by Neal Asher
‘What can be done with it this close?’
‘Many things. We can electrocute it, slice it with particle beams or laser, even detonate a thermo nuke between it and the ship.’
‘And that won’t harm the ship?’
Tomalon came back from his sensor to give Cormac a pitying look. ‘The hull of this ship is half a metre of Thadium s-con ceramal. There are few energy weapons that can touch it, and it can take a surface blast of up to forty megatons.’
Cormac wondered if the people inside could. He also knew of one energy weapon that could touch this ship’s hull, and wondered how Tomalon would react to being told that the Occam Razor could be destroyed by sunlight. Glancing at the Captain, it also occurred to him that the man looked very much like a creature of myth that could also be destroyed by sunlight, but reckoned Tomalon would not appreciate the humour, and so Cormac continued to watch the show.
There was no feeling of impact as the Dragon sphere took hold where it could and drew itself against the ship. The view of Dragon that Cormac now watched – from one of the grabships as it released – reminded him of a child hugging the legs of a parent. Soon all the grab-ships had returned to their hold.
‘Going under now,’ said Tomalon.
They went.
8
The gabbleduck was his favourite toy. Once initiated, it just would not stop until it had found all of the toy Brothers he had concealed in the area, then chomped them down, and burped after every one. It made him giggle every time when it did that and, even though she tried to conceal it, he knew his mother was amused as well.
‘Let’s get back to it,’ she said to him, turning away from the instrumentation that had absorbed her attention for some time now. ‘Where was I?’
‘Babbleguck come home,’ the boy said without turning from his toy, which had just found a Brother shoved under the edge of the carpet but was having difficulty in pulling the man out by his feet – the victim seemed to have got a grip on the underlay.
‘Gabbleduck,’ the woman corrected, then frowned when she saw her son grin.
‘Daddy Duck said, “Who’s been eating from my bowl?” and Mummy Duck, finding the soup in her bowl had been supped too, said, “And who’s been eating from mine?” Baby Duck, not wanting to be left out, looked in its bowl and said, “Some bugger’s et me soup.”’
The picture in the book now showed the room much expanded, the table piled with chewed bones and other detritus from some huge feast. The three gabbleducks were monoliths of alien flesh, bone and muscle that almost filled the rest of the room.
Somebody was talking really fast in a foreign language and she really wished that person would shut up. As she ascended through various levels of awareness, Eldene acknowledged to herself that though she knew what a ‘foreign language’ was, she had never actually heard one spoken. Obviously it was someone else jabbering away in the orphanage dormitory . . . no, in the workers’ bunkhouse. She’d have to tell them to shut up in a moment. It was quite enough that she was cold and her bed felt slightly damp and lumpy . . .
As Eldene finally woke up, Fethan whispered in her ear, ‘Say nothing and make no sudden movements.’
Eldene opened her eyes and stared at him. Fethan was crouching right next to her, holding the stinger across his lap. He was clearly visible in the silver-blue light of Amok – one of the larger Braemar moons – and as he glanced at Eldene, his eyes reflected that argent light. With delicate precision, he pointed out into the night.
Carefully Eldene eased herself upright, confused about what had woken her, but wary enough to obey Fethan’s instructions. A breeze was evident and for a moment she thought she had been disturbed by the fluting of the grass. Then that other sound repeated, and she froze.
It was just like someone speaking utter nonsense very fast and affirmatively.
‘Y’scabbleubber fleeble lobber nabix chope!’
Easing herself higher, Eldene peered in the direction Fethan was pointing. In the moonlight, it did not take her long to discern that something was nosing along the edge of the grasses. All she could see for a moment was a body like a boulder and a long duck bill swinging from side to side, then the creature reared onto its hind legs, opened out its sets of forepaws from the wide triple keel of its chest, and blinked its tiara of greenish eyes as it prepared for its latest oration.
‘Y’floggerdabble uber bazz zup zupper,’ it stated portentously.
