by Neal Asher
“Unstrap and prepare your weapons,” I instructed the remainder.
As they obeyed, the thermic lance finished its work and a loud crash ensued. That was the hydraulic hammer smashing a disk of hull into the ship beyond. I reached down and hit the control for the iris door and it slid open to release a cloud of stinking smoke, slowly clearing as air filtration ramped up to a scream. The interior of the other ship was devastated: a burned and melted mess of interior walls, crash foam, and fire retardants snowing, some fires still burning.
“Thetics,” I called, while pointing into the other ship. “Go in there and secure the ship. Try not to kill the one you saw me speaking to.” They had just about enough intelligence to follow such an instruction. If there weren’t any survivors it wouldn’t matter too much—it would just mean a bit more work inspecting the cargo, and checking the ship’s log and other data stores.
In good order they moved into the other ship, silently passing instructions among themselves and splitting into two parties, one heading forward and one to the stern. Just a minute later I heard a laser carbine firing, then pulse-rifle fire in return.
“Not too bad,” said Harriet, now standing at my side and eyeing the two thetics that had failed, then the one that had smashed into the wall and was now slowly oozing from its suit.
“Standard 10 percent,” I agreed, moving toward the iris door. I meant the two failures—the one that smashed into the wall could be counted as a casualty.
“What are you going to use?” Harriet asked. “Demolition charges?”
“In good time, Harriet,” I replied. “We’re here after information and, if we’re lucky, maybe even the item salvaged from Penny Royal’s planetoid—I want to check up on the cargo first.”
Grav was out inside the Layden, so from the leech lock I propelled myself inward to find my way to a central drop-shaft. The cargo area on ships like this was usually positioned ahead of the engines, so I turned right, soon having to push aside a floating corpse that could have served as a sieve. Shortly after that I observed a group of four thetics heading back toward me, and pulled myself to one side to allow them past. Further on I found two of their number leaking out of their suits, then another member of the crew—most of his head missing.
“In there,” said Harriet, pausing at a side tube and sniffing.
I entered the tube and eyed the palm-locked doors, then drove my fist through one of them and tore it out of its frame and tossed it aside. The room within was racked out, the plastic frameworks filled with simple aluminium boxes the size of coffins. On seeing these I first felt disappointment, then a growing anger. There would be no salvage aboard this ship, for its cargo was of a very different kind. I dragged one of the coffins out, pushed it down against the floor and tore off its lid.
Inside lay a naked woman, her body marked with circular blue scars and her head bald. Her eyes were open and she was breathing gently, but she showed utterly zero response to me. I slapped her face, hard, but all she did was slowly return her head to its original position. I reached in, cupped the back of her neck in one hand and hauled her up into a sitting position and studied the scars on her head.
“Fully cored and thralled, I reckon,” said Harriet.
“So it would seem,” I replied, releasing the woman and watching her slowly lie back like a damped box lid closing.
I pulled out another box and checked the contents of that, shoved it back in the rack and moved on to a square box at the end, pulled that out and opened it. This contained hexagonal objects each the size of a soup bowl, prador glyphs inscribed in their upper surfaces.
“Thrall control units,” I said tightly, pausing to look at the number of those other coffin-sized boxes around me and wondering if the same number lay behind each door. “Let’s see if our thetics managed to get us a captive.”
Making my way up to the bridge of the hauler I noted another two thetics down and returning to their original form, but there were also two more crewmen riddled with pulse-rifle fire. Finally, entering the bridge I found four thetics pinning their captive to the floor, the rest milling about aimlessly, and another three of their kind floating through the air, partially dismembered and reverting—obviously having run afoul of their captive’s laser carbine before they could bring him down.
“I want two of you to remain here to restrain the captive,” I instructed. “The rest of you go back to the bathysphere, now.”
The milling immediately ceased and most of the thetics departed.
“Get him up off the floor,” I instructed the two remaining. The fight seemed to have gone out of the man now, probably because of the shots to each of his legs and his right biceps. He was obviously in a great deal of pain.
“I have some questions,” I said.
“Fuck . . . you,” he managed.
“My first question is: does your cargo consist of fully cored humans only? That is, are there any included who have been spider thralled?”
“Why the hell ... should I answer you?”
“Curious question to which I’m sure the answer must be obvious,” I said. “If you don’t answer me I will torture you until you either do answer me or you die. Harriet.” I beckoned with one finger and Harriet turned away from a deliquescing thetic she had been sniffing. “His right hand, do you think?”
Harriet walked right up to the man, nose to nose, then sniffed down his right arm, pausing for a while at the wound in his biceps then moving on down to his hand. She licked his hand, then lifted her head back up to gaze into his eyes.
“Crunchy,” she said, exposing her teeth.
“Why do you want to know?” the man asked, trying to focus his gaze on me.
“Why do you want to know why I want to know?”
“I don’t want to die.”
I smiled tiredly, turning away and heading over to the ship’s controls. As I began to search for the ship’s log and other data storage, I said, “All you need to know right now is that if you do not answer my question Harriet here will bite off and eat your right hand.”
