The Voyage of the Sable Keech s-2

by Neal Asher

  ‘That were a hard landing. What happened?’

  Heaving himself out of the man-shaped dent, Wade looked around as if dazed. He noticed the rails all around the roof; the tables bolted to it ready to take umbrellas and be surrounded by chairs. After a moment he realized he was not fooling this Hooper. For some reason they had known what he was almost immediately. He guessed that the sizeable dent was also a bit of a giveaway.

  ‘Just a little disagreement.’ He winced.

  * * * *

  ‘Your evidence is not entirely satisfactory,’ said the Warden.

  Hovering a hundred metres above the sea, with the two smaller drones on either side of him, Sniper repressed his frustration. Returning to the search after locating the Vignette, he tried repeatedly to convince the Warden that its sinking should be investigated further, but the Warden had a hornet in its bonnet about this hive-mind agent, and considered finding that intruder a lot more important. Sniper disagreed; Prador, as far as he was concerned, were a lot more dangerous than stinging insects.

  He protested, ‘I ain’t trying to convince a legal submind. I just think this is something I should investigate. And we’ve looked under every rock in this area, and checked every ship—but no agent.’

  ‘Then it is time to widen the search.’

  Sniper hissed and spun about like a coin.

  The Warden continued, ‘If you believe Prador are down there, did you neglect to record their ship’s arrival while you acted as Warden, or did they come by runcible?’

  ‘No need to be sarky. There’s another possibility.’

  ‘Yes, the newly adult Prador that left the Seagre island ten years ago. It would perhaps have been better if you had ensured its demise at the time.’

  ‘Well. I set a molly carp after the bastard, and he was at least fifteen kilometres from its dad’s ship,’ Sniper replied grumpily. ‘Anyhow, I was busy, and most of the SM shells were scrap by then.’

  ‘Busy?’

  ‘Well… it took me a while to take on your role. It’s complicated up there.’

  ‘Complicated,’ the Warden repeated flatly. Then after a long pause: ‘Actually you were right. The chances of the Prador surviving the molly carp were slim, but the chances of it surviving aboard its father’s ship were utterly remote.’

  ‘There, y’see?’

  ‘So where did the Prador come from that supposedly sank the Vignette?’

  ‘Bollocks,’ Sniper muttered.

  ‘Precisely, as you say, “Bollocks.” Now let us look at the facts. The Golem agent of an ancient hive mind is loose down there for as yet unknown purposes. Has it not occurred to you there may be a connection?’

  ‘Why would a hive mind want to sink a ship and take its crew?’ Sniper asked. ‘That’s the Prador way of operating—taking the human crew to use as blanks.’

  ‘I don’t know, but some connection does seem likely.’

  ‘Nope,’ said Sniper stubbornly. ‘I still think it’s Prador.’

  ‘Then what do you propose?’

  ‘Check out Ebulan’s ship. I can get there in a few hours.’

  Again a long pause. Sniper sensed something like confusion through the link. It occurred to him that the Warden’s long confinement might have sapped the AI’s confidence.

  ‘Very well, do so. But I want the geological drones to continue the search, and you to return to it the moment you’ve ascertained the position.’

  The Warden then cut the connection.

  Sniper did not try to analyse why the Warden had now changed its mind. He dropped out of the sky, then engaged his fusion engines. As he shot away he sent back to Eleven and Twelve, ‘Come on slowpokes, get those burners on.’

  * * * *

  As Ambel peered through his binoculars, what he saw evinced in him some surprise, and for the Old Captain that was no common occurrence.

  ‘Definitely a ship’s boat, and there’s someone waving from it,’ he announced.

  ‘Can’t have been out at sea here for long—wouldn’t have survived the first rhinoworm to come along,’ observed Boris.

  ‘Well let’s pick ‘em up before one does happen by,’ Ambel replied.

  Boris eased the helm over, and Galegrabber eased himself and his fabric brethren to the optimum angle. The Treader curved in towards the smaller craft, foaming out a white wake in the stiff breeze. The men in the boat began rowing hard to intercept the ship’s course.

