The Engineer ReConditioned

by Neal Asher

  “You’ll let me in your ship or I’ll skin you from the feet up,” he hissed. The next moment he found himself on his back on the floor, the woman standing over him.

  “I do not understand you,” she said, and it sounded as if she really did not. “If you had such weaponry the Owner would never allow you to use it.”

  “There is no Owner,” Cromwell spat. “I would use the weapons on the Proctors to free us from them!” The woman sat down on the floor again, staring at him all the while.

  “I come from Earth,” she said. “I am here to see the Owner to tell him we are ready for his guidance now. He exists.”

  Cromwell stood up, stared at her in disgust, then banged on the door of the cell. He stomped down the corridor pulling another cigarette from his packet and lighting it. At the end of the corridor he mounted a stairway that led up to his office. There he paced for a while before eventually throwing himself into his chair and flicking on the communicator.

  “Owner my ass,” he said as he punched up a coded number.

  The screen flicked on and the face of a young woman gazed out at him.

  “Is it done?” he asked.

  “Yes.”

  “Any problems?”

  “Yes.”

  Cromwell had not expected that.

  “Go on,” he said carefully.

  “Your son was injured.”

  Cromwell sat back in his chair and stared at the woman coldly.

  “How badly?”

  “The board cutter had his cutting tool with him. He took a lump off your son’s arm before we killed him. We took him to Doctor Grable. He’s in a room in the nursing home.”

  “Evidence?”

  “We cleared as much as we could find, but it was dark…the residents were showing an interest, sir.”

  “Keep him concealed. No one is to know where he is. The board cutter…he had no time to speak to anyone?”

  “We got him before he reached Lumi’s house.”

  “That, is not what I asked.”

  “He spoke to no one.”

  “Very well.” Cromwell stubbed out his cigarette as he considered his options. “If they start genetic testing we’ll have to move fast. Has there been any Proctor activity?”

  “I’m told one was seen at the scene of the killing while Lumi was there.” Cromwell swallowed dryly. They should not be interested. It was not in their remit.

  “Okay, keep your eyes and ears open. Anything unusual and I want to know. If they start testing I want Jamie moved to Cosburgh. Keep me informed.” He cut her off then quickly punched in another number. After a pause a bald-headed man with a walrus mustache looked out of him.

  “Doctor Grable,” he said.

  Lumi studied the two patterns on the screen then turned to Brown.

  “It wasn’t Cromwell, but there is a close match. I would say it was a relative, perhaps his son or his brother. I suggest you check them both out. No general testing, that will alert him.”

  “We’ll check all the nursing homes. If he’s badly injured Cromwell will have him in one of them,” he said.

  “How about Grable’s place?”

  “My men are moving in now.”

  Jamie Cromwell lay on the surgical table feeling slightly sick. There was no pain with the nerve-blocker in place, but he could feel the pullings and cuttings at his shoulder as Grable installed the plastic joint. This was not the kind of adventure he liked. It had always been fun going out to ‘sort things out’ with Keela. He loved the feeling of power, loved being able to say the words, ‘Kill him’. There was nothing else that gave the same buzz.

  “How long will I be laid-up?” he asked.

  “Oh you’ll be up and about after this. But you won’t be able to use this arm for three weeks, and I would suggest plenty of rest,” said Grable.

  Jamie considered telling him that he should save his suggestions for his other patients. He was working on Jamie Cromwell, there was a difference, but when he looked at the doctor’s bloodied surgical gloves and close work eye visor, he desisted. There was no telling what the doctor could do to harm him. Jamie did not like pain when it was his own.

  “What’s that?!”

  “Be still!” Grable held him down on the table as he tried to rise. The sound of gunfire had come from outside, and there was shouting now. Grable stood up and walked to the window.

  “Constables,” he said, after a moment. “A large force of them.”

  “I must get out of here,” said Jamie. He sat up, supporting his arm and trying not to look at the bloody mess of his shoulder. One glance had been enough: the plastic joint was in place in raw flesh and tied-off arteries, all sealed under a layer of translucent jelly. He carefully lowered his legs over the side of the table. Grable was looking at him strangely.

  “I have to go,” he repeated.

  “No,” said Grable. “You must not. They will catch you and question you.”

  “What else is there to do then?” asked Jamie.

  Grable turned from the window and went to his medical cabinet. He opened a drawer and removed an old-fashioned syringe. While Jamie watched he squeezed out the air. How would this help him to escape? Grable approached.

  “Here, sit down again,” he said.

  Jamie had a sudden horrible suspicion. “What is that for?”

  “It will calm you, relax you.”

  Jamie did not want to be calm and he did not believe Grable. He lashed out and kicked the doctor between the legs. The doctor swore and bowed over. Jamie swore at the pain of a broken toe and a sudden foretaste of pain from his shoulder. In the surgical gown he staggered for the door. There he turned back in time to see the doctor reaching for the syringe where it had stuck point-down in the wooden floor. Jamie opened to the door and fled.

