by Neal Asher
'You have limited choices. Open this sealed chamber, or I will simply remove it from your ship. To do so I will need to open out some areas…'
Dragon was right.
'Hubris, open the isolation chamber,' Cormac said quickly.
The shutters slid aside and the pseudopods burst through the window. They were in, then out, in a moment, and the dracomen were lost in the mass of writhing flesh.
'Pulling back to the drop-shaft,' said Chaline, though they could all see that for themselves. 'Hubris, what seal do we have if Dragon disengages?'
'Have seals for drop-shaft ready,' replied the AI.
Scene by scene, the screen showed pseudopods being drawn back. One view showed the seals sliding into the drop-shaft behind it like great coins. In the shuttle bay the pods slid back into the fleshy wall beyond. The ship shuddered.
'Dragon disengaging.'
They all felt the explosion of air leaving the shuttle bay. The great sphere of Dragon drew away. Along with other debris, the shuttle followed it into vacuum.
'Dragon disengaged.'
'Cento…' said Aiden.
'We'll get the shutde back,' said Chaline.
On emergency drives, Hubris limped back into orbit around Samarkand.
'Dragon didn't know all that was going on,' said Mika as she repaired Cormac's ribs.
He did not want to see what she was doing to him. He had seen quite enough blood and ripped-open bodies in his time not to be squeamish, but as always it was a different matter when it was your own blood and your own open body. The nerve-blocker on the back of his neck had, after adjustment, numbed him from the armpits downwards. But, as was always the case with such operations, he could faintly feel the tuggings and certainly hear the sounds. Cormac had wanted to just strap his ribs up and avoid this, but Mika had insisted because he was in danger of getting a punctured lung. He glanced aside at the pipes leading into the remote lung, and again experienced that weird feeling of disconnection. The blocker had shut off some of his autonomics, and his heart and lungs were on hold.
'What makes you say that?'
Cormac's voice sounded exactly the same to him, even though it issued from a mechanical larynx, much like that of a Golem, operating on the shunted nerve impulses from the nerve-blocker. The object was stuck on his shoulder with a skin-stick pad. It had the appearance of a large snail shell made of blue metal, and fixed sideways to a coin of perspex in which small lights glinted.
'Well, the dracomen are part of it. I would speculate they were something like remote probes or agents. It wanted them back for debriefing.'
There was a thump in his chest, then a sticky squelching sound.
'It could have just asked,' said Cam from where he sat rubbing at his arm above his silvered hand. The technician was studying Cormac's open chest with great interest.
'I think you're right,' Cormac said to Mika. 'It was almost as if it was frantically searching the planet for them, and when it didn't find them there it turned its attention to us and grabbed them as quickly as it could.'
'Desperately,' added Mika.
'I don't know. Certainly without any regard for human life. We were lucky Hubris could take that kind of punishment.'
He fell silent. At least, most of them were lucky. Mika had been dealing with various injuries for some twenty hours now. Three of the crew were in life-support canisters, awaiting return to civilization. They might survive, though they would then be spending a long time in a regrowth tank. One of the runcible technicians had not been even that lucky; her head had been crushed to pulp when one of the runcible components had shifted and caught her against a wall
'Did Chaline have anything to say?' he asked her.
'Repairs are well under way, but she's not happy about the delays. She's becoming very single-minded about her runcible.'
Mika stepped back from him with her gloved hands held up and away from her white coat. The gloves were quite bloody. She looked up at the screen above where Carn was sitting. This screen showed a scanned image of Cormac's chest. He had only looked at it once.
'Aiden?' he asked.
'He retrieved the shuttle. Cento's been stored… so has the shuttle; it's beyond repair. They're getting another one out of storage as soon as the shuttle bay has been repaired. Chaline was panicking about the heavy-lifter, but it was undamaged.'
She stepped close and started manipulating things in his chest again.
'Heavy-lifter?'
'In storage… one heavy-lifter and four minishuttles. Chaline needs the lifter to take down the runcible.'
