by Neal Asher
Calm took its time returning to him.
The delta-wing re-entry shuttle detached from the TCC station and fell like a sycamore seed in an arc over the jewel of Earth. Retro rockets flared and it stabilized level with Earth’s horizon, leaving the station turning against the stars like a lapidary’s barrel for polishing asteroids. Then the main engine glared and it sped for that horizon.
Strapped into the plush white leather of an acceleration chair, Jack breathed a sigh of relief and clutched his case to his lap. There had been so many things he had needed to check, but they were an excuse for his paranoiac horror of a full med-scan. He had demanded release and they had not refused, but there had been delays in the transference of credit to his Ecubank account. However, aboard the station credit had been readily available to him, just as had been the black market in satellite-grown memory crystals.
Doctor Bannerman supped coffee from his capped mug and opened his medical journal with weary disinterest. He had other things on his mind. Twice now he had been put off and he was getting angry. Smith’s fingers should not have healed like that, no way. The man had suffered some kind of allergic reaction as well, and just on that evidence alone Bannerman had requested quarantine, and been refused. When he had seen the fuzzy tape from the med-scanner he had requested it again, and urgently. He shook his head. It made him feel cold inside when he considered what he had seen there. Yet, damn them, they had refused again. And he knew why.
Money.
That was what this was all about. Had they accepted his judgement on Jack Smith the same quarantine order would have applied to the ship and its cargo: millions of ecu worth of complex ices. He gazed up from his journal and through the window of the lounge, which showed the curve of the TCC station seeming curving up to the blue-white expanse of Earth, which was now sinking as the lounge he occupied spun away from it. On that curve, like an insect on the flank of some huge metallic buffalo, he could see the link miner docked at the mouth of a loading bay with activity around it – the motes of light that were auto-handler drays. They were unloading the ship as quickly as possible. He suspected it would go for breaking rather quickly too.
Money.
The corporation could lose a huge percentage of their profit. The prices of mined comet ice had been dropping for some time, ever since it had been possible to duplicate, in satellite factories, the processes the ice had previously undergone in the Oort Cloud. I’ve done my job, Bannerman told himself, and he flicked through his journal without seeing, and drank his coffee without tasting.
Damn the mercenary bastards.
It was no good. He had done his job, but he had not done all he could. He was a doctor; he had responsibilities. And he had other masters. Abruptly he stood up, rising ridiculously high out of his seat in the low spin gravity of the station. When his Velcro soles touched the carpet again he headed for the door. It might cost him his job, but somebody had to be informed.
The transmitter lay on the table in his cabin disguised as a hand diagnosticer. It had the letters imprinted in its plastic W.H.O. like a question, and had in fact been manufactured by World Health. Bannerman sat down and the chair back automatically folded round him. With care he pushed a concealed switch on the side of the diagnosticer and flicked up the touch panel to reveal a second panel of lettered buttons underneath. He typed out his message:
LINK MINER ONE HAS BEEN IN CONTACT WITH AN ETO. PILOT JACK SMITH CARRYING PARASITIC ORGANISM. REQUEST FOR QUARANTINE REFUSED BY TCC. SMITH NOT RETURNED FOR MEDSCAN. BELIEVE FINANCIAL-
There was a hammering at his door. His fingers hesitated over the buttons and he felt a trickle of sweat run down his backbone.
Here it comes.
He finished the message.
-MOTIVATION.
The door burst open. He hit transmit, just before an arm reached over his shoulder and snatched up the diagnosticer. He turned as it bounced on the floor.
‘What the hell do you think you’re doing?’
A heel came down on the instrument, smashing it to fragments that bounced across the carpet in slow motion. Bannerman gaped at it, then looked up. A man and a woman stood in the room, both of them dressed in dark grey TCC businesswear, both of them with cropped blond hair, both of them expressionless. The woman spoke.
‘Doctor Bannerman, the Chairman will see you now.’
Bannerman remained in his seat. He did not like this.
