The Voyage of the Sable Keech s-2

by Neal Asher

  Then, once the rudder was repaired, over the ensuing days and nights Thirteen watched the continuing voyage of the Sable Keech settle into an uneasy rhythm.

  * * * *

  The trench was a vast canyon under the sea, up to seven kilometres deep in some places, and sometimes twice as wide. As Sniper cruised down the long slope leading into it, he observed a wide trail in the sand and mud, then eventually encountered its source, perambulating along the bottom like a mobile mountain. From below the slope of gnarled pyramidal shell cut through with glimmers of iridescence, dinner-plate eyes turned to track his course, and thick white and grey tentacles groped out of the murk after him. He accelerated beyond their grasp.

  ‘Eleven, Twelve, how are you doing?’

  Twelve replied, ‘We’ll be with you in two hours.’

  ‘That the best you can do?’

  ‘Without imploding, yes,’ Twelve replied dryly.

  Sniper grumped to himself and moved on.

  Soon he was travelling alongside a vast cliff occupiedby diamond jellyfish like glinting blue glass eyes, roving glisters black as midnight, and populations of smaller molluscs roaming like flocks of vertical sheep. All his detectors were operating at maximum efficiency: his magnetometer checking for anything metallic around him for a distance of a kilometre, he probed the ground below with ultrasound and to a wider radius with infrasound, constantly sampled the sea water for unusual compounds, and just watched, listened… As the canyon grew wider, he moved to its centre to maximize the efficiency of his scans. Detecting metal he immediately put his weapons systems online, until discovering a vein of silver in the rock. Another return had him digging down into mud, using his tentacles and the blast of his tractor drive. But he only revealed a very old piece of ceramal hull, quite possibly from the same craft Jay Hoop crashed onto what later became the Skinner’s Island. Then Sniper reached the first side canyon.

  He was undecided about entering this tributary, as it seemed too narrow here, but checking his map of the trench he saw that further along it became wide enough to hold Ebulan’s ship—or rather Vrell’s ship, now. He motored between the narrow walls, paused to listen to the sound of packetworms grinding through obdurate stone, ascertained that the rumbling disguised nothing else, and moved on. Passing through a blizzard of diamond jellyfish that had detached from the walls, he found glistening tubular structures sticking to his armour, so combed them away from his surface with his tentacles and jetted on beyond the clouds of microscopic eggs thus released. Another of the giant whelks was wedged in a crevice ahead of him, its cracked shell gaping open, one eye missing, the remaining eye directed above him to a circling heirodont the size of an ocean liner. The heirodont ignored Sniper, intent on larger prey. Beyond them, where the canyon widened, no spaceship was revealed, though huge pieces of iridescent shell were scattered on the ocean floor. Turning to head back, Sniper realized his was a walk-on role in a drama played out down here many times before.

  Moving beyond the tributary, Sniper zigged and zagged as the canyon grew wider, picking up two metallic sources that came to nothing. Another three tributaries branched off just ahead. Two of them, by his internal map, were over fifty kilometres long. Assessing how far he had come and what area he had covered in what time, Sniper made a rough calculation of how long this search would take him, presupposing he would have to search the entire trench on his own. The resulting figure depressed him. However, he was no longer alone. Up above him now he detected two metallic objects descending, and scanning them by sonar he recognized the shapes of a fish and a scallop.

  ‘Each of you take one of the longer side canyons,’ he instructed, ‘and maintain constant link to me.’

  ‘So you’ll know when we’re obliterated?’ enquired Eleven.

  ‘I see,’ said Sniper. ‘I thought your descent overly protracted.’

  Neither of the other drones replied as they descended to the separate canyons and sped off into their individual darkness. Sniper turned into the remaining canyon, there exploring a killing ground used by a large prill—the creature surrounded on all sides by the dismembered remains of a pod of black glisters. It leapt up from the bottom at him, turning at the last moment to present its array of sickle legs revolving like the blades of a food processor. He caught hold of it with his two larger tentacles, held it for a minute as its bladed limbs grated harmlessly over his armour, then shoved it away.

  ‘I haven’t the time,’ he muttered.

  ‘What was that?’ asked Twelve distantly.

  ‘Lively down here,’ Sniper sent.

  ‘Yeah, we’ve seen,’ replied the other drone.

  Sniper returned to the main trench, ruminated for a little while as he searched it, then came to a decision. Abruptly he programmed some missiles in his carousel, and fired them off along the trench. After a few minutes a detonation broke the night a few kilometres ahead of him, and his sound sensors nearly overloaded internal programs with data.

  ‘What are you doing?’ Twelve asked.

  ‘Call it extended sonar,’ Sniper replied.

  Seeing with sound, he had just shone a very bright torch into the darkness.

  ‘Better,’ he opined, but he still knew this search could take him weeks.

  * * * *

  Close to utter exhaustion, the giant whelk pulled herself ashore, discovering that her buoyancy detracted from her ability to grip the bottom. But still she refused to release her prize even though it soon became utterly covered with leeches from the shallows. Reaching the tide line, she stretched tentacles up the beach and grasped a rocky outcrop to help pull herself and the heirodont’s severed head finally out of the sea.

