by Neal Asher
Walking soft on the ceramal deck plates, he came up behind her. She wore an aug that had the appearance of faceted sapphire behind which she tucked a strand of her long blonde hair as she glanced up from her note screen and gazed about herself. She could not see Skellor with his chameleonware operating, even though he stood only a few paces behind her. Her aug first, he thought, to prevent her broadcasting a cry for help. He reached out, his hand only inches from her face, and paused to relish the thrill of being this close and yet unseen, of having this much power, then he closed his fingers around her aug and tore it from her head.
She shrieked and ducked down in reflex, blood welling from the spot where he had torn the aug’s anchors from the bone behind her ear. Skellor tossed the aug from the walkway and watched it continue along in a straight line into the bowels of the ship, now that it was beyond the pull of the grav-plates. The woman pulled herself upright and looked about in terrified bewilderment. Skellor now took offline the Jain boosting of his body, for he had swiftly learnt that with it operating he had no judgement of his own strength. Then, just as he had been taught by one of the Separatist fight trainers, he side-fisted her temple. Catching her as she slumped, he re-initiated boosting and slung her over his shoulder as easily as if she were a sack of polystyrene. Extending the range of his ’ware field to include her he quickly moved off. Had other people been viewing this attack they would have seen her simply rise into the air and disappear.
One of the drones she had sent away approached down the walkway as he marched along it. Pressing himself against the rail, to allow it past, he smiled to himself – utterly invisible, even to machines with a greater spectrum of senses than a human being.
Soon he reached the abandoned hold, where he lowered the woman to the floor before sealing the door behind him. Now he had to learn how to take exactly what he wanted. Squatting beside her, he pressed his fingers into the raw wound behind her ear and sent filaments from the Jain substructure through her skin and into her skull. Using the same methods the substructure had employed to connect to his crystal matrix AI and to himself, he connected to her and, adopting the same decoding programs he had earlier used on the structure, he read her mind. First he built a model of her brain in one small memory space in his aug, then, decoding the workings of her mind, he began to transfer across everything that was her. Soon he found that he no longer needed the model and erased it. It was a destructive reading, he found: memories, experiences, skills, understanding . . . all those facets of this human mind he absorbed, but by doing so destroyed their intricate source – it was like memorizing a book and burning each page once it was memorized. When he had finished, he withdrew his fingers and observed that she was still living: still functioning on those autonomous impulses that he had not touched. Grimacing, he touched her again, found the relevant area of her brain, and stopped her heart.
Sitting back, Skellor began the process of editing everything that he had taken. He dumped huge amounts of memory he considered irrelevant, and acquired-skills he himself had already far exceeded. In the end, what remained to him was her knowledge of this ship; of the ship’s layout and the location of those areas the Occam AI could not see; of the function of automatic systems; of the drones, their connections back to the AI, programming languages – a wealth of knowledge that would enable him to travel throughout the ship undetected even without his chameleonware. From her he also learnt why the ship had so quickly departed Callorum, and viewed through her eyes the destruction of Miranda as displayed on the viewing screen in her cabin. He discovered too that there was no command crew, but that there was an interfaced captain. He learnt of the army of Golem in storage, of the five-hundred-strong staff of technicians, crew, maintenance, and ECS – mostly now gone into cold-coffins. Finally he learnt where the Separatist prisoners from Callorum were being held, and realized what his next task would be.
Cormac stepped into Medical and quickly caught hold of the doorjamb before he shot up into the air. The youth lay propped up in a cot, his foot in an auto-doc boot, drug patches on his arms. He was eating ravenously from a well-stacked plate. Bright-eyed he glanced up at Cormac. Then, remembering something, his expression became bewildered.
‘You’re Cormac,’ he said.
Cormac nodded and moved carefully across the carpeted floor to take a seat by the cot. Abrupt changes in gravity took some getting used to, but any higher than it was at that moment would have been uncomfortable for the youth.
‘You’re Earth Central Security,’ Apis added.
‘That I am,’ said Cormac.