  “Come back!” the doctor bellowed, and Jamie heard him coming after as he stumbled towards the stairs. He reached the landing just as the doctor caught up with him. He tried to yell at the constables he could see coming into the reception area. The doctor’s hard hand slammed over his mouth, and he was shoved back against the wall. The doctor lifted the syringe to plunge it in Jamie’s neck. Jamie kneed him in an already tender spot. He had learnt a lot from Keela. As the doctor gasped again Jamie grabbed the syringe hand with his free hand, and pulled it down in an arc to stab it into the doctor’s thigh.

  “Oh! Oh, you bastard!”

  Grable staggered back and gaped down in horror at the syringe. He pulled it out of his leg and saw it was empty.

  “I must—” he managed, turning back towards his surgery, then he fell on the floor. By the time his screams and convulsions had finished the constables had reached that floor. As they led Jamie away he looked back and noted how the doctor had ripped off his fingernails while clawing at the floor, and how the convulsions had displaced one eye from its socket and broken his teeth.

  “Why was he killed?” asked Lumi, his eyes not straying from the nautiloids in their tank.

  “He saw something he was not supposed to see,” said Brown as he looked around the laboratory.

  “And what was that?”

  The Chief Constable returned his attention to Lumi to see what reaction his words might elicit. “He saw a spacecraft that had landed in the wilder.”

  Lumi turned from his nautiloids. “Spacecraft?”

  “Yes.”

  “The Owner?”

  “No.”

  “Please explain.”

  “A spacecraft of unknown origin landed in a wilder zone ten days ago. Apparently Cromwell’s people found out about it first and sealed off the area. Coti saw the ship before they did that. He avoided Cromwell’s people there, but they caught up with him in Blue Street. He was killed to silence him.”

  “Cromwell must see great advantage in this craft. If it is not something to do with the Owner then it’s likely from Earth or the colonies. Perhaps he thinks the war is reaching out to us again, the fool. Has Jamie given any indication that his father thinks this?�
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  “He says that this is his father’s belief.”

  “What of the crew?”

  “One pilot, a woman, whom Cromwell has captured.”

  “This is fascinating,” said Lumi. “Have you closed in on Cromwell yet?”

  “All his residences have been raided. He left this morning with a large group of his people and headed into the wilder.”

  “Then he’s gone to this ship and taken the pilot with him. He must not get his hands on any high tech weapons. He will bring disaster on us. We must go after him immediately.”

  “I agree,” said Brown. He was staring at the tank again.

  “We need a tracker,” said Lumi.

  Brown turned to look at him. “In this we are lucky. Bradebus is in town. My people have gone to hire him.”

  Lumi looked at him. “You’ve been ahead of me all the way,” he said. “Why do you come here?” Brown smiled bleakly. He pointed at the tank. “Are they the ones? These creatures?”

  “Yes, they are the nautiloids the Owner allowed me into the restricted zone to study,” said Lumi.

  “What was he like…if you don’t mind me asking?”

  Lumi thought back to that time when he was twenty-five years old and hiking along the Choom beaches of the wilder, on the edge of the restricted zone, in search of fossil nautiloids to back up his theory that they were not Earth-import life forms. He remembered his frustration when he stood at the marker line: silver posts spaced fifty metres apart. To step through that line was instant death for a human. Human bones in fact lay on the beach there. So wrapped up in his frustration had he been that he thought this the reason he had not heard the man approach. This was not the reason. He turned to see a big man in a black suit of strange design: a suit piped and padded and linked to half-seen machines floating in the air about him. His hair had been white, cropped, his eyes as red as a devil’s. Lumi had known in an instant he faced the Owner. The half-seen mechanisms were the subspace machinery of the Great Ship Vardelex, and part of the Owner himself—extensions of his mind and senses, grown and added to over ten thousand years.

  “You are Lumi,” he had said, and in that moment the machines had faded away around him and his eyes had turned from red to a quite normal hazel.

  “I am,” Lumi managed.

  The Owner pointed to mountains in the restricted zone. “Up there are the fossils you seek. You will not find them anywhere else on this planet.”

  Was he being taunted, Lumi wondered.

  “You may study them at your leisure.” The Owner stared at him very directly. “I place no restrictions on you in this matter because I know you to be responsible.”

  Lumi felt sick with excitement and fear. He gestured at the fence. “I cannot…”

  “It will not harm you. I have instructed the fence here not to harm you. You may pass through.” Lumi could not do it. All his upbringing, all the social conditioning, the hundreds of years of tradition…He was terrified. The Owner saw this in an instant, took hold of his arm with a hand as cold as ice, and marched him between the silver posts. On the other side of the fence Lumi had fallen to his knees and been sick on the sand.

  “You may pass through this section of fence for the rest of your natural life. You may study the fossils and nautiloids and whatever else you may find here of interest to you.” Lumi had gazed up into eyes returned to red, the weird machinery back.

  “Why…have you allowed me this?” he managed.

  “Because I can,” the Owner had said, a strange smile on his face.

  “What was he like?” Lumi said in reply to Brown’s question. “My meeting with him has been detailed time and time again, much has been spouted about how human the Owner is when he disconnects himself from his machines. I think that is exactly the case. He isn’t human. He probably ceased to be human thousands of years ago. You know what I felt most strongly about that meeting? It was that only a fragment of him communicated with me, the largest fragment permissible.”