I glanced round in time to see the man seeming to brace himself, pulling himself more upright. Returning to the controls I found myself puzzled by the lack of security, quickly locating the ship’s log and transmitting it to the Coin Collector and receiving confirmation a moment later.
“The customer for this shipment ... did not want spider thralls used because after a period of time they can be rejected by the body.” The man paused, then continued in a rush, “I’m just the pilot—I’m not involved in the rest of it.”
Ah, here’s something, I thought to myself as I uncovered a number of encrypted files. Then, feeling slightly impatient, I turned back to our prisoner.
“The customer presumably being a prador ... So let me clarify,” I said. “Each and every human being in your cargo has suffered the removal of both the brain and a portion of the spinal cord so is essentially just technologically animated meat. They’re all dead.”
“Yes ... it’s best ... they don’t suffer.”
“I see.” No one here to rescue then. I had done some questionable things in my time, but what was being done here was utterly beyond the pale. I’d known that Straben’s organization was involved in the coring trade, which was why I’d had no reservations about sending the thetics in like I had, and now I had complete confirmation.
“Next question.” I held up a finger, then brought it down on the touch controls. The encrypted files refused to transmit. I stared at them for a moment, then banished them from the screen and called up a ship’s schematic. “What did the salvagers find in Penny Royal’s planetoid and where will that find be located now?”
“I don’t know . . . I don’t know what you’re . . . talking about.”
The schematic showed the location of this ship’s mind—a second-child ganglion that was barely sentient. It merely acted as a data processor and stored none at all in itself. However, it had to store it somewhere. After a moment I had it. Smiling, I
reached down and tore off the panel in front of my seat. In there I located a series of crystals plugged in like test tubes in a rack. I detached optics and switched the rack over to its own power supply before detaching the external power feed and pulling the whole thing out. I now had the ship’s collimated diamond data store. I could try to break into the files it contained and sort through the data myself, but there were terabytes of it here. Best to hand it over to Tank.
“You don’t know about some item or items obtained from Penny Royal’s planetoid?”
“No . . . I don’t.”
The man seemed to be telling the truth and really I didn’t feel I had the time to check. Hobbs’ Street had to be our next target and we needed to move swiftly.
“Thank you.” I dipped my head in acknowledgement, then patted a hand against my left thigh. I could try out the other gun now, but that seemed mean, since Harriet hadn’t seen much action here. I relented. “Harriet, you may kill him now.”
The man shrieked as I stood up with the ship’s data store and headed for the door, glimpsing, as I went, Harriet pulling on something like a dog worrying a length of bloody rope. As I headed back toward the bathysphere I decided that first I would have the prador mind removed from this ship and transferred over to my own—a useful replacement should that thing in the tank finally expire, or should I, for whatever reason, want a ship mind that did not owe its loyalty to the Client. The best option then would be a kiloton thermite scatter bomb on a timer set to go off sometime after our visit to Hobbs Street. It would completely gut this ship, burn up its cargo and destroy its workings, including its U-drive and fusion reactor. The ship would then only have any value as scrap and one portion of Straben’s organization would be defunct—and during this mission I would have cleaned up at least a small portion of the crap scattered about the Graveyard.
Hobbs’ Street smelled odd, damp and sweet. That wasn’t due to the residents here, but to an odd mutation of a terran honey fungus that had spread throughout the moon colony, running its mycelia through air vents, electrical ducting or any other opening available, sucking nutrients from spillages on the floors of hydroponics units or out of the soil of private gardens. I paused in my study of a clump of honey mushrooms sprouting from a crack in the foamstone pavement and considered the workings of coincidence. I had decided that here I would use the other gun, and there was a connection. . . .
As I looked up an ancient hydrocar motored past. It was the cops, and I was surprised to see them. The car, a by-blow of flying saucer and Mercedes, had an assault drone like a huge grey copepod squatting on its roof. The vehicle was painted white with fluorescent blue circles decorating it—a color scheme that had come to mean much the same as the black and white stripes of a wasp: danger. The driver and his mate, respectively a hulking man and an equally lethal looking woman, eyed me as they passed, the blue ring-shaped scars on their faces visible in the street lights.
“Probably here in the hope of picking up any strays,” I said.
“There won’t be any,” said Harriet.
“They would probably like to join in,” I continued. “John told me that he had some trouble dissuading his hoopers from contacting me and offering assistance.”
Harriet dipped her head in acknowledgement. “Understandable, considering the history. Jay Hoop, his pirates, and their coring operation weren’t very popular on Spatterjay.”
Weapons grade understatement, I thought. It surprised me that Straben had managed to keep his headquarters here at all.
“They’re coming,” said Harriet.
Hobbs’ Street was crowded, it being one of the most popular thoroughfares, and now it was becoming even more crowded. The thetics in the street were clad in a wide variety of clothing and their faces were concealed by syntheskin, but they hadn’t managed to suppress their inclination to march along in neat squads like the soldiers they were meant to be. There were five street doors to Straben’s conjoined buildings, which extended five floors up with the chainglass street roof attached across on top of the fifth. Fifty thetics were in the street, ten to each door, while a further seventy thetics clad in light space suits were, even now, moving into position up on the buildings’ roofs, which were exposed to vacuum.
