by Neal Asher
They sat on the Flat some distance from the house, in twilight.
‘You are my wife, and I owed you this,’ said Logan. ‘But I will understand if you want nothing more from me.’ He gestured at the exposed workings of his cyborg body. ‘Do you?’
She gazed at him expressionlessly. ‘You can feel if you want to and, when you are repaired, you can be human in every way. You are still you inside.’
‘But what about –’ He broke off as a shadow fell across them then, with a deep thrumming sound the drone Sting settled on the Flat.
‘So you saved her,’ said the drone.
Logan nodded, not smiling.
‘And what about Trader John?’
‘He’s inside his house.’
‘Dead?’
‘Still alive, since he’s mostly machine like me.’
‘That’s not so bad,’ said the drone, ‘but sentence must still be executed.’ He rose into the air and turned, then spat a whole series of missiles straight at the house. They shot in through the ramp door. ‘Get your heads down.’
The missiles exploded inside the house, first blowing out all windows and gutting it with an inferno, then tearing its apart. Smoking debris bounced across the flat. One big leg spiralled up in the air and came down with a crash. Then after a while, all was calm in the orange glow of the burning wreckage.
‘You didn’t answer my question,’ said Logan.
Emily reached out and rested a hand against his face. ‘You are still you inside,’ she said. ‘I don’t know what I am, inside, any more. And I don’t yet know what I want.’ She smiled tiredly. ‘That’s the best answer I can give.’
I had a nightmare once of standing on a bridge and seeing what I thought were trout in a stream, until they raised their tubular thread-cutting mouths out of the water. There was a deep green jungle above a white sand beach too, out of which improbably long blue hands reached out to grab someone. And then a bowl of stone on a mountainside in which lay three people who had been skinned and were still alive. This turned into a short story called Spatterjay, and when I wanted to write the next thing after Gridlinked I turned to it, and another story called Snairls, and out of these the book The Skinner was born. Many of my readers love the planet Spatterjay with its hostile life forms, and its immortal, indestructible Old Captains and so do I, so how could I not write a story set there?
BAD BOY
Sand grated against the side of my sore face and my hands were burning. My legs hurt badly and I really did not want to look at them because bones might be sticking out, though of course they would not have penetrated my monofilament suit. But still, as the terror steadily receded, I celebrated the victory of surviving the swim to shore, which was practically unheard of in the seas of Spatterjay. Usually such a swim would be akin to one through a mincing machine.
I rolled onto my back to gaze up at blue-grey clouds against a purple-blue sky, reached down to a thigh pocket, unclipped it and pulled out a medpack. This provided me with a container of analgesic wet-wipes also laden with sprine. First my hands, wiped thoroughly all over and into the cuffs of the suit, then my face, scalp and neck, also wiping down into the collar. Relief from the burning sensation quickly ensued. The usual ocean predators had fled this area from something larger and nastier, and so the water had been free of leeches with their plug-cutting mouths and the snappy claws and other sharp limbs of glisters and prill. But it still swarmed with the microbes of Spatterjay, and the burn was them eating my skin. The analgesic killed the pain, while the sprine killed the microbes as it did all the virus-infected life of this world.
I finally tossed the wipe away and eased up into a sitting position to gaze down at my legs, and yes, broken bones were jutting against the fabric of the suit. Looking out to sea I eyed the distant floating bubble-metal wreckage of the grav platform. It had supposedly been a safe method of travel, but we’d got too close to the sea. The huge stony tentacle had speared up from the surface and slammed down on the thing, catapulting me into the water. I scanned down the beach hoping my driver had survived, but no one was in sight. I then looked up at the wall of jungle, or dingle as they called it here, interspersed with peartrunk trees, and knew that crawling up there would offer no more safety than here – less in fact since the place would be swarming with leeches. And I tried to avoid thinking about just how long I might manage to stay alive alone in this place.
‘The bugger was not happy,’ said a voice behind me.
