by Neal Asher
"How did you get them?" he asked. It seemed important to keep talking, to keep delaying.
"Sewers," she said, proud of herself now. "We got you to bury them just twenty yards from one. It took a bit of digging to get to them, but was worth it."
She looked past him to Carl. "Are you done now?"
"Ready to roll," Carl replied.
To Pramer and Skyril she said, "Cut him loose and give him some clothes. If he tries anything, break his arms, but don't kill him. We want to have a talk with him back at base." She glanced at Carl. "A long, long talk."
Back at base…
When they cut the ropes tying him to the chair he could not have attacked anyway, since he had enough of a problem just standing up. Skyril stood back while Pramer brought over a bundle of clothing and dumped it on the chair. Cormac struggled into a pair of jeans and a black T-shirt with a holographic logo over the right breast. The only other item was a worn hat with a wide floppy brim, which he left. Though his feet were hard from combat training he would have liked boots—it was easier to run if your feet were well protected. Pramer picked up the hat and jammed it on Cormac's head.
"Move." Skyril prodded him in the back with the flack gun, then stepped out of reach. As Samara opened the door, Carl came up behind her, clutching that brushed-aluminium case.
"If you look up," said Skyril. "I'll cut out your right eye."
Cormac now understood the reason for the hat. They were worried about satellite surveillance and recognition systems that would certainly be on the lookout for him. If he looked up, there was a small chance he would be spotted and a Sparkind unit would be sent to rescue him, but was that chance worth an eye?
"He won't be looking up," said Carl. "Cloudy day today."
Skyril caught Cormac's shoulder and shoved him towards the door, while Pramer watched, his expression neutral. He and Cormac had been in combat together, so maybe that made a difference. Keeping his head down, Cormac stepped out after Samara and Carl. A glimpse from under the hat brim confirmed the cloudy sky, so there was little chance of him being spotted from up there. They turned left to where a large, old hydrocar limousine was parked across the end of the alley. Beyond that he recognised the top part of a statue surrounded by scaffolds and realised he wasn't far from where he had first met Samara. Glancing to the right he saw that the alley stretched for thirty feet, beyond which lay weed-choked ruination. He could run, but doubted he would get ten feet before someone brought him down.
Carl placed the case in the limousine's boot then walked round to climb inside. Only as he drew closer did Cormac realise that the driver was Sheen. Pramer climbed in beside her, while Samara climbed into the back next to Carl, where sets of seats faced each other. Skyril waved Cormac in next and followed him in.
"Move up against the door," he instructed, flack gun pointing down at Cormac's legs.
The man wasn't going to make the mistake of sitting close again.
With the whining note of a turbine imbalance the limousine pulled away. Cormac decided to relax as best he could since he was in no condition to attempt escape at that moment. He'd taken the full brunt of a neurotoxin stun grenade and now felt extreme sympathy for the ECS agent he'd hit earlier with a pepperpot stun gun, which fired the same toxin. Without intervention, it apparently took the toxin sixteen hours to clear from the bloodstream. Medium functionality, as the combat lecturer had informed the class Cormac once attended, returned within two hours. If no other option was available, take vitamin supplements and drink plenty of water.
"Do you have something to drink in here?" he asked.
Carl grinned at him. "Like some vitamin supplements too?"
Cormac turned to gaze through the window. After a moment he asked, "Was it you who killed Yallow?"
"Certainly," said Carl. "That woman has been the bane of my life since I entered basic training three years ago."
The frustrated rage growing in Cormac seemed too much to bear, and he knew it was that, and not the aftereffects of stun that now made him feel sick. He wanted to throw himself at Carl but, suspecting this was what the man would have liked, he controlled his rage and tried to turn it to ice.
"Understandable." He nodded. "She pissed on you in hand-to-hand combat and, despite all your claims, was the better marksman."
