by Neal Asher
A soldier came running towards me through the dark, firing at the bushes and the trees. I stepped behind one of the trees, waited until he was opposite me then reached out and chopped him across the back of his neck. As he went down, I heard the last soldier yodelling in agony. Then there was silence. I walked towards that last scream and the sauraman came from it to me. In the darkness we stood about five metres apart and looked at each other. The sauraman now held an Optek that he pointed at me. I expected him to use it and that finally I would have to kill him. He did not. He grunted and went back to the four dead soldiers. I followed.
“You understand now that I am not your enemy?” I asked.
The sauraman ignored me while he raided the dead. For my own peace of mind I went and took up the APW and its spare power packs. He looked at me for a moment then continued with what he was doing. He stripped the least bloody of the corpses and fashioned his jacket into a loin cloth held with a belt. The clothing would not have fitted his squat and muscular frame any other way. Two of the soldiers had rucksacks into which he put spare ammunition, money, knives—anything of value or utility. He was very thorough. The Opteks he tied together with the pair of trousers. He made a carry strap from another belt. I looked at his haul and thought he would certainly have trouble carrying it all until it became evident, when he dumped the two rucksacks in front of me, that he did not expect to. I obliged him by picking them up. Into one of them went the spare power packs. He then demonstrated that he could have carried it all, for he took up the roll of Opteks, belts with holstered pistols and other items such as water bottles and the like, on one shoulder. Over his other shoulder he slung the stripped corpse, before setting out at a jog into the forest. I followed, content at the moment to just go with the flow. He interested me.
That night I suppose we travelled ten kilometres into the forest. My companion, with unerring senses, found a place where trees had fallen to provide a cosy shelter. He dumped the corpse outside and his loot inside. I put the two rucksacks inside as well. From the APW I removed the power pack before putting it inside. Once this was done he built a fire and ignited it with one of the lighters taken from one of the soldiers. I squatted at the other side of the fire while he went about this, and in the dull twilight I studied him more closely.
His hands were thick-fingered, and rather than fingernails he had hard curved claws as blunt as a dog’s. He was completely hairless and completely scaled. Those scales on his head and down his back were the largest and most evident, being thumbnail-sized. The rest of his body was covered with scales only a couple of millimetres across. Halfway up his forearms and up the back of his calves he had spur claws. His eyes, as I have mentioned, had slotted pupils. They were the eyes of a snake. His ears were pointed, and I have to wonder if that feature was a conceit of the geneticist who had spliced his kind. His teeth were all canines. As I discovered, shortly after he had lit his fire, he was a meat eater and not particularly choosy about where his meat came from. I’d wondered why he had wanted the corpse.
With the fire going the sauraman used a knife to remove one leg from the soldier’s corpse. The calf muscle he cut into strips to hang on sticks over the flames. While these were cooking, he separated out the thigh, spitted it, and had it high over the flames to cook through. The strips were done by the time the larger piece of meat began to sizzle and give of the aroma of roasting pork. He ate two or three of the strips before remembering his manners and holding out a stick for me. I demurred, not because of any feeling of disgust, but because my energy source is something that only has to be renewed every five hundred years. Anyway, he looked hungry. When he insisted I pointed at myself.
“Collector,” I said.
He ate the meat off the end of the stick and then repeated my name quite precisely. He then pointed to himself.
“Gurt,” he said, then he offered me another human satay. He didn’t get it. I’m not so arrogant as to think that everyone on Earth knows my name and knows what I am. But I’ve been around for a long while and it is infrequent that I come across any who do not. I thought we’d better get things sorted there and then. I pointed at myself again.
“Cyborg,” I said, wondering if he might know the word. He showed no reaction other than to continue his munching. I held up my hand, sequenced the release program, then stripped off the glove of synthe-flesh to reveal the skeletal ceramal hand underneath. Gurt went very still as he looked at my hand. Suddenly he grinned, which was not the reaction I had expected. He pointed with the stick from my head down to my feet. I did a partial release at my neck to show ceramal vertebrae and another to coyly expose the shine at my ankle. He grinned again and continued with his eating. He didn’t offer me any more meat.