‘I killed them.’
Cormac looked at him carefully. Twenty-three Masadans?
‘Perhaps you’d better start at the beginning. You are from station Miranda I take it?’
‘Yes.’
‘Tell me what happened to you.’
Apis did that. When the boy finished, it was Cormac who felt bewildered. So, Dragon definitely was involved – but how? That question would have to wait for the moment.
‘It’s doubtful you’ll be tried for murder. What you did, you did in self-defence, no matter the number killed.’ Cormac put his hand gently on Apis’s shoulder. ‘If anything, I congratulate you. These Masadan soldiers sound like fanatics and, from what I’ve heard, seem likely to have been responsible for many deaths.’ He took his hand away. The youth looked relieved, but that might be because Cormac had not crushed his shoulder. ‘As for your mother, Mika is having her moved to a cold-coffin up here, where she can more easily make a diagnosis. Mika is good, and I have no doubt your mother will soon be conscious and well. Tell me, do you have any idea why Dragon attacked the ship?’ Apis shook his head. ‘How far did this attack take place from where the station was destroyed?’
‘I don’t know – we went into U-space. It’ll be in the landing craft guidance computer.’
Cormac nodded. Occam would have downloaded that information by now.
‘Have you any idea why the Masadans took you and your fellows off the station?’
‘Not to rescue us . . . though that’s what they said. But they made some of us work in the engine room of their ship. Mother said we were to be slaves.’
Null-gee construction, thought Cormac: Outlinkers would make excellent station builders.
‘That’s all for now. I’ll leave you to finish your meal.’
In the bioscience section adjoining Medical, Cormac found Mika seated with her feet up on a workbench while she studied a portable screen.
‘How’s the mother?’ he asked.
‘She’ll take a while. She had a fractured skull and a cerebral haemorrhage. I’m leaving her in cold-sleep for the present while I check my files here on Outlinker physiology.’ She nodded down at the screen she was holding.
Cormac moved further into the room and gazed into the isolation booth containing the thing he had killed on Callorum. Suddenly it just didn’t seem as important now.
‘Tomalon . . . Ship!’ he said.
‘What is it?’ the ship AI asked abruptly.
‘Do you have the co-ordinates of the Dragon attack on the Masadan craft?’
‘Of course.’
There then came a strange whining muttering sound followed by a sharp snapping. Like a vessel filling from the bottom with flesh, Tomalon appeared in the middle of the room.
‘Yes, we have the co-ordinates,’ he said, taking over from Occam.
‘I didn’t know you had holojectors on this ship,’ said Cormac.
‘Only in some sections. The Occam Razor was being refitted, prior to being called out to Callorum.’
Cormac considered that: this ship was an old one and, though powerful, was in many ways far more primitive than other Polity ships.
‘Can you take us to the co-ordinates of that attack?’ he asked.
A moment’s displacement had the room wavering and Tomalon’s image flickering on and off, then it stabilized – they had dropped into U-space.
‘In transit,’ said Tomalon,
confirming this.
Cormac turned to Mika, who wore a puzzled expression. ‘Did you ask the boy about what happened to him?’ he asked, trying not to put too much irony into his voice.
With a flash of irritation she replied, ‘I didn’t need to ask. He needed to tell someone.’
‘Then you realize things are starting to get complicated.’
‘They always do when you are involved,’ she replied, returning her attention to her screen.
Cormac studied Mika until there came a further feeling of displacement as the Occam Razor rose back out of underspace. Returning his attention to the Captain’s hologram, he observed it sliding sideways to pause by a console and screen probably used to run research programmes. The screen came on and lights played around the touch-pads of the console, as it no doubt linked into the ship’s ubiquitous communications channels.
‘We are there now,’ said Tomalon, his mouth moving but his voice issuing from the console.
Cormac walked over and stared at the screen. It showed him a spreading cloud of twisted lumps of metal tumbling through the void; the hazy glitter of metallic particles and a fog of gases. One large tangle of wreckage contained a dull red glow, and vapour was spilling from this out into space.
