The Engineer ReConditioned

by Neal Asher

  “Instruction?” he asked.

  “They lack the intelligence to learn. It has been the same with their kind since the time they ruled the Earth.”

  Birds—the direct descendants of the dinosaurs. There were hiveminds old enough to remember, but they were strange and did not communicate much with the younger minds, and not at all with the human race.

  Eventually Janer reached the glassy cone of the spire and its level circular floor. He saw the other hornets clinging to the transparent wall, flaws in glass. He walked over to the opposite side of the chamber and gazed out.

  “You are content now?” asked the hivemind.

  “I feel an easing of certain tensions,” he replied.

  “That’s good, because we’ll be spending the rest of the journey here.”

  Janer paused. “Why?”

  “Look it the direction my companions are looking.”

  Abruptly the hornet launched from his pocket and was buzzing in the air. He gazed across the chamber, past the hornets, stared intently through the wall at the tumble of cloud. Then he saw it, wreathed in lightning: another faerie castle, another snairl approaching.

  “It is not the storm that causes the activity below, but the anticipation of this snairl. Every five hundred years they mate.”

  “Esua!”

  “Yes, this is why we are here. This is why we are interested.”

  Janer noted the royal we. The hivemind was completely at the link.

  “Why such great interest?”

  “This snairl is male,” the mind told him.

  “I don’t understand.”

  “Like their mollusc brethren, male snairls manufacture in their bodies a harpoon of calcite they use to spear the female and hold it close. Normal snails then mate and part. For a male snairl, the making of this harpoon is a killing effort. Such mate only once.”

  “It will die?”

  “Yes.”

  “There is danger then. What of the crew, the passengers?”

  “Look down.”

  Janer peered down past the body of the snairl and saw egg-shaped objects being spewed out into the air, opening gliding wings, falling through the sky.

  “They are safe.”

  “The passengers, yes. For the crew there is never any escape.”

  Janer whirled around and faced the hovering hornet. “What! No warning! Just let them die!”

  He turned and ran back. Eller. He found that he did care what happened to her.

  “Fool,” the link told him. “The geneticists made both: snairl and crew.”

  Again, Janer did not hear.

  * * * *

  Janer was halfway down Upper Shell when the snairls met. The impact threw him back against the helium bags, and the shells clashed and rang. He saw fragments of shell fly glittering through the air. There was a giant sound: a bubbling groan, the sighing of caves. As the shells rocked and scraped he staggered to the wall and looked down in time to see the male snairl extrude a barbed spear of cloudy glass and thrust into the body of the female, and the bodies ooze together. Foamed slime spiralled up on the wind like spindrift. The towered shells closed throwing Janer back against the helium bags then parted high, ground at the base. Janer went head-first into the glassy wall, lost it all in a flash of black.

  * * * *

  Janer’s immediate reaction to consciousness was to vomit on the floor and clutch at his head. There was a weird buzzing from his hivelink, something he had never heard before. Perhaps he had broken it. He staggered upright and tried to blink the double images from his eyes. Unsteady on his feet, it was a moment before he realised the snairl was back on an even keel. At the wall he peered down. The sky was clearing and he could see everything in detail. The female was gone. The male snairl hung in an arc under its shell, flaccid, its connections to the shell stretched taut. The crew. Eller. Supporting himself against the wall Janer made his way down, wondering as he went, how long he had been out. Minutes? Hours? As soon as he reached the down-tube into the snairl body he realised it must have been some time.

  The floor was drying, tacky, as he stepped out of the tube, and he wondered about that until he heard the rustling of air pumps—something previously disguised by the living sounds of the snairl. They were not biotech and would run until clogged with decaying flesh. A biolight lay nearby, its legs waving weakly in the air, and its tick-mouth gaping and clicking hungrily. The air smelt of death. Janer carefully stepped around the biolight, but he need not have worried; it was too weak to get at him and would never have got through his monofilament clothing. He peered down the corridor artery at the other biolights there and one fell while he watched. They would all be hungry. He pulled the hood and mask from the neck-pocket of his overall, and put on the gloves. They would go for exposed body: his eyes and mouth. He would just have to be very careful.

  Janer found the first of the crew shortly after crushing under his foot the third biolight to drop on him. As he crushed it, its juices spread in a glowing pool and Janer left bright footprints behind him. He noticed then a change in the quantity and spectrum of the lighting.

  The man had crawled away from his partner with five biolights attached to his back. Their glow was reddish, their energy drawn from near to human blood. The man had left a thick slime trail that was now skinned over. The woman was curled in a corner with a biolight attached to the side of her head. As he turned to her the biolight fell away, leaving a bloody hole, and tried to drag itself towards him. He stood on it and it burst with a wet pop. The woman turned her head, opened her mouth with a dry click and tried to open her crusted eyes. He stooped down by her and caught hold of her.

  “Dead,” she rasped, her last breath hissing out foul in his face. He let her go and ran, something of what the hivemind had said coming back to him—the geneticists made both. He remembered then that he had never seen crew eating, never seen much in the way of personal effects… They are like us—all one. They were dying now their host was dead, like the biolights.

