by Neal Asher
“You’ve seen this?” Harriet inquired.
“No,” I replied.
“Do you remember?”
I turned toward her. “No, I don’t.”
I felt slightly sick as I turned away. It must have been a wholly psychological feeling since my artificial body was incapable of nausea. So why had Harriet brought me here to see this? I didn’t know, all I did know was that I was standing beside the entire scientific team—plus ECS security personnel—that had been sent to liaise with the Client. I began to head out, then paused now I could see what lay beside the door I’d come in through. I eyed a glittering stack of crystal fragments, ten human corpses untouched by desiccation or decay because, of course, they weren’t human but Golem androids. Beside them rested two huge metal beetles, motionless, no light gleaming in their crystal eyes: war drones. It seemed the Client had killed the AI complement of that mission, too.
I headed out of the hold.
The moon was highly volcanic because it was one of many similarly sized moons irregularly orbiting an ice giant. It seemed that they often tore at each other gravitationally, and were torn at by the giant they orbited. In astronomical terms the whole system was unstable and, running a model of it, I saw that at least two of these moons would be shattered in about a hundred thousand years’ time; thereafter the system would stabilize with an asteroid ring.
“Do you have something you wish to tell me?” I asked Harriet as I gazed at the images displayed in the hexagonal screens.
“I have nothing I can say to you yet,” she replied.
Was that because we were too close to the Client now? I could feel its influence reaching out to me, demanding, dictatorial. Coordinates sat clear in my mind as the Coin Collector lurched under fusion drive, dropping lower and decelerating. Even if I wanted to stop this, to go away and never head for those coordinates, I couldn’t, for Tank controlled the ship.
The world was mostly black, etched with red veins and red maculae, white at their centers with hot eruptions; smears of grey ash spread equatorially from these. It drew closer and closer, the great ship’s engines roaring and the whole vessel shuddering around us.
“Why are we landing?” Harriet asked.
The question was obviously rhetorical.
“Perhaps,” she continued, “the bathyspheres are not large enough to convey what needs to be conveyed.”
I had never described the Client to her, so was she guessing or did she know? It was true, nevertheless, that if the Client wanted to move itself and its multitude of minions aboard this ship, then the ship had to land. What did this then mean for me?
Soon the horizon was an arc across the whole array of screens before me and we seemed to be coming down on a relatively stable plain before a range of mountains like diseased fangs. Scanning gave me a cave system deep in those mountains, precisely at the location of the coordinates in my mind, while the Coin Collector aimed to land to one side of them. I stood up and headed for the door, Harriet as usual close behind me. As I mounted my scooter I sent orders from my artificial body—orders I hoped I could not rescind.
While heading down into the bowels of the ship I turned to Harriet, who was pacing easily at my side. “The air out there isn’t breathable.”
She flicked her head once. “It doesn’t matter—I ceased to need breathable air long ago.”
“So you underwent more modifications than I know about?”
“Some,” she replied.
Lower down, the air in the ship was laced with sulphur and it was hot. It ceased to be breathable for a human being, or any creature that needed oxygen, on the lower level, as we approached a massive open door with a ramp extending from it to the charred ground below. I parked my scooter beside the door, hoping I would be able to return to use it, but doubtful of that, and I began walking down. My artificial lungs had by now ceased to process what they were breathing and my body had gone over to power cells and stored supplies.
“What are they?” Harriet asked.
I peered out across the plain at the four creatures approaching. They looked like manta rays hovering just above the ground as they swept toward us, but upping the magnification of my eyes I could then pick out the blur of insect legs moving underneath them.
“Exo-forms is what we called them,” I replied. “The Client is a hive creature and a hive all in one, perpetually conjoined, being born and dying all in one and able to meddle at genetic levels with its parts. It is a natural bio-technician, geneticist, and makes forms like this to interact with environments outside its preferred one. It was a form something like these that acted as a translator.”
“So your memories are clearer,” Harriet suggested, as we proceeded on down.
I realized they were, and I remembered the terrible anger of the Client when the AIs shut down the project, though the results of that anger were unclear, but for those corpses in the hold, just as were details of the project itself before that, and precisely how it had been closed down. I wondered only then: how could the farcaster have been broken up and taken away if the whole team, including its AIs, had been slaughtered?
The ramp was shaking—perpetual tremors being transmitted from the ground and through it to my feet—but the new rumble was something else. As I stepped off onto a surface of shattered and then heat-fused chunks of obsidian, I turned.
“Here they come,” I said, and stepped aside.
The thetics were already a quarter of the way down the ramp, over two hundred of them now. They were all clad in hard shell spacesuits of a combat design that enabled them to move quickly. They came down in good order at a steady trot, in neat rectangular formations. At the base of the ramp they spread out, utterly ignoring me, following their orders. Two groups of them then went down into firing positions and pulse-rifle fire cut through the poisonous air toward the approaching exo-forms. Two of them immediately went down, plowing into the ground like crashing gravcars. Two more swept to one side, but then a missile from a shoulder launcher hit between them and sent them tumbling. The thetics moved on at a run, heading for the coordinates in my mind.