Happy and relieved, I eased round to find the source. Captain Smurk stood where the waves lapped against the sand. His canvas clothing hung ragged on his huge frame.
He added, ‘Deliberately and –’ He coughed and spat something into the sea, finishing with, ‘– visibly bad.’
He was referring to ‘Bad Boy’, but what he implied by that statement I had no idea.It wasn’t unusual for Old Captains to make obscure statements. He had lost one of his hobnail boots and his hat – the bald dome of his head now revealed with its circular blue leech scars. I blinked, trying to figure out what else was wrong about this image, then saw it when the captain turned towards me. The man’s right arm was missing, torn off, ligaments and shattered bone protruding through broken virus-toughened and bloodless flesh. A large chunk was missing from his torso below his ribcage and with his remaining hand he held his guts in, while the front of his right thigh had been ripped right down to the bone. But even now exposed flesh was shifting, oozing across that thigh bone, closing up where his arm had been torn away and incidentally expelling the mangled head of his humerus from his shoulder. After a moment he took his hand away from his guts, a cloudy skin having drawn across to hold them in place.
This meant: my situation had not improved with Smurk’s arrival. The cold fear I had felt swimming in from the grav platform wreckage nudged my spine.
‘It’s not usual,’ I replied, struggling to keep my voice steady. ‘We knew that when we came out here.’ I enforced calm, trying to tell myself that Smurk obviously had it under control for now. But I needed to get mobile quickly, so opened the medpack again, took out a small diagnosticer shaped like a pre-Quiet War computer mouse and pressed the rubbery thing against my neck. The device sucked into place as I leaned forwards and carefully, with hands only shaking a little, undid the stick seams attaching my trousers legs to my boots. Blood poured out, but the pain started dying as the diagnosticer keyed into my internal nanosuite and made adjustments, numbing the nerves from halfway up my thighs down to my feet.
‘It grabbed you?’ I asked, unable to stop my voice rising to a high note at the end.
The Captain grunted dismissively and tramped round to stand in view. As the man’s injuries rapidly healed Smurk was also growing thinner, bluer, and didn’t look quite so calm and centred as he had been before. Even though I knew about this change, actually seeing it happening kept the fear nicely topped up. This was dangerous. As a xeno-biologist I had studied this transformation and could not deny the reality. Hoopers like the captain had been rendered practically indestructible by the viral threads weaving their bodies together as tough as towing cable. However, the action of the virus was not necessarily good for its host.
In a mutualistic arrangement with the leeches of this world, it kept its hosts alive as a reusable food resource for the leeches, who in turn disseminated it to other prey. This arrangement had resulted in just about everything here being infected by the virus. Besides making its hosts improbably tough it also retained an eclectic selection of their genomes. With this it made changes to enable a very badly injured host, like the captain, to survive. They developed a serious hunger. Infected humans so damaged also lost grip on what little sanity they possessed. The long list of life forms on this world that might see me as dinner had now grown by one: Captain Smurk.
‘Got a tentacle on me and took me down,’ said the captain. ‘Started on me till it recognised the taste.’ He waved his remaining hand at the nub of flesh protruding from his sho
ulder. ‘Didn’t do anything to you,’ he added, with just a hint of accusation.
Recognised the taste? I felt no inclination to question him on that because his voice had begun to slur and he couldn’t keep his eyes still. His tongue had changed and, in one immediate and somewhat redundant change the virus made to injured humans, Smurk had begun growing a leech mouth at the end of it.
I really did need to get mobile. The pain relief now made it easier to roll up my trousers to expose the compound fractures of fibula and tibia of both legs. The injuries required more than the diagnosticer and nanosuite could provide.Reluctantly reaching up to the chrome comma of the augmentation behind my right ear, I pressed a fingertip against it, turning it on. I had closed the thing down so as to get more of a feel for this place before conducting my chore here. But survival had now become the primary objective.
