by Neal Asher
“How far do you have to travel from here?” he asked Grable.
“You don’t have to know that. All you have to know is that we’ll be back here in two days solstan.”
Grable took precautions as well, but then he had no choice, that was the only information I had given him. He did not know the direction in which we would be going just yet. I took my own precautions.
“We’ll see you then.”
The ramp retracted with swift finality and the shuttle rose with an eerie lack of sound on its AG. A few minutes later we saw the accelerating flare of its engines. The sound reached us as we hurriedly unpacked our equipment. Out of the corner of my eye I saw Grable quickly get hold of some kind of hand gun and glance at me speculatively. By then I had a control box in my hand and was stepping back from my luggage.
“This should keep us secure,” I said, and flicked a nail against a touch plate.
The Tenkian autogun rose out of the box like some terrible chrome insect. Red and green lights flickered on its various displays and its barrel glimmered in the starlight. Soon it was hovering above the box with its turret revolving, pausing, considering.
“I have it programmed for a twenty metre circle from me,” I said. I watched as Grable carefully holstered his gun. He didn’t know what else I had it programmed for.
The sun was a spherical emerald when it breached the horizon and gave even the ash around us the appearance of life. Scylla’s binary companion was days away yet, on the other side of the planet, where it had dragged the planetary sea. As the sun cleared the horizon the tint became less gharish but by then the life of Scylla was coming to meet us. The first murder-louse approached with the dainty and deadly purpose of a spider. The autogun killed it at an invisible line.
“If one of those gets through its a toss-up between whether you get eaten or injected full of eggs,” Grable told me after he had named the creature.
“I’d have thought you more prepared,” I said.
He smiled bleakly and pulled on gloves that keyed in at the wrists to the body armour he was wearing under his normal clothing. I felt a little foolish.
“I’ve an autogun as well, but not as good as that Tenkian.”
It killed nine more lice before we had the portable AGC assembled and the rest of our equipment on it. Only when we were twenty metres above the ground with the autogun perched at the back of the craft did we relax, though not for long, the Tenkian’s purpose then was one of dealing with creatures like a cross between a moth and a crab which seemed to want to come and visit.
“Okay, which way?” Grable asked. I took out my palm computer and called up my satlink, direction-finder and map, after a moment I read off the co-ordinates to him. There was a pause. I expected him to make his move then, but it wasn’t to be. He punched the co-ordinates into the autopilot and off we went, just as if we were partners. I thought it likely he wanted to be sure I was telling the truth.
The trip took five hours. Once we passed over the edge of the incinerated area we got a look at what the surface of Scylla was really like. I realised then why this planet had first been named Shore. (Like probably a hundred other planets. How many Edens, New Earths and Utopias would there be if the naming of planets had been left to humans?) The surface was a tideland.
The plant life was sea weeds: kelps and wracks and huge rotting masses of something like sargassum. There were rocky areas, muddy areas, sandy areas, and pools dotted across the shorescape like silver coins. Through a set of image intensifiers I observed a multitude of different kinds of molluscs. There were plenty of arthropods as well, the murder-lice being the most prevalent. Perhaps there were other dominant kinds, but I didn’t like to keep the intensifiers to my eyes for too long, as it meant my eyes weren’t on Grable.
As we drew close to our destination we began to see centuries-old wreckage. I passed the intensifiers to Grable and pointed at the blurred squares and lines in the mud flats below us.
“Looks like the remains of an earlier attempt,” I said.
He glanced over but didn’t accept the intensifiers.
“Where shall I put us down?”
I pointed to where a rock field rose up out of the mud flats. The entrance to the base was in such an area, if this place had not changed too much since Paul had been here. As Grable brought the craft down between two huge boulders he gazed out at the mud flats dubiously.
“It’s an underground installation?” he asked.
“Yes, and before you ask, I brought a pump.”
A wide-field metals resonator found us the entrance in a matter of minutes. A shot from Grable’s handgun turned the door into a molten ruin. After that we had to leave my pump labouring away for hours to get rid of the water and liquid mud. Sitting in the AGC we ate a meal of recon steak, croquette potatoes and courgettes, and watched the Tenkian splattering murder-lice with metronomic regularity. Off to one side the roar of the outlet hose was like the warming up of a shuttle engine. It was a good pump; made of nano-built ceramics and powered by a couple of minipiles.
After we had eaten we checked on the pump and found that a couple of rooms were now accessible and that the inlet hose had attached itself to a wall like a leech. I turned the pump off, moved the hose down into an underwater stairwell, and turned it on again. The exposed rooms contained little of value or interest other than orgiastic clumps of those molluscs called hammer-whelks, one shell of which had got me into all this. The floor was half a metre deep in reddish slimy mud.
Two hours passed and the outlet hose of the pump shifted, as one of its ground staples came out, and created a geyser over the mud flats. For a while we had a blue-shifted rainbow, until I went out and drove another staple into the rock. In another hour the next floor was revealed and things became a lot more interesting.
