by Neal Asher
“He’s Gurt,” said that one.
“What do you want, Gurt?” she asked.
“Is there no courtesy here?” Gurt asked.
The saurawoman, whom I later learned to be called Sophist—an interesting name—reluctantly welcomed us and invited us to her village. Before going with Gurt I instructed the pilot to close up the lifter and stay alert. Sophist led us down a jungle trail, all her fighters gathered close around us. I expected to come into a village of wattle huts with streets smelling of sewerage. The village was nothing like that. It was very much like a Cotswold hamlet transported into the middle of a jungle. It was tidy. The stone houses had neatly-tended gardens and multicoloured vines growing up the walls. Sophist led us to a communal eating hall, with tables and chairs of fine-grained wood neatly set out in rows. The one fly in this particular pot of ointment was the gutted human corpse roasting on a spit over an open fire at the end of the room. As we entered the room I felt someone prodding at my leg and looked down at a naked child of the village. The little boy was more heavily-scaled than the adults and he had a long tail. I guessed part of the growing up process for him was the losing of that tail.
“Not food,” one of the adults told that child and he scampered away.
Soon after we had entered the hall other villagers began to file in. Gurt leapt up onto a table and stood there waiting until everyone was in. I ended up with armed adults crammed all around me, all of them looking at me speculatively. They turned their attention from me when Gurt began to speak.
“I am Gurt, Lieutenant to Horl of Ankatra. Horl of Ankatra is now dead,” he said, eliciting much muttered disbelief. Gurt continued, “The child stealers came to Ankatra and we fought them as we always do. This time they had not come for our children. They took Horl and myself and seven brave fighters of the Mark. They took us up.” Gurt pointed at the ceiling then went on to tell them all he had told me. He told them of his meeting with me and those speculative gazes were fixed on me again.
“He is meat,” said a sauraman standing right next to me.
“He is not. He is the Collector of legend. He is the man machine,” said Gurt.
This was the first I’d heard of Gurt’s knowledge of me. His people must have either picked it up from the JMCC ‘teachers’ or from the people they fed upon when not arguing about ‘lemu rights’.
“Meat,” said the arguer, prodding me with one horny claw.
“Show them, Collector,” said Gurt.
I was getting tired of pulling my face off so I turned to the arguer. He held at his side a muzzle-loader with a long and heavy steel barrel, took it off him. He tried to resist and a look of surprise appeared on his face when he found he could not. When he released his weapon I bent the barrel in half then handed it back to him.
“Strong meat,” said someone, and there was a general tittering.
“The child stealers live in a great building high in the sky. They are our enemies and they are enemies of the Collector. We go there to do battle with them. Who will come?”
There was no sudden rush of volunteers.
“We will consider what you have said,” said Sophist. “Now you must eat with us.”
I sat at the table with the arguer on my left and Gurt on my right. Sophist sat opposite us. I refused the meat, but not the drink made from fermented lilies that was passed around. Sophist got the prime cut of the meat, which to these people was the head. She broke it open and scooped out steaming brains with a clam shell. The next course was the crackling, nice and salty, and passed down the tables on trays. Next came slices of meat in deep bowls. Sauraman children ran about munching on nicely crisped hands and feet. Large pots were then brought out in which whole lemurs had been boiled with some sort of greenery. The roast human had obviously only been a starter. I asked Gurt about this and he said it was because of their rarity now.
“Do your people build sailing ships?” I asked him.
“Yes,” said Gurt, and grinned at me.
I visualised the future of Earth humans when the Madagascan sauraman population overflowed onto mainland Africa. It looked bleak for them.
We returned to the lifter at nightfall, after receiving Sophist’s promise that the news and the request Gurt had brought would be disseminated amongst the other villages. Gurt slept a contented sleep that night in the cargo area. The pilot and navigator banned him from the foresection sleeping area because of the sudden stinking flatulence he suffered.
“What the hell has he been eating?” the pilot asked.