I watched, through the eyes of my artificial body and through pin-cams the thetics all wore in their clothing. I saw those up on the roof avoiding the heavily secured airlocks, consulting building blueprints and selecting areas over which they glued down atmosphere shelters, before beginning to cut through below, thus making their own airlocks. They would be inside within five minutes. Meanwhile, those down on the street were moving in on the doors with sticky bombs or sausages of thermite, depending on the design of door concerned. I began walking.
“So, Harriet,” I said. “You seem a lot more coherent lately.”
She glanced at me, her reptilian face unreadable. “Do I?”
“Undoubtedly,” I said, watching her.
“I’ve never been incoherent,” she argued.
“Not as such, but—”
I couldn’t take that further because a loud bang ensued, the explosion as bright as a welding arc, and a gust of smoke blew out into the street and then rose up toward the glass roof. People began yelling and running. It might have been thirty years since John Hobbs took control but there had still been incidents, and the people here still knew when it was best just to run. I noted that one of the doors had disappeared just as thermite flared further down the street and two more explosions occurred. I watched thetics pouring into three of the buildings, pulling short wide-blast sawn-off pulse rifles from under their coats. I saw thermite burn in a fast ring around an armored door then a central charge blow it inward. Just one more....
I glanced over toward the door concerned as a machine gun began firing in short bursts. An explosion took out the door, but from a stone-effect arch above it a lumpish ugly security drone had dropped on a pole and begun firing a miniature version of the Gatling cannons prador favored. In annoyance, I saw thetics being torn apart, even one civilian who had been a bit tardy getting out of there. I reached down and flipped open the patches on my trousers, drew my QC laser and plugged in its power lead, then I drew the other gun, noting Harriet now watching me intently. Meanwhile a thetic opened out a telescopic launcher, shouldered it, and put a missile into the door arch. The drone arced smoking and bouncing out into the street.
“Harriet—” I began, but didn’t get to finish as she shot off through the door concerned. Obviously the most secure doorway was the one into the building I most wanted to enter because, if my data was correct, Gad Straben himself had entered here just a few hours ago. I now entered to be greeted by the sound of gunfire and the commingled screams of pain and terror that were the usual result of Harriet’s presence. It occurred to me that she might have been uncomfortable about my questioning and that was why she had gone ahead, but why this occurred to me I don’t know.
Through pin cams on their clothing I observed the thetics in the other buildings moving from room to room and killing anyone who resisted, just so long as they weren’t Straben. It was brutal, but then Straben’s organization was brutal, and anyone working for it had to know they were culpable in mass murder. Those on the roof were now in too and working their way down—just as efficient and methodical as those working up from below—but also just as indifferent to personal survival. I reckoned on walking away from here with maybe just twenty or so surviving thetics. The rest would crawl off and die completely to become food for the honey fungus, or else turn into something nasty in the drains.
Directing my course by pin-cam feeds, I climbed the stairs since the building’s drop-shafts were keyed to staff ID tags and wouldn’t work for anyone else. Most of the action was now taking place on the third floor. At the second floor, some man in businesswear carrying a heavy flack gun charged down, skidded to a stop on a landing, and took aim. I raised my other gun just as a flack round exploded against the wall behind me and pepper
ed me with shrapnel, then changed my mind, and raised my QC laser, a short while afterward stepping over the burning corpse.
By the time I reached the third floor it was all over. The main data room looked like an abattoir and over in one corner Harriet was tearing chunks off of some rather corpulent individual and gobbling them down. Many of the consoles were smashed and smoking, holo-displays flickering through the air like panicked specters, and flimsy screens seemed to burn with internal blue fires. Over to one side a chainglass window overlooked all this, plush office space inside, and there, working a console in frenetic panic, sat Gad Straben. I ran over to the door—armored of course—kicked it hard, then swore as my other boot went straight down through the floor and the door remained in place.
“Get me a charge!” I shouted, heaving my leg back out of the hole.
There were only two surviving thetics in the room, and they were guarding two women and a man who lay face down with their hands behind their heads.
“You three,” I said, brushing debris from my trousers as I walked over. When they looked up I continued, “Get up and go,” and stabbed a finger toward the door. They slowly stood up, eyeing me as I replaced my weapons in their holes in my legs and closed them up, then took off just as fast as they could. They were probably only temporary employees of Straben since they hadn’t resisted, so whether they lived or died was a matter of indifference to me. I turned to the two thetics.
“I want an explosive charge to get through that door,” I said concisely, since neither of them had understood me the first time.
One of them went over to one of its fellows, who was quietly deliquescing in a corner, pulled some sticky bombs from his belt and returned with them. I stared at the bombs for a moment then went over to the dead thetic myself and checked the belt. There—just what I needed. I detached a circular object like a coaster and took it over to the office window, slapped it against the chainglass and hit the pressure button at its center. With a whumph the chainglass turned to white powder and collapsed to the floor. I stepped over the ledge and into the office, seeing Straben simply stand and hold out empty hands.
