by Gavin Smith
‘Go and find her for me,’ he finally rasped.
‘Dad, she’s just moved out. A lot of people do it.’ She had known he wanted her to do this downstairs.
‘No word, nothing,’ he told her. That’s because she doesn’t give a shit about any of us, Beth thought but said nothing. ‘She would have phoned – she’s a good girl.’ He might as well have added ‘and you’re not’, Beth thought. She had heard it anyway.
‘Have you tried phoning her?’ Beth asked.
He shook his head. ‘No number,’ he managed. ‘She said she would call when she got a phone.’
Beth knew for a fact that Talia couldn’t live without her phone. There was no chance she didn’t have one. It just wasn’t important for her to call her father. After all, what use was a poor, broken-down, dying old man?
‘Look, Dad. London’s a big place. I wouldn’t even know where to begin.’
Beth was surprised when her father reached forward and grabbed her arm. It felt like a skeleton had grabbed her, but for all that his grip was still strong.
‘What is it with you? Why can you only hurt this family? And believe me, you have no idea how true that is!’ Beth closed her eyes, wondering if this was when her father was going to blame her for her mother’s death, but he let go. She opened her eyes and he was struggling to his feet. He brushed away her attempts at help.
‘Look, I’m not going to London but I’ll phone a few people, okay?’ she told him. He just nodded as he made his way towards the door.
Beth was angry with herself. She was angry because she was concerned despite herself. When she had seen Talia’s pale, spite-filled pretty face from the dock, she had sworn she was never going to help her again. Let her die choking on her own blood and vomit face down in the street somewhere. But after calling around she was starting to share her father’s worries.
Talia had not gone to London; she had gone to Portsmouth. That was good. It was a smaller city and she should be easier to find. She had been in semi-regular contact with her remaining friends in Bradford, those she had not used up, until a few weeks ago. Talia had gone down to meet some goth, or whatever they were called now, a pretty boy called Clark who Beth vaguely knew. She had managed to get his number out of one of Talia’s friends and called him. He had given her a mouthful of abuse and hung up, refusing to answer any more of her calls.
However, another of Beth’s friends, Billy, who also worked the doors, had said that there had been some Internet porn clip doing the rounds recently. He was not alone in thinking that the girl in it looked a lot like Talia. He had not gone into details and Beth had not asked, but he had said awkwardly it was some pretty raw stuff. Billy had been one of those guys more than a little bit in love with her sister but was too nice for Talia to be interested. Billy had gone round to see some more of Talia’s friends in person. It sounded like he had been not quite so nice this time. Two hours later he had phoned Beth back with an address in Portsmouth.
‘I have some money saved from my disability,’ her dad said from the doorway to the living room. She had been sitting on the stairs talking to Billy on the phone.
‘This is it, Dad. This is the last time I try and help her.’
‘Just bring her back to me before I die.’
She doesn’t care! Beth wanted to scream. And you’ve always been dying, haven’t you, Dad? It’s a wonder that Mum beat you to it. The only thing Talia is interested in is using you in her ‘poor me’ stories. Instead Beth just nodded.
In her room Beth packed. Clothes, soap, toothpaste, deodorant, ratty old towel, sleeping bag, all went into the army-surplus kitbag with the Celtic knotwork patterns drawn on it with marker pen. It was not much. Beth knelt in front of her bed staring at the kitbag, trying to make a decision. Finally she reached under the bed and pulled the box out. Opening it, she laid each item on the bed carefully. Brass knuckles, not the ones she had used on Mikey, her old ones that had lived in her pocket when she was working the doors. A pickaxe handle, one end with a bike chain wrapped tightly around it. A Balisong knife, often incorrectly called a butterfly knife. Beth had confiscated it from some kid when she had been working. She had kept it because she recognised a high-quality blade when she saw one. Finally she drew her great-grandfather’s First World War bayonet out of its sheath and looked at the old blade. She had stolen it years ago because nobody else cared about it, and she had not wanted Talia to sell it. The blade needed work, but that was okay – she would take her whetstone with her.
