by Neal Asher
Stepping out into a new morning was always an adventure. He got out quickly, machete ready as he turned to look up at the roof. No mantids in sight. He checked around the house and found the broken open and scoured out shell of the dirt turtle and guessed that had been the Stalker’s midnight feast because no mantid could break a shell like that. He then found carapace remains of a large mantid and guessed it to be the one that had been on the roof, and that it too had fallen foul of his other night-time visitor. Inspecting the outside of the house he saw that though there were claw marks on the walls, they weren’t deep enough to require repairs. As he took the wheelbarrow out, heading towards the mountains, he saw carapace, still wet with ichor and shreds of flesh scattered here and there, the bloody spine of a gnapper snake, its skull lying on a clump of grass nearby, the scattered rib bones of some sort of graser and a short distance further on the ears of a hare. All these confirmed what he had learned long ago: you don’t go outside in the darkness. Readox had been his first lesson in that respect.
The track wound around between hills, the path well-worn from his previous journeys. After a little while the slopes got steeper and the hills taller. He passed a copse of turtle trees – wide ropey trunks supporting thick leaves the size and shape of turtle carapaces – from the branches of which sack bats burbled at him. And then, after a few hours, the crash site came into view.
The shuttle had been of a simple design – just a slab of a thing with a rounded nose ahead of the cockpit screen, a compartment behind for passengers and/or cargo, turret steering thrusters jutting from its body, two fusion nacelles protruding from the sides at the back and a grav engine within the body. Now the main body of the thing lay half dug into the ground sans nacelles and steering turrets. It had carved a trench as it crashed and left those and numerous other chunks of itself in a line of debris. Most of those he had been able to carry were piled behind the vehicle now, while the trench had overgrown with brambles and was now the home of a colony of rabbits. He could still see one of the nacelles he had been unable to move, a hundred yards back from the main body, jutting up a chunk of the hull it had torn away. Bright green vines cloaked it now.
As he drew closer he saw that the antenna he had fashioned for the radio lay tilted over and something had shit all over the solar panel he had left in place to power it. Closer still and he saw the screen he and Mickonsel had fashioned out of branches tied together with shuttle optics and wiring was still in place. He still had no idea where the chainglass cockpit screen had gone. It had popped out at some point during the crash and would have been unlikely to have broken, but though they had searched they had not found it. He walked up beside the vehicle, dumped the wheelbarrow and, picking up crossbow and machete, walked around the other side. The grave markers were still standing, though tangled in green vines too. He considered clearing them but knew they would be back by the next time he came here, and doing so would do no good for the occupants below. He squatted, looking at Redox’s marker.
The crash had been hard. The catadapt woman Grace, the pilot, was dead. She had not put on her safety harness and her impact with the front console had told him she was dead before he later checked her pulse. Just he and Mickonsel had been relatively uninjured because they were the two who had put on their safety harnesses. Readox was a mess: broken arm, mashed face, and when they got him outside he noted that he could not feel his legs. It was late afternoon of a long day when they crashed and, while Mickonsel kept trying to call the Falcon, Ben went off and collected wood from a nearby copse. He made a little camp, brought out food and heat sheets bags for them to sleep in. They had only just begun the survey and hadn’t seen anything that might be a problem so why not sleep under the stars while they waited for rescue? This was after all an old biotech world fashioned for human habitation, so it seemed unlikely that those who built the ecology had included nasty predators.
‘I’m getting a ping,’ Mickensel had said, ‘but they’re just not responding.’
Twilight brought the innocular flies as he and Mickonsel sat around the fire while Readox lay in a drug-soaked haze. They closed up their envirosuits and discussed what might have happened, and assumed some fault aboard the Falcon itself. But surely, once they solved their problem, they would be in contact? Surely, once the shuttle had not reported in they would move the ship over the locator beacon and see what had happened?
Then the mantids came.
It all happened so fast Ben felt he must have fallen asleep and straight into some virtuality nightmare. The things swarmed over their camp and they simply had no time to do anything other than fight a retreat using lumps of wood as clubs to the shuttle, and to the sound of Readox screaming. Once inside with the door closed they had the things coming through the front screen. Only the distraction of Grace’s corpse gave Mickonsel time to get the carbine out of the weapons locker. He shot those in the shuttle and coming in through the front screen, then climbed out that way, Ben behind wielding the long drill bit of a ground auger. By the time remaining mantids retreated the area was littered with their smoking almond-shaped bodies, like leaves. Of Readox very little remained, and by the time that long night ended, nothing but a skull, which made the second grave when daylight returned.
They rigged up a tarpaulin to cover where the screen had gone missing, but always one had to be on guard while the other slept. They simply ate, drank and slept, and periodically tried the radio. They used the shuttle toilet till it malfunctioned and started pushing their waste back at them, then resorted to a large sample cylinder. When day finally arrived they were stinking, tired and frightened to go out. But in the end they did, first to bury Grace who had begun to stink more than them, then Readox’s skull.
