by Neal Asher
–From Quince Guide compiled by humans
Out of necessity, Mr Crane wore a protective suit. The blasts of searing gas from the many volcanic vents, as well as the spills of glowing magma across the hellish landscape, were bad enough and would eventually have melted his brass outer covering despite its inlaid s-con grid, but there was also the acidic atmosphere that might have etched away that covering first. Skellor also wore a suit, but one he had extruded from inside himself. As the two of them trudged towards the wedge-shaped survey ship perched on the glowing ridge ahead, Skellor wondered if he was foolishly wasting time with this side jaunt –and if that sense of aesthetic correctness might prove his downfall.
Skellor knew that though he possessed huge abilities to interact with and alter his environment, this was simply like possessing hands and eyes –for being able to use them did not necessarily mean you knew precisely how they operated. And though he could acquire information, knowledge, skills, he did not possess enough of them to take overt actions while ensuring sufficient personal safety. Some proof of this was how Cormac’s simple ruse had lured him to Elysium, to within range of the sun mirrors. Then, Skellor’s lack of knowledge and his subsequent actions, which he equated to those of an impulsive adolescent, had nearly been fatal to him. Admittedly, it would have been difficult for him to know about Cormac’s previous dealings with Dreyden, the erstwhile ruler of Elysium, but thus putting himself within range of weapons capable of obliterating him had been stupid. He remembered, almost with a wince, the pain he had suffered while his Jain substructure in the Occam Razor burned. Someone would pay for that.
Drawing closer to the ship, Skellor saw two people clad in reflective hotsuits heading down towards the plain of ash. It amused him that there were four people here searching for Jain artefacts. They would be very surprised, and very chagrined, when living Jain technology found them. Skellor pondered that irony.
Though that was not his purpose here, he needed information about what he carried inside him –the Jain technology that was mutating in a way somehow hidden from him –and that information was not something he could acquire from the Polity. However, one brief exchange between Cormac and Dragon –absorbed as part of his memory from recordings inside the Occam Razor –had told him where to obtain such information. Dragon knew about Jain technology, and somewhere –probably on the perimeter of human space –two Dragon spheres still lurked. But how to find them? As he and Crane began to climb the slope, Skellor reviewed what he thus far knew about Dragon.
The creature in its initial form of four conjoined spheres had been a probe, a data-gatherer sent by the Makers –a race of energy-based life forms located out in one of the Magellanic clouds. But it malfunctioned and started interacting with humanity, setting itself up as some sort of demigod on the planet Aster Colora. Upon delivering some obscure judgement, it had then apparently destroyed itself. But, as far as Skellor could work out, it had actually separated itself into four entities to surround and attack the Maker ship sent to retrieve or destroy it. The drastic events at Samarkand had then proceeded from there: one sphere destroyed by Cormac in the process. Events at Masada had since accounted for another sphere. From both farragos, Skellor could see that these entities liked to meddle in human affairs. Dragon now even had its own corporation operating in the Polity, and its own networks of humans coming under its control via the Dracocorp biotech augs. How these networks connected back to their controlling Dragon spheres was the only firm lead he had and, with this small piece of business out of the way, would be the one for him to pursue. But now . . . now it was time to look inside the survey vessel.
There was no special code to operate the outside door, just a simple inset handle easy to operate for someone in a hotsuit. Skellor had already observed the carrier shell in orbit above, and with an earlier probe he had discovered that neither the shell nor this survey vessel it had transported here were run by AI; therefore such a simple door mechanism confirmed for him that both shell and vessel were old and privately owned. He pulled the handle up and, as the door swung open, he waved Crane ahead of him. The Golem almost had to crouch to fit himself inside the airlock. Skellor followed, pushing up close to Crane and pulling the outer door closed. In a minute, the lock had filled with cooled air and the safeties preventing him opening the inner door cut out. Crane was the first to duck inside.
‘What have you forgotten now?’ asked someone, from further inside the ship.
Crane stood with his head bowed so as not to bang it against the ceiling. Skellor looked around. Here was the initial decontamination and rough-cleaning area, and there were no artefacts in the isolation tank. But, then, this four-man research team had not been here very long –Skellor had followed them out only a day after their departure. This team, he had learnt, consisted of three humans and one Golem. A woman, easily identifiable as not being the Golem, ducked through into the cabin, and froze.
‘Who the fuck are you?’ she managed.
‘Have you found anything yet?’
‘Fuck off!’
‘Unforgivable rudeness,’ said Skellor, placing his hand against the control panel for the airlock. From the Jain substructure inside him, he sent filaments searching, connecting and overriding the safety system. He pointed to the open airlock. ‘Mr Crane, put her in there.’
The woman had time only to let out a yelp and duck back a little way before Crane’s hand closed on her shoulder. She struggled and began screaming, and just then one of the men ducked through from the other direction, holding level a small gas-system pulse-gun.
‘Tell that thing to put her down,’ he demanded.
Skellor just turned and walked towards the man. Three shots slammed into his chest, opening smoking holes and flinging pieces of his Jain carapace across the deck. Reaching the man, he slapped the weapon away, grabbed him by the jacket, and almost negligently tossed him towards Crane, who caught hold of him in his other big hand.