She packed all of them. If Talia had properly done it this time, was in real trouble, then she would have need of them. She was off to try and help her sister again. She was armed. This was how she had ended up in prison.
Beth put her leather jacket on, slung the kitbag over her shoulder and headed down the stairs. She did not even say goodbye. Let him hear the door slam on another daughter, she thought.
She walked out onto wet streets surrounded by grey stone.
McGurk leaned heavily on his cane and looked at the bloody and naked girl lying on top of the rubble, dust still settling on her. He was sure she was still alive: her tits were moving.
‘Well fuck,’ he said, his strong Portsmouth accent unmistakable. He could hear sirens in the distance. ‘Put her in the motor.’
‘Boss?’ Markus asked. A house blowing up was bound to draw the attraction of the police.
McGurk turned to look at Markus, who looked away from him, unable to meet his eyes. Total obedience, that’s what it’s all about, McGurk thought as Markus went to pick the girl up. Besides, it was his house and he wanted to know what had happened, and he thought that maybe she was the one Arbogast had told him about, the one he had come to see.
McGurk climbed into the back of the BMW and felt the boot slam.
‘Before the Old Bill shows up, Markus,’ he said, letting just enough impatience creep into his voice to worry the other man.
4
A Long Time After the Loss
It took a long time to convince the Black Swan’s systems that the mating with the other ship/thing was safe enough to open the airlock. The docking system was too strange, too organic. Eventually Nulty had to override the system himself.
They were not shy. One of them was waiting in the docking tube for them. He looked like an eccentric soft machine sculpt. Except the alienness seemed less forced. He – they were pretty sure it was a he despite a degree of androgyny – had pale skin with lines traced over it. Eden magnified her vision. They weren’t lines but the outline of delicate scales. His eyes were black pools, no visible iris or pupil. His neck seemed to palpate slightly and his head, utterly hairless, looked swollen. Webbed fingers with black sharp-looking nails were wrapped around a staff which looked like it was made of a material somewhere between bone and pearl. He wore a scaled robe of silver-coloured material that seemed to move of its own accord.
When he opened his mouth, they recognised the noises as words; the syntax was familiar but even so it strained their neunonics’ translation routines. Behind the strange, nominally human, man they could see a soft pearl-like luminescence. It smelled, not unpleasantly, of the sea, and they could hear the sound of water gently lapping against something. Their suit sensors showed that the atmosphere was apparently breathable. If there were any toxins the sensors couldn’t pick them up. The sensors also told them that the atmosphere was warm and damp.
‘I am Ezard,’ their translation subroutines finally came back. ‘I am the speaker. You are welcome here.’
‘First contact?’ Brett asked the others over the interface.
‘He’s human, or was once,’ Eden replied.
‘Follow me,’ Ezard said. The translation was coming faster now. He turned and walked down the tube of flesh. With a degree of trepidation, the four followed. Eldon was last. He waited until the Swan’s airlock closed behind them and then sent a neunonic command to set off the viral canister that Brett had attached to his suit. He had expected some sort of warning siren and to t
hen be torn apart but nothing happened.
‘The environment is clean here. You can take your helmet suits off if you wish, although we will not be offended if you don’t,’ Ezard was saying when Eldon caught up.
‘It’s as much for your protection as ours,’ Brett was explaining through the translator interface with the suit. ‘We come from a culture with a great deal of nano-technology pollution.’ They walked out into an open area. ‘Seeders.’ There was awe in his voice.
Eldon looked around, struggling to cope with what he saw. He did not even notice that they had lost contact with the Swan.
It was clear that, allowing for the thickness of the hull/skin, the chamber was as wide as the craft and almost as long, though either end seemed to be packed with interconnected biomechanics that were neither quite machines nor internal organs.
