The Voyage of the Sable Keech s-2

by Neal Asher

  ‘Stop interfering. Go away.’

  But the young mind kept asking questions—kept probing. The old mind tried to shut out the babble as it again returned to introspection.

  If it loaded itself to crystal, memcorded itself, would it truly continue? Even humans, whose technology this was, were undecided. The reifications were a prime example of this indecision. They believed the body sacred, and that there could be no real life without it. They claimed their cult was not a religion, for they did not believe in souls or an afterlife, yet the foundation of their cult was just as irrational. The mind itself badly wanted to live, but was now truly divided over the issue: both accepting the inevitability of physical death and wanting to load to crystal, yet not accepting Death in any form. The latter attitude arose from the more physical aspect of it, and the most visceral and emotional. Reality did not impinge one wit. That part of the mind railed against Death, wanted to bring it down and sting it into oblivion. It viewed Death as some entity that needed to be fought, as a personification like the Grim Reaper which, if defeated, would remove any ending to life. That part was insane, but nevertheless its presence deadlocked the mind’s more logical side. Internalized, the dispute would not end, would only become the source of a greater splitting of the mind’s mentality.

  ‘I know you‘re going after sprine. You’ll get yourself killed, then the AIs will restrict us further.’

  Despite its concerns for its own mortality, this evinced amusement in the old mind.

  ‘Naive,’ it told the other.

  ‘No, just not senile,’ the youngster spat back.

  The old mind’s amusement grew.

  ‘Don’t do this. Recall your agent,’ the young mind begged.

  The old mind groped for internal perception, located some information in partially dislocated memory, and showed reams of code to the younger mind.

  ‘What? What?’

  ‘Child, it is the genome of the Spatterjay leech.’

  The young mind retreated in confusion: ‘(What are you doing?) (What are you doing?)’

  Amusement faded as the old mind perceived how very little time it had left. Isolating its less sane aspects had accelerated the process of its internal division elsewhere. And loading itself to crystal in its present state would not halt that process, for it would merely then be mirrored in crystal. It needed instead the schematic for sanity that could only be created quickly enough in the faster outside world. The two recordings—one of this self and one of the isolated self—must clearly find that schematic soon. It was unfortunate that the less sane self, which had departed first, still believed it possible to kill Death, and had created the means…

  7

  Hammer Whelks:

  the hammer whelk is close kin to the frog whelk, but is also its chief predator. Like their kin, the large adult hammer whelks breed in the ocean trenches, releasing eggs to float up to the surface and hatch. The baby whelks, washed inshore, settle in island waters and congregate in packs. Physically, hammer whelks differ from frog whelks in two main respects. Their single foot, rather than used for leaping, terminates in a large bony hammer used for smashing shell, and they possess a tubular sucker for capturing prey. Their mouths are equally as nightmarish. Every year they decimate the frog whelk peregrination out to the depths, but, just as the frog whelks are vulnerable to the hammers, the hammer whelks themselves are vulnerable to the crushing jaws of the rhinoworm —

  The day was growing oppressive, cloud hanging in a jade ceiling above them, as threatening in its aspect as was the reality of life aboard the Vignette.

  ‘They’re all lash-happy,’ said Silister, leaning over to whisper into Davy-bronte’s ear. ‘Take that Drooble.’ He nodded towards the foremast where the man named was tied, the wounds in his back already healing after the thrashing Orbus had earlier given him. ‘Orbus flogged him three times on that last trip, and I heard he has keelhauled him twice before that.’

  ‘Keep your voice down, and your head down,’ said Davy-bronte. ‘With luck we can jump ship at the Sargassum—get some other Captain to take us on.’

  Silister eyed his companion. ‘We should have left with the rest of them.’

  ‘Yeah, but we were greedy and foolish.’

  ‘We weren’t greedy. We wanted what was owed us.’ Silister winced as he said it. Orbus had fed them enough seacane rum to pickle a rhinoworm, then brought them aboard on the pretext of finding them their wages, where he commenced being profligate with even more rum. The next thing they knew they were waking up from a drunken coma with the Vignette out of sight of any port. ‘You realize we’re the only normal ones aboard,’ he added.