‘Well, our friend must be one of the other two, so let’s go back outside,’ said Skellor.
The woman carried on screaming and fighting; the man tried reasoning, but he too soon started to scream once the outer lock was open. Skellor was surprised at the tenacity with which a person could hang on to life. Even with smoke pouring from their clothing, their skin melting and slewing away and contrails of flame whipping up and about their bodies, the two still tried to fight their way past Crane and back into the ship, which was filling with the same searing acidic air anyway.
‘Hey ho,’ said Skellor, as the two finally died and the heat began to blacken and contort them into ebony foetuses. ‘Let’s go find the others.’
–retroact 6 –
‘“Mission objective achieved” is all I’m getting,’ said Angelina, her fingers pressed against the bean-shaped aug behind her right ear.
‘What about visual? Aural?’ John Stanton asked.
‘Nothing.’ Angelina shook her head. ‘It won’t tell me anything more. It’s almost as if it’s shut down. We know where it will be anyway, so no problem there.’ Now turning to face Semper and Stanton, she said, ‘I’ll want you first to check that Stalek and that idiot Falco are both dead.’ And with that she waved the two men ahead of her.
Stanton closed his mouth on any further comments and tried to restrain his cynicism about this whole little outing. He drew his heavy pulse-gun from its insulated holster in his hotsuit. From his belt he detached a small adhesive mine and held it in his left hand. He was just as unenamoured with the idea of using a subverted Golem as were many others in the Pelters’ organization. Facing forwards, he and Semper now advanced.
Stalek had built his house on the equatorial belt of Huma, so it necessarily possessed a ceramic shell and thick, heavily insulated walls. At present that insulation only served the purpose of maintaining a comfortable internal temperature against the constant fifty degrees outside, since the resinous incendiary briar that constituted most of the surrounding jungle had yet to achieve ripeness. In
the distance, Stanton noted a column of smoke from where one patch of briar had reached that point in its growth where the sparks from its exploding seedpods ignited it. It was early, though. Later in the season, this entire continent would become an inferno: the briars burning down to provide plenteous ash in which the seeds could lie ready to germinate in the ensuing sooty rainstorms.
Semper studied the door’s palm lock, then let out a bark of laughter. He took a crowbar from his belt, jammed it under the lock, and levered the plate and attached console from the wall.
‘Is that a good idea?’ Stanton asked.
‘It’s a dummy,’ Semper explained. ‘Understandable really: he has to be able to get in and out wearing a hot-suit, so he can’t use something that operates by his palm print and DNA coding. Merely a simple input code.’
Taking a small console from his belt he unwound two optic cables terminating in interface clamps, which he now closed on two optic cables trailing from the back of the lock and into the wall. Then he simply waited while the device he still held did the job of safe-breaker for him. The seals on the circular door eventually whoomphed, and it hinged outwards to reveal an airlock and an inner door. Semper stared inside for a long moment, before turning to Stanton.
‘Now this I don’t like,’ he said. He stooped and picked up one of the many pieces of briar charcoal that were scattered on the ground, then tossed it into the lock. The thing that immediately dropped from the ceiling onto the charcoal was a wolf spider half a metre long –only it was a spider with metal bracings and hydraulic pistons augmenting its legs, and a more complicated arrangement of gleaming motors augmenting its obsidian fangs.
‘Jesus!’ Semper bellowed.
Stanton’s pulse-gun sputtered white light, hitting the creature mid-air as it leapt out at them. It slammed back against the jamb, hit the ground and, smoking, made to leap again at Semper. Angelina drew her own weapon and fired, complementing the shots Stanton was again putting into the creature. Twice more it leapt and their shots slammed it back. It only gave up when its organic body was reduced to a charcoal remnant inside its cyber-bracing skeleton.
‘Okay, Semper, the door,’ ordered Angelina.
Stanton kept his weapon pointed at the cyborg spider as it slowly curled up its legs like a fist. Semper took rather longer over the true palm lock operating the second door, but soon they were stepping into the brightness of Stalek’s home.
‘Stanton, find his house system and neutralize it,’ Angelina instructed, herself making no move to go further into this strange home.
The big man moved on, rounding furniture seemingly fashioned from the carapaces of huge crustaceans, while keeping an eye on the large plants contained in pots scattered throughout the room –plants whose beautifully coloured giant daffodil heads turned to track his progress. Reaching the further wall, he studied something set into it that looked more like a work of weird art than any technology, then stepped back raising his weapon and blasted it, his shots punching molten holes through the gleaming metalwork and oddly shaped touch panels and screens. The bright lights flickered briefly as they dropped from the control of a house AI to some backup safety system. Turning, Stanton fired twice at a plant lowering its lime-green and purple striped head towards him, severing its stalk. As the head dropped to the ground, it protruded a red tongue coated with small metal hooks.
‘About as safe as we’re gonna get,’ he observed.
Angelina pointed to a wooden door to Stanton’s right. ‘We go there –up to the attic. That’s where Stalek did his work.’
