by Neal Asher
‘Ah, here,’ he said, halting and turning to face a door. He reached out and pressed his hand against the touch-panel, and for a moment Aphran expected klaxons to start blaring. Then she chided herself for being obtuse – if he could break into a Polity Security Area, then closed doors were obviously no problem to him.
The door slid aside and as Skellor pulled his hand away from the panel, Aphran saw that it was as if he had just pressed it down in some tar – long strands stretched and attenuated, then snapped back into his palm. Useful ability maybe, but she was not sure it was one she wanted to own.
‘Cold store,’ she said, stepping into the room beyond and surveying the rows of cold-coffins either side of a single aisle.
‘There are only fifty people here,’ said Skellor, ‘but the system that watches this room is the same system that watches all the other sleep rooms on this ship, so I can access it here.’ So saying he headed down the aisle to a space in one row of coffins, finding an instrument wall. Here he slapped his hand against a touch-console. This time the task for him appeared much more difficult as, after a few seconds, he closed his eyes and bowed his head. Aphran watched the blood pulsing faster in his aug, and noted how the greyish veins on his face seemed to be moving: sliding under his skin like lizard tails.
A series of sucking thumps sent her into a crouch with her pulse-rifle held at the ready, then she realized that the noise came from cold-coffins hingeing open – all of them. Inside each was exposed the naked body of a man or a woman, their concave impressions mirrored in the lids.
Opening his eyes and glancing round, Skellor said flatly, ‘Damn.’
‘What happened?’ Aphran asked, standing again. She noted that Danny had moved not at all.
‘Vascular control,’ Skellor explained. ‘I was trying to get the system to pump them dry, then return their blood before they’d reached thaw-up, which would have killed them all rather neatly. Unfortunately, I overlooked a subroutine that isolates the coffins, which in turn then revive their occupants. But don’t worry, this was only a test run, so it’s only happening in here.’
‘They’re waking up?’ Aphran asked.
Skellor surveyed the room as if that had not occurred to him. ‘Oh, yes,’ he said. ‘You’ve got about six minutes yet, so you’d best hurry and kill them all.’
Aphran stared at him in horror, and immediately felt the claw inside her head closing when she made no move to obey. Suddenly she found herself walking towards the head of a row. It was not as if she was being forced, for it was her doing the walking; it was rather as if at the wholly animal level she had made the choice to stay alive, for by obeying was the only way she could.
‘You take that other row,’ she instructed Danny, the words tasting foul to her.
Upon reaching the cold-coffin at the end of her own row, she placed the snout of the pulse-rifle against the temple of its occupant, and pulled the trigger. The man’s head lifted to the side, blooming open like a flower on the blue flash of energy. However, as he settled back, what ran out of the ugly wound was not blood but the complex antifreeze that had been pumped into his body whilst his blood had been pumped out. The next coffin occupant was a woman, and seeing a tattoo on her arm that branded her as Earth Central Security, gave Aphran no comfort. This was bloody work. She was a soldier in the Separatist cause, not a murderer. Her tenth victim leaked blood, and her fifteenth sprayed it across the metal floor. Her last one of twenty-five opened his eyes and sat upright before she shot him twice in the chest, knocking him out of his coffin. Perhaps she should not have been so tardy; Danny had killed all his lot long before.
Carrying her laptop, Mika entered the cold-sleep area and glanced around. Everything looked as it should be; anything wrong in any of the ten or more of these areas, and the Occam’s AI would have registered it immediately. This particular area, though it had room for many more of them, had only eight occupied coffins. Seven contained some of the Occam’s technicians – overspill from another area a quarter of a kilometre to port of the ship – and the eighth one held Apis Coolant’s mother.
It had been Mika’s intention to leave her in cold-sleep until she could be returned to an Outlinker medical facility, as the injuries she had sustained though easy enough to deal with in a normal human, in an Outlinker were not so amenable to the medical technologies at Mika’s disposal. Even the boy’s broken ankle had caused her some problems – normal bone welding not being sufficient to the task of repairing fragile Outlinker bone – and she’d needed to fabricate an autodoc boot to monitor the slow process of repair.
