by Neal Asher
Hunching further forwards as the howl died, it opened its bill wide and heaved, ejecting from the back of its throat a jet of white bile and chunks of flesh, splashing onto the corpse. It grabbed up the corpse and tore it into pieces, hurling them off into the trees so hard they broke branches. Next it rippled forwards, horribly fast and came right up to me. I could smell its breath – carrion and something spicy – and white bile spattered my face, burning where it touched. I had no time to reach for the pulse rifle and thought I must be about to die. I stared into those emerald eyes and it seemed I could see star systems in their depths.
‘Oogra blastic blastic,’ it told me knowingly, then abruptly rounded the tree and went crashing off into the valley.
I lay there noting how close I’d come to defecating. My heart was thumping and I held out my hands to watch them shake. Hot and cold shivers ran through me. I don’t know, I just don’t know. This had been as dangerous to me as the encounter with the Jack because, in the end, I could have died. But I also had a sense of an encounter with something otherworldly, almost supernatural in its effect. I felt as if I’d never be able to stand, to go on, and that after this all striving had been sapped of meaning. The gabbleduck, I was sure, was no mere animal. Marcus came down the tree and silently handed me a walking staff he’d cut. My hands steadied on the thing and the shivering stilled. In a dreamlike state, I finally hauled myself to my feet while he took up the pack and his rifle. We collected my rifle on the way out of the valley – I wouldn’t let him carry that.
Rationality returned and I wondered again about the creature we’d left behind. To say that its response to the Jack had been extreme was an understatement. Had it, in some way, sensed the Jain technology in his virus? Did enough of its intelligence remain for it to know it was in the presence of some part of the technology that had led to its kind abandoning their minds? Perhaps not. Perhaps some cellular mechanism deep inside the thing had identified it and caused it to eject it. But that howl. I don’t know. I just don’t know.
10
As the sun set we made camp in a bowl of rock high on the face of one mountain. Marcus had gone off ahead earlier, as I trudged along wincing with every step, and then returned with a load of sleer segments bound together with vine. The extra weight hadn’t seemed to affect him at all. Once at our camp, he disappeared off again, breaking into a fast run down towards a nearby valley, and it was only then that my suit started buzzing.
After allowing the comlink, I said, ‘What the fuck do you want?’
‘Well that’s not very friendly,’ Suzeal replied.
Her voice came out loud because I’d set the comlink so that Marcus could hear too. I turned it down again, then closed up my hood and visor to see her face and study her reactions.
‘You let me walk into an ambush and used me to get to the prador. I guess, because of that, I’m not feeling very friendly.’
‘You were useful to me,’ she stated flatly. ‘Let us hope you may continue to be so, otherwise I see no reason to send a shuttle to pick you up.’
‘And that might actually happen? Sure you haven’t got further uses for me down here?’
‘Tell me about the prador,’ she said. ‘The cloud and the chameleonware echoes made it difficult enough to hit anything, let alone gather data. They were making something and I’m sure I saw a hooder down there …’
I considered just telling her to fuck off, but she was still my only chance of rescue from this world, and I thought it would be interesting to see her reactions to what I had witnessed.
‘Vrasan thralled a hooder.’
‘The fuck!’ she exclaimed. ‘That’s insane. How the hell did he do that?’
‘I think his mission here had more than one objective and he came prepared. You were right, this wasn’t all about those Old Families. He wanted to know who you were trading with and shut you down, sure, but I think the king wants hooders too.’
After a long pause she asked, ‘Why?’
‘Because they’re ancient biomechs and it may be possible to return them to functionality. I don’t need to tell you how much the prador like weapons.’ I kept back from her Vrasan’s hope that he could use a hooder to attack her station.
She fell silent again, then turned contemplative. ‘Seems I’ve been missing a trade opportunity. I expect the king would pay well for living hooders.’
Was she amoral or immoral? I wondered. There was no thought there for how dangerous it would be to humanity if the prador reactivated Atheter war machines. But then, she traded in living humans. Why would I have expected any other response from her?
‘How is the situation up there?’
‘The prador are still rooted like beetles in a log. We can’t get anything out of the station and they’ve been firing at any ships that arrive, driving them away. They also keep taking shots at us, trying to hit our railgun, but our laser and hardfield defences are preventing that.’
‘So what do you intend to do?’
‘It might be time to sacrifice the space dock,’ she opined. ‘The loss of infrastructure will be catastrophic and will take us years to recover from. But we’re losing a lot of trade and the dock isn’t completely necessary for transfers.’
‘Aren’t there people in the dock?’
‘A few thousand at last count, if they’re still alive.’
I felt horrified by her callousness and tried to put myself in her position. Her biggest concern was the bottom line. While the prador occupied the dock, trade wouldn’t recommence so I supposed she considered the loss of ships and traders on and in the dock a minor matter which she could blame on the prador.
‘Can you talk to them?’
‘Oh I’ve been talking. It seems they’ve backed themselves into a corner. They have their mission, and the member of the Guard I spoke to sees no way out but to stick to it unto death, which I’d have been happy to provide long ago if it wouldn’t have caused so much damage to me.’