‘What’s the point? The ice is being unloaded. Smith has not returned for his med-scan. The Chairman has no intention of allowing quarantine. I’ll just stay here if you don’t mind.’
‘You will come with us.’
Simultaneously they took hold of him and dragged him to his feet.
‘You have no right to do this!’ Bannerman shouted, hoping someone else would hear, then he fell silent as something hard stabbed against his belly. He gazed down to see a small matt pistol the woman held.
‘You will come with us.’
He complied.
They led him from his cabin, down the aseptic corridors of the medical quarter then to the tastefully panelled corridors of the executive quarter and to a lift with plush upholstered bench seats. They thrust him inside and stepped back. The doors slammed shut and the lift jerked up against the spin of the station.
The lift was taking him to the Chairman’s office, which wasn’t so bad. He closed his eyes for a moment and breathed more easily. When the doors slid open he saw he was right, only separated him from the office itself stood a Perspex screen, beyond which a corpulent figure slouched in an armchair in a shadowed room.
‘Doctor Bannerman,’ said Geoffrey Haven, Chairman of The Cryon Corporation and a tantamount dictator up here. He was called the Toad by those who dared, but not many did dare.
‘What is the meaning of this?’ Bannerman asked, realizing he had been speaking in clichés for the last half hour.
‘Life or death,’ said the Toad.
Bannerman felt himself go rigid.
The Toad went on, ‘You see, I don’t like traitors and blabbermouths, especially if they come near to losing me money. What message did you send?’
‘I—’
The Toad interrupted, ‘No matter. I’ll know soon enough and, either way, I’ll do what I must. You see, in two minutes I am going to open that lift to a jettison shaft, to vacuum. In the bench seat behind you is a space suit. The record for getting fully suited is fifty-three seconds, so I am giving you plenty of time. You will note the display on the wall is already counting.’
‘You can’t!’ But Bannerman knew he could.
The Toad began to laugh.
Bannerman desperately pulled up the lids on all the seats, found the suit, ripped off his jacket and kicked off his shoes. Twenty seconds. He slid himself into the suit and methodically went through the sealing procedures. Easy. Easy. He pulled on the gauntlets. Forty seconds. He hitched on the air pack and connected it to the helmet. He was going to make it. Fifty seconds. Laughter. That laughter. Something was hissing, then roaring. A door into night opened behind him and an invisible hand snatched him through. As the air gusted from his lungs and his ear drums burst he saw that the display read fifty-three seconds.
The Toad had lied.
Bannerman fell into a vast well, struck its side as he spiralled down.
I can survive. I can survive.
He knew it was possible to live for minutes in vacuum. He reached for the helmet yet it stayed tauntingly out of reach. He saw stars and the Earth like a vast jewel with vision blurring as the moisture evaporated from his eyes which were swelling in their sockets. Then he managed to grab the helmet. Somehow he got it over his head and began to dog it down. The need to breath was unbearable and he could feel blood vessels bursting in his skin. The last dog clicked into place. The safety light glowed a beautiful green and he waited for sweet air to gust from the pack.
There was none.
Chapter 2
Gene looked down at the man sprawled on the bed
and wondered if she was doing the right thing staying with him, despite the potential reward. He looked wasted, an atomy. He had told her he did not have one of the new versions of AIDS but had refused to take a med-scan. Gene made sure her shots were up to date.
With annoyance she dumped her acquisitions from the market on the kitchenette floor, turned on the coffee maker and lit up a Moroccan Gold. The smoke calmed her as she waited for him to stir. From the open window came the sounds of Sao Paulo awake: the continual roar of traffic, screeching of brakes, bellowing of air horns and sirens, the mutter and shout of eight million people. The flat was uncomfortably hot, the air thickened and tainted by the fumes from the streets below since hydrogen powered air-cars had yet to make their mark here as they had in Europe.
Jack woke with a spastic jerk then stared up from the bed with bloodshot eyes.
‘You’re back’ he said, and scrubbed at the scum on his lips.
Gene repressed her sarcasm, knowing it would have been wasted at this time in the morning, for his mind would be on only one thing.
