The Bosch: A Novella (Polity Universe)

by Neal Asher

  ‘We wait,’ Yoon replies, head moving like a searchlight as she checks around her, puzzlement writ on her face.

  Police depart the ship they first entered and now head towards them. He looks around for the sergeant and, though he cannot see her, sees her car over by another ship.

  ‘I don’t suppose –’ he begins, then sees a figure striding fast and confidently from the nearby ship towards them.

  ‘Yoon,’ says this man. ‘So good to see you recovered!’

  Yoon hisses, dropping into a crouch, while Petod gazes at the double of the Krodor Ambassador. This Ibruk raises his hand and the black object there cracks two times. He sees Yoon stagger, flesh and blood exploding from her back and feels something clip his trousers. She turns her face aside, coughs blood, then looks forward again as like some great black bat the Plague Doctor falls on the golem. The gun skitters away, claws rip in a morass of shadow. The fight is difficult to follow. He sees briefly a stone skull and shreds of unbleeding flesh and skin. Yoon stands and steps forward and he sees the wounds in her back easing closed. Something coughs like a giant clearing its throat. An acrid scent fills the air, and he realizes that the Doctor and Yoon, in this place, is the intent.

  Then comes detonation.

  Fire erupts from the throat of a steering thruster in the side of the ship, the blast wave hurling him to the ground in a shower of hot cinders. Burning barrels tumble past crumping heavily in their course and he sees one crash against Yoon to send her sprawling. The blast turns to a howl. He squints into the glare. Is it the engine flame howling or that staggering human figure – the last of its artificial skin burning and peeling, silver metal running as it collapses to scrap? Or is it the Plague Doctor standing in the flame path, fighting what should have blown it from the platform, and then him and Yoon, for it blocks the blast? He sees the creature spreading – a sheeted mass folding out but failing, incandescent light glaring through its substance. It turns its weird birdlike head towards him and he knows what he must do. He rolls towards the sprawled form of Yoon, grabs her and hauls her up with a strength he never knew he possessed, throwing her more than human weight over his shoulder and staggers away. At last the Doctor fails, exploding away in burning tatters and the flame scores past them setting their clothing smoking. The ship moves as he drops with Yoon down by a stack of crates. It slides away from them, clips the edge of a crane and then shoots off over the edge of the platform, speeding away close to the surface of the world.

  ‘Damn you,’ whispers Yoon, abruptly sitting upright.

  She straightens out a broken arm with a cracking sound, looks to Petod, exposing a face burned down to the bone on one side. She hauls herself to her feet slapping out smouldering fabric and peers up at the sky, contemplatively for a moment, and then nods her head.

  Light spears down to hit the ship, and vomiting fire it drops. It hits the lower slopes, bounces up again shedding debris, and then skids out across the surface of one of the lakes. Its grav engine is still functional enough to give it negative buoyancy for a moment, but then something blows out of its side with a blue flash, and it begins to sink. Yoon grabs his shoulder and turns him, pointing him towards the sergeant’s car.

  ‘Come.’

  Pain suffuses her body. The barrel broke her arm, crushed ribs already broken by the shots that also damaged organs, while the fire seared her to the bone. But the pain of the Plague Doctor’s death also still cycles in her mind from a connection she could not close. She waves Petod to the driving seat and climbs into the other, ignoring the police and their sergeant running towards her. She feels a deep frustration with the messiness of her intervention here, at the incorrect deaths of two Bosch, at the chaos and lack of control. And at last her whole self is truly angry.

  Petod lifts the car from the platform and sends it out towards the low slopes and lakes while she struggles to bring herself to order. Eventually, as they slide above the lake in which the ship sank, she restores a degree of equilibrium that manages to kill the pain.

  ‘So what now?’ he asks.

  What now indeed. She studies him for a long moment, then makes the required changes inside herself – generates the required pheromones to her leaking skin. Next, she loads another complex organic chemical in the sac below the claw of her right forefinger.