  The door ripped like wet paper as he pulled it aside. Eller blinked at him from her place on the floor in the ropes of slime. A pot of water rested to one side of her. She had cleaned her face and her eyes, but her eyes were dull, drying out.

  “Eller…this…”

  “Janer,” she said and smiled, shifted. Her body had grown long, gaps as wide as his arm between the segments, there her heart, beating slowly, there her intestine, drawn taut. He knelt beside her and she managed to get a hand up to his shoulder. She shifted again.

  “Kiss me…just once more,” she said.

  Janer was leaning forward when he heard the low buzzing. Distorted speech came through his link, but he could not make it out. He turned his head slightly as the hornet darted in. Eller made a horrible sound, somewhere between a groan and a hiss, jerked her hand away, her mouth opening wide at the pain as the hornet launched itself from her arm. It had stung her. Janer wanted to crush it at once, then he saw her mouth; her white tongue open at the end like a flower, rasping teeth wet inside it. More buzzing, more glittery shapes in the room. Five hornets hovered between him and Eller, darted at him, and because he could no longer hear their speech his fear returned and he stumbled back. Eller tried to crawl towards him and he realised, like the biolights, and shuddered in horror. The hornets drove him out into the corridor. The walls were cracking and liquefying now. The death stink had turned to something else, now. Stumbling ahead of the insects he was numb to thought. They drove him to the Upper Shell.

  * * * *

  The floor was cool against his cheek. The hornet, standing on the side of his neck and working with the cellular structure behind his ear, finished its task and flew from him.

  “We were unaware of the danger,” the mind told him.

  “It’s wrong, that they should die like that.”

  “They all lived for as long as the snairl. Though they could feed on other things after its death, they would not long survive it. The chemistry is too complex. They
are one being, like ourselves.”

  “Is all this what you came to learn?”

  “No.”

  “What then?”

  “The shell does not decay. The body below will drop soon and the shell will need to be counterweighted. We came for the salvage. Here we can be safe.”

  Janer, his shoulder against the crystal wall of the spire, could see them. The cloud was vast and grey, and moved with purpose. He could feel the presence of many minds—a million hives. The hornets were coming to their new home.

  ABOUT “SPATTERJAY”

  Spatterjay is the planet where all the action takes place in The Skinner, and all the characters and events here will be familiar to readers of that book This story is in fact a precursor, whereas from Snairls I only snatched Janer and his hornets. Again it was a story published in Grotesque (issue 8 ’95) and suitably so, though not enough so to justify changing the title to “Splatterjay.” It is a story whose genesis was in a nightmare of long blue and bony hands reaching out of dense jungle to grab someone, and of trout in a stream, which weren’t. It spent a number of years in a folder, in the form of a few scribbled lines, then grew out of some free-association writing I was doing to limber up my brain one day. Acorns and all that.

  SPATTERJAY

  Sweating green blood, a lung bird wheezed from the tree tops, its flaccid wings groping for the clouds. Ambel tucked his trumpet-mouthed blunderbuss under his arm and despondently watched its limping progress.

  “Suitable protein,” suggested Jane.

  “There isn’t any. Would you eat that?” asked Peck.

  “Depends on how hungry I got.”

  “I guess we could make a stew.”

  Ambel made no comment on this, but he closed up his blunderbuss and aimed. The weapon flashed and banged, sparkles of still-burning powder gouting through the air. A cloud of acrid smoke obscured view for a moment, then they saw the bird falling into the trees, bits breaking away from its ill-made body.

  “Let’s go,” said Peck.

  They trotted through the knee-high putrephallus weeds, their masks pulled up over their mouths and noses. The pear-trunk trees shivered as they passed. By the time they reached the area where the bird had fallen it was gone. They caught a glimpse of something huge and glistening dragging the squawking and flapping mess into the deep dingle.

  “Bastard,” said Peck, turning to Ambel. Ambel shook his head as he squatted down and thumped another paper cartridge down into the barrel of his buss.

  Jane lifted her mask, winced at the smell wafting off the weeds then said, “Leech. A big one. Best leave it alone.”

  “Can you eat leeches?” asked Peck. He always got a bit weird when he hadn’t had enough to eat.

  Ambel shook his head.

  “Too acid,” he said. “Makes you fart like a wind machine and burns your ring when you crap. Know a guy died of it once. Terminal wind. Blew his arsehole across the room.”

  Peck snorted disbelievingly. “Well, we gotta get something to take back.” He looked towards the dingle.

  “Not there,” said Jane. “We’ll go back to the beach and circle around. Might get a rhinoworm coming in.”

  The three moved back through the weeds onto the green sand of the beach. Ambel gazed out at the ship and noticed that the masts were still bare. They needed a sail something bad. They needed food, yes, but whatever they got from the island would only keep them going for a little while, as they were. They had to get back to port and get some real Earth-food inside them; some dome-grown grain and meat.

  “They say there are people out here who survive on wild food. They say the Skinner lives out here on one of the islands,” said Jane.

  “You gotta be kidding, all alive, and Hoop?” said Peck.

  Ambel nodded morosely to himself. “They all survive, but they ain’t people no more, Hoop included.”

