by Neal Asher
One of the fourth-stage sleers kept still. The other swung its head from side to side, as if excited to be about the chase but not yet taken off the leash, then abruptly it surged forwards and bore down on Mr Crane. The Golem immediately turned and ran full pelt into a narrow side canyon. Like some giant charging bull, the monster had difficulty turning in after him. Kicking up rocks and debris as its huge weight bore down on four feet, it skidded and crashed into the side canyon’s wall as it attempted to pursue him inside. It paused for a moment, perhaps puzzled as to why he had entered this blind alley, and was now standing, perfectly motionless, at the far end. But the delay was only brief- then it went in after him.
Crane just waited and watched as the monster bore down on him. His next actions would be dictated by a minuscule fraction of one fragment of his wrecked mind. The sleer was big, it was heavy, and its eating utensils could certainly damage him—therefore he must avoid them. He squatted suddenly, and as the sleer drew close, he straightened up his legs with the full force of their industrial torque motors, leaping high above and to one side of the creature. It slammed into the canyon wall, shattered sandstone and dust raining down all about it. Mr Crane’s lace-up boot came down briefly on a narrow ledge, then he bounced back out and down, landing astride behind the sleer’s head, which it was shaking furiously from side to side as it backed up the way it had come.
The beast then froze as it processed this new input into its already stunned brain. Crane helped it in making a decision by closing his thighs hard enough to start cracking the forward carapace. The enraged sleer began to buck and thrash its body from side to side. Its ovipositor, whirling like a drill bit, stabbed again and again over above Crane, but the sleer could not twist it low enough to strike him. Rolling up his sleeves, he then stabbed the blade of one hand into the back of the monster’s head—three times—to break through the thick carapace. The sleer rolled, trying to dislodge him, but as it came back upright, its passenger was still in place, just having lost his hat. He rubbed a hand over his bare brassy skull, then thrust that same hand deep inside the sleer’s head, and methodically began to tear out its contents.
The sleer tried smashing its back against the canyon wall to dislodge him—failed. Crane continued excavating glistening nodules and scarves of pink flesh, rubbery masses of tubes and handfuls of quivering jelly. Eventually the creature’s movements became spasmodic, when not painfully slow. It walked sideways up towards one canyon wall, leant there as if resting, then walked sideways towards the other wall… but never made it. Suddenly the life went out of the beast as if Crane had pulled its power plug. Its legs gave way and, with a sigh, it collapsed.
After dismounting, Mr Crane used sand to clean his hands, rolling the gore away in balls just like the sleers he had watched earlier had shed sand mixed with their mating juices. He took some time doing this, occasionally glancing back towards the main canyon. Once his hands were pristine again, he used the edge of a sulerbane leaf to scrape much of the ichorous mess off his coat. Only then did he look around for his hat.
Seemingly undamaged by its brief departure from Crane’s head, it was lying over by the far wall of the canyon, where first-stage sleers had bored numerous burrows. He walked over, stooped and picked it up, straightened it and brushed away the dust. Only as he was placing it on his brass skull did he notice the blue eye gleaming in shadow. Then the great cobra thing hurtled out and slammed into his chest, bore him to the ground and pinned him there, smoke boiling away around it as if it were the contact head of a giant spot welder. Crane struggled to rise, then slumped back like the sleer he had just killed. The Dragon pseudopod remained connected to his chest for some time, then, as if having thoroughly drained its victim, slid back into the sleer burrows.
Crane remained motionless, deep down inside himself.
* * * *
There were all sorts of interesting and complex compounds floating about in the air—the pollution produced by a nascent industrial society. But, as he walked through the streets of the Overcity, Skellor also noticed oddities that could only result from such industry ascending from a basis of a previously acquired body of knowledge. The phocells were a prime example: photoactive electricity was not something you stumbled across in a society where people still used oil lamps and candles. Another such example was invisible to the few citizens still up and about this night, but not so to Skellor. He tracked the neat line of red-shifted photons spearing up from the tower below which he now stood. This edifice was a steel column topped by a small dome, from which protruded the cylinder of an optical telescope. Yet certainly it was not that item which was producing the laser beam.