  Davy-bronte nodded as he continued working the caulking between the planks of the ship’s lifeboat. This had been their only chance to talk openly for some time: alone here in the lifeboat hanging, horizontal, from its davits over the side of the ship. Silister had tried bringing up the subject below decks once, then quickly mumbled off into silence. It was only then he had realized all the other Hoopers aboard with them were in love with pain. They were all much older than himself and Davy-bronte, and all bore that certain glassy look in their eyes.

  ‘Are you two done in there yet!’ Orbus bellowed from his chair up on the bridge.

  ‘Nearly finished, Cap’n!’ Davy-bronte called.

  ‘So you’ll not be needing a little motivation?’

  ‘No thank you, Captain Orbus,’ said Davy-bronte, glancing at Silister with his expression unreadable.

  Silister swallowed dryly, and wondered how much longer he could contain his anger. He reached out and ran his tar-smeared fingers down the blade of the panga he had brought into the lifeboat with him. ‘No way, absolutely no way at all is he going to put me up against that fucking mast.’ But even as he said it he knew it was a promise he could not fulfil. Orbus could break him like a twig, and for that matter so could any other member of this older crew.

  Davy-bronte nodded, then reached inside his shirt to pull free and partially reveal the weapon he carried.

  ‘Hell,’ said Silister, ‘where did you get that from?’

  ‘Cost me all my savings, plus a loan from Olian’s I’ll be paying off for a few years yet.’ Davy-bronte pushed the quantum cascade laser back out of sight.

  Suddenly Silister found hope. Maybe they might be able to get out of this.

  ‘Aw, not you again. Bugger off!’ yelled Orbus, then anything further he said was drowned out by a loud roar.

  The two juniors looked across into a blast of spray blowing over the ship as if a squall had just hit. A flattened ovoid, four metres across, was rising out of the sea on turbines. It was fashioned of brassy metal bloomed with the marks of heat treatment, and streaked with weedy growths and rashes of orange barnacles. It seemed a patchwork of old and new, for gleaming armour abutted old tarnished surfaces. Deep in dark hollows all about it, red lights glinted. From other hollows protruded the barrels and launch tubes of various weapons.

  Davy-bronte grabbed the back of Silister’s shirt and hauled him down. Cupping a hand around his friend’s ear he hissed, ‘No way is that thing from the Polity!’

  ‘Now I said bugger off!’ Orbus bellowed, standing firm.

  ‘Is he blind?’ Silister asked.

  The thing revolved slightly, as if scanning down the length of the ship. One square indentation in its surface widened like a camera shutter, and extruded a square tube. The huge drone rose higher and Silister saw that underneath it trailed a large net bag fashioned from cable. He glanced aside and saw Davy-bronte gripping the butt of his QC laser, but thought that a pointless gesture. He felt this confirmed when the drone folded out two large gleaming claws—evidently a new addition—from its surface, leaving claw-shaped recesses behind. It drifted to the bows, still kicking up spume, then swung in, crushing the rail and shoving the ship sideways. It reached out one claw and snipped off the foremast, then with the other claw snatched Drooble up over the stump and dropped him into the trailing bag. Shadow
opened above—the sail abandoning them. Something whined and swivelled. A black line cut up from the drone. There came a flash and a dull detonation, then pieces of sail were raining down on the deck.

  ‘Get off my fucking ship!’ Orbus screamed, and began firing his pulse rifle.

  The square tube extruded further and spat something trailing a line. From behind Orbus, Silister saw a harpoon punch right through the Captain’s body, then open out four barbs. The huge drone reeled the bellowing Captain in, hard, smashing him through the side rail. It then tore him off the harpoon and inserted him into the same bag as Drooble. By now other crew were reacting: one firing an old shotgun, another causing still more danger to his fellows through ricochets as he opened up with some ancient automatic weapon.

  Davy-bronte began drawing his laser till Silister, panicking, grabbed his arm.