'Oh… seems we might be all right…'
Mika did not immediately reply. Cormac felt more movement, then heard the low drone of the bone welder. He glanced down at that moment and wished he hadn't. From his solar plexus upwards, the skin and muscle of his chest had been peeled back. Mika had a finger shoved through a hole between two obviously broken ribs and was running the tip of the welder along the break. Cormac could smell something strangely dusty. Calcium particles had escaped the electrostatic process that was laying them down in the breaks.
'We are, I suppose,' said Mika, standing back again to view her work. 'But Hubris is going to be here some time. It needs parts brought from Minostra, and they'll have to come through the runcible. Not until then will it be able to leave orbit.' She placed the head of the welder back in its sterilizing holder and pushed the wheeled unit a little way back from the table. 'Cellweld Inc.' was the wording of the logo on this device, which was a silvered box on top of a wheeled trolley. A touch-console was mounted in the top of the box, and from the side of it issued a skein of pipes and cables. These terminated in a head that could take any of the racked adaptors stored underneath the box. Mika selected something that looked like a small glass spade. 'I've clamped the breaks just to give some support to the welds. I don't suppose you'll be resting for a while yet. The clamps will take a year to dissolve; plenty of time for your ribs to completely heal. I've dealt with most of the internal tissue damage. I'll seal you up now.'
Why was it, Cormac wondered, that doctors so relished telling you exactly what they were doing?
The welder droned and there were horrible sucking sounds in his chest. The tugging felt like what an errant child feels when its mother pulls on its coat.
'There, all done,' said Mika after what seemed an age. 'I've put a couple of analgesic tabs in, and they'll dissolve over the next few days. There might be the odd twinge, but you'll be all right now.' Behind her he saw the tubes of the remote lung clear of blood and felt the small tugs as she detached each of them. He did not get time to feel any lack of oxygen, for she reached immediately for the back of his neck. Feeling returned suddenly. There was no fading in, no pins and needles; his body just turned back on. He took a gasping breath and the sound of his heart was a sudden thunder.
'You are all right,' she said, even in this circumstance not prepared to ask a question. Cormac sat upright and looked down at his chest. It was flawless. Cell-welding left no scars, at least not on the body. He nodded to her. She smiled briefly at him, then turned to Cam.
'It's not pain and it's not physical function,' she said, resuming a conversation they had been having as Cormac had come in.
Carn opened and closed his silvered hand. 'I've lost PU contact. All I get is normal sensation.'
Cormac glanced at him. So that's what his hand was. The necessity of using separate instruments on the artefact must have been annoying for him, all for the sake of a glove. Cormac swung his legs over and stood up. He took up his shirt from where he had tossed it, and pulled it on. He could see that he was now completely dismissed from Mika's attention, and that she was totally focused on Carn. He left her to attend to him.
The drop-shafts were still out of commission, but that was not too much of a problem aboard a ship. It merely meant there was no irised field to drag him to his destination. He had to step into the shaft, where he became weightless, and shove off the inspection ladders in the di
rection he wanted to go. The trick, as with all weightless manoeuvring, was not to get up too much speed. Soon he stopped himself at the required level and headed for the recreation room, which had now become the centre of operations. He passed through corridors where robot welders were at work, and other areas where technicians had stripped panels away from the walls and were swearing in their own particular jargon. In some areas the gravity was somewhat changeable, which was more worrying than it being completely out. A fluctuating gravplate could quite easily smear a person across the floor. When he arrived in the recreation room he found only Thorn and Chaline. Chaline was watching a tablescreen. It showed a scene across the hull of Hubris. The ship was crawling with robots like cockroaches. Thorn was sprawled asleep on a couch, a flask lying on its side on the table next to him, with a half-full glass of Scotch next to it.
'How are things going?' Cormac asked Chaline.
Still watching the screen she said, 'Seventy hours and we should be fully secure. Hubris won't be able to go supralight until we get a new engine housing from Minostra. The ramfields are down.'
Cormac nodded, then said, 'I walked over some fluctuating grav out there.'