‘Identify,’ he said flatly.
‘Everything you would expect,’ said Tomalon. ‘The remains of a ship torn apart: hull plates, insulation, gas, and corpses.’
Now a square isolated the glowing tangle of wreckage and the view closed in on that. Clinging to a twisted structural member projecting from the tangle were two bloated human shapes – one with bright red skin and one with skin of a golden yellow.
‘Dead?’
‘They are all dead,’ Tomalon replied. ‘These two probably died before the others out there, because that glow you see comes from a broken atomic pile.’
‘Anything else within scanning range?’ Cormac asked, glancing behind when Mika came to stand at his shoulder.
‘Four hundred kilometres out there is what remains of a landing craft – the twin of the one our friend Apis occupied. Nothing alive there either. I’ve been close-scanning all debris in the area for survivors, but there are none.’ Tomalon paused and a strange muttering issued from the console as if he was exchanging a comment or two with someone nearby him – obviously some spillover from his link with Occam. He went on, ‘Extending the range of scans now.’
‘A waste of life,’ said Mika.
‘Death always is,’ Cormac replied.
‘Life-form detected,’ Tomalon said suddenly, his voice containing that rough edge that was something of Occam.
‘Where?’ Cormac asked.
‘Two light days along our projected path.’
‘Identify.’
‘Spherical creature one kilometre in diameter. Ninety-eight per cent projection: Dragon.’
‘Now the shit hits.’
Mika had no comment on that. Tomalon merely flickered out of existence.
7
The woman studied instrumentation for a short while and the boy, knowing the importance of those things she did, contained his impatience, and turned his attention to the toys scattered on the floor all about him. Shortly the woman was satisfied with what she was seeing and returned her attention to the book.
‘Out of the wilderness Brother Malcolm came at last to the house of the gabbleducks and lifting the latch, he entered said domain. Upon the table were three bowls, and thus Brother Malcolm said, “I was hungry and so I was fed.” And sampled only a little from each bowl of food, for he was a pious and ungreedy man.’
The woman paused as she scanned back through the text. ‘Ungreedy?’ she repeated, whilst the picture in the book showed the great slob of the Brother tucking into a huge mound of food on the table.
‘Fatso,’ said the boy, pointing at the man’s picture.
‘Just so,’ said the woman, then went on. ‘Even after so small a meal, Brother Malcolm found weariness descending upon him, to hook lead weights in his eyelids. Moving then to the other rooms of the house, he found three beds. The largest of these that he tried was too hard, and he could find no rest. The medium bed was too soft, and he could find no rest there either. However, the smallest bed was just right, and he slept the sleep of the just.’
In the picture, the great fat Brother had not managed to haul his bulk up onto either of the large beds, and so chose a small bed that sagged under his weight and out of the end of which stuck his feet clad in filthy socks with red and white stripes.
The mountains were close enough now for Eldene to discern snow on their upper slopes and dark occlusions of vegetation fingering up from the plains that abutted below. From the slope they stood upon – a rampart of earth that divided croplands from the wilderness of Masada – she gazed out upon this scene with some trepidation. It had taken most of the day to get this far, and as yet there had been little danger of note. However, she wondered if the heavy mesh fence that now stood behind them was there to keep people in or to keep something out – something it was obviously ineffective at doing, as they themselves had scrambled over it in minutes. Her worries increased when Fethan took the stinger from her and handed her Proctor Volus’s gun in return, then instructed her in its use.
‘It’s powered up for one magazine, but that’s okay because that’s all we’ve got. There are five rounds in each disc of the magazine, and seven discs in total,’ Fethan said, displaying the cylinder he had extracted from the butt of the gun before clicking it back into place. ‘Simple firing mechanism: the trigger’s electrical, so it’s very light and easy to use. You hold it down on one pull to get continuous fire for each disc – that’s the five rounds. One press and release gives you one shot. Double press and hold down, and the gun will empty its entire cylinder – that’s thirty-five shots discharged in about five seconds. Be very careful with this. I don’t want to be picking bullets out of my syntheskin every time you get a little nervous.’ He handed the weapon over and Eldene accepted it as if she was taking a poisonous snake.