‘Did you get the food?’
She nodded and lifted a bag up onto the counter separating the kitchen from the main room. Jack came off the bed like a piece of spring steel and was opening the bag before she even had time to release it. He sure didn’t move like a man who was ill.
‘Carlson said he would look at the merchandise today,’ she said.
Jack nodded and dry gulped a handful of vitamin and glucose tablets. Gene wondered if he was on drugs, but had never seen him taking any.
‘What is this merchandise?’ she asked.
Jack stepped round into the kitchenette and began to break eggs into a pint jug. This was his usual breakfast. He would be hungry again in a couple of hours then a couple of hours after that, then again and again until he went to bed and slept for ten to twelve hours. He ate more in a day than Gene ate in a week, yet he was painfully thin.
‘It’s not drugs,’ he said.
Gene watched him. ‘You don’t trust me.’
‘Where did you say he wanted to meet me?’
‘The Cicero, this evening at ten o’clock.’
He nodded and Gene turned away as he gulped down the glutinous mass. Carlson had told her to stick with him and find out where he kept this ‘merchandise’, though he had not told her what it was. She found this difficult at times since Jack was not easy to live with. With a degree of repressed irritation she stubbed out her joint in the sink and stepped from the kitchenette to the bedroom. There she sprawled herself on the bed with her legs pointing towards the counter where Jack was now mixing a glucose drink. A cloud of dust settled around her. The bed always seemed to be dusty no matter how often she vacuumed it out. Jack seemed to shed skin like a snake and his complexion was always pale no matter how long he spent in the sun. She waved a hand in front of her face then, irritated that he wasn’t paying attention, she lifted one leg to show the tops of her stockings and her knickers and began to rub her hand up and down her inner thigh.
‘Come on Jack, I feel horny.’
He peered at her as if he did not understand what she meant, then drained a pint of glucose syrup. Gene began to undo the studs of her leather waistcoat. She was very attractive and had a good body. She knew this. This was why Carlson had chosen her all those years ago. Yet with Jack she never knew where she stood. Sometimes he reacted like a sex-starved adolescent, other times he showed no reaction at all. After a moment he grinned a death’s head grin then came in from the kitchenette, knelt between her legs, and began to assist her with the waistcoat.
‘If it’s not drugs then what is it that would interest Carlson?’ she asked as she pulled his head down to her breasts.
‘I guess it doesn’t matter that you know,’ he said, his voice muffled as she moaned theatrically in response. ‘I have a batch of TCC memory crystals for sale. I sold him one about six months ago when I first returned.’ As a reward for that she reached down and began to stroke his penis. His breathing was heavy. This she could handle. This she knew.
‘Worth a lot of money. I hope you’ve got them safe?’
‘Safe as safe can be,’ he said, using precisely the same accent as the actor in the holovision commercial.
Gene smiled and thought to herself, in the bank, then moaned again as he pushed her micro skirt up off her hips, tugged her knickers aside and entered her. Then, being the consummate actress she was, she showed not a hint of the bored resignation she felt as she waited for him to finish.
The security camera followed Jack’s progress across the foyer with cyclopean suspicion. No doubt the security guard thought him an unlikely candidate for the custom of Ecubank. He was skeletally thin, had the fevered appearance of a junky, and the jeans and T-shirt that hung on him looked suspiciously as if they might be dirty, not just fashionably scruffy. He probably smelled.
He came, at length, to one of the many service points and rested his hands on the shelf before the armoured glass. The girl behind the glass had difficulty forcing her ‘I am waiting to serve you’ smile.
‘I’ve come to collect something from my box,’ he said.
‘Please speak the number of your box into the microphone to your right.’
Jack did as instructed as the girl, Cherry Lane her badge named her, peered at a screen to one side.
‘Could you now place your right hand on the touch pad and look into the retinal scanner with your right eye.’
He placed his hand on a matt square on the shelf before him and stared into the green glare of the scanner set in the armoured glass. After a moment a chip card poked out of the shelf at him like a robotic tongue. He yanked it out and left the machine mute.