The Client was very very disappointed in me and I now expected punishing pain which, I felt sure, I could resist for long enough. I followed the thetics out, my mental defenses as tight and as ready as they could be. But there was no attack, and in those parts of my mind where the Client had its grip, all contact slid into something completely alien—beyond my understanding.
“It’s a good plan,” Harriet opined, “but for the Client’s defenses and its absolute hold on you.”
“What do you mean?” I asked, now breaking into a fast loping run.
“I mean,” said my troodon companion, easily keeping pace with me. “You ordered the thetics to go in after the Client and attack it, and then you disconnected yourself from them so you could issue no further orders, so the Client could not force you to order them to desist.”
“And?”
“You hoped that if they didn’t kill it they would at least keep it distracted enough for you to get close and use the weapon you designed specifically to kill it.”
“You seem to know rather a lot,” I suggested.
A battle now raged ahead of us, at the foot of the mountains. We reached the fighting just as it was terminating, exoforms like giant horseshoe crabs turned over and smoking like wrecked tanks, thetics reverting in the grip of long white worms, others pouring out of suits torn apart by ice-pick mandibles. But still there were many left, all funneling into the wide cave mouth ahead. I followed them in.
At last, said the Client, perfectly understandable.
The cave sloped down, ever darker, then being lit by a hellish glow. The chamber seemed to have no limits; it seemed as if I had walked through some Narnian doorway out onto the surface of a hotter brighter world. Ahead of me I saw thetics keeling over, one after another, and I couldn’t see what was killing them. I kept walking; found I could not stop walking. I stepped over and past hard shell suits and obse
rved dissolving faces behind chainglass visors. Harriet was still beside me and I glanced across at her.
Kill me now, I thought, but couldn’t say.
“It’s killing them with the farcaster,” she said, dipping her head to indicate what lay ahead.
The Client was wound around its crystal tree, large wasp-like segments conjoined in a great snake hundreds of feet long. At its head was the primary form which I could see was an adult some days away from death, and yet to be cast away like those husks scattered on the ground all around to allow the next creature-segment to take over. At its tail its terminal segment was giving birth to another, which would remain attached and in its turn give birth. The whole cycle—the time it took for the terminal form to reach the head—was just solstan months long. Meanwhile, all those segments fed, chewing down an odd rubbery nectar exuded by the crystal tree, which in turn extracted the materials to make it from the ground below, and from the husks the exoforms fed to its nanomachine roots. But there was something else about that tree too. It fed the Client, supported the Client, and was the totality of its technology and, near its head, a crystal flower had bloomed: the farcaster.
Soon I was circumventing the husks of former head segments. Reaching the base of the tree I saw the last of the thetics collapsing around me, and I went down on my knees. I don’t know whether that was my own impulse or an instruction from the creature rearing high above me. I managed to turn my head slightly, searching for Harriet, just in time to see her huff out a haze of smoke, slump, and then sprawl beside me.
I’d let her down. I’d been careless. I felt a surge of grief immediately followed by a dead dark hopelessness. What was the point now? What was the point of ... continuing?
Give me the gun, said the Client.
The farcaster was here and my search had been a pointless one. I just couldn’t understand, I just couldn’t . . . and then I saw it.
The human body lay inside some kind of pod at the foot of the tree, almost like a flower yet to open. Through crystal distortions I could see it nestled in white snakes, some attached to it, small ones around the gaping wound in its skull, a large one entering its mouth, others attached here and there around a body that had been broken and torn. And through crystal distortions I recognized my own face.
Give me the gun. It wasn’t an instruction in human language but a need, a chemical pattern, a chain of pheromones perpetually renewing. Somehow I found the strength to resist, and saw the snakes wriggling about my doppelganger lying under crystal ahead.
No, I managed.
It could send one of its exoforms to take me apart and thereafter seize the gun. I knew with absolute certainty that it had finished with me. I was a tool it had employed and all its tools died when their usefulness was at an end. I knew with utter certainty that I was going to die. I just did not want to die in ignorance.
Explain, I tried.
The Client at once understood that I accepted defeat and death, and relented.
The pressure came off and I found myself deeper in the Client’s distributed mind, ever dying and ever renewing. Chemical language offered itself and I accepted. I was me and the Client again and its memories opened. Of course the Client was able to manipulate its own genes and its own biology and, like all its kind, that manipulation was part of it and not some logically refined science. The Client’s species did have its geneticists, its bio-techs, and even its bio-warfare experts, but the Client wasn’t one of them. That had been a lie. However, it was an expert and it was that expertise that had enabled it to escape. It was an expert in U-space tech, it was an alien Iversus Skaidon, and it had built the farcaster.
I understood now what had killed the thetics and Harriet: energy dense micro-explosives no larger than spores but detonating inside with the force of gunshots. The Client had farcast such explosives into the prador aboard the Coin Collector, draining its limited supply of energy and using up those same explosives, before escaping aboard that ship so long ago, the worlds of its kind burning and tearing apart under prador kamikaze assault.
Why not all, I wondered.