* * *
The sun flooded the forest with green-filtered light. I listened to a family of chimpanzees yelling and screaming the order of the hunt to each other as they tracked and tore apart a spider monkey. Gurt slept in the shelter of the fallen trees, finally succumbing after he had chewed the last fragment of flesh from the thigh bone. The makings of his next meal he had hung in a nearby tree. I thought him overly optimistic as I listened to hyenas and at least one big cat making their various noises of anticipation.
While Gurt slept I watched beetles, their carapaces exactly matching the fallen elm leaves, bumbling about their business on the forest floor. I also observed a brown bark mantis watching their activities with a similar if more predatory interest. I do not need to sleep very much, and when I do it is only for psychological reasons. My brain, flash-frozen and bio-gridded, sits inside my ceramal skull unchanging. All those aspects of life that I have: memory, hate, love, curiosity, are the programs of the synaptic computer linked to that grid. To some it nay seem that I am less than human. I have always felt that I am more.
The synthetic-flesh covering that sheathes my nigh indestructible ceramal skeleton is as sensitive as I wish it to be. I can feel pain, mostly I choose not to. I can feel and sense the world with all the acuity of any man, and more. My vision can range from infrared to ultraviolet and my hearing can extend into ultra and infra-sound. I am as strong a machine as mankind has ever made. I never tire and I never grow thirsty or hungry, yet I can eat and drink and appreciate the experience. My sense of direction sucks though, and I was wondering just then where exactly I was in the forest.
At about midmorning Gurt woke without fuss, drained most of a water bottle, pressed his hand against his stomach, then went off into the forest to attend to a call of nature I had not heard in centuries. The pack of hyenas had drawn closer by then and I heard one of them let off a yelping wail and run yipping into the forest. Gurt, it would seem, was not a man to be overly troubled by the beasts of the wilderness. With his strength, I suspected, he would not be the kind to run for the nearest tree at the sight of a lion. More likely he would eat the lion. Sitting there waiting for him I drained what was left in the water bottle. It looked likely to be a hot day and I might need to sweat for appearance sake.
“Gonna kill ‘em,” he said, coming back to the fire wiping his hands on a fist full of leaves. This was the first sign from him that he understood my every word.
“Who?” I asked. Perhaps he meant the hyenas.
“God soldiers,” he said.
“Ah.”
With that he took up two of the Opteks and expertly checked their loads. He then strapped one of the pistol belts around himself and filled a bag with spare ammunition for all three weapons.
“Coming?” he asked, when he was ready.
I went and got the APW and a spare power pack, then I followed him into the forest. Now, I thought, it’s time I learnt something about him.
“You’re a sauraman,” I said.
He grunted in the affirmative.
“Are there many more like you?”
“Three,” said he.
“Not many.”
“Were nine.”
“The God soldiers?”
“Killed em.”
As you may have gathered, extracting facts from Gurt was akin to extracting teeth from a crocodile, yet, despite his monosyllabic replies, I read into him a degree of sophistication. He had accepted me immediately, and he handled weapons with skill and familiarity. I don’t mean to say I thought him from some apparently civilised society like that of the families. I think he was that most precious of individuals: an intelligent savage.
We made about half the return distance before Gurt halted and sniffed the air. Wondering precisely what it was he had noticed I upped the sensitivity of my nose. Immediately I picked up the smell of burning wood overlaid with the tang of petroleum. Camp fire, I thought. I couldn’t have been more wrong. We moved on more cautiously, Gurt showing more caution than myself. He halted a second then a third time. On the third occasion, he climbed a tree to scout-out our path. He came down the tree very fast.
“Fire,” he said.
I was about to offer some sarcastic remark in return when I heard the explosions. As we stood there below the tree he had just quit, two springboks went hurtling past us, closely followed by a lioness. Shortly after them, came a family of chimpanzees, some on the ground and some in the trees. There were no pursuers here: they were all running. Beyond them I saw the wall of fire and concluded that the explosions were exploding trees. Taking a leaf out of Gurt’s book of meaningful communication I was reduced to monosyllables.
