by Neal Asher
‘Oh no … no!’ Anders’s feeling of the unfairness of it all was in that protest. I stared out at the array of green eyes, and at the long single claw it had hooked over the catwalk rail. I guessed it would winkle us out of the cabin like the meat of a rock conch from its shell. I didn’t suppose the bubble metal alloys would be much hindrance to it.
‘Gurble,’ said the gabbleduck, then suddenly its claw was away from the rail and we were rising again. Was it playing with us? We moved closer to the windows and looked down, said nothing until we were certainly out of its reach, said nothing for some time after that. At the last, and I don’t care how certain the scientists are that they are just animals, I’m damned sure the gabbleduck waved to us, before it returned to its misty realm.
2
PUTREFACTORS
Three moons chased each other across the umber sky and ferris flies spun in swarms above the goss thorns. On the white sand of the shore, where weed had collected in decaying banks like spills of tar, footprints were clearly visible. Prints from deck boots, Ansel reckoned. He squatted by one of them and stirred the sand with the barrel of his thin-gun, then stood and shrugged his rucksack more evenly on his shoulders. Glancing back at the shuttle resting on neutral grav out at sea, its lights reflecting off the foamy water, he saw that the pilot was now in the cargo bay, securing the AG sled with which he had brought Ansel ashore. The same sled the man had used to bring Kelly to this beach seven Fores days ago. The pilot said he would return here in another fifty days to pick Ansel up. Kelly would only be leaving this place in a body bag.
Ansel watched the shuttle rise silently from the sea. When it was a hundred metres up its thrusters spat twin blue flames and it fled into the sky. Afterwards he studied the moons.
In the Almanac the three moons were only numbered, though it was probable the colonists had named them. He felt certain one of them had to be called cheese or some such, so closely did it resemble a wedge of Cheddar. As another moon, shaped like a lemon, and the smallest of the three, tumbled down behind the horizon, he moved off. The larger moon moved slowly across the sky and it was in the ruby light of this that Ansel followed the trail. He reckoned on gaining a good three hours on Kelly before sunrise. What he hadn’t reckoned on was the sudden weakness and sickness that hit him almost as soon as he set out.
At Terran Holdings Company headquarters they’d said this might happen. It was his body’s reaction to the symbiont – the creature inside him that enabled him to survive on the food here. But he had not expected it to be so bad. Fifty metres down the beach and he fell shuddering to his knees. Abruptly he vomited, and when he saw what he had brought up, he vomited again. On the sand before him was a slimy grey sheet of matter that moved slightly as he watched it. He pulled the bottle of aldetox provided for just this circumstance and swilled down a mouthful. In a minute, his symbiont quietened and he was able to stagger to his feet, then into the shade of a goss thorn sprouting from the shell debris farther up the beach. There he took off his rucksack and pulled out his thermal sleeping bag. It took him all his effort to climb inside and there he lay shivering till dawn.
Before the sun rose, the sky changed from umber to a delicate flesh-pink, then broke up into bars that were every pastel shade between that pink and a dark orange. When it finally breached the horizon, the sun itself was an intense topaz that spilled shadows before it like blue oil on the ground. Wearily Ansel pulled himself from his thermal bag then staggered down to the sea. With a small glassite saucepan he scooped clear water and gulped it down. It tasted vaguely of a fizzy stomach remedy, but of nothing else. He had been told it was safe. When he had drunk his fill, he washed his face and returned to his belongings. Now he felt hungry, and must forage for his food. There was supposed to be no problem with this. He looked up at the branches of the goss thorn where ferris flies hung like strange Christmas decorations. The long fruits that grew parallel to the inner branches of the tree were haired with fly spines. The direct download from the Almanac had provided him with more than enough knowledge to easily survive here. He knew it was inadvisable to eat fruits like this and so, packing away his bag and hoisting his rucksack, he moved off. Only a few minutes later he found his first cornul bush.
