Lockdown Tales

by Neal Asher

  ‘What?’

  ‘At your behest the captain took you too low to get a look at Bad Boy. It destroyed your platform in passing on its way round the island to come in from the other side. If it had come ashore where you are now, we would not be talking.’

  ‘You have an interesting idea about lucky,’ I grumped. Now talking to the Warden I felt safer, even though that was illusory. The AI’s ability to intercede on the surface remained as limited as before. By the time it got permission to act it would probably have watched in minute detail how one of the creatures here dismembered me.

  ‘Also your assessment is incorrect,’ said the Warden. ‘Your equipment is not on the bottom of the ocean but inside the giant whelk. But it’s not all bad news either. Captain Smurk just caught a fleeing land heirodont and is eating that.’

  ‘Shiny,’ I replied. ‘Any chance of a satellite strike any time soon?’

  ‘Firstly, I do not have permission and doubt it will be forthcoming; secondly, no other action I take from up here will drive the whelk back into the ocean; and thirdly, killing the creature is contraindicated.’

  ‘Contraindicated?’

  ‘We have discussed the matter and are not so blasé about terminating a life form that may be millions of years old and may well be a Class Four or upwards intelligence. The Conclave is also reluctant to permit this until the results of your study are in.’

  ‘That’s just a little bit unlikely now, don’t you think?’

  ‘I repeat: your equipment is inside the giant whelk.’

  I halted abruptly. ‘Oh.’

  ‘Quite.’

  I contemplated the equipment he had brought: I had the tools for analysing that whelk shit and any organic detritus it might shed, but my main aim had been to stick a hardened multi-scanner in its path to get that scanner precisely where it was now: inside the whelk. I wasn’t thinking straight else I would have got that the moment the Warden said my equipment had been eaten. Perhaps the possibility of me being eaten at any moment was interfering with my rationality.

  ‘My relay console is inside too,’ I said. ‘I’ll need something to boost signal strength and an aug upload for translation.’

  ‘Thankfully the Conclave has given me permission to intercede in this small matter,’ the Warden replied. ‘SM17 will be arriving at your location shortly.’ And that was the end of it, because the AI cut the link.

  Walking again, I contemplated questions unasked. Being a xeno-biologist in a Polity swarming with AIs could be a thankless and annoying task. Any studies I might want to make had usually already been conducted by remote drones then assessed, collated and extrapolated from by AIs. This was why I had jumped at the offer to come here and make a study of the giant life form currently grinding its way across this small island towards me. However, this begged the question of why? Why had the Warden not pushed for permission to send one of its drones down to stick a multi-scanner on or inside Bad Boy? By now they could have all the information needed to figure out why the giant whelk was behaving so… badly. The only conclusion I could come to was delaying tactics. For some reason the Warden, and thus the AIs of the Polity up to and including Earth Central, wanted the whelk’s depredations to continue for a while longer. And that usually meant politics, though I had yet to parse what was actually going on.

  My legs now much improved, I trotted for a short distance along the strand,scanning my surroundings and considering what to do next. Just ahead, and a little way into the jungle, a jagged rocky mount reached for the sky with a small patch of vegetation on top of it. All being well, I accelerated, moving up closer to the dingle where the sand lay hard packed. But just as I settled into a steady pace a land heirodont broke through the vegetation ahead and I skidded to a halt, adrenalin surging and nerves jangling.

  The thing looked like a lizard made in the shape of a rhinoceros, but only vaguely so. It walked on four legs terminating in huge flat pads. Its head horns repeated in rows along its neck, and it had no tail. Mandible limbs lay folded under its three-cornered mouth. I noted the pock marks of healed leech scars all over its hide and, recognising a herbivore, felt calmer. This creature’s feeding usually resulted in leeches dropping from the trees to feed on it. It was the ultimate expression of what the virus did, for it kept the creature alive as that reusable food source.