  Climbing up to the bridge, Anne observed, ‘We’ll have to reef to pick them up—it’ll slow us.’ Down below, Peck had already unwrapped his shotgun.

  ‘That’s as maybe,’ said Ambel, ‘but we can’t leave the lads to die. Anyway, we’re out over deep water now, so there shouldn’t be any problem with big angry molluscs.’

  ‘That’s good.’ Anne turned to stare behind them.

  As they finally drew in beside the small boat, Boris shouted at Galegrabber, ‘Reef ’em!’ after the sail seemed a little reluctant. Muttering to itself, it pulled the reefing cables that wadded the fabric sails up against their spars, then climbed high up the mast, peering nervously all about. Ambel frowned at it, then climbed down to the main deck.

  ‘You all right there, lads?’ he asked, leaning over the side. He vaguely recognized the two men in the boat, which probably meant they were juniors, as he clearly recognized every senior crewman. How could he not, having known them for centuries?

  ‘Captain Ambel!’ said one of them delightedly. He was a thin-set lad with blond hair tied in a pony tail. The other one was of squatter build, his ginger hair patchy on the dome of his head. Another few years and it would likely all be gone—just like Ron’s.

  ‘Do I know you?’ the Captain asked.

  ‘I’m Silister, and my friend is Davy-bronte… from the Vignette.’

  ‘Ah…’ said Ambel. ‘Well get aboard sharpish and you can tell me all about it.’

  The two men scrambled up the rope ladder Peck had cast down to them. Ambel observed chunks taken out of the side of their craft, some burns, and the remains of a rhinoworm on which the two had obviously been dining. The boat was also partially awash. He nodded to himself—they had been adrift for a while and survived, doubtless with some Polity assistance. As soon as the two men were on deck and standing before Ambel, he shouted up to Galegrabber, ‘Let’s be moving along then!’ The sail seemed intent on something out at sea, so he yelled. ‘Galegrabber!’ Eventually it obeyed and, under the boom of fabric sail, the Treader journeyed on.

  ‘What about the boat?’ Peck was peering over the side.

  ‘Tie her off at the stern,’ Ambel replied.

  Muttering imprecations Peck took up a coil of rope and climbed over the rail.

  ‘All right, lads, which of you has the laser?’

  The two of them looked uncomfortable. Eventually the squat one, Davy-bronte, opened his shirt and pulled out a QC laser handgun. He hesitated for a moment, then turned it round so as to present the butt to Ambel. The Captain took the weapon, inspected it for a moment, then handed it back to him. The look of surprise on Davy-bronte’s face both amused and saddened him.

  ‘This isn’t the Vignette. It’s your weapon, so you keep it. I just want to know who has it so I know who to call on should it be necessary.’ He pointed up to the bridge. ‘Anne up there’s got a laser carbine. And that over there is mine.’ He pointed to where his blunderbuss hung. ‘Now, speaking of the Vignette, where exactly is that ship now?’

  After a long hesitation, the one called Davy-bronte replied, ‘A couple of kilometres down, I reckon.’

  Ambel winced. He might not have much time for Orbus, but no Captain liked to hear about a ship going down. The best that could be hoped for crew from a stricken ship who ended up in the water was that something big might grab and kill them quickly, since only very young Hoopers would have the luxury of drowning. Ambel knew, only too well, what happened to older Hoopers left helpless in the sea.

  ‘Why’s that then, lad?’

  ‘A big Prado
r war drone shot a hole through the side.’

  Coming over the rail with the end of the rope, the other end of which he had just attached to the boat, Peck said, ‘Chewin’ bloody squeaky weed bugger.’ He then headed for the stern, flipping the slack along the rail as he went, while the rowing boat drifted out behind the ship.

  Ambel ignored his muttering. ‘Prador war drone?’

  Silister now replied, ‘It come out of the sea. The Cap’n thought it was that other big Polity drone at first an’ it harpooned him, then it rained sail meat an’ it got Drooble first…’ He trailed off, looking confused, then brightly added, ‘We were caulking the boat. We hid.’

  Ambel patted him on the shoulder. ‘Perhaps you’d better start—’

  ‘Aaargh!’