I hadn’t expected to find human remains and was most surprised when I did. The man, or woman, had climbed into an armoured diving suit and died there. What I found was a skeleton inside a thick crust of grey corrosion. I only knew the skeleton was there because the salts that had corroded the armour had kept the faceplate clear, inside and out.
“The Golem twos might be the same. They didn’t make very good ceramal then,” said Grable.
“They crated them. There’s a good chance the crates were some kind of vacuum-sealed plastic. Let’s just hope we’re lucky,” I told him.
We found three crates and our scans showed us the contents were intact. I felt a surge of joy, excitement, justification. Grable showed unexpected friendliness. We attached AG units and loaded two of the crates with efficient co-operation. Grable was all smiles.
“You get that last one and I’ll detach the pump,” he suggested. Grinning, I raised my hand and entered the base. Only when I reached the crate, turned on the AG unit and found it didn’t work, did the nasty distrustful part of my mind come out from under its stone and say, “You dumb fuck.”
I ran outside in time to see the AGC ten metres up in the air and rising. Its units were struggling and I noticed that a cluster of hammer-whelks was clinging to the underside.
“Grable you bastard!”
“The world-tide should be along in a few days! Enjoy your swim!”
For a moment I considered programming the Tenkian to go after him. But it was still spattering murder-lice. I shuddered to think what would happen to me without its protection.
I am using the keypad now to input this. I have no choice. I came out of the blackness with a leaden heaviness in my lungs and a strange numbness to my skin. I staggered to my feet and felt the skin of my arm. It is no longer skin. It is an exoskeleton. I reached up to my face with hands like complex pincers and screamed at what I found there. My face has deformed horrifically. I looked down and saw my teeth lying in the mud. I have no need of them now. I managed to click my mandibles a few times before I blacked out again. I thought that perhaps my mind was becoming as irrelevant as my teeth. When I woke next I was feeding on the remains of the murder-louse I was stea
ling my shape from, and I felt no inclination to stop. That wasn’t what got to me. What got to me was that I wasn’t breathing, not at all.
The nightmare lasted perhaps ten hours before either I began to accept or something in the structure of my brain was altered or excised. I was frighteningly hungry and the lice beyond the perimeter of the autogun looked good. I turned the gun off and waited. In moments the lice were on me, mandibles grating on my shell and ovipositers thumping against my torso like bayonettes. I tore them apart like handfuls of weeds, then turned the autogun back on while I fed, cracking open legs and carapaces with my mandibles. It sure beat the hell out of the nutcrackers they provide in restaurants.
A minute ago the autogun showed a red light and I shut it down. No more lice came though. A steady vibration is shaking the air and the ground under my feet is jerking spastically.
The binary is rising; another sun, a small blue sun. The horizon it breaches is a line of white and silver. The world-tide. At the first signs I folded the autogun and, copying the lice I could see, I found a crevice and jammed myself in it. Here I am. The initial wave I estimate to be about twenty metres high; a mountain of water swamping the world. Behind it the sea is mounded up like a leashed monster. The sight is terrifying, exhilarating, magnificent. Now I must hold on.
The tide has passed. How many days? I don’t know. All I know is that there was a time when I watched the surface get closer, then a time when I stood up and swatted away a murder-louse like an irritating fly, before sliding the nictitating membranes from my eyes. I thought Grable would be gone as would my lift off-planet. Even so, when the water was round my feet I reached into the remains of my jacket, extracted my palm computer, called up a map to locate the pick-up point and headed that way.
In the first moments of the tide I had nearly been dislodged from my crevice. Then the surges passed and in the company of murder-lice I swam in the sea, and I breathed. I did not have gills, but somehow my lungs had been altered to extract oxygen from the water. The lice left me alone as they fed on the masses of flotsam caught in the flood. I was almost enjoying myself when the first dark shape blotted out the blue and green light.
They were a kind of flatfish but the size of great whites and there was nothing amusing about their sideways opening jaws and offset eyes. I got into my crevice with all speed as they hit the murder-lice. The water clouded with ichor and legs and pieces of carapace drifted before being snapped up by smaller fish.
There was little pleasure from then on. Next came the giant rays that ate lice and flatfish alike. There was a particularly unpleasant squid that I only saved myself from by discharging the Tenkian’s cell into it. The rest of the time was a waking nightmare. I wasn’t even safe in my crevice. A hammer-whelk joined me and I ignored it until it attached itself to my leg and drilled a centimetre diameter hole through my shell. I managed to pull it away and extract its siphon from my leg before it hit any arteries, but the pain was beyond belief, and I didn’t know how to scream. I swore then that Chaplin Grable was going to really pay. I swore that if I got out of this I would use the form I now had before being adapted back to human normal. I was going to eat him feet first.