  Lumbering out onto the sand it cast me a mournful glance with compound eyes before coming to a halt at the water’s edge. There it huffed for a while before turning and heading off staying close to the sea. Maybe it would escape the devastation here if it could keep from the reach of the whelk’s tentacles. But it was also a warning for me because other creatures would be on the move this way as they sought to escape.

  Breaking into a run again I came opposite that jagged stone peak and then eyed the dingle. Mats of vines hung from trees and other large plants, draped over cycads and lay in thick tangles on the ground. Blue reed sprouted amidst this interspersed with nodular growths like yellow puff balls. I searched along the edge until finding a stick of tough fibrous wood, was about to pick it up then remembered to do something I had not had time to do when the whelk attacked the grav raft. I removed gloves from their pouches at my wrists and slid them on, closing stick seams about the wrists, and unrolled a hood from my collar and tightened it over my head. From the front of the collar I could pull up a transparent visor with air holes down the sides, but didn’t bother with that. Taking up the stick I carefully began to forge a path through the growth, also prodding at suspect areas in case something was lurking there.

  Within just a few hundred yards I began to see them. Leeches the size of a finger clung to the trunks or spread leaves of some plants, while one the size of an arm crawled onto my boot and I kicked it away. Beyond the first line of dingle the vegetation began to thin out but the going became more precarious with a layer of oily bubble grass over the ground. I paused, spotting movement over to one side. Like a flock of sheep, a number of large whelks, each shell standing a couple of feet tall, were making their way towards the sea. Frog whelks? No – they would have been moving as their name implied. The whole flock halted and stalked eyes oozed up to observe me. Vibration through the ground signified these were hammer whelks – creatures that used their armoured feet to bash in the shells of their prey. A blow from one of these could kill a man, but after a moment they moved on, more interested in surviving than feeding.

  Reaching the foot of the mount I began to climb. Something whickered at me from a crevice and I skirted round that. When higher I watched a creature like an onion the size of a man’s head, with spider legs, climb out and head towards the ground. Higher still I peered down at what looked like the backs of a herd of water buffalo heading towards the sea, until I reassessed and saw these were huge leeches. Thankfully I was not in their path, because almost certainly they would have attacked with plug-cutting mouths the size of buckets. The climb became steeper and soon I had to use my hands. I had begun working my way up an almost vertical face when the visitor arrived.

  ‘So what are you doing now?’ a voice asked out of the air.

  A metallic-blue seahorse watched with red eyes as it floated in the air just a short distance away. From nose to tail the thing was three feet long. It tilted its head to inspect me, flicked its tail and drifted a bit higher, blinked.

  ‘Climbing to get a better view,’ I replied. ‘You’re SM17 I take it?’

  ‘I certainly am,’ the drone agreed.

  The Warden of this world had a particular kink. When it fashioned subminds of itself it loaded them to drone bodies aping the life of the seas of Earth and other worlds. It also tended to give them a loose leash and did not often reload them into its own mind. Many of them, over the years, had become distinct entities and applied for and gained independence… of a sort.

  ‘Are you armed?’ I asked.

  ‘Minimally so,’ the drone replied. ‘It’s much easier to just get out of the way.’

 
; I grimaced and continued climbing.

  ‘You have something for me?’ I asked.

  In response a new icon appeared in my aug menu.

  ‘Tell me about this while I climb,’ I instructed.

  ‘It’s an aug upgrade that also links into discrete processing within me. You’ll be able to use me in place of much of the equipment you lost, and you’ll be able to assess the data from your hardened scanner.’

  ‘Signal boosting?’

  ‘Yes, that too – through me.’

  ‘Okay, I’ll look at it when I get higher.’ But now I found a ledge below the peak and crawled onto that to gaze across the island. ‘Um, maybe no higher,’ I added.

  The ledge gave a clear view of the further shore and of Bad Boy. The giant spiral shell had a rocky coralline appearance and certainly looked like a large version of a terran whelk’s shell. Below this its head section protruded, showing two huge red distance eyes towards the centre with smaller auxiliary eyes either side. From the bulge of this head its skirt had spread across the ground for fifty feet all around and with its tentacles starring out from this. It kind of annoyed me that these things had been named whelks since, despite the shell, they more resembled cephalopods from the family Nautilidae. But the first humans to come to this world, being pirates and their prisoners, probably hadn’t been that bothered about correct taxonomy. Anyway, that wasn’t so easy when it came to alien life.

