The Skinner

by Neal Asher

  ‘Oh yes,’ said Erlin. ‘But what happens to a human who doesn’t get to eat Earth food at all? You know, ever since ECS drove Hoop and his crew away, there has always been Earth food available here. Hoopers could only grow a few adapted varieties that Hoop himself established here, but they were still enough. If such food had not been available there would have been no humans here when the Polity returned.’

  ‘They die without it?’ Janer asked.

  Erlin gave a humourless laugh and gazed out to where the sun was sinking into a mantel of grey clouds which almost had the appearance of floating mud flats.

  ‘It would be better if they did. They do not: they just cease to be human – we know this because Hoopers have been stranded and unable to obtain Dome-grown food . . . Peck, it seems, had been taken by one of these creatures that had once been human – a creature they called the Skinner, because of its unpleasant habits. I, of course, wanted to see it for myself, and demanded that I go ashore with them in their attempt to rescue Peck. I think what finally persuaded them was the surgical laser I carried. I’d managed to remove its safety limiters and then had an effective weapon.’

  ‘So . . . you went ashore.’

  ‘Yes, we went ashore and we saw this Skinner.’ Erlin stared down at the water and proceeded to give a clinical description of the beast. Janer might not have believed her, had he not seen some strange and frightening things in his time. When she had finished her description she paused for a while before going on with, ‘When it came at us it was waving something in its right hand. Ambel put a hole in it with his blunderbuss and Anne and Pland got it with harpoons. When I saw what the creature was holding I joined in the fight. I cut it with my laser, and I tell you that was no easy task – then I crawled away to spew up my guts. The other three used my laser to finish the job on the thing.’

  ‘What did it have in its hand?’ Janer asked, getting right to the point, even though he thought he might already know the answer.

  ‘It was Peck’s entire skin.’

  ‘Jesu! The poor bastard.’

  Erlin gazed at him now with a slightly crazy look in her eyes. ‘Yes, he was. When you meet him you’ll have to ask him all about it,’ she said.

  ‘What,’ said Janer, ‘he survived?’

  ‘Oh yes. Ambel picked up his skin and we went to find him. When we found him, skinless, writhing in a bowl-shaped rock, I tried to put him out of his misery. Ambel knocked the laser out of my hand, then he, Anne, and Pland proceeded to dress Peck again in his own skin.’

  ‘You’re kidding.’

  ‘Am I? You know what sticks in my mind the most?’

  ‘What?’

  ‘How they punched holes through his skin to let the air bubbles escape . . . so they could squeeze the air out through the punctures. They carried him back to the boat and out to the ship, but he managed to climb on board himself. There, you see, the raw extremes . . . those are what I saw.’

  Janer watched her as she stared into the descending night. Perhaps she was a bit deranged. He did not want to openly call her a liar.

  8

  The turbul were all either dead or fled, and now the glisters fed with alacrity. As, one after another, they gobbled down turbul bodies, their own bodies expanded hugely to accommodate their gorging but, unlike the frog whelk which had caused all this furore, they had sub-shells which slid into place to protect newly exposed flesh swelling between original segments of shell. It was a rather hasty and frenetic banquet, for a glister feeding on one end of a turbul’s body was hard-pressed to eat half of it before coming nose to nose with the uninvited diners. On each occasion this happened the glister might snatch a between-meals snack of prill or leech before moving on to the next turbul – the fish’s flesh being so much sweeter and more tender, and definitely to be preferred.

  Keech shook with fever. His nerves were regenerating very quickly and when he could stand the pain no longer, he shut down some of the connections to – and in – his organic brain. He did want life, but he wanted sanity too. Even so, with connections closed off, he felt like a diseased wreck. His entire body was delivering to him the message that he was full of infection and decay, and that he was falling apart. The physical evidence of this was how he had swollen, and the plasma leaking from his skin and a creamy fluid oozing from his nose. The cleansing unit was humming now as it worked hard following the nanofactory programme. A pool of volatile balm had puddled on the rock around his knees, having leaked from the holes lasered in his torso. These holes were now filled with nubs of veined, purplish flesh, and a messages light was clamouring for his attention. He decided to view the said messages and turned the system back on.