I thought it best not to tell him.
* * *
During the night I watched as sauramen and women gathered on the shore and lit campfires there. By dawn there were about forty of them, and when Gurt finally woke and went to greet them, there were twenty more. He took with him a few of the weapons we had brought and the recruits had a high old time blasting away at the trees and anything foolish enough to show itself in the upper branches. By midday there were over a hundred sauramen and women, which was getting towards the full load the lifter could manage. I instructed the pilot to keep the door between the fore section and the cargo bay closed unless I requested it be opened. Then I told Gurt to bring our recruits aboard.
Space stations are, by their nature, normally impossible to attack unless by subterfuge. Computer-controlled shield projectors, lasers, missiles, and pulsed-energy cannons, would be enough to deal with any attack. There was the possibility that a ship the size of a station, carrying the same armament and shielding, might be able to do the job, just as a fleet of ships might be able to, though not without huge damages and losses. The Enmark station was one of the smaller ones, at only a kilometre in diameter and two long. It supported a population of ten thousand or more. It might have seemed madness to try to board it with only a hundred or so sauramen, but for a few critical factors.
Callum Manx Enmark was no longer the Director and no longer had cardinal status. In an attempt to retain power he had obviously blown the computer system. This meant that all computer-controlled shields and weapons were out—we should be able to board. There might be fire from manually-operated weapons, but I was sure the lifter’s own defences would deal with them adequately. Once on board I reckoned on us facing resistance from people personally loyal to Callum, not from the entire ten thousand. Most of the people on the station were civilians and would be keeping their heads down until things were resolved. Callum’s actions, by corporate law, were illegal, and some of those civilians might even be on my side. All I intended was for the sauramen to get me through so I could kick Callum out of office and put the system back online. I didn’t expect a lot of resistance.
* * *
As the lifter cruised towards the station and adjusted its attitude for docking, I stayed alert at the weapon’s console. There was no attack at all as we closed in and none while we docked. This puzzled me. I’d at least expected a couple of missiles to be fired at the lifter. Nothing.
Docking clamps crashed into position and the lifter was set against the station like a fly come to suck blood. I went back into the hold where the sauramen waited. They sat on the floor all armed with nice new weapons, complemented by the occasional spear or muzzle-loader. With Gurt’s and Sophist’s help I manually engaged the airlock and we were ready to go in.
“You’ll find the floor here a little unnerving. The gravity of the ship is at ninety degrees to that of the station. The corridor here will appear to curve down to a precipice. That precipice is the floor of the bay area.”
Gurt looked puzzled. “Just follow me,” I said.
I led them to the down-curving corridor. Halfway round, with my body at an attitude of forty-five degrees to them, I looked back.
“Come on,” I said.
Gurt was the first to follow—tentatively, as if someone was going to snatch the floor from underneath him. The rest of them held back until they saw him walking, without ill effect, around the curve. Soon all of us were coming out into the open bay a
rea. The first shots were fired then, and when I saw their source I knew we were in trouble.
The soldiers ran out of the back of the bay, armed with slow pulse guns. These were another weapon designed to kill on-station without penetrating the hull. They fired disperse pulses of ions that electrocuted those they hit. The men carrying these weapons wore black uniforms and mirrored helmets. The Army of God was here and there would be more resistance than I had expected.
Sophist was the first to be hit by the bluish haze of an ion bolt. She convulsed where she stood while small lightnings earthed themselves from her to the floor. The sauramen opened fire with their weapons and two soldiers disintegrated where they stood. Then everyone was running for cover and blasting away as they did so. I dropped to one knee where I was and opened up on full automatic, emptying box after box at the charging soldiers, forcing them quickly into cover so all the sauramen could get out of the ship. I used the same weapon as my sauramen, not the APW I had strapped across my back—that was for later, when we were deeper into the station. Four ion bolts hit me while I was there and I was paralysed while each discharged into the floor. Once the last had discharged I started firing again and ran for cover myself. All the sauramen were in the bay now, and I was getting double vision and some strange error messages from my system monitors.