  The massive head was now just one great writhing mass of leeches. Irritably she stripped them away, feeding one after another, like sweets, into her beak and champing them down. A strange whistling sound distracted her, and she kept searching around for its source, finally locating it as the gas issuing from the now open orifices in her shell. But she returned her attention to the leeches, soon revealing the head itself, badly pocked but still recognizable. She prodded the beast’s mandibles and they snapped at her. Its remaining angry eye blinked and glared. Groping along the beach till she found a small boulder, she heaved it up, then smashed it down on each mandible in turn, but this was still not enough. The whelk hauled herself and the head further up the beach and, using the rock outcrop as an anvil, again smashed the mandibles until there was nothing left of them. Next she turned over the head to inspect the severed neck, then began to chew on the tough flesh. It took her hours to eat away all the skull’s exterior flesh, but she left the monster eye still blinking and glaring at her.

  Only after another few hours did she discover that no amount of chewing would get her through the thick skull itself. She glanced towards the sea and observed huge movement out there. The heirodont’s body still seemed fairly lively, and somehow had stayed with her despite its lack of a head. Memory again nudged her. She then finally pecked out the eye and shoved the skull further inland. It seemed the safest thing to do in the circumstances. Now replete, she moved on across the island to the beach on its other side. She settled down contemplatively, gurgling eructations regassing her shell.

  Now what? she wondered.

  * * * *

  Depression slowed Vrell’s return to his sanctum. Some of the U-space engine’s super-conducting power cables must have had their insulation damaged, for they had transmitted a massive temperature surge inside it, cracking and blowing minor components all the way through. The main components remained undamaged, as they were built to withstand forces far beyond mere heat. The casing of the line-singularity generator was intact, as were all its internal parts. The Calabi-Yau shape expansion matrices (a technology stolen from the humans) could not be damaged by heat, though they could have been collapsed into one of the smaller dimensions of the quantum foam. And the phase emitters had gone into safety mode, folding a few degrees out of phase with reality, though those systems that
could bring them back were trashed. Overall, the damage was beyond anything one Prador adult, even with slaves, could repair. In normal circumstances the functional parts would have been salvaged and all the rest scrapped. Yet, as Vrell entered his sanctum, he began to think the unthinkable.

  Bringing back the phase emitters would be the most taxing task, but then the repairs to their support systems could be countenanced. Perhaps if he used an expanded Calabi-Yau shape as a tool… Such shapes were, after all, six-dimensional. All he needed to do was work out the formulae controlling energy input into a matrix, so as to distort the shape into the spatial analogue holding the phase emitters. At a rate of one base-format calculation per second, using all the ship’s computing, this would take Vrell approximately four thousand years. Too slow, therefore. But aboard there was further computing capacity he could use, in the form of human minds. He turned his attention to his control units and the spider thralls they controlled. It should be possible to use those minds to increase the computing power by an order of magnitude… It was then that Vrell noticed some interference to the thrall channels, and immediately put a trace and decode program onto it.

  More Prador? Here?

  The program did its work with surprising speed, and Vrell studied the results. In the ocean, not very far from him in planetary terms, he had detected the code spillover from nine interlinked spider thralls. That was very strange. The readings he was getting told him they linked through only one channel back to a control unit up on the sea’s surface. This did not seem like the work of Prador, for there was no encryption in the coding, yet their technology was definitely being employed.

  Nine thralls …

  This meant a mind, or minds, he could use. He must take the risk.

  ‘Brother, retrieve this.’ He sent coordinates and the signal to trace to the drone cache. ‘If you are seen, do not return here until you have destroyed the watcher.’

  ‘Yes, brother mine,’ the earlier version of Vrell replied, as it motored its war drone body out into the depths.

  * * * *

  It had been another slow day aboard the Sable Keech, but it would not be long before things started to get more interesting. Forlam, who of course was fascinated by the ship’s grisly passengers, had informed Erlin of the recent events below decks, and of the discovery of some reifs incinerated by laser carbine. So it seemed Bloc might be beginning to exercise his power. Did she feel good about the possibility of danger? She was not sure. However, whatever he might do did not negate what she felt were her responsibilities here. She looked across the lower Tank Room to where Janer was working. She had spent most of the day running diagnostic checks of the control equipment and, at her behest, he was visually checking filters and scanning for contamination in the small autodocs each tank employed. She would let him go once he seemed about ready to start shouting at her, which would bring them full circle to the end of their last relationship. But the equipment needed to be ready. And here, she thought, turning to the reif who had just stepped from the stairwell, is the reason why.

  ‘Just lie down on the table,’ she said, when he finally approached.

  The reif, a man without visible signs of a death wound, twisted his face in what looked very like a grin. ‘I’m not here for a medical.’

  Erlin felt there was something not quite right about him—but then that could just be her. She had been sane for only a little while now, and even so knew that the virus had wrought changes in her mind. Some day she must make a study of the psychological damage the change caused.

  ‘Then why are you here, John Styx?’ asked Janer, who had rapidly found this an excuse not to continue with his mind-numbing task.