‘God in Heaven,’ Eldene whispered, groping for her gun.
Fethan reached out and caught her wrist. ‘Still and quiet,’ he hissed. ‘Gabbleducks are only dangerous when not making any noise.’
Gabbleduck!
Eldene had not really believed in them, but now the truth confronted her. She watched as the creature dropped back down and nosed back out into the flute grass, crushing a trail away from them and muttering as it went. When Fethan released her wrist, Eldene let out a suppressed breath and relaxed back against the rock.
‘They eat grazers, you said?’
‘Yeah, though you’ll be unlikely to see any of them, as they run before you can get too close.’
Eldene reached for her water bottle, but Fethan tapped her on the shoulder and stood up. ‘There’s something else.’
Eldene watched him climb up onto the outcrop, then unwrapped herself from her tarpaulin and followed when he gestured her to do so.
‘Lot of activity out there tonight,’ said Fethan as Eldene joined him, failing to not crush the hemispherical molluscs under her feet no matter how carefully she trod. Fethan pointed over the flute grass, in the direction they had come.
The thing stood on two long thin legs that raised it high above the grass itself. Its body had the shape of a thick bucket seat, its long curved neck extending from what would have been the backrest. Below this neck, Eldene could just make out numerous sets of forearms folded as if in prayer. It had no head as such; the neck just terminated in a long serrated spear of a beak. While she watched, it took one delicate arching step that must have carried it over five metres. She noticed its foot was four-toed and webbed.
‘Heroyne?’ Eldene guessed.
‘Yeah, a small one,’ Fethan affirmed.
As she watched the heroyne, Eldene felt tears filling her eyes – her recent experiences had been frightening, these creatures were frightening, yet both in their way were wonderful and in utter contrast to her grey toil under the Theocracy.
‘Thank you,’ she said.
Fethan acknowledged this with a nod, and the both of them stood there for some time watching the heroyne as it strode on, occasionally spearing writhing shapes, occasionally shaking its beak at the jabbering of the gabbleduck. The rest of the night Eldene slept only intermittently, woken in turn by the increased fluting from the grasses, the momentary return of the gabble-duck, by nightmares of a heroyne towering over her and tilting its head while it decided if she might be good to eat – and by a tight ball of something in her stomach that she could only describe as happiness.
Gant smelt burning and just knew there was something wrong. He wondered if this knowledge could be put down to instinct, then he wondered if such an abstraction could have survived the copying process that had resulted in his present self.
‘Aiden? Cento?’ he said into his wristcom, while drawing his pulse-gun. Then he damned his own stupidity – he was in a security area so radio signals could not penetrate the shielding incorporated in the walls. All communications from here had to be via direct line wires or optic cables. Moving to one of the coms set in the wall itself, he spoke the same words. His voice should have activated the device and his words caused it to relay them to the required recipient, but there was no response. He tried the touch-pads and found them dead.
Of course, his next action should have been to get the hell out of there, then return with a shitload of backup. But Gant was Sparkind and a Golem android now, and utterly confident that there was little he could not squash on his own. He ran to the door and flung h
imself through it, rolled, and came up into a crouch to spot potential targets. No movement. The guy sitting at the console looked wasted, and the other . . .
Gant suddenly had one of those moments of revelation that in others often necessitate a change of underwear. Golem. He tried to communicate with it on the same level as Cento and Aiden did with himself – direct radio transmission, mind to mind – but got nil response. Someone had killed this Golem. The head was a blackened ruin, which did not necessarily mean much as the mind was contained in an armoured case in the chest. But the lack of movement or communication did signify. Swinging round, Gant quickly moved back to the door and headed for SA1. He was only a few paces down the corridor when the blast from a riot gun lifted him into the air and deposited him on his back.
‘The ship you were on, the General Patten, was completely destroyed by Dragon,’ explained Cormac.
