The Skinner

by Neal Asher

  Suddenly he spotted her clear ahead of him, and couldn’t resist firing. The APW emitted a stuttering pulse, a sure sign of it reaching the end of its charge. But he dared not stop to change canisters now. He might lose her. He could lose her at any moment. He saw her glance back. She must be well aware what that disperse emission from an APW signified.

  ‘You’ll have to do better than that, Keech!’ she shouted.

  He fired yet again, damning himself as he did so, but unable to do otherwise. This time there was light, but no fire, no damage.

  Suddenly Frisk was running towards him, screaming, her face twisted with hate. He continued to aim his APW at her, its trigger depressed. Spurts of fire started her clothing smouldering, but the weapon put out nothing effective. He dropped it to pull out his pulse-gun. His first shot slammed into her left bicep, gouging a chunk of muscle and spraying fragments behind. His second shot caved in her stomach and bowed her almost double, but did not slow her. There was no third shot, for by then she had slammed into him like a collapsing wall.

  Keech went down with Frisk on top of him, the pulse-gun spinning away. She hammered a fist into his face – once, twice. He felt his cheekbone break, and aug contacts discharge under his skin. Then she was off him, and hauling him to his feet. She was strong, strong as an Old Captain. Keech found himself airborne, then lost all his breath as he slammed into a tree trunk. Leeches started falling about him.

  ‘This body,’ croaked Frisk, ‘is all old Hooper.’ She pressed down on the mess he had made of her arm, then made a horrible groaning sound. As she slowly paced towards him, Keech was struggling to recover his breath and to beat away leeches that were oozing towards him. He’d need a lot more than his slowly returning heavy-worlder strength to defeat her.

  ‘I should have done this myself long ago. I should never have left it to hired killers,’ she sneered. ‘First I think I’ll tear your arms off.’

  Keech began breathing slowly and evenly. He recalled she had always been a talker, had always loved going into detail about how she was going to kill her victim. Anticipation was a large part of the pleasure for her. She came to loom over him, then bent and grabbed the front of his overall to haul him to his feet. In one quick motion, he brought both his hands to her throat and, as he closed them with all his strength, she laughed in his face.

  ‘I know it’s not enough,’ he said. ‘You may kill me now, but the machine that is me will keep working after I am dead. So go ahead and tear my arms off.’

  Slow realization dawned on her as he initiated the cybermotors in his fingers and completely relinquished his mental control of them.

  His fingers began to close on her hard Hooper neck.

  Even with its wavering unbalanced gait, the Skinner easily stayed ahead of them. They only gained on it when it fell, or when it needed to shove its way through thickening dingle, but wherever there was open ground it quickly pulled ahead again. Ambel just kept going at the same dogged pace, though Janer was beginning to find the chase exhausting. He had reached the stage where he felt he must soon quit, when the Skinner began to stumble and show signs of slowing.

  ‘Now we have you, my lad,’ growled Ambel.

  The Skinner suddenly fell forwards in a rocky open space, sprawled out like something dead washed up by the tide. They quickly moved in and, with grim purpose, Ambel approached it holding his machete to his side. Janer stood back and watched with morbid fascination as the machete whistled down.

  Thunk. A diseased leg jerked away. On the backstroke, he took off the Skinner’s remaining hand. Janer stared at the head: the hate-filled black eyes and gaping mouth. There was no sign on it of the yellow that denoted sprine poisoning, and it had nearly detached itself from the body.

  ‘Ambel!’ he yelled in warning, then began firing.

  Ambel turned and hurled his machete. It struck rocks with a ringing clash that sent sparks skittering into the air. Janer set those same rocks smoking as he pressed the trigger down and kept on firing. Thumping between the rocks like a pig escaping the slaughterman, the head moved quickly into cover. They ran to the spot where it had disappeared, and stared down at a dark hole cut deep into the ground. Janer crouched forward, pushed the snout of his carbine into the cavity, and pulled back on the trigger. Nothing at all happened. He stepped away and peered at the carbine’s display. Empty.

  ‘Bugger,’ said Ambel.