‘Tell him,’ I said.
‘Tell him what?’
‘Tell them that you will destroy the dock unless they stop firing on incoming and departing ships.’
‘A threat I have already tried.’
I thought about that for a moment. ‘He probably doesn’t want you bringing in any assistance or further armament.’ I thought for a bit longer. ‘The king wants those Old Families. How important, relatively, is your space dock compared to your trade with them?’
‘Interesting question.’ She looked contemplative. ‘The dock is probably more important now I know the king is moving against those families. That exchange has a limited life and it would be good to start trading with the king and his family instead. I’d certainly need the dock if I started moving hooders.’
‘Give them something in exchange for a ceasefire,’ I said, but then instantly felt bad about encouraging her to sign the death sentence of those Old Families. I added, ‘Of course, the king doesn’t know which families are involved so you don’t have to give them all. You should also factor in that not destroying his prador here will put you in a better position with the king.’
She stared at me hard. ‘And you are a clone only a few months old,’ she said.
‘With the knowledge of a Polity agent integrating in my mind.’
‘Yes. Physical aspects too, it would seem.’
I knew exactly what she meant. ‘Skills, it seems, are also a part of that knowledge. I didn’t know I could fight like that until pressed to do so.’
‘And who knows what else you may discover? Now tell me about your interesting companion. I’ve never seen a mutation so advanced, with the human retaining that level of intelligence.’
I felt wary of her interest, and trod carefully. ‘There’s little to tell. By freeing him from his thrall, I released the prador control of his mind and he was obviously grateful for that.’
‘You must have some detail about him.’
‘Very little. He can only communicate by scribbling in the dust. I
know his name and little beyond that. We haven’t really had time to get fully acquainted.’
‘And that name is?’
I didn’t want to tell her, and she probably hadn’t been able to see what he’d scribbled in the dirt. But it struck me that she’d see it as implausible I hadn’t asked it, and I also still felt sure Marcus wasn’t his real name.
‘Marcus is all he told me. I’ve tried getting other information but I’m not sure he understands. He may have retained some intelligence but I think, through the mutation, he’s lost a lot of his memories. His scribblings are hardly legible.’ Even as I finished speaking, I realized this was the first time in my life I’d told a direct lie, even though I’d been evasive with Suzeal on certain things before. But then, for the larger portion of my life, I hadn’t been speaking to anyone.
‘Very well, we’ll speak again.’
‘Wait! Are you going to negotiate with the prador? Might you be able to come for us soon?’
‘I will consider it.’
‘And are we still heading in the right direction for that installation?’
She hesitated, looking at something to one side. ‘Head about ten degrees to the right of the sunrise now.’
‘How far away are we?’
‘Your journey to the prador base covered a lot of the distance. You’re now two hundred and sixty miles from the installation. In another hundred, you’ll be out of the mountains.’ She clicked off the link.
I closed down the visor and hood then looked over at Marcus, who was now squatting at the edge of the bowl with a pile of wood on the ground in front of him.
‘She obviously wanted to talk while you weren’t here,’ I told him. ‘Still problems up there, so no pick-up for us. I told her as little as possible about you, in fact said you are brain-damaged, which I suspect is what you prefer.’
He nodded once and picked up the wood, bringing it over, piling it carefully and using one pulse shot to set it burning. That evening we roasted the sleer flesh and it tasted better. The anachronism of a campfire brought comfort – something deeply rooted in the human psyche. It also brought a sleer to investigate, but it paused at the edge of the light, then headed off again. I wondered how much fire would put off the other monsters here, and if it really was a good idea, then drifted to sleep on the stone.
* * *
The first day had been hard, the second day harder still. On the fifth morning the swelling had gone down around my ankle and I tightened the binding. I ate some of the human food Marcus offered me and felt an extreme hunger for it, despite having gorged on sleer flesh over the previous days. Some nutrient was obviously missing. Our communications were brief while I struggled to walk, briefer still while we saw to the necessities of survival. I tried, but he seemed disinclined to share much, especially when I wanted to learn more about his past. Perhaps he was ashamed or reluctant to share, if what the king had said was true about him having been involved in the coring and thralling trade. Or perhaps he feared I’d pass on information to Suzeal. I promised that during my next communication with her, I’d ensure his presence, but it had been a few days since we last spoke and I was beginning to feel concerned. Every evening I’d tried to reopen communication with her, but had just got a fizzing sound.
‘Perhaps something’s happened up there,’ I said. ‘Suzeal has been quiet.’
We’d camped in the lea of a rock in twilight. Marcus stared at me, but of course said nothing. His face had regained some more humanity, so I could just about read his expression. It seemed the essence of, ‘Yeah, whatever’. Suzeal could have become bored with us now since all we’d been doing was plodding through the mountains. Or maybe, no longer serving her purposes, I’d become irrelevant.