‘Thank you and good evening,’ said Cherry Lane.
Jack headed to the door on one side of the foyer, ran the card through a reader, then entered as the door clicked open. The plain box of a room contained a table and chair bolted down in the middle of the floor and a hatch set in the wall opposite. Two hamburgers please, thought Jack, and abruptly felt hungry again. He hurried to the hatch, shoved his card into the slot beside. Minutes later he was back in the street clutching his case of memory crystals.
The street was chaos: stall holders out-shouting each other for attention, queues outside the hypermarkets, psychotic drivers in rusting, petrol-driven hulks blaring their horns seemingly without purpose and driving at any pedestrian with the temerity to step from the pavements, which many were frequently forced to do. Jack loved the crowding and he did not know why. Before his trip out to the comet he had hated cities and had always breathed easier upon returning to his house on the edge of the East Anglian flood plain. Here though, he felt a strange, almost sexual, joy.
A hundred yards from the bank he stopped at a snack bar and bought himself a large doner kebab, which he consumed with mechanical efficiency as he checked out his surroundings. A short distance away from him two big thickset Vietnamese men clad in paperwear overalls turned to a African street vendor wearing a ridiculous Chinese hat and began to inspect the cheap jewellery he was selling. Jack finished his kebab, wiped lamb grease on his jeans, picked up his case and moved on. Shortly he stopped at a vending machine and bought a couple of chocolate bars, which he ate with the same mechanical efficiency as the kebab. Behind him the two men were taking a vast interest in a display of women’s underwear. Jack felt something feral uncoil inside him and it terrified him more than the knowledge that he was being followed. Jack moved on.
They came at him as he neared his apartment and as the neon and holographic displays were coming on. He felt as tense as a spring and found he could distinguish the sound of their footsteps from the melee of other sounds, and could hear them as they speeded up. To his right lay dark alleyways into one of which, he decided, they intended to force him. Immediately he broke into a run, intending to head where the crowds were thickest, yet, that something inside him seemed to look to where he could flee most easily, where there was least obstruction, and without
volition he turned into one of the alleys and sprinted. No, dammit! No! But he could not stop. He knew, with sickening dread, that this alleyway came to a dead end, but just ran faster.
The alley snaked between windowless buildings that clutched skeletal fire escapes high above. It was littered with piles of decaying refuse from overturned dustbins, and the broken plastic and glass of obsolete computers. Jack soon reached the alley’s end where an ancient Citroen quietly rusted. There was no way through, for just beyond the car rose a cliff of slimed brick. He turned, and his fear slid away to be replaced by a sudden anger.
Something is pressing my buttons.
Yet he could not get past the anger. With a shaking hand he placed his case on the bonnet of the Citroen, then turned to meet his pursuers.
They came round the corner at a steady loping jog, aware that he had nowhere to run. One of them held an antique revolver, the other the transparent glitter of a chain-glass flick knife.
Why were they hesitating? Why were they so slow?
Jack advanced and kicked the gunman in the groin and, before that one had even bowed over, struck the other one three times with the edge of his hand. The second man’s flesh felt like cotton wool, and Jack could feel bones breaking like bread sticks. He flicked back to the gunman, who was now at last bowed over, and brought his knee up into the man’s face to send him reeling back, the revolver arcing through the air.
Slow motion?
For a moment he could not comprehend what was happening, but then realized that it was not them, it was him. He was moving with unhuman speed.
The two men fell simultaneously. Jack stood perfectly still for a moment, then stamped on the one he had kneed. The man’s chest collapsed like a blown-up paper bag and lung tissue jetted from his mouth. Jack turned to the other, but saw he presented no danger. This one lay crumpled with his head twisted at an unnatural angle. Jack felt something coil up inside him, as insidious and venomous as a cobra concealing itself under a stone. Abruptly he felt weak and very hungry, but he also felt a sudden need to try and tidy up the mess he had made. He dragged the bodies over to the Citroen and arranged them neatly inside before leaving the alley and heading off to find a food vendor.