  They continued to gaze into the hole, and Janer even thought he caught the glint of eyes looking back out.

  ‘We could bury it in there,’ Janer suggested.

  Ambel shook his head. ‘It’d only dig its way out again. Just one thing for it.’ With the power of a machine he stooped, gripped rock, and broke it away from the edge of the hole, then reached down for more. There was a tenacity in the Captain Janer found a little difficult to comprehend.

  ‘Why wasn’t the sprine killing the head too?’ he asked.

  ‘Had never fully connected itself. I wounded the body,’ said Ambel, still relentlessly pulling away rock. Janer watched him a while longer, then removed his own backpack, extracting from it the hexagonal box. He couldn’t help feeling a certain inevitability about this moment.

  ‘I have a way we can kill it,’ he said. ‘All I need is a crystal of sprine.’

  ‘At last,’ breathed the Hive mind.

  Ebulan reached out with rigid control, and Pilot touched and manipulated the various complex controls to start AG and warm the thrusters. Through another blank, the Prador put the weapons console online and checked the loads. All readings were optimum. The rear nacelles contained a hundred and forty-four missiles fitted with CTDs, as well as cluster and planar explosives. There were four defence lasers and two giga-joule particle beams. Even the old rail-guns were in perfect order, and had carousels full of ceramo-carbide missiles that could be fired at half the speed of light.

  Meanwhile other blanks were running on the slave programs loaded into their thrall units, maintaining the ship, or standing ready to replace Pilot or the blank seated at the weapons console, all ready and equipped with hull patches and fire retardants, should the ship be hit.

  The Prador destroyer rose out of the trench spilling an accumulation of silt and broken shell from its upper surfaces. It rose past heirodonts pausing in the depths for one brief respite in their painful lives, till finally it came up underneath an island of sargassum. As it rose it hauled up tonnes of seaweed with it, so that leeches and prill cascaded about it in organic rain. For a short while the hull matched the colour and texture of the floating mass of seaweed, then a line of fire traversed the ship, from its sensor arrays to its rear thrusters. Weed exploded from the armoured hull and fell flaming into the sea. Clouds of superheated steam were blasted away, then recondensed in an expanding cloud as the destroyer began to move. As it tilted, the sea below it flattened, then three evenly spaced thrusters blasted ribbed blue flames, and with a crash the destroyer accelerated into the sky.

  Pilot moved a hand across the weapons console and slapped in a launch-and-seek program. A rear nacelle opened and three lines of fire sped away. Ebulan viewed them for just a moment then turned his attention to the detectors ranged before his own eyes and the eyes of his blanks. It hardly mattered if those departing missiles found their target; they were merely diversionary.

  The Warden observed the path of the three missiles for a microsecond then sent a warning to the Dome.

  ‘Acknowledged,’ said the submind there, with a heavy emphasis. The Warden probed a little and discovered that the submind had been on to the missiles from the moment they were launched so had already been tracking them for at least a whole second. It ignored the mind’s sarcasm and, with that part of itself not tied up in trying to crack Prador code, it turned its attention elsewhere.

  ‘Twelve, take the SMs out from the island, to attack the Prador ship,’ it sent.

  ‘Yeah, let’s kick us some ass!’ returned one of them.

  Two observed, ‘I note you say “attack” not
“destroy”. You realize we’ll be lucky even to slow it down?’

  ‘If you can realize that then the Warden certainly can,’ said Twelve patiently.

  The Warden watched the seven drones accelerate out from the island and fall into an arrow formation. It prepared itself to upload all the subminds, should – at the moment of their physical destruction – they even have time to transmit themselves. Through their eyes it watched the Prador destroyer come into view and with a little further probing, learnt that the enforcer drones were ready and willing for the fight, and that SM12, though ready to do what it could, felt certain it was about to become a metallic smear on the ocean surface.

  ‘We go in like this,’ explained Twelve, sending them details of an attack formation selected from its library. One, Two and Seven slid to the fore and spread to the three points of a triangle. The remaining drones spread to the corners of a square. Both shapes began revolving.

