. Seeing her interest I gave her access to the files recently transmitted.”

  “Alex’s?”

  “Eight per cent of them had as their source Alexion Smith.”

  Chapra nodded to herself then hit the shower control across to cold. She swore as the blast of icy water hit her so soon after the hot and stood it for as long as she could. She never entirely placed her reliance in hangover cures. When she finally turned off the shower and dried herself with a rough towel from the dispenser, she felt thoroughly awake. She went through into the bedroom and gazed down at Abaron lying in a tangle of sheets, still apparently asleep. Her underwear she took up in one hand and her bodysuit she slung over one shoulder, then she padded naked from his quarters to her own. If that was the way he wanted it…

  In her own quarters Chapra slung her old clothing into the cleaner, drew another bodysuit of the next primary colour on the spectrum and dressed. Once clad she touched her caste mark with its colour stick and went through its range of colours until it matched her clothing. She then decided against eating in her quarters and headed for the communal eating area. There she halted at the door to take in the scene. The girl sat before the screen with the touch console across her lap. To one side of her stood a hologram projector. Judd, Rhys and a third sexless and featureless Golem stood around her, slaves to her beck and call. On a table beside her was a plate of what Chapra recognised as high energy food and a beaker of vitamin drink. Here everything was secondary to the ingestion of information. Nothing could have driven that point home more thoroughly than the portable toilet beside the chair. She wondered if the girl had slept, or required sleep, then turned away and went back to eat in her quarters. Later, in the control room, Abaron smiled at her in a surprisingly mature manner. She had expected him to be embarrassed or resentful.

  “Perhaps we should have taken a tranquilliser,” he quipped.

  “We did,” said Chapra, and he laughed. Chapra wondered if she might prefer him lacking in confidence and all screwed-up.

  “Has anything interesting happened while I’ve been asleep?”

  Chapra detailed the girl’s researches and the scene that had met her when she had gone to the eating area.

  “It was the toilet that did it really,” she said. “She’s just another probe beast, just another mechanism for obtaining information.”

  “I didn’t go there,” said Abaron, his face curiously lacking expression.

  “It bothers you too?”

  Abaron shrugged. “Genetically speaking she’s the closest relation I’ve got.” He looked up from his console as Box activated the projection from the isolation chamber. “Ah, we have some action.” The girl had just come through the lock and was walking out on the jetty. At the end of the jetty she stripped off her clothing then dived in. It could have been a scene from anywhere on Earth had the water not been nearly at boiling point and had not the Jain immediately zeroed in on her like a hungry crocodile.

  “I wonder if the Jain will smash this probe beast,” said Chapra. Abaron looked askance at her. She ignored him and cut the refractivity of the water. They watched as the Jain caught the girl with its single hand and snaked out one tentacle to plug in to her back. The actions looked almost obscene. The girl froze, arms outstretched and fingers rigid; a newt with its neutral buoyancy.

  “I have received disturbing news,” said Box abruptly, hardly impinging on their fascination.

  “Yes, what?” said Chapra.

  “There is an unidentified ship heading towards us, due to arrive in two days. On its way here it released smart missiles at the Jubilan communications satellite and the planet-based runcible. The satellite was destroyed but the missiles fired at the runcible were intercepted. Had the runcible been destroyed we would have received no warning.”

  “What?” said Abaron. “What was that?”

  Chapra suddenly felt very cold. This had been a possibility right from the start.

  “Unidentified?”

  “The probability is high that it is a mercenary craft employed by the Separatist movement.”

  “How long until the Cable Hogue gets here?”

  “It is translight with a new design of engine. Projected time of arrival is four days.”

  “Cable Hogue?” asked Abaron angrily.

  Chapra said, “The dreadnought sent out here to protect us—”

  “Oh yeah,” Abaron sneered.

  “My thoughts exactly, but we are not in a position to dispute the matter. I for one would prefer Earth Monitors here and an AI-directed warship than Separatists and out-Polity mercenaries.”

  “Why didn’t you tell me?”

  “Because it would have interfered with your work.”

  “I don’t belie
ve that.”

  “You don’t have to. You’re at the bottom of the ladder and only here because I agreed for you to come.” Abaron was still angry, but kept his mouth shut.

  Chapra turned from him. “We have forty-eight Solstan hours?”

  “Yes,” said Box.

  Abaron looked thoughtful for a moment then said, “What about the runcible?”

  “It is not possible, at this time, to use it,” replied Box.

  “Why?”

  “Since entering the Quarrison Drift we have gone beyond the range of any other runcible to which you could transmit.”

  Abaron swore and peered down at his touch console. He refused to look at Chapra. She repressed the sudden contempt she felt. Really, he had been right to ask…

  “What capabilities do you have?” she asked Box.

  “I do not have armament.”

  “Can we outrun this ship?”

  “With a translight slingshot around the sun this is possible.”

  “What about the Jain?”

  “Hang on,” interrupted Abaron. “What do they want?”

  “They want the Jain. Isn’t that obvious?”

  “No, not necessarily. What are the projections, Box?”

  “Separatists are normally xenophobic in outlook. It is more likely that they are coming here to kill the Jain and destroy all its technology than to kidnap and use it,” said Box. Chapra folded her arms, nodded, and met Abaron’s look of victory for a moment. He was grasping things more firmly now but Chapra had no time for such games. Things had turned deadly serious. She turned to the projection and saw that the girl was climbing out onto the jetty. The Jain’s tentacle was still plugged into her back. Once she was up on the jetty the Jain began to follow her.

  “Box,” said the girl, looking straight from the projection at Chapra and Abaron. “It is necessary that I speak with decision makers.” There was nothing of a little girl in her voice. Over the com Chapra understood the precise selection of every word. She had asked, “What about the Jain?” She realised then that it might be the Jain itself that answered the question. She stared at the projection, noticed something else. “The machine, it’s shrinking again isn’t it?”