Chaline did not look round. 'No, you didn't. You walked over gravplates with a fluctuating power source. We had a little bit of a panic with one of the generators and had to shut it down.'
Cormac decided to ask no more concerning the damage. The list would just go on and on.
'Hubris, what's the situation with Dragon?' he asked as he walked over to the catering unit.
'Dragon is in orbit seven hundred kilometres ahead of us. There is some activity on its surface,' the ship replied.
At the catering unit Cormac said simply, 'Coffee,' as the machine now recognized his voice and would provide it exactly how he liked. He inspected the cup of white sludge it had provided, then fully keyed in his request. Another one to add to Chaline's list. When he finally got the drink he was after, he returned to Chal-ine's table and sat down.
'Right, tell me, what's the activity?'
The screen changed to show Dragon, and Chaline looked at Cormac in annoyance. He shrugged apologetically, then returned his attention to the screen. Ripples were travelling all round the surface of the alien.
Hubris said, 'One hour ago there was an energy emission directed away from the Andellan system. It was full-spectrum lased light. The reading was in the giga-joule range. If the same pattern is being followed this time round, another emission will occur in fifty-four minutes. I am moving the ship to the other side of the planet, and have left just one observer probe.'
At that particular moment Cormac felt he would rather be on the other side of the galaxy. Was Dragon getting ready to destroy them? If it was they were in serious trouble.
'Anything else?'
'I am also picking up emissions across all spectrums. Some of them have some internal logic and mathematical coherency, but I have not as yet been able to translate. These emissions are directionless.'
'OK,' said Cormac, and the screen flicked back to the scene Chaline had been observing. He studied her and noted how she was deliberately keeping her face free of expression.
'All yours,' he said with a smile.
'Thank you so much,' she said, then pushed her chair back and stood up. 'Unfortunately some of us have work to do.'
Cormac made a gesture of appeasement, but Chaline walked away. He couldn't decide if she was angry or amused. Involvement, he thought, trying not to feel guilty. He sat there sipping for the next few minutes, then called up again the scene from the probe.
Dragon was rippling even faster now, and its spherical shape was being distorted.
'Hubris, are you sure we're safe here?' he asked.
The AI's reply was succinct. 'No.'
The fifty-four-minute mark passed. Sixty minutes was reached, sixty-five… The flash momentarily blacked out the picture from the probe. When it came back, Dragon was spherical again, the ripples moving across its surface just as Cormac had first witnessed.
'Hubris, where did that one go?'
'The planet's surface. Imaging in… the probe has it.'
The picture showed a spreading black cloud with hellish red fires at the centre of it.
'That was Mount Prometheus,' said Hubris.
Cormac shook his head in amazement. Enoida Deacon would not be displaced from her niche in the history books, but what the hell was Dragon doing?
'I have picked up something from Dragon. It's in all human languages.'
'Let's hear the English version then.'
Dragon's voice boomed from the speakers. 'Escaped! Escaped! Criminal! Bastard! Damn! Fuck! Fuckit!'
Cormac sat there with his mouth open. So that was what Dragon was doing - it was having a tantrum.
20
Chameleon: How often there is confusion and misuse of the extensions of this word. The 'chameleon-wear' refers only to clothing made from the photoreactive fibres developed by ECS in 2257. It is merely an effective form of camouflage, and does not render the wearer invisible. It just blends said wearer in with his or her background. The 'chameleonware' is a different matter. It is hardware that, using field technologies, can bend light round an object, blank out heat signatures, blur air disturbances, and make said object radar and sonar inert.
From Quince Guide, compiled by humans
Pelter took one pass over the lake before banking the bird and coming on in. The screen, set to infrared, showed him all he needed to see, in pastel shades of blue and green like the negative of a colour photograph. He applied the aerobrakes and noted small contrails that revealed the wings, but that was no problem at this altitude. Through Mr Crane's eyes he studied the collapsed bulk of Stanton lying on the floor, and considered how to kill him. His enjoyment at wiping out that arrogant ship captain had quickly faded. Now he surprised himself wim the acknowledgement that Stanton's death was not something he wanted to see. The mercenary had to the because of his intended betrayal, but he had been a good friend for some years. There was a bitter taste in Pelter's mouth as he watched the lake come into sight. In his aug he called up an image of Stanton and slipped it in to the requisite slot of a program in Crane's command module. It was the same program he had used for Tenel and many others. He would set it running when he felt ready, and then did not have to watch.