  ‘What now?’ she asks. ‘Now I release you.’

  She reaches across and puts her hand around the back of his neck, pulls him in for a long slow kiss, gently pressing the tip of her claw into his neck and injecting his freedom. He responds eagerly to the kiss at the beginning, but then passion begins to wane as her chemical hold on him fades. He pulls back and looks in her eyes.

  ‘It was strong,’ he says.

  ‘Yes, and I should not have done it. You are free now.’

  ‘You’ve given me free will?’

  ‘I have.’

  ‘Okay then.’ He leans forwards and kisses her aggressively.

  Finally she breaks the embrace, surprised he has not as aggressively rejected her. Perhaps there will be something here, but later, for now she has a chore to complete. She checks herself again, sure the required chemicals emit from her skin, opens the car door, and steps out into the air.

  She falls fast and hard, hitting the water feet first and losing herself in a cloud of bubbles. Her first breath of water is painful, like drowning because it has been so long, and her burns ache with the slight brine of it. But soon the familiarity of her favoured element embraces her. She swims down but not far, because the top of the ship is only ten feet below the surface. The shot she ordered from the station has torn a gaping hole in its side. Sculling in the water before this she peers inside, knowing that the chemical spilling from her burns are spreading in a fast sub-molecular process and already their reach is as much as a mile from her now.

  The hole opens into a bridge and two seats are there – neither occupied. The equipment here is burned and blackened, its circuitry destroyed by the ion charge of the blast from above. She searches for human remains, but can find none. Perhaps the intensity of the burn here completely destroyed the albino ophidapt assassin.

  No.

  A door to the rear opens with an explosion of bubbles and a figure shoots out. The woman is clad in a skin-tight suit, gel over her eyes, and she has the adaptation to breath underwater. Shock lines cut through the water from a projectile weapon, one slamming into Yoon’s belly then out her back through were her right kidney would have been, had she been human. She writhes away and shoots up, grabbing the hole’s edge, and flipping over it as further shots crack by, rattling her ear drums. Tensing, she closes the wound – later body repairs needed. The ophidapt swims out, perhaps expecting to find her dying here. Yoon propels herself down hard, slamming into the woman at the waist, and they tumble away from the ship. The gun falls through the water, but a knife flashes out, cutting up towards her chest. Yoon could writhe away, but perhaps lose her grip. She allows the knife into her body under her breastbone, then stabs in her claws, injecting poison. The woman replies with a bite, sinking fangs into her neck.

  Both of them now slow, fighting poisons as they float towards the surface. Yoon can see that what should have killed the woman instantly has not. Further extreme adaptations, but it is expected for a professional assassin to be difficult to kill. They reach the surface, floating just a few feet apart. The woman ejects water and gasps air.

  ‘I should’ve . . . done the job . . . myself,’ she says.

  Yoon ejects the water from her lungs too, and replies, ‘You would have failed.’

  The woman contemplates this for a moment, then nods. She says, ‘It’s a mess, but I’ll get clear of it.’ She raises a hand out of the water holding another weapon.

  ‘No,’ says Yoon. ‘You’re just going to die.’

  ‘Really?’ says the woman, enjoying her power, enjoying the moment before the kill. ‘How’s that going to happen, then?’

  Yoon sculls back from her, moving clear, and points pa
st her. ‘Like this.’

  The woman turns, just in time to see the huge fin of the Progenitor cleaving towards her. The next moment she shrieks, travels twenty feet through the water sideways, a hot beam sawing away from her new weapon. Next, tugged from below, she disappears from sight. Yoon continues to scull, watching the spot as the red rises and spreads.

  ‘Can I take you anywhere?’ asks a voice above.

  She looks up at the hovering gravcar, Petod leans out of the door and reaches down towards her. She stretches up and touches his hand for a moment. Smiles.

  ‘Sometime soon,’ she says, and dives down into healing waters.

  ENDS