Apis stood in a gravity of one gee. The exoskeletal suit that the Golem, Aiden, had earlier found in the Occam’s stores, bulked him out so he now looked to have the musculature to withstand this gravity. The thick grey material covered him from his feet to under his chin, where it flared to cup his head. There was also a coms helmet that went with the suit, but they told him he would have no need of it, just as he would be unlikely to need the hood that folded up from the back, or the visor that could rise to meet it from the chin rest, or the weapon-system connection ports. For this was a suit specifically manufactured for military use.
‘Yes, I knew that,’ he said, staring straight back at Cormac.
‘Did you know many of those aboard?’ Cormac asked, sitting. Apis moved carefully to another chair and sat down. He would be all politeness, but he wondered what this grim man wanted from him. The Cormac of The Dragon in the Flower – the book detailing the events preceding Dragon’s supposed suicide on the planet Aster Colora – did not strike him as the kind to waste time on socializing, especially with a teenage Outlinker. They were now heading into a potential war zone, with a titanic dying alien clinging to the outside of the ship. Surely there were more important things that required his visitor’s attention?
‘My probable father, Peerswarf, also others I’d known in the tech section for a few months, my teachers . . .’
‘Friends?’
‘They were all in the communal areas. I was in the tech section,’ said Apis bluntly.
Cormac looked around the room. ‘Why one gee?’ he asked.
That isn’t it, thought Apis.
‘I want to get used to using this suit. I don’t want to be helpless again. If soldiers . . .’
Apis suddenly lost track of what he was saying. It was fear, he realized. With this exoskeleton on, he could fight back.
‘You weren’t exactly helpless. A brain beats physical strength every time.’
You’re watching me, thought Apis, gauging my reactions.
Cormac said, ‘Now, I don’t want to aggravate your grief, but there are details I need from you. I want you to tell me the entire story.’
Ah . . .
‘From when?’ Apis asked.
‘From a relevant point.’
Apis stared at him for a long moment. ‘I discovered the mycelium,’ he said, and was gratified to see a flash of reaction in Cormac’s face.
‘Then start from there.’
Apis did so, frequently being stopped for questions about various points, some of which struck him as utterly irrelevant. Why did Cormac want to know precisely where the mycelium was found, and at exactly what time? Why did he need to know all the technical parameters of its growth through Miranda? Why did he push so hard to learn the wording of Masadan prayer?
When Cormac finally left, Apis felt tired and frustrated, but as he headed for his zero-gee hammock, replaying the conversation in his head, he realized that the agent had missed very little, that it had been a very thorough interrogation.
Stanton sipped his drink very carefully, as he did not have Dreyden’s tolerance of scotch with lumps of hallucinogenic cips ice in it. Already the man’s collection of tropical plants had taken on a slight halo of glowing blue, and there seemed suspect movement just at the edges of his vision.
‘The more I look at those things, the more I sympathize with the Separatist cause,’ said Dreyden as he lit up yet another cigarette. Stanton studied the man: with his feet up on the balcony rail of his apartment in the geodesic dome, which also housed his plant collection, the man was trying to impress with his relaxed urbanity. But Stanton was not impressed. Dreyden was actually gaunt with worry, and eaten away by drugs and the constant medical treatments that kept them from killing him. Though he had reached the top here in Elysium, it seemed he was having trouble maintaining his foothold there. Stanton turned from him and looked up at what elicited the man’s sympathies.
Outside the dome, the two war drones hovered where they had finished their brief demonstration – all their targets now so much metallic vapour. Dreyden pressed the two yellowed fingers clamping his cigarette against the expensive aug he wore, as if he really needed to concentrate to operate it. One of the segments of the dome slid aside onto vacuum, but trailing the nacreous meniscus of a shimmer-shield behind it to fill the gap. With small jets of thruster flame, the drones manoeuvred towards this gap and one after the other oozed into the dome to then drop down and hover over the cyanids and plasoderms.
‘Separatism will eventually lose unless it is prepared to accept and use AI,’ said Jarvellis. ‘There’s always been a bit of an arms race, but now the Polity is winning.’