The cornul bush possessed a star-sectioned green stem and ferny leaves. In its branches were hundreds of fruits small enough to fit in the palm of a hand. They were yellow and red, green and white, and in as many different shapes as there were fruits on the bush. The Almanac had provided him with no explanation for this. He just knew that all of the fruits were edible for someone with the symbiont. Ansel plucked a white fruit, shaped like a banana, and studied it. This innocuous object would have killed him five days ago, after protracted painful convulsions, just as similar fruit had killed the Director and ten members of the board two months ago. He bit down and relished the taste explosion in his mouth. Even to people without the symbiont the fruits tasted like this, hence the way they had been so well received at the banquet in the Strine Station. No one had suspected a thing. No one would have believed that someone could smuggle highly toxic fruits aboard the station, then into a high-level Company banquet. After he had eaten his fill, Ansel moved on. He decided he should ask Kelly, before he killed him, just how he had managed that. Certainly, Kelly must have contacts on the station, and a shuttle secreted somewhere.
The footprints in the sand turned inland and soon became difficult to follow, but Ansel did not worry too much about this. The village of Troos lay a couple of kilometres from here. Kelly’s family lived there, and that was where Ansel would doubtless find him.
Inland the fauna and flora changed markedly. The goss thorns were more dispersed now and here grew into solid trees with trunks like barrels, short and viciously thorned limbs, and blue-green spines hazing their bark. Occasionally things that looked vaguely like butterflies went winging past. Ansel knew these to be flying flowers – the ultimate pollen-carriers. Botanists and entomologists had concluded, after many years of discussion, that these flowers had once been nectar-feeding insects, and that this mutualism had been carried to its ultimate extreme. It was after he watched one of these objects fall on the still-attached flower of another plant, for mating, that the wind changed, and Ansel got his first hint of putrefactor.
The putrefactor was not the most pleasant of creatures. Ansel had heard descriptions of them and of the smell that often surrounded them, and thought nothing of it. The Almanac justly pointed out that the creature had its place in the environment of Fores, just as the maggot has its place in the environment of Earth. The putrefactor was the mortician of this world.
The ’factor was stretched out over the upper branches of a huge goss thorn. It looked like a great spread of drying grey-green mucus deposited there. Ansel guessed that this one had not fed in quite a while, as it was possible to walk close to it without gagging. He knew the creature would have a territory covering about a square kilometre, and that anything that died in that territory would immediately become its property. Only death would motivate it. The ‘factor had a store of patience to make a vulture look frenetic, often staying unmoving for periods of ten years or more.
Ansel closed his eyes for a moment to more clearly see the images and text scrolling down his visual cortex from the Almanac download:
With a death in its territory the putrefactor will immediately tense, cracking away its hard outer covering, then ooze from its perch or hide. Its rate of travel is not much faster than a slug’s, a creature it does resemble. On its arrival at the corpse, the factor spreads out and engulfs it completely, even should the corpse be ten times its size. Digestion is quick: the corpse broken down into simple organic compounds. Very little is wasted.
Ansel opened his eyes and grinned to himself. He felt that the colonists’ name for it was the most appropriate. It was called a ‘shroudbeast’ here.
Between the goss thorns, cornul bushes and areas overgrown with purple-stemmed briars, dark-green mosses blanketed the ground, and f
rom this seed-stems with bulbous red heads sprouted like grass. The covering was soft but firm underfoot and made walking a pleasant experience even though he was heading uphill. Soon Ansel came upon tracks where the seed-stems were crushed down and he knew he was getting closer to the village. Farther in, these tracks were worn down to bare sandy ground that eventually brought him to a wider track, which in turn led to a gate in a goss-thorn fence. The thorns had not been removed from the posts and rails, and acted as a barrier to the wildlife. Beyond the fence the track wound between strip fields, some ploughed and some containing crops of tall plants with trumpet flowers. Passing between these fields, Ansel came quickly to the brow of a hill and looked down on Troos.
He crouched next to a field ditch and, through his image-intensifier, surveyed the village. Like many villages on many worlds where there was a surrounding wilderness, this was built at the edge of the river – the low wooden houses huddled together as if for comfort. To one side, large barns clustered, and beyond these projected a jetty to which several skiffs were moored. There seemed to be some activity around the barns, a couple of women at a well, but little else going on. Ansel clipped the intensifier at his belt then drew his thin-gun. He studied the display on the side of the weapon, grunted his satisfaction, holstered it, then stood and headed on down.
