Lockdown Tales

by Neal Asher

  ‘You’ve saved my life,’ he told her.

  ‘Yes,’ she agreed with a nod, as he returned to cutting the bamboo he had stored in the house. Anna was meanwhile weaving, at highly improbable speed, the vines she had collected out in the darkness. He’d heard shrieks and clatterings out there, but she returned only with the vines, and some ichor spattered on her envirosuit.

  ‘I need to find some way to repay you for that.’

  He began joining the bamboo, delighted by the way his hands were working, the lack of that gritty feel to his finger joints and the stiffness, delighted by the lack of pain in his back, delighted by his strength and endurance.

  ‘Nonsense,’ she said. ‘I have repaid you. If you hadn’t found me and dug me up, how likely was it that I would have been found?’

  He nodded agreement as he took the assembled screen over to the toilet and used wire to bind it to the side of the toilet platform. It was make-work really – something to keep them occupied throughout the night. His suggestion that they go to the shuttle in darkness had been met with a brief consideration then a negative. Yes, she could kill anything out there that chose to attack them just like him swatting away innocular flies, but it would all be too inconvenient. She added that the innocular flies themselves were still a danger too – they still might inject reprogramming nanites that could cause problems with his present suite.

  He fixed up the first woven sheet, securing it with vine ties she had left protruding for just that purpose. It of course fitted exactly. He made the other screen and the door, and by the time he had those fitted she had made the rest of the woven sheets and returned to other jobs. She had already made preparations for their morning journey, assembling numerous connector leads, altering some of his tools and then disassembling his tester along with personal computer hardware from his dead friends, then reassembling these into new computer items. Now she took apart his carbine and, by the time he had fitted the woven sheets, had reassembled it and put it on charge, and next set to work on his old water pump. He eyed the weapon and, despite feeling so good, felt a shiver of cold.

  ‘Did you see anything out there?’ he asked.

  She looked up. ‘I saw tracks. It appears, as you said, the creature can travel on four legs or two.’ He hadn’t said that – he’d just said he’d seen it standing upright like a man. She continued, ‘I followed the tracks and found where it had dug up a mantid nest. It had killed and eaten four of them.’

  He nodded. ‘I searched through the almanac but I could find no animal like it. They had no large predators here.’ He shrugged. ‘The mantids were there but smaller. Do you know different?’

  ‘No, they did not have large predators. Tell me again of your encounters with this creature.’

  He described his snap shot at the thing, his other glimpses of it when tardy about getting back to the house at night, the way it lurked out there and had tried to get in.

  ‘I think you have been very lucky,’ she said.

  ‘For a debateable meaning of “lucky”. But I’d like you to explain that.’

  She grimaced and he wondered about the difference between emulation and real expression of a feeling. ‘I don’t know yet but, seeing how it uprooted that mantid nest, it strikes me that if you had not hit it with the carbine that first time it would have been in here.’ She gestured around the interior.

  ‘But you have no idea what it might be?’

  ‘I have no idea,’ she replied.

  He watched her blank expression, and wondered if his own paranoia was giving him the idea that she knew something she wasn’t telling him. He let it slide because whatever the Stalker was, he now had an ally should it pay another visit… and he had his carbine back.

  After a pause which paranoia told him was due to her wanting the subject dropped, or might have been his own reaction, conversation started up again – him at last remembering how to conduct this social interaction and her complementing him. The war here had been a ridiculous disagreement between purists on how things should be run. One side said that ‘pure’ biotech only could be used and gross mechanical technologies were anathema. The other side disagreed, feeling that though they should use biotech their goal should be the permanence of hard tech. She had fallen into the second camp, mainly because the first had decided that all Golem should be shut down and dismantled. She told of old friends and enemies, of battles with microbes and tank-grown monsters and of the final plague released by the other side and to which they had mistakenly thought themselves immune. They called that the ‘dumb plague’ because it thoroughly altered the brain and skull structure of those infected, and reduced them to the level of animals.

  ‘I don’t know what happened to the others,’ she said at one point.

  ‘The other Golem,’ he surmised.

  ‘Yes. They would have survived the plague and there were hundreds of thousands of them. I would have expected at least some to have remained here.’

  ‘My understanding of history is not the best. As the Polity broke up a lot of Golem went the way of other AIs – loading to virtual collective substrates in neutron stars, heading off into the universe, combining with human minds.’ He shrugged. ‘There are a lot of Golem amidst remaining human populations now. Maybe those that didn’t upgrade and up sticks need to be around humans.’

  She stared at him with a raised eyebrow, then her face broke into a grin that he felt to be truly genuine.

  ‘It seems you are well enough to take the piss out of me now,’ she commented.

  ‘Only a little,’ he admitted.

  They continued in this vein and, not wanting to spoil it, he did not pursue something that had been niggling at him since she said it. She had mentioned tank grown monsters. He felt, at some point, he must return to that subject and discuss it with her, sure now that there was something she wasn’t telling him.