I stand by what remains of the AGC. It is jammed between two shellfish crusted slabs of rock where the world-tide left it. My laughter sounds like coughing and the ratchetting of claves.
I pulled the hammer-whelks from the metal they had been clinging to when Grable lifted the craft and saw the holes they had made through into the oh so delicate control circuits. Grable’s hand, in his armoured glove, is gripping the control column. I don’t know where the rest of him is. I shall move on now. The Golem twos are in a nearby crevice. My fortune in the human world is assured. I am heading for one of the sealed bases that were finally established here. It is about five hundred kilometres away and there will be more world-tides to be endured before I reach it.
The Tenkian follows, operating on batteries taken from the AGC. I will survive.
The Gabble
The shimmer-shield visor was the most advanced Jonas had been able to acquire. It only occasionally caught the light as if to let him know it was still there, it allowed a breath of the native air through to his face as he guided this clunky aerofan over the landscape-the breather unit only adding the extra 10 percent oxygen he required-and he could actually experience the damp mephitic smell of the swampland below. This would be the closest he could get to this world, Masada, without some direct augmentation.
Jonas looked around. The sky was a light aubergine, the nebula a static explosion across it fading now with the rise of the sun, ahead of which the gas giant Calypse was in ascent: an opalescent orb of red, gold, and green. Below him a flat plain of flute grasses was broken by muddy gullies like a cracked pastry crust over some black pie. From up here the grasses looked little different from tall reeds reaching the end of their season. The reason for their name only became evident when Jonas spotted the monitor transport and brought his aerofan down to land beside it. The grasses tilted away from the blast of the fan, skirling an unearthly chorus. The hollow stems were holed down their length where their side branches had dropped away earlier in the season. Thus each one played its own tune.
Settling on a rhizome mat, the fan spattered mud all around as it wound down to a stop.
Jonas waited for that to finish before opening the safety gate and stepping down. The mat was firm under his feet-this might as well have been solid ground. He looked across. Three individuals stood in a trampled clearing, whilst a third squatted beside something on the ground.
Jonas walked over, raising a hand when he recognized Monitor Mary Cole turning to glance toward him. She spoke a few quiet words to her companions, then wandered over.
“Jonas.” She smiled. He rather liked her smile: there was no pretension in it, no authoritarian air behind it. She was an ECS monitor here to do a job, so she knew the extent and limitations of her power, and felt no need to belittle others. “This is not what I would call the most auspicious start to your studies here, but I knew you would be interested.”
“What’s this all about, Mary? I just got a message via aug to come and meet you at these coordinates to see something of interest to me.”
She shrugged as they turned to walk toward the clearing. “That was from B’Tana. He likes rubbing people’s noses in the rougher side of our job whenever the opportunity presents.” She glanced at him. “Are you squeamish?”
“I’ve been working for Taxonomy as a field biologist for fifty-three years. What have you got here?”
“A corpse, or rather, some remains.”
Jonas halted. “Should I be here, then?”
“Don’t worry. This is not murder and you won’t be bringing any contamination to a crime scene. We got everything that happened here on sateye shortly after he screamed for help over his aug.”
Entering the clearing, Jonas glanced around. No doubt about what that red stuff was staining the flattened grasses and spattering nearby upright stalks. Mary held back to talk to one of her companions while Jonas walked forward to stand beside the man working with the remains. There were fragments of bone scattered all about, the shredded rags of an envirosuit, one boot. The skull lay neatly divided in half, stripped clean, sucked dry.
“May I?” Jonas asked, gesturing to the bone fragments.
The man looked up from the handheld scanner he was running over the rhizome mat.
Beside him rested a tray containing a chrome aug, a wristcom and a QC hand laser-all still bloody.
“Certainly-he’s past caring.”
Jonas immediately nailed the forensic investigator as a Golem android. That was the way it was sometimes: a disparity between speech, breathing, movement, maybe even a lack of certain pheromones in the air. It never took him long to see through human emulation programs.
He turned his attention to the fragments, squatted down, and picked one up. It was a piece of thigh bone: as if someone had marked out a small diamond on th
at bone, drilled closely along the markings with a three millimeter bit, down to the marrow, then chiseled the piece free.
“Hooder,” he said.
“Medium sized,” the Golem replied.
Jonas turned to him. “Who was this?” He nodded toward the remains.
The Golem winced and glanced toward Mary Cole, then said, “A xenologist who came here to study mud snakes. We lose between five and ten each year.”
Jonas called over to Mary, “Is this what you would call an educational outing for me?”
Glancing over she said, “Jonas, you would not have been sent here if you needed that.”
She nodded to her companions and they headed back toward the transport, then she came over and gestured at the remains. “We get them all the time. They upload skills then come here thinking they’re going to brilliantly solve all the puzzles. You, as you say, have worked for Taxonomy for fifty-three years. The maximum experiential upload is less than a year-enough for a language or some small branch of one of the sciences.”