‘We need to block that screen,’ Mickonsel had said – their first implicit admission that help might not come.
They used a shearfield cutter to slice wood from the copse to block off the screen. Ben really missed that cutter – it had been a very useful tool. They sorted their food and agreed to ration it, checked through their supplies to see what was useful. And days and nights passed. Ben took Snooper out to check local plant life and found their first podule, Snooper also passed mantid meat as fit for human consumption and Mickonsel relished hunting the things down. But water began to run out. They began searching the locale, found a stagnant pond whose water they boiled, but it began to dry up. Ranging further and further from the shuttle they found the spring, from which they began hauling water, but it was a long and tiring trek every time. They discussed relocating there and Ben surveyed the area. He marked ground far enough away from the spring not to be too soft and wet. They cut wood and hauled stone in the days, argued about design, discussed construction techniques and always wondered what had happened with the ship above. When at the shuttle they kept trying the radio regularly. Nights were long and both frightening and boring.
Only in retrospect did Ben realise Mickonsel stopped talking at about the same time they ceased to be able to ping the Falcon. That was four solstan months after the crash. Probably he did not notice because he wasn’t talking either, as depression sank over him. He remembered the day, two months later, quite distinctly. He had gone out with his barrow and Snooper and found a large podule and a great load of blue potatoes. Perhaps they could plant some of them? He would have to discuss it with Mickonsel. Ben now found his own dark mood had passed. First he smelled burned meat as he climbed inside the shuttle, then he saw Mickonsel sitting in Grace’s seat. Even from the back he could see what the man had done, because from there he could see the charred hole in his skull. Ben walked up and studied him. Mickonsel had stuck the carbine under his chin and pulled the trigger. Ben was angry with him, shouted at him, even slapped him across the head. He then searched for a note, in the almanac, in one of their various recording devices, even written by hand, but found nothing. But really, what was there to say?
Ben dug the third grave, then went back to simply living. He built his house,
saddened by defeats and collapses, celebrating successes. It took him over three years Earth time because he did not hurry and paid attention to every detail. Podule harvests made it easier to complete the power supply and the water supply, as did some of the other biotech plants here like bottle and tube bamboo. Finally the house was built and the water system ready to start when he removed the pump from the shuttle toilet and installed it there. Doing so would be a final step and, on realising that, he also understood he had been procrastinating. He spent the next two long days hauling things he would need from the shuttle, including the clothing and belongings the others had brought along. When it finally came time for him to sleep in the bed he had made in the house, he understood that by leaving the radio at the shuttle he was maintaining one connection with hope. And then, as once spoken of in ancient literature, he began the long habit of living.
Ben stood up from the grave, frowned down at it for a moment, then transferred his gaze to the sky. Still, after all these years, he had no idea what had happened up there. He had his theories. They had used probes to collect samples from the planet so perhaps something had escaped. Perhaps the Falcon had swarmed with mantids or some disease he had thankfully not encountered had spread. The ship had been old and in need of constant maintenance, so maybe some drastic failure had killed them all. Ben had actually written out a list of the possibilities, and there were many in an old spaceship. Perhaps the ship had been attacked by another. There were still hostile aliens out there, and pirates, though encounters with either were rare. But in the end one thing had him dismissing all of these, but also wondering if he was venturing into conspiracy theory.
The crew had been a mixed bag of soldiers of fortune and experts in many disciplines, but self-discipline wasn’t one of them. They argued with Captain Constance and her subordinates and there had been talk of seizing control by some. He, and the other three that had been aboard the shuttle, had been vocal supporters of Constance and of the status quo. Readox had been quite harsh with those arguing for change. Grace had been one of the crew and ever at Constance’s side. Mickonsel had been harsher than Readox and even beaten unconscious someone who had been campaigning for a change of leadership. While Ben had spoken out against those who wanted to put their leadership to a vote. Perhaps a mutiny had occurred up there. Perhaps it had been planned long before and when the four of them went out in the shuttle it had been sabotaged because, though the vehicle had been old, it had been meticulously maintained. He knew because he had done the maintaining.
Ben snorted, turned and headed back to the shuttle. It struck him as highly likely he would never know the truth. Pulling open the door he checked the radio and saw that it was still working, but the power low. The signal would also be rubbish, so he collected a lump of cloth, went outside again and climbed up to first clean the panel and then erect the aerial again. A return inside showed it up to power already, so he tried sending a call for help – words he and Mickonsel had repeated time and time again. The words sounded strange to him and his throat hurt just speaking them a few times, so unaccustomed to speaking had he become. Next he checked the beacon function of the radio and saw that it was still on – still broadcasting this location. Enough. He got his tools and set to work inside the shuttle stripping out optics and, as ever, found other items that might come in useful. By the time he had finished he’d filled the wheelbarrow – this happened whenever he came here.