  ‘We’ve only got one chance.’ Davy-bronte pointed at the davit rope nearest to Silister. ‘On my signal, you cut that one!’

  It took a moment for Silister to grasp what his companion intended, then he understood. Releasing Davy-bronte’s arm he took up his panga and turned to the rope nearest to him.

  ‘Now!’ commanded Davy-bronte, aiming and firing his laser.

  With his panga, Silister chopped straight through his rope. Davy-bronte’s laser cut slower, so the lifeboat fell at forty-five degrees down the side of the ship into the sea, but fortunately the bows bounced up rather than penetrated the surface. Silister was flung over the side, came up smacking his head underneath the boat, then ducked back up beside it where Davy-bronte hauled him. It had fortunately happened so fast no leeches had time to attach. The small craft was now in the lee of the ship, sheltered from the storm blast of the drone’s turbines.

  ‘Under this,’ urged Davy-bronte, pulling across a tarpaulin.

  ‘That thing’ll have scanning gear.’

  ‘Then let’s hope it doesn’t use it. I don’t think rowing away now is going to help us.’

  They hid under the tarpaulin as the courses of their boat and the Vignette itself slowly diverged. But the mainmast came down with a horrible crackling and splashed into the sea only metres away from them. A couple of loops of rigging hooked over their little boat, tilting it and binding it to the main ship. Over the roar of turbines, the screaming, bellowing and weapon fire continued—and now something was on fire up there. Silister listened to the metronomic regularity of the harpoon firing, then the sounds of weapons ceased. Only the turbines and the bellowing and screaming continued.

  ‘Shit!’ yelped Davy-bronte.

  The huge drone was now moving around the beleaguered ship blasting a cloud of spindrift ahead of it, its cable bag packed full of the Vignette’s struggling and shouting crew. The drone slid above them, its turbine blast driving their small craft down and nearly swamping it, but the two crewmen lay perfectly still. It spat something that smashed through the side of the main ship and detonated. Then the drone rolled to one side and dropped down into the waves, taking its catch with it.

  Silister hurled back the tarpaulin and brought his panga slicing down on the rigging that was dragging them down. Davy-bronte immediately started bailing with just his hands.

  ‘No antigravity—so it didn’t want the Warden to detect it,’ remarked Silister, shakily, then turned to help his friend with the bailing.

  Waves of steam fogged over them as the Vignette quenched its fire in the sea. By the time they were sure their own boat would not sink, the ship had gone under.

  * * * *

  An iron-coloured seahorse with topaz eyes unwound its bifurcated tail from its roost in a peartrunk tree, turned and drifted gently away through the foliage. SM13’s instinct had been to immediately contact the Warden and spill everything it had seen and all it thought might have happened here. However, Thirteen was now a free drone and no longer under orders to report such things to its master, and was currently on an Out-Polity world where there was no legal requirement to inform any authorities of possibly nefarious doings. The drone did feel some moral obligation to report, but not because of what had happened to some reifications or to the Batians. The former were no more dead than they had been before, and for the latter death was an occupational hazard. No, the little drone felt obliged to report because five Hoopers had died.

  Thirteen drifted down to a level where the foliage was not so thick, then followed a path between globular scabrous peartrunks from which bark had been ripped so that now green sap oozed out like engine oil. On the other hand, reporting those deaths would not help the dead… Thirteen bobbed in the air—the only outward expression of the frustration the little drone was feeling. Really, the presence of a hostile alien life form on Spatterjay did come somewhere within the Warden’s remit, even though it was no longer Thirteen’s responsibility to report it. The little drone just feared contacting the Warden because, even though now a free drone, Thirteen still feared subsumption. Eventually it braced itself and opened a channel. The reply was immediate.

  ‘What is it, Thirteen?’ the Warden asked.

  Thirteen transmitted a copy of the image file recorded last night, and waited.

  ‘I am aware of the hooder’s presence, but wonder why it should be my concern?’

  ‘I just thought you’d better know,’ said Thirteen grudgingly.

  ‘I know. The creature was transported here in the cargo aboard the Gurnard. That ship is a free trader and so the Polity has no responsibility for its cargo.’