  Morning arrived after he cropped the white hair from his head, scrubbed down his body to be rid of improbably quantities of dead skin, and slept again. The dawn was like any of the hundreds he had already seen but now filled with exciting possibility, and just a hint of… something else.

  ‘We will need to make two trips, minimum,’ she said.

  He nodded while stuffing his face with food and washing it down with plenty of water. He then put aside his plate, unfinished. His appetite had increased but it seemed he became satiated sooner. He returned the food to the fridge.

  ‘Two trips?’

  ‘We can get a lot of the work done on the first trip,’ she said, ‘but if we are successful and can repair the grav engine, it will of course need power.’

  He pondered that for a moment, then said, ‘The house battery. While we work out there it’ll charge up here and we can take it out next time.’

  ‘Precisely.’

  He collected his back pack and filled it with some of the tools they had selected. He also filled a water container and hung it from his belt, as an afterthought filling a belt bag with some food. Anna went outside, a little early he thought, to open the shutters, and came back with the wheelbarrow. They loaded the rest of the tools in that, while Ben kept a careful watch for innocular flies. Finally, with the sun breaking over the horizon, they set out.

  As usual in the morning the remains of creatures that had met their end in the night scattered the landscape. He wondered just how many of them Anna had sped to their end – scavengers then hollowing out the remains – and how many were the result of that other visitor. There did seem rather more of them than usual around the house. As they walked she moved ahead of him along the track and he found himself staring at her arse. Her human emulation being near perfect, he found a response stirring in a body that had long been numb to such. Shaking his head and telling himself not to be stupid, he tried to summon up visions of what lay underneath that clothing: skinless pseudo muscle. It didn’t seem to help. He then considered raising the subject of tank grown monsters, but sunshine and his reborn
health made him reluctant. It seemed a subject to be left back in the night with the shadows.

  Finally they reached the shuttle. She looked over her shoulder as they stepped inside. ‘I’ll get to work on the grav engine now. If I need any help with that I’ll call you.’

  ‘I’ll collect up some of the stuff outside and bring it there.’ He pointed to the rear of the shuttle’s crew compartment. ‘Then set to work on that steering thruster.’

  ‘Not too much stuff in here, mind,’ she said. ‘I’ll need to take up most of the floor.’

  ‘Okay.’

  ‘And there’s something else we could really do with.’

  ‘That being?’

  ‘The front screen.’

  He grimaced, remembering his constant searching of the area, nodded and headed out. Even as he reached the door she had stooped down and begun undoing with her fingers numerous plunge bolts he would have needed a special tool for.

  Outside, he peered at the pile of debris he had collected, then abruptly changed his mind about the order of business. Instead, he went over and shifted things aside to expose three steering-thruster turrets and cleared a space around them. He first inspected them closely looking for damage, then heaved them over to inspect the undersides. Most of the damage was where they had been torn away. Checking each closely, he selected the most intact one, then fetched tools and began disassembling broken components. Hoses supplying the chemical propellant had been snapped – power leads and control optics too – hydraulic rams fractured, the cog wheel that engaged in one of the cog rings still hopefully in the shuttle had been shattered, but one of the other turrets had an intact one. Once he had removed all the broken components he then began taking apart the other two turrets and replacing the broken with the unbroken. He even found some hoses not snapped, but which had pulled out their connectors. He knew as he connected them up to the turret his work had only just begun, because he would find equal damage in the shuttle itself.

  So involved had he become in this work that only when he got up to go into the shuttle in search of a tool Anna must have been using did he realise hours had passed. She had stacked all the seats outside, having unbolted them from the floor. Inside, the floor plates were all up and leaning against inner hull, and she was down in the space below. The grav engine sat in the middle – a great lump of a thing webbed with cooling tubes, nested in optics and power supply and with numerous subsidiary mechanisms attached. It was heavily braced to stop it tearing free and attached by brackets and heavy wave guides to two effector bars running along either side parallel to the hull. She was sitting on one of these, optic cable running from her arm into the tangle of technology before her, other devices plugged in here and there. On one floor plate, laid out flat just along from her, she had heaped optics and burned devices. He took in the chaos, her metallic eyes, found the tool he needed, picked it up and departed.

  Outside again, Ben had his lunch then returned to work on the thruster turret. Finally reaching a point where he had done all he could, he climbed up onto the top of the shuttle to find the socket they had chosen for the thruster. Up on top would give them the most use out of it along with the grav engine, since underneath the shuttle wasn’t an option. The damage was bad, but with a rediscovered enthusiasm for his old job he began removing it. The cog ring was shattered, but he found a complete one in a side socket. He replaced everything else he could and finally sat back to contemplate his work. He had done all he was able to for now; the rest would need the turret in place – a task he could not perform alone. It was time now to check the fuel supply.