During the trek back he saw two mantids watching him from their mound. Perhaps it was the memories of what had happened at the shuttle all those years ago that compelled him to dump the wheelbarrow and go hunting. He loaded the crossbow, hung the machete from a belt loop and walked towards them. At first they showed no reaction other than to watch him. Then they started to get agitated, shifting about and raising their forelimbs towards him in their ‘you wanna fight?’ pose. He raised the crossbow and fired, the projectile making a whirring sound as it shot through the air. It took the head off the mantid on the right but, as was usual, the creature kept moving about and waving its limbs for a while before keeling over. He kept an eye on the course of the projectile beyond it, seeing it thump into some low-growing glossy-leaved plant. The other mantid turned and inspected its fellow as Ben dropped his crossbow and broke into a stumbling run. It finally looked up in time to take the machete through its neck. He walked round it as, headless, it lunged at where he had been standing. Keeping his eye on that glossy plant he walked over, used the machete to chop through it and finally found the projectile.
By the time he returned to the mantids their bodies had both caught up with the news that they had no heads, and they were still. Grabbing their back legs he dragged them to the barrow, picking up the crossbow on the way. Some of the flesh would be a nice addition to his next meal and, since he had a whole day ahead of him, he decided he would dry the rest into biltong. It tasted good – a bit like prawns.
Finally getting back to his house he felt oddly reluctant to go inside to expected disappointment. He unloaded his barrow and returned it to its lean-to, dropped the mantids outside the front door, then walked round opening all the exterior shutters. Then he took the optics, his tools and a few other possibly useful items inside. She still sat as before with her head down on the table. He scanned over her carefully, hoping for some sign that she had moved, but could see nothing. As he leaned closer to inspect her back he detected a faint humming and could feel warmth against his face. He touched items there and found that the metallic fungi had warmed up. Next he heaved her back into a sitting position. He could now replace the remainder of the damaged optics but the prospect of such work, after spending the night in here doing the same, did not fill him with enthusiasm and, anyway, he had his chores to do.
First he dealt with the mantids while sitting on a chair outside, cutting off carapace and separating out the body meat and tasty organs to dump in a bowl which he took inside to his fridge. Next he brought his barrow back around and loaded up the debris, carted them from the house and tipped them in the hole he threw all his waste in. Tank work ensued. He had removed two tanks from the shuttle – one for fuel and one for potable water – and over two days dragged them here to install them, long ago, when such a task had not seemed impossible. One was up in the roof of the house and he would get to that later, the other was as low down as he could manage without burying it and then being unable to drain it. He got a bucket below the tap he had made and opened that. His sewage ran into the bucket and, since it had been some time since he’d emptied the tank, he took ten bucket-loads over to dump on the mantid remains, shovelling over some earth to kill the stink.
He next walked off to the right of his house then down, taking two fresh buckets – the product of squat growing bottle-bamboo – to the spring. Here he followed the course of meticulously joined tube-bamboo. Many years ago he had used another pump from the shuttle, connected to a solar panel over by the spring, and had piped the water to his house through this. When the pump gave up he resorted to this measure because he had no replacement. He still had the pump and had taken it apart, but had never got round to searching for replacements for its components. Perhaps that was a task he should now get onto, since hauling buckets had become a painful chore rather than invigorating exercise.
The plants around him grew taller and greener, then rocks displaced them and revealed a cleft at their centre. The spring bubbled out here scaling moss, growing in its flow, with deposited calcium. Below, a short waterfall fell onto a flat slab that hadn’t been there originally – he’d put it there to make filling the buckets easier. Beyond this it turned into a stream, which wound between rocks and turf to disappear into the plain. He filled the buckets and trudged back with them, went round to the back of his house and climbed a stair he had made ten years ago when he decided he no longer liked climbing the ladder. This took him up to the shallow slope of the roof, tiled with turtle tree leaves which turned hard and glossy when they dried, and which might have been design
ed for the purpose, and these mostly covered with solar panels from the shuttle and the one he was building from podule finds. He climbed up steps in the roof between panels to the peak, put the buckets down on a platform nearby, then reached down and twisted off the stopper for the filler hole into his main water tank. It took forty buckets to fill the thing, with a long rest every ten buckets, and the return of pain throughout his body, now accompanied by strange sweats, nausea and black dot floaters in his eyes.
Back inside the house he checked on the Golem and saw no change, then went to his bed and slept, subsequently finding he had been out of it for six hours. He ate and drank, dozed some more after that, then went outside again.
In his garden he managed to grow blue potatoes and black parsnips and many other crops besides, but here they produced a meagre crop often infested by white threadlike worms. He supposed that when the ecology had been engineered here the crops had burgeoned without any need for pest control, but this was an old biotech world, long abandoned, and the life had run out of control with natural evolutionary pressures but mostly some plasticity to the modified genomes of what grew here. How else to account for the mantids and the night Stalker? They could not have evolved in the thousand or so years since Afthonia was occupied. Then again, maybe someone had done something here – some form of bio-terrorism. He had as much chance of finding out about that as he had of finding out what had happened in the Falcon, if it was still above.