  ‘Janer,’ said the reif, then looked at each of them in turn before tilting his head to stare up at the ceiling, focusing on one of the camphones attached there. Erlin did not need any further hint. She beckoned him to follow her into an area separated by partitions erected by one of the Hoopers. Here, on wide work surfaces, sophisticated equipment lay at her disposal. It was also her base and her refuge.

  ‘Unfortunately, when crewman Lumor put up these partitions, he accidentally smashed the camphones. Very clumsy. He’s also sadly been unable to locate replacements for them.’

  The reif grinned. It was definitely a grin this time. Erlin shot a look at Janer, taking in his slightly bemused expression, before returning her attention to the reif. He reached into his pocket and withdrew a dented spray can. She took it and held it up.

  ‘And what am I supposed to do with this?’

  ‘I would like you to analyse the contents.’

  ‘It may have escaped your notice, but I am rather busy.’

  ‘This will only take a moment of your time, Erlin.’

  Something familiar…

  Erlin shook the can and turned with it to her nanoscope, which included a viewing screen mounted above the glittering mechanisms of the scope itself. Using the side console she designated an empty sample cylinder from the carousel of six. The carousel turned, and in a moment the small chainglass cylinder folded out from the scope’s mouth.

  ‘Could this be dangerous?’ she asked.

  ‘Not now,’ Styx replied.

  She grunted and just held the spray can over the top open end of the cylinder, and sprayed inside. ‘Right,’ she said, working the console, ‘could this be nanotech?’

  ‘I think not,’ said Styx. ‘I rather suspect some animal product.’

  The cylinder folded back into the scope. ‘In that case I’ll just use straightforward molecular analysis.’ The screen blinked on displaying a shifting cladogram. Chemical formulae began to scroll up below it. ‘You’re right; looks like some kind of hormone.’

  ‘Would you be able to find out what kind?’

  Erlin began running a program to compare the substance in the scope with the billions listed in the scope’s database, then she turned and gazed at him. ‘Who are you and what do you want?’

  ‘I want some answers,’ the reif replied.

  ‘You didn’t answer both of Erlin’s questions,’ said Janer.

  ‘For all present purposes, I am the reification John Styx. However…’

  Styx rolled up his sleeve to expose an antique watch. He did something with the controls and pressed his thumb against the face. After what ensued, both Erlin and Janer laughed out loud—which was obviously not the reaction Styx had been expecting.

  14

  Sea Lily:

  these plants are a close relation to the seacane, but the fact that they sprout flowers has provided the source of much contention between xenobotanists. Flowers mean pollinators and there is only one pollinator on the planet—the lung bird—which usually stays inland and needs to be attracted out by a very strong (and fetid) perfume. So how did this variety of seacane evolve flowers? The issue is further complicated: seacane was, far in the past, a land plant but, like the ocean heirodonts, it moved back into the sea. The lung bird is a crustacean that came out of the sea and took to wing. So in evolutionary terms the two life forms were travelling in opposite directions. Many theories have been posited to account for this, including alien interference. Probably the truth has much to do with six billion years of uninterrupted evolution. The same truth accounts for the lily’s symbiotic relationship with rhinoworms, and the relationship between leeches and peartrunk trees—

  The spaceship surfaced from U-space like a volcanic island heaving up out of the ocean: something hot and titanic, vaporizing anything that touched it. Immediately alerted, the Warden observed it through some of his deep-space eyes, and in that interval the rent through from U-space had yet to close. The thing was three kilometres long, nearly as wide, and a kilometre deep. Inevitably its shape was similar to a Prador’s carapace, but one distorted by encrustations that the Warden was uncomfortably aware were powerful weapons systems.

  That was quick, was the AI’s immediate thought.

  This Prador ship must only have been days away from the system.

&nb
sp; Immediately upon that thought, the Warden’s suspicions were aroused: Why so close?

  ‘Prador vessel, this is the Warden of Spatterjay opening communication,’ the AI sent.

  The huge ship continued into the system on a dirty fusion drive that caused a lot of interference with the Warden’s link to its scattered eyes. The AI knew that Prador fusion drives were as efficient as Polity ones, producing less than 15–12 % total fuel burn as isotope pollution. The interference was deliberate, which probably meant this spaceship contained technology the Prador did not want the Polity to know about. Such an action could be simply a sensible precaution of creatures keeping their offensive and defensive capabilities secret, but there could also be a more sinister purpose behind that.

  ‘Prador vessel, this is the Warden of Spatterjay. Please respond.’

  Nothing. The Warden became uncomfortably aware of how Coram lay, at present, directly in the vessel’s path. The AI now considered initiating the moon base’s defence systems, but that might be taken as undue provocation. Instead it sent signals to move its eyes in closer—a different kind of provocation. Side thrusters now fired, turning the behemoth round. The rear drives dropped to a spluttering low-power burn, then went up to full power when the vessel lay rear-end towards Coram and the planet. This burn lasted only a few minutes before shutting off. It was perfectly timed so that the ship now drifted in surrounded by a screen of radioactive gas. Then a powerful signal came through and the Warden was looking into a Prador captain’s sanctum.