‘Why am I likely to need this now?’ Eldene inquired. ‘Surely I needed it more back there.’
Fethan grinned at her. ‘Oh, it’s not exactly a halcyon wilderness out here.’
‘Any safer than back there?’ Eldene asked, gesturing with the gun.
‘Safer, mostly – and at least out here there’s no chance of you getting trigger-happy and killing innocent workers.’
‘What am I likely to have to defend myself from, here?’ Eldene asked as they descended the slope into head-high flute grass.
‘Heroynes, siluroynes and mud snakes,’ Fethan replied.
Eldene snorted, remembering a book of fairy tales amongst the precious few books the orphanage had possessed. ‘Yes, and no doubt there’s gabbleducks and hooders that I’ll need to use one of my precious three wishes against,’ she said.
Pushing into the grass, Fethan replied, ‘Quince Guide has those last two both listed, along with pictures of them, and Gordon tells of a hooder attack on one of the first survey teams. I myself have only ever seen gabble-ducks, though I know of others who have lost friends to hooders, and some who are convinced that they are destined to go the same way.’
‘You are kidding?’ said Eldene.
Fethan glanced back at her. ‘Oh no, it’s all part of the cycle of life here: the tricones feed on decaying matter filtering down through the soil, mud snakes feed on tricones that get too close to the surface, and heroynes feed on them in turn. Gabbleducks, siluroynes and hooders apparently feed on the many different varieties of grazers that eat the flute grass. All the predators I’ve named, if large enough, will take a stray human if he’s careless, though human flesh tends to make them ill.’
‘You are kidding,’ said Eldene, thinking she really did not ever want to run into anything capable of feeding on that huge tricone they had seen earlier.
‘Keep your weapon handy and your eyes open,’ Fethan replied.
Travelling along gullies and ac
ross the occasional flats – in which black plantains and the volvae nodules of rhubarbs sprouted from mats of roots – was easiest, but to remain on course they did have to push their way through stands of flute grass. However, closer to the mountains, the stands became less numerous and they were able to pick up their pace. Twice they crossed flattened trails through the vegetation, and on both occasions Fethan pointed to the ground and said, ‘Mud snake.’ By midday the ground began to rise and dry out, and here sparse stands of grass contained sprouts of new growth that were waist-high. Here the blister moss grew in clumps as large as footballs and there were occasional lizard-tail plants curving five metres into the air. These were clad in scales coloured in a clashing combination: purple at the tips, ranging to green, then orange at their roots. Some hours into evening, Fethan called a halt at a rocky outcrop where the ground was at its highest before dropping back into another plain of flute grass.
‘Best we stop here,’ said Fethan. ‘I can hear if something approaches, but mud snakes tend to hunt at night and one could easily grab you from below.’
‘Or you,’ Eldene suggested as she wearily sat down on a contorted stone.
‘Or me, yes, but I’d still be in one piece after their attack.’
Eldene unstoppered her water bottle, flipped her mask down, and took a drink. Opening and closing the mask was now becoming second nature to her, and curiously, she no longer felt that nakedness at the absence of her scole. She felt free.
Studying the stone she was sitting on, she saw that it was covered with small translucent hemispheres that she at first took to be some sort of mineral. On closer inspection, she saw that something was moving inside each hemisphere, so she quickly stood and moved away.
‘They’re all right,’ Fethan assured her, reaching over, snapping one of the things from the rock with his thumb, and showing Eldene the underside. A greenish fleshy sucker clenched at the air for a moment and a single globular palp-eye extruded. When Fethan returned it to its place the creature turned round once as if getting comfortable, sucked its eye back in then pulled down flat against the stone. ‘If you start to run out of food you can give ’em a go,’ he added. ‘They’re a delicacy in the Underworld, though they tend to cause flatulence, which is not an admirable condition for someone sharing a cave.’