First, he must be polite, he decided. He would ask very considerately after the whereabouts of Kelly. He would find Kelly’s daughter and two sons and ask them if they had seen their father. If it transpired that he was getting no cooperation, he would have to use stronger tactics. This he expected, as the colonists were a cantankerous and ungrateful bunch. When THC staff had returned here after the hundred years of the Corporate Wars they had discovered the descendants of the original miners lapsed into primitivism. For these people they brought in technology, education, contractual employment with its prospect of wealth and the chance to travel offworld. Their repayment had been a refusal of all contracts, obstinate mulishness, damage claims for the abandonment of their ancestors, and steading claims on land the Company had bought mineral rights to a hundred and eighty years ago. Ansel suspected he might have to get a little rough.
Ansel strolled into the village and down what he supposed must be the main street, to where the two women were standing at the well. As he approached, they took one look at him, hoisted up their skirts and headed towards the barns.
‘Wait,’ Ansel called, but they ignored him.
He calmly walked after them, round a two-storey building with a wide arched doorway through which he could see a scattering of tables and a bar with bottles racked behind. On the other side of this place, he came face to face with the two women, now accompanied by two men. None of these people looked happy to see him.
‘What do you want, Company man?’ asked the elder of the two men.
Ansel studied the bearded face and saw there the obstinacy he had expected.
‘I want Kelly Segre Janssen,’ he said.
‘And why do you want him?’ asked the younger man.
Ansel studied the two men. They both looked to be in their thirties, and as this place was without antiagathic technology that probably was their age. They were infants to him. He appeared to be the same as them, but was twice their age.
‘I would prefer to speak to someone in charge,’ he said.
‘I am the elder here,’ said the bearded one.
Ansel doubted that, but thought he would let it ride for the moment.
‘Okay, it’s a simple enough matter. The Company owes Kelly a substantial sum for information he provided for the Almanac. I’m here to make sure he gets it.’
The two men looked at each other.
‘He’s here to be my father’s good friend,’ said one of the women.
Ansel looked at her. ‘You’re Annette Segre Janssen?’
‘I am.’
‘You’re right – I want to be your father’s good friend.’
She said, ‘You’re here to kill my father because he smuggled cornul fruit aboard the Strine Station and used it to poison the Director and some Company officials.’
Obviously ‘good friend’ meant something different here, Ansel thought, and he stood no chance with subterfuge. He reached for his thin-gun then paused when he heard deliberate movement behind him. Whoever it was, was good. He had heard nothing until then. For a moment he hesitated, then in one motion he drew his gun, squatted and turned. A bright light flung him into darkness.
Ansel woke with his head throbbing and a foul taste in his mouth.
Stunner.
He reached to his belt and found his holster empty. His pack was gone as well. Carefully opening gritty eyes, he stared up at a plasmel ceiling. Underneath him he felt the cold pattern of metal decking.
‘You won’t find your gun, nor will you find any of those other lethal little devices you had concealed about your person, assassin,’ someone said.
Ansel rolled and sat upright. He was in the cargo hold of a small shuttle. Sat on a plasmel crate was a grey-haired man of indeterminate age. He held a stubby pulse-gun pointed casually at Ansel’s face. Ansel felt a sinking sensation in his gut when he recognized the grey uniform the man wore. He was Security – a monitor from Earth Central.
Shit.
‘We’ve been expecting you for some time now. We knew the Company wouldn’t let Kelly’s actions go unpunished. Their sending you here was ill-considered though. They did it before Kelly’s deposition was registered at ECS and before they realized their need to cover up. I would guess that about now, other agents are on their way here to deal with you.’
What the hell is he talking about?
The monitor went on, ‘You’re our evidence. They can claim the symbionts here mutated over the last century, but they can’t claim that of yours.’