The chamber – Eldon struggled not to think of it as a wet cave with ribs – reminded him of the texture of the inside of his own mouth. The suit sensors told of a warm wind blowing through. The wind seemed to blow one way and then be sucked back. There was no visible floor; it was mostly clear water. The same omnipresent pearl-like luminescence that illuminated the rest of the cavern lit the shallows. There were much darker areas that were obviously a lot deeper.
The water was broken by islands which looked like a mixture of bone and some unknown type of flesh. On the islands there were more people like Ezard. They appeared to have binary male and female sexes and only a very few of them were clothed as Ezard was.
‘I assure you it did not look like this when we started. It was far more utilitarian. We sculpted this over the many generations that we’ve lived within the Mother,’ Ezard told them.
‘Where are you from?’ Eden asked, awe in her voice.
‘Earth,’ Ezard answered.
‘You don’t happen to know where it is, do you?’ Eldon asked.
‘If it exists still it will not be as it was.’
Eden glanced at the others questioningly.
‘They could know so much,’ Brett said over the interface.
‘Yes, alive they would be of incalculable worth to the uplifted races but nothing to us,’ Eldon told him angrily.
‘Boss, Brett may be right. We can’t get away with this.’ Eden said.
‘Just shut the fuck up and think about the money. Look at them – they’re not right.’
‘They’ve just evolved to fit the environment,’ Eden said.
Ezard turned to look at them. ‘I cannot express how glad we are to see you. We have been trapped in this realm too long. We want to meet the rest of humanity. Can you take us out of the red sky?’
Eldon sent the command from his neunonics and his suit visor opened. He breathed in the air. He, like the rest of the crew, had immunised themselves against the particular flavour of viral they were using. If you used virals you hadn’t protected yourself against, then you were a fool who deserved to die, in his opinion.
‘We’ll be glad to help.’ He ignored the demands to know what the fuck he was doing over the interface. He knew with his long life he must have picked up all sorts of nano-infections that his cheap nano-screens could barely control. Time to spread them around, he thought. A plea of ignorance might help if they got caught.
Nulty was still picking up the sensor glitch. Eldon had been right: there had to be something there. Nulty did not like that and was running the signal through every filter he could think of, but the interference of Red Space was preventing him from gathering any more information. It seemed like another strange field reading, not dissimilar but not the same as the weird readings he was getting off the thing they were docked to. A thing he was more and more sure was some kind of S-tech ship.
He had expected to lose contact with the boarding crew but that did not mean that Nulty liked it. He wondered if they were being torn apart by feral Seeder servitors. He could pilot the Swan if he had to, though he was not sure about the bridge drive. The issue was the docking tube. It wasn’t a known tech interface. It seemed attached to the Swan like a leech.
Eventually they all followed Eldon’s lead and opened their visors, making the suits recede from their faces. Melia was the last.
‘It smells of fish,’ she observed. ‘I’m hungry.’
The bio-sculpted inhabitants of the ship/thing Ezard referred to as Mother were all staring at them, their expressions unreadable. Eden could not shake the feeling that they were communicating in some way. She had watched one of them crawl to a swollen nipple-like growth on the wall of the chamber and suck on it. Moments later she had sunk to the ground in what looked like a narcotic stupor.
Ezard had said little. He had just let them wander, as they wanted.
‘When you feel safe, when you are happy, we should discuss if you would be prepared to help us leave this place.’
Eldon had just nodded.
‘Call me when you need me.’ Ezard had then dived off the smooth bone/flesh island into one of the deeper pools. He glided though the water, propelled by a rippling movement in his cloak. Eden was not sure if it was technology, biology or some symbiosis of both.
Brett was looking despondent. Their attempted genocide was weighing heavily on him. He was wandering towards the subjective front of the craft, approaching the biomechanical machinery/organs. In front of the wall of machinery/organs there was what looked to be some kind of web made of a fine, delicate version of the same material as Ezard’s staff. In the centre of the web was a cocoon of the same material. It glowed with an inner light and something about it suggested a feminine quality.