“Run,” I said, about a second after Gurt had already shown me his heels.
Gurt was impressively strong and dangerous in a fight, but one thing he was not was a sprinter. Had this been an ordinary forest fire I think he might have managed to outrun it, but as it was being encouraged along with liberal doses of napalm and oxygen bombs he wasn’t fast enough. I accelerated past him and twenty yards ahead I halted, and pushing my APW round to my front on its strap, I pointed a thumb at my back. He didn’t hesitate. He discarded the Opteks and leapt straight on my back when he reached me. Such was his weight that he even had me staggering for a moment before I corrected. I started off at a steady fifteen-kilometres-an-hour to get used to the load and steadily built it up. Shortly I was up to thirty-kilometres-an-hour, then forty. I passed a couple of chimpanzees, one carrying her baby on her back just as I was carrying Gurt. I clipped another one that chose the wrong moment to leap from tree to tree in front of me and after it had picked itself up it screeched along behind me for a moment before I outdistanced it. Vicious little bastards, but then what can you expect from man’s nearest relation?
“Faster,” said Gurt, and I imagined that I could feel the heat on the back of my neck.
I accelerated, feeling heat build up in my joints because of the extra loading. I turned on my sweat glands, and they used the water I had drunk earlier. Forty kilometres an hour, forty-five. A bird bounced off my chest and Gurt caught it as it fluttered past. I thought this a rather unreasonable time to be taking a snack.
The fire was soon far behind us and I was able to slow and put Gurt down. From there we continued on at the kilometre-eating trot he seemed able to maintain.
“How wide?” he asked, gesturing at the trees.
“Thirty kilometres,” I guessed.
He grunted and we just kept going. An hour later I had to carry him ahead of the flames again. An hour after that I did it again. By mid-afternoon, just ahead of a pall of smoke and amongst the fleeing animals, we reached the abrupt edge of the forest and the deep hissing stutter I instantly recognised.
I suppose I should have expected something like this. My excuse is that I just got caught up in the excitement of the moment. I had even, momentarily, forgotten all about my precious tree orchids. Why, I should have asked myself, would people who had come to harvest the trees, set fire to the forest? They’d done it to drive someone out of the forest, or at least to remove that someone’s cover. It was all about me. I try moderately hard not to be conceited, but this was the only conclusion to which I could come. The weaponry was the decider. You don’t position a number of AG gun ships, armed with pulsed-energy cannons, on the edge of a forest to nail an escaped slave or two..
“Shit,” I said, monosyllabically.
“Agreed,” said Gurt.
The gun ships were square-sectioned stubby crosses, each with a spherical cockpit on the end of one of the arms. On the arms either side of the cockpit were sideways-projecting gun turrets adapted to support pulsed-energy cannons. There were no markings on them, but they were standard corporate Family manufacture. The question was: which Family? It was not a question I felt inclined to consider for over-long when one of those cannons turned on us and opened fire.
The pulsed-energy cannon works on much the same principle as the quantum cascade or QC laser. The laser, developed originally for the solid state electronics’ industry a couple of millennia back, was soon taken up by the military when a power pack was invented that could support it as a weapon. These lasers produce coherent light, usually at the red end of the spectrum. The pulsed-energy cannon produces coherent radiations inclusive of X-rays and microwaves. One pulse looks like a tracer bullet. Where it hits it leaves nothing but radioactive ash. It is not a clean weapon, but it is certainly an effective one.
We crawled then ran back into the forest with trees exploding behind us and the whole forest burning ahead of us. Things had taken a decided turn for the worse and it was perhaps this that returned to me, if but for a moment, an at least workable sense of direction. I pointed to our left and held my arms so Gurt could remount. I then ran as fast as I could—forest burning to my right and gun ships blasting away the trees to my left. I could have just buried myself in the earth to wait for it all to be over. There was, though, the nagging suspicion that whoever was hunting me would be wise to that trick and that there would be Soldiers of God out with metal detectors once the fire had finished. Also, I didn’t want to abandon Gurt—he was one genotype I didn’t have in my collection, and anyway, I liked him.