While Ansel tried to make sense of that, the back door to the hold slid open and a woman walked in. She had black skin and blue eyes and wore an orange and grey suit. Ansel was struck at once by her assurance and the level calm of her gaze. Like himself she seemed to be about thirty years old. By her air he guessed her to be many times that. In one hand she carried a notescreen and in the other a short-range surgical laser. People of her age took precautions.
‘Have you got it?’ the monitor asked the woman.
‘I have it,’ said the woman. ‘It’s exactly the same so there has definitely been no mutation. It’s a deliberate alteration to the ’factor’s genome.’
‘The time-scale the same?’
‘Yes: thirty-seven years after implantation. Here, of course, that means thirty-seven years after conception. They’ve got a right to be angry,’ she said.
‘What the hell are you talking about?’ asked Ansel.
The woman and the monitor looked at each other.
‘He doesn’t know?’ asked the woman.
‘You think he’d have agreed to implantation if he had?’ asked the monitor.
They both looked at Ansel.
The monitor said, ‘It’s enough for you now to know that THC will want you dead.’
The woman glanced at the monitor then shrugged.
Yeah, right.
Ansel had been with the Company for many years and done a lot for them. He was not the kind they had killed – he was the kind who did the killing.
‘Okay, get up,’ said the monitor.
He sounded angry. Ansel stood up and, as he stretched his legs and arms, the snout of the pulse-gun did not waver from his face.
The monitor nodded towards the door. ‘Out of here.’
The shuttle had been manoeuvred into one of the large barns, which was why Ansel had not seen it from the hill. He followed the woman and the monitor out into orange sunset where the bearded villager and Kelly’s daughter waited. The two of them glanced questioningly at the monitor.
‘He’ll give evidence. He is evidence,’ said the monitor, prodding Ansel in the back with his pulse-gun.
As he walked ahead, Ansel noted that the bearded
villager carried his pack. Perhaps his thin-gun was in there, along with those other lethal devices to which the monitor had referred.
When they reached one of the houses the monitor leant close in behind him. ‘Remember this, assassin: you’re just as much evidence dead as alive.’
Ansel nodded. Whatever this bullshit was he knew he would never testify in an EC court. The Company had too much pull and he would be bailed and gone in an instant. But he had no intention of it coming to that. The pistol snout nudged him in the back again and he entered the house.
‘Where’s Kelly now?’ Ansel abruptly asked.
Before the monitor could stop her Annette answered, ‘My father is upriver getting the Book of Statements.’
Ansel noted the reverence in her voice. He smiled to himself as the monitor shoved him forward.
‘Secure him,’ said the monitor tightly.
They tied him in a back bedroom, rough ropes securing his wrists and feet to the bedposts. He guessed the monitor did not want him aboard the shuttle where he might get free and have access to whatever weapons might be there. As soon as the door closed he tested the tension of the ropes. Steady flexing did not loosen them, it only drew them tighter on his wrists and ankles, but the frame of the bed moved. Its creaking brought the bearded one to the door. Ansel closed his eyes and decided to rest. Later.
When he woke he checked the timepiece set in the nail of his right forefinger. Two hours had passed and he hoped everyone in the house was asleep. He steadily pulled on the ropes securing his wrists and managed to slide himself far enough down the bed to hook his feet under the bottom rail. There was one weapon the monitor had been unable to remove, and perhaps had been unaware of: Ansel’s home planet had a gravity of one and a half gees, and though he looked just like an Earthman, he was much stronger. He gripped the ropes around his wrists and pulled hard with his feet. There was a loud crack and he lay still, listening. No movement. He pulled again, steadily, until the tenon holding the bottom rail to the bottom bedpost broke through and the rail pulled away. With the toe of his boot he levered the rope that secured that leg up and over the post. Lying still, he listened again. Nothing. He levered the rail back and forth with his foot until the other tenon began to work free, finally pulling the rail all the way back onto the bed so that when it came out of its mortise hole it did not drop to the floor. With both legs free it was then a simple task to snap the top rail and get his hands free. He was removing the rope from his wrist when an explosion rattled the windows and fire seared the darkness.