But in the end it came down to convenience. Though it would not be easy for Mika to repair this woman’s fractured skull and the consequent thrombosis, it was by no means impossible. If Mika was perfectly honest with herself, the only reason she had been avoiding the chore was so she could spend more time studying the human/calloraptor hybrid Cormac had killed. However, this choice was unfair on the boy Apis as, though he might seem rather advanced for a teenager, he’d had some hideous experiences and was now amongst strangers. He needed his mother.
Plugging the optic cable of her laptop into the woman’s coffin, Mika waited impatiently for the status list to come up on the screen. After a moment, she looked about herself to make sure she had not overlooked the presence of anyone, then began to speak out loud.
‘Who are you?’ she asked. ‘What is that? Why is this? How do you do that?’ It was so easy for normal Polity citizens to ask direct questions, yet for Life-Coven graduates it seemed so difficult and unnatural. The ideal was that you used all the resources at your disposal to discover answers – including your own reasoning abilities – and that to have to ask a question was a kind of defeat. In cases where there were no other options available the Life-Coven taught that you should then feel free to ask, which was all very well if the concept of not asking had not been as deeply inculcated from birth as potty training. In this respect Mika was discovering just how wrong her early training had been, so was attempting to retrain herself.
‘Where is this item? Do you have this ability? Are you . . .?’ She trailed off, realizing that the status list was taking an awful long time to come up on her screen. Quickly she started the laptop’s self-diagnostic program, and immediately got a response that assured her there was nothing wrong with the device. Now she sent a search engine through the console’s memory space to try to find the optic connection. Briefly there came a flash of some very odd code across the screen, then the words ‘Nil Return Signal’. Frowning, Mika rested the device on top of the cold-coffin and headed down the aisle to the instrument wall. Here the same strange code was scrolling across all of four different screens. She tried the touch-controls and the code disappeared, but beyond that there was no response.
Running back to the cold-coffin, Mika felt a horrible sinking sensation. Problems with cold-sleep coffins? They did not have problems – it was unheard of. Grabbing up her laptop she quickly detached it, fed its own optic cable back into it, and laid it on the cold-coffin behind her. Now she tried the touch-plate lock on the lid of the coffin: nil response. Nothing else for it but to use the manual lever – no matter how many alarms this caused to go off. She gripped the cold metal and drew it back towards her, and with a thunk the lock disengaged and the coffin lid sighed open. Gazing at the Outlinker woman, Mika immediately knew something was terribly wrong: the woman’s skin had been light lavender when Mika had transferred her from the landing craft, but now it was dark. It was always the case that people in cold-sleep looked colourless, pallid, simply because the blood had been withdrawn from them and replaced by clear fluid. This woman should be bloodless and she was not. Mika placed her hands on the woman’s chest. Nothing. With sudden fierce strength, she got hold of her and pulled her onto her side. Stiff with rigor mortis. Her underside was also deep purple where the blood had pooled in the lower portions of the corpse – for this was what she was now dealing with: a corpse. Mika let the woman drop back into place in her aptly
named box.
‘AI . . . Occam, this is Asselis Mika reporting a malfunction in Cold-sleep Room One.’ After no response from the intercom set into the control wall, she rushed out into the corridor and tried the intercom there.
‘There is no malfunction in Cold-sleep Room One,’ one of the AI’s subminds informed her.
‘The Outlinker woman who we recently placed in a coffin there is dead,’ Mika replied, trying to keep her voice from getting shrill.
‘System function return is optimal. There is no problem in Cold-sleep Room One,’ repeated the sub-mind in a somewhat annoyed tone. Clearly, even though only a submind, it did not like having to point out the obvious to idiots.
‘I suggest you send a drone here as fast as you damned well can, because I don’t think that rigor mortis and postmortem lividity are particularly healthy symptoms even for someone in cold-sleep! Also, I’m standing out in the corridor at the moment since the com in there does not work either.’
‘System function return for com is optimal. There is no problem with the com in Cold-sleep Room One. Asselis Mika, do you require medical assistance?’
‘I want a direct link with Tomalon or Occam itself,’ she demanded.
‘You have a problem,’ immediately stated the voice of Tomalon. ‘Occam is gearing for a full diagnostic check and I have sent Aiden and Cento to assist you.’