  Ambel stepped past them and hurried to the stern, in time to see Peck leaning back hard, his feet slipping along the deck, the rope now a taut line to the stern rail, then out to the boat beyond. Ambel stepped to the rail and saw the boat, half sunk, waggling from side to side.

  ‘Let it go, Peck.’

  ‘Umph.’

  The line slackened. The boat turned a circle, lifted up out of the water and fell back upside down. A familiar flat white tentacle rose behind it, then came down hard, smashing it to matchwood.

  ‘We got all the sail on?’ Ambel asked loudly but casually.

  ‘Yes, Captain!’ shouted Boris. He was also turning the Treader quickly, so it would run with the wind.

  ‘What?’ asked Silister, who had followed with his companion.

  ‘One thing at a time,’ said Ambel. ‘Now tell me again what happened to the Vignette.’

  * * * *

  The giant whelk chewed on the fragments of wood, sucking every nuance of flavour from them. She located and gobbled up the slightly rancid chunk of rhinoworm. She was very hungry, having discovered that swimming used up more energy than crawling along the bottom, but all this unaccustomed activity also made her feel more alive than ever before. Also, such were the changes she had undergone, mentally and physically, she was beginning to question her earlier motivations of revenge.

  The bulk of her young had been eaten by a shoal of turbul, but should she ever encounter any of that species again she would treat them no differently than before. She would kill and eat them just the same. The human… yes the word was now clear in her mind… had only killed one of her young, and she was not exactly pursuing that particular human, but any with some connection to it. No matter. She gave an underwater shrug. She would kill and eat them just the same. That was what she did. Anyway, she was enjoying this chase. It was with a growth of something new inside her—humour—that she recognized that she killed and ate any living thing she could lay her tentacles on. And so she laboured on after the Treader.

  The heirodont, closing in from five hundred metres behind her, possessed no sense of humour at all, probably because it spent most of its life being fed upon by parasitic leeches. However, it did enjoy a chase, and it definitely ascribed to the same creed as the whelk: it killed and ate anything it could get its mandibles around.

  11

  Sea Leech:

  upon entering the ocean, the leech’s body-shape becomes leaflike to more suit it to the pelagic life. It grows huge on a diet of flesh taken from boxies, turbul, oceanic heirodonts—anything soft enough for it to bore into with its plug-extracting mouth. By the time a sea leech becomes whale-sized, such prey is too small to provide sufficient nutrient by plug feeding. However, it would be dangerous for the leech to take prey down whole as, with the incredible durability and voracity of all Spatterjay’s fauna, that prey would eat the leech from the inside. Hunger drives the next transformation. The leech grows a sprine-producing bile duct and feeds upon whole prey—poisoning them with sprine inside its intestines. Again genetically programmed to respond to their environment, they mate only when the surrounding population of their own kind drops below a certain level (this measured by the quantity of particular pheromones in the water). Leeches are hermaphrodite: they will close against another of their kind and exchange genetic material. After this the leech dies during the process of attaching its own body-segments to the bottom of masses of floating sargassum. The segments then collapse into hard encystments, and the cells inside them turn into eggs encased in sprine jelly. Each of these hatches a diatom, which then begins its long journey to shore to become a land leech —

  In his stateroom. Bloc sat on the edge of his wide, soft and unneeded bed and stared at the polished, oak-panelled wall—an occupation that seemed more and more frequent to him lately. Internally, he gazed into the red tunnel comprising the third channel from his control unit. He felt that what he barely controlled there was his only option now. Ellanc Strone and those aligned with him had not needed to come on this voyage, but they had, and now their earlier complaining was turning into open defiance. Bloc realized that Strone understood Bloc’s position here; that he was isolated and could possibly be usurped. Could it be that the other reif was secretly working for Lineworld? No matter, Bloc must quickly assert full control aboard this ship, and remove all dangers to himself and this enterprise. As if to illustrate, the reason for this now appeared on his internal visual display:

  OUTPARAFUNCT: B.P. LOAD INC. 15%

  He had increased the amount of Intertox in his balm to a fifth, but still he was getting those warning messages. How long he could hold on before having to go into a tank he did not know, but it seemed unlikely he would reach the Little Flint before his transformation. He realized how he resented those reifs who would. He resented their knowingness, their lack of respect for him. He had done all this. This ship was his. And he refused to allow them to be so casual, dismissive and contemptuous in his presence. He stood up abruptly.