Still invisible, Skellor entered the building and began to climb a winding stair. A ticking, hissing sound followed him up as his creatures first walked to heel, then spread out at his silent command. Here he found some night people whose work concerned the sky and the stars.
‘A message laser,’ he observed, standing over a woman in a corridor convulsing as an aug insect bored into her skull. All around him, his creatures were taking over the inhabitants of the tower, one after another, and through them he was tracking everybody down. Two mechanics in grease-stained ankle-length coats fell in behind him as he came to the upper viewing chamber. His creatures instantly took a man and woman as they pored over their calculations, but the old man standing, thickly wrapped against the cold, gazing through the telescope’s traversal slot, he left alone for a moment. Someone had bolted the message laser to the side of the telescope, probably because the positioning mechanisms of the telescope could aim it accurately.
The beam itself, Skellor now knew, having extracted the information from many minds, was produced by a ruby wrapped in one of the magnesium bulbs whose production process it had taken this man, Stollar, ten years to perfect. It was also through this device that they hoped to bring down one of the landing craft from the Ogygian, though Skellor doubted their primitive computing powers were up to the task.
Stollar turned. ‘Who…What is…?’ He looked in horror at his assistants, took in their vacant expressions, the things attached to the sides of their heads, and others of their kind swarming about the floor. ‘You’re the one it warned Tanaquil about.’
With a nod, Skellor acknowledged the speed of the man’s mind. ‘It?’ he asked.
‘The sand dragon.’
That came as a rude reminder, almost like a slap to wake him. Skellor focused his attention on Crane’s control unit, and only then realized how smoothly it had been taken out of his control. There was no contact now, no contact with the Golem at all. But something was still subverting the control unit inside Skellor himself- some subtle infiltration.
‘You are controlling all their minds.’ Stollar’s horror was intense, his face chalk white, as he stepped up onto the first rung of one of the telescope’s maintenance ladders, to try to get further away from Skellor.
Skellor had no further time for the man. He shifted Jain substructure inside himself, coughing at the reluctance of the device to move—his eyes watering in reaction to this thing caught in his throat.
‘How many do you control?’ Hysteria now in Stollar’s voice.
Skellor released his hold on the aug creatures, and they scuttled towards the other man. He coughed, hacked, then spat up the black stone of the control module. ‘Damn you, Dragon.’ He looked up in time to see Stollar stepping back through the traversal slot, trying to claw away the creature attached to one side of his head. He fell. The link was just going in when Stollar hit the unyielding metal of the platform below. His death was instantaneous but not, unfortunately, sufficiently thorough. Skellor turned to go and make his way down. He wouldn’t waste a mind like that—all that was required was a few repairs.
— retroact 14 -
Crane dropped from the otter-hunter’s outrigger and hit the copper-salt sea with the curtailed splash of a lead fishing weight. Foam white surrounded him briefly, then he was sinking fast, trailing large lens-shaped b
ubbles made by air escaping his clothing. The bottom of his coat flared out around his legs, and he clamped his right hand firmly on his hat to hold it in place. Looking down, he momentarily thought he was seeing the bottom, until light reflected from scales in the green mass below him as the shoal of adapted whitebait swirled away. Then, finally and abruptly, the bottom came up with a crump against his hobnailed soles. Glittering silt spread in a cloudy ring from his impact point, then quickly settled. The seabed here was almost entirely composed of shell fragments and whole shells: trumpet shells with their distinctive banding, the bone-white carapaces of pearl crabs like miniature human skulls, iridescent penny oysters, sharp scythe shells, and the occasional dull-bronze gleam of dark-otter bone. Taking his bearing from his internal compass, Mr Crane turned until he was facing in the right direction, and began striding towards the distant shore.