She followed, giving the plants a wide berth but staying well back so he and Semper would encounter first anything nasty, Stanton noted, as he operated the simple latch and opened the door. The stairs winding up into the attic were lit by biolights –yet another sign of Stalek’s attraction towards exotic technologies. Stanton eyed the spidery creatures with their glowing sugar-bag bodies, then glanced back at Angelina.
‘Why the hit on him?’ he asked abruptly. ‘Seems to me he was providing you with some useful toys.’
‘Not really your concern,’ Angelina replied. ‘But he was becoming increasingly unstable, and some of his work was of questionable . . . quality.’
‘So you have this lunatic subvert a Golem Twenty-five android for you?’
‘Just get up the stairs, mercenary,’ Angelina spat.
Stanton nodded to himself and began to climb, thinking how Angelina and her brother Arian were not the best people to make judgements on the stability of others. However, Stanton was not about to push his luck too far –the money of these terrorist rich kids was still good.
From the topmost landing, four wooden doors led off into different rooms, but Angelina, coming up closer behind Semper and Stanton, pointed to the one directly ahead. ‘The rest also contain various workshops, but he uses that one for any final assembly.’
Adhesive mine still to hand, Stanton nodded to Semper, who shoved open the door in front of him. Stanton stepped into the room and then slid to one side, crouching down, pulse-gun aimed and adhesive mine held palm outwards in readiness. Semper did the same, moving to the other side of the door. Stanton noted that the man was just as trusting as himself: as well as brandishing a pulse-gun, he held a small EM grenade.
No action. Stanton slowly stood upright and surveyed the room.
Stalek’s and Falco’s bodies were not visible, but Stanton tracked the trails of blood over to the Cleanviro booth, and guessed where they might be.
‘Find the fucking control module,’ said Angelina, obviously shaken by what she was seeing.
Stanton left Semper to go over to where wrecked computers and other equipment had been stacked in a corner of the room. Himself, he did not intend to turn his back on the room’s other occupant. The Golem had pulled a chair up in front of a table. It wore a long coat and a wide-brimmed hat. Before it on the table, several objects were laid out as if it was involved in some intricate game of chess with an unseen opponent. Those objects consisted of various tools and pieces of hardware, a small rubber dog and two other gruesome items. While Stanton watched, the Golem reached out one brass hand, clad in a blood-crusted fingerless woollen glove, and carefully turned the head of the aviapt so that it faced Stalek’s head. It then looked up and gazed at Stanton with midnight eyes.
‘Found it.’ Semper came over and handed a small console to Angelina.
The woman’s hand was shaking, Stanton noted, as she took the console and detached from it the small black pebble of a control module. She closed her eyes for a second, concentrating, then slipped the module into one of her belt pouches.
‘Stand up . . . Mr Crane,’ she said finally.
The Golem stood and stepped aside, as if ready to come around the table. Stanton took a step back. Jesus, the thing was big! Standing there, it seemed to fill the entire room. Stanton estimated it to be at least two and a half metres tall.
‘Hold it there!’ Angelina yelled.
The Golem froze.
‘You will follow us, doing no more than I instruct,’ she said, with enforced calm in her voice. She turned to Stanton. ‘Put that mine of yours on its chest, over its brain case.’
Stanton was not so sure he wanted to get that close, but he obeyed. As he stepped in, the Golem abruptly reached up and undid the top buttons on its coat, exposing its brassy chest. Stanton placed the mine carefully, hoping that hand movement had been at Angelina’s behest. The Golem buttoned up its coat again.
‘Okay, let’s go,’ she said.
The Golem reached down and closed its hand over one of the severed heads.
‘Leave that!’
The hand closed and the head imploded with a dull thud, spewing bloody gobbets of brain across the table-top.
‘Follow!’
As Angelina turned away, Stanton saw the Golem’s hand snap out and take up the small rubber dog, which it slipped quickly into its pocket. He made no comment on this, nor when the Golem turned its face towards him and half
closed one eye in what might have been a wink. With Semper at his side, he just followed the killing machine out, glad that the thing was walking at Angelina’s back rather than his own.
–retroact ends –
‘A message in a bottle would be the nearest analogy.’
Cormac chewed over the words as they crossed the now empty chamber to the Flint runcible. Before reaching the dais, he halted and glanced round at his companions. Gant stood beside Mika, as if ready to prevent her escape. Perhaps that was because it had taken so long to get her moving. The result of this delay was now stacked on a gravsled that Thorn guided by a remote-control device: the woman’s luggage.
The Flint AI had already emptied the place, and Cormac knew that it was training just about every detector available on his companions. It had shut down all computer access other than the voice link to itself, and there were no robots present –nothing that Jain technology could subvert.
‘But there’s no record of the Vulture having landed there?’ he suggested.
‘No record of that ship’s presence, true,’ replied the Flint AI. ‘But three ships did land that could easily have been the Vulture. Also, Viridian did detect a U-space signature unrelated to any ships that landed in the designated areas. The most likely explanation is that Skellor has installed chameleonware on the Vulture, and brought it down somewhere else.’