‘Yes,’ said Dreyden, ‘the Polity is winning.’
Stanton glanced at him and recognized a look in his face that he had only seen previously in Arian Pelter’s, from the moment just after agent Ian Cormac had nearly killed him, right up to the point when Cormac actually did kill him. He glanced at Jarvellis sitting in a lounger on the other side of Dreyden and knew her expression: she had opined that this man was, as she put it, ‘out with the fairies’ for some time before Stanton himself had seen it. He had been as slow seeing the same in Pelter as well.
‘It depends what you mean by “winning”,’ he replied. ‘It’s suppressing any rebellion against it, and expanding, but there’s an awful lot of space out there that isn’t Polity-controlled.’
‘All very well if you want to keep on moving,’ said Dreyden, drawing heavily on his cigarette before flicking the glowing butt over the balcony. ‘Now, on to money.’
Smiling easily, as if unaware of the man’s sudden abruptness, Stanton placed his briefcase on the table between them. Opening the case, he removed a card holding ten cut blue gems, each the size of someone’s eye, and each containing square flaws which on close inspection would reveal intricate patterns as of an old integrated circuit. Closing the case, he dropped the strip of gems on the lid for Dreyden’s inspection.
Dreyden spun the card with his finger. ‘Etched sapphires . . . interesting.’ He looked up at Stanton. ‘Are they scan-enabled?’
Stanton nodded. ‘Each is a unit representing a hundred thousand New Carth shillings – the price we agreed, yes?’
Dreyden sat back, pulling yet another cigarette from the dispenser and lighting it with his fancy ring. He drew deep and waved one hand airily through the smoke. ‘Oh, it’s agreed.’
Opposite them the two war drones, obviously instructed through Dreyden’s aug, began to rise back towards the shimmer-shield door in the roof of the biodome – since through there lay no doubt the most direct route to the bay containing Lyric II.
‘I’ll take it on trust that they are genuine,’ Dreyden added.
Stanton kept a smile on his face, knowing that also through his aug, Dreyden could control the orientation of every mirror out there. He was aware that any who had crossed this man and thought to then escape by ship were now so much drifting ash. Apparently a ship the size of Lyric II would last for slightly less time than a fly in a blast furnace if even a single one of the mirrors was directed at it.
There wa
s something horrible about the way Skellor moved, as if something chitinous was heaving along under his skin, but with movements not quite in consonance with his own. Studying him, Aphran wondered at the strange outgrowth that extended up the side of his neck and cupped his chin, at the grey veins that ran across his face and the backs of his hands. What the hell was all that about? And why was there blood flowing in his crystal matrix AI? She could only assume that he had now put it fully online, and that somehow he must have used that weird shit he had been playing with on his off-time from doing work for the group, to prevent it from killing him. Had she been able to, Aphran would have opened up on him with the pulse-rifle she had picked up in the Security Area but, judging by the burnt-out Golem she had seen in there, such action would not have availed her much. Anyway, she was unable to act against him: her aug felt like the body of some vicious insect with its sharp legs clawed inside her brain, and she knew that all his orders must be obeyed – the consequences of disobedience would be agony and death.
Glancing aside, she studied Danny, and to a certain extent considered herself lucky. Her own aug, though somehow subverted and now being used to control her, was at least the same Dracocorp item that had been provided by the Masadans. The boy’s aug, where Skellor had touched it, now sprouted the same greyish material that inhabited Skellor’s body, and roots of it were spreading across the boy’s neck and his head. Now, whenever she looked into Danny’s face, all she got in return was the expression of an imbecile, but one who obeyed Skellor without hesitation.
Finally finding the courage to speak, Aphran asked, ‘What about the others?’
‘They’ll cause sufficient disruption. My ’ware field wouldn’t extend to cover you all,’ Skellor replied.
Aphran glanced about herself – she had not even been aware that they were covered. She glanced to Skellor’s belt and saw that he was now not wearing the generator he had spent so much time on. What was he talking about?