Carl's grin remained in place, but it lost its sincerity and after a moment he folded his arms and turned to gaze out the window. Reaching under her seat Samara pulled out a squeeze bottle of mulljuice and tossed it across to Cormac. Carl glanced back and frowned at this, his gaze focusing on Samara, then after a moment shrugged and returned his attention to the passing scenery. Clamping down on nausea Cormac drained the entire bottle then placed it down on the seat beside him, where Skyril retrieved it and jammed it behind him. But it wouldn't have been any use as a weapon, it being flimsy plastic.
"Thank you," said Cormac to Samara.
"You're going to need all your strength," she said unpleasantly.
Cormac folded his arms, made himself as comfortable as he could, and stared at Carl, just trying to figure him out.
"How old are you?" he asked.
"I was killing ECS soldier boys before you appeared in your daddy's testicles." Carl glanced round. "That's if you are what you appear to be."
It sounded so utterly wrong coming from the recruit Cormac had known for over two years, so wrong from someone he thought his own age. He tried to think of something else to ask, but it was almost as if the juice he had just drunk was alcoholic, for abruptly he just could not see straight. Perhaps he had been drugged, but it was just as likely the aftereffects of the toxin. He closed his eyes and drifted…
"Out!"
He fell backwards, just managing to catch hold of the door frame to stop himself from tumbling out of the car, swung his feet round and staggered out. It was dark, but not so dark he could not see Skyril's grin. Though he might hesitate to kill Pramer, Cormac felt he would not hesitate for a second if the target was Pramer's partner. Utterly weary, Cormac stood, shoulders hunched, and seemingly without the strength to even lift his arms. They were in the midst of a skarch forest, with only the odd glimpse up through the foliage of cloudy sky backlit by the glow of the orbital debris ring.
"Get in."
Skyril was holding open the hatch to the luggage compartment of a corroded ATV with worn bubble-plas tyres. Cormac walked over slowly, gazed into the oily space and hesitated.
"Wasn't the instruction clear enough for you?"
Something prodded him in the back and he glanced back to see Samara brandishing a pulse-rifle, probably his own. A few paces back from her Carl stood holding a thin-gun—probably the one Cormac had stolen earlier—his expression glacial. Beyond him Pramer was driving the limousine away, Sheen sitting beside him. Cormac was glad to see the both of them go, for, should the opportunity arise, Sheen was another he might hesitate to kill. He climbed into the luggage compartment whereupon Skyril slammed the hatch shut on him. He closed his eyes and tried to make himself as comfortable as possible in the cramped space. In a surprisingly short interval he drifted into sleep, but was then snapped out of it by the first bump—a sequence of events that was to repeat for a nightmarish time.
6
The diving suit felt clammy and sticky but that was due to the internal gel layer. The top half of the suit was ribbed and padded since it incorporated a haemolung and a breathing-assist formed of artificial muscle. Fortunately all this equipment had been positioned to flatter the wearer so when Cormac donned it and clicked his room's viewing window to its «mirror» setting, he gazed upon an eight-year-old who was either heavily into weight-training and steroids or had been boosted. There were gill slits positioned at intervals down either side of his chest, signs of the additional ribcage within the suit for deep water work, but the joint motors for that same work were artfully concealed.
Next Cormac pulled on the gloves, engaged them at the wrist and flexed his fingers. He ran a finger down the palm of on
e glove and it felt to him almost as if there was no intervening material as the glove transferred the pressure of his touch inside. After a moment he toggled a touch control at the base of his forefinger with his thumb, and webbing extended between his fingers, another touch and it receded. Now he pulled the hood up over his head, felt the pressure phones ooze into his ears, then pressed the face mask into place. Air was fed to him from the haemolung through holes where the mask engaged with his collar ring, so there were no inconvenient dangling tubes. The mask itself was a simple hemisphere, the top half transparent and separated from the opaque bottom breather half. A membrane pressed against his face running in a line which centred on the tip of his nose.
"Diagnostic test," he said.
"I am fully functional," the suit replied in his ear, a little snootily he thought.
"Run a test anyway."
"I just did," it replied. "And again."