  VIRAL INFECT

  Again that message.

  IDENTIFY he instructed almost automatically.

  SPATTERJAY VIRAL FORM AI

  He cleared that one, then another immediately appeared.

  MEMSPACE: 00037

  Annoyed, he quickly cleared that too, while considering all the potential dangers.

  Strone and his followers numbered thirty-six—he had identified them all. Now, Bloc could simply order his Kladites to dispense with them, but that would not go down well with the other six hundred reifications aboard. Also the Hoopers, though primitive, were necessary at the moment and, despite the automation aboard the Sable Keech, it might be foolish to annoy them. The sails, even Zephyr, worked to their contracts for money and that was all. If they became a problem, though, this ship had the facility to sail on without them. It had the facility to keep going without any sails, either living or plain fabric. That left Janer Cord Anders and Erlin Taser Three Indomial, who he certainly wanted to keep on his side. So, no overt action on his part, but there was another way.

  Bloc closed his eyes and turned his attention inward to the partitioned control unit he used to control Aesop and Bones. Those two channels were familiar and easy for him. The third channel was something else, however: a red tunnel of madness. He ignored it for the moment and turned his attention to his servants.

  Bones he put on hold: utterly motionless in the corridor outside. Aesop he summoned inside. Bloc opened his eyes as the door opened and closed.

  ‘Summon Ellanc Strone and his friends to the stern meeting hall,’ he said.

  ‘You’ll not settle anything with them,’ said Aesop.

  Bloc eyed him. ‘Did I ask your opinion?’

  Aesop remained silent.

  Bloc continued, ‘Seven o’clock this evening. When that is arranged, I’ll have another task for you, which you must complete before that meeting begins. I think you know what it is.’ He turned away, but Aesop was not leaving, so he turned back.

  ‘Leave now,’ said Bloc with finality, and pushed.

  * * * *

  As he stepped off the ladder Isis Wade paused to study his hands. The human form, he felt, was interesting: perpetually on the point of toppling from its mere two
limbs but never doing so. The limitation of possessing only two legs, however, was more than made up for by the complicated dexterity of the hands. No doubt, had the body he occupied actually been human rather than a mechanical construct, he would be surprised by many of its other… functions. But he was Golem and, behind all this emulation of humanity, something utterly else. He turned from die ladder and scanned the bilge.

  There was a great deal down here, most of it at Lineworld’s insistence, some at Bloc’s, and he suspected there was something else that nobody wanted here… perhaps. Making his way along walkways and through hidden corridors he approached the ship’s bows. Being Golem, his hearing was superb; he could hear the beating of a human heart, hear it stop.

  Wade shook his head—another human gesture, as if the thoughts in a mind could be physically shaken free. It did not work, for the fact remained that he was allowing these distractions to divert him from his prime purpose here aboard this ship. But the human dramas were so much easier…

  In the twisted conglomeration of rooms, corridors and walkways below the chain lockers, Wade began scanning about himself as he proceeded. Eventually, on a grated walkway affixed directly to the lower ribs of the hull, he found what he was searching for. He stooped and picked up a pair of bloody trousers, slashed to ribbons. He shook them, and caught something that fell out: a piece of bone. It was white, with bluish striations through it, and looked as if someone had roughed out its shape from the main bone with a small drill, then snapped it out. Wade nipped it aside then peered over the edge of the grating. After a moment he moved over to one side, clicked across the catches securing one section, then hinged it up. This gave him access to what had been deposited below the walkway. Down there were many more pieces of bone, fragments of cloth, strings of fibrous flesh, a skinning knife and a screwdriver. He picked up the knife and inspected the name etched into the blade: Sturmbul. Wade accessed the list of passengers and crew he had loaded, and after a moment nodded. Gazing into the darkness, towards the chain lockers, he carefully reached out to pull the section of grating down, stood back, and headed quietly in the other direction.