The battle from then on seemed to be all firing without very many people getting hit. The ion bolts discharged through the crates, au-tohandlers and small transports the sauramen hid behind, whilst the mercury shot they fired was easily stopped by the same. No one seemed to be inclined to heroism. Everyone wanted to stay alive. The fight could not continue like this though. We had limited ammunition and the soldiers probably did not. We had limited numbers yet these soldiers could be reinforced at any time. I guessed that they were the nearest to the bay at which we docked, and that there would be others scattered all over the station. I decided it was time for me to act. About ten metres from where I crouched was an autohandler with grab arms and heavy forklift. Most of the soldiers were crouched behind a row of packing cases, some blasted open to expose the rough aluminium castings inside. The handler was just the job.
I ran across the intervening area and leapt up behind the panel through which the handler could be programmed. Feeling a touch of deja vu I reached under the panel and tore away a bunch of optic cables. Two ionic bolts hit me one after the other as I got hold of the panel, twisted it, and tore it away. Underneath the panel I exposed the original manual controls and the servo motors that operated them. I pulled the servo motors free. Another bolt hit me and lines ran down my vision and there was a weird whistling in my ears. Using the manual controls I turned the handler and had it pick up the nearest convenient crate. With this positioned before me to absorb the bolts I looked around at the crouching sauramen.
“Charge!” I yelled, feeling slightly strange.
Sauramen fell in behind the handler as I drove it at the line of crates. The handler went through the line with a crash and the sauramen leapt up onto the scattered crates and fired down at the soldiers. I leapt from my seat, up onto the crate the handler had suspended three metres in the air, and opened fire from there. Another ionic bolt hit me and caused random squares to appear in my vision and the ringing in my ears turned to a steady thumping. I saw that the shot had come from across the bay area, and that it was shots from there that were also picking off my men. I leapt from the crate and hit the ground running. At the bottom right of my vision a little red light was flashing. This meant that my autorepair system had been activated. I rounded the small shuttle, from behind which the shots had come, and charged straight into a group of four soldiers. I went into them with my weapon on automatic. They hit me a couple of more times, but to no avail. Their shots just put a few more squares across my vision. It wasn’t really fair, but then whoever said life was?
The remaining soldiers retreated down the corridors and escalators from the bay area. There were about forty bodies scattered across the decking. The numbers looked about even, but to my surprise I saw that some of them were stirring—the sauramen. They were tough buggers. After a few minutes, while weapons were collected and bodies checked, about half the sauramen had revived. It turned out that the only ones dead were those that had been struck by three or more ionic bolts. There was a number still unconscious. I had them taken back to the lifter, before calling together the remainder of the sauramen and leading them, down a wide escalator, to a precinct that led into the centre of the station. The precinct was a tubular structure with sky-effect ceiling panels, lawns, gardens and decorative pathways down its centre, and shops and restaurants down the sides. It was deserted and I didn’t like it.
“You can bet your life there are autoguns down here somewhere,” I said. Gurt nodded in understanding—after being in my tanks he knew about autoguns. Sophist, who was one of those to have recovered, did not know, and Gurt explained to her in low tones. I removed the APW from my back and led them all to one side of the precinct. Before me was a sign advertising ‘The Best Synthetastes This Side of Jupiter’. On the menu was a list that included a ‘dinosaur meat selection, trilobite thermador, and human flesh’. I did a double-take at the first and the last on the list.
On a low setting I used the APW to take out the tinted window of the restaurant. The small blast cut a hole the size of a head through the glassite, then as the chain molecules unravelled, the whole window fell as a sheet of dust.
“Come on,” I said, leading them in. “We go round.”
The restaurant was all hexagonal tables and bucket chairs. As we moved through, a floating vendor shaped like an ancient one-armed bandit came directly towards me.