‘Good,’ said Mika. ‘I must go back in now to check the other coffins.’
‘If you do,’ said the Captain, ‘do not use your console, as it may be infected.’
‘You suspect a computer virus,’ Mika stated.
‘Virus or worm, whatever. There are too many safety backups in the cold-sleep control system for it to be anything other than deliberate subversion of programs.’
‘Murder,’ muttered Mika, heading back into the room and instantly thinking, like so many of those who have sought to do the best for a patient and failed: How do I tell her son? And there was no one who could answer that question for her, dared she even to ask it.
Every com-unit howled, whether it was mounted on a wall, integrated in a wristcom, or part of the device built inside a Golem’s head. Cormac exited his room and broke into a run. Halfway down the corridor he felt something lurch through his body as he passed over a fluxing grav-plate. He immediately halted and stepped over to a nearby handle affixed to the wall and gripped it for support.
‘Tomalon? Occam?’
From his wristcom issued a sound that could have been interference but sounded more like a steady keening.
‘Aiden? Cento?’
‘Online,’ came the twinned reply.
‘What’s happening?’ he asked.
‘All the people in Cold-sleep Room One are dead,’ replied Aiden flatly.
‘Oh God, no . . .’ Tomalon intruded, his voice fading into then out of audibility. Nothing useful there.
‘Aiden, get yourself and Mika back up to Medical. I advise you to use the shaft ladders, as the drop-shafts may not be functioning correctly. Do we know who else hasn’t gone into cold-sleep yet?’
‘There is no one else,’ replied the Golem.
‘Okay.’ Cormac paused, not wanting to examine too closely what that might mean. ‘Is Gant still in the Security Area?’ he finished.
‘He is.’
‘And still no response from there?’
‘None.’
‘Right, that seems one likely source of our problem. Cento, I want you to join me there.’
‘Will do,’ replied Cento. Then, ‘There is another probable source.’
‘Yes,’ replied Cormac, thinking about the millions of tonnes of alien attached to the outside of the ship. ‘But would Dragon attack like this from such a vulnerable position? It knows that the Occam could turn it to space-borne ash in a few seconds, and anyway every system on that side of the ship is isolated.’ He believed this was nothing to do with the alien – so it was something else.
‘Tomalon?’ Cormac asked again.
Again that keening sound, then eventually Tomalon spoke. ‘They’re all dead,’ he said dully.
‘We know that,’ spat Cormac. ‘Let’s now find out why and prevent any more deaths.’
‘They are all dead,’ Tomalon groaned.
‘What precisely do you mean?’ asked Cormac, suddenly all cold function.
‘All of them! All of them!’ The voice was Tomalon’s and it was also Occam’s.
‘Do you mean everyone who went into cold-sleep?’ It was a question Cormac did not want to ask, but had to.
‘Yes,’ the reply, echoed from intercoms all down the corridor. Almost unconsciously, Cormac reached back with his finger and initiated his shuriken holster. Underneath his sudden frigidity of thought, he felt a ball of anger growing.
‘Listen to me carefully, Tomalon. I can understand your and Occam’s grief, and feelings of guilt, but you are merely feeding each other’s dysfunction. I need you to stabilize ship control and go to maximum internal security alert.’
‘Initiate Golem?’ returned the voice of Tomalon, echoed a fraction of a second later by the voice of Occam.
‘No. With this level of subversion we cannot guarantee that they won’t be under someone else’s control. They are just as much in storage as the people in cold-sleep. Get your drones searching the ship, especially in and around the Security Area. I’ll be there soon.’
‘I . . . will,’ the Captain managed.
Now Cormac altered settings on his wristcom and opened a channel that had been isolated for this single purpose.
‘Dragon?’
For a long moment there was no reply, then a grudging ‘Yes.’
‘Are you attacking us?’ he asked.
There came a roaring, as from a vast crowd-filled auditorium in response to some momentous event. ‘I am legion,’ Dragon replied, as this sound slowly died.
‘If you do not give direct answers to direct questions, I will send the code to detonate the CTD that presently sits between you and this ship. Perhaps you would survive the blast, but I think it unlikely you would survive being shoved out of the underspace field and being smeared across a few light years.’