  ‘I thought… alien life forms down here…’

  ‘The hooder is merely a dangerous animal. If I took responsibility for every dangerous animal on the surface of Spatterjay I would probably need a couple of SMs down there covering every square kilometre of land and every cubic kilometre of sea.’

  ‘What about the Prador when it came?’

  ‘Do you need a lecture in precisely what comes within a Warden’s remit?’

  ‘Perhaps I do.’

  ‘The relevant sections stipulate that I am to watch for anything representing a danger or a potential danger to the Polity, and I am empowered to intervene when any such danger generally threatens the population or the biosphere of Spatterjay, but especially when caused by anything proceeding from the Polity itself. The Prador, Ebulan, fell under both sections.’

  ‘Ebulan came from the Prador Third Kingdom.’

  ‘Then the danger he represented was general and not especial.’

  ‘Seems a bit specious.’

  There came a long pause from the Warden, then, ‘I could stretch the terms of my remit and interfere, but I do not want to, in a situation where the danger to this small group—which they dealt with adequately enough—was brought on by themselves.’

  ‘And the Hoopers?’

  ‘Unfortunate, but I cannot take responsibility for the individual lives of any who are not citizens of the Polity.’

  Feeling a sudden daring, Thirteen said, ‘You’ve changed.’

  Again that long pause, then, ‘I may send Sniper, when he is available.’

  ‘Sniper? What’s Sniper doing?’

  The communication link cut and now, as well as being free, Thirteen realized it was completely out of the circuit. Perhaps this was why drones like Sniper sought employment with AIs like the Warden. Independence did have its drawbacks.

  Eventually Thirteen dropped lower, entered an area where a stand of putrephallus plants had been crushed, and viewed the discarded dead segment of hooder lying on the plant’s stinking phallic bed, then it slowly turned in mid-air. This was where the drone had tracked the hooder to last night, before returning to the compound. The creature had been moving very slowly, and because of its starveling condition and the damage inflicted on it by the APW, the drone had not thought it would be going much further for a while. It was gone now, however. Thirteen rose up from the trees, turned on all its scanning gear, and began to search.

  * * * *

  You’ve changed. The Warden came at that statement from every angle. It was sp
ecific enough to be worrying, yet vague enough that no clear confirmation seemed possible. The AI ran diagnostic programs through itself, ran system comparisons between its backup memories and present attitudes. There seemed a vague indication that it had returned to an earlier mindset in which it more closely adhered to its Polity remit, and was generally more circumspect. This could have been caused by the compression process it had undergone to escape being subsumed by the drone, Sniper. That had certainly been hurried, after the shock of discovering the ancient war drone possessed a larger and more powerful mentality than itself—built upon the foundation of a life centuries long. Perhaps that was the problem: the whole experience had been humbling. However, a further possibility was that Thirteen’s own perception had changed: becoming a free drone could prove both an illuminating and frightening transformation.

  ‘Yes, what is it, Seven?’

  The submind had been trying to attract the Warden’s attention for some microseconds.

  ‘Captain Sprage, boss. He’s opened a channel up here again through that conferencing link of his.’

  ‘Then you can again inform the Captain that whilst Erlin Taser Three Indomial is a valued Polity citizen, her stepping outside the Line and putting herself in danger is none of my concern. And, Seven, I am not your “boss”. I am the Polity Warden of Spatterjay.’ As the Warden finished speaking, it felt something akin to a flush of embarrassment. Would I have said something like that before?

  ‘He’s not calling about that. He’s calling about a missing ship.’

  ‘That happens. Again, it is not my concern.’

  ‘But… Warden, he’s got some coordinates from the point where the conferencing link to the Vignette went offline. He’s very concerned about it, but only wants to know if you might have seen anything with any of your eyes.’

  The Warden did a fast scan through its Polity remit and found that this situation fell in one of those grey areas. Though this might concern only the loss of a few individuals, it had been communicated to the AI via one of the sort-of rulers of the human population here, and so might pertain to something important.