The net opened up – a thousand worlds within a world, all the information of the Polity a thought away, communication with anyone, anywhere, available with just a blink and a word but, most importantly, much more finesse of control over the diagnosticer and my nanosuite. With what seemed a third eye I gazed upon the multi-layered menu and with a hand of invisible fingers made a selection. The diagnostic feed came up to my inner vision, showing a three dimensional image of my body with injuries highlighted. Only seeing that did I feel an area in my chest the suite had numbed, where my ribs had been broken. I searched for solutions to the broken legs. My nanosuite could rapidly knit carbon fibres to stick bones together but it could not position them. I looked up at the captain.
‘It didn’t grab me because the impact threw me some distance away,’ I said. ‘If I’d been a hooper I could probably have clung on and would have gone down with the platform like you.’ I paused for a second and felt a bit selfish adding, ‘And my equipment.’ Right then I wasn’t thinking of the scanner, analysers or field nanoscope, but the Spartech assault rifle in one of the cases.
‘So you say,’ said Smurk, now looking just a little bit crazy.
‘I need some help here,’ I finally said, scared of what that help might lead to.
Smurk’s eyes rolled, his head nodding and jerking, but then he seemed to get a grip and peered down at my legs.
‘You need ’em pulled and straightened,’ he said.
‘Should take the nanosuite a few –’ I began, but Smurk stepped forwards, squatting down to press his knee into my right thigh, then got hold of my foot to pull and twist. The muted pain still made me gasp, eyes watering. After a moment I managed to focus on that internal vision, observing splintered bone retracting into my legs. I quickly input an order to have the nanosuite hold off from automatically threading together the breaks, and studied the image.
‘Twist my foot to the left, slowly,’ I instructed, calm as possible, aware that at any moment he might decide to rip my leg off.
The captain made a strange gobbling sound but complied. Fragmented bone in the tibia closed up, but then opened out a bit as the fibula break lined up.
‘There,’ I said, knowing that would have to be enough and initiated nanosuite repairs in that leg. A loading ring appeared, counting round. ‘Hold it there…’
The captain snorted agreement, a strand of saliva shooting from his mouth.
The ring completed its circuit. I waited a moment more before saying, ‘Okay, the other leg now.’
When the captain released that leg to move over to the other the internal three D image showed the bones of the first flex a little but stay in place. The leg would not bear my weight yet, but the repairs continued. I checked the stats as Smurk pulled on my other leg, and saw muscles with their artificial additions quickly knitting together too.
‘Twist to the left,’ I instructed, watching the image of the second leg. ‘Hold it there.’
The nanosuite continued to work its wonders and the second ring wound round to completion, but before then Smurk released his hold and quickly staggered away. The break collapsed a little but then firmed. Another readout showed an alert then nanosuite adjustment via the diagnosticer as it seized control of my leg muscles and set them stretching to straighten the break. I eyed the captain, who was stooped over with his chest heaving, took out another wet wipe and cleaned my legs exposing bright red scar tissue and one slowly closing split. In some respects, with the nanosuite, I possessed the same ability to heal as Smurk, though without the drawbacks. Groping in the sand around me, my hand came down on a large rock. Then the stupidity of that impacted and I choked down a giggle. Smurk was an Old Captain – that meant even shots from a Spartech assault rifle would only make him tetchy.
‘Howzz longzz?’ Smurk managed, then turned towards me. The man’s tongue oozed from between bright blue lips, a hollow opening in the end like a lamprey mouth. His pupils were pinpoints. And a knotted baby fist protruded from his damaged shoulder.
‘Half an hour and I’ll be mobile, but slow,’ I replied, my mouth dry, and back suddenly feeling chilled.
‘Howzz long till you runzz?’
I swallowed that dryness. ‘Maybe an hour.’
The captain pointed up along the beach. ‘I goezz there.’ He then pointed the other way. ‘You runzz.’ He staggered off, fighting his biology. With a surge of adrenalin I pushed myself to my feet despite the alerts from the diagnosticer. I would probably cause myself some damage doing this, but not half as much as would a hungry Old Captain.