Entertaining a suspicion he asked, "Are you AI?"
"Yup," the suit replied. "Lot of processing power in these suits nowadays and sometimes subbies like me often hitch a ride."
"And if I don't want a submind in my suit with me?" Cormac asked.
"Aw, don't be a spoilsport."
Cormac considered dismissing the interloper, but curiosity, and perhaps a little in the way of a loneliness he wouldn't admit, got the better of him.
"What's your name?" he asked.
"Well," replied the mind, "I can give you the name of the AI that made me about twenty years ago, but I prefer to be called Mackerel."
"Then Mackerel it is."
"Are you ready yet?" Dax leaned in through the door, also suited up. He was grinning and had a harpoon gun resting across one shoulder.
Cormac understood this utter change in his brother's character, but still felt uncomfortable with it. He pulled the mask from his face and the hood back off his head, stooped and took up his flippers, then headed for the door.
"Are you allowed to use a harpoon," he enquired.
"Special dispensation," Dax spoke over his shoulder as he headed for the water locks of this section of the hotel. "There's a lot of very large g-mod turbot out there. If I get one the hotel will cook some of it for us and pay us for the rest—or rather take the cost off our bill."
As he followed his brother he looked round for his mother, expecting her to be here to see them off. No sign of her, but then lately when she wasn't talking to Dax she was often ensconced alone in her room.
The corridor doglegged at the end and along one wall were three pressure doors with windows spaced between them. Halting by the first door Dax turned to Cormac.
"Let's take a look at your suit," he said.
Cormac grimaced in annoyance, since he felt himself more than capable of checking out his own suit. Really, having an adult check your suit was the kind of thing that needed to be done for infants. He held up his arm, showing the small screen attached to his wrist. Dax waved it away.
"Put your mask on and your hood up, and put on your flippers," he said.
Cormac obliged, while Dax did the same.
"Your suit is fine," said his brother, turning towards the pressure door. Of course, Cormac's was a child's suit and would have a computing channel open directly to his brother's. If there was any problem with Cormac's suit, Dax would receive an alert at the same time as Cormac did.
The inner pressure door opened with a slight hiss of equalizing pressure and Cormac noted a change since the last time he had been here: the door that opened into the sea, which had once been made of ceramal, had now been replaced with chainglass, which made the whole experience of going through the lock a lot less claustrophobic. They both stepped inside and the door drew shut behind them. Immediately, seawater began pouring in through nozzles set in the walls. Cormac remembered with some embarrassment how frightened and helpless he had felt when he first experienced this.
In moments the water was up to his knees, then up to his waist.
"We'll head straight out to flat sands above the reefs," said Dax, his voice clear through the phones in the plugs filling Cormac's ears. "The turbot are out that way hunting mackerel."
"Nasty turbots," said the submind, Mackerel.
Cormac glanced at his brother, but Dax showed no sign of having heard the submind speak. "Don't worry," said Mackerel, obviously guessing what Cormac was thinking. "I'm not letting him hear me and I won't let him hear any replies you make to me… unless of course you want me to?"
"No, keep our conversations private."
"Thought that's what you'd want."
The water reached his neck, then was soon over his head. It occurred to him then to wonder about what the submind had just said.
"How… will you know?"
"How will I know when you're speaking to me and not to your brother?" it said to him. "Remember, I'm your suit and I'm monitoring you on many different levels."
Cormac wasn't sure if he liked the idea.
A clear bell tone rang in the airlock and the water swirled around them as Dax pushed open the chainglass door.
"Let's go," he called, something odd in his voice.