‘You must be merciless and swift. Kill anyone who gets in your way—they don’t matter—but be sure to get Alston.’
In one fragment of Crane’s mind: the perfectly recorded image of a man behind a pedestal-mounted harpoon gun, him swinging the gun around and firing, braided wire snaking out after the barbed missile with a hiss like cold flesh dropped into scalding oil. Enough for face recognition.
‘I bet that smarts, you little fucker.’
Enough for voice recognition.
Complex pheromones, a fingerprint of the exudations of one human life—Crane even knew how Alston smelt. Pelter had not stinted on providing the information for recognition.
In another fragment of the Golem’s mind: a detailed library describing the numerous functions of the human body—how it lived—and in mirror image the numerous ways Crane could halt those functions. There was no emotional baggage attached. It comprised no more than a dry scientific description of how to turn off the human machine.
Pelter’s order acted across these two fragments. In the first: how to locate one specific human. In the second: how to cause that same human to cease functioning. ‘Anyone who gets in your way’ being unspecific was more problematic. And interaction with other partially disconnected fragments coloured Crane’s basic actions. ‘Gets in your way’ depended on Crane’s location. Pursuing order, Crane surmised: sea>island/ anyone>Alston.
He decided to be methodical.
The bottom abruptly dropped away and soon Crane was stumbling down a slope as if all this time he had been walking on the spoil heap from a seafood plant. Then he stepped from shell onto the clay bottom of a channel, sinking up to his calves before his boots hit something firm. The surge of current from one side carried silt in a jet stream away from where he stepped, shooting to his left and out of sight behind more mounded shell, but this current caused him no more problem than having to hold his hat in place. At each step, tubeworms emerged from the clay and gasped out their feeding heads like white daffodil flowers, as if Crane’s weight was bearing down on some soft, hidden, communal body lying underneath.
The dark-otter threw a shadow before it from the glittering surface above as it came hurtling up the channel against the current, probably tracking the cause of the silt disturbance. It was the limbless pelagic form, black as coal and ten metres from the tip of its long tail to the massive carp-gape of its toothless mouth. It dipped its head towards Crane and, perhaps knowing the shape he bore was poison to it, then swung up and circled above him. Many of its kind had, over the years, made themselves ill by trying to eat human corpses deliberately dumped into the sea precisely to teach that point. If it did attack him, Crane would define it as part of the mentioned ‘anyone’. But the creature soon lost interest and continued up the channel and out of sight.
Reaching the other bank, Crane climbed for ten metres up through tumbling shell the currents had mounded along the rim of an underwater stone plateau. This plateau provided a more stable environment for the life that preferred to inhabit the shallower waters near the island. To his right a fanfare of trumpet shells jutted and waved above a bed of penny oysters. Single kelp-like trees spread canopies in the waves, fracturing the sunset light, and in their tentacular branches pearl crabs fluoresced like Christmas lights. Slightly to the left of his current course, one such tree was particularly bright with nacreous luminescence. Crane changed his course to bring him there—this delay was acceptable as Pelter had given no time limits, only the vague instruction to be ‘swift’.
Caught, hanging in the convoluted branches, legs dangling down the spiral trunk, the burned and broken corpse seemed a crucified pearly king, or some macabre decoration in a casino town. Crane recognized Semper only after a recognition program propagated across five of his mind fragments, which connected to his library of human biology and physiology, and Crane then worked out how the man had looked. He reached up and tugged at one skinless foot. Semper dropped from the sea tree and, trailing pearl crabs and a small shoal of steel-blue fry, slowly sank to the bottom. What Alston had done to this man, Crane recognized. How could he not recognize Serban Kline’s gift to himself? How could he fail to recognize that thing he had fragmented himself to escape? He moved on.
What was it that coloured his actions when he finally reached the island shore? The emulation of the emotion—or rage itself?