  ‘And the purpose of this?’ enquired Two.

  ‘We’ll present a dispersed and more difficult target,’ said Twelve. ‘We also have a better chance of firing past shield projectors, and intercepting lasers and rail-gun fusillades.’

  ‘In your arse,’ said a voice.

  ‘Who the . . .?’ began Twelve, but by then they were already on the Prador ship.

  The drone formation slid over the destroyer like a tube. Lasers heated their casings on this pass, and they only managed half a second of fire. Their missiles needled down at the golden armour, most of them blasting against projected fields so that for half a second the destroyer was surrounded by coins of fire. Some missiles did get through to blow concentric ripples of flame around the hull of the ship. But where they struck, they left only glowing spots on its armour, and those spots quickly faded.

  ‘Loop round,’ said Twelve. ‘We’ll go in from the side this time.’

  ‘Yeah, and with that you’ll achieve what?’

  ‘Prador war drone approaching from the east!’ yelled Seven.

  ‘It was a Prador war drone, but now it’s me.’

  ‘Sniper, is that you?’ asked Twelve.

  ‘Isn’t that what I just said?’ replied Sniper.

  The old war drone had now become an amalgam of dented Prador drone with a headless aluminium crayfish attached to its surface and linked to the inside, through the split, via a fountain of optic cables.

  Sniper went on, ‘Dispersed and more difficult target, my arse. That Prador is playing with you. While it appears that you might be doing some damage, it knows there’s less chance of anything else being sent against it. Otherwise you’d all be scrap by now.’

  ‘What would you suggest?’ asked Twelve.

  ‘I don’t suggest. I’m telling you that a dispersed attack is going to do nothing to affect that armour. You need to go in randomly and concentrate on just one point. Go for something vulnerable: a sensor array or a thruster. Now do it!’

  Twelve bowed to Sniper’s experience, and the formation broke as it hurtled back in towards the ship, the drones weaving all over the sky as lasers tried to pick up on them almost with a casual indifference.

  ‘Seven to Ten, concentrate everything you have on that port thruster,’ sent Sniper. ‘One and Two, once they hit it, you hit the port laser with your rail-guns. Twelve, you’ve only got a geological laser – so why the hell are you here?’

  ‘As a distraction?’ Twelve suggested.

  ‘Yeah, if you like,’ said Sniper.

  ‘Where are you going?’ Twelve asked, noticing that Sniper was receding into the sky.

  ‘Don’t worry about me. I’ll be back before you know it. Or, rather, back before our friend in that ship knows it.’

  The SMs shot in over the destroyer and their missiles spread like a cloud of gnats around it. Everything seemed random until the cloud suddenly closed on the rear of the destroyer. A constant stuttering explosion bloomed, and the casing of a thruster went incandescent. The destroyer tilted as if a giant hand had slapped its back end – but then it quickly corrected. Shortly after that, there was a flash of purple fire, and an extrusion on the front of the Prador ship suddenly blackened and cracked open. Directly on top of that a luminous green line stabbed up from the destroyer and something danced before it, flickered, and became just a line of dust in the sky.

  ‘There went Seven,’ said Two.

  ‘Particle beam,’ observed Nine – then, ‘EM shells!’

  Twelve flew over the top of the ship, through a wall of fire. It could do nothing: its little geological laser, had it even been working, could not have touched this Prador armour. As it passed through the fire, Twelve closed its cockle-shells and tumbled through the air, as the EM pulse knocked its AG controls out of sync. Correcting at the last moment, it noted the crash foam inside itself melting, and that the casing on its micro-pile was developing hairline cracks.

  ‘Warden, take me,’ it said, accelerating towards the nearest weapons blister. The particle beam flashed out so all that struck the ship was a metallic cloud of vapour.

  ‘Sniper, what now?’ asked Two, as it swerved away and watched Nine, caught in the intersecting beams of three or more lasers, trying to get away, but distorting and melting in midair.

  ‘Keep hitting it,’ instructed Sniper, his signal now echoey with distance.