  N-FACT MESSAGE: BALM DRAINED. WATER REQUIRED – 8 LITRES.

  The nano-changer program was fully online. Keech got unsteadily to his feet, picked up the cleansing unit and walked down to the edge of the rock. He stared out across the slow dark roil of the sea and thought for a moment that something further was wrong with his vision, until he realized that night was descending. He looked down and saw below the water’s surface, whelks of one kind or another, clinging to the stone, their shells seemingly formed of coiled gold and veined jade. He drew his pulse-gun before kneeling and dropping the unit in the water. No reaction from the whelks. Perhaps they became somnolent in darkness – or perhaps they did not consider him edible.

  Immediately the unit began taking in water. He could feel it suffusing his flesh and cooling him. Was his bone marrow producing red blood cells now? What would happen first? In seeming answer, his arms began to itch intolerably. As he scratched at them, grey skin began to slew away. His hope of seeing pink skin underneath was dashed when flesh as white as fish meat was revealed. He stopped scratching and inspected his fingernails. Two of them were bent right back. He shook his hand and they fell out, pus now leaking from the ends of his fingers.

  N-FACT MESSAGE: DANGER – TANK AMNIOT UNSUITABLE. ELECTROLYTIC REQUIREMENTS . . .

  Keech turned the message off. He wasn’t in a tank. The nearest electrolyte he could immerse himself in was this sea, and that seemed a suicidal idea. He’d just have to pray that Erlin could help him. When his irrigator automatically moistened his already wet living eye, he reached up and unplugged it. Some things seemed to be working, anyway. Once the unit stopped drawing in water, he stood, picked it up, and headed unsteadily for his scooter. The nanites could still work on his body while he was in the air, so there was no point in waiting here any longer. He mounted his scooter and dropped the unit between his thighs. From the comlink came that familiar strange buzzing the instant he turned it on.

  ‘Yes?’ said the Hive mind.

  ‘I have your package, and I will deliver it,’ said Keech, the liquid in his mouth and throat distorting his synthesized voice. A set of slowly changing coordinates flicked up on the screen map, and Keech lifted his scooter from the stone. Once in the air, he keyed the autopilot and sat back. He didn’t want to fly manually while he was dripping on the controls.

  Through thousands of eyes the Warden observed the people in the base on Coram and on the planet below. When a situation hinted at ramifications that might impinge on its remit, the AI observed it with greater attention, or assigned a submind to watch it develop. When an SM could not be spared from its particular vehicle: be that an iron seahorse, floating cockleshell, or some other more esoteric sea-shape, the Warden loaded a copy or created one for that specific purpose. Sometimes it allowed these new minds to continue. At other times it resubsumed them. After all, they were only a pattern of information – as was all life.

  At present, through one of its eyes, the AI was observing with interest the arrival of an amphidapt from the runcible in the core ocean of Europa, in the Sol system. The attachment that came with this woman had her noted down as a separatist terrorist who might be attempting to smuggle leeches to the strange dark sea that was her home. After only moments of observation, the Warden lost interest and assigned SM24 to observe instead, as it did not u
nderstand how she believed she might bypass the bio-filters of the runcible. Not a molecule got through that the Warden was not prepared to allow through. Now it let its attention wander to a fight occurring just beyond the Dome gate. Just for the hell of it, it placed a bet for an E with the submind in charge of Dome security, and got odds that made it wonder if it was time to subsume said mind – for it obviously knew something the Warden did not. Shortly after that, the AI received a signal from a direction whence nothing had come in decades – in fact from one of its deep-space eyes. It gave the new matter almost a quarter of its attention.

  The ship emerged out of underspace, leaving a coruscating trail as antimatter particles struck the disperse local hydrogen. Two of the Warden’s deep-space eyes flared out in an EM shockwave, so of necessity it had to observe from a distance. Around the ship the stars distorted, as if seen through a lens, as it fell into the system seemingly out of control. Braking on ram scoop motors, it threw out a torus of radiation as it dumped velocity and came down to half the speed of light.