— retroact ends -
16
A spaceship, even a clunker centuries old, is a complex and valuable piece of hardware, so most owners of such, including private individuals, ECS and the many other organizations gathered under the Polity AI umbrella, work on the principle of ‘If it ain’t broke don’t fix it’ and ‘If it works don’t throw it away.’ That is the reason for the wide variety of interstellar and in-system ships now prevalent. It is why you will see old ion-drive landing craft operating alongside craft exclusively using antigravity — and every evolution of landing craft in between. In interplanetary space, you’ll find ancient ion-drive liners operating beside the most modern fusion-drive craft, great ramscoop cargo haulers, or survey craft propelled by chemical rockets. Crossing interstellar space are ships centuries different in design using all the aforementioned engines for their in-system work, plus radically different U-space drives, too. In the most modern ships, that drive will be a discrete machine contained at the core. In the older ships, balanced U-space engines are in dual, triform or quadrate format. These are normally positioned outside the ship, on piers, to distance the mind-bending drive energies from the ship’s crew and passengers — who often need also to travel either in hibernation or sedated.
— From How It Is by Gordon
The plain was an ancient seabed scattered with salt pans left as, over many centuries, the sea had evaporated. Weathering had revealed fossil remains, boulders containing crystals of smoky quartz like inset windows to a cold furnace, and fields of stones sieved out of the ground by the perpetual wind. Arden, during her long sojourn here, had journeyed a great deal within the perimeter allowed her. She had found a wonderful fossilized twelve-metre ancestor of an apek, all glittering iron pyrites and opalized carapace, and, acceding to her request, Dragon had sealed it under a layer of some rough substance similar to chainglass. She had found diamonds, emeralds, star rubies and sapphires, as well as other nameless gems and, with the disquietingly organic mechanisms Dragon manufactured for her inside itself, had cut and polished them. For a woman whose lifetime areas of study had been xenobiology and xenogeology, it had been an interesting time, and only as a matter of principle had she regularly protested against Dragon’s imprisonment of her. She supposed her patience stemmed from having been born within the Polity. With all the benefits of a genetically enhanced body and a seemingly limitless lifespan, what was the hurry?
Because of Arden’s long and detailed study of the plain, she knew precisely when she reached the area Dragon had excavated and then replaced above itself—not because the land level was higher here, as there were many such areas across the plain, but because of the meticulousness of the geology. The boulders with their quartz inclusions were placed just so, the stone fields looked as
if they had been raked, and single fossils were placed artfully on dusty surfaces. There seemed something akin to a Japanese stone garden about it all, or of some display in a Polity museum. Trudging back from the edge of the plain, her pack of light camping equipment slung from one shoulder, she recognized a particular boulder with a seemingly wind-excavated hollow under one side of it, and veered from this signpost to head for her home—the one she possessed here anyway. Then she jumped in surprise, dropping a lump of pale yellow beryl she had just found, when one of Dragon’s pterodactyl heads slid out from underneath that same boulder and rose above her with a hissing roar.
‘No Jain, just Crane,’ it said cryptically, gazing back the way she had come.
‘And what’s that supposed to mean?’ Arden hissed, stooping to pick up the fallen beryl. ‘You said this Skellor guy is loaded with the stuff.’
The head swung towards her. ‘He is, but the Golem android he has sent here as his ambassador, though showing signs that it once contained Jain mycelia, is now free of that parasite.’
‘Ah, the “metalskin android” Vulture mentioned? He’s called Crane?’
‘Mr Crane—he’s very specific about that.’
‘Should be interesting,’ Arden opined.
Dragon blinked. ‘You intend to remain?’
‘You want me to go, just when things are livening up?’
‘Maybe too lively,’ said Dragon. ‘Polity ships now.’
‘Here for that Skellor?’
‘The ship is called the Jack Ketch’
It took Arden a moment to dredge her memory for what that name meant. She remembered the historical context, and rumours of other things—hints of AI atrocities, brief and bloody annexations and border wars. But, then, it gave some Polity citizens a bit of a buzz to talk of such things—it was like sitting round the campfire telling ghost stories.