‘I am not attacking. I cannot attack,’ Dragon immediately replied.
Cormac considered that: how easily it could be a lie. With his finger poised over his wristcom he still considered sending the code that would detonate the CTD, as even if Dragon was not the source of the present danger it would be best to detonate to curtail future dangers. The creature’s next words stopped him, however.
‘I can see it,’ said Dragon.
‘What can you see?’
‘I can see the enemy. It is on your ship and it will take your ship. It is what it does and it is what it is.’
‘This enemy, what is it?’
‘Ancient,’ said Dragon. ‘The eater. The body that continues to kill and consume after its mind is burnt. You must return to realspace. I must leave this ship.’
‘You know your words are opaque to me,’ said Cormac. ‘Get pellucid or you’ll be leaving this ship in pieces.’
‘You usually call it “the Jain”, and assume you talk of a dead race of individuals,’ Dragon replied.
It was all Cormac needed to now understand what was happening.
Skellor.
How so very confident they had been in their superiority, and how so very sure they had been that he had made his escape. Skellor had not escaped; he had begun, from that very moment when they had nearly captured him, to attack. Cormac switched channels back, as he headed for the nearest drop-shaft, so he could address the others.
‘We are really in it now: looks like the source of our problems is Skellor, interfaced – as we know – and now possessing active Jain technology,’ he said. At the shaft itself, he reached in to test that the field was operating, before punching his destination and stepping beyond the threshold. The gravity field dragged in down through the ship, in a curve, so that – without reference to the floor he had stepped fro
m – there was neither up nor down.
‘Where’s Scar?’ he asked of his wristcom as he had to upend himself to walk out of the drop-shaft near the Security Area.
Through Aiden’s ears he heard Mika reply, ‘Scar is still in Medical. He was helping me with one or two things there.’
Cormac wondered just what experiments she had been doing on Scar this time, then he spun – with Shuriken ready to throw – as Cento came trotting from the side corridor.
‘Firing – down there,’ said the Golem, pointing down a corridor ahead of him and to Cormac’s right. Cormac immediately matched the Golem’s pace and, as he ran, he pulled his thin-gun from his jacket pocket. He could not yet hear any shooting, but then he did not have a Golem’s superb hearing. Their pace increased when they both heard Gant shout, ‘Give it up!’
Rounding a corner, they had to leap the corpses of two Separatist prisoners. Beyond these, they came to where someone had blown out the walls, and where insulation and wiring were hanging from gaping holes in the ceiling or blasted up from gaps in the floor. Ahead of them was a figure that turned and showed itself to be Gant, and most certainly Golem: between his neck and his groin, his clothing had been blasted away, as had his syntheflesh covering. The column of his spine and the solid node of his chest, with its rib indentations, were exposed; also shielded optic cables that looked more like water pipes than anything else, and the smooth gleaming movement of his pelvis. Ahead of him, two figures were fleeing, and he was about to give chase; but then he turned, obviously now in direct-line communication with Cento.
‘What have you got here?’ Cormac asked as he and Cento closed.
‘Four prisoners. They already got Cardaff and Shenan – though Christ knows how they got her. Their only weapons are a couple of pulse-rifles and a riot gun. I want to take at least one of them alive, but every time I get close they knock me over with that damned gun.’ With a degree of puzzlement he looked down at the damage those blasts had done to him.
‘Okay,’ said Cormac. ‘They won’t be able to keep both of you off.’ He glanced at Cento. ‘The two of you go in fast and grab at least one of them.’ Both Gant and Cento moved off at his instructions – accelerating away faster than any man could move. Cormac trotted along behind, scanning about himself as he went, utterly aware that there could be another twenty or so Separatists waiting somewhere in ambush. However, there came no yells and no sudden fusillade. The riot gun blasted once, and there was a brief stuttering of pulse-gun fire, before he came upon the scene of Cento holding a man and woman above the floor by the backs of their necks, disarmed and kicking, and of Gant swearing vehemently and climbing to his feet. Soon Gant had rejoined Cento and taken charge of the woman. As Cormac approached, both Golem were holding their prisoners by the biceps, in front of themselves.