“Tables for one hundred and three, sir?” it asked, before a broad-bladed spear struck it and set it tumbling through the air trailing wisps of smoke.
“Table bzzzp. Drink bzzzp. Let me clean that up bzzzp,” it said, repeatedly as it tumbled. We moved to the back wall of the restaurant.
“This should do,” I said, and shifted up the setting on my APW. I didn’t know what was behind this wall, though I thought it likely not to be living quarters. With a flash and crash the back wall of the restaurant buckled and blasted away. Beyond it the dust of its disintegration settled on the automachines of a manufactory. Here were the computer-controlled mills, lathes, presses that have been an indispensable part of industry since industry began. The sauramen looked with suspicion at the machines, but there were no thrown spears as in the restaurant. We moved down aisles wide enough for us to walk three abreast, but which had been designed for maintenance and material-loading robots. This was not a place where people would very often come. Anything anyone wanted made would first be constructed, viewed, and tested in a computer in the comfort of someone’s apartment or office. The instructions would then come down here by optic cable and the machines would do the work.
The manufactory ended at another main-section wall in which were wide sliding doors and a simple door control. There was no need for me to blow another hole. Beyond these was a huge materials store, with racked bars and ingots of machinable metals, ceramics, plastics, glasses, and a thousand other materials with numbers rather than names. I warned the sauramen to be wary now. We had not gone the way expected, but by now more soldiers would have been moved to intercept us. I was not wrong.
On the treble-click, sauramen were diving for cover amongst the stacks of materials. The twin barrels of the machine gun filled the room with ricocheting flack bullets. Flinders and fragments tore in every direction. Two sauramen had no time to get to cover and simply flew apart. Before a round struck me square in the forehead, and I staggered and fell backwards over a stack of bearing cases, I saw that the twinned guns had been mounted on one of the maintenance robots, and that soldiers were coming in behind it. As I hit the ground I managed one shot before the APW was torn from my hand, its casing smashed. The robot ground to a halt, half its side blasted away. Momentarily the guns were firing at the ceiling, then they swiv
elled down concentrating their fire on me. They were remotely-controlled and whoever was controlling them knew who their greatest danger was. Bearing cases crashed all around me and multiple hits slid me back across the floor. My syntheflesh covering was stripped from my torso and my arms as I tried to rise. I didn’t see her do it. I had too many problems of my own at that moment. It was Sophist who leapt up onto a stack of copper ingots and fired an entire box down on the twinned guns. She shut them down, but in repayment was cut in half by Optek fire.
In the bloody scramble that followed I realised I had made a big mistake. No one in command on a station would allow soldiers to carry weapons that might penetrate the hull. There would be no APWs or hard rounds, no pulsed-energy weapons or high intensity lasers, but there would be weapons capable of stopping me. I considered pulling out then, but thought it unlikely we would be able to get the lifter away. We had to carry on. I had to use my abilities to their fullest extent.
While the fire-fight continued, I stood then ran to where the soldiers were taking cover. I used no weapon but myself. Optek fire and ionic bolts struck me repeatedly. My autorepair system went wild with error messages. I reached three soldiers crouching behind a rack of metal bars, snatched an Optek from one and used it to brain the other two, then picked the other one up and threw him at some of his fellows who had rushed to help. Four men went down in a tangle. I dragged a copper alloy bar from the rack and walking with it held as a staff I advanced on others who had taken cover. The ionic bolts that hit me now mostly discharged down through the bar into the floor. Optek fire put me out of balance as it stripped away my outer covering, but the bullets ricocheted off my ceramal skeleton. After the next group of soldiers I stepped away with the bar bent and running with gore. My sauramen came in after me. The soldiers started to realise then that their weapons had little effect on me and that hiding was no use. I suppose I killed about forty of them in the next ten minutes. I don’t like to examine those memories too closely. Suffice to say that soon they were running for their lives, many of them abandoning their weapons.