  ‘Please identify yourself,’ sent the Warden, as it noted the pilot was experiencing difficulties. A jumbled theta-block of pictographic computer language then overloaded all the Warden’s receivers for two microseconds. It took the AI another three seconds to discover that there was little information of value in this communication, other than its form. By now the vessel had the Warden’s full attention.

  ‘Prador ship. Please identify yourself.’

  The ship was tumbling, using ram scoop and ion drive intermittently, as it tried to slow. Leaving a long trail of fire behind it, it arced around the sun. Another block of information overloaded the Warden’s receivers. Four seconds later the AI got the gist.

  ‘Nature of U-space generator fault?’

  The garbled reply lasted for a couple of seconds, then cut off as the ship went into U-space.

  The people in the Coram complex were baffled at the sight of all the exterior windows immediately becoming shrouded in something like an undulating wall of sun-glinting water as shimmer shields slammed into place across them. Internal doors closed – just slowly enough for people to get out of the way. Deep inside the moon, energy buffers went online to take any surge from the arm-thick superconducting cables linked to every essential system in the complex. Through the shimmer shields, ugly weapons turrets could be seen rising out of sulphur and ice.

  ‘Attempting to land,’ was the gist of the next transmission.

  The Warden immediately direct-linked to the runcible it controlled, ready to transmit itself away should that action be necessary. It knew that if this was an attack, it would itself be the main target. A few seconds later the ship resurfaced in an explosion of antimatter half a million kilometres from Spatterjay, and on the opposite side of the planet from the moon.

  Through its satellite eyes the Warden watched as the craft managed to get down to a speed of ten thousand kilometres per second. It skipped atmosphere then tried some sort of aero braking. There was a momentary U-space signature, then a flat antimatter explosion in the stratosphere. After the initial flash and detector overload, the Warden detected a scattering of debris blown into orbit around the planet. It picked up a brief whistling-bubbling sound on com which it tentatively identified from its library as the sound of a Prador getting fried by a high-intensity microwave burst. It considered the event for a whole six seconds before contacting one of its subminds.

  ‘SM Twelve, you saw?’

  ‘I saw it. I didn’t know any visitors were scheduled.’

  ‘They weren’t. It was some sort of Prador vessel, but I couldn’t get close enough to identify it. Check that orbital debris and report back.’

  ‘OK, boss,’ said SM12.

  From one of its satellite eyes the Warden observed a meagre dot accelerate away from the planet at hypersonic speed, before flicking its attention elsewhere.

  ‘SM13, I want you moving into your last sector immediately. You are now on full crisis alert.’

  With a degree of peevishness the Warden then opened up its next communication channel.

  ‘Sniper, I do know that a molly carp is not capable of travelling at seven hundred kilometres per hour. If it dies, you understand you’ll be charged with killing a grade-three intelligence?’

  ‘I understand. The carp’s fine. What’s happening up there?’

  The Warden transmitted a condensed information package to the war drone. Sniper might be a pain sometimes, but did have his uses, especially in any situation that might involve explosions and sudden death. The Warden then flicked away from the drone to another focus of attention. Now linking through the local server, it accessed a very particular aug on the planet below. The actions it was pursuing were initiated from a program within itself which it labelled ‘nasty/suspicious’. The blueprint for that program had, in fact, initially come from Sniper.

  Sniper scanned around inside the molly carp for breakages. Dropping it five metres into the sea the moment the Warden had contacted him had not been a clever idea. Surprisingly the carp was undamaged, just a bit twitchy. He relinquished all control of it as he scanned the information package.

  Prador . . .

  Some very old and unused programs initiated in Sniper, and as a result he came as close to excitement as it was possible for him to get. He immediately began running systems diagnostics and checking his inventory: 121 smart missiles with coiled planar loads, an assortment of mines, plenty of carbide fingers for his rail gun, and of course his APW. He was well armed, but his big problem was his power supply. Hauling a molly carp all that distance on AG had depleted his batteries, so his allotropic uranium generator was struggling to bring them up to charge, and his microtok was struggling to keep the generator running. In drone parlance, he was knackered. He decided the best thing for him to do now was sit tight until everything was up to charge.