The whisde of the wind across the skids as he lowered them was the loudest sound heard during their long flight to land. The next cacophony was when diose skids hit the surface of the lake. Pelter glanced back and saw the foaming wake, and that was all right as well, for anything they did now would be beneadi the notice of the runcible AI - or, rather, anything they did from now up to the point when they started using proscribed weapons. Pelter eased the bird round and directed it to the shore of the lake. The land beyond rose not much above the surface level of the lake. In the distance there was a collection of boulders, and beyond that was what Pelter knew to be the beginning of a huge forest, though of what type he did not know. The highest items nearby were reeds and sedges growing at the edge of the water, apart from the dropbird itself. Only a couple of blasts of the compressed-air impeller were required to push the bird dirough the reeds and onto the squelchy shore. Pelter undipped his belt and looked round at them.
'A few solstan hours until sunrise,' he said. 'We'll rest until then.'
'What about him?' said Corlackis, stabbing a finger at Stanton.
'In the morning,' Pelter replied, then eased his seat back into a rest position and closed his eye. The four behind did the same. He watched them through Mr Crane's eyes before eventually allowing himself to rest completely.
His body felt like a block of lead on the soft ground. He felt sick and his shoulder hurt, and a tiny blacksmith was making horseshoes inside his head. This was worse than the worst of hangovers. The smell of peat filled his nostrils and he tasted earth in his mouth. Opening his left eye he got a low view of palegreen ferns sprouting from the black soil. Beyond them some thick gre
en growth was smeared across the ground. For a moment he had absolutely no idea where he was, or what was happening. When memory returned, he discovered it was possible to feel worse than he already felt.
Jarvellis.
Stanton heaved himself up onto his elbows, then puked yellow bile. Pain lanced his skull at every convulsion. In a way that was preferable to the other pain.
'Give him another shot,' said Pelter.
Stanton just managed to look round as Corlackis squatted by him and pressed an injector against his neck. He felt the stuff go in and immediately start to kill his nausea. The pain in his head started to fade also. He felt he might be able to stand now, but just didn't want to. The other pain had expanded to fill every space.
'Get up, John,' said Pelter.
Stanton tried to feel angry, but found he just couldn't find the energy for it. He pushed himself to his knees, then unsteadily to his feet. Mennecken and Svent were sitting on a crate unloaded from the dropbird. Dusache was leaning against the bird itself, grounded on the shore of the lake. A curious sight, as he seemed to be standing at an impossible angle. Corlackis stepped aside and Stanton was looking at Pelter, who had Mr Crane at his back. No chance to hit him, Stanton thought. Of course, given the opportunity he would kill Pelter, but he knew he would not be given that opportunity.
'His knife,' said Pelter.
Corlackis reached into the pocket of his coat and took out a plastic-wrapped package. It hit Stanton on the chest, and fell to the ground. He continued to stare at Pelter.
'It's your knife, John. Pick it up and return it to its sheath.'
Stanton did as he was told. What was the game now? Him with a knife up against Crane?
'Give him his gun as well.'
Corlackis looked askance at Pelter, before reaching into his jacket and taking out Stanton's pulse-gun.
'Take the charge out first, Corlackis,' Pelter said, when the gun was about to be handed over. Corlackis pulled the charge and handed the gun to Stanton. Pelter held out his hand and Corlackis handed him the charge. Pelter turned and threw it out across the bleak moorland. Stanton tracked its progress and saw it land amongst a rare mass of the green growth. A cloud of objects shot into the air where it landed. Stanton took that as a sign of his present luck. The charge had probably landed in a nest of this planet's equivalent of hornets.