  Sweeping up jungle and tearing down trees as it steadily trundled inland, the whelk fed masses of vegetation under its skirt to the awaiting maw. While I watched a heirodont, like the one earlier, broke from cover and ran. The giant whelk lashed out a tentacle to bring it down, coil around it and pull it in. Bad Boy had cut a swathe four hundred feet wide leaving rocky ground and black soil behind. This time it did not seem to be eating the topsoil so perhaps it wasn’t quite so hungry? I watched for a while, tracking the thing. It was moving marginally to my right so the way to avoid it and come in on its trail, was to continue along the beach in the direction I had been heading. I nodded to myself, then eased down to sit on the ledge with my back to the rock.

  ‘Okay,’ I said. ‘Let’s see what we can learn.’

  The seahorse drone SM17 settled on the ledge over to one side, impossibly balanced on its tail. I opened the new icon.

  First the feed from my aug simply blanked and it was as if my third eye had been blinded. An archaic icon appeared: an egg timer. I sighed, half watching it while most of my concentration was on the island. I wondered where Smurk had got to and if the man had enough sanity to keep clear of the giant whelk. Only then did I realise my own danger. Walking along the beach would take me from the creature’s path, but right now it still headed nominally towards me. It had taken me an hour or more to climb up here and would take as long if not longer to get back to the ground.

  ‘Fuck,’ I said, scrambling to the edge and heaving myself over to climb down.

  ‘What are you doing now?’ asked SM17.

  ‘What does it look like? I’m getting back to that beach as fast as I can.’

  ‘Oh I see.’ The drone floated out from the ledge to watch me. ‘I had assumed you were being tardy because you knew about the other option.’

  ‘Eh? Other option?’

  The drone floated closer, well within reach. ‘Grab my tail.’

  I stared at it for a long moment. The thing wasn’t big and grabbing its tail seemed rather like clutching at the string of a party balloon to slow my descent. However, gravmotors could be powerful and the drone must be packed with hardware to dense tech levels, and probably had microtoks or fusion nodes as power sources. I reached out and grabbed the tail with one hand – rough ridges giving me a good grip and then the tail winding around my hand. I then reached out and grabbed hold above that with the other hand. No give in the drone as it took some of my weight and none when I finally pushed my feet from the cliff. SM17 began to descend.

  ‘I won’t take you right round the island,’ it said. ‘This is draining my laminar storage and I’ll need to charge it up again from fusion.’

  ‘Understood.’ The drone carried me out from the cliff and down. I looked over towards the whelk again and noted something seen only in rare instances in the recording from the other islands the whelk had attacked. Here and there, huge coiled heaps stood steaming in the afternoon chill. Of course, even a creature this size needed to shit, especially when digesting the organic mass of an entire island.

  The drone passed over the band of jungle and began to descend, then abruptly altered course because leeches scattered that area of beach like basking seals. It finally came down towards clear sand, unwrapping its tail from my hand and then the tail turning slick and dropping me just a foot to the ground, which was enough to elicit a warning from my diagnosticer. I started walking, away from those leeches and towards the back trail of the giant whelk, incidentally removing the diagnosticer and shoving it in a pocket.

  ‘Scan data coming in now,’ said the drone.

  the egg timer still hung in place, but with the upper glass bulb nearly empty. It then blinked away and a whole series of menus appeared. All were familiar, the same as those on the screen of my relay console. I went straight to a three dimensional image scattered with data links: the lower body of the whelk – its head, skirt, tentacles and underlying maw. Above this the image steadily expanded in transparent blocks filling with the creature’s internal structure. A glowing dot just to the back of the maw marked the scanner itself.

  ‘The scanner is low down,’ I noted. ‘I would have thought by now it would be in the main intestinal tract higher up.’