With their propensity for understatement the hoopers called it the ‘Bad Boy’. Spatterjay’s seas swarmed with hostile life inclined to eating just about anything that moved or a least taking a tasty chunk out of the same. That life ranged from microbes that could strip away a swimmer’s skin if the leeches did not get there first, through vicious arthropods like glisters and prill, to the giant fish-like heirodonts and ocean-going leeches the size of blue whales. But above all these in terms of size, sheer destructive power and voraciousness, was whelkus titanicus. Some of these giant molluscs had been confirmed by Polity underwater drones to be incredibly ancient – probably even the first creatures infected when the virus took hold on Spatterjay over five million years ago. Some of them were so packed with the virus their squid-like bodies were as hard as stone and as durable as steel. Fortunately their feeding grounds lay in the ocean depths and they rarely ventured above the surface. When any of them did. the consequences were inevitably disastrous, but they never stayed long – usually returning to their abyssal home in a few days. Until Bad Boy.
The giant whelk first came ashore on a c-shaped atoll hoopers used as a harbour far from the larger islands of the world. Bad Boy was immense, fully a hundred feet to the top of its shell and with tentacles a hundred and fifty feet long. Fortunately it came up on the outside of the atoll to begin its depredations. It ate everything, macerating down trees as well as land-going heirodonts and leeches. Knowing the danger, the hoopers took to their ships fast, but still it reached the harbour before all could depart and smashed three ships. I could only assume that no one had died because of the sheer ruggedness of hoopers. Other crews rescued those in the sea as the whelk seemingly lost interest and went back ashore. One survivor of this event was Captain Smurk – beats me why he volunteered to take me out to the giant whelk that had destroyed his ship.
By the time Bad Boy returned to the sea a second time it had all but denuded the atoll of life. The thing had even scooped soil rich in organics into its maw. Satellite imagery showed the ocean turning black shortly after it submerged and a sampling drone rendered the useful information that the thing had just taken an immense shit under the sea.
The whelk went on to denude two more atolls and seemed, by a circuitous route, to be heading in towards the larger inhabited islands. The Polity warden, the AI set to watch over Spatterjay but with contractually limited ability to interfere in events on the surface, offered assistance. A conclave of Old Captains, now linked by Polity comware, refused this help. The sails, being the indigenes of the world and thus having a la
rger vote in the Conclave, agreed. That was until it next appeared on the stony shores below the Big Flint – a monolith of stone protruding from the ocean on the top of which the organic sails – large batlike creatures that served, under contract, as sails on hooper ships – had made their home long before humans arrived on their world. The satellite railgun strike that all then agreed on knocked the whelk from its hold halfway up the Big Flint, whereupon it crawled back into the ocean.
Yes, something needed to be done.
I managed to get up to a slow trot as, with the sounds as of giant earth-movers digging the foundations for some mega high rise, the peak began rising up on the far side of the island,. I gazed at this, then turned to look back down the beach. Thus far Smurk had managed not to turn around and come after me.
‘Gather data, they said,’ I muttered. ‘Be careful, they said.’
On my aug menu a comlink icon began flashing. The source was the AI Warden, or at least one of its subminds, so I opened it.
‘You seem to be experiencing some difficulties,’ the Warden observed.
‘Uhuh. Difficulties…Bad Boy just smashed our grav platform depositing all my equipment on the bottom. Smurk and I got ashore, but my nanosuite is dealing with compound fractures in both my legs, meanwhile Captain Smurk is falling out of the giggle tree. And there’s that.’ I pointed to peak rising on the other side of the island – the top of Bad Boy’s shell. ‘But of course I’m telling you nothing you don’t know.’
The Warden, now apparently distributed throughout the system of satellites in orbit, had an omniscient view of the world below with cams that could distinguish the grains of sand on this beach, and a mind capable of counting them.
‘You were lucky,’ the Warden opined.