  That killed the conversation until they reached the first stream winding out from the deep dingle. Ambel looked into the water and thinking about the dome he thought; salmon, then, seeing how they were grouped he thought; eels. But of course some of them broke from the water, their glistening ribbed backs rolling in the glitter, round thread-cutting mouths probing the air.

  “Leeches again,” said Peck. “There anything edible on this island?”

  “Yes,” said Jane avidly as she pointed out to sea.

  The rhinoworm was as long as a man and its sinuous body as thick. It was aptly named. It had the head of a rhino, little different from those pictured in the old zoology books, and it had the body of a thick eel. It was pink and red-speckled. They watched it approach the mouth of the stream and rear its head out of the water with a leech writhing and flicking in its narrow mouth. Ambel’s blunderbuss boomed, part of its head disappeared, and it sank back down into the water, clouding it blue.

  “Quick! Quick!” shouted Jane, leaping up and down. Peck waded out, hooked his grapple into its flesh and waded back in, trailing the line out behind him. He was nearly ashore when he yelled and splashed in very quickly.

  “Gerrit off! Gerrit off!”

  A four-foot long leech had attached itself to his hip. He fell in the sand and grabbed hold of the horrible thing in both hands to try and prevent it boring in even further. Jane grabbed up the line and began hauling in the rhinoworm while Ambel tended to Peck. He did the only thing that was possible in the circumstances; he grabbed hold of the leech in both hands, put his foot against Peck’s leg, and hauled with all his might. Peck let out a scream as the leech pulled away with a fist-sized plug of his flesh in its circular mouth. Ambel bashed the creature against a rock until the lump came free, then after trampling the creature to slurry he handed the piece of flesh back to Peck. Peck screwed it back into his leg, then wrapped a bandage from his pack around it to hold it in place.

  “Help me with this,” said Jane. She had got the rhino-worm to the edge of the water, but could not haul it up onto the sand by herself. A mass of leeches was building up around it, each of them after its plug of flesh. Ambel rushed over and helped her haul it in, then the both of them stomped as many of the creatures as they could. As they stomped the last of them Peck was able to join them and relished splattering the last few.

  “Right, let’s chop it and head back to the ship,” said Ambel. They proceeded to slice the rhinoworm into huge lumps, which they packed into their waterproof packs, and staggering under their loads, headed back up the beach. Before they set out Peck was able to take his bandage off. The plug of flesh had healed back into place and his muscle was working again. When they reached the rowing boat and were dumping the packs into it Jane grinned at Peck.

  “The Earther’ll want to see your leg. Probably want blood samples and a few pots of piss outta you as well,” she said.

  “Bollocks,” said Peck, and gave the boat a shove. “Don’t know what she’s all worked up about. We ain’t that different.”

  Ambel, who was, so the Earther had said, built like a tank, rowed the boat, being careful not to put too much pressure on the oars and go snapping them again. Jane, as skinny and small as a starveling child, had undone her shirt to her waist and sat plaiting her hair and looking at Ambel meaningfully. She was always horny after a meat hunt, and when all her attempts to get Ambel into her bunk failed, as they always did, she turned to the next available crewman. During the next few hours the crewmen would be falling over each other as they tried to stay close to her. Peck had opened one of the packs and was cutting slices of rhino-worm meat to stuff into his mouth. He had injury hunger; another phenomenon the Earther woman was eager to study. Shortly they arrived at the wooden cliff of the side of the ship and the meat was hauled aboard. The three followed, after passing up the oars, then Ambel hauled the rowing boat up the side and held it in place while others strapped it just below the gunnels. The Earther woman came out of her cabin to watch this and when it was done she returned shaking her head in amazement.

  “How long before you were mobile again?” asked Erlin as
she inspected the circular scar. They all had these scars, every member of the crew; white and neat circular scars on their bluish skin.

  “Eh?” said Peck, brilliantly.

  “How long after this injury were you able to stand again, to walk again?”

  “Couple of minutes after I screwed the plug back.”

  “Let me get this right. Ambel thumped the leech against a rock until it released the piece of your leg it had excised. You then took that piece of flesh and screwed it back into your leg.”

  “Yeah, so what?”

  “Doesn’t that strike you as a little odd?”

  “Who you callin’ odd? At least I ain’t the colour of burnt sugar. Bleedin’ Earthers always callin’ us odd.”

  It was the strangest piece of racism Erlin had ever encountered. Her first doctorate had been in history because she had been fascinated by her genetic heritage. Not that she was a true Negro, there had been none for more than a five hundred years, nor any other definite racial types, but her skin was very dark. She was almost a throwback, but for her white hair and blue eyes. The people here though, on this strange little world, were very different from the usual run of humanity. She handed Peck a couple of bottles.

  “Here. I want your next urine samples. Now I’ll take some blood.” This she did, quickly and efficiently. You could not take too much time over such things with hoopers as they healed so fast a needle would block in less than thirty seconds. When Peck grumbled his way back out onto deck she got the blood under her nanoscope and found the fibrous structures she had expected to find. It was all coming together now. She had a damned good idea of what was going on and reckoned that when she made her report, Spatterjay would be descended on by just about every science team in the Polity.