  “What do you mean?”

  Lumi shook his head. “A man does not discuss philosophy with a microbe.”

  “You think the gap that wide.”

  Lumi pointed at the nautiloids. “He let me study those. Only in the last few years have I come to a conclusion about them, that conclusion recently backed up by evidence from the fossil beds. They are native to this planet, as are creatures like the blade beetles, but they were extinct before the Owner got here. This was a dead world. He populated it with life forms from Earth and then resurrected some of the old life forms. He must have got the information from their fossils somehow. I also think he created the Proctors, and that they are not machines as is often thought, but highly sophisticated living creatures. I think that in these things we see only a hint of his power.”

  “Do you think he is a god?”

  “As near as makes no difference to us. Think of the war. Our ancestors came here in an escape craft from a ship capable of destroying planets and which itself had been destroyed. The Owner allowed them to settle…it’s an old story…but think about some other facts: This world was in the war zone yet nothing touched it, nothing came into the system unless the Owner allowed it. The two warring factions of the human race had no power here whatsoever.”

  “Then, what power does Cromwell have?”

  “He could get us all killed. With high tech weapons he is sure to try to destroy Proctors. It might be that he could become just enough of an irritant to get himself flattened.”

  “A good thing, surely?”

  “One microbe or the whole Petri dish. The laws are for a reason. We are here on sufferance. The population stricture should have told you enough. The people killed when the population tops two billion are not the idiots who can’t control their gonads and there is no enforced birth-control or sterilisation unless we do it. The Owner’s message in this should be evident: We keep our own house in order. I have a horrible feeling, no, I am certain, that if Cromwell starts killing Proctors then the Proctors will start killing back, and they won’t stop.”

  Bradebus the tracker was the most irascible old man Lumi had ever known. He was also reputedly the best tracker known and had often helped the Constabulary find criminals who had fled into the wilder.

  “Who you after then?” the old man asked, scratching at a ragged mess of a beard. Brown looked to Lumi then said, “Cromwell.”

  “Ah! Got something on the bastard then?”

  “You could say that. He’s gone into the wilder with many of his people. We want to catch up with them as soon as possible.”

  “Who’s going?”

  “Myself, Chief Scientist Lumi here, and fifteen constables.”

  “When did he go?”

  “This morning.”

  Bradebus stared at Lumi calculatingly then gulped down the rest of his glass of whisky. The barman waddled forward and immediately refilled the glass.

  “We want to leave as soon as possible,” said Lumi.

  Bradebus took a gulp from his glass and grinned. “Oh, we’ll catch up all right. Can’t say we’ll take him by surprise though, not with fifteen clod-hoppers along.”

  “The men are ready now,” said Brown to Lumi.

  Bradebus said, “You know more or less what direction he took?”

  “Yes,” said Brown.

  “You go along then. I’ll catch you directly.”

  “This is important, Bradebus,” said Brown.

  “It always is,” said the tracker, turning his back on them.

  The edge of the wilder was marked by a line of black metal posts. On one side of this line were arable fields and lands for livestock, on the other side the deep woodland that was the wilder itself. The bus drew to a halt in a circular parking area, in which the road terminated, and Lumi and the constables disembarked. The men and women were all in field kit and carried an assortment of weapons. Lumi was in his hiking gear and carried no weapons. Brown was quick to remark on this.

  “Sir, I would feel bet
ter if you carried this,” he said, and handed over a pistol belt. Lumi drew the weapon and inspected it. It was a ten-bore revolver with eight chambers. A weapon you only needed to hit a man with once. Lumi considered rejecting it then changed his mind. Such an act might have been admirable in some circles, but here and now it would have been foolish. He strapped the weapon on and observed the constables unloading more powerful armament.

  “What’s that?”

  “Missile launcher,” said Brown. “If he gets to the ship and takes it up…” Brown did not need to elaborate. “Okay, let’s go,” he said to his men. And they walked between the black posts into the wood. This close to the perimeter there were many well-trodden paths. They moved at a slow pace following the main track Cromwell’s group had reportedly followed. By evening they had not left that track, and stopped at a well-used camp site.

  “We’ll wait here for him,” said Lumi, and went to set up his tent. Before retiring he ate a meal with the ten men and five women under Brown’s command, drank tea, and listened to Brown briefing them. They had known nothing of their mission prior to entering the wilder.

  The night sounds kept Lumi awake for some time and in the full dark he heard the arrival of Bradebus announced by the guards. He slid out of his sleeping bag and after pulling on some clothing went out to see the man. The night was lit by the second and third moons; one a pitted and dented thing that was called the Old Man, the other a mirror-bright sphere that had acquired no name. It was simply called the Third Moon.

  The tracker was dressed in clothing made from animal skins and wore a long coat of bear fur. He carried a short hunting carbine, a knife nearer the size of a machete, and two pistols holstered at his belt. He was squatted by the remains of the fire when Lumi saw him.

  “We didn’t expect you until the morning,” commented Lumi by way of something to say. Bradebus nodded. “Morning we go off the track to the north. Should catch up with them a bit. Loop in the track.” He poked at the fire with a stick.