Dax pushed off and drifted out into the sea, his suit immediately adjusting to give him negative buoyancy. Cormac peered down at the bottom twenty feet below, rocky and forested with weed, mussel beds lying between like spills of coal. As he pushed off he dislodged something from a ledge below the door and turned over on his back for a moment to observe a scallop jetting unevenly away from him. Now, in this position, he gazed back at what he could see of Tritonia. On either side the convex wall curved away, filled with viewing windows, many of them lit from inside and crowded about outside with undersea life attracted to the light. To his right he saw a robot crawling along the exterior of the structure, a clean trail behind it as it stripped away barnacles, a shoal of fish dogging its course as they tucked in to the bounty of shredded shellfish it provided. The machine looked like a large aluminium lizard with a wide flat head and a mouth like a manta ray's. It wasn't something that could be mistaken for a large iron scorpion. Cormac now focused on the undersea city's roof. Up there a secondary seabed had been provided and upon this had burgeoned a forest of kelp. He knew that now, up there about the numerous artificial islands and moorings, sea otters had become established, feasting on a cornucopia of abalone.
"Come on sea slug!" shouted Dax. "Shift yourself!"
Cormac rolled over again and kicked hard after his brother, who was lower down now, sculling over a bed of oysters and menacing a large edible crab with the barbed point of his harpoon. Once he saw Cormac coming after him, he kicked away above the crab, which held its claw high and scuttled backwards, falling over the edge of the oyster bed. Crab had been a menu favourite for over thirty years and despite the availability of the big GM sea farm versions, demand still outstripped supply. Cormac peered down at the crustacean as it righted itself and now raised its claws threateningly. It did look very much like one of the Prador, the difference being size, intelligence, and who was likely to eat who, though there had been news stories buzzing around the nets of some human soldiers trying a new addition to their diets. It was only fair, Cormac thought, the Prador showed no reluctance in adding humans to their menus.
The start of the reefs was marked by the Tesco III, which had been sunk by an eco-terrorist cruise missile over two hundred and fifty years ago. This had been during the time when Middle Eastern oil was both running out and being supplanted by fusion power. Cormac had studied some of the history of the time but found it boring in its repetition of idiocies stemming from the political corruption of science. The two-mile-long oil tanker was only vaguely recognisable as a ship under the masses of marine growth. Along one side was an entrance for divers who found such a claustrophobic environment enticing and who might enjoy hunting the massive conger eels that haunted the huge dark spaces inside. Dax increased his buoyancy and abruptly rose beside the wall of this tanker.
"Take me up," said Cormac, then abruptly f
elt himself rising too. As he went up he felt the breathing-assist of the suit beginning to slacken off as pressure decreased. He also felt other subtle adjustments as it sought to protect him from the pressure change.
He swam in closer to the cliff and studied the corals and multicoloured blooms of weed that owed their existence to a craze, over a century ago, for seawater fish tanks containing colourful GM seaweeds. Amidst these he observed numerous hermit crabs. Many of these had made their homes in a variety of natural whelk shells, but many others had found other quite odd-looking residences.
"What is all this stuff?" Cormac asked.
Dax replied, "Indestructiphones," but said nothing more.
"Mackerel?"
"Here you see the result of the industries, of the early twenty-second century, producing cheap and incredibly hard-wearing ceramics and glass," the submind replied. "Those are the ceramic cases of Indestructiphones, just like your brother said, also webcams, glass pipe fittings for plumbing and bottles and jars."
Cormac could see that some of the latter still bore inset labels of their erstwhile contents—coriander, mustard, tabasco, pickled ginger. He then paused to gaze at the ghoulish sight of a hermit crab that had taken up residence in the remains of a ceramic artificial hand.
Soon he passed the crumbling rails of the tanker and swam after his brother across the wide deck, now occupied by a garden of brain corals which, like all the corals in the vicinity, were no product of evolution, but had been adapted to grow fast and survive in the cold waters here. Beyond the ship the reefs proper began: corals stretching as far as they could see. Only by pausing and gazing for a long while could Cormac discern the regularity of this waterscape.
"Mackerel," he said, "what was it they dumped here?"
"One-hundred-year tyres," the submind replied. "They were carbon-filament tyres that gave even the most advanced recycling equipment of the time indigestion. They epoxied them together in tubes and dropped them to make a conservation area impossible to trawl."