  The thrusters were a simple design powered by hydrogen and oxygen. The system had a lot of safety cut offs to prevent leakage in case of damage. He had considered taking out the water cells that used minimal power and layered meta-materials to crack water into oxygen and hydrogen, to use in his house, but they were heavy and once emptied he would have needed to purify water to recharge them. He also had no real need of that power source either, what with the shuttle panels and the increasing amount of the same he had been accruing from podules. Checking, he found the fuels cells to be half full, while there was still pure water in the feed tank. He smiled at that as he climbed down from the shuttle, acknowledging that taking the cells from a system he could repair would have been one further sign that he was stuck here.

  Nothing more to do now. He went in to check on Anna.

  The grav engine looked even more in pieces now and he frowned at the mess. She had opened the thing up and he could see packed coils and plates and the shimmer of pseudo-matter. This was the kind of work where he simply stopped. As a shuttle tech you left a grav engine to the shipyard where computer and sometimes AIs, if any of the few remaining were available, got to work – those AIs of course including Golem like her.

  ‘How’s it going?’ he asked.

  ‘Slowly,’ she replied. ‘The damaged exterior components are no problem.’ She waved a hand at those he had seen earlier removed. ‘But internal field tech went out of balance and shut down.’ She paused for a moment, then shrugged before getting back to work. ‘It does, as you surmised, look like sabotage.’

  ‘Virus in the control software?’

  ‘Seems likely.’

  He grunted at that. ‘I’m about done with the thruster turret and will need you to help me get it into place. I’ll go take another look for that screen.’

  ‘Yes, you do that.’ She looked up again. ‘Check those copses again. The screen would not have popped while you were in flight but when you hit, so I doubt it went far.’

  He nodded and headed out, collected up the carbine then studied his surroundings. He had walked the path of the crash site many times, in the first months checking the ground for disturbances on the theory that if he could not see the screen above ground perhaps it had penetrated below the surface. He’d dug into some disturbed areas and come up with nothing at all. Steadily widening the search, he’d checked the area on either side of the crash scar for a couple of miles in either direction. The thought of starting again depressed him. He shrugged and swore. He wouldn’t check all of where he had looked before but beyond it because maybe the screen had been flung for miles, though he would, as Anna suggested, check the two copses of turtle-leaf trees again because there were plenty of places something could be lost in them.

  He set out, walking at first, then annoyed with how long this would take, breaking into a jog. The joy of his functional body dismissed depression. With rabbits scattering in the low vegetation ahead he shortly reached the first copse. Walking round to one side of it he chose the trunk of one tree as his starter mark and walked through trying to keep to as straight a course as possible. Familiarity returned as he recognised a big old stump covered in bracket fungus and as hardened leaves shattered under his boots. Out the other side he moved twenty paces to his left and walked back in. All the while he looked for some glassy glint, some hint of the screen, but saw nothing.

  How many hours he spent there he had no idea. The sun seemed to have hardly moved in the sky and he carried no com unit to show him the time. He did begin to feel tired and thirsty by the time the copse had become a map imprinted on his mind, so stopped to eat the last of his food and drink some more water. In the next copse he searched similarly, and felt the same disappointment he had felt many times before. The screen wasn’t here – as he had hypothesised it had been flung a long distance. He must now search beyond where he had searched before and the thought of that began to depress him again.

  Returning to the other copse he felt weariness in his bones. His nanosuite might now be working to repair the years of damage, but he still needed the old cures of food and sleep. Thinking on that, he felt hungry again and eyed the fungus. The brackets had been white when he first came here but were now an odd veined yellow. He knew they were edible because he’d checked them with Snooper, but were they still edible now? Reaching out to snap a piece off he saw his hand turn yellow too, and
realised the coloration of the fungus had more to do with the quality of the light than its age. He held his hand in that light, studied its changes and the shadow underneath.

  Realisation came in a wave of gratitude and extreme annoyance at his own stupidity. All his searching here and in the other copse had been at ground level – a ridiculous mistake to make for someone who had spent large parts of his life in zero gee – flatlander thinking. He leaned in close to the fungus and looked back towards the sun and there, caught in the top of a tree, was the chainglass screen from the shuttle. His annoyance dissipated as he considered how Anna had suggested here was the best place to search, and he wondered if she had found the screen already, but wanted him to have this little victory. It was the kind of thing Golem did.

  ‘I am absolutely wiped out,’ he said. ‘I need food and sleep.’

  ‘And obviously I am not.’

  They stood outside the shuttle, both looking towards the screen he had dragged all the way from the copse. He turned to look at the shuttle. She had put the turret back into its socket on top but had left connecting the thing up to him.

  ‘I’ll go back to the house.’ He felt reluctant to go and leave her working, but he had to accept that she ran on fusion and capacitor batteries and had no need of sleep.

  ‘Take the wheelbarrow with you and, when you return, bring your house power supply.’

  ‘You’ll have the grav motor ready by then?’

  ‘I don’t know,’ she replied, which he felt was an odd thing for a Golem to say. Usually they could have everything calculated out to the second.