It could have made more of these explosives and steadily annihilated every prador in existence, surely? No, because there were trillions of prador and each first-child or second-child, as the Client had learned, could not be killed with just one such explosive. And here was the complete killer of that idea: it needed to know the precise locations of its targets. It needed help; it needed spotters to locate prime targets like father-captains, like the king of the prador. And it needed a weapon that once farcast into such a target would then wipe out all the prador around it—its family. That’s where the Polity came in, and that’s where I came in: one of the Polity’s prime biowarfare experts.
I felt the rage again. The orders had been explicit: nothing was to remain. Even as I hit the destruct to turn all my computer files to atomic dust and burn up my samples in thousand-watt laser bursts, the micro-dense explosives tore me apart, and I knew nothing. Now, however, I understood how little trust the Client had of its allies, how it had targeted them all, killing all the humans in the team, shattering the crystal minds of all the AIs. Then, realizing its mistake, it had come for me, and incorporated me—drawn me in like a damaged but still useful exo-form.
But the journey, why the pointless search?
The Client needed me separate from it because as an exoform close to it I could pick up on some of its thoughts and might uncover the lie I had been told, and learn that the farcaster was intact and that what it wanted was the bio-weapon I had destroyed. That separation was maintained by the first-child ganglion in the tank and U-space communications that could be shut down in an instant. With our minds so close, why could it not take the design of that weapon straight from my brain? It couldn’t, because it wasn’t there—it was lost with a large chunk of my brain. However, the skills were still there and I was capable of remaking it.
It took the Client many years to build my avatar. It used one of the Golem whose mind it had destroyed, it used elements of the thetic program, which had been the product of one of the research team it had killed, and it did the best it could. It needed me motivated to rebuild that weapon. My motivation was an ersatz freedom, maintained by my ostensible separation from the Client and the firm knowledge that the bioweapon would work as well against it as against the prador. I responded as predicted. I remade that weapon, it resided aboard the Coin Collector, and it resided inside the bullets in the gun inside my thigh.
Give me the gun.
I realized that the action of handing over that weapon wasn’t the main thing the Client required, but its consequence. The knowledge was locked inside me and, by handing over the gun, I would unlock it.
Trillions of prador. I didn’t like them very much but such a genocide appalled me. The Client had its farcaster—had never been without it—and shortly it would have the weapon to annihilate them all. How it intended to target them I didn’t know, but it could find a way, for it had the time of an immortal and the utter certainty of purpose. I put up futile resistance and agony filled my skull, not the one in my artificial body, but in that one over there, wrapped in worms and entombed in crystal. My vision was blurred as I stared at the seared ground and fought for, I don’t know, at least some redemption from what was to ensue. Then my vision cleared a little, and I saw a strange thing.
Ten objects lay scattered across the ground in front of me. They were colorful curved spikes, shocking pink.
I gave up, simultaneously sending the signal to open the hatch in my thigh while reaching down to tear aside the canvas flap. My hand closed around the butt of my fungus gun and I withdrew it, all the knowledge of what its bullets incorporated riding up inside me. I really wanted to aim the weapon at the Client and pull the trigger, but that was utterly beyond me. I turned it, rested it in the flat of my hand, and presented it. Already the Client was looping down, both mentally and physically, multiple wings roaring to support its weight, its wasp-like leading segme
nt reaching out with four limbs terminating in hands that seemed to be collections of black fish hooks, black hooks in my skull too.
But it was the hand of a reptile, sans claws, that took the gun.
“Tuppence,” said a voice, but I was still in that moment.
I saw Harriet aiming the gun with a dexterity she had seemingly not possessed in many decades. One shot went into the Client’s leading segment, into its thorax, which in turn was partially melded to the head of the segment behind. A second shot went in two segments back from that. Then another two shots went in widely spaced, one after another. The hooks withdrew from my mind, but I was rigid with agony, the Client’s agony. I managed to turn my head in time to see Harriet flung aside by a detonation in her side. It tore a hole, but what was revealed inside wasn’t bloody, but hard and glittery. She rolled, came up again, and fired the remaining two shots.
“Tuppence.”
A roaring scream filled the cavern as of a whole crowd being thrown into a furnace. The Client reared back and wrapped itself around its tree, black lines rapidly spreading from the bullet impact sites. It shed its forward form, birthed behind, sucked on a crystal tree suddenly turned milk white as it filled with nutrient. It birthed and shed in quick succession, its discarded segments falling about me not as dry husks but soggy and heavy as any corpse. I saw one issuing brown sprouts, spore heads expanding. The Client fought on for survival, tearing at its tree; crystal began to fall and shatter then like the dried wings of its husks once had. Around me I now saw exoforms, but there was no coherence to them—they were just running, crashing into each other, crashing into the walls of the cavern.
“Tuppence.”
At last it ended, the Client freezing round its tree, final segments infected, one newly born freezing halfway down its birth canal, a last head segment falling. The Client died sprouting a fungus that, in its original form, killed mere ants. I died too. Under crystal I saw black threads spreading, then all sight of my body blotted out as a spore head exploded in there.