Brett stood looking at it for a while. The others were some way back sitting on one of the islands, not sure what to do while they waited for genocide to take place.
‘We should be heading back,’ Melia said over the interface.
‘If it happens it’ll happen quick,’ Eldon replied, still angry at what he saw as betrayal by the licensed concubine.
‘We’ve no idea what effect it will have on their altered physiology,’ Eden pointed out. ‘If Nulty’s right and this is S-tech, then who knows how they could have augmented themselves.’
‘So what? We just make our excuses and leave?’ Eldon asked.
‘They don’t seem armed,’ Eden said. ‘But I don’t fancying holding off a small civilisation with four disc guns, yeah?’
Brett looked down. He was surprised to see a dolphin looking at him, similar to those that worked with the Church. Except it was not quite a dolphin. Where the Church dolphins had waldos, this one had tentacles. Where the Church dolphins used interface to communicate, this one appeared to have a human mouth growing out of its neck. The creature looked old, its skin cracked and covered in growths.
It was staring straight at Brett from about eight feet down in the clear water. A shadow passed over it and with a flick of its tail it dived down into a tunnel that led into the machinery/organs.
Ezard all but leaped out of the water to land on the island next to Brett. The black pools of his eyes made him difficult to read, but Brett was pretty sure that he was staring at the cocoon with an expression of reverence.
‘What is it?’ Brett asked. He now spoke the same anachronistic version of Known Space common that Ezard did, the translation subroutine having learned it fully and meshed it with his neunonics. Effectively the language had been downloaded into his brain. Though Brett was pretty sure he had heard the others here speak a different language, one that sounded a little like sea life communicating. He had heard sounds like that in immersion programmes. Brett reckoned it would require modifications to their voice boxes to allow them to make the sounds he had heard.
‘She,’ Ezard corrected. He seemed to be struggling to explain concepts with the linguistic tools he had. ‘She is a conduit, a translator. The Mother speaks through her because she is of the Mother’s line. When we are in the real, maybe she will hatch, become like a god. She is the link between them in the past and us now.’
Brett did not understand but found s
omething beautiful in what Ezard was saying. More and more he was sure that he did not want to kill these people.
‘Look, Ezard, there’s something I have to tell you,’ he said. His handsome face was in turmoil as he struggled with his betrayal. He liked and trusted his companions but his loyalty to them was outweighed by the magnitude of the crime they were about to commit. Ezard regarded him with an expression that managed to be both expectant and inscrutable.
Tentacles shot out of the water and wrapped around Brett. He was ripped off his feet and dragged into the water before the others had a chance to respond. Ezard dived into the water after him.
The panic that came from submersion was just an ancient race memory. Brett had more than enough oxygen in his system to survive for a reasonable amount of time underwater. The grip of the dolphin’s tentacles was strong but not crushing. Still, as he struggled to get free, the tentacles might as well have been steel cables.
The dolphin moved with incredible rapidity through the water towards the tunnel that Brett had seen him disappear into earlier. Except now it looked less like a tunnel and more like a sphincter.
His neunonics sounded an alarm as the sensors on his skin, which he used to understand pheromones when dealing with insects, picked up an unknown secretion. The sphincter closed behind them.
Brett found himself being dragged through massive and very alien internal organs that seemed to pulse with their own life. There was the sensation of going deeper and deeper, though whether that was real or just fear, Brett couldn’t be sure.
He tried the interface and was more than a little disturbed that he could not contact the others. Whatever prevented them from contacting the Swan obviously had the same effect between different sections of the ship/thing, whatever it was. Brett did not like the totality of the signal block either.
The dolphin breached onto a small bone-like alcove that looked different to the other areas – dark, lacking in life. The organs around the alcove looking diseased to Brett. The tentacles dragged him out of the water and laid him next to the prone dolphin.