  Floating long beside me SM17 said, ‘It seems its digestive processes are moving a lot faster than normal – hence the faeces scattered behind it.’ It added, ‘Anus and mouth are close together.’

  ‘I have an old scan for comparison in my relay console,’ I replied. ‘I’m presuming you have access to something similar?’

  ‘I do – presently downloading it from the Warden.’

  I nodded then concentrated on the image about the scanner. A great deal of macerated vegetation and other objects surrounded it, and I recognised other items in there. I mentally focused in, highlighting them, and saw two of the plasmel cases containing my equipment, then a couple of regular chunks that looked like parts of the grav platform. Pulling back again showed the overall image had expanded to include the bulk of the whelk’s body in its shell and much of that shell too, but loading had slowed down now.

  ‘And that’s it,’ said SM17.

  At that moment the glowing spot of the scanner and much that surrounded it dropped down as the whelk heaved up off the ground. As it then moved off this new mound of faeces, the scan image managed to build a few more blocks then froze. I had lost ultrasound and sonar and was now only getting EMR bands to which the virus hardened flesh and stony shell were resistant. The whelk shifted on.

  ‘Shut it down for now,’ I said.

  Rounding a small peninsular revealed where the whelk had come ashore. I broke into a run again on the hard ground at the head of the beach. Here I leapt a long leech with a body as thick as my waist and it snapped at me like a striking cobra, but missed. I spotted a cluster of those onion creatures down by the waterline and then a herd of land heirodonts on a rocky islet just out from the nose of the peninsular. Soon I ran past where the dingle had been torn down, having to jump deep furrows in the beach, and then reached the point where no dingle stood at all.

  The ground here looked like it had been turned over by robot ploughs and broken up by disking machines. In the distance the whelk was heading away but, turning in to walk its path, I saw that it had by no means completely denuded this place of life. Its tentacles could reach out and snatch creatures that came close, but they did not have infinite reach. Over to my left a squat leech massing like a hippopotamus oozed along, and ahead a different kind of land heirodont the size of a dog wandered round a great steaming
pile of the whelk’s shit, saw me and ran off. I paused, looking around, then moved on again when a leech crawled out of the ground by my feet and began thumping its mouthparts against my leg.

  ‘I need to get to my equipment,’ I said, but was again thinking more about the Spartech assault rifle rather than the other tools of my trade.

  SM17 drifted along beside me, effortlessly. I felt a flash of annoyance with the thing spectating while I tramped through the mud.

  ‘Over to your right,’ the drone replied.

  I pulled up menus and used one function to get a ping from the hardened scanner as confirmation, then used a mapping program from the conventional aug software to initiate an icon. Now, every time I looked towards the scanner’s location, a representation of the device appeared above the ground with an arrow below it pointing downwards. Trudging on, I soon saw the pile of faeces the arrow was pointing at.

  ‘It seems strange to me that this hasn’t all been sorted out already,’ I said. ‘Obviously the Conclave did not object to the Warden sending you, so why would it have objected to you or some of your fellows scanning and analysing Bad Boy?’

  ‘They would not have objected,’ said SM17. ‘In fact they themselves made just that request. The Warden told them that a human expert would solve the puzzle a lot more quickly.’

  ‘The AI said a human would be better?’ I asked disbelievingly, coming to a halt and turning to face the drone.

  SM17 swung round to me. Its head shifted and eyes that had previously been on the sides of its head moved round to the front to give it binocular vision.

  ‘So what the hell is going on then?’ I asked.

  ‘I think you know the answer to that already.’

  I stared at the drone, not having expected such a direct answer. and now realised that SM17 must be one of those drones that had obtained independent existence from the Warden.

  ‘Politics,’ I said.

  The drone dipped in agreement. ‘The Warden is withholding assistance and pushing for political gains, such as an agreement for it to send its drones down at any time, or be able to deploy orbital weapons without consultation in emergencies, but mostly small detail, like bringing the laws here more in line with those of the Polity.’