The forest floor soon began to slope downhill and I had to slow myheadlong rush as the ground got softer. Prairie elms were soon replaced by other deciduous trees like oaks and horse chestnut. You got a curious mix this near to the glacier. The weather is such that old Africa is much encroached on by the temperate climate that had been farther north before the meteor strike and subsequent ice age. Patches of forest like this had sprung up soon after, in the dryer veldt, fed by melt water and cooled by cold air flowing down off the ice. Soon we reached an area of fallen trees where the ground had become too soft to support them and I had to put Gurt down. We made our way through this wreckage to an abrupt stand of bamboo seemingly colonised wholly by giant snails and the adapted land crabs that fed upon them. Beyond the bamboo was swamp that the fire had yet to reach. Gurt looked askance at the water and sphagnum bogs then looked up as one of the gun ships passed overhead, scattering fire in every direction. I waded in and he followed.
Night had fallen by the time we reached the river. Using a narrow-beam setting on the APW I cut a tree to raft us downstream. I can’t swim, and walking along the bottom gets a bit tedious. I also tend to end up going the wrong direction when I try that. As we floated downstream in darkness I had to discourage one crocodile with a rap on its nose, but otherwise we were okay. A gun ship crossed the river upstream of us with its searchlight probing the water. It had missed us by half an hour or so, for which I was grateful. I had no doubt it was rigged-out with detectors suitable for picking up human-sized lumps of ceramal. Still in darkness we paddled ashore and got out on a muddy bank below the open veldt. I listened to a passing herd of mammoth up there, while Gurt slept curled in the mud, oblivious to the world. I decided then that I needed information and there were those who would be with the mammoth who could provide it. Leaving Gurt to sleep I climbed the bank and set out through the waist-high elephant grass.
A dark shape rested in the stunted branches of a baobab and with glinting eyes watched me approach. He was about to fly until I pulled the glove of syntheflesh off my hand and hel
d up that hand in greeting. The Pykani settled down and waited until I was under the tree.
“I am honoured, Collector,” said a lisping voice in the darkness.
“To whom do I speak?” I asked.
“I am Stuka,” replied the little vampire in the tree.
Someone, I mention no names, took DNA from the frozen corpse of a mammoth dug from the Russian tundra. From this DNA that someone resurrected the mammoth into a world swiftly being depopulated by water wars, manufactured plagues, and more esoteric killers like the Great African Vampire—creatures bred to feed on people, lots of people. Someone then took DNA from the aforesaid, spliced it with the gene of pygmy humans and produced the Pykani—creatures well adapted to feed upon the blood of the mammoth. Stuka was a perfect little man with a slightly translucent body, bat wings, and fangs.
“An army of God is burning my forest, Stuka,” I said.
“We’ve seen the lights,” replied the Pykani.
I looked behind me and I too could see the lights: the long low glow of burning forest and the higher firefly glows of about ten gun ships.
“I think they were after me,” I said.
“Their weapons are fearsome.”
“Who are they?”
“The Army of God is powerful because it has powerful weapons. They were fanatics without power until someone gave them those weapons. Now their leader styles himself the Lord of Cuberland. You have been named demon and must be destroyed.”
“Their weapons?” I asked.
“One of the Families. I do not know which one.”
“What about the gun ships?”
“They came only yesterday, Collector.”
I thought about that. I thought hard about that. Someone had provided a bunch of fanatics with the weaponry to put them in power. I was now a demon. Sounded like a deal to me: we’ll give you these if you off him, we’ll also give you back-up. A Family punch-up with the Army of God as incidental I reckoned. I held sixty percent of the stock in the Jethro Manx Canard Corporation, which made me a viable target either internally or if another Family was making a move on Manx Canard. I bet on the latter, as Jethro Susan, my wife of two centuries, had the reins there. I had to get back and find out what was going on.