  With machine-gun sonic cracks, the surviving SMs turned and resumed attack.

  ‘Where are you?’ asked Two, as it emptied its rail-gun magazines, ahead of the last of its missiles.

  There came no reply from the ancient war drone.

  With a fragment of its mind, the Warden watched the battle. Much of its attention was channelled through SM11, who it had hovering geostationary over the island. Through this drone’s sensors it observed Sniper taking the Prador drone shell up and out of atmosphere and, knowing just how effective Sniper’s ballistics programs were, it knew what the drone had in mind. From the Polity base, it observed shield projectors slam two of the missiles fired at it down into the sea. Those two missiles vanished in two explosions that were discs of fire: straight planar explosive – a diversion. The third missile bounced off a shield, went up, and came back down. A smart missile, released some time before and sent on patrol, made the decision to go get it. The two missiles collided high above the base. The ensuing explosions continued all the way down to the shields, which heated under the load. Cluster missile, the Warden observed dispassionately.

  With the rest of its resources, the Warden was concentrating on its code breakers. Momentary breakthrough there . . . but the sequence folded after half a second. Through Eleven, it had some feedback from the blank called Pilot, so now it knew it was on the right track.

  Secondary automatic systems absorbed transmitted subminds, as one after another the enforcer shells were destroyed by the Prador ship. It would handle these later, the Warden decided, as it shunted them into storage.

  All that evinced any apparent emotion in the AI was when the Prador code finally started to come apart.

  The island was now in sight and in range, but firing the CTDs was as yet out of the question, as they’d be intercepted long before they reached their targets. Particle beams could not be intercepted, though. Ebulan set his blank to firing on the island and through his own viewer had the satisfaction of seeing great swathes of dingle exploding into fire, with even rock melting wherever the beams touched it. He gave a mental instruction for Pilot to move them in low over the Old Captain’s ships, so a CTD could be used on them. When nothing happened, he probed down the link – and just found nil response. Pilot must have been destroyed. There must have been a hit Ebulan was unaware of. He looked through another blank’s eyes in the control area but saw no sign of any damage. Pilot simply stepped away from his console and walked from the area. Ebulan knew horror then: someone else was controlling his blank. He instructed yet another blank to draw her weapon and go after Pilot. But Pilot acted first. He activated the emergency door between the control area and central corridor, then drew his weapon,
put it on high discharge, and with a single blast he fused the door to its frame.

  Ebulan focused on the blank seated at the weapons console, and the two still here with him. He soon sent them up and running for the central corridor. The blanks inside the control area he quickly got firing on the door. But the female blank he’d made draw her weapon first, abruptly stopped firing at the door, turned to her two companions, and cut them down – before putting the snout of her weapon in her mouth and blowing her own head off.

  In panic Ebulan did an emergency reinstall of the random code. But this made no difference to Pilot; while Ebulan was effecting the reinstall, the blank caught hold of the first of his companions to come in after him, slammed that one’s head repeatedly against the wall, then tore out the back of his neck. Along with the flesh and bone came the spinal section of the Prador thrall unit, and the corpse slumped. Without further instruction from Ebulan, the other two blanks stood unmoving while this happened.

  Suddenly the ship lurched sideways under multiple concussions. Ebulan made one of the two blanks draw his weapon and shoot Pilot through the chest. In panic, he sent the other blank back to the weapons console. There he checked the readings and saw that the attacking SMs had finally managed to blow a thruster.

  An abrupt feeling of pain. Shut off. Ebulan lost contact with the blank that had just shot Pilot. He now sent the one over at the weapons console to go and look, and meanwhile transferred direct control to himself. Now he had full views outside, tracking on the attacking SMs, and could also see through his remaining blank’s eyes. He fired off the defensive lasers, shifted shields and strafed the sky with particle beams.

  Pilot wasn’t dead – just a hole through his chest. Old Hooper. Ebulan’s blank drew his weapon, but his arm, and the hand holding the weapon, thudded to the deck.

  Another attack from the SMs. Ebulan released five missiles on random trajectories to pull them off.