  He did a quick ultrasound scan beyond the fleshy vessel he was in and saw that a sailing ship had just come into range. No matter to him unless they decided to hunt down this carp and cut it open, so he settled down to wait. He was now in what he supposed might be called the carp’s small intestine, and had quite a way to go to reach the final exit.

  Using two ceramal-composite oars with blades as wide as a man, Ambel towed the Treader with a rowing boat. Each time he dipped those oars in and heaved, the hawser connecting the boat to the ship creaked and stretched, and the ship slowly slid on through the water. The boat itself was heavily reinforced, especially about the rowlocks. The first time Ambel had used these oars in an unreinforced boat, his exertions had torn the sides out of it, and the crew had to quickly haul him back before the leeches got him. Just in case of that eventuality, Pland and Anne kept an eye on their Captain while they supervised work on the deck, and Peck was in the nest keeping an eye elsewhere.

  ‘What’s he doing?’ asked Pland.

  Ambel had shipped his oars and was staring off to one side. Both Pland and Anne followed the direction of Ambel’s gaze, towards the horizon. A spreading disk of red fire grew behind cloud like a skin cancer. It broke and dispersed as they watched, but it took a long time for the colour to leave the sky.

  ‘What’s that?’ Pland asked.

  ‘Big meteor?’ Anne suggested doubtfully.

  They both stared contemplatively at the coloration in the sky and only returned their attention to Ambel as he started rowing again.

  ‘Molly carp to starboard!’ yelled Peck from the nest.

  ‘Where the hell did that come from?’ said Pland.

  He and Anne both stared at the creature as it rose out of the water and came down with a huge splash, seemingly trying to bite the waves. After pausing for a moment it swam round in a couple of tight circles, then rocked backwards, apparently examining the boat, before setting off at a frantic pace to do one circuit of the ship. Those who had been scrubbing the deck stopped to watch the show, glad of an interruption to their tedium. Once back where it had begun from, it settled down now to blow bub
bles and make strange grunting sounds.

  ‘That’s one confused beasty,’ said Anne.

  ‘Bit of a mad moment, maybe? We all get those,’ said Pland.

  Anne snorted and gave him a look.

  ‘They used to follow the boxy boats . . . never cause no harm,’ said Sild, leaning on his mop.

  Immediately on his words, the carp reared up and suddenly sped towards Ambel’s reinforced rowing boat.

  ‘Now that’s normally what Peck does,’ said Anne.

  Gollow and Sild eyed each other in confusion, turned to watch as she and Pland sped away along the deck, then abruptly dropped their cleaning utensils and followed.

  They all ran around the forecabin to the foredeck and began winding in the cable that joined ship to rowing boat. Boris joined them, from the helm, but even with his help, they knew they would not be quick enough. Ambel shipped his oars and, holding one like a club, he stood and waited for the carp. The carp reached the rowing boat when the boat was only four metres from the ship. The creature hesitated in its approach, then, as if coming to a decision, it lunged. Ambel chopped down on its head with all the force he could muster. There came a sound as of a sledgehammer hitting a block of wood. The carp itself immediately stopped, but its bow wave continued on to hit the boat, almost tipping it over. Ambel kept his feet and used all his weight to bring the boat back on an even keel. When the carp nosed in again, hesitantly, as if not sure what had happened to it, he hit it again, this time high on the hump of flesh located behind its head. Again that solid bang. Ambel inspected the bend in his oar, then swivelled it in readiness for another blow, perhaps hoping to batter it straight again. The carp shook itself once, then lifted its head out of the water and turned an accusing eye on Ambel.

  ‘That’s it! You show the bastard!’ yelled Peck from his perch. Anne, Pland, and Boris stared up at him, trying to decide which of the two contestants Peck was addressing.

  Ambel rested the butt of his oar in the bottom of the boat as he stared eye to eye with the creature. After a moment, the carp opened its mouth and issued a deep whooshing hoot, then it turned and moved slowly away.