Days and nights followed in quick succession. We fell into a routine of Marcus heading off during the day to hunt and gather while I plodded on, and evenings of fire and food. On the tenth evening we stopped lighting a fire after we spotted a hooder in the moonlight heading out of a nearby valley. We fled into the night and saw it reach the fire and scatter it in a shower of sparks, then travelled on in fear of it coming after us. But it didn’t. The following day we continued walking and, even after this, my ankle and thigh were a lot better that evening, though covered in deep black bruises. A repast of cold sleer preceded sleep, and the day after we finally got a view from the mountains of rolling hills and a plain lying beyond. It was sitting under a haze so it wasn’t clear, but I could see circular areas dotted it which seemed likely to be banyans.
As we descended to the hills, we found that the simple terran grass had won the battle against alien flora and had cloaked the stretches of ground lying between copses of banyan and other trees. A herd of animals, like those on the droon’s hunting ground, grazed on the grass, which surprised me, but then, cellulose is cellulose. A muddy heap punctured with holes revealed other animals resembling a cross between meerkats and rabbits, and the grass in the surrounding area was cropped down like a lawn. They disappeared when a shadow passed over the ground of a flying creature which seemed to be the by-blow of a crab and a beetle. As the hills began to flatten out, I got a closer look at the plain ahead and saw reed-like plants rippling in the breeze, cut through with glistening channels. At this lower elevation, the circular areas I’d seen earlier were no longer visible. As we drew nearer I began to hear what sounded like eerie music and understood that ahead lay a landscape much like that of Masada. The plants were flute grasses, the stems of which, when they shed their side shoots, turned into musical instruments played by the wind. I was surprised, since Masada had a very different environment, what with its lack of breathable air. I would’ve thought the high oxygen content here would poison if not inhibit these plants. Instead the dumping of Stratogaster’s Zoo had clearly created a unique environment which had attained a balance. Polity ecologists would have been fascinated.
Soon we reached ground dotted with flute grass shoots – red and purple and sharp – and more knowledge came to me. On Masada the Theocracy once punished people by pegging them out over such growth, so they died in agony as the shoots penetrated and grew through their bodies. Of course, my earlier self would have known something like this, as his interests always seemed slanted towards death and destruction. The ground started to get boggy, but tightly bound with flute grass rhizomes. It moved as we walked but we didn’t sink. We next had to round old growths of stems, still standing stripped of side shoots, while new growth came through and put out wiry tangles dotted with buds. Finally we came to a wall of the stuff and my heart sank. This would slow us considerably, but Marcus moved into the lead, parting and crushing down the grasses with relentless strength. I was glad to have retained my walking staff because the grasses made the surface difficult. We trudged on as the sun fell down the sky and set in the mountains behind. As it began to grow dark, Marcus halted and pointed at the ground, then walked a spiral, crushing down grasses. This would be our camp for the night.
‘You cannot write in the dust here,’ I said.
He nodded agreeably and tore open a sleer segment. We ate in silence, drank some of the remaining water, then I curled up and had no problem drifting into sleep.
Pure starlit night was strewn with stars above us. Marcus had said something, I was sure, and that was what had woken me.
‘What—’ I began, then stopped when he held his finger up against my visor. I sat up carefully, wincing at the crackling of the grass beneath me, then opened my visor and hood, pushing them down into the neck ring. Distantly, something big was pushing through the grasses, and then it uttered familiar nonsense phrases that sounded like someone grumbling. That a gabbleduck moved through the grasses nearby was bad enough, but worse was that I couldn’t shake the conviction it was the same one we’d seen up in the mountains. Had it followed us?
The thing continued to move off, its mutterings growing increasingly difficult to hear. I leaned back and looked up at the sky. Plenty of stars were evident and then, by its slow progress
across the firmament, I picked out a small moon. Lights flashed around this object and, between it and a point off to one side, a blue-orange line flashed briefly into being. I suddenly realized I was seeing the docking moon and the Stratogaster station, though the latter was an indistinct dot. A particle beam had obviously just been fired, but whether from the moon or the station I didn’t know. It struck me as likely Suzeal hadn’t followed my advice to begin negotiations with the prador. I touched Marcus’s arm – he had his head tilted, still listening – and when I had his attention, pointed up at the moon. We watched for a while and the beam flashed again, this time between the moon and another point, which flared and died. It was the prador doing the shooting. Perhaps they’d just taken out another arriving ship. Marcus hissed, then bowed his head between his knees and became somnolent. This seemed his preferred sleeping position, if sleep he did. I lay down again and drifted off.
A wind began blasting with morning twilight, pulling me awake to the cries of the damned and the musical instruments of hell. The sound was certainly different to the gentle fluting of yesterday. We didn’t eat, simply got up and started pushing through the grasses. An hour or so later, the sun broke above and Marcus altered our course as Suzeal had directed. During the long slog throughout the morning, I’d noted a flickering on the control console of my suit. An inspection of this revealed automatic adjustments had been made to its fitting around my arms and legs. I was putting on muscle and had apparently